I Love... 1971

By Lissa Levesque

I’ve recently listened to "Master" – the Big Finish audio adventure by Joseph Lidster – and I found it to be even better second time round. In this instance the Master is played by Geoffrey Beevers (since Anthony Ainley is insane) with the explanation that the 1980s Master fell apart at the seams and the Traken version was left underneath. I may be simplifying it slightly but that’s the gist. The play explores the Master’s past and his motivations (or lack of them) over the centuries. This got me thinking back to the very first time we met the Master. It was 1971 and it was the year of the renegade.

There had never been a recurring baddie in Dr Who before the Master. The Daleks were interchangeable and there was never any indication that a senior Dalek in one story was in any way connected with any other story. The Meddling Monk was never really a baddie (and seemed to be Dennis Spooner’s way of filling up some space in Masterplan when he couldn’t think of anything else), Kevin Stoney had played two very similar characters in Mavic Chen and Tobias Vaughn but never had we had a Moriarty to the Doctor’s Holmes. Or rather we had as Moriarty only appeared in one Holmes story but why let the truth get in the way of a thirty year old analogy?

The casting of Roger Delgado was, of course, inspired. It was essential that the Master be able to match Jon Pertwee’s Doctor in the screen presence department. Delgado’s charisma and his amazing eyes made him a favourite almost immediately with the viewers. He wasn’t an unsympathetic baddie that people wanted to see destroyed – he was the classic villain that they wanted to see come back next week and have another go.

One thing I didn’t like about the play "Master" when I first heard it was that it implied that the Master was all about death. He was Death’s Champion just as the Seventh Doctor was Time’s Champion. The Master’s plans were essentially about causing as many deaths as he could without rhyme or reason. I thought this was truer of the less interesting Ainley Master but not of Delgado’s multilayered original. But then I looked back at his stories and I’m not sure I was right. In Terror of the Autons he wants to kill as many people as he can using the plastic flowers. He couldn’t seriously expect the Nestene Consciousness to give him dominion over the galaxy or the Earth or whatever he was after.

The Mind of Evil saw him dealing with another alien menace while also dabbling in world politics. Would the parasite have given him power? Or was it just a device for causing pain and death to its victims? The rocket of nerve gas that he planned to steal – would he have used it? Damn right he would. In the Claws of Axos his aim is to escape but at the same time he isn’t opposed to helping Axos to destroy all life on Earth. In Colony in Space he wants the Doomsday Weapon. He claims it is to act as the deterrent that would make him ruler of the galaxy but do we believe that? Is he so insane that he thinks it would be possible for one being to control an entire galaxy? Or was he driven solely by the desire to pull the lever and test the weapon?

The Daemons could’ve given him power but only over the Earth. What would he want with that? One little primitive planet that both he and the Doctor were so keen to escape from. It seems more likely that he simply wanted to rouse Azal and get him to abandon their human experiment and wipe out all life on the planet.

What "Master" attempted to do, like "Omega" and "Davros" before it, was to breathe new life into Doctor Who characters that had been poorly served by the 1980s. JNT’s desire to bring back as many old foes as he could regardless of the creative talent available meant that these characters were thought of with distain by modern fans. The Master had become a panto villain with his ridiculous disguises, obviously stuck on beard, anagrams of his name and that silly velvet suit. It all seemed so fake when compared to the original. The Master in a normal suit or, best of all, in a vicar’s uniform was worth a thousand penguin costumes.

Some people think it was a mistake to have the Master in all of 1971s stories. Perhaps it was but in light of his subsequent passing, we should be thankful that we got those extra Roger Delgado episodes. In any case, the earthbound setting limited the production team to one kind of story. As Terrance Dicks might (and regularly does) say, "you could do we go to them or they come to us – and we couldn’t go to them." The Master provided the all important third element. He was never the monster – he was the unpredictable factor. He could be working for the monsters, the monsters could be working for him or he might have nothing to do with the monsters. For instance, in Colony in Space it is the human miners that are the real bad guys – the Master is playing his own, far more dangerous, games. You could have made all five of 1971s stories without the Master but I think they would’ve been far less entertaining without him.