Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 120: The Final Test (The Celestial Toymaker, Episode Four)

Dear diary,

Well! How stunning! The shot of the TARDIS atop the pedestal, all lit from behind by fierce beams of lights, the electrified floor that glimmered beneath a thin layer of dry ice, the jagged triangles formed of a dark, black quartz, with numbers set into them… That's surely the best that anything in Doctor Who has looked up to now!

Hm? Sorry, what? No, no. That's definitely what those 'TARDIS hopscotch' scenes looked like. They did. Promise. You must be thinking of something else. Yeah, that's it.

…Oh, alright. I'll admit it. I cheated. At the time of writing… I've not watched The Final Test. No, I've not given up on the experiment. The Celestial Toymaker hasn't beaten me into submission. The truth of the matter is that I came home today, got ready to cue up the episode and then… well… I didn't. I did the washing up instead. With the soundtrack plugged in. I listened to it, instead. Don't worry, I'm going to go and have a look at the episode in a moment, but I wanted to see how it fared without my being influenced by the visuals, before I actually saw them.

I enjoyed it more than I did the previous episode, but I wonder if that's down to me forcing myself to imagine the most fantastic set I possibly could for today. In many ways, there's nothing different in today's episode compared to anything from the last three. The escape from the Toymaker's realm was quite well done, but it came a bit out of nowhere, and almost seemed a little bit… easy for my liking.

Still, I've found plenty to enjoy in the episode. Cyril really is good fun, and there are mannerisms in his voice that remind me somewhat of Patrick Troughton as the Doctor. Elsewhere, the music throughout the story has been quite good, and it's no exception here.

But now comes the hard part. The Lost in Time DVD is cued up in the drive, and it's time to see what this episode actually looked like. I'll be back in a bit…

(You can imagine some kind of musical interlude here, if you like. Or just a fade to black before I return)

I'm somewhat intrigued. My intention was to watch a few key bits from the episode - a bit of the hopscotch game, a little of the Doctor and the Toymaker in the Trilogic room and the ending of the episode - just enough to give me a fair idea of how the episode looked. Thing is… I ended up watching it all! The full 25 minutes! And you know what the weirdest thing is? I think seeing it has improved my score by at least a couple of marks…

Let's get the negative out of the way first. It really does look pretty cheap. The hopscotch game certainly isn't as grand on screen as it was in my head, but even so, it's better than I remembered it being. For a start, there were actual raised platforms. In my head, I'd convinced myself that the episode itself featured just triangles marked out on the floor in tape. Perhaps the worst room has to be the one the Doctor has been stuck in all this time. The Dolls House is pretty grand (and much larger than I'd imagined! I assumed that they dolls grew to human size, but I get the impression from this that they must have always been so!), but the room is very bare. The tiny screen set into the wall is a particular disappointment - especially after the large back-projections seen back in The Daleks' Master Plan.

But then there's several things that are improved by seeing the episode for real. The performances of Michael Gough as the Toymaker, and Peter Stephens as Cyril are fantastic - they're really the things that drew me into the episode and kept me watching for the full running time. I mused the other day that I didn't really get the fascination with bringing the Toymaker back to the series in later years, but the chance to pit Michael Gough against another Doctor is pretty tempting.

If you'd told me a few days ago that I'd end up doing one episode of The Celestial Toymaker twice in one evening, I'd have assumed that I'd be calling it quits with the experiment, the blog, and Doctor Who as a whole. I'm stunned.

(It was looking like a 5/10 based solely on the audio)

Next Episode: A Holiday for the Doctor

Next Episode: A Holiday for the Doctor 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 119: The Dancing Floor (The Celestial Toymaker, Episode Three)

Dear diary,

What on Earth must Dodo think she's walked in to? She took to the Ark and the Monoids and the idea of time/space travel pretty easily (I think she was mostly distracted by the TARDIS wardrobe), but now… The Celestial Toymaker is quite unlike anything that the programme has ever attempted before, and it's an odd introduction for her to life in the TARDIS so early in her journey.

In some ways, this seems to be Season Three's 'sideways' story (in the same way that The Edge of Destruction wasn't really a futuristic story, and the first episode of The Space Museum was an interesting idea in stepping sideways in time, before it became a tedious, cardigan-eating bore), but even when you think of it as being in the same bed as those two stories, it's something of a curiosity.

The first two episodes have just about skirted by on leaving me baffled by the time the end credits rolled. They weren't the most accomplished episodes in Doctor Who history, but they were just about passable. Eventually though - and really, that means 'today' - it wears a bit thin. It has helped that, because I'm not watching a recon, I can imagine these episodes looking however I want to. My only frame of reference is a dimly-remembered few bits of the fourth episode, but I've somewhat pushed those to the back of my mind while listening. Indeed, now I'm not sure how much of my memory of that episode is me remembering and how much is me making it up in my head.

The other thing that I keep coming back to (and you'll have to forgive me for bringing this up a third day running, but frankly I'm too bemused by this story to really write a great deal more) is that it could be a really dark and sinister piece. Between yesterday's episode and today's, I re-watched The End of the Line on the DVD for The Gunfighters. It's a documentary about the production of Doctor Who's Third Season (and, really, one of the best in the entire range - I've seen it three or four times already this year, and I'd not be surprised to find myself sticking it back on once I've finished with the season), and it goes into the rather torturous gestation of this tale.

The short version is that because this season saw the production team in a state of turbulence (three different producers and a few different script editors before the year is out), this story somewhat fell through the cracks, caught between two teams with very different ideas. It's the first script to be written by Brian Hayles, and a story is told in the documentary is that, having gotten about half-way through, Hayles called the production team and told them he didn't think he could continue with the script - because he was scaring himself writing it. Donald Tosh goes on to talk of how the story originally was all to do with playing with people's minds and manipulating them: and there's still a few elements of that in here.

It's clearest in Episode One, when Steven sees images of himself displayed on a screen. The Doctor tells him it's only displaying the images to him, and that it's drawing them from Steven's own mind. It would perhaps be interesting - and especially from a budget-saving point of view - to have the guest characters in this story drawn from Steven's mind, too. So we could have a Dhravin appear at one point, or a Dalek. Even a Monoid. That might be interesting enough. Imagine Steven and Dodo entering the Dancing Floor to find a group of Daleks sat there, guarding the TARDIS and dancing around. I'm sure Terry Nation would have vetoed it, but it's an interesting thought.

Then there's the idea that the contestants Steven and Dodo actually are playing against are people like them - who've become trapped here in the Toymaker's realm and are now playing for their freedom. It's an interesting idea, and while it starts to get explored here (with Steven and Dodo debating what they actually are). it never goes quite far enough for my liking.

The Toymaker himself is growing in potential for a character, too. There's a point here when he could be very sinister: telling two of his 'dolls' that if they fail him, he will break them. He demonstrates by smashing a plate, but it would be so much more effective had he broken another failed pawn.

And tomorrow, I move back into the world of the existing episode, so any opportunity to imagine how good this could look will be out the window, and I'll get a real eye-opener to the world of the Toymaker…

Next Episode: The Final Test

Next Episode: The Final Test 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 118: The Hall of Dolls (The Celestial Toymaker, Episode Two)

Dear diary,

This isn't, perhaps, going to be a popular statement… but I can see why The Celestial Toymaker spent so long being considered as one of the greats. Oi! Come back! Don't close the tab! Hear me out!

In the days when you can't see the story, or hear it (heck, even the novelisation wasn't released until June 1986, a little over twenty years from broadcast), this must have sounded brilliant. Take this episode, for example. If I were to describe it to you as Steven and Dodo having to choose the right chair, by using dolls to test them out, but six of the chairs have horrible consequences…

Oh, all right. It still sounds naff. But it shouldn't, because there's some quite creepy moments in here. One of the dolls gets cut clean in half when it's placed on a chair. Another is electrocuted as Dodo throws it up onto the chair. It doesn't sound great when you can hear it on the soundtrack, and it probably didn't look great to watch, but the idea of it… that's pretty solid.

Otherwise, I'm still not sure what to make of this story. This particular episode is usually the one that people hold up as being appalling because of the use of the 'n-word'. Obviously, it's not something that's comfortable to have in here, but it's a fact of the matter that it appeared this way at the time, 47 years ago, and that we've moved on from it. A friend made a good point the other day, though. Were this episode to be returned to the BBC's archives, what would they do about it? On the soundtrack it's covered by Purves' narration (indeed, I didn't even realise until later on that it had been spoken over), but the episode itself may not have that option. I'm guessing that the Restoration Team would just cover it cleverly in some way.

But setting that aside, I think I'm still more baffled by this story than I am actively bored by it. Today's episode was listened to while I did the washing up, and I spent most of the time wondering what on Earth they were thinking by making a story like this. It's really unlike anything that we've seen in the series, and it's not something that we'll ever really see again.

And then I got to thinking about the fact that people are always so keen to bring the Celestial Toymaker back. He's in one of the novels, a few of the Big Finish audios (played, superbly, by David Bailie. If you've not heard his performance then you really need to. Off to the Big Finish website with you!), the first of the Eighth Doctor's DWM comic strips. There was even a planned return to the programme in the 1980s (again, available from Big Finish now).

I couldn't get my head around why people were so keen to bring him back, but I think it is simply the fact that the idea behind him is a solid one. He's a God. A powerful God who gets terribly bored and draws people like the Doctor to his realm to entertain him. Done well (and this story perhaps isn't the best example of that), he could be a very good character.

And so we move to Episode Three. I'm still a little surprised by my own reaction to the story - as I said yesterday, I'd been dreading this one. Tomorrow's my last opportunity to picture the Toymaker's realm entirely in my mind as opposed to what I can see in the surviving final part, so hopefully it'll give me plenty of imagery that can only work well away from this serial's budget…

Next Episode: The Dancing Floor

Next Episode: The Dancing Floor 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 117: The Celestial Toyroom (The Celestial Toymaker, Episode One)

Dear diary,

Ohh, I've been dreading this one. So far (with the occasional blip here or there), Season Three has been doing pretty well. The boredom that had started to seep in with Season Two has dissipated, and I'm really enjoying the programme at the moment. But then there's The Celestial Toymaker. For a long long time, this story had a golden reputation. People would fall over themselves to take credit for it.

But then the fourth episode was found.

Overnight, people changed their stories to pin the credit on somebody else. Anybody else. As long as it wasn't them. I'm guessing you can understand why I've not been too keen to reach this one. Thing is, though, I've not seen the fourth episode. I know some of the various criticisms that get levelled at it, but I've yet to witness them first-hand. And it actually seems to be doing the trick.

By the time this episode ended, by which time I'd expected to be sobbing and wondering if it was too late to drop out of this diary, I was more intrigued than anything else. I'm not sure I've actually got a clue what's really going on (it didn't help that the moment the rules of Steven and Dodo's game were announced happened to coincide with me reaching the self-service till in Asda), but I think I've enjoyed it.

One of the things that gets said a lot about the fourth episode is that the story simply looks cheap. Here, again, is the benefit of listening to this one as an audio - I don't know! It could look great! There's a moment in this one, where the Toymaker tells the Doctor and his companions that they can go back to the TARDIS if they want. Peter Purves' narration then explains a screen showing them hundreds of TARDISes.

That's how he described it, yet my mind automatically went for lots and lots of police boxes revolving around them. We already know that they're in an octagonal room with no features, so what if the walls of the room are suddenly lined with facsimiles of the ship? In my mind, that scene looked great.

They seem to be trying to inject a lot of tension into this story, too. Early on, the Doctor warns Steven and Dodo that nothing here is 'just for fun', and we later find out that the Doctor has visited the Toymaker's realm before. We're told that he didn't stay long enough on that occasion to play any of the games, but it's interesting to find a place like this that the Doctor actively knows of - and a place that he's scared of. It really helps to sell the threat to us, and isn't something we've seen before.

Even the ending of the episode sounds quite sinister, with the lights dimming, claps of thunder, and the clowns being reduced to lifeless mannequins which then shrink back down to the size of dolls. The narration describes Dodo as shuddering as she leaves the room, and in my mind at least, it's a pretty creepy scene.

Ah, Dodo. She really is just a companion, now, There's no attempt to suggest that she's new to all this TARDIS travel stuff. Right at the start of the episode (or to be more exact, at the very end of the last episode), she emerges from the wardrobe again, thrilled with her latest discovery. It's 'fab', apparently. When they think they've arrived in an empty place, she's keen to move on to somewhere more exciting. It really is a shame that she's not being given more of a character so far.

Still, it's a much better start than I'd feared to this story - even if it is all in my head so far. Here's hoping things don't go too awry before the last episode rolls around!

Next Episode: The Hall of Dolls

Next Episode: The Hall of Dolls