The War Machines
“Who Are You? Who? Who? Who? Who?”
Last Saturday I had the great joy of seeing The War Machines on a cinema sized screen at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith: Watching these four episodes of Doctor Who from 1966 in the exact space in which they were made, Riverside being one of Doctor Who’s regular recording studios during the 1960s.
The event, presented by James Goss and Gavin Rymill was a marvellous way to spend a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, with the pair introducing each episode in turn, offering notes and observations that enhanced everyone’s experience of what is already, at least in my opinion, one of the most rewatchable Doctor Who stories ever made.
I wasn’t going to write about the event for Psychic Paper, in part because the serial isn’t all that far away from its slot in the regular The Long Way Round1 column, believe it or not, and I didn’t want to pre-empt myself. But the story and my own history with it have been rattling around my head since I came back from Hammersmith, and because of both this and how the mobile Buttondown site has been playing up for the last few days, I’ve decided I’m going to anyway.
This is not least because the copy of The War Machines shown on Saturday was an unrestored version, minus the various censor cuts made by the New Zealand Broadcasting Company that have since been added back into it2 for VHS and DVD release. Which is to say, it’s the same version that I saw on hookey VHS in nineteen-hundred-and-frozen-to-death, and practically internalised as I watched it repeatedly in a state of something approaching awe.
The story was well under thirty years old at that point, which was more than thirty years before now. I no longer have my original VHS, but if I did it would now be an artefact older than the 16mm film copies of the serial from which it was, at an unspecified remove, surreptitiously copied. But that isn’t quite as terrible a thought as it maybe should be. Because one of the things that was surprising to me about The War Machines in 1991 was how it did not feel ancient in the way that other Hartnell stories I’d by then seen (and loved) did.
There is something 1950s, even vaguely pre-War seeming, about much early 1960s monochrome VT television, as much as I love the form. But this is resolutely not true of The War Machines. It was not, in the early 1990s “contemporary” but it was qualitatively different from The Gunfighters, which I had seen a few months before, and which was made literally a month or so before it. In a strange way, The War Machines’ determination to be absolutely contemporary in 1966 made it seem less dated than its contemporaries did thirty years later. Figure that one out.
Because the War Machines of The War Machines are very much a threat from 1966’s cutting edge. Their controller, rogue computer WOTAN, coordinates them through the phone lines of its base in the newly completed Post Office Tower; I.e, by using the internet. But in 1966 the internet was essentially theoretical. Even ARPANET, the US military’s proto-internet, became operational in 1969 and that basically linked up six US airbases and UCL.
Which may, come to think of it, be why The War Machines is based in Bloomsbury. As I myself was before the 1990s were over, attending the same University that Wotan was seemingly connected to, and spending most of my life in the shadow of his tower. That hookey VHS of this story was amongst the possessions I’d taken with me when moving to a London that was consciously attempting to emulate the one the story portrayed as the old century came to an end.3
The War Machines is itself as much about “swinging London” as it is about its actual plot. Its computerised menace, in a then-contemporary setting, demanded a verisimilitude unprecedented in Doctor Who, which then-new director Michael Ferguson seemingly effortlessly supplied. His Covent Garden and its nightclubs may be sets, but they’re good ones, and to get in ahead of them he opens the story with a mix of high establishing shots conveying scale, silent location film to integrate the characters, and studio VT for dialogue. All of which is cut quickly together live during the studio recording.
It works brilliantly. Suddenly, and for the first time, Doctor Who is grounded. Later in the story, the same techniques create a palpable sense of a real place under threat, as WOTAN’s machines’ doings are reported by real life newsreaders like Kenneth Kendall and Dwight Wylie, using techniques borrowed from Quatermass and the Pit (1958). The War Machines are allowed to roll amok on the streets of London thanks to another canny mix of techniques; location filming, back projection, model work and reported speech over army radios. They even get to smash a phone box! (Although not in the version I saw last weekend or before 1997.)
The contemporary vibe of this story is something that, definitionally, was outwith Doctor Who’s original format. The “We can’t get these two weirdly hot schoolteachers back home” one. After this story? It’s an integral part of Doctor Who’s format and remains so to the present day. Something returned to at least every single year for the rest of time. One third of the “opening trilogy” concept introduced by Russell T Davies and rightly held on to by his successors as 21st century show runner. Including his own second incarnation.
I’ve said often in this newsletter, and will undoubtedly say again, that I believe the heart of Doctor Who is in juxtapositions. The police box on an alien planet, the Daleks on Westminster bridge, the Egyptian Mummy in Edwardian England. And so on. A contemporary setting opens up new possibilities for such juxtapositions, and it’s such a shame that this is the only contemporary story for William Hartnell’s Doctor. His Victorian presenting space wizard is both magnificently incongruous, and paradoxically totally at home, in such a setting.
1966’s Doctor Who often rationed William Hartnell’s appearance (and for complicated reasons) but for much of this story he’s the energetic centre of his own series again. Whether hobnobbing with scientists, civil servants or ministers4, quarrelling with yet relying on the army5 or strolling into a nightclub and being complimented on his “fab gear” he’s content and in control. His Doctor standing alone, fiercely staring down a War Machine, is one of any Doctor’s finest onscreen moments.
But this too is a matter of clever technique. Hartnell is barely in studio for Episode 1. But given a fair crack of the serial’s advance filming, some tutting in the background in a long scene in the middle in which other actors do the heavy lifting, and a strong scene towards the end, he seems solidly present throughout.
Yet he’s not to whom the story belongs. That’s new companions Ben and Polly, pop star beautiful both, who meet, then flirt across the class divide in that nightclub. They ground the story as much as its white heat technology, Ferguson’s technical mastery or Hartnell’s quicksilver presence. Together, they represent Doctor Who’s reflection of, and contribution to, the birth of British cool.
You know, where I write about Doctor Who in order, but in the order in which I first saw it? No? Fair enough. It’s quite a silly idea. ↩
And sometimes recreated from other sources, with frankly varying degrees of success. ↩
Whether me walking through pretty much every location scene in this story, both by accident and design, on a regular basis for several years constitutes “Cool Britannia” is something for others to judge. ↩
And how obviously is the unnamed Minister of this serial meant to be then Chancellor and future Prime Minister James Callaghan? Actor George Cross is practically doing an impression of him. ↩
Something his later selves are going to make a vocation of. ↩