The Massacre
(Season 3, Dr 1 with Steven, 5-26/2/1966, producer: John Wiles, script editors: Donald Tosh and Gerry Davis (last scene), writers: John Lucarotti and Donald Tosh, director: Paddy Russell)
Rank: 16
'The Catholics and Hugenots were dressed for battle
In their shirts and frocks
When a supposed spy came from out the sky to the sound of a rattle
In a strange blue box
Though Steven protested innocence
As an Englishman abroad
He surely was one of the 'others' in defence
Out for our rightful King's greatest hoard
Was he in league with Anne the servant girl?
What did he know of the sea beggar?
He seemed to know a lot of things about the world
And his fashion sense was mega!
He disappeared one day did Steven
On the eve of the bloody war
Leaving a mystery regarding his motivation uneven
And what he was really here for
Could he after all have been a spy working for the Medicis?
Or could his story be really true?
I wonder where he is right now and hope he’s peachy
Not dead at the bottom of the sea, but free in a box so blue?'
So there we were, in an epic battle between good and evil, where the Daleks were holding the universe to ransom across twelve tense weeks (well, eleven tense weeks and a Christmas cul-de-sac) and so many people close to the Doctor died. He’s in shock companion Steven is hugely in shock (and clearly had the hots for at least two of them – the verdict’s still out over Bret Vyon!) and so are the audience: Dr Who isn’t usually quite this gruesome, this savage, this dependant, this…real. You’d more than forgive everyone for following this up with a quieter, sillier story full of hope, but in its own way ‘The Massacre’ is just as brutal and amongst the grimmest Dr Who stories of them all, one that pushes the already strained relationship between the Doctor and Steven to breaking point. Till now the Tardis has represented safety and, even in the early days when he was a lot more amoral than he became, the Doctor represented a sort of comfort and hope that you would always be safe as long as he was around, still thinking, still scheming, still the equal of whatever the universe could throw at you. But now Steven sees the true horrors of what our often brutal and bloodiest history was like at one of its cruellest moments in time and yet he still does the unthinkable, taking his chances with a world that isn’t his own because he’s more scared of the Doctor and his callousness. If Dr Who is, by and large, a series of hope, with the belief that you can overcome your problems however desperate (where even death isn’t quite the end thanks to regeneration), the this is the series at its least hopeful and despairing, it’s most aggrieved at the state of the universe then now and always. ‘The Massacre’ is a story that leaves you thinking ‘they can’t possibly go there can they?’ and then it does, in spectacular form, making the likes of ‘The Caves Of Androzani’ look like a gaudy carnival and ‘The Horror Of Fang Rock’ look like a party. All the people we meet in this story are doomed to die horrible deaths, many of them on screen. And the Tardis’ part in this story is merely to observe then run away shocked, able to change positively nothing.
The difference with ‘The
Massacre’ and ‘Masterplan’ though is that the sacrifices against the Daleks
were tough but felt worth it for the greater good. The Doctor had a plan and it
was a big and scary one that risked a lot of people’s lives but if he didn’t do
it the Daleks were going to kill everyone anyway. When Katarina, Bret and Sara
went to their deaths they did so knowing that their sacrifices helped in some
way, if only for keeping the one person who might be able to save the people
they loved – the Doctor – alive that little bit longer. The Massacre does not
do any of that. This isn’t a world of heroes and villains where the lines are
clear, instead it’s a world of Catholics and Hugenots in 16th
Century Paris, of faith and belief, against the backdrop of the latest attack
in a long line of attacks from both sides, a tapestry of distrust and betrayal
that’s been going on for decades. Both sides hate each other’s guts for what at
first were misperceived slights which soon grew out of control to become raging
hatred. Anyone studying the subject for more than give minutes just wants to
box both sides’ ears together because it’s a not-so-civil religious war that
could so easily have been solved. For Steen, like much of the audience, he
doesn’t understand it at all: he’s an astronaut from several century’s in the
viewers’ future, when religion has long since faded into the background (and it
would be far more in keeping with writer John Lucarotti’s vision for the series
and this story that he’s agnostic, with a throwaway line that he’s ‘C of E’
surely added by script editor Donald Tosh after worrying that he was losing
half the audience and needed to get them back on side). The difference between
‘The Massacre’ than ‘Masterplan’ and indeed most other Who stories, though, is
that the audience isn’t encouraged to pick a side but instead to agree with
Steven that the fighting is pointless and stupid. For him this war, this life or death struggle
that means everything to the people he meets on both sides, is all a complete
nonsense, long since lost to history. But, so ‘The Massacre’ says, humans are
fighting because that’s what humanity does, they’re a species that hates
differences and fears what they can’t understand, in every era but especially
this one, a world of unspoken rules that can get you killed if you break them. And
Steven hasn’t got the first clue what’s going on. ‘You know nothing about this
time period and what’s going on’ is the Doctor’s parting warning to stay out of
trouble. Not half: it takes precisely a minute before he is. ‘I’m afraid you’ve
arrived in Paris at a most unfortunate time’ adds a man named Nicholas, surely
the understatement of the decade, 1960s Who or 15702 France.
For once in a historical
story the Tardis doesn’t arrive just before a big historical event unfolds but
right slap bang in the last bloody part of it, when a bloody web of decades of
deceit and mistrust is already tangled. Being part of French rather than
English history most viewers would have known little to nothing about the real
events (less famous than The French Revolution with less implications for
Britain, and not taught in schools like all the Tardis’ travels in merrie
England) and you’re supposed to feel as
lost and discombobulated as Steven does and for most of the story the Doctor
isn’t around to share his knowledge (and indeed seems as confused as Steven
does), so that when the final big event happens it comes as a surprise. This is
a guidebook though so we can afford to tell you the real backdrop as to what
was going on: The Hugenots and Catholics have rubbed shoulders warily for
centuries, as Royals came and went on behalf of one side or the other, but in
1560 there was an incident known as the ‘Conspiracy Of Amboise’ (yes, like the
Abbott), when the Hugenots grew wary of the extra power the religious Duke of
Guise had over their Catholic King Francis II and tried to assassinate him to
stop the religious whispering in their ear. Were they right? Maybe, but the
Duke hadn’t actually suggested any laws against the Hugenots yet and most
probably would never have done, although the Queen Mum, Catherine De Medici, is
a shadowy manipulative untrustworthy figure who liked stirring up trouble (not
that she’d done anything specific either yet). It was a defensive move made out
of fear that kicked off the very trouble and prejudice that the Hugenots had
been hoping to avoid (a bit like the guerrillas creating their own timeline in
‘Day Of the Daleks’), one with the shadowy presence of a hooded abbot in a
doorway according to one woodcut, the one bit of ‘fiction’ in this story bar
the Tardis crew (something the writer claims was a complete coincidence and he
hadn’t found when writing the story, but during research for his novelisation
in the 1986).The assassination made the Catholics fearful though, a surviving
Guise outlawing any religious services on grounds of treason. The Hugenots,
naturally enough, started holding services in secret despite the risk to
themselves and, certain they were plotting against him, Guise went searching
and found one in a barn in the French town of Vassy, getting the King’s guards
to embark on a bloody slaughter of everyone present. Anne Chaplet, the servant
girl that Steven takes such a shine to, lost her father in this bloody
slaughter.
This massacre lead to the
outbreak of a civil war in which the Duke is killed, of which the Massacre that
takes place in part four of this story is the third, triggered ironically
enough by what might well have been a genuine attempt to stop the bloodshed.
Henry of Navarre, a Hugenot, was next in line to the throne and getting married
so what better way to symbolise peace than to marry him off to a leading
Catholic, the sister of Charles IX. It should have been a time of celebration,
of uniting warring factions, but it went
wrong (what is it with Dr Who historicals and marrying off King’s sisters in failed
peace treaties?) Unfounded rumours spread quicker than in the age of the
internet that it was all part of a Hugenot plot to unseat the King and have a
Catholic Queen instead, with the help of the Dutch protestants known as ‘The
Sea Beggars’ (this is where the cryptic message Steven is given comes in).
Chances are it’s all a complete load of (Donald) Tosh, but you can also see in
an age where the Royals have already declared war on you once they might be
pulling the wool over your eyes. During the events in this story Catherine
Medici is growing scared of the Hugenots’ power and their influence at court
over Charles now he’s King. She’s worried the Hugenots will do to the Catholics
what they did to the Hugenots. So she arranges to have him murdered, quietly, through
a hired assassin named Maurevert. If called out on it, well, there were a lot
of people who hated his guts and he was meeting with a load of high profile
Hugenots: clearly they were plotting something! Only the assassin messes up
badly, crippling de Coligny but not killing him outright. He goes running to
the King who is incensed and vows revenge. Afraid for her life Medici doubles
down and sends out executive orders to outlaw the Hugenot religion altogether,
on pain of death. No wonder, then, that everyone we meet in this story is so
jumpy, with that final order coming through right during Steven’s extended five
day visit and exploding into a bloody massacre during episode four. The King
tries to stop it before being pressurised into agreeing with the Queen Mum with
the sort of half-hearted ‘go home’ speech Donald Trump gave during the Capital
Hill riots, but to no avail: after decades of growing suspicions now it’s
downright war. Neither side gave any
quarter and for what? A load of rumours,
lies, half-truths and suspicions that leaves the viewer, like Steven, watching
on appalled asking ‘how did it come to this?’ The Daleks are by comparison easy
to defeat when people of the universe finally decide to work together against
them but in a France that’s as divided as its ever been its harder to know who
to trust and everyone is in danger including astronauts from the future, rebel
timelords, dignitaries and servant girls alike (with Anne Chapplette caught in
the middle, neutral despite being a Hugenot who lost her father to the
Catholics). What a time to be alive – not least because most of Paris wasn’t by
the end of it all. As for the abbot, that’s sort of real too, maybe, though not
quite in this time period. Some ten years before the story an abbot in a commune
known as Amboise, home of Marmutier Abbey, turned out to be a man called
Chastillion who was in disguise. No one is quite sure why – he was excuted without telling - but
it seems fair to suggest he might have been trying to get close to Catholics to
infiltrate them from the outside. It’s only a small lie to think that someone
else might have been trying something similar – and died before their plan came
to fruition too.
That’s one hell of a
story for a so-called children’s programme on at a Saturday teatime, all part
of short-lived producer John Wiles’
dislike of the more ‘fantastical’ elements of Dr Who’s second year. He
wanted a story that wouldn’t be as obvious to solve as other Who historicals
and which indeed was, in so many ways, unsolvable. Luckily there was a writer
on his books who could deliver it, with almost the last decision made by
outgoing producer Verity Lambert to contact John Lucarotti, the writer who’d
already contributed Who’s bloodiest most despairing stories so far (‘Marco
Polo’ and ‘The Aztecs’). Lucarotti didn’t know much about this timezone (and
had actually pitched for two stories I desperately want to see, the Indian
mutiny of 1857, dropped for being ‘too recent’ for a historical and Erik the
red discovering Newfoundland and talking to the Doctor about discovery and
exploration, dropped because all that filming in a boat would have been too
pricey and make the crew seasick). but was happy to learn, exploring the
British Museum (which is where he found the woodcuts used at the end of the
story). He was, however, less than happy
with the re-writes, Tosh disliking much of his story and especially what he did
with the Doctor and cutting it out, much to his horror; it’s the programme’s
loss that he never worked on it again (bar his fine novelisations anyway). In
fact this is another of those Who stories I fell in love with from the
novelisation, long before I heard the soundtrack or saw the photographs
(because the episodes themselves have been long since wiped: strictly speaking
not telesnaps this week as Wiles though John Cura was too expensive to hire,
but other people took pictures of their TV and the filming of the programme,
which thankfully have survived so we can at least see tiny parts of it), but
unlike my other favourite novels ‘Enemy Of The World’ or ‘The Crusade’ that
captured the feel of the TV story so well its really very different to what
ended up on screen. John Lucarotti’s original script was even more dense, layered
and ambiguous and centres around the devious Abbott of Amboise, a man who looks
exactly like the first Doctor (its Dr Who’s first ‘true’ doppelganger – of
many! - give or take a rubbish Dalek android) but who couldn’t be more
different: he’s a scheming, power-hungry man who has such faith in his religion
and just happens to look like The Doctor. There’s one big similarity though,
especially following The Daleks’ Masterplan: the Abbott thinks that the end
justifies the means. He’s happy to sacrifice anyone who gets in his way for
being a heretic whose doomed to eternal damnation anyway so the sooner they get
there the better. There’s no sense of people coming together, of compromising,
of finding the peaceful solution: everyone in this story hates everybody else,
even though to Steven they all seem to be much the same, ordinary people caught
in extraordinary events and trying to muddle through as best they can. You can
understand Steven’s bewilderment and hurt (in both book and on TV) when he sees
the Abbott in the distance and thinks his friend has a plan, only to find out
he’s as wicked and cruel as the rest, if not more so, not to mention a shock
‘can’t-believe-they-just-did-that cliffhanger to part three where the Abbott is
murdered and – unlike every other Dr Who story ever – stays dead, leaving a
shocked Steven contemplating the one thing the series had already teased us
with doing in the age of Ian and Barbara, leaving our friend stranded in a
cruel time period so alien to his own, homeless. In a script full of constant
shocks and violence it might well be the most shocking moment – and unlike most
other shocking cliffhangers it remains unresolved when we rejoin the action in
episode four.
Sadly scriptwriter Donald
Tosh dampened a lot of this element down in the final story (afraid that the
audience wouldn’t follow it and demand answers) so that the Abbott barely
features and his only real function in the plot is to die in front of Steven.
The layers of distrust and paranoia, so carefully extended out from the
supporting cast to our own heroes, gets lost so that ‘The Massacre’ instead
becomes more a less interesting tale of survival for Steven when the book is
far more interesting and subtle. Even so, it’s still one of the truly great
stories in its finished version, particularly for Steven in a rare tale that
was written for the capable but cynical astronaut from the future from the
first rather than an altered script intended for Ian, and Peter Purves carries
the show brilliantly in a way no companion had before and none will again until
Tegan in the 1980s, As good as he is as a Blue Peter presenter I’m always sad
Purves never got the big acting break he deserved because he’s so very good,
especially in the scenes of Steven trying to keep himself together through his
grief because he knows if he gives into it he’s lost and trying to be the
Doctor even while he’s grieving him. Poor Steven is an innocent abroad here as
even his natural character trait of cynicism (created by waiting years in the
Mechonoid city waiting for help that never came in ‘The
Chase’) doesn’t prepare him for just how downright nasty human beings can
be.
Steven is left behind in
a tavern when the Doctor goes off to talk chemicals with Preslin the
apothecarist (Erik Chitty in a very different role to his most famous one as
the sleepy teacher in Please Sir!’ and the equally sleepy timelord in ‘The
Deadly Assassin’). It’s a clever twist on the usual formula: you think we’re
going to follow the Doctor and his famous friend, like all other historical
characters, but there are bigger things going on than meeting celebrities and
more to solve than can be fixed by making potions. The Doctor really should
know better: he’s usually so strong on his history but, like many viewers at
home, seems oblivious to the date or the dangers of being in a city with a
curfew and no home to go to. Unusually Preslin appears to be a fictional
‘famous’ historical character, or at least if he was real no records of him
have survived, perhaps because of what happens at the end of episode four (so
how the Doctor comes to know about him is a real mystery: there are, after all,
many famous apothecarists around: ‘the ‘About Time’ series suggests Pierre
Ramus as the sort of person the Doctor would normally want to meet). We don’t
see him again, post visit, until episode four (with Hartnell on holiday for
episode two and playing the Abbott throughout episode three). That’s one of the
great things about ‘The Massacre’ though – where usually in a historical we’d
follow The Doctor meeting some famous figure and getting into trouble we know
he can solve because he has so many times before and future, here the plot
stays with Steven and his panic as the Doctor fails to return before the local curfew.
Steven is befriended by the local Hugenots (some more than others) and alarmed
when a frightened servant flees runs into the tavern fleeing a bunch of
soldiers, Anne Chaplet having overheard a plot to kill the Hugenots (she’s a
whistleblower, a sort of Julian Assange in a skirt but far more humble).
It’s a huge blow for
Steven, lost in a strange time and place without the Doctor to help.
Nowadays stories are all about making
companions independent and showing them to be close-enough the Doctor’s equal
but that’s not the case here: Steven’s truly out of his depth and not for lack
of trying. This isn’t a timezone anyone would want to be trapped in either and
the story is really good at the claustrophobic coming down on Steven as he
tries to work out the right thing to do – and more often than not gets it
wrong. One of the ideas they dropped after the Hartnell era was the idea that
the Tardis passengers were ordinary people whisked away into time and space who
wanted most of all to get home; later series have them more as adventurers who
know what they’re getting into. Which makes more sense plotwise than having
people moping around wanting to go home (see the 5th Dr stories for how quickly
it drags when they try it again and Tegan does it, at the beginning and end of
what seems like every single story) but also robs us of that sense of danger –
all it takes is for something to happen to the Doctor and the companions are
stranded for life, wherever the Tardis lands (the companions can’t even hide
out there in this era, as the Doctor doesn’t yet trust anyone else with a key).
We’ve had a few goes at this before, notably Vicki accidentally dematerialising
the Tardis in ‘The Web Planet’ and Ian or Barbara or both hoping that the
Doctor finds them and doesn’t simply leave without them, but this story goes
all out: Steven actually sees the body of the Doctor and is convinced that he’s
dead, to the point where he’s trying to carve out a new life for himself.
At least he’s not truly alone though, not completely. For
there’s Anne, with one of the sweetest and most believable romances in all of
Who. As much as he’s traditionally the
hard-nosed cynical one in the Tardis, after years as prisoner of war in
isolation, we’ve seen glimpses of Steven’s warm heart peek through before now
and while everyone else treats Anne as the lowly servant she is and a traitor
working for their Catholic enemies to earn a crust, he’s above the local
politics and looks to the human underneath and he’s concerned enough to look
after he when no one else will. The pair are very similar: they’re really the
last of the neutrals in a brutal France that demands everyone choose a side and
fight to the death to keep it, trying to survive while dreaming of a better
peaceful future (Steven really craves being able to put down roots following
the zig-zagging and fights to the deaths of ‘Masterplan’). They get very close,
very quickly, as only running for your life will do to you, with Steven’s
knowhow and Anne’s local knowledge saving the other repeatedly. You think for
the longest time that this story is going to do what all the other Dr Whos do
and have the Doctor sweep in and put everything right if only they can stay
alive long enough, but no; he’s genuinely missing and every time Steven tries
to do what the Doctor normally does and get people to listen to him (basically
be a Clara) he finds how out of his depth he really is and barely escapes with
his life. This is a story, after all, about humanity not timelords and how
easily we can get ourselves in a muddle over what, to future, generations seems
like nothing at all and Steven for all his abilities, for all his strength, for
all courage, for all his knowledge, is fighting a losing battle trying to
reverse all those centuries of human nature and decades of suspicion of
anything different to you. The real villain in ‘The Massacre’ is the dangers of
mob rule, of people getting together and deciding they don’t like someone
different to them, a universe away from Dr Who’s usual message of tolerance and
understanding, even though ultimately both sides are ‘wrong’ – and both sides
pay for it.
Uniquely ‘The Massacre’ not only takes place over several days (a rarity in itself: most Dr Who stories last for hours at most) giving it a grander sense of scale than most other stories but ends each episode with the curfew, picking up the story next morning with the hint of more struggles that have gone on out of the camera’s eyesight (and no recap). It’s a neat trick that makes the horror and claustrophobia of this story stand out: even for a historical this world feels ‘real’ and you feel Steven and Anne’s fear all the more for the fact that the story seems to be unfolding in real time, without even a b-plot focussing on the Doctor, with no apparent hope of escape. It also helps sell the idea that they’re growing close to one another. There’s even a hint that, given that he thinks he’s saying, Steven and Anne have shared more than just their ruffs if you know what I mean – they can’t say this on TV of course but the novel hints it much louder and there’s definitely something in the air at the start of episode four, the pair having shared the night together, which shines through even in a telesnap. Interesting that given what happens later... As love stories in Dr Who go it’s one of the sweetest: you long for someone to go right for Steven for once, one of the unluckiest companions ever in the series, and Anne is a good match for him, a gentler softer more naturally kinder version whose just as brave and tenacious, brilliantly portrayed by Anne Robertson, one of the greatest companions that never was.
Because yes, even though
Anne seems a shoe-in to be the next companion to replace Vicki, Katarina and
Sara, she’s left behind at the end in one last astonishingly depressing twist.
The original plan was for her to come aboard but Tosh and Wiles had already
killed off one companion from the past considering it too much work bringing
her up to speed with what the audience already knew (Katarina); they didn’t
want another one. They may also have been put off by having another timid
companion like Susan, but Anne is a
thousand times more promising and already proven to be fiercely brave when the
people she loves are in danger they could have done a lot with that. So instead
they have the Doctor mumble something about the importance of not interfering
with time (something key to Lucarotti’s first two scripts but rather forgotten
by the time Dr Who reached its third season – the audacity given the hints the
Doctor has been dropping to Preslin to lay low at the start of the story!),
kicking the poor girl out under Steven’s protest and sending her home with the
instruction to stay put for the next few days (all very well and the Doctor
clearly thinks he’s saving her life, but this is an age when people were angry
enough to go door to door killing people and a locked door and a peasant girl
with a price on her head are no match for a baying mob. Plus what is she going
to do for food and water? It’s not like she an order an online delivery, food
went off near-enough daily and had to be bought regularly. Plus presumably, not
being rich, her house still has an outside loo). It’s a shock: we’ve been
trained to think the Doctor can save anybody and always do the right thing, but
he blatantly doesn’t. You’re even trained to think that he’ll work on the
hanging sub-plot, of Steven’s overheard warnings of an assassination of ‘The
Sea Beggar’, but rather than putting
things right between the Catholics and Hugenots he admits defeat, legs it and
runs away, admitting that the next day 10,000 will die (including many of the
characters seen on screen) in one of Europe’s bloodiest religious massacres and
there’s nothing anyone can do about it, even him. Sometimes awful things are
just meant to be and the hardest truths about the human condition don’t have a
‘why?’ to be explained, they just are.
Cue one of the scenes I
hold dear as one of the very greatest Dr Who scenes of them all, as a furious
Steven bustled into the Tardis rounds on the Doctor like no companion before
and only a few since: the Doctor talks about not being able to interfere in
history, but Steven’s seen him invent wooden horses in Troy and goodness knows
what The meddling Monk got up to before he was stopped. Of course he should
save someone innocent who isn’t responsible for any of this, who will just be
another needless statistic. Really, of course, the Doctor hasn’t realised how
close Steven and Anne have grown and in his urgency has no time to find out;
he’s more interested in saving their own two skins and has risked his life to
find his friend. Steven storms out the Tardis, apparently forever and a
broken-hearted Doctor gives one of the single greatest speeches of the series:
he’s all alone – for the first time ever on screen, since first leaving Gallifrey
if you believe the lore – and is left lamenting a life where everyone gets to
move on and he doesn’t, crippled by the weight and responsibility he carries to
keep history running the way it should, burdened by the need to view a bigger
picture that no one else can see. Nobody else understands, even the people he
thought could share some of his burden and he’s utterly devastated, having seen
more destruction and death than one kin two-hearted being can bear. And now he
is just like Steven, homeless and alone, unable to go back home (for shadowy
reasons finally explained three years later in ‘The war Games’). As angry as
you are with him, much like teven is, your own heart bleeds for him. Usually
they tried not to give Hartnbell long speeches given his problems remembering
lines (and he misses quite a few in the following scene with Dodo according to
the script!) but the week’s extra holiday and the chance to be another
character has done wonders for Hartnell and after a run of stories filled with
more accidental fluffs than normal he absolutely nails this important speech as
he, in turn, thinks he’s lost Steven for good and bitterly regrets everything
he had to do. As much as Tosh diluted this story, by taking out much of its
teeth, this extra scene he added at the end shows that actually he really did
‘get’ what Lucarotti was trying to do: the Dr’s callous behaviour unwittingly
makes him much more like his doppelganger than he realises, a man who thinks
the end justified the means in keeping the sanctity of time travel too. Of
course the Doctor could – and should – have saved at least Anne, an innocent
servant girl that no one would have missed (I’d like to think it was memories
of Steven that makes the 10th Dr relent in Pompeii after hearing Donna’s pleas
to save someone).
That’s the great thing
about ‘The Massacre’ though – he didn’t have all the facts. Nor did the
Catholics. Or did the Hugenots. The big bad this month is nothing less than
miscommunication and the deadly ripples it causes. It seems like this story is
going to be another morality play of heroes and villains, just like The Dalek’s
Masterplan’ but in ruffs, and it ends up being a far more complex story about
how there are no heroes and villains in ‘real’ wars and how everybody’s motives
are complicated – even, as it happens, the Doctor’s. It’s a wonderfully
timeless story, aboutb the catholics v Hugenots todfay but about whatever the
next stupid human war and riot might be tomorrow (it’s uncomfortably close to
the equally religious and ignorantly motivated Southport riots of 2024, so new
at the time of writing they haven’t even got a ‘proper’ umbrella name yet,
although like many a ‘classic’ Dr Who story this one seems to be partly about
the cold war too, about ‘us’ fearing ‘them’ and our paranoia getting out of
hand). It’s a brilliant script, daring, courageous, devastating, with
Lucarotti’s usual gifts for dialogue mixed in with Tosh’s understanding of what
makes good TV. How I wish they’d done more together, whatever the divide,
rancour and suspicion and paranoia between the two writers, mimicking the
storyline!
The regulars shine like
never before, with an extra mark for Hartnell’s brief turn as the Abbott of
Amboise, whose played like the darker side of the Doctor with none of the
twinkle in the eye or the friendly harrumphs and mutterings, much more like
Hartnell’s harder-edged performance in all his past film epics in fact and a
reminder of just how great an actor he was (putting paid to anyone who thinks
the 1st Dr is just an extension of himself not a carefully planned acting
role). Peter Purves, as we’ve seen, is sublime – his performances vary
depending on the quality of the script but give him a good one (this is his
best by a nose) and he’s as great as any companion in the rest of the series,
dependable and brave, yet understandably flawed as any of us would be in his
impossible situation. The supporting cast are top-notch too and each one were
seemingly chosen for their shock value, given that they were all either best
known for children’s television or music hall revival ‘The Good Old Days’, not
exactly naturals for a bloody tale of civil war and riots. Even Eric Thompson,
a year into doing ‘The Magic Roundabout’ (which was itself made in France
originally of course before his very English made-up narration started being
rude about the French) perhaps the first
bit of Dr Who unlikely stunt-casting of an actor known for comedy playing
straight drama, who is superb as the sceptical Gaston (like Purves he deserved
to get many more straight roles after this rather than being pigeonholed as a
children’s TV presenter). Leonard Sachs as de Coligny is so much better than a
presenter of pecuniary pretentious pronoucning puffballs (see Jago in ‘Talons
Of Weng Chiang’, a character based on Sachs’ usual spiel) has any right to be. Annette
Robertson is so good in her small role as Anne Chaplet you long for Steven to
have smuggled her into the Tardis after all. For perhaps the only time in the
1960s and 1970s we go an entire story without any element of the plot ripping
off Quatermass – and yet there is Andre Morell as Tavannes, Quatermass himself in
the third TV series (‘Quatermass and The Pit’, the one with the alien spaceship
buried in the subway, just like ‘The Web Of Fear’), one of the most famous TV
goodies in scifi now playing a sort of baddie and playing him rather well.
If there’s a problem,
well, the machinations of the era and the schemings of King Charles IX and
Catherine Medici that take up so much of the plot end up being, ultimately, a
deadend: the full title of this story, after all, is ‘The Massacre of St
Bartholomew’s Eve’ and we don’t get to see their final plans or the go-ahead
that kicks off the Hugenot purge, never mind the battle. Frankly the Royals in
their ivory towers are the boring sort of characters we see in Dr Who all the
time – its the real people in the street, their lives ended by Royalty on a
whim, who are much more interesting (for what its worth the Catholic King has
just married off his sister to a Hugenot and ‘Sea Beggar’ De Coligny has a
price on his head after its feared the Hugenots will take this a reason to rise
up against the King now they’re closer to the throne. There’s also a lot more
reasons for people’s motivations in the book than you get on screen – even with
all four episodes running quite long (this is about the only four-part story
where all the episodes fill up the maximum 25 minute running time) there just
isn’t space to get to know everyone as much as I’d like with characters coming
and going. Compared to the book, too, the whole Abbott sequence seems like a
red herring – he’s only in two scenes and Hartnell’s performance is so good I
want to see more.
Even so, those are tiny
problems not worth fighting a war over. For the most part ‘The Massacre’ is
sublime, a much forgotten story (it’s one of only three where absolutely no
moving footage exists – not even a censor’s clip), a complex historical drama
that instead of doing what the usual historicals do, even more of a Greek
tragedy where everybody loses than ‘The Myth Makers’ despite not being set in
Greece. Rather than doing what past historicals did and recycling a well known
story and fitting it into the Dr Who world is very much about the Doctor and Steven
being thrown into this one and struggling to cope. It’s one of the most
‘grown-up’ stories the series ever did, with the usual gorgeous costumes and
sets all Who historicals (oh to see them in more than just photographs!) but
also a darker, more sombre edge that even the best of the other stories don’t
have. ‘The Massacre’ (a word coined by historians for the events in this story,
no less) could have easily been a rushed hatchet-job (given how hastily it was written
and then re-written) but instead its one of the most elegant sophisticated
stories Dr Who ever put on screen with character and dialogue to die for. Give
this cast a script this good (even in cut-down form) and watch them soar. Sadly
in another week we’ll be back to having fun with monsters and Dr Who won’t ever
be quite so deliciously dark or adult again until the later 7th Doctor stories
over twenty years later, with a curfew on making the series quite this gloomy
that’s lasted all the way to the present day. If you’re up for it though and
tired of watching silly runarounds down corridors with low stakes and rubber
alien costumes then I implore to give this story a listen – or better still
watch the unofficial ‘Loose Canon’ reconstruction’ using all those lovely
existing photographs (there’s no animation as yet; they’d probably mess it up
anyways) or best yet track down the book and read it, even if you’re not the
sort of fan who generally reads the novelisations – and enjoy a story back at a
time when Dr Who was a serious as any drama on television and a damn sight
better to boot.
POSITIVES + Another of
this story’s unique aspects is the way so many of the gruesome aspects aren’t
shied away from but shown on screen, not for real (that would have had the
series banned even in the days when Mary Whitehouse was, if not quite an
impressionable schoolgirl, then not the middle aged know-it-all she became) but
in a series of genuine wood carvings borrowed from The British Museum as the Tardis
leaves. Most of them (but not all) are by Martin Englebrecht and come from the
work ‘La Maison Appartment de Bretonuilleiers a Paris and discovered by Lucarotti
during his research and loaned to the BBC on request. These tell the horrors of
the day and age in a way words never could (hangings, drownings, stabbings, mutilations,
torture, even impaling) and make everything in the story feel more ‘real’
somehow, having been created through a real eyewitnesses’ eyes, full of the
action and confusion of the time and showing the dangers of misdirected mob
violence. After all, the wood carvings and letters and diaries are the only
reminders we have that these life and death struggles even took place nowadays
without photographs a time machine at our disposal, something that always makes
such pasty events seem distant, as if they happened to other people not us’;
the thrill of ‘The Massacre’ is that maybe all history was as layered and
interesting and real as this, even though most of it is just a tale in a book
and a fragment in a museum nowadays. More historicals should have picked up on
this angle, mixing the real in with the fiction to tell the true story, as it’s
a good one. It goes well with the music too, which is an excellent score that
despite taken solely from stock to save money, is clearly chosen with more care
than most times this happened (much of it is by French composer Pierre Arvey
and taken from his twin works ‘Hunted Man’ and ‘Frightened Man’, recorded for the
BBC music library. The constant use of sound effects, often filling in for the
sets they can’t afford to build, are just as good and atmospheric: the tocsin
bell tolling in the main square to signal curfew, the birdsong, the sound of
horses on stone…You can’t always tell from photographs how a story turned out
even though this one looks amazing; I can definitively state it sounds amazing
though, with an atmosphere like few others from the soundtrack alone.
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Dalek’s Masterplan’ next ‘The Ark’
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