Timeless Adventures

by Brian J. Robb

  Curran had no option but to reply to Whitehouse and attempt to mollify her concerns. He pointed out that the cliff-hanger was part of a fantasy sequence (both the Doctor and Goth were in the Matrix), but that ‘one or two people… may have imagined that Dr Who’s dreams were reality. The head of department [Bill Slater] felt some of the sequences were a little too realistic… Accordingly, several were edited before transmission. The result was reasonably acceptable, although the head of department would have liked to have cut out just a few more frames of action than he did.’ The clip showing Baker’s head being held under water was removed from all subsequent repeat screenings, although it was reinstated for the 2009 DVD release.

  Whitehouse appeared to accept Curran’s letter as an admission of a ‘mistake of judgement’ in a response in the Daily Telegraph, and there was no public acknowledgement by the BBC that any further action was to be taken. However, Curran and Slater had apparently decided that Doctor Who had gone too far once too often and action was required. The first that Hinchcliffe knew of any change, however, was during the rehearsals for The Robots of Death when he and Tom Baker were introduced to a visiting Graham Williams as ‘the new producer of Doctor Who’. It appears all three were surprised by the change, as Williams had been in development on adult police thriller Target, which he’d created and expected to be producing. Instead, management were instigating a job swap, putting Hinchcliffe in charge of the more adult Target and parachuting Williams into the Doctor Who job. Hinchcliffe later admitted: ‘I didn’t know I was being replaced until Graham Williams walked in the door.’ Williams was not just given stewardship of the show, he was given a definite brief. His instructions were to tone down the horror, reduce the macabre content and remove anything that might be seen by outside critics (especially Mary Whitehouse and her followers) as nasty or objectionable.

  Hinchcliffe defends his period on Doctor Who to this day, believing that he produced a gripping but grown-up series of stories that were suitable for the audience the show had in the mid-1970s. ‘What I tried to do was make the show work,’ Hinchcliffe said. ‘When I inherited it, it worked very well for the very young audience and the smart 12-year-old, and there was something in it for mum and dad. I think what we did was to increase the appeal, so that it was more compelling. Mum and dad would continue to watch and really believe it and the growing audience of the student generation would also. We wanted to make it more plausible, rather than have people think it was a joke. We treated the stories a bit more seriously in the way that we developed them and handled them.’

  Hinchcliffe’s time as producer saw Doctor Who achieve the peak of its ratings and critical success, with each of his three seasons consistently averaging 11.5–12 million viewers, and individual episodes reaching as high as 13 million (the precise number who saw The Deadly Assassin, episode three, Doctor drowning and all). With the arrival of Graham Williams and his restrictive brief to remove the horror from the series, Doctor Who would have no choice but to move in a new direction. The question was, what would Williams replace the tea-time horror with? The answer was to be humour.

  Graham Williams’ time on Doctor Who started and ended with the show in crisis. Like Philip Hinchcliffe before him, Williams had been promoted to take over the show from a script-editing background (notably on Z-Cars and Barlow at Large), so he came to it with a great deal of storytelling experience, but virtually no practical producing experience.

  The first story on the slate for season 15 was scheduled to be a vampire tale by Terrance Dicks entitled The Witch Lords. However, given the controversy over Hinchcliffe’s gothic horror legacy, this may have been thought inappropriate and Williams dropped the story. The formal reason offered was that it would clash with the BBC’s own ‘proper’ adaptation of Dracula that same year. The story would later be made in revised form in 1980 as State of Decay.

  The replacement was a hastily written adventure called Horror of Fang Rock, also by Dicks. The second-broadcast story The Invisible Enemy was made first, but studio space wasn’t available at Television Centre when Horror of Fang Rock was ready, so the whole production was relocated to BBC Pebble Mill’s Birmingham studios. Despite the troubled start to his tenure, viewers would have been hard pressed to see any sign of it when the series debuted in September 1977.

  Horror of Fang Rock was not too removed from the gothic thrills of the previous three years. An isolated setting – a Victorian lighthouse – is invaded by the alien survivor of a crashed spaceship. Survivors from a sunken vessel also take refuge there, only to encounter the shape-changing Rutan creature that has escaped a battle with the Sontarans. The Doctor and Leela arrive and try to protect the lighthouse’s new residents as they are picked off one by one by the creature. The story contained much that had worked previously, combining an alien threat with the best period design efforts of the BBC. The script and direction make good use of the limited locations, but, with Robert Holmes continuing as script editor, this is no great surprise. There is, however, little of the literary inspiration of recent tales beyond the poem quoted in the story: The Ballad of Flannen Isle by Wilfred Gibson, which tells of strange happenings in a lighthouse. Although almost the entire cast perish, in line with Williams’ new ‘no-gore’ guidelines it’s all done with remarkably little bloodletting.

  The next story, The Invisible Enemy, is notorious for introducing dog-shaped robot sidekick K-9, who was immediately popular with a large proportion of the younger audience, if not with the series’ star and production team. Although seen on British TV screens before the 1978 UK release of Star Wars (1977), K-9 was definitely inspired by the robotic duo of C-3PO and R2-D2 (as is clear from the name alone). Going further back, the utility droids Huey, Duey and Louie from Silent Running (1972) might have been an influence. After the unexpected success of Star Wars in the US in the summer of 1977, many space-fantasy movies and TV series followed, and several American shows boasted their own comedic robotic sidekicks, like Twiki in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Muffit in Battlestar Galactica. Having a humorous robot aboard the TARDIS meant that Doctor Who was right in the middle of the SF pop-culture mainstream, even if the series had missed the opportunity of having D-84 from Robots of Death join the TARDIS crew.

  The Invisible Enemy drew much of its inspiration from anticipated medical breakthroughs, especially as depicted in the film Fantastic Voyage (1966). The hospital-in-space setting may have been inspired by James White’s Sector General stories (1962– 99). To battle an intelligent ‘virus’ that has infected him, the Doctor and Leela are cloned and injected into his own brain. The story even echoes some of the 1970s concern with mankind’s effect on Earth (the Gaia theory), extrapolated to a galactic scale as the Doctor likens mankind’s expansion into space to a disease.

  As with Horror of Fang Rock, Image of the Fendahl was another throwback to Hinchcliffe horror, having been commissioned by outgoing script editor Robert Holmes. Williams was faced with the challenge of producing a terrifying story of the occult without incurring the wrath of his immediate BBC superiors, Mary Whitehouse and the NVALA. Dennis Wheatley’s occult novels were all the rage in the mid-1970s, and Image of the Fendahl simply replaced the super-natural with the alien (as Doctor Who had done several times before, notably in The Daemons). Although Wheatley’s best-known works had been written in the 1930s, the 1968 film of The Devil Rides Out had brought them new popularity, with well-thumbed paperbacks being swapped in playgrounds nationwide (Wheatley was soon succeeded in the paperback-horror ‘nasty’ stakes by James Herbert and Guy N Smith). The discovery of the Fendahl skull that begins all the trouble echoes the real-life discovery of the skull of ‘Lucy’, part of a prehistoric skeleton found in 1974 in Ethiopia that shed new light on mankind’s ancient development.

  Graham Williams’ replacement for the horror content of Doctor Who was to be parody and satire, a gambit that only starts to become clear with The Sun Makers, by which time Williams was gaining more control over the show and running
out of scripts left over from the Hinchcliffe/Holmes period. New script editor Anthony Read was a willing collaborator in Williams’ move to produce more parodic, rather than horrific, scripts. This change of direction, however, also allowed star Tom Baker to indulge his more mischievous side (which Hinchcliffe had kept under control). Having four years’ experience as the series’ lead, Baker could easily ignore Williams’ diminished authority, especially as it was already being further undermined by the requirement that he clear scripts with his head of department, Graeme McDonald. It was the beginning of a slippery slope that would pitch the programme in the direction of comedy and see the beginning of a distancing between the programme and its audience.

  The Sun Makers had been inspired by Robert Holmes’ own problems with the Inland Revenue. The result was a pastiche of out-of-control petty bureaucracy in the far future as Pluto’s workers rise up (with a little help from the Doctor) to defeat the evil Company. Beyond Holmes’ own personal take on the issue (reflected in a series of script in-jokes), The Sun Makers was inspired by a combination of 1970s labour relations in Britain, the 1927 Fritz Lang film Metropolis and 1950s comedy movies starring Ian Carmichael, like the Boulting Brothers’ I’m Alright Jack (1959). That this version of Metropolis looks visually far less impressive than the 1927 silent version is down to the budget cuts that Williams was suffering, partly due to Hinchcliffe’s profligate overspending on his swan song, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, as well as the ever-increasing cost of producing drama at the BBC in the inflationary late-1970s.

  If Horror of Fang Rock and Image of the Fendahl had been Hinchcliffe-style throwbacks and The Sun Makers a sign of things to come, Underworld can only be explained as an attempt at cost-cutting by using the CSO technology that had so used to excite Barry Letts. Based on the story of Jason and the Argonauts, Underworld saw the Minyan spacecraft R1C (captained by ‘Jackson’) on a quest to recover its race banks from a ship named the P7E. Jackson was Jason, with the race banks replacing the golden fleece, while the P7E was Persephone. Other aspects of the story (from names and settings to lines of dialogue) reflected this source material. Williams encouraged writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin to work this material in, much as he had done with Holmes’ Inland Revenue material in The Sun Makers. ‘That element of sophisticated humour was certainly going to continue for the rest of the time I was doing the series, and that was not accidental,’ said Williams. ‘I wanted the humour to be there, to add a little bonus without detracting from the story. If people did not get the joke, it should not impair their enjoyment of the show.’ Two other stories would mine this seam of Greek myth recast as space opera (The Armageddon Factor and The Horns of Nimon).

  Having built the set of the spaceship featured in Underworld, it became clear that the remaining sets would be unaffordable, as would any complicated location shooting. Williams’ solution was to fall back on the use of CSO. Instead of filming the heroes traversing sets designed to look like caves, or film them on location in real caves, the choice was made to shoot everyone in front of a studio green-screen and insert background cave photographs to complete the scene. The result is a near-unwatchable visual mess. Despite that, the audience increased across the story from episode one’s 8.9 million viewers to episode four’s 11.7 million, which just proves that Doctor Who is at its best when story driven and character driven, rather than effects driven, and that a discerning audience can ignore poor realisation (or at least they could in the late 1970s) in order to enjoy a well-told story.

  Williams and Read also stole another idea from the Barry Letts playbook: they wanted to end their inaugural season with an epic adventure that would have a dramatic effect on the Doctor. The result was The Invasion of Time, an inadequately realised story cobbled together in a hurry to replace another, clearly unaffordable and overambitious script about killer cats from outer space. Instead, Read and Williams brought the Doctor back to Gallifrey in a sequel to The Deadly Assassin, and had him seemingly turn evil by assuming the presidency in order to allow an invasion by the Vardans. Of course, it’s all a trap, but the Doctor has been used in turn by the Sontarans, who appear at the climax of episode four, intent on staging their own invasion.

  The kind of labour disputes featured in The Sun Makers hit the BBC itself and affected the making of The Invasion of Time. A scene-shifters’ strike caused more of the final episodes to feature outside-broadcast, location-shot footage (including a municipal swimming pool and a disused hospital interior) to represent the deep interior of the TARDIS. The resulting show saw Gallifrey become a Soviet-style society rather than the stuffy English bureaucracy seen in Holmes’ The Deadly Assassin. The nature of the production, however, did much to sabotage the story (as it had done on almost every story of Williams’ first season). This resulted in a meeting between Williams and Head of Serials Graeme MacDonald with a view to figuring out a way of handling the series that would avoid the behind-the-scenes chaos that was beginning to affect the onscreen quality (not the last time this would happen in the series’ history). Williams had a plan for the sixteenth season that would address many of the problems. Unlike the season just wrapped, the next would be carefully planned. It would have to be, as the six stories involved would tell one linked story, chronicling the Doctor’s search for the Key to Time. This was Williams’ first attempt to answer the perceived challenge posed by Star Wars and its successors. Audiences were thought to be no longer prepared to put up with poor plotting, and even poorer effects on TV: they wanted Doctor Who to match the new breed of television and movie science fiction coming from the US. It would be a challenge the venerable original version of the series could never quite rise to.

  Graham Williams saw the Key to Time season as a method of attracting an audience that would stick with the show for a full season, from first episode to last. His previous season had varied widely from a per-story average low of 7.8 million (Image of the Fendahl) and a high of 10.5 million (The Invasion of Time). Williams’ hope was that the ongoing over-arching story, albeit spread across six separate serials, would hold audience attention for a 26-week run.

  A three-page document had been drawn up in November 1976 (soon after Williams took the producer’s position) outlining his ambitions for what was to become the sixteenth season of Doctor Who in 1978. Full of mystical and esoteric-sounding content, the document outlined the forces that balance the universe and introduced the ‘Guardians’, one representing ‘good/construction’ and the other ‘evil/destruction’. These forces are accessed through the Key to Time, which has been split into six segments and scattered through time and space. The Doctor and his new companion, Time Lady Romana (Mary Tamm), are set the task of finding the pieces, assembling the Key and returning it to the White (‘good’) Guardian, while avoiding the hindrance of the Black (‘evil’) Guardian and his agents. An added complication was the nature of each segment: they could change form or be disguised as anything (or anyone). The document included a character profile for the new companion, Romana. ‘We decided to do the one big remaining stereotype that had yet to be done,’ admitted Williams. ‘This was the exact opposite of the savage huntress (Leela), namely the ice goddess.’ A long search finally saw Tamm cast as the neophyte Time Lady who was to act as both a companion and conscience for the Doctor.

  The six stories were planned as diverse adventures and some had been developed independently of the story arc idea, so the Key had to be inserted into the plot somewhere. This was more successful in some cases than others. Opening tale The Ribos Operation pulled off the now established trick of having the design department create a period-costume-drama look representing an alien world. Robert Holmes’ script and the look of the story were heavily influenced by the popular movie conception of Russian literature in the Dr Zhivago (1965) mould (or Anna Karenina, with some of the sets coming from the 1977 ten-episode BBC adaptation featuring Eric Porter) crossed with a heist movie plot. On the planet Ribos, three conmen have tricked the Graff Vynda-K into believing the planet is ric
h in the mineral Jethryk, used for powering spaceships. In fact, the only Jethryk on the planet is on display in a reliquary and is part of the Key to Time sought by the Doctor. Caught up in the conmen’s manoeuvres and the Graff’s ambitions, the Doctor also has to recover the Key segment.

  The literary games are further played out in later story The Androids of Tara, a fun retelling of The Prisoner of Zenda in the same future-feudal mode as The Ribos Operation, giving the BBC costume designers and set builders a period workout once more. A sword-wielding swashbuckler, with electrically augmented swords and laser-crossbows, The Androids of Tara (in which the Key segment is a statue) is an old-fashioned, Errol Flynn-type adventure story given a superficial science-fiction makeover, as Doctor Who simply didn’t do ‘straight’ history anymore. That story was preceded by another Hinchcliffe-era horror throwback in The Stones of Blood, the first two episodes of which would have fitted very well between the Jekyll and Hyde-like Planet of Evil and the Hammer Horror-influenced Pyramids of Mars. An Arthurian-inspired tale that also draws on the fashionable revival of druidism in the 1970s, The Stones of Blood sees the Doctor and Romana tangle not only with the alien Ogri, who resemble standing stones, but also with archaeologist Vivien Fay (really an alien criminal in disguise, an old Hinchcliffe staple) and the Megara, justice machines from the planet Diplos. The Hammer horror vibe is successfully mixed with high-tech SF, and the Doctor discovers the Key segment is Fay’s necklace, the Seal of Diplos.

  The other three stories (coming second, fifth and sixth in the running order) are varieties of space opera. The Pirate Planet (in which the Key segment is the planet Calufax) was a Douglas Adams-written satire that owed a lot to his The Hitch-Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy in tone and approach (perhaps due to the fact it was written at the same time). The Power of Kroll is another allegory for 1970s Britain’s approach to energy policy, but also a critique of the exploitation of ‘Third World’ resources and people. Searching for the next segment of the Key to Time, the Doctor and Romana land on the swamp moon of Delta Magna and get caught up in the conflict between native ‘swampies’ and the giant squid they worship (it has eaten the Key segment!), along with those who administer the local chemical refinery and a mob of gunrunners. Finally, the entire story arc culminates in the six-episode out-and-out space opera of The Armageddon Factor, which had two planetary empires – Atrios and Zeos – engaged in perpetual war. The Cold War analogy is not difficult to see, and neither are the Second World War references with a heavy overlay of Greek myth (again from writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin, who’d done the same in Underworld). The final Key segment is disguised in the form of Princess Astra (Lalla Ward), who provides the lookalike template for Romana’s regeneration at the beginning of the next season. Encouraged to hand over the all-powerful Key to the White Guardian (after a moment’s temptation to keep it and rule the universe himself), the Doctor sees through the Black Guardian’s disguise and re-scatters the Key. On the run, he must use the Randomiser (a random destination generator now inserted into the TARDIS console) to avoid pursuit by the Black Guardian.