Spearhead From Space: Ranking - 75

 Spearhead From Space 

(Season 7, 3rd Dr with Liz and UNIT, 3-24/1/1970, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Robert Holmes, director: Derek Martinus)

Rank: 75

   'Fez...Must find my fez...No wait, that's not me yet. This face would have been very useful on the planet Delphon where they communicate with their eyebrows...I went there once in my shouty Scottish self and got locked up for insubordination. Wait, how did I know that?' These regenerational insights are so complicated!' 

  

 Even in a series that’s all about the inevitability of change this is the big one, the biggest sea-change in one go in Who history! Seven months after Patrick Troughton swirled away into Gallifreyan darkness DW is back with a new Dr and a new production team and this time its in colour! (green mostly, with bits of brown, which is to this era what orange sparkly pixie dust is to new-Who). To keep the Beatles analogies of the 1960s going this is the early solo period when the fab 4 are releasing some of their best work (only here ‘solo’ effectively means Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks, who go from being two of many people working on this show to being the showrunners) and break new ground by entering new places – and even though where they go separately will end up in time more repetitive than anywhere they went as a team here everything is so vibrantly wonderfully ‘new’ that its hard not to get caught up in all the enthusiasm. Season 7 of the show is special: to push the analogy of 1970 to breaking point it has the honesty of ‘Lennon/Plastic Ono Band’, the down-to-Earth back-to-basics storytelling of ‘McCartney’, the morality and deep-thoughts of ‘All Things Must Pass’ and the melancholy of ‘Sentimental Journey’. Maybe its no ‘Revolver/Dalek’s Masterplan’ or ‘Sgt Peppers’/’Evil Of The Daleks’ and its not the jaw-dropping new kid on the block anymore like the days of Dalekmania/Beatlemania but its a show that’s found new ways to say new things for a whole new decade that’s breathed new life into a franchise that was beginning to unravel and get just a bit hit-and-miss in its last year. Given the sheer amount of changes the show has undergone in one go its amazing that ‘Spearhead’ hits the ground running as immediately as it does. To start with the obvious if you’re watching in sequence, it gets forgotten now what an immediate change moving into colour was and it comes at the perfect point, after the 2^nd Dr swirls away into nothingness with goodness-knows-what happening before the Dr makes it down to Earth in his new form (the comic strips continued the story and had the Dr have new adventures before hiding as a scarecrow which makes the casting of a pre-Worzel Gummidge Pertwee more than a little eerie; equally this is accepted by a sizeable minority of the fanbase as the era where the 2^nd Dr ended up in ‘The Two Doctors’ and ‘The Five Doctors’). New technology often comes with new teething troubles and given the January 1970 transmission date this story was slightly ahead of the curve for a BBC1 show in what was the great crossover-into-colour year for the station’s flagship programmes, after dabbling in it on the more experimental secondary channel BBC2. People seriously wondered at the time if DW, one of the shows that made the biggest use of monochrome (particularly when the Daleks and Cybermen were on to cast shadows) could even work in colour. But it does – from the first scene it all feels so ‘right’ for the show. The same goes for the new Doctor. The famous story is that Jon Pertwee was nagged into applying for the job by his old ‘Navy lark’ co-star Tenniel Evans (who’ll turn up alongside his old friend in ‘Carnival Of Monsters’ in a few years’ time), who recognised that Pertwee’s authority and eccentricity would make him a perfect fit for the show. Pertwee wasn’t sure but asked his agent anyway, who doubled up with laughter at the idea but put his name forward anyway, ringing up to receive shock silence down the end of the phone. The agent apologised and said he thought it was a daft idea too but that wasn’t why Letts and Dicks were quiet; by chance they had just put together a list of ideal candidates, not really expecting to get any of them (they just wanted a ‘general idea’ of who would be good for the part) – and legend has it that Pertwee was second on that list. Pertwee himself struggled with working out how to play the part though: while Hartnell tended to play the same sort of ‘rough guy with charm’ roles in his pre-DW work and Troughton’s characters had a similar ‘feel’ to them despite his vast range, Pertwee was most famous for inventing a huge variety of different mostly quirky people on the radio. He really hadn’t done that much telly and only a little bit of films (one, ‘Murder At The Wundmill’ was on the very wonderful channel ‘Talking Pictures TV’ the other day and that’s probably more what people were expecting: Pertwee plays a buttoned up buffoon of a policeman who acts like his Navy Lark character Petty Officer Pertwee and speaks like a posh Worzel prototype). Sensibly though everyone realised that putting on a fake voice would be exhausting for such a punishing film schedule and in the end Letts told his worried star he should ‘just be himself’. Pertwee replied, as many an actor would ‘But I don’t know who that is!’ They compromised by having Jon play an exaggerated version of himself: he’s as eccentric and mad and fun as both a comedian and indeed an alien stuck on Earth ought to be but also authoritative and commanding, as someone whose lived that long with that much experience stuck on a backward planet would be (and its worth remembering that, at 50, Jon was only five years younger than Hartnell had been on his first episode and four years older than Troughton, for all the 3^rd Dr will become known for his action sequences and running around). Despite Pertwee’s worries he’s instantly ‘right’ in this story too: he’s delirious and manic for the opening episode (a brave move given how much was a resting on it), then brilliantly funny in the largely improvised scenes of ‘escape/showering’ in episode two (note that the Dr has a tattoo on his arm that seems to have gone by the time we next see a Dr this unclothed when Matt Smith tries out a naked hologram), then owns the camera by being a straightforward dashing hero in a way neither of his shiftier predecessors were by episodes 3 and 4. Letts and Dicks, too, put their stamp on a series they’ve been involved in but have never been in charge of till now and instantly ‘get’ what will keep viewers watching in the 1970s compared to the 1960s: we’re no longer exploring aliens worlds or exploring space; we’re saving ‘us’, the near-contemporary Earth of the viewers watching and its full of spectacle and action, rather than philosophy and imagination (though that’s in there too, ready to peek out at unexpected moments, to keep older viewers watching) While restricting the Dr to Earth in...whatever year this is (UNIT dating varies wildly – officially its the ‘near future’ for viewers in 1970, which some writers take to mean ‘next decade’ and others mean ‘next week’) will become dull in time here its exciting: there’s the frisson that the aliens aren’t invading a time or place you have to imagine but your home right now and that your own life might change if everyone ‘loses’, not to mention that what you see on the screen could perhaps happen tomorrow in your street. The set-up with UNIT is at its best across season 7 too. By the time The Master turns up in every other story in seasons 8 and 9 as the Dr’s own ‘Moriarty’ to his ‘Sherlock, The Brigadier will have been re-written as his bumbling ‘Watson’, making mistakes and always two steps behind. Here, though, he’s still the tough no-nonsense military might we met in ‘The Web Of Fear’ and ‘The Invasion’ and more than willing to stand up to the Dr. Many of the best scenes in this story and the next two come from the Dr’s battles with The Brigadier – though they’re on the same side in trying to keep Earth safe they have very different ways of doing it and the Dr’s never had this with any companion before (even when Ian used to argue with the 1^st Dr he was never allowed to win the way the Brigadier sometimes does). Newly recruited scientist Liz Shaw, too, is at her best in this story when she’s a fellow cynic who doesn’t fully trust either of them (before she throws her lot in with the Dr, more often than not, though never forgetting that the Brig effectively pays her salary, something the Dr couldn’t care less about).What’s interesting about the Dr in this year in particular is the unique way he manages to be both the establishment figure who turns up with the full backing of a United nations army unit and the perennial outsider. Normally in a set-up like this the outsider would be either the cynic or the comedy relief, but the plots come from the fact that the Dr has far more experience than all the Earth-bound idiots trying to stop him and by virtue of the fact that we know he’s telling the truth. The comedy comes from the government officials who assume authority but are either trying to make money out of a situation or hopelessly out of their depth. Though its new to Who its not completely without precedent and sensibly Dicks and Letts seem to have modelled their new-look series on three very popular projects past DW alumni have gone on to create. One is ‘Department S’ created by old script editor Dennis Spooner, that saw an eccentric man in a frilly shirt try to solve that week’s (more human) based dilemma with an al-action sidekick and a posh girl; two episodes even feature plastic dummies (though,weirdly, those are the two where Peter Wyngarde of ‘Planet Of Fire’ dresses the most normally). The other is ‘Doomwatch’, created by other script editor and cyberman creator Gerry Davis with Kit Pedler and has a team not unlike UNIT going round investigating unlikely problems and fighting bureaucracy to put them right. And then there’s original producer Verity Lambert and her series ‘Adam Adamant Lives’, which has a time-traveller of a sort who goes to sleep in Edwardian England and wakes up in Swinging London. Guess what? He fight bureaucracy and unlike cases and etc etc (and he even wears a cape just like the 3^rd Dr’s). In other words, its a change that was clearly in the air and people working on DW would surely be influenced by what past DW shapers were working on – the difference is that, as an alien, the Dr has more scope to see things the people around him can’t than in the other series; he’s automatically got more age and authority than the people trying to stop him while he’s even more eccentric and removed from the world than any of these other characters. With all that going on the Auton plot often gets forgotten but its another big plus for this story – a story outline simple enough that it feels like a valid threat even with so much screentime given over to the new setup, of the Nestene Consciousness controlling a bunch of plastic mannequins and making them come to life (an idea so simple yet powerful enough Russell T nicked it for his DW comeback episode ‘Rose’). It was a sign of faith that Terrance Dicks gave this all-important idea over to his new mate Robert Holmes, who had only written two DW scripts before this, neither of which had been the biggest hits the show had seen (though I for one have a soft Kroton-shaped spot for his first one). A faith that was returned given how quickly Holmes nails this new Dr, his new assistant, an inherited Brigadier he hadn’t written for and a whole new alien species in ‘The Autons’. Though their second story ‘Terror’ is the one that fleshes out the idea, having the Nestene consciousness control other plastic items and giving them a collaborator to do all the talking, they’re already a highly memorable foe: the idea of a loved one being replaced by an auton replica and nobody believing you is one of DW’s darkest creepiest plots (its actually a real psychological condition ‘Capgras Delusion’). The mannequin breakout of a shop window is rightly one of DW’s most memorable and talked about scenes, the perfect example of the ordinary becoming extraordinary in this show’s hands and the perfect sign that the show was changing to become something the audience could plausibly see ‘tomorrow’ rather than having to imagine. With so many new things to get right its amazing how little goes wrong in this story – there are a few little pointers, the scenes of a delirious Dr in hospital go on a bit long (and set an unfortunate precedent where most new Drs get to walk around dazed, though none do it quite as well as Pertwee till Tennant comes along), the human agent Channing, he of the big staring unblinking eyes, and his relationship to the Nestene are rather glossed over, while the third episode cliffhanger as the Dr is attacked by the tentacles of the Nestene is the one place Pertwee goes a bit overboard, a rare blip where he takes what’s a serious dramatic moment and tries to make high comedy out of it (amazingly this is the ‘improved’ version taped alongside the next story because the first looked silly, well sillier). No matter though: he’ll learn, fast, will Pertwee as will everyone else for what’s one of the best and most consistent runs in DW history. For this story the plastic threat is fantastic, the Doctor gets some great scenes to stamp his mark on the series, there are lots of great bits of comedy dialogue and high action drama and a general feeling that, after sleepwalking its way through most of season 6 (and its large pile of unusable scripts that fell apart at the last second) DW has found its feet again, as surely as if the Tardis had been given a sat-nav. Though this era will get better still after this, as the spearhead of the new-look series this story is a valuable step in all the right directions: so many many new things to get right and yet the most incredible thing about ‘Spearhead’ is how much it still feels like the series that had been running for six years, a new chapter in a long story rather than a whole new book that ignores what the old days got right (though I do miss the Tardis which is parked in the Dr’s laboratory and forgotten about for the next two years). This isn’t some plastic ‘dummy’ version of the series that went before it: this is still DW inside and out, just as good as it was before, only suddenly very different.

+ For one story only the entire thing was shot on film (they won’t do this again till the Paul McGann movie a quarter century later) which gives everything the feeling of being lush and expensive and (for perhaps the only time) probably better on screen than it looked when they were making it. Rather than another good policy decision by the new production team, though, it was by accident: this is the first of many many DW stories in the 1970s to be hit by an industrial strike, this one for cameramen, which meant there was a backlog of BBC stories to be made and preference was given to the big ratings-winners planned for Christmas, not the return of a series that had been struggling for viewers and wouldn’t be on till January. Rather than abandon the whole thing Letts simply moved this story outdoors, using an outside broadcast unit rather than official cameramen. Recording everything on film was a happy side-effect of this as you couldn’t film outside using cheaper videotape in those days. Though it rocked the budget badly it makes ‘Spearhead’ seem a lot more modern than other stories around it nowadays and is the only ‘old’ DW you can see in true high definition (as videotape just isn’t clear enough to clean up, even on Blu-Ray).

- We never truly find out where UNIT headquarters is: in ‘The Web Of Fear’ and ‘The Invasion Of The Dinosaurs’ its hinted to be in the heart of London, whereas in other stories like this one it seems to be in a reclusive spot in the countryside filled by ‘comedy’ yokels. Almost the first shot of this story is poacher Sam Sealey finding the Nestene consciousness orb and stealing it, all while talking with a Mummerset accent that nobody in Britain actually speaks with (even in 1970) except in B-movie films and series. He’s, sadly, typical of the 3^rd Dr era’s worst traits: working class characters are all on the take every bit as much as their posher colleagues in Whitehall, only they’re even more unlikeable and surely. No wonder the Dr hates getting trapped on Earth in this timezone – everyone he meets seems to be up to something and this isn’t the last poacher we’ll meet in the series. Though not as bad as ‘Pigbin Josh in ‘The Claws Of Axos’ somehow its worse in this story because it feels really at odd with the more realistic characters of the rest of the show and indeed the glossy production values.