THE BLACK ARCHIVE: Warriors’ Gate — Missing [not believed wiped] episodes from the original drafts
A rummage through the early edits of my 2019 book on Stephen Gallagher’s celebrated Doctor Who story.
Published by Obverse Books, The Black Archive #31: Warriors’ Gate was my 2019 monograph about one of the most intriguing Doctor Who serials transmitted in the final Tom Baker season of 1980–81. While researching, writing and editing, and for reasons of space and relevance, some material about the influences on the story and development of writer Stephen Gallagher’s and director Paul Joyce’s careers could not be accommodated in the book. With this in mind, I thought it might be fun to dig through my early drafts so you could enjoy some ‘cutting room floor’ diversions that didn’t make the final version. If you haven’t read the book — available to buy here — then it might be wise if you do as reading these notes will probably a) spoil your enjoyment of it, and b) not make much sense without having read it. You have been warned.
Originally the book was written as a Working Draft in two sections, ambiguously referred to as ‘Chapter 1’ and ‘Chapter 2’, which were continually in flux between June and December 2018. In December these were combined in a lengthy editing process and redefined into an introduction, eight chapters and a conclusion. Prior to this reconfiguration, the first iteration of ‘Chapter 1’ outlined Doctor Who script editor Christopher H Bidmead’s remit for season 18 and looked at how writer Stephen Gallagher, who had then not written for television, became involved with the series. It traced the numerous influences that came to bear upon his writing process, including Gallagher’s radio drama work. ‘Chapter 2’ covered the hiring of director Paul Joyce, reflected back on his career and artistic influences, his film work, and how he eventually worked for BBC Birmingham under producer David Rose. It then continued with the production of Warriors’ Gate and analysed the visual and narrative complexities of the story.
Gallagher’s early career featured in some depth in the June 2018 version of ‘Chapter 1’, including slightly more background material on how he started to write. Gallagher graduated from Hull University and headed for London, hoping to work in the film industry as either an editor or as a director. Compared to the published version, this first draft went into a little bit more detail about the influences on Gallagher’s writing. His correspondence with writer Andy Lane proved very useful and, in one letter to Andy [Hull Archives: UDGA Warriors’ Gate (file 1). Letter to Andy Lane, 19 February 1981], Gallagher noted his admiration of several science fiction authors and their work, including Piers Anthony and his Battle Circle (1967–75) trilogy. In my early version, I looked at the themes in Anthony’s books with the intention of highlighting their influence on Gallagher’s science fiction radio serials and later work:
Piers Anthony’s Battle Circle trilogy postulates a post-apocalyptic America where society has been reduced to a struggle between nomadic warriors and the underground technologically savvy ‘techies’. Although the novels have been dismissed as stereotypical science fiction in some quarters, Anthony’s themes of the interdependence of, and hierarchical control over, different levels of society to prevent the escalation of humanity’s destructive tendencies chime well with Gallagher’s own exploration of command and control in his radio serials.
Conversely, Anthony’s Chthon (1967) is a poetic, allegorical novel that follows Aton Five, exiled to the novel’s titular prison planet, as he attempts to lead fellow prisoners on a tough, life-threatening journey through its caverns to freedom. Aton’s narrative is non-linear, interspersed with fragmented flashbacks to his youth and family life, his imprisonment and his duty aboard a space ship. The novel ‘weaves a complex tapestry of myth and legend from classical antiquity; from Norseland; from the Christian Eden and Paradise Lost; from Dante’s Purgatory; from the modern mythologies of psychoanalysis and psychology; from literature; from folk tales of magicians and dragons.’ [Collings, Michael R, Piers Anthony, p16–17] It also links to the fire-breathing hybrid creature of Greek myth, the Chimera. [Collings, pp27–30]
Gallagher understood these literary allusions and the escape through the caverns may have influenced the pursuit of Mitchell through the various levels of the Central Command building in [radio serial] The Last Rose of Summer (1978). Similarly, there is a non-linearity and a fairy tale sensibility to the narrative in Warriors’ Gate, an appreciation of Norse mythology in Terminus (1982), and an extrapolation of the Chimera myth, of a creature composed of two or more parts, for his take on the genetic manipulation that creates a human-monkey hybrid in his 1982 novel Chimera.
Further to this contextualisation of Gallagher’s early work within the genre was the relevance of SF writer Alfred Bester to Gallagher’s ideas. Although the published Black Archive still refers to Bester’s The Demolished Man (1953), in my earlier draft another of Bester’s novels was connected to ‘Gallagher’s themes of how control and power are used and abused and how society and its citizens are transformed by advances in technology, particularly the impact on free will and individual identity bound up with developments in genetics and biotechnology, [which]would also percolate into the dystopian themes of his early radio serials and novels.’ [Collins, Frank, Working Draft 2018]
It originally went something like this in the Working Draft:
Another text that Gallagher might have been influenced by is Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1957). Bester’s work was regularly referred to by later generations of writers, particularly those who were in the vanguard of the British ‘New Wave’ of the 1970s (such as Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss and M. John Harrison) and the cyberpunk authors of the 1980s (William Gibson and Bruce Sterling). The Stars My Destination was an example of Bester’s bricolage technique, one drawn from many sources that ‘paid little heed to the supposed divide between literary and popular fiction, and proved eclectic in his range of allusion.’ [Smith, Jad, Modern Masters of Science Fiction: Alfred Bester]
This well regarded space opera was apparently patterned after Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo and, like its anti-hero Edmund Dantes, it tells of how a brutal small-time criminal Gully Foyle, left shipwrecked in space by his criminal sidekicks and ignored by a passing ship the Vorga, sets out for revenge. Set in a 25th century society, some individuals have possession of psi powers and teleportation by pure will (known as jaunting) and when Foyle escapes from prison after attempting to destroy the Vorga, he is transformed by these powers and cybernetic implants into a sophisticated killing machine. While he attempts to track down the person who ordered the Vorga to abandon him, he builds his personal wealth and acquires PyrE, an explosive detonated by telepathic thought and being fought over by the Inner Planets and Outer Worlds as a means to end their war.
Foyle’s revenge triggers a major personal, moral and ethical transformation, changing him from a very unpleasant and violent man into a highly intelligent, remorseful individual who eventually discovers, by controlling his feelings and desires, how to jaunt to precise destinations in space and time. His growing inner strength as an individual and jaunting prowess is contested over by the decadent elites who run authoritarian and oppressive corporations and mega-conglomerates. He gives up PyrE and leaves humanity to choose its fate: self-destruction or journey with him into the universe.
The moral and ethical transformation of Foyle, as well as his cyborg augmentation, is similar to the way Gallagher changes our perception of his characters Mitchell and Randall in the [Manchester Piccadilly] radio serials. They become complex emblems of the manipulation by corrupt authoritarian governments and politicians.
Subsequently, The Black Archive’s early drafts also went on to incorporate very lengthy summaries of the plots of the radio serials Gallagher wrote for Manchester Piccadilly Radio, The Last Rose of Summer, Hunters’ Moon and The Babylon Run, broadcast between 1978 and 1980, and the BBC Hi-Fi Theatre presentation of An Alternative to Suicide in 1979. This BBC play brought him to Bidmead’s attention. These summaries were significantly reduced (and were no great loss) but during the process I opted to remove a little nugget from the June 2018 draft about how the early trilogy of plays were recorded at Piccadilly Radio:
Made on low budgets and relying on the cooperative efforts of all involved, Gallagher was reliant on Pete Baker [Piccadilly’s breakfast DJ who was part of a consortium that pitched Gallagher’s work to the station] to realise the soundscapes for the radio serials and he ‘devised a method by which we’d use our limited time with the actors to get a clean voice recording, and then he’d prepare all the sound effects on the instant-start cartridges used for commercials and jingles. Then he’d re-record the voice track through the DJ’s desk in the station’s unused backup studio, varying the acoustics with equalisation and playing in all the effects in real time.’ [Gallagher, ‘Creating the Audio Drama’ post on his website].
A quick resume of Gallagher’s work during the writing of his last Piccadilly radio drama, in both the June and September 2018 drafts, included a reference to legendary BBC producer John Tydeman directing Gallagher’s first BBC radio play submission The Humane Solution (1979). Gallagher told me the play ‘had come to me complete and without any warning, and I blitzed the entire outline down in a notebook in less than half an hour. The script then came easily because everything I needed was there. Bernard Krichefski was the editor on the Saturday Night Theatre slot, which was the natural home for a 90’ play, and after reading it he invited me to Broadcasting House for a meet and chat.’ [Gallagher, email to author, 28 April 2018]. Tydeman then encouraged Gallagher to submit An Alternative to Suicide for Saturday Night Theatre. A footnote about Tydeman also noted his influence on the careers of Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard. He produced Stoppard’s first radio play The Dissolution of Dominic Boot (1963) and brought him to the attention of critics and supported his ambition to write for the London stage. The impact of Dominic Boot and Stoppard’s major breakthrough play Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead (1967) on Warriors’ Gate director Paul Joyce are also discussed in much depth in the published edition of The Black Archive.
One of the sections I dropped from these drafts was the material found in Gallagher’s archive about several other story pitches he made at the time he was discussing the development of his one-page ‘The Dream Time’ outline with Doctor Who’s script editor Christopher H Bidmead and which was the basis for Warriors’ Gate. It’s worth resurrecting the last edited version from September’s draft here:
The quotes used retain the spelling and punctuation of the original notes. ‘The Folded Tardis’ finds the Doctor trapped inside Adric’s imagination during the ‘frozen moment of an explosion’, wherein Adric’s fantasy of himself as a sword and sorcery hero is ‘marshalled against a vicious nightmare-figure that turns out to be Adric himself.’ The Doctor forces Adric to confront the good and evil sides of his personality [Hull Archives, UDGA Warriors’ Gate (file 1). Gallagher’s undated notes]. A letter from Bidmead, enclosing Adric’s character outline, with the proviso to ‘see if it strikes any sparks’ may have inspired the idea. [Hull Archives, UDGA Warriors’ Gate (file 1). Letter from Bidmead to Gallagher, 7 January 1980.]
In ‘Dr Who outline’ an industrial saboteur locks onto the TARDIS and hides the key to the Denevan Mint, which is ‘part of a transtime/galactic business, trading under various guises & ‘front’ companies’. This note continues ‘Dr is charged with recovering the key or Tardis destroyed by remote device’ and concludes with a ‘final showdown in a deserted Harrod’s’. The bottom of the note is inscribed with ‘Also — THE VAMPIRES OF POLYGON’ as the suggestion of another undeveloped idea. [Hull Archives, UDGA Warriors’ Gate (file 1). Undated notes.]
Gallagher’s reaction when I described these notes was… ‘I don’t remember these at all. They sound great, though.’ [email to author, 28 April 2018]. It’s interesting to note that during our email conversations he was already working on the restored novelisation of Warriors’ Gate, his original adaptation of the scripts which didn’t meet with producer John Nathan-Turner’s approval because it did not use the scripts as broadcast [significantly overhauled by Bidmead and director Joyce]. Subsequently recorded and released by BBC Audio, Gallagher kindly allowed me to read through his restored manuscript before it went into production. It was then published, along with short stories that offer something of a sequel, as Warriors’ Gate And Beyond in BBC Books revived Target range of Doctor Who novelisations in 2023. For Big Finish, he was also putting together The Nightmare Country, a story he originally pitched for season 21 which the Doctor Who production office had originally decided not to take any further.
Much was then cut from the ‘Chapter 1' material that covered director Paul Joyce’s involvement in bringing Warriors’ Gate to the screen. A lot of Joyce’s early background and track record was, unfortunately, removed simply by dint of word count, balance and relevance. I had to focus on Warriors’ Gate and give all those who were central to its creation equal room for comment.
I had originally pieced together Joyce’s early career from his own website, his articles (mainly published on the culture site The Arbuturian and, given how well written they are, they are well worth a read if you are interested in his work as a photographer and film maker), previous interviews in In Vision magazine that covered the making of Doctor Who, on the BBC DVD, and a very comprehensive interview he granted Toby Hadoke’s Whosround podcast. This material was then supplemented by a new interview I conducted with Joyce in August 2018. Joyce was also kind enough to send me some unpublished work and engaged in a lively email conversation that proved useful and enlightening. As the editing process continued, we [the editorial team and myself] suggested to Joyce the publication of my full interview with him as a separate web-only supplement, to allow readers of the Warriors’ Gate book to enjoy the contextual material in full, much of which was taken out of the book. Although Joyce preferred us not to do so, as he was working on a biography at the time, his enthusiasm for my book was undimmed.
For this reason, I’m just going to refer to material already in the public domain and backed up with Joyce’s essay and interview quotes featured in the published Black Archive. A charming and patient interviewee, my three hour interview with him covered a range of topics (not just Warriors’ Gate) in some detail and took its cue from the following material I’d included in in the June draft of ‘Chapter 1’:
After leaving Dulwich College, and eschewing a university education, he ‘entered the City of London as an executive trainee in The Bank of England. Here it quickly became all-too-apparent that I would not rise rapidly… but rather I would be side lined as a mild eccentric whose highest ambitions would be to get to wear flowery bow ties and edit the in-house magazine.’ [Joyce, Paul ‘Guinness with Godot’ — unpublished essay emailed to author 20 April 2018.]
He rejected this vision of premature middle age and was working at Knight Frank as an estate agent, with a decent salary and company car, when he had something of a Damascene conversion: ‘I was on the M25 one day, sat behind a huge lorry, and I had this kind of crisis — I don’t want to be doing this anymore — so I handed in my notice and gave back the car. Then I centred on the London School of Film Technique [it later became The London Film School]. That was my crossing the Rubicon moment.’ [Jonesy, ‘Camera Obscura: Paul Joyce’]
Theatre and film became intertwined for Joyce after spending two terms at the School and The Black Archive notes his first film, The Goad, was inspired by Samuel Beckett’s mime play Act Without Words II and that Beckett’s recurring theme about rubbish and detritus signifying mortality and the modern world provided a thread from Beckett to Stoppard and to Joyce’s work on Play For Today and Warriors’ Gate. There was more about the filming of The Goad and the 1964 Aldwych Theatre production in my original drafts:
To this end, Joyce traced the eventual destination of London’s rubbish collections to a dump in Rainham. With this as the location, he managed to persuade the two actors from the Aldwych performance, Freddie Jones and Geoffrey Hinsliff, to reprise their roles. It was an inauspicious debut as a director and potentially an omen of things to come when ‘due to a camera fault, (we) had to return for an additional day’s filming a couple of weeks later. This was awkward as by then the whole aspect and character of the rubbish-tip had changed dramatically and a wall of rubbish, which we had been using as a backdrop, had simply been crushed into the ground.’ [Joyce, ‘Guinness with Godot’].
Further to this, a post-interview draft of ‘Chapter 1’ described how a group of fellow creatives Joyce knew from the literary scene, centred around the Charing Cross Road’s bookshops, the pubs in the vicinity of the Aldwych and the Royal Court, and fringe theatre productions (including writer Harold Pinter, actors Patrick Magee and Henry Woolf, academic Martin Esslin and BBC producer John Gibson), helped him contact Beckett to seek his approval and, more importantly, secure the rights for the film. Joyce’s meeting with Beckett is atmospherically retold in a piece for The Arbuturian.
The Goad opened some doors and initiated other aspects of Joyce’s career, coverage of which we had to drop from the book. For example, his documentary film directing, for which he is now well known, started with stints at Universal and Paramount in the 1960s:
He showed The Goad to Cecil Tennant, then a talent agent working at Universal MCA’s London offices. He liked the film and put Joyce in touch with Universal’s publicity department where he was offered documentary work on several of their forthcoming film releases. Work… Is That What It’s Called? (1967), a publicity film for Peter Hall’s comedy Work Is a Four-Letter Word (1968) starring Cilla Black and David Warner was a British entry at the Berlin Film Festival. A year later, he was flown to Rome by Paramount to cover the making of Roger Vadim’s Barbarella (1968), a film adaptation of the French science fiction comic strip created by Jean-Claude Forest. He ‘used the Publicity Department’s money to make a pretty useless publicity film’ and of an hour-long interview with Fonda and Vadim ‘not a minute was usable and I will remember to this day my producer back in London consigning the whole lot to a dustbin with a sage-like sigh.’ [Joyce, Paul ‘Barbarella Forever’.]
It’s worth noting that some of this footage did survive as a short six-minute publicity film “Barbarella Does Her Thing”, credited to Joyce, and is available to watch on You Tube. It was recently expanded into a 15-minute special feature “Barbarella Forever!” on Arrow’s 2023 4K edition of Barbarella. His career as a photographer also blossomed at this time and his portraits and landscapes have since been featured in a number of exhibitions. This experience came in useful when he photographed Powis Castle and garden for Warriors’ Gate.
His connection with Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is covered in further depth in The Black Archive. However, this evolved out of the film adaptation of the absurdist radio play The Dissolution of Dominic Boot (the production originally supported by John Tydeman at the BBC), entitled The Engagement (1970). My original draft joined more of the dots between Beckett, Stoppard and Joyce, through their shared dark sense of humour, one that became more evident in The Engagement. By dint of it being a film adaptation, it also allowed Joyce to add visual comedy to the piece. It was a sensibility that Joyce also eventually recognised in Gallagher’s scripts as well as the many shared connections between Beckett, Stoppard and Shakespeare.
Joyce’s The Engagement piqued the interest of The National Film Finance Corporation and their funding enabled him to start production on a film adaptation of Thomas Hinde’s existential thriller The Day the Call Came. Filming did commence in 1971 with actors Dennis Quilley, Anna Carteret and David Warner but the British film industry was in decline at that time, further finance could not be secured and the film was abandoned. Hinde’s ambiguous narrative about paranoid schizophrenia is important in that Joyce’s fascination with the psychological states of characters would influence his Play for Today: Keep Smiling (1980) and colour certain aspects of Rorvik’s personality in Warriors’ Gate. The early drafts of The Black Archive outlined more of Hinde’s narrative and its relationship to Joyce’s Keep Smiling but again there was not enough space to include this:
The narrator of Thomas Hinde’s thriller, Harry Bale, seems to be a sleeper agent operating undercover as a fruit farmer in rural suburbia. When a message arrives and alerts him to stand by, he spirals into paranoia and believes his minders are contacting him through cryptic telephone messages or mirror signals from mysterious parked cars. They could also, however, be the ravings of an unreliable, delusional narrator. Bale’s growing suspicion of his neighbours, which is a stingingly detailed observation of rural life by Hinde, and his anxiety about his ‘orders’ may simply be the result of his psychosis. Aspects of Bale’s delusions, and Beckett and Stoppard’s use of character duos as metaphors for the dual nature of the human personality, eventually crop up in Keep Smiling.
This sense of duality, of split personalities and the absurdly tragicomic, in Beckett, Stoppard’s play and in Hinde’s book, also found its way into one of Joyce’s first forays into television, albeit as a writer rather than a director. His work with Peter Terson — as co-writer and director — on a play called Love Us and Leave Us at the Open Space Theatre in 1976 eventually led to a three-part Crown Court for Granada called ‘The Jolly Swagmen’ (1976).
My original draft went into some detail about Joyce’s connection with Terson, who had a substantial working relationship with regional theatre and television in the late 1960s and 1970s as playwright-in-residence at Stoke’s Victoria Theatre. He also wrote The Wednesday Play: Last Train Through The Harecastle Tunnel (1969), an eccentric comedy directed by Alan Clarke. He contributed a notable comedy trilogy, The Fishing Party (1972), Shakespeare — or Bust (1973) and Three for the Fancy (1974), all featuring the same three Yorkshire miners as the leads and produced by David Rose, to Play For Today. I took up the story thus:
The Jolly Swagmen incorporates two of the play’s [Love Us and Leave Us] characters and reiterates Joyce’s enjoyment of tragedy and comedy that highlight life’s trivialities that he related to in Warriors’ Gate. Jobbing builders and pub comedy duo Albert Lovelace [George Innes] and Ronald Leavis are accused of robbing pensioners after gaining entrance to their homes disguised as tradesmen. They are temporarily excluded from their own trial when they continually interrupt the proceedings from the dock with their caustic theatrical banter and routine. The two performers allegedly played an elaborate practical joke on one of the pensioners and were mistaken for the ‘Jolly Swagmen’ gang of thieves, who have a similar predilection for dressing up. For Joyce, it was also another opportunity to work with actor [George] Innes who had appeared in The Engagement and who Joyce would approach for Warriors’ Gate.
Mistaken identities and banter were present in Gallagher’s original scripts for Warriors’ Gate and the characters of Lovelace and Leavis mirror the verbal jousting between Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, in Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, that Joyce later acknowledged were central to his on screen interpretation of Rorvik’s feckless crew.
There’s also another important connection between Joyce and Peter Terson. Namely, the much revered producer David Rose. The plays produced by Rose while he was Head of English Regions Drama at BBC Birmingham and his influence on Joyce are discussed further in the book. We did have to cut further discussion of BBC Birmingham’s output — important not only to Joyce as an aspiring television director but also relevant to the development of the television film, regional voices in television and the use of the television studio to experiment with narrative. Taking my cue from Joyce’s appreciation of Play for Today: Red Shift (1978), an adaptation of Alan Garner’s book filmed by John Mackenzie, I took a little detour into Rose’s remit at BBC Birmingham to try and underline how that opened up to Joyce the potential of specifically authored work in television drama:
Red Shift [with its narrative moving through different phases of history, linking the destiny of three men across space and time, the Cheshire landscape and a Neolithic axe] was one of many remarkable dramas he [Rose] made at BBC Birmingham for Play For Today and was typical of his remit to work with regional writers, many of whom were new to television. He also increased the number of plays made entirely on film and encouraged experimentation in the studio. He developed this approach with two half-hour drama strands Thirty-Minute Theatre (1965–73) and Second City Firsts (1973–8), perhaps each best represented by both A Touch of Eastern Promise (1973), then a rare instance of a half-hour play filmed completely on location and capturing the verisimilitude of its Birmingham setting, and David Mercer’s You and Me and Him (1973), an innovative studio drama made with minimal sets using one single actor, Peter Vaughan, playing a character with three divided personalities. To show these personalities in conversation with each other it relied on ‘clever use of eyeline matching, and the skilful editing of videotape editor John Lanin.’ [Cooke, Lez, A Sense of Place: Regional British television drama, 1956–82, p87] Rotten (1978), the last Second City Firsts, also demonstrates the creative freedom afforded a director like Philip Saville, who fashioned ‘an experimental drama using electronic effects, split-screen, montages and superimposition to tell the story of a boy who lives a childhood fantasy life in the 1960s, inspired by the music of the Beatles, growing into a rebellious teenager by the time punk explodes onto the scene in the mid-1970s.’ [Cooke, A Sense of Place: Regional British television drama, p122]
Rose’s own desire to push the boundaries of what was possible in television drama, without interference from Television Centre in London, resulted in several other standout entries in the Play for Today canon… David Rudkin’s Penda’s Fen directed by Alan Clarke and Philip Martin’s Gangsters… On the one hand Penda’s Fen was a non-naturalistic exploration of English landscape, mythology, sexuality and identity and on the other, Gangsters was an urban, fast-paced thriller in the stylistic mode of a Hollywood B-film that depicted the multi-racial tensions within an inner city Birmingham riven by drug dealing, illegal immigration and corruption. The latter also experimented with non-naturalism and reality, genre hybridity and narrative construction, even more so when it became a series for BBC One in 1976.
The original drafts of ‘Chapter 1’ then continued to explore Keep Smiling, the television play that producer John Nathan-Turner saw after Rose had recommended Joyce as a director to him. Much of this play, written and directed by Joyce, is covered in The Black Archive and it describes Joyce’s use of the studio and location filming to underline the encroaching paranoid schizophrenia experienced by his main characters Simon and Mary. Some strong examples of Joyce’s writing and direction, and worth mentioning, were cut from the book — again simply because of space. They emphasised his use of genre, familiar themes and the studio recording and location filming to underline the surreal aspects of the play:
Joyce films Simon’s struggle into work as a mock thriller. He shows Simon’s boss on a phone, reflected in a desk lamp, saying ‘we need to know which way he’s going to jump’ and frames Simon through the dangling telephone cord cutting across screen. This film noir inflection also characterises the studio work, using tight framing with close ups in the foreground and action in the background, oblique camera zooms and low-key lighting. Keep Smiling demonstrates Joyce was already imbuing his studio recordings with the film techniques and genre aesthetics that would distinguish Warriors’ Gate.
Mary’s doctor can only offer sedation and he predicts Simon will present further paranoid states, will lose his job and that she ‘should prepare for a siege.’ Several disturbing sequences reflect this. One evening, as Simon watches the television news, the newscaster on the screen switches from the news studio, out of the television set, and appears at the kitchen table to read the headlines. The purple lighting of the TV broadcast is cleverly replicated in the kitchen, recreating Simon’s sensory processing as he considers the death tolls regurgitated by the bulletins. Later in the play, having heard the news of an Ethiopian famine, a roast beef joint Mary has cooked for dinner is seen from his POV dissolving into the image of a famine victim’s body.
As Simon spirals into a violent delusional state, the effect on Mary and their two children takes precedence and Joyce’s narrative becomes an examination of her and the children surviving Simon’s abuse and the disintegration of her marriage. She is forced to leave him, after her doctor and the police (represented by a Beckettian double act of sergeant and constable who come to visit her) refuse to intervene, and she brings up the children on her own. Despite the subject matter Joyce finds moments of comedy, often in Mary’s intermittent encounters with Cath who sums up Simon’s mental health crisis as merely ‘recapturing his lost youth.’ Her advice to put a brave face on it all reflects the play’s title, mentioned in postcards the now absconded Simon has sent and that he conveys in voice over, ‘keep smiling, love Daddy, kiss, kiss.’ For the play’s conclusion Joyce impressively cranes up from a wall of Simon’s postcards covering the windows of Mary’s home and tracks across the garden as her children run through fields in the foreground of a distant industrial landscape. [In our interview, Joyce suggested he was trying to show how life carried on in the wider world beyond Simon’s disturbed mind.]
Beyond some further material about the play’s reception, the book then moves to the production of Warriors’ Gate itself, mostly covered in the early drafts of ‘Chapter 2’. We cut less of the material from this draft and instead tightened up what was written. A few stories of Joyce’s experiences in the studio were truncated because of space but also because it was also felt, in the end, that many of these anecdotes had already been highlighted in other publications and there was little new material to add to a narrative covering what was obviously a difficult time for everyone working on Warriors’ Gate. There were still a lot of new insights about the story to encompass in the book and one of the most important was a fuller appreciation of the relationship between Warriors’ Gate and the work of French film director Jean Cocteau.
The first drafts of ‘Chapter 2’ were structurally different from what was published in The Black Archive, in which material was more succinctly organised around major themes. For example, a comparison between Cocteau and Joyce originally led to the discussion about pop video and the New Romantic movement that would be used to conclude the published chapter on the cinematic and televisual aspects of Warriors’ Gate. This was probably the biggest section of the book that underwent a restructuring and a lot of material about politics, youth culture and the origins of the Blitz Kids went by the wayside. Sadly, in the process I lost the amusing Tom Baker quote about Alien (1979):
When the Conservative Party returned to power after Labour’s disastrous handling of the strikes that had crippled the country in early 1979 (collectively known as ‘the Winter of Discontent’), popular youth culture also evolved in response to Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street doorstep vision of a harmonious future. From the youth subcultures and diverse pop scene that had emerged in the 1970s, the major labels had largely assimilated punk’s reaction to the stagnation in music culture. However, in the post-punk era there were new forms of expression jostling for attention.
The short documentary film Steppin’ Out (1979) by Australian filmmaker Lyndall Hobbs, offered cinema audiences a brief exploration of London’s diverse youth cults and club culture zeitgeist. The 25-minute film visited King’s Road punk boutique Seditionaries, a Mod night at Legends, and a theme night at a little Covent Garden nightclub called Blitz. Hobbs’ footage of the Blitz was of a ‘Come As Your Favourite Blonde’ party rather than the legendary Tuesday ‘Bowie nights’ hosted by Steve Strange but it teased a nascent movement known as the Blitz Kids, one to become commonly known as the New Romantics, that had emerged from similar nights run by Strange and [Rusty] Egan at Soho club Billy’s in 1978.
The Blitz Kids, who wouldn’t really influence mainstream media and the music charts until the end of 1980, probably baffled cinema goers more eager to see the main feature and were unlikely to be sympathetic to the likes of Steve Strange and Boy George dressed to the nines, challenging rigid gender stereotypes and publicly showing off in a way that most people didn’t at the time. Ironically, the main feature they were waiting for was Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and Hobbs’ documentary accompanied the film’s exclusive run at the Odeon Leicester Square before its wider release in late September 1979. Despite Tom Baker’s advice that the crew of the Nostromo should ‘go down to the hold and bore the alien to death’, [The Horns of Nimon (1979) episode two, DVD commentary. Lalla Ward recalled that she, Tom Baker and Graham Crowden went to see it at the Odeon Leicester Square] Alien was just as much an influence on the look and feel of Warriors’ Gate as the advent of raiding history’s closet, releasing synth pop, and making music videos.
Warriors’ Gate went into production just as the first of the New Romantic bands made the charts and, from their humble origins, they became a catalyst for many of the cultural developments that followed in the 1980s. As Ultravox’s lead singer Midge Ure offered, ‘The Blitz was an important moment in British popular culture. It was the inspiration, the place that spawned London’s next ten years’ worth of creativity, maybe its next twenty.’ [Ure, Midge, If I Was… The Autobiography, p58] It articulated a moment of transition before the so called ‘New British Pop’ went on to conquer the charts on both sides of the Atlantic but it also inspired unemployed young filmmakers and fashion designers as well as musicians. Steppin’ Out caught a glimpse of the Blitz crowd and their kaleidoscopic style — part futuristic European, part Beau Brummell — was ‘like a glimpse of past and future all at once: the prototype sounds of tomorrow, the reanimated styles of yesterday.’ [Rimmer, Dave, New Romantics — The Look, p10] Again, this sentiment wasn’t too far away from the ideas explored in Warriors’ Gate and the refreshing of Doctor Who’s own visual and aural aesthetics as it too transitioned into the 1980s.
Much of this led into the aesthetics of pop video and its influence on Warriors’ Gate. I originally said a lot more about David Bowie and the making of the influential ‘Ashes to Ashes’ music video in the draft chapter too:
The pop video aesthetics of Warriors’ Gate also owed something to Blitz’s reputation for its ‘Bowie nights’, an homage to an inspirational pop cultural figure who, one night in May 1980, dropped in to the club to recruit some extras for a video shoot. On freezing Beachy Head and Pett Level Beach in Hastings, and at a cost of £25,000, director David Mallet, David Bowie, Steve Strange and his Blitz entourage of model Elise Brazier, fashion designers Darla Jane Gilroy and Judith Frankland, shot the location footage for Bowie’s music video to accompany the release of his forthcoming single, ‘Ashes to Ashes’.
A footnote we cut also covered this in slightly more depth:
Mallet is quoted that the video for ‘Ashes to Ashes’ cost £35,000 rather than the generally attributed £25,000 and a considerably more realistic sum compared to sources suggesting it cost £250,000. Mallet also mentions that the solarisation effect used on the sky and sea was in fact an accidental discovery when he was shooting a Hot Gossip routine for The Kenny Everett Video Show (broadcast 14th August 1978) on location in, coincidentally, Hastings. While Bowie mentions Giger as the inspiration for the bio-mechanical ship in the music video, Mallet also refers to it in a conversation with Bowie as ‘the scene from Quatermass where you’re plugged into the spaceship’. [Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane and Martin Power, ‘Culminating Sounds and (En)Visions — Ashes to Ashes and the case for Pierrot’ in Eoin Devereux, et al, eds, David Bowie: Critical Perspectives, p43]
Further to this, and long after my book was put to bed, a rewatch of Thames Television’s The Kenny Everett Video Show (1978-1981) confirmed that not only did Mallet develop his visual techniques on the Hot Gossip sequence but that he also used the same location and applied the same solarisation effects to the recording of a windswept Justin Hayward crooning his hit song ‘Forever Autumn’ which featured two weeks earlier in the 31st July 1978 edition. [I’m grateful to Nicholas Pegg for tweeting this revelation]. As noted in my book, Warriors’ Gate embraced similar video techniques.
I also dropped from a very early draft of this chapter various connections between television and pop video aesthetics and the underground film makers of the period. The youngest of them were students who frequented Blitz:
Regular Blitz Kids included filmmaking students from St Martin’s College of Art and the RCA. The work of John Maybury, Cerith Wyn Evans and Holly Warburton, inspired and supported by the iconoclast artist and director Derek Jarman, extended the tradition, created by directors Kenneth Anger, Jean Cocteau, and Jean Genet, of filmmakers working outside the structuralist film canon. Jarman was also a regular visitor to Blitz and understood the way the wind was blowing. He directed the 12-minute promo film for Marianne Faithfull’s album ‘Broken English’, shortly after the release of his darkly romantic film adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1979), and incorporated Faithfull within a beguiling tapestry of Super 8 footage, evocative of Anger’s own ritualistic, alchemical imagery.
Jarman noted of The Tempest: ‘It is an image of the times. The look of the film parallels but does not copy the extravagance of the new romantics who in their turn reflect the deep insecurity of our time and the conservatism it has engendered.’ [Quoted in Wymer, Roland, British Film Makers: Derek Jarman, p71] Maybury had been making his own Super 8 films before he worked with Jarman during the filming of Jubilee in 1977. Coincidentally, the work of Jean Cocteau, the very definition of the European Romantic auteur film director, an influence on Jarman’s films, particularly in the use of images of mirrors, was a vital aesthetic exemplar for Warriors’ Gate.
Maybury, Evans and Warburton incorporated new video techniques and cheap Super-8 technology into their work but it was rich in content and form, offering a baroque, transgressive counterpoint to the formal aesthetics of avant-garde film. Slow-motion, superimposition, colour, hand-made props and scenic design were combined with dance, performance, music, photography and fashion. This identifiable pop surrealist aesthetic already had some precedence in experimental television drama and entertainment shows but it would also merge with music videos, a number of which Jarman and Maybury also went on to direct. These artists were instrumental in breaking down the rigid divisions between film and video and had ‘no allegiance to what they saw as a hopelessly elitist and ‘academic’ film practice which too often seemed to illustrate high theory.’ [O’Pray, Michael, ‘Moving On: British Avant-Garde Film in the Late 1970s and Early 1980s’] Taking into context the work of director Paul Joyce, we could see this return to non-realist aesthetics as a reflection of the European film consciousness and ‘artiness’ he was attempting to bring to a multi-camera, studio bound production such as Warriors’ Gate.
Finally, a long section about the increasing use of synthesisers in popular music was also dropped at quite an early stage. It was an over elaborate attempt to tie the developments at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in with new technology and Nathan-Turner’s modernising remit but I ultimately felt it didn’t really go anywhere contextually:
Similarly, when the budget conscious Nathan-Turner reviewed the production of music in Doctor Who, he approached the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1979 to investigate whether it was possible for the Workshop to take on the composing of all the music required by the series. By then, technology was becoming cheaper and the Workshop was incorporating more synthesisers into its stable of instruments. Making his case to the Head of Drama, Nathan-Turner reasoned that it would not only be more cost-effective to commission the Workshop but also their output would better reflect the kind of music he felt should be the score to Doctor Who. As composer Peter Howell recalled of Nathan-Turner’s approach, ‘he wanted it to be more modern. He didn’t use many adjectives but that was one of them.’ [Peter Howell, Toby Hadoke’s Whosround podcast 219, August 2017]
This sense of modernism sprang from a European ‘futurism’ in music that Blitz’s DJ Rusty Egan was incorporating into his play lists in 1979. Skewed towards playing tracks that made heavy use of synthesisers, he was already ‘blending the English, French and German versions of tunes such as Bowie’s ‘“Heroes”’ or Kraftwerk’s ‘Showroom Dummies’… with syndrums and other percussion effects, echo units, even random noises from a portable radio.’ [Rimmer, Dave, New Romantics — The Look, p86.]
The Radiophonic Workshop itself had been established in the 1950s during a period when artists and classical composers were experimenting with sound and electronic processing and used tape loops and early electronic instruments, such as the Theremin and the Ondes Martenot, in their work. A variation of ‘musique concrete’, the use of tape to manipulate found sounds combined with oscillators and white noise generators, influenced Workshop composers Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, Desmond Briscoe and Dick Mills. Derbyshire employed these techniques to realise Ron Grainer’s original Doctor Who theme in 1963 and it is now seen as one of the most influential pieces of electronic music. The Workshop’s output, providing sound effects, jingles and incidental music for radio and television, also developed in parallel with the growing incorporation of tape loops, noise generators and synthesisers into rock and pop compositions by the likes of The Beatles and The Beach Boys.
By the end of the 1960s the use of Moog synthesisers, brought to commercial popularity via composer Wendy Carlos’ ‘Switched-On Bach’ album in 1968, had crossed over into the mainstream. Synthesisers, sequencers and drum machines became dominant tools in the musical armoury of many European musicians. In Germany, the likes of Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Can and Faust established a progressive and influential musical movement that along with Brian Eno and Bowie’s experiments in pop, ambient electronics and minimalism on the ‘Low’ (1977) and ‘“Heroes”’ (1977) albums, mixed and recorded in Berlin, fuelled the synth pop that emerged in the wake of punk and heralded the arrival of the New Romantics. Simultaneously, French electronic musician and composer Jean-Michel Jarre scored a huge commercial success (despite a hostile music press more infatuated with punk at the time) with his 1976 album ‘Oxygène’ and, equally determined to keep up with music technology, he incorporated sequencers in the similarly derided follow up ‘Équinoxe’ (1978). The sampling technology of the Fairlight CMI, which was probably first heard by record buyers on Peter Gabriel’s third solo album in May 1980, was also used on Jarre’s ‘Magnetic Fields’ album in 1981. These technologies and instruments were to become tools of the trade to the composers at the Workshop in Maida Vale and Nathan-Turner even referred his boss Graeme McDonald to Jarre’s music when he made his case for reimagining the Doctor Who theme music. [Marson, Richard JN-T The Life and Scandalous Times of John Nathan-Turner, p96.]
Much of the above was still in the draft as late as November 2018. It was an expansion on the June to September drafts and by then had incorporated all the analysis of Gallagher and Joyce’s work on Warriors’ Gate, it’s relationship to Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958), Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bete (1946) and Orphee (1950), and Resnais’ L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961). These sections and the concluding chapter on the artist Caspar David Friedrich were left relatively unaltered compared to the editing and restructuring of other material as I’ve described above.
I hope you enjoyed this patchwork of material that exists on the other side of the Warriors’ Gate and The Black Archive mirrors. Thank you again to Philip Purser-Hallard, Stuart Douglas and Paul Simpson at Obverse Books, to Stephen Gallagher and Paul Joyce for all their help and encouragement, to Hull History Centre and BBC Written Archives and, finally, to all of you who bought, read and enjoyed the book.
Material originally included in the first unpublished drafts of The Black Archive: Warriors’ Gate revised 2023. All written material by Frank Collins (the author) is © 2023 and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Please seek permission from the author if you would like to quote or re-use any of the author’s own written material.
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