The Talons of Weng-Chiang Part One

The one where the Doctor and Leela find a giant rat in the sewers of Victorian London...

Doctor Who has always felt right and comfortable in Victorian times. The first time the Doctor visited the Victorian era on TV was The Chase, but this story is one of three prime examples in classic Who, along with The Evil of the Daleks and Ghost Light. It's something to do with the BBC's perennial talent at depicting the era that makes these Doctor Who stories so memorable. The 21st century series has also made the most of this ideal setting in stories such as The Unquiet Dead, The Next Doctor and The Crimson Horror.

Of course, the main thing that overshadows The Talons of Weng-Chiang these days is the controversy surrounding the portrayal of Li H'sen Chang, a Chinese illusionist, by a Caucasian actor, John Bennett. In these more enlightened times, a director would never contemplate casting a non-Asian actor in an Asian role like this, but back in the 1970s, this was quite common and acceptable. It might not be acceptable now, but it was in 1977, when this serial was made, and that is how the story must be judged. If you judged everything in history using the morals and ethics of 2020, everything would seem wrong, but it's important to view things in context. Nobody who made The Talons of Weng-Chiang intended to offend, that was just the way TV drama was made at the time.

Thankfully, director David Maloney only cast one non-Asian actor in an Asian role, and didn't populate the entire story that way. It could have been worse: the entire cast of coolies could have been yellowfaced white actors, but luckily Maloney cast real Asian actors: Tony Then, John Wu, Vincent Wong, Jimmy Ang, Dennis Chin, Sabu Kimura, Arnold Lee, Fred Lee Own, Dennis Matsuki, Basil Tang, Kim Teoh, and of course Deep Roy as Mr Sin. Admittedly, they are largely non-speaking, uncredited roles and actors, but just think how much worse it would have been if they'd all been white actors with slanty-eyed make-up. It doesn't make Li H'sen Chang's casting any less regrettable, but it softens what could have been a very nasty blow.

Moving past the "yellowface" debate, Heather Stewart's make-up job for John Bennett is pretty impressive, changing the appearance of Bennett's face to resemble that of a real Chinaman without the tell-tale signs that none of it is real. Whether Bennett should have affected quite so strong a stereotypical Chinaman's voice is, however, also debatable. For the record, just so you know, none of this bothers me, as I see it within the context that it was made. No, it's not ideal, but there it is for all to see on the screen, on VHS, on DVD and on Bluray. I'm not going to deprive myself of one of the finest Doctor Who serials ever just because the director got some casting wrong. This material should not be erased from our cultural history; it's part of it, for good or ill. If you don't like it, then don't watch it, don't buy it, don't stream it. That way, you're not supporting or promoting it.

Right, now that's dealt with, on with the episode proper. Cab driver Buller is complaining backstage at the Palace Theatre that his wife Emma has gone missing, and she hasn't been the same since she was mesmerised by Chang on stage last week (he put the 'fluence on her). Chang tries to allay Buller's fears, but the shouty chauffeur is having none of it, and determines to call the peelers. The next thing he knows he's being assaulted by Chang's ventriloquist's dummy, which wields a knife as it totters threateningly toward him in the foggy streets.

A knife-wielding ventriloquist's dummy is just one of many aspects of this story that are fundamentally violent. There's also a street brawl, axes, nunchucks, kung fu, an autopsy on a mortician's slab, and a mutilated rotting corpse fished from the Thames. It's surprising that these things felt right for a family drama shown at Saturday teatime in 1977. Doctor Who by this stage was certainly not being made for little children, it was being squarely aimed at the older child, the teenager and their parents. It made for wonderful drama, but I can understand why incoming producer Graham Williams was tasked with making the series appeal to younger viewers once more, because if Doctor Who had continued on Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes' trajectory, it would have been making video nasties by Season 17!

The Doctor and Leela arrive in a beautifully foggy London street (that TARDIS materialisation is gorgeous). The Doctor is dressed as Sherlock Holmes (perhaps a bit too on the nose) and Leela as some kind of Victorian urchin boy, and they intend to visit the Palace Theatre to see the latest music hall acts (the Doctor is sad to miss Little Tich, a 4ft 6in tall dancer and singer of the time). There are various posters dotted around the theatre for different acts, including Dexteria and Zetini, neither of which were real acts, I don't think.

The Doctor and Leela manage to get into a street brawl almost as soon as they arrive, and are taken along to the police station to lay down evidence. The coolie (an unfortunate word which some do find offensive these days) they captured does not speak English, so Sergeant Kyle calls upon Li H'sen Chang to act as an interpreter. But as we know, the coolies were acting in partnership with Chang's miraculously sentient dummy, which stabbed poor Buller through the heart, so Chang is hardly impartial. Indeed, Chang slips the coolie a pill of deadly scorpion venom, which he takes in sacrifice. It kills him instantly. In reality, there are very, very few scorpion venoms which would be powerful enough to kill a man, and even fewer that quickly, so Chang must have a very good source.

The Doctor recognises the venom as the work of the Tong of the Black Scorpion, an infamous Chinese crime organisation which worshipped the ancient god Weng-Chiang, the god of abundance. When he visits the Limehouse mortuary to see the results of pathologist Professor Litefoot's autopsy on the coolie's body, he also gets involved in the autopsy of a body recently fished from the river by PC Quick. The body turns out to be that of Mr Buller, and it seems he was killed by a stab to the heart (hello, Mr Sin), then mutilated by what would seem to be a gigantic rodent, then thrown into the Thames for the fishes. Nasty.

There's so much going on that it's easy to overlook just how rich and enjoyable some of the performances are, not least Christopher Benjamin's effervescent theatre manager Henry Gordon Jago. He has a cracking little double act with Chris Gannon's Casey, who claims to have seen a ghostly skull in the theatre basement. Jago is written so beautifully by Robert Holmes, who must have had a pile of dictionaries and thesauruses next to his typewriter when he wrote this story. Phrases like "lustrous legerdemain", "what the deuce", "oopizootics" and "horrendous hyperbole" just drip with character and enrich the script no end. And of course, Benjamin delivers it all with such enthusiasm and conviction that you really do believe in Jago as a real larger-than-life character, when he could just as easily come over as way over the top and unbelievable.

Some other quick observations about the episode:

• This is the second story in a row where we see an automaton's hand covered in blood. But why does Mr Sin have blood running down his arm out of his sleeve?
• Louise Jameson is great in the police station scene, returning Leela to her huntress origins in The Face of Evil: "I am a warrior of the Sevateem. I know the different sounds of death. Now put our prisoner to the torture... Make him talk!" Leela is so good (and funny) when she's like this.
• That wonderful little turn from Patsy Smart as "ghoul" is one of the finest and funniest cameos in all of Who. As Quick pulls Buller's rotting corpse out of the river, she gurns: "On my oath, you wouldn't want that served with onions. Never seen anything like it in all my puff. Oh, make an 'orse sick, that would!" Smart wasn't even 60 when she filmed this, although she looked about 93, but she makes the most of what little screen time she has (and what wonderfully written screen time!). Tragically, Smart would end up overdosing on barbiturates at the age of 77, in 1996.
• Casey refers to Jack the Ripper, wondering if the recent disappearance of nine local girls is to do with him, which dates the story to after the autumn of 1888. Jolly Jack is an unlikely - inadvisable, even - topic for a Doctor Who story, but it's not his only mention in TV Who: Madame Vastra claims to have devoured him, finding him "stringy, but tasty all the same", in A Good Man Goes to War. The Ripper has also turned up in numerous spin-off books and audios.
• Leela's janus thorns make a lethal return, killing the axe-wielding coolie who tries to kill the Doctor. Oddly, as soon as the Doctor discovers Leela used the thorn because he was trying to kill him, he forgets reprimanding her altogether and carries on, happy to leave the poor coolie's corpse in the street.

The cliffhanger sees the Doctor and Leela discovering a giant rat in the sewers, but although Maloney keeps shots of the rodent brief, there's no hiding the fact it's not realised very well at all. Maloney makes a particular error in showing the normal-sized rats first, then using a real rat to represent the giant rat climbing over a fence. When mixed with the final shot of the infamously unconvincing rat built by the BBC's props department, it all comes across very poorly, and it isn't 100% clear that what the Doctor and Leela are seeing is an oversize rodent. It's the mix of real-sized rats and a real rat to represent the giant rat which confuses, and all in all it's a very disappointing cliffhanger.

Sherlock Holmes mentions the "Giant Rat of Sumatra" in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire, adding that it is "a story for which the world is not yet prepared". I don't think the world has ever been prepared for the Giant Rat of Television Centre either!

First broadcast: February 26th, 1977

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: David Maloney's spooky, fog-swathed location filming on the streets of London add so much atmosphere.
The Bad: The ratty cliffhanger. As well as the rat prop being unconvincing, it's edited poorly too.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆

"Would you like a jelly baby?" tally: 07

NEXT TIME: Part Two...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part Two; Part Three; Part Four; Part Five; Part Six

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: https://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-talons-of-weng-chiang.html

The Talons of Weng-Chiang is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Talons-Weng-Chiang-Special/dp/B009BOSEEA