025 The Gunfighters

Started 9-Aug

Brightly comic with pithy lines. Quite unconvincing as a western but clearly the intention is to satirise westerns.

Johnny Ringo is Shane.
Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp are western legends. The shootout at the OK Corrall is too. The actual history in this story is pretty ropey (apparently).

This teleplay is having fun with trope-y toys. Conceptually it's actually a little like kid's play with different brands, types and ranges of toys... like Barbie on the Star Wars Millenium Falcon action figures set or My Little Pony with bendy dinosaurs.

A point I've made before about this one is that watched in 2018 these episodes are shorn of the context of popular TV at the time this was made. TV westerns were in the early to mid 60's what Celebrity Cooking Shows are like these days. Back then there were many of them, the most popular TV shows were Westerns, so were lots of the less popular ones. When Dr Who was first shown in Australia on ABC channel 2 in 1965 the bill was 7pm The News, 7.30pm Dr Who, 7.55pm Tales of Wells Fargo. These days we have the idea that 60's telly was corny sitcoms and spies and detectives. Well it was. But it was also westerns....

The Gunfighters is a parody of the high budget US filmed TV western series.

Specifically,

• The Lone Ranger
• The Gene Autry Show
• Gunsmoke
• Cheyenne
• Have Gun – Will Travel
• Sugarfoot
• Wagon Train
• Maverick
• Trackdown
• Wanted Dead or Alive
• The Rifleman
• Bonanza
• Laramie
• The Virginian
• The Big Valley
• The High Chaparral 

....there's dozens of 'em... and all make The Gunfighters look stupid, cheap and a bad idea. Fake British "American" accents (except Shane Rimmer as Seth Harper who doing a fake Canadian "American" accent), studio lighting and video and the wimping out with gun play are competing with film, real horses, genuine western Hollywood chutzpah.

Which is why it had a bad reputation at the time. Here's a hard fact. Ep4 of this serial "The OK Corral" Audience Appreciation score was 30%  To this day that's the lowest,  last place, bottom of the barrel. Clearly the audience of 1966 saw this as a poor quality fake.

These days the western doesn't exist. No one reads 'em, no one makes 'em, even die hard fans are hard to find (DW fans aren't remarkable they are exceptional!!). The nearest to a popular Western show is HBO's Deadwood and that's more like Game of Thrones than Rawhide.

Might be tempted to say Gunfighters was bad then, it's still bad and therefore it's bad. But I think there is something tragicomic going on.

The tone in this seems jokey with an undercurrent of menace. This is a weird mixture. When you add the repetitious song with it's narrative elements the story takes on a almost operatic tragedian aspect.


Except that it ISN'T.... it's The Gunfighters. A silly experimental Series 3 DW serial that was lucky to get made, survives only through dumb luck, the other experiments that surround it having rather worse luck at surviving.

Is it good Doctor Who? The end of ep2 when Johnny Ringo makes his dramatic entrance is attractive and ominous but the DW theme music cuts against it really strainfully. So, that's a no....

Luckily this is the LAST Wiles/Tosh hangover script. From here it's all Lloyd and Davis's own work.... and it's about to swing.

Warning for where we're going. We haven't had a 'base under siege' story yet. When we start you'll have plenty of chance to get used to it.


ABM Rating 2.19/4.00
LJM Rating 1.50/5.00
SPJ Rating 2.50/10.00

No. 23 (out of 25)

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