Susan’s “jolly good smacked bottom” explained
Susan’s “jolly good smacked bottom” explained
We Doctor Who fans have long squirmed with embarrassment at the scene early in The Dalek Invasion of Earth in which the Doctor tells Susan: “What you need is a jolly good smacked bottom!” She had just done herself a minor injury whilst (accidentally) demolishing a bridge onto the TARDIS. But even so, it’s shocking to hear the Doctor advocate corporal punishment.
With one (related) exception, which we’ll come to in due course, the Doctor never does this again. But why does he do it this time? Even for this most stern, high-handed version of the Doctor, it’s uncharacteristic. Perhaps a detailed examination of the script will help us understand the intent of the line a bit better…
Oh. No, it won’t. That line isn’t in the script.
I’ve looked at Terry Nation’s original draft script (entitled ‘The Invaders’), which has some significant differences from the programme we see on screen. It also conspicuously lacks any reference to smacking Susan’s bottom. I then looked at the camera script, which in theory is the final script, prepared for and used during the recording itself. Again, the line isn’t there.
In theory the camera script should be a very close guide to what we see on screen – it’s a blueprint for the programme essentially. In practice, it’s not uncommon for there to be small differences between the script and final recording, particularly in the early years of the programme, due to actors fluffing or approximating their lines, or small tweaks being made at the last minute.
In this case, it’s surprising how far this particular scene deviates from the camera script. It isn’t just the “jolly good smacked bottom” that isn’t in the script; a number of lines have been omitted or significantly rephrased between script and performance. For example, in the script Susan bashed her head in her fall and only slightly later in the exchange becomes aware of her ankle injury.
That said, Alan Barnes pointed out after my first version of this article that whilst the line doesn’t appear in the camera script, there is a blank space in the right place for it which suggests a line of dialogue had been deleted late in the day. Between the draft and camera scripts there would have been a rehearsal script prepared by story editor David Whitaker. This no longer exists, which is a shame as it would be crucial evidence as to whether the “jolly good smacked bottom” was actually scripted.
The line may have been in the rehearsal script and removed from the camera script late in the day, leading to Hartnell – who would already have learned it – becoming confused and performing the line although he should have passed it over. Or Hartnell may have given only an approximation of the deleted line – whether a better or worse version we cannot know. Alternatively, it could have been a different line that was deleted, making this space in the script a red herring.
In any case, this all suggests some reworking went on late in the day, perhaps at the end of the preceding week’s rehearsal period or possibly on the recording day itself. I am going to assume that the line in question, or something roughly equivalent at least, was intended at some point in production, if not necessarily for final recording – i.e. it was either added at the last minute or had been in the rehearsal script but was supposed to be dropped, but wasn’t.
So who wrote the “smacked bottom” line, and why? It could have been Terry Nation, the credited writer; it could have been David Whitaker as part of his script editing duties; or it could have been director Richard Martin, perhaps in combination with the cast themselves. In his Doctor Who Magazine ‘Fact of Fiction’ feature on the story, Alan Barnes suggests William Hartnell may have added it himself. But we’ll return to these suspects later. The why is the more interesting question.
I think the line is doing more than is initially obvious, and once you know how the story ends it starts to make more sense. It relates to the Doctor’s decision to leave Susan behind to build a new life with David Campbell, and the fact that Susan has been afforded precious little character development in the series up to this point, a fact Whitaker would probably have been acutely aware of now that he was faced with arranging her exit.
Susan had, of course, been in the series since its first episode, An Unearthly Child. The very title tells us that she is a child. Dialogue specifies she is fifteen years old. Throughout her time in the show, Susan is referred to as ‘child’ by the Doctor, if not always by every other character. In The Daleks, Alydon describes her as: “No longer a child, not yet a woman.”
To the Doctor though, she remains a child. Susan appears to have aged to sixteen by the time of The Dalek Invasion of Earth; she quotes this age in Marco Polo and her subsequent adventuring between the two stories doesn’t suggest the passage of time adequate for another birthday to have occurred. Let’s not get into her being alien and at what rate she ages; as far as the series is concerned at this time, she is, or at least ages as, a human. And given that the Doctor leaves her to live out her life with humans that’s the only approach that makes sense.
The relationship between the Doctor and Susan was always close but essentially unchanging. The only potential modifications to this came in The Sensorites, when the pair briefly fall out. “Stop treating me like a child,” she implores the Doctor, only to be rebuffed: “You will do as you’re told”. Ian suggests she’s been hypnotised by the Sensorites but Barbara knows better: “She’s just growing up, Ian.”
There are also a couple of hints in the dialogue at Susan developing a desire for the stability of a home, but there’s no suggestion that she wants this imminently. However, the most significant line is the Doctor’s, when, after Susan has again submitted to him following their quarrel, he refers her proudly as “a fine young woman”. It’s the first time he refers to her as a woman rather than as a child, and the last until he locks her out of the TARDIS at the end of The Dalek Invasion of Earth.
It was Susan-actor Carole Ann Ford’s decision to leave the series when she did. Faced with writing her character out of the series, the production team had a problem. Whereas Ian and Barbara had walked into the TARDIS as independent adults and could walk out again at any time, Susan had been established as a child with a close and interdependent relationship with her grandfather. This had to change for it to be credible that she would part with the Doctor and, perhaps more crucially as it transpired, for him to part with her. The only other alternative was killing the character off, but that was clearly never a possibility. So 16-year-old ‘child’ Susan has to become a woman and the Doctor has to recognise this.
Ford announced in the press that she would be leaving the series at the end of her contract as early as March 1964. We don’t know if this was communicated to the production team earlier than this but, either way, March 1964 is the latest point that they could have known they would need to write the character out. I suspect it not coincidental that the same month Peter R Newman delivered the first three scripts of The Sensorites. Did Ford’s announcement prompt Whitaker to try to start developing Susan’s character and her relationship with the Doctor when editing these scripts, or might he have asked Newman to incorporate this into his story while he was writing it, with a view to the ongoing process of arranging her exit?
The Sensorites gives us mixed signals. Barbara recognises Susan is growing up. The Doctor acknowledges her as a woman for the first time, but continues to treat her as a child. The latter attitude prevailed over the course of the next two adventures that bridge the gap before The Dalek Invasion of Earth. It appears the ball had been dropped on developing Susan as her departure approached, perhaps because of the stereotypical damsel-in-distress role the nature of the series forced the character into.
Arguably, there was a failure of foresight on the part of Whitaker and producer Verity Lambert. Given all the battles they had to fight to get the early episodes made and to keep the series from being peremptorily cancelled, it’s not surprising that the longer-term futures of their characters were not thought out. It should have been obvious that if the series were to continue in constant production, as was hoped, then sooner or later some of the regular cast would want to move on. That’s not so hard for Ian and Barbara – simply have the TARDIS materialise close to their own time and location and they can wander off (though what they eventually did in The Chase was more interesting). Susan is the challenge for the reasons outlined already.
Ideally, development of Susan’s character from child to young woman, and the Doctor’s acknowledgement of this, would have started early on and progressed gradually across all her stories, so her leaving – or being left – at the end of The Dalek Invasion of Earth appeared a natural conclusion to her time in the series. Some will argue that this sort of character development across lengthy seasons of genre television was not how the medium did things in the early 1960s. Maybe. But it doesn’t mean that the Doctor Who team couldn’t have made at least some provision for their characters’ futures in case of the failure of the BBC’s attempts to kill the show off.
Rather than turning from child to woman across a season (and a bit) of stories, that transformation occurs within the one story. Whitaker wrote in a July 1964 document called ‘Proposed Elimination of Susan from “Doctor Who” Series’ that in the story that became The Dalek Invasion of Earth: “The enormity of the world catastrophe has a marked effect on Susan’s character.” And, after she falls in love, “Doctor Who is aware of her growing womanhood”, leading to him deciding to leave her behind.
In the latest issue of Vworp Vworp! Alistair McGown writes eloquently about Susan and her character development, tentatively suggesting that she had an ‘arc’. I’d respectfully disagree. I think the document referred to above (which is included on the season 2 bluray set) essentially shows Whitaker conceding that Susan had not been provided with adequate development up to that point that could logically culminate in her leaving the TARDIS, and that therefore all this development had to happen within the space of her final adventure. The Sensorites had merely hinted at the direction of travel; The Dalek Invasion of Earth had to actually realise a huge shift in the relationship of Susan and the Doctor.
It does this in a number of ways, but starts by establishing the status quo – Susan’s juvenility. She had never been shown to have much in the way of practical skills, such as an adult may have, and this is emphasised early in the story. After Barbara tells David that she can cook, therefore giving her a useful (albeit gendered) function for the rebels, David asks Susan what she can do. “I eat,” she replies testily, which stresses her dependence. This exchange isn’t in Nation’s draft.
However, by the fifth episode, Susan is managing to cook over an open fire. She appears to be learning practical skills. Perhaps she was being facetious earlier when not volunteering any cooking skills (and nor did she deny any) but it made the point of her as essentially an unproductive mouth to feed. In the cooking scene, her horseplay with David confirms their romantic connection. This is acknowledged by the Doctor when he interrupts them, noting wryly: “I can see something’s cooking.” That’ll be the character development, Doctor. Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t occur in Nation’s draft either and was clearly Whitaker’s work.
When the Doctor locks Susan out of the TARDIS at the end, she protests that she belongs with him. He replies: “Not any longer, Susan. You’re still my grandchild and always will be, but now you’re a woman too.” It’s the second time he refers to her as woman in the series. This is the pay-off of the whole serial; not the defeat of the Daleks but the Doctor’s acknowledgement that Susan has grown up and is no longer a child. It’s a lovely scene but it is regrettable that the Doctor’s actions rob Susan of any agency in her future, so arguably he’s still treating her as a child, making decisions for her (just as he insisted in The Sensorites), but that’s clearly not the intended reading so let’s park that modern interpretation.
To get back to the point: what is the “jolly good smacked bottom” line doing right at the start? A “smacked bottom“ was a common and wholly uncontroversial punishment for children in Britain in the 1960s. Ford, and her character, are spared the indignity of the punishment actually being delivered but the reference to it confirms that the Doctor’s attitude to Susan at the start of the story is that she is a child, to be treated as a child. This then helps establish the journey she and the Doctor go on across the serial: more mature aspects of her character emerge, which the Doctor recognises along with her need for independent from him.
Regards who added the line, we’ll probably never know (and I’m not asking Carole Ann Ford!). It certainly wasn’t Nation, who was a ‘hands-off’ writer once his scripts were delivered, happy to leave everyone else to get on with their jobs. I’m inclined to think that it was Whitaker and that the line did appear in the rehearsal script, since Whitaker’s redraft added plenty of other character development for Susan to underpin her changing relationship with the Doctor. If that was the case, it will remain a mystery why it was supposed to have been dropped (it could be for timing reasons, in response to objections from the cast or Lambert, or because Whitaker simply thought better of it).
Equally, although I’m swayed by the ‘blank space’ evidence, I still wouldn’t entirely rule out a more collegiate decision between the cast (Hartnell and Ford, as the pair most concerned), Whitaker and Martin arising during rehearsals, with the new line replacing an unrelated deleted one perhaps so last minute that it never got written into the camera script (the copy that exists at least). We can only speculate.
Whilst the line in question is certainly an embarrassing and anachronistic one for the show, it does at least have a useful function in establishing the character journeys that are essential to the story. Compare this to Twice Upon a Time, in which Steven Moffat has the David Bradley version of the first Doctor threaten Bill with “a jolly good smacked bottom”. Here it is used for laughs and, along with some sexist lines of the type the character never actually used, to inaccurately suggest that this oldest Doctor is a dinosaur in his attitudes.
In The Dalek Invasion of Earth, a “smacked bottom” is what the Doctor thinks Susan deserves, but he doesn’t directly threaten her with it, as he uncharacteristically does to Bill in the 2017 episode. The irony is that, for all its anachronism, the Doctor’s 1964 advocacy of corporal punishment is excusable in the specific context of the story; the more recent invocation of the same is no more than a cheap gag at the character’s expense.
Images © BBC
With thanks to Andrew Pixley and Alan Barnes.
Sources
Alan Barnes, ‘The Fact of Fiction’ article about The Dalek Invasion of Earth in Doctor Who Magazine #487, July 2015.
David Brunt, The Doctor Who Production Diary: The Hartnell Years, available from Telos Publishing here.
Alistair McGown, ‘Susan Who?’ article in the (highly recommended) Vworp Vworp! issue 6, available here.
The Dalek Invasion of Earth production documentation from the Season 2 blu-ray boxed-set