Velvet smoking jackets, hovercrafts, Venusian karate, neutron flows, bouffant hair, angry civil servants, insulted Brigadiers, giggling popsies and crystals from Metebelis III. Yes, we're into the telefantastic world of Jon Pertwee.
That Pertwee's performance as the Doctor would turn out to be the most serious of all was a revelation to the TV critics. For he wasn't a very serious actor. The descendant of French aristocrats, he was expelled from two schools and thrown out of RADA for writing rude things on the toilet walls. He served in the navy and reached a high rank in partying; on one occasion he woke up with a tattoo on his arm and couldn't remember how he came to get it. Pertwee's early career was dominated by comedy roles that made the most of his rubbery features and ability to affect silly voices. So when he landed the part of the Doctor it was tempting to continue the farcical style of the Troughton years. But Pertwee insisted on playing it straight – and the production team, who were tired of filming alien worlds in quarries – agreed.
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The early results made for astonishingly dark TV: arguably the two best and most sober seasons of Doctor Who were Pertwee's first and Sylvester McCoy's last. Pertwee's Doctor found himself stranded on Earth, denied the ability to time travel by his people and forced to make a home among the slightly sinister United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT) run by the strict but urbane Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. His first story, Spearhead From Space, signalled its darkness when a soldier's head crashed into a car windscreen and covered it in bright red blood. The Silurians ends with UNIT concluding peace talks with some reptilian cave dwellers by blowing up their habitat. The villain in Ambassadors of Death is not an evil man but a career soldier undergoing a pitiable nervous breakdown. And in Inferno (for my money, the best Who serial ever made), the Doctor visits a parrallel dimension in which Britain is a fascist state and he fails to save it from a volcanic eruption that destroys the world. It's nail-biting stuff.
Things grew brighter and sillier as Pertwee's time wore on but there was always that vein of seriousness. Subjects included environmentalism, the Common Market, apartheid, penal reform and what happens if plastic mannequins could walk. The Monster of Peladon is about the resolution of an industrial dispute, a boringly worthy plot only made watchable by the presence of an alien that looks like a giant phallus with a curtain wrapped around it. And a re-occurring theme is the dead hand of bureaucracy. When not being bullied by the Brigadier, the Doctor is being bullied by civil servants – the best of which appears in The Sea Devils and spends his entire screen time eating breakfast and blowing things up. In Pertwee-era Who there's always some privileged dolt who blows things up. And whereas in modern Who the Doctor is always pausing in the middle of the action to say, "Humans are AMAZING!", in that childish Blue Peter presenter way of his, Pertwee's Who has only contempt for us talking monkeys.
The few people he liked were his companions and, boy, what lovely companions he had. In the second season, the producers decided to lighten things up by casting Katy Manning as Jo Grant, a scatter-brained beauty so sexy that she once posed topless for a magazine with a Dalek (you can see the original here and a wonderful Lego recreation here). She was what in the 1970s they called a sexpot. Sadly, the species died out when Barbara Castle introduced women's equality. The first lines of dialogue between the Doctor and Jo captures the spirit of their alliance: Jo enters the Doctor's laboratory and knocks something over. He says,
Doctor: Look, I said I don't want any tea today, thank you.
Jo Grant: I'm not the tea lady.
Doctor: Then what the blazes are you doing in here? Don't you know this area is strictly out of bounds to everybody except the tea lady and the Brigadier's personal staff?
Jo Grant: I'm your new assistant.
Doctor: Oh, no.
Oh yes. But what started as a comic mismatch grew into something rather beautiful. Maybe even love.
Between the Doctor and the Master, however, there was mostly only hate. Things went a bit James Bondy under Pertwee and it was decided that he should have his very own Blofeld. For that they cast Roger Delgado as The Master, who was forever disguised as a vicar or standing over a machine with a radar dish attached that goes "wee-wee-wee-wee" (electronic noise was the soundtrack to Pertwee's era – the music was a series of whistles and farts produced on a synthesizer). He also did that classic Seventies bad guy thing of hiding his real identity behind transparent name changes: "Retsam is the Master backwards!" Quelle surprise.
As time wore on, the show succumbed to the same problems that afflicted other eras: the production staff got lazy and deferred to the star's increasingly eccentric characterisation. Pertwee's hair grew so big that it got its own dressing room. The stories, once witty political parables, became long-winded bores about some news story or other. And the production design nadir was The Invasion of the Dinosaurs, an ambitious attempt to have London over-run with dinosaurs that lacked the cash to see it through. Critics pointed out that the tyrannosaurus rex looked eerily like Basil Brush.
So Jon Pertwee bailed out in 1974 and took his frilly shirts and Venusian sign language with him. Doctor Who was never quite the same again. His era represented the high point of the programme as a serious piece of science-fiction, a show that explored what contemporary life might be like if something small was changed and the effects of that change taken to their logical, apocalyptic conclusions. As Pertwee later put it, nothing frightens the audience more than, "a Yeti on your loo in Tooting Bec."
Not that Jon didn't have a sense of fun. Enjoy the funkadelic disco masterpiece that he recorded – lovingly reproduced at the top of this post with some smashing clips. Damn, he was cool.