The Highlanders: Ranking - 173

  The Highlanders

(Season 4, Dr 2 with Ben, Polly and Jamie, 17/12/1966-7/1/1967, producer: Innes Lloyd, script editor: Gerry Davis, writers: Gerry Davis and Elwyn Jones, director: Hugh David)

Rank: 173

'Oh the Doctor's love is for a red red Rose

Pursued by the Judoon

She was stung by the Crimson Horror

While in the Highlands in June

The Doctor's first visit with a bonnie lass

was in 1746

When he just missed the battle of Culloden

But still got himself in a fix

They were very nearly trapped

Till all the Sea Devils gang dry

But lived to fight another day

Thou extermination seemed nigh

He gained a Highland Piper

a bonny highlander

His kilt will confuse many on his future travels

And cause quite a stir

But that's all in the future

When things turn out fine

For a moment in this adventure

It seemed like auld lang syne'

Robert 'Pyrovile' Burns

Och aye the noo! The last Dr Who story set in Scotland for a decade ‘The Highlanders’ makes the most of every cliché about life North of the border it can including kilts, dirks, thistles, young men shouting ‘Craeg An Tuire’ (‘The Boar’s Rock’, actually the rallying call of the clan McLaren rather than McCrimmon in real life, where the soldiers used to rally and hold speeches) and Hannah Gordon, TV’s go-to Scottish actress for the next fifty years (unlike ‘Terror Of The Zygons, however, there is no haggis and no loch ness monsters). ‘The Highlanders’ is the last of the 1960s historical stories too, with a gap of eight years till they try something like it again with ‘The Time Warrior’ (though that starts a run of very different scifi-based stories that just happen to be taking place in the past), ending an unbroken run of alternating-past-and-present-bar-sideways-oddball stories that stretches right back to the show’s caveman days (in a manner of speaking). Made by a production team under duress who wanted to make science-fiction and a lead actor who was already sick of appearing in bit parts in history dramas it’s something of an anomaly, an outlier in the way the viewing public thought Dr Who was for in 1966. That, coupled with the fact that all four episodes were wiped from the BBC archives (depressingly early, in 1967, as so few TV stations round the world were interested in taking Dr Who on in this era) and only snippets, the soundtrack and a few photographs exist, means that ‘The Highlanders’ often gets overlooked, the second ever Troughton tale not quite like the Hartnells before it but not really like the ‘base under siege’ era to come either. It is, if you will, a highland fling during a time when the series was at its most ‘English’, a short affair that gets overshadowed by the great romance with hairy beasties to come.  

The story goes that the production team of producer Innes Lloyd and script editor Gerry Davis happily axed the historicals as soon as they could, which - after a bit of admin, ‘The Smugglers’ held over from the previous year and one last finale for Hartnell  with ‘The Tenth Planet’- started when Patrick Troughton did. Only head of BBC serials Shaun Sutton, who took an interest in Dr Who, wangled his way to getting Elwyn Jones to agree to write a story for them: at the time police drama ‘Z Cars’  had made him something of a star in the world of television and getting him was a real coup, by far the highest profile writer Dr Who had working for it back then who hadn’t been made a star through working on the programme. Only Jones had no interest in scifi and said he wouldn’t have a clue how to write it: he asked if instead he could have the Tardis go back in time and write something historical; after a lot of gnashing of teeth Gerry Davis suggested a programme based on the battle of Culloden (because he liked Robert Louis Stevenson and thought a Dr Who variation on ‘Kidnapped’ would be fun, rather than any boring historical knowhow). The only issue now was how to go about it: though Davis had worked on a handful of historicals inherited from his predecessor Donald Tosh he’s mostly let the writers get on with it and only helped with the dialogue. He didn’t have Tosh’s sense of fun that was determined to make history more visual and less boring than school and he didn’t have original script editor David Whittaker’s drive to make the past come alive and seem as real as the present. Instead ‘The Highlanders’ came out a bit of a hybrid. 

On the one hand it is as true to life a reconstruction of a real event as a TV drama made 300 years after the fact possibly can be and is as brutal, in terms or character and motivation, as Dr Whos ever come, with no attempts to dress up what really happened or make things cosier for children. There are some powerful discussions of the rather grim way the English put down Scottish rebellions in 1746 (just after the battle of Culloden, which has ended right before the Tardis arrives) that’s as dark and sombre as any in Dr Who’s catalogue, past or present, as out of place at times as if someone’s drizzled blood on a tin of Scottish shortbread. The English and Scottish here truly despise each other after all and for good reason: this was the last gasp (and the fifth major battle in forty years) of the Jacobite rebellion,  a fight to the death between two different Royal lineages but more than that it was a fight to the death over religion, the death of the heirless William and Anne leading to the German family of Hannover competing with the descendents of the Scottish King James II (or VII of Scotland). The Scottish lot had history on their side, having actually been on the throne before and were much closer relatives so it seemed as if they were a shoo-in for the throne; however the English were even more adamant they wouldn’t have a Scottish King than they were a German one and there was great fear about what a Catholic succession to the throne might mean (this was, after all, not that long after the Gunpowder plot – Catholics weren’t to be trusted in a mostly Protestant land, or at any rate not as much as they were before Henry VIII got in a tizzy and uprooted English religious traditions because he wanted a quickie divorce). ‘The Highlanders’ doesn’t shy away from any of the bad feeling between the two sides: prisoners are hanged, others are shot, poor Ben ends up in the middle of a mass deportation to the colonies (which back then basically meant an extended death through starvation) and everyone hates each other’s guts. Soldiers are threatened with the lash, others are knived and there’s a scene of multiple men being hanged that might be one of the most shocking moments of 1960s series. So much for the jolly romps of ‘The Romans’ or ‘The Gunfighters’ – this is a world that would have any right-minded time traveller running back to the Tardis sobbing.  

But then the story goes all wonky, throwing a recently regenerated and still quite manic 2nd Doctor into the mix and most of the humour comes from him. The Doctor isn’t scared, not for himself or his friends: he’s quite lackadaisical about health and safety (certainly compared to Hartnell) and thinks this big fight to the death is ridiculous: just another phase in human civilisation that the descendents of the people fighting will have forgotten all about in, ooh, 300 years or so? Throughout this story the Doctor doesn’t drive the story by trying to keep out and let history happen the way it should, as the 1st regeneration did – instead he’s right in the mix getting in the way, making fun of authority, dressing up in multiple disguises, at one pretending to be German for no apparent reason while with the Scots and Scottish (fior slightly moe reason) when with the English: absolutely the last person anyone should be trying to be in a world where the stakes are so high on getting caught out. This Doctor isn’t afraid  and he doesn’t react as if this is a cut-throat world of life and death – he’s having fun, treating history as a theme-park the way Tosh sometimes did, and trying out an increasingly daft array of hats. Some of the people we meet, meanwhile, are pure caricatures: the brutish Englishman, the English gent whose meant to be in charge of battle but has no stomach for fighting, the pretty and pretty innocent Scottish lass and the clan of Scots who are every cliché going: brave but a little dense and careful with their money, their resources and their lives (even Jamie – perhaps, in this story at least, especially Jamie). History was never like this, even in Dr Who before now: is this real, the viewer ends up asking themselves, or is it pure fantasy? But if this was all make believe like in the stories, then why do so many people spend this story in so much pain? And if it’s real then why is the Doctor making so many quips and treating it like a fun day out?  

‘The Highlanders’ feel in some ways like a Donald Cotton story, lurching from pure drama to pure farce, but the difference is that instead of a fun three episodes leading to a blood-soaked finale the two strands are going on at once. Gerry might have been working from Cotton’s template (the historicals he’d worked on most closely) but he does it his own way. This ended up being 90% his work, written at high speed when one by William Emms (who wrote ‘Galaxy 4’) fell through at the last moment and Elwyn Jones, who’d written the outline and a bit of the first draft, had to drop out for his own script editing duties on ‘Z Cars’ (Jones and Davis will work together again on ‘Doomwatch’ though, a series of contemporary concerns which is so different to this story in every single way it shows what an oddball ‘The Highlanders’ is and how far out these two men’s comfort zones it was). Legend has it that Davis, who used to hang around on set in case any re-writes were needed at the last minute, was so behind he took his typewriter with him to filming, pausing his clackety-clacking only when a take was actually being made and that time was so tight he was still working on this story’s later parts when the earlier ones were being filmed.  As a result there isn’t much thinking going on: ‘The Highlanders’ feels like a guttural script, written from the heart and memory, without any need for any greater plot than survival. 

As with ‘The Gunfighters’ this story makes more sense to viewers of the 1960s than it does now, as the BBC had only just finished airing a big historical drama about Culloden three years earlier, one delivered by RADA trained actors in an approximation of Scottish accents in what was, given the reviews, a very English-orientated view of the battle. Basically the English were pre-destined to win because the future had to turn out like this. Without their victory we might not, sob, have had a British empire! Because it’s also a family show shown at teatime there’s not a lot of bloodshed and the English are all heroic and dashing and nice, while the Scots are brutes. Now Davis was himself an English lad (born In Sussex) but he’s hung around other cultures and done enough reading round the subject to know this wasn’t true; Jones, meanwhile, wasn’t Scottish but was born in Wales – another country increasingly marginalised by English influence that secretly wants to bring down their posh cousins a peg or two. Notably ‘The Highlanders’ is very different to ‘Culloden’ in two ways: one is that it takes place right after the final battle, where that series ended and asks increasingly awkward questions about what happened next, when valiant soldiers who’d put up a fair fight and been the English army’s equal in so many ways were massacred by ‘Butcher’, ‘The Duke Of Cumberland’ (and himself a relative of the King he wanted to put on the throne). There was no Geneva Convention in those days, the treaty signed in 1949 and still a talking point when ‘The Highlanders’ was on seventeen years later (should we be merciful or seek revenge on people who fought us?), especially between the parents who’d fought in WW2 and their children who were adamant about never ever fighting again. The other is that, far from being noble fighters, the English are manipulators and schemers, as cruel as any Dalek and as prepared as any Cybermen. To The RedCoats the Scots are sub-human, irritating rodents who got what was coming to them; to the Scots the English are absurd in their red coats that made them stand out so much in the battlefield (red because it covered up the bloodstains and so was better for morale), poor victors who won because of their greater numbers and weapons rather than because they had any right to. Even though the battle is over with a clear victor when the Tardis lands Davis and Jones make it a much tighter battle, with the sense that it could easily have gone the other way. As even as it sort of is, though, ‘The Highlanders’ is firmly on the side of the Scottish even though practically everyone working on the story was English (even Frazer Hines playing the new Scottish companion); indeed, aside from Ben and Polly, who are the very definition of English pluck, most of the English in this story are either cruel or cowardly or both, rich wimps who can’t stand the sight of battle.

In fact class and money is the sort-of second theme of this story. Gray, the closest to a villain in the story (and the only figure in the story who actually existed, bar the off-screen Kings) is, ironically, enough, a black-and-white thinker who cares nothing for people’s lives or wellbeing if he can grab hold of more money. He’s an 18th century Davros, happy to sign over the lives of the people under him if it means his own survival. Slave trader Trask, too, doesn’t have the decency to be appalled by his trade (the way Romans sort-of were in, umm, ‘The Romans’) as long as he gets the moolah. Even lower down the tree the Doctor comments of one guard that he would ‘sell his own Granny if the price was right’ – this is an era when living was tough and the only chance for the working classes to earn a decent wage was to become a soldier – any soldier, on any side. They can’t afford to have morals: if they don’t carry out orders they lose their job and their family starves, while equally if they let the enemy kill them first they’re no good to their family dead either. The ‘real’ enemy here are the rich who keep both sides fighting, at least to 20th century eyes. We all knew such men existed for the world to be the way it was back then but it’s another to see it on screen – and you can bet neither of these men or people like them were in the sanitised ‘Culloden’ TV version . So far until smugglers and this historicals have been about discovering our heroes were flawed and their enemies weren’t the villains they were portrayed to be, that life was more nuanced. Here everyone seems evil and driven by money and the few not touched by its evil hand are fools easily outwitted. That’s all very un-1960s, an era when money was as low down in people’s core life values as it has ever been in living memory (when money can’t buy you love). Bear in mind that this was broadcasting the suddenly more class-conscious 1960s, a collection of teenagers who finally have money for the first time ever and a sense that Britain is back on the right economic path after a difficult twenty-odd years post-WW2. All the war leaders in this story are in charge because they’re the ones with all the money, who don’t need to get their hands dirty – not because they’re the best at strategy or fighting and certainly not because they care for the men under them. We’re a year away from the ‘One World’ satellite broadcast of ‘All You need Is Love’, when loving your neighbours is ‘in’ – the enemy are the elders, of all countries, who have more money than sense and are busy making penniless youngsters sign up to the armed forced to survive and conscripting others to fight in Vietnam and Korea. To the children of 1966 fighting because your King asked you to fight another King, both of whom thought they had divine right to rule direct from God, was ridiculous – almost as ridiculous as being asked to fight communists on behalf of capitalists (because most of the kids being conscripted were very much on the wrong side of capitalism): both sides were stupid and fighting for no reason. To the viewer of course its all for nothing: nobody really remembers this battle or who won or what it was for – and so, by association without actually saying this out loud,it is for conflicts around in 1966: the Vietnams, the Koreas, all will end up in a history book and a documentary-drama on TV one day and that’s that, with gaining land not really gaining anything at all and losing so much. 

 Of course it didn’t seem that way to the people of the time, when this battle was a literal matter of life and death for which you gladly risked your lives, which is where Dr Who historicals bringing the past to life come in, yet Davis for one seems to agree with the people watching in a way David Whittaker for one would never have done: this war was indeed all for nothing and barely remembered two hundred years later. This is all at one with how Dr Who had been progressing across the later Hartnell years, as a discussion between parents and children about what the future might look like when the war generation head for retirement and the baby boomers take over: despite being a 1740s story rather than a 1960s one this very much feels like a story saying ‘you know what? You adults have been doing it your way, with wars and skirmishes, for far too long – it’s time we had some peace and healed the conflicts with or neighbours’. It seems odd to call ‘The Highlanders’ a ‘generation gap’ story, given that the people here are the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren of the people at home watching on first transmission but just look at how the people in charge of these battles on both sides are all ill-suited, afraid to do themselves what they expect the youngsters under them to carry out. The youngsters, Ben and Polly included, are all far braver and tougher than their elders give them credit for, but the adults in this story are all wimps. Even Ffinch, the one adult here whose close in age to the others but whose a figure of ffun and a young adult clearly better suited to more creative pursuits than life in the army. The Doctor, meanwhile, is treating this like a colourful romp straight of a Monkees episode, where outrageous things happen and the adults are the butt of all the jokes (a series that was just about to start in America but wouldn’t make it to Britain for another year, when it was usually shown just before Dr Who) – the only difference is that, in Dr Who, people do get hurt and it isn’t always a joke. Then again, Polly is kind of posh herself (the most upper-class of all Who companions, bar Victorian lady Victoria, Traken noble Nyssa and, possibly, time lady Romana, who ight not be all that posh by timelord standards, we don’t really know) and calls Kirsty a ‘stupid peasant’ in her frustration at one point, so perhaps not. 

There’s another interesting quirk of the characters in this story too, Jamie and Hannah Gordon’s Kirsty aside: no one seems to have any feelings for anyone or think about how their actions affect anyone else. War, it appears, breeds contempt for those not like you and pushes you into thinking of yourself as the only way to survive. The irony is that they call the Scots King ‘The Young Pretender’ but he isn’t pretending – nor is anyone else in this story to whom everything is very real and desperate; the only person pretending is the Doctor; honestly everyone’s lives would be easier if they weren’t fighting and putting each other to the sword but simply gave in and were good prisoners for a scene or two. Even Jamie is almost unrecognisably like his future self: brave, sure, but hot-headed and angry, a warrior uncomfortable in defeat and at peace. It takes the warmth of the Tardis trio (especially Polly) to start making these people think about things from a bigger perspective (and even Polly is far more callous and cruel than we ever see her again, mostly to Kirsty for sobbing her way through the story – to be fair her tears do get quite irritating).It’s as if Davis, two stories on from co-creating The Cybermen, is writing a sort of back story, working out how we could ever reach the point where we (or the Humans from our twin planet Mondas) could possibly become unfeeling cyborgs: the answer is you just can’t afford the luxury of feelings at times like these, when you’re pushed past your extremes and will do anything to survive. Not for the first or last time a Dr Who historical digs beneath the bones to what life would have really been like rather than the mythical heroic past of the documentary, full of cowards, thugs and chancers – much like every other time period in fact (the costumes change in Dr Who but people rarely do, in past present or future – particularly 1960s Dr Who). Forget the cosy drama: this is what the real battle of ‘Culloden’ was probably like, a world of people who’ve learned not to trust fighting another bunch of people who’ve learned not to trust, both sides refusing to bend and meet in the middle somewhere (there are many later Dr Who stories that have the timelord step in and negotiate, ‘The Zygon Invasion/Inversion’ being a good example: notably the Doctor doesn’t do that here, almost as if he knows without trying that it won’t work).  

What it does mean is that Troughton’s more mercurial, less straightforward Doctor compared to the Hartnell incarnation can do things in this world that no one else can. He’s the only one smart enough to consider disguise, saving the lives of the Scottish clan by having Jamie play the bonnie prince who needs to be captured alive (taking advantage of the fact that in the days before photographs, when paintings were more flattering than accurate, nobody knew what anybody else looked like bar a vague description; Jamie being a piper unused to direct fighting also means he has ‘soft hands’ like a King’s), dressing up as German Doctor ‘Von Wer’ (German for ‘Who’ – the second and last reference to the fact that ‘Who’ might be his real name, just as in ‘The War Machines’ and the comic strips), a Jacobite and, most infamously, a washer woman. By becoming someone else, by dressing up and putting on a different character, the Doctor can run rings around all these rigid people who don’t expect him to do half the things he does in this story (such as locking tyrant Gray up in a cupboard and whacking dutiful Perkins’ head repeatedly on a table); everyone is expecting a straight fight, not someone cunning and playing with the truth. This is a Doctor who thinks the battle is a bit daft so can take the mickey out of it, crying ‘long live King George’ in a moment his new friends think means he’s betrayed them – when all he’s really doing is testing an echo (and doing a bit of inappropriate teasing).  It’s hard to imagine Hartnell doing any of this: he was always immovably himself, even in situations when it might have been better to disguise himself, but this new kid is happy to be the clown, to dress up in drag, to be anyone the situation needs him to be (and it’s a sign, too, of just how different Troughton’s background as a ‘character actor’ had been compared to Hartnells, who more or less played the same authoritarian parts his whole life, with varying degrees of absurd twinkle in his eyes). This early on even his chief creator Davis doesn’t know who the 2nd Doctor is yet so he gets round that problem by allowing him to be a bit of everyone in turn: different accents, different personalities, even different genders.  

The story is certainly ambitious but doesn’t quite carry it off. Because the Doctor’s basically acting weird, to the point where we at home don’t know if we can trust him, it leaves Ben and Polly, in only their fifth story, as the reliable pair of hands. They’re a team who actually get to explore this dark and dangerous world the way we would and the story works best when they’re on screen. Alas they get split up early on for sub-plots that don’t really go anywhere and which don’t necessarily feel true to their characters, traditional wimp Polly suddenly turning all gung-ho and macho as she urges the Jacobites to rebel (again) and Ben suddenly developing Doctor-like powers of survival as he survives certain death by drowning from tricks picked up by Houdini; the only part of this sequence that rings true is that he doesn’t panic in the water (this is the only story that makes good use of the fact that Ben is a sailor: you’d think ‘The Underwater Menace’ up next would but he barely gets his feet wet in that story). Michael Craze and Anneke Wills are excellent though, somehow making these additions seem like extensions to their character rather than contradictions and some of Polly’s very 1960s baiting/flirting with her poor posh victim, spoilt rich kid Algernon Ffinch who doesn’t know what’s happening and basically gets beaten up by two girls, is one of her defining moments as a character. Ffinch is, oddly enough, more out of place here asa rich Englishman who just wants a quiet life and can’t find it in battle than the so-1966-it-hurts Ben and Polly who are at their best here, resilient and prepared to risk everything for people they’ve barely met and who quickly understand the Scots they meet as people like them in funny clothes; they can’t see why the English think of the Scots as alien monsters who are beneath them when their needs of shelter food and safety are just the same as theirs, especially after their recent brushes with Daleks, Cybermen and War Machines. 

Unlike the Doctor they actually interact properly with the people who live in this world too, getting to know them properly. One of them is a young lad named Jamie and while he’s far from the best character here (Kirsty gets all the best lines) he does show promise and it’s a good thing they hurriedly re-wrote the ending of this story and put him on board the Tardis too, even if his presence gives less and less to Ben to do in future. The legend goes that overwhelmingly positive response to Jamie meant they hastily put him in the Tardis isn’t quite true: for one thing they were a couple of weeks head of transmission so two episodes of ‘The Underwater Menace’ with Jamie had been filmed by the time the end of ‘The Highlanders’ was transmitted. Even so Davis’ instincts were right: Frazer Hines has a charisma that shines out even from murky telesnaps and his straightforward reliable dependency makes him the perfect foil for the 2nd Doctor in a way the more traditional Ben and Polly couldn’t be. Hines and Troughton were already good friends, which helped: they’d worked together twice in  and ‘Smuggler’s Bay’ in 1964 (which is kind of like ‘The Smugglers’, unsurprisingly)and a production of ‘Moonfleet’(also kind of like ‘The Smugglers’ if we’re being homnest). It was, however, a late addition to add him to the Tardis: they actually filmed Jamie waving goodbye with Kirsty at the end before travelling all the way back to location to shoot the sequence again with Jamie onboard; Frazer himself was only asked about staying on very late in the day (to spare him nerves and the need to impress, so the actor said, though it might simply have taken Davis and Lloyd that long to make their minds up). Note that Jamie has a very different voice in this story, a far more accurate Scots burr, which he changed for the next story to something closer to a ‘Scottish’ version of his real voice because he realised how hard it would be to keep up across a full series (you can really hear it on the soundtrack released on CD in the 1990s with Frazer as himself doing the linking narration). Jamie is, though, ‘better’ than the rest to viewers of the time because he isn’t a soldier – he’s a piper who plays music while other people fight, which is as 1960s as it gets. Weirdly we never see Jamie, part of the MacCrimmon clan famous for their piping, play the pipes across the series (although he was meant to, in the script for ‘Fury Form The Deep’, where it stuns the sentient alien seaweed in place of Victoria’s screams); odd too that he doesn’t rush off from the Tardis to grab his pipes or have them on him, as they would have been as s econd nature as carrying a pen or a laptop is to us; you think he’d at least ask the Doctor for another set when he discovers just how much junk there is in the Tardis. Even so, if you come to this story fresh without knowing what happens next Jamie’s departure is a surprise: he hasn’t really done anything the others in his clan don’t do and Kirsty is a much more promising character – like Victoria will be, a maiden in distress, but slightly less wet. Hannah Gordon, in one of her first TV appearances, is already a clear star of the future and is a lot better than the part should be on the paper. It’s a wonder they didn’t re-shoot the last scene and have her on board The Tardis as well.  

In some ways it’s a good thing the historicals ended here. Just listen to the dialogue – almost the only thing on this story left now and once the saving grace of all the Dr Who historicals – and despair: practically every line is an argument between two people opposed, even if it’s light banter, and there are no epic speeches or poetic lines. Where did all that David Whittaker influence go? And yet there’s nothing a little more care and time and budget couldn’t have put right: the costumes, the setting, the idea are all sound (it’s about time we had an Earth story that wasn’t set in England for instance: only ‘Marco Polo’ had been elsewhere so far and let’s face it Marco himself couldn’t have been more English if he’d been smoking a pipe and holding an umbrella).There are some great ideas in here and I so wish we could see it  because, if nothing else, ‘The Highlanders is exciting – if in more of a ‘breathless rush’ kind of a way than out of a complex plot. I love the way the plot quickly gets us on side with the Highlanders where other series in 1966 would have been condescending and makes us question the history books (almost all written by the English’ the Scots couldn’t write), which is exactly what Dr Who is for, redressing old imbalances and giving voice to those who were denied it for so long. 

Of course that also means that its not that accurate and there’s also a surprising lack of information about the Jacobite rebellion: there’s no sense here, for instance, that we’re forty years into an on-off war that was probably being fought by these younger characters’ grandparents or that the vast majority of people, English and Scottish alike, couldn’t care less about who was on the throne just could we please get back to normality now? Most surprising of all there’s no fighting the whole story: people are outnumbered and captured, or outsmarted, but there isn’t a single fight scene anywhere, which seems odd for a story about a battle – even a battle that’s over. Had Davis had longer to perfect this story (so he could actually do some research for it), had they worked out who the 2nd Doctor was meant to be so he could join the party too instead of faffing about with hats and dressing as washer-women (it will take another couple of stories before he calms down) and had we actually seen more of Culloden than its aftermath this could have been a classic; alas it’s more a jumble of good scenes than a really good story with a plot that ebbs and flows rather than one that directly leads where it needs to go. Without that memory of ‘Culloden’ semi-fresh in our minds to watch ‘The Highlanders’ gets a bit lost in translation I think and is a hard story to get a hold of given that only a few fragmented seconds of it exist in the archives: one minute it’s a pantomime, one minute it’s a serious drama as if, the last semi-historical for nearly eight long years, it’s a compilation of every angle the production team has tried: history as something that can’t be changed, as something better than the time the show was made in, as something worse than the time the show was made in, as a chance to meet long forgotten heroes, as a chance to meet real forgotten people who never make the history books, as entertainment, as education, as a sign of how pointless the past was to the present, as a sign of how relevant the past still is. Hoots mon, that’s a lot of weight for a four parter to carry! Ultimately this first trip to Scotland (there’s still only ever been three, which really isn’t many in sixty odd years given that Scottish viewers pay the TV license fee that funds the BBC as well as English ones) is more of a highland fling rather than a chance to really delve deeply into Scottish history. Still, ‘The Highlanders’ has some great ideas and is highly under-valued and under-rated. I suspect if its ever recovered a lot of people will start loving it a lot more.

POSITIVES + We only have photographic stills to go on so I could be wrong but...from what I can tell this story looks amazing. Dr Who had only just begun to do location filming properly a few stories before this and chose firstly a quarry and then a Cornish landscape for ‘The Smugglers’ that was chocolate-box pretty, but here for the first time it really feels as if the Tardis has landed in a whole other time, with Frensham Ponds in Surrey doubling really effectively for the Scottish Highlands. You really get the sense of a vast bare land that isn’t providing enough to eat and is making the people who live on it desperate, every bit as desolate and cut off as the land. The hillsides, with added bracken and conifers and dry ice to suggest gun smoke, looks beautiful but battle-scarred. It could have been so very pretty, all wide rolling hills and bird song. But the sound of war is never far away (the soundtrack is almost all we have) and signs of conflict are everywhere. The feel is of a very beautiful place in a very ugly time in history with hills wounded by signs of battle that haven’t healed yet, just like the people, the sort of ugly mess where the birds stopped singing a long time ago but which is just a few years of peace away from being beautiful all over again, with nature far smarter than man about these things. 

NEGATIVES - While everyone else is taking everything earnestly seriously and genuinely scared of the hangman’s noose or deportation there the Doctor is, treating everything as a big joke, using the confusion of Culloden to confuse the enemy, talk in cod German accents, dress up in a variety of costumes, shout 'down with King George!' to test an echo on impulse even though it could have got lots of people killed and ‘comedy’ scenes where he knocks his jailor’s head on a table then asks him if he’s suffering from ‘headaches’. Worst of all this Doctor’s suddenly war-mad, demanding weapons at one point to fight the redcoats in a way we’ve only ever seen happen with Doctors when someone they love is in danger (as per ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ or ‘Caves Of Androzani’): here, though, it’s the Doctor’s main plan not his defensive desperate one. It’s a good job they gave the job to Patrick Troughton – in lesser skilled hands it might have been awful; even so it’s still pretty bad and you almost dread the Doctor turning up to interrupt the action. Especially in his ‘German Doctor’ character (with an outrageous accent almost exactly like the ‘Mexican’ one Troughton uses as salamander in ‘The Enemy Of The World’!) There are flashes of steel and hardness, though, which also make him less unapproachable than Hartnell, a casual callousness that takes you by surprise: in the future you only really see this aspect of the Doctor when his back his against the wall and he thinks he has no choice and even then he agonises over it afterwards). I suspect, had I been around in 1966, I’d have been longing for William Hartnell to come back after this and ‘Underwater Menace’ back to back despite Troughton’s promising debut in ‘Power Of The Daleks’; thankfully he’ll settle down by the time of ‘The Moonbase’ and then give one of the single greatest performances of any of the Doctors in the show’s history. 

BEST QUOTE: ‘What wicked times we live in, lieutenant’. 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The 3rd Doctor returned to the land of Redcoats for one of the more ‘normal’ Dr Who comic strips printed in TV Action for ‘The Glen Of Sleeping’ (issues 107-111, running across the whole of March 1973). The Doctor is enjoying a rare holiday from UNIT, going for a spot of fishing (wonder if he caught any gumblejacks like the 6th?) when he spots a group of archaeologists digging up a mysterious artefact in a nearby field and his curiosity gets the better of him (well, it is the 3rd Doctor). Surprisingly (spoilers) it’s all a trap laid by the Delgado Master, in what turned out to be his only appearance in the TV Action strips – having paid for his likeness the comics may well have panned to use him more before the actor’s untimely demise just three months later. The Master’s typically bonkers plan is to summons a mystical being from Earth’s past known as ‘Red Angus’ who has been ruling over a clan of unstoppable Scottish clansmen, who The Master then intends to use to take control of a nuclear submarine and use that to make the Doctor give his Tardis over (it’s never explained what’s happened to The Master’s). How does all this tie in to ‘The Highlanders’? Well, in a bonkers final reel it turns out that (more spoilers) Red Angus is a time-travelling alien known as a Chronon, the Doctor dating its arrival in Scotland to 1745, travelling there in The Tardis. He doesn’t meet Jamie sadly (‘The Highlanders’ is set in 1746 so the lad wouldn’t recognise him anyway) but there is lots of kilt-on-kilt action before the aliens are dispatched and The master is stranded. Craig-au-teure!  

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