The Hand of Fear Part One

The one where the TARDIS lands in an exploding quarry...

I must admit I'm totally baffled by the opening scene of this episode. It's a busy opening sequence with lots of information being imparted, but in booming voices that I find quite difficult to understand. It seems to be a man dressed in a beige duvet and hood wandering around pushing not quite enough buttons for the task at hand, talking to a disembodied voice which I also find tricky to make out. The scene seems urgent, and I just about get the gist that someone or something has escaped in a spaceship, which they then blow up, but the detail is lost on me.

Almost five minutes into the episode, the TARDIS materialises in a quarry (a real one this time!) and out steps Sarah Jane Smith in the worst outfit any companion has ever worn, ever! She looks utterly ridiculous in this Andy Pandy outfit, and I can't for the life of me understand what either the character or the actress were thinking agreeing to wearing it on public television. It's truly appalling, although Elisabeth Sladen must have liked it enough to wear it again, in 1993's Dimensions in Time (with added beret). She even made her poor daughter Sadie wear a version of it in the same year's documentary Thirty Years in the TARDIS!

The location filming at Cromhall Quarry gives the Earth scenes great scope, and the shot of the quarry blast, and a wall of stone surging towards a protected locked-off camera, is magnificent (it's not stock footage, director Lennie Mayne actually shot it).

What ensues is all pretty gritty and down-to-earth stuff, as first the Doctor and then Sarah are rescued from the rubble, with Sarah rushed to hospital unconscious. Being buried in quarry rubble might not be an everyday occurrence, but it's suitably "ordinary" enough to make this episode feel quite domesticated and soapy, with the scenes in the hospital feeling like Emergency Ward 10 or Angels. The drawback here is that the story falters to a gentle amble, and it feels like Mayne is directing on auto-pilot.

Plus, Christine Ruscoe's sets are truly appalling, among the dullest in all of Doctor Who. I know that hospitals aren't exactly nerve centres of architectural and aesthetic splendour, but the walls are so bland and boring, the corridors so underwhelmingly dull. Imagine working in a place with such blank walls, no posters or windows, just acres of magnolia misery. Even the signage pointing to the Pathology department is shabby and worn. Christine Ruscoe also designed the sets for Pyramids of Mars and State of Decay, both gorgeously gothic classics, so I'm not sure what went wrong here. Maybe she was more comfortable with period settings than contemporary (her sci-fi set for the Kastrian dome is also pretty shoddy).

The Doctor teams up with pathologist Dr Carter, who seems to work in an isolated wing of the hospital with no other staff, and nothing better to do today than kow-tow to the Doctor's beck and call. It's an established conceit within Doctor Who that our hero tends to just waltz into situations and take over - and that people seem to let him - but it's hardly realistic that he could take over an entire hospital department unchallenged, and demand equipment from neighbouring departments on the premise that there might be aliens about! By rights, Dr Carter should have called security and had the Doctor locked up by now!

Sarah Jane seems to be possessed by the ring on the petrified hand she found in the quarry, and Elisabeth Sladen puts in another excellent performance. She walks purposefully around the hospital (an image undermined by her ridiculous outfit) and finds a convenient Tupperware box in which to carry the hand, before zapping Dr Carter and making for the nearest nuclear power plant (like you do).

The final five minutes are a mix of humdrum and remarkable. There are seemingly endless shots of the two doctors hurtling toward Nunton Power Complex in an Austin Allegro, which just makes me realise how unusual it is to see the Fourth Doctor in something as everyday as a motor car (actually, his forays to contemporary Earth during his tenure are scarcer than you'd think - fewer than ten stories in seven seasons).

On the flipside, Lennie Mayne works wonders with the location filming at Oldbury Power Station, which, surprisingly, is a real-life nuclear plant. I very much doubt Doctor Who - or any film crew - would be allowed access to a nuclear power station these days! Mayne directs Sarah's journey through the power complex with an eye for scale, shooting the galleries to make them look as grand as possible as the little red and white figure wends her way through them clutching her Tupperware. It's great when Sarah encounters somebody to zap with her ring too, with Sladen holding her outstretched hand to camera so that a blue glow can be placed on top by the effects team.

It is a bit unrealistic that there's next to no security at the power plant. From public entrance to the heart of the fission room, Sarah encounters one security guard on the front gate, and one technician, and that's it. Is it a Bank Holiday? It might have been better to see Sarah zapping all manner of staff trying to stop her, which would have ramped up the tension a little, because as it is it's just a very well directed tour of Oldbury's byways and stairways in the manner of a corporate information film.

The broken hand in Sarah's Tupperware box regenerates its lost finger as it begins to absorb the radiation from the fission room, and as the hand comes alive and begins to twitch, the Doctor Who sting comes in. It's a great cliffhanger, but it's been a labour getting to it.

First broadcast: October 2nd, 1976

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Lennie Mayne's direction of the power station location is great.
The Bad: I'm not sure which is worse, Barbara Lane's Andy Pandy outfit for Sarah, or Christine Ruscoe's drab set designs. Actually, yes I do: it's that awful costume.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆

"Would you like a jelly baby?" tally: 05

NEXT TIME: Part Two...

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

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.com/2014/07/the-hand-of-fear.html

The Hand of Fear is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Hand-Fear-DVD/dp/B000FPV8KG