Timeless Adventures (14 page)

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 ideology 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
.

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.