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"People keep giving me guns - I do wish they wouldn't!"
The Shakespeare Code was still downloading when I left for work (I sense a regular pattern forming) and I have little to say about Smith and Jones other than that it was fun and I really like Martha so far. So, instead, an expression of love for The Gunfighters.
Early Doctor Who is full of fine stories people have more or less forgotten about. (Fans should pay more attention to The Romans and The Massacre!) Alas, The Gunfighters has not suffered the same fate - instead, it's been relentlessly criticized for the best part of forty years. It's frequently nominated as a story people would cheerfully trade for The Power of the Daleks and suchlike, were it possible to get into a TARDIS and go back to choose exactly what the BBC would burninate [1]. All I can say is that now I've seen it for myself, I'm delighted that they kept it. Some of the accents are dreadful, but given how lenient we are on the special effects and wobbly sets, I can overlook them. (Overhear them? Um ...)
For those who don't know, in The Gunfighters the Doctor and his companions land in the Old West. Delighted, Steven and Dodo dress up in the silliest costumes they can find in the wardrobe, while the Doctor goes in search of a dentist to extract his broken tooth. Unfortunately, they've wound up in Tombstone and the new local dentist is a certain Doc Holiday. Finding out that the Clampton brothers are in town and gunning for him, Holiday substitutes our Doctor for himself. Wackiness, as they say, ensues.
It's very, very silly and very, very funny.
In Doctor Who, dying is easy. Comedy is hard. I can count the number of comic Doctor Who stories that work for me on my fingers. (Only counting TV: The Romans, The Time Meddler, The Gunfighters and City of Death. Note that three of the four are Hartnell historicals.) The problem isn't that Doctor Who can't be funny. Even the most serious and scary episodes tend to have at least one joke that makes you laugh out loud: the "who looks at a screwdriver and says 'this could be more sonic?'" routine from The Empty Child springs to mind, for instance.
No, the problem is the number of writers/script editors/producers who confused comedy with stupidity. You can't just bolt silly bits onto a standard Doctor Who plot and expect it to turn into a comedy. A comedy - as opposed to a drama with jokes in it, something the show has always done beautifully - needs to have a funny plot. The action in The Gunfighters or City of Death revolves around the jokes in a way the action in, say, Nightmare of Eden just doesn't.
Part of the beauty of The Gunfighters is how much of the comedy comes out of the characters. Steven insists on getting around Tombstone in a silk shirt, boots he has trouble walking in and an accent that falls off at the drop of a cowboy hat. Dodo actually has a personality for once, and the relationship that develops between her and Doc Holiday is amusing and interesting. William Hartnell, almost at the end of his time in the role, is at his best as an irascible old man out of his element. (His first sight of his companions new outfits leads to the memorable complaint 'why can't you dress inconspicuously like me?' Hey pot, quit insulting the kettles!)
This is the story that makes you wonder just how many of Hartnell's fluffs were deliberate characterization, because all but one of his 'slips' here sounds completely deliberate [2]. The joke about the Doctor calling Wyatt Earp 'Mr. Werp' somehow stays funny after the fourth repetition, and around episode three I realized why. It's not a temporary lapse like his calling Ian 'Chesterfield' or 'Chatterton', he honestly thinks that Wyatt Earp is called Mr. Werp. The Doctor is never going to be fallible in this particular way in any of his other nine lives. When he regenerates, he loses a peculiar kind of vulnerability that he never regains, even in his ostensibly more naive incarnations. I never realized that I missed it until now.
In the second half of the story, though, a curious thing happens. It was by no means unusual for the Doctor to take a secondary role in a sixties story, but Dodo and Steven are effectively sidelined as well as the gunfight draws near, leaving our attention on the cowboys. The viewer (this viewer anyway) is half-expecting Steven to ride out with the Earps when the time comes, but as it turns out the only one of the three directly involved in the climax is Dodo. (She saves Doc Holiday from being shot in the back, and thus seals the fate of Johnny Ringo.) The last occasion I can recall when the show focused this much of its attention on the guests at the expense of the regulars was The Space Pirates, which doesn't work anything like as well. Moreover, the gunfight itself is played in deadly earnest. Everyone treats it seriously and - miraculously, given that this is Doctor Who - nobody overplays their death scene.
This show has always excelled at juxtapositions: blue police boxes in prehistory, dramas where the Doctor offers everyone a jelly baby, hospitals on the moon, comedies that end with battles. I love Anthony Jacobs' hilarious star turn as Doc Holiday, I love the death of Johnny Ringo, and I love the filthy look Steven gives the bad guys when they make him sing The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon for the fifth time in the row. Most of all, I love that this was the kind of show where someone would turn to someone else and say 'I know what this season needs: a parody Western!'
[1] My own nominations for stories that should have been set on fire are The Web Planet and The Dominators, and I'm only sorry they didn't do a more thorough job of ridding the universe of The Underwater Menace and The Space Pirates. If they wanted to burn Time-Flight right now I would not complain.
[2] The odd fluff out is the one where he hilariously refers to Steven as 'she', which seems to be an actual mistake. But who can tell with Billy?
Early Doctor Who is full of fine stories people have more or less forgotten about. (Fans should pay more attention to The Romans and The Massacre!) Alas, The Gunfighters has not suffered the same fate - instead, it's been relentlessly criticized for the best part of forty years. It's frequently nominated as a story people would cheerfully trade for The Power of the Daleks and suchlike, were it possible to get into a TARDIS and go back to choose exactly what the BBC would burninate [1]. All I can say is that now I've seen it for myself, I'm delighted that they kept it. Some of the accents are dreadful, but given how lenient we are on the special effects and wobbly sets, I can overlook them. (Overhear them? Um ...)
For those who don't know, in The Gunfighters the Doctor and his companions land in the Old West. Delighted, Steven and Dodo dress up in the silliest costumes they can find in the wardrobe, while the Doctor goes in search of a dentist to extract his broken tooth. Unfortunately, they've wound up in Tombstone and the new local dentist is a certain Doc Holiday. Finding out that the Clampton brothers are in town and gunning for him, Holiday substitutes our Doctor for himself. Wackiness, as they say, ensues.
It's very, very silly and very, very funny.
In Doctor Who, dying is easy. Comedy is hard. I can count the number of comic Doctor Who stories that work for me on my fingers. (Only counting TV: The Romans, The Time Meddler, The Gunfighters and City of Death. Note that three of the four are Hartnell historicals.) The problem isn't that Doctor Who can't be funny. Even the most serious and scary episodes tend to have at least one joke that makes you laugh out loud: the "who looks at a screwdriver and says 'this could be more sonic?'" routine from The Empty Child springs to mind, for instance.
No, the problem is the number of writers/script editors/producers who confused comedy with stupidity. You can't just bolt silly bits onto a standard Doctor Who plot and expect it to turn into a comedy. A comedy - as opposed to a drama with jokes in it, something the show has always done beautifully - needs to have a funny plot. The action in The Gunfighters or City of Death revolves around the jokes in a way the action in, say, Nightmare of Eden just doesn't.
Part of the beauty of The Gunfighters is how much of the comedy comes out of the characters. Steven insists on getting around Tombstone in a silk shirt, boots he has trouble walking in and an accent that falls off at the drop of a cowboy hat. Dodo actually has a personality for once, and the relationship that develops between her and Doc Holiday is amusing and interesting. William Hartnell, almost at the end of his time in the role, is at his best as an irascible old man out of his element. (His first sight of his companions new outfits leads to the memorable complaint 'why can't you dress inconspicuously like me?' Hey pot, quit insulting the kettles!)
This is the story that makes you wonder just how many of Hartnell's fluffs were deliberate characterization, because all but one of his 'slips' here sounds completely deliberate [2]. The joke about the Doctor calling Wyatt Earp 'Mr. Werp' somehow stays funny after the fourth repetition, and around episode three I realized why. It's not a temporary lapse like his calling Ian 'Chesterfield' or 'Chatterton', he honestly thinks that Wyatt Earp is called Mr. Werp. The Doctor is never going to be fallible in this particular way in any of his other nine lives. When he regenerates, he loses a peculiar kind of vulnerability that he never regains, even in his ostensibly more naive incarnations. I never realized that I missed it until now.
In the second half of the story, though, a curious thing happens. It was by no means unusual for the Doctor to take a secondary role in a sixties story, but Dodo and Steven are effectively sidelined as well as the gunfight draws near, leaving our attention on the cowboys. The viewer (this viewer anyway) is half-expecting Steven to ride out with the Earps when the time comes, but as it turns out the only one of the three directly involved in the climax is Dodo. (She saves Doc Holiday from being shot in the back, and thus seals the fate of Johnny Ringo.) The last occasion I can recall when the show focused this much of its attention on the guests at the expense of the regulars was The Space Pirates, which doesn't work anything like as well. Moreover, the gunfight itself is played in deadly earnest. Everyone treats it seriously and - miraculously, given that this is Doctor Who - nobody overplays their death scene.
This show has always excelled at juxtapositions: blue police boxes in prehistory, dramas where the Doctor offers everyone a jelly baby, hospitals on the moon, comedies that end with battles. I love Anthony Jacobs' hilarious star turn as Doc Holiday, I love the death of Johnny Ringo, and I love the filthy look Steven gives the bad guys when they make him sing The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon for the fifth time in the row. Most of all, I love that this was the kind of show where someone would turn to someone else and say 'I know what this season needs: a parody Western!'
[1] My own nominations for stories that should have been set on fire are The Web Planet and The Dominators, and I'm only sorry they didn't do a more thorough job of ridding the universe of The Underwater Menace and The Space Pirates. If they wanted to burn Time-Flight right now I would not complain.
[2] The odd fluff out is the one where he hilariously refers to Steven as 'she', which seems to be an actual mistake. But who can tell with Billy?