Timeless Adventures (23 page)

The Keeper of Traken
is a ‘Garden of Eden’ parable (with an atmosphere that echoes Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, adapted by the BBC that same year), in which a perfectly balanced world is corrupted by the evil Melkur, a long-dormant statue located in a verdant grove. Melkur is revealed to be a TARDIS housing the decaying Master (from 1976’s
The Deadly Assassin
). The theme of corruption continued in
Logopolis
as the new Master (having body-snatched Nyssa’s father, Tremas) arrives on the title planet, where a society of mathematicians is preserving the universe’s harmony through the fundamental manipulation of numbers. The Master’s interference disrupts their process and threatens the universe. In defeating the Master, the Doctor falls from a radio telescope to his ‘death’. His regeneration is aided (in an echo of the Third Doctor’s) by the mysterious wraith-like figure of ‘the Watcher’ who has been haunting the Doctor throughout. The 21 March 1981 final episode of
Logopolis
was watched by 6.1 million, with the season as a whole averaging only 5.8 million.

The regeneration of Tom Baker’s Doctor into Peter Davison, the star of
All Creatures Great and Small
(a show that had John Nathan-Turner as production unit manager) had come at just the right time. The change of time slot had worked, but it was too late to significantly raise the season-average viewing figures. So important was the change of actor after seven years (a generation had grown up knowing no other Doctor than Tom Baker), the BBC scheduled a repeat series showcasing an adventure from each of the previous Doctors in preparation for Davison’s debut in 1982. However, the show’s retreat from engagement with the realities of the world (filtered through fantasy entertainment) would be a major contributing factor to the decline of
Doctor Who
through the 1980s. The poor viewing figures for Tom Baker’s final season meant that Nathan-Turner was aware he would have to do something drastic if he was to win back the popular audience. Part of his new approach would be heavily reliant on the casting of the Fifth Doctor, and for the first time the series cast an already established television star: 29-year-old Davison.

In casting Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor, producer John Nathan-Turner was looking for a contrast with Tom Baker. Davison’s light, straight hair and his youth contrasted hugely with the near-50, dark, curly-haired Tom Baker. While these superficial elements were at the front of Nathan-Turner’s mind, he was lucky with his choice. Davison was a rising TV star (with sitcoms
Sink or Swim and
Holding the Fort
). The change of lead actor and a controversial move from Saturday early evenings to 7pm on Mondays and Tuesdays (in most areas) contributed heavily to the ratings almost doubling over Tom Baker’s final year. Davison’s first season of stories (the show’s nineteenth on air) all averaged around nine million, with atypical period adventure
Black Orchid
reaching ten million. The soap-opera-like cast line-up and scheduling helped
Doctor Who
rise to new levels of success and popularity, even as the show retreated from any popular social or political engagement.

Nathan-Turner, however, appears to have taken the wrong lessons from the failure of Tom Baker’s final season with the viewing public. The season had proved a hit with the increasingly vocal and actively involved fan base. The return of the Cybermen and the Master gave Nathan-Turner a taste for reviving monsters and characters from the show’s past, a process given more momentum due to the looming twentieth anniversary and growing appetite for nostalgia. Nathan-Turner would continue to exploit the growing cultural and intellectual phenomenon of postmodernism in popular culture. Self-reflexivity became central to narratives in film and television, in which characters would make comments or experience events that seemed to reveal an awareness of their status as fictional entertainments.
Doctor Who
had always enjoyed a loose continuity, but increasingly in the 1980s the show’s own narrative history would become central to its storytelling. At first this engaged audiences with a taste for nostalgia, but over the longer run it would become off-putting, with the series perceived as needing a high degree of knowledge of the past to understand it. Nathan-Turner’s genius for publicity and PR was also part of this, with narrative developments in the show promoted as event television, or manipulated through the prism of other forms of entertainment (shooting on location for
Planet of Fire
, Davison and Nicola Bryant posed on the beach in a James Bond pastiche, while new companion Bonnie Langford was introduced when she and Colin Baker arrived on a theatre stage suspended by Kirby wires).

The Master was the villain in Davison’s first story,
Castrovalva
(a sequel to
Logopolis
), and in the season’s climax,
Time Flight
, in which a hijacked Concorde lands on prehistoric Earth. Bidmead continued his exploration of complex mathematics in
Castrovalva
, with a look derived from the work of early-twentieth-century Dutch artist MC Escher. This may have drawn on a then-popular science book,
Godel
,
Escher, Bach
by Douglas R Hofstadter, which connected music, art and maths, but it was definitely inspired by an Escher print called ‘Castrovalva’ that was hanging in a BBC office. With modern video effects, the show just about managed to pull off an Escher-inspired environment. The first two episodes (almost entirely TARDIS-set) dealt with the aftermath of the regeneration, before the final two relocated events to Castrovalva, an artificial environment created by the Master as a trap for the Doctor. This story structure made sense in the new twice-weekly transmission slot.

The glamour of filming at Heathrow and featuring Concorde, with the active co-operation of the airport authorities and British Airways, seems to have been enough for Nathan-Turner to commission
Time
Flight
. Concluding the series with the unexpected return of the Master was also attractive as a more sophisticated version of Barry Letts’ approach to structuring the series (and Nathan-Turner had certainly learned from Letts as executive producer).

Nathan-Turner’s recreation of
Doctor Who
was a combination of hard science fiction with game-show or light-entertainment production values. New script editor Eric Saward was keen to build on Bidmead’s legacy and push the show in a more ideas-driven direction. Given the political and social upheaval in Britain in the early- to mid-1980s, it is remarkable that this previously socially and politically engaged series should fail to explore this material. Nathan-Turner wanted a new way to engage audiences in an increasingly competitive television environment, and he found it in the combination of Saward’s movie-inspired science fiction and an easily accessible visual look that would not be alienating to viewers who experienced
Doctor
Who
as part of an evening’s television.

Saward would implement Nathan-Turner’s idea of event television in the most spectacular way with
Earthshock
. He’d been hired for the job on the back of submitting
The Visitation
, a traditional story that re-tooled classic
Doctor Who
tropes for the 1980s. It featured invading aliens trapped in a historical locale and a notable historical event affected by the Doctor (in this case he’s involved in starting the fire of London, after a similar fire-starting experience in Rome during
The Romans
).

Following the ideas-driven double bill of
Four To Doomsday
(a 1960s-throwback political and environmental parable about autocratic rule in which an alien frog god aims for Earth after destroying his own planet’s ozone layer) and
Kinda
(a complex Buddhist/colonial parable featuring more pop-video-inspired hallucinations), and the pseudo-historic double bill of
The Visitation
and
Black Orchid
(an Agatha Christie-inspired heritage-house mystery), Saward and Nathan-Turner unleashed
Earthshock
, a story that (for better or worse, often both) was to dictate the style of the series for the rest of the decade.

Doctor Who
had always used returning adversaries sparingly in the past, with three exceptions: the Daleks (at the height of 1960s Dalekmania), the Cybermen (in the late 1960s ‘monster’ season) and the Master (during the early 1970s). This all changed in the 1980s, with the Daleks returning every two years from 1984 and the Master featured as a regular villain during Peter Davison and Colin Baker’s time in the TARDIS. Nathan-Turner formulated the idea that exploiting the show’s own heritage was a good move following the fan-acclaimed ‘Master trilogy’. He went one step further, tapping the postmodern interest in nostalgia by bringing back barely remembered villains like Omega (
Arc of Infinity
), the Black Guardian (
Mawdryn Undead
,
Terminus, Enlightenment
), and creatures like the Sea Devils and Silurians (teamed up in
Warriors of the Deep
). The most dramatic return of all, however, was that of the Cybermen in
Earthshock
.

Six years after they were last seen (in
Revenge of the Cybermen
), the cliff-hanger of episode one of
Earthshock
revealed the newly redesigned ‘tin soldiers’ were back, jolting a nation of fans in surprise. Nathan-Turner had turned down the chance of a
Radio Times
cover announcing their return, preferring to maximise the surprise. This was intended to create word of mouth, turning
Doctor Who
into a must-see event. The intention was to increase the number of viewers for the second surprise, the unexpected (and equally secret) death of the Doctor’s companion Adric (Waterhouse) at the climax of episode four (something not seen since
The Daleks’ Master Plan
in 1966).

As part of the increasing postmodernism of the show,
Earthshock
features a quick catch-up on Cyber-history when the Cybermen view a selection of clips from past
Doctor Who
adventures. The first time Nathan-Turner had tried this was in a flashback sequence just before the Fourth Doctor fell from the Pharos Project radio telescope in
Logopolis
. This was part of the general nostalgia surrounding the programme as it approached its twentieth year on air, with TV review show
Did You See
? devoting a special report to
Doctor Who
’s past monsters on the back of the return of the Cybermen.

The effect of
Earthshock
on 1980s
Doctor Who
would be profound. Saward would go on to write a series of macho stories full of soldiers, violence and space opera (
Resurrection of the Daleks, Attack of the
Cybermen, Revelation of the Daleks
) that would come to define the decade’s
Doctor Who
in the eyes of a dwindling audience. As script editor, he would shape others’ work to this template (with other stories modelled after
Earthshock
:
Terminus
,
The Caves of Androzani
,
Vengeance on Varos and The Two Doctors
). Each of these stories would (in part) emulate the macho American cinema of the 1980s, drawing on the work of James Cameron and films featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. There’s a lot of
Die Hard
in the often self-referential tone of much of Saward’s work, and it seemed that
Doctor Who
’s mass audience didn’t care for it.

From
Earthshock
onwards, Nathan-Turner’s
Doctor Who
would be driven by event-television choices. The show’s twentieth season saw each story contain a significant element from the series’ own past, largely thanks to the influence of fan ‘continuity consultant’ Ian Levine who was helping the production office keep the show’s 20-year-old continuity straight (see chapter six). Each story had a headline-attracting stunt attached, some more than one.

Season opener
Arc of Infinity
combined the return of companion Tegan, who’d been left behind in Heathrow at the conclusion of
Time
Flight
, with an encore appearance by Omega, the Time Lord villain who’d appeared in
The Three Doctors
. Adding to the sense of special occasion, the production featured foreign filming (for the first time since
City of Death
) in Amsterdam (a habit that would recur in each of the next two years, on
Planet of Fire
and
The Two Doctors
).

Although there had been a BBC2 repeat of
The Three Doctors
(featuring Omega as the anti-matter villain) as part of the
Five Faces
of
Doctor Who
season before Peter Davison’s debut,
Arc of Infinity
is guilty of assuming detailed knowledge of the show’s past. Returning creatures or villains were not effectively reintroduced, other than with a throwaway ‘Oh it’s X, Y or Z’ uttered by the Doctor, and maybe an ‘I’ve met them before’ aside to the companion.

The rest of the season would see an encore encounter with the Mara (the dark-side threat from
Kinda
) in
Snakedance
(a spiritual remake of
Planet of the Spiders
); the Black Guardian in the loose trilogy of
Mawdryn Undead, Terminus and Enlightenment
; and the Master in historical adventure
The King’s Demons
. The original plan was for the twentieth-anniversary season to climax with the return of the Daleks in the Saward-scripted
Warhead/The Return
(retooled one year later as
Resurrection of the Daleks
). This reliance on the past allowed for a certain amount of creative reinvention (returning monsters were invariably redesigned), but it satisfied hardcore followers of the show (fans interested in its deep history) at the expense of the wider, casual audience.

The Black Guardian trilogy introduced new companion Turlough (Mark Strickson), an alien masquerading as an English public-school boy, pressured into attempting to kill the Doctor (repeatedly) on the Guardian’s behalf. The idea of a traitor-cum-threat within the TARDIS crew was a new one, but old elements of the show continued to recur with an appearance from the Brigadier (replacing the originally planned return of the First Doctor’s companion, Ian Chesterton) inspiring another series of nostalgic clips of old episodes built into the narrative. Again, as with
Arc of Infinity
, little care is taken to reintroduce the nostalgic elements to less regular viewers. Showrunner Russell T Davies would better handle the process of bringing back old monsters for the refreshed
Doctor Who
. He would also cleverly rework old plot elements, such as the way David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor seemingly began the regeneration process in
The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End
, echoing the false regeneration featured in the Davison adventure
Mawdryn Undead
, when the Doctor’s companions misidentify a disfigured impostor as the regenerated Doctor.