Earthshock
“You once said that you liked happy endings, and no-one can ever know.”
Earthshock Part Two
Seen: 16th August 1982
The Long Way Round
If anyone acquainted with 1980s Doctor Who were writing a list of notable things about Earthshock, their top two would inevitably be that it features the return of the Cybermen after seven years, and that it ends with the death of companion Adric (Matthew Waterhouse). Some might put that second fact first. But those two would be anyone’s top two. Third on the list would probably be that it features a guest performance by Beryl Reid in the ostensibly unlikely role of a space captain named Briggs.
Back in 1982, two out of these three innovations won the immediate approval of then Doctor Who, Peter Davison. The first actor to play the Doctor young enough to have seen the series as a child, one of his earliest memories of Doctor Who was of the Cybermen emerging from the snow at the end of the first episode of The Tenth Planet (1966). He was also of the opinion that the three companions his Doctor had been presented with on his transformation from Tom Baker was too many, and that at least one of them should go. Killing Adric off, he concluded, would add an element of unpredictability and danger, even “realism” to the then nineteen year old series.
About Reid, Davison had more mixed feelings. He later observed that it seemed to those in studio with her that she did not have a handle on the science fiction aspects of the serial’s scripts. More importantly, Earthshock was an unpleasant experience for her, because director Peter Grimwade, apparently unhappy with her being cast “over his head” by producer John Nathan-Turner1, treated his most distinguished cast member “as though she were cattle.”2
I mention these headline facts about the serial not simply to get them out of the way. I’m not just saying the things that must always be said about Earthshock. Honest. More, it’s that how these three things interact in the fan imagination has always interested me. Well, I say “always”. It wasn’t on my mind when I first saw the final two episodes of this story, combined into a single double length instalment, a new Part Two, during the 1982 repeat season Doctor Who And The Monsters.3
Reid’s casting has long been controversial in Doctor Who fandom, and was before convention anecdotes of her unhappiness during the production surfaced. The series’ (then largely male and young adult) fanbase decided that employing someone they knew from Yorkshire Television’s Get Up and Go!, a children’s series where she was partnered with a green puppet cat, or her appearances on light entertainment favourites such as Celebrity Squares or Give Us A Clue, was an insult to the gritty, and very serious space drama that Doctor Who apparently is.4
Ian Levine, a record producer and Doctor Who fan then close to the production team is quoted on the DVD and Blu-ray special features for this serial, saying that Earthshock’s writer Eric Saward wanted Captain Briggs to be “a real hard nosed marine”5. On other occasions he has suggested the part should have been played by a cigar-chomping, crew cut, tattooed American actor.6 Now, with the best possible spin on it, that casting is obvious.
Whereas the seemingly outré casting of a slight, 62 year old woman with a russet bouffant as a grizzled space freighter captain is at worst, not something that would occur to everyone. Or be possible in any series other than Doctor Who. In a sense, it’s assertively British; the television equivalent of how a songwriter like Paul McCartney or Ray Davies would throw a concept like “the Daily Mail” or a “Carnabetian” into an idiom as fundamentally tough, and fundamentally American, as rock and roll, transfiguring the work around it as they did so. You could argue that such a move is parochial, but doing so depends on assuming Americana to be universal. (It isn’t.)
Another, and significantly more important, point is that Beryl Reid was a phenomenal actor. The recipient of the 1967 Tony Award for Best Actress In A Play7 and and the 1980 Olivier Award for Best Comedy Performance8. The year Earthshock went out, she would make her second appearance as retired, alcoholic SIS operative Connie Sachs in Smiley’s People, for which she would win a BAFTA for Best Actress9. Doctor Who was very lucky to have her, whatever the part.
Briggs enters the story towards the end of Part Two as a businesslike presence, sarcastically dismissive of her officers’ worries and efforts. Berger, the one with whom she seems to have some rapport, advises Security Officer Ringway that it’s his seeming earnestness that irritates their Captain. Briggs later responds to the news that another one of her crew has died with an eye-rolling “That’s all we need”. Their deaths are an inconvenience. One that causes extra paperwork, prompts black humour, and forces her to spend time questioning their ostensible murderers. “You’ve caused me a great deal of trouble,” she seethes at the Doctor and Adric.
And here’s the rub; Davison’s anecdotes about Reid’s experiences on set make her achievement in this story all the more remarkable. Because, she does something quietly extraordinary with Captain Briggs, a thinly written part that in the hands of the kind of actor Saward apparently wanted would have likely been entirely unmemorable. In the margins of this action adventure story, and with almost no help from the script, she gives her a journey.
As the Doctor argues that her ship needs to stop, and that there is a bomb hidden in the hold, Briggs starts to show emotion. Unfortunately for him, it’s self-pity. She whines and wheedles that she’s not only going to lose the bonus she expected for bringing her cargo in on time, she might also have to pay a heavy fine. She almost has tears in her eyes. Entirely venal tears. The potential loss of money is moving her more than the loss of life, which is already considerable, has done.
She then willingly, motivated by fear, sacrifices much of her crew by letting them continue their doomed attempt to stop the Cybermen reaching the bridge, even when the Doctor has begged her not to twice. This is the point Briggs realises how little she knows about what she’s facing. How outside her experience this all is. Which is of course why casting a “a real hard nosed marine” type as Captain Briggs would be wrong. She10 isn’t a soldier, she’s a haulage driver, and she isn’t ready to participate in the war the Cyberleader so casually announces.
The confusion and horror that quickly pass across her face as the Doctor describes that same Cyberleader as “Positively flippant,” compared to the rest of its species, serves to make the point. From now on, Briggs is barely concealing heaving, desperate panic, not irritation. Her flippancy, unlike the Cyberleader’s, is all gone now. “The boys right, there’s a chance, leave now!” she pleads with the Doctor, as the Cybermen drag him and Tegan away, leaving Adric and Briggs trapped on the ship’s bridge.
Captain Briggs, who barely more than an episode earlier was cracking jokes about the effect of crew member deaths on the survivors’ bonuses, is now desperate to save every one she can. “Come on, lad!” she says insistently but compassionately to Adric as they try to evacuate her ship in the serial’s final scenes. Her delivery turning something seemingly written as an instruction, or chastisement, into earnest encouragement coming from urgent personal need11.
In the lift, she carefully wraps her arm around his, as if to discourage him from getting out and trying again.12 She knows he’s going to try, but she thinks she can stop him. She can’t, and the boy she tries to save dies. At this point, Captain Briggs is the only character pursuing a happy ending.13 She doesn’t know she’s a character in a tragedy.
Peter Davison has, in more recent years, said he regrets that tragedy, and his enthusiasm for the death of Adric. That the “realism” that he felt it might bring to the series was a blind alley; “On reflection, I think, probably, I didn’t realise how many fans would be badly affected by the loss of Adric… maybe it was not a good idea.”14
No fiction is “realistic”. Especially not performed fiction. It might strive to be mimetic, but even that’s, and by definition, a kind of imitation. In real life, everything ultimately ends unhappily. The glories of the world are transient, even the sunset and the well-prepared meal the Doctor bathetically invokes when trying and failing to remind the Cyberleader of its lost humanity. Human mortality is an absolute. That’s what the Cybermen are afraid of, after all. What they ultimately represent.
Fiction is not real life, and happy endings are the exclusive privilege of fiction. There’s a case that we should allow it to exercise that privilege with a little less embarrassment.
A school friend of Nathan-Turner’s recalls him being a fan of Reid as early as the 1950s; Marson, Richard. Totally Tasteless: The Life or John Nathan-Turner. 2nd ed., Ten Acre Books, 2022. (Page 27)
Quotes and general argument from the Earthshock disc of the Doctor Who Season 19 Blu-ray set (2018). Davison also suggests - sarcastically but with real feeling - that had any of the many prop guns used on set in Earthshock been real, the director would have been unlikely to have survived the final studio day.
I’ve reached this conclusion based on how much more numerous and detailed my memories from Earthshock are compared to the other three stories I’ve already covered, and that they are all from Parts Three and Four.
Full credit to Doctor Who Magazine editor Gary Russell for writing in his review of the VHS release, “… Beryl Reid is superb, not the hideous mistake many fans believe,” in Doctor Who Magazine #191 (3rd September 1992).
Specifically, in Putting the Shock into Earthshock (2003), a DVD extra also included on the 2018 Blu-ray issue.
I have this noted but can’t find the original source. If you know it, do write in.
For The Killing of Sister George, a role she reprised in the film adaptation (1968).
For Born in the Gardens, a then new play performed for the two hundredth anniversary of The Theatre Royal, Bristol, which is the oldest continuously operating theatre in English speaking world. Which is to say, it was a prestigious gig.
The first was in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979), for which she was nominated but did not win. Bafflingly, Grimwade had worked as an assistant on Tinker Tailor, and hired other members of its cast, e.g. Alec Sabin, to be in Earthshock himself; which makes his pique at Reid’s casting even less defensible.
Apparently “He” in earlier iterations of the script, although there’s no documentary proof of this.
An earlier version of the line is tippexed out of the production script at this point. I wonder what Briggs originally said?
This action is a handwritten addition on the transmission script, indicating it was developed in rehearsal or studio.
That’s probably the fourth most significant thing about this story; it “reveals” that the Dinosaurs were wiped out by a spaceship crashing into prehistoric Earth, having been hijacked and then lost in tine by Cybermen.
Again, on the Season 19 Blu-ray.