Doctor Who A-Z #59: The Daemons (1971)

For the second time in as many years, Doctor Who closes a season by closing the book on a particular version of the show. And just like the last time, there isn’t much of a change in the cast and crew to explain the tonal shift. When Season Nine of Doctor Who begins, it will have the exact same Doctor, companion, supporting cast, producer and script editor as Season Eight. The biggest change is that Roger Delgado’s Master will go from being in nearly every episode to being in just shy of half the episodes, which isn’t much of a shift. And yet it’s the Master who’s the key to understanding what’s happening here.

There is an oft-told anecdote from the filming of this serial, that a scene had to be reshot because a group of passing schoolchildren audibly cheered Delgado when they saw him. This must have convinced producer Barry Letts that he was doing the right thing by easing up on the Master’s appearances; by now, he might as well be the hero. A common criticism of Season Eight is the writing staff can’t have seriously expected viewers to be surprised by the Master’s appearances when he’s in every single story. This overlooks the fact that the Master’s appearances are very rarely played as a surprise. I’d say The Mind of Evil is the only one that positions the Master’s involvement in the plot as an actual shock twist, and even then the ending of the preceding story has flagged up that the Doctor and UNIT hunting down the Master will be the show’s new format. Even so, something happens to villains when they come back this often. The question that the Daleks and the Cybermen have just about avoided – how can they be plausible threats when the Doctor defeats them so often? – is hard not to ponder when you’ve had five back-to-back stories with the same adversary.

In order to reflect this, there’s a change of tone in The Daemons, one which affects the show’s other current semi-regulars UNIT.  In Season Eight, UNIT still retain a little of the grit and realism that the preceding season depicted them with; in the more eccentric stories, the Master and UNIT are perilously close to grounding the proceedings while the Autons and the Axons do all the crazy glam-rock business around them. That won’t be the case going forwards. From here until the end of the Pertwee era, the Master is the Doctor’s frustrated frenemy and the Brigadier is his fed-up sitcom boss. This is the kind of shift guaranteed to wind up those fans who accuse Barry Letts’s time as producer of being being cosy, unambitious and conservative, and there exists an argument that The Daemons was only considered a classic for so long because it was hard to see until its VHS release. (Perilously close to John Nathan-Turner’s “the memory cheats” line which he trotted out every time fans accused the show of declining in quality under his watch, but that doesn’t mean it’s always wrong)

Well, that VHS release is long in the past, and The Daemons has since been repeated on terrestrial television, reissued on DVD and Blu-Ray and published as a script book. While it’s no longer remembered as one of Doctor Who‘s all-time pinnacles, its reputation hasn’t collapsed as sharply as The Celestial Toymaker or Silver Nemesis, to name two stories that were once thought of as highlights of their seasons. I myself watched it more than once as a child, and I can’t say the scales fell from my eyes the second time. The crux of the matter, I think, is that when you’re a child The Daemons is an unforgettably gripping, grown-up exploration of Satanic horror, and when you’re an adult it’s a hilarious romp where the Doctor is menaced by gun-toting Morris dancers and there’s a running joke where he keeps assuming all his companions have gone down the pub. But I don’t think that means The Daemons doesn’t work. It actually shows it works twice, in radically different ways.

The child’s-eye view of the serial is not entirely wrong. The Master’s coven, and the lingering shots of him raising a ceremonial dagger in the air, are surprisingly intense. Watching other scary Doctor Who stories as an adult can be a disillusioning experience, as you recognise that some once-terrifying serial is actually a watered-down version of a stronger horror film or novel you’re now familiar with. While The Daemons has a suitably bubbling cauldron of influences, from Chariots of the Gods? to Quatermass and the Pit, the horror scenes are mostly riffing off the work of Dennis Wheatley, whose novels are if anything more infantile and less disturbing than this PG-certificate variant. So there’s a power there that can’t be reduced even as you recognise the more ridiculous elements of this subplot, whether it’s the audible boredom in the Satanists’ chanting or their sulky grumbling when they don’t immediately get the rewards the Master has promised them.

The Master’s descent from the Doctor’s one true rival to a man who can just about keep an army of pub landlords and village postmasters from mutinying is a steep one, but the story allows for it: as the third episode cliffhanger attests, this is a story where the threat is what the Master unleashes, rather than the Master himself. Similarly, Letts and his co-writer Roger Sloman make it abundantly clear that the shift in the depiction of UNIT is intentional, with scenes of the Brig, Yates and Benton dancing, drinking and lounging around in their civvies watching TV. And somehow, in the midst of all this cosiness the show actually manages to get closer to the taboo horror implicit in its new Earthbound format: the idea that the monsters are now invading the viewer’s real world.

The early ’70s were a strange time in Britain. The defeat of Harold Wilson by Edward Heath did not dissuade a strange union of tycoons, intelligence agents, newspaper bosses and rogue British army units from their belief that Wilson was a Soviet mole, and the collapse of the counterculture allowed all their strange beliefs about the Age of Aquarius and Space Brothers to leak into mainstream society. The Daemons is set, extremely specifically, in this world. The Doctor scolds Jo for her distinctly hippie-ish New Age beliefs, yet as soon as he hears about a village called Devil’s End he immediately decides there must be dark forces at work. His closest ally in the guest cast is not a scientist or an investigative journalist but a White Witch, one who is not the rural crone we see in similar stories but a relatively young, educated, professional woman who espouses her beliefs with the confidence of a seasoned campaigner. At times, the characters seem to forget what they believe: having scared the Master’s coven into submission by pretending to be a sorcerer, the Doctor then demonstrates that all his “sorcery” was scientific in origin, and yet they’re still terrified of him.

And why wouldn’t they be? The nearest thing we have to a rationalist in this story is the Brigadier, who spends his time stuck outside Azal’s heat barrier and impotently (but unforgettably) ordering his men to shoot a stone gargoyle. With a counterweight like that, it’s no wonder everyone is of the Devil’s party this week. The difference between the Doctor and his enemies this week is not a matter of faith versus reason, it’s that the Doctor (and Jo) are altruistic and self-sacrificing while the Master angrily complains about democracy in a way that suggests he’d be right at home in the above-mentioned anti-Wilson coalition. Without the Doctor’s universalist ethics to link him back to the stars, being stuck on Earth has made the Master awfully small-minded, concerned with the pettiest, most limited kind of human politics. It’s no wonder he was given a rest after this, but that doesn’t stop The Daemons feeling like a natural outcome for this version of the character.

Next: Day of the Daleks (1972)

Graham’s Archive – The Daemons

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