Timeless Adventures

by Brian J. Robb

  This conclusion to Patrick Troughton’s time as the Doctor brought to a close six years of epic fantasy adventures and marked the end of the black-and-white era of Doctor Who. In doing so, writers Hulke and Dicks created a back-story for the Doctor, answering some of the questions posed by the show’s own enigmatic and unexplained title. This was a brave move, but the production team had determined that the mystery couldn’t stand forever. While concerned about burdening a new, incoming production team with a rigidly established mythology, there was also a strong possibility that the series might have ended entirely in 1969, so they felt under some obligation to provide a conclusion to the show’s past six years with some answers to the big question of the Doctor’s identity. The material they produced would form a strong part of the series’ foundation myth, right through its run. Even though Russell T Davies would kill off the Time Lords with his ‘Time War’ back-story, the fact that the Doctor was the last of his kind became central to the new conception of the revived series.

  When the show returned, post-Troughton, in 1970, it would be in colour and the entire production process would change along with the creative team behind the scenes. But Doctor Who’s continued reflection of social, political and technological changes in Britain would become even bolder.

  3. COLOUR SEPARATION OVERLAY

  Where William Hartnell’s time on Doctor Who had been one of innovation in storytelling and technology, Patrick Troughton’s three-year run had been one of consolidation, in narrative, budgetary and structural terms. As the series entered the 1970s, with colour television and ever-greater technological development ahead, it faced its biggest challenges to date.

  As the Conservatives returned to power in 1970 under Prime Minister Edward Heath, Britain was in crisis. Industrial strife was rampant, with a series of crippling strikes affecting transport and power. The global oil crisis was having an effect, while a growing environmental movement was enjoying its first popular successes. The new government’s desire to join the forerunner of the European Union, the European Economic Community (EEC), was beginning to play a part in British life and politics.

  Doctor Who was also facing a crisis as the 1960s drew to a close. Ratings had fallen off once more, with the potentially series-concluding epic The War Games averaging just under five million viewers, half the number who’d witnessed the arrival of the Daleks back in 1963. It wouldn’t be the last time that the show faced cancellation due to apparent dwindling popularity with viewers. At this point, the BBC considered a six-year run to have been a success and there was some internal debate about whether to end the show. Troughton’s Doctor had been shown starting the process of regeneration, a change forced upon him by the Time Lords, but, with no new actor cast, the decision to either cancel the show or launch a new actor as the Doctor was still open.

  Upper management at the BBC always had an uneasy relationship with Doctor Who. For some of the ‘old guard’ the show was too populist, ‘low brow’ even, and had abandoned its original educational remit in favour of ratings-grabbing creations like the Daleks. This view put the late-1960s version of the show in opposition to the raison d’être of the BBC: a publicly funded corporation with ambitions to educate and enlighten the masses. Although originally developed within this ethos, by 1969 Doctor Who clearly no longer fulfilled it. However, the BBC itself had been changing throughout the 1960s, starting with the arrival of Director General Hugh Carleton Greene. Doctor Who itself had been part of that process. The programme could be cited as both an example of the BBC’s conservatism and part of its radical agenda, reflecting a changing nation back to itself via the medium of popular entertainment.

  With the departure of Doctor Who champion Sydney Newman from the BBC in 1967, the prospects for the series’ continuation had taken a downward turn. The renewal of the show that producer Innes Lloyd and star Patrick Troughton brought about was enough to win it another few years on air, during which time it continued to develop and change. As the end of Troughton’s time in the TARDIS drew near, however, there were rumblings that Doctor Who no longer deserved a place on primetime BBC1 Saturday evenings.

  Terrance Dicks – a figure who would become very important to Doctor Who’s narrative development during the 1970s – joined the show as Assistant Script Editor in Spring 1968. The first thing he heard when joining was that the BBC was considering cancelling the show. ‘I thought, “That’s a great start to my career; three months and that will be the end of it!”’ recalled Dicks. ‘For a while they did actually consider ending it, because even then it had been going for a pretty long time in television terms. The viewing figures were OK, but they weren’t marvellous any more. I was actually involved in looking around for something else to replace the show.’

  Several Doctor Who-type shows were being considered as the 1960s drew to a close, but it is unclear if these were ever intended as direct replacements. Returning to the science fiction literary origins of Doctor Who itself, the BBC considered producing a series of dramas drawing on the adventure stories of Jules Verne, whose Captain Nemo may have been a source for Doctor Who’s title character. Another possibility was an updated remake of Nigel Kneale’s 1950s Quatermass dramas. These groundbreaking serials had seen an Earthbound professor battle alien incursions amid official scepticism.

  When the BBC decided that none of these shows, or several others mooted for production, was a suitable replacement for Doctor Who, a decision was taken to continue with the series. However, when it returned to screens in January 1970, Doctor Who would be a very different show. The lead character would have a different face, there would be a new production team behind the scenes, there would only be 26 episodes per year (rather than the 1960s average of 43), and, most noticeably of all, it would be in colour.

  Outgoing producer Peter Bryant was tasked with setting up the first story of the 1970s (Spearhead from Space, filmed in 1969) before handing over to the team of producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks, who would remain with the series for the next five years, as long as new Doctor Jon Pertwee.

  Several actors had been considered as Patrick Troughton’s replacement in mid-1969, when it became clear the show would be continuing. Among them were Ron Moody (then best known as Fagin in Oliver Twist, 1968), and ex-Goon Michael Bentine, before Letts settled on Pertwee, better known as a radio comedian, master of silly voices and star of the long-running radio comedy The Navy Lark.

  As well as changing the lead actor, the way the show was made had to change radically, too. In line with every other BBC-produced show, Doctor Who would enter the 1970s in full colour. This development was echoed at the end of 2008, when the producers of the revived and phenomenally successful twenty-first-century Doctor Who faced a similar challenge. Just as the BBC wanted all programmes and live output to be in colour in 1970, by 2010 all content would be transmitted in High Definition (HD). By 2008, the teams at BBC Wales, after a shaky technical start, had already notched up a couple of years’ experience of HD television production with Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood. Starting with Planet of the Dead, at Easter 2009, the BBC’s flagship show was finally using the new process.

  Faced with similar upheaval in the 1970s, the new Doctor Who production team discovered there’d be no additional budget available to cover the expense of making the switch. Colour television was broadcast on a higher-definition 625-line system, meaning clearer, crisper pictures (even more so in HD by 2008). As a result, the design detail of costumes, sets and make-up all had to be upgraded to a new level. This was expensive. Amid a general move to shorter seasons for TV drama, reducing Doctor Who from over 40 episodes per year to the mid-20s therefore made a lot of sense. It allowed the budget to go further and addressed complaints from the series’ previous two leading actors about the gruelling workload that their almost all-yearround schedule entailed. Shooting on location would also make for a more intensive production process, as had been discovered in making serials like The War Machines and The Invasion.

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p; As well as these superficial, though important, changes, there was also to be a major change to the format of the show, as set up in the final episode of The War Games. No longer a wanderer in time and space, Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor would be an exile on Earth, battling aliens trying to invade the planet. This clearly echoed the Quatermass serials of the 1950s (to such an extent that author Nigel Kneale felt aggrieved) and may have been a hangover from the BBC’s vague thoughts about remaking the series. This way, the corporation had the best of both worlds: a new series of Doctor Who that was not entirely unlike the previously popular Quatermass. Terrance Dicks, script editor during much of the 1970s, felt the comparison was inevitable: ‘If you’re doing a science-fiction serial set on Earth, you’re going to echo Quatermass whether you like it or not,’ he said on What Lies Beneath, a DVD documentary. In the same programme, Barry Letts called the new Doctor ‘a cross between Quatermass and James Bond’. Jon Pertwee was tasked with playing the Doctor as a new, dynamic, Earthbound action hero.

  Another long-fought battle was won as the Doctor Who base of operations was finally moved to Television Centre (with model work and additional film work based at Ealing Studios, as always), away from the limiting facilities of Lime Grove and Riverside, with production offices based in the BBC facility at Union House in Shepherd’s Bush. Stories could be recorded in blocks now, as more time was available, and could even be produced out of broadcast order (a luxury not afforded the black-and-white era). Location and studio shooting could be maximised to best use the available budget and resources. Broadly, this production set-up would remain in place for the rest of the show’s original 26-year run, until 1989.

  All these changes were seen by incoming producer Barry Letts as opportunities to be exploited. He had a new vision for the series, with a new leading man and a whole new electronic box of tricks to bring special effects to colour television drama. As 1970 began, Doctor Who had not so much regenerated as become an entirely different show.

  Despite all the superficial changes, the opening adventure of 1970 was as traditional as they come. Spearhead from Space had been shot entirely on film at the BBC facilities at Evesham as a strike made Television Centre initially unavailable to the production. This gave the opening story a distinctive look, building on the gritty, contemporary feel of The Invasion, but one that would not be repeated as the show settled into its regular production pattern.

  This first story continued the established format of the Troughton years, with an alien invasion of Earth thwarted by the Doctor with the help of UNIT, now co-opted as a regular part of the series’ format. With the new Doctor exiled to Earth and unable to escape (and he tries quite hard to do so, even while there’s an ongoing alien invasion), he reluctantly allies himself to UNIT as a base of operations. New companion Liz Shaw (Caroline John) is introduced as an intelligent UNIT recruit who is almost as smart as the Doctor himself. The role built on that of her immediate predecessor, the equally smart Zoe Heriot, and both had been created in reaction to the mostly more dependent female companions of the 1960s.

  Letts and Dicks approached the show under the assumption that a large part of the audience had grown up with it. Those kids from seven years before who witnessed the arrival of the Daleks were now teenagers, so the show was retooled to be more ‘grown up’, more in line with filmed adventure shows from ITV like The Avengers. ‘By the time we were doing it,’ said Letts on the DVD documentary What Lies Beneath, ‘it was definitely a grown-up programme, as well as a children’s programme. [We felt] the stories should be about something of deep interest to the adults.’ Additionally, Terrance Dicks had a strong dislike of the ‘sideways’ fantasy-based shows, such as The Celestial Toymaker and The Mind Robber. These were banished in favour of Letts’ realism: Doctor Who in the style of the procedural cop or doc shows increasingly popular in the 1960s, like Z-Cars or Emergency Ward 10.

  The new Doctor would be debonair, an adventurer in the style of John Steed from The Avengers or Adam Adamant (the character Verity Lambert had launched after Doctor Who). He would dress in Victorian garb with a dash of 1970s élan, and he’d have a fascination for fast cars and gadgets. A lot of this reflected Jon Pertwee’s own personal style and interests (as part of his first costume, Pertwee wore his own grandfather’s cloak) as much as it drew on any characterisation developed by Letts and Dicks.

  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.
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  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.