outside the government

The 1980s called. They said you can keep their bloody title card.

It’s December 28th, 1981. The Human League are now at number one with “Don’t You Want Me,” with ABBA, Adam and the Ants, and Eurovision winners Bucks Fizz also charting. Kraftwerk are lower in the charts, if you’re into that kind of thing. (I so am.)

Since the Five Faces series wrapped, an inconclusive attempt at an arms reduction treaty between the US and USSR takes place in Geneva, Arthur Scargill becomes president elect of the National Union for Mineworkers, which is likely to end well. Muhammad Ali fights his last fight, the US-supported El Salvadorian army kills 900 civilians, martial law is declared in Poland, the Penlee lifeboat disaster takes place off the coast of Cornwall, and the first test tube baby is born.

While on television we have one the only attempt in the course of the classic series to produce a spin-off: K-9 and Company. This is, perhaps, one of the stories that has most substantially shifted in how we must take it following the new series. Given that Russell T. Davies showed rather conclusively that, in fact, a series following the solo adventures of Sarah Jane Smith can work just fine. The existence of a K-9 centered spinoff is perhaps less of a glowing endorsement (though actually, I’ve never actually met anyone who’s even seen the K-9 series), but the fact of the matter is that K-9 appeared in fully a third of The Sarah Jane Adventures stories.

So like it or not, the fact of the matter is that this concept works. And if we’re going to continue being honest about this story, let’s note that at 8.4 million viewers it beat all of Season 18 of Doctor Who, and furthermore did it during the festive season and with a transmitter out in the northwest that meant it wasn’t seen there. The reason it wasn’t picked up had more to do with changes in leadership at the BBC than with the failure of this production. And so the default take on this story – that it’s a dead end that didn’t work – doesn’t wash. It did work. Just not for until over thirty years after this aired.

All of which said, it’s not hard to reason why the BBC might have been unimpressed with this pilot. While it’s clear today that the basic ideas behind this show work, this specific execution is deeply, deeply flawed – badly enough that it’s in many ways harder to see what convinced Russell T. Davies that there was actually meat on them bones than it is to see why people wrote the idea off for thirty-five years. The problem is that this pilot can’t decide if it’s a straight children’s show or an all-ages Avengers-like show with Sarah Jane and a robot dog.

The bulk of it is written like a quasi-serious adult drama. It’s certainly kid friendly, but it’s not for kids as such. In this regard it’s much like Doctor Who itself is.…

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Outside the Government is an occasional series focusing on televised Doctor Who material that is not a part of the series proper – spin-offs, documentaries, and, in this case, reruns.

It’s November 2nd, 1981. Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin are at number one with “It’s My Party.” I’m finding records on this point just a little dodgy, but I think we’re looking at a five week run, in which case what we should say is that in one week The Police overtake them with “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic.” Two weeks later Queen and David Bowie take over number one with “Ice Ice Baby,” which holds number one for the remainder of this experience. Elvis Costello, The Jam, The Human League, Rod Stewart, Soft Cell, The Pretenders, and Oliva Newton-John also chart.

Since the prepared-for end, Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinckley Jr. Jodi Foster was unimpressed. Pope John Paul II is also shot and nearly killed. And Marcus Sargeant took six blank shots at Queen Elizabeth II. The first Space Shuttle takes off, serving in most regards as a tombstone for all dreams of spaceflight that had animated the 1960s, reducing wonder to a banal and pointless repetition of spaceflight essentially for its own sake. Peter Sutcliffe is found guilty of being the Yorkshire Ripper, and I’ve learned my lesson about commenting on that particular issue. The first recognized cases of AIDS are identified by the CDC. And, of course, the whole race riots thing we talked about last time. And Hosni Mubarak is elected President of Egypt following Sadat’s assassination.

While during the five weeks that Doctor Who’s five faces apparate, Antigua and Barbuda gain independence from the UK and the General Synod of the Church of England votes to allow the ordination of women. Luke and Laura marry on General Hospital, and Reagan signs the order that will lead to the Iran Contra scandal.

While on television we have the first real attempt to historicize Doctor Who. The Five Faces of Doctor Who repeats, in which episodes were screened daily Monday through Thursday to provide, over five weeks, reruns of five four-part stories from the history of the program personally selected by John Nathan-Turner. The stories, for the record, were An Unearthly Child/100,000 BC, The Krotons, Carnival of Monsters, The Three Doctors, and Logopolis.

It is first and foremost telling what stories were selected. The constraint of the timeslot restricted the program to four-parters. Combined with the problems of missing episodes this left, for a Hartnell repeat, the following options (assuming I haven’t forgotten about something that was completed post-1981, which I may well have): An Unearthly Child, The Aztecs, The Romans, The Space Museum, The Ark, The Gunfighters, and The War Machines. Of these, given the nostalgia factor of a first repeat series, An Unearthly Child was the only choice.

But this had the effect of badly obscuring Hartnell’s Doctor, who, after all, is at best prototypically formed in An Unearthly Child.…

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