With an average of over eight million viewers consistently tuning in, Barry Letts had reason to be happy with the direction his Doctor Who was heading. The show still suffered from stories that – for broadly economic reasons – were simply too long, running for a total of six weeks. Letts would persevere with the six-episode (and occasional four-episode) story formats for another two years, until his successor Philip Hinchcliffe imposed a ‘standard’ story length of four 25-minute episodes that would last until the show’s lengthy hiatus from 1989.
Faced with launching their fourth season in charge, producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks felt they had to come up with a hook to rival the arrival of the new Doctor in Spearhead from Space, the Master in Terror of the Autons and the long-awaited return of the Daleks in Day of the Daleks. ‘We always used to try to think of a gimmick to launch each of our seasons,’ admitted Dicks. For the first time in Doctor Who – apart from the disguised critique of television storytelling in The Mind Robber – the programme itself was to become the focus of a televised adventure. Dicks’ idea was to bring together the three actors who had played the Doctor, in celebration of the series’ own tenth-anniversary year. The justification for this comic-book-style team-up would be a danger that no single Doctor could handle. ‘The Time Lords feel the Doctor will be unable to cope, so they bend the rules of time and allow the Doctor to meet and ally with his other selves, thus tripling his powers,’ wrote Dicks in a memo to The Three Doctors’ scriptwriters Bob Baker and Dave Martin.
Both Hartnell and Troughton had quickly agreed to their one-off return, although Hartnell concealed his deteriorating health. The writers suggested that the three Doctors should be brought together to battle a dark figure from the Time Lords’ own past: Ohm, a legendary Time Lord lost in an anti-matter world at the heart of a black hole. Ohm was renamed Omega, a founder of Time Lord society, whose stellar manipulations had gained them the power of time travel, but at great cost to himself. Abandoned by the Time Lords, Omega has been trapped for eternity in the black hole and has gone slowly mad. Omega’s plan is to trick the Doctor into switching places with him (just like the Master of the Land of Fiction in The Mind Robber) so he can escape to the real universe. At the climax, just before he is defeated by the united Doctors, it is revealed that all that remains of the masked and cloaked Omega is his will to survive: his physical being has long since evaporated, leaving nothing but his ego.
Rewrites were necessary to accommodate Hartnell’s relatively restricted mobility (he mostly appears on the TARDIS scanner screen) and the action sequences central to the story were redrafted for Troughton and Pertwee alone. The return of Hartnell and Troughton to the series provided a massive publicity boost (and won the programme another Radio Times cover, a regular event for each of Letts’ season openers). The nostalgia effect, the resultant publicity and the almost 12 million viewers for the final episode were all noted by an occasional floor manager and production unit manager named John Nathan Turner, who would return to the series in a more significant capacity in 1980.
Several key things were changed for the tenth season. The TARDIS console room was redesigned, falling more in line with the original Peter Brachacki design; an attempt at revamping the theme music was tried and abandoned prior to broadcast; and (in story terms) the Doctor’s exile to Earth was officially lifted, freeing the series to return to the classic ‘wanderer in time and space’ format.
The Three Doctors is full of fantasy physics and scientific buzz-words like black holes, singularity, supernova and anti-matter, torn from the pages of New Scientist. None of them is used in any recognisably proper scientific way, despite the production team’s claim to have been scouring the pages of science magazines to keep up with the latest developments. Later dubbed ‘technobabble’ by fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation, this meaningless scientific talk is used simply to move the drama forward, introduce Hitchcock-style ‘MacGuffins’ or to make dialogue sound portentous, dramatic and meaningful.
Following The Three Doctors’ celebration of the show’s own history, Letts and Dicks continued to plough a limited, cleverly self-reflexive furrow with the Robert Holmes-scripted adventure Carnival of Monsters. On the surface, this is a comedy that sees the Doctor and Jo caught up in events when the owners of a travelling show come up against a planet’s petty bureaucracy. Alien showman Vorg and his assistant Shirna are stopped upon arrival on the planet Inter Minor, as head bureaucrat Pletrac is not satisfied with the safety of their entertainment device, the Miniscope. This device – a banned peepshow that contains miniaturised life forms from many worlds – allows Holmes to satirise television, and specifically Doctor Who. Vorg comments that the ‘monsters’ contained in the scope are ‘great favourites with the children’ and that the machine is there ‘simply to amuse. Nothing serious, nothing political.’ Both could be seen as comments on the role of Doctor Who, with Letts and Dicks proving the most successful at concealing the ‘political’ within stories told ‘simply to amuse’. Vorg is portrayed as the producer of a show like Doctor Who, marshalling his resources to put together the best entertainment he can within political, social, institutional and technological constraints.
The first episode plays as an accomplished BBC period drama, with the Doctor and Jo finding themselves on the ship SS Bernice in 1926, only for the second instalment to reveal that they are actually trapped within the Miniscope itself. The next producer of the show, Philip Hinchcliffe, came to realise that utilising the expertise of the BBC design departments to produce what they were good at – period drama sets and costumes – within a Doctor Who fantasy story would immeasurably improve his production values. The BBC design departments always had an easier time with a 1926 ship, or Victorian times, than they ever did with the far future, vast space ships or alien cultures.
The satire of television and popular entertainment in Carnival of Monsters is wrapped up in the by now standard drama of alien immigrants (literally so, as the Inter Minor bureaucracy blames the violence that erupts on the relaxation of the immigration rules) and a plot to overthrow the government. This is in the background, though, and comes secondary to the Doctor’s attempts to have Vorg stop using the ‘Scope and release its captives (this story’s eco-concern: captive animals). Perhaps it is significant that Letts directed this story himself, as it is a template for the kind of clever writing and issue-raising-in-the-guise-of-entertainment that he and Dicks excelled at.
Originally intended to lead up to the climax of the Doctor/Master relationship/rivalry, the space-opera double bill of Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks proved to be a narrative whose ambitions exceeded the reach of the production’s resources. This was a return to the epic storytelling of the mid-1960s, exemplified by The Daleks’ Master Plan, but Letts and Dicks ensured the script was prepared in advance (necessary thanks to the new production system in operation during the 1970s) rather than being worked out on a week-to-week basis, as was occasionally the case in the 1960s (and certainly with The Daleks’ Master Plan).
The ambition for Frontier in Space was to introduce a new galaxy-spanning setting in each episode, thus giving the entire story a sense of scale and movement that the series rarely attempted (and rarely achieved). Among the individual episodic settings are an Earth space-ship under attack, Earth in the twenty-sixth century, a lunar prison colony, a prison ship operated by the Master, the power base of the Draconian Empire and the planet of the Ogrons (last seen as supporting shock troops in Day of the Daleks). Scripted by Malcolm Hulke, the Earth-Draconian conflict is the US-USSR Cold War of the post-Second World War era dressed up as science fiction. Hulke paints the Master as a manipulator who uses the spectre of fear (rather than any real threat) to provoke both declining empires into conflict. Who benefits from such a conflict? The Master’s allies are revealed in the final episode of Frontier in Space to be none other than the Daleks, an early 1960s-style cliff-hanger continuing directly into the next adventure, Planet of the Daleks.
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br /> One reason why Frontier in Space is so well regarded by Doctor Who fans is the design and execution of the Draconians. Make-up designer John Friedlander pioneered a form of mask-making that included the performer’s own eyes and mouth that has since become standard. At the time, it was a radical development that allowed the alien, lizard-like, slightly Japanese (culturally, at least) Draconians to come across to viewers as real characters, rather than ‘the monster’. Unfortunately, a dispute between the director (Paul Bernard) and the producer about the quality of the Ogron god-monster prop (it resembled a giant testicle!) meant that the ending of the story was fluffed, resulting in a very poor send-off for Delgado’s Master. His death in a car crash while on location for a film shoot in Turkey resulted in the abandonment of a final face-off between him and Pertwee’s Doctor and was one of the factors that contributed towards Pertwee’s eventual decision to leave the show in 1974.
The following story completed the narrative and saw Terry Nation’s first return to Doctor Who since The Daleks’ Master Plan in 1966. Unfortunately, Nation ignored any attempts by other writers to progress or develop the Daleks and reverted to a number of themes (not to mention clichés) that he was familiar with. Planet of the Daleks features a jungle world called Spiridon upon which a division of militant Thals have arrived, set on wiping out a hidden Dalek army. Nation is still stuck in the Flash Gordon serial-style scripting that served Doctor Who so well in the 1960s but had been largely abandoned in the 1970s in favour of more political and social depth. Nation’s favourite elements featured in the serial, besides the jungle setting, included killer plants (Mission to the Unknown/The Daleks’ Master Plan), invisible monsters, heroes hiding inside Dalek casings, bacterial weapons, and the standby of all lazy dramatists: a countdown. Nation’s scripting deficiencies meant that Planet of the Daleks was a throwback to the basic Boy’s Own adventure-serial style, and that Letts’ and Dicks’ trademark political and social commentary was missing. They’d more than make up for that lack in the next story, however: the conclusion of Doctor Who’s tenth-anniversary year.
For the third year in a row, producer Barry Letts brought writer Robert Sloman in to craft a season finale to Letts’ own brief. Aware of the political and social commentary running through the series, Letts decided to finish the year with a full-on eco-parable. Environmental concerns had featured in a variety of Doctor Who stories, but The Green Death would be the first to put them front and centre. Sloman was charged with writing out companion Jo Grant after three years, as Katy Manning wanted to leave. This was yet another factor in Pertwee’s developing resolve to depart at the end of the following year (his fifth, making him the longest-running Doctor up to that time).
Growing awareness of environmental issues, especially among the young, could not be ignored by the media, especially after the formation of Friends of the Earth in 1969 and Greenpeace in 1971. These campaigning groups were beginning to win airtime and the expression of pro-environmental, anti-business views was becoming commonplace. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (1962) tackled the overuse of pesticides in agriculture (and may have influenced Planet of Giants) and explored issues of environmental poisons, topics echoed in The Green Death. The book was controversial, but led to the banning of DDT and other pesticides and a growing public awareness of environmental issues.
A mysterious death in a disused mine in South Wales sees the Doctor and UNIT called in. Toxic waste products have been pumped into the mine by Global Chemicals, rather than being disposed of properly. The resulting green goo is the cause of death, but it has had a wider environmental impact, mutating local insects to produce giant, man-eating maggots and super-sized flies. The villains are the men-in-suits who run Global Chemicals, who are in turn being led astray by their mad computer called BOSS. The heroes (besides the Doctor, Jo and UNIT) are the inhabitants of the ‘Nut Hutch’, a local environmental group seemingly staffed by hippie drop-outs and led by Professor Cliff Jones (Stewart Bevan), a love-interest figure for the departing Jo Grant (Bevan was Manning’s real-life, off-screen boyfriend at the time).
It may have been a fairly simple depiction of some big issues, but for popular television (the first episode attracted 9.2 million viewers, while an omnibus Christmas repeat saw 10.4 million tune in) aimed at a young audience in 1973, this was radical political and social drama disguised (barely) as adventure fiction. It was a big step forward from the disposable space adventure serials of a decade before, like Terry Nation’s The Keys of Marinus.
Letts had no regrets about the overtly serious content he was building into Doctor Who. He wrote in Dreamwatch magazine in 2004: ‘One of the first things I did when I took over as producer was to ask Audience Research for a breakdown of the Doctor Who audience – and I discovered that 58 per cent of it was over the age of 15. In other words, the majority of our viewers were adults. Yet that also meant that 42 per cent were children of all ages, the children that the programme was aimed at from the start, and we certainly couldn’t let them down.’ This audience breakdown showed Letts that, while he had to make the series attractive to younger viewers, the majority of the audience had grown up with Doctor Who, having been five years old or above when it had begun a decade before in 1963.
‘We tried to offer stories on several different levels,’ Letts wrote. ‘First and foremost, we wanted good drama, solidly based on character; secondly, a fascinating science fiction idea and/or a theme with relevance to a real issue (such as the mining corporation versus the settlers in Colony in Space, or the ecological background of The Green Death); thirdly, a cracking action adventure; and lastly, scary bug-eyed monsters for the younger children. Maybe we went too far sometimes, but this is one of the core features of Doctor Who.’
The Green Death was perhaps the pinnacle of Doctor Who’s political and social commentary in the 1970s. Many more stories would contain a similar subtext, but never again would it be so overt, so persuasive and so dramatically entertaining. Even though it is six episodes long, in terms of successfully melding a contemporary issue or concern with engaging character-driven drama and monstrous scares, few Doctor Who stories do it as well and as accessibly as The Green Death.
While Doctor Who’s eleventh season consolidated much of the work done by Letts and Dicks during the early 1970s, it also featured many superficial changes that would be carried over into the Tom Baker period. Prime among the changes was the arrival of a new companion: feminist journalist Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen). The character was devised as a more savvy version of Jo Grant, smarter and more inquisitive and independent, but not as intelligent as Liz Shaw, so no threat to the Doctor. The stories still required an audience-viewpoint character to ask the questions that would allow the Doctor to deliver the story’s exposition. Another very visible change was a new, dramatic title sequence and logo, the first since the series’ debut in colour in 1970. A similar ‘time tunnel’ sequence, with a change of the lead character’s face, would survive until 1980.
Opening the season was The Time Warrior, in which Linx – a Sontaran warrior trapped when he crash lands in the Middle Ages – uses his technology to kidnap contemporary scientists to help repair his ship and hasten his escape. This story revived the idea of tales set in the past and featuring aliens and their technology (last seen in 1967’s The Abominable Snowman). Pioneered in The Time Meddler back in 1965, this would now become a standard storytelling component of the show. This technique addressed one of the BBC’s design weaknesses by putting the (usually) well-designed alien creature in the kind of period setting the BBC excelled at. The story also allowed the Doctor to deliver a classic line that summed up the approach of the series. Asked by Sarah if he’s ‘serious’ about being a Time Lord with a time-travelling police box, the Doctor replies: ‘About what I do, yes. Not necessarily the way that I do it.’ Pertwee’s debut tale, Spearhead from Space, had introduced the idea that the alien Doctor had two hearts. Similarly, the first story of Pertwee’s final season introduced another importa
nt mythological innovation by naming the Doctor’s home planet: Gallifrey.
In The Time Warrior, the position Linx finds himself in parallels that of the Doctor: he’s an alien scientific advisor to a ‘military’ group. The application of advanced technology in a historical setting drew on the real-life situation early in the Vietnam war where the superpowers would help one side or the other with weaponry and advice, without becoming directly involved (already depicted in the 1968 Star Trek episode A Private Little War – Star Trek having begun its initial run on UK television in between Troughton’s final story and Jon Pertwee’s debut.)
The political commentary in the following story, Invasion of the Dinosaurs, was a lot more substantial than that of The Time Warrior. Following the eco-environmental message of The Green Death, Malcolm Hulke once again flexed his agit-prop muscles under the guise of a teatime adventure. The Doctor and Sarah return to the present, only to discover London deserted. The city has been evacuated (as ever, Doctor Who draws on Second World War iconography) due to the appearance of prehistoric dinosaurs! The villains are radical environmentalists intending to use a time machine to return Earth to its unspoilt state, as it was before the effects of technology and pollution. Only a select few will survive Operation Golden Age.
Rather than an alien invasion, the story presents a group of driven idealists as the ‘threat of the week’, while still delivering the requisite serial thrills with the arrival of various (unfortunately unconvincing) dinosaurs on the streets of London. Doctor Who had featured scientific-conspiracy storylines before (notably in The Ambassadors of Death). This conspiracy tale stretched all the way to the government (through the minister, Grover) and involved the army (a dramatic conflict personalised as UNIT’s own Mike Yates – series semi-regular Richard Franklin – is revealed to be in on the conspiracy following his experiences during The Green Death). Fear of an armed takeover of Britain was a political reality in the UK in the 1970s, reflecting concerns about the possible actions of Labour in government. Labour were returned to power in February 1974, just as the last episodes of Invasion of the Dinosaurs were being transmitted. The involvement of Mike Yates on the ‘wrong’ side of the conspiracy demonstrated the show’s new interest in longer-term character development (anticipating the way that much television drama is now made). Rarely in Doctor Who had characterisation of minor supporting characters been consistent (the Brigadier having suffered some odd character swings through the years). Very few were dealt with in anything more than a perfunctory manner, even when the series was as grounded in an ensemble group as it was in the first half of the 1970s.
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