May 14, 2025

The Curse of Fenric

The Burial of the Dead

By the time The Curse of Fenric was transmitted, Doctor Who’s immediate fate was already sealed. Sealed like a tomb. Or in a flask. There would be no new television Doctor Who in at least the financial years 1990/91 or 1991/92. Not that that was something that anyone was prepared to admit to in public at an event which, in retrospect, looks like a reluctant wake.

At a belated launch for the last two stories of the 1989 season of Doctor Who, held just before The Curse of Fenric Part One was shown, BBC Head of Drama Series Peter Cregeen - the man who had wielded the axe - insisted to the press that “Doctor Who has been on for twenty six years and I see no reason that it shouldn’t continue”.

He was attempting to fend off potential fan and press criticism. The BBC Drama and Publicity departments had been scarred by Doctor Who’s 1985 on-then-off cancellation and were extremely wary of fan sentiment, which they knew made good, if unflattering, copy for Fleet Street on a slow day.

Jonathan Powell, once the Head of Drama and now the Controller of BBC 1 had a personal dislike of Doctor Who’s producer John Nathan-Turner, and the extent to which that motivated his - and his department’s - disdain for the series in the later 1980s has been hotly debated.

At the extreme end of the scale some even suggest that removing Doctor Who from under Nathan-Turner by cancelling it was the only way to remove someone who had been BBC staff since the 1960s, and whom it was almost impossible to sack, only make redundant in the right circumstances. That would require a game plan.

A Game of Chess

The idea of Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor as a player of games, particularly of chess, emerged during production of Silver Nemesis. The serial’s chess board scenes were developed during rewriting that took place on set, some of it involving McCoy directly, at least according to the man himself in DWM #142.

Now, of course, we should all be wary of actors’ claims to have substantially rewritten their own lines. But this is one of those cases¹ where the paper trail bears out actorly reminiscence. The final version of the scene in which the Doctor activates the Nemesis by pantomiming a game of chess with the Cybermen is found nowhere in the draft script or either rehearsal draft for that serial, appearing only in the transmission script, a form of paper edit created from the transmission master of the episode to act as an ex post facto reference. No previous versions contain any references to chess at all.

What’s key here is that the scene climaxes, if not actually ends, with the Doctor shouting “Illegal move, but check mate!” While that phrase does not appear in The Curse of Fenric, the idea behind it, that of “winning” a game of chess by playing an illegal move (in Fenric’s case by having a white pawn changes sides and check the white King) is absolutely central to the latter serial. The Curse of Fenric was already in development when Silver Nemesis was made, and would be the next story to be shot.² The first of Doctor Who’s next, last season.

The Fire Sermon

The Curse of Fenric was initially scheduled as one of the 1989 production block’s two studio / location combination stories. Changes made to Doctor Who’s production schedule after the 1985 “hiatus” meant that from 1986 to 1989 the programme always ended up trapped in Television Centre at the height of summer, having dragged cast and crew on location in early Spring, which in England is winter really at least as often as it isn’t.

Despite the chance of bad weather, Fenric’s assigned director Nicholas Mallet persuaded producer John Nathan-Turner to let him shoot the entire serial on location, finding ‘real life’ places to shoot e.g the office of Royal Navy Commander Millington. Another change to Doctor Who’s budgeting after 1985, as regular readers will know, was that Doctor Who’s per episode cost was, according to the BBC’s own internal calculations, insufficient for a 14 episode season, with the minimum number of episodes needed to made to successfully amortise its costs being 20. A fact that no one discovered until the summer of 1989, after that years’s series had been shot, this being the first time anyone outside the production office bothered to run the maths, and which may itself have contributed to the series’ long-anticipated but also oddly sudden demise.

Nathan-Turner, according to many anecdotes, kept a small financial reserve to one side during production of Doctor Who for contingencies and emergencies, known as “the knicker elastic fund”. The move to location for Fenric, combined with worse-than-expected weather, saw the contingency budget for 1989 swallowed during the production of its first story. On location, Nathan-Turner was asked about “the knicker elastic fund” only for the producer to grimace and announce without levity: “It’s gone ping.”

Death by Water

One of Nathan-Turner’s under appreciated talents was as a director. Under appreciated, in part, because he was never the credited director of Doctor Who, or any BBC Drama programme. He never took the BBC director’s course, and became a producer having been a Floor Assistant and Production Unit Manager. He had, early in his producership, intended to direct Black Orchid (1982) before handing it over to Ron Jones when it became clear timing made this impossible.

Nevertheless he would occasionally “fill-in” as a second unit director for stories that were running behind schedule, and it’s notable that some of the more celebrated location visuals in 1980s Doctor Who - such as the Cybermassacre in The Five Doctors - were directed by the producer, rather than the story’s credited director.

On The Curse of Fenric, JNT took a second camera unit and shot a number of the scenes at the beach, particularly those underwater. These mostly involved stuntmen, not actors, but included the hugely memorable moment of the dead Soviet soldier’s eyes opening underwater as he begins his transformation into a vampire. (He also directed much of the battle at the Church.)

Also shot at the beach, but this time by Mallett, was the serial’s final scene, in which Ace leapt headfirst into the water. Watching herself decades later for the Blu-ray Sophie Aldred wondered aloud how she didn’t smash her head open on the rocks near the shore and / or drown, given the low tide, high rocks and general 1980s attitude to health and safety. Back in 1989 fan discourse questioned the purpose of the scene at all, missing the symbolic cleaning, perhaps even baptism, it seemed to represent.

The Curse of Fenric is a story where the symbolic and the literal juxtapose and clash, if not necessarily conflict. That Fenric can free himself by playing what is in practical terms a nonsensical chess move, by using an ordinary chess scrobbled from a Wren’s private belongings, is the stuff of supernatural fantasy, not science fiction.While the ability of faith - in gods or political systems or people - to repel vampires is justified in terms of psychic barriers and pseudo science, Fenric’s escape isn’t.

Most of a decade earlier, Doctor Who’s then script editor Eric Saward had demanded an explanation for how the Box of Jhan in Kinda cured madness, with writer Christopher Bailey objecting that to do so would be the equivalent of “explaining” how a wolf could successfully disguise itself as Red Riding Hood’s Grandmother. (In response Saward wrote and inserted one himself instead.) That Saward’s successor Andrew Cartmel never demanded similar of Fenric’s author Ian Briggs, speaks worlds about his greater willingness to mix the colours on Doctor Who’s dramatic and emotional palette.

Such pseudo-rationalist explanations in fiction are often overtaken by events, even if they don’t fall over immediately. The Curse of Fenric’s disguised wolves are the “wolves of Fenric” “descendants of the Vikings who first carried the flask”. The problem with that is the mathematics of genealogy indicates that after a thousand years of so, everyone in even a large geographic area is related to everyone else.

All humans have two parents, which means that in theory they will have four grandparents, eight great grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, and so on. The number of anyone’s ancestors doubles with every generation moving away from them back through history. This means that, if we decide that ‘G’ is the number of generations we’re going back, the number of ancestors any human has in that generation is 2G, 2 raised to the Gth power.

If a generation is 25 years, then 1000 years is 40 generations. Two to the power of 40 is 1,099,511,627,776. This means if you fill in an ancestry chart going back 40 generations you need to fill in 1,099,511,627,776 names in the tenth generation. This is a problem, because there are not at present, nor have there ever been, one trillion ninety-nine billion five hundred eleven million six hundred twenty-seven thousand seven hundred seventy-six people alive on the planet Earth at any one time.

This means that anyone alive in the 1940s would have everyone who was alive 1,000 years before in their ancestry chart around 2,000 times; and that’s assuming that everyone alive 1,000 years before had issue and a line of descendants that continued for 1,000 years, which by no means all of them will have. This, of course, means that those people who did have descendants alive 1,000 years in the future would appear many, many more than 2,000 times.

Which means that it’s all but mathematically inevitable that everyone alive in 1943 is a wolf of Fenric, and certainly that everyone in Europe, let alone everyone on the east coast of Britain is. Framing the ‘curse’ in rationalist terms, in terms of genetics and DNA, would have undone this story aspect, had Cartmel been motivated to make a Saward-like intervention. Leaving greater ambiguity, the story merely says “passed down through the generations”, gives the idea a little room to breathe.

Not that Cartmel or Briggs could have known the above about generations; like with the problems with the budget Nathan-Turner had been given, no one actually did the maths until a long time after it would have been useful to those working on Doctor Who to know it.

What The Thunder Said

It was common in the 1970s and 80s to refer to senior BBC management as “the gods”, and it’s tempting to see that phrase as behind the demanding, never-pleased Gods of Ragnarok seen in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, the last Doctor Who story of 1988, the first episode of which sneaked into 1989. Certainly by 1989, “the gods” in Doctor Who terms could not be placated.

When Cregeen spoke at the press launch for this story, his own clumsy phrasing, excerpted at the top of this post, perhaps fell the wrong side of the line between “evasion” and “lie”. Cregeen’s boss Mark Shivas had put his signature to a piece of paper giving the exact reason why Doctor Who couldn't continue immediately - that there would not be any money reserved for it in BBC’s Drama budgeting until 1992/93 at the earliest - on 13 October. A piece of paper we still have.

Doctor Who’s after life began very quickly post mortem, with Nathan-Turner creating, almost literally on his way out the door, an extended version of The Curse of Fenric for VHS that three decades later remains many fans’ preferred version of the serial. But in another and more significant way the programme would spend a long time gone. In 1992 Cregeen was actively, and again in writing, dismissing real and substantial interest from the American co-producers of the eventual 1996 Doctor Who TVM, saying that bringing back the series a mere five years after ending it would be “premature”. It seems that, and in sharp contrast to the occasional, and even less understood crises in production that have occasionally engulfed Doctor Who this century, BBC Drama simply didn’t want to make Doctor Who. Because they didn’t think it was something worth making.

Maybe they should have had a little more faith.