Doctor Who A-Z #04: Marco Polo (1964)

Watching Marco Polo as part of a chronological rewatch of Doctor Who means confronting three oddities of the show’s 1960s incarnation for the first time. The first, and most glaring, is that this story no longer exists in the archives. During the 1970s the BBC had a crisis of storage space caused by their policy of storing shows on both videotape and celluloid. Shows stored on film were wiped without anyone checking whether video copies existed elsewhere; to make things worse, this is before VHS and other home viewing formats alerted TV bosses to how much money there was in those archives. To “watch” Marco Polo, then, means watching an audio recording over still frames. It is an unlikely candidate for an animated reconstruction, and even if that did happen you’d still miss out on what were – according to those lucky enough to catch it on transmission – many of the most compelling reasons to watch it.

Marco Polo, you see, is an epic, a lavishly staged seven-part historical voyage which director Waris Hussein was immensely proud of. This brings us to the second oddity, which is that this is a “pure historical”, a fan term for a story in which the only science-fictional element is the Doctor and the TARDIS. Hussein’s previous directorial credit – An Unearthly Child – is technically a pure historical story too, although it doesn’t fit as neatly in the subgenre as Marco Polo does. It’s worth questioning whether a story whose entire first episode takes place on present-day Earth can be truly “historical”, for a start, but more importantly An Unearthly Child does not attach itself to any particular flashpoint in history in the way the later ones do. Audiences would have to wait nine weeks for something that truly laid out what to expect from a pure historical story: a Great Man of History, an exotic location, a fiendish villain, fears of changing the past (which the Doctor seems fascinatingly unbothered by in An Unearthly Child). This is what we get in Marco Polo.

It’s also the first historical story written by John Lucarotti, who was more tied to this genre than any other stalwart Doctor Who writer. His one attempt at science fiction, Puffball, was completely rewritten by Robert Holmes and turned into The Ark in Space. And yet, compared to other pure historicals like The Crusade or The Highlanders, Lucarotti’s scripts are closer to standard science fiction concerns. For all there are no aliens or future tech, they do put heavy emphasis on time travel and the problem of changing history, suggesting he was familiar with Ray Bradbury at least. This theme is less prominent in Marco Polo, but you can see the early stirrings of it. Ian and Barbara keep threatening to blurt out things they shouldn’t know about, and the question – which would be central to Lucarotti’s next script – of whether the TARDIS crew should oppose the values of the eras they enter is first broached with Ping-Cho and her arranged marriage to an elderly man.

The line you often hear about the first season’s historical stories is that they are far more assured than the science fiction instalments, because the BBC Drama Department was learning how to do science fiction on the fly but it can do great period drama in its sleep. Even the sad surviving evidence for Marco Polo offers plenty of support for this view. The costumes and sets are lustrous, and the performances, particularly Mark Eden in the title role, are first-rate. But elevating this above The Sensorites – let alone The Daleks – requires a certain willed myopia. For all their flaws, the two stories I just mentioned contain massive leaps forward in Doctor Who‘s sensibility and storytelling methods, ones whose after-effects are still detectable in the series today. Marco Polo, by contrast, arranges itself around its title figure, giving him the role of narrator in the same way that the first episode of An Unearthly Child, before the Doctor entered the story, allowed Ian and Barbara to briefly control the narrative. It doesn’t feel like a Doctor Who story about Marco Polo so much as a Marco Polo story that guest stars the Doctor.

You do, of course, have to give the pure historicals some leeway on this count. They represent a version of Doctor Who that barely survived the first regeneration; it’s inevitable that they don’t tally with how we see the show today. Even when marked against 1960s stories that struggle with the same restrictions, though, Marco Polo comes up short. The threat in An Unearthly Child came from savage cavemen and wild animals, which isn’t as dazzlingly original a threat as the Daleks but it works. The threat in Marco Polo initially comes from the travellers running out of water, which is certainly a problem when you’re travelling through the desert but hardly makes for gripping drama. There is also the question of how the serial treats its non-Western cultures.

The paradox of the Hartnell years, from a modern standpoint, is that they’re both spiritually cosmopolitan and artistically Anglocentric. The First Doctor’s TARDIS only occasionally visits Britain, stopping off instead at France, Italy, America, Palestine, Antarctica, Greece, Mexico, Egypt and – here – China. The show wouldn’t have this kind of wanderlust again until Jodie Whittaker’s tenure, but by then these settings were achieved with extensive foreign location shoots and a diverse cast. 1960s Who, by contrast, is the product of an era which saw television as more akin to theatre than cinema. This has its benefits – late-twentieth century television was simply better-written and less wasteful in its spending than anything you’ll see on a streaming platform – but it does mean that nobody saw any reason to render China with any level of realism. Hussein successfully managed to cast some Asian actors, most notably Zienia Merton as Ping-Cho, but there simply weren’t enough non-white performers in Equity’s talent pool at the time, so you also get Tegana, a cackling brute played by an actor with the none-more-British name Derren Nesbitt. Worse, large parts of the story rely on sympathetic characters like Marco Polo and Kublai Khan trusting Tegana, which makes them look like absolute idiots, since he’s essentially a pantomime villain.

The final oddity of Marco Polo is that the Doctor isn’t present for the second episode. The original plan for Doctor Who was that it would run all year round, like a soap opera, a plan which immediately ran up against the reality of how difficult it was to make television science fiction. Even the more realistic schedule, though, was still extremely gruelling, and all of the main cast were permitted weeks off. The next time Doctor Who did a seven-part serial – The Evil of the Daleks – Patrick Troughton had his holiday in the fourth episode, by which time the story had built up such momentum and such a memorable supporting cast that you might not even notice the leading man is missing. In Marco Polo, the Doctor is around for the first episode, which like a lot of Hartnell-era stories is dedicated to working out where the TARDIS has landed this week. Then he takes a break while the stakes and characters are set up, a decision which only reinforces the sense that the Doctor isn’t really central to this story. For some viewers, all these oddities are beguiling, a look back at a version of the show which is almost unrecognisably different to what it is now. For others, Marco Polo might merely remind you why the production team moved on from these ideas in the first place.

Next: The Keys of Marinus (1964)

Graham’s Archive – Marco Polo

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