Timeless Adventures (21 page)

Having built the set of the spaceship featured in
Underworld
, it became clear that the remaining sets would be unaffordable, as would any complicated location shooting. Williams’ solution was to fall back on the use of CSO. Instead of filming the heroes traversing sets designed to look like caves, or film them on location in real caves, the choice was made to shoot everyone in front of a studio green-screen and insert background cave photographs to complete the scene. The result is a near-unwatchable visual mess. Despite that, the audience increased across the story from episode one’s 8.9 million viewers to episode four’s 11.7 million, which just proves that
Doctor Who
is at its best when story driven and character driven, rather than effects driven, and that a discerning audience can ignore poor realisation (or at least they could in the late 1970s) in order to enjoy a well-told story.

Williams and Read also stole another idea from the Barry Letts playbook: they wanted to end their inaugural season with an epic adventure that would have a dramatic effect on the Doctor. The result was
The Invasion of Time
, an inadequately realised story cobbled together in a hurry to replace another, clearly unaffordable and overambitious script about killer cats from outer space. Instead, Read and Williams brought the Doctor back to Gallifrey in a sequel to
The Deadly
Assassin
, and had him seemingly turn evil by assuming the presidency in order to allow an invasion by the Vardans. Of course, it’s all a trap, but the Doctor has been used in turn by the Sontarans, who appear at the climax of episode four, intent on staging their own invasion.

The kind of labour disputes featured in
The Sun Makers
hit the BBC itself and affected the making of
The Invasion of Time
. A scene-shifters’ strike caused more of the final episodes to feature outside-broadcast, location-shot footage (including a municipal swimming pool and a disused hospital interior) to represent the deep interior of the TARDIS. The resulting show saw Gallifrey become a Soviet-style society rather than the stuffy English bureaucracy seen in Holmes’
The Deadly
Assassin
. The nature of the production, however, did much to sabotage the story (as it had done on almost every story of Williams’ first season). This resulted in a meeting between Williams and Head of Serials Graeme MacDonald with a view to figuring out a way of handling the series that would avoid the behind-the-scenes chaos that was beginning to affect the onscreen quality (not the last time this would happen in the series’ history). Williams had a plan for the sixteenth season that would address many of the problems. Unlike the season just wrapped, the next would be carefully planned. It would have to be, as the six stories involved would tell one linked story, chronicling the Doctor’s search for the Key to Time. This was Williams’ first attempt to answer the perceived challenge posed by
Star Wars
and its successors. Audiences were thought to be no longer prepared to put up with poor plotting, and even poorer effects on TV: they wanted
Doctor Who
to match the new breed of television and movie science fiction coming from the US. It would be a challenge the venerable original version of the series could never quite rise to.

Graham Williams saw the Key to Time season as a method of attracting an audience that would stick with the show for a full season, from first episode to last. His previous season had varied widely from a per-story average low of 7.8 million (
Image of the Fendahl
) and a high of 10.5 million (
The Invasion of Time
). Williams’ hope was that the ongoing over-arching story, albeit spread across six separate serials, would hold audience attention for a 26-week run.

A three-page document had been drawn up in November 1976 (soon after Williams took the producer’s position) outlining his ambitions for what was to become the sixteenth season of
Doctor Who
in 1978. Full of mystical and esoteric-sounding content, the document outlined the forces that balance the universe and introduced the ‘Guardians’, one representing ‘good/construction’ and the other ‘evil/destruction’. These forces are accessed through the Key to Time, which has been split into six segments and scattered through time and space. The Doctor and his new companion, Time Lady Romana (Mary Tamm), are set the task of finding the pieces, assembling the Key and returning it to the White (‘good’) Guardian, while avoiding the hindrance of the Black (‘evil’) Guardian and his agents. An added complication was the nature of each segment: they could change form or be disguised as anything (or anyone). The document included a character profile for the new companion, Romana. ‘We decided to do the one big remaining stereotype that had yet to be done,’ admitted Williams. ‘This was the exact opposite of the savage huntress (Leela), namely the ice goddess.’ A long search finally saw Tamm cast as the neophyte Time Lady who was to act as both a companion and conscience for the Doctor.

The six stories were planned as diverse adventures and some had been developed independently of the story arc idea, so the Key had to be inserted into the plot somewhere. This was more successful in some cases than others. Opening tale
The Ribos Operation
pulled off the now established trick of having the design department create a period-costume-drama look representing an alien world. Robert Holmes’ script and the look of the story were heavily influenced by the popular movie conception of Russian literature in the
Dr Zhivago
(1965) mould (or
Anna Karenina
, with some of the sets coming from the 1977 ten-episode BBC adaptation featuring Eric Porter) crossed with a heist movie plot. On the planet Ribos, three conmen have tricked the Graff Vynda-K into believing the planet is rich in the mineral Jethryk, used for powering spaceships. In fact, the only Jethryk on the planet is on display in a reliquary and is part of the Key to Time sought by the Doctor. Caught up in the conmen’s manoeuvres and the Graff’s ambitions, the Doctor also has to recover the Key segment.

The literary games are further played out in later story
The Androids
of Tara
, a fun retelling of
The Prisoner of Zenda
in the same future-feudal mode as
The Ribos Operation
, giving the BBC costume designers and set builders a period workout once more. A sword-wielding swashbuckler, with electrically augmented swords and laser-crossbows,
The Androids of Tara
(in which the Key segment is a statue) is an old-fashioned, Errol Flynn-type adventure story given a superficial science-fiction makeover, as
Doctor Who
simply didn’t do ‘straight’ history anymore. That story was preceded by another Hinchcliffe-era horror throwback in
The Stones of Blood
, the first two episodes of which would have fitted very well between the
Jekyll
and Hyde-like Planet of Evil
and the Hammer Horror-influenced
Pyramids of Mars
. An Arthurian-inspired tale that also draws on the fashionable revival of druidism in the 1970s,
The Stones of Blood
sees the Doctor and Romana tangle not only with the alien Ogri, who resemble standing stones, but also with archaeologist Vivien Fay (really an alien criminal in disguise, an old Hinchcliffe staple) and the Megara, justice machines from the planet Diplos. The Hammer horror vibe is successfully mixed with high-tech SF, and the Doctor discovers the Key segment is Fay’s necklace, the Seal of Diplos.

The other three stories (coming second, fifth and sixth in the running order) are varieties of space opera.
The Pirate Planet
(in which the Key segment is the planet Calufax) was a Douglas Adams-written satire that owed a lot to his
The Hitch-Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy
in tone and approach (perhaps due to the fact it was written at the same time).
The Power of Kroll
is another allegory for 1970s Britain’s approach to energy policy, but also a critique of the exploitation of ‘Third World’ resources and people. Searching for the next segment of the Key to Time, the Doctor and Romana land on the swamp moon of Delta Magna and get caught up in the conflict between native ‘swampies’ and the giant squid they worship (it has eaten the Key segment!), along with those who administer the local chemical refinery and a mob of gunrunners. Finally, the entire story arc culminates in the six-episode out-and-out space opera of
The Armageddon Factor
, which had two planetary empires – Atrios and Zeos – engaged in perpetual war. The Cold War analogy is not difficult to see, and neither are the Second World War references with a heavy overlay of Greek myth (again from writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin, who’d done the same in
Underworld
). The final Key segment is disguised in the form of Princess Astra (Lalla Ward), who provides the lookalike template for Romana’s regeneration at the beginning of the next season. Encouraged to hand over the all-powerful Key to the White Guardian (after a moment’s temptation to keep it and rule the universe himself), the Doctor sees through the Black Guardian’s disguise and re-scatters the Key. On the run, he must use the Randomiser (a random destination generator now inserted into the TARDIS console) to avoid pursuit by the Black Guardian.

Although deemed to be a critical and ratings success, the idea of a season-long arc story on
Doctor Who
would not be tried again for another eight years, although some seasons would feature related story trilogies or overall themes. The Key to Time season had averaged 8.6 million viewers (consistent with the previous year’s 8.9 million average), ranging from lows of 6.5 million for the first part of
The
Power of Kroll
to 12.4 million (almost double) for the next part of the same adventure.

The two stories that opened Williams’ final season in charge of
Doctor
Who
were ratings blockbusters, thanks in large part to a strike that took ITV off air for three months in the autumn of 1979.
Destiny of
the Daleks
climaxed with 14.4 million viewers watching, while the following story,
City of Death
, reached a record audience for
Doctor Who
of 16.1 million (actually coming a week after the ITV strike had
ended and broadcasting had resumed).

The return of the Daleks for the first time in four years was event television anyway and bound to draw an audience. It’s a shame, therefore, that Terry Nation’s final script for the series should be so poor and the resulting production so shabby. Douglas Adams had become script editor, so the series’ seventeenth season on air saw the comedy element that had been growing through Williams’ period in charge foregrounded even more.
Destiny of the Daleks
sees the Daleks unearthing their creator, Davros, to help them break a stalemate in their ongoing war with the robotic Movellans. Growing awareness of computers and their roles in modern life (especially the military) lay at the root of this story. Superpower stand-offs, like the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, are another clear influence on Nation and Adams’ thinking, alongside game theory and the doctrine of ‘mutually assured destruction’, according to which it was believed that no country could initiate a nuclear war due to the fear that instant response would see them destroyed in turn.

The following story,
City of Death
, was the first time
Doctor Who
had been filmed abroad, with the story set in modern Paris (all the location filming was accomplished in a few days, often shooting on the fly on the streets without permits). The disruptive effects of experiments in time see the Doctor and Romana encounter Scaroth, last of the Jagaroth. Splintered through time, the alien has hidden among humanity and financed his temporal experiments to reunite himself through selling art fakes, including the Mona Lisa. It’s a light run around, wittily scripted by Adams and Williams (under a false name), with many memorable images and moments, from the unmasking of the alien Scaroth (Julian Glover) to tiny guest appearances by Eleanor Bron and John Cleese as art critics expressing their appreciation of the TARDIS as art object (which it later became thanks to artist Mark Wallinger, who displayed a silver, mirrored TARDIS at the 2001 Venice Biennale). The complicated time-twisting story is told with an unusual brio, and the story moves at a pace that wouldn’t be matched until the 45-minute episodes of the post-2005 series revival.

The remaining stories of Williams’ period showed evidence of a series in rapid decline. Although
The Creature from the Pit
was a pastiche of free-market economics, it boasted a central monster that appeared to be a giant inflated green bag.
Nightmare of Eden
had better monsters, in the shape of the Mandrels, and a serious subtext concerning drug-trafficking (the Mandrels can be transformed into deadly addictive drug vraxoin). The cod-disaster-movie setting of two ships that have crashed and merged mid-materialisation is a clever idea, while the Continuous Event Transmuter (a virtual-reality machine) sees the show continuing to experiment with new special-effects technology in the form of the Quantel digital-effects system. Finally, the season ended on a memorably poor note with
The Horns of
Nimon
, another parody of a Greek legend set in space, this time Theseus and the Minotaur. Poor production values and over-the-top guest stars served to derail this story, even before the unconvincing, bull-headed Nimon aliens appeared.

Those three adventures suffered troubled production histories as Williams seemed to be increasingly losing control of his show (due to a variety of factors) and was battling with his leading man, who was determined to re-shape the show his way. The culmination of this was the cancellation of what should have been the season-finale story,
Shada
. With 77 minutes of the 132-minute, Douglas Adams-scripted, six-episode story already filmed, the production was abandoned due to strike action at the BBC. It was to be an ignominious end to Williams’ troubled time as
Doctor Who
’s producer. It appeared that only a dramatic regeneration could save the series, and that’s exactly what incoming producer John Nathan-Turner set out to achieve.