014 - The Crusade

Broadcast:

27^th March - 17^th April 1965

Doctor:

William Hartnell

Companions:

Ian, Barbara, Vicki

Adversary:

El Akir - A rogue Saracen

Written by:

David Whitaker

Director:

Douglas Camfield

Music:

Dudley Simpson

Script Editor:

Dennis Spooner

Producer:

Verity Lambert

Average Viewers:

9.38m (10.5, 8.5, 9.0, 9.5)

Summary: The travellers find themselves in 12th century Palestine and get caught in the crossfire of the Third Crusade. Barbara is captured by a Saracen so the rest try to ally themselves with Richard The Lionheart to save her.

Doctor Who was on its first period of decline and despite modern opinions being favourable The Crusade would be the least welcomed serial for twelve months (based on average Audience Appreciation figures). The appreciation index average dropped below 50% for the first time and viewing figures went below 10m for the first time since Planet Of Giants at the start of the series - though they were still higher than the bulk of the previous series. The boost provided by the return of the Daleks had subsided and the show was set to remain at its current level for the rest of the year until part way through the third series. The Crusade was a solid history piece with the TARDIS and its passengers laid on top. With few exceptions, David Whitaker wrote both the Christians and Muslims fairly and the only sense of enemy for the viewer comes from the fact that Barbara is taken early on. This coupled with the audio-only presentation of episodes 2 and 4 on the "Lost In Time" DVD set made for quite a dull first viewing 10 years go but the Loose Canon reconstruction breathed some life back into it...

Viewers watching the original broadcast would have done so with the knowledge that NASA had launched their first 2 man orbiter, the Intelsat "Early Bird" became the first commercial communications satellite (though it wouldn't come into service for a couple more months) and protests of the time included a third civil rights march to Alabama with a crowd of 3200 growing to 25,00 over a four day period and the same number of students protested against the Vietnam War. The pop charts handed the Number One spot over from The Rolling Stones to Unit 4 + 2 with "Concrete and Clay" and then Cliff Richard's "The Minute You're Gone". Cinemas were screening The Sound of Music, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Masquerade, while Morcombe And Wise were The Intelligence Men. Anyone wanting to stay in on Wednesdays could now tune in to antiques gameshow "Going For A Song" which started the week after episode one...

As the first episode begins, the viewer is taken directly into the action with English knights talking in a very classical way. It feels like someone has put the wrong video tape into the broadcast machine, this is definitely a period drama... Then we are briefly reassured by the arrival of the TARDIS amongst the trees (with a very curious wobbly computer sound effect never used for the materialisation before or since) but no sooner has the Police Box appeared than the camera cuts away again. It is three minutes before we finally see the regular cast and within a matter of seconds Barbara is snatched away! William Russell was on familiar grounds having played Lancelot in his own series prior to joining Doctor Who and he would go on to have a pretty good sword fight - despite this his appearance in episode three was only via a fairly brief film insert because it was his turn to take a week off!

I wrote comparatively few notes whilst watching The Crusade and it is hard to know what to say. It holds together pretty well and has some wonderful moments; Vicki is disguised as a young man to afford her better reason for being with the Doctor; Ian is knighted by Richard I to give his word more authority when he tries to negotiate for Barbara's release; the Doctor steals ("or borrowed, shall we say?" as he puts it) some clothes from a market trader (who we learn acquired them from a thief in the first place) leading to a later scene of confusion; Barbara gives a very straight answer when asked where she came from, talking about the two previous adventures which leads Saladin to presume she is a teller of tales and instructs her to provide the evening entertainment (at which point she decides her only hope is to recount Romeo and Juliet!

We are reminded again that history must take its course and although Richard would continue on towards Jerusalem he would only see it from afar. Some scenes are quite wordy while others are practically silent, especially Barbara's long escape run at the end of episode 2, which is unfortunate given the fact that it is one of the missing episodes. There some intelligent writing though as we are given a wonderful gem from Princess Joanna (Joan) who wonders why she confides in the Doctor "There is something new in you, yet something older than the sky itself"; Barbara is presented with a knife, not to defend herself but to kill herself and Safiya should they be detected; Vicki is afraid of being alone and that the Doctor might actually prefer her not to be around. Some real challenging moments including the final scene where Ian apparently turns against the Doctor and wishes to execute him... all as a ruse to allow them to escape into the TARDIS but plaid deadly straight with no warning.

And then the TARDIS dematerialises with the correct sound and they are away. One of the Cusaders reflects "Poor, brave Sir Ian, spirited away by fiends" and we are left with a TARDIS scene and as couple of knight related puns. There is nothing specifically wrong with The Crusade other than some slow scenes but it does have a relative emptiness to it. The drama is there but without much weight and other than it being regular characters there isn't much to make us care about any of the characters particularly, perhaps because there is no clear goodies/baddies delineation. I gave it a score of 62% which seems to fit the general consensus at the time.

A final mention has to go to the archive state of the serial. It is the earliest example of a partially retained story. Episode 3 is the original crisp video recording but episode 1 is a slightly ropey film copy from international sales (not discovered until 1999 in a private collection in New Zealand where the story was bought but never broadcast!) and while the audio is reasonable the picture suffers from striping down the right hand side. It was long believed that even audio for the other two episodes no longer existed but luckily a copy was discovered in 1995 but it's quality is a bit rough in places. The Crusade acts as a reminder of how lucky we are to have some of the excellent early stories in such good shape and especially how good some of the off-air audio recording are. For that alone, I salute it.