Day 59 — February 28th 2021
A Holiday for the Doctor and Don’t Shoot the Pianist
A Holiday for the Doctor (The Gunfighters — Episode One)
Come get yourself comfy, yes come settle in,
Gunfighters starts today, I’m ready to begin.
A bad reputation, weighed down by a song,
I’ve not got a lot to say, so this won’t be long…
Oh, how can you not enjoy The Ballard of the Last Chance Saloon? It comes in for a lot of stick, and often seems to be the reason that The Gunfighters has such a bad reputation, but I really enjoy the song, and I think it might even be my favourite part of the story! It’s not something I’d want the show to do every week, but I enjoy it as a one off for a story. I also find it amusing to imagine that it’s the TARDIS singing the song, and while this is the only time we as an audience are allowed to hear it, she does this during all of Doctor Who’s adventures, so he has a constant soundtrack running through his head. Sometimes, when I’m particularly bored, I like to imagine what some of these songs sound like. Go on, you try making something decent rhyme with ‘Yartek’.
There was a time when The Gunfighters was generally considered to be the single worst Doctor Who story ever broadcast. Because people said it was, and in the 1970s there wasn’t really any way to check. I spoke a little about this during The Celestial Toymaker, which ended up with a mythical reputation based on the memories of fans who’d seen it at the time. This one went the other way, and was roundly decried as being awful, and as a worthy candidate to go missing. It was even said that this story had garnered the lowest ratings ever, which isn’t true, and I’ll examine that falsehood a little more further down today’s entry.
I think what surprised me the most is just how funny this episode is. Everyone talks about The Romans and The Myth Makers as being the explicitly funny historical, but this one gives them a decent run for their money. The first real laugh for me came early on when Steven wonders why Doctor Who decided to give them all ridiculous psudonyms;
‘You can’t walk into the middle of a Western town and say that you’ve come from outer space! Good gracious me, we’d all be arrested on a vagrancy charge.’
The real comedian here, though, is Peter Purves. He’s brilliant throughout and shows a real affinity with comic timing. He’s spoken in the past about hating that he had to sing during this story, but I think it’s the best part of the episode, with some particularly funny double takes when guns are levelled at him. We even get the ‘Doctor Who?’ joke in this one, which I usually find falls a bit flat, but it doesn’t on this occasion;
Doctor Who: ‘And lastly sir, your humble servant Doctor Caligari.’
Masterson: ‘Doctor Who?’
Doctor Who: ‘Yes, quite right.’
It’s fitting that this joke should appear here in only Innes Lloyd’s second story as producer. You can argue all day and night about whether the lead character in Doctor Who is called ‘Doctor Who’ or just ‘the Doctor’, but I think it’s indisputable that Lloyd was making the show under the total belief that his name was absolutely ‘Doctor Who’, and to suggest otherwise would be bizarre. We’ll get a few indications of this over the next few weeks, so I’ll try and keep track of them as they come up.
I really like the idea that the two companions are initially excited to dive into an adventure in the ‘Wild West’, and their wearing of fancy dress cowboy costumes is exactly the kind of thing I can imagine New Testament Who doing (although now I think about it, we had another Western adventure in 2012 and they didn’t do that…). I also think Hartnell really suits the hat, and his regular costume fits in rather well with the period!
It’s fitting because we’re not visiting anything really resembling the real Frontier, but a Hollywood version of it. I think I’m right in saying that lots of the plot points in this story are taken directly from the 1957 film Gunfight at the OK Corral, meaning that a number of historical inaccuracies introduced there are carried across to this adventure. That’s not a complaint though; I don’t know enough about the history of this period for it to really matter, and I’d wager that a Hollywood Western is a better fit for Doctor Who than trying to be slavishly accurate.
The first episode is definitely not one of Doctor Who’s worst; 6/10.
Don’t Shoot the Pianist (The Gunfighters — Episode Two)
The ratings are falling, it’s time to worry,
Who’s on the decline in a real quick hurry.
At least that’s what they tell us, but is it the truth?
That the viewers didn’t care for Doctor Who’s sore tooth.
I don’t have an awful lot to say about this episode. It’s not that I haven’t enjoyed it (indeed, I liked it even more than A Holiday for the Doctor, which is reflected in the fact that I’ve given it a 7/10 score), I just don’t have much I particularly want to discuss in relation to it. It could also be that my mind is elsewhere because I want to talk about The Gunfighters’ reputation.
During the entries on The Celestial Toymaker, I commented that its status as some mythical ‘perfect’ lost story had risen up in the 1970s, when no one had seen the episodes in a decade, and we only had the memories of a few select fans to go on. The same is true for The Gunfighters but in reverse. The same fans who hailed Toymaker as a lost classic quickly dismissed Gunfighters as silly and rubbish.
I think this reputation was only solidified with the release of A Celebration in 1983 for the 20th Anniversary, in which Peter Haining seems particularly bitter about the story;
‘If ever reviewers feel tempted to pour scorn on the attempts by Americans to emulate British costume drama, a good lesson in humility could be learned from studying this serial as demonstration of how the British can not do westerns. It was billed as a show about the gunfight at the OK Corral, but it was more the massacre of the OK Corral.
So badly was the show received by the public that its audience viewing figures dropped below the horizontal axis line on the ratings graph in the Doctor Who producer’s office for the first time in the programme’s history!
What made this serial so poor is the cumulative effect of so many bad points, which on their own would be forgiven in most other stories. 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. It was certainly the story that decided in the mind of new producer Innes Lloyd that the time had come to rethink the policy of using historical stories in Doctor Who’s framework.’
Now I reckon given how important many fans have said A Celebration was to them in their discovery of old Doctor Who, things like this seep in and get treated as fact. It’s certainly presented as an outright fact in Haining’s text. he’s not giving the opinion that The Gunfighters wasn’t very good, he’s outright telling you that it is, and he seems to be attacking it from just about every angle imaginable.
I also reckon that pretty much everything he’s written there is absolute bollocks. So let’s take a dive in.
Taking issue with the script, or the performances, or the direction I can understand, even if I don’t agree. I took plenty of issue with The Daleks’ Master Plan and have had people tell me they absolutely disagree. That’s fine! It’s all subjective! The scripts I enjoy certainly won’t be to everyone’s tastes, and the same is true in the other direction. What we can examine, though, is the part about the viewing figures. That this was Doctor Who’s lowest-rated story is a myth that used to get repeated often, and I think it stems from a misunderstanding of what’s written here. It’s easy to forget that things like the viewing figures for 1960s episodes weren’t readily available in the 1980s, so it’s not exactly easy to check!
But Doctor Who’s ratings are something of a hobby for me. I have a big spreadsheet for New Testament Who which I keep updated as new episodes air (indeed, I’ve still not gotten around to watching the last series of the show, but I still made sure to update the spreadsheet each week!). I’m less well-versed on the ‘classic’ figures, but I was interested to see if Haining’s comments held up.
I suppose it comes down to what he means when he says ‘audience viewing figures dropped below the horizontal axis line on the ratings graph… for the first time in the programme’s history!’. Certainly some of the episodes of this story rated lower than most up to this point. Episode Four, The OK Corral, came in lowest with a figure of 5.7 million. But it’s not the lowest-rated episode we’ve had so far. Only a few weeks earlier, the first episode of The Ark attracted just 5.5 million, and episodes, and before that the very first episode of Doctor Who pulled in only 4.4 (although as it’s the first week, we’ll let that one off).
So if you take that statement to mean that The Gunfighters achieved a new low for the number of people watching… that’s simply not the case. Even if you’re looking at the average viewers across the serial you come out with a score of 6.25 million, which places it ahead of An Unearthly Child’s 5.90.
It’s also not the lowest the series was going to go before Hartnell left the role. The next story, The Savages, hits a low of 4.5 million for its final episode, and The Smugglers dips to 4.2 million. Both of those stories have an overall average viewership in the 4 millions.
The ratings for the latter half of Season Three seem to paint an odd picture. In the 1960s, Doctor Who was on telly almost year-round, which means it’s interesting to compare the figures for episodes broadcast in the same week across different years. Here’s the figures for all the episodes broadcast between November 1963 and the end of 1966;
Following the first episode of The Massacre (broadcast in the third week of 1966), the figures seem to fall off a cliff, shedding two million viewers, who don’t return for the next six weeks or so. The series climbs back up for the third episode of The Celestial Toymaker, before falling even further. The episodes airing between May and June 1965 were averaging between eight and ten million viewers apiece. That same period in 1966 averages between four and six.
It’s tricky to say why this might be the case. It could be that John Wiles was right, that the series needed a shake up. It’s certainly true that ratings don’t recover again until the last two episodes of William Hartnell’s tenure, and that once Patrick Troughton takes over as Doctor Who the ratings don’t dip below 6.75m again for almost two years. Equally it could be that the denser content of stories like The Massacre just didn’t capture the young audience and actively switched them off the programme.
When I’m looking at the ratings for the ‘new’ series, I don’t think the actual number of viewers are all that important. People will often say, when the series hits a new low in viewing figures, that they don’t matter any more, and that the way people has watched television has changed now. I think they’re probably right, although not to the extent that they’d like to be. For me, the more important figure is the AI — Appreciation Index — Number.
While the viewing figures will tell you how many people were watching any given programme, the AI Number will tell you what they thought of it. In the 21st century, viewers are asked to score the programme they’ve just watched out of 10, and these scores are used to work out an AI number between 0–100. The average AI Number for BBC One, the home of Doctor Who, is 81. In the 21st century the AI numbers have remained fairly consistent, with David Tennant’s episodes generally considered the most enjoyable by this metric, with an average of 86.3, with Matt Smith coming in at 86, Peter Capaldi at 82.7, Christopher Eccleston at 82.2, and Jodie Whitaker at 80.5.
The way the AI numbers have been calculated has changed massively over the years, meaning that it’s impossible to compare the numbers for 1960s Who to the ones taken in the 1980s, let alone the ones in the 21st century. But they can still be used to paint a picture of how people rated the show at the time. By this metric it is true to say that The Gunfighters hit a new low — with the final episode scoring just 30. At that time the average score was considerably lower — 62 for drama programmes on the BBC and 64 for childrens’ programmes. Doctor Who as a series falls pretty squarely between the two departments, so I reckon we could take 63 as an ‘average’ to aim for.
Up to this point, only seven episodes have hit or exceeded an AI of 63 and none since the first episode of The Dalek Invasion of Earth in November 1964. Most episodes tend to fall somewhere in the 50s, but as with the ratings there’s a noticeable drop off as the third series goes on;
The average AI for The Gunfighters — 38 — is considerably lower than the average AI for any other story in the Hartnell era, and I think it must have been this data being misinterpreted that led Haining to suggest that this was the lowest-rated story ever, perhaps inaccurately applying the term ‘viewing figures’ to the AI Number.
Whatever the case, the reputation for this story remained rock bottom for a long time. In a 1998 Doctor Who Magazine poll, this story was the lowest-ranked Hartnell adventure, coming in as number 151 of 159 with an average score of slightly under 5/10. Since then, with release on both VHS and DVD, the story has had something of a reappraisal. In the 2014 poll it placed 202nd of 241, with an average score of 5.93/10. That’s quite a jump. It’s also not the lowest-placed Hartnell any more — there’s five others below it.
So if you’ve always avoided The Gunfighters because of the reputation it’s carried for almost 40 years, maybe now’s the time to dive in and give it a go? I certainly reckon it’s better than people say, and it looks like fandom is starting to agree…
(Thanks for indulging my very long, very rambling, very number-heavy post today! Normal service resumes tomorrow…)
