Doctor Who A-Z #08: The Reign of Terror (1964)

And so Doctor Who‘s first season ends as it began, with one of two “pure historical” stories not written by the subgenre’s mainstay John Lucarotti. The Reign of Terror is instead written by Dennis Spooner, who will soon take over as script editor from David Whitaker. As a script editor, Spooner will be particularly focused on the problem of the pure historicals, and it’s worth being clear on what exactly that problem is. It’s not, as fan lore has it, that the ratings and audience approval scores went through the floor every time there were no monsters: the pure historicals are mostly respectable mid-table players on both counts. The problem is that Whitaker’s laudable principle that historical stories should not ascribe real-world events to the Doctor and his friends leaves our heroes with very little to do. It may well have been a problem anyway, but the science fiction stories are increasingly defining the Doctor as more of a revolutionary hero than he was conceived as. This makes for a jarring shift when he arrives in the middle of an actual real-world revolution and ends up mostly trying not to get in the way.

The Reign of Terror takes place in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and sees the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan – the same characters who had, at the start of the year, foiled the Daleks’ nuclear holocaust – reduced to looking on and tutting as Robespierre gives way to Napoleon. This isn’t altogether a bad thing; at first, it’s quite charming in imagining a version of this series which is radically more low-key than anything that followed. The bulk of the first episode concerns the TARDIS crew trying to work out where they are. When the plot requires the Doctor to go to Paris, rather than pilot the TARDIS (at this point still a deeply unreliable machine) he simply walks, getting into amusing scrapes with a chain gang and a clothes shop owner as he goes. Hartnell is enjoying himself quite a bit here, and it’s a drag to have to keep cutting back to a tediously static plotline in which his companions have to break out of jail.

I try not to measure old Doctor Who episodes against modern standards when it comes to the depiction of female characters, not least because it is so much more damning when they fall short of the standards of their time. Upon arriving in prison, Barbara is pawed and drooled over by an inexplicably Yorkshire-accented jailer, a scene which other reviewers suggest was intended to be funny. Susan, who at the start of this season was a genuinely enigmatic, fascinating character, is reduced to having a screaming fit when she sees a rat in her cell. Ian fares better by dint of not being a woman, but he’s still caught in a subplot about a British spy which is unreasonably boring.

The spy element does, at least, point up a problem with the story that the production team can’t be blamed for. This time next year, Spooner will write The Time Meddler, a script which offers the show a completely different way to play out a historical story. The Time Meddler defines the pleasure of a Doctor Who historical as watching the Doctor and company land not just in another time but another genre, a genre which they then corrupt into a Doctor Who episode. It’s a strikingly postmodern idea, one which still works as a definition for Rogue or The Devil’s Chord or indeed any historical story in the show’s current incarnation. What’s more, you can see Spooner working to refocus the historical stories on genre rather than history in all of the episodes he wrote leading up to The Time Meddler. The Romans, for instance, is only superficially about the Doctor meeting Emperor Nero. It’s actually about the TARDIS crew invading a sword-and-sandal drama, which is a much more mischievous idea.

The Reign of Terror feels like a first, imperfect step towards this approach. The problem with making a pure historical, though, is that the opportunities to subvert the genre are limited. Your options are basically restricted to using the TARDIS crew’s status as time travellers to throw a wrench into things, or to simply trust in the inherently entertaining nature of the genre they have landed in. Which is the problem that I can’t blame Spooner for, because I just don’t find the French Revolution that interesting. There are modern stories which could work as pure historicals: The Curse of the Black Spot, for instance, would work in this register because modern children still think pirates are fun. The Reign of Terror exists largely because, in the early ’60s, creations like the Scarlet Pimpernel still had a bit of pop-culture currency. But filtering the Revolution through the lens of archaic British adventure fiction means The Reign of Terror is bad history even when you take out the time-travelling police box.

British writers like Baroness Orczy, you see, take it as read that their readers will consider it a profound tragedy that royal tyranny was replaced by military tyranny, whereas I’m sat here wishing there was a way they could both lose. Ian has a speech in episode five which seems to be attempting some moral ambiguity, but the serial still depicts Robespierre as a Pol Pot figure who near-singlehandedly directed the Terror. His only positive quality is that he’s not Napoleon, who is depicted in a wholly invented scene meeting with Paul Barras to plot a coup against Robespierre. The real sin here is not the inaccuracy but the timing; The Reign of Terror has kept us waiting until episode six to meet the one character the entire audience will have expected to see as soon as the setting was announced. Say what you will about the modern ‘celebrity historical’ episodes, at least they don’t make you sit through a month and a half’s worth of 1920s drawing-room mystery before they bring on Agatha Christie.

Next: Planet of Giants.

Graham’s Archive – The Reign of Terror

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