113 The Celestial Toymaker Episode 3: The Dancing Floor

EPISODE: The Celestial Toymaker Episode 3: The Dancing Floor
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 113
STORY NUMBER: 024
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 16 April 1966
WRITER: Brian Hayles
DIRECTOR: Bill Sellars
SCRIPT EDITOR: Gerry Davis
PRODUCER: Innes Lloyd
RATINGS: 9.4 million viewers
FORMAT: CD: Doctor Who: The Lost TV Episodes Collection: No. 2

"Hunt the key to fit the door that leads out on the dancing floor. Then escape the rhythmic beat, or you'll forever tap your feet!"

Steven & Dodo find themselves in the kitchen of Mrs Wiggs, who's arguing with Sergeant Rugg while Cyril the kitchen boy dozes in the kitchen.

Dodo & Steven need to hunt the key, which they eventually find hidden in one of Mrs Wigg's pies. Alas the Tardis at the end of this game is a fake too. They then proceed to a dance floor where they are forced to dance with the dolls against Sgt Rugg & Mrs Wiggs.

Steven swaps partners to unite with Dodo and the both jump off the Dance floor by another Tardis.... which is again fake.

They then meet Cyril, now dressed as a schoolboy who says they can call him Billy. He will be their opponent in the next game.

Worked a bit better for me again this episode. I'm feeling the absence of Hartnell somewhat, especially after the Doctor is missing from Dalek Masterplan 11 and most of the Massacre. I know the invisible Doctor's game with the Toymaker is meant to be adding tension and a time limit to what Steven & Dodo are doing but this isn't for me. Peter Purves says this is one of his favourite stories, along with the Massacre, both of which feature Steven working away from the Doctor for a period of time thus giving the actor more to do.

It should be noted that the schoolboy Cyril seems to resemble Billy Bunter, and the comment he makes would make it seem that that was the intention:

Hello, remember me? I'm Cyril, known to my friends as Billy. Had you that time! Scare ya?

However the copyright holders for Billy Bunter complained and a voice over announcement was made denying any connection between the characters.

Peter Stephens plays the schoolboy, Cyril. Stephens was The Knave in the previous episode too who, like Cyril in the Kitchen, slept on the sidelines of the clash with the King & Queen in the last episode. He makes a return Doctor Who appearance as the priest Lolem in The Underwater Menace.

Sgt Rugg & Mrs Wiggs are played by Campbell Singer and Carmen Silvera who were the Clowns in the first episode and the King & Queen of Hearts in the second. The Dolls/Dancers are played by Beryl Braham, Ann Harrison and Delia Linden . Meanwhile the Doctor's Hand is provided by Albert Ward, who performs the same role in The Smugglers!

The next episode of The Celestial Toymaker exists and from the start of the following story we have telesnaps for all of the missing episodes up until the point where John Cura stopped taking his telesnaps during The Dominators. The next episode with no visual record is episode 220 The Invasion: Episode One. That didn't use to be the case: when the telesnaps were discovered the photos for episode 189 The Enemy of the World part 4 were missing but fortunately this episode was returned in 2014.

One of the concepts in the story, the invisible Doctor, was meant to serve as a means to replace Hartnell with another actor. Producer John Wiles and lead actor William Hartnell never got on as several people testify, notably Peter Purves in The Ark DVD commentary. However Wiles' BBC bosses, the aforementioned Gerald Savory and his superior Sydney Newman, who was involved in the creation of Doctor Who, refused and so that function of the plot had to be dropped contributing to Wiles' departure from the series. In fact this story marks the production debut of Innes Lloyd, who inherited his first few stories from Wiles. His first decisions can be seen in The Savages episode 1, where the individual story episode titles disappear in favour of story titles, but the War Machines is a much better picture of what he was really after creatively.