Set in the London Underground, the 1968 Doctor Who story 'The Web of Fear' is finally available on DVD. For many enthusiasts, it's the story that defines the Patrick Troughton era of the series.
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| Hammer horror... (Image: BBC) |
Memory’s a funny
thing. Back in the 1980s, when nobody could see Series 5 of Doctor Who and
we only had scratchy, off-the-TV soundtracks to go on – aside from telesnaps, the frame-by-frame
photographs archivist John Cura provided for programme makers – we bought into
the idea, put around by some older fans, that the fifth season was the
high-point of Doctor Who in the 1960s.
Single episodes tantalised us with the promise of a slew of base-under-siege
classics that established once and for all what the series was really
all about: a quirky hero and his plucky chums versus a variety of towering,
preferably robotic, monsters.
Of course it’s
not as simple as that. When ‘The Tomb of the Cybermen’ turned up, I couldn't
square the classic of fandom folklore with a 1967 TV production that sported
untidy direction and wildly variable characterisation and performances. In the
1990s, the delightful surprise was the return of ‘The Ice Warriors’: a science
fiction story that featured monsters rather than a science fiction story about
monsters, with innovative production design and direction, as well as
startlingly modern dialogue.
Fast forward to
2013, and against all odds, ‘The Enemy of the World’ and ‘The Web of Fear’ were
recovered together. It’s going to sound churlish considering the astonishing
discovery of eleven old episodes forty-odd years on, but I found ‘Enemy’
similar to ‘Tomb’ in its not entirely successful mixture of impressively staged
film set pieces – the location filming, the confrontation with Salamander in
the TARDIS – and crushingly leaden direction. Predictably, the best things
about it are Patrick Troughton’s dual roles: he was such a good character actor
that you really believe the Doctor and Salamander are two separate people.
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| The beginning of a nightmare. (Image: BBC) |
I remember ‘The
Web of Fear’ so well from 1968. Having first watched Doctor Who (I think) during ‘The Power of the Daleks’, I was by
then hooked, and of all the 1960s stories, it’s the bizarre images in ‘Web’
that captivated my nearly four year-old imagination the most: the TARDIS snared
by web in space, the dead newspaper seller who keels over, the web/fungus of
the Great Intelligence squirming through the tunnels, the battle with the Yeti,
the web guns, a Yeti control unit bleeping across the floor and terrifying a
soldier. The trailer, with the Doctor talking to the audience and warning them
about the return of the Yeti, is a particularly vivid memory, but I have no
memory whatsoever of 'The Enemy of the World' episode six, even though I must
have watched it.
So – would ‘The
Web of Fear’ turn out to be the second upward curve on the graph of reappraised
quality in Series 5...?
146 minutes
later...
Good news: the
Great Intelligence’s rematch with the Doctor may not be as intellectual as ‘The
Ice Warriors,’ but (as you’d expect from Douglas Camfield, one of Doctor Who’s
best directors) ‘The Web of Fear’ is pacy, acted with conviction and overflows
with images of the uncanny in an everyday setting. No other programme could
offer such a – an overused word, but I’m going to use it – surreal mixture of
elements: robot versions of legendary animals who fire guns full of lethal web,
in a London Underground being choked by a fungus-like organism. Considering
what was going on elsewhere in society at the time, I do wonder if recreational
chemicals might have played some part in the story’s origination.
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| A base under siege and a traitor within... (Image: BBC) |
There’s so much
to enjoy (an unnecessary and unfortunate Jewish stereotype aside). The
characterisation of the soldiers trapped in the Goodge Street fortress is
particularly authentic. Like a khaki Greek chorus, Corporal Lane (Rod Beacham)
and Craftsman Weams (Stephen Whittaker) discuss their situation, speculating
that the Yeti are robots created by a foreign power for germ warfare or – far,
far more unlikely – invaders from outer space…. Staff Sergeant Arnold (Jack
Woolgar) is a seasoned, tough-but-with-a-heart-of-gold leader of men, and
Woolgar’s salty performance is so convincing that the final episode revelation
about him is a genuine shocker. Captain Knight (Ralph Watson) may be a bit of a
chinless wonder with a bizarre pronunciation of Charing Cross, but he gets a
wonderful moment of disgust, reacting to the statement by Harold Chorley (the
excellent John Rollason) that the killing of soldiers is ‘great stuff’ for his
news story. Among all the Rourke’s Drift stiff upper lippery, it’s wonderful to
have an unrepentantly cowardly character in Driver Evans (Derek Pollitt).
Nobody can stand him, and when he does decide to help, he gets shouted at by
the Doctor. They should have brought him back – imagine how different Doctor
Who would have been with Evans taking the role of Sergeant Benton.
And then there’s
one Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney). If you can blank out his
major role in the series in the 1970s, here he’s clearly designed to be the
main suspect as the Great Intelligence’s agent, as no-one knows anything about
him and sabotage only starts happening when he turns up; bearing that in mind,
his sole survival of the Yeti attack takes on a very sinister aspect. This Cold
War paranoia about infiltration by an enemy occurred in 1960s series as varied as Callan
and Counterstrike, and would have struck a particularly mature chord
with the adult audience, particularly as we’re kept guessing about the identity
of the traitor until the last moment. Chorley is the other candidate,
disappearing for two episodes and leading you to wonder if he’s manipulating
events behind the scenes.
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| The stuff of childhood terror. (Image: BBC) |
There’s so much
other good stuff: the bewilderment of Professor Travers (Jack Watling) at the
Doctor’s companions Jamie (Frazer Hines) and Victoria (Deborah Watling) not
having aged since he last met them; the very contemporary dig by the
impressively tough Anne Travers (Tina Packer) at the ‘gutter press’; the brilliant
model work of the tunnels and the Goodge Street lab and, of course, the Yeti.
Some Doctor Who monsters look great in still photos but a bit silly when
they move, but the reverse is true of these furry robots: they’re quick, savage
and brutal, and unnerving when they suddenly switch off and stand still. A
great monster.
As I’ve said,
‘The Web of Fear’ is a straightforward story well told, and Camfield has to
take most of the credit for that. He recognised that Doctor Who had more
in common with horror films than science fiction movies, and here we get an
edgy vocabulary of extreme close ups – Troughton’s characterful, lined face was
made for black and white – and film noir style photography so
expressionistic that some backgrounds to the scenes are pure black. This not
only adds to the claustrophobic feel, but hides the budgetary limitations in
the sets, so we don’t get anything as stagey as the Gravitron control room in
‘The Moonbase’. No one’s doing ‘children's TV’ or hammy acting (unlike in
‘Tomb’ and ‘Enemy’) and Hines, in particular, is more muscular than usual.
In February
2014, I’m delighted to report that ‘The Web of Fear’ is, next to ‘The Ice
Warriors’ and ‘The War Games’, the best (nearly) complete Troughton Doctor
Who story resident in the BBC archives. In many ways, for me, it is the
Troughton era, and you could show it to today’s children and they’d be excited
and thrilled by it.
I’ve believed
since 1968 that ‘The Web of Fear’ was brilliant. All these years later, it's
gratifying to know that I was right.
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