The Myth Makers, by Ian Z. Potter (and Donald Cotton)

When I first listened to the audio of this lost story, with linking dialogue read by Peter Purves, in 2007, I wrote:

The Myth Makers was the four-part story between the single-episode, Doctor-less Mission to the Unknown and the twelve-part epic The Daleks’ Master Plan, bringing the First Doctor, Steven and Vicki to ancient Troy. Vicki here becomes the second regular to be written out after developing a love interest; the Doctor is mistaken for Zeus and helps Odysseus construct the wooden horse, though is somewhat obsessed with its fetlocks “no safety margin at all… if only you would have allowed me another day to fit shock absorbers!”

I liked the creative reinterpretation of the characters from the Greek legend. Priam takes a shine to Vicki, renames her Cressida and won’t hear a word against her. Both Paris and Menelaus are incompetent, the former a coward and the latter drunk, making one wonder what Helen ever saw in either of them. (Menelaus: “I was heartily glad to see the back of her!” Paris: “I think this whole business has been carried just a little bit too far. I mean, that Helen thing was just a misunderstanding.”) Helen herself never appears in person, the BBC beauty budget presumably not reaching that far. The interpretation of the story that will always remain with me, I think, is Roger Lancelyn Green’s The Luck of Troy, but this will do as an sfnal version.

As with all the “lost” stories, one never knows what one missed, though I can make a couple of guesses – Frances White (Julia in I CLAVDIVS) as Cassandra, or Vicki in her dress. But Peter Purves’ narration is, as ever, great, even though of the three regular characters his has the least to do. We end with a real acceleration of pace towards the next story; Vicki and the Doctor say their goodbyes off-screen, while Cassandra’s handmaiden Katarina accompanies a wounded Steven aboard the Tardis as a new (but very short-lived) companion.

When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2010, I watched the Loose Cannon reconstruction and wrote:

The first three episodes of The Myth Makers are tremendous fun, rather in the spirit of Carry On Cleo which came out a few months earlier. The switch to epic drama and tragedy in the last episode is rather effective and sets the tone for the next story better than I had remembered. Donald Cotton presumes that the audience will have sufficient familiarity with the Trojan legends to appreciate the paradox of the various heroes being vain, cowardly, stupid, greedy or alcoholic.

I wonder also if he deliberately reversed the events of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, where Cressida leaves Troilus for Diomede rather than the other way round. I know that the received wisdom is against me on this, but mention two further, admittedly weak, hints at a deberate reversal: Vicki arrives in Troy while Shakespeare’s Cressida leaves the city; and Hector is killed at the end of the Shakespeare play but the beginning of the Who story. Also, though this may not count, Troilus kills Achilles here, whereas Shakespeare has Achilles triumphant and alive at the end.

The lore is that Hartnell was in bad form while this was being made, but he seems to me to greatly enjoy his banter with Ivor Salter as Odysseus. Mind you, I felt a bit sad when I realised that John Wiles’ name had replaced Verity Lambert’s in the credits, and I am sure Hartnell must have started wondering how much longer he would last as the sole survivor of the original cast and crew. (Another year, as it turned out.)

Watching the reconstruction again, the striking thing is how little the Doctor and companions do; Vicki and Stephen spend most of the story imprisoned, and the Doctor just does the horse (though admittedly that’s a big part of the plot). I did like the dynamics among the Trojan ruling family. Barrie Ingham, who plays Paris, had also just played Alydon in the first Peter Cushing film, Dr Who and the Daleks. You can find the recon online, and get the Purves narration here.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Donald Cotton’s novelisation of his own script, written twenty years after it was broadcast, is:

Mind you, we Greeks are constantly expecting the materialisation of some god or other, agog to intervene in human affairs. Well, no – to be honest – not really expecting. Put it this way, our religious education has prepared us to accept it, should it occur. But that is by no means to say we anticipate it as a common phenomenon. It’s the sort of thing that happens to other people, perhaps; but hardly before one’s own eyes in the middle of everyday affairs, such as the present formalistic blood-letting. Certainly not. No – but, as I say, the church has warned us of the possibility, however remote.

When I first read it in 2008, I wrote:

Once again, Cotton produces a memorable Who novel through a first person narrative: this time he has the poet Homer telling the story of how he witnessed the Doctor and friends interfering with the outcome of the siege of Troy. Homer didn’t appear at all in the story as broadcast (though Cotton has him absorb the silent role of the Cyclops played by Tutte Lemkow); constricting the whole narrative to a single viewpoint character does create some difficulties in telling the story, but basically it is a really good story anyway, and while it’s not Cotton at the utter peak of his form, it is surely one of the top ten novelisations. Cotton has taken the opportunity to restore as chapter titles some of the punning episode titles scrapped by the production team (eg “Doctor in the Horse”).

Coming back to it now, I still very much enjoyed it, including the anachronistic asides, especially as I have read a few more novels loosely based on the period, and also recently read the Wilson translation of the Odyssey. You can get it here.

Before I get onto Ian Potter’s Black Archive, which (spoiler) is one of the best in the series, I have been doing a little research myself into the BBC’s previous treatments of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. The first broadcast version was on the National [radio] Programme in 1935, and a couple of names leap out, most notably that Menelaus was played by Francis De Wolff, who would play Menelaus’ brother Agamemnon on Doctor Who thirty years later. It was an early break for Jack Hawkins and Anthony Quayle as well.

Francis De Wolff was in another radio production on the Third Programme in 1946, this time playing Ajax, and here Pandarus was played by Max Adrian, who of course was Priam in Doctor Who. Other Whovian names that jumped out at me were Valentine Dyall as Hector, Leonard Sachs as Paris and Laurence Payne as Troilus. Cresside was played by Belle Chrystall.

Belle Chrystall and Valentine Dyall returned in the same roles for a 1952 Third Programme production, in which Troilus was played by Marius Goring. Grizelda Hervey, who had been Helen in 1946, was Cassandra this time.

The first TV version in 1954 featured Donald Eccles as Priam, eighteen years before he played the High priest of Atlantis on Doctor Who. John Fraser was Troilus, Geoffrey Toone was Achilles, and Timothy Bateson and James Culliford also had small parts.

Familiar names again in a Third Programme production in 1959, with Francis de Wolff returning as Ajax and Valentine Dyall as Hector; Achilles is Trevor Martin, who much later played the Doctor on stage.

Another Third Programme production in 1964 is very star heavy – no crossover with The Myth Makers this time, but many actors who went on to star in Who, with Michael Kilgarriff doing the prologue and Margarelon, Julian Glover playing Hector, Stephen Thorne as Aeneas, Cyril Cusack as Pandarus, Maurice Denham as Ulysses and Peter Pratt as Ajax.

A televised National Youth Theatre production in 1966, a year after The Myth Makers, featured a young Timothy Dalton as Diomedes and also Derek Seaton, later to play Hilred in The Deadly Assassin, as Ulysses. The director was Bernard Hepton who went on to star in Secret Army.

Most entertaining of all, The Listener‘s review of a Radio 3 production in 1980 tells us that “Maureen O’Brien beautifully played Cressida as a squeaky sex kitten – a wanton from the start, with come-hitherish inflections.” Other familiar names include Gabriel Woolf as Agamemnon, Sheila Grant as Cassandra and Terence Hardiman as Hector.

The following year the BBC Television Shakespeare has less crossover with Doctor Who, with Vernon Dobtcheff as Agamemnon the only name I spotted. I thought it was interesting.

The only production since then is a 2005 Radio 3 version, where the only Who-related name I spotted was Toby Jones as Thersites.

In the 47 years between 1935 and 1981 there were seven BBC radio productions and two on TV of Troilus and Cressida, not to mention several productions of William Walton’s opera which I have not listed above. In the 43 years since 1981, there has been just one.

There are two points that occur to me from this. One is that obviously expectations of how much Shakespeare you should expect to get on the BBC have shifted quite a lot since 1965. The other is that viewers of The Myth Makers when it was broadcast would have had a much better background knowledge of the Troilus and Cressida story than most viewers today.

Ian Potter’s Black Archive monograph is unashamedly longer than usual, but (spoiler) one of the best Black Archives I’ve read recently. He begins with a short note on the spelling of character names, and then a prologue explaining the good and bad points of the story (highlights – Good: it’s funny; Bad: it screws up Vicki’s departure).

The very brief first chapter, “Foundational Myths”, briefly surveys the limited archaeological evidence for Troy, a metaphor (this is not stated) for the limited evidence we have about the lost Doctor Who story.

The second chapter, “Source Texts”, looks at the Iliad and Troilus and Cressida, and frames an argument for how and why The Myth Makers differs from both.

The third chapter, “The Engaging Mr Cotton”, looks in great detail at the life and career of Donald Cotton, who wrote The Myth Makers. He wrote a lot for stage, and had written several previous treatments of Greek myth. He had a complex love life as well. (The only mistake I’ve spotted by Potter is in the name of Cotton’s protégée towards the end of his career – it was Tamsin Hickling, not Tamsin Wickling.) Its third paragraph is:

Donald Henry Cotton was born near³ Nottingham on 26 April 1928, the son of Professor Harry Cotton, the distinguished and respected head of Electrical Engineering at Nottingham University and a mother described by Cotton’s wife Hilary Wright as `neurotic and over possessive’⁴. According to Wright, Cotton’s father, while a popular and gregarious figure, was stand-offish with his son, and the boy seems to have grown up a solitary, guarded child. Cotton went to the local Southwell Minster Grammar School, a school which, having historically trained boy choristers, retained a strong music tradition. Reading his school’s annual magazine, Cotton seems to have made no special impact during his time there, unlike his father, who as the school’s governor regularly appears in its pages.
³ According to Cotton’s 1969 biography in the programme of My Dear Gilbert at the Worthing Connaught Theatre. His father’s address is given as Mapperley Street in Nottingham in the mid-193os, but local press places him in Gunthorpe, a small village near Nottingham, in 1952, so this may well be where Cotton grew up.
⁴ Testro, Lucas, ‘Man Out of Time’, DWM #58i, p25. More detail on Professor Cotton’s career can be found in Crewe, ME, ‘The Met Office Grows Up: In War and Peace’.

The fourth chapter “The Unravelling Texts”, is one of the longest I’ve seen in any Black Archive. Potter takes the extant versions of the script and traces its development from Cotton’s original hand-written notes to camera script and screen. This can be done badly or well, and here it is done very well. The most interesting conclusion (of many interesting points) is that Donald Tosh, the script editor, rewrote most of the fourth episode to take account of Vicki’s departure and the installation of Katarina as the new companion.

The fifth chapter, “What Did It Look Like?”, considers the limited evidence available, and also the reputation of director Michael Leeston-Smith, concluding that the horse itself must have been a fine thing.

The sixth chapter, “The Many Wiles”, is also long by Black Archive standards, and examines in detail the career of Doctor Who’s second producer after Verity Lambert, John Wiles. I have often given my view that the Wiles period showed a road not taken, a grittier show where companions might die and comedy mixed with tragedy, not so very different from New Who in fact. Wiles was South African, left in protest at apartheid, crashed out of his first big TV job (Doctor Who), and continued a career as a minor theatre writer and novelist. Potter has gone deeply into Wiles’ body of work, and emerged with a fascinating picture of the man, which would have been worth the cover price of this Black Archive on its own. In particular, he addresses Wiles’ attitude to racism (where he finds little case to answer) and underage sex (where the evidence is more troubling). But the crucial point is that Wiles mishandled the writing out of Maureen O’Brien and lost the confidence of William Hartnell, who was then able to get him fired (though he seems to have jumped before he was pushed).

An epilogue apologises (quite unnecessarily in my view) for the length of the book.

As I said up front, this is a standout in the usually very good Black Archive series, and you can get it here.

Next: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, by Dale Smith (and Stephen Wyatt).

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The Myth Makers, by Ian Z. Potter (and Donald Cotton)

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