Doctor Who: The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967)

REVIEW

It's easy now to underestimate just how traumatising these four 25 minute episodes were to the mind of an impressionable five year old child, but believe me when I say that Tomb of the Cybermen was one of the very first times I can remember being really, genuinely terrified. All kids are scared from time to time - indeed it sometimes seems if children live in a constant state of impending panic as they try to make sense of the strange adult world around them. But to be truly, physically terrified is not something you feel every day. Unless of course you grew up in 60s Britain and had Doctor Who to do the job for you.

Once confined to the file marked 'Missing Believed Wiped', The Tomb of the Cybermen was recovered in 1991 when 16mm telerecording prints were found in 1991 at TV ASIA in Hong Kong. It was a momentous occasion for Doctor Who fandom, but it raised the obvious and worrying question - was it really as scary and as wonderful as we remembered it?

Well of course not - we're adults now and can see the technical primitiveness that plagued most Doctor Who when as children we were blind to it, or at least didn't care. We can see the odd dodgy performance, try to turn a blind eye to the occasional camera or boom mic that wobbles into shot and do our best not to notice when one of the monster costume starts disintegrating in front of an unforgiving camera lens. But you can see how The Tomb of the Cybermen would have been absolutely terrifying - it's still blindingly obvious what it was about these four episodes that sent kids across the land scurrying to their beds in September 1967 in full expectation of some of the worst nightmares they'd ever have.

That said, even today - and I'm writing this in my early-forties - there are still moments in The Tomb of the Cybermen that will leave you, at the very least, somewhat unnerved. It's structured and filmed in classic horror movie mode and the setup will be immediately familiar to any self-respecting genre fan - a group of mismatched individuals are stranded somewhere mysterious where the lighting is, at best, subdued and where something implacably evil is stirring... It's every mummy film you've ever seen with the Egyptian desert replaced by the eerie wastes of Telos and the reanimated bandaged kings replaced by an army of revived Cybermen, here making their third appearance in Doctor Who and claiming their place as the only real rivals the Daleks ever had.

Previous Cybermen stories had been disappointing - The Tenth Planet (8 October 1966 - 29 October 1966) is remembered more fondly now because of its climactic regeneration than it is for the frankly ridiculous Cybermen, strangely camp creations with sing-song voices and fabric faces. The Moonbase (11 February 1967 - 4 March 1967) saw them put to better use but it wasn't until they emerged from their ice tombs that they achieved their obvious potential. Tomb is a rare story in which the Cybermen really as inhuman and emotionless as their reputation suggests. The simplicity of their design in this story, the blankness of their impassive metal faces and above all the monotonous drone of that hideous computer voice (the single element of the story that haunted my five year old nightmares for weeks...) all successfully suggest that these really are the awe-inspiring, unstoppable force that we always knew they could be.

Even their motives this time are altogether more horrifying than their previous plans - in The Tenth Planet they wanted to invade the Earth, a laudibly ambitious scheme but one already done to death by other monsters - and they'd been beaten to it anyway by the Daleks in The Dalek Invasion of Earth (21 November 1964 - 26 December 1964). In The Moonbase, their plans to take over a weather control station on the moon seem rather underwhelming. But here, they have only one desire - to create more of their own by "converting" the organic interlopers in their tombs into the first of an army of new Cybermen. And if right now the words "Star Trek" and "Borg" have just sprung to mind... well, you're not the first to notice it.

One of the single most unsettling moments in the whole of Doctor Who - the one that stayed with so many of us who saw it at the time - comes when the Cyberleader, an impressively nasty creation, despite the fact that his head seems to fall off in one shot - outlines their strategy. When a clearly terrified Jamie tells the Cyberleader "We're not like you," it replies, again in that deeply troubling computerised voice, "You will be..." Cue a thousand kids fleeing behind the sofa in floods of tears.

While the story was absent without leave for all those years, it generated a fearsome reputation and one suspects that this is no small part due to the indelible quality of the images. Peter Bryant's direction is fantastic, taking Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler's sparse, stripped-down script and turning it into a dark gothic horror the likes of which would become commonplace during Tom Baker's tenure as The Doctor. He's aided immeasurably by the magnificent sets designed by Martin Johnson - the ice tombs themselves are still impressive, managing to suggest something much larger than they actually are and the moment when the revived Cybermen claw their way out and slowly, mechanically descend to the control room floor is one of the all-time great Who moments.

When The Tomb of the Cybermen was recovered, it had an awful lot to live up to. Those of who saw it on its first broadcast had childhood memories that could so easily have been dashed when faced with the reality. Thankfully, any doubts as to its brilliance were soon dispelled - The Tomb of the Cybermen was, and remains, one of the crowning glories not only of the Patrick Troughton era, but of the show as a whole.
KEVIN LYONS

Last Updated: 15 October, 2008