You don’t get the mix, he’d be 106.
Born on the seventh of July 1919 in London’s Chelsea, John Devon Roland Pertwee carried three of my favourite programmes as a child growing up in 70s Britain, spanning the entire decade: first as the third incarnation of telly’s travelling Time Lord, Doctor Who, between 1970 and 1974. Then as host of Whodunnit?, a Cluedo-ey murder mystery game show (1974-1978), and finally as the simpleton scarecrow Worzel Gummidge (1979-1981).
Not only was this commanding tallperson my first Doctor (however briefly), but he was everyone’s first Gallifreyan to be immortalised in colour, and the first to head a multi-doctor anniversary special, 1973’s The Three Doctors. Though it was dressed down in his Gummidge garb where I encountered him in the flesh for the only time… in Milton sodding Keynes! Reverse the polarity and join our gang as we honour the true Venusian Aikido master with a heavenly cup o’ tea an’ a slice o’ cake. Because he’s a Doctor too.
Set the seasonal scene. It’s the summer of ’69 — the last week of June 1969, to be exact — and Harold Wilson is Britain’s Labour prime minister, having just announced plans to reduce the country’s voting age to 18, albeit a levelling up which would work against him the following year, overturning a huge three-figure majority. Hi Keir!
Across the pond, ‘Tricky Dicky’ Richard Nixon is the American president (oo-er). And on both sides of the divide The Beatles are top of the charts with two different hits: Get Back in the US and The Ballad Of John & Yoko in the UK — the final week that their final chart-topping 45 on home turf as an active entity was in pole position.
Even closer to home — well, a first floor ward in what is now Charing Cross Police Station — that Steve Pafford guy is born five days after the finale of a marathon ten-episode Doctor Who serial called The War Games, which saw the bumbling beatnik Patrick Troughton hand in his keys to the TARDIS, while an American import called Star Trek symbolically took over the show’s 5.15 timeslot on BBC1 the following month.
Though a regeneration wasn’t depicted on screen, Troughton had opted to pass the sonic screwdriver to the more combative, smoking jacket whimsy of Jon Pertwee, the first of only three occasions in the programme’s history where the incumbent actor gave way to an older man.
Being that Charing Cross child now transported to 1970s Bletchley in Buckinghamshire — generally a rural Conservative county bluer than the Doc’s TARDIS — one’s earliest television memories are dominated by two things: first, a plethora of tin-foiled tinsel-sporting glam rockers stomping around Top Of The Pops every Thursday night (the ones that caught my Gorgon eye? Gary Glitter, Slade, and a bit of Bolan, but no Bowie, ironically).
Then, two evenings later, a rather scarier T. Rex in The Dinosaur Invasion*; during the tail end of Pertwee’s tenure as the third Doctor. This was just before he morphed into the man who, for me, will always wear the Gallifreyan crown, the legendary Tom Baker.
Despite Milton Keynes being the shiniest, fastest growing new town in Britain, we didn’t exactly witness endless celebs passing through. Not unless they were imported local residents like Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth (they were a couple) or Barry McGuigan and Kevin Whately (they weren’t) or visiting A-listers for a weekend (Queen, Bowie, U2, Robbie et al at the Bowl).
Outside of that media microcosm, there than the two queens — QEII and Margaret Thatcher — opening the shiny new shopping centre, the only star turns I vividly recall seeing in the mirrored metropolis in person were a grumpy-faced Don Estelle (little Lofty from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum) hilariously hawking his budget album in Woolworths by singing along to it (he got a bit cross when he caught me and my fellow juveniles sniggering). Oh, and and, well, hello, Jon Pertwee switching on the Christmas lights in 1990.
Not only was Pertwee perched on the John Lewis balcony above the plaqued spot where Thatch had declared the CMK centre open — and the same store where the roller-skating closet Cliff Richard filmed his Wired For Sound clip a decade prior — but the actor was in character, dressed up as Worzel Gummidge — the show where he played the loveable if slightly simple titular character .
I’d certainly enjoyed the Scarecrow show as a schoolkid, but it’s fair to say when I discovered the venue for my first full time job (A thatched-roof Harvester steakhouse on the old A5 called The Fountain) was proudly displaying life-size effigies of Worzel Gummidge and Aunt Sally by the front door I found them more cold and creepy than warmly nostalgic.
Listen to Worzel’s funny voice, sweetie.
Worzel’s appearance was obviously designed to attract the mums and kids (no shit, Sherlock). Judi and I, then a discerning 19 and 21, were watching bemused and bewildered at the very back of Middleton Hall by the menswear store that had just kitted me out with my first bespoke suit (a double-breasted version of Bowie’s Sound + Vision tour garb, natch). When we heard him make some well-worn quip about an action that might make his trousers fall down — “and you don’t want my trousers to fall down!” — Jude and I turned to each other and gestured, “pub time.”
It’s moments in time like that when you realise the things you enjoyed as an unquestioning pre-pubescent no longer felt appropriate. Childish things have indeed been put away, though we did snigger when the local paper reported security was frothing with barely concealed rage when Worzel took the elevator down to mingle in the Hall where the kids kept pulling at his straw hair.
Time I had me thinkin’ ’ead on, because this illustrates one thing that has been a surprise to so many of us in the last 20 years, since a certain blockbuster reboot and revival. No one, least of all me, could ever have imagined we’d still be talking about another telly programme starring Pertwee, let alone watching it, and, er, writing about it.
Just what the Doctor ordered then.
How lucky was I. The 1970s was arguably the greatest decade for Doctor Who (the only decade it spanned a full 10 years until the 2010s, in fact). And ensconced in that glorious televisual era, two actors ruled the roost: Jon and Tom, as in Baker, Pertwee’s replacement until the early 80s.
Assessing any two iterations in a row will show you that Doctor Who is essentially many different sci-fi shows strung together over the years, and never more so than in the 70s. Having largely dispensed with its original premise of a slightly cerebral educational programme (”edutainment”, to coin a later George Lucas phrase) which used time travel as a means to explore scientific ideas, the cash-strapped Pertwee years depict the Third Doctor grounded on Earth by the Time Lords and left with no choice but to earn his keep as a scientific adviser to UNIT.
Jon Pertwee was a well known comedic actor who’d been in a trio of Carry On movies and The Navy Lark et al, yet he surprised everyone with his largely serious straight performance.
Looking back on his run half a century on, I sometimes wonder if JP played it a tad too serious. Yes, he’s the dandy man: a 007-esque action hero with a few twinkly flourishes. On top of that, his commanding slightly de haut en bas way of expressing frustration with his situation is matched only by his enthusiasm for modern gadgets, alien martial arts, and vehicular mayhem.
The only light to the vortex of darkness and third base is the occasional camp cliffhanger where he’d do his hackneyed crosseyed and painful routine, his big rubber face gurning and grimacing with the most ridiculous expressions whenever a dastardly creature from the deep tries to strangle him. Oh, the hilarity.
Death To The Daleks, a four-part adventure with Sarah Jane Smith (played by the always wonderful Elisabeth Sladen), is another early memory from the same 11th season that spawned Invasion Of The Dinosaurs. In many ways, it’s a complex plot-heavy story indicative of Doctor Who’s lasting appeal. We have the Doc’s most formidable foes in the tin-pot Daleks, one of the most adored companions in Sarah, and the petrifying Exxilons who contributed to the “hiding behind the sofa” phenomenon that scared little ’uns for decades. Hell, my younger sister went one further in the Tom era and was so spooked by one episode she actually vomited behind the sofa, I kid you not.
Rewatching even earlier choice cuts from Three’s tenure, one thing stand out is that Pertwee quickly converts the show’s freewheeling anthology format into something more like a homely settled sitcom yet not set in a lounge but a workplace with added action and monsters for good measure.
Apparently at the actor’s behest, there was also an increased emphasis on the types of gadgets and vehicles popularised by the James Bond films and the 1960s Batman series, the latter of which was a driver of early colour TV sales in Britain when the show was repeated on ITV throughout the decade.
Having moved out of his defunct TARDIS, the Doctor dallies with whatever car, motorbike, or hovercraft he got hold of for that week’s random chase sequence. By his final season, he’s driving around in the Whomobile, a Car-Built-For-Homer-looking flying vehicle that Pertwee apparently commissioned with his own money for use in the programme.
Perhaps mercifully, geekspeak was pared down to a memorable if slightly sarcastic catchphrase: “Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.” It sounded good but JP and writer Terrance Dicks knew it was nonsense, since neutrons have no polarity and proved there actor’s personal opinion that the Doctor often used “technobabble” as a way out of a tight spot. A fan, one James Peterson, who met him at a 1983 Doctor Who event, a rare occasion — possibly only — where Pertwee shared a stage with his successor Tom Baker (they weren’t terribly fond of each other) asked him “tell me, should I reverse the polarity of the neutron flow?”
He smiled warmly and said, slightly invidiously, “Oh that horrible line. I never could remember it!”
One hundred and six years on, it seems like Jon Pertwee isn’t in any danger of not being remembered. Aunt Sally would like that.
Steve Pafford
*I rewatched Invasion Of The Dinosaurs not so long ago and, lo and behold, I can’t find the pivotal scene I remember; with Jon Pertwee dangling off a window ledge as a monster of some description is on the loose. It could be that my memory is playing tricks and it’s a completely different story — either way it’s a Doctor Who serial in the last year or so before Baker took the reins. Any idea?
BONUS BEATS: Was the “perspicacious” Pertwee the recipient of the funniest Gotcha of all time? I think so…
