When I posted the original Escape To Danger entry for "The Romans", I made mention of the gulf between what was generally knocking around as publicity shots when I was a youth in the 1980s, and what we have in our photographic vocabulary today.
The above is probably my favourite still from Serial M nowadays. The look on Maureen O'Brien's face is charming, along with the fact that it represents a rather sweet comedic scene.
And talking about comedic scenes, "The Romans" is notoriously well served in that department. It's tempting to think that the popularity of Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo's "Asterix" books had crossed the English Channel and flavoured Dennis Spooner's script for Serial M. However, despite being anthologised in 1961 from a Pilote magazine strip running 1959 to 1960, "Asterix the Gaul" didn't receive an English translation until 1969.
Whether Spooner was a keen Francophile or not is beside the point. There's some pretty funny stuff in "The Romans", which is good because played straight the script could have been really bloody grim if it felt so inclined.
The second production block of Proper Who started with "The Rescue" (Serials J and K were left over from the first block to have something in the can when the new season started), and there is a noticeable mellowing in the character of the Doctor. "The Romans" carries this forward, and it's probably at this point that I realised that the endless early DWM descriptions of the First Doctor as "crotchety" and "tetchy" (copyright J. Jeremy Bentham) were generally bollocks and damned lazy journalism.
But it's the "post-coital... blissed-out on wine" ("The Discontinuity Guide", bless it) Ian and Barbara that often get overlooked while the Doctor goes off and has all the fun.
I'll have to take that for granted, I'm afraid. Post-coitus, I generally would prefer to be vacuuming or putting up shelves, or anything to get out of the immediate and tiresome "snuggling period" that many women seem to consider an essential part of the process.
At least William Russell gets a hair makeover out of it. If "The Romans" had been in the Missing Adventures range, he would have probably got an STI...
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