Timeless Adventures (17 page)

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.

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.’

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.’

The Ark in Space
featured the eruption of ‘body horror’ into
Doctor
Who
, capturing the ‘Me’ generation’s inward-looking self-absorption and obsession with body image and disease, especially uncontrollable diseases like cancer. Thirty years after the Second World War, an entire generation had grown to adulthood in relative peace and prosperity. With little in the way of outward threat (the Cold War was constantly looming, but rather abstract and certainly not personal), affluent societies (like that in California) turned inwards. Plastic surgery and modern dentistry ‘improved’ appearance, but, despite high-tech health care, some diseases could not be conquered, like various cancers. The body could still turn against someone, no matter how rich they were. The fear of disease and transformation is even more basic than that, but the mid-1970s context of
The Ark in Space
gave the story an additional resonance. Movies at the time were dealing with similar fears of loss of control over the body, whether through demonic pregnancy in
Rosemary’s Baby
(1968), or loss of identity in
The Stepford Wives
(1975) and
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1978). More pertinently, the SF thrills of
The Fly
(1958), with its transformation of a scientist into an insect, were also directly echoed.

Finding themselves adrift on a space station in the far future, the Doctor, Sarah and Harry have to save the remnants of mankind (who’ve been hibernating to escape a ravaged Earth) from infestation by the Wirrn. The space-borne, wasp-like Wirrn reproduce by laying eggs in other species (hence Hinchcliffe’s feeling that Ridley Scott’s 1979 movie
Alien
bears a passing resemblance), but they can also transform other species into Wirrn hybrids (as happens to Noah, leader of the station) and absorb their knowledge. It’s a fantastic premise for an alien species, mostly well realised by the designers, and supported by the cast taking the threat seriously, in line with Hinchcliffe’s ‘new seriousness’ approach. The audience clearly liked this less-jokey approach to the show, with 13.6 million switching on for episode two, surpassing the series’ previous highest-rated episode (episode one of the imaginative Hartnell adventure
The Web Planet
, where 13.5 million viewers tuned in for an adventure that coincidentally featured several complex alien life-cycles!).

Outgoing producer Barry Letts had developed the remaining stories of season 12, so Hinchcliffe worked with the material he inherited. Although none of the other adventures would feature his ‘gothic’ take to the same extent as
The Ark in Space
, he was able to have some input into the feel of
Genesis of the Daleks
, the story that revived the much-maligned Daleks and introduced the character of Davros, their mad-scientist creator. Returning monsters were very much part of Letts’ plan for the new Doctor’s first season, so
The Ark in Space
was followed by a two-part rematch between the Doctor and the Sontarans,
The Sontaran Experiment
. Slight though this tale was, it still managed to pack in commentary on the ethics of torture, as Sontaran commander Styre experiments on captured humans in a post-apocalyptic landscape. The setting – although shot on location on Dartmoor – was supposed to be a futuristic London reclaimed by nature, a riff on the disaster fiction of JG Ballard.

However, it was the Daleks who were to make the biggest impact in the 1975 series. After years of low-rent appearances in poor scripts written by their creator Terry Nation in the style of 1960s cliff-hanger serials, they were in serious need of reinvention. Nation’s inspiration was to explore their origins, something only hinted at in 1963. Audiences had supposedly seen their ‘final end’ in 1967’s
The Evil of
the Daleks
, but had never been privy to their creation. In pursuit of this, Nation again fell back on the tried-and-tested allegories he was comfortable with.
Genesis of the Daleks
presents two armed camps – the Thals and the Kaleds – fighting a war of attrition across the wastelands of the planet Skaro. Most of the story explores the Kaled struggle for survival, and the environment presented is akin to that of Hitler’s bunker in the final days of the Second World War. Nation presents a science-fiction take on Hitler’s Nazi fantasies of genetic purity, as Kaled chief scientist Davros struggles to find a way of preserving his people, aware that time is running out for the whole planet. Davros is a scarred humanoid figure locked into a mobile survival unit whose bottom half resembles a classic Dalek chassis. He has created a ‘travel machine’, modelled after his own high-tech wheelchair, to contain the genetically re-engineered form he sees his own people eventually becoming. These future Kaleds are already being engineered by Davros himself, in anticipation of nature.

The Time Lords send the Doctor and his companions, Sarah and Harry, to Skaro, with instructions to destroy the Daleks at their creation. Their aim is to avert the death and destruction the Daleks will cause, or to at least affect their genetic development, resulting in less aggressive creatures. With no choice but to get involved, the Doctor is soon engaged in a variety of riveting ethical debates with Davros. It’s unclear how much of the finished script was Nation’s and how much was due to extensive rewriting by script editor Robert Holmes, but
Genesis
of the Daleks
was a huge improvement over Nation’s scripts for the Pertwee-period Dalek adventures. Holmes and Hinchcliffe rehabilitated the Daleks, lifting them to a new metaphorical level at a time in Britain when the pseudo-fascist National Front was on the rise. To present debates about eugenics, genetic engineering, racial purity and race survival to peak BBC1 audiences in the mid-1970s was brave, but it succeeded admirably with the public.
Genesis of the Daleks
has become one of the most clearly recalled and oft repeated (the two may not be unrelated) of all
Doctor Who serials
.

Although there are elements of the
Frankenstein
story (Davros creates the Daleks in his own image, only to have them turn on him as their programming refuses to allow them to recognise any other being as superior to them), the story tackles other deep-seated issues. Faced with the opportunity of destroying the Daleks outright – all he has to do is touch two wires together to detonate explosives in the Dalek embryo chamber – the Doctor hesitates. ‘Have I the right?’ he asks himself, fearing that destroying the Daleks in this way makes him just the same as them, a perpetrator of genocide (‘If I kill… wipe out a whole intelligent life form, then I become like them. I’d be no better than the Daleks.’) This is a distillation of the philosophical question of the ‘problem of evil’: how can the existence of God be reconciled with the existence of evil and suffering in the world? For a popular drama, primarily aimed at children and reaching over 13 million viewers, to tackle such a weighty topic was unusual.