Doctor Who and The Mutants (1972)

The many lies involved in just one piece of subversion

The British Empire, in 1921 and 1972

In 1972 the British Empire had shrunk from a quarter of the globe in 1921 to just a dozen scattered islands. But still, the British public were patriotic and mostly unashamed of their imperial history. Many fathers, uncles and grandfathers, still living and encountered at family gatherings, had fought for it in war, or been involved with it in myriad ways. Turning the young against the Empire, the country, their race and the aspirations of their forefathers, was a huge challenge. It took a million little efforts. One curious example is a Doctor Who story from 1972.

British television in the early 1970s was much less Britain-hating than it is today, but the fact that this story could be made is evidence of the currents operating even then. Nasty, destructive, self-righteous, and shamelessly dishonest. The fashion for national self-immolation was already strong, if only among the media and the intelligentsia.

The Mutants is a crude guilt-trip about the British Empire, masquerading as a meditation on colonialism.

Presumably part of the reason it “got a pass” was an assumption by BBC higher-ups that a children’s pulp sci-fi show isn’t important. To be fair, even within the annals of Doctor Who lore, this story is not prominent. But it was made, and it was seen by millions of children, and it undoubtedly influenced their thinking.

The minds of people - including adults - receive story as truth, unless they remain vigilant to the possibility that it is fiction. But the whole point is to forget such things and sink into the story, to believe. Nobody watches a story so as to not believe it.

If they do question it, they will question its sharp edges (plotline, character decisions), not the blurry elements of its mise-en-scène. The mind assumes those to be harmless (true). The more mundane an element seems, or the more casually it is shown, the more the mind will take it on trust.

People want to believe. A story is not just an escape from their humdrum lives, but a sort of religious communion with their peers, and a clarifying sermon from their “betters”. The mind that resists those twin comforts will tend to be either very disciplined or unimaginative. Imaginative people especially want to sink into stories, which requires trusting the storyteller - not consciously but unconsciously, which of course is more dangerous.

All of this means that the thoughtful child is the most manipulable by storytellers. By the time he is able to question your stories, let alone to notice and question their mise-en-scène, you have long ago furnished the stage of his mind.

The Mutants in its 1977 novelisation, 2003 VHS, 2011 DVD, and 2023 Bluray. A piece of media like this lives on in different eras, being seen by multiple generations

In the 30th Century, the Earth Empire is withdrawing from the planet Solos, which it has “stewarded” for 500 years. The Empire was drawn to Solos as a rich source of certain minerals. Centuries of mining for those has unleashed pollution, disrupting the planet’s climate.

The Empire’s colonists (“overlords”) have subjugated the intelligent native species, the Solonians, by means of beating, slavery, deculturation and segregation. Worse still, the Solonians are now feeling the effects of all the pollution: they are mutating into hideous, unintelligent and aggressive creatures - the eponymous Mutants.

It turns out that this mutation is actually part of the Solonians’ natural life process, a four-stage evolutionary cycle which normally takes 2000 years but has been accelerated by the pollution. This is an unusual concept and could have made for an interesting story were it handled less ham-fistedly by the writers.

As if to ensure an absurdly one-sided treatment, they have imperialism be personified by “the Marshal”. He is perhaps the most loathsome character imaginable: arrogant, bullying, scheming, dishonest, ignorant, vicious, ruthless, reckless, irresponsible, selfish, power-mad, callously murderous, and blithely genocidal. These terrible traits are not accompanied by a single redeeming one. Even the Earth Empire, which has subjugated the Solonians for 500 years, is shown as more virtuous than the Marshal.

With the Empire now receding, the Marshal wants to take Solos independent so as to keep it going as his personal colonial project, of which he will be in sole charge. The Empire has gone soft, bureaucratic, effete, moralistic… whereas he is tough enough to keep things going.

Though he has the build and mannerisms of Mussolini, the Marshal is clearly a parody - and a grotesquely unfair one - of Ian Smith, who took Rhodesia independent from the receding British Empire after Britain insisted on majority rule - eg. democratic predominance of the native Bantus over the White Rhodesians (British-descended settlers). This not only sold out the Whites who had built a highly-functional society out of the wilderness, it doomed the society itself. Ruled by Blacks, it transformed from a very productive and prosperous country, “the bread basket of Africa”, into a failed state of chaos, corruption, instability, violence, disease and starvation. Ian Smith knew this was inevitable as long as the Blacks remained unelevated, and his intention (it is clear that he did not believe in hard biological limits) was to elevate them, but until that was achieved it would be deeply irresponsible to give them control of their society. Smith was a well-intentioned, responsible and brave man, and to depict him as “the Marshal” is simply disgusting.

Consider the differences between Ian Smith and the writers vilifying him (Bob Baker and Dave Martin). Smith was a patriarch, an educated man, and an award-winning athlete. During World War II he was a brave fighter pilot who lied in order to be allowed to do his patriotic duty. He endured severe injury while serving but went back to serve again, ending up fighting behind enemy lines, guerilla-style, before hiking across the icy Alps barefoot, and then he returned to serve a third time. After the war he was a farmer, a well-loved politician, a founder of a successful political party, a leader respected by his peers, and a man who devoted his life to protecting his country, defending it against overwhelming international pressure from outside and Communist subversion from within. By contrast, Baker and Martin were, to put it kindly, a pair of talented termites. They were good writers but, even then, only at the low-brow “pulp fiction” level (with pretensions). They never risked themselves to defend anything, never led anything, never founded anything, never faced any organised opposition, never took on any militia or governments or empires, never had to make choices that affected millions of people, never earned the respect of their peers as leaders, never achieved anything even approaching the scale of Ian Smith’s life and works. Yet they considered themselves more wise, moral and knowledgeable than him - enough that they did everything they could to turn the British people against him while he fought a heroic battle. And decades later, they remained proud of themselves for this.

In The Mutants, the Earth Empire sends an administrator to Solos to arrange its independence. He comes into conflict with the Marshal, reflecting Britain’s conflict with Ian Smith:

MARSHAL: The [mutated Solonians] are a menace and must be wiped out.

ADMINISTRATOR: And that’s your alternative to independence? Genocide?

MARSHAL: Give them independence, they’ll starve out of total incompetence.

ADMINISTRATOR: Nevertheless, they shall have their independence. Whether they’re ready for it or not.

Ian Smith never wanted to genocide the natives of Rhodesia. It is despicable to “satirise” him in this way.

Note that the Marshal’s prediction, of starvation by incompetence, is exactly what did happen to the natives of Rhodesia once they were given independence, which indeed they were not ready for.

As for the Solonians themselves, while they are shown to be a warrior people, they are brave and honourable, and some (such as the leader Ky) are intelligent and reasonable. Already this is a ridiculous way to approach the British Empire because these traits do not match any of its subject peoples, especially in Africa. But this romanticising of “the oppressed” gets even worse when we learn that the apex of the Solonian life cycle is a sort of angelic being, peace-loving and wise, with fantastic otherworldly capabilities. A fair treatment of British imperialism would have the Solonians be violent, impulsive, ignorant savages with an average IQ of 74 - but we can’t have that, even back in 1972.

Note the subtle difference

Another element in the story is that the Earth Empire has destroyed Earth with pollution and thus has no choice but to keep colonising other planets, but then flagrantly pollutes those as well (as it has done to Solos) - but this is the opposite of the truth of European imperialism. It was not the British who filled the River Ganges with “untreated sewage… industrial waste, agricultural runoff, remnants of partially burned or unburned bodies from funeral pyres, and animal carcasses”.

Another opposite is that the Solonians had an advanced culture prior to the Earth Empire’s arrival. The truth of colonial Africa - whether British, French, Dutch, German or, yes, Belgian - was completely different. Accounts of what the British found in Benin City, for example, involve slavery, mass human sacrifice, decapitation, mutilation and crucifixion.

When such behaviour is the norm, is it any wonder that some colonial regimes instituted segregation? But in The Mutants, since the Solonians are clearly reasonable, segregation can only be seen as grotesque.

Yet another opposite is that the Solonians cannot read their own ancient hieroglyphs, because the Earth Empire “overlords” have deprived them of their culture and history. It is doubtful that anything like this happened anywhere in the British Empire, apart from within the British Isles (in Cornwall, Ireland, Wales and Scotland). Abroad, the opposite is the truth. The Australian Aborigines and Sub-Saharan Africans had no written languages and therefore in most cases didn’t know their own history until British men deciphered it and explained it to them. The Egyptians plundered the pyramids which remained unexamined until British explorers arrived. The Rosetta Stone had been used by the Mamluks to plug a gap in a wall! Everywhere the British went, they learned the native languages and built museums to preserve the local history of peoples who lacked the wherewithal to have ever done it themselves.

As for slavery, as usual the salient facts are ignored - that Africans had been enslaving each other forever, that the British Empire put a stop to it (against the wishes of African slave-traders), that Europeans were enslaved by coloured people in the past, that what slavery the Europeans did temporarily conduct was the most humane in all of history - and we see only that the lovely Solonians were victimised by brutish European “overlords”. The writers are not interested in the truth, only in vilifying the British Empire in its final dying days.

To say that The Mutants presents a one-sided portrayal of European imperialism would not suffice; it is a wildly distorted one-sided portrayal that bears almost no relation to reality and is fashioned specifically to put European imperialism - and by extension European countries and people - “in the dock”. This caricature treatment is then pored over by demented leftist academics who are just as biased and even make a virtue of being biased:

The story even has a German scientist character, employed by the Marshal to devise more efficient ways to genocide the Solonians. This is supposedly a reference to Nazi scientists (but, of course, not the Jewish scientists on the Manhattan Project, who were eager to use their nuclear weapon on German civilians). The Mutants really has it all.

It has to be significant for Doctor Who as a show that this story originated with its producer, Barry Letts. He handed the idea to writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin, who in turn had their own anti-imperial, anti-racist motivations.

And here, we find an example of something being twisted by progressivist Chinese whispers. Wikipedia reports:

Notice that Wikipedia specifies “over non-white people”, making it clear that this man was a White supremacist, looking forward to dominating people of other races. When I read this sentence, I instinctively felt something was amiss. What are the odds that a man in Bristol in 1970 would casually say to his neighbour “I’m moving to South Africa, to be a kind of master over the Blacks”?

I did some digging. Those extra words “over non-white people” are not in the source Wikipedia is quoting, a 2013 academic essay by Cassie Hemstrom:

In turn, Hemstrom’s source is a 2011 documentary, Mutt Mad (transcript here), in which Baker said:

So, it seems the phrase “to be a kind of master” was never used by Martin’s neighbour, or even by Martin, but only by Baker relaying the story forty years later! (His expression “if you’d like” strongly implies that this was his own phrasing.)

If the neighbour did use the phrase, he might have used it ironically or disapprovingly, signalling that he didn’t like the idea but had to go along with it for the sake of a new life. Or he might have been referring to mastery not over people but over the farm - a huge responsibility for any man to take on. Or, more likely, he was simply noting the reality, that Black men would be looking to him as their master. The least likely reading is the one conveyed by Wikipedia, that he was a White supremacist going there because he sadistically wanted to rule “over non-white people”.

However, almost certainly, this man never used the phrase at all, and it was conjured by either Martin or Baker to pour scorn on him as he went off to do a very difficult job feeding hundreds of people while they stayed comfy in Britain and wrote TV scripts framing him as a villain.

However, let us assume that he had indeed said he was going “to be a kind of master” over non-white people. Let us also assume he said it with a serious desire to rule over other races. For Martin and Baker, this could have inspired an interesting story. What about a man who is ill-suited to the role of master, who has an insecurity which propels him towards cruelty, yet has a subject people who need to be led and stewarded? That would be an interesting moral conflict to examine. Instead, Martin and Baker acted with pure contempt and wrote a cartoon in which the evil White man goes off and subjugates beings who are not merely equal to him, but superior.

In this, Martin and Baker were aided by a producer and a director who were of the same mind. As an alarming side-note, the director was Christopher Barry, whose knighted father had organised the 1951 Festival of Britain. (The fish rots from the head.)

Staggeringly, the script for The Mutants was originally even more anti-imperialist, but supervisor Terrance Dicks, who was actually pro British Empire, toned it down! I can’t imagine what it was originally like, because the finished product is as reckless and indulgent a screed as you could imagine.

The Mutants is a very self-assured and self-righteous story, but the result of its thesis, in real life, is not divine Solonian superbeings, but starving Zimbabweans asking White farmers to return and feed them because they lack the intelligence to operate the farms that the White Rhodesians established.

In summary… the only way you can make the British Empire seem monstrous is to lie that its officials had genocidal loathing for the subject peoples, and that those peoples were equal to them or even superior to them, instead of indolent Indians and brutish Bantus.

That lie was told relentlessly by The Mutants over six episodes, each getting an average of 7.8 million viewers. The lie would be absorbed into the minds of the children watching. Thirteen years later, they eagerly donated to Live Aid… and thus created the teeming masses of Africans who are now bussed (by the international governance so lauded by Doctor Who) into German cities, Dutch towns and Irish villages.

Lastly… a salutary lesson can be learned by surveying the home towns of the men responsible for The Mutants. They all died between 2007 and 2021. I wonder whether any of them had the sense to re-consider his views in light of the changes occurring to the place that created him. Writer Bob Baker came from Bristol, which is now just 71% White British. Director Christopher Barry came from Greenwich - now 56% White British. Producer Barry Letts came from Leicester - now 33% White British. As for writer Dave Martin, an activist against Apartheid, he came from Handsworth - now 6% White British.

What a bunch of useful idiots.

Terrance Dicks, bless him for trying, came from East Ham - now 21% White British.

In 2021, the Guardian described The Mutants as “a clever satire on colonialism”.