The Brigadier’s family hatchback

Old TV is time travel. It’s full of extraordinary, telling details, often stuff that the people making the programme weren’t conscious of as they made it. The things they took for granted or didn’t sweat can now seem so vividly odd. They’re well worth digging into. They are history alive.

For example, in the 1971 Doctor Who story Terror of the Autons, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and two of his officers drive a pale blue Austin Maxi, registration POF 61OG, which is involved in an action sequence in Episode 3. The shape of it, the boxy way it moves, the guttural sound of the engine, are all very distinctive of the time. “Gosh,” I thought, watching a bit today while fact-checking something something else, “I’d forgotten cars sounded like that…” 

The sound of the past, once so prevalent and now a detail from history. 

On the commentary recorded for the DVD release, producer Barry Letts and actors Nicholas Courtney and Katy Manning joke about the incongruity of such an ordinary car in the midst of an alien invasion. Basically, they ask, why doesn’t the heroic Brig drive something more, well, manly?

I think something quite interesting* is going on here. This car we see on screen isn’t ordinary at all. 

The Austin Maxi was the first car to be launched by the newly formed British Leyland Motor Corporation. That was on 24 April 1969 — less than 18 months before this particular model featured in scenes filmed for Doctor Who in September 1970. It’s brand new — and also more than that, too. 

Around this time, British Leyland’s publicity people seem to have loaned several Austin Maxis to BBC productions, surely as a means of subliminal advertising. The idea, of course, was to make the new model of car familiar to viewers, encouraging them to buy one. In that sense, this is the car of tomorrow — the next model that viewers’ will themselves drive. And that fits with this story, and Doctor Who of the time, being set in the very near future.

That’s why, I think, that in September 1970 it didn’t seem incongruous to the production team for Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart of the UN’s Intelligence Taskforce to drive into battle in a five-door hatchback. At least, it wasn’t incongruous enough for them to put him behind the wheel of something else.

The irony is that the subliminal advertising worked. People did become familiar with and buy Austin Maxis, so this particular model took on a range of associations as an ordinary, family car. It was once the aspirational new car of the future. That it now feels incongruous is a sign of how much we’ve moved on. 

See also

• 15 years of The Coup — or how I gave the Brigadier a knighthood
• My long-ago plan to make him a Lord and all
• More of me wanging on about the Third Doctor’s era of Doctor Who