Doctor Who A-Z #55: Terror of the Autons (1971)

Here he comes, folks. The Autons might be the headline monsters but there’s no question who steals the show. In introducing the Doctor’s most frequent enemy, Terror of the Autons makes good use of the show’s recurring props, with a gently modified version of the TARDIS materialisation sound effect heralding the appearance of a very different blue box to the one we expect. Director-producer Barry Letts builds nicely to the Master’s first appearance, with one shot ending in an unmotivated zoom-in on circus big cats, licking their lips as if they know a fellow predator is coming.

Letts’s direction is uncredited, thanks to 1970s BBC regulations on who was allowed to wear more than one hat, so it’s worth giving him some grace and considering this as his auteur piece. The most obvious thing to note about the serial’s visual style, particularly today, is that Letts has a faith in chromakey technology that it won’t deserve for a few decades yet. Each effect is surrounded by a fringe of blue or yellow fuzz, depending on which screen has been imperfectly erased. Perversely, this makes it easier to appreciate. Since it’s so easy to notice, we can take a guess at why Letts used this technology every single time he deploys it.

Some of it’s simple enough. The Master’s Tissue Compression Eliminator, a weapon so unpleasant Sacha Dhawan’s Master still uses it, sees chromakey used for pure special-effects wow value. The most interesting use is also the one people find funniest these days, which is Mrs. Farrel walking into a photograph of a kitchen. As silly as it looks, anyone familiar with the economics of television production will know exactly why Letts didn’t budget for a whole set to be built for the sake of one shot. Back when location shoots were more difficult and expensive, audiences unconsciously accepted that most TV shows took place in a limited number of rooms; by expanding the Farrels’ house this way, Letts is ironically using special effects to expand the show’s sense of realism.

Which is interesting, because compared to the previous Auton story Terror of the Autons isn’t very realistic at all. This isn’t solely down to the video effects. The whole story is brighter and more flamboyant than anything we saw in Season Seven. The military installations, power stations and wintry moors of the past season are gone, replaced here with a literal circus. This is the point at which Pertwee-era Doctor Who follows the lead of its main character’s dress sense and gets its glam-rock glad-rags on. And yet Terror of the Autons, with its scenes of apparently human policemen’s faces falling off, people being smothered by plastic folding armchairs, murderous dolls and bloodied corpses, was the Doctor Who story that frightened me the most as a child. I felt nauseous every time I thought about McDermott’s death at the hands of a folding armchair. Questions were asked in Parliament about the serial’s use of police officers as alien villains, and Letts himself later wondered if making a doll – an item the child audience might be expected to own themselves – into a killer was irresponsible. The new campy, colourful Doctor Who was not necessarily going to be tamer than the gritty, grounded season that preceded it.

Which is what happens when you get Robert Holmes in to write it. The reuse of the Autons was motivated by nothing more than recognising they’d been a hit the first time round, but beginning Season Eight with the same opening villains from Season Seven does increase the sense of Terror of the Autons as a spiritual restart for 1970s Doctor Who. It also marks a restart for Holmes, whose reputation for both horror and satire is established here. Spearhead from Space was as different from his two Patrick Troughton scripts as they were from each other; this is the first time he’s had a success to build on, and boy does he. The humour in Terror of the Autons is noticeably more abrasive than the series norm; whenever a documentary about Doctor Who needs a clip to illustrate the Doctor’s contempt for the military mindset, chances are they’ll pull something from here, as the Doctor takes every possible opportunity to lambast UNIT. Even his new companion is subject to his irritability, and maybe the only thing saving this from being as ugly as the Sixth Doctor’s later relationship with Peri is Katy Manning’s savvy decision to play Jo as shrugging off every insult the Doctor inflicts on her.

It also helps that the Master is here. For the first time, the Third Doctor isn’t the smartest guy in the room, and it’s inevitable that he comes to respect the Master as a more worthy adversary than the human bureaucrats and fanatics who stood in his way last year. The version of the characters’ relationship where they’re almost Miltonic, God and Satan fighting for control of the universe, will rarely surface in Jon Pertwee and Roger Delgado’s take on the characters. That can wait until the likes of Survival and Last of the Time Lords. Here, they’re gentlemen rivals, a characterisation which is perhaps more forgiving than the Master deserves but works because Pertwee and Delgado are both so great at aristocratic hauteur.

Even at this early juncture, there’s clearly more to mine in the Master than there is in the Autons. Both of Holmes’s Auton stories position the creatures partly as satires on consumerism, plastic men for a plastic era. When they returned in the 21st century, they were used either for action spectacle (Rose) or existential horror (The Pandorica Opens), and no wonder. The satirical element of the Autons has been explored so thoroughly by Holmes that even Alan Moore – in his Doctor Who Magazine strip Business as Usual – couldn’t add much to it. But the Master, casually mesmerising a whole circus then leaving a masked stooge to die in his place, bristles with narrative possibilities. And the rest of this season will be devoted to exploring them.

Next: The Mind of Evil (1971)

Graham’s Archive – Terror of the Autons

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