Doctor Who A-Z #24: The Celestial Toymaker (1966)

The format of Doctor Who is famously one of the most expansive in television history, and it is to the writing team’s immense credit that they took about a year to get bored of its limitations. Terry Nation’s idea to have the Doctor and his companions enter the human imagination in Season Two’s The Chase was vetoed by producer Verity Lambert, but after Lambert left the idea was revived by new producer John Wiles. He commissioned the show’s first full-on fantasy script from debuting writer Brian Hayles, built around a mysterious toymaker with god-like powers, who may be another member of the Doctor’s as-yet-unnamed species.

The Celestial Toymaker is not much fun, although we should cut it some slack for the astonishing level of behind-the-scenes chaos. Wiles’s disagreements with William Hartnell were now so irreconcilable that the producer left the series, though not before wondering whether the detail of the Doctor’s invisibility – written into the script to give the ailing Hartnell a couple of weeks off – could be used to have a completely new actor take over the role of the Doctor at the end of the story. (Not just yet, but the idea stuck…) Script editor Donald Tosh also left during production, which caused a massive problem when Gerald Savory, author of the play George & Margaret which Hayles’s story heavily referenced, suddenly decided against allowing the BBC to use his characters. This happened at such a late stage that actors had already been cast in the offending roles. Hayles was on holiday at this point, assuming that his work had been done, so incoming script editor Gerry Davis’s first, thankless, task involved a complete rewrite of the middle two episodes.

So just to recap: several major supporting characters have to be written out without the screenwriter present, the lead actor is a voiceover and a pair of hands for half of the story, and the producer, at this point, is no-one. You expect the result to be a bit of a trainwreck, and it is, but at least this is all happening during the making of a story which thrives on a certain ragged, undisciplined quality. Ever since it was broadcast The Celestial Toymaker has received praise for its wild, idea-flinging originality and its eerie Alice in Wonderland ambience, complete with King and Queen of Hearts. This is the series’s first excursion into the “dark nursery corners” Alan Moore would later praise the show for getting into, a mode which 21st-century stories like The Empty Child, Night Terrors and The Church on Ruby Road continue to find inspiration in.

Which is all well and good, though you wonder how much of it is intentional. As soon as the Toymaker’s clowns turn up, Steven and Dodo dissolve into loud, affected laughter, as though the producers are trying to reassure viewers that these bad clowns aren’t as thoroughly evil as the one starring in the then-new American serial Batman. Hayles was worried that the serial was becoming too dark as he turned in new drafts, which is presumably why the most disturbing idea – Dodo’s suspicion that the Toymaker’s toys might be sentient, enslaved beings – never goes anywhere. Despite all this sanitisation there is one jarringly nasty shot in the final episode of the burned, twisted corpse of the Toymaker’s henchman Cyril. Even as someone who enjoys seeing Doctor Who push the limits of horror in family viewing hours, it struck me as more tasteless than chilling.

Perhaps they simply wanted to emphasise that Cyril wouldn’t be coming back; he is such an obvious rip-off of Frank Richards’s children’s comedy character Billy Bunter that the BBC had to broadcast a disclaimer after Richards’s estate complained. The Toymaker, by contrast, was hoped to be a recurring character. This took a while to bear fruit, but before his recent return in The Giggle former producer Graham Williams was hired to write a second Toymaker story which was scuppered by the show’s mid-’80s hiatus. Williams was critical of The Celestial Toymaker, both for its indulgent set-pieces of characters playing children’s games at length and for the dubious racial aspect of Michael Gough’s Toymaker wearing a Chinese Mandarin outfit, which does make you wonder in which way this being is meant to be Celestial. One reason for suspicion is that this is, infamously, the only Doctor Who story to use the N-word, as the King of Hearts recites the archaic version of ‘eenie meenie minie mo’. It’s pretty incredible that this show can get through the whole of Rosa without that word, but a story about clowns playing hopscotch just had to have it.

Williams has a point about the racism, then, but the game-playing is harder to reach a conclusion on. It’s true that this is a very visual story, and it’s a shame we only have one surviving episode to judge it by. Listening to the orgy of yelling and horn-honking that constitutes episode three, I wondered whether any format, visual, textual or audio, could make this into acceptable drama. It copes better than expected with Hartnell’s absence, shining a welcome spotlight on Steven and Dodo. Their chalk-and-cheese double-act – the macho space pilot and the Carnaby Street chick – is much more charming and successful than it’s given credit for. The attempt to make the Doctor’s game into a ticking-clock crisis falters as soon as it’s specified he has one thousand and twenty-three moves to win, and there are points where I wondered if we were going to see every single one in real time. But in the days since I watched it, I’ve found myself looking back on it more fondly. In a series which was increasingly working out a formula – space epics, comedy historicals, the first invasion of contemporary Earth at the end of the season – it does, at least, represent a radical break with tradition. Later stories would do this kind of thing better, but The Celestial Toymaker deserves some credit for doing it first.

Next: The Gunfighters (1966).

Graham’s Archive – The Celestial Toymaker

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