Timeless Adventures (13 page)

The newly re-tooled
Doctor Who
debuted to eight million viewers, a significant leap upwards from the five million who saw Patrick Troughton’s exit in
The War Games
the year before. That success had been aided considerably by plenty of press coverage, something Troughton had avoided, and a
Radio Times
cover. Now Letts and Dicks knew they’d have a decent chance to develop the series over a longer term than they feared when they took up their jobs.

Jon Pertwee’s first season consisted of only four adventures, spread across 25 episodes. Following the four-episode introduction,
Spearhead from Space
, each of the remaining stories was seven episodes long, and some of them outstayed their welcome. However, this was a budgetary consideration, in that sets and locations could be stretched further if the stories ran for more episodes. It was an approach that was deemed not to be successful, despite an average audience for the season in excess of seven million viewers, and it was largely abandoned in future years.

The three stories that make up the remainder of season seven have much in common, in theme and approach.
Doctor Who and the Silurians
(the only time the show’s title was used in a story title) sees a revived race of lizard men lay claim to Earth. While the Doctor engages in détente (echoing the real-world Cold War conflict between the West and the Soviet Union), the Brigadier prepares to use force and blow the ‘monsters’ back to prehistoric times. Despite the Doctor’s moral outrage, the Brigadier (representing the military establishment) ultimately wins.

The serial’s writer Malcolm Hulke, a committed left-wing dramatist, had told Terrance Dicks that the new
Doctor Who
format only allowed for two stories: the alien invasion and the mad scientist. The outline for the Silurian story was an attempt to breach these limitations by having the ‘aliens’ as the original natural possessors of the Earth: they’re already here. This allowed the story to deal with issues of Britain’s colonial past: newly-evolved mankind has colonised the Silurians’ home (while they slept), but the Silurians now plan to do the same to mankind in retaliation.

Hulke also explored some topics that would recur throughout the Pertwee episodes, and which became hallmarks of the era. The Doctor, throughout these five years, is played as a very moral hero, outraged by injustice and willing to stand up against authority, even those who nominally ‘employ’ him. The end of deference (destroyed in the 1960s through the rise of the new youth culture and television satire like
That Was The Week That Was
, as well as political scandals like Profumo) was heavily reflected in the series’ depiction of politicians and civil servants as bumbling no-hopers at best and open-tocorruption, self-serving bureaucrats at worst. The military were to come off no better, depicted in the Silurian tale and many thereafter as ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ types, while UNIT appears to be staffed by buffoons, such as recurring characters Yates and Benton.

Hulke was also an uncredited rewrite man on the next story,
The Ambassadors of Death
, originally drafted by one-time series’ script editor David Whitaker in the late-1960s but adapted for the show’s new 1970s format. This plays like a remix of themes from the previous story: humans are terrified of radioactive alien ambassadors from outer space (more intergalactic immigrants) and a scientific institution is undergoing a crisis (as with the Wenley Moor facility in the Silurian story). The overlay this time is the iconography of a late-1960s, early-1970s British spy thriller, like the early James Bond movies, or Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer series, especially
The Ipcress File
(1965). This was another sign of the growing maturity of
Doctor Who
, moving away from material aimed exclusively at children and including genres and references that teenagers and adults could equally appreciate.

Finally, wrapping up the show’s first colour season was
Inferno
. Again, the story features a scientific institution in crisis (the Inferno project, drilling to Earth’s core in search of a new source of energy). The Doctor lives through the events of this story twice, once in a parallel universe where his friends from UNIT are all evil fascists and the planet is destroyed by the Inferno project’s drilling (but only after primordial ooze escapes from the planet’s core and turns a few people into hairy throwbacks to our primitive ancestors called ‘primords’). A recurring theme of this season – distrust of science and scientists – features prominently in this story, written by Don Houghton. By 1970, the North Sea oil discoveries of the 1960s were being actively exploited with the construction of active drilling platforms that would begin delivering oil and gas to the mainland via pipeline in 1971. The drilling project in
Inferno
tapped directly into the era’s news headlines, while unleashing the primords brought the season back full circle to the ancient lizard men of the Silurian episodes.

These long stories, at seven weeks duration each, may have been a money-saving gambit, but in storytelling terms they suited neither Barry Letts nor Terrance Dicks. By the final episode of
Inferno
, viewing figures were right back where they’d been with the last episode of
The War Games
, at just 5.5 million. Additionally, each new story’s first episode proved to be the highest rated, encouraging the producers to believe that more ‘first nights’ would help the series. An increase in the number of stories per season would therefore be required.

The following year would see
Doctor Who
adopt a style that was much more representative of the way Letts and Dicks wanted to run the show. The season kicked off with the introduction of an adversary for the Doctor who would prove to be the most important addition to the series’ mythology since the creation of the Time Lords. Feeling the Doctor was akin to Sherlock Holmes, Letts decided he needed a Moriarty, resulting in the creation of the Master (Roger Delgado). A renegade Time Lord, he was the Doctor’s evil mirror image. The presence of the Master in each of the eighth season’s five stories gave some justification for the repeated invasions of Earth as he teamed up with the invaders to pursue his own agenda.
Terror of the Autons
opened the season, and was almost a direct remake of
Spearhead from Space
, with the addition of the Master and the storytelling tweaked to suit Letts’ and Dicks’ growing social and political agenda. Alongside the first appearance of the Master, the story standardised the UNIT set-up that would be a recurring element.

Additionally, Jo Grant (Katy Manning) was introduced as a dizzy UNIT operative who becomes attached to the Doctor. She was in total opposition to the knowledgeable, more mature Liz Shaw, who had proven difficult to write for and was unceremoniously written out. As a scientist, she had been expected to understand what the Doctor was talking about, thus robbing the audience of an identification figure whose major function was to ask questions clarifying the sometimes complicated plots or concepts. Jo Grant fulfilled this role admirably.

Keeping faith with Sydney Newman’s initial impetus, Letts and Dicks were determined to continue to develop the political content of the series, reflecting British society in the guise of science-fiction adventure drama, as had been the case in the late-1960s. ‘
Doctor Who
always tended to deal with fairly serious matters,’ confirmed Terrance Dicks, ‘very often not in a didactic, pre-planned way. I’ve always said that what a writer thinks and feels, what his opinions are and the general climate of the time, they’re going to creep into the show by osmosis.’

This resulted in Pertwee-era
Doctor Who
becoming a more politically committed drama hugely resonant with the times, while still being entertaining and emotionally engaging. This resonance also attracted big audiences:
Doctor Who
was not simply entertainment, but fantasy drama that related to viewers’ experience of the real world. During season eight the show tackled issues like prison policy (
The Mind of Evil
), nuclear power (
The Claws of Axos
), the fall-out from decades of British colonialism (
The Colony in Space
) and the rise of alternative religion (
The Daemons
), all in the guise of disposable, episodic, action-adventure television.

Both
Spearhead from Space
and its sequel/remake
Terror of the Autons
tackled the consumer society that was in full bloom in the early 1970s. They take the sudden ubiquitous availability of plastic (due to the new products being developed from oil) and show how newly mass-produced goods may not be good for the population after all. In
Spearhead
, a small, family-run plastics company is taken over and turned into a more efficient automated outfit (a metaphor for the collapse and rebuilding of British industry), but it’s all a front for an alien invasion.
Terror of the Autons
retold the same story, with the addition of the Master, but upped the ante as writer Robert Holmes terrified the nation’s children with a series of plastic products (including much-loved toys) that turn on people, killing them.

Colony in Space
, in addition to the obvious colonial theme, introduced a concern for the environment that would become central to
Doctor Who
in the 1970s. Environmentalism had risen up the political agenda, so the show reflected the interests of its audience and key writers. Later adventures like
Frontier in Space
,
The Green Death
and
Invasion of the Dinosaurs
continued to interrogate environmentalism from a variety of points of view, exploring one of the hot-button political topics of the times.
Colony in Space
sees human beings of the future leaving a ruined, over-populated planet to start fresh elsewhere. Colonising other planets is not an easy task, and the inhabitants of Uxarieus find themselves enduring a harsh existence, caught between Interplanetary Mining Corporation, the exploitative company that funds and supplies the expedition, and those being colonised. Although, superficially,
Colony in Space
resembles a landgrab Western, Hulke’s script starts off as a political parable that is thrown off track by the need to service the arrival, in the final two episodes, of the season’s recurring villain, the Master.

Regarded as a classic by fans of the show,
The Daemons
tackled the 1970s social phenomenon of alternative ‘new-age’ beliefs, wrapping them up in an alien invasion straight out of Arthur C Clarke’s
Childhood’s End
. The 1960s had seen the dawning of the Age of Aquarius (largely thanks to the hippie musical, 1967’s
Hair
), but things had taken a sour turn with a series of political assassinations and the Charles Manson killings in 1969. It was a time of changing values, and the so-called ‘New Age Movement’ came to symbolise a switch from materialism to spirituality. In
Doctor Who
, Satanic magic in
The
Daemons
turns out to be no more than very advanced science (Arthur C Clarke had once posited that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’, while his novel
Childhood’s End
revealed the arriving aliens to have an uncanny resemblance to Satan).
The Daemons
’ idea that powerful aliens had visited Earth in ancient times and left their technology behind unearthed a strand of Erich Von Daniken-style thinking in
Doctor Who
that recurred in several stories, and was also a very prominent concern of 1970s pop culture. In a series of best-selling books, starting with
Chariots of the Gods
? in 1968, controversial Swiss author Von Daniken had suggested that humankind had been the beneficiary in ancient times of visitations from advanced alien civilisations. In coming years,
Death to the Daleks
and the Tom Baker serial
Pyramids of Mars
would feature elements of Von Daniken’s ideas.

By the end of
Doctor Who
’s eighth year, Letts and Dicks had manoeuvred the show away from the gritty ‘realism’ of the Doctor’s exile to Earth. Costs had been held under control by utilising the formula of Earth-centric adventures and by featuring the regular UNIT ‘family’ as a springboard for stories. However, Letts was not prepared to be so limited, and in
Colony in Space
gave the Doctor his first off-Earth adventure for two years. It was the shape of things to come as
Doctor Who
continued to adapt, thrive and reflect the political and social concerns of its almost eight million regular viewers.

Doctor Who
had always been an outlet for experimentation in the way television was produced. The technical demands of the show had proven to be a major factor in the delay in getting the series on air in 1963. Since then, the very nature of the Doctor’s adventures had called for a wide range of innovation in special visual-effects techniques. The black-and-white era allowed for electronic ‘in-lay’ effects to be achieved in the studio, giving the Doctor and his companions the chance to gaze out over a (model) Dalek city through an in-studio composite shot in
The Daleks
. This combined the output of two separate cameras, looking at two distinct scenes, one a model, one live action. The merged scene provided the visual ‘wow’ factor that the series increasingly relied upon in creating each new alien environment. This was by no means new, being an old film technique prominently used in 1933’s
King Kong
and many other movies.

With the arrival of colour in the 1970s,
Doctor Who
had access to a new BBC technology: colour separation overlay (CSO), the television equivalent of modern cinema’s blue-screen or green-screen special effects. A colour version of the electronic ‘in-lay’ technique, CSO would be fervently (some would say recklessly) embraced by producer Barry Letts as a way of both stretching
Doctor Who’
s shrinking budget (in the deflationary economic climate of the 1970s) and of realising the otherwise unrealisable on the television screen. Letts even appeared in a BBC training film enthusiastically demonstrating the uses of CSO in drama. The indiscriminate way in which CSO was used was largely responsible for the distinctive, colourful ‘look’ of 1970s
Doctor Who.