Like a lot of you I was tremendously excited and pleased to hear last month that two of the missing episodes of The Daleks’ Master Plan had been found, and what’s more that they would be released on iPlayer at Easter weekend. I have been a huge fan of The Daleks’ Master Plan since I first listened to it in 2007, and also enjoyed the Big Finish sort-of follow-up stories (there’s a great First Doctor / Second Doctor crossover called Daughter of the Gods). And over Eastercon I sneaked aside for an hour to watch the new discoveries.

The first episode, “The Nightmare Begins”, pleased me beyond my expectations. Hartnell has taken on the mantle of being the action hero of the story in a way that would have been unthinkable when he first started the show two years earlier. There is lots of Sixties angst about world government, peace, and combat in jungles (this is not Vietnam, but Malaysia, possibly Kenya, and going back a bit further Burma and Nagaland). The most important human being is visibly not a white man (though played, shamefully, by a blacked-up white actor). Women give men orders. And the Daleks are back. The BBC are very lucky that the first of the two recovered episodes is really one of the good ones. (Though it’s difficult to think of a lost Hartnell episode which is likely to have been a complete dud.)

The third episode, “Devil’s Planet”, isn’t quite as good, but it’s still attractive, with some great lines, as the Doctor shows his technological snobbery about the stolen ‘Spar’ spaceship. One wonders a bit about the prison planet Desperus. Are there any, er, women there? And where do raw materials and food come from? But it’s far from the least plausible planet ever seen on Doctor Who, or even in this story. And the ending of the episode, with Katarina held prisoner at knifepoint, is genuinely tense – especially when you know what happens next.

I’m also really delighted that Alan Stevens, whose work on Blake’s 7 and The Prisoner I have previously enjoyed, is publishing a book about The Daleks’ Master Plan in August.

One of the more bizarre reactions to the recovery of the two episodes was a piece in The Spectator by Gareth Roberts. Roberts, in case you missed the memo, wrote or co-wrote six episodes of New Who, nine stories of The Sarah Jane Adventures and ten Doctor Who novels, but was basically booted out of the Whoniverse in 2019 for his offensive tweets about trans women. (He was also pretty offensive about Muslims.)

Since then he has gone full-on culture warrior for the Right, and has been a regular writer in The Spectator since 2022. This week’s piece on “The surprising conservatism of the old Doctor Who” (I won’t link, but you can evade the paywall easily enough), asserts but fails to prove that Terry Nation, the writer of the story, and Douglas Camfield, the director, were “unusually politically conservative”.

Of course, what you get from art is often what you bring to it, but most people would agree that Doctor Who leans left – see, for instance, Alex Wilcock’s classic essay “How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal”. Malcolm Hulke, one of the classic series’ more prolific writers, was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Roberts’ evidence to the contrary is slim to the point of invisibility.

Roberts starts by pointing out (entirely correctly) that Nation’s writing “is often of the two-fisted war story kind, often featuring – as here – desperate commando missions in jungle terrain.” There’s nothing particularly right-wing about war stories in the context of mid-twentieth-century Britain. Bear in mind that the 1945 election was swung to Labour by the mailed-in votes of soldiers in the field. Roberts also points out that the (fascinating) scene set in the space command centre is implicitly critical of the complacent and affluent society of Earth in the year 4000. Again, nothing very right-wing about that.

In any case, the idea that the creator of Blake’s 7, which is about rebels against a militaristic regime led by a woman, was “unusually politically conservative” is ridiculous. Terry Nation often wrote about politics; but his strength was satire, coming as he did from comedy, and he applied his satire liberally to all. In “The Secret Invasion”, a Dalek novella published in 1979 but set in 1974, we read:

Now two more men were hurrying toward the conference room. One wore spectacles and a worried expression. The other had a fawn raincoat and was smoking a pipe. He reminded David of Mike Yarwood.

Emilie nudged her brother excitedly and whispered, ‘That’s Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary. And that’s the Prime Minister.’

David stared. ‘That’s not Mr Heath,’ he said derisively.

‘Of course it’s not,’ Emilie said impatiently. ‘It’s Mr Wilson’s turn this month.’ Emilie knew about politics.

As for Camfield, Roberts presents little evidence about his political views, other than that he had wanted a military career (but was ruled out on health grounds), and was friends with a right-wing writer. (A number of people in Doctor Who fandom used to be friends with a right-wing writer, before Roberts pushed them away.)

And Roberts presents literally no evidence that Camfield’s political views, whatever they may have been, had any influence on his work. True, he “conducted his TV work with incredibly precise and indeed military levels of planning”, but this is hardly an ideological quality. Looking in the other direction, it will not take you long to think of several examples of utterly incompetent and disorganised right-wing leaders.

I strongly recommend Michael Seely’s biography of Camfield, which goes deeply into his work but has little to say about his politics. There is a case to be made about his political views – apparently he opposed the closed shop, though as far as I recall this was a pretty centrist position in the 1970s – but you won’t find it in Roberts’ article, which is an intellectually lazy attempt to project the culture wars of today onto a TV show made before either of us was born (and I turn 59 in two weeks), written to confirm Spectator readers in their somewhat uncomfortable prejudices.

But do go and watch The Daleks’ Master Plan. It’s brilliant (what there is of it).