Doctor Who A-Z #27: The War Machines (1966)

Remarkably, Doctor Who had never done a story set on a recognisable contemporary Earth before The War Machines. There had been one – Planet of Giants – set on an unrecognisable contemporary Earth, and it had stopped off briefly in modern-day England to either pick up or drop off companions. The fact that we get both here, losing Dodo and meeting Ben and Polly, shows the series hasn’t completely reinvented its attitude towards the present. But the idea that the viewer’s everyday world can be the setting for a whole Doctor Who story, that it can be as spectacular a venue for adventure as an alien planet or a historical period – this was all new.

The fact that this ended up becoming a very, very big part of the show means it can be hard to appreciate The War Machines for what it is, rather than for what it launched. The problem is compounded by the fact that this is William Hartnell’s third-from-last story. Nobody making this serial knew what was going to happen at the start of the next season, but watching it today you can’t think of anything else. The unconventional episode three cliffhanger, which simply dollies in on the Doctor standing his ground as one of the titular War Machines advances on him, feels like it belongs in a Patrick Troughton story like The Web of Fear or The Invasion. It’s a shame, really, that Hartnell didn’t get the chance to do some more stories like this. Whereas his shabby, informal, mop-topped successor would often look extremely at home in 1960s Britain, the stern, Edwardian First Doctor is a wonderfully disruptive presence on these streets.

It would be easier to avoid viewing The War Machines solely in the light of what would come later if the serial itself was better. It comes at the end of an awkward series, just after John Wiles’s brief spell as the show’s second producer. Wiles’s questionable achievement was to tone down the massive swings in quality that happened under his predecessor Verity Lambert, levelling the playing field until the whole show is basically alright. There were definite signs of a backlash against the show’s astonishing early success; the formula of going bigger with every successive Dalek story had reached its logical conclusion, and the audience response to the comedy historical stories had become negative enough for Wiles’s replacement Innes Lloyd to phase them out entirely. Which is a problem if you share my view that the historical stories are the only consistently good bits of Season Three.

This, then, is why The War Machines exists; they needed some stories set on Earth if only for budgetary reasons, and building one around the unveiling of the new Post Office Tower seemed less likely to provoke audience revolt than another historical one. As soon as it starts, though, you are struck by how natural it all feels. Of course 1960s Doctor Who should stop to feel the warmth of Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology”; of course there should be a story about computers. The fact that it now looks completely naive to see the Doctor react in shock when a room-sized computer proves capable of doing sums and remembering trivia is only part of the charm.

Indeed, if we’re awarding The War Machines points for doing things early, we should give it some grudging praise for hitting – in 1966 – the exact same brick wall that every Nineties techno-thriller would run into. The problem with computer thrillers is that their unique element is also completely un-cinematic, just a series of mouse clicks and keyboard clatter on a completely inert machine. You could do what Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke did and make your immobile machine into a character, but that doesn’t happen here – for all the fretting about artificial intelligence that goes on in the first episode, the villainous computer WOTAN doesn’t demonstrate much personality. Instead, writer Ian Stuart Black decides to add some physical threat to WOTAN’s plot to annex the world’s computer system. In the first two episodes, that externalised threat takes the form of a phone call that brainwashes anyone who hears it. In the second half of the story, it takes the form of the War Machines.

It’s useful that Black’s story breaks down so neatly into two halves, because it allows you to mentally separate the rather good first part from the not-so-good second part. There are still problems in the first two episodes: the Doctor takes a maddening length of time to work out Dodo is possessed, and the decision to pack her off to a farm to get better is the most disdainful way possible of writing a companion out. But WOTAN’s phone calls are beyond sinister, and it’s hard not to be swept up waiting to see how this unusual plot develops. Then it turns out that WOTAN just wants to make machines that smash things, and they’re not even particularly impressive machines. I mean, the bar is set pretty low: they merely have to be more intimidating than a telephone. Watching the scene in episode four where the army cordon a War Machine off with ropes – not electric ropes or anything, ordinary ropes – and it just mills around looking confused, you are forced to acknowledge they have failed at this task.

The strangest thing is, it doesn’t matter that much. I mean, obviously it would be wonderful if Doctor Who did a story about the dangers of putting national infrastructure online at a point when no-one had even said the word “internet”, let alone “internet of things”, and the story would overall be improved if the War Machines weren’t hilariously unthreatening. But everyone plays it with conviction, from Hartnell and his variously arriving and departing friends to William Mervyn’s wonderfully buffoonish civil servant to real-life newsreader Kenneth Kendall, who gets a fantastically irresponsible full-frame appearance warning viewers that London is being invaded. Most of all, there is Michael Ferguson’s direction, which is forceful and noirish and makes a great case for contemporary London as an essential Doctor Who setting. The punch-up in the Inferno nightclub feels like real violence for once, the blend of studio and location filming is seamless, and he cuts fast enough to – just – make you ignore the foolish decision to only make one War Machine prop.

The lessons being learned here, then, are both good and bad. For all his script’s flaws, Ian Stuart Black has staked out some major geographical and conceptual territory that the show will return to time and time again. Equally, Innes Lloyd has learned that if you get a great director and keep the cast on the same page, you can make any old twaddle work on screen. Having said that, if you offered me a choice between watching a bad script made with skill and conviction or a good script that’s badly acted and directed, I’d choose the former. Doctor Who fans can sometimes go too far in our admirable conviction that special effects don’t matter, that we sometimes end up talking about well-made television as though it’s a confidence trick. But making television is an art, and it’s a pleasure to see it done this well. The War Machines is still most admirable as a pointer towards future triumphs, but it also showcases how much the production team’s skill and confidence has grown since they were first asked to deliver the impossible every week.

Next: The Smugglers (1966)

Graham’s Archive – The War Machines

Full Doctor Who Archive Here