Day 19 — January 19th 2021
A Land of Fear and Guests of Madame Guillotine
A Land of Fear (The Reign of Terror — Episode One)
This episode comes as a proper shock to the system, because it’s proper bleak. So far the series has had plenty of terror and violence, but nothing quite like we get here, where it’s all so much more real, and as a result it’s far scarier.
For starters, we’re introduced to two new characters after spending the first half of the episode in the company of only the regular TARDIS crew. The series has established a format by this stage — each story introduces a handful of ‘temporary companions’ who’ll help our heroes throughout the story. Carol and John. Marco and Ping-Cho. Altos and Sabitha. Autloc and Cameca. This time around it’s D’Argenson and Rouvray; on the run from the French Revolution. Only they don’t get to run very far, because they’re both shot dead within five minutes of their introduction. It’s the first sign that this episode isn’t messing about.
There’s something so much more powerful about the fact that they’re shot with real guns, too. The moment carries far more impact than the human commander being shot by a Sensorite yesterday, because we identify far easier with the results of a real bullet.
As the story goes on, the soldiers decide to burn down the farmhouse in which Doctor Who is currently laying unconscious. He comes round just long enough to be overcome by the smoke, and collapses again. Part of me thinks it’s the best cliffhanger the series has given us yet — I’ve never felt more as though one of our regulars was in peril — and part of me isn’t sure it’s suitable.
At the risk of going all Mary Whitehouse, I can’t imagine children sitting down to watch this at tea-time on a Saturday!
I’ll tell you what, though, it’s bloody good, and an 8/10 from me.
A couple of TARDIS notes for this episode; it’s the first time we see the full-size prop materialise, and it’s achieved in a simple way which seems incredibly archaic now. During rehearsals earlier in the day, a photograph was taken of the woodland set without the TARDIS present. This photo was developed, enlarged, and then Camera Four was pointed at it.
Meanwhile, Camera Two was pointing at the woodland set — matching the angle of the photograph taken earlier — with the police box in position. During recording of the episode, the vision mixer simply faded from the image on Camera Four to the one on Camera Two, and the TARDIS appears. The light on top of the police box flashes as it lands, and it gives us a clear view that the ‘Police Public Call Box’ signs are transparent — as you can see the light flashing through them.
A photo was taken of the TARDIS on set for use at the end of The Reign of Terror, too, to avoid having to rebuild the woodland set later on.
But that’s not the only bit of TARDIS trickery in use here. The first four episodes of this serial were recorded in Studio G at Lime Grove, rather than the more familiar Studio D — and they were the only episodes of Doctor Who to use the space. Over the years much has been written about Studio D being impractical for the series, and that it was ‘long and thin’. This description really applies more to Studio G, which was 104ft long but only 34ft wide. By comparison, Studio D was a shorter 73ft but a wider 55ft.
Owing to the awkward small space, and the need to maximise the use of the woodland set, once the TARDIS had materialised it was removed from the set and replaced with an alternative; a police box frontage which had been created for the original pilot episode.
For the Pilot, this frontage was attached to the TARDIS set, allowing the view of the Control Room beyond the police box doors. It doesn’t appear in the broadcast version of An Unearthly Child (though it was present in the studio for recording), but finally makes it’s on-screen debut here, almost nine months later.
Guests of Madame Guillotine (The Reign of Terror — Episode Two)
My main memory of The Reign of Terror is that it’s a little bit boring, and that it almost entirely failed to keep my interest during my last marathon. That’s the only time I’ve seen the story, and I can’t claim to have been tempted to revisit at any point in the last eight years.
As such, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed A Land of Fear, but this episode hasn’t grabbed me as much at all. I’m reminded today of my biggest issue last time around; following two stories in which Susan is written really well, with a decent amount of character and treating Carole Ann Ford as more than a child, this episode reduces her to wailing and whining, and having a fit at the sight of a rat.
During my last marathon, I really took against Susan. I seem to recall spending a lot of the first season complaining about the character and longing for Vicki to arrive. It’s not been so bad this time around, and I think I’ve appreciated more the times when the writers — really only Lucarotti and Newman — try to do something interesting with her. It makes it all the more a shame when you get her given material like this.
This time around it’s William Russell’s turn to have a couple of weeks in the sun, and he’s absent from this episode and the next. I’m not entirely sure the attempt to cover his absence with film material works quite as well as it did with Carole Ann Ford in The Aztecs, though. There’s an awful lot of cutting into a shot just after Ian is supposed to have left it, and there’s a particularly clumsy moment when he’s supposed to be standing next to Barbara and Susan, but it cuts between them in such a way that anyone can tell he’s not really there.
Add to that the fact that the film sequences featuring him seem to have been shot a bit like an Expressionist film. There’s a quality to the lighting and the shots which make it stand out as being different to the rest of the episode. On the one hand I think the whole story done in that style might work well, but when trying to integrate him into the story it doesn’t quite gel.
Also on film today; it’s Doctor Who’s first trip outside, as we get some location shooting for the first time. It’s a clever plan to have a stand-in so they don’t need to drag Hartnell out to the countryside, and while it looks lovely (and works well fro France), I’m not sure that Brian Proudfoot quite nails Hartnell’s mannerisms, though, as Doctor Who suddenly becomes far more sprightly than usual when walking along!
It’s only a minor quibble, though, and cutting from the location filming to Hartnell in the studio works far better than trying to tie in the material featuring Russell.
A 6/10.
