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)
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.…