Timeless Adventures (6 page)

The original impact of the Daleks is easy to underestimate, looking back now from the perspective of the twenty-first century, when they are so familiar to us. According to BBC information used to sell
Doctor Who
abroad in the mid-1960s, ‘Eighty-five per cent of letters to the BBC’s popular
Points of View
[a TV feedback programme] concerned the Daleks.’ The document went on to itemise examples of viewers’ Dalek-related activity, including one Birmingham girl who’d constructed a model Dalek from egg boxes and silver paper and a Scottish viewer who wanted to form a ‘Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Daleks’. There were many requests to purchase Daleks, either full-size props or toy models.

The back-story of a nuclear war between the Thals and the Dals (later Kaleds in the later revisionist history of
Genesis of the Daleks
) on the planet Skaro played right into 1960s Cold-War concerns, an issue that would have resonated with just about every one of the 10 million viewers of the serial (the Cuban missile crisis – during which Russia had deployed nuclear warheads to Cuba, just off the American coast, provoking an extreme political-military crisis – had taken place a mere 12 months earlier). The technology of body replacement (explored more chillingly later with the Cybermen) that had turned the Dals into the Daleks was also understandable to an audience familiar with the concepts of replacement limbs and then-theoretical heart transplants. Viewers could even have regarded the Daleks’ tank-like, life-support ‘travel machines’ as giant iron lungs.

To make the first 13 episodes of the show self-contained (in case the series ended there, as was possible before the success of the Daleks ensured its continuation), Verity Lambert had commissioned a standalone two-part story to follow the Dalek adventure, utilising only the standing sets of the TARDIS and the regular cast.

The psychological drama that ensues when the TARDIS malfunctions in
The Edge of Destruction
allowed the characters to express and expunge their distrust of each other, clearing the air for them to return for future adventures as a more coherent team. It also allowed for the final clarification of the nature of the Doctor’s character, which had evolved through the first 13 episodes from that of a self-interested but curious and reluctant traveller to an adventurer, willing to investigate situations and make moral judgements, taking sides in conflicts and energising the oppressed. This would be a format that would serve the series well for many years to come: the Doctor had become a crusader for freedom in all its forms.

Those first 13 weeks that
Doctor Who
was on air, and the many months of preparation that had preceded them, laid the foundations for an epic televisual myth which would grow and prosper over most of the next 26 years before being triumphantly reborn in the twentyfirst century, where it once again captured the imagination and affection of the entire nation.

It is arguable that what are now popularly perceived as ‘the 1960s’ didn’t really begin in the UK until 1964, the year of the Labour victory in the General Election following 13 years of continuous Conservative rule. Change was in the air in the run up to the October poll, and although the Labour victory was narrow (five seats), it reflected the huge political and social changes taking place in the whole country.

With the conclusion of the two-part, self-contained psychological thriller
The Edge of Destruction, Doctor Who
had successfully survived into 1964, despite the doubts of many within the BBC about the series’ ongoing viability: the show now had a commitment that would see it last at least until the end of its second year. The challenge faced by producer Verity Lambert was how to broaden and deepen the adventures of the Doctor and his companions. Her solution was to split the Doctor’s journeys into two broad categories: historical tales and science-fiction adventures, with the originally proposed ‘sideways’ adventures largely unexplored.

The earliest development work on
Doctor Who
had focused on ways of bringing literary science fiction to the small screen, but it was the barely developed educational remit that would drive the stories set in different periods of Earth’s history. The mid-May 1963 format document, written by CE Webber and annotated by Head of Serials Donald Wilson, noted that ‘each story will have a strong informational core based on fact’. During incoming Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s period in office there was a focus on educational opportunity for all, culminating in the establishment of the Open University, a government-backed distance-learning project. The growth of comprehensive schooling was another feature of the 1964–1970 Labour government, with
Doctor Who
’s historical tales loosely reflecting topics featured in history lessons in UK schools. The Newsom Report (
Half
Our Future
, which led to the setting up of the Plowden Committee on primary and secondary education), published in October 1963, had promoted the development of a coherent national curriculum, including history alongside geography and social studies in a subject dubbed ‘The Proper Study of Mankind’. It included a call for pupils to develop ‘an ability to enter imaginatively into other men’s minds’ and added that ‘people make history. It is an enlarging of the spirit for our boys and girls to meet great men…’ The report’s words are a clear mission statement for many of
Doctor Who
’s early historical adventures.

Sydney Newman’s hope was that
Doctor Who
should be informative, as well as entertaining. Early episodes saw the past depicted as an exotic background for the characters’ adventures, much the same as the early science-fiction stories. The fact that much of the historical subject matter (the French Revolution, the Romans and the Greeks would all be tackled) reflected the 1960s UK school history curriculum was a happy coincidence, rather than the result of any formal planning. Although Newman was clear about the show’s educational remit – ‘I was intent upon it containing basic factual information that could be described as educational, or at least mind-opening’ – producer Verity Lambert was more focused on attracting an audience, especially in the wake of the reaction to the Daleks.

As we have seen, it was no accident that the two main human audience-identification figures were schoolteachers covering history and science. The characters of Barbara and Ian allowed the writers to fill in the background to an episode, whether historical or scientific, in a way that felt natural to the drama. Lambert saw Newman’s loose educational remit bringing the show some prestige. ‘We were going backwards and forwards in time,’ Lambert told
Doctor Who Magazine
#234. ‘Although our people could go back in time and observe, they could never change the course of history. It was a wonderful way of teaching, and certainly we had a lot of letters from teachers who said they’d asked their classes to watch those particular episodes.’

The history-themed stories following
The Edge of Destruction
were the epic travelogue
Marco Polo
and
The Aztecs
, the latter exploring in some depth the question of changing the past. These early episodes (alternating with the science-fiction adventures) continued to set down formats and story templates that would define the nature of the series. The majority of the historical adventures appeared during the first three seasons of
Doctor Who
and made up just over a third of the total stories. They helped give the series an educational respectability, within and outside the BBC, suggesting it had something worthwhile to offer viewers beyond mere entertainment.

John Lucarotti was the writer on both
Marco Polo
and
The Aztecs
, and he had a strong personal interest in both subjects. Lucarotti had avidly read the English edition of Polo’s own account of his adventures and had adapted it once before for a 15-episode radio serial. He drew on these diaries to give his seven-week epic serial a sheen of authenticity. Similarly, the Aztecs were a personal favourite of Lucarotti, the writer having lived in Mexico. It didn’t do any harm to Newman and Lambert’s pseudo-educational project that both subjects were also taught in schools.

Marco Polo
(the serial is now lost due to the BBC’s short-sighted policy of recycling videotapes up to the late-1970s, thus erasing many irreplaceable recordings) had been designed as a travelogue, which saw the Doctor and his companions journey with Polo’s caravan en route to the court of Kublai Khan. Political intrigue and stops along the way provide many opportunities for historical lessons to be imparted.

It was often believed later that the early historical
Doctor Who
serials suffered from low ratings and that’s why they were eventually phased out. Given that the ratings for
Marco Polo
were on a par with those of
The Daleks
, ranging between 8.5 and 10 million viewers across the serial’s run, that myth is easily discounted. Although recorded and transmitted in black and white, surviving colour photographs show the sets and costumes of
Marco Polo
to have been sumptuous, rivalling any equivalent theatre or movie production. Viewers would undoubtedly have learnt something about the historical period from this well-researched and constructed serial. Despite this and the high ratings, however, many children maintained they found the historical stories ‘boring’ in comparison to the more exciting space adventures.

It is no surprise that the
Doctor Who
stories that ventured into the past were more concerned with the central characters than with getting the historical details accurate. It is unlikely that any historian, then or now, would recognise the journey of Marco Polo as depicted by the BBC in the confines of Lime Grove Studio D, or agree with the programme’s depiction of Aztec society.

An internal BBC memo from 1964 listed other possible historical settings and events that
Doctor Who
could explore, including Viking raids on Britain (
The Time Meddler
), Bonnie Prince Charlie (
The Highlanders
), Drake and the Armada, Raleigh and the colonisation of the Americas, the Globe Theatre (2007’s
The Shakespeare Code
), Australian convict settlement, the Roman invasion of Britain, Richard I and the Crusades (
The Crusade
), Cornish smugglers (
The Smugglers
) and Boadicea. British television adventure series, especially those aimed at children or those made by Lew Grade’s commercial independent production company ITC, were often based around historical, swashbuckling characters like Robin Hood, Sir Lancelot (William Russell,
Doctor Who
’s Ian Chesterton) or Sir Francis Drake (all the ‘great men’ of the Newsom Report), and this no doubt influenced
Doctor Who
’s depiction of history.

More important to the drama were the implications of the historical stories for the lost travellers. Following the epic tourist narrative of
Marco Polo
, in
The Aztecs
Lucarotti tackled one of the show’s central concerns: the possibility, or otherwise, of changing history. Lucarotti had the Doctor’s history-teacher companion directly address a key question which by now (this being the show’s third historical adventure) must have been troubling alert viewers. Mistaken for the reincarnation of a Goddess in pre-
Conquistador
Mexico, Barbara decides to use her position to forbid a ritual sacrifice. Saving one life, however, is not enough for the newly empowered suburban teacher. ‘If I could start the destruction of everything that is evil here, then everything that is good would survive when Cortés lands,’ she says. The Doctor emphatically forbids any intervention: ‘You can’t rewrite history… Not one line! What you are trying to do is utterly impossible. I know, believe me, I know.’ That’s a clear statement of the inviolable nature of history. This rule was later adapted: some changes to history were allowable as they were minor or set things on the correct course. Later, when the show returned in the twenty-first century, the same discussion would recur when the Doctor (David Tennant) and companion Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) arrive in the city of Pompeii, prior to the volcanic eruption, in
The Fires of Pompeii
. Set on warning the citizens, Donna is told by the Doctor that history is unchangeable, although he is persuaded to save one family from the inferno, allowing that: ‘Some things are fixed, some things are in a flux. Pompeii is fixed.’

There was a Mexican buzz in the mid-1960s. The South American flavoured 1962 World Cup had taken place in Chile (who secured third place, with Brazil winning) and the 1968 Olympic Games were due to be hosted by Mexico, so
Doctor Who
’s foray into the country’s turbulent history was part of a larger cultural focus. The decision to set a story during the Aztec period may have been influenced by the forthcoming debut of
The Royal Hunt of the Sun
, a new play by rising young playwright Peter Shaffer. As well as debating the ethics (or even the possibility) of altering history,
The Aztecs
was one of the few
Doctor Who
stories that gave the Doctor something approaching a romantic relationship (very much the norm for the twenty-first century series, but unusual previously). A delightful subplot has a bemused Doctor (Hartnell at his whimsical best) accidentally becoming engaged to an Aztec woman, Cameca (Margot van der Burgh), when sharing a cup of hot chocolate.