|
|
 |
|
Winston Churchill
(2010 - 2011) |
|
| Ian McNeice |
|
Ian McNeice was born in October 1950 in Basingstoke
in Hampshire. He went to Taunton School in Somerset
and then had two years at the Salisbury Playhouse
as an Acting ASM before going to LAMDA (1971-74).
The next few years were spent in theatre, including
four years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, ending
with Nicholas Nickleby on Broadway.
His
television breakthrough was as Harcourt in the BAFTA
award-wining series Edge of Darkness in 1985. His American screen breakthrough was
playing opposite Jim Carrey as Fulton Greenwall
in Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls in
1995.
He played the part of the Newsreader in 20
episodes of Rome (2005 - 2007). Other television appearances
include: 3 episodes of the Ruth Rendell Mysteries "Murder
Being Once Done" (1991), 2 episodes of Pie
in the Sky (1994), 3 episodes of Dune (2000), Hornblower (1998), 3 episodes of Children
of Dune (2003), New Tricks (2007) and Jonathan
Creek (2010).
His most memorable television
appearance however, is as the character Bert Large
in Doc Martin which
he has been playing since 2004. |
|
|
|
 Although he is most prominently known in history
as the Prime Minister who led Britain against Hitler’s
forces during the Second World War, Winston Churchill was also
a close friend of at least three Doctors, providing them with
aid and assistance in various adventures and forming a close
friendship with them despite some potential personality clashes.
Born the son of a cabinet minister, Churchill began his life
in the military, but his initial attempt at a political career
failed, resulting in him taking on a new job as war correspondent
for the Daily Mail during the Boer War.
 |
Players
(Terrance Dicks) |
|
When forced to take command of
an effort to move a train after it had been knocked off the
railway by a bomb, Churchill encountered the Sixth
Doctor and
Peri Brown,
the two having landed in Africa by accident while trying to
travel to London in the same era. Although The Doctor
and Churchill were able to effectively coordinate the effort
to move the train back onto its tracks - The Doctor and Peri
also thwarting an attempt by The Players,
powerful beings who manipulated history for their own amusement,
to assassinate
Churchill just to see what would happen to history without him
-, they were both subsequently captured and locked in a Boer
prison. Fortunately, another faction of Players provided Churchill
with the means to escape, while The Doctor and Peri were able
to reacquire the TARDIS -
which had been taken into the prison storage for later examination
- and escape after triggering
an explosion in the ammunition shed to distract the guards.
During the public acclaim he received
after his heroic escape, Churchill returned to the military
for the duration of the Boer War, later returning to politics
and rising to become First Lord of the Admirality by the beginning
of the First World War. However, a political scandal after
the failure of his attempt to attack Turkey via the Dardanelles
prompted Churchill to return to the field, rejoining his old
regiment and returning to France as a Major. During an ambush
staged by another group of Players, Churchill was rescued
by the Second Doctor and his friends Lieutenant Jeremy Carstairs
and Lady Jennifer Buckingham; having recently thwarted the
War Games arranged by his old friend the War Chief, The Doctor
had asked to see for himself that some of his friends from
the Games had been returned to their proper places in time
before doing some work for the Time Lords. When they were
subsequently captured by the Players known as the Count and
Countess, who planned to send Churchill to Germany (Although
they were unconcerned about whether the Kaiser intended to
kill Churchill or claim that he had defected),
 |
The Shadow in the Glass
(Justin Richards & Stephen Cole) |
|
The Doctor
apparently sacrificed himself to hold the Count at gunpoint
while Churchill, Carstairs and Lady Jennifer stole the plane
that they had been planning to use to take Churchill to Germany
and returned home. Churchill served in the trenches for a
year before returning to Parliament, feeling that he had been
redeemed in his eyes for his old failure, recognising that
he could play a better role to aid the war effort in government.
By 1936, Churchill’s career, despite having
held several prestigious posts in Parliament, was in decline
due to his opposition to the policy of appeasement practised
by most of his peers, with only a few close friends such as
the now-Colonel Jeremy Carstairs recognising that his fears
about Hitler’s plans were correct. During this time,
Churchill was reunited with the Sixth Doctor and Peri as they
investigated the Players’ continued interference - the
two posing as their own descendents to account for the fact
that they hadn’t aged since meeting Churchill in Africa
-, Churchill introducing them to the future King Edward and
his American mistress Wallis Simpson. While spending time
with Churchill, The Doctor and Peri discovered a German conspiracy
to allow Edward to take the throne and dismiss the government
in favour of a new cabinet that would be more sympathetic
to Hitler’s policies, Churchill helping them dismantle
the conspiracy by tricking Edward into incriminating his treasonous
plans after Peri acquired a list of those involved in the
conspiracy.
The exact details of Churchill's next encounter with The Doctor are unknown, but it would appear that, at some point between the abdication of Edward VIII and the Second World War, an unknown incarnation of The Doctor met with Churchill and told him the truth about their history together. After learning the truth about The Doctor, Churchill would sometimes express an interest in acquiring the TARDIS for Britain, but in general he appeared to accept The Doctor's decision to let Britain fight the Nazis on their own, in turn understanding that The Doctor would step in to help Britain when the situation became particularly desperate.
 |
Their Finest Hour
(John Dorney) |
|
Early in the Second World War, Churchill contacted The Doctor for help investigating reports of what appeared to be an advanced enemy plane attacking British troops in 1940 ("Ravenous 1 - Their Finest Hour"). Responding to this call, the Eighth Doctor and his companion Liv Chenka learned that the advanced technology of the new plane came from the Heliyon species; the Heliyons avoided fighting wars of their own by essentially wagering on the outcome of wars on more primitive planets, with one of the Heliyons who had placed a wager on the current war on Earth discreetly undermining Britain’s forces to tip the odds in their favour. The Doctor was able to deal with their interference by providing some RAF planes with force fields that could help them find the alien ship, subsequently contacting the Heliyon homeworld to expose the attempted cheating and force them to withdraw from the war, allowing The Doctor and Liv to let history unfold as it should.
 |
| Victory of the Daleks |
|
Churchill would call The Doctor for help once again in 1941, asking his old friend for advice regarding a new weapon developed
by the genius Professor Bracewell, which Bracewell referred
to as his ‘Ironsides’, robots equipped with powerful
weapons ("Victory of the Daleks"). However, the
Eleventh Doctor swiftly identified the Ironsides as Daleks,
realising that Bracewell was a robot that the Daleks had created;
the entire scenario was set up to lure in The Doctor so that
the Daleks could trick him into activating the ‘Progenitor
Device’, which would allow them to recreate their virtually-extinct
species from new DNA (The Daleks couldn’t do it themselves
as they registered as being ‘impure’ after they
were created from Davros’s cells ("The Stolen Earth/Journey's
End"), but the device responded to them after the ‘testimony’ of
The Doctor, the Daleks’ greatest enemy, confirmed their
identity as Daleks). While The Doctor confronted the Dalek
ship, Churchill and Amy Pond were able to convince Bracewell
- shaken at the discovery of his true identity - to help them
modify fighter planes to confront the Dalek ship in the upper
atmosphere, although The Doctor was forced to allow the Daleks
to escape when they threatened to detonate Bracewell.
In 1943, Churchill's government were attempting to expose the Nazi sympathies of suspected collaborator Sir Davenport Finch, with their plan involving a fake copy of the Amulet of the Wastelands, an artefact so powerful that even the Time Lords were concerned about its presence on Earth ("Operation: Hellfire"). Seeking to ensure that the amulet was secure, the Time Lords sent the Third Doctor back to 1943 to retrieve the amulet, where he became involved in Churchill's 'Operation Hellfire' as government agents tried to expose Finch's agenda. The Doctor was able to retrieve the amulet while Finch's fascist allies were all captured or killed by Churchill's forces.
The Doctor and Churchill met again in 1944, when the Sixth Doctor asked for his friend’s help in sneaking him into France to infiltrate a planned German raid on the English village of Turrelhampton. The Doctor had been investigating the existence of a Fourth Reich in 2001 and had determined that the Nazis had acquired alien artefacts from a ship that had crash-landed in that village a few months ago. Although The Doctor was only able to provide Churchill with a limited amount of information about what he was attempting to accomplish, Churchill and his cabinet were able to plant forged documents in Germany’s records for The Doctor’s alias of Major General Johann Schmidt of the Berlin Fifth Medical Corps, The Doctor sabotaging the raid while allowing the Nazis to recover the items that he knew they would possess in the future.
 |
| The Wedding of River Song |
|
Although he did not meet The Doctor personally,
Churchill helped The Doctor discover a trap that his greatest
enemies were preparing for him when he came into possession
of one of the last paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, another friend
of The Doctor’s ("Vincent and The Doctor"),
which depicted the TARDIS exploding, Churchill’s subsequent
attempt to call The Doctor being diverted to River Song when
The Doctor didn’t answer his phone, allowing River to
recover the painting in the future and take it to Earth, where
The Doctor deciphered coordinates written on the TARDIS door
in the painting to help him track down the trap’s location
("The Pandorica Opens/The
Big Bang").
 |
Subterfuge
(Helen Goldwyn) |
|
The Seventh Doctor had a particularly solemn encounter with Churchill when he visited 1945, learning that his old foe the Meddling Monk ("The Time Meddler") was acting as a political consultant to Churchill's post-war campaign for re-election ("Subterfuge"). The Doctor was able to assist Churchill in thwarting an attempt by a Nazi spy in MI6 from using alien technology to steal various works of art to fund the spy's plans to go into hiding, as well as fund The Monk's own efforts to establish himself as an independent political figure. The Doctor was able to help the aliens escape Earth by retrieving a vital component of their engine, but The Doctor was also forced to 'sabotage' Churchill's re-election campaign by altering his final speech so that it would create the impression of Churchill as a war leader who was still relying on the more brutal measures where Britain wanted to focus on rebuilding. The Doctor tried to apologise for what he had done, protesting that it was in the name of preserving history, but Churchill declared that, as far as he was concerned, this Doctor was no longer a friend of his.
In a reality where time was fractured so that all
of history was happening at once, Churchill was the Holy Roman
Emperor of Earth, questioning The Doctor - now the captured ‘soothsayer’ -
to learn what had happened to history. Although The Doctor
was able to explain that the damage to time was caused by
an attempt to avert the fixed point that was his death, his
demise being apparently ‘necessary’ to prevent
him from answering the question that would reveal a great
secret, Churchill was prevented from responding to this turn
of events when The Silence - a mysterious race who people
forgot about as soon as they stopped looking at them - attempted
to attack him and The Doctor, only to be driven off by Amy
Pond and her assembled forces, The Doctor later managing to
put history back on track by faking his death (The Wedding of River Song").
Although The Doctor and Winston Churchill have
experienced the occasional personality clashes that one would
expect from two such strong-willed individuals working together,
their goals have generally been aligned and they have shown
a great deal of trust and respect for each other’s abilities,
making Churchill a worthy and willing ally to The Doctor when
he needs him.
|
| |
|
