Doctor Who A-Z #129: The Five Doctors (1983)

When I’ve told fellow Doctor Who fans that the next story I’m reviewing is The Five Doctors, there’s generally been a knowing laugh. Not, to be clear, a mocking laugh – nothing like the “ha ha, you poor sod” response I got when it was The Underwater Menace. No, it’s an indulgent, fannish amusement, the appropriate response to an indulgent, fannish and amusing story. Script editor Eric Saward’s original plan for the show’s twentieth anniversary was to tempt Robert Holmes back into the fold to write it, a goal he’d achieve in the next season. Instead he got Terrance Dicks, and for all this isn’t Dicks’s best work it’s the one that most perfectly sums up how fans feel about that former script editor. The Five Doctors is the exact TV equivalent of one of the novelisations Dicks turned out at such a prodigious rate: it is quick and undemanding, cosy and charming, and it bangs out Doctor Who cliches with a confidence that comes from knowing you invented most of them.

Given that Holmes would later complain about the “shopping list” of elements he was given to include in The Two Doctors, it’s probably for the best that he wasn’t available for this one. Dicks’s impossible brief is to write an adventure story with five heroes, each of whom has at least one sidekick, one of whom will have to be recast because he’s dead, one of whom doesn’t want to be involved but has to be represented somehow, and all of whom have to fight some enemy or other on their way to solve a mystery. It might have made for a satisfying video game, had the BBC been thinking about such things in 1983. It cannot possibly make a tight and well-structured screenplay.

Dicks, arguably the Doctor Who writer with the best grasp of story structure, knows this can’t be done. But Dicks is also the man who had to co-write a story that was ten episodes long because two shorter stories fell through. He knows that people can overlook a messy story structure so long as the script keeps moving, and the audience feel like they’re getting their money’s worth. The Five Doctors offers an obvious way to achieve this. Each of the five Doctors – and Sarah Jane Smith, whose status as most favoured companion is pretty baked-in by now – gets an introductory scene, they get to share scenes with their companions and fight an old enemy, while the Master and the Time Lords set up the ending elsewhere. It is one of those adventure stories where the outcome wouldn’t be much different if the hero (or heroes, in this case) never turned up. But people say the same thing about Raiders of the Lost Ark, and if your scriptwriting guidebook says Raiders of the Lost Ark is a badly-written adventure story, you should throw it out the window.

The Five Doctors has its flaws, most of which fans can anticipate and play along with Rocky Horror-style by now: Sarah Jane falling down the world’s gentlest incline, the awkward repurposing of footage from the incomplete Shada to represent the Fourth Doctor, the chess game that doesn’t even approach making sense, Paul Jerricho’s inexplicable delivery of the line “No, not the mind probe!” It is worth remembering, though, that Dicks presided over the first era of the show that managed to position its cheap effects as part of a consistent camp aesthetic, and The Five Doctors proves just as capable of absorbing its own critiques.

The returning characters are played as tellingly slightly different, slightly heightened compared to how they used to be, most obviously in the case of Richard Hurndall’s excessively doddery First Doctor. The production team had very little reference material to go on when it came to recreating ’60s Who; the visual reference for the Yeti wasn’t even a photo or clip from the series, but a photoshoot from the 1973 Radio Times Doctor Who pull-out section. The fact that Hurndall has been brought in to replace the late William Hartnell means his performance is more vulnerable to charges of caricature than the other Doctors, but he isn’t much wider of the mark than Jon Pertwee or Patrick Troughton, both of whom are delightful. The reason, perhaps, is that the multiple-Doctors structure allows them both to focus solely on the parts of the role they enjoy most. Pertwee gets to dump most of the technobabble on Peter Davison and play the Doctor as a pure action hero, while Troughton – as in The Three Doctors – is clearly having fun being the soul of mischief rather than the moral centre. His double-act with an older, wearier Brigadier could never have existed in his era, when the Brigadier was a brand new character. But somehow it feels completely natural, as if we’ve been watching this for decades.

Indeed, for all The Five Doctors is built to evoke nostalgia, it’s most entertaining in mix-and-match mode, whether that’s giving Pertwee the Cyberman story he never had, allowing Sarah Jane to meet the Master for the first time, or pairing the First Doctor with Tegan for no reason other than they’re the most amusingly mismatched Doctor-companion pair possible. This is not a version of continuity that exists anywhere else in the Davison era, where the agenda for returning monsters and characters was increasingly being set by fan consultant Ian Levine. But it’s much more fun, and in setting different eras of the show off against each other it actually comes up with something remarkably ahead of its time – the Raston Warrior Robot, a new villain who prefigures Steven Moffat’s penchant for children’s-game monsters (don’t blink, don’t turn around, don’t breathe, joined here by don’t move).

Let’s end by countering that shopping list of nitpicks and naff moments with a larger checklist of small delights from The Five Doctors: Turlough’s increasingly unhelpful responses to the Cybermen’s bomb, the grotesquely wriggly Kaled mutant, Jon Pertwee delivering the epithet “Jehosophat!” with such force that a generation of viewers thought it was the Master’s real name, the Cyberman who vomits after getting hit by the Raston, every single line the Second Doctor delivers at UNIT HQ. Most of all, there is the cocktail party Tegan, Turlough and Susan have when they first meet on board the TARDIS. Sadly, their conversation is drowned out by the First and Fifth Doctors’ conversations, but if we must have fanwank, I demand at least one story where the Doctor travels back to find out what the hell they were talking about. What, The Five Doctors asks, is the point of this much continuity if you’re not going to have fun with it?

Next: Warriors of the Deep (1984)

Graham’s Archive – The Five Doctors

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