Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:

August 24, 2011

Time Can Be Rewritten 11 (Verdigris, BBC Books, 2000)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum pertwee, time can be rewritten 13

The year 2000, for a generation of Britain, marked the end of the future. A fluke of naming committed in 1977 inadvertently left the most important comics magazine in the UK with a name demarcating a clear and unavoidable sell-by date. It’s tough to blame anyone – nobody starting a grubby comics rag ostensibly edited by a fictional galactic conquerer and featuring a barely coherent revamp of 50s icon Dan Dare would have taken seriously the question “but what are we going to do in 23 years.” The answer was clear – be working on something else, this magazine having gone under 20 years earlier. But come 2000, there we were, staring awkwardly at one of the most iconic mastheads in science fiction and going “well, that’s underwhelming, isn’t it?”

2000, then, is the perfect date to revisit early 70s science fiction. In 1972, nobody believed there would be a year 2000. And come the year 2000, it turned out they’d been right all along. There really was no future. Enter Verdigris and Paul Magrs. I’ve already, in previous posts, hinted that the rise of the BBC Books line to replace the Virgin books line in Doctor Who was a mixed blessing at best, and that the seven years since the series came back have by and large validated that by favoring writers and innovations from the Virgin line while ignoring most of the new blood brought in at BBC Books. Part of that, though, is that there are actually only two real pieces of new blood brought in at BBC Books. The first is Lawrence Miles, who, while he wrote a Virgin book, is most associated with the BBC line having written four key books for them and spun off his own Faction Paradox series from them. The second is Paul Magrs.

Magrs – who I actually, in one of my handful of brushes with Z-List status in he world of Doctor Who, saw give a talk in early 2001 when I was studying abroad at the University of East Anglia where he taught – is an interesting writer. More than almost any other Doctor Who writer, Magrs visibly has a preferred approach to writing Doctor Who and little desire to deviate from it. Admittedly he has branched out considerably over the years, having now written numerous stories without his signature character Iris Wildthyme, but Verdigris isn’t one of them, so she’s probably as good a place to start as any.

Central to any assessment of Magrs’s work, after all, is the initial decision of whether or not an utterly barmy and frequently inebriated middle aged woman who travels around space and time in a double decker bus that is slightly smaller on the inside than it is on the outside is a brilliant idea or the worst thing ever. Many perfectly intelligent and sensible commentators have committed themselves firmly to the latter answer, which, unsurprisingly, presents a somewhat insurmountable barrier to enjoying Magrs’s work.

The real problem, though, is that Iris is just the tip of the iceberg.…

August 22, 2011

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 13 (The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum pertwee, pop between realities 11

With thankful apologies to Chris O’Leary of Pushing Ahead of the Dame.

1. Five Years

Some say the end is near
Some say we’ll see armageddon soon
I certainly hope we will. – Tool, “Aenema”

The smart money, you have to realize, was not on reaching 1978. The question was just which of the myriad of ways we might kill ourselves would pull it off. Nuclear war? Ecological disaster? Social collapse into anarchy? Doomwatch, after all, made three seasons off of cataloging the myriad of ways humanist might slaughter itself.

So it’s no particular surprise that Bowie starts the album with a song of apocalypse. And a remarkably concrete song of apocalypse at that – wandering through the streets and observing the people responding to the news that the Earth has five years to live. But notably absent is any explanation of how this happened – of which disaster will befall us. All of them. None of them. In a world in which the end is an absolute certainty, the means are beside the point.

The result, as Bowie exposes, is the fetishization of disaster. The Atrocity Exhibition writ large. The news isn’t that we have five years to live. It’s that we have only “five years left of crying.” The end is a welcome thing. This has always been the logic of Doctor Who – the appeal of looking at the monsters, of seeing the threat. The money shot of Inferno is that we finally get to see the world end in fire instead of just being teased. At last, armageddon stops blue balling us and gives us our payoff. The end of this growing agony and the cathartic release of knowing there is a genuine resolution. Finally, the finale. At its endpoint, Bowie’s song explodes from its initial yearning sorrow into a soaring football terrace song. A rousing sing-along chorus of “five years,” the end turned into the anthem it always was. You’ll Never Die Alone. You’re Going Home in a Nuclear Fireball. Come On You Daleks.

2. Soul Love

The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images. – Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

In a world defined by its imminent apocalyptic finale, the blinding flash of the nuclear inferno becomes the light of a film projector, pressing nuclear shadows to the screen for us to watch. There is nothing but appearances in a pre-apocalyptic world. Bowie’s song begins with a mother kneeling before the grave of a heroic son “who gave his life to save the slogans that hover between the headstone and her eyes, for they penetrate her grieving.”

When the ultimate disaster porn spectacle has become the teleology of the world, there is nothing outside the gaudy glory of slogans. Love is nothing but an ideology, a product, another slogan. There is only idiot love, the love of love. But here again, there is a countermeasure to the bleak cynicism offered by this. The fact that love is empty, cold, a rote formal process.…

August 19, 2011

Prove To Me That I am Not Mistaken (The Time Monster)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum pertwee 11

Honestly, I was browsing Google Image results for
“Time Monster,” and this was the best thing I found. And
hey, who wouldn’t rather look at Cookie Monster than
Kronos? I mean, seriously.

It’s May 20, 1972. T. Rex is back on top with “Metal Guru,” which, continuing our rule that glam songs should be seen as well as heard, is linked. It holds number one for four weeks before finally yielding to Don McLean’s “Vincent,” Elton John, Johnny Cash, David Cassidy, The Rolling Stones, and Wings also chart. But perhaps the most remarkable moment, chart-wise, is the final week of this story, where T. Rex, Slade, The Move, Sweet, and Gary Glitter are all in the top ten. This period, with David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars entering the charts (with its lead single, “Starman,” entering the singles chart at 49 the same week that five glam acts are in the top ten). In fact, if you want an experience that is aesthetically indistinguishable from The Time Monster, has far better acting, and is completable in less than 1/6 the time, I recommend just marathoning all five of those videos linked above.

While in the news, Nixon becomes the first US President since World War II to visit Russia in a meeting in which the Apollo/Soyuz mission is agreed upon. While he’s out, the first Watergate break-ins happen, and the first Ford Pinto explosion happens, beginning one of the most horrifying episodes in the history of corporate capitalism as it eventually becomes clear that Ford knew full well that the car was dangerous, but determined that the cost of settling lawsuits from exploded drivers and their families was lower than the cost of performing a recall. Then, in the tail end of the story, comes the big Watergate break-in, as Nixon campaign operatives are arrested following a botched attempt to bug the offices of the DNC. Nixon quickly moves to squash the FBI investigation of the break-in, a move that will bring down his Presidency when it’s uncovered. In Europe, Andreas Baader of the Red Army Faction is arrested (and I was just talking about them with a friend before I sat down to write this), with Ulrike Meinhoff following two weeks later. British European Airways Flight 548 crashes into Staines shortly after takeoff in the worst airplane crash in british history until Lockerbie.

While on television, we have something we haven’t seen in a while. I mean, we’ve had bad stories before, but the last few times we’ve had an unmitigated disaster of a story it’s been because the entire thing was misconceived – it was a story that should never have been attempted done badly. That’s harder to say of The Time Monster, where the basic ideas seem remarkably solid but the actual execution is an absurd train wreck. The last time we’ve really seen something like this, where a solid idea on paper just goes terribly wrong, is probably actually The Chase.…

August 17, 2011

Change, My Dear (The Mutants)

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“But I stiiiillll haven’t fooouuund what I’m looking for…”

It’s April 8, 1972. Nilsson is still at number one. After one week, however, they are stunningly unseated by, and this is one of those moments where I love following the British charts, Pipes and Drums and the Military Band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guard, with “Amazing Grace,” which further impresses by staying there for five weeks. Also in the charts are Lindisfarne, Ringo Starr, Tom Jones, Neil Young, and T. Rex.

The IRA sets off a wave of fourteen bombs in Belfast in response to the Bloody Sunday Massacre. In a show of all being friends now, China gifts two giant pandas to the National Zoo. (Some time later, in my sister’s favorite story about her traumatic childhood, my mother has her walk across a frozen expanse of Washington DC in February, promising her pandas as the incentive for her not to have a nervous breakdown, only for everyone to discover, upon reaching the zoo, that the pandas have been dead for some time and instead there’s a memorial full of children’s drawings and poems about how much they miss the pandas. This was over a decade ago, and she still complains bitterly.) More of Pruitt-Igoe gets blown up, the Paris Peace Talks to try to end the Vietnam War derail spectacularly, and Nixon announces that the US will be mining North Vietnam’s harbors. And J. Edgar Hoover finally displays an ounce of taste and dies.

And oh, hey, we finally got through those bits in two paragraphs again. That hasn’t happened in a while. So in any case, on television it’s The Mutants, the second outing by the madmen behind The Claws of Axos and, for my money, the best Pertwee story since The Ambassadors of Death. Which, puzzlingly, does not seem to be what you’d call the consensus view of this one. So I guess we know what we’re doing with this entry.

The thing about Baker and Martin is that, more than any other Pertwee-era writers, they are a pile of strange tics. Going into one of their stories it is necessary to simply accept that the characters are going to be intensely programmatic, the narrative aimed primarily at spectacle, and that the whole thing is going to be completely gonzo. But it’s not as though any of these things on their own are unique to Baker and Martin. The programmatic character was invented by Robert Holmes, nobody out-gonzos a Robert Sloman script (Or The Curse of Peladon for that matter), and those inclined to complain about a spectacle-based script should probably take a long, hard look at exactly what all those shots of impressive ships cutting through the ocean are doing in The Sea Devils. Rather, it’s that Baker and Martin have shown more willingness than almost anyone save perhaps the Sloman/Letts team to push all of these to their max. But unlike the Sloman/Letts team, who contributed four of the great Curate’s Eggs of Doctor Who history, Baker and Martin offer a sort of ruthless consistency to their stories.…

August 15, 2011

A Finely Tuned Response (The Sea Devils)

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You have to understand, Doctor, we need your fashion
sense to survive. As bad as velvet jackets are, my people
think chopped up fishing nets are acceptable evening wear.

It’s February 26, 1972. Chicory Tip are still at number one. Two weeks later, it’s Nilsson with “Without You,” which holds the title for the remainder of the story. Michael Jackson, T. Rex, Paul Simon, Slade, and, I am sorry to say given that I loathe and despise them with every fiber of my being, Chelsea FC also chart.

In other news, Nixon concludes his visit to China. He follows this by attempting to get John Lennon to conclude his visit to the United States, using the somewhat novel method of deporting him as a “strategic counter-measure” to his anti-war beliefs. (The phrase is not Nixon’s but Strom Thurmond’s. Not that that’s an improvement.) Two days thereafter, he passes an executive order setting standards for classified information, allowing the US to engage in a thirty-year campaign to cover up the FBI surveillance of John Lennon. Also in the US, demolition begins on the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing complex, a disastrous public housing project that was a marvel of architecture, and a travesty of virtually everything else including “remembering to think about the tenants when doing architecture.” (We will on several occasions find ourselves dealing the UK equivalents of this particular farce.)

While in the country I’m actually supposed to be writing about, Edward Heath renounces the use of the “five techniques,” a set of approaches used widely by the UK in Northern Ireland for what I believe the current euphemism declares “enhanced interrogation,” but those of us not seeking to excuse our own monstrosity just call torture. He follows this by proclaiming direct rule over Northern Ireland, dissolving the Northern Ireland Parliament and administering the country from London.

While on television we have The Sea Devils. On the surface, this is as straightforward a piece as we could have. Vintage action-style Pertwee (which to be fair we haven’t really seen since The Mind of Evil) and a flat-out attempt to remake The Silurians with the Master and some impressive naval footage. Malcolm Hulke stuck on a script that in no way flatters his strengths. A blog post in which I find some bright spots to emphasize in amidst the general sense that there’s just something crushingly lackluster about this approach to Doctor Who when compared to the manic inventiveness of the glam style. Wrap it all up in under 2000 words, call it a short one, and clear some time tonight for watching Misfits or something instead of finishing up the post. God bless the easy ones.

Except that the convergences of circumstance and the fact that the show is moving successfully away from the season seven mould (which, while fascinating, was at its best when Whitaker and Hulke tried to break it) and toward a new mould mean that, under the patois of earthbound-by-numbers storytelling there’s some scattered points that are worth remarking on.…

August 12, 2011

Time Can Be Rewritten 10: The Face of the Enemy (David McIntee, BBC Books,

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum pertwee, time can be rewritten 7

It’s January of 1998 – the month after The Roundheads came out, for helpful reference. But in this case, the slow undulations of the wilderness years aren’t really what I want to talk about, because the book we have on offer today is really quite interesting on its own merits. The Face of the Enemy is an oddity in the Doctor Who novels range. It’s one of two books from the Missing/Past Doctor adventures lines to focus entirely on characters other than the Doctor. The first of these – Virgin’s Downtime – is just the novelization of a Marc Platt-penned direct to video story with the Yeti in it. But this one is a different beast – a story of what UNIT gets up to while the Doctor is on one of his periodic jaunts off-world – to Peladon, in this case.

The result is a story that goes a long way towards disentangling some of the issues and juxtapositions of the Pertwee era. Because we’ve only really seen, at this point, two Pertwee stories that work much like traditional Doctor Who. Other than that, Pertwee has been paired up with the Brigadier and, in most of the stories, Yates and Benton. The Curse of Peladon, in fact, is the first story in the Pertwee era not to feature the Brigadier. So thus far, there’s been no way to meaningfully tell the difference between a Pertwee-era Doctor Who story and a UNIT story. And as I’ve already suggested, this is perhaps at the root cause of some of the tensions we’ve found so far in the Pertwee era.

And let’s be clear – the tensions are there. Contrary to the apparent beliefs of some of my esteemed commenters, I actually do like the Pertwee era. It’s my least favorite era of Doctor Who, true, but that’s like declaring the 2000 vintage my least favorite vintage of a fine wine. I still love the thing. But good lord, the era is utterly schizoid in spots. I keep harping on the ending of The Silurians largely because it captures the fundamental problem – the show can’t decide what it wants to be. And it handles this strangely – it tends to charge off in a given direction, and then, in the next story, charge off in a different direction with minimal heed paid to its compatibility with the last direction. With only the continuity of actors to hold it together, the era becomes… schizoid. I mean, that’s really the only way to describe a show that went from the social realist thriller approach of The Mind of Evil to the glam mania of The Claws of Axos. Yes, Doctor Who has always been about contrast between stories – hence going from Vortis to the Crusades. But it’s one thing to go from the tone of The Web Planet to the tone of The Crusades with a time machine. It’s quite another to do it while remaining on Earth.

But that’s changing.…

August 10, 2011

A Life of Ordered Calm (The Curse of Peladon)

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It’s really the fact that the cape
vaguely resembles a condom that
makes it.

It’s January 29th, 1972. The New Seekers, with no trace of irony whatsoever, would like to teach the world to sing, and are going to have to insist that the harmonies be perfect. T. Rex mercifully puts this out of its misery quickly with “Telegram Sam,” which, as with most glam acts, really needs to be seen as well as heard. This spares us for two weeks before Chicory Tip have their one hit with “Son of My Father,” a song that comes far closer to capturing some of the basic themes of this entry than it has any right to. America (with “Horse with No Name,” of course), Cat Stevens, Melanie (with “Brand New Key”), Sonny and Cher, and Don McLean (with “American Pie”) all also exist in the top ten.

While in news without power chords, the famed Bloody Sunday massacre of U2 (and absolutely brilliant Saul Williams cover) fame takes place as the British army opens fire on unarmed civil rights protesters in Northern Ireland. So OK, still power chords, but given that since I wrote the Day of the Daleks entry nearly a week ago, I should perhaps briefly talk about something I didn’t talk about there. See, I’m writing entries in six-entry chunks over the course of a week, then taking a week off for other projects these days – so this was written on 8/9/11, and I’ll be writing up through the entry for Monday the 22nd over the next five days. But had I written the Day of the Daleks entry yesterday, I’d have mentioned the dystopian urban jungles of Day of the Daleks and their eerie parallels to the photos of a burnt out and looted London. (Although what I would have said would largely involve the fact that the wasteland was all overgrown parking garages and things – a return to nature, not a nightmarish terror of rubble, and how there’s been a shift since 1972 in what we imagine society’s collapse will look like.)

But one of the things that really is worth stressing is that Northern Ireland is part of the UK. So when I say that the British army shot and killed fourteen unarmed protesters, what needs to be stressed is that this is a military deployment inside the UK shooting its own citizens. Reports exist of soldiers prior to the massacre actively declaring that “we want some kills” going into the day, and the overwhelming reports from anyone other than the military itself is that those shot were unarmed and fleeing for their lives. It is, in short, a dark and genuinely horrific atrocity. So when, in a few paragraphs, we get to talking about a sci-fi show with an accidental giant green penis alien, remember the context is that this story is going out in times of egregious, serious unrest in the country. Perhaps flip back and forth between this blog and The Guardian’s coverage of the riots every few paragraphs to get the proper impact.…

August 8, 2011

You’re Just a Soldier (Day of the Daleks)

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“No, really, the fish was this big.”

It’s January 1st, 1972. Little Jimmy Osmond is at number one with “Long Haired Lover From Liverpool,” for which the UK continues to seek a formal apology. Alarmingly The Osmonds at large and Donny Osmond are also in the top ten. We regret to inform you that the number one does not change over the time this story is running. Also in the charts, however, are David Bowie, Slade, Elton John, The Sweet and T. Rex, along with Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.”

Since The Daemons, the UK has begun negotiations to join the EEC now that Charles de Gaulle isn’t there to block them, continuing a process you may remember from way back here. Jim Morrison has died. The UK abandons its Black Arrow space program, formally consigning The Ambassadors of Death to a future that never happened. Tensions in Northern Ireland ratchet up, with the UK sending more troops and with UK security forces beginning Operation Demetrius, i.e. the long-term internment without trial of suspected paramilitary rebels. To say that this went over poorly with large numbers of people would be an understatement. Richard Nixon formally takes the Bretton-Woods economic system out back and shoots it by decoupling the dollar from the gold standard. The result, termed Nixon Shock, is a great way to make obsessive Tea Party/Ayn Rand devotees rant for a long time. The UN swaps the People’s Republic of China in for Taiwan, which we’ll unpack a little in the paragraph after next, Ian Paisley founds the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland, India and Pakistan have another quick spot of war, and both Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are formed.

While during this story, Kurt Waldheim becomes Secretary General of the UN, while Nixon begins development on the Space Shuttle, a decision that will turn out to be a death blow to the space age. The planned Libertarian utopia Minerva declares independence before being annexed and successfully invaded by Tonga, which has to go down as one of Libertarianism’s more hilariously ignoble defeats.

Right, so China. So, back in 1949 Mao Zedong and his forces successfully took over China. This was followed by some awkward moments like the Great Leap Forward, which proved fatal to 45 million people, and the Cultural Revolution, which went even worse on the whole. Initially, the USSR was more or less in favor of China, although each country viewed the other with some suspicion due as much to the fact that each of them was very big as to the fact that they had markedly different takes on Marxism. The US, meanwhile, was none too pleased with these developments, fighting the Korean War as a proxy war against Sino-Soviet influence. Then came the Cultural Revolution, and China and the USSR definitively split and discarded almost any pretext of getting along. In fact, they kinda started shooting each other, resulting in a situation where the US was stuck in a proxy war with China and the USSR in Vietnam while China and the USSR were themselves having a bit of a war.…

August 5, 2011

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 12 (Chariots of the Gods?, Ace of Wands, The New Age)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum pertwee, pop between realities 9

And now, then, for the other part of the argument. The Daemons was revolutionary in terms of how it expands the domain of what Doctor Who can do. But wait a moment. This is a show that only two and a half years ago was exploring the land of fiction. This is a show where one of its dominant creative forces over the first five years was obsessed with alchemy. And yet on the other hand the show has always praised science over superstition, promoted the idea that there is a rational explanation behind everything, and treated scientists as enlightened men of peace who can bring about positive social change. So to some extent, what’s happening in The Daemons is the resolution of a fundamental tension that has been in place in Doctor Who ever since the Doctor equated the TARDIS with television in the first episode, making it simultaneously a scientific marvel and something that is primarily understood in terms of more wooly notions like “the power of stories.” It’s not accidental that this resolution happens in 1971. But understanding why is a big project. And that’s what this entry is.

Let’s start with Jo’s first line, invoking the Age of Aquarius. The most obvious cultural association with that phrase comes from the 1967 musical Hair, which memorably began by proclaiming that this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. The idea is that the world is passing out of one era and into another, and that this new era will be one of peace and harmony. But this is just utopian eschatology. Every generation is convinced the world is going to end on their watch because they were dealt such a shitty hand by their parents’ generation. And then they narrowly survive and deal a shitty hand to their kids, and the cycle cheerily repeats itself. Eschatology is just a way of being. The end of the world is a lifestyle choice.

More interesting than the idea that we’re at the dawning of some new eon of possibility – or than the idea that we’re all going to die of some terrible misfortune – is what sort of apocalypse we imagine (remembering that the apocalypse can be positive or negative). And so what’s most interesting about the Age of Aquarius is not that everyone believed an egalitarian society based on peace and love was inevitable. It’s that they believed it to be inevitable because of astrology.

I mean, pause for a moment and look at the essential idea of the Age of Aquarius. Basically, over time the direction that the north pole is pointing changes, moving backwards through the Zodiac. Each change takes a bit over two millennia. The idea is that when these changes take place, it maps to massive social change on Earth. The opportune question isn’t why everyone believed a utopian society was going to dawn – that happens all the time. The question is why people were basing this belief on what stars the north pole was pointing at.…

August 3, 2011

The Evil Has No Name (The Daemons)

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The Master, at his most Aleister Crowley, faces down
Sergeant Benton at his most Bruce Springsteen.

It’s May 22, 1971. Dawn are at number one with “Knock Three Times,” and hold it for four more weeks before giving way to Middle of the Road’s “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep,” which is just one of those things that happens on the British charts. See also Israeli novelty blues. What’s more interesting is the lower reaches of the chart, where we see… OK, well, here’s the thing. I have next to no idea who any of these bands are. Admittedly, I am not the world’s biggest 70s Music Buff, but I like to think that I’m not completely hopeless and that many of you will also be more or less mystified by the information that John Kongos, Tami Lynn, Blue Mink, East of Eden, R Dean Taylor, and the Elgins were also in the top ten.

In other news, a massive earthquake levels Bingol, Turkey. Neville Bonner becomes the first indigenous Australian to sit on the Australian parliament. But the big stories are the US dropping its trade embargo with China, which we’ll talk more about on Monday and the beginning of publication of the Pentagon Papers. (Though two days after this story ends, the British grant asylum to a Russian space scientist, which is kind of cool too.)

To recap, we’ve been playing of late with the idea that there are two completely distinct modes of thought operating in the Pertwee era at any given time. The first is what we’re calling glam Pertwee – a style based on the interplay and juxtaposition of images. The second is what we’re calling action Pertwee – a style based on telling tense techno-political thrillers. Thus far virtually every Pertwee story can be understood reasonably well as a combination of influences from the glam and action styles. Colony in Space started to challenge this, but only superficially by bringing in a more complex ethics than past action-style stories had displayed, not by breaking out of the paradigm.

The Daemons does not shatter that paradigm, but it does push it a little bit. And it is as a result an unusually complex story. So to some extent, we’re going to do it in two parts. First we’ll look at what the story does today. Then on Friday we’ll do a Pop Between Realities post in which we try to make sense of the larger cultural signifiers going on here.

The Daemons is, by any measure, one of the major Pertwee stories. It’s well-remembered both by everyone who worked on it and by audiences at the time. It also marks the introduction of one of the major writers of the Pertwee era as Barry Letts puts on his third hat, already being the producer and occasional director of Doctor Who. Here he and his friend Robert Sloman collaborate under the pseudonym Guy Leopold, but make no mistake – this team ends up doing the season finales for the next three years as well as this one, which means they get to write some landmark episodes.…

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