Doctor Who A-Z #09: Planet of Giants (1964)

If nothing else, Planet of Giants allows you to reflect on Verity Lambert’s pioneering genius. Doctor Who‘s first producer was pitched the idea of the TARDIS crew being miniaturised by C.E. Webber and Sydney Newman, who thought it would make a good first episode. Lambert thought it would be too difficult to produce, but working on the first year of the show persuaded her it was achievable. She was right twice: right to think it could be made, and also right to initially reject it. Planet of Giants is a tremendously forgettable story, which is strange, because judged in the context of the Hartnell era this should stand out a mile. It’s the first Doctor Who story to be set entirely on contemporary Earth, though it’s understandable why so many people misremember The War Machines as the groundbreaker in that regard. The War Machines, for all it’s far from perfect, understands what contemporary-set Doctor Who needs to be: its scenes of killer robots in front of the Post Office Tower is the sort of mixture of sci-fi iconography with recognisable landscapes that the series still regularly returns to.

In Planet of Giants the contemporary setting is defamiliarised by having the Doctor and his friends shrunk to insect size by a TARDIS malfunction. For the first ten minutes or so, they’re wandering around a garden convinced they’ve landed on an alien planet where all the creatures are giant-sized versions of Earth insects (not just yet, but give it a few stories…). I suspect even viewers at the time would have worked out the actual twist faster than the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan do, but the shot where it’s spelled out is worth waiting for. The TARDIS is at the bottom of what appears to be some fathomless canyon or earthquake chasm, then the camera pulls back to show the ship actually nestled in one of the cracks in a suburban garden path. All of the miniaturisation trick shots are this good, from the enormous plug-hole the Doctor and Susan are nearly washed down to the scene where Ian discovers a dead body that – to him – is the size of a mountain. Even the giant insects, an ingredient which The Web Planet would royally botch just a few months later, look good.

It’s hard to imagine Planet of Giants would look this good if it was produced, as Newman and Webber intended, as the first ever Doctor Who story. It also wouldn’t really matter. Doctor Who became a hit because of its second story, not its first. One thing that might have been more satisfying in that hypothetical Season One version of Planet of Giants, though, would be the plot. The original concept of the Doctor as a wanderer with limited powers would have been well-suited to a pure version of Webber’s concept, where the plot would have revolved around the TARDIS crew simply surviving this hostile environment. That’s the core concept of the pure historical stories, after all, and while they don’t always work the best of them are among the highlights of the First Doctor’s era. By this point, though, the lessons of stories like The Daleks and The Sensorites are filtering through: the Doctor is a hero, and he needs to fight evil. Which is where the writer, Louis Marks, comes in, deciding that Newman and Webber’s old idea could be used to explore environmental concerns.

Again, this is hugely ahead of its time, both in terms of where Doctor Who is right now and where British television was as well. It just doesn’t join together as well as it should do. For most of the serial, the Doctor and his friends might as well be in a different world to the ironically-named pesticide-peddler Forester, unable as they are to properly interact with him. That’s inherent in the concept of the episode, yes, but it doesn’t make it any more enjoyable to watch, feeling more like you’re watching someone channel-hopping between two stations than a convincing drama. The environmental message – clearly influenced by Rachel Carson’s historic book Silent Spring, about the effects of DDT on wildlife – is a laudable one, but it sits awkwardly with the fact that the insects we’re meant to worry about the survival of are positioned as monsters for the first two-thirds of the story.

This is the first script from Marks, who then goes on a long sabbatical before returning with three frequently extraordinary, sadly often-overlooked stories for Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker. This is, by some distance, his worst script, and it was hastily rejigged in order to reduce its episode count from four episodes to three. In other words, even a production team who’d cheerfully allotted seven weeks to Marco Polo thought the original script was rambling on a bit, and even with that last-minute re-edit it’s not hard to see why. Marks would improve significantly after this, and there is something telling in the fact that he came back to the series during an era when Doctor Who was regularly addressing the kind of environmental issues he’d tackled here. It’s as if he was waiting for the show to catch up with his ideas and ambitions; it’s more likely, though, that he simply needed more time to improve as a writer. As it is, despite being held over for a year Planet of Giants could still have done with a little longer in the oven.

Next: The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964)

Graham’s Archive – Planet of Giants

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