Doctor Who A-Z #12 – The Romans (1965)

The 2005 revival of Doctor Who inspired some transformative ways of watching the old series, none more dramatic than the one applied to the Hartnell era. Previously, the First Doctor’s early displays of bad temper, untrustworthiness and even violence were often read as straightforward mistakes, little out-of-character moments which the show would weed out as it went on. Watched in the light of modern Who and its season-long (or longer) arcs, it looked surprisingly forward-thinking; three-and-a-bit seasons of Doctor Who where the Doctor slowly became the Doctor.

You can overindulge this reading. There’s no evidence that anyone on the show was proactively thinking about the Doctor’s character in this way, and a major step forward in heroism is often followed by a step back. But here we are in the middle of the second season, and Dennis Spooner, the incoming script editor whose only previous story – The Reign of Terror – was one of those steps back, has written something that could have been written to order as the crisis point in the middle of the First Doctor’s arc. In a lot of ways, The Romans shows the First Doctor at his least heroic; idle, irresponsible and larcenous, the final episode shows him simply giggling at a catastrophe he helped create. It also shows him at his most charming.

The obvious reason is that The Romans is the show’s first experiment with a full-on comedy story. Bad behaviour doesn’t need to be punished in a comedy; so long as it’s funny, the audience will accept it. It’s one of the ‘pure historical’ stories of the First Doctor’s era, meaning no robots or aliens, the only science-fiction device is the TARDIS. There are many myths as to why these stories were phased out early in Patrick Troughton’s run, but the truth is the production team seem to have worked out the essential problems early on. David Whitaker, whose vision for the show was otherwise so expansive, listed a series of deadly sins for the pure historicals in his first writers’ guide: no historical inaccuracy, no scenes where the Doctor invents something or carries out an action that we know was done by a real historical person. These rules were often broken, but that’s not the core problem. It’s possible to imagine a version of Doctor Who which continues along the path set by 100,000 BC, where the Doctor and his friends arrive in a dangerous historical period and the adventure simply involves them trying to survive and escape. The problem is, once you’ve seen the Doctor stop an alien genocide, it becomes harder to accept him just muddling through back on Earth.

Season One simply alternates between these two modes; there wasn’t time for the undreamed-of success of The Daleks to inspire any course-correction. As the first pure historical of Season Two, The Romans is therefore the first one that has to argue for the subgenre’s survival in the light of the show turning decisively towards science fiction. And while the comedy is certainly a big part of Spooner’s response, it’s not the whole strategy. The Reign of Terror might have been a step back from the heroism the Doctor exhibited in The Sensorites, but it was a step forward in the show’s treatment of historical subject matter. For the first time, a historical setting was treated as an excuse to play in a different genre’s sandbox, an approach which is still detectable in modern historical serials like Rogue and Legend of the Sea Devils. Spooner repeats that approach in The Romans, and for the first time it opens up new dramatic possibilities. After four episodes of ignoring the historical record in order to treat Emperor Nero as essentially a comedy character, the Great Fire of Rome actually becomes a shock ending.

The Romans begins with that hoary old opening gambit of Hartnell-era stories, a scene where the crew are separated from or unable to use the TARDIS. Except where this is usually followed by them exploring and getting into trouble, The Romans cuts to them wearing togas and relaxing in a Centurion’s villa. Rather than a crisis that must be resolved, the loss of the TARDIS is now an excuse for a holiday. This is arguably as much of a jab at the show’s emerging cliches as it is an attempt at opening up new narrative possibilities, but damned if it doesn’t work. Many reviews of The Romans overlook how strange this immediate jump into the story is. In the final episode Ian wonders if it was all a dream, and viewers who can remember The Edge of Destruction might indeed have assumed something similar. The fact that the Doctor has, essentially, just broke into a soldier’s house and started stealing his food does suggest this vacation won’t remain peaceful forever, and so it proves. But the dream-like opening primes you for a Doctor Who story that won’t play by the series’ normal rules.

The humour is broader and more farcical than that which would become the series norm when Douglas Adams was script editor, but it works, both in terms of how funny it is and in terms of how much it brings out of the regular cast. Even Vicki, whose characterisation outside the context that introduced her is still an unwritten book, gets some delightful bits of business; I love her little excited squeak when the Doctor suggests going to Rome. The Doctor, as noted above, seems delighted to be an agent of chaos for a while. Ian gets to display a kind of dorky enthusiasm for exploring different eras that carries through into later stories like The Space Museum and the one where he sings along badly to the Beatles. His relationship with Barbara, which previously has been something the show has neither confirmed nor denied, is openly flirtatious here.

Season One had a dismaying occasional motif of Barbara being put in sexual danger, not least in Spooner’s own script for The Reign of Terror. Even this, remarkably, is detoxified by The Romans‘s comic tone, partly because Emperor Nero’s pursuit of her is played as a Scooby-Doo chase sequence, partly because, as played by Derek Francis, Nero is clearly gay as a bunch of grapes. Francis, who would go on to be a regular in the Carry On series, had been badgering the production office for a part in Doctor Who since the show began, meaning he beats Russell T Davies, David Tennant, Marc Platt and even Andrew Smith to the title of first Doctor Who fan to contribute to the series. How wonderful that his campaign paid off with such a peach of a role, and in such a marvellous story too. If The Romans is a dream, it’s a very pleasant one.

Next: The Web Planet (1965)

Graham’s Archive – The Romans

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