Doctor Who A-Z #31: The Highlanders (1966-7)

If, like me, you’re fascinated by the question of why Doctor Who abandoned ‘pure’ historical stories, The Highlanders offers something like the perfect test conditions to run an experiment. This is the last time pure historicals were a regular part of the series’ repertoire, rather than a decades-later experiment in reviving them. It is made by the exact production team whose last two stabs at the form – The Gunfighters and The Smugglers – had seen a cratering in Doctor Who‘s audience appreciation index and ratings respectively. (The Highlanders is a solid if unspectacular performer on both counts, in case you were wondering) The only difference is the leading man. This is Patrick Troughton’s one and only pure historical, allowing us to determine once and for all if these stories could ever work with a lead other than William Hartnell, or whether they’re inescapably bound up with the First Doctor’s era.

It turns out the answer is cautiously positive. The usual line on Troughton’s early stories is that he brought more energy and humour to the role, but anyone who’s seen The Romans and The Gunfighters knows Hartnell had an awful lot of fun with the pure historical stories too. For a while, at least; the standard arc of a Hartnell-era comedy historical was to start off in a near-parodic register, then gradually darken the tone until we arrived at whichever grave historic event the story is building up to.

The Highlanders gets away with maintaining its comic tone throughout by having the TARDIS materialise just after the Battle of Culloden, which is exactly the kind of cataclysm the Hartnell stories would have built up to. That’s one difference: another is that the comedy constantly comes from the Doctor, rather than from genre parody. This has two notable effects. Firstly, the humour the Doctor brings doesn’t have to mesh with the story’s setting, and indeed The Highlanders becomes funnier and more suspenseful the more the Doctor’s clowning rubs up against real danger. Doctor Who as an entire series might be described as a picaresque, but this is one of the rare serials that really does feel like a seventeenth-century rogue’s progress, possessed of a vague air of Defoe or Thackaray. Here, the Doctor survives by disguising himself as an English soldier, an elderly Scottish washerwoman and – most outrageously – a German physician called “Doctor von Wer” who diagnoses an English officer with a persistent headache – then bashes the man’s head against a desk until he’s proved right.

All these disguises lead us to the other consequence of making the Doctor a more prankish character: it further destabilises our sense of who he is these days. Remember, this is only Troughton’s second story. Other Doctors would spend their sophomore outing facing a moral dilemma (The Silurians, The Beast Below), guiding companions through emotionally troubling situations (The Ark in Space, The End of the World) or facing off against a familiar enemy (Attack of the Cybermen, Into the Dalek). All of these story types are designed to reassure us that this new Doctor is the same person, but The Highlanders doesn’t do that at all. Rather, it foregrounds what’s different about the Second Doctor, establishing that our hero is now someone who will land in a war zone and – once he’s checked his companions don’t want to leave – will run into the middle of it to cause even more chaos. It’s a startling characterisation, but also an intoxicating one.

Indeed, it seems to have infected the production team. Comparing The Highlanders to something like The Reign of Terror indicates how the show’s morality has shifted since the first season. The Reign of Terror faithfully reproduces the British establishment view of the French Revolution as a historic tragedy caused by unwashed fanatics, but The Highlanders is unmistakably on the side of the Jacobites. Rightly so – the Doctor has, by now, fought so many alien despots it would be strange to see him side with imperial power on our planet. But this argument would, you suspect, cut no ice with the large number of people who complained about Peter Watkins’s experimental docu-drama Culloden, aired by the BBC just two years prior.

I don’t think the makers of The Highlanders were looking to make a statement – indeed, considering the controversy surrounding Culloden, they were probably looking to avoid doing that. Fundamentally, the show is still looking at historical periods through an ironic, genre-informed lens. But historical fiction is not a political monolith; this anarchic, anti-establishment Doctor unmistakably makes more sense in this Walter Scott pastiche than he would have been in something informed by Baroness Orczy or even Shakespeare.

You can go overboard praising The Highlanders. Despite the jolt of energy provided by the new leading man, a lot of the problems with the pure historicals are still present. There is still limited scope to subvert or play with the story’s subgenre, meaning its entertainment value will be dependent on how much you enjoy novels like Rob Roy and Kidnapped. There are still an awful lot of scenes where the Doctor and his companions are captured, then escape, then are re-captured, then threatened with death, then escape again. Granted, these are the basic building blocks of most Doctor Who, but  other stories at least have some wild science fiction concepts to draw the eye away from these adventure-serial cliches. The history is insane – the subplot with the slave traders rests on their business being illegal, which wouldn’t be the case for the best part of a century. And despite this being Jamie’s first story, he barely registers, with the most prominent Jacobite character being a pre-Watercolour Challenge Hannah Gordon.

Jamie’s lack of presence is undoubtedly a flaw in the script, but even here you can see promising signposts to Doctor Who‘s new ethos. The show seems uninterested in anything as commonplace a Jacobite soldier in the Jacobite rebellion; there were a lot of them about back then. Much more exciting to imagine a Jacobite soldier in Atlantis, or on a futuristic moon base, or at Gatwick Airport. And, now the writers had closed the book on the pure historicals, they would begin imagining exactly those scenarios.

Next: The Underwater Menace (1967).

Graham’s Archive – The Highlanders

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