Doctor Who: The Masters of Luxor Review

Released in 2012, The Masters of Luxor

was part of Big Finish's third series of The Lost Stories. Written by Anthony Coburn

in 1963, the fabled story was adapted by

Nigel Robinson, and featured the vocal

talents of contemporaneous TARDIS

crewmembers, Carole Ann Ford and

William Russell.

The full, and unedited scripts were first

presented in 1992, by John McElroy, the

editor of Titan Books' Doctor Who: The

Scripts. Coburn's original documents were

only uncovered when the publishers were researching his only televised serial, The

 Tribe of Gum (published in 1988).

"THE WAIT IS OVER... A dark and silent

planet. A magnificent crystal edifice,

perched on a mountainside.

A legion of dormant robots, waiting for

the signal to bring them back to life.

The Doctor and his granddaughter Susan, and their reluctant companions,

Ian and Barbara, are about to unleash forces which will threaten their very survival.

Read for the first time the complete script of this magnificent, but regret-

tably never produced Doctor Who story."

The back-cover blurb of this paperback script book previews one of the

earliest lost Doctor Who stories, and like most of the William Hartnell

episodes, each instalment had individual titles: The Cannibal Flower,

The Mockery of a Man, A Light on the Dead Planet, Tabon of Luxor,

An Infinity of Surprises, and The Flower Blooms.

The embryonic series was to open with The Giants (latterly Planet of

 Giants) by C E Webber, followed by the six-part The Masters of

Luxor (initially titled The Robots), but ultimately both of these scripts

were abandoned in favour of 100,000 BC (aka The Tribe of Gum then

An Unearthly Child) and Terry Nation's The Daleks (aka The Mutants)

respectively. The rest, they say, is history.

SYNOPSIS

The crystal-city in which the TARDIS crew become trapped is in

fact an automated prison on one of Luxor's 700 satelites, in the

Primiddion galaxy.

The decadent Luxorite society was strictly ordered (effectively

enslaved by their own robots), and anyone who revolted against

the titular Masters was exiled to the prison-moon. The Masters

deemed the women of Luxor to be inferior, and any "imperfect"

female children were killed.

The rebels were then subjected to experimentation from Lord

Tabon, one of the Scientific Masters, in his quest to create the

 'Perfect One' in man's image. So both Tabon and his creation

(shades of Frankenstein) seem to have developed a God

complex, and this religious issue is touched upon in the scripts.

The Perfect One now seeks to drain the "flesh and blood" life-

force from the time-travellers too, particularly the elusive

"women". This idea is further explored in The Savages (1966).

Tabon's One has a liquid-metal cerebrum. When this Azzintium

cortex is solidified by making One immobile, an atomic device

linked to it's brain explodes and destroys the moon.

NOTES

• this story immediately follows the events of The Tribe of Gum (Coal Hill Comprehensive, Kal and Za are all mentioned here)
• the TARDIS can "free float" (ie. be manoeuvred "like a helicopter"), has a Fault Locator (seen in The Daleks, The Edge of Destruction and Planet of Giants), holds an "emergency" energy supply, is continually referred to as "she", possesses a kind of intuitive power, and is actually solar-powered
• the moon is described as a "dead planet" (but this one is not radio- active like Skaro), and the prison is a very similar setting to the Dalek city, with it's surveillance cameras and mountain-side "back-door"
• Barbara compares the city to the carnivorous cannibal flower, sucking the TARDIS' power away
• the Doctor has a photographic memory, quotes Karl Marx, and embraces Tabon's religion
• Susan is called Sue or Suzanne throughout the original scripts
• the Doctor and Susan are not human (Ian and Barbara are "you Earth people") which ties in more with the pilot epiosde
• cliffhanger recaps are absent from the scripts, and part six would have led directly into The Edge of Destruction
• Coburn's scripts feature a hierarchy of robots: the "primitive" Mark One machines (which bow at commands, and seem incapable of speech); the more humanoid Mark Twos; the more advanced Derivitrons (one is even named, Proto); and their overall master, the human-like 'Perfect One' (programmed by Tabon)
• these automata have a remarkable parallel to those central to The Robots of Death (1977) - here, the black Dum servants are the lowest ranked robots in their caste-system (they cannot speak), the green Vocs are superior to the Dums, whilst the silver Super Vocs control all other robots - the roboticist Dask (unmasked as Taren Capel, who was raised by robots and hates mankind) has reprogrammed all of the Sandminer's automata to obey his will

The Genesis of Doctor Who

After reading Brian J Robb's Timeless

 Adventures: How Doctor Who Conquered

TV, I've concluded just how fortunate

Whovians are that our beloved show was produced at all.

In March 1962, Eric Maschwitz, assistant to Controller of Programmes, Stuart Hood,

assigned Alice Frick and Donald Bull of

the BBC Survey Group to prepare a

feasibility study into the creation of a new

science fiction series. A second report by

Frick and John Braybon recommended a time travel format.

Sci-fi buff Sydney Newman began work

as new Head of Drama for BBC TV that

December, and was soon expanding

Frick's work with Donald Wilson and

C E Webber.
But the old guard at Television Centre

were determined for 'Dr. Who' to fail -

only for it's defenders - key personnel

Verity Lambert, David Whitaker, Anthony Coburn, and Waris 

Hussein - the embryonic show would have fallen at the first hurdle.

Fast forward to the transmission of the first Dalek adventure in

December 1963 - the Corporation's powers-that-be thankfully

reacted by abandoning the show's intended thirten-week lifespan.

Only after reading the production notes on The Rescue DVD did I

learn that by August 1964, Donald Baverstock again wanted to

 revert the Doctor Who contract to just 13 weeks, and cancel the

show when all remaining stories finished in January 1965.

Only when Lambert and William Hartnell's agent dug in their

heels did Baverstock finally agree to another, twenty-six-week run,

by which time the programme's long term future was secured.

The threat of cancellation would however revisit the show in times

of crisis. As The War Games concluded the black and white era in

1969, the BBC considered a six year run to have been a good

innings and there was some internal debate about whether to axe

Doctor Who. 

The lowest point in the show's history was the 'hiatus' of 1985

when Michael Grade 'rested' the Doctor's adventures for eighteen

months, then the end finally arrived in 1989 with outright can-

cellation.

It's hard to believe that the programme could have ended after

The Dalek Invasion of Earth (just fifty-one episodes), and was

so close to becoming a footnote in TV history.