Doctor Who: "Robot" (BBC Wales, 1974 & 1975)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, March 4) at about 9:15 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing four-part sequence from the original Doctor Who program on the BBC from Wales. It was called “Robot” and Charles and I streamed it on Tubi, which turned out to be a free service but one that fills the programs with ads. As a native of the United States I’m used to and relatively resigned to commercials, but they were annoying because Doctor Who was a BBC production and the BBC doesn’t have commercials (though maybe it does now; the Conservative Party has wreaked havoc on a whole lot of Britain’s non-capitalist traditions and it’s quite likely they’ve wrecked that one, too). The Doctor Who sequence we watched was the start of season 12 (though the home page said season four; that might mean that it was the first season where the fourth actor in sequence played the Doctor – more on that later) and the first episodes in which Tom Baker played the Doctor. Doctor Who premiered in 1963 and the first Doctor was William Hartnell, who was in a British “B” movie from 1943 called The Dark Tower. I remember the night Charles and I were watching that one and he recognized Hartnell as “the first Doctor on Doctor Who.” The gimmick was that the Doctor was the sole surviving Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey and every so often he would regenerate his appearance so he could be played by a different actor, though the original ground rules said he could have only 13 total incarnations before he would die permanently. (The producers of the Doctor Who reboot BBC Wales launched in 2005 have just ignored that rule.)

The “Robot” sequence was quite clever and well done, though Charles was disappointed that the villainous menace was purely terrestrial (“I like it better when they’re aliens,” he said at the end) and I was disappointed that we didn’t get to see the inside of the TARDIS (short for “Time and Relativity Dimensions in Space”), the vehicle through which the Doctor moves through various dimensions and historical eras. In fact, though the TARDIS was supposed to be able to reshape itself and fit into whatever historical era it was in (and Doctor Who was originally planned as an educational program in which the Doctor would travel to various events in Earth history that would be depicted relatively accurately, though by popular demand the producers quickly abandoned that premise and made it straight science-fiction), because of a malfunction early on it permanently froze into the appearance of a British police call box. “Robot” centers around a secretive research lab called Think Tank (apparently “Think Tank” was a recurring plot element, a group of malevolent scientists out to do dastardly things to the world) and its front group, the Scientific Reform Society (SRS). A professor named Ketterell (Edward Burnham), his hair frizzed to make him vaguely resemble Albert Einstein (the popular image of a scientist in the mid-1970’s, when this show was produced), has invented a super-robot of living metal and the folks at Think Tank/SRS are using it to steal the components to make a disintegrator ray gun. Their ultimate objective is to steal the nuclear launch codes of all the nations in the world that have nuclear weapons and threaten to start World War III unless all the nations yield sovereignty and authority to the SRS.

In Terrance Dicks’ original story, SRS is an underground group seeking to make the ideal world of Plato’s The Republic, governed by scientists and intellectuals who will make everyone else behave in the ways the elite has decreed is the “best” for them, a reality – only when they communicate these ideals to the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith (Elizabeth Whalen), the common-sense reporter who stumbles onto the SRS, they’re horrified at the fascistic nature of them. (Given the likely return of Donald Trump to the White House, this is a weird time to be watching a movie about a neo-fascist takeover of the entire world.) Dr. Ketterell originally programmed the robot to serve humanity, not destroy it – apparently Terrance Dicks had read Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and “borrowed” the Three Laws of Robotics – but the folks at SRS have reprogrammed it to kill at their command. In a not-too-surprising but legitimate reversal, it turns out that Dr. Ketterell actually quit the research institute not because they wanted to use his robot to destroy the world, but he was on board with the project to destroy the world and it was the people running the institute who didn’t want that. The second- and third-in-command at the institute are Miss Winters (Patricia Maynard, giving a good performance but speaking in such clipped tones she sounds like Julie Andrews’s younger sister) and Jellicoe (Alec Linstead), and there’s a nice joke when Winters upbraids Sarah for making the sexist assumption that Jellicoe, not Winters, is in charge of the operation.

Fortunately, the Doctor is able to invent a serum that neutralizes the structure of the “living metal” Ketterell made his robot out of, and by pouring the stuff into a red pail and then splashing it on the robot from his 1920’s-era yellow convertible the way Dorothy did in the Wicked Witch of the West with a pail of water in The Wizard of Oz, he’s able to melt the thing and end the threat. There’s an intriguing King Kong-esque subplot featuring Sarah, who was the only human who was actually nice to the robot (the baddies who invented it assumed it would never feel emotions, but Sarah knew better) and who can, within limits, pull it away from its destructive programming and actually awaken its kinder, gentler side. “Robot” is basically your generic Sci-Fi 101 plot of Sinister Batch of Humans Aiming to Destroy the World, but it’s got a lot of the highly campy bits that were a large part of the show’s appeal and helped it reach a wider audience than just children.