I’ve put on my Stetson, I’ve made up a song,
People think this one’s a stinker but they’re all damn wrong!
So open your earholes, I’ll soon change your tune,
Let’s talk about the masterpiece…

At the Last Chance Saloon.

While watching THE GUNFIGHTERS (1966, Donald Cotton) I think it’s natural for a lot of questions to spring into one’s mind. Questions like “How long did it take them to come up with this many verses?” and “What exactly was the sweet that The Doctor was eating?”. Questions like “How on Earth did they afford to fly out all these genuine Americans to play cowboys on the meagre budgets of 1966?”, and “Did William Hartnell stand in any horse poo, and if so, how did he react?” So many important questions, most of them with answers you could at least guess at (in order, 1. Either far too long or far too fast, 2. Fisherman’s Friend, 3. OK I had a hard time writing that one with a straight face, and 4. Almost certainly, and what he said can’t be reprinted on a family friendly blog) but going into this serial having read a fair few reviews and with an understanding of larger fandom opinions, I had one very big question, nagging at me like a broken tooth that needed pulling, one that did not seem to have an answer.

“How did this get its reputation as one of the worst Hartnell stories, nay, one of the worst Doctor Who stories of all time?”

So, like Gandalf riding his horse to Minas Tirith while the Hobbits dodge murder in the woodlands, I went digging through my references and with embarrassment realized that that “unanswerable” question actually seems to have been answered; we think it’s bad because most of the 80s reference works told us so. Even more embarrassing was discovering that my enjoyment of this story was no longer that transgressive; on the contrary, El Sandifer tells me that because I like this story I’m engaging in something called “Reconstructionist criticism”, which sounds lovely and fantastic and certainly makes me feel warm and special, but also means that coming into this review hoping to break ground by calling it a masterpiece just isn’t going to turn heads.

Yes, I did use the word “masterpiece.” Maybe that alone will still bend some necks, because on paper, it isn’t. “Masterpiece” is a word I use a lot more subjectively than many. There are things in this world that have objectively been considered failures that I would look at and call a masterpiece. I think that’s part and parcel of being a Doctor Who fan, or at least one obsessive enough to write reviews; we all have our own personal masterpieces, each with its own defining features, and frankly, objective quality rarely factors into those equations. I call this a masterpiece because I think it not only sets out what it wants to do with style and aplomb, but also because it lays down groundwork for one of the things most celebrated about Doctor Who, and one that’s most special to me - the fact that it can do anything. Nowhere is this clearer than in the much maligned song.

Sandifer talks about the song, saying:

“…it is a line in the sand that declares that the world of the Western is different from everything else. [It is] clear that the TARDIS is visiting an existing landscape.”

I agree with this wholeheartedly and would even take it a step further; the distinction between the “accurate” historicals and the “fun” historicals is already well defined at this point so I won’t harp on it too much. The short version is that some historicals are concerned with evoking a period accurately and some of them are concerned with making sure all the correct historical genre tropes get hit.

The Gunfighters falls squarely into the latter camp; we are presented with this simulacra of the Old West, so clearly not real that Steven and Dodo’s costumes are almost picture-perfect recreations of Woody and Jessie from Toy Story, but no one really pays attention to the anachronisms. Their actions and backstory are narrated by a song at every turn. They haven’t landed in Tombstone; they’ve landed inside The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon, something I think has been overlooked by other readings. This story isn’t best read as a funny historical, this is a story best read as a precursor to The Mind Robber, but also to so many genre and format-bending stories in the EU and, yes, begrudgingly so, I will admit that it’s this story that extends out into The Church on Ruby Road and The Devil’s Chord. Because to talk about the legacy of The Gunfighters, you have to talk about music in Doctor Who.

Neither of those two latterly mentioned contemporary episodes are my favorites. In fact, I don’t much like CoRR and The Devil’s Chord is mostly saved for me by the performances, and not the music. But those songs aren’t any more artfully written than The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon, which was apparently being constantly re-written and updated with more and more specific lyrics about the plot. So why do I have such a problem with The Goblin Song and “There’s Always a Twist at The End” when, apart from a couple of gripes about words that could scan better, I find the Ballad not only charming, but one of the vitally important muscles flexing in this episode’s circulatory system?

I think the answer stems from that first, important question I asked, the one I thought I had no answer to. Why did people react poorly to this when it originally aired? The answer may be that they didn’t, who knows? It turns out that question only mattered for as long as Jeremy Bentham told us it did. But there’s an inverse to that question, perhaps one that’s more vital. Why have people suddenly decided that it’s good again? In what way were we able to reevaluate and unlearn our preconceptions? I think the Ballad is the key factor in both of these questions.

I don’t have a hard time believing that when Lynda Baron croons her way into the opening seconds of this episode, people were confused. I can imagine a world where, as the episode progresses, despite the solid performances from the central cast, the reoccurrence of the song would begin to grate on the parents watching. Hell, even some of the smaller children, far more used to space adventure, might well have given a curious turn and asked, “Mummy, will she be singing through all of Doctor Who?”

The viewing figures bear this out. 6.5m the first week, followed by a slight up-tick to 6.6 in the one to follow. Attributed perhaps, to people tuning in to see if it was going to be another week with “that bloody song”. And then a steep fall-off for the remaining two weeks of the serial. Not, as the rumors go, the lowest ever recorded, especially if you’re like me and think AI figures are mostly garbage anyway, but still enough of a reaction to draw evidence from. Whether this was wildly hated at the time, who can say. But something made people stop watching, and given that the acting, production, direction and design are all, to my eyes, at least as good as anything else the show was doing at the time (they had real horses! Imagine the paperwork.), I can come to maybe three conclusions:

1. The song, as discussed.
2. The accents, which are admittedly all over the place, and do occasionally hamper the acting. I find this hard to buy though, as apart from Charlie the Barman no one is absolutely dismal, just ropey, and it’s difficult to know how critical of accent work the families of 1966 would have been.
3. A general dismay of the Western, and America in general leading to a feeling that the genre had somehow sullied Doctor Who.

3 is an entirely different review and 2 is trite and easy, so I’m gonna say that at the time, the song might have just been too much to bear. Too different. Too much of a big swing. And now, here’s where I tie it back to The Goblin Song and The Devil’s Chord. I’ll quote one of the commenters from the Eruditorum review of The Gunfighters:

“…my parents finally got a colour television set and suddenly it made sense to watch Doctor Who out in the lounge rather than on a 5" black and white fire hazard. What a mistake to make, it seemed as all the family could chortle at my favourite programme.”

There are points in my life where I have been embarrassed to be a Doctor Who fan. I still have them now honestly. The small nerd who loves to play pretend, maybe plays pretend longer than most kids, that child lives inside every Doctor Who fan, and the world is often not kind to that sort of soul. Even though Russell T Davies made it event television in the 2000s, it’s still the sort of niche that you don’t necessarily reveal on a first date. In America, even more so. But time, and therefore distance, allows us a little more safety when it comes to liking things that don’t fit the framework of what we’re used to. It’s easy for us to like The Gunfighters now, because we’re far enough away that we can have a sort of detached irony. It doesn’t have the immediacy of watching an episode of television with a family member, or a partner perhaps, and having to sit as The Goblin Song extends for its full 3 and a half agonizing minutes (sorry, I’m trying to be neutral) while you stew in anxiety over sidelong glances, the phantoms of stifled giggles. “This is the thing you spend all your time obsessing over?”

One of the biggest sources of cognitive dissonance any obsessive will experience is knowing full well that they’re watching a children’s television program whilst also dedicating thousands of words and hours of brainpower applying theory and analysis to it. I haven’t the word-count to go into it in this review, which is still ostensibly about the one with the cowboys and not analytical criticism and fandom at large, but it’s safe to say that this tension exists in every Doctor Who fan who owns at least one reference book. Those of us who do are also often likely to be the most dedicated evangelists for the show, trying at any opportunity to hook our claws (OF AXOS snarf snarf) into anybody unfortunate enough to give us five spare minutes of silence to fill. Taken any way, a weird, badly written song that elbows its way into the piece and loudly declaims “THIS THING YOU LIKE IS OFTEN RATHER SILLY” can rather take the wind out of the sails of anyone desperately wanting their friends to think the thing they like is cool. It’s very difficult to keep up that pretense of cool when even you can’t buy into the CGI goblins badly crooning their autotune, telling you quite firmly “This is where you are and this is what we’re doing.”

So back to my question – why are the modern songs so divisive, whereas The Ballad, despite what the chaff of many an online forum would have you believe, gets a pass? I think, quite simply and altogether too neatly, the answer mostly comes down to time. We have, now, sixty years of history between us and The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon. Doctor Who has gone on to do many other strange things in the interim and has taken heat for quite a lot of these changes. A lot of the black and white era now gets a pass because redemptive (or should that be reconstructionist) readings tend to come from a place of wonder, marveling at what they were able to achieve in the 1960s, things that seem so quaint to us now but were groundbreaking then. This is mostly done for effects, or to turn a blind eye to obvious faults in the scripting or casting process, but I think today, one of the kindest and most important places to turn that eye is at The Gunfighters, and the song. Because I think the big secret is that they knew there was a chance people were going to hate it, and they did it anyway.

The song was being developed separately from the script, although I’m not sure how much conversation was going back and forth between the musical director and the writer (and probably won’t until 2036 when Toby Hadoke finally gets around to doing a Too Much Information on this one) and I have to think that in the second episode, when Steven Regret asks quite meekly whether they might not sing a different song, if he wasn’t speaking for some members of the production.

The point is, it got made – the quality of it is irrelevant, whether or not people liked it is also actually irrelevant. The point is that Doctor Who was then, and has been since, a show run and created by the sort of people who are willing to take an awkward swing, willing to ruffle feathers not just with concept or casting, but with the technique and artistry of making the show itself. The Gunfighters was, of course, never the template for what Doctor Who was supposed to be; perhaps had the viewing figures doubled week on week we would have been treated to Lynda Baron gaily singing us the Ballad of Vengeance On Varos in the mid 80s and the world would look very different. Alas, she doesn’t and it didn’t, but we do have, from The Gunfighters, a much more subtle model for what Doctor Who should be; a show never afraid to alienate by taking silly risks, and a show that always benefits from the gentle varnishing of time.

All of this is basically to say that if you catch me in a nursing home in 50 years calling The Church On Ruby Road a masterpiece, don’t call me a hypocrite.