Timeless Adventures (20 page)

In response to further
Doctor Who
serials like
Genesis of the
Daleks
and
The Seeds of Doom
, Mary Whitehouse and the NVALA described the show as being full of ‘obscene violence and horror’. In one public speech, Whitehouse complained specifically with regard to
The Seeds of Doom
that ‘strangulation – by hand, by claw, by obscene vegetable matter – is the latest [
Doctor Who
] gimmick, sufficiently close up so that they get the point. And just for a little variety, show the children how to make a Molotov Cocktail.’

Looking back on his run-in with Mary Whitehouse, Philip Hinchcliffe was sanguine, even though her actions had essentially cost him his job. ‘She was very vocal at the time on a lot of programmes and she homed in on us,’ he recalled. ‘I think she confused violence with thrills. Our aim was to be thrilling, but I don’t think there was a huge amount of violence. At the time, television boundaries of taste were evolving very quickly. I was a young producer, and I think probably I was pushing the envelope for that type of programme in that teatime Saturday slot. I don’t think we ever got it massively wrong. We were bumping up against the limits of what we could do at that time with that audience, but I don’t think we got it grotesquely wrong at all.’

However, it was the now-notorious, ‘drowning’ cliff-hanger at the climax of episode three of
The Deadly Assassin
that saw Whitehouse finally find a target that the BBC could not ignore. Whitehouse’s complaints were a mix of the nonsensical and the appreciable. She was worried that children would not comprehend the nature of the cliff-hanger and so would believe that the Doctor would be held under water for a whole week. ‘At a time when little children are watching, you showed violence of a quite unacceptable kind,’ she wrote to Curran. Violence, she asserted, ‘permeated the programme’, and the cliff-hanger itself ‘could only be described as sadistic’. In addition, Whitehouse delivered anecdotal evidence that a neighbour’s son had threatened to hold his brother’s head under the bath water the next time he annoyed him ‘like the man did with Doctor Who’.

The problem for the BBC was that, although it had already been trimmed, against Hinchcliffe’s wishes, by Head of Serials Bill Slater, the sequence as broadcast was actually in contravention of the BBC’s own 1972 guidelines on the depiction of violent material. The guidelines warned about taking care with material where a large proportion of the audience would be children, urging ‘caution’ in relation to episodic cliff-hangers, especially if they contained ‘frightening closeups’ or ‘over-detailed portrayal of death’. Whitehouse was aware of these guidelines and was able to cite them in relation to
The Deadly
Assassin
cliff-hanger.

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
).