The second Doctor's era (1966-1969)

Patrick Troughton

• Last of the Black-and-White Moderns by Stephen Maslin

Last of the Black-and-White Moderns by Stephen Maslin 17/4/11

Architectural historian Charles Jencks once said that the death of modernism could symbolically be given a very precise date and time: 3pm, March 16th, 1972, when, less than 20 years after its construction, the Pruitt Igoe housing project began to be demolished. It was seen an admission that a particular style of building was a failure and that, perhaps, one former certainty about how lives could be improved had been false. Similarly, one might also point to the Tate/La Bianca murders and the violence at the Altamont Free Festival only a few years before, sounding the death knell for the optimism of the hippy era. Thus it could be said that around this time, we have a cultural breakpoint between the radical certainties of the modern that had defined European culture for the preceding 60 years and the moral ambiguities of the post-modern.

Why mention all this here? Well, the transition of Doctor Who from the 1960s to the 1970s, though most obvious in its turning the corner from monochrome to colour, is in reality much more than that. Compare The War Games (Second Doctor, 1969) with The Sun Makers (Fourth Doctor, 1977). In the latter, the good guys are as wicked as the bad guys, both camps quite willing to indulge in the torture of complete strangers. The Doctor makes an existential choice to help one side rather than another for his own reasons, not from any actual evidence of moral superiority. Contrast that with the "evil I have fought" that the Second Doctor refers to during his trial in the final episode of The War Games. The implication is that he knows what evil is, that we know what evil is, that there can indeed be certainty about what is right and what is wrong. The Time Lords do not dispute this moral view and the Doctor's defence rests solely upon it.

The Second Doctor era is defined by such black-and-white morality, rather than merely by black-and-white film, and separates sixties Doctor Who from what follows. (Two stories into the Pertwee era, for example, we had the Brigadier blowing up the Silurians and, from 1973 onwards, we had Target Books with almost every character painted in shades of grey; by the time we get to the Virgin New Adventures, even the Doctors is.) It is tempting to feel that the Second Doctor era is, by implication, culturally unsophisticated but with certainty comes conviction, not just in its moral systems but in the making of the programme itself. The producers not only made the best show they could (in less than ideal circumstances) but for what they saw as the best reasons: in the spirit of BBC founder Lord Reith, to educate, inform and entertain. And certainty in a brave, new, as-yet-untarnished future had unexpected rewards. For example, many of the Troughton stories sound like nothing else, the embracing of the Radiophonic Workshop's then-cutting-edge electronica producing not only futuristic effects but also some breathtaking soundscapes. The Wheel in Space may not stand out as a particularly great story but there are some quite beautiful and innovative collages of sound (and it is by no means unique in that regard).

Now, getting rid of things was something of a habit in 1960s Britain. Early on in the decade, the British government, in a fit of ill-thought modern zeal, short-sightedly decided to get rid of about a third of its railways and Doctor Who later had its own house-clearing: the junking of great swathes of sixties episodes. The result is that, alas, half of the Second Doctor's TV stories are now missing. This has had another profound effect on how we think of the Second Doctor era. With a sense of loss, as elusive and unreachable. (When The Tomb of the Cybermen was returned to the fold in the early 90s, its status as a classic was somewhat diminished when it was found to be a lot less awe-inspiring than the myth it had engendered.) So, a black-and-white show (both literally and metaphorically), yet whose worth is often expressed more in terms of its absence.

The companions of that time are often seen as lacking depth but if that means having a Liz Shaw or a Barbara Wright or a Turlough then give me an entertaining twosome like Ben and Polly any day. This brings us to a third important element of the Second Doctor era: it's really good fun. Innocent, wide-eyed, gosh-and-golly fun. It's loveable in a way that William Hartnell or Jon Pertwee or Colin Baker stories rarely are (though it did have its serious side: parts of Season 5 are rather bleak in tone.) At the same time, it has left us with some quite brilliant and unexpected television. It's hard to credit that something as weird as The Mind Robber was ever broadcast at Saturday teatime or that scary lost classics like The Web of Fear or Fury From Deep were ever considered suitable family viewing for that time of day.

The big surprise, however, is just how good so much of it really was. On DVD, there is precious little but one should not be without The Mind Robber (Doctor Who has never been more inventive), The Invasion (the iconic pre-cursor to the Pertwee era, with marvellous animated reconstructions of the missing episodes) and The War Games (ten episodes long, so expect a couple of the middle episodes to drag a little, but most of it is great entertainment; astonishing if one considers the budget). The Lost in Time DVD set has four particularly noteworthy orphan episodes: The Faceless Ones episodes 1 & 3 (why can't we have a complete version of that story and not The Seeds of Death?), The Evil of the Daleks episode 2 and The Web of Fear episode 1 (the latter with sets so convincing that London Underground demanded to know how the BBC had broken in to one of their Tube stations).

Of the audio-only stuff, check out The Macra Terror (narrated by Colin Baker), The Web of Fear (Frazer Hines), The Wheel in Space (Wendy Padbury) and The Underwater Menace (Anneke Wills). Personal favourites are the Tom Baker first-person narrated versions of Power of the Daleks, Fury From The Deep and Evil of the Daleks, if you can track them down (though the sound quality of the Frazer Hines CD versions are better.) Of the scant original fiction, Steve Lyons' The Murder Game and Mark Gatiss' The Roundheads are well worth a read.

All of the above would be of no consequence, had not Patrick Troughton successfully achieved the near impossible: becoming a new 'version' of a well established character in a way that even now seems distinctly odd. In fact, had he not done so, there would be no Doctor Who as we know it today. Without his so quickly winning over the viewing public and then turning in week after week of perfectly pitched performances, the show would not have survived to be become the cultural colossus it is.