059 The Daemons

Steven B 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.

In one sentence: the Doctor and UNIT must stop the Master, who plans on summoning the Devil by the means of black magic in the crypt under the church of an English country village.

That’s it, right there; that’s the story.

Whereas, in life, actions tend to speak louder than words, in television – at least to the public consciousness – images remain far more powerful than the story they tell. And so, if you are telling – or rather, transmitting in the late spring/early summer of 1971 into the homes of millions of children, whose memory will prove unreliable, and their families, who are watching it almost in passing as they may Top of the Pops – a story that counts amongst its ingredients such powerful images as a much-loved Hero and all his friends, a Villain and some country folk with a dark communal secret, a white witch and Satan himself, all as set amidst the familiar tranquillity of a quaintly/sinisterly-named town, why would you expect anything less than a reputation that far exceeds the sum of its iconic parts?

Because, to be fair, and by which I mean to be distantly objective and even cruelly critical, The Dæmons isn’t the story that an older cousin of yours so hyperbolically told you it was. Neither is it the one you allowed yourself to conjure in your imagination when reading that one-paragraph summary in The Making of Doctor Who. In being less than what it should be, however, it proves itself to have transcended its form and becomes an example of what Doctor Who can be at its very best; a modern myth.

The Dæmons is a moment when British Television through Doctor Who unintentionally and again placed its own entry alongside fairy tales inherited via Victorian literature or more ancient oral traditions. Consequently, our favourite show can be seen to rightfully stand alongside any other immortal form of stories to entrance and frighten children. This is the real strength of The Dæmons; that it is an absolutely compelling piece of television, despite and/or because of its hotchpotch plot.

Let’s look, as ever, at some of the serial’s elements. The Doctor, as the central character, is as imperious as he ever has been in his third incarnation. Despite Pertwee’s harshness towards his friends, most notably Jo – whom he reproaches for speaking ill of the Brigadier on account of his default setting of ‘blow it up’, despite doing exactly the same thing himself both here and elsewhere – he is believably and typically positioned as the spokesperson for science in a story steeped in superstition.

In the Doctor’s interactions with Miss Hawthorne, the white witch of Devil’s End played so expertly by Damaris Hayman (and whose character is perhaps named after the central antagonist of the Salem witch trials?), Doctor Who again enters the reason-versus-religion argument.  Interestingly, it here treats the debate with suitable ambiguity, which is actually something that we will later come to expect of end-of-season scripts by Robert Sloman and Barry Letts.

Turning up as a Devil-worshipping vicar who talks backwards and is basically Aliester Crowley, the Master in turn leads a village of pagans who have abandoned Christianity, is very 1973’s The Wicker Man (so The Dæmons did it first – ha!)

The scene in the wonderfully-named Cloven Hoof pub in which Miss Hawthorne and the Doctor discuss what exactly bashed Benton up is perhaps the best example of how this ambivalence is presented. On the one hand, Miss Hawthorne insists that Benton was attacked by supernatural forces of the occult, while the Doctor immediately counters that it was nothing more than a psionic forcefield.  We’re presented with a epistemological deadlock: “Science”, the Doctor insists; “Magic!” Miss Hawthorne retorts.

So which one is it? Well, that all rather depends on where you’re standing. If you’re starting point is that of an unearthly lord of time, you might too easily call to mind everything that is to be known about the physical laws of the universe and insist that you are correct. To Sloman and Letts’ credit, the character of Miss Hawthorne’s, however, doesn’t represent a standpoint that might be expected of a stereotypical country yokel (and to hers, Damaris Hayman’s performance makes that clear).

Instead, Miss Hawthorne’s viewpoint suggests that if it quacks like a duck, it’s entirely fair to say that it is, indeed, a duck, even if the Doctor may otherwise call it an anas platyrhynchos. In essence, her perspective is at the other end of the Doctor’s stance in the debate between magic and science as provided by Clarke’s oft-quoted law, whereby, essentially, the highest science is indistinguishable from what may otherwise be mistaken as magic, particularly to the untrained or inexperienced mind.

Surprisingly maturely, a television show for kids doesn’t reduce the science versus magic debate to a right/wrong binary, but calls into question not just the terms of the argument but the audience’s own preconceptions – it’s strong stuff, and it’s good stuff, and it’s stuff we will come to expect of the Sloman/Letts partnership, though here operating under the nom de plume of Guy Leopold, that will serve up the season finale for the rest of the Pertwee era. It invites the viewer to actively question and participate in the debate, rather than to blindly accept that science is right because it’s, well, science, and that’s that – because then you’re just replacing one form of historically lazy, unthinking doctrinal suspension of criticality for another (insofar as the lazy mind only need to point to science as the only justification required as opposed to the scientific method of enquiry, at least).

Another strong element in the success of The Dæmons is what has come to be known as ‘the UNIT family’, incorporating the Brigadier, Jo Grant, Captain Yates, Sergeant Benton, and, of course, the Master, all alongside the Doctor. Yates and Benton play an important role in driving the narrative, albeit at the Doctor’s instructions, as they are stuck on the inside of the heat barrier that blocks Devil’s End from the rest of the world. Fashion choices aside – it was the ‘70s, after all – it’s just, well, so nice to see these two lesser lights being given more of a part to play alongside the larger-than-life Doctor as played by Pertwee, even in so far as arriving via an actual, real helicopter. (I wonder what Jon Pertwee had to say about that!)

With the Brigadier unable to get into the village until later on in the serial, there’s a clever narrative trick that keeps him and the rest of the UNIT crew part of the action by getting the put-upon irregular, Sergeant Osgood (related in many people’s head-canon to the Osgood we see during the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors’ reigns) to build the Doctor’s impressively technobabble-y named EHF wideband width-variable phase oscillator. We satisfyingly get the band together again later on when UNIT roll in to Devil’s End with enough time for Nicholas Courtney to deliver the line of his life in the face of an advancing gargoyle, before they are able to apprehend the Master, who is led away to the sound of children cheering. Job done, then. The touch of the May pole dancers on the village green as the adventure ends is another little flourish that adds to the memory banks, and the overall impression is of a good day out for the whole family.

Of the Master, Roger Delgado is brilliantly villainous, as ever. Turning up as a Devil-worshipping vicar who talks backwards and is basically Aliester Crowley, and who in turn leads a village of pagans who have abandoned Christianity, is very 1973’s The Wicker Man (so The Dæmons did it first – ha!), while the image of the Devil appearing in a village is obviously drawn from Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit.

Then, of course, there’s the fact that we get the see the face of the very Devil himself – and it isn’t the Master that we’re metaphorically talking about in this instance, but the actual, real, literal Devil. Azal, the Dæmon, is the physical embodiment of everything associated with the Devil. Fanged teeth protrude from a grotesque, inhuman face that is crowned with a set of horns. His body is a demonic mix of man and goat, and he has the capacity to shift his form, in this case from little to large and back again (and back again, and…). As a member of the Dæmon race from the planet Dæmos, though, he clearly isn’t the Devil, and is instead a scientist who – rather faux-biblically – has arisen to judge his creation. (But, if it looks like a half-man, half-goat… which again calls to mind the Doctor’s and Miss Hawthorne’s difference in discourse concerning magic and science.)

In being less than what it should be, however, it proves itself to have transcended its form and becomes an example of what Doctor Who can be at its very best; a modern myth.

Having been responsible for pushing man along evolutionarily, and having also been responsible for scientific advances up to and including, according to the Doctor, even the Industrial Age, Azal will now disinterestedly hold the power of life or death over humanity and the entire planet. It reads very much like an alien conspiracy on some levels, which were popular at the time, as well as being couched in amidst an Armageddon-esque narrative that persists in common story concerns up to and including the present day, and so the idea alone is obviously powerful enough to be worth doing in Doctor Who.

In many ways, The Dæmons foreshadows the Gothic elements of the early Tom Baker years under Philip Hinchcliffe, with such recognisable elements as the virginal maiden (Jo), the old woman (Miss Hawthorne), the stupid servant (Garvin the Verger), a faceless, easily-led mob (the villagers), an evil member of the clergy (Mr Magister, aka the Master), and the rational outsider Hero (the Doctor, of course), all set amongst and around the crypt of the local church where terrible things are happening in secret, before the whole place is memorably blown up. Back to The Making of Doctor Who for a moment, just to say that this ‘realistic’ special effect – it was the ‘70s, after all – has long-since entered legend for causing letters of complaint to be written in to the BBC from the public at the destruction of a centuries-old church all for the sake of a television show. Reviewing it now, I suppose all that we can say is that they were simpler times back then, I suppose.

And maybe that’s why The Dæmons persists in our memory. We know that it doesn’t quite add up, and that once the Master summons the Devil there is nothing left for the story to do other than wait for the Doctor to put him back in his bottle. Instead, we get some padded fluff and set pieces that make up for some evocative, extended, external filming interspersed with images of the Master in a dark, red-lit cavern doing Very Evil Things. The truth is, though, put on the telly when we’re all sat around together, and I think that most people might be inclined to not turn it over to the other side.

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