A Bluffer’s Guide to Doctor Who: The Highlanders
English soldiers patrol the highlands after Culloden: Will the Doctor get away Scot-free?
Previously…
William Hartnell has been replaced by Patrick Troughton as the Doctor. After a six-part Dalek story to establish the new status quo, the series sets forth to reassure viewers it’s still the show they know and love…
Describe The Highlanders in six words:
War crimes ignored for cross-dressing opportunities
This is… the one where Jamie joins.
Except, that’s a retrospective way of looking at it. At the time, this was the one after Culloden.
Episodes: Episodes 141–144 out of 870 (as of 18th April, 2022)
First broadcast: 17th December, 1966–7th January, 1967
First overseas broadcast: August 1967 (ABC in Australia).
Last broadcast before prints were considered missing was on ZBS in Zambia, April 1970.
Key Characters
Doctor: Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton)
Companions: Ben Jackson (Michael Craze), Polly (Anneke Wills)
Villains: Solicitor Grey (David Garth), Perkins (Sydney Arnold), Trask (Dallas Cavell)
Other Key Parts: Jamie (Frazer Hines), Kirsty (Hannah Gordon), Ffinch (Michael Elwyn)
I’m New To This. What Should I Know?
- The Highlanders introduces Jamie MacCrimmon (sometimes spelt McCrimmon) played by Frazer Hines. Jamie and Hines are popular among fandom. However, the characterisation of Jamie here isn’t any indication of what Jamie is most liked for.
- It’s also famous for being the last pure historical. Pure historical is a fan term for a story set in the past with no science-fiction elements other than the TARDIS crew. These types of adventures were the bread and butter of the series but had always been dealt differently by various production teams. By now, under Innes Lloyd, the feeling was to dump them in favour of more gripping adventure tales.
- It’s also not the last pure historical, that actually being a Peter Davison story called Black Orchid in 1982. But as a regular, expected operating procedure for the program, The Highlanders is the last pure historical.
- All four episodes are missing from the BBC archive. It has not been animated due to tartan being difficult to animate, and there’s a lot of tartan!
- It is perhaps here though that I should note that telesnaps exist. These were a collection of photographs taken by John Cura of programs directly from his television for a small fee. Lloyd’s predecessor Wiles did not but Lloyd did almost immediately. It is possible to look at these in conjunction with the surviving audio for a resemblance of what the episodes would have been like.
- Like all historicals of the time, the story assumes a solid working knowledge of the events depicted with very little exposition being provided. As such, I’ll direct you to Wikipedia.
The Narrative
Location: Northern Scotland
Time: 16th April, 1746 and a few days after. Significantly, the TARDIS lands moments after the battle of Culloden has finished (the cannonballs are still warm and the surviving Jacobites are fleeing for shelter).
What Happens?
The TARDIS lands on Culloden moor, moments after the Jacobites have lost against the English army. The time-travellers are captured by upon discovering one of their prisoners is a “Doctor” they change their tune: their Laird has been wounded in the battle and they hope the Doctor can save him.
Unfortunately, Redcoats are patrolling and find them all. In getting separated, the time-travellers get their own hi-jinks. Ben gets sold into slavery, Polly teams up with Kirsty, and the Doctor flits around various subplots.
Solicitor Grey is eventually arrested for being a slave trader (despite slavery not actually being illegal at the time). The time-travellers are escorted back to the TARDIS by Jamie, who joins them in the TARDIS.
The Production
Recording
Location filming: November 1966 at Frensham Ponds, Surrey
Filming: November 1966 at Ealing Studios
Studio recording: December 1966 in Riverside 1
Key Production Credits:
Writer Elwyn Jones
Director Hugh David
Script Editor Gerry Davis
Producer Innes Lloyd
Any Behind-the-Scenes Gossip?
First, let’s start with the writer’s credit: Written by Elwyn Jones.
Jones was former BBC Head of Series who had recently left that position to pursue a freelance writing career. One of his first stops was a meeting with Gerry Davis, as Jones was eager to write a historical story for the series. Jones was a prestigious grab and Innes Lloyd and Davis wanted to use him (This can be credited with why the serial was commissioned considering the apparent dislike the two men had for historical adventures). Except, Jones’ freelance writing career was about to take-off to a new level when he was entrusted with Z-Cars, an action-packed police serial. Jones did not have time to do both. In the end, Davis wrote the entire script. Jones would never write for Doctor Who.
Second, the director: Hugh David. David actually did direct this story. But he wasn’t meant too. Instead, the scripts he was going to direct was The Underwater Menace. David read the script. He was not amused. His main concern was the amount of money needed to execute in anyway satisfactorily. He had contacted a friend currently working on You Only Live Twice (the fifth Connery Bond film) who said it would take Doctor Who’s annual budget. David felt that The Underwater Menace was a dead fish. Instead, The Underwater Menace was moved from being Troughton’s second story to being his third, and The Highlanders became the second Troughton serial.
Last, Frazer Hines joining the main cast. In interviews, Hines describes that he was surprised to join the cast. It appears, however, that Davis and Lloyd found the Jamie character interesting during the scripting stage (hard to see how, he is a very minor character). Shaun Sutton, Head of Drama, recommended Hines for the role. Hines clearly does have some star power. The original ending of the TARDIS leaving without Jamie was recorded as part of the filming on location during 14th–15th November. However, when Hines accepted a contract to appear in more stories, a new ending was shot on 21st November.
Troughton was happy to have Hines on board, having worked with Hines three years aog in Smuggler’s Bay (1964) and had even remembered that Hines had injured his hand during the recording. He asked Hines about it during The Highlanders which flattered Hines. Anneke Wills and Michael Craze were less enthused, fearing that a new companion would interfere with their characters. They would be proved right.
The Analysis
Stray Observations:
After seeing a cannonball, the Doctor wants to leave.
“I would like a hat like that.”
The battle is heard but the story focuses on a few people having left it (at least before it becomes about pirates): This is due to the budget but provides intimacy, a sense of the material.
Polly being braver than Kirsty: Still, it’s her screaming at a dagger that’s held at her that is the cliff-hanger for Ep 1.
Doctor Who gag in Ep 1
Bagpipe music plays while the titles are overlaid: A development from the special titles Innes Lloyd has used previously
The jail set in ep 2 looks magnificent
The Doctor getting around Jamie’s belief in blood-letting by manipulating Jamie’s belief in astrology
Another pirate story so soon?
Ben telling Jamie not to worry because the Doctor will save them: Very confident considering the short time.
No music for the fight scenes?!
What are we missing?: Troughton’s physical comedy in Ep 2; Anneke Wills has some great acting early in Ep 3. Troughton wearing his stovepipe hat. Ben’s swimming stunts in Ep 4. If this was ever found, the resourcefulness of Polly will be what we comment on.
Very similar to The Smugglers but quicker. Solicitor Grey is a cleverer, more evil version of the Mayor with Perkins his funny sidekick. Pirate is a better version of Captain pike (willing to be a secondary character whereas Pike never felt like the collaborating type) with the present viciousness of Cherub (in vibe, at least)
Going A Bit Deeper:
As the last ‘pure historical’ The Highlanders is often reviewed through the prism of being the last gasp of the show’s commitment to history. An odd claim to take seriously, having listened to what survives. This serial does not take history at all seriously. Rather, it is the pantomime to Hartnell’s historical farces. The last historical adventure to take itself seriously was indeed the ultra-serious The Massacre. As a story about a massacre, that makes sense. For The Highlanders, it sets itself after the battle (quite literally, the battle has just finished, the cannonballs are still warm, and the survivors are retreating). By doing so, it can remove all the grim reality about the battle (a grim reality recently in the public consciousness thanks to Peter Watkins’ 1964 film Culloden) and instead engage in hi-jinks.
The death of the pure historical is not that they didn’t work. It’s just that they were hard to make work, and Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis had their own desires for their adventure series. Indeed, if The Highlanders had the Doctor land moments before the battle had started, what on Earth would we have seen? The BBC showing the Doctor fighting against the English? Or, Patrick Troughton spending the 40 minutes the battle apparently took telling Ben and Polly that they couldn’t interfere as we had two episodes of people being slaughtered in real-time?
But… Land the TARDIS in the Antarctic, or a space colony, or the Moon… Have aliens invade… No problem at all. No-one’s noses are going to be out-of-joint by the sight of Patrick Troughton repelling monstrous invaders in a heightened fictional locale. Which aligns perfectly with Lloyd’s and Davis’ ideas for making Doctor Who an adventure series with a reliable formula.
(It’s probably worth noting, that at this time, Gerry Davis was having troubles with scripts. One of these was Doctor Who and the Nazis which probably sums up the entire problem with historical adventures as far as Davis was concerned. Patrick Troughton having hi-jinks in the Third Reich? Yeesh! Others included more adventurous fare that Davis didn’t want to put on screen: a formula that he could make work — such as the Base Under Siege model he had used himself on The Tenth Planet — sounded like a godsend. If only he could get more scripts like the one Kit Pedlar and he had written, he wouldn’t have to get these terrible other ones made, he probably thought. “I mean, seriously Innes,” he would have said, “There’s no way to make The Imps work. And can you only imagine what we’d get if we put this Atlantis story in front of the camera?”)
The problem with defining The Highlanders as the last historical, is that is very similar in parts to The Smugglers, a story that series had only finished ten weeks ago. That also had pirates (and The Highlanders has better pirates) and a brutal scheme treated like farce (and The Highlanders has a better scheme: slavery, and some of the people involved are clever and witty, unlike in The Smugglers were everyone was a gullible fool). Doctor Who could easily do another story in ten weeks time, just commit to what it really wants to do, and call itself The Pirates: four episodes of the Doctor, Ben, Polly and Jamie dealing with Captain Blackbeard. C’mon, Innes, you can do that. Four episodes with ship sets and the BBC doing 18th century costumes, some Ealing filming for a walk-the-plank cliffhanger scene, and a Great British Actor doing some telly for his kids. Perfect. I can imagine the telesnaps now.
Following this thought experiment, what stops The Smugglers, The Highlanders and The Pirates from being interchangable?
Patrick Troughton.
Troughton can easily be the Doctor in The Smugglers: teasing the villains with faux-sincere flattery will become one of the Second Doctor’s tricks in the trade. The seriousness of the Doctor when he addresses how they have a moral duty to protect the villagers they’ve put in danger also works well (and can compete with a similar scene from The Moonbase about “corners of the universe” and things that “must be fought” for anniversary clip reels).
Hartnell cannot dress in drag. Hartnell’s sense of humour is at odds with comedic violence while doing outrageous German accents. Hartnell is not a character that can lark about while his companions have their own plots because the First Doctor is not a larking about character. The closest we ever come to this is the second episode of The Reign of Terror where we see Hartnell’s Doctor engage in various escapades on his long walk to Paris. But that’s not sustained over four episodes. And it’s not him behaving like a loose unit, playing dress-ups like a kid with a costume box. It’s certainly not him shouting “Down with King George” just because he likes the echo. Even the tamer moments are different: the Doctor manipulating Jamie’s beliefs in horoscopes to respectfully and diplomatically avoiding ‘bloodletting’ is not a Hartnell-style response.
This story is all about the new Doctor doing things that the old Doctor wouldn’t. There’s a reason why it is hijinks with Highlanders: It’s trying to be fun. It’s begging for it to be liked. Don’t worry that Hartnell has gone, it says, the show is still fun. In fact, it screams, look what we can do now. Part of this is just the screamingly obvious having the Doctor on location: something the series hasn’t revelled in. Because on the whole, Hartnell wasn’t taken along on location. But here is Troughton, being menaced by Highlanders and rollicking across Scotland in film inserts.
The real last thing about The Highlanders, is that it’s the last time Troughton plays the Doctor like this. Soon, Troughton is going to come up against actors going more over-the-top than he can, and so Troughton is going to develop a character that flitters around the edges of power struggles, a character who steals scenes from megalomaniacs with understatement. It isn’t a massive difference but the Second Doctor changes more than losing that giant hat and Innes Lloyd slowly having his trousers tightened. And once Troughton has established his character and Lloyd and Davis have perfected their ideas for adventure serials, it’s less about the historical adventures and more about changing the role of the companions from being the audience’s contemporary representatives to being damsels and muscles.
Between You and Me:
A great story for Polly. Not really much for anything else. Labelling it as the last historical and the first story with Jamie probably really does work as describing what this story is significant for. Still, there are some comedic moments with Troughton that I just really want to see…
Recommended / Further Reading:
https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/doctor-who-guide/the-highlanders/