The Myth Makers
(Season 3, Dr 1 with Vicki and Steven, 16/10/1965-6/11/1965, producer: John Wiles, script editor: Donald Tosh, writer: Donald Cotton, director: Michael Leeston-Smith)
Rank: 12
'Dear Diary, well here I am, a Trojan prisoner of war waiting for Troilus to rescue me. I hope he comes soon: I've nearly finished all the rations I smuggled out of the Tardis food machine and there’s not much battery power left for the ‘secondary’ one I stole. I wonder where the Doctor is now? He'd laugh if he could see me living this new life. The others too. Steven would be teasing me for having adopted to all the local Greek costume customs, Ian would be challenging all the Trojans to a fight to defend my honour every time one of them gets sarky and Barbara would be shooting at my new pet, three-Cerberus. He's such a cutesy, he has a real chumbley feel when he walks, just like those robots we met once. He's a sweetie though, considering he used to be the gatekeeper of the underworld, its only his middle head that's a tiny bit evil - the others are quite sweet if you have the right sort of doggy chocs (and luckily the Tardis dispenser does). I hope Troilus comes soon and wasn't put off by that evening I told his and Greece's future. He looked a bit alarmed when I told him about the European Union. And about Eurovision. And about how they'll write about us in plays and operas in the middle ages. And in the movies. He seemed disappointed to be left out of the2004 film ‘Troy’ and laughed when I described Orlando Bloom being cast as Paris, Brad Pitt being Achilles and Sean penn being Odysseus. ‘Well, they sure got that wrong’ he laughed. Which of course led on to a discussion of what else I’d seen and I mentioned 'Game of Thrones'. Now he thinks dragons are real and wants one for Christmas (oh yes, I may have planted the idea of Christmas in the minds of the Ancient Greeks a thousand years early. Sorry Doctor, I didn’t mean to change the course of history honest). Well must go, I have to supplement my Tardis food somehow and there are some stuffed figs and honey and breast of peacock cooking. How ironic that I'm in Ancient Greece and what I really need right now is some grease-proof paper! Yours Cressida-Vicki'
I’m sure every Doctor Who fan has had the experience at some point of falling in love with a story that feels so totally made for them and excitedly shared it with someone else, only to be told ‘it’s all Greek to me, I don’t get it at all’. Hardly anybody else even remembers this story about the Greek-Trojan wars, given that its one of those obscure Hartnell historicals that doesn’t even have the decency to exist anymore (bar a few rogue seconds, photographs and the audio soundtrack) and most people are, it’s safe to say, puzzled by it. ‘The Myth Makers’ doesn’t work like other historicals. It doesn’t try to bring the past lovingly to life the way ‘Marco Polo’ does, it’s not about the past being a bloody and scary place (and indeed a bloody scary place) like ‘The Massacre’ and it’s not a pseudo-scifi story like ‘The Time Meddler’ about putting history back on its correct path. The closest to it is ‘The Romans’, where the great figures of history are revealed to be merely Human, but not really like that either: he writing is more subtle and, besides, it’s a longstanding tradition from colonised Brits that our Roman forebears were all a bit mad and less civilised than us anyway. No ‘The Myth Makers’ is something unique in the series, described by the publicity department at the time as ‘high comedy’ (something that no doubt made Dennis Spooner, the writer of ‘The Romans’, dead cross) but that’s not quite right either. ‘The Myth Makers’ is a collection of Ancient Greek myths and legends that almost certainly didn’t happen and full of characters who have become confused and buried behind several centuries’ worth of writings treated as if everything was unfolding in real time, shot like a (1960s) modern film, or a soap opera, or a sitcom. You can’t say its anachronistic because the details about the way they lived their lives is painstakingly accurate (writer Donald Cotton was something on an expert on Ancient Greece after writing multiple radio shows about the subject, though this was his first work on TV): it’s the people who are oddly modern, or at any rate timeless, as far away from their traditional images as you can get without ever contradicting them. It’s a world full of people we’re told are heroes for helping to create what we see as the first modern society, treated as if they’re the flawed human beings like us who descended from it. It’s Dr Who as The Flintstones without the jokes about dinosaurs or the Asterix books without the Romans, the ultimate example in the series of how times change but humanity never does. And like most dramas that tell life the way it really is in our current times you don’t know whether to laugh or cry at all the missed opportunities and characters as flawed as ourselves getting things wrong. And almost nobody gets that about this story, which isn’t meant to be pure farce or bloody drama or everything people always say about ‘The Myth Makers’: it’s meant to be about life, in all its shades, in all its hues, when instead of treating the people of our time as they’re myths and legends and heroes and Gods as so many of our Hollywood blockbusters do but a mystical and mythical age told as if they were real flawed people.
It’s not every drama that
seeks to tell a time-travelling romance set in Ancient Greece that’s filled
with excruciating puns, but as anyone who knows me will tell you that all means
it’s tailor-made for me. I am a Greek geek after all (at least partly because
of this story – Dr Who’s original cultural remit worked on me at least if
nobody else) fascinated by the birth of the first ‘modern’ civilisation that
looked even vaguely like ours and as you may have noticed, this many reviews
in, I’m never having as much fun as when I’m cracking a pun. I’ve loved this
story ever since the novelisation came out which, like most of the best Target
novels, is more than just what was on telly: it features Donald Cotton’s
original and better ideas, before the production team (who clearly didn’t
understand what he was trying to do – even Donald’s close friend and one-time
brother-in-law script editor Donald Tosh) changed things round on him; it made
a lot more sense and made what he was trying to do clearer, especially with the
neutral half-blind Cyclops narrator being more of, umm, well, our ears if not
our eyes throughout. Out of the maybe 300 or more Dr Who related fictional
books I’ve read this is still by far and away my favourite, full of such drama,
such passion, such love, such laughs, such everything. If you want to know what
it’s really like to be a human and what it means to live on this planet then
don’t go to Dickens or Shakespeare (no please don’t do that), go read ‘The Myth
Makers’ where lots of people struggle to do their best in a world where things
keep going wrong and catch them off guard.
Modern audiences tend to
be a bit suspicious of the Hartnell historicals and I don’t know why – they’re
some of the greatest things the series produced. Lovingly created past details,
dramatic stories with high tension the sheer horror of our friends being
trapped in a world where death is cheap and survival unlikely – even the worst
and more boring ones happen against a marvellously colourful backdrop (yes even
in black-and-white) which after you’ve sat through as many grey space stations
as I have makes them seem all the more amazing. They were a dying trend by
season three though, made by a production team who didn’t quite know what to do
with them. Even in 1965 though people were confused by ‘The Myth Makers’, which
hedges its bets between whether the events in the Greek legends are ‘real’ or
not by having the Dr cause half of them, just a couple of years after telling
us he ‘couldn’t interfere with history’ (apparently Donald Cotton never got
that production memo – or maybe he did and ignored it as that would be very in
keeping with the story’s ethos too). This is an era when viewers didn’t know
whether historicals were going to be serious gritty dramas made to look as real
as possible or out and out farces – this story is both. The tone veers
sharply between being the biggest Dr Who fairytale of the 20th century, an
outright comedy as funny as any in the Dr Who canon and the most brutally
graphically real story Dr Who had seen so far (yes even out-bloodying ‘The Aztecs’), a tale where everyone spends
three episodes cracking jokes then an episode trying, futilely, to avoid being
slaughtered. Which annoys a lot of fans but is arguably closer to the original
texts and more recognisable to a real Ancient Greek than, say, ‘The Romans’ is
to ‘The Romans’ (although they might have to ask you where the Greek chorus
commenting on the action is: ‘Greeks invented ‘Gogglebox’ don’tchaknow. And
‘Vengeance On Varos’ which uses much the same idea). Though fans tend to lump
the dozen black-and-white historicals in together as if they’re all part of the
same ‘genre’ they actually range quite a lot, from the realism of ‘Marco Polo’ to the farce of ‘The Romans’ to
the modern era parallels of ‘An Unearthly Child’ to the parody of ‘The Gunfighters’ and the
storybook feel of ‘The Smugglers’, as different production teams had different
ideas about how realistic they wanted their trips through time to be. Well,
‘The Myth Makers’ is a bit of everything: we get to explore both Ancient Greece
and Ancient Troy properly on the characters’ own terms, see larger than life
characters from the ancient tales become larger than life cartoons and learn a
lot about our own time (or did in the 1960s anyway), in a script that both
takes itself seriously and sends the whole concept up. For most fans that
dizzying combination catches them off guard and they don’t know whether to
laugh or cry, unsure whether we’re meant to care for these characters or see
them as ciphers.
I reckon it’s both
though: like Donald Cotton’s other script for ‘The Gunfighters’ horror, love
and comedy go hand in hand, all different sides of the human experience and its
the unpredictability of not knowing what might be coming next that’s more human
than experiencing any one of them. Because for all the ancient past trappings
(the furthest we ever go back in time in Dr Who with recognisable people i.e.
not grunting cavemen, stranded aliens Gods or Big Bang explosions) this story
is about what it means to be human in any era and to find yourself caught up in
a society that expects you to conform against type, something that’s as true
now as it was in the 1960s and indeed was in the 12-13th century BC (the
likeliest date the siege of Troy took place, if indeed it took place at all: a
Victorian archaeology expedition in 1870 set out to prove once and for all if
the siege of Troy could possibly be real and got ambiguous answers: certainly
there was a big fire that wiped out a big city in this date). No one here is in
charge of anything: even Paris, the supposedly authoritarian ruler of Greece,
is a vague and sweet old man after a peaceful life (had this been a few years
later it’s a part that would surely have been played by John Le Mesurier). No
one is in control of what’s happening, they’re just stumbling along till The
Doctor turns up which is why the siege has been going on for so long. Take
Troilus: he’s a 17 year old dreamer who wants to curl up with a book and think
about fairytales, he doesn’t want to be turned into a soldier but he’s born
into a society that’s always at war so off he goes. Take Odysseus, whose not a
hero warrior but a thug in a rug (well, a toga) and whose more of an
opportunistic used car salesman type (if you come to this story from season 24
you’re convinced he’s going to turn out to be Sabalom Glitz again; the actors
even look alike). Take King Priam, a genial host who’d much rather be at peace
than at war, a mild mannered man not a natural leader whose always smiling (at
least in the telesnaps: maybe they just caught actor Max Adrian off guard).
Or maybe he was laughing
at Hartnell – the two are said to have clashed most horribly and part of the
hurried re-writes on this story were to keep the two actors apart during
filming as much as possible. A shame as Priam is basically Kublai Khan from
‘Marco Polo’ again and we know how well the 1st Dr bounced off him. Francis De
Wolff as Agamemnon too: legend has it in rehearsals Francis would deliberately
mess up the line ‘take a bone, ham, and sit down’ instead of ‘hambone’ while
staring straight at him. Hartnell, though, had reason to be cross at someone:
in an eerie mirror of what will happen with Christopher Eccleston in 2005 his
aunt, the person who’d brought him up and much more of a mum to him than his
biological mum, died and Hartnell wasn’t granted time off from making this
story to go to her funeral, while he’d also just been formally diagnosed with
arteriosclerosis and was struggling with his lines, further muddled by an
accident in rehearsals of episode one where he got knocked over by over-zealous
extras. The real trouble was that Hartnell was missing Verity Lambert terribly
and clashing repeatedly with her replacement John Wiles over the direction the
show was taking (ironic, really, that a story about power struggles had one
going on behind the cameras too, as a cold war blew up into a fierce battle). Luckily
most of the script calls on the 1st Dr to be huffy and impatient, moaning about
being captured and trapped inside a horse – notwithstanding how good an actor
he is, at times it doesn’t seem as if Hartnell is acting, more venting his
frustrations at being somewhere he didn’t want to be). Mostly though Hartnell
is secure: he has all those tricky Greek names to learn and all those revered
actors around him, with most of his safety nets gone or going. No wonder he was
fed up and tetchy, with some of his worst tantrums taking place during making
of this story. As horrific as that must have been to work with, though, on
screen it works: The Doctor has been slowly turned into a grandfather type but
here he’s as cross-patchy as we’ve seen him since ‘Marco Polo’, as frustrated
at the narrow vision of the people around him as we are.
Only the scheming
Cassandra seems at home in this world of distrust: everyone else is too nice
for this society and notably everyone seems to have all but forgotten why
they’re fighting; they’re just re-acting to events because everyone else is and
they think they ought to be too. As it happens Cassandra’s prophecies are all
‘right’: she sees the Tardis as a bad omen (which it is, given that the Doctor
is the catalyst that turns a cold siege into a hot battle) and she’s the only
person to find the sudden appearance of a bloody big horse suspicious. Only
nobody listens to her because what does she know about anything? You sense
she’s Donald Cotton himself, a soothsayer who can see things going wrong and
powerless to stop them. You see, I think there’s more to ‘The Myth makers’ than
meets the eye: it’s not just about Ancient Greece but about the world as it was
in 1965, a reminder of how through history mankind has always been a single
mistake or misunderstanding away from wiping ourselves out, our stubbornness
holding us back even in the one time and place we’ve come to associate with
democracy freedom and peace. A lot of myths and legends were created to enable
humans to discuss things about society and apply it to the present day, but in
Cotton’s hands the past is the present, the same war of distrust and envy and
misunderstanding fought over and over again, just with different weapons and
different clothes. The Greeks and Trojans are at each other’s throats as
everyone knows but this isn’t some World War Two style battle with all guns
blazing. It’s a siege, a cold war, fought reluctantly by two sides who are
scared of what the other side might do rather than a glorious battle. Usually
in Dr Who everyone thinks the same as their leader (except perhaps the one who
thinks differently and befriends The Doctor) but here we have a world just like
ours full of hawks and doves, weary battle hardened soldiers who know how
life-changing war can be clashing with young upstarts desperate to prove their
valour and peaceniks in the middle who are lovers not fighters. Ancient Greece
is long held up as the first example of a democracy and this is the downside of
living in a democracy (while Troy is exactly the same): nobody can agree on
anything so we end up in a stalemate. Even the skirmish itself sounds like a
mistake neither side really wanted to fight, all over a kidnapped Queen that
nobody likes or wants back, while the country that took her have got fed up of
waiting for a ransom for her. Both sides are going through the motions, neither
wanting the upper hand but so scared of what the other side might do that they
go through the motions anyway, fighting on ‘just in case’ the other side wants
a war when both sides only want peace. Though the closest we get to a nuclear missile
is a clash of swords, this is a story about two super-powers who distrust each
other despite being so similar in every way, who are both stumbling into war.
For me this is one or the best of the many Dr Who takes on the cold war,
something the series couldn’t avid even whe it was taking a trip back into
history: something society has arrived at almost by accident and a battle which
seems ridiculous to modern viewers who know the Greeks better as writers and
philosophers not fighters (and by association how are the future going to
remember the 1960s?) Some say that the
fourth episode, which goes from high farce into deadly violence and is easily
the bloodiest seen in Dr Who outside ‘The Massacre’ doesn’t fit but I say it
does. ‘The Myth Makers’ is a warning, from ancient history, not to repeat all
our mistakes all over again with another war that nobody really wants and where
everybody on both sides die (give or take Troilus and Vicki starting a new life
for themselves in Ancient Greece anyway). You’re meant to be watching this laughing
at all the misunderstandings and thinking ‘what a waste and its all for nothing’
because nobody remembers who won the Greek-Trojan war and it all seems like a
waste of time all these centuries on and then its meant to hit you: wait, is
this what our grandchildren are going to think of us and the cold wear? Especially
if it turns hot? Oh and just to rub the point home they hire Barrie Ingham to
play Paris, two years after he was in ‘The Daleks’
which everyone greeted as a cold war polemic about what might happen if either
superpower ever presses the nuclear button and which, when you get down to it,
is basically the same plot as this story but with more jokes (a lot more jokes).
Where did it go wrong?
Well, society isn’t built to protect everyone: even in our first stirrings of
democracy people have got the power plays the wrong way round. Every single
person in this story is doing what people expect of them, not what they want to
do, which is why both sides are stuck trying to invade the other on principle
even though nobody really wants to, when their heart isn’t really in it. Note
that Paris, who caused the whole thing in the first place when he carried off
Helen of Troy and whose usually pitched as the antagonist of the decade long
siege, spends most of this story shrugging his shoulders and going with the
flow, at best ignorant of the people dying because of him and at worst cowardly
because he won’t join in to fight for his own cause (there were more than a few
politicians like that in 1965 on both sides of the cold war: its the LBJ and
Brezhnev era to save you looking it up). ‘That whole Helen thing was just a
misunderstanding’ sighs Paris at one stage. ‘The war with the Greeks has been
going on ten long years and frankly we’re very bored’ snaps Priam at one point.
What was portrayed in every other adaptation of the Greek myth as a wonderful
thing, a glorious moment in history, is a lot of waiting around. War takes on a
life of its own and even if you call for peace and your opposite calls for
peace there will always be people on either side who refuse to back down and
still want a war. It’s unworkable, without an end until one or other or both
sides disintegrates (which is more or less what happened in 1989). And who pays
the price for that? Everybody, in a bloody massacre, whether they wanted peace
or war it didn’t matter: war killed them all in the end.
There’s an interesting
side thing to note here. Who accelerates the war more than anyone? Yes that’s
right, he does. Admittedly The Doctor is captured by Agamemnon and made to work
on Troy’s behalf at threat of death and comes up with his plan as an
alternative to being catapulted over Greece’s walls with the cannonballs but
nevertheless…he creates the plan with the Trojan horse that leads to the
battle. This is such a shift from how Dr Who used to do things that it takes
you surprise: while the idea of a Trojan horse is almost certainly a myth that
never happened there is at least enough leeway in documented history where it
could. And The Doctor caused it. The
timelord who once shouted at Barbara for trying to stop an Aztec sacrifice
actively changes history. But did he cause the war to heat up again or bring
the peace nearer? For as well as the cold war think there’s another layer going
on here. A mere twenty years after America dropped the nuclear bomb on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki here we are again, with the ancient times’ equivalent of
a super-weapon that the other side didn’t see coming and had no chance to stop,
one which kills a lot of Greeks outright but nevertheless might well have saved
others from being killed had an endless war dragged on longer. Something needs
to stop the stalemate. It feels like a generation still guilty over the deaths
that happened on their watch debating openly about whether it was better to
save the future many by killing the few and it’s an argument that has no easy
answers (and one that The Doctor still debates now: the time war is treated very
much as a nuclear weapon, particularly when Steven Moffat’s writing about it in
stories like ‘Day Of The Doctor’ – for Russell T Davies, who came up with the
idea, it was originally more abstract than that).
Could Cotton really be
using the past to write about the present? Sure: because that’s what everybody
does with myths and legends, they exaggerate or distort the bits that are most
relevant to their own time. This story, of course, didn’t really happen, almost
uniquely for a Dr Who historical – or if it did then it almost certainly didn’t
happen like this, after several millennia of distortions and re-tellings before
Homer thought to write events down nearly 1200 years after they happened in the
Illiad 500-ish years later (a lot of people assume its an accurate re-telling
by an Ancient Greek of another Ancient Greek, but for context in terms of
dating it’s the equivalent of a modern writer telling a tale about The
Renaissance today and people assuming it to be word accurate). The story was
further distorted with re-tellings by
Virgil, Benoit De St Maure (where Cressida appears for the first time as
‘Bresieda’), Boccacia, Chaucer, Shakespeare, all of these writers adding bits
and taking other bits away to emphasise the parts of the story that best fitted
‘their’ version of the world. But whose to say that it didn’t happen just like
this? Until we invent a time machine and go back in time for real all history
from that long ago is up for grabs. Normally that meddling with history would
be annoying but there’s a big get out of jail card here with how long ago this
all is. While going back before most records began must have been a right pain
for the costume and props departments(I’m still not convinced by the very
modern looking and deeply ugly Greek wallpaper!) it’s a gift for the writer,
with lot of room for the Tardis team to get involved and still have the story
fit in with the few established facts we have, shaping the story for themselves
without contradicting any historical evidence (because there really isn’t very
much at all). I’m always surprised more historicals didn’t go for such an
ancient period when they could get away with this ambiguity more without
historians writing in to complain, as they did all the time. As a result
everyone is temporarily freed from the idea that they can’t meddle in history.
Especially Vicki who meddles
with time in rather a big way and is to date the only companion to effectively
become her own ancestor. Vicki’s leaving story is clumsy in so many ways,
Maureen O’Brien written out against her will for the heinous crime of, uhh,
complaining out loud and wishing the scripts would be of a slightly higher
standard (her exact words while making ‘Galaxy
4’ were ‘it’s not Shakespeare is it?!’, is sometimes said to have inspired
Tosh to commission this story and base it loosely on one of Shakespeare’s
plays, but have it so that they all talked like us!) Vicki, adopting the Greek
name Cressida, is paired with Troilus in a romance that comes thick and fast
despite no on-screen (well, on-soundtrack) chemistry whatsoever. It’s
irresponsible in so many ways that The Doctor would leave an orphan in his
care, one of the youngest and most impressionable seen in the series, in such a
bloody and uncertain time because of someone she met just a few hours ago
(though in keeping with what he does with Susan at the end of ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ he’s apparently
changed his mind by the time it’s Steven’s turn to fall in love in ‘The Massacre’). And yet it works, this
unlikely romance a lot more convincing than, say, the hurried way Leela is
married off in ‘The Invasion Of Time’
or even Susan’s fish-slapping courtship. Vicki has been yearning for roots
ever since we first met her, orphaned and abandoned, while she’s also been
oddly old-school for a companion supposedly from the late 25th century, her
heart racing more the further she goes back in time (aside from Ancient Greece
she’s happiest in Ancient Rome or The Crusades). She’s a born storyteller, with
a vivid imagination and a yearning for peace so Ancient Greece was always going
to be a good fit. She and Troilus are also both meant to be contemporary with
the teenagers watching in Who’s original 1960s family audience, fighting their
pro-war parents over the necessity and inevitability of war, with the moment
when they walk off hand in hand to build another city from scratch based on
peace this time really affecting. It also speaks volumes, in a story about
misunderstandings and distrust, in a metaphor for the cold war period of
misunderstandings and distrust, that Vicki risks everything she has to go and
find Troilus and tell her that she isn’t responsible for sending him to his
death, that sorting things out properly and telling the truth is even more
important than her adoptive family of The Doctor and Steven (who Cotton very
much treats as a surrogate grandfather and brother this story, with Vicki and
Steven just like any youngsters similar in age and jockeying for position of
top dog, all banter and teasing and sneaking respect). Vicki learns
responsibility after a story arc of relying on other people to keep her safe,
leaving in this story not just because she falls in love but because she can’t
bear the thought of Troilus thinking she betrayed him, sending him on a fool’s
errand out of harm’s way during the Trojan invasion that, by accident, puts him
in danger when he comes across Achilles (and, frustratingly I can’t tell if
he’s wearing anything on his heels or not from the telesnaps before you ask) As
much as it seems as if she leaves the Tardis on a whim, really this is the
chance for roots Vicki has been looking for since we first met her and Troilus
is just enough like her, a fish out of water full of boyish enthusiasm and
idealism and a love of all things cute, so it does feel natural they should
envision a life together, even if we know that their life will be tougher than
they think and even though they actually get very little on-screen time to talk
about it (you have to hope he’s OK with her adopting every animal they meet and
giving them funny names, though, something that seems unlikely given his
upbringing).
Vicki has one of the more
interesting character arcs in DW too: in her early stories she’s very much a
child in an adult world, a naive innocent fooled by the only actual adult left
alive on Dido and who chortles her way past assassins and Daleks about to exterminate
her without much of a care. By the end of her time in the Tardis, though, she’s
grown into being the more experienced big sister trying to keep Steven out of
trouble (even though he’s older than her and from nearly as far in our future),
the rough edges knocked off her so that she becomes responsible and wary, the
first to spot trouble and get the others out of it. As Susan’s ‘replacement’ as
the identification person for the youngsters in Who’s family audience watching
she’s the youth of the day growing into adults, aware that life is harder than
simply choosing peace and crossing your fingers, and yet in the great
generational discussion that lasted across most of the 1960s Cotton is firmly
on her side. Peace might be unlikely, it might be foolhardy, it might be a lot
tougher than she ever realises, but surely hoping for war is better than being
like Achilles or Hector and pushing for war that never ends and keeps going
round in cycles. Vicki is also one of the Tardis’ most intuitive companions,
best at sensing when something is wrong by a sixth sense rather than logic, so
it’s perfect she becomes a soothsayer in this story (and her time-travelling
knowledge helps too of course). Vicki starts her debut story literally waiting
for ‘Rescue’ but by this story she’s braving
danger to do the right thing and that’s a lot more satisfyingly rounded than
the lives most Who companions get. I’ve always found it neat, too, that she
goes from the planet ‘Dido’ (almost certainly named after the daughter of Greek
God Venus) via Dido’s Son Aneas to Troilus (Aeneas’ cousin in the original
Greek myth), like a Steven Moffat series arc laid out several stories in
advance (although given the amount of time we’ve changed script editors between
the two and how few of the writers actually bothered to watch Dr Who stories
that weren’t theirs its surely just coincidence). However sudden, however
unlikely, Vicki’s departure is one of the series’ most moving as Vicki tries to
get a nattering bizzling Doctor to listen to her one last time and tells him
that she needs to leave, before hugging the Tardis goodbye like an old friend
and hot-footing it to her possible doom to look for Troilus, realising at the
last minute that she’s become a myth herself, the fortune-teller Cressida who
saw all the bad things coming (it makes sense she’d be a storyteller, though
what never quite makes sense is why she adopts a name at all and doesn’t just
call herself Vicki from the get-go; Priam calls her Cressida and she just never
contradicts him). It’s the icing on a great Greek cake (a karidopita? A sort of
walnut cake popular in Greece), even though her departure was last minute and
not in the original script: the actual plan was to kill her off in ‘The Dalek’s
Masterplan’ (where its Vicki who sacrifices herself in place of Katarina, which
would have been totally the wrong death for such an optimistic idealistic
character; romance suits her much better).
Most people don’t know
how to take ‘The Myth makers’ and I can see why. Much of the story is delivered
in broad brush strokes, with pantomime heroes and villains (Cassandra
especially is as cruel as any non-Dalek we’ve ever seen in Dr Who, with the
twist that, technically, she’s right about everything and the danger the Tardis
signals) but then its mean to be more like a modern sitcom than a Greek play,
with the ‘motivation’ for the characters power (which is the motivation in
practically every sitcom anyway, from ‘Porridge’ to ‘Friends’, albeit in a
social group or specific place rather than all of Greece or Troy). We all know
a Priam, someone in power who doesn’t want it, having to cope with so many
threats from below he has no chance to lead from the top. We all know an
Odysseus, a charmer whose nice to your face but happy to stab you in the back
if it helps him get what he wants. We all know a Cassandra, pompous and haughty
and full of sarcasm about how the rest of the world gets stuff wrong when they
can do it so much better. We all know a Troilus, who couldn’t care less even
though he’s expected to inherit all these problems. Most of all ‘The Myth
Makers’ is the Dr Who historical than most feels like ‘now’ (or did in 1965
anyway): while others, even ones set comparatively recently in the 18th
and 19th centuries, were all about how different life would have
been for your great-grandparents ‘The Myth Makers’ is about how times never
really change. In many ways too it’s the most realistic of Dr Who stories as
nothing quite goes to plan. The Doctor confidently adopts the persona of Zeus,
thinking it will help him get away with a multitude of sins, only for Agamemnon
to rope him into doing his dirty work for him (he doesn’t even get the time he
needs to build a proper wooden horse – with cushions). Steven tries hard to
come to Vicki’s rescue, but is captured before he gets very far and gets
injured at the end the first time he has a chance to fight (he’s still
delirious well into the next story ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’). Cyclops, one
of the few decent people we meet in this world, is sent to liaise on Vicki’s
behalf but ends up being murdered, accidentally causing the unfolding of events
in the last episode as everyone is waiting on his message (he’s a much, much
more interesting person in the book). It’s a world not of heroes and villains,
like in the myths, but people who make mistakes and get things wrong, like real
life. One thing I love about Cotton’s script is that we see this war from both
sides: The Doctor has a bumpy ride with the Trojans, while Steven and Vicki
don’t fare much better with the Greeks, although we meet basically good people
on both sides. Stories like ‘The Massacre’ and ‘The Highlanders’ make us pick a
side but in ‘The Myth Makers’ both Greece and Troy are made up of heroes and
villains and friends and fools.
Admittedly the story we
get on screen isn’t anywhere close to the one in the book, it lacks the depth
and multiple layerings, while it was a big shock to find that most of my
favourite moments in print aren’t in the finished version at all, taken out by
Tosh to make it more serious. From the little we can see of it on screen they
didn’t quite pull off even the diluted script either, with unconvincing models
(the Greek horse looks incredibly flimsy; they also built a full-size leg for
the actors to act against and to show scale but annoyingly no photos seem to
exist of it) and some mighty ugly sets (The House of Priam has such a weird
taste in wallpaper – that horseshoe pattern hurts my eyes!), while this is one
of those season 3 stories where, after two years of successfully conjuring up
all the lush detail of ancient times past, we mostly see people pontificating
in front of an empty set and a painted curtain because the budget’s been cut (a
contemporary review said that the hurried mass exodus of soldiers from the
horse was ‘anything but speedy’). No matter: this is still one of the greatest
and most under-rated Dr Who stories of them all. It’s also surely the funniest:
even though they made the author take out his planned episode titles ‘Zeus Ex
Machina’ (for being too obscure a film studies reference) and ‘Is There A Doctor
In the Horse?’ (for being a little too self-reverential; it is, after all,
about Steven and Vicki wondering whether the whacking great decoy that’s just
turned up is the Doctor’s work or not – as they say it’s certainly in his
‘style’), Cotton still gets away with ‘Small Prophet, Quick Return’ for when
Vicki (not the tallest of companions) whose seen as a sort of soothsayer gets
back from the Tardis and re-joins the plot. There’s also what might just be my
favourite Dr Who gag of them all: ‘Woe to Troy! Woe to Zeus!’ says Cassandra seeing
bad omens everywhere. ‘Well you can’t say woah to the horse’ says Priam ‘it’s
already here!’ There’s another great scene where Paris wheels in the Tardis and
says its his prize, wanting to display that thing in the square, mirroring
where the horse will end up. ’I’m not having that thing in my temple, get it out
of here!’ snaps his dad as if this is 1965 and his son’s just been to the shops.
‘But it’s a monument’ wails Paris. ‘A monument to what?’ asks his long-suffering
dad, just like your family at home. Priceless. However Cotton’s dialogue can
turn on a knife edge from comedy to drama, all with the same period iambic pentameter
of, at any rate, the Shakespeare adaptation of the tale, poetic and memorable
with many quotable lines throughout. Considering that he never wanted to write
for children’s telly and had never seen Dr Who (Cotton got the commission after
spending a morose time down the pub ranting that all his friends in show
business had given up on him, then came home to a telegram from Tosh talking
about his new appointment on Who and asking for a script, which Cotton felt it
would be churlish to turn down after all his complaints!) for my money Cotton ‘got’
it better than any writer since David Whittaker, a series that can go anywhere
at anytime and yet, deep down, is about the people watching it.
He also insisted on hiring his friend Humphrey Searle with this his only Dr Who score and its one of the best, with the biggest ‘normal’ orchestra the series ever had and like the script turning on a knife-edge from big military crescendos to soft lyrical romantic interludes. So much so that its almost a shame when people keep talking over it (of all the Dr Who scores out there this is the one I’d most likely listen to independently of the story. Not like the Murray Gold scores that are so tied into their stories yet available on CD. That way lies madness I tell you). Searle treats this story not as a cute little bit of TV but like an opera (like, say, the opera ‘Troilus and Cressida’ by William Walton). Funny and silly, yet tense and brutal, while romantic and sweet, few stories cover as much ground as ‘The Myth Makers’ does and even if the TV story isn’t quite up there with the book it’s still an incredibly clever, layered, intricate, laugh out loud story that will make you weep buckets. Stuff Shakespeare’s rather laboured version of the ‘Troilus and Cressida’ tale – it’s the Dr Who version that’s high art (and yes high comedy, in a way). I don’t expect anyone without my sense of humour, absurdity, philosophy or love of the time period to like this story anywhere near as much as I do and even I can see the whacking great faults in it.Nevertheless, the long-held idea that this is another one of those season 3 stories, like Cotton’s other story ‘The Gunfighters’, that doesn’t quite work, is a myth: for me, at least, ‘The Myth Makers’ works most beautifully, with a combination of elements that no other story would dare think of, never mind try. Of all the missing stories this is the one I long to see most: it’s a story to get lost in and, as wonderful as it is to have as many photos as we do and the soundtrack, it still isn’t quite the same. The gap where this story should be, on the Whoniverse’s i-player, feels like the biggest absentee there is: this story is so very Dr Whoy and so tied into the year it was made that it would be a shame for fans to miss out on the magic this story offers up, a tale worthy enough of Homer himself.
POSITIVES + Maureen O’Brien is superb. She doesn’t get a lot to work with at the best of times in Dr Who, but she carries more of this story than usual and despite her anger we know she felt at being pushed out from this series without warning (receiving the news she was being axed waiting on her doorstep after coming back from a pricey holiday with her boyfriend she suddenly couldn’t afford) she gives what might just be her best performance of the lot. There aren’t many clips from this story that exists but even the few seconds of a panicked Vicki watching Cassandra plan to set the Tardis alight and her mournful goodbye to the Tardis and the Doctor say so much. Her balance of lovesick teenager and worried weary adult and her fury at being teased by Steven is pretty darn great even on audio too. Of all the many quadzillions of characters that have been in Dr Who dare I say it but I think Vicki might be favourite, the perfect match of actress and character, always lovable, always cute, always hopeful no matter what life throws at her but serious when the plot demands it and somehow never annoying in the way the similar Susan was (not least because Vicki is one of the few companions who loves her life, travelling and having adventures).
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: There have
been two complementary versions of what happened to Vicki after the events of
‘The Myth Makers’. ‘Frostfire’ (2007) was a big deal for Big Finish after
tempting Maureen O’Brien back to reprise her character for the first time in 42
years, with a story that launched the long-running ‘Companion Chronicles’
range. Now in Ancient Carthage following
the Trojan wars, Vicki (now using the name Cressida permanently) is leaving a
scroll for posterity in an ancient tomb. Unfortunately though we don’t get that
story but another about an unseen adventure on the frozen wastes of the Thames
in 1814 – the same frost the 12th Doctor and Bill visit on TV in ‘Thin Ice’.
Instead of a giant fish, though, it’s a phoenix whose fallen to Earth and has
been trapped y the cold, a useful metaphor for the winters of Ancient Greece
and the way Vicki feels away from her cosy life on the Tardis. Marc Platt doesn’t
quite get Vicki’s earnest childish adultness as well as he gets most other eras
of the show and on that score after waiting so long to hear what happened to
Vicki ‘Frostfire’ is a disappointment, but in every other way it’s quite a
clever story, mixing Jane Austen and time zones with aplomb. ‘Heartwarming’ in
all senses of the word.
Previous ‘Mission To The Unknown’ next ‘The
Dalek’s Masterplan’
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