Day Nine — January 9th 2021
Wall of Eyes and Rider From Shang-Tu
Wall of Eyes (Marco Polo — Episode Four)
I’ve got a bit of a fascination with the TARDIS. Not so much the fictional TARDIS as it appears within Doctor Who, but rather the TARDIS as a prop or a set used in the production of the programme. You may have noticed that in this blog already, because I keep pointing out what I think are interesting things about the prop as I go along.
A few years ago I spent months and months on end researching and writing a blog about the various TARDIS props used in 21st Century Doctor Who, and I’ve started but am yet to finish a similar project charting the boxes used for the ‘classic’ years of the show, too. It fascinates me to track the little changes that get made as time goes on, and I love wrestling with the mystery of what was used when, and why. There’s points in the Christopher Eccleston era, for example, where they suddenly take one of the doors from the first prop and attach it to the second! For no obvious reason! Maybe they just picked up the wrong one? Maybe someone did it on purpose? We’ll never know, but I love trying to find out.
Which is why I’ve spent much of today grappling with a TARDIS-related mystery in Wall of Eyes. It’s a mystery that I’ve concluded can’t be solved unless the actual episode itself shows up — and believe me, I’ve spent all day checking to make sure.
The background to the mystery I’ve been trying to solve; about ten minutes into today’s episode, Doctor Who sneaks across a courtyard and into the TARDIS. A few scenes later, he’ll be caught emerging from it and put under strict guard by Marco Polo. Between these two events, though, we have two very brief shots of Doctor Who inside the ship, working on the faulty component while humming to himself.
The actual mystery itself; just how much of the TARDIS interior do we see?
Doctor Who recording in the 1960s was a bit of a tight affair, especially when — as with this episode — they were confined to the pokey Studio D at Lime Grove. This episode already features a number of settings including the Way Station Interior, an outdoor Courtyard, various tents (inside and outside), a Chinese Tea Room, and the Outer Chamber of the Cave of Five Hundred Eyes. Surely they wouldn’t waste space trying to build any of the TARDIS set for the sake of two brief shots lasting less than ten seconds in total?
I first wondered if there was supposed to be a longer TARDIS scene which got cut down, leaving us with these two brief shots and nothing more, but the camera script for the episode confirms that the TARDIS scenes in the finished episode (49G and 49J) are as scripted — brief cutaways. Presumably, the humming was something Hartnell worked up in rehearsals. What’s more, this scene was a late addition when it was discovered that the script was under-running; it was added the day before recording.
And that makes it seem even more bizarre to me that they’ve added another location — the interior of the ship — so last minute, when surely the plans for the studio were already worked up and finalised? The sets would have been put in place on the Thursday night ready for camera rehearsals on Friday morning, leaving it very last minute for a change of plan in studio layout.
Sadly, this is the one episode of Marco Polo not directed by Waris Hussein, who retained tele-snaps for all of his episodes, which means it’s the only episode of the serial we have no snaps for. That’s not to say we’d have any of the TARDIS Interior even if he had — the scenes are so brief that they could have slipped through the net. It also means this is the only episode of the serial for which we don’t have copies of the studio plans, so there’s no answers to be found there.
The Doctor Who Programme Guide from the late 1990s lists among this episode’s sets ‘TARDIS Wall’, although the guide acknowledges that it’s basing this on the camera script, so is likely to be an assumption. And it’s the same assumption I would make — that they probably erected a single TARDIS wall in a corner somewhere, and shot Hartnell stood in front of it, close enough to disguise that there was nothing else.
But it still leaves me with a question — if they simply put up a single wall… which wall did they use? Was it one of the regular ones with the inset roundels? The wall containing the TARDIS doors? One of the Photo Blow Up walls with the printed roundels? It’s a mystery we’ll not solve unless the episode turns up, and I can already tell it’s going to bother me until then!
Something which I really should have mentioned before now is that Marco Polo was the story to win Doctor Who it’s first Radio Times cover, and one of the few regular ‘classic’ stories to receive one; that’s to say one of the few stories not featuring Daleks, or Cybermen, or acting as part of an anniversary.
The issue hit the shops the day before this episode was recorded, and along with the last-minute script changes, was something of a sticking point for William Russell. He wrote to his agent over the weekend to complain about the time he was having on the series, and about not being featured on the cover, even though he was supposed to be the series ‘second lead’. Thankfully things were resolved, and we’ve got a lot more of Ian to enjoy yet!
I’ve a handful of old Radio Times issues framed up in my office — all of them featuring covers for 1960s Eurovision Song Contests — and I’d love to include this one on the wall, but it’s a fairly rare piece these days, and tends to go for quite a bit of money!
7/10
Rider From Shang-Tu (Marco Polo — Episode Five)
I’m willing to put money on the fact that Susan and Ping-Cho’s friendship in this story wasn’t written with romantic undertones in 1964, but my god it doesn’t take much of a leap to read it that way in 2021, does it? In fact, I think it’s all the stronger if you do read it in that way, and assume the two girls are falling in love with each other during their long journey to Cathay.
It would certainly make Ping-Cho’s betrayal of Polo to steal back a TARDIS Key, and Susan risking the lives of her friends to say one last goodbye all the more poignant. I’m not sure I paid it much attention during my last marathon, but it’s one of the things I’m enjoying the most on this occasion, because it helps to make the characters — and the story — richer.
It also ties in nicely with Doctor Who’s distrust of Ping-Cho; it’s not just because she knows he’s made a spare key, it’s because he sees her as someone who might take his granddaughter away. There’s a moment between Barbara and him in Episode Four;
Barbara: ‘I shall be jolly glad to leave here. In fact, the only regrets I’ll have will be for Susan.’
Doctor Who: ‘What do you mean?’
Barbara: ‘Oh, I think she and Ping-Cho are very fond of each other. It’s a pity they’ve been kept apart so much.’
Doctor Who: ‘It’s a pity there was any association at all.’
I think in most other situations, we would definitely read Susan’s friendship with Ping-Cho as a sign that she’d be leaving come the end of the serial; she starts to talk wistfully about the day hat her travels are over, and today she speaks lovingly of her home;
Ping-Cho: ‘How I miss my home in Samarkand. And your home, Susan? You’ve never told me about that. Is it so very far away?’
Susan: ‘Yes, it is. It’s as far away as a night star.’
Forget David Campbell — the love of Susan’s life was Ping-Cho!
7/10
