The 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat #03 - The Gambit Menace (Slight Return)

Alright, this is slightly embarrassing... But the truth will out! 

A few weeks ago, I opened the cobwebbed doors of the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Tat, and in our maiden voyage round its dusty halls, had a gander at the Doctor Who figures issued by Denys Fisher in the late '70s. And in this first missive - which you can find HERE - we covered the infamous tale of how the toy version of Fourth Doctor Tom Baker ended up actually having the head of Gambit from the New Avengers. All well and good...

...Or so I thought. But literally mere days after I'd pressed the big orange PUBLISH button, what would turn up but some new revelations concerning this famous toytown head transplant! Now the story of who the Fourth Doctor figure got a bonce resembling Gareth Hunt has long been doing the rounds. However in the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine new information regarding the Denys Fisher toy range came to light (and special thanks to Mr Clayton Hickman for bringing these revelations to my attention).

In a rather splendid issue themed around 1970s Doctor Who (and coming with a very nifty reprint of some '70s Who comic strips which I highly recommend picking up), there is a feature on the Denys Fisher toy range. And said feature includes an interview with the man who oversaw their production, Mr Peter Viner. This gentleman had joined Denys Fisher as a development engineer in 1969, and went on to become the Head of Research and Development, so if anyone knew the truth, it would be this veteran toymaker!   

Now as the Gambit/Gareth Hunt headswap tale has been in circulation since at least the early 1990s, Mr Peter was well aware of it. However when quizzed about it by DWM's Gary Gillatt, he was quick to debunk the story and put down any resemblance to Gareth Hunt down to the more primitive sculpting and manufacturing techniques of the late '70s. Of course, none of the above will sway a die-hard conspiracy theorist, who would undoubtedly take the "well, he would say that!" line, but tinfoil hats are well known to be impenetrable like that...

But looking at publicity shots of Gareth Hunt as Gambit, and comparing them with the Fourth Doctor doll, there is most obviously a big difference in the hairstyles. Now it is true that Mr Hunt had a more Bakerseque permed look in later years, most notably in the "Three types of the finest coffee beans" Nescafe ads he starred in the early '80s, but at the time when Denys Fisher would have been plotting a Gambit figure, publicity shots show him sporting a side parting and a distinct lack of bubbly curls! See for yourself below, here's '70s Gambit on the left and '80s Hunt to the right.

See, Gambit era Gareth clearly has a wavy barnet! So then, I rather suspect that this much passed about tale of head swapping may well have its origin in the distant days of the 1980s, when folks spotted a resemblance between the Doctor doll from the '70s and with the then current incarnation of Mr Hunt who was doing his coffee beans routine on every other ad break on the telly at the time. And until new evidence surfaces (probably in two days time the way things are doing round here currently), I'm going with it! 

Next time, we will get to the monster figures I swear, unravelling the mysteries of Dalek livery and how a Cyberman got his nose! 

The 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat #01 - Doctor Who and the Gambit Menace!

Welcome dear friends to the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat! Now this creaking old edifice contains a good many items that were produced in thrall to the great God Spin-off, and a further good many of those are items produced with the aim of extracting money from small children. Or at least, their parents. These days any sort of property with a demographic that includes legions of ankle-biters will have a range of tie-in action figures leading the charge at the frontline of the merch. But it wasn't always this way. The trailblazer for this brave new world of spin-off toys was of course the original Star Wars, and after the massive success of the Kenner/Palitoy action figure range, any movie or TV enjoyed by a sizeable number of children would transform their characters into a line of plastic homunculi. And before you could say "by the Power of Ponyskull!", this approach was developed further in the 1980s with the emergence of franchises and properties that were created to just flog toys in the first place. 

However while Lucas and Star Wars are often hailed as the creators of this toytown trend, spin-off toys had already been around for a while already. However in the years before we had heard the phrase "may the Force be with you", action figures based around cinema or TV properties were something of a different proposition. In the post-Deathstar years, the Star Wars approach of pocket sized figures at pocket money prices became the industry standard, along with the canny approach to turn every possible character into a doll, even if they had only lurked about in the background - Death Star Droid I'm looking at you. But in the pre-Stars Wars toy stores, any figures you found based on your favourite TV shows or movies were likely to come in a wide variety of different scales and sizes, and often be limited to only a handful of characters. And a perfect example of this simpler era of tie-toys comes in the form of the Doctor Who figures released by Denys Fisher in the late '70s.

In 1976, the Time Lord had been travelling for over a decade on the telly, and his current incarnation, the Fourth Doctor, played by Tom Baker, was proving to be the most popular yet. And so, the venerable British toy makers Denys Fisher released what would be the first proper action figure version of the Doctor. Now since the show's beginning, it had been popular with kids, and there had been many tie-in toys and much merchandise, such as books, comics, jigsaws and board games. However up until 1976, the only figures or dolls you could buy were various toy versions of the Doctor's arch enemies, the Daleks. However thanks to Denys Fisher (and Mego in the US) now you could buy a nine and half inch high Fourth Doctor, complete with hat, scarf and even a sonic screwdriver! But wait, there was more! You could also buy a Leela, complete with hunting knife, and an in-scale version of the Doctor's beloved robot hound K9. There was a range of enemies to pit your plastic heroes against in the form of Daleks, Cybermen and the K1 Robot (AKA the Giant Robot), and topping off the range was a replica TARDIS. 

Now don't get me wrong, these were a great range of figures and are now highly prized by collectors. Certainly I was delighted to get a Doctor, TARDIS and a Dalek one Christmas. But there were several features to this range that make them worthy of inclusion in the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat. The first is an odd little detail about the Doctor himself, or rather his miniature toyshop version. Now at first glance, it's rather nice to note that  the costume was very faithful to the Doctor's onscreen ensemble, and they did really try to have a figure that looked like Tom Baker. But I always found that my Fourth Doctor figure reminded me of another small screen hero - namely Gambit from Brian Clemens' The New Avengers, as played by Gareth "three types of the finest coffee beans" Hunt. 

And the funny thing is, many years later I discovered that there was a very good reason for this. For around the same time as the Denys Fisher Doctor Who range was being made, they were developing plans to do a range of New Avengers dolls. featuring plastic versions of Steed, Gambit and Purdie. The figures were to feature a karate chop action, and while some ads and promotional material did surface, the range of toys never really materialised, probably due to the New Avengers disappearing from our screens in 1977. And as far as toy historians know, only Joanna Lumley's character from the show, Purdy, turned up in action figure form in the shops. 

However, not wanting to waste a lot of development time and money, the sculpt of Gareth Hunt's bonce was cunningly recycled to give the Fourth Doctor doll a noggin. And it was, if you'll pardon an absolutely shameless pun, a gambit (boom! boom!) which worked rather well, as it certainly looked enough like Tom Baker to fool most kiddiewinks. However it would perhaps explain why the Doctor's plastic hat never quite fitted on his head well enough for my liking...

However the range holds further and stranger anomalies... Come back to the 'Orrible 'Ouse next time, to discover what wonders the Denys Fisher TARDIS had to offer!