TARDIS Eruditorum - A Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 3: Jon Pertwee

TARDIS Eruditorum #3

by Elizabeth Sandifer, Anna Wiggins (Contributor)

In this third volume of essays adapted from the acclaimed blog TARDIS Eruditorum you'll find a critical history of the Jon Pertwee years of Doctor Who. TARDIS Eruditorum tells the ongoing story of Doctor Who from its beginnings in the 1960s to the present day, pushing beyond received wisdom and fan dogma to understand that story not just as the story of a geeky sci-fi show but as the story of an entire line of mystical, avant-garde, and radical British culture. It treats Doctor Who as a show that really is about everything that has ever happened, and everything that ever will. This volume focuses on the first years of Doctor Who in colour: the five glam-rock tinged years of Jon Pertwee, looking at its connections with environmentalism, J.G. Ballard, neopaganism, and Monty Python. Every essay on the Pertwee era has been revised and expanded from its original form, along with seven brand new essays exclusive to this collected edition, including a look at whether Torchwood makes any sense with the history of Doctor Who, how the TARDIS works, and just what happens when Jo Grant, as played by Katy Manning, meets the eccentric Time Lady Iris Wildthyme, as played by Katy Manning.

Genres: Doctor Who, Nonfiction, Essays, Tv, Politics, Reference, Criticism

382 pages, Paperback

First published April 2, 2013

About the author

Note: This author previously published under the name Philip Sandifer.

Reviews

[F.R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the Pertwee era.

I like it a lot more than Philip Sandifer does anyway.

I like that this very strange, adrenalin pumped, particularly British version of Doctor Who existed; a version which couldn’t have existed anywhere else but the 1970s.

Yes I can see why people are sniffy about Pertwee’s performance, as he’s frequently high-handed, patronising and supercilious. But this is a highly advanced and intellectual alien being, of course he’s going to be somewhat superior and arrogant to those around him. The Doctor might like human beings, but that doesn’t mean he actually wants to live with them.

As such I come to this era from a slightly different perspective to Philip Sandifer, who freely admits that it’s the period of Doctor Who he’s least fond of (although he makes it clear that doesn’t mean he actually dislikes it). It was therefore something of a surprise that a lot of the points he raised in these essays I agreed with. He’s very sharp on the whole camp, glam, over the top aesthetic of the show, and how it struggles to exist next to the more serious military set action adventure tone the show also goes for. He sees that as a massive flaw, but for me that dichotomy is one of the most important aspects: the fact that those two versions of Pertwee are existing side by side and at times at war with each other, is why – even though the show is largely Earthbound – it manages to achieve some kind of variety.

And yes, I think he’s somewhat hard on ‘Inferno’, which with its zombies brutally killing scientists is one of the darkest and most fascinating pieces of television ever to have gone out in the Children’s TV slot at 5.15 on a Saturday evening, but mostly I agree with a great many of Sandifer’s individual points. Yes, those flaws exist, but I think the whole manages to be so much more than them.

What’s missing though in this smart and entertaining guide to The Pertwee Years though, is an essay specifically on Roger Delgado’s The Master and how crucial he is to this run of the show, and how crucial he is to Doctor Who itself. The Daleks, The Cybermen and The Master are the three big villains of the show, but whereas the Daleks and the Cybermen have evolved dramatically since their first appearance, The Master has remained defiantly the same. In fact he has failed to evolve. Other actors have taken the role (and John Simm is a talented actor) but have been completely unable to erase the original. He is the actor nearly all fans would pick out as their favourite Master. True, he was the original, but it’s not as if the vast majority of Doctor Who fans would pick out William Hartnell as their absolute favourite Doctor.

So what is it about his performance that is so special? When the show realises quite what it has, how does it respond to put him to best effect, or how does it fail him completely? (Both occur doing his run). How is he able to rise above the material he is often given to remain this haunting demonic presence more than forty years later? In the next edition, two thousand words on that would be lovely, Dr Sandifer, thank you very much.

For me I like that as well as the saturnine appearance and the dark hypnotic eyes, there’s a great deal of charm. Charm is a loaded word in the Pertwee era, as Pertwee himself used to request moments of charm as The Doctor, and it feels like the Moriarty of the show was given the same courtesy. One of my absolute favourite moments of Delgado as The Master occurs in ‘The Sea Devils’ where he watches The Clangers on TV and laughs amused to himself. Why is he laughing there? Is it because this is what the naive Earth people imagine extra-terrestrial life is like? Or is it, as I prefer to believe, him laughing at a time he met a race just like that and the things he did to them…?

Four stars for now, but with an essay on The Master in the next edition, I might just push it to five.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2138231.html[return][return]This is the third in the series of collected articles from Philip Sandifer's excellent blog, this time looking at the Pertwee era, of which Sandifer and I share the majority view among fandom - though it is not a crushing majority - that this is not Old Who's finest period. But rather than whining about the stories, like I have done, Sandifer unpacks with some care why it is that the Third Doctor sometimes doesn't quite work, often rather sympathetically, particularly to Pertwee himself, and also Katy Manning and Nicholas Courtney on whom the success of the stories often depends. I had previously read his essay on Moonbase 3 after watching the episodes; but in the context of the other essays showing what Dicks and Letts were trying to achieve, and why it barely worked in Who and didn't work on the Moon in 2003, it makes a lot more sense. Basically his thesis is that the show was flitting uneasily between action and glam, though Dicks and Letts may not have been fully aware of this themselves.[return][return]There is also some brilliant additional coloration in the side essays on Monty Python and David Bowie, and the piece on The Three Doctors is an extended riff on William Blake which also quotes another William, my brother. As before, Sandifer explains better to me what I have seen on screen and makes me want to expand my reading / viewing (though in fact none of the non-TV Who referenced here, five books and two audios, were new to me).[return][return]Which is not to say that I completely agree with him. On a broad point, I find Sandifer's overall tracking of the show's history deterministic and almost Whiggish. To pull another quote, this time from the Planet of the Spiders essay:[return][return]"Pertwee doesn t regenerate because his time is past. He regenerates because he s finally accomplished what his era set out to do in the first place."[return][return]It's a nice peroration, but it is very much projecting the future onto the past as if it were inevitable (which is what I mean by Whiggish). Pertwee regenerated, fundamentally, because the actor decided / was persuaded to leave the show. The artistic judgements about where to take the story flowed partly from that fact and largely from other factors affecting the show's creators, some of which we know about and some of which we don't. And while it's good and satisfying that towards the end of Planet of the Spiders, Pertwee's Doctor has a moment of repentance and redemption before he dies, I think it's a strong reading (which is to say, factually incorrect) to say that he regenerates because he has accomplished his mission - indeed, I wish that it were otherwise; I'd have preferred if this thought had been better integrated into the story as a whole, better yet the season as a whole, rather than just dragged in at the end.[return][return]And on a much more specific point, I agreed with almost all of Sandifer's judgements of individual stories with the extraordinary exception of The Mutants, which most fans would put pretty far down the list of Pertwee stories and I would put firmly at the bottom. Sandifer praises it, though not terribly coherently, for its use of "spectacle". I will allow it good use of location filming, but really not much more than that; in terms of spectacle, the transmogrification of Ky at the end is surely a botch? Its political messages are certainly botched, and so, rather more often than one can forgive, is the acting and directing.[return][return]Anyway, despite my occasional disagreements, another good addition to the thinking fan's bookshelf.

[Tom Marshall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elizabeth Sandifer's "TARDIS Eruditorum" blog project kicked off in January 2011: a phenomenally ambitious effort to tell the story of Doctor Who and its place within British culture from 1963 to the present. There is something about Doctor Who - its longevity, its hold on those who fall down its rabbit hole, and its ravenous nature when it comes to devouring stories, weird imagery, mythology, and intertextuality - that spurs fans to write serious academic works about it, more than you will find for almost any other television programme. Such volumes vary from Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles' About Time to the Black Archive series (critical monographs on individual stories). Within this pantheon, however, Sandifer's work stands out as exceptional for a variety of reasons:

(1) while proceeding in chronological order from 1963 to the present might be an approach taken by any number of other guidebooks, few are as meticulous or explicit about tracing Doctor Who's relationship with the wider culture surrounding it. In Sandifer's hands, analysis of Doctor Who is not just about appreciating themes or characterisation, nor is it a matter of documenting ever-changing television production over the decades, although both of these approaches are frequently factored into her work. Rather, she uses the lens of Doctor Who to examine stories the United Kingdom tells about itself - its obsessions and fears, the way it uses its literary heritage, and its material social circumstances - in a startlingly original manner I have not otherwise encountered. One imagines a similar sort of project could be embarked upon with the Bond franchise, and the way its films reflect changing social mores, but I find it highly dubious it would yield results that are anywhere near as interesting or as insightful, not least because Doctor Who's mercurial, ever-shifting nature allows for a far greater range of perspectives, styles and influences than Bond has ever had or could ever have. It has been noted in some quarters that the fact that Sandifer is American leads her to misinterpret certain things or come to unlikely conclusions; I have to say I've never felt this particularly strongly, and would indeed go so far as to say that the perspective of someone looking in from the outside (who has obviously conducted extensive research and immersed herself in British culture) is in some ways more valuable than that of a Brit, and in some respects permits fresher insight.

(2) there is genuine power and bite to the arguments she sets forth. Far too much fan writing falls into the same traps of regurgitating the familiar positives or negatives about a story, or ticking off continuity points of interest as though everything set down in the Holy Writ of Rassilon were actually true in our universe and the pleasure of verifying it falls to the truly devout. By being explicitly aware and indeed profoundly focussed on Doctor Who as fiction but also as having a solid ethical dimension rooted in the real world, Sandifer's essays are as likely to be rousing polemics against a story's abhorrent politics or sensitive discussion about the nature of bullying as they are discussions of production codes and which audio drama contradicts which novel. This inherently politicised approach will probably not be for everyone; clearly, Sandifer is approaching the series from a leftist perspective, although if this fact surprises anybody you have to wonder whether they've ever watched much Doctor Who in the first place. It lends her work a tremendously compassionate and humane quality which also demands the highest of ethical and moral standards, while often being aware and forgiving of the times the series falls short of meeting those standards.

(3) Sandifer is an extremely literate and well-read critic, and it shows, although for the most part not in an obviously showy way. This extends both back into wider literary movements as well as forward to the specifics of television and concerns about spectacle. Clearly, Marxist criticism is a major influence, and she tips her metaphorical hat to Guy Debord and the Situationist International on more than one occasion, the concept of 'psychogeography' being as it is a direct influence on her own term 'psychochronography'. But in this volume alone you will find an eclectic mix of references to glam, Bowie, Plato, Antonio Gramsci, von Daniken, Aleister Crowley, and J. G. Ballard, and discussion of such concepts as the aforementioned psychochronography, the spectacle of the strange, the complex cosmology of William Blake, and the Kabbalah. It is the presence of provocative discourse on occultism, metatextuality, and countercultural movements of the day which enlivens Sandifer's essays enormously and which elevates them above the bulk of fan criticism.

(4) despite the above, the writing is mostly jargon-free, engaging, and extremely entertaining. I frequently find myself laughing out loud at the author's dry asides or sarcastic observations, and she has a gift for a memorable turn of phrase. You will not always agree with Sandifer (though find me a writer or indeed a person of whom that cannot be said?!), but you will rarely if ever be bored. It is no surprise that the blog series quickly developed a sizeable readership, nor that it has inspired a number of similar projects: I ran a blog along similar lines myself for a time, but far more accomplished examples include GigaWho, Darren Mooney, and Andrew Ellard. The debt these critics, all extremely good in and of themselves, owe Sandifer is significant, and invariably gratefully acknowledged. You could fill a large bookcase with books about Doctor Who, but any such collection that does not include the work of this giant of the field is seriously incomplete.

This particular volume, adapted from the section of the blog covering the tenure of Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, spans 1970-74, and in my view marks the start of something of an 'imperial phase' for the Eruditorum, which runs throughout the Pertwee and early Baker eras, with only the McCoy and Capaldi essays rivalling her work on this period. What's notable about that list, though, is that of all those eras it's only the Pertwee era that isn't quite to her taste. It's even more to Sandifer's credit, then, that she puts out such consistently engaging content about this era that doesn't quite work for her - there's a fascinating degree of ambivalence at the heart of the book, examining the way the Pertwee era is constantly toing and froing between the Action Thriller version of the show and the weird postmodernism 'Glam' version of the show. It made me re-evaluate the whole era completely in a number of ways. Also of note in this particular volume is the surreal entry on 'The Three Doctors', which fuses the story with Blakean visions of Urizen, Enitharmon, and other figures in his own personal mythology. As with a couple of Sandifer's other essays, most notably the ones on 'The Deadly Assassin' and 'Logopolis', this requires reading several times to truly make sense of it, and a good familiarity with Blake will certainly help! Sandifer is particularly good at not being cowed by the momentousness of many of these stories: every fan brain has an in some ways unhelpfully overawed tendency to exclaim "the first Master story! the first Sontaran story!" and the like. Instead of approaching them with hindsight, she tends to peel back the dusty layers of history they have accrued and consider how they might have gone down at the time and what they would've said to their original audience. The value of this approach is obvious; no one making 'The Mutants' would have dreamed we'd be discussing it in the 2020s, after all. In this book version there are also a number of additional essays not found on the blog, many of which turn out to be unexpected highlights - I particularly appreciated the assessment of Paul Magrs' retrospective contributions to the era, in the essays on 'Verdigris' and 'Find and Replace', and the piece on how to square UNIT and Torchwood with each other is fun too.

There really is hours of reading to be enjoyed and savoured here: essays and insights I will return to time and time again. I cannot recommend this book (and the series as a whole) highly enough.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A less sympathetic reading of the era, for sure, but a largely convincing one in my eyes. It’s a radical reading of the era’s failings while, as always, attempting some form of redemption in its glam aesthetics, Jo Grant as lightning in a bottle, and the work of Malcolm Hulke. The essays concerning other adjacent programmes - like Survivors - make an interesting case for why the kind of ‘social realism’ Who was doing was also fundamentally flawed and unable to live up to the promise the end of the Troughton era posed: can the show engage with humanity successfully rather than ignore it? In some ways, the glam aesthetic of starmen and dandies suited Pertwee’s ability to make everything around him sing, but, Sandifer argues, this was a betrayal or at least a dilution of the basic principles of the programme, meaning “[I]t’s a story about the viewer’s world in which the viewer doesn’t matter”. This is often a downbeat reading - and argues that the era’s two approaches of glam and the military Doomwatch drama don’t quite mesh - but nevertheless one which sustains the book in an interesting and readable way, taking forays into attempts to respond to the era well into the 1990s. I enjoy criticism that I may not necessarily agree with but which is well-argued. Heck, it also contains some of the best Ziggy Stardust analysis I’ve ever read! Go buy it.

[The Bookseller · Rating 5 out of 5]

As always a very well written and exciting new look at Doctor Who. Even when he is berating a story, often held high regards by the majority of fans, he explains very clearly as to why he believes it is not good. The Third Doctor is a real hit a miss Doctor. Even when you ask people who watched his era as a child, but are not fans now, they will have polarizing opinions. Philip Sandifer does a fantastic job as to why this is the case. Presenting how Doctor Who changed after Patrick Troughton's era.

My only complaints (while still leaving my five stars) is that he has a habit of going on a complete tangent for one essay. Particularly, he will find a very bizarre why of writing it. In this book, it was his review of 'The Three Doctors’, where he seemed to have written it like a poem....I think it? It is quite hard to understand. It is a shame because, this was an episode I would have loved to have heard his thoughts on the episode, and without a better academic knowledge, it will be hard for me to.

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Jon Pertwee era of "Doctor Who" is one of my favourites...but not the author's cup of tea. Nevertheless, it's another powerful, insightful, amusing, and thought-provoking critique, combined with lashings of lovely historical/political/social comment. The best read is one where you can disagree with the author, yet appreciate virtually everything they write. This is one such book.

[Mark Archer · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you enjoy the previous book it's more of the same from Liz (appropriate for an era that had Liz Shaw and Elizabeth Sladen). Whilst she's not the biggest fan of the era it's not as much of a hate-fest as some make it to be.

There are a few place's where it gets a little more experimental than the previous two, but not enough to put you off if you enjoyed them as well.

[Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I certainly enjoyed the 3rd Doctor more than Sandifer when I watched them, I wonder if my opinion would change watching them now.

[The Book Ninja · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable essays. Some badly put together sentences, needed more diligent editor. Also, let’s not blame Pertwee for the writing , he’s just an actor. The biggest crime of his era is that the writers actually thought sci-fi is a new genre and treated fans as uninformed. A lot of it was insulting in that respect but Sandifer rightly focuses on the political parallels. The cackhanded metaphors for unions and colonisation etc are all down to the writers and not Pertwee.

[Jamieson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The third volume in the TARDIS Eruditorum series focuses on the Pertwee era (1970-1974) by collecting the original blog posts (this was originally a blog) and adding a few print exclusives. Unlike most guides/reviews of Doctor Who that tend to focus on production, plot and/or a straight review of the story in question, this book looks at how culture and politics of the time affected Doctor Who and how Doctor Who affected them. It's described in a nutshell as a walking tour through time with a focus on Doctor Who.

The author looks at all the TV stories of course, but also takes a looks at a handful of Doctor Who novels and audio that came out decades later as well as various media and events that effect how Doctor Who was viewed at the time such as Monty Python, Doomwatch and the Ziggy Stardust album just to name three. Nearly every essay starts with a breakdown of who was number one in the music charts at the time of airing and world news that was going on at the time such as Watergate or the Bloody Sunday in Ireland.

As such, this is not your average Doctor Who guide or reference book. However, it is utterly fascinating and great for Doctor Who fans who have an interest in history and politics. It's quite different from most Doctor Who reviews out there and thus is definitely worth checking out.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm SO close to giving this two stars. While Sandifer makes some interesting observations his writing is so poor and his overall conclusions so absurd as to be laughable. It reaches an apex in his essay on The Three Doctors, which is both unreadable and an annoying attempt at self-congratulatory obscurest literary masturbation.

Sandifer's books would be improved 100% simply by removing the phrases "at the end of the day," "frankly," "if we're being perfectly honest," and about a half dozen others which often appear more than once per page. It's mind numbingly bothersome.

[Matt Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sandifer Talks Glam

Sandifer does it again with his psychochronography of the Pertwee era. Through all his praise and frustrations he bucks conventional thought and makes you think about things, forcing reconsideration or even reinforcement of your own held preconceptions. Doctor Who writing for Doctor Who fans who are fascinated in more than marks out of ten, blind praise, or raging damnation.

And well worth the cost.

[Nina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the Pertwee era, but not as much as I expected to enjoy it. Phil Sandifer does an excellent job of explaining why. The Pertwee era is full of contradictions in its approach to storytelling, flipping back and forth between approaches within the same scene from time to time. It's not as straightforward as some other eras of the show. Still, it's great fun to watch and it's easy to see why he's many a fan's favorite Doctor.

[Gareth Jones · Rating 1 out of 5]

Devolved into pure repetition

The author freely admits to dislike of the era. A point of view which I largely share. But then largely repeats his argument of action/glam duality turgidly for essay after essay. Couple that with a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of Pertwee's pre who career, mistaking comedy for character and you've got a quite awful book.

[Kurt Criscione · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent again... despite the many moments in which i utterly disagree with Sandifer... still very readable. Now to wait for the Baker Book.

[James Gent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting readings of the Third Doctor's TV adventures, with plenty of added social context and the occasional esoteric tangents.

[Stephen Hartwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting look at the Pertwee era through the lens of early 70s culture.