Marco Polo

So, sadly, it’s off with the DVD player and on with the iPod for Marco Polo (legally converted for my own personal use from the CD version I paid money for, back off BPI!!!) I had never listened to this story before, originally intending to spread it over a few days. Three hours later, the battery on my iPod was nearly empty, but I was left there looking into the middle distance with Marco. This story has had near universal acclaim, but there must be people who like Doctor Who, but aren’t willing to listen to an audio only historical. Believe the hype. You may not love it for the same reasons that others will, but fall in love with it you will. From the Roof of the World to the Khan’s palace, this story will keep you gripped from beginning to end, an epic that covers the span of several weeks. With the visuals missing, the primary credit for this has to be John Lucarotti, one of the finest writers the programme ever had. Although he takes us on what is basically a travelogue of 13th Century Cathay, the story is anchored by Lucarotti’s use of character. It would be useful to compare it with the other 7 episode story of the season, The Daleks. Both use the incapacitation and subsequent inaccessibility of the TARDIS, to justify the regulars not just taking off again. Both have times when they are ready to depart, but are stopped at the last minute. However, we accept these in Marco Polo, because they are consequences of character interaction- when Susan stops to say goodbye to Ping-Cho, the viewer doesn’t mentally wish her to forget it and leave, as we have seen a beautifully written and performed friendship develop between the two girls, and we feel Susan’s need to say farewell to her new friend, in spite of the urgency.

The supporting characters all appear to be excellently realised. Marco himself is fascinating, a man who is essentially decent and likeable and yet, in spite of the plotting around him, he himself is the greatest obstacle to the Doctor and his companions. The use of Marco Polo’s diary as a narrative device is inspired- he, in effect, is the audience for those events which are too routine to be dramatised and, like the audience, he puts his own colour on proceedings. Derren Nesbitt makes a superbly laconic and frightening Tegana. Zienia Merton’s Ping-Cho is delightful, an innocent girl uprooted who finds a kindred spirit in Susan. Kublai Khan himself is a wonderful character; we totally accept him as a likable old man and the as the most powerful man on Earth.

Tristram Cary’s approach to the music is brilliant. A lesser composer would have made an ‘Oriental’ pastiche, but Cary creates an ambient score that gives more of a sense of setting than situation. A gong is used effectively for scene changes.

There are so many wonderful locations- the Cave of Five Hundred Eyes, the Summer Palace, Lop and the Gobi Desert (if there’s one place on land that could have been transported from another planet, it’s the Gobi). But we will never see them. Not one second of footage escaped the junking. To attempt to compensate for that, I watched the telesnap reconstruction on the Edge of Destruction DVD. The set and costume design appears to have been fantastic, making this story’s loss seem even worse.

There are no reasonable criticisms that can be made- there are flaws, but you would have to be actually looking for them, as only a couple stick out. There are very few historical and geographical inaccuracies (Lucarotti’s scripts were very well researched). I found Marco’s comment about the TARDIS making Kublai Khan greater than Hannibal and Alexander odd, considering that he ruled an empire several times larger than the Macedonian and Carthaginian empires combined. The only conqueror who would have fitted the bill would have been Kublai’s grandfather Genghis. There is also the inevitable question of white actors playing non-white characters. This is sensitively done on the whole and even the accents which are sometimes used are not offensively caricatured. Interestingly, some actors affect an accent and others don’t, but as the Mongol Empire was vast and free of racial prejudice by all accounts, a variety of accents might actually be appropriate. Ironically, the only non-white actor playing a major role is Zienia Merton and, as Ping-Cho came from Samarkand, one of the most cosmopolitan regions in the Empire, she could safely have been played by a white actress!

Marco Polo is exciting, haunting, frightening, funny, educational, beautiful. It is everything one could ask for in a Doctor Who story- with not a spaceship, monster or alien planet in sight!

NEXT: The Keys of Marinus