Dr Who: 1976 and all that…

Thanks to a thread at missing episodes, I’ve discovered there were actually two Dr Who omnibuses prior to Christmas 1976 – Pyramids of Mars on 27^th November and The Brain of Morbius on 3^rd December, both one hour long and presumably scheduled to fill in the odd mid-season gap between The Deadly Assassin Part 4 on 20^th November and The Face of Evil Part 1 on 1^st Jan 1977.

An omnibus Seeds of Doom was scheduled to follow the first two repeats on 11^th December but was pulled at the last minute in favour of Gerry Anderson’s outer space odyssey Into Infinity.  I’ve heard Into Infinity referred to in the same breath as The Seeds of Doom-omnibus-which-never-was but never quite got the sense of it, assuming that Seeds would definitely have been on 27^th December as per usual.  So I’m grateful to Richard Bignell for the correction.

Quite why the Pyramids and Morbius omnibuses have fallen through my memory I have no idea.

Dr Who: the 1970s’ Christmas omnibuses

Scraps of Dr Who

As this is the season of good will and indulgence, I hope you’ll indulge me just a little…

As a postscript to Dr Who: the 1970s’ Christmas omnibuses and from my 1973 scrapbook, I proudly present my very own cut and paste of the Radio Times cover for 15-21 December.

Nine years old and I can almost smell the Gloy golden gum…

Happy New Year!

 

 

 

---

Dr Who 1970s’ Christmas Omnibuses

 

Dr Who at Christmas: the 1970s Christmas omnibuses: Part 3

A little taste of the times…

Christmas 1974 positively sparkled with an excellent, perhaps the most excellent, adaptation of David Copperfield starring Patience Collier, Martin Jarvis, Arthur Lowe and Jacqueline Pearce whilst in 1975, Crackerjack’s Christmas Pantomime, Robinson Crusoe, featured Windsor Davies, Don Estelle, John Inman and John Lawrie, a different kind of sparkle perhaps.  

Both Christmases were lit up by the annual Dr Who Christmas Omnibus: Planet of the Spiders in 1974 and Genesis of the Daleks in 1975.   

And in 1976..?

---

1974: Dr Who 
Friday 27^th December, 2.45-4.30pm 

1.10 Grandstand – introduced by Tony Gubba
2.45 Dr Who: Planet of the Spiders
4.30 The All Star record Breakers
5.00 National News – with Richard Whitmore
5.10 Tom and Jerry [Regional News – not London]
5.20 Top of the Pops – Noel Edmonds and Dave Lee Travis

‘A complete adventure in one programme starring Jon Pertwee as Dr Who… A Tibetan style monastery in rural England; a stage magician with uncanny powers; an alien crystal… these are the strands of the sinister web woven by the Metabelis Spiders’  – Radio Times billing.

 

Or Jon Pertwee regenerates into Tom Baker – again.

Even the fact that this omnibus began not at 4.00 or 3.30 but at 2.45pm was exciting to me as a ten year old. The earlier time made the screening feel somehow more ‘urgent’ and it was less long to have to wait.

Indulgence

For all its shortcomings and accusations of indulgence (actually the much criticised chase takes up only half of episode 2) Planet of the Spiders remains underappreciated.  A well-crafted story arc gently builds on seeds sewn in The Time Monster (the Doctor’s teacher), The Green Death (Jo) and Invasion of the Dinosaurs (Mike Yates) to provide a coherent and poignant close to the Pertwee era.

Thus a moral tale (the emptiness of power, the innate healing power of mind, surrender of ego followed by rebirth) coupled with an end-of-an era, retrospective feel makes for an ideal Christmas recipe.

The regeneration game 

Most touchingly of all, this was transmitted only the day before Part 1 of Robot in which Tom Baker picks up the mantle and a whole new era of Dr Who begins.  “Tears, Sarah Jane?”  I’m sure I shed some of my own as my familiar white-haired hero was transformed before my eyes into a brown curly-haired stranger for a no less traumatic second time.

As a six-parter, this would have been 2.30 in episode format, so approximately 45 minutes have been lost.

8.6 million viewers tuned in as against a shade over nine million viewers on average for the original.  Throughout the two weeks of Christmas and New Year, BBC-1 showed Holiday Star Trek each weekday morning at 11.45am.  Possibly this may have bumped-up Planet of the Spiders‘ viewing figures.

ITV screen the film Half a Sixpence at 2.25 all the way up to Looks Familiar at 4.50.

Transmutation

Planet of the Spiders is the first omnibus repeat still held in the BBC archives and is included on the DVD release along with the trailer.

 

 

No illustrations accompany the billing in Radio Times but on the Saturday 28th December page we have a Pertwee-Baker transmutation across four photos as if in imitation of the superb Radio Times 10th Anniversary Special artwork which blended the features of the first three doctors across a double-page spread, thus creating Hartnell-Troughton and Troughton-Pertwee hybrids.  This Pertwee-Baker version is rather more basic and it’s clear Pertwee’s head has been matted onto Baker’s be-scarfed body but still it’s a nice try and gets the idea across.

For the first time in the 70s, the new Dr Who season is not marked by a Radio Times cover, odd really considering Tom Baker’s debut the week before.  All my research has drawn a blank as to what did make it onto the New Year edition cover.

 

---

1975: Dr Who: Genesis of the Daleks
Saturday 27^th December, 3.00-4.25pm 

12.15 Grandstand – Introduced by Frank Bough
3.00 Dr Who: Genesis of the Daleks
4.25 The Basil Brush Show – with Roy North
4.50 Final Score 
5.05 News/Weather – with Michael Fish
5.15 It’s Cliff & Friends 
5.50 Saturday Night at the Movies: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, mad World

‘A complete adventure in one programme, starring Tom Baker, written by TERRY NATION… The Time Lords have a mission for the Doctor. He finds himself stranded on Skaro -the planet of the Daleks where a war of attrition is reaching its bitter final stages’ – Radio Times billing.

 

That’s not Terry Nation but TERRY NATION.

Blast off Basil  

No really, Blast Off Basil.

In a bizarre reversal of the usual BBC-1 Saturday evening schedule, Dr Who now precedes Basil Brush which is incongruous given Genesis of The Daleks’ hard-edged, adult themes.  The omnibus would have benefitted immensely had Basil’s twenty-five minutes been added to its running time.  You really need the full exposition to feel the effect.

At the time, I wondered whether the change from Jon Pertwee to Tom Baker might signal the end of the Christmas omnibuses.  Added to that, Season Thirteen had begun not around Christmas 1975 but back in autumn of that year and so was a little past mid-way by Christmas.  There was no longer a need to refresh viewers’ memories and whet their appetites after a six month break.

Butchered 

And yet I was pleased to see Genesis of the Daleks appear in the schedules for 27^th December in time honoured fashion.  But with approximately 65 minutes removed, it was the most excised of the omnibuses.

The tough cut was presumably to meet the demands of a crowded schedule.  In retrospect, it perhaps suggests the BBC losing interest in the idea of Christmas omnibuses.

Changing times

Even as an eleven year old comparing my memory of the episodic broadcast nine months earlier with this butchered version, I was aware that dramatic impact had been sacrificed.  For the first time, I felt less than entirely satisfied.

Having made the change from primary to secondary school three months earlier, in retrospect, my more critical response also seems like one which prefigures adolescence.  Three or four years earlier I’d have been grateful for anything.

Added to that, by this time my parents were ignoring Dr Who, my father not being a fan of Tom Baker’s more ironic, send-up style (he really should have seen this though).  Watching alone and being in a new house I didn’t warm to took away something of the cosiness.

Stopgap Who

In Radio Times, Frank Bellamy’s artwork is captioned: ‘The most important mission the Doctor has ever faced – can he prevent Davros creating his Daleks?’ and depicts all three ‘Ds’.

8.5 million viewers tuned in compared to an average of almost 9.6 million for the spring screening.

The ITV Network runs with ski-ing and wrestling as part of its usual Saturday afternoon World of Sport package.

This was the only time an omnibus was screened on a Saturday.  The Genesis omnibus was used as a stopgap as there was no Dr Who serial later that day with The Android Invasion’s final episode screened on 13^th December and Brain of Morbius not commencing until 3^rd Jan 1976.

Embed from Getty Images

 

---

1976:
Bank Holiday Monday 27th  December 

1.25 [Racing from] Wincanton
2.34 Walt Disney’s Babes in Toyland
4.20 The Superstars
5.30 Evening News – with Richard Whitmore

Tuesday 28th December 

1.00 Racing Grandstand 
2.35 The Nutcracker
4.20 James and the Giant Peach
5.15 Evening News – with Richard Baker

 

And so to my bitter disappointment on discovering that The Seeds of Doom, my favourite Dr Who story since The Green Death some three years earlier was not to be comped come December.

A repeat was planned but then dropped for unknown reasons.  What those were, I can’t imagine. Seeds of Doom even had snow!

Scrooges! 

The unexplained absence marked the missing of a much-loved tradition.  Christmases felt truncated, colder even, accentuated for me by a passing from childhood innocence to self-aware adolescence

1976, aged twelve, was the last year I had a Christmas stocking.    

Cold, cold Christmas 

Perhaps the omnibuses ended because Dr Who seasons no longer ran January- June.  Perhaps new producer Philip Hinchcliffe didn’t favour the format, preferring episodic repeats which became a fairly common feature of the mid-late 70s when scattered across the early-evening weekday schedule usually as summer filler.  Or perhaps there were changes to BBC senior management come 1976.

Had the tradition continued, both Seeds of Doom and especially 1977’s Dickensian/Holmesian The Talons of Weng Chiang, with its fog shrouded London streets and mysterious magic cabinet, present themselves as obvious high calibre candidates.  I struggle once we reach The Invasion of Time (1978) and The Armageddon Factor (1979) admittedly.

For whatever reason, the Christmas feasts were no more.  Inextricably bound to the early-mid 1970s and coinciding exactly with my remembered childhood, the Dr Who Christmas Omnibus tradition had become a magnetic, essential part of my Christmas and still engenders feelings of great warmth forty years on.

Ever since 2005, Dr Who has had a Christmas Special shown on Christmas Day, as if that somehow picked up on a longer established tradition which, like many mythologies, was actually never the case.

A Christmas toast

So perhaps at about 3pm on Tuesday 27^th December 2016, I’ll sit down to Seeds of Doom on DVD with a glass of ginger wine and a mince pie or two.

Until then, in the words of William Hartnell in 1966’s The Feast of Steven (the only old Who episode actually broadcast on Christmas Day): “A Happy Christmas to all of you at home!”

---

Dr Who 1970s’ Christmas Omnibuses Part 1
Dr Who 1970s’ Christmas Omnibuses Part 2
Scraps of Dr Who
Dr Who: 1976 and all that 

 

Dr Who at Christmas: the 1970s Christmas omnibuses: Part 2

Ken Dodd’s ‘We Want to Sing’, those slightly grim visits to children’s hospital wards fronted by Leslie Crowther… Christmas television wasn’t all a bundle of fun for a child of the early 70s.  

But the Dr Who Omnibuses certainly were.  From 1971-75, these glorified adventures became a fixture of my childhood TV Christmas as much as (well, rather more than) the Blue Peter Christmas appeal, Disney Time and All Star Record Breakers. 

Part 1 gave an overview of the tradition.  Here I’m recalling the stories which made up Christmas omnibuses for 1971- The Dæmons, 1972 – The Sea Devils and 1973 – The Green Death.

---

1971: Dr Who and the Dæmons
Tuesday 28^th December, 4.20-5.50pm 

1.10 Grandstand – introduced by Frank Bough
3.55 Here’s Lucy
4.20 Dr Who and the Dæmons
5.50 National News: weatherman Jack Scott
6.00 Tom and Jerry

‘For the first time a complete adventure in one programme starring Jon Pertwee as Dr Who’  – Radio Times billing.

Spotting The Dæmons in Radio Times so completely unexpectedly just before Christmas excited me tremendously.  The anticipation of an hour and a half of my favourite story from my favourite TV programme totally out of the blue was a thrill almost beyond belief.  There was something amazing about Dr Who brightening a mere Tuesday too.

Even better, I’d missed episode two back in the Spring as it had coincided with our Whitson (rain and mumps) break at Lyme Regis in a bungalow which needless to say had no television.

Feature length fun

Note how the Radio Times billing, (which was accompanied by a Frank Bellamy illustration depicting the Master and the Doctor) highlights the omnibus’s feature film feel, encouraging the sense that it is a post-Christmas afternoon matinee treat for all the family to gather around and enjoy.

The 4.20pm start time (earliest ever for Doctor Who to date) meant I watched it with my parents almost throughout; in 1971, Christmas was still no more than a two day break from work for many people but this year Monday 27th and Tuesday 28th were Bank Holidays.

When it came to Dr Who, my father was fully signed up to The Daily Sketch’s maxim, ‘the children’s own programme which adults adore,’ dissenting only if it got ‘a bit too silly’ (Alpha Centauri was a bugbear).  He enjoyed and even admired the programme when he got the chance to see it and the relaxed schedule of Christmas offered an opportunity to really sit back and soak it all up.  My mother flitted in and out to prepare turkey sandwiches (well it was still the 70s) and slice Christmas cake as Azal ruminated on whether or not to sacrifice the Earth.

“A pleasing terror”

As drama dealing in the supernatural, Doctor Who relates to Christmas’ associations with darkness and magic.  This is especially true of The Dæmons.

The supernatural was a popular theme in film and television in the early 70s.  December 1970 had brought the unsettling Play for Today Robin Redbreast and it’s not insignificant that regular Christmas dramatisations of M.R.James ghost stories began in 1971.  Derek Johnston’s Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween is an excellent account of this broadcast tradition.

Undoctored

The Dæmons had been the indisuputable highlight of Season Eight, or at least it was certainly seen that way at the time.  An expensive, location feel resembled British horror and supernatural films of the early 70s, meaning the serial lent itself extremely well to feature film format.

A reprise would remind audiences of the Master’s capture at the tale’s end, a storyline which would be followed up with the Doctor and Jo visiting an imprisoned Master in the following season’s The Sea Devils.

As a five parter, once titles and cliffhanger reprises were omitted, The Dæmons came in at just under two hours long, still a trifle longer than the average film.  Perhaps it was this, or the requirements of the schedule, which dictated a trim.

Approximately thirty-five minutes are lost to give an omnibus running time of ninety minutes.  So (forgetting cliffhangers and reprises) about a fifth of The Dæmons’ actual storyline has hit the cutting room floor.  I don’t think it has ever been revealed who decided what should be cut but Barry Letts must have had the final say.

The omnibus drew a very respectable audience of 10.5 million viewers, more than the average of 8.3 million who viewed the original showing.

ITV were showing a number of mostly children’s programmes in opposition.  As Thames viewers, we would have had The Charlie Brown Show, the always to be avoided Junior Showtime and Magpie, none of which were competition for The Dæmons.

I still remember the sense of anticlimax when the final end credit of The Dæmons – ‘Directed by Christopher Barry’ – faded from the screen along with the ‘Dddrrrrrrrrrwwwrr!!!’

Still it was only four days to go before a brand new story began and in the meantime there was a Radio Times Frank Bellamy cover to study, depicting these strange ‘Daleks’ which, curiously, my parents were already familiar with.

---

1972: Dr Who and the Sea Devils
Wed 27^th December, 3.05-4.45pm 

1.05 Grandstand – Introduced by Frank Bough
2.35 Screen Test
3.10 Dr Who and the Sea Devils
4.35 Thursday’s Child – 1/6 adaptation
5.05 A Collection of Goodies
5.30 National News
5.40 Tom and Jerry
5.45 Fifty Years of Music – or They Don’ Write ‘Em Like That Any More

‘The complete adventure in one programme starring Jon Pertwee as Dr Who’… ‘Now you can see again the whole of the Doctor’s struggle against the Master and the strange creatures from the bottom of the sea’ – Radio Times billing.

Thump!  The Radio Times Christmas number lands on our doormat and I turn straight to the after Christmas listings and – yes!  As I had hoped, The Sea Devils is there.  At this point, my expectation of a tradition was established.

The billing is accompanied by a Frank Bellamy illustration and a caption bearing all the hallmarks of an enthusiastic but not very knowledgeable Radio Times staffer: ‘Time warp time – the Doc takes on the Master and the Sea Devils’.

No turkey  

Again, the choice of story is fervently the right one.  As Season Nine finale, The Time Monster was something of a damp squib: studio bound, experimental, too cerebral at times and a bit of a mess much of the time.

The Sea Devils was expansive, exciting, glossy, stylish, all round cracking entertainment.  With its flashy seafaring escapades, the most fondly remembered story of the 1972 Season ideally lent itself to feature film format.  And then there was that splendid swashbuckling swordfight between the Doctor and The Master.  Could that be a turkey sandwich Jon Pertwee is munching?

8.7 million viewers watched The Sea Devils in December, compared to an average of a little over eight million for the original Spring broadcast.

Meanwhile, Thames opted for an afternoon lineup of Looks Familiar (30s/40s nostalgia panel show) at 3pm, The Saint at 3.30, and at 4.25 Lift Off With Ayshea (Roger Whittaker, Olivia Newton John, 10C.C., and Frankie Stevens).

As a six-parter, an unedited transmission of The Sea Devils would have a running time of 2:30.  The omnibus clocks in at 1.40, representing a loss of approximately 50 minutes.

The Sea Devils omnibus was repeated again at 10.50am on Thursday 23^rd August 1973 and again on Bank Holiday Monday 27^th May 1974 in place of a cricket match making it the most exposed Pertwee story within his tenure.

Who on standby

In other repeats, Day of the Daleks appeared in a one hour slot on Monday 3^rd September 1973 in place of the European Athletics Championships.

It seemed as if Dr Who was becoming a reliable schedule filler.  As a child with no interest in sport, these totally ‘out of the blue’ reappearances had a magic of their own though why I was on hand to have seen them all, I cannot say.  It was almost as if, even in the middle of a summer morning, by wishing Dr Who were on, I made it happen.

After that breathtaking Christmas Sea Devils omnibus there would be only three days to wait for the new season.  My appetite had been whetted by the charismatic threesome adorning the New Year Radio Times cover.

---

1973: Dr Who: The Green Death
Thursday  27^th December, 4.00-5.30pm 

1.00 Racing
2.30 The World of Jimmy Young
3.15 Penguin City – narrated by Peter Scott
4.00 Dr Who: The Green Death
5.30 National News
5.40 Tom and Jerry
5.45 Top of the Pops – Ten Years of Pop Music, 1964-74 with Jimmy Saville

‘A complete adventure in one programme starring Jon Pertwee as Dr. Who.  Deep in an abandoned coalmine the Doctor faces the hideous result of industrial pollution.  Now you can see once more the whole story of the terrible threat of the giant maggots’ – Radio Times billing.

1973 was the Christmas of The Goodies and the Beanstalk shown at 5.15pm on Christmas Eve on BBC-2.  But even The Goodies at their best was trumped by a repeat of my favourite Dr Who story to date.

Yes, the one with the maggots.  What lovely Christmas viewing to accompany a nation collectively munching on cold turkey sandwiches.

Radio Times this time features a two panel photo-strip to accompany the billing which shows Pertwee in close-up declaring: “The maggots are all over the place!” whilst in the second panel Jo and Cliff, clambering over rocks within sight of a giant maggot, exclaim: “…come on let’s get out of here!’

BBC-1 New Season!

The 1974 season of Dr Who began not on the first Saturday of the New Year (as had been the case on 3^rd January 1970, 2^nd January 1971 and 1^st January 1972) but two weeks before that on 15^th December 1973 meaning that The Green Death omnibus fell, somewhat inconveniently, between episodes 2 and 3 of The Time Warrior.

This inauspicious timing removed some of the impetus behind a repeat as curtain-raiser to a new season, especially as Jo Grant was now a Season Ten throwback having left at the end of The Green Death.  

Green Christmas 

The Green Death was by far my favourite story of Season Ten and my favourite Dr Who story to date.  I was thrilled that it, not, as I had feared The Three Doctors, was picked as the Christmas omnibus.  The 10^th anniversary story featuring William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton was of course a major landmark and had a pantomime whimsicality which lent itself well to Christmas.  But no, there’s nothing like a Welsh coal mine full of giant green maggots to brighten a Yuletide afternoon.  I suspect Barry Letts would have been especially keen to push for The Green Death as the serial aired many of his environmental concerns.

For all its high revulsion factor and ecological proselytising, The Green Death also had an unusually emotional storyline: the developing romance between Jo Grant and the young Professor Jones.  At the end of episode six, Jo accepts Cliff’s proposal of marriage, leaving the Doctor to drive off alone into the sunset.  This affecting side to the story and its tear jerking culmination makes for an appropriately heart-warming story for Christmas.

Galloping home

I vividly recall being so excited seeing The Green Death again that I could hardly tear myself away to go to the toilet (though you’ll be pleased to know I did).  I can remember galloping downstairs three steps at a time to get back to the sofa.

As a six-parter, The Green Death would have been 2.30 in episode format, so, approximately 60 minutes have been lost, unfortunately a more major incision than The Sea Devils’.

The audience was a healthy 10.4 million viewers, substantially more than the average of 7.7 million who viewed the original broadcast.

Thames gave us at 4.20pm Children of Eskdale, a re-showing of Barry Cockcroft’s acclaimed documentary and at 5.20pm Lift Off With Ayshea (Slade, New World and The All Night Rock Show sing ’20 Fantastic Sounds’).

The start of the new Dr Who season had still been marked by a Radio Times cover (the pre-Christmas edition) which was perhaps not the best but at least Pertwee was centre stage.  So it seemed as if the Radio Times tradition was confidently continuing along with the omnibuses.  More than that, there was November’s brilliant Radio Times Dr Who 10^th Anniversary Special to enjoy and the 1974 Dr Who Annual courtesy of Father Christmas.

Next week, I’ll conclude with a look back to the omnibuses of 1974 and 1975, Planet of the Spiders and Genesis of the Daleks, and speculate as to why the tradition ended there.

---

Dr Who 1970s’ Christmas Omnibuses Part 1
Dr Who 1970s’ Christmas Omnibuses Part 3

 

Dr Who at Christmas: the 1970s Christmas omnibuses: Part 1

I’ve stayed shy of posting on Dr Who as it’s such a giant universe unto itself.  But as Christmas grows closer, this is the first of three posts on a particular Whovian manifestation and one with a strongly seasonal flavour – the Dr Who Christmas Omnibuses of the 1970s.

---

December 1976… on this day, or thereabouts, forty years ago I got a nasty shock.

The Christmas double-issue Radio Times arrived through our letter box that morning with a reassuring thud, an event which, each year, I anticipated with much excitement.  I turned straight to the BBC-1 listings for 27^th December to check the start time for the omnibus Dr Who: The Seeds of Doom only to find… there was none.

Instead of pods, compost crushers and obscene vegetable matter, the afternoon was dominated, with a camp surrealism, by Walt Disney’s Babes in Toyland and sportsfest Superstars.  A quick flick through to 28^th and 26^th December, just in case, then a scour through the entire magazine showed The Seeds of Doom was nowhere to be found.

To say I felt disappointed or even cheated was an understatement.  Gutted would be more accurate.

On the third day of Christmas…

Doctor Who omnibuses had been a fixture of my Christmas since 1971 when I was seven.  Always scheduled on the afternoons of 27^th or 28^th December, this Yuletide treat extended Christmas Day and Boxing Day festivities into a third day.

As an only child, Christmas Day and Boxing Day were spent in entirely adult company with my parents and their friends, Vivien and Earnest.  Although this might sound like a hardship to some, I thoroughly enjoyed our Christmases (we played games too!) but it did mean both days were lead by adults whereas 27^th December felt like my day.

With the house festooned with decorations and Christmas tree lights deeply glowing as the day darkened, feature-length Dr Who was the perfect afternoon accompaniment to Christmas cake and Yuletide log.

Forty years on, I’m reviving that tradition by revisiting those omnibuses across three posts.  Here I’ll look at why the early 70s offered fertile ground for the omnibuses and at their appeal to an avid, young Dr Who fan.  Then across two further posts, I’ll review the the stories shown each year and my memories of seeing them.

Box of delights 

Embed from Getty Images

 

I got an immense thrill in the days and hours leading up to these feature-length Whos, counting down the minutes to the start.  The thrill was no less than the anticipation of a brand new Dr Who episode on a Saturday at 5.15, different, yes, but just as intense, like reliving an exciting experience knowing just how amazing it was going to be, also knowing that the excitement would last four times as long.  I couldn’t wait for it to start and when it did, I couldn’t bear for it to end.  I’d count down the minutes towards the closing titles too as if in dread anticipation of my disappointment.

A repeat meant marvelling once more at extraordinary sights like the devil appearing in a village church threatening to destroy the world or the Sea Devils rising from beneath the waves.

It also allowed opportunities to spot elements of story or setting which had passed me by the first time as well as checking those bits which didn’t reappear.

And the timing made it feel so incredibly special, the perfect Christmas present delivered by the BBC, every year.

Like so many aspects of childhood, this one felt as if it would go on forever.  But it was not to be.  I didn’t know it at the time but the Dr Who Christmas Omnibus tradition had ended with Genesis of the Daleks in 1975.

Repeating itself

Doctor Who repeats were rare indeed.

In the 60s, Evil of the Daleks was the only complete serial to be shown again in June 1967.

Summer 1971 brought a highly unexpected Friday teatime episodic repeat of Jon Pertwee’s debut, Spearhead from Space, perhaps partly as a schedule-filler, partly as an acknowledgement of the series’ rising profile.

Then came Dr Who and the Dæmons, ‘for the first time a complete adventure’, on Monday 28^th December 1971.

What may have prompted this first Christmas repeat in a new format?

A Christmas celebration  

Following declining ratings, in 1970 Dr Who was given a chance to prove itself with a new actor, Jon Pertwee, in the title role.  The 1970 season was judged an artistic and commercial success so the series’ future, for now, was secured.

By 1971, with a second season of improved ratings and audience appreciation under its belt, Dr Who merited additional exposure as a further boost to its rising profile.

Evidence that the BBC wanted to get behind the series came in the form of the New Year Radio Times covers which graced the start of all five Jon Pertwee seasons.  Radio Times was very pro-Doctor Who during Pertwee’s tenure.

Throughout the 60s, Doctor Who was shown almost all year round.  But from 1970, seasons were 25 or 26 weeks long only running roughly January-June, meaning the show was off the air throughout the summer and autumn months.  So a Christmas repeat of a story from that year’s January-June run would serve as a curtain raiser for the new season.

The story goes that, following original transmission in May, Episode One of The Deamons was discussed by BBC1 controller Paul Fox and Richard Levin, head of television design. Both men commended the quality of the story’s script and production and it was perhaps Paul Fox’s support which producer Barry Letts was then able to leverage to bring about the Christmas omnibus in December 1971.

Could there have been a 1970 omnibus?  Obviously, yes, in theory but three out of four Season Seven stories were exceptionally long seven-parters and probably Barry Letts hadn’t been long enough in the job to propose the idea.  An Inferno omnibus would have been quite something though.

Which story to tell?

What of the choice of stories across Christmases 1971-75?  Each selection surely had to be the story judged ‘best’ from the previous season, whether in terms of ratings, audience appreciation or some other vaguer sense of impact.

An obvious candidate would be the climactic story.  A reprise would remind viewers where they had left Dr Who series six months earlier and create momentum into the start of the new season beginning in just a few days time.  Three out of five stories chosen over 1971-75 were series finales, the exceptions (quite rightly) being The Sea Devils and Genesis of the Daleks.

Despite the much heard criticism that six part stories are too long, all stories given the omnibus treatment were six-parters (The Dæmons is an honorary six parter) perhaps because they tended to be the more expensive, more expansive, higher profile adventures, resembling the blockbuster feel of a one-off feature film.

Yet the BBC could simply have opted for four parters – The Claws of Axos, Day of the Daleks, The Three Doctors, Destiny of the Daleks and Revenge of the Cybermen – and saved themselves the trouble of making cuts.  I’m so glad they didn’t.

Or, worse still, they could have chosen the wrong six-parters – Colony in Space, The Mutants, Frontier in Space, Monster of Peladon.  What a post-Christmas comedown that would have been (it is specifically the non-Earth six-parters which are to blame for the genre’s overlong, overpadded reputation).

Happily the stories selected, presumably by Barry Letts, were the right ones every time.

I hope you’ll join me for two more posts in the leadup to Christmas when I’ll look at each of these stories in turn, starting next week with 1971-73: The Dæmons, The Sea Devils and The Green Death.

Photo Credit: buddymedbery Flickr via Compfight cc

---

Dr Who 1970s’ Christmas Omnibuses Part 2

 

Soldier and Me: incredible afterthoughts

Having watched Soldier and Me again (my second and inevitably more critical DVD viewing) a friend and I spotted a few slightly incredible aspects to the plot.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say they’re holes, just unlikely though quite endearing coincidences.

Given that the chase covers such a wide area both in Stockport and across the Lake District, it’s highly improbable that Jim and Pavel’s pursuers could have kept such a near constant tab on them.   The boys are out of reach yet curiously close at hand.

The most unlikely moment of all is Smiler boarding the same train out of town and turning up in the same carriage.  His face emerging from behind a newspaper is a great ‘reveal’ moment until you stop to think about how it could have come about.

In a curious way, the ‘never too far away’ chase does fit in with Jim’s diminished, city-boy notions of the vast Lake District – if you head for a farm near a lake it’s bound to be Nichol’s farm.

Still, where would thrillers be without coincidences?  It’s all exciting stuff especially when viewed through my ten year old – rather than 50-something – eyes.

Soldier and Me review

Soldier and Me

Original TV series: 9 episodes [23-24 mins] • tx. 15.09.74 – 11.11.74 • Granada for ITV • Network DVD 2-disc set released 17th August 2015.  

---

If you think that 70s children’s television drama means cramped studio sets, received pronunciation kids and bad CSO then think again.  BAFTA winning Soldier and Me dispels all these expectations.

Fundamentally a thriller, Soldier and Me is also action adventure, a road movie, a buddy drama and a kind of coming of age film – not to mention the more obvious grand chase.

It remains intelligent, compulsive, gritty and funny over forty years on.

 

The unravelled thread

Set against the fallout of the 1968 Prague Spring uprising (an interest in the iron curtain countries was something of a preoccupation for left-leaning Granada), the drama centres around two boys, Czech refugee Pavel Szolda ‘Soldier’(Richard Willis) who involves the older and more streetwise Jim Woolcott (Gerry Sundquist) in a plot by a Czech gang to murder a dissident.

The boys try to unravel the plot but end up being pursued by gunmen across open countryside.

Authentic

Director Carol Wilks, producer Brian Armstrong and lighting cameraman Ray Goode had all worked on Granada’s World in Action and bring something of that series’ uncompromised authenticity to bear on Soldier and Me.  Filmed entirely on location, the series doesn’t flinch from showing the toughness of survival in harsh terrain and the sense of genuine threat from the armed plotters.  

The dramatically lit sequence in which the boys witness a night time interrogation, are discovered hiding in the language school and then make their initial getaway – rapid action intercut with telling stills –  is particularly well done.

Best buddies?

The boys’ incongruous relationship, unsentimentally portrayed throughout as irritability (on Jim’s part), gradually matures into mutual respect.  I like the late scene in which Jim realises that they will always remember what they have been through together.

Gerry Sandquist and Richard Willis are both excellent, Jim’s deadpan commentary adding a drily sardonic edge to the drama.  Richard Willis probably had the harder part here, burdened with large round spectacles, school uniform and a tendency to whine and wriggle rather a lot but there is a vulnerability and fearlessness to his accident prone character which is endearing.

I won’t give the ending away except to say that there is a little learning about the adult world which isn’t nearly as heavy handed as that perhaps sounds.

Run for your life 

Every road movie needs strong, seemingly incidental scenes to add interest and spectacle along the way and Soldier and Me has some particularly vivid ones such as Jim’s struggle for air amidst a smother of women in a small clothes shop and the boys’ night time school break-in which leads to a direct descent into a toilet bowl.  Although comic, these scenes feel genuine and well observed.

A number of bold sequences wouldn’t make it into children’s drama today – a leap off a moving train (prompting a warning at the time), riding two to a bike across rough terrain, an encounter with a gun toting farmer (Jack Woolgar) not to mention teenage smoking.  A memorable scene in which Jim flirts with a grinning woman on a train, hoping she might pass him one of her sandwiches, certainly wouldn’t.

Northern grit

A strong sense of locale, characteristic of Manchester-based Granada, is another of the series’ strengths.

The opening episode features stark, almost expressionist black-and-white shots of Salford’s back-to-backs and open spaces whilst in the second half the rugged beauty of the Lake District is more than just a back-drop (changed from the original Norfolk of David Line’s novel Run for Your Life).

Grainy darkness

Extensive use is made of what looks like genuine night-time filming which would have been expensive in the mid-70s.

Sometimes, the action seems to emerge from a grainy darkness, so much more atmospheric than the blue tinged, theatrical approximations of night often seen in television drama today though, having said that, the film stock hasn’t aged too well and would have benefitted from a  little loving restoration.

Familiar faces

Richard Wilson (One Foot in the Grave), Harry Markham (Kes, This Sporting Life, A Kind of Loving), Fred Feast (Coronation Street) and Derrick O’Connor (Hope and Glory, Pirates of the Carribbean) are among the well known faces in supporting roles.

The gun shot which pre-empts the opening title credits is fired by Jack Woolgar  stalwart of 60s and 70s film and television, perhaps best known for playing Carney in Crossroads in the mid-70s.

And it’s all rounded off with a funky theme.  I particularly enjoy the scenes when it sounds as if there is a guy at an electric piano happily noodling away to the action.  There is a suitably doleful flute rendition of the theme at the mid-point of latter episodes.

The Czech gang listen to Smetana’s Vltava on a car radio and this gradually becomes an emerging soundtrack to the end-drama itself – most effective.

No subtitles

A single flaw is that at times the gang members speak in English so as to let the audience in on the plot whereas subtitles over genuinely Czech dialogue would have preserved the series’ uncompromised feel.

The notes to accompany the DVD insist that Soldier and Me was broadcast on Sundays whereas I am fairly certain I remember it in the 4.50-5.20 weekday slot on Thames.  Richard Willis’ notes say that broadcast was delayed until 1975 whereas the DVD gives dates of September – November 1974 and I’d say that falls in with my recollections.

Oh, and we learn that the memorable slow-motion title sequence in which Gerry Sundquist tumbles down a hill until his bottom crashes into the camera was exactly what happened and entirely by accident.

The (not so) long chase

If you remember Soldier and Me, you have probably seen it again already.  If not, and you’re feeling a little sceptical, give it a try and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Some might find the chase sequences a little spun out but when I’m reminded that the BBC’s The Long Chase (seemingly wiped) was 26 episodes long to Soldier and Me‘s nine, I think I’ll forego that criticism.

Richard Willis’ personal reminiscences of making the series

A terrific, eclectic review by Frank Collins looks at the book as well as the TV adaptation, drawing on features in TVTimes and Look-In.
 

---

Soldier and Me: incredible afterthoughts
 

The Changes DVD Review

Original TV series: 10 episodes, tx. Jan-Mar 1975, 5.20-5.45pm, BBC-1
DVD: 2-disc set, BFI, August 2014 

---

It sounds grumpy to begin a review by saying ‘Why has it taken so long?’ The Changes is a well remembered, ground-breaking piece of television, first transmitted almost forty years ago.  There was a re-showing on UK Gold in 1994 (imagine that now) and pirated copies have been in circulation for a while but the series seems little regarded by the BBC itself and has been allowed to quietly rest in semi-obscurity.

So it falls to the BFI to release The Changes on DVD which means it comes with a minimum of fuss and commercial blah and we are treated to a thirty page booklet which is thorough and informative (justifying the slightly higher than the norm asking price).

Picture quality is perfectly watchable considering no restoration work has taken place and, sadly, is unlikely to do so as this is not regarded as a major league release.   Sound is fine throughout, thanks in part to actors not mumbling their lines beneath frenetic soundtracks as is so often the case today, though the closing theme does sound a trifle wobbly on its sustained notes.

Peter Wright’s opening essay sets The Changes within the socio-economic context of the times though perhaps not everyone will agree with his analysis. He also examines the series set against developments in BBC children’s television in the early-mid 70s.  Interviews with cast members and particularly with director John Prowse and producer/adaptor Anna Home would have been the icing on the cake but Wright’s essay, in reviewing documentation from the time, rightly pays tribute to Home and BBC Head of Children’s Television, Monica Sims, as major forces in seeing The Changes through to completion.

The booklet also features composer Paddy Kingsland’s recollections and useful biographical pieces on Kingsland, Peter Dickinson and Anna Home.

Apart from the obligatory stills gallery, the sole DVD extra is an only mildly interesting 1983 government film consisting entirely of stills, At Home in Britain, about the lives of Asian residents living in Britain.
 

---

The Changes: bad wires, good faith and a question of balance
 

The Changes: bad wires, good faith and a question of balance

10 episodes, Original tx. Jan-Mar 1975, 5.20-5.45pm, BBC-1

A well remembered and ground-breaking children’s drama series emerges from the  mists of the mid-70s into 2014 and onto DVD.  This is what ‘The Changes’ means to me now and what it meant back then.  

---

Embed from Getty Images

World’s End Housing Estate, January 1975

1975

I was nearly eleven when The Changes was first broadcast in January 1975. It was a pertinent age to view the series as it prefigured major changes in my life that year.

1975 was the year I moved from a cosy village school to a huge comprehensive.  Almost simultaneously, my parents left the comfortable, airy 60s detached house of my childhood and bought an older building which needed a lot of repair, making it feel exposed, unhomely and, crucially, pre-modern.

The series unfolds not just as Nicky’s search for the origin of The Changes but as her own journey from child to adolescent. It was a journey I was not yet ready to make in January 1975.  But as the year advanced, I had a sense of stepping into a harsher, less sheltered world, underscored by my growing awareness of the sort of issues tackled by The Changes.  By the end of 1975 I was forced to leave childish things behind as a premature adolescence began.  The sombre feel of The Changes prefigures the depressive mood of my teenage years and their search for meaning and identity.

‘A series for older viewers’

I am sure I recall the pre and post-John Craven’s Newsround warning of unusually adult content in the forthcoming programme at 5.20, as that sort of message would definitely have made me prick up my ears. I couldn’t have guessed at how visceral and violent that content was to be.

Episode One’s opening scene is one of domestic familiarity – schoolgirl Nicky Gore does her homework with the television on in the background while her mother sits knitting and father reads the paper.  Then, from nowhere and everywhere, the angry ‘noise’ begins, prompting Nicky’s father, involuntarily, to smash the television.  It is hard to express how shocking, how terrifying was that sudden and inexplicable act of savagery in a suburban living room, witnessed in my own suburban living room back in 1975.

This single act leads into an orgy of mass destruction taking place across Britain, apparently caused by the noise compelling people to destroy machinery. The scenes of electrical appliances and even bicycles dragged onto streets and smashed up alongside burning cars, were – and still are – incredibly disturbing.  The series talks openly about many people left to die and we see Nicky forced to leave an old man in a doorway to fend for himself.  A thin veneer of civilisation is stripped away literally overnight as Britain is cast back into a pre-industrial age.

I don’t think I had seen anything so unsettling on television, carrying such an air of urgent threat perhaps since the apocalyptic Dr Who story Inferno almost five years earlier. The sense of dislocation, panic and utter fear is palpable.

Parallel worlds

What was depicted in that first episode built upon my semi-conscious awareness of growing discontent in the adult world around me, a world of sudden power-cuts, energy conservation campaigns (‘Save It!’) and constant scenes of industrial conflict on the television news.  What I was experiencing was a child’s view of the breakdown of the post-war consensus and the very uncertainty of society itself.  The Changes also bore disturbing parallels with the notion of a post holocaust Britain, at a time when I was becoming aware of the cold war and nuclear threats.

Seen now, it is as if what we are looking at is an alternative view of Britain, an extreme form of what might have come about if industrial decline had continued apace and instead of being propelled into a world of Thatcherite conspicuous consumption and an economy driven by global financial services, Britain reverted to a kind of isolated communitarian/agrarian republic, overall poorer yet potentially more egalitarian and with a distinctly land-based local identify, too fragmented to be called patriotic.  In other words, a wholesale rejection of consumer capitalism and all that has come to be seen as ‘modernity’.  This perhaps seems fanciful in an age of 24/7 electronic media saturation and near global capitalism but would not have seemed so to Britain ‘managing decline’ in the mid-70s.

When Anna Home came to adapt Peter Dickinson’s trilogy – The Weathermonger, Heartsease, The Devil’s Children – she inserted this pre-Changes opening episode to allow the full force of what follows to have maximum impact.

‘Devil’s Children’

Nicky and her parents try to escape to France but she becomes separated from them amidst the chaos of the city streets.  Compelled to make her own way, she chances across a small band of travelling Sikhs and joins them.

It took me a while to accept this turn of the story as a child, as, at first, it seemed insufficiently connected to what had gone before.  In retrospect, as a ten year old, I was probably a little young for the programme’s target audience and wanted episode one’s explicit sense of drama and threat to continue, if not heighten.  I can appreciate the subsequent episodes more now than then.

The sensitive and overwhelmingly positive portrayal of the Sikhs – the contrast between Nicky’s can-do feminist individualism and the Sikh’s deferential traditionalism – is an unusually forward-thinking aspect of the series at a time when British television sitcoms were awash with crude cultural stereotypes.  The series shows how genuine understanding, respect and affection can be established across racial, cultural and religious divides.  But The Changes never wears its liberal, feminist, multiethnic and environmentalist credentials on its sleeve and does not feel patronising in its portrayal of race and culture.  Nicky encounters and adjusts to this new world and we do so with her.

It seems extraordinary that it took a series for children to ask whether a minority community can thrive in a ‘host’ country (the debate was still framed in this way then) and show how this might look.

‘Wicked and dangerous’

Racism, misogyny and suspicion rear their ugly heads as a kind of neo-feudalism takes over the land. Machines become synonymous with ‘wickedness’, outsiders and dissenters branded as ‘evil.’  Nicky herself is put on trial as a witch and faces death by stoning.  The series seems to be making a critique of dangerously inward-looking tribal religiosity, one which is entirely white and male dominated.

As The Changes is shot entirely on film and on location, it benefits from an immediacy which studiobound drama of the time often lacks. It is essential that what we are seeing looks and feels like ‘the real world’ and indeed it does.  Only occasionally do we drift slightly into children’s drama cliché – the choreographed fight sequences in episode five and the exaggerated baddie acting of the black bearded robber chief are cases in point.  Other characters, such as Arthur Barnard the bigoted farmer turned quasi-squire, impart a genuine sense of brutish ignorance and menace.

There are very few special effects overall, bar a mind-bending, colour saturated sequence and kaleidoscopic review of key scenes in Episode Ten and the series doesn’t demand them.  Its unflashiness is one of its great virtues.

I like the fact that it is not afraid to adopt a lighter tone and a leisurely pace at times.  This gives a greater sense of ‘real time’ unfolding and of the slower feel to life following The Changes.  It accentuates the role that the land itself plays in the drama – the changing landscape of river, farmland, woodland and forest.  It’s possible to see the middle episodes of The Changes as some kind of English, ruralist road movie with Vicky’s journey becoming less and less connected with the modern and the urban and more and more with the past, the land and, eventually, a mythical England.

The Noise

Embed from Getty Images

Bad wires: The noise seems to travel along power-lines

Paddy Kingsland’s synth/electric guitar dominated incidental music (with sitar and tabla for the episodes featuring the Sikhs) gives the series a great deal of ruralist medievalist/70s atmosphere. There is perhaps a little too much music at times, particularly in some of the earlier episodes (the overuse of the same theme in different keys at the start of Episode Four grates a little) but there are also some lovely and most evocative passages such as Episode Nine’s horseback ride which is beautifully shot too.

In the DVD booklet, Paddy Kingsland’s recalls almost smashing up his Delaware synthesiser to create the noise.  The result is chillingly effective, a little like running a pencil over piano strings with the sustain pedal held down whilst holding your head in the instrument’s cavity so that you are both surrounded by the swirling sound and feeling its resonance inside your head  – only ten times as terrifying.

The unusual option to include different music for start and end titles works very well, underlying the before and after worlds and with an apt musical amalgam of the two at the story’s conclusion. The opening theme uses tabla and synth to convey – in a 70s funk kind of way – the fast pace of modern, urban life, then giving way to the noise and a sense of disintegration.  The trumpet/horns dominated end theme hints at something medieval and magisterial, yet timeless.  It has a kind of foreboding, understated grandeur.

I also like the device of actually showing the scene of the story’s climax – the mysterious standing stone in a quarry cavern – as the closing titles’ backdrop to all ten episodes, so that as each episode advances we have the sense of moving another step closer towards this ending, the source of The Changes. The imagery forms a totally unexpected end to Episode One, intrigues us by Episode Seven, and begins to make sense by episode Eight or Nine.

The voice of the ‘thing’ is masterfully realised – the sound of something ancient, unknown and unknowable, hidden from us yet conveying a sense of great latent power and elemental emotion which threatens to burst forth in full fury at any moment – infinitely more effective than standard alien monotone sci-fi voices.

Merlin myth

I am not sure how I feel about the eventual resolution lying in myth and legend.  In some ways, the largely unexplained magical ending seems like a kind of retreat from the hard-edged nature of what has gone before.  On the other hand, it embeds the series’ radical social/political agenda in wider, deeper notions of time, place, continuity, freedom and change as well as myth, legend and the unexplained.

Nicky’s confronting the thing has echoes of 1971 Doctor Who story The Dæmons, in which another spirited but defenceless female (Jo Grant) risks all to confront an immense source of power in mythological form and in so doing, a threat to the world is averted.  Another parallel with The Dæmons is Nicky’s conversation with Jonathan as the industrial world returns, in which she reflects that human-beings must be free to make their own mistakes, decide their own futures, even if those decisions may seem dangerous and wrong.

This ending seems to express an optimism that an innate balance can be found.  Perhaps that is ultimately what The Changes is about – balance and equanimity.

Over time

Such has been the rapid pace of technological change over the last forty years that a pre-Changes world of 1975 probably feels to us, or certainly our children, almost medieval in its crudeness.   It’s strange to think that I lived through that ‘medievalism’.

The Changes remains an ambitious, challenging and highly original piece of television. The further away we move from the mid-70s, the more clearly I see how The Changes draws upon many themes of the time, themes I was only dimly aware of as a ten year old.  Those same themes – environmentalism, multiculturalism, racism – and The Changes itself, remain as pertinent today as nearly forty years ago.

Don’t be put off by the early-web appearance of Tony Gosling’s Bilderberg.com as this site as it is an excellent resource on The Changes.  In fact, its primitivism seems oddly fitting.

Robin Carmody’s essay is a passionate and insightful appreciation of The Changes.  

---

The Changes DVD Review

New on Lightspots

When I began Lightspots, the focus was always going to be on 60s music but I had it in mind to move beyond that over time into related areas such as film and television, still with a retro slant.  I’ve updated my  About page to say a bit more about this.

Regulars will have already noticed a couple of recent television reviews.  Now I’d like to widen the scope to look at two overlooked 70s television series which, I hope you’ll agree, deserve a wider audience.  Hopefully you may have seen them just recently as both were released on DVD last month.  They are The Boy from Space and The Changes.

The Boy from Space

The Boy from Space is a well remembered, chilling drama from the BBC’s Look and Read series.  Although created for schools’ television, I think it stands up well as an effective piece of drama in its own right.  I’ve tried to show how some of the educational aspects, rather than detracting from the drama, actually serve it rather well.

The Changes

The Changes has been released to quite cool reviews in some quarters and clearly disappoints some who saw it in 1975 or those wanting a more action-oriented thriller.  But I think it deserves to be remembered as an ambitious piece of children’s television which resonates strongly with many key aspects of Britain in the mid-70s.

I’ve reviewed The Boy from Space this week.  The Changes will follow next Friday.  There will be two pieces on each series – one covering the DVD release and a second, much fuller article discussing each series and offering a personal perspective from this child turned adult viewer.

Rest assured that music remains the mainstay here so the next music post is just two weeks away!  There is a new page, My 60s to maintain the musical strand until then.

Have a good weekend
David