The Gunfighters

Chapter The 219th, which depicts a time when Doctor Who can truly be said to have gone west.

Plot:

A couple of days around the 26th October 1881, Tombstone, Arizona. The Doctor, Steven and Dodo arrive in the TARDIS, with the Doctor on the lookout for a dentist to fix his toothache. Luckily for him, Doc Holliday has also just set up his dental practice in the town; unluckily, the Clanton boys have come to town to kill Doc Holliday. The wily dentist / gunslinger spies a mistaken identity ploy as this other newcomer to the town is also called "Doc". Lending the Doctor his own monogrammed gun, Holliday sends the unsuspecting Time Lord off to the Last Chance Saloon where the outlaws wait. The Doctor is saved by the intervention of Wyatt Earp, who keeps up the pretence that the Doctor is the Doc to protect both men from the Clantons (and their extra hired gun Johnny Ringo who arrives in town with a score to settle with Holliday too). Earp keeps the Doctor safe in the sheriff's office, despite efforts by the Clantons to flush him out by threatening Steven. Holliday flees town, taking Dodo with him, but is persuaded to return with her. The Clantons kill Wyatt's younger brother, which prompts him - with another brother Virgil plus Holliday - to face the Clantons and Ringo in a gunfight at the OK Corral. The Earps and Holliday win, killing all the bad guys.

Context:

I watched this from the DVD one episode per night across four nights towards the end of January. A couple of surprises ensued. First, the Better Half joined me for the first part (she's been keeping clear of any Doctor Who watch, new or old, of late). She described the story cheerfully as "The one where Lynda Baron's singing a song over the top of it" and believed that I'd watched it only "very recently" (the last time was when the DVD came out for the first time in 2011, over ten years ago). She didn't walk out midway through the episode, but she didn't join me for the remaining three. The second surprise was that this marked another time that my random selections of stories have completed a season, which seems to be happening a lot lately now I'm in my eighth year of doing the blog. It was only after I finished watching and ticked off the story on my big spreadsheet (I'm a Doctor Who fan who blogs, of course I have a big spreadsheet) that I realised. Season 3 is the fifth season completed now after seasons 8, 17 and 23, and new series 13.

First Time Round:

My memory's never perfect when recalling my first watch of even recent stories, but I've got serious doubts about my recall with regard to The Gunfighters. I'm looking at the release dates for the Doctor Who VHS range, and the story came out as part of a boxset of collected Hartnell stories in November of 2002. (An aside: such is the poor reputation of the story that it has never been trusted to attract a home buyer on its own merits - it was clumped together with another story in a DVD box set too, and - assuming there is a season 3 box set sometime in the future - will not stand alone on Blu-ray either.) I purchased that first boxset on day of release, in MVC in Brighton, and so would have had The Gunfighters to watch for the first time then. I know I never saw it on a pirated copy before that (unlike The Sensorites, another of the stories in the VHS set) and I know it wasn't repeated on terrestrial TV (Unlike The Time Meddler, the final story packaged with it on VHS), so this must have been the first time I saw it. But looking back it's a story that I feel like I've always known, or at least for something like twenty years before 2002. Why would this be? Maybe it's memories of the novelisation that I read in the 1980s. I think, though, that the story was so infamous (more information on exactly how infamous in the Deeper Thoughts section below) that it just seemed like I'd already seen it multiple times before I finally caught up with it.

Reaction:

The very first moments of the first episode of this story set up The Gunfighters as something that's going to be shockingly innovative. A song (the Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon) is playing from the off to accompany the action, which has never been done before. Cowboys ride in to frame onto a rather magnificent OK Corral set, filmed at interesting angles by director Rex Tucker. It looks expensive. Though it regularly depicted historical settings, Doctor Who had never done a Western story before. Whether it'll be good or bad (and the minute the outlaws on screen start to speak it does very much feel like it will be the latter), it will certainly be new. Dig just a little below these cosmetic aspects, though, and the story is very similar to an existing template: it is essentially a re-tread of writer Donald Cotton's previous story, shown earlier in the season, The Myth Makers. Just as in that story, the setting is a historical period that is a common one to be mythologised. In both instances, there is no effort at historical accuracy, but instead the story riffs on more modern presentations of the myths. The Myth Makers seemed based more on a radical 1960s theatre production of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida than it was based on Homer, let alone a reflection of how lives were truly lived in Asia Minor over a thousand years BC. The Gunfighters, of course, is presented through a prism of the most lurid and unrealistic Cowboy movie tropes.

Almost all of the guest characters appearing in the story are real people from history (interestingly, this was the last time such a thing happened in Doctor Who for many years - the next time a Doctor met a specific historical personage, Colin Baker was the star of the show). One would be forgiven for thinking they aren't, though; Johnny Ringo, for example, sounds terribly made up, but he existed. He did have beef with Doc Holliday, but he wasn't present at the gunfight at the OK Corral, and he died the following year elsewhere. The gunfight as depicted on screen is slightly adjusted compared to the real events - in reality, more people were present, one of the Clantons survived, and Holliday and the Earps were injured. Historical detail is sacrificed to make for a more exciting narrative, and realism is sacrificed too. As wild as the West undoubtedly could be, it seems very unlikely that someone could gun down a saloon keeper in cold blood as Johnny Ringo does to the barman Charlie, then leave his dead body slumped over the bar and mosey on upstairs to stay in one of the rooms until the next morning. This sort of thing might happen in Westerns on TV, but the artifice and exaggeration does tend to distance one from the action on screen. The larger than life performances and the winking to the audience nature of the comedy both reinforce the effect that what is being shown is something confected and false; it reaches Brechtian levels of alienation. The trouble is that then the script appears to be expecting those watching to feel something at times, for example when Steven is threatened by a lynch mob, or when the Earp brothers discover that their younger brother has been killed. It can't have things both ways.

Another alienation mechanism is the song. I like the song, maybe more than most, it's well written and clever - sometimes acting as narration, sometimes as counterpoint; but, it is clearly overused. There are periods of the story where it's played every couple of minutes not giving anyone watching time to suspend their disbelief. Another similarly disruptive factor, but this time definitely not intentional, is the variability of some of the performances. Anthony Jacobs as Doc Holliday and John Alderson as Wyatt Earp are god tier, many others comport themselves with reasonable dignity, but a couple of the cast have much difficulty in maintaining an American accent, and unfortunately every time they talk the bubble of reality in the story pops. The regular cast are all great, but - in another parallel with The Myth Makers - they have very little to do. Peter Purves and Jackie Lane get to perform the song early on, but then spend the rest of the time being held captive by one faction or another. There are a couple of scenes and moments that allow William Hartnell to show off his flair for comedy, but he mostly acts as the stooge for the other characters rather than driving any aspect of the plot forward. By the climax of the story, it's all about cowboy versus cowboy shooting; two out of the three regulars don't even appear in the gunfight sequence, and Dodo appears only briefly to complicate things for Doc Holliday, who is much more the protagonist of the story than any of the three actual stars of the show.

At the micro level, there is much that is good and much that is bad. There are many witty, lines, and some great direction on film. The good guys at the end striding through a hail of bullets is implausible but very cool, and there are some great low angle shots used. On the other hand, there's moments where the Clantons chorus particular lines in a sign-song way like truly hardened killers probably don't. The resolution of the cliffhanger of episode 1 is a terrible cheat, worse than the worst excesses of the Saturday morning serials that partly inspired Doctor Who. The Doctor is walking towards the saloon where people are waiting to kill him, he's a couple of metres away at most, within grasping distance of the door; then, at the start of the next episode, he just doesn't arrive. Time passes, then somebody else arrives instead. Altogether, though, I don't think the negatives outweigh the positives, and it's still an enjoyable watch overall.

Connectivity: 

The trap street in Face the Raven has something of an old Western town about it, with desperate ex-outlaws living there now trying to make a straight living. Both there, and in Tombstone as depicted in The Gunfighters, a rough form of justice is in force, and the Doctor and his companions are brought under the protection of a figure of authority. There's even a couple of showdowns in the Capaldi story, though they are against the anthropomorphised force of death in the form of a black bird rather than any gun-slinging cowpokes.

Deeper Thoughts:

Critical Re-evaluation: A Case Study. The souvenir programme of the Doctor Who 20th anniversary celebration at Longleat (Doctor Who's version of Woodstock, and I was there!) featured an essay summarising the Doctor's adventures to date. This was written by Ian Levine, DJ, music producer and Doctor Who 'superfan'. At the time, Levine was working as an unofficial continuity adviser to Who producer John Nathan-Turner. It likely wasn't to give the fan perspective that he was chosen to write this essay over any journalist or writer, but instead for the same reason he worked in that unofficial role: he'd amassed a lot of research materials over the years, including many copies of episodes themselves. As such, he could be much more efficient in turning in something accurate than someone who'd need to do all that research from scratch. His is a fan perspective, though; the show is very important to him, and he has strong opinions about it. My guess is that - even though it was for a celebration tie-in - it would have offended his sense of integrity not to be honest about the programme's up and downs. Thus, the essay touches on periods of Doctor Who's first 20 years where, in the opinion of the essayist, there is less to celebrate. So it was that Ian Levine, in a professional publication, put it on record that The Gunfighters was the worst ever Doctor Who story. I read and re-read all his words so many times over the following months (it was difficult to get hold of affordable summaries of the whole of Doctor Who in those days, Doctor Who Magazine just gave tantalising glimpses) so I'm sure I'm right - there was no qualifying "possibly" or "probably" or "many people think" it was just there in black and white: The Gunfighters is the worst.

Levine was not alone in such an appraisal at that time of course. There was no access to vintage stories for the mass audience back then, so newer fans relied on the memories of longer term fans. It was a pervasive view in the 1980s amongst that small number of taste-makers that The Gunfighters was not just a duffer, but the ultimate duffer. This wasn't so out of line with the view of the audience in the 1960s to be fair: it got the lowest audience appreciation rating of the series to date, and the BBC Audience Research Report documented many negative viewer comments: "Third-rate story telling", "Hackneyed, ridiculous and dull", "A weak and puerile plot", "The script, even for a children's programme, was absolute rubbish". Lots of Doctor Who audience reports over the years garnered similar comments for other stories, though; and, is it really the script that's the issue? Did anyone comment back then on the accents or the song or the ambitious idiocy of trying to recreate the old west in a tiny British studio? Not that I've ever seen reported. Anyway, however fair or unfair, this was the accepted wisdom for the lifetime of classic Who. Fanzines of the 1980s back this up, as quoted in the first edition of the Television Companion, a 1998 compendium published by Virgin. The Companion's writers David Howe and Stephen James Walker summarise in line with the accepted position of the previous decade ("The story must be adjudged one of the least effective of the Hartnell era"), but this was already being challenged elsewhere.

In the 1990s, a new generation of fans became more involved in writing about Doctor Who (and many would go on to write Doctor Who too, in book or even televisual form); plus, the surviving vintage episodes were now more available, through VHS or repeat broadcasts on the UK Gold satellite and cable channel. There was less need to rely on the hand-me-down knowledge of the previous decade. A good bellwether of changing fan opinion at this point was The Discontinuity Guide by Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping, which Virgin published in 1995. This book unashamedly took some contrary positions to those held by the earlier fans; it says about The Gunfighters that it has a "great script", and is "A comic masterpiece, winning you over with its sheer charm". It's difficult to imagine a more different response to that of Ian Levine and Co. Though the book was clearly only supposed to be a personal take by the three authors, it nonetheless created its own wisdom that endured for a while afterwards. An interesting point is that the book lists as a goof an anachronistic line of the ballad of the Last Chance Saloon that mentions "earning your gunfighter's wings", a phrase not coined until WW1. The line, though, is "earning your gunfighter's fee". Cornell, Day and Topping did not as yet have access to a pristine digital copy of the story with restored audio.

When that pristine version became available in 2011, the person I'd judge to be the final fan taste-maker gave his opinion. This was Gary Gillatt, whose DVD reviews in Doctor Who Magazine around this period were justly valued and praised. He says that The Gunfighters was "rather marvellous" in its way, and was "produced with care and conviction" but ultimately leaves its audience "feeling unmoved". It would seem that fan wisdom regarding this musical Western tale had in thirty years gone right through the three stages of Hegelian dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis; it was the worst, it was fantastic, it was a bit of both. Why do I think that there have been no more taste-makers in the last ten years and there won't be any in future? Post Gillatt's time reviewing for the official magazine, social media has become more and more mainstream; in parallel, the across-the-board availability of all of Doctor Who to consume has become a reality. That any fan could subscribe to a service to watch any surviving classic Who story, even The Gunfighters, at the touch of a button without having to rise from the living room sofa would have seemed like science fiction in the early 1980s, let alone when this story was first broadcast, but it is nonetheless true. Any of those fans also has an instant global platform to share their thoughts as soon as they've finished watching (or - let's face it - probably before they've finished). The era of one collective view of a story that gradually develops over time is over; now there is a democratic explosion of a million different views at once. This means no consensus, but the consolation is that there is no orthodoxy either; I think that's a fair exchange.

In Summary:

It has flaws, but is not as bad as its reputation: a mixed saddle-bag.