Timeless Adventures (10 page)

Lime Grove Studios had been built in 1915 in Shepherd’s Bush as a film studio by the Gaumont Film Company and purchased by the BBC in 1949 as a ‘temporary measure’ while the purpose-built Television Centre was constructed in nearby White City. While Lime Grove had been a state-of-the-art studio following a refurbishment by Gaumont-British in 1932, it was something of a technological relic in 1963. Despite that, the studio continued to be used by the BBC. Verity Lambert was not happy about trying to make an innovative new science-fiction show in such circumstances. The studios were small and difficult to light, given the out-of-date equipment available. Memos from the time reveal that, just like the BBC’s original purchase of the studio, use of Lime Grove Studio D for recording
Doctor Who
was intended to be a temporary situation, with the use of studios at Television Centre or Riverside (another small BBC studio) planned. For one thing, the police-box prop being designed for use as the exterior of the TARDIS had to be slightly scaled down from the real thing (then still widely seen on the streets of London), as it would have been too large to fit into the lifts at Lime Grove.

As noted, with video editing unavailable, each 25-minute episode of
Doctor Who
was recorded more or less ‘as live’ on a Friday evening across about 75 minutes, anywhere between two to four weeks in advance of transmission. Anything more complicated than dialogue scenes (like a dynamic fight sequence or a complicated model shot) was captured on film the previous week, usually at the BBC-owned Ealing Studios. Everything else was shot, usually in chronological order, on the Friday evening following a week of script read-throughs, rehearsals and an in-studio dress rehearsal earlier on the same day. Mistakes were to be avoided, although the £100 videotape used could be rewound to the beginning of a fluffed scene and recorded over if a retake was required. These tapes could later be recycled, accounting for the loss of over 100 original recordings of black-and-white episodes of
Doctor Who
.

These primitive production conditions explain why vast alien vistas (the Dalek city on Skaro in
The Daleks
) and historical cultures (
The Aztecs
) were all rather more limited than the imagination of the writers intended. Thankfully, the imagination of the audience could usually be relied upon to fill in the illusion, creating in the mind’s eye the kind of amazing worlds that black-and-white 405-line television transmissions could only suggest.

The result was that
Doctor Who
had to be a dialogue-heavy series, in which the fantasy situation was often conveyed in spoken conversations rather than shown. The drama was mostly framed theatrestyle, square on from the audience point of view, with the camera and the characters moving left to right (and vice versa) across frame rather than backwards and forwards into the depth of field (as Studio D at Lime Grove allowed for very little in the way of depth in set building). This was one reason why attempts to realise fully-formed alien worlds, like that in
The Web Planet
, were abandoned, while later episodes featuring the ‘base-under-siege’ situation succeed. These adventures were built around one large, significant set that could be accommodated in Lime Grove Studio D, but could be shot from a diversity of angles to convey the drama and generate novelty from episode to episode. It also allowed the show to stay within its limited budget.

Post-production work on these early
Doctor Who
episodes was minimal. With two or three sections of videotape (with minor line fluffs and clumsy movements left in, as retakes were not economical) recorded in order to make up each 25-minute episode, all that had to be added was music (and sometimes even this was played in ‘as live’ during the studio recording) and sound effects, with very limited special-effects or (primitive) electronic-effects work being done. If additional post-production work or editing was required, the finished episode could be transferred to 35mm film through a process called ‘telerecording’ (which basically consisted of pointing a film camera at a video screen and recording the video image). This allowed for the option of more extensive editing on the less expensive film copy if necessary, but, more often than not, was done so the costly videotape could be reused to record a future episode. The film recordings were also useful to create duplicate copies for sales to foreign television stations, as transmission from film was much more common in the 1960s than from videotape. This process, though, would prove to be significant in saving many episodes of
Doctor Who
that were otherwise deleted by the BBC in the late-1970s.

By 1967,
Doctor Who
had changed dramatically. The Doctor had a new face and personality, as character actor Patrick Troughton took over from William Hartnell. Troughton had played Robin Hood in a 1950s TV series and appeared several times in
Dr Finlay’s Casebook
on the BBC. In 1963, he’d featured in the fantasy film
Jason and the
Argonauts
. Cast to bring new life to the series, Troughton’s take on the Doctor was dubbed a ‘cosmic hobo’ by Sydney Newman. His arrival was little remarked upon, and certainly did not provoke the press frenzy that would later be attached to the series’ regular change of lead actor.
The Daily Sketch
was one of the few newspapers to pay much attention to the curious change, referring to ‘the strange affair of The Changing Face of Doctor Who. The time travelling Doctor is back as usual on BBC1 this afternoon – and advance reports say that his return will be an explosive event to woo the kids away from Guy Fawkes bonfires. But something is very much out of the ordinary – instead of being played by William Hartnell, the Doctor is spooky character actor Patrick Troughton. When veteran Bill Hartnell decided to drop out it could have meant the end for
Doctor Who
. Scriptwriters have been turning mental somersaults to explain why a new hero is appearing, without warning, to young fans. Full details of his debut are being kept a secret, until today.’

There was no suggestion that Patrick Troughton should play the same character as William Hartnell, even though they were both portraying the same Doctor. The critically acclaimed Troughton took the path of playing up the Doctor’s whimsical nature in response to Hartnell’s perceived severity. His ‘cosmic hobo’ version of the Doctor was someone whose clowning meant he’d be underestimated by his adversaries. He connected much more with his human companions, too, as he was somewhat less alien and a lot less threatening than Hartnell’s incarnation had been.

Producer Innes Lloyd, who’d been running the show since
The Celestial Toymaker
and had been instrumental in removing Hartnell, was now firmly in charge. The budget-busting experimental shows of the past, like
The Web Planet
, were dumped in favour of a handful of more manageable and affordable formulaic story templates. The main format for the remainder of the decade was the ‘base-undersiege’ story, in which an isolated community (often the staff of a scientific outpost or institution) is attacked by an alien menace, with only the Doctor and his friends to help. A lot of these outposts were either on Earth, nearby on the Moon, or else in orbiting space stations (locations also featured regularly in the revived twenty-first-century series, for many of the same reasons). This allowed for economy in set building and in the creation of environments. Lloyd appeared to have been heavily influenced by the Hollywood movie
The Thing from Another World
(1951) that showed a scientific and military community under attack from a revived alien creature.

Similarly, the series moved on from creating alien cultures, as in the Hartnell era, and relied instead on the shock value of various ‘monsters’. Troughton’s time in the TARDIS is remembered as one in which the series ruthlessly exploited old and new monsters, with return engagements commanding viewer loyalty, shown by the reliably consistent viewing figures of seven million. Lloyd relied less on the Daleks to draw viewers, featuring them in Troughton’s debut story
The Power of the Daleks
to bridge the change of lead actor, and then only once more in
The Evil of the Daleks
, a story that narratively set up the Daleks’ ‘final end’ by wiping them out. This was due to Dalek creator Terry Nation’s hopes of spinning off a separate Dalek TV series, and his pursuit of this would keep the Daleks off screen until 1972.

Troughton’s time on the series is defined by its reliance on formula and sequels: the Doctor encounters the Cybermen four times in just three years (1966–69), with return appearances for the armoured Martians known as Ice Warriors and the robotic Yeti helping to build up a feeling of expectation and excitement in viewers. Many one-off creatures were also featured, including the Macra (giant crabs who made a brief return in the David Tennant adventure
Gridlock
), killer robots called Quarks in
The Dominators
and the Krotons, crystalline entities feeding off human intelligence. This approach gave the show a distinctly different identity from previous years, beyond the change of lead actor. However, it was a restrictive format that could not last too long. Regular change – in front of and behind the cameras – would become part of
Doctor Who
’s unique signature.

One very noticeable effect of this revised approach to the series was the end of the purely historical adventures.
Doctor Who
had abandoned long ago any pretence at fulfilling its original educational remit. Shortly after the Daleks arrived, the bug-eyed monsters took over. A rapid progression of Dalek wannabes (Mechanoids, war machines) and ever more fanciful alien creatures (Voord, Sensorites, Zarbi and Menoptra) continued into the Troughton period with a parade of menacing monsters. Innes Lloyd disliked the history tales, as did many of the viewers. After Troughton’s second story,
The Highlanders
, the purely historical story (with no science-fiction elements apart from the Doctor, his companions and the TARDIS) lay dormant for 15 years, only returning briefly when Peter Davison took on the leading role.

The Highlanders
was notable for one other significant reason: the arrival of Jamie McCrimmon (Frazer Hines), one of the Doctor’s longestlasting companions. The role of the companion had changed during the three years the series had been on air, moving from the audience-identification figures of Susan and her teachers to an alternative team of three, each of whom served a key narrative purpose. While Hartnell’s era worked through a variety of unsuccessful Susan replacements (Vicki, Dodo, Polly), the removal of Ian and Barbara allowed for a more fundamental change. The mid-1960s line-up comprising the Doctor, lost astronaut Steven Taylor (Peter Purves) and rescued space orphan Vicki (Maureen O’Brien) would serve as a template for some of the series’ most successful character combinations over the years.

These three symbolised the brains (the Doctor), the brawn (Steven/Jamie) and the emotions (Vicki/Victoria/Zoe), the acceptable gender stereotypes of the period. Thus the Doctor could solve the problem in an intellectual way, the young male companion would function as a strong-arm physical resource, while the female companion could humanise the alien Doctor and (more often) scream at the monster or be captured to await rescue. It was a formula settled on in the Troughton period following the departure of Ben and Polly in
The Faceless Ones
, leaving the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria Waterfield (Deborah Watling) – and later Zoe Heriot (Wendy Padbury) – to see out the 1960s.

Later years would see this line-up recreated many times, with Jon Pertwee’s Doctor teamed up with UNIT soldiers or the Brigadier, and with Liz Shaw (Caroline John), Jo Grant (Katy Manning) and Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen). The early Tom Baker era saw him teamed with Sarah Jane and Harry Sullivan (Ian Marter), a throwback to the Ian- or Steven-type character, and, later, with Leela (Louise Jameson), a primitive warrior, who took on the physical role. Later still, the Doctor’s robot dog K-9 was often used as the mindless muscle, a weapon as a pet. Even in the twenty-first century, the formula still proved useful when Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor, shellshocked from the Time War, came to rely on Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) for the strong-arm stuff, while moulding young shop girl Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) into an intergalactic warrior.

Frazer Hines proved to be an effective partner for Troughton’s Doctor, sticking with him right up to the end of the 1960s (Troughton would reappear in the series, alongside Hartnell and his own successor, Jon Pertwee, in 1973’s tenth-anniversary story,
The Three Doctors
, while both Troughton and Hines returned separately in 1983 for the anniversary adventure
The Five Doctors
, and again – this time together – in 1985 for
The Two Doctors
, indicating their ongoing popularity with the public and fans).

The Troughton era of the show presented an attempt to build a coherent universe, although there’s no explicit sense of continuity. It would have been possible for casual viewers to have built a sense of a future Earth ‘history’ from the Doctor’s various late-1960s adventures. This future history consisted of moon bases and wheels in space, with mankind slowly spreading out among the stars, bringing their own problems with them, like space ‘pirates’, and encountering new threats, like the Cybermen or the Ice Warriors. The technological achievements of humanity depicted in
Doctor Who
in the 1960s could be seen as the ultimate results of Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s technological ‘white heat’ writ large across the solar system.

The threats encountered from space were representative of genuine issues perceived to be threatening Britain in the late-1960s. The ‘base-under-siege’ strand of storytelling in
Doctor Who
might be seen as a reaction to immigration issues facing the nation. Those invaders from space (Cybermen, Ice Warriors, Yeti) could easily be the newest post-war wave of foreign immigrants coming to take up residence in the UK. The island of Britain was, at least according to political mavericks like right-wing Conservative MP Enoch Powell, a ‘base-under-siege’ itself.