Doctor Who A-Z #20: The Myth Makers (1965)

Andrew Cartmel, the final script editor for classic series Doctor Who, would always push for more stories to be set on Earth, arguing that whereas the BBC’s attempt to create alien planets and races were variable, they were reliably world-class at period drama. The Myth Makers proves this was always the case. This week’s guest cast features Royal Shakespeare Company co-founder Max Adrian, Frances de Wolff – whose career spanned the distance from Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan to Carry On Cleo – and Jack Melford, who had racked up an enormous CV since his first stage appearance in 1911. Even as the public perception of Doctor Who began to focus more and more on its science fiction elements, it’s clear that you could still get a better guest cast by offering the chance to play Agamemnon than you could by offering the chance to play a Morok.

It’s ironic, because this is almost certainly the story that made the phasing-out of the pure historicals inevitable. That’s nothing to do with its quality, though – it’s more to do with the bizarre decision to sandwich four episodes of mid-paced comic absurdity in Ancient Greece in between a trailer for an unprecedentedly huge Dalek epic and the actual unprecedentedly huge Dalek epic. And yet, pulled out of context, The Myth Makers is very good indeed. Donald Cotton’s story might seem like a too-obvious follow-up to Dennis Spooner’s The Romans from last season – same comedic approach, different ancient empire! – but its opening scene is as action-packed as Spooner’s is dreamy, and it forges its own path from this point onwards.

There are no surviving episodes of The Myth Makers in the BBC archives, and as much as I’d love to see it one day, Cotton’s script is so dialogue-heavy that it doesn’t make that much difference. Every now and then there’ll be an action scene that reminds you this isn’t a very well-written radio comedy, but for the most part it is disarmingly easy to settle in to listening to The Myth Makers. The comic historicals might be a subset of a subset in Doctor Who terms, but the more I look into them, the easier it is to see different approaches: The Romans, like Cotton’s next script, is close to genre parody, while the humour in The Highlanders revolves around the anarchic potential of dropping the Doctor in a serious situation. The Myth Makers is something altogether different. Here, Cotton seems inspired by the sheer ridiculousness of the Trojan War story itself, writing Cassandra as a bad-tempered villain tired of never being believed, and giving Paris a cherishable scene where he admits this whole war has got a bit out of hand, a bit silly really.

The silliest part of the Trojan War – at least, as it exists in the popular imagination – is its resolution, and this is where The Myth Makers really does something daring. The Romans built up to a situation where the Doctor accidentally caused Nero’s Great Fire; his unnervingly giggly response to the carnage marks a mid-point in the hero’s journey of William Hartnell’s Doctor. For a while, The Myth Makers seems to be travelling the same path. The set-piece where the Doctor comes up with the Trojan Horse – after first suggesting using a huge catapult to get the soldiers over the wall! – is very funny, and it seems like this paradox is the natural end point of the story…

…except it’s episode three.

One of the other things The Myth Makers is doing, it turns out, is exploring a contradiction in the idea of the comedy historical. The purpose of a historical story is for the Doctor to witness a key moment in human history. The purpose of a comedy is to be funny. This is straightforward enough, but in practice there aren’t many events that go down in history because they’re a right giggle. Every comedy historical, then, has to find a way to incorporate a very not-funny real-life event into the larks. The Highlanders will manage it through sheer cheek – having the Doctor materialise just after the Battle of Culloden – but The Myth Makers looks the horror in the eye. The final episode is a massacre, and the Doctor realises he can’t do anything to stop it. He flees in the TARDIS, accidentally taking a Trojan woman – Katarina – with him. Worse, he leaves his companion Vicki behind, and although literate viewers will have recognised she was being lined up to play a particular role in the Trojan saga, it’s still a shock to see the Doctor abandon a friend in the rush to get out of trouble.

Back at the start of Season One, you wouldn’t have blinked at this. Back then, writers had to come up with elaborate reasons for the Doctor to stay and fight rather than get away at the first opportunity. But that quickly began to change, and Season Two ended with a story seemingly designed to shake the last of the Doctor’s complacency out of him. The ending of The Myth Makers can only be read as an acknowledgement that war is an uncontainable horror, and it manages to do this without making the preceding three episodes of comedy feel glib or disconnected. There are parts of The Myth Makers where the humour recalls Monty Python, or Carry On, but In the end it’s more like Blackadder. Like Blackadder Goes Forth, the ending reveals that the serial’s scathing cynicism about war and rulers is not just there to raise laughs. It shows that war is a nightmare that might make even the Doctor act out of character – and it also highlights the Doctor’s character development, by making that out-of-character behaviour something he would have considered as a first resort just two years ago.

The Romans was a Hail Mary pass, using comedy to try and energise a strand of the series that was increasingly difficult to align with the rest of the show. It worked, so The Myth Makers is free to take it a step further, grounding its satire in the developing morality that was, ironically, making the pure historicals a hard sell. For all their days were numbered, Cotton’s story shows they at least went out with their head held high.

Next: The Daleks’ Master Plan (1965-66)

Graham’s Archive – The Myth Makers

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