Elizabeth Sandifer

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.…

Continue Reading

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.…

Continue Reading

Deborah Watling frantically calls for the producer to point out that doing little green men for black and white television is a bit naff if you stop to think about it.

Just a quick note that, in preparation for going on vacation for ten days in June, starting now and continuing for a few weeks I’m working on building a backlog of posts and scheduling them to update automatically. This won’t affect the posting schedule at all – new content should be up on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the foreseeable future. However, it means that the sense of the present in the entries is steadily going to drift. Monday’s entry on The Enemy of the World, for instance, is extremely likely to be written before The Almost People airs. So if a post comes along that fails to make a spectacularly obvious point comparing the most recent episode to whatever episode I’m looking at, it’s probably because I wrote it a week before you read it.

It’s November 11, 1967. The Foundations, a British Motown group, are at number one, because these things happen in the UK charts. Two weeks later it gets unseated by Long John Baldry’s “Let The Heartaches Begin.” Knowing nothing about this song, I listened to 90 seconds of it. Look, we all make mistakes in life. But on week two of this rather unfortunate moment in pop history we can already see relief riding triumphantly up the charts, arriving decisively when The Beatles “Hello, Goodbye” shows up. What are the UK charts going to do when they don’t have The Beatles to save them from their own ill-advised taste?

Whereas in real news, the Vietnam War continues to be a massive problem that is seemingly about to bring down Johnson’s Presidency via a Primary challenge, the value of the UK Pound finds itself a cliff and leaps off of it with impressive zeal, and the Concorde makes its debut. Of these, the devaluation of the Pound is of the most interest to us, as it is a part of a larger economic recession hitting the UK in this period, and setting a fair amount of the national mood firmly on “pessimistic.”

Whereas on television we have the Ice Warriors. Regular readers of this blog will note that I have been getting increasingly exasperated with base under siege stories. But I haven’t entirely dealt with why. So since The Ice Warriors is a quite good piece of storytelling with only a few particularly overt flaws (of which the title characters are probably the biggest), it seems like the perfect place to look at the underlying problems here.

The easiest way to see the difference is to fire up The Rebel Flesh (which by the time this posts is hopefully on iTunes) and compare it to this story. Both of them are bases under siege. In fact, as the good folks at Tachyon TV pointed out (and to be fair, so did I, but they had the good sense to do it in public so they’d get credit for it), The Rebel Flesh feels like a Troughton story.…

Continue Reading

There comes a point in Doctor Who where the sheer and unrelenting absurdity of the show’s premises and visual iconography simply renders all attempts to mock it moot.

It’s September 30, 1967. Mr. Humperdinck continues to rule over the musical Landscape untroubled by the psychedelic whippersnappers in the rest of the top ten (of which there are at least three). He continues this for two weeks, at which point he is abruptly unseated by the Bee Gees with “Massachusetts,” with The Move’s “Flowers in the Rain” immediately behind. For the next four weeks, it’s just a question of which bits of psychedelia fail to unseat the Bee Gees, who are currently beautifully exploiting the popularity of psychedelia to provide a safe and fun-seeming alternative with their almost-but-not-quite psychedelic lettering on their single.

“Flowers in the Rain” and “Massachusetts” are also, interestingly, the first two songs played on BBC Radio 1, one of a Collection of four new radio stations that comprised the BBC’s long overdue concession to the existence of rock and pop music on the part of the BBC and the death knell of the pirate radio stations. You also, during this story, have the murder of Jack McVitie by the Kray Twins, a key event in the unraveling of the dominant system of organized crime in London in the 1960s. In other news, it’s mostly Vietnam War I fear, though you have the memorable instance of Allen Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman attempting to levitate the Pentagon during this story. Which is actually probably a decent way into this one.

One of the problems looking back at the 1960s is that for all we romanticize psychedelia and the hippies, for a wide variety of reasons, nobody wants to go back to Old Times and actually do that again. The October 21, 1967 March on the Pentagon is kind of a key event in this phenomenon. For large swaths of the world, the attempt to levitate it while Ginsberg performed Tibetan chants is simply incomprehensible, and is evidence that however nice an album Sergeant Pepper was, perhaps the whole acid thing went just a little further than is useful. I mean, levitating the Pentagon? Really?

In fact what we have here is a case of failing to understand your audience. Anyone who was tuned in to the psychedelic movement at large would have recognized the Pentagon levitation as an act of guerilla theater in the classic psychedelic vein. Did Hoffman and Ginsberg actually expect to levitate the Pentagon? It’s tough to imagine that they did, given that it’s not like they had a lengthy track record of levitations to go on. I mean, even if you decide to just completely embrace the idea that it is possible to levitate objects via meditation and chanting, nobody starts with the Pentagon. I don’t care how many drugs you’ve done, if you’re actually making efforts at psychic levitation, you don’t start with a colossally large building while the cameras are watching. You start alone, quietly, in your Room, or perhaps in the Basement, and establish that you can actually do this.…

Continue Reading

Oh no! You took it out of its original packaging! Now it’s worthless!

It’s September 2, 1967. Scott Mckenzie is at number one with “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair),” the basic subject of which we discussed on Wednesday. The Beatles’ anthem for the same events, “All You Need is Love,” is still at number six, having peaked at number one in July. A week later, Engelbert Humperdinck, who has increasingly become the very image of the establishment for the purposes of these metaphors, takes number one a week later, and holds it for the remainder of this story (and a third of the next). The rest of the charts remain pleasantly psychedelic, however, with Keith West, Flowerpot Men, and The Move keeping the dream alive.

Continue Reading

It’s OK, Mr. Emperor. Even the biggest Daleks suffer from droopy eyestalk sometimes. It’s perfectly natural, and doesn’t mean you’re not a real Dalek at all.

It’s May 20, 1967. The Tremeloes, best known as the band Decca signed instead of The Beatles, are at number one. The Tremeloes, like The Beatles, came from the Merseybeat scene we’ve talked about some already (which is also why The Beatles are spelled the way they are), and unlike The Beatles of 1967, were still churning out generic doo-wop inflected rock numbers such as “Silence is Golden,” which held number one for three weeks before Procul Harum takes number one with a nice, sweeping prog/psychedelic rock epic “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” which holds the number one for the remaining four weeks of this story. But let’s face it, the real news is this: Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is released, and becomes the soundtrack to the so-called Summer of Love, about which more on Wednesday.

In news that anchors who don’t sing won’t take, Celtic beat Inter Milan to win the European Cup, making them the first British team to do so. On one level, this continues the brief and shining moment of British domination of the sport. On another level, you have to understand Glaswegian sports fandom, the Old Firm rivalry, and sectarian violence to even start to understand what the phrase “Celtic won” means, and since none of those things are remotely relevant to Evil of the Daleks, hey look, we’ve moved on. (Though I’m sure it made Frazer Hines, a complete football nut, followed it avidly.) The Soviet Union, the US, and the UK agree not to put nuclear weapons in space, which is very nice of them.

In other news, let’s take a deep breath: Israeli/Egyptian tensions flare up mightily, the Six Day War breaks out and ends (these things happen when you put a six-day war in the midst of a seven-week Dalek serial), Biafra begins its futile attempt at independence, a Marxist rebellion begins in India, Loving v. Virginia is decided in the US, legalizing interracial marriage, Thurgood Marshall is nominated to the Supreme Court, two American race riots happen in Tampa and Buffalo, The EEC is merged with the ECSC and EAC to form the European Communities, and, three days after this story finishes, homosexuality is finally decriminalized in the UK, a move that most immediately impacts the artistic community, where it had long been an open secret (Doctor Who having prominently employed at least two semi-out gay men in its first three years – Max Adrian and Waris Hussein).

While on television, we have Evil of the Daleks. Which is as hard a story to see straight as exists in Doctor Who, so let’s just dust off the old-fashioned tricks and go through the thing linearly to see how it works, then sort out the rest.

There’s a fine and at times difficult to pin down line between a methodical, suspenseful pace and a slow one, and this story walks it.…

Continue Reading

The Doctor tries to sand his jowls off on an airplane wheel.

It’s April 8, 1967, and Englebert Humperdinck will not die. Actually, this is his last week at number one. Next week it’s Nancy and Frank Sinatra with “Somethin’ Stupid.” Once again we’re just seeing the pendulum in action here. It’s just that the pendulum is unusually swung at the moment – nothing all that interesting in the entire top 10 (though #11, Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze, reminds us that there is a counterculture out there). It peaks at #3, and The Who, The Mamas and the Papas, and Cat Stevens all break the top ten in the next few weeks as well, bolstered by a population who, having listened to Humperdinck for a month and a half, finally intuitively get what this revolution is all about. The flip side, and this is a lovely day to talk about it given that Eurovision is this weekend, is that the UK wins the Eurovision song contest with “Puppet on a String,” bringing this touching song about complete physical and emotional submission to your man to number one. (“If you say you love me madly, I’ll gladly be there like a puppet on a string.” Stay classy, British pop music.) Oh, and Pink Floyd chart, but nowhere near the top ten.

Whereas in the world of things that don’t sing, the Tories win the Greater London Council elections, never a good sign for Labour. Mass protests against the Vietnam War, Surveyor 3 lands on the Moon, Greece falls to a military dictatorship, the Soviets manage to kill an astronaut, and Prime Minister Harold Wilson announces that the UK will be applying to join the EEC.

Most of these can be slotted into standard 60s fare, but the last one might be lost on you, which probably also means that Mark Gatiss’s great joke about Euroskeptics in The Roundheads was lost on you too. So sad. Basically, the EEC is an earlier version of the European Union. It’s one of several “communities” to crop up after World War II – the first of them being the ECSC, European Coal and Steel Community, which sought to establish control over the basic supplies needed for war. A few more stabs in the dark in the general area of this eventually led to the EEC, which quickly became fairly powerful in that it made intra-European commerce more efficient, allowing Europe as a whole to remain a major force even as few of its component states retained the superpower status they had prior to the World Wars.

The thing is, the EEC and the UK kind of have a… history. Because shortly after it was founded, Charles DeGaulle shut down the process for countries to join because he didn’t want the UK to join, fearing that it would basically serve as a US puppet state. Given that the UK rarely required reasons to be ambivalent about its status in the European community, the re-opening of applications and the UK’s decision to apply in 1967 is, by any standard, a major shift in the general tone of European cooperation.…

Continue Reading