Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 453: The Hand of Fear, Episode One
Dear diary,
By the time The Hand of Fear was released on DVD in 2006, I was regularly picking the stories up on release day as I passed by Woolworths. As if I didn’t already know from any number of guidebooks about the series, this particular release bore a sticker on the front, proclaiming it as ‘Sarah Jane’s final classic story’. Now that I’ve reached it in the context of the marathon, it’s as though things have come around a bit… quick. Sarah Jane has been companion for longer than most companions (even - just - edging out Jo Grant’s three seasons), but her time in the TARDIS has felt rather short.
I think it’s because of the change in teams throughout her time. She spends her first season alongside Jon Pertwee, and while they worked brilliantly together, they didn’t share the same rapport that she and Tom Baker would later build up. That said, in her second season, I often felt that she was overshadowed by the presence of Harry in the TARDIS. It’s only really through the stories of Season Thirteen that she’s become the wonderful companion that I know and enjoy.
But what on Earth have they dressed her in for her final appearance?!?! Of course, I’ve always known of the ‘Andy Pandy’ costume from this story (although I had no idea that it was described as such in the episode itself!), but it’s not until you actually encounter it watching through like this that you realise just how out of place it really is. Lis Sladen talks in her autobiography of making Sarah’s dress sense more and more ‘out there’ the longer she travelled in the TARDIS (and she makes the same point in the commentary for this episode), but this is, I think, the first time I’ve ever noticed it so much. Oh, sure, there’s been a few questionable clothing choices over the past few seasons, but this is batting things into a whole other league.
Thankfully, it’s not holding Sladen back, and she’s turning in a hell of a performance for her final story. She’s always been rather good with her ‘possessed’ acting, and it’s nice to see her really giving it her all in her final story. She gives a wonderful ‘far off’ look when trying to be disconnected from events, and I’m completely sold by it. Seeing a companion taken over like this isn’t new by any stretch (a similar thing even happened to Sarah in the last story!), but I’m loving the performance here. It sets this possession out above the rest, and that’s always nice.
I’ve never noticed before just how contemporary-Earth-centric these early Tom Baker years are. I’d always thought of the programme in the 1970s as being almost entirely Earth-bound for Jon Pertwee’s tenure, before barely touching down here again once Baker stepped into the role. It’s actually proved to be far more delineated than that, with every season from about 1972 onwards featuring at least a couple of stories set in the ‘present’. Since the Fourth Doctor took over, we’ve had Robot, Terror of the Zygons, The Android Invasion, The Seeds of Doom and now this one - almost half of his stories have taken place in this period of history. Sarah’s departure will change that, and we’ll start seeing less adventures placed here through the rest of Baker’s run. Maybe losing his human companion cuts another tie to the planet? After all, we won’t have another one until Tegan shows up, and that’s a long way off from now.
That said, this has a different feel to all the other stories set in this period over the last few years. For the first time since The Sea Devils, the Doctor has touched down on modern-day Earth in a story which won’t feature UNIT, and unlike The Seeds of Doom, he’s not been called in as such, but he’s simply arrived here while trying to give Sarah a trip home. It’s ironic, then, that the TARDIS should touch down in that most Doctor Who of locations - a quarry. There was a time, back around Season Three when quarries had first started to become shorthand for ‘alien world’, that I mused on how well they worked. It’s still true, now, but the language of the programme means that I watch the Doctor and Sarah Jane walk through this landscape, and my mind instantly sets it on some aline world. It’s only once we’re out of here and off to the hospital that things start to feel as though we’re really down to Earth. I’m also surprised just how often quarries do appear as themselves in Doctor Who. It was clever when they first tried it during The Ambassadors of Death, but we’ve only recently seen one at the end of last season!
