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I'm sitting here in Woodstock, with the election results (which I'd managed to forget, and only remembered once I was driving up Banbury Road) on BBC 1, and have just finished the first mug of chocolate I've had in months. I don't know why or how the scent of chocolate filled my nostrils as I approached the Bladon roundabout, but it did and reminded me of the Green & Black's jar in the cupboard. I have made up for lost time and made a second trip to the kitchen, forgetting briefly about calories.
I thought of giving this review a different heading. The pedantic side of my soul was urging me to refer to 'Doctor Who I.31-36' but it then remembered that the idea of the season was after the fact; Verity Lambert even had to argue for a production break after finishing The Dalek Invasion of Earth, as much as the broadcasting break after The Reign of Terror. But episodes 31 to 36 are a distinct serial and produced as such even if they were broadcast under individual episode titles, though as Beruthiel complained, it's easy to get lost and uncertain whether this is episode four or five.
As I type Glenys Kinnock and other Welsh politicians are being interviewed from the lobby of the cat people's hospital on New Earth. Designers of studio-bound Doctor Who in 1964 couldn't take outside broadcast cameras to modern architectural sites, as there was studio space to use. Still, these were definitely Raymond Cusick sets. The Sensorite city was marked by its irregularly curved arches, reminiscent of his Dalek city but replacing grinding monotonous discipline with something more playful. The human spaceship combined the homely - not for this craft a monitor screen, they see what's outside the craft using good old-fashioned windows - with other echoes of the Dalek city in circular information screens and doors which open (at least in the first episode) with the same sound effect as the sliding doors on Skaro in the first Dalek story. (Why not use the same sound for the doors? It's not as if we were going to see Skaro or the Daleks again.)
I last saw The Sensorites about three years ago, when the VHS box set was released. I was surprised by it, because it has traditionally received a bad press from fandom, and because I found it one of the most watchable stories of the Hartnell period. The playfulness of the Sensorite city is appropriate because - as was widely recognised by the DSoc viewers - the Sensorites are very childlike. Their wearing of sashes as identifiers would have been recognised by lots of Doctor Who's child audience as reminiscent of games and PE lessons. The way in which the Sensorites are beaten back on the spacecraft by the defiance of Ian and Barbara was seen in our room as very like the children accepting schoolteacher authority. The First Elder governs by trust and the idea that Sensorites would conspire against the common good (as perceived and determined by the First Elder, but only insofar as the First Elder's understanding of society considers it to be self-evident anyway - the young George III would have liked the First Elder) is anathema to him.
Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood's About Time considers that this is an anti-Imperial story. "Encountering other cultures should be about what we can bring, not what they have that we want." This message was certainly there - John is driven mad because his greed for molybedenum made his mind more open to the Sensorites' telepathy, and there's a strong suggestion that it's the intervention of the humans and the explosion of their device in the atmosphere of the Sense-Sphere which has led to the suspicion, distrust and paranoia of the City Administrator - a forceful performance by Peter Glaze, one of at least two actors behind the Sensorite masks whose faces would have been familiar to the television audience in 1964, the other being Bartlett Mullins, the Second Elder, whose many roles included Cloughie, mentor to Bob and Terry in the original Likely Lads series.
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calliope85 reminded me, it's possible to overstress the imperial analogy, where the humans could be seen as the British and the Sensorites as the noble civilization whose pacific ways might easily be overrun by force. Despite this John Bailey's commander, revealed in the final episode as the leader of the remains of the human force who have been poisoning the Sensorites, comes across as the sort of rule-bound mediocrity who populate the fiction of empire.
More fruitful perhaps would be another observation of Calliope's, that the Sensorite society is 'very Platonic'. The description of the political system the Second Elder gives is met by the observation from Ian that some Sensorites are more equal than others. Doctor Who was in part conceived as a riposte by modernists to the donnish fantasy of Lewis and Tolkien on one hand, and to the grammar school education which might be thought to have paralleled the traditional mode of address of the BBC. Ian's Orwellian reference emphasises the programme's contemporaneity (even if it's not particularly agitational in the Sydney Newman sense) just as the placing of Ian and Barbara as staff in what was almost certainly a very trendy comprehensive school in An Unearthly Child did.
Anyway, must go to bed, as it's getting towards 3am. Projected share of the vote, as announced by Jeremy Vine on BBC 1 a few minutes ago - Labour 27%, Conservative 41%, Liberal Democrat 26% - +1%, +1% and -1% respectively. Not as good a night for the SNP in Scotland as widely expected, either.
I thought of giving this review a different heading. The pedantic side of my soul was urging me to refer to 'Doctor Who I.31-36' but it then remembered that the idea of the season was after the fact; Verity Lambert even had to argue for a production break after finishing The Dalek Invasion of Earth, as much as the broadcasting break after The Reign of Terror. But episodes 31 to 36 are a distinct serial and produced as such even if they were broadcast under individual episode titles, though as Beruthiel complained, it's easy to get lost and uncertain whether this is episode four or five.
As I type Glenys Kinnock and other Welsh politicians are being interviewed from the lobby of the cat people's hospital on New Earth. Designers of studio-bound Doctor Who in 1964 couldn't take outside broadcast cameras to modern architectural sites, as there was studio space to use. Still, these were definitely Raymond Cusick sets. The Sensorite city was marked by its irregularly curved arches, reminiscent of his Dalek city but replacing grinding monotonous discipline with something more playful. The human spaceship combined the homely - not for this craft a monitor screen, they see what's outside the craft using good old-fashioned windows - with other echoes of the Dalek city in circular information screens and doors which open (at least in the first episode) with the same sound effect as the sliding doors on Skaro in the first Dalek story. (Why not use the same sound for the doors? It's not as if we were going to see Skaro or the Daleks again.)
I last saw The Sensorites about three years ago, when the VHS box set was released. I was surprised by it, because it has traditionally received a bad press from fandom, and because I found it one of the most watchable stories of the Hartnell period. The playfulness of the Sensorite city is appropriate because - as was widely recognised by the DSoc viewers - the Sensorites are very childlike. Their wearing of sashes as identifiers would have been recognised by lots of Doctor Who's child audience as reminiscent of games and PE lessons. The way in which the Sensorites are beaten back on the spacecraft by the defiance of Ian and Barbara was seen in our room as very like the children accepting schoolteacher authority. The First Elder governs by trust and the idea that Sensorites would conspire against the common good (as perceived and determined by the First Elder, but only insofar as the First Elder's understanding of society considers it to be self-evident anyway - the young George III would have liked the First Elder) is anathema to him.
Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood's About Time considers that this is an anti-Imperial story. "Encountering other cultures should be about what we can bring, not what they have that we want." This message was certainly there - John is driven mad because his greed for molybedenum made his mind more open to the Sensorites' telepathy, and there's a strong suggestion that it's the intervention of the humans and the explosion of their device in the atmosphere of the Sense-Sphere which has led to the suspicion, distrust and paranoia of the City Administrator - a forceful performance by Peter Glaze, one of at least two actors behind the Sensorite masks whose faces would have been familiar to the television audience in 1964, the other being Bartlett Mullins, the Second Elder, whose many roles included Cloughie, mentor to Bob and Terry in the original Likely Lads series.
As
calliope85 reminded me, it's possible to overstress the imperial analogy, where the humans could be seen as the British and the Sensorites as the noble civilization whose pacific ways might easily be overrun by force. Despite this John Bailey's commander, revealed in the final episode as the leader of the remains of the human force who have been poisoning the Sensorites, comes across as the sort of rule-bound mediocrity who populate the fiction of empire. More fruitful perhaps would be another observation of Calliope's, that the Sensorite society is 'very Platonic'. The description of the political system the Second Elder gives is met by the observation from Ian that some Sensorites are more equal than others. Doctor Who was in part conceived as a riposte by modernists to the donnish fantasy of Lewis and Tolkien on one hand, and to the grammar school education which might be thought to have paralleled the traditional mode of address of the BBC. Ian's Orwellian reference emphasises the programme's contemporaneity (even if it's not particularly agitational in the Sydney Newman sense) just as the placing of Ian and Barbara as staff in what was almost certainly a very trendy comprehensive school in An Unearthly Child did.
Anyway, must go to bed, as it's getting towards 3am. Projected share of the vote, as announced by Jeremy Vine on BBC 1 a few minutes ago - Labour 27%, Conservative 41%, Liberal Democrat 26% - +1%, +1% and -1% respectively. Not as good a night for the SNP in Scotland as widely expected, either.
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