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This Pretty Little Thing Here (The Claws of Axos)

11

I’d make a snarky comment here, but A, nobody ever even
mentions the captions in the comments, and B, what is
there to say about this picture that the picture doesn’t
say itself?
It’s March 13, 1971. Mungo Jerry is at number one still, followed by dueling ex-Beatles with McCartney and Harrison. But it’s week two of the story where it finally happens. T. Rex hits number one with Hot Love, establishing glam rock as no longer the next big thing but simply as the big thing. It’s worth pausing here and looking at T. Rex’s Top of the Pops appearance for this song just to see the way in which the visual styles of pop music and Doctor Who had merged into a single aesthetic. Elsewhere in the charts are Deep Purple and John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band.
In real news, Bangladesh splits off from Pakistan, William Calley is found guilty of the Mai Lai massacre, the Ed Sullivan Show airs its final episode in the US, and the 47 day British postal workers strike ends. There’s going to be a lot of strikes over the next few years, so keep your eyes on that.
But let’s get back to T. Rex. T. Rex is one of those bands that really consist of a single creative force – Mark Bolan. This was, to be fair, not always true. In the late 60s, under the fuller name of Tyrannosaurus Rex, Bolan and Steve Peregrin Took brought psychedelic folk to not quite the masses before Bolan sacked the hobbit and created glam rock. The nature of this transition is a watershed moment in popular culture, and gets at a point I made some time ago and didn’t really pick up on – the fact that the crash-and-burn of 60s counterculture that occurred in France and the US simply didn’t happen in the UK. Instead, after a bit of fussing about, the psychedelic and counterculture aspects of culture made a coherent and traceable transition into glam. 
But actually defining glam is hard. And since this isn’t primarily a music blog, I’ll leave that to more capable people. Instead, let’s note that glam and Doctor Who existed in parallel and developed together. Doctor Who from 1971-1973 is as glam as glam rock, and what we called Ballard Pertwee on Wednesday can just as well be called glam Pertwee – perhaps even more accurately. 
All of which is an extremely lengthy way of circling around to the fact that The Claws of Axos pushes this aspect of the series further than it has been pushed to date, and in some ways further than it will ever be pushed again. Tat Wood refers to this story as the moment when Doctor Who was more glam than glam rock. And much as with Mind of Evil on Wednesday, the same bits that make it brilliant are the bits everyone complains about. So just as on Wednesday we explored what made the action Pertwee version of the show work, let’s look at how the glam version works. 
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Your last memory is of receiving a contact from an unknown agency: me. Everything since has been erased from your minds. (The Mind of Evil)

23

And the child prayed, “God, will you make it so The Mind
of Evil is in black and white so we don’t have to look at
Jon Pertwee’s horrible purple jacket?” And God said, “Yes,
my child, but I must leave one photo behind as a warning
to all.” And so it was done.

It’s January 30, 1971. George Harrison is at number one with “My Sweet Lord,” having unseated Mr. Dunn. He enjoys a five week run before Mungo Jerry’s “Baby Jump” unseats him. Lower on the charts, T. Rex still stalks about upon a White Swan. The Supremes are on the charts with “Stoned Love,” a song that is actually probably not about sex while smoking cannabis, not that that has any real relevance to its interpretation. Judy Collins, Paul McCartney, Neil Diamond, and Elton John also chart.

In other news, Idi Amin, or as he’ll eventually become known, His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular, deposes Milton Obote in Uganda. Charles Manson is convicted. The Apollo 14 mission takes place to rapidly diminishing interest. Rolls-Royce, one of the great symbols of luxury, goes bankrupt and is nationalized by the Heath government. The Seabed Treaty, outlawing nuclear weapons on the ocean floor, is signed by the major countries who should sign something like that. The Weather Underground, in a rare stab at effectiveness, manages to bomb a bathroom in the US Capitol building. The UN formally establishes Earth Day, signaling that the environmental movement has thoroughly gotten underway, and also manages the Convention on Psychotropic Substances, formalizing an international effort to crack down on psychedelics. But perhaps most importantly, it’s Decimalization Day! One of the things that most firmly sticks the UNIT era in the 1970s was the fact that back in Season 7, it visibly used pre-decimal currency. All that comes to an end and we finally learn that Susan was Right as, on February 15th, the UK adopts decimal currency.

While on television, it’s The Mind of Evil. One of the last “missing stories,” like chunks of The Ambassadors of Death, it exists only in black and white now despite having originally been transmitted in color. The result is a mixed bag for the story. On the one hand, the general consensus is that The Mind of Evil actually looks better in black and white than it did in color. On the other hand, being in black and white has left this one of the least remarked upon Pertwee stories (On the Doctor Who Ratings Guide, it has the fourth fewest reviews of any of the Pertwee stories).

Although it may not prove useful through to the end of the Pertwee era, at the moment it is useful to think of the Pertwee era as fundamentally schizoid. There are, if you will, the Two Pertwees.…

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He Was a Friend at First (Terror of the Autons)

34

The Doctor is so irritated at Mike and Jo that he’s begun
voluntary conversion into a Cyberman just to stop feeling
emotions about them.

It’s January 2nd, 1971. Dave Edmunds is at #1 with “I Hear You Knocking.” It’s unseated the next week by Clive Dunn’s “Granddad,” a piece of Victorian nostalgia by one of the stars of the sitcom Dad’s Army, which holds #1 for the next three weeks. Lower in the charts are the Jackson 5, Neil Diamond, Glen Campbell, and Andy Williams. But the real action starts at number ten in the first week, rising up to a peak position of #2 the final week “Granddad” is on top, namely T. Rex’s chart debut with “Ride a White Swan,” recognized as the real start of glam rock. Tat Wood argues that Terror of the Autons is an equal partner in the start of glam rock, which is an interesting argument, if not one I’m completely sold on. But in any case, glam will serve as the primary musical accompaniment to the Pertwee era from here on out.
In other news, we’ve done a season transition, which means six months to catch up on. Deep breath: The US withdraws from Cambodia. Thor Heyerdahl’s Ra II expedition is completed successfully. The Aswan High Dam opens in Egypt. The largest rock festival of all time happens on the Isle of Wight. Jimi Hendrix dies of an OD in London. Janis Joplin follows suit in LA. The US’s ridiculously meager and pathetic version of the BBC, PBS, begins broadcasting, which will turn out to have profound ramifications for Doctor Who as, with minimal budget, importing BBC shows is a cost-effective policy for them, resulting in Doctor Who’s US debut in 1972. The October Crisis begins in Canada when, in a series of events that seems deeply bemusing given Canada’s current stereotypical reputation, Quebecois separatist terrorists kidnapped the British Trade Commissioner and held him for 60 days.
Which catches us up to 1971, where a stairway crush at a Scottish football match between the Old Firm results in 66 deaths. (For those playing along at home, the Old Firm refers to Celtic and Rangers, two Glaswegian football teams whose sporting rivalry serves as a proxy rivalry for Catholic/Protestant sectarian disputes and thus, by extension, for the Troubles that continued to calmly rear their heads. Harold Wilson’s flagship venture, the Open University, began. And the worlds first ODI cricket match is played between Australia and the UK.
Whew. I miss when Doctor Who was on for 3/4 of the year, you know? So, Terror of the Autons. On the one hand, this is one of the most beloved of Pertwee stories, full of classic scary moments and, furthermore, the debut of three classic characters in Jo Grant, Mike Yates, and the Master. On the other hand…
I’ve talked before about the Pertwee backlash of the 1990s. This story is what we might call exhibit A in this regard. That’s down largely to Paul Cornell’s full-throated, bomb-throwing savaging of this story in DWB… oh God, I need to cover this, don’t I?
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Time Can Be Rewritten 9: The Scales of Injustice (Gary Russell, Virgin Books, 1996)

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It’s July 1996, right in the middle of that awkward period where everyone is shifting uncomfortably following the TV movie, by this point not yet sure what it means for the future of Doctor Who, but quite sure that the answer is not, at least in the short to medium term, going to be anything good. The now moribund Virgin Books line releases Gary Russell’s Third Doctor novel The Scales of Injustice.

Gary Russell has something of a reputation for what is generally referred to as “fanwank.” That is to say, he’s known for writing books that are packed to the gills with continuity references for the sake of continuity references. Now, a sane person could and perhaps even should ask what the difference is between fanwank and, for instance, having the Macra pop up forty years after their last appearance for a cameo. And plenty of people have asked that. If nothing else, then, The Scales of Injustice serves to explore that line.

Because this book is not so much continuity heavy as it is capable of producing continuity gravity. Direct references exist not only to the four Pertwee stories preceding it but also to Time Flight, Remembrance of the Daleks, The War Machines, The Invasion, The Web of Fear, The Sea Devils, Warriors of the Deep, and probably a fair swath more that I didn’t even notice. One thing you may notice about that list is that not all of the stories are links. That is because many of them are stories that haven’t actually aired by the point in the series this novel takes place in.

Which means we’re in the wild and wonderful world of future continuity, a topic we’ve picked up in a couple of these Time Can Be Rewritten columns. (Incidentally, a reader found a counter-example to my claim that no stories set pre-The War Games ever mention the Time Lords. Apparently John Lucarotti’s novelization of The Massacre does.) But more even than The Dark Path, this is a book about reconciling Doctor Who stories and squaring away continuity errors. It tackles not only the nature of the Brigadier’s love life (glimpsed in Planet of Spiders and Battlefield), Mike Yates’s assignment to UNIT and promotion to Captain (complete with a gratuitous scene to explain why Benton didn’t get the promotion), Liz Shaw’s departure (more later), but also, for the horde of people who were concerned about it, the question of why the Doctor claimed to have twice negotiated with the Silurians for peace in Warriors of the Deep when in fact he only did so once.

Let’s pause here for a moment and look at that. I don’t want to get too far into Warriors of the Deep some thirteen seasons too early, but accounting for this supposed continuity error is trivial. First, a bit of context for anyone who is actually trying to use this blog to learn about early Doctor Who. Warriors of the Deep is a 1984 story in which the Fifth Doctor faces both the Silurians and the Sea Devils, the latter being cousins of the Silurians introduced in season nine.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 11 (Doomwatch, The Atrocity Exhibition)

, 4

As we watch the at times compelling, at times just kind of sad spectacle of Doctor Who frantically trying to reinvent itself on a brand new formula and premise, it may be worth looking at other contemporaneous British attempts at Earth-based science fiction to get some idea of what genre Doctor Who is trying to impose itself on. It’s not, of course, as if Doctor Who has never imposed itself on other genres before. The historicals, in their latter days, were all about genre crossing. But note the specific wording – a story like The Gunfighters was about taking Doctor Who and crashing it into the western then filming the explosion. With the UNIT stories we are by and large seeing something different: a fair swath of the production team does not seem to be trying to cross Doctor Who into another genre. They’re trying to make Doctor Who as an example of another genre. Until we understand what that genre is, it’s going to be difficult to say what can be accomplished by turning Doctor Who into that genre.

To some extent we’ve already seen what that genre is via Monty Python. Or, more to the point, we’ve seen that whatever Doctor Who is trying to do, it’s so flamingly obvious within the context of British culture that it can be parodied prior to Doctor Who doing it. Of course, if we rewatch the Science Fiction sketch, we can see that it’s just as much a parody of the old Quatermass formula. In other words, there’s an established sort of science fiction here that Nigel Kneale invented with Quatermass that Doctor Who, under UNIT, comes perilously close to faithfully and blindly discharging. Of course, we’ve also seen with the Brigadier the beginnings of a response, which we’ll see expanded on when we get to Terror of the Autons.

But Doctor Who wasn’t even the only contemporary sci-fi thriller airing on BBC1, little yet the only one being made in Britain at the turn of the decade, so let’s look at two others to set up some signposts. The first is obvious – Doomwatch, created by Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler, is, like Adam Adamant Lives!, a case of “what Doctor Who people did next.” And like Adam Adamant Lives!, the answer is “something that is almost, but not quite, what Doctor Who did next.” Just as Adam Adamant Lives! prefigured the charismatic lead model of the Troughton years, Doomwatch was an attempt by Davis and Pedler to work through their issues (well, Pedler’s issues mainly) regarding contemporary science via contemporary earth-based sci-fi.

Perhaps the most alarming thing about Doomwatch is that it’s actually quite good. This is alarming because the creative talent on it was, as I mentioned, Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis. We discussed the seeming nature of Pedler’s Doctor Who scripts in the past. Gerry Davis, on the other hand, is responsible for The Celestial Toymaker, The Tomb of the Cybermen, and, to be fair, The Tenth Planet.…

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Go Down Go Down Go Down Go Down (Inferno)

34

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.…

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Where Spacemen Live (The Ambassadors of Death)

12

What do you mean “homoerotic undertones to the UNIT
era?”

It’s March 21, 1970. Lee Marvin continues the apparent obsession with country and western in UK music with “Wand’rin Star,” unseated after only one more week by Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” which lasts until mid-April before being unseated by Dana’s “All Kinds of Everything,” the 1970 Eurovision winner. This is actually mildly controversial, given that Dana herself is from Northern Ireland, but in Eurovision represented the Republic of Ireland. (As you will recall, The Troubles, the lengthy period of unrest between the UK and Ireland, were getting into full force here). Dana is in turn unseated by Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky.” Spirit in the Sky is an interesting piece. Looking at its single cover, in 2011, it looks, frankly, redneck – a bright red cover featuring a photo of a long-haired man in front of an American flag. However in practice, the song is a vaguely psychedelic piece about the afterlife that is treated as a precursor for a lot of glam rock. Andy Williams, Kenny Rogers, Stevie Wonder, and Steam also make appearances.

In other news, the Concorde makes its first flight and the first Earth Day proclamation is made. Ian Paisley wins a by-election to the House of Commons. But more importantly, the seven weeks of these stories surround Apollo 13’s launch, catastrophic malfunctions, and eventual (and damn near miraculous) safe landing – essentially the last time that the public followed space story as an ongoing matter instead of in the aftermath of a fatal catastrophe. But perhaps the most important news story is one of music. This is also the story that was on when The Beatles, who had provided, in many ways, the nearest analogue for the artistic movements of Doctor Who throughout the 1960s, announced their imminent breakup.

I’m not even sure where to begin in terms of pointing out the fitting connections here. The fact that the first stirrings of glam rock – Doctor Who’s next musical parallel – hit #1 the same month as Doctor Who is running an oddly David Bowie-inflected story and where its previous musical influence, the Beatles, breaks up? Or the fact that as the Beatles depart so does David Whitaker, the show’s strongest creative force to date? Or that Doctor Who has its last big space story just as the world’s last big space story is going? We are, as they say, spoiled for choice.

But for me, of course, it has to begin with Whitaker. And end there. And really, be all about that. There’s a lot going on in this story, but look, nothing beats the fact that this is Whitaker’s departure. Mind you, this is not quite a David Whitaker story, whatever the credits might say. Indeed, the last solo story by Whitaker was the sublimely good The Enemy of the World, since The Wheel in Space was a joint venture with Kit Pedler. In this case, Whitaker apparently had trouble working in the new format for Doctor Who (which, to be fair, so was everyone else, as the bewildering ending of The Silurians demonstrated), and furthermore was moving to Australia.…

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Eh? Doctor Who? (The Silurians)

22

Fun fact: The third eye can both burn a hole through a wall
and repair it again after. Steven Moffat should really
have used that in A Good Man Goes to War.

It’s January 31st, 1970. Edison Lighthouse have been so kind as to depose Rolf Harris, reaching number one with “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes).” It holds number one for five weeks before being unseated by Lee Marvin’s “Wand’rin Star,”  Peter, Paul, and Mary, Jethro Tull, the Jackson 5, Simon and Garfunkel, and Chicago are also in the charts, but perhaps the most interesting thing is the Beatles “Let it Be” debuting at its chart peak position of #2 in the last week of this story. Also in music news, Black Sabbath releases their first album, effectively establishing heavy metal music.

Elsewhere, avalanches and train crashes give everything a nice disastrous feel. But here’s perhaps the more interesting thing. Something we have to remember about 1970 was that what we now call “the sixties” was not entirely and firmly tied to the calendar decade. What I mean by this was that hippies and the like did not simply roll over and die at the strike of midnight on January 1st. Case in point, Jeffrey R. MacDonald, a US Army officer, murdered his entire family and then claimed “drugged out hippies” had done it. This, however, is really just a reference to the Manson murders, another story that unwound over the six months between seasons. The significant thing about the Manson murders is not the murders themselves, which are just a sightly more homicidal version of Jim Jones, David Koresh, or the Heaven’s Gate cult. No, what’s significant about the Manson killings is the fact that they fed a story that hippies were dangerous. Note that the prosecution in the Manson murders stuck closely to arguing the connection between the Beatles and hippie culture. The central idea of the Manson murders and the reason they grabbed the popular imagination was because they featured the real fear of evil hippies. This, again, shows us how quickly things were collapsing and changing.

Other news involves the Weathermen, America’s most hilariously toothless domestic terrorist organization, inadvertently blowing three of their own members up (two more than the death toll of non-members across their bombing campaigns). The Poseidon bubble, a bizarre speculative bubble involving Australian nickel mining, bursts. Rhodesia fully separates from the UK, and still nobody supports their existence. And the Chicago Seven are acquitted.

Interesting times in other words. On television it’s interesting as well, with The Silurians, mistakenly broadcast under the title Doctor Who and the Silurians, airing. The Silurians is interesting for a couple of reasons. It’s the first solo script of Malcolm Hulke, who has previously co-authored for both Season 4 and Season 6. But this is perhaps less interesting than the fact that it’s the first Pertwee script by an avowed skeptic of the Pertwee era. This is ironic given that of the eight scripts Hulke was involved in for Doctor Who, six are in the Pertwee era.…

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I Do Tend To Get Involved (Spearhead From Space)

11

It’s genuinely funny to imagine “Space Adventure” playing
over any of the Auton scenes, by the way. If you were
wondering.

It’s January 3, 1970. Rolf Harris is at number one with “Two Little Boys,”a version of 1902 song about the American Civil War, which is exactly what you’d expect to be at number one in the UK, yes? Other artists in the top ten include Kenny Rogers, Glen Campbell, and Elvis Presley. Rolf Harris holds number one for all four weeks this story is going on for. It’s not that there aren’t other things bubbling under the surface – there are. But apparently January in 1970 was a time for everyone to be mildly obsessed with the idea of American country music.

One aspect of the change to color that happens with this story is that the show cuts itself down to roughly 26 episode seasons, as opposed to the 40+ episode seasons it did for its first six years. This means in turn that the show has much longer summer breaks, having been off the air for six months now. In those six months, the Stonewall riots took place, kicking off the gay rights movement. The moon landing actually happens. Ted Kennedy drives his girlfriend off a bridge. That whole Woodstock thing happens, along with the beginning of prosecution for the My Lai massacre. . The Days of Rage take place in Chicago in a backlash against the trial of demonstrators from the 1968 Democratic Convention. Richard Nixon begins winding down the Vietnam War. Altamont also happens, seemingly trying to split the difference between Woodstock and My Lai. And, for the tech geeks, the UNIX epoch begins, just three days prior to the UNIT one.

And that’s just the setup before the Doctor crashes into the world. In the four weeks over which this story airs, Biafra finally capitulates, ending the Nigerian Civil War, and the Greater London Council announces the construction of the Thames Barrier to prevent flood damage to London.

While on television… see, the last time we did one of these, it was a story with the notable advantage that nobody could see. The Power of the Daleks is a story we peer at, trying to understand this mysterious transition. Being as it’s episodes 2-7 of the joint longest streak of missing episodes running, the transition to Troughton is something we try to figure out in hindsight.

Spearhead From Space, on the other hand, everybody knows – especially since its central iconography was reshaped into the launch of the 2005 series. This is one of the most iconic and classic Doctor Who stories in existence. Normally this means we have to do a lot of reconstruction to undo the glare of fandom, but in this case, watching the story in sequence right after The War Games, much of what is important about this story is extremely obvious, if not exactly the everyday reaction.

Of course, we’ve delayed a week instead of doing that here, but then, the show delayed six months.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 10 (Monty Python’s Flying Circus)

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Well we couldn’t not cover Monty Python, now could we? All the same, if you want to find yourself mildly taken aback by the nature of British culture in the early 1970s, consider that the first season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus aired its twelfth episode, The Naked Ant, the day after the first episode of Spearhead From Space aired. Seriously. The first two episodes of the Jon Pertwee era were followed just over 24 hours later with the last two episodes of the first season of Flying Circus, both on BBC1. Superficially, it’s tough to wrap one’s head, in 2011, around the enormity of this – the degree to which those two weeks of January 1970 crackled with what we now recognize as real cultural fire. Upper Class Twit of the Year and the story that brought one of the most iconic images ever from Doctor Who are literally from the same week (although the iconic shop dummies attack sequence was, to be fair, in episode four of Spearhead).

The question is whether this is simply a nifty coincidence or whether there’s actually some fundamental understanding about Britain at the dawn of the 70s to be gained from knowing this strange factoid. As it happens, the answer is the former, but to understand why we’re going to have to answer a different question first – why the heck is Monty Python such a big deal?

Put on your sweeping generalization hat, because we’re about to do a very whirlwind tour of the history of British comedy after World War II. If we leave Monty Python out of the equation for the moment, there are essentially two crucial things to know about British comedy from 1945-1970: Spike Milligan and Carry On. Among comedy snobs, there is no ambiguity over which one of these is superior. Spike Milligan is one of the most famed and accomplished comedians in history, and the Carry On films have a reputation round about the Friedberg/Seltzer comedies of the 2000s (Scary Movie, Date Movie, and the like).

Let’s get them over with first, then. Since it’s the Carry On film to directly mention Doctor Who, let’s look specifically at 1966’s Carry On Screaming – a parody of the Hammer Horror film line that we’ve also mostly ignored before now, but will have to get a post out on some time before Philip Hinchcliffe shows up. Carry On Screaming also has, for the discriminating Doctor Who fan, appearances from Peter Butterworth and Jon Pertwee.

The essential premise of a Carry On film is delightfully formulaic. You take a popular genre and do a story in that genre in which every single character is replaced with a blundering idiot. So, for instance, in Carry On Screaming you have a situation that is a familiar horror movie setup – a monster is kidnapping women, and the police investigate. All fairly straightforward. Then you take all the figures this story requires – girl to kidnap, boyfriend looking for his missing girlfriend, police, mad scientist, etc – and have them all be incompetent.…

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