Doctor Who A-Z #61: The Curse of Peladon (1972)

Jon Pertwee-era Doctor Who looks and feels very different to William Hartnell-era Doctor Who, and yet behind the scenes there’s still a surprising amount of shared personnel. This serial, for instance, is written by Brian Hayles, who’s been working on the show since 1966’s The Celestial Toymaker. He’s had a few years off prior to this, but by this stage in the Pertwee years the show’s format can admit a few throwback stories. After a long stretch of mostly Earth-based adventures, The Curse of Peladon marks a welcome trip back to the “let’s cram as many weird creatures in a room as we can” ethos that drives Hartnell stories like The Web Planet and The Daleks’ Master Plan, an ambition that’s still detectable in modern stories like The End of the World and The Rings of Akhaten. It also begins with that classic early Who trope of the Doctor and his companion being separated from the TARDIS.

That story beat was designed to keep the lead characters from running off at the first sign of trouble, a contrivance which became unnecessary as Patrick Troughton changed the Doctor from wanderer to hero. Jon Pertwee then refined the character further into an action hero, saving humanity from the worst of the universe with gadgets, fast cars and unconvincing kung-fu. What this means in practice is that Pertwee’s Doctor is generally beating up ugly monsters in order to defend humans or human-like aliens, a moral scheme which is upended here in one of Doctor Who‘s best-ever twists.

Granted, its efficiency is slightly spoiled now because everyone knows it, but you could say the same of The Mousetrap. The big shock of The Curse of Peladon is as follows: the Ice Warriors, a race of monsters who’ve been portrayed as straight-ahead villains since their first appearance, are on the side of good here. We have previously had rare sightings of aliens like the Rills and the Chameleons who are nicer than their monstrous looks might suggest. We’ve also had the Silurians, who were created to be morally ambiguous. This is, however, the first time a whole species has gone from threat to ally. Even the revival series, which often has a more complicated attitude towards monstrousness than the classic run, rarely has a recurring species switch sides like this.

You could argue that The Curse of Peladon is not as thorough a repudiation of the series’ attitude towards monsters as Galaxy Four. The real villain on Peladon, after all, is the delegate from Arcturus, a wizened skull-like thing inside a mobile life-support system. If the Ice Warriors are allowed to be good here, it’s arguably only because there’s something even grosser-looking than them on screen for once. But it’s a good twist, one that allows the normally cocksure Third Doctor to realise he’s been aiming his suspicions in the exact wrong direction for once. And the Arcturan delegate isn’t working alone.

His collaborator is Peladon’s High Priest Hepesh, who isn’t a monster at all, at least not physically. Hepesh’s public persona as an obedient servant of King Peladon masks a different kind of fanatic, one willing to commit treason if it means stopping his medieval planet from entering the Galactic Federation. Since Peladon’s entry into the Galactic Federation is normally read as an allegory for the then-current story of Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community, this is quite a bold suggestion. It’s as if, rather than being a humble, patriotic man of the people, Nigel Farage was actually an elitist willing to collaborate with sinister, anti-British foreign powers to achieve his ends. Boy, can you imagine if that was the case?

There’s a lot of interesting material here, but Hayles hits the wall at the end. The final episode unravels the story’s mysteries in descending order of how much anyone can possibly care, beginning with the unmasking of Hepesh and ending with Jo Grant bashfully rejecting King Peladon’s romantic interests. She’s actually off for a date with Mike Yates, which strikes me as barking up the wrong tree, but it still feels like a better bet than King Peladon. Despite being played by a young David Troughton, the King is such a dull character. The core problem of the Peladon stories – that they require the Doctor to side, to some extent, with unelected monarchy – isn’t as terminal as it would be in this story’s sequel. But it is there.

The kindest way to read the Peladonian monarchy is as a camp element, a reading which the serial graciously supports. There is a theory that every era of Doctor Who, at least in the classic series, maps onto the British music scene of the time. The mix of futuristic and Edwardian elements in Hartnell-era Who, for instance, is actually a pretty good summary of the Top 40 during the early days of Beatlemania, and the bold, colourful childhood imagery and subversive politics of the Sylvester McCoy years is surprisingly simpatico with the emerging acid house subculture.

This theory means The Curse of Peladon, which aired mere months before The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was released, must be glam-rock Who, and boy does it ever live up to that. The shift from present-day Earth stories shot partly (or, in the case of Spearhead From Space, entirely) on film to a studio-bound, video-shot alien planet means the colours are more lurid and flaring than ever. The queer element of glam is also present thanks to Alpha Centauri, whose hermaphrodite species makes it Doctor Who‘s first textually LGBT character. At one point the Doctor corrects Jo when she misgenders it, a moment that struck certain people as wokery gone mad when it happened in a David Tennant episode fifty-one years later. There is also the minor mystery of why Izlyr and Ssorg, the two apparently male Ice Warrior delegates, have only one bed in their quarters…

Next: The Sea Devils (1972)

Graham’s Archive – The Curse of Peladon

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