The Gunfighters

It's funny, but often the very things we love to laud up about Doctor Who are the same things we dislike it for. It's cheapness, for example. The truly cheap stories, like "Timelash" or "Time Flight", are loathed because they are shoddy. And why are they shoddy? Because there wasn't the money to get them right. What we actually mean when we say we like Doctor Who in spite of its occasional cheapness, is that we like the stories that disguise their budgetary limitations, i.e. that are still cheap but look expensive. Then there's diversity. Doctor Who can go anywhere and be anything, hence our love of it. Yet all the most popular stories involve the Doctor sorting out some menace from outer space. Again, what we mean is that we like Doctor Who when it's being Doctor Who but is dressed up as something else ("Talons" is Doctor Who literally disguised as Sherlock Holmes, "Inferno" is Doctor Who masquerading as a disaster movie etc). "The Gunfighters" is Doctor Who at its most diverse, playful, daring and cheap. So naturally we hate it.

I'm not going to come over all post-modern and say "The Gunfighters" is really good. As a Western, as a Doctor Who story, even as a bit of television it's slow, poorly acted and whimsical bordering on inconsequential. You have to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy it, as the ballad seems to pop up and slow everything down whenever any pace is acquired. But it's faults are very much the SAME faults that make any sixties Doctor Who unsuitable for today's demanding audience. Namely, it doesn't have the slickness or the taughtness of pace that we're used to now, and it's clearly all done on a shoestring. In short, it's made like a theatre production - you have to be patient and remember the actors are changing costumes behind the set between scenes and suspend disbelief when someone behind the cameras coughs. It's "The Sensorites", except in a different setting.

Yet the reason the story has taken such a hammering down the years is not because it's cheaply made. In fact it looks no worse than any other Hartnell story, the sets are decent enough and Doc Holliday and Kate are more interesting characters than Arbitan, Carol from "The Sensorites" or David Campbell. But this is the Doctor, Stephen and Dodo having a week off, and not really being in what we'd call Doctor Who at all. One episode is even called "A Holiday For the Doctor"! There aren't any monsters, the TARDIS doesn't get stolen and unlike other stories set in the past there is no sense of a great historical event being perverted or threatened.

In fact there's very little threat at all, bar some pistols being waved about, and it's quite clear this kind of malarkey is only adding the jubilant spirit of adventure being seized upon by the TARDIS team. Do we only take seriously Doctor Who stories where the Universe, the Earth of even just the Doctor is seriously threatened? Do we discredit TARDIS voyages where nothing goes particularly wrong? Can we not enjoy an adventure where there is no threat? No? Can, then, we believe in a hero who carries on travelling when every time he lands lots of people get killed and the world needs saving? Would anyone's life be worth living without all the fun bits?

Doctor Who, it seems, is not good when the Doctor has a day off. Perhaps it's because we like to think of it as a drama serial, and not a comedy or a western. It has to be serious and dramatic instead. Yet while we harp on about how it can be all things to everyone, when it occasionally plays a different game we chastise it for doing so.