Doctor Who A-Z #41: The Web of Fear (1968)

Asked what the appeal of Doctor Who was, Jon Pertwee said that other science fiction shows will give you monsters on other planets, or on spaceships, but in this show you might find “a Yeti sitting on your loo in Tooting Bec”. When Pertwee was announced as the Doctor, he took part in a larky photoshoot with a Yeti, but he never faced one himself. Nor did any other Doctor except Troughton’s – the lone Yeti in The Five Doctors only threatened him, and the Yetis’ puppet-master The Great Intelligence returned under Matt Smith without its furry robot henchmen. There are precisely three stories featuring the Yeti, each of which sees the creatures fighting the Second Doctor, and only one of which – this one – sees them come anywhere near Tooting Bec. (It remains sadly unconfirmed whether they’re toilet-trained or not)

What I’m saying is this: The Web of Fear was such a hit that it single-handedly rewrote the public perception of what Doctor Who did. And in the context of 1960s Doctor Who, this is manifestly not what it did – the show has plenty of stories where humans fight aliens in space, or on a far-future Earth, but the “monsters in your neighbourhood” model had only appeared twice before this, in The War Machines and The Faceless Ones. Within two years, the show’s format would be temporarily rewritten so it did this all the time, and Troughton’s successor would be alluding to this exact story as the quintessence of Doctor Who. That’s success.

There is a danger that, like Tomb of the Cybermen, this story will always be seen through the lens of its archive status: it was one of the missing stories fans most pined for, then we got it (well, most of it) back, sing hallelujah. To counteract that, I re-read Elizabeth Sandifer’s Eruditorum review to refresh my memory on how this story was seen before its rediscovery. The Web of Fear is many things, and one of them is a whodunnit: someone in the small band of soldiers and allies the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria find themselves amongst is a spy for The Great Intelligence, and the Doctor must find out who. Sandifer thinks Haisman and Lincoln cheat on the solution; a commenter below suggests an alternative explanation where they fudge things a little but essentially play fair.

I’d side with the commenter there, although I think I’m siding with the commenter because I had the chance to see the episodes: the performance of the guilty party and Douglas Camfield’s direction produce enough useful ambiguity to turn a potentially nonsensical solution into a workable stretch. Camfield was one of Doctor Who‘s best-ever directors and this might be his finest work: its dramatically-lit close-ups, fast pace, compositional tension and jags of expertly-handled action are an inventory of his virtues. When the story chills – and it does chill, so much so that Troughton recorded an in-character trailer warning child viewers that the Yeti were a lot scarier this time round – we must assume it chills because of Camfield. It’s not as if the concept is scary. The concept, in case we’ve forgotten, is robot Yeti in the London Underground shooting cobwebs at people, which is one of Doctor Who‘s top ten silliest ideas (and therefore one of the ten silliest ideas in television history).

And yet… the silliness of the central idea shows a real flash of genius on the part of Haisman and Lincoln. When they were asked to write a sequel to The Abominable Snowmen, which aired just twelve weeks before this did, it wasn’t because the earlier serial left some fascinating questions hanging in the air. The Abominable Snowmen is such a tight exploration of its chosen subject matter as to be hermetically sealed. If I had to guess how it was written, I would imagine Haisman and Lincoln came up with a type of story that could work for Doctor Who (early 20th century explorers’ tales), found a location (the Alps) which fit that subgenre, found a culture (Tibetan Buddhist monks) that existed in the location and then found a monster (the Yeti) in their folklore. Everything fits so neatly together, there is no room for any further variations.

Faced with the dilemma of either sending the Doctor and his companions back to 1930s Tibet for another go-round or putting the Yeti in a context where they stick out like a sore thumb, Haisman and Lincoln decided the latter is not just more fun, it’s more Doctor Who. This is the earliest possible point where the show could be said to have some kind of mythology, some kind of toybox that can be re-opened, and Haisman and Lincoln are already mixing and matching with the kind of deranged glee Steven Moffat would exhibit in stories like A Good Man Goes to War. Professor Travers, the rugged, adventurous academic from The Abominable Snowmen, is brought back as a rotund, grouchy elderly man. It’s a very straightforward way of having fun when your show has a time-travel premise, but this kind of arc plotting simply hadn’t existed in Doctor Who before.

It can be hard to appreciate this when watching The Dominators, which appears to contain no ideas whatsoever, but Haisman and Lincoln’s skill lies in coming up with these big, bold ideas. They can slip up on the details, most obviously with the dubious stereotypes that find their way into the guest cast. Of the Jewish wheeler-dealer Julius Silverstein, the best that can be said is that he only appears for one scene. The same can’t be said for Private Evans (“there’s lovely!”) an irritating, cowardly, inept comic relief Welshman who keeps stinking up the place. But this does at least stop the serial falling into the usual trap of Troughton-era base-under-siege stories, whose guest casts usually boil down to “four scientists and a woman”. There is a great variety of accents and attitudes in The Web of Fear, and some of the stereotypes are more entertaining than offensive – like the obnoxious tabloid hack Harold Chorley, who gets cut down to size by Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart in extremely satisfying fashion.

Ah yes, that’s the other reason Who fans always remember this story: the debut of one of the show’s all-time icons. He’s not yet the Brigadier, not yet with UNIT, but as soon as he enters the story you get the sense things are going to be OK. Which is strange, because his actual function in the story is to be a red herring, but Nicholas Courtney is so charming and authoritative you can’t imagine it could ever be him. It would have been nice if it was Stephen Whittaker as Weams – not because that would have been a neater plot resolution, I just wanted to see the Intelligence possess him so Troughton could cry “It’s turned the Weams against us!”

Next: Fury from the Deep (1968)

Graham’s Archive – The Web of Fear

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