Timeless Adventures

by Brian J. Robb

  The Keeper of Traken is a ‘Garden of Eden’ parable (with an atmosphere that echoes Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, adapted by the BBC that same year), in which a perfectly balanced world is corrupted by the evil Melkur, a long-dormant statue located in a verdant grove. Melkur is revealed to be a TARDIS housing the decaying Master (from 1976’s The Deadly Assassin). The theme of corruption continued in Logopolis as the new Master (having body-snatched Nyssa’s father, Tremas) arrives on the title planet, where a society of mathematicians is preserving the universe’s harmony through the fundamental manipulation of numbers. The Master’s interference disrupts their process and threatens the universe. In defeating the Master, the Doctor falls from a radio telescope to his ‘death’. His regeneration is aided (in an echo of the Third Doctor’s) by the mysterious wraith-like figure of ‘the Watcher’ who has been haunting the Doctor throughout. The 21 March 1981 final episode of Logopolis was watched by 6.1 million, with the season as a whole averaging only 5.8 million.

  The regeneration of Tom Baker’s Doctor into Peter Davison, the star of All Creatures Great and Small (a show that had John Nathan-Turner as production unit manager) had come at just the right time. The change of time slot had worked, but it was too late to significantly raise the season-average viewing figures. So important was the change of actor after seven years (a generation had grown up knowing no other Doctor than Tom Baker), the BBC scheduled a repeat series showcasing an adventure from each of the previous Doctors in preparation for Davison’s debut in 1982. However, the show’s retreat from engagement with the realities of the world (filtered through fantasy entertainment) would be a major contributing factor to the decline of Doctor Who through the 1980s. The poor viewing figures for Tom Baker’s final season meant that Nathan-Turner was aware he would have to do something drastic if he was to win back the popular audience. Part of his new approach would be heavily reliant on the casting of the Fifth Doctor, and for the first time the series cast an already established television star: 29-year-old Davison.

  In casting Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor, producer John Nathan-Turner was looking for a contrast with Tom Baker. Davison’s light, straight hair and his youth contrasted hugely with the near-50, dark, curly-haired Tom Baker. While these superficial elements were at the front of Nathan-Turner’s mind, he was lucky with his choice. Davison was a rising TV star (with sitcoms Sink or Swim and Holding the Fort). The change of lead actor and a controversial move from Saturday early evenings to 7pm on Mondays and Tuesdays (in most areas) contributed heavily to the ratings almost doubling over Tom Baker’s final year. Davison’s first season of stories (the show’s nineteenth on air) all averaged around nine million, with atypical period adventure Black Orchid reaching ten million. The soap-opera-like cast line-up and scheduling helped Doctor Who rise to new levels of success and popularity, even as the show retreated from any popular social or political engagement.

  Nathan-Turner, however, appears to have taken the wrong lessons from the failure of Tom Baker’s final season with the viewing public. The season had proved a hit with the increasingly vocal and actively involved fan base. The return of the Cybermen and the Master gave Nathan-Turner a taste for reviving monsters and characters from the show’s past, a process given more momentum due to the looming twentieth anniversary and growing appetite for nostalgia. Nathan-Turner would continue to exploit the growing cultural and intellectual phenomenon of postmodernism in popular culture. Self-reflexivity became central to narratives in film and television, in which characters would make comments or experience events that seemed to reveal an awareness of their status as fictional entertainments. Doctor Who had always enjoyed a loose continuity, but increasingly in the 1980s the show’s own narrative history would become central to its storytelling. At first this engaged audiences with a taste for nostalgia, but over the longer run it would become off-putting, with the series perceived as needing a high degree of knowledge of the past to understand it. Nathan-Turner’s genius for publicity and PR was also part of this, with narrative developments in the show promoted as event television, or manipulated through the prism of other forms of entertainment (shooting on location for Planet of Fire, Davison and Nicola Bryant posed on the beach in a James Bond pastiche, while new companion Bonnie Langford was introduced when she and Colin Baker arrived on a theatre stage suspended by Kirby wires).

  The Master was the villain in Davison’s first story, Castrovalva (a sequel to Logopolis), and in the season’s climax, Time Flight, in which a hijacked Concorde lands on prehistoric Earth. Bidmead continued his exploration of complex mathematics in Castrovalva, with a look derived from the work of early-twentieth-century Dutch artist MC Escher. This may have drawn on a then-popular science book, Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R Hofstadter, which connected music, art and maths, but it was definitely inspired by an Escher print called ‘Castrovalva’ that was hanging in a BBC office. With modern video effects, the show just about managed to pull off an Escher-inspired environment. The first two episodes (almost entirely TARDIS-set) dealt with the aftermath of the regeneration, before the final two relocated events to Castrovalva, an artificial environment created by the Master as a trap for the Doctor. This story structure made sense in the new twice-weekly transmission slot.

  The glamour of filming at Heathrow and featuring Concorde, with the active co-operation of the airport authorities and British Airways, seems to have been enough for Nathan-Turner to commission Time Flight. Concluding the series with the unexpected return of the Master was also attractive as a more sophisticated version of Barry Letts’ approach to structuring the series (and Nathan-Turner had certainly learned from Letts as executive producer).

  Nathan-Turner’s recreation of Doctor Who was a combination of hard science fiction with game-show or light-entertainment production values. New script editor Eric Saward was keen to build on Bidmead’s legacy and push the show in a more ideas-driven direction. Given the political and social upheaval in Britain in the early- to mid-1980s, it is remarkable that this previously socially and politically engaged series should fail to explore this material. Nathan-Turner wanted a new way to engage audiences in an increasingly competitive television environment, and he found it in the combination of Saward’s movie-inspired science fiction and an easily accessible visual look that would not be alienating to viewers who experienced Doctor Who as part of an evening’s television.

  Saward would implement Nathan-Turner’s idea of event television in the most spectacular way with Earthshock. He’d been hired for the job on the back of submitting The Visitation, a traditional story that re-tooled classic Doctor Who tropes for the 1980s. It featured invading aliens trapped in a historical locale and a notable historical event affected by the Doctor (in this case he’s involved in starting the fire of London, after a similar fire-starting experience in Rome during The Romans).

  Following the ideas-driven double bill of Four To Doomsday (a 1960s-throwback political and environmental parable about autocratic rule in which an alien frog god aims for Earth after destroying his own planet’s ozone layer) and Kinda (a complex Buddhist/colonial parable featuring more pop-video-inspired hallucinations), and the pseudo-historic double bill of The Visitation and Black Orchid (an Agatha Christie-inspired heritage-house mystery), Saward and Nathan-Turner unleashed Earthshock, a story that (for better or worse, often both) was to dictate the style of the series for the rest of the decade.

  Doctor Who had always used returning adversaries sparingly in the past, with three exceptions: the Daleks (at the height of 1960s Dalekmania), the Cybermen (in the late 1960s ‘monster’ season) and the Master (during the early 1970s). This all changed in the 1980s, with the Daleks returning every two years from 1984 and the Master featured as a regular villain during Peter Davison and Colin Baker’s time in the TARDIS. Nathan-Turner formulated the idea that exploiting the show’s own heritage was a good move following the fan-acclaimed ‘Master trilogy’. He went one step further, tapping the postmodern interes
t in nostalgia by bringing back barely remembered villains like Omega (Arc of Infinity), the Black Guardian (Mawdryn Undead, Terminus, Enlightenment), and creatures like the Sea Devils and Silurians (teamed up in Warriors of the Deep). The most dramatic return of all, however, was that of the Cybermen in Earthshock.

  Six years after they were last seen (in Revenge of the Cybermen), the cliff-hanger of episode one of Earthshock revealed the newly redesigned ‘tin soldiers’ were back, jolting a nation of fans in surprise. Nathan-Turner had turned down the chance of a Radio Times cover announcing their return, preferring to maximise the surprise. This was intended to create word of mouth, turning Doctor Who into a must-see event. The intention was to increase the number of viewers for the second surprise, the unexpected (and equally secret) death of the Doctor’s companion Adric (Waterhouse) at the climax of episode four (something not seen since The Daleks’ Master Plan in 1966).

  As part of the increasing postmodernism of the show, Earthshock features a quick catch-up on Cyber-history when the Cybermen view a selection of clips from past Doctor Who adventures. The first time Nathan-Turner had tried this was in a flashback sequence just before the Fourth Doctor fell from the Pharos Project radio telescope in Logopolis. This was part of the general nostalgia surrounding the programme as it approached its twentieth year on air, with TV review show Did You See? devoting a special report to Doctor Who’s past monsters on the back of the return of the Cybermen.

  The effect of Earthshock on 1980s Doctor Who would be profound. Saward would go on to write a series of macho stories full of soldiers, violence and space opera (Resurrection of the Daleks, Attack of the Cybermen, Revelation of the Daleks) that would come to define the decade’s Doctor Who in the eyes of a dwindling audience. As script editor, he would shape others’ work to this template (with other stories modelled after Earthshock: Terminus, The Caves of Androzani, Vengeance on Varos and The Two Doctors). Each of these stories would (in part) emulate the macho American cinema of the 1980s, drawing on the work of James Cameron and films featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. There’s a lot of Die Hard in the often self-referential tone of much of Saward’s work, and it seemed that Doctor Who’s mass audience didn’t care for it.

  From Earthshock onwards, Nathan-Turner’s Doctor Who would be driven by event-television choices. The show’s twentieth season saw each story contain a significant element from the series’ own past, largely thanks to the influence of fan ‘continuity consultant’ Ian Levine who was helping the production office keep the show’s 20-year-old continuity straight (see chapter six). Each story had a headline-attracting stunt attached, some more than one.

  Season opener Arc of Infinity combined the return of companion Tegan, who’d been left behind in Heathrow at the conclusion of Time Flight, with an encore appearance by Omega, the Time Lord villain who’d appeared in The Three Doctors. Adding to the sense of special occasion, the production featured foreign filming (for the first time since City of Death) in Amsterdam (a habit that would recur in each of the next two years, on Planet of Fire and The Two Doctors).

  Although there had been a BBC2 repeat of The Three Doctors (featuring Omega as the anti-matter villain) as part of the Five Faces of Doctor Who season before Peter Davison’s debut, Arc of Infinity is guilty of assuming detailed knowledge of the show’s past. Returning creatures or villains were not effectively reintroduced, other than with a throwaway ‘Oh it’s X, Y or Z’ uttered by the Doctor, and maybe an ‘I’ve met them before’ aside to the companion.

  The rest of the season would see an encore encounter with the Mara (the dark-side threat from Kinda) in Snakedance (a spiritual remake of Planet of the Spiders); the Black Guardian in the loose trilogy of Mawdryn Undead, Terminus and Enlightenment; and the Master in historical adventure The King’s Demons. The original plan was for the twentieth-anniversary season to climax with the return of the Daleks in the Saward-scripted Warhead/The Return (retooled one year later as Resurrection of the Daleks). This reliance on the past allowed for a certain amount of creative reinvention (returning monsters were invariably redesigned), but it satisfied hardcore followers of the show (fans interested in its deep history) at the expense of the wider, casual audience.

  The Black Guardian trilogy introduced new companion Turlough (Mark Strickson), an alien masquerading as an English public-school boy, pressured into attempting to kill the Doctor (repeatedly) on the Guardian’s behalf. The idea of a traitor-cum-threat within the TARDIS crew was a new one, but old elements of the show continued to recur with an appearance from the Brigadier (replacing the originally planned return of the First Doctor’s companion, Ian Chesterton) inspiring another series of nostalgic clips of old episodes built into the narrative. Again, as with Arc of Infinity, little care is taken to reintroduce the nostalgic elements to less regular viewers. Showrunner Russell T Davies would better handle the process of bringing back old monsters for the refreshed Doctor Who. He would also cleverly rework old plot elements, such as the way David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor seemingly began the regeneration process in The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End, echoing the false regeneration featured in the Davison adventure Mawdryn Undead, when the Doctor’s companions misidentify a disfigured impostor as the regenerated Doctor.

  Big science-fiction ideas feature in Terminus and Enlightenment. Terminus sees the Doctor save the entire universe by ensuring the Big Bang happens in a story that draws heavily from Norse creation myths (mythology that would recur twice more during Sylvester McCoy’s time), while Enlightenment has the immortal ‘Eternals’ amuse themselves by racing spaceships disguised as old-fashioned sailing ships. The anniversary season ended with something of a whimper – thanks to the cancellation (due to strike action) of Warhead/The Return – with The King’s Demons, an old-fashioned historical tale in which the Master attempts to disrupt the signing of Magna Carta. Ratings had averaged seven million viewers for the season, an improvement on Tom Baker’s final year, but still falling behind the series highs of the 1970s.

  The Doctor Who nostalgia boom culminated in a giant, over-subscribed convention at Longleat (see chapter six) in March 1983 and the broadcast, in November 1983, of the celebratory anniversary story The Five Doctors. This TV movie was screened as part of 1983’s Children in Need charity telethon night, two days after the actual twentieth anniversary on 23 November. This was the height of Doctor Who’s growing self-awareness, uniting three Doctors (Davison, Pertwee and Troughton), with a stand-in for the late William Hartnell (Richard Hurndall). The Fourth Doctor (Baker) featured in previously unseen material recycled from the incomplete story Shada. Opening with a clip of William Hartnell from The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Five Doctors encapsulates all the signature traits of Doctor Who in the 1980s. The plot – in which various Doctors and companions have to make their way to the Dark Tower in Gallifrey’s Death Zone to defeat renegade Time Lord Borusa in his attempts to achieve immortality – comes across as a variation on the Marvel comic-book team-up and a riff on the growing popularity of Dungeons and Dragons adventure gaming. It is simply an excuse to pack in as many references to the show’s past as possible, and feature characters that ordinary viewers may or may not recognise, but each of whose fleeting returns would be applauded by fans. Various faces from the past were shoe-horned into Terrance Dicks’ busy script, with guest villain appearances from a lone Dalek, an army of Cybermen and the Master.

  The tendency to recycle and reuse characters and story elements continued into season 21. Facile political commentary crept into underwater, base-under-siege story Warriors of the Deep. Pertwee foes the Sea Devils and the Silurians returned in a heavy-handed Cold War analogy thrust forward to the year 2084 (one hundred years after the year in which it was broadcast). Less sophisticated than much of the political content of the show during the early-1970s, it was nonetheless a late – and rare – attempt to re-engage with wider, real-world issues that connected to the larger viewing public. Warriors of the Deep was Doctor Who’s reaction to the
rise of Ronald Reagan, his ‘star wars’ missile-defence policy, and the Greenham Common protests against the arrival of US nuclear missiles in the UK.

  The apparent destruction of the TARDIS in Frontios was part of Nathan-Turner’s ongoing event-television agenda. The production office had publicly hinted that the police-box shape of the TARDIS might be abandoned and, with the seeming destruction of the ship by a Tractator-manipulated meteor storm, it was plausible that the plan was being enacted. Nathan-Turner would often float these high-concept ideas in press conferences, thereby generating publicity. The idea of an actress playing the Doctor had been used when Baker quit the role, and resurfaced when it was announced that Davison was leaving. The TARDIS replacement idea was given another workout in the opening to Attack of the Cybermen when the Doctor (Colin Baker) gets the chameleon circuit working briefly. Despite its originality, Frontios also reveals a growing trend in Doctor Who stories of the 1980s: it amalgamates elements from various stories from the past. The insect civilisation of the Tractators echoes that of The Web Planet, while their plot to pilot the planet of Frontios is drawn directly from the Daleks’ plan in The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and the far-future civilisation seems based upon that shown in The Ark.

  The next story, Resurrection of the Daleks, featured the annual flashback sequence made up of clips from old episodes. The focus this time was on a series of images of the Doctor’s companions as the Daleks probe the Doctor’s mind (although a production oversight missed out Louise Jameson’s Leela). Narratively, however, Saward’s script was once again a combination of Alien and Star Wars, drawing on popular cinematic SF rather than creating any real-life allegory. The nearest Resurrection of the Daleks comes to social comment is a Dalek’s parting threat that Dalek-hidden duplicates still occupy positions of power in the British Government. The Doctor describes the duplicates as ‘less than stable’. Here it is a throwaway line, but Russell T Davies would make aliens-in-government the central conceit of a witty two-part story (Aliens in London/World War Three). The story also sees Tegan leave the TARDIS in an abrupt manner when she decides the death and destruction she experiences travelling with the Doctor have become too much. In reality, Fielding, Strickson and Davison were all leaving the show in 1984, so their departures were staggered across several stories. By The Twin Dilemma, the entire lead cast of the series had changed.