The War Machines: Ranking - 87

                           The War Machines

(Season 3, Dr 1 with Dodo, Ben and Polly, 25/6/1966-16/7/1966, producer: Innes Lloyd, script editor: Gerry Davis, writer: Ian Stuart Black, director: Michael Ferguson) 

Rank: 87

   'On at Covent Garden this week following the invasion of The War Machines are the intergalactic operas: the 2nd Dr in 'The Magic Recorder', The Chief Clown in 'Pagliacci', Martin Jarvis in 'Madame Optera', David Banks in 'CarCyberMen' and 'The Face Of La Boe-Heme'

  

 

Script editor Gerry Davies had an office at the BBC overlooking the city. He liked to spend the few idle moments working on a series like Dr Who allowed him staring into space over the London horizon to ‘ground’ himself away from Dr Who’s distant worlds and alien monsters. The big news of 1966 was the building of the post office tower (now called the BT tower and despite the name more concerned with ‘telecommunications’ than mail, though maintaining a rogue computer like that would explain the exorbitant price of stamps), set to be the biggest building in London (a position it held until 1980) and he’d seen it built up, week by week, while he worked feverishly at his typewriter. It’s still there today and still in charge of all ‘telecommunications’ – phone calls in other words - though closed to the public since 1981 for security reasons (alas more boring and prosaic ones than the rogue computer in this one. Or at least that’s what they’ve told us...For all we know everything in this story is true and the internet is the latest fiendish plan by a rogue computer).One of the things Gerry wanted to do with the series he’d just taken over was root it more in reality, to make it closer to the things he saw from his window, that affected real people. So with that in mind he came up with the idea to interviewing prospective ‘scientific advisors’ alongside the new writers he talked to who might have a different take on the sort of things the child viewers of the day might be dealing with in the future or real. But as someone with a literary background who didn’t know all that much about science and still needed to tell a story Gerry had a problem: how could he tell if these people were going to come up with workable ideas rather than get lost in the minutiae of science and how could he tell if they were on the right lines? So he devised a little game, to put these strangers on the spot and see what they would come u with. Time after time as people came into his little office (including, so legend has it, Patrick Moore the astronomer who’ll make a guest appearance a whopping forty-four years later in ‘The Eleventh Hour’ and Dr Alex Comfort in the days before he wrote his bestseller ‘The Joy Of Sex’) he would point out the window and say ‘What do you think would happen if someone tried to take over the post office tower?’ Most people looked at him blankly, or went ‘eh?’ or left the room thinking he was a loony but one person who didn’t bat an eye was, funnily enough, eye specialist Kit Pedler, an ophthalmologist Doctor at the University College London, invited by Gerry after he have an interesting and erudite talk about the future of medicine on the programme ‘Horizon’. Soon they were deep into a conversation about Kit’s worry that technology was progressing to a point where mankind wouldn’t be able to stop it and that it might not be too far into the future when a computer became sentient enough to take over the world. And Gerry knew he’d found what he was looking for: a plausible story rooted firmly in the ‘real’ world of everyone at home watching. Kit wasn’t a writer though and as yet Gerry was too busy with other scripts so, after a cul-de-sac with writer Pat Dunlop (who started on a different script but pulled out when his dream job ‘Juliet Bravo’ came up) so the storyline was handed to Ian Stuart Black, a writer who’d just finished ‘The Savages’ on time (a rarity back then; it also means he’s the first ever writer on Who to have two story credits back to back).

‘The War Machines’ ended up simultaneously the most 1966 and the most ahead of its time story ever. It marks the first time the Tardis had landed in the present day since Ian and Barbara in very first episode (see ‘An Unearthly Child’) with two obvious exceptions: the minutes-long stop off at the end of ‘The Massacre’ when Dodo thought it was a real police box and stepped inside and ‘Planet Of Giants’, when a Tardis malfunction meant everyone was an inch high). The thrill this time isn’t the fact that we’re exploring new worlds or bringing the past to life but that this story is happening in real places that you can actually visit and there’s more location filming than ever before, as the camera takes in every last loving detail of swinging London in 1966. It really is swinging too: there are nightspots, clubs, discotheques, all the sorts of things the local audience of teenagers would know, as opposed to school-children or school-teachers (it was another plan of Davies’ to win over the children who used to watch the show by making it appeal to viewers who were now a little older). Somehow it’s as ‘right’ yet ‘wrong’ to see The Doctor (still a teenager himself in timelord terms) here in this world as it is in a foreign land (there’s a line fans nowadays try and pretend doesn’t happen when someone asks if he’s ‘that DJ’. Give the white hair they probably mean Jimmy Savile).

They tried and failed to get permission to film in the actual post office tower (it had only opened three days before location filming started and only five weeks before transmission and you can see why having invading monsters and mass brainwashing wouldn’t have been the ‘family friendly with a restaurant’ look the General Post Office were aiming for!) but we get lots of shots of everything else:  the Tardis arrives in Bedford Square (in a classic high-action shot taken from the roof of the office of George Wimpey and Son LTD, a construction firm based across the road), Covent Garden Market, Berners Mews (the alleyway), Maple Street (the road The Doctor and Dodo walk down), Conway Street and Gresse Street  (where they walk) and Cornwall Gardens (the final showdown with the war machine trapped by the army). With a younger cast than usual too (secretaries or sailors in the day and teenyboppers at night) and a funky soundtrack (though nothing a ‘real’ teen of 1966 would be seen dead dancing too: it’s all from a stock record ‘The Mood Modern’ by Johnny Hanksworth and features such unlikely named tunes as ‘Frantic Fracas’ ‘The Eyelash’ ‘Brow Beater’ and ‘Rhythm ‘n’ Beat’ which the titles alone will show you how out of touch it is for the era of ‘freakbeat’ and the first stirrings of psychedelia. This story is screaming: this is happening, this is now! After all, why wouldn’t the Tardis land here? It’s the era of what The Americans used to jokingly call ‘the second English invasion’ when British groups are dominating world charts, when English fashions from relatively nearby Carnaby Street are the in-place to be and just two weeks later England beat West Germany in the 1966 World Cup Final (making this the last story before we were ‘winners’, a line that’s inserted here for all three of you who like Dr who and football. One of which is probably Matt Smith). Generally speaking Dr Who stories set in England are slightly embarrassed and tend to play up the ‘oops. sorry’ card (‘The Crusade’ ‘The Highlanders’) or the ‘aren’t we quaint?’ card (‘The Daemons’ ‘Village Of the Angels’) or shows off a particular landmark (‘The Invasion’ ‘The Web Of Fear’) but occasionally you’ll get a story that’s simply proud to be made in such an eccentric place for such eccentric people. ‘The War Machines’ is the first of those handful of stories and boasts louder than any other. The people making this story know that, even with all of time and space to choose from, London in 1966 is simply one of the greatest places the tardis can possibly land. This story is ‘now’, back when now meant 1966.

And yet the weird thing is that rather than be a period piece ‘The War Machines’ has aged better than most of the things around it. You know how many of the 1960s Dr Who stories looks as if the Tardis has been dropped in an entirely different programme, from costume dramas to Westerns? Well that’s true here too, but the genre is a modern Dr Who story. The idea of computers growing a brain was greeted at the time as a far-fetched plot to be put alongside recent series features like an energy draining machine, an imaginary world filled with dancing dolls or aliens with a single eye and Beatle hairdoes. Watching the story today though and it gives you the shivers: Wotan, the new post office tower computer, might be one hell of a lot bigger and chunkier than today’s computers, and looks more than a little weird (it has no display monitor and talks in ‘ticker-tape…when it isn’t whispering in an evil megalomaniac sort of a way), but the idea that a computer can somehow evade it’s employees, take over minds and have a will of its own that refuses to be destroyed is exactly the sort of thing people are tackling today with Artificial Intelligence.  Speak to any AI bot today be it ChatGPT or Twitter’s Grok, and the feeling you get isn’t ‘I’m talking to a computer’ any more but ‘I’m talking to a person that’s evolving, learning and starting to think for itself’ (I had a nice chat about ‘The Space Museum’ with one the other day and I was alarmed to find that not only did it know the plot, which it could have picked up online, but was happily debating the philosophy behind it with me and debating freewill and pre-determinism from a computer perspective). Right now, in the right circumstances (i.e. when it’s not trying to take my job away from me and writing absolute dross in cheap kindle books online) it’s useful, but one day soon it could be scary. It’s alarming to find that sense of unease captured so well in a story made fifty-seven odd years ago about a computer that’s even controlled by sound, just like today’s speech AIs (something that would have been the most science-fiction idea going in 1966). What’s more Wotan’s plan is to control people through their phones: admittedly they’re all landlines for now (no mobiles for another three decades yet after all) but the idea of ‘screentime’ being harmful and whether you can safely leave your children in the hands of an electronic sitter is the sort of thing that, were they to do a story like it today, would be the single most obvious plot going (honestly if the new series doesn’t do a sequel where Wotan is in everybody’s home as a piece of AI tech I’ll be disappointed.

 Update: Well, funnily enough series opener ‘The Robot Revolution’ started heading in that direction then turned it into a joke about being ‘AL’ not ‘AI’!). This story is ‘now’, if you’re reading this in 2023 or a nearby year.

Steven Moffat’s ‘Bells Of St John’ is very much a sequel for instance, only with wifi substituting for telephones (there are even two cast members wearing bow ties). Although it’s another writer that ‘The War Machines’ most resembles: Russell T Davies. This story shows off just how much location filming it an do in London’s capital. There’s a machine that thinks it’s an old God taking over the world (Wotan being the German translation of Norse God Odin, in charge of the afterlife: it’s the name Wagner uses in ‘The Ring Cycle’ where funnily enough he’s killed by the wolf Fenrir, where the idea for the wolves of Fenric in ‘The Curse Of Fenric’ came from, although there’s no relation between the two stories and so far they’ve never met in any spin-off fiction. He is quite right wing, as computers go, wanting to destroy people for fun, but it is just a name. Unless of course he is the Norse God and the Vikings were actually worshipping a computer (now there’s a Big Finish spin-off I’d love to hear). Although Ian Stuart Black might well have got the idea from the name of a German Tank in WWI, launched around the time the writer was born in 1915).  It has as its headquarters the single most obvious building in London. There’s even a couple of cameo appearances by TV and radio news broadcasters who fill us in on the ‘plot’ at speed and give us the sense of a far bigger global dilemma: Kenneth Kendall and Dwight Whylie become the first people in Who to ever be credited as themselves. Just to add to the realism the man seen driving the taxi is the first ‘real’ person seen in Dr Who just doing their job (he answered The Doctor hailing a cab as if it was real and they went with it, later paying him £200 for use of the footage; other people seen driving in this story are fake though, the scene shifters getting cameo parts. Wotan also gets a jokey credit, the only time in Who history a ‘fictional’ character gets his own namecheck at the end with everyone else, leading many fans to wonder if there really was a Wotan computer system in charge of the phonelines. It would certainly explain a lot about my BT services and especially the bill). Even the fact we’re in the present day and we see how the characters live when they’re not running from dangerous aliens is very Russell. As a result ‘The War Machines’ is a story popular with fans who first came along in the 21^st century, bridging the gap between the ‘classic’ and the ‘new’ series in a way few other stories do. Much as Davies and Pedler and Black and producer Innes Lloyd wanted this story to be a ‘re-launch’ for the series, a new template to do things, it took almost forty years for that to happen properly. Though there’s a case to be made, too, that the UNIT stories from the 3^rd Doctor era wouldn’t have happened without this one either, as The Doctor clashes with establishment and government officials who don’t believe him and ends up working with the local army. This story is ‘now’, if you’ve somehow gone back in time and taken this book with you to the early 1970s or the late 2000s.

Mostly though it’s 1966. Oh the irony! The Doctor has spent nearly two full years (our time) trying to land the Tardis somewhere near enough to London in 1965 for Ian and Barbara to resume the lives that were so rudely interrupted by that detour into the Totter’s lane junkyard  and then where does it land just a few stories later? Swinging London in 1966 and the start of what can be considered Mark II of the series. From now on the series is going to be far less about exploring other worlds and more about watching those other worlds come direct to ours, delivering an extra thrill for the audience at home that these events could semi-plausibly happen to them tomorrow, but I have to say losing a little of the magic and imagination along the way. Even so, something clearly had to change: across season three the budgets are getting tighter, the alien sillier, the sets more damaged, the plots more repetitive and the viewing figures (and particularly the audience appreciation numbers) freefalling ever since the steady but ambitious original producer Verity Lambert bailed out at the end of series two. Simply by doing something so radically different as bring the Doctor into ‘our’ world (at least on first transmission) means that this story feels like it ‘matters’ with a level of excitement that’s been missing since ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’. While in time this plot idea of home counties invasions will get even more tired than the one its replacing, here its the single most exciting thing Dr Who could be doing because it’s the one thing it’s never done till now. If you’re a kid watching then those are ‘your’ people on screen at last, with Ben and Polly closer to the real deal than Ian, Barbara, Vicki, Steven or Dodo had ever been. If you’re not a kid watching though this story still works: the nightclub scenes seem as alien as anything Wotan does, while those newfangled computers that are relatively new are clearly ‘evil’. This is also a story where ‘sound’ is responsible for everything bad, thanks to Wotan’s telephoning, the great fear of every parent who doesn’t understand that newfangled racket going on in your teenager’s bedrooms. Whereas if you’re really young the war machines look incredible fun, like a sit on and ride toy. There really is something for everyone in this story.  

The post office tower isn’t just an audition piece either but a worthy choice for a Dr Who tale: the tower looked very alien in 1966 and still does a bit now, exactly the sort of thing other stories would show in model form sticking out the side of an alien landscape, only this one happens to dominate the London skyline (even with bigger, weirder buildings around it nowadays it still looks out of place). It cost £2.5million, which was a lot back then (the budget for roughly a thousand 1966 era Dr Who episodes in fact) so how people’s money was being spent was a big talking point too; for that price they might as well have been building a giant sentient computer. The viewers who saw this story go out the first time would have come to it from a run of documentaries and news items about how amazing and futuristic this building was and how its aim to make London specifically and England in general stay in ‘communication’ with each other was the height of British engineering and technology. How very Dr Who, then, to take something mankind was proud and smug about and wondering out loud what might happen if all that combined technology was used for war not peace. What could possibly be more plausible than having something that already seemed a little like magic to the people at home than make it the home of giant mad robot intent on taking over the world? The wonder in this story isn’t that someone thought to make a story like this, more how did the Post office Tower not try to stop this when they heard about it? (As it happens they were distantly supportive, not allowing any filming or any official support, but not blocking it and allowing the director Michael Ferguson on a private tour so he could see firsthand how the IBM computers they used worked; they were far more helpful than the London underground were over ‘The Web Of Fear’ anyway – although I suspect a quick re-write at the end of episode four to make them the ‘good guys’ saving the day alongside the Dr probably helped. Possibly they thought it was a good pug for their restaurant on the top floor where the public could go and eat, closed only after a bomb attack in 1971). What can’t be under-estimated is that this was the first location seen in Dr Who that you could actually go and visit at the time and point to, bar the Daleks on Westminster Bridge in ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ (and that was from the future).

Wotan is a nifty creation too, the start of a whole new breed of villain in Dr Who, the mad computer with ideas above its station which we’ll be seeing a lot of from now on but at a time when home computers seemed impossible (when they were the size of a house themselves) it’s impressive that anyone should be thinking like this. While the fear of transplants in the Cybermen (Pedler’s other great Who idea) isn’t really a thing, he was right to be wary of computers and how much power they have over people instead of the other way round and this story taps nicely into age-old fears that date back to the luddites about new technology that only a handful of people understand. Wotan is one of Dr Who’s first voice-only parts that isn’t a Dalek and Gerald Taylor is excellent, hissing where other villains would roar and debating intellectually with the Dr where others would exterminate, even if he has a tendency to rant (even that’s in keeping with the theme of computers though: if my laptop could speak it would definitely rant). Wotan of course suffers from the 1960s way of thinking that in the future technology would get bigger and seem more and more impressive, rather than smaller and easier to use, so its a huge monstrosity filling up several floors even though it has the power of a modern calculator and the whirling magnetic tapes rather than digital files makes it seem a quaint period piece now. He’s also analogue, with no digital anything in sight. But it’s what he does and how he acts that makes Wotan chilling, the little boy who grew up to overthrow his masters. We know by 1966 that The Doctor can overthrow any corrupt regime and has a good track record against invading monsters, but a computer? That’s new. There’s a telling scene where The Doctor even looks at a 1960s telephone as if it’s a piece of alien technology he’s never seen before. How can he defeat a killer computer that can brainwash people at a glance? Especially one that – in another bit of fortune-telling – has links to lots of other computers all over the world, including the White House and every other powerhouse on the planet (remember, this is ten years before the army invent the internet and thirty before the public started using it, so it really is quite an eerie premonition).

Wotan isn’t that mobile as computers go, though, so has its human slaves build new robots: hulking great things that take over Covent Garden Market (I’d like to think they’re off-screen invading the opera house too – given Wotan’s name he probably sent a war machine along to watch Wagner’s Ring Cycle) and it results in the first of many many Dr Who battle sequences to come where lots of extras fall over going ‘ugh’. They are, perhaps, the story’s weakest link: somewhere along the way, perhaps taking their cues from the size of computers, the production team got the idea that big was best but that’s not necessarily true: the sheer cost means that outside contractors Shawcroft Models can only afford to make the one and yet they have to pretend it’s a whole army, so they simply add ‘numbers; to the sides to try to fool us in an idea that simply doesn’t work. They’re also cumbersome and slow, more so than even ‘The Mecchanoids, which means that everyone can easily run away at speed. Pity poor Gerald Taylor who not only speaks as Wotan but works the machine himself, rolling hydraulic tyres with his feet and working the grab-hands that make them look as if they’ve run away from backstage at an interplanetary Argos (of course the big showdown happens in a warehouse, where they even have cool ‘W’ logos emblazoned on the sides of the crates). There are even a couple of fire extinguishers to be let off  at key moments. However they’re clearly not practical: the reason we see them is Covent Garden Market is because that’s the only London landmark with enough space for them. They also somehow wind up at the top of the post office tower despite clearly being too big for the lifts (of all the scenes that must happen but aren’t seen on TV this is the one I’m dying to see very badly). They don’t have an official name but Black’s Target novelisation, inevitably, calls them ‘Valks’ as in Wagner’s Valkyries (winged messengers who guide the souls of the dead  from Earth to the afterlife…

Although no afterlife in history looks quite like this one!)Given the size of the robots and ease with which they ought to be able to get out the way the big showdown ought to be one of the silliest Dr Who scenes – and it is out of context – but the story is so engulfing that you’re too caught up in it to care.

As brilliant as they are many Hartnell Dr Who stories tend to be loose and slow, with scenes for description and investigation and character and exploration more than plot, but what strikes you about this story (especially if you’re watching them in chronological order – what do you mean you don’t?!) is how modern this one seems in that sense too: every scene is important to the plot in some way with no real superfluous material and there are short scenes and quick jump cuts from one sub-plot to another (what a shame they couldn’t have tried this a few years earlier and saved Hartnell having to learn all those lengthy lines!) There are notably fewer fluffs here and Hartnell shines even for him, this Doctor who’s at home everywhere he goes suddenly as natural walking round swinging London in 1966 as he is Vortis or Skaro (Edwardian chic is ‘in’ after all, with a shop named Lord Kitchener opening in Carnaby Street that year and Sgt Pepper’s around the corner, the kids of the day ignoring their parents and skipping a generation to ‘borrow’ from their grandparents, as all generations tend to do to some extent). The 1st Dr is still the only regeneration we’ve seen on screen in a nightclub incidentally, odd as that seems: in ’our’ universe the address for the fictional but plausible sounding ‘Inferno’ club is actually right for the genuine ‘UFO’ Club so it’s nice to imagine a pre-fame Pink Floyd have only just walked off the stage playing something suitably spacey like ‘Astronomy Domine’ or ’Interstellar Overdrive’ when the Dr walks in. This is also the first real time the Dr has come up against the establishment directly and desperately tries to make them listen – he’ll be doing this a lot as the 2nd and 3rd Drs, but it’s a shame the 1st Dr didn’t do it more as he’s born for this. Just watch Hartnell bristle and seethe with indignation gloriously, the way he did in all his classic films. He’s particularly good in the way he stands stock still staring while everyone else runs around madly panicking and still totally owns the camera, while in the reprise he distracts the war machine with his cloak in much the same way a toreador would a bull; he should have been allowed to do more of this but sadly its pretty much the last time he gets to ‘own’ this role he made his own.

It’s a good story for the newbies too. A lot of screentime is given over to Ben and Polly, who get the best companion debut since Vicki got a whole story to herself with ‘The Rescue’. Designed by Davies and Lloyd to be closer to ‘real’ teens who might be watching, they were designed from the first to be a ‘Lady and the Tramp’ tale of a working class scruff and a posh lady from the upper classes. Thankfully they drop the original plan for Ben (who was supposed to deliver naval phrases in every situation, from ‘what ho – my hearties!’  and ‘shiver my timbers’ that no real sailor in 1966 would have used and the initial plan to base Ben on 1950s skiffle singer Joe Brown (!) and Polly on Marianne faithful (!!!)  for something a bit more ‘real’ and 1966 (when both were old hat). Though Who creator Sydney Newman had long since dropped out the picture by now you sense he’d have approved of the casting, as Michael Craze’s ‘breakthrough’ role as a child actor was in Newman’s Who prototype ‘Pathfinders In Space’ (technically the prequel ‘Destination Luna’, which was transmitted live and so never was recorded, sadly). His elder brother Peter has also been in Who already (as one of the Xeron rebels in ‘The Space Museum’ while he’ll go on to be in ‘The War Games’ and ‘Nightmare Of Eden’ too). Alas he won’t get much of a chance to show off what he can do in this series (delivering the voice of a policeman in episode four in post-production is the closest he comes to showing off a ‘range’) but it’s a strong debut, making Ben instantly likeable despite being the butt of all the jokes (and the rescue rather than the rescuer, in a twist to every other story Ben’s in). As for Polly, Anneke Wills was suggested for the role by her then-husband Michael Gough, who’d so enjoyed his time on ‘The Celestial Toymaker’ and thought she would find it fun. They’re contradictions that are clearly meant to go together too, even if they’ve only just met for the first time in this story: Ben’s practical and heroic, but rigid and all too keen to play things by the book (he is a sailor used to taking orders, not giving them, after all) while Polly has all the imagination and good ideas but lacks the courage to see them through. She’s god with people though in a way ben isn’t and stands up to Wotan better than Dodo does, her fondness for Ben strong enough to overpower her conditioning and allow him to escape (Ben is touched, as if no one has done anything like that before, and you could see the rest of their time in the Tardis together as Ben saving Polly over and over again to say ‘thankyou’). We see their first meeting and it’s love-hate at first sight, as Polly is asked to cheer Ben up and seems to do that by teasing him – much to his hate at first and to laughter thereafter (he gets his own back by nicknaming her ‘Duchess’ and using it more when she says she hates it). The actors had never met before first rehearsals but they have a real chemistry together, a meeting of opposites caught somewhere between the clear love Ian-Barbara have for each other and the antagonism of Vicki-Steven or Dodo-Steven. They’re even more our representatives than the schoolteachers were, swinging sixties kids who defy authority with ease and who so belong in this time zone that being whisked away in future stories really makes the audience wonder what this time-travelling life might be like for them. As with so many of this period of conveyer belt companions we’ll never really get to know Ben and Polly before they’re shelved for even more complex and rounded future assistants, but they’re at their best in this story and a highly believable double-act. His most noticeable feature compared to past companions: his impatience, as he can’t even enjoy a night out the town from shore leave without getting bored. Her noticeable character trait compared to companions past: sarcasm. We’ve never had a companion quite like Polly before, who’s scared enough of the monsters to scream more than anyone so far but cynical enough to laugh at people and defy authority along the way (she’s not exactly bowing to her experienced boss in this story). Michael Craze and Anneke Wills excel from the first, nailing these two characters and their interaction with the Doctor, who looks like the sort of authority figure they should be rebelling against but who turns out to be an even bigger rebel than they are, is a delight.

On the other-hand poor Dodo seems less like an actual character than ever when set against some ‘real’ swinging 60s kids with her awkward fake cockney and endless enthusiasm. She gets written out partway through the story after being brainwashed by Wotan and doesn’t even get a proper leaving scene with the Doctor, leaving by note (it seems odd in retrospect that he doesn’t go back to check up on her in person - after all there’s no hurry for him to leave in this story unlike most others; in reality, of course, it was more BBC penny-pinching so they didn’t have to pay poor Jackie Lane for two episodes). As much as Dodo never really worked as a character it’s a particular sad way for her to go, driven mad by having betrayed the Doctor – she was, after all, the most open-hearted (some would say stupidly so) of the Doctor’s companions, so to see her betrayed and betraying him in turn is quite a horrific way to go. The likes of Sarah Jane got hypnotised more weeks than not and never thought anything of it, but Dodo’s exactly the sort of character to have been tormented by finding out she couldn’t trust everything would be alright in the end. She might not have been the most likeable or believable companion but she deserved a far better send-off than this. Jackie Lane, asked to be a child and play younger than her years in all her other stories, is chillingly good at being hypnotised too, turning nasty and mean. Had she bee given the chance to play an older Dodo more like this she’d have been a lot more popular than she was. Jackie largely gave up acting after leaving the series, becoming an agent for voice over artists – her biggest coup was getting Tom Baker the ‘Little Britain’ gig!

It has to be said, too, that ‘The War Machines’ is a ‘character’ story because the plot is, at times, crackers. It’s not that it couldn’t happen (indeed the whole thing about sentient computers is the single most plausible story of the 1960s, though the idea that the General Post Office, who can’t even deliver letters properly half the time, can create a machine this intelligent is stretching things a little), more the way it unfolds. We never do find out Wotan’s back story. Later stories that do this kind of a plot would throw in ‘the computer came to life after absorbing an alien crystal’ or something but there’s nothing here. Did Wotan become sentient gradually and no one noticed? Or was its hypnotism so strong it was always there and nobody could stop it? Was it the work of one man, perhaps an alien from another world, or a committee of humans that stumbled across it? Wotan’s plan, to take over the Earth one phonecall at a time, will take forever even in the days when there were less phonelines per person (and a sizeable minority of people still didn’t have a home phone). Surely it would be easier to, say, take over TV centre and hypnotise people through television? Everything else that happens hinges on a number of coincidences: The Tardis lands on the very day of Wotan’s launch, even though it’s been years in preparation. The Tardis lands the very moment when Wotan is taking over its first ‘mind slave’, with just enough practice to take Dodo over as the second. The nightclub where The Doctor leaves Dodo by chance also happens to be right next to the warehouse where the war machines are being built. It’ also where their first victim is killed, a tramp attacked by the war machines, and the second half of the plot is driven by Ben and Polly reading about it in the papers (unlikely both because he’s a tramp and murders in London are common actually in 1966 more than now whatever the tabloids tell you, and because his body wasn’t discovered till 3am and most presses roll around 6-7am; it would have been held over for the next day, if printed at all).  It seems unlikely that even Wotan can take over an entire warehouse and have that many people build twenty working war machines overnight in one go (this is why we have the sort of red tape and bureaucracy the Doctor destroys in other stories, like ‘The Sun Makers’, to stop this sort of thing happening). Some say it’s amazing the Doctor gets into the post office tower on such a prestigious day unstopped too: in the book it’s because he’s a recognised friend of Ian Chesterton (high up in social circles by 1966 and a consultant of technology!); modern fans just assume he had an early version of psychic paper. There are other little plotholes too: Ben is grumpy because he’s on shore line and all his mates are in the West Indies but we never find out why he didn’t join them, or why after complaining of having six months to kill with nothing to do suddenly changes to being desperate to go back to his ship by the story’s end (a rare lapse Davies should have picked up on). It really is so out of character for The Doctor not to notice that Dodo is hypnotised too: some companions don’t change at all but the difference is Dodo is night and day. He usually pays far greater attention than that. For all of his reputation as a no-nonsense authoritarian, too, the grandfatherly 1^st Doctor would be first to head into battle to save the people under his care and it’s deeply out of character first that he concentrates on the bigger picture when Ben wants to recue Polly and again when Dodo is sick. The Doctor also weirdly has a ‘prickling’ sensation of fear he never has again and while he says he feels it when Daleks are near he’s never commented on it elsewhere (as it happens there is a story set round the corner, ‘Evil Of The Daleks’, the exact same day, not that Black knew it when he wrote this as it won’t be made for another year). He’s also more bloodthirsty than we’ve seen since he tried to bash a caveman’s head in, happy to send a converted war machine to kill the people who created it, even though their only possessed, not evil. Perhaps most of all, this entire problem happens because of a giant computer and yet nobody thinks of disrupting it’s power source like, say, turning it off and on again (well, it works with mine). But then this is one of those stories where the characterisation is shaped by what the plot needs, rather than driving it organically the way it should, and people’s motives change with the wind (as if this story has been…gulp…written by a computer, who doesn’t understand humans!) This is one of those stories where you have to take it on trust that these things happened and make sense and not think about it too much (and another way that more modern viewers have a head start on viewers in 1966!)  

Overall, though, ‘The War Machines’ is a very decent story, It moves at quite a pace (despite the slow speed of the title inventions), has a thoughtful plot that asks big questions about sentience and control and there are some particularly fine cliffhangers, such as Dodo being warned that ‘Dokkkk Torrrr Whoooo Isssss Reeeee Quiiiiired’ (it’s a quirk of the Innes Lloyd era that he was the only person who seemed to think the character’s name really was Dr Who’. It crops up again in ‘The Highlanders’ and ‘The Underwater Menace’) and The Doctor holding his ground when the war machine try to run him over and even the army are fleeing like cowards. There’s some nice bits of characterisation, with the Doctor back to being age-old and impossibly young and the supporting cast of dignitaries are worthy foes, with and without hypnotism (it’s a curious fact that everyone in this story tends to be either old or young with no one middle-aged, except in crowd scenes). It all fits nicely with the past, taking us right back to where we started (we even start the story with a policeman walking past, just like the very first shot of the very first story – a scene that had to be filmed again when a passerby mistook actor Peter Stewart for a real policeman and asked him the time. She should have asked the timelord standing behind him!) Most of all, though,  this story feels like the future, impressively ahead of its time in so many ways. It’s not perfect – other Dr Who stories to come will do this better, while the war machines themselves are another of the series’ desperate attempts to re-capture the Daleks by having aliens that aren’t just men in costumes, only this time instead of a man in an imaginative tank it’s clearly a man in a whacking great box. Still, if you’re going to rip up the template and pretty much re-start the series from scratch then you’re not going to get everything perfect first go and the longevity of this series owes more than a little something to ‘The War Machines’, an experiment that was picked as the template for so many years to come. At the time of writing the tower is in the process of being sold, with the hope that one day it will be turned into a hotel. Dr Who fans are sure to be the first to book in. Just be careful when you use your phone…

A short note to end on: ‘The War Machines’ is almost unique in that its in a no-man’s land between ‘missing story’ and ‘complete’. The very vast majority of each episode exists and this was in fact the first Dr Who story to ever be returned from private hands after the mass junking of the mid 1970s (as early as 1978/79, when the invention of video meant they could make money from an expensive-to-house archive) from a film collector in Australia, rather than returned through the BBC’s contacts). But that version is a censored one with certain clips removed. Another copy from Nigeria came to light in 1996 that fills in a few of these but not all. So there’s maybe four-five minutes missing across the whole story, cleverly plugged for the video, DVD and the i-player versions thanks to the soundtrack and recycled shots from elsewhere (most of them are in episode three where the warehouse battle originally ran about a minute longer, with extra dialogue between Krimpton and Wotan, a hypnotised Polly and Wotan and the man on the telephone in episode four.    

POSITIVES + One of the things that makes this story stand out so much is that the title captions have their own separate ‘page’ in a funky computerised font (E-13B if you want to be really nerdy about things, mostly used back then as the big chunky lettering made it easier for computers to read without mistaking numbers or letters for anything else). Each syllable fires up as if it’s just been fired from a canon (well, a Canon printer anyway) and makes a nice change from the usual run of having captions super-imposed over the action. They stand out a mile and make it look just for a second, as if Wotan has taken over the BBC and Saturday teatime programme Dr Who. 

NEGATIVES – With so much of the budget being spent on the visuals the sound really suffers in this story. There is no musical score, just a collection of odds and ends recycled from other stories, which means Wotan makes the exact same sound the Cybermen use when hypnotising people and when doing ‘computery’ things lifts the soundtrack of another scifi series ‘A For Andromeda’. It doesn’t quite work.  Ditto the amount of stock footage used in this story with bits of London skyline clearly shot for something else and footage of welders borrowed from the Imperial War Museum and rather clumsily inserted into the scene where workmen are putting together the war machines, even though they’re clearly welding a boat.   

BEST QUOTE: ‘You know, there’s something alien about that tower…I can sense it!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Poor Dodo didn’t get much of a send-off did she? If you ever wondered what happened to her after ‘The War Machines’ then the deeply weird 3^rd Doctor novel ‘Who Killed Kennedy?’(1996) by David Bishop fills you in. Note: it’s not a happy life unfortunately.  The overall plot is a fictional account of JFK’s assassination, an event that’s long been tied with Dr Who given that it happened right on the eve of broadcast for the first ever episode (what a weekend that was!) and follows fictional journalist James Stevens as he tries to track down the possible killer. He soon uncovers another mystery instead: a time traveller who keeps coming and going, tracking down some of the people who met with him. Dodo, by courtesy of being one of the few companions back on Earth in the 1960s who knew him, is one of Stevens’ key witnesses. Her memory is still hazy thanks to the after-effects of Wotan’s hypnotism but she tells weird tales of giant dolls, Wild West gunfighters and shaggy Cyclops monsters that no one else believes. She also adds the detail that her family were of Hugenot stock (so she was a descendent of Anne Chaplet after all?! See ‘The Massacre’). By the time Stevens properly meets Dodo she’s just been released from a psychiatric ward and is homeless; by rights she shouldn’t be out at all but in one of the most adult and chilling scenes in all the Who books another patient raped her and she only got away by kicking him to death, where the asylum thought they’d better kick her out (a similar but un-connected rape takes place in ‘Salvation’, a notorious 1999 ‘Early Adventures’ novel by Steve Lyons told in flashback from before she joined the Tardis. Writers really don’t like Dodo!) The journalist then sleeps with her in return for giving her board and lodgings even though she’s still clearly traumatised! There’s a hint that Dodo ends up pregnant by James and is about to tell him when he returns to their flat to find her murdered, as part of the JFK conspiracy cover-up to put him off the scent. Poor Dodo: she might have been the most irritating of all the 1960s companions but she didn’t deserve to be killed off in a spinoff book. My preferred take is that she recovers and helps invent a cure for the common cold, so her future self doesn’t have to go through the events of ‘The Ark’! 

  

A much lighter read all round is ‘Earthworld’ (2001), an 8^th Doctor novel by Jacqueline Rayner that’s a lot of fun (and the prolific writer’s crowning achievement. Not that even I’ve quite read all of her Who books yet. There are a lot!) The Doctor and reluctant companion Anji are trying to return to her home in Soho in the year 2001 but wouldn’t you believe it? The Tardis has gone wrong again and landed on New Jupiter by mistake, a replica Earth by the intergalactic equivalent of the National Trust. Only their knowledge of the Earth has been taken from objects found in their archaeological digs, most of which are guesses that turn out to be hopelessly wrong (or indeed, have nothing to do with Earth at all having come from outer space!) A case in point are The War Machines, discovered buried under the post office tower. The archaeologists know that ‘post office’ means sending letters through the mail so put two and two together: these machines must have been 20^th century postmen. ‘We have actual filmed records of them on the streets of London. Presumably delivering letters’ one of the archeologists proudly boasts. Companion Fitz retaliates ‘And I suppose they had those great thumping arm things to protect their non-existent ankles from small fierce dogs?!’ No wonder so many Earthlings complained about letters going missing! Other gags in this very funny book: the dinosaurs in the park were all herbivores ‘which presumably means they only eat creatures called herb’, there’s an epic fight with an android Elvis (that the locals think really was an Earth ‘King’!), there’s an Earth gift shop that sells Earth fudge (with small print that it’s actually made on Alpha Centauri!), a misunderstanding of the advert ‘Go To Work On An Egg’ (which is assumed to be an archaic mode of transport!) and ‘The Medieval Zone’ possesses a display dedicated to the legends of Camelot. Only it’s misread the name ‘Merlin’ and assumed the wizard must be a talking Marlon fish! Probably my favourite 8^th Doctor novel just for the sheer zany humour (though to be fair there’s not a lot of competition as a good half are pretty unreadable!)

‘The Love Invasion (2005) was one of the first comic strips printed in Dr Who Magazine after the Russell T Davies comeback (it’s in issues #355-#357, the first of which was published just five days after ‘Rose’ was broadcast). In this fun story by Gareth Roberts the 9^th Doctor is on the trail of an alien known as the Kustollan Igrix, a sort of fleshy version of the demon from ‘The Awakening’ with a really big spiny head.  He’s trying to alter the course of history (although the biggest change seems to have been that West Germany beat England in the 1966 cup final!) and has been chased back to Earth in late 1966, where the monster just happens to have parked his spaceship in the grounds of the Post Office Tower! While The Doctor is charging down corridors with his sonic screwdrivers eagle-eyed viewers spot what’s happening in the post office tower restaurant: Ben has saved up his money and taken Polly out for a treat and is down on knee, proposing in the place that caused their lives to turn upside down. Awww. Sadly The Doctor is characteristically too busy to notice!

This might seem an odd place to mention the excellent Liz Shaw ‘Companion Chronicles’ story from Big Finish ‘The Last Post’ (2012) but bear with me. This first-class story by James Goss, the last recorded by Caroline John before her death, runs across the entirety of season seven and sees Liz and the Brigadier slowly coming to know and trust The Doctor. We see a great deal of Liz’s home life, including her love-hate relationship with her mother and her friends from Cambridge who think she’s gone potty playing soldiers with the army. Liz notices that a lot of her friends and family have been dying in mysterious circumstances, accompanied by a note apparently from ‘The Doomsday Clock’ of all things. Though at first Liz dismisses it as a hoax she’s terrified when her beloved mum is in danger (especially given all the things she never quite got round to saying to her – theirs is a very stiff upper lip family) and asks UNIT to step in. Which they do: it turns out that (spoilers) The Doomsday Clock was built using spare parts from Wotan, who has been out for revenge ever since and has been using Liz’s scientist friends to ‘get’ to The Doctor. A worthy sequel to the most UNITy of all pre-‘Invasion’ Who stories that ties up lots of story arcs up into a neat bow and finally gives Caroline some material worthy of her abilities. Highly recommended.  

Finally, ‘Sleeper Agents (2022) by Paul Magrs is part of the BBC Books franchise ‘Beyond The Doctor’ that looks at what happened to companions when they left The Doctor. Against all odds Polly returns to the post office tower (Ben has gone back to sea) and starts noticing strange events happening again (most of them to the new pet cat she and Ben have just bought to live with them in their Chelsea flat).  Polly thought she’d help with the mopping up job less than a week after Wotan was dismantled but isn’t prepared for a pair of mysterious strangers trying to turn it back on. It’s a very simple, obvious plot, especially when Polly is kidnapped and Ben has to rescue her just like the old days, but there are some lovely bits of characterisation here too. Ben and Polly barely knew each other before their adventures with The Doctor and are suddenly a bit awkward around each other, especially when they visit each other’s houses and see how different their lives were (Ben’s place is empty, Polly’s filled with knock-knacks and expensive pottery figurines!)

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