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The Gunfighters is a serial I’ve been looking forward to covering for the blog, so there’s some irony that it’s proven a more difficult one to write.
It’s not because this serial is hard to write about—far from it. One of the benefits of doing a long-form project such as this is that I have a rich vein of themes and concerns I can return to, from the way in which the series engages in displays of performance to the ongoing legacies of Britain’s empire. It’s easy, for instance, to see how a serial set in the Wild West might engage with questions of empire or imperial expansion. The Gunfighters even exists within a transitionary limbo, caught between the protracted end of the Wiles-Tosh era and the gradual establishment of a Lloyd-Davis one. How Doctor Who’s relationship to these ongoing themes changes (or stays the same) during that transition is certainly ample material to get writing happening.
No, the difficulty with writing about The Gunfighters is ultimately because of a technical setback. There is a lost draft of this blog post, ironic because in a season defined by its lost episodes The Gunfighters is one of only three to exist in its entirety. It means that I’m writing about episodes I’m able to actually watch, rather than inferences based on reconstructions or slithers of surviving footage.
Losing a draft, however, also means that this entry had to start very much from scratch.
It’s unfortunate, because that’s certainly affected my enthusiasm for writing this post: it’s one that I’d already substantially written, and now I have to do it again. It’s unfair, because The Gunfighters is another comedy-historical by writer Donald Cotton.
This is a serial I want to be enthusiastic about. So, setting aside the turbulent writing of this blog post, let’s head straight into the turbulent nature of Doctor Who’s third season.
As I have stated over the past few posts, Doctor Who is in the process of being handed from one regime to the next. John Wiles and Donald Tosh have long since stepped aside by this point, but their influence continues to linger. Much as they had inherited serials such as The Dalek’s Master Plan or obligations such as commissioning John Lucarotti to write a third serial, we are in a period of scripts commissioned by the old regime that the newcomers are ultimately responsible for producing. Just as Wiles and Tosh faced the prospect of producing The Dalek’s Master Plan with considerable reluctance, Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis in turn didn’t relish the prospect of making The Gunfighters.
The reasons Wiles and Tosh were so reluctant to produce The Dalek’s Master Plan are manifold, but ultimately came down to the obligation that they would make a twelve-episode serial featuring the Daleks—a monster race neither were particularly excited about. They came to Doctor Who with a joint vision to make Doctor Who “more serious, less juvenile” and—having been the face of Verity Lambert’s push to make Doctor Who “very exciting” television—the Daleks represented a conception of Doctor Who that they were eager to move away from. This tension between the vision of the incoming production team and their immediate predecessor gets at one of the reasons why Lloyd and Davis were so unenthusiastic about producing The Gunfighters: they had a vision for Doctor Who where the historical would be obsolete. Their vision will gradually materialise over the final serials of the Hartnell era. If Tosh and Wiles were reacting against Lambert’s vision, Lloyd and Davis will instead use one of the Lambert era’s crowning achievements as the rock upon which they will build their own vision of Doctor Who.
In the meantime they’re stuck with producing The Gunfighters by Donald Cotton, commissioned by Wiles and Tosh in late-November 1965.
The last time we engaged with Cotton was in The Myth Makers, where my reading of the serial was informed by the broader context of the third season. Part of this was in how various episodes flowed into one another, building various associations that culminated with Cotton’s script. The cliff-hanger ending of Galaxy Four, for instance, depicted then-companion Vicki wondering about the events on the lonely planet Kembel. In Cotton’s The Myth Makers, Vicki was subsequently accused by the priestess Cassandra of practicing prophecy after claiming to have knowledge of future events. Taken separately one is merely a neat framing device to segue into “Mission to the Unknown,” a stand-alone episode designed to tease the imminent The Dalek’s Master Plan, while the other a classic instance of comedic misunderstanding. Together, however, we can read Cassandra as recognising Vicki’s role in initiating the transition to “Mission to the Unknown” as a prophetic act. Vicki, in other words, had seen a glimpse of things that were yet to come.
This then plays into Vicki’s departure during the serial’s climax. Presented with a choice between continued adventure in the ancient world or the death promised by The Dalek’s Master Plan, Vicki chose adventure. It’s a decision which has had profound thematic ramifications for Doctor Who, haunting both the programme and Vicki’s successors as companions ever since.
Dodo is the most recent of those successors. The Gunfighters may only be her third appearance, but already she’s been depicted as a naïve and earnest adventurer. She was happily vibing during her first adventure through time and space, and suggested she could “catch a bus back” if she got lost. In many ways, Dodo better reflects Andy Lane’s criticism of Vicki than Vicki ever did: “innocent but [with an] oh-so-annoying chirpiness.” Where Lane used this description to critique Vicki as a character, however, I see Dodo as offering a response to the tensions of the Wiles-Tosh era. Through her innocence and “oh-so-annoying chirpiness,” Dodo offers the possibility of a resurgent adventuring spirit.
We can see that adventurer’s spirit on full display in the opening scenes of The Gunfighters. Stepping out of the TARDIS, Dodo is immediately overcome with excitement upon discovering they have landed in the town of Tombstone in the American West. “Hey, they had cowgirls too, didn’t they?” she asks the Doctor, letting out an enthusiastic “Ya-hoo!” when he confirms that there were.
Dodo’s chirpiness, however, seems to be a bit much for the Doctor. He begins The Gunfighters in “paralysing pain” brought about by a terrible toothache and criticises the Western costumes that both Dodo and Steven change into as “absolutely absurd.” His mood softens, however, when Dodo offers him a hat:
DOCTOR: For me, my dear child? Oh, that’s very thoughtful of you, thank you. Yes, at least it’ll keep the rain off. Yes, it’s most suitable.
Doctor Who, “A Holiday for the Doctor,” (Donald Cotton)
It’s a small moment but, in offering the hat, Dodo restores some emotional balance and shares her spirit of adventure with the Doctor. After a season defined by both thematic and production tensions, even a small moment like this offers the tantalising possibility that the programme is entering a new period of stability—and it’s through Dodo’s influence.
Cotton, however, conspires to break up this stability as early as the second episode (“Don’t Shoot the Pianist”). In this episode he separates his lead cast, settling upon a double-act that pairs Dodo with the gunman and gambler Doc Holliday. Within The Gunfighters, Holliday is a particularly interesting character—I’ll talk about him in some more detail shortly—but for the moment I want to talk about how Cotton uses Holliday to bring out new qualities in the still-new Dodo.
Much of the tension in The Gunfighters comes from the conflict between Doc Holliday and the Clanton family, seeking revenge after Holliday had shot one of their brothers. This creates trouble for the local sheriff, Bat Masterton, and Marshall Wyatt Earp—a friend of Holliday’s. As the situation deteriorates over the course of “Don’t Shoot the Pianist,” Earp pressures Holliday to leave “till this thing blows over.” From this Holliday infers that Earp will be “gunnin’” for him if he remains. With circumstances spiralling out of control, Holliday reluctantly flees with his paramour, Kate, and Dodo in tow.
This brings us to the events of the third episode, “Johnny Ringo.” Holliday had only left Tombstone because he had been threatened by Earp, and tells Kate that he had to “stay close” because he “may have to go back again real soon.” Adding to this, Dodo reminds Holliday that she needs to return to her friends who remain back in Tombstone—something Holliday agrees with, noting that “a gentleman has to take account of these things.” When Dodo confronts Holliday the following morning, however, he seems far less committed to helping her reunite with the Doctor and Steven:
DODO: You said that you were taking me back to my friends today.
Doctor Who, “Johnny Ringo,” (Donald Cotton)
HOLLIDAY: Yeah, today. Or the day after… I will do so in my own good time
The result of this is that Holliday comes across as self-serving and opportunistic, taking advantage of Dodo’s desire to return to Tombstone to suggest that he wasn’t acting purely out of self-interest in remaining nearby. His insistence, then, that “a gentleman has to take account of these things” comes across as an actor performing a role: the role Holliday having chosen being that of a gentleman. As a result, Cotton places Dodo into a position where she must convince a self-interested actor to help somebody else. If this were Vicki we might assume she would immediately respond with a performance of her own: after all, in serials such as The Space Museum she increasingly demonstrated an aptitude for performance. It’s something that marginalia (such as The Unwinding World) would later latch onto as essential character traits.
Dodo isn’t quite so performative. There’s an honesty to her character. Instead of a performance, like Vicki might do, Dodo simply grabs a gun and threatens to shoot Doc Holliday.
It’s a remarkably practical and direct solution, and goes some way towards differentiating Dodo from her predecessor. However, Cotton still writes Dodo as an inexperienced and naïve adventurer—using this as a source of comedy he couldn’t with a veteran like Vicki. In this case, although she might be threatening Holliday at gunpoint, Dodo has never used a gun before. Cotton therefore leans into this, and depicts Holliday seemingly coaching Dodo in how to properly threaten him with a gun:
DODO: I shall try not to kill you. I shall aim for your arm.
Doctor Who, “Johnny Ringo,” (Donald Cotton)
HOLLIDAY: That’s real thoughtful. Just at the moment you’re aiming right between my eyes.
DODO: Oh, I’m sorry. Is that better?
HOLLIDAY: It’s an improvement.
At this point we need to start switching gears, and start grappling with Doc Holliday himself.
I’ve already pointed out that there is a performative quality to Holliday. As seen in how eagerly he frames himself as “a gentleman” for offering to return Dodo to her friends, he will latch onto and act out roles that benefit his own self-interests. Here, however, he doesn’t appear to be acting in the role of a gentleman. Holliday points out that Dodo’s aim is all wrong, and suggests that she should adjust her aim. If Dodo isn’t a performative character like Holliday, and is instead an honest character using direct means, then Holliday is attempting to regain control of the scene by changing it into a performance. He does so by settling into the role of a director.
However, Holliday remains performative. After serving as Dodo’s director, he pulls out his own gun and reveals that he never considered himself in any danger at all: “I didn’t want to have to shoot you neither.” In this scene Holliday has not only filled the roles of both actor and director, but also playwright: writing a scene whereby he is “for the first time… taken, beaten to the draw.”
Perhaps we can read this as merely Holliday continuing to serve his own interests. After all, he had already chosen not to travel too far from Tombstone before Dodo reminded him she wanted to reunite with her friends. Being “beaten to the draw” by Dodo therefore provides him with a justification for returning. And yet, Anthony Jacobs portrays Holliday as utterly gracious in his defeat. Perhaps this is a necessary performance for his paramour, concerned for Holliday’s safety, but does he need to continue the pretence for Wyatt Earp upon his return? Jacobs’ plays Holliday as seemingly proud at being bested by Dodo upon his arrival back in Tombstone. He openly declares that he had been “brung here at gunpoint by a woman,” and introduces Dodo as “the one and only Miss Dodo Dupont.” Proud is certainly how Jackie Lane plays Dodo in this scene as she then dances into view, casually waving her gun around like a conquering hero.
There’s something almost performative about the way she does this. Why, after I’d just said a distinction between Vicki and Dodo is Dodo’s comparative direct and pragmatic character? Perhaps it gestures towards something conspiratorial—that Holliday and Dodo are now collaborators in a choreographed grand entrance. In moments like these, perhaps we are reminded of an earlier conspiratorial double-act: that shared by the Doctor and Vicki in serials such as The Romans or The Crusade.
However, in functioning as both actor and director, Holliday also serves as an echo of a quite different second season character: the performative villain. I’ve previously referred to the essay “So neatly plotted, and so well perform’d”: Villain as Playwright in Marlow’s “The Jew of Malta” by Deats and Starks, which discusses a tradition of theatrical characters that function as “playwright-directors.” These villains will actively work to create plays-within-plays, adopting the roles of writer, director and even actor in these theatrical deceptions. The two most obvious instances of this archetype in Doctor Who are perhaps Bennett from The Rescue and the Monk from The Time Meddler. If we broaden our sample to marginalia, however, we also find Machiavelli in The Ravelli Conspiracy to be another variation on this theme. Within the television series itself a lesser, but more recent, example can be seen in the Toymaker, who takes on the role of casting director for the duration of that serial.
Holliday is arguably not a villainous character. Perhaps when he claims that “a gentleman has to take account of these things” it’s solely performative, and yet of all the roles to perform he still chooses “gentleman.” Perhaps escorting Dodo back to Tombstone merely aligns with his own interests, and yet he not only escorts her back but appears proud to have been bested by her. He hides beneath layers of performance, but there is something noble about Holliday’s buried character. When Kate says that “the Doc’s the best” of the outlaws and “a real gentleman,” she’s right.
There’s an anti-heroic streak to Holliday, and it seems clear that the character’s grey morality holds dramatic appeal to Cotton. Let’s talk, then, about perhaps his most duplicitous act in the entire serial.
In the first episode of The Gunfighters, “A Holiday for the Doctor,” we open with the Doctor suffering a toothache and hoping to “avail [himself] the services of a dentist.” He is quickly pointed in the direction of Doc Holliday’s dental surgery, where he is spotted by Seth Harper. As I mentioned previously, Cotton derives most of the serial’s tension from the conflict between Holliday and the Clanton family: Harper is a hired gun aiding the Clanton’s in their vendetta. When Harper sees the Doctor in Holliday’s surgery, he immediately begins to jump to conclusions:
HARPER: Doc!
Doctor Who, “A Holiday for the Doctor,” (Donald Cotton)
DOCTOR: What? Yes, yes, what is it?
HARPER: Holliday!
DOCTOR: Holiday? Yes, I suppose so. Yes, you could call it that.
It is, of course, a case of mistaken identity—a contrived case if you were being uncharitable. What’s important, however, is that Holliday overhears this exchange and decides to take advantage of the Doctor’s obliviousness.
Knowing that the serial will continue to explore Holliday as a performative character, we can read the character’s actions in this earlier scene as Holliday slipping into the role of stagehand. He fusses over the Doctor’s costume, noting that he “ain’t dressed right for a party,” and insists that the Doctor accept a gun with Holliday’s “name printed on it.” A prop—in this case Holliday’s own gun—is added to the Doctor’s costume. Having noticed that the Doctor had been mistaken for himself, Holliday casts and dresses the Doctor as his doppelganger. He makes his intent clear in the opening scenes of the second episode, “Don’t Shoot the Pianist,” stating that “five minutes should see the end of the man the Clantons think is Doc Holliday.”
As Holliday states this, the Doctor is entering the local saloon and reencounters Seth Harper. The gunman doesn’t just refer to their earlier encounter in Holliday’s dental surgery, but also notices the addition of Holliday’s own gun to the Doctor’s costume:
DOCTOR: The man you’re looking for is the local dentist. Yes! He has a little shop here, along the street.
Doctor Who, “Don’t Shoot the Pianist,” (Donald Cotton)
HARPER: It seems to me that’s where I found you.
DOCTOR: Yes, well, I can explain that. You see
HARPER: And your gun’s got his brand on it.
The scene, of course, is built around the irony that nobody is aware that they’ve been set up by Doc Holliday. By the start of the third episode, “Johnny Ringo,” the Clanton’s at least realise that they had been deceived. That same episode reveals that the Doctor remains oblivious, referring to Holliday as “a great friend of mine” and points out that “he gave me a gun, he extracted my tooth” as proof of their friendship. Of course, Cotton realises the ironies embedded into that line: why else emphasise that Holliday had given the Doctor a gun?
We could say that he indulges in these acts of performing and directing to survive—after all, he gave the Doctor his own gun hoping it would convince the Clanton’s to shoot the wrong man.
However, this isn’t the sole performance that Holliday directs in The Gunfighters. What about his efforts to portray a gentleman, or taking on the role of Dodo’s director? Neither of those are about survival. As noted, he seems to take great pleasure in having been “beaten to the draw” by Dodo—an act he helped direct her through. Even if this was about survival, it’s hardly a foolproof means of surviving: as has been seen in countless performative antagonists previously in Doctor Who, there is always a point where the performance falls apart. Perhaps it’s simply the case that Holliday—a hedonistic “good-for-nothing drunken gambler”—derives pleasure from performance and irony.
Holliday wouldn’t be the only one. After all, Cotton himself seems to take delight in layering these ironies. The viewer is expected to delight in the resultant comedy. As the source of these ironies, the diegetic originator of them, then we’re invited to take pleasure in Holliday’s mischievous and anarchic tendencies.
It’s a pleasure that, during the heights of the Lambert-Spooner era, we were asked to find in the Doctor’s own performances. In some respects, Holliday holds up a cracked mirror to this earlier version of the Doctor. Over the course of the third season his role has changed, with both The Myth Makers and The Dalek’s Master Plan gesturing towards the Doctor as a distanced, reluctant psychopomp. This is in contrast to stories throughout the first two seasons, and in particular those of Dennis Spooner, where the first Doctor was a revolutionary trickster who indulged in performance and outsmarting his rivals.
The Romans is a good comparison here. Just as in The Gunfighters, the Doctor is confused with another character—in this case a famed lyre-player who had been invited to play at Nero’s court in Rome. Crucially, the source of this confusion is a prop: just as it is Holliday’s gun which is held up as proof that the Doctor is Holliday, it is a lyre itself which is proof that the Doctor is the lyre-player. In Spooner’s script this is seen as an opportunity. The Doctor confides as such to Vicki, noting that “we shall never get a better chance of meeting Nero,” and Spooner derives comedy from the Doctor’s attempts to maintain the pretence. Here in The Gunfighters, however, the Doctor shies away from any such attempt to inhabit the role he has been cast as. It’s a stark difference, even in comparison to Cotton’s last serial—in The Myth Makers, the Doctor is pleased to be mistaken for Zeus, at least for a time. After being challenged by Odysseus to “fling a thunderbolt or some such” and kill Steven, accused of being a Trojan spy, the Doctor drops the pretence.
So why the change? Why does the Doctor, previously happy to indulge in performances of his own, now shy from them?
I did suggest in my post on The Myth Makers that perhaps Cotton was arguing that performance was a limited means of engaging with the past. The Doctor eagerly adopted the role of Zeus, after all, but was constantly challenged and undermined by Odysseus throughout that serial’s first episode. We can read the Doctor’s dropping of the role in the second episode as having been pushed towards a point where his performance is no longer believed. Of course, Cotton then goes and does the opposite here in The Gunfighters: the Doctor is reluctant to perform the role of Holliday, despite everyone around him adamantly insisting that he is.
We could see this as simply a further example of the ways in which The Gunfighters uses dramatic irony for comedic effect. With the context of Cotton’s earlier serial, however, there’s a further layer of irony here: regardless of whether the Doctor chooses to perform or not, he will always be in a state of tension with the historical figures who surround him. He is, in other words, a poor fit in history—and Cotton uses this to push the Doctor into his own comedic register.
If the Doctor is a poor fit in history, then this clarifies the performative qualities of Doc Holliday. As an historical figure, it’s unsurprising that Holliday is allowed to be such an eager performer here. He isn’t engaging with the past. This is his own present.
But what is that present? It’s the American West, surely?
That is what we’re told by Steven and Dodo when they first arrive, noticing a sign reading “Tombstone” and excitedly proclaiming that they’re in “the Wild West!”
With a Cotton script we need to be careful, however. There’s a difference between what we’re told and what the script implies—after all, Cotton does love his ironies. In The Myth Makers he writes Vicki as excited at the prospect of landing in Greece and the change to “meet the Heroes.” This was immediately contrasted with Steven’s cynicism. Cotton wrote Steven as concerned that the Doctor had been taken prisoner, and that the men he and Vicki had seen through the TARDIS scanner “wouldn’t be heroes, or anything like them.” The irony is that the more experienced Vicki is mistaken, whereas Steven’s cynicism does him credit.
Steven’s response, however, is in stark contrast with his attitude in The Gunfighters. Steven seems positively excited about having arrived in the American West—even going so far as to say that he had “always wanted to be a cowboy.” The irony of course is that Steven’s idea of what a cowboy is ends up being “absolutely absurd,” something that Peter Purves physically emphasises in his performance. Steven stumbles and fiddles with his spurs, has difficulty performing fancy gunplay, and later exaggeratedly flinched when a gun is fired. Despite having “always wanted to be a cowboy,” Steven is entirely unsuited to the American West. He is a boy playing a gunman.
Cotton immediately contrasts Steven’s “absolutely absurd” performance with the confident machismo of Marshall Wyatt Earp. Swaggering through the studio-space with a gun of his own, Earp uses the weapon like an extension of his own arm—a gestural tool, using it to indicate to the TARDIS travellers that he wants them to line up against the wall. At least at first glance, it appears to be a scene emphasising how unsuited the time travellers are to the past.
In a Nashean sense, Earp has been “raised from the grave of oblivion” as a “reproof” to this “absolutely absurd” vision of the American West that Steven and Dodo have dressed up as. Cotton even uses Dodo to frame Earp’s presence here in such terms, stating that she has “always wanted to meet [him] and here we are face to face.”
And yet Wyatt Earp isn’t really Wyatt Earp, is he?
Of course, we know how television works. Earp is being portrayed by an actor, in this case John Alderson, and Dodo’s assertion that she is meeting Wyatt Earp “face to face” is merely part of the illusion of television. However, it’s also an ironic statement: Dodo isn’t meeting Earp “face to face” because this is a television programme. Furthermore, Cotton’s version of Earp also differs from the historical Earp—the most important difference being that Wyatt Earp wasn’t a “Marshall of Tombstone” as he claims here in The Gunfighters (it was actually his brother, Virgil, who here is instead the Marshall of Dodge City.) Cotton instead writes the cultural memory of Wyatt Earp—a swaggering, iconic lawman—and uses this memory of Earp to undermine Steven’s boyish, “absolutely absurd” performance.
This isn’t a story set in the American West. The Gunfighters is a story exploring fictionality, a juxtaposition of two fictions of the American West at the hands of an English screenwriter.
That The Gunfighters is a British production is an important thing to recognise, because European audiences had a different understanding of the Western compared to Americans. In his essay “Italian Westerns as Political Parables,” Ignacio Ramonet claims that for Americans, the Western was an “epic genre” that “suited America as long as the country believed in itself and its manifest destiny.” Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simmon similarly note that Westerns were seen as “symbols, sometimes even documents, of American history.” For Europeans, however, Ramonet claims that “the West constitutes a pure cinematic convention” and that the burgeoning Italian Westerns of the mid-60s developed “a theatricality, an artifice” which contrasted with the “natural conventions” of Hollywood productions.
For Italian directors this usually meant an “extreme realism,” for instance “of bodies (hairy, greasy, foul-smelling), clothes or objects (including a mania for weapons).” The Gunfighters is contemporary to the emergence of this Italian Western, but Cotton has a different approach. He too latches onto the artifice of the Western genre, but it’s a different kind—one where Steven is an “absolutely absurd” cowboy, Wyatt Earp is based on the cultural memory of a Western lawman, and Doc Holliday is an opportunistic performer who in turn directs the performances of others.
I can point back to The Myth Makers, where Cotton similarly emphasised an artifice about the Trojan War. Soldiers wore “Grecian costumes” and Vicki longed to meet “the Heroes”—figures from stories. The Gunfighters, then, seems to continue a thematic project that Cotton had begun in his first serial.
But to say that Cotton, like an auteur, was singularly exploring themes of artifice and fictionality would be lying.
Michael Leeston-Smith, that serial’s director, used his camera to further push this theme: visually emphasising the serial’s fictionality. In one of that serial’s few surviving scenes his camera focuses on Vicki’s anxious face, before cutting to the TARDIS scanner depicting King Priam leering through the screen of a television. That Cotton isn’t an auteur is even more important to emphasise here, considering that The Gunfighters was produced with great reluctance in the first place. Between Cotton’s writing of the scripts and its filming it had to go through various other hands, each struggling to align a serial rooted in artifice and performance to a still-developing new aesthetic.
So let’s talk about why “The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon” is so important to what The Gunfighters is attempting to do, and why it’s perhaps one of the most important developments in the historical genre to date.
Cotton originally envisioned “The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon” as merely a mood piece, and this is how the song is used throughout the first two episodes. Here it forms the focus of the climax to the first episode, “A Holiday for the Doctor,” and is reprised in the opening scenes of “Don’t Shoot the Pianist.” The song is used as a diegetic musical piece performed by Dodo and Steven. At first glance it might appear as if the song is being used to push the characters into performative roles. This isn’t a willing performance, however: the song is performed at gunpoint.
I don’t want to focus too much on this scene, because the main point really is that the song functions here as a diegetic piece.
It’s important to emphasis the diegetic nature of the piece in this scene, because it’s not how director Rex Tucker usually uses the song in The Gunfighters. Instead, he primarily uses it as a non-diegetic piece that appears to be somewhat distanced from the narrative: a third-person narrator describing the “cinematic conventions” of the Western genre. Take Tucker’s initial establishing shot, as his camera peers from underneath a wagon to witness the arrival of the Clanton brothers in Tombstone. The lyrics accompanying this scene, sung by Lynda Baron, seemingly invites the audience to “fill up [their] glasses/And join in the song.” The lyrics to “The Ballad” further aid Tucker’s camera in quickly sketching a specific image of the American West—references are made to “you coyotes” and “blood upon the sawdust/In the Last Chance Saloon,” suggesting at once something wild, animalistic and violent about the people living on the American frontier. Before the viewer has even seen Steven or Dodo change into their “absolutely absurd” costumes, this is the tone Cotton and Tucker establish for The Gunfighters.
I’ve spent a lot of time discussing Cotton’s role in shaping The Gunfighters, but Tucker is an important creative voice here as well. More than just directing the words on the page, Tucker’s were among those reluctant hands through which Cotton’s scripts had to pass. In latching onto “The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon,” he’s trying to find a way to salvage material he lacked faith in.
He wasn’t alone. Lloyd nor Davis had much faith in The Gunfighters either. They apparently didn’t feel that the “comedic bent”—what I’ve pointed out is Cotton drawing attention to the artifice of his own serial—“suited their more serious vision for the programme.” It’s ironic, then, that the solution that these three men arrived at to elevate a script deemed too farcical was to make it even more farcical. Tucker seizes upon the “The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon” as a means by which he can cohere The Gunfighters, developing it beyond merely a mood piece and into something far more interesting.
“The Ballad of the Last Chance” saloon initially appears to be an observational song, offering lyrical imagery that adds flavour to the visuals Tucker depicts with his camera. We saw this in the opening scenes—how Baron sings about “coyotes” and “blood upon the sawdust,” images of a mythicised West.
This all changes in the third episode.
Starting from the third episode, “The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon” begins to explicitly reference actions performed by the characters within the serial. Where once it merely gestured towards the imagery of “blood upon the sawdust,” for instance, now it explicitly comments upon how a character has “gone kind of mental/Under Earp’s heavy blow.” What does this shift represent? It does, after all, seem like a very sudden change has occurred between episodes. Is Tucker, perhaps, assigning narrative weight to a character being hit by Wyatt Earp? Or maybe it’s simpler than that: perhaps the mere fact that drastic change in circumstances during “Don’t Shoot the Pianist” has allowed the song to overwhelm the serial.
The narrative of The Gunfighters is being absorbed into the narrative of the song, but it’s a song about a mythicised West. This extra layer that Tucker has added suggests that the ballad is mythicising the acts of the serial as they occur. Through “The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon,” Tucker finds a way to take Cotton’s themes of performance and artifice and make The Gunfighters privy to its own fictionalisation.
However, we end on an elegiac note. This is the ballad of the Last Chance Saloon, a final resting point before entering the wild frontiers that lie beyond. We now turn to a wild and brief frontier: the final serials of the William Hartnell era. The emergent vision of Lloyd and Davis awaits.
Chair with a Panda 