The Daemons: Ranking - 64

 

The Daemons

(Season 8, Dr 3 with Jo and UNIT, 22/5/1971-/19/6/1971, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Guy Leopold (pseudonym for Barry Letts and Robert Sloman), director: Christopher Barry)  

Rank: 64

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   'Caught between the Devil and a yellow Bess-ie'

For a story that concerns itself with the idea that magic isn’t real and is just a name people give to science they don’t understand, there’s a lot of magic in the air for this story, which ends a season of episodes that do much the same thing every week (The Master teams up with an unlikely alien and invades a big city) by doing something similar, but weirder, that no one would have been expecting (The Master teams up with The Devil – yes really – and takes over a sleepy English village). The magic is there in the sparkling dialogue (the Doctor-Master put-downs are a lot of fun), it’s there in the location filming complete with excited locals (Aldbourne in Wiltshire, location spotters, the quintessential sleepy village), it’s there in the glittering guest cast (Damaris Hayman, who was in real life to Tony Hancock in his later years what Jo Grant is to the 3rd Dr), it’s there in one of the biggest ‘no they couldn’t possibly, could they?’ moments as The Master really does summon up the devil on Walpurgis night (the ‘opposite’ of Halloween, six months apart on April 30th – and a lot more plausibly than when David Tennant does it in ‘Satan’s Pit’ too), it’s there behind the scenes too in how well the cast and crew bonded during this story, which the whole bang lot of them remembered with affection. If the devil really was involved in this story, as its naysayers feared given that the production team was meddling with witchcraft, then maybe he should have picked a few more writing credits along the way? 

 In reality of course it’s the work of another overseer working in the bowels of Hell (or Tv centre as they knew it back then): producer Barry Letts and a story that was an extension of the audition piece he’d written for Jo and Mike Yates, where they encounter ghostly goings on in a crypt. Letts wrote the scene to provide a bit of everything in just a few minutes: awe, fear, laughter, tears, to test how quickly the actors responded. The idea was, it seems, a bit of a pet project: one of Barry’s biggest memories that made him want to work in the creative arts was he Dennis Wheatley novel ‘The Devil Rides Out’ which came out when the author was nine. The book follows a scientists who discovers that a neighbour of his is a secret ‘white witch’ and his house is covered in pentagrams – scoffing at the absurdity of the idea his scepticism is gradually whittled away by several freakish events until the Devil himself and the neighbour agrees to eternal damnation in return for the Devil going back to Hell. 

Though the Letts household wasn’t particularly religious the book scared Barry so much that he stole into his parent’s bedroom and pinched their rosary beads to take to bed ‘just in case’! Barry no doubt aimed to make an adaptation of the film himself one day but Hammer Films beat him to it (with Christopher Lee and Patrick Mower in the two lead roles). So instead Letts wrote his audition piece and sighed to script editor Terrance Dicks ‘It’s a shame I’ll never be able to make this sort of a story with Dr Who’. Terrance replied that, given the weird things they’d been making lately, he didn’t see why they couldn’t have the Devil in there somewhere. Figuring that his job was to scare the nation’s nine-year-olds the way he’d once been, Barry wanted to write something similar. Rather than farm the idea out to someone else, though, he kept it for himself. Letts had started his career as a writer long before he became a director (of ‘The Enemy Of the World’ amongst other projects) and had indeed submitted two scripts to the Troughton era that were passed over. Undeterred he decided to have another bash himself for ‘his’ Doctor, figuring that after two years of asking other writers what he wanted in the series it was about time to put his money where his mouth was. However Letts was in a quandary: he was reluctant to work on his own in case he got too busy when he should have been doing other work on the series but didn’t want to collaborate with any of the show’s regulars in case they found themselves too ‘scared’ to demote to him or give him honest feedback – indeed, no one outside his secretary and Terrance even knew that this was his going to be his script. He phoned up his old writing partner, Owen Holder, but found that he was busy. It looked as if the idea was going to be a non-starter but then Barry’s wife suggested a friend of hers that he’s never actually met: Robert Sloman, who was currently working as the distributor for the Sunday Times but who had once been a freelance writer and was desperate to work again. The pair worked together really well – so well that they went on to write all the season finales for the rest of barry’s time on the series. If you’re thinking that you don’t remember either name from the creditys, though, they used the pseudonym ‘Guy Leopold’ (Guy being Robert’s son’s name and Leopold Barry’s middle name): partly to keep up the charade that Barry wasn’t directly involved (and couldn’t be credited anyway given that producers weren’t meant to give themselves ‘work’) while Sloman was worried his old writing partner Laurence Dobie would be cross his friend had worked without him. I like to think there was a ‘Gerald Wiley’ moment somewhere when Barry ‘invited’ himself to a production meeting and revealed who he really was, just like Ronnie Barker, but if there was sadly he reaction hasn’t been recorded. 

 Chances are most people working on the show guessed anyway as ‘The Daemons’ is the quintessential 3rd Doctor in so many ways, with all the elements Barry had been asking individual writers to include ion the show. As the co-creator of every main character (apart from the Brigadier, whose potential he’s seen straight away) Barry knows these people inside out and makes sure the plot has space for them all to have their moments. The script leans heavily on the idea of UNIT having a home life away from work (something Letts was always nagging writers to include) and you see them basically having one big holiday, interrupted by occasional Satanism. The Master, too, is a Letts creation that’s given more space to breathe than usual, Letts nailing the fact that the character’s grand ego is covering up deep insecurities and that as powerful as he is he always wants more. Of all the many Dr Who moments of the ‘ordinary’ hitting the ‘extraordinary’, the sleepy English village and the Devil are two complete extremes that make for several highly memorable moments, while the script comes down right in the middle between belief in magic and belief in science (the Doctor explains a lot of this story away using the old Arthur C Clarke idea that ‘to an advanced civilisation there is no discernible difference between science and magic’ but nevertheless locals with Miss Hawthorne is ‘right’ a lot more times than anyone else in this story – the Doctor included. It’s an oddball story in many ways this one, contrasted between the expected and the unexpected. A story about a controversial subject like witchcraft (back at a time when you couldn’t set a story inside a church – so it’s re-named a ‘crypt’ here – and when you weren’t allowed to say the word ‘God’), with that many location sequences at night and constant action sequences are exactly the sort of things a producer would normally cut out of a script, not add into one. On a technical sense of what Barry wanted other writers to do it’s a nonsense in so many ways – and yet Barry comes to this story first and foremost as a fan, eager to play with all the era’s toys because, Devil and location aside, however, this is the one Pertwee story that has every element of the era gathered together in one place.

 I’ve always found it strange that an acknowledged Buddhist, who’ll put his beliefs into more than a few Dr Who scripts before he goes, starts his writing career with Who in a very Christian setting. It’s the sort of thing that most showrunners would plead with their team of writers not to do - especially in Britain in 1971 - not least because they give The Master in his most vicious and ruthless era the disguise of a very gentile English vicar (the wonderfully named ‘Mr Magister’ – Magister being Latin for Master) and blow up a church (actually a model shot but one so accurate that the BBC still got letters of complaint that sacred ground had been blown up for a mere children’s programme – the props team kept one on their notice-board for years as a sort of backhanded compliment over their work). These were the days when anything even vaguely controversial about Christianity was a no-go area, when you couldn’t set anything inside a Church or use the word on ‘God’ on TV without the censors banning you and yet here Dr Who is not only ignoring the warning signs but demolishing them (though maybe the most damning thing of all is the way everyone talks about ‘magic’ as being wrong, in a setting that makes it clear magic is misunderstood science and then equates Christianity to magic). It’s a perfect disguise for The Master, though, someone whose as respectable and gentile as they come and which gives him space to be charming, all the whole thumbing his nose at longstanding Earth traditions. Roger Delgado fits into this world even better than he does in other disguises as a scientist, a government official, a carnival barker and whatever the hell The Kalid in ‘Timeflight’ is meant to be. Automatically rusted and assumed to be ‘good’ because of his job, it’s only Miss Hawthone who can see through his intentions to who he really is. 

Equally controversial is just how rude this story is about traditional English rural life. As much as modern viewers are horrified by ‘The Green Death’ and ‘Terror Of The Zygons’, which take the mickey out of Wales and Scotland by featuring every ethnic stereotype going (Ireland escaped all the way until the ‘Timeless Child’ arc when, weirdly, a pre-Doctor Doctor turns out to be from a quaint Irish village, but is more puzzling than cruel compared to the others), ‘The Daemons’ does the same for traditional English life, which is full of quaint mostly-forgotten customs everyone partakes in out of habit. There’s a village green that’s too small to be of any real use and has seen better days and seems to exist purely for the Doctor to have somewhere to be tied up. There’s a pub where everyone spends all their frère time drinking, apparently out of habit. Then there’s the Morris Dancing (something traditionally done on Mayday, so enhancing the ‘Walpurgis’ setting of the night before), a pagan fertility ritual which, had you stopped and asked most of the people taking part what they were doing, nobody would actually be able to explain it (as a measure of how much the roots of this tradition – to encourage bountiful pregnancies in the village in the coming year – has been forgotten my primary school performed these every year. We were eight. And no even in our village pregnancies didn’t start that young. And we weren’t alone: most of my uni friend and beyond, who’d grown up in different places, all did much the same at my age. Some peope think it’s a misunderstanding of dancing that the Moorish enemy did during The Crusades and was originally named ‘Moorish Dancing’ and so not English at all, even though it seems the most English thing ever). There are roots in this village much older than Christianity, all of them apparently directed by the devil since the beginning of time. And then the script turns what might have been a quiet local Sunday on its head by throwing in killer brainwashed Morris dancers, a satanic ritual (with at friend Katy Manning’s suggestion Matthew Corbett as one of the followers, working as an extra so he could get his equity card and thus take over the presenting gig for ‘Sooty’ from his dad Harry; it might be a comment on a job he never actually wanted that he’s a Satanist practicing ‘bad magic’ before taking over a bear with powers for good!) and The Master conjuring up The Devil, all in a kid’s show on a Saturday teatime. 

Had this been the work of a lesser producer I’d assume Letts was doing his best to try and get this show in so much trouble it was taken off the air, but oddly enough nobody – not a single viewer - objected on that front, perhaps because – from The Master on down – everyone is so charming in this story that it feels less like an attack and more a celebration. Even after re-watching this story off and on for thirty years now I’m at a loss as to how they managed to pull that off. But it’s true: you feel for and like everyone in this story. Even The master. Perhaps especially The Master (who was so popular on location that he was cheered by the fans louder than the Doctor and everyone had to be asked to boo him instead!) As much as Barry loved horror and terror and action and drama at heart he was a quiet, kind man who never had a bad word to say about anybody (everyone has a tale of one or other Who producer losing their temper but not Barry and his term was second longest of anyone) and that respect for everyone’s point of view is what makes this story work as well as it does: you feel for the Doctor trying to keep everything together, you feel for Jo whose trying to be heroic but the Doctor keeps telling off, you feel for the Brigadier kept apart from the action by the heart barrier, you feel for Yates and Benton having to be de facto in charge with a bunch of villagers on their conscience, you feel for Miss Hawthorne who believes in the Devil and understands the threat better than anyone and you even feel for The Master who just wants someone evil to pat him o the head and tell him what a clever bad little boy he is (spoilers: the Devil has bigger things on his mind than thanking the minion who brought him back). 

 It’s almost template in the way it has exactly the sort of things Dr Who always does – and it’s no surprise that this story out of all the many that do, pinches the most royally from 1950s scifi series ‘Quatermass’ –specifically the third film series ‘The Pit’ where an alien spacecraft is found buried underground and has been influencing humanity across time, just like here (it might have helped if they hadn’t made archaeologist Professor Horner just like Quatermass, however, grumpy and acerbic and uninterested in a show for telly. David Simeon, playing TV presenter Alistair Fergus like a cross between David Frost and a dotty presenter from ‘The One Show’, incidentally, is a local brought up near the filming). The idea of an archaeological dig live on telly was a great and very Dr Who one though whoever came up with it. Viewers in 1971 would probably have remembered the first time they did for this real, live, on BBC in 1968 in the wake of the relics found at Sutton Hoo. Expecting more artefacts from Ancient Britons might be buried there, there was much excitement that we might get the equivalent of Tutankhamen’s Tomb live on TV with everyone watching and sharing the thought of being the ‘first’ people to see something of yesteryear; a few viewers even thought there might be a curse and they’d see devastation of the type seen at Devil’s End on screen. Instead they found nothing – not one thing – and the broadcast was such a washout it wasn’t till the 1990s they tried something similar on live telly. Making something as downright boring and ordinary as archaeology at it’s worst exciting, though, that’s very Dr Who . I’m amazed, actually, that this series hasn’t done more with the idea: aside from ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’, ‘Resolution’, River Song in a total of one story and Benny in the ‘New Adventures’ books we’ve never had the idea again even though the idea of something from the past being dug up in the present for generations in the future is very Dr Who, even before you start sticking artefacts into plots. Cutting a village off (thanks to the heat barrier used by the Devil to grow) is also clever and something very Dr Whoy they’d never tried before: the scenes of the Brigadier trapped outside, his usual army ‘stick’ catching alight, and the vain attempts of helicopters and aeroplanes to break through, are very well done (although the typically eccentric English weather does result in rather a lot of snow heaped up for ground so close to a ‘heat barrier’).

 Witchcraft, too, was overdue an appearance in the series after eight years, being such an established part of folklore crying out for a Dr Whoy explanation. Ater all, it wasn’t as far away as people think: the last prosecution for witchcraft in England was as late as 1944 and even though, technically, it was to stop Helen Duncan, a psychic medium con artist from fooling people with muslin she produced as ‘ectoplasm’ during séances (that nevertheless a lot of people believed in, both then and now: she dies in mysterious circumstances in 1956 which her followers say was the result of a botched police raid that caused the ectoplasm to go back inside her body in fright, strangling her insides ) nevertheless the fact that there even still was a law this late on and in most viewers’ lifetimes made this sort of thing perfect for Dr Who. Mercifully, too, we don’t get the stereotypes of cackling women on brooms with cauldrons or even the other stereotype of ‘The Witchfinders’ that they were ‘ordinary people attacked by a zealous crowd’; instead Olivia Hawthorne is a white witch who lives an ordinary, if often weird, life. There are many Olivia Hawthornes in Britain then now and no doubt always and while there no doubt some Satanists calling up the devil in their basements still (that’s who I blame every time David Cameron or Boris Johnson end up in public office again, despite all the problems they’ve caused us) you’re much more likely to bump into practising ‘good’ one. If Dr Who was going to do witchcraft one day – as inevitably they were – then this is the way to do it: kindly, rather than mockingly or dismissively. As for the all-seeing Devil creating mankind, well, that’s as Dr Who and British as they come: while Hollywood and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ was trying to big up mankind’s role in the universe led on b y an invisible immortal unknowable God we’re the creations of a pint-sized Devil who clearly regrets ever bothering with us at all. Charming! 

 Somehow what could have been crass and stupid (‘K9 and Company’, a DW pilot for a series that never happened in 1981, has virtually as the same plot and that’s very silly indeed) comes over as really sweet: white witch Miss Hawthorne is actually proven right with her senses and premonitions more than the Doctor is, for all his science and knowledge, while the Devil is sent packing (spoilers) not with the usual technical gobbledegook and the Doctor doing something clever but through love and Jo’s willingness to sacrifice herself (as unlikely as this is as an ending, and as much as fans love to point out how stupid it is that it’s enough to stop The Devil in his tracks, in context morally its perfect for this tale of double-crossing and using people’s faith against them and a lot less stupid than the Dr sweeping in to save everything with his sonic screwdriver. After all the Deil has been manipulating humanity since the beginning and think he’s corrupted everyone: to found out someone is still pure at heart is kind of like a big computer error and an immortal’s life-crisis all in one). Plus if anyone’s being laughed at here its The Master, whose ego leads him to believe that he can control anyone, even the Devil, until he gets hoisted on his own petard and discovers how few moral scruples evil demons really have. His attitude in this story, after all, is decidedly un-Christian as he hypnotises people and takes away their free will, controlling everyone and making them work against their better instincts – the UNIT army, the local witch, even the Devil plays things by the book more than he does as he recklessly ignores the rules. 

 Best of all is the location. We’ve forgotten the rush of excitement nowadays when so much of Dr Who is recorded out of a studio (and when most of the best stories make a studio set look as if its outside anyway) but in context having so much filming in an actual village makes this story seem far more ‘real’ than the others alongside it, whatever the unlikely events. Aldbourne in Wiltshire is sublime casting: assistant Peter Grimwade (himself a director of Dr Who in later years) couldn’t believe his luck when he was sent to scout out for somewhere suitable. Aldbourne wasn’t a million miles away from TV centre, was close enough to a major town (Marlborough was six miles away) for easy filming and civilisation but looking for all the world as if it’s a million miles from anywhere. The Headington Quarry Morris Dancers – who are still going strong – were eager participants too, while everything laid out on the script was there on tap, altogether: a village green (with a cross for Pertwee to get tied up to), Membury Airfield ready for the helicopter scenes, a disused aircraft hanger they were allowed to use at Bridge Farm Ramsbury, a village pub ‘The Blue Boar’ for both location setting and for the regulars to drink in after filming (who till the 2000s still had the fake ‘Cloven Hoof’ sign up in the bar for Whovians to spot, till new owners sold it at auction), even a stone age barrow that worked well as a plausible archaeological ‘dig’ site and, of course, a church. After years of slogging their guts out in the BBC, when everyone who wasn’t working on this show (and even some that were) seemed highly dismissive of Dr Who, the sheer helpfulness and excitement of everyone was a real lift. The locals were invited to be unpaid extras and they turned out in droves, interrupting filming for autographs that to other showrunners would have been an annoying delay but to Letts was a great chance to show the regulars how much they were loved, with Pertwee and Delgado’s morale raised no end. No wonder everyone concerned remembered the filming so fondly, with Terrance Dicks even adding an in-joke to praise the village when archaeologist Horner referred to ‘the 3rd Lord of Aldbourne’. 

 Notably science and religion are both ‘wrong’ in this story – its only love that wins the day, not superstition or gadgets. As much as the Dr runs around thinking it’s his show, actually it isn’t (something that’s true of Letts’ other more spiritual stories too): it’s Miss Hawthorn’s quick thinking that saves the Doctor from superstitious locals (and in case you’re wondering ‘the Grand Quiquaequod’ is the word ‘Who’ in Latin, in past present and future tense) , Yates’ heroicness that saves Jo from sacrifice and Jo’s pure heart that saves everyone (only the Brig lacks a similar moment sadly, though he does know the Dr well enough by now to have faith in his decisions and thus gets to save more of his men than usual – one of which, the hapless clumsy scientist one, is Osgood’s dad): all these are ‘good Samaritan’ gestures to save someone, even at great cost and even when you’ve just had a fundamental disagreement with them. By contrast The Master loses because his motives aren’t pure: Azaal can see through the fact that he’s been revived for ill gotten gains, while The Master doesn’t have friends to save him – just brainwashed henchman who can’t think for themselves enough to do any sacrificing. That’s, ultimately, why he loses – because he’s never inspired anyone to greatness the way the Dr has Jo and his own ego gets in his own way. Which a lot of fans have taken to be Christian motifs, but really they’re more Buddhist ones, like all Letts and Sloman stories (if this were truly a Christian story the goodies would die horrible deaths, become martyrs and then be resurrected, while The Master would only get his comeuppance in the afterlife – which given that he’s a timelord is a long time away). Incidentally, in case you’re wondering about the spelling, yes it is ‘daemons’ with an added ‘a’; this was an idea of director Christopher Barry’s who was worried about how the public might view an overtly Christian story and used the ancient Greek spelling, which technically didn’t mean a ‘devil’ type demon at all but a general ‘spirit’ who could be helpful as well as good. Though not a Letts idea it fits nicely with his philosophy in this story that there’s no such thing as ‘pure’ evil, just people doing bad things either out of karma because bad things were done to them first or out of a survival instinct. Azeal, by the way, means ‘Angel Of Death’. Apparently The Master’s Latin only stretches to his own name – which is, at least, in character as the first word he’d look up - otherwise he might have had a clue that the old red guy wasn’t going to be too happy at being woken up. Oh and if you’re worried that The Master’s incantation really will conjure up the Devil while you’re watching, don’t be: it’s actually the words to ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’ spoken backwards phonetically, with ‘Namyah Siramad’ or ‘Damaris Hayman’ in reverse thrown in by Delgado for good measure as an in-joke. More scary might be the writing on his ceremonial robes, with the word ‘Master’ written in the 16th century occult (and banned) alphabet Theban. One final in-joke: the Doctor complaining that Jo has got them lost by holding the map upside down really happened one day on location and got added to the script! 

 If there’s a problem with this story it’s with the effects. Even the opening effect is wonky and oddly shot: we see…something between the gravestones but can’t see what it is or the significance (actually it’s the assistant floor manager’s black hat pulled on a string to a cacophony of sound effects!) Bok, the Devi’s pet gargoyle, is hardly the natural feared assistant of Beelzebub somehow. He’s clearly a tiny actor running around in an odd looking outfit (of all people it seems odd the Devil should need to cut corners, not least because of all the dead tax-dodging millionaires he must have with him in Hell) and the moments when he’s supposed to fly are oddly directed (was there a special effect that was never added in? Although even without it everyone’s eyes are all over the place for where he’s supposed to be). He’s short and stocky and walks around with his tongue sticking out like an errant schoolchild rather than the epitome of evil. You can’t help but think that The Weeping Angels are the result of Steven Moffat ten years old when this story went out and creeped out by genuine graveyard gargoyles outside his hotel window on a family holiday, being extremely disappointed in this and wanting to make actual creepy gargoyles when he grew up. The Devil, too, is a let-down after all that build up. You would have thought the show’s producer who’d seen so many less ambitious effects come a cropper, would know to have a threat they could actually depict properly on screen, not a growing and shrinking 20 foot Devil. Inevitably Barry was going to let his favourite technical discovery colour separation overlay (the idea of filming people in one place and a set in the other, then combining the two and playing around with the ‘size’ button) loose on his pet project and even though it was always a devil of a job to make it work properly it’s used so often as ‘magic’ even though it’s all rather clumsily down and even in 1971 on a black and white telly you could see the joins. Azaal is actually rather good when he’s standing still, but when he’s moving and especially when he speaks he’s your usual everyday Who villain rather than the baddest most evil monster we can ever see in this series. Stephen Thorne is rather odd casting too: I know him as the rather prim and proper Inspector Lestrade in the superlative Clive ‘Paradise Towers’ Merrison radio Sherlock Holmes (the best adaptations of the stories by a quadzillion light years) but in both his Dr Who roles (he goes on to play Omega) he’s called on to shout and rant and that’s not him at all (indeed, this is very much an ‘Old Testament’ Devil, more interested in making mankind guilty and shamefaced, rather than the hipper Newer one). Even the shrinking and growing idea has been done to death already with The Master’s tissue compression eliminator turning people into dolls. You can usually rate a Dr Who story on how good its cliffhangers are, how well the writers build up the tension to a climax and a revelation that takes the episodes in a new direction, but this one is a rare exception as they’re all awful, with all the big dramatic events tending to take place in the middle of an episode instead; one of them is even The Devil turning on The Master, which even given that he’s an interesting character we don’t want to see snuff it is not really what cliffhangers of peril are traditionally for (who cares if a baddy kills another baddy?) 

 Perhaps because on paper it should be awful ‘The Daemons’ has had a bumpy ride down the years – at the time of broadcast and indeed for quite a few decades it was held up as one of the best 3rd Dr stories, with Barry requesting the story be held back as an ‘example’ of his era of Dr Who (nothing to do with it being his ‘baby’ at all, nope, no way). The story was even more fondly remembered by the general public after a Christmas repeat got the highest viewing figures DW had had in six years (10.5million…for a repeat of a story that had been on just seven months earlier!) And then the story was forgotten about: typically BBC they wiped four out of five episodes in colour, only keeping the black-and-white tapes despite their promise and despite keeping lesser stories around it intact like ‘The Mutants’ and ‘Colony In Space’. Until the 1980s and early 1990s when it became one of the stories that seemed to lodge itself in fans’ memories over time, building up to ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ levels of hysteria (and like ‘Tomb’ ‘Child’ and ‘Talons’ there was even a script book of it published). And then in 1992 the BBC decided that the Dr Who videos were doing so well they would actually spend money on it (Shock! Horror!) using the surviving episode four and the ‘hints’ of colour that had been uncovered on an NTSC version together to make a new master-tape that would be fully coloured throughout. It didn’t always work (the skin tones aren’t quite right and the reds, especially, are much stronger than everything else) but nevertheless, fittingly for this story, it felt like magic. The technique was so groundbreaking Tomorrow’s World’ even ran a feature about how they did it, unthinkable acceptance from a mainstream BBC programme in the ‘wilderness’ years when the show was off the air (it helped that the Tomorrow’s World editor was the one time head of the Bedfordhsire branch of the Dr Who Appreciation Society). And then, to much publicity, the re-colourised story was shown in 1992…and everyone started hating it. The story was too slow, too weird, too unconvincing. Seen separately from the rest of the era, as a standalone story rather than as a culmination of two years’ work, it just didn’t flow to most of the general public, while if anything the rural setting and digs at Christianity were even more out of kilter with what was seen as the ‘norm’ for British telly. Even the fans whose memories of this story had grown exponentially (and hadn’t seen the bootleg copies taped from overseas screenings in the interim) were disappointed: in their heads the gargoyles really did seem to fly like magic rather than by clumsily editing the film. The Devil really did seem all-powerful and magical, growing on screen in a technique never seen before, rather than actor Stephen Thorne edited in using colour separation overlay. Modern viewers could se the joins the 1970s viewers couldn’t and were less invested in these characters and what happened to them. ‘The Dameons’ then spent the next twenty odd years tumbling from near the top of ‘best of’ lists to the point where a lot of fans were openly calling it an example of everything they hated about this ‘smug’ and ‘self-indulgent’ era of the series, without the hard science most fans have come to associate with the show and something the series should never ever have tried to do. 

 These are all valid points. I mean, in any other series including the Devil would be the point at which a long-running saga should end, as you can’t exactly beat that as a villain – which is exactly what happened to ‘Being Human’ in series five). And yet, there’s something charming about this story that works almost despite itself: a lucky accident that shouldn’t possibly work and yet somehow does, at least for me. Mostly I think because unlike one-off viewers on BBC2 I am invested in these characters and everyone gets a chance to shine in turn - the Dr gets lots of space to do Doctory things, Jo is plucky and heroic and gets a turn saving everyone at the end (after the first year having the others rescue her from trouble over and over this is a bigger moment than it might seem), Yates gets to be dashing, the Brigadier actually takes part in the action instead of huffing about it, The Master gets to be suave and oily in all the best ways, and best of all pairing Benton with Miss Hawthorn gives them a Dr-Jo vibe all of their own (I demand a spin-off series, I really do). I really like the five-part format too, which gives the story more room to breathe than your regular four parters without going on too long like the six parters; given that Dr Who only tried this three times and two of these stories are in my top 65 it’s safe to say I‘d have been happy had they kept this as a regular thing, rather than a quirk of scheduling and fitting programmes round sporting events. 

 More than any one element though this is just one of those stories that ‘works’, where all the disparate parts come together in one satisfying whole, with some of the era’s most iconic scenes and quotable lines stuffed into a story that’s not quite like anything else the show ever did (Satan’s Pit, the closest on paper, is a lot more on the nose than this and though they give more reasons for at story to realistically take place in the Dr Who universe it feels over-written and cartoonish, without the charm of ‘The Daemons’ that winds up feeling like just another monster story, while ‘The Awakening’ is like a folk memory of this story a decade on, a two-parter which has all the charm of this story but less actual plot). It all feels ‘right’ somehow, like the natural end to a series arc that has been all about UNIT coming to trust one another and to see through The Master’s brainwashing and aliens offering gifts, of not becoming gullible without going the other way and becoming cynical. Fittingly given the Christian themes it’s a story all about sacrifice and superstition, of thinking for yourself and not taking things on face value (and thus, in subtle hints, the opposite of how Christianity was being taught in the 1970s, even while the iconography is proven to be basically correct). Though its plot really concerns itself with an energy that keeps people away, perhaps the best thing about ‘The Daemons’ is how inviting it is and how much it wants to keep you in and how much everyone seems to be enjoying themselves, a series-finale celebration that wraps up one of Dr Who’s most popular seasons nicely. Yes parts of it look very creaky nowadays, even compared to other stories this same year, but if you’re too busy caring about the bad effects and the illogical science rather than becoming wrapped up in the ‘magic’ of it all then, well, you’re missing out on a whole dimension of watching this show. As Miss Hawthorne will no doubt tell you. At length. 

 POSITIVES + Damaris Hayman‘s Miss Hawthorne is one of the greatest of all Dr Who incidental characters, handled with unusually great sensitivity. What could have been another of Dr Who’s dotty old ladies, easily duped and exploited in a cynical and commercial world (that’s certainly how the director saw her, till the actress went and told Barry her concerns over her character specifically and witchcraft in general weren’t being taken seriously enough, taking fellow superstitious believer Roger Delgado along with her for support and offering to be a ‘magical advisor’, much like the Doctor was a scientific advisor to UNIT but in reverse) becomes The Doctor’s equal in this story – even more so than The Master whose out of his depth from day one. She’s as certain and stubborn in her beliefs as he is, throws in her lots with the Doctor on getting the archaeological dig stopped that kicks off the whole story despite her fundamental disagreements with him, is the person to use science in her freeing of the Dr, thanks to Bessie’s remote control and even gets to whack people overt the head with her crystal ball! It’s there in the script but Damaris adds another dimension on top of that, giving a performance that’s subtle and noble rather than wacky but also believably ‘witchy’. She loved the filming in Aldbourne too, incidentally, giving the church reading on the Sunday ‘day off’ between filming weeks as a ‘thankyou’ to the locals and being invited to come back and judge the carnival float the following year – which she did repeatedly before her death in 2021. 

 NEGATIVES - Oh no, not another species trying to shape the human race! There’s a whole lot of backstory that just gets in the way, about how the Devil manipulated mankind and made us his science project like a kid at school, which as well as contradicting what the Racnoss and Fendahl tell us later just doesn’t feel as if it belongs in this story somehow; this is such a philosophical morality tale that giving the Devil an actual concrete back-story and a reason for setting humans on human rather than just ‘because he’s evil’ just doesn’t seem right somehow and it undercuts the ending too. I mean, if the Devil made us in ‘his’ image then we should all have turned out nasty, shouty and hairy – which might explain a lot about GB News presenters thinking about it - not humans who can think for ourselves and with a moral compass that lets us sacrifice ourselves for the greater good; I know that’s why he wants to blow us up in the end, because we’ve all turned out soft, but he must have been really rubbish at his job of corrupting us in that case and not an all-seeing all-powerful demon at all. 

BEST QUOTE: Benton: ‘What’s going on around here? All Hell seems to be breaking loose’. Miss Hawthorne: ‘You know sergeant, you might be exactly right’. 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: By and large I don’t mention documentaries in these reviews because even when time and space is relative that would be another thousand pages of text and I know you’ve all got homes to go to. However ‘Return To Devil’s End’ (1993) a straight-to-video by independent company Reeltime Pictures for the show’s 30th anniversary is particularly notable: long before DVD extras and decades before Blu-rays this was the documentary that started it all, a four-way reunion in the Wiltshire Village where ‘The Daemons’ . Jon Pertwee, Nicholas Courtney, Richard Franklin and – most exciting of all given his lack of interviews – Ian Levine alongside director Christopher Barry all talk about their memories of making the story and even though it’s been 22 years their recollections are fresh and clear. You don’t learn an awful lot you didn’t get from conventions, fanzines and the later DVD extras to be fair but you do get to see four old friends having fun. The only pity is the people who aren’t there: Katy Manning, Barry Letts, Terrance Dicks and, of course, Roger Delgado (whose remembered by a very tearful Pertwee). A real shame the BBC didn’t just buy up the rights to put this on the DVD or Blu-Ray or better yet a TV repeat (how about BBC3?!?): never re-issued it’s really rather rare these days and deserves to be seen again. 

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