Doctor Who A-Z #15 – The Space Museum (1965)

Doctor Who fans have a pastime which is mean and unfair and very funny, namely spotting William Hartnell’s line fluffs. Some of these ‘Billy-fluffs’ are delightful; the very next story after this one has him warn his companions they’re about to become “burnt cinders floating around in Spain – in space!”. Yet it’s always struck me as unfair that these are laid solely at Hartnell’s door. A lot of early Doctor Who, like a lot of 1960s television in general, was recorded “as live” – i.e., no retakes unless something goes disastrously wrong. It’s part of the reason why they got so much done: at this late point in Season Two, Hartnell has racked up more screen time than pretty much every new series Doctor except David Tennant (even then, that’s partly because you can’t be sure he isn’t going to come back and add another few hours to his tally).

It’s true that this production model was particularly rough on Hartnell – a man born in 1908, whose health was faltering, playing a role which involved vast reams of technobabble – it wasn’t great for anyone else either. For evidence, look at The Space Museum, a story which contains rare moments where someone doesn’t fluff a line. It reaches a near-hallucinatory zenith at the start of episode three, where the alien Moroks (sounds, helpfully, like H.G. Wells’s “Morlocks”) try to break into the TARDIS. It’s a scene whose suspense factor is reduced significantly by the fact that every single actor takes a couple of seconds to realise where their cue is.

The usual line about The Space Museum is that it consists of a great opening episode that’s let down by the remaining three parts. I’d like to depart from that, if only because I don’t think the opening episode is much good either. It has a compelling mystery hook – arriving at a strange alien museum, the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki find their own future selves as exhibits – but there is already plenty of evidence that writer Glyn Jones won’t be able to stick the landing. It’s hard to trust Jones’s ability to write a time-travel-based mystery when, upon seeing his future self, the Doctor starts to fret that he’d “never mastered the fourth dimension”. I mean, really? What have you been travelling in all this time?

Sure enough, the second episode has one of the more infamous crash-landings in Doctor Who history, as the eerie, Edge of Destruction-style enigma of part one is replaced with the Moroks (sounds, helpfully, like “morons”) telling each other things they already know, and a gang of the least threatening rebels in the show’s history plotting to overthrow them. The idea that the whole of the planet Xeron is one massive museum has an appealingly weird quality – Borges’s Library of Babel meets the British Museum – but that’s quashed by the decision to make this story into a generic despots-vs-rebels tale. How threatening can a dictatorship be when the only thing it’s in charge of is a museum? The rebels are truly pathetic as well, coming across less as a well-drilled fighting force and more as a student mime troupe, despite one of them being future Boba Fett Jeremy Bulloch.

The only interesting thing about the rebels is how gung-ho Vicki is about encouraging them to revolution. Ian is written as slightly too goofy and Barbara is barely featured, but Vicki going all Robespierre is eyebrow-raising – not least when you remember that the actual Robespierre appeared in this show less than a year earlier, and the Doctor and his friends were highly disapproving of him. The Space Museum is the third-from-last story in Season Two; the same slot in Season One was filled by The Aztecs, where the Doctor famously insists that “not one line” of history could be changed. The Space Museum takes the exact opposite tack, with the Doctor encouraging his companions to do everything they can to avert a future where they’re reduced to museum exhibits. It would be fascinating if… well, it would be fascinating if the actual episodes weren’t deeply boring, but it would also be nice if this didn’t establish a double standard between Earth history and alien history that the show would soon embed into its core ethos.

Indeed, this sense that the historical and science-fiction stories are meant to play by different rules spoiled The Space Museum‘s chances of becoming a truly memorable story. Glyn Jones complained that he’d written the story as a comedy, and the central dilemma might have made a very clever farce, but after commissioning the story David Whitaker handed the script-editor’s chair to Dennis Spooner, who was adamant that there were no chuckles in outer space. Given that Spooner inaugurated the comedy historicals with his own script for The Romans, this is an odd objection to make. The implication seems to be that science fiction is too central to the show’s identity for anyone to make fun of it, which obviously betrays a certain contempt towards the historicals, and as the humourless finished script for The Space Museum shows it’s not doing the science fiction stories any favours either.

The screenplay is rich with padding – at one point the TARDIS team have a lengthy argument about which corridor to go down – but Hartnell is, at least, having fun. The famous scene of him hiding inside the museum’s Dalek exhibit is by no means uncharacteristic of his impish performance. It’s a shame that he drops out of the story for an episode, taken away by the Moroks (sounds, helpfully, like “bollocks”) for “preparation”, which just sounds like they’re going to throw some sage and black pepper on him then stick him in the oven on Gas Mark 6. Even the wrap-up is handled by Ian, who explains how they’ve rewritten the future in a way that sounds like he understands even less of this than we do. It’s laudable that The Space Museum makes an early attempt at using time travel as part of the story, rather than just a device to get the Doctor and his friends into this week’s setting, but it’ll be another couple of years before it does something like this successfully.

Next: The Chase (1965)

Graham’s Archive – The Space Museum

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