Planet of Giants | Sophisticated Idiots

Planet of Giants
1964

Planet of Giants review: Ian and Susan discover what they think is a giant ant

or A Bug's Life

or Short and Sweet

Sometimes you just have to hold your hands up and accept brilliance when you see it.

Planet of Giants is riddled with limitations but is an absolute exemplar in making the best of what you have.

The serial’s leaked production notes show some of this genius laid bare:

We can’t afford to create some of the creatures in the script. Fine, they’ll appear off screen and we’ll be creative with lighting.

Fashioning giant bugs that can move on screen is going to be a nightmare. Fine, make it a plot point that the wildlife has all been poisoned.

We’re going to struggle to maintain the quality of the story across four episodes. Fine, we’ll cut it to three episodes in post-production.

We’re worried that people are forgetting that Ian is a teacher. Fine, we’ll make Ian keep his tie securely fastened throughout.

We’re concerned that the Doctor is not seen as the lead actor in the show. Fine, we’ll have him take charge in the action scenes and climb a 100-storey drainpipe.

Really? Hartnell? Well, I guess if our leading man carks it we can replace him with another actor and write in that some timey-wimey Doctory magic means he can change his face every now and again.

Crikey, that could keep this show running for decades. Don’t be ridiculous, I doubt we’ll convince the Beeb to fund it beyond this season.

It’s no overstatement, by the way, to say that cutting this story to three episodes is life-changing.

The Oxford English illustrates its entry for ‘good decision’ with a still from this story. Of Ian in his massive briefcase.

What this all means is that Planet of Giants is a wonderful example of the knee-trembling brilliance that can be achieved despite operating on a tight budget. Take note, Warriors of the Deep.

This is a tightly-plotted, creative and utterly charming three-parter, famously inspired by Jimmie Rodgers singing the creepy ditty, “There are snakes, ants that sting and creepy things in an English country garden.”

As is so often true in the Hartnell era, the production team are pulling out all the stops and being damnedly imaginative.

The show at this fledgling stage makes experimentation a bona fide art form. They’re mixing it up, doing something different and pushing boundaries at every opportunity.

And it’s a sight to behold.

In the decades to come the show would become creatively stale, frequently falling back on the TARDIS team chancing upon yet another spaceship in the future captained by a megalomaniac.

But here, in its formative years, envelopes were being pushed so routinely Verity Lambert could have run the Royal Mail.

You never knew what you were going to get from one week to the next, and this veritable pick n’ mix of a show was irresistible. Sure, sometimes you’d pull out a coffee crème of The Sensorites or The Space Museum but most of the time you’re gorging on delicious treats like this one.

In Planet of Giants it’s a delight to see Hartnell having such a wonderful time. He skips his way through this story, taking charge of his show and being gleefully whimsical.

Of all the surprises we’ve encountered during this marathon Who undertaking, our love of Billy H has been the biggest shock to us.

Like most viewers under the age of 70, until we’d embarked on this epic quest we’d only seen the First Doctor second-hand: as a Hurndell caricature or Cushing’s Wonka impression in the Dalek films on TV at Christmas.

The reality is that Hartnell is 14 Carat Gold. An inconsistent character, sure, but never knowing if he’s going to scold his companions or risk his life to save them makes life as a viewer just that little bit more exciting.

He’s full-on Action Man here, albeit in a Mr Burns kinda way. We were concerned enough for his wellbeing when he pulled himself up to peek over the edge of the garden path, so when he ascends that drainpipe – the equivalent of free-climbing the Shard – we were asking Pat Troughton to start limbering up.

Of course, the old miniaturisation idea has subsequently become a tired cliché but in 1964 it was suitably fresh, and the murder mystery subplot brings a very welcome air of Hitchcockian film noir to proceedings.

It’s a very gentle sort of story, a Midsummer Murders prequel aided by casting a Richard Nixon lookalike as the wrong’un, and the stakes are pleasingly small-scale, thankfully avoiding being exaggerated to world-destroying proportions.

And this is all great: it gives us a chance to see how the characters react to their against-the-odds situation.

With so little to play with, the producers should be applauded for their overtime efforts to keep up the dramatic tension. We’d love to see modern editors stitch together an iPlayer-friendly trailer from these highpoints:

Hand washing
Lifting a phone receiver
A domestic cat
A dead worm
Opening a briefcase

This creative team have taken some plain ingredients and whipped them into something delectable. The artisan quiche craftsmen.

The giant props are, on the whole, impressive but we have to question whether it was necessary for the art designers to spend two days fashioning the gigantic notepad, purely to generate a plot device which leads nowhere.

By this stage both the audience and the TARDIS team are 100 per cent convinced that Nixon is producing a lethal chemical so it’s hilarious that the Doc and co painstakingly copy down the formula on their mini notepad just to corroborate it.

The task is so laborious that the director inserts a fade edit, even in the age when letting the camera linger on a tedious scene was a national pastime.

There's also some curious role reversal at play in this serial. Not only is the Doctor unusually chipper and up for the physical stuff, but Ian is uncharacteristically unstressed about their latest flirtations with death.

And Susan makes herself useful. In her penultimate story (the first companion departure is nigh, peeps…) she refrains from the overblown screaming and instead helps to move the plot along through her hitherto unseen superpowers of displaying common sense and a degree of resilience.

In fact, the damsel in distress role is fulfilled here by Barbara, rather disappointingly.

For a no-nonsense character who was recently commanding an Aztec tribe, it’s a shame to see her denigrated to fainting at the sight of a fly and being a bit of a twerp about the poisoned seeds. She’s a teacher: would she really decide the best way of checking the seeds she suspects of being coated in poison is to rub her hands over them?

Her brain must have been compromised by the weight of her massive hair, which doesn’t seem to have been miniaturised to the same proportions as the rest of her.