The Myth Makers: Ranking - 12

 

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 18^th and 19^th 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).

NEGATIVES - Poor Katarina, the handmaiden to Cassandra who gets caught up in events over her head when looking after a wounded Steven at the end of this story. She barely features before she abruptly joins the Tardis crew and only lasts another four episodes before sacrificing herself in an airlock. Logistically she’s there simply because Terry Nation had already written Vicki into his 12 part epic (and originally asked by the production team to kill Vicki off before they felt it would be too horrific and asked him to change it), and as he was refusing to work on any more re-writes a replacement was hastily created instead. A little too hastily though: we don’t get to know poor Katarina much at all (she’s only in the last episode of ‘The Myth Makers’ and her joining seems ever so sudden; it was only a couple of years ago The Doctor was kidnapping schoolteachers rather than risk them talking about The Tardis) and the Doctor acts very out of character for him in welcoming her on board and taking her out of her time without hesitation (and no Steven being sick doesn’t cut it: the Tardis has far better medicines than she has after all), submitting to her ideas that she’s passed over into the afterlife in the confusion (just compare to how he turns down Anne Chaplet as a companion in ‘The Massacre’ in two stories’ time). Four of Adrienne Hill’s five episodes have been long since wiped, but judging by the snippets and audio we have she’s one of the great lost actresses playing one of the great lost companions – we deserved to see a whole lot more of her. Hill left acting to become a drama teacher not long after her Dr Who role; her pupils say she often talked about her time on Who and got sad that none of them could remember her being on it.

BEST QUOTE: Odysseus: ‘Of all the undignified ways of entering a city, this takes the fried phoenix!’

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.

We get to see more of Vicki in ‘The Storyteller’, the official name given to the trailer for the season 2 blu-ray release of 2023 which saw Maureen O’Brian return on screen as Vicki for the first time in 58 years! Pete McTighe writes for Vicki better than he ever wrote for the 13^th Doctor and companions and nails her impressionable loneliness, recalling the events of ‘The rescue’ and ‘The Myth Makers’ with some neat modern computer graphics. She remembers her friends, with Her take on the Doctor: ‘The  wisest man I ever met, whose eyes sparkled like the night sky and whose temper burned like the sun’.  Vicki comments that ‘each adventure made me who I am’ and the camera pans back from her memories to as close to  Ancient Greece as you can get in Britain and on a budget. Vicki mimics the 11^th Doctor’s lines about life being stories, talking about her adventures to her grand-daughter, just as the 1^st Doctor once treated her as his adopted grandchild (her favourite is about The Daleks). Nice to know she still has a Scouse accent even after all those years surrounded by Greeks!. Not the greatest trailer for the series but it’s oh so good to have Vicki back again!

Previous ‘Mission To The Unknown’ next ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’

 

The Massacre (Of St Bartholemew's Eve): Ranking - 16

 

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 16^th 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.  

NEGATIVES - Alas the worst scene comes after the best (Hartnell’s lone speech) and undoes much of the good work of the story. Anne was rejected as a companion because, being a 17th century servant, she wouldn’t know all the things that the 1960s viewers at home would take for granted. That’s patently daft: Jamie and Victoria aren’t exactly modern, even if both date from after this story’s period setting. So instead we get Dodo Chaplet, a contemporary of the viewer who wanders into the Tardis when it lands in 1966 in the last scene and she naturally assumes it’s a real police telephone box, looking for help after witnessing a car crash. Quite aside from the fact that they were already so rare in 1966 Dodo should be as amazed at finding one as finding out the box is bigger on the inside, her reactions are all wrong: she’s not curious in the least about where she is, she’s not angry or scared or confused but calm  and her Liverpudlian accent is already slipping (actress Jackie lane is a Londoner really; which is quite weird in itself given how Vicki was a Liverpudlian playing a sort-of Londoner, a sign of how music has shifted from Merseybeat to, well, cockneybeat by 1966). The Doctor doesn’t behave normally either, explaining all about the tardis within seconds (just contrast this with the rtigmarole he goes through to stop Ian and barnara telling anyone – has the events of ‘The Massacre’ made him determined to be more trusting and less suspicious?) and he simply takes off with her indoors, before she’s learned of the real dangers, once Steven’s ruined that great last scene by walking back indoors to warn him about a policeman on the loose (hardly the biggest problem the Doctor’s ever faced). The Doctor merely waits to hear she’s an orphan, chuckles that she looks like a bit like Susan and takes off not thinking about anyone except himself as if he’s learned nothing; he doesn’t even wait to see if the person in the accident Dodo was trying to phone about is alright: I mean, for all he knows the Tardis just landed right on top of them. The weirdest thing of all though...Dodo shares Anne’s surname, which makes Steven wonder if they’re related (the script is ambiguous about this: Dodo’s reaction to being asked if she’s French is ‘don’t be daft!’ while the Doctor chuckles ‘Possibly’, a cover-up for a speech he should have given about how she might have great-grandparents who emigrated from France and time is non liner and timey wimey. Or something). What’s weird about this is a) that they even take the time to hint at this at all b) to have carried Anne’s maiden name then Anne must have had her child/children out of wedlock, something scandalous in 1572 to say the least or married someone with the exact same surname, which seems statistically unlikely and c) who was Anne kicking around with unmarried when she thought she was about to die and could throw caution to the wind? Steven...So does Peter Purves spend the next few stories travelling with his (sort of) great-granddaughter (much like the Doctor once did), fifty years before Dr Who does it again with River Song? And did the Tardis land at this point in time deliberately just to pick Dodo up? (It’s the only time the Tardis stops off somewhere randomly for a short time when it isn’t being chased through time and space – usually there’s a reason). What’s weirder than all of that, though, is that if this is what the production team were going for then Dodo neither looks nor acts anything like Steven or Anne and the point is lost. Even weirder than that, of course, is that such a promising nuanced complex companion is replaced by a character who, though Jackie Lane tries her best, is one of the show’s most one-dimensional and she’s already irritating beyond belief in her first scene. It’ll get worse…

BEST QUOTE ‘My dear Steven, history sometimes gives us a terrible shock and that is because we don’t quite fully understand. Why should we? After all we’re all too small to realise its final pattern. Therefore don’t try to judge it from where you stand. I was right to do as I did, yes that I firmly believe. Even after all this time he cannot understand: I dare not change the course of history. Well, at least I taught him to take some precautions. He did remember to look at the scanner before he opened the doors. Now they’re all gone. All gone. None of them could understand. Not even my little Susan. Or Vicki. As as for Barbara and Chatterton…Chesterton…They were all too impatient to get back to their own time. And now Steven. Perhaps I should go home, back to my own planet/ But I can’t…I can’t’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘The Meeting’ is a ‘Brief Encounter’ from Dr Who Magazine #167 (1990) that was so popular it was reprinted in the first Dr Who Yearbook from 1992. The story saw John Lucarotti return to the scene of ‘The Massacre’, his last piece of work for Dr Who – the twenty-four year gap is one of the longest for writers returning to the show even in brief form. It’s a highly postmodernist story about how working on this series never really leaves you, with Lucarotti himself visiting present-day Paris and popping in to visit an inn named ‘L’auberge du Pont Remain’ which resembles the inn of The Massacre where he meets…the first Doctor. ‘Remember all this?’ asks the Doctor, waving his arms: he means the events of The Massacre in the 16^th century of course (‘with Gaston de Whatsisname and that other one, the Huguenot fellow’ – Lucarotti remembers the names of all his characters but doesn’t feel right correcting him), but he might as well be talking about the 1960s and working on the show. ‘What are you doing here?’ Lucarotti asks. ‘Visiting you’ the Doctor replies ‘Mustn’t lose touch with old friends’. The Doctor then asks if the writer is thinking of going to Samarkand too, the location of Lucarotti’s first story ‘Marco Polo’! The writer sensibly points out that the Doctor was only ever imaginary and closes his eyes, finding the Doctor gone when he opens them again. Just a touch of sunstroke perhaps, but no his bill has been paid by ‘an old man with long grey hair’ (and yes, you’re not the first reader to point out that really it should have been white!) Short but sweet.    

A quick mention too for the Big Finish audio ‘Fugitive Of The Daleks’ (2024), part of the ‘First Doctor Adventures’ series, which has its own otherwise unverified theory about who The Abbot of Amboise is and what he’s up to: he’s the robot double The Daleks created in ‘The Chase’! Well, there’s nothing in ‘The Massacre’ to contradict it, so it works for me.   

Previous ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ next ‘The Ark’