051 – Spearhead From Space

Meredith Burdett is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

I know what you’re thinking as soon as you start to read this, ‘what can possibly be said about Spearhead from Space that hasn’t already been said before?’ In many ways, you’re right; this is the Doctor Who story that has had so much attention since its original airing in January 1970.  It’s been released twice on VHS and DVD in England alone, then again on Blu-ray, and it formed part of the short lived Doctor Who reruns that started after Doctor Who Night in 1999.

It’s been dissected, discussed, praised, and critiqued by every Doctor Who fan and reviewer all over the world. It’s got so many firsts in Doctor Who history both in front and behind the camera that to list and discuss them all in this retrospective would take up most of the word count, but, one would imagine as you read this, you probably know all that anyway.

So what I wanted to talk about, in celebration of this amazing, wonderful, terrifying and unforgettable adventure, was the one thing that stuck with me from the very first time I watched it when I was a young lad; the fear… or rather, the fear of one man.

Stay with me on this one, I promise you that there’s good reason for this.

Doctor Who before Spearhead from Space, and in stories after it as well, always had to use fear in the correct context. This was a children’s show that quickly turned into a family adventure but never into an adults-only show. Over the top screaming and reaction shots aside, Doctor Who had always played it safe so that the kids watching could have a scare, possibly a bad dream or two but could always remember Doctor Who as an adventure rather than a never-ending nightmare. Of course, in the mid 1980s during the Colin Baker years the show came under heavy scrutiny for violence that was unacceptable but watching it now, you can see that that was partly due to inner BBC politics and not because the show was suddenly showing us graphic Saw-like deaths on Saturday teatime.

But what Robert Holmes and the production team on Doctor Who did with Spearhead from Space was something very clever indeed. They took a very, very simple and realistic scenario and turned it into something so horrible, so dark and so cruel that it stayed with me up until this very day. Maybe this essay is a way of ridding me of my Doctor Who demons but in many ways, I don’t want to ever forget that particular scene that scared me to death when I first watch Spearhead from Space on a lazy Saturday in the early 1990s.

Just to set the scene for you, I was told by my mother that, as my dad was out for the day, I would have to come with her to Twickenham High Street for a few hours whilst she did some shopping. If I was good, I could have a treat for the afternoon. Not sweets (I weighed a few more pounds then I should have when I was young) and not comics (I had too many). So I walked briskly and obediently along with my mother as she priced up odds and ends that she needed to get for the house to render it looking pleasant for future guests when they came around (this meant nothing to me whatsoever). I thought of what treat would best indulge my boring Saturday expedition to make all the walking worth it. And then I saw Blockbuster Video. This palace of wonders (that finally closed a few months back, sadly) held one of the largest resources of Doctor Who videos as I had discovered some weeks previously and so, after some quick negotiation (‘Mum can I rent 4 Doctor Who videos please?’ ‘No, you can rent 2.’ ‘Ok, fine’) I had The Curse of Fenric and Spearhead from Space on shiny VHS, clutched close to my chest and ready to watch when I got home. The rest of that shopping trip was a dream, I tell you, as I kept imagining in my head what each story would offer me.

Caroline John instantly has the Doctor intrigued; she’s clever, forthright, clearly doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and that just spurs the Doctor on. You can see as soon as he sets eyes on her, that this new incarnation of the Doctor is out to impress Miss Shaw.

Skip forward some few hours later and we get to the real meat of the story. I’m watching Spearhead from Space and I’m suitably terrified. The Autons have, after 30 minutes, taken their place for me as the scariest and most insidious Doctor Who monster ever (I didn’t know the word insidious at that age – I’m embellishing for you) and Channing’s cold and vaguely sweaty demeanour has me intrigued and unsettled. I’m also having an incredible amount of fun watching the whole adventure unfold as the Third Doctor starts his life with a big dose of trouble.

There’s so many other joys to this story as well: the Brigadier finally become a regular character that properly starts Nicholas Courtney’s incredible journey that left so many of us missing him since 2011. Caroline John instantly has the Doctor intrigued; she’s clever, forthright, clearly doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and that just spurs the Doctor on. You can see as soon as he sets eyes on her, that this new incarnation of the Doctor is out to impress Miss Shaw. The use of colour brings Doctor Who into a shiny new decade and the production team wastes no time in making use of the new format: the woods, the hospital, the horrible close-ups of Channing in full, bloody colour are all to be marvelled at.

But that’s not what sticks with me for so many decades; admittedly I still give a suspicious glare to shop window dummies, especially when I’m walking through Ealing High Street, but what really got to me was the build up and the death of poor old John Ransome played by the excellent Derek Smee.

You see, Ransome was an everyday chap like you or me. He worked hard, got paid and presumably had a nice little life outside of work, although sadly now, we’ll never know. But when he comes back from a business trip that has gone markedly well, he’s fired with no proper explanation. Finding himself at a loose end and understandably upset and confused, he heads over to his old workplace to confront his former boss, and it would seem from their conversation friend as well, George Hibbert. After having it out with his boss and having no success in terms of reemployment or explanations, poor old Ransome leaves a dejected man. His office has been changed, the work staff is new and he still is just as much in the dark as when he arrived.

So he decides to sneak back into the factory later and find out what’s going on. This proves the undoing of the man and leads to what I feel is one of the most terrifying and horrific scenes in Doctor Who. No, it’s not Ransome being chased by the Auton through the factory (although that terrified me as well) but the scenes afterwards, when he’s safely back with UNIT.

Fans from the UNIT of the Second Doctor era will remember that once the Doctor and his friends escaped the menaces they were facing and got back to UNIT HQ, they would have a short reprieve to relax. A bit of banter and a cup of tea before facing the menace again, usually. But in Spearhead from Space, Ransome has been through a life changing experience; he’s been running for his life through the woods, blind fear and panic causing his instincts to kick in and get as far away from his former place of employment as possible. Eventually, after what must have seemed an eternity, he’s found by UNIT troops and taken to a nearby encampment set up in the woods. Once there, he’s offered security, pleasant words and a cup of tea. All is better.

Except it’s not.

This is a new era for Doctor Who and anything can happen, and anything does. A cup of tea is offered to Ransome but the man is in too much shock to drink – the fear in his eyes, the shaking body, this is a broken man. He’s offered a sip of tea from a soldier, and the tea simply dribbles from his mouth, he can’t even drink it. The fear that’s clouding his very being has stopped him from taking a break from the alien menace of the week because for Ransome, there is no break, no stopping for a laugh and a giggle. He’s seen things that he never wanted to see, felt terror that he never thought he would feel and that tea, neatly dribbling from his mouth as he shakes and holds himself with his arms in some vague attempt to comfort his soul, chilled me to my very core. Gone were the free and easy days of alien menaces, Doctor Who had literally and metaphorically arrived on Earth with a loud bang and had caused the monsters to up their game in terms of how they were going to terrify human beings.

The fact that after that ordeal, Ransome is then hunted down and despite the fact that he’s in the safe and warm embrace of UNIT, is killed in the most horrible way possible, was a further ordeal to watch. He never found out why his life changed so dramatically, he never found out what it was that was chasing him and he never got to be saved by the Doctor. It’s one of the saddest and most terrifying character stories ever to have been shown in Doctor Who’s 50 year history.

Many years later, Russell T Davies would so something similar with his character Clive in 2005’s Rose: the man had all these ideas but before he could find out anything, he was shot by an Auton in a shopping centre in front of his wife and child. It’s a fitting testament to the longevity, terrific writing, acting, and direction that went into making Spearhead from Space so different and so brilliant to any Doctor Who story that that come before it or would follow afterwards.

Let’s hope that when the day comes (and let’s also hope that’s not for a while) and Peter Capaldi and Steven Moffat decide to move on from Doctor Who, that the production team and the new fella who plays the Doctor manage to get the changes as fantastic as Jon Pertwee, Derrick Sherwin, Derek Martinus, Robert Holmes and Terrance Dicks managed to.

Oh, and of course Derek Smee, the wonderful and talented actor that’s been scaring me for almost 30 years.

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