50th Masterversary - Part 1: Classic Doctor Who

[nym_wibbly]

Part One: Classic DW | Part Two: New Who | Part Three: Big Finish  | Part Four: Fanworks

Intro

Second of January 1971: Doctor Who: Terror of the Autons. That's 50 years today since the first appearance of the Master in Doctor Who. If the TV show planned to mark the glorious occasion at all, lockdown 2020 nuked their plans - they just about squeezed out yesterday's New Year's Day episode in time to get it under the wire. (They introduced a brand new incarnation of the Master, played by Sacha Dhawan, last New Year.)

 

Big Finish is all over it, though, with an audio Master-fest, Masterful, starring as many of the incarnations as they could scrape together (minus audio-Dreyfus, for reasons). Even the skittish John Simm got on board for this, adding his weight to a growing and welcome trend at Big Finish over the past few years. The Master was scarce at Big Finish for a very long time, first because they didn't have the rights to use the character then later because they're not a character to be used lightly - they'll totally steal the whole show if you give them so much as a line, let alone making them the big bad of the story.

 

As with many of the Big Finish lines, the Master has now gone critical over there. They're everywhere, from some long-overdue revisits by Mark Gatiss' AU incarnation to a growing range of solo spin-offs starring first Sir Derek Jacobi, then Michelle Gomez. Geoff Beevers, who's been plugging away on audio longer and more consistently than any of them, is the gift that keeps on giving - a while back he got to write and perform his own Short Trips title, I Am The Master, whch was evilly awesome. Somehow, finally, BF secured enough rights to the 1996 telemovie to be able to invite Eric Roberts aboard - he's got his own upcoming solo release, Master! Alex MacQueen, whose appearances remain scarce but oh-so-welcome, gets another outing in the anniversary special, and Jon Culshaw does scary things with his voice to bring us the incarnations whose actors have long since passed.

 

1971-1996

 

In 1971, Doctor Who introduced the Master - played by the late Roger Delgado - as an equal and opposite for Jon Pertwee's Doctor. A fellow Time Lord, another renegade. A foil. The phrase 'Moriarty to his Holmes' gets chucked around a lot, but it's not particularly accurate IMO. More like they're two sides of the same coin or, in the Doctor's case, "there, if I don't tread carefully, go I." The offscreen friendship between the actors gave instant chemistry between the Doctor and the Master, who spent as much time bantering and cheerfully one-upping as they did actually destroying/saving the planet. They're as much old school-chums as adversaries, and their dispute is a long way from being personal enough, or having sufficient baggage, to apply the word 'enemies'.

 

Their story rambled on over several long serials with the suave, courteous Master coming up with increasingly unwise plans to grab a bit of power, and the Third Doctor outwitting him with a roll of the eyes. (Curses! Foiled again! Reset.) It was going somewhere darker. The intention was to have the Master redeem himself at the last and die taking the Doctor's side. They never got to tell that story. Roger Delgado died in a car crash in the summer of 1973. The change to the TV show was profound - you can see Pertwee's heart and joy go out of it in the subsequent stories. He left the role the following year, handing over to Tom Baker in June '74. 

 

That's where I came in. 1974, me, newborn minifan. Doctor Who was part of my life before I can even remember - very likely I was parked in front of it from birth as my parents watched - but give or take a glimpse in what must've been a rerun of Tom Baker's The Deadly Assassin (Peter Pratt), I didn't meet the Master until 1981. Geoff Beevers briefly played the malevolent and murderous cadaver-incarnation who'd appeared in The Deadly Assassin. He handed over to the late Anthony Ainley, who was happy to allow the role of the Master to become career-defining. He got to kill Tom Baker almost immediately - so far, the only time the Master's "killed" the Doctor. By and large, they don't want the Doctor dead, or even to force their regeneration. There's a fondness or co-dependency in the relationship that started before Ainley came along - started with the personal camaraderie between Pertwee and Delgado - and persists to the present day, even when the Master (and, arguably, the Doctor) is long over the sanity horizon and into a much darker place.

 

Ainley would've loved that, I think. He always wanted to show that darkness in the character, but the BBC at the time was being shaped by the pucker-mouthed primness of the shrill, "Dear BBC, Yours, Disgusted" people who shrieked self-importantly every time there was a spot of blood, any notable violence, any Church-of-England-defined blasphemy or sin, etc. (I wonder what 2071 will make of today's self-involved armchair-crusaders with their effortless "me too" cyber-armies, and of how the Beeb rose to the challenge?) Darkness neutered, Ainley went crazy with the camp and the seductive, purring and smiling his way through several glorious outings through the Peter Davison (Fifth Doctor), Colin Baker (Sixth) and Sylvester McCoy (Seventh) eras. In his final story, Survival - in what turned out to be the last gasp for Classic DW on the BBC - Ainley did get to play it darker.

 

I was deeply and permanently influenced by the Ainley!Master and the handful of other villain/anti-hero archetypes who were around on my telly at the time. They were always the highlight of my TV experience, even though they often showed up only once per season, and that's broadly true even now. I'm drawn to these characters for their own drama, and for the sharp-relief viewpoint they offer on the nominal hero/protagonist/starring character of a piece. I say this quite a lot, because it's true: I imprinted on the Master at at tender age!

 

Ainley genuinely loved playing the Master, and it shows, even when he's working with mid-80's material so bad that the scenery ought to be melting in embarrassment - so bad that other actors in the scene look visibly wretched about it all. Ainley saved it by going all-out camp: the black-clad, goatee-sporting archetypal opposite to the Fifth Doctor's knight-in-white-cricket-gear hero. Darkness to the Doctor's Light... almost. It doesn't work without nuances, and it never could've. With Three-Delgado, it manifested as petulance and smugness in the Doctor, frustration in the Master, who at that point genuinely wanted to co-rule the universe with the Doctor rather than fight him. With Tom Baker, Ainley was a horrifying spectre - one of the bodysnatcher incarnations, out of regenerations and looking for any way to prolong his own existence. The Master became a true arch-enemy during the Fourth Doctor era, then something more complicated and less predictable during Peter Davison's time as the Fifth Doctor. There's a lot of clowning and fun capers, but watched with a cynical eye, those episodes are not the Doctor's finest white-hat hours. He hit some major grey-areas. That too carries over to the present day.

 

I'd paid close attention to all of this, and the modest developments in the print media and early audio that filled 'the Wilderness Years'. The 1996 TV Movie/failed pilot thingy killed off one incarnation of the Master - likely meant to be the Ainley one - in the opening scene, only to see him rise again in a newly-snatched body with added decaying gross, as the new body can't take it. By all accounts, Eric Roberts didn't mean to play it at all camp, just large. Um. Oops? (The script didn't help. I mean, actual onscreen bondage with Paul McGann's pretty, woobie Eighth Doctor. Actually wanting to take the Doctor's actual body.) Roberts is much more self-contained in his new audio role at Big Finish, which launched in one of the Diary of River Song episodes and continued in the final episode of Ravenous. I imagine he'll do great, dryly wicked things now he's got his 'own show' at Big Finish.

Part One: Classic DW | Part Two: New Who | Part Three: Big Finish  | Part Four: Fanworks

Comments

[luthien]

Thanks for your thoughts on this important day!

Ainley was also the Master I most strongly remember from when I was growing up. The ABC used to repeat certain Third and Fourth Doctor adventures over and over in the late '70s and earlyb'80s, but for some reason almost all of the Delgado Master episodes were not among them, so I didn't really get to know him until long after Ainley had become the defining incarnation of the Master for (young) me.

All of the incarnations of the Master give good value, though. Of the ones currently to be had on Big Finish, I particularly enjoy the War Master - perhaps because he's a bit of a throwback to the gentleman villain that I remember.

[sjh2009]

This was my Dr Who era. I started watching John Pertwee and then Tom Baker, I did watch Peter Davidson but didn't like Colin Baker so I stopped watching, although I have often picked up the odd episode now and then. But those early days, with the Daleks and The Master, I loved those episodes. It was the show that I remember watching all through my childhood and teenage years with such fondness.

Thank you for sharing.