Timeless Adventures (11 page)

Just before
Doctor Who
debuted on TV, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 was passed, changing the nature of immigration to Britain. In the years after the Second World War, immigrants had come from former British colonies or newer Commonwealth countries to set up residence in the UK. There were few restrictions. Following the 1962 law, however, immigration controls were applied requiring those without directly issued UK passports to hold work permits or else have relatives already resident in the UK. Since Indian independence in 1947, more than 60,000 Indian immigrants had arrived in the UK, many working in the service sector, especially in small retail shops and post offices. In the post-war years, many displaced Eastern Europeans would also make their way to the UK to live.

This arrival in large numbers to major metropolitan centres like London, Birmingham and Glasgow of peoples from other cultures had made the UK urban population aware of the ‘alien other’ among them. It often became the aim of new immigrants to assimilate, to become just like those born in the UK. English language and customs would be learned and would be passed on to children, often in preference to the family’s original native language or culture. This assimilation of immigrant communities would, in part, be responded to by second-generation immigrants, many of whom would show greater interest in their ‘roots’ or the cultures from which their parents or grandparents came. There is an echo in the Cybermen’s threat to humanity that ‘you will become like us’ through cybernetic conversion.

The political and social issues surrounding immigration came to a head in the UK in April 1968, just as the Cybermen were invading
The Wheel in Space
. On 20 April 1968 (just a week before
The Wheel in Space
began), MP Enoch Powell made a controversial speech in Birmingham, in which he warned his audience of what he believed would be the consequences of continued unchecked immigration from the Commonwealth to Britain. It became dubbed the ‘rivers of blood’ speech, after his use of a quote from Roman poet Virgil. The speech, responding to unrestricted immigration and the implementation of the Race Relations Act of 1968, cost Powell his shadow-cabinet post, but it brought the simmering issues of immigration and race relations to the forefront of the political agenda in Britain.

The repeated invasion narratives used in
Doctor Who
in the late-1960s reflected the real fear of ‘the other’ or the unknown that British people may have been feeling in their real lives as they adapted to their new friends and neighbours. Although never referred to directly in the series, as they would be in cutting-edge comedy shows like
Till Death Do Us Part
and even
Steptoe and Son
, issues of foreign/alien invasion, assimilation and domination thread themselves through the
Doctor Who
of the 1960s in a way that makes the stories told inseparable from the politics and culture of Britain at the time. This engagement with real-world issues in the guise of space fantasy goes a long way to explaining the inherent popularity of the show and the connection it was able to build with British television viewers, a connection it would eventually carelessly abdicate in the 1980s.

There are other echoes of the political realities of the 1960s in the stories and iconography of Troughton’s
Doctor Who
. The alternative story to the ‘base-under-siege’ tale was the alien invasion of Earth, drawn from the experiment of
The War Machines
. Instead of an isolated outpost, the invaders would be seen in recognisable contemporary settings, often marching past national landmarks in the way the Daleks had in
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
in 1964. After battling his signature monsters, the Cybermen, on
The Moonbase
(where they attempt to destroy the Earth by commandeering the Moon’s weather-control system), uncovering their tombs in the far future (in a pastiche of the classic Universal ‘Mummy’ movies, remade by Britain’s Hammer Films in 1959, with sequels running through the 1960s into the 1970s) and fighting them on
The Wheel in Space
, the Doctor faced the Cybermen on Earth in
The Invasion
.

Prior to this, the soldiers-versus-invaders formula of
The War Machines
had been repeated in
The Web of Fear
, the London-set sequel to
The Abominable Snowmen
, which had introduced the robotic Yeti. Repeating the trick pulled off previously with the Daleks, the alien creatures were brought from their remote location (Skaro/the Himalayas) directly to the centre of British political and social power (contemporary 1960s London). Yeti battling British soldiers in the London Underground was an image retained by viewers for many years to come (and became the basis for a famous Jon Pertwee quote about bringing the strange and unusual into conflict with the everyday, which he characterised as ‘finding a Yeti on the loo in Tooting Bec’).

Soldiers in action on British streets had not been seen since the Second World War, but it would become a very familiar sight for BBC viewers based in Northern Ireland. The ‘Troubles’, stretching from the 1960s to the 1990s, were the latest manifestation of a conflict between Republican and Loyalist forces dating back to the 1600s and the partition of Ireland early in the twentieth century. British television audiences would become used to seeing British troops in recognisable urban environments, from Aden to Belfast. The final episodes of
The Invasion
revealed the mysterious invaders to be Cybermen, and the involvement of UNIT (looking pretty much like the British Army) presaged the real-world deployment in Northern Ireland.

The United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT, reconfigured by the twenty-first-century version of the series into the Unified Intelligence Taskforce to avoid any association with the UN itself) had its roots in
The Web of Fear
, but would continue to feature in the programme right through until the last regular Russell T Davies scripted episode,
Journey’s End
, in 2008. The appearance of Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney, previously Space Security Agent Brett Vyon in
The Daleks’ Master Plan
) commanding troops against the Yeti invasion led to his reappearance (this time as a Brigadier) as the commander of UNIT in
The Invasion
.

UNIT supposedly operated under the auspices of the United Nations, and was tasked with the job of battling and resisting alien invasions of Earth wherever they were found (oddly enough, usually within daytrip travelling distance of BBC Television Centre). This military force would prove very useful to the Doctor (especially in the 1970s, following his regeneration into Jon Pertwee and exile to Earth, when it seemed as though the planet was being invaded every few weeks). The use of the military wasn’t restricted to being a solution to conflict (who else could repel these alien invaders en masse?): they were often useful authority figures that the Doctor could come into conflict with, thus playing out the series’ often opposing ideologies.

Another worldwide political-military threat of the late-1960s reflected in
Doctor Who
’s storytelling was that of nuclear annihilation. The ending of the Second World War with the deployment of two nuclear weapons by the USA against Japan haunted post-war politics and popular culture, and
Doctor Who
was no exception. Ultimate weapons had been and would be referenced many times: in
The Tenth Planet
, mankind threatened to unleash the Z-bomb on the invading Cybermen.

The fear of atomic destruction (or of the misuse of nuclear power) was represented in
Doctor Who
– in a way that echoed the Japanese Godzilla/Gojira movies – in a series of threats from the deep:
The Underwater Menace, The Macra Terror
and
Fury from the Deep. Godzilla
(1954) is largely seen as a metaphor for the effect of the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan. In the movie, atomic testing awakens the slumbering lizard-like creature that then wreaks havoc on Odo Island and Tokyo. While
The Underwater Menace
is a ‘destruction of Atlantis’ story (the first of three alternative noncompatible versions of that myth presented in
Doctor Who
TV adventures), drawing on the cliff-hanger serial
Undersea Kingdom
, it also features mad professor Zaroff (Joseph Furst), who has a crazy plan. In an era when the discovery of North Sea oil was big news (and would fuel increasing Scottish nationalism as ownership of the resources was disputed), undersea drilling was an accepted form of exploration. Nutty Professor Zaroff, however, plans to use a nuclear reactor to crack the Earth’s crust and drain the oceans. In the way of many stock comic-book villains, he never really explains his motivations.

This story was soon followed by
The Macra Terror
, featuring giant, gas-guzzling, crab-like creatures who secretly dominate a totalitarian pleasure camp (a kind of ersatz Butlins, a popular holiday destination in 1950s and 1960s Britain). The exploitation of mineral wealth (the gas needed by the Macra to survive) vies with the fears of brainwashing and totalitarianism. Finally,
Fury from the Deep
more explicitly tackles the off-shore oil and gas industry, with the pipes carrying the gas also home to a form of parasitic, intelligent seaweed. The fear that North Sea oil mining might uncover something unknown, in the way that atomic testing had awakened Godzilla, was not entirely unreasonable. In the 1960s, the undersea world was as much an alien environment as outer space, one being brought to television regularly in all its weird wonder by Jacques Cousteau. In the 1960s, Cousteau had fought against the dumping of nuclear waste at sea, for fear of its impact on living organisms and the environment. While it was highly unlikely that nuclear-mutated creatures, like Atlantean fish people, giant crab monsters or intelligent seaweed might emerge from the depths, the health of the undersea environment was becoming a genuine popular concern.

These examples show how, through the late 1960s,
Doctor Who
repeatedly exploited political, social and scientific fears that were prevalent in British society for the purposes of entertaining an actively engaged television audience. It may have looked like a science-fiction adventure show in which an oddball, eccentric but well-meaning alien tackled creatures from outer space, but
Doctor Who
was taking note of the audience’s real-world fears and reflecting them back, often with fantastic solutions attached.

The emphasis on formulaic ‘base-under-siege’ tales left little room for the creation of fully-realised weird alien cultures that had been a hallmark of the Hartnell years, or indeed for fantasy-based ‘sideways’ adventures like
The Celestial Toyroom
. The singular exception came towards the end of Troughton’s run in
The Mind Robber
, a meta-text about the creation of stories themselves. Written (mostly) by Peter Ling (who co-created soap opera
Crossroads
),
The Mind Robber
sees the Doctor and friends deposited in the ‘Land of Fiction’ where they encounter a series of literary characters brought to life. Those encountered include Rapunzel, Lancelot, Gulliver, Medusa and futuristic superhero Karkus, from a comic strip (from the far-future year 2000) known to Zoe. After several fantastic, threatening and confusing adventures, it is revealed that the imaginary story-world is controlled by a ‘Master of Fiction’. He’s a human, kidnapped from his magazine-adventure-serial-writing duties on Earth in 1926 and plugged into the computer that generates this ‘Land of Fiction’. Battling with this Master (not the same character later created as an adversary for the Doctor in the 1970s, despite fan attempts to reconcile the two), the Doctor attempts to take control of the telling of the story himself, by dictating alternative outcomes to the computer. The entire adventure is a satire of
Doctor Who
’s own serialised storytelling, even down to the production-line nature of telling an ongoing story. The previous adventure’s troubled production process resulted in a standalone opening instalment (which Ling did not write), using the basic studio and some second-hand robot costumes to create a 25-minute prelude set in a featureless white void.

The struggle that the show’s writers had in the 1960s to keep up with the pace of production was evident as Troughton’s time came to a close with the ten-episode epic adventure
The War Games
. Emerging as a solution to behind-the-scenes production problems, writers Malcolm ‘Mac’ Hulke and Terrance Dicks started
The War Games
as a serial-style story that saw the Doctor and his friends encountering soldiers from different historical eras in each episode, before coming to the realisation that they’ve been kidnapped by interfering aliens and placed together in a fight to the death. By the end of episode nine, the Doctor realises he can’t solve the problem himself (the villainous ‘War Chief’ is a member of his own species gone bad, like the time-meddling ‘Monk’). He calls in the Time Lords – this is the first serial to name the Doctor’s own people – to help, knowing that it will likely result in his own capture. The final episode sees the situation with the War Chief resolved, and climaxes with the Doctor put on trial for breaking the Time Lords’ non-interference policy. The Doctor argues his case passionately, having developed from his initial non-involvement with the struggle of the cavemen in
An Unearthly Child
and disengagement with the need to defeat the Daleks in
The Daleks
to declaring, at his trial, that, ‘There is evil in the universe that must be fought.’ Accepting his justification, the Time Lords decide that the Doctor could be useful, agreeing he ‘may have a part to play’ in the defeat of galactic evils. They exile him to Earth at a time in its history (the end of the twentieth century) when it is considered to be under particular threat. As part of his sentence, the Time Lords impose another change of appearance on the Doctor, resulting in his regeneration. His companions, Zoe and Jamie, are returned to their respective times, their minds wiped of all memory of their adventures with the Doctor except for their first encounter.