I think the Gunfighters works really well in how it combines humour and grimdark stuff, it does something kind of like The Three Amigos, where Stephen and Dodo think they're in this light-hearted Roy Rogers romp, dressing up in silly outfits and doing bad American accents and not realising that the cowboys they've met are the historically accurate violent sociopath kind. It's unfortunate that some of the cowboys unintentionally bad American accents are as bad as Peter Purves's intentionally bad American accent, though― soref
when i was growing up with the show "the gunfighters" had a reputation for being The Worst Doctor Who Story. i learned this from peter haining's "the doctor who file", actually, a book that received inexplicably wide distribution in the US in the '80s that solidified a lot of my ideas about the show
i think a lot of his unpopularity speaks to the biases of '80s fandom, which was very... let's say that "attack of the cybermen" didn't reflect the unique fan biases of ian levine. the approach taken to that episode reflected a lot of fan beliefs about the show at the time.
fans (and to be fair the audience at large) wanted monsters, not historical stories, and if the stories had to be historical stories, they should be Serious Historicals. also, by that point the show had finally broken through in the us (the 20th anniversary saw the show really start getting picked up by a lot of united states public television stations). a comedy historical featuring terrible american accents punctuated by a comedy musical number was pretty much the antithesis of what fans wanted from the show. also not helping the show's reputation: it existed in full. it's pretty easy to overlook a story's flaws when you can't actually _see_ those flaws. fans didn't want to watch "the gunfighters", they wanted to watch "the celestial toymaker"!
except that "the gunfighters" is _significantly_ better than "the celestial toymaker". getting cotton to write for the show is probably the best thing tosh and wiles ever did. doing historical stories that start out as comedies before taking a turn at the end to radically deconstruct historical myths is... i'll stand by my statement, it's not really the best approach for a show with an audience of three-year-olds. that's about the only criticism i have to make about cotton's writing. cotton is an _extremely fucking funny_ writer. i understood this from before i had any idea who he was. he wrote a piece in "the doctor who file".
god, cotton was even funnier than robert holmes, who also wrote a piece for the book, about five minutes before he died. it was a self-deprecating comedy bit. the guy who, as script editor, extensively re-wrote the show's scripts for three years, brought the show to new creative heights after having spent the past five years writing stories that established key elements of the show's character, in the process burning himself out and turning himself into an alcoholic wreck of a human being who had maybe one more truly great script in him ("the caves of androzani", 1984) - one of this man's only published prose works is a comedy bit about what a lazy writer he was. that comedy bit is literally all i knew about the man, for ages. i wasn't sure why the book had bothered to get the perspective of such an obviously marginal figure in the show's history.
knowing this now makes the piece even funnier. donald cotton was still funnier, though. god, y'all need to read the man's novelizations for target books. they're just really exceptional pieces of work. he did them for both of his scripts for the show as well as for dennis spooner's "the romans". some fans like to praise the historicals as being high-minded and elevated, but honestly, they're fucking bad history.
lucarotti was a good writer. i like his writing. unfortunately, "the aztecs" really does say a lot about doctor who's approach to writing history. there's the germ of a good idea here - barbara comes in and wants to end human sacrifice, and the doctor says that "you can't change history, not one single line." admittedly, the show was still in its first season. there wasn't sixty years of evidence directly contradicting that assertion. the thing is, there is _tons_ of room to morally critique barbara's liberal "reformer" point of view, her belief that is she can just end human sacrifice, she can keep the aztecs from being destroyed. this belief is nonsense, is what it is. it's her refusing to take accountability for the role imperialism and colonialism played in the extermination of indigenous peoples. doctor who, an alien, is in a unique position to point this out, to point out it wasn't human sacrifice that destroyed the aztecs, but european culture. he could point out the very specific role christianity played in destroying a lot of the best historical sources of indigenous people, with missionaries declaring their works "heresy" and destroying them. instead, lucarotti's scripts seem to implicitly make the doctor a member of the church of england!
if this all seems a bit radical for a children's show, well, davies can fucking do that sort of thing. for me it doesn't matter how a story like that would have been received, what matters is that _lucarotti could never have written a fucking story like that_. that's the sort of story doctor who _could_ have done, the sort of story... i mean look, david whitaker wrote radically deconstructive stories, donald cotton wrote radically deconstructive stories. lucarotti's stories, as history, are utterly _whiggish_.
in contrast, the blog Escape to Danger says this of cotton's novelization of "the romans":
He learns from his companions of a passing scholar who they encountered in a nearby town, and who performed ‘a rambling iambic account of the Rape of Lucretia’, which he considers to be inappropriate for ‘a mixed audience’ (a view with which Vicki later agrees).
to try and describe cotton's approach to history, i thought about making a tasteless joke suggesting that cotton is the sort of person who would have done a historical about the rape of the sabine women... only to be reminded that _cotton himself already made a similar joke in 1987_.
i fucking love donald cotton, and it makes me so, so happy that "the gunfighters" is one of the few season three serials to survive in full. really, it's the best possible argument one can make for tosh and wiles' tenure on the show.
he submitted another script for the davis and lloyd production team, but they had no interest whatsoever in his script. which is understandable, except for the fact that their script pile was so low that they wound up filming "the underwater menace". not only is the script hot garbage, but the available historical evidence suggests that both of them knew full well it was hot garbage. thanks to the amazing performances of patrick troughton and geoffrey orme... and yes, i said geoffrey "NOTHING IN THE WORLD CAN STOP ME NOW!" orme. a lot of fans have a hard time with understanding the idea that people could be _intentionally funny_ on the show. orme is fucking _great_ in the callan pilot "a bullet for schneider", nothing at all like his role as zaroff here. just like everyone else, he knows he's playing a stock mad scientist in an utterly terrible script. his performance is not only extremely entertaining, but his character plays _so fucking well_ off troughton's - look at the recovered episode 2 and you can see their dynamic in action.
anyway. i can't blame them for not commissioning "the herdsmen of venus" as a script, but i bet it would have been fucking great.
cotton's only other major work in television is writing the untransmitted pilot of "adam adamant lives". the only bit of it that survives is the 1902 sequence, which was reused at the start of the transmitted pilot. the whole hook of the show is the contrast between the overwrought victorian drama of adamant and the reality of the 1960s, and the only bit of the pilot that survives is the bit where _everyone_ is exactly that overwrought. such a shame. it's just such a great idea for a character. look at this bit about the creative process:
The main character originally went through a number of possible names: "Cornelius Chance", "Rupert De'Ath", "Dick Daring", "Dexter Noble", "Aurelian Winton", "Magnus Hawke" and even "Darius Crud" before Sydney Newman settled on Adam Adamant.
"darius crud"! certainly better than "magnus hawke", which sounds like the name of an internet would-be "dominant" - not remotely dashing. sadly, he didn't write anything else for the show. instead the show commissioned a script by goddamn _dick sharples_. twice. sharples' first-season episode is the only one which doesn't survive in the archives, which is a bit of uncommonly good fortune. his second-season episode was called "death begins at seventy", because that's what passed for wit to the razor-sharp mind of dick sharples. sadly the episode in question no longer exists, which is in fact a bit of a shame, what with it having been directed by _ridley scott_ and all. i really ought to watch "the league of uncharitable ladies", the episode scott directed that does survive...
for anyone wondering i'm procrastinating from applying for jobs. that's why i'm writing novels. gives me an excuse to watch this adam adamant record, which, judging from the opening tag, is in fact _very_ well-directed - clearly a cut above the similar sequences in the b&w episodes of "the avengers", which is no small feat! a delight to watch. if you've taken the time to read all this nonsense, you absolutely _must_ see this scene, at the very least.
― Kate (rushomancy), Sunday, 10 December 2023 01:42 (four months ago) link
three weeks pass...