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[COLUMN] 55 Years On, Jon Pertwee's First Season of Doctor Who Remains Influential | by Darren Mooney
🕑 Added 2025-03-16 14:00:11 +0000 UTC
Note: This article contains a full discussion of the seventh season of classic Doctor Who, which aired between January and June 1970. It was recently released in a beautiful remastered blu ray box set that I just devoured, and the individual episodes are available on the BBC iPlayer in the United Kingdom and on Tubi or Britbox in the States.
The seventh season of Doctor Who marked a number of significant changes for the show.
The 1960s gave way to the 1970s. Jon Pertwee replaced Patrick Troughton as the Doctor. The series transitioned from black-and-white into color. The premise of the show also fundamentally changed. Doctor Who had historically found the Doctor travelling through time and space in his TARDIS. Following the events of the sixth season finale, “The War Games”, the Doctor was exiled to (more or less) contemporary Earth.
There are conflicting reports about whether the BBC considered cancelling Doctor Who at the end of the previous decade, which had seen a sharp decline in ratings as the “Dalekmania” of the mid-1960s faded from cultural memory. However, it was clear that the show required a complete overhaul. The seventh season is effectively the first time that Doctor Who had to reboot itself, something that the series had done multiple times since as it transitioned from one format and style to another.
The seventh season is one of the most successful of these transition points, gracefully pivoting the show’s format, lead and premise over the course of a single season. It is no surprise that the season premiere, “Spearhead from Space”, served as an obvious template for Russell T. Davies when he would revive the show in 2005. Davies’ first season recycled the villainous Nestene Consciousness and its Auton drones for its premiere, while keeping the action on (or at least in orbit of) Earth.
Pertwee’s first season remains one of the most impressive seasons of Doctor Who ever produced, in large part because it manages to change so much without missing a step. When cast, Pertwee was largely known as a comedic actor, given his work on comedy radio shows like The Navy Lark or his roles in various Carry On films including Carry On Screaming. There was an initial sense that Pertwee would push the show into broad comedy, as reflected in the promotional images.
Pertwee’s later seasons would admittedly veer into high camp, with the introduction of characters like the Doctor’s old childhood-friend-turned-enemy the Master (Roger Delgado) and the resolution of any tension between the Doctor and his human allies. As podcaster John Smith noted of later seasons, “It starts to feel cosy and camp in a particular way, especially later in the run where you have this ensemble U.N.I.T. family.” Even Pertwee’s performance tended to get broader and goofier.
However, in his introduction, Pertwee “opted to downplay all funny elements” of the script. The actor reportedly told producer Derrick Sherwin, “Look, I’ve got a reputation as a comedian, but I don’t want to play it like that. I want to play the character straight.” The result was a clear shift in the character, who transitioned from the absent-minded grandfather played by William Hartnell or the “cosmic hobo” played by Patrick Troughton into something of an interstellar aristocrat.
It helped that the show itself started to feel grounded and in conversation with contemporary Britain. Exiled to Earth, the Doctor was forced to work with the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (later Unified Intelligence Taskforce), known as “U.N.I.T.”, under Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney) and alongside scientist Elizabeth “Liz” Shaw (Caroline John). The Doctor was no longer master of his domain. He was no longer in complete control of his adventures.
There is a compelling tension between the Doctor and the Brigadier and, to a lesser extent, between the Doctor and Shaw. When the Brigadier and Shaw return the Doctor’s TARDIS key in “Spearhead from Space”, in the middle of a crisis, the first thing that the Doctor does is to try and fail to run away. In “Doctor Who and the Silurians”, the Doctor can do nothing to stop the Brigadier murdering the Silurians under government orders, “A whole race of them. And he's just wiped them out.”
There is a frisson in watching the Doctor, already established as a cosmic anarchist who shies from direct violence, in the employ of an explicitly military organization. “That's typical of the military mind, isn't it?” he complains in “Silurians.” “Present them with a new problem, and they start shooting at it.” These anxieties bubble to the surface in “Inferno”, the final story of the season, in which the Doctor visits a dystopian alternate universe where the Brigadier and Shaw are fascists.
This feels in step with concerns bubbling beneath the British popular consciousness of the moment. The seventh season premiered just a few months after the British military deployed in force to Northern Ireland, in what would become the longest campaign in British military history. During this era, British and international newspapers were filled with photographs and reports of British military troops deployed in communities that were ostensibly part of the United Kingdom.
More broadly, with a general election looming, the support that Prime Minister Harold Wilson had voiced for American military intervention in Vietnam was a loaded issue. “Britain's support for America's war was denounced by Labour backbenchers, and Wilson and his ministers were often heckled – and at times physically attacked - by protestors when they appeared in public,” wrote Geriant Hughes. While Wilson refused to provide troops, he did provide military support. No wonder the Doctor suddenly found himself surrounded by soldiers wielding guns.
Jon Pertwee arrived at a very tense moment in British history. This was reflected across the season in a number of ways. “Spearhead from Space” taps into the economic anxieties of the era, with John Ransome (Derek Smee) returning from an attempt to secure investment funding from the United States to discover that his company has “sacked all the workers. It's completely automated now.” The episode ends with store mannequins coming to life, gunning down civilians in the streets.
“We're turning over to automation, General,” owner George Hibbert (John Woodnutt) boasts to Major General Scobie (Hamilton Dyce). “It means we can keep staff down to a minimum.” Scobie agrees, “Splendid. Don't get machines going on strike, eh?” It seems worth nothing that the number of working days lost through disputes and strikes in the United Kingdom climbed from 2.8m in 1967 to 11m in 1970 and later 23.9m by 1972. Indeed, one of the reasons that “Spearhead from Space” looks so good today is because it was shot on location on film due to a strike, lending it a more cinematic aesthetic.
However, it also felt like Doctor Who was in conversation with itself. Following the fairly conventional alien invasion narrative of “Spearhead from Space”, the remaining three stories of the season are all deconstructions of the classic alien invasion narrative. In “The Silurians”, the humans discover a species that predates their dominion over earth. The alien attack in “Ambassadors of Death” is a false flag orchestrated by General Charles Carrington (John Abineri) to manipulate public opinion. While “Inferno” features monstrous mutants, but its real villains are the fascist doppelgängers.
This marked a departure from the default storytelling mode of the Troughton ear, the “base under siege” story in which characters would be trapped in a remote location and menaced by an outside force. The Troughton era was saturated with these stories, which often felt like mad libs. The most charitable reading of this template was as an expression of the mythic “island fortress” that lingered in the British psyche after the Second World War, an isolated community under perpetual siege.
This storytelling template could feel quite reactionary. This is not to suggest that every base under siege story is inherently reactionary. Even during the Troughton era, “The Macra Terror” revealed the threat was coming from inside the base and “The Faceless Ones” revealed its aliens were actually not so bad. However, these sorts of narratives had a decidedly xenophobic underpinning, with Troughton’s Doctor famously vowing, “There are some corners of the universe which have bred the most terrible things, things which act against everything that we believe in. They must be fought.”
In the context of contemporary Britain, it was hard not to read these stories in light of the incendiary rhetoric of figures like Conservative MP Enoch Powell. Powell delivered his infamous “rivers of blood” speech in April 1968. Powell believed that Britain was effectively being invaded by immigrants from overseas. “Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now,” he warned. Pertwee’s first season ran through an election year that would find the Conservatives returning to power, and that anxiety simmers through it.
Although Conservative leader Edward Heath tried to temper Powell’s rhetoric, it didn’t work. Immediately before the election, Powell broke with his party to give a barnstorming speech about how the United Kingdom was under threat “from within” by “forces which aim at the actual destruction of our nation.” Heath refused to withdraw party support for Powell, and the public didn’t seem to object strongly enough to punish the Conservatives at the polls.
Powell’s rhetoric resonated with some voters, with contemporary reports quoting supporters describing him as a “worthy successor of our beloved leader Winston Churchill.” Malcolm Dean, who covered the campaign, acknowledged that, while some argued that Powell’s rhetoric had no meaningful impact on the election, “Nonetheless, others equally strongly believe it was Powell who won it.” Incidentally, the election occurred during the broadcast of the season’s final story, “Inferno”, which featured a parallel fascist Britain.
As such, the seventh season’s repeated deconstruction and interrogation of what a “monster” is within the larger context of Doctor Who feels very much of its moment. It is also in conversation with the show’s past. While it is too much to describe the seventh season of Doctor Who as especially “mature” or “adult”, it is more thoughtful than the show had been to that point. It has also aged remarkably well. It is, by some considerable distance, the best of Pertwee’s five seasons in the role.
Unfortunately, the show would immediately retreat from this approach. Pertwee objected to Shaw’s competence and ability to serve as a foil to the Doctor, complaining that he “couldn’t really believe in her as a sidekick to the Doctor, because she was so darned intelligent herself.” The next season would replace Shaw with Jo Grant (Katy Manning), a more junior companion more likely to – to quote the Brigadier – “pass [him his] test tubes and to tell [him] how brilliant [he is].”
Indeed, the eighth season premiere, “Terror of the Autons” feels like a very conscious retool, an attempt to remake “Spearhead from Space” in a more generic and less compelling way. The Doctor got a cartoon arch enemy in the Master. He also smoothed over his relationship with the Brigadier and embraced the establishment rather than existing in tension with it. It was “Terror of the Autons” that, in the words of Paul Cornell, “exiled the Doctor to Earth and made him a Tory.”
Still, while Doctor Who would spend the next few years rolling back from the ambition and the drama of its relaunch season, the seventh season set a new standard for the show. Even today, the Autons and the Silurians remain a central part of the show’s internal iconography. For years, there have been rumors of a U.N.I.T. spin-off that would use the format of this season as a template, which looks to finally be happening with the upcoming The War Between the Land and the Sea.
More to the point, the seventh season demonstrated that Doctor Who was a resilient and enduring format, one that could change and evolve with the times even beyond swapping out its lead actor. “Spearhead from Space” proved that, much like the show’s lead character, Doctor Who was capable of a complete regeneration.
