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 Let
ts 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.
Doctor Who found itself being used as a test bed for many new televisual techniques, and only after CSO had proved its worth on the show was it adapted for use on others like Top of the Pops or even the nightly news. Later stories were also used to test out new technologies. In 1979, Destiny of the Daleks saw the production loaned a cut-rate Steadicam (used extensively on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, 1980) in order to provide proof of its efficacy on television, while 1980’s Meglos would see extensive use of a development of CSO called Scene-Sync, in which the cameras could move in relation to the model backdrops and live action.
Letts’ enthusiasm for CSO resulted in a series of experiments in Terror of the Autons, in which CSO replaced simple sets. Several scenes saw the actors appear in front of flat photographs, having originally performed in front of a green screen. It may have saved money, but it wasn’t particularly convincing, especially as the CSO process had a tendency to result in blue lines or fringes appearing around actors. Similarly, instead of using a puppet to represent a killer doll, Letts used CSO to drop an actor in a rubber suit, electronically shrunk down, into the scene. Even views outside car windows were faked using CSO. While this sense of experimentation was admirable, and paid many dividends, so much CSO usage in one story gave it a very strange look. CSO would become a standard tool during the 1970s, until further advances in electronic television effects made the results more convincing and more commonplace. However, as in so many things, Doctor Who was there first, pioneering the technique.
As his seasons progressed, Barry Letts became convinced of the power of a strong ‘first-night’ start to each new series, and began to develop the idea of always ending each run on a high with an important ‘season-finale’ story. Such overall structural planning is second nature in television now (as can be seen by the heavily US-influenced revival of Doctor Who), but it was not as common in the early 1970s. Letts’ seasons had already enjoyed a boost from the debut of a new Doctor (although he’d not produced that particular story himself), as well as by the creation of a new recurring foe in the Master for season eight. As his third season loomed, Letts found himself considering the return of old enemies as his hook, so summoned the Daleks.
For a series featuring time travel, Doctor Who very rarely tackled the consequences of altering history, but it was a topic season nine’s opening story Day of the Daleks would approach head-on. The Daleks returned to Doctor Who in 1972 for the first time in five years. Although grafted on to a pre-existing storyline, their presence gave the adventure’s grim future more of a focus. Aping the real-world vogue for summit-conference diplomacy in the ongoing Cold War between the US and the USSR, the story sees a gathering of world leaders come under attack by armed terrorists from the future. In attacking the conference, the freedom-fighter guerrillas set off the very chain of events the diplomats are endeavouring to avoid. The storyline echoed two Harlan Ellison-written episodes of the American 1960s TV series The Outer Limits (Demon With a Glass Hand and Soldier) that went on to inspire James Cameron’s film The Terminator (1984). In Day of the Daleks, the Doctor reworks history (in contradiction to earlier precepts laid down by the series, notably in The Aztecs), avoiding a future dominated by the Daleks.
This kind of fascinating time paradox works well in this story, but it is clear why the series avoided such storylines in general. If any action can be changed or undone, it makes all the Doctor’s adventures rather pointless, as he can just zap back in time repeatedly until he fixes things to his satisfaction (a key problem with the 1996 Paul McGann-starring TV movie, which has the Doctor’s companions restored to life as the TARDIS travels back in time). Of all the show’s writers, the one most associated with time-related quirks is the revived, twenty-first-century series’ lead writer Steven Moffat, all of whose stories have included some time-twisting element.
Dalek creator Terry Nation had withheld his permission for their use since Evil of the Daleks in 1967 (apart from a brief appearance during the Doctor’s trial in The War Games in 1969). Part of Nation’s reason for withholding the Daleks was his long held, but repeatedly thwarted, hope of launching them on American television. After effectively concluding the history of the Daleks with their ‘final end’ in Evil of the Daleks, Nation had approached the BBC about featuring his creations in their own spin-off. This would have focused on the Space Security Service and its agents, as featured in Nation’s The Daleks’ Master Plan. Nation drafted a pilot script, entitled The Destroyers, but when his proposal was rejected he turned to the American market, while the BBC opted to remove the Daleks from Doctor Who. Having tried without success to interest various US broadcasters, including NBC, by 1972 Nation was ready to allow the return of the Daleks to Doctor Who. Disappointed by the script from Louis Marks (who’d written the troubled Planet of Giants in the 1960s) for the four episodes of Day of the Daleks, Nation insisted he write any future Dalek scripts himself.
Following The Day of the Daleks, Doctor Who reflected the political reality of 1972 very effectively in The Curse of Peladon. The none-too-subtle subtext in a tale about a backward planet’s attempt to join a Galactic Federation would have been plain to UK residents watching the TV news debates about the pros and cons of Britain’s proposed membership of the EEC, known more informally as the ‘common market’. With the Second World War still a recent event to anyone in their early-40s, the idea of seceding political or economic control to a European body proved to be politically controversial. The case for and against membership had long been debated in newspapers and on television. Anyone with a passing interest in the news would have seen the gathering of delegates and backroom machinations of The Curse of Peladon as curiously familiar.
Letts again fell back on the gambit of featuring a returning monster, the Ice Warriors (last seen in 1969’s The Seeds of Death), but with the spin that they would not (as viewers probably expected) be the villains (as Germany had been). The new ambiguity attached to the Ice Warriors reflected the complexity of the European issue: in real life, there were no bad guys or good guys, just differing points of views and ultimate aims.
Having brought back the Daleks and the Ice Warriors from the 1960s version of the series, Letts and Dicks then turned to a setting last exploited in that decade (in The Underwater Menace and Fury from the Deep): the deep sea. As Terror of the Autons had been a remake/sequel to Spearhead from Space, so The Sea Devils was a companion piece to 1970’s Doctor Who and the Silurians. Naturally, the Silurians couldn’t return, having been blown up by the Brigadier, so returning writer Malcolm Hulke was charged with developing a similar aquatic nemesis and adding the return of the Doctor’s newest enemy, the Master.
Having secured the RAF’s co-operation in the making of The Mind of Evil the previous year (making use of a real-life missile convoy in an action sequence), Letts now turned to the Navy for support on The Sea Devils. This resulted in the serial being shot in and around some significant naval assets, heavily boosting the production values. The story is recalled by many thanks to the episode-four cliff-hanger: an army of Sea Devils emerges from the water to menace the Doctor and Jo.
While The Sea Devils went for spectacle, exploiting the visual iconography of Britain’s newly operating oil rigs, the next story got back to directly reflecting contemporary political concerns in a heavy-handed way. The Mutants was a post-colonial parable of the situation in South Africa in the mid-1970s. Far in the future, the Earth Empire is collapsing, but the bureaucrats are still resisting moves towards independence by formerly dependant planets. The racial divide between humans and aliens is played as a form of apartheid, which was at that time the ideo
logy of social control in South Africa. Equally, the story of oppressive colonialism could be seen as applying to British history in India. Overlaid onto this is the emergence of transcendental life on the planet, as the ‘mutants’ transform from ‘mutts’ into enlightened super-beings, an ascension the forces of Empire wish to suppress. This aspect of the story was picked up by Salman Rushdie and included in a portion of The Satanic Verses dealing with human transformation: ‘It seemed to him, as he idled across the channels, that the box was full of freaks: there were mutants – “Mutts” – on Dr Who, bizarre creatures who appeared to have been crossbred with different types of industrial machinery… children’s television appeared to be extremely populated by humanoid robots and creatures with metamorphic bodies.’
The closing story of season nine was the epic adventure The Time Monster, a climax to the ongoing UNIT and Master storylines. Greek mythology is plundered as a backdrop for a battle between the series’ two great egos: the Doctor and the Master. The Time Monster was able to tap into cheap package holidays taking families to Greece, growing ‘new-age’ mysticism and a vogue for popular history on TV that had brought the myths of the audience’s long-forgotten classical education back to life.
Oddly, the over-the-top nature of this adventure seems more like the over-wrought season finales of the modern version of Doctor Who than anything previously attempted. There is an epic scope and ambition to this tale of the Master using experimental technology to raise an ancient God-like monster. UNIT battles menaces from different times, and everyone finds themselves back in ancient, mythological Atlantis, caught up in the legendary city’s final days. The climax sees the Doctor and the Master crashing their respective TARDISes in a ‘time ram’. As ancient mythological stories often do, The Time Monster depends partly on Doctor Who’s own mythical narrative past. The story reveals more of the Doctor’s own personal history, and some-thing of how the TARDIS works (including hints that it might be organic, even sentient), and functions as a concluding battle between arch enemies (as the planned ‘final confrontation’ story was not made due to Roger Delgado’s untimely death in a car accident in 1973). The celebratory nature of this story, and the show’s willingness to invoke its own history, would be developed further in the opening story of the tenth season, The Three Doctors.
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