This is potent, thought-provoking stuff for a thrilling adventure aimed at the whole family. Pertwee’s Doctor – an alien Time Lord who just looks like a human – finds himself caught between reptiles and mankind, trying to broker peace. There are impassioned speeches. Often with reptilian creatures dressed in bits of fishnet.
But Hulke also wrote Doctor Who stories about greedy multinationals in space, and an Empire in which dissidents are imprisoned, without trial, on the Moon. In 1974’s Invasion of the Dinosaurs, well-meaning idealists want to literally turn back the clock to when things were “better”, reverting the Earth to a pre-technological era. The Doctor explains, sadly, that they’re chasing an illusion: “There never was a golden age.”
This is all political. Indeed, Hulke was unabashed about the fact. “I’d say it’s a very political show [and] all Doctor Who stories are political,” he said in an interview in 1979, conducted just weeks before his death from cancer. He gave an example: “Doctor Who is a pacifist [and] always trying to do a Jimmy Carter between warring sides.”
The notion chimed with Hulke’s own politics. He’d been a conscientious objector during the war, consenting to serve in a non-combat role. Working in a NAAFI canteen on a Royal Navy corvette led to a more fundamental awakening. While docked in Norway, he met Russian prisoners of war who enthused to him about Marxism; when Hulke got back to England, he joined the Communist Party.
Yet he was an awkward sort of Communist. In January 1947, after less than two years as a member, he resigned on a point of principle – the party wasn’t sufficiently democratic. Before the end of the year, he tried to rejoin, was refused and told not to try again for six months. He reapplied after two months. My sense from this period is a desperate need to belong and to be heard.
His strange early life surely accounts for this. Born in November 1924, Hulke was brought up by his mother, Elsie, and her partner Winifred Boot, who ran a guest house in Kensington that catered, he said, for domestic servants, widows and Russian émigrés. Hulke rarely went to school as his mother couldn’t afford the schools she thought suitable. Elsie and “Bootie” were also in trouble with the law over petty crimes such as shoplifting and falsified cheques.
Then Elsie died and teenage Hulke discovered that she had lied to him his whole life: the man he had been told was his late father, her husband General Walter Backhouse Hulke, had actually passed away on January 9 1923. Plus, his mother had not registered his birth, so Hulke discovered that he was considered an alien. It was around this time he joined the party; I think he was desperate to be part of something, to be listened to and respected – to be found legitimate.
