Review The Chase (1965)

Doctor Omega

Member: Rank 10
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Your thoughts on this story....


The Doctor has assembled a new time machine with a TV screen showing scenes in the past to order, Lincoln, Shakespeare and the Beatles are selected. They land on a barren planet with two suns,and become separated.A sandstorm causes the Doctor and Barbara to lose the TARDIS,Ian and Vicky meet an octopus-like monster, and the Daleks arrive, still hunting for them.






On to the next story....

THE TIME MEDDLER

https://www.imdforums.com/threads/the-time-meddler-1965.3434/


Back to the previous story....

THE SPACE MUSEUM

https://www.imdforums.com/threads/the-space-museum-1965.3414/
 
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Doctor Omega

Member: Rank 10
I get the impression that Terry Nation lazily threw this together, simply with an eye on a third Dalek movie storyline, which this was, at one point, planned to be before the poor box office returns of DALEKS INVASION EARTH 2150AD.

As a story, it is a fun, if cheap and shaky romp. The ending is probably the best part, with the Dalek/Mechonoid battle and the return of Ian and Barbara to their own time.

Two quality actors and two strong companions.

Conceptually, it is an entertaining idea, that of a chase through time and space, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired at quite a number of points in the story - and the overall impression I get is of a first draft script that needed some serious rewriting. Not that Nation would have been around to give a damn about rewriting it himself, as his seemed to live by his adage "Take the money and fly like a theif!"
 

Doctor Omega

Member: Rank 10
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In 1966, audio of the final episode of "The Chase" was edited together with new narration (provided by David Graham) and released on a 33 r.p.m. vinyl album by Century 21 Records in the UK and by Astor Records in Australia.


 

Doctor Omega

Member: Rank 10
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As Barbara Wright, the late Jacqueline Smith was one of the first occupants of the TARDIS, following Susan Foreman into the junkyard at Totter’s Lane back in November 1963. In this old DWM interview, she talks about getting the role at a party, about her time on the show, and about her return, as a different character, in the Fourth Doctor story ‘Meglos’.
“I was at a party one evening and the usual bunch of friends were there. I’d known Verity Lambert socially since she had joined the ABC television company for whom both my husband and myself had done some work. She was one of Sydney Newman’s proteges, and by this stage she had transferred with him to the BBC, where she had been asked to become a producer. Anyway, this party came at just the right point for me, because Verity was in the process of casting the regulars for her new television serial ‘Doctor Who’. We talked about it, and shortly afterwards, she offered me the part of Barbara Wright, which I was more than happy to accept. Because of this good beginning, Verity and I always got on well. Making that number of programmes every year meant that it helped to ease the burden of doing so many.

“I think nearby everybody, including the BBC, under-estimated ‘Doctor Who’s appeal. We had quite long-running contracts which bound us up initially for a year, but which had a number of clauses which meant that they could drop you or the series, or both, whenever they felt like it. So in effect they had the best of both worlds. Looking at the show’s durability now, it’s a quite amazing phenomenon, although it was an excellent idea, particularly for the time. I think he has managed to last so long because it has this ability to change and develop, it’s never the same, so nothing gets too boring or familiar.

“By the end of a series one did begin to get very tired, but they would usually try and write the scripts to accommodate you, so that one week Carole Ann or Bill Russell would have more to do, and on occasions they’d even write us out for a couple of weeks so we could dash off for a holiday. We were so on top of each other, in those tiny, tiny studios, that bad tempers would have been a disaster. I got on particularly well with William Russell. He shared my sort of approach to acting and liked to get on with the job with the minimum of fuss. I’ve worked with him since, doing a lot of rep abroad, in France, and I’m hoping to work with him again soon.

“Carole Ann Ford and I enjoyed a very easy relationship, although we didn’t keep in touch after she left the series. She was very busy being a mother and our paths just never seemed to cross. However, I did see her again recently at a ‘Doctor Who’ convention and I enjoyed that very much. She’s really quite well known at these conventions, I gather, whereas I’ve only done the one. They’re quite amazing. How so many people can still appreciate what we did all those years ago in a tiny black and white studio really astonishes me I suppose it’s unique.

“It all goes back to the success of Bill Hartnell as the Doctor, I should imagine, and we always got on well. He would get very annoyed with the way things were done if he thought they were being done the wrong way, but he cared so much about the programme and I think it showed. He particularly enjoyed all the comeback from children, and I grew quite fond of him. I think he was sad when we left. I know I was.

“All I knew at first, all I was actually told, was that my character was a very learned history teacher and that I was there to represent the Earth point of view when we went back in time and did the occasional serial set in the past. I found that quite easy, as I liked history and those historical stories appealed to me anyway. Everything else I had to put in myself, and this meant taking it up with either Verity or the director concerned. I think there were times when I said ‘Barbara wouldn’t say this or she wouldn’t do this’, and they were usually very good and listened to me on those points because I knew the character better than anybody else.

“I had quite a good part in ‘The Daleks’, and in a series like ‘Doctor Who’ one tends to remember that. We were all absolutely fascinated with (the Daleks), it became very easy to suspend one’s disbelief when acting opposite one of those things, and that helped make the whole thing that little bit more polished and exciting. I remember Carole Ann Ford bringing her young daughter to the studios one day, and her daughter trying out the Dalek for size. They have that irresistable appeal, that does make you want to try them out for yourself. There were others I liked – the Sensorites were unusual, for instance, and the Mechanoids were interesting too, but overall it still has to be the Daleks. One could almost put up with the lessened part to be in one of those Dalek stories, because they were such fun to make.

“The other reason for remembering that story is much sadder. We were in the studio on the night that the news of President Kennedy’s assassination came through. It was devastating and everybody was very, very upset. I don’t think, looking back, that anyone today can quite understand all that Kennedy had meant to the western world, and when he was killed the last thing anybody wanted to do was get on with acting out a fantasy in a confined studio. I don’t think anybody stayed behind after the recording for the customary drink.

“I always preferred the historical stories, because I was given a bit more to do in them. In the science fiction stories, it was the monsters and weird characters who tended to take over, and all the girls tended to have to do was look frightened and get lost in a gloomy passage or two. I adored all the dressing up that went with doing the historical stories, and they were much more colourful for us because the historical sets were so gorgeous to act in.

“I think I liked ‘The Aztecs’, and the one about the Crusaders, best. In ‘The Aztecs’ I had the most magnificent headdress, which was terribly difficult to balance, but which looked superb and made me feel very regal. The story itself was extremely clever and it was a fascinating period. I suppose I liked it above all the others because that was the one in which Barbara was most important to the storyline. I liked ‘The Crusades’ for similar reasons, and also because I greatly enjoyed working with Douglas Camfield on that one. ‘The Romans’ was another which was great fun to do. It had Derek Francis in it. He used to make me laugh all the time and we got the chance to play ‘Doctor Who’ all out for comedy, which was fun.

“Shooting ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ on location was hardly what you’d call a massive amount of location filming, and the location itself was just around the corner from where we recorded the studios in Hammersmith. We had very little time to do it in, more or less one take only, so it was just as bad as working inside. I can recall very clearly filming the sequences in and around the famous landmarks of London, because we shot them first thing in the morning, as soon as the light came up – on a Sunday too! That was even more arduous because we had to run along pushing this wheelchair, which I can tell you soon lost its novelty value.

“I certainly wasn’t asked (to be in the film Dr. Who and the Daleks), partly because I was hardly a top box office name but most of all, I expect, because all my time would have been taken up making the series itself. I never had much time to watch myself in the series, although obviously I saw the occasional one or two. I haven’t seen it now for quite a long time, and besides it’s virtually a different programme now, it’s moved on so much. Science-fiction isn’t really my own taste as far as entertainment goes.

“The good thing about Barbara was that because she was older than most of the girls since, the writers were more hesitant about making her look silly, or scream too much. That side of things was largely left to Carole Ann Ford, which is why she left earlier than Bill Russell and myself. Naturally Maureen O’Brien felt very nervous when she first arrived, but nobody was out to be unpleasant and that initial, understandable feeling quickly wore off. I think we got on very well, although it was strange not having Carole around at first. Maureen didn’t really enjoy her time with the series, though, because she inherited Carole’s role of screaming all the time, which luckily for me I retained the better of the two female parts. It was more or less her first big television part and I think it was a bit of a rude awakening.

“(William Russell) and I decided to leave virtually as a mutual thing. We’d done two years of it, which was a strain and there wasn’t a lot more we could do with it either. Everything that we wanted to do in the series had been accomplished and we felt, and I think Verity sneakingly agreed with us, that it was time for the series to try and see if it could do something new. As for the question of going together, well, it all just seemed to come together at the right time for both of us. I think it had always been felt that Ian and Barbara, who had this slightly romantic side to their relationship, should go together much as they came – back to the London they left. They wrote us out well. They took us all around the centre of London to get some shots of us ‘back home again’, which were later shown in the last episode. For the last live action filmed piece, we went back to, guess where, glamourous Hammersmith.
 

Doctor Omega

Member: Rank 10
Hunters of the Burning Stone was a Doctor Who Magazine comic story released in 2013, starting in issue 456. It celebrated the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. It featured the return of Annabel Lake and the city of Cornucopia, introduced in a previous DWM strip, The Cornucopia Caper. It is most notable for the shocking re-appearance of Ian Chestertonand Barbara Wright. The story itself was a direct sequel to An Unearthly Child, explaining what happened to the Tribe of Gumafter the TARDIS team left them.

It also added a vital piece of the mythology of Doctor Who, revealing that it was the Eleventh Doctor who broke the chameleon circuit on the First Doctor's TARDIS, as seen in the very first episode, giving the TARDIS its iconic image of a police box.

The story was voted by Doctor Who fans in 2013 as being the best comic of the year. (DWM 479)






The Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver on the glowing cube, made of the same psychic metal Cheshire saw earlier, and walks through its walls, hoping that whoever is behind the chaos he has been witnessing is inside. It teleports him to a different location, and the Doctor looks on in surprise and horror...

...as Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright welcome him to Coal Hill School.


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Part 2: Doctor Who?
Ian and Barbara neither recognise the Doctor nor recall their adventures together. The Doctor tries to jog their memories, but to no avail. Looking outside the classroom they are in, he realises that the psychic prison Ian and Barbara have been trapped in is so large, they don't even realise it exists. The Doctor asks them what year it is, and they reply that it's 1963, leading the Doctor to realise that their memories of travelling with him have been erased, as they were actually abducted from 1965. The Doctor tries again to get them to remember him, this time by asking them about Susan Foreman and drawing a picture of the TARDIS on the blackboard. This tactic succeeds, and their memories come flooding back.


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Doctor Omega

Member: Rank 10
Mechonoid Attack System


Part 1 of 5. Set after the events of ‘The Chase’ the Dalek death squad return from their chase in time and space with a captured Mechonoid. This video follows its efforts to escape from the Dalek base.


 
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