Spearhead into the 70's

DOCTOR WHO - SPEARHEAD FROM SPACE (1970)

Autons attack!; their featureless facades a metaphor for characterless, mass-production. Fragments of the plastic-hungry Nestene Intelligence, the Autons brake out of a shop window and fire their wrist guns down a mundane British high street.

AFTER the optimism of the 1960's, Britain in the 1970's is most remembered for its economic disorder, power cuts, IRA bombings and riots. Post-war affluence was indeed fading, though David Bowie's dictum "one isn't totally what one has been conditioned to think one is" also illustrates a period of individualism and complexity. As late as 1971, women were banned from going into Wimpy Bars on their own after midnight on the grounds that the only females out on their own at that hour must be prostitutes; yet only eight years after that rule was lifted, Margaret Thatcher was in Downing Street. Despite all this eclectic nonsense, it was great decade to be a kid: hours pouring over Figurini Panini football stickers and STAR WARS bubble-gum cards, space hoppers, BAGPUSS, View-Masters and Cadbury Curly Wurly.

One of the highlights about growing up in the 70's was experiencing DOCTOR WHO's most vibrant era. Jon Pertwee's initial adventure - SPEARHEAD FROM SPACE - burst onto the screen in colour, arguably the first serial to go for the viewer's jugular. Even though Pertwee was known as a comedy actor, he portrayed the Time Lord as a technology-orientated man of action, who was also keen on "moments of charm." The serial would also signify the plagiarism to come (here, more than shades of Nigel Kneale's QUATERMASS II), but this four-parter did introduce the Autons and a new gritty feel; even UNIT, at the start of their long integration, had blood on one of their cracked windscreens. SPEARHEAD FROM SPACE begins with the TARDIS arriving on Earth in the middle of a meteorite shower, actually hollow globes containing the Nestene Consciousness. This disembodied alien has an affinity for synthetics, and agent Channing (Hugh Burden) has infiltrated the plastics factory to form mannequin-like replicas of establishment figures with the aim of colonisation.

Scientists-in-arms: Jon Pertwee and Caroline John.

The dawn of the 70's not only stifled a hopeful future, equality of the sexes was still a brooding issue. The self-titled Second Wave Feminists fought their corner in a Britain that was renowned for its CARRY ON view of women, and this anger spilled over at the 1970 Miss World contest at the Albert Hall. After compare Bob Hope fuelled the flames by making a number of crass comments ("I'm very happy to be here at this cattle market tonight"), he was bombarded with flour and stink bombs. Newsletters and publications such as Shrew, Spare Rib and Women's Report gathered a momentum of ideas, which developed the theoretical differences between socialistic feminism and the more radical format; as the decade developed, the liberation movement was addressing sexual stereotyping in education. 

With the Time Lord exiled on a near-contemporary Earth, DOCTOR WHO introduced a new female companion; but rather than the screaming, threatened norm, Liz Shaw (Caroline John) was a disciplined scientist and meteor specialist. Shaw could understand the Doctor more on a level footing, but producer Barry Letts decided that she was too intellectual to provide a dramatic balance. Lasting only a handful of serials, Shaw was either too far ahead of the time, or a character who writers struggled to fully relate to. Consequent feministic traits were very haphazard in 70's DOCTOR WHO: sassy, independent reporter Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) regressed to rescue fodder; leather-clad Leela (Louise Jameson)'s usual reflexes were to kill; and we had to wait for the first incarnation of Time Lady Romana (Mary Tamm) for the Doctor to have any scientific sparring partner again.

Twisted Tales

SUPERNATURAL (1977)
INSIDE NO. 9 (2014 - )

SUPERNATURAL based two of its episodes around creepy dummies. After the death of her mother, and her father's re-marriage, a young girl becomes obsessed by a doll in the Peter Sasdy-directed VIKTORIA.

SUPERNATURAL was a BBC anthology devised by Robert Muller, who wrote seven of the eight tales. Muller intended the show to rekindle the flavour of early horror cinema, subtle tales of fear based around The Club of the Damned. Each week, a prospective member will tell a true tale of terror; if successful, they will be given lifetime membership, if they fail, murder awaits. It is certainly a series of two halves, with the first four stories suffering from verbal diarrhoea and two excruciatingly loopy lead performances by Robert Hardy (as a haunted actor in GHOST OF VENICE) and Jeremy Brett (who falls under the spell of Lesley-Anne Down in MR NIGHTINGALE). Amazingly the series then opens up considerably: Denholm Elliott and John Osborne expertly play brothers living with their paranoid mother in LADY SYBILL, and NIGHT OF THE MARIONETTES has Gordon Jackson a biographer of Byron and Shelly. Unfortunately this momentum is lost with DORABELLA, a straightforward Gothic where two travellers are ensnared to provide a new vampire blood line. The exterior scenes breath some fresh air, even though it relies heavily on matte shots from Hammer's SCARS OF DRACULA.

Inexplicably broadcast on BBC1 in the summer - and scheduled to clash with BBC2's popular Horror Double Bills - SUPERNATURAL was shot on then industry-standard videotape, and suffers from visible ghosting (the muted colours of the gloomy castles and Victoriana add to its tired façade). Muller's intentions may well have been "to set the viewer's mind into action" with a set of archetypal examinations, but the series was not re-commissioned, despite strong supporting roles by Ian Hendry, Cathleen Nesbitt, Catherine Schell and Vladek Sheybal. The Club of the Damned is also disappointedly underdeveloped, with members displayed as stuffy armchair dwellers rather than bloodthirsty Turks all too eager to literally wield an axe.

Graham Humpreys' poster for THE HARROWING, the final episode of INSIDE NO. 9 series one. Here, a unsuspecting schoolgirl housesits a Gothic mansion, but is actually the centrepiece for a demonic transfer.

During the Radio 4 documentary HOUSES OF HORROR, the observation is made that the main difference between Hammer and Amicus is that Amicus's dour, modern settings were what is revealed after Hammer's large-bosomed damsels and mist-enveloped castles evaporate into your romantic mind's eye. One of its commentators, Reece Shearsmith, really takes this to heart for his INSIDE NO. 9 - co-written with Steve Pemberton - a series of stand-alone thirty minute dramas that feel like TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED melded to PLAY FOR TODAY. The twelve episodes so far have been noteworthy for their eloquently dark writing and almost cinematic staging, with stellar casts bringing to light every sickly twist and turn. The tone has also been refreshingly irrelevant; SARDINES, for example, sees Tim Key cast as a victim of paedophilia, exacting his revenge on his tormentor, family and associates while they are all locked in a wardrobe, while A QUIET NIGHT IN focusses on physical comedy. The highlight of the second series is THE 12 DAYS OF CHRISTINE, a tight-as-a-drum emotional journey of a young woman beautifully played by Sheridan Smith.

Creepy Compendium

DEAD OF NIGHT (1945)

The demonic silent film roles of Conrad Veidt were an inspiration for Michael Redgrave’s extraordinary performance in DEAD OF NIGHT.

PREYING masterfully on the country’s post-war fears and paranoia, Ealing’s portmanteau DEAD OF NIGHT - over sixty years later - still remains a resonant work of art. Representing a departure for the studio from the classic comedy mould, the film is a psychological thriller made up of five ghost stories, which brought such a disturbing aura of unease at the time of release, that several newspapers called for it to be suppressed. The work sets up a classic genre opposition between science and the supernatural, and makes it clear from the outset which side it is on. The character of Psychiatrist Dr van Straaten (Frederick Valk) is quickly isolated; his attempts to offer rational interpretations are dismissed - and pays for his scepticism with his life.

DEAD OF NIGHT is structured as a recurring nightmare, in which architect Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns) arrives at a strangely familiar country cottage. Unlike most horror compendiums, this framing story is embedded into the narrative, and is not just a device to link the tales. The first story recounts the presentiment of death offered to a racing driver (Anthony Baird), while the second touches on a young girl (Sally Anne Howes) who encounters a boy murdered several decades previously. The third has a couple (Googie Withers and Ralph Michael) whose cloying self-satisfaction is destroyed when she presents him with an ornate mirror, before the film takes an ill-advised detour into comic relief with the much maligned golfing segment. The film’s fifth episode is its most famous and disturbing, with Michael Redgrave as unbalanced ventriloquist Maxwell Frere, with John Maguire as his jeering alter ego Hugo Fitch. By the end of the story the ventriloquist is seen confined to a hospital bed, face alight with madness as the castrato tones of Hugo issue from his unmoving lips, a scene which anticipates the ending of PSYCHO.

Dreamlike poster art for Ealing’s only foray into horror.

The film as a whole can be seen as a response to the social dislocations caused by the end of the war, a confusion in masculine identity arising from difficulties in integrating a large part of the male population back into civilian life. On one level, DEAD OF NIGHT reveals a male fear of domesticity, which is here equated with the presence of strong, independent women who are seen to have usurped male authority. The film is full of weak, crippled, and/or victimised male characters: an injured racing driver, a boy murdered by his elder sister, a meek accountant dominated first by his fiancée and then by the influence of the haunted mirror, and a neurotic ventriloquist who eventually collapses into insanity. It is significant in this light that the character whose dream the film turns out to be is an architect, a symbolically charged profession at a time of national reconstruction. That this architect is indecisive, frightened, and harbouring murderous desires underlines the DEAD OF NIGHT’s lack of confidence in the future.

This can be connected with one of the characteristic themes of British World War II cinema, namely the formation of a cohesive group out of diverse social elements. Instead, this group is fragmented by the film's insistent stress on the ways in which each individual is trapped within his or her own perceptions. Repeatedly characters stare disbelievingly at the "impossible" events unfolding before them, and seeing is no longer believing. Therefore, the faith in an objective reality central to British wartime documentaries and which also contributed to the style adopted by many fiction films has been eroded in DEAD OF NIGHT. Dreams and fantasies have taken its place, to the extent that "None of us exist at all. We're nothing but characters in Mr Craig's dream."