Go Down Go Down Go Down Go Down (Inferno)
Sometimes Wikipedia picks the weirdest frames as its images… |
It’s May 9, 1970. Norman Greenbaum continues to be at number one. More alarmingly, at number two is the England World Cup Squad with “Back Home,” the first of many post-1966 humiliations England’s national football team would suffer. Worse, a week later the England World Cup Squad takes number one, holding it for three weeks. It’s unseated by “Yellow River” by Christie, a song in the classic “soldier returning home” subgenre. This lasts a week before Mungo Jerry’s “In the Summertime” plays us out of season seven. The Hollies, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Tom Jones, The Moody Blues, Fleetwood Mac, and The Supremes also chart.
Since The Ambassadors of Death wrapped, the most obvious news story is the Kent State Massacre. This is because 2/3 of my readers are Americans, and mistake inspiring a really good Neil Young song with mattering. All Kent State amounts to is a confirmation that the hippie/anti-war movement was successfully so marginalized that affixing bayonets, advancing towards them, and shooting them dead is not entirely outside of the mainstream. More interesting for us is actually something like Thor Heyerdahl setting sail with a papyrus boat called Ra II to try to prove that it was theoretically possible for the ancient Egyptians to have influenced the design sensibilities of South American civilizations. This is proper 1970s stuff – bewilderingly overreaching theories of human development held together by sticky tape and charisma.
But perhaps most interesting for our purposes, two days before the final episode of this story aired, the UK held a general election in which, in a shock result, Harold Wilson’s Labour government fell and Tory Edward Heath became Prime Minister. Exactly why Wilson went down is a matter of debate, with theories ranging from the fairly improbable (that England did poorly in the World Cup) to the quite likely (a raft of poor economic data doing in the not actively unpopular but not particularly popular Labour government), to the marginal and frankly disturbing (Tories were fired up following Enoch Powell’s River of Blood speech, discussed here). We’ll track the consequences of this through most of the Pertwee era, with one particular consequence taking us all the way through 1990.
While on television… this one’s interesting. Somewhat surprisingly, the Doctor Who Magazine Mighty 200 poll ranks this as the best Pertwee story. Given that I can’t even see how you’d argue it as the best story of season seven, this is a bit of a surprise. Tat Wood suggests that people are more enamored with the idea of Inferno than they are with the actual episodes, and I suspect this is more or less on target.
The biggest problem that Inferno appears to have when you start watching it is a crushing sense that we’ve seen this before. Here we are after two seven part adventures set in scientific installations where mysterious things were afoot, and what do we get? Another scientific installation with mysterious deaths and monsters.…