N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!
Nary a clip exists from any of the seven episodes of Marco Polo and whilst there are fan-made reconstructions out there I could watch, I’ve chosen to stick with listening to the off-air soundtrack and casually thumbing through the telesnaps for visual reference. (If you weren’t already aware, these are available in the excellent first volume of Doctor Who Magazine‘s recent missing episodes special editions.) Besides, if the rumours are to be believed, I’ll be watching it in all its glory soon anyway!
All rumours aside, Marco Polo works rather well in audio-only format, in part due to its use of Polo as narrator as a framing device. Also, The Singing Sands in particular sounds terrifying and whilst I would love to see these episodes as much as the next fan, in this case we can be thankful that the serial is – fortuitously – a great listen.
“One day we’ll know all the mysteries of the skies. And we’ll stop our wandering.”
Susan, The Singing Sands
The word ‘epic’ is bandied about far too freely these days, but this story really is epic, being a travelogue of hundreds of miles’ journey and taking place over several weeks. As with The Daleks, the seven-episode length gives the story time to breathe, but perhaps more importantly gives the Doctor and his travelling companions proper time to cement the bond of friendship suggested at the end of The Brink of Disaster. True, the Doctor’s still a cantankerous old duffer at times, but it’s becoming clear that that’s just his nature, and as such it’s in this serial that the balance of the Doctor/Companion(s) dynamic is first achieved.
It’s often said that today’s television viewer requires a degree of sophistication not required all these decades ago but, for me, these early Doctor Who serials show that’s simply untrue. For example, in Five Hundred Eyes Ping-cho recounts how warlord Ala-edin drugged his followers with hashish. There can’t be too many children’s TV shows brave enough to include such a tale. Understanding the context of a story such as Ping-cho’s requires a level of intellectual sophistication in its young audience every bit as demanding as the ability to be thrown knee-deep into a story within a thirty second pre-credits sequence (to use the same example I gave in my earlier post on The Daleks).
Finally, as an aside, I couldn’t help but smile at how Tegana described the TARDIS as ‘a warlord’s tomb’ – I’m assuming he’s never been to Trenzalore though!
All in all, this is marvellous stuff, a serial we truly should lament is absent from the BBC vaults. But of course, there’s always those rumours …
