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The Black Archive #18
Marco Polo
‘This is the Plain of Pamir, known to those who travel to Cathay as the Roof of the World.’
Marco Polo (1964) reflects a cultural change reshaping TV’s role as historian, placing the interpretation of history in the viewers’ hands by recruiting them as travellers in Polo’s caravan.
Examining camera treatments and mobility, adaptive and remedial interventions, public and book history, cultural assumptions and memories, this book celebrates the work of collaborators, copyists, studio personnel and fans in reconstructing this most famous and earliest of missing Doctor Who stories.
Marco Polo (1964) reflects a cultural change reshaping TV’s role as historian, placing the interpretation of history in the viewers’ hands by recruiting them as travellers in Polo’s caravan.
Examining camera treatments and mobility, adaptive and remedial interventions, public and book history, cultural assumptions and memories, this book celebrates the work of collaborators, copyists, studio personnel and fans in reconstructing this most famous and earliest of missing Doctor Who stories.
- GenresDoctor WhoNonfiction
182 pages, Paperback
First published April 7, 2018
20 people want to read
About the author
Dene October
10 booksDene October lectures at the University of the Arts London on subjects ranging from David Bowie studies to fan cultures, fashion and Doctor Who by Design.
He studied fashion journalism at London College of Fashion and won the Graduate Journalism Award. His writing ranges from feature articles to academic books, poetry to novels.
He is co-editor of Doctor Who and History and has contributed many book chapters on the British programme, and on pop icon David Bowie.
His current book, Marco Polo, was 2018 Critters awards finalist in the Non Fiction category. The book explores the lost 1964 Doctor Who classic by entwining broadcast history with the stories of the famous Venetian, as well as his own childhood geographical and televisual travels, all while reflecting on the themes of media, mobility and memory. The result is an epic travelogue where the author tags along with Marco, Ping-Cho, Susan, Ian, Barbara and the Doctor whilst simultaneously examining a different theme in each chapter on such topics as camera story-telling, collaborative authorship, public history and transformative journeys.
He studied fashion journalism at London College of Fashion and won the Graduate Journalism Award. His writing ranges from feature articles to academic books, poetry to novels.
He is co-editor of Doctor Who and History and has contributed many book chapters on the British programme, and on pop icon David Bowie.
His current book, Marco Polo, was 2018 Critters awards finalist in the Non Fiction category. The book explores the lost 1964 Doctor Who classic by entwining broadcast history with the stories of the famous Venetian, as well as his own childhood geographical and televisual travels, all while reflecting on the themes of media, mobility and memory. The result is an epic travelogue where the author tags along with Marco, Ping-Cho, Susan, Ian, Barbara and the Doctor whilst simultaneously examining a different theme in each chapter on such topics as camera story-telling, collaborative authorship, public history and transformative journeys.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 16, 2023
'Marco Polo', the fourth Doctor Who serial, is the study of the eighteenth Black Archive book. It is written by Dene October and goes into some depths on the story, including it's inspiration via The Travels, the historical travelogue written by Polo.
Whilst the book is clearly very well researched, I have to be honest and say that I found it a slog to get through. It's a very dense book, and I am not personally interested in the real-life Marco Polo so much as the fictional version portrayed by Mark Eden. Thus the book lost my interest when October covers the real travels of Polo.
Nevertheless, it covers a lot of different topics, some more successfully than others. I found the sections detailing remediation fascinating, and how we view media is very thought provoking. Having studied TV Production at University, this is a book that would have been invaluable to me when writing essays, especially the parts about fan culture and adaptations.
Whilst I did not enjoy it as much as the other entry I have read in the Black Archive series (The Romans), I cannot deny it is a thoroughly researched book, albeit perhaps not the one for me. If you like Doctor Who and Marco Polo, though, this is definitely a book worth reading.
Whilst the book is clearly very well researched, I have to be honest and say that I found it a slog to get through. It's a very dense book, and I am not personally interested in the real-life Marco Polo so much as the fictional version portrayed by Mark Eden. Thus the book lost my interest when October covers the real travels of Polo.
Nevertheless, it covers a lot of different topics, some more successfully than others. I found the sections detailing remediation fascinating, and how we view media is very thought provoking. Having studied TV Production at University, this is a book that would have been invaluable to me when writing essays, especially the parts about fan culture and adaptations.
Whilst I did not enjoy it as much as the other entry I have read in the Black Archive series (The Romans), I cannot deny it is a thoroughly researched book, albeit perhaps not the one for me. If you like Doctor Who and Marco Polo, though, this is definitely a book worth reading.
July 23, 2022
https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/marco-polo-by-dene-october-and-john-lucarotti/
Dene October’s Black Archive on Marco Polo is one of the longer ones in this series. He makes a very strong argument that this story, which most fans like without necessarily loving, should be considered as one of the peaks of Old Who. Sadly, those of us who did not see it will need to rely on his word. It is enhanced by the fact that October actually saw Marco Polo twice – when originally broadcast by the BBC, and then again a year after in Australia where his family had meantime moved. He therefore has a huge advantage over most of the rest of us who will probably never see any of the seven lost episodes; if they were findable, they would surely have been found by now.
(As I said in a previous entry, I used to have fantasies of some day opening a long-shut cupboard in the Green Zone in Cyprus to find a bunch of Doctor Who tapes that had been abandoned by some luckless TV technician in 1974, but in fact now that I’ve established that the Green Zone in Nicosia is still basically where it was when established in 1963, I accept that this is never going to happen, especially not to me.)
Like the original story, October’s book is divided into seven chapters. In a really interesting first chapter, October insists that the story should in fact be seen as educational, as a dramatisation of the original Travels of Marco Polo with a didactic agenda. My instinct is that this is over-analysis; the purpose of the drama is the drama. If this had not been Hugo season, I’d have read the Travels too to make up my own mind. In any case I have acquired it and will get to it sooner or later. October goes further into detail on both the Reithian missionof the BBC and the extent to which the original Travels can be regarded as fictional anyway. It’s one of the most interesting sections I have read of any of the books in this series.
The second chapter looks at the soundscape of the episode, the low visibility of the Doctor and the voice of Marco Polo as the central character and audience identification figure – very unusual for Old Who, rarely done in New Who.
The third chapter looks at the visuals of the story, especially the camerawork. October insists that the lost visuals impact of the series was particularly good. This is frustratingly difficult to prove, as all we have are a few still shots and people’s memories, but it’s good to hear.
The fourth chapter has October reflecting on the fallibility of his own memory of having seen the show twice, and on the way in which viewers experience television. He then veers off into a fascinating sidetrack on the memory abilities of the historical Marco Polo, based on the identifiable mistakes in the Travels – he does not mention the Great Wall, for instance.
The fifth chapter looks at travel as a narrative device, and again invokes the Travels as a point of comparison for how we experience the Doctor Who story.
The sixth chapter looks at the character of the Khan, and the portrayal of rulership and of the Orient in the story.
The seventh chapter combines three important themes: Marco Polo‘s portrayal of gender, the reliability of the narrator, and how fans have worked to retain and reconstruct the lost story.
It’s one of the good ones in this series, and made me think a lot more about the story than I had expected.
Dene October’s Black Archive on Marco Polo is one of the longer ones in this series. He makes a very strong argument that this story, which most fans like without necessarily loving, should be considered as one of the peaks of Old Who. Sadly, those of us who did not see it will need to rely on his word. It is enhanced by the fact that October actually saw Marco Polo twice – when originally broadcast by the BBC, and then again a year after in Australia where his family had meantime moved. He therefore has a huge advantage over most of the rest of us who will probably never see any of the seven lost episodes; if they were findable, they would surely have been found by now.
(As I said in a previous entry, I used to have fantasies of some day opening a long-shut cupboard in the Green Zone in Cyprus to find a bunch of Doctor Who tapes that had been abandoned by some luckless TV technician in 1974, but in fact now that I’ve established that the Green Zone in Nicosia is still basically where it was when established in 1963, I accept that this is never going to happen, especially not to me.)
Like the original story, October’s book is divided into seven chapters. In a really interesting first chapter, October insists that the story should in fact be seen as educational, as a dramatisation of the original Travels of Marco Polo with a didactic agenda. My instinct is that this is over-analysis; the purpose of the drama is the drama. If this had not been Hugo season, I’d have read the Travels too to make up my own mind. In any case I have acquired it and will get to it sooner or later. October goes further into detail on both the Reithian missionof the BBC and the extent to which the original Travels can be regarded as fictional anyway. It’s one of the most interesting sections I have read of any of the books in this series.
The second chapter looks at the soundscape of the episode, the low visibility of the Doctor and the voice of Marco Polo as the central character and audience identification figure – very unusual for Old Who, rarely done in New Who.
The third chapter looks at the visuals of the story, especially the camerawork. October insists that the lost visuals impact of the series was particularly good. This is frustratingly difficult to prove, as all we have are a few still shots and people’s memories, but it’s good to hear.
The fourth chapter has October reflecting on the fallibility of his own memory of having seen the show twice, and on the way in which viewers experience television. He then veers off into a fascinating sidetrack on the memory abilities of the historical Marco Polo, based on the identifiable mistakes in the Travels – he does not mention the Great Wall, for instance.
The fifth chapter looks at travel as a narrative device, and again invokes the Travels as a point of comparison for how we experience the Doctor Who story.
The sixth chapter looks at the character of the Khan, and the portrayal of rulership and of the Orient in the story.
The seventh chapter combines three important themes: Marco Polo‘s portrayal of gender, the reliability of the narrator, and how fans have worked to retain and reconstruct the lost story.
It’s one of the good ones in this series, and made me think a lot more about the story than I had expected.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews