WHO'S SCREAMING

         

There is one source of stories that seems unlikely ever to be part of the Wold Newton Universe, despite their long-standing role as a corner stone of British popular culture. I am, of course, referring to the Carry On... films, a series of saucy British comedies scripted by Talbot Rothwell and directed by Gerald Thomas. They began in 1958 with Carry on Sergeant and they, erm, carried on until 1978, producing various television spin-offs along the way. [1]

At first glance they don't appear to be Wold Newton material. So what if some male patients and doctors in sixties' hospitals liked to make double entendres about the pretty young nurses. That might be interesting to know, but it's hardly substantial enough to justify an article. [2]

However, there's more to these films than meets the eye, and one of them has definite Wold Newton connections. Carry on Screaming (1966) was set in the early 1900s and starred Kenneth Williams as the mad scientist Dr. Orlando Watt and Fenella Fielding as his sister Valeria. Crossover references can be found in much of their dialogue, such as:

WATT: Look what happened to Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll. I was at school with them, you know. Yes, they always pinched my pocket money. Said the change did them good!

  

VALERIA: You know that prescription Dr. Jekyll made up for you?

WATT: Oh, yes. That stuff. But don't you think it would be awfully risky? I mean, we still don't know what the side effects are. He might have triplets!

  

(On learning that Valeria plans to murder someone by sending a snake down a bellrope, 'Speckled Band'-style.)

WATT: It's an awfully dated method, you know. Fangs ain't what they used to be!

  

VALERIA: Why don't we do what they did to your friend Dracula? Drive a spike through his heart.

WATT: No, I don't really feel like driving anywhere tonight.

Now, other WNU researchers are far more familiar with the various members of the Frankenstein and Jekyll families and with Dracula's many soul-clones than I am, so I'll leave it to them to decide just and which ones, Dr. Watt knew. [3] Instead I'd like to take a close look at possibly the oddest crossover reference in the film:

POLICEMAN: Your name please?

WATT: Doctor Watt.

POLICEMAN: Doctor who sir?

WATT: Watt. Who is my uncle, or was. I haven't seen him for ages.

Now, this could just be one of the many jokes inserted by scriptwriter Talbot Rothwell, with no historical justification behind it. After all, there's nothing else to suggest that this character really is a nephew of a certain renegade Gallifreyan Doctor. [4]

Except... except...

Watt's scientific research is based on using 'regeneration' to cheat death. The word is used many times throughout the film. Indeed, his equipment seems to be a steampunk version of the regeneration machines based on Gallifreyan technology used by the Minyans in the Doctor Who serial 'Underworld' or by Mawdryn's crew in the serial 'Mawdryn Undead.'

Stranger still, is that the TV series Doctor Who wouldn't use the word 'regeneration' in this context until 'Planet of Spiders', broadcast in 1974. Before then, the process had been described as 'renewal'. If Watt's uncle really is the Doctor, it would mean Rothwell uncovered a connection between the Doctor and the word 'regeneration' eight years before his official biographers at the BBC.

But how could they be related? The doctor has claimed to be half-human on his mother's side, so maybe there's a connection there. However, I don't think that's the case. Consider the facts: Carry on Screaming is set in the early 1900s, and we're told that Watt originally died and was regenerated by his equipment 'fifteen years' earlier. Perhaps we should be looking at what the Doctor was doing in the late 1880s.

One very obvious incident leaps to mind: the Third Doctor's visits to the Diogenes Club around 1887. We actually see him there in the novel All-Consuming Fire, although we're never told why he's been visiting that era so much. Fortunately, there's another hint in 'Backtime', a comic strip also featuring the Third Doctor, published in Countdown magazine in the 1970s. [5]

In this story, we're repeatedly told that the Doctor has used something called backtime to take his TARDIS back to the 1800s, implying it's not his usual method of time travel. Presumably this was an attempt to escape from his exile in the late twentieth-century. [6] Although the Time Lords would always return his TARDIS to earth, like a galactic yo-yo, the Doctor could apply the fourth-dimensional equivalent of backspin causing it to fly backwards in time on its return journey.

Clearly, the Third Doctor made many visits to this era, to relieve the monotony of his exile. And it must have been on one of these trips that he first met the young Dr. Orlando Watt. In those days Watt was, in his own words, 'happy enough as a simple chemist, making my little liver pills. They never did anyone any harm. Well, not if taken in moderation; but if you overdid it, ooh...' (Given Watt's training at medical school with Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll, he's talking about being a biochemist or chemical researcher, rather than a drugstore sales assistant.)

Over the course of his visits to this time, the Doctor took the young scientist under his wing, helped him with his researches, and generally became an uncle figure to him. [7] It was probably from the Doctor that Watt picked up the habit of hiding his genius behind rambling nonsense. This was, after all, an old trick of the Doctor's.

Then, tragedy struck. Watt used himself as a guinea pig to test the potency of his liver pills. He accidentally took an overdose, and died. The Doctor was forced to construct a regeneration machine to save the life of his young protege. Alas, the Time Lords detected this use of Gallifreyan technology. And, with their typical bureaucracy, they did as little as possible to fix the situation.

The Doctor was prevented from making more backtime journeys to the past, but Watt now had access to advanced alien technology, and a desire for immortality. For the next fifteen years, his ambitious sister spurred him on, like a nineteenth century Lady Macbeth, pushing him deeper into madness until his final downfall at the hands of Det. Sgt. Bung of the Hocombe Police Force.

Obviously, the film exaggerates many details for comical effect, as well as adding many of Rothwell's trademark double entendres to the dialogue, but once you strip away this surface layer, it is telling another true story from the Wold Newton Universe.

FOOTNOTES

[1] No, I'm not counting Carry on Columbus. Well, can you blame me..?

[2] But Carry on Doctor does have a bandaged invisible man among the patients, which might suggest a WNU connection. Other films in the series include parodies of James Bond, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Beau Geste and Dick Turpin. However, as parodies, their WNU worth is questionable.

[3] Watt's worry that Jekyll's potion might have sex-changing side effects might imply that this was the Jekyll from the film Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hide. However, the fact that the potion doesn't have this effect might imply that it wasn't that particular Jekyll after all!

[4] Yes, I do know that the Doctor's name isn't really 'Doctor Who.' But there's evidence that he occasionally used it (and variations such as 'Doktor von Wer') as an alias.

[5] In this strip, the Doctor calls himself Doctor Who, implying he uses that as his alias on these backtime trips. This explains how Watt knows him under that name.

[6] The Doctor makes this particular trip to do historical research into flying machines, and while there he visits a bookshop buy a book called Balloons and Flying Machines. So, apart from balloons, what other sort of flying machines were around in 1863? One for the steampunk WNU experts...

[7] On one occasion, Who and Watt even used the TARDIS to visit America, where they played baseball with a certain famous duo. I don't know the name of the player on third base.

         

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