Doctor Who Reverse the Polarity - An Analysis Of The Pertwee Era
Part Two - Season 8
After the success of Season 7, it was quite clear that Doctor Who wasn't going anywhere, and viewers had been well established with the new format of the programme.
You have the valiant hero of the Doctor, in the form of Jon Pertwee, known as the dashing dandy in a cape, the Edwardian gent in the 70's. Whose role was to stand up for the little guy, and be intolerant of pompous figures of authority, he was a rebel at heart who was very serious in the role, but with a twinkle in his eye.
You also have the support of UNIT, lead by Brigadier Lethbrigde Stewart, a character superbly brought to life my Nicholas Courtney. Now, before I go any further, it is important to point out that UNIT is no sense of the word a military organisation. They may come across as that, and easy to confuse for being the left right, left right, on the double Dad's Army soldier type of people. UNIT is an investigative organisation whose role is to investigate alien life matters on earth.
United Nations, Intelligence, Taskforce is what UNIT stands for. They are in no sense of the word the army organisation they appear to be.
Other roles of support come from two new comers to the series, Jo Grant played by Katy Manning, and Captain Mike Yates played by Richard Franklin. Not forgetting Sergant Benton played by John Levene.
But there was also going to be a new member of the family joining, and that is where our analysis of Season 8 begins.
THE MASTER
The dynamic duo of script editor Terrance Dicks, and producer Barry Letts always liked to open the new season with some sort of a gimmick to really come in with a strong opening to emphasise that Doctor Who WAS BACK and they meant business.
In discussion between Dicks and Letts, they were talking about the relationship in the past season with the Doctor and the Brig (Brigadier) was very much like that of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, and suddenly a light bulb moment happened where one of them said "What he needs is a Moriarty".
A good villain, a strong and powerful villain, which of course meant he would have to be another time lord but gone bad and turned to the side of evil and conquest. Dicks said "I've got the perfect name for him. The Master" and in reply Letts said "And I know, exactly the actor to play him. Roger Delgado".
Letts had worked alongside Delgado as an actor and director on other dramas at the BBC and knew him very well. He also knew that Delgado was typecast as being 'the perfect baddie' in films and in TV series. He put two and two together, approached Delgado, and the rest is history.
The Master is the Doctor's best enemy. They are duelling enemies, they are constantly in competition with one another to see who can outwit the other. Something which Pertwee and Delgado do superbly on screen.
Like the Doctor, the Master is a renegade from Gallifrey (The Planet of the Time Lords) and even though he's very similar to the Doctor in terms of intellect and skill, he is in someways better as a character than the Doctor due to his wit, charm, manipulative mind control capabilities, hypnotic techniques, the sort of person who would shoot you in the back before thinking twice. He is a very clever opponent, even though the Doctor always out smarts him, there are brilliant moment in which the Master can outwit the Doctor which is one of the reasons that makes him a strong contender as a villain. He's up there with the Daleks, and The Cybermen as being the Doctor's best enemy.
As such, The Master was to go on to be a welcomed member of the UNIT family and a perfect equal adversary to the Doctor.
TERROR OF THE AUTONS
Terror of the Autons is the first story of Season Eight, and marks the beginning of a lot characters journey's into Doctor Who. It's Jo Grant's first story, Mike Yates's first story, and the first story to feature The Master. It also the second story to feature the Autons as a monster after having proved to be successful the previous year in 'Spearhead from Space'.
Only this time, the Nestene was being aided by Master in the hope of conquering the world and destroying the Doctor in the process. So for a show that is called Doctor Who, for the first few minutes of the story beginning, the audience aren't actually following the events of the title character, they are being declined the Doctor's appearance only to be enticed from seeing him to follow the first stages of the Masters plan.
Jo Grant's first scene is delightful, as it sets up what would turn out to be a fun and happy three year relationship between Jo and the Doctor. Jo basically walks into the Doctor's lab and wrecks the Doctor's experiment accidentally, Jo gets confused when the Doctor's equipment catches fire she grabs a fire extinguisher and sprays water and foam all over the Doctor's apparatus. The scene sets Jo up as the lovable cluts we all come to know and love her for.
It gets the first story of the season off to a great start and we're only a few minutes into Terror of the Autons. It's when the story starts to unravel you learn of the Master's involvement with the Nestenes and the Autons, measures of which have drastic repercussions to the viewer watching the episode.
I am perfectly aware this was a different time to the way television programmes are made now, but even I know the dos and don'ts of TV. There are elements to Terror of the Autons which are recognised as going a step too far.
One example is the troll doll. The Troll Doll is a horrible ugly looking plastic doll that comes to live when in a heated environment and strangles people to death. The production team had complaints from parents whose children were frightened having watched the episode where the doll strangles a man to death, they refused to go to bed with their teddy bears in case it came to life and suffocated them.
Another example is the scene where the plastic chair unfolds and suffocates a man to death in a very horrific way, a bit deep for a family show going out at 5:30pm on a Saturday afternoon.
It was at this point after receiving such complaints from concerned audience members and higher up members of staff from the drama department at the BBC, Doctor Who learnt a huge lesson and since then was never that violent or realistically horrific during the time Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts were in charge.
THE MIND OF EVIL
It was a story set in a prison, the exterior marvellously supplied by the surrounding of Dover Castle.
It evolved around an idea of a brain washing machine extracting the evil of the mind. However, as it turns out to be the case in this story, the mind can be a dangerous thing.
There is lots of espionage, action sequences, undercover agent stuff, the sort of things you'd expect to find in a Bond film. If I could name an example of a Doctor Who story that is most like a Bond film, Mind of Evil gets 1st prize.
There is an alien creature from within what is called the 'Keller Machine' who feeds off the evil of the victims mind and attacks them by playing on their worst fears. Where continuity comes into this the Mind parasite attacks the Doctor on three separate occasions. The first visions tongues of flames, enveloping the Doctor's terror struck face. He tells Jo as he recovers "Not long ago I saw an entire world disappear in flames'. This marks a reference to the recent story "Inferno" also written by Don Houghton, who is the writer of Mind of Evil.
The main issue this story has is the Master's plan which is so convoluted that is lacks credibility. You can watch Mind of Evil and find it very enjoyable if you don't concentrate on the Master's plan of which two aspects never dovetail satisfactorily. But Delgado pulls off the role so well, the average viewer would hardly notice.
But the story does set itself up with a reasonably good pace, and it has all lots of elements in there that make Jon Pertwee's run as the Doctor so enjoyable.
THE CLAWS OF AXOS
The Claws of Axos stands out as being one of the most recognisable stories of the Pertwee era, and it's not difficult to understand why. You've got a great monster in the shape of the Axons, Red and Orange blob monsters that alone create memories viewers watching will remember for a lifetime, as well as in their elegant gold and yellow humanoid apprearances.
Set in Britain, an alien organism Axos comes to Earth and spreads its Axonite particles across the Earth to allow itself to feed on all life on the planet.
In 1969, script editor Terrance Dicks, contacted new writing duo Bob Baker and Dave Martin after reading a draft they had sent in called 'A Man's Life'. After offering them a seven part serial in November 1969 for Doctor Who's eighth season, Baker and Martin submitted various storylines for ideas for stories they had. Despite most of them not being suitable, Dicks did commission a script from them on the 1st of December 1969, only for a six part story and not a seven part story.
The original storyline for Claws of Axos was set in central London, and was formed around Battersea Power Station, which would eventually become the Newton Power Complex, as it would have been too expensive to make on the budget the production team had available. Later it had been revealed by Bob Baker in an interview that when Dave Martin and himself started writing together they were new and inexperienced to the writing scene and didn't think of things such as budget. Dicks promptly encouraged the writing team, and advised them to scale down the story.
After going back to the storyline stage again, the story was changed to be set outside London and excluded the large action sequences set in space and around major landmarks in London. It does make you think "What If?" you have an ambitious creative writing team in Bob Baker and Dave Martin, who between them have very good ideas, but just think, if it were possible to have the story they originally written "The Claws of Axos" we know would have ended up being a totally different story altogether.
Working titles for this story included: "Doctor Who and the Gift", "The Friendly Invasion", "The Axons", and my personal favourite "The Vampire from Space".
We have characters coming like Corporal Bell who was in 'Mind of Evil', her role in this is to announce weak weather conditions over Kent.
There is also the character of Mr Chinn whose sent to investigate the Doctor because there's no record of who he is. Chinn is in every sense of the word, a pompous, greedy politician who puts the interests of himself before the interests of the world. He's exactly the type of character the Third Doctor despises, and we think of him as an idiot.
Not to mention, Bill Filer, who an American agent, I don't know why he's there or what his role is in the story, but the fact of matter is, he's there.
Location filming for this story was planned to take place over five days in early 1971, starting on the 4th January. Filming would take place in various locations around Kent, but mainly in Dungeness.
During the location shooting of the scenes with the tramp, an overnight snow storm necessitated the creation of a line of dialogue in the programme to explain that the variations of weather from shot to shot in these scenes (filmed on various days but supposedly taking place within minutes of each other) are "freak weather conditions" as a result of Axos' arrival.
The story includes interior scenes inside the TARDIS for the first time in the Pertwee era of the show.
The configuration of the TARDIS set-up is unique for this adventure. The TARDIS monitor appears to be a circular screen embedded in one of the 'roundels' in the console room wall, rather than the traditional rectangular screen (this feature is seen again once, a year later, on the unique set built for The Time Monster).
The doors of the console room do not open directly into the exterior as in all other adventures have done; instead they open into a corridor that features the 'roundel' motif. When the TARDIS interior reappears, in the next production (Colony in Space), both these features have been eliminated.
COLONY IN SPACE
Colony In Space first broadcast on BBC One in April 1971. It was a story with a political undertone and is essentially a civil war in space. There a lots of interesting science fiction elements within this story and as a drama it stands up well and would be acceptable today as a good piece of action drama shot by a very good, and at time young, action director. Michael Bryant, who would go on to direct other stories of the Pertwee era, "The Sea Devils", "The Green Death", "Death to the Daleks", and "Revenge of the Cybermen" with Tom Baker's doctor.
With the UNIT family providing a nice support for the Doctor during his exile on Earth, it was a constant thought of Dicks and Letts to get the Doctor back travelling in time and space again, and they came up with the idea of the time lords sending him off on a mission as an unwilling secret agent. The Doctor hates it, but he has no alternative.
Though Doctor Who is well brought up with UNIT, this story doesn't feature Mike Yates or Sergant Benton. The Brigadier appears at the beginning and end of the story, and that's all. So as a viewer you are walking into a brand new team of just Jon and Katy (The Doctor and Jo) for the first time, and that is quite exciting as you are then relying on your main character to carry the weight of the story.
Colony in Space has a lot of elements within it, so much so in fact, I feel maybe some of the themes in go over the heads of young viewers watching it in the 1970's.
The story functions as social commentary – in this instance, the dangers of colonialism. The story, by former Communist Party of Great Britain member Malcolm Hulke, has been described as "unashamedly left wing", with the pioneering colonists and the greedy IMC. As with The Space Pirates (1969), the story can be seen as a Western in space, with the colonists using rifles like cowboys and the Primitives wielding spears in a similar role to Indians.
Establishing the alien world of the planet Uxarieus is a colourless grey quary. Our first inkling of an alien world for the first time in 70's Doctor Who.
The Third Doctor, and indeed Pertwee look happy to be back in the TARDIS. However, even though the loveable and loyal Jo Grant had been assigned to the Doctor since Terror of the Autons the previous year, in this story we finally realise that she didn't quite believe his stories of time travelling in an old police box.
The Doctor's arch enemy The Master, would appear in every story during the eighth season of Doctor Who, but although his threat was expected, he doesn't appear in Colony In Space until halfway through to save the stories becoming predictable.
Colony In Space is the first story to take Jon Pertwee's Earth based Third Doctor to alien planet. Fore the alien world to feature in colour episodes, there is a certain irony that the planet is filmed in a colourless quarry that typifies many an alien planet in Doctor Who, before and since.
THE DAEMONS
The Daemons is a perfect example of a Doctor Who story in the early 1970's. Without the TARDIS, and with restrictions of a Doctor exiled to Earth, it proves that the series can world equally well without alien worlds and a threat that is more local and familiar to viewers. And in a story where the Master turns out to be the new vicar, the threat doesn't get more local than that.
Producer Barry Letts had a fascination with black magic from the early age, so when he decided to co-write the final story of season eight, he chose to expand on an idea from the audition script he had used for the casting of Jo Grant and Captain Mike Yates. For the audition piece, the new characters confronted the Devil in a church, but for The Daemons the black magic element was explained by science and the 'Devil' became a devil-like creature called Azal.
Letts wrote the script with Robert Sloman, and they chose to under the pseudonym of Guy Leopold.
Like all of the stories of 1971, Roger Delgado made an appearance as the Master. Although a strong and popular character, his inclusion in every story was seen to be a mistake by Letts, so his character was to be given a rest after this story.
With location filming in the picturesque Wiltshire village of Aldbourne, which looks exactly the same today as it did in 1971, The Daemons ends Jon Pertwee's second season as the Third Doctor on a high.
So what Season Eight has taught us and established within the 'Whoniverse' as some fans call it, is that the UNIT family is a powerful bond, and welcomed three new members within Season Eight, a loveable new companion in Jo Grant, a strong support in the form of Mike Yates, and a powerful enemy in the form of the Master.
A strong season of stories that would go on to shape the future of Doctor Who, even to today when we watch it with Jodie Whittaker's Thirteenth Doctor.
Join me next time, where I continue my analysis of the Pertwee Era where I review, Season 9.
