Confession time: the text I previously mentioned as struggling with in this installment of Escape To Danger has turned out to be more pertinent to a completely different story. So let's hit pause on that and go back to the drawing board in the hope of cranking out something quick and relatively painless...
When I was first kicking ideas around for this one, I got incredibly bogged down in pondering what exactly constitutes a (cough) "historical" Proper Who story and the variations in emphasis and content between them all.
And then domestic paradigms shifted, work interfered and I soon tired of the sound of my own half-arsed tittings on the subject.
Incidentally, readers like myself who stupidly kept on buying new packs of 1996's unplayable Doctor Who Collectable Card Game will well remember the above shot. "Greek Hoplites" was one of the most depressingly common cards in the series.
Anyway, "The Myth Makers" is sadly one of those handful of "missing" stories that have disappeared virtually without a trace. There are no telesnaps known to exist, relatively few publicity photos in circulation, and apart from the obligatory fan-recorded soundtrack (and bloody hooray for that, let it be said), there are only a handful of wobbly off-air 8mm cine fragments known to exist.
Which is more than "The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve" can boast, I'll admit. But a pretty shit archive status nevertheless.
Which is a shame, because "The Myth Makers" has a hell of a lot going for it.
Donald Cotton's script sparkles with genuine humour and displays a depth of knowledge that he was actually renowned for. Not that anybody tuning in at the time would have cared; after the bizarre one-off that was "Mission To the Unknown", everybody was probably expecting some kind of Dalek action.
I imagine that titting about in Troy for four weeks didn't go down all that well...
Maureen O'Brien suffered the first of a series of Piss-Poor Companion Send-Offs (TM) that plagued the latter years of Hartnell's tenure. (And by the way, it wasn't until the 1990s that I recall seeing any published photographs of Vicki together with her hurried on-screen squeeze Troilus at all).
(Maureen O'Brien was probably more concerned at the time about the fact that she returned to work from an expensive foreign holiday to find that her contract had not been renewed. Hence her somewhat, erm... ambivalence towards Yer Who over the years).
And the whole Max Adrian and William Hartnell thing has been looked at here. So please have a look over there if that tickles your fancy.
There's still a very interesting "history versus mythology" angle to look at here, but I am going to cowardly postpone that until I finally pull my thoughts together on considering "historical" stories in general. (It might take some time, so don't hold your breath...)
Great cast, great script and the fact that "The Myth Makers" has its main character view the expected conclusion of its plot to be a preposterous invention of an ancient poet is just grist to the old cleverclogs mill here...
I imagine that titting about in Troy for four weeks didn't go down all that well...
Maureen O'Brien suffered the first of a series of Piss-Poor Companion Send-Offs (TM) that plagued the latter years of Hartnell's tenure. (And by the way, it wasn't until the 1990s that I recall seeing any published photographs of Vicki together with her hurried on-screen squeeze Troilus at all).
(Maureen O'Brien was probably more concerned at the time about the fact that she returned to work from an expensive foreign holiday to find that her contract had not been renewed. Hence her somewhat, erm... ambivalence towards Yer Who over the years).
And the whole Max Adrian and William Hartnell thing has been looked at here. So please have a look over there if that tickles your fancy.
There's still a very interesting "history versus mythology" angle to look at here, but I am going to cowardly postpone that until I finally pull my thoughts together on considering "historical" stories in general. (It might take some time, so don't hold your breath...)
Great cast, great script and the fact that "The Myth Makers" has its main character view the expected conclusion of its plot to be a preposterous invention of an ancient poet is just grist to the old cleverclogs mill here...
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