A Great Spirit of Adventure
Space Time Visualiser: 23rd April 1975
Today the Space Time Visualiser travels back 36 years to an obituary on the BBC News.
It all started out as a mild curiosity in a junkyard, and now it’s turned out to be quite a great spirit of adventure!
William Hartnell died thirty-six years ago; before I was born. I suspect that the story of his life is a familiar one to most people reading this – born out of wedlock, lied about his parentage, protégé of Hugh Blaker, leading actor in his middle years, character actor in his earlier and later years. Lambert spotted him in This Sporting Life and cast him in her new series. You can pick all that stuff up on Wikipedia though, or for a more complete history, I’d suggest sampling the excellent Carney biography. What these raw facts fail to explain is why he was so successful as Doctor Who. I don’t think I’ll be able to either, but I’ll give it a go.
When Hartnell died, the BBC news report of his death used a clip from The Gunfighters to illustrate his work. It’s not surprising. Hartnell will be known forever as the Doctor, and it’s for good reason: it was undeniably his best role. You might also have seen him in Carry On Sergeant or Brighton Rock, or in that film with Sean Connery and Patrick McGoohan. I’ve not seen much of his earlier 1930s work, but it remains something of a mysterious allure to me – William Hartnell, young? But then again, looking at the photos in Carney’s book, I’m not sure men of that era were ever young.
It’s true he seems somehow ancient, Hartnell. Even his name conjures up a smoky world of black and white men drawing on filterless cigarettes in army uniforms and old suits. And yet, there’s a youthful enthusiasm, a mischievousness, at the heart of his performance. There was a lie spun sometime in the 70s or 80s that described Hartnell’s Doctor Who as ‘crotchety’. It became the keyword to quote when you hadn’t bothered to look at any of his work, alongside similar short-cuts like ‘cosmic hobo’, ‘dandy’, and ‘Tom’. But when I watch Hartnell’s stories, I find ‘crochety’ difficult to reconcile: I see one of the best comic actors of his generation playing a role he genuinely loves. Here was an actor who was at his happiest when chasing an incompetent assassin around a Roman bedroom, clattering him over the head with vases; or laughing for a full minute at Marco Polo while (probably) waving a hankerchief loosely in the air. He’s certainly the best comedy actor in the lead role, and his Doctor Who is far funnier than Tom Baker’s trademark over-cooked semi-madness, or Patrick Troughton’s arse-grabbing efforts. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Hartnell had stayed with the Carry On series. Would there have been a role for him in Nurse (the daffodil?), or Constable, or perhaps Ted Ray’s part in Teacher? I struggle to imagine he’d have been a Sid James or Kenneth Williams-type long-running actor, though it’s nice to think he’d have still got to play off Peter Butterworth, since they’re both clearly larking about like schoolchildren in The Time Meddler.
When discussing Hartnell’s Doctor Who, there’s usually some comment on him being ill or being an old man, as if to excuse some perceived deficiency in his performance. He wasn’t that old – fifty-five when he started; even Davison’s played the Doctor at an older age than that – and though the illness – the beginnings of arteriosclerosis – was genuine, I suspect the main difficulty was having to carry whole episodes with the sort of dialogue he’d never had to speak before. What’s rarely mentioned about his familiar ‘billy fluffs’ is that on-screen he doesn’t care, and deals with losing his lines with bluff and arm-waving assuredness and carries on. If nothing else, when even his co-stars become experts at prompting him, it’s great fun for the viewer. I love Ian’s ‘What galaxy’s that in, Doctor?’ in The Web Planet. I’d go so far as to say we’d be infinitely worse off as a sub-culture without ‘burnt cinders floating around in Spain’, or ‘anti-radiation gloves… drugs…’ It’s things like this that people latch on to.
If Hartnell did have a fault, it’s that he is at the core a film actor working in telly. His touching scenes at the end of Carry On Sergeant show him at his best on-screen, and all his Ealing sequences in Doctor Who are played to perfection. He was a master of knowing where a camera was at any particular moment. Hartnell was understandably comfortable with the film-style shooting of recording short sections of a scene at a time. Even on tape, you can see it, right there in front of you -- there’s a reason there’s a recording break just before he does his virtuoso final speech in The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and it’s not just to let him wander across to the other set. The same thing happens at the end of The Edge of Destruction, with his utterly mental rant about stars and planets and the coagulation of matter (‘A new birth of a sun… and its planets!’). Beat that, Tom.
I think it’s important too to remember that Hartnell wasn’t playing a Time Lord, an eccentric alien from a god-like civilisation – he was playing a person, an old man with a sense of humour (indeed, in The Sensorites, the Doctor includes himself in the phrase ‘we humans’). This matters: he’s being someone you feel comfortable with, on this strange journey he takes you on. Not a distant alien, but a person with whom you can sympathise. Your favourite grandfather then, sometimes gentle, sometimes tetchy, instantly funny again. As Hartnell himself put it, a cross between Father Christmas and the Wizard of Oz. He was that magical.
His best performances? It’s clear he loves historicals. The Romans, obviously; The Myth Makers. Getting engaged to Cameca in The Aztecs. Facing off against a War Machine, staring bang into camera. ‘My ship… my TARDIS…’ at the end of the first episode of The Web Planet. The bit in Planet of Giants where he makes the others help him up to look over the edge of a paving stone – it would have been a ten-second scene if Barbara or Susan had done it, but the Doctor insists and takes him about a minute to get up and back down again. The start of The Romans, when he says, ‘Oh fabulous, my dear, absolutely fabulous! What was it we had before, the sort of, “Hors d’oeuvres”, so to speak?’ That he can turn so quickly from his lively antics to exasperated irritation when he realises he has eaten ant’s eggs might well be his greatest strength.
And a moment please for two of my favourite moments, both from The Dalek Invasion of Earth: his utter pain as he clutches Susan and delivers the line ‘You need taking in hand…’; and never was a Doctor so totally determined, so angry and righteous, so perfect and doctorly and right as ‘Yes, they dare! And we have got to dare to stop them!’ That we can see the strength of this while simultaneously being aware we’re watching a 56-year-old actor pulling daft faces is why Doctor Who is still around today. Thanks for everything, Mr H!
