‘He knew there’s only one way to fight a war. Any war. With your gloves off.’ Looking for Peter is a fascinating extra on the DVD of The Sensorites, in which Toby Hadoke’s mild curiosity about the writer Peter R Newman becomes a touching voyage of discovery leading to Newman’s elderly sister, and the story of his tragic early death. Along the way, Hadoke chats to DWM’s Marcus Hearn about Newman’s other writing credits – beyond Doctor Who, the only notable one being Yesterday’s Enemy.

It was first produced as a BBC play broadcast on 14^th October 1958, focusing on a small squad of British soldiers lost in the Burmese jungle during the Second World War, who occupy a small Burmese village. There, their commander, the ruthless Captain Langdon, takes increasingly harsh measures against civilians and enemy agents alike – until the Japanese Army finds the survivors and takes action of its own. There are overtones of Heart of Darkness, while the overall theme is “there’s no such thing as a good war” – the British are just as capable of committing atrocities as their enemies. To the Burmese, the combatants are all the same.

Hammer film producer Michael Carreras saw the BBC broadcast, and immediately earmarked Newman’s script as a candidate for movie treatment. He called on Val Guest, who’d previously helmed Hammer’s TV to cinema adaptations of The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass II and The Abominable Snowmen. Guest agreed to direct, providing he could retain the uncompromising tone of Newman’s original. The result is one of Hammer’s grimmest films, and one of its strongest (it was nominated for the BAFTA Best Picture award in 1960), with excellent production design, crisp black and white cinematography, and all-round great performances, particularly from Stanley Baker as the re-named Captain Langford, and Leo McKern as war correspondent Max. Guest wrings tension from the scenes of Langford stubbornly refusing to bow to pressure to free civilian hostages, and then, when the tables are turned, from the fate of the captive British soldiers. In a corrective to Hammer’s 1958 “Japsploitation” shocker The Camp on Blood Island, the Japanese Major Yamazaki is erudite, civilised and rather more reluctant to resort to execution than Langford.

Sadly, aside from a tentative 1961 Spaghetti Western The Savage Guns, and The Sensorites, this was Newman’s only script. Watching the Looking for Peter documentary, there’s a slight sense Newman’s career peaked too soon, and he never lived up to the promise of his first script. His niece recalls episodes of writer’s block and frustrated ambition. Even The Sensorites can be read as Newman applying the themes of Yesterday’s Enemy to a family science fiction serial. For the British Army read Earth astronauts, and for the Japanese read the Sensorites (including the unfortunate, perhaps unconscious idea, that “they all look the same”).

After an opening episode that pitches the menacing Sensorites as members of the emerging Doctor Who monster club, alongside the Daleks and the Voords, Newman reveals them to be a sensitive people. Human beings are the real monsters: The Sensorites notably climaxes with the revelation that a group of Earthmen have been hiding in the city sewers, committing their own kind of atrocities against the native population. Their commander is a man determined to maintain discipline among his ragtag group of survivors, just as Langford stamps his authority on his own men. At the last, it’s the Sensorites who are the more civilised people: ‘I could have killed him. I wanted to. But that would not be the way, would it.’ Newman’s work is informed by the idea that good and evil transcend racial divides; that in extremis even a civilised person might become a monster, and that fear of the unknown – the Sensorites circling a crippled spaceship or the Japanese Army encircling a Burmese village – can drive a rational man out of his mind. Yesterday’s Enemy brings The Sensorites, perhaps the most fizzy and ethereal of the Hartnell serials, into sharper focus.

Next Time: The Reign of Terror

Sources: Yesterday’s Enemy (Indicator Blu-ray, 2021); Looking for Peter (BBC DVD, 2012)