The Final Test (The Celestial Toymaker Episode 4)

The one where Steven and Dodo play TARDIS hopscotch with Billy Bunter...

At last I'm able to see the imaginative set and costume design of The Celestial Toymaker, although obviously not in colour, as the beautiful set photos are. Daphne Dare and John Wood really excelled themselves on this story, creating the fantasy world of the Toymaker with brash and colourful skill. The design of the story is probably the best thing about it, but it's also frustrating that the sole surviving episode is the only one not to feature the wonderful Campbell Singer and Carmen Silvera. The Final Test doesn't really demonstrate Dare and Wood's work adequately either.

John Wood's set design is particularly reminiscent of those episodes of The Avengers which pit the female star against a diabolical mastermind in a house of traps. It's one of the most memorable Avengers episodes, whichever version of it you remember or prefer (Don't Look Behind You, The House That Jack Built, The Joker), and the Swinging 60s day-glo design of the swirling dice indicator, the reflective walls and the toy robots could have been influenced by Harry Pottle's design work on The House That Jack Built, which debuted in the UK on March 4th, 1966 - two weeks before The Celestial Toymaker's first episode went into studio.

The Dancing Floor (The Celestial Toymaker Episode 3)

The one with a food fight in a kitchen...

William Hartnell has hardly been in his own TV series these last few weeks. His part in The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve was much reduced (despite him having two roles to play!), and his physical presence has been absent from episodes 2 and 3 of The Celestial Toymaker. The fact the Doctor is both invisible and mute for much of this story means poor old Michael Gough has nobody to bounce off, and ends up talking to himself mostly. He does get a brief exchange with Sergeant Rugg and Mrs Wigg, but other than that, Gough is virtually performing a monologue. Shame.

Rugg and Wigg are this week's characters for Campbell Singer and Carmen Silvera to bring to life, and once again they come up trumps. Brian Hayles doesn't so much write characters in The Celestial Toymaker as conjure caricatures, so there's not much depth for your average actor to dig into. By all accounts, there were probably too many voices trying to be heard in the production of this story - producer John Wiles had his preferences, and so too did outgoing script editor Donald Tosh and his replacement Gerry Davies - so it's hard to know just how much depth Hayles gave his creations, but I'd wager what we get is a good example of what he wrote. Which is not much.

The Hall of Dolls (The Celestial Toymaker Episode 2)

The one where Dodo almost gets frozen to death...

As soon as the Toymaker made the Doctor both invisible and mute, I knew William Hartnell was off on his holidays again! It's a pretty blatant way to explain the absence of your leading man, and demonstrative of the contempt which producer John Wiles had for the argumentative Hartnell behind the scenes. Making the Doctor invisible was one of Wiles's ideas for changing the series' star, as he hoped that when the Doctor reappeared, he'd be played by another actor. Thankfully, Wiles's rather two-faced plan did not come to fruition, and we would enjoy another six months of Hartnell's twinkly magic.

The handful of lines the Doctor does have are delivered so dispassionately by Hartnell that it's obvious they were recorded separately and played back into the studio. There's no immersion in the moment from Hartnell, he's simply reading the lines from a piece of paper, and not performing them.

The Celestial Toyroom (The Celestial Toymaker Episode 1)

The one where the Doctor is made both invisible and intangible...

The big problem with The Celestial Toymaker is that you can't watch it. If you look at the beautiful full colour photos that were taken on set, and then listen to the off-air soundtrack recorded by David Holman, your heart sinks. Because The Celestial Toymaker looks stunning. It's just a shame that we can only listen to it, because that makes for a very different, and much less rewarding, experience, sadly...

As the episode begins we're reminded of what happened at the end of The Bomb, when the Doctor seemed to disappear in the TARDIS. Dodo understandably attributes this to the Refusians from The Ark (because they too were invisible and intangible), but it seems a much more sinister force is responsible for this jiggery-pokery.