There’s absolutely nothing I can write that will live up to the expectations for this one, so with a few deep breaths:
The Moonbase
(episode 1)
Well, here we are then.
We’ve escaped from the nefarious plots of Zaroff, and now the TARDIS is crashing!
The Doctor desperately tries to stabilise his machine as his companions hold on for dear life, and succeeds.
The TARDIS took this opportunity to land.
Polly thinks the inhospitable landscape seen on the scanner is Mars.
Meanwhile, we get the first hints of Space Adventures by Martin Slavin (1922-1988), which is my favourite bit of incidental BBC music, bar none. And I will probably mention it every time it appears in this story, so there’s a fun drinking game for you all.
(This bit of music)
Ben recognises the landscape as being the moon. And teases the Doctor about missing his target by several million miles.
Innes Lloyd, producer, wanted to see Doctor Who reach the moon before the Apollo Space Programme achieved it!
Ben and Polly convince the Doctor to go investigating, and luckily he has space suits in the TARDIS so they can walk on the surface of the moon. Which apparently looked great, but some sod wiped the video.
If you think I'm going to make references to The Police, well, I was tempted...
The camera pans over the moon (apparently).
Ben and Polly and Jamie start to experiment with the low level of gravity. The Doctor is concerned about everyone.
(I’d like to note this lurking about in low gravity is also the solution in four episodes time.)
Jamie goes too far and bumps his head off a metal door.
Luckily, some astronauts appear and take him inside this base, which is on the moon. The other TARDIS regulars find a door and enter the base.
Inside the base, a number of worried scientists pour over machinery, looked over by their boss, Hobson. Then, one man, seemingly worn out, collapses at his desk.
A warning light on the big map flashes over the Atlantic Ocean.
Benoit goes to the fallen man, and sees black lines appear on the mans face. He and Bob take the stricken man to the medical wing, even as the base doctor has apparently fallen victim to this outbreak also.
A new man takes over the desk but is worried it’ll infect him.
Niles reports the new illness to Earth.
The Doctor walks in and introduces himself to Hobson. They are mistaken for the relief medical crew. The Doctor says his spacecraft landed on the moon.
Hobson takes this remarkably well, it has to be said.
Hobson is played by the great Patrick Barr, a Talking Pictures regular (Lavender Hill Mob, Escape by Night, Longest Day, etc etc). He was vastly in demand on TV and film, the Donald Sumpter of his day, and getting him for Doctor Who was a major coup. In fact, getting him at all proved tricky, as he was so in demand, he was doing a play for ITV (The Crossfire) at the same time. Director Morris Barry complained that the “Allied Invasion of Sicily was less hassle than getting Patrick Barr released from ITV” (DVD), and it turned out Dr Who could only book one film day with Barr. 20th January 1967. So he filmed all of his scenes on film at Ealing on that day.
The character of Hobson is based on Sir Vivian Fuchs, the British explorer and scientist who led the successful Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1958. In later life, he was president of the Royal Geographical Society, and has several parts of Antarctica, and ecological prizes, named after him.
Hobson introduces the Doctor to the Gravitron team, but becomes confused as to why the Doctor hasn’t heard of the Gravitron before, or why he doesn’t know the year. He plumps for 2050, and was merely two decades out – no bad for a time traveller!
DOCTOR: Well, I may be able to help you if you'll introduce us.
HOBSON: Right, Doctor. You'd better meet them all. We're all scientists here, you see. No room for idle hands, I see to that. Roger Benoit, beside you there, is my assistant. He takes over as Chief Scientist if anything happens to me. He's a physicist like me and Joe Benson there. Nils, our mad Dane, is an astronomer and mathematician as is Charlie here. Ralph, Jules and Franz are geologists. When they're not acting as cooks, looks-outs, general and, you know, handymen.
DOCTOR: And this is where you control the Earth's weather? I see.
BENOIT: The gravitron there controls the tides, the tides controls the weather. And from this console here we plot it all on that map. Simple, eh?
BEN: Oh, yeah, very simple. Wish we'd had all this back in 1966.
DOCTOR: Was it a bad year then?
Hah!
The Moon Base is a weather control station, which is trying to cope with large scale climate change on Earth by changing the gravitational waves from the moon.
When you think of global warming, you think of Gaia and when you think of both, the first name to come to mind is the late James Lovelock. One of the more influential scientists of the 20th Century – his team accidentally invented the microwave while trying to invent cryogenics – Lovelock first wrote about the impact of climate change in the 1950s, when few paid attention to him. Over the decades, his views went from being on the fringes to becoming mainstream accepted science. As he lived to be 103 years old, Lovelock lived long enough to see himself become the Cassandra. In later years, he was convinced that climate change was now irreversible. The friendlier old man scientist version of George Carlin’s “the planet is fine, it’s the people who are f’d” take on events. Even so, while at NASA, he invented the electron capture detector, and, using it to prove his theories, came up with proposals and technology to help fix the Ozone layer and other climate issues. So, if the world of the future is not The Moonbase level hell that James Lovelock predicted, you will have James Lovelock’s efforts to thank. He was trying to save us all even as he felt it was useless.
Somebody who took great interest in Lovelock’s work was noted eccentric Dr Kit Pedler, who had a unquenchable thirst for knowledge in new science and technology which was only equalled in the late 20th Century writers by your Douglas Adams. We’ve already seen in The War Machines how Pedler’s take on the internet is surprisingly accurate, for a man whose entire knowledge of the web came from some theory papers he’d read on the possibility of it. (In the 1960s, internet experiments with phone lines were carried out in the US, but in London, it was more a case of Pedler taking what he’d read and extrapolating what he felt would be the most logical practical way of putting it into practice.)
The Cybermen came about from his fear of augmentation to the nth degree. His Lovelock fandom expressed itself in his books on Gaia, written in the 1970s, in which he passionately wrote about the need to protect the planet, and the dangers of man made climate change. A TV regular in the 60s and 70s (sadly most of it has been wiped) he would conduct TV experiments to prove the dangers of pollution on the human body.
“As an example” of environmental issues, he told the New Scientist (reported by David Gibson in the Evening Times, 23 March 1971), “look at the habit of many coastal towns of discharging raw sewage into the sea. They know they are doing wrong, we know they are doing wrong. But they protect themselves if you challenge them by referring to a 1959 publication by the Medical Research Council which said there was no health hazard in bathing in raw sewage.”
What was that about Kit Pedler and timeliness, again?
The environment was his great love, and so when it came to The Moonbase, he saw ways of merging his environmentalism, and his near future SF ideals, by placing the story in 2070, and seeing a world where man made climate change had gone to such extremes, that the only way humanity can survive is through man made weather control, from a base on the moon. Dotted throughout the story we get references to the climate disaster down on Earth.
Writing for Doctor Who could easily have been one of the least exciting things Gerry Davis did in his lifetime. Before his early death in 1991, when he had been stopped mid-project by the late discovery of Stage IV cancer, he fit more adventures into his sixty years on the planet than Enid Blyton managed for all the Famous Five and Secret Seven! By the time he was in his early 30s, he had been in the merchant navy in the 1940s, been a translator for Italian cinema, worked as a newspaper reporter on multiple continents, been a Canadian radio regular, and most intriguing of all, worked for a time in the Arctic Circle. Because when you think of fiction that follows the old mantra of “write what you know”, obviously The Tenth Planet comes to mind!
In the 1960s, his wife developed terminal cancer, so Gerry Davis moved back to England.
After her death, he started writing for British TV.
At the same time, Raymond Baxter (of Tomorrow’s World fame) suggested Kit’s name to Innes Lloyd as a man bursting with potential ideas for Doctor Who.
When Davis got the Doctor Who job, he wanted a scientific advisor to suggest more realistic Dr Who plots, and when he met Pedler, a strong bond formed immediately. “Every time we met we’d just talk for hours and hours and ideas would bubble out”, said Davis in DWM124, “I loved working with Kit, because we both got excited about working with images!” Pedler’s family remember Gerry Davis coming round to their home and the two men brainstorming in the study for hours and writing in the same room. It was Davis that brought the boys own adventure spirit to Pedlers scientific ideas, that merging of the possible and the fantastic which was to provide alchemy in its finest TV gold variation.
And what did they do after Doctor Who? Doomwatch!
“Interviewed by New Scientist magazine, Dr Pedler explained his pipe-dream…. Of a dedicated band of five or six scientists, with no allegiances except to the public good, set up as a freelance watchdog against misuses and political pressure." (Evening Times 23 March 1971)
It was, to quote Toby Hadoke, the perfect “symbiosis of imagination and nuts and bolts”.
The Doctor announces himself as a doctor, and offers his immediate assistance, already realising something is wrong without having been told.
The warning lights flash up on the screen, and another man collapses from the virus.
Earth contacts the Moon Base by radio. Hobson is given a ticking off for leaving a hurricane loose in the Pacific Ocean. The Moon Base uses gravity to control the weather back on Earth. The Doctor listens worried to the news that three men have taken sick in the last lunar day from the crucial staff.
Hobson really hates Controller Rinberg, and Niles the technician continually calls his boss “Hobby” and gets away with it. That was an adlib from rehearsals, but note, when things get serious, Niles starts calling him Mr Hobson later on!
There’s interference on the line which means only one thing: someone is listening into the conversation, from elsewhere on the moon!
In a nearby space ship, someone IS listening to Hobson’s conversation with Earth!
Earth announces the Moon Base is under quarantine.
Earth authorities are passing the buck to Hobson, basically.
The Doctor immediately goes to the sickbay as he wants to uncover the virus. It’s an early example of the Doctor finding people in trouble and refusing to go because only he can save the day.
Jamie, already in the sickbay, has a concussion.
He’s worried The McCrimmon Piper is going to get him.
JAMIE: The Piper. The McCrimmon Piper. Don't let him get me!
DOCTOR: Piper?
POLLY: Some legend of his clan. As far as I can make out, this piper appears to a McCrimmon just before he dies.
DOCTOR: Has this phantom piper appeared to Jamie yet?
POLLY: You don't believe it, do you?
DOCTOR: No, but he does. It's important to him.
POLLY: He keeps asking us to keep the piper away from him.
DOCTOR: Good. Well, we'll see whether we can do just that.
The Doctor says its not important if they believe in the Piper, the fact that Jamie does is important to him!
Ben makes a Carry on Nurse quip to Polly!
Polly tries to comfort one of the sick men. It’s Dr Evans, who looks badly ill.
The Doctor is worried by the symptoms, which don’t add up.
The Doctor is very worried about things.
HOBSON: How can I rest with that thing up the spout. You know the score as well as I do. Five units off centre we lift half London into space. Five more and the Atlantic water level goes up three feet.
Benoit tells a tired Hobson to get some sleep but the boss refuses to, as he’s worried about the faulty Gravitron and his sick men. If they don’t fix the Gravitron, the Atlantic Ocean water levels rise by three feet. If only they’d had a Net Zero policy back in the day…
Ben offers to help Benoit, who convinces Hobson to take some rest.
He sends Ben to the food store.
The chap running the food store, Ralph, is quite jumpy. This might be because something keeps stalking him in the darkness of the food store. He discovers that something has been in at the sugar supplies.
We briefly see the SHADOW OF A CYBERMAN falling over the worker, before Ben arrives.
(This bit was apparently terrifying to watch, my source being several folk who got to see it as kids!)
Ben helps with some stock taking, but when he is on the other side of the store, something continues to sneak up on poor old Ralph.
It’s a Cyberman, and it electrocutes the poor man, before dragging his corpse off.
Ben goes to look for Ralph but he’s disappeared.
When I read the book I really liked Ralph as a kid, thinking his role was a lot bigger than it is!
The Doctor is investigating little things.
The base goes dark and it’s the fake night-time on the moon to keep everyone’s biological clocks from going haywire.
Behind them, Dr Evans wakes up and screams.
He doesn’t want to be touched, and warns of a silver hand, before dying.
The Doctor goes off to report this to Hobson.
Hobson is already bewildered that Ralph has vanished.
The Doctor tells Hobson and Benoit that Evans has died, and there’s a genuine pause of emotion in Patrick Barr’s voice. He really does care about his team.
In the sickbay, Polly gives Jamie a drink.
He’s still on about the Phantom Piper.
Polly sees something leave the room, and screams, so the crew go to investigate the other door, and find nothing.
But Dr Evans body is gone.
The Doctor is worried.
Someone has collapsed at the controls. That’s five of the nineteen men sick now.
Polly is worried about what she saw.
The Doctor is worried.
The Doctor rushes off to test a theory.
Jamie wants water, so Polly goes to get some.
Space Adventures starts, and Jamie lifts up in horror as a Cyberman walks into the room and looms over him.
“It’s you, the Phantom Piper!”
Love it.
Isn’t the concept of the Phantom Piper of the Clan McCrimmon great? It puts you instantly into the mind and the Scottish lore of Jamie’s character more than four episodes of The Highlanders managed. It reminds one of Saki’s Wolves of Cernogratz, which howl only to mention the death of a family. The Irish have the banshee, a female spirit which shows up when someone is about to die. Ray Bradbury wrote a story based on that, and claimed it was all true “apart from the bits which weren’t”. Irish mythology similarly has the Balor, a giant with one eye which has links to the Greek Odyssey tales, and which has links to death and revenge.
Scottish folklore is full of different types of death omens, from black dogs to ghostly ancestors, to the Bean-nighe, the spectral washer women cleaning the clothes of the soon to be deceased. Sometimes they are said to sing the mourning song of the dead as they appear. The Mull of Kintyre has a famous song by Paul McCartney, and also a bagpipe playing ghost, as the survivor of a massacre could be heard playing his pipes on the beach longer after he died. There’s long standing tales about ghostly pipers at Edinburgh Castle, Duntrune Castle, and others.
It should be noted that while Jamie in Doctor Who is a MacCrimmon, and the MacCrimmon family were pipers in Scotland, the Doctor Who MacCrimmon line is a fictional version of the historical family. And that one of the many popular ghost tales in Scotland is that of a ghostly MacCrimmon piper, on the island of Skye! Whoever was responsible for this flourish in The Moonbase knew their stuff. My suspicions are Pedler, given his interest in the supernatural, but we’ll never know now.
The DVD claims that it would have worked better with the Mondasian Cybermen, in their shrouds, as in the early scripts. It also states that the idea is based on the ghostly drummer of Cortachy Castle, whom each of the Ogilvy Clan saw when they were destined to die. Which takes us back to Saki!
Incidentally, the Earl of Airlie, leader of the Clan Ogilvy, seen at the Queens funeral with an eye-patch, died earlier this year. If the Phantom Piper came to collect him, I regret to say the Telegraph left that tantalising detail out of his obituary!
The Moonbase
(episode 2)
JAMIE: No! No, I'll not go with you. Do you hear me, piper? No, leave me. Leave me, I'll not go with you, do you hear me? Leave me. No, I'll not go with you.
I cannot overstress how important the next twenty-five minutes were to my early childhood.
This didn’t just cement me as a Doctor Who fan. It made me the writer I am today.
You cannot give justice to a piece of TV which so made you what are you. But let’s give it a try!
The Phantom Piper (read – a Cyberman) looms over a defenceless, concussed Jamie. He’s unable to fight off the creature, but it quickly twigs he lacks the benefits of being dead, or virus'd, and goes for another man.
Another man who isn’t dead, and is terrified, but is dragged off.
Polly again arrives to see the scene and screams, and everyone rushes in just too late once more.
I mean, I’m slagging off the script here for making Polly scream twice. Here’s a retort from the audio commentary:
“If you saw a blooming huge Cyberman, wouldn’t you scream? And besides, it gave me a chance to leap into Patrick’s arms!”
Anneke Wills
Polly identifies the creature carrying the man as a Cyberman and EVERYONE in the room reacts. The Doctor, hugging her, is worried. Some of the men look concerned. Hobson scoffs, as everyone knows the Cybermen died out a long time ago.
And I think this is the first case in Dr Who history where we have a direct reference to a previous story. As in, the guest cast know about the event because its become part of cultural memory. I like how, instead of collective amnesia, the events of The Tenth Planet are taught to every school kid as a traumatic historic event like World War Two. It makes it feel more… real.
Hobson sends people off to search every square inch.
Polly tells her story to Hobson. He seems to believe most of the story, except for the bit about the Cyberman.
BEN: But the Cybermen were all killed when Mondas blew up, weren't they?
HOBSON: Stop this Cyberman nonsense. There were Cybermen, every child knows that, but they were all destroyed ages ago.
DOCTOR: So we all thought.
HOBSON: That's enough. Now let's have a little calm thinking. For the past two weeks a completely unknown disease has appeared in the base. People drop in their tracks, they develop this black pattern on their skin. Then some of the patients disappear, right? Well, they can't leave the base without wearing space suits, and there are no space suits missing, so where are they?
DOCTOR: I must say it does sound a little odd.
And to be fair, the Cybermen have had one hell of a makeover since The Tenth Planet, so Polly recognising them instantly is another sign of Polly having hidden depths of plot intuition.
The Doctor looks through his diaries, brushing off questions from Hobson with non-answers.
The Doctor is very worried at the idea Cybermen are in the base. He’s already treating them like one of his most feared enemies, which is a bit of a leap from their debut, but 7 year old me didn’t notice this!
Clearly the script editor loved his new toys!
The matter of the script editor had been annoying me for ages. I am aware I am probably the only person in the world who cares. Gerry Davis was the script editor during this period. Davis had a close relationship with Kit Pedler. Obviously he edited the scripts. The DVD states that Davis wrote most of the scripts, because Kit Pedler was in hospital at the time.
However, if you read the dialogue, it doesn’t read like a Gerry Davis script. The characters tend to look out for each other, they are wittier, and the scientific appeal of Pedler is kept in the fore front, rather than used as window dressing. This difference with The Tenth Planet and Tomb of the Cybermen had been in my head subconsciously until I read in a DWM about Davis's busy workload at the time.
Gerry Davis clearly loved the script? Well, at the same time, the scripts for The Highlanders collapsed, and then so did The Underwater Menace, and so Davis spent his time almost entirely re-writing that one. This was done at the same time as the final scripts for The Moonbase arrived ahead of deadline.
So, if Pedler was ill, and Davis elsewhere, who edited The Moonbase scripts into working order?
Andrew Pixley long ago suggested Victor Pemberton, but with the caveat that any information over a decade old was liable to be incorrect or outdated. I scoured every interview I could find of the men at the heart of this. Davis, Pedler, Pemberton, Morris Barry, etc. Something to back up Pixley’s claims, as I trusted his research. Then, I noticed that Davis had mentioned in an old interview bringing in Peter Bryant when he had trouble with the number of scripts that needed editing.
I knew that Victor Pemberton had been brought into the show by Bryant, I knew that Pemberton was around during The Moonbase (he plays the doomed Jules), and I knew that Peter Bryant was, in the sympathetic words of Barry Letts, and the not so sympathetic words of Terrance Dicks, a raging alcoholic who tended to pass work on to underlings.
So, when I finally found a Pemberton interview, in the DWM archives, which referenced working on the scripts but charitably “not remembering how much”, we were able to solve this mysterious triangle.
Of course it had to be Victor Pemberton! We’d squared the Hobson to Robson district circle!
Incidentally, I spent six months researching this very question, as I didn’t want to know better researchers than me. Finally I plucked up the courage and asked Toby Hadoke for help, only to find this is the only question in Dr Who history to stump him. There was no paperwork on the matter. The only people who would know are long dead. Victor Pemberton himself died in 2017, and apparently would have loved to discuss it. This is the issue with leaving things too late.
In short, all of this is as far as I can get in determining how actually sorted those scripts out. It seems like a hodge podge of all the talents at the time, trying their best to make Kit Pedler’s idea of the future a reality.
“Two of us worked on that with Peter Bryant, although I can’t remember who, I’m afraid.”
Victor Pemberton, on working on the Moonbase scripts, DWM108
The man stayed charitable about his efforts next to others to his dying day, but he was involved in some way in these scripts, like Pedler, Davis, and Bryant.
But the important thing is, no matter how much he did behind the scenes for this story, the full scale of Victor Pemberton’s work for Doctor Who remains underappreciated. From the little bits that come out, he may well have been as much of a fire fighter fixing the chaos of the Troughton era, as Uncle Terry was, but Terrance Dicks was a far better self-promoter.
Appreciate the guy, I say. He’s about to take on some Cybermen. But that would be spoilers for ten minutes time…
Hobson goes over the facts, and the Doctor agrees its all a little odd that people can disappear from a moon base without needing spacesuits.
Hobson then uses his logic to deduce that the Doctor and his companions might have something to do with the virus and wants them to leave his moon base. Ben is happy to go, but the Doctor refuses, as he now sets out his stall as defender of all who can’t defend themselves.
Patrick Troughton is great here, and the camera loves every expressive crack in his face.
The Doctor tells Hobson he will find the cause of the virus.
He’s given 24 hours to do so.
The Doctor gets to work.
The Doctor says he hasn’t a clue what is causing the virus, but he’s determined to find out.
POLLY: Listen, are you really a medical doctor?
DOCTOR: Yes, I think I was once, Polly. I think I took a degree once in Glasgow. 1888 I think. Lister. Hold that for me, will you?
The Doctor’s reference to Glasgow is inaccurate, in that Joseph Lister was, by the 1880s, working in London with connections to the royal family. (Roy Hattersley disparages his talents as a medic in his Edwardians book – not like Roy to have bad opinions!) He did work in Glasgow in the 1860s, during which time he advanced his knowledge in aesthetics, coagulation, disinfecting wounds, and Pasteur’s theories. There is a plaque in the Royal Infirmary dedicated to his work there. So while the date is off, it’s a nice shout out to Glasgow’s role in the history of virus fighting, apt in a story about a dangerous new virus!
Hobson, Benoit and Niles try to work out what the problem is with the Gravitron. The indicators aren’t doing what they’re meant to be doing, and it means chaos for the climate change down on Earth.
There’s a fault in the field.
Niles tells us he has a wife and family!
Seriously!
NILS: If we lose that hurricane, Mister Hobson, all hell will break loose on the Earth. I've a wife and family.
I laughed at Hobson’s “you’re not the only one”, but even more shockingly, Niles actually survives this story!
This is a lot of technobabble, but Patrick Barr is treating it like it is life or death. Because, presumably, on Earth, it is!
They can’t get the Gravitron to work, and worse, the Earth Controller contacts them on the radio.
Rinberg demands Hobson fixes the day, and refuses to take any excuse like people dying or malfunctioning equipment. The plummy voice of the Controller is very aristocratic and feels like it would fit well into the current government. I like how his example of the weather going dodgy is it effecting the lovely heatwave in Miami, now facing Hurricane Lucy. Even when the climate has irreversibly changed, there are people still going “but at least we have some lovely sunny weather”.
Which is only truth in television these days.
RINBERG [OC]: The directional fields are showing a progressive error. Reports have come in of wide-spread pressure fluctuations in Atlantic zone 6. You must get the gravitron back into balance.
HOBSON: We're trying to compensate by re-aligning the probe. We have an error in the servos.
RINBERG [OC]: Well, there's no sign of any improvement here. We've just had a report from Miami, Florida. Thirty minutes ago they were enjoying clear skies and a heat wave. Now Hurricane Lucy is right overhead.
BENOIT: There is only one thing to do.
HOBSON: What's that?
BENOIT: Shut it down.
HOBSON: What, switch the gravitron off?!
BENOIT: Yes, it's the only chance.
HOBSON: We can't do that, man. The collapse of the gravity would devastate half the globe. There'd be storms, whirlwinds, hurricanes.
RINBERG [OC]: I overheard your conversation. It's quite out of the question. You're not to shut down the gravitron under any circumstances, and that's an order. I think perhaps you don't appreciate how serious the situation already is.
HOBSON: I bet he gets a knighthood.
RINBERG [OC]: We spent years in a general assembly negotiating methods of agreement between farmers and landowners and so on. Now the weather's out of control they're after our blood, and I must say I can't blame them. You've got to get that thing under control, quickly. Now please get on with it.
CONTROL [OC]: Earth control, over and out.
HOBSON: Well, you're all in the picture. We've got trouble, bad trouble, we haven't got much time. We're going to run through every circuit, every field pattern, every damn nut and bolt on Charlie boy in there until he's running sweet and smooth. A full class A test, in fact. Now you all know what to do so let's get on with it.
(indebted yet again to the Doctor Who Transcripts website)
“I bet he gets a knighthood”, was Patrick Barr in an adlib.
Look at that, though. The Controllers commentary is a wonderful example of how government authority will look for scapegoats and run roughshod over the experts. It’s not dated at all, sadly.
The crew continue to investigate the machinery, and the Doctor waltzes in to take specimens off the men. He manages to utterly annoy Benoit doing this.
A smug Doctor then tries to remove someone’s shoe. Troughton excels at comedic moments. He also walks backwards into Hobson in a great moment.
It made me laugh when I was seven, and it makes me laugh now.
Andre Maranne is excellent as Benoit. A regular in the Pink Panther movies, where he played the foil to Herbert Lom’s increasingly deranged Dreyfuss, there was a long running rumour online that Maranne had died in the 1990s. This was despite the fact he continued to reply to fan mail, and that he still lived in the same house he had done for fifty years with his wife, so that any curious fans could have knocked his door and been told to their face that he wasn’t yet dead. (When he wasn't in France of course.) Eventually through the sterling work of Toby Hadoke, this myth was dispelled, although Andre Maranne has since died, at the rather more venerable age of 95, in 2021.
Still, this was a better fate than the one which fell upon stage actor Peter Pratt, whom some of you may know as the decaying, dying Master in The Deadly Assassin. When a premature obituary of the man was published in 1994, he himself wrote back, saying it was wrong and he was in fine health. A few months later he died of a heart attack, and the same publications published their obits all over again.
The fates, they like to play silly buggers sometimes.
Maranne, a regular on English and French language TV, can also be seen in the Yes Minister Christmas Special, Fawlty Towers, and as a member of Spectre in the James Bond film Thunderball! Born in Toulouse, his stepdad was a dealer in Chinese antiques in Algiers, and he spent the war as an apprentice in a printers workshop. He became an actor with La Comedie Francaise, and met a holidaying British teacher, whom he was to marry in 1955. When not acting, he enjoyed wind-surfing near his Aix-en-Provence villa.
Incidentally, one of Patrick Barr's last roles was as a good guy in Octopussy. James Bond and Doctor Who, it's like two degrees of separation!
Benoit yelling in French at the Doctor was Andre Maranne’s suggestion to colour the character.
“Eh là, qu'est-ce que vous fabriquez ici, imbécile d'idiot ! Vous n'avez rien d'autre à faire ? Vous croyez que nous sommes en train de nous amuser ?”
Or:
“Hey, what are you doing here, you stupid idiot! Don't you have anything else to do? Do you think we're having fun?”
JAMIE: The piper! I knew!
Ben goes to find supplies, and Jamie is concerned about the Phantom Piper. He points to the Piper and Polly turns to see a Cyberman!
When I was seven, I leapt out of my seat in fright!
The Cyberman electrocutes both of them and goes to take Jamie but no, he’s not got the virus, so it grabs another man instead.
Colin Baker’s introduction to the Early Years stated that Jamie had the virus, and this faux pas made the Cybermen turning down Jamie twice very confusing to child me.
The Doctor rushes in to find Polly out cold. Luckily the Cyberman set his weapon to stun.
Incidentally, that set looks great, with the big windows looming out into space.
There's been pressure changes, and Hobson says if he finds out anyone is playing about he’ll tear their hides off. Back in the store room, minus Ralph (RIP We hardly knew ye) some sugar bags are moved out of the way, to reveal a big hole and a Cyberman!
The Cyberman then carefully places the sugar bags back. Apparently, they keep out the vacuum of space!
Part of the antennae on the lunar surface is missing pieces.
Hobson suspects sabotage, and the likeliest suspects are the Doctor’s team.
Benoit tells someone to get Jules and Frances, as they’re going to be sent up onto the surface to fix the gravitron antennae.
Ben tells Hobson another patient has disappeared to help the boss man’s blood pressure.
Jules (Victor Pemberton!) and his mate check each other’s space suits and walk out on the surface of the moon. Space Adventures starts to play, the eerie middle section, in case you think they are safe.
The Doctor is bamboozled by the lack of clues about the virus. The base is seemingly sterile!
Hobson walks in ready to throw them all out, so the Doctor pretends to have made a discovery. (Oh Polly, I wish I had, gets a wonderful Troughton wistful look.)
POLLY: Doctor, it wouldn't, I mean it couldn't possibly have anything to do with Lister, could it?
DOCTOR: Lister?
POLLY: Well, I mean, you did say that you took your degree in Glasgow in 1888. It does seem an awful long time from now, 2070 or whatever it is.
DOCTOR: Polly, are you suggesting that I'm not competent to carry out these tests?
POLLY: Oh, no. No, no, no, no. I was just wondering if there was anything that Joseph Lister didn't know in 1888 that might possibly help you now.
That was Polly Wright, on behalf of the Roy Hattersley Fan Club.
The Doctor sends Polly off to make coffee for everyone, to kill some time.
This clip gets replayed a lot. Admittedly Polly hasn’t had much to do so far, but she’ll make up for it soon.
On the surface of the moon, the two men set about fixing the broken antennae.
Danger, Vic Pemberton, danger!
Two shadows loom over them, and it’s a pair of Cybermen who stab the men’s air supplies in a genuinely nasty moment.
The Cybermen have done little so far but hide in the shadows, and sneak up and kill people when no one is looking.
It’s incredibly effective.
The Doctor admits he hasn’t found the cause of the virus, but suggests they all have a coffee to calm down.
Benoit gets ready to go outside and see how Jules is getting on.
Cut to two empty space suits on the surface of the moon. Creepy stuff.
A man drinks from his coffee and collapses, the latest victim of the virus!
We see the black lines of the virus sneaking up the nerves in his arm and fingers.
They take the man into the sickbay, and Hobson goes to drink his coffee.
Cut to a pensive thinking concerned Troughton reaction, a close up of the sugar container, and:
“DON’T DRINK THAT!” Yells the Doctor, tossing Hobson’s drink against the wall.
It’s the sugar! The virus is in the sugar! And not everyone uses it.
And not only is this a great bit of deduction from the Doctor, but let’s hear it for Hobson. Apparently he does take sugar in his coffee. Which means he hasn’t had a coffee in two days.
I can’t stand coffee myself, but for those who do like it, I hear this is a superhuman feat of will power.
The Doctor checks the sugar under the microscope to reveal: the virus!
A large neurotropic virus.
Just think, all this coffee drinking proved dangerous on the moon. They should have stuck to the hot chocolate instead. Or Irn Bru.
The Doctor confirms it must be the Cybermen.
Hobson says they cant be in the base as his men have searched every nook and cranny…
HOBSON: My men have searched every square inch of the base. There's no space to hide a cat, let alone a Cyberman! Anyhow, how did they get in?
…and suddenly, the Doctor’s face lights up in horror.
Back in the house we lived in from 1991 to 1994, you could leap behind the sofa. I know this because I did just that, realising just ahead of time what was going to happen. It’s all in Troughton’s reactions. He’s genuinely superb here.
He brings Hobson over to him, Space Adventures starts, and asks the killer question:
DOCTOR: You say you searched all the base?
HOBSON: Yes. What of it?
DOCTOR: Every nook and cranny?
HOBSON: Yes.
DOCTOR: No chance of anyone hiding anywhere?
HOBSON: None whatever.
DOCTOR: Did your men search in here?
HOBSON: Well…
DOCTOR: Did they?
HOBSON: Well, there were always people in here, so they probably...
DOCTOR: Did they search in here?
HOBSON: No!
The Doctor, Hobson, and Polly look around the sickbay for signs of an intruder. The booming instrumental Cyber March plays in full effect, as a worried Doctor sees a Cyberman, which pops off its bed and calls for backup.
Yes, it nearly destroys the prop bed in doing so.
Yes, this is a cliffhanger that works with mood and atmosphere, rather than cold logic, as there wasn’t time for a Cyberman to hide in that room. (And if every nook and cranny was searched, how come that hole wasn’t found?)
But man, the atmosphere. That moment Patrick Troughton flashes a worried look in the middle of random conversation, you’re hooked. As a child, you’re hooked. Never mind the Phantom Piper, Troughton’s Doctor is the Pied Piper here. We’re on the journey with him now, like it or not.
Seven year old me was too scared to watch. But insisted on seeing the next episode.
No matter how old I get, I still remember that “oh no” feeling I got as a child when the Doctor got worried there.
I’ll say a lot about the science and the adventure and the verve of the story, so I’ll just add this.
The Moonbase is a bloody effective bit of horror.
Those Cybermen lurking in the shadows, sneaking up on their prey, linger long in the nightmares.
It’s hard to be subjective about this one, I love it to bits.
The Moonbase
(episode 3)
“Some splendid chases in low gravity.”
Kit Pedler, on The Moonbase, The Observer, 5/2/1967
“Altogether Dr Pedler is a very modern-minded man. He thinks science is often taught abominably (“What children want is bloody great bangs”) and that scientists forget they are communicators. “They shouldn’t be inside any ivory tower. So often when they come into the hot-wash of life they are mute.””
Kit Pedler, promoting The Moonbase, The Observer 5/2/1967
Stop losing episodes of my favourite story FFS! This is the one with all the bits that got praised by the press and BBC executives too!
The Moonbase not only saw the largest rating for over a year (for episode 2), but the highest Audience Appreciation score since 1964! Kit Pedler was even interviewed for Late Night Line Up about the success of the serial, and Morris Barry was commissioned for a sequel (Tomb) before Episode 4 had even been shown on TV.
Well at least someone animated it.
"What a pity they haven’t been kept. You see it was a terrible mistake. I know with hindsight it is easy to say that they should never get rid of things, but! I have absolutely no objection to the rescreening of my old episodes."
Patrick Troughton, DWM78
You tell 'em, Pat. Where's our time machine?
The Cyberman in the sickbay looms over the Doctor and friends.
It stalks them, and tells them to stop trying to escape.
Hobson admits he was wrong about the Cybermen.
One man tries to sneak the Cyberman and is shot dead.
Another Cyberman appears.
In the space ship, Cyberman start their operation.
The Cybermen recognise the Doctor.
The Cyberman tells Hobson that his men aren’t dead, just altered.
The Cyberman goes to kill Jamie but gets told about the concussion and decides he is of no value.
The Cybermen force Hobson and the Doctor to the control centre, leaving Polly and Ben with Jamie. Under pain of conversion!
“I don’t like the word converted” says Ben!
Kit Pedler didn’t like it either. Although, a lot is said about Pedlers fear of augmentation. Before being roped into academic science while training to be a surgeon, he built the world’s first artificial retina.
Evans is ALIVE and with a controlling hat device put on him, he is controlled by the Cybermen. The fact that the Cybermen put a space suit on Evans suggests that he might still be in there somewhat, and its not just a zombie.
Which probably makes it scarier.
Benoit cannot get in contact with the service party because they are dead.
The Cybermen appear with Hobson and the Doctor.
The Cybermen plan to destroy Earth by destroying the Moon Base and its weather control system.
This Cyber Leader is easily grumpy. Stupid Earth Brains!
Clever clever clever. It’s just patronising the humans here.
Jamie feels a lot better. Apparently, Pedler’s idea was that the Cyberman’s electric attack on Jamie in Episode 2 actually sped up his recovery from concussion. Given similar electric therapy helped Bryan Danielson recover from post-concussion syndrome, that’s another prediction success for our mad professor. Does this mean I need to take Uncanny seriously now?
(Towards the end of his life, Pedler became interested in paranormal research and trying to find scientific explanations for hauntings, telekinesis and so on...)
Ben and Polly try to work out how to escape. Ben suggests radiation, but Polly points out they didn’t have access to any. Jamie said that in his day they’d sprinkle holy water over witches, and Polly gets an idea…
Polly works out that the breathing apparatus on a Cyberman is made of plastic, and that she can whip up some chemical solution based on nail varnish. Ben is non the wiser as she rushes to sort it out.
In the main Gravitron room, the door opens and out of the shadows appears Dr Evans, Jules and Ralph!
More dead than alive, completely controlled by the Cybermen.
This is the first example of the Cyber conversion process we learned about in The Tenth Planet, and its bloody creepy. We saw how panicked and worried Ralph was in Episode 1, and here he is passive, unresponsive.
The animated men take over the Gravitron.
This is an unusually complex plan for the Cybermen. No wonder they preferred to just chuck bombs at their problems from then on. They should have been like their creator, Kit Pedler, who once built a nuclear bomb in his garden shed, minus the actual plutonium, to prove it was possible to do so.
That last bit sounds like I've made it up. I haven't.
The Cyber Leader casually tells them that the processed men will be destroyed, as the Doctor tries to fiddle with some buttons.
Ben knows that nail varnish remover is acetone, so Polly puts together her solution.
An ether, alcohol, acetone combo, just the cocktail you need for a permanent hangover. Or a dead Cyberman.
Hobson wonders why the Cybermen don’t operate the controls themselves.
Meanwhile the Doctor fiddles with some buttons, we see Ralph trying to fight off the mind control, and then, the Doctor thinks to himself and we hear his internal dialogue!
DOCTOR: (to himself) Funny. Funny. Go to all that trouble to make the men do the work. Why? Do it themselves, easy. They're using the men as tools. Why? Don't know. Yes, I do though. There must be something in here they don't like. Pressure? Electricity? Radiation? Maybe. Gravity! Now there's a thought. Gravity. Oh, yes. Gravity.
The Cybermen are too busy destroying Earth to notice the Doctor thinking to himself.
Earth Control tries to contact them, but the Cybermen refuse to let anyone answer. Earth tells the Moonbase to send off a distress rocket.
If they don’t respond, Earth will send a relief rocket.
Polly and Ben have created a Polly Cocktail dispenser.
Ben and Jamie rush off to defeat the Cybermen, telling Polly to stay where she is as this is MEN’s WORK. Oh dear.
Polly ignores them and they all set off to the main base room.
The Cybermen are facing away from the doors.
The doors open, they jump in, and drop down and spray the chemicals.
The Cybermen start to choke to death and die. Nasty.
Ben’s killed several Cybermen in his time now.
Once again, Polly saves the day.
The crew take the control devices off Ralph, Jules and Dr Evans.
On the spaceship, the Cyber team realise the operation has failed, so plan to do a full scale invasion.
Benoit says he will go outside to find the missing men. I just want to point out here, for completeness, that Jules was one of the men who went outside to fix the antennae. They know where he is, the sickbay!
Anyhow, Benoit is out on the surface of the moon. Things were a bit stressful, no wonder he's miscounting colleagues.
He finds the space suits, and a shadow looms over him. They can be seen from the moonbase, but Benoit sees nothing around him outside. He then walks straight into a Cyberman, but realises its gun doesn’t work in the vacuum, so goes to run, with the Cybermen chasing him. The music plays intensely over this scene, as Benoit only just makes it back to the Moonbase in time.
Apparently, this was terrifying. It got promoted in the newspapers ahead of time as the “thrilling chase in zero gravity” mentioned above. Morris Barry got kudos from the top brass for how effective this scene was. Both my parents remember how chilling it was at the time, when they were kids. It was pretty much universally acclaimed as one of the greatest moments in the show.
And its bloody lost!
The Cyberman continues, passively walking after the terrified man. It's like a bloody horror film villain here.
Ben appears in the nick of time, to throw a container at the Cyberman, saving Benoit’s life.
The Cyberman dies of Polly Cocktail suffocation.
Since he was getting praise for this tense scene...
Morris Barry took the role of Doctor Who director because his kids kept complaining about how he claimed to be a TV director and yet hadn’t worked on Doctor Who! He came across as a mild, good humoured old man in his late in life interviews, so its funny to think of him as this headmaster type director in his prime, the Peter Grimwade of his day.
You can see in his work that he was interested in framing shots. If you look at The Moonbase or Tomb of the Cybermen, everyone is specifically in place in the camera line so you can see them react to things without blurring focus. Positioning was key, and if the actors weren’t were the sets should be, they moved the sets!
This amusing anecdote on the convention circuit is often split from the first half of the story, which had Patrick Troughton concerned about the position of the Gravitorn prop, which shortly after fell and nearly squashed Doctor Who!
Sadly for Barry, his great achievement in the Moonbase was the moon surface scenes. Contemporary newspaper reports beam with delight over the claustrophobic chase scenes on the surface of the moon, and how effectively they had been done. We’ve lost all of them now. What we do know is that the BBC was so pleased with Morris Barry’s work, he was commissioned on the spot to direct more Cybermen adventures in the near future.
Outside of Doctor Who, Barry became better regarded as a producer, for the 1977 BBC Dracula (yes, the one which gave us Horror of Fang Rock), and he became the producer of the 70s Poldark after Anthony Coburn’s health declined. (Shh don't tell Stef!) He also turned to acting, appearing in Doctor Who (Full Circle), Day of the Triffids and popular Tales of the Unexpected episode Vengeance is Mine Inc.
Incidentally, I am not the person who wrote on Morris Barry’s Wikipedia page that The Moonbase is often spoken of as a classic of Doctor Who, but you can’t argue with what the fans want!
Hobson then sums up the entire Troughton era:
HOBSON: Now listen, everybody. I don't know how many more of these Cybermen there are, but from our point of view we're under siege.
They keep trying to send an SOS to Earth.
He also asks Polly to make more of the Polly Cocktail in case they need it.
The Doctor works out that the Gravitron can be lowered to the surface of the moon.
The team look out and then they see the Cyber ships arriving en masse. The invasion of the moon has begun!
Hundreds of Cybermen walk out across the lunar surface, towards the moon base. An unstoppable army, intent on destruction. And only the Doctor and his friends, and Hobson and the few men he has left, stand in their way.
Space Adventures up to full force, blasting out of the TV. Or to quote their creator (Dr Pedler), "we now hear the sinister Cybermen theme".
The Doctor has never been more trapped.
The Moonbase
(episode 4)
Moving pictures again, thankfully.
The moonbase is under attack from an entire army of Cybermen!
Now that we get to see the feet of the Cybermen marching on the moon, it does look quite effective.
Hobson and The Doctor keep an eye out.
The Cybermen contact them on the radio and tell them to surrender.
Hobson tries to contact Earth but the Cybermen jam the frequency, by smashing up the aerial.
Benoit is happy to wait for the relief rocket to show up.
The Doctor is worried as the Cybermen know about the relief rocket already. In fact, they wake up Dr Evans in the sickbay and send him to the main control room. But first he kills Beckett. And he was patiently waiting for Godot too.
Incidentally, those model shots of the base? The models cost £50 to construct at the time. They look great.
The Cybermen plot to destroy the relief rocket.
Benoit switches on the radio so they can listen into any Cyber plans.
Ben has been taught how to run the controls because they’ve run out of scientists. Too much sugar in their diet, you see.
Michael Craze was also given some of the lines written for scientists. He was wary (correctly as it turns out) about Frazer Hines joining the cast and sharing his lines, in scripts like this where Jamie hadn’t originally been intended. Hence Jamie spends two episodes lying down in a fever getting comforted by Polly – the best fortnight of work ever, as Frazer Hines called it!
But then, Morris Barry gave scientist lines to Ben, Ben’s lines to Polly, and swapped other lines round to try and give everyone something to do. He may have been the Peter Grimwade of the Sixties, but there’s a similar care to the craft going on here.
Polly brings in coffee, sans sugar. Finally Hobson gets his drink.
And no one notices Dr Evans appearing in the room, and sneaking into the gravitron control room. In fairness, Hobson must have been gasping for a coffee by this stage!
Evans begins to fiddle with the controls.
The relief ship is on the scanner.
Everyone is happy but the Doctor is very worried. The rocket has enough weaponry on it to destroy every Cyberman.
But then it deflects off course.
HOBSON: They've changed into an escape orbit. Follow it.
NILS: But it's going too fast. I can't keep up with it. It's accelerating too fast.
BENOIT: Look out, man. You're on the sun.
NILS: But that's where it's heading.
BENOIT: The acceleration, it's gigantic!
HOBSON: Get R/T contact with the ship.
NILS: No good, sir. The Doppler effect. It's going too fast.
BENOIT: They've had it, I'm afraid.
POLLY: Will somebody please tell us what it all means?
BENOIT: The rocket has been deflected towards the sun. Nothing can save them now.
POLLY: Save them? What are you talking about?
BENOIT: From plunging into the sun.
BEN: But the sun's millions of miles away.
BENOIT: Once they get into the sun's gravity belt they can't change course. It may take a week but they'll end up there just the same.
Hobson and his men look horrified.
The rocket was deflected off course by a gravitron.
And then they realise it could only have happened from that room, and they realise Evans is in the control room.
HOBSON: Evans, can you hear me? Listen, Evans, this is Hobson talking. Evans, you've got to concentrate. Your brain has been altered by the Cybermen. You're being controlled by them, anyhow.
Even at this point, Hobson is still hopeful he can cure the sick men.
Ben and Jamie rush off to the sickbay to stop the other possessed men waking up.
At that moment, they do.
Ben and Jamie arrive just in time to see them coming out the door, which they barricade with a metal lid. Luckily none of them decide to try the other door. (Though I suppose that leads to other parts of the base, not the control room.)
The hurricanes are going nuts back on Earth.
The Cybermen decide to end the siege by shooting the glass window, opening the base to the vacuum of space. Air rushes out. Niles rushes everyone to the oxygen masks, while Benoit and Hobson put a coat in the hole, only for it to make a bigger hole.
They need a hero.
And they find one.
The inanimate coffee tray, which patches up the hole in the base, saving everyone!
Now you can look at this in one of three ways.
One, it’s a matter of vacuum, and the vacuum keeps the coffee tray in place. Which is what I assumed as a child.
Two, that the Gravitron is actually keeping them safe. Even though its not switched on for another few minutes.
Third, that its just a daft non-science solution to a bit of Doctor Who jeopardy, and that focusing on one bit of bad science in a feast like this is navel gazing well beyond the necessary.
I’m on three these days, as a boring and chill adult.
The Doctor tactilely checks on Polly. Dr Cuddles in the house!
Evans has passed out so the Gravitron is off.
They get Evans out of there, and replace him with a healthy scientist.
The Cybermen get reinforcements.
(On the HD edition, you can see the wires of the Cyber ships landing, but meh, suspension of disbelief!)
The Cybermen get a bloody big super gun out, which takes several Cybermen to carry.
Everyone ducks for cover except the Doctor, who just checks that the Gravitron is switched on.
The energy blast bounces off the base.
Twice.
One pissed off Cyberman stops it. You can almost hear him swearing...
The Doctor is delighted he was right, then nearly faints! Hah!
The Doctor checks that the Gravitron can be lowered to the surface of the moon. Hobson says it may effect the base but the base is doomed otherwise anyway.
Polly relays instructions to Benoit.
The gravitational force gets stuck, above the heads of the marching Cybermen.
More Space Adventures. Could listen to that one for hours, you know.
Hobson and the Doctor try to bring down the gravitron by hand.
Hobson remembers there’s a safety cut-out, which he destroys. Then they take the Gravity field down to the lunar surface.
The Cybermen stop marching and find themselves launched off into space.
“Hooray! That’s taken care of the Cybermen!” You never see folk so happy at the end of a Doctor Who siege story.
Hobson plans to get the base working again, and the Doctor and friends sneak out back to the TARDIS.
Leaving Hobson, Benoit and co to quietly save the Earth.
Three cheers for Hobson. He is the gold standard for bosses of bases under siege in Doctor Who. He trusts his assistants. He grows to trust The Doctor. He changes his opinions as the evidence proves The Doctor or Benoit correct. He cares enough for his own sick men to have trouble sleeping over their health. He actively stands in the way of a Cyberman’s gun ahead of one of his team at one point. He trusts everyone to know their job and do it to a professional standard. And, through trust, intelligence and pragmatism, he manages to keep most of his men alive, and he’s likely going to help save billions on the planet Earth. That the commander of the base under siege is a likeable, competent , intelligent person really improves the quality of the adventure. It is, to quote @r kinspace of Gallifrey Base, the Hobson-Robson Scale of Doctor Who base under siege leaders!
Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor shows off his Time Scanner, which tells us the future. Jamie thinks this is bad luck, and so does Polly, when we see a Macra claw on the screen.
The general warning of The Moonbase, about a future of extreme climate change and the need for the world to come together to fight it, only ages better with time. It is a fitting epitaph for the writer, who is buried under a tombstone reading “a man of ideas”. When Kit Pedler appeared on Nationwide (the sixties equivalent of Newsnight) to warn about pollution levels in the major British cities and their impact on health, he was seen as a nutty professor. Nowadays, you need to be on the nuttier end of the anti-vax movement not to know he was right. In the 60s, the likes of Pedler and Lovelock were spouting terrifying visions of the future. Now, The Moonbase is a terrifying future of the present and things to come. His ideas live on through his children, respectively a children’s novelist and an ecological architect. Kit Pedler died, far far too prematurely, but the spirit of the man lives on. “We’re living on a leasehold planet and we don’t even pay the ground rent” he warned in Doomwatch. Time will tell if we listen.
I first saw The Moonbase, when my Auld Yin bought a copy of Cybermen: The Early Years, so the time must have been early 1994 and my age seven.
Yes, Dad's to blame.
We watched the first episode that evening after school, with my mum reminiscing. She remembered the story well from childhood and was irked to say the least to find out that half of the story is missing.
(It’s still missing, so if you have copies of Episodes 1 and 3 in your private collection, please let us know….)
Come the cliffhanger, I was too scared to watch anymore, and so ran through to my bedroom. Dad convinced me to watch to the end of the story, as the imagination would produce an ending worse than anything that actually happened. He cited Uncle Richard letting him stay up late to watch the Roger Corman version of The Pit and the Pendulum, and the ending scaring him senseless so he left the room, and had nightmares for weeks afterwards. (I’ve seen the film since. It’s mediocre. I mentioned this to the Auld Yin, who said he felt the same, now he was no longer five years old!)
There is a link, I feel, between the Doctor and the scared child in this era. Both of us were scared by these Cybermen, but both of us then put on our brave faces and took on the challenge to the bitter end. And one of us had the comfort of two reassuring parents, a blanket, a teddy bear and a mug of Horlicks.
And the next day I wanted to see the story again. There were two episodes of Wheel in Space on that video too, but they still don’t showcase the story in the best light. I’ve known many fans who loved the story on broadcast, and all the great moments they mention are now lost! But it was The Moonbase, with its tight claustrophobic sets, its notably heroic Doctor, and its humour (the interaction between Benoit and Doctor a particular favourite) that stood out more.
Also the Scottishness – references to Phantom Pipers and Glasgow. Within months I was in danger of wearing out the video.
And it just sat there in my head, that one story I loved most, of the ones I’d seen, until I got the Discontinuity Guide and it referenced how rubbish the story was. Then another guide did the same. I’d taken this to be a gospel fan classic, a holy cow of fandom if you will, and to see this was not the case was quite a stunner.
I couldn’t have been more shocked if I’d gone online to discover there was an anti-Pertwee backlash due to fan opinions made before I was born, or that McCoy and Aldred (my other great heroes) were the victims of a massive hatedom.
Which I did.
And they were.
So I did what I always do. I wrote about how great it was. Whotopia gave me a platform to write about the story, as did a school magazine, and when I finally got onto Doctor Who online fandom, well, if Jesus sent his disciples into the lands of non-believers, then I was going to send my views on The Moonbase out into the lands of Outpost Gallifrey, and other websites.
At one point, I had written more positive words on 4 episodes of Doctor Who (only 2 of which my generation can actually see) than I had written for my entire Standard Grade English coursework.
I was pushing the good name of the story, from every conceivable angle, to the point where, in first year university, I was at a party, when, on hearing my name mentioned, someone asked if I was the same Michael Collins who was always writing about The Moonbase on Outpost Gallifrey!
I remember the day that Lost in Time, the DVD set of orphaned Dr Who episodes, came out, for general release, and then, a few days later, I awoke to 10 different Private Messages on the Outpost Gallifrey forum.
All of them had the same gist.
“I’ve finally seen those episodes of The Moonbase. They’re quite good!”
I’ll take quite good as a triumph!
It’s still performing slightly under par. It went out in Round 1 of the fandom Top 3 Tournament this year, a result I am still grumpy about (because obviously in a world with Trussenomics and climate change, 200 fans opinions on a forum is mood-shifting). It ranked around the top 100 in the last Doctor Who Magazine poll, and we wont find out if it changed that, as they aren’t running a proper poll in this anniversary year. Still, it’s come a long way, and it’s done better than the poor Web Planet fans have achieved! (No justice for Zarbis!)
I think the best way to sum up The Moonbase is this. I've just spent six months trying to find the answer to a bit of minutiae for this review. Yesterday, October 30th, I watched The Moonbase twice, once with the audio commentary and production notes to pick up on any new facts that would shape my reading of events. That took six hours, between writing and watching. And I could bloody well watch the entire thing again today. I've seen this story countless times since I was seven years old. Even to this day, the thrill and excitement at key moments never leaves me. There's a large part of me which will always clearly remember that seven year old child, as long as The Moonbase exists as my own personal time machine.
Now, please, someone, anyone, Ian, Phil, even Stef Coburn if he wants to do a face turn, someone find those two bloody missing episodes!!!!
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