I Love... 1965

By Steven Alexander

Although many people bemoan the Troughton adventures missing from the archives, we are lucky to still have a large amount of the show’s formative years on video. In its first season, the show had employed a constant format of historical stories and sci-fi stories in rotation. Inevitably the science fiction proved to be the more marketable story type and became more dominant. 1965 saw Doctor Who embrace a vast number of new formats, largely due to the influence of Dennis Spooner, who replaced David Whittaker as script-editor. While Whittaker excelled at producing straight down the line adventure stories, Spooner bought more variety and humour to the show. This was also the year where Doctor Who discovered what kind of a show it could be.

Having established itself as a workable concept, it was time to push the boundaries and experiment to see what could be achieved and what worked in the format. The biggest change was that the number of companions was reduced from three to two, which gave the more room for the main cast to get involved in the stories. Even though Ian and Barbara were the most convincingly human companions that the show produced, Vicki and Steven were successful and endearing replacements, despite being carbon copies of the previous companions. The new set up of male companion, female companion and Doctor lasted on the show right up until Tom Baker’s time.

The year started with The Rescue, two of the most normal Doctor Who episodes ever recorded. The basic story could have fitted in at any point in the show’s history without seeming too out of place. The Romans and the Myth Makers were fine comic tragedies, which are as historically accurate as the modern movies Gladiator and Troy respectively. Perhaps it’s my own fault that I prefer the atmosphere created in the tiny BBC studios to the ones that required millions of dollars and thousands of computer generated extras to realise. There was also costume madness in the surreal Web Planet, the most altogether alien story that the show attempted. Its often noted that episodes of Who that are a few years apart have a completely different feel to them, but The Web Planet is miles off on it’s own stratosphere.

There was one constant in 1965, amid the changing companions and varied stories. The Daleks were ubiquitous. Youngsters like me can only look back in jealousy at the pick and mix variety of Dalek goodies that the copyright free-for-all produced in the sixties. It seems hard to believe that anything could grip the public consciousness for more than five minutes any more, but in 1965 Dalekmania really gripped the country. Its true. Years before Star Wars, you could dress as a Dalek, read about Daleks in comic books, eat your dinner from Dalek platters and buy Dalek toys that talked, rolled along the floor, floated in water or fell apart after a few minutes of play. And: "…don’t miss the fabulous DALEK BADGE!" Even Mr. Marx took some time out from endorsing communism and set down his plans to bugger up the battle sequences in Power and Evil of The Daleks by producing hopelessly inaccurate models of our favourite pepper pots. Terry Nation left for America, while Raymond Cusick cried into the first of many beers.

While most writers expanded the boundaries of the show, Terry started his grand plot conservation program in 1965. The ideas that turned up in The Chase and The Daleks’ Masterplan were to be used again and again, right through to Genesis and Destiny. Invisible creatures, mutants, radiation, Terrynationium… sorry, I mean Taranium.

Then there was the awful Peter Cushing Dalek movie, where the malevolent denizens of Skaro replaced their death rays with deadly fire extinguishers. Roy Castle played Ian Chesterton as a bumbling tit, Cushing replaced Hartnell’s sternness with bumbling tittishness while Barbara and Susan escaped the worst of it because they only had to scream as the Daleks tried desperately to prevent them catching light.

Great stories, more Daleks than you could shake a plunger at, John and Gillian, Ian having some kind of hysteric fit at Ticket to Ride, farce, tragedy, drama, men in sleeping bags pretending to be aliens, fire extinguishers, the first annual, a Christmas episode – 1965 had it all. By the end of 1966, it would have all changed.