'ALIEN: ROMULUS' (A MINI REVIEW)

Some while ago now, I said “the Alien films all have to feature Ripley, just like you couldn't make a Dalek film without the Doctor.”

I like to think I’m big enough to admit it when I’m wrong.

She hasn’t shown up in the last two (not counting that one) and ’Alien: Romulus’ even finds ways to turn this deficiency to its advantage. First, where later sequels had become wrapped up in their own continuity this allows for a reset. (In internal chronology, it comes straight after the first film.) Also, this allows a new, young cast to blunder blind into the Alien universe and make their own mistakes. We shout helplessly at the screen “get out of there, it ’s got one of those in it?”. But how are they to know?

Of course in a standard horror film this would just be the teens visiting the haunted house. But here its a course correct, that takes us further back to where we were before then where we were before.

Furthermore, I am won't to complain that contemporary culture insists our protagonists must always be The Special One. (I blame Neoliberalism for this, typically enough, as it means our heroes have to represent not us but me who is not like all the others, not really. I expect you’ve heard me.) Happily, this series has in effect gone the other way. Ripley was not military but she was a capable Warrant Officer. While in ’Covenant’, Daniels was a coloniser. But Rain, our protagonist here, a young wage labourer, the nearest yet to some regular Jo.

And who is our regular Jo set against? I also said “the Alien may be the adversary but the Company are effectively the villain.” And this film is smart enough to get that. Some have complained it starts too slow, but this is info it needs to get over. We’re in a future dystopia, like now only more so. The scenario is ‘the maze and the Minotaur’ in which the Corporation has provided both. The characters become trapped between the Alien’s law-of-fang-and-claw and the demands of rapacious capitalism. (The films tend to exploit Social Darwinism for drama, rather than critique it.)

Plotwise, this is most epitomised by the two Andys. The de rigeur android has two settings; there’s a kind of special needs version who has his skills but also needs looking after himself (not far from the cat in the original), and there’s the other - highly effective but not at all on their side.

But of course, as ever, its most epitomised visually - by the two clashing aesthetics, industrial gothic against the weirdly alien. There’s an effective scene where the corridor they’re about to getaway through is found to be covered in alien… whatever that stuff is. (That industrial gothic look has become almost enhanced by the passage of time. We’re now aware what a mechanical world it is, of chains, metal hatches and grille gates. Monitor screens are analogue and flickery. A retro future.)

’Alien: Romulus’ is rarely lss than involving. You can’t help but get drawn in, feel the tension, jump at the right moments. See it. You won’t be bored.

But the second and third instalments (perhaps even the fourth, to a lesser extent) took all this and took it somewhere new. This is much more more than it is new. It follows the two rules of sequels, ‘bigger’ and ‘faster’. *Aliens’* had already gone for armies of Aliens, so this throws swarms of facehuggers at us, like mobs of spiders. And with this the remorseless inevitability of the first film is, unsurprisingly, gone. Aliens now seem able to not just gestate but grow full size in mere minutes. (I grew hopeless confused as to whether their arrival had let the facehuggers out, or whether the ships had already been overrun.)

The commercial and critical failure of ’Prometheus’ has certainly bounced the series into this more crowd-pleasing direction. (“Less cosmic pontificating, more chest-bursting” read the memo.) So is the result any more than ‘effective franchise instalment’? Not much. Even ’Covenant’, with its Medievalism and bestiaries, had more that was its own.

Added to which, the main place it does innovate doesn’t necessarily work…

(PLOT SPOILERS in next para)

We discover the Corporation have tried to bring capitalism and monster together, thinking to build the strongest creature of all, the best (in their minds) of both worlds. Here the title comes in, they have two spacecraft named after the Rome-founding twins famously raised by wild wolves. That didn’t end well for Remus, and it doesn’t here. But this feels like the film’s own failing, obliged to come up with a new monster variant for the finale, which it then projects onto the Corporation. (I may just object to lanky monsters. Personal reasons.)

But beyond that there are flickers. Trapped in mining jobs on a planet that never sees day is not a bad metaphor for the ceaseless demands of wage labour. Our young team escaping to bathe in sunlight for the first time is a striking moment. (Science Fiction often works best when it shows not the unfamiliar but the familiar from an unexpected angle.) And the zero gravity trick is neat. So… few admittedly, but there. Quite possibly this came out better than might have been expected.

’CHILDREN OF THE STONES’

Happy days! Our look at Teatime Dystopias, when kids' TV went weird (starting here), continues with a well-remembered if rarely repeated classic. We foretell PLOT SPOILERS!

Where There's Stone There's Strange

Like all great TV shows, ’Children of the Stones’ starts with a great credit sequence. And, like all TV shows made in the Seventies, it starts off with a very inexpensive credit sequence (see end). In fact, it’s just a bunch of close-ups of some old stones.

Of course, it’s the disorientating music that makes it, that gives it that eerie effect. It was described by Stewart Lee as “the most inappropriate children's TV theme ever penned.” (In his Radio Four documentary 'Happy Days'.) Needless to say he meant it as a compliment.

Admittedly composer Sidney Sager may have been at something of an advantage. In those staid days, science fiction and fantasy were permitted more out-there music and sound design than the norm, just by invoking that catch-all heading ‘weird'. I genuinely think that throughout my childhood, the only time I heard any music other than pop fodder was through science fiction shows. As a sensitive youth, I found that fear was more easily triggered by sound than by vision, particularly the uncannily ‘causeless’ sound of soundtrack music. When it all got too much, don't shut your eyes - cover your ears.

But the music comes to affect and infect the visuals, in a kind of sinister synaesthesia. As you listen to the voices (provided by the Ambrosian Singers) rising and falling, undulating and unpredictable, you start to see the misshapen stones the same way. In fact as the show progresses, great play is made out of their inscrutable shapelessness. Those undulations become like Ernst’s famous frottage artworks, when you were never quite sure what you were seeing and what you weren’t. (I suspect that at points fake stone props were deliberately used to suggest semi-subliminal clues of this kind.)

But perhaps most magnificent is the image above, where they’re held in contrast to the electrical boxes and measuring devices which our protagonists heroically take to them – the measuring rod held up against the defiantly askew. In many ways the image acts as a microcosm of the whole series, and much like the show it seems to pack in so much. As I once said of Paul Nash’s megalith paintings: ”Inevitably we come to see these things as outside ourselves, a puzzle to be solved with measuring tape and aerial photographs. Yet there's the nagging sense the answer is within us, one of those things we seem to know but cannot quite recall.”

As with ’Sky’ you could diminish 'Stones' by reducing it to a formula; it’s at root a mash-up of 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ with ’The Stepford Wives,’ with a dash of 'The Wicker Man' thrown in for garnish. But that would be to mistake the recipe for the taste, and the taste of that eerie opening remains.

Broadcast in 1977, only two years after ’Sky’, Children of the Stones’ is more insistent still on the fundamental weirdness of the English landscape, and is often cited as an example of the Old Weird Britain. This is less a genre (a set of rules which more or less associate with a mode of thought) than a mood. And this lack of specificity gives the concept a flexibility, a resistance to hard definition.

And 'Stones' knows how to play this ambiguity. Though both it and 'Sky' were ITV shows, we who grew up in the shadow of our parents’ snobbery cannot help but see ’Stones’ as an honorary BBC production, ’Blue Peter’ to ’Sky’s ‘Magpie’. This difference is there even as those credits roll. <i>’Sky’</i> is full of filters and post-psychedelic effects, here we’re just shown some stones. (It is hard now not to see 'Sky' as a period piece, while the lesser use of special effects allows 'Stones' to seem more timeless.)

While much of 'Sky' is chase-and-run, ’Stones’ has a more complex storyline which develops quite slowly. Clues marinade, events accumulate. (In fact co-author Trevor Ray had been an associate script editor on ’Doctor Who’, with which ’Stones’ shares both strengths and weaknesses. Most notably, it lasts seven episodes when it could easily have fitted into five or even four.) Those who think of Brit SF TV as extras in rubber suits shouting “boo!” at the screen will be somewhat nonplussed by all of this.

While Sky has some iconic force to his performance, the series’ acting in general is at best adequate. By contrast ’Stones’ has some name actors in chief roles, including Ian Cuthbertson and Freddy Jones. (Though admittedly that does expose the poorer child performances somewhat.)

Let's go back to 'Stepford Wives' a moment, because the similarities are so strong they throw an emphasis on the differences. Both used location filming heavily, but used quite different locations to quite different effects. 'Stepford Wives' is set in an idealised suburbia, as if a gleamingly pristine advert for a newly built estate sprang to life, so was shot in small town and suburban locations wherever possible. It's a bit like the way Portmeirion works in 'The Prisoner', you're aware you're looking at something simultaneously real (not a set, a real space) and artificial (an un-place with none of the feel of the lived-in).

While 'Stones' is set in a village. The makers based their fictional Milbury closely on the actual geography of Avebury, a Wiltshire village genuinely nested inside a stone circle. (From today’s perspective Milbury can seem pretty idyllic; with a population of fifty-three it can claim its own Post Office, museum and pub. In fact the pub seems to survive on precisely three customers. They must have been pretty heavy drinkers...) And this distinction between suburb and village is significant. Here it's the rootedness, the connection of everything to its own history which is the cause of all the problems. These aren't plastic people. These are stone people.

You can read in any book on Romanticism how Britain’s early and rapid urbanisation led to the veneration of the rural. The heart and soul of the country, clearly it wasn’t where we were. So by default it must be where we weren’t. As a child I was taken to see twee English villages in much the way I was taken to see the Crown Jewels at the Tower. It was worth seeing because it was so unfamiliar, yet at the same time supposed to be our heritage. This made it ripe for inverting.

And stone circles, aren’t they ideal for this? They’re kind of just <i>there.</i> They’re used as emblems of Britain, appearing on tourist posters and the like. But at the same time as being quaintly traditional, like country pubs and cricket greens, they’re foreign objects, sitting loftily on our landscape like they own the place, despite the fact we know little about why they were put there - defying our supposed smartypants modernity. We construct theories to explain away how and why “they” built them, like a kind of intellectual comfort blanket.

”Complete the Circle”

The story's central conceit is that Hendrick, Lord of the Manor, is using ancient magic to brainwash the villagers into docile happiness. He’s been at this a while, since roundabout the dawn of humanity. The main image of this is the circle, a word which comes up in every episode’s title. When the outsiders Adam and Matthew arrive, the circle vies with the straight line - the primary relationship of parent and child. In that earlier image it’s their magnetometers and other paraphernalia which are pointed hopefully at those old, weird stones.

In a key instance of the show's 'Blue Peter'-ness there’s none of 'Sky’s working class protagonist or its suggestions of the generation gap. Adam and Matthew are a father-and-son team, with Adam in the finely middle class job of academic researcher. (An astrophysicist, albeit one who seems confused between his own job description and that of a geographer.)

While ’Sky’s Arby Vennor has to abandon his regular work to get involved in the adventure, here it’s the father’s job which takes him there. Being “very clever at working things out” Matthew helps his father in his researches, and is essentially a junior version of him. As Adam gets rather pally with Margaret, the museum creator, Matthew does the same with her daughter Sandra. Generations don't gap here. They recur. 

It’s an unstated but fundamental rule that, when people go to Hendrick to be converted, they go two by two. In Matthew’s case, there’s a brief explanation that his mother has died. There may also be one for Sandra but if so I missed it. But notably everyone seems to be in a one-parent family, for example the Doctor and his son. This rule is upheld by Hendrick’s table/altar (below) only having three chairs. For a family even of three would risk counterposing the bigger circle with a smaller one.

The sole exception is the solitary Dai, who survives by avoiding the village, clutching his magic amulet and going into endurance bouts of loony mumbling. Alone he cannot fight the circle, so instead he continually dies and is reborn, the show’s equivalent of Kenny from ’South Park’. (There may even be a sneaky pun in his name.) Unlike others he’s not an outsider to the village, his exception just proves the rule.

Hendrick himself is not exception but variant. At first he’s rather like Goodchild in ’Sky’ an ominous presence prone to turning up unannounced, his urbane charm merely part of what makes him chilling. (Though he’s more the series’ answer to Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle from ’The Wicker Man.’) Though it’s often spoken of as the circle’s centre, we don’t get inside his manor house until the fourth episode, when we first see it through Adam’s eyes. From that point we are enabled to follow Hendrick from his own point of view. We find that instead of the standard parent and child relationship he has a butler, reinforcing his separation and authority. He is outside and at the centre of the circle he creates, his is the burden of command.

As Matthew points out, and like all great bad characters, the fantastic and terrible thing about Hendrick is that he genuinely believes he’s working for everyone’s good. His spell runs ”return to us the innocence that once we knew. Complete the circle. Make us at one with nature and the elements.” By making the villagers docile he purges them of all capacity to do evil, and in return gives them harmony and (in an interesting twist) intelligence.

Despite my heading it’s arguable how dystopian this series actually is. While ’Sky’ boldly tells us our whole way of life is doomed, ’Stones’ has a set-up which tacitly assumes that everything outside the village circle – in Adam-and-Matthew land - is okay. True, the village itself turns out to be a faux utopia, if one seen through almost from the start. In fact, at its most basic level, the series is about the conformism of closed communities. (This was the element picked up in the comedy film ’Hot Fuzz’, which is simultaneously tribute to and parody of the series.)

In this way, it’s tempting to see it as Enlightenment values trumping pagan superstitions, religion casting out the unknown versus science trying to understand things. Adam and Matthew represent a virtual roll-call of scientific rationalism – inquisitive thinking, individual identity and all the rest of it. They’re like science fiction characters trying to navigate through the tropes of a horror story, their magnometers like crucifixes against the strangeness.

Given the date, it would even be tempting to see it as a parting kick to the already waning back-to-the-land rhetoric of hippie subculture, with their feelgood mantras. Couldn’t Hendrick’s spell be the founding statement of some well-intentioned Home Counties commune?

And yet… Hendrick is himself a scientist, holding banks of computers in the deconsecrated church’s crypt. If the stones themselves are the dominant image of the series, this seems the broadening point, the image which connects it to the science fiction of the era. See the amp monoliths of the gatefold sleeve of the first Hawkwind album from 1970, above. Author Arthur C Clarke famously claimed “any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The Sixties and Seventies were the point where that became true of our technology, where our lives became besieged by an ever-increasing supply of devices and accoutrements - with us lacking the faintest clue how they really worked.

Also muddying the occult/rational waters, and with shades of ’The Tomorrow People’, Matthew develops psi powers. (Adam has a strong reaction when he touches one of the stones, suggesting he too is ‘sensitive’ but it is Matthew’s powers which develop.) So, rather than opposing Hendrick's magus with rationalism, their chief counter-weapon is itself a kind of shamanism.

The series might seem to resolve more neatly into good guys versus controlling baddies than the cosmic moral ambiguity of ’Sky’ or the conflicted wish at the heart of ’The Changes’, but the autochthonian is still given its seductive appeal. As the Wiki entry for the concept in Greek myth says, "they are rooted and belong to the land eternally.” Folk horror often uses protagonists as interlopers, going somewhere else within the UK (here less than a day’s drive from London) but finding it foreign soil. Yet unlike say *’The Wicker Man’* the incomers are seen not so much antagonists as the sick who need curing. Newcomers are incorporated until they belong. Milbury’s danger is through being someone else’s utopia. Welcome, friend.

Ultimately, circle versus line manifests as the conflict between circular and linear time. Events happen less in a causal than a fatalistic manner. The painting, found off-screen by Matthew before the series even starts, is an inbuilt plot spoiler - demonstrating almost everything that will happen. Dai lives a prisoner of circular time, living (and dying) the same events over and over. As Rob Young wrote in ’The Magic Box’, “when narratives engage with paganism and ritual, actions get stuck in a loop.”

Whereas Adam and Matthew are the champions of linear time; they must enter the village, complete a project and then leave. To Hendrick leaving is a non-concept. Notably they arrive by road, their journey interrupted when they (think they) see a strange stone figure jump out at them. And they defeat Hendrick through manipulating linear time, like it’s their element. (Check out the denouement for what I mean.)

Yet circular time is also, in a sense, accumulated time. Instead of the present arriving to replace the past, events recur, deepen like a coastal shelf. In an earlier piece, we looked at how Henry Moore’s sculpture explored his own fascination with the autochthonian. As the show’s name suggests, here this fascination becomes a phobia. The number of villagers not only equals the number of stones, in the end they turn into them. Perhaps the stones grow like coral, thickening with each iteration.

And the series does a good job of suggesting the vast timescales involved, rather than succumbing to attempt an inadequate literalisation. At one point, Hendrick takes umbrage at Adam's jibe at our primitive caveman ancestor. The inference is that he has good reason to take the insult personally. The “magus” he insists the caveman was, that's him.

Like ’Sky’, there’s no sense that victory is in any way complete. This war of linear versus circular time isn't really resolved – each just returns to its respective corner. And perhaps the point is that it can’t be. The picture, we should remember, predicts their escaping the village. Which it does by portraying a previous occurrence. And the coda suggests that circular time may already be reasserting itself and will always recur, like the seasons, no matter how many times it is defeated. This is a Manichean war, opposites endlessly attracting and then repelling one another.

The series as a whole is nicely open-ended; rather than being spoon-feed, you are left a lot of plot points to tie up yourself. However, there are times where you can’t help wonder whether those points do fit together, or whether you’ve been set a fool’s errand.

For example, it's debatable how much sense the conceit of stone people actually makes. Are they stones brought to life through these ancient magical forces? Have those people been in the village all these centuries, so the stones are their natural calcified form? But of course it’s there because it makes a great deal of symbolic sense - the stones quite literally have no free agency and are locked in a circle.

There's similar problems with the black hole/ supernova element. It’s originally a mystery what the stones are aligned with, it seems an empty section of sky. Then it’s revealed as a black hole which, back in the day, was a bright supernova. But Hendrick’s whole shtick is to dispel the villagers’ ‘evil’ into the repository of the inescapable black hole. If time is circular, how was that possible with the supernova? The star's collapsing seems there merely as a measure to indicate the vast timespan rather than a piece of internal story sense.

However, if not every piece fits perfectly, that’s no reason to throw away the whole picture. This series assumed its child audience were intelligent enough to follow it’s not-always-straightforward plot, run through some quite philosophical concepts and (at times) cope with being quite thoroughly spooked! Do they write ‘em like that any more? I’m not at all sure that they do...

The first five minutes, including that eerie opening...

'SKY'

(The first part of Teatime Dystopias, our look at SF in Seventies Kids shows, on ‘The Changes’, lies here. Though they can be read in any order.)

”It is like this. The truth that men once saw was a window of many colours, now the window is shattered and lies in glittering shards across the floor. But the fragments you pick up cannot be the whole and the wind of chaos begins to blow through the open space.”

When middle-aged men blog about old TV shows its normally because they have youthful memories they wish to indulge. But this post is appearing precisely because when the ITV children's series 'Sky', by Bob Baker & Dave Martin, was first shown back in 1975 I didn't watch it.

I mean, I didn’t miss it either. I was home from school and plonked before the telly every evening. This was the Seventies, after all, there was bugger all else to do. But truth to tell, my young brain found it all too much to take. Some weeks I'd try risking it only to find myself hastily changing channels. While with others I didn't dare put myself through the ordeal at all and I'd stick to the altogether safer realms of the BBC.

Of course, times were simpler then and I certainly was. But it wasn't just that I found it scary. Worse, I found it unsettling, reason-defying, literally uncanny. It was like a bad dream. It seemed almost impossible to figure out what was going on, even who the good guys were.

I'd now be less likely to reach for the word 'scary' than 'Seventies'. It seems like the elements from every other Seventies SF show distilled into one - someone's overlaid, composite memory of them all. Strangely blonde alien messiahs, psi powers, cosmic pontificating, ecological themes, visions of armageddon, Stonehenge-is-really-sci-fi, a spaceship as a wicker man… all seen through a filter of spacey music and post-psychedelic screen effects. Even Glastonbury hippies get a look-in.

Part of what so fazed my young brain was the title character (up top). With his synthesised unearthly voice, spaced-out eyes, spectral presence and general all around alien-ness, was he hero or villain? He had recognisably human sidekicks, but unlike the good Doctor seemed far too otherly to be the hero. He didn't look so far from the scarily superior aryan kids from the film 'Village of the Damned' (above). And yet he simultaneously seemed so vulnerable, so haunted. Without that sort of pole to set your compass by, how could a young child be anything but lost?

I knew it not at the time but, also archetypically for the Seventies, the character was channelling a great deal of David Bowie. Actor Marc Harrison was encased in a blonde wig and blue contact lenses. (Which ironically made him look most like Bowie in 'The Man Who Fell to Earth',, above, a film not released until the following year.) And of course blondeness and whiteness was a general signifier of futurism in the Seventies, in fashion and design as much as SF.

Bowie had repeatedly used the metaphor of aliens to represent generation gaps, with youth as the nascent “homo superior” who were becoming increasingly unknowable to their own parents. (Which, as we’ve seen, was a phrase instrumental in developing another ITV children's SF series,'Tomorrow People', in 1973.) Yet the Tomorrow People didn't wear weird all-blue contact lenses but smart jumpsuits, and behaved quite properly – as if the cast of 'Blue Peter' had developed psychic powers, which they'd decided to utilise to defend the Earth when they weren't busy on bob-a-job week.

'Sky', conversely, was almost the anti 'Tomorrow People,' the point in the schedules where the uncanny just erupted. And one component of this was its incorporation of generational conflict, albeit in an unusual way. It's almost a staple of children's SF that its young protagonists are as beset by everyday travails as by extraordinary ones – they're set detention at school or grounded at home, and always on the night when they need to meet the passing space rocket. (Of course appealing to the young mind, with whatever it had fixed on to do that evening feeling as important as meeting a space rocket.)

'Sky' has a school, true, but one seemingly without any teachers to it. In general, adult characters are weak and marginal - an alcoholic Major, ineffectual yokel cops. But this just allows adult authority to be bundled up inside one figure – Sky's antagonist, the ironically named Goodchild (above). Played in an almost absurdly melodramatic way by a black-clad Robert Eddison, like Dracula but with less redeeming features.

The patriarchal Devil was a staple of Seventies horror (albeit in horrors more normally aimed at adult audiences), and Goodchild is a chip off this block. After a first line “I'm looking for my charge”, he spends almost the whole series chasing Sky around the place. He often explicitly takes on roles of adult authority, such as that of a Doctor at the hospital.

More unusually, class makes an appearance alongside age. With Sky so strange and remote, the primary audience identification character is Arbie (above). He's not just working class, but surly and widely distrusted as a tealeaf – James Dean meets Ed Grundy. His family lives next door to the more middle class Roy and his Major dad, not out of any Seventies egalitarianism but the better to juxtapose them.

In a seemingly perpetual plot point the natural word is constantly turning against Sky, like antibodies against a foreign intruder. Which was perhaps the main source of my youthful disquiet. Firstly, it found horror in what was all around you – the English landscape, the stuff more commonly used for pretty backdrops. And worse - if this was the hero, how could the very Earth turn against him? Which is actually quite a good question. Despite Goodchild's panto villainy, there's a sense that the two are locked in some endless Manichaean dualism.

Sky's white coding goes against Goodchild’s black, not just foes but primary antagonists. Upon age versus youth and white versus black the show then places every other dualism – authority versus rebellion, custom versus innovation and earth versus... well, sky. Only some way in do we discover the SF-sounding Juganet which Sky searches for is actually Stonehenge, which of course is some time machine/ astral portal sort of thing. (The original purpose of Stonehenge was almost certainly to link earth and sky rather than oppose them, the builders abundantly aware how deep those stones had to be sunk just to stand up. But let's not fret.) In fact the moralistic name Goodchild is perhaps not entirely ironic, for he ultimately represents the natural order.

Nor is this just a matter of painting Goodchild less black. Contemporary viewers watching the opening scenes would most likely assume Arby to be the sidekick to pheasant-hunting posh kid Roy – at which point he promptly drives off on his own. But there's a sense in which by finding Sky he merely swaps one bossy rich kid for another.

Arbie's sister Jane seems inserted into the script at a late stage, to give the girls someone to relate to. And as she mostly just follows Arbie around as he follows Sky, it's doubtful that strategy was particularly successful. Yet at one late point its she who not unreasonably suggests Sky is simply using them. And certainly nothing happens to dissuade us of this. The war of earth versus sky seems to have little interest in the human jam sandwiched between them. One way of reading things would be to pursue the Bowie metaphor, where Sky is the star with his head full of visions and mouth dispensing significant statements, and Arbie his lowly earth-bound fan.

As we discover, while Sky is a saviour he isn't really our saviour. Because of reasons he's shown up at the wrong time and, while he expects and accepts human assistance, he shows a right royal lack of gratitude for it. Not being meant for us, he's consequently not able to tell Arby anything particularly useful. What he does have to say basically boils down to “I'm not your messiah, I just took a wrong turn. Actually, you lot.. well, you're all buggered. Sorry about that.”

Which seems the mood of the moment. To go back to Bowie, the year before ‘Sky’ was broadcast he tried explaining what the ‘Ziggy’ album was all about: “Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village. They don’t have a care in the world and are of no possible use to us. They just happened to stumble into our universe.” This is clearly a post-hoc construction, almost entirely unrelated to the album made a couple of years before. But the remarkable thing is how close it is to ‘Sky.’ 

One intriguing aspect of this is that neither Sky nor Goodchild wants the world as it is now. If Goodchild represents nature, it doesn't follow Sky is in hock to the white heat of technology. Despite his name he's not here to predict any media empire branding, explaining things have been on the wrong track since the time when “with the first flint man bent nature to his will”.

As stated at the opening, psi powers were a staple of Seventies SF, mind control battles about as common as bell bottoms. Yet what's interesting about 'Sky' may be less than it's yet another iteration, but the way it knocks out what often seems a core component of them. Think again of 'Tomorrow People’ and their jaunting belts, human evolution and technological development so aligned as to be almost symbiotic. Whereas in 'Sky' it's all just got to go.

What Sky's mission means in practise, or how it even differs from Goodchild's vision, is... wait for it... ill-explored. Insofar as it's possible to tell, his psi powers – and in particular his telepathy - represent a kind of nouveau spiritualism. Using them makes us at one with the world, while tools and even speech just separate us from it. Or something. Yet while there is something New Agey about this it doesn’t have the feelgood factor that seems central to New Age ‘thinking’. We get to visit Arbie’s post-tech future and it’s not much of a utopia. (Despite the telepathy it’s not unlike the world of ‘The Changes’, including the sense that we’re in somebody’s utopia, just not ours.

Though there is a sense this is fitting. We see all this from our perspective, from a fallen, lesser world. So of course what we see is fragmentary, and hard to interpret. And perhaps what's really significant is what's absent. In a quietly brilliant scene, when Arbie finally gets back home he doesn’t rush back into the arms of his family but goes round the kitchen switching on lights and taps – refamiliarising himself with familiar things. But we’re supposed to do the opposite. The ambiguous dualism essentially tells us soon there’ll be no more water in that tap, the whole thing is up the spout and we need to sort it out for ourselves.

Producer Patrick Dromgoole later said “What we were trying to say to the children was their normal definition of good and bad was not going to work because they were suddenly confronting one of the great mysteries of the universe and a very simple definition wasn’t available.” (So yes, they were screwing with my young mind!)

And perhaps that’s what's significant. Nowadays we fancy ourselves as dystopian connoisseurs, like a drunk boasting he can take his booze. But would we countenance anything so bleak, strange and challenging as this on contemporary children's TV?

True there may be films which have taken on this mantle. ’The Hunger Games’, based on teen-lit novels, may be something of a sibling. But they’ve mostly been overwritten by apocalypse porn. A genre where, while the disaster may even be pulled from the headlines, it is always rendered as something known and explicable. Both characters and audience will be aware what they’re up against. Even horror variants, such as zombies, are normally subject to quite rigid rules. And, however much they fetishise the spectacle of destruction, at heart they’re Robinson Crusoe stories. Even when stripped of our lattes and i-phones, we Westerners will find within ourselves the will to survive.

But most of all… Wilfred Owen once said “all a poet can do today is warn.” And when you’re issuing a warning, it makes sense to direct it at the young, those least inured in the bad habits. I’ve now lived through many of the dates they used to flaunt so ostentatiously in science fiction in those big futuristic fonts. We passed those warning signs. So inevitably they now seems prophecy. I’m not surprised that things have skirted so close to disaster. What I’m surprised about is that they haven’t tipped over yet.

’Sky’ is not particularly well-acted or even necessarily that well-written. As Goodchild chases Sky from one hidey-hole to another, as the super-intelligent alien hides in another country setting (“you'll be safe here”) then belatedly remembers nature has it in for him, it quickly becomes repetitive. And its boldest defenders would have to work hard to claim it's in any way coherent.

But it's got the sort of qualities that analysis can miss. It throws up interesting concepts and memorable images, which can stick in your brain. (In my case, over decades. Despite the fact I didn't even watch it.) You're never sure what are flaws or weaknesses, or what are deliberate ambiguities and clever devices. (For example, the rather wooden performances of the others throws into relief the larger-than-life nature of Sky and Goodchild.)

Compare it to a dark psychedelic track, like something by Trees or early Pink Floyd. (Similar visual effects were, after all, regularly used on music programmes of the time.) The underlying structure may be of an overly familiar pop number, but that's simply not the part to focus on. The disorientating psychedelic effects leap up at you, take you by surprise, drag you into their realm. Similarly the spooky music, the photo-filter effects, the strange-looking characters aren't embellishments to what's going on, they are what's going on. As Sky says at one point, “What you read are symbols, and fragments of symbols.” My eight year old self was right. It can't be made sense of, and that's the key thing about it...

That very Seventies credit sequence...

Coming soon! Perhaps the best-known teatime dystopia of them all...

‘THE CHANGES’

(Here starts ‘Teatime Dystopias’, a three-part series on how science fiction was used by Seventies children’s TV. Which, primarily, was as a means to traumatise tots. Please BEWARE PLOT SPOILERS!)

Adverse Conditions Ahead

“We interrupt our regularly broadcast programme to bring you the end of Western civilisation...”

That’s not quite how ’The Changes’ started, but it’s not far off. If it's something like a junior version of ’Survivors’, it actually came first. (Both were broadcast in 1975, but it had been filmed two years before.) Except ’Survivors’ took a scientifically plausible explanation for social collapse, reiterated in its title sequence. While this took a fantastical one, as in its own title sequence. Speaking of which…

For the first but not the last time in this series, those highly effective titles are an example of restriction generating innovation. The repeat image of things just stopping is as effective as it is simple. To end life as we know it doesn’t require an epidemic to be unleashed, the nuclear button be pressed, resources to run out or the workers to rise up from the Lower City. In fact it doesn’t require anything. The lives we had been living weren’t even precarious, they were arbitrary. They could have stopped at any point, it just happened to be today.

And the soundtrack… it’s bizarre to think that little more than a decade later, electronic beats would be used to induce ecstatic states. Here its machine sounds to convey a machine sense - the regular, the humdrum heartbeat of the daily grind. Then that stopping.

There’s two things you can’t avoid saying about ’The Changes’, and they go together. First, it’s strong use of location footage gives it an immediate, verite feeling quite at odds with the staginess of much TV from this time. Added to which the camera is mobile, following the action around.

Second, it needs to be situated in its era, a time of power cuts and social upheaval. Our modern phobias are wrapped up in mighty CGI conflagrations, sometimes referred to as the spectacle of the end of the world, where we’re all inevitably going to die but at least it’ll be while watching a good show. While the Seventies was about the taps stopping working and the water going bad. Their apocalypse wasn’t just coming, it was going to get you where you live.

Peter Dickinson’s source novels predate this era, the last being written in 1970. Many scenes from them are excised, to be replaced by more budget-friendly alternatives. But there’s two significant points where the show adds scenes, and this is the first. All the books started after the Changes had begun. Whereas some of the show’s most memorable moments are in the first episode, where we see the actual a-changin’.

We first see young Nicky dutifully doing her homework in a setting of domestic quietude. Then a mere three minutes in, to quote the first episode’s title, the Noise starts. And the family are immediately reduced to a destructive frenzy against anything mechanical. As, it transpires, is everyone else. The motivation is moralistic if not actively religious, the machinery deemed “wicked”. (And not in the “well wicked” sense.) The first blood-and-thunder preacher has shown up mid-way through the first episode. While you’re probably not intended to think of it directly, it recalls the iconoclastic fury.

(If they why of this is taken up later, its somewhat unclear how people are affected. At first it seems it’s an intermittent madness, lasting only as long as the Noise sounds. Once it stops, people’s immediate reaction is to escape somewhere, as if the problem’s confined to others. But it’s also a permanent reset, bedded in people’s minds, where even mention of the wicked things by name can cause shock and outrage. Or for that matter what the limits of this wickedness are. For example, bicycles are bad but carts are okay.)

Nicky soon falls in with some Sikhs, travelling with them. Why Sikhs? The Seventies were the ‘look East’ era, with an increased interest in its mysticism. But that rarely took in Sikhism. Dickinson dedicated the book they appear in to a Sikh name, so possibly this originally stems from a personal relationship.

However, two things are striking. Firstly the Sikhs are accurately presented as, in the book’s words, “a warrior people”. When the distrust they’re met with spills over into hostility they are quick with self-defence, which makes them useful protectors for Nicky. (Note to self - when civilisation ends, don’t get yourself stuck with a bunch of aum-ing Buddhists if Sikhs are available.)

But a wider (if not unconnected) point is that they’re outsiders, that they were outsiders before any of this started, and they’d be scarcely any less outsiders if they were still in India. Which manifests within the story as their being unaffected by the Changes. In fact their initial reason to allow Nicky to travel with them is that she can be their ‘canary’ of wickedness, alert them to what’s considered wrong-doing in these new social mores.

Based on a trilogy, the series divides neatly into three. And it’s significant that even after Nicky parts company with them she takes up with Jonathon. Who is white but before the Changes was a keen engine tinkerer, and so any Noise effect has already rubbed off him. Meaning Nicky always has someone with her less changed than she is.

Why do this? She’s the audience identification character, if not our brave heroine. Why not show her as unaffected by the Changes as we are? Instead things are played very much the other way. She loses her parents when, rather than follow them, she joins a mob attacking a car. And at first she attacks the Sikhs, when one tries to start up an engine.

Before watching, I’d blithely assumed the Changes would only affect the adults. Who when I was a child always seemed strangely vexed about technology which I just saw as ubiquitous, rationing TV viewing, guarding telephones, fretting about amplified music’s ability to suddenly strike you deaf and so on. The story does suggest the Changes wear off with the children the quickest, but still has them affected initially.

Let’s segue into another question, as that may turn out to have the same answer. The Changes are shown as a terrible rupture, a “madness” which kills many and constantly throws Nicky into danger. England has descended into a kind of Home Counties Fascism, ruled by village despots and malevolent witchfinders. (Prone to saying things like “Wickedness! Right here in the heart of Shipton!”) Otherness is so feared it’s like the Daily Mail comments board comes to life. The reassuringly strangulated BBC voice-over at the start of each episode seems strangely jolting.

But at the same time the series demonstrates the way Sixties counter-cultural themes had by the Seventies gone mainstream, the critique of consumerism, the back-to-the-land movement and so on. Another show which premiered in 1975 was the long-running sitcom ’The Good Life', about a middle class couple who opt out of the rat race for “self-sufficiency in Surbiton.” And in their travels Nicky and Jonathon come across a remarkably similar couple, Michael and Mary, who had swapped London for “the simple life” of rabbit-hunting and bread-baking before the Changes even began. (They’re the second major invention of the show, with no correlative in the source novels.)

And these can clash. The witchfinder chases Nicky across a whole episode, gaining knowledge of her whereabouts by threatening another with a knife. But the chase is a leisurely affair, a canter across the countryside set against repeat panoramas of bucolic England, taking in a visit to a village pub. The incidental music sticks to the Seventies synths, but to fit those views shifts into pastoral. (And there’s little that’s more Seventies than folky snyth.)

Laid out like that, it sounds like a weakness. Some popular trends have been tossed together, and what results is a mish-mash. And at times it seems that’s the case. But at others it turns out quite the opposite. It’s perhaps best summed up by the kindly old man Nicky meets in the first episode, before she’s left Bristol. Much like the tramp in ‘Quatermass II’, he acts as a kind of moral compass. He comments “it’s funny not having the noises, it’s like when I was a kid, nicer really, more peaceful”, even as he knows he’s dying. Let’s look at how that works…

The End of Civilisation And Its Discontents

First off, Nicky consistently under-reacts to all of this. After the initial outbreak of the Noise, to her parent’s shock she calmly gets dressed for the next day’s school. When they tell her not to go, she sneaks out anyway. She then seems strangely phlegmatic about being left behind by them, who seem strangely phlegmatic about leaving her. This may just be a narrative necessity, to avoid having multiple episodes where she’s just sobbing on her bed. But it’s referred to diegetically, she’s asked about this by the Sikhs and shrugs the question off. And children can be a strange combination of conservative and adaptable, adjusting to a new normal more quickly than adults.

It’s also noticeable that in both the first and second section Nicky is befriended by both a boy and a girl. There’s a scene where the camera stands with the Sikh girl Ajeet as she looks up at Nicky and the Sikh boy Gopal, who have climbed a tree. She’s asked if she doesn’t mind getting so dirty, but doesn’t seem to. Then later as she goes travelling with Jonathon his sister Margaret helps their escape, then returns to help her mum with the farm. The Changes of ’The Changes’ grant her what might, in Seventies terms, be called ‘boy’s liberties’. Had the Noise never happened, she’d probably have just stayed with her homework.

For some reason, I never watched this show at the time. However, I was a big fan of ’Here Come The Double Deckers’ (first broadcast 1970/1, but endlessly repeated). And what attracted me was the trope of Free Range Children. It showed kids living in a secret hideout, where adult authority would attempt to intrude with slapstick ensuing. No parental edicts about bedtimes or the tidiness of rooms, just endless hanging out with your mates.

And the first film I saw at the cinema was ’Lost In the Desert’ (1969), a tale of a young boy who got lost in the… well, you probably guessed. (It’s essentially ’Walkabout’ without the elder sister.) Watching a child about the same age as me strive to survive on that big screen was a demanding watch, a feeling amplified by the realisation that if I reacted too visibly I wouldn’t get taken to the cinema again.

Both stemmed from the same source. But it was an unspoken assumption that it was okay to feed kid’s desire to be free of adult authority and also stir their phobia of being without their parents, provided they were delivered via different channels - never the twain shall meet.

Except for ’The Changes’, which was (consciously or otherwise) all about them meeting. Nicky gets to climb her trees, but with that freedom comes the witchfinder who wants to stone her to death.

And that was in a sense a juvenile microcosm of the wider culture, which both fretted about what technology was doing while fearing it being taken away. There’s more to this than the love of adventuring, even if that becomes our route in. It’s the notion that technology has coddled us, disconnected us from the real world, to the point that life now lies elsewhere.

And popular cultural themes are normally conflicted. Quite possibly it’s that conflict which causes them to become themes. Dramas can seek to resolve them, which they’re unlikely to do to everyone’s satisfaction. Or they can opt to ride the turbulence, and perhaps even map some of it.

Deus Versus Machina

And what turns out to have caused the Changes? There’s a megalith-like stone, sitting in a cave, seen over the closing credits of every episode. That’s our culprit. It’s a kind of spirit of the land - “there in nature, deep in the root of things.” And it’s Nicky, not the unaffected Jonathon, who’s able to sense it, to realise what it is and to plead with it. (In a scene remarkably like the ‘talking down the maverick supercomputer’ trope Seventies SF was so fond of. This was the decade that truly wrapped science and mysticism up together.)

She saves the day by appealing to it’s better nature, which is an example of the ‘talking cure’ so beloved of liberal culture. But it makes more sense in this context than something like ‘The Quatermass Experiment’. 

Some while ago, we looked at ‘Day of the Dead’. Which speculated that the zombie rising happened because our hubris made God wrathful. But the Changes seems more like something so powerful a force would do. Take away our noisy toys, not give them back till we’re better behaved. (Though at one point lightning strikes Nicky and Jonathon’s boat, so the stone’s willing to do its own dirty work at times.)

They encounter Furbelow, who touched the stone and made a wish upon it. “I didn’t mean it to turn out like this, of course”, he cries, “I thought it was for the best.” And he’s like all of us at this point of history, concerned about something, not quite knowing why or what to do about it, in his befuddlement just making the whole thing worse. Which is echoed in the stone’s warning - “whoever touches me unbalances the world”.

Though how this muddled wish transpires as the Changes is, perhaps inevitably, in itself muddled. He wishes for world peace, a cure for cancer and the usual stuff. Perhaps the stone picks up on his underlying technofear, or on waking up sweeps the land of all the newfangled stuff its not used to.

Furthermore, we’re also told that the stone’s wake-up call was “too soon, too sudden”. (In which case it must surely have set the alarm clock for about now.) What its waiting for, or what this has to do with Furbelow’s befuddlement is anyone’s guess. (This confusion may be here because the book’s ending gets changed, without being entirely overwritten.)

Still, if you need to squint at the thing for it to work then let us squint. The upshot is - because Furbelow, one of us, has made this muddled wish which becomes more like a curse it takes Nicky, another one of us, to un-wish it. And with it un-wish her adventuring.

After which, there’s noticeably no happy-ending shot of Nicky being reunited with her parents. She explains to Jonathon that its all over. Then the end credits are essentially a mirror image of the opening ones, with motion restarted. The immediate problem is over, the stone’s gone back to sleep. But the underlying causes, they all remain.

Coming soon! Further teatime dystopias! (Same time, same channel...)

‘FURY FROM THE DEEP’ (PATRICK TROUGHTON’S DOCTOR WHO)

First broadcast Mar/Apr ’68
Written by Victor Pemberton
PLOT SPOILERS scream from the depths of this review

"It's down there, in the darkness, in the pipeline, waiting!"

”Weeeeeeeeed!”

Google-image this story, and see what you see. Admittedly, as we’re on another lost one, the options are limited to the surviving stills. But most hits are of that grotesque gurn (coming later) or the Doctor using a stethoscope on a piece of pipe (above). Both gloriously absurd, the sort of thing we love this show for. From them, I’d always imagined this would be at very least a good episode.

Alas not.

It's clearly another direct lift from Quatermass, though this time by a circuitous route. Hammer had intended ’X The Unknown’ (1956) as a sequel to their ’Quatermass Xperiment’ from the previous year. Ever-irascible, Nigel Kneale refused use of his character. But they just substituted a different name and used another ‘X’ in the title as the connecting element.

The threat this time was animate earth on the rampage. Which Victor Pemberton borrowed, tried to pitch it as a ’Who’ script, failed and so turned it into the radio drama ’The Slide’ (broadcast 1966). Through reasons unclear the rejection was then reconsidered, but with animate earth now used goods it was switched to sentient seaweed.

Now, seaweed and foam are not, at the end of the day, particularly blood-curdling things. In fact, when rooms start to fill with foam, your first response is to wonder if this is turning into an Ibiza-style party. 

But none of these are in themselves reasons to fail. In fact the show has already got away with worse. (David Whitaker apparently rejected it for the recycling, which is a little like the miner calling the steelworker red.) ’The Moonbase’ was barely any less generic but made use of its story type and, at least in its first half, generated a genuine air of menace and mystery. This is more like repeating something by rote, knowing you already know it. It’s not, by a strict definition, bad. It’s more flat, devoid of fizz.

Similarly ’X The Unknown’ had worked a whole lot better before the big bad was revealed to be not terribly big or bad, but did stir up an effective air of foreboding till then. With this, you spend a long time waiting for stuff to happen, then when it finally does it scarcely seems worth the wait.

Yes the stethoscope thing is brilliantly bonkers, but it’s gone within seconds. When the sinister Oak and Quill show up in the second episode things definitely perk up. (Helped by their scenes surviving. They were clipped out by Australian censors, and are now ironically all that remains.) Their menace is effective through being laced with comedy, and vice versa.

Quill’s open-wide gurn verges on cartoony. Yet this Guardian review of the animated reconstruction (which I’ve not seen) makes the interesting point that when he’s actually rendered as a cartoon the effect is diminished. It needs that uncanny valley.

But they don’t seem to have much in common with the other taken-over characters, who act more… well, taken over. And, as if there’s no way to resolve this, they get successively marginalised from later episodes and disappear before the end. Yet if they don’t make any sense, they do work – which kind of feels more important. And there’ll be more of that.

Against Vegetable Malevolence

The seaweed is forever taking over people, but only speaks at a couple of points. One of which is to insist: “The mind does not exist. It is tired. It is dead. It is obsolete. Only our new masters can offer us life. The body does not exist. Soon we shall all be one.”

Rather than standing for Those Darn Commies (like people are wont to claim), the weed does function as actual seaweed. Its a nature’s revenge story, stirred into retaliation at its abode being trespassed on by that intrusive oil drilling. And the point is how unlike us its vegetable malevolence is. Even with the Cybermen, becoming like them means becoming another iteration of them, another unit in the ranks. This is a step beyond that, we’ll all merge together in one vast undifferentiated blob. The earlier line “come over to us, come over to us” is perhaps repeated for both its literal and underlying meaning.

Now there’s an obvious objection here, which would run something like…

“Give up on this consciousness business. It’s no good, you know.”

“If you don’t have consciousness, how come you’re able to tell us to give up on it?”

“What? To advance the plot, fool!”

But then again, it does need conveying in some way and about the only means available back then was dialogue. In fact there should be more of it. “I have existed for millennia, you mayfly creatures must succumb to my enduring truth, soon all will be as it was before”… that sort of thing. Perhaps with several taken-over humans talking in unison. It would have been more involving than the endless “let’s do something”/”no let’s not” debates which take up most of the time.

Similarly, when the taken-over Maggie and Robson meet on the beach they speak more like… well, like they’re two people that the manifestations of one entity. Maggie walking into the waves makes no story sense. But it’s a good representation of de-evolution, a more sinister version of the Reggie Perrin opening.

And in offering an end to separation, a way to rejoin the all, the seaweed represents something at least partly attractive. We could be back where we belong, never confused or isolated again. All truly horrific things are also part enticing.

Interestingly, there are those who see this as another classic story. Some may simply want more ’Doctor Who’, and the more like more *’Doctor Who’* it is the better. But others may seize upon these few hints and suggestions and construct a whole story out of them, their minds overpainting all the generic features with something more colourful. A story which, had it just been served them, wouldn’t have been as involving as the one they felt invited to create.

This is always going to be the case to some degree, for watching or reading is never a purely passive act. But ’Doctor Who’ seems to invite it more than other things. Which is surely a large part of the reason why it came to have such a large fandom. We may even have a preference for an incomplete experience such as this, as it gives us gaps we can fill in as we choose.

And to say I can be sympathetic to this view would be an understatement. That’s exactly what I did over ‘The Celestial Toymaker’, at the very least. It’s what I tried to do here, though this time with more limited success. But there’s got to be some collaboration between you and the text, or you’re just daydreaming with the TV on. And this marks my limit.

Always a Base Chief, Always a Companion

As always, there’s the base chief who stubbornly distrusts the Doctor up to at least episode four. He’s been given other names, this time its Robson. At the same time, everything unique about this instance makes it worse. He’s worked his way up through the ranks and so has retained a shopkeeper’s shillings-and-pence brain, fixated upon production quotas. This leads him to thunderingly shout down the plummy voices of the boffins who try to talk more educated sense to him, the endlessly repeated set-piece arguments setting their different accents at odds. He seems so defensive as to be actively paranoid.

It’s not as extreme as the scheming Bragen in ‘Power of the Daleks’ but there’s a strong sense of power being placed in the wrong hands, inverting natural class hierarchies. There are those who will rightly raise the alarm when the show becomes racist, but show no concern over this sort of thing.

It’s true that time is put into Victoria’s send-off, rather than it just being tagged onto the end. And many celebrate this story for that. But assigning time isn’t the same thing as using it.

Companions tend to start well but degenerate into screamers, like Susan. Or some go the other way, starting out as tedious simperers then inexplicably gaining some gumption in their very last story, like Vicki. (Some don’t do either, like Dodo. Who should really have been called Don’tdon’t.)

Curiously, in her last story Victoria seems to go for both. She suddenly gains the ability to get out of locked rooms with a hairpin, but also perpetually blubs about all the danger like she’s only just noticed its there. Susan went off to get married, Vicki to have adventures with her new-found boyfriend. Victoria gets doled out substitute parents. Ho hum.

The weed being susceptible to her screaming is a good meta gag, even if it gets scant intra-story explanation. (It’s the “particular pattern of sound” is all we’re told. Is seaweed supposed to have ears?) God only knows whether this makes her more or less pro-active, but you can’t help but think for the weed to really be in trouble its weakness would have been whingeing.

‘THE WEB OF FEAR’ (PATRICK TROUGHTON’S DOCTOR WHO)

First broadcast Feb/Mar 1968
Written by Mervyn Haisman + Henry Lincoln 

PLOT SPOILERS lie ahead, as likely as line delays! 

“It’s like a spider's web, ain't it?”
“Yes. And we're the flies, all right. But where is the spider?”

Yeti on the Circle Line

A mere three stories after ‘The Abominable Snowmen’… this is the fastest reappearance so far. Which takes us to a poser. As we’ve seen before, ’Doctor Who’ is often torn between the requirement of individual stories to do their own thing and the imperative to build up a rogue’s gallery of monsters. Repeat performances can lead to diminished returns. And yet the Yeti…

Their first appearance was, if not bad, not better than okay. While this, their second, is widely regarded as a classic. Despite retaining the original writers, Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln. What can have caused this uptick in quality?

One answer is setting. Classic ’Who’ spends so much time hanging round the same few sets, getting those sets right is significant. And this is of course the one where they decided to take the Tube. Which makes a virtue out of the necessity for limited and confined spaces. And of then throwing everything into semi-darkness so you don’t see quite how limited and confined they are.

Even the one above-ground sequence in the fourth episode, though shot at least partially in the streets, is normally made up of close-cropped shots - rarely including any sky, keeping things claustrophobic. (Taking the Yeti out of the shadows, alas, works less well.)

But there’s an extra element… At first, the travellers don’t know they’re in the Underground. And while of course we watch with hindsight, surely even contemporary viewers would have recognised it before them. Or at the very least Londoners would, at a time the Beeb was London-centric. And they were supposed to. The original plan, after all, had been to shoot on location.

So familiar names like ‘Holborn’ and Charing Cross’ have been taken over by this alien entity, it’s remorseless progress displayed on the regular Tube map. (Wyndham does something similar with above-ground place names in ‘Day Of the Triffids’.) This may be so widely seen as a classic story because it does such a classic ’Who’ thing - defamiliarise the familiar, turn it into something sinister.

And, whether the setting inspired, whether new script editor Derrick Sherwin had a hand in it, or whether it was just a case of second time lucky… Haisman and Lincoln also turn out a significantly better script this time round.

In the big scheme of things this may follow in the wake of ‘The War Machines’ in establishing the ‘aliens head for the Home Counties’ story type. But it’s eerily empty settings are actually a more similar experience to ‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’. And like that story only more so, everything is stripped down for action, pressed into service. It feels less meandering, more compelling.

As is not unusual, very little makes sense. (If what the Great Intelligence wants is the Doctor, who go to so much trouble to take over the whole of London?) But pressing questions are constantly thrown at you, to snatch your attention from this.

As has happened before now, the Doctor couldn’t be in an episode because Troughton had gone on holiday. Normally, everyone else keeps talking and hopes you don’t notice. This time his absence is foregrounded. The first episode cliffhanger essentially tells you itself how he escapes, even if we were likely to conceive he might be killed off. But with everyone constantly talking about him, you cannot help but wonder where he is or what he’s up to.

Though the overriding question, who is the traitor, suffers from hindsight. We all now know it can’t be the main suspect, because it’s the Brigadier. (Here still a Colonel.) Which, unfortunately, it mostly seems to be set up for. The eventual reveal seems both arbitrary and guessable. The Staff Sergeant dies then gets better again, even when the Private who died with him doesn’t? Mmm.

(There are admittedly set-ups. When Driver Evans, the comedy Welshman, gives the Doctor a Yeti figure which brings their bigger brethren to your door, he says this is on the Staff Sergeant’s order. Yet how he steals the web sample from the tobacco tin remains a mystery. And the most useful takeover for the Intelligence would be one person the Doctor never seems to suspect, the scientist Anne Travers. That way he’d know the lab findings straight away, without waiting for them to be passed on to the military.)

All-Out For the Otherly

More than most of the Troughton era, this story is saturated in the Cold War era, marinaded in paranoia. In the tradition of spy movies, what the Great Intelligence is after is intelligence. Intelligence inside the Doctor’s head rather than encrypted onto microfilm, but still intelligence.

Then there’s the deliberately inconclusive ending, when the Doctor’s rather Doctorly and Jamie’s more action-packed solutions conflict - allowing the Intelligence to escape. This of course sets it up to come back and be bad another day. But that was never so foregrounded with either the Daleks or the Cybermen. The lack of triumphalism is striking, and does suggest the way the Cold War didn’t just mean war, but war without end. (Early publicity shots of Jon Pertwee involved Yeti, so sure were they of a third outing. As it happened, quarrels over the rights ensured they never came back.)

Yet at the same time, again more than most of the Troughton era, looking for exact Cold War analogies won’t get you all that far. The Cybermen, as we’ve already seen, were a bad fit for stand-on Reds. The Great intelligence would be an even worse one. For that matter, it doesn’t really lead to any kind of analogies. ’The Abominable Snowmen’, as we saw, led naturally to talk of psychology and Buddhism. This story is so tightly woven it seems impervious to that sort of thing. Analogies bounce off like bullets from a Yeti’s hide.

Instead… Yes the Yeti are back, but this is the story which goes all-out for the otherly, ’Doctor Who’ as (capitalised) Weird fiction, if ever there was. But that Weirdness is conveyed through reference to things to be found here but which still feel otherworldly, on the borderline between being tangible and nebulous – webs, fog, pulsing fungus. The Intelligence is described as “a formless, shapeless thing, floating about in space like a cloud of mist.” The last story was titled ’The Abominable Snowmen’. Whereas this time that non-stuff even takes over the name. And not content with that it reappears in the end credits.

The vanishing fungus sample, however awkward a part of the whodunnit, fits neatly into this, as if the stuff is inherently ungraspable. Compared to them the Ice Warriors and Cybermen are solid, material things. They may well beat you in a fight. But at least you’ll recognise what’s going on while it happens.

In fact the image which will most likely will stay with me isn’t a rearing Yeti in a dark tunnel, even if that’s where Google searches go. In fact it’s Jamie and the Colonel opening a door. They fear there might be Yeti lurking the other side, as happened earlier. Instead they come across the pulsing fungus. It doesn’t look like the next room has something strange in it, it looks like the door opens to strangeness itself, one reality system invading another. It’s not entering our reality to enact some plan against us, the mere act of it entering our reality is inherently destructive.

Writing about an ‘Outer Limits’ episode he doesn’t even like, Mark Holcomb hits on the term “clinical weirdness”. And much of ‘Web Of Fear’s atmosphere comes from the matter-of-fact military mindset being held up against the all-out weird.

Moving the action forward a few decades, formally speaking this follows on from ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’. Yet because of this sheer otherly business, it’s perhaps more akin to ’Web Planet’, even if the style is less interpretative dance and more Expressionist sketch. Count the ways - all a plot to trap the Tardis/Doctor (delete as appropriate), drones mysteriously carrying out the will of an alien intelligence, whose voice we don’t hear for some while. Not to mention the re-use of webs!

The Troughton era has a reputation for being formulaic. And it’s true that foes recur more frequently than with Hartnell. But just as the Cybermen were reworked in order tell new stories about them, so here is the Great Intelligence.

Yetis On the Loo In Tooting Bec

Among many other things, this is the story which establishes the meta gag “all these tunnels look the same to me.” You could perhaps argue for a long time over whether this is iconic and so became an establishing story in the show’s history, or it was establishing so now feels iconic. So let’s not.

Let’s note instead it doesn’t start in the standard way, with the Tardis landing somewhere new and their crew finding their way about. They’re travellers, after all, not secret agents. Instead the Intelligence makes a grab for the Doctor. There’s nothing that automatically associates that with repeat foes. In fact, ’Web Planet’ used it for an entirely new adversary. And ‘Celestial Toymaker’ for a retconned one. But it was also used with the Daleks, in both ‘The Chase’ and ‘The Evil Of the Daleks’. And a rise in repeat foes made it more likely.

But it’s generally agreed that more was being established here than ‘rogues gallery on rota’. It was also a prototype for stories set on contemporary Earth.(Well, England. Well, London. Well, North London.) Which came into their own with the next Doctor. (Even if they made full use of colour, while this is in every inch a black-and-white story.)

And so we inevitably head to that well-known Jon Pertwee comment: “All the threats should come to Earth… There’s nothing more alarming than coming home and finding a Yeti sitting on your loo in Tooting Bec.” (And I would indeed be alarmed at that thought. My loo being in Tooting Bec, that’s going to get inconvenient.)

An idea which Wood and Miles, in their ’About Time’ guide, pillory as “the worst idea ever.” They make one valid point, that incongruity is primarily a visual motif and less a a story idea. (You see much of it in Surrealist art, for example.) But ’Who’ is often bog-standard plots set on repeat, enlivened by some iconic visuals.

And how do we respond when we get that? Firstly children often perceive ‘imagistically’, taking in a cascade of images, rather than try to follow involved plots. I for one, if looking at old TV shows or comics from my youth, often stumble on an image embedded but isolated in my brain, and think “oh, that’s where that came from.”

Further, memory is primarily visual and highly selective, more a still camera than a CCTV recorder. Where ’Doctor Who’ remained alive, before re-releases were even conceived of, was in people’s memories. The disappointment some feel when re-united with those classic stories may be that their association was only ever with a few images, but became misattributed to the surrounding three hours.

But more importantly, both sides in this debate suppose the link between creating incongruity and Earth-set stories. Which isn’t necessarily the case. What we need is the juxataposition of familiar and unfamiliar, which is quite distinct from saying that we’re English so can only relate to English settings. The important feature in the example above is that the ordinary-looking door opens from an ordinary-looking room. And for that to happen things don’t need to be set on Earth. The earlier story 'The Macra Terror’ worked in a very similar way, despite being set on an unspecified colony which was quite unlike everyday Earth.