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

There’s a dirty joke to be made about getting crabs at a holiday camp, but we’re above that. Except when we’re not.

It’s March 11, 1967. In the charts, Engelbert Humperdinck is edging out The Beatles’ first single from the Sergeant Pepper sessions, Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever. Improbably, he will do so for the entire run of this story, and The Beatles will fail to make number one with that single. In real news, the psychedelic movement spreads from San Francisco when a copy of the Human Be-In takes place in Central Park, and Pope Paul VI releases his encyclical Populorum progressio, affirming the Catholic Church’s commitment to social justice – a striking commitment to make in the larger context of the 1960s.

While on television, we get The Macra Terror. As with a lot of Season 4, this is one history screws us up on. The problem is the same problem we ran into with The War Machines – also by Ian Stuart Black, as it happens. This looks a lot like stuff that came after it, and so we view it as a “normal” story. Trouble is, it looks very different from the stuff that came before it, and so at the time was anything but a normal story.

This may seem like a surprising statement. After all, at its heart The Macra Terror looks pretty standard. The Doctor shows up somewhere monsters are doing bad things and stops the monsters. We did, in fact, just see this. And in terms of that basic plot summary, it’s actually the fourth one this season, and that’s discounting the subtle variation where a mad scientist is doing bad things instead of a monster. On paper this is a straightforward development of the standard theme of the show lately.

But even using history, there’s something a bit odd here. Seven monsters make their debut over the Troughton era – the Macra, the Chameleons, the Ice Warriors, the Yeti, the weed creature, the Quarks, and the Krotons. Of those, two – the Ice Warriors and the Yeti – appear again in the classic series. But one appears in the new series – the Macra. There is surely something worth remarking on when a monster is brought back after forty years – not just as a name check, but as an actual on-screen appearance as a story’s primary monster.

Admittedly part of it is pure whimsy on Russell T. Davies’s part – he’s said that he really just wanted to bring back an obscure and abandoned monster. And another part of it comes down to the specifics of what he is dong in Gridlock, which is to say, comes down to things we’ll deal with much, much later in the blog. But there is something about The Macra Terror that made it the pick of the litter of long-abandoned monsters.

The answer comes down to one of those great divides between people who come at the story from the novelization era of fandom, where it was “that Patrick Troughton story with the crabs” (A 1987 novelization, for those keeping track at home).…

Continue Reading

We are programmed just to do Anything you want us to

It’s February 11, 1967. The Monkees top the charts, with the rest of the top ten including The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Cat Stevens, and The Move. In weeks to come, Petula Clark and Englebert Humperdinck will top the charts, while the rest of the top ten will see The Beatles, The Hollies, and Donovan chart as well. Non-musical news is slow this month, with a general heating of the Cold War providing the main backdrop.

And Doctor Who offers us The Moonbase. Which… well, let’s just say we have a lot to talk about. Eventually we’ll get into how this story marks the completion of the Troughton transition and conclusively establishes a new paradigm for what Doctor Who is. But to see why this story changed everything forever, we’re going to have to understand why this story was inevitably going to be made.

The inevitability of a lunar story in the late 60s has been remarked upon before, and is fairly obvious. But one thing that the frequent discussion of Doctor Who’s transition away from the exoticism of Hartnell stories and towards things like this overlooks is the fact that the very things that made a lunar story inevitable are the same things that are why the larger transition of Doctor Who towards the “base under siege” model took place.

Since I am apparently possessed with a strange and obsessive need to reference The Web Planet in every entry (mostly because it embodies the explorer spirit of the Hartnell era better than anything else), it is worth contrasting this story with that one, especially given that The Web Planet’s most obvious visual inspiration was Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon. The Web Planet is a story where a world with a thin atmosphere is nevertheless lush and full of strange life. And it aired in February of 1965.

The thing is, there’s a huge line in science fiction that can be drawn in July of 1965. Before that, you get things like, on the paranoid side, Quatermass, which assumes that space is teeming with awful threats, and on the more optimistic side, The Web Planet, which, even though it’s set in a different galaxy (but see Miles and Wood for several discussions of the extremely sloppy way in which the word “galaxy” is used throughout Doctor Who), tells us that space is teeming with fascinating and theatrical worlds. The default assumption was that planets were full of interesting stuff, and when you went to them, you’d encounter it.

Then came July of 1965, and, more importantly, the Mariner 4 probe. This, perhaps more than anything, explains the stark change over the third season of Doctor Who – more or less concurrently with the end of The Time Meddler, Mariner 4 flew by Mars and determined that there was almost certainly not life on Mars, nor had there probably ever been ancient civilizations there. Space, in point of fact, was more or less empty.…

Continue Reading

They’re not fish from space, they’re ballerinas!

Meanwhile, in news that does not sing, the US is found out for experimenting with germ warfare, the opening strains of the Summer of Love happen in San Francisco with the Human Be-In, which also introduces psychedelic culture to the masses (never mind that Doctor Who did it two months earlier. In a week or so we’ll watch, astonished, as Doctor Who invents steampunk in 1967 and gets no credit for that either). The UK begins negotiating to enter the European Economic Community, pre-human fossils are discovered in Kenya… and we’re so far two days into the four weeks this story ran. Thankfully things slow down, and over the rest of it the major news consists of the UK nationalizing 90% of the steel industry, the Apollo 1 disaster happens, and the US, USSR, and UK (who were apparently still expected to make it to space in 1967 – a fact that may be relevant in 1970 for our purposes) sign the Outer Space Treaty to demilitarize space.

If you have the sense that the 1960s are kicking into high gear very suddenly, you’re not far off. So I am deeply amused to bring you The Underwater Menace, which, according to Doctor Who Magazine’s definitive “Mighty 200” fan poll, is the worst story we’ve yet covered – one of the ten worst Doctor Who stories of all time, in fact. And so, even though its quality is by miles the least interesting thing about The Underwater Menace, I suppose we should start there.

The case for the prosecution is that the script makes no sense, the villain is ludicrous, and the whole thing is an effects-driven wreck of a story assembled under pressure. Wood and Miles take it to task for the fact that “it displays utter contempt for the audience. It’s not so much that it isn’t trying, it’s that it doesn’t think we care that it isn’t trying.” Shearman and Hadoke are kinder, both admitting that they love the story’s barminess.

It’s certainly the case that few of the usual reasons for writing off this story seem to hold up to scrutiny.…

Continue Reading

Jamie McCrimmon, in his debut.

It’s December 16, 1966, and time for us to ring in 1967. Almost everything you need to know about music in 1966 can be explained by the fact that Tom Jones is at #1 with “The Green Green Grass of Home,” while The Kinks are at #7 with “Dead End Street,” a song about inescapable economic despair with a chorus of “We are strictly second class / we don’t understand /why we should be on dead end street/People are living on dead end street / gonna die on dead end street” while a background shout of “dead end!” repeats. (To be fair, after two verses of maudlin sentimentality, “The Green Green Grass of Home” turns out to be about waiting on death row, but the degree to which this feels like a pale imitation of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Silent Night/7 O’Clock News,” which does the smash fade from sentimentality to harsh materialism with far greater aplomb, and was released in the US, at least, two months earlier ultimately reminds us that this is still Tom Jones we are talking about.) Tom Jones will hold the #1 spot for the entirety of this story.

In actual news, meanwhile, you’ve got a nice illustration of how 60s news works in hindsight. You’ve got basically three categories of events. The first is of significance only to people who think that the 60s are about youth cultural revolution. For instance, The Doors releasing their self-titled debut on January 4th. The second is of significance only to people who think the 60s are about an obnoxious assault on traditional culture. For instance, the theft of millions of dollars of art from the Dulwich Art Gallery in England. And then there are the ones that are significant to both groups, and thus reveal the fault lines in what was actually going on at the time. For instance, Prime Minister Harold Wilson withdrawing all offered settlements with Rhodesia and insisting that the UK will only recognize a majority-black Rhodesian government.

This paradigm is not entirely unhelpful in understanding Doctor Who in its fourth season. On the one hand, you have the stuff that’s chum for fans of later eras: The Doctor is funny! Lots of contemporary Earth stuff! On the other hand, you have the stuff that feeds the Troughton-era backlash that seems to have seized Doctor Who fandom somewhere along the line – stuff that amounts to the loss of things that were around in the Hartnell era: No historicals! Endless bases under endless sieges! And on the third hand, because this is British science fiction and we have Zaphod Beeblebrox handy whenever we want him, you have stuff that turns to Marmite: Monsters! And… um… more monsters, really.

The underlying issue is this. In its first season, Doctor Who flailed around and tried to figure out what it was. In its second season, though, Doctor Who was ruthlessly confident about what it was. That confidence was arguably misplaced at times, but it was unquestionably there.…

Continue Reading

Of the many things to love about Daleks, the way their eyestalks wilt when they lose power is perhaps the smuttiest.

It’s November 5, 1966. The Four Tops are at number one with “Reach Out I’ll Be There.” In two weeks, The Beach Boys will take it with “Good Vibrations,” and two weeks later it’ll be Tom Jones with “Green Green Grass of Home.” Meanwhile, in the news, the Rhodesia situation goes worse and worse, John Lennon meets Yoko Ono, and Barbados declares independence from the UK.

While on television…

Sometimes Doctor Who is magical. I mean this on several levels, but one of them – and a significant one – is that the show is a clear formative influence on the sci-fi/fantasy culture that will eventually produce writers like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. As with many things about the future, we’ll get there in time. For now, the only thing you really need to know is that it’s hardly unusual for the show to have something of a spiritual dimension.

I mention this because, as The Power of the Daleks spins up, it’s essential to understanding the only thing that’s on anybody’s mind – what the heck just happened to the Doctor. Again, this is something it’s easy to forget in hindsight. We’ve had eight further post-regeneration stories now. We know how these work. But The Power of the Daleks isn’t written for us. It’s written for an audience with no idea what is going on. And it’s establishing all of this for the first time, which means there are no precedents for this. This isn’t “a regeneration story.” It’s the regeneration story – the story about what happens when the Doctor changes who he is.

It’s tough to say what does happen, though. Minimalist exposition and the fact that we’re on the joint longest stretch of missing episodes in the series conspire to make this a maddening thing to piece together. So let’s go to the behind the scenes and look at what the people making this thought was going on. For me, the choice quote from Gerry Davis and Innes Lloyd’s notes on what they call a “metaphysical change” is this: “It is as if he has had the LSD drug and instead of experiencing the kicks, he has the hell and dank horror which can be its effect.”

What does this mean? I probably should have tossed Timothy Leary in back when we did our roundup of 1966 counterculture. But suffice it to say that talking about LSD and metaphysical changes ties right in with the existing discussions of spiritual journeys that we’ve already had. But what, specifically, does LSD evoke? Well, let’s crack open our Timothy Leary – specifically The Psychedelic Experience – and look at his incantations to be used in case of massive acid trip:

That which is called ego-death is coming to you. Remember: this is now the hour of death and rebirth; take advantage of this temporary death to obtain the perfect state – Enlightenment. 

Continue Reading