Hulke concluded Invasion of the Dinosaurs by allowing the Doctor to deliver a speech backing the aims of Operation Golden Age, while condemning their methods. It was an environmental plea made directly to viewers, via a comment to the Brigadier, and one that appears years ahead of its time: ‘At least [they] realised the dangers this planet of yours is in, Brigadier. The danger of it becoming one vast garbage dump, inhabited only by rats… It’s not the oil and the filth and the poisonous chemicals that are the real cause of pollution, Brigadier. It’s simply greed.’ It was an unusually bald, uncompromising statement for the show to make, and one that probably struck a chord with younger viewers. Invasion of the Dinosaurs simultaneously appealed to the 1960s idealists who’d seen their hoped-for advancements dissipate in the 1970s and to children (of all ages) who think dinosaurs are ‘cool’.
The boldness of Doctor Who in foregrounding such obvious political content at this time may have been a result of the end-of-an-era feel. During the broadcast of Invasion of the Dinosaurs in February 1974, Jon Pertwee announced he’d be hanging up his frilly shirts and velvet capes and handing the keys to the TARDIS to a new occupant. Three reasons were eventually cited for his departure: he’d allegedly been refused a requested raise in his fee by the BBC; he wanted to move on to new acting challenges; and he felt that, with the death of Roger Delgado and the departure of Katy Manning, his Doctor Who team was disintegrating around him. Both Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks then announced their intention to also move on to pastures new with the end of the eleventh season. They had tried to leave two years previously, after The Time Monster, but the BBC had persuaded them to continue, afraid that breaking up the team would harm the success of the show (a situation later echoed in the behind-the-scenes story of the latest revival of Doctor Who). Terrance Dicks wittily commented that ‘Doctor Who is the only prison where time gets added on for good behaviour!’
The third annual outing for the Daleks (following Day of the Daleks and Planet of the Daleks) arrived in Pertwee’s final season in the form of Terry Nation’s Death to the Daleks and plunged the programme back once again from the relative sophistication of its 1970s scripts to its 1960s Flash Gordon-style serial origins, the only mode of scripting Doctor Who that Nation seemed comfortable with. The Doctor arrives on the planet Exxilon where a sentient city is draining power from everything (including the TARDIS and a Dalek expeditionary force). While the opening TARDIS power-cut scene might have mirrored the genuine power cuts caused in the UK by the mid-1970s energy crisis, Nation’s script quickly descends into sub-Eric Von Daniken code breaking as the Doctor and local ‘primitive’ Bellal make their way to the centre of the city.
By this stage, it was clear that the Daleks had been mishandled in their 1970s appearances, largely due to the show’s reliance on creator Terry Nation to script for them following Day of the Daleks. His repeated reuse of old ideas was painfully obvious, as was the lack of imagination brought to the Dalek serials by their respective directors. It wouldn’t be until the 1980s and the arrival of director Graeme Harper that the Daleks would get the kind of inventive visual direction they’d long deserved.
Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks had always been open to writers using allegory (some subtle, some not) in Doctor Who to tackle contemporary social and political issues. It gave the series some heft, above and beyond its status as Saturday entertainment and, no doubt, made it more interesting to work on. Having dealt with topics such as environmentalism (Doctor Who and the Silurians, The Sea Devils, The Green Death, Invasion of the Dinosaurs), the end of colonialism (The Colony in Space, The Mutants), the nature of television itself and specifically Doctor Who’s own history and function (Carnival of Monsters, The Three Doctors), the duo were running out of topics as their time on the show drew to a close.
Where The Curse of Peladon had featured an allegory for the UK’s entry into the EEC, the sequel story The Monster of Peladon dealt directly with UK industrial relations, particularly the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974. Set 50 years later, the Doctor returns to Peladon with Sarah to find the planet in turmoil. The Federation, of which Peladon is a part, is at war with Galaxy 5 and is dependent on Peladon’s reserves of trisilicate. Those who mine it, however, are refusing to adopt ‘modern’ technological working practices, while protesting that they are not earning enough ‘to feed our families’. The roles of the moderates and radicals within the planet’s various factions mirror those of the principals involved in the bitter real-life mining dispute of 1972, as astute viewers would have recognised.
This political content was (lightly) disguised under the same codmedieval fantasy trappings as seen in The Curse of Peladon. The castle settings and faux-Lord of the Rings-style court served as the setting for a space opera, featuring a similar menagerie of glam-rock alien delegates and a mining class who uniformly sport badger hairstyles. It may not have featured the most convincing alien society ever created, but The Monster of Peladon reflected the culture of the mid-1970s as much in its mise-en-scène as in its politics. The big boots, the even bigger hair and the out-of-control glitter make-up reflected a typical night out in a 1970s disco.
This mining melodrama led into Pertwee’s final story, Planet of the Spiders. Barry Letts – himself a Buddhist – took the opportunity to explore a subject little touched upon in his five years in charge of the show: religion. Conceived by Letts (and written, as was traditional now for the final story in a season, by Robert Sloman), Planet of the Spiders was a Buddhist parable that tackled the Doctor’s repeatedly displayed thirst for knowledge. The upcoming regeneration offered Letts the chance to have the Doctor learn a hard lesson in the process of, essentially, losing one of his lives.
Following The Green Death and Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Planet of the Spiders builds on the character development of Mike Yates. Sarah is drawn by Yates into investigating a rural meditation centre where he has been recuperating. The residents have made contact with an alien force that manifests on Earth as over-sized spiders that can possess humans by leaping on their backs (a fate that befalls Sarah). After helping the humanoid inhabitants to try and overthrow their spider masters, the Doctor returns to the planet Metebelis 3 from where he’d previously stolen a powerful crystal (representing his quest for knowledge). He confronts the Great One (the spider god) and loses his life due to excessive radiation. The Doctor has to sacrifice his ego (his third persona) to make up for past mistakes and to secure the future (his fourth persona). ‘It is wrong to have a greed for knowledge,’ said Letts. ‘Greed presupposes a preoccupation with the self, the ego. We know that in the beginning the Doctor stole a TARDIS to satisfy his greed for knowledge, and in The Green Death he steals one of the [Metebelis 3] blue crystals for precisely the same reason. He is willing to allow himself to be destroyed, the false ego being destroyed to find the real Self. He knows he will be destroyed, but knows also that he will be regenerated.’
The Doctor Who concept of regeneration was filtered through Letts’ Buddhist philosophy in Planet of the Spiders. The meditation retreat is run by Abbot K’anpo Rinpoche and his deputy Cho-Je. K’anpo is revealed to be a Time Lord mentor of the Doctor. He is killed while protecting Yates from attack by the spider-controlled residents. In death, K’anpo is reborn as Cho-Je, his own future self. At the climax, K’anpo reappears to aid the Doctor’s regeneration. ‘The old man is destroyed and the new man is regenerated,’ explained Letts. ‘Yes, it was all a quite deliberate parallel.’ As if to emphasise his attachment to the tale, Letts not only devised the storyline, he also directed the six-episode serial.
It is surprising that Doctor Who had not tackled religion in any serious way (while Star Trek seemed to deal with some alien pretending to be one god or another every other week). It is fitting, though, that the Pertwee era should have come to an end in a celebration of that most 1970s of all religious philosophies, Buddhism, which had grown in prominence (or, at least, in media coverage) in the West since the late-1960s. It seems appropriate, after half a
decade spent helping UNIT defend the Earth from threats coming from ‘out there’, that the Third Doctor should end his time looking inward.
Layered on top of the Buddhist parable is an examination of psychic powers, another 1970s social topic. The opening episode sees the Doctor investigating psychic powers and referring obliquely to notorious 1970s spoon bender Uri Geller. This leads into the adventure with the mind-controlling spiders, whose modus operandi is through mental domination of already wicked or weak people.
Planet of the Spiders was Barry Letts’ attempt to sum up his approach to Doctor Who. Reflecting his leading man’s interest in fast-moving vehicles, he indulges Pertwee with a 12-minute chase scene in episode two featuring a variety of vehicles on land, at sea and in the air. Each of the long-running team of characters has significant character moments, as if to draw a line under their participation (although some would return, notably Sarah and the Brigadier). The wrapping up of the character of the Third Doctor secured the concept of regeneration as central to the series, and is given a name for the first time. The first change of actor was narratively mysterious, referred to simply as a ‘renewal’. Troughton’s Second Doctor doesn’t go to any great lengths to explain the change, except to connect the process to the TARDIS. The then script editor Gerry Davis even believed the change to be akin to that featured in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Tale of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The next change is similarly provoked by a crisis, brought on by the Time Lords who punish the Doctor (yet still finding his existence in the universe to be of use to themselves). The change of physical appearance is part of this punishment.
Although mention of the Time Lords had been a common factor throughout the early-to-mid-1970s (especially with the involvement of the Master), little mention had been made of regeneration until Planet of the Spiders required another real-world change of actor. It was only then, as a fourth leading actor was sought for Doctor Who, that the concept of regeneration really took hold, both in the programme and with the public at large. The use of the term ‘regeneration’ to describe the process of change that the Doctor undergoes is in keeping with Letts’ religious/philosophical take on the series. He felt it necessary to not only explain to viewers afresh about the Doctor’s ability to change (it had been five years since the last such occurrence), but also the need to codify the process, give it a name and normalise it for future producers (who’d be free to follow his template or not).
During the early-to-mid-1970s, under producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks, and with Jon Pertwee as the title character, Doctor Who had undergone significant change and consolidation. It had shown itself capable of flexible narrative strategies that could deliver compelling action-adventure storylines aimed at a young, Saturday-early-evening audience, while still offering up complex takes on contemporary political and social issues. The technology of television production had changed and progressed in this time, and Doctor Who had proven itself to be (if not always successfully) at the forefront of such technological exploration, partly due to Letts’ own enthusiasm and willingness to experiment. As always with Doctor Who, the only constant was change and the changes coming in the mid-to-late-1970s would be some of the most significant in the series’ history.
4. GOTHIC THRILLS
The mid-1970s saw Doctor Who regenerate in more ways than one. Starting in December 1974, the Doctor had a new face in the shape of little-known Tom Baker, but the changes went deeper than that. Incoming producer Philip Hinchcliffe (previously not associated with the programme) and script editor Robert Holmes (a writer on the show since 1968’s The Krotons) developed new storytelling strategies in a concerted effort to distance their Doctor Who from the (largely) Earthbound action-adventure template the series had adopted most recently. Their partnership was to be as strong as that of Letts and Dicks, and would move the show in new creative directions.
‘I had the good sense to realise that I needed to do a lot of research and listen to a lot of people who knew what they were talking about,’ admitted Hinchcliffe, then a young producer coming to his first job, having previously been a writer (on Crossroads, amongst other shows) and script editor, knowing little about Doctor Who. ‘I think I brought a fresh outlook and new ideas to it, but I tried to soak up the required technical knowledge.’
Doctor Who had been a consistent ratings success throughout the early 1970s, increasing the audience from an average of seven million in 1970 to almost nine million by the time Letts, Dicks and Pertwee departed. Their politically and socially engaged fantasy-drama version of Doctor Who struck a chord with the viewing public. Despite pressure to maintain this level of success, it was in the nature of Hinchcliffe’s job that he should reformat the series with the arrival of a new Doctor. After five years, the UNIT ‘family’ and the largely Earthbound settings would be abandoned, with a move away from engagement with real-world events in favour of a lively strand of drama drawn from classic gothic tales.
Letts and Dicks oversaw the first Tom Baker story, with Hinchcliffe shadowing them. Robot was a remake of King Kong, written by Dicks almost as a ‘greatest hits’ compilation of ‘best Doctor Who bits’, as a new lead actor had not been found when it was written. Ian Marter had been brought in to play the ‘strong-arm’ companion (a role fulfilled previously by teacher Ian Chesterton and astronaut Steven Taylor), in case an older actor was cast (as Letts favoured). The casting of a fit, 40-year-old Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor made Marter’s role superfluous, although his Dr Harry Sullivan character remained for the next year or so.
As Letts had believed five years previously, Hinchcliffe felt that the audience for the now 12-year-old show had grown up and were now teenagers through to students. ‘The audience was evolving,’ Hinchcliffe explained. ‘I began to get letters from university students. I thought, there’s something going on with the audience. They’re not just the intelligent 12-year-old and the little six-year-old hiding behind the sofa: everybody else is watching. Here was an opportunity to take the show into a more adult area without losing its identity as a family show. We wanted it to work for the four- or five-year-old, for the 12-year-old, for the older member of the audience, not just the mums and dads. Clearly, students were beginning to tune in to it.’
Season 12 saw a period of renewal on the show. While Robot was a Doctor-Who-by-numbers adventure, it still found some space for a little political allegory in the midst of the giant-robot-as-King-Kong spectacle. The villains represented the rise of the technocracy, a political philosophy gaining currency in the 1970s. Faced with rising pollution and power cuts caused by an energy crisis, one strand of political thought (espoused by Miss Winters and her Scientific Reform Society) suggested that society and individual lifestyles should be managed along logical lines, a form of social control that amounted to fascism by another name (the Daleks would approve). Sarah Jane Smith was written as a combination of fearless reporter Lois Lane (her investigations uncover the plot) and Fay Wray (as the object of the Robot’s attentions at the climax). Dicks’ script also played with cinematic robot iconography. The title robot looks back to giant, out-of-control movie robots of the past, like the (semi-organic) Colossus of New York (1958), Tobor in Tobor the Great (1954) and space sentinel Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). It also anticipates a host of late-1970s popular-culture androids, from Star Wars’ C-3PO to UK sitcom star Metal Mickey, and Twiki in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, ITV’s much-vaunted, bought-in 1980s rival to Doctor Who, and even Doctor Who’s own K-9.
It was only with Baker’s second story that Hinchcliffe’s blueprint for a radical new approach to the series became clear. Hinchcliffe had a distinctive approach to storytelling. ‘I thought there was a way we could take the “naffness” out. Early on, we took some very basic decisions about taking these stories seriously. We were going to tell stories really tightly, make them as compelling as we could, ramp up the suspense and cliff-hangers and generally make it work in terms of good adventurous storytelling.’
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Hinchcliffe’s period on the show is described as ‘gothic’, an appropriate label given the period’s reliance on both the ‘horror’ side of gothic entertainment, as well as the literary aspect of the genre’s origins. ‘It evolved naturally. I don’t think we ever used the term “gothic”,’ noted Hinchcliffe. ‘There were about three shows in early draft script form that [script editor] Bob Holmes had. I had the most influence on The Ark in Space. If you look at The Ark in Space, it is exactly the same concept as the movie Alien (1979). Robert [Holmes] had a leaning towards that kind of gothic thing [and] so did I, up to a point. I don’t think we consciously put seasons together that would add up to that. We looked at every story idea on its merits.’
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