The Highlanders

Chapter the 259th, features the young pretender (in his second appearance as the Doctor).

Plot:

The Doctor, Ben and Polly arrive in the aftermath of the battle of Culloden in Scotland 1746. They meet the local Laird and members of his clan, including a piper called Jamie McCrimmon. The Laird is ill and the Highlanders believe the Doctor can help him. Polly goes off to fetch water with the Laird's daughter Kirsty, and while they are gone everyone else is arrested by the Redcoats. A solicitor called Grey saves them all from the noose. Grey, with his clerk Perkins, is involved in some dodgy dealings, and takes the Doctor, Ben, Jamie and the Laird to become slaves and be transported off to work the plantations. The Doctor bamboozles everyone with many ruses and disguises, and manages to escape. The others are held near port, in a ship stolen from a Scot and captained by the piratical Captain Trask ("Arrr!"). Meanwhile, Polly and Kirsty get the better of an effete Redcoat Lieutenant Algernon Ffinch, and use him to track down their friends. Reunited with the Doctor, they buy up weapons using money stolen from Ffinch, and row out to help the others. Trask is killed in their uprising, and the Highlanders sail out towards the safety of France, leaving the time travellers at the docks with Jamie who has stayed behind to show them back to the TARDIS. When they reach there, they are almost recaptured by Grey, but Ffinch turns up and arrests him. Jamie decides to travel with the others in time and space.

Context:

Over a few days in early March 2023, I watched an online reconstruction of the four episodes which used off-screen images, surviving clips and the full soundtracks (taped off the telly by fans in the 1960s) to recreate as closely as possible these now lost episodes. This version also had the explanatory narration by Frazer Hines taken from the official BBC CD audio release, so the website hosting it was definitely breaching some copyright regulations. Thus, here is where I state that I have in the past fully supported the official releases, purchasing The Highlanders audio and surviving clips in the formats on which they have been made available for sale (more details in the First Time Round section below), and would buy them again if they came out with or without animation on a Blu-ray.

First Time Round:

The first time I would have seen any material from The Highlanders would have been in November 1998. The big Doctor Who VHS release in advance of Christmas that year was The Ice Warriors; this came with official reconstructions much like the ones I watched this time of The Highlanders (see Context section above) of its missing two middle episodes. Additionally, it had an extra tape with a documentary about missing episodes in general. This featured a lot of excerpts from otherwise long-gone visuals including recently found material that had been excised from Doctor Who episodes by Australian censors. Archiving vicissitudes had meant that the bits not felt suitable for broadcast had ended up being retained, the rest thrown away. So, there were a couple of clips on that VHS from The Highlanders showing brief shots of a stabbing and a hanging. Nonetheless, it was exciting to see any glimpse of an otherwise lost story, however brutal or short. The audio of all four episodes with that explanatory linking commentary came out a couple of years later, and I snapped that up too.

Reaction:

The Highlanders was Patrick Troughton's second story after he took on the role, and the final regular Doctor Who historical (i.e. a trip into history for its own sake, not as the backdrop for a science fantasy tale). To an extent, it's a try-out in the same way as his first story: how is this new Doctor going to comport himself within a historical context, now we've seen him ace the previous sci-fi one? However well he did, though, it would turn out that there weren't going to be any further stories of this kind; as such, it's a bit of a curio. Troughton's Doctor lands in only two further historical settings in his tenure, and both of them could really be anywhere / anytime as the history is not essential to the story being told. If this was going to be the last, it's at least a fun, engaging story to go out on, and Troughton does indeed perform well. He's not calmed down to become the Doctor he would be later, but the story gives ample scope for some of the wild antics that were intrinsic to his earliest days: there's lots of disguises and putting on funny voices, trying on of different hats and causing mayhem. The scene where - pretending to be a German Doctor with an outrageous accent - he bangs the clerk Perkins's head repeated on a table only to then enquire whether he suffers from headaches reaches remarkable heights of anarchic comedy. It's not something one could ever imagine William Hartnell doing, which is maybe the point. Troughton (like the second Doctor) has less and less to prove as his stories continue, hence why the play-acting and slapstick lessens.

The story doesn't make any attempt at realism or examination of the period. Bonnie Prince Charlie is mentioned a few times (the reward for his capture becomes a plot point as the Doctor uses it to bamboozle his enemies occasionally), but he never appears. The story seems to have been commissioned more as a literary pastiche than an exploration of history. As The Smugglers a couple of stories back displayed the influences of Stevenson's Treasure Island, this story seems to have taken a little from another of his works, Kidnapped. It hones the formula; like The Smugglers it is populated with a colourful collection of rogues, but they seem a more diverse and rounded selection than in the earlier story. Each, though, is unified in one purpose - to make money. An abiding theme of the piece is how every non-Highlander character is motivated purely by avarice. It's not exactly uncommon for this to be a motivator for Doctor Who villains, but it is rare to see it done so comprehensively, with every lowly Redcoat featured having their hand out expecting corrupt remuneration at some point. The Highlander characters meanwhile are concerned only for their own survival. As such, it doesn't make any sense at all for Jamie at the end to forego the safety of a journey to France so he can instead help the Doctor, Ben and Polly find where they parked. This, of course, only happens to allow Frazer Hines to join the TARDIS crew.

Note that I worded it above that Frazer Hines had joined the TARDIS crew, rather than Jamie. The most significant long-term contribution of this story is a new addition to the regular cast, but there's nothing much in the action that makes Jamie stand out. He's personable, but has hardly anything to do in the narrative. It seems very likely that the decision to keep him on had more to do with the actor's behind the scenes working relationship with Patrick Troughton (they'd worked together before The Highlanders), and maybe a smidge to do with him looking pretty on camera perhaps, than anything in the character of Jamie. It was ultimately the best decision for the show, but it means there's too many people in the time machine; this leaves less for Ben and Polly to do, and ultimately would lead to them leaving the series. This is a great shame, as The Highlanders is one of the best stories for the pair of them. Sailor Ben gets to be aboard ship again, and do a Houdini-style escape; Polly is resourceful and ruthless, besting poor Algernon Ffinch at every turn, and in a flirtatious manner to boot. The actors Anneke Wills and Michael Craze have lots of fun with the material. Beyond that, there's a couple of good fight scenes (as well as one can tell from the audio, anyway) and some nice bits of comedy. It's not perfect: Polly and Ben's historical knowledge waxes and wanes depending on the plot point of the moment: Polly knows that France is a safe haven for the Highlanders when moments before she was surprised that the Redcoats and Highlanders couldn't get along as friends. But it's fun, and rattles along at a good pace without ever overstaying its welcome.

Connectivity:

Both The Highlanders and Timelash see the TARDIS travel back in time to the Scottish Highlands of yesteryear.

Deeper Thoughts:

A visit to Riverside Studios for Time and Riverside, 11th March 2023. When I started this viewing of The Highlanders, it was coincidentally 56 years to the day since the master video tapes of the story were wiped. It was the very first story to suffer this fate, on 9th March 1967, only a few weeks on from the story's debut BBC1 broadcast. The policies of the broadcaster that allowed this to happen are not easy to understand with the benefit of decades of hindsight. A couple of days later, it was time for looking back at the BBC's activities again, but this time more fondly. I had a ticket to a Doctor Who Appreciation Society event at Riverside in Hammersmith, an arts centre and cinema built on the site of the studios where all four parts of The Highlanders were shot (just four of something like 80 Doctor Who episodes that were created there - the original building having been demolished in 2014). The format of the day was for three individual episodes of Doctor Who from William Hartnell's tenure that were made at Riverside to be shown, each followed by a panel. Before all that, I arrived and met up with a number of the friends that I've been attending BFI events with for a good while, all of whom have been mentioned previously on the blog: David, Trevor, Alan, Chris and Scott. For the event, a full-size TARDIS police box replica had been erected in the building, near to the doors down to the cinema theatre where the episodes would be screened. All of us got our picture taken with that beauty. This was also the chance to say hi to a few familiar faces that attend these events regularly, and to chat to new people too.

Yours Truly pictured with TARDIS prop

The first episode shown was Flashpoint, the finale of The Daleks Invasion of Earth (my blog post for the whole story is here), and the ending with Susan leaving still packs an emotional punch, leaving me moist-eyed in Riverside. The prints being used to project the episodes were a bit of a surprise after recently seeing this (and all the episodes shown on the day) restored for the season 2 Blu-ray set; they appeared to be masters based on the original VHS releases. Seeing all that film dirt and video wobble brought about a nostalgia rush for this viewer at least. The panel afterwards featured Carole Ann Ford, who played Susan, Jessica Carney, the Doctor's other granddaughter (or rather William Hartnell's real life one), and a surprise guest Nick Evans, a Dalek operator in Flashpoint. Evans was hilarious, describing himself as "the oldest Dalek living in captivity" and covering some well-worn anecdotes like the queue of bursting Daleks on location waiting to relieve themselves down a grating. Although he was a bit frail, Evans didn't need as much help to get to his seat down the steep steps of the Riverside cinema theatre as did a cosplayer in an accurate Sensorite costume including full mask. That's commitment. Ford was her usual slightly reserved but professional self, answering questions she must have answered hundred of times before. Carney eloquently summarised the appeal of Doctor Who as mostly "nonsense" but occasionally true, and highlighted something I'd not consciously noticed: Hartnell fluffs when dealing with unreal situations, but is very rarely anything less than superb when he has material with emotional truth (not just his big speech to Susan at the end, but little moments like his reaction to Westminster bells sounding out over the desolate but now liberated London "Just the beginning, just the beginning...").

(L to R) Evans, Carney, Ford + Interviewer

The quality of any Doctor Who might be judged on its nonsense to truth ratio. Perhaps that was why a large number of the audience got up and left before the start of the next episode, The Centre (the final episode of The Web Planet). I found it relatively easy to sit through just 25 minutes of the story, but that's probably the maximum I can do in one go. The informative panel afterwards featured the director Richard Martin, and vision mixer Clive Doig. The 88-year old Martin had clearly decided not to even try to get down the steep steps, so talked with a microphone from the back seats about the challenges of making the story, sleepless nights before studio days spent planning with a bottle of whiskey. His memory was good but not perfect. At one point he said "We should have got a dancer in" to choreograph the action of the Menoptera characters; cue everybody in the audience inwardly screaming "But you did!! Her name was Roslyn de Winter and she was credited for supplying 'Insect Movement'". After the panel was a two-hour break for photos and autographs; I don't do either of those, but Doig was probably the only person there that Saturday for whom I might have broken that rule. Everything he's been involved with I've loved, from vision mixing many episodes of early Doctor Who to the children's programmes of the 1970s and 80s he produced like Vision On, Jigsaw and Eureka, and even the puzzle page he wrote for the Radio Times for many years. In the end, I decided it wasn't worth queueing as I didn't want a photo or signature, I just wanted to say thank you; hopefully some other fan did this for me on the day.

 

Doig (on left); Martin (not pictured) was sat in 'the gods' 

We spent the break looking for the pub nearby that's anecdotally noted as Riverside Studio Three by cast members (there were only two studios, so this is a joke akin to calling a golf club bar the 19th hole). I couldn't find anything online to specify exactly which watering hole it is (answers on a postcard), so we had a drink in the Blue Anchor, and then a spot of lunch in the Rutland Arms - both of them have been around since decades before the 1960s, so are both potential candidates. Given the date, one topic of conversation dominated. It was another BBC policy that was not easy to understand, but this one brand new. Gary Lineker, a popular sports broadcaster, had been banned from presenting that day because of comments he'd previously made that were critical of the UK government. Every other BBC sports presenter, pundit and commentator had refused to work in sympathy, and there was breaking news throughout the day about all the different programmes that were being cancelled. It must have been seismic to get six of the least sporty men in London that day talking about it. I couldn't help but compare what was happening to all those lost Who episodes, including the many filmed at Riverside (only about 50% of which survive): an inadvertent institutional persona developed that forgets about all the things that made it great in the first place. After the break, we were back for the final screening, of The Planet of Decision, final episode of The Chase. This was followed by a panel of Maureen o' Brien, who played Vicki, and Peter Purves, who played Steven.

O'Brien (Middle) and Purves (Right)

After a couple of questions about the usual - irascible Bill Hartnell who had a heart of gold, etc. etc. - it got more interesting as the interviewer moved onto other less familiar areas of their careers. O' Brien talked about why she stopped writing crime novels ("My editor hated my seventh book"), and some of her notable theatre roles, including playing Rosalind in As You like It at the Sheffield Crucible in a cast with the young Alan Rickman. Purves talked about some of the interesting films he was part of for children's television programme Blue Peter, including building houses in Tonga and walking the suspension cable of the Forth Road Bridge. He also talked about having directed 30 pantomimes in his time (I wish I'd been brave enough to shout out "Oh no you haven't" from the audience, but alas I wasn't). Once the panel was over, and artist Alister Pearson had raffled off a print for charity, it marked the end of an enjoyable event, and the six of us then spent a few hours in the Riverside's bar / restaurant. After having to miss the last couple of BFI Doctor Who events because of other commitments, it was nice to go to something similar and celebrate the history of the show as it reaches its 60th anniversary year. That's a big birthday, and a long lifespan for a show. Everything that was lost because of the BBC's inadvertent throwing out the baby with the bathwater policies is nothing compared to what the ravages of time can accomplish: every fan should appreciate having living links to the earliest parts of our favourite show's history, while we still have them. The next Time and Riverside event is concentrating on a single story, The Crusade, and will be taking place on Sunday 21st May. Further details can be found here.

In Summary:

A fun final Highland fling before this sort of story fell out of fashion.