The Gunfighters
(Season 3, Dr 1 with Steven and Dodo, 30/4/1966-20/5/1966, producer: Innes Lloyd, script editor: Gerry Davis, writer: Donald Cotton, director: Rex Tucker)
Rank: 170
🎵Don't look now but there goes a Judoon
Interrupting the ballad of the last chance saloon
The Doctor's not happy, he's broken out in a frown
Because a slitheen's just got him on the ground
No wonder he's in such a bad mood
Now he's been sat on by an Ood
And a Sea Devil in an old string vest
What are they all doing in the Wild Wild West?
Why they've come to exterminate the ultra-maroon
Who insists on endlessly singing the ballad at the last chance saloon
Then pandemonium breaks out as the Doctor drinks his Manhattan
For up next is even worse - the song from The Rings Of Akhaten! 🎵
𝅘𝅥𝅮 'Well fill up your glasses and settle down with these tweets, they go on for a while so maybe get something to eat? As I recall a DW story that fills most fans with gloom, the only one with its theme tune, about the last chance saloon’. 𝅘𝅥𝅮
But that was, fittingly for a series about time travel, a problem for then, not for now and while ‘The Gunfighters’ is hardly a classic of the highest order, it might well be the most unfairly misunderstood story of the lot in this book. More than any other story from the 20th century the reputation of this one has grown to the point where we appreciate it more: as a one-off amongst 328 different adventures (and counting) it’s a lot more palatable than it was as the 25th ever story. We’re no longer bombarded by competing Westerns that look bigger and better. The whiplash-inducing bounces from tragedy to farce make a lot more sense both to modern viewers used to programmes in general doing this (the ‘Office’ era comedies of fake authenticity from the early 2000s that leave us unsure if we should laugh or cry are very much in the same formula as writer Donald Cotton) and in Dr Who in particular (now that stories run for just 50minutes most weeks having sudden changes like this are far more common and a regular staple of stories under all three modern showrunners Davies, Moffat and Chibnall). For all that ‘The Gunfighters’ is obviously made on a small budget in black-and-white in a studio so cramped the horses don’t have space to get up to full trot before running into the scenery, it feels modern in a way that its contemporaries feel very much rooted in the 1960s: the big word here is irony and while viewers in the 1960s liked to keep their programmes, well, black and white (with comedies that were funny and tragedies that were tragic) we can understand and appreciate this story much better now. What in 1966 seemed like a cul-de-sac now seems like a shortcut to what we know today and ‘The Gunfighters’ has shot up ‘favourite story’ polls like few others: admittedly from the very bottom rungs to somewhere about two-thirds down but even so: it seems fair to say that more fans like this story now than have ever liked it before and it’s a story whose reputation grows all the time. You can date this story’s slow rise in popularity to Mel Brooks’ 1974 film ‘Blazing Saddles’ I think, the first movie to laugh at Westerns as a genre and turn cowboys from heroes who know what they’re doing to figures of fun – but ‘The Gunfighters’ got there first by eight years and broke all the rules. No wonder the average viewer didn’t know what to make of it and just wanted some aliens to come back.
You certainly wouldn’t get a story made like this now – because there’s no way a Western would be popular enough to pull in viewers (I mean, they sort of tried it with ‘A Town Called Mercy’ in 2012 I suppose but only by whacking a scifi plot on top of the Western one). To be honest it was a bit of a stretch in 1966, with Westerns a fad peculiar to the 1950s that was all but dead by 1966. Nobody seems quite sure why watching cowboys was such a particular past time for 15 odd years but I can have a guess: in the immediate post-WW2 era America were the heroes of the hour, the country of gunslingers that had saves us from the Nazis and hadn’t yet pulled British troops along into a number of questionable wars in Vietnam and Korea. They also had two things Britain didn’t have in the immediate post-war period: money and space. We were still living off rationing and rebuilding homes post-bombing raids that were small and easy to erect but cramped. The Americans seemed to be ‘free’ in a way Brits did not. The idea of a good fighting evil from a country that had just won a war, across a desert landscape that was impossibly wide and luxurious, out in nature that was untouched by Hitler’s bombs, was a popular form of escapism for people who wanted their brave new world to look a little like that. At one time or another there were fifty separate American TV series celebrating the open range and goodness how many films. By 1966 though a new generation is in town and rustling for a fight: the kids who were beginning to question just how black-and-white the idea of good versus evil was when the ‘cowboys’ had just dropped a nuclear bomb on two Japanese towns and seemed to be itching to drop another on Russia. This is the age of questioning authority, of not just accepting that the good guys were good because they said they were. Rationing had ended, teenagers had money to spend on luxuries that were hip and now (not the sort of things their parents bought on American import but mostly British made records) and Britain had her own identity again. Swinging London was the place to be, closely followed by industrial Liverpool, not the countryside. Cars with horsepower were the thing, not horses. The heroes of the day weren’t sheriffs apprehending criminals but the outlaws who dared to speak the truth (and truth was very big to the 1960s in a way it had never been in the 1950s, when as a whacking generalisation most people were trying to pretend their life was perfect and getting better, honest, because otherwise what would all that loss in the war have been for?) The fad for Westerns gradually dwindled to the point where the only ones still on TV by 1966 were the super-popular and long running ones like ‘Bonanza’ and ‘Gunsmoke’ and the only films still being made were comedies (‘Carry On Cowboy’ was but a few months old when this story was on air).
And then in comes ‘The Gunfighters’, which in the TV ratings war seemed to be taking a knife to a gunfight. Why did they do it? Well, William Hartnell says it was his idea or at least he did to ‘The Mirror’ newspaper, though like many Hartnell official quotes I suspect the reporter just bumped into him on a grouchy day when the production team were picking on him and he felt his expertise in films and television was being taken for granted so wanted to sound more in control of his life than he really was (a few months later, when he’s effectively sacked from Who, he’ll tell so many official papers that he took the decision to leave that most fans will get into a real muddle about the circumstances over which he became Patrick Troughton, but that’s another story for four stories’ time, or at any rate it is if you’re the sort of fan who reads these reviews in strict chronological order). Official paperwork shows that it was outgoing script editor Donald Tosh, who’d enjoyed working with Donald Cotton on ‘The Myth Makers’ and quite fancied doing another historical about the sort of event most children knew without looking it up in the library, like the gunfight at the OK Coral. Cotton, who’d been passionate about Ancient Greece but knew little about the Wild West, did the bare minimum of research (most of it coming from his one time cabaret act and writing partner Tony Snell who was working in America at the time and took a detour via the real town of Tombstone in Arizona to send back some thoughts. Apparently not very many of them: even compared to other Who stories that have Nero being influenced by the Doctor (‘The Romans’) or Cotton’s own story where the Doctor gives the Trojans the idea for their wooden horse (‘The Myth Makers’) or even modern-day stories where the Doctor locks Hitler in a cupboard (‘Let’s Kill Hitler’) the inaccuracies in this story are legendary. ‘The Gunfighters’ has the gunfight at the OK Coral take place in the main high street, not an empty backlot behind it. They have Wyatt Earp as the all-American hero working as the Sherriff, when he wasn’t – his younger brother Virgil was the deputy (though an overseer sheriff of a wider area of which Tombstone was just a part) while the more, shall we say? morally dubious Wyatt was running a saloon named ‘The Oriental’ a few towns over from Tombstone which was really a front for a gambling den: Doc Holliday and Bat Masterson were two of his regular card dealers. In the gunfight itself three people were killed (Frank McLeary, Tom McLaury and Billy Clanton), three more injured (Virgil in the leg, Morgan in the shoulder, Doc Holliday in the hip), four of the characters in this story definitely weren’t there (including Johnny Ringo) while another character was pure fiction’ borrowed’ from a 1957 film of the event (Kate).
Most damningly of all there’s not one mention of the incident that kick-started the whole thing: Wyatt Earp had a fast racehorse that won him lots of money as an inveterate gamble, but one day it was stolen with Billy Clanton rumoured to be spotted riding it, enough for a hothead like Wyatt to get angry. Things weren’t helped by the fact that Wyatt fancied the same girl as the true Marshall of the town (John Behan, a figure who isn’t in this story at all) who chose Wyatt and created a lifelong rivalry (losing a horse and gaining a woman seems good odds to me but that’s not how they saw it!) Far from being the entire feud (an event that lasted thirty seconds at the most not the minutes it lasts here: a newspaper headline in local paper ‘The Tombstone Epitaph’ ran ‘Three men sent to eternity in the matter of a moment’) it ran for decades and would result in the death of Morgan and the crippling for life of Virgil before it ended, neither of which are seen here. The reason people talked about the OK Coral wasn’t that it was the biggest gunfight or the most important but because it featured such good shots: no less than three ex-sheriffs. Who in the Dr Who version all appear to be truly terrible shots. The result looks as if Cotton ignored all facts altogether and is the sort of thing seemingly guaranteed to give a true researcher like Peter Haining apoplexy.
So why bother? Because it’s meant to be funny. We know from his own script for ‘The Romans’ that script editor Donald Tosh was more interested in a good story than truth telling and the more funny the better, with Donald Cotton more than happy to follow suit: these two knew they were making children’s telly, not an accurate representation of world history. ‘The Gunfighters’ comes from a particularly 1960s strand of Dr Who that only lasted a few years and which a lot of fans misunderstand. Back in the days before Who was ‘about’ bases under siege or ripping off Hammer horror films or yetis on the loo in Tooting Bec it was about the relationship viewers had with their TVs. Dr Who’s unique selling point wasn’t necessarily the time or space aspects but the fact that it was the one show that could channel-hop the way you could from your sofas, with a space and time machine that meant it could go anywhere into any programme – and in 1966, in the days before repeats and videos, it was a one time thing never to be repeated. We’d already had historicals, comedies, Dalek-filled war films, ‘The Web Planet’s twist on an nature documentary in space, the beginning of ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ that looked to all the world like a United Nations conference, heck just like week we had what looked like a quiz show from outer space. What was the ‘other’ big hit with UK TV viewers in the 1960s that wasn’t scifi? It was Westerns. What was, more often than not, on ITV at the same time as Dr Who in the 1960s? ‘Gunsmoke’. ‘The Gunfighters’ is meant to be a swaggering parody, a spoof of the other programmes you saw on TV by throwing the Doctor and companions at this world and shaking it up the same way Who always did. Only because Westerns are, by their nature, serious (or at least they always were in 1966) the discrepancy between how they behave and how ‘The Gunfighters’ acts is all the bigger.
I think it’s more than that though: Cotton is actively laughing at the genre, treating this very 1950s fad that parents would have enjoyed with the sweeping cynicism of their very 1960s children. I’ve raised it a few times already that my view of 1960s Dr Who is that it’s an ongoing discussion between generations, almost the only safe space in the 1960s that families watched together and had to juggle both points of view to hold viewers. Just imagine for a moment that you’re a teenager in 1966 who has pen-friends or maybe cousins the same age in America facing the draft, while your mum and dad keep talking about how awful the last war was and the papers are full of apprehensions about what the pesky communists are up to and how there’ll be another. Till now you’ve lived your life in an atmosphere of watching mum and dad in rapture at the all-American cowboys sweeping in to save everyone ay the last moment and put things right and they’ve said it so many times almost begun to believe it themselves. They don’t see the ruin and poverty and the deprivation the war caused: they see it as a noble and just cause to fight foreigners. There you are, scared that you’ll be next to fight your near neighbours when world travel is easier now and you know that foreigners your age are just like you, that it’s your parents who seem to have come from outer space. Your favourite show is Dr Who, a show where, far from being a rooting tooting gun-toting cowboy upholding the law he’s an alien whose a bit of a rebel himself, more likely to tear down an authority figure if he sees it as being wrong as uphold it and never with a gum but with his brains and the help, not of an army, but of his friends. Yeah the Doctor’s an elderly authoritarian figure himself but he’s more like your Edwardian Grandad than your mum and dad: he’s more like the figures who fought in WW1, young conscripts who had no choice and didn’t think war was noble.
This is a series that’s all about being nice to strangers and realising that those who don’t look or think like you aren’t necessarily evil just different: let’s face it, in Dr Who the exotic Indians nearly always tend to be more friendly than the gung-h cowboys. Till now your mum and dad have lapped up every word the Westerns say, even when you know everything they say about American cowboys and the wonders of capitalism don’t chime with how you see the world. And then you watch ‘The Gunfighters’. Your parents are enjoying the fact they’ve got horses on TV instead of that alien rubbish, but you see a world where everything you hate about your parents’ generation, which is usually taken so seriously and sacrosanctly, is being mercilessly parodied. Of course they don’t bother with the facts. What do facts matter? What does a tiny battle in a tiny corner of a tiny country (who thinks it runs the world but doesn’t) matter when you watch a show that covers the entire universe! Did the audience appreciation index, the lowest Dr Who ever scored (a 30% approval rating for episode four!) which was bruising enough to make the OK Coral gunfight look like a playground skirmish, ask the children what they thought? No, by and large it asked the mums and dads, who were slightly uncomfortable with the way their children kept laughing at what they held so dear. And Peter Haining? He’s a scholar who believes in accuracy – this story wasn’t made for him either. Above all else, it’s meant to be funny (something a lot of fans including him seem to miss, if only because Westerns are no longer as common as they were)– especially if you know your source material, both because of the way it nails its cliches and the way it subverts them, by deliberately making this big legendary fight so small (we are in a tiny BBC studio after all). ‘Star Trek’ was already on air in the States and pitched as ‘cowboys and Indians in space’; Dr Who was always far more nuanced and about how you can’t always separate history into goodies and baddies, with this story pretty neutral which side of the fight is ‘right’. Think of it as a particularly meta Monkees episode rather than a Dr Who one, where the audience are in on the joke, and it all makes sense.
It is, after all, by Donald Cotton – one of the funniest of all Who writers, who before this had written similarly groan-inducing puns in Ancient Greece and later a Who novel set in Ancient Rome. The trouble was, by the time they came to make it, Donald Tosh was gone and so was producer John Wiles, replaced by the altogether more serious figures Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis, who don’t understand this story at all. They think they’ve inherited a proper scifi series and want to use to critique serious worried about the present day, not a comedy laughing at the past. What’s the good of doing that when there’s a nuclear missile primed and ready to strike? But they miss the point: ‘The Gunfighters’ is laughing at a fundamental level much bigger than getting its facts wrong and saying ‘oops’; it’s a fundamental subversion of the very country that in 1966 seemed to be about to drag Britain into another war. This is comedy on a much bigger scale than the people making it (except, perhaps, Hartnell and Peter Purves, who nail the jokes) realised. So the production team trim the jokes (a lot of which were put back into the novel, which isn’t a patch on ‘The Myth Makers’ but is a lot better than the TV version), throw in some gun battles, add a few incidental details and have a lot more capturing and escaping, because they’re the sort of things that always happen in Westerns. Cotton himself was perplexed by some of the changes this new production team asked him to make: this wasn’t the story he’d been asked to write at all, but a straight drama without the knowing winks he’d written to the audience.
I don’t know how far this production had got along before the change in production team but I’m willing to bet it was around halfway through casting: while every guidebook will tell you this story is closely based on the romanticised version of the truth ‘Gunfight At The OK Coral’ from 1957 (it even has it’s own version of ‘The Ballad Of The Last Chance saloon’, sung by Frankie Laine on the back of his success with ‘rawhide’) I think Cotton crossed that source material with one much closer to home and in line with Dr Who’s budget. Two of the actors hired for this story were alumni from Gerry Anderson’s puppet franchise. One of them was even in ‘Four Feather Falls’ the 1960 series that is to Westerns what ‘Stingray’ is to ‘The Poseidon Adventure’, a series that’s meant to be serious yet also for children on a stupidly small budget, which has very minor violence (of a sort that won’t upset the under-tens) and which breaks things up every few scenes for a song, with sheriff Tex Tucker played by my pick as the best crooner of the period Michael Holliday (with Nicholas Parsons, of ‘Curse Of Fenric’, as his talking voice). That’s Shane Rimmer, one of the breakout voice stars of 1966 thanks to his role as Scott Tracey in Anderson’s ‘Thunderbirds’ playing Seth Harper and our very own David Graham, a Dalek voice regular but also ‘Parker’ in ‘Thunderbirds’ and the voice of Grandpa Twink and the baddy Fernando The Bandit in ‘Four Feather Falls’ as hapless barman Charlie. Only look ma, they’ve got legs, the voices off the telly, they’re real! The joke lost on many is that ‘The Gunfighters’ looks like ‘Four Feather Falls’ made for real, with actual people, in an awkward halfway house between the kiddie-friendly puppet fair and the gruesome reality of what the Wild West would have really been like. The fact that we have a ballad interrupting the action every few minutes is straight out of ‘Four feather Falls’, emphasising how this is children’s fair. Except it isn’t, the story – like ‘The Myth Makers’ – ending with a finale so bloody (quite apart from the gunshoot itself Steven is very nearly lynched by a braying mob despite being entirely innocent). ‘Is this what you revere?’ the story asks the mums and dads of the land ‘These American cowboys aren’t the pure heroes you see them as: people die and get hurt because of them. They wiped out the Indians! We’re Dr who fans – we see through your façade and how fake it all is!’ A lot of viewers are confused by the sudden tone change at the end and consider it a mistake but that’s the whole point of this story I think: you’re meant to be whisked out of your ‘gee its only drama’ mentality when you watch this and see war for what it really is. In an ongoing discussion for and anti war Cotton is firmly on the side of the kids: there’s nothing heroic about killing people. Except on TV. And Dr Who was always more than ‘just’ a TV programme to the people writing it (well, by and large: I mean there was that Tom Baker story about a talking cactus and the Peter Capaldi story about trees coming alive, but basically).
I can see why ‘The Gunfighters’ isn’t everyone’s cup of tea though: the production misunderstands the script and botches it up. Quite aside from the new script editor and producer mishandling it they hand it to director Rex Tucker, as much a part of the ‘old’ school as anyone who ever worked on Who (he was originally hired to create Dr Who from scratch in 1963 but ended up clashing with Verity Lambert, young and female and everything he wasn’t, so often Sydney Newman gave him a different post; he’s said to have moaned the entire shoot how Dr Who was beneath him and only a children’s programme – notably he only returns to the series now that Verity isn’t there). Tucker shoots it straight, removes any sense of the absurd from the script and treats what was meant to be a funny story about how you couldn’t possibly shoot a Western in an English TV studio with as authenticity as he can (with a lot of part four shot at the bigger studios at Ealing; though when I say ‘bigger’ that’s not by much and it was purely a paperwork thing as they wouldn’t allow live animals at Riverside). Far from looking like a puppet’s show on telly it now looks like a cramped version of ‘Bonnie and Clyde’. To be fair to him Tucker does a great job in the circumstances: faced with a cramped studio he still uses extras galore and even horses and shoots from the high (fake) storeys of the saloon to get unusual camera angles to make everything look bigger. Barry Newberry worked overtime on the sets, lovingly re-creating the feel of Tombstone (he did do his research, asking Yale University for everything they had – and was shocked to learn that most Western towns of the 1880s looked like red brick English ones anyway, so went for fakeness in the end to reflect the myth of the West rather than the real thing). ‘The Gunfighters’ looks amazing: even though the script is rather counting on it looking stupid.
I really feel for the poor actors though, who clearly don’t know how to play it. Some under-act, others over-act while everyone bar the regulars (and even them on occasion) sound ‘wrong’: it was hoped that they’d be able to hire true American actors for this story but in the end only one person in the entire cast was actually born Stateside – and that’s Reed De Rouen in the minor part as Pa Clanton (Shane Rimmer gets bonus points for being a Canadian who can do a pretty good facsimile of an American twang). Everyone else though: not a hope. Half of the cast sound as if they’re having a stroke and the other half give up and sound like they’re Londoners with a cold (rehearsals were often interrupted by guffaws as actors tested out their accents: for what it’s worth I reckon Cotton was sharp enough to realise this and make it all part of the joke – until everyone else got on board and it was played straight). It’s a good job this story doesn’t only exist on audio because it sounds terrible. The characters themselves are poor too, even granted that Cotton was writing them as clichés: Wyatt Earp is as goody-two-shoes a sheriff as you’ll ever find, while Doc Holliday’s scheming is mildly irritating, Laurence Payne’s square-jawed Johnny Ringo is incredibly bland even for a thankless ‘hero’ role (the production team wanted a craggy face and originally tried Patrick Troughton, before finding out he was booked) and floozy Kate gets up your nose quicker than covid; of the cast only Richard Hurndall feels comfortable (he’s a lot better at playing Ike Clanton than he is playing William Hartnell in ‘the Five Doctors’). Everyone in this town feels like a walking, talking cliché straight out of the pictures: a clever idea had everyone followed the script more closely and realised what was going on, but still such a fall from grace from the rounded authentic characters of past Who historicals by David Whittaker and John Lucarotti. Then there’s that blasted song that keeps breaking the action up just as it gets going: Tucker re-wrote half of it to fit the plot better (Cotton wrote the more atmospheric verses). It’s a nice idea on paper, adding to the artificiality and half-truths of this world, but in practice nineteen verses is way too many and Lynda Baron (yes, the ‘Open All Hours’ actress who’ll later guest in ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Closing Time’) entirely the wrong singer for it. This isn’t a believable world at all and even though it was nearer in time than any Dr Who historical thus far (William Hartnell being born just twenty-seven years after the real gunfight took place, while in 1966 there were still people around who’d witnessed it firsthand (albeit as youngsters in 1881 and who were now OAPS) it feels like a much further off, alien world. The fight at the OK Corral itself is only kind of OK too, the budget visibly stretched by episode four, a letdown after four episodes of knowing we were getting there.
All that said, the Dr Who elements work well in this world. A lot is asked of a still new to TV Peter Purves and he’s superb, a scifi astronaut from the future who hasn’t got a clue what’s happening in this bewildering world around him, someone who lives by entire different laws regarding life and death who flits between horror at the world about him, pure farce at the ways he tried to avoid it and his natural survivor’s instinct allowing him to play these characters off one another just enough to live. He’s also a passable singer, despite his embarrassment at being asked to (as written it should have been Dodo but Jackie Lane couldn’t sing as well so they switched it round in rehearsals). Only his accent lets the side down: why oh why did they decide to make a story set in America so soon after seeing his accent as Morton sodding Dill in ‘The Chase’? (Still the single most unconvincing accent in the series even with so many nearlies in this story to choose from). Dodo herself is less irritating than normal: her chirpiness and relentless optimism in the face of danger is a gift for Cotton and it wouldn’t surprise me if his original script had her go through far more gruesome realities in episode four rather than merely disappear from the plot (because this entire story is about how the Wild West isn’t as romantic as we’re told). The Doctor has never felt more alien: he hates the gambling, the drinking (even though he was happily knocking back mead in ‘The Time Meddler’ eight stories ago), the debauchery and especially the reckless shooting without regard for other people’s lives and spends most of this story tutting at everyone while they react to him as if he really has come from another planet, even though everyone assumes this week that he’s merely from ‘outta town’. William Hartnell shines, relishing the chance to go back to his comedy roots after years of playing heavy straight men and delivering his lines with just the right sort of tongue-in-cheek knowingness that shows that he at least, was in on Cotton’s jokes. He’s a delight, switching from playing the innocent gullible victim (so that his enemies under-estimate him and consider him a harmless old man) to the masterful cunning chess player we more usually associate to Sylvester McCoy to occasional action hero. Hartnell had, for my money, the greatest range of all the actors and actresses to play the Doctor and after a lull he finally gets a story that asks a lot out of him. Legend has it that he butted heads with the director (backed up by the new producer) every five minutes (often with Purves backing his friend up) but there’s no sense of that on screen: he looks as if he’s having a wonderful time playing at cowboys and Indians.
As dumb as the plot is (what do the Tardis crew care about a gunfight in Arizona?) there’s a real sense of tension as the story gets moving and moves intone of the most brutal and violent episodes (the fourth) of the original run of Who; you wonder whose going to come out of it all alive (especially as the answer isn’t what the history books say), while like many a Hartnell story the plot isn’t so much about how they put things right so much as how everyone is going to survive long enough to get back to the Tardis in one piece, which after so many years of having the other Doctors so firmly in control of their destinies is a relief. ‘The Gunfighters’ certainly isn’t perfect and it gets more than a bit muddled in translation so that in its finished form it isn’t funny enough to be comedy gold nor is it reverential enough to work as an accurate historical story. Restricting most of the action so that it happens off-screen while we just get the chatting parts in a static saloon is a really bad idea too. Even so, there’s a lot more to love about this story than hate and it’s the sort of thing Dr Who really should have tried (once! I’m not sure about the second), a natural place for this most elastic of formulas to stretch to. Innes Lloyd used this story as an ‘excuse’ to drop the historicals he didn’t want to make because they ‘weren’t popular, but he was wrong: the following futuristic story ‘The Savages’ had far fewer viewers. What Dr Who fans liked most was the range the series could offer and ‘The Gunfighters’ is a big part of that: it’s not the smartest story, it’s not the best, it’s not the most interesting but it is different and different is good: different is in fact the antithesis of Westerns and the way they end up the same every week. I can see why a small boy brought up on Daleks wouldn’t like this one and find it boring. Though one loved it: a small boy named Anthony Jacobs visited his dad on set (he was playing Doc Holliday) and was entranced – so entranced he became a writer partly because of the impact of this story and ended up the chief author of the 1996 Paul McGann TV Movie, a script closer in feel to this story than is often realised (the costume the 8th Dr steals is of Wild Bill Hickock after all and there’s a very meta thing going through that script too). Because the general consensus is wrong I think: ‘The Gunfighters’ is good well made fun and there’s nothing in it a slight tweaking, a couple of extra sets and dropping that irritating song couldn’t put right.
♩ I would sing this review for you but I can’t carry a tune, herein ends the main review of the last chance saloon. ♩
POSITIVES + I’ve seen the floor plan of the studio this story was made in and I still don’t know how they managed to fit Tombstone high street in there. Unless it was bigger on the inside of course. It’s amazing: I’m so glad this story exists complete not because it’s the best Dr Who story or anything but because it would lose so much just on audio. There are American series that spent way more on Western sets than this and were far less convincing. And these were built by staff who weren’t specialists in Westerns but were doing a series of board games last week and a jungle planet next week. Incredible.
NEGATIVES - That “£^%^^(() song. I think I understand the principle behind it: it’s a Greek chorus commenting on the action that breaks the fourth wall; given that this is 1966 it feels very at one with other TV of the time, particularly The Monkees. I’m convinced, too, that this story was a deliberate send-up of 1962-63 satire with politics show ‘That Was The Week That Was’, where every week Millicent Martin would sing a song about some ridiculous event in the news that was meant to be funny but was sung with such a straight face it sounded like it was some big tragic event. Only, this being Dr Who, they comment on an event from the past not the present. It’s so out of place in the finished story though: I mean, give that thing to ‘The Myth Makers’ - a hippie Greek Chorus in a story set in Ancient Greece would actually have been funny. Here it’s just awkward and it keeps giving away the plot (if they were doing it nowadays they would have River Song adding ‘spoilers, sweetie’ every verse). Lynda Baron is totally the wrong person to sing it; by contrast Peter Purves is actually really rather good at his verse despite not being hired for this sort of thing at all. The song itself though doesn’t have much to do with traditional Western ballads and certainly nothing to do with music in 1966. It’s very much the sort of thing Rod, Jane and Freddy would have sung on ‘Rainbow’; funny that! You see, originally the director hoped his daughter Jane would sing it, before reluctantly deciding she had the wrong sort of voice: she ended up the ‘Jane’ in ‘Rod, Jane and Freddy’, in ‘Rainbow’, alongside Roy ‘Dalek’ Skelton as ‘Zippy’ and ‘George’ plus briefly John ‘K9’ Leeson as ‘Bungle’. Though she did get a part as the bored looking extra at the back of the scene where Steven is being taken to be lynched.
BEST QUOTE: ‘You can’t walk into the middle of a Western town and say you’ve come from outer space. Good gracious me, you would be arrested on a vagrancy charge!’
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: There are three wilder Wild West stories in the Dr Who canon in three different mediums. On TV If you’ve ever thought to yourself ‘gee I wonder what Matt Smith would look like on a horse? A) you need help but b) see ‘A Town Called Mercy’ (2013), the modern Who equivalent of ‘The Gunfighters’ with a Wild West setting but a very different storyline about an alien gunslinger in a town really called Mercy.
‘Peacemaker’ (2007) is a novel by James Swallow, starring the 10th Doctor and Martha, with a Wild West setting but a very different storyline about an alien selling snake oil that cures smallpox (before a cure had been found) in a town really called, umm, actually it’s called Redwater. It’s a slow burn, notable for its technobabble and the rare inclusion of some Indians alongside the Cowboys, that finally takes fire near the end. Swallow get’s the 10th Doctor’s hyperactive toddler who occasionally sulks character down perfectly but he’s all at odds with Martha (there’s an infamous scene where she’s so jealous of the Doctor banging on about his ex she secretly names her horse ‘Rose’, something she’s far too nice to do on screen).
‘A Town Called Fortune’ is a Big Finish story in the ‘Companion Chronicles’ range (2010), this one an ‘Evelyn Smythe’ story co-starring the 6th Doctor. It has a Wild West setting but a very different storyline about slave labour in a town really called Fortune. It doesn’t have any aliens this time, but there is a mixup where the Doctor appears on all the wanted posters in town. It’s a so-so story this one with some great little character moments that never quite goes anywhere, but Maggie Stables’ solo performance is some of the best in the series.
♩ Well that’s your last chance of cussing at the last chance saloon. I have a tip: if you want to do songs in 60s Who properly then go hire Keith Moon!’♩
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