Doctor Who, page 3 of 8

It struck me recently how Lovecraftian my favourite period of Doctor Who (the first half of Tom Baker’s reign) was. I don’t know if there was ever an explicit influence, but the fact it was a science fiction show being made during a British horror boom (the early seventies), probably led to a certain amount of natural crossover.

Script editor Robert Holmes certainly brought in (or encouraged) all sorts of horror and sci-fi influences, mostly filmic ones — King Kong  in “Robot”, The Thing from Another World in “The Seeds of Doom”, The Beast With Five Fingers in “The Hand of Fear”, Frankenstein in “The Brain of Morbius”, for instance. He wanted to “darken things up a little”, saying “I don’t think it would be unfair to accuse us of aiming towards a slightly ‘gothic’ area. Tom always called it ‘Who-noir’.” (quoted in Classic Who: The Hinchcliffe Years by Adrian Rigelsford)

Another thing that led to a Lovecraftian feel could have been Holmes’s attempt to shrug off good/evil dichotomies. According to producer Philip Hinchcliffe, Holmes “had a theory that there’s no such thing as good or evil in the universe; it’s all just part of a process, and the side you fall into simply depends on how you’re made. He was fascinated by the notion of an organic life-form which lands on earth and causes havoc because it’s neither intentionally bad or good, it’s just that its ‘process’ conflicts with ours and appears evil by comparison.” (from Classic Who, again.) This is pretty much spelled out by Sutekh: “Your evil is my good, Doctor. I am Sutekh the Destroyer. Where I tread I leave nothing but dust and darkness. That, I find good.”

Of course, Doctor Who could never have addressed the underlying cosmic horror outlook of Lovecraft. The Doctor is a heroic figure, and it’s one of the tenets of Lovecraftian horror that people can never be heroic — cannot, in fact, ever be anything other than gnats and flies before the terrible forces that rule our universe. (“In my presence, you are an ant, a termite — abase yourself, you grovelling insect!” — the ever-quotable Sutekh.) Doctor Who, on the other hand, had a fundamentally optimistic nature (necessarily so, perhaps, being a kid’s show). When the Doctor defeats Sutekh, it’s with the feeling of things being returned to their rightful balance, rather than a brief avoidance of an eventually inevitable human defeat (which is how “The Call of Cthulhu” ends). And just consider how Lovecraft would have viewed the story of one of the Doctor’s human companions — more as the sort of alien abduction perpetrated in “The Whisperer in Darkness” or “The Shadow Out of Time” than a romp through space & time, with the Doctor, perhaps, as a sort of charlatan Nyarlathotep figure.

But it’s surprising how much of a similar feel the alien creatures had during these few seasons to Lovecraft’s creations:

insect-like creatures who can fly through the vacuum of space — the Mi-Go (Lovecraft), and the Wirrn (Doctor Who)…

a man transformed into a giant, lumbering, tentacled monster intent on wiping out all human life — the creature at the end of “The Dunwich Horror” (Lovecraft), and Keller transformed into a Krynoid at the end of “The Seeds of Doom” (Doctor Who)…

an alien entity who wants nothing more than to destroy all life in the universe, but who has been imprisoned in a tomb on Earth — Cthulhu (Lovecraft) and Sutekh (“The Pyramids of Mars”)…

a created lifeform, intended as a servant/soldier, destroys the race that created it — Shoggoths (At the Mountains of Madness) and the nascent Daleks (“Genesis of the Daleks”) who, in their naked form, are rather Lovecraftian sea-slug-like slimy blobs…

an ancient alien lifeform, buried for millions of years, is uncovered and comes to life again — At the Mountains of Madness, “The Hand of Fear”.

To me, the most Lovecraftian creatures are the Fendahleen — perhaps just because they spring from the same impulse to try and create a monster that doesn’t simply look like a man in a suit (in the case of Doctor Who) or which isn’t just a slight alteration of the human form, but is designed to be totally alien to everything we ever think of as human (in the case of Lovecraft’s monsters).

Of course, a more direct source of influence on “The Image of the Fendahl”, with its ancient, alien powers being released by scientists examining a 12 million year old skull, is Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit. But the Lovecraftianism of Nigel Kneale’s output is a whole nother subject (the meteorites of Quatermass II — nicked virtually wholesale by Doctor Who in “Spearhead from Space” (another Robert Holmes story) — to me recalls Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out Of Space”, for instance.)

So, to recap: Sutekh is Nyarlathotep, Zygons are Deep Ones, and the Doctor ought to faint more often.

What a magnificent piece of TV Robin of Sherwood was/is. Rewatching its first two series recently, I was struck by how much it creates its own special atmosphere, its own world. I know this has to be true of every successful TV series, and by being set in a specific historical period, complete with Medieval costumes and crumbling Norman-conquest era castles, Robin of Sherwood certainly has a shortcut to establishing a visual signature that programmes set in modern times don’t have, but the series works its magic in other ways, too. At times, it’s as much mood-piece as it is drama, set in a timeless realm of myth and imagination as much as it is in recognisable English history. And quite appropriately, too, for the retelling of an oft re-told tale, and one which takes the resilience of myth and memory over mortality, and the old ways over the new — its credo is “Nothing is forgotten” — as one of its tenets of belief.

A big chunk of its atmosphere, of course, comes from Clannad’s enchanting soundtrack, which mixes the ancient (folky & medieval-sounding instruments) with the modern (the occasional bit of soft synth). The fact that it reuses a stock set of pieces, rather than (as was the practice with, say, Doctor Who) having a completely original score for each episode, just goes to emphasise this timelessness, as each piece — “Battles” for action sequences, “Strange Land” for mounting tension, “Lady Marian” for romantic bits, and so on — both adds to your anticipation of the particular atmosphere of each scene, and gives the feeling that this is a replaying of an ancient set of mythical, archetypal events. Sometimes a single sound effect does all the work, as with the weird, echoey wolf cry (usually accompanied by a sudden camera zoom) that announces moments of supernatural surprise; and that blurring of the distinction between soundtrack and ambient sound adds to the feeling that this is a magical land we’re in, one as “full of noises, sounds and sweet airs” as the island in Shakespeare’s Tempest. Plus, the music is just a damned good listen on its own.

The show mostly takes place in a quite limited set of characteristic locations, each one with its own distinct feel. There’s the lush leafy greens of the outlaws’ hideouts (it’s never winter in Sherwood, only timeless summer), the heavy stone walls and murky interiors of the Sheriff’s castle, and the muddy peasant messiness of forest-clearing villages. These three settings must make up about 90% of the locations used in Robin of Sherwood, as if this were a three-tiered world, like the various myths (Norse and Christian, for instance) which have three levels or sub-worlds — the Good Place (Heaven), the Bad Place (Hell), and the battleground (Earth) — which their heroes move between, fighting their endless fights.

So much of the dialogue of this series has stuck with me (admittedly, through many viewings over the years). Robin’s counter-curse to the bullying Templar knight: “Evil to him who thinks evil”. His first line to Maid Marian: “You’re like a May morning.” That mad old man in the dungeons: “Feet first — it’s the only way.” And the wonderful comedy of the Sheriff and his sidekick Gisburne (Gisburne: “The halfwit, my lord!” Sherrif: “Which one?”), occasionally joined by the self-satisfied (but cannily fearful of paganism’s powers) Abbot Hugo (“Leviticus? Leviticus!”). You can’t help but love the Sheriff. He’s the ultimate pantomime villain, and Nickolas Grace revels in wringing vitriolic sarcasm from every line (“It’s not a celebration, it’s a wedding!”). (My favourite Sheriff line has to be when he’s driven to mad hallucinations in “The Children of Israel”: “Leeches! See the leeches!” I see them, Nickolas, I see them!)

Most of all I love the way the series took on the supernatural, becoming a sword & sorcery version of the Robin Hood myth, with distinct Hammer Horror flavourings (particularly in the Baron de Belleme and “Seven Swords of Wayland” episodes). Robin of Sherwood takes place in a world where both paganism and Satanism have a real, magical power. (Oddly, Christianity doesn’t. Perhaps, being the established religion, it has enough worldly power not to need it. In the series, it’s seen as the religion of the conquerors, not the peasants and outlaws, a religion of silver crucifixes, gold chalices, heavily be-ringed bishops and gothic churches, not the woods and fields.)

It all comes together to create a timeless world in which the series tells its stories — a world that is part historical, but a good thick slice of myth & fantasy, too. “Nothing is forgotten”, is both the outlaws’ credo and their ultimate defence against the overwhelming might of their oppressors; but it could just as easily refer to the show itself, or the myth it’s retelling — for us, it’s the stories of Robin Hood that will never be forgotten.

Oops, a bit more 70s TV. This 1977 series belongs to that subgenre of horror/science fiction stories (which includes John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, Ramsey Campbell’s The Hungry Moon, and the Jon Pertwee Doctor Who story The Daemons) in which a village is isolated by a magical barrier, so that some evil/alien force can gather its strength before moving on to take over the rest of the world. With Children of the Stones, the evil force is, oddly enough, happiness; those villagers affected greet each other with a “Happy Day”, know what each other is thinking, and tend to be inordinately good at maths. But of course the reason this happiness is evil is that it’s one man’s idea of happiness, imposed on its subjects without their consent.

It’s the end of this 7-part series that really makes it a children’s serial. This isn’t a criticism; it’s just that you need to have a certain amount of awestruck credulity (or childlike sense of wonder) to accept the final explanation for what’s going on. The bowl-shaped rock beneath the village is a transmitter for pure evil? So that it can be sent towards a black hole? Right.

I’m not ruining the story by revealing this, because Children of the Stones is best accepted as you’d accept a weird dream — for its sense of mystery and menace, not its logic. This is particularly true for the way the story comes to an end, because I really have no idea what happened there. Something to do with time. All very odd. But before that you have plenty of the sort of thrills and weird chills any devotee of 70s horror TV and film will love: a mysterious stone circle, an old painting depicting an ancient ritual being held there, a mad lord-of-the-manor type with an oddly purposeful interest in astrophysics, a boy with burgeoning psychic visionary powers…

For me, the best part of the series was the relationship between the two main characters, the father and son who arrive as outsiders in the village. There’s something very affecting about the way they get on with each other, how naturally they work together, and the trust they have in each other, that takes their characters that little step beyond the usual sort of stock relationships encountered in this type of story.

And here’s a nice little YouTube clip of Stewart Lee using Children of the Stones and The Changes (reviewed on a previous Mewsings) to discuss how the representation of teenagers on TV has changed from the 70s.