WHONIVERSE: THE THIRD DOCTOR, 1972-73.
As Doctor Who approached its tenth anniversary, the production team relaxed and began acknowledging the series’ heritage. Daleks, Ice Warriors, “sea Silurians” and even past Doctors began showing up, delighting the 9-year-old me. I remember staring wide-eyed at the cover of the Radio Times with its fabulous ‘Day of the Daleks’ illustration, courtesy of Frank Bellamy (above).
In fact, Steve has made the folk memory of ‘Day of the Daleks’ I carried around in my head for years after seeing it twice in 1972 (the initial tx and the omnibus) into a reality sitting on my Blu-ray shelf. Towering dystopian control centres, past Doctors moving on the Daleks’ interrogation screen, an army of Daleks attacking Auderley House… thinking about it, the time jumping mixture of international tension, action and SF in ‘Day of the Daleks’ is the closest the series ever came to the seminal Doctor Who comic strip in Countdown (which began publication in 1971). There was a brilliant Dalek strip – ‘*Sub Zero’ (below)– running concurrently with the TV story’s transmission.
It's never been remarked upon as far as I know, but ‘Day of the Daleks’ is a direct sequel to ‘The Mind of Evil’. The tense relationship with China in that story, no doubt exacerbated by the murder of their delegate at the World Peace Conference in London, makes sense of the People’s Republic’s reticence to attend UK-based peace talks.
In 1972 when the story was transmitted, US President Richard Nixon visited China and resumed diplomatic relations the country, so the opening story of Season 9 is really the last gasp of the idea that the Jon Pertwee stories took place in the near future. Unfortunately, no one bothered to tell Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes (see 1975’s ‘Terror of the Zygons’ and ‘Pyramids of Mars’).
It doesn’t sit right with me that the Doctor calls The Controller “a quisling”. The derogatory term comes from Vidkun Quisling, the nominal head of the puppet government in Norway after the Nazis invaded in World War II. After the war, Quisling was found guilty of treason and executed, even though he proclaimed his innocence to the end. It’s an incredibly judgmental thing for the Doctor to say – even the moral soapboxing third regeneration – but heard in the context of the serial, Dalek-occupied 22nd century Earth is clearly meant to be analogous to 1940s Norway.
There were over 600 prison camps run by the Quisling regime and one of them, Ljanskollen, was a labour camp in which the prisoners worked on an oil pipeline; The Controller’s comment that the Doctor encountered “a scientific labour camp” clearly alludes to the slave build in Ljanskollen.
It’s a great shame that Louis Marks, the talented scriptwriter behind ‘Day of the Daleks’, only made one contribution to the Pertwee years. His screenplay is just as clever, literate and novel as his ‘Planet of Giants’ had been in 1964. Script editor Terrance Dicks’ successor, Robert Holmes, very wisely contracted him for two stories in quick succession, 1975’s ‘Planet of Evil’ and ‘Masque of Mandragora’ (1976). With only four very different stories on his Doctor Who CV, for me Marks is one of the series’ very best writers, of any era.
The Master is sparingly used over 1972 and 1973, helping the credibility of the character no end. In ‘The Sea Devils’, there’s the first suggestion that the Doctor and the Master had once been school friends, a revelation that immediately added a new dimension to their rivalry (above). ‘Frontier in Space’ would be the last Roger Delgado Master story, although no one knew that when it was made. The character’s threat level continued to decline – the rogue Time Lord now favoring psychological violence via his hallucination device, which preys on the fear centres of the mind – although, shockingly, he does threaten to eject Jo from a spacecraft’s airlock. When the Master reappeared three years later, his civilised mask had slipped completely.
‘The Three Doctors’ (1972-73) and ‘Carnival of
Monsters’ (1973) both lean away from the New Scientist-worthy science
fiction of Pertwee’s first three years towards fantasy. Coincidentally, both share the theme of a
monster or monsters attempting to escape from confinement – Omega from his black
hole, the Drashigs breaching the Miniscope. In ‘The Three Doctors’, the UNIT
family (minus Captain Yates) follow the yellow brick road through the black
hole to confront the Doctor’s “greatest hero”, the stellar engineer, Omega. Confirming
the story’s debt to the children’s book The Wizard of Oz (1900), there’s
a marvelous example of Second Doctor anarchy when he sends UNIT HQ over the
Event Horizon.
The anniversary story’s visuals have an appealing, cheap surrealism – the Doctor's computer, water cooler, UNIT
laboratory’s bench, door and Bessie stranded around a bleak quarry.
Most of the budget had obviously been spent on hiring William Hartnell and
Patrick Troughton; appropriately, the First Doctor acts as a scanner-bound
United Nations, keeping the peace between his squabbling successors. It’s touching how Doctors Two and Three defer to Doctor One’s authority and advice (even though,
technically, he’s the youngest).
The Radio Times ran an accompanying article with ‘The Three Doctors’ Episode One, featuring a photograph of Katy Manning (Jo Grant), Carole Ann Ford (Susan Foreman) and Fraser Hines (Jamie McCrimmon, above). I remember thinking this might mean the latter two might turn up in the story, a closely guarded secret that I can imagine happening today under Russell T. Davies. It wasn’t to be, sadly.
Robert Holmes’ ‘Carnival of Monsters’ leaps forward several years to the satire of his ‘The Sun Makers’ (1977), as well as, remarkably, anticipating the meta-fiction of the 60th anniversary story, ‘The Giggle’ (2023). ‘Carnival’ is a dizzying mixture: Major Daly (Tenniel Evans) is reading a book on the way to Bombay, but he, his daughter Claire (Jenny McCracken) and John Andrews (Ian Marter) talk and act like characters in an Agatha Christie novel, endlessly repeating their lines. Vorg and Shirna (the wonderful Leslie Dwyer and Cheryl Hall) are circus entertainers, while the isolationist Inter Minor tribunal debating their admission to the planet – the United Kingdom joined the Common Market on 1 January, 1973 – are quite literally ‘grey men’, civil servants obstructing progress.
On top of all that, the Miniscope is an obvious metaphor for television itself, designed “simply to amuse… Nothing political.” Crawling around inside its workings, the Doctor and Jo elaborated on my childhood belief that the people I saw in television programmes actually lived inside our TV set. ‘Carnival of Monsters’ was years ahead of its time, a lasting testament to Bob Holmes’ creative genius.
‘The Green Death’ (1973) now looks rather patronising in its portrayal of Llanfairfach, a Welsh mining community, but if ever there was a story that certain right wing critics would scream at today for being “WOKE!”, it’s this one. Pollution from a chemical plant is pumped into the countryside, contaminating the local insect life and creating poisonous mutations. (It was pretty much remade in 2017 for Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor as ‘Arachnids in the UK’, featuring a suspiciously Trumpian businessman called Jack Robertson. It’s probably no coincidence either that his initials are ‘JR’).
Reinforcing the point that capitalism is the villain, Global Chemicals is run by “the BOSS” – Biomorphic Organisational Systems Supervisor – an artificial intelligence that brainwashes the CEO, Jocelyn Stevens (a fantastically subtle, and ultimately heartbreaking, performance by Jerome Willis, above). The BOSS, fruitily voiced by John Dearth, has a fondness for humming Beethoven’s Symphony No.9 and addressing Stevens as “my little superman”. Even Doctor Who’s normally bold producer Barry Letts was worried that the production team had gone too far this time, but no adverse press coverage appeared.
In a well thought out character strategy, ‘The Green Death’ is a turning point for UNIT’s Captain Mike Yates (Richard Franklin). He’s the Brigadier’s “inside man” at Global Chemicals, but is discovered, brainwashed and ordered to kill the Doctor. Yates is saved by the Doctor’s mind-cleansing Metebelis 3 crystal, but his mental resistance is key: otherwise, the Doctor says, “he would have come in shooting.” His on-off-and-never-really-on-romance with Jo, conclusively ends when Mike attends her engagement party to Professor Cliff Jones (Stewart Bevan). After the traumatic events in Llanfairfach, Yates is, fatefully, given time off to convalesce…
Watched now, ‘The Green Death’ is a resoundingly high watermark for Jon Pertwee, Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks’ time on Doctor Who. Apart from the eco message, inventive use of Captain Yates and topical villains, it movingly highlights the gulf between the ageless Doctor and his human companions. He briefly sips the celebratory champagne at Jo’s party (below) and discreetly exits – sadly, she watches him go. These are career best performances from Jon and Katy. How emotional she felt about leaving the series is apparent in how choked Manning sounds in her final scenes with Pertwee.
Finally, Michael E. Briant’s direction of the Doctor’s lonely drive away from the revelry is so finely judged, it wouldn’t disgrace a feature film.
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