Timeless Adventures Page 7
The War Machines succeeded because it connected directly with the TV viewing audience. WOTAN uses telephone lines to communicate with and hypnotise those people it uses in its plan. With every home in the land installing a telephone, the threat had more reality than any battle with the Daleks in a far-off, futuristic, alien world. The action was taking place on streets and in environments that almost all those watching would recognise: it made the series relevant to viewers (a lesson that had been learned from The Dalek Invasion of Earth, nominally set in the future). Another important development instituted on The War Machines, and laying down groundwork for the immediate future of the series, was the involvement of a genuine ‘scientific advisor’. New Doctor Who producer Innes Lloyd (who had succeeded Verity Lambert’s short-lived successor John Wiles after Galaxy 4) and his script editor Gerry Davis drew on the services of Doctor Kit Pedler, a well-known TV pundit on scientific matters. Although consulted specifically to give some scientific accuracy to the serial’s computers, Pedler would play a larger part in the coming Troughton era, contributing greatly to the establishment of the Cybermen. Similarly, the 1970s producer-and-script-editor team of Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks would consult scientific magazines like New Scientist to find developments in science and technology upon which they could base exciting Doctor Who stories. The War Machines saw Doctor Who abandon the weird, far-out space fantasy of most William Hartnell episodes in favour of slick, often-contemporary or near-future SF thrillers dealing with the big scientific issues of the day. This change of approach was a harbinger of a bigger change coming for the programme, as William Hartnell neared the end of his time as the First Doctor.
There are many pop cultural icons that have been played, on film or on stage, by different actors who have brought their own unique interpretation to the roles. Several actors have played Sherlock Holmes, Superman and James Bond, and made their mark. Similarly, many see it as a challenge to deliver ‘their’ Hamlet, just as Tenth Doctor David Tennant did in the summer of 2008.
The recasting of the title character of Doctor Who, however, was a unique stroke of genius that, more than even the TARDIS, or the Daleks, or the show’s wonderfully open-ended concept of exploration of time and space, allowed the series to prosper and change for over 45 years. The simple fact of being able to change the lead actor, introducing not only a new face but essentially a new character, and yet claim he’s still the same person, is unique in television history. Each new Doctor can refer back to his predecessors as they are all part of an ongoing (albeit loose) continuity. There had been thoughts of replacing William Hartnell before 1966, and the idea of a different actor playing the character had been established when Peter Cushing provided a different interpretation in the big-screen Dalek remakes.
During Doctor Who’s third year on air, producers John Wiles and Innes Lloyd gave some thought to replacing Hartnell. Increasing health problems and a reputation for being difficult led each of the new producers to ponder how Doctor Who could continue without the lead actor. Broadcast in April 1966, the fantasy/‘sideways’ story The Celestial Toymaker saw the Doctor made invisible by the powerful, God-like Toymaker character (Michael Gough). One plan hatched by Wiles was to simply replace Hartnell by having the Toymaker restore the Doctor in a different body. The series could then continue with a new lead actor. Although not implemented, the thought of continuing the series without Hartnell had been mooted and it would be down to Lloyd, the then-current producer, to later enact the proposal.
Besides the change of lead actor, Hartnell’s final adventure, The Tenth Planet, is also notable for introducing Doctor Who’s second-best-known monsters, the Cybermen. Following his work ensuring the scientific veracity of The War Machines, Kit Pedler was consulted by Lloyd on a variety of cutting-edge science concepts with a view to working them into other Doctor Who stories. The concept for the Cybermen developed from mid-1960s anxieties about organ replacement, then just beginning with successful heart transplants. The Cybermen were a race of humanoids from Earth’s twin planet Mondas who had taken cybernetic replacement of failing limbs and organs to an extreme. Either as a deliberate policy or as a consequence of their conversion to a cyborg race, the Cybermen had removed, lost or inhibited their emotions. The warning was that Wilson’s ‘white heat’ of technological process could have its downsides, as well as its benefits. Pedler extrapolated the Cybermen from trends in 1960s medicine – from a growth in cosmetic surgery and the use of technology to replace previously organic parts through to an increasing use of drugs to manage emotional or mental disturbance. At the same time, NASA were considering the survival of humanity in space. Several solutions were proposed, ranging from cybernetically augmented space suits to a blending of humans and spacecraft. Surgically or mechanically augmented humans were sometimes referred to as cyborgs, short for ‘cybernetic organism’.
Combining these topics resulted in the Cybermen, presented in their first appearance as bandaged survivors, still clearly largely-organic. Lloyd was so taken by the creatures they quickly became a staple enemy, and were a returning monster for the rest of the decade. The Tenth Planet also established another format that would be ruthlessly exploited over the next few years: the base-under-siege story. The Cybermen begin their invasion of Earth at the South Pole in December 1986, assaulting an isolated space-tracking station. This set-up would recur in many of the stories made over the next three years, providing a ready-made template into which a variety of themes (and monsters) could be incorporated.
At the story’s climax, as 7.5 million viewers watched, the Cybermen were defeated and their planet destroyed. A worn-out Doctor stumbled back to the TARDIS and, collapsing onto the floor, physically changed before his new companions’ eyes. Signs had been building that all was not well with the Doctor – during The Tenth Planet he had commented that his body was ‘wearing a bit thin’, while his encounter with the Daleks’ Time Destructor in The Daleks’ Master Plan had adversely affected him, as had having his life force partially drained in The Savages. Although the concept of regeneration would become central to the series, at this point it was referred to as ‘renewal’: a change of bodily form, but not necessarily personality. Practically speaking, however, a different actor in the role meant a new personality.
Change had come not a moment too soon for Doctor Who. Ratings towards the end of Hartnell’s time were falling after the highs of Dalekmania. It wasn’t unusual during the first two seasons for serials to rate anywhere between nine million and 12.5 million viewers. However, while the third season started at a high of 9.9 million for the gender role-reversal space opera of Galaxy 4, viewing figures had tumbled to around five million for both The Savages and the format freshening The War Machines. Changing the lead actor and the character of the Doctor in November 1966 (just seven months after Harold Wilson had regenerated himself, securing a new lease of political life in a second election victory) proved to be a masterstroke. The novelty factor alone must have attracted a significant number of viewers, and audience figures for Patrick Troughton’s three seasons in the title role consistently held at around the seven-million mark.
As the First Doctor himself said in The Sensorites: ‘It all started out as a mild curiosity in a junkyard and now it’s turned out to be quite a great spirit of adventure.’ Now Doctor Who itself had a sense of rejuvenation, a fresh start with a new lead actor, and a whole new spirit of adventure awaited.
As a product of the BBC’s unique institutional set-up, Doctor Who operated within a production process that changed little between the 1960s and the 1980s. From the start, Doctor Who faced technical challenges, and the show’s ambition had been curtailed by the means of production available. In 1963, the producers had to work with the resources to hand. This served to limit what could be achieved on screen, while also (conversely) allowing the series to serve as a test subject for new technologies, from ‘inlay’ and Colour Separation Overlay (CSO, the BBC’s 1970s version of blue- or green-screen production) to ‘Sc
ene-Sync’ on 1980’s Meglos and even 3D for 1993’s Children in Need charity skit, Dimensions in Time.
While Verity Lambert and her production team were figuring out exactly what Doctor Who should be during the early months of 1963, the studio facilities allocated were causing much consternation and resulted in many caustic internal memos. Contrary to popular belief, Doctor Who was never transmitted live, but the early episodes were more or less recorded ‘as live’, with usually one recording break. This was due to the primitive videotape recording system used. Videotape editing was prohibitively expensive in 1963, so the only ‘edit’ allowed was to stop and start the recording in an emergency. Episodes were often shot using three cameras to cover the principal characters and any action. The cameras could not change lenses mid-shot, so close-ups of actors in dramatic moments were only possible by ‘dollying’ (moving in on the subject on tracks or wheels) the camera into the scene itself. These – and a whole host of other limitations arising from shooting the series in Lime Grove Studio D – account for the unique look and feel of Doctor Who for most of its first years on air.
This production process explains the distinctive way in which early Doctor Who recreated history or imagined far-off alien civilisations. Sometimes the show would try to work within these restrictions, and writers and producers would be realistic about what could be achieved on a budget of somewhere around £2,300 per episode. At other times, attempts would be made to produce something more ambitious, like the truly alien environment and insectoid eco-system of The Web Planet.
Lime Grove Studios had been built in 1915 in Shepherd’s Bush as a film studio by the Gaumont Film Company and purchased by the BBC in 1949 as a ‘temporary measure’ while the purpose-built Television Centre was constructed in nearby White City. While Lime Grove had been a state-of-the-art studio following a refurbishment by Gaumont-British in 1932, it was something of a technological relic in 1963. Despite that, the studio continued to be used by the BBC. Verity Lambert was not happy about trying to make an innovative new science-fiction show in such circumstances. The studios were small and difficult to light, given the out-of-date equipment available. Memos from the time reveal that, just like the BBC’s original purchase of the studio, use of Lime Grove Studio D for recording Doctor Who was intended to be a temporary situation, with the use of studios at Television Centre or Riverside (another small BBC studio) planned. For one thing, the police-box prop being designed for use as the exterior of the TARDIS had to be slightly scaled down from the real thing (then still widely seen on the streets of London), as it would have been too large to fit into the lifts at Lime Grove.
As noted, with video editing unavailable, each 25-minute episode of Doctor Who was recorded more or less ‘as live’ on a Friday evening across about 75 minutes, anywhere between two to four weeks in advance of transmission. Anything more complicated than dialogue scenes (like a dynamic fight sequence or a complicated model shot) was captured on film the previous week, usually at the BBC-owned Ealing Studios. Everything else was shot, usually in chronological order, on the Friday evening following a week of script read-throughs, rehearsals and an in-studio dress rehearsal earlier on the same day. Mistakes were to be avoided, although the £100 videotape used could be rewound to the beginning of a fluffed scene and recorded over if a retake was required. These tapes could later be recycled, accounting for the loss of over 100 original recordings of black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who.
These primitive production conditions explain why vast alien vistas (the Dalek city on Skaro in The Daleks) and historical cultures (The Aztecs) were all rather more limited than the imagination of the writers intended. Thankfully, the imagination of the audience could usually be relied upon to fill in the illusion, creating in the mind’s eye the kind of amazing worlds that black-and-white 405-line television transmissions could only suggest.
The result was that Doctor Who had to be a dialogue-heavy series, in which the fantasy situation was often conveyed in spoken conversations rather than shown. The drama was mostly framed theatrestyle, square on from the audience point of view, with the camera and the characters moving left to right (and vice versa) across frame rather than backwards and forwards into the depth of field (as Studio D at Lime Grove allowed for very little in the way of depth in set building). This was one reason why attempts to realise fully-formed alien worlds, like that in The Web Planet, were abandoned, while later episodes featuring the ‘base-under-siege’ situation succeed. These adventures were built around one large, significant set that could be accommodated in Lime Grove Studio D, but could be shot from a diversity of angles to convey the drama and generate novelty from episode to episode. It also allowed the show to stay within its limited budget.
Post-production work on these early Doctor Who episodes was minimal. With two or three sections of videotape (with minor line fluffs and clumsy movements left in, as retakes were not economical) recorded in order to make up each 25-minute episode, all that had to be added was music (and sometimes even this was played in ‘as live’ during the studio recording) and sound effects, with very limited special-effects or (primitive) electronic-effects work being done. If additional post-production work or editing was required, the finished episode could be transferred to 35mm film through a process called ‘telerecording’ (which basically consisted of pointing a film camera at a video screen and recording the video image). This allowed for the option of more extensive editing on the less expensive film copy if necessary, but, more often than not, was done so the costly videotape could be reused to record a future episode. The film recordings were also useful to create duplicate copies for sales to foreign television stations, as transmission from film was much more common in the 1960s than from videotape. This process, though, would prove to be significant in saving many episodes of Doctor Who that were otherwise deleted by the BBC in the late-1970s.
By 1967, Doctor Who had changed dramatically. The Doctor had a new face and personality, as character actor Patrick Troughton took over from William Hartnell. Troughton had played Robin Hood in a 1950s TV series and appeared several times in Dr Finlay’s Casebook on the BBC. In 1963, he’d featured in the fantasy film Jason and the Argonauts. Cast to bring new life to the series, Troughton’s take on the Doctor was dubbed a ‘cosmic hobo’ by Sydney Newman. His arrival was little remarked upon, and certainly did not provoke the press frenzy that would later be attached to the series’ regular change of lead actor. The Daily Sketch was one of the few newspapers to pay much attention to the curious change, referring to ‘the strange affair of The Changing Face of Doctor Who. The time travelling Doctor is back as usual on BBC1 this afternoon – and advance reports say that his return will be an explosive event to woo the kids away from Guy Fawkes bonfires. But something is very much out of the ordinary – instead of being played by William Hartnell, the Doctor is spooky character actor Patrick Troughton. When veteran Bill Hartnell decided to drop out it could have meant the end for Doctor Who. Scriptwriters have been turning mental somersaults to explain why a new hero is appearing, without warning, to young fans. Full details of his debut are being kept a secret, until today.’
There was no suggestion that Patrick Troughton should play the same character as William Hartnell, even though they were both portraying the same Doctor. The critically acclaimed Troughton took the path of playing up the Doctor’s whimsical nature in response to Hartnell’s perceived severity. His ‘cosmic hobo’ version of the Doctor was someone whose clowning meant he’d be underestimated by his adversaries. He connected much more with his human companions, too, as he was somewhat less alien and a lot less threatening than Hartnell’s incarnation had been.
Producer Innes Lloyd, who’d been running the show since The Celestial Toymaker and had been instrumental in removing Hartnell, was now firmly in charge. The budget-busting experimental shows of the past, like The Web Planet, were dumped in favour of a handful of more manageable and affordable formulaic story templates. The main format for the remainder of
the decade was the ‘base-undersiege’ story, in which an isolated community (often the staff of a scientific outpost or institution) is attacked by an alien menace, with only the Doctor and his friends to help. A lot of these outposts were either on Earth, nearby on the Moon, or else in orbiting space stations (locations also featured regularly in the revived twenty-first-century series, for many of the same reasons). This allowed for economy in set building and in the creation of environments. Lloyd appeared to have been heavily influenced by the Hollywood movie The Thing from Another World (1951) that showed a scientific and military community under attack from a revived alien creature.
Similarly, the series moved on from creating alien cultures, as in the Hartnell era, and relied instead on the shock value of various ‘monsters’. Troughton’s time in the TARDIS is remembered as one in which the series ruthlessly exploited old and new monsters, with return engagements commanding viewer loyalty, shown by the reliably consistent viewing figures of seven million. Lloyd relied less on the Daleks to draw viewers, featuring them in Troughton’s debut story The Power of the Daleks to bridge the change of lead actor, and then only once more in The Evil of the Daleks, a story that narratively set up the Daleks’ ‘final end’ by wiping them out. This was due to Dalek creator Terry Nation’s hopes of spinning off a separate Dalek TV series, and his pursuit of this would keep the Daleks off screen until 1972.