Inspirations - Battlefield

 

The principal inspiration for Battlefield, the second story from Ben Aaronovitch, is the Arthurian legend.

Arthur himself is mentioned - though he's merely a long-dead corpse in this. The villainess is Morgaine, and her evil son is Mordred. Heroic knight Ancelyn derives his name from Lancelot, and the Doctor is believed to be Merlin.

Arthur's sword Excalibur plays a crucial role. At one point Ace rises from Lake Vortigern with the sword - looking like the Lady of the Lake. Archaeologist Peter Warmsley quotes from Alfred Lord Tennyson's Arthurian poetry. (James Ellis, who played Warmsley, thought his part underwritten, and so added a lot of Tennyson himself. Most was cut but some sections remain).

Ancelyn mentions the Battle of Camlann, which was Arthur's final battle where he killed Mordred but was fatally wounded himself.

Between 1468 - 1470, Sir Thomas Malory wrote Le Morte d'Arthur whilst in prison (having been implicated in a failed plot to overthrow King Edward IV. He was in and out of prison often). It was published in 1485.

This work pulled together a number of much older English and French works on Arthur - such as Chretien de Troyes' 12th Century poems on Lancelot and the Grail. It forms the basis for most of our popular ideas about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, including the Grail legends.

In this Arthur inherits the Round Table from Guinevere's father, when they get married. Morgan Le Fey is Arthur's half-sister, and Morded is her son - but also Arthur's child through an act of incest. Excalibur isn't pulled from a stone, but given to Arthur by the Lady of the Lake. Lancelot and Guinevere's relationship is presented as courtly love, and not at all adulterous.

In 1958 TH White published The Once and Future King, which was a modern updating of Malory's work. This includes Arthur pulling Excalibur from the stone.

Rather than claim that King Arthur, Morgaine et al derive from our Dark Ages, Battlefield opts to have them all derive from an alternative universe, where magical powers are real. Doctor Who had always claimed that magic did not exist - things which appeared magical always had to be given a scientific explanation. The best example of this is The Daemons.

Lake Vortigern gets its name from a 5th Century English warlord who is said to have invited the Saxons into England to help defend it against attacks from the Picts and the Scots. Vortigern wasn't his name but his title - it means Great Chief or Supreme Lord. He was not a King of the Britons, as many have claimed.

Battlefield was the first story to feature UNIT since The Seeds of Doom back in 1976. The Brigadier is called out of retirement to rejoin the organisation, having last been seen teaching at Brendon School in Mawdryn Undead, and then attending a UNIT reunion in The Five Doctors. Nicholas Courtney expected to be killed off in this story, which he was okay about - so long as it was a heroic demise - but the writer couldn't bring himself to do it in the end. The Brigadier is now married to a woman named Doris. This comes from Planet of the Spiders, where the clairvoyant Professor Clegg "reads" the Brigadier's watch and senses him receiving it from a young woman named Doris in a Brighton hotel, for unspecified favours rendered.

UNIT now have blue badges and uniform flashes, which reflect real UN troop insignias. The Brigadier's replacement is Brigadier Winifred Bambera. Surprisingly she doesn't seem to have heard anything about the Doctor, and doesn't even seem to know much about her predecessor.

The UNIT passes which Ace shows depict the Doctor in his Third incarnation, with Dr Liz Shaw as his assistant.

"Bessie" makes her final appearance in the show - apart from the clip from The Five Doctors seen in The Name of the Doctor. A number of old monsters are also referenced when the Brigadier talks about the weapons UNIT has brought - such as gold-tipped bullets for "you know what" (i.e. Cybermen). The Doctor also lists a number of monsters to prove to Bambera that he is the Doctor.

After causing all sorts of continuity problems by having the Brigadier retired by 1977 in Mawdryn Undead, JNT ensures that this story is definitely set in the near future. There is mention of a King (presumably Charles III), and £5 coins.

Script Editor Andrew Cartmel was a strong advocate of nuclear disarmament, and he wrote the scene in which the Doctor and Morgaine are in the UNIT command vehicle, where she is planning to launch the missile. So passionate was he about the anti-war message that the scene ran to several pages, so had to be pared right back.

Jean Marsh was the obvious person to play a witch-like role - she had just appeared as witches on the big screen in both Return to Oz and Willow. She finally gets to play alongside Courtney here. In The Daleks' Masterplan, she had played his sister (Sara Kingdom), but only arrived as his character (Bret Vyon) was killed.

This story marks the last time that the TARDIS console room is seen the classic era of the programme. It was hastily put together, and the shortcomings of the set had to be hidden by the lights being left unusually dim.

Whilst Cartmel listed this story as one of his top three favourites, Aaronovitch hated it. He disliked the dialogue and thought the knights should have looked more high-tech. He also hated both the design and the music. He wished it had been a three part story.

Next time: the writer uses his rather tedious work experience as inspiration for a story about evolution...