tom baker

Frankly, this image is just here so that my heart doesn’t sink whenever I scroll past this entry and remember the story.

It’s November 22, 1975. Billy Connoly is at number one with “DIVORCE,” a novelty parody about dogs and, well, divorce. The remaining three weeks of this story, on the other hand, belong to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” one of the most epically successful singles ever. It is worth pausing and discussing what “Bohemian Rhapsody” does that is so significant. First, it’s a high profile case of a band performing a successful end-run around their label. EMI had no faith in the single for its length and lack of traditional song structure, and it was instead deliberately leaked via DJs. Second, it’s aggressively not poppy. It’s telling that there’s a lengthy period here where the number one song goes from a six year old piece of protoglam to a novelty record to this that provides a useful context for why postmodernist horror was proving to be adequate teatime entertainment. Third, it marks some of the initial stirrings of New Romanticism, which will eventually be one of the dominant aesthetics of the series. Also charting are Bowie, The Bay City Rollers, Rod Stewart, and Steeleye Span. 

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No! Not the Mind Nightlight!

It’s October 25, 1975. So… next Tuesday, basically. Art Garfunkel, who only has eyes for you, is at number one. It lasts for two weeks at number one, and is improbably overtaken by David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” rereleased six years after its original release and providing Bowie with his first number one single in the UK. “Space Oddity” plays out the story. ABBA, The Four Seasons, Roxy Music, and John Lennon also chart, the latter with “Imagine.”

In real news, Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, commits his first murder, killing Wilma McCann in Leeds. It is worth pausing here and commenting on the fundamental absurdity of the phrase “Yorkshire Ripper,” combining as it does the macabre celebrity killer glory of Jack the Ripper with Yorkshire, a thoroughly working class region generally lacking in glitz and generally associated with the imagery of its mining regions, or with a more idyllic, pastoral imagery of agriculture, or, more broadly, with a wide variety of non-London cultural touchstones. Yorkshire, in other words, is conceptually miles from the seedy glamor of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper. “Yorkshire Ripper” is, in other words, a phrase that trades on the shocking contrast between the images evoked by each of its words. This is not to detract from the utter horror of Sutcliffe’s crimes – he’s one of the most brutal serial killers around – but rather to remark upon the sheer and callous skill with which he was transmuted into a media event, complete with a catchily incongruous brand-name that could be splashed across the red tops. (Just as a note for anyone who wades through the comment section, this paragraph has seen a good three revisions due to infelicities of phrasing)

Franco steps down in Spain, beginning to bring that dictatorship to an end shockingly long after everyone assumes a country like Spain was democratic. (By “everyone” I mean “Americans” here and not “people who read this blog.”) The first petroleum pipeline opens in Scotland, the Green March takes place in Morocco – a mass coordinated demonstration to try to take over Western Sahara, and, for fans of truly great bad music, it’s the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. (For proper effect, read that sentence with a Gordon Lightfoot-esque inflection so that “rald” is said about twice as loud and a solid octave higher than the prior syllable)

While on television, we have a story that is, from a critical perspective, somewhat weirder than normal. Two of the sort of standard issue angles to take on Doctor Who stories are, roughly speaking, “it’s got some problems but it does some really extraordinary things” and “it’s terribly unambitious, but executes a standard type of story very well.”It seems like these two things should be exact opposites, but somewhat incredibly, Pyramids of Mars manages to be a story that simultaneously does both.

In one very real sense, this is where the Hinchcliffe era comes together. It is not the best story to date, although it is very, very good.…

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RARRRRR! I’m EEEEEVIL!

It’s September 27, 1975. Rod Stewart sails on at number one. He sinks, and David Essex arrives to demand, “Hold Me Close.” Pop music may be a fickle mistress, but the people of the United Kingdom obey and keep him at number one for the next three weeks. Art Garfunkel, Showaddywaddy, Leo Sayer, The Four Seasons, and ABBA all also chart.

In real news, The Spaghetti House siege, in which Marxist black nationalists hold up an Italian restaurant and end up staying for six days, takes place in London, an event that is mostly just a sensationalist news story to fill the space between episode one and two of Planet of Evil, but at least has an entertaining name and no fatalities. The Thrilla in Manilla happens, as does a bombing outside Green Park Tube Station, and the first episode of Saturday Night Live.

On television, for the first time since The Faceless Ones, the Doctor Who we’re talking about is actually intersecting with the point in the calendar I’m writing from. With The Faceless Ones, that was dead on – the final episode of that story aired on May 13th, which is also the day that entry posted on. Here it’s off by a day – the final episode aired on October 18th. Personally, since this is the last entry written in a six day stretch starting with The Sontaran Experiment, I’m writing from an unseasonably warm Sunday, October 9, 2011 in suburban Connecticut, having watched the final two episodes of this last night.

In the Pertwee era, Doctor Who intruded into its audience’s lives by using the familiar as its setting – unfolding dramas in real places, and creating allegories for current events. But the central turn of the Hinchcliffe era, as we’ve said, is that the Doctor fights ideas now. To use a word rendered meaningless by vague use in something approaching its literal sense, Doctor Who has taken a very cerebral turn. It’s not telling stories about the world around the viewer anymore. Instead it’s telling stories about the world inside the viewer.

And so instead of allegories and allusions to the real world, it embeds itself in the viewer’s world according to an altogether subtler logic. The move to an autumn/winter schedule for Doctor Who moves it into darker and colder evenings. Planet of Evil went out just as the sun was setting in most of England, and later in the season stories will start going out firmly after dark. But the change involved here is about far more than light levels.

Living in New England, the last week or two has been marked by that sensation  of cold the moment you set outside. Not the frigid and despairing cold of winter, although that is worth discussing in its own right, but an altogether more pleasant cold. It is a cold that causes the body to draw inward, to huddle inside of itself slightly. One becomes more aware of one’s self, of the crunching of leaves underfoot and the swirl of scents and spices that seem to waft continuously through the air.…

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So complete is Terror of the Zygons’s appropriation of the Pertwee era that it even includes a dodgy giant lizard in honor of Malcolm Hulke.

It’s August 30, 1975. The Stylistics are at number one with “Can’t Give You Anything (But My Love),” one of the many Philadelphia soul songs to chart in the UK and not the US. They are unseated by Rod Stewart with “Sailing,” which is not the more famous bad Christopher Cross song, but really, it’s not like that justifies anything. It still lasts the remaining three weeks of this story. KC and the Sunshine Band, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Roger Whittaker, and Mike Batt with New Edition all also chart.

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Some monsters appear and give an immediate sense of terror and awe. Other monsters appear and make you go “Oh. It’s them.”

It’s April 19, 1975. The Bay City Rollers are at number one with “Bye Bye Baby,” which lasts for two weeks before Mud overtake them with “Oh Boy,” an a cappella cover of an old Buddy Holly song, which also lasts for two weeks. Peter Shelley, The Goodies, 10cc, and, in the highest concentration of Tammy’s ever seen in the top ten, Tammy Wynette and Tammy Jones all chart as well.

While in real news, the Red Army Faction takes over the West German embassy in Stockholm, then promptly inadvertently blow themselves up, leading to West Germany changing to a “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” policy. That’s about all that happens in these four weeks. Well, that and the Vietnam War ending. But that’s nothing, right?

While on television, we have Revenge of the Cybermen. On the surface, this is straightforward – a story commissioned under Letts and made under Hinchcliffe, written by Gerry Davis, a writer who was frankly rubbish even in his prime, and thus desperately rewritten by Robert Holmes in a not-entirely-successful effort to salvage it, it’s a lackluster story of the sort new production teams do in their first year. And that’s not a completely unfair reading of it. But for once, it’s instructive just how this story gets snared between the Letts and Hinchcliffe approaches, and in particular how it follows (and fails to follow) from the doors blasted open by Genesis of the Daleks.

Letts, for his part, had been trying to bring the Cybermen back for a while. This is not surprising – one of the ways in which Letts dramatically evolved the show was in how actively and savvily it manipulated and engaged with audiences and audience expectations. Occasionally this backfired, as with the dropping of the dinosaurs from the episode title for the first part of Invasion of the Dinosaurs, or the shoehorned Daleks in Day of the Daleks, but more often it led to tour de forces like the reveal of the Daleks in Frontier in Space. So of course he would have gone for bringing back the “other classic monster.” And Letts was savvy enough to have a good angle on how to do it as well – hire back one of the writers who had done that monster last who was also still a respectable television man (Davis was only three years out from Doomwatch here) to do it so that it feels nice and nostalgic.

But neither Hinchcliffe nor Holmes are particularly enamored with nostalgia and classic monsters. In fact, after this and the next story, they basically don’t use nostalgia as a major story appeal again until The Deadly Assassin, and there it’s one of the most stark breaks with the past of the relevant concept imaginable. So it’s not quite a surprise that the Hinchcliffe era balks at doing a straight nostalgia piece. But…

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In one of the least shocking twists in Doctor Who history, the guy in white is A) the first Kaled we meet not to wear black, and B) the first one to turn out to be a good guy.

It’s March 8th, 1975. Telly Savalas is at number one with “If,” which, in layman’s terms, means that the star of Kojak is at number one with a spoken word cover of a Bread song from 1971. This lasts for two weeks before the Bay City Rollers clean things up with “Bye Bye Baby,” holding #1 for the other four weeks of this story. Mud, Johnny Mathis, Barry White, Guys ‘n’ Dolls, and The Sweet also chart.

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And yet despite this scene, it was the Zygons who were brought back in a softcore video nasty in the 90s.

It’s February 22, 1975. Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel are at number one with “Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me,” and continue to be through to the next week. The Carpenters, Helen Reddy, and Johnny Wakeland and the Kishasa Band also chart.

In the US, Daylight Savings Time kicks off two months early to deal with the energy crisis that has by now wound its way over there. A fleeing IRA member fatally shoots a chasing London police officer, setting off most of what you’d expect. The IRA member, Liam Quinn, went on to a several-decades long career as a cause celebrate. The Movement 2 June, an anarchist group allied with the Baader-Meinhof Gang, kidnaps a West German politician, managing to secure the release of five of their members from prison doing so. A massive tube crash at Moorgate station kills 43 people. And, on the day the second and final episode of this story airs, Aston Villa defeats Norwich City in the Football League Cup, now known as the Carling Cup.

While on television, it’s The Sontaran Experiment – the only two-part Doctor Who story between 1965 and 1982. This alone should raise some red flags from our perspective, in that it clearly does not quite fit with the normal order of things. Doctor Who, in the period we’re talking about, does four and six part stories. This is the only Doctor Who story from 1972-1981 not to be either four or six episodes long.

The previous two two-part stories had relatively straightforward reasons behind them. The Edge of Destruction existed to fill out an initial thirteen-episode order on the cheap. The Rescue existed because it was the first time the show had tried introducing a new character. And given that both were written by the incomparable David Whitaker, both fulfilled a clear narrative function, dealing with character points. The Sontaran Experiment, however, does not have nearly so lofty a set of goals. Its reasons for existing are entirely technical. Its storytelling is minimal, and ill-paced.

Part of this is the writers. Giving this story to Baker and Martin made sense for the reasons it was actually done, but there are major problems with the decision. Baker and Martin are best at coming up with weird ideas, and at their weakest in the specific mechanics and craft of scriptwriting. A two episode story is necessarily one that prioritizes having one or two ideas but being carefully crafted. Instead we get one that seems to have been written as a four-parter with the first episode done straightforwardly and the last three parts condensed into the second episode. All of this seems to have been to maintain the traditional first episode cliffhanger of the monster reveal. And while I am not among the critics who laugh at the basic idea of holding back the monster reveal in a story named after the monster, recognizing as I do that this is based not around surprise but around the anticipation of the spectacle, it’s also very obviously a dumb and pointless move in a two-parter because of what it does to the pacing. As…

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I won’t lie. It’s a man with bubble wrap glued to him. But it’s the scariest man with bubble wrap glued to him ever.

It’s January 25, 1975. The Tymes, a Philadelphia soul group, are at number one with “Ms Grace.” (This is something of a golden age for this genre of music, and it spills over to the UK. In return, David Bowie slips over to the US and records Young Americans – which he’s just putting the finishing touches on now. Young Americans is his version of a soul album – an album that would spawn his first number one single in the US, “Fame,” which merely hits 17 in the UK.) It lasts one week before giving way to Pilot, a splinter group of the Bay City Rollers, with “January,” which stays on top for the remainder of this story. Gloria Gaynor, Marie and Donnie Osmond, The Carpenters, Helen Reddy, and Wigan’s Chosen Few also chart.

In real news, the Weather Underground bombs the US State Department, hurting absolutely nobody and generally continuing their reputation as the fluffy bunnies of the terrorist world. An earthquake takes place in Haicheng, China, killing over two thousand people, but here the real news is that it did so as expected, being as it was the first ever successfully predicted earthquake. An unsuccessful attempt to partition Cyprus following last summer’s Turkish invasion of it takes place. And, for our purposes most interesting of all, Margaret Thatcher defeats Edward Heath to become the new leader of the Conservative Party.

While on television, we have a legend. It is not that The Ark in Space is the best story of the Hinchcliffe era. It’s not. But there are a handful of points in the history of Doctor Who in which an episode airs that clearly marks a sudden leap forward in quality: a point where you can basically say that nothing that has come before is quite this good. The tendency I’ve discussed before whereby storytelling techniques get ever savvier and lead to a general trend of improvement for all television helps make this happen, but the point remains: watching The Ark in Space, it is clear that we have just moved to an entirely new level.

In this regard, what is most striking about the episode is that it’s so much grimmer. Not since Terror of the Autons has the series engaged in such a concentrated and extended effort to be scary. And even there, the fear was wedded to a sense of the spectacular and the emerging glam aesthetic. The last time the show spent a lot of time being scary for its own sake was The Wheel in Space. But here, all of a sudden, the show is all about fear, and lingering in moments of fear. I’d say “again,” but that would obscure things somewhat. Even in the Troughton era, at the height of the golden age of monsters in season five, the show did not go for this sort of unrelenting horror.…

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The real highlight of this story is watching the robot body catch reflections of the green screen and occasionally blink out of existence in places. That and singing Kraftwerk to yourself. Mmmm. Werk. By far Philip Morris’s best product.

It’s December 28, 1974. Mud are “Lonely This Christmas,” and apparently a lot of people care and are trying to buy their single to make them feel less alone. After three weeks of this they finally plummet down the charts as people realize Christmas has been over for a while, and Status Quo’s “Down Down” takes the number one spot. Also in the charts are Barry White, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Gloria Gaynor, Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes (I promise I did not make that up), and, once again, The Wombles, who make their fifth and final top ten placing.

Since Pertwee’s regeneration, the 1974 FIFA World Cup has happened, sans England, but with Scotland, so that’s nice and frustratingly rarely mentioned when people decide to list England’s failure to qualify as a reason why the Heath government fell. Nixon resigns, essentially kicking off the American sleepy period equivalent to the British one we’ve already discussed. Haille Selassie was deposed in Ethiopia, and Ceefax began in the UK, and Ali defeats Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle. More tragically, the Birmingham pub bombings take place, killing 21 and injuring another 182. The exact cause is under some dispute, with the IRA being widely blamed, a Marxist splinter group called Red Flag 74 trying to take the blame despite probably not being responsible, and a group of Irishmen known familiarly as the Birmingham Six ultimately being arrested and, after some truly spectacular police corruption, convicted and sent to prison for sixteen years.

While during this story, the British government abandons another attempt at a Channel Tunnel, Wheel of Fortune debuts, and Lesley Whittle, a 17 year old heiress, is kidnapped by Donald Neilson. Also, International Women’s Year is kicked off in the UK, which I note not because I’m particularly enamored with commemoration-style politics like that but because I haven’t cited a lot of news stories that point to the degree to which these are golden years for feminism, so I figured I should.

I, of course, am still off in 1992, in the basement. I think, though I honestly don’t remember vividly, that I actually marathoned that entire tape in one day, so while we’ve jumped over six months in world history since Planet of the Spiders, I’m pretty sure from my perspective we’ve had lunch. Still, this is perhaps advantageous – it’s not clear that there is any story to date in Doctor Who more suitable for watching when you are A) ten, and B) have no idea what the show is supposed to be like.

Robot is, by necessity, an odd duck. By convention, Doctor Who has, for the past few seasons, banked an episode across seasons. The Time Warrior was actually made immediately after The Green Death, Carnival of Monsters immediately after The Time Monster.…

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