The Doctor who fell to Earth: looking back at the classic Doctor Who serial, “Spearhead From Space” by Robert Holmes (1970)

With the departure of Patrick Troughton in 1969  Doctor Who  teetered on the edge of cancellation  as the ratings had  fallen  to just  above five  million for his  final  ten part serial, “The War Games.”  In the end the BBC decided to give it  another  season, which some suspected might well prove to be the last.  Against the odds the series was re-invigorated,  re-establishing  itself as a Saturday teatime must-see  for another generation of young people, including myself. This was brought about by four  key factors:

Firstly, the producer Derrick Sherwin –  who bridged the transition from  the Second to  the Third Doctor – opted for a new story arc, anchoring the Doctor on Earth (having  been exiled by the Time Lords at the end  of “The War Games”)  where he becomes  the scientific advisor to UNIT,  a  quasi-military outfit first encountered by the Second Doctor in “the Invasion.” UNIT is led by  Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney)  who  first appeared as a regular army officer in “The Web of Fear” and then as the commanding officer of UNIT in “The Invasion”.

The programme makers felt that the format had become tired and wanted to show the Doctor battling his enemies on Earth, rather than on far distant planets. The Earth  in fact  turned out to be the Home Counties, subject to a surprisingly high number of alien invasions. This format  harked back to the Quatermass  serials of the 1950s in which  Professor  Bernard Quatermass  also grappled with alien  invasions of southern England.

Secondly,  the new serials were filmed in colour,  which allowed a fresh  look (although it was not without problems when the screen showed less than convincing monsters and  questionable  sets). Of course,  to begin with  many people would still have watched  Doctor Who  in black and white as colour TV sets were very expensive to begin with: just  200,000  sets having been sold by the end of 1969. By 1976, however, over 1 million had been sold and  the sales of colour sets  overtook those of black and white sets.

Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks

Thirdly,  the series was driven forward by  the new script editor, Terrance Dicks, and the  new producer, Barry Letts,  who took over  from Sherwin  when he departed after producing  the new Doctor’s first  serial, “Spearhead in Space.”  Letts and  Dicks formed a very close professional working relationship which was instrumental in popularising Doctor Who to a fresh  audience.

From the interviews they seem quite different characters:    Letts   the intellectual,   interested  in subjects such as  Buddhism for instance,  whilst   Dicks is the practical  man of television  dedicated to ensuring that, as he often says,  “the screen doesn’t go blank at 5.30pm”.

And finally the inspired choice of Jon Pertwee as Troughton’s replacement, whose selection  was  a surprise to many.  Jon came from a “clan” (as he termed of it) of writers and actors.  When the Second World War started he joined the Royal Navy, avoiding  the RAF as,  according to Jon,  he had a fear of being trapped in a burning aircraft. If you look closely at his arm  in some episodes you can see his naval tattoo of a scarlet and green cobra, acquired after a very drunken night out.

Jon  served  for a time on HMS Hood, where he was a spotter up in the spotting top. He  was transferred off the ship by the Captain   for officer training which was  very lucky for him, for, on 24th  May 1941,    HMS  Hood was attacked  by the Bismarck and exploded  within minutes with the loss of 1, 415 men.  Just  three  crewmen survived.   Jon says, “It was such a dreadful thing to happen. I lost all my friends, all of my mates. All of them…You never really escape things like that. They stay with you all of your life”.

Looking back Jon  was adamant about the horrors of  war:

“War is terrible. Anyone who tells you different is a liar…I realise I was very lucky to survive the war. There were a lot of times I nearly died. Once I was with some shipmates on leave in London and there was an air-raid. I had premonition and went down into the underground station to take shelter, but my shipmates wanted to get home to loved ones. …Next morning, I made my way back to my barracks, horrified by the damage done during the attack. It really was all smoke and ruins. I was the only one who got back to barracks. All of my mates had been killed during the bombing…A lot of nights it really did feel like the end of the world.” Doctor Who magazine, 457, March 2013, Interview with Jon Pertwee, p.25.

After the war Pertwee forged  a career as  a comic actor mainly on the radio,  his most well-known role being that of  Chief Officer  Pertwee  in The Navy  Lark  from 1959 to 1977  (which is still  being repeated on Radio Four Extra, by the way).  Jon was offered the part of Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army  but turned it down  as he was appearing on  Broadway in A Girl in My Soup. When  the role of the Doctor  came up Jon asked his agent to apply for the role,  and was surprised to find he was already on the shortlist. He was actually the second choice,  Ron Moody being  the first bur Moody was not available.   Jon had not watched the series much before taking the role.

Jon was given a wardrobe which exactly suited his character and patrician personality, cutting an Edwardian dash in frills, velvets, hat and cape. They also gave him a retro car, Bessie.  In contrast to Pat Troughton quixotic clowning, Jon is very much the  action man. He often uses  Venusian Akido, felling his opponents with a single  touch.  In “The Time Warrior” he fights  the   medieval knights  with a sword,  and even swings across the room on a chandelier,   Errol Flynn style.  In  “The Curse of Peladon” he fights  the King’s champion, Grun,  in single-combat –  and wins.  In “Colony in Space” he fights off an attack from the Primitives who are armed with spears. The Doctor is launched into space in  “The Ambassadors of Death” and goes on a space walk  in “Frontier in Space”.  Jon never  missed an opportunity to include a gadget or some mechanised  method of transport  into the role.

He is also presented as a scientist. The serials often open with the Doctor sitting in a laboratory conducting an experiment or tinkering with a piece of the Tardis,  as he tries to overcome the Timelords’ prohibition on his leaving the  Earth. In “The Silurians”  he works to find a cure for the plague spread by the Silurians. In “The Sea Devils” he rejigs a transistor radio to transmit a distress signal.  In “The Time Monster” he rigs up a Heath Robinson gadget which he calls a “time flow analogue “ to interrupt the Master’s experiments  with time.

The Third  Doctor is  an anti-authority figure,  impatient with red-tape or bureaucracy,  and very short-tempered  with the establishment  figures  he comes across such as   Whitehall civil servants in pin-stripes,   army generals, businessmen  and scientists.

There are occasional flashes  of Jon’s  talent  for comedy.  In “The Green Death” he dresses up as  milk-man with a Welsh accent  to infiltrate the headquarters of   Global Chemicals,  and later on in the same serial  masquerades as  a char-lady in a scene straight out of a Carry On film.

Barry Letts says:  Jon was a kind and unselfish man as well; indeed, his sensitivity was extended to everyone else. He did a lot to turn our casts and crew into a cohesive and happy company. For example, when a newcomer (even playing a small part)  arrived in the rehearsal room, he’d wander over  and introduce himself. “Hello,  I’m Jon Pertwee, I play the Doctor”. He made good friends of all the stunt men and other actors who were regularly cast. He was amusing and charming,  and could surprise you with flashes of unexpected humility. Barry Letts, Who & Me (2007) , p25.

Jon was introduced as the Doctor in “Spearhead from Space,, written by Robert Holmes, probably the most influential writer in th ehistory of the series. After serving in the army  during the war in Burma where he became an officer and joining the police on returning to England, he started working as journalist. He then progressed to writing for television including scripts for The Saint, Public Eye and a science fiction series, Undermind. Holmes  began writing for Doctor Who,   working with Terrance Dicks on  “The Krotons” to fill a gap in the schedule,  and then wrote “The Space Pirates”.

Jon’s  companion  for his first season was Caroline John, who plays a  Cambridge scientist, Dr Liz Shaw.  Caroline had worked mostly worked in the theatre and had struggled to get any roles on television.   When she went for the interview they talked  to her about The Avengers and how they wanted to make it more sophisticated with Jon Pertwee taking on the role as the Doctor.

Caroline says that when the filming started for the first serial she was “a bundle of nerves”. She recalls Jon as being totally  professional  and an excellent actor and says they got  on very well “in a sort of father-daughter relationship”. As a character Liz  is clever, self-assured, cool, not at all  over-awed by the military men or male scientists with whom she is  usually  surrounded,  and sticks up for herself when neccessary. She never gets to travel in the Tardis, however,  or even see inside.

“Spearhead From Space”   opens with  meteorites falling to Earth, part of an invasion by the Autons, a collective intelligence, which has seized control of a plastics factory and is creating replicas in readiness to take over the Earth. At the start of the first episode the Doctor is shown falling out of the Tardis and spends much of the first  and second episode in a coma, recovering from his regeneration. Meanwhile Lethbridge- Stewart has recruited Liz Shaw  to advise on the scientific implications of the meteorites. The Doctor finally wakes up, escapes from hospital in borrowed clothes,   steals a car and makes his way to UNIT HQ,  where he convinces the Brigadier that he is indeed the Doctor, despite his new appearance.

The invasion begins when shop dummies spark to life and terrorise the high streets of England  in a classic scene (although to Derrick Sherwin’s chagrin, the BBC budget did not stretch to the dummies being shown smashing their way through the shop windows). Finally the Doctor puts together a device  with Liz’s help which defeats the Autons. The serial ends with the Brigadier offering the Doctor a job as their scientific advisor  as “Doctor John Smith”

Unusually “Spearhead from  Space”  was shot entirely on location in 16mm  without the use of studio sets because there was a strike at the BBC,and the studios could not be used. This meant that the direction  is  fluid and  dynamic (just watch the press scrum scene at the hospital),   and  looks great more than forty years later.

Overall it’s a great season opener and harbinger of  even greater things to come. When  Russell T Davies brought back Doctor Who in 2005, out of all the possible alien threats  from Doctor Who’s past, he chose the Autons to appear in the very first  serial, “Rose,” his tribute to  a classic era of Doctor Who.

 

Further reading and useful links

Barry Letts, Who & Me (2007)

Richard Molesworth,  Robert Holmes: A Life in Words (2013) published by Telos publishing

interview with Caroline John (1990)  Wine and Dine

If  you would like to comment on this post, you can either  comment  via the blog or email me, fopsfblog@gmail.

 

 

Nuclear and mental meltdown: Brainrack by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis (1974)

In a previous post I discussed  Mutant  59: the  Plastic Eater, the first novel by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis,  who worked together on Doctor Who,   and then created  the early 1970s ecological thriller series Doomwatch.

Their second novel Brainrack was published in 1974 by Souvenir Press,  and followed a similar trajectory to their first novel,   exploring  the  dangers  of what unregulated  scientific advances might do to people and  society.

The “hero” of the novel is a scientist Dr Alexander Mawn, who is that familiar  science fiction character –  the maverick –  at odds with  the scientific establishment. He believes  that an unidentified phenomenon is causing people to suffer from diminished intellectual abilty with possible disastrous consequences for society. He calls this “brainrack”.   Mawn’s  discovery  is unwelcome news to a number of politicians and businessmen who attempt to  publicly discredit him. After his laboratory is attacked and his assistant killed,  Mawn goes in pursuit of the man behind the attack – millionaire Brian Gelder –  who is building a nuclear power station in Scotland for the government. Mawn teams up with research psychologist Marcia Scott and,  through his Whitehall contacts,   manages  to get themselves invited to witness the opening of the Grimness  reactor.  Mawn believes the safety of the reactor been compromised by  “brainrack” affecting the operators whom he and Marcia  have tested.

The core of the book is a gripping and horrifying  second -by-second description of a nuclear accident at the reactor, caused by  faulty  heat sensors,  which successfully  brings together Pedler’s scientific knowledge with Davis’ writing ability. It’s worth remembering that  this  was written long before before accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

13.45 + 60 seconds

Inside  the core, the explosive reaction between the melting fuel cans and water culminated in one long shock  wave which   slammed through the whole assembly hammering against the steel shell…

13.46 +   2 seconds

The whole building shook and there was a deep echoing boom followed by the howling scream of gases escaping under pressure. Glass showered down from breaking florescent lights  in the ceiling of the Control Room . There was a second heavy explosion and an instrument panel sheared away from its wall mountings and fell massively forward,  strking one technician on the shoulder….

13.46 + 10 seconds

…the concrete floor erupted like a volcano as one of the pumps burst like a huge grenade,  flinging jagged cast iron fragments into the air like shrapnel. The room  filled with  clouds of roaring steam as fragments of the pumps careered and ricocheted off the walls…

Many  of the operatives die in the explosion or  from  massive radioactive poisoning,   but a small group  includng Mawn, Marcia and Gelder survive,  and manage to make their way out of the wrecked  reactor  and through the wintry countryside  to safety. Back in London Mawn now enjoys renewed  credibility with the government  and heads a research project which   eventually identifies a component in petrol as the cause of “brainrack”. He persuades the government  to agree to  an experiment  in which all traffic in London  is banned for four  days. After a shaky  start  the levels of the pollutant start to fall. The books ends  with Mawn addressing a crowd in  a car-free  London street:

“…Every one of us is going to make a full and final decision. From now on  every car owner  who starts his engine is going to be fully aware of what he’s doing. There’s no way for him to get out of it”.  He put his arm around Marcia’s  shoulder and started to move away.

“Over the next forty years or so, we’re going to be forced to adjust the whole of our life style – the whole of our technology to cater for millions of adults…  who are never going to recover.  So present  my apologies to the Prime Minsiter and tell him that the choice is really quite simple. It’s cars or the minds of our children, and  God knows which we shall choose.”

Brainrack  is a novel of ideas and action,   rather than character  and development. I am not sure if I even like Mawn very much , while  Marcia never amounts to much more  than his  eventual bed-partner, which  is par for the course for women characters in much of  early 1970s fiction.  From the late 60s onwards Kit Pedler was increasingly disillusioned with the  notion  that unfettered scientific research   would  lead to greater happiness for all. He came to believe that  much scientfic research  was in fact  driven solely  by corporate interests or national prestige and was destroying the planet  – and   needed to be stopped before it was too late. Forty years on, with global warming unchecked and London choking from diesel fumes,  it feels as though we should  heed these warnings more than ever…

Further reading

Michael Seely has produced an excellent  biography of Kit Pedler: The Quest for Pedler:the Life and Times of Dr Kit Pedler (2014), published by miwk.

You can watch one  episode from Mind Over Matter, a television series presented by Kit in the spring in 1981, which looked at the possibility of telepathy and other  paranormal activity.

If  you would like to comment on this post, you can either  comment  via the blog or email me, fopsfblog@gmail.