Love and Liberty

I heard at 7am the news that Charles Kennedy had died. It feels so terribly unfair. He had so many gifts and should have had so much more to give with them. And just as Liberal Democrats are starting to recover from the grief of the election, and find something to celebrate in such unlooked-for growth in our numbers (from 45,000 members to 60,000 since polling day), our family is plunged into the most appalling shared grief of all. My heart goes out to Charles’ immediate family too. I knew Charles as Leader, much less since, but I’ll miss him.

Like many Lib Dems, I started the day by pouring out some of my grief on Twitter and a comment on Lib Dem Voice – then a short piece on my Tumblr, which is where, essentially, I write and publish things quickly, before there’s time for insecurity to stop me writing. But I’ve decided that Charles deserves a proper thank you and memorial from me, too, which in my typical way means much the same I said earlier, but at significantly greater length.

A Great Communicator (but not in every way)

You’ll have read a great many tributes and obituaries. Like all Leaders, he had his good and his bad points – perhaps more of both than most. Charles’ greatest strength was that he came across as genuine, and decent, and more like an ordinary bloke than other politicians: today British politics has to make do with Nigel Farage, his anti-matter duplicate. Getting to know Charles over half a dozen years or so, as I’ll come to, he always struck me as the same in private as he was in public, and in private, too, he rarely let people see his bad days.

The one thing I’ll say that contradicts most of the pieces I’ve seen about Charles today is that I don’t think he was a great orator. He was a great communicator – probably the best the Liberal Democrats have had, though I reckon we’ve been blessed with three. But his greatest gift was in speaking directly, conversationally, not reading lines from a platform. I don’t mean he couldn’t deliver a speech – he could, and I saw many of them. Some stuck in my head for his principles as a call to action; some inspired me by turning those principles into a brave challenge. But platform oratory wasn’t his best platform, and if you want to read a review of one of his speeches with a favourable view of the content and a not entirely complimentary look at some of his vocal tics, I wrote one quite some years ago and still think I was right. That doesn’t matter.

I think it may well have been on introducing Charles for the first of the three speeches I mentioned above that a Lib Dem MP said something rather indiscreet that stuck in my head as much as the speech itself. Charles was relatively new in the job of Leader, and there was a wide assumption (not necessarily a fact) that he’d been more the choice of the armchair members than the activists – but also, by this stage, a widespread feeling of pleasant surprise that he’d made himself both a more explicitly Liberal leader and more distanced from the Labour Party than anyone had expected before his election (I remember one of his initial backers telling me sourly that I was probably more pleased with his victorious candidate than he was, and happily agreeing). So when Charles was introduced for his own Leader’s Speech with “I didn’t vote for him – but I’m ever so glad he won!” there was both a huge laugh and a sense from many, myself included, that we would have said the same if we’d been daring enough.

My Memories of Charles (and the Reverse Aesop)

I got to know Charles mainly on the Lib Dem Federal Policy Committee. I was an elected member throughout his Leadership, and for four years I was a Vice-Chair to Charles as Chair. He was the same in private party meetings as he was on the telly: a big change from Paddy Ashdown’s fight to the death on every issue – bringing people together, but passionate on the issues he really cared about. The converse was also true; the chance of my taking over the Chair for an hour when Charles suddenly discovered he had another urgent Commons appointment rose in direct proportion to the time FPC members spent droning on multiplied by the lack of interest he had in the subject. His slipping out rarely helped meetings to finish on time, as he was far more skilled in finding kindly ways to shut people up when they were blathering on than I ever was.

I used to joke at the time that in choosing Charles to succeed Paddy the party had done a reverse Aesop – calling for King Log after King Stork. That was a little unfair (to Charles, at least). He may not have wanted pitched battles on every line of policy, but I remember him usually making two different sorts of crucial contribution across the board. One was in spotting when policy was getting either too impenetrable or too up itself (not that he’d use those terms). In particular, he had a keen eye for the Lib Dem habit of setting up National Institutes for Well-Meaning Interference. Nobody else on the FPC was ever so good at puncturing pompous proposals, rolling his eyes at yet another new bureaucracy: “No more capital letters, please!” Part of that was what you might call Charles ‘remembering common sense’. But there was another element in there. Whether it was being a Highlander, an outsider, his temperament or his chosen ideology, he quietly disliked people pushing other people around.

Growing Into a Liberal Leader

I didn’t know Charles well enough to be able to say whether it was out of that instinct, or his political judgement as Leader, or it simply seeming the obvious thing to do, but his other ‘big picture’ contribution was more blatantly ideological – under Charles, the Liberal Democrats started using the words “Liberal” and “Liberalism” in the headlines, not just in the small print. The Liberal Democrats never lost our Liberalism; when during the election I was searching for inspiring Liberal quotes, short and long, for my Liberal Democrats Believe Tumblr (which, like so many things, I must get back to), one of the most inspiring speeches and probably the one I quoted at greatest length was one of Paddy’s Leader’s speeches, which is as brilliant an exploration of philosophical Liberalism as you could hope to find. But you’d rarely find the word on its own on a policy paper front page or in a shorthand description of the party.

I suspect that a lot of this comes down to simple history: Paddy had been a Liberal MP, and as the Liberal Democrats’ Leader for our first decade, he was careful not to ‘unpick the merger’. And so was everyone else who’d gone through that shambles of a time. Under Charles, the party was more at ease with itself, with the passage of time and the passage of members. Quietly, we had a Leader who would say of us, “We’re a Liberal party,” without anyone being under the impression he was expelling former Social Democrats; policy papers on what we stood for started proclaiming “It’s About Freedom” or “Freedom in a Liberal Society”, rather than the party’s early years of “Our Different Vision”, which I remember reading cover to cover and still being unable to say quite what it was.

I joined the new party immediately after the merger in 1988, because I’d been a teenage supporter but didn’t see why there were two separate parties and waited until it was official to sign up. For me and my generation of Lib Dem Youth and Students, it was natural to be Liberal Democrats, happy with a party born out of a merger, not wanting to go back to the structures and strifes of a party we’d never been members of, but of course we were ideologically Liberals too. Older members found it more difficult to separate the history and the philosophy, so it was something a lot of Lib Dems were very quiet about during the ’90s. It was obvious to me that Bob Maclennan – a former Leader of the SDP – was by far our most Liberal Home Affairs Spokesperson of the time, and similarly, when Bob was Party President in the mid-’90s he was the most senior figure to speak of our Liberalism, unabashed, one of many reasons I became an unlikely fan and friend. No-one could accuse him of digging up old rivalries or a Liberal Party takeover, and the same was true when Charles, another former Social Democrat, was elected Leader. He was able to talk about what we all stood for without it being divisive. Under Charles’ Leadership, the Lib Dems started to grow our own distinct philosophical rivalries, today spoken of more along Social Liberal and Economic Liberal lines, though neither (with a few exceptions!) as sharp as between our two predecessor parties. Most Lib Dems are both Social and Economic Liberals, and those who come down much more heavily on one side than the other are just as likely to have come from the old SDP as the old Liberal Party – but, like the vast majority of Liberal Democrat members, are most likely not to have been a member of either party that voted to merge into the Lib Dems nearly three decades ago.

So every time a ‘political correspondent’ talks about the ‘fault lines in the Lib Dems’ being based on the Liberal Party vs the SDP, they are almost without exception talking bollocks – just as it would have been absurd to characterise every internal debate of the pre-1988 Liberal Party in terms of Whigs, Radicals and Peelites who merged to create the Liberals in their turn. We are not our parents, and neither are parties. Charles, in his calm and consensual but crucial way, helped the Liberal Democrats to grow up.

Charles’ Principles and Passions

The much less quiet decision that Charles took, after much internal debate and soul-searching, and which came to define his Leadership, was to oppose the Iraq War. It’s often falsely remembered as a populist move. It was nothing of the kind. It was a terrifying plunge into doing the right thing when nobody else would, and we were vilified for it. In the run-up to the War, there were mass marches in opposition, but not largely by natural Lib Dems, and the massed fire of the media was all against us. When the invasion began, our opinion poll support took a dive. It was only much later, when it became clear to people not that the principle of invading another country against international law was wrong – people knew that, and were gung-ho anyway – but that the Labour Party and the Republican Party had created such an appalling, bloody mess, that support swung back our way. Remember that the Labour Party and their Tory and press cheerleaders called Charles and the Lib Dems “Traitors” and much worse for not going along with their illegal war of aggression.

If Iraq was Charles Kennedy’s defining issue by circumstance and brave decision in a hard place, perhaps his greatest passion was Europe. A committed and persuasive European, internationalist, democrat and reformer, while Liberal Democrats and many others who simply liked and agreed with him will miss Charles for too many reasons to count, over the next couple of years our loss will be a huge loss in the coming referendum. As well as the personal loss for his family and our wider Lib Dem family, both bereaved, it’s tragic to lose his voice when he’s so needed.

“I am a Highlander, a Scot, proudly British, and European. I’m proud of all four of these things, and I don’t see why I should have to choose between them or delete any of them.”

You may well have seen today a letter from Charles replying to a voter with his judgement that, even though he’s blue, Gonzo’s a nice guy and his favourite Muppet. I can reveal that he rather liked Doctor Who, too, and that his favourite Doctor was always Patrick Troughton, so I’ve had the Mighty Trout’s most Liberal story on this afternoon. If you really want to celebrate one of Charles’ passions, though, put on some David Bowie to remember him by. There, he was a real fan.

Labels: Charles Kennedy, FPC, Iraq, Liberal Democrats, Liberalism, Obituary, Paddy Ashdown, Personal, Speeches, The Golden Dozen

Today should have been my Grandma’s one-hundred-and-second birthday. Sadly, instead today is her funeral. I can’t be in New Hampshire for the ceremony, so I’m remembering her here.

I had the great privilege of knowing two of my grandparents well into my life, my Dad’s dad Walter and my Mum’s mum Eileen White. Both had long, active and determined lives. Both were fiercely independent. Grandad was fit and active until shortly before his death aged 95, back in 2006. Grandma was the same for around a hundred years, and only started to fade in the last couple. I remember Mum telling me she’d had an operation a couple of years ago after which, when the hospital insisted she stay a few nights to see that she was all right, she immediately booked herself out and walked home.

Grandma was widowed when my Mum was just a girl, so I never met my maternal Grandfather (my Nana, Dad’s mum, died when I was a teenager). She did marry again, and I did know him for a while as Grandpa, though he’s been gone quite a while too. She lived in many different States of the USA, but for the last couple of decades had settled in Concord, New Hampshire, and I suspect the Granite State’s motto “Live Free Or Die” is one she’d have identified with, at least if endorsing someone else’s motto didn’t compromise her stern independence (only once, I think, did Mum tease out of her how she voted: after gently probing several times to see if she was backing President Obama in 2008, Mum carelessly tossed out, “So you’ll be voting for Vice-President Palin, then?” which gained the response, “Do you think I’m a complete fool?”). She was a formidable lady.

I wish I’d seen more of her, and been in touch more often. Some of my favourite memories of her are from the Nineties – my twenties, her eighties – when she was able to come over here and I had one of only two trips so far over there. In 1998, I was in the USA on business of a kind for three weeks and travelled up to New Hampshire to see her on one of my two days off, where we got on very well and had a rather lovely day together. That’s when, discussing politics, she told me the story that I’ve most often told on here from her, most recently in telling My Political Story – Why I Am A Liberal Democrat. I remember her nodding and telling me that she could see I’d be political when I was aged four and strutting about naked on a beach and told a big boy off for kicking down another boy’s sandcastle. She was probably right.

My absolute favourite moment was in 1996, when I got my Mum into trouble. Sorry, Mum. I’d been pretty much out to the world since I was seventeen, badges and everything, with only a handful of notable exceptions. One was Grandma. Mum had prevailed upon me not to tell her, because she was old and we didn’t see her often and she didn’t know how she’d react. So when she came over sometime in the mid-Nineties, I saw her a couple of times but never quite found the moment or the courage to talk to her properly. And I regretted it. So, eventually, I composed a long letter that walked on eggshells, knowing she’d probably be upset and wanted both to reassure her and to be honest with her, because by then I’d been with Richard for a couple of years and I knew I always would be, and I didn’t want to shut her out. So I sent the letter, and waited on tenterhooks.

A week later, the phone rang. I think it was the only time Grandma ever rang me rather than writing. And in fact she rang me twice in quick succession. The first call was more abrupt and to the point. It went something like this.

“Why are you so upset?” she asked.
“Well… I’m not,” I replied, taken aback. “But I thought you would be. I’m completely fine about being gay.”
“And why would that be?”
“Well… Mum thought…”

I think that’s about as far as I got in that conversation before there was a determined

“Right! I’ll ring again in a minute.”

One what I understand was a curt mother-daughter bollocking later, she rang me again, and we had a long and charming conversation in which she was all sweetness and light. That is, after the first explanatory explosion:

“Does my family think I’m wrapped up in cotton wool? I’ve known for years!”

So remember that when ignorant people insult all over-seventies by trying to tell that you they’re bigots who know nothing.

I loved her for all that I didn’t see her much, and I’m deeply sad that I won’t be able to see her again. Five months from today, Richard and I plan to be in the States on our honeymoon, and I wish I could do as we’d planned and visit Grandma with my wonderful husband. But it’s not to be.

Mum and Dad travelled over far more often. For the last few years, they’ve always gone to the States and been with Grandma on her birthday. This time, they’d barely landed in New York, planning to travel up to New Hampshire the following week, when they heard that Grandma had had what seemed to be a minor heart attack and was in hospital. They went straight up there and found her suddenly very frail in the hospital, and were with her for about two hours before she just slipped away.

For complicated reasons, I’ve not been able to speak to them and have had a chain of emails, but I know they’re having a very rough time and my heart goes out to them.

Labels: Gay, Obituary, Personal

Counting down towards the fiftieth birthday of Doctor Who with Fifty great scenes… Today’s is Doctor Who’s first major use of the “timey-wimey” – back in 1972, as a one-off key dramatic turning point with consequences. It’s also the first scene in my Fifty to be a really massive spoiler, so I’m warning you before this gripping revelation. In a dystopian future Earth controlled by the Daleks, human freedom-fighters are desperate to change time with an assassination… And, in addition to all the avenues that sends me down, I have a small tribute to Ray Cusick, creator of the Daleks.

“You went back to change history – but you didn’t change anything. You became a part of it.
“…You’re trapped in a temporal paradox! Styles didn’t cause that explosion and start the wars. You did it yourselves.”

Mysterious figures have been appearing out of nowhere to try and kill top diplomat Sir Reginald Styles before a crucial peace conference. The Doctor (Jon Pertwee), still exiled to Twentieth Century Earth and working with UNIT, is called in to investigate – who are the real villains? The combat-clothed would-be assassins? The brutal Ogrons pursuing them? Or, perhaps, in a story called “…of the Daleks”, could there be some other force behind it all…? Well, no, the involvement of the Daleks isn’t the big spoiler. The Doctor and his companion Jo are both drawn forward in time to a ruined 22nd Century Earth that’s little more than a giant Dalek slave-camp. The human resistance have utterly failed in taking the fight to the Daleks on an already shattered Earth… But their history tells them that Sir Reginald was a murderer who destroyed his own peace conference and triggered the world wars that left Earth easy pickings for the Dalek invasion. Using stolen Dalek time-travel technology, they’ve been travelling back to kill him first. Before you ask, this was a decade before The Terminator (and Harlan Ellison wrote an introduction to the US edition of the Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks novel rather than an instruction to his lawyers, so clearly it was differently creative to the way The Terminator arrived at its plot). Though I do wonder if its starting point might not have been 1984 – that to control the past is to control the future, and not just by altering the textbooks?

It’s a story of contrasts: exciting and flat; intelligent and flawed. The final episode deploys the most of both, its first half largely made up of brilliantly escalating, compelling dialogue scenes that bring out the best in the actors, its second half the big action finish that director and budget fail to deliver perhaps most conspicuously out of all Who stories (something which the Special Edition tries hard to overcome, with limited success). I was first gripped by the novelisation Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks some years later, which avoids some of the flaws of the television version and carefully walks the line between the human assassins being ‘terrorists’ or ‘freedom-fighters’ by generally terming them “guerrillas”. And while it’s easy to think of them as ‘freedom-fighters’ once their initial ambiguity is resolved into the knowledge that they’re fighting against the Daleks, at the story’s finest moment – a scene running from about seven minutes into Episode Four to a climax about five minutes later (or at the end of Chapter 12), in effect a perfect mid-episode cliffhanger – we come to question their fight all over again. They’re careless of human life and have little objection to killing or abandoning the Doctor – until learning that the Daleks fear him makes him in their eyes a weapon to be utilised. It’s the Controller of this sector of Earth, a Dalek-appointed bureaucrat, who shows the most humanity in his haunted tale of the wars that ruined Earth, and the brutalised fighters who’ve only ever known a Dalek Earth who show mercy only at the Doctor’s urging when they burst in to rescue our hero from Dalek suckers. Jon Pertwee’s Doctor and the Controller (Aubrey Woods (the Controller)) are both grandstanding performances at their best when suddenly focused down into quiet, intense dialogue scenes, and it’s the Controller’s despair more than the guerrillas’ determination that moves the Doctor, setting him on a vital train of thought once taken to the guerrillas’ base.

Once held by the human suckers, the Doctor’s given a simple proposition: they’ll send him back to the Twentieth Century, and he can kill Sir Reginald for them. But a lot of this makes the Doctor uneasy, and it’s not just the implicit feeling that murdering people in cold blood is the sort of thing the Daleks do and not him. Impatiently, the guerrilla leader tells him that, improbably, people still wrote history books through the wars, pinning all the blame on a power-hungry Sir Reginald, and that, improbably, they’d managed to find out that the Daleks had time travel and steal some of their devices, both a portable time machine and a large bomb. How convenient. Having met Sir Reginald and formed the impression that, while a dick, he’s no dictator, Jo and the Doctor each put their fingers on potential problems with this. He breaks it gently:

“But your history [No good for me – na, na, na na] could be wrong, you know?”

She’s more blunt:

“But if this is true, Sir Reginald Styles must be completely round the bend!”

It is notable that no-one seemed ever to have found any cells of fanatical Stylesists around the world ready to seize power as the bombs fell – in fact, the only cells of fanatics who might in some way be being manipulated by fascist dictators are the ones the Doctor is sitting in, and he’s already observed that

“Changing history is a very fanatical idea”.

So, which fascistic fanatics who want to rule the world and have the power to change history do we know of, readers? Fortunately the dialogue is better-written than that and builds the drama to a peak rather than dropping quite such explicit hints, but Doctor Who’s deep-grained suspicion of ‘The ends justify the means’ (paraphrased in this scene by the Doctor) gives a very satisfying philosophical steer to the direction of the dramatic revelations. As the Doctor slowly brings out the truth with his questions, we’re reminded that one of the assassination cell was wounded and left for dead in the last attempt on Sir Reginald – both in dialogue, and in cross-cut images of him slipping into the cellar of the government mansion where the peace conference is due to take place… Complete with the bomb, taken along as a last resort.

If there’s no reason to think that Sir Reginald got his hands on some terrible new explosive and used it to blow up the peace conference – incompetently killing himself in the process – then somebody else must have done it. And, though it’s never made explicit, isn’t history always written by the winning side? While some of the story disappoints in the TV version, for me both on the page and on screen it’s one of Jon Pertwee’s finest moments as he pushes the logic of the guerrillas’ plans to its remorseless conclusion – a last suicidal attempt to carry out orders that doesn’t defeat the Daleks, but creates their future for them.

Always a favourite scene of mine, it’s relatively recently that it’s come to redeem what was one of those slight disappointments for me about the story: that it sets up what could be an intriguing mystery of motives as well as of time travel, but blows it too early. Presented with two apparently violent, villainous groups, camouflaged assassins taking orders from the moustached leader of their terror cell vs brutal ape-like aliens taking orders from an icy Controller (known only as the Controller), it not only offers a visual pun – guerrillas vs gorillas – but, in their mutual antagonism, a puzzle of which are the real ‘baddies’. Almost immediately, though, it’s revealed which side is working for the Daleks, and with that the mystery collapses into obviously evil Ogrons and quisling Controller vs misunderstood or misguided freedom fighters, making Jo seem dumb for clinging throughout to the opposite interpretation. And yet, the last time we watched the story, Richard wisely observed that this climactic scene and the ones following (which you’ll have to watch yourself) not only reverse everything the guerrillas know, but everything the audience knows about who’s really doing the Daleks’ evil work:

“All through this, Jo thinks that the Controller is the goodie, and the guerrillas are the baddies. And it turns out she was right all along.”

It’s not without some controversy. This whole scene’s a major point of disagreement in the principal DVD documentary (of several). Lead writer of the time Terrance Dicks is quite right to say that the story needed it – arguing that if strange things happen, the viewers are unsatisfied if they don’t get an explanation. Barry Letts, often spot-on with his instincts as producer, here gets it entirely wrong, claiming that it shouldn’t happen in the last episode – the last episode should be action. So Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy should start by saying who the mole is, then just make time until an extended shootout? Particularly when the ‘action’ climax of this story is so infamously thin, it’s great to have such a memorable a mid-episode climax that depends on concept and actors rather than budget. As Ben Aaronovitch says, otherwise there’d be nothing of substance in Episode Four, though even he seems to wish there was somewhere else to put it. Not at all. I didn’t come to the story as a middle-aged, thoughtful Liberal, but a boy who drew ray-blasts all over my books because there were never enough in the illustrations (and it was one of Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks’ pictures that taught me how to draw explosions). And even then, I was gripped by the big twist even more than by the fabulous Dalek battle in my head.

Day of the Daleks and the Time Paradox

This was really the first time that Doctor Who had brought together the philosophical and practical sides of time travel into what would now be called a “timey-wimey” story – previously, the Doctor had talked about the impossibility or undesirability of changing time, rather than us being shown its effects, while stories featuring more time travel than just ‘TARDIS arrives at beginning, TARDIS leaves at end’ had effectively made time a different form of space to chase about in. This moment of this story was the first time that time was really used as intelligent drama – as well as providing in itself a warning that getting stuck in timey-wiminess is bad, and that trying to resolve it by getting deeper into timey-wiminess is worse, and that you’ll have a miserable life in which everything becomes meaningless. I always took this as proof that, while if you came up with a really good one-off story in which it had consequences that would work as drama, you couldn’t possibly do it every week. Some might argue that Doctor Who later doing it every week disproves that rule – but probably not if they’ve watched it. Notably, the next time that the Doctor is pitched against the Daleks in a story about changing history, the Time Lords position him on the wrong side, leading to deeper philosophical argument, the Doctor no longer having a get out of jail free card for a moral dilemma, and arguably the start of the Time War which consumes both Time Lords and Daleks. Again, drama means consequences.

There have been many heated debates across the years about exactly how the ‘Dalek future’ that the Doctor averts comes about (not least round at a couple of leading fan-writers’ place one Christmas, when Richard and one of them debated it to the death while I and the other partner kept our heads down in the kitchen). I won’t go into it in metaphysical or philosophical depth, nor detailed temporal physics, but here are a few thoughts. When I was a boy, reading the story, it always made sense to me, possibly because my religious upbringing prepared me for the conceptual leap of some exterior cause with different, Creator’s rules. A lot of essays I’ve read seem to assume that the Daleks do the hard work of invading, then the guerrillas accidentally use Dalek time travel to create a paradox which spares them the trouble, after which the Daleks retrospectively doss about just protecting the new timeline; or that it’s a parallel universe, which nobody ever mentions (this is, instead, explicitly the time-travel version of the sort of story Inferno was, with Pertwee again at his best up against it); or that the Daleks just ‘found’ the wrecked Earth or that in some other way the paradox just started by itself and the Daleks found themselves a part of it.

The forty-one-year-old me has much the same reaction, albeit with longer words and paragraphs, to what I’m confident the seven-or-so-year-old me who first read the book would: that’s silly, far too complicated, and missing the point. Obviously, the Daleks are the baddies, and are almost as good at time travel as the Time Lords, and as the Doctor can’t change history then obviously this isn’t how history is supposed to go (unlike the Daleks’ first invasion, in about the same spot, but that’s another story). So the reason the Doctor can put a spoke in this particular timeline must be that the Daleks intervened to set it up in the first place.

“We have changed the pattern of history.”

The time paradox is a closed system which goes round and round perfectly, once the Daleks somehow from outside the closed system just gave it a little starting push. As a boy, I pictured (perhaps in a mixture of science fiction, perpetual motion and theology) the Daleks lifting out a section of history as a bubble, intricately joining bits of it together and then setting it back in place to spin round and round. I can’t to this day explain the mechanics of that, but the conceptual image still makes perfect sense to me: the Daleks used their extremely clever time-travel engineering to bootstrap it and can then stand back while it circles for ever. It doesn’t matter that we don’t know exactly how it works, because the logic of the story and everything we know about the Daleks is that they’re behind it all, and unlike all those other ‘explanations’ that require there to be all those extra and often contradictory elements added to the story, my instinctive understanding has an Occam’s Razor about it and credits the Daleks with being clever. As well as appropriately making them the authors of their own destruction, as it’s only when they fearfully identify the Doctor as their enemy that makes the humans pay attention to him.

Richard wrote a more detailed and carefully considered analysis of what he sees as time paradoxes when considering What Does Timey-Wimey mean? in reviewing 2011’s Doctor Who – The Girl Who Waited on Millennium’s Fluffy Diary, as well as revealing that while a timey-wimey story may have been conceptually exciting to me as a one-off, when given nothing but so that no event means anything any more and Doctor Who disappears up its own timeline, my response is… Well, I may have given a hint there. But my Fifty aims to be positive, so I’ll stick to pointing you in Richard’s direction where, fascinatingly, despite having more of a head for high-level temporal physics than I do, he sees Day of the Daleks as philosophical rather than temporal engineering, driven by a plot in which the Daleks symbolise determinism and the Doctor free will. Rather brilliantly, this makes Day of the Daleks a battle between The Dalek Factor and The Human Factor, and a thematic sequel to The Evil of the Daleks after all. So the Doctor’s paradox trumps the Daleks’ not just dramatically but allegorically, when both quisling and terrorists – each thinking the other the enemy, but each raised with a Dalek mind-set – believe the ends justify the means and are equally surprised when the Doctor has compassion for the individual instead, in different ways the salvation of each of them (and of the world). Have a read.

Ray Cusick and the Daleks

Writing about any Dalek story this week is going to have a touch of melancholy, following the death of Raymond P Cusick. Doctor Who has been so extraordinarily lucky in so many of the people who’ve worked on it over the last half-century – actors, writers, designers of sound and landscape, and more – that even a shortlist of ‘If it weren’t for these people, the series wouldn’t be around today’ couldn’t be very short. But Ray Cusick would always be in the top tier: the man who designed the Daleks. There were others who were vital to them, too, including Terry Nation, Peter Hawkins and Brian Hodgson, but Mr Cusick created that iconic look and propelled the series to its first great success. He was an immensely talented designer, whether working on planets, historical periods or giant suburbia (and that’s just his Doctor Who work), yet he’ll always be remembered for creating the series’ first and still one of its most visually striking and coherently imagined alien worlds and Doctor Who’s first big monster.

There’s a touch of guilt for fans, too, in that the other thing he’s remembered for is as ‘Laughing Ray Cusick’, a way to cope with the reason that his interviews about the series were always unsmiling and with unhappy undertones, what became almost the series’ original sin – that while other people and the BBC itself made an awful lot of money out of the Daleks, the person who most deserved to didn’t. I hope he still found some pride in them. And it’s notable that in all the minor redesigns of the Daleks that have followed, to take them too far from the logic of Mr Cusick’s originals is to invite disaster. Bringing them into colour for the first time in the TV series, Day of the Daleks at least makes the right choice in making some of its Daleks gun-metal grey for a lasting suggestion of one-being tanks, yet it not only robs them of much effect by directing them very feebly but ignores the work of the original actors and sound engineers, as a result proving that messing up the vocal design can be almost as big a mistake as throwing out Mr Cusick’s shape. Notably, it’s the only DVD for which an alternative Special Edition completely redubs every Dalek line rather than just changing the special effects…

Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – The Trial of a Time Lord: The Mysterious Planet

I’ve always been curiously fond of the opening for the prosecution in the Doctor’s big Trial, and gave The Trial of a Time Lord: The Mysterious Planet as near to a rave review as it’s likely to get for the DVD, there choosing a Golden Moment of existential crisis. And there’s more to come in the Fifty, too. But one of the things I particularly like about it is that it lets Colin Baker really blossom as the Doctor, not just through him finding interesting things to do to distract you from the script, as in too many, but simply writing well for him – giving him good speeches and a good relationship with Peri. It was the last full script from Robert Holmes, master of the speech, the scary bit and the one-liner and probably the greatest Doctor Who writer of them all, here in the first of what will be quite a few of his lines featuring in my countdown.

It’s half-way into Part One, and the Doctor (Colin Baker) and Peri have discovered that the mysterious planet is, inevitably, a familiar one: ours, and two million years in the future, it’s gone down the Tubes. So, it’s another dystopian future Earth, but at least this one wasn’t created by the intervention of a bunch of Time-Warring superbeings with a magnetron. Er… Anyway, confronted with the ruins of Marble Arch Station, Peri is distraught; the Doctor, sympathetic but worldly (it’s not that long since he was faced with his own gravestone). It’s a beautifully elegiac scene for both of them, her reacting at the human level to the loss of her world, him taking the long view.

“Planets come and go. Stars perish. Matter disperses, coalesces, reforms into – other patterns. Other worlds. Nothing can be eternal.”

Extra Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – Father’s Day

The Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) has wise words about putting things in perspective.

“The past is another country. 1987’s just the Isle of Wight.”

Next Time… Duelling futures (it’s more timey-wimey, I’m afraid).

Labels: Christopher Eccleston, Colin Baker, Daleks, Day of the Daleks, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 50, Fandom, Ideas, Jon Pertwee, Obituary, Richard

Counting down towards the fiftieth birthday of Doctor Who with Fifty great scenes… This time it’s a brilliantly inventive mix of comedy and horror, taken from a 1987 story that brought the Doctor not to a shiny spaceship or a stylised English village but to a run-down tower block – run by Richard Briers. Paradise Towers is a grossly underappreciated story, and this scene would have been higher still in my Fifty were it not that I wanted to skip forward in order to give my own little tribute to Mr Briers.

“It’s – it’s – aaagghh!”
“Yes, I know.”

I gave Paradise Towers a rave review when it came out on DVD, so I’ve already gone over it in some detail and even, for the first time in my Fifty, already celebrated this particular scene as a Golden Moment. So for added value for long-term readers, this version’s different. As with much great Doctor Who, there’s always something new to get out of it, and only a week or so ago, when already thinking about this entry, I realised there was another blatant source for the story that I’d previously not connected with it. Seeing some barking libertarian talking head on the telly, Richard’s and my mature response was to cast Carry On Up The Fountainhead (‘How d’you know she is?’ ‘What?’ ‘Randy!’). The Fountainhead word-associated to Fountain of Happiness Square, where the Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) and Mel first step out into dilapidated architectural marvel Paradise Towers. Something suddenly clicked in my head, and I suddenly realised that this tale of a solipsistic architect arrogantly careless of the people who might get in the way of his grand designs was more than a touch Carry On Ayn Rand already, cocking a snook at the ‘superior’. It was some time after that point that I realised the Great Architect Kroagnon’s name is half-derived from the grating architect Roark. Oh well. So much for brilliantly detailed analysis.

Anyway, arriving to see the sights of the acclaimed architectural triumph Paradise Towers, the Doctor and Mel find it’s a right old sight. The Doctor finds things to delight in, but Mel’s been listening to the fans:

“Just rubbish!”
“Nothing’s just rubbish if you have an enquiring mind.”

Their reactions are similarly divided on running into a gang of girls who’ve created names, crossbows and a culture from their surroundings: “Bin Liner,” declaims one as she sashays menacingly forward to introduce herself our heroes. The Doctor’s soon reciprocated and is caught up in a joyous dance with these Kangs… Mel stands grimly at the back. At crossbow-point. I always laugh at the exuberant wordplay, but in a more disturbing set of scenes in another part of the graffiti-covered, litter-strewn Towers cross-cut with these playful ones, we can see it’s not all fun and games.

A Caretaker is moving nervously along a darkened corridor, walkie-talkie in hand, as much to seek reassurance as to make his report to his Chief (Richard Briers, at this stage only heard). I loved the dirty set design, the low lighting, the sinister silhouette against the window – in a properly crapulent ’80s tower block, it always felt like Doctor Who had finally landed somewhere close to home, both bringing the series up to date and making it that much more unsettling. And, of course, like so many blocks of flats, the Caretakers are bugger all use. Is he fixing the lights, cleaning the wall-scrawl, offering help and advice to visitors? No. He’s as scared as the rest of us. And it’s the running commentary of his fear that really makes this scene, with Joseph Young’s captivating performance of a minor authority figure out of his depth as he finds mounting evidence of murder, even as his boss’ voice keeps crackling testily back at him that nothing’s the matter. Even the sinister bass of the music adds to the atmosphere.

But if it’s not the Kangs fighting among themselves, what could have killed the young woman we saw scream her last in the episode’s opening moments? What should be on the side of the Caretakers, under their control, but have become a law to themselves and almost a mythical sight? Surely not the Mark 7 Megapodic Cleaners? And while in many Doctor Who stories the sight of them might have been saved for the cliffhanger, and in many Doctor Who stories that take themselves more seriously the sight of such an unconvincing robot might wound the story terribly, the essential absurdity that these are the cosy cleaners that have gone on the rampage prepares you for what is, basically, a very unthreatening hoover with ideas above its station. And when Mr Briers at last sounds sympathetic, his punchline – exactly on the line between horror and comedy – is pitch-perfect.

Poor Caretaker 345/12(3).

Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – The Face of Evil

It’s six minutes into Part Four: there’s a mad computer in denial; two tribes of believers on the point of losing faith; and the Doctor wisecracking while his new companion the local freethinker tries to kill him. Unusually, it’s not just because of his sense of humour. But never mind all that. This time, the quote really speaks for itself…

“You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common… They don’t alter their views to fit the facts; they alter the facts to fit their views. Which can be uncomfortable, if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.”

Next Time… It’s about timey-wimey (oh, just shoot me for typing that).

Richard Briers

“I have played straight drama, which I love, but I eventually miss doing comedy because we are in such miserable times. And I do feel that my purpose in life is to cheer people up.”

Richard Briers was a figure from as far back as I can remember. Not always a comforting figure – even Tom Good had something slightly unhinged about him. I was most fond of him for Roobarb, who was just barking (and it’s sad to read that Bob Godfrey, the brilliant animator of those vibrating lines of Roobarb and Custard and all, has died in the last week, too). Grown up, I can still cackle at his drunken flirting with Margo, and came to appreciate his Martin in Ever Decreasing Circles – who I’d never warmed to when I was younger, but now see as a searing docu-drama about a typical Lib Dem local party committee member [in the commentary on a Christmas episode, the cast are asked about their most unusual roles. Richard Briers: “Mine was Doctor Who, a long, long time ago, when I played Hitler.” Peter Egan cuts in as Paul-to-Martin: “Oh, I don’t think you’d be miscast as Hitler… In fact, I think he’s a bit left-wing for you.” Richard-as-Martin: “I wish I’d never said anything now.” They fall about… The interviewer, of course, excitedly remembers Paradise Towers. Penelope Wilton modestly adds “I’ve been the Prime Minister,” which Mr Briers watched, and both her co-stars impressively get the literary reference to Sycorax. But I digress].

Mr Briers gave many brilliant straight drama performances, too – by one of those horrible coincidences that meant we’d never have put it on the following day, the night he died we were watching him in Midsomer Murders – Death’s Shadow. But he’s rather fine, and rather sad, in that, too; it’s a murder mystery, and a good one, so I shan’t tell you what he’s reacting to, but (my) Richard and I were each gripped by one particularly well-played reaction from him (17.20 and 1.34.58 in respectively, if you have it). And then there’s Paradise Towers.

Oh well. He’s not all bad in it – he is absolutely perfect as the foil nagging at the young Caretaker over the comms, then that moment of belated, inappropriate tenderness. He’s almost forced to be great when he and Sylvester swap roles as the Chief interrogates the Doctor. And he’s suddenly touching in peril at the end of Part Three. But, for the most part, he was ever after refreshingly candid that he ignored the producer and just wanted to have fun with it, so for much of it he is blankwallandcleaneringly terrible, albeit abetted by the designers festooning him as Hitler On Ice (in the words of some infamous review that escapes me). And yet, after two decades of fans glowering at him, he was a guest at the first convention I ever attended and brought the house down within seconds of coming on stage – by apologising for underplaying. I’ve never seen such instantaneous forgiveness.

So I want to say two things about Richard Briers in person. I met him twice, each time at the end of hours’-long autograph queues where most actors inevitably get tired and testy, yet he was never anything other than charming, enthusiastic and interested. The second time was an appearance at the Stamp Centre on the Strand, with his wife Ann Davies (who’s also lovely) and Tom Baker, where Tom was an old hand at these things while Richard was not only being the straight man to Tom’s booming rudery, but constantly looking about him with a delighted smile as if he couldn’t believe he’d got to his seventies without discovering such utter joy as being in a cramped shop packed with a never-ending queue for which he wasn’t even the main attraction. Was he a genuinely lovely man who really was personally interested and delighted in every single person he met? Or was he a brilliant actor who was able to fake it and extemporise interested things to say for four hours non-stop just because that would give all the queuers a happy experience to take home with them – which would also make him a genuinely lovely man?

One of the things I asked Tom (Tom Bad, perhaps I should call him, to make a distinction from the man signing my The Good Life set) to autograph that day was a photo I rather liked of him as the Doctor, with K9, from the 1980 story Full Circle. Unusually for a Doctor Who location shoot, the sun was blazing, and Tom’s rich red coat set among suddenly vibrant green leaves looked stunning, the whole image far more exotic than it had any right to be. He took it, and sat back.

“I seem to be in some sort of jungle.”

Richard Briers leant over, fascinated, his eyes lighting up.

“You went all over the world in your show!”

Tom snorted.

“All over Buckinghamshire!”

Not all actors – particularly ex-famous ones – took so well to being surrounded by people to whom they weren’t the lead. Back at that very first convention I attended, one actor – let’s call him Mr G— – had been a big soap star but had played only one minor character in Doctor Who, and was volubly aggrieved that his queue was much, much shorter than those for people he’d never heard of. Visibly more and more sour with the people he was signing for, when he stomped off at the end of his session Mr G— let rip in the green room, embarrassing most of his fellow guests with a tirade against “bloody anoraks” (that is, fans who didn’t properly appreciate him as the most important person in the hall, or perhaps the world). By contrast, I also once met Mr G—’s on-screen soap wife after she’d much later taken a role in an audio Doctor Who and, like Mr Briers, she came across as delighted and delightful in a similar setting. But back in that green room with Mr G—, for a few seconds there was silence. Then Richard Briers took a sip of tea, and looked up, with a mild but firm tone, to tell him:

“Those ‘anoraks’ are paying your wages.”

So, farewell, Richard Briers. You’ll be missed. My condolences to Ann and the rest of your family and friends. And thank you for being a genuinely lovely man.

Labels: Carry On, Comedy, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 50, Fandom, Obituary, Paradise Towers, Personal, Sylvester McCoy, Tom Baker

Someone in the office you want to kill? Aggresso-therapist Dr Jaeger offers a harmless way to relieve your frustrations. What could possibly go wrong? The Avengers – My Wildest Dream gives you The Manchurian Capitalist, a disorientating, violent thriller of board members killing each other in dreams, all witnessed by Steed and Tara. Guest stars include Peter Vaughan, Edward Fox, John Savident and the mighty Philip Madoc, who sadly died last month, as did stylish director Robert Fuest, who gives the episode real (or is it hallucinatory?) punch: dizzyingly shifting points of view; stunning fight sequences; showing off striking sets…

“It’s a – dream! It’s all a dream!”

My Wildest Dream was one of the episodes that first got me into The Avengers when I discovered the series in the middle of Channel 4’s mid-’80s repeats (even taping the thrilling fight and car chase after Vengeance On Varos and The Mark of the Rani to fill up one of my precious Betamax tapes), and for me it’s still a favourite. You can find it on Disc 3 of The Avengers – The Complete Series 6 DVD Box Set, or Disc 32 in The Avengers Complete 50th Anniversary Collection – I’ve previously offered tips on which The Avengers DVDs to buy – while original viewers in 1969 had a slightly harder job: because of concerns about the violence having too much oomph, it was shown on a different day than usual and much later in the evening. Even though there’s only one tiny spot of blood (the BBFC now classifies it a PG). Surprisingly, this was made quite early in Tara King’s season of The Avengers but held back until close to the end, despite being one of her best – Linda Thorson is at her most mature and confident, looks cool, has great timing and gets a fantastic fight, so this fits right in with her later episodes, generally her best and a fabulously strong run.

Though he remained as consultant for a while longer, My Wildest Dream was the final script by Philip Levene, one of The Avengers’ most prolific and defining writers, his scripts known for their humour, teasingly science fiction elements and general outrageousness. This, however, while witty in places, is uncharacteristically down to Earth and tense – while for me Tara King’s season of The Avengers is one of the two that best balance the silly and the sinister, this threatening psychodrama weighs heavily at the sinister end and is easily Levene’s darkest, revisiting his Death’s Door drugs and dreams but with considerably more palpable danger (plus a dash of Brian Clemens’ Honey For the Prince). And that’s greatly boosted both by Robert Fuest’s vividly in-your-face direction and Philip Madoc’s unsettlingly bipolar performance…

Robert Fuest and Philip Madoc

Artist, designer and director Robert Fuest started off on The Avengers as a set designer right in the early days, on Ian Hendry episodes that no longer exist – though you can see his designs in the surviving episode The Frighteners, and pictures of some of his work in the photo galleries for the Season 1 and 2 DVDs – and came back with a bang at the other end of the ’60s as a director in his own right, instantly becoming the best of the Series 6 helmsmen across the seven Tara King stories he directed. He returned for The New Avengers’ The Midas Touch and The Tale of the Big Why, though he’s probably most famous for the two Dr Phibes films he directed in between. Yes – they were his idea. Marvellous!

My Wildest Dream was actually Fuest’s first Avengers episode in the director’s chair, though the first of his to be broadcast was Game, a story so highly regarded it was chosen to launch Tara King, and which I’ve previously raved about for its Op-Art inventiveness and superb eye for colour. My Wildest Dream is less quintessentially Avengers, not having the same immediately joyous wacky appeal, but for me it’s even better. The cinematography is simply outstanding, with lessons learned from those 1961 Avengers taped in poky sets – watch for those inventive camera angles that liven up, say, Nurse Owen talking by showing her in her own desk mirror, or his instinctive affinity for shadows – but getting every advantage from the bigger budget, whether it’s roving cameras inside cars on location or the rapid cross-cutting stabbings that still make you jump even if what you see is rarely what you think you see. That other most prolific, defining Avengers writer Brian Clemens clearly loved Hitchcock as an influence on his scripts, but if ever there were a Hitchcockian Avengers director in his pace and energy, his inventiveness, and his gleeful black humour that nearly but not quite goes too far, it was Robert Fuest.


While Bob Fuest has always been one of the most outstanding contributors to The Avengers for me and here hits his stride so perfectly that it’s difficult to believe it was his first time, on the other side of the camera there’s the final Avengers performance from another of my favourite irregulars in the series, Philip Madoc of the gorgeous voice and predatory grin. While in his five Doctor Who screen roles he was usually the guest-starring villain, in his five Avengers episodes he was usually a little lower down the cast list, but still making a memorable impact. I love his understated Dutch banker who quietly realises when the game is up in Death of a Batman and his scene-stealing Soviet agent in The Correct Way to Kill (for which, when I reviewed it, I was for very personal reasons particularly sad that fellow actor Peter Barkworth had just died; since then, tragically, all that episode’s male guest stars have passed away), but it’s his first and his last appearances in The Avengers that are his most striking for me. Startlingly young and smooth in 1962’s The Decapod, he unleashes that fabulously wolfish grin as an ambassador who may or may not be the villain – while in 1969, his uncanny, unhinged business executive Slater persistently steals the show (and is framed on probably my favourite Avengers set just to make sure you can’t ignore him).

For my other favourite series, in Doctor Who it’s strangely Philip Madoc’s first and last TV roles that are his least impressive, while in between this great actor created two utterly terrific but unrecognisably different villains (as Jack Graham suggests in his tribute on Shabogan Graffiti). Both The War Games with Patrick Troughton and The Brain of Morbius with Tom Baker are outstanding stories, with Time Lords the ultimate villains in each but Madoc’s roles more memorable still: the War Lord, the cold alien conqueror who comes in after his junior villains have been fighting to outdo each other and dominates with underplayed, deadly, quiet wit; and egotistical surgeon Mehendri Solon, determined both to bring his master back from the dead and to establish himself definitively as the maddest scientist in history greatest doctor in history, enjoying every word as he declaims, sneers and insults his way through a horrible but very funny Frankenstein pastiche.

“Your name will also go on ze list! What is it?”
“Don’t tell him, Pike!”

I’d provide an overview of Philip Madoc’s career, but he’s been in everything. A champion of and the definitive portrayal of The Life and Times of David Lloyd George; DCI Noel Bain in his own detective series, A Mind to Kill; a long-running lead role as Cadfael on the radio (and, like his TV counterpart, the Master – or is he?); probably most famously for an actor famous for his guest roles, the U-Boat Captain in The Deadly Attachment, Dad’s Army’s finest episode, who visibly almost corpses as he rejects the idea of nasty, soggy chips, wanting them “Crisp – unt light brown.” I wish Channel 4 would show again or release 2003’s eerie Y Mabinogi, for which he provided a (Welsh) voice of legend and which I’ve only seen once, in the middle of the night. And it’s telling that, on the joyous news last month that Alan Garner was at last to return to his Alderley Edge tales – the first two being such a major part of our childhoods – the first thought for both Richard and I was that, sadly, Mr Madoc would not be around to record Boneland for CD in the gorgeous way he’s read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, each of which we’ve recently listened to together.

I think there was only one event I knew of at which I might have met Robert Fuest, and I wasn’t well enough to go; there were a handful at which I could have met Philip Madoc, and though I was too ill to make most of them, I’m so glad I made it to a shonky pool hall in Barking in 2008 on the DVD release of The Brain of Morbius. Though he was pleased to recall praise from other actors for his sinister War Lord, he was very clear that Dr Solon was his favourite Who character, for the script, for how much he had to do, and for how much fun it all was (miming dropping and picking up an evil brain). I remember him being presented with his own copy of the DVD, and saying sotto voce to fellow guest Cynthia Grenville as she passed him hers,

“Now, Cynthia, if I sign that, it’ll rub straight off.”
“Oh? Why?”
“Because you haven’t taken the wrapping off.”

Asking which one it was when presenting him with an earlier DVD release of My Wildest Dream, I told him:

“You go a bit mad in this one. Peter Vaughan had been injecting you with new drugs.”
“Ah, yes. He was always doing that.”

But what I most remember was when I apologetically passed him our DVD of Doctor Who – The Power of Kroll to sign, knowing his opinion of it, and all the backstory why (and why he was much happier that his real final Doctor Who roles, many years later, included classier audio dramas like Master and Faction Paradox). Philip bared his teeth at it and asked, carefully enunciating each word, “Is this the one by the sea-side?” as if not quite actually saying ‘Why do you wish me to autograph a turd?’ Though he perked up mildly at the feature about him, A Villain For All Seasons, I felt I had to justify myself:

“I know you don’t think much of this one, but I always find your performance very entertaining. It’s the way you look permanently pissed off – you seem to be playing someone who’s looking at his boss and thinking he could do a much better job of it.”

I was rewarded with that full, dazzling, dangerous, wolfish grin.

“Just very good acting.”

That Golden Moment

“I feel so much better, Doctor. I feel so much better.”

From the disturbing, disorientating teaser to the charming, funny tag scene, My Wildest Dream brims with superb moments, taking in Tara’s most breathtaking fight sequence and probably my favourite – and one of the most barking – of all Avengers sets along the way. But the scene that sums up this episode for me may just help explain why some censors and schedulers took fright. It’s less a golden moment than a crimson one, with two brilliant guest stars and stunning direction that both surprises and shocks.

Boardroom tensions have been just a little edgier than usual at Acme Precision Combine Ltd; undergoing unconventional treatment from the sinister Dr Jaeger, one board member has already stabbed a rival then fallen to his own death while apparently believing himself to be in a dream, and now Philip Madoc’s Slater seems to be going down much the same path to conclude his own clashes with Henry Winthrop. And, as they did the first time, Steed and Tara have had a mysterious tip-off and dashed to the scene in Steed’s Great Gatsby yellow Rolls (ahead of being incredibly fashionable in the ’70s, and tipped to be so again this year). Winthrop’s home, The Lodge, is a great find – like a giant witch’s hat, it’s very distinctive, a memorable setting for a murder. We hear Howard Blake’s swirling music and sinister bass beat, as we did the first time, as Madoc explains in gleeful voiceover how Winthrop lives alone, the camera cutting from him in Jaeger’s surgery, reflected in his own knife, to his legs striding up to the house, to viciously guillotining Winthrop’s picture in his red-lit darkroom – an inspired piece of substitute violence – before he stabs, Winthrop dies, our heroes burst in —! Only for Winthrop to turn, developing film in hand, surprised but very much alive, Slater’s attack being just another drug-induced fantasy acted out with his aggresso-therapist. Or is it?

Of all the five members of the Acme Board, Slater and Winthrop are by far the most entertaining, thanks to Philip Madoc’s superb turn as a man who, doped out of his head, is the one who most enjoys it all and then is most miserable in withdrawal (only in being separated from his dreams and his doctor, of course – what do you mean, ’60s drug metaphors? It’s not a metaphor, he’s just drugged to the eyeballs) and, as his main rival for direction of the company, the marvellous John Savident. Another man of many memorable guest parts, he’s probably best-known for Coronation Street – never mind – and here he grabs the camera in just one scene, surprised by the intruders, shocked by news of deaths in the company, but preeningly confident that it’s just a false alarm and, if not, he can handle anyone with the gun he keeps to hand.

But outside, in another car among the daffodils, Jaeger’s cool, calm orderly Dyson is losing his cool and his schedule as he frustratedly tries to bring the lurching, incoherent Slater round just enough to prod him out of the car and into the Lodge. Tara sees him go, just too late, and the hallucination plays out all over again, Winthrop gasping horribly and lurching right into our faces like – sorry, I’m quite fat, too, but it’s an irresistible simile – a harpooned whale just as our handily unimpeachable witnesses burst in once more and, satisfied at acting out his fantasy again, Slater thanks his doctor, smiles, and offers his knife to them to put away for his next go…

The Avengers has always shown death, and frequently great violence, often of a fantastic nature, which the directors imply rather than present in gory horror – people shredded, bloodlessly, in The Hidden Tiger (with which this has a twist or two in common) or The Winged Avenger spring to mind – but while those make you fill in the blood, the sheer speed and savagery of the stabbings in this episode, the way the camera plunges around, even when most of the time it’s only dummies that the knives are plunging into, makes this far more startlingly visceral than earlier stories that should, in theory, have been more gruesome. And of all the scenes, this one’s the most striking, in part because all four actors are compelling, but also because in the darkroom everything already looks like it’s drenched in blood – and it’s the only moment when Fuest really pushes it as we see a splash of proper blood on Winthrop’s beached front and Slater, fascinated, pokes his finger in it for a moment to look at it before turning to Steed and Tara. He’s going to have a hell of a comedown…

Steed and Tara

I love The Avengers and, unlike some, in particular the sixth series with Tara King – that glorious fanfare opening with knights, roses, running along the bridge in sunshine and colour to open every episode, and with mysteries solved by Patrick Macnee at his most urbane and authoritative and Linda Thorson wide-eyed but winning through. Both lead actors are on top form in My Wildest Dream, with Linda Thorson especially giving one of her best performances: here, Tara is resourceful, witty, stunning in one of the series’ most physical fights and puts off an unwelcome admirer with considerable style (and a cheer from me when she throws him flying). She even gets to do such effective detective work in following leads that Steed gives her twelve out of ten.


It’s a great day for Steed and Tara’s outfits, too. Tara’s given two looks with culottes, which really suit her, a pleasant pale blue and white ensemble and a terrifically cool one with a leather jacket that she looks far more comfortable in than if she was forced into one of Cathy Gale’s old catsuits (something Diana Rigg never liked). That’s what she wears when checking out Slater’s optical workshop at Acme, when Fuest’s direction really lets rip in a massive Pop-Art punch-up between her and Dyson, as both hurl each other across an enormous room filled with blue, red and yellow glass, framed through jagged broken glass and targets and then finally leaping out through the door and into an almost as kinetic car chase, all to the accompaniment of some of Howard Blake’s most exciting music and then Laurie Johnson’s (which I remember from the likes of Something Nasty in the Nursery). Outstanding. The follow-up fight’s briskness is a bit of a let-down, not to mention showcasing unsafe taste in decoration, but you can almost hear her saying, ‘Well, haven’t we done this?’

Steed, too, looks good – particularly in grey with a striking copper tie, but also in his dark blue suit, blue shirt and maroon tie or rich chocolate-brown suit with trademark deeper brown collar and matching tie. He can even get away with a yellow shirt and olive-brown suit, just as she manages to look businesslike in a bright kimono, though both of them have brief bad moments (ironically, the only outfit she’s complimented on on screen is a green tartan best left to a Scottie dog, while it’s a good job that the closing tag scene has such wit and warmth to distract you from his hideous brown striped trousers and roll-neck). His best scene here, on the other hand, is far more laid-back than Tara’s physicality – once she’s tracked down Dr Jaeger, he goes in for the kill. Or, far worse, the piss-take…

Bad Therapy

“You’re not in my dream. Go away.”

Madoc is outstanding as he’s pulled from one reality to another, always told what to think by forceful medical figures, confused but sullen and resisting – and never more memorable than once he’s been whisked away after killing Winthrop, to be discussed by Steed and Tara with pompous Dr Reece, who believes everything in the world can be dealt with by “New drugs, you know,” and who keeps confronting him with the nasty reality. It’s a good scene in itself, as everyone simply insists on their own point of view and has no interest in listening to the people they’re talking to, but it’s elevated to brilliance by Fuest’s direction and Robert Jones’s hilariously untherapeutic set design. Yes, rather than being put in a comfy bed on a friendly ward with flowers round a little window, Slater has been put in the Observation Room. And I can never help but hoot as Reece stalks away from Slater, both of them still talking across each other, and the massive white space with a threatening red stripe down the middle, pointing to the patient, is revealed, the word “OBSERVATION” picked out in large, unfriendly letters along the whole back wall. Just to perfect it, it doesn’t have a door, but another wall, which simply glides in front to snap shut and leave poor Slater stranded. Walls just shouldn’t move like that. And Reece’s moving phone mounted on it does strange things to your head, too.

“A catharsis! A release of all repressions and hatreds! A man lives out his dream – his wildest dream!”

Peter Vaughan is another of my favourite actors, another I’d love to meet, and another with a list of roles as long as your arm. Probably best-known as Porridge kingpin Genial Harry Grout, today (like top Avengers guest star Julian Glover) he’s reaching a whole new audience in Game of Thrones, though not so far in its sexposition scenes, high fantasy’s answer to the Topless News Channel. And his Jaeger here is utterly compelling, a self-confessed quack who genuinely believes that he’s ahead of his time, a pioneer. He is a real doctor, too – but of what (perhaps Valeyard is a German title)? Intense, mesmerising, vaguely Germanic, he’s My Wildest Dream’s other outstanding performance, in a role that has much in common with Ronnie Barker’s Mr Cheshire in fellow Avengers classic The Hidden Tiger – an obsessed, focused, brilliant technocrat (and a bit round-faced and in Porridge)!

While Laurie Johnson does a splendid job taking over the music for The Avengers once it goes into film from Series 4 onwards – not least in providing the main title them with that perfect fanfare – for some of Series 6 he was busy with a musical and recommended new composer Howard Blake, later of Flash Gordon and The Snowman fame; this was the first of ten episodes for which Blake provided much of the score in a similar but sharper style, and arguably his best (up with Who Was That Man I Saw You With, which provides the opposite bookend to his Avengers soundtrack CD release).

Between them, it’s Peter Vaughan, Howard Blake and of course Robert Fuest who seize our attention from the first here in a gripping teaser sequence as the first member of the Acme Board narrates his stalking his ideal victim to a harsh jazz beat, up the fire escape, into his room, a vertiginous spin and plunging his poniard in to stabbing brass – then reeling out into reality, disorientatingly now set to floating, dreamlike music, where it’s only a dummy with the man’s face that he’s knifed, egged on by Jaeger’s shouting and injections. After which he’s picked up for work by none other than the man he’s just ‘killed’… Dr Jaeger believes so passionately in himself that he’s the centre of the episode for most of the way through, dominating members of the Board and the voice that keeps urging, compelling. Madoc’s scenes with Vaughan crackle with conviction as two superb actors spur each other on – one sweating, sullen, in denial, then finding release; the other lashing out with sheer charisma to force Slater into accepting his point of view, revealing his innermost fears and hatreds, then delighted as he makes a breakthrough:

“Excellent! That’s really excellent, Mr Slater! ‘Kill’… ‘Destroy’… And ‘erase’! I particularly like ‘erase’!”

And as his ‘patients’ stab and stab again the dummies with the faces of their tormentors, though you know it’s only a dummy, though you know no-one’s really being murdered – this time – you can’t help feeling queasy at the violence with which sawdust gouts out onto the glass table through which we’re seeing Jaeger’s rapt face.


Of course, it all falls apart. That’s what happens when Steed walks in.

From the moment Steed charmingly praises Jaeger’s receptionist, Janet Owen – “What a nice voice you have. Soothing” – and she’s one of the least charmed respondents in TV history, and Jaeger makes the mistake of letting this relaxed, charming man who claims to think he’s a horse into his consulting room, Jaeger’s galloping downhill faster than you can say ‘woo’. Suddenly, the Doctor is in need of some aggresso-therapy of his own. And the other big guest star you’re likely to recognise might just help…

Not Liking Steed, and Simply Not Like Tara

“Who is it you hate?”
“Steed.”
“Who is it you hate?”
“Steed.”
“Who is it you hate?”
“Steed!”

Oh, poor Teddy. No, scratch that – the Hon Teddy Chilcott is an utter git, a self-obsessed upper-class twit who’s clearly met Tara at one of the parties she hates and just will not leave her alone. It’s rare that any of the Avengers get a love interest, and here she’s very plainly not interested – even in Edward Fox. Handsome but querulous, he disapproves of her “cloak and dagger nonsense” and even more so of Steed. The impression is that he just doesn’t want a woman to work, but it is perhaps possible that he’s particularly pissed off by secret agents – might he afterwards be so scarred by this experience that he applies himself to the secret service in order to control them, and winds up M? Never! But, sexist git as he is, the way Tara simply keeps ignoring him is very funny, from her replying to his fishing for a compliment (“Persistent,” she suggests), to her priming Steed with excuses to get away, to the marvellous moment when he lies in wait to surprise her with flowers… And his despicable follow-up, where his sexism is notably only sustained by false advantage, the swine, and exactly how he gets his comeuppance. Then, satisfyingly, he’s beaten up for a third time, now by Jaeger’s nurse / receptionist, and deployed as a sinister pawn in which, at last, you can see Fox as the Jackal to be.

Nurse Owen is, though, the only element of My Wildest Dream that doesn’t entirely come off for me – and not just because I never warm to a sinister medic called Owen. She starts off as the intriguing voice on the phone that keeps propelling Steed into the plot, giving him tip-offs that are just too late to save the murder victims, and when called on to be cold and enigmatic, Susan Travers is perfectly decent. My problem with her comes when she gets to do the action scenes – also rather well – and also gets many costume changes: striking in dark blue with red stripes at collar and cuffs; all right in pale orange frock; nasty in pale mud; sofa-like in brown stripes. Paired with an older, authoritative man (ignore Dyson, who in his sharp suit and shades just wants to be Alfie), too, it suddenly becomes obvious who she’s meant to be – who else gets all those outfits, intelligence, and to knock men out? She and her partner are evil reflections of Tara and Steed. And though they’re both quite serviceable, they just don’t have an ounce of the charisma needed for those parts. He even has a fat, ugly car. Our heroes agree, too, as at the climax Tara wallops one villain in passing and the other’s easily carpeted. But that does make the ending a little unsatisfying; I like to imagine them recast with actors a little less dull and, once all is revealed, being something more of a challenge.


The tag scene as Tara psychoanalyses Steed is, of course, light, frothy, bubbly – in a word, champagne. As a boy, little John confesses, he would creep to his father’s study for a splash of soda water. He really wanted lemonade, but his father wouldn’t have the palate-rotting stuff in the house. This tickled me when I saw it as a boy, because I remember similarly stealing into the kitchen by night to make some Andrews’ Liver Salts, not because I liked the taste, but because at least it fizzed! So, wonders therapist Tara, does that explain his liking for…?

“No, the insatiable craving, the perpetual desire, the uncontrollable urge to lay my hands on a bottle of champagne, that’s a very very different reason…”
“Dare I ask?”
The bottle pops.
“Because… I happen to like it.”
They drink, and cue the music!

Labels: Books, Comedy, Doctor Who, DVD, Faction Paradox, Music, Obituary, Patrick Troughton, Personal, Philip Madoc, Pictures, Quackery, Reviews, Style, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 2, The Avengers Season 6

Midnight; the witching hour… When better to read the much-loved book of one of the best-loved Doctor Who stories? The Doctor visits an archaeological ‘dig’ near the innocent little village of Devil’s End, only to find the local vicar (in truth the MASTER) is summoning up… Guess! Now on DVD too, many fans remember Doctor Who – The Dæmons most fondly from Barry Letts’ gorgeous novelisation. I’ve loved it ever since buying a copy as a boy at (appropriately) a church fête, and these days also on CD, read by the late, great Barry himself. Spoilers follow. But first, religion…

Prologue

I’d meant to publish this on Monday – a particularly august Doctor Who feast day – but, being much more ill than usual (as usual, so often), I didn’t. If anyone has been praying for me, of course, I’m thankful for the thought, as for any kind wishes. Anyway, Monday the 26th of March is the day, in the new calendar, that Doctor Who Rose; it’s the anniversary of part of The Talons of Weng-Chiang, one of the series’ finest stories; and, of course, it was also the birthday of Barry Letts, who produced and co-wrote this story. In the meantime, I seem to have slipped into an argument which some claim to be over science and religion – though it isn’t, really – and which might be caricatured as “Magic!” “Science, Miss Farron!”

I don’t have the energy to write a full article on it, particularly when you wouldn’t believe how long I’ve spent looking at Doctor Who and the Dæmons (the priority, I’m sure you’d agree), and I’ve really said my piece as a comment on Tim Farron’s reply to reports of his complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority with other Christian MPs. Now, my view is fairly simple: everyone should be treated equally under the law, without special privilege or exceptional discrimination; and the law should maximise freedom. As far as specific religious claims go, I don’t believe we can know the truth at the heart of religions – we can’t know for certain if there’s an afterlife, for example, nor which of those said to be on offer is the best – so I’m happy for ads about unprovables to duke it out as they like: ‘There’s probably no god’ / ‘There certainly is’ / ‘There is, but it’s my one and yours doesn’t count’, or whatever.

When it comes to claims about how the world we live in works, however, that can be investigated and either refuted or supported. And the argument is whether adverts headed “Healing on the Streets”, which explicitly list different ailments and promise “XXX can heal” them, should be permitted without in-depth, peer-reviewed evidence of healing for the medical problems listed. Or, rather, as no-one – despite many claiming an attack on free speech – has taken up the absolutist free speech of caveat emptor and no advertising regulation at all. So you’ll be shocked to read that the argument is in fact a tiny one (which is why it’s become so fierce): does every single medical ad listing health problems and the explicit claim “XXX can heal” them require evidence before it can be allowed; or does every single medical ad listing health problems and the explicit claim “XXX can heal” them require evidence before it can be allowed except where the “XXX” word is “God”, in which case anyone can say anything at all. Or, rather than “anyone”, anyone “proper”. The latter position, like homeopathy, is not one I can support, as – measuring it against my principles – it demands extra-special favours from the law, and appears to be a further attack on freedom, by saying that some people must have the power to pronounce on who is “proper” and who is not.

So, in short: Christians (or, indeed, anyone else) should believe and say what they like; if some Christians (or anyone else, including other Christians with different views) want to put out ads about theological questions which are unprovable, good luck to them; and if anyone (whether religious or not) wants to make a medical claim, they should have to prove it reasonably. Now, some Christians want to say this position and others like it is an attack on Christianity. I, and the many Christians who would share my views, believing perhaps in equality before the law or that God made the laws of physics and biology, would say that it is nothing of the kind, merely a defence against exploitative charlatanry and against special favours and exceptional treatment for one or another group. I’ve known and admired (and often voted for) Tim Farron for slightly more than half of each of our lives, and as far as I remember he’s been a practising Christian for that whole period. It’s daft to suggest that I’ve suddenly discovered this or suddenly taken against it. I do, however, think he’s let himself down on this one issue, though I give him credit for arguing his corner in public and engaging with his critics, because it looks to me as if he’s talked himself into a curious blind spot in which he believes that he’s against all special treatment, and this is special, so give me my treatment.

Obviously, there is a very wide spread of views among Christians, many of whom would agree with Tim, many of whom would criticise him for wanting special privileges rather than thinking all are created equal, and many, regretfully the sort of self-styled “Christians” who appear the most in the media and embarrass the others, who would attack Tim for not making this a major ‘culture war’ issue, pretend to speak for all Christians (some, even, for all Liberals), scream that any Christian who disagrees with them is an atheist out to destroy religion, pretend victimhood for not getting special favours, bear false witness, mount nasty ad hominem attacks and censor those who have better arguments. You might read the testimony of the righteous George Potter about such people, if you can bear it.

Unfortunately, one of these unpleasant self-styled Christians whose copy of the Nine Commandments does not include “Thou shalt not bear false witness” and who covets powers and principalities and special privilege over their neighbour is the current Archbigot of Canterbury, of whom I am not a fan. And, sadly and embarrassingly to many Christians who believe in democracy, equality and freedom rather than clutching other people’s power and strength to whine about decadence, he’s gone off on one again. He’s got form – but his latest speech is a doozy:

‘Wahhh the uppity darkies and queers and harridans are oppressing me by answering back and life was so much nicer when they knew their place and it’s not fair that they want the same rights as I have and if I don’t have my privileges I’m only the same as them and they’re just darkies and queers and harridans who should be despised as slaves and sinners and shrews and how dare they say I’m only as good as scum like them boo hoo boo hoo what a world what a world I’m the real victim here.’

Unlike my previous fisking of his mendacious pleas for extra-special rights and privileges to (literally) lord it over the rest of us, they’re not his precise words, but I’ve accurately encapsulated their meaning. What a comfort it must be to the BNP to know they have such a learned presence in the House of Lords. Though, word to the wise, which rather exposes his academic pretensions for what they are: women aren’t a minority. In other news: free speech means that you can talk crap, and the rest of us can answer back; and you’re a minority, too, which means that by your “logic” you should shut up.

But now back to a less sinister Church of England vicar.

The Opening of the Barrow

When you get to “The Sacrifice” below, there’ll be some spoilers. You’re warned. And if you’ve never seen the story and get the DVD, well, hit “Play All” as soon as the menu comes up – yes, even the main menu telegraphs the ending (and, less blatantly, there’s some of it in this otherwise excellent The Dæmons DVD Coming Soon Trailer)! Usually, I’d say ‘don’t look at the menus until you’ve seen it’, but this one really stretches it. If you watch the DVD, now with the colours restored to something considerably more clear and vivid than anything those of us born since its broadcast in 1971 have ever seen before, you’ll see that though there are many reasons this story is so fondly remembered, one stands out there above all: for an iconic story of the Doctor, the Master, and raising the Devil (or is he?), the iconic imagery of a gorgeously archetypal English village is irresistible. Before Cardiff, Aldbourne in Wiltshire was the number one Doctor Who pilgrimage site, and about a dozen years ago my long-suffering beloved even drove us there for a couple of hours (note that since that photo was taken I, like Azal, have swelled to vastly greater size).



When I was a boy, this was officially the best Doctor Who story ever; everyone said so. Well, the fans who wrote the magazines and the team who made it did, anyway. And I thought that must be true, then, even though it wasn’t my favourite story even from its season (though it just might be, now). It’s gone out of fashion and some way back in since (at number 34 and the second-highest-placed Pertwee story in the most recent mighty poll of 200 stories), but over the years it’s grown into a comfortable and comforting place in my heart; no doubt that has its own problems for a story that ought to be terrifying (Millennium sings, “What do you do… when the devil squishes you… in an English country… gar-ar-den…” with a notable absence of terror), but for me it still does what people always said of it – shows off what was most appealing in a certain type of Doctor Who. And a few things that remain less appealing, too. Yet I suspect the other major appeal this story has, competing with the village for the deepest fan love, is not the cast or the concept but the extraordinary novelisation, Doctor Who and the Dæmons. The original story was written in 1971 by “Guy Leopold”, a pseudonym for producer Barry Letts circumventing BBC regulations by co-writing the story with Robert Sloman (a partnership that suited them so well, they went on to repeat it every year of Barry’s time as producer), but Barry got to write the novel under his own name three years later, just as he was giving up the day job. His sole book for the original Target range was for many years the longest Doctor Who novel – at almost dead-on 50,000 words, it’s not far off twice the usual count of middle-period Target novels – and has not just length but depth and enthusiasm, still widely regarded as among the handful of the best novelisations to this day.

The original cover’s all right, though not one of Chris Achilleos’ best, as Azal’s green fog swoops round the Doctor; still, my first copy, bought at the St Peter’s Church Fair, seemed ancient and thrilling (though I doubt it was more than three or four years old at the time), and both later covers were still more powerful – Andrew Skilleter’s rearing Dæmon, now used on the CD, and Alister Pearson’s striking, colourful composition (compare the three here). Unusually, though, for me the most memorable illustrations were the black and white interior drawings by Alan Willow, not usually one of Who’s greatest artists, rose to a series of images that stuck in the mind, with the seriously hairy chest of the Dæmon Azal one that had an impact on me even as a little boy. Yes, this cruel recaptioning is quite right about that. Meanwhile, flipping the book to its indigo or purple back (depending on how faded your battered copy may be), you’d find one of Target Books’ most quotable blurbs, though for a story that comes down firmly (if not always plausibly) on the side of science against magic, no-one’s told the copywriter:

“DOCTOR WHO is strangely concerned about Professor Horner’s plan to cut open an ancient barrow near the peaceful English village of Devil’s End; equally worried is Miss Hawthorne, the local white witch, who foretells a terrible disaster if he goes ahead; determined that the Professor should is Mr. Magister, the new vicar (in truth the MASTER) whose secret ceremonies are designed to conjure up from out of the barrow a horribly powerful being from a far-off planet . . . The Brigadier and Jo Grant assist DOCTOR WHO in this exciting confrontation with the forces of black magic!”

This is not, perhaps, the most original story in the world, but it’s satisfyingly formed and hugely influential on Doctor Who stories ever after – more so than its prototype, The Abominable Snowmen, this is what people think of when they imagine the archetypal mix of legend with an alien explanation. It sets out to scare, but also to absorb a genre alien to Doctor Who and convert it, to have its cake and eat it. The concept is nicked from another great BBC show: at its core, this is inspired by Quatermass and the Pit, from the big idea of demons as aliens directing human development to countless details (the interrupted TV broadcast of a dig, the buried spaceship, the telekinetic storm, “with horns!”). Yet the trappings of Dennis Wheatley and the series’ own set-up, of the Doctor settled down in exile with the UNIT armed force, give this a more conservative feel: rather than tension between militarism and rationalism amplified by alien strain into brute possession, this fleshes out the soldiers into a cosy ‘family’; a superstitious woman confronting the scientist with evidence that makes him widen his horizons though not swallow her view becomes a superstitious woman as loveable main character and a ‘scientist’ who knows it all already because he just does; in place of the savage mass hysteria of teeming modern London, the safe little postcard village has just a couple of momentary possessions and an embarrassed lynch mob who really can’t wait to be told to put their torches down.

Later riffs on the central concept tend to move further from the Quatermass model, but also from cosiness, aiming more single-mindedly to frighten. Like other ideal Doctor Who Halloween fare, The Dæmons is not, of course, set at Halloween – no Who TV story is, bizarrely – but at the opposing (May)pole of Beltane, just as arguably Doctor Who’s scariest adventure, Image of the Fendahl, takes place over Lammas. The other contender for that title is Pyramids of Mars, which though broadcast over Halloween doesn’t look nearly chilly enough to be set then; both, however, have much in common with The Dæmons, each exploring the theme of an alien ‘dark god’ on the rise. Though far less cosily. I’ve set out before several of the ideas that The Dæmons has in common with Pyramids of Mars, and how in each case the latter story goes much further – I’d add that The Dæmons’ third cliffhanger (or more or less the end of Chapter 8) is much the same as Pyramids’ first, with the crucial difference that we almost root for the villain in one, while the other pushes the same concept shockingly on. And even in Twenty-first Century Doctor Who, people still want to do The Dæmons all over again, from the latest claimant to the ‘Here is the Devil’ story of The Impossible Planet to The Hungry Earth, 2010’s illiterate love letter to the Letts era.

The Appearance of the Beast

One of the reasons this story was for so long so fêted is that all the regular cast had fun, and had plenty to do – which was not just repeated in endless interviews, but showed on screen, and meant that for every viewer their ‘favourite’ had a special moment or three. Though Corporal Bell isn’t seen here or ever again (two female leads would surely have outnumbered the five men terribly), the rest of the “UNIT Family” – including, and especially, charming regular the Master – all had arguably their most memorable moments. Well, I say all. There are two notable exceptions, in very different ways but very much tied together: the third Doctor and his companion Jo Grant.

Jon Pertwee’s Doctor is the one with whom I have the most difficult relationship, having loved him as a boy from the books and the fabulous photos, been aghast as a young man to discover the arrogance of his actual portrayal on videos, then slowly come to an understanding of his character which lets me love, if not like, him. The Dæmons minimises one problem I have with the era – though the novel is still so marvellous it’s superior to the TV version, the TV version remains terrific for me, so the ‘Pertwee Gap’ is far less here than my expectations from most of the books created when faced with the video reality of most of the TV stories – but sends the other off the scale. In his first season, the third Doctor is abrasive but enthusiastic, making him not unlikeable; in his later seasons, he develops a cosily patrician trustworthiness; but in several stories in his second season, he’s nothing but an arrogant git. And The Dæmons is one of two performances at which my jaw still drops at what an utter swine the man is. And I don’t entirely blame Jon Pertwee; this book makes it plain that the characterisation was firmly embedded in the script.

It’s true that the Doctor has his charming moments – singing while driving, because the sky is blue, always sticks in the mind, and at one heroic point throwing away a paternalist advantage to risk telling the villagers the truth and let them make their own decisions – but while they take a bit of finding, you don’t have to look very far for the reverse: start with the Doctor’s very first scene in the book, on page 9. Though Jo doesn’t get her TV line of “How infuriating can you get?” at him, Barry still describes him as “infuriating” several times, which makes it all the more incredible that he’s plainly on the Doctor’s side in such exchanges as this:

“The Doctor smiled to himself somewhat ruefully. He was obviously wasting his time trying to turn Jo into a scientist.
“‘But how do you know there’s nothing in it?’
“The Doctor started to fasten down Bessie’s bonnet.
“‘How? I just know, that’s all.’”

The old fraud is obviously wasting our time professing to be a scientist, with lines like that to close down anyone asking questions (the job of a scientist). He’s just as bad later, arguing everything from authority. When he exclaims,

“What does any scientist do with an experiment that fails? He throws it in the rubbish bin.”

I really want Jo to chip in, ‘But, Doctor! You’ve been telling me to learn how to be a scientist, and scientific method says “Write it up for a peer-reviewed journal so than people can learn from the proving of the null hypothesis”.’ So it’s no surprise that the story’s big scene establishing the show as one based on science rather than magic degenerates into a ping-pong “Magic!” “Science!” match based on who can shout the loudest rather than marshal the most persuasive argument. Andrew Hickey’s excellent (and much shorter) article on the story shares a particular despair with this ex cathedra approach to ‘science’ (and two of his three “problematic” characters are the two I’m in the middle of looking at here. Who’d have thought?). Similarly, having had lots of training and trained many people myself, I find myself wishing physical violence upon the Doctor for the way he throws his boorish technobabble at poor Sergeant Osgood, clearly having absolutely no clue of how to communicate an idea (an advanced alien sneering at a human instead of helping him understand, like a bullying teacher mocking a five-year-old for not getting Einstein).

Jo’s utter devotion to the Doctor seems only to bring out the worst in him, reflecting terribly on both – one coming across as an abused spouse, the other a domineering bully. She shows the slightest disagreement, and he insults her in front of everyone and shuts her up; she follows him slavishly, and he, er, insults her in front of everyone and shuts her up. Take this, where he stamps her down for cheerleading his own words:

“‘Lethbridge Stewart, you’ll do no such thing! Of all the idiotic plans. In the first place, the energy released could only strengthen the barrier. In the second place, you could provoke the most terrible reprisals; and in the third place, I have a better idea. Over.’
“The familiar feeling of frustration the Brigadier so often experienced when dealing with the Doctor began to creep over him…”
“…‘Of all the idiotic plans,’ said Jo, ‘as if blowing things up solves anything.’
“The Doctor looked at her severely. ‘The Brigadier,’ he said, ‘is doing his best to cope with an almost impossible situation. And since he is your superior officer, you might show him a little respect. Are you coming?’ and he swept out.
“A slightly rebellious, but definitely subdued Jo Grant followed him.”

Doubtless he’d have had a go at Jo for disloyalty to him if she’d backed the Brig instead. On the telly, of course, this scene is matched with the Doctor flinging his cape on indoors, again, the better to strike a pose.

Of course, as he’s so beastly to his actual friends, you’d expect him to really pour flames on someone really bad… But no, he disagrees with the Master quite chummily, and though he frankly understatedly calls Hitler a “bounder” and, by extension, doesn’t think much of Genghis Khan, in the context of other stories on either side of this one you’re surprised that he doesn’t name-drop them as his mates, too, as he does – incredibly – with Mao and Napoleon. It’s one of the series’ most boggling spot the difference games; swap the names round, and it’d be just as much in (or out of) character.

Several Doctor Who companions were conceived as “Avengers girls” – the actresses often told so – and with only one exception utterly failed to deliver. Yet only Jo Grant managed the vertiginous fall from that state of grace all the way down to ‘ditzy child’ even before her first scene was shot. As a boy only reading about her, I held this against Jo quite strongly, comparing her unfavourably to brilliant Dr Liz Shaw and her devastating put-downs before Jo and to still more plain-speaking, independent Sarah Jane Smith after her (there was probably an element of ‘blame the victim’ in not thinking much of Jo because she just adoringly takes it from the Doctor, while loving Liz’s near-psychopathy towards him in Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters. Go Dr Shaw!). But while my view of Jon Pertwee’s Doctor has changed for the worse on watching him, the biggest single positive change in my attitude to the Pertwee stories from the books to the TV versions came on discovering Katy Manning as Jo Grant. On screen, Katy grabs what’s often next to nothing in the script and gives us a great character, which takes real talent. And I have to say that, on the several times I’ve met her – not least when once trapped in a lift with her – she’s been absolutely lovely, thrillingly charismatic, and of course mad as a brush. How could I fail to love her? Yet, despite my love of this story – and hers – The Dæmons is arguably where Jo is most childishly credulous and least well served by the script.

Obviously, part of Jo’s problem here is the Doctor; she loves him to bits, and if he’s bombarding her with put-downs like a total swine, she’s going to look rather pathetic in not standing up to him. It would be easy to say that The Dæmons is simply sexist, and while to me the Pertwee era is the only part of Doctor Who that is deliberately and consistently sexist in its scripts, this one is more complicated – while Jo has perhaps her worst part, and worse still in the book, another female character is one of the strongest of the period, and stronger still in the book. All of which makes Jo’s role in the second half of the story the more incomprehensible, as she’s written to take a knock on the head, wake up confused, and go off dazedly thinking she’s being heroic but actually going into peril for no reason. Yes: usually a fictional blow to the head means ‘I lose my memory’, but here it means ‘I will completely artificially arrange to need rescuing’. It’s appalling, too, that once she’s on the wander, not one person’s concerned that she’s concussed, either that that’s triggered her actions or that it might yet have side effects. No, they jump straight from ‘roadkill’ to ‘silly little girl’: Captain Yates calls his co-worker a “little idiot” on finding her gone, then again to her face on finding her, rather than, say, checking her head or asking if she feels dizzy (except as in ‘blonde’). And the book makes it even worse, with Jo herself saying “I’m an idiot,” just to stop the reader having any doubts that girlies are stupid. I suppose the reader has the choice as to whether she’s just very dumb or concussed, hallucinatory and therefore even more lacking in agency. Gee, thanks. Still, the book’s much clearer that she’s grabbed by ivy that’s suddenly animate as one of her page-filling perils, even without the helpful illustration of her as a boggle-eyed dollybird; on screen, it looks like she just has a blurry stagger in an earthquake. Admittedly, that may make more sense than groping fronds which have never groped before and never will again, but at least the book communicates the authorial intention.

Despite her characterisation and the wave of insults from every side, Jo pulls the Doctor’s fat out of the fire on several occasions: the bastard has a go at her map-reading, but the only reason they get anywhere near the dig is that when his arrogant shittery pisses off everyone in sight, her charm persuades them to give directions to her instead; and, obviously, the infamous ending, for which the Doctor rewards her with another shower of shit and a command to strip off. I can’t see it as irony or redemption, though. Instead, such a terrible role for Jo yet her still ‘solving’ the story only undermines the narrative still further.

Without the actors playing them, the other UNIT regulars – Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Captain Yates and Sergeant Benton – are mostly less vivid than on screen, but they, at least, all get something to do… Even if the Brigadier’s role is the reverse of Jo’s – not to wander pointlessly into trouble to fill up time, but to be kept pointlessly out of it to fill up time. He does, though, get to go off to a regimental do, get some brilliantly irritable italic radio conversations, and of course get to utter his most famous line – though I’ll leave that for the DVD review, should I ever get to it. Benton gets a sort of love interest with Miss Hawthorne, a terrific sequence to save the day with his gun and her wits, and an entertaining dream; Yates is less likeable, but is made the butt of misunderstandings about village life to punish him for it, and is also given some impressive action man moments (and Barry adds an extra in-joke to the character’s final line, supplied in the first place by the actor). There’s a justly famed moment as he goes into a dream, too (poor PC Groom is another character to drift away, though his dream ends less well than the soldiers’), with Barry brilliantly capturing the confusion of falling into a doze:

“He put down the cup and leaned back. Just the chance he needed to get his thoughts in order, he said firmly to himself. Those hoofmarks, for instance. Either there was a monster lurking in the woods, or a hoaxer was at work. If it were to turn out to be a monster it simply became a question of whether the anteater’s tongue was longer than the jelly baby or, on the other hand, vice versa…
“Mike Yates’s eyes snapped open. For Pete’s sake, he was on duty, wasn’t he! This was no time to fall asleep.”

The White Witch

One of basically two memorable one-off female characters of the Pertwee era, Olive Hawthorne is the local white witch – though Church of England, naturally – and there to warn of dire calamity, dance with Sergeant Benton and, like so many others, to be someone at whom the Doctor sights along his nose and lets off both barrels of Mr Patronising. Like Jo, Miss Hawthorne is massively assisted on screen by the actor playing her, in this case Damaris Heyman, being so endearingly memorable; unlike Jo, the book expands mightily on her role and makes her more memorable still, even giving her something important to do at the end (and though technically that then stops before she gets to do it, its real narrative function is to enhance the ending, which it does very successfully both by adding a break to wind up tension and by obliquely explaining what happens).

Miss Hawthorne’s primary role, however, is to be the viewer’s and reader’s way in to Devil’s End, providing the voice of the nice side of the village (and the gossip of the rest), and along the way to be quite massively endearing. It’s a joy to read her going into peals of laughter at Mike Yates’ pompous attempts to boss the village about, and explaining its local politics (though not party politics), then her way of getting the Squire on side and what happens with his “migraine” (always the morning after a night of stimulatin’ conversation down the Cloven Hoof Pub, by an odd coincidence; too much for the old nerves).

Squire Winstanley himself is the village weathervane – though the actual weathervane also has a part to play – as he swings from light to dark. It’s always entertaining to wonder just who are the group summoned so swiftly and secretly – without even Miss Hawthorne knowing, let alone the prowling soldiers – to the Master’s ‘The sermon that follows is of vital importance to you all…’ meeting at the Squire’s. Winstanley’s obviously too pickled to draw up a list, so has the Reverend been experimenting with blazing evangelical versus lily-livered high church sermons and marking off who applauds the one and tuts at the other? My bet’s on his getting hold of some ready-made set: the local Conservative Association, probably, or he’s leant on coven member Mr Ashby at the General Store for his list of subscribers to the Daily Mail. And I know about Mr Ashby, of course, thanks to Barry’s deft one-phrase biogs of the coven (with a couple, like young Stan Wilkins and his thoughts of love potions, then given much bigger roles on the page), making the author an echo of the Master’s one-line exposés of his audience – most notably the somewhat fruitier expansion on just why Mr Greville’s wife won’t be back from her sister’s in a hurry.

The New Vicar

The Master was introduced in the first story of 1971 as the Doctor’s dark mirror, and had been in every story of the season – so it was inevitable that in this, only Doctor Who’s third purpose-built ‘season finale’ (though Barry Letts would be the series’ first producer to do them every year from this point on in his time, and to write each of them), he would be back, and bigger than ever. Mr Magister the local vicar, in horn-rimmed glasses and mellow tones; the imposter revealed, with scowl and snapping fingers; the Satanic priest, in gorgeous robes and deep in evil. And, even in the book, blatantly loving it.

This isn’t the first time in Doctor Who that religion has been both the heart of the local establishment and utterly corrupt, though it is the most complete – yet it’s still worth noting that the most trusted local figure remains the ‘real’ old vicar, who retired so suddenly a few weeks earlier, almost certainly to a very, very small plot in his own graveyard. The Master is the book’s most intensely charismatic character, and enjoys playing with religion from different angles – first sending up the ‘trendy vicar’ with a nice cup of tea and “the modern view,” then mocking the Squire’s drinking with a pious quote from “Saint Paul” that’s really from Othello (sadly not Iago), then preaching a fierily conservative appeal against “Decadence… democracy, equality, freedom. What this country needs is decision, power, strength” (and if you listen to the DVD commentary, be prepared to explode at just what a fascist fathead one of the actors has become, thinking this shows how the series predicted Britain today and that the Master was quite right). And throughout, Barry conveys the Master’s hypnotic eyes and how they seem to change colour as they bore into his victims’, something that influenced many later New Adventures writers for the Doctor.

There are losses, too, of course, for the book against Roger Delgado’s performance on screen; on the page, the Master takes a deep breath as the stakes are raised at one crucial moment, while I prefer his TV counterpart’s counter-intuitively breaking into laughter that his reckless gamble is still on – that mixture of fear and unhinged delight is something I can easily imagine John Simm playing, too. And while it offers a different side to him to remember his and the Doctor’s youthful friendship, I’ve never been as attracted to the perigosto stick as others…

The Sacrifice

It’s nearly time for the spoiler, so don’t say I haven’t warned you. But as I approach the end of the story, it’s worth a quick look at the structure. Because to me, The Dæmons is structured very well – or, rather, it’s structured brilliantly to start with, and then preposterously for most of it, but cleverly enough to get away with it. The first episode, or the first three chapters, is essentially a Prologue (despite, of course, the first two pages being officially labelled as such), but deftly disguised – basically, there are a set of characters there who are only around to tell you what’s going on and to trigger the main event, after which they vanish, and it’s only at that trigger point that the Doctor and Jo reach the main plot. But then the next eight chapters, or three and a half episodes, are an intricately fashioned interlocking set of characters and events designed to prevent the end of the story following immediately (which, if you step back, it easily could), and so successfully that only Jo’s concussed blundering really draws attention to itself as a writer’s delaying tactic.



The first of these two structural gambits is largely fed by a television programme – a televised archaeological dig that’s not digging up what it thinks it is, and will all go hideously wrong on the stroke of midnight, May 1st. And Barry Letts, having long worked in television, delights in pitching two bitchy ‘viewers’ favourites’ against each other in much entertaining behind-the-scenes detail, passing the time, providing the inciting incident, and of course being the perfect vehicle to explain what’s going on. As they leave, their jobs done, Barry also, incidentally, provides the answer – or at least an answer – to a little mystery left hanging by the TV programme’s version of the TV programme, to which I may return…

The second structural gambit is to, with a near-miraculous degree of success, stop the Doctor, the Master and Azal meeting up to talk it over, at which point the story ends. This is perhaps most noticeable in that Episode Four (translating it into chapters is complicated, as I’ll come to) is almost entirely an obstacle course to stop the Doctor getting back to the Cavern: earthquake; technical hitches; a shooting; Morris Men of Doom… And yet most of it’s rather gripping, even if afterwards you’re hard-pressed to say what, if anything, actually happened – and, perhaps crucially, it enables the Doctor to fight a proxy fight with the Master for the soul of the villagers. In some ways it’s more of a problem that, after spending three and a half episodes trying to get to the village rather than stand about uselessly outside it, the Brigadier finally arrives at the village in order to stand about uselessly inside it (Bok replacing the heat barrier with exactly the same functional effect). And then there’s the problem with the Master, after twenty-four episodes of him as the big villain: the meat of the finale is the dialectic between the Doctor and the Dæmon, and that suddenly pushes him off to one side, a spare part, not just humiliated by Azal suddenly jilting him at the black altar but by a narrative switch that leaves both him and the audience unsatisfied. And at last, of course, that that central dialectic seems to end in an abrupt collapse rather than logic.

The Dæmons has one of the most infamous anti-climaxes in Doctor Who, and it’s not even original: the Doctor was offered supreme power and rejected it in Colony In Space, the previous story, too. So, is the ending as much of a let-down as everyone thinks? And does Doctor Who and the Dæmons improve it?

For me, yes, it is still an anti-climax. Though Azal is termed a Dæmon, he’s more of a dispassionate god looking for someone to lead what he sees as ‘his’ people or send fires and floods to wipe Earth clean for a new batch, and the Doctor doesn’t want to be the messiah (an interesting article identifies not just Azal but the Doctor and the Master as the story’s Dæmons). The previous story makes it clearer that he doesn’t want the responsibility, almost as much as he wants everyone else to have free choice – it’s still a winning moment when even this most paternalist Doctor rejects Azal’s paternalism though he doesn’t help humanity’s case by droning on about how crap we are, in the first of the really overboiled Pertwee homilies. Free choice, though, is not in Azal’s plan, so power reverts to the Master and the Doctor gets the finger. Fortunately, Jo throws herself in front of him, at which point Azal instantly blows up. I paraphrase slightly, but in its essentials you can see why many people still have a problem with it, over forty years later. When the book says of this, “Azal was behaving very strangely”, many readers will retort, ‘Too right, matey’. Neither am I impressed by the empowering nature of Jo’s transmutation from, er, petrified victim to willing victim, though she could be read as a sort of Everywoman to illustrate that all of humanity are stupid children who can’t do anything for ourselves but react to the closing argument between the Grown-Ups From Outer Space, which is a teeny bit patronising but at least no longer sexist. There are, however, defences, justifications, explanations and, in the case of the book, an addition that comes with its own structural cleverness.

Ironically, the only Pertwee story that (just) beat The Dæmons in the Mighty 200 poll was Inferno (though I’d put a couple of others ahead of both), and the irony is that that story also ends in an anti-climax. Though I prefer this one, as at least it’s so bizarre you still talk about it, rather than a damp squib. However, you can do better than that, and there are two main alternative sources. One is Millennium Dome, Elephant’s Mysteries of Doctor Who #9: So why exactly does Azal blow himself up at the end of the Dæmons? As well as revealing Azal’s experimental requirements, he posits two plausible explanations, one based on the Doctor’s exposition of the Dæmons’ science (and thematically ‘right’), the other taking an idea established elsewhere in Doctor Who and applying it with neat logic.

The other alternative, more ambiguous and more of an allusion than a direct explanation, comes from Barry Letts in Doctor Who and the Dæmons, and does indeed improve on his TV version. When directing Doctor Who, Barry would occasionally swap scenes around, even if this meant different orders in different episodes – certainly in Planet of the Spiders, possibly in Carnival of Monsters – but his most ambitious re-editing comes towards the end of Doctor Who and the Dæmons. Some scenes slip from what was one episode to another; some now jump back in time rather than cutting between roughly simultaneous events; and another scene being added as a metaphor for what’s going on.

That crucial extra piece is Miss Hawthorne attempting to use some magical judo against the flying gargoyle Bok, whose power she hopes to use against himself on the magical principle that an attack that doesn’t find its target rebounds on the sender. I think you can see what this is getting at. What I rather like about this, other than the characterisation, is that it neither directly connects this with Azal, nor allows the attack to be completed – so there’s a double ambiguity, rather than just coming out and saying ‘…and so magic works’. It’s still not ideal, nor in how the scenes are rejigged. Miss Hawthorne’s magical attack really should come before the Dæmon’s still dreadfully unconvincing decision to pop his cloven clogs, particularly if it signals how it’s supposed to work; the Devil’s end is still far too abrupt, though it’s helped, at least, by cutting away to Miss Hawthorne for some time (if not quite at the right time) in order to give us a pause to think about things. And there are two omissions from the coda which the TV offered, perhaps suggesting they were written by the script editor in last-minute tidying-up rather than by Barry; the book loses the barrow and the spaceship within it blowing up, and the Master’s put-down of the Doctor’s optimism. In all, though, the book remains for me a striking improvement on the story, expanding it, widening it, giving it far greater characterisation, and leaving me more satisfied as it closes with

“a dance of thanksgiving, a dance of liberation, a dance of joy.”

Doctor Who Magazine 417’s in-depth and informative Fact of Fiction by Alan Barnes on The Dæmons (which I must compare to the DVD text notes when we get to them), is generally worth reading and even starts by mounting a bold justification for the story’s ending as an ironic and “deeply satisfying dramatic inversion” (with the ‘Devil’ not evil but amoral, so it’s less Satan defeated by love than a stern dad, I’m not convinced this argument works as well as Millennium’s version, but it’s a brave stab), but does have the odd mistake and omission: standing out for me, he doesn’t make clear the identical Quatermass “with horns” scene; he fails to note the two quotes from The Dæmons fitted together to made a cut-and-shut flashback line in 2007’s Utopia; and he talks about Benton’s “rifle,” which is not only very visibly a pistol on screen but, in the book – from which Mr Barnes quotes extensively – Benton even complains to himself that the Doctor’s demanding a tricky shot and must be assuming he’s got a rifle. Despite the power supply running through a cable to be cut off by the heat barrier being surely a more significant problem, he also smirks that the Nuton Power Complex, supplying power to the Doctor’s machine, “is operational again, so soon after its destruction!” Given that only its laboratory blew up and left most of the place untouched, that’s not surprising, but it’s a mistake everyone seems to make and, as getting it right would involve watching The Claws of Axos, you can let him off.

The Third Appearance

After TV and book, the third version of The Dæmons is Barry Letts’ unabridged and rather excellent reading of his novel across five CDs and six hours, which is one of the best in the range. As always, these productions have their ups and downs – no Doctor Who theme, but interestingly different sound effects and musical stings (a great improvement on the TV’s mood-destroying wibbly synthesiser), and with most of its chapter-points inserted rather irritatingly not at natural ‘scene breaks’ but just roughly three-minute intervals, making navigation far less straightforward than it should be – but, unlike Barry’s kindly and occasionally meandering commentaries on the DVDs, when reading from a script he suddenly comes into sharp focus and you realise what a very good actor he was to begin with. It’s really very enjoyable, with the one notable downside that somehow having the Doctor’s still more patronising lines read out makes them more egregious than on the page. Astoundingly, even all the running on the spot is great fun to listen to as well as to watch, and Barry not just loves his characters but is able to bring them all to life. True, a man of over eighty recording lines for Jo Grant has a higher register that cracks a bit, making it unintentionally amusing when the Master replies to her “You beg so prettily, my dear.” Barry’s Master, though, is outstanding, especially with an echo on him: a page earlier than the moment that caused me unfair mirth, when Jo defiantly announces that the Doctor will come, the book’s “I hope he will. I shall be able to . . . ah . . . kill two birds with one stone” is delivered with a marvellous little chuckle in the middle.



I don’t read a lot of fan fiction, but I must also recommend Not To Be Enterprised Lightly, “In which the Master discovers there’s more to being a vicar than wearing a dress with a funny collar”, a short and entertaining combined character piece, wedding comedy and rather more attentive look at the Church of England and its canon than perhaps the main story itself can boast. You might also admire a sample for a The Dæmons graphic novel, while I’ve taken the liberty of printing here Adrian Salmon’s fabulous artwork for The Dæmons in Doctor Who Magazine’s Time Team.

Epilogue: By Barry Letts

Barry Letts died two and a half years ago; he would have been 87 this week. I met him just the once, at a convention early in the year he died, but in some ways I’d known him almost all my life. Few Doctor Who producers had such a distinctly personal effect on the series (Richard noting that those few tend to be the ones that really mattered), and fewer are remembered so almost universally fondly, with a rather lovely tribute to him now, appropriately, available on The Dæmons DVD. Although I started watching Doctor Who, aged three, only with his very last story as producer, he had a huge impact on me from childhood on, especially through the books based on his era, and not least politically. And not just me – not only was his period regarded as ‘the golden age’ by many influential fans as I was growing up, later overtaken by revisionists who’d agree with one of Barry’s own stories that “There never was a golden age,” but of all the vibrant mix of old Doctor Who that influenced the new when the series returned under Russell T Davies, Barry’s tenure was arguably the most significant. And now, of course, Doctor Who’s made in Barry!

There are many things about Barry Letts that I liked and admired – and loved – and some with which I disagreed. I suspect that, had I been a couple of decades older and watched the programme from the start in 1963, I’d have been deeply disgruntled with Barry’s reign of exile to Earth rather than adventures in time and space; but having started watching the series as the Doctor once more became the wanderer in the fourth dimension he was always meant to be, I’ve always been free to love much of the UNIT days and characters, not least because I know that he’s not with them for ever. It’s the example I remind myself with whenever there’s a patch of newly made Doctor Who that really doesn’t suit me; by definition, a constantly changing, wandering series will go somewhere else before too long, and then I’ll be more happy with what I didn’t fancy at the time, able to appreciate what I like about it and think, ‘Well, it’s in the past, and wouldn’t it be dull if everything was the same?’ about what I don’t. And, of course, with Barry having taken over immediately after the ‘exile to Earth’ format was decided, all his later interviews have suggested a not dissimilar approach – he loved the characters, but was champing at the bit to get the Doctor out and about again.

Aside from his era in general, there are two sorts of thing I associate particularly with Barry Letts, and for which he deserves enormous gratitude and fondness. First, the four stories he co-wrote for Doctor Who on TV with Robert Sloman make a fascinating set, each capping one of the seasons he produced, each serving as season finale (before such things were expected) and summation of his themes, each multi-layered and asking interesting philosophical questions – though I didn’t always agree with the answers – and three of the four rather wonderful in their own ways. The Dæmons will, I think, always be his most celebrated story for so many reasons, his first and probably best; The Time Monster, as I’ve written, a bit of a mess, not totally hopeless but unsuccessfully trying to recapture The Dæmons (with a long list of elements recycled from their first go that I’ve already set out, so won’t cruelly recycle here myself); The Green Death arguably his most coherent story yet also the most unlike the rest, more sharply political than philosophical; and Planet of the Spiders, a Buddhist fable that’s perhaps his most deeply personal work, and which I’ve always loved despite being at odds with much of it.

The other thing for which I’m eternally grateful to Barry is that he seemed such a nice man, giving so much of himself to Doctor Who all the way from taking over the producership through to his final months in 2009. On paper, in interviews and in person, he always came across the same way, and almost every story about him agrees; he was kindly, though not without steel, intelligent, and always generous to the series and its fans. The only time I got to talk to him was at Fantom Films’ Who and Them – Celebrating the Work of Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks, when I nerved myself to join him in the bar with Terrance Dicks (though he was less in the bar than some producers) to ask some of the questions I’d always wanted to ask. He looked frail, though much less so than in some of his earlier interviews taken at the previous low points of his cancer, but spoke spryly, welcomingly, interested and interesting. He’d said on stage that The Dæmons was his favourite story, and seemed pleasantly surprised when I congratulated him on his reading of it, new at the time – as well as giving some interesting views on one of my favourite years of Doctor Who, 1980-81’s Season Eighteen, for which he’d returned in an advisory role. It has a unique feel for me, and I’d often wondered just what sort of impact he had on it. Mainly a link between producer John Nathan-Turner and the BBC higher-ups, he said, but praised John for knowing what he was doing and mostly not needing help, except on scripts, which he had no interest in at all. On those, he gave far more fulsome praise for lead writer Christopher H Bidmead:

“Chris was full of ideas and had a very strong imagination, though he’d talk away and I often wouldn’t understand a word of what he was saying. But he’d never done anything like this before, so I gave notes on some of the first few scripts particularly. Then, once Chris had left, John went off to a convention in America, leaving a trainee script editor in charge – ‘Don’t bother me with scripts,’ said John – and he had this script that was due next by a director, and it was dreadful. I mean, it was unusable. It was a sort of skit on Welsh rugby [I react with disbelief; “Yes,” he emphasises]. So I said we couldn’t possibly do that, but there was another one that was ready by Terence Dudley that just might work, so we put that into production instead.”

Barry’s dedication and generosity is very clear to DVD viewers – with many of his stories in need of heavy restoration work and so coming out after his death, we still get to see and hear him on pretty much the whole range of the stories he oversaw. It’s impossible not to see how much he cared about Doctor Who to the end, and all the extra features still being produced with his contributions are testament to how much material he determinedly recorded in advance because he knew how ill he was and still wanted to give as much as he could.

Now, I’ve said that I don’t agree with everything of Barry, and though I won’t critique him in detail here, there are a few observations I should add for balance. Barry was also a director, and evidently loved it more than producing, though for me his direction was more workmanlike, with flashes of inspiration. For me, Barry was, as a man, generous. As a producer, steady. As a director, all right. As a writer, variable. I’ve set out my philosophical problems with Planet of the Spiders before, even as I can’t help love the story; I disagree with his view that his successor Philip Hinchcliffe “Went a bit far”, as it’s that going a bit far that first enthralled little me about the series; and then there are some of his later stories. If I tend to prize the TV stories he co-wrote even though they don’t bear his name, I tend to wince at the later stories for radio and novel which do. For me, they’re really not the best way to remember him, and I’d go for his other works above long before you get to the hit-and-miss radio serial The Paradise of Death, the absolute bomb The Ghosts of N-Space (though neither as bad as his Blake’s 7 attempts), or any of his later ‘original’ Doctor Who novels, which have little of the depth, style or storytelling of Doctor Who and the Dæmons. Above all, I’d urge you to put his audio play Sarah Jane Smith: The TAO Connection to the bottom of your list, because it’s just horrible. Badly written, badly plotted, but also simply bad. I nearly wrote a post late last year called ‘Doctor Who Vs The Gays’ to comment on a then-current and, I think, unjustified controversy, but one of the reasons I was reluctant to was that portrayals of LGBT characters are usually far more complex than mere ‘good / bad’, and the prime problem is that there are still so very, very few characters that each one bears far more weight than a character should. It doesn’t help that we’ve almost completely vanished again in the latest new regime on TV. Now, I’ve met Who actors and writers who’ve been explicitly homophobic (and in person), heard conflicting tales about others, and known others still who’ve been unfairly maligned. Such is the complexity and ambiguity of art. And across almost every other series, too; thank you, to pick the latest example, Upstairs Downstairs, for your groundbreaking characterisation of lesbians as titillating and gay men seedy corrupters of youth for whom a punching is too good (but funny). What I’ve been putting off, then, is that everything else I’ve seen about Barry’s life, his casting choices, his views as far as I can see them, and what I made of him in person, mean that I can’t see him as homophobic. When writing The TAO Connection, however, I suspect that simply coming from a different generation and just being rather thoughtless explains the most vilely homophobic stereotype ever depicted in any form of Doctor Who. It didn’t help that for many years, Big Finish’s productions boasted almost zero gay characters on their CDs despite the many LGBT people making them. So perhaps it was that dearth that meant when only their second gay character (and second villain) in five years of releases was the equivalent of your second Jewish character being a child-murdering usurer, I felt someone might have asked whether playing up to the nastiest possible caricatures used to attack an oppressed group as your sole illustration was entirely well-considered. One day there’ll be so many ordinary and extraordinary LGBT characters that one horribly negative stereotype won’t bother anyone. But, right now, I’d never bother listening to it again.

One later work by Barry, however, is well worth looking out – on CD, in expanded book form, or waiting for the next time it comes round on Radio 4 Extra. His autobiography, Who and Me, is charming, self-deprecating, and shining with love for Doctor Who and many of the other works he was part of in his early career as actor, director and writer. As ever, I don’t agree with every case he makes, but he makes them engagingly and persuasively, and if you catch the audio version he is, again, a lovely reader, his writing’s conversational style perfectly brought out as the man himself chats to you. And I never fail to get slightly misty-eyed when, half-way through his time on Doctor Who, this volume comes to an end with a never-to-be-followed

“No; I’ll tell you next time…”

If you want a taste of Barry’s era of Doctor Who, you might go to this page of the BBC’s Doctor Who site, scroll down to the bottom right and click on Doctor Who Years: The Seventies which, despite promising Tom Baker, spends its first quarter-hour putting pop hits to clips of every story from Barry’s time, when Jon Pertwee was the Doctor. It’s endearing, exciting and entertaining, and for the ’70s edition, at least, doesn’t have too much editorialising of the compiler’s particular preferences (though watch out – it sometimes gives away the endings). Though forgive me for possibly having a preference for some of the stories from 1975 onwards, and the music from 1977 on (even two acts I’ve seen live, and one song which in a later version was the first time I was identified in public as gay in a friendly way: after dancing to it at a school disco, one boy observed, “You’re not entirely straight, are you?” Wonder what happened to him?). Shame they don’t have the real Rock’N’Roll Years online, really, isn’t it? Surely it’s about time BBC4 mounted a complete repeat of The Rock’N’Roll Years – and of Doctor Who, come to that…

For many fans, Barry Letts’ legacy is straightforward: he was producer for one of the most popular Doctors, Jon Pertwee, from his second (and in my view best, not least thanks to Barry’s moral underpinning) story on; and, in leaving, he chose the next and arguably most popular of all the Doctors, Tom Baker. And on Barry’s death, I remember Tom’s heartfelt tribute to the man who changed his life (“a nudist as well as a Buddhist” – well, I’m with him on one of those), as well as über-fan Toby Hadoke’s lovely obituary in The Independent – and, of course, those by Andrew Hickey and Millennium Dome, Elephant. And Will Howells’ song. Remembering Barry’s Buddhism, I’ll not say ‘Rest in peace’, but, if he was right, ‘Come back as something exciting’.

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