Timeless Adventures (12 page)

This conclusion to Patrick Troughton’s time as the Doctor brought to a close six years of epic fantasy adventures and marked the end of the black-and-white era of
Doctor Who
. In doing so, writers Hulke and Dicks created a back-story for the Doctor, answering some of the questions posed by the show’s own enigmatic and unexplained title. This was a brave move, but the production team had determined that the mystery couldn’t stand forever. While concerned about burdening a new, incoming production team with a rigidly established mythology, there was also a strong possibility that the series might have ended entirely in 1969, so they felt under some obligation to provide a conclusion to the show’s past six years with some answers to the big question of the Doctor’s identity. The material they produced would form a strong part of the series’ foundation myth, right through its run. Even though Russell T Davies would kill off the Time Lords with his ‘Time War’ back-story, the fact that the Doctor was the last of his kind became central to the new conception of the revived series.

When the show returned, post-Troughton, in 1970, it would be in colour and the entire production process would change along with the creative team behind the scenes. But
Doctor Who
’s continued reflection of social, political and technological changes in Britain would become even bolder.

Where William Hartnell’s time on
Doctor Who
had been one of innovation in storytelling and technology, Patrick Troughton’s three-year run had been one of consolidation, in narrative, budgetary and structural terms. As the series entered the 1970s, with colour television and ever-greater technological development ahead, it faced its biggest challenges to date.

As the Conservatives returned to power in 1970 under Prime Minister Edward Heath, Britain was in crisis. Industrial strife was rampant, with a series of crippling strikes affecting transport and power. The global oil crisis was having an effect, while a growing environmental movement was enjoying its first popular successes. The new government’s desire to join the forerunner of the European Union, the European Economic Community (EEC), was beginning to play a part in British life and politics.

Doctor Who
was also facing a crisis as the 1960s drew to a close. Ratings had fallen off once more, with the potentially series-concluding epic
The War Games
averaging just under five million viewers, half the number who’d witnessed the arrival of the Daleks back in 1963. It wouldn’t be the last time that the show faced cancellation due to apparent dwindling popularity with viewers. At this point, the BBC considered a six-year run to have been a success and there was some internal debate about whether to end the show. Troughton’s Doctor had been shown starting the process of regeneration, a change forced upon him by the Time Lords, but, with no new actor cast, the decision to either cancel the show or launch a new actor as the Doctor was still open.

Upper management at the BBC always had an uneasy relationship with
Doctor Who
. For some of the ‘old guard’ the show was too populist, ‘low brow’ even, and had abandoned its original educational remit in favour of ratings-grabbing creations like the Daleks. This view put the late-1960s version of the show in opposition to the
raison d’être
of the BBC: a publicly funded corporation with ambitions to educate and enlighten the masses. Although originally developed within this ethos, by 1969
Doctor Who
clearly no longer fulfilled it. However, the BBC itself had been changing throughout the 1960s, starting with the arrival of Director General Hugh Carleton Greene.
Doctor Who
itself had been part of that process. The programme could be cited as both an example of the BBC’s conservatism and part of its radical agenda, reflecting a changing nation back to itself via the medium of popular entertainment.

With the departure of
Doctor Who
champion Sydney Newman from the BBC in 1967, the prospects for the series’ continuation had taken a downward turn. The renewal of the show that producer Innes Lloyd and star Patrick Troughton brought about was enough to win it another few years on air, during which time it continued to develop and change. As the end of Troughton’s time in the TARDIS drew near, however, there were rumblings that
Doctor Who
no longer deserved a place on primetime BBC1 Saturday evenings.

Terrance Dicks – a figure who would become very important to
Doctor Who
’s narrative development during the 1970s – joined the show as Assistant Script Editor in Spring 1968. The first thing he heard when joining was that the BBC was considering cancelling the show. ‘I thought, “That’s a great start to my career; three months and that will be the end of it!”’ recalled Dicks. ‘For a while they did actually consider ending it, because even then it had been going for a pretty long time in television terms. The viewing figures were OK, but they weren’t marvellous any more. I was actually involved in looking around for something else to replace the show.’

Several
Doctor Who
-type shows were being considered as the 1960s drew to a close, but it is unclear if these were ever intended as direct replacements. Returning to the science fiction literary origins of
Doctor Who
itself, the BBC considered producing a series of dramas drawing on the adventure stories of Jules Verne, whose Captain Nemo may have been a source for
Doctor Who
’s title character. Another possibility was an updated remake of Nigel Kneale’s 1950s Quatermass dramas. These groundbreaking serials had seen an Earthbound professor battle alien incursions amid official scepticism.

When the BBC decided that none of these shows, or several others mooted for production, was a suitable replacement for
Doctor Who
, a decision was taken to continue with the series. However, when it returned to screens in January 1970,
Doctor Who
would be a very different show. The lead character would have a different face, there would be a new production team behind the scenes, there would only be 26 episodes per year (rather than the 1960s average of 43), and, most noticeably of all, it would be in colour.

Outgoing producer Peter Bryant was tasked with setting up the first story of the 1970s (
Spearhead from Space
, filmed in 1969) before handing over to the team of producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks, who would remain with the series for the next five years, as long as new Doctor Jon Pertwee.

Several actors had been considered as Patrick Troughton’s replacement in mid-1969, when it became clear the show would be continuing. Among them were Ron Moody (then best known as Fagin in
Oliver Twist
, 1968), and ex-Goon Michael Bentine, before Letts settled on Pertwee, better known as a radio comedian, master of silly voices and star of the long-running radio comedy
The Navy Lark
.

As well as changing the lead actor, the way the show was made had to change radically, too. In line with every other BBC-produced show,
Doctor Who
would enter the 1970s in full colour. This development was echoed at the end of 2008, when the producers of the revived and phenomenally successful twenty-first-century
Doctor Who
faced a similar challenge. Just as the BBC wanted all programmes and live output to be in colour in 1970, by 2010 all content would be transmitted in High Definition (HD). By 2008, the teams at BBC Wales, after a shaky technical start, had already notched up a couple of years’ experience of HD television production with
Doctor Who
spin-off
Torchwood
. Starting with
Planet of the Dead
, at Easter 2009, the BBC’s flagship show was finally using the new process.

Faced with similar upheaval in the 1970s, the new
Doctor Who
production team discovered there’d be no additional budget available to cover the expense of making the switch. Colour television was broadcast on a higher-definition 625-line system, meaning clearer, crisper pictures (even more so in HD by 2008). As a result, the design detail of costumes, sets and make-up all had to be upgraded to a new level. This was expensive. Amid a general move to shorter seasons for TV drama, reducing
Doctor Who
from over 40 episodes per year to the mid-20s therefore made a lot of sense. It allowed the budget to go further and addressed complaints from the series’ previous two leading actors about the gruelling workload that their almost all-yearround schedule entailed. Shooting on location would also make for a more intensive production process, as had been discovered in making serials like
The War Machines
and
The Invasion
.

As well as these superficial, though important, changes, there was also to be a major change to the format of the show, as set up in the final episode of
The War Games
. No longer a wanderer in time and space, Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor would be an exile on Earth, battling aliens trying to invade the planet. This clearly echoed the Quatermass serials of the 1950s (to such an extent that author Nigel Kneale felt aggrieved) and may have been a hangover from the BBC’s vague thoughts about remaking the series. This way, the corporation had the best of both worlds: a new series of
Doctor Who
that was not entirely unlike the previously popular Quatermass. Terrance Dicks, script editor during much of the 1970s, felt the comparison was inevitable: ‘If you’re doing a science-fiction serial set on Earth, you’re going to echo Quatermass whether you like it or not,’ he said on
What Lies Beneath
, a DVD documentary. In the same programme, Barry Letts called the new Doctor ‘a cross between Quatermass and James Bond’. Jon Pertwee was tasked with playing the Doctor as a new, dynamic, Earthbound action hero.

Another long-fought battle was won as the
Doctor Who
base of operations was finally moved to Television Centre (with model work and additional film work based at Ealing Studios, as always), away from the limiting facilities of Lime Grove and Riverside, with production offices based in the BBC facility at Union House in Shepherd’s Bush. Stories could be recorded in blocks now, as more time was available, and could even be produced out of broadcast order (a luxury not afforded the black-and-white era). Location and studio shooting could be maximised to best use the available budget and resources. Broadly, this production set-up would remain in place for the rest of the show’s original 26-year run, until 1989.

All these changes were seen by incoming producer Barry Letts as opportunities to be exploited. He had a new vision for the series, with a new leading man and a whole new electronic box of tricks to bring special effects to colour television drama. As 1970 began,
Doctor Who
had not so much regenerated as become an entirely different show.

Despite all the superficial changes, the opening adventure of 1970 was as traditional as they come.
Spearhead from Space
had been shot entirely on film at the BBC facilities at Evesham as a strike made Television Centre initially unavailable to the production. This gave the opening story a distinctive look, building on the gritty, contemporary feel of
The Invasion
, but one that would not be repeated as the show settled into its regular production pattern.

This first story continued the established format of the Troughton years, with an alien invasion of Earth thwarted by the Doctor with the help of UNIT, now co-opted as a regular part of the series’ format. With the new Doctor exiled to Earth and unable to escape (and he tries quite hard to do so, even while there’s an ongoing alien invasion), he reluctantly allies himself to UNIT as a base of operations. New companion Liz Shaw (Caroline John) is introduced as an intelligent UNIT recruit who is almost as smart as the Doctor himself. The role built on that of her immediate predecessor, the equally smart Zoe Heriot, and both had been created in reaction to the mostly more dependent female companions of the 1960s.

Letts and Dicks approached the show under the assumption that a large part of the audience had grown up with it. Those kids from seven years before who witnessed the arrival of the Daleks were now teenagers, so the show was retooled to be more ‘grown up’, more in line with filmed adventure shows from ITV like
The Avengers
. ‘By the time we were doing it,’ said Letts on the DVD documentary
What Lies Beneath
, ‘it was definitely a grown-up programme, as well as a children’s programme. [We felt] the stories should be about something of deep interest to the adults.’ Additionally, Terrance Dicks had a strong dislike of the ‘sideways’ fantasy-based shows, such as
The Celestial Toymaker
and
The Mind Robber
. These were banished in favour of Letts’ realism:
Doctor Who
in the style of the procedural cop or doc shows increasingly popular in the 1960s, like
Z-Cars
or
Emergency Ward 10
.

The new Doctor would be debonair, an adventurer in the style of John Steed from
The Avengers
or Adam Adamant (the character Verity Lambert had launched after
Doctor Who
). He would dress in Victorian garb with a dash of 1970s élan, and he’d have a fascination for fast cars and gadgets. A lot of this reflected Jon Pertwee’s own personal style and interests (as part of his first costume, Pertwee wore his own grandfather’s cloak) as much as it drew on any characterisation developed by Letts and Dicks.