Elizabeth Sandifer

The Doctor and Tobias Vaughan make their way through imagined streets.

It’s November 2, 1968. Mary Hopkin is at number one with “Those Were The Days,” with Joe Cocker in number two. He overtakes her one week later, and is in turn overtaken by the theme to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. It lasts until the last two weeks of this story, at which point “Lily the Pink” by The Scaffold, a comedy band featuring Paul McCartney’s brother, takes over. Elsewhere in the top ten over these eight weeks one can find Jose Felicano’s cover of “Light My Fire” and Hendrix’s version of “All Along The Watchtower.” Elsewhere in music, Elvis makes his comeback and the Beatles release the White Album.

In other news, Richard Nixon is elected President of the United States, bringing, in effect, all hope the left might have ever had over the 1960s to a crashing end, as we talked about last Friday. In more subtle news, Douglas Engelbert demos the NLS, or oN-Line System, in an event called the “mother of all demos.” Although at the time known only to a small core of technical users, this is one of the most important events in the history of computers, and the technology Engelbert shows off here ends up being the basic underpinning of the modern desktop computer. Among the concepts debuting here are the mouse and the idea of “windows” within a computer system, and the first major debut of word processing on the computer.

While on television we have The Invasion. Essentially a backdoor pilot for the Pertwee era of Doctor Who, this story exists primarily to try out a new format whereby the Doctor is the assistant of a military organization called UNIT who battles alien threats on Earth. Here, to kick things off in a big way, the Doctor reteams with Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart from The Web of Fear – now given his more famous rank of Brigadier-General – to fight the Cybermen in London.

This is not, of course, the first time that the series has been set in London. In fact, it’s the sixth major instance. First of all, An Unearthly Child opens there. From there contemporary London is avoided until the end of the third season, but futuristic London is attacked by Daleks in The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Contemporary London finally gets its day in the sun in The War Machines, where it gets attacked by evil computers. From there we nip off to Gatwick Airport for The Faceless Ones and the start of Evil of the Daleks, before returning to the Underground (and brief aboveground shots) in the aforementioned Web of Fear.

But something is different this time. For the first time in a story set in a more or less contemporary London (the “more or less” aspect of it will be dealt with later), we have a focus on the idea that London – the very home of the program – is under real attack, with the sixth episode culminating in one of the great money shot cliffhangers of Doctor Who as the Cybermen burst from the sewers and storm down the steps of St.…

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You mean I could leave Jamie and Zoe behind and just take you two? As I’ll say in about 37 years, fantastic!

It’s September 14, 1968. In our traditional sign of some sort of restoration of order, The Beatles are at number one with Hey Jude. They are unseated two weeks later by a signing to their own record label, Mary Hopkin, a British folk singer, who holds the number one slot with “Those Were the Days” for the remainder of this story.

In news that doesn’t sing, the Apollo missions get closer and closer to the moon with their first manned launch, Apollo 7. The merger between General Electric Company (no relation to the American company General Electric) and English Electric is the biggest merger in UK history. There’s a lovely revolution in Panama. And, most significantly, in the one major bit of 1968 catastrophe to hit the UK, rioting breaks out following a civil rights march in Derry, leading to the twenty years of tension and terrorism between the UK and Ireland known as The Troubles.

While on television we have, thankfully, the exact story we needed after the grotesque train wreck that was The Dominators. The Mind Robber is a thing of absolute beauty. If The Dominators was the complete breakdown of all heart, soul, and ethics in the series, The Mind Robber is, more even than Power of the Daleks, a story that is about establishing Doctor Who as an unending story.

The basic idea is that following a TARDIS malfunction the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe get caught in the Land of Fiction, a realm in which stories are real. The title, which is admittedly intensely marginal, refers to the Master of the Land of Fiction, who has apparently lured the Doctor here in order to get him to run things in the Land of Fiction.

Much has been made of many of the obvious aspects of this story. The intertextuality, the degree to which this represents Doctor Who acknowledging a longstanding debt to a tradition of British children’s literature, the pleasant and inventive surrealism – all of these are well worn topics that you can see covered in almost any book on the series. Even if you go for criticism from third generation fandom – things like Running Through Corridors or About Time (Those links are UK links. American links are available on the pretty spinny wheel on the right of the site) most of what you get are acknowledgments of how brilliant this story is. And it is absolutely brilliant – a story with more creativity, and more of a sense of joy than anything else in the Troughton era.

So let’s move beyond that, as we try to do here, and try to find two new things to say about The Mind Robber. First, I want to talk about a particular approach to Doctor Who that The Mind Robber is a particularly key moment in. Let’s start by looking at how this story is less of a departure from past stories than one might think.…

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You know, looking at them, I can’t think of any witty jokes to make that the picture doesn’t do for me.

It’s August 10, 1968. Tommy James and the Shondells are at number one with “Mony Mony,” but if we really want to capture the spirit of this one we need to look at number two, or just jump a week ahead to where it hits number one and look at Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s “Fire,” which dethrones Mr. James for a single week. From there on out, it’s just the Beach Boys and the Bee Gees. So let’s go back to Arthur Brown. Personally, I advocate taking three minutes out of your day and just watching Mr. Brown perform this song on Top of the Pops. But if you cannot spare the time to watch a man with a hat whose most visible feature is the fact that it is a pair of horns that are constantly on fire scream “I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE” on BBC One, well, I pity you. It’s basically the greatest thing ever, and should really be recognized as the anthem of uniquely British psychedelic culture as discussed last Friday.

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In a scene not actually in the episode, the Cybermen menace Zoe as she fiddles with the sexual air supply. (The sexual air supply, I should note, is in the episode.)

It’s April 27, 1968. Louis Armstrong is declaring how wonderful the world is, and is at #1 doing it. He continues proclaiming this for four weeks, before being unseated by one of the great anthems of pedophilia, Union Gap’s “Young Girl.” What a wonderful world indeed. So wonderful that nothing too terrible happens during these six weeks – just your usual nuclear tests, Vietnam war protests, deadly tornadoes, nuclear submarine sinkings, and Manchester United winning the European Cup. This last one I actually quite like, as a Manchester United fan, but I’d be lying if I said it was a hugely relevant point. Oh, and the May 1968 events in Paris. But those are for Friday.

While on television…. Hooboy. This may be the most misunderstood story by Doctor Who fandom I’ve yet covered. I commented to the endlessly brilliant Anna of the lovely blog A Random String of Bits last night that The Wheel in Space has what are possibly the two least likely cowriters in Doctor Who: Kit Pedler and David Whitaker. Long time readers of this blog probably have some sense of how weird this is, but if you don’t, imagine Alan Moore rewriting Arthur C. Clarke and you’re at least in the general ballpark.

See, Kit Pedler is… OK, let’s be honest. He’s not much of a writer. I mean, this surely isn’t a huge revelation. Every writing credit he has on Doctor Who (and, so far as I can tell, every fiction writing credit he has period) is co-authored, which, while not an immediate sign of anything, is suggestive. (He does have solo credit on the first two episodes of The Tenth Planet, but from there on out it’s co-authoring flat out, so let’s face it, I bet Gerry Davis did a fair amount of work on those two as well.) One imagines that Pedler’s involvement in his scripts amounts, in most cases, to declaring a location where the Cybermen will show up (The moon! A tomb! Panama!) and… possibly nothing else, actually. I mean, we should give the man credit – the Cybermen were a brilliant idea, and apparently The War Machines was his as well, which… OK, well, The Cybermen were a brilliant idea.

But at the end of the day, Pedler is an optometrist with a flair for creating “hard SF” premises. Previously he was, seemingly, brought into the program mostly because Gerry Davis liked working with him. Since Gerry Davis walked away from the series for seven years after leaving as script editor, this left Pedler without a co-author for Cybermen stories. So clearly they had to find someone else to do it. Thankfully, the show has a lot of candidates – one can readily imagine Ian Stuart Black, Victor Pemberton, or Brian Hayles getting tapped for this role, for instance, or current story editor Derek Sherwin.…

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OH MY GOD! I SAW UNDER JAMIE’S KILT!

Hi! So, how was A Good Man Goes to War? I hope it was good. I wrote this post a full week ago, and since I suspect that there are going to be things that it would make sense to point to in A Good Man Goes to War here, I figured I should remind you of that fact. 

It’s March 16, 1968, and Israeli novelty blues are still at the top of the charts. It is replaced by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, and Tich with “The Legend of Xanadu,” which sits oddly on the line between novelty and love song. In week three The Beatles ride in to save us with Lady Madonna, and in week five it’s Cliff Richard. Honestly, I’m at a loss – this is not music I’m terribly familiar with. Cliff Richard appears to veer in his career from young rock guy to evangelical Christian. I see lower in the charts things like 1910 Fruitgum Company, which I have never heard of. I look at the cover and think “Ooh, that looks like a nice bit of psychedelia.” And it turns out to be bubblegum pop. Let’s call that the defining image of these weeks.

In real news, the British Foreign Secretary resigned seemingly over a drunken row with the Prime Minister, the Mai Lai massacre took place, 91 people are injured in a London protest against the Vietnam War, 200 more are arrested. Aer Lingus flight 172 crashes, killing 61. Lyndon Johnson declares he will not seek re-election, which was probably a good idea on paper, though as it turns out, this upcoming US Presidential Election is going to go somewhat badly for the planet. (I am rather more a hippie than an archeologist). Martin Luther King is murdered. Political assassinations in Germany. And, just to wrap off these uneventful six weeks, on the day the final episode of Fury From the Deep is transmitted, Enoch Powell makes the famous Rivers of Blood speech in which he rails against excessive immigration into Great Britain, complains that the British way of life is being destroyed, and warns:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

In other words, this is the bit of history that we’re talking about when we talk about the turbulence of the 1960s.…

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The funniest thing about one of these sitting on a toilet is actually that their roars are the sound of a toilet flushing slowed down. Maybe that’s why they go to Tooting Bec. So they can get the sound clips for their roars…

It’s February 3, 1968. The Love Affair are at number one with “Everlasting Love,” a piece of production line pop given a reasonably psychedelic spin in album art. It’s unseated by Manfred Mann covering Dylan, who are in turn unseated by Esther and Abi Ofarim’s “Cinderella Rockafella” a novelty blues song by an Israeli double act. (Look, you have to get used to these things. Eventually I’m going to have to talk about how “Do the Bartman” hits number one in between KLF and The Clash, and I’m going to have to do it with a straight face, so if you can’t deal with Israeli novelty blues, we’re in trouble.)

As 1968 progresses, it becomes increasingly hard to read events outside of a larger narrative. When we see three college students killed when police break up a civil rights rally at an all-white bowling alley in South Carolina, or the the Tet Offensive ends, it’s very hard not to read these as part of the ongoing progression towards the collapse of the idealism of the 1960s. Music echoes this with an increasing number of songs that are not quite the unambitious conservative pop of Engelbert Humperdinck, but are also not exactly The Beatles, The Who, or Jimi Hendrix.

While on television, we get The Web of Fear. Once again, we’re stuck with a story where the history of it is frustratingly and maddeningly layered. Basically, the core issue is this – the story was tremendously popular and influential, and ended up having a much larger impact than anyone making it anticipated or intended, and as a result watching it there’s tons of stuff that works oddly because you know how it turns out. Really, this is true of both of the Yeti stories. Even though the Yeti never appear again except in cameo, these two stories remain important because they introduce someone who goes on to have a large role in the series. I am talking, of course, about John Levene, who is inside one of the Yeti costumes in each story and goes on to play Sergeant Benton through Jon Pertwee’s tenure as the Doctor.

Sorry, that probably whizzed over some people’s heads. Let’s back up. Starting in season seven, about two years after this story aired, Doctor Who gets a complete revamp in which it is set entirely on Earth with the Doctor teaming up with UNIT, an international military force, to fight aliens in modern day Britain. We’ll be spending a lot of time talking about that. But as it turns out, one of the major characters in UNIT is Brigadier General Aleister Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, better known as The Brigadier.

The Brigadier appears in the season six story The Invasion, which was in part an effort to test out the UNIT concept before they committed to it for the whole series.…

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People do not remark on the fact that Salamander dresses like Jon Pertwee enough. This is sad, as there are some great jokes about Pertwee as an evil version of the Doctor to be made here.

It’s December 23, 1967. The Beatles are at number one with “Hello Goodbye.” Also at number three with the Magical Mystery Tour EP. They’ll hold it for five weeks, which is good, because the rest of the top ten for those weeks leaves more than a little to be desired. At week six, the bottom falls out and Georgie Fame takes over with the Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde.

In terms of news, we have the origin of the term “black hole,” which will be a term with surprisingly large impact on the series. Prime Minister Wilson endorses the “I’m Backing Britain” campaign asking people to work an extra half hour without pay, which ends up being a complete turkey. The Prague Spring gets underway, which is a bit unusual given that it’s January. And the Vietnam War keeps it up.

But look, the real news is this. Doctor Who airs The Enemy of the World. And I am here to tell you that it is the best Doctor Who story up to this point. It is, in fact, one of the all time greats of the series. It is a criminal offense that there are people who think of this as the red-headed stepchild of season five and prefer the monster stories. This story is absolutely incredible, light years ahead of its time, and still fantastic to this day. I’m honestly at a loss for why this does not have the wild and ecstatic praise reserved for it that Marco Polo or The Massacre, both of which it runs rings around. I’ll take it as a given that it’s never going to attain the luster of The Tomb of the Cybermen or something by virtue of it being mostly missing, but there’s really no excuse for it not being recognized by those who have seen it as an absolute triumph. Because it is. This story belongs on the list with things like City of Death, Caves of Androzani, Doomsday, and Blink. It’s that good.

(For the sake of completists, since I have declared this the best story to date, I will say that previously I consider An Unearthly Child/100,000 BC, The Aztecs, The Rescue, and Power of the Daleks to be the best stories to date.)

Let’s just dive right into it. The usual thing everybody knows about this story is that it’s another in an oddly long line of identical duplicate stories that Doctor Who does. The first, of course, is The Massacre. In this one, Patrick Troughton gets to pull double duty as both the Doctor and the villainous Salamander. The second thing that everybody knows about this story is that it’s Doctor Who Does James Bond. This should not be a surprise to us today, when the default mode of Doctor Who is “Doctor Who does X” where X is some other genre – The Curse of the Black Spot being the most recent flagrant example.…

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