Last Night on iPlayer: Doctor Who

In our series celebrating individual episodes of British television, FINLAY McLAREN has a ticket to Tombstone and an appointment with the Gunfighters…

For more than sixty years, Doctor Who has been full of jokes, comic turns, and a knowing sense of the absurd and the bizarre. Just think of the ring-modulated catfight between Daleks and Cybermen in ‘Doomsday’ (‘It’s like Stephen Hawking meets the Speaking Clock’) or Tom Baker warning a group of RADA-trained tribesmen, ‘Drop your weapons, or I’ll kill him with this deadly jelly baby,’ in ‘The Face of Evil’. Humour is as much a part of the show’s appeal as the time travelling police box and the sonic screwdriver. In fact, it might be the most important part.

Of course, most Doctor Who fans hate all this. After years of mockery from friends, family and Russell T. Davies, fans — or Whovians — generally agree that the series really ought to take itself a bit more seriously. To this end, they have become hypervigilant for any hint that their favourite show is becoming ‘too silly’, watching every episode like the Colonel from Monty Python’s Flying Circus: ‘Now, nobody likes K9 more than I do, except perhaps my wife and some of her friends.’

Over time, these puritanical devotees have criticised the show’s late-1970s imperial phase as being full of ‘undergraduate humour,’ its triumphant return in the new millennium as ‘campy’ and/or ‘childish,’ and its recent big-budget Disney+ iteration as ‘dumbed down’ and ‘too juvenile to get invested in’. That final comment suggests that until recently Doctor Who has been a proper, serious, grown-up drama, like The White Lotus in space or The Pitt, but with robots.

This aversion to anything that risks being ‘too silly’, and therefore embarrassing them in front of the casual audience, probably explains why Whovians have always been so down on ‘The Gunfighters’.

First broadcast sixty years ago this week, ‘The Gunfighters’ is Doctor Who’s contribution to that most hallowed of sci-fi traditions: the inevitable Wild West episode (see also: ‘Living in Harmony’, ‘Gunmen of the Apocalypse’ and ‘Spectre of the Gun’).

In this adventure, Doctor Who (check the credits — ed.) and his assistants Steven Taylor (played by Blue Peter’s Peter Purves) and Dodo Chaplet (Jackie Lane) arrive in Tombstone, Arizona, days before the infamous gun fight at the O.K. Corral. Soon, Doctor Who is mistaken for notorious outlaw Doc Holliday, prompting hijinks involving cowboys, dentists and a lot of singing.

When it first aired, ‘The Gunfighters’ drew the lowest viewing figures and appreciation index of the series up to that point. Sydney Newman — then BBC Head of Drama and co-creator of the programme — wrote to the production team, criticising the story for being overly comedic. Even the show’s typically loyal child audience stuck the boot in, voicing their displeasure on Junior Points of View the following week. In the absence of repeat broadcasts or home media, this poor reception stuck.

In 1983, when the BBC released Doctor Who: A Celebration, a coffee table book designed to celebrate the series’ twentieth birthday, Jeremy Bentham, the co-founder of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, was asked to write retrospective reviews for every serial. His verdict on ‘The Gunfighters’ was withering: ‘The script was pure Talbot Rothwell, the acting was not even bad vaudeville and the direction was more West Ham than West Coast… It was not good. It was bad and it was ugly.’

Modern opinion hasn’t been especially kind either. In 2009, Radio Times critic Mark Braxton awarded the story a single star, warning that ‘without a big slug of bourbon to fortify you against what amounts to substandard Quantum Leap, “The Gunfighters” is misconceived at best, at worst, total hogwash.’ Five years later in Doctor Who Magazine’s ‘First 50 Years’ poll, readers ranked it as the thirty-nineth worst story of all time.

But here’s the thing. Sydney Newman, Jeremy Bentham, Mark Braxton, contemporary viewers and even the readers of Doctor Who Magazine are all totally wrong. ‘The Gunfighters’ is fantastic. Every last, shamelessly daft, rootin’ tootin’ second of it.

Now, I’m a reasonable man, so I’ll admit that some of the criticisms aren’t entirely unfounded. Setting a story in America without any American actors was perhaps not the wisest move. Though the production team did manage to find one Canadian — Shane ‘rent-a-yank’ Rimmer who plays Seth Harper — the rest of the cast are unmistakably British.

How do I know that? Well, because their American accents have a habit of wandering. They’ll start a line somewhere near Arizona and then end up back in Surrey, resulting in deliveries akin to: ‘Well, golly, gosh and gee, I sure is the fastest sharp shooter in the west, yee-haw! *turns* More tea, vicar?’

And then there’s the song. Performed by Lynda Barron (Nurse Gladys Emmanuel herself), ‘The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon’ plays throughout ‘The Gunfighters’, topping and tailing most scenes and commenting on the action like a sort of honky-tonk Greek chorus. But while the hundred different verses of Doctor Who’s answer to ‘American Pie’ might be too much for some, each one of those verses is a part of the story’s offbeat charm. Besides, what other episode of Doctor Who features Auntie Mabel as an omniscient musical narrator. For originality alone you’ve got to give it some credit.

All of this might make it sound as though I’m heading toward a ‘so bad it’s good’ defence — aka the last refuge of the self-conscious geek — but that’s not the case. ‘The Gunfighters’ is a properly great piece of TV. And it’s great for exactly the same reason that its detractors dislike it: because it’s silly.

Coming after the apocalyptic ‘Daleks’ Master Plan’ and ‘The Massacre’, as well as the high-concept sci-fi of ‘The Celestial Toymaker’ and ‘The Ark’, ‘The Gunfighters’ is, by contrast, high farce. Producer Innes Lloyd actively encouraged this approach, suggesting that writer Donald Cotton take inspiration from the comedy western film Cat Ballou, released the previous year.

That intent is immediately apparent in Cotton’s script, which is whip-smart and packed with funny lines. My personal favourites include ‘You can’t walk into the middle of a western town and say you’re from outer space! Good gracious me, we’d all be arrested on a vagrancy charge!’ and Doctor Who’s defence of Doc Holliday: ‘He gave me a gun, extracted my tooth… what more do you want?’

William Hartnell, the very first Doctor Who, is at his absolute best here, clearly relishing the opportunity to show off his comic muscles, from flustered double-takes and indignant spluttering to perfectly timed physical ‘business’ as he blunders from one misunderstanding to the next. His wide-eyed horror at the sight of a heaving bosom may be the best moment in the show’s eight-hundred-and-ninety-two episodes.

The supporting cast throw themselves into the comedy too, particularly Anthony Jacobs as the outlaw-turned-dentist Doc Holliday and Sheena Marshe as his girlfriend Kate, who share some wonderfully dry exchanges. ‘Wyatt Earp is gunnin’ for me, and you know that in my whole life I never killed a friend.’ ‘Ah, you’re a real gentleman.’

Doctor Who’s assistants are also a big part of the fun. Although he later described ‘The Gunfighters’ as ‘crummy’, Peter Purves gives a terrific performance as the time-travelling himbo Steven Taylor, happily playing at cowboys while looking less like a gunslinger and more like someone about to sing ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’. Similarly, the much-maligned Dodo, who only appeared in six stories before being unceremoniously written out, is fantastic here. She treats the various life-or-death situations thrown at her like minor inconveniences encountered while on a day trip to an immersive Wild West experience.

In the end, our heroes manage to escape death at the hands of the eponymous gunfighters and slip away in the TARDIS; but not before Doctor Who warns Dodo that she is ‘fast becoming a prey to every cliché-ridden convention in the American West.’ Sadly, much of the audience agreed.

Following ‘The Gunfighters’ disastrous reception, along with falling ratings and the increasing strain on Hartnell, the production team decided to rethink the series. Out went the historical settings and genre experiments, in came blobby monsters and running down corridors. The result was a very different kind of Doctor Who, one that would never again be as playful, as silly, or as much fun as it is here. But then, most of the show’s fans preferred it that way.

‘The Gunfighters’ is available on BBC iPlayer

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