This is the real Fifties.
For a series regarded as quintessentially British, very few moments on Doctor Who stand out as purely—which is to say, peculiarly—rooted in the British experience. True, there have been occasional references to cricket and boarding school, and explorations of British history make up an entire sub-genre of stories, but they all remain explicable, understandable, to the moderately well-read viewer from beyond the English Channel. That is, until Malcolm Kohll’s “Delta and the Bannermen” (Story Production Code 7F), showcasing that most specifically British of all institutions: the holiday camp.
Established as an inexpensive, all-inclusive getaway in the early twentieth century, the holiday camp, exemplified by the Butlin’s chain, typically features a series of shared, spartan accommodations not unlike barracks—and indeed several camps were used as such during the Second World War—with group meals at fixed times and elaborately planned entertainments on the fenced-in camp grounds, from fun races and skits through to dances and bathing beauty competitions. A veritable army of young people would serve as camp hosts, running the festivities and doing their best to engage campers in activities. While American analogues to the British holiday camp exist, as in the Catskills resorts of the ’50s, the incessant focus on constant communal interaction sets these camps apart. The visual language of the British holiday camp—bright colors, workers in matching blazers, and utilitarian architecture within a walled compound—makes for an instantly recognizable setting, at least if you happen to be British.
Many of the holiday camp guests in “Delta and the Bannermen” are not British, instead being Navarinos, “[s]quat, wrinkly, purply creatures,” transmogrified into human form in preparation for a nostalgia trip to Disneyland on Earth in 1959. The Seventh Doctor and Mel tag along on their trip, in a spaceship designed to look like a bus, by virtue of being the ten billionth customers at an intergalactic toll booth, winning spots on the tour as a prize. Also tagging along is Delta (Belinda Mayne), whom we see fleeing from a group of armed ruffians at the start of the story, defended bravely by what, to all intents, appear to be life-size plastic green army men.
There’s a curious lack of concern on the Doctor’s part about this nonchalant excursion of aliens into Earth’s past, even after the galactic tour bus smashes into an early American satellite, causing the Navarinos to land, somewhat shy of Anaheim, in Wales after the Doctor’s intervention with the TARDIS. Rather than immediately removing the aliens via his own perfectly functional time-space craft, he suggests they all stay at Shangri-La, the holiday camp they have fortuitously crashed next to, going so far as to ask the camp’s mechanic, Billy (David Kinder), to help Murray (Johnny Dennis), the Navarino tour guide, fix the “nav pod” on the interstellar bus.
Such temporal infelicities soon pale, however, as one of the Navarinos, Keillor (Brian Hibbard), turns out to be an intergalactic assassin who recognizes Delta as the “Chimeron queen,” relaying her location to Gavrok (Don Henderson), leader of the Bannermen seen hunting her at the beginning of this story’s first episode. And as a three episode story, events must needs move fast. (Season Twenty-Four, like the season just past, is budgeted for only fourteen twenty-five minute episodes, leading to a pair of three episode stories to close out Sylvester McCoy’s abbreviated debut season.) Kohll doesn’t even wait until the middle of the story to have Mel scream, as in the first episode cliffhanger she witnesses an egg carried in a glowing disco box by Delta start to hatch an unlikely green chicken…