Doctor Who A-Z #25: The Gunfighters (1966)

The first episode of The Gunfighters is titled ‘A Holiday for the Doctor’, and that fairly describes the mood as the story opens. Not since The Romans have we seen a TARDIS crew so eager for a vacation: Steven and Dodo, a duo who even seemed to be having fun playing the deadly games in The Celestial Toymaker, are little short of thrilled to learn they’re in the Wild West. They gleefully go off to explore and get themselves some cowboy clothes (which the Doctor correctly identifies as inauthentic Tom Mix gear, one of many details that made my Western-loving heart sing). Even the Doctor, who’s suffering from a terrible toothache, seems to be enjoying himself – or maybe it’s just William Hartnell who’s having a blast, giving one of his liveliest, funniest, most energised performances.

He is, it would be fair to say, having more fun with The Gunfighters than most viewers. For many years, this was remembered as Doctor Who‘s worst ever story, and while some of that can be traced back to the opinion of influential figures in early fandom (Jeremy Bentham and Ian Levine were not impressed), the rot set in earlier. Director Rex Tucker considered himself too good for Doctor Who, which poisoned the atmosphere on set. Producer Innes Lloyd was so disappointed with the story he made the decision to phase out the ‘pure historical’ stories (i.e. ones where the Doctor and his companions were the only SF element). Then it was broadcast, and the reception was even worse. The audience appreciation figures hit an all-time low, and the show’s co-creator Sydney Newman wrote a memo decrying the serial.

Defenders of The Gunfighters sometimes make out that the serial’s critics are simply parroting handed-down opinions, but that’s obviously not true – Lloyd wasn’t, Newman wasn’t, the 1966 audience weren’t. Even so, some of the more common fan criticisms of The Gunfighters make little sense. It’s often decried for being cheap-looking and poorly acted, which isn’t true at all. No, it’s not as lavish as a contemporary Hollywood Western like How the West Was Won, but nobody watching in the mid-60s would have expected that. They’d have expected something like an American TV Western, and it doesn’t look much worse than that. 1980s script editor Andrew Cartmel would come to realise that Doctor Who works well on Earth because the BBC are reliably great at period drama. This is as true of Cartmel’s era as it is of the show’s earliest incarnation: can anyone seriously say The Gunfighters looks cheaper than The Web Planet, or The Underwater Menace?

Similarly, while the cast’s attempts at American accents are frequently insane – barman Charlie appears to come from Arizona’s less-celebrated Cornish district – the performances underneath them aren’t bad at all. Anthony Jacobs’s Doc Holliday is a fine performance, and Sheena Marshe – as a sanitised version of Holliday’s girlfriend, the Hungarian prostitute ‘Big Nose Kate’ – is an unusually strong, ribald female guest character for this era of the show. The second half brings in Laurence Payne as Johnny Ringo, a gunfighter who won’t cross paths with the Earp family for another year – but who cares, actual Westerns have committed worse historical howlers, and Payne’s performance brings some genuine menace into the serial’s home stretch.

There are longueurs in the script, there are also plenty of big laugh lines; I love the Doctor’s fear that, if he’s exposed as an alien, he might be “arrested for vagrancy”. I liked it a lot more than The Reign of Terror or The Crusade, though that is in part because I like Westerns more than I like stories about the French Revolution or the Crusades. Which is where we touch on something a bit bigger than just thinking the serial looks cheap or is badly acted: as I have noted before, the pure historicals have very little recourse to subvert the genres they enter. Nowadays when the Doctor enters a story about cowboys – as he did in the Matt Smith episode A Town Called Mercy – we are comfortable in the assumption that it will end up being a story about aliens, or robots, or something else that fits in with Doctor Who. The Gunfighters, if anything, becomes more and more like a Western as it goes on, and for a lot of fans that means it gets further and further away from something they might enjoy.

Why do Doctor Who fans not enjoy Westerns? My theory is that there is no place in a Western narrative for a character like the Doctor. I don’t mean a character who doesn’t use guns; The Gunfighters plays that for laughs, A Town Called Mercy plays it as a moral dilemma, and both of these approaches work well. The real problem is that the classic Western hero is too much like the Doctor. Adventure fiction set during the French Revolution tends to be about fanaticism and ideological rigidity, which is the kind of context where a trickster and a wanderer like the Doctor will naturally stand out. Most Westerns, though, are themselves about wanderers. Indeed, the Westerns being made at the same time as The Gunfighters tended to focus on trickster figures like The Man With No Name or Django, characters who are unlike the Doctor in that they’re violent but otherwise occupy the same space in a story.

In another world, where The Gunfighters was successful and established the Wild West as a viable landscape for Doctor Who, the show could usefully have built on these parallels. It could have recognised that an archetype like Johnny Ringo might be built up into a dark mirror of the Doctor’s wanderlust, in the same way that Davros matches him in genius or The Master matches him in chaos. And it might have recognised that The Gunfighters‘s steady build from genre parody to straight-faced action violence is, itself, a kind of subversion. The Gunfighters was ultimately a dead end, but if you can stand the incessant refrains of ‘The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon’ you might find that it’s one of the early show’s more beguiling dead ends. It wouldn’t work in any other Doctor’s era, but it works here, and that’s enough.

Next: The Savages (1966)

Graham’s Archive – The Gunfighters

Full Doctor Who Archive Here