‘But who – or what – are you?!’ ... Season 4 of Doctor Who

Patrick Troughton took over as the hero of TV’s Doctor Who on fireworks’ night 1966. He was, of course, playing the same character as his predecessor, William Hartnell, or a character by the same lack-of-name, or is it better to say, the same role? After many years of watching these stories in completely random order, skipping via VHS or paperback from era to era, I finally started (this time last year) watching them in order of broadcast. Here I am at the end of Troughton’s first season and the most disconcerting effect is this change of lead actor. In his first story, Dusty Springfield looky-likey Polly gets her finest hour, trusting her instinct that this scruffy loon is the same man she and her boyfriend Ben have been travelling with, until now a haughty, bohemian grandfather figure.


We know she’s right – and Ben does come around eventually – and they end up as happy fellow travellers: Polly teasing the Doctor, the Doctor ragging Ben, all of them blithely adopting a hunky highlander for zero gravity larks on the Moon’s surface. But I find myself asking what it is Polly and Ben have accepted: the reincarnation of the Doctor’s questing spirit, his eccentricity, his revolutionary zeal, in a new body, but a new personality, a new mind. He’s missing a few memories at first, and talks about his prior incarnation in the third person (‘The Doctor was a great collector, wasn’t he? I don’t look like him...’) If it wasn’t for Ben and Polly, what ‘continuity’ would he feel obliged to maintain with his first persona? What do these terms mean? Who is the Doctor, if he is no one man?

In his first seven stories we see different possibilities: the stories vary in style and so does the Doctor. David Whitaker has the right idea – the incorrigible detective led by curiosity into others’ affairs, disarming authority with rampant eccentricity (and bewildering his friends in the process) is instantly recognisable as the post-1974 Doctor. He’s less dignified than Hartnell or Pertwee, and less careful writers (hello Gerry Davis and Geoffrey Orme) take him so far into clownishness it’s hard for him to return to gravitas at crucial moments. Troughton is very good at conveying the sense that the fun is suddenly over, and something dreadful’s about to burst through the wall (in fact, it’s already coiled around your left ankle).

I still love these earlier stories – The Underwater Menace especially, for being so funny – but I like it even more when the show settles down and plays to its strengths. Power of the Daleks is the first Doctor Who story where something is so frightening it can drive a man insane. We have a cute runaround in history, and then The Underwater Menace with its token monsters. The Fish People are more pitiable than petrifying but they suddenly feel part of the furniture, and there is the first threat that you can be made into one of them. It’s like a natural progression from the Doctor’s reincarnation – the body can be altered, personality can change; why shouldn’t the soul be in danger too? In each successive story of this season, good men are turned bad by the enemy. Even the Doctor, or so it appears!

The show is less adventurous than it ever was with Bill Hartnell, but it grows in confidence as it finds its natural metier (frightening the life out of eight year olds). The Evil of the Daleks is an elegant, nightmarish epic adventure about essentially human qualities. This is the story that replaces the human soul with psychology and political consciousness – hello, Rousseau vs. Locke! The healthy scare is part of that story, hence the rather childlike companions. It’s a smart move with Jamie, undercutting a lot of machismo that could become tedious with a man of the modern age. Simpering Victoria, though, places the Doctor and Jamie in conventional male roles. We need a space age teen like Season 2’s Vicki, to keep them where they need to be: two big teddy bears, voyaging through the cosmos!

Don’t forget, me and my friend Sarah Hadley are both still blogging away about these stories here: http://campbellsrecorder.blogspot.co.uk/  Hopefully next week we will be voyaging to the lost city of the Cybermen, beneath the silver sands of the planet Telos...

As it’s the fiftieth anniversary year, I have been tempted into another marathon of a kind. Reading agendas are easier to come up with during the office drudge than to put into practice, but this is eleven books across the year – surely achievable...? We’ll see! I’ve looked at the unread novels I own, and the things that are out there and tempting me. I’ve also tried to pick from a selection of eras in Doctor Who fiction – and here’s my current plan:

Doctor Who and the Crusaders...



Foreign Devils...



The Harvest of Time...



Festival of Death...



The Crystal Bucephalus...



Killing Ground...



White Darkness...



The Banquo Legacy...



What do you think?