Synopsis:
Steven and Dodo have met their next opponent - the mischievous schoolboy Cyril.
They will play a dice game with him, similar to "Snakes & Ladders", in which they must traverse numbered platforms. The TARDIS sits on No.14, and the winner will be whoever lands on that square first. Players can miss a turn, roll a second time if they get a 6, but also be made to go back to the start if they are standing on a square when another player lands on it. This means that Dodo and Steven could conceivably act against each other by accident.
An additional hazard is that the game is to be played over an electrified floor. Stepping off the squares will be lethal.
The Toymaker notes that the Doctor is about to complete his game, and so allows him his voice once again.
The dice game gets underway, and Cyril commences his practical jokes to distract his opponents. Noting how gullible she is, the schoolboy targets Dodo. Steven is too firmly set against him.
Dodo is the luckier player, whilst Steven keeps losing turns or being sent back to the start. One of Cyril's ploys is to use red ink to pretend he has hurt his foot - luring Dodo off of her square. He also spreads slippery powder on another square.
The Doctor refuses to speak to the Toymaker initially, annoyed as he is with him trying to put him off his game.
Cyril throws the winning dice score but is in such a rush to gain Square No.14 that he forgets about his slippery powder. He slides off onto the floor and is electrocuted - reduced to a burnt doll.
Steven and Dodo must play out the game properly, and luckily she rolls the winning dice throw.
The TARDIS is gained.
The Doctor has only one more move to make before he finishes his game. He refuses to make it, and goes to join his companions. They enter the ship but find that it has been immobilised.
The Doctor storms out and demands that they be permitted to leave, but the Toymaker points out that his game has not been completed.
The Doctor re-enters the TARDIS and confers with his companions, explaining how they cannot depart yet. They are stuck here until the Trilogic Game is actually completed.
If he goes outside to make the final move, however, he will be caught up in the instantaneous obliteration of the Toyroom.
Recalling the earlier actions of the Toymaker, he commands the final counter to move automatically. Nothing happens.
A frustrated Steven asks if they are just going to talk their way out of their predicament.
Inspired, the Doctor impersonates the Toymaker's voice to make the final move, then has Steven operate the dematerialisation sequence. The evil being can only look on in horror as the last counter moves into place and his domain is destroyed.
The Doctor points out that in order to move the counters as his opponent had done, he had to use his voice. Steven had given him the idea when he spoke about talking their way out of the situation.
The Doctor knows that their foe is immortal and will simply create a new realm whenever he wishes, but for now he has been defeated.
Dodo continues to feel sorry for the characters they encountered. She recalls the sweets Cyril gave her and is going to dispose of them when the Doctor stops her - fancying one himself. As he pops it into his mouth, however, he suddenly cries out in agony...
Next episode: A Holiday For The Doctor
Written by: Brian Hayles
Recorded: Friday 8th April 1966 - Riverside Studio 1
First broadcast: 5:50pm, Saturday 23rd April 1966
Ratings: 7.8 million / AI 43
Designer: John Wood
Director: Bill Sellars
Production on The Final Test began with the Ealing filming of the Trilogic Game's automatic movements, and the final shots of the invisible Doctor (hand-doubled by Albert Ward).
The last move - 1023 - saw the counter slowly rise up into the air on a piece of wire.
Neither Campbell Singer nor Carmen Silvera were required for this episode, so only Michael Gough and Peter Stephens joined the regular cast.
William Hartnell returned from holiday, and only featured in the second half of the instalment.
The set comprised 14 triangular podia, mirroring the Trilogic Game board, with the TARDIS prop sitting on the final one. The walls were metallic blue and silver, as with previous areas of the Toyroom.
The two giant toy robots were present. One had the Game tally displayed on it, whilst the other held a TV monitor on which the Toymaker could appear, filmed on another part of the set.
The other significant prop was the revolving score column - an illuminated pillar which gave the dice scores and other instructions such as "Miss A Turn".
The squares were to have flashed when Cyril was destroyed - off camera - according to the script, but this effect was not seen in the finished episode.
Cyril's demise saw Stephens move out of camera shot as a flash charge was detonated. The camera then cut to a shot of a burnt doll - the same one which the Toymaker had been seen to remove from the dolls house - lying smoking beside a podium.
As the action moved closer to Square No.14, a recording break allowed some of the other prop squares to be removed, to allow the cameras to move forward.
There's a clever shot where we see the Toymaker on the robot's chest monitor, then suddenly appear right next to Steven. No recording break was necessary.
The Toymaker was being recorded by one camera for the monitor, with a second camera taking in the robot and Steven as a wide shot. Gough was standing just out of shot but close to Purves, with a third camera pointing at him. A rapid cut from the second camera to the third made it look like the distant Toymaker had miraculously appeared right next to Steven.
The destruction of the Toyroom was achieved simply through the use of stock footage.
The closing credits played over a close-up of the TARDIS console, which remained on screen for a longer period than usual. Ordinarily, the fade to black came in quite quickly.
After recording, Peter Purves retained the Trilogic Game prop as a souvenir. However, on leaving the series he found himself out of work for more than a year. Thinking the game to be bad luck, he threw it away. He was then offered a role in Z-Cars, and his long-running stint as Blue Peter presenter followed soon after.
William Hartnell had been issued with two new contracts - one covering episodes one and four of The Celestial Toymaker, and another for the next 16 weeks, covering the last three stories of Season 3, plus another story to be held over for the start of Season 4.
The efforts of John Wiles and Donald Tosh to replace him in this story fell by the wayside. Both Gerry Davis and Innes Lloyd found ways to manage his increasingly frustrating behaviour.
Both Wiles and Tosh complained bitterly about the changes which Davis had made to the story since they handed it on, thinking a cleverly sinister script had been reduced to pantomime, but Brian Hayles actually thanked the new Story Editor for his contribution.
For many years, The Celestial Toymaker was regarded as the great lost masterpiece of the Hartnell era. It had a huge reputation within fandom, mainly thanks to the nascent Doctor Who Appreciation Society. One of the original members was Jeremy Bentham, who acted as the society's historian.
When Marvel Comics decided to produce a weekly Doctor Who publication, editor Dez Skinn looked to the DWAS to help with the non-fiction aspect of the comic. What Bentham liked, Doctor Who Weekly liked - and what he disliked, it disliked. His opinion became the "official" position.
At this stage, full access had yet to be gained to the BBC archives, or to the actual episodes themselves, so much of what was written about the programme came purely from the memories of those who had watched the episodes on their initial transmission.
Doctor Who Weekly and its monthly successor carried inaccurate information about the series for many, many years - well into the mid 1980's:
The Edge if Destruction was written purely because the sets for Marco Polo weren't ready, The Seeds of Doom was filmed at Mick Jagger's Stargroves home, a clip of the Second Doctor from The Macra Terror was viewed by the Time Lords in The Three Doctors, and many more.
Along with these misremembrances - or plain old fashioned mistakes - were somewhat clouded and biased opinions.
Perhaps it was its surreal nature, combined with its perversion of childhood games and toys, that gave this story its dizzyingly high reputation...
But then people got to see The Final Test, when it was released in June 1991 on The Hartnell Years VHS. It rapidly became clear that the story comprised little but silly, childish games, with no real threat.
The Toyroom characters are far from sinister, and the dangers all seem very low-key. The games were too simplistic for adults, and complicated for children as the rules weren't properly explained and the lacklustre direction didn't help.
It was not the surreal masterpiece that fandom had long claimed it to be.
Those who had been championing it began to keep quiet about it - revising and reversing their once outspokenly positive view of it.
The novelisation, widely believed to be primarily the work of Alison Bingeman, was also a massive disappointment. The audio release simply reinforced the realisation that this was not terribly good.
Perhaps the imagery of the missing episodes might have done something to raise their reputation once more, but the new animation doesn't look like it is going to help with this as they've chosen to totally reimagine the story (see Trivia below).
The story still has its champions, but they are no longer in the majority.
- The ratings see a significant drop to below 8 million, and the appreciation figure continues to slide, to a new second lowest score.
- This episode was the subject of a BBC Audience Research Report, which found that almost as many people had watched the rural soap Weaver's Wynd (15%) as had watched Doctor Who (15.6%).
- A third of the respondents disliked the episode, stating that the conclusion lacked excitement.
- The general view was that people didn't like excursions into outright fantasy - "fantasy gone mad" as one put it.
- The one positive from most reviews was Michael Gough's powerful performance.
- Junior Points of View on 29th April featured a letter from a young viewer pointing out that the Trilogic Game was actually very simple to play, having taken only 25 minutes to complete it. Another correspondent complained that the Doctor should have been a lot more clever than to accept one of Cyril's sweets as it was almost certainly poisonous.
- Some newspapers picked up on the on-screen announcement about the complaint from the Frank Richards estate, regarding the similarity of Cyril to Billy Bunter.
- The Final Test was discovered in the archives of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and returned to the BBC in 1984. It was missing the "Next Episode..." caption.
- This was Bill Sellars only Doctor Who story. He went on to have a hugely successful career as a producer - including period country vet drama All Creatures Great And Small.
- The story is due to be released in animated form on 10th June 2024 in the UK, with a remastered version of this surviving instalment. The animation style has met with a considerable amount of disapproval, with many unhappy that it fails to respect the original production. The counter argument is that this cartoonish CG style compliments the surreal nature of the story, and may attract newer fans to the classic stories.
- The Toymaker never returned to the series during its "classic" era. He came close to doing so, however, in 1986. Ex-producer Graham Williams was commissioned to write a story which would launch the 23rd Season. It would feature the Toymaker, operating out of a lair beneath Blackpool Pleasure Beach, and involved a lethal computer game which unleashed electronic monsters. Titled "The Nightmare Fair", it had its director - Matthew Robinson - allocated and the funfair had agreed the filming when the series was suddenly thrown into hiatus. The story was novelised, and later produced as both a full cast audio adventure and an audiobook.
- The Toymaker has also appeared in comic strips in Doctor Who Monthly, in Missing Adventures novels, and in original audios from BF, in which he was voiced by actor David Bailie, who had portrayed Dask in The Robots of Death:
No comments:
Post a Comment