Learning to Love: The Time Monster

I recently read through a thread on Gallifrey Base about The Time Monster, the opening poster asking, “What’s wrong with it?” It was met by a great swathe of Time Monster supporters (or should that be apologists?) listing the myriad perks of this apparently under-rated gem. Many opined that it was their favourite of Season 9. Even Graham Duff is of the same Time Monster persuasion on the DVD commentary. (What, better than Day of the Daleks? Better than The Sea Devils? Heck, better than The Mutants?!) Now I love Gallifrey Base. It gets a bad rep elsewhere online occasionally but the conversations there are fervently intelligent, passionate and often beautifully well-articulated. Its existence shouldn’t be taken for granted: the place is a joy. But seriously – The Time Monster?!

Thus, I embarked on the six-episode trip of a lifetime. I’ve already sat through these hours of television several times and never managed a second go immediately. It’s the sort of tale about which I always think, “Was I right? Was I in a bad mood? Was it really so dreary?” And I always finish the story thinking, “Yes, I was right.” And so in the tradition of these Learning to Love articles I attempted to find something in The Time Monster to enjoy. Strap yourselves in – these six episodes can be a slog.

But that opening sequence on film is glorious! Roger Delgado’s supreme Master - the very thing of nightmares to this most assured and confident of Doctors - lauds it over him, the camera shooting up at the man in black, making him yet more loomingly powerful. Like the Wicked Witch of the West, he disappears in a bolt of lightning. Watching Pertwee wake from his sleep terrified is surely the set-up for a thrill ride of an adventure: perhaps a definitive meeting between the Time Lord nemeses. Unfortunately, we’re in largely for a knock-off version of The Daemons which removes all the atmosphere which made that story good; and everything that killed its pace and made it feel twee is turned up to eleven. Within twenty minutes, Bessie is doing stupid things to Dudley Simpson’s at times excruciating synthetic jabbing. Ruth Ingram and Stuart Hyde are charmless and annoying, with Ingram’s misjudged right-on feminist spiel thankfully and perhaps miraculously not the natural antecedent to Sarah Jane Smith. What’s most glaring though is the bleached-out, drab, pallid look of the whole thing. It’s boringly designed, boringly costumed and badly lit and the NTSC conversion makes the experience even more gruelling on the eye. Thankfully though, within this pasty, grey-beige mire, there’s Roger Delgado’s Greek accent, Nicholas Courtney saying “TOMTIT” with a blisteringly funny Wildean earnest and Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning being the very opposite of Ingram and Hyde in their charm qualifications.

Episode Two is irritating and without it, the whole show might well hold up rather better. Here, we get an entire instalment in which the writers – Robert Sloman and Barry Letts - deliberately refuse to allow the plot to make progress. The Master, for a second time, wails, “Come Kronos, come!” only for Kronos to yet again fail to put in an appearance and sadly you can tell Delgado’s heart’s not quite as in it on this occasion, he too feeling as if he’s treading water. Ingram and Hyde talk about physics for a long time and re-do the experiments they re-did in Episode One and Hyde is aged – but don’t worry, he’ll be fine in an episode or two and nobody will even remark upon it. This repetition makes it all the more improbable and ridiculous that the Doctor and the Master don’t meet one another, despite being in the very same building.

Much better does thankfully arrive. When a knight in shining armour appears in a pulling of focus, things look like they might be about to get exciting. The Episode Three cliff-hanger is, for the first time in the story, tense and almost manages to be edge-of-the-seat. Kronos itself, sneered at for years by fandom and apologised for by Barry Letts in the DVD documentary, doesn’t look half bad all told. His appearance through the crystal, cross-fading with a real bird fluttering its wings angrily, is an acute, violent image and to his credit, director Paul Leonard shoots the rubberman himself with restraint. Kronos’s legs flying around the lab don’t look quite as ridiculous as they might when one imagines the height of its unseen ceiling, meaning Kirby wires are logically out. The camera glare adds a strangeness to the chronovore’s appearance and there is a genuine sense that this is a creature from outside our realm.

When we reach The Two TARDISes episode, events stagnate again and whilst champions have insisted Delgado’s coccyx line is one of utmost charm, I must admit to finding it irritating, repetitious and above all, bloody stupid. There are moments when Doctor Who’s comedy is ridiculously funny and when its comedy transcends most comedy shows of the time, but here we’re in gags-without-punchlines territory. Sloman and Letts are no Croft and Perry. Heck, they’re not even Hale and Pace. I feel like an utter killjoy railing at a moment so beloved by fandom, but I just don’t get it. The word coccyx itself is only really funny because it sounds like cock. And Katy Manning’s delivery of “My what?” tells us that’s exactly what Jo’s thinking too. Naughty girl.

When we reach Atlantis, things do pucker up again. Suddenly, we’ve got sets which look like somebody enjoyed making. The cyclorama backdrops are beautifully painted, giving much-needed depth and there is a sense that, despite the lack of water, we really might be in Atlantis. This is especially refreshing for the Third Doctor who was up to this point - three years in - a stranger to history. In his chequered red coat, he fits snugly into this world of high courts just as well as he did on Peladon. And the Lady Jo Jo Grant looks especially hip in the latest Atlantean togs.

Sadly, George Cormack gives a cloyingly pleasant-natured turn as King Dalios. He exudes a tiresome goodness more irritating than even Ingrid Pitt’s What-The-Hell-Is-She-Doing? acting. It’s Roger Delgado who is able to steal the show here, turning on the charm and convincing us that this might just be the first time the Master wants a wife. You just wish that after failing to hypnotise Dalios, he’d killed the smug, little angel in his sleep. Also worthy of a facepalm is Aidan Murphy’s Hippias, a man acting in a constant state of wedgie. Once the two of them are offed at the start of Episode Six, the story can really come to life.

Because after five frustrating episodes, it is the last instalment in which The Time Monster really delivers. We open with Pertwee playing troubadour valiantly and camply in equal measure, before we get the oft-celebrated diasiest daisy speech. It is not the speech itself that is so beautiful (to be honest, it’s pretty trite), rather the tight two-shot and the look Katy Manning gives him throughout the whole monologue. At the end, there’s an even more important, massively undervalued moment. The Doctor asks her if she’s still scared. “Not as much as I was,” she smiles and we realise what the whole speech was about: he was trying to make her forget the danger and make her happy, even for only a moment. Now, that’s my Doctor, right there.

Later, Atlantis is destroyed in an uncharacteristically strong display of pandemonium. Tens of extras run around the sets as debris and stonemasonry fly about them. Kronos, off-camera, wings flapping and in lens flare, casts shadows across the city, leaving Ingrid Pitt to dry up in her own majestic way. Pertwee slams into that TARDIS prop with such vigour, it’s a small wonder he doesn’t burst out of the back. Then, of course, there follows Delgado overplaying his last scenes wonderfully, Jo’s self-sacrifice (which works rather better here than in The Daemons and makes total sense in the circumstances) and finally baby Benton becoming good, old, big, lumbering, naked JL. What a treat for everyone. And Katy Manning’s thinking about cocks again.

If there’s anything at all of merit in watching The Time Monster, it’s all in Episode Six which feels like a different story entirely and is in its own way quite a remarkable piece of work. Worth the five-episode slog before it? Oh, go on then: definitely. But I’m in no rush to start all over again.

JH