In 1976, Tom Baker’s Doctor Who was front and centre during what many still regard as the glory days of British broadcasting. But just over the horizon, a war was coming…
It would be overselling it to say that 1976 was the year in which the world burst into colour. But it was the year when colour TV sales outnumbered those of black and white sets for the first time in the UK, meaning more viewers could now enjoy Doctor Who’s stripy scarf and menagerie of monsters in all their polychromatic glory. (As if to underline the point, that stripy scarf and its owner also graced the first edition of BBC1’s new Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, which must have been doubly galling for those still watching in black and white.)
The year had got off to a flying start, change-wise, with civilians entering the supersonic age aboard January’s first scheduled Concorde flight. Meanwhile, the seeds of an even more seismic shift were sown in 1976 as Steves Jobs and Woznick formed Apple Computers, and Bill Gates and Paul Allen registered their new company, Microsoft. But the event of most significance for Doctor Who’s future outlook was surely the one that took place on March 22nd, when filming began in the Tunisian desert on a little-anticipated space adventure film called Star Wars…
If this was the shape of things to come, no-one had told Doctor Who producer Philip Hinchcliffe and his script editor Robert Holmes, who in 1976 were still finding much of their inspiration on the bookshelf. As Hinchcliffe saw it, Doctor Who had long suffered from what he called “a poverty of genuine science-fiction – of the literary kind”; hence the stories of the show’s – exceptionally strong – 14th season taking inspiration from everyone from Frank Herbert and Harry Harrison (The Face of Evil) to Isaac Asimov and Agatha Christie (The Robots of Death), and reaching its apotheosis with The Talons of Weng Chiang, whose grab-bag of literary influences include Arthur Conan Doyle, Gaston Leroux, Sax Rohmer, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde – none of whom had a known fondness for spaceships and disco robots. (As an aside, Agatha Christie died in 1976, but you can’t blame George Lucas for everything.)
The bookish mood music even extended to the TARDIS, whose control room got a Jules Verne-style makeover, swapping sterile white futurism for polished brass and wood panelling. It’s also significant that half of the season’s six stories are set on Earth, while another – The Robots of Death – takes its design cues from the Christie influence by dressing a far-flung world and its inhabitants like a 1920s whodunit. (The robots themselves are conspicuously more Charleston than disco.) By contrast, of the 17 stories produced by Hinchliffe’s successor Graham Williams – the man on whose watch Lucas’s bomb actually went off – only four concern themselves with Earthly matters.
So what rivals for viewers’ affections did Doctor Who have during this pre-Star Wars belle époque? Saturday, September 4th 1976 was something of a red-letter day for British sci-fi fans, heralding the return of both Doctor Who and – in a couple of ITV regions, at least – Gerry Anderson’s more showy Space: 1999. Thames’ kiddie sci-fi favourite The Tomorrow People also came back for a fifth series during Season 14’s run, while newcomer The Muppet Show delivered an injection of fabric-based mayhem to Sunday evenings. But the year’s biggest buzz was generated by the arrival of Lindsay Wagner’s glossy-haired cyborg The Bionic Woman. A huge hit for ITV, this super-powered Six Million Dollar Man spin-off stands as the only sci-fi show to top the UK ratings during the whole of the 20th century. (It’s fair to say that Star Maidens, a camp and vaguely fetishist British-German space opera about a race of alien dominatrices, did less well for the network when it crash-landed that autumn.)
In the West Country, meanwhile, HTV had earned a reputation for producing quality children’s fantasy drama with a strong emphasis on English history and mythology. Its 1976 offering, The Georgian House, was a time-travel tale with a powerful anti-slavery/racism message, while in Avebury, the cameras rolled on teatime folk-horror classic Children of the Stones, which arguably upped the behind-the-sofa ante even further than Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchliffe were prepared to push it. Again, both serials are very much products of their time, being more routed in the traditions of children’s literature than cinematic sci-fi spectacle.
Other debuts in 1976 included Nigel Kneale’s horror anthology Beasts, Richard Carpenter’s supernatural comedy The Ghosts of Motley Hall, spy-fi spin-off The New Avengers and Franco Zeffirelli’s biblical blockbuster Jesus of Nazareth. What TV viewers loved more than anything, though, was John Thaw and Dennis Waterman roughing up wrong ’uns in The Sweeney, which was the most watched TV programme in 1976, and the reason why Philip Hinchcliffe was reassigned to take charge of the BBC’s own tough guy cop show, Target.
It was, naturally, also a purple patch for BBC costume drama, with productions of Poldark, The Duchess of Duke Street and Our Mutual Friend all airing this year, along with Jack Pulman’s seminal adaptation of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius. This, of course, was very much within the corporation’s wheelhouse, which partly explains why, as George Lucas and his crew were constructing their Death Star at Elstree during the long, hot summer of 1976, down the road at BBC Television Centre, the Doctor Who team were recreating 15th century Italy for an affectionate Masque of the Red Death pastiche called The Masque of Mandragora. (Whose writer Louis Marks, incidentally, was a former lecturer in Renaissance history and the author of a postdoctoral thesis called The Development of the Institutions of Public Finance in Florence During the Last Sixty Years of the Republic c.1470-1539. As influences go, it’s not quite Flash Gordon.)
If you believe in a ‘golden age of television’, then 1976’s Saturday night line-up is arguably when it peaked
In cinemas, the New Hollywood movement – in which a generation of young auteurs like Martin Scorcese, Sidney Lumet and Francis Ford Coppola had redefined the movie landscape with gritty, existential studies of complex, damaged anti-heroes – was also entering its twilight phase, caught between the teeth of Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and the shock to the system George Lucas was about to administer. And while horror was enjoying something of a post-Exorcist boom – this was the year of The Omen and Carrie – the only significant science fiction film of 1976 was Logan’s Run, which wasn’t exactly geared towards the action figure market (unless Jenny Agutter’s came with removable clothes). Britain’s Amicus Productions, meanwhile, cleaved firmly to the classic literary sci-fi template with former big-screen Dr Who Peter Cushing and Doug McClure starring in an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1914 novel At The Earth’s Core.
One box office hit that intersected with Doctor Who in a surprising way was Alan J Pakula’s All the President’s Men. In the post-JFK and Watergate era, Manchurian Candidate-style conspiracy thrillers were enjoying a new lease of life – 1974’s The Parallax View was another recent example – and Robert Holmes’ The Deadly Assassin was a timely addition to the canon. Cementing its topical credentials, the story – in which the Doctor runs as a candidate for the Lord Presidency of Gallifrey – began airing three days before Jimmy Carter’s election to the White House on November 2nd.
The Deadly Assassin keyed into the zeitgeist in another way, too – by attracting the attention of Wolverhampton housewife Mary Whitehouse, then at the height of her self-styled moral crusade against the permissive society in general, and the BBC in particular. Having previously described Hinchliffe and Holmes’ brand of gothic horror (rather brilliantly, in some ways) as “teatime brutality for tots”, this time it was the cliffhanger to The Deadly Assassin’s third episode – a freeze-frame of the Doctor being held underwater – that had her reaching for the smelling salts. Though the fallout from the row went all the way to the Director General, a few weeks later Bill Grundy invited punk provocateurs The Sex Pistols onto his Thames TV talk show, and the nation’s moral compass started twitching in a whole new direction.
The Doctor wasn’t the only one getting wet in late 1976: water, water was everywhere that autumn, Britain’s three-month drought having finally broken in the last week of August. The two-month deluge that followed was good news for the garden, and for Doctor Who’s viewing figures. But then, persuading people to watch the BBC in late 1976 and early 1977 wasn’t exactly difficult: if you believe, as is often stated, that there was a “golden age of television”, then this season’s classic Saturday night line-up was arguably when it peaked. And if you want to plant a flag on a specific date, you could do worse than November 28th, 1976 – when, after an evening of Basil Brush, Doctor Who (actually an omnibus repeat of The Pyramids of Mars, which set a new ratings record for the programme of 13.7m), Bruce Forsyth’s Generation Game and The Duchess of Duke Street, Michael Parkinson closed the evening fending off a frenzied attack from “that bloody Emu”.
(As if to underline this classic line-up’s cultural hegemony, that same month Tom Baker was offered the post of rector of St Andrew’s University in Scotland. But only after the first choice – a Mr Basil Brush – had turned it down.)
History has a way of smoothing out and simplifying narratives, and when it comes to Britain’s folk memory of the 1970s, two contrasting images compete for attention. The unhappy one is a dirty grey-brown picture of industrial strife – of the three-day week of 1974, and rubbish piling up in the streets during the 1978/79 “winter of discontent”. But when people look back fondly on the other side of the 1970s, one glorious year dominates: a year when a summer of endless sunshine gave way to cosy evenings of cocoa and toasted crumpets in front of the fire, watching Brucie and Parky and the most iconic of all Doctor Whos, saving the universe armed with little more than a bag of jelly babies and a toothy grin.
That grin wasn’t just restricted to 25 minutes on a Saturday, either. In 1976/77, Tom Baker’s Time Lord enjoyed a level of cultural saturation the show wouldn’t see again for another three decades. He popped up on everything from Seaside Special to the Radio 1 Roadshow; he and his best friend Sarah had adventures on the wireless (BBC Schools Radio’s Exploration Earth) and on LP (Argo’s Doctor Who and the Pescatons); he was on greetings cards and button badges, in books and comics and even packets of Typhoo Tea. There was also a new Doctor Who Appreciation Society – no mere “fan club” for these diehards – and a dedicated BBC arts documentary presented by Melvyn Bragg, both paving the way to a future in which people could take the business of liking Doctor Who much more seriously. On several fronts, it seemed, the programmes’ age of innocence was drawing to a close.
Beyond the front parlours and student common rooms of Britain, meanwhile, a new era of space exploration was underway. In July 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 orbiter had taken the legendary Face on Mars photo (unlike The Face of Evil’s mountainside visage, this one didn’t look like Tom Baker, disappointingly). Then, in February 1977, the US space shuttle programme lifted off with the first test flight of the Enterprise.
Within a few months of that, though, all eyes would be on a galaxy far, farther away. And Doctor Who – the children’s own programme that adults adored, currently at the very peak of its powers – was about to get some serious competition for a generation’s hearts and minds.
Identity parade
Though there are arguably more problematic stories in the Doctor Who canon, in recent years The Talons of Weng Chiang – with its cartoonish depiction of Chinese culture and the casting of English actor John Bennett as the magician Li H’sen Chang – has become something of a cause célèbre in discussions of the show’s early identity politics.
Whether or not you accept the defence that the story was “of its time”, such portrayals were certainly commonplace in the mid-1970s. The summer of ’76 saw Peter Sellers opening in full ‘yellowface’ as Inspector Sidney Wang in spoof whodunit Murder by Death, while 1975’s One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing – in which the main Chinese characters are played by Peter Ustinov, Clive Revill and Bernard Bresslaw – was still doing the rounds of the children’s film circuit. On TV, David Carradine had also recently hung up his staff after three seasons as Shaolin monk Kwai Chang Caine in Kung Fu. Thankfully, Doctor Who narrowly dodged a bigger bullet on that front when plans to have Louise Jameson play new companion Leela in what amounted to ‘blackface’ were abandoned after early make-up tests.
As for the series’ sexual politics during this era, whether Leela – who on the one hand was brave and fiercely independent, and on the other was dressed in tiny scraps of chamois leather – represented a step forward or two steps back is still up for debate. What’s striking, though, is that, following the departure of punchy ‘women’s lib’ advocate Sarah Jane Smith, The Deadly Assassin somehow managed to produce four episodes of Saturday night TV without any women in at all. Which was unusual, even for 1976.
This article was originally published in Doctor Who Magazine issue 550, April 2020
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