The Celestial Toymaker by Brian Hayles
2 - 23 April 1966
Well, I'm at least relieved that I know I've crossed the low point of this season by now. The Ark left me underwhelmed, but The Celestial Toymaker left me outright disappointed. It would be overly reductive to say that this whole serial is just Steven and Dodo playing silly games with pantomime dollhouse characters, while the Doctor's silent disembodied hand stacks triangles, but I still found it terribly dull. There were a few highlights, and it is at least interesting to see the noticeable signs of a new production team falling into place. Innes Lloyd's Doctor Who, it seems, is a more sprightly and lighthearted take than that of John Wiles, which I certainly can't take any issue with.
The minimalistic backdrops are eyecatching even with no motion in the first three episodes. I was actually surprised to learn that episodes one through three were not tele-snapped (as I've discovered it's meant to be spelled) by John Cura, since I barely noticed any visual deficiencies in these episodes of the Loose Canon recon I watched. Closer recollection suggested to me that these were in fact mostly publicity shots repurposed to provide visual reference for a set of episodes for which there is basically none. So instead of belaboring how dull I found the serial (or groaning over particular moments like the King of Hearts' nursery rhyme) I thought it would be more interesting to turn to a general discussion about the subject of tele-snaps.
This serial marks the end of an incredible dry spell of thirty-three episodes for which tele-snaps were never commissioned. Out of this number, we have nine episodes which survive in their entirety; one more has an extended surviving clip of a few minutes in length (Four Hundred Dawns) and another few have a handful of brief clips from an 8mm home camera (from The Myth Makers), some short clips which I seem to recall were donated to Blue Peter (from parts of The Daleks' Master Plan), and a smattering of home photos (from The Feast of Steven and others). Otherwise, what I have just emerged from is the longest period in the show's history for which basically no visual reference survives. Part of the onus for this lack can be laid at the feet of John Wiles, who declined to commission Cura for his entire tenure as producer. I'm grateful that fate has made me quite well-disposed to recons, even fairly threadbare ones, so this absolute desert has not been quite the dismaying experience I might have feared going into it. So the worst of it has come and gone, but it's hard not to imagine what might have been.
Although I haven't been enamored with his vision for the show (to say nothing of his feuds with the cast), I can't entirely begrudge Wiles for not commissioning Cura, as the fee of commissioning tele-snaps for a given episode was rather steep. It's sometimes easy to forget that John Cura was already in the sunset years of his career by the time he started taking tele-snaps of Doctor Who, and that he had been performing this service for numerous programs since 1946. The expansion of both ITV and the BBC over the previous decade had forced Cura to purchase additional equipment and increase the complexity of his operation. Heightened fees were the necessary consequence of this, but sadly it does mean that his work started to dry up. It's a true pity, as it seems that he was a man with both a significant technical expertise, and a great passion for his craft. I was appalled to learn that when his widow contacted the BBC with an offer of his complete tele-snap archive after his death in 1969, they shortsightedly turned her offer down and she ended up junking the whole thing. Such a loss of television history is unthinkable today, but alas we can only look back on the past and shake our heads at this.
From the vantage of our time in history, it's now easy to see that much is owed to people like Cura. It's likewise owed to the amateurs who recorded audio and video of their own from the episodes as they aired, to various lost episode hunters, and to the Loose Canon and Planet 55 staff among others who have worked on restoring missing episodes into a watchable form. Without them, all this Monochrome Malarkey would probably not ever have been attempted. We as Doctor Who fans should be well aware that we are extraordinarily lucky, given the sheer number of junked tapes, a BBC of that time which was at best indifferent to preserving televisual history, and the mere fact of the passage of time, to have even as much as we do now. We could, for example, have no visual record of The Aztecs, had the tapes not survived, as no tele-snaps were commissioned for that serial, or even just one missing episode could have had no surviving audio track recorded by fans at home.
So despite the discouraging gulf of 97 episodes which still remain missing, Doctor Who is not impoverished by the bits of its history which are no longer here. Rather, the gaps enrich what remains in our hands by reminding us how very lucky we are to still have The Aztecs, or An Unearthly Child, or even stinkers like the one remaining episode of The Celestial Toymaker, added onto the fact that there is at least some audio or visual record of every episode in this period. Given all this, it really is impossible to complain. So tonight, I won't. I'll just smile and think of The Gunfighters instead.
(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 3 May 2020.)
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