Timeless Adventures (19 page)

The Masque of Mandragora
certainly achieved that, with a successful raid on the BBC’s period-costume holdings and location filming that makes the most of Portmeirion, but with a director who seems to have gone out of his way to avoid many of the recognisable shots or locations viewers may have remembered from
The
Prisoner
. Writer Louis Marks had been a lecturer in Renaissance history, so was able to turn to his passion for his final script for the series. The story explicitly plays out the battle between science and religion (albeit under the guise of a fictional cult worshipping an alien entity), or knowledge and ignorance, using the dawning Renaissance period as a thematically suitable and colourful backdrop. It came at a time when there was growing interest in creationism and the beginnings of a new attack on the scientific method, especially in the US. The story lacks a physical monster (the helix energy is an abstract threat) and instead is played out as a battle of ideas between superstition and reason. The Doctor is on the side of reason and science, but he can at least understand the importance of obviously ‘wrong’ supernatural ideas to the functioning of a certain type of society. These were big conceptual issues for
Doctor Who
to be tackling and showed that, as they entered what would turn out to be their final year in charge, Hinchcliffe and Holmes had lost none of their ambition.

Remembered mainly as the story that saw the departure of Sarah Jane Smith,
The Hand of Fear
returns to several themes that the series had dealt with in the recent past, with influences including mummy movies (again) and the social-political side being concerned with energy production (again). The ‘energy’ part of the story, however, is so muddled that it has little impact, beyond simply revealing that the writers (Bob Baker and Dave Martin, later to invent K-9) seem to have little understanding of nuclear power. Landing in a quarry (narratively a real quarry, not one standing in for an alien world), the Doctor and Sarah are caught up in a crisis at the Nunton nuclear power plant when the fossilised hand of alien exile Eldrad is re-energised by radiation. A possessed Sarah helps revive Eldrad, who sets out to return and conquer its home world (Eldrad’s gender is fluid, depending on what life form inspires its revival). Twelve million viewers tuned in to see Eldrad defeated and the Doctor drop Sarah off back in Croydon (or, as later revealed in the David Tennant episode
School Reunion
, Aberdeen). The slate was now cleared for the next tale, one that would have a dramatic impact on
Doctor Who
’s future internal narrative history.

Tom Baker had long wanted to see the Doctor feature in a story without a companion at his side, and he got his wish in
The Deadly
Assassin
. Robert Holmes took the opportunity to return the Doctor to his home planet of Gallifrey (named by Holmes in
The Time Warrior
). This did more to demystify the series’ central character than even
The War Games
at the climax of the Troughton period or the anniversary adventure
The Three Doctors
(which had featured brief scenes on the Doctor’s then-unnamed homeland).

The Time Lords are revealed to be a bureaucratic, stuffy, desiccated society, and the story makes plain the Doctor’s reasons for wanting to escape and explore the universe. Drawing on the recent history of political assassinations in the US (particularly that of John F Kennedy the day before
Doctor Who
’s first episode aired) and films like
The Manchurian Candidate
(1962) and the more recent
The Parallax
View
(1974), the opening of the story sees the Doctor apparently brainwashed into assassinating the President of the Time Lords. Later developments reveal this to be a plot orchestrated by the Master to discredit the Doctor. Holmes returns the Master to
Doctor Who
three years after Roger Delgado’s death, but has him appear as little more than a skeletal creature in a dark cloak. The ridiculing of politicians, through the buffoonery of the Time Lords, was a reaction to the fall of the political classes in Britain (as a result of the Profumo affair and the Jeremy Thorpe scandals) and the US (the fall of Richard Nixon and Watergate). The growing
Doctor Who
fan base (see chapter six) reacted badly to Holmes’ depiction of the Time Lords, although the story is now seen as something of a classic.

Apart from the political pastiche,
The Deadly Assassin
is notable for its third episode, set almost entirely within a computer-generated fantasy world called ‘the Matrix’ (this was 1976, long before the film series of the same name). Filmed on location, the episode sees the Doctor and his unknown adversary (later revealed to be Chancellor Goth) fighting it out using the power of their minds to warp ‘reality’. It made for innovative television and was years ahead of its time in depicting alternative interactive realities on screen. It would also lead directly to the end of Hinchcliffe’s time on the programme…

The companion-less
The Deadly Assassin
was a one-off experiment, falling directly mid-season. The remaining three stories of the year would introduce and develop a new companion, the savage Leela (Louise Jameson), a wild warrior woman dressed in animal skins and descended from the crew of a crashed spaceship from a time far in humanity’s future.
The Face of Evil
, along with
The Masque of
Mandragora
and
The Deadly Assassin
, is a story that would not have happened without the Doctor’s previous involvement: he brought the Mandragora Helix to Earth and he’s the subject of the plot in
The
Deadly Assassin
. Baker’s Fourth Doctor apparently had an unscreened adventure prior to
The Face of Evil
, where he’d thought he was solving a problem for the survivors of a crashed spaceship by fixing their semi-sentient computer. Instead, however, he’d driven it mad by inadvertently downloading his own personality. Returning to the planet, he discovers a primitive society split in two (the Sevateem, descended from the ship’s ‘survey team’, and the Tesh, once the ‘technicians’) and dominated by Xoanon, a computer suffering from multiple-personality disorder. The Doctor’s previous involvement is confirmed by a giant, Mount Rushmore-like carving of his head on a mountainside after the locals recognise him as the (jelly) baby-eating ‘Evil One’.

The society-secretly-run-by-computer is another mild (and not particularly hidden) attack on religion, as both the Sevateem and the Tesh accept their place in Xoanon’s world without question. The one exception is Leela, who quickly comes under the Doctor’s wing. The Doctor sees potential in Leela and over the next few episodes develops a kind of Henry Higgins educator role where he attempts to broaden her horizons and mould her into someone better able to fit into the universe at large. The moral of the story was clear – and fitted nicely with growing political disenchantment in the 1970s: question your leaders; question everything.

The theme is continued through into
The Robots of Death
, in which the decadent crew of a giant ‘sandminer’ vehicle are shaken out of their passive reliance on servant robots by the arrival of the Doctor and the revenge plot of disgraced robotics genius Taren Capel. Heavily reliant on Frank Herbert’s
Dune
for its planetary setting and the industry of (spice) mining,
The Robots of Death
is just as indebted to Isaac Asimov’s rules of robotics, which posit that a robot must never harm a human being. The most interesting thing here is a visual conceit: rather than trust the BBC’s designers to come up with suitable futuristic fashions for the sandminer crew, Hinchcliffe had them model everything from sets to costumes on the art deco designs of the robots themselves. This results in an outlandish, though entirely consistent and thematically coherent vision of a society that the viewer can extrapolate from a handful of characters and one enclosed setting. It was a lesson that future producers of
Doctor Who
might have learned, though not all of them seem to have paid attention – or when they did look into the show’s past, they took inspiration from the wrong things (as in the 1980s). Modelled after a 1920s ‘whodunit’ plot,
The Robots of Death
is a critique of a society grown decadent off the
back of mineral wealth with a reliance on an ‘under class’ used to produce that wealth. In that way, it’s a critique of 1970s oil-driven Capitalism in the UK, and the design and make-up anticipates the cultural change on its way as Punk played itself out and gave way to the New Romantics.

With Philip Hinchcliffe’s time as producer of
Doctor Who
coming to a forced end (see later for details), he clearly decided to go out all guns blazing. His final story,
The Talons of Weng-Chiang
, is a glorious summation of his pulp-literature-driven storytelling style and period-drama art design, all in one near faultless six-episode adventure. Hinchcliffe recognised the importance of his key BBC collaborators to the success of his episodes, and he intended to allow them to end his time on the show on a high, regardless of budgetary impact.

The Talons of Weng-Chiang
is a brilliant fusion of Victorian pulp fiction conventions, warped to fit the
Doctor Who
format. Tom Baker is essentially playing a version of Sherlock Holmes (complete with cape and deerstalker), while the script gives him three Watsons (Leela, Professor Litefoot, and theatre impresario Henry Jago). The villains – Weng-Chiang/Magnus Greel, misled magician Li H’sen Chang and Mr Sin – are all drawn from the writings of Sax Rohmer and the movie and serial versions of cod-Chinese villains like Fu Manchu. Design-wise, the story draws on the (by then 20-year-old) traditions of Hammer horror, while the character of Weng-Chiang, who spends much of the story skulking about in the sewers under a theatre, allowed for a design riff on
The Phantom of the Opera
(complete with dramatic unmasking at the cliff-hanger climax of episode five).

The Talons of Weng-Chiang
was the apotheosis of Hinchcliffe and Holmes’ time on the show, putting aside any but the most cursory social or political commentary for the more abstract purpose of deconstructing English literary archetypes. Spoofing Sherlock Holmes was nothing new after a series of mid-1970s movies deconstructed the ‘great detective’ (
The Private Life of Sherlock
Holmes
[1970],
Sherlock
Holmes’ Smarter Brother
[1975],
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
[1976]) but
The Talons of Weng-Chiang
extended its targets to cover many of the great heroes and villains of Victorian pulp (and classic) literature. It was the culmination of Holmes and Hinchcliffe’s habit of dropping the Doctor into the middle of other genres of fiction (rather than SF), causing the programme to reform itself around him. His era encompassed horror (
The Ark in Space, Terror of the Zygons, The
Seeds of Doom
), politics (
Genesis of the Daleks, The Deadly Assassin
), new ageism/Von Daniken-ism (
Pyramids of Mars
) and the nature of belief (
The Masque of Mandragora, The Face of Evil
). Not a bad achievement for an entertainment show primarily aimed at a family audience.

Philip Hinchcliffe was forcibly removed from his position as producer on
Doctor Who
after three years of critical and ratings success as a direct result of the activities of ‘clean-up-TV’ campaigner Mary Whitehouse. It wasn’t the first time that Whitehouse’s group had targeted
Doctor Who
(and it wouldn’t be the last), but the mid-1970s was when she was most effective.

On 13 November 1976, the third episode of
The Deadly Assassin
ended (as with so many of the series’ cliff-hangers) with the Doctor in mortal peril. Battling Chancellor Goth within the fantasy world of the Matrix, the climax of the episode saw the pair fighting at the edge of an expanse of water. As Goth got the upper hand in the struggle, the Doctor was held under water, with the episode ending on a close-up freeze frame of his submerged, anguished face. While the majority of viewers would have reacted to this particular cliffhanger as they had to so many others – the Doctor couldn’t be dead; the show was back on again next week – there was one particular viewer who took it upon herself to write a letter of complaint to the Director General of the BBC, Charles Curran: Mary Whitehouse.

Since the early 1960s, Whitehouse had been the figurehead of a small but vocal campaign group that had set out to ‘clean up TV’ by reining in what they saw as the corrupting influence of many television shows on the nation’s youth. With the 1960s being a period of significant social and political change, Whitehouse had decided to ignore the wider causes of moral and social unrest and lay the blame solely on the media. It was as if, in order to fight against the mass changes in society that she disapproved of, she’d had to narrow her focus to a target she felt she might have some chance of affecting. Her main obsession would be the publicly funded BBC.

Driven by her Christian values and the (in her eyes) lack of values shown by her pupils when she was a schoolteacher, Whitehouse had engaged in a battle of wits with the former BBC Director General Hugh Greene, declaring that the BBC was ‘more than anybody else responsible for the moral collapse in this country’. Greene ignored her concerns and blocked her from participating in BBC programming. Through petitions, letter-writing campaigns and public meetings, Whitehouse developed a higher profile. She successfully had the BBC ban the video for Alice Cooper’s ‘School’s Out’ in 1972 and had complained about the release of Stanley Kubrick’s
A Clockwork Orange
the previous year. The formation of the National Viewers and Listeners Association (NVALA) gave her a platform, and she used her base to hit out at programmes such as
Till Death Us Do Part
and violence in
Tom and Jerry
cartoons.

Part of the remit of
Doctor Who
was to scare the nation’s children. Perhaps that hadn’t been the original intention of Sydney Newman and Verity Lambert when they devised and launched the series back in 1963, but by the mid-1970s it was a strong, widely appreciated facet of the show. Whitehouse first complained about this fundamental aspect of the series in relation to Jon Pertwee’s final story,
Planet of the Spiders
. A psychiatrist from the Church of England’s Children’s Society complained to the medical magazine
General Practitioner
that the story ‘was probably responsible for an epidemic
of spider phobia among young children’. This was enough for the
Daily Mail
to contact Whitehouse and solicit a quote attacking the show. ‘This underlines the warnings we have been giving about the effect of
Doctor Who
on the very small child,’ said Whitehouse, before going on to declare war on the programme. ‘We intend to ask the BBC, as a matter of urgency, to finance independent research into the effect of
Doctor Who
on the under-fives, and in the meantime ask it to switch the programme to 6.30pm.’