The Macra Terror Episode 1

The one where Polly gets her hair done and Ben and Jamie get a massage...

Twenty-one years before the Doctor visited a futuristic Earth colony which turned out to hide a dark secret beneath its sugary-sweet veneer, the Doctor visited a different futuristic Earth colony which appears to have its own dark secret beneath its sugary-sweet veneer. But unlike The Happiness Patrol's Terra Alpha, The Macra Terror's colony goes unidentified.

From the outset, The Macra Terror is bonkers. Or at least it sounds bonkers, with some out-there sound design from Brian Hodgson and Delia Derbyshire, making her first contribution to the series since realising the theme tune in 1963. And the entire aural smorgasbord is rounded off eccentrically by the late, lamented Dudley Simpson. The soundtrack burbles and fizzes with energy and typically 1960s visions of the far flung future. There are snatches of The War Machines and The Daleks in there for good measure too.

The sing-song jingles which permeate the holiday camp colony are amusing and catchy, but create an atmosphere of unsettling falsity about both the story and the location. Everybody seems to be happy, watching drum majorettes bang out a tune and revelling in the relaxing arms of the Refreshing Department. But as this is Doctor Who, you know that all cannot be as it seems, and these fears are realised in the scenes where we see poor old Medok trying to escape the colony, get recaptured and imprisoned, and then escape again. Everything seems fine on the surface, but as the Doctor very quickly suspects, there's something wrong just beneath the surface.

It's great that the Second Doctor now seems to know precisely what to do when he finds himself in these situations. Following his epiphany in The Moonbase where he laid down his mission statement to fight evil across the universe, here we see him start to scratch at the surface of the colony's veneer almost immediately, and in the time he spends with Medok, he seems to already suspect something about the creatures the prisoner speaks of: "Do they crawl slowly over the ground?" There's little clue as to how he knows so much after so little time, but it's another foreshadowing of the Seventh Doctor and his trip to Terra Alpha - in the later case, he'd heard rumours of trouble on the colony and travelled there purposefully to overthrow Helen A's regime. The Second Doctor might not be quite as scheming, but his determination to root out the rot here is similar.

It's nice to see the regulars enjoying themselves for once, larking about in the Refreshing Department, with Polly in her element as she gets her hair done (she really must have been missing the aesthetic charms of Swinging '60s London), and Ben taking full advantage of a massage from a bunch of dolly masseuses! Jamie, on the other hand, being from the 18th century, is more reserved and cautious about such treatment, even going so far as to ask for the girls to back off for fear of what they might do to him! I suspect this is more a fear of being primped and preened than it is of female attention. Still, the entire routine is joyous to listen to, again prompting me to rue the fact we can't see it (particularly as Michael Craze appears to get his shirt off again!).

I do love the Doctor's insistence on remaining unkempt, putting himself through the "rough and tumble" machine after being cleaned and tidied to perfection. The Second Doctor has always been the scruffiest incarnation, but I can imagine almost every other Doctor preferring not to go through this process, even the more appearance-conscious Third and Sixth.

There's a lot of fun to be had in this episode, and only fleeting hints of an actual Doctor Who adventure until the very end, when the Doctor and Medok encounter a monster in the darkness. As BBC soundtrack CD narrator Colin Baker puts it: "The crab-like creature was hideous." We also get a glimpse of a darker, more militaristic side to the colony society via security chief Ola and his men, and their insistence that if you speak out of turn - or break the colony's strict night-time curfew - you'll be locked up... or killed!

Anyone who ever writes about The Macra Terror cannot do so without mentioning George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, so there, I've done it. The parallel is screamingly obvious. Blunt, almost. But it'll be interesting to see how far writer Ian Stuart Black takes the Orwellian parallel in what has so far been an eccentric but intriguing story.

First broadcast: March 11th, 1967

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The combined aural talents of Dudley Simpson, Brian Hodgson and (an uncredited) Delia Derbyshire make The Macra Terror by turns eerily threatening and as camp as tinsel.
The Bad: Not sure I can identify anything for this episode.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆

NEXT TIME: Episode 2...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Episode 2; Episode 3; Episode 4

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: http://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/the-macra-terror.html

The Macra Terror is available on BBC soundtrack CD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Macra-Terror-Doctor-Stuart-2001-05-01/dp/B01K3N3EH4