Prose, it’s so last century. Sure, these posts are random and rambling, but who’s got time for that? It’s long past time that this blog embraced the listicle. So here I offer you: The top ten mental things about The Chase. That’s right! I’ve managed to narrow it down to ten.

  1. Domestic Life, part 1.

This action packed adventure starts at home, with the TARDIS crew pottering around not doing much. The Doctor (erratic William Hartnell) is fiddling with his new telly. Ian (William Russell) is reading a sci fi book. Barbara (Jacqueline Hills) is making a dress, while teenager Vicki (Maureen O’Brien) complains about being redundant. So far, so much a reflection of family life. But you have to wonder about these people, who have a wondrous time and space craft, and all the myriad technology within at their disposal, who resort to dressmaking, reading and fixing the TV reception in their spare time. Has any other adventure started so mundanely?

  1. The Time Space Visualiser

The Doctor’s new toy is more than a TV. It’s a TSV: a Time Space Visualiser. It can show you any event in history, which might seem a bit pointless when you have a machine with which you can actually visit those events. But in these early days, the TARDIS is a directionless beast so the chances of successfully piloting the Ship to the Gettysburg address are so slight you might as well just stay at home and watch it on the box. The set itself is enormous (in that typically 1960s way that all technology is) but the screen is tiny. Trying to fit the brute and the series’ four cast members in shot is a considerable feat of subtle crowding. Our crew choose some pleasant family viewing: a Shakespeare documentary and Top of the Pops. If only they’d chosen to tune in to Marco Polo. We might have got a clip or two.

  1. Testicles with tentacles

Writer Terry Nation fills his story with exotic aliens, as if trying as many ways possible of replicate the success of the Daleks. In the first two episodes, we get the fairly dodgy Aridians, fishy folk whose crested swimming caps are clearly visible. But they’re more convincing that the scrotumly Mire Beasts, which occasionally lurch into shot to thrash a tentacle unconvincingly at our heroes. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t catch on.

  1. A Dalek which isn’t very Daleky (aka a dislike of the unlike)

You know the one I mean. It stutters. It dodders. It makes mistakes. It’s clear that someone, either Nation, or director Richard Martin, or (my bet) story editor Dennis Spooner thought the Daleks should not be models of uniformity, and that one of a comedy variety would liven things up a bit. Imagine if that idea had caught on. You could have one playing trains and one serving the tea. No, too far, right?

  1. Flight Through Eternity

The third episode is The Feast of Steven come early. A game of two jokey halves, the first set on top of the Empire State building in 1966 (Ian and Barbara resist the urge to leave the Doctor then and there) with a comedy hick (Peter Purves). Although set at height, this is a low point, complete with a boob joke, when a lusty guide leers at a young woman’s chest and says, “as we gaze out across the panorama”. The second half is set on what should be the humourless setting of the doomed Marie Celeste, but Nation squeezes in an, ahem, hilarious section where Ian gets clobbered accidentally by Vicki. All this, plus the first cardboardy attempts to show the TARDIS in flight. Luckily, it doesn’t last an eternity.

  1. Journey Into Terror

The fourth episode is just as weird. What would happen, it supposes, if the Doctor and the Daleks met fictional horrors like Dracula, Frankenstein and a screamy grey woman? How much you enjoy this hammy episode depends on whether you’re charmed or irritated by its premise. The Doctor reasons that they have landed in the recesses of “the human mind”. But as the episode ends, a sign tells us we’re at the defunct 1996 Festival of Ghana, cancelled by Peking. Quite how the Chinese gained control of African amusement parks in the future, and closed them complete with signs written in English is never explained but we’ve certainly missed out on an adventure in a far more intriguing world than your bog standard house of horrors.

  1. The Doctor’s robot, um, double.

He’s so not. Not in long shot, not with the lights down, not while miming to Hartnell’s dialogue. It’s a brave attempt, but no amount of cutting between shots or valiant acting from the regulars can make it work. The Daleks are blind to its faults though: “Success!” one of them crows. “Paramount success! It is impossible to distinguish from the original,” it continues optimistically. That dodderiness is clearly catching.

  1. Magic mushrooms

More from the Nation monster factory. On planet Mechanus, you can be molested by giant mushrooms called Fungoids. Of course you have to wander near one first. Then stand right under it. And let it gently envelop you in its rubbery canopy. But then you just wiggle your way out. So that’s OK then. Again, they didn’t catch on.

  1. What the Mechanoids said

Still more from Nation’s Monsters-R-Us. This time, it’s giant Christmas baubles the Mechanoids (hey – surely they’re due for an appearance in a new series Christmas special?). They’re so big, they barely fit into shot. At one point, our heroes have to catch a lift with one, and they need to squeeze up against a wall to give it room. Unfortunately, their scratchy voices are almost unintelligible, but never fear: I’ve read the subtitles so I can tell you they say all sorts of memorable things like “Eight hundred thirty Mechanoid. English input. Enter.” and “English. Enter. Enter. Zero. Stop.” I hope that’s cleared things up for you.

  1. Domestic life, part 2.

At the end of the story, Ian and Barbara elect to take the Daleks’ ship and pilot it back to 1960s England. There they frolic around on some landmarks and crack jokes on the bus home. It’s hokey, but they were always a pair of old dags, so we’ll forgive them. The Doctor and Vicki watch their homecoming on the TSV. But wouldn’t it have been nice to have this foreshadowed a little; if back in the first episode, instead of tuning into Shakespeare and Lincoln, our teachers had looked longingly at life back at home? Or even if they’d foreseen their return to Earth at the end of the story? Timey flippin wimey!

All this, and we haven’t mentioned Vicki being inadvertently left behind, the killing of a Dalek with a cardigan or Ian’s alarming dancing. Say what you like about The Chase but it really does keep on giving.

LINK to Last Christmas. Both feature the Doctor meeting mythic/fictional characters.

NEXT TIME: Let’s not pretend. You’re very blobby. It’s truth or consequences in The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion.