Clerk:

Defendant, please stand. The charge against you is that in 1984-1985 you did deliberately neglect your duty as a family television programme by electing to subject your audience to violence beyond what they might reasonably expect to see at 5:20pm on a Saturday afternoon. In addition, you made your lead character unlikeable, attempting to murder his companion and using threatening, abusive and insulting words and behaviour with the intent of causing harassment, alarm or distress. As a result of your actions, your audience abandoned you in droves, preferring to watch the less violent and upsetting programming on the commercial channel. Do you understand that?

Doctor Who:

Yes.

Clerk:

Do you plead guilty or not guilty?

Doctor Who:

Not guilty.

Inquisitor Darkel:

You may be seated, Doctor Who. Before we begin, may I say a few words? The charges against you are serious indeed. And there can only be one penalty if you are found guilty: cancellation. Are you aware of the severity of the sentence that faces you?

Doctor Who:

Yes, your honour.

Inquisitor Darkel:

And you still refuse a court defender?

Doctor Who:

I do, your honour.

Inquisitor Darkel:

Very well. We will proceed. Valeyard, you may make your opening speech.

Valeyard:

Thank you, sagacity. It is my intention during the course of this blog post to prove that the accused, Doctor Who, is indeed guilty of the diverse charges laid against it. I shall be calling on various epistopic interfaces to demonstrate that Doctor Who is too violent to be allowed to continue its adventures in space and time. I shall demonstrate that the lead actors in the programme have failed to connect with audiences. And I will prove that the programme’s ratings have nosedived since the lead actor incarnated in his latest regenerative iteration. In short, I shall show that the complainant, Mr Michael Grade of the British Broadcasting Corporation, is wholly correct in his assertions that Doctor Who requires resting. Permanently.

Inquisitor Darkel:

Thank you Valeyard. I take it you wish to call your first witness?

Valeyard:

Yes, your majesty. I now call Vengeance on Varos.

Gold Usher:

Repeat after me, “I promise to-“

Inquisitor Darkel:

Usher, I think we can dispense with these incidentals lest this trial become even more weary.

Gold Usher:

As you like, milady.

Inquisitor Darkel:

Valeyard, please continue.

Valeyard:

Thank you, oh radiant one. May I direct the court’s attention to this scene, in which the Doctor pushes two hapless mortuary attendants into a poorly-sited acid bath, dissolving them into adipose tissue? I know it’s unpleasant, but I do wish the court to note that we see the blistering flesh hanging off one mortuary attendant’s body. I also draw the court’s attention in particular to the Doctor’s smirking response to these sad deaths: “Forgive me if I don’t join you.”

May we wind forward a few rels? Thank you. I would also like to draw the court’s attention to this scene, in which the Doctor has used deadly poisonous vines to rig a death trap for two of the poorly paid staff of this grim establishment: one Mr Quillam, who I’m told loved birds and animals, and the Chief of Operations, a man whose rotund appearance lent itself well to playing Father Christmas at the orphanage. Please note that rather than try to reason with Mr Quillam and the Chief, the Doctor’s instinct is to inflict premeditated violent death on them.

May I also remind the court that the sixth Doctor also takes amusement after he kills Shockeye in The Two Doctors, and at Davros’s hand being shot off in Revelation of the Daleks. A course of conduct that I hold amounts to a distinct lack of compassion and empathy, hallmarks of a psychopath.

Inquisitor Darkel:

Doctor Who, do you have anything to say in your defence?

Doctor Who:

The Doctor’s life was in immediate danger.

Inquisitor Darkel:

So, you contend that it is acceptable for the Doctor to kill, and then joke about it like some cut price James Bond, providing it’s in the course of saving his own skin?

Doctor Who:

Well, when you put it like that… No further questions.

Inquisitor Darkel:

Valeyard, do you wish to call any further witnesses?

Valeyard:

Indeed I do, light in my darkness. I call Attack of the Cybermen. In this baffling piece of fan fiction, we see a head being shot off, decapitations, hands being graphically crushed, a character boiled to death and another begging for euthanasia. And, for the first time this season, the Doctor picks up a gun and uses it to kill his enemies. The first, but not the last.

Inquisitor Darkel:

Is it your intention to argue that the Doctor carrying a gun is somehow a violation of Doctor Who’s principles, Valeyard?

Valeyard:

As always, your eminence is one step ahead of me. Yes, Attack of the Cybermen is merely the first instance this series. The Doctor uses a gun to shoot up the control room on Varos. He then uses a crystal to create a death ray to assassinate the Borad of Karfel. Again, in six epistopic interfaces of the twenty-second segment of space/time, I believe this amounts to a course of conduct that suggests the sixth Doctor is perfectly ready to resort to violence and even assassination to achieve his ends.

Inquisitor Darkel:

Doctor Who, do you have any questions?

Doctor Who:

I don’t think I need to refute the Scrapyard’s so-called evidence. I shall call my own witnesses in due course.

Inquisitor Darkel:

Valeyard, do you have anything more to add?

Valeyard:

I should like to draw the court’s attention to this graph, which shows that at the start of the season ratings were a whisker off nine million, declining to a bare six million after eight episodes. A full third of the audience were so repulsed by the litany of horrors they were forced to witness that they switched over.

Inquisitor Darkel:

Valeyard, these ratings are no worse than Season 21’s are they?

Valeyard:

Your highness, I don’t have those figures to hand…

Inquisitor Darkel:

No, but I do, Valeyard. They look to hover between six and eight million. So Season 22 is hardly a catastrophic dip, is it?

Valeyard:

If your grace says so.

Inquisitor Darkel:

I do say so, Valeyard. Doctor Who, the time has now come for you to mount your defence.

Doctor Who

Thank you, your honour. I shall now prove that the charges against me were trumped up by persons who shall remain nameless cough Michael Grade cough  as a smokescreen for a cost-cutting exercise for the BBC to fund the launch of a new weekday soap opera. My first witness is The Mysterious Planet. As you can see, in this story, which marked my triumphant return to BBC One after 18 months on hiatus, I address and disprove all the charges of violence against me.

Inquisitor Darkel:

How so, Doctor Who?

Doctor Who?

I direct the court’s attention to this scene, where I point out that a certain amount of graphic detail is unavoidable when you are making an outer-space adventure series. There has always been violence in Doctor Who and Season 22 is no worse.

Valeyard:

Doctor Who, may I ask to what you are referring when you say “ a certain amount of graphic detail is unavoidable”?

Doctor Who:

Well, erm…

Inquisitor Darkel:

Answer the question, Doctor Who.

Doctor Who:

Some savages have just captured a couple of outer space rogues who were talking about blowing up a totem pole.

Valeyard:

I see. It’s hardly biting the head off a rat, is it? Or watching a man’s hands being crushed into bloody pulp? Or seeing the grisly remains of a human being peering from within a gory platter of pulsing internal organs and begging his daughter for death?

Doctor Who:

Erm…

Valeyard:

It’s just, it seems like you’re trying to excuse Season 22’s excesses by pretending that they’re no worse than Glitz and Dibber shooting some outer-space laser guns. What about this scene in The Mysterious Planet, where a giant robot horribly electrocutes comedy actress Joan Sims?

Doctor Who:

Yes, good isn’t it?!

Valeyard:

It is not good, Doctor. In this photograph you can see her face bleeding and her veins bursting from her flesh.

Doctor Who:

To be fair, we cut that quite a lot in the actual episode.

Valeyard:

So you admit that the content of the show is too graphic for a family audience, and you ought to have practised more restraint?

Doctor Who:

Well, we’d got our wrists slapped, hadn’t we? Best err on the side of caution.

Valeyard:

Your moral bankruptcy revolts me.

Doctor Who:

Erm… Let me call my second witness, Mindwarp. In this story I, erm, well. I’m not really sure what’s going on in it to be honest.

Valeyard:

It looks like another story where the sixth Doctor goes mad and tries to kill Peri.

Doctor Who:

Ah, yes! But it’s a trick, isn’t it. Isn’t it?

Valeyard:

You tell me.

Doctor Who:

Erm… Let me move on to my third witness. It’s a story from the Doctor’s future, a web of mayhem and intrigue where he actually saves the human race!

Valeyard:

Is it going to be your defence that the Doctor improves?

Doctor Who:

Yes!

Valeyard:

This I must see.

Doctor Who:

Well, I wouldn’t say that. It’s basically Nightmare of Eden to be honest.

Inquisitor Darkel

I liked Nightmare of Eden. That one with the scarf and the blonde girl were very witty.

Doctor Who:

Ah, well, erm. This one has Bonnie Langford in it.

Valeyard:

And this is offered as your defence?

Doctor Who:

She’s quite good.

Inquisitor Darkel:

Doctor Who, is this going anywhere or are you just wasting the court’s time?

Doctor Who:

Um, let’s skip to Part 13. This is Robert Holmes’s last script ever.

Valeyard:

Ooh, I’m in this one!

Doctor Who:

Yeah, it’s quite clever how they reveal you’re the Doctor, isn’t it?

Inquisitor Darkel:

What’s that? He’s the Doctor?

Valeyard:

Don’t worry about it, your awesomeness. It’s not really important to the plot.

Inquisitor Darkel:

As you were.

Doctor Who:

Anyway, the location work is excellent and the strange fairground world inside the Matrix promises that this is going to be a climax every bit as memorable and creepy as The Deadly Assassin.

Inquisitor Darkel:

That was a great one. Oh, I did like that one with the scarf. It was so long… … …

Valeyard:

Milady? Milady!

Inquisitor Darkel:

What? Ah. Anyway, what was Part 14 like? A triumphant climax that brilliantly paid off the previous 13 weeks?
Doctor Who:

Well, I wouldn’t go that far. But it is quite good. I mean, you find me guilty as charged of all the violence and stuff, but I fiddle with some wires behind the TV and so you let me off. It’s a bit of a lash-up job but to be fair the original writer walked off in the longest sulk in history, and they had to cobble it together on the hoof.

Inquisitor Darkel:

What? Are you serious? You spend 14 weeks on a self-imposed courtroom drama that’s meant to put the programme on a literal show trial in front of the viewing public to prove to everyone that the Michael Grade was wrong, and you don’t even have a climax? You show the programme isn’t violent by raising the idea that it’s too violent? You address the Doctor being unlikeable by having four episodes where he goes mad and tortures Peri until her brain is taken over by a giant slug and she gets gunned down? Your defence is that things can only get better? And you don’t even have an ending in mind? And you had 18 months to prepare? What on earth were you thinking? Were you even thinking? I mean, fair enough you introduced the sixth Doctor as the antidote to the fifth.  Although even then, that’s solving a self-made problem. You made Peter Davison’s final season a damning indictment of the fifth Doctor’s basic niceness leading to prevarication and ineffectiveness. He had to “mend his ways” because “ it’s stopped being fun” – but that’s because you stopped making it fun. And your answer to that is the sixth Doctor, a man whose coat is the most likeable thing about him. A man who’s willing to kill to save the day, but only when it’s already too late and pretty much everyone’s already dead. A man who smirks about the people he kills. A man whose relationship with his companion is distressingly close to domestic abuse: poor Peri, cowering and feebly trying to defend herself as the Doctor bellows in her face. You do all that, and you claim it’s all part of some massive master plan, to make the Doctor mellow with time? But why did you make him so awful to start off with? Just, why?

It’s September 1986. Doctor Who has been off the air for 18 months. The Trial of a Time Lord is its chance to disprove Michael Grade’s comments that it has become overly violent with farcical storylines and low ratings.

And for a more sensible view of The Trial of a Time Lord, visit this article on my main blog.

Next Time: “Is it going to be the Doctor’s defence that he improves?” Time and the Rani.

February 1985. During the previous 12 months, the year-long miners’ strike tore communities across the country apart, a breakdown in the social and political order of Great Britain. It ended with the most powerful trade union crushed by the Iron Lady. Having defeated the enemy without and freed the Falklands, Thatcher had now crushed the enemy within. So began her imperial phase.

The strike hangs over any British TV from 1984-85. Even in Doctor Who, Season 22 features two stories that touch on honest miners being exploited. Arguably, the upsurge in female villains in this season – three (the Rani, Kara and Chessene), compared to none in Season 21 – is an indication of the writers’ sympathies in the dispute.

Any reference guide will tell you that Robert Holmes was not entirely happy with his ‘shopping list’ brief for The Two Doctors – on top of Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines he had to incorporate a foreign location that changed from New Orleans to Seville midway through the writing process, and the return of the Sontarans, B-list monsters that last appeared in 1978. Equally, Holmes must have been aware of the plaudits his latest script, The Caves of Androzani, had won. The script editor Eric Saward immediately felt an affinity for Holmes’s writing, and modelled his own Season 22 scripts on Androzani’s mix of florid revenge tragedy and conflicting agendas, so that Revelation of the Daleks is almost nothing but double acts working at cross purposes towards a gore-drenched climax.

The result of this is a writer who’s both irritated and flattered by the production staff, but within the constraints of John Nathan-Turner’s bids to grab fanzine headlines – Foreign locations! Old Doctors! Famous monsters! – a script editor who’s willing to give him pretty much free rein. Given the last time Holmes was working to his own agenda the producer ultimately got moved off the show for making it too violent, this is a bold move.

Holmes’s initial response was to write a story themed around cookery – he claimed, because he couldn’t think of any other reason why aliens would visit New Orleans, although given the list of ingredients Nathan-Turner gave him to concoct a story with it could just be another example of Holmes’s mordant wit. And with Eric Saward asking Holmes for more of the same after the success of The Caves of Androzani, Holmes writes Titus Androgum, a story that has one eye on Shakespeare’s first and bloodiest revenge tragedy, Titus Andronicus – a play in which “justice and cookery go hand in hand,” according to the 18^th Century writer George Steevens.

Holmes was clearly thinking of Shakespeare when he wrote this – if nothing else, the Bard-quoting Oscar Botcherby makes the point explicit. And I think he was deliberately referencing Titus Andronicus, a play that’s been condemned for centuries as being in bad taste, which features graphic depictions of dismemberment, cannibalism, murder and rape. Whereas literary historians usually race to declare Shakespeare the author of anything and everything, there have even been attempts to remove the play from the Shakespeare canon on the basis that it’s too brutal. Some Doctor Who fans similarly feel that The Two Doctors is a blot on Robert Holmes’s reputation.

One of the central themes of Shakespeare’s play is of civilisation reverting to brutality. When the Goth Queen Tamora is wed to the Roman Emperor Saturninus, barbarianism is introduced into Roman society, and the city becomes “a wilderness of tigers”. In The Two Doctors, Chessene is the barbarian queen, elevated above her station by Dastari’s augmentations but unable to ever forget her own true nature. She’s a blank slate villain, unknowable, except that she has a burning ambition for maximum power. And, in the end, she’s unable to become civilised but reverts to licking up the Doctor’s blood like a dog, just as Tamora is reduced to feeding on the flesh of her children. All the way through, we’re reminded that while she might look human, Chessene has the pedigree of an Androgum, “a lowly, unthinking creature of instinct”. Her nature, barbaric and cannibalistic, can’t be changed however much she is taught to be a ladylike. As the Doctor says, “Whatever Dastari’s done to her mind, her nature will stay exactly the same, and Androgums have as much emotional capacity as a gumblejack.”

Throughout the story, there’s a deeply unpleasant suggestion that race is intrinsically linked to concepts of good and evil. Even that is present in Titus Andronicus, where the black character Aaron is motivated by simple malevolence. He might be the smartest man on the stage, manipulating others for his own ends, but his nature is evil. Robert Holmes suggests that the same is true of Chessene. She is irredeemable.

The Doctor himself is the best example of how Chessene’s barbarism infects even the most civilised person, changing them into a monster. Just as Titus Andronicus opens with the proud Titus arriving in Rome and demonstrating his allegiance to the Empire, so The Two Doctors opens with the second Doctor arriving in the grand surroundings of Space Station Camera, uncharacteristically showing off his inheritance (“How dare you have the impertinence to address me like that? I am a Time Lord!”) and somewhat arrogantly defending Time Lord interests to Dastari. His reward, like Titus’s, is to be wrong-footed, tortured, imprisoned and converted into barbarism. He’s infected with the nature of an Androgum so that he becomes as brutal as Chessene. There are few things as shocking in Doctor Who as watching the second Doctor transform into a monster that’s willing to stand by and watch a van driver get beaten to death, before merrily stealing the murdered man’s vehicle.

This idea that civilisation is a veneer and there is a monster lurking inside all of us is frequently touched on in The Two Doctors. Holmes inserts odd jibes  – Jamie is accused of speaking in a “mongrel dialect”, betraying his own barbaric origins as a “hairy-legged Highlander”. Dastari’s ambition has made him complicit in mass murder. The only honest monster is Shockeye, a creature entirely defined by his shameless devotion to self-indulgence: “The gratification of pleasure is the sole motive of action.” Unlike the Sontarans, who are barely characterised at all, Shockeye has one, clearly articulated and unwavering motive: he wants to eat a human being, preferably Jamie.

This introduces a second strand: a message of ‘meat is murder’. According to Nicola Bryant, Robert Holmes told her that as he was a vegetarian it amused him to write a story where humans are part of the food chain. Images of hunting are used in The Two Doctors to make the point that even the sixth Doctor will kill fish for their juicy flesh, while Oscar murders insects – not even the most educated and erudite characters are entirely free from wild instincts. In Oscar’s case, his obsession with gassing moths (and Anita’s baffled reaction) could be a reference to the famous scene in Titus Andronicus where Marcus kills a fly, and Titus, mad with grief, declares, “Out on thee murderer! Thou kill’st my heart.” While human beings are treated as meat, dead insects are lamented: “Nevermore a butterfly” as a proxy for the end of the universe. In The Two Doctors, this leads, via Oscar’s murder at the hands of Shockeye, to a punchline of the Doctor declaring that from now on he and Peri will follow a healthy vegetarian diet.

The third strand is the revenge tragedy: the nub of The Caves of Androzani is a little lost in the mix of The Two Doctors. The final episode ends, like Androzani, with events coming to a head, characters double-crossing each other, and – aside from the regulars – only one woman (Timmin and Anita) surviving the subsequent bloodbath. In Androzani, the point was that the fifth Doctor refused to become involved in the violence, and this was his salvation. That’s not the case in The Two Doctors, where the sixth Doctor reluctantly participates in the final death tally by killing Shockeye with cyanide. The problem with the scene is not so much the death – which is surely justifiable in self-defence – but the staging (two overweight men gently jogging through a field), and the Doctor’s subsequent quips – “Your just desserts” and later, “ He’s been mothballed!”

Shakespeare’s off-colour jokes about rape and mutilation are one of the reasons why later audiences have struggled with Titus Andronicus. Experience has shown The Two Doctors to be similarly problematic for Doctor Who audiences, unused to seeing the hero make light of murder, or the uncomfortable scene of Oscar bleeding to death while quoting Hamlet. On 27^th February 1985, between Parts Two and Three of this story, the BBC announced it was cancelling Doctor Who. Anyone tuning in for the final episode would have been greeted with the above scenes of Shockeye’s death, plus Chessene’s blood-drinking, Oscar’s stabbing, the gruesome murder of the Sontarans, and Shockeye wandering about holding Stike’s severed leg (just as in Titus a messenger walks in holding severed limbs). On this basis, BBC claims that the show had become ‘too violent’ could easily be justified.

Modern critics have suggested that dismissing Titus Andronicus as gratuitously violent is to miss the point; that Shakespeare deliberately uses references to the works of Ovid to highlight the gulf between elegant literature and repellent reality, and that the violence is there to make a point about the ritualised violence of his own society. If Robert Holmes is using Titus in the same way, to give shape to The Two Doctors, to confront his own audience with the consequences of the breakdown of their own social and political order, then he couldn’t have picked a more apt precedent.

But while I’ve argued that in The Two Doctors, Robert Holmes deliberately references Titus Andronicus, it’s as much a product of Holmes raiding his own greatest hits: the deserted and deadly space station from The Ark in Space, the theatricality and the time-travelling villains hiding out on Earth from The Talons of Weng-Chiang, and the revenge tragedy of The Caves of Androzani. Holmes’s instincts remain sharp: he makes the second Doctor and Jamie a mirror of the sixth Doctor and Peri, with Jamie replacing Peri as an object of physical lust for the monsters. The script delights in the kind of overblown dialogue Holmes has always enjoyed, with lines like “I can’t bear the sight of gory entrails, except, of course, on the stage” worthy successors to the likes of “You wouldn’t want that served up wiv yer onions!” or “You stinking offal, Morgus!”. For all that it’s a problematic story, perhaps deliberately unlikeable and bridling at the yoke of the producer’s impositions, The Two Doctors is the last major work by Robert Holmes, and perhaps more than any previous story seems like the writer letting rip, howling his fury into the wind. To paraphrase Condon and Sangster, “It’s ugly, it’s manipulative, and it’s the last great work of the master.”

Next Time: “The Doctor. The man who keeps running, never looking back because he dare not, out of shame. This is my final victory, Doctor. I have shown you yourself.” The Doctor faces himself in The Trial of a Time Lord.

January 1984. In the 12 months since the last post, the Cold War deteriorates as the USA runs a series of military exercises to test the responsiveness of the USSR. Apocalypse comes a step closer. In the UK, despite over three million people being unemployed, the Conservatives win the June 1983 election with an increased majority.  And on August 19^th, during rehearsals for this story, the BBC announced that Colin Baker had been cast as the sixth Doctor.

Which means that for the 20^th anniversary special and the whole of his final series (which aired between January and March 1984) the fifth Doctor was publicly a dead man walking. Colin Baker’s new Doctor – complete with patchwork costume – was unveiled to the press on 10^th January 1984, while the new season was only a week in, and with another 17 Davison episodes to go before his replacement actually turned up in the show. In the 21^st Century that’s been how the programme has been made – we knew Eccleston was going from week one, and Matt Smith was announced a whole year before he arrived. But back in 1984 this was an unprecedented advance notice of a new Doctor.

Given that The Five Doctors ends with the fifth Doctor receiving the approval of his predecessors and setting off for new adventures, it’s poignant that kids old enough to read the Radio Times 20^th Anniversary special (like me) already knew his days were numbered. The final three Davison stories are very much a winding down of the era, with Tegan and Turlough written out before the fifth Doctor made his last bow a fortnight later. Season 21 therefore has a similar funereal feel to Season 18, where everything starts to lead, inevitably, to Logopolis. And if a chunk of Season 18 was about adjusting the show to continue in Tom Baker’s absence, making the indestructible fourth Doctor suddenly old and vulnerable, so Season 21 prepares us for the imminent Colin Baker years by thoroughly trashing the fifth Doctor.

I think the production team’s plan was for the sixth Doctor to be a more active, interventionist Doctor – in control of events rather than buffeted by them. If the fifth Doctor’s fatal flaw is trying to reason with a cruel and unreasonable universe, and in the process becoming “neurotic” and “effete”, then, on paper at least, the sixth Doctor is Eric Saward’s solution – a bullish anti-hero who gets the job done without worrying about the niceties. In Season 21 the fifth Doctor dithers over the Human-Silurian War and killing Davros, and ends up opting out of doing anything on Androzani bar trying to escape. On three occasions, this hero Doctor ends up in the middle of bloodbaths. That’s quite a compelling argument why he has to go – to be replaced by someone who’s actually capable of achieving victory. Sadly, it does mean that a good chunk of Season 21 consists of grim, gore-drenched massacres complete with poison gas and melting heads. That one of these is also the best-ever Doctor Who story is – like the fifth Doctor himself – a lucky accident. The last time Doctor Who was quite so grim, and the Doctor quite so ineffectual, was in Season Three, and that ended up with Steven walking out on him in disgust, just as Tegan does in Resurrection of the Daleks.

Then you have the other half of Season 21 – the bits that I love. The Awakening and Planet of Fire are both magnificent and under-rated. And then there’s Frontios, which is one of the best Doctor Who stories ever. It’s so good, it’s been indirectly referenced by both Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat, and gives one of its lines to the title of The Hungry Earth.

The first episode of Frontios is an inspiration for Utopia. The TARDIS has drifted too far into the future, past the destruction of the Earth and into the orbit of one of the last outposts of humankind. Not even the Time Lords came this far. In the middle of a meteorite shower, the Ship is forced down onto the desolate planet, which the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough quickly learn is on the edge of destruction, its population wiped out by the attacks from the skies; cannibalistic retrogrades circling like wolves, or else consumed by the hungry Earth. By the end of Part One, the TARDIS has been ripped apart by an unfathomable force, its crew trapped at the end of the universe. The situation is as grim as anything this season.

Fortunately, the Doctor is more chipper than he’s been for quite some time: his holiday in Little Hodcombe must have done him the world of good. From the moment he arrives on Frontios, he’s taking charge, saving lives, trying to help. Far from effete, he’s practically reckless: pointing out the flaws in their arguments and needling colony leaders Plantagenet and Brazen to the point where he’s a second from getting shot. He’s even joking about his companions, mentioning, “Turlough wouldn’t risk an unsafe tunnel” (I’m not so sure), and doing the whole brilliant routine about the Tegan android while Janet Fielding glowers. The moment when he politely reaches out to shake the Gravis’s flipper is a touch of Pertwee, and his joyously anarchic trumping of the Gravis out-Troughtons Troughton. But then, look at his reaction to the Gravis’s dismissal of Captain Revere’s death, a shadow of disgust and anger falls across his face. If this is the fifth Doctor Christopher Hamilton Bidmead had in mind when he wrote Castrovalva, what a shame he didn’t stay on as script editor for another year. Davison is astonishingly good. He never gives a bad performance, but I think this is pretty much as good as anyone has ever been as the Doctor.

Bidmead also makes a virtue of the earnest cod-Shakesperean house style of the Saward show by having the dynastic leader Plantagenet speak almost entirely in speeches. This is clearly a joke, since as Plantagenet launches into one of his well-rehearsed routines Mr Range visibly rolls his eyes, having heard it all before. Everyone else is a little more naturalistic. Mark Strickson enjoys getting to do something other than cringe in corridors: to an extent, this is a story about Turlough conquering his fears – stepping in to save the Doctor with a “deadly” hat stand, then, battling repressed memories of the Tractators, forcing himself to go back into the tunnels to rescue the Doctor again.

There are also a lot of things that don’t quite work. The info text on the DVD takes great delight in pointing out some continuity errors. The excavation machines aren’t as shocking as Bidmead intended (quite rightly). And equally, the Tractators are a good idea in principle that don’t quite work in practice. But that’s the 34-year-old me writing. The five-year-old me remembers the cliffhanger to Part Two vividly as the Tractators doing a kind of Red Indian dance around the captive Doctor and Tegan, and took to wearing a washing basket on his back to imitate them. But then, five-year-old me also thought the Myrka was a terrifying dinosaur that came smashing through doors to give him nightmares, so he’s clearly an idiot who can safely be ignored.

The thing is, though, there are lots of Doctor Who stories where things don’t quite work, but which we forgive. Because it’s not a conspicuously important story – no-one leaves, no significant new characters or monsters come back or get introduced, even the Doctor’s new orange trousers debuted in the previous story – Frontios tends to be forgotten. And that’s sad, because Bidmead’s script – with its use of the TARDIS as a complicated space/time event and not just a magic box; the belief that enlightenment comes only through scientific progress, and an emphasis on engaging with and understanding the world around us – is every bit as interesting as Logopolis and Castrovalva. But this time Bidmead’s managed to make it work in the shape of a traditional Doctor Who story with monsters.

Until the Doctor helps them to understand the true nature of their enemies, the last humans assume the attacks are coming from above, not below. After Captain Revere’s death, the leaders have even sealed up the research room, symbolically turning their backs on learning and science and placing all their hopes in the hereditary heir of the colony, or, in the Rets’ case, in the miracle of Cockerill’s escape. But unquestioning obedience to your leaders, turning away from scientific investigation and concealing the truth are shown to be the paths to retrogression and ultimately extinction. Never has the fifth Doctor looked more like a light in the dark, a shining beacon of beige in a sea of grey and black. Once he’s understood the nature of Frontios and the Tractators, the Doctor doesn’t need a gun to win. He doesn’t need to gas the Tractators to death, or threaten to shoot their leader in the face. He reasons his way to a solution. He lures the Gravis into the remains of the TARDIS, and tricks it into using its power to reassemble the Ship. The Doctor uses the TARDIS itself to defeat the Gravis, just as he later will, in Blink, to defeat the Weeping Angels (he even mentions “the gravity of the situation”, a line Moffat lifts for Flesh and Stone). Humankind is saved, and even the monsters get to live.

In the next story, the Doctor’s back to carrying a gun. Victory over the Daleks will come at a terrible cost, as will almost every victory during the course of the next couple of years. So this is how I want to remember the fifth Doctor: the Doctor who redeemed Turlough, who saved the human race, and let the monsters survive. Never cruel, never cowardly. A hero. The fifth Doctor. You were my Doctor.

Next Time: “On my oath, you wouldn’t want that served wiv yer onions. Never seen anything like it in all my puff. Oh, make an ‘orse sick, that would!” The Two Doctors.

February 1983. In the previous 12 months, the fortunes of Margaret Thatcher have been transformed by a British victory over the Argentinian invaders of the Falkland Islands. Flushed with pride, Thatcher implied she was reconnecting Britain to its glorious past, saying in a TV interview, “Victorian values were the values when our country became great.” Nostalgia as policy.

Meanwhile, for Doctor Who fans, the 20^th anniversary year was our opportunity to feel proud of the show. Given I was four years old at the time, I can’t remember whether it did or not. But I remember Turlough lurking in the corridors of Mawdryn’s spaceship. And I remember being slightly distressed when, over the end credits of The King’s Demons Part Two the continuity announcer said “And that’s the last in the series of Doctor Who”. Along with that, a Betamax tape of The Five Doctors (including the Children In Need introduction) and Peter Haining’s A Celebration almost permanently on loan from Pershore Library, 1983 is the very first year of Doctor Who of which I have clear memories. This is where my nostalgia begins.

Mawdryn Undead, a story that takes place simultaneously in multiple times, strangely resembles the experience of being the fan of any long-running, well-documented programme: even as you’re watching an episode you’ve never seen, you bring decades of learned history to bear on it, spotting allusions and kisses to the past, always seeing patterns in things that aren’t there. And watching it 30 years later on DVD, having watched it again and read countless reviews or articles in the intervening time, it’s impossible at this stage to unpick event, experience and myth.

I guess that puts me in similar position to my dad, watching this in 1983 having been a regular viewer since the Hartnell years. But to him, the show to him wasn’t a list of facts and story codes, more a jumble of snapshot memories, of moments that made a particular impression or that, for some obscure reason, stuck in the mind. My dad would undoubtedly know who the Brigadier was, he’d recognise the old Doctors in the flashback clips. He’d be familiar with the Time Lords and regeneration. He’d probably recognise Tom Baker’s coat. A lot of the continuity references in Mawdryn Undead would definitely work for him because they don’t assume any more knowledge than what anyone with even a vague notion of Doctor Who could remember.

Importantly, given so many 1980s’ stories get a kicking for being ‘obsessed with continuity’, Mawdryn Undead gets its approach to the show’s past nearly completely right. There’s a reason the DWM Time Team picked this as the classic “watch this” sidebar for their discussion of School Reunion, and it’s not just because of the superficial similarity of an ex-companion unexpectedly turning up in a school. It doesn’t really matter who the ex-companion is – Sarah Jane could have been Jo Grant, and the Brigadier could have been Harry Sullivan who could have been Ian Chesterton. The point is to both root the show in its own past, and to bring that past into the present, a kind of crossover between time zones that, handled well, satisfies nostalgia and novelty. The current companions can raise an eyebrow at the Brigadier’s paternalism or Sarah Jane’s disco dog, and the old companion can bring their experience to bear, so that ultimately the audience is both delighted at seeing an old friend, and satisfied that the current team is a worthy successor. The celebratory tone is more important than the pedantic details of UNIT dating.

Peter Grimwade, an underrated writer who always made something decent out of the nightmare briefs he was given, brilliantly reflects this in the structure of the story. Mawdryn Undead isn’t a story about the mechanics of time travel in the same way as Day of the Daleks. The most important reason to have two time zones is to get a second Brigadier aboard the spaceship to save the Doctor at the last minute. But it uses time travel as a metaphor for nostalgia, of being trapped by the past, afraid to face up to old mistakes, and ultimately of being able to move on from them. The1983 Brigadier is afraid of looking back at what caused his nervous breakdown, and so has lost touch with who he really is. Mawdryn and his undead crew are trapped forever by their ancient error of judgement, and have spent an eternity contemplating its consequences. The Doctor is the rogue element that connects the past, present and future, and so offers a way out of everyone’s’ predicament.

Mawdryn is a fascinating character: unlike most Doctor Who villains, he doesn’t want to survive at any cost: he just wants to die. He wants the Doctor to commit euthanasia, to end “the agony of perpetuity”. It’s quite a disturbing idea for a family TV show, particularly given that Mawdryn is explicitly set up as a parallel to the Doctor – a renegade who stole something from the Time Lords a long time ago, who’s mistaken for a regenerated Doctor by the Brigadier and Nyssa, who wears the Doctors clothes, and ultimately wants to take the Doctor’s lives (he practically shares his last words, “Can this be death?” with the fifth Doctor).

Immortality – at least immortality that means living forever without the hope of change – is shown to be a curse, and the Brigadier says he would have died of boredom if he’d just retired to grow vegetable marrows. Later in the season the Eternals and Rassilon are going to teach the same lesson. Life, Grimwade is saying, depends on renewal and change.

What makes the Doctor unique is his ability to keep changing, not quite immortal, but not quite mortal either. Mawdryn Undead explicitly calls out his ability to regenerate and thus cheat both death and time as the thing that makes him a Time Lord. This then sets up the central dilemma in Part Four when Mawdryn, Tegan, Nyssa and the Brigadier all pester the Doctor to give up that ability to regenerate – to give up being a Time Lord – so that the mutants can die, and Tegan and Nyssa can escape.

The new companion, Turlough is also seeking the Doctor’s death to save his own skin. We don’t learn what his crime is, or why he’s been exiled to Earth (this is not the first time the poor Brig has had to babysit an alien exile who goes around stealing classic cars and is desperate to escape the planet). Apparently Eric Saward thought the TARDIS was too cosy with Tegan and Nyssa, and so liked the idea of a companion out to kill the Doctor. Watching Mawdryn Undead knowing Peter Grimwade directed Adric’s swansong, you also get the impression that Turlough is an attempt to do Adric right – and it’s telling that at the end of the story the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa think they’re going to have to race against time to save him from an exploding spaceship in Earth’s orbit, only to discover Turlough’s self-preservation is far stronger than Adric’s. Because Mark Strickson is a better actor than Matthew Waterhouse, and makes Turlough fascinatingly twitchy and conniving, he gets the benefit of the doubt, even if it’s questionable whether the fifth Doctor really did need another untrustworthy companion.

Plus, Turlough’s actually not evil – his villainy is entirely inspired by the Black Guardian. When I looked at Frontier in Space, I suggested that Season 10 was effectively a year-long celebration spread over multiple stories, and not confined to the headliner The Three Doctors. That’s overtly the case for Season 20, where John Nathan-Turner wanted to bring back old monsters and villains for every story. That’s not entirely a bad idea, but whereas anyone who saw The Five Faces of Doctor Who or Kinda in the last 18 months could reasonably be expected to know of Omega and the Mara, the Black Guardian is a different proposition. He was last (and indeed only) seen for about two minutes, four years earlier. To be fair, he was mentioned several times subsequently, but in 1983 the question of whether the Doctor was wise to have disabled the randomiser in The Leisure Hive is probably not at the top of many fans’ lists of burning issues. This desire to follow up obscure details is the real failure of continuity in the 1980s, and the Black Guardian a curiously underwhelming villain to make the centrepiece of the anniversary.

But that aside, this is great way to celebrate 20 years of Doctor Who. Steven Moffat has frequently cited this era as his favourite, and knowing that, it’s not hard to see how Mawdryn Undead might have percolated through his imagination: a story where the present and future interact with the past, that’s basically caused by a machine that’s gone wrong, requires a special ability of the Doctor to fix, and is ultimately resolved by a quirk of time travel: a story where the act of remembering is key.

When we first meet him, the 1983 Brigadier has lost his memory of what happened in 1977. He’s even forgotten the Doctor. But at the crucial moment, when he’s faced with his 1977 self, despite the Doctor warning him of the dire consequences of the Blinovitch Limitation Effect, the Brigadier remembers what he has to do. So he reaches out to touch the past, and save the Doctor’s future.

That’s the final lesson of Mawdryn Undead – remember the past, but move on from it: “move with the times,” as the Doctor says. Season 20 is great not because it wallows in nostalgia, but because it holds up the present to the past, and decides, after all, that it doesn’t want to go back. The anniversary year ends with the Doctor saying goodbye to his previous selves, and looking forward to beginning a new journey.

Let’s see where it takes him

 

 

Next Time: “Not even the Time Lords came this far. We should leave. We should go. We should really, really go.” The TARDIS encounters the last humans on Frontios.

February 1982. 11 months have passed since the last blog post, during which MTV launches in the USA in August, opening with Video Killed the Radio Star. In the UK the New Romantic movement is at its height with acts like The Human League and Adam and the Ants topping the charts. There are riots in Brixton and Toxteth, Eurovision victory for Bucks Fizz, and the Royal Wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana.

While in Doctor Who, the transition from Tom Baker to Peter Davison’s Doctors is covered by The Five Faces of Doctor Who, the show’s first ever repeat season. It consists of An Unearthly Child, The Krotons, Carnival of Monsters, The Three Doctors and Logopolis leading up to the fifth Doctor’s first story in January.

Peter Davison’s Doctor therefore arrived with not just the baggage of one but all four previous versions. In his first story, he was then obliged to do impersonations of all of them to represent the disorientation of his post-regeneration trauma. And in about 18 months’ time he’s actually going to come face to face with most of them for the 20^th anniversary, at the same moment that his successor’s casting is announced. Right from the start, we’re constantly reminded that Davison is “the fifth Doctor” rather than simply “the Doctor”, and that pretty soon the sixth Doctor is going to arrive. It’s like turning up for a new job to find all your predecessors’ photos on your desk, and spotting interviews for your replacement going on in the boss’s office. The fifth Doctor is less of a Time Lord and more of a temp.

Plus, Davison in 1982 was hardly the most obvious choice for the role, whatever Tom Baker might sniffily have said. In fact, he’s a blisteringly strange choice to cast as a 760-year-old alien. His previous biggest role was as the feckless Tristan Farnon in All Creatures Great and Small, and his other main TV roles at the time were the leads in two sit-coms: hapless Brian in Sink or Swim and house-husband Russell in Holding the Fort.

Apparently John Nathan-Turner cast Davison after seeing a picture of him playing cricket and thinking how different from Tom Baker he looked. Which means that basically, Davison was cast to be Not Tom Baker. Most people would agree that Davison is very good at being Not Tom Baker. But then, almost all actors are, by definition, good at being Not Tom Baker. So it’s purely down to luck that Davison turned out to be so astonishingly good as the Doctor. Nathan-Turner later cast Colin Baker because he was very entertaining at a wedding reception, with rather different results. In a show where success is so often a happy accident, Davison’s casting probably counts as the happiest of all.

Davison quickly discovered that no-one had really given much thought to what his Doctor might actually be like. The producer was most interested in the visuals – spending more time thinking about the Doctor’s costume than his character. The fifth Doctor is therefore almost entirely characterised by the way Davison chooses to play him: a kind of humble genius, easily distracted by small, beautiful things – in Kinda, by the wind chimes; later, and rather more fatally, by a few lumps of fused silica.

In Kinda, he’s excitable and keen to go exploring even if it means leaving Nyssa – who’s feeling a bit faint – on her own in the TARDIS. When he’s faced with Hindle’s genuine madness, he tries to be reasonable. That’s this Doctor’s defining characteristic: reasonableness. In the future, he’ll even try to reason with the Cybermen and Davros. Later on in Davison’s run, the script editor Eric Saward makes this the fifth Doctor’s fatal flaw: that he tries to be a reasonable man in an unreasonable universe, and his attempts to broker peaceful, rational solutions merely prolong pain and suffering, and lead, inevitably, to bloodbaths. In response to this world full of hurt and horror, the Doctor adopts a kind of wounded sardonicism. But here, in Season 19, when the universe still seems full of wonders, he takes great delight in exploring it.

Kinda opens with a joke – a man dressed in khaki putting on a mask to frighten a younger, dozing colleague. We quickly learn it’s a cruel joke, because the frightened man, Hindle, is understandably edgy, given four of his colleagues have wandered off into an alien jungle never to be seen again. The older man, Sanders, is determinedly unflappable, role modelling the fine British value of keeping a stiff upper lip. He thinks Hindle lacks backbone, too nervous, too by the book. The two speak the same language, come from the same culture, but don’t understand each other at all.

Outside their base, which we learn is a dome on the planet Deva Loka, the TARDIS has arrived in the jungle. The Doctor, Adric and Tegan go exploring and find some strange wind chimes hanging in the trees. As these are the days before The Blair Witch Project, no-one thinks twice about messing about with them. The Doctor is quite taken with their tone: “A perfect fifth,” he says approvingly. He immediately searches for an explanation for the chimes, always looking for a reasonable solution. Adric impetuously rattles the chimes and runs off into the forest, and Tegan, suddenly dozy, drops off to sleep under them. The camera zooms straight into her pupil, and she starts having a dream that looks like a David Bowie pop video, full of strange, bleached-out characters and disturbing images.

Back at the dome, Adric and the Doctor have been rounded up by an empty encounter suit and taken before Sanders and Hindle. Their arrival, and Sander’s laissez faire reaction, is enough to push Hindle over the edge into outright neurosis. When Sanders decides he’s going to go looking for the missing crewmen, leaving Hindle in charge, no-one thinks this is a good idea. But Sanders won’t be told anything, and goes anyway, leaving a broken Hindle to declare that he has the power of life and death over everyone.

Hindle is the Doctor’s most dangerously human enemy: pitiful, if he weren’t in a position of absolute power. Simon Rouse’s performance is astonishingly good, and Davison, unlike some of his predecessors, is a wise enough actor that he’s happy simply to react to Rouse rather than try to compete with him. Davison is as good as Troughton in a very similar scene from his own 10th episode, The Underwater Menace episode two, in which the second Doctor questions Zaroff. Watching Troughton carefully edging round Furst, gently prodding the maniac, then stroking his ego, you can appreciate why Davison cited Troughton’s performance as a particular inspiration. Unlike Pertwee and Tom Baker, who focus on playing the Doctor in an interesting way regardless of what any of the other actors might be doing, Troughton and Davison play the Doctor’s reactions in an interesting way.

To me, Kinda is a story all about people who can’t communicate with each other, and two cultures that are so different that they don’t even have a common frame of reference. Only the Box of Jhana can let the humans see through the Kindas’ point of view. It’s also about the difference between knowledge – the Doctor, Hindle and Adric always trying to work things out for themselves – and understanding, which the women of the Kinda tribe have, but which the male fools lack. Hindle’s break down happens in part because he’s unable to come to terms with this uncertainty: the ambiguity of the forest, things peering from behind trees, the dark places of the inside, threaten his sterile territory, his book learning and ultimately his sense of self.

But to try to explain Kinda is almost to fall into its trap. You have to try to understand that the allusions and the symbols are just that – there is no one answer, it isn’t an allegory that can be decoded. If we try to explain the giant pink, papier-mâché Mara away as a Buddhist metaphor to excuse it, we’re only fooling ourselves.

The reality is, with three script editors each pulling the author Christopher Bailey’s work in their own direction – Christopher Hamilton Bidmead towards hard science fiction in the style of Ursula K Le Guin, Eric Saward towards action adventure and more ready explanations and Antony Root, well, probably just to something filmable – there probably isn’t one straightforward solution. Kinda wasn’t even written for Davison’s Doctor. Christopher Hamilton Bidmead commissioned it in April 1980 for Tom Baker. It’s still possible to see how this could have worked for the sombre, rather more reflective fourth Doctor of Season 18, it has a lot in common with that year’s more poetic, experimental stories such as Warriors’ Gate and Full Circle where the biggest danger comes from failing to understand how the world works.

Amazingly, more script editors worked on Kinda than on all of the Doctor Who stories from 1969-77 put together. That’s one of the reasons why Davison’s Doctor is so oddly defined in Season 19 – going from the excitable young Doctor of Four to Doomsday, to the gun-toting action man of The Visitation to the Hartnell throwback of Kinda with his half-moon spectacles and paternal attitude. Davison even gets two “first” stories – recording Four to Doomsday a few months before his broadcast debut Castrovalva. Nevertheless, thanks largely to Davison, the fifth Doctor can honestly say, “Whoever I feel like, it’s absolutely splendid.

Ultimately, the lack of any one guiding vision for Season 19, the absence of a consistent tone or style works in its favour. The season is wildly inconsistent, but charmingly experimental, perfectly capturing the creative, reckless spirit of pop culture in the early 1980s. It’s not just the TARDIS destinations that are unpredictable, but the whole tone of the show. It picks up and discards Agatha Christie murder mystery, military sci-fi, pseudo-mysticism and psychological fantasy, with a new bi-weekly timeslot meaning each approach comes and goes faster than ever before. It’s like MTV flitting from one pop video to the next. And at the heart of it all, four leads under 30.  After Season 18, dominated by old men with beards, Doctor Who has suddenly never looked so youthful, never moved so quickly, never seemed quite so full of its own potential.

That’s all going to end when Eric Saward crashes a freighter into prehistoric Earth on 16^th March 1982, taking the dinosaurs and Adric with it and casting a shadow across the rest of the fifth Doctor’s tenure. But for those two, wild months at the start of 1982, Doctor Who was new again, and a whole new generation fell in love with it.

 

Next Time: “If it’s time to go, remember what you’re leaving. Remember the best. My friends have always been the best of me.” An old comrade and an old enemy return in Mawdryn Undead.

It’s March 1981. In the six months since the last blog post, the biggest news is the murder, in December, of John Lennon. Also, Michael Foot is elected leader of the Labour Party, prompting thirteen members of its moderate wing to quit and form the SDP. While in Doctor Who, Tom Baker’s made the headlines by announcing that he’s going to quit the show at the end of the current season.

I used to dislike Logopolis, feeling that its focus on the technicalities of non-volatile bubble memory, charged vacuum emboitments and block transfer computation were a pretty dull way to write out an actor famous for his hatred of ‘bafflegab’. But I can see now that I was quite wrong. All of these technical details are incidental to the story Christopher Hamilton Bidmead wants to tell, a lot of vamping to conceal the truth. Because this is actually a story about Doctor Who’s future turning up and forcing Tom Baker to relinquish his grip on the series.

Doctors have had premonitions of their imminent ends before. The first Doctor worried that “This old body of mine is wearing a bit thin” in the last episode of The Tenth Planet, and the third Doctor knew full well that returning to the Great One’s crystal cave would destroy him. But never before has the next Doctor turned up four episodes early to chivvy his previous incarnation into the grave.

The first time we see the next Doctor in this story, he’s watching new companion Tegan Jovanka and her aunt Vanessa from the roadside where his predecessor has parked the TARDIS around an actual Police Box. The old Doctor apparently plans to measure it so he can arrange for the people of Logopolis to help fix the chameleon circuit. But he’s troubled, disturbed by the departure of his friends Romana and K9, and by the return of the Master. He’s further perturbed by the Cloister Bell’s clanging chimes of doom, which signify some wild catastrophe.

While the old Doctor worries about his broken-down vehicle, the new Doctor watches Tegan struggle with a flat tyre. The first person to spot him is Auntie Vanessa. “I thought I saw a man hovering over there,” she says, hopefully. “Perhaps he needed a wave of encouragement.” Then the old Doctor pops his head out of the TARDIS door and, having glimpsed his replacement, rubs his chin thoughtfully as further disturbing possibilities start crowding his head.

The old Doctor and Adric quickly become aware that the Master has escaped from Traken, leading to a memorably creepy journey through a series of TARDISes inside TARDISes, darker and darker. Meanwhile, Tegan has wandered aboard and got lost in the interior. For the audience, there’s something very disturbing about this: the TARDIS has hardly ever been invaded, and it’s never seemed such a dangerous environment. We sense that things are slipping from this Doctor’s grasp, that even his own Ship is no longer entirely in his control. “Are we still going to Logopolis?” asks Adric. “How can we with the Master in the TARDIS?” snaps the Doctor. “There’s no telling what a creature like that would do on Logopolis.”

In Part Two, after an abortive and desperate attempt to flush the Master out of the TARDIS, the old Doctor arrives by the banks of the Thames. He spots the next Doctor beckoning him from a bridge. “Nothing like this has ever happened before. I’ve got to get to the bottom of this,” he tells Adric. The two Doctors talk, and the old Doctor’s fate is sealed. “I’ve just dipped into the future,” he says, fatalistically. “We must be prepared for the worst.” He sets course for Logopolis – previously the very last place he said he wanted to go. But, as he tells Adric, they are in danger from a chain of circumstances that fragments the law that holds the universe together.

What does this mean, exactly? Later, the old Doctor warns the Master that he is interfering with the law of cause and effect. From this, we can deduce that the next Doctor has turned up before the events that led to his creation. But there’s more to it than that. The next Doctor isn’t just hovering about, an insubstantial Watcher. He’s guiding events, creating the very circumstances that lead to his own arrival. The minute the fourth Doctor speaks to his successor, and takes his advice to go to Logopolis – presumably because the next Doctor has warned him about the consequences of the Master’s interference – he’s signed his own death warrant. It’s a classic self-fulfilling prophecy. The fourth Doctor has to go to Logopolis to stop the Master’s plan so that he can become the Doctor who tells himself to go to Logopolis to stop the Master’s plan.

So, against his better judgement, the old Doctor goes to Logopolis, thereby putting the Master in a position to interfere with the vast experiment that’s keeping entropy in check and preventing the heat death of the universe.  Once there, he catches sight of a strange new addition, a copy of the vast Pharos Telescope looming over him: the Wicker Man to his Sergeant Howie. “I’m an ignorant old Doctor, and I’ve made a mistake,” he later says. “There’s only one direction help can come from now. I’ll just have to sit here and wait.”

Meanwhile, the next Doctor continues to manipulate events, collecting Nyssa from Traken and lurking in the shadows of the vast, crumbling streets of the city at the end of the universe. After the ominous, cryptic pronouncements of the first two episodes, Part Three makes the stakes clear – the whole cosmos is teetering on the edge of destruction. Since the Time Lords and the Guardians failed, it’s fallen to Logopolis to try to prevent the inevitable collapse of the closed system into disorder and entropy. Through reckless villainy, the Master, quite unwittingly, has condemned the whole of creation to death. Even he can’t quite believe it. It’s certainly not what he intended.

This is all the lead-in to one of the best-ever cliffhangers: the Doctor and the Master forced into a last alliance to prevent the imminent apocalypse. It’s preceded by a bitter outburst from the old Doctor, in which he turns on Nyssa, Tegan and Adric and claims they forced themselves on him. They’re not even his companions – they belong to the next Doctor, whose whole era is arriving four episodes too soon. Dismissing them all, the old Doctor places them in the care of his next incarnation, waiting inside the TARDIS – because even the Ship has now been appropriated. The old Doctor has nothing left.

Headstrong as ever, Tegan defies the Doctor and remains on Logopolis. But Adric and Nyssa hide in the TARDIS with the next Doctor, who then takes the entire Ship out of time and space to escape the cataclysm. The Doctor beckons to Adric. He wants to talk to him. We never hear what’s said, but Adric says he knows what’s going to happen. From this moment on, everything depends on the old Doctor playing out his pre-ordained role in this tragedy.

(Interestingly, although entropy is apparently the inevitable fate of the universe, the next Doctor may be immune. According to my extensive research on Wikipedia, a bootstrap paradox – where a thing goes back in time to become itself, lacking any real origin – cheats the second law of thermodynamics since because it can have no beginning or end, it cannot age or decay. Is the Watcher therefore Christopher Hamilton Bidmead’s solution to the problem of entropy?)

Back on Earth, now, the old Doctor and the Master go through their final paces. Of course the Master is going to try to double-cross the Doctor. Of course the Doctor is going to foil him. That’s as pre-destined as the paradox of the next Doctor. I think the really sad moment in Part Four, the moment when Tom Baker’s magnificent Doctor realises his time really is up, is when he looks through a window at the Pharos Project and spots the Watcher standing in the TARDIS doorway, practically tapping his wrist. It’s Wilf knocking four times; it’s Davison spilling the bat’s milk; it’s Troughton kissing Zoe on the forehead; it’s Colin getting on an exercise bike: the moment we know the inevitable end is coming.

A few minutes later, as the fourth Doctor hangs from a power cable, staring in fascinated horror at his impending death, does he contemplate the way his future has trapped him in this moment? As the next Doctor’s team gaze up at him, dangling from that gantry, waiting for their time to begin, are they secretly willing the old man to release his grip, wondering what happens to the causal nexus if he decides he’d prefer to hold on? Does the fourth Doctor fall, or does he let go?

“It’s the end. But the moment has been prepared for,” he says, with a final grin. It’s a moment that’s been prepared for since the first episode. For all Bidmead’s pseudo-science and the Master’s black hat villainy, Logopolis was really all about making it impossible for the fourth Doctor to stay: surrounding him with the fifth Doctor’s crew and ultimately making the restoration of cause and effect dependent on him sacrificing himself so the future could be be born.

Nyssa has the last word. “He was the Doctor all the time,” she says solemnly, as the Watcher takes his fallen predecessor into himself. The line is notable, because it’s different from the reprise in Castrovalva (a surprised, “So he was the Doctor all the time!”). In Logopolis, the line sounds more like a clarification – we should have been paying more attention to this weird figure dressed all in white, because he’s the real leading man in this show. The funny old guy with the scarf was just hanging on beyond his time, until he realised the universe had already moved on.

 

Next Time: “You know, I loved being you. Back when I first started at the very beginning, I was always trying to be old and grumpy and important, like you do when you’re young. And then I was you.” The Doctor plays a perfect fifth in Kinda.

September 1980. The biggest UK news since the last blog entry is the Conservative victory in the April 1979 General Election and Margaret Thatcher’s subsequent appointment as Prime Minister.  Meanwhile, Graham Williams has resigned as Doctor Who’s producer at the end of Season 17 and recommended that his Production Unit Manager John Nathan-Turner be appointed his successor. Both Nathan-Turner and Thatcher will remain in place throughout the 1980s, and it’s still even money as to which of them is more reviled in fandom.

But back in 1980, as Thatcher’s popularity started to wane – prompting her to make the famous “lady’s not for turning” speech at the Tory conference – Nathan-Turner’s star was very much in the ascendant and he was keen to make a very public mark on the show, which is perhaps clear from the fact that he immediately arranged for this, his first story to be covered in the book A Day in the Life of a TV Producer.

The changes are indeed evident from the off as the new arrangement of the theme music and the opening starfield titles arrive with a scream. It’s the first substantial change to them since 1973, and works quite well as a statement of intent. Sadly, it’s immediately followed by a long and rather dull sequence of the Doctor snoring in a deckchair on a dreary beach, which undermines the energetic new credits. But after a little gentle nagging from Romana, and a couple of continuity references to Horror of Fang Rock and The Armageddon Factor, the Doctor decides to rouse himself and take the TARDIS to the famous Leisure Hive of Argolis.

Unfortunately, in the first of the boardroom scenes that dominate The Leisure Hive, we learn that “Argolis is out of date”, struggling to compete with new and exciting leisure planets like Limnos IV and Abydos. I’m not quite certain whether this is meant to be a sly dig at Nathan-Turner’s sponsor, the ex-producer, but if so it’s rather misjudged given Season 17 attracted audiences of over 10 million, and in the face of stiff ITV competition from Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century this story struggled to achieve half that.  Sadly, anti-gravity swimming pools and robotic gladiatorial games do indeed sound more exciting than Argolis’s science of tachyonics which, we’re solemnly told, “remains, after 40 years, little more than a curiosity.” More interesting is the rather neat hologram pyramid in which the extravagantly-coiffured Argolins communicate with their travel agent on Earth, Mr. Brock (presumably so named because he resembles a badger).

So far, then, Nathan-Turner’s new approach is already foundering in a couple of turgid sequences of exposition, with talk about agents, lawyers, investments and directorships. It’s Howards’ Way in space. Meanwhile, on ITV, Buck is visiting the Planet of the Slave Girls. A nation drags itself off the sofa and reaches out its hand to switch to the other side.

Then the TARDIS arrives in an audacious moving shot, making full use of the astonishing abilities of the Quantel machine. The hand pauses for an imperceptible moment, then switches over anyway. Which is a shame, because after this disastrous opening, The Leisure Hive starts to buck (sorry) its ideas up and develop into something that, although hardly dynamic, is at least quite interesting. Pangol’s terrifying declaration that “For the next hour and half we will examine the wave equations that define the creation of solid tachyonic images” is an empty threat. Instead, we’re treated to a story that’s all about artifice, false impressions and misdirection.

That’s clear when the Doctor and Romana declare the Earth scientist Hardin’s rejuvenation demonstration to be a special effect, and it’s clear when Pangol discloses the tricks of the recreation generator. Later we’ll learn that a number of characters are not at all who they appear to be. There’s even a cheeky nod to Doctor Who’s own ropey effects as the Doctor and Romana float, via the magic of CSO, past a zero-gravity squash game and the Doctor, sporting a chromakey fringe, declares, “I noticed vague interference patterns.” The first episode ends with a clever cheat – the Doctor being ripped apart in the manner of an earlier victim of the recreation generator, his face and scream mixing into the Doctor’s face and the scream of the end credits. But how strange that the episode should save all its neat tricks for its end rather than hook viewers at the beginning.

Part Two is more of the same – more tiresome boardroom scenes enlivened to an extent by the sweet romance between Hardin and Argolin matron Mena, a rare cross-species dalliance. Mena’s fate – her withered seeds dropping off her hair pod in a forlorn metaphor for the Argolins’ sterility and rapid ageing – is nicely handled, and Adrienne Corri really sells Mena’s increasing decrepitude and desperate attempts to prevent the extinction of her planet. The second episode sets up the idea that someone is trying to sabotage the Hive, and there’s even a scene which is explicitly referenced by Russell T Davies, when someone opens a cupboard to discover a human skin-suit that’s been designed to fit over a much larger, pot-bellied lizard. But the big problem is, it’s not really clear what we’re supposed to be concerned about: is the main plot the death of Argolis, or the boardroom squabbles over the Hive’s future, or Hardin’s time experiments? All these events are, of course, connected. But none is developed in a way that’s likely to linger much in the imagination or appeal to an audience being tempted by Buck’s Planet of the Amazon Women.

Instead, all the effort seems to be going into the visuals. Which is perfectly understandable, given that the consistent failure of the Williams shows was their design. June Hudson, the star costumier of the last season, has been drafted in to dress the Argolins in splendid canary robes, Tom Baker in rich claret and the Foamasi in iridescent green. Dorka Nieradzik’s make up design, particularly for the aged Mena and Doctor, is superb. Lovett Bickford’s direction – all close ups and sudden reverse shots – is showy, and the sets, while not a million miles away from Season 17’s, are pleasingly solid, with ceilings and everything. Argolis might look superficially like Skonnos, with its swirling crimson atmosphere, but it’s a more substantial environment.

But, here, this improvement seems to be at the expense of a clear and compelling story. The cliffhanger to Part Two is fantastic – the Doctor aged 500 years – but nothing is really done with the idea. Other than making Tom Baker’s Doctor seem more vulnerable than before – which is also the point of the first cliffhanger – it doesn’t really make any difference. If Graham Williams’ mantra was “It’s all about telling stories. Nothing else matters.” John Nathan-Turner seems equally fixated on the cosmetics, the headline-grabbing moments, the gimmicks, even if they come at the expense of making a coherent programme.

Part Three introduces the idea that Pangol is the vanguard of a brash new future dominated by science and technology, keen to usher in the death of the embarrassing old Argolis with unseemly haste. I imagine the analogy was entirely lost on Nathan-Turner and his new script editor Christopher Hamilton Bidmead, so keen to trash the past and set the series on a path to a bright future of solid science fiction and question mark collars. The Leisure Hive is, like Pangol, the herald of the future, a new way of making Doctor Who. And like Pangol, it was probably a necessary survival tactic. But that doesn’t actually make it any good.

Like so many of Nathan-Turner’s stories, The Leisure Hive is best enjoyed for some of its wonderful images: the ancient Doctor emerging from the recreation generator; the hourglass running backwards; the Doctor being torn, limb from limb. All of these are in the finest tradition of a show that’s built around iconic moments. Appreciated as a statement of intent, an experiment with a new style of making the programme, this is understandable. As a precursor to Season 18’s obsession with old men and entropic planets, it’s prescient. As a Doctor Who story, it’s something of a curate’s egg.

But let’s cut The Leisure Hive some slack. Nathan-Turner might not have nailed it first time, but neither did Hinchcliffe or Williams. With its mixture of Christopher Hamilton Bidmead’s façade of technical credibility, Lovett Bickford’s extravagant direction and Nathan-Turner’s hyperactive focus on making the show look distinctive and different, there is nothing else quite like The Leisure Hive in the whole of Doctor Who. And after 50 years that’s quite an achievement.

 

Next Time: “The Doctor’s darkest hour. He’ll rise higher than ever before and then fall so much further.” It’s Logopolis.

February 1979. As bodies lie unburied, rubbish piles in the streets and schools shut down due to fuel strikes, the Winter of Discontent is the final nail in the coffin of the 1974-79 Labour Government. Crisis? What crisis?

While in Doctor Who we have The Armageddon Factor, the culmination of the 26-week Key to Time story. In a way, the most astonishing thing about The Armageddon Factor is that it got made at all. Graham Williams was not a lucky producer. He took over just when inflation and behind-the-scenes problems conspired to make Doctor Who increasingly difficult to actually do. Then, the planned last story of his first season had to be canned because it was unachievably ambitious, and desperate measures led to Williams and script editor Anthony Read cobbling together The Invasion of Time around existing sets and costumes, and emergency location filming.

Apparently, Season 16 was equally hard going, with Williams staggering from one crisis to another. Behind the scenes, Tom Baker was arguing with practically everyone, and around the time this story was being made he was threatening to resign. That unhappy workplace might be one reason for the mass exodus of regulars between this season and the next: Mary Tamm and John Leeson quit, and Anthony Read threw in the towel as well.

Which means it’s maybe a surprise that The Armageddon Factor is quite so good. It starts with a deliciously cheeky parody of bad drama that’s obviously meant to wrong-foot the viewer. Then, it opens out into a grim diorama of John Woodvine’s bloodthirsty Marshall spouting bellicose jingoism as Lalla Ward’s compassionate Princess watches disapprovingly. Lalla Ward isn’t an obvious choice for new companion, but then, Astra isn’t obvious companion material – too earnest, too accepting of her fate. She’s definitely missing the second Romana’s ability to keep a straight face even when she’s clearly taking the mick. However, what Ward brings to Astra is a certain otherness (those scenes in Part Four when she stands transfixed by the Key, or when she becomes almost fatalistic about her own nature) combined with a haughty façade that hides a much kinder character. Put those together with what Mary Tamm was pushing for behind the scenes – a bigger role with more interesting things to do, and then later for Lalla Ward to be cast as her replacement – and you can see the elements of the second Romana coming together in The Armageddon Factor. Even in her first scene, Ward brings an edge to some of her lines with Woodvine, and the tight, sarcastic little smile she throws him on her way out of the door is brilliant.

As she heads off into the wrecked corridors of Atrios, the rather threadbare design aesthetic of the Graham Williams stories comes up trumps, for once. Atrios is deliberately grotty, coloured in washed out browns and greys, with a kind of muddy patina to everything. For all you can argue the pros and cons of the rest of the Williams episodes, it’s hard to defend some of the design choices: Season 15 had some particularly awful examples of barely adequate sets, weak monster design and notably poor effects. The Armageddon Factor turns some of these shortfalls to its advantage: Atrios and Zeos are consciously similar planets, and both are war torn and well past their prime, while the Shadow Planet is suitably gloomy. The writers and production staff have obviously got to grips with what the series can afford to do on its straitened budget, and three main sets and some corridors are pretty much all we get for the remainder of Williams’ run. Meanwhile, the monsters – the Shadow and his Mutes – are cheaply done, but effective because someone has worked out that using the iconic image of Death is within the show’s budget, and they managed it last year with the Fendahl (the closest thing there is to a classic Williams monster). The upshot of all of this is that Bob Baker and Dave Martin have written The Armageddon Factor around the limitations of what can now be achieved.

The third and fourth episodes are a perfect example of Baker and Martin’s new budget-conscious approach. Whereas Terrance Dicks always claimed they had wildly expensive ideas (like a skull-shaped spaceship landing in Hyde Park), the info text on The Armageddon Factor tells us, for example, that they actually described a cheap way to achieve the Zeon fleet’s attacking Atrios (using a radar screen rather than models). Perhaps after the previous year’s experience of The Invisible Enemy and Underworld they’d learned that the production team was no longer in the business of working miracles. Even so, they obviously took seriously their brief to write a fittingly grandiose climax to the Key to Time story. It’s certainly the only serial since the first that is actually about the Key and what it represents, rather than grafting the over-arching quest onto a standalone script. For example, creating a fake sixth segment to temporarily enable the Key’s power gives us, for the first time, an idea of what the thing capable of. While it’s clearly impractical to show the whole universe stopping, the image of the time loop (and the clever use of the extending countdown to add another element of jeopardy to the final two episodes) gives a hint of the truly awesome abilities of the Key.

But then Baker and Martin do their usual trick of chucking in the kitchen sink: so, on top of the interplanetary war, the Mentalis computer locked in a logical trap, K9 taken over by the Shadow and turned against the Doctor, the Princess as the actual sixth segment, and the decaying time loop, they decide to drop in another renegade Time Lord and reveal the name of the Doctor. One of the pleasures of Baker and Martin’s scripts is the sheer amount they throw at the audience, hoping some of it will stick. This is a fitting farewell to them. Only Peter Grimwade will ever manage to cram in quite so many strange ideas into each script.

The theme of the story is clear even in the first scenes. Princess Astra wants to make peace between her planet Atrios and its bitter rival Zeos, whereas the Marshall just wants to bring about the total destruction of his enemies. At no point do Baker and Martin suggest that Atrios is “good” and Zeos “evil”. The whole point is that in any conflict that can lead to mutually assured destruction – the Armageddon factor of the title – no side can take the moral high ground. This idea is picked up in the second half of the story, when the war between Atrios and Zeos is explicitly stated to be a prelude for the war across the whole cosmos. “Chaos shall break upon the universe,” cackles the Shadow – one of the most effectively creepy monsters in this whole era of Doctor Who – at the same time that the Marshall is delighting in the idea of blasting Zeos into oblivion. Meanwhile, characters like Astra and ultimately the Doctor, who aren’t interested in absolute power or total victory, are the voices of reason and sanity. There’s a lovely moment in Part Four when the Doctor and Romana reflect that having assembled the Key to Time they have power over the whole universe – something that no-one should have.

In that context the final revelation of the story: that the White and Black Guardians are practically indistinguishable, and neither ought to have control over the Key, makes perfect sense, and the Doctor’s decision to disperse the Key is a deliberate anti-climax, the only logical way to have him still remain recognisably the Doctor. It’s back to the debate in Genesis of the Daleks, where the only right choice is to walk away from absolute power over life, the universe and everything. It’s well known that Douglas Adams wrote the final minutes of The Armageddon Factor including the bit where Tom Baker pretends to go mad with power (oh, the bitter irony for Graham Williams). The creator of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, one of the most highly regarded and successful British authors of the last 50 years, is definitely the most impressive name ever to appear on Doctor Who’s production staff. What’s astonishing about the last scenes is that Adams instantly sees the problem inherent in the Key to Time season – what happens next? Having pointed out that the Guardian is no less corrupt than the Time Lords, Adams has the Doctor essentially blow a raspberry in his face, declare that free will and human life is far more important than some mumbo jumbo about the universal balance of power, and that randomly travelling through time and space is more interesting than going on quests for some higher authority. Essentially, Adams undoes Williams’ whole grand mythology in favour of paring back the show to its most basic principles: a pair of Time Lord exiles, wandering in the fourth dimension.

It’s a shame that Mary Tamm’s Romana didn’t get to stay on for the whole series of Adams-edited adventures because her character really comes together here. Her Romana began the season as a slightly aloof character, with a sense of ironic detachment from the ridiculous events she was forced to endure. At the start of The Armageddon Factor, she’s really playing up to that, claiming her optimism has opted out, and treating the search for the sixth segment as yet another tiresome annoyance. But during the course of this story, something about Romana changes. She seems to develop a particular affinity for Astra, which means that when the truth about the Princess’s nature is finally revealed, Romana is appalled. It leads to probably Tamm’s best scene when, in Part Six, she confronts the Doctor about what they have done to Astra, turning a living being into a component of a machine: “No power should have that right, not even the Guardians.” (Was Joss Whedon watching, you wonder).  Though it’s quickly forgotten, it’s a great moment: a genuine confrontation that smacks of Sarah Jane’s occasional outbursts.

Sadly, in most of her other scenes with Tom Baker, Tamm is merely a very good feed for the star’s ego (although their bemused reaction to learning that Merak is in love with Astra – “Ah…” “Hmm…” – is wonderful). However, elsewhere, she gets more to do: even a bit of Venusian aikido in Part Three (presumably as a last ditch attempt to give Romana some of the special abilities Tamm had been promised when she was cast).  You can see how Romana brings a different dynamic to the series: with two Time Lords in the TARDIS, there’s a chance to advance the plot in different ways. For a big chunk of the middle episodes, Romana adopts Merak as a temporary companion while the Doctor gets to explain the plot to Shapp (a truly diabolical performance that would surely never have been allowed in any previous era. Davyd Harries, your silliness is noted). This is a slightly different way of telling the story than we’ve previously seen, and makes the exposition-heavy bits rather more dynamic than they might have been. Certainly, in the following season the temporary companions – Duggan, Clare Keightley, Chris Parsons, Seth – become a regular feature.

However, this is Tamm’s final appearance. Once again, Williams assumed that he could talk his leading lady round to staying. But he didn’t, and so Romana is the first companion since Liz Shaw not to even get a leaving scene. It’s a sad blot on Williams’ record, another example of events overtaking him, and it left the show reeling from yet another crisis. Williams once said, “It’s all about telling stories. Nothing else matters.” In principle that’s fantastic, and you can see Williams really means it. He spotted the potential of Douglas Adams and insisted on making The Pirate Planet despite opposition from the Head of Serials. He co-wrote City of Death, one of the best ever Doctor Whos. On paper, stories about going inside the Doctor’s mind to defeat a monster; about re-telling The Prisoner of Zenda as a space fantasy; about a stranded alien who’ll steal the Mona Lisa and wiping out humankind just to fix a spaceship, are marvellous concepts.

But the role of a producer is not just about coming up with good ideas: it’s about actually getting the series made to time and quality, week after week. Season 15 was a huge challenge, and despite everything learned over the last two years, Season 17 was equally problematic, including a BBC post-mortem on the special effects for The Creature from the Pit, and a director who quit because Tom Baker was so out of control. Twice, Williams got to the end of a series without thinking about how he was going to write out a departing actor. The next year pretty much the same thing happened to him, when Shada was cancelled.

In the end, the Key to Time falls apart more quickly than it comes together, and the quest finishes on an unresolved note. The Doctor’s been struggling so hard and so long to assemble the thing that he hasn’t really thought about what he’s going to do if he succeeds. There’s a metaphor in there, somewhere, for Graham Williams’ producership.

As the end credits roll, a familiar name appears: an ambitious Production Unit Manager who’s been assisting Williams for some time, and thinks he knows how to fix Doctor Who. Let’s see how that turns out.

Next Time: “I told you it was amazing. Well, it used to be.” The Doctor visits The Leisure Hive.

September 1978: a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. In the 20 months since the last blog post, the Queen celebrated her Silver Jubilee and the Yorkshire Ripper repeatedly struck in Leeds, Bradford and Manchester. In the month The Ribos Operation was being written, Margaret Thatcher made some inflammatory comments about immigration that depressingly led to a massive opinion poll swing to the Conservative Party. But as far as Doctor Who is concerned, the most significant event was the UK release, in December 1977, of the worldwide hit Star Wars, which revitalised the whole genre of outer space sci-fi.

The Ribos Operation opens with a scene that producer Graham Williams seems to have been planning since he got the job at the end of 1976. In it, the TARDIS is caught in blinding light as heavenly music swells, and the Doctor is summoned to meet the White Guardian, the embodiment (so he implies) of order and good in the cosmos. The White Guardian, who – as his name suggests – looks like a patriarchal British colonialist, tells the Doctor that the balance of the universe has been thrown off, and that the whole of reality is teetering on the brink of eternal chaos. The White Guardian then offers the Doctor a choice of either helping to restore the balance, or being condemned to eternal nothingness. Naturally, the Doctor reluctantly agrees to accept the White Guardian’s burden. He’s thus dispatched on a mission to reassemble the six scattered segments of the legendary Key to Time that binds the galaxy together and will allow the White Guardian to put a halt to the encroaching chaos.

The first thing to note about all this is that Graham Williams conceived it at the very moment the fourth Doctor had finally won his freedom from UNIT and the Time Lords. That is, about one week after The Deadly Assassin was broadcast, Williams had already decided the idea of the Doctor as a free agent was not something he wanted to pursue. According to the info text on The Ribos Operation DVD, Williams found the idea that the Doctor had power without responsibility distasteful. So we get a scene that in some respects mirrors the end of The War Games, with a higher authority putting an end to the Doctor’s anarchic adventures, and giving him a mission to protect the interests of conservative forces. Given we’ve just seen the previous production team of Hinchcliffe and Holmes move in almost exactly the opposite direction, this is hard to see as anything other than a massive volte face.

In some respects it’s easy to see why that might be the case: the story goes that the BBC brought Williams in specifically to curb the excesses of Hinchcliffe, which were starting to become politically inconvenient. The BBC Head of Serials instead instructed Williams to make the series more family friendly and avoid further complaints about its levels of violence and horror. So an uncharitable reading might be that Williams was himself on a mission to protect the interests of conservative forces. Certainly, he was dealt a pretty bad hand coming in as producer: the situation with scripts was pretty dire, especially after the cancellation of the planned The Witch Lords, while Hinchcliffe’s over-spend on his last two stories meant Doctor Who’s budget was comparatively lower for Season 15, and as a result, for the first time ever, a series looked cheaper than the one before. And because of the time he had to prepare the season, Williams didn’t even have chance to implement the creative changes he wanted to make.

Let’s be charitable, then, and after the false start of Season 15 take The Ribos Operation as the real beginning of Graham Williams’ vision for Doctor Who. The opening scene sets out the stall – the Doctor is now an agent of the White Guardian, and he has a new purpose: to stop the spread of chaos. We’re then introduced to his new companion, a Time Lord called Romana. She’s looks and sounds a very different character from Leela: a well-groomed aristocrat, more qualified (at least on paper) than the Doctor, and with a nice line in withering put-downs. The Doctor and K9 are appalled. As a companion, she’s certainly a break from the past. She’s not even human, which means the TARDIS is now crewed by two immortal aliens and their robot dog that have no real need to ever visit the Earth unless they happen to have a specific reason to do so. This isn’t as much of a problem as it could be, given we’ve already seen that the Doctor is now pretty much the audience identification figure, and the companion is mainly there to clarify the plot. But it’s still a situation that would have been unthinkable at any previous point in the show’s history.

Up to this point, the script has more or less been the work of Graham Williams and script editor Anthony Read. Robert Holmes’ script properly kicks in once we arrive on Ribos. He immediately introduces us to the first of three double acts around whom the story revolves. Garron and Unstoffe are working class con men, and they’re a classic pairing. Garron, the old timer, has his patter down to a tee. Unstoffe is young and a bit over-keen, with a tendency to go a bit too far in his conversations with the mark. That mark is the Graff Vynda-K, the deposed tyrant of a space empire, who forms the second double act with his loyal aide Sholakh. The Graff is dangerous because, like most of Holmes’ villains, he’s weak: short of money, and short of temper. Watch any episode of Hustle and the characters are almost exactly the same.

The third double act is the Doctor and his young apprentice Romana. All three double acts work in the same way, they’re all outsiders visiting Ribos to try to steal something, and each has one smart but less experienced junior partner. The comedy arises from the way the three double acts mirror each other, or cross over (for example, Romana and Garron get a scene together in the catacombs, while the Doctor and the Graff lock horns) to the bemusement of the natives. The whole script is witty and clever, with funny little references to “the north” where the alien visitors all pretend to come from. There are some farcical moments – like Unstoffe’s excruciating anecdote about “scringe stones” or the Doctor and Romana’s business in the jewel room – while the Graff’s florid villainy is amusing in its deliberate, scenery-chewing excess. Holmes wisely uses the Key to Time quest merely as a hook to get the Doctor and Romana involved in the story, rather than its main focus.

The thing is, none of this is a million parsecs away from what George Lucas did with Star Wars. Given The Ribos Operation was written in January 1978, it’s the first Doctor Who script that was inevitably influenced by Star Wars from the outset. And the interesting thing about Star Wars is that for all it revolutionised special effects, the story was resolutely traditional, and told from the point of view of marginal characters like C-3PO and R2-D2, and full of double acts like the droids, roguish smugglers Han Solo and Chewbacca, and the teacher/pupil partnership of Obi-Wan and Luke. You can easily imagine Holmes being impressed not just by the effects, but by the skilful way Lucas suggested a far larger, lived-in universe than the one we actually see – references to the Clone Wars and the spice mines of Kessel were just tantalising hints that weren’t actually shown for another 20 years. The Ribos Operation similarly paints a picture of a backwater planet, like Tatooine, on the outskirts of a huge empire, whose people remain blissfully ignorant of the vast space war going on all around them.  To an extent, Holmes has always been good at implying a bigger world than he can show, but from this story on he really focuses on doing it. And is it really a coincidence that the aristocratic Romana is dressed, like Princess Leia, all in white?

You can also see why Graham Williams might have thought it would be a good idea to build a season around the galactic struggle between the light and dark sides. It’s hard to say whether the number of myth-inspired episodes during his tenure – Underworld, The Armageddon Factor, The Horns of Nimon – were a consequence of Star Wars’ appropriation of those archetypes, but regardless, something about them clearly appealed to Williams. It would be tough to argue that Star Wars wasn’t at the front of his mind when he was making Season 16.

For all that it’s inspired by Star Wars, Holmes manages to work in the anti-religious themes of the Hinchcliffe episodes. Not for him the weird mysticism of “the Force” or even “the Key”: Binro the Heretic is a seeker of scientific truth in a world of superstition. Binro’s disparaging comments about the Ice and Sun gods fighting for supremacy over Ribos are hard to see as anything other than a critique of the whole Guardian mythology. On one level, he’s closer to the truth than he realises – there really is a cosmic struggle between two rival gods that’s centred on Ribos. However, Binro isn’t interested in these epic struggles. He’s interested in what he can observe, in trying to explain the universe rationally rather than framing it in simple religious terms. For his pains, he’s been condemned as a heretic, but Holmes clearly says, “Binro was right.”

The Ribos Operation is Holmes’ least epic story. In fact, barring the opening scene, this is the most small-scale fourth Doctor adventure of all, with no ancient evils rising from the past, or threats to the entire galaxy. At the moment when Doctor Who is threatening to play at being a vast space saga, Holmes scales it right back. This is a self-deprecating masterpiece. Knowing that Doctor Who isn’t in the business of replicating Star Wars effects Holmes instead takes all the right lessons from its story: the juxtaposition of genres, the focus on people unwillingly caught up in vast events, the suggestion of a world that extends beyond the edge of the screen. The Force is strong with this one.

Next Time: “The end of time will come at my hand. Free of time, and cause and effect, while creation itself ceases to be.”  At the end of days we learn the name of the Doctor. It’s The Armageddon Factor.

It’s January 1977, and in the six weeks that passed between the end of The Deadly Assassin and the first episode of this story, the most notable UK news has been the country’s receipt of a loan from the IMF in the same month that the Sex Pistols achieved public notoriety after an appearance on Thames Television’s Today programme. Against a backdrop of national decline, punk, with all its anti-establishment connotations, has arrived to spit in the face of the popular consciousness.

It’s a happy accident, given that this story had been on the cards since about 1975, that The Face of Evil captures something of the confrontational style of punk. The first of three Chris Boucher episodes from 1977, this one – which famously had the provocative working title The Day God Went Mad – makes no bones about its contempt for religion: the Doctor outright dismisses “religious gobbledygook” at one point. However, there’s more going on here than that.

When asked at a convention what was her favourite Doctor Who monster, Lalla Ward replied, “Tom Baker”. She was more right than she realised. The Face of Evil is the Doctor’s: in this story, he’s having to pay the price for a past mistake. “I thought I was helping them,” he muses, as he realises horrible implications of what he’s done. Later, he blames his own egotism for Xoanon’s mental breakdown: the computer can’t handle being the Doctor, and has gone mad. Quite what that says about the Doctor’s sanity is skipped over. But it’s interesting given 2013’s overarching storyline that the cliffhanger of Part Three has the Doctor being bombarded with the one question he’s never answered, the question that’s driven Xoanon insane: “Who am I?”

Apparently, when he came to design a new companion to replace Sarah Jane, producer Philip Hinchcliffe was partly inspired by a neighbour’s daughter who claimed to identify more with the Doctor than Sarah. You can see why that might be the case: Tom Baker’s Doctor has a habit of occasionally turning to camera to deliver a joke to his audience. But it’s never more blatant than here, when he spends his first scenes addressing 11 million viewers directly, looking out of the screen and into the living room. Back in 1977, Doctor Who really was taking over TV. In the design of Leela, then, Hinchcliffe implicitly recognises that the viewers no longer need a contemporary human as their way into the Doctor’s universe – they’re already engaged with the Doctor himself. That freed him to come up initially with the idea of a Victorian urchin who would be the Doctor’s Eliza Doolittle: asking questions to help progress the plot, but in other respects not an obvious audience identification figure.

Then they made this story. Right from the opening scenes, it’s obvious that Louise Jameson is an excellent actor, easily dominating the scenes where Leela is on trial, and establishing herself immediately as someone interesting that we want to watch. Boucher cleverly writes the opening practically as an audition scene, giving Jameson the chance to be defiant, upset, pleading, and frightened all in the space of a couple of minutes. She leaves the Sevateem as an exile, condemned for questioning the ancient traditions of the tribe, and a few minutes later bumps into the Doctor – another exile with a dangerous habit of questioning authority. By this stage, it’s clear to the audience that these two are made to be together, and they remain together for pretty much the whole of the story. By the time Leela runs into the TARDIS at the end, we’ve already accepted her as a de facto companion. It would be inconceivable for her to be left behind.

Hinchcliffe must have recognised this potential at an early stage, and so the Eliza Doolittle plot is transferred across to Leela. Here, it mainly manifests itself as Leela’s readiness to kill with deadly Janis thorns, and the Doctor’s obvious disapproval of that. But Leela’s obviously an apt pupil, fascinated by the Doctor’s world and eager to learn. The other obvious thing is that she’s named after the hijacker Leila Khaled, a poster girl for Palestinian liberation and Marxist revolution. Thus the Doctor ends up travelling with a companion whose anti-establishment credentials are as overt as it was possible to be in a BBC family show in the mid 1970s.

What this says about the direction Hinchcliffe and Holmes wanted to take the series is unclear, but given Season 14 is a move away from the established format of 1972-76, and given the previous story is a pretty clear tying up of the Doctor’s subordinate relationship with Gallifrey, the implication is that they wanted to broaden the Doctor’s adventures, and get away from a reliance on old monsters and UNIT. The idea of a companion from Earth’s history learning about the universe, which evolved into the idea of a savage future descendant of humankind learning about human development, suggests they were keen to end the Doctor’s ties to 20^th Century Earth.

As the first Hinchcliffe story with no elements carried over from Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks, The Face of Evil is the pathfinder for the new approach. It’s interesting that it’s another clear attack on superstition, with the Sevateem and the Tesh, like the Time Lords, having degenerated from people on a scientific expedition to people who treat their machines as holy relics. It’s also interesting to note that Hinchcliffe’s favourite of his stories seems to be The Masque of Mandragora – he novelised it and wanted it to be repeated as part of the 1981 Five Faces of Doctor Who season. It’s a story about the conflict between religion – which is shown to be the result of an unquestioning obedience to an alien intelligence – and the new renaissance of science and empirical observation.

In The Face of Evil, we see the Doctor’s dislike for religion. He also claims that “Answers are easy, it’s asking the right questions that’s hard.” The spirits in the forest and the Sevateem god are just projections of a badly programmed computer. In the cancelled Foe from the Future, the ghosts are actually the results of botched time experiments, and in The Talons of Weng-Chiang the god Weng-Chiang is actually war criminal Magnus Greel. Time and again in this era, the supernatural is revealed to have a rational scientific explanation.

Had Hinchliffe and Holmes stayed on, Season 15 could well have pushed this further. We already know Terrance Dicks was going to write The Witch Lords, a story that showed vampire myths were actually based on memories of ancient aliens. We would have a companion with the name of a Marxist revolutionary whom the Doctor is teaching to see that everything has a scientific explanation, that superstition and an unquestioning respect for tradition and authority must always be confronted. “Never be certain of anything,” he says. And we’d have a Doctor who’s no longer beholden to the Time Lords, who makes it clear in The Face of Evil that “I don’t take orders from anyone”. Very punk.

But instead, during rehearsals for the next story The Robots of Death, Hinchcliffe was introduced to his replacement, Graham Williams. A few weeks later, he was gone. He never got to fully realise his vision for Doctor Who, and The Face of Evil stands as the pilot for a lost future.

At the end of the story, the Sevateem and the Tesh bicker about who’s going to lead them into the uncertain future. “That’s not my problem,” says the Doctor, turning his back on the people he’s just freed, apparently having learned nothing from the disastrous consequences of his last visit. “Don’t be told what you want. Don’t be told what you need. There’s no future for you.”

Next Time: “There is evil in the universe that must be fought, and you still have a part to play in that battle.” The Doctor gets a new boss in The Ribos Operation.