It could so easily have
ended.
There in 1969, when the
second Doctor was put on trial, it could so easily have ended. Perhaps the show
could not have been brought down with just six words, but six sentences
perhaps, re-written, could have seen the Doctor’s adventures brought to a halt,
could have seen him return home to Gallifrey to save the lives of his friends,
and that could have been that.
Certainly, the mood at the
time seems to have been that if Doctor Who was to survive into the 1970s,
Things Had To Change.
Perversely, it was the
same challenge that had been laid down ahead of Patrick Troughton’s casting in
the role – the show needed to change if it was to survive. It changed in 1966
and had wrung three more years out of the premise of a wandering errant knight
in space and time, fighting evil and protecting the good. Six years was a good
run for such a show. But different wisdom prevailed, and the show’s production
team confirmed that if Things Had To Change, things would change. If any show could meet that mandate, it was Doctor
Who.
When it came back in
January 1970, “All Change!” was the order of the day. Radio comedian and film
actor Jon Pertwee was the new Doctor – and a bigger contrast with Troughton
would be hard to imagine – Troughton’s short, dark “clown” was replaced by a
tall, lean man with a nose you could break rocks with and a shock of white-blond
hair. What’s more, to the handful of
people in Britain who could afford a colour TV, Doctor Who was now available to
view in all the colours of the rainbow. But by far the biggest change was in
the format. The Tardis, the Narnian wardrobe to all of time and space, was to
be grounded, and the Doctor, the ultimate rebel against authority, was to be
stuck on Earth in the 70s (or 80s, depending on the dating protocol – but
really so very much the 70s), as the
scientific advisor to a special military unit. It was as risky a shift in the
show’s paradigm as first introducing regeneration had been, and like that move,
it could have killed the show stone dead in a quest to re-invent Doctor Who as
an action-spy thriller along the lines of The Avengers or Danger Man. The
unique selling point that would set the show apart from those rivals though
were the aliens, so when the new Doctor was launched, there was its difference,
right in the title: Spearhead FROM SPACE.
Spearhead is a wonderful
oddity – recorded entirely on film, it looks like little else in the show’s
history, including the episodes that follow it and build on its premise. And
with so many debut elements to cram in, it’s a wonder it works at all, let
alone as well as it does. New Doctor, new premise, new companion, new
production ethos – and that’s before we even come to the story, and the
invention of one of Robert Holmes’ finest, creepiest ideas. It’s 1970, the
beginning of the march towards disposable culture, and that means plastic. How
deliciously sick do you have to be to tap into that relatively new feature of
everyday life and make it the stuff of nightmares for forty years and counting?
Robert Holmes genius-sick,
that’s how sick. The Autons are, in terms of the fundamental philosophy behind
their creation and the reason they scare the audience, right up there with the
Daleks and the Cybermen. The Daleks are what you get if you teach
eight-year-olds to hate and then lock them in the dark and give them a ray gun.
The Cybermen are what you get if you’re so scared of dying you forget how to
live. The Autons are what you get if you turn your society over to uniformity of
aspiration in the service of commerce. They are the shop dummies from hell, and
they’re coming to get you. As a way of responding to those in the BBC who
thought Doctor Who couldn’t adapt to the new world, the Autons were also a
great big plastic one-fingered salute.
The story shows Jon
Pertwee’s new Doctor off to great advantage – Patrick Troughton would have
phenagled and gibbered his way out of hospital; Jon Pertwee has a wheelchair
chase! While unconscious for much of the first episode, he’s already the focus
of one strand of the story, while the shenanigans at the plastics factory ably deliver
the creeps, without shooting the bolt of their scares too soon. In that regard,
Spearhead is a debut of two halves, the first two episodes setting up the
mystery of the Doctor and something
creepy and plastic – we see an active Auton first in the forest, and it’s so
incongruous there, with its empty eyes, that it takes the breath away, and when
it begins to move through the woods, it’s unnervingly flexible and human.
Somehow, when something looks like a shop window dummy, you expect it to have
jerky movements, but it feels like this thing could hunt you down on foot and
kill you without a thought. Really though, the bulk of the plastic menace for
the first two episodes is delivered by the imperious and very alien Channing,
who acts (to dip into another fandom for a second) as Locutus of the Nestene,
speaking about humanity dispassionately as something to be destroyed (‘Total
destruction’) like thousands of other species before it.
When the Doctor recovers
from his regeneration though and starts firing on all cylinders, so does the
story – the idea at the end of episode two that the thing we saw hunting in the
woods has been manufactured on a
production line, as it delicately ballet-hops its way off the line and behind the
hapless Ransome is massively creepy. The notion of a leading general being
replaced by a plastic ‘android’ is a simple and effective gateway into the
central idea: so many people in politics, in the army, in business, do things
that seem antithetical to the general good…perhaps it’s deliberate. Perhaps
they’re not fully human at all. Perhaps they’ve been replaced. It’s a solid
bodysnatching chiller, and the end of episode three, when General Scoby comes
face to face with his duplicate on his own doorstep, is a surreal framing of
the idea.
Episode four picks up the
pace significantly, with that scene –
the one that everybody remembers. Shop window dummies jerking and spasming to
life, breaking free of their displays, and with 70s hair and clothing, gunning down
shoppers in the street. The odd thing about that scene is not that it scares
the bejesus out of a nation of children, but that in storytelling terms it’s
utterly random. Why should the Autons
announce their presence by going on a killing spree of shoppers? What do they gain by it? Absolutely nothing, which
seems to suggest it’s there for its allegorical value - the shoppers pay the
price of the consumer culture that would let the Autons destroy the whole of
humanity. They die for us, as surrogates of our casual consumption and waste of
the world’s resources (perversely, we’re more biodegradable than the Autons
are), and our addiction to commerce.
Or maybe, just possibly,
Robert Holmes really hated going
shopping on a Saturday afternoon.
That scene is possibly the
newest thing about New Who in 1970. The seemingly random slaughter of
innocents, the horror of the everyday made frightening, and the fact that when
it happens, the Doctor’s nowhere to be seen, not just minutes away from
stopping them. That’s why it’s remained burned into the memory of those who
watched it over the decades since. If the challenge for Doctor Who in 1970 was
to change or die, to find a reason to exist in the TV schedules of the nation,
Robert Holmes, the shop dummy scene and Spearhead From Space gave it its new
mission statement: We scare the pants off children. We bring the horrors of
time and space to a high street near you, so you are now in danger. That’s what
we do now, and you will love us for it.
More than forty years on,
the mission statement of Spearhead From Space is still in effect. The show is
still scaring us with the ordinary given a lethal twist – statues, shadows,
dolls, wifi – and children of all ages are still running with the Doctor to
keep them safe.
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