CORE VALUES

Think Daleks vs Cybermen over London was epic? Pah! The Daleks Masterplan is the biggest Doctor Who epic there ever was. Tim Worthington looks back to heady days of the Tarranium Core, Mavic Chen, those pesky delegates and a little toast to everyone at home…

According to all known laws of science, 'The Daleks' Master Plan' should be rubbish. Even at the dizzying height of Dalekmania, when their image adorned everything from bagatelle games to fish slices and people walking down the street in papier mache Dalek masks were a common sight, the idea of an entire twelve (thirteen, if you count the mezannine) episodes being devoted to a single story featuring the malevolent mutants in metal casings was something approaching overkill. To add to this, the story was commissioned under duress from BBC Director General Sir Huw Wheldon - reputedly based on no more sound an artistic basis than that his mother was quite keen on the Daleks (ed- lets hope the current DG’s family don’t crave the Nimon)- which is never a situation conducive to the creation of great art. Meanwhile Dalek creator Terry Nation, was not exactly at the peak of his concentration and delivered scripts for some episodes that were scarcely more than a couple of pages in length. Most notoriously of all, the story was bisected by a slapstick comedy Christmas special that played host to the most cringeworthy moment ever witnessed in the series and as most of it has long since vanished from the archives and what little did remain hasn't exactly been given frequent public airings, there hasn't been much changing of minds going on.

So, not without good reason, the general consensus has always been that it wasn't up to much. The fan 'luminaries' may wax lyrical about their memories of the story, not least in the curious and now long-forgotten semi-regular 'Nostalgia' feature in "Doctor Who Magazine", but then they were always banging on about stories that were no longer available for anyone else to see. When the two-part novelisation of the story was published in 1989, it was generally assumed that author John Peel had put an enormous amount of effort in to rework the original scripts and make everything more consistent and coherent; some reviewers actually remarked on this in their writeups. That the original scripts themselves surprisingly did not surface amongst Titan Books' otherwise well-judged series of Doctor Who scripts only served to lend weight to this suspicion, and when the two (as there were at that time) existing episodes finally did resurface it was only as part of the trailblazing sales success that was "Daleks: The Early Years", chiefly of interest to those who just couldn't get enough of blurry old monochrome photos and footage of Peter Davison chatting to Roy Skelton.

Fast forward through a decade and a couple of revolutions in home entertainment technology, though, and suddenly the three (yes, three - all will be explained in due course) existing episodes of "The Daleks' Master Plan" were the talk of the "Lost In Time" DVD box set. Even amongst three jam packed discs' worth of material - which offered such alternate distractions as surviving extracts from the greatest Dalek stories of all time, tantalisingly brief 'censor clips' from otherwise completely lost stories, and some mocked-up pretend 8mm off-air footage from 'The Savages' (a story that did not even exist in the first place, and they're never going to fool anyone into thinking otherwise) - those three episodes really stood out as something quite remarkable. Even non-fans seemed unusually taken with them, and were heard to express dismay that no others remained. What this sudden reversal in fortune has really brought to light is that even the average fan doesn't really know a tremendous amount about this most mysterious and little-documented of black and white-era stories, and there are large parts and major details of it that are little more than the cause of head scratching bafflement to most. If the past is a foreign country, then 'The Daleks' Master Plan' is not just a foreign country but also entire galaxies worth of purposeless aliens introduced for no good reason and then immediately written out again for equally little good reason. So what exactly did go on in 'The Daleks' Master Plan'? What was the plan, and how did it involve Ancient Egypt, supervillains on family holidays and what almost spilled over into real-life galactic conflict over story titles? More puzzlingly still, how did they manage to stretch it out to twelve episodes? The story of 'The Daleks' Master Plan' essentially begins not in the inhospitable jungle of Kembel, as might be expected, but in fact amongst the giant ants, stolen inventions and avuncular village 'Bobbies' of the previous year's 'The Planet Of Giants'. Back then they were obviously even having trouble filling four episodes, let alone twelve, and the final two parts of the miniaturised runaround flagged so badly that the decision was taken to edit them down into a single third-part conclusion. So while they had spent the relevant portion of the series budget, there was nothing to show for it and so the leftover episode allocation was shunted into series three. With this incorporated into the recording block for serial 'T', which opens up a huge can of worms that will be returned to in a minute, the production team wisely avoided the temptation to pad out 'Galaxy 4' with another episode's worth of standoff between The Drahvins and The Rare Photo Of The Rill, and opted instead to use the slot to make an episode-length trailer for the impending Dalek epic due to start, erm, four weeks later. Uniquely in "Doctor Who" history, this standalone episode did not feature any of the regular cast, which probably sat quite nicely with William Hartnell's habit of taking a holiday every single week.

Given that this extra episode had been shoehorned into the production of serial 'T', and was effectively an appendix to it, it was assigned the production code 'T/A'; this was used in most of the production documentation and, more soberingly, on the release form for the episode to be wiped in the early 1970s. However, as the guesswork production code 'D/C' appeared once on a document prepared in April 1965 by the production team, some purists vociferously insist that this must have been the genuine article and will accept no argument to the contrary. Even aside from the fact that said document was vague about story titles and contained some other slight errors, and was put together before it or even a couple of the preceding stories had been made (and referred to incoming companion Steven as 'Michael'), and in any case the episode was not made as part of the same production block as serial 'D' (which, fact fans, was superior first series historical epic 'Marco Polo'), they insist on standing their ground in so humourless a fashion that even notorious just-the-facts merchant Andrew Pixley once felt moved to indulge in a spot of whimsy about an awards ceremony being flour bombed by pro-'D/C' protestors a la Bob Hope and the Women's Libbers at Miss World. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The 'D/C' misunderstanding, it would appear, originated from the fact that the additional episode was initially referred to on internal memos as a 'Dalek Cutaway'. So, not particularly surprisingly, those selfsame individuals also maintain that, while the onscreen episode title may well have been 'Mission To The Unknown', 'Dalek Cutaway' is the overall title of the one episode 'story' itself. This is where it could start to get a bit confusing for the casual reader, so a quick bit of clarification - for the first couple of years, "Doctor Who" featured individual onscreen episode titles and the overall story titles were rarely disclosed. For once, the BBC's meticulous Programme As Broadcast documentation (in which they record their actual on-air output in intricate detail) is no help in resolving this silly dispute, as it rather handily identifies the show as 'Dalek Cutaway - Mission To The Unknown'. Obviously this can be interpreted as description and title respectively, but no doubt some will demand more evidence, which frankly it is a pleasure to impart. 'Mission To The Unknown' is the title that appeared onscreen at the start of the episode, it's also the title on the script and the publicity photographs, it is identified as the name of the 'story' by the "Radio Times" (one of the only occasions on which this happened), and perhaps most significantly the episode features plenty relating to a mission to the unknown and absolutely nothing whatsoever about Daleks being cut away (something that was only achievable with the 'Dalek Cut-a-mastic', a weird mid-1960s item that allowed creative youngsters to cut Dalek-shaped, erm, shapes from sheets of polystyrene using a heated wire tool). Whereas 'Dalek Cutaway' is quite self-evidently nothing more than a description, and could only really be a viable story title in a universe where 'Doctor Who And Tanni', 'Oh, You Know, That One With Chellak' and 'The Final Three-Part Story Does Not Have A Title As Yet' are regular sightings in episode guides. `Mission To The Unknown' itself begins on the jungle planet of Kembel, identified as the most hostile planet in the universe, and also the setting for a good deal of the ensuing twelve-partery. It is here that a Space Security team led by undercover agent Marc Cory (Edward De Souza) are attempting to frantically repair their crashed rocket whilst avoiding the hostile Varga plants. One of their number, Garvey, is not quite so successful in adhering to the latter imperative, and having seen "The Quatermass Experiment" one too many times he begins the slow transformation into a half-man, half-plant creature intent on similarly infecting his crewmates. Having dispatched the rampaging plantman before he can do any more infecting, Cory provides a convenient bit of plot exposition for the benefit of the viewers - he has been assigned to check on reports of possible Dalek activity in the area, revealing that Skaro's finest have conquered over forty seven planets in the last five hundred years (which sounds impressive until you work out that it actually comes to an average of less than one a year), and suspects that the Daleks may well be in conference with certain unidentified alien allies on that very planet.

Cory's suspicions are correct, and the Daleks are holding a conference with their allies at that very moment. Said allies are an oddball collection of representatives of fellow beligerent galaxies, collectively known as The Delegates. They are all as keen on galactic domination as the Daleks are, although they apparently prefer to spend their time denouncing each other's non-attendance as an 'outrage', saying "a-greed!", rhythmically hitting desks with the palms of their hands, and being exterminated. Not counting the Daleks and their human ally, of whom more hereafter, there are a grand total of eight Delegates and confusion has long since reigned over exactly who was who. Throughout the ensuing story they would appear in several different combinations, sometimes looking slightly different and sometimes even apparently swapping their names around, so the few photos of them that existed before any footage turned up weren't much help, really. However, recent research by dedicated experts has resulted in a reasonably reliable list; the one who looks like Patrick Troughton with spikes growing out of his face is Trantis, the Harry Hill-like character who moves like a particularly effeminate ballet dancer is Gearon, the clumps of dried grass inside an opulent hooded cloak is Zephon, the one who looks like Moby after a sprint through a cake-decorating factory is Celation, Tony Parsons with a cushion cover wedged on his head is Warrien, the dark-skinned one wearing a Fischer-Price Activity Playset space helmet is Beaus, the one whose face literally does resemble a KT Tunstall-like map of the world is Malpha, and best of all, the ridiculous chess piece/christmas tree hybrid with no discernible limbs is Sentreal (and not 'Ooobyjoob' or whatever Ian Levine claimed it was). It's actually quite a pity that this extraordinary costume doesn't still exist today, as it would no doubt fetch a packet at auction and give rise to the headline "Sale Of The Sentreal". While, presumably, the failure of a shabby old cushion cover to attract any bids whatsoever would lead to the subheading "Warrien On The Cheap". (ed- and didn’t they all snack on Kembel Mint Cake?)

Anyway, despite their sheer ridiculousness, The Delegates have rather advanced plans - outlined for the benefit of the audience by the voluble Malpha - for the conquest of the solar system. The first planet they will turn their attention to, illustrated by a Dalek dramatically sweeping a model of it off a star chart with its sucker arm, is the Earth. Cory, who has been listening in, is understandably alarmed by this, but his presence (which The Delegates predictably conclude is an 'outrage') has already been detected. When the remaining crew rather stupidly fall victim to the Varga plants, escape becomes impossible, and Cory is cornered and exterminated. Unbeknownst to the Dalek patrols, though, he had recorded his findings on a small cassette recorder concealed inside a miniature rocket, which probably ranks as the most weirdly futuristic-yet-dated gadget ever seen in the show. Cory doesn't have time to activate it but the Daleks fail to spot it, and it's on that cliffhanger that the audience are thrust right into four weeks' worth of preamble with wooden horses before the big kick-off. Quite how successful this overlong trailer was in creating interest in an impending overlong Dalek story is not entirely clear, although one person who quite clearly wasn't impressed was a parent who wrote a bizarre letter to the "Radio Times", expressing their disgust at the long-term stratagems of the Daleks and company and stressing a hope that any existent alien races would turn out to be more civilised than this. Well, quite, and you'd think they'd have better dress sense than Warrien too. No doubt to the exacerbated disgust of that letter-writer, 'The Daleks' Master Plan' (trivia fiends might like to know that early storyline drafts were entitled 'Doctor Who And A Battle Of Wits', and headcases who favour 'Dalek Cutaway' might like to know that it was originally described as 'Twelve Part Dalek Segment') began its lengthy run on 13th November 1965. Most Hartnell-era episode titles were notoriously over-dramatic and out of proportion with what actually happened in them, but on this occasion when they called it 'The Nightmare Begins' they really weren't kidding; the story begins as dramatically as it means to go on. Inside the Tardis, new-ish recruit Steven Taylor is still delerious and badly wounded after a skirmish in the final episode of their otherwise comedic romp through ancient Greece, and is being tended to by Katarina, a Greek handmaiden who had only just arrived as a replacement for Vicki, the teenager from the future who in the grand tradition of female companions had left to marry a man she had only just met. As it would transpire, they could really have done with Vicki's level-headedness, perceptiveness and ability to blend in obtrusively into unfamiliar societies over the coming weeks.

In his quest to secure help for Steven, The Doctor lands on Kembel, where two Space Security agents named Brett Vyon and Kert Gantry (played by future Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart Nicholas Courtney and future "Play School" presenter Brian Cant respectively) are busying themselves trying to find out what has happened to their missing colleague Cory. Surprisingly they don't seem to have much knowledge of the reported Dalek activity in the area, although they do know for certain that their location is Five Zero Alpha to Charlo Charlo Egan, worth mentioning as it conjures up amusing images of Peter Egan fighting his way through the jungle and dodging the Varga plants. They find little trace of Cory, but do stumble across something that causes them far greater unease - a distinctive spaceship known as The Spar, which is not some sort of planet-hopping cut-price supermarket but the personal transport of Guardian of the Solar System, Mavic Chen. Looking somewhat like a futuristic take on Fu Manchu, Mavic Chen is indeed in league with the assembled plotters but has cunningly covered his tracks by telling everyone he's going on holiday, even going as far as appearing on a proto-ITV2 style magazine show to indulge in idle chatter about his vacation plans. Played by Kevin Stoney, Chen would later resurface in all but name (and, erm, appearance and timeframe and occupation) in cahoots with yet another race of supervillains. Although their presence on Kembel is detected by the Daleks (another 'outrage', unsurprisingly), Gantry and Vyon are discovered first by The Doctor, who chances upon them while - setting something of a running motif for this story - wandering around talking to himself. Various arguments and counterarguments about the importance of their respective purposes ensue, and while Vyon foolishly tries to assume control of the Tardis and ends up immobilised by - yes! - the magnetic chair, Gantry ventures outside to continue the search and is promptly exterminated. Over at the conference hall, things are not going too well. Talks are about to begin, but the somewhat egotistical Zephon insists on delaying his entrance for effect as if he's Mariah Carey. The Daleks, who have already set up an important plot detail by expressing their concerns about Chen's long-term ambitions, are none too amused by this showboating prevarication but for the moment they have more important matters to attend to - namely the four remaining humanoid interlopers. In tense scenes, a Dalek patrol armed with huge flamethrowers in lieu of their usual appendages attempt to literally smoke them out, by setting light to the entire forest. Although slowed down by Steven's injury, and by Katarina's equally debilitating need to have everything explained to her very very very slowly, the Tardis crew and Vyon find their way to the conference centre, where they take advantage of Zephon's diva-esque strop by knocking him unconscious and stealing his cloak. Borrowing Zephon's apparel, The Doctor infiltrates the conference, leading to some tense moments where he almost gives himself away before they handily divulge their entire gameplan; they are trying to construct a fearsome-sounding piece of equipment known as a Time Destructor, but before it can be completed they need a certain quantity of a rare mineral called Tarranium, which can only be found on one planet and takes fifty years to mine. As the planet in question is Uranus, Chen has been able to secure some Tarranium, leading to another outburst of table-slapping. Then the presence of intruders in the building is belatedly discovered and a load of alarms go off in unison, and The Doctor uses the resultant panic (which for some reason provokes Celation into jumping on top of a table) as the perfect opportunity to swipe the all-important Tarranium Core and make his escape. When its absence is discovered, the real Zephon is promptly exterminated, although in truth they were probably just fed up of his celebrity-standard arrogance.

Pausing only to pick up a discarded rocket-cassette-recorder hybrid thing that just happened to be lying around the Doctor and company steal The Spar, safe in the knowledge that the Daleks will not dare fire on the ship for fear of damaging the precious Tarranium. What they can do, though, is attack the ship with a 'Randomiser' (presumably not the same one that the Fourth Doctor would append to the Tardis many years later) and force it to land on the risibly-named prison planet Desperus. This penal colony is home to the universe's most dangerous criminals, and with good reason; without a powerful and fully functioning spacecraft, it is virtually impossible to leave. It's fair to say that things aren't going brilliantly by this point, and The Doctor doesn't exactly lift everyone's spirits much when he plays back Cory's tape recording. While they are attempting to circumvent the Randomiser's effects, a bedraggled criminal named Kirksen sneaks aboard. For some inexplicable reason, he is keen to get to Kembel and once they set off for Earth to warn the authorities about Chen's plans, he takes Katarina hostage in the airlock and demands that they change course. The Doctor and Vyon argue about what they should do, while Steven bangs furiously but ineffectively on the airlock door, until before their disbelieving eyes, in the first of several shock moments to pepper this already edge-of-the-seat story, Katarina sacrifices herself by ejecting the pair of them into space. Although it had rapidly become clear that Katarina's historical ignorance made her a difficult character who wasn't going to last very long, it's doubtful that the audience - who were more used to seeing companions leave to marry men they had only just met - were really anticipating such a shock exit. The Doctor pays tribute to her with a quick and rather cursory speech and she is then promptly forgotten about and left to float through space (a sequence that, rumour has it, led to Stanley Kubrick contacting the production team to ask how he could replicate the effect for the upcoming 2001: A Space Odyssey). In fact she was lucky even to get that much - Terry Nation, who disliked writing for her and knew little of her character outline, simply left a gap in his original script for the production team to fill in as they saw fit.

If The Doctor and Steven were upset by what had happened, then that was nothing compared to the grating-voiced bile spat by the Daleks, who were sufficiently annoyed by their escape from Desperus to blow up their pursuit ship in a fit of rage. If that wasn't bad enough, the Daleks then receive a verbal dressing-down from Trantis over their failure to retrieve the Tarranium Core. Matters are momentarily smoothed over by the intervention of Mavic Chen, who announces his intention to return to Earth and report Brett Vyon as a traitor, but it turns out that Trantis is no great admirer of Chen either and shares the Daleks' concerns about his long-term aims. Back on Earth, Chen assigns the ruthless Space Security Agent Sara Kingdom (Jean Marsh, who only a couple of months previously had appeared as Joanna in 'The Crusade') to apprehend Vyon, who at that moment has just stopped off with the Doctor and Steven at an 'Experimental Station'. Vyon's associate Daxtar, who works there, rather clumsily reveals that he is somehow part of Chen's plot; Vyon's reaction is to kill him, upon which he himself is almost immediately killed by Sara Kingdom. Suddenly, this is all looking less like Doctor Who than it does Get Carter.

Driven on by The Doctor's conveniently plot-advancing habit of insisting on nosing around even the most inhospitable and dangerous-looking surroundings, he and Steven find their way into a research chamber where some sort of unidentified experiment is about to take place. Sara corners them, but before she can so much as place them under arrest said experiment begins; in a truly perplexing sequence worthy of the most deranged psychedelic big-screen weird-out of the day everything goes solarised and overexposed, then The Doctor appears to chew on a gigantic slab of toffee for quite some time, and then Steven and Sara are seen jumping up and down on a trampoline in slow motion in front of some sort of cross between a rotating diamond and a gyroscope.

From the shouting that ensues between the Chen's smooth-headed henchmen the Technix and the station's scientists, it emerges that this was some sort of experiment in teleportation which was intended to send some mice whizzing across time and space. Happily for the latter but not for the former, it was an unqualified success, and the bold rodent pioneers took The Doctor, Steven and Sara with them to what is purportedly a planet called Mira, but which in the grand tradition of The Eye Of Orion resembles nothing more than a slightly rearranged Kembel. All this planet-hopping is by now starting to form something of a pattern and it is becoming increasingly obvious that this whole story is one long chase. However, unlike earlier stories like 'The Keys Of Marinus' or indeed 'The Chase', this isn't simply to facilitate the padding out of episode counts to fill the allotted scheduling block, and for once there is a real sense that the constant change of location is part of a determined ploy to outrun and outwit the Daleks. Anyway, they don't get to spend too long on Mira. Sara has already been freaked out by the evidence of Chen's true intentions, and The Doctor and Steven have already been freaked out by her revelation that Brett Vyon was her brother, and all three have been freaked out by the 'invisible' pawprints that are scattered around them, when a Dalek patrol shows up. The Doctor again points out that if they attack him then the Tarranium Core will be destroyed, but a timely attack by the planet's inappropriately named invisible inhabitants the Visians (who, excitingly, are illuminated in sillhouette by the Dalek's blasts) provides them with an even better window of opportunity. Seeing his chance The Doctor simply strides up to the Dalek ship, uses some old-fashioned sleight of hand to overpower the lone guard, and takes off in it!

Reusing an admittedly clever plot device that occurred with alarming frequency in the Hartnell years, The Doctor makes a fake replica of the Tarranium Core, while Mavic Chen rather tellingly remarks to his increasingly irritated co-conspirators that "human curiosity is something that I have no control over". One thing they do have control over, however, is the stolen Dalek ship, which is dragged back to the planet's surface with a tractor beam. But just when victory seems within their grasp, human curiosity comes into play yet again as Steven attempts to tamper with the ship's force field-protected controls, and ends up being himself coming under the force field's influence himself. Cunningly, The Doctor insists on the projected handover of the Tarranium Core taking place outside the Tardis, where he leaves Steven outside to hand over the fake Core and walk calmly back inside while temporarily shielded from the Daleks' extermination blasts. So, this is the point at which the two-volume novelisation of the story split itself in two, and a rather good point for the reader of this article to take a quick breather before braving the lunacy to come. Six episodes' worth of darting between jungle planets, suspicions about Mavic Chen's intentions and general slapping of tables had raced by at an exhilarating pace, but as the seventh episode was due to fall on no less inconspicuous a date than the 25th of December, it obviously had to take something of a different approach. And 'different' is the right word.

'The Feast Of Steven', the most absurd episode of "Doctor Who" by far and also the only one ever to be transmitted on Christmas Day (in a spot of interactive fun, you may of course wish to block out the previous twelve words with marker pen depending on where they eventually decided to schedule 'The Christmas Invasion', and also this bit too), begins much the same as any other episode of this prolonged saga, with the sensors indicating that the Tardis has arrived on a planet with a poisonous atmosphere. In a sense the sensors are right, as it is in fact outside a Police station which bears a not entirely unintentional similarity to that seen in the BBC's popular long-arm-of-the-law drama "Z Cars". Apparently the production team had originally wanted this to be staffed by the cast of "Z-Cars", but the usual BBC shenanigans saw to it that this was deemed 'inappropriate' and disallowed. By now you are no doubt thinking that this is a rather strange opening for an episode that wasn't actually produced by John Nathan-Turner, and you'd be absolutely right. To the distant accompaniment of 'The First Noel' (performed, as the production documentation helpfully records, by those famed recording artists 'Small Group Of Children'), the Tardis crew get into a silly argument with equally silly policemen - and let's be honest about it, from PC Rowse through to that 'bobby' having a chinwag with Wally the Workman before dashing off to arrest some Autons for breaking windows right up to the Special Branch geezers from 'Silver Nemesis' and beyond, "Doctor Who" never could get its portrayal of the police right - about whose rightful property that pesky Police Box was. There's a Dirk Benedict Meets A Cylon-style postmodernist gag about an actor who had previously been seen blacked up in 'The Crusade', and then it's straight on to a mock-silent movie slapstick runaround in a Hollywood film studio involving Charlie Chaplin, the Keystone Kops and a pre-fame Bing Crosby, complete with rinky-dink music and crumbly old caption cards. Back in the Tardis at the conclusion of the episode, the main cast belatedly honour the fact that it had been Christmas Day at the Police Station by handing round the champagne. Then, in what some maintain was an entirely unscripted moment, William Hartnell turns to the camera and says "...and a Merry Christmas to all of you at home! Shoes". Well, at least it makes slightly more sense than "Ace, the tea's getting cold, aye, unless it's not".

Of course this was far from the only startlingly over enunciated exclamation that William Hartnell ever made in the series - it's not even the only one in this story - but its bizarre blend of cloying sugariness and early postmodernist breaking of the so-called 'fourth wall' is emblematic of this most baffling of episodes. It is difficult to gauge whether 'The Feast Of Steven' was a work of brain-frazzled genius or just plain daft. Sadly, the one thing that it does not do is give any indication of what the Daleks and company were up to while all this was going on, which is a particular cause for dismay given that not only would Mavic Chen have made a convincing Santa, but also, if turned on his side, Sentreal would have resembled nothing less than a giant cracker. The next week, however, it was business as usual, and after a bit of New Year-acknowledging silliness involving the Tardis crew, Big Ben and a pair of Douglas Adams-esque cricket commentators, it soon becomes clear that the Daleks hadn't exactly been dragging their heels. They had presumably spent Christmas morning assembling their brand new Time Destructor ("thank you Beaus, it's just what we've always wanted!"), as it's up and running and ready for testing, and having presumably grown tired of his proclamations of disapproval, they decide to test it on Trantis. Fortunately for him, the fake Tarranium Core means that it doesn't work. Less fortunately for him, he is promptly exterminated.

While this extraordinary exercise in sheer entirely-expected-but-not-really-to-this-extreme nastiness has been playing out, the Tardis crew have found their way to the volcanic planet Tigus, where they have the misfortune to run in to The Doctor's old adversary and fellow Time Lord (although they weren't called 'Time Lords' then) The Meddling Monk. Brilliantly portrayed by Peter Butterworth, this particular time-travelling scamp is worthy of a little more attention than has ever really been paid to him. As his name suggest he is more of a mischief-maker than a villain, more at home perpetrating such scams as opening bank accounts and whizzing forward in time to collect the interest. The handful of appearances he made in the series were uniformly great, particularly his comic bickering with The Doctor, and he'd be the perfect sort of character to bring back if Russell T. Davies hadn't arbitrarily killed off the entire Time Lord race for no real reason. The Monk uses "some kind of ray" (always the third alternative to fellow miracle scientific cure-alls mercury and static electricity in the 1960s episodes) to disable the Tardis, but The Doctor undoes this by refracting the sun's rays through his equally scientifically versatile ring, and fearing the onset of yet another round of comic one-upmanship the Daleks decide to do the pursuing themselves. Thus it is that all parties arrive in Ancient Egypt, and tumble headlong into what is to all intents and purposes a belting story in its own right. The early historically-based tales were always a lot better than most people are prepared to give them credit for, full of outstandingly clever plot devices and sympathetic characters, but here the historical setting is simply a backdrop to futuristic wrangling over a missing piece of hardware and as such it's a completely different kettle of fish. It also won't be winning any awards for its forward-thinking portrayal of the Ancient Egyptians, but that's by the by.

The Doctor has stopped off because he needs to make certain that no permanent damage has been caused by The Monk's meddling, and while he is engrossed in his repair work Steven and Sara and nearly captured by the Daleks and Chen (currently being shouted at a lot by what the script describes as the 'Red Dalek', although how the viewers of the days of black and white were supposed to know this is anyone's guess), but are saved by the timely intervention of the Egyptians loudly decrying the presence of 'intruders' and waving a lot of wooden sticks around. Like all historical figures in the series, they are inevitably more interested in the mysterious 'blue box' by than any of the human or alien interlopers. The Monk, meanwhile, has been press ganged into helping to recover the Tarranium Core, but he is not match for The Doctor who overpowers him and steals something from his Tardis before leaving him bound and gagged in a sarcophagus. It is here that he is discovered by Steven and Sara, who iniitally mistake him for a living mummy in the rather peculiar cliffhanger to episode nine. But before any can comment on its lack of relation to the actual storyline, they are captured by the Daleks and taken as hostages to force The Doctor to return the real Tarranium Core. The Doctor insists that he will only hand it over to Chen and a lone Dalek escort if the hostages ("in which I also include that Monk fellow") are released to him at the same time. After some tense prevarication as the initially unseen Doctor berates his adversaries for breaking the terms of agreement and bringing more than one Dalek, he eventually strides into view, announcing with unintentional mood-killing bombast "I am now about to hand the Tarranium Core to Mavic Chen". Quite how this absurd and indeed absurdly-delivered line found its way into the series is difficult to explain. Then, bang on cue, the Egyptian army arrive to give these angry gods with machines of fire a sound stick-assisted thrashing, and in the confusion the Tardis crew make their escape. They may have lost the Tarranium Core, but they have gained some vital circuitry that will allow them to return to Kembel, while the rightful owner of said circuitry finds that its absence leaves him stranded on an ice planet, waving his fists in comic frustration.

Back on Kembel, of The Delegates only Gearon, Sentreal, Malpha, Beaus and Celation still remain. The rest have either been exterminated or, in the case of Warrien, presumably left to join the editorial staff of some new highbrow arts magazine ("Cushion On Head Review"?). The remainder are engaged in a furious and passionate debate about their suspicions, concluding by demanding the removal of Mavic Chen and, with comic inevitability, slapping the table top so vigorously that, according to the script, the table starts shaking. A Dalek appears and tells them to be silent, but this only makes them noiser and angrier and their "Dead Poets Society"-style show of defiance is only quelled when Chen himself arrives and shoots poor old Gearon, who hadn't even said anything about him. Steven and Sara, who unsurprisingly have become seperated from The Doctor, arrive at the conference centre to discover that all of The Delegates - and Chen - have been locked in a cell. They are all so furious at the deception that they are planning to round up their own galactic forces and take on the Daleks themselves, which is enough to convince Steven and Sara to release them. The Delegates all leave rather hurriedly in their various ships, but before it can take off The Spar explodes. Is this the Daleks' last revenge on Chen? No, it's actually a last piece of double crossing on his part. Clearly utterly unhinged by this stage, Chen is convinced that The Doctor is trying to out-Delegate The Delegates and become the Daleks' ultimate ally. Then he goes even more bonkers still and tries to take on the entire combined might of the Daleks with a single ray gun, upon which he is finally given a quick exterminating blast. The Doctor makes a grab for the now-activated Time Destructor which isn't quite working as intended and then makes a run for it, once again safe in the knowledge that they won't risk attacking him for fear of damaging it, and races off to the Tardis in a bid to neutralise its effects. As the Daleks implode and mutate into some sort of humanoid octopi, the trio start to age rapidly while fleeing through the jungle. The Doctor and an increasingly bearded Steven just make it into the Tardis in time, but Sara stumbles and falls and literally ages to death. As The Doctor and Steven ruminate bitterly on the sheer futility of the events of the previous twelve weeks, the credits promise 'Next Episode: War Of God', and the still-shellshocked viewers are joltingly catapulted straight into a 'needless and nightmare-raising' historical adventure with a conclusion that continues to baffle historians of both senses to this day. The Daleks have been defeated... but for how long?

I'll tell you how long for. A short while and a couple of superlative chilling David Whittaker-penned Dalek stories later, Terry Nation withdrew the rights for them to be used in "Doctor Who". He had his eye on making a big-budget Dalek series in America, chronicling their ongoing battle with the Space Security forces, which implies that the whole of 'The Daleks' Master Plan' had basically been an extended testing ground for his artistically and financially ambitious ideas. This project ultimately came to nothing; suspicion has long been rife that a general paucity of inspiration in the project failed to convince any Stateside backers of its worth, but if 'The Daleks' Master Plan' was anything to go by that was hardly likely to have been the case. There was another good reason why television audiences never got to see the likes of 'The Daleks' Master Plan' again, though - during the early 1970s, the master tape of every single episode was wiped. 'The Feast Of Steven' fared even worse; considered unsuitable for repeat or overseas sales, it had been wiped by the end of the decade, and as no film recording was ever made it's probably gone for good. The Time Destructor itself couldn't have done a better job. Even the few film prints that were made for overseas sales - never actually shown anywhere else on account of its violent content- were not retained anywhere. While a full set of off-air audio recordings made by a fan survived (and have since been put to practical use for a BBC CD set with linking narration by Peter Purves), for many years the only visual material known to survive was a brief clip of Katarina struggling with Kirksen in the airlock from the fourth episode 'The Traitors', used in a November 1973 edition of "Blue Peter" for a feature celebrating ten years of "Doctor Who". And thereby hangs a tale; although everything else that the production team borrowed was returned to the Film Library - including, contrary to popular belief, the fourth episode of 'The Tenth Planet' - this never was and is still unaccounted for. Rumours that the person responsible left a dummy film can in its place, and is due to return it while exclaiming "I am now about to hand the fourth episode to the BBC", cannot be confirmed. When the BBC undertook a stock check of their archive at the tail end of the 1970s a couple of short sequences from episodes one and two were discovered to have survived by chance, mainly model effects shots but also substantial footage of the Daleks burning the forest on Kembel, and a couple of years later episode five ('Counter-Plot') and ten ('Escape Switch') were discovered with several other lost BBC shows in, rather inexplicably, the basement of a Mormon church in London. In 1993, while searching for the Kert Gantry footage to use in the "Thirty Years In The Tardis" documentary, the production team unearthed a lengthy clip of Kert Gantry being pursued and exterminated by the Dalek patrol. Then, a whole decade later, a former BBC employee returned the second episode 'Day Of Armageddon' just in time for the release of the brilliant DVD set of stray footage from missing stories "Lost In Time". This was one of the most significant finds since people first started searching for missing "Doctor Who", as not only is it the only extant episode to feature Katarina (up until that point, the only companion not to be represented by one) but is also a superb piece of work infused with a chilling, ominous atmosphere. Plus of course it features a hefty amount of banging on tables. Whether any more episodes are out there is open to question, although if the Australian censors managed to keep hold of a few frames that they had snipped from 'The Underwater Menace' for all these years, it's perfectly plausible that the viewing copies of 'The Daleks' Master Plan' that they declined to transmit could be languishing in a vault out there somewhere.

Mention must also be made here, mainly because there wasn't really any room to mention it anywhere else, of John Peel's belting two-part novelisation of the story. Staying true to the televised version of events, even down to including 'The Feast Of Steven' in the narrative (although the "...and a Merry Christmas" remark thankfully doesn't survive the transition to the printed page), Peel's only amendment to the original scripts was to insert a six month gap between the two halves of the story, primarily because he liked Sara as a character and wanted to give other writers the chance to use her in original stories. However, unless anyone who religiously ploughs through those endless BBC Books 'Past Doctor' efforts can provide evidence to the contrary, nobody ever has done and that's a real shame. Anyway, suffice to say that "Mission To The Unknown" and "The Mutation Of Time", as the two volumes were subtitled, were amongst the very finest of the novelisations, and this was reflected by the fact that they were the first to ever be awarded the full five marks on Russell's Rateometer, the scoring system adopted by "Doctor Who Magazine"'s voluble book reviewer Gary Russell.

This should hardly have been a surprise. Suspense, tension, shock plot twists, hallucinogenic sequences, alien planets by the bucket load, some very silly individuals sat around a conference table, and of course the Daleks themselves at the height of their popularity - 'The Daleks' Master Plan' has the lot. The reasons why it has been so consistently overlooked are both obvious and understandable, but it really is about time that a little more notice was taken of it because if it continues to be ignored, well, that would be as big an "outrage" as Zephon refusing to enter the conference room!

WHO IS THE LONGEST RUNNING DOCTOR WHO?

An easy enough question to ask you may say but, really, it’s not. When David Tennant announced his departure from the series after three years, he had done considerably less work than old Billy Hartnell and Patrick T did in their three years. Yet, he’s done more than Peter Davison, who famously stuck firmly to Pat’s idea that “three years is enough” when they met in the BBC car park. Then there’s Colin Baker’s three years during which he accumulated less screen time than anyone except Eccles and poor old 90 minute McGann. Those are big differences in what is supposed to be the same time span. It’s very timey and a little wimey. And it’s that key phrase “screen time” that we’re talking about here. There’s no point talking about years or seasons or stories or episodes because over the last 45 years they have all varied in length and format. What we really need to measure is official screen time. It would, of course, be crazy to watch every episode with a stopwatch and record the exact number of seconds each Doctor is on screen. Someone will do it one day though! Equally it’s too tedious to start considering things like Doctor lite episodes and Hartnell’s Holidays. For the purposes of this survey we are talking about the Official Screen Time (OST) of each Doctor, that is to say the episodes that ran while he was the Doctor. Yes, we have counted `Mission to the Unknown` as a Hartnell just as `The Five Doctors` is a Davison and `Turn Left` is a Tennant. Cos we’re not that scientific and we don’t have a white coat between us the calculation is simple; the number of OST minutes. So one episode of `Frontier In Space` for example is 25 OST mins. `The Next Doctor` is 60 OST mins. And this is what it all looks like…

Or in order of OST minutes, Tom is first, then Billy, then Pertwee. Tennant, with his OST mins taken up to `The Next Doctor` is 5th and however long the 2009 Specials are he cannot catch those baggy trousers of Troughton. He would need to have done another 2 seasons to do that given that each season is now about 585 OST mins. And as for Matty, well he’s got years of work before he can approach these figures.

Name	Mins
Tom Baker	4450
William Hartnell	3400
Jon Pertwee	3200
Patrick Troughton	2975
David Tennant	2064
Peter Davison	1830
Sylvester McCoy	1050
Colin Baker	915
Christopher Eccleston	585
Paul McGann	89

Adjusted for return appearances (eg `Three Doctors` etc), the table changes a bit with Troughton having completed more minutes as the Doctor than Pertwee, though these are not all OST mins of course. This is only as the Doctor of course; where we to add Col’s minutes faffing about with his hat on Gallifrey in `Arc of Inifinity` he’d close in on Sylvester though still not catch him.

Name	Mins
Tom Baker	4450
William Hartnell	3400
Patrick Troughton	3300
Jon Pertwee	3290
David Tennant	2064
Peter Davison	1837
Sylvester McCoy	1050
Colin Baker	915
Christopher Eccleston	585
Paul McGann	89

And the point of all this is….we have no idea whatsoever. Interesting though don’t you think.

BILLY LYRE

William Hartnell was “the original”, the very first Doctor whose adventures took place over forty years ago with a mission to educate mostly courtesy of a vista of historical stories. Tim Worthington dons his pince nez to see how a 1960s sci-fi series looked into the past.

History, as any bored schoolkid knows only too well, is a difficult subject. It may by definition be grounded in documentation and factual records, but it's also widely open to interpretation, reducing serious academics to bitter playground spats over who would 'win' out of Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel (ed- the debate about who made the better album went on and on!). This isn't just confined to 'proper' history either - look at the Jon Pertwee era of Doctor Who, held up by some for so long as the undisputable pinnacle of the series but later ferociously challenged when others actually got to see some of it. And just as 'proper' history has its naysayers, deniers and doubters, this led to the rise of the 'Pertweesceptics', a covert band of conspiracy theorists who believe that series nine was shot on a secret set in 1971, and that if an episode guide goes past The War Games then it doth fall of the edge of the world.

They may not yet have reached the stage of inspiring mad stories about people having 'near-Pertwee' experiences involving travelling down a long slit-scan tunnel, but Doctor Who's attempts at tackling historical events in its early years have been the subject of just as much speculation, misinformation, archaeological research and general disinterest as their real-life inspirations. Those who saw these early historical tales at the time may wax lyrical about how 'Marco Polo' was fantastic because they showed a map on screen or something, but to everyone who didn't, the historicals have always been something of a mystery. Alright, so it was always going to be difficult for any non-Dalek story broadcast during the height of Dalekmania to fully imprint itself in the public memory, but a non-sci-fi story was at a major disadvantage from the off. Adhering closely to the BBC's original belief that "Doctor Who" should be primarily educational, and with no Macra, Cybermen or Delegates to capture the imagination, the historicals were well-made and well-written but were a thing of the past (pun very much intended) even by the standards of the early 1960s. Ver Kids wanted edge-of-the-seat sci-fi thrills, not what was tantamount to extra schoolwork sneaked in via the time-travelling adventures of a crotchety old man in a 'frock coat', and once Yarvelling's malevolent mutants in metal casings had made their debut in the second story there was no going back. A loyal few may have remained glued to the TARDIS crew's lengthy voyages against painted backdrops, and a few more feverish adolescents may have continued watching for altogether less healthy reasons (we'll come back to that later), but as the viewing figures for the early series prove the historicals were fighting a losing battle. By 1967, they had been quietly dropped.

History also, it is often said, repeats itself, but the Doctor Who historicals never did. They were shown once, and by the early 1970s - barring a lone novelisation and a handful of fan-circulated audio recordings with dogs barking away in the background - they were all but forgotten. Within a few years, however, 'fandom' had started to make its mark, and with amusing irony the race was on to uncover as much historical detail as possible about stories that had been based on historical detail in the first place. Unfortunately, much of this initial research derived from the hazy memories of fans who had watched the stories, and their opinions - which, it has to be said, were only ever expressed as opinions - somehow came to be taken as fact. Thus it came to be enshrined in Fan Law that The Crusade was an atmospheric tale with high production values, whereas The Gunfighters was 'pantomime embarrassment', and the best that anyone could really manage about The Smugglers was the fact that it had been on TV. Much has changed since then, of course. These neglected and oft-overlooked stories were finally novelised, seemingly all at once, in the mid-1980s, while the sterling work of Andrew Pixley (which puts that of 'proper' historians to shame) has done much to explain the context and indeed the locations in which they were made.

In another sense, though, it seems that very little has changed. The historicals still achieve undeservedly low placings in 'best story of all time' polls, have always hovered at the lower end of the video and DVD sales charts, and the novelisations don't even command that much on the second-hand market despite at least in a couple of cases being relatively hard to find. These are stories that need to be re-evaluated, but also need to be seen in order to be re-evaluated. The problem is, there isn't a tremendous amount of them left to see. The BBC's failure to learn from the lessons of the past and keep hold of these important historical documents is something we'll be coming back to later on, along with the already-promised allegations of unhealthy adolescent interest in said stories. For the moment, here's a Look And Learn-style summary of the events between ye olde years of 1963 and 1966. During this time, as part of the first three-and-a-bit series of Doctor Who, there were eleven 'pure' historical stories (well, as pure as ones involving time travellers could be), and two involving comical battles of wits with a fellow time traveller, which will be included here on account of being fantastic. These were very much in line with what creator Sydney Newman envisaged for the show, but not at all in line with what the vast majority of the viewers wanted, and so they were quietly phased out; weirdly enough, at almost exactly the same time that Terry Nation temporarily withdrew the rights for the Daleks to be used. Frankly, the Cybermen couldn't have come along at a more opportune moment.

So is The Doctor shown influencing the course of major historical turning points? Of course not - that's for the Third Doctor's boring boasts about off-screen adventures, not to mention the writers of rubbish cash-in books, to suggest. Here, the crew simply wander into some period of Earth's history, variously in the aftermath of, in the build-up to, or slap bang in the middle of some important sequence of events. They decide to take in the scenery, end up being caught up in events (usually through being mistaken for somebody else), right a few minor low-key wrongs and disappear again with history remaining resolutely un-influenced. This is something that the Doctor in particular is extremely wary of, but his explanations of his reasons are amusingly inconsistent - sometimes he tells his companions that it's impossible to change anything, other times that he's morally prevented from doing so, and others still that any changes they make will have enormous implications for the course of history. Either way, just to be on the safe side he's meticulous in his avoidance of anything that could potentially alter history, on one occasion even taking a self-made pulley system with him to prevent it being 'discovered' too early.

The fact that Doctor Who was originally intended as a history-heavy scholarly effort is arguably best exemplified by the assortment of characters that made up the original TARDIS crew; while Ian Chesterton was a science teacher and could reel off all those utterly incorrect 'facts' about mercury and static electricity, his colleague and travelling companion Barbara Wright had history as her chosen specialist subject. More pertinently still, the Doctor's granddaughter Susan was, when the viewers first met her, one of their pupils. Their respective roles in the early historical stories are particularly interesting in this regard; despite their intended function as the so-called 'eyes and ears' of the viewer, they are given much more than mere schoolwork to do. Ian invariably ends up doing something valiant and heroic, and by the end of the story will have been honoured or ennobled, revealing much about the values and hierarchy of past societies in the process. Susan fulfils her usual quota of screaming and twisting her ankle at inopportune moments, but she also often befriends younger characters in the historical yarns, spending much of her time swapping make-up tips and exchanging stories of what it's like to be a youngster at that particular moment in the Earth's history. Barbara, meanwhile, has a very different part to play in proceedings. Invariably captured by the villains of the piece, barely an episode is ever allowed to elapse before she is forced into skimpy figure-hugging period clothing, subjected to countless lecherous looks and cheek-stroking, and generally threatened with torture, violation, branding, whipping, having things shoved up her bottom and other unspecified kinky-sounding 'punishments', all of which doubtless had a significant effect on the high proportion of adolescent male viewers who were just that bit too old for Dalekmania. That's just in the televised versions - in the novelisations, the writers seem to have a disturbing obsession with intricately detailing just how revealing that clothing was, just how closely it brushed against her shapely thighs, and just how much she shivered at the touch of a leather-gloved hand. Who'd have thought it of the dowdy schoolteacher with the bird's nest hair?

The spooky, atmospheric first episode famously introduced the titular `Unearthly Child` Susan in a claustrophobic 20th century classroom set, with the two suspicious teachers following her home to an equally claustrophobic and equally 20th century junkyard set and being whisked away through time by that crotchety old man with a hat in astrakhan fur. What often gets overlooked is that this episode actually finishes with the TARDIS arriving on a barren prehistoric landscape dominated by a misshapen shadow, and that this is where the little-seen remaining three episodes take place. Nearby cave-dwellers The Tribe Of Gum are locked in a power struggle between Za, the hereditary leader, and Kal, the charismatic lone survivor from another extinct tribe, with victory hinging on the discovery of how to make fire. After being seen using a lighter while examining his surroundings, The Doctor becomes an unwilling pawn in their political shenanigans, and the four travellers are imprisoned in the appropriately named Cave Of Skulls. However, it soon emerges that Za is a caveman of relative honour, while the unscrupulous Kal thinks nothing of resorting to underhand tactics and even murder to achieve his aims. After saving Za from an attack by a Stone Age 'big cat', Ian shows him how to make fire by rubbing two sticks together, and armed with this knowledge Za defeats his rival in a fight to the death and assumes control of the tribe. Refused permission to leave and potentially spread the secret of fire to others, The Doctor and company scare away the tribe with the aid of skulls mounted on burning sticks, and make it back to the Tardis just in time to dematerialise in a hail of hurled spears.

The Stone Age part of `An Unearthly Child` (yes, that's what we're calling it here, get used to it) is not only overshadowed by that legendary opening episode, it's also overshadowed by the more ostentatious historical adventures that followed. It's extremely well acted and directed, and the cave dwelling sets are unsettlingly cramped-looking and realistic, but in comparison to what would come later there isn't really that much of a proper 'story' to speak of. This is not to denigrate Anthony Coburn's scripts, nor indeed the uncredited additional material provided by CE 'Bunny' Webber, but their primary purpose was always to introduce the main characters and the central concept and those in search of edge-of-the-seat action should look elsewhere. The week after they fled from The Cave Of Skulls, the quartet were plunged straight into an epic seven-week story written by a former gag merchant who had recently been fired by Tony Hancock, and once the Daleks had made their debut a little part of the original vision of Doctor Who was abandoned for good. Introduced by a previous-episode teaser showing Susan pelting Barbara with snowballs - a definite niche fetish as Barbara misuse goes - `Marco Polo` was commissioned before a single Dalek had so much as trundled its way past a camera, but from the outset the difference between it and `An Unearthly Child` was marked.

`Marco Polo` is essentially little more than a travelogue, complete with an onscreen map with one of those line and dot things going across it, following the travellers as they hook up with Marco Polo's convoy en route to meeting Kublai Khan at Peking. There is, however, a fair amount of intrigue to lift this above the status of a mere history lesson on wheels. The Doctor (allowing for William Hartnell's customary bi-weekly holiday halfway through) accidentally loses the TARDIS while gambling with Polo, who announces his intention to present it to Khan in the hope that he may finally be allowed to retire from his explorations and return to his homeland. Susan tries desperately to help Ping-Cho, a young girl who is journeying to her arranged marriage to a rich old man but who has her eye on a hunky young soldier. And if all that wasn't enough to be getting on with, there's also a traitor in their midst - Tegana, posing as an emissary of peace but in fact secretly on his way to assassinate Khan on behalf of his war-ravaged homeland. Not wanting the perceptive and loyal Polo on hand to rumble his ruse, Tegana tries numerous methods of stalling the convoy's progress including arranging an attack by bandits, attempting to steal the TARDIS, tainting their water supplies with poison acquired from the semi-legendary Man From Lop, and - when that fails - simply piercing their water barrels and leaving them to die of thirst. Fortunately, the Doctor is on hand to point out that the condensation forming on the outside of the TARDIS in the intense desert temperatures will be sufficient to slake the collective thirst of a small army of travellers. Erm, OK then.

John Lucarotti, the houseboat-dwelling industry veteran who scripted `Marco Polo`, was both an experienced writer of thriller and adventure serials and an enthusiastic historian, hence he was able to achieve a perfect balance between the education and excitation-related content. It is no surprise then that the story now enjoys such a lofty reputation, although the fact that not a single scrap of film exists and all that modern audiences have to rely on are scripts, telesnaps and some very crackly audio recordings surely can’t have exactly hindered the development of its mystique. It’s easy to knock stories that have been critically ‘bigged up’ in absentia, and in this particular instance there’s a fair amount of silliness that detractors can latch on to, but even going simply on the evidence of the novelisation `Marco Polo` was a suspenseful and tightly-packed story, in which all of the characters - even the out and out villains - come across with real dignity; no mean feat for something that ran for seven episodes. The fact that it managed to hold on to the audience that had been generated by the first Dalek story is testament to this, and if anyone is still in need of any further convincing, look no further than the bizarre but extensively document interested expressed by Disney in making a motion picture version of the story. Wonder who they would have cast as The Man From Lop?

A mere six weeks of men in rubber wetsuits slinking around in search of some keys followed before the cast were straight back into the realms of pure history, courtesy of another Lucarotti effort, `The Aztecs`. Although there was still an inescapable touch of the Blue Peters about proceedings, the story took a commendably different approach to `Marco Polo`, setting all of its robust and fast-moving action in a single location. To cut a short story even shorter, the TARDIS arrives in an Aztec tomb, Barbara steals a bracelet that leads the locals to believe her to be a reincarnation of one of their deities, power struggles ensue, Ian tries his hand at gladiatorial combat, Barbara attempts (and fails) to change history by urging her 'charges' to abandon their bloodthirsty religious practices, The Doctor becomes engaged after drinking some cocoa, and much crawling through primitive sewers is needed before the crew make their escape with the aid of a wheel-based pulley system, which The Doctor takes with him as 'the wheel' hasn't actually been invented yet. While `Marco Polo` depended on a background threat for its storyline, and `The Aztecs` concerned itself with human sacrifice and barbaric sports, both were essentially 'gentle' stories which took a polite look at less enlightened periods of history, and did not really concern themselves with any one specific event. All of this would change with the eighth and final story of the first series of Doctor Who, `The Reign Of Terror`

This six part story was written not by Lucarotti but by Dennis Spooner, more commonly associated with gritty action-packed ITC film serials, and the difference showed. Here the TARDIS arrives in Eighteenth Century France, in the throes of violent revolution, and more by accident than design the travellers find themselves caught up in a covert plot to smuggle counter-revolutionaries and other dissidents to safety. After an attack on the plotters' safe house by the authorities, Ian, Barbara and Susan are marched off to face the guillotine, while the dozing Doctor goes unnoticed even as the departing soldiers set fire to the building. Saved by plucky local youngster Jean-Pierre, whose impoverished origins clearly prevented him from hiring a dialogue coach, The Doctor is free to indulge in his own special brand of subterfuge and sabotage, posing as a number of authority figures in his quest to rescue his compatriots (Ian winds up being co-opted into a plan by some British spies to infiltrate and subvert the government; Barbara, less surprisingly, is simply left to languish in a dungeon) and provide some low-key assistance to the rebels, who have now seen their chance to engineer Robespierre's downfall. Although, interestingly, despite his own apparent breaking of his rigorously enforced rule, the Doctor does not succeed in changing history in any way; plans and deceptions are constantly rumbled and replaced by other plans, and the rebels succeed despite rather than because of his 'assistance'. Interchanges with comedy jailers and unintentionally amusing accents aside this is a comparatively grim tale with none of the sense of 'wonders of ancient history' that characterised the earlier efforts. The fact that the production team were able to get away with such bleak overtones on a Saturday teatime is testament to just how much of a success the series had become, although perhaps not as much of a testament as the fact that this story contained the first ever use of location filming in the previously studio-bound Doctor Who, used to capture the vivid and exciting realism of The Doctor walking past some trees. However, the template essayed by `The Reign Of Terror` was seldom returned to; as if to emphasise this, the very next historical tale came from the same author but was its exact opposite in virtually every respect. By the time that it arrived, series two was four stories in, and the main cast had changed slightly; Susan being replaced by Vicki, a giggly adolescent from The Future who joined the crew after being rescued from a wrecked spaceship. By now the educational imperative of the series had started to lessen, and Vicki was given none of Susan's teaching-by-proxy duties. Instead, she served as a highly effective comic foil for the Doctor, and had a habit of further complicating the already convoluted historical tales by being repeatedly mistaken for a boy.

`The Romans` chooses to depict Ancient Rome as the farcical seaside postcard-esque vision of Up Pompeii! and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum rather than the opulence and nobility of Spartacus. The story, such as it is, is closer to a Whitehall farce than average Doctor Who fare, with the characters essentially performing slapstick pratfalls across an extended stage set for four episodes. With the TARDIS stuck at the foot of a cliff, the travellers seek refuge in what they believe to be a civilised and welcoming society, and Ian and Barbara are promptly called into service as slaves; the former as a galley rower, and the latter as a serving maiden being constantly chased around the room by a clearly priapic Emperor Nero. Meanwhile the Doctor and Vicki have their own equally pressing problems as the former is mistaken for expert lyre player Maximum Pettulian, who is both expected to put on a virtuoso concert by the Emperor, and expected to partake in some clandestine shenanigans by the real Petullian's co-conspirators. Following all kinds of cloak and dagger nonsense, during which the two estranged parties never once encounter each other, they finally use the opportunity to flee when Nero sets fire to the city in a fit of comic pique. Played for laughs throughout and all the better for it, The Romans was singled out for fulsome praise by a serious-minded critic writing in The Times, and is a perfect example of how to do 'funny' in an ostensibly straight-minded show. The novelisation, written by Cotton himself, is arguably even funnier, taking the form of a series of letters chronicling the strange events sent by a bewildered Centurion to his disapproving mother.

Two stories later, The Crusade (aka The Crusaders, The Crusade, The Saracen Hordes, The Wheel Of Jaffa and The Lionheart) was business as usual. Well, not quite. The story itself, penned by original series script editor David Whittaker, may indeed have returned to the gentler style of the earlier historicals, but notoriously shared little of their meticulous approach to getting actual historical details right. Without going too deeply into the chronological errors and inconsistencies, not to mention the implications of its slightly dubious moral position (which would probably take up an entire book in themselves), the first episode begins with the travellers arriving in twelfth century Palestine, just in time to get caught up in a skirmish between some British knights and their Saracen assailants. Seeking to protect King Richard, the rapidly-'captured' Barbara and an equally captured Knight pose as the King and his sister Joanna, while the other three hook up with the King, who promptly knights Ian and sends him off to offer the real Joanna's hand in marriage to the troublesome Saracen leader Saladin's brother Saphadin, while Joanna causes a fuss and refuses to consent, Ian gets first attacked and then befriended by Ibrahim the bandit ("such ecstasy!"), Barbara escapes and hooks up with some aggrieved locals who start a revolt against Saphadin's evil sidekick El Akir, and after some final rumblings over whether or not The Doctor is a spy for Saladin, they make their exit. It all makes a lot more sense on screen, honest. In fact, despite the above noted surfeit of dubiousness (and, removed from its sociocultural context, the sight of white actors blacked up with comedy 'ethnic' accents doesn't exactly help matters either), it is a belting tale well told. There's excellent acting, notably from big league guest stars Julian Glover and Jean Marsh, a mocked-up studio 'forest' set that for once looks entirely convincing, comedy, subterfuge, nail-biting climaxes and Barbara forced into the skimpiest of period costumes by men in rough leather gloves. Or at least that's how it appears from a modern-day perspective, viewed almost as if it were a genuine historical document in itself. To the 405 line TV-hogging audiences of the mid-1960s, however, it doubtless all seemed like a little bit of a chore when there were Zarbi, Daleks and The Morok Messenger whizzing around elsewhere in the series. The historicals thus far had all been fantastic works of television, but gave a jerky and inconsistent feel to the series as a whole and required constant retuning of the viewer's expectations. Fortunately, at the end of that second series - by which time Ian and Barbara had returned to their own time and been replaced by stranded astronaut Steven Taylor, whose main function in the historicals was, intriguingly, to rail against all of the barbarism and inhumanity he sees around him, as well as being perpetually confused by a constant stream of Doctor lookalikes - the production team finally stumbled on the 'right' way of doing historicals, and effectively set the trend for much of what would follow in later years.

`The Time Meddler` is set squarely in 1066, with the Battle Of Hastings approaching and against a backdrop of grunting Britons and marauding Nordic types, but also introduces viewers to another member of The Doctor's then-unnamed time travelling race. Played by Peter Butterworth, The Meddling Monk also travels through time in his own TARDIS, but not to do good like The Doctor or to do bad like too many other latterday Time Lord introductions. Instead he has a rather skewed sense of humour, and a huge volume of get-rich-quick schemes to rival even those of Kramer from Seinfeld, and on this occasion intends to give King Harold the upper hand by arming him with twentieth century weapons. Of course, The Doctor could just have said "it won't work, you silly man, stop trying to change history", but then we wouldn't have had the four episodes of knockabout tomfoolery from two comic veterans of stage and screen. `The Time Meddler` is, effectively, `The Romans` for science fiction fans, funny and thrilling at the same time.

Curiously, this effective balance would not be maintained in the third series. Donald Cotton's `The Myth Makers` seemed to lose sight of the sci-fi end of the scale, ending up a broadly overplayed farce where gags took precedence over historical accuracy and, for the most part, an actual storyline. The story, such as it is, broadly follows that of the Trojan Horse, although not as most historians would recognise it. The time-honoured tale of Helen Of Troy, Paris Of Troy, Agamemnon, King Priam and a huge wooden rabbit is played out in a manner that would seem to invite one of those 'Any Resemblance To Characters From Greek Mythology...' disclaimers, while in what little background this flimsy plot has to offer The Tardis is 'captured', The Doctor gets mistaken for Zeus and a Trojan spy, and Vicki is retitled Cressida Of Troy and opts to stay behind to marry a historical figure she's only just met. By all accounts this totally bonkers story - so zanily written that the BBC top brass felt the need to step in and stop the production team from using Cotton's original episode titles like Is There A Doctor In The Horse? - didn't really come across too well on the screen, although sadly there's not really very much footage in existence to confirm or disprove this. There were certainly production problems that could account for this; the need to try and make it look as though there was a real giant wooden horse in the studio despite there being neither the time, money nor even physical space to build one must have tested a few patiences. Lending even more weight to the idea that something went very wrong in translation is Cotton's own novelisation of the story, a rip-roaring screwball comedy that knows it doesn't have much in the way of historical accuracy or plot but frankly just doesn't care.

In its closing minutes, The Myth Makers took a curious turn for the less comic, with Steven seriously wounded as they make their escape and The Doctor reluctantly having to take Trojan handmaiden Katarina with them to tend to him. This was by way of scene-setting (if you don't count the scene-setting one-off 'teaser' episode five weeks previously) for the following week's commencement of the bleak and violent twelve week hallucinogenic freakout that was The Daleks' Master Plan. Katarina, the series' first ever historical character, only managed to make it through four weeks of psychedelic warmongering before being ejected into space; the production team quickly realised that they'd bitten off more than they could chew by bringing in a character that had to have even the most basic of architectural fittings explained to her, let alone Daleks, Time Destructors and The Master Of Zephon. About three quarters of the way through, the production team felt the need to lighten the tone slightly, and after a downright odd Christmas Day pantomime episode, they brought back The Meddling Monk for a couple of episodes' worth of comic one-upmanship between him, The Doctor and The Daleks and their allies in Ancient Egypt. It's not strictly a historical tale, and the Egyptians don't really do very much apart from throw things at Daleks, but it would be churlish not to mention the brief stopover here as the lone surviving episode is fantastic.

The Daleks' Master Plan did get all dark and malevolent again in time for its shocking Time Destructing climax, and the historical story that followed, `The Massacre` made no attempt to lighten the lingering mood. Expecting a pleasant stopover in sixteenth century France, the Doctor and Steven have been there for all of three minutes before they are co-opted into various schemes of contradictory subterfuge, and it gradually dawns on them that they have arrived immediately prior to the massacre of the Huguenots by the reigning Catholics. Despite being dragged into the plotting and counterplotting as unwitting pawns (and yes, the Doctor is mistaken for someone else yet again), they know deep down that there is nothing that they can do but stand back and watch events unfold until an opportunity to get away presents itself. They can't prevent the massacre from taking place, and nor can they save Anne Chaplet, a young girl whom Steven has befriended, which briefly leads to him abandoning The Doctor in disgust in modern-day London. At the very end of the story, though, he returns with another young girl who had mistaken the Tardis for a real Police Box. Apparently, the fact that cockney loudmouth Dorothea 'Dodo' Chaplet has the same surname as the girl they left behind means that she managed to survive the turbulent events after all. Erm, righto.

`The Massacre` can also boast of the dubious distinction of having a real-life historical mystery attached to it. As The Doctor and Steven flee the ensuing carnage in the final episode, the script calls for a series of woodcuts loaned from the British Museum to convey the true horror of events to the family teatime audience. That's what the people who wrote in to the Radio Times to complain referred to, too; but the existing production paperwork states that David Weston (Muss), Michael Bilton (Toligny) and Leonard Sachs (de Coligny) took part in this filmed insert in some way. There's no film or telesnap evidence of this, and the surviving audio recording gives nothing away... so what exactly did happen? Were they shown responding to the woodcut-depicted events with Martin Freeman-style 'reaction shots'? Or, more chillingly, languishing in a cell or being led away to their execution? Were they even seen penning letters of complaint? Sadly, until archaeologists uncover a film print during excavation work at Lime Grove, this is destined to remain one of the great unanswered questions of the past. What there can be no doubt about is that gobby mod girl Dodo and her Carnaby Street clobber changed all the 'rules' during her all-too-brief dalliance with Doctor Who's World Of History. She only appeared in one such story, but within its four episode confines managed to break almost every taboo as she was seen (or at least implied) to drink, gamble, hang out with ladies of ill repute, and totally fail to do anything resembling singing.

`The Gunfighters` follows on directly from previous tale The Celestial Toymaker as the Doctor decides that the only man who can fix the tooth he has broken on the rock hard sweets left behind by evil Bunter-esque games nerd Cyril is that varmint of the Old West, Doc Holliday. The fact that the first episode is titled `A Holliday For The Doctor` is a dead giveaway that Donald Cotton is back in the writer's chair, and while again there's not tremendously much in the way of dramatic plot development to speak of, and a fair amount of liberty taken with historical fact, the hilarious runaround as The Doctor's sharp-shootin' dental chum tries to avoid the unwelcome attentions of both Marshal Wyatt Earp and the vengeful Clanton Family is a joy to behold. The novelisation, written from the perspective of a an ageing Doc Holliday relating his memoirs to a journalist in a nursing home, is even better, and presumably The Gunfighters is so often found hovering near the bottom of Best Story charts (or, worse still, hovering near the top of Worst Story charts) is purely because so few people have ever really bothered with it, preferring to let the story's lingering poor reputation do the deciding for them. This was the last story to bear individual episode titles rather than an overall story title, and if you were thinking that probably suggested major changes in the offing then you'd be exactly right. With production responsibilities having changed hands several times since the launch of the series, and the BBC finally stumbling out of its didactic dark ages, the imperative to keep Doctor Who as a semi-educational concern was imperative no longer, and as the historical stories notoriously got lower viewing figures than those with weird alien landscapes and alien monsters the production team had no hesitation in binning them with immediate effect. Well, immediate-ish. There were still the pressures of a weekly production schedule to wrestle with, and a couple of historical commissions already in the in-tray, so a couple more did end up finding their way onscreen.

By now Steven and Dodo had also been written out, their replacements being the more sassy and down to Earth Londoners-about-town Ben Jackson and Polly Lopez (look, let's not even get into the business about her surname, OK?). Ben and Polly were great companions full stop, and it's a tremendous shame that so few of their episodes still survive, as it was in the historical stories that they really shone. Ironically, while they were ostensibly brought in to give the series a more 'modern' feel, it's in their excursions into the past that they fully become the Avengers Girl and Ealing Films Sidekick archetypes that they were always envisaged as, never afraid to whip up a bit of insurrection or to use feminine 'wiles' to outsmart dumb men. Although the latter applied slightly less frequently to Ben.

Their first historical, Brian Hayles' `The Smugglers` does in fact maintain some of the thrill and vigour of the reinvented series; there is no attempt at all to 'make learning fun', nor even to make learning learning, and aside from a couple of minor details like costumes and modes of transport this story could just as easily have been set in the present day. There's also, thankfully, none of that by now tedious 'oooooh, you look just like The Doctor' business to contend with. Instead, they find themselves entrusted with a secret code by a reformed smuggler turned churchwarden, which his former compatriots - the noble Jamaica, the treacherous but by-the-book Captain Pike and the far from cherubic Cherub (played, somewhat alarmingly, by longtime genial Grange Hill caretaker Mr Griffiths himself, George A Cooper) - will stop at nothing to get hold of. And that includes murdering churchwardens and murdering each other, before their plans are finally thwarted by the arrival of some Inland Revenue men. No, honestly.

Ben and Polly were also around to witness the first ever regeneration as William Hartnell handed the lead role, and a mirror with a photo badly glued onto it, to Patrick Troughton, and after a chilling six-part Dalek story they were straight into what would turn out to be the last of the historicals, `The Highlanders`. Co-written by Gerry Davis and Elwyn Jones, the story is in fact rather different to what had gone before, with the air of an ITV Saturday teatime serial and the extensive location filming to match. Set in eighteenth century Scotland, It starts off in much the same manner as The Crusade, with bluffs and double bluffs abounding in the hope of protecting a fleeing Bonnie Prince Charlie, but then turns into a more dynamic tale as The Doctor uncovers a plot by a crooked English solicitor to transport some Scottish prisoners of war - and Ben - to be used as forced labourers on a remote plantation. While Ben gets to do plenty of seabound swashbuckling, including being made to walk the plank, it falls to The Doctor and Polly to outwit the solicitor and the British army respectively. At the end of the tale, they were joined in a rather overcrowded TARDIS by young Clan piper Jamie McCrimmon; Jamie was never originally planned as a companion, but the production team liked him so much that they decided to keep him on as a regular, although contrary to popular belief 'viewer response' had little to do with this decision and Frazer Hines was contracted for a regular role before the serial had actually aired. As noted above, a previous attempt to introduce a companion from 'the past' into the series had been little short of a rapidly-abandoned disaster, but Jamie's relative modernity made him far better suited to the task, able to grasp the concept, if not the technicality, of scientific innovations with the aid of a simple explanation where necessary, or alternately just to brush his bewilderment aside with a sarcastic "oh aye, that!". Jamie would remain with the Second Doctor for pretty much the entirety of his tenure, but the historical stories from whence he came would not enjoy similar longevity. `The Highlanders` is a great story but must have seemed like a real fish out of water amongst the Fish People, Macra and whatever other aquatic adversaries there were in series four, and the production team were clearly keen to get rid of the troublesome subgenre altogether. Not for nothing is the Troughton era, from that point on entirely unencumbered by anything but the briefest of excursions into the most modern of twentieth century eras, fondly remembered as 'The Monster Years'.

It is with no small irony that these historical stories, confined to the already poorly-represented black and white early history of Doctor Who, should have since become pretty much the stuff of archaeological digs themselves. The original master videotapes had mostly been reused by the BBC even before the decade was out, and the film prints that were made of all the stories in question were mostly junked by BBC Enterprises in the early 1970s, unaware that their copies were the only officially surviving ones at that time. Since then, a number have turned up courtesy of private collectors, overseas film vaults, and one eagle-eyed fan who spotted a pile of film cans taped up for destruction. `An Unearthly Child`, `The Aztecs`, `The Romans`, `The Time Meddler` and `The Gunfighters` all exist in full, along with episodes one, two, three and six of `The Reign Of Terror,` episodes one and three of `The Crusade`, and one of the Ancient Egypt-troubling episodes of `The Daleks' Master Plan`, and sod all of `Marco Polo`, `The Myth Makers`, `The Massacre`, `The Smugglers` and `The Highlanders`. Above and beyond this there are an unnerving assortment of hangings and stabbings as cut from `The Smugglers` and `The Highlanders` by Australian censors, some smudgy 8mm off-screen footage from `The Reign Of Terror` and `The Myth Makers`, a brief shot of a clapperboard being waved around during location filming for `The Highlanders` (why didn't whoever kept it just keep the whole reel?), and some bizarre colour home movie footage of the making of `The Smugglers`, featuring what appears to be William Hartnell being stolen. There are of course those trusty off-air audio recordings of all of the missing episodes, and equally off-air telesnaps of most of them too. The one exception to this is `The Massacre`, of which virtually no visual evidence remains at all.

It's unlikely that anyone would praise their invaluable contribution as source material for a PhD thesis, but despite their reputation the Doctor Who historical stories are tremendous fun as well as a not particularly useful way of learning nothing of particular value or accuracy about real world history. Most of the extant historical episodes are available on DVD now, and it's also worth digging out the novelisations issued when they weren't quite so available, although don't follow the example of one particular individual who will be spared the embarrassment of being named here, who once landed themselves with a detention for being caught reading The Myth Makers during a 'proper' history lesson. Meanwhile, if you've been sufficiently inspired by this article to think about having a go at archaeology yourself, then you might like to start off by trying to figure out exactly where a joke about Top Of The Pops and the library music piece Illustrations No.4 - Frightened Man would have fitted into an earlier draft of it.

MIND THE GAP!

'Dr Who' followers around the world were shaken to the core when the series was put 'on ice' in 1985. John Connors traces the turbulent 18 months that followed during which time the Doctor was indeed in considerable distress.

On Wednesday 27 February 1985 London's daily newspaper 'The Evening Standard' received a phone call from a never identified source at Thames Television repeating a rumour they'd heard to the effect that 'Dr Who' was being taken off the air "for at least 18 months". This was not a new rumour. Who producer John Nathan Turner had already heard it himself the previous week from both Ian Levine (his unofficial script consultant) and Robert Holmes (who'd been commissioned to pen a third Auton story) but he'd dismissed them. It's almost certain that the stories originated from one of many fans who were employed at the BBC and it was wishful thinking on the producer's part to ignore the signs of a television programme in crisis; signs that had been apparent for two months. Episode 1 of 'Attack of the Cybermen' had garnered impressive ratings of 9 million but they had tumbled to 7 million for the second part. By 'Mark of the Rani' part 1 they'd dropped alarmingly to 6.28 million; a fall of almost a third in less than 8 weeks. This fall had been noticed by the press who were on alert for a cancellation/crisis angle, a situation heightened by rising complaints about the level of graphic violence in the season Which had been voiced publicly in the 'Radio Times' and on 'Points of View'. Inside the BBC, Jonathan Powell had singled out 'The Two Doctors' for particular criticism - the stories' meandering lack of focus, glossy but empty content and seemingly gratuitous acts of violence making it a perfect example of the series decline even before it reached the viewing public. Powell had made all this clear to Turner during a private meeting but if the latter's recent DWM memoirs are to be believed he did not see the inevitable until the storm hit. Twelve years later Nathan Turner still runs with the official explanation that Powell gave him when informing him that 'Dr Who's 23rd season would not go into production until 1986 at the earliest. He says he was told by Powell that the BBC needed to commit a large amount of money towards expanding it's daytime programming and that in order to fund this, other programmes were being cut back or postponed until the following financial year. This is by no means untrue; many other series were affected ('Juliet Bravo' for example suffered a curtailed season, 'Pop Quiz' and 'Crackerjack' were cancelled and never returned) but it would also be accurate to say that had 'Dr Who' been seen as an ongoing success it would not have been such an easy target.'The Standard's story that day dwelt on the financial angle but added that the show was only being "rested" and would be back "next year". They also had quotes from the DWAS who were "shocked" and Levine who said 'Dr Who' was "more than just a TV programme. For 22 years it's been a way of life" presumably speaking up for all those Time Lords resident on Earth! Just to stoke things up the paper reminded everyone how the BBC had been forced to back down over 'Dallas', the popular U.S soap opera that they'd hinted they wouldn't be able to afford to buy anymore until a tabloid led revolt made them think again, It was to be this precedent that leading fans would use as a benchmark for their actions in the next few days. The floodgates were well and truly open as the cancellation featured on that evening's news bulletins and the next morning, February 28th every national newspaper carried the story including 'The Sun's now renowned DR.WHO IS AXED IN A BBC PLOT story that occupied a third of the front page, a prominence that the 'Daily Express', 'Financial Times', 'Daily Telegraph' and 'Guardian' also gave it. Had the 'Sunday Sport' been around they would no doubt have run the story as REAL AUTONS ARE IN THE BBC. 'The subject was mentioned in several of that day's news and chat shows and it quickly became clear that the decision was unpopular with many people who worked at the Corporation. Lots of Who luminaries were wheeled out for a quote including an unusually outspoken Patrick Troughton ("He should stick to acting" fumed Michael Grade later) and Jon Pertwee who took the opportunity to suggest they brought each of the former Doctors back for a year, an idea that presumably delighted Colin Baker! By that afternoon the Dr Who Fan Club of America had even offered to raise the money to pay for the BBC to make season 23 that year.This blanket coverage from the press was far from the spontaneous outcry that it appeared as Levine had spent the previous day working overtime to stoke up the tabloids with the help of Nathan Turner who officially had nothing to say. Levene was convinced that unless there was a big enough backlash against the suspension the series would never return and he, Nathan Turner and BBC Press officer Kevin O'Shea pooled ideas to try and "suggest ways of getting the programme back in production sooner rather than later" as JNT puts it in DWM. gap003.GIF (142701 bytes) In a 1992 DWB interview, Levine went into detail about the way this worked using the example of 'Sun' journalist Charles Catchpole; "(JNT) told me that there were codenames within the BBC that Catchpole would know so I phoned him and said I worked on the 6th Floor under Michael Grade and that my name was Snowball. I said that there was a plot to get rid of 'Dr Who'." Assuming that the journalist's response wasn't a sarcastic "Well you'd better call UNIT then", Levine went on to detail how much money the show made for the Corporation from overseas sales and merchandise. The trio had realised that while the series' plight would make a big entertainment story it wasn't front page material unless it was given a wider angle and the notion that the affair was part of a wider BBC gambit involving finances was just the ticket. Stunts like Levine pictured smashing his television set also gave the fans a passionate angle even if the idea was JNTs and the set was found on a scrapheap. Perhaps Levine should have smashed his gold discs instead?The most curious aspect of all is that it was Michael Grade who was blamed for everything. Even DWB which was relentless in it's attacks on the quality of the series at that time (something the DWAS almost ignored) and seemed well informed as to what was going on, failed to identify Powell as anything other than one of a series of BBC execs to whom letters could be written. Grade, who was far more ambivalent to the show than Powell (who was on record as hating 'Dr Who') got all the flak and was even pursued on a skiing holiday and for months afterwards to the point where cancelling 'Dr Who' is one of the best known things he supposedly did at the BBC.On March 1, press coverage entered it's second day as both 'The Sun' and the 'Daily Star' launched 'Save Dr Who' campaigns and there was the emergence of what must rank as the most embarrassing Who related project ever, an all star single the proceeds of which would go towards funding season 23 though it later became a charity record. After Band Aid these sort of records would become familiar but protesting against a TV show being taken off the air for longer than usual is pushing it as far as worthy causes go. Paul Mark Tams, a former DWAS exec member was the mastermind behind this idea. By that afternoon however the tide turned. The BBCs managing director Bill Cotton decided on some damage limitation and issued a statement to the effect that 'Dr Who' would be back in 1986 and was "definitely" not cancelled for good and would be returning to it's "traditional" 25 minute format. He even took time to phone up DWAS Co-ordinator David Saunders to tell him in advance of the statement, presumably to stop the fan network giving the press any more stuff for the next day's editions and it worked like a dream; for the tabloids the statement was confirmation that 'Dr Who' was saved and the story had run out of mileage. In fact the BBC had said nothing new but the wording gave the impression of a compromise and allowed fans the satisfaction of having won. It was thus a strange situation for leading fans to find themselves in when they met on March 3rd to discuss a crisis that had seemingly ended. Yet there was agreement to continue the letterwriting campaigns, urge local groups to pursue publicity and write again to Bill Cotton to gain assurances. The meeting was attended by the DWAS exec, various genre magazine editors, DWB, Ian Levine and Paul Tams and it was to provide the basis for a period of reasonable agreement between the factions though an incident in which it was discovered DWB editor Gary Leigh was secretly taping the meeting was an indication that this truce was to be short lived. As time went on fandom was split both by the way the response to the crisis was handled and by the content of the forthcoming season 23. This was nevertheless a vibrant time for fans at all levels. The next few days saw the story fade from the national press though Grade was finally cornered and stressed the need for the series to appeal to a British audience suggesting that strong overseas sales were not considered of importance. He also poured scorn on fandom's noisy response to the situation describing them as a "small interest group" and the fuss in the papers as "a storm in a teacup". Given subsequent insight as to how it wasn't really too much to do with him, his anger isn't surprising even if, at the time, it cemented his reputation as 'Dr Who's Public Enemy No.l. The charity single was recorded on 7/8 March and despite Tams' earlier claims that a good proportion of the period's top pop stars would be involved, the woeful celeb count actually amounted to members of Ultravox and The Moody Blues, the ex drummer of The Jam, all of the artists Levine produced (few of whom were known outside the dance music world) plus stars from the show including Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant, Anthony Ainley and Nick Courtney. To be fair, they had the best intentions but the song itself, 'Doctor In Distress' was a lamentably ordinary Hi NRG workout with awkward lyrics that betrayed a lack of copyright clearance, hence K9 becomes "a canine computer" and so on, though Ainley's contribution is priceless! Released under the unfortunately appropriate moniker of Who Cares, the song was banned by the Radio 1 on the grounds that the lyrics couldn't be heard though it was probably for the best. gap005.GIF (204547 bytes) The seven days that shook the world of 'Dr Who' were over but the aftershocks would go on for the next 18 months and beyond. DWB spent the time dreaming up ways of keeping the campaign going spurred on by developments they were the first to reveal - in particular the next season's reduced episode count and Eric Saward's dramatic walkout- their coverage ranging from accurate scoops to outright paranoia and a line of distinctly distasteful personal abuse. An article in the September 1985 issue is a typical example of the scattershot approach. "Season 23 will almost certainly be the very last" it announces proceeding to justify the statement with the fact that there were no Who repeats scheduled for that summer and that all protest letters about the suspension were being passed to JNT to answer. Most of all, scorn was directed at the DWAS for doing nothing in case they upset the BBC "The day will come" the article concludes menacingly "when questions will be asked and a lot of heads will be on the plate." Rumours that DWAS exec members took to travelling in bullet proof cars cannot be confirmed! In truth the Society was in a difficult position and the accusation of being unwilling to upset the BBC that Leigh often made was partly true. The DWAS had to look at the bigger picture and, as it was now certain that there would be a season 23 in some form, the best option would be for the Society to help promote it in the most positive way which is what CT did. That does not mean that behind the scenes the situation wasn't being monitored and assessed or that there was no strategy; in fact the next year a plan was drawn up for use in the event of any future cancellation crisis. Apart from the sniping that it created the different approaches meant that fans were well served; they could rant and rave along with DWB while being sure that the DWAS was maintaining a dialogue with the production office and the 6th Floor, Yet at the time a lot of fans were frustrated by what they saw as the DWAS' lack of action and perhaps the most contentious issue was to be the episode count of the next season. As early as April 1985 rumours had begun to circulate that season 23 would not contain 26 episodes. At the DWASocial 5 event that month Levine addressed the audience to claim that there would only be 20 episodes and urged them to renew their campaigns. The same day, Nathan Turner denounced Levine's claims describing them as "rabble rousing". CT editor Dominic May then printed a review of the event describing Levine's speech as akin to a "Hitler rally" under the headline 'Who Do You Believe?' Nathan Turner was also upset by this inference that there was any doubt about what he'd been saying! The actual occasion was just as heated as it sounds and only Colin Baker's presence helped diffuse the tensions though it should be mentioned that some people applauded both Levine and Nathan Turner with equal enthusiasm! In a subsequent interview Levine claimed that JNT apologised for publicly denouncing him but said "I will decide when the fans know not you". It's also worth noting a letter published by C f and dated l7 April (after DWASocial 5) sees Jonathan Powell stating that the number of episodes that the next season will comprise of has "not yet" been decided. It wasn't until September 1985 that any further evidence was forthcoming thanks to a telegram sent to the series' American distributors Lionheart but received accidentally by Ron Katz, head of the American fan club which stated that there would only be 14 episodes. Meanwhile the rest of 1985 saw plans for next season being formulated although script editor Eric Saward later alleged that not a lot was done with the extra time. The radio play 'Slipback' was made and, true to form, Nathan Turner ensured that there were sundry photo opportunities and even a parachute jump to keep the press involved. In the autumn Michael Grade commented again on the show re-iterating his views on the weaknesses of last season and saying that the ratings for the next one would decide the series' future. December 18 saw the BBC finally officially announce the 14 episodes presumably hoping everyone was too busy 'doing' Xmas to be bothered protesting. Coming hard on the heels of the final closure of the Blackpool 'Dr Who' Exhibition it was a bleak time for fans. Colin Baker was reported to be "upset, angered (and) disgusted". Fans were dumbfounded when on January 23 1986 it was announced that Bonnie Langford was to be the next companion replacing Nicola Bryant halfway through next season. Bonnie, who's cool credibility was zero, was pictured zooming about on high wires with Col while 'The Sun' described her as "the last hope" for the series. Ian Levine denounced the casting as "the last straw" and severed all connections with the production office. In his recent DWM series Nathan Turner went out of his way to defend Bonnie whom he described as "a fine performer" who he said he'd cast due to her "enormous talent" and to gain publicity. Even his staunchest supporters would agree that this was total miscasting and Bonnie herself soon regretted the move which she thought would give her a chance to break away from her twee image but instead showed up her inadequacies as a television actress, Her arrival was to turn the tide too for many who'd supported JNT thus far and at a time when Michael Grade was publicly calling for 'Dr Who' to strive for the production standards of the likes of 'Robin of Sherwood' showed how out of touch with modern television JNT and, by implication, 'Dr Who' was becoming and it was the producer's greatest folly to believe in that old adage that there's no such thing as bad publicity. Slowly 'Dr Who' was becoming a machine that had no function other than to feed itself; the survival of the show had become more important than maintaining it's status as a challenging and entertaining programme. These developments unsettled Eric Saward and led to deteriorating relations in the production office and the script editor quitting after JNT rejected his ideas for the climax to season 23 which would have seen the Doctor and Master falling into a vortex. The producer felt this was too negative and that there should be a clear message that "the show was back in business". The trial concept itself was quite liked by Michael Grade though not by Jonathan Powell (who hated 'Mysterious Planet' especially) and the show's dirty laundry was dragged back into the public domain when Saward was interviewed in 'Starburst' and slammed recent developments going as far as claiming Nathan Turner spent script conferences looking out of the window; the producer later described this interview as "hurtful".

Everything faded into the background when season 23 debuted on 6 September 1986. The DWAS held their PanoptiCon event that weekend and screened the episode live in what must rank as one of the all time best convention moments. Over 700 attendees became increasingly excited as 5.45 grew closer and just before the episode began hundreds of party poppers and streamers were let off. Dominic Glynn's re-working of the title theme was greeted by thunderous applause as the 18 month gap was over at last and the huge screen made the impressive opening model shot even more stunning. Of course you had to be there. Eleven years later we're more familiar with 'Mysterious Planet' as the wordy, rather dull and meandering story it is. Yet the euphoria persisted with rumours that 10 million people had watched it. The truth was that the whole season was a ratings disaster. That first episode only got 4.9 million viewers and this dropped to 3.92 the next week. The highest rated was 5.94 for 'Terror of the Vervoids' part 3. Action was swift and in November Colin Baker was sacked, a move that the press had already anticipated speculating it was because he had been outspoken during the suspension but Grade claimed that 3 years as the Doctor was standard (?!). There was sympathy for the actor but his Doctor is nowadays generally seen as the least effective though he also had the highest proportion of poor scripts to work with. Like Saward before him Baker made his grudges public; in his case, it was 'The Sun' who delighted in adding to the impression of 'Dr. Who' as a series in terminal decay. Soon after season 23 had finished there was a rumour that only three more seasons would be made and then the show would be scrapped for good. Curious…

THE DOCTOR WHO MAN

John Nathan Turner loved `Dr Who` but his devotion was never fully repaid.
Words: John Connors

Three tales about JNT–

1985. An elegant hotel suite is packed to the rich curtained walls with eager and emotional `Dr Who` fans. Rumours are sweeping the grand interior and amongst the gaggle of fans and there is a palpable air of expectation and antagonism around the place. Like a heavy afternoon where a sullen sky looms overhead, it feels as if a storm will break any second. Two figures take to the stage. Both are a little on the round side; Colin Baker is smiling but it's a nervous smile. John Nathan Turner glowers thinly at the assembled hordes aware of the mood he has created simply by turning up. He knows the truth and that the rumours are largely true though he will deny it this very day. He will later take offence when the DWAS newsletter `CT` infers he may have been lying as if the very idea were untenable. Time of course proved that the rabble rousing Ian Levine was right but that's not really the point. The relationship between the producer and the fans was that of cat and mouse and it had always been thus.
Circa early 1980s. `DWB` had got it's editorial in a twist about the influence of JNT on the direction of the most vehemently supported television programme in the world. Today, at a time when guests still walk on water and float into convention halls to ecstatic applause, this producer will get on stage and criticise “that rag”. He'll attack it like a pop star might attack `The Sun` for intruding on their private life from the stage in a way I never saw nor heard of him doing otherwise. Fandom gave him trouble from the off, except when it gave him awards.
Late March 2002. The self same (and now former) producer is quite ill and could stay at home but chooses to return to the convention scene now he knows times are different. `Dr Who` fans no longer get quite so passionate about their series; they moan in small corners a bit but mostly are happy to consume the leftovers and welcome any and all guests with good grace. These days Gary Leigh lives in the US (the place where he once scorned the producer for spending so much time) and is nowhere to be seen. Wheelchair bound, looking frail and sounding vague JNT can't actually be hoisted onto the stage so lurks at the front. To those further back than the first few rows his is a weak, disembodied voice seeming to offer unenthusiastic responses to the usual questions. Everyone was speculating on his condition but when asked about the nature of his incapacity he offers something about a broken foot. Spinning till the end…

More than any other backroom figure in the history of the series, JNT created and thrived in his own myth and ensured that we would remember him long after we might pass Barry Letts in the street with his fish supper and no longer recognise him.

JNT was a cult figure from the off. Those initials. That `Day With A tv producer` book. JNT with shades on at the Longleat event. JNT with his “stay tuned” and “no comment” statements, his Hawaiian shirts and his ever so slightly camp, but droll speaking voice and, when he took offence with “eyes narrowed”. JNT publishing his DW memoirs, about 100 episodes of them in DWM and even then revealing no more than a handful of titbits, refusing to acknowledge things that we all damn well knew. And he knew that we knew.

He was involved with the series for twenty of it's twenty six years first as production assistant on `The Space Pirates`, in various capacities on some early Pertwees and then eventually managing the budget for season 15, 16 and 17 before being appointed producer in December 1979. JNT soon made his mark, standardising Tom's costume in what now seems like a symbolic statement of intent. Out went the humour, in came science, courtesy of Christopher Bidmead and there were also lots of new companions, including Adric. Supposedly an `artful dodger` type of character, the infamous `bottle of wine` tale of how Matthew Waterhouse (posh, pretentious and not in the least bit streetwise) got the role became the first of a string of JNT stories that did the rounds of a fandom that was bigger than you might think.

Pretty soon, JNT started to change the way `Dr Who` looked to the general public, `bringing it into the 80s` - female companions in flimsy dresses, television actor de jour Peter Davison in the title role and appointed an unofficial continuity advisor, one Ian Levine. JNT was passionate about `Dr Who`; he had a fan's delight in the series moments of success and, certainly at the start, he wanted it to reclaim it's ratings because he was a fan; it had nothing to do with his ego or career. It would be this attitude that would end up de-railing his career and souring his relationships with fans and production staff. No other producer paid the amount of attention to what fandom was saying, which is why no other producer was so badly burned by it. Late 70s zines were every bit as scabrous about Graham Williams as they were about Turner; the difference being Williams had never sought their approval above other considerations and he wasn't so emotionally tied to `Dr Who` for it to hurt that much.

In the early 80s `Dr Who` became a success for another time because all it's special features had been boiled down to their raw components. Gradually, as Bidmead moved on and Saward grabbed the creative reins the show had more continuity, brighter settings and tons of guest stars. Most great tv actors wanted to appear in `Dr Who` and JNT saw this as a potentially huge publicity device, getting valuable tabloid space. While the ratings were good and the show enjoyable this worked a treat. Had JNT left after three seasons, he would have been rightly lauded as the second best producer the show ever had. He modernised the series, gave it an 80s sheen and even though it had started to repeat itself, there were still heart stopping moments like the end of `Earthshock`, the whole of `Kinda` and so on. Often the promise fo that early long pan over deckchairs on Brighton beach was fulfilled but equally it is moot as to how much of this was down to the producer himself. He did assemble the team however and that in itself is a skill. Even the fans, who dearest wish had once been for Tom to leave (unbelievable but true) seemed happy; the Dr Who Appreciation Society even created a special award presented to him in 1982 and he was dubbed `the Fan's producer`.

Then Davison left and Colin Baker became the Doctor. There is no getting round this casting faux pas, however nice a bloke Col is and it was squarely down to JNT who developed a knack of imposing decisions contrary to the way the rest of the series was being handled when it suited him and yet, allegedly, staring out of the window at script meetings. It is not difficult to see how Eric Sward would become increasingly frustrated by such interference and the real crux of the lurching direction the series went in during the mid 80s was due to there being no creative balance for the script editor's slap dash megamix mentality. It was the point when the writing team stopped writing stories and started constructing spectacles. Plots and internal logic were left on the cutting room floor by over zealous editing. Having done a lot of scripting work, Saward would thus often find his efforts derailed by producer's whims or odd casting or, eventually, in the case of Bonnie Langford, impossible casting.

Too many people have related stories of the producer's volatile temper and bearing of grudges for them not to be true, but there also seems to have been a certain relish in taking on opponents. JNT liked a fight as long as it was bitchy and on his terms. Yet he would later talk of betrayal if these fights reached the outside world. I have known people who had to meet JNT on a weekly basis for news and he loved to dangle snippets of information as if doing them a huge favour; but often it would be in the `Daily Mirror` before fanzines had published.

There was also the vexed question of why JNT stayed so long as producer. Since his death, an attempt has been made to suggest he was almost a prisoner yet many people at the BBC during the 80s quit to form their own companies and few of them probably possessed as much pizzazz as JNT when it came to working up people's enthusiasm for things. So, why did he stay? It must go back to his love of DW and the way he was treated by Stateside fans. He was spending more and more time in the States, getting a hero's welcome and the star treatment from worshipful US fans. Why can't the UK fans be like that, he had been heard to mutter on more than one occasion. There was a furore in 1983 when it was claimed American fans got preferential treatment at the Longleat shindig and a year or two later a deep seated divide had opened up over the way each side of the Atlantic viewed the series and it's producer. In te States, JNT was a star to fans especially as he helped bring all the series' icons (even Tom) to conventions over there.

Here, `Dr Who Bulletin` had stared sniping; nearly every month they managed to carry a front page news story which, whatever the topic, got round to disparaging the producer. There were threats of revelations about JNT's private life and possible legal action in retaliation which all looks a bit silly I retrospect. JNT was only the producer of a tv show while Leigh and company behaved as if he had committed major cries against society. Leigh even stated many times how his aim was to get the BBC to sack John Nathan-Turner. That any of this mattered to the series itself shows how far the producer and the fans had become interconnected. The war of words boiled over in early 1985 when the series was put on ice for 18 months. JNT may have had more sympathy – and certainly more dignity – had he quit there and then, a reasonable course of action considering the BBC had effectively judged his work unsatisfactory. Instead, just like Graham Williams before him (albeit in very different circumstances) JNT was saddled with very restrictive guidelines but unlike his predecessor he did not rise to the occasion. When the series returned it was, to be frank, a bit crap, cheap and uninspired. Ratings were poor, Saward walked out after JNT wanted to change his dark, and eminently more appropriate season climax, into something more positive (and confusing!). Rather than now leave we had his usual “I have been persuaded to stay” speech.

Suddenly it appeared as if everyone had turned on JNT. Saward went to the papers to launch an attack which the producer later called “extremely personal and abusive”. DWB went in for the kill throwing all sorts of muck and it goes without saying that JNT did not appear to have the confidence of his employers. Rumours circulated that he couldn't be moved on from the show because he was a BBC employee and they had no other projects for him. Even Ian Levine attacked, often in contradictory fashion and demonstrating why his appointment as `unofficial advisor` had been an enormous mistake.

Luckily salvation was at hand courtesy of Andrew Cartmel who had a radical vision of a new, graphic novel version of Dr Who` that seemed to match the expectations of a new generation of viewers and even though the BBC scheduled it badly, the last three seasons offered a glimpse of how the series still had mileage. Of course, like he always did JNT interfered a little too much but even his light entertainment leanings could not dent the firepower fury conjured up by a new raft of writers and directors. Then the producer's tenure really was over when the series was cancelled for good at the end of 1989.

Afterwards, instead of making a decisive break from the past, JNT pootled about, unable to find anything to do that appeared to occupy his mind quite as strongly as `Dr Who`. He kept coming back as an advisor to this, a presenter of that, a presence here and there. Rather heartlessly DWB pursued him at every turn till he was replaced as the BBC's video release advisor. Turning up at conventions during the 90s he maintained his producer's visage giving away little or claiming not to be able to remember anything. He was always working on other projects but then they always seemed to be involved with Who alumni and not one of them ever saw the light of day. He could never break free because he probably didn't want to. Even that final convention appearance was bizarre.

As a producer, JNT knew everything there was to know about budgets and publicity; he could probably have marketed a parsnip and made it sound exciting. But creatively he relied on his script editors and there are clearly discernable changes in format each time that post holder changed. He wasn't really the right producer for a show like `Dr Who` and certainly not for such a lengthy tenure and the idea that he couldn't leave seems ludricous in hindsight and one can only reach the conclusion that he didn't really want to. Yet it could also be argued that he was the reason the show lasted as long as it did. During the cancellation crisis of 85-86 JNT personally helped engineer a lot of the publicity aimed at saving the show, even though officially he could say nothing.

As a `Dr Who` personality, he was secretive and guarded about his life and thoughts to the very end, even about any beliefs that drove his decisions on the show (contrast that with Barry Letts' philosophical influences). His only stated aim was `bums on seats`; a depressingly un-artistic view of something as writer driven as `Dr Who`. The irony is that many fans probably know more about him than we do about any other producer of the show and yet now it seems a little unfair to put any of it into print. I think that's an irony he'd enjoy.

John Nathan Turner produced 130 episodes of `Dr Who` but never really knew what the show was about. He ruined a promising television career by refusing to move on and became entranced by the fame and notoriety he had in the enclosed `Dr Who` world. If we can call the positive things he did for the show an achievement then we can also reflect on how much time and effort he wasted on the series and on his fan detractors. In the end he could never see the big picture that counted, not even to do the best thing for himself. And that's a bit sad really.

DENNIS POTTER AND THE SEA DEVILS!!??

Could Britain's renowned television playwright have submitted a script for `Dr Who`? Read on…

Words: Matt Salusbury

When I was seven, I saw The Sea Devils. Classic Pertwee-era action adventure, gun battles between monsters and UNIT troops, martial arts, fencing, car chases. Hurrah! And the famous bit at the end, in which they think they've got the Master, except it's really a hypnotised prison guard in a rubber Master mask, and when they rip it off, the guard says: “I must obey. I must obey…” as the Master makes his escape in a hovercraft. Naturally, the Brigadier was in attendance in that final scene as well. I remember making a drawing of that scene some years later, and putting the Brigadier in the drawing too, peaked cap, swagger stick and all. Sergeant Benson out of UNIT was presumably running around mopping up after the Sea Devils, I recall. I saw it once in 1971, so I'm a bit hazy on the details. When I read a synopsis of The Sea Devils thirty years later, guess what? It turns out the Brigadier wasn't in it. There were no UNIT people in it. The BBC had been lent the Royal Navy for that series, so it was sailors running about shooting Sea Devil , not UNIT . But I remembered the Brigadier being in it. I had remembered something that had in fact never happened. In these days of satanic child abuse allegations and UFO abduction experiences, it would be instructive to do a proper psychological survey into the ‘Brigadier in The Sea Devils effect' – the phenomenon of our ‘memories' of scenes from Who that never actually happened.

Dennis Potter, possibly Britain's most famous TV scriptwriter ever, may also have suffered from this ‘Brigadier in The Sea Devils effect'. In Humphrey Carpenter's biography of him, there is the intriguing statement that “(Dennis) Potter told a journalist that he had once had a sci-fi script rejected by Verity Lambert when she was Doctor Who producer in the 60s…As far as he could recall it was about a schizophrenic who only thought he was a time traveller.”

Dennis Potter is best remembered for The Singing Detective, but he also wrote the original Pennies From Heaven, Brimstone and Treacle, Lipstick on my Collar and the screenplay for the film adaptation of Gorky Park. In 1994 he famously gave a last TV interview to Melvyn Bragg in which he broke the news that he was dying and in which he revealed that his swan song was to be the scripts for Karaoke and the science fiction story Cold Lazarus, which came out posthumously in 1996. At a time when the likes of Mary Whitehouse complained about the sexual content of Potter's and others' TV drama, Potter was almost alone in passionate defence of television as a medium, and in his insistence that television could do better. Potter understood early on in TV's history that it tended to numb and confuse its viewers with a “blizzard” of images, and that the makers of TV programmes therefore had a duty to produce works that stood out and were thought provoking.

Potter was also fondly remembered for his criticism of the corporate control-freakery of BBC management. During an Edinburgh Television Festival lecture he lambasted then BBC Controller John Birt as a “croak-voiced Armani-clad Dalek”, a quote which is still remembered in media circles and which helped establishing “dalek” (lower case) in the Oxford English Dictionary. Clearly, Potter was a man who knew his Who .

Dennis Potter started out as a newspaper TV critic in the early 1960s. In his column, he described his first sight of anti-immigration MP Enoch Powell on television – wild eyes, strange forehead, and neatly folded old-fashioned handkerchief corner sticking out of the breast pocket of his suit. What struck Potter was how bizarre and scary Enoch Powell was – “Next appearance, Doctor Who ”, he concluded. From TV criticism, Dennis Potter came into TV scripts. His Brimstone and Treacle kitchen sink fantasy was accepted by the Beeb and filmed, but then left unreleased. Its story of a silent mentally retarded girl moved to speech by a Satan/Messiah figure who comes to live with the family was deemed too controversial. When the girl speaks, it is to accuse her father of sexually abusing her. Brimstone came out much later as a film starring Sting, and Potter began to earn a reputation for covering the seamy underbelly of human relationships and experience – memories of child abuse ( Karaoke, influenced by his own admission of being sexually assaulted as a child), furtive ‘hand jobs' under hospital sheets and the sexuality of terminal hospital inmates, ( Singing Detective, Karaoke ), sclerosis, children finding out about a parent having an affair. He had frequent run-ins with the decency brigade, but he became respectable enough that he could get away with more post-9 0'clock nudity in his TV plays than was usually allowed. Viz comic parodied this in its Maurice Day, Sexual Pervert strip, in which the annoyed character fast-forwards through ‘last night's Dennis Potter play' complaining about “Plot, plot, plot!” before he gets to ‘the tits.'

A recurring theme in the Potter universe was growing up in the Forest of Dean in the 1940s. The Forest was constantly revisited – in his Blue Remembered Hills (adults unsentimentally play wartime boys whiling away an afternoon there,) in flashbacks to the character's wartime childhood in Singing Detective , and again in childhood remembrance in Karaoke. Some biographers say that Potter's ‘official' version of his own Forest of Dean childhood was fictionalised, and that the truth was a little stranger. Potter's contemporaries from the Forest commented on the scene in which a character based on Potter climbs trees in Blue Remembered Hills . Apparently, he was regarded as a bit of a wuss as a child, and they couldn't imagine him climbing trees. Potter defensively replied that he did climb trees, but only when the tough kids weren't looking. Personally, my favourite Potter series has to be Lipstick On Your Collar , set during the Suez crisis, in which humdrum office routines are broken up by song and dance numbers involving a lot of gratuitous burlesque nudity. It also has a sympathetic Welsh hero, which we of the Welsh Diaspora don't see enough of. But Lipstick 's best asset is its complete absence of anything to do with the Forest of bloody Dean.

So what's all this about Britain's greatest TV scriptwriter submitting a Doctor Who script? An SFX magazine piece on Brimstone described it as a rejected Who script, but the original quote just called it a sci-fi script. Verity Lambert, however, was the first Doctor Who producer. Verity Lambert was recruited by the BBC - as its youngest producer at the age of 27 - in June 1963 to produce Who . She came from the brave new world of commercial television at ATV, which she left after being told they didn't have work for women producers. She had a reputation for gritty social realist serials, and a disdain for the conventions of children's TV. It was this approach which helped Who break out of its purely “family viewing” slot. Lambert's triumphs, as well as Doctor Who , included a long stint on Blue Peter, Rumpole of the Bailey and the 1970s Quatermass series with Jonathan Mills in the title role. Her costly disasters included the short-lived Costa Del Sol soap El Dorado, abandoned after a short run in 1993. Lambert later worked as Potter's co-producer on his 1986 film Dream Child, based on the life of the real-life Alice Liddell, who was the model for Alice in Wonderland. It is unlikely, well nigh impossible that a speculative script outline sent by Dennis Potter to Lambert could somehow have inspired the Doctor Who concept. Lambert was hired in July 1963, with the Who concept of a time traveller already thrashed out, and with story editor David Whitaker already putting finishing touches to the guide for script writers. Casting had already begun. William Hartnell's First Doctor, although a ‘crotchety old man', was by no stretch of the imagination a delusional schizophrenic. Nor were there any other science fiction series ideas being mooted by Verity Lambert of anybody else in the Head of Serials Department.

Potter's biographer does not mention the name of the journalist to whom Potter made the revelation about the script. The extensive estate of Dennis Potter archive lists all his scripts, even the rejected or filmed but unreleased scripts going back to the 1950s, but there is no mention of an outline script for Doctor Who or any sci-fi script when Lambert was Who producer up to 1966. A call to the BBC press office didn't turn up anything either. It all begins to sound like a case of Potter having a laugh with the unnamed journalist, or maybe a case of a non-existent memory, a case of ‘Brigadier in The Sea Devils' syndrome. However, the BBC Written Archive does have a record of the BBC writing to Dennis Potter, asking him to write them a script for a 45-minute documentary about science fiction. This was commissioned in November 1965, just as Verity Lambert was leaving as Who producer. Clearly, the BBC already saw Potter as something of an expert on sci-fi by then.

Dennis Potter's swan song was the sci-fi series Cold Lazarus . Potter, stricken with cancer, refused an offer to take part in drug trials for a new drug, as he said it might spoil his concentration in writing Lazarus. He also immersed himself in the subject matter, avidly reading anything he could lay his hands on about the workings of the brain and memory, and cryogenic freezing processes and suspended animation. Potter knew that he would die before Lazarus was filmed and televised, and in his instructions to the crew he said Lazarus “should not look like Doctor Who.”

But Lazarus does look – and feel – like Doctor Who. What's more, it looks like good Doctor Who. It came out in 1996, not long after the Who TV movie, and showed what might have happened if the BBC had given the show the attention it deserved, if they had given it the love that Potter had demanded for such a casually neglected medium as a TV series. And Lazarus looks like one 1985 Who story in particular, Revelation of the Daleks . The plot of Lazarus is not a particularly good one. The political satire, with a thinly veiled Rupert Murdoch character, is about as sophisticated as the Curse of Peladon's satire on joining the Common Market. (Jonathan Pryce plays a much more chilling and convincingly demented Murdoch character in the Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies .) The idea of a group of anti-media terrorists with the war cry ‘Reality or nothing!' is frankly rubbish. But Lazarus has a very convincing feel to it, and it's that all too rare animal - confident, unashamedly British sci-fi. The London of the year 2368 may be unrecognisable but the place names are familiar – Notting Hill and Brixton feature, for example. The corrupt cops have samurai-inspired uniforms, but their accents are still believably Cockney. There are almost no special effects – all the money up there on the screen has gone on design and costumes. And the characters are so convincing – Frank Finney and the lady out of Rising Damp , office politics, bunking off work to make unauthorised phone calls, and the wonderfully pissed-off look on the face of the detective when he comes to the videophone after being interrupted in the shower. “This had better be good!” he snaps.

Lazarus was not sold as sci-fi though, Lazarus is a television play in several parts (remember television plays, anyone?), Lazarus is drama. Like Who was supposed to be. And like Potter said telly should be, it's memorable. The Lazarus of the series is David Freel, or at least his cryogenically frozen head, being slowly revived hundreds of years after his death in the 20 th century. His memories are being extracted and played on a screen by scientists working for the Stiltz/Murdoch media guy, who sees a lot of money in the multimedia entertainment potential of recovered memories. There is a struggle over the head, during which it becomes apparent that the head of Freel is fully conscious, and he just wants to die. Finally, Frank Finney out of the Reality or Nothing terrorist organisation shoots the head and releases Freel's spirit. On the downside, it should be pointed out that Lazarus' distorted recovered memories do include – you guessed it – a childhood in the Forest of Dean. This will all sound very familiar to fans of Revelation of the Daleks . The story was a standout good Who story surrounded by a sea of dross that was the mercifully short-lived Colin Baker ‘era'. The plot, like Lazarus , wasn't too important, and it was Doctor Who pretty much without the Doctor. Exploitation of the dead features in Revelation , too. The Doctor visits the planet Necros when he hears an old friend has died having requested cryogenic freezing – a request that is out of character. It turns out that the Daleks have chopped off his head and are turning it into that horrid slushy jelly fish thing that's going to be the inside of a Dalek. Other frozen dead guys are also being converted into Daleks, or even secretly minced up to sell as tinned food. Like Lazarus, there's a lot of frozen disembodied heads in Revelation , including the fake head of Davros. There are some nice plot twists and surprises, and some truly moving office politics sub-plots among the morticians of Necros, who we actually care about. Dialogue, costume and design are of a high standard, with no wobbly sets or over-ambitious special effects to get in the way. Revelation's disembodied head-count meant it was regarded as controversial when it came out. Is it just my imagination, or is Eric Seward's Cold Lazarus really a Dennis Potter Channel 4 remake of Revelation of the Daleks ? Is it Dennis Potter's missing rejected Who script?

This got me wondering if there were any other great authors or playwrights out there with rejected Who scripts that we don't know about. I couldn't find any, but one author comes close – Salman Rushdie. David J. Howe's Doctor Who – A Television Companion says of the obscure Pertwee series The Mutants that Salman Rushdie critiqued it in Satanic Verses as having a ‘racist undertones'. I had a flick through Rushdie's famously controversial Satanic Verses to look for the quote about racism in The Mutants . Due to the all the fuss about the fatwah and the book burning and everything, nobody has actually concentrated on the story in Verses . Flicking through it is a dizzying experience. Verses is packed with sci-fi references, as it is with every imaginable kind of cultural reference, from Gardener's World to Boney M. I couldn't actually find the quote alleging racism in Mutants , but Howe seems to have missed the point anyway, as a theme it keeps revisiting is the ridiculousness of racial politics applied to sci-fi. An important sub-plot in Verses is a kid's TV show called The Alien Show which the Indian hero finds himself starring in. The Alien Show is heavily influenced by the Muppets' “Pigs in Spaaaaaaace!” It features cute psycho animal, mineral and vegetable foam rubber characters such as the “puking” Australian cactus Matilda (shades of Meglos) as well as groundbreaking SFX. The Alien Show mutates into a sanitised American version shorn of its real or imagined racial stereotypes. (The studio thought that one alien character could be construed as being a caricature Asian, another shape-shifting changeling character could be interpreted as anti-Semitic, and so on.)

Verses shows that Rushdie has a love of science fiction shows, and a sense of the ridiculous when it comes to ‘anti-racist' critiques of science fiction. His first novel, Grimus , was a science fiction story. And let's face it, someone bringing up such an obscure series as The Mutants fifteen years after its release has to be a bit of a Who nerd. If he wanted to raise serious issues of racism in Who , Rushdie would have cited the very English actors playing Arab or Asiatic villains in greasepaint and stuck-on eyebrows – Saladin in The Lion and Dalek collaborator Mavic Chen in Dalek Master Plan . I couldn't find the Mutants quote in Verses, maybe it was a case of the “Brigadier in The Sea Devils ” memory effect manifesting itself in David J Howe. Could it be that David J Howe was confusing The Mutants with the many references Rushdie makes in Verses – and in his other works – to mutants (small ‘m') of all kinds, particularly ‘ethnic mutants' and ‘cultural mutants' such as diaspora Non-Resident Indians living in the UK, such as himself. It's a favourite and constantly revisited theme of Rushdie's. Type in Rushdie and mutants on an internet search, and dozens of Rushdie quotes about mutants come up. “Many of the new mutants will not survive” seems to be a frequently cited quote of his.

But it got me thinking, what if Rushdie had submitted a Who script? What would it be like? If The Alien Show out of Verses is anything to go by, it would look more like Red Dwarf than Who . Or maybe Rushdie would turn up at a script conference with this idea for a story in which the ever-iconoclastic Doctor inadvertently writes something which offends a theocratic regime in need of an enemy, and has to go underground while his books are burned, his translators are stabbed to death, countries come to the brink of war, and the Doctor is pursued up and down corridors by wild-eyed fanatics screaming for his blood. No doubt the script editor would have rejected Rushdie's idea as too bizarre even for Doctor Who , but it is of course exactly what happened to Rushdie in real life. Ridley Scott, director of Alien, Columbus, Black Rain, Gladiator, Duellists , comes close to the ‘rejected Doctor Who script' category. He was engaged to do the design for a series that evolved into the first Dalek story . In the event, Scott was forced to admit that he wasn't available for the shooting dates, and the design contract was passed on to obscure in-house designer Raymond Cusick. The rest is history. But just imagine, Daleks designed by Ridley Scott. How would they have turned out?

This last ‘what if?' scenario is not strictly a ‘rejected Doctor Who script', but it's a ‘rejected science fiction directorship', which come close. Guess who the first choice to direct Return of The Jedi was? David Lynch. Yes, that's right, that David Lynch. David Lynch as in Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead . Scarily weird David Lynch. In the only sci-fi film he actually got to make, he turned Dune , a book which is basically pants, into a film which, whatever its flaws, is memorably and disturbingly weird. Think what he would have done if he'd got his hands on Jedi . The rather lame Emperor character would have been played by Dennis Hopper, straight out of rehab, with an oxygen mask pressed to his face, during his Tourette's syndrome rant as he rubbed himself up against a blue-velvet clad Princess Leia. The love triangle of Leia-Skywalker-Solo, which is unconvincingly sorted out at the last minute when Leia and Skywalker turn out to be brother and sister, would have turned into some steamy abusive incest thing under Lynch. Remember also that Lynch used dwarfs to such disturbing effect in Twin Peaks , so what would he have done with the Ewoks? He would have had them speaking backwards, and cryptically warning Skywalker that “This-is-a-green-Formica-table.” And what would Lynch have made of the sadomasochistic relationship between Jabba the Hutt and Leia in that slave girl costume? Lucas' precious child-friendly merchandising opportunities would definitely have got out the window, and Lynch's Jedi would have had an ‘18' certificate slapped on it, which is probably why Lynch never got to make it.

It would have been a damn sight better than Jedi directed by Dennis Potter, in any event. The controversial nudity would have made it more interesting, but Potter would no doubt have taken one look at the forested world of the Ewoks and decided, ‘Hang on, this reminds me of the Forest of Dean in the 1940's. Now that 's a good idea…'

THE MAN WHO WAS IN EVERYTHING!

Cyril Shaps 23.10.23 – 1.1.03

He was the Archimandrite! He was the voice of Mr Kipling! And he wore the look of a perpetually frightened man! Born on October 13 1923 in Highbury, London, Cyril Shaps was the quintessential supporting character actor who sprinkled a little magic on numerous productions over several decades. In fact, looking at his cv you might think he was in everything ever made!, Though many of his roles were small and sometimes appeared insignificant he always added a little something that made them noticeable. If you check his copious entry on the Internet Movie Database it’s quite fascinating. Sometimes his characters were merely descriptive; `bent little man` in the 2001 mini series `Jack and the Beanstalk` or `older man in sweatshop` in `The Man Who Cried` (2000) and my favourite, `mad old man` in the 1996 mini series `Gulliver’s Travels`. He certainly ran the gamut of the professions - he’s played (deep breath) a pew opener, priest, reverend, jeweller, waiter, watchmaker, doctor, pathologist, chiseller, landlord, diamond cutter, police doctor, East German doctor, child welfare officer, bank clerk, control assistant and warden! He’s been in some famous productions too; check these out again if you think you may have missed him cos he’s in there somewhere: `The Pianist`(2002), `The Importance of Being Earnest` (2002), the `Murder Rooms` episode `Kingdom of Bones` (2001), the 2000 mini series `Anna Karenina`, `Our Mutual Friend` (1998). He played Pepys in the 1994 film `The Madness of King George` and was in the acclaimed mini series version of `Gulliver’s Travels`. In the 1994 adaptation of `Martin Chuzzlewit` he was Mr Fips. Other notable appearances in the 80s and early 90s include `Blackeyes`, `Erik The Viking` and `Private Schultz`. In the 1970s he appeared in such varied fare as `The Spaceman and King Arthur`, `The Spy Who Loved Me`, `Jesus of Nazareth`, `Bar Mitzvah Boy`, `The Odessa File` and he was Jackdaw in `Porridge`. There’s plenty of sixties Cyril – he was in the 1965 version of `Nineteen Eighty Four`, `To Sir With Love` and such obscure delights as `Up Jumped A Swagman` and `The Little Ones`. What exactly happened and what he did in the 1960 film `Follow That Horse` must remain a mystery. But Cyril goes even further back, gracing such 1950s fare as `SOS Pacific`, `The Silent Enemy` and `Interpol`, In 1957 he appeared in a mini series of `The Swiss Family Robinson`. And that’s just films! His tv work has included `Doctors`, `Midsomer Murders`, `The Bill`, `EastEnders`, Lovejoy`, `The Young Ones`, `Raffles`, `The Sweeney` (the episode `May` from 1976), `Some Mothers Do `Ave `Em`, `Jason King`, `The Liver Birds`, `The Persuaders`, `Spyder’s Web`, `Department S` and the amusingly named `Man In A Suitcase`. Plus he was the voice of Mr Kipling, the secretive cake maker whose face we are never allowed to see, perhaps on the grounds that Cyril always looked too terrified and that wouldn’t have instilled confidence in such exceedingly good cakes. Telefantasy fans know Cyril Shaps of course, though he appeared in less genre series than you might think. In 1955, he was in `Quatermass Two` and then waited a decade before playing Dr Duval in the `Too Many Cooks` episode of anthology series `Out Of The Unknown` in 1966 and then a year later came the first of his `Dr Who` appearances as Viner in `Tomb of the Cyberman`. A bit of a typecasting part as his terror is there for all to see. Three years on, he was in `The Ambassadors of Death` where he met a grisly end whilst supposedly under UNIT protection so perhaps his nervousness was justified. In 1974 he was back; this time as Professor Clegg in `Planet Of The Spiders` looking as reassuringly furtive as usual. Then in 1978 came his appearance as The Archimandrite, a sort of archbishop figure in `The Androids of Tara`. He appeared altogether more confident in this role, despite having a carpeted and upturned waste paper basket on his head. He did make two further genre appearances going `Into The Labyrinth` in 1981 and with Kate Winslet in `Dark Season` thus enabling us to connect him to Leonardo Di Caprio in two moves and Robert De Niro in three. In all, Cyril Shaps appeared in more than 80 films and tv series and was also the father of current head of Granada TV, Simon Shaps.

MATINEE OF THE DALEKS

Matt Salusbury travels back forty years to witness the Daleks’ invasion of Theatreland

“Saturday teatime is sacred to the one-eyed monster” (Harold Jackson, Guardian, 22nd December 1965)

40 years ago, the forgotten Dalek drama Curse of the Daleks ended its brief and only matinee run on the stage of London’s Wyndham Theatre after just one month. It was the first example of the anoraky obsessive Doctor Who continuity thing, linking the first The Daleks story with Daleks Invasion of Earth and the first outing for the Daleks without the Doctor, as the Daleks' creator Terry Nation owned the copyright for the Daleks but not for Doctor Who. The Doctor is not even mentioned.

Curse is also notable for its absolutely mentalist programme notes by scriptwriter David Whitaker – about how Dalek creator Terry Nation rang him up in a tizzy and asked him to come over and look at a small opaque glass cube about the size of a sugar lump which he’d found in his garden. When he carefully drilled a hole in it, little slivers of metal fell out which turned out to contain microfilm, “these were Dalek history – the history of Skaro from the future. Had the peace-loving Thals sent them as a warning – or had a Dalek history library exploded, jettisoning debris through the universe?”

Whitaker would have the audience believe that Curse of the Daleks was based on such a capsule found in Kensington Gardens – ‘so keep your eyes and ears open when you’re out in the park’, children. The programme notes also stated that “In accordance with modern theatre practice, the National Anthem will only be played in the presence of Royalty’ – in the unlikely event of Her Majesty the Queen dropping in for the matinee performance of Curse of the Daleks.
Curse was an attempt to cash in on the Dalekmania phenomenon. The Telegraph’s critic commented that “as Mr Nation discovered a few thousand pounds ago, “The-Daleks-are-invincible!” The very proactive Walter Tucknell, in charge of Dalek licensing at the BBC in 1964, came up with wizard wheezes like adding the Anti-Dalek fluid neutraliser to a toy company’s range – it was really just a re-branded Dan Dare water pistol. There were only a handful of Dalek toys in the shops for Christmas 1964 – TV21 comics, birthday cards and badges. By mid-1965, an 18-page advertorial in Games and Toys was running, showing the 80 Dalek items in production. Terry Nation told the Radio Times in 1973 that there were 132 Dalek products in all, from jelly babies to wallpaper to bedroom slippers, bringing him money ‘beyond the dreams of avarice. The programme for Curse includes the ‘Dalekode’ cut-out cryptography code wheel from the Dalek Pocket Book and Space Traveller’s Guide (Panther/Souvenir) and a shameless plug for the Dalek Painting Book. Daleks were the hottest property by Christmas 1965. But by the time of Curse, just after Christmas 1966, interest had already started to wane. The craze was over by 1967.

While the script bears the credit ‘Curse of the Daleks stage play by Terry Nation and David Whitaker,’ the Nation estate’s agent told me that Terry Nation’s widow Kate had never heard of the play and had no record of its existence, and asked me to send a copy if I come across one. It seems that the script was almost entirely written by Who’s original story editor David Whitaker, with elements ripped off from his scripts to the TV21 comic’s Daleks strip. Whitters was an actor before he turned to scriptwriting and was comfortable writing for the stage. Under the Stage Licensing Act of 1737, all plays had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for censorship. When censorship of plays ended in 1968, the plays came to the Manuscript Collection of the British Library in London. The script for Curse of the Daleks is in the Library’s card index system in the Manuscript Collection as Play no 1965/50, Lord Chamberlain’s Licence no. 356, dated November 1965.

The sniffy Illustrated London News theatre critic compared Curse of the Daleks unfavourably with the robots from RUR, which is a bit like comparing Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space unfavourably with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sniffy Illustrated London News guy imagines that it must be some kind of panto because it’s for the kids at Xmas. Certainly all the Daleks silently trundling in and out of secret doors when the humans have their backs turned is reminiscent of the ‘Behind you!’ element of panto.

Curse has the most basic of whodunit plots and brought harsh words from the critics: “a false start depending too much on weak jokes” (The Times), “[while] little boys are fascinated by the ‘space dialogue’, little girls like it but can’t grasp the detail, male grown ups find it difficult to keep pace. Female grown-ups smile tolerably.” The first half seems to have been particularly pants, with rubbish dialogue for the human actors. As well as having no Doctor Who, the first half suffered from not much by way of Daleks either, nor were the Daleks on stage for very long in the second half. Everyone agreed that things improved when the Daleks showed up: “Until the Daleks massed appearance, the action seems somewhat tame. Then, with the first sign of a Dalek shuddering to life, the plot starts to grip…. an ultimately satisfying adventure.” (The Times), “Daleks possess a magnetism lacking in the flesh and blood characters….no less compelling on stage than on the TV screen.” (Illustrated London News) “after tots have discussed the outlook learnedly over ice cream. things liven a lot as the Daleks act in close formation.” (Telegraph)
The play opens with a rhyme to the tune of ‘Remember, remember, the fifth of November: “When fears are abating/ Don’t try to forget them/The Daleks are waiting Quietly planning and /Scheming and hating/Remember!”

Then we are in the bare, ‘curved ribbed storehold’ of the spaceship Starfinder. We see two prisoners. Harry Sline is under arrest for slave trading between Mars and Venus, and he’s looking at a 30-year prison sentence in The Deeps underwater prison in the Atlantic. Disgraced Commander John Ladiver’s many crimes include illegal sales of uranium to ‘the wrong people’, an act that almost led to war in space. He’s suspected of having ‘cached away about 30 million.’ Ladiver is facing execution. Both have just done eight days in a holding cell on Satellite Prison, and Sline is trying to file through the handcuffs chaining the pair together. Food is brought by radio-pic (primitive ‘radio-picture’ communications device) operator and engineer Bob Slater, who’s armed with a “short stubbly” detonator handgun. Captain Steven Redway looks in on the prisoners. The crew’s “immaculate silver and grey uniform of the period” was off the peg from Nathans theatrical outfitters.

The Starfinder, travelling at light speed, runs into trouble as it hits a meteor storm, resulting in ‘programme circuits shorting.’ The ‘small and wiry’ Co-pilot Rocket Smith (‘Rock’ to his friends), enters to inform the Captain that there’s smoke coming out of the radio-pic set. Somebody sabotaged it by chucking iron filings in it. Forced to land to make repairs, the crew choose the relatively quiet nearby planet of Skaro, even though the Unispace Police have declared Skaro ‘out of bounds.’ The human crew are dimly aware that the hot planet Skaro is the home of the now deactivated Daleks and the beautiful blonde “wandering” race of Thals. The aloof ‘Little Miss Iceberg’ Marion Clements – dark, attractive, businesslike in her smart white lab technician’s costume, enters with her boss, the handsome and dignified fiftysomething Professor Vanderlyn. The prisoners are disembarked, still manacled together, along with Vanderlyn’s equipment, including refrigerated crates of biological specimens from around the universe, wheeled in on a trolley to keep them out of the oven-like heat on board the Starfinder. Now we’re in a courtyard in the dead City of the Daleks on Skaro, all archways and ramps and secret doors. There’s a dormant Dalek standing in the courtyard, overgrown with vines and with its eyestalk and its suction pad arm pointing at the ground. Vanderlyn relates how the humans managed to switch off the Daleks power at the end of the Dalek war, and embraces the Skaro landing as an “opportunity to make notes, aha!” Rocket hangs his jacket over the Dalek’s eyestalk. Vanderlyn and Marion pull the creepers off the Dalek to examine it. Captain Redway’s attempt at flirty jokes and Rocket Smith’s awful-sub-comic argumentative banter with Marion Clements go down like a lead balloon. And it’s pants!
When Vanderlyn starts to unload his specimen cases from the trolley there’s one he doesn’t recognise – a large case with VENDERLYN on it, containing a dozen thick black discs – smooth bright metal base, metal without joins, in two sections with “some kind of barely visible pin sticking out of a hole in the base.” Before long, Rocket notices one of discs is missing. Seconds later it inevitably turns up stuck to the side of the overgrown Dalek, whose eyestalk twitches into life! “Slowly, its sucker stick starts to straighten up.”

It moves around and exits through the ramp. The mystery black boxes turn out to be “flooding power into the Dalek like a blood transfusion,” and whispering recorded orders to the Daleks.
It is suggested “We could simply whistle up the space boys and that would be that” – presumably the Unispace security forces or the SSS (Space Security Service – they feature in The Dalek Master Plan and in Nation’s treatment for a Daleks TV series). Captain Redway takes command, while Vanderlyn goes into another tedious science lecture, this one on electricity. Sline files through his manacles and is felled by an anaesthetic bullet as he makes a break for it. Three Daleks appear trundling down the ramp with a trolley on which is Vanderlyn’s crate, now containing the slumped body of Bob Slater. The black boxes are gone. Now we’re in a rare scene with Daleks in it, in the Scanner room inside the City. “Black claw-equipped Daleks” are powering themselves up and plugging in a huge wide-screen telly on which they have the humans under surveillance. We hear a disembodied voice, called TANNOY DALEK in the script, who commands: “All-Daleks-not-on-patrol-duties-to-return –to-their-panels!” The Daleks have much better lines than the humans.

Redway goes missing with the only detonator gun, leaving Rocket Smith in charge. It turns out that Slater was not killed by Daleks, but poisoned by a hypodermic. The humans send up a flare to bring in the Thals, who reply by flashing a piece of polished metal.

An explosion heralds the appearance of the dignified, white haired Thal leader Dexion and his daughter Ijayna as they seal passages behind them. “Close the arches!” barks Ijayna. “It’s no good being afraid of them.” Thals are still a quite low-tech, wandering race like in the original The Daleks, but they are no longer the namby-pamby girly pacifist race of that story. They’re already established as the guerrilla race we won’t meet again until the Pertwee-era Planet of the Daleks. “You are badly prepared!” comments Ijayna, to which Dexion replies; “You must make allowances. These people have not lived in the shadow of the Daleks as we have, “ and so on. Thal clothes are “simple and designed to suit Skaroan climate which is constantly hot…Every effort must be made by the designer to help us avoid making the Thals look like pantomime creatures. They are not. The Thals are graceful, attractive, people, the simpler their clothes the better.” So no silver-sprayed wellies as in the Doctor Who and the Daleks movie, then. One theatre critic (or newspaper sub-editor) confused ‘Thal’ with ‘Thai’

The “fair, tall and beautiful” female Thal “Ijayna wears a skirt…. a thin silver band around her forehead which enclosed the top of her hair, sleeved top fixed at the wrists with silver cuffs. Top’s neckline and backline square-cut. Neck and backline edged with silver.” She has a surprisingly accurate 21st century bare midriff. This obsessive attention to Ijyana’s appearance is known in the Christmas season plays for children trade as “something for the dads.”
These Thals and Commander Ladiver have met before. Ladiver led the regular five-yearly patrol of local stars three years before, and investigated Ijayna’s claim that someone had landed secretly on Skaro just before Ladiver’s last visit – possibly to test the black boxes, they now believe. Ladiver’s reports were ignored, and his subsequent uranium-smuggling career was a cover for routine flights across “the Skaro universe.”
Well, blow me! It turns out Ijayana and Ladiver are engaged to be married. The Thals set Ladiver free. Dexion refers to “my people waiting in the dead [vitrified] forest” which featured in The Daleks, set fifty years before, and close to the city of the Daleks then. So it’s presumably the same City of the Daleks now, with courtyards added. A badly wounded Redway stumbles in, and the Tannoy Dalek orders the humans to “Obey the Daleks!” and hand over their radio. It seems whoever is controlling the Daleks plans to “rule the universe from Skaro.” Night is falling when a torch-equipped Dalek appears through a secret door. They exterminate Sline when he runs for it.
There’s a distinctly unDalek-like interest shown in rounding up the ladies, which is a clue to the plans of whoever the human traitor is: “The two females are to be given food and drink and also water in containers and pieces of fibre cloth. I shall order it! …Our master has ordered that we begin to prepare for the invasion of the planet earth!” By then, it looks as if whoever’s running the Daleks is probably male. Suspicion falls on Vanderlyn or Rocket Smith.
Now we’re in the Control room, which is the “redressed” courtyard set made to look like it’s underground. “Panels with switches and dials either side, glowing bulbs, recorded tape spools spin.” There’s a whole array of tripods and rostrums, bars and looped cables and big chunky Dalek six-pin electrical sockets with ‘holes in it, the size of a telephone dial.’ The male prisoners are drugged and propped up on a bench; the ladies are “secured to floor by magnets.” It was Bob Slater all along! (Which I guessed.) He wasn’t really dead. He’d just injected something to freeze his heart. He put the detonator guns out of action. And he went off to see the Thals and smash their radio. And he’s NUTS! “I’ll show you how mad I am! Daleks, we will connect the power!” It turns out the whole elaborate plan to take over the universe arose because he couldn’t get laid. Rather than put an ad in the “men seeking women” section of the local paper, he resolves to use the Daleks to take over earth. “The Daleks obey me!” Bob has already got his eye on the two girls, and goes on and on about how they’re going to be his playthings when he rules “all the universes” and how he will finally be able to pick up chicks.

Ladiver thwarts the Dalek powering-up by clinging to the underside of a trolley full of power cells pushed by a trolley Dalek. When Daleks get full power, their black boxes fall off and they’re free of Bob Slater’s hair-brained scheme. They immediately turn on Slater (“You-are-no-longer-our-mas-ter!!) and exterminate him. In these pre-‘exterminate’ days, they just say “Die!” It isn’t related how the exterminate effect is done on stage.
But Ladiver has been busy pulling stronger-than-the-sun power cells out of their sockets all this time, and generally putting the boot into Dalek electrical engineering. No sooner are the Daleks all independently powered up, than the Black Dalek is begging the humans to “Turn on our power ….again” As he shuts down, Black Dalek warns, “Tell your people on earth……that the Daleks are waiting ……. One day…….we will …….rise again…one day…..”
“Tell them the Daleks are finished.” Says Ladiver.
“Are they?” replies Rocket, “Marvellous!”
The curtain falls on an interracial human-Thal snog between Ladiver and Ijanya. Hurrah!

“Too much space jargon” was the complaint of the Telegraph’s critic, while The Times said, “though the period is the 21st century, the dialogue is initially strangely reminiscent of British war films with the upper lip being kept resolutely stiff.” The cast had to “cope with lines that come straight from a Victorian novel, according to The Guardian. It is the dreadfulness of the dialogue that makes Curse really stand out:
“Nor me skipper.”
“I’ve had to deploy my men on various essential duties.”
“Apparently, they don’t teach you manners at flight school, captain.”
“The fool! The blind, stupid fool!”
“I’m forcing myself to put aside personal considerations.”
“Think what you’re doing man!”
“Our own power repels your controls, earthman!”
As Vanderlyn reminds us, “A Dalek, you must remember, needs no rest. He is a brilliant scientist, soldier and electronics engineer. He works 24 hours a day everyday, to see his race conquer and succeed in everything… Death has no terror for them. As you destroy a Dalek, so another takes its place…simply because Daleks only understand success or destruction.”

Sad Dalek-spotting nerds with no friends will be excited to hear that – alongside all the flame-thrower Daleks, oxyacetylene cutter-equipped Daleks, heavy weapons Daleks, sieve-armed embryo-handling hatchery Daleks, machine-gun equipped Exxilon expedition Daleks, left-handed Daleks, and other specialist Daleks that cropped up in various series, Curse has a unique Dalek variant all of its own. It’s a torch-equipped Dalek that has the normal exterminator but a suction arm replaced by a torch. The torch is used to activate concealed light-sensitive sensors that open secret doors out of the City of the Daleks courtyard, and it’s also handy for intimidating humans by shining it in their eyes. Curse is also the only occasion we see trolley dolly Daleks pushing trolleys. There’s even a trolley fight as humans shove trolleys up against Daleks.

Neither the Dalek operators nor the ‘Tannoy Dalek’ voice are credited, but the programme credits AARU – suppliers of the movie Daleks with the claws, for providing the Daleks. “Black claw-equipped Daleks” feature in the script turning on the big telly, plugging in power and starting up the generator at the end, but the technical rehearsal photo and publicity shots show the Shawcraft Daleks from the TV show. It looks like both were used. The Daleks in these photos don’t yet have the receptor dish on the back out of Dalek Invasion of Earth, or the solar panel slats around their mid-section, which did not become standard until The Chase in 1966. The presence in Curse of Daleks without receptor dishes – apparently 29 years after Roy Castle turned off the power in The Daleks proves beyond reasonable doubt that, when the First Doctor in The Dalek Invasion of Earth met receptor-dish equipped Daleks and said they must have been from an earlier period of Dalek history, he was talking out of his arse.

How the Daleks could have demolished London and Paris – as alluded to in the rhyme at the beginning – if they were unable to get off the floor of their spaceships from which they got their power is hard to imagine. There are outdoor scenes with a Dalek on the firing range in Genesis of the Daleks and they go on an exterminating trip into the Thal city, so we can assume that early Daleks did have a very limited range capacity to go out and about on reserve power for a short while, a bit like the old Sinclair C5 Galaxy.

Oh, God, don’t get me started on Dalek chronology! It’s complicated by the Fourth Doctor’s statement that he “only held up Dalek development by 800 years or so.” Then there’s The Day of the Daleks, which turns out never to have happened because the Doctor prevented it. The tendency of the recent Ecclestone era’s surviving Daleks to “fall through time” after the Great Time War confuses things even more. A quantum physics doctorate awaits anyone who can unscramble Dalek chronology.

Curse doesn’t simplify things very much either. Curse makes no mention of the Doctor at all, as Nation had no licence to use him, and the shutting down the power on Skaro incident at the end of The Daleks is attributed to a human army at the end of the (brief) Dalek war 50 years earlier, or the Daleks must be assumed to have already been revived all over again after Roy Castle turned the power off, and then shut down all over again by the Earth forces. “Nobody’s seen a Dalek for years,” as one character comments in Curse.
Curse seems to introduce another Dalek invasion that preceded the one in Dalek Invasion of Earth but this one is ended when the humans get to Skaro and shut down the central power source, transmitting power through space to the invasion fleets. In which case The Dalek Invasion of Earth would occur sometime after Curse, after yet another dick for brains had gone and turned the Dalek’s power back on again. The play is supposedly set 50 years after the original Daleks series, which tends to wee all over Dalek chronology (as usual), because the script gives a date of 2179 AD and says it’s Monday (!) If it really is 50 years after Daleks Invade Earth 2150 AD (the movie version of the TV series), then it should be 2200. Unless this is the same invasion as The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and the thwarting of the Dalek invasion by detonating a magnetic bomb and setting off a volcano in Berkshire was just the first battle in a long war against Daleks all powered from a central source, including the satellite dish power receptor Daleks of Invasion. Except that the Daleks in Curse don’t have the power receptor dishes on their backs like they do in Invasion. There is also universal confusion about “universes”. Curse is set in “the Skaro universe … in the next universe but one.” ” Our enemy plans to rule the Universe from Skaro. All the universes in fact,” and bonkers Bob Slater promises to rule “all the universes.” Maybe scriptwriter Whitters is confusing universes with galaxies. Could the meaning have changed by 2179?

There are some hilarious anachronisms in the 2179 of Curse. “About a year ago, girls were supposed to be gentle creatures – very much the weaker sex and happy to be so.” Sunday Joints have survived, and “a ten shilling watch can tell the time as well as Big Ben.” The survival of the quaint custom of engagements could be a Thal cultural thing. When the Guardian’s critic talked about “a troupe of wooden figures” he was talking about the human actors not the Daleks, although The Times said the “actors play with all possible conviction.” The curse in Curse of the Daleks – apart from the inability to go up the stairs – seems to have been the curse on its actors’ careers. A life of walk-on parts in single episodes of undistinguished TV series awaited most of them as they finished work on Curse. You certainly never hear thesps on Radio 4 with their witty reminiscences about how “ I was third radio operator with Sir Richard Burton in Curse of the Daleks in matinee at the Wyndham back in ’66, don’t you know, luvvie?”

Nicholas Hawtrey, Curse’s Captain Redway, appeared as a guest star in an episode of Danger Man and the highlight of his career was probably the butler in Dangerous Liasons with John Malkovich. He pretty much reprised his Curse role in the 1966 Troughton-era David Whitaker-scripted TV Doctor Who series The Power of the Daleks as Examiner Quinn. Power recycled a lot of Curse ideas like (doh!) turning the Dalek’s power on again. Hawtrey seems to have been a fluent French speaker, appearing in French films or playing Frenchie characters in films with names like French Kiss in a TV series on General De Gaulle and had a regular stint on Victorian below stairs melodrama The Barretts of Wimpole Street. He played Abbe Pierre in a French movie on the founder of the Emmaus movement. Hilary Tindall, who played Marion Clemens, ‘one of those hardish girls of the 21st century,’ seems to have escaped the curse of the Curse of the Daleks, finding fame with her “dark good looks and seductive glamour [which] made her the ideal other woman …in the still shockable 1970s” when she featured in 50 episodes of The Brothers, as the wife of a haulage business owner who was in and out of bed with a lot of married men. Sad Doctor Who geeks will get excited by a Doctor Who connection – Sixth Doctor Colin Baker also starred in The Brothers. Tindall was a mezzo-soprano singer and appeared in musicals like “South Pacific”. The Swedes were so taken by The Brothers they brought her over to star in a Scandinavian remake.’ Other Tindall appearances were in the TV movie of Max Headroom – ’20 minutes into the future, and as Deborah Swaffham, putting married relations in jeopardy in Reginald Perrin’s commune in the third series. She even has a topless scene in 1980s ITV series A Kind of Loving. She also ‘starred’ in the instantly forgettable 1980s Granada kitchen utensil factory office sitcom Nice Work. In the original Randell and Hopkirk series, Hilary Tindall smiles behind her veil in the episode ‘The Smile Behind The Veil’. In the 1960s superhero Tibetan lost civilization nonsense sci-fi secret agent series The Champions, by Terry Nation’s co-writer on The Dalek Master Plan, Dennis Spooner, Hilary featured in one episode as a scientist’s fiancée who discovers he is selling high-speed planes to China.
David Ashford, who played engineer, ‘radio-pic’ operator and bonkers megalomaniac Bob Slater, was in BBC2’s murder series Malice Aforethought and one of the Quatermass films. All the other actors disappeared off the theatrical radar screen shortly after appearing in Curse. So obscure were the cast that set designer Jay Hutchinson Scott was perhaps the most famous one who outshone them all. He had designed for Glyndebourne and the National Theatre of the Netherlands, for TV and films, but is best known for the set design of No Sex Please, We’re British. He was more at home with intimate, realistic drawing room interiors with a sofa in the middle for half naked dolly birds to chase Ronnie Corbett around in his vest and spotted boxer shorts than with scanner rooms on Skaro. Kenneth Williams in The Platinum Cat played in the evenings on the same stage after the Daleks had gone home, with the same producer as Curse, so it must have been a set that was easy to take down and put up again. Williams’ autobiography does not mention whether he tripped over the set for Skaro during his “OOOh, Matron!” routine.
Maybe the real curse in Curse of the Daleks is the tendency of not very far-sighted people throughout future history to go and bloody well turn the Dalek’s power on again. I blame the public information advertisements, which clearly aren’t scary enough. We’ve got some truly horrific ‘don’t drink and drive’ and teenage roadkill ads at cinemas these days, but what we really need is something like ‘Think once, think twice, think don’t go and turn the Dalek’s power back on again.’

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Cyril Shaps Remembered

Curse Of The Daleks

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Think Daleks vs Cybermen over London was epic? Pah! The Daleks Masterplan is the biggest Doctor Who epic there ever was. Tim Worthington looks back to heady days of the Tarranium Core, Mavic Chen, those pesky delegates and a little toast to everyone at home…

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MIND THE GAP!

'Dr Who' followers around the world were shaken to the core when the series was put 'on ice' in 1985. John Connors traces the turbulent 18 months that followed during which time the Doctor was indeed in considerable distress.

THE DOCTOR WHO MAN

John Nathan Turner loved `Dr Who` but his devotion was never fully repaid.
Words: John Connors

DENNIS POTTER AND THE SEA DEVILS!!??

Could Britain's renowned television playwright have submitted a script for `Dr Who`? Read on…

Words: Matt Salusbury

THE MAN WHO WAS IN EVERYTHING!

Cyril Shaps 23.10.23 – 1.1.03

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Matt Salusbury travels back forty years to witness the Daleks’ invasion of Theatreland

New Who

Old Who

Torchwood

The UNIT Family

The Telesnap Chive

Gallifrey Gazelle

CORE VALUES

Think Daleks vs Cybermen over London was epic? Pah! The Daleks Masterplan is the biggest Doctor Who epic there ever was. Tim Worthington looks back to heady days of the Tarranium Core, Mavic Chen, those pesky delegates and a little toast to everyone at home…

WHO IS THE LONGEST RUNNING DOCTOR WHO?

BILLY LYRE

William Hartnell was “the original”, the very first Doctor whose adventures took place over forty years ago with a mission to educate mostly courtesy of a vista of historical stories. Tim Worthington dons his pince nez to see how a 1960s sci-fi series looked into the past.

MIND THE GAP!

'Dr Who' followers around the world were shaken to the core when the series was put 'on ice' in 1985. John Connors traces the turbulent 18 months that followed during which time the Doctor was indeed in considerable distress.

THE DOCTOR WHO MAN

John Nathan Turner loved `Dr Who` but his devotion was never fully repaid. Words: John Connors

DENNIS POTTER AND THE SEA DEVILS!!??

Could Britain's renowned television playwright have submitted a script for `Dr Who`? Read on…

Words: Matt Salusbury

THE MAN WHO WAS IN EVERYTHING!

Cyril Shaps 23.10.23 – 1.1.03

MATINEE OF THE DALEKS

Matt Salusbury travels back forty years to witness the Daleks’ invasion of Theatreland

John Nathan Turner loved `Dr Who` but his devotion was never fully repaid.
Words: John Connors