• Eric Saward's contribution to the show by Rob Matthews
• Spoiling a magic trick by Thomas Cookson

Eric Saward's contribution to the show by Rob Matthews 3/4/02

Revelation of the Daleks is for me one of the top five stories in Doctor Who's run. It's also perhaps the bleakest in terms of worldview, and the most littered with scenes of violent death. Now, I'm not a particularly morbid person, and Doctor Who is not a pessimistic show, so this is quite anomalous, but that's partly why it's a success. There's a good quote about this story to be found in David J Howe's TV companion -

"One could point out that the story was not only laced with gratuitous horror, but had main and subsiduary plots which could easily be called unsuitable for a young audience. But using these points as criticisms would, it seems, be missing the point somehow. While they would all be fairly damning to a normal Doctor Who story, the mere fact that all could be levelled at Revelation indicates that it was trying to do something different"

How can I put this - after many years of battling against bad guys, and seeing innocent people killed in every single battle, you'd have to be unbelievably resilient not to let it get to you in some way. At the risk of weaving everyone's reviews together here, the point was well made by Mike Morris in his Visitation piece that Saward brought a sense of moral tension into the show. The Doctor was no longer getting away from his adventures unscathed because he no longer had a script editor who would let him. Saward addressed certain issues that arose when you looked hard at the history of the show - particularly its attitude to violence -, and a lot of fans perhaps think that in doing so he was just taking Doctor Who too seriously. But I personally don't think there's anything wrong with that approach. The Doctor develops more than ever before as a real character in season 21 precisely because of it. It's only by really challenging the Doctor and his actions that he can remain relevant as someone you view as a hero as opposed to a superhero. The difference of course being that a hero doesn't have the odds stacked in his favour from the start (I've never understood the appeal of Superman). This challenging of the Doctor and his actions was central to the show for all its remaining years, it defined the Virgin NAs, and is still relevant to the BBC books, which are currently (at the time of writing) engaged in making the Doctor more human, less powerful. It was Saward who first started doing this for real. The show was reinvigorated by the dark streak he introduced; it kept the Doctor and the show from resting on their laurels, munching on jelly babies and toppling dictators without a care in the world. It shouldn't have been unnecessarily prolonged, this 'darkest hour' of the series, but fortunately - though more by chance than design - it wasn't. It ended naturally after four seasons, #19 to #22, not a story arc but a thematic arc. And the moral core of the show was strengthened by its willingness to outstare 'the abyss which looks back also'. Think about it - there wasn't a single successful Doctor Who story between the end of season 22 and the beginning of #25. Saward provided the tension and the sheer buildup that made Andrew Cartmel's vision for the show successful.

(that's success in terms of creativity as opposed to audience figures).

Ah, that's the other thing. Vision. I was thinking recently that Eric Saward's contribution to Doctor Who is analogous to Lawrence Miles', in that no-one else can render his vision quite as successfully. The only real way for the novels to stay true to Miles' vision would be for him to write every single one of them. And in the same way, Saward's style is so singular that it occasionally slots awkwardly into scripts that aren't his own. As a script editor he's fascinating but flawed. But as a script writer, he's great.

And as with Lawrence Miles, the main problem is that it's hard to justify letting one man's hugely individualistic vision railroad the whole property. Especially when so many people just don't like it.

Saward hit a good and necessary compromise by scripting several pivotal stories himself - Earthshock, which reinvented the Cybermen and killed off a companion for the first time since Hartnell's era; Resurrection of the Daleks which somehow managed to simultaneously make the Daleks more credible and undermine them, picked up thematic threads left dangling from Genesis, and gave another companion a downbeat departure that was completely without precedent; and Revelation of the Daleks, which closed the show's darkest season with an utterly superb illustration of Saward's maxim that 'when you show violence, you should show that it hurts'.

Saward's a morbid scribe. There's no point in denying that - it's simply the way his writing is inclined. Hell, Revelation is set in a giant funeral parlour on a planet named after death. But that for me is why dark subject matter never seems gratuitous in his hands. It's simply part and parcel of his worldview. And that's not actually a crime, you know. I believe he's fascinated by it, but refute utterly that he revels in it. Revelation is a story that's noteworthy not simply because of the number of violent death scenes, but because of how uniquely memorable they are, how shocking in spite of their frequency. We're used to Daleks yelling 'Exterminate' and zapping people, but when the DJ is murdered you truly feel you've just witnessed something utterly obscene. Jobel's and Tasambeker's pathetic deaths (that's pathetic in the sense of pathos, by the way) are nothing short of poetic in their sad pointlessness. The mutant's forgiveness of Peri and her reaction to it bring a lump to the throat. Then there's Orcini's cuddling up to Bostock's corpse as he detonates his bomb, and Stengos' horrific/heroic entreaties to his daughter to kill him as he transforms into a Dalek. It's an emotionally exhausting story and demonstrates Saward's complete confidence in his own vision for the show.

Of course, it's quite well known amongst fans that Saward was reaching the end of his tether with the series at that point and that he actually wrote the Revelation scripts while on holiday. That he was becoming rather careless about other people's scripts is evident from Vengeance on Varos and Timelash, and that he then lost interest completely is clear from the utter hash he made of Trial of a Timelord. So Revelation was a last, glorious gasp and in an ideal world have been his final script for the show.

As things stand, he stayed too long. But for a while there he was very opposite of the purveyor of cynicism he's made out to be. He was the show's conscience.

Spoiling a magic trick by Thomas Cookson 22/9/09

Briefly in 2005, Doctor Who was once again a show about making a difference, and Rose herself told us "you don't just let things happen, you make a stand, you say no!"

But then Rose changed, becoming petty and self involved. And worse still, the show indulged her sense of self-importance. The Doctor treated her as the most important thing in the universe, long after she'd left, espousing cringeworthy pretentious rubbish about how her name keeps him fighting and how Martha can't replace her.

When Mike Morris described Rose's emotional goodbye scene as 'manipulative', I didn't get why that's meant to be a bad thing, and it's a charge which can be applied to anything, really. But when I caught a glimpse of the mentality of the shippers, in Doctor and Rose fan fiction, and online petitions to reunite the Doctor and Rose, I realised why.

It was like a boyband craze. The Doctor and Rose relationship and their tear-jerking romantic scenes had really played on the emotions of emotionally immature teenage girls and created a rather frightening following. In their eyes, the Doctor and Rose splitting up was as traumatic as the Boyzone split. Mind you, I remember watching the last episode of The Girl From Tomorrow when I was 10, and being upset at Jenny and Alana's separation.

The shippers seems to think that if the Doctor and Rose were reunited then all would be right with the world again, same way that if Take That or Boyzone were reunited, then all would be right with the world again. But in the 70's golden age, Doctor Who was actually about teaching the young viewer to come to terms with the fact that there's a lot that's not right with the world.

But the grass isn't greener. I had fallen in with the anti-RTD brigade having been hounded by opinion fascists for criticising the New Series. But I've learned that the anti-RTD brigade can be just as nasty, offensively obtuse pondscum as any other nasty faction in fandom, and I've learned that factions are as old and rigid as fandom itself. In fact, I got quite offended when one such 'negative' forum had a thread about Verity Lambert's recent passing, and a particularly petty and immature poster took the oppurtunity to say how it was also a tragedy that Russell T. Davies had 'ruined' Verity's vision. In a thread about paying respects, it was a crass and tasteless remark.

But I should know that fandom has always been petty. My local fan group was a very cliquey environment and on one occasion I hadn't brought enough money for one of the meetings. I thought being a trustworthy regular by now, they'd let me owe it next meeting, instead I was banned for a month. The money wasn't for the hire of a room, it was for doing an upcoming convention, but of course we who'd helped fund it weren't given any ticket concessions whatsoever if we wanted to attend. Since then, I've never forgotten the ridiculous pettiness of fandom.

And I think I'm coming to realise that the show shaped the insular pettiness of fandom long ago. Lawrence Miles has said that science fiction inherently breeds insular and petty fandoms, and yet it surprises me that he should hypocritically praise the 80's era of Doctor Who.

Because it's where the show itself became insular in a way that's just as despressing as the shipper mentality. Before 1980, Doctor Who had strong societal and global concerns. The 60's Dalek stories reflected the decade's civil unrest, with its revolutions, fears of nuclear war, and finally the humanised Daleks developing their own counterculture. The War Games seemed to be telling the viewer to get out there and make a difference. The Green Death was driven by eco-concerns of the day. Genesis of the Daleks reflected the brutal era of Pol Pot and it hasn't dated today. The Deadly Assassin has many things to say on propaganda.

But by the 80's, the show was only concerned with continuity, with itself. About correcting continuity issues and the crippling introspection of its main character and pleasing fandom. Even when it tries to reflect serious issues of police brutality and nuclear war in Warriors of the Deep and Resurrection of the Daleks, it's too caught up with referring to past stories and putting the Doctor in a position where he's no longer making a difference or offering any wisdom on the chaotic situation (or, if he does, the pointless massacres renders any message seem hypocritical or like he's advocating a suicidal 'turn the other cheek' attitude).

Doctor Who stopped being about telling the viewer to get out and really think about the world and make a difference, and instead to applying their energies to monster wish lists and continuity theories. It became soapish, insular, and I'd argue that it promoted insular thinking amongst its fanbase.

I often wish the show had ended in 1981 with a 'happy ending' version of Keeper of Traken. I think it was back in Logopolis when they decided that Tom Baker's Doctor needed taking down a peg or two, and that his replacement should be a doormat, where Doctor Who became a defeated series. Long before Michael Grade, the cancellation crisis or anything else, Doctor Who just looked defeated. The approach to the show and to the main character had become neurotic and repellant. The Doctor stopped being someone to look up to, or someone capable of making a difference and became treated with utter contempt by the producer and script editor. One incarnation was made to look like an incompetent moral nuisance, and the next into an unhinged, violent misogynist. No one can tell me they had the right idea at the heart of it. Doctor Who had just become an awful, desperate, scornful TV show.

Since then, the fans and the franchise aimed at the fans, have kept the Doctor in the role of a pascifist, as a backlash against Colin's hooligan Doctor, and so that the Doctor could never destroy his enemies for good, so that the fan-pleasing promise of a rematch was always there. I don't mind this pascifist approach when it's not being done with the kind of contempt for the character that Warriors of the Deep displayed.

Blood Heat might show the Doctor in the same unpleasant, superior position of blaming the victim again by siding with the Silurian aggressors, but the conclusion does justify his statement that peace is the way forward. The Holy Terror showed the Doctor's compassion and sympathy for a child abuser without making his compassion seem twisted or dangerous like Warriors does. Same was true of Neverland, where the Doctor pleads for the Time Lords not to destroy the Daleks. The scene works not by eliciting sympathy for the Daleks, but by showing how ugly Gallifrey's lynch-mob society is. A society where people are gratified by scorn and executions as entertainment, and the Jeremy-Kyle-esque showman has all the say, and only allows the condemned to say enough to further condemn them (depressingly that's exactly how the Doctor of Warriors of the Deep and The Idiot's Lantern behaves). So, ultimately, the horror isn't about destroying the Daleks, but about knowing that it won't just stop there.

And yet, Big Finish has also done the kind of spin-offs like Bernice Summerfield, Dalek Empire and Unbound where our heroes are more aggressive and violent and able to do things that the Doctor can't. And it shows the freedom of that kind of storytelling and a stronger message of fighting to make a difference and not being crippled by society's laws or guilt complexes. To a degree, the New Series showed that too, initially.

In fact, I'd say that the Michael-Grade-induced backlash got immediately onto the right track morally, if not narratively, in Trial of a Time Lord. A story that, through a court hearing, specifically shows why the Doctor's morals and methods are so important. Particularly the scene where Peri shoots blind at Sil because the bad Doctor won't help her pacify the situation. But before then, we had to endure four years of demoralising awfulness, confused and twisted morality and, most frustrating of all, false dawns of quality that reminded you how good it could be when it occasionally pulled everything together.

Doctor Who was always a series that saw development and new revelations. The Tom Baker era had seen a lot of development for the show and its hero, particularly in Genesis of the Daleks, The Deadly Assassin and Logopolis. Indeed, I'd much rather the Big Finish writers had followed up Logopolis than the 80's writing team.

But during the Saward era, hardly anything develops. Nothing happens that reshapes the universe as we know it, apart from maybe Resurrection of the Daleks and Trial of a Time Lord, and those stories are almighty messes. The Doctor himself regresses terribly and becomes an extra in his own series. Hell, the Cartmel era showed far more development in three seasons than Saward's era did in five, even with just four stories per season.

Maybe Doctor Who was simply dead. Doctor Who was something that probably should have gone into retirement and died with dignity in Shada, and since then has been a corpse that keeps getting forcibly resuscitated, living on a loop and growing ever more senile and deranged with old age (Time-Flight, Twin Dilemma), unreasonably hostile and scornful to pretty much everyone (Warriors of the Deep) and eventually had to be lobotomised (Season 24 and RTD's stories). Shada would have been the ideal ending of the show, but even if the show had to settle for simply fading out with Horns of Nimon, that would at least be a more dignified end than what we did get, a mercy killing too late to stop the worst degrees of anguish and humiliation.

But the show then had a wonderful 'afterlife' in comics, books and audios. And the audios are my most treasured form of Doctor Who now. And that's where I ask myself whether those audios would be as good without the inspiration and the cautionary pitfalls of the 80's. Robert Shearman and Joseph Lidster are among the franchise's best writers, and they were made fans by the very Saward era that I'd like to erase from existence. Without Castrovalva, there might have been no Holy Terror. Without Vengeance on Varos, there might have been no Jubilee. Without Black Orchid, there might have been no Creatures of Beauty. Without Mindwarp there might have been no Unbound series. Even Dalek Empire, influenced largely by 60's Dalekmania, probably wouldn't be as strong without ideas inspired by Kinda and Revelation of the Daleks, such as the Seer of Yaldos and the Orcini-clone, Kalendorf.

Indeed given the humanistic tone of the Big Finish audios, it reminds me that in some ways the 80's did produce some extraordinarily humanistic stories. For a while, stories like Kinda and Black Orchid seemed to indicate that Doctor Who had grown beyond high body counts and hissable villains (leaving the Master as a spare part), actually doing stories that had no bad guys, and showed the consequences of misunderstandings and prejudices. Certainly, Kinda and Snakedance show a far more respectful and considered portrayal of tribal culture than the savages who inhabit Death to the Daleks and Power of Kroll. Mawdryn Undead and Enlightenment have a beautiful, tragic sense of existentialism, and even Terminus is probably more in line with Doctor Who's ethos of sympathy for the underdog and resolving problems without violence or thoughtless destruction than any other story I can think of.

Maybe that's why the mean spiritedness of the mid-80's era hurts so much. The sense that it actually could have gone somewhere positive instead of drowning in vileness. So I wonder what it would have been like if Saward hadn't been script editor and wasn't there to commision the worst with the best. Plus, he made the kind of edits and additions that ruined stories, such as Tegan and Adric's repulsively petty bitch spat in the otherwise enlightening Kinda, or killing off the last characters in Warriors of the Deep in a hollow and nasty fashion and thereby taking away that morally twisted story's only chance at redemption.

Of course, Doctor Who in the 70's had been very boys own and had huge body counts, and continually had the Master using his ingenuity to escape justice with sequel rights to our perverse admirtation. I'd say the difference was that 70's Doctor Who was done with frivolity and elan. 80's Doctor Who was so humourless that any dubious ethics were more discomforting because now it felt like the show really meant it.

The worst aspects of the Saward era seem to be homages to the Hinchcliffe era. Eric seems to think that body counts equals drama. But the Hinchcliffe stories rarely went out of their way to kill off characters in the horribly contrived way that Warriors of the Deep did with Preston and Vorshak, or Resurrection did with Professor Laird, or The Two Doctors did with Oscar. Horror of Fang Rock came close with the death of Skinsale, but just about got away with it by emphasising greed as his fatal flaw, a reason for why he died. The 80's stories don't have that, just a twisted scorn on humanity.

Colin Baker's repulsive 'alienness' was an attempt to recapture Tom Baker's cold, alien callousness in Pyramids of Mars, but clearly forgetting his 'All life is our kith' speech in the same story, or that if he'd strangled Sarah, the show would be instantly banned in most households.

Warriors of the Deep tried to recreate Genesis of the Daleks' sense of the possibility of failure for the Doctor and his misplaced compassion. But it didn't simply show up the limitations and weaknesses of the Doctor. It imposes them on him, in a way that suggests a limited, stereotypical understanding of the character with a whiff of contempt for him too. Previous Doctors weren't in any way, shape or form pascifists and were fully capable of taking violent action if necessary.

In The Sea Devils, Jon Pertwee showed that he knew what had to be done and destroyed the Sea Devils when he realised peace was not an option. In Warriors of the Deep, that should have been obvious to Davison by episode two. Likewise, Tom Baker was prepared to blow up Davros in Destiny of the Daleks, and Pertwee would have done the same to the Master in Mind of Evil, so why did Davison keep letting Davros and the Master escape? Though in fairness, the sequel-rights immunity of the Master was beyond Eric's control. Even treating Davison as his own character, different from his predecessors, he never seems to develop. Snakedance should have represented the Doctor emerging as a stronger, more confident figure, but by Season 21 he has completely regressed from that.

Robert Smith? argued in his Sixth Doctor review that the Colin Baker era was supposed to be tasteless to outrage and offend, to be morally challenging. That this was the same Doctor who wiped out the Nimons and killed Solon, but shown in an unsanitised light where the ugliness of it was there for all to see. In that regard, Warriors of the Deep is the converse, where we really see a microcosm of the bloody results of the Doctor's misplaced compassion for the enemy in Genesis of the Daleks, and see his morally arrogant coldness, when confronted with the victims of his failure.

But to me, that's not really a good thing. Eric seems to be simply spoiling a magic trick by pointing out what's up the magician's sleeve. Taking the image of an innocent, peaceloving childhood hero and pointing out loudly that he wouldn't work in the real world. He's just making TV that's negative and demoralising, in a show that should never be either.

And that's where I really wish Christopher Bidmead had stayed on as script editor. Season 18 is probably as close to consistent in style and quality as the JNT era ever got, with a concerted effort at developing the show, not regressing it. He would have certainly commissioned Kinda, Snakedance, Terminus and Varos, and encouraged more of their ilk.

However, I think he would have refused to commission most of the 80's crap. It takes two to tango, but I think he worked well with John Nathan-Turner, and would have been listened to. So I think he would have vetoed the tickboxes and bloodbaths, the continuity that put years and wrinkles on the depressingly unending show, and the Doctor becoming a woman-throttling monster. Bidmead was all about burning bridges. Logopolis was meant to sever ties between the Doctor and Gallifrey, and Castrovalva was probably meant to be the Master's final demise (judging from Warriors' Gate, I think Bidmead believed in retributive justice). Furthermore, Frontios is the only Season 21 story besides Caves of Androzani to not treat the Doctor with contempt, and make Davison come up as a champ.

So Eric gave us a masterpiece in Revelation of the Daleks (which is one story with the kind of global humanistic concerns about famine, economics, cryogenics and corporate corruption and real thematic meat that set it apart from its era) and he helped make Caves of Androzani a success. But he didn't work well with John Nathan-Turner. The violence and demoralising tone of his stories shows that bitterness at being unheard, and frankly JNT's superficial tickboxes and monster parades laid the show open for Eric's cold-blooded approach, like giving an alcoholic a drink and your car keys.