Outside the Blue Box: Sky (1975)

The writing team of Bob Baker and Dave Martin were major contributors to the 1970s golden age of classic-series Doctor Who, yet they’ve never been embraced by the show’s fans as enthusiastically as contemporaries like Robert Holmes or Terrance Dicks. There’s a stereotype of them as ideas men, good at coming up with a continual flow of wild SF concepts but less gifted at shaping them into a satisfying story. Certainly some of their later work earns this dismissive verdict. What’s strange is that it’s hard to pin down what separates a classic Baker and Martin story from a weaker one. When a more acclaimed show stalwart like Holmes or Steven Moffat turns in something that isn’t well-regarded – The Power of Kroll, say, or Let’s Kill Hitler – it’s usually easy to point to something tangible that’s gone wrong. By contrast, the difference between a fan-favourite Baker and Martin script like The Hand of Fear and something like The Armageddon Factor seems mostly to be a matter of panache.

It would be one thing if Baker and Martin were simply bad at structuring scripts; certainly they’re not as phenomenally gifted in this area as Holmes and Dicks. Yet a comment on my review of Baker’s solo script Nightmare of Eden alerted me to the fact that Nick Park, no less, credits Bob Baker with teaching him everything he knows about story structure. And you can see what Park means: A Grand Day Out holds together about as well as such a whimsical story needs to, but as soon as Baker comes aboard the Wallace and Gromit series with The Wrong Trousers there’s a genuine discipline and mastery of pacing in the writing that wasn’t there before. Clearly, in order to crack the mystery of who Bob Baker and Dave Martin are, we can’t just look at their contributions to other people’s franchises. We need to look at something they made themselves, which is where Sky comes in.

Broadcast on ITV in the spring of 1975, Sky is Baker and Martin’s entry into that fondly-remembered 1970s cycle of spooky kids’ shows that included Children of the Stones and The Owl Service. By the time the action has relocated from the village it starts in to a prehistoric burial mound, you might wonder if Baker and Martin wrote this in a fit of jealousy after seeing The Daemons. Yet it also contains quite a lot that recalls my personal favourite of Baker and Martin’s Doctor Who scripts – if only because nobody else loves it as much as I do – The Mutants. The Mutants is an anti-apartheid allegory that ends with one of its persecuted indigenous characters becoming a floating God-like being. That character was called Ky, a name which all but demands you find parallels between him and the title character of Sky. From a certain angle, Sky is the story of what Ky did next.

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From the start, Sky is an angelic figure. He materialises in rural England and is immediately covered up by leaves and branches, an effect achieved by shooting in reverse. He has long blonde hair and glowing blue eyes, and once he’s awake he demonstrates a broad range of psychic and telekinetic powers. The job of waking him falls to two local siblings, Arby and Jane, who are baffled by his talk of “the Chaos” and “the Juganet”. It’s clear that Sky has come from the future, and part of the series’ intrigue comes from uncovering what kind of future we’re being prepared for.

One of the big surprises Sky holds for Doctor Who fans is how gently paced it is. Baker and Martin’s Doctor Who scripts rarely pause for breath; the departure of Sarah Jane Smith at the end of The Hand of Fear is all the more affecting for being the first real moment of reflection in the whole story. The Claws of Axos was written as a Patrick Troughton-era seven-parter, and it still feels like one even in its four-episode final form. It’s strange that successive Doctor Who producers rarely gave Baker and Martin the chance to write longer stories, despite clearly having enough material to fill them. Sky is seven episodes long, exactly the length of that planned original version of The Claws of Axos, and it shows them investing far more in atmosphere and slowly-gathering tension than even the best of their Doctor Who scripts.

This is certainly the case in episode three, when Robert Eddison shows up as the series’ villain Ambrose Goodchild. Equipped with an ominous beard and a musical theme that sounds astonishingly similar to the one that introduced Roger Delgado’s Master in Terror of the Autons, he’s an outrageously sinister figure, able to make the words “chin-chin” sound like a death threat. There’s a scene in episode four which must have given every child watching it nightmares, as Goodchild finds a hospital Sky has been admitted to and gains access by posing as a surgeon. The cliffhanger implies Goodchild is about to perform an operation on the mystery boy, complete with Eddison making a meal out of snapping on the latex gloves. Doctor Who occasionally got into trouble for subverting the kind of authority figures a child will plausibly meet – Polly being strapped down for the operation in The Underwater Menace, the policeman in the aforementioned Terror of the Autons – and this scene goes further than any of those.

The resolution isn’t particularly reassuring either. It turns out Sky has escaped by getting an elderly patient at the same hospital to take his place on the operating table, using the fact that this old man – implicitly senile, or otherwise mentally ill – is particularly susceptible to Sky’s psychic powers. In another scene, Sky uses the unfortunate man as a surveillance device by hijacking his sight, a process the man clearly finds extremely distressing. Sky is not a comfortable character, often casually referring to himself as a God. You can compare him to the First Doctor at his most deceitful, the Sixth Doctor at his most aggressive or the Seventh Doctor at his most manipulative, and Sky is still harder to root for.

To an extent, this is what Baker and Martin are going for. Sky is an ambiguous messiah leading Arby and Jane into an unknowable future, and this is the source of much of the show’s intrigue. But when we get answers, it’s even stranger. It turns out that Goodchild is not some villain from the future, he’s a manifestation of nature itself, as it desperately tries to suppress Sky. The early stirrings of environmentalism had been reflected in family viewing before – not least in Doctor Who‘s own The Green Death – but it was usually assumed that children would side with the forces of nature. Here, nature is an unforgettably sinister villain. Sky’s androgynous, early-Bowie vibe suggests a queer reading, where this Ziggy-ish messiah from the future is put on trial for being “unnatural”, but I don’t think that’s what the show is about either. Making sense of this requires us to dig a bit deeper into the beliefs of the time.

Goodchild is against Sky because he represents progress, but – despite Goodchild talking about pollution and environmental degradation as he confronts Sky – this doesn’t mean technological progress. In the final episode, Sky tells Arby and Jane that the human idea of space travel is completely wrong, saying that expecting rocket ships to take you to the stars is like shouting at the sky and calling it radio. Sky is an agent of progress in the 2001: A Space Odyssey sense, an outside catalyst trying to prod humanity to evolve into creatures fit for the future. In the case of Sky’s future, it’s one where our mental powers supplant technology entirely. It’s a very post-hippie dream, and the characterisation of Goodchild should also be looked at as a product of those times. The second episode of Adam Curtis’s 2011 miniseries All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace is devoted to a critique of the 1970s environmental worldview, encapsulated in the famous report The Limits to Growth. The argument made by that work’s authors was that we should abandon the pursuit of endless expansion in favour of living in harmony within our means, just like a well-balanced ecosystem. Except, as Curtis notes, ecosystems don’t work like that. They’re chaotic, unplanned and often involve evolutionary leaps of the exact kind that Baker and Martin’s Sky is a product of. It is this of-its-time concept of nature as static, unchanging, which Goodchild represents.

The stew of ideas in Sky is a lot to process at this remove, and it was probably a lot at the time. Having had Sky and Goodchild face off in episode six Baker and Martin throw a massive curveball for the final episode, as Pyramids of Mars‘s Bernard Archer crashes into the drama playing the leader of a colony of telepathic future humans. It’s too big a development to introduce in the final episode of a show, and it gives a little more ammunition to those who’d accuse Baker and Martin of recklessly hurling out ideas rather than exploring them in any depth. Yet Sky successfully shows another side of the writers, one which is as eerie, low-key and haunting as their Doctor Who work is flamboyant and spectacular. It was subject to the same poor archiving as its parent series (episodes three and seven only exist in degraded video copies) but it lingered in the mind of those who watched it. As proof, Big Finish produced an audio legacy sequel for its fiftieth anniversary in 2025. I haven’t heard it, but I’d like to think Arby ends up opening a chain of American restaurants.

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