Day 183 — July 2nd 2021
Invasion of the Dinosaurs Parts One and Two
Invasion of the Dinosaurs — Part One
It’s a double celebration today, because July 2nd marks the exact half way point of the year. There’s been 182 days before this and there’s 182 days after this, which means I’m officially half way through my Doctor Who marathon!
It’s not quite the exact half way mark for Old Testament Doctor Who — that came during Planet of the Daleks last week — but because of the way a few episodes are watched only one per day the dates don’t quite match up. Still it’s exciting to think that in terms of time I’m exactly as far away from The TV Movie as I am from An Unearthly Child, and I’m so pleased to say how much I’ve been loving working my way through these stories again. My enthusiasm for Doctor Who has been at an all time low over the last few years, but watching through again has reminded me how much I love this ridiculous old nonsense.
It’s fitting, then, that today is the day we reach the very first Doctor Who story I ever saw! I’d caught the second Peter Cushing film on telly as a kid (though hadn’t paid much attention), but found the VHS of Invasion of the Dinosaurs at the local library towards the end of 2003. I can recall knowing that Doctor Who was about time travel, and the synopsis on the back — London evacuated because dinosaurs have started turning up at random — was such a great pitch. I can also remember totally misunderstanding the disclaimer about Part One being in black and white, and confidently telling my grandparents that they started making the programme in colour from Part Two onwards.
I spent a couple of years thinking that was a bizarre time to switch before I realised where I’d gone wrong!
BritBox only has the recoloured version of this episode available, but frankly that feels like heresy to me, so I’ve stuck the DVD on instead.
It’s oddly exciting to be back into black and white. As nice as it’s been to have colour over the last four seasons there’s something which just feels right about Doctor Who in black and white. And what an episode to have available in this format! Lots of lovely shots of a deserted London, some great shadows in the various warehouses… yeah, this episode was made for black and white. It’s a shame that the surviving film copy isn’t the best quality — there’s a lot of distortions which the Restoration Team haven’t been able to fix — but it’s wonderful to have the episode all the same.
And there’s something somewhat ironic that it’s this episode which makes repeated reference to ‘colour television’; once as a poster in the shopping centre and twice as part of the sentencing later in the episode. It’s almost as though they knew this one would end up in black and white…!
Those shots of a deserted London are an especially effective way to open the episode — they look just as haunting now as they would have at the time. Possibly even more so given similar images of the city over the last year thanks to various lockdowns. Director Paddy Russell — making a return to the series for the first time since The Massacre — broke the rules by slipping out with a cameraman at about 4am on a Sunday morning to ensure they’d get the shots required, and it was totally worth it. So many iconic locations and all looking gorgeous.
There’s also something a bit magical about seeing some of these locations return to the series having appeared before, long ago. There’s a war memorial that Barbara hid behind in The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and of course shots of Trafalgar Square featured in the same story. And then there’s Covent Garden which last showed up in The Web of Fear. This episode being in black and white only serves to add to the nostalgia I’m feeling for these places.
And it’s not only iconic places which are making a return today. Early on when our looter made his way down a set of metal stairs I made a mental note that it resembled a location from The Ambassadors of Death. Well that thought kept niggling at me so I double checked… and it is the same location! Lord help me, I’ve become the kind of fan who can identify individual staircases in Doctor Who!
I think my favourite part of the episode is watching Doctor Who and Sarah explore the empty city, and I wish we got to see them in some of the more ‘tourist’ spots. I long for a shot of them walking through a deserted Trafalgar Square. That said, seeing them in the shopping arcade feels surprisingly fresh; it’s not the type of place we’ve ever seen in Doctor Who before. It impresses me that even after contemporary London stories have been a part of the format for this long they can still come up with ways of keeping them from growing stale. The same can be said for the row of bomb-damaged houses which form part of this opening sequence. You forget that early 70s London still bore such obvious reminders of the war, and it’s a bold shot to include.
Also new is seeing a car crash like this in the series — it’s surprisingly bleak. I was genuinely surprised by just how beaten up the car was, and when we cut to the looter laying on the side of the road covered with blood… maybe it’s for the best that we only see this in black and white? That said, the lack of colour adds something of a grown up tone to the proceedings, so it might have looked less drastic in colour, even if you could see the red of the blood more clearly.
We’ll discuss the dinosaurs more as the story progresses, but it’s worth discussing the pterodactyl here as I’m not sure it makes another appearance. I think it gets noted as an example of a bad Doctor Who effect, but I think it’s actually really good! There’s a shot where it swoops down the stairs which is really effective, and the moment it smashes the window of a Land Rover to attack Doctor Who is brilliantly exciting. Okay, so some of the close up shots where it’s a puppet are perhaps less effective, but I’ve not got a bad word to say about it, and I’ll defend it to the end.
I’m not going to go on about Pertwee and Sladen and how well they work together, because I’ve spent the last two days doing just that. But I will stop to note just how much I love Doctor Who grinning his way through the mugshots having been arrested on suspicion of looting. It’s another example of his version of the character finally clicking for me — and by that I sort of mean ‘it’s the kind of thing Troughton would do’. I also love the Brigadier’s reaction to seeing the mugshots among a pile of paperwork detailing prisoners. It’s such an inventive way of bringing the two strands of story together, and far more interesting than simply having Doctor Who and Sarah picked up by some patrolling soldiers would have been.
Oh sure, I’m probably blinded by a bit of nostalgia for this one, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I got the same feeling watching today — especially in the early scenes of Pertwee and Sladen on location outside the TARDIS — that I did almost 20 years ago seeing this for the first time. They say you never forget your first Doctor Who, and that’s certainly the case. A 9/10.
Invasion of the Dinosaurs — Part Two
There’s a chance that I’ve still got my nostalgia goggles on for this episode, because while I gave The Green Death a good grilling for not making more of Mike Yates’ reveal as a traitor I’m perfectly happy with this one even though they arguably do even less. In my head I recalled a similar sequence where Mike pulls a gun on our heroes — and I suspect that’ll come later when his allegiance is revealed to the other characters — but here he shows up to the bad guys hideout with surprisingly little fanfare. I feel like I should be complaining, that we should have more than 20 seconds of cryptic talk about ‘our man from UNIT’ before we find out who, but I can’t help finding it exciting all the same.
I wonder if part of that might be because the story is already setting up a lot of other characters who I know will turn out to be working for ‘the other side’, so I know there’s more reveals to come? Malcolm Hulke is back on writing duties with this one — his final scripts for the programme — so of course all the guest cast are richly drawn and believable. When Doctor Who is introduced to Sir Charles he essentially spits out a load of exposition to us, introducing the idea that the man cares about the environment deeply, but it comes across as totally natural, largely in part to the humour of the scene being played brilliantly by an almost entirely silent Nick Courtney.
I tried to avoid going on about Doctor Who and Sarah in the first episode, but I’m going to have to praise them a bit here. I love how quickly she’s settled into the role of the companion and how natural that feels. When General Finch tries to have her evacuated as a civilian Doctor Who steps in and calls her his assistant, and you get the sense that both characters are perfectly happy with that set up. And how brilliant is Sarah at taking all this in her stride? There was a great sequence in The Time Warrior where she tried to rationalise the situation she’d found herself in and she does similar here, trying to make sense of the dinosaurs;
Sarah: ‘But where did that monster come from?’
Doctor Who: ‘That’s a very good question, Sarah.’
Sarah: ‘Suppose suppose there was an egg, buried in the ground somewhere,
and somehow or other it hatched out?’
Doctor Who: ‘What, producing a sweet little baby monster?’
Sarah: ‘Yes. Ah. No. No, how would it grow to that size without anyone noticing.’
Doctor Who: ‘Perhaps somebody kept it as a pet and turned it out when it got
too big to feed.’
Her enthusiasm and pragmatism are incredibly endearing, and I’m so pleased that she’s slotted into the programme so well. I know she’s generally considered one of the best companions of all time, but Jo Grant had so defined the show lately that I still worried about how it might work. Clearly there was no need. It also excites me for the future — everyone talks about Sarah and the Fourth Doctor Who, which must be something extra special when she works this well against his earlier incarnation.
I’m listening to Elisabeth Sladen’s autobiography in conjunction to her time in the series and I’m surprised to be reminded that she didn’t always get on with Pertwee during their time on the programme. She tells a particular story in relation to Invasion of the Dinosaurs about arriving for rehearsals to have Pertwee announce to the room that he doesn’t like her new haircut at all. I’m looking forward to hearing more as the next few seasons play out, but it’s true to say that none of this sometimes-frosty off-screen atmosphere has made it to the screen. Doctor Who and Sarah Jane are the best of friends, and I totally buy that relationship already.
There’s nowhere else to really bring this up, and I don’t have anything much to say about it beyond ‘isn’t this brilliant’, but I love Benton bringing Doctor Who up to speed with the situation;
Doctor Who: ‘How many of these things have been seen up to now?’
The Brigadier: ‘Well, the pins record the sightings…’
Benton: ‘It’s a colour code, Doctor. We’re using red pins for Tyrannosaurus, blue for Triceratops, green for the Stegosaurus and pink for your actual Pterodactyl.’
The Brigadier: ‘Thank you, Benton.’
I genuinely quote that more than I quote almost any other line in Doctor Who, save for everything the Empress of the Racnoss ever said. It helps, probably, that I have a two year old and dinosaurs are heavily marketed to kids so of course he’s got a toy of yer actual pterodactyl.
We went to Cardiff Museum earlier this week and I got to trot the line out there, too. Truth be told George isn’t all that fussed on dinosaurs — although it was very cute when he pointed at the skeleton of a diplodicus and shouted ‘dinosaur!’ — but this episode certainly captured his attention because he stood next to me and watched the whole thing this morning.
An 8/10.
