First broadcast: January 1970
Plot spoilers: Medium-to-high
”The New Policy”
”No eyes, no hair, just stares...”
”What?”
”Men. Creatures! Made in the factory!”
Some ’Who’ stories, there’s no real doubting which one they are. Take this. It’s the one where the dummies break out the shop windows and run amok. It’s one of the show’s most memorable sequences. Though I’ve never specifically heard it said, I would bet my frilly cuffs that this kicked things off and the script was then written around it.
But then why should that be so iconic? Why should one and a half minutes stand out so much from twenty-six years? (Particularly if you watch it back and realise they could only break that plate glass by having it happen off-screen.)
Perhaps the child psychologist Piaget will know. He conceived of the young mind as animist, progressing from a generalised sense that “all things are conscious”, even the most inanimate objects, through “things that can move are conscious” to what he called the mature view. (“Not everything that moves is necessarily conscious, just look at Ian Levine.”)
Interestingly, he saw the source of this as anxiety, a reaction to what otherwise seemed inexplicable. “It is when some phenomenon appears doubtful, strange and above all frightening that the child credits with a purpose.” (‘A Child’s Conception of the World’, 1929) And the child progresses through these stages not mechanically, like passing exams, but unevenly, shifting back and forth. So the old beliefs linger, overwritten but never truly banished.
Crucially, then, this is less a child’s anxiety than an anxiety rooted in childhood. (Surrealist art, not known for being aimed at an infant audience, often played on it.) So even in the adult that child sense can be re-induced. Which is crucial for a ‘family viewing’ show such as this. How do you appeal to both child and adult at the same time? You allow adults to reconnect to their child fears.
And this animism is all the stronger in the case of things in the image of a human. ’Who’ has already featured animate toys and dolls in ‘The Celestial Toymaker'. (If poorly applied, alas.) And it would frequently return to the trope, for example with the Weeping Angels. Further, Piaget insisted that animism isn’t anthropomorphism; in other words, things are granted sentience, but they continue to merely fulfil their function just as things do. So here the Autons don’t just oppose the shoppers they shoot, they behave in a contrary way to them. They are life and unlife at the same time.
So in a sense this sequence is classic because it's timeless, reversing development, taking adults back to a child perspective. But at the same time there is something very timely about it. And to get there we need to compare it to some near neighbours. The ’Twilight Zone’ episode ’The After Hours’ (1960) essentially takes mannequins as a variant of toys, and tells a Pinocchio tale. While the 1967 'Avengers' episode 'Never, Never Say Die’ focuses on duplicate copies. 'The Avengers' and 'Who' in particular were always exchanging writers and story ideas, so similarities are not so surprising. But instead let’s look at the differences. The 'Avengers' story becomes that spy-fi staple, the bodyswapping farce. Whereas here the focus is on duplication itself – on production.
This is of course not just the first story to feature Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, but the first of the new Earth-based adventures. (The conceit being he’d been sent there by the Time Lords, and told to think about what he'd done.) And if these new direction stories were to become more indebted to the classic BBC series 'Quatermass', they waste little time about it. The alien takeover narrative of 'Quatermass II' is unceremoniously filched in almost its entirety.
And then, more shamelessly still, they borrow to an almost equal degree from the show's own earlier 'Quatermass' homage – 'The War Machines’. To steal not only from another show but your own prior stealing from it – now that's chutzpah.
But the difference lies in the differences. In 'Quatermass II' alien takeover is signified by the familiar trope of a mark, echoing folk tales and witch trials. Here it is a plastic sheen, like spray-tan. One of the first encountered 'humanised Autons' (as opposed to those shock troop shop-front dummies) is a Secretary. And she sports the bland perfection of the Seventies 'dolly bird', recalling the then-familiar phrase “putting my face on”. In fact the closest parallel might be nothing from the list above but ’The Stepford Wives’ (1975, from a 1972 novel), which while more feminist had the same focus on getting replaced by a more perfect version of yourself. (And when you look at the silicon sheen on today’s celebrities, I’m not sure the Autons didn’t win after all. Rylan Clark? Clearly an Auton.)
Simon Reynolds writes that “plastic as a pejorative dated as far back as the Twenties...but it was really in the Sixties that people started using the word to mean fake and superficial.” (’Shock and Awe’,Faber & Faber) Think for example of the 1967 Mothers of Invention track ‘Plastic People’: “She paints her face with plastic goo/ And wrecks her hair with some shampoo”.
Which you might expect. Though their history is longer, in the Seventies plastics were becoming increasingly ubiquitous - to the point where they seemed almost new technology. Notably, the 'Doomwatch' episode 'The Plastic Eaters' hit the screen only a month later. Though, unsurprisingly, 'Who' is less concerned with maintaining scientific caution than using the stuff as a poetic symbol. Just like the Cybermen weren't really about your Auntie getting a replacement hip, the malevolent Autons aren't really about plastic bags replacing paper ones.
So plastic comes to play an almost transmutive role in the story. It becomes the bridge in the once-firm division between man and machine, between metal and flesh. One of the key settings is the Auto Plastics factory, where designer Ransome returns after a business trip. To find everything changed. His presence is now no longer required by his former business partner Hibbert, who has a new and somewhat sinister compatriot in Channing. In general, everyone seems to be behaving very strangely. 'Edge of Destruction’ levels of strangely. They don't shake hands when they do business. He's fobbed off by being told all the changes are down to “the new policy”.
But perhaps the key sequence is the one preceding this, set on the factory floor. It has, as you might expect, similarities to the factory sequence from 'War Machines'. But, again, the differences... That was clearly being undertaken in secret, happened upon by a tramp. Here they are not surreptitiously making robots by night but doll parts by day. After the 'poetic realism' of 'War Machines', this is 'real realism'. It could be documentary footage of a doll factory merely inserted into the episode. It might even be taken for filler.
…except the whole significance of the story is there in that scene. One of Marx's famous dictums was “it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour but the instruments of labour that employ the workman”. This scene is like that sentence turned into a feedback loop. The workers (all women here, despite Charlie's chosen phraseology) are making approximations of human parts with machines. While they themselves work robotically, to the machine's speed, just a replaceable set of parts themselves.
“We're turning over to automation,” explains Channing. “It means we can keep staff down to a minimum.” But of course the meaning of the phrase is not literal. Its not a story about mechanisation resulting in rising unemployment, something in its infancy at the time of transmission. It means a minimum of autonomy. In 'Quatermass II' the manual work still needed to be done by workers, who could scupper the invaders' plans simply by folding their arms. But times change...
It's like lifting up the lid and exposing the workings. You could look at that scene and wonder if, like the Secretary, the workers have been taken over yet. But when you do you come to realise it doesn't really matter. The Autons may win, or the Doctor may defeat them. But whichever way the workers are staying on that production line.
That shop-window-busting scene, where the immaculately attired dummies usurp the somewhat-shabbier-looking shoppers – yes it’s iconic, but it’s not altogether surprising. In a way it’s cachet lies in the fact it’s a moment whose time had come. As the counter culture came to be more subsumed into the mainstream, critiques of consumerism became a staple of the Seventies. But this story goes beyond that. It takes not just consumption but production into its lens. True it only does this incipiently, but its being there at all is noteworthy.
In this way the replacement of mind control (used in both 'Quatermass II' and 'War Machines') by... well... replacement is significant. Notably, Holmes' working title for the story was 'Facsimile'. In this new, plasticated world we all become replaceable. People aren't just done away with but vaporised, made to disappear. (Via the command “total destruction”.) Being surplus to production is analogous to non-existence.
In 'The War Machines', the plan's combination of takeover by mind control (represented by the sentient super-computer in the Post Office Tower) and by robot invasion (represented by the factory) never seemed very joined up. And here the Post Office Tower is essentially replaced by another handy London landmark, the waxwork museum Madame Tussauds. Which makes more sense...
...no really, it does! Well, that symbolic sort of sense anyway. Because it is used as their warehouse of Auton duplicates of the great and the good, the “government types” and military top brass. Because it matters who our betters are. While us proles, we’re essentially mere parts - faceless, interchangeable cogs. We can be replicated by the production line we're working on.
Yet it needs stressing that the critique of production is only incipient. Just as with 'Quatermass II', as with 'War Machines', as with 'Tenth Planet' or countless other examples, the problem is framed less in terms of our losing our agency than a rather fetishistically individualised sense of the pure self. The Nestene Consciousness, who control the Autons, are bad because they are collective. Ransome becomes suspicious of Hibbert when “you keep saying we”. When Channing later intones “we have no individual identity” we are intended to be chilled.
There's a plethora of telephone scenes, despite the fact that unlike 'War Machines' they have no obvious narrative function. But they're most likely there to underline one early scene where Channing is in a phone booth. Someone impatiently barges in to ask how long he'll be, to discover the receiver is down. We separate beings communicate one-on-one, nodes in an exchange. While the Nestene, a hive mind, pool their thoughts universally by telepathy.
Except of course they possess only the supposed downsides of collectivity – and so they still have leadership! While their consciousness arrives on Earth via meteorites (giving the story it's title) which can then inhabit the Auton shells, its the 'swarm leader' which goes missing – putting their plans on hold until it can be found. “Swarm leader” seems a peculiarly oxymoronic phrase, reminiscent of Kenneth Williams insisting on being called “Citizen Sir” in 'The Black Fingernail'.
When looking at 'Tenth Planet’, it became obvious that the notion of the Cybermen standing for communism can't really hold up to scrutiny. This story may be firewalled against misinterpretation, but from another direction. Ransome has been away on business, which is carefully specified as in America. Though by the Seventies this had become common, there may be a significance to it.
Particularly back then, America seemed the place where capitalism came from. “The latest thing from America” was a common phrase. Any mention of “the new policy” might stir up Stateside thoughts in people's minds, new business practises shaking up the trusted old ways. Ransome's trip throws us off this wrong scent. (Though my mind goes in another direction. The Nestene’s name always make me think of the notorious Swiss multinational Nestle.)
Because, just like the Cybermen, the Nestene come from neither west nor east, neither left nor right. Not even up, not really. Outer space is not being used as a blind to disguise their actual origins. In a cautionary story, they stand for the future. (The meteorite's calling signals sound almost uncannily prescient of mobile phone rings.) And space stands for the future just fine.
From A Clown To A Dandy
”I couldn't bear the thought of being tied to one planet and one time.”
If not much has been said about the new Doctor so far, then the story doesn't do much more. He's kept out of the action for almost the first half, as he recovers from his (still unnamed) regeneration. (While Troughton’s first outing got an instalment to itself.) And when he does appear, as perhaps should be expected in a story so indebted to 'War Machines', he's clearly a successor to Hartnell.
Donning the aristocratic signifiers almost as soon a stepping from his sick bed, he 'borrows' his trademark cape and vintage car from... yes, really... a Doctor. Which he promptly drives to UNIT and speaks so imperiously to a sentry you can't help but be reminded of Andrew Mitchell's Plebgate affair. His commanding voice, we don't even need to be shown, gets the job done. In fact, it could be argued he doesn't <i>really</i> behave like the Pertwee Doctor until he's in his posh togs. In his sick bed he feigns derangement as a means to get what he wants, then pulls a face of mischievous-child triumph, a very Troughton trick to pull.
At points he acts less like a hero and more like an aristo who, after losing his heritage, has been thrust unwillingly into a day job. Suddenly he has responsibilities, even the need for a name. At first he tries to evade it by sneaking off, only to find the Tardis disabled.
And herein lies the paradox. For a story about the alienation induced by modern production methods (which in no small way this is), it is all the more bizarre to have a protagonist so steeped in privilege culture. But rather than searching for some intra-story way of getting to grips with this, we are better off seeing it as symptomatic of Seventies culture overall - perhaps even British culture in general. Andrew Hickey has often observed that there is much of George Orwell or Tony Benn in the Doctor, the toff who turned to the proles. This paradox will be turned over again and again by the show. It's the grit that makes the oyster.
The Autons and their replacement/takeover scenario may have been devised to match his regeneration. The Doctor conveniently manages to land not just at the same time as the Nestene's meteorites, but in the same wood. (In the Pertwee era, not only does the Earth reduce to the Home Counties, they can be spanned by stretching out your arms.) His line about his new face being “very flexible, you know” might seem to suggest at some kind of parity. Yet the Autons' replacements ultimately do the opposite of the Doctor, who is the same person only looking different.
However, for all that there's a newfound emphasis on his alien-ness. He's shown to have two hearts, something he's been previously quiet about. But of course this alienness is now required precisely because of the new format – because things are now Earth-bound. However copycat the scripts might get, the Doctor is not Bernard Quatermass the Earth scientist. He's from another world and has at root an inscrutably alien nature. The 'Radio Times' cover which introduced him was keen to show him as some kind of magician.
If this is not the first UNIT story, it's clear UNIT is now being set up to be regular feature. (We're almost explicitly told the Autons will be back for a rematch.) This story went out the same year as yet another Seventies SF show with an alien invasion premise, 'UFO'. While SHADO, UNIT's equivalent, hide behind the cover of a movie studio, their glam fashionista uniforms suggest the cover they've gone in for is quite deep. Nominally SF, 'UFO' overlapped considerably with pop-surreal spy-fi stories, such as 'The Avengers', 'The Man From UNCLE' and Marvel comics' 'Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD'. (Where SNAAC applies, Snappy Acronyms Are Always Compulsory.)
UNIT can't compete with this fashion parade, but they still look a good deal more dashing than that regular army clobber. Of course they have to act the straight man to the Doctor's dandy. But like the plastic they occupy a between-space, not as hidebound as the straight army, but neither as savvy to strangeness as the Doctor. Notably it's Captain Munro from the regulars who gets replaced.
And with UNIT of course the Brigadier is back. This significance of this may be hard to reconstruct from hindsight, as we tend to see his role as effectively beginning here. But while fans frequently complain the new policy of Earth-set stories constrained the show, the contemporary casual viewer – tuning in to a much faster-paced show, with more location shooting and now in glorious technicolour – would have seen it as opening up.
All those revelations about the Time Lords to top off the last season, now they don't even get mentioned by name. This is built to be a jumping-on moment for new viewers. (Ratings had been falling through Troughton's tenure, and are known to have increased with this story.) Given all this, the Brig's reassuring face becomes one of the very few recurring features, the only person around who would have been able to recognise the old Doctor. (The Tardis is alternately guarded and ferried around like a totem, but we don't see inside it.)
Yet if the Brig is the familiar face, all the audience identification business falls to new companion Liz Shaw. When Hartnell became Troughton they made sure it happened mid-season, with Ben and Polly still around to provide a live commentary. This time it’s a season-opener. Here, as Andrew Hickey comments: “we’re introduced to these vaguely familiar elements as if they’re totally new, through the eyes of new companion Liz Shaw.”
Her introductory scene is all about her, and us, being brought up to speed. But it also tells us about both her importance and her character. Her initial skepticism has to be seen in this light. We're used to encountering the small-minded disbelief of the petty bureaucrat - obsessing over protocol and procedure oblivious to the fact that silver-suited extras are even now over-running High Wycombe. But from Liz, coming so early in the reboot, its a skepticism she expresses for us – and so in her we see it as a sign of intelligence. (Though she doesn't need to worry about those “little blue men”. Everyone she runs into will be green.)
She's clearly been head-hunted by UNIT on her own prowess, though just in case we haven't got it yet the Brigadier states firmly she's “not just a pretty face”. If the Doctor's still a magician, this time he's not handed another mini-skirted assistant. Liz is an actual scientist who does actual science stuff, almost a dummy run for Romana. To think that it was only four years ago when Polly first appeared, and we got almost excited over her being a secretary.
Though 'Quatermass' featured female scientists, despite so much else being sourced from there Liz has no real antecedent. She's more an acknowledgement of shifts in Seventies culture – what was then dubbed “Women's Lib” and we now tend to call second-wave feminism. A wave which had expanded from political and legal campaigning to a general critique of culture, which of course included popular culture. Gloria Steinem’s article <i>’After Black Power, Women’s Liberation’</i> was at this point barely a year old.
A popular TV show keen to expand its audience may have not wanted to seem behind the times, or to cut itself off from a potential female audience. Certainly, like the UNIT uniforms Liz's look seems pitched - tied-back hair but mascara round her eyes. Not too old-world, not too dauntingly modern.
Given all this, when Liz is shown taking to the Doctor straight away the man she's meeting is the man a whole chunk of the fresh audience may be meeting. A mysterious stranger, an alien. All we can be really sure about is that he's brilliant and here to help us. Actually, we can't even be entirely sure he's here to help us.
One of the more unfortunate similarities to 'War Machines' is that the ending is as much of a let-down. Things are essentially solved by the combination of a technomaguffin and overacting. (Androzani calls it “a disappointing ending which fizzles out in a sea of woeful tentacles”, and indeed its a sequence about as infamous as the Autons coming to life is famous.) Seemingly you're only supposed to twig that Channing was an Auton himself right at the end. A natural reaction to which would be “if I'd have known I wasn't supposed to guess that, I'd have tried harder not to”.
Yet overall, while Holmes' previous two efforts ('The Krotons’ and 'The Space Pirates') are not what you would call well-remembered, this has gone on to be a favourite among fandom. Yes, the same fandom which normally so takes against the Pertwee era! Which is perhaps odd, as it very much establishes the new policy rather than provides an exception to its rule. Maybe sometimes its the first time that can be the charm.
Coming soon! Those anomalies in the tempo-spatial sphere persist…
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