Tony Fyler steps into a police box in a
junkyard.
The original Tardis team
was envisaged as being 'something for everyone' to reinforce the family nature
of Doctor Who, but they were also each their own companion archetype. Susan the
young girl to whom the mysterious Doctor was a mentor. Barbara, the voice of
both insatiable curiosity and moral scruple as it was envisaged in 1960s
Britain. And Ian, the brave if reluctant adventurer, doing the 'man's work' -
all the heavy lifting and all the heavy fighting that the girls weren't
socially 'allowed' to do, and the Doctor, as the champion of the intellect,
wouldn't stoop to, however necessary it was or however much he benefited from
it.
From the beginning, things
were never entirely that cut and dried – the First Doctor buckled a good swash
on occasion and was about to stove a caveman's head in when Ian stopped him in
the very first adventure.
Ian is more than an
archetypal hero though. From An Unearthly Child onward, he's the more
light-hearted of the two teachers kidnapped into time and space, chuckling at
Susan Foreman's oddity, while for the most part, Barbara is perplexed and
worried by it. He's the one who gives voice to the absurdity of the reality
they come to inhabit - 'a thing that looks like a police box, standing in a
junkyard, can go anywhere in time and space?' - and he's also very much the
most practical of the original companions. Shouldering much of the
responsibility for moving the story along, it's often Ian - in stories like The
Dead Planet and The Keys of Marinus - who sees a straightforward path to the
adventure's end and rolls up his sleeves to help get the travellers to that
point.
While he's initially
furious with the Doctor for kidnapping them, Ian comes to terms with the
reality of the situation relatively quickly - if there's no direct route back,
there's no direct route back, and that's all there is to it - and quickly it
becomes Ian, more than Susan or Barbara, who becomes what we would later understand
the fundamental companion to be: the viewpoint of the audience. Susan, who was
initially supposed to fill that role for the children watching, never quite
managed it because her character after all was supposed to be as alien as the
Doctor was (for all she degenerated in the writing to that other
companion-staple, the screaming one who gets captured and has to be rescued). Barbara
became, most of the time, rather more rigid and schoolmarm than her normal
character was, when she was faced with regular peril. But Ian was most often
the logician, getting things straight so that he could find the solution, the
pathway through time and space that would lead them all home. In essence, he
was ‘Dad,’ the one who could be trusted to take care of the hard things,
whether it was getting involved in complex French history and the journey of
Marco Polo to the system of governance on leading rebellion on strange new
worlds. He was Dad, certainly, but he was Dad with a dressing-up box and the
heart of an eight-year-old boy too.
Ian Chesterton was an
everyman of his time, taken out of that time and thrown into the universe to
sink or swim. That he swam so often was down to his nature as a very ordinary
hero – treating the world as a friend until it treated him otherwise, strong in
his support of the friends who are true to him, wide-eyed and marvelling at the
wonders of the universe, but unafraid to stand on the principles his parents
taught him, and put himself and those principles to the test in a good cause,
or for a good friend. It’s Ian, right at the start, who teaches the Thals to
stand up to the metal-plated Nazi attitudes of the Daleks, by bringing the evil
of their philosophy close to home, as we can deduce it would have come for the
very young Ian himself in a world of bombing and disappearing relatives gone
off to war. It’s a scene that comes right back to haunt him the next time he
meets the Daleks too, when it turns out they’ve invaded his home planet and he
joins the resistance to their domination because, to paraphrase a later Doctor
– some things must be fought.
Really, that’s telling
about Ian Chesterton – for all the sixties were a time of division and change,
they also had people like Ian in them: people who’d grown up with early
memories of the war, and who, while embracing the world in general in a spirit
of brotherhood, never shrank from saying that wrongs were wrong, and standing
up for right, whether that came in the form of segregated living at home, or
tin-plated pepperpots of death in space. That’s what Ian Chesterton is: a good
man, with no enemy but those who choose to be, but who, through his exposure to
the universe of time and space, is forced from time to time to go to war.
Of course, as is the case
with many early companions, the audio stories of Big Finish have massively
rounded out Ian’s character, background, beliefs and the arc of his life. It’s
remarkable that many decades later, while sounding like an older man, William
Russell has been able to recreate Ian Chesterton with the trademark chuckle,
and the trademark dropping into firmness and resolution of the man we saw on
screen, but also to infuse him through the audio scripts with a warmth for
which there was seldom time on TV. His care for Barbara in particular is
something that was generally only hinted at as a kind of shared-traveller
impulse on the TV show, but through the audios, it’s given a greater voice,
though rarely are we in Romeo and Juliet territory – that’s not who those
people were. But a steadily growing need to have and keep each other in their
lives, and close, is a beautifully subtle thread throughout the audios. Stories
like Domain of the Voord, like The Flames of Cadiz, like The Rocket Men and
like The Time Museum show sides to Ian Chesterton that Russell’s on-screen
performance meant you always suspected, but which were never given the chance
to come to the fore.
Ian Chesterton, friend of
the universe, warm-hearted man with a sense of right and the courage to put
himself between the innocent and the evil. In so many ways, the mellowing of
the First Doctor’s alien spikiness – and to some extent the rationale for the
Doctor’s fondness for travelling with humans ever since – can be laid as a
tribute at Ian’s feet. When he stopped the Doctor killing the caveman in the
first story, the point of human beings as a potential civilising influence was
first made. In some ways, the Doctor has been trying to be as good as the very
best of his human friends ever since.
Never cruel or cowardly –
that’s Ian Chesterton.
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