Doctor Who and the Disruptive Coup

Charles RB

The Armageddon Factor is the last of the “lost stories” despite never being wiped. In an era of Doctor Who defined by calamity and mess, it was a plot worthy of Adams that the second episode of the series’ grand finale was scheduled for the same day as a coup. After a decade of fantasising [1] by a growing club of mid-level spies and officers, aging press magnates, a few businessmen, and CIA men who were easily rooked, the Day of the Jackboot broke out over the seemingly unending Winter of Discontent on January 27th. The fact we call it the Day of the Jackboot is symbolic of how much of a shambles it was – the name comes from the Sunday Mail, a Scottish paper, as the plotters shut down the national papers but forgot about Scotland’s presses.

Part 2 did not air after ‘Mounties’ troops entered Television Centre but it could have easily run the following week. Instead the plot was seen as “too close to real events” by the Controller of BBC One and a hurried repeat of Hartnell’s 1,000,000 BC was rushed into the slot.

In the cold light of the modern day, this claim looks ludicrous. The Armageddon Factor is a hackneyed tale of clear villains with names like The Shadow, a third factor manipulating two superpowers, and a lot of corridors. There is nothing like ‘Day of the Jackboot’ (as the Sunday Mail’s famous headline called it) going on: no soldiers, no paranoid spies, no press shutdown, and no distasteful involvement by a royal figure. However, at the time a story about a war-torn planet – one that would end with the villain disguised as a friendly aristocrat – must’ve been abnormally close to the bone.

Losing the story the entire Key to Time event had led up to was the final straw for the tired, embattled Graham Williams. He decided to leave the show and tapped production unit manager John Nathan-Turner to take over. The joy of promotion would swiftly leave Nathan-Turner when he saw his brief: he and the new script editor Douglas Adams would need to find a new wrap-up for the Key to Time, manage a change in companion with Mary Tamm unwilling to return for the regeneration [2], and make episodes that wouldn’t offend a politically skittish country and on a much lower budget, as the coup had knocked the country into recession. The revelation of CIA involvement was one more headache as it threatened to end the BBC’s deals with American distributors and thus a source of potential revenue for Doctor Who.

While Callaghan purged society of the plotters, negotiated with Carter, and fought his way to a Lib-Lab election victory, he could at least be glad he wasn’t doing Doctor Who as well.

Adams and Nathan-Turner fell upon Anthony Fisher’s A Gamble With Time – originally just a sendup of the Bulldog Drummond stories – and steadily beat this story, first with Fisher’s involvement and then without, to get the story to work as a capper to the Key to Time. Now the high-stakes games of 1920s Monte Carlo were for the last segment, with agents of the Guardian among the mobsters, and the Doctor would be attacked on arrival so Romana could regenerate. In another time and under someone like Holmes, it could have been a tense thriller. Instead, the story is a known Curate’s Egg. A shocking opening scene led into a broadly comedic story, with Fisher’s original plans made more farcical by Adams’ sensibilities. The story’s stakes also do not come across on cheap sets and with a low-level plot, and especially after the ‘lost’ Factor promised vast galactic warfare.

Nathan-Turner tried to reign in the comedy but his decision to cast Paul Barber as the detective “Pug” Farquharson, due to his work in the crime drama Gangsters, would inadvertently backfire. During the 80s and 90s, Barber’s “Pug” would be seen as a trailblazer, the first black companion on the show and a rare black male lead in science fiction at all. In 1979, putting a Liverpudlian black man as the thuggish strongman – one who’d been written to be lampooned – next to the bohemian Baker and upper-class Ward made it look like his race and accent was part of the joke. This was made worse by Barber being offered a year on the show as the secondary companion, in a deliberate attempt by Nathan-Turner to try and reduce Baker’s role and power with it; now the accusations of racism would linger.

The Armageddon Factor loomed over A Gamble With Time. Fans would be sure that the story they didn’t see was grander than the compromise they got. The eventual video release in 1986 would correct many assumptions but the 1979 novelisation – the first such novelisation of a serial that hadn’t been broadcast – had been out first. Target Books had rushed it out to be in the shops the same week that Part 3 of Gamble was broadcast. Terrence Dicks made a cheap show into a grand epic and was able to take great liberties with the plot. This version of the story, stripped of budget woes and lovingly altered, was compared to the messy, cheap, harried show, and fans did not like the comparison.

The rest of the series – Nightmare of Eden, Destiny of the Daleks, The Vampire Mutations [3], and Shada – did not have the industrial problems that had blighted the rest of the decade, as the unions stayed quiet in support of Labour and against “Burma” (as the elites would now be nicknamed). The budgets didn’t get hit by the same inflation cycle. They did, however, start out low and a lot of the scripts had to be altered as a result. A notable crisis was Destiny, initially planned around the character of Davros, had to drop the villain to save money on casting and costumes, and so Terry Nation, saving time, simply changed the character into the now-iconic golden Dalek Supreme, voiced by Terry Malloy.

Mutations had an entirely different issue: the plot had evil lords that fed on the people. With the future of the monarchy in jeopardy after Mountbatten’s actions and a referendum on the way about retaining it at all – one of Labour’s election pledges, which left the Tories divided on whether to support or oppose – this was seen as far too political. The “Three Who Rule” were abruptly rewritten by Dicks to be Victorian fiction villains, which Adams ran with by contrasting the tropes of that genre with the poor, backwards 18th century sticks the vampires were actually in. While this is now one of the most popular stories of the 1970s, at the time it was decried as taking a potentially serious story and making it into pantomime, unlike the great lost Armageddon Factor.

Further conflict came from Lalla Ward’s casting – while she and Tom Baker had grown fond of each other when filming Factor, their class differences were a whole herd of elephants in the room after the Day of the Jackboot. [4] Both of them had been appalled by the coup but Ward was still the daughter of a viscount, and there were dark suggestions about what the various peers had been involved in. As her father had been taken prisoner by the Axis, Ward was understandably hostile to any suggestion that her family would have ever bowed a knee. Baker, already morose about the Day of the Jackboot, grew more so at the harsh end of his nascent relationship.

As the reduced show limped to an end, Baker abruptly decided to leave the show. This happened without any time to write a proper regeneration. A hurried rewrite of Shada turned the villain Skara into a returning Master (now played by Geoffrey Beevers) and had him and the Doctor die together. The plans to write out “Pug” had to be quickly scrapped with the hope that Barber would be available next year. Nathan-Turner was very much at the end of his tether, and had to call in a raft of favours to keep Douglas Adams from resigning as well.

Instead, Nathan-Turner decided he’d resign after his second year and finally move to pastures new.

There is a fitting last comment on this era: Callaghan paid a visit to Television Centre for what was officially a tour and unofficially a PR boost, and he came across Shada being filmed. A photo was taken of him, Nathan-Turner, and Baker, all of them smiling, all of them looking tired, all of them on their way out.



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[1] Our POD is the infamous meeting where Cecil King got some people together in 1968 and said in the inevitable event of a national collapse, Mountbatten should take over. Here, nobody loudly points out this is both stupid and treasonous, so the idea festers until the Winter of Discontent.

[2] She didn't return OTL and here, there's less reason to.

[3] OTL JN-T picked this very script from the pile in a desperate attempt to get something useable and ITTL's chaos, he's doing the same.

[4] Because the relationship ends sooner and in the context of the thwarted coup, this is seen as the reason - people don't know they were barely compatible and doomed to years of clashes. (Similarly, it's not known that Baker would already be tiring of the role)
 

skaven

This is very, very good. Is it inspired by Agent Lavender and the toings and froings in that thread?
 

Charles RB

Recasting the lead role after six years of Tom Baker could have been a long, arduous slog – especially with the pay being worse than comparably easier jobs and after a year of mixed reviews for the show. A young Peter Davison (already a big name) was approached but turned it down, feeling it could be detrimental to his career. Barber suggested several black actors try for the role but, according to rumour, the BBC leaned on John Nathan-Turner to turn them down for fear of the show becoming a ‘black’ programme.

It was by pure chance we got the “Two Bakers”. Colin Baker was simply at the same party John Nathan-Turner was, both on friendly terms with the same people. The jobbing actor, whose main role was as a heavy in The Brothers, struck Nathan-Turner as charismatic and funny, and he turned out to be a big fan of the show. While the BBC would have preferred a bigger name, the marketing department spun replacing Baker with Baker into tabloid gold with photographs of Colin in full Fourth Doctor costume, removing a cheap Tom Baker mask. [1]

Baker, Nathan-Turner, and Adams had a heavy discussion about the role. It was agreed they needed to make him distinctive from Tom – also the reason for the Fifth Doctor’s dapper 1960s suits – and they put across the idea of a more aloof, controlled character with a large vocabulary. The actor himself was keen on appearing suspicious and winning the audience’s trust, with Nathan-Turner seeing him akin to Austen’s Mr Darcy. [2] Adams suggested that this could make the character look like (in his words) “a tosser” and that they should avoid that by steering into it, making the Doctor someone who could prove wrong, be made the butt of a joke, and be ignored. While the producer was unsure, Baker ran with this and suggested it could work as a 1980s version of how Troughton could seem childish and silly before turning the screws.

All three agreed to stop using the sonic screwdriver. Nathan-Turner and Baker agreed to phase out K9, though Adams wanted to keep him. Lalla Ward loved the character and would start to convince Baker that he was good for the smaller kids, which just barely saved the character from being axed.

As the “Lib-Labs” finally got a grip on the sluggish economy and the unions, BBC budgets stabilised and the show could be promised 20 episodes with a relatively higher budget for each serial. Barber and Ward both agreed to stay for a second year, with intention to leave at the end. All new scripts would be made knowing the money was in place and where the cast members would be. They even knew who to replace “Pug” with – an Australian, in the hope of getting ABC to enter a coproduction deal.

ABC agreed to stump up the cash for Doctor Who to film a serial over there every year for the next three years, as long as the first serial was Colin Baker’s debut. Being able to promote the first new Doctor as appearing ‘here’ was too good a marketing deal to pass up. [3] Adams and Nathan-Turner duly marked the debut story down as an overseas tale, with Tegan Cadee [4] to appear there as a guest star and then reappear in the final story, while Duggan would depart in the fourth. Adams suggested regenerating Romana into a third incarnation to give the fifth story some bite – and because he’d become friends with Ward and felt like keeping the character around even after she’d gone. After the mess of last year, 1980 would use two experienced Who writers and reliable TV veteran Anthony Steven to smooth things through, with bright new writers Andrew Smith and sci-fi author Christopher Priest to freshen things up.

These best laid plans all came a cropper. One of those returning veterans was David Fisher and his script, Avalon (about a futuristic Butlins and alien mafias), was an idea Adams had first rejected but Nathan-Turner overruled him on. This caused tension in the crew and soon between Adams and Fisher as the two fought over the story. [5] Priest’s Sealed Orders proved unusable – the writer too inexperienced with TV and overestimating the budget’s abilities – and was held back a year. And Steven’s The Twin Dilemma, meant as the series opener, proved terrible and progress slow.

With Nathan-Turner’s permission, Adams dropped Steven and ran with a half-done pitch by new writer Stephen Gallagher. The Dream Time was, after all, based loosely on the aboriginal belief of the Dreamtime and a hall of mirrors giving access to parallel universes [6] could be moved to Sydney. Adams liked the surrealism and imagery inherent in the story and worked closely with Gallagher to flesh it out, while ABC staff sent back corrections on the Australian location scenes. Tegan would be an air hostess (to relocate her to Britain) who acquits herself when blundering into the Doctor’s adventures.

Terrence Dick’s Sontaran siege story Shakedown came next, followed by Andrew Smith’s The Marshmen, Avalon (the crime plots seen as an apt reason for “Pug” to depart here), and a story hurriedly commissioned by TV veteran Terence Dudley, The Day of Wrath, in which the alien Monarch abducts Tegan and others as specimens. The more straight-forward plot of Wrath became buffoonish under Adams, who liked the idea of the ship being divided into ‘human zoos’ for people from the past and asked for this to be taken to the point of ludicrousness, then for the humans to blunder into each other’s settings. Romana was shot at the cliffhanger for part 3, regenerating at the end of the series.

Reviews were more favourable this year – the TARDIS crew gelled well and Colin Baker quickly took over the role, the stories were more coherent, and The Dream Time’s location and cinematography were generally praised. Hardcore fans disliked the humour in the more serious stories but still praised more the series than they criticised. Shakedown in particular was popular and the departing John Nathan-Turner left suggestions to use more old monsters.

But while the show was a bigger hit in Australia than ever before, in the UK the ratings declined. Buck Rogers, a then-glossy and glamorous import, was running against them on ITV and Doctor Who just could not compete. Its sole rating spikes were thanks to the news, as BBC One news bulletins mentioned Callaghan’s resignation during The Marshmen and the invasion of the Falklands during The Day Of Wrath. [7] British fans from the time still hold Wrath in higher regard than those who saw it later or abroad: going from talk of a real invasion to people plotting an attack on Earth was an eerie experience for the younger viewers.

By this point, John Nathan-Turner had stepped down and moved on, and Douglas Adams – both as he was already there and the success of his Hitchhiker’s Guide – was the new executive producer.



[1] The JN-T era had some notably weird promo photos.

[2] These aims are OTL as well

[3] ABC turned down doing any deal OTL but the presence of a new Doctor is changing their minds.

[4] Tegan Jovanka was a mistake by Christopher Bismead, misreading ‘Tegan or Jovanka’ as a single name

[5] Adams said no and JN-T yes in OTL

[6] The early ideas that became Warrior’s Gate.

[7] It’s no coincidence that these two events are so close. Argentina OTL went in because they thought Britain, long disinterested in the islands, was signalling it wouldn’t care, and this is the same principle but taking advantage of a messy change of government.
 

Charles RB

Change was yet again on the way.

The first was a new Romana – in a deliberate reaction against the young, glamorous actresses who’d played her before, Douglas Adams cast elderly character actress Hilary Mason. The idea of turning Romana into a northern female Hartnell (in his more avuncular turns) struck Adams as too amusing not to do. With this new Romana, the pseudo-aloof Doctor (with plans to use more of Baker’s belligerence), and a robot dog, Tegan would be the ‘straight man’ by default.

On the production side, the show would return in August ‘81 as a weekday show rather than a Saturday one, airing Monday and Tuesdays in the hope of boosting ratings and to test the timeslot for other shows. [1] A new script editor had also been found in radio playwright Eric Saward, who had submitted Invasion of the Plague Men on spec. Adams was both impressed enough and desperate enough to give him the job on the basis of this intentionally lurid story that tackled Elizabethan social conditions. The story seemed to fit with Adams’ own sensibilities. [2]

With Plague Men and Christopher Priest’s revised Sealed Orders, Saward and Adams only needed three more scripts. Christopher Bailey’s The Kinda was accepted and Saward approached his radio colleague Barbara Clegg, who pitched a social satire in space with Enlightenment. The cast was established and only Priest needed to do any major rewrites; Romana’s recent regeneration meant altering a large chunk of his story, though it did provide a surface justification for why the Doctor was ordered to assassinate her. [3] Initial plans were that this would be the story filmed in Australia.

The Falklands War prompted a rethink. The intense naval battle against the Belgrano and the bloody landing at Goose Green gripped the nation, and the final victory famously saw church bells ringing in parts of England. [4] Barbara Castle went from ‘Nanny State’ in charge of a weak government to a ‘A New Boadicea’ , both headlines used by The Sun within the same week. A surge of patriotism – and in many cases, unpleasant jingoism – swept the country, to the ambivalent feelings of many liberal intellectuals like Adams. While it was a surge that benefitted a left-wing leader and which was helping make the Cold War look drastically absurd, with two ‘Western allies’ going to war and the left-wing President Carter [5] unable to back a left-wing Prime Minister against a dictatorship, it was still men dying for a colonial possession.

Adams phoned Saward and said he wanted a war story, one that would show that even if it was necessary it was still a bloody, horrible thing you did not want to experience. This meant the Daleks were unusable due to their Nazi connotations. Saward hit on the idea of the Cybermen and it was decided to move this to Australia instead of Sealed Orders, as a modern-day setting would give it immediacy. (It was also hoped the Australian military might donate some extras) To get it done on time, Eric Saward would co-write it under an alias and alongside Ian Marter, former Who actor turned Target novelist. It was felt Marter had the speed and knowledge to help get the script done quickly. The Bridgehead was completed in two weeks.

In the new timeslot, Doctor Who saw an immediate ratings jump. Critical response was far better than recent years as well: with production, budget, and cast finally locked down, the show was on its feet and being praised for, as The Times put it for Enlightenment, “inventive flights of whimsy far beyond the tin foil robots of before”. The comedy even pleased the notoriously humourless fanzines. Academics and fans of the future, and Australian and American critics of the time, noted the prevalence of strong female characters in this scripts written in Castle’s early term. Mason and Fielding both got as much meaty line as Baker did, The Bridgehead featured multiple female soldiers as supporting cast, and both Kinda and Enlightment would see memorable female villains in the Mara-possessed Tegan and Captain Wrack. [6]

In such a comedic, bright run, The Bridgehead stands out even more and gained the highest ratings of the series. In Australia, it would get highest ratings of its timeslot, following an aggressive marketing campaign – “the Cybermen are coming to your own neighbourhood” screamed the TV spots and posters, and a few appearances by actual Cybermen walking down residential streets in Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne.

The story itself was a fast-paced, grim thriller in which Australian UNIT soldiers, backed up by the Brigadier and Sergeant Benton, try to stop a Cyberman landing party converting people in the Outback towns. George Miller, in the middle of plotting his second Max Max film, was made director [7] and even under TV budget and camerawork he delivered a far more kinetic story than planned. The Doctor appeared almost overwhelmed by the pace and the carnage, and in two moments every fan remembered, K9 was taken offline in the episode 1 cliffhanger (mainly to stop him gunning down the Cybermen) and in the fourth episode, Benton died covering Tegan’s escape.

There were complaints to the BBC from parents and questions asked in the press if the show had gone too far, and Adams assured his bosses that this was a one-off story that wouldn’t be repeated. It had been the grim story he’d asked for and far more. When Invasion of the Plague Men came out the week after, fans were actively worrying if one of the companions might die next.

Ian Marter’s novelisation of The Bridgehead would be Target’s biggest seller and over in Doctor Who Monthly, the Cybermen strip Junkyard Demon became a reader’s favourite.




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[1] The times and reason for them are in line with OTL, but the real Series 19 started later to fit around Peter Davison’s other shows.

[2] This original version of The Visitation was seen as too ‘whimsical’ ala Adams’ run by JN-T.

[3] The plot of the infamously lost story

[4] Different people, different timings, and different international situations mean that while Britain still wins, it’s a harder and bloodier conflict. It’s not the epic war that our writer makes out but it’s seen as that by Britain, coming so soon after the failed coup and a change in government.

[5] CIA backing of the failed coup helped Carter inch his way back into government but Congress is against him. A weak position, and no relationship with Castle like Reagan & Thatcher had, means a weak response.

[6] Wrack would appear anyway but this is not known OTL.

[7] This would be a cynical "let's suck up to the Aussies by hiring a local bloke" move to keep ABC sweet - Miller is free at the time and is willing to do it (cos MONEY).
 
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Charles RB

Doctor Who was celebrating its 20th series in 1982 [1] and from a position of strength. The BBC ran a series of repeats, The Five Faces of Doctor Who, in the spring and summer to capitalise on it: An Unearthly Child, Spearhead From Space, The Three Doctors, The Mask of Mandragora, and The Dream Time. Fan outcry that Troughton wasn’t getting his own dedicated story saw The Krotons added to the end as a ‘bonus’. [2]

Behind the scenes, it was unclear how much of the show’s backstory they should plunder – especially as the 20th anniversary was next year. Adams and Saward both felt it was important not to look complacent and rely on old glories, and so the past nods would be restricted. One of those was Snakedance, a sequel to last year’s The Kinda, and another was a Dalek story that could bring back Terry Molley’s popular Gold Dalek. Barbara Clegg’s The Dalek Elite was picked as the vehicle; the original draft featured kids at war but, to avoid comparisons to The Bridgehead, she changed that into a Gestapo-style boarding school with the Gold Dalek as Headmaster. Other stories would try to be original and Saward even planned to bring in two new writers.

Christopher Bidmead brought in Castrovalva, a surreal story involving an Escher-esque closed environment which he planned to use to get across mathematical concepts. To the shock of many fans, Bidmead wanted to bring in more real science and less whimsy to the show – something Saward has sympathies with but, under Adams’ dictation, he was asked to have the script lightened. Bidmead got the bulk of what he wanted in but was unhappy with the inclusion of “student union gags”, as he put it, and decided against pitching again. Saward took the brunt of the man’s ire and this left tensions with Adams.

Peter Grimwade had already approached Adams in his script editor days [3] with the idea of a malevolent force possessing a rogue element among an alien race, and he brought a near-complete script of Xenaphin to his meeting with Saward. One major new element, inspired by an errand at Heathrow, was Concorde. This would not just ground the Earthbound parts of the story in the real world, it meant good PR for the show.

A minor disaster struck, however, when Janet Fielding said she planned to leave the show. The success of The Bridgehead in Australia had resulted in offers of work back home and she could not pass it up for a BBC salary. Snakedance was rapidly pushed to the front of the series and edited to give Tegan a reason to want out, and Xenaphin edited to open with the Doctor returning her to Earth. To Grimwade’s dismay, this meant substantial edits to his completed script: all of Tegan’s lines had to be scrubbed or moved, and the Doctor’s scenes had to be altered to sell that he was morose about leaving his companion.

The BBC had ‘suggested’ to Adams that a young girl ‘for the dads’ would make for a good companion and so Adams, in what Clegg would call “an evil mood”, asked her to make one of Elite’s young girl characters (all sexless and underage) into the new companion. Thus the letter of the law was followed. In a rewrite, Prefect Stemp – originally meant to die – was instead redeemed and rebelled against the Gold Dalek. A relatively unknown Rita Ghose [4], still only a minor stage actor, had landed the role when it was still meant as a minor one-off and was gobsmacked to find herself gifted a lead role so early. Doctor Who accidentally inherited its second non-white companion. Stemp's zealotry and 'blunt force' approach would become comedy fodder as situations would not operate the way she felt they should, and the Doctor and her would be acerbic sparring partners with Romana as a referee.

With a trilogy of tales around the changing of the companion, Castrovalva was placed fourth and required a third round of heavy redrafting. While dealing with a furious Bidmead, Saward also needed to find and commission a suitable story to end the run and preferably one set in Australia. (Plans were made to film The Dalek’s Elite at an Australian school if they absolutely had to) He remembered how much the fans had loved seeing Priest on the show and the prolific fantasy writer Tanith Lee had already written for Blakes 7, so he approached her first.

Lee took the job and delivered the hauntingly strange The Silver Metal Lover [5], set in a future Australian where robots have replaced human labour. The Doctor and his companions end up involved in a tragic Romeo and Juliet affair, hoping to save the doomed pairing of a robot and a young girl from the authorities. Saward and Adams made her change the ending to a happier one, changed the title to Silver Love, and got George Miller (who was interested in trying a less kinetic story) to direct again. The story completely lacked any monsters, the first tale to do so since The Highlanders.

A final change was placed when Hilary Mason asked to leave: the overseas filming was exhausting and she knew the BBC hoped to keep doing it. Romana duly left to covertly work for reform on the future Earth, taking K9 with her (Saward had been pushing for this and Lalla Ward was no longer around to fight the dog’s corner).

All of the behind-the-scenes drama was invisible to the audience. Once again, Doctor Who had a good year of good ratings and critical acclaim. Overseas ratings were staying good and on the rise in America, with talk of location filming over there. This confident, inventive show with its strong female core was part of the zeitgeist as Castle called a snap election and, midway through The Five Faces, became leader of a majority Labour government; North Sea oil money was starting to flow; and the economy gradually climbed due to a combination of oil, incentives for industry, and EEC membership. Everything was looking up in the early 80s. [6]

Now the show would just need to pull off its 20th anniversary.





[1] Previous butterflies mean this happens a year earlier

[2] Different stories are selected as this is no longer about building on Davison’s arrival – Troughton losing out for being black and white, when he’s going to be appearing in Three anyway.

[3] This happened OTL

[4] Rita Wolf OTL but with this sudden success, she doesn’t use the Anglicised stage name.

[5] This was published in 1981 OTL but butterflies have delayed it enough that she decides to recycle it.

[6] Times are quite good ITTL but how good is being overstated due to popular perception, then and now: after the last few years of pain and coups, the recovery looks twice as grand
 
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Charles RB

After being disrupted after the Day of the Jackboot, Doctor Who in America had began to grow again after the casting of Colin Baker. The success of the ABC co-productions had made both the BBC Enterprises and Douglas Adams (who’d enjoyed a trip to a Who convention in Chicago) wonder if this could be done with America as well, and distributor Lionheart – seeing a big payday in the offing – was willing to stump up the money. [1] New Orleans was chosen as the location.

To boost their chances, Adams suggested they should have an American companion for the rest of the year. Eric Saward was leery but won over when Adams idly suggested they could just kill the character off later. Killing Benton had driven the fans wild and, not counting Romana’s regeneration, no companion had been truly killed since The Dalek’s Master Plan, a story the fans lionised. Now they just needed a companion. Plans for a grizzled American cop were dropped for being too similar to “Pug” Farquharson and an alien-chasing CIA man would clash with the UNIT setup. In the end, they chose to lampoon the popular soap Dallas and make Richie MacDuff the arrogant playboy scion of an oil dynasty.

Off the back of this push, Adams was able to wheedle the BBC into upgrading the camera equipment Doctor Who used. [2] George Miller’s directing was not replicable by most studio directors but they needed to be the best they could to not look as bad in comparison.

The two most important stories for 1983 would be this American episode and the 20th anniversary story – Adams got permission for this to be an special that could be split into three episodes for the overseas markets, and ABC decided to co-fund it [3] in exchange for getting the show early. It was agreed the rules would be bent so Saward and Adams, both wanting to have a go at writing again [4], could do the anniversary and Saward decided to approach Robert Holmes to return for the American story. Holmes accepted but saw no point in using New Orleans as a location; desperate for a motive for his aliens, he decided the evil Kraalons (later Androgums) would be a race of gourmands who’d come to the culinary city. Plans were made for a liberal sprinkling of US/UK culture shock jokes and he decided to skewer MacDuff as much as possible throughout The Androgum Invasion.

Most of the redrafting Holmes would need to do would be based on the demands of the location and otherwise, the black comedy of cannibal aliens went untouched. (Part 3 would even have MacDuff in hysterics when he realised the entire reason the Androgums were here was solely to eat and there was no grander scheme)

The Five Doctors, on the other hand, would be getting rewrites even during filming.

Deciding on the story had been simple: Douglas Adams had an idea for an alien who had splintered himself across time, and multiple Doctors would be needed to stop each facet of Jagaroth from erasing all life from Earth. Saward successfully lobbied for the Cybermen to be used as Jagaroth’s heavies and two separate time zones would use them, one of them using their look from The Tenth Planet. Deciding that went like a dream. What was a nightmare was ensuring every Doctor would be in it and then which companions. The first problem was Hartnell was dead and would need to be recast, the second was Tom Baker was unclear whether he would do it, and the third was finding the salary to bring Pertwee back. On top of that, Frazer Hines was unable to get off Emmerdale and that knocked out the most iconic companion for the Second Doctor, and Deborah Watling had to drop out for The David Allen Show. Adams was never a particularly fast writer and this only added to the stress for Saward, who was having to pick up the slack as well as having to script edit.

The two men fell out badly by the fourth rewrite. Adams had already planned to move on, ready to make his Dirk Gently series, but the feud had soured his planned exit and led to growing tension in the production of every other story. American entertainer, comedian and jobbing actor Mac McDonald had landed the job of Richie MacDuff on the strength of his Comedy Store gigs [5] and came in “to the aftermath of a really bad argument where both sides want to talk through you”.

The planned scripts for 1983 included The First Sontarans by Andrew Smith, Elizabethan horror Point Of Entry by Barbara Clegg, Song of the Space Whale by Pat Mills, and “Untitled Dalek Story” to round out the anniversary. Saward had to let most of the writers get on with their work, trusting these three writers, two with a track record and one with a long career writing comics, could be left alone. The Dalek story would be harder. Saward chose a new writer, the Irishman Johnny Byrne, who had been making enthusiastic pitches and asked him what he’d do with the Daleks. The pitch was steeped in Cold War conflict, and the concern that the men in charge of the weapons may not be reliable, with the Daleks attempting to compromise our silos. He also suggested that instead of the USSR, the opposing block was the Silurians – this suggestion won him the gig. [6]

Killing MacDuff in the Dalek story would be too much like The Bridgehead, so Saward asked Mills to do the deed. He would soon regret that.

After all the old Doctors were finally locked in [7], The Five Doctors selected the Brigadier, Sarah Jane Smith, and Leela [8] and K9 as the companions for the Second, Third, and Fourth respectively (Sarah Jane was moved to the Third to avoid weighting the companions towards the Dicks/Letts era). An older Susan would be alongside the Fifth Doctor and, in a bit of Adams whimsy, the Fifth Doctor’s companions would be put alongside the First Doctor and the Master as students. Rick Myall was cast as the young First Doctor as another joke at the audience’s expectations (which Saward disagreed with) and Don Warrington was cast as “Mister Seta”, in the hope of catching the audience off guard. From comments by fan consultant Ian Levine, the First Doctor scenes were during the French Revolution – his favourite point in history, according to The Reign of Terror – while the Fourth would meet Da Vinci, the Third met Sarah Jane investigating activity in modern Hong Kong (filmed in several Chinatown’s and the City), the Second Doctor during the Blitz, and the Fifth in 22nd century Britain.

With The Five Doctors put to bed and Pawns of the Daleks reaching its final draft (with a tired Fifth Doctor realising the Daleks have begun their plague bombardment and invasion anyway), Saward could look over the other scripts. To his outrage, he found Pat Mills had killed MacDuff in a humorous scene. Mills loathed the idea of an elite heir and oil baron in the show and had spent much of the script throwing barbed jokes at him before killing him off, which completely went against what Saward had been hoping for. After a ferocious row, Mills rewrote the story. This didn’t satisfy and to Mills’ own outrage, Saward did the third draft himself. [9] The two men would never have a good word to say about each other and Mills would forever insult the way TV worked.

All the blood, sweat, and tears finally resulted in broadcast episodes. Once again, it was popular with critics, fans, and general audiences, and the abrupt murder of MacDuff in Space Whale had the desired effect. The Five Doctors got the highest ratings and a huge amount of publicity. An exhibition was held at Longleat House as a tie-in and became infamous among fans for the unexpectedly large crowds and lines. Myall made an unannounced appearance at Longleat dressed in a mashup of the First Doctor and Rick from The Young Ones.

While Douglas Adams could bow out on a high in the UK and the Antipodean markets, the American expansion had failed. While The Androgum Invasion got a ratings boost, it had not lasted – mainstream American audiences and critics found the show too cheap looking and silly. The existing fans were also divided between those who loved the episode and those who’d expected a more serious story from the show’s first appearance in the States, not a black comedy romp. Richie MacDuff was also divisive, fans either liking the satire on Dallas or being irritated that the first American companion was a ‘joke’.

(Barely noticed at the time was a growing number of African-American fans of the show. They’d first been attracted by “Pug”; now the main companion was a woman of colour and the white rich man was a goof, the New Orleans filming used a number of local black actors, both Mills and Byrne’s future stories showed a multi-ethnic future [10], and the Master was established as once having been a suave black man. This also meant the Doctor could become black as well, a powerful idea.)

The worst outcome was that Lionheart had overcommitted to The Androgum Invasion for a small return. [11] The distributor began to collapse, forcing BBC Enterprises to look elsewhere. To the BBC, this was a sign that the show could never be more than a cult hit in the United States and it was best to focus their attention on other markets. Adams would later say he felt he was lucky not to be blamed for the debacle and that Lionheart got the umbrage instead; he departed the show and went straight into the primetime hit Dirk Gently.



--


[1] Lionheart OTL were not able to find the cash and Enterprises was not interested in helping, both things changed by the success of the ABC deals.

[2] OTL Doctor Who used outdated camera equipment and setups for years because the BBC didn’t care to change them

[3] Done OTL as well

[4] Working as executive producer has used up Adams’ spare time and the show has not been chaotic enough to require Saward to pinch hit.

[5] Most known OTL for being Captain Hollister on Red Dwarf, he was working in London with alternative comedians in the early 80s.

[6] With OTL’s Warriors of the Deep, it was Byrne who suggested doing the Silurians and Sea Devils.

[7] Leaving earlier and under a darker cloud means Tom Baker is more inclined to return: the distance is greater and he wants to have some fun with the role again.

[8] Available at the time but not contacted

[9] Pat Mills is famously very left wing and famously protective of his scripts, so having at a JR Ewing type and getting angry at it being rewritten seem in character. In OTL, he was annoyed working with Saward.

[10] This is due to the different political environment in Britain at the time, with a more bolshy left wing. We are, of course, talking relatively here – just a handful of black and Asian people, which is still enough to stand out at the time.

[11] Just because they found the cash doesn’t meant they should have!
 

Charles RB

Replacing Douglas Adams was going to be a hard job and rather than scramble for another visionary, the BBC decided to bring in a more solid company man – the show was felt to just need a steady hand to continue as it was. It was also felt that a company man would be more amenable to suggestions from on-high. Clive Doig [1] was among several men approached to be producer and, having worked on the show in the 1960s, agreed to do it. By this point he had created and produced numerous popular children’s shows and educational shows, and was producing Eureka! when he was headhunted.

Colin Baker was starting his fifth year in the role and felt it was time to move on now he had the same length as Pertwee and Tom Baker. [2] Eric Saward was also looking to move on to new shows, hoping to capitalise off the success of the ‘Baker the Second’ run. The appointment of Doig provided the reason to jump ship. Doig would prove to be a cordial boss to both men but was already thinking of 1985, leaving Saward to have free reign while he sought out replacements.

Following the ratings success of the Australian and American shoots, both domestically and for the Antipodean market, Doig spoke to BBC Enterprises about which market they should go for next. They requested the Asian market – Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong – which the show was pushing for after the success in Australia. Saward was duly asked to commission a story set in Singapore, preferably bringing in an iconic foe, and they decided on a companion from the area, more along Tegan’s lines than McDuff’s.

After the success of the foreign-filmed The Dream Time, Steve Gallagher was tapped for ‘Untitled Singapore’ and requested he include a new companion: an ‘Oriental Artful Dodger’, who could play off the stiffer Stemp. Gallagher had become interested in the stigma of diseases like leprosy and decided to have an alien plague ship land in Singapore, where the Doctor would have to prove the “Lazar disease” was curable and drastic measures were not needed. The Daleks would be the reason the ship had crashed, tying in to last year’s Pawns of the Daleks which had re-established their use of viral warfare. To introduce the new companion, a criminal gang would try to exploit the crash – to save exposition time, it would be allied to the Triad gang seen briefly in The Five Doctors.

The role of Chang Lee was originally meant for a younger man but David Yip, recently the lead in The Chinese Detective, heard the role was going around and pushed for it [3]. To compensate for his age, he became less of a Dodger and more of a Fagin with bits of Del Boy, someone stuck in the lower end of the underworld and wanting out. Gallagher also brought back some of the Australian UNIT characters from The Bridgehead at Saward’s request and paired them with newer Malaysian and Japanese ones, creating a multinational UNIT team.

Subsequent stories would include Eric Pringle’s The War For Little Hodcombe, where Civil War re-enactments become deadly real; Philip Martin’s Vengeance on Varos, satirising media violence; and Matthew Jacobs’ [4] ghost story Planet of the Dead, in which a mad future scientist attempts to raise the dead [5]. The regeneration would be done by Robert Holmes in The Caves of Androzani, a tight thriller in which the Doctor has to save his companions from death by poisoning. As fans would note, as soon as Saward as given free reign, the show became a lot harder, darker, and more violent. This is remembered as playing well with the upcoming regeneration, as the Fifth Doctor is stalked by death.

While scripts were being written, Rita Ghose first decided to leave the show and then had to leave earlier than planned after landing a role in The Chain [6]. Gallagher was told to write her out in the opening story. The plans for a replacement girl had to be accelerated: the plan was for a wealthy blonde ‘gentlewoman’ scientist named Dr Laird, to give the Doctor someone to mentally spar with and due to Doig’s educational show background. The result was English actress Pamela Salem dying her hair and making a brief, aborted attempt at a Scottish accent. The War For Little Hodcombe was moved up to allow Laird (given the first name Peri, short for Perpugilliam) [7] to be introduced, visiting her uncle.

With Pringle’s story only able to fill three scripts worth [8], Saward took a gamble and asked Tanith Lee back for a one-episode story, preferably set in a single location. Lee’s The Dark Of The Woods spun off the Red Riding Hood story and had a Germanic maid caught in the side-lines of one of the Doctor’s adventures, with the Doctor as the woodsman and an unnamed monster playing the wolf.

A Plague on Singapore was filmed first and went with few issues. All of the British shows, however, faced disruption from a series of industrial strikes in the spring and summer – various scenes had to be cut or altered on the fly, and two days of filming were lost to an electrician strike. At the time this was annoying but not seen as abnormal. Occasional strikes and disputes had been happening during the 1980s but nothing akin to the 1970s. [9] It was only later this started to be treated as a harbinger.

The show aired in the autumn and the Asian overseas markets would duly see a rise – in a real surprise, the attention to the show led to the discovery of a long-lost Troughton story, Tomb of the Cybermen, which was rapidly scheduled to run after the Baker episodes finished. A Plague on Singapore had some critical knocks for relying too much on recurring characters and there were concerns about the violence, but in general the show was doing fine and Saward could bow out with pride.

Then October saw the infamous miner’s strike, sparked by a dispute about coal board reforms within the Labour Party. [10] The left wing under Michael Foot and Tony Benn were staunchly opposed to closing some of the underperforming pits and revamping others, despite the welfare packages arranged for the displaced miners. Arthur Scargill took note of this and argued the unions round to a mass strike, believing that with the ‘Foot Column’s’ support a sufficient shock would force Castle to back down and negotiate. He had greatly miscalculated: Castle was furious with her backbench and several ministers trying to, in her view, force her to be uneconomical and risk greater disruption to the mines later, and was already bogged down in negotiations in Northern Irish and South Africa. [11] The shock hardened her heart.

The three weeks of the strike hit the ratings for Little Hodcombe and the opening of Varos, and they did not fully recover. Audiences were unwilling to come back midway through a story and not a story as blackly comic and gruesome as Varos. Just like Castle won her battle but was left shaken politically, Doig saw his safe hit show wobble and leave him feeling personally responsible (though the BBC did not yet blame him). Still, he and the incoming script editor Barbara Clegg had faith their new Doctor would boost ratings again.

And in Part 4 of Androzani, Colin Baker duly regenerated into Lenny Henry.


--


[1] in OTL, when he heard a rumour Nathan-Turner was leaving, he put himself forward as a replacement



[2] Colin once said he hoped to be around as long or longer than Tom, and admitted later he just hoped to be on it a long time.



[3] Roles are limited for Chinese actors at the time. The higher status of the show and two prominent non-white companions makes Who a place to go.



[4] 1984 was the year his first writing credits came out and it’s not impossible he might have pitched to Doctor Who without many butterflies.



[5] The Master’s plan in Jacobs’ early TV movie drafts.



[6] OTL she was also in Majdha the same year. ITTL, she’s not going to be going for two while on the TV as well.



[7] Saward co-created Peri with JN-T, who was originally meant as a wealthy blonde. With Saward mostly on his own, elements here combine with the Dr Laird he would create for a OTL Dalek story



[8] Having to introduce a companion fills one more ep than OTL



[9] ‘Started again’ as strikes briefly ceased after the coup, with unions backing the Labour governments. Now there’s been time and there’s prosperity, so there’s cause to agitate again – not at the level of OTL though.



[10] The problems with coal are not butterflied away.



[11] Without Thatcher and Reagan, the international situation is different and South Africa doesn’t have backing.
 

fasquardon

I like the idea of Tanith Lee writing Doctor Who scripts.

Kinda sounds like the show will be facing hard times in the late 80s. Has there been an alternate Doctor timeline that has avoided that downturn yet?

fasquardon
 

The Wooksta!

Really enjoying this TL, largely because it seems like a turn left scenario and written by someone with enough knowlege of the programme's history and the way programmes were made at the time it's set. Consequently, I can believe in it a lot more than the 99% of alternate Who threads on site.
Lenny Henry? Nice move. Although with Doig as the producer, I foresaw McCoy in the role.
 

Charles RB

DWM features and websites like A Brief History Of (Time) Travel are extremely handy for fact-checking how things got made and how they almost got made. It's a great help for us nerds! (It's depressingly not easy to find out much about young Anglo-Chinese actors, which is the OLT reason I went with Yip)

fasquardon said:
Kinda sounds like the show will be facing hard times in the late 80s. Has there been an alternate Doctor timeline that has avoided that downturn yet?
Click to expand...

If not, that'll tell you everything about how the BBC saw Doctor Who in the 1980s! (And it also makes for more interesting timelines if the show was some problems ;) )
 

Charles RB

Clive Doig wanted to freshen up the character of the Doctor and cast an actor of colour [1], getting the character away from being a middle class patrician figure. Originally he planned to still cast a middle aged or elderly actor, but in discussion with Barbara Clegg about the direction of the show – Doig was hoping for a less fantastical direction, more grounded in real science and history [2], and Clegg saw this as an avenue for dramatic writing over comedy or ‘ray gun’ spectacle – they agreed their type of show would need a charismatic, younger figure as a balance. It was Clegg who suggested Lenny Henry, who she’d seen in The Comic Strip, and who Doig felt younger viewers would remember fondly from hosting Tiswas.



Henry was not even thirty in 1984 when he was both offered this job and started The Lenny Henry Show – with the zeal of youth, he felt he could pull off both shows. To accommodate the sketch show, scheduled in the autumn same as Doctor Who, the BBC would move Doctor Who to the end of summer and The Lenny Henry Show would start in late October. [3] The workload would be harsh but doable. Henry pushed to have the Doctor wearing sharp modern clothes rather than anything vintage or ‘quirky’, and his Sixth Doctor would be a mercurial trickster figure to make use of his comic timing.



The first story would be Eric Saward’s Attack of the Cybermen, his intended swansong. Tomb of the Cybermen had been a popular repeat in 1984 – further repeats in the spring and early summer had followed, with The Dalek Invasion Of Earth, Day of the Daleks, Genesis of the Daleks, and The Seeds of Death (due to a lack of surviving Troughton Dalek story) – so Saward decided to make his story a semi-sequel. With the Cybermen losing the Cyber-Wars of the 26th century to the Glitter Gun, they holed up in their Telos tomb and with the help of the Brotherhood of Logicians’ agent Lytton, use time travel to go back to modern London and change the timeline. The Doctor would end up tricking the Cybermen into turning on their human allies and bringing down Telos from the inside. Under Doig’s edict, Saward had to include a lot of semi-realistic engineering and computer sciences, and to have an excuse to film abroad he was asked to make the city Amsterdam.



Other stories planned were Graham Williams’ The Nightmare Fair, with the Celestial Toymaker returning to make Blackpool itself into a trap; Brian Finch’s Leviathan, with a generation spaceship’s crew thinking they live in a Germanic Dark Ages under threat of Herne the Huntsman; Philip Martin’s Mission to Magnus, with Sil playing up a conflict on a gender-divided planet on behalf of the Ice Warriors; and Pip and Jane Baker’s War on the Future, about the Luddite movement being steered towards destroying Louis Stephenson’s work in the Industrial Revolution. [4]



In the end, The Nightmare Fair – a holdover from Saward’s time – had to be massively changed, first down to the fantastical parts being at odds with Doig’s plan and second because David Yip said he’d rather not appear alongside an Oriental stereotype. The rewrites and educational mandate turned the story into a plot by human villains, revealed to be a rogue KGB group, trying to lure in and capture the Doctor with an alien hoax. Mission was also earmarked to changes, as Clegg found the idea of the gender war and evil matriarchy quite irritating, and she also suggested (after phone calls from Ian Levine [5]) that the Ice Warriors be the good guys as in the Peladon stories. War on the Future went through many redrafts due to quality, with Clegg’s rewrites causing the Bakers to demand their names taken off (the Holmes penname “Robin Bland” rode again), and would end up as the first pure historical since The Highlanders. Playing with the new Doctor, Clegg also had a few references to both the Doctor and Chang’s race put in: it is a recurring mention in War on the Future, a multiracial Dark Ages makes it clear something is not quite right in Leviathan, and the KGB believe Chang is the Doctor and the Doctor the companion in The Nightmare Fair.



Production would go without any industrial disputes, but initial rehearsals were strained as Henry was younger than his co-stars and felt a need to prove himself. Tensions were worked out by the third story. Doig would have to step in during the Amsterdam filming to stop Henry and Yip visiting the red light district. [6]



The 1985 episodes have been remembered by fans and academics as well-crafted stories making good use of Henry and taking risks with the human-only stories & racial nods. At the time, however, the show saw a slight dip in its ratings instead of the expected return to 1983’s numbers. Not everyone in the audience was on board with a black Doctor, even if they would not explicitly say this or admit it to themselves (bar a sordid National Front campaign). Australian ratings would dip further, causing ABC to write to the BBC expressing “concerns about the direction of the show”.



This would probably have happened at any point in the 1980s. In the aftermath of Labour’s internal fights over the strikes, however, the Conservative Party under Kenny Clarke had come out swinging and one tactic being used, which Clark was perturbed by but allowed to continue [7], was to fan the flames of discontent over the “loony left” and their “social engineering”. Political correctness in the media joined gay rights, racial integration, and Northern Ireland as things Labour were allegedly forcing on Britain out of mad ideology, and their efforts to stop the AIDS epidemic [8] were criticised for “ignoring that sexual probity would solve much of it”, as was said in a Prime Minister’s Question debate. In this environment, a black Doctor with a Chinese male companion (Professor Laird was also brought up despite strong, clever women having been companions before) was ‘clearly’ a sign of political correctness and social engineering.



Even in the dedicated fandom, Lenny Henry’s era was becoming an issue. A number of fans fell out and fanzines split into feuding ones over arguments about Henry’s ‘suitability’, political correctness, and the direction of the show – the latter swiftly becoming a political fight even when a number of fans simply meant “it’s not got old monsters”. [9]



While Doig and Clegg had naively not seen this coming, Henry would admit after he left the show that he’d expected it. The BBC higher-ups had not seen this coming either and were now greatly concerned, with the fan wars and wider political arguments making the slight ratings dip look like a greater crisis than, in hindsight, it really was. Tensions were high.



Ironically, the Sixth Doctor achieved the holy grail that Lionheart had died for: it boosted American ratings. While fan wars hit the US as well, and a number of American fans stopped watching the show over ‘political correctness’, this was compensated by an increase in African-American audiences. With Chang and Laird, Asian-American and white female audiences had a slight rise as well, but black fandom was surging. Even non-nerds were watching, hearing about this suave black male hero who ran rings around Russian heavies and robot Stormtroopers (the lack of fantastical villains in this year had arguably helped here).



Even as Doig and Clegg were under fire, invitations were coming for a Detroit Doctor Who convention.





[1] OTL he said he’d have cast a woman but “Doctor as woman” was an idea Tom Baker started, and that hasn’t happened due to his different departure.

[2] His educational show background showing through

[3] The BBC did this for Davison and so would likely do it for Henry.

[4] What became Mark of the Rani started with the Luddites and the Master & Rani were requests by JN-T and Saward.

[5] He is noted to have just called up willy-nilly

[6] Davison and his co-stars did visit during Arc of Infinity’s filming. A different executive producer is going to put the kibosh on this.

[7] Not the first and last leader to allow some dirty tricks in the hope of winning.

[8] Different governments in the US and UK mean AIDS is being heavily fought in 1985. Due to the nature of the disease and the fact it's long been seen as a "gays only" disease still means the fight isn't as good as it should have been, but it's remembered as a grand state response by most (straight) people.

[9] How many fans just meant that and how many were subconsciously racist is unknown by the writer and a different writer may assume a different ratio. There would definitely be a lot of dedicated Who nerds who would lament this year for a lack of Chumblies even if a resurrected Hartnell had been cast.
 
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