The Who Who Haunted Whomself

Doctor Who visits 1970 and finds a Britain suspended between decades

An occasional series looking at Doctor Who, a peculiarly British kind of TV show, and its cultural contexts.

1970

1970 is a moment of dualities, apparently, hanging as it does between the ‘60s and the ‘70s. There is a sudden rash of stories about duplication and mirroring: in Inferno The Doctor slips into another universe populated by alternate versions of his friends, while in The Man Who Haunted Himself Roger Moore gets more, bifurcating into a doppelganger. In Roeg and Cammel’s psychedelic nightmare Performance Chas and Turner fatally confuse their identities; in the 1970 version of The Secret of Dorian Gray, Dorian finds his own mortality (and morality) separated off into a painting.

Inferno

• 7 episodes, colour, May to June 1970

• Starring
  Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, and Caroline John as companion Liz Shaw, an accomplished scientist with UNIT (an organisation dedicated to defending Earth from aliens).

• Synopsis
  The Doctor has sidled into a government drilling operation just so he can borrow their nuclear reactor to repair his spaceship, the TARDIS. But an accident propels the Doctor into an alternate Britain under a one-party military rule, where the drilling is going horribly wrong. Oh, and there's a strange green goo that turns people into overheated and over-hairy beast men. I'm still not sure what that bit is about, to be honest.

The Man Who Haunted Himself

• 1970, 89 mins, colour. Directed by Basil Dearden.

• Starring
  Roger Moore, Anton Rogers, Hildegard Neil, Freddie Jones and an awful lot of ‘Look, it’s him out of thingy’ British character actors.

• Synopsis
  Roger Moore is Pelham, a straight-laced City gent who, after a car accident, finds that people claim to have met him in places he hasn't been. Someone is pretending to be Pelham - someone considerably more hard-edged and easy-living, more prone to fast cars, fast women and fast business practices. Slowly Pelham loses his identity, his grip on reality and, finally, his life, to this doppelganger.

SIR CHARLES FREEMAN
I'll be glad to get out of it all…
Business is an alien world these days.

Inferno is a story full of strange incongruities. Not the least the fact that it's so highly rated in IMDb while parts of it are so alarmingly silly. Especially the beast men. 

It is a story about parallel universes, different versions of Britain in 1970. Both feature a project to drill into the Earth’s core to unleash a new power source for the country. In both the megalomaniac scientist in charge of the project (whose name is Stahlman, steel man, like Stalin, do you see?) doesn’t know that the drill is also bringing up from beneath the earth a strange green goo that de-evolves people into beast men. Absolutely no explanation is attempted for what the green goo is, why it should cause humans to suddenly develop furry gloves and Rhodes Boyson sideburns, or why, weirdly, they should then be searingly hot. But here they are, the hairy handed sons of boil, hopping about and leering at the camera like Jim Dale’s Mr Hyde in Carry On Screaming. It has almost nothing to do with the alternate universe plot of the story and is all the more delightful for it.