Day 79 — March 20th 2021
The Macra Terror Episodes Three and Four
The Macra Terror — Episode Three
The Macra Terror is very much a game of two halves. I don’t mean in terms of quality especially, I’ve enjoyed these latter episodes pretty much on par with the first two, but the setting of the story and the things in which it’s interested seem to shift at the half way point.
Episode Three begins with Doctor Who and his friends — minus Ben — being sentenced to the ‘Danger Gang’, working down in the mines looking for gas. We don’t hear about the Danger Gang at all in the first two episodes, and although we’ve heard a little bit about the Colony mining for gas before now, the process has been largely left in the background, and the pithead was left off the guided tour our heroes receive in the first episode.
Perhaps the strangest thing to come of this shift in setting and interest between episodes is that Medok is suddenly an expert on the mining operation, and is written as though he’s been a part of the Danger Gang for some considerable time. Our regulars are surprised to find him working down here early in the episode (‘They threw me out of the correction hospital,’ he explains, ‘apparently I’m a hopeless case’) but he’s then on hand to do all the exposition for the rest of the episode. It feels a little jarring, and it’s one of the few places I think the story stumbles. In many ways it feels like an issue that’s been introduced somewhere between drafts, where possibly Medok had spent some time in the pits at some stage before his escape and hospitilisation.
Perhaps the biggest shame is that Medok is killed before the episode is through, and his death feels like it should carry more weight than it does. Had he been sentenced to the mines at the same time as Doctor Who and friends, rather than acting as an old hand here, his death would have been more tragic. I think the biggest mistake in the story is that we don’t even see his death; a Macra reaches for him, and then Jamie finds the body a little later on.
The mines have a very distinctive look to them, and they’re one of the few ares we can see in Design Department photographs from production. Part of me thinks they look a little ridiculous (it certainly varies from the way they look in my mind), but the other part of me thinks there’s something quite beautiful about them, and something that reminds me further of The Savages.
It sounds like I’m just complaining about this episode, but for all my issues (and they’re things which could be easily solved with another draft) I really enjoyed this episode still. Doctor Who himself if the particular highlight and although we can’t see him writing his calculations on the wall and then giving himself a ‘10/10’, I can just imagine Troughton doing it. I’d forgotten that he later corrects it to an ‘11/10’, and I had a genuine laugh out loud moment as it happened. It feels so incredibly ‘Doctorish’, although I can’t picture it happening in the series under Hartnell. Perhaps it’s the perfect example of how all the later Doctors take more from Troughton’s portrayal. I also particularly enjoyed his indignation at Jamie describing him as an ‘old man’.
It’s not all fun and games, though. Troughton is particularly effective in the pit head when he realises Ben is watching him. There’s something about the way he intones the words ‘Hello, Ben…’ which is almost a little sinister. Their whole exchange is particularly effective, and it’s one of my favourite Troughton moments in the series so far;
Doctor Who: ‘Hello, Ben. Don’t go. Come in. Don’t be afraid.’
Ben: ‘I have nothing to be afraid of.’
Doctor Who: ‘No, of course not. It wasn’t your fault you betrayed your friends.’
Ben: ‘The voices tell me what to do.’
Doctor Who: ‘The voices may not be right, Ben.’
Ben: ‘I do what I am told.’
Doctor Who: ‘Yes, I know. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To spy on me. What does Control want to know this time? Can’t you answer me? You know, Ben, this is very unlike you.’
Ben: ‘I don’t know what you mean. It is my duty.’
Doctor Who: ‘It’s hard for you to struggle against the voices, isn’t it, Ben? But I warn you, if you spy on the others, watch out Jamie doesn’t catch you. He’s not so tolerant as I am.’
After all my moaning today it may come as a surprise that I’m giving Episode Three an 8/10. I like to think I can appreciate the parts of the story that don’t quite hold up while also finding myself really enjoying it!
The Macra Terror — Episode Four
‘I can stand an operation on its head quicker than anyone,’ says Doctor Who in this episode, and if that’s not a pretty decent mission statement for the character then I don’t know what is! They’re funny these last two episodes of The Macra Terror. I feel like I don’t have an awful lot to praise about them, and yet I’m still enjoying them immensely. I wonder if it’s a perfect example of a story being more than the sum of its parts? My notes today are all along the lines of ‘the Old Shaft opening up onto the Cheerleading Practice makes no sense’, and noting that this episode feels like an odd hybrid of the style seen in Episode Two and the one used for Episode Three, which ends up with the episode feeling like an odd clash. And yet, it’s another 8/10 from me here.
I don’t really have an awful lot more to add apart from reiterating that this story feels like it shouldn’t work but somehow does. So let’s talk about production schedules instead.
When Doctor Who first began in 1963, it had a fairly decent lead time of 36 days between recording of the episode in studio and the broadcast of said episode. After a blip for the remount of The Dead Planet (recorded just 15 days before broadcast), the schedule largely settles down to episodes being recorded 22 days ahead of broadcast — roughly three weeks. This remains the case for most of the first series, until a delay in the broadcast of The Sensorites pushes the schedule back up to a 29-day lead time.
As a result of being held back for broadcast after the summer break, the episodes of Planet of Giants end up being ‘in the bank’ for a full 71 days, the longest gap between production and broadcast in the Hartnell era. The schedule carries on broadly along the ‘22 day’ lead time until things start to fall apart during production of The Daleks’ Master Plan. All of the episodes from Escape Switch to the end of the third series (The War Machines Episode Four) are recorded 15 days ahead of broadcast, on Friday nights.
When production resumes for the fourth recording block in September 1966, recording was shifted to Saturday nights, where it remained for the next few years. Episodes of The Tenth Planet was recorded three weeks ahead of broadcast, but a week’s break in production between that story and the next reduces the lead time for The Power of the Daleks to just 14 days. But then they take a two-week break over Christmas, meaning that from the first story to enter production in 1967 (The Underwater Menace Episode One) the programme is being recorded just 7 days ahead.
What that means, effectively, is that while Episode One of any given story is being shown on television, the cast is in studio recording Episode Two, and so on through the rest of the story. I think it’s this tight schedule being misremembered that led to the idea Jamie was retained after positive feedback — usually you’d know pretty quickly during production how well a story was being received.
From a practical point of view it means that both The Macra Terror and The Faceless Ones suffer from a lack of photographs taken during production. The main purpose of taking photographs at this stage was to promote the series in the likes of the Radio Times, but recording was so tight that photos taken during recording of an Episode One — ready to promote a new story — would be too late to be of any use to a publication.
For The Macra Terror they get around this by having two of the cast — Peter Jeffrey as the Pilot and Gertan Klauber as Ola — pose in costume against a makeshift background during the first day of rehearsals for the story — Monday February 27th. Although these images depict characters in costume from the story, it’s hard to really call them ‘photos from The Macra Terror’. In the case of this story we also have a handful of Design Department photos of the sets taken for continuity purposes (taken prior to recording of Episodes One and Three, it would appear. Fitting as these episodes both introduce new sets due to appear in later episodes).
There’s also a pair of images of Graham Leaman as the Controller being menaced by the Macra claw which were taken during the pre-filming of his scenes on February 17th, though they don’t show him in the ‘old age’ make up he sports for that scene in the broadcast episode. Finally there’s two almost identical images of the Macra prop taken outside the Shawcraft Models workshop in Uxbridge.
The Faceless Ones fares even worse, with only four variant shots of Doctor Who hiding behind the wheel of a plane taken during production, a single shot of a Chameleon, an image of a character taken because it was required to be seen on screen in Episode Three, and some press shots of Gilly Fraser and Pauline Collins larking about between rehearsals.
All things considered, such was the tight turnaround of production at this point in the programme’s history that we’re lucky anything made it to screen at all!
