I’ve been pondering a question while writing my review of ‘Spare Parts’ – one of a series of reviews I’m about to write about the Cybermen – what is it that makes monsters work? The more I thought about it, the more complicated the question became. Not least because monsters prey on our fears and concerns – some of which today would be viewed as ‘problematic’. The Daleks may arise out of their own ‘Dislike for the unlike’, but then so do many of our monsters – some, like the giant spiders are from our phobias, others from xenophobia and our fear of invasion by those unlike us. As monsters are based on our fears, I think these also change over time – not just with changing concerns in our world, but also as our own concerns and fears change through our own lives. What taps into your fears as a child, probably still lurks somewhere in the background of your adult psyche, but as you grow older, your fears change – other factors come into play – your sexuality in your teenage years or later concerns relating to parenthood and your children or later still ageing, disease, mortality or fears of losing your ‘self’ or just fear of loneliness. The monsters with longevity, I suspect change with you and are able to work for both adults and children.
The monsters of childhood are there to take you away from the protection of home or in some sad cases are in the home already – the father in the wardrobe of ‘Fear Her’, the toys coming alive in the closet of ‘Night Terrors’ or the monsters under the bed of ‘Girl in the Fireplace’ or ‘Listen’. But also, what attracts us to monsters as children is often I think the imagery and design – the Daleks, which are easy to draw or imitate or the Cybermen who are big, shiny, nasty robot men, marching en masse or any other array of monsters based on reptiles or insects or other familiar animal species. A repeated catchphrase might also be a factor – ‘exterminate’ or ‘delete’ (a late addition to the Cybermen is has to be said) or ‘don’t blink’, the aural equivalent of the vivid image.
I recently read a review of ‘Image of the Fendahl’ from an old DWM and the writer quoted some work by educationalist Cedric Cullingford on how children under 12 understand television, which he argues in the case of ‘Doctor Who’ is in the form of ‘a series of clear images’ in amongst the rather complex plot details. The children remembered what the Doctor looked like, the TARDIS and K9 and that the Doctor ‘fights monsters’. The thing that the children remembered from the actual episode was basically the image of the skull glowing and something happening to Thea – the plot specifics and details were completely lost – ‘about a skeleton. Skull changed into a woman’s head and back again’ was the most coherent of the memories. That this is also one of the final images of the story is significant – the cliffhanger and taps in to something the odious Mary Whitehouse complained about ‘Deadly Assassin’ – the fact that children were left with that image of the Doctor drowning. Those images are exactly the way that I remember ‘Doctor Who’ certainly from my early years (3-7) – the images of giant maggots, the spider on Sarah’s back, the Doctor and Brigadier driving a jeep underneath a Brontosaurus, a Dalek on fire and the Sea Devils rising from the sea. All striking images, I don’t remember much in the way of plot specifics from those early years, although I would argue that I did understand more of the plot a fair bit earlier than aged 12, but those early vivid images have stayed with me my whole life.
The monsters of adulthood are slightly different I think, more psychological in nature – there to take your children away or prey on the elderly or anything that renders you powerless – the state bureaucracy, work, disease or the common nightmare of being buried alive or being trapped in your own body. This is also I think the age at which body horror impacts you more. I grew up watching a period of the show that revelled in this – the Wirrrn, Krynoids, Zygon or android replicas, animated cadavers, brains in a jar (or on the floor!), genetic experimentation and numerous ghoulish villains afflicted with disfigurement of some kind (the Master, Greel or Davros). None of which scared me at all as a child, to my mind the ideas behind these stories are far more frightening as adults. They tap into largely adult concerns of what is happening to our bodies of disease and mortality. As a child I might have thought, ‘oh, that’s nasty’, when Winlett or Keeler are transformed horribly into a Krynoid, but the actual fear of it doesn’t arise out of a genuine concern as a child, as an adult the thought is horrific and parallels our own fears of what is happening in our own lives. I’m unlucky enough to have seen what cancer has done to people I know and love, seen what kind of transformation can occur in a relatively short period of time and what the end game looks like. That has to change your way of thinking – I can’t be alone in that surely? Likewise, the loss of self that you see when someone you love has dementia, I feel so sorry for anyone who has had to go through that, I’ve seen it, but more from a distance than up close, but to lose the core of you – your memories and personality, even intermittently is a hugely scary thought. These are adult concerns, possibly less so if you are in your 20’s and 30’s and you are lucky enough not to have witnessed this first hand, but the older you get, unfortunately encountering something like these situations is almost inevitable – I envy anyone who hasn’t.
Regardless of age, we all have our own sets of fears and demons. And sometimes these go deep into our unconscious and to some disturbing and unsettling places. Some relating to sexuality. Some relating to our own prejudices. How many monsters, particularly represent the ‘other’ or the ‘unlike’ – foreign vampires from the east coming to attack virginal young English women, monsters based on physical deformity, all of those invading aliens that represented communism in US Sci-fi in the 1950’s. If we look too closely into the most famous monsters in our culture, well we see things that we really might find unpalatable. Maybe that is why we have seen a move away from the monster in the show (Daleks, Cybermen and Weeping Angels aside)? The aliens in more recent series have been closer to those of the Pertwee era than Troughton or Hinchliffe/Holmes – more capable of moral ambiguity, rather than straight evil. The Zygons especially in Peter Harness’s storyline with parallels to the real-life backdrop to that year – asylum seekers/migrants and radicalisation and the Ice Warriors or Silurians where they are neither good nor evil. Or alternatively we have the whole malfunctioning tech angle of ‘The Empty Child’ or ‘Mummy on the Orient Express’ – where no one is to blame. Maybe, it is just easier and avoids going into potentially problematic areas in these more sensitive times. ‘Doctor Who’ for me though is fundamentally about the Doctor versus the monsters – those are the stories that I grew up with, the ones I read as Target books, what attracted me as a child to the show. You might think differently to me, but it feels to me that however modern and clever and nuanced you might want the show to be, the Doctor is someone who fights the monsters and that is still useful in these polarised times – someone who is decent, with a moral compass who stands up to evil.
Maybe the most successful, long-running monsters in our culture are those which stay with us from childhood through to adulthood, because they are complex enough to prey on adult fears and yet still designed to appeal to children? And I think that certainly applies to the show’s two main monsters – the Daleks and the Cybermen. With the Daleks, they have I think three elements that make them successful. The design, which is beautiful – a genuine 60’s design classic from a very talented designer in Ray Cusick and is crucially easy for children to draw and imitate. Then there’s the voice which is incredible – if you listen to a lot of audio, you will realise just how powerful that voice is on its own – the Daleks work perfectly well without being able to see them – something which indicates to me that the visual design is far from being everything.
And then there’s the writing. Now Terry Nation (and to a lesser degree Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis) come in for a lot of stick in these parts as ‘hack’ writers. I would argue the opposite – anyone out there who feels that they could do what they did – have a go. Go on, try to come up with a monster or any creation for that matter, which will last over 50 years and entrance generations of children and adults. How many of them are there in our culture? List them – Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, zombies, werewolves, the mummy, variations on demons, ghosts and monstrous reptiles or chimera? Apart from that Wells’s Martian travel machines, the Triffids, the alien? I’m running out. From TV? Well I struggle here, Star Trek doesn’t really seem to have monsters as such – the Klingons to me seem fairly third-rate, the Borg – well they are just a re-badged Cyberman aren’t they? But then I’m not really a fan and I might be doing them an injustice. However, the overwhelming majority of people growing up in the UK, will know what a Dalek is or a Cyberman, possibly even a Weeping Angel. It is as true now as it was in the 1960’s or when I grew up in the 1970’s. That is a massive achievement – to create a genuine long-lasting cultural icon to match those created in mythology or the Victorian gothic. And think about it – for all of the talented writers who have written or run the 21st century show and all of the effective design work and superior effects technology, what have they added to the list of top ‘Doctor Who’ monsters I would have written down in 1984? The Weeping Angels and possibly the Ood and that is about it, I’d really be stretching things to add the Slitheen or Silents. But still the Daleks and Cybermen are there at the top of the list looking a long way down.
I would argue that you could lift the Daleks and Cybermen out of the series and put them in say ‘Star Trek‘ or ‘Blake’s 7‘ and they would be just as effective. They even work perfectly well on their own – the Big Finish series ‘Dalek Empire/Dalek war’ and ‘Cyberman’ proved that to me. Sure, they need human protagonists as well, but they work well enough as a concept without the Doctor to define them. Why is that? Well because the writing and the definition of the concept is a vital element. If you compare say the robots of ‘The Masters of Luxor’ with ‘The Daleks’ – only one of those stories and protagonists gets you to 55 years and counting and it isn’t the Anthony Coburn script or ‘The Perfect One’. I suspect that many people in the general audience don’t necessarily know that or think about the fact that they are anything other than robots (likewise the Cybermen), but they are enhanced massively by knowing that inside the casing is a green blob of fascist hate, engineered to survive a nuclear war and genetically manipulated to not only survive, but believe they are the ultimate species in the universe and should destroy everything else until they are the sole survivors. Of course it taps into the zeitgeist of World War II and fascism, eugenics and the ‘master race’, how could it not – the creatives in involved in bringing the Daleks to life where all growing up during the war. In that respect, they are at least as much of the 30’s and 40’s as the 60’s, the cold war and threat of nuclear war.
As an adult, I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent in the company of the Daleks, an awful lot if I take into account the hours of output on audio – as we speak I’m listening to a rather fine Dalek audio ‘The Dalek Occupation of Winter’ a first Doctor story with Steven and Vicki. They still work perfectly well for me all those years since (46!) since I first saw ‘Planet of the Daleks’. The body horror aspect of them isn’t generally played too high in the mix. We have Stengos inside the glass Dalek in ‘Revelation’, the human/Dalek Hybrid of ‘Evolution of the Daleks’, the recent use of the mutant outside of its case and controlling relationship with a host in ‘Resolution; and of course Davros himself. In some ways though, the most effective use of this with the Daleks was on audio in BF’s ‘Dalek Empire’. In one of the series we hear a young, bright, woman slowly being converted into a Dalek – we are privy to her thoughts as she slowly transforms – it is truly horrific and genuinely disturbing.
With the Cybermen, they have always been below the Daleks and I think always will be, it’s built into them. They are built for survival, not to be the supreme being – they believe they are superior through their strength and logic, but they haven’t been programmed to specifically hate everything else in the universe – they have just had their emotions removed to survive the conversion process. However, I find that at least in their original conception they resonate far more with me than the Daleks. As we will see with ‘Spare Parts’ or ‘World Enough of Time’ their creation is a tragedy – worlds that have slipped slowly into a nightmare. A step that a desperate population takes almost without thinking, just in order to survive. A population sleep walking into horror and de-humanisation. That feels to me all too plausible, my parents and grandparents and a generation of ‘Doctor Who’ writers all saw the effects of Germany falling slowly into such horror. In my lifetime a country that I visited in the early 90’s Yugoslavia, which seemed perfectly ‘normal’, slowly fell into genocide. The same applies in Syria or any number of places – societies that slide imperceptibly into increasingly horrific acts perpetrated on the general population, but also perpetrated by members of that population. Mondas or Telos or Planet 14 or the colony ship – all fall that way, into tragedy.
They are a product of the concerns of the 1960’s, but spare part surgery and Cybernetics as a concept are only likely to become more relevant to the population. Through stem cell research and cloning, we have moral choices to make – growing replacement organs on ‘donor’ animals for example. Whilst in the realms of technology, right now, we have devices that we cart around with us – hand held, blue tooth ear pieces, on our wrists and not least medical prosthetics of the kind envisaged by Pedler. How long before these devices start to become implanted instead or designed as extensions of our own bodies? How long before robotics, AI, cybernetics and even genetic manipulation start to become the norm and even a part of us? We are in 2019 – the year of ‘Blade Runner’, but we still have a way to go. The nightmare future foreseen by amongst others, Kit Pedler, Gerry Davis and Terry Nation has only been delayed I’m afraid and our societies will have to draw their own lines in the future about what is morally acceptable. The Cybermen represent the crossing of those lines. We have two aspects of these technological developments depicted in the Cybermen – the gleaming chrome and steel, conceived in the ‘White Heat’ of Wilson’s 1960’s technological revolution – basically what we see from ‘Moonbase’ onwards. And then the earlier version, the one that feels born out of austerity, this is accidental rather than by design – making a virtue out of the budget limitations of the show, but it also works brilliantly in retrospect – more 1950’s in feel, made with an earlier technology more bakelite than chrome – conceived on a world falling apart – an impoverished world closer in feel to blitz-torn Britain of the 1940’s or the dark post-war days of austerity and rationing. The world of ‘Spare Parts’.
A Journal of Impossible Things 