Doctor Who A-Z #46: The Invasion (1968)

One of the little-remarked-upon peculiarities of Doctor Who is that, for a science fiction series, it doesn’t do many future Earth stories. It addresses the future of humanity, certainly – as early as the first season, The Sensorites was sketching out a mythology of mankind exploring and colonising space. But anyone looking for news from home will be disappointed. Between the Dalek invasion in the 22nd century and the destruction of the planet some five billion years hence, little is disclosed about what Earth has in store.

My suspicion is that, while the histories of Skaro and Gallifrey are endlessly malleable, Doctor Who takes its Earth history seriously. It is here that we hear of “fixed points in time”, it is here that changing history becomes a dilemma in stories like The Aztecs and Rosa. Obviously this is the case because Doctor Who‘s writing staff is mostly drawn from Earth (although I’ve always had my suspicions about Marc Platt). But it creates a sense within the show that Earth’s history is written in stone, and if this is the case for the past it must be the case for the future. If the Doctor goes to – say – the 24th century and finds the Sontarans have occupied Earth, does this not render any effort to save the world right now a bit of a pyrrhic victory? It’s for this reason that, when the show does dabble in horrific future Earths in stories like The Mysterious Planet, Orphan 55 and 73 Yards, these are presented as potential futures which can still be averted.

It’s not quite clear when The Invasion is set, and the show’s later attempts at sketching out a history for UNIT – the United Nations anti-alien force introduced here – would infamously make it even harder to work out. According to the Brigadier, it’s been four years since The Web of Fear, which in turn was claimed by Professor Travers to be some thirty, forty years since the 1930s-set The Abominable Snowmen. Sometime within the next fifteen years, then, The Invasion‘s 1968 audience can expect to see Britain reduced to a corporate captive state, where the government is absent and the military is co-opted, huge expanses of what used to be public land is patrolled by private security guards with orders to shoot on sight, and the whole thing is being orchestrated by a sinister tech baron who demands conformity or death.

Obviously the 1970s did not turn out like this, although it still feels like something that’s been delayed rather than prevented. Nevertheless, the depiction of a grim dystopian Britain still offers a kind of chill Doctor Who rarely ventures towards, aided immeasurably by the production team’s mastery of the old Alphaville trick of finding modern-day buildings with a suitably futuristic look. The Invasion is eight episodes long, and it was never supposed to be – Troughton’s final season is unusually heavy with unmade stories and rejigged episode counts. Its monsters, the Cybermen, only surface at the end of episode four. It should drag tremendously, but the novelty of seeing the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe in such unfamiliar, unfriendly surroundings never flags.

The Invasion was written by the show’s script editor Derrick Sherwin from an outline by Kit Pedler, and it suggests Sherwin’s input might be why this season is unusually mindful of the companions’ backstories. In particular, Zoe’s history as a computer programmer allows her to dismantle International Electromatics’s security apparatus – a joy for us, and for her as well. There’s also a well-stocked guest cast, given plenty of breathing room by the eight episodes. Sherwin and Pedler wanted to bring back Professor Travers and his daughter Anne from The Web of Fear, but that serial’s writers Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln were in the middle of a protracted feud with the BBC over merchandising rights. Cheekily, they decided to re-use a character from The Web of Fear anyway – I guess Haisman and Lincoln saw less of a future in Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, which would be another example of their sage decision-making process – but there is still a professor and his daughter in here, in the form of Edward Burnham and Sally Faulkner’s Professor Watkins and Isobel. Quite right too – Isobel is one of Doctor Who‘s great could-have-been companions, a gorgeous 60s fashion photographer, bold enough to pick her way through a pile of dead Cybermen eagerly snapping photos.

I’m not sure I would show The Invasion to a Doctor Who novice. There’s rather a lot of it, but if you’re on board with the essential pleasures of the show – its mix of mundanity and fantasy, horror and whimsy – it’s a solid treat. Once again, Douglas Camfield proves himself to be a master of pacing and directing actors, and his decision to bring Don Harper on board as a composer was a fine one. Everything comes together in the lair of Tobias Vaughn, the head of International Electromatics and the quisling selling Earth out to the Cybermen. Harper’s music would settle well into an episode of Chris Morris’s Blue Jam, Kevin Stoney’s performance as Vaughn is imperious and startlingly nasty, and his pad is a wonderful exercise in ’60s lounge-lizard production design. It’s easy to see why, as Troughton’s tenure moved towards its end, the producers would make this kind of contemporary Earth story a blueprint for the show’s future. Well, contemporary-ish.

Next: The Krotons (1968-9).

Graham’s Archive – The Invasion

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