Invasion Of The Dinosaurs: Ranking - 164

    Invasion Of The Dinosaurs

(Season 11, Dr 3 with Sarah Jane, 12/1/1974-16/2/1974, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Malcolm Hulke, director: Paddy Russell) 

Rank: 164

'Phew Brigadier, I'm so glad that's over, now all the dinosaurs have been sent back to where they came from I'm going to go to the Tardis to put my feet up and...who left the doors open? It's full of diplodocuses!' 

Ah, ‘Invasion Of The Dinosaurs’. The story that everyone remembers with either a smile or a shudder or, if you’re a true fan, a little bit of both. For all that I was rude about ‘Dinosaurs on A Spaceship’ giving the game away about what that plotline was all about ‘Invasion’ is even simpler: oh look, dinosaurs in London, didn’t see that coming (well, technically you didn’t if you were one of the few people in 1974 who didn’t have access to a Radio Times where they gave the game away early you might not have seen it coming, given that the first episode was simply titled ‘Invasion’, but the whacking great picture of Jon Pertwee surrounded by ancient reptiles rather gave it away – ditto anyone whose come to this story afterwards when the title is laid down in every guidebook going and gives the game away. Erm, including this one now. Sorry about that…) Only the dinosaurs are a sort of giant red herring: writer Malcolm Hulke was saddled with the idea of dinosaurs by a production team who were high on drashigs (not a drug – the model puppet in ‘Carnival Of Monsters’ that turned out to be pretty effective despite being really cheap) despite being one of the few little boys grown –into-men who didn’t actually find dinosaurs all that interesting. Rejecting producer Barry Letts’ idea (Mankind sent back in time to a world where dinosaurs exist! See the whole ‘Terra Nova’ series for what a silly idea that would have been) and most of Terrance Dicks’ idea (dinosaurs in the present day let loose on modern London!) instead Hulke does his trademark thing and makes this a complex story about human beings and their clashing motives and how we all have to work ut how to live together to share the same path of soil. Forget the dinosaurs who only make cameos every time there’s a cliffhanger and ignore the ‘invasion’ part of the title (because, really, there isn’t one): this is about the lengths that certain fringe groups go to in order to make their ideas affect the mainstream and it’s a complex clash of conundrums that, fittingly for a series about time travel, are about whether it is better to go back to a certain but fake past over an uncertain yet real future. Instead of being about a dinosaur in London this becomes a story about Humans we know and love coping with the idea of dinosaurs in London and what would really happen if one of those splinter groups ended up in power, holding humanity to ransom. Basically it’s a story about trust and who in society has the individual's best interests at heart, with added T Rexes and Brontosauruses when things get boring.      

This is one of those stories where so much goes wrong but with such good intentions that they kind of cancel each other out, with ‘Invasion Of The Dinosaurs’ one of those stories that falls somewhere in the middle. Let’s start with that idea of ‘operation golden age’, the idea that scientists can take people back to the past and wipe most of humanity out because we’ve ‘gone wrong’. It’s a brilliant idea, one that raises all sorts of difficult questions for a series that’s long been at war about whether mankind has ever properly evolved and whether the past was a happier time than the present. Hulke doesn’t seem to think so, adding a few lectures from the Doctor about how we have to make the most of ‘now’ and that the past probably wasn’t as golden as it looks from a distance – that every time we feel nostalgic for was a struggle, just in very different ways to the one we live in. He’s clever enough to write complex three-dimensional characters who really do believe that we need to go backwards to go forwards though, some of whom make very convincing arguments that mankind have got too big for their evolutionary boots and have taken a wrong turning. Even though no two stories agree on when the UNIT adventures are set, they’re clearly sometime ‘soon’ on first transmission – soon enough for the audience to notice the poverty, inequality, racism, strikes and splintering of the mid-1970s, when everyone seemed to be at war with each other most of the time. We hear it so many times, that the Earth used to be a simpler, happier, less polluted place. That last point is an interesting one: Hulke, a keen Whovian even when he wasn’t writing for the series, would have been an avid watcher of ‘The Green Death’, Barry Letts and Robert Sloman’s ecological parable from the year before, in which fringe environmentalist Clifford Jones not only saves the world but gets the girl (Jo Grant) as a sort of ‘Human Doctor’. Hulke cheekily calls his boss’ bluff here though: surely, he says, it’s too simple to say that returning the environment back to the way it should be would cure humanity of all our worst impulses? Won’t there always be a capitalist somewhere ready to exploit it? So he takes the idea of Cliff and pushes him further until he becomes the sort of zealot whose no longer doing things for the good of the individual but for the ‘good’ of the whole planet – even if that means wiping most of the population out. There’s a sub-plot about all the people Operation Golden Age have picked for their expedition, who they’ve fooled into thinking are on a mission to another world but have been lied to because they’re really about to travel in time not space (just like the sub-plot of ‘The Enemy Of The World’, a story by David Whittaker heavily re-written by its director, one Barry Letts!) They’re the sort of people our society values and looks up to: athletes, artists, writers, idealists, maybe even one or two of his Dr Who colleagues. But they’re a hopeless bunch in terms of starting a new world: they wouldn’t last five minutes in the ‘real’ world battling dinosaurs and living a hand-to-mouth existence. I mean, how are they going to stop a T Rex in its tracks? Write a book about how it’s bad to eat Humans and make them read it? The athletes might throw a discuss at one or two I suppose, but really you can’t turn back the handle of progress – and if you did you’d lose all the great things humanity has gone on to have, including the leisure time necessary to make art and play sports. Douglas Adams, for one, seemed to adore this idea and went a stage further in his ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To the Galaxy’ books, writing in the same scenario but with telephone sanitisers and estate agents instead of writers, with the twist that they were sent back in time so the contemporary world could be rid of them!  

Cleverly, though, Operation Golden Age aren’t just a bunch of cranks. They’re people we’ve been taught to respect, motivated by the genuine thought that they’re doing good, even if that means killing lots of people. Once the Doctor and Sarah work out what is going on, arriving in the Tardis into the middle of an evacuated London, they’re alarmed to find how high up the chain of command this conspiracy goes: the politicians who are in on it and try to stop all investigations, General Finch whose infiltrated UNIT and turned their own friends against them, even (a huge mega spoiler that you seriously need to heed if you haven’t seen this story, because it’s one of the all-time great shocks of Dr Who) that nice Captain Yates, whose still suffering the after-effects from (guess which story?) ‘The Green Death’ . Yes that’s right, Hulke was cheeky enough to go there and label his boss’ co-written story as ‘brainwashing’! It’s all very well handled though: a project taking up that much funding would need to have people in on the inside and it would make sense that people in authority would be inspired by the hogwash of a time when the awful youth of the day paid their dues and due respects and did national service and made the country and the planet great again, etc, etc. Letts’ first idea for the story was a likeable politician testing out a machine that went back to the past and the Doctor having to rescue him, an idea Hulke threw out straight away being far too cynical for that! Instead he makes the politician a misguided egotist, one who genuinely thinks what he’s doing is for the good of everybody but blind to the fact it means killing most of them off. Many politicians, both in Dr Who and the real world, would make a decision like this affecting the whole of humanity on a whim because they were convinced they were right and you can hear it in every speech the right made during Brexit: that we’ve taken a wrong turning and molly-coddled the young for too long, we need to send them to the army and make a man of the children (even the women). Worryingly, that seems to be the entire Conservative campaign manifesto as I re-write this review in June 2024. Back in 1974, though, the thought that politicians might not necessarily have us at the heart of their policies and were serving themselves was new: the Watergate scandal reached a head, with the resignation of Richard Nixon right in the Summer when Hulke would have been on his last draft of this story and was proof that politicians couldn’t be trusted as far back in time as you could throw them.

The military, too, want to go back to when people took orders and saluted them in the street. The world wasn’t like that in 1974 though – and it’s not like that fifty years later either. These men are dinosaurs, who belong to an outdated world that doesn’t exist anymore, at least as much as the giant reptiles who are violently taken out of their time-stream and who end up here, anachronisms that should have long since been buried, people who cling on to the past so rigidly that they won’t embrace progress, even though for a lot of us progress actually seems to be taking us backwards. In all of Dr Who’s many lengthy discussions about what the world was going to be like when the children watching took charge (a theme that ran throughout the 1960s but has been rather lost in the UNIT years) ‘Invasion Of The Dinosaurs’ is one of the all-time best because the mention is that humanity is meant to evolve and end up going down evolutionary cul-de-sacs and that to wipe out any of it because you don’t like it is to wipe out the good that’s been created along the way. There never was a time when children were what adults wanted them to be so let the young be young because, in another generation, they will be doing exactly the same to their offspring and chuntering about their silly haircuts/pop music/lack of respect for the rules. In turn they’re everything children fear about the world: that they’re commodities to be treated any way the people in charge like, be they politicians, military leaders, scientists or gullible people with more money than sense who keep voting the wrong people in. Not how old everyone in this story is though, it’s the Dr Who equivalent of ‘don’t trust anyone over thirty’ because they’ve all been eaten up y the ‘system’ and brainwashed, something very much in keeping with what the 1960s stories were (mostly) saying.

Rather than just your everyday Dr Who megalomaniacs, though, they do have a point: there was a moment, at the start of lockdown when the deserted streets of all our major cities (and minor ones) went quiet and the wildlife came back again when I found myself thinking about this story (in between, y’know, thoughts of dystopia and the end of the world) and thought that maybe ‘Operation Golden Age’ had a point (before thinking ‘oh no, I’m turning into Martin Jarvis!’) The world still continued on without us and in many ways nature was carrying on better without us there to interrupt it. There’s a part of me that really wants to see brontasauruses and diplodocuses running round the Earth again, even at the cost of being eaten while watching them, although even I think they should maybe put it to a vote to see if humans mind being wiped out first. Hulke gives the Doctor the perfect speech, sympathising with their motives but not with their means because ‘we have to make the best of the world we live in now’ rather than fit it to what we want it to be. It’s one of the all-time great Dr Who speeches and I’m surprised it’s better known and printed on t-shirts or something.  

Mike Yates, of course, isn’t a dinosaur yet (he’s meant to be about what? Thirty here) you can also see why he gets caught up in this world. Now, UNIT aren’t just your regular army of nobodies; across six years they’ve become like family, we’ve seen them rise and fall, fight off petty faceless bureaucrats and petty faceless aliens both and we’ve come to trust them implicitly. Yet this ‘betrayal’ isn’t really a betrayal at all that comes out of left field – in many ways Yates’ new friends represent all the green credentials and ethos that the Doctor has been spouting on our behalf for so long. He’s had a horrid time and been damaged by the system. There he was, living his lie and following UNIT orders working undercover for this nice old computer away from the lefty ideals of the Doctor for months and BOSS the computer has got to him: all that order! All that logic! It sounded so good! Even now that he’s back and working for UNIT he can’t help but wonder…is what he’s doing really right? I mean, the world’s so chaotic now, so unpredictable and unsafe, invaded every two seconds by one monster or another and in his line of work he gets to see people hurt by the current system a lot. Not like the future BOSS envisioned. That was safe, predictable. He’s a man used to taking orders from people he trusts and after what he went through might well feel as if the Brigadier let him down (though somebody had to go undercover). Could it be, too, that he resents the lefty types trying to save the world their way, because Jo used to be his girlfriend? The cleverness of this story is you can see both why he wants to join Operation Golden Age– and why he’s wrong, because there never was a Golden Age to go back to. The moment when he turns, when Sarah (whom he’s never met, this being her second ever story) realises that he’s ‘one of them’ is one of the all-time great twists in the series, one we don’t see coming but one which makes perfect sense. Richard Franklin, whose acting was always variable in the series, is a lot happier making the Captain shifty and uneasy than he is as a straightforward dashing hero. It’s such a brave thing to do and the sort of ‘character arc’ we’d never had in the series before: by and large you can watch any character’s stories out of order before this one and it wouldn’t change a thing (Jo being the one exception, growing from hapless dependent to powerful strong woman across her three series) but this one really does things nobody would have been expecting in 1974. The sequel, in ‘Planet Of The Spiders’ when Yates atones for putting people in danger, then gives Yates redemption, which is exactly how it should be for a character who always wanted the best for people even when those methods were wrong. Written with the usual strong characters and moral ambiguities of Malcolm Hulke’s expert penmanship, ‘Invasion’ Of the Dinosaurs’ is a story where nobody wins and everybody loses, fully in keeping with producer Barry Letts’ Buddhist principles, of analysing your own hypocrisy and ego-trips, even when you think you’re doing the right thing (a journey that will end with a symbolic ‘death’ for this Doctor in three stories’ time). Hulke himself claimed it was the best of all his Dr Who scripts: I’m not sure I quite agree (‘The Silurians’ was just too good!) but nevertheless in pure script and character terms ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ works a treat!

There are a few things that really hamper this story’s ability to be as good as it sounds on paper though. The biggest and most obvious one is the part everyone’s been pointing out since the episodes were first screened: the dinosaur models are truly awful, crude in every way the script isn’t. So much so that many fans have wondered if the dinosaurs were inserted against the writer’s will, but no: they were the part of the plot that was always supposed to be there, because they really did they could pull these models off and make them look good, honest. I mean the idea of including them is sound: what better way to signify a lost past can there be than the life-forms that once ruled the Earth and didn’t have any of that messy human society nonsense? Including dinosaurs in Dr Who for the first time is a great idea in any story but especially this one as it’s not just in a throwaway scifi ‘oh look a lost colony/DNA splicing experiment gone wrong/They’ve been kidnapped by a mad alien intent on selling his cargo to the highest bidder’ way either like most lesser shows. In a series where the Doctor can travel anywhere in time and so often hangs around Earth it’s weird that he hasn’t bumped into the creatures that ruled the planet for one hell of a lot longer than Humanity has. Unfortunately, 1974 effects being what they were, they look less believable than almost anything in this series, as if they were put together out of random bits left in a box. By the time of the last model shot in episode they look as if they are falling apart so badly it’s as if they’ve been left inside a swamp since at least the Cretacous era, not six weeks of filming. They’re also clearly not anywhere near the Doctor or friends, with some of the worst CSO (Colour Separation Overlay) shots around, a series of ‘mistakes’ meaning that quite often the models and the live footage were shot from different camera angles and couldn’t be matched up in the edit (which is why you have sudden and sometimes rather rude close ups of dinosaur body parts). While normally the rule with Dr Who is that if you’re too caught up in the models and not in the story you’re watching the wrong show, the dinosaurs really are so poor you can’t take anything they do seriously. And as a result you can’t take operation golden age seriously. And so a story about the true horrors of what man can do to man becomes a comedy everyone points and laughs at.

What went wrong exactly? Yet again the true evil of Dr Who turns out to be capitalism: Operation Golden Age might have an unlimited budget, but Dr Who didn’t. Specifically the production team baulked at the proposed costs of all the dinosaur models that the effects team came up with and who were, besides, so overwhelmed with orders from other programmes that they would never have been able to complete every effects shot wanted all in time for the show’s broadcast date given Dr Who’s notoriously quick turnaround. A solution was quickly found: sometimes when the BBC were understaffed they turned to an independent model-maker, Westbury Design and Optical and, better yet, they were far cheaper. They were also, however, far less experienced and tended to over-promise and under-sell on their models. The models all needed to ‘move’, so rather than the usual stationary ones the company could do they became rod-puppets that could be manipulated, wire meshes covered in latex that really didn’t look much like skin. I have to say I came to this story after seeing pictures of it in guidebooks and thought the still photographs didn’t look that bad: certainly no worse than all the B–movie budget films about lost worlds of dinosaurs that either starred Conan-Doyle’s characters or Raquel Welsh’s anachronistic cavewomen. They’re a different matter when they have to do something on film though, with jerky movements that make Wallace and Gromit look like graceful ballerinas and a scene of two long-necked beasts fighting that’s done so weirdly that it looks to all the world as if they’re kissing. Normally when model shots go wrong in Dr Who they just shoot them in the dark and keep them back for one or two shots so that we don’t see the full horrors of what they look like, but poor director Paddy Russell was stuck: almost every cliffhanger in this story called for one to appear somewhere and all the darkness in the world wasn’t going to save this lot. I wish wish wish that we’d had this clever plot with the budget of ‘Jurassic park’, instead of that dumb plot with the good effects (for his part Letts called this story his biggest disappointment o the show and raved that with how ‘Walking With Dinosaurs’ turned out they could remake it in the 1990s to look really good; sadly we got ‘Dinosaurs On A Spaceship’ instead). Ironically they look a lot better in black-and-white, despite the continual efforts down the years to colourise the ‘missing’ part one of this series, which is the last episode of Dr Who not to be kept in the archives (it’s a murky story: the first part might have been wiped after confusion that it was part of the Troughton story ‘The Invasion’ and thus, as a black and white story, unlikely to be repeated or sold abroad; then again the rest were wiped too: as ever we owe Ian Levine big time for rescuing this stuff in a condition even vaguely broadcastable, although the colourisation process hit more problems than the ones for ‘Terror Of The Autons’ or ‘The Daemons’ and never looks quite right).

What’s perhaps more unforgivable (and something you think the writer would know, given the amount of complaints he got about whether the Silurians could ever have come from the Silurian era) is that all these dinosaurs have supposedly been taken from London in the past (T Rexes – although the one on screen looks more like an Allosaurus as the nation’s seven year old boys pointed out in droves, Apatasauruses, Stegosauruses, Brontosauruses, Triceratops and Pterodactyls) never ever lived there. We had more than our fair share of interesting dinosaurs we could have used: some Camptosauruses (a sort of brown, less aggressive T Rex with a droopier neck that gave him a bit of a hunch; I like to think they walked around in a Hawaiian shirt), an Iguanadon and a Baryonyx (a sort of pterodactyl without the wings) and a Gigantosaurus or three (because apparently we had an obesity problem in this country even back then), It’s almost as if Hulke, who had no interest in dinosaurs, did the old Terrance Dicks trick of picking a book up from the children’s section of the library and writing down the first ones he came across, however unlikely. For all that, though, the thrill of even a bad and shoddy looking dinosaur popping up in the middle of a modern road is exactly what this series is for, the ordinary and extraordinary hitting each other head on. As for hoe they sound, well…That’s the problem, nobody knows exactly how a dinosaur would have sounded and unless we somehow revive one or go back in time for real we’ll never know. For all we know they sounded just like this and the radiophonic workshop at least make their sound effects organic (the T Rex, for example, is a mooing cow played backwards, although some of the dinosaurs are made very squeaky on the grounds that they had tiny voice boxes, which might be scientifically accurate but is aesthetically a non-starter).

No a bigger deal is the rather weird amount of sub-plots going on, none of which ever really get anywhere and which somehow seem a lot more unlikely than sucking up dinosaurs from the past. Take the one about kidnapping Sarah Jane and making her think that she’s been sent on a spaceship to another world, something that just isn’t believable at any point and seems to take aeons to resolve. In theory it ought to be an emotional moment where Sarah has everything taken away from her – but we all know that she’s a trained journalist so unused to getting herself into scrapes long before she met the Doctor, that she’s just trapped in a scientist’s basement like last time. We can see the ventilation shaft and know how she’s going to escape long before she does and even if she were lost in space in this era the Doctor can pilot the Tardis well enough to just get her back again. It just plays on our heartstrings a chord too much, stretching a natural four parter into an unwieldy six parter once again. It’s also incredibly unfeasible: I’m all for that many athletes and writers and what have you being thick and gullible enough to think they really have been sent into space but none of them ever think to look out the window and go ‘gee, we don’t seem to be moving very far do we?’ If I was going on a journey that far into space and risked my life for it I’d want to know everything about it, yet these people all seem kind of ague about the ins and outs of the plan, as if they’ve just popped out for a holiday not committed the rest of their lives to this project. I also find it deeply suspicious that that a mockup spaceship that big would fill up so much of a Government building and yet there hasn’t been one leak about it, not even one large enough for a Rottweiler of a journalist like Sarah Jane Smith to sniff out before now: I mean the government leaks worse than a sieve and you can’t move for people falling over themselves to give official secrets away. That’s why we all knew that denial of those lockdown parties in Downing Street was such a crazy career-suicide thing to do and why it still seems bats to me that Boris Johnson hid the fact that he was really going cold turkey from drugs during a time when there was extra scrutiny on people going on and out of Downing Street and thought wrongly that he could handle the withdrawal, rather than suffering from covid, when he had to go into hospital (even going so far as to dismiss every nurse who came into contact with him if they so much as breathed funny, an open secret if you follow as many civil servants online as I do). It’s a plothole big enough to drive a triceratops through and unusual for a writer of Hulke’s capabilities. 

Talking of Sarah Jane, Elisabeth Sladen doesn’t seem quite ‘right’ all story – the Sarah of her other first few stories would be treating her kidnapping as a journalistic scoop rather than getting as blubby as she does here. Hulke feels as if he’s writing for Jo Grant as a journalist (the very thought!) and struggles to include Letts’ series notes that she’s an independent woman with a career of her own; this Sarah is just a wimp, not at all how she is in other stories. She’s pretty thick too, waking up a dinosaur with flash photography because she’s forgotten she’s in the dark, in the way Jo Grant would have done endearingly (but here gets on your nerves). She’s a journalist used to taking her own photos; Sarah Jane’s not above making basic errors like all companions, but this really shouldn’t be one of them. Then again he’s painted himself into a corner here as Hulke: he needs a character whose gullible enough to be sold down the river by the military and government officials all in on the scheme and yet who are so obviously the bad guys they might as well have flashing neon t-shirts and a curly moustache and he can’t make it the Doctor without undoing eleven years of the series, so it has to be Sarah – even though, as a journalist, she’s spent her career learning who to trust and getting to the truth of issues. The lack of the usual UNIT regulars for so much of the story is a necessary one, given that one of the best aspects of the story is taking away the things we know and love and giving us the rare sight of an evacuated UNIT HQ removed to a school of all places. There’s a particularly lovely moment for Benton, almost the last person our friends can trust, as he’s forced to follow general Finch’s orders but knows the Doctor is always right so he advises his friend to knock him out ‘with some Venusian ooji’ – he might end up court-martialled for it, but at least he and everyone else will be alive (there’s an even nicer character moment, sadly cut in the editing suite, where a smiling Brigadier orders Benton to ‘guard himself’ because he’s not allowed to still be on duty and he ‘can’t spare any other men’). The Brigadier himself has to be kept away for the vast majority of the story, so that we can see Finch doing all the very un-Brigadiery things, so that even UNIT that we’ve come to love and trust to do the right thing seems to be on the ‘wrong side’(this too might be Hulke’s less than subtle comment on the earthbound series which he’d been complaining about since season seven, because the Doctor is normally against everything the military stand for). I know why the Brig is shunted off the side to this story, but it’s still a shame and there’s another large hole where he ought to be.

The guest cast too don’t seem quite as on top of their game as usual.  John Bennett needs to be a real anti-Brigadier for Captain Finch to work, cold and threatening where he’s all warmth, but John Bennett plays him as a sort of emotionless Auton replica version of the Brig instead which is a subtle difference but enough to lose some of the impact his character should have had. The big turning point of this story, after all, is finding out that even our second home in UNIT has an interloper and isn’t immune to manipulation: instead the baddy is so obvious most can spot him a mile off (everyone but Sarah in fact). Charles Grover MP really needs to be a threat too, the sort of bureaucrat the Doctor’s used to seeing off tenfold, with more power and more charisma, but Noel Johnson doesn’t quite get this part right either, playing him as a sort of Ian Duncan Smith (a posh twit nobody seriously listens to) rather than a David Cameron (an evil misguided man who really does think he’s doing the right thing with tonnes of charisma but no common sense). Even Martin Jarvis struggles with his role as a rather one-dimensional mad ‘n’ bad scientist, though he was superb in both his other Dr Who roles as both a weary governor working for a giant slug and a six foot butterfly (don’t ask; interestingly he’s a lot more enthusiastic reading out the novelisation of this story, which is one of the better adaptations around, mostly thanks to the extra background Hulke always adds to his novels but also the fact that you can imagine the dinosaurs however you want to in your head).

Pertwee lacks his usual verve too but I suspect that’s more a problem with the acting than the writing. Jon really didn’t enjoy working on his final year: he was missing Katy Manning and Roger Delgado and hasn’t had any scenes with Nick Courtney yet so he’s mostly on his own with the new girl he hasn’t fully bonded with yet. In addition his bad back is playing up again (an injury from his navy days that many of his Dr Who stunts set off) and life prancing round London is difficult so his Doctor is going through the motions as much as he ever does. His biggest moment of enthusiasm comes when The Whomobile arrives, his real life personal car/hovercraft which was built by Pertwee’s car-maker and friend Peter Farries specially for him. Officially named ‘The Alien’ an enthusiastic Pertwee persuaded Letts that it was exactly the sort of thing the Doctor would drive and it duly replaced the generic ‘Doctor drives off in a space age tricycle' chase scene pencilled in for episode five (much to Hulke’s horror). There was nothing else around quite like it: there were three wheels (one for steering, two for power) so that officially on its car registration it was listed as ‘an invalid tricycle’, while the fibreglass shell was revolutionary for the day, 7 feet by 14 feet, and able to withstand speeds of 100mph despite being moulded (usually there would be a weak point at the seams where it joined the chassis). The vehicle came with several Pertwee-friendly gadgets (a stereo, an early mobile phone and even a TV, though goodness knows when he had time to watch it when driving) and was officially roadworthy (though it couldn’t actually go underwater despite the hovercraft ‘skirt’), Pertwee driving it on many a real road, until he got fed up being stopped by police asking for his license! Some say it’s silly and yes it is a bit, especially when driven for no reason in ‘Planet Of the Spiders’ for nearly a whole episode, but it makes sense here: The Whomobile is the style and design of a possible future, a combination of some of mankind’s greatest engineering achievements to date. Can we really throw things like this away to go back in time and play with dinosaurs?   

It is, after all, the middle of a very very long season and after five years of constant work by both production team and most of the cast you can forgive everyone the odd off day. I can see why so many people want to forget this story exists, too, given how it turned out – this was, in fact, the last Dr Who story ever to be released ion VHS (in 2003, when it was a format that already felt prehistoric given that we’d had four years’ worth of DVD releases by then, aptly – even on DVD you could only buy it in a box set twinned with an even more disappointing story ‘The Android Invasion’, for murky unfathomable reasons known only to the Gods of Ragnarok and the BBC marketing team). It’s just a shame that all these things had to go wrong with a script this good – the first two-thirds of it anyway as, once again, the ending is a bit of a let down and bit too easily resolved (the baddies are sent back in time at the press of a button, something that could have happened in episode one and saved us all that bother). For the most part though it’s a rollicking story about trust and authority and what happens when the wrong people are in charge with agendas of their own that no longer keep us safe. I love this story’s unique mix of the past, present and future rolled into one in a way Dr Who had never done in such a way without the story being ‘about’ time – the dinosaurs, the deserted London streets and the fear of the future (and the space age car) all feel part of the same story in a way they wouldn’t in lesser hands. I love the spy theme throughout this story that you never quite know who to trust, with the dinosaurs the one-dimensional threat in a story that’s about three-dimensional Humans and the conflicts and arguments around out future. After all, you know where you are with a dinosaur, but what do you do when the people you’re taught to trust and even the people you know and love let down? That’s a great idea for drama: any drama, not just Dr Who. 

There are some really great moments in this story, most of them featuring an eerily evacuated London, our thriving metropolis at a standstill and the Doctor and Sarah trying to work out what could possibly have happened to make them evacuate 8 million people overnight (at a time when London’s population for real was 7.4 million, incidentally, proving that Hulke at least was thinking of UNIT stories as being in the very near future). Yes my inner seven year old is screaming for more diplodocuses, but the story would in many ways work better without the dinosaurs in it and the models doesn’t spoil this story completely, or at least not as much as everyone says. Even without them,  though, this still isn’t quite a classic: the script isn’t as tight as Hulke’s best and the acting is as lazy as 1970s Who ever gets. Still, if ‘Dinosaurs’ comes across as a little slow and lumbering, like a Stegosaurus on a sit-on lawnmower rather than a T Rex on a motorbike as we all hoped for when we first heard the title of this story, whatever era we first saw this story in, that’s a small problem to have compared to the pure beauty of one of the era’s more thoughtful scripts. This might not be the best script he ever wrote but the incredible Hulke is still my favourite regular writer for the series, a brilliant conjuror of worlds who has so many great points that he wants to make – and how fitting that, in what he probably knew would be his last script for the series (given the change in production team the following year) he offers a story all about the dangers of nostalgia and the need to move on, which in a series that’s fundamentally all about change is as great a way to bow out as any. Having decent dinosaurs on top would just be greedy, though I for one am amazed they haven’t CGId a new bunch for a season eleven blu-ray set yet (presumably towards the back of the pile simply because its main stars, Jon Pertwee Elisabeth Sladen and Nicholas Courtney, are sadly no longer here. Now that was a golden age worth getting nostalgic for! 

One final cheeky thought: this is Hulke’s last script. He knows he can’t be ‘fired’. He’s spent his time on the show gently ribbing his friends making it. Could it be that there’s one last in-joke buried here? Hulke’s least pleasant task on the show by far was re-writing the seven episodes of ‘The Ambassadors Of Death’ straight on the back of the seven episodes of his own ‘Silurians’ script that exhausted him to the point where he (briefly) hated Dr who and everyone on it. Especially every time Terrance Dicks asked him to go back to his basic draft and take out all his nice additions. Could it be that ‘operation golden age’, of returning to the past, is Hulke’s utter hatred of one of Dick’s pet phrases ‘we want it more like the first draft’?  Note the fact that the mad scientists who lives in the past is named Whittaker, just like the writer of the first draft of ‘The Ambassadors Of Death’ (and no, it’s not a reference to Jodie, she won’t be born for another eight years yet).  

POSITIVES + Dr Who had done several invasions of the country in stories past by 1974, generally countryside conveniently close to TV centre which doubled as anywhere in England as needed and, on one occasion each, Wales and Scotland. This time though we’re actually meant to be in the heart of London for only the third time (and the first time in colour) and there are lots of long, lingering location shots of a deserted city centre for good measure which are, in their own way, as shocking as any monster (although that said you can still hear a lot of traffic in the distance which I’m surprised they didn’t mask better in post-production). In ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ and ‘The Invasion’ both the thrill is that the extraordinary things we only see on TV are here in our real world, but the shock here is that the ordinary world is wrong and there’s  no one here at all. It’s truly eerie seeing places deserted, the biggest sign of things gone wrong you can have (it’s not for nothing that memes taken from this story were shared a lot during the pandemic lockdowns). The shots were taken by director Paddy Russell personally  before she’d even officially started work on this story, so if she was arrested for being a spy and taking pictures in the capital at four in the morning (uncomfortably close to what happens to the Doctor and Sarah in part one) she could claim she was a tourist on holiday not officially linked to the BBC. Sadly she didn’t get that far before humans went to work and got in the way but her shots are terrific: Moorgate Underground Station (who refused her permission to take pictures underground but let her linger round the entrance), Smithfield Market, Westminster Bridge (again!), Haymarket, Wimbledon Common…she got round a lot in her couple of hours before calling it a day. It seems somehow right to see Triceratops walking along Trafalgar Square, or Brontasauruses in Covent Garden or T Rexes down the embankment. Since Brits started developing amnesia about Boris and Brexit and strikes and the ongoing covid pandemic and all the other stuff no one talks about any more I can suddenly see why everyone seemed to forget about London being invaded by dinosaurs in stories set in Dr Who’s future too and never mentions it again, something that really bothered me the first time I saw this story (and why we thought they could never ever get away with doing something like this on such a grand scale. The modern series of course does something like this every other week). It’s also spookily accurate, at least the parts about moving the government to Harrogate in Yorkshire (something seriously considered both during WW2 and the 1970s during the cold war to ‘confuse the enemy’, something Hulke must have picked up at some point as its too accurate a detail to just make up. Why Harrogate? Exactly – the sheer unlikeliness of it meant that no enemy was going to correctly guess and bomb it, especially if the government were safely underground).

NEGATIVES - It seems a low blow to go after the dinosaurs in general again, so I’ll switch tactic slightly and go for the pterodactyl model that looms at the Doctor and Sarah in a warehouse that looks suspiciously like an umbrella with something tacked on the end of it being flapped in Jon Pertwee’s face. Because that’s exactly what it is! Yes, unlike the dinosaur shots, which are models everyone was promised would look great until they arrived at the studio, this was always in the script as a prop and was always going to be hard to pull off, regardless of how the other dinosaurs looked. It really doesn’t look convincing one bit and looks even less so if you freeze frame it on DVD (something the production team never, ever expected us to be able to do, to be fair). Pertwee’s doing his best to act scared, but it’s a non-starter and one of those moments that makes Dr Who seem, well, a bit silly.

BEST QUOTE: ‘It's not the oil and the filth and the poisonous chemicals that are the real cause of pollution, Brigadier. It's simply greed’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Well here’s a weird one. Proof that Dr who could turn up inside any programme comes with the 1974 new year edition of the long-running series Billy Smart’s Circus, broadcast six days before episode one of Dinosaurs’. A short three-minute cameo, it features the debut of the Whomobile, driven by Jon Pertwee (with Gabriella Smart and various dogs) into the middle of the circus tent as a clearly nervous performer gabbles away at top speed to the bemused circus owner’s son David. The Doctor was driving to UNIT HQ, came across Gabriella crying and gave her a lift. She’s still missing some dogs though so they drive off again to look for them (she comes back later in a far less daft car, without the Doctor sadly). A nice insight into how Pertwee would have been at all the big fetes and carnivals he used to open, practically every week back when he was the Doctor. Included on the ‘Invasion Of The Dinosaurs’ DVD. 

Not forgetting ‘The Dr Who Book Of Dinosaurs’, one of several spin-off books published for the Christmas market in 1976 (another, the Dr Who Book of Pirates, was prepared for the following year but abandoned after poor sales until being released with Dr Who Magazine in time for ‘The Legend Of The Sea Devils’ in 2022. So at least one good thing came out of that story). It’s a factual book that’s more like an encyclopaedia, a chatty well illustrated book that nicely captures the 4^th Doctor’s style but which is full of little errors and omissions that the Doctor really should have known better (no Gigantasuauses! And Pteradons but no Pterodactyls!) although most of these make sense given our more limited knowledge back in the 1970s. The 4^th Doctor has heard his audience are interested in ‘great lizards’ so takes a trip back in time to look firsthand, starting 180 million years into the past (that’s even before The Spice Girls were born). Going through each of the dinosaur ages in turn, we get to see how the different species rise and fall, with different dinosaurs becoming top dog (well, top dino) and ending weirdly enough with some early mammals who lived post-dinosaurs, including the Doctor’s ‘favourite’ the ‘Megatherium’ (a sort of prototype accident-prone sleepy sloth, who resembles Harry Sullivan his then travelling companion a little) and Humans who are described as ‘the fiercest and most dangerous killer to ever walk The Earth. Though he doesn’t look too impressive at the moment does he? No armour to protect him, no fur even, no claws and fangs to attack with or fight off his enemies’. The Doctor then has the audacity to comment that he has no idea how the dinosaurs died and gave out some theories, none of which include ‘a ship piloted by my future assistant being pursued by Cybermen being sent back in time and ramming into the Earth’ (see ‘Earthshock’). Lovingly illustrated, it’s a cute stocking-filler for children that loved the series and dinosaurs. And honestly that’s everybody who loved the series isn’t it?! I think it’s fair to say that Chris Chibnall, who wrote ‘Dinosaurs On A Spaceship’ and Steven Moffat who commissioned it, were both nerdy enough fans to still have this volume on their bookshelves somewhere.    

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