Elizabeth Sandifer

I got a bad desire.

It’s February 23, 1974. Suzi Quatro is at number one with “Devil Gate Drive.” A sort of post-glam piece of bubblegum, it holds the spot for two weeks before giving way to Alvin Stardust, another sort of sanitized glam cash-in. It lasts for one week before yielding the top spot to Paper Lace’s “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero,” widely recognized as one of the worst songs ever recorded. David Bowie, Ringo Starr, The Hollies, Paul McCartney and Wings, and the Bay City Rollers all also chart.

The most obvious piece of news to cite here is the fact that the election that returns Harold Wilson as Prime Minister takes place. Charles de Gaulle Airport opens in Paris. And seven major Nixon aides are indicted in the Watergate break-in and cover-up.

Far from all of this, on television, is Death to the Daleks. There are many Doctor Who stories from the 70s that are well-remembered because they are classics. There are also, however, several Doctor Who stories from the 70s that are well-remembered because they came out on VHS early. The 80s VHS releases were focused almost entirely on classic monsters and highlights from the early Tom Baker years, which meant that both Day of the Daleks and this were among the stories that were widely and universally available on VHS. The logic on this was understandable, if crass – the early releases strongly favored four-parters, which were cheaper (in the UK, six parters got released as two tapes. The US generally condensed them to one, but the result was that in the early days, four-parters were strongly preferred). Within the era favored by the releases – Pertwee and Hinchcliffe-era Baker – these were the two four-part stories featuring the Daleks, so they were shoo-ins for release. (This same logic is why Revenge of the Cybermen was improbably picked as the first release – it had the right Doctor and a monster the show had just brought back.) For American fans, this release seemed particularly common, frequently ending up as the only Doctor Who story that ended up at the local Blockbuster. And so for a generation of Doctor Who fans, this is one we’re intimately familiar with. (Not to impose myself overly on the narrative. Yet.)

As I’ve suggested, the level of familiarity here is oddly incommensurate with the level of quality. It is not that Death to the Daleks is a bad story – although it’s hard to argue with a straight face that it’s a particularly good one. Unfortunately, the weirdness inherent in the odd overwatching of this story tends to obscure the degree to which the story is screamingly weird on its own. Because coming after ten weeks of The Time Warrior and Invasion of the Dinosaurs, this story sticks out like a sore thumb.

I don’t inherently mean this as a bad thing. It’s just that for the past 16 episodes and nine months, Doctor Who has been, seemingly by choice, an earthbound show again.…

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Sod captions! I’m just going to say K-KLAK! from now on! K-KLAK!

It’s January 12, 1974. Improbably, despite the fact that it has been two weeks since Christmas, Slade continues to hold the number one single, though after only one more week of this they give way to The New Seekers’ “You Won’t Find Another Fool Like Me,” which in turn gives way to Mud’s “Tiger Feet,” which has a four week run and is the number one single of the year. Andy Williams, The Sweet, Lulu, Diana Ross, David Bowie, and The Wombles all also chart.

While in real news, Patty Hearst is kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn is exiled from the USSR. Really, that’s about what I can scrape together here. Oh. On US television, both The Six Million Dollar Man and Happy Days debut. There. That’s truly major world events there.

While on good television… oh, wait, never mind, it’s Invasion of the Dinosaurs. A story that is not so much in the territory of “good” as it is “infamous,” with (likely spurious) rumors even existing that Barry Letts requested its destruction because he was embarrassed by the effects. I’ve usually foregone criticizing the effects of Doctor Who, generally stressing when they are adequate instead of when they’re not. But here we finally have to actually talk about special effects.

Let’s start with a brief typology of special effects. There are essentially two types, which we can call visible and invisible effects. An invisible effect is one that is meant to work in the background. When we see it, we are not meant to gawk at the effect, we’re meant to sail right over it, accepting it within the narrative. Invisible effects merely have to be good enough to not announce themselves. The sets are usually an example of invisible effects in Doctor Who. Very rarely is the point of a story or scene in Doctor Who up to 1974 to gawk at the studio scenery. So as long as nothing crashes into the scenery and makes the wall wobble, the scenery is usually more or less acceptable in Doctor Who. The horrible scene in The Green Death in which the Doctor sits in an unmoving Bessie while a CSO landscape scrolls by is jarring because it’s supposed to be a scene where we’re not thinking about the effects, but because they’re so obvious, we think about them anyway. (We’ll talk more about invisible effects when we get to The Ark in Space, which provides a fabulous limit case.)

Visible effects, on the other hand, are showpieces. The greatest visible effect in the history of cinema is, for my money, the scene in The Muppet Movie in which Kermit rides a bicycle. Nothing about this scene is meant to be realistic or believable. The audience is not meant to believe that Kermit is a real frog who happens to also be a cyclist. The only reason that effect is interesting is because the audience is consciously aware that Kermit is a piece of felt that cannot possibly ride a bicycle, and thus stare at the scene trying to figure out how the effect was done.…

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roofle pwned feminist

It’s December 15, 1973. Slade is at number one with “Merry Xmas Everybody,” with Gary Glitter, Roxy Music, Wizzard and Mott the Hoople also lurking in the charts. Slade holds #1 through Christmas, and into the new year, in the last real flourishing of glam.

I’d do the usual new season politics roundup, but I feel like the last entry did most of it. You’ve got the Yom Kippur War, tons more bad stuff in Northern Ireland, Pinochet’s coup d’etat in Chile, Spiro Agnew’s resignation, and the mounting hilarity of Watergate. While during this story, OPEC doubles the price of oil, and the Three-Day Week itself comes into force.

So let’s get down to watching Doctor Who, since the nature of the blog as it gets to the end of an era is that I end up packing it with entries about things other than TV episodes. (There are, after this, four more Pertwee stories, but Robot is eight entries away.) And The Time Warrior, made at the end of the Season Ten block (i.e. a block where the show was, as I’ve said, on fire creatively), is, in a practical sense, the last Pertwee story that has a large number of people who unabashedly and unambiguously love it. Not that at least some of the four after this don’t have their fans (though some of them basically have nobody whatsoever who likes them), but that this is in one sense the Pertwee era’s last stab at outright greatness.

It’s also very much a passing of the torch. It’s Robert Holmes’s last story before he becomes script editor, a position he unofficially adopts for part of Season Eleven, and adopts in full for Season Twelve. And it’s the debut of Sarah Jane Smith, the iconic companion of the Holmes/Hinchcliffe era renaissance. So there’s  a lot to love here.

As with the last Holmes story we saw, the major highlight here is that Holmes is a wizard at creating epic stories out of low rent characters. This is perfectly in keeping with the “fallen power” feel of Britain that has been brewing for a while and really reaches a head with the wiping out of the Heath Prime Ministership. Here we get Irongron, whose name makes him sound like a strange reject from The Krotons. At the start of the story, Irongron is a pathetic loser of a warlord complaining about his bad food and bad wine, and talking of how he’s going to have to go do some conquest to get new stuff, but with the clear sense that he is pathetically all talk.

This is the essential Robert Holmes move – to make a villain out of a pathetic schlub instead of out of some terrifying and powerful figure. So Irongron is scary not because he’s inherently powerful, but for the far more interesting reason that he’s an easily manipulable loser who’s come under the influence of a powerful alien warrior. What Holmes does with this character – and with many of his other characters – is make him scarier by making him more low rent.…

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Oh Cliff, you take me to the most romantic places.

It’s May 19, 1973. Wizzard is at number one with “See My Baby Jive,” which stays at number one for four weeks until Suzi Quatro’s “Can The Can” unseats it for a week, followed by 10cc’s “Rubber Bullets.” Also in the charts are The Sweet, Gary Glitter, David Bowie, T. Rex, Lou Reed, Alice Cooper, and, um… Perry Como. I’m exaggerating a little bit, as Stevie Wonder and Fleetwood Mac also chart. Since we haven’t talked about them in a while and it’s worth checking in occasionally, David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane is at the top, with Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon all charting. Along with two Beatles compilations and 40 Fantastic Hits From The 50’s And 60’s. So a bit of a nostalgia trip creeping in there.

In real news, Skylab launches, followed immediately by Skylab 2, which whizzes off to the stars to fix the first one. Lord Lambton resigns from Parliament after The News of the World busts him on his fondness for prostitutes. The Greek military junta puts an end to the whole monarchy business, Secretariat wins the Triple Crown, and the Ezeiza massacre takes place in Argentina, with snipers shooting supporters of Peron. And finally, Peter Dinsdale commits his first fatal act of arson, killing a six year old boy in Kingston upon Hull.

While on television, it’s the end of Season Ten of Doctor Who, which means it’s time for Robert Sloman and Barry Letts to lay another Curate’s egg. But unlike certain other Curate’s eggs, this one hatches giant maggots that kill you by turning you bright green. Readers may be noticing a certain pattern of disdain for the writing of Mr. Sloman, and to a lesser extent Mr. Letts. (Though I’ve not seen a clear account of what their process is, my assumption, especially given that Letts demonstrates skill in other aspects of the program, is that Letts comes up with some story ideas and leaves them for Sloman to turn into a script, with most of the resulting defects entering at that stage. But there’s a whiff of dangerous revisionism here – much of the appeal of that apportioning of blame comes down to the fact that Barry Letts is a decades-long friend of the series with numerous positive contributions, whereas Robert Sloman goes away after Planet of the Spiders. Leaving the blame with the guy who doesn’t keep showing up is convenient.) And while The Green Death is without a doubt his best script yet, and rightly deserves much of the praise heaped upon it, what all of this misses is that it is also by miles his worst script yet.

This may seem a contradiction in terms, but it’s one that gets at the heart of the issues with the Sloman/Letts scripts. They are full of some of the best scenes and ideas in the Pertwee era, and also full of some of the most atrocious plotting, torturous dialogue, and, in the case of The Green Death, appalling politics of the Pertwee era.…

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The Doctor is totally Banksy.

It’s April 7, 1973. Gilbert O’Sullivan is at number one with “Get Down,” with David Cassidy, Donny Osmond, and Little Jimmy Osmond all also in the top ten. A situation along these lines persists for three weeks before Dawn reach number one with “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree,” which ends up being the number one song for the year. David Bowie, Sweet, and Gary Glitter also chart in other three weeks of this story.

In real news, the Labour Party takes over the Greater London Council, prefiguring their general election win ten months later. Also, the House of Commons declines to reinstitute the death penalty, and a one day strike in opposition to government policy on inflation takes place amount 1,600,000 workers. Elsewhere in Europe, the GSG 9, Germany’s counter-terrorism force, is formed in response to the Munich killings. In the US, a large swath of Nixon aides resign in an attempt to draw a line under the Watergate scandal, which I’m sure is going to work. A 71-day standoff with the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee ends with the surrender of the Native Americans. Also the Sears Tower is built, and screw you if you call it Willis Tower.

While on television, it’s pretty much 1965/66. No. Wait. That’s The Daleks’ Masterplan, which, while the stretch of twelve episodes we’re tying up here was an explicit attempt to redo, isn’t at all what this story is like. On television, it’s pretty much 1963/64, as Terry Nation suddenly reappears and writes a story that is basically just The Daleks only an episode shorter. Note that I say he writes a story that is just a remake of his old work, though. That doesn’t mean that’s what we get on screen.

But before we go there, it’s worth taking a step back, looking at these twelve episodes, and asking how we got here. There are a lot of reasons. First and foremost, Letts, having gotten the Daleks back in his toolbox, was understandably eager to use them. A feature of the deal to bring them back, however, was that Terry Nation got first refusal on the right to write a Dalek story. He’d been too busy to exercise it in 1972, but was now keen to. So that meant that they had to use a Nation script if they were to do Daleks.

But also attached with all of this was a more curious motivation. It was the tenth anniversary, and before The Three Doctors had even been planned out there was a desire to do something nostalgic for it. Accordingly, the production team leafed through past events and said “Ooh, twelve week Dalek epic, that sounds fun.” So they called Douglas Camfield, who had directed The Daleks’ Master Plan, and asked him for advice. His advice was “don’t do that.” So they dropped to plan B – let Nation write six weeks of Dalek thrills, then have a different six-parter that dovetails into it.…

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Only Doctor Who would finally give aliens masks where they can have facial expressions, then have them just look tired and busy all the time.

It’s February 24, 1973. The Sweet continue to be at number one with “Blockbuster,” but are unseated after one week by Slade’s “Cum On Feel The Noize,” a more emphatic anthem. It lasts four weeks before Donny Osmond unleashes “The Twelfth of Never.” Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” T. Rex’s “Twentieth Century Boy,” Alice Cooper’s “Hello Hurray,” and the Jackson 5’s, consisting at this point of Jackie, Tito, Michael, Jermaine, and Marlon, cover of Browne’s “Doctor My Eyes” all also chart. Also during the course of this story, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon is released.

The day before Pink Floyd’s release, on the other hand, came Thomas Pynchon’s release of Gravity’s Rainbow. Other non-musical events of the six weeks included voters in Northern Ireland voting to remain part of the UK (Irish nationalists supported a boycott of the referendum), while IRA bombs go off in London. The Governor of Bermuda is assassinated by a small Bermudan black nationalist group. The Watergate scandal begins to blossom in the news, while in the UK is the Lofthouse Colliery disaster, a mining accident in which seven coal workers died in West Yorkshire.

On television we have Frontier in Space, the annual Malcolm Hulke Lizard People Extravaganza. As with all of Season Ten, there’s more going on here than in similar stories from past seasons. Which is good. One could be forgiven for thinking that we’ve been here before, after all. The Master manipulating two parties into a conflict for his own benefit. Misunderstandings between humans and lizard people. Pig-headed military figures. I’d link those phrases to the appropriate Hulke stories, but one is spoiled for choice – literally every Hulke story to date has qualified for at least two of that list.

The thing about the Pertwee era is that in a real sense, it builds logically and inexorably towards a peak in Season Ten. To give a sort of map of the era, at least for our purposes here, it spends its first three years working out a bundle of anxieties and contradictions. Then its last two seasons each end up embodying one half of that split, with Season Ten as the brilliant glam monument and Season Eleven basically flopping around like a dead fish. This is a strange split. It’s not that Season Ten is doing something massively different from the seasons on either side of it. Season Nine has its Hulke lizard story. Season Eleven has its Hulke lizard story.

But for some odd, ineffable reason, perhaps down to nothing more than the lingering energy of the madcap singularity that was The Three Doctors, perhaps down to Doctor Who just being in the exact right place to catch a social wave, the show is on fire in 1973. Everything they try comes off, even when (as in the next story), it has no right to.…

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Ah, realism.

It’s January 27th, 1973. The Sweet’s “Blockbuster” has mercifully brought an end to this unfortunate Jimmy Osmond business, and hold number one for four weeks, marking a pleasant restoration of glam rock order. Gary Glitter, Elton John, David Bowie, and ELO all also chart. In non-musical news, Roe v. Wade is decided in the US, the US ends its involvement in Vietnam by signing the Paris Peace Accords, while in the UK the Sunday Times wins a court case allowing it to publish articles on thalidomide, as it was increasingly turning out that people should probably have figured out that in addition to reducing nausea in pregnant women it also caused them to give birth to deformed flipper babies. Oops.

While on television we have Carnival of Monsters. It ought go without saying that Carnival of Monsters is the best Pertwee story to date, probably the best period, and flat-out one of the best Doctor Who stories ever. And yet somehow it does not go without saying. In fact, on the big Doctor Who Magazine poll, Carnival of Monsters inexplicably finishes behind Inferno, The Daemons, The Silurians and The Sea Devils – and those are just the stories it’s completely bewildering why anyone would prefer to this, as opposed to the ones where I can at least squint and pretend that there’s some logic to.

The thing is, if you ask non-fans, it’s clear this story’s reputation is right where it should be. It’s not a coincidence that this is the one used for the Five Faces of Doctor Who repeat, was among the earlier DVD releases, and has generally acquired a reputation as the goto Pertwee story for the general public. Which makes this a case of that classic problem where Doctor Who fans occasionally know far less about Doctor Who than anyone else.

It’s worth taking a step backwards here and looking at season ten as a whole. Like all the Pertwee seasons, it consists of five stories. Unlike any of the other Pertwee seasons, fully four of these are “event” stories – that is, stories in which a character recycled from an earlier story appears or stories in which a major character debuts or departs. The only other Pertwee season to have anything like this sort of pure focus on event stories is Season 8, and that’s only true if you want to overlook the fact that the Master wasn’t an “event” yet.

More broadly, the Pertwee era is actually strangely short on primarily self-contained stories. If we take a broad view and count stories that are “events” for historical reasons – things like The Silurians or The Time Warrior – Pertwee ends up with only four stories in his entire tenure that are definitively not event stories: The Ambassadors of Death, Inferno, The Mutants, and this. And save Inferno, that list consists of stories I’ve claimed are underrated.

The non-event status of Carnival of Monsters, however, is more than just a reason why it’s oddly overlooked by fans.…

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