Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} and by Malcolm Hulke Malcolm Hulke. reminds Ben and Polly they’re back in 1966 – a time (and indeed date) menaced by War Machines, alien shape-shifters, Daleks and gender stereotyping. They also have to contend with dodgy pilots, aliens with zero personality, lethal haberdashery and a cross-dressing Beatles lookalike. The Doctor gets the cold shoulder, Jamie gets snogged, Polly gets duplicated and Ben gets lost, while our plucky quasi-companion plays amateur sleuth, armed only with a sharp tongue and a crap hat. So do Jim and Martin think The Faceless Ones soars into the stratosphere or plummets like a zapped fighter pilot? Episode 100: The War Games. “You have returned to us, Doctor. Your travels are over.” But thankfully not forever. It was, still, a long way from being all over. So Jim and Martin stagger to their century milestone with their biggest story yet, The War Games. It’s an epic tale of trials, tribulations, heavily corrected (and impaired) vision, and a Very. Stupid. Voice. The Doctor plays with fridge magnets, Jamie plays the fool, Zoe plays Villa like a violin and the War Lord plays with his real live toy soldiers – and gets a Paddington stare for his trouble. Romans gawp and mince, wigs wander almost as far as the accents, and the scenery is chewed up, gargled and spat out – even when it’s as wobbly as a Quark under enemy fire. So do Jim and Martin think this is a worthy end for a very worthy Doctor? Or was it ten parts of terrible tedium? Episode 083: . That’s what the unsuspecting viewer probably said in 1973 when the so-called “large and savage reptile” hoved into view at the top of the Ogron quarry. If only there’d been enough budget to show more than its dangly bits… But close your eyes for those couple of seconds and Frontier in Space will reward you with many riches. For where else can you find the third Doctor in hoisty judo slacks, Jo in platform baseball boots and Delgado’s Master in a Dracula-collared PVC number with Dalek logo? And where else could you observe, in one story, twitchy Earth folk, noble Draconians, monumentally thick Ogrons and a stir crazy TARDIS team, who are in and out of prison more often than Mr Mackay? But does Frontier in Space go where no Drashig has gone before? Or does it outstay its welcome like a Draconian at a UKIP rally? Doctor Who Interview Archive. Malcolm Hulke worked on a number of classic ‘Doctor Who’ stories, including ‘The War Games’ and ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’. Here, he talks about political messages, job lot purchases of spaceship models, and his first script for the series, ‘The Hidden Planet’, which was never made. “The Hidden Planet was about a planet which is the same size as Earth, but on the other side of the sun, and therefore we have never seen it. The Doctor goes to the planet and for obvious reasons the TARDIS crew think they are on Earth. But they find things are different. They landed in a field and Susan noticed a four-leaf clover, and then they see they are all four leaf clovers. And then other mysterious things happen like birds flying backwards or having double wings, and things of that sort. “For ‘The War Games’, we got an important instruction, to find a way of changing ’s appearance but to leave it open as hadn’t been cast. We then came up with the idea of the Time Lords – a very complicated way of doing things, really, I suppose, but it gave us a good few scenes about the Doctor’s trial and his sentence into exile – that was another thing. Stories on Earth got higher ratings, so they wanted him exiled to Earth for some reason or other, and left it to us to work it out. I think it was quite an interesting job. It was the sort of story you could stretch, although I think the ratings fell off a bit towards the end. “With ‘Frontier in Space’, the BBC said to me ‘We’ve just had a whole load of models of space ships from a Lew Grade show on ITV. We can paint ’em up different colours, can you write a story which will use them?’ It was obvious that with that amount of hardware, there has to be conflict because without conflict you’ve got no drama and this leads your thinking, fairly naturally, to wondering what was ‘Frontier in Space’ all about? A kind of ‘Star Wars’ – you’ve got two sides and who are they? Why are they at war? And the idea came of two great empies with an imaginary frontier drawn across them, across which their spaceships weren’t supposed to travel, but of course they did and that’s what gave us a story. “There are only so many ideas, and all the writer can do is keep re-shuffling them like a pack of cards and keep dealing them out in a different way. In the case of ‘Frontier in Space’, what made it different was that there was a third party which was manoeuvering the Ogrons to make the two sides antagonistic towards each other. That, incidentally, is a very political idea, really. The two sides as far as I was concerned were the and America, and somebody else trying to tickle them up and get them at war with each other when they were quite capable of living in peace. “Looking at my last serial, ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’, that was very political. Oh, and I was told that the special effects department had found that if we liked, they could show monsters wandering around contemporary London by various forms of trickery, so could I think up some reason why dinosaurs were in contemporary London? I decide what I wanted to do, and came up with a lovely idea of ‘The Golden Age’ with all these people behind it who just didn’t fit in. There were lots of rather sad people always living in the past, and who wanted to turn back the clock. I think they were totally wrong in their thinking, but I liked the story – it’s easily my favourite – because I felt that it was the way a lot of people feel, left out of left behind by things changing. “But sometimes people with altruistic views can overlook the main issue – that was really the message behind that one. But remember what politics referes to: it refers to ‘the relationships between groups of people’. It doesn’t necessarily mean Left or Right, Labour or Conservative, it’s the relationships of groups of people so really all ‘Doctor Who’ stories are political. Even thought the other people look like reptiles, they’re still people. I’d say it’s a very political show. In my stories, the ‘baddies’ aren’t really bad becuase they’re doing what they think is right. I find it hard to imagine anyone as totally bad or totally inimical, and there’s a great amount of… well, although I say it myself, philosophy and politics in my science fiction, and ‘Doctor Who’ in particular is a great opportunity to get across a point of view. And the point of view that I have is that, let’s say a maggot, that’s just about to eat someone alive, is not necessarily a bad maggot – that’s the way he is, just maggoty!” There was a peculiar relationship between and the Doctor… you see the Doctor was the only person like him, at the time, in the whole universe, a renegade and in a funny sort of way they were partners in crime.” Malcolm Hulke. Doctor Who – All The Years is a quick examination of what was happening in the world of Doctor Who over all its years of existence. I’ not attempting to create a thorough history–just brief look back at the real-life timeline of my favorite TV show. Go back to the beginning and read about 1963 here. (Daily Doctor Who #206) Doctor Who – 1974 – All the Years. Doctor Who – All The Years is a quick examination of what was happening in the world of Doctor Who over all its years of existence. I’m not attempting to create a thorough history–just brief look back at the real-life timeline of my favorite TV show. Go back to the beginning and read about 1963 here. (Daily Doctor Who #157) Doctor Who – 1973 – All the Years. Doctor Who – All The Years is a quick examination of what was happening in the world of Doctor Who over all its years of existence. I’m not attempting to create a thorough history–just brief look back at the real-life timeline of my favorite TV show. Go back to the beginning and read about 1963 here. (Daily Doctor Who #114) Doctor Who – 1972 – All the Years. Doctor Who – All The Years is a quick examination of what was happening in the world of Doctor Who over all its years of existence. I’m not attempting to create a thorough history–just brief look back at the real-life timeline of my favorite TV show. Go back to the beginning and read about 1963 here. (Daily Doctor Who #89) Doctor Who – 1971 – All the Years. Doctor Who – All The Years is a quick examination of what was happening in the world of Doctor Who over all its years of existence. I’m not attempting to create a thorough history–just brief look back at the real-life timeline of my favorite TV show. Go back to the beginning and read about 1963 here. (Daily Doctor Who #73) Doctor Who – 1970 – All the Years. Doctor Who – All The Years is a quick examination of what was happening in the world of Doctor Who over all its years of existence. I’m not attempting to create a thorough history–just brief look back at the real-life timeline of my favorite TV show. Go back to the beginning and read about 1963 here. (Daily Doctor Who #64) Doctor Who – 1969 – All the Years. Doctor Who – All The Years is a quick examination of what was happening in the world of Doctor Who over all its years of existence. I’m not attempting to create a thorough history–just brief look back at the real-life timeline of my favorite TV show. Go back to the beginning and read about 1963 here. (Daily Doctor Who #51) The War Games [Classic Doctor Who] I’ve written a few of these posts lately, which have mostly come about because of spending money I received for my 50th birthday. But like Talons of Weng-Chiang , last time, I’ve owned the DVD for this story for a long time. Unlike Talons , I’d actually watched it before. But I am enjoying rewatching these stories lately, especially doing it through the eyes of my nerdier daughters. The Avengers 1 – the Complete Megaset – The Town of No Return, The Gravediggers, . Back when Marvel comics superheroes were only on the fringe of pop culture, and not at the heart of it, ITV in the United Kingdom released the fourth season of their whimsical espionage series, The Avengers . Doctor Who and the Communist : the work and politics of Malcolm Hulke. ‘To my mind the basic problem is that writers are by their nature back-room-minded introverts and yet, in the publicity jungle, they find themselves pitted against an army of highly extroverted actors and actresses. I don’t blame promotion people at all for taking the easy path of boosting the performers, if the writers fail to sell themselves as potentially equally good copy.’ Malcolm Hulke. Malcolm (Mac) Hulke was a successful writer for television, radio, the cinema and the theatre from the 1950s to the 1970s. Born in 1924, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in June 1945, not, as he later wrote to a party official, because he was attracted to its Marxist philosophy, but because ’ I had just met a lot of Russian POW’s in Norway, because the Soviet Army had just then rolled back the Germans ’. He appears to have remained a member until the late 1960s, although his relationship with the party hierarchy had its ups and downs. Mac began working as a writer with Eric Paice, whom he had met at the left-wing Unity Theatre. Their first success was This Day in Fear , broadcast in July 1958, starring Patrick McGoohan. They went on to write four plays for the Sunday evening drama series Armchair Theatre – The Criminals (1958) , The Big Client (1959) , The Great Bullion Robbery (1960) and The Girl in the Market Square (1961) – and a series of science-fiction dramas for children, Pathfinders in Space, broadcast by ATVin 1960, commissioned by . In the 1960s Mac worked with on a number of episodes of the thriller series The Avengers . The series evolved over the decade from a black-and-white gritty crime and mystery thriller to a stylish fantasy series, filmed in colour, which combined English eccentricity with elements of ‘Swinging London’ carefully crafted to appeal to the American market. Dicks and Herbert’s episodes included ‘The Mauritius Penny’ (1962) in which a fascist organisation plan a coup under the guise of dealing in stamps, and ‘’ (1963), which features a criminal organisation run as a commercial business. Dicks went on to work on Doctor Who as the script editor and commissioned Mac to write for the popular science-fiction show, which had been running since 1963. Mac wrote eight serials for Doctor Who between 1968 and 1974. In ‘ The War Games’ (1969) (co-written with Terrance), The Doctor and his companions Zoe and Jamie land in the middle of what appears to be the First World War. The Doctor explains, ‘We’re back in history, Jamie. One of the most terrible times on the planet Earth.’ But they then discover that other wars from history, such as the American Civil War and the Mexican revolutionary war, are taking place in neighbouring zones. They are not in fact on Earth, but on a planet on which the war games are being run by an alien race so that they can create an invincible army to conquer the galaxy, assisted by a renegade Time Lord, the War Chief. The Doctor succeeds in uniting soldiers from different eras into a force which attacks and takes over the aliens’ headquarters. In this story Mac shows war as violent and pointless, controlled by ruthless leaders who place no value on human life. He adds to this by not giving the aliens names, only titles such as ‘The Security Chief’ and ‘The War Lord’, and we never learn the name of their planet. His final script for Doctor Who was ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ (1974) which dealt with the issue of threats to the environment. The Doctor says at the end, ‘It’s not the oil and the filth and the poisonous chemicals that are the real causes of the pollution…It’s simply greed’. Mac drew on 25 years of writing experience for his book Writing for Television (1974), in which he explained the craft involved and also gave practical advice such as the need to get an agent. Andrew Cartmel (script editor on Doctor Who 1987-1989) says of this book: I still remember Malcolm Hulke’s book— a glossy black hardcover with a red typewriter on the cover. It was packed with good advice (keep your submission letter — these days it would be a submission email — very short and to the point) and also schooled me in the arcane script formatting that was de rigeur in those days… you kept a vertical slab of half the page blank, theoretically so that camera directions could be written in. It was a practical guide and also an inspiration. It was my bible. And thanks in no small measure to it, and to Hulke’s common sense guidance, it was only a few years before I found myself working as the script editor on Doctor Who — where I discovered that the same Malcolm Hulke had been one of the mainstays of the writing team during the golden age of the show. Mac was also an active member of his trade union: the Television and Screen Writers’ Guild, formed on 13 May 1959. Ted Willis, a successful writer for stage, television and film (and former member of the Young Communist League) was elected chair of the new body. In 1960 Mac and Peter Yeldham edited the first three issues of the union’s new quarterly newsletter Guild News . In 1969, Mac also edited the Writers Guide, produced by the Guild for aspiring writers. The second edition, which appeared in 1970, included the following upbeat assessment: ‘The Guild is strong, it needs to be stronger. It is essential that anyone who works in films, television or radio joins immediately because individually we are nothing, collectively we can win for ourselves proper recompense commensurate with the inestimable contribution we make to our societ y.’ Among the other television series he wrote for were: Gert and Daisy, Tell It to the Marines, No Hiding Place, Danger Man, Gideon’s Way, Ghost Squad, and United! Mac worked as script editor on Crossroads , Spyder’s Web and an Australian series Woobinda: Animal Doctor and also wrote the scripts for two films: Life in Danger (1959) and The Man in the Back Seat (1961). Malcolm died on 6 July 1979. Terrance Dicks recalls that, as a convinced atheist, he had left orders that there was to be no priest, no hymns or other ceremony at his funeral and his friends therefore sat by the coffin not knowing what to do. ‘Finally Eric Paice stood up, slapped the coffin and said “well cheerio, Mac” and wandered out. We all followed him’. A common theme in a good deal of Mac’s work was illusion and deception: the police in This Day in Fear are not the police; the stamp collectors in ‘The Mauritius Penny’ are not harmless philatelists; the generals in ‘The War Games’ are aliens; and so on. His message to the audience? Question what you think you see or what you are being told by the powerful. Ask yourself what is really going on. As the Doctor says in ‘The Faceless Ones’ : ‘Things are not always what they seem.’ I would also suggest that in his non-fiction writings – Here is Drama , The Making of Doctor Who , The Writers Guide and Writing for Television – he seeks to demystify, to hack through the technical jargon and accretions of tradition, and help the reader understand what are admittedly complex topics. As he wrote in the first chapter of Writing for Television entitled ’What You Don’t Know You Don’t Know’: ‘The more we learn about a complex subject, the more we realise there is to learn. And we can only start when we acknowledge there is something to learn.’ Mac believed that writing was a craft, and should be respected (and paid properly ) but that it was a craft that, with imagination and hard work, could be learned and that there was an onus on those who had been successful to help others onto the first rung of the ladder. The final word must surely go to his good friend Terrance; he was ‘a very kind and generous man.’ The War Games [Classic Doctor Who] I’ve written a few of these posts lately, which have mostly come about because of spending money I received for my 50th birthday. But like Talons of Weng-Chiang , last time, I’ve owned the DVD for this story for a long time. Unlike Talons , I’d actually watched it before. But I am enjoying rewatching these stories lately, especially doing it through the eyes of my nerdier daughters. The War Games. Starring Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor. Companions: Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon and Wendy Padbury as Zoe Herriot. Written by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke. Directed by David Maloney. Format: 10 episodes, each about 25 minutes long Originally Aired: April – June 1969. (Episodes 35-44 of Season 6) The War Games is the first Doctor Who script credited to Terrance Dicks, one of the series’ most prolific contributors, who was already working as the show’s script editor. Apparently, the ten episode epic came about when two other stories fell through, and Dicks drew upon the more experienced Malcolm Hulke to help him fill the gap. And more than that…for the first time, to fill in the Doctor’s backstory. Spoilers Ahead! The Doctor is really…a Time Lord from Gallifrey! But to be fair, this was a pretty big move for the show to make after six seasons of offering only the barest of hints and keeping it mostly undiscussed. And though there’s nothing terribly complex about, the reveal was interesting, logically presented and strong enough to creat a solid foundation for the show to go forward on which has lasted all the way to the most reason season, when it was suddenly replaced with the much clunkier “Timeless Child” twist. However, as good as the revelation about the Time Lords is, it does take a long time to get there. There is some build up with the obvious prior relationship that the War Chief has with the Doctor, but really it’s a good eight episodes into the story before they are really talked about, nine episodes before they get involved, and ten before they actually turn up. Prior to that, the main story is about unnamed aliens kidnapping people from different periods in earth history in order to create an army of galactic conquerors. There’s nothing wrong with this plot but it struggles to retain interest over the story’s expansive length. Things really begin to feel padded out around Episode Six, and there just seems to be a lot of back and forth between the war zones and the War Lord’s headquarters. The story certainly would have benefited by being reduced to six episodes, but the whole “resistance” subplot ends up being a bit rushed and could have been developed more as well. Design-wise, the whole World War I time-zone is quite good, with trench and the forward command post all being well-realized, as well as all of the soldiers with their props and costumes. The characters are straightforward but likable–I’m a particular fan of Russell (played by Graham Weston), one of the resistance leaders who comes from the Boer War. He’s a bit of a boss in every fight he gets into. Struggling a lot more is the untitled aliens and their whole operations centre. Everything about the place looks silly–the psychedelic patterns on the walls, the mysterious invaders and their affected speech patterns and the soldiers with their retro-futuristic goggles–it all just look like a big collection of cheap science fiction cliches. The political dynamics between the Security Chief (part of the alien race) and the War Chief (from the Doctor’s people), and the way they both try to stay on the good side of the War Lord (the alien leader) gives us something to watch during these segments–but again, it’s too stretch out to really work well. But, after all that, it’s such a pivotal story in the history of the show, you wouldn’t want to miss it. In addition to introducing the Time Lords, it’s also the last black and white story, the end of Doctor Who ‘s 40 episode seasons, and the last story before the character spent a period being exiled to earth. The story also features cameo appearances by famous monsters (Daleks, Cybermen, Quarks and ), a sad farewell to companions Jamie and Zoe, and the sonic screwdriver being used as an actual screwdriver. After watching this story (and The Enemy of the World ), one of my daughters decided that Jamie was one of her favorite companions, and the other declared the Second Doctor to be amongst her three favorite Doctors (along with Smith and Capaldi).