Hello everyone, the Historian here, once again attempting to fill in the gaps left by the posting pause. As before, regardless of the date of this post, this is being written in January of 2014. Last time, things got a little involved, so I’m going to try to streamline this (and future) story wrapups. Let me know what you think.
PRODUCTION: Unlike The Celestial Toymaker, there isn’t a lot of drama to tell of with The Gunfighters. The script, from Mythmakers writer Donald Cotton, was comissioned by the outgoing production team. The new production team (producer Innes Lloyd and story editor Gerry Davis) were…a little less than enamoured with the scripts. They’d already started talking about doing away with the historical stories (thanks to the perception that they were less popular than the science fiction ones), and the comedy in the scripts wasn’t the direction Lloyd and Davis wanted to go in either. But, as with the previous story, the two were stuck with The Gunfighters.
Cotton, amusingly, had originally set out to write a fully researched, realistic script…but decided to throw all of that out and just write what I have referred to as “Mythic History.” This is neither the time, nor the place to really go into the true history of the shoot-out at the OK Corral…let’s just say that “Mr. Werp” and Doc Holliday were not exactly much more good guys than the Clantons themselves. Still, the scripts were reportedly more serious than what was actually seen, as Lloyd (clearly not thrilled with them) apparently requested that the humor be further emphasized.
Rex Tucker, the man who famously left Doctor Who in a huff before the first episode was even shot (he’d originally been set to direct every other story, as well as stand-in as a production advisor…before conflicts with Verity Lambert ended that plan), came in to direct the story. It’s actually Tucker who we have to praise or to blame for the prominence of “The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon.” A version was in Cotton’s scripts, but it was Tucker who decided to have the song act as a kind of Greek chorus for the story.
When the story finally aired, it was considerably less than an unqualified success, although Lloyd and Davis may have been pleased in that it gave them more ammunition in their argument for the abolition of pure historicals!
For a heck of a lot more info, here’s the story’s Brief History of Time (Travel) page.
PROJECT REPORT: Watching this story…was honestly shocking to me. Not only did I remember it as being interminable (having seen it years ago), but I remember (again, going back to books like Peter Hainings) that everyone was supposed to have felt that way. I could not have been more surprised to discover that not only did the Project members really enjoy it…but so did I! Not that we liked it all–the (mostly) bad American accents, and the song…oh, the song… But, for the most part, we found it fun to watch and laughed with the story, rather than at it. But don’t take my word for it–here are the episode posts:
A Holiday for the Doctor
Don’t Shoot the Pianist
Johnny Ringo
The OK Corral
Not much more to say, other than here’s a link to the BBC episode guide for the story. And, as a final note, do not believe the hype–seek this story out on DVD and decide for yourself! Hopefully you’ll enjoy it as much as we did!
More to come, but until then, I remain
THE HISTORIAN
