"The missing link" by Thomas Cookson 20/3/15
That title isn't intended as a cheap shot at Ian. Frankly, I'm uninterested in cheap shots at fandom's favourite whipping boy, often mocked and derided as representing the shamefulness of being too enthusiastic about the show.
My title's more referring to Lawrence Miles' account of meeting him at the Tavern and getting such a hostile reception that it made him question how someone as insular and unpleasantly tantrumous as Ian could ever become a fan of such a moral-minded show that encourages open-mindedness and respect and deplores such appalling, selfish behaviour.
I was long ignorant of the shadier side of Ian, or what input he ever had in the show proper. I only knew him from retrospective documentaries as the missing-episode hunter who'd saved the first Dalek serial from the furnaces that had claimed many less fortunate 60's episodes and serials. A hero, essentially, and unmistakably one of us.
Since then, a less endearing image of Levine has grown, of representing a rather obsessive, 'sad' fan image that we're pejoratively desperate to avoid. Many have described him as a volatile bully. He's also blamed for being influentially responsible for the show's 80's decline, if not outright cancellation. That's dependent on personal taste though. If you think the show didn't go wrong until the McCoy era, then Ian (having jumped ship by then) was completely innocent.
In the late 70s, Ian was a long-term fan who was disgruntled with the show under then-producer Graham Williams, feeling the humour was out of hand, too many liberties were being taken with established continuity (particularly in Destiny of the Daleks) and frankly Williams 'didn't care' about the show. His views were far from minority opinion back then.
When John Nathan Turner took over as producer in 1980 and was keen to distance himself from his maligned predecessor, Ian was immediately brought onboard as self-appointed fan expert for script vetting and fan-pleasing suggestions and for compiling compilation clips for Logopolis, Mawdryn Undead and Resurrection of the Daleks. Subtly but malignantly guiding the show away from casual viewership to being a show for fans.
But why was his influence debilitating, and where did it start?
Well, his significant input began on JNT's second produced story State of Decay. Ian instructed that the crashed ship be renamed from Hyperion to Hydrax to avoid comparison with a ship of the same name in 1972's The Mutants. He also apparently suggested doing the linked trilogy of E-space stories, which became a recurring motif with both the Master and the Black Guardian's returns.
The show retained a significantly high casual viewership throughout Davison's first season, so let's say his worst influence wasn't until Arc of Infinity (or Attack of the Cybermen if you're really desperate to exonerate the Davison era). Personally I think of Warriors' Gate as the last story of Doctor Who's innocence.
Was continuity the problem? Well, not per se. Castrovalva and Earthshock weren't exactly ratings killers. Quite the opposite. Likewise Empire Strikes Back wasn't a box office flop. A well-written story can be thrilling, compelling and adventurous no matter how late you start into it. I'd say that's why Season 19 still engaged casual viewers rather than just Levine's niche. In fact, it's been argued that Black Orchid and Earthshock are worthy shortcuts to New Who's approach.
But the problem with Ian's influence goes beyond continuity. I found something unbearably depressing about listening to Ian Levine's long-winded podcast, and at how someone could devote their lives to a show they seemingly get such little joy out of, to the point where I just had to turn it off.
But I hope here to properly explore (or diagnose) the personality of Ian Levine, and fans with autism in general. Autism is about as common in fandom as snobbery about autistic behaviour is. There's much to suggest Ian is autistic. And I know from being diagnosed with autism myself that it can be a debilitating personality disorder, and I think Ian's was debilitating to the show itself.
Autistic people aren't often bad at writing. In fact, they often articulate themselves more eloquently through the pen. But Ian's interactions behind the scenes were mostly just verbal, feeding JNT with praise, suggestions, revisions. Maybe Ian didn't want for more than references and recurring foes. But if he did want for something more, he might've been incapable of articulating what it is. Autistic fans don't often translate what they love well. Hence why continuity is often all that keeps many 80's stories from being completely empty. Nothing else was apparently requested or needed.
Ian's influence was most damaging on Warriors of the Deep and Attack of the Cybermen. On Warriors of the Deep, he had demanded excessive rewrites to correct the thirty-something continuity errors, and presumably to make the ending more of a carbon copy of the original downbeat Silurians story. Attack of the Cybermen he apparently co-wrote himself with Eric Saward as a belated sequel to 1966's The Tenth Planet, and packed it with excessive continuity references. Many fans argue this was the last straw for most casual viewers, and the reason ratings troubles were swiftly followed by cancellation.
Personally, I don't buy that. The show was cancelled for money reasons, meaning the BBC had to do some downsizing. And interestingly Paul Castle has said that once those Levine excesses were done and out the way, then Colin's era began improving in earnest with Vengeance on Varos. Likewise The Two Doctors and Revelation of the Daleks feel far more daring, fresh and new than their more restrictive check-list Davison era counterparts.
But how did Ian's influence get so out of control? How did such an impressionable, long-term fan, who apparently knew the show so intimately well, ever manage to influence the series into something so incompatibly antithetical to its original ethos? How did Warriors of the Deep and Attack of the Cybermen give us the Doctor as a virtual Hitler-sympathiser in a way Terrance Dicks would never allow?
It's the Doctor that chiefly appeals to autists. The eccentric outsider manchild who suffers ignorance gladly and aloofly, and who exists in a world of his own.
In Warriors of the Deep, he ceases to be a role model for the autistic, and becomes a completely debilitated sufferer of the condition's most extreme traits. His seeming inability to acknowledge his unacceptable behaviour in vandalising the base's reactor. His insisting of the Silurian's nobility seems based on the debilitating autistic tendency toward both obsessive fixation and a tendency to take people's word at face value (like his forgiving Lytton). His angry outbursts upon realising the last surviving humans don't share his viewpoint for reasons that seem to shock and dismay him. Moreover, his stubborn refusal to be influenced or motivated by surrounding aggression or crises, until coaxed. Much like how Attack of the Cybermen dispenses with the ticking clock altogether.
This is based on an autistic inability to understand a seemingly hostile world, or the autist's own ability to antagonise people, which leads to them blanking it out and carrying on as normal, and determined to remain unchanged in routine. Essentially the Doctor is meant to end the story reassuring us with the conceit that everyone would have killed each other anyway, and that he's prouder for being different to them and not getting involved. Oblivious to how inhumanly calloused it makes him seem.
Like Attack of the Cybermen's denouement, it feels like Ian's egocentricity is behind the Doctor's seeming inability to demonstrate even remote humility whilst lamenting the 'misunderstood' villains. "There should have been another way" basically translates as 'I still think I was right and it's their fault but no one listened to me'.
This tends to also be why some autistic fans don't accept the Doctor nuking Skaro because they don't buy that any events could or should have changed him after Genesis of the Daleks.
So the story depends on the Doctor having this debilitating condition and fixation in a way irreconcilable with every past portrayal of him. But what always disturbed me is somehow knowing autistic fans would accept this message on the same gullible, face-value terms. The message that when attacked, bend over backwards to appease them. Don't resist, don't defend yourself. Place your attackers' well-being above your own. The cruel irony is autistic people are most vulnerable to being bullied, attacked or exploited. Sure the story's about the military, but there's no awareness that Preston's urging to prevent a nuclear war from wiping us out, and understandably her own death. We're meant to hate her for that at face value and accept a Doctor who scorns her for it, even though his behaviour couldn't be uglier if he'd chastised her for using mace on a would-be rapist.
It was a show for the vulnerable and averse to healthy living, outright telling us that acting on self-preservation or common sense is evil, and it's better to let yourself die for your killer's benefit. How worthless could this show become to shun casual viewers for the sake of being detrimental viewing to its own niche?
The Sea Devils definitely appeals to autists. Humanity seen through an alienated outsider's view. The Doctor wanting to make peace as best he can amidst antagonism, and taking people at face value to a fault. Like when he hands his Sea Devil gun to fellow prisoners and is somehow shocked when they use it to shoot a Sea Devil guard. So this is the missing link. Ian and Who's mutual influence on each other, and why the show's distance from its golden age to its death by fannish incontinence is in some ways so frighteningly small. But The Sea Devils works as an anti-war piece. Warriors, however, is designed to not be thought-provoking at all. As Philip Sandifer argued, it protests the total annihilation option so moronically that it ends up tacitly endorsing it.
80s Who's remove from human relations probably provided haven for autists, when elsewhere the media was making society and the world seem especially hostile and scary. But it was the blind leading the blind. Some autists are the worst for setting a healthy lifestyle for others. That's why some autists need supervision and understanding counsel. But 80s Who became a lifestyle, which Levine himself helped shape. Worse, by a production team that renounced City of Death, which was the more desirable basis for the show turned lifestyle.
So how much to blame was Ian? Despite his tough talk, Ian was probably very gullible and vulnerable and was probably exploited by JNT, whose narcissistic personality disorder thrived on the adulation of the easily impressed. Warriors of the Deep's debilitating message confirms to me why I feel JNT was exploiting our desires, not rewarding them.
As Ian became wary of JNT's approach, he gained alliance with Eric Saward, and they encouraged each other's supercilious conceits that any approach they made that cut against JNT's pantomime vision was worthy in and of itself. This was an alliance made in hell.
Ian would've taken the show's continuing existence for granted, without a sense that the end was coming. I'd like to think in Ian's shoes I'd let the makers get on with their work rather than interfering and making crisis conditions worse. Sure my own autism means I can be egocentric, supercilious, obsessive, gullible and tediously one-track-minded. But I used to be far worse. I've since developed some humility, empathy and self-awareness. Not because I'm necessarily smarter than Ian, or less afflicted, but because certain life events made me wise up and learn to compromise.
I don't think Ian did, or ever will. Ian was born into a well-off family that owned a Blackpool nightclub. He's a millionaire now with plenty of fan acolytes. He was always privileged and spoilt, so he could afford to be as egotistical, uncompromising and unassumingly gullible as he liked.
If there's a reason the show under his influence didn't grow or progress, I think that's the biggest one.