The history-themed stories following The Edge of Destruction were the epic travelogue Marco Polo and The Aztecs, the latter exploring in some depth the question of changing the past. These early episodes (alternating with the science-fiction adventures) continued to set down formats and story templates that would define the nature of the series. The majority of the historical adventures appeared during the first three seasons of Doctor Who and made up just over a third of the total stories. They helped give the series an educational respectability, within and outside the BBC, suggesting it had something worthwhile to offer viewers beyond mere entertainment.
John Lucarotti was the writer on both Marco Polo and The Aztecs, and he had a strong personal interest in both subjects. Lucarotti had avidly read the English edition of Polo’s own account of his adventures and had adapted it once before for a 15-episode radio serial. He drew on these diaries to give his seven-week epic serial a sheen of authenticity. Similarly, the Aztecs were a personal favourite of Lucarotti, the writer having lived in Mexico. It didn’t do any harm to Newman and Lambert’s pseudo-educational project that both subjects were also taught in schools.
Marco Polo (the serial is now lost due to the BBC’s short-sighted policy of recycling videotapes up to the late-1970s, thus erasing many irreplaceable recordings) had been designed as a travelogue, which saw the Doctor and his companions journey with Polo’s caravan en route to the court of Kublai Khan. Political intrigue and stops along the way provide many opportunities for historical lessons to be imparted.
It was often believed later that the early historical Doctor Who serials suffered from low ratings and that’s why they were eventually phased out. Given that the ratings for Marco Polo were on a par with those of The Daleks, ranging between 8.5 and 10 million viewers across the serial’s run, that myth is easily discounted. Although recorded and transmitted in black and white, surviving colour photographs show the sets and costumes of Marco Polo to have been sumptuous, rivalling any equivalent theatre or movie production. Viewers would undoubtedly have learnt something about the historical period from this well-researched and constructed serial. Despite this and the high ratings, however, many children maintained they found the historical stories ‘boring’ in comparison to the more exciting space adventures.
It is no surprise that the Doctor Who stories that ventured into the past were more concerned with the central characters than with getting the historical details accurate. It is unlikely that any historian, then or now, would recognise the journey of Marco Polo as depicted by the BBC in the confines of Lime Grove Studio D, or agree with the programme’s depiction of Aztec society.
An internal BBC memo from 1964 listed other possible historical settings and events that Doctor Who could explore, including Viking raids on Britain (The Time Meddler), Bonnie Prince Charlie (The Highlanders), Drake and the Armada, Raleigh and the colonisation of the Americas, the Globe Theatre (2007’s The Shakespeare Code), Australian convict settlement, the Roman invasion of Britain, Richard I and the Crusades (The Crusade), Cornish smugglers (The Smugglers) and Boadicea. British television adventure series, especially those aimed at children or those made by Lew Grade’s commercial independent production company ITC, were often based around historical, swashbuckling characters like Robin Hood, Sir Lancelot (William Russell, Doctor Who’s Ian Chesterton) or Sir Francis Drake (all the ‘great men’ of the Newsom Report), and this no doubt influenced Doctor Who’s depiction of history.
More important to the drama were the implications of the historical stories for the lost travellers. Following the epic tourist narrative of Marco Polo, in The Aztecs Lucarotti tackled one of the show’s central concerns: the possibility, or otherwise, of changing history. Lucarotti had the Doctor’s history-teacher companion directly address a key question which by now (this being the show’s third historical adventure) must have been troubling alert viewers. Mistaken for the reincarnation of a Goddess in pre-Conquistador Mexico, Barbara decides to use her position to forbid a ritual sacrifice. Saving one life, however, is not enough for the newly empowered suburban teacher. ‘If I could start the destruction of everything that is evil here, then everything that is good would survive when Cortés lands,’ she says. The Doctor emphatically forbids any intervention: ‘You can’t rewrite history… Not one line! What you are trying to do is utterly impossible. I know, believe me, I know.’ That’s a clear statement of the inviolable nature of history. This rule was later adapted: some changes to history were allowable as they were minor or set things on the correct course. Later, when the show returned in the twenty-first century, the same discussion would recur when the Doctor (David Tennant) and companion Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) arrive in the city of Pompeii, prior to the volcanic eruption, in The Fires of Pompeii. Set on warning the citizens, Donna is told by the Doctor that history is unchangeable, although he is persuaded to save one family from the inferno, allowing that: ‘Some things are fixed, some things are in a flux. Pompeii is fixed.’
There was a Mexican buzz in the mid-1960s. The South American flavoured 1962 World Cup had taken place in Chile (who secured third place, with Brazil winning) and the 1968 Olympic Games were due to be hosted by Mexico, so Doctor Who’s foray into the country’s turbulent history was part of a larger cultural focus. The decision to set a story during the Aztec period may have been influenced by the forthcoming debut of The Royal Hunt of the Sun, a new play by rising young playwright Peter Shaffer. As well as debating the ethics (or even the possibility) of altering history, The Aztecs was one of the few Doctor Who stories that gave the Doctor something approaching a romantic relationship (very much the norm for the twenty-first century series, but unusual previously). A delightful subplot has a bemused Doctor (Hartnell at his whimsical best) accidentally becoming engaged to an Aztec woman, Cameca (Margot van der Burgh), when sharing a cup of hot chocolate.
The straightforward historical tales continued to alternate with the science-fiction stories, but the effort to remain educationally relevant was relaxed somewhat after The Reign of Terror, the story that closed out the show’s first season in September 1964. It shifted Doctor Who’s historical focus to the French Revolution and once again addressed the issue of altering history. The French Revolution was an obvious period for Doctor Who to visit, since it had appeared as the title of a history textbook in the debut episode, complete with Susan’s comment, ‘That’s not right,’ indicating she had some unusual knowledge of actual historical events. The Doctor clearly states that Napoleon cannot be assassinated, as it wouldn’t be true to history. As history can be in flux and can be interfered with by powerful forces, it has to be protected, often by the Doctor and his companions. Making sure that the ‘right’ outcome happens (as it has already happened) is alright. The disengaged Doctor of An Unearthly Child has become the protector of time.
New series writer Dennis Spooner, who would be responsible for taking the historical serials in a new direction, played out the political machinations that followed the Revolution as an espionage thriller akin to the then-fresh James Bond films Dr No and From Russia With Love. Additional inspiration seems to have come from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities – probably the most populist account of the Revolution that people in the 1960s would have been familiar with (in the form of the movie, if not the original novel). Spooner saw the historical tales as narrative playgrounds in which he could exploit clichés and deploy humour, rather than as earnest, dry, educational texts. His black humour lightens the tone of The Reign of Terror (given the bloody subject matter) and makes it suitable for Saturday teatime. He’s careful to hit all the correct historical markers, but this is closer to the twenty-first century style of ‘celebrity historical’ story in which the Doctor and friends interact with an important historical personage (The Unquiet Dead, Tooth and Claw, The Shakespeare Code, The Unicorn and the Wasp), or at least have to deal with the fallout from his activities (in this case, Robespierre, although Napoleon does make an appearance). The Reign of Terror was the begin
ning of a process that saw the historical stories adopt the same view of history as popular movies, rather than historically accurate (or educational) accounts.
Historical accuracy was all but abandoned altogether by Spooner for The Romans. Written and played as a West End farce, having more in common with the same year’s Carry on Cleo in style and approach than with Doctor Who’s previous attempts at history, The Romans was a change of style and pace. When the hapless Ian and Barbara are kidnapped by slave traders, the Doctor finds himself caught up in events at Nero’s court, even providing inspiration for the Emperor’s plan to burn down Rome. The show was drifting further away from any intended educational purpose. Doctor Who had rapidly moved from recounting historical events for an educational reason to parodying history for simple entertainment.
Spooner set the template for Doctor Who’s future take on history when he mixed the two styles of stories – historical and science fiction – together. The Time Meddler was set in 1066, another of those obvious historical stopping-off points that 1960s viewers would be familiar with. Rather than exploring the historical period, however, Spooner introduced another of the Doctor’s own mysterious (and so far unnamed) people: another time traveller named the ‘Monk’. He’s the time meddler of the title, setting out to equip King Harold with an atomic canon with which he can fight off the Viking hordes. The Monk is out to improve the past in the same way that Barbara hoped to. With his anachronistic technology (that must-have item of the 1960s, a record player!) and his own TARDIS (a Mark Four, evidently a better model than the Doctor’s), the Monk is what the Doctor could become without the restraining influence of his human travelling companions.
The Doctor attempts to reiterate his doctrine of non-interference (it is unclear if this is his own invention or the policy of his people): ‘You know as well as I do the golden rule about space and time travel,’ he lectures the Monk. ‘Never, never interfere with the course of history.’ The younger audience, perhaps those bored with history at school, probably agreed with the Monk’s rejoinder: ‘And who says so, Doctor? It’s more fun my way.’
With The Time Meddler, Spooner had accidentally signed the death warrant of Doctor Who’s purely historical adventures (with one or two notable exceptions) and simultaneously created a new type of story that would become core to the series’ concept: the pseudo-historical. These stories (and while there’d be several of them, there are perhaps not as many as the popular conception of Doctor Who might suggest) would see the Doctor and his party arrive in a historical period, meet a historical celebrity, and become caught up in some kind of science-fiction plot. Perhaps someone is tampering with time (The Talons of Weng-Chiang, Mawdryn Undead) or aliens are manipulating historical events (The Time Warrior, The Mark of the Rani); either way, the historical background is simply a colourful setting for a science-fiction adventure.
While several more straightforward historical stories featured during William Hartnell’s three-year run as the Doctor (including The Massacre, by which point viewing figures for the historical stories had taken a tumble; The Gunfighters, a pastiche of movie Westerns rather than the real West; and The Smugglers), none would have the ambition of those first attempts at making populist educational drama within an adventure-serial template (Marco Polo, The Aztecs). In fact, the history-as-backdrop approach became even more prominent in Donald Cotton’s wittily scripted The Myth Makers, which abandoned any claim to historical accuracy, preferring the mythic version of events. From now on, Doctor Who’s historical tales would not be set in a researched historical milieu, but would instead take place in either a popular conception of the period (reinforced by movies and popular books) or within a widely accepted mythical version of the past.
Alternating with the historical stories were Doctor Who’s science-fiction adventure serials, which were rapidly becoming the heart of the show. During the 1963 Labour Party national conference, Harold Wilson made a well-remembered speech about the increasing speed and complexity of scientific and technological change in Britain in the early 1960s. He’d argued that this new Britain ‘was going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution’. Doctor Who would capture this feeling of rapid technological change in its own televisual black-andwhite heat.
Despite originating in a British cultural context, Doctor Who ultimately drew more on American cliff-hanger film serials from the 1930s and 1940s for its episodic format (including the 25-minute running time for each episode and regular narrative breaks in the form of end-of-episode cliff-hangers) than the initial research by the BBC into adapting literary science fiction for television.
An evening’s entertainment at the American cinema in the early twentieth century would consist of a main feature (or features, if a double bill), accompanied by a cartoon, a newsreel and an episode from a serial or ‘chapter play’. Serials would run for between 12 and 15 chapters, feature continuing characters, and each instalment would end with a cliff-hanger that put the heroes in some form of mortal jeopardy. Although many serials were Westerns or adventure tales (set in unexplored jungle regions and far-off exotic lands), there was a strong strand of science fiction, often featuring comic-strip characters such as Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and superheroes like Captain Marvel. Each episode would run for between two and three reels, about 20 to 30 minutes, and the episodic format encouraged viewer loyalty, bringing audiences back to the same cinema week after week to see the next instalment. The coming of television saw the UK and the US adopt the serial format for ongoing drama, mostly for ‘soap opera’-style shows, and American TV drama quickly settled on the 50-minute length (a full hour with advertisements) for weekly serial drama. The cinema serials themselves often appeared (right up until the end of the 1980s) on television on both sides of the Atlantic as holiday schedule fillers, so were familiar to generations of viewers.
A series built from discrete individual narrative serials, like Doctor Who, was relatively rare on television. Again, the format drew on the experience of soap operas, where narrative threads would weave in and out of individual episodes. The difference here was that (mostly) Doctor Who would wrap up an individual story within a set number of episodes (most often four), and repercussions or dramatic fallout rarely carried over from one serial to another (although there are exceptions). The science-fiction cinema serials of the 1930s and 1940s clearly influenced the structure and storytelling of the earliest Doctor Who science-fiction stories, with a dash of HG Wells fiction and spaceage British comic-book and radio adventurer Dan Dare added for good measure.
Following the phenomenal success of The Daleks, Terry Nation had been asked to contribute a historical serial, but when that was abandoned the need for rapid replacement scripts saw him fall back on serial science-fiction adventures for inspiration. The Keys of Marinus was the show’s second science-fiction tale (after The Daleks) and the one that most resembled the American cliff-hanger serials. Nation created a quest narrative for the six-episode ‘chapter play’ – the Doctor and his companions are tasked with retrieving the four missing ‘keys’ that control the all-powerful Conscience of Marinus (a computer) before the alien Voord can use it to dominate the planet’s people. After the initial set-up, each episode took place in a distinctive environment on a different continent: among them Morphoton, a city of excessively contented people controlled by disembodied brains; a treacherous, living jungle (an environment that would become common in Nation’s later Dalek scripts); frozen wastes and ice caves; and the futuristic city of Millennius (where bureaucrats rule and Ian is put on trial).
Finding the four keys (and a fake fifth one), the travellers return to their starting point – a pyramid on an island of glass surrounded by a sea of acid – only to discover that their contact (the Keeper of the Conscience) has been killed by Yartek, leader of the alien Voord. Switching the fake key with one of the real ones, Ian is able to trick Yartek into accidentally destroying the computer, freeing the people of Marinus. The conclusion allows Nation/the Doctor to outline one o
f the series’ most basic tenets (one that would be revisited in a variety of stories): ‘I don’t believe that man was made to be controlled by machines,’ says the Doctor. ‘Machines can make laws but they cannot preserve justice. Only human beings can do that.’ The episodes were broadcast just a few months before the technocrat Harold Wilson came to power in October 1964, and reflected the mood of the nation.
This theme related back to Nation’s debut serial, The Daleks, and would recur in just about every script he would write for the show. The shadow of the Second World War loomed heavily over Nation’s writing, resulting in the repetition of archetypes, themes and situations that Nation’s audience would recognise: those over the age of 20 would easily relate the Daleks and the Voord to the real-world fascists of just two decades previously.
The serial nature of Doctor Who, and the almost-all-year-round transmission pattern of the 1960s, allowed the show to explore a large number of science-fiction ideas. The Sensorites (set in the same planetary system as the revived series’ Ood stories) featured the perils of first contact between human explorers and alien life. The Sensorites are dying from a mysterious disease, which Ian also falls victim to. The origin of the poison in the water supply is traced to a trio of human expedition survivors who are now trying to destroy the aliens they fear. As in The Aztecs, humans sometimes make the worst monsters. In its design and realisation (such as the look of Sense-Sphere and the Sensorites) the story clearly draws on the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials starring Buster Crabbe.
Timeless Adventures Page 5