100,000
BC
3
episodes
written
by Anthony Coburn
originally
transmitted 30th November - 14th December 1963
In
a way 100,000 BC is the first story in Doctor Who to be
declared non-canon. The beginning of the series will be retold twice,
first in David Whitaker's novelisation of The Daleks and again in the
first Peter Cushing movie. These days with video, DVD, YouTube,
Netflix. torrent sites and projects like this we take as gospel the
televised version of events but back then you didn't have much of a
chance. You either saw 100,000 BC when it first aired or you
didn't have another chance until 1981 and The Five Faces Of Doctor
Who repeats. The novelisation you could put on your shelf and read
whenever you liked and once the movie made it to television it was a
bank holiday staple for decades.
So
100,000 BC is surplus to requirements, yes? Well, yes and no.
These three episodes represent three of five weeks in Doctor Who's
history where no one knows what a Dalek looks like. Once you've got
Daleks the appeal of cavemen arguing about fire pales somewhat, which
is actually a pity. This is a very good story: pacey, well-directed,
well-acted and with a strong underlying theme of fear woven
throughout.
Actually,
let's start with the theme of fear which motivates much of what we
see in this story. Last time I made a comment about how An
Unearthly Child felt surprisingly modern in some ways but these
three episodes actually feel like the sort of story modern Doctor Who
might tell if it did an old-fashioned “pure” historical. One of
the big innovations of modern Who was to write a story around a
theme: Vincent and the Doctor, for instance, is all about
Vincent's emotional state, his depression and his joy so even
his inevitable suicide isn't seen as a defeat. Here, forty-one years
before Russell T. Davies holds his first tone meeting we see Verity
Lambert, Waris Hussein and Anthony Coburn get the trick right with a
production that is literally all about fear.
Old
Mother fears fire because she fears change; Za fears the tribe will
turn on him if he can't make fire; Hur is afraid her father will give
her to Kal instead of Za; Ian fears the strange world he finds
himself in; Susan fears for her grandfather's safety; the Doctor
fears the mob of cavemen who capture him and demand he make fire; and
Barbara, in one of Jacqueline Hill's best scenes as Barbara, breaks
down in tears as the TARDIS crew flee from the Cave of Skulls. You
might think I'd be a bit hard on that last scene, especially coupled
with the similar fit of tears Susan goes through when the Doctor
disappears but both women get strong, empowering scenes later on:
Barbara explaining compassion to Hur and Susan leaping on the back of
a caveman as she spearheads the attack to save the Doctor.
Like
I said with An Unearthly Child and as I'm sure I'll say again
over the next two seasons: there are far worse times to play a female
companion than under Verity Lambert's producership. I'll have plenty
of opportunities to lay tribute at those particular feet so let's
talk instead about Waris Hussein's directing.
First
off I have to say this: a lot of the praise I'm about to heap on
Hussein is probably not just down to his being a good director (which
he most definitely was) but also to the fact that Doctor Who is just
starting. In the black and white years the series was produced almost
continuously, to the point where cast members disappear for an
episode or two at a time so they can have a holiday. The series is
being made on a very fast production line and that has all sorts of
consequences: actors get fatigued, sub-standard scripts make it to
screen because there's simply no time to replace or rewrite them; and
sometimes things just plain looked like a good idea on paper but
turned out less impressive in practice. All these issues and more
we'll grapple with throughout the Sixties and beyond but here, a
couple of weeks into the series, these issues don't exist. Everyone
is fresh and raring to do, the first scripts have considerable polish
and everyone has had time to work out what they want to do with what
they've got.
What
Waris Hussein wants to do, incidentally, is most interesting with the
cave people. Anthony Coburn puts in some good work here as well by
giving them great turns of phrase: Kal doesn't understand the
Doctor's pipe and matches and so believes the Doctor makes fire come
from his fingers and has smoke in his mouth. Its Hussein's direction
that makes them alien through hunched postures and animal movements,
jerky motions as if they feel constantly under threat which ties in
well with Hur not understanding compassion except in terms of a
mother protecting her child, she doesn't even understand the word
“friend”. Alethea Charleton as Hur, incidentally, is an absolute
highlight of the story as she completely embraces the non-human
movement style.
On
the side of the TARDIS crew, as I say, the highlight of both
directing and acting is Barbara's breakdown in the middle episode (or
the third, if you're counting from An Unearthly Child, as is
more normal). In later years the first trip in the TARDIS is an
occasion for wonder and wide-eyed amazement but here it is terrifying
and in pre-history it doesn't even have the allure Barbara will find
in later historical adventures: the chance to meet people she's only
read about.
This
actually brings us to another way in which 100,000 BC is often
forgotten: there's a slight (though far from universal) tendency to
skip it when listing the pure historicals and start with Marco
Polo. This isn't entirely unfair, we're not actually exploring
history here. Over the next couple of seasons the historical stories
will tend to feature one or both of a) a famous historical figure;
or, b) a historical event, though not necessarily a famous one. In
spite of the title we've come to known from our programme guides
there's nothing to suggest even an approximate date for this story to
take place in and, this being pre-history, there are no famous
historical figures. Instead we see solidly fictional cave people in a
solidly fictional drama about the discovery of fire. We're in pulp
adventure territory with comic strip cavemen menacing our children's
serial heroes. Seeing as I like the story an awful lot it seems
churlish to complain but it gives the lie to the idea that Doctor Who
dropped the educational aspects of its mandate on some kind of fixed
curve: the first historical features no reference to any sort of
authentic history, just a Boy's Own adventure setting that happens to
be set in the past. There isn't even a real explanation of how to
start a campfire, which given the ways in which later stories will
fail to make magnetism, condensation and stuck switches interesting,
is probably a blessing.
If
any of these seem like criticisms (and, in my view, they are not)
then the best way to consider it is this: the historical is obviously
not done cooking. This is a fantastic adventure story but we aren't
yet in the “pure historical” territory the Hartnell era will
become associated with.
In
a way this is reflective of the series in general. This is the story
where the Doctor picks up a rock, subtly but obviously with the
intention of braining a wounded Za so they can escape. All that stops
him is Ian and he makes a feeble excuse about how he was going to ask
Za to draw the route back to the TARDIS in the soil. There's a way to
go before he becomes the Doctor, either as we understand the
character or as Hartnell is generally remembered. There are hints
though, like the scene where he tricks Kal into brandishing the
bloodstained rock he used to kill Old Mother. It's a victory he wins
through cleverness, dispatching an enemy through sheer bluff. This is
the Doctor we want, even if his next move is to incite the other cave
people to throw stones at Kal and drive him off. He is, honestly, a
bit of a bully and a bit of a sulker at this point, glorying in being
smarter than a bunch of starving primitives and leading them on to
ostracise someone who threatens him.
He
does not, in short, have a worthy adversary yet.
That's
about to change.
Next
Episode: The Daleks
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