GUEST POST Doctor Who: The Most Golden Era?

Peter Chambers weighs the Doctor Who era I remember from my childhood and does not find it wanting.

No Doctor Who fan is without an opinion on which era was a golden era. This is evident in that someone who professes otherwise is not a true Doctor Who fan. Douglas Adams would have understood. And gone for lunch.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, here in Liberal England, that our host remembers that the Pertwee era was the best, because he remembers Pertwee as "my Doctor". Is he right? Can we adduce evidence for this? Or are we condemned to find evidence to the contrary.

I will contend that he is half-right. Does this make me half-right? Are we both half-wrong? I shall explain.

I shall describe an era by the name of the Producer who was in charge at the time. Implicitly I shall claim that the Most Golden Era was within the Classic Period, but the Moffat-Capaldi era featured some material as good as any in the Classic Period. This will not be further discussed here, and is obviously true in the Douglas Adams sense. A list of Producers and the episodes they supervised is given on the Tardis Fandom site.

Our host’s theory that the Most Golden era starts with the first Pertwee episode equates to saying that the serial Spearhead From Space is the start. This is coincidentally the first serial I ever watched, the first colour serial, the first Pertwee episode, and the first Caroline John (Liz Shaw) episode. It is reviewed by a credible commentator who uses the name The Watcher on Who.

The Watcher asks if Spearhead is a 'soft reboot' of Doctor Who. The second Doctor wished to leave the show, and monochrome was to be replaced by colour, which meant that the cost of colour production had to be absorbed by the existing budget. 

The previous production team made some plans for this and used the last monochrome serial, The War Games, to set up the transition. This has been rendered in colour and is now on iPlayer. It is a nice contrast to Spearhead. The previous producer, Derrick Sherwin, stayed on for Spearhead, then handed over to Barry Letts.

Jon Pertwee exits the Tardis surrounded by smoke and collapses on the ground. It is the 1970s. Soon a scientist called Liz Shaw meets a Brigadier in a building in London. Soon they are up to their necks with Autons. A little like the events of 2005 in the Modern era. Start with a bang and work your way up from there.

Pertwee and Letts entertain us until the end of Season 11 – Planet of the Spiders. Then Philip Hinchcliffe becomes Producer and Tom Baker takes over as the Doctor. This starts what is known as the Hinchcliffe-Holmes years, which I believe is the second part of the Most Golden era. 

Robert Holmes was sometimes script editor, and sometimes writer. Many of your favourite episodes from that time might turn out to be written by him, possibly under a pseudonym. Spearhead was one. The Deadly Assassin was another. (Did he and Moffat ever go down the pub? Who knows...)

The Hinchcliffe-Holmes years continued until the end of Season 14, when the team met the most frightening monster to threaten Doctor Who. No, not Bonnie Langford, Mary Whitehouse.

Mrs Whitehouse spoke out for a moral majority of people in Britain that no one could quite remember the names of. The National Viewers and Listeners Association. They contended that some giant spiders and people running down corridors from monsters in cheap plastic costumes constituted a threat to the moral character of the nation. 

Some of the senior management of the BBC agreed with them. The show Had To Change! Hinchcliffe was shown the door. Gothic horror and drama was out. Light entertainment was in. Comedy. Escapism. The Most Golden era was over.

Robert Holmes provided a low key note of revenge in Season 15 – a transitional season – in The Sun Makers, when Louise Jameson is shown throwing Capitalist Landlords from the top of "kilometre high towers". Philip – thou art avenged!

So perhaps Jonathan is half-right and I am half-wrong. Or so it seems. Please avoid pressing Like or Subscribe as these functions are not provided here. Perhaps comment down below, and certainly watch a few favourites over on iPlayer. 

There is no paid sponsorship, but do have a pint of real ale in your local before it is closed down by a Private Equity firm. Or it burns down due to wild fires and climate change. You heard it first in The Green Death. Which also warned you about AI.

Peter Chambers is a Liberal Democrat member from Hampshire. The photo of Jon Pertwee is from New Zealand Archives.

GUEST POST Political lessons from science fiction

Peter Chambers turns to Dirk Gently and Battlestar Galactica to help him understand what is happening in the world.

The Electric Monk is a character introduced by Douglas Adams in his 1987 novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. The Monk is a machine intelligence in the service of an alien who visits Earth before life as we know it arose here. It probably looked like Julian Glover wearing an unconvincing rubber mask. It was about as diligent as a human.

The alien had a problem. Its ship – shamelessly copied from the Dr Who serial City of Death – was then about as reliable as SpaceX Starship. The normal rockets were not functioning. But the alien decided that a tech-hack might work. It would take off on Warp Drive. From a planetary surface. With no Tech Support.

Now before SF fans choke on their pints of Dow Bridge Centurion (4.0 per cent), pause for a bit. It was desperate and there was some oppression stuff and illiberal anti-democratic stuff needing doing out in the galaxy. It possibly had a PPE degree, and was used to trading off risk. Or at least closing the agenda. Naturally it could inspect the Warp Drive itself. But what a faff!

This is where the Electric Monk came in. The alien’s people had invented these MI when they wanted reassurance about things, without being diligent about things, or – by crikey – sweating the detail. So the alien asked the Monk to check the Warp Drive. The Monk assured the alien that all was well. Which is about as useful as a ferry safety check conducted by Chris Grayling and the SNP.

Chop chop. Switches on, batteries to power, warp to speed, retract landing legs. Boom.

End of alien. Normal life starts on Earth. Here we are. Then we invent GPT.

We now have something that will draft that conference speech for you. And check it. And do a schedule. And reassure you that the speech will be fine. Even accept that minor correction you made. Progress. Which is a term seldom heard in Market Harborough.

The hard six

The line "Sometimes you have to roll the hard six" occurs in episode 1.10 of the 2004 American SF series Battlestar Galactica, which is titled The Hand of God.

Edward James Olmos plays Commander Adama, Mary McDonnell plays President Laura Roslin, Katee Sackhoff plays Lieutenant Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, and Jamie Bamber tries to play Captain Lee "Apollo" Adama. The Executive Producer (lead writer) was Ron D. Moore. Ron used a team writing approach, and his writers bible included portraying the BSG as a USN carrier and the convention that those enemies of humanity, the Cylons, were monotheists. The Cylons know who created them, so surely the whole world was a creation?

The situation in 1.10 is desperate. The human fleet is very low on fuel. They either land on a planet or find some fuel or fuel ore. A scout locates a defended enemy base with a fuel refinery. The Commander and his pilots draft a plan to take the enemy base. It is high-risk, high-reward. There will be losses of irreplaceable pilots and machines, including civilian freighters. They take the plan to the political administration. President Roslin listens:

Adama: If you keep running from the school-yard bully he keeps on chasing you, but the moment you turn around and stop and you punch him really hard in a sensitive spot, he'll think twice about coming back again.

So it's either this, or run out of fuel and be annihilated. Sometimes you have to roll the hard six.

Roslin: Well the Freighters are yours. Good hunting.

You can watch this scene online.

The term "hard six" originates in the dice game craps. There it means a pair of threes on two dice. The probability is 1 in 36, which is 2.777 recurring percent. The payoff is high. It would have to be in an episode where a good outcome is moderate losses of irreplaceable people. The payoff would have to change the game.

There follows some well scripted action involving the "which hand is the ball in?" subterfuge with large explosions and dead AI. Which was the point of the episode in series one.

This is all easy to do in a scripted drama. It is routinely used by hacks. Ron D. Moore used it this once in series one.

In real life, with limited uncertain information, it may still have to happen. Contemporaries say that Operation Market Garden fell into that category. It was said to be worth the risk at the time. Later historians and writers endlessly second-guess that.

And what for the Lib Dems in 2019? There was a lack of solid information, high risk, possible high reward. But it did not work. Sometimes it does not. Was it right?