You may recall that in my review of Morbius I alluded to the fact that this year, for the October Horror Movie Challenge I had decided to watch only films featuring actors who had played Timelords in any televised iteration of Doctor Who (including the Peter Cushing films which, though originally released in cinemas, have become a TV staple - and besides, you can't do a horror movie challenge and leave Peter Cushing on the table, can you?). Well, we're now three days into what used to be the ninth month of the year before a couple of Roman nobs got up themselves, the challenge is complete, and I want to get down some things I learned from it. But first, I suppose, I should list the films I watched, in order, and saying which Timelord actors they feature. So:
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| Don't look so worried Tom, it's only 31 films |
1. The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976) - Patrick Troughton (The Second Doctor)
2. The House That Dripped Blood (Peter Duffell, 1971) - Jon Pertwee (The Third Doctor)
3. The Vault of Horror (Roy Ward Baker, 1973) - Tom Baker (The Fourth Doctor)
4. The Ghosts of Borley Rectory (Steven M. Smith, 2021) - Colin Baker (The Sixth Doctor)
5. Dracula (John Badham, 1979) - Sylvester McCoy (The Seventh Doctor)
6. Alien 3 (David Fincher, 1992) - Paul McGann (The Eighth Doctor)
7. Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) - John Hurt (The War Doctor)
8. 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) - Christopher Eccleston (The Ninth Doctor)
9. Fright Night (Craig Gillespie, 2011) - David Tennant (The Tenth Doctor)
10. Morbius (Daniel Espinosa, 2022) - Matt Smith (The Eleventh Doctor)
11. The Lair of the White Worm (Ken Russell, 1988) - Peter Capaldi (The Twelfth Doctor)
12. Attack the Block (Joe Cornish, 2011) - Jodie Whittaker (The Thirteenth Doctor)
13. The Blood on Satan's Claw (Piers Haggard, 1971) - Anthony Ainley (The Master)
14. Tales that Witness Madness (Freddie Francis, 1973) - Michael Jayston/Mary Tamm (The Valeyard/Romana 1)
15. At this point in the challenge I took a night off from tracking Timelords to watch Werewolf by Night, which still counted to my overall OHMC total but wasn't even vaguely Gallifreyan. It does have Man-Thing in it though so, y'know, there's that.
16. Dracula: Prince of Darkness (Terence Fisher, 1966) - Peter Cushing (Doctor Who)
17. Underworld: Evolution (Len Wiseman, 2006) - Derek Jacobi (Professor Yana/The Master)
18. The Shout (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1978) - Jim Broadbent/John Hurt (Curse of Fatal Death Doctor/The War Doctor)
19. Sherlock Holmes: The Hound of the Baskervilles (Brian Mills, 1988) - Bernard Horsfall (Chancellor Goth)
20. The Black Torment (Robert Hartford-Davis, 1964 - Patrick Troughton (The Second Doctor) (nb. this was suggested by a Facebook friend and I knew I would probably have to double up on Doctors at some point during the challenge - indeed at this point I wasn't counting Jim Broadbent as a Curse of Fatal Death Doctor and so had already doubled up, technically, with The Shout)
21. Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright, 2007) - Timothy Dalton (Rassilon)
22. Corporate Monster (Ruairi Robinson, 2019) - Jenna Coleman (Clara Oswald, The Impossible Girl)
23. The New Mutants (Josh Boone, 2020) - Maisie Williams (Ashildr)
24. Quatermass and the Pit (Roy Ward Baker, 1967) - Julian Glover (Scaroth/Count Scarlioni)
25. The Satanic Rites of Dracula (Alan Gibson, 1973) - Richard Matthews/Peter Cushing/Joanna Lumley (Rassilon/Doctor Who/Curse of Fatal Death Doctor)
26. Vampire Circus (Robert Young, 1972) - Lalla Ward (Romana 2)
27. Rowing with the Wind (Gonzalo Suarez, 1988) - Hugh Grant (Curse of Fatal Death Doctor)
28. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Gore Verbinski, 2003) - Jonathan Pryce (Curse of Fatal Death Master)
29. The Witches (Nicolas Roeg, 1990) - Rowan Atkinson (Curse of Fatal Death Doctor)
30. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (Peter Greenaway, 1989) - Alex Kingston (River Song)
31. Bram Stoker's Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992) - Richard E Grant (Curse of Fatal Death and Scream of the Shalka Doctor)
That is, I'm sure you'll agree, a list of thirty-one films. Admittedly, one of those films is Werewolf By Night, which I watched on a night off, but if you look carefully you will see that, thanks to the fact some films in the list feature more than one actor who's played a Timelord, even with the exception of Marvel's creature feature I still managed to have 31 actors who'd piloted Tardises or ponced around on Gallifrey. So what did I learn?
1. You do have to cheat, a bit
The attentive Who fan perusing this list is going to have problems with some of my selections - which is to be expected, given that one of the main activities of Doctor Who fandom sometimes seems to be arguing about what 'counts'. For my purposes, I was counting only televised incarnations of the characters, whether they were canonical or not, which allowed me the fairly massive - and very useful - cheat of being able to count the many brief incarnations of the Doctor from the Comic Relief special The Curse of Fatal Death. However I would argue that this was as much a constraint as it was a cheat, as it meant I couldn't use actors who had played Timelords in the audios, which might have given me a much larger pool to pull from.
The really egregious cheat here, obviously, is including Scaroth, who is not, strictly speaking, a Timelord, but rather one individual who, due to some timey-wimey business, winds up in a situation where twelve different versions of him are scattered throughout history. However, as we see in 'City of Death', it's pretty clear that his consciousness can move about in time between each of these incarnations, if imperfectly, so for my purposes I'm counting him as an honorary Timelord. Besides which, including Julian Glover allows us to watch Quatermass and the Pit, which leads to my second observation...
2. One of the pleasures of Doctor Who is the doors it opens into other British institutions
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| Quatermass: the Doctor, but actually British and thus depressed |
I don't mean that you can pootle along to Vauxhall Cross and then persuade the security guard to let you in and help you ransack MI5's filing cabinets based on your shared feeling that the Sensorites were never used to their full potential, obviously. What I mean is that one of the joys of the show is that it provides you with all manner of jaunts you can go on to examine other powerhouses of postwar pop culture. Using Julian Glover to go from Who to Quatermass is an excellent lateral move, because both are sci-fi franchises which date back to the earliest period of television in Britain as a mass medium, and it's interesting to compare the way they treat similar subjects (and also, let's face it, Barry Letts ripped off huge chunks of this story in 'The Daemons'). Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this is comparing Bernard Quatermass himself to the Doctor: both are scientific geniuses with a strong pacifist streak and an uneasiness about working with the military, but whereas the Big D can zip off in his Tardis at the end of an adventure, Quatermass, being human, is grounded and forced to deal with the consequences - something shown to great effect in the startling end credits sequence of the 1967 film version of Quatermass and the Pit, where the Professor and his assistant, played by Barbara Shelley, stand on opposite sides of the frame silently struggling to come to terms with the fact that, moments earlier, maddened by Martian mind control, they attempted to kill each other. The threat may have been dealt with, but nothing is over for the people forced to deal with it. You can see how that would have felt relevant in postwar Britain - the film explicitly links the crashed Martian craft to the war, with Glover's Colonel Breen refusing to believe it is anything other than an unexploded experimental German 'V' weapon until long after the Martian corpses are pulled out and begin to decompose, but even if the link wasn't made explicit, pretty much any exterior shot of London from the many Hammer or Amicus films I watched as part of this challenge illustrates how much of the city was, even in the 1970s, still littered with areas of waste ground or ruined buildings left over from the Blitz.
Of course, those Hammer and Amicus films are another treasure of British culture which Doctor Who opens a door to, and I'll have a lot more to say about them later, but while we're comparing the Doctor to other Great British Archetypes I can't pass up the opportunity to mention Jeremy Brett's gloriously weird portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, as seen in our list in ITV's feature-length Hound of the Baskervilles. Brett's Holmes is the most faithful to Conan Doyle's original depiction of the character - which means he plays Holmes as aloof, disdainful and, frankly, queer. I think it's significant that every other major Holmes adaptation since - the two Guy Ritchie movies, Elementary and fucking Sherlock - has had to be in some way a reimagining of the character. After the Brett versions, there wasn't any point in trying to do a faithful adaptation anymore - it had been done, and they'd nailed it. In a way, Holmes had to regenerate into Benedirk Crumplepump, Johnny Lee Miller, or Robert Downey Jr to become interesting again.
As an actor who feared being typecast when he took on the role of Holmes, Brett would probably have turned down the part of the Doctor if offered, but it's interesting to imagine a parallel universe where he approached it with the same diligence he brought to the Great Detective, perhaps replacing a Peter Davison who, in that universe, leaves the show at the same time as Eric Saward - meaning incoming Script Editor Andrew Cartmel has the perfect man to play his new, mercurial, plotting vision of the Doctor. Magnetised by Brett's performance, the nation's viewers watch the Cartmel Masterplan unfold. In that universe, when you mention Looms in the context of Doctor Who everyone knows what you're talking about, and consequently the inhabitants of that universe's version of the UK become much more resistant to reproductive futurism. The bands of the mid-90s British rock revival - or Britglam, as it's known in those parts - don't try to hide the fact their riffs are cribbed from 70s lipstick boot boys by going on about the Beatles, and they steal none of those riffs from Gary Glitter (who has, in the more open sexual climate, been exposed, along with Savile et al - indeed, a driving element of the Britglam aesthetic is a burning need to redeem the pure and joyful elements of 1970s rock from the taint of its sleazebag supremos). When Dai, the People's Prince, is murdered in a car crash to prevent him marrying his boyfriend Freddy Mercury, the people revolt and tear down the institution which marks the epicentre of national corruption, and in 2003 the citizens of the New British Republic celebrate the 40th anniversary of a show which has aired continually since the day Jackie Kennedy died. Brett himself has retired from the show, but his replacement, a curly-haired fop in a colourful jacket who alternates between manic glee and grim severity, has won the nation's heart with his polymorphous perversity, and the feature-length special in which he faces his oldest enemy in a terrifying alternate Britain is a critical and audience success...
Don't get me wrong though. Sylvester McCoy is tied with Peter Capaldi as my favourite Doctor. And actually, Sylvester McCoy will be the subject of our next fact...
...which you will get tomorrow because I have been writing for three hours now and there is still a ton of stuff I want to talk about so let's make like the Classic Series and do this as a serial, eh?
In Part Two: A charming Sylvester McCoy, the multifarious John Hurt...and Jim Broadbent as you've never seen him before!
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