City of Death is very good.

Perhaps not quite as good as its reputation suggests: but definitely very good.

On October 20th 1979, sixteen million people watched the final instalment of the story. Sixteen million. In 2026, a drama series is doing pretty well if six million viewers switch on.

Times were, of course, different. There were three channels, and one of those showed nothing but cricket commentaries in Welsh. There was no internet, cinemas showed the same movie for weeks on end, and the pubs didn’t open until 5.30. Kids (I am told) were allowed to play marbles and hopscotch unsupervised on street corners, but they had to come home when it got dark.

So there was not much to do at quarter past six on a Saturday apart from watch Doctor Who.

The autumn of 1979 was unusual even by the standards of the time. ITV had replaced its regular programming with a card which said “We are sorry that programmes have been interrupted: there is an industrial dispute.” In August one of the ITV unions had gone out on strike in support of a perfectly reasonable 25% pay rise. They went back to work at the end of October, whereupon some of the BBC unions downed tools over an equally reasonable dispute about who was responsible for making sure the big hand and the little hand were in the correct positions on the Play School clock. (Or, according to some sources, that the Crackerjack clock was set to precisely five to five.) This resulted in the cancellation of Shada. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy includes a skit about the philosophers' guild threatening a walk-out over demarcation.

There is a widely dispersed oral tradition that a million people continued to watch ITV even when it wasn’t showing anything, and that there was a notable jump in the birth rate the following April.

But still, sixteen million is an awful lot of people. Enough to fill a line of double decker busses stretching from Lands End to John O’Groats. Or five entire Waleses.

What impression of Doctor Who did those sixteen million people come away with?

At the end of Episode One, the villainous Count Scarlioni pulls off a latex mask and reveals himself to be….a scaly green alien with one cyclopian eye.

This scene frequently turns up on compilation reels, alongside the Myrka and the Skarasen, as evidence of how primitive Old Who was and how right Michael Grade was to put it out of its misery. It’s actually not badly done: not as clever as the Sarah-Jane reveal in Android Invasion, but quite fun all the same. Julian Glover puts his hands to his actual face, we quickly cut to the mask being removed from what could well be a mannequin, and then back to Glover (or his stand-in) looking at his alien self in the mirror. The exact same shot is used when he unmasks again in Episode Four.

There is no particular reason for the Count to have pulled the mask off at that particular moment. Maybe, like the Slitheen, he just finds it uncomfortable to wear for prolonged periods. Julian Glover apparently did, hence the stand-in. [2]

But the cliffhanger does have a function. On the surface, Scarlioni is an urbane, Simon Templar bad guy: a witty, aristocratic art thief. But under the skin, he is decidedly a Doctor Who monster.

And that really tells us everything we need to know about City of Death. It appears to be a sit-com: a Wildean comedy of manners in which every line is a zinger or an aphorism. But under the bonnet, it is still very much a Doctor Who story.

Or, if you prefer: City of Death is a rather clever, high-concept science fiction romp which has cleverly disguised itself as a social comedy.

In the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams reduced the meaning of life to a punchline. City of Death turns on a similar conceit. When we were very young, human existence seemed to acquire new meaning and significance once you knew that an inscrutable alien stand-in for the Deity had been playing Strauss to cave-men since before the Dawn of Time. But that idea had become familiar through over-use, Daniken’s space-gods and Arthur C Clark’s Monolith were now ripe for parody.

Count Scarlioni is really Scaroth of the Jaggeroth. Zillions and zillions of years ago, he blew up his warp drive, inadvertently kicking off the chemical reaction which gave birth to Life on Earth. As a side effect, he was split into twelve “splinters” of himself, scattered across time, and they have been clandestinely influencing human civilisation ever since. He wants to get humans to the point where they can help him construct a Time Machine, go back to the Dawn of Time and prevent the accident, and therefore the human race, from ever occurring.

As science fiction shaggy dog stories go, it’s quite a strong one. Alan Moore’s alien frat-boys DR and Quinch messed around with human evolution because they wanted the continents to spell out a very rude word in their own language. It’s a long way from the Star Child and Thus Spake Zarathustra.

These kinds of wibbly wobbly timey wimey plots were pretty rare in classic Who. Fans at the time felt that the use of the TARDIS to ferry the Doctor back to the Renaissance and then to the Dawn of Time was a severe breach of narrative etiquette. And to be honest, it is rather lame, given that it is only two stories since the Doctor relinquished control of the TARDIS to the Randomiser.

“Oh but Andrew, surely the Doctor can switch the Randomiser on and off when he wants to?” Yes: yes I am sure he can. And there might very well have been a scene in which he said that in order to save humanity he would have to make himself vulnerable to the Black Guardian. But there isn't.

In Episode Three, Scarlioni rants: “Can you imagine how a man might feel who has caused the pyramids to be built, the heavens to be mapped, invented the first wheel, shown the true use of fire, brought up a whole race?” In becoming a God Like Alien and taking control of human development, he is entering a fairly crowded field. The Daemons and the Fendahl and Sutehk have all had their turn. The Doctor is not above a bit of benign uplifting himself. In Pirate Planet he was claiming to have taught Newton about gravity (with a g); and this week he claims to have encouraged Shakespeare to write Hamlet. I imagine there is some fan-fic, or possibly a collectible card-game, in which the Doctor and the GLAs are engaged in an eons-long four-dimensional chess game, one heaving the human race hither and the other hauling it thither. Perhaps so many of them are at it that in the end it hardly makes any difference and Homo Sapiens is in control of his own destiny. Or perhaps it’s a huge philosophical metaphor: what we think of as “human history” is merely the intersection of the self-interested schemes of forces far beyond our comprehension -- in the same way that what we like to think of as our “selves” is really the locus for an infinite number of malicious or benevolent “memes”.

But that line of thinking ruins the cosmic joke. While we are watching this story, we have to pretend that Life on Earth really is and always has been an accidental by-product of Scaroth’s scheming. City of Death is only fun if we pretend that Image of the Fendahl never happened. The Doctor travels sideways through multiple iterations of a single idea, not forwards and backwards along a singular timeline that gradually reveals itself.

Laugh at Doctor Who’s production values if you like: I am sure many of the Sixteen Million did. But I don't think this kind of thing would have worked if it had been mounted on a more impressive scale. In Episode Four, the Doctor, Romana and their new friend Duggan arrive on Primeval Earth, seconds before the Jaggeroth ship accidentally gives birth to life as we know it. This is big, cosmic, biblical stuff. The Jaggeroth says let there be radiation and behold there is radiation. And yet what we are looking at is three actors and a guy in a mask in front of a painted backdrop in a studio. A perfectly good painted back-drop: not something you would single out as a terrible example of Doctor Who’s make-do-and-mend ethos. The model space ship is really nice and you can’t see the wire when it takes off. But it’s artificial: we have to suspend our disbelief and eke out its imperfections with our mind. If it had been a full-on CGI set piece, which we could swear had been filmed on location in the Archaeozoic epoch [3] we could never have bought into the preposterousness of the premise.

1: Creature From the Pit got a perfectly responsible ten million viewers, so in fact we are talking about six million people who would rather have been watching Mind Your Language.

2: One Richard Sheeky apparently, who has an impressive CV including such roles as Man at Reunion, Man, Policeman, and Man (Uncredited).

3: I looked it up.