Note: this essay was originally written in 2012/2013 for a book of essays about politics in British tele-fantasy that was never published. It was expanded slightly in September 2020 and contains quotations from exclusive interviews with Eric Saward, Philip Martin and Andrew Cartmel, all of whom have my thanks for graciously giving their time and answering my questions.
Doctor Who, by virtue of its longevity, enjoys a unique position as a continuous reflection of the society that created it over a 26-year period, acting as a kind of longitudinal study of changes in societal attitudes and news values. While other programmes may be short-lived and explore a particular issue in depth (as in mini-series such as the anti-nuclear environmental thriller Edge Of Darkness), employing a small number of writers and directors who could be chosen to ensure their sympathy to the themes, Doctor Who would employ several such every year, under pressures of time that often prevented the production team only working with ‘their kind of people’. Or, as Terrance Dicks, Doctor Who’s Script Editor (1970-74) commented: "In all television programmes scripting is very hard and on Who it seemed particularly hard because they had got themselves into a particularly complicated state with lots of scripts being turned down, written off and whatever and the problem with doing that is that you are in the danger of being in the position of when you actually haven't got anything to put on the screen and you have this terrible idea that when 6.10 or 5.50 comes up on a Saturday night and they say ‘Doctor Who’ we'll have to play a grammar phone record or something. Basically you don't want this to happen." (Dicks, 1995).
It is true to say that Doctor Who has generally (although with notable exceptions) conformed to a fairly generic ‘liberal’ point of view – anti-unnecessary aggression, anti-racist, and former Script Editor Eric Saward believes “(t)he better scripts always seemed to have this humanitarian point of view, probably verging on left-of-centre but not wildly political.”[1] The Doctor normally finds himself in opposition to an enemy who sees little value in the lives of others and is prepared to achieve their aims through violence, and his solution will normally involve as little violence in return as possible. His enemies are often reflections of elements of the real world – the Daleks were famously based on the Nazis, the Cybermen reflected concerns about scientific developments that would lead to the human body being re-built from mechanical parts when it began to fail. In the 1970s the socially conscious Producer/Writer Barry Letts commissioned stories about pollution, the Common Market, colonialism and his own interest in Buddhism[2].
As the 1980s began, things were changing considerably in the Doctor Who production office. John Nathan-Turner had taken over as Producer, and he and Executive Producer Barry Letts felt that the show needed to be more serious, the stories based more around real scientific ideas. Christopher H. Bidmead was given the job of Script Editor for the programme’s 18th season. Bidmead agreed with the brief he was given and the stories he commissioned were mostly dramatizations of particular scientific ideas, such as evolution, pocket universes, and (fittingly) entropy in the final story to feature Tom Baker’s fourth Doctor, ‘Logopolis’ (written by Bidmead himself).
In general the political of this season was minimal – an anti-slavery theme ran through the esoteric ‘Warriors’ Gate’ for example – but there was one moment in the season which touched on something more specific. In ‘Full Circle’ (written by Andrew Smith) a group of humanoids lock themselves in their crashed space-ship at the point in the year when mists rise from the swamps and the Marshmen – strange, amphibious creatures – rise from the waters and attack. A young Marshchild is captured by the humanoids who dissect it - much to the dismay of the Doctor who arrives too late to prevent it. This not only gives the story its moral heart (the Doctor’s furious dressing down of the leaders who decided to go ahead with it) but also places it firmly in its time and the debates around the ethics of vivisection and experimenting on animals (although Smith himself denied this was a deliberate reflection on the vivisection debate in conversation with this writer).
This is an example of how Doctor Who’s format allowed it to reflect its times even when those in charge of production were not specifically looking to do so – politically at least. Bidmead only acted as Script Editor for that one season but began the commissioning of the next as well as writing season opener (and debut Peter Davison story) ‘Castrovalva’ – inspired by a painting by M.C. Escher and exploring the concept of recursion. He had also begun work on Christopher Bailey’s Buddhist parable ‘Kinda’. Again, the exploration of an idea was important, but the idea was abstract rather than directly and obviously connected to the real world. His full-time replacement Eric Saward was less interested than Bidmead in scientific developments and focussed on the practical aspects of getting scripts that were exciting and worked structurally.
When Doctor Who began in the 1960s, while aspects would have seemed outlandish and unlike anything previously broadcast, other aspects placed it firmly into its time. Guest actors for example often spoke perfect ‘BBC English’, the show itself was supposed to fit in with the educational aspect of the BBC Charter – hence having history and science teachers as the Doctor’s first companions. But in some more subtle ways it was breaking away from some of these traditions. Its first episode, for example, was set in an ordinary comprehensive school, and teachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright were never portrayed as overly patrician – indeed Ian is able to identify the pop song the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan is dancing to on her portable radio and reveals a knowledge of the band who recorded it. Twenty years later it was proposed to have actor William Russell reprise his role as Ian for the story ‘Mawdryn Undead’. However, in this story Ian was to be teaching in a private boy’s school – a role that was eventually given to the retired Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart[3] when Russell was not available, but it is a telling difference – 1983 was the age of Grange Hill, yet rather than tie in with the success of this other BBC programme, Doctor Who chose to isolate itself from the experiences of the majority of the viewing audience. This was not a deliberate political point – the story’s setting was a reflection of writer Peter Grimwade’s own schooling – but it does give an indication that reflecting the experiences of the audience was not the production team’s main priority at the time, rather it was (as Bidmead would say of Eric Saward’s approach to Doctor Who) “to get damn good stories onto the screen.”[4] Equally, when Seward wrote the first Cyberman story in seven years (the fan-favourite ‘Earthshock’) he used them as an impressive, militaristic force rather than as a reflection of the risks of the meshing of humanity and technology.
By 1984 the real world however had started to break through into the stories of Doctor Who again. The opening story of the 21st season was entitled ‘Warriors Of The Deep’. The story was set in the late 21st century, when the Earth is separated into two power blocks, each with the ability to wipe out the other. The story has clear echoes of the Cold War (which was still not resolved at the time the story was written) and the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (as writer Johnny Byrne acknowledged in a documentary on the DVD release of the story). These elements were not specific to the 1980s of course, and had been the subject for dramatists since the 1960s. However there was an element which had more to do with a directly contemporary issue. In episode one the TARDIS materialises in space above the Earth and is confronted by an armed satellite called Sentinel 6 which fires upon the TARDIS and forces it into an emergency landing. This is simply a way of getting the Doctor into the story dramatically whilst also establishing the dangerous time that the story is set in. But it also reflects one of the major international issues of the time. The American President was Ronald Reagan, who had been known as a film star before moving into politics. It is fitting that one of the most controversial policies of his government should be remembered by a nickname taken from a popular film. The so-called ‘Star Wars’ programme (actually the Strategic Defence Initiative, or SDI) had been announced by Reagan in 1983 and amounted to a plan to use satellites to enable the U.S. to shoot down missiles aimed at America (principally from the Soviet Union or their Warsaw Pact allies[5]) before the missiles could impact on American soil, rather as Sentinel 6 does to the TARDIS in ‘Warriors Of The Deep’. The story doesn’t dwell on this moment, but it does suggest that the future portrayed on the screen could easily have developed from the real political situation of the time, and offered a warning as to the kind of future the governments of the world were creating – a world of paranoia, of power-games between power-blocks, of the militarisation of space and the constant possibility of death falling from the skies.
This latter element was not only explored in this season by ‘Warriors Of The Deep’. ‘Frontios’ presented another dystopian future for the human race[6]. In this story, humanity has left the Earth looking for a new home on a giant space craft before crashing on the barren planet of Frontios. After the “failure proof technology” on the ship fails, the humans are forced to eke out a meagre existence building a new society. But then after ten years showers of meteorites start to fall from the skies with increasing regularity, the colonists believing this to be a deliberate “softening up” process before an invasion – an invasion which strangely has never come. Bidmead’s main inspiration for the story came from observing woodlice in his flat, and he would base the story’s alien menace (the Tractators) on them, but on a documentary included on the DVD release of the story he reveals that “there may have been a political influence of the news at the time when Beirut was under bombardment”[7] from Israeli forces, leading to high numbers of civilian casualties. As Noam Chomsky wrote;
“The first target was the Palestinian camp of Rashidiyeh south of Tyre, much of which, by the second day of the invasion, "had become a field of rubble." There was ineffectual resistance, but as an officer of the UN peace-keeping force swept aside in the Israeli invasion later remarked:
"It was like shooting sparrows with cannon."”[8]
The above scenario sounds very much like a description of the kind of warfare being waged on the people of Frontios.
Robert Holmes was at this point (and would remain) the most frequent writer of Doctor Who (as well has having acted as Script Editor for three and a half popular seasons at the beginning of Tom Baker’s tenure). But by 1984 he had not written for the programme for five years. Having been unable to write the 20th Anniversary story ‘The Five Doctors’, Holmes instead was commissioned to write Peter Davison’s final story as the Doctor, ‘The Caves Of Androzani’. Holmes’ scripts had often courted controversy, either because of their political or their horror content. His story ‘Terror Of The Autons’ had drawn criticism from the police for a scene in which two police officers are revealed to be aliens in disguise, while ‘The Talons Of Weng Chiang’ has been accused of racism in its portrayal of Chinese magician Li Seng Chang and its use of racial slurs in the dialogue. Holmes’ scripts often included a political element – ‘Carnival Of Monsters’ was critical of the use of confining animals for entertainment, ‘The Deadly Assassin’ was a political thriller loosely based on the book and film The Manchurian Candidate, and ‘The Sun Makers’ was a satire on the tax system in which Pluto has been made habitable and is owned by a Corporation who taxes its employees into constant poverty and therefore subservience (inspired by Holmes’ income tax bill, but expanded out into a critique of big business ethics and privatisation). All of Holmes’ scripts had displayed a wicked brand of humour, which he used to make his points in an entertaining rather than didactic way. ‘The Caves Of Androzani’ however, would be different. Gone were the eccentric double-acts and funny one-liners. In ‘The Caves Of Androzani’, things start grimly, and deteriorate from there. The TARDIS lands on the barren planet of Androzani Minor. A group of gun-runners narrowly avoid a military ambush, which the Doctor and Peri accidentally walk right into the middle of. Captured and presented to General Chellak, they are accused of treason and ordered to be shot by Morgus, the head of the Sirius Conglomerate on Androzani Major – the owner of the planet. The smugglers rendezvous with the masked Sharaz Jek, who is waging a guerrilla war against the army to prevent them getting supplies of a rare substance called ‘spectrox’ – the most valuable substance in the universe, a chemical which slows down aging, providing those who drink it with twice the normal life-span.
‘Androzani’ is marked for how little humour it contains. The Doctor is given a few one-liners but they’re more bitter than funny. The Doctor is infected with the disease which eventually forces him to regenerate at the story’s climax in episode one, and the audience watches him deteriorate until the end of episode four when he gives the only remaining antidote to Peri instead of himself, despite not knowing for sure that he will be able to regenerate. But the story is an unforgiving study in greed and revenge from which no-one except the Doctor and Peri emerge with clean hands, and their morality comes at a price. Jek was Morgus’ business partner, who Morgus attempted to assassinate. He failed, prompting the disfigured Jek to build an army of robots to reduce the amount of spectrox available to Androzani Major, offering to end the war if Morgus’ head was delivered to him on a plate. Morgus is the epitome of the Thatcherite businessman, caring solely for his profit margins and prepared to do whatever he can to make himself richer. He has ‘the Presidium in his pocket’ and is visited by the President on numerous occasions throughout the story, putting his own interests directly to him in the way that Robert Maxwell or Rupert Murdoch had access to 10 Downing Street. When his workers go on strike he simply suggests firing the entire work-force, treating them as criminals and sending them to the Eastern Labour Camps. This would, the President comments, mean that the people Morgus had been paying to work for his companies would then be working for him again in the camps – “this time for no payment’”. “I hadn’t thought of that” replies Morgus, an answer the President (and the audience) does not believe for a moment. It is not hard to believe that this could be a reference to the building tension between the Union of Mineworkers and the Thatcher government which would explode into the sustained and bitter strike of 1984 (the year the story was actually broadcast) which would lead to much criticised police clamp-downs on the striking miners - the story is, of course, based around a substance that has to be mined for, which society has become so dependent upon that great power is held by whoever owns the means of its production. The power struggle between Morgus and Jek is not so different to that between Thatcher and Scargill,[9] with the latter controlling access to the mines and the former trying to break him and his army of androids/miners. As Robert Holmes died in 1986 it is impossible to know whether this was a deliberate reflection of real events or just a co-incidence of course, but there is a parallel.
That Morgus has the balance of power in his favour is demonstrated by the manner in which he calmly murders the President when he thinks the latter is aware of the fact that he himself has been employing the gun-runners in an attempt to get spectrox from Jek without the latter realising who he’s providing it for. Money is more powerful than democracy. Morgus’ plans eventually unravel – his secretary (who he has barely given a second thought to) informs on him and seizes control of his business empire and he is killed by Jek as he desperately tries to steal spectrox from him.
‘The Caves Of Androzani’ has been voted the best story that the Classic series ever produced. There are various reasons for this – the strength of Davison’s performance, the imaginative direction – but the tightness of Holmes’ script has to be one of the principle ones. It’s an angry script, one that offers no easy redemption or happy ending, and one that while set on a distant planet is clearly about the world around Robert Holmes when he wrote it. However, the next season would see a story take on many of these themes (plus others) again, and would take them even further.
Philip Martin had never written for Doctor Who before. He had come to prominence largely thanks to his series Gangsters [10]. The story Martin came up with, ‘Vengeance On Varos’, remains one of the most controversial in the programme’s history.
The planet Varos is the only known source of a mineral known as Zeiton-7, which is used throughout the galaxy for powering space and time travel. The planet has an exclusive contract to sell the Zeiton-7 through the Galatron Mining Corporation, a representative of whom (the reptilian Sil) is visiting the planet determined to reduce the price the Varosians charge them for it to enable the Company to make a bigger profit. The Governor of the planet is holding out for a better deal, not knowing that his Head of Security has made a deal with Sil behind his back. The people of the planet (represented by Arak and Etta who act as a Greek Chorus as they watch the action unfold) are presented with food rations and entertainment – footage from the ‘People’s Dome Of Punishment’ in which criminals are placed and given the chance of a pardon if they can navigate their way through various lethal traps and find the safe exit. This acts as ‘excellent moral re-enforcement’ as the population gets to see what happens to criminals, and potentially as a profitable side-line as tapes of the events are sold to ‘every civilised world’. When the Governor has a particularly big decision to make he has to hold a vote of the population who have ‘punch in’ buttons fitted into their homes. If the Governor loses the vote he is subjected to an energy ray which eventually (after enough defeats) will kill him, and his replacement is picked at random from the ranks of the Governor’s Guard.
The story bares striking resemblances to ‘Androzani’. The conflict in both arises due to the exploitation of a valuable substance which has to be mined for. Big business swoops in, using its financial power to gain direct audience with the rulers of the planet to pressure them into doing what they want. Where ‘Androzani’ has Morgus, ‘Varos’ has Sil, a superb performance of childish petulance and spite by Nabil Shaban. “Sil is rampant capitalism writ large. The 'greed is good' philosophy. Sil is the greedy angry child buried in all of us which is why I guess he has proved so popular,” explained Martin in an interview given to this author.[11] One interesting difference between the two characters is that Morgus is the head of his company, whereas Sil is a representative of his (the sequel ‘Mindwarp’ would reveal more of this power structure). In ‘Androzani’ it could be thought that the corruption in the company was due to Morgan’s influence, but in ‘Varos’ it is simply standard practice which Sil is happy to follow. Sil is representing a mining company, and there is a constant tension in the story built on the negotiations to get a fair deal for the planet’s mining output. The true value of Zeiton-7 is hidden from the Varosians, who believe it to be largely worthless. They are being deceived over the strength of their bargaining position and suffering hardship and rationing which they do not realise is needless if only they can get a fair price for their product. In ‘Varos’ it is a company that is doing this, but at the time arguments were being made in government about the lack of productivity in coal compared to nuclear power and talking down the industry. “It has always intrigued me how harshly workers such as the miners are treated when the energy needs of the nation often depend on them. Maybe it is the fear the establishment has that if such groups ever did organise and exert their power the threat to their hold on power would be immense. I wasn't conscious that I was directly referring to the miners’ strike but obviously the times we were living through then must have had some influence.”(ibid)
‘Varos’ however goes much further. The horrifying methods by which people are killed in the Punishment Dome call to mind the controversy over ‘Video Nasties’ which was a major topic in the 1980s (it has been alleged that ‘Varos’ itself falls into the category that it tries to critique), and the reaction of Arak and Etta to these clips (as well as the expectation that the footage of executions will sell widely across the galaxy) shows just how degraded their sensibilities have become by exposure to the media – they watch the Doctor and his friends’ attempts to escape the Punishment Dome with unabashed glee as they are confronted by pools of acid and psychological tricks which convince the brain that they are dying in a desert. This precedes the rise of the saturation of reality television by decades, in which democracy has become part of the daily entertainment, with the Governor’s actual death substituted for their political death. ‘Varos’ also raises the issue of just how democratic the planet (despite its voting system) and via metaphor our own democracy really is. The Governors of Varos are all chosen from the ranks of the Officer Guard, who are the decedents of the original guards from when Varos was a prison planet. This mirrors the idea that there is a ‘political class’ in the UK, and that most politicians still come from the upper echelons of the class system[12]. This means that what matters is not so much the individual leader as the system that they have to operate within. “It seemed like an interesting way to take the referendum process a stage further in dramatic terms,” said Martin. “It also illustrates that although the rulers can be punished and ultimately destroyed, I do try to make the point that some problems of government are virtually impossible to solve in the short term and changing the ruler for another equally impotent is mere wishful thinking.”(ibid)
In some ways ‘Varos’ is perhaps a little too ambitious – the ending in particular appears to be trying to reflect on the precariousness of the business world as Sil is forced to cancel a planned invasion and offer the Varosians any price they choose for Zeiton-7 thanks to a sudden change in the equation of supply and demand. Unfortunately the way this is played out makes little sense – more Zeiton-7 is said to be needed, but also that another source has been found, and these two elements seem to contradict each other in a way the script doesn’t quite seem to grasp. “This is a little confusing I admit,” Martin would state years later (ibid). “The idea was to show how the one valuable resource Varos has is being exploited and it's true value being hidden from them by the machinations of Sil's masters. Africa is in a similar position today.”
It is hard to discuss ‘Vengeance On Varos’ without mentioning
its most notorious scene. The Doctor is believed to be dead and his body has
been taken to be dumped in acid for disposal. He is however only unconscious
and wakes up, startling the two guards who were to destroy his body. According
to fan myth the Doctor pushes at least one of the guards into the acid bath, a
belief that sustains itself despite the fact that the story has been available
to view for many years now – first on video and now on DVD. The first guard is
so surprised at the Doctor’s recovery that he trips and falls into the acid
bath. The Doctor grapples with the second, but he is pulled in by his colleague
who tries to use him as leverage to pull himself out. The Doctor shows clear
disgust at what has just happened but departs the scene with a quip; “Pardon me
if I don’t join you.” This scene is however one of the most graphic in the
programme’s history (the previous adventure ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’ would also
be criticised for a similarly graphic scene) and reflects the approach of the
production team behind it. ‘Vengeance On Varos’ offers a stinging critique of
the politico-socio environment of the 1980s and uses the dramatic language of
the very media it is criticising to make its point. Whether in-so-doing the
story ventured too far into becoming the very thing it was written to critique
is for the individual viewer to decide.
“With 'Gangsters' violence is the currency the characters use. The cruel world of Varos is not dissimilar but so much of the violence takes place in the imagination of the viewer which is much more potent than the images that I provide. I was on Mary W(hitehouse)'s hit list which at the time was something of a badge of honour, although I am against violence for its own stake. In my work you know that violence is no easy matter, the blows hurt and the consequences to its victims are not smoothed over.” (Martin, ibid).
That same season also saw the return of Robert Holmes who continued his reputation for political stories with ‘The Two Doctors’, a story that had all the makings of a fan-favourite – the return of Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines (as the second Doctor and his companion Jamie), the militaristic Sontarans and location filming in Spain. However, the story had a troubled genesis, and Holmes found himself having to change whole sections of his script as the country in which the filming would take place changed over the story’s gestation period, much to Holmes’ annoyance according to Script Editor Eric Saward. Also the level of graphic violence would rear its ugly head once again.
Despite that, the script for ‘The Two Doctors’ is arguably much more like the Holmes stories of the past that he had become popular for. The dialogue is more obviously quotable, there are memorable double-acts and there is much more humour than in ‘The Caves Of Androzani’. But it is exceptionally dark humour, and the script has an angry energy as it explores its main theme – that, to quote a popular phrase of the time, ‘meat is murder’.
The Second Doctor and Jamie arrive on a space station to discuss time travel experiments going on there with the base’s head scientist Dastari. Also on the station are the Androgums, a food-obsessed species who act as servitors, one of whom (Chessene) the Doctor is horrified to find has been augmented to ‘mega genius level’ by Dastari – “You can’t change nature,” the Doctor warns him. Whilst there the Sontarans attack, killing the scientists who work there and kidnapping the Doctor. Realising that the Second Doctor has been taken to Earth, the Sixth Doctor follows in the TARDIS to stop the Androgums and Sontarans developing advanced time travel technology and transforming the Second Doctor into an Androgum…
‘The Two Doctors’ is effectively a morality play in which characters are judged against their treatment to animals and the eating of meat. The most obvious example of this is the character of Oscar, an unsuccessful actor turned restaurateur who helps the Doctor’s investigation. Oscar is a pathetic figure, full of bluster, self-regard and cowardice but it is not this that leads to his later demise. Oscar is a Moth collector and is obsessed with collecting the different species of Moths for his collection. “You really love them, don’t you?” asks Anita. When Oscar answers in the affirmative, her simple but brutal reply is to ask “So why do you kill them?” Oscar sees no contradiction and proudly comments that he uses cyanide because it is “”quicker and kinder on the Moths than other methods. Oscar is later stabbed by the Androgum Shockeye and dies. Plot-wise there is no reason why Oscar has to die, but thematically there is – Oscar dies because he kills moths, therefore is killed in his turn.
Holmes doesn’t stop there either. Both Jamie and Peri are
menaced by Shockeye who is desperate to taste the meat from a human, who he
considers to be nothing more than cattle (he also bites into a rat at one
point, putting humanity on a par with rodents). Jamie in particular suffers as
a result of this, writhing in agony as Shockeye uses a device to break up the
fatty tissue in his body to make him more edible. When Dastari shows unease at
Jamie’s cries Shockeye assures him that humans do not feel pain in the way that
‘we’ do, explicitly satirising the pro-meat lobby’s argument. Even the Doctor
is not shown as blameless and suffers accordingly – injured to the leg by
Shockeye’s knife, the Doctor makes a painful escape before managing to kill
Shockeye with Oscar’s discarded cyanide. His crime? Fishing, in episode one.
The final line of dialogue sees the Doctor telling Peri that “From now on, it’s
a healthy vegetarian diet for the both of us.”
The ruthlessness of Holmes’s script is somewhat unusual for Doctor Who. The programme has never shied away from the deaths of characters, even heroic ones, but usually characters die for clear plot reasons or in noble acts of self-sacrifice. By the end of ‘The Two Doctors’ only the Doctors, their companions and Anita (who is not present in the climactic scenes and does not share Oscar’s habit of killing moths) are left alive and few of the deaths could be said to have even a hint of dignity about them. Sontarans are blown up, their severed legs used as comedic props, Chessene is unable to resist tasting a pool of blood on the floor for all her augmentations and when she finally dies her body reverts to its Androgum form. Oscar’s death has come in for much criticism for its lack of plot purpose and the graphicness of the way it is presented, but his passing is at least taken seriously by the characters around him, with the Doctor quoting Hamlet (“Goodnight, sweet prince”) and Anita showing genuine grief for her friend. Dastari is allowed to realise his mistakes and attempt to help the Second Doctor to escape before being shot down by Chessene – a punishment for the scientific vanity of trying to put himself into the position of a God by changing the nature of a species.
The final story of the season is Eric Saward’s ‘Revelation Of The Daleks’. Loosely based on Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One, this story presents the slightly incongruous scenario of Davros (the creator of the Daleks) running a planet on which people with incurable diseases are placed in cryogenic suspension until a cure can be found for them. Using the assumed title of ‘The Great Healer’, Davros is known for providing a food source to feed millions of the starving across the galaxy. What is not realised is that the food source he has found is made from the bodies of those who are supposed to be sleeping in his establishment (he is also using them to create a new Dalek army but that is a side-issue). At the time the script was being written, images of the starving populations of African nations like Ethiopia were becoming more and more visible in the West, shortly leading to the ‘Live Aid’ concerts. The story is largely more philosophical than political (would it actually be morally right to use the bodies of the dead if it meant feeding the living?) but the story has a political aspect because, as writer Saward explained, “you’ve got Kara who in a way was Margaret Thatcher, humorously I hope…you are affected by the days you are living through.”[13]
Doctor Who had often come in for criticism about
the levels of violence in the series (especially in the mid 1970s during Robert
Holmes’ time as Script Editor) but the mid-eighties, and most especially 1985’s
Season 22 took this to a new level (resulting in demands that future stories be
toned down for violent content). Saward himself has repeatedly defended the
series against this charge, as he did again when interviewed for this essay;
“I always viewed as the fact that when you show violence, when you show corruption, when you show people being evil, when you find people being evil you want to show the consequences of what they do and I think that’s quite important. I don’t think you gratuitously hang around violent scenes just to drain the last bit out, but not that you punch someone on the nose and everyone laughs afterwards, they don’t if someone is in pain.”(ibid).
In many ways this reflects the extremes of the time the programme was being produced in. Viewers of the news would have been used to footage of violent clashes between strikers and the police. Allegations of police brutality were made about their handling not only of the miners but also the anti-nuclear protestors at Greenham Common. Threats were being made by the government to put the army onto the streets to keep order - it is even alleged, by then-MP Tony Benn amongst others, that soldiers were actually put in police uniforms and used covertly against the miners[14]. During Eric Saward’s time this aggression would be reflected in the tone of the stories – “When your daily life is affected by very much a right-of centre form of thinking, you do tend to react and you do respond strongly in a way that allows you also to function within a given show.” (ibid)
The next script editor would reflect political issues more directly.
In 2010 (on what must have been a very slow news day) something unusual happened. The BBC’s political discussion programme Newsnight covered a story that former Doctor Who Script Editor Andrew Cartmel had said at his interview that if he could do anything he wanted with Doctor Who, it would be to “bring down the Government”. Cartmel was on hand to point out that Producer John Nathan-Turner had quickly put the kibosh on that idea. The strange thing about the entire episode was that the claims – made by Sylvester McCoy who played the Doctor in the final three seasons of the Classic Series – had been made a full five years previously in his Forward to Cartmel’s book Script Doctor. Quite why these claims were considered news in 2010 is unclear, but it is hard to argue that Cartmel’s radical ideas did not make their way onto the screen.
“I was never aware of commissioning or developing stories to reflect topical issues,” Cartmel commented in an exclusive interview for this essay. “What I *was* aware of was a prevailing background sense of social injustice which no doubt fed into aspects of the scripts. I think Doctor Who or any other work of popular art is in jeopardy if it's hijacked as a polemic. Having said that, a powerful story of injustice, or a sharp social satire, is bound to have resonance with its own period.” (interview with the author, 2012).
The first story that Cartmel commissioned was McCoy’s second adventure ‘Paradise Towers’ (written by Stephen Wyatt). The story grew out a conversation between Wyatt and Cartmel about J.G. Ballard’s novel High Rise in which the inhabitants of a luxury tower block slowly deteriorate to tribal savagery. Wyatt took this initial idea and developed a slightly more family-friendly version in which the tower block has become segregated into the Caretakers, the Residents and the ‘Kangs’ – girl-gangs with their own dialects and customs. Something is killing members of all three groups, the building seems to have been booby-trapped by its own designer, the ‘Great Architect’ Kroagnon.
By 1987 it was news to no-one that the tower blocks which had been built in the UK as part of a grand social experiment had been far from a roaring success. Indeed, at the beginning of the decade rock band The Clash had written of the experience of growing up in one in their song ‘Up In Heaven (Not Only Here)’ and various references in the song are reflected in ‘Paradise Towers’: “And whatcha gonna do when the darkness surrounds? / You can piss in the lifts which have broken down /…/ Their children daub slogans – to prove they lived there/…/Fear is just another commodity here” (Strummer J and Jones M, Sandinista!, 1980). Paradise Towers may have been designed as a luxury block, but by the time the Doctor and his companion Mel arrive it looks much more like the contemporary blocks as described in The Clash’s song which would have been familiar in the popular imagination of the viewers if not in their direct experience. The corridors are dirty, the Kangs are teenagers who ‘play’ unsupervised in the corridors and lifts and cover the walls in their ‘wall scrawl’ (graffiti). The Caretaker’s attempts to police these gangs appear to be totally ineffective – they are totally out of their depth. Except for the robotic cleaners and the elaborate slang used by the Kangs much of the story could have been set in the late 1980s. In this sense, ‘Paradise Towers’ was an attempt to reflect an aspect of British society in microcosm – the kind of games played by the Kangs out of the view of any responsible adults and the growing distance between the youth and authority figures like the police is fairly easy to read as a critique of mid-1980s Britain.
At the end of that season Mel was replaced by a new companion, Ace (as played by Sophie Aldred). Although the Doctor meets her on a distant planet in the future, Ace is a streetwise teenager from 1980s London (or at least, the mainly male writers’ idea of one[15]) with a habit of mixing her own explosives. This character would allow a shift in the amount of direct political content over the final two series. At first her backstory is somewhat mysterious – she is somehow swept up in a time-storm and deposited on Ice World, where she meets the Doctor in the adventure ‘Dragonfire’. Their first trip together takes them to London in the 1960s in ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’ (written by Ben Aaronovitch). Ace struggles to adapt to the more conservative attitudes of the early 1960s – especially in terms of people’s attitude to issues of race. Far from the permissive ‘swinging sixties’ she finds herself plunged into a world where seemingly nice people can hold racist views quite casually and where the B&B she spends the night in can have a ‘No Coloureds’ sign in the window. Ace reacts with disgust – she is a product of a time when racial mixing is more common, but the story itself was a warning against complacency. When Terry Nation created the Daleks they were a representation of the Nazis. Over the years they had become largely a monster in their own right but shorn of metaphorical weight. Writer Ben Aaronovitch however had the idea of what the Daleks represented very much in mind and re-cast them as the kind of Neo-Nazis that were still a visible problem in the 1980s. Not only do the Daleks ally themselves with a racist group (the ‘Association’) but they themselves have become split on issues of racial purity – two Dalek factions are involved in a civil war on the grounds that one group has experimented on itself and is now no longer ‘pure’ (this re-politicisation of the Daleks would be repeated in 2005 when Russell T. Davies presented them as the more recent bogeymen of religious fundamentalists in the episode ‘The Parting Of The Ways’). With Britain (and especially London where Ace grew up) becoming ever more multi-cultural, there was a growing tension between those like Ace who embraced this and mixed freely with members of different ethnic communities (as would be shown in later stories to be commented on below) and those who would see this as a threat to the English national identity, as summed up in Enoch Powell’s infamous speech on the risks of the Race Relations Bill of 1968[16] in which he stated “The discrimination and the deprivation, the sense of alarm and of resentment, lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming.” This strain in British society frequently reappears, through the (temporary) rise of the British National Party and the English Defence League (to name just the two most obvious groups). Race riots such as the ones in Brixton and Toxteth would have been fresh in the memory when Aaronovitch wrote the script.
The ethics of fighting evil is an issue that also comes up in ‘Remembrance…’, at the end of which what we believe to be the entire Dalek race is destroyed by the Hand Of Omega – the stellar manipulator that the Doctor allows them to steal, having effectively booby-trapped it first. It has been suggested that this makes the Doctor guilty of genocide. In truth this is not as clear-cut, nor as out of character, as it has been suggested. In a celebrated moment in the 1975 story ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ (written by Terry Nation), the Doctor has the opportunity to prevent the Daleks from ever developing. “Do I have the right?” he asks himself, and decides that he does not due to the impact the act would have on the other races who formed alliances as a result of the threat posed by the Daleks. What is less well remembered is that only a few minutes later the Doctor changes his mind and attempts to wipe them out after all. Also, in ‘Remembrance…’ the Doctor does not destroy the Dalek fleet directly – he sabotages the device the Daleks plan to use to help them enslave the universe. It is only when they attempt to use the device that they themselves are wiped out. In truth, this is only a larger-scale example something the Doctor has done numerous times before – used his enemy’s greed and lust for power to trick them into causing their own destruction (he would do the same to the Cybermen two stories later).
“The genocide thing is hooey,” Cartmel would explain to this writer. “As Ben says, we never imagined anyone would be stupid enough to think the Doctor would blow up a planet unless it was safely inhabited only by utterly nasty Daleks. And where they are concerned we speak not of genocide but a definitive victory over an enemy of limitless evil.”
The issue of race would crop up again more than once before the end of the next season. In ‘Battlefield’ (again by Ben Aaronovitch) Ace herself is shown to not be immune to racist thoughts, shouting at the character of Shou Yuing “Shut up you yellow, slant eyed…”[17] before catching herself. Their argument has been engineered by the sorceress Morgaine, both characters hearing insults that were never said to drive them out of a chalk circle which was protecting them and Excalibur from her. But the viewer does not hear these imagined insults, they exist only in the characters’ heads – Ace’s racist comment is real because the viewer hears it. The story moves on quickly – the two characters hug each other, and Ace comments that Morgaine is playing with their minds. This is true, but there is no suggestion that Morgaine put those words into Ace’s mouth. This is an interesting moment in a story that is unusually multi-cultural – U.N.I.T.[18] for once felt like a part of the United Nations with soldiers from all across Europe, led by a black female officer, Brigadier Winifred Bambera. The fact that writer Ben Aaronovitch felt able to include that racial slur (and that it caused little controversy) is in itself telling – it is unlikely the series could have gotten away with similar references to the stereotypical physiognomic features of the Afro-Caribbean or Asian communities, for example. There is no suggestion that Ace’s comment is being presented as acceptable, but it is interesting to speculate what she would have been allowed to say had the other character been of a different ethnic group.
The explanation for Ace’s special sensitivity to race issues comes in the story ‘Ghost Light’ (written by Marc Platt) in which the Doctor takes Ace to a Victorian house known as Gabriel Chase – a building she burnt down in the 1980s. The Doctor presses her for details on her motive for this destructive act. “They burnt out Manisha’s flat,” she replies. “White kids fire-bombed it. I didn’t care anymore.” The story as a whole feels slightly like a throw-back to the Bidmead style, in that the narrative explores general scientific concepts (in this case evolution and experimental methodology) rather than a specific political point, but Ace’s presence allows the writers to touch on the issues of the day more directly, whether through reference to events in Ace’s life before the story or by tying Ace back to the place and time she comes from. The final story of the Classic Series was ‘Survival’ by Rona Munro and begins when the Doctor takes Ace to Perivale in the late 1980s to catch up with her old friends. When they arrive none are in the usual haunts and Ace is about to give up when she stumbles across Ange collecting money for Hunt Saboteurs. She tells Ace that, aside from a handful of friends who left the area for specific reasons, most of their old gang has simply disappeared. It soon becomes clear that their friends have been kidnapped by the Cheetah People – humanoid felines who travel from their disintegrating planet, looking for prey. Ace is transported to the planet and meets her friends Shreela and Mitch, while the Doctor arrives there with Sergeant Patterson, an ex-army officer who now teaches self-defence at the local youth club. They find that the Doctor’s old enemy the Master is there, directing the Cheetah People, while he himself is transforming into one of them. He explains that the planet is disintegrating because the Cheetah People fight each other in the Dead Valley. The Master is desperate for a way off the planet and knows the Doctor will find one if stranded there also. Eventually the two Time Lords realise that when one of the humans transforms into a Cheetah they will be able to take the others with them. Mitch changes first and the Master uses him to get to Earth, while the others use Ace who has also started to change.
In a 1987 interview, Margaret Thatcher was quoted as saying “who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families” (Keay, Women’s Own, 1987). Although there is a question mark over how accurately she was quoted in the final article, the phrase stuck and has become one of her best remembered statements. ‘Survival’ in many ways sums up this and many of the other predominant attitudes of the 1980s and scales them down to the personal level. There are repeated references to ‘the survival of the fittest’ and ‘the law of the jungle’ and various characters express or represent elements of Thatcherite ideology. For example, the Doctor meets two shop-keepers in episode one who tell a joke involving two friends who find themselves menaced by a lion. One begins to put on running shoes and his friend mocks him, pointing out that a person can not out-run a lion. ‘I don’t have to out-run the lion’ comments the other friend, who has decided to allow his friend to be caught by the lion rather than himself. Patterson comments that the best he can see to do is teach the young to fight as it is “fight or go under”. When one of his charges wins a bout but refuses to deliver the final blow Patterson chastises him. “What’ll you do when life starts pushing you around?” he asks, prodding the young man in the chest. It does not seem to occur to him that in such circumstances ‘strength in numbers’ (or to put it another way, co-operation as part of a group) might be a better strategy – a blind spot that later rebounds on him when his self-defence class (influenced by the half-transformed Mitch and the Master) kill him upon his return from the Cheetah planet. Patterson might be an expert in self-defence, but as an individual he can not survive when faced with a hostile group.
Even a seemingly comedic moment at the end of episode three could be seen in this way. When the Doctor arrives back on Earth after his final confrontation with the Master, he is faced by a woman who complains of the noise caused by cats fighting. “It’s the owners I blame” she says, as “they want the pet…but do they keep it under control?” Substitute ‘parents’ for ‘owners’ and ‘child’ for ‘pet’ and you actually have a question about who is really responsible for the problems of youth crime. Thatcher herself was keen to stress (as she does in the Women’s Own article quoted above) that some children are robbed of the chance to make proper choices about their behaviour due to poor parenting. Ace has a terrible relationship with her mother (although no details are ever given). Ace’s friends have gone missing in suspicious circumstances but no-one cares – the police don’t seem to be searching for them, their parents are not shown at all which gives the impression of them being out on their own. If there is no such thing as society, the family structure breaks down, and authority figures like the police simply don’t care, what is left?
The story is also split quite sharply along gender lines. Ace’s transformation can been seen as a metaphor for growing sexual awareness, as her ‘sister’ Kara shows her how to follow her desires (in this case, channelled into hunting and the chase) – a fairly clear lesbian subtext, five years before Chennel 4 soap opera Brookside would cause controversy by broadcasting the first lesbian kiss to be seen on British television before the watershed of 9pm. But there is also another strand to the story – the fight to be Alpha Male. This competition had been dramatised in the past in films such as Wall Street and Wolf in which success under capitalism is shown to come from application of aggression and ruthlessness. ‘Survival’ subverts this idea throughout. Patterson is the Alpha Male at the youth club but his pack turn on him when the younger Mitch and more powerful figure of the Master usurp him. The Master may be the pack leader of the Cheetah people, but his hold on them is precarious and lasts only as long as he finds them victims. And of course, when the two main contenders for this title finally fight, the Doctor deliberately refuses to kill the Master, realising that he is beginning to transform into a Cheetah - it is this refusal that saves him as he inherits the power to transport himself off the planet without deteriorating into savagery like the Master. “Rona may well have had that in mind. She's a subtle and brilliant writer,” remarks Cartmel, before adding that “I don't think you get alpha males in feline species, so the metaphor breaks down at that point.” However this backs up the main point – the Master’s attempt to be the alpha male is an egotistical move that is doomed to fail as he tries to dominate a species that does not recognise the concept.
‘Survival’ confronts 1980s Britain head on, not only by being set there but by using themes and metaphor on top of the setting to deconstruct the ideas and concepts on which the governing ideologies of the time were based. But possibly the most controversial story of the era took the use of metaphor to levels that the programme had rarely gone to before – Graeme Curry’s ‘The Happiness Patrol’.
The Doctor and Ace arrive on the planet of Terra Alpha to investigate ‘disturbing rumours’ that Doctor has heard about it. They find a planet on which it is a crime to be unhappy, policed by the garishly-clothed all-female Happiness Patrol. Public grief is punishable by death, by order of the planet’s leader Helen A. The executions are handled by the Kandyman – a creature made out of sweets.
It is difficult to know where to begin analysing ‘The Happiness Patrol’. As writer Graeme Curry stated in ‘When Worlds Collide’ (a documentary included on the DVD release of the story), the story does not fit exactly into any one political reading, and is instead influenced by various events that were going on at the time. Certainly the most obvious political reference point in the story is actor Sheila Hancock’s decision to play Helen A with the mannerisms of Margaret Thatcher, and the script does play up to this also – some of Helen A’s dialogue would not be out of place in a Thatcher speech (“Families are very important for people’s happiness” being just one of many such) and she is married to a quiet, retiring man whom she bosses around and dominates totally – the commonly held view of Thatcher’s relationship with her husband Denis (and probably an unfair one). And, yet again, there is a reflection of the Miner’s Strike with the demonstration held by Killjoys from the Sugar Factories. But as Curry points out, the large-scale disappearances mentioned in the story reflect what was going on in Argentina in the late 1970s/early 1980s, and also reference General Pinochet’s regime and apartheid in South Africa. In her book The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein explores the connection between the economic ideas of the ‘Chicago School’ as led by economist Milton Friedman (i.e. mass privatisations, cuts to welfare spending, opening of all protective economic border controls to the force of the free market) with the repressive state apparatus required to enforce these measures on unwilling populations. One of the key tactics used in Chile and Argentina was ‘shock and awe’ – actions taken swiftly to frighten and disorientate the population and reduce them to a feeling of powerlessness which prevented insurrection. To take the example of General Pinochet (the earliest exponent), ‘more than 3,200 people were disappeared or executed, at least 80,000 were imprisoned, and 200,000 fled the country for political reasons.’ (Klein N, 2007). This is directly reflected in ‘The Happiness Patrol’, where disappearances are announced as ‘Routine’ and the list of those who have vanished is long enough to be rolled out along a street. Equally the Pipe People are, as writer Curry explains in the commentary on the DVD of the story, the indigenous population of the planet, forced off their own land like the Native Americans – another reference that expands the scope of the story’s satire well beyond the borders of what even Mrs Thatcher could control.
At various points in the story the Doctor and Ace encounter
Trevor Sigma – a bureaucrat from the Galactic Census Bureau who travels around
the galaxy to keep tabs on the population levels of planets. Before leaving he
shows the Doctor a list he has made up of people who have gone missing since he
last visited six months previously (it is, as might be expected, a very long
list). Trevor makes no attempt to find out where these people might have gone
or why they disappeared, he simply regards it as a strange mystery. When he
meets Helen A and she comments that rather than use the Bureau’s methods of
population control she came up with her own he shows no curiosity about what
method this is or whether it might account the numbers of the missing. Although
a relatively minor character, Trevor’s presence is key to explaining why Helen
A is able to get away with what she is doing. Trevor represents the
international community (the United Nations, NATO, etc) who stand by whilst
tyrants tyrannise their populations. He is a Weapons Inspector or a Human
Rights Observer who goes into a dictatorship and has the wool pulled over his
eyes, preventing him from seeing what is actually going on. This is shown to
happen for two main reasons. One is Trevor’s lack of will to investigate – he
is mildly curious about the number of people who have vanished but not to the
point where is seems to particularly worry him. The other is the fact that he
is clearly intimidated by Helen A – when he tells her that she may not repeat
an execution that has failed he immediately backs down and offers her an alternative
suggestions when Helen A becomes angry. The latter is understandable (his life
could be at risk after all) but he is clearly not going to take any action
about the former once he gets to the safety of his own planet. This reflects
the frequent criticisms around such inspectors who were seen to do little to
prevent massacres and ethnic cleansing across the world – culminating in levels
of distrust so high that George W. Bush and Tony Blair were later able to
suggest that sending Weapons Inspectors into Iraq would do no good as Saddam
Hussein would be able to fool them – in his 2003 State Of The Union address,
Bush stated;
“The 108 U.N. inspectors…were not sent to conduct a scavenger hunt for hidden materials across a country the size of California. The job of the inspectors is to verify that Iraq's regime is disarming…The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary; he is deceiving. From intelligence sources we know, for instance, that thousands of Iraqi security personnel are at work hiding documents and materials from the U.N. inspectors, sanitizing inspection sites and monitoring the inspectors themselves.”
In other words, the fact that the inspectors found no such weaponry in Iraq is to be dismissed as evidence that the Inspectors are having the wool pulled over their eyes.
It is this element of maintaining the appearance of there being nothing wrong within a dictatorship (or at least leaving enough doubt to prevent intervention by the international community) to the outside world that is satirised by Helen A’s determination that everyone must be happy (or at least, appear happy) at all times. To this end she bans dark clothing, sad music, walking in the rain without an umbrella – all exaggerations of course but exaggerating the truth to the point of absurdity has long been one of the most important weapons in the satirist’s arsenal. There are no prisons on Terra Alpha, there are ‘Waiting Zones’; people are not murdered, they ‘disappear’. The Happiness Patrol who act as the police have dyed pink hair and extreme make-up. None of these things alter the reality, they simply attempt to mask it. However in an interesting twist the script reveals Helen A to be totally sincere about this – she is not simply trying to fool people into looking the other way, she is genuinely disgusted by grief and wants people to be happy. She is the ultimate conviction politician, as Thatcher was during the 1980s, firmly believing that her economic policies (which helped cause high unemployment), moral sense (which was profoundly homophobic), and breaking of the Trade Unions (which represented millions of people) would lead to a better life for everyone. Her ideology was good for the whole country, and if things were not working it was because it was being blocked and obstructed by troublesome socialists in the Local Authorities, by the undemocratic Union leaders like Arthur Scargill, or even by ‘wets’ in her own party – Conservatives who did not share her vision or have the stomach to see it through.
‘The Happiness Patrol’ has been analysed on numerous occasions from various different political perspectives. One of the most common angles examined is through a gay lens – the boldness of the colours and costumes and hair-styles does suggest a certain campness, brought into sharp relief when the TARDIS is painted bright pink. I am personally not convinced by the argument that a character is wearing a pink triangle during their execution - he is wearing a dark jacket over a pink shirt which suggests a pink triangle. But when all the characters are wearing pink and any jacket would create such a ‘v’ shape. On the other hand the Kandy Man and Gilbert M do act like a married couple going through a particularly messy and unpleasant break-up, and at the end of the story the latter runs off with Helen A’s husband Joseph C.
‘The Happiness Patrol’ is one of the most ambitious stories ever produced by the series. Not only in terms of the physical realisation of the story (which was not entirely successful) but in the sheer number of issues and themes it attempted to reflect both in the UK and in the wider world. Doctor Who normally attempted to be universal by sticking to general themes such as freedom and oppression. ‘The Happiness Patrol’ attempts a kind of universality by referencing the political situations of several countries at the same time, layered on top of each other until they create a fictional world that is both unlike anywhere in our own, but also strangely familiar, all sound-tracked by the blues – the music of the oppressed.
There are some ways in which a series can be political without ever really meaning to be, in some cases by the very fact of it not considering an important issue at all. Classic Doctor Who has tended to present the world (and by extension, the universe) though a solidly white, middle-class and male perspective. The show’s first producer was the pioneering Verity Lambert, but she would remain one of only a handful of women who had any direct creative influence over its 26 years. Not only was Lambert the only female producer, only five women would go on to direct stories, and five women have been credited with writing for the series, three of whom were co-writers and two of whom are alleged to have not actually written any part of the scripts. Most of these women worked on the series in the 1980s, but that is still a poor return for ten years’ worth of stories. On screen the main female presence was the companion, who acted as a counter-balance to the always-male Doctor. Criticisms of the various companions were nothing new – the cliché of the shrieking young woman who requires the dashing male hero to rescue her seemed almost beyond the control of even well-meaning production teams. So while the first TARDIS crew contained the resourceful Barbara Wright, it also contained the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan who ended up being the one to twist her ankle or scream when she saw a monster.
Different production teams made attempts to address this but they tended to be either half-hearted or ran out of steam. So, in 1970 Dr Liz Shaw was introduced as the third Doctor’s first companion – an experienced scientist who could assist the Doctor in repelling the various menaces to the human race. But when actress Caroline John decided to leave the series after one season she was replaced with the character of Jo Grant, who was not a scientist and had a tendency to be captured, hypnotised and ruin the Doctor’s experiments. Sarah-Jane Smith was then introduced as an independent journalist but soon deteriorated into a wide-eyed screamer. Even Romana who was a fellow Time Lord often needed rescuing.
Five female companions were introduced in the 1980s, and in most cases there was an attempt to avoid the mistakes of the past. So, Nyssa (who was effectively a fairy-tale princess) was a scientist who was (occasionally) allowed to support the Doctor in finding solutions to some of the problems, and on one notable occasion was allowed to run around Gallifrey with a gun attempting a daring rescue of him. But at the same time she tended to be portrayed as a victim who ended up wearing almost underwear in her final story. Tegan was an Australian air-hostess who was supposed to be independent but the attempts to have her stand up for herself tended to make her appear sarcastic – in one story she describes herself as feeling ‘groggy, sore and bad tempered’, and the Doctor’s reply of ‘Almost your old self’ is funny because it’s accurate.[19] That said, both Nyssa and Tegan (and by extension the actors portraying them) were given stories designed to show-case them more – Tegan had a much larger role in ‘Kinda’ and ‘Snakedance’, and in ‘Enlightenment’ (the only story from the classic series both written and directed by women) she is given an interesting sub-plot involving a humanoid creature called an Eternal who becomes infatuated with her without her succumbing to the bland ‘romantic heroine’ stereotype. But such moments are largely tokenistic and actress Janet Fielding has been highly critical of the writing of the female companions in this period, pointing out that the character’s idea that to be a ‘trolley dolly’ was a great and glamorous career was old fashioned in the extreme. She also expressed concerns about specific stories such as ‘The Five Doctors’, in which it was scripted that Tegan and Susan were sent out of the TARDIS console room to make tea while the male characters discussed the situation – Fielding’s objection led to Turlough being sent instead.[20] Indeed, both Nyssa and Tegan were introduced in deliberately covering outfits for their first season, as Producer John Nathan-Turner deliberately tried to prevent accusations of ‘hanky-panky in the TARDIS’, but by their second seasons the costumes became skimpier and more revealing.
In 1993 Fielding attended a Doctor Who Panopticon convention. She told the audience that she felt it was time for science-fiction to move on, and that the formula of the show was out of date, especially with regards the roles for women.[21] Ironically, many would argue the series had just started to get the role of the female companion right just before the show was cancelled…
Before then however was Peri, an American botany student who again started in the ‘feisty’ category, but gradually this descended into a bickering relationship between her and the Doctor which made you wonder why they bothered travelling together at all. Her introductory story ‘Planet Of Fire’ showed the ways in which attempts to present strong female characters could be undermined by other elements of the production. Introduced as a botany student who refuses to allow her well-meaning uncle to prevent her doing what she wants while in Lanzarote, she is one of the few companions able to resist the Master’s attempts to hypnotise her. Not only that, but her strength of will is shown to be the equal of the renegade Time Lord’s, as they fight for telepathic control of the shape-shifting robot Kamelion.
The other side of this coin is that when deliberately stranded on a boat by her uncle, she decides to swim to shore. That she would strip down to a swimming costume at such a moment is entirely reasonable – but that does not explain the way the camera tracks up her entire body while she wears a skimpy two-piece. Then, inevitably, she finds herself in trouble in the water and requires rescuing by the Doctor’s (male) companion Turlough, who carries her into the TARDIS, her cleavage placed in the centre of various shots before she covers it up with a shirt. The message seems to be that a female character can be strong in some scenes, but must conform to type and require rescue by the males around her at others, and on top of that she remains an object of the male gaze.
Indeed, while it was nothing new for female companions to find themselves the objects of male desire, for Peri being lusted over by undesirables was to become a disturbing matter of routine. In her second story (the aforementioned ‘The Caves Of Androzani’) she becomes the object of Sharaz Jek’s obsession and becomes part of a ‘Phantom Of The Opera’-style tragedy, in ‘The Two Doctors’ she is treated literally as a piece of meat (although in the story’s defence that is part of its point, and the male companion Jamie is the preferred meat of choice), and she ends up (rather bizarrely) married to the boorish Warrior King Ycarnos. Worst of all, in ‘Timelash’ the half-human, half-reptilian Borad attempts to make her into a mate for him by exposing her to what is effectively a rape by a reptilian monster (when the monster attacks her a special gas would cause them to fuse together into a creature like the Borad himself). While this is clearly presented as an act of evil, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth as Peri once more is drooled over. Even when this idea is spun around in ‘Vengeance On Varos’ it reveals latent attitudes – a running joke in the story is that Sil considers Peri repulsive, but even this contributes to the idea that it is her appearance that is the most important thing about her. And, as in ‘Timelash’, Peri has to undergo a physical transformation – this time temporarily transformed into a human/bird hybrid, as well as having her brain operated upon in the story’s sequel ‘Mindwarp’ (although how much of what is presented in that story actually takes place is a matter of conjecture). All of this adds to her undergoing a level of personal trauma arguably on a level experienced by no other companion, most of whom survived various generic attempts on their lives but were rarely shown to suffer or have their bodies become part of the storyline. And to top it all off, she was not only a victim of the villains of the stories, but of the hero as well. In ‘The Twin Dilemma’, the Doctor turns violent whilst undergoing post-regenerative trauma, believing Peri to be a spy and strangling her. Even if we dismiss this as the actions of a character in the grip of a delusion, the Doctor’s treatment of Peri remains pretty awful throughout the following season, with endless scenes of them bickering in the TARDIS and sniping at each other. While Peri is not always blameless when it comes to these arguments, the fact that the Doctor is so much larger and louder than her makes the relationship feel emotionally abusive as well as threatening. There are a few reasons for this happening. Colin Baker wanted to play the Doctor as a kind of Mr Darcy from Pride And Prejudice – someone who you initially dislike but gradually realise you have misunderstood. He and Bryant very deliberately played against the bickering lines during the following season, making them more playful, mock-fights between friends than the ones from their first full season together. Also, the series was broadcast in a new format – 45 minute episodes rather than 23 minutes. Saward was greatly in favour of this change as it allowed the stories to develop more before requiring an artificially-constructed cliff-hanger. The problem though is that too many of the stories involve the Doctor and Peri hanging around in the TARDIS waiting for the rest of the plot lines to be set up around them. And with no action to participate in, they just end up arguing with each other until the story is ready for them to enter properly.
After internal BBC criticisms that the series had become too dark and violent, the next companion was a deliberate throwback to the less confrontational characters of the 60s and 70s. Mel (played by Bonnie Langford) was a pleasant young woman from an (unseen) English village, whose background as a computer programmer was pretty much totally ignored during her travels with the Doctor. Her relationship was much less fractious with the Doctor than Peri’s had been, and she was frequently seen to be resourceful and willing to investigate matters on her own initiative. Also, she was much less pawed over than her predecessor. Unfortunately, these are not the factors that the character are best remembered for. Rather it was her ability to scream like a banshee at the appearance of a monster, often to add drama to a cliff-hanger (she was once asked to pitch her scream at a precise note so it would merge seamlessly with the music at the end of the episode).[22]
Mel is a very good example of how the best intentions of a writer can be undermined by the production of a story. ‘Paradise Towers’ writer Stephen Wyatt recalls[23] that he wrote a particular scene in that story to show Mel in a strong light. She and the character of Pex (written – if not exactly cast – as a parody of muscle-bound 1980s action-film vigilante characters) are at a swimming pool when they are attacked by a killer robot in the water. In the original script, Mel snatches a gun from Pex and calmly shoots it, showing her experience with dangerous situations. In the final version the robot grabs hold of her and nearly drowns her. She does manage to escape its clutches and destroy it as scripted, but only after a lot of shrieking and flailing around. Why did this happen? Well, the first version of the scene works on a character level, and has a certain humour to it. But the transmitted version is more dramatic, showing the character in real jeopardy. Pex could have been the one put in danger, but the audience would relate less to him and so care less. The production team was obviously not against the idea of a strong female companion, as only two stories later they introduced Ace (as played by Sophie Aldred), a companion who mixed her own explosives, got to beat up a Dalek with a super-charged baseball bat and take out a Cyberman squad single-handed with little more than a sling-shot and some gold coins. Also (partly at the insistence of Sylvester McCoy) Ace was one of the few companions to be allowed to develop on-screen, and had stories that were designed at least in part to show the character to grow up (as noted above). Whilst there are question-marks over how realistic the portrayal of Ace as a working-class teenage girl was (remembering that she was written for almost solely by middle-class male writers), there can be little argument that she was a much stronger character than most of the female companions up to that point. It is also surely no co-incidence that the first story of the new series in 2005 (‘Rose’) strongly mirrors the final story of the classic run (‘Survival’), with the influence of Ace on the character of Rose fairly clear, showing just how far ahead of her time the character actually was.
The other major female presence in this era is the Rani, a dispassionate Time Lord scientist played by Kate O’Mara (of Dynasty fame). The Rani is a contemporary of the Doctor and Master, and is introduced in a story (‘The Mark Of The Rani’) featuring them both before returning as the sole villain in Sylvester McCoy’s debut (‘Time And The Rani’). The character came from a specific brief to the writers Pip and Jane Baker to come up with a rival Time Lord to the Master (the briefing document pointedly remarks that she should not be called ‘the Mistress’). Whilst there are other notable female villains in the 1980s, the Rani is the only one (in the entire run of the Classic Series) to appear in more than one story. Intelligent, cunning and amoral, the Rani’s encounters with her fellow Time Lords result in a cut and thrust contest of wits, in which she gets the chance to mock the Doctor and Master, barge them out the way and generally attempt to get them out of her hair so she can continue her (highly unethical) scientific experiments. She is, at least, a memorable villain who happens to be a women, and she stands as a worthy adversary for the Doctor with no allowances made for her gender.
Overall, Doctor Who in the 1980s continued to walk an unsteady tight-rope when it came to gender issues, but towards the end of the decade there were some signs of it coming up to date on-screen, particularly with the character of Ace. But the lack of women in the major production roles (writers, directors) is something that would not be resolved before the series was taken off the air.[24]
Whether or not Doctor Who is an appropriate or effective medium for political messages is something for the individual to decide, but it seems evident that in the 1980s (as in other decades) the programme was indeed influenced by what was going on in the real world. This should hardly be surprising, nor seen as automatically propagandist. Writers require inspiration, and while this can come from other works of art, from science or from historical events, it is almost inevitable that something of the world that the writer exists in every day and their view of it will bleed into their work. Constraining this is the need to produce a script which works dramatically, the established structure of the programme, and the potentially conflicting views of the production team in question. As we have seen, this sometimes means that stories with a very definite agenda are produced. More frequently, stories are made which reflect elements of the real world, or which use real-life events as a starting point before the need to structure a dramatic script takes precedence over any political influence. The Doctor himself is rarely a directly political figure – he may find himself in worlds that reflect political situations but his input into them is to attempt to halt cruelty and injustice rather than to support particular causes. When the Doctor does express a political preference, such as at the end of The Trial Of A Time Lord when he backs the Inquisitor to run for President of Gallifrey, he does so based solely on her personality rather than any specific policies she may wish to put in place.
When Doctor Who was cancelled in 1989, it brought an end to 26 years of continuous drama. Aside from a one-off TV film in 1996, it would be 16 years before the series would return. When Russell T. Davies brought it back in 2005, the element of topical and political critique featured heavily, especially in its first season, which contained a satire on the political spin used by Tony Blair to convince the country to back a war in Iraq; an update of the Daleks to represent religious fundamentalists; a story that looked at the impact of the mass media on its viewers and the importance of news, and frequent references to financial greed and pollution. It is tempting to wonder at the kind of stories writers of the series in the 1990s might have told – and what we would now be able to see reflected in those stories.
References
Ballard, J.G.; High-Rise; 1975, Harper Perennial; 2006.
Benn, Tony; The Benn Diaries: New Single Volume Edition; 1995, Arrow Books; 1996.
Cartmel, Andrew; Script Doctor – The Inside Story Of Doctor Who 1986-1989; 2005, Reynolds & Hearn Ltd, 2005.
Cartmel, Andrew; Through Time – An Unauthorised History Of Doctor Who; 2005, Continuum, 2005.
Howe, David J; Stammers, Mark; Walker, Stephen James; The Handbook: The Sixth Doctor, 1993, Virgin Publishing, 1993.
Howe, David J; Walker, Stephen James; The Handbook: The Fifth Doctor, 1995, Virgin Publishing, 1995.
Howe, David J; Walker, Stephen James; The Handbook: The Handbook: The Seventh Doctor, 1998, Virgin Publishing, 1998.
Jones, Owen; Chavs – The Demonization Of The Working Class; 2011, Verso Books, 2012.
Klein, Naomi; The Shock Doctrine; 2007, Penguin, 2008.
Marr, Andrew; A History Of Modern Britain; 2007; Pan MacMillan, 2009.
Milne, Seumas; The Enemy Within; 1994; Verso Books, 2004.
Walker, Jane; “A Mouth On Legs” No More, Interview with Janet Fielding, Doctor Who Magazine Issue 214, 06/07/1994.
http://www.chomsky.info/books/fateful01.htm http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html
Interview for Woman's Own ("no such thing as society"); http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689
Saddam is 'deceiving, not disarming’; http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jan/29/usa.iraq1
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2013/mar/27/doctor-who-female-writers
http://stelladuffy.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/dr-who-and-the-missing-women/
[1] Interview conducted by John Isles, 2012.
[2] ‘The Green Death’, ‘The Curse Of Peladon’, ‘Planet Of The Spiders’.
[3] As played throughout the 1970s by Nicholas Courtney.
[4] ‘Driven To Distraction’, 2011 – documentary included on the DVD release of ‘Frontios’.
[5] Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania.
[6] Written by former Script Editor Christopher H Bidmead.
[7] ‘Driven To Distraction’, 2011.
[8] Fateful Triangle, 1999.
[9] Arthur Scargill, then-leader of the National Union of Mineworkers.
[10] A gritty drama about Birmingham’s organised criminals, which developed into a strange fantasy.
[11] April 2013.
[12] Something that has become more relevant with the allegation that the Coalition Government that took office in 2010 is a ‘Millionaire’s Cabinet’ – ‘All in all, twenty-three out of twenty-nine ministers in [Prime Minister David] Cameron’s first cabinet were millionaires; 59 per cent went to private school’ (Jones, Owen; 2011).
[13] Quoted from an interview with John Isles, 2012.
[14] In his diary on November 4th, 1986, Benn records an ex-soldier telling him that ‘we were regularly put into police uniforms and sent on the picket lines.’ (Benn, 1986).
[15] An issue that shall be dealt with later in the chapter.
[16] Which has become known as the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.
[17] From part 3.
[18] United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, as introduced in the 1969 story ‘The Invasion’ and which recurred regularly throughout the 1970s.
[19] ‘Frontios’.
[20] ‘Girls! Girls! Girls!’ documentary on the ‘Paradise Towers’ DVD release, 2011.
[21] She would clarify these statements the following year in an interview in issue 214 of Doctor Who Magazine (July, 1994).
[22] ‘Trial Of A Time Lord: The Terror Of The Vervoids’.
[23] On the Commentary track to part 4 of the story on the DVD release, 2011.
[24] And
is still something of an issue in the New Series. See Mathilda Gregory’s
article from The Guardian ‘Why Doctor
Who needs more female writers’ or writer Stella Duffy’s blog-post on the same
subject, ‘Dr Who and the Missing Women.’
(c) Philip Marsh, 2020.
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