Day 57 — February 26th 2021
The Celestial Toyroom and The Hall of Dolls
The Celestial Toyroom (The Celestial Toymaker — Episode One)
I can’t remember what I made of The Celestial Toymaker last time I experienced it, and depending who you ask it’s either a dud or a classic. I’m not sure there’s any story which has swung around in the general fan consensus as much as this one. Audience Research undertaken by the BBC at the time was not favourable to the story, and indicated that the final episode in particular ‘had little appeal for a large proportion of the sample, over a third of whom actually disliked it’. By the mid 1970s, with the episode a decade in the past and living on only in the memories of those who saw it at the time, The Celestial Toymaker became something of a legendary story. It was a bit of a holy grail of missing episodes, and when John Nathan-Turner was planning Colin Baker’s second season for 1986 he intended to bring the Toymaker back because it was something the fans were so keen to see.
In recent years, largely due to the story now being available to listen to at any time (and the fourth episode even being returned so we can watch it), the story has taken a bit of a tumble in opinion again. In the Doctor Who Magazine poll from 2014 which I so love to quote, this story placed 197th out of 241 — just one place higher than The Savages which we’ll be reaching in a few days’ time.
As I say, I can’t recall what I made of it on my last marathon. That’s true of loads of stories if I’m honest. Some I’ve got a vague sense of liking or disliking, but the vast majority I’ve almost totally forgotten my opinion on. It’s one of the reasons doing this marathon has been so fun — I’m rediscovering stories like The Ark which I doubt I’ve given a second thought in almost a decade. It also goes to show, I think, why consensus on this story can have changed so much by the mid 1970s — everyone forgets what they thought about them.
One thing I have just noticed, and it has no relation to anything I’ve just been saying apart from the fact that I’ve just noticed it; one of the clowns in the photo above is subtly giving the middle finger. So there you go, that’s an interesting new Toymaker fact!
Unfortunately, it might be the only interesting thing about this episode. Ooh, this was a tough one. I get the impression that The Celestial Toymaker is one of those stories which suffers for being audio only, and would work significantly better if we could actually see it all. There’s some really great visual ideas in this one which I think get lost when you’re just listening to the soundtrack.
Take the Toymaker’s dollhouse for example. There’s a fair few images from production which show off the scale of the set, and it looks pretty impressive. There’s no way to know exactly how well it would have translated to screen, but the idea that he takes his playthings from the dollhouse to send them off to do battle is a really sinister one which you pretty much entirely miss with the soundtrack. Indeed, I feel like I only know it’s a thing because it’s one of those Doctor Who ‘facts’ that kicks around in the back of my head somewhere.
Also sinister is the idea that the two clowns turn back into dolls once they’ve lost the game of Blind Man’s Buff. In the narration, Peter Purves describes them as having reverted to ‘twisted wooden dolls’, which conjures up images of the brilliantly effective Peg Dolls from Night Terrors. Who knows if they would have lived up to that creepy premise in the original episode, though.
There’s a couple of things I’d really like to see from this episode. The first is clips of Steven from past adventures — he sees himself on a screen holding the Time Destructor on Kembel, and in the streets of Paris. The sequences weren’t filmed specially for this episode (Peter Purves wasn’t required for pre-filming at all), so we can assume they were actual clips from the stories in question.
Shortly after on the same screen we see a conveyer belt of TARDISes, and I’d love to know how this looked. The sequence was filmed on Thursday 3rd March, and paperwork suggests that the TARDISes were made usin an image of the TARDIS prop from Marco Polo — it’s tempting to suggest it’s the same shot used as a cardboard cutout in that same story, but I’d love to know for sure! The very end of this episode is also probably the only time the empty inside of the Police Box prop is deliberately and thoroughly shown on screen, when it stands in for a fake TARDIS, and I’d love to know how that looked too.
Overall, a lacklustre start and a 3/10.
The Hall of Dolls (The Celestial Toymaker — Episode Two)
There was a time when The Celestial Toymaker could have been William Hartnell’s final appearance as Doctor Who, with the original version of the story created with the intention of making him invisible and mute, and then casting a new actor to take over the role when he was made corporeal again for the story’s end.
The attempt to get rid of Hartnell stemmed from a mutual dislike between the star and his still-new producer John Wiles. Wiles found Hartnell difficult to work with, and complained that he wasn’t fit for the job — suffering from ill health and struggling to remember his lines. On the other side of the argument Hartnell felt that Wiles didn’t understand the job, and by all accounts the producer had made it clear that he didn’t particularly want the job. Things got so bad at one point that Hartnell would bypass his boss altogether and go over his head higher up the chain of command at the BBC when he wanted to complain.
Luckily, those same ‘higher ups’ at the BBC took Hartnell’s side, and any attempt to replace the star in this story were vetoed. It led to some major rewrites (along with a number of other things which I won’t go into here) which are brilliantly examined in James Cooray Smith’s article about this story on the Hero Collector website), and the ultimate result was that Wiles resigned his post on Doctor Who, with Script Editor Donald Tosh following suit quickly after.
Watching through the episodes of the brief John Wiles era in this marathon, I think you can see the battle being played out on screen. I wondered during The Daleks’ Master Plan why Hartnell had been sidelined and almost entirely written out of the last two episodes of the serial. You then start to notice a pattern. He’s in the middle two episodes of The Massacre, but he only has a single pre-filmed scene in one and two short scenes in the other. He appears throughout The Ark, but he’s absent again from two episodes in this story. I wonder if you can see Wiles trying to shift Hartnell out of Doctor Who already. Either because he didn’t want to work with him, or to soften the blow for his eventual plan to lose him completely here.
There’s a cruel irony that Hartnell manages to win the battle and keep his job at this stage, when we know that he’s only got another five stories to go after this before he really was moved on against his will. It makes me determined to make the most of him for the next three weeks, though, because you remember how brilliant he was in the role, and although the story about his ill health gets trotted out a lot, he’s been on fine form throughout Season Three, and I’d argue he’s been more active in some of these stories than ever before.
This episode features some more TARDIS shenanigans, in the form of several white cupboards that look conspicuously like the Police Box. As you can see from the above photo — one of several gorgeous colour shots taken for this story — the cupboards consisted of some surprisingly accurate front facades attached to some plain half-depth sides. Take a good look at these cupboards, because we’ll be coming back to them next week for a very important stage in the life of the TARDIS prop.
It’s a shame that the fact the cupboards look like the TARDIS is another fun element that seems to get lost in the translation of this episode from television to Narrated Soundtrack. I’m not sure that their resemblance is noted in the narration at all, and it feels like a slightly clunky moment once the game is won and we discover that the last cupboard isn’t the TARDIS after all. There’s been no real indication before then that it even might be.
What’s that? I’ve not actually said anything about this episode at all, really? Oh dear. What a shame. 2/10.
