1.Inferno (1970)
Greg: Ah yes! I remember that one! In glorious colour! I saw it in about 1990 at a Doctor Who club in Southport. It was exhilarating! Amazing television. And for a seven-parter, it actually sustains, because Dr. Who is shunted off to an alternate world where George Orwell’s nightmare vision set out in 1984 seems to have come true.
Sam: The Doctor slips sideways in time during a key moment when the Earth’s crust is about to be penetrated and arrives in a parallel universe with a mirrored cast – is it Nazi or Communist? Either way it’s ghastly! – and discovers the great experiment will prove catastrophic. One thing that sticks in the mind is a poster (I think using the portrait of special effects man Jack Kine) that reads: Unity Is Strength.
Greg: The staring eyes of the man with the moustache – it’s pure Big Brother.
Sam: Very Orwellian indeed…
Greg: I think the idea is it’s meant to be Stalinist Communism, but it’s hard to tell the difference between that and fascism. The Brigade Leader (Nicholas Courtney) doesn’t seem to be perpetrating any ethnic cleansing, I suppose.
Sam: Either way, it’s a savage take on what the nation could have been like if the extreme ends of the political spectrum snatched the reins. Everybody is austere and awful. Even Liz Shaw, at least to start with. A ghastly bunch!
Greg: The bigger threat comes from the monsters – infected humans who have come into contact with a mysterious slime that transforms them into ape-like savages. The make-up on the primords is incredibly good – the skin kind of has a blue look. In fact, Dawn of the Dead went for the same colour some eight years later – and that’s creepy as hell too!
Sam: They’re almost cadaver-like… Combined with a super-human strength.
Greg: Is this one the scariest ever Who? I’m thinking of poor Walter Randall…
Sam: Ah, is that the friendly repair man we see at the very beginning, who ends up being a huge obstacle at the end? I suppose this is a classic zombie thriller – I’d never quite seen it that way before, but yes! It’s a viral thing.
Greg: It’s hard to fight a virus, as we know.
Sam: What I find terrifying about the whole disaster is that it devolves humans into base animals and it’s all the fault of human curiosity; the hubris to break into the Earth’s crust. This is one story that says: science should sometimes restrain its ambitions.
Greg: “When one tries to rise above nature, one is liable to fall below it.” – Conan Doyle. Yes, there’s Walter Randall and various regulars from director Douglas Camfield – Ian Fairbairn, for example. But Derek Ware as the infected UNIT soldier who attacks the Doctor atop the gas cylinder – that’s an incredible performance of animalistic mania. Like someone with rabies.
Sam: Indeed, I was really distressed when the Doctor encounters Ian Fairbairn – he we have all classes of society being debased into sub humans and turning on each other. It reminds you that your pension isn’t important when the world is on fire and man turns against man.
Greg: Utterly terrifying! It would stay in the mind of a child for a whole week! Inferno still creeps me out.
Sam: It’s a biblical apocalypse, all caused by the obsessions of a demented scientist, Professor Stahlman – played so sneeringly by Olaf Pooley. He’s arguably Pertwee’s finest nemesis save for The Master. It’s no wonder, at the age of 101, people were still asking him about a that role he played for seven weeks 50 years earlier…
Greg: So sad when Pooley finally left us in 2015, but what a life! What a part! So well-written. In fact, I do think Don Houghton is under-rated as a writer. This is a cracking set of scripts. There’s a great double act. Sheila Dunn, who is in this, was Douggie Camfield’s wife in real life. I think she’s rather lovely as Petra Williams. She teams up beautifully with Derek Newark as Greg Sutton, your kind of alpha male (despite his silk neckerchief) that all of these kind of stories need.
Sam: He’s great. Very macho, always angry. Lots of fists thumping desks like an episode of The Sweeney. This story is full of sweaty men waving fingers and shouting, “Now you listen to me!” The little romance between Sutton and Petra is a delicate detail, too.
Greg: Amazingly, Inferno had a troubled production as Camfield suffered a heart attack during filming. Renaissance Man Barry Letts, already producing, had to step behind the camera to keep it on track. The production doesn’t lose anything though!
Sam: And yet, as you say, at seven episodes, it doesn’t drop the ball once. It delivers in every episode. Perhaps because it’s the one Doctor Who story we see where it all, quite literally, goes to hell as the Earth is consumed in flame and magma – with screaming, insane humans eating each other – whilst the Doctor escapes alone.
Greg: It’s Armageddon.
Sam: What’s so heart-wrenching is how the Doctor has to win over his doomed friends, such as Liz, Petra and the arch Brigade Leader, to escape whilst he leaves them to a flaming fate. It’s an act of altruism that they give him safe passage in the hope their alter egos – in the other world – have a slim chance at life. Is that moment surely the most horrific episode of Doctor Who? Yet also the best?
Greg: Spot on! It’s amazingly audacious that the alternative Orwell world is left to burn. And Nick Courtney shows what a very fine actor he was with his cowardly, bullying Brigade Leader, meeting his end without any dignity.
Sam: All bullies are cowards. The blank look on his face when he realises he’s out of bullets is amazing. What a performance. It’s no surprise that this was Nick Courtney’s favourite Doctor Who story.
Greg: Dr. Who then has to explain that owing to the Blinovich Limitation Effect, he can’t take him back to his own timeline, except when that meddling boy Turlough is wandering around an alien ship. Or else, “zap”, or such like. I think I’m getting mixed up. It’s getting late…
Sam: Wrong era. Back to Inferno. Quick.
Greg: There’s Christopher Benjamin as Sir Keith Gold, too. Another great character performance. Bit of a grump in real life, but still. He’s never blocked me on Twitter for wrongthink, so Chris, all is forgiven!
Sam: There’s still time.
Greg: True. Is he a wokie? Have we ever watched this one together?
Sam: No, we haven’t. We only ever tend to watch the really rubbish stuff together, like Monster of Peladon. I watched this for the first time in 1994 with a school friend: I had birthday money to burn on the very expensive VHS double cassette. We watched it from beginning to end on a sunny day with the curtains closed. It felt like an epic experience – it still does.
Greg: You can never tire of watching this story. It sucks you in.
Sam: And what else shines through in this? Just how remarkable Jon Pertwee was as an actor: He gives it the lot; comedy, sarcasm, compassion, aggression, and endless energy. Watching Inferno, you realise just what Doctor Who could and should be. Mr Pertwee had it all.
Greg: It’s hard to argue with any of that! But, let’s answer our question posed earlier. It’s been lovely to revisit the Pertwee era, and remember the wonderful man himself. But the Third Doctor, was he a patrician Tory in the Churchill mould? Or was he at heart a leftie hippy?
Sam: What, a demented activist or a raging Nazi? Or is it actually possible to be a non-extreme mosaic and be non-party political?
Greg: According to Twitter, there’s only two sides. Ask Leela.
Sam: Perhaps we can accept a little learning from the Pertwee Era. I mean, all of these stories have different lessons about the dangers of jumping into one chamber of thought, don’t they? For instance, Invasion of the Dinosaurs is a warning to those who think being cruel in the name of a perceived, wider good is acceptable.
Greg: Communism.
Sam: Meanwhile The Green Death is a stance against globalisation and big industry.
Greg: Anti-capitalism.
Sam: Inferno is all about the dangers of blind scientific progress. Yet The Daemons has some respect for mysticism, or ancient values, whilst underpinned by rational thinking. I think I know which side the Doctor sits on, don’t you?
Greg: The side of the angels, boy. That’s an Edge of Darkness reference…
Sam: The simple answer? He’s above all this rubbish. And that’s what makes Doctor Who of this era so great. It’s all about the hard concepts, the big ideas, and what we can learn with open eyes and an open mind. Perhaps we’d all do well to look back on a few of Jon Pertwee’s greatest hours?
Greg: I couldn’t agree more. He’s seen so much of the world, and the universe. He doesn’t believe in easy answers or black and white moralising. He has wisdom – a word I associate with the Third Doctor. He’s also very English, fair-minded, good-mannered, charming, a touch dashing. He’s the best of us. Rather like his Bond contemporary, Sir Roger Moore.
Sam: And for that, we salute you Mr Pertwee. I don’t know about you Greg, but there’s just enough time for us to pop on the last episode of Planet of the Daleks. What do you say? Let’s spool up the VHS, hit play, and escape up that ventilation shaft with Jo Grant.
Greg: Oh, matron! Sounds good. If only your old man hadn’t wiped over it with an episode of bloody Hetty Wainthropp Investigates. Thanks for all the memories, Jon!
Sam: While there’s life, there’s hope…
Greg Jameson and Samuel Payne are two-thirds of The Complete Menagerie – a podcast dedicated to cult pop culture in space and time from 1963 to 1989. Most of their conversations lead back to Doctor Who.
Find out more and listen to episodes of The Complete Menagerie.
Catch up with Part 1 of Jon Pertwee’s Top 6 Doctor Who Stories.
