The Gunfighters (Doctor Who)

Plot

The Clanton brothers, Ike, Phineas, and Billy, are in Tombstone, Arizona, looking for Doc Holliday. They want revenge for their brother Reuben’s death. At the Last Chance Saloon, they meet their hired man, Seth Harper. Bar singer Kate overhears them and warns Holliday. The TARDIS lands in a stable. The First Doctor has a terrible toothache. He and his companions, Steven Taylor and Dodo Chaplet, meet Marshal Wyatt Earp, who offers to protect them. The Doctor finds Holliday, who works as a dentist. Dodo and Steven go to a hotel. The Clantons mock them, thinking the Doctor is Holliday. Seth invites the Doctor to the hotel. Holliday is fine with letting the Doctor be shot instead of him, but Kate stops that. Holliday hides upstairs in the hotel and fires his gun to trick the Clantons into believing the Doctor is Holliday. Wyatt and Sheriff Bat Masterson arrive and arrest the Doctor to keep him safe. A mob confronts Steven, planning to lynch him as a friend of Holliday. Wyatt and Masterson calm the situation and arrest Phineas. The Doctor and Steven are released and told to leave town. Dodo joins Kate and Holliday, who plan to escape town and take her along. Seth discovers their plan, so Holliday kills him, and the three leave. Johnny Ringo arrives and takes Seth’s place. The Doctor and Steven go back to the saloon looking for Dodo and meet Ringo. Wyatt’s brothers, Warren and Virgil, come to Tombstone to help him keep order. The other Clanton brothers go to the jail, free Phineas, and kill Warren. Ringo takes Steven and Kate to the Clanton ranch. There, the Clantons tell their father they killed Warren. Wyatt swears to get revenge and gathers a posse of lawmen. Holliday returns to Tombstone with Dodo and offers to help Wyatt. The Doctor cannot stop the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Ringo and the three Clanton brothers are shot dead. Soon after, the Doctor, Steven, and Dodo leave in the TARDIS. They arrive on a strange planet and decide to explore. As they walk away, the scanner shows a man approaching the TARDIS.

Production

Donald Cotton had a good rapport with script editor Donald Tosh during their work on The Myth Makers, so Tosh asked him to write another four-part serial. The commission for Dr Who and the Gun-Fighters came on 30 November 1965, with a deadline of 14 January 1966. Cotton’s friend Tony Snell was travelling across the United States at the time and sent back research on the real history of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Cotton, however, preferred to draw from fictionalised accounts, including Wyatt Earp’s 1931 biography and the 1957 film Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. As a result, several characters in the story—like Pa Clanton, who was already dead, along with Bat Masterson and Johnny Ringo—had not actually been in Tombstone during the real event. Tosh wanted the serial to be a parody of American Westerns, especially the 1957 film.

Cotton delivered the first two scripts, under the title Doctor Who & the Gunslingers, on 15 December 1965 and 14 January 1966. Tosh left Doctor Who that January, and Gerry Davis took over as script editor. Cotton was unhappy with Davis, who gave him less creative freedom. Davis respected Cotton’s intelligence and sophistication but thought he was a poor fit for Doctor Who and disliked the serial. The new producer, Innes Lloyd, favoured science-fiction stories because he believed audiences preferred them to historicals. Tosh later felt that the wit in Cotton’s scripts was lost after Davis and Lloyd took over, since they did not appreciate it.

Rex Tucker was assigned to direct. He had served as the programme’s de facto producer during its creation in 1963, before the first official producer arrived, and had been scheduled to direct some first-season serials before plans changed. Cotton submitted the final two scripts, now called The Gunfighters, on 26 and 31 January. Davis thought the third episode needed rewriting because it lacked action and required too many sets; Tucker also had several criticisms. Lloyd assured Tucker that Davis would rework the scripts and suggested a tongue-in-cheek approach, comparing the serial to the comedy film Cat Ballou. Tucker watched Gunfight at the O.K. Corral for reference. After disagreements with Lloyd over editing, Tucker asked for his directorial credit to be removed from the fourth episode, though it remained in the Radio Times listing.

Reception

The Gunfighters aired on BBC1 as four weekly episodes between 30 April and 21 May 1966. The third installment was broadcast five minutes later than normal because it clashed with the FA Cup Final. As expected for a show entering the summer months, viewership declined, and the serial saw a notable drop from the preceding story, The Celestial Toymaker. A persistent myth claimed The Gunfighters had Doctor Who’s lowest-ever audience numbers; it did achieve the season’s weakest figures up to that point, averaging 6.25 million viewers across its four parts, but the two serials that followed actually drew even smaller audiences. This story was the last in the original run to give each episode its own title, and “The O.K. Corral” remained the final regular episode with a distinct name until “Rose” in 2005. From The Savages onward, every serial used a single overall title divided into numbered episodes. John Cura resumed taking tele-snaps of Doctor Who with the first episode of The Gunfighters, as he had not been contracted to do so during producer John Wiles’s tenure. The serial was sold overseas from the mid-1960s, though Australian broadcasts required some cuts, particularly of shots showing dead bodies. The 405-line videotape of the first episode was cleared for wiping on 17 August 1967 and subsequently erased; the other three episodes were likely wiped before 1970. The BBC Film and Videotape Library kept a 16 mm print of the fourth episode, and BBC Enterprises’ negatives of all four episodes were discovered in the 1970s. UK Gold aired the serial in both episodic and compilation formats in December 1992 and January 1993. Bill Norris of The Stage and Television Today called the concept “plain foolish,” criticizing the costumes and lacklustre setting, though he praised the performances of Graham and Marshe. The serial also drew criticism from Junior Points of View viewers and an Audience Research Report, which condemned the violence, accents, and scripts, but commended the acting of Hartnell and Jacobs. The Appreciation Index scores were very low: the second episode’s rating of 39 tied the programme’s lowest (with The Daleks’ Master Plans seventh episode), while the third episode scored 36 and the fourth scored 30—Doctor Who’s lowest ever figure, far below the average and the only time it dipped beneath the production office’s graph.