November 12, 2024

"Number Nine. Number Nine."

“Who’s to know?”

The 1972 series of Doctor Who was the first during which no actor or character arrived or departed. It was also the first series of Doctor Who entirely written by people who had written for the show before. 

These facts could be considered, if one were feeling churlish, to be signs of complacency or stagnation. But in this instance what they demonstrate is stability. A stability had been hard earned by the behind-the-scenes diarchy of producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks, who had been working together for a little under two years when the first of 1972’s stories started shooting in September 1971.

It’s often ignored that the 1970 relaunch of Doctor Who which Letts and Dicks inherited from their predecessors, Peter Bryant and Derrick Sherwin, is in some ways modelled on what happened to it in 1969. Because fans think of the end of the Troughton era as constituting as “Season 6” of 44 episodes, running from August 1968 to June 1969, it’s easy not to notice that in 1969, as in the two years that followed it, there were 25 episodes of Doctor Who starting around new year and ending in time for Wimbledon Fortnight. 

When, for the 1970 run, Doctor Who’s episode number was cut and its start date moved, what actually happened was the first nine episodes of the production block were cut off, leaving Doctor Who to launch in what had previously been its mid-season; Week One of the new calendar year. In 1972 Doctor Who got an episode back, with an increase to 26. While it’s tempting, easy and probably correct to assume this is in part a response to Doctor Who’s increased success in 1970 and 1971 when compared to 1969, it’s also surely because the first Saturday of 1972 was also the first day of 1972. Meaning there were 26 Saturdays that year before Wimbledon, not 25. An extra episode of Doctor Who meant not having to find a fill-in for the week between when it would have finished and the tennis starting.

Retaining that additional episode for subsequent production / transmission runs is also the reason the start of the 1973, 1974 and 1975 series sneak into the previous calender year, with all of them starting in what we’re now, it seems, condemned to refer to as “twixtmas”. (No, I don’t like it anymore than you do.)

Even then there are echoes of 1969 when the first story of the year The Krotons started on 28th December 1968. The “Week 1” episode that year was the second episode of The Krotons, not the first.¹ That garnered 8.4m viewers, the same as the first episode of Spearhead from Space a year later. But what the 1970 series managed to do was sustain a run of higher ratings for longer, in the process securing for the series a future that no one working on that 1970 run thought it was likely to have.

I’ve said in the past that it’s easy to inappropriately compare viewer numbers over time, but while I’m going to very briefly indulge in that kind of comparison here, I’m at least comparing episodes shown in the same slot on the same channel, in the same week of the year, and separated by only a year minus a day in calendar terms.

If we compare January and February 1969 and 1970, and without looking at the story titles or invoking our own views of their qualities, that 1970 is an improvement on 1969 and even though it starts from the exact same point, is just straightforwardly true.

I’m only bothering with the first ten weeks of the year because at the very most these are the numbers that might have contributed to Doctor Who’s unanticipated renewal at some point in late February 1970.² Just under two years later, at Christmas 1971, a repeat compilation of the final serial of that February-commissioned series, The Daemons, became the first episode of Doctor Who to be seen by more than 10m people since Devil’s Planet on 27 November 1965, more than six years before.

The next episode, the first of the 1972 series with which we started this post, Day of Daleks Episode One became, with 9.8m viewers, the first new episode to be seen by more than 9.5m people since The Abandoned Planet in early 1966, and one of only six episodes seen by 9m or more people in the intervening half decade or so. Three of which had also been under Letts and Dicks.

This constitutes a remarkable turnaround, but there was more success to come. The second episode of Day of the Daleks Episode 2 went better, the first new episode of Doctor Who to be seen by more than 10m people since the aforementioned Devil’s Planet (27th November 1965). A month later The Curse of Peladon Episode 2 hit 11m viewers for the first time since Air Lock (23 September 1965).

The latter two episodes of The Curse of Peladon saw ratings nose dive, but with a proximate cause. The country was entering the depths of the 1972 Miners’ Strike, and electricity black outs became increasingly common as limited stockpiled coal ran out. The strike also affected The Sea Devils Episode One, and to a sufficient extent that a special recap of its contents was edited and appended to the front of Episode Two. (It’s on the Blu-ray.)

It would be easy, but also wrong, to see the 1972 upswing in the series’ fortunes as inevitable, in the same way plenty of people of many political persuasions manage to see elections. I.e. that they are won or lost solely due to the arbitrary swing of a popularity pendulum.

A vote does not have to be positive, of course. Many people vote to get out an incumbent, or to prevent an opposition from gaining power. They vote against perceived or real deficiencies in a party or candidate, rather than for positive attributes in another.

This is essentially the same process as choosing what to watch in the era of three channel television. People would watch something because it wasn’t what was on the other side, rather than for what it was. But even if they only did it for that reason, a revealing preference is still being expressed; and what’s being expressed by the numbers for Doctor Who from 1970 and up to late 1977 is that generally speaking it will be chosen by viewers over almost anything else put up against it.

The 1970 series of Doctor Who was, and despite the picture immediately below this paragraph seeks to imply to the contrary, the first to bring back no monsters from a previous year of the show. That’s something that’s less obvious than it might be, due to two of the four stories featuring then-new creations which became amongst Doctor Who’s hardy perennials, appearing in the new century more often than in the old.

1971 would be the second series to achieve the feat of not drawing on the past, but for the fact it contains a sequel to a story from 1970, and that’s not so much plundering the past, as capitalising on your own success. 

1972 would be very different. Bringing back 60s monsters, the Daleks and the Ice Warriors, as well doing another direct sequel to one of the current team’s own stories by introducing a new version of the prehistoric historical humanoid reptiles seen in Pertwee’s second serial as The Sea Devils.³ Having shown that Doctor Who was not resting on its laurels, its production team was now able to plunder its past because its present was clearly on equal terms with it.

This is arguably the point in its history where Doctor Who becomes a programme that revives things, as well as simply continuing them. One that has a past mythology that can be dug into. Eras that can be invoked. Bringing back monsters that haven’t appeared for two and nearly five years respectively, and which were introduced when the series had a different leading man is subtly distinct from doing the Daleks every six months for the first four years. Or asking Kit Pedler for another Cyberman story to be written up by someone else.⁴ Or bringing back the Autons after exactly twelve months.

By 1972 Doctor Who is a series with history, and confident enough in the success of its current incarnation to cherry pick the past and do its own thing with its elements. The Ice Warriors and the prehistoric-humanoid-reptiles-of-disputed-nomenclature were both brought back by their creators. Whereas Day of the Daleks essentially involves no one who had worked on a previous Dalek story at all. A writer new to them, if not Doctor Who paired with a director new to both;⁵ and the inventive direction of newcomer Paul Bernard is part of what makes Day of the Daleks seem so fresh. His work The Time Monster at the end of 1972 is even more ambitious - and sadly less consistent.

The equally new Lennie Mayne makes Peladon a strange and claustrophobic world, at least as alien as anything seen in Doctor Who since The Web Planet. With Michael E Briant, returning for a second Doctor Who serial in The Sea Devils, and handling its outrageous production demands with aplomb, it’s curiously only Christopher Barry’s direction of The Mutants that lets the side down, and Barry had been on Doctor Who, on and off, since 1963.

This is a season that I used to joke “Would be, if it were the length of a post 1985 series of Doctor Who, be the best ever. Unfortunately, there are twelve more episodes.” Because Day⁶, Curse⁷ and Sea Devils⁸ are all stories that earned repeats which helped affix them in the collective memory of Doctor Who viewers, and at least two of which form part of Doctor Who’s arguable “core canon”⁹ (with Day also an early VHS).

I have softened considerably on the wildly imaginative, delightfully rambling and frequently very silly The Time Monster over the years. (Of which more another a time.) The Mutants remains a strangely stumbling production of an interesting story idea, one which perhaps suggests that the 1972 series’ otherwise canny mix of old and new contributors could have done with another stir.¹⁰

But like the two series before it, there’s simply no argument that the 1972 run of Doctor Who didn’t “work”. From this point the programme would not be in any danger of cancellation for more than a decade, thanks to the renewal wrought here. The 1973 series would begin with The Three Doctors, a story remembered as the series’ tenth anniversary special. Doctor Who was a programme which Letts expected to produce for a year before it was quietly canceled. He had taken it back to its early 1965 levels of popularity, and it had begun being referred to as “a national institution”.

Before that though would come a surprising and random temporary low in its ratings. One which has always interested me because it cuts so hard against the series’ general trend at this point. On 17th June 1972, The Time Monster Part Five was seen by only 6.0m people. That isn’t just down to the standard attrition you’d expect as the series dragged on into summer. It’s 1.6m fewer than both Part Four and Part Six. So it can’t be put down to uninterest in the serial by audiences. But it did cause the series to crash down to 67th in the weekly chart, compared with the show’s then more usual summer placings of the top thirty - or at least forty.

This has bothered me for more years than I’m prepared to admit. Why does The Time Monster Episode Five have an abnormally low rating for 1972 Doctor Who? It’s not power cuts, I’ve checked. It also doesn’t seem to be because of unusually strong competition from either BBC 2 or ITV. The latter was running the news, whereas the former was running The Television Doctor (“In the last of the present series, Television Doctor examines a few of the many Old Wives’ Tales” - Radio Times) against the first ten minutes and Man Alive: Pupil Protest (“There is a new militancy among schoolchildren. What's it all about?” - Radio Times). Neither of which seem obviously a Kronos killer.

17 June 1972 was, however, the day that the first glimmerings of the Watergate scandal broke in the US, and the day of the first arrests related to it. While UK/US time zone issues and the speed at which the scandal unfolded unfortunately make it unlikely that that ratings crash was due to a rush of adults checking out ITV news over the protests of their children, I can't quite rule it out - and the attraction of blaming it on the criminal actions of a two-term US President is, right now, not inconsiderable.

Maybe, though, it really was just a very hot summer’s day.