aWill Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 333: The Time Monster, Episode Three
Dear diary,
Recently at work, I found myself in one of those slightly awkward conversations about Doctor Who. It’s always awkward when this happens, but because people know that I’m a fan, I always seem to find myself as the default guy for this topic. Usually it comes as a result of someone seeing a Doctor Who item in the morning’s papers, and deciding to quiz me on it. For years it’s been ‘That Matt Smith has quit as Doctor Who, hasn’t he?’ (to which the answer was normally ‘no, he hasn’t…’), or else people telling me that their favourite Doctor was John Hartnell, or Jim Davison.
Today’s conversation originated from a different place. A colleague has just returned from a few weeks’ break in Greece. When I asked what he’d gotten up to on holiday he told me that he’d bought a Kindle version of the 50 Year Diary book, and had spent a few days reading it on the beach. Having told him that it was a waste of perfectly good sand castle time, the questions started. It came from other colleagues, ones who didn’t have much of an interest in the programme. ‘Oh, have you written a book? What’s it about?’
It’s very hard to explain to someone who isn’t a fan of Doctor Who quite why you’d bother to sit down and watch it all in order from the start. You often find yourself faced with questions about how long it’s been going, how many episodes there are, what your favourite episode is (as if it would mean anything to them when you say The Tomb of the Cybermen) etc, etc. And then… it always turns in the same direction:
Old Doctor Who used to be a bit rubbish, didn’t it? People always seem to point out the wobbly sets (something I’ve not been keeping a track of in the Diary, but I can’t say I’ve really noticed), the fact that the Daleks can’t travel upstairs, and the monsters. It tends to swing with the monsters. Half the people I speak to tell me that they were scared of the Cybermen in black and white, while the other half simply talk about how they were all stupid ‘men in rubber suits’. And I do my duty as a Doctor Who fan, telling them that – actually – the monsters are pretty good! I tell them how effective some of the creatures are, and mention that you sometimes get brilliant human villains like Tobias Vaghn.
And then… well… then you get an episode like this, in which a person in a white bird costume is strung up from the ceiling, and flapping around in a laboratory. It’s fair to say that this isn’t the programme’s finest moment. It’s a real shame, because a lot of other stuff in this episode has been quite enjoyable. The Master summoning up various figures from history to do battle with UNIT is blatant padding (if we didn’t get the point, he demonstrates the same trick three times), but it’s quite fun, and it’s nice to see Yates being in charge of a battle again. It’s all shot on film, so that helps make it look a bit better, too.
The Master is as good value as ever, though it’s only today that I’ve noticed how little he actually wears his ‘iconic’ Nehru suit. It always seems to be the outfit that’s most closely associated with this incarnation of the character, but he spends just as much time wearing standard suits as he does this. Today he changes back in to it (Though I’m not entirely sure why), and I suddenly realised how little I actually associate it with him now. I’ve also remembered that The Time Monster is the story in which we get to see the ‘washing up bowls’ TARDIS console room, so every time he gets close to that computer bank, I’m expecting us to follow him inside. Special praise also has to be given to his introduction as ‘A Lord of Time’ – what a great way of phrasing it!
I also need to highlight another brilliant piece of dialogue between three of our regulars:
THE DOCTOR
Oh dear.
JO
What's up?
THE DOCTOR
It doesn't work…
THE BRIGADIER
You astound me.
It’s only a brief moment, but I think it sums up everything that I do enjoy about this era of the programme…
