Doctor Who A-Z #50: The War Games (1969)

Patrick Troughton’s final season sounds like a nightmare to make. The War Games‘s ten-episode length is a product of the turmoil: other stories had their episode counts rejigged during filming and editing, back-up stories were hastily put into production and several storylines were rejected outright. One of that latter unlucky group was Douglas Camfield and Robert Kitts’s Operation Werewolf – not a prequel to Tooth and Claw, as you may expect, but a story set on D-Day. It was rejected for the same reason that Brian Hayles’s First Doctor script The Nazis was; the events it depicted were thought to be too recent to be tastefully incorporated into a Doctor Who storyline.

This was all uncovered later. There wasn’t an organised Doctor Who fandom digging into this stuff during the Patrick Troughton years; nobody in The War Games‘s original audience will have heard of Operation Werewolf, let alone known the reason why it was never made. And yet, once you’ve seen enough of a programme you become extremely sensitive to variations in its fictitious universe, those moments when a show starts acting inexplicably out of character. Those viewers who had been watching Doctor Who since 1963 at this point wouldn’t know about the internal BBC documents that prohibited using recent history as part of the show. They would know from watching, though, that the Doctor had never made an incursion into human history more recent than a century or so ago. There is, then, something immediately, viscerally strange and wrong about seeing the TARDIS land in the trenches at Ypres, in the middle of a devastating, agonising battle fought just over fifty years before this story was broadcast. Imagine if one of next season’s episodes was set on Bloody Sunday, and you’re getting a sense of how dangerous this is.

The most important thing to note about The War Games is that this discomfort, this dissonance, is absolutely deliberate. The opening credits, which splice the story title and writers’ credits into a flicker-cut barrage of artillery fire, jolt the viewer before the story’s even begun. We know that the TARDIS usually lands its crew in the middle of a dangerous situation, but this is a new kind of danger, just as it was for the soldiers fighting this war. As the Doctor, Zoe and Jamie dive into a bomb crater to escape machine-gun fire, director Douglas Camfield switches to hand-held camera, a rare sight in this era of the show which gives a newsreel immediacy to the combat scenes.

Watching this, I was reminded of Paul Cornell’s claim that Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor was the first one you could imagine intervening in a real-world humanitarian crisis without it feeling glib. I’m not sure I agree with him entirely, but it is meaningful that McCoy’s era was the one in which the show’s informal prohibition on World War II storylines was overturned. And watching Patrick Troughton in the trenches of World War I doesn’t prove Cornell wrong either – the whole point of the story is that even Troughton’s Doctor, who’s been newly vocal about the need to fight evil wherever it arises, is lost here. The viewer instinctively knows that something’s wrong, and sure enough that proves to be the case.

It’s proven uncommonly quickly, too. The show had made one previous attempt to tell a story about rogue Time Lords interfering in Earth’s past, but The Time Meddler got through most of its first episode before revealing that it wasn’t a pure historical story. That was the right approach for the Hartnell era, when the show still regularly produced the kind of non-SF historical adventure stories that The Time Meddler initially pretends to be. But by the time of The War Games we haven’t had one of those for nearly two and a half years, so writers Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke immediately begin inching the rug away from under our feet. Before the first episode has hit the halfway mark we’ve seen some alien gadgetry in a World War I officer’s room, and soon afterwards people use apparently hypnotic glasses on their troops.

In these early stages, you could argue that The War Games is Doctor Who‘s closest engagement with the groundbreaking Surrealism of 1960s programmes like The Prisoner. Specifically, the episode two cliffhanger in which the Doctor, his companions and the WWI nurse Jennifer drive an ambulance through a mysterious fog and emerge in Roman Britain is the weirdest, most uncanny thing that’s happened in the show up to this point. Even the fairly simple resolution – they back the vehicle up, reverse through the fog, and find themselves back in Ypres – only compounds the mystery. And, as noted above, this is episode two.

There is no dramatic template for a ten-episode story; no-one has ever spoken of the classical ten-act structure. But The War Games makes it look easy, parcelling out new revelations across its epic four-hour-plus run-time with an unflagging pace and energy. Does it need to be ten episodes long? Maybe not. BBC Four recently produced a ninety-minute version, and even I have to admit there’s some downtime in episodes seven and eight. But firstly, how astonishing that this story gets past the usual upper limit of six episodes before indulging in anything that might be termed as filler. Secondly, as I alluded to at the start of this review, the reason why this is ten episodes long is because a six-part script and a four-part script proved to be unworkable. The War Games is really a lesson in making the best out of a bad situation, not least because if any 1960s Doctor Who story looks as if it’s had the equivalent of two stories’ worth of budget spent on it, it’s this one.

Once the story gets out of the mysteriously linked war zones and into science fiction territory, it’s a remarkable design accomplishment. The spiral-patterned walls, fetish-suited guards and elaborate hypnotism devices of the War Chief’s control room are both quintessentially 1960s and profoundly weird and alien. And even this is outdone in the very last episode by the entry of the Time Lords, famously our first glimpse of the Doctor’s species. The fan lore is that these Time Lords are aloof, god-like non-interventionists which Robert Holmes would later pervert into shabby, double-dealing crooks, but I don’t believe that for a second. If they look particularly imposing here it’s because the Doctor is facing their business end; they’re not going to send a buffoon like Runcible out to deal with him here. It’s disarmingly easy to imagine Borusa in the background, pulling the strings, especially since they decide the Doctor’s form of intervention isn’t bad, exactly – it just needs to be confined to one planet for a while. It’s hard to fit that into a reading of the Doctor Who universe where the Time Lords are moral absolutists who never transgress their own geographic and ethical boundaries.

For all it was one of the least-watched stories of the classic series, the repercussions of The War Games are all over modern Doctor Who. Not just in the Time Lord stories, either. The army of rebels the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe assemble from various different time periods prefigures the history-as-selection-box approach of stories like The Wedding of River Song and Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. The Doctor’s decision that the War Chief can only be brought to heel by the Time Lords inaugurates that wonderful Doctor Who trope of the threat so serious it can only be contained by an even worse threat, reprised in Flesh and Stone and Revolution of the Daleks. And Jamie and Zoe’s exit is echoed in one of the new series’s best-remembered moments, the Doctor’s farewell to the memory-wiped Donna in Journey’s End. It’s a suitably capacious legacy for a story that seems to obey no limitations, which in its audacity, confidence and relentless flow of ideas represents not just the best of Doctor Who but one of the very best things broadcast on British television in the 1960s.

Next: Spearhead from Space (1970)

Graham’s Archive – The War Games

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