DVD Revisited: The Reign of Terror

Simon Danes is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.


There are no more classic series DVD releases, but the range continues to be available. In our new feature, we remind you of some releases that you might have overlooked, and give you reason to check them out at last. To start, Simon Danes takes a look at The Reign of Terror, episodes and extras.


Yes. OK. The Reign of Terror. Here we go.


Meh.


It’s not bad. It’s not terribly good, either. There are some good bits, and it picks up in the last couple of episodes, but it’s just rather dull.


I didn’t catch it when it was first broadcast: I was -1 at the time, so, like the rest of us, I had to wait until the DVD came out before I saw it (not having bought the VHS). As has so often been said, binge-watching Doctor Who DVDs isn’t the same viewing experience as waiting an entire week for the next instalment; the weeks wait meant that the original viewers wouldn’t have minded or noticed the fact that it’s all pretty slow.


That said, it’s still true that nothing much happens. The plot is little more than get captured – escape – get captured – escape – get captured – escape – and so on, until you’ve got six episodes’ worth. We’re in and out of the Conciergerie for a month and a half and it ain’t that interesting. There’s a comedy jailer in there, who isn’t very funny; a dumb attempt to dig through solid stone walls with a plank from a bed; nasty food; gormless looking extras, and some invisible rats. (Maybe they didn’t try pre-filming real rats at Ealing because they remembered the problems with the killer rats in the 1950s Rudolph Cartier / Peter Cushing 1984: the studio lights were so hot that the dear little chaps fell asleep and were about as menacing as comatose gerbils. Or maybe it was just to cut costs: film’s expensive, after all.)


The key image from the real reign of terror is the guillotine, and they never built one in the studio: you just have a bit of stock film clipped in from an old production of A Tale of Two Cities. I suspect lots of the original viewers would have wanted scenes set around the guillotine because they would have been tense, dramatic, scary – but maybe there aren’t any because they didn’t want to frighten the kiddies too much. Pity. We get a nice horse and a tumbrel, though. The sets are pretty good, too, particularly the exteriors of the Paris streets, though because this is 60s Who on a shoestring, said streets are eerily deserted. Except for a splendid Terry Jones-style old lady, who coughs and splutters her way across the screen. (‘Dennis! There’s some lovely filth down here!’)


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The regulars, as always in the first season, are first class. Hartnell’s Doctor is still acid, spiky and unpleasant; he hasn’t yet become the kindly, giggling old twit of his later stories. A good man, but not a nice man: someone you’d have to know very well before you came to like him. His interaction with his companions is superb: the Tardis scenes are probably the best bits in the whole story, with Ian and Barbara – who clearly are very fond of him, despite his ordering them to leave the Ship and never come back – cajoling him into allowing them to part on good terms. There were moments which made me catch my breath: Hartnell’s passive-aggressive sneering at the tailor and the jailer, chin jutting forward as he sticks his face into theirs to wither them with a blast of sarcasm, is pure Peter Capaldi. Or the other way round, really; moments like that show how much Capaldi’s performance owes to Hartnell.


Would The Reign of Terror appeal to those who’ve been reared on NuWho? The more leisurely pace and the way it was shot would lead some to dismiss it. A pity, really, because the old continuous recording teachnique is in many ways superior to the single camera shooting of today. It allows the actors to dictate the pace, rather than the editor, and there’s a much more theatrical feel overall. (It’s an exaggeration, but there’s something to be said for the explanation of 60s TV as one-act theatre plays with cameras stuck in front of them.) These were, after all, the days when reps still existed; actors learnt their trade by playing a myriad of parts in rep, with a new show every week or two weeks; the prime medium for actors was theatre, not film or television. When you have an excellent cast, and it’s they who are dictating the pace and driving the scenes forward, the results are very good indeed (cf the Tardis sequences again). That’s something we’ve lost in modern TV drama, and it’s a shame.


But the problem is that The Reign of Terror has some pretty rotten acting (some of the aristos are very hammy, and the thuggish serjeant in part one has been reading The Art of Coarse Acting), and the script just isn’t very good. Nice to see Edward Brayshaw, though, well before he takes on the robe – or Nehru suit – of the War Chief, and Keith Anderson as Robespierre is convincing. The boy in the farmyard’s surprisingly good, too.


The Extras

Not enormously abundant. “Don’t Lose Your Head”, the ‘making of’ documentary, is great: the accounts of the problems caused by an under-experienced and over-stressed director are particularly interesting. Henric Hirsch’s dithering unsettled Hartnell, and Hartnell’s anxiety translated itself into belligerence; it’s not hard to imagine the shouting matches. Poor Hirsch had a nervous collapse, a very young Tim Coombe told Bill to back off, and it’s amazing that episode 3 ever got in the can. The production subtitles are as witty as always – it’s worth buying the DVDs just for them.


The animation? An enormous amount of hard work, love and dedication has obviously gone into them, and I don’t like to be negative, but I’m afraid I really didn’t like them. The characters’ movements are very clumsy, and the likenesses are often very poor. They’re not helped by over-heavy shadowing. Hartnell comes off worst; the Doctor looks like a talking skull. The backgrounds are nice, but… well, it didn’t work for me. While watching them, I wondered if it would have been better simply to have a rostrum camera over some line drawings of the characters in the scene; perhaps an artist could capture the sort of contemporary 60s’ look of Arnold Schwartzman’s or Henry Wood’s illustrations in the 60s’ Muller Doctor Who novels. Wouldn’t that fit the productions’ period better than computer animations? If the animations’ purpose is really to suggest the original episode, rather than to re-create it, I’d go for the rostrum camera and line drawings.


No? OK, maybe not. Just an idea.


The verdict: The Reign of Terror isn’t the nadir of Season One (The Keys of Marinus, anyone?), but it’s not its best, either: it’s miles away from the brilliance of An Unearthly Child or The Daleks. Not brilliant, not bad. Not hot, not cold. Not transcendent, not abysmal.


The Reign of Terror is available for just £6.50 from Amazon.


The post DVD Revisited: The Reign of Terror appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.

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Published on March 11, 2015 14:17
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