Spearhead from Space

A notable story for the introduction of the Autons, one of the Doctor Who’s most famous monsters, as well as for the fact that it was entirely recorded on location, with no video interiors within the confines of the television studio, as a result of strikes at the BBC (it’s also presumably the reason why we never see a TARDIS interior, because they wouldn’t have had access to the sets). As the sleeve-notes to the DVD correctly note this gives the story a unique feel in the series’ history. The use of location filming and real locations grounds it in a far more real world. What really interests me is the elements that make up the reality depicted in this story.

I seem to remember years ago reading in SFX magazine that the ‘comedy yokel’ was something of a staple of the Jon Pertwee era of the show. In the first moments of this story we’re introduced to just such a figure, a character, a poacher, who seems straight out of an English rural novel, or the popular stereotype of D.H. Lawrence as meteorites crash in Epsom, shortly followed by the TARDIS, looking incongruous surround by the forest. As someone who was born in 1979, I find myself wondering how representative this character could have been of life in 1970. Really, I have no way of knowing, although I doubt such characters as a poacher and his wife would ever have been able to afford such a prosperous looking cottage, and I feel fairly confident in suggesting that rural life in 1970 probably did have greater continuity with the world described by someone like Lawrence than to what you could find in our own time. It still feels like a cultural stereotype though, a pastiche of an older reality, although there’s still a moment in a later episode where the wife of our rural stereotype faces off against one of the Autons with her husband’s shotgun where the look of panic on her face has the sense of something real.

For those that care about such things, the dating of the UNIT stories is famously screwed up. It’s not actually mentioned in this particular story, but at some point it was decided that they should be set in 1980. Only when a retired Brigadier reappeared in a Peter Davison story in the mid 80s, the dates given would seem to place the stories in the 1970s contemporary with when they were made. It’s rather sweet the way some fans have apparently come up with theories to account for such discrepancies in-story. Personally I’m in agreement with those who have started to argue for multiplicity when dealing with these science fiction universes. The history of something like Doctor Who now stretches across such an array of stories in a variety of different media that constructing a coherent narrative is surely impossible.

Presumably for reasons of budget there was never any effort to ‘place’ the stories in an imagined future of ten years hence in terms of what we see of fashions and such like, so it makes far more sense to see them as set in the 1970s. At one point General Scobie vioces his assumption about the advantages of a fully automated factory, “robots can’t go on strike I suppose”, referencing both the reason for the story’s being on film and locating it clearly in its contemporary reality. A fear of 'plastic people' with its associations of conformity and dehumanisation feels peculiarly late 60s (Plastic People  was the title of a song by Frank Zappa and The Kinks sang about a Plastic Man). Placing the Autons in what would have been the audience's present is surely part of their effectiveness as monsters, locating horror within the everyday as shop dummies come to stumbling life. UNIT themselves though seem to belong in an earlier time than the 70s. You could easily see them as plucky Brits in some random film of World War II that turns up on a Sunday afternoon or Bank Holiday. This element of the past is further emphasised in the first couple of episodes by the strange hospital which appears to be a retrofitted country house, the sort of location that mentally belongs in World War II or even the previous War and their immediate aftermath.

And then there’s the Doctor himself of course, outfitted as an Edwardian Dandy, and borrowing a car that even in 1970 must have seemed antique, as well as the many science fiction elements. The whole narrative becomes a patchwork, or bricolage of these disparate time periods, which is surely appropriate in a series about a time traveller, even if the Doctor has been exiled to a particular time and place. Although there is still the eventual uncertainty of precisely when it is he’s been exiled too... But that is information which can only be supplied from without the story's frame. From outside the story we bring our own assumptions about the time and the reality in which the story is located. So that, watched here and now, in the present of 2011, the plastic special effects, swirly graphics, Radiophonic Workshop music, which were once intended to evoke the 'future', now seem to be inescapably tinged with nostalgia, a part of the viewer's past.