The Invasion
(Season 6, Dr 2 with Jamie and Zoe, 2/11/1968-21/12/1968, producer: Peter Bryant, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Derrick Sherwin from an idea by Kit Pedler, director: Douglas Camfield)
Rank: 28
'Dear Mum on Mondas, Wish you were here! had a fun holiday on our twin Earth. See attached pictures of me deleting the pigeons in the park and looking at the Autons in Madame Tussaud's waxworks. I got a bit sick on the London Eye, but then I remembered that Cybermen aren't meant to go dizzy or feel pain so I tried to hide it and I was only a little bit sick afterwards. Our cyber controller was so pleased with us for exterminating the Humans that he let us go get ice creams and take them to our underground layer in the sewers. I'll be back home soon, probably. Oh and I've got a tonne of cyber-industries gadgets to take home as presents. See you soon, invasion plans and rogue timelords permitting!'
As much as I’m the nerdy sort of collector who wants to own everything about the subject I’m interested in no matter how obscure or overlooked, sometimes a decent compilation is a really good way to enjoy something too. Having a ‘greatest hits’ package for a series as long, as varied and unwieldy as Dr Who is asking for trouble, but if I had to pick one story that summed up this mad ol’ series better than any other it would be ‘The Invasion’. It’s not that this eight-parter does any one thing better than any other Dr Who story, more that it does pretty much all the things you associate with the show all together, in one go, even though it’s doing some of them for the first time and others for the last time, as if past, present and future have collided in some accidental timeloop. Not in some boring generic tick-box way like some other stories that try a little too hard to be all things to all timelords either (looking at you ‘Claws Of Axos’ and ‘Age Of Steel’) but in a set of episodes that tells a great story in its own right, not too complex for newcomers to understand but complex enough for fans to get something new out of it. I mean just take that title alone ‘The Invasion’ (because everyone wanted to keep The Cybermen art a surprise…ruined, not for the first or last time, by the Radio Times doing a big splash feature on the story!) It almost doesn’t matter what’s being invaded by whom, because this is a story that’s much about how Humans would rally together (or not) in the case of a mass invasion and how unprepared we are for cyber-converted visitors from space. Especially as modern capitalist life is turning so many of us into unthinking cyber zombies to begin with.
This was a time of
transition for Dr Who, four stories from the end of its sixth season when the
show will become almost unrecognisable with a new Doctor, new companions, new set
up, new production team and in colour to boot. The start of the new era is
beginning to arrive though: Terrance Dicks starts his record six year stint as
script editor here (by far the longest the ‘classic’ series ever had), old
producer Peter Bryant is bowing out to make way for Barry Letts, stars Patrick
Troughton, Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury have all come to the decision that it
was time to move on at the end of the year either just before or during the
making of this story, while this is additionally an adventure based on an idea
by Dr Kit Pedler (Dr Who’s own ‘scientific advisor’ for the transition from the
1st Dr to the 2nd who comes up with a lot of the stories in this era- only he
didn’t have time to write, given he was busy with the first series of
‘Doomwatch’) and the only script credited to former script editor and future
producer Derrick Sherwin. Change is in the air, with a story that’s still
recognisably like every other 2nd Dr story (a fight against inhumane ruthless
killer monsters!) but also feels rather like the 3rd Dr stories to come (all
that military setup and a plot about mass invasions) and flashes of the end of
the 1st Dr era to boot (a big computer and a cyber-army picking
people off one by one). Stylistically, too, this is a halfway house between the
atmospheric 1960s and the visual 1970s, filmed in black and white but with the
‘feel’ of a colour story. The overall feel is like one of those clever shots of
the Tardis arriving somewhere in mid-materialisation, when its clearly taking
up space but hasn’t quite fully arrived yet.
One other thing makes
‘The Invasion’ feel like the future. Traditionally so far if the monsters have
a voice it comes from a leader whose a taller meaner version of the rest, or
maybe a mad computer, but the Cybermen have a baddy whose amongst the most
eloquent and intelligent of the lot. While the Cybermen do their usual invading
thing there’s also a human collaborator doing all the talking for them in Kevin
Stoney’s wonderfully subtle portrayal of your usual mad psychopath collaborator
Tobias Vaughan, a millionaire businessman with more money than sense, whose
become rich off building technological gadgets that exploit us rather than
entertain us, someone who could do so much good but who instead chooses to do
harm. I love the way that Vaughan’s office is filled with links to cameras and
videophones, as if he’s invented Zoom calling a good thirty years before anyone
was thinking like this for real. Were this story to be re-made today they would
be just like Bill Gates or Elon Musk, but the clever thing about Tobias Vaughan
is just how charming he is: while the Cybermen walk the walk he’s a man who can
talk the talk quite brilliantly. The clues as to his Cyber-collaboration are
all there (if you somehow missed the Radio Times expose): the computer
secretary in the basement, the way he stays so calm and unruffled even when the
Doctor is on to him (the moment at which the baddies generally start to panic
or rant) and the lack of blinking (though it’s hard to tell given that the
actor has a lazy eye). Kevin Stoney is magnificent in the part: even when you
know he’s up to no good you still feel yourself trusting him against your better
instincts because what he says sounds so reasonable and his calm demeanour
makes the Doctor sound like the unreasonable madman. He’s a little like mad
psychopathic human collaborators of the past (notably wonderfully subtle
psychopath and Dalek buddy Mavic Chen played by, umm, Kevin Stoney) but more
the sort of person associated with the stories of the 4th Dr era (when Tom
Baker was at his best clashing with someone as full of life as he was). Of
course Tobias Vaughan is going to be working with the Cybermen – and arrogant
enough to think he can successfully double-cross them, when they intend to do
exactly the same thing to him. Tobias Vaughan is a superb baddy and Kevin
Stoney is one of the best actors to ever appear in the series – it’s a real shame
he wasn’t brought back ‘Master’ style as a semi-regular – and Roger Delgado’s
suave first incarnation owes a lot to Stoney’s unruffled unhinged madman,
equally at home discussing figures with accountants and giving instructions to
take over the world via his cyber-radio. Peter Halliday’s Packer is a superb
henchman too, doing all the dirty jobs Vaughan is too posh to do, taking the
brunt of his employer’s wrath and his increased anguish over what his boss
might shout at him next is by turns hilarious and sad, all emotion to his boss’
neutral tones. ‘The Invasion’ also shows off the actor’s impressive range by
getting Halliday to provide most of the chilling emotionless Cybermen voices on
the side.
Even though they don’t appear
till halfway through (and are described as ‘our allies’ in conversation till
then) there’s only one star, however. I have a real soft spot for the Cybermen
stories of the 1960s, which are all first-class without exception and make our
Mondasian cousins amongst the most brutal and sneaky and hard to kill of all Dr
Who monsters, before they started mucking about in the colour years making them
susceptible to gold and guns and all sorts of things. This might be because
they lend themselves to a particular sort of 1960s story, about spies lurking
undercover and the inhuman people running the world: The Daleks are kind of
timeless and The Master is a particularly 1970s sort of a threat, a colourful
individual taking over the world on a whim, but The Cybermen are the machine, the
unstoppable giants in control who dictate how everyone lives. They’re a real
threat in this story, arguably for the last time, an unstoppable force everyone
is automatically afraid of even if people don’t know what they are. They look
great too: this is the debut appearance of the iconic designs everyone
associates with Cybermen and even though I’m mighty fond of the first and
second versions they do make the monsters look ;tougher’ and suitably more ‘streetwise’,
with ‘teardrop’ eyes that hint at the Human emotions buried so very far under
the surface and jug-handles that mimic the transistor radios they use as part
of their plan, making them like objects. The Cybermen try several different
invasions in this story: they start subtly by using cyber-technology hidden
away in machines being built by cyber industries, then pop out from their
hiding places down some remarkably clean sewers (surely the ultimate example of
Dr Who taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary – not many series would
make a sewage system such a plot point, although it is also very like the Yetis
in the underground from earlier in the year) and then, when they’ve gathered
all they need to know about mankind, the Cybermen invade en masse, with another
fleet waiting poised in space. It’s a bonkers plot but somehow, especially
watched an episode a week the way it was meant to be watched, it works.
The real villain in this
story, as with so many Kit Pedler ‘ideas’, is technology. Now Dr Who has had a
changing view of just how good science is. The Doctor, after all is a
scientists who believes in curiosity and
growth and development, but at the same time thee’ always been a long-running
fear across this series that the wrong people are in charge and that one day
the technology might take us over. We already saw that with ‘The War Machines’
giant computer controlling everyone but here it’s worse because this is a businessman
handing us over to our enemies. Basically technology is only as good or as
moral as the people who make it and while Professor Watkins is exactly the kind
of entrepreneur someone like Kit Pedler would love, the (quite literally)
robotic corporations that take his inventions over and steal his soul use and
mass-produce it do so for all the wrong reasons. It’s no coincidence that Vaughan
has made his money out of his bugged technological gadgets at International
Electromatics, each one sending radio waves into the ether for the Cybermen to
follow and out Humans to sleep. Doctor Pedler had already invented the Cybermen
partly out of his fears that new biological technology was getting to the point where Humans could
play God with each other and replace worn out parts; it’s a natural next step
that, rather than implant a bunch of cybernetics into our body, we are really
imploring them willingly into our brains. Unless you have a technology degree
few people really understand how the gadgets we surround ourselves us with work
and they would be an easy thing to exploit – as you can see with the fuss about
what countries are using Tiktok and other apps to ‘spy’ on us today. ‘The
Invasion’ correctly guesses that uneasy feeling you have whenever you research something or even talk
about it to your friend, only for your socil media to fill up with adverts for
it the whole of the next week: even back in 1968 there was a feeling that ad
campaigns were getting too clever and trying to ‘brainwash’ us into buying their
products. Putting an evil genius in league with the Cybermen behind it all is a
natural next step. It’s at one with all of ‘Doomwatch’ this story, Pedler’s
next creation, about all the things he’s most frightened can so easily get out
of hand with no regulations to control them. He would, I suspect, have hated AI
even more than the writers of Who do now. The scenes where the Doctor and Zoe ‘accidentally’
dismantle Vaughan’s computer, by simply questioning its logic, are particularly
good: even before The Cybermen turn up we see the failures of technology and
how it lacks a touch a Human being would have, the grey thinking that is above
yes and no answers.
Mostly, though, ‘The
Invasion’ is a sort of back-door pilot
to the new action era of Who that the incoming production team want to create.
Dr Who was in trouble across season six with falling ratings as newer and more
modern scifi series arrived on TV (1969 is the first year the UK get Star Trek,
just as Americans are getting bored of it and see it cancelled at the end of
the year). If Dr Who is to go ahead, say the BBC bosses, it needs a radical
re-think: it needs to be cheaper, with
more stories set on Earth and with each story containing more episodes (so that
the costs of things needing to be built for each story could be spread out
across more weeks). As an eight parter, the longest story since ‘The Dalek’s
Masterplan’ three years earlier, ‘The Invasion’ is just a smidgeon longer than
the seven parters to come when Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts take over for
real in 1970. Terrance also figures that if the Doctor is going to be stuck on
Earth (and a new Doctor at that, given that Patrick Troughton has just handed
in his notice) then he needs a team of regulars around him the audience can get
to know. So, after a trial run with a bunch of soldiers in ‘The Web Of Fear’
everyone’s favourite fictional army subdivision UNIT get their call-up papers
here, the British division of a United Nations Taskforce created to fight off
alien invaders. It’s predictably the sort of thing that would happen in the
real world, after all the half-invasions thwarted by the Doctor already, but
with a few key differences: for one they actually have a budget and secondly
the public actually kind of respect them. We already met the Brigadier in ‘Web’
and see him in command here. We also meet Sgt Benton for the first time (still
a corporal here), John Levine an extra who’d already played a great deal of
monsters in the show who gained ‘promotion’ after another actor kept coming in
late to rehearsals and was fired by director Douglas Camfield (picked for the
UNIT story because he ran his shows like a military exercise with fixed
schedules and couldn’t stand lateness – he has a cameo as the driver who gives
everyone a lift into town from The Tardis in episode one. That’s his wife
Sheila Dunn as the voice of the computer – you can see what she looks like when
he casts her again in ‘Inferno’. Or if you’re really impatient freeze-frame the
later scenes of Isobel’s flat and its modelling photos: the ones taken of
actress sally Faulkner mysteriously went ‘missing’ between episodes so, as the
director lived with a wife who looked much the same and they were only ever
seen again in long shot, he snapped some of her instead). Interestingly there’s
no one else: there’s a lot of soldiers who have lines and Robert Sidaway as a
Captain who, to be frank, does most of the work but none of the other actors
turned up the following year as regulars.
UNIT are also closely
modelled, like a good 50% of Dr Who, on ‘Quatermass’, in which a rigid unthinking
army is told what to do by a mad scientist; although unlike most of the UNIT
stories to come the bad side also has a Quatermass set-up of its own with Cyber-drones
working under the technology of Professor Watkins, the maddest of mad
scientists. They’re never better than in their debut. They’re not the comedy
stooges of their later appearances but neither are they mindless army drones.
They’re a proper thinking, well, UNIT here, banding together and making the
most out of their resources and open to help from passing humans and aliens
(something that very much sets them apart from the cyber-soldiers they’re
fighting, who don’t understand the concept of having allies). The Brigadier is
such a powerful authority figure here he’s also, like most of the story, in
transition, from the shifty Colonel of ‘Web Of Fear’ (he’s been promoted by
this story as well as been given soldiers of his own to play around with) to
the bumbling Watson to the Dr’s Sherlock Holmes of a few years’ later. However
its Benton who makes the most impact despite comparatively little screentime,
the Brigadier’s own personal Jamie whose brave and straightforward and loyal to
a fault, John Levene making him warm and naive without making him look stupid.
Would that UNIT had always been portrayed on screen as well as this, as a bunch
of people working for a common goal despite their differences. Instead of
becoming a bunch of peril monkeys in camouflage and the butt of the Doctor’s
jokes. They’re every bit as logical and ordered as The Cybermen, but capable of
grief and doubt and eagerly adopt second opinions from passing aliens, the best
of both worlds. The Brigadier, particularly, is a sort of anti-Vaughan: he
cares passionately about each of the men in his charge, isn’t prepared to make
them do something he isn’t prepared to do and his bluster is obviously concealing
a warm heart just as Vaughan’s charm is concealing his cold one. It’s the one
great treagedy of this story that the pair never meet on screen and have a
showdown against each other: my money would be on the Brig for all of Vaughan’s
riches and power.
The reason the Brigadier
is here is that the original intention for this slot had been a third story
involving the Yeti in contemporary London, only the production team fell out
with writers Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln over ‘The Dominators’: they’d cut
themselves a deal on the side for all the publicity for the Quarks and fought
tooth and nail over the production team’s decision to cut the story down from
six episodes to five (that story went out under a pseudonym as they were so
ashamed of the finished product, as well they should be – although their draft
of it is even worse). Plans to have star name actor Jack Watling and his niece
appear were mooted but shelves when Victoria (Watling’s daughter Deborah) left
the series and his role got so small that it wasn’t worth offering to the pair
of busy actors. They both get sort of replacements in this story instead, with
mad Professor Watkins and his niece Isobel, who are often quoted as this
story’s weakest aspects but for me only add to the sheer newness’ of this
story. You might remember from some of our reviews of the Hartnell stories how
much ‘Swinging London’ was the in place to be that everyone wanted to go to
from mad computers and Daleks on down? That’s cooled off a lot by the late
1960s (when Vietnam, Altamont and NASA between them were killing off the idea
of the ‘hippie dream’ where science and society were bad and peace seemed a
utopian fantasy) but here’s one last gasp in Isobel Watkins, a photographer in
a feather boa who thinks taking pictures of the Cybermen would be a ‘groovy’
addition to her portfolio. She’s everything the Cybermen and Vaughan are not:
she’s playful, flirtatious, into a good time listening to records (she has one
of the most impressive collections seen in the series) and modelling, a girl so
‘now’ and ‘with it’ for 1968/69 you wonder how on earth she coped when the more
austere 1970s arrived. I love her quirky nature: the un-cyber logic that she
writes notes on walls instead of paper ‘because you can’t lose a wall’ and
still doesn’t take off her feather boa even when running for her life. Before
when Dr Who have tried to go hip and contemporary they’ve gone young: Vicki,
Polly, Dodo, Thomni (‘The Abominable Snowmen’), the cast of ‘The Underwater
Menace’ - every half-hippie we’ve seen have been teenagers ‘going through a
phase’. But Isobel is different: she’s
the first of Dicks’ stock-in-trade independent females, recognisably like a
template for ‘Sarah Jane’ (albeit even kookier), someone with their own life
sorted out and able to hold her own with the male attention of a bunch of
soldiers and actively looking for trouble rather than follow orders. If, as
we’ve said a few times, 1960s Dr Who is an ongoing conversation between war
generations and their boomer children as to whether these kids will ever be
ready to face off a mass invasion of Russians/Germans/Chinese/Japanese soldiers
the answer is a resounding yes: Isobel might be a floaty peacenik whose never
done a day’s ‘proper’ work in her life but she’s also as hard as nails and
fights alongside the soldiers. It’s her Uncle whose scatter-brained and
ill-equipped to deal with the invasion, a rational scientists easily bullied
and threatened into working for the enemy. Note how young the soldiers all are
too: this is a young army not just because it’s only been created but because
they all look twenty or younger apart from the Brigadier and even he isn’t
exactly your elderly crusty general type. It’s the adults like Vaughan who are
the real enemy, the symbol of capitalism and big business, who do their best to
exploit the young generation. Of course, just to keep the mums and dads
watching happy the world is out to cyber-sleep through pop music played on
(cyber)transistor radios, their brains rotting in exactly the way their parents
said they might…
Although this is a show being
shot in black and white it’s also one that’s having its first thoughts about
what it might look like in colour. The Cybermen are born for monochrome, tall
metallic-grey meanies that look slightly silly in colour (which might be why we
don’t see them again till 1975) but feel threatening the way they’re shot here,
casting giant shadows over our familiar world and lurking in the dark of our
sewers, underground, as un-noticed as 6 and 7 foot tall silver beings can be. At
the same time, though, the thrill of this story is that, unlike their previous
five appearances, they’re no longer restricted to the shadows and hiding but
wide out in the open, strolling down our roads and pavements like they own the
place, the sort of big visual spectacle that will become a mainstay of the show
in the colour era (there’s usually one shot like this per Pertwee story). It
makes a huge difference having the Cybermen come from ‘their’ world to ‘ours’:
this is clearly not just a set in a TV studio and it could, thanks to the
realistic nature of Kit Pedler’s ideas and Derrick Sherwin’s script, happen any
moment. There is a cold war taking place after all: goodness knows when it’s
going to heat up into an actual war and our streets are invaded for real; ‘The
Invasion’ feels like a test run for all the nasty things people are afraid of
just round the corner.
Mostly though ‘The
Invasion’ is, like the vast majority of 2nd Doctor stories and for pretty much
for the last time, about a base under siege – the ‘change’ is that the base is
the whole of London in near-contemporary times rather than a base on the moon
or a spaceship or Antarctica and the siege is a more stealthy invasion than
usual. This is part of Pedler’s increasing feeling that big industrial cities
were ‘wrong’ and that we were moving away from our natural inheritance as
animals who lived on Earth, over-tipping the balance (his most famous works,
outside Dr Who and Doomwatch, are his books about the concept of Gaia, the idea
that Earth is a living organism that’s always trying to re-balance itself,
often at our expense). So, instead of this being a far away land about the last
defence against an invading force, as per ‘The Tenth Planet’ ‘The Moonbase’ or ‘The
Wheel In Space’ ‘The Invasion’ is a tense gritty thriller about ‘them’ coming
to ‘us’ and picking us off one by one. The ‘them’ are the Cybermen, the most
prolific baddies of the 2nd Dr era, in their last story for six years and
they’re at their best here: tall, dark and for all I know probably handsome to
some cyber-women out there, doing their thing converting the locals of Earth
and robbing them of all emotions. And which world is it that’s invaded? Well,
for once its not a base of a few straggling pioneers in some unforgiving part
of the landscape or a space station housing a handful of people but the whole
of London, with iconic shots of The Cybermen marching their way around various
landmarks like a bunch of alien tourists, hot-footing it round London’s tourist
traps as if they’re on holiday. In fact There was more location filming for this story
than ever before, a side effect of the shortened number of episodes this season
and the fact this was the first story filmed for season six, with a full
twenty-two separate locations beside the TV studio and the usual model shots
and gunfights on film at Ealing. As a rule the rural scenes were shot in
Gloustershire and the urban ones actually in London: the UNIT base is really
the RAF one in Fairford, the entrance to the sewers is in Regent’s Street and
Fore Street, the Cybermen leave the sewers at Queen Victoria Street and head
down the pub in Knightrider Street. Interestingly, Vaughan’s headquarters is in
Millbank, one-time headquarters of the Labour Party (rather apt for an
institution being eaten away from within by a cyborg substitute taking them
over one body part at a time – the only wonder to modern audiences is that
emotionless leader Keir Starmer doesn’t sport jug-handles on the sides of his
head and doesn’t shoot Jeremy Corbyn for daring to have ‘feelings’ for his
electorate). All are great examples about the way Dr Who has the ‘ordinary’ hit
head on with the ‘extraordinary’, letting loose imaginative monsters in real
settings. Watch out too for the filming around a Guinness Factory in Acton
(complete with its own railway sidings usefully), the first company to allow Dr
Who full reign round it’s buildings in return for a nominal fee, the first time
a big company (that wasn’t a quarry) had got behind the series. They also treated
the cast and crew to all sorts of goodies in return for the chance to give
their employees a sort of day out: there are so many shots of the stars
drinking behind the scenes in guide books its a wonder they aren’t all slurring
their lines by episode eight. In fact the scene where the Doctor and Jamie ‘appear
round a corner’ had to be shot several times with all dialogue removed, because
the pair were drunk and too busy giggling. Something that I suspect didn’t go
down well with the fastidious director. Not that he’d been light on the booze
either…Most famous, though is that shot of those cold illogical silver giants
marching past St Paul’s Cathedral, the biggest and most famous place of worship
in Britain, so ‘wrong’ it’s ‘right’ (a suggestion of designer Chris D’oly John,
that the director leapt on). Originally there were set to be many more, but the
guerrilla filming in the early morning ran on too long and there were too many
people around: even so the shots they got were iconic, as famous as any in Dr
Who. It was only three years earlier when we were having to make do with an
extra’s feet walking down a road because they couldn’t spare the regulars for
filming for even a day outside the studio.In fact the only obvious places in
London the Cybermen don’t go are the ones that had already been in acclaimed Who
classic ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’; maybe the Cybermen were scared off by all the Dalek graffiti on Nelson’s Column?) Over the next few years you’d be amazed at how often London gets invaded once the 3rd Dr becomes exiled on Earth but for now its (almost) new: Pedler had already had a bash at invading the Post Office Tower in ‘The War Machines’ and we’ve had other stories set in the underground or in the Earth of the past or future, but this is the first time we’ve had a monster from off the telly invading streets that are recognisably ours more or less ‘now’. And it’s thrilling.
As well as expensive
(adjusting for inflation ‘The Invasion’ is at least a candidate for the most
expensive Dr Who story ever produced at a whole £29,000 – including some £4,000
it went over budget). And unlike some Who stories that spent money rashly (i.e.
most of the big series finales in the modern era) this one uses it sparingly and
uses it well: a big set here, location filming there (and just to remind you
that this is Dr Who note that all of Vaughan’s offices, from around the world,
are identical to the last prop, almost as if this was just the same set with a
different picture outside the window). Notably, too, there are surely more
extras than had ever been seen in one place before, thanks to the help of the 2nd
Battalion of Coldstream Guards who appear as UNIT soldiers. Yes that’s right:
actual soldiers for the first and – as it turns out – only time (although the
navy get to have their own go in ‘The Sea Devils’). Yes that’s right: the army
were watching recruitment numbers amongst the young fall due to, y’know, all
those illegal wars they fought for no reason across the 1960s like Vietnam and
Korea and they thought being associated with a children-friendly series like
‘Dr Who’ would help them out. Which it sort of does – I mean, the military
never seem cooler or more professional in Dr Who than here – but equally rather
misses the point: I mean the army are basically useless against the Cybermen
and it’s only Zoe’s quick thinking with the missiles and the Doctor’s knowhow
that helps them out; even civilian Isobel is the one who comes up with the
brainwave of taking photographs of the Cybermen as ‘evidence’ the invasion is
real.
There are some truly
great scenes with the regulars too: few Tardis teams are as beloved as the 2nd
Dr, Jamie and Zoe and by now they know each other so well that they are
bouncing off each other instinctively, with some truly great moments of comedy
in amongst the high drama. Just check out Patrick Troughton’s howls of pains as
he leaps from shooting Cybermen and collapses, only to immediately start posing
for Isobel’s camera, using his recorder as a telescope or his improvised coin-tossing
when down in the sewers (completely ignoring the answer!) The Doctor is, as
usual, a comedy figure until the stakes are high and this story makes a lot of
the fact that Vaughan totally underestimates him until it’s too late, the
smartest man in the room who also knows its smartest to act stupid and keep
quiet sometimes. Like many a Cybermen story the more they become an immovable,
unstoppable force the more he becomes like quicksilver, unpredictable and
malleable, inventive and creative in a way his foes could never be. 18th
century Highlander Jamie gets to be properly brave and heroic as usual but also
shows a new side to him, evidence that mankind hasn’t really changed that much
as, like a kid of the 21st century, he becomes obsessed by Vaughan’s latest
(cyber-made) electronic gadget, like a kid with an i-phone. Zoe too has one of
her best stories and every time a new fan likes to talk about how they can’t
stand the old series because of ‘how it always features young girls being weak
and screaming’ I have to fight the urge to send them the scene where she’s in
command of a whole army, giving orders based on her own calculations and doing
the macho job of bringing down a cyber-fleet more or less single-handed (even
if, admittedly, that scene’s rather undermined by the casual sexism of a
soldier’s line ‘Can we keep her? She’s much prettier than a computer!’) Watch,
too, for the way Zoe and Isobel walk into harm’s way knowingly (while poor Jamie
lags behind, scared!) and Isobel’s feisty put-downs with the Brigadier (it was
a brave series in 1968 that could let Isobel’s line ‘you…you man, you!’ through
and comment on how ‘men are no good in situations like this’ as well as call
the Brigadier a ‘cretinous anti-feminist’, something even Liz Shaw never does!)
There’s a lot going on in
this story, which starts as a simple case of brainwashing, moves into a spy
epic then becomes a full on action spectacle, but for once in a Dr Who story
this long you need that extra running time to properly get to know these
characters and uncover all the different twists and turns as we go slowly,
scene by scene, from Vaughan being utterly in control of the Cybermen that he’s
secretly planning to betray to the Cybermen openly betraying Vaughan as that
was their plan all along as he goes to pieces, but so slowly and imperceptibly
that it all feels real and plausible, not histrionic and hammy. Like most of
the best Dr Whos only by good and bad coming together to stop an even worse
threat much bigger than humanity does everyone finally ‘win’. The plot might
ebb and flow, move from out and out comedy to full on action adventure but it’s
one that always keeps you guessing and has enough twists and turns to justify the
running time. A lot of Dr Who six and seven parters would have been better off
as four parts, but the biggest surprise of ‘The Invasion’ is how there’s less
padding than on a Cyberman, each episode upping the ante significantly until
the final part is as tense as the generally leisurely 1960s episodes ever come.
It’s wrapped around a plot that never outstays it’s welcome either, where
despite the length Sherwin is clever enough to make every scene feel connected,
so that despite having multiple different groups of people wandering around you
never lose sight that they are after the same thing: to take down Vaughan and
the Cybermen, in two separate ways. The ending, as a general rule Dr Who’s
weakest points where a solution suddenly presents itself out of nowhere, is doubly
good: the Doctor’s usual use of science against the monster is entirely justified
given that the Cybermen have been using technology on ‘us’ and the fact that his
invention amplifies the Cybermen’s feelings, reminding them of the people they
used to be, is more satisfying than the usual ‘press a button’ endings, whilst
most of the tension comes from the Doctor trying to win over the implacable
baddy over to his side away from the Cybermen, something that we’re less
confident he can do. Stoney is never better than when playing the dazed and
vulnerable version of ‘Vaughan’, still desperately trying to stay in control
even when he knows it’s hopeless and the game is up.
This isn’t just a bunch
of bland recycling or foreshadowing then: ‘The Invasion’ does all things bigger
and better than most Dr Whos, to the point where it’s the ultimate ‘Invasion of
Earth’ story (maybe that’s why it gets such a simple, straightforward title?)
but it also does a lot of things for the first time, finding the sweet spot
between being ‘experimental and imaginative’ and ‘reliably using tried and
tested ideas’. On the one hand it gives us things we’ve never seen before, like
the individual and the monster working together and the sense of scale is
something we’ve never seen before. On the other hand it’s like ‘The War
Machines’ with a proper budget, or as if The Celestial Toymaker was the Doctor’s
equal again, just not in a room full of toys, or like ‘The Dalek Invasion Of
Earth’ if it had an actual bunch of soldiers running around being extras. It’s
recognisably like Dr Whos of old, but also has a foot in the future. Till now
Dr Who has been on just the right side of shambolic and home-made, with some
scenes that are as professional as anything on television in the 1960s and
others, erm, not. ‘The Invasion’ though is visibly slicker than anything the series
had ever done before if you’re watching these stories in order and it has a
professionalism that few stories will ever match, even the 21st
century ones. A lot of that is down to Camfield’s military precision in the
direction, but a lot of it too comes down to Pedler’s idea and Sherwin’s
cracking adaptation of it as well as a cast who are working overtime to get
everything as right as they can. You wouldn’t know, from reading the behind-the-scenes
memos, that this was a show on borrowed time with falling ratings: the big word
here is confidence. There really aren’t many old Dr Who episodes you can show a
non-fan without being embarrassed somewhere but this is the closest one.
If there’s a problem then, well, it’s not much
of a one but you could argue that ‘The Invasion’ has no ambition beyond showing
that invasion. There are no real sub-plots, no cut always to how the world at
large is coping with this invasion (the way you get the feel of a whole planet
suffering ‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’). It also
smacks a little too often ofplaying with soldiers on some massive scale: there’s
no attempt to deliver the sort of ‘metaphor for what’s really going on’ subtext
that runs behind many of my favourite stories – this isn’t a story about the
lengths we go to in order to survive like ‘The Tenth Planet’ or how much
emotions are a part of us as in ‘The Wheel In Space’ while equally The Cybermen
aren’t secret substitutes for certain politicians or a way of living or a cold
war parable or tax inspectors or Dr Who itself like in other stories, they’re
just Cybermen (although even there ‘The Invasion’ works better in some ways for
modern audiences than it would on first transmission: Tobias Vaughan is clearly
a blend of Elon Musk and Richard Branson, making a living mucking about with
technology you suspect is secretly beyond them, taking over things that were
working perfectly well already and using them as a means to have more power
over ordinary people; in 1969 ‘brands’ were more about what an object did than
the backstory of the eccentric millionaire behind them who got lucky/cheated
people out of their claims/inherited investment money from daddy, the way it is
now. He’s even more scarily like Bill Gates, with the same blank expression,
funny eye and cruel sneer). There’s at least five too many shots of the same
stock footage of missiles (borrowed from Hemsley Downs Base as part of the deal
with the army) used over and over too, putting this story in danger of seeming
like an army recruitment film. The Tardis being invisible at the start is a bit
silly too, especially in a story that’s otherwise so ‘real’ and clearly there
as part of the ‘spy’ motif, a stealthy gadget that’s never explained properly the
way good science fiction always is (besides, if the Doctor really could do this
sort of thing at will you’d think he’d do it all the time).
Oh well – there is, after
all, more than enough going on as it is and symbolism is the sort of thing you
keep for your groundbreaking second album, not a greatest hits package and this
is a great greatest hits set full of all the drama, horror, laughs and tears
you associate with DW, with just the right mixture of sparkling dialogue and
action sequences to keep things moving without moving them for no reason (there
are, after all, a lot of DW stories either side of this one that fall into the
trap of one or the other). There’s something for everyone here – and if you’re
tired of ‘The Invasion’ then you’re tired of life (or are at least tired of Dr Who,
which amounts to much the same thing). In short ‘The Invasion’ would be the
perfect story with which to start your ‘classic’ DW journey through the 20th
century for those lucky lucky UK viewers out there who’ll get to see all these
stories for free for the first time all together in one place via the BBC
I-player in November (a bit of technology so unlikely it feels as if it could
be a bit of Cyber-Industries technology as it is). Except that the BBC flipping
deleted a quarter of it (including the first episode) and while there’s a so-so
animation to replace the missing 50minutes that means it just feels like one of
those ‘greatest hits’ sets with a few ‘re-recordings made at a later date due
to contractual shenanigans’ sets that’s so disappointing for people who want to
see the originals. Even that’s almost a rite of passage though: if you’re
caught up enough in the story to be angry that part of it is missing then you
most definitely have potential as a ‘classic era’ Whovian!
POSITIVES + The score. Much
as I love Dudley Simpson it’s nice to get a change and the combination of electronic
bleeps from Brian Hodgson and a four minute burst of jazz from respected
composer Don Harper (who wrote the theme tunes for ‘Sexton Blake’ and ‘World Of
Sport’) is unique to the series and very memorable. The robotic tingles (which
sound like a Cybermen doing ASMR to send each other to sleep) contrasted with
the free-for-all jazzy improvisations nicely sum up the difference between Cybermen
and Humans a full twenty years before ‘Silver Nemesis’ turns it into a plot
point. There’s a burst of very robotic pop music, too, which Jamie for one
seems to really enjoy (he is a piper after all, music is in his blood and it’s
not that different to bagpipes) which could easily be created by The Cybermen
but is actually taken from the BBC’s stock library too (sadly rumours that The
Cybermen created The Spice Girls starting with this song are unfounded). It’s
one of the few pieces of music used in the series that wasn’t properly recorded
in the Beeb’s archives, so to this day nobody is quite sure who composed it (even
now they have a lot of those short bits on file, taped en masse at high speed
for a tiny wage).
Previous ‘The Mind Robber’ next ‘The
Krotons’
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