Love and Liberty

Things To Remember About Labour #3

2012-02-14T16:00:00.000Z

Labour opposed every single move towards Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender equality before they were for it. The Labour Government spent millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money fighting to keep discrimination in the armed forces and age of consent before the European Court found against them and they were forced to change the law. Now they shamelessly claim credit, like a crook caught by the cops and found guilty after a long trial they tried to escape… Then pretending they turned themselves in out of their own goodness. They voted against civil partnerships and in favour of Section 28, too, before belatedly U-turning and pretending they’d been in favour of equality all along.

Labour’s civil partnership laws were designed as a second-rate same-sex marriage, so they deliberately exclude mixed-sex couples; the original Liberal Democrat proposals that the Labour Government voted down in Parliament years earlier were gender-neutral and non-discriminatory. At the same time, the Scottish version of Section 28 was scrapped by Lib Dems in the Scottish Government while the Labour Government at Westminster kow-towed to the bigots for several extra years.

Today, the Labour Party continues to pretend it’s in the lead to the LGBT communities, while being very different to other audiences. The Liberal Democrats in Coalition Government are acting on putting Lib Dem policy in favour of equal marriage into law, while Labour tells the LGBT press they’re “pressing the Government” for it… Except that the Labour Party has no policy in favour of equal marriage, and explicitly opposed it when they had absolute power in government for thirteen years.

And just in the last week, we’ve seen yet again that Labour politicians are against homophobia when it suits them… But homophobic themselves again and again as long as it’s against someone they don’t like, like a Tory or a banker. ‘Some of my best friends are gay’ doesn’t cut it this century.

The Lib Dem position on LGBT rights is simpler and more principled – for equality when Labour was opposing it, for liberty before it was fashionable, Always Been There, Always Will.

Things To Remember About Labour #2

2012-02-09T15:00:00.000Z

In thirteen years of authoritarian government, the Labour Party inflicted 4,400 new laws on the UK – more than any other government in British history.

Though Labour is all over the place on almost every policy in Opposition – alternating between Tory and Trot – there’s one thing in which they’re consistent.

Labour is still determined to be to the far right of the Libera-Tory Coalition on law and order, immigration, civil liberties… Basically, they’ll say anything to please a Tory or a Trot, but the one thing that keeps them together is that they’re never, ever Liberal.

Housing Heresy?

2012-02-08T19:21:00.011Z

Would rent controls be the worst method of controlling housing benefit aside from all the others?

With its mixture of good ideas and painful ones, the Welfare Reform Bill going through Parliament is causing more anguish among Liberal Democrats than anything since… Well, since the last horrible compromise the Coalition Government came up with. The logic is relentless: Labour wrecked the economy and stiffed us with the bill; government is still spending vastly more than it has coming in; the NHS and benefits dwarf all other government spending; the Coalition is committed to NHS increases; benefits need to be cut. It’s just that that means taking money from the people who, by definition, have least – and with the Coalition also committed to pension increases and (a Lib Dem victory) to increasing benefits with September’s high inflation rate, that narrows mightily the field of possible cuts.

Amid all the pain about how wrong it is to restrict benefits and the echoing question of where else to find the money when there’s simply none left, that old political cliché of ‘thinking the unthinkable’ – usually spoken by the unspeakable – is being trundled out on a daily basis. So, looking at where the soaring costs are in the benefits system, one element stands out as a massive problem for which no-one is proposing any action.

I come, inevitably, to the elephant in the room, and Millennium’s howl of pain which, amongst other points, reiterated his support for a Citizen’s Income – at least the Universal Credit is a small step in the right direction – but noted the biggest problem with it:

“And since I've been saying for AGES that I would support a flat Citizen's Income if only I could make the maths add up – the problem remains the disproportional effect of Housing Benefit in a housing market that is still massively over-inflated, which is why that's proving such a botherer in the current debate about a "cap" on benefits…”

If the Coalition Government wants to make really big savings on the welfare bill, arbitrarily finding relatively small groups from whom money can be clawed back (often because they can’t fight back) just isn’t going to do the job. And while I support the Universal Credit as a way of simplifying the benefits system and making work pay, this has its limits when there’s not much work to be had (the government needs to cut benefits more as there’s not enough tax coming in. But there’s not enough work about for being to move off benefits into and pay taxes on. So the government needs to cut benefits more as there’s not enough tax coming in. But…).

Everybody knows there is one big problem in the benefits system, and nobody knows how to tackle it. Which drives me to an unthinkable thought.

Shouldn’t we look at how rent controls might work, a quarter of a century after they were abolished?

And, yes, it’s a bizarre and heretical thought for a free-marketeer in one of the two free-market parties and in coalition with the other one. But there’s a simple answer to the gut-instinct complaint, ‘But that would distort the free market!’ No. It can’t. Because the rented sector reliant on housing benefit isn’t a free market at all. Either you abolish housing benefit and let all the consequences of an untrammelled free market in housing erupt, or recognise that this is a market that is warped out of all recognition by subsidy at the bottom, and that it therefore needs an equivalent pressure downwards.

The obvious solution is a vast new build of social housing, but – though the Coalition Government, incredibly, is building much more than Labour did – to pull that off in a couple of years is both financially and physically impossible. Previous governments have put limits on housing benefit but, blatantly, this hasn’t worked. Whether it’s people having to pay top-ups to their landlords or simply that the problem is too big for controls on the benefits side to handle. Government is still paying out vast sums with no effective control, not going to the people in the greatest need but instead subsidising businesses (some small, some large) in the way that we don’t for any others, yet that endless subsidy distorts and makes unaffordable for many people not just the housing market but the whole of government spending.

Look, the idea of price controls makes me cringe. It summons up ideas of post-War drudgery or Gordon Brown salivating, neither of them attractive images. But with massive cuts needed to government spending, the Coalition is having to do a lot of things that either or both parties don’t want to. So what’s the religious objection to the government setting up trials looking at benefits cuts from the other end of the telescope?

I admit that I don’t much like talking about either housing or benefits policy, either. With housing, in my many years on the Lib Dem Federal Policy Committee, there was no other issue that came up so many times to so little effect, and it was, I’m afraid, boring – not because of the vital issue itself, but because over a decade and a half it became clear that I could pretty much deliver all the speeches on either side, and the summing-up that always failed to come to a conclusion:

‘This is a really big issue’;

‘It costs lots of money and where do we get it from?’;

‘But it’s really important’;

‘Yes, Simon, but where do we get the money from?’;

[Half an hour later] ‘Next business’.

And I don’t like talking about benefits because, very simply, I’m on them. I’ve been too ill to work for many years, and I feel ashamed, so I’d prefer to keep my head down. But I noticed in my diary that it was twenty-three years ago tonight that my political career, such as it was, started very small (joining my local party Exec) before its meteoric rise and then health-related complete crash, after which I gave up standing for FPC and now rarely stir myself to write from my pit. But I remember why I started in politics, and it wasn’t to take away benefits from people even worse-off than I am.

Besides, taking money away from landlords might be more popular than taking it away from people with cancer. Who knows?

Of course any rent controls would take a lot of looking at. I don’t want a return to the monolithic sort running for half the last century, or ones that do little for the poorest but give you the jackpot if you’re renting a penthouse. Even regional setting would be far too crude, and any system would probably have to be restricted to rents paid by housing benefit and to bear down very gradually, year by year, so as not to depress the housing market too far (because that inflated bubble is still holding up what’s left of the economy). And I’m prepared to believe – especially after thirteen years of Gordon Brown – that the amount of micro-managing bureaucracy involved would make it impossible to pay off. So it may well be that, after carefully examining the costs and effects, after feasibility studies and pilot schemes, the government might find that it wouldn’t work.

But I still have to ask the question, and propose that we try those feasibility studies and pilot schemes. Would micro-managing bureaucracy for landlords be worse than micro-managing bureaucracy for people who can’t find work, or who are too ill for it? Because that goes on all the time. Would distorting the housing market with a downwards pressure be so shocking, when governments have for decades distorted it with hundreds of billions of pounds of upwards subsidy? And if you have to do something drastic to make savings in the benefits bill, who is better-placed to bear them?

Note: Good grief. Apparently, this is my six hundredth blog post and, thanks to having fallen much more ill than usual (as usual) in December and still being rather worn down, only my second so far this year – this January was only the second month in six years of blogging that I failed utterly to publish a single word on here. Oops. For those of you interested in such things, last year’s 145,792 (ish) words came in uneven bursts of between 37,715 and 314 a month, but none of them were as poor as zero.

Things To Remember About Labour #1

2012-02-08T15:00:00.000Z

Anything new the Labour Party claims they’d do if only they were in government now?

It’s a great big lie.

They had a booming economy* and absolute power for thirteen years**.

So if they gave a flying fuck about it, they’d have done it.

*Later revealed to be a debt-fuelled disaster that’ll probably take another thirteen years for the Libera-Tory Coalition to repair and pay off Labour’s bills.

**The Labour Party, on its own, had massive Parliamentary majorities, so they could do whatever they wanted – and did. Even though the large majority of people voted against them each time. Neither the Tories nor the Lib Dems have anything like that power, so each has to compromise.

Old Is New Again: Doctor Who – Galaxy 4 and The Underwater Menace

2011-12-12T20:22:00.019Z

Doctor Who fans were given a spectacular early Christmas present yesterday, when a surprise screening at the BFI revealed that there were two more episodes in existence than everyone had thought there were. For all of us born after the ’60s, this is the first time we can see these performances from William Hartnell in Galaxy 4 and Patrick Troughton in The Underwater Menace – an exciting prospect, even if neither story is universally loved. But in anticipation of these tales of Dalek wannabes and Flash Gordon-style hammery, I have reviews I prepared earlier based on the soundtracks of each. When I see the new old episodes on release next year, how wrong will I be?

The BBC website already has tantalising clips of Galaxy 4 Episode 3: Air Lock and The Underwater Menace Episode 2 to watch, with articles on how they were found both there and on the Radio Times site. If you know nothing about these two stories, be warned that each clip contains spoilers for its story’s key plot point – one implicitly, one directly – and so, unusually, do my reviews below. If you want to wait and see things for yourself, then, stop before the main headings. I will say that both stories, though very different in tone and setting, have monsters with two unusual things in common – and that both were designed to be four-part, ‘typical’ Doctor Who stories of the time and, incredible as it may sound, had comparatively significant cash spent on them to make them look good; it’s widely thought that this may have been more successful in one case than the other. And yet while Galaxy 4 is the one with a particularly well-respected director, of the two clips it’s the one from The Underwater Menace that’s compelling. That even makes up for this, the earliest surviving episode with Patrick Troughton’s Doctor, not being one in which he has his most famous hat – though he does get an outrageous replacement – nor a topless Ben. The clip from Galaxy 4, on the other hand, is visually interesting more in its design than its direction, so perhaps Julia Smith will win out over Derek Martinus after all. Now I’m wondering if the Chumblies are oscillating or merely wobbling (only seeing more of them will tell). Both clips, though, already display a little of what their stories are famous for: painful earnestness saved by Bill Hartnell in one, and an over-the-top mad scientist dragged to Earth by Pat Troughton in the other.

Missing – Presumed in the Skip

Half a dozen years ago, watching the whole of Doctor Who when there was considerably less of it – at both ends, it now happily transpires – I wrote reviews of all of William Hartnell’s stories as the Doctor and the first few of Patrick Troughton’s for an online discussion, and this seems an appropriate day to reprint these two for the first time where more than about half a dozen people can read them below, even if it’s inviting ridicule should things not look as they sounded. But how can I have reviewed these already without ever having seen them, you might ask, being born half a dozen years after their only airing in Britain? Well, I’ve written before about the BBC’s barbarous purges in which they destroyed many of their TV shows from the ’60s, creating what are now disingenuously referred to as “lost” or “missing” episodes. These two are the first surviving episodes to turn up for nearly eight years, since The Daleks’ Master Plan Episode 2: Day of Armageddon back in 2004. Until yesterday there were (or weren’t) 108 of them; now there are only 106 to go, and at least one of them would probably scrape into most fans’ top 100 to be found! Fortunately, for every single story, people recorded the soundtrack at the time, so you can now get the full adventures on CD with linking narration to make them clearer, while there are also many off-screen ‘telesnaps’ which mean we can get a fair idea of what the whole thing looked like for free, assembled into photonovels on the BBC website – and, unofficially, the two have been combined into Reconstructions, which you can get hold of for free as long as you don’t tell the BBC about it.

Of the six seasons broadcast in the ’60s that starred William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton as the Doctor, the middle ones were the worst hit; while most stories survive intact from each of Seasons One, Two and Six, there are only four complete adventures from Seasons Three and Five put together and, as I wrote earlier this year when publishing a review of Doctor Who – The Smugglers, not one story still exists in full from Season Four. These two finds don’t complete any stories, but they do offer an ‘orphaned’ episode for Season Three’s Galaxy 4, of which only a clip had previously been known to exist, and add another ‘orphaned’ episode to the already existing one from Season Four’s The Underwater Menace. Both are sure to be released on DVD next year, probably with soundtracks for the “missing” episodes (and, if we’re very lucky, perhaps partial Reconstructions or even, just maybe, animation for the now half-complete The Underwater Menace). Already today, you can buy the other material on the DVD collection Doctor Who – Lost In Time, which includes that extended clip from Galaxy 4 (peculiarly, presented in the middle of a documentary rather than as a menu item on its own) and the infamous Episode 3 of The Underwater Menace, or you can get the soundtracks for the whole stories both as separate releases and in newly remastered box sets, respectively Doctor Who – The Lost TV Episodes Collection No 1 (1964-1965) and Doctor Who – The Lost TV Episodes Collection No 3 (1966-1967). In which each is probably the weakest story…

For DVD reviews, this is usually the point at which I mention that back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine Issue 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – and how high they and I scored the stories I’m coming to. And they didn’t think much of these, but, hey, they’re the only episodes with arguably my two favourite Doctors that I have never seen, so my enthusiasm’s racing. Even if the DWM vote put Galaxy 4 down into 172nd place and The Underwater Menace even lower at 194; I might put each of them as much as ten places higher, but no more than that. At the moment, I’m much more ill than usual, and Richard had to wake me with the glad tidings yesterday afternoon; when I crawled from bed to watch the clips some time later, though, even my sounding like a Dalek couldn’t hide my excitement. I promptly rang one of my oldest friends with the news, who was audibly thrilled when I told him two episodes had been found. And then said, “Can’t we ask them to put them back where they found them?” when he found out which two. Yet still, the DVD releases can’t come soon enough! And remember, before you read on – spoilers…

Doctor Who – Galaxy 4

“I told them soldiers were no good for space work. All they can do is kill. But they wouldn’t listen. If you are to conquer space, they said, you will need soldiers. So here I am confronted with danger. I’m the only one able to think!”
Season Three of Doctor Who is a strange one even by the standards of the series as a whole. Like the first two seasons, it’s highly innovative and experimental, but with a new production team (the first ‘new’ production team) it has a very different feel. Companions chop and change far more abruptly and the dangers the Doctor faces continue to get ‘bigger’, with this the first of many exploding planets, all making it an unsettling year – but the ideas get bigger, too, with a lot of ‘big concepts’. The downside is that the endearing characterisation and dialogue-driven drama of the first couple of years doesn’t always fit in with the new brooms. And Galaxy 4 is definitely a sign of things to come…

Mini-Skirts Are In Fashion; Complexity Is Out

There are two ‘big ideas’ that everyone knows about Galaxy 4, from the skimpiest story summaries: the Rills are ugly but good, while the Drahvins are wicked but ‘beautiful’ (in a very ’60s way – the book’s cover of highly posed ‘beautiful space women’ against a blazingly pink sky is easily the campest thing ever painted by Andrew Skilleter); and, linked to that, the Drahvins are the nearest broadcast Doctor Who has ever got to the horrendous old sci-fi cliché of ‘the planet of women’. The trouble is, there’s very little else to know about the story, especially as there’s very little made of the ‘evil women’ side of the plot. Naturally, it’s a relief that Steven doesn’t snog them into being good (as is the norm in such stories in other series), and that they’re mostly just dim and for a good reason, rather than behaving as screaming girlies who happen to have large Freudian weapons (admittedly, Maaga bullies her soldiers and makes them cry, but at least she’s a strong character), but in the gaping hole left by the omission of sexist blather is… Not much.

It’s nice that for once Doctor Who is doing a story where ‘ugly’ doesn’t mean ‘evil’; right from The Daleks, the series has a strong current against fascism which is slightly undermined by, for example, the ‘good race’ being blond and ‘perfect’ while we know the others are evil because they’re mutated horrors with funny voices. Unfortunately, while the Rills seem quite an interesting piece of design from the two photos we have of them, all we ever hear is how ugly they are, as if we could miss the moral. Surely the Rills themselves wouldn’t think of themselves as ugly (one of the novels even suggests that Rill social advancement is based on their ugliness, which seems to miss the point)? It doesn’t help that the Rill has the plummiest voice yet heard in the show, which appeals to my own prejudices by suggesting Shakespearean ham, or possibly Lord Melchett. The Doctor has a great moment when he calls this giant alien monstrosity “Young man”, though – we could do with more of that. Their “warning” ammonia bomb is perhaps supposed to recall World War I gas warfare, but (coupled with the Rill’s stern, schoolmasterly tones in telling naughty Maaga to stay indoors) I can’t help but think of it as a stinkbomb. There’s also a teeny bit of a plot hole, where – before we find out the Rills are generous and friendly – they decide to blow up the TARDIS, for no good reason, especially as they’ve deliberately not attacked the spaceship of the Drahvins, who they know are hostile. It’s difficult to imagine any other reason for them to do this than faux-villainous plot convenience in advance of the ‘twist’.

Hands Off My Chumblies

On the bright side, the particularly good Loose Cannon Recon both greatly improves the long clip that’s left of the story by putting it in context and proves that one of the reasons it’s so sad so much of Season Three was tossed into skips and burnt by the BBC is that it seems to have some lovely visuals. Ironically, the first two seasons’ dialogue generally makes them more suited to audio releases, while it looks like there are ‘lost’ higher production standards in the third, where every planetscape appears an improvement on The Chase. The Recon shows some superb design for the time, with great scenery and a very solid ship, as well as re-enacted scenes for the Chumblies, the cuddly little robots that the BBC once again hoped they could cash in on as much as the Daleks (plus someone ‘playing’ Bill Hartnell as, er, a hand waving a knobbly stick). They look quite jolly as they telescope up and down, so again it’s a shame that most of what we have of them is their irritating sound effect on the CD. Ah well [the rediscovered episode means I shall have to take back my observation that if I never hear another Chumblie “oooo-up-ooooom”, it’ll be quite soon enough].

In the end, this is a story with its eye on the big picture; the first planet destroyed in the series, much talk of galaxies, alien races and some rather nice scenery all there to illustrate a big ‘message’. You can’t fault its sci-fi ambition, but it’s as if they spent so much time making it seem ‘big’ that they forgot to fill in any of the details. The galaxy-spanning view makes little sense seen up close, when we realise that the name of the story merely refers to where Maaga comes from and tells us next to nothing, or that her mission to “conquer space!” (and before Sarah Brightman) seems a tad improbable in a backward ship with just a handful of more backward clones to staff it. Added to that, the sheer obviousness of the ‘point’ undermines itself; the story has its heart in the right place, but it goes on and on with little happening, and Season Two’s characters have given way to cardboard that spouts moral messages. It’s never actively bad, but it’s much, much too slight for its length. Photos of Drahvins and Chumblies may look camp and rather exciting, but as we’re drearily reminded, don’t judge by appearances – a simple moral for an even more simple story.

Galaxy 4 – Maaga

In mitigation, with its proto-Jagaroth spaceship and froody alien vegetation, and of course its (sigh) threatening dolly-birds and cute robots, this was clearly made to be seen, so perhaps the plot was secondary and it was deliberately designed as a ratings-grabber to look at? So will seeing it at last save or damn Galaxy 4? I can’t wait to find out. As then-companion Peter Purves has always said how much he hated this story, his commentary will surely be entertaining, too.

Looking back at it now, there is at least one way in which Galaxy 4 – ’50s B-Movie as it is, with its beehived alien Baaaad Girls – feels slightly ahead of its time. By mostly ignoring the gender reversal dynamics and focusing on Maaga, it’s an early example of TV’s Magnificent Bitch, even though she’s played by Stephanie Bidmead rather than Stephanie Beacham (now there’s a thought: Steven Moffat’s already had a Drahvin spaceship making a cameo last year in a story about a more grandiose but more improbable exploding Universe, undoubtedly because he likes women in micro-skirts, so if he ever does a full-on Drahvin story, how’s she for casting…?). For the most part, this makes it camply amusing at the expense of what little credibility it has – even the first episode title, Four Hundred Dawns, suggests she fuels her ship with her wooden compatriots (‘Throw another Dawn in the furnace! …I’m almost out of disposable Drahvins’, as Richard has it) – and it’s difficult not to imagine it turning up the Planet of Women dial to something like the Two Ronnies’ The Worm That Turned, not least because if it had been made in 1980 they wouldn’t have dared call the villain Maaga. Not only is her name often pronounced so it’s just a shade short of The Good Life’s anti-hero, but it’s uncannily similar to that of another blonde Leader, too.

And yet the scene I’m most keen to see from Air Lock – other than the surely unmissable spectacle of Rills reeling about – is one that’s always gripped me on audio, where Maaga gives a virtual soliloquy, barring the occasional dumb comment from one of her dumb subordinates. She starts off merely grumbling about them, and indeed gives her most infamous line, but it carries on to something much better, a proper bit of villainous spite, delivered in a gripping undertone:

“It may be that we shall kill neither the Rills nor these Earth creatures. Not with our own hands, that is. It may be better for us to escape in the Rills’ spaceship and leave them here. And then... When we are out in space… We can look back. We will see a vast, white, exploding planet... And know that they have died with it!”
“But we will not see them die.”
“You will not. But I, at least, have enough intelligence to imagine it.”

Her having an imagination is quite the best thing in it, which you could even take as a postmodern commentary that the special effects are never going to live up to your mental picture… And at the end, of course, we get to imagine in exactly the same way about her last moments – which might make it an even more postmodern commentary on the bloodthirstiness of the viewers, who watch all these things for their entertainment.

Or she might just be being beastly.

Doctor Who – The Underwater Menace

“You’re not clumsy, Doctor. You did it on purpose.”
The TARDIS lands at the entrance to what’s left of Atlantis and does Flash Gordon.

Of all the stories with missing episodes so far, this is the one where people seem most likely to want the surviving episode lost, too, as it might be better-regarded if only the short ‘censor’s clips’ had survived to suggest a grim and dangerous story about horrible operations, rather than the load of old codswallop we get to see in the surviving Episode 3 in all its ludicrous glory. Even fans who’ve never seen it tend to know that the final line of that involves the mad scientist exclaiming,
“Nothing in the world can stop me now!”
I’ve read several reviews excusing the story by saying this is the worst episode of the four, but that’s nonsense – both soundtrack and Recon make clear that Episode 1, for example, moves very slowly, the TARDIS crew act like idiots and it’s not even funny. Despite all that, it’s still possible to defend it, simply because the surviving episode is often fun. Is it good? Nah. Is it a pleasure to watch? Go on, go on…

Good News For Troughton, Bad News For His Friends

Though at times he’s just as extravagant as in his first two stories, everyone wanting ‘the new Doctor’ toned down a bit is in for a stroke of luck. Opposite Joseph Furst’s Professor Zaroff, he seems relatively underplayed, and not only is he funnier than Furst, at least with the hero we’re laughing with rather than at him. He’s both sharp and funny, particularly when puncturing Zaroff’s plans: “Oh, have I dropped a brick?” or calling his bluff on the explosion being unstoppable and not requiring his finger on the button with “Miss your big moment? I think not.” He’s already getting other people to play on his strangeness, most entertainingly when the lovely Ben bluffs his way past a guard using the old ‘I’ve got a prisoner’ trick: “He’s just not normal, is he?” He tries to bring down Zaroff by suggesting the Fish People strike (a major contrast with Pertwee in The Monster of Peladon), but when it comes down to it, he’s back to what’s clearly already his usual way of foiling an evil plan: blow everything up, as he did on the Vulcan Colony the landing before last. With this strange mix of the gentle and the utterly destructive – ‘Better safe than sorry!’ he seems to think, to make sure the plan’s thoroughly knocked down – you have to feel relieved that Scotland survived in the previous story, or that he didn’t at least blow up the cells and scupper Trask’s boat. By contrast, he also tries to save Zaroff from his horrible end. Meanwhile, with the most ludicrous array of hats seen so far in the series, we see the Doctor delighting in a huge priest’s hat, wearing a fish mask on a stick, and dressed as a gypsy in groovy shades for a very funny ‘action’ scene in the market. You can see why he’s Matt Smith’s favourite Doctor. It’s also the last story he wears his arresting stovepipe hat that appeared in all his early publicity shots, and a little sad that the only surviving episode from one of the ‘stovepipe stories’ is devoid of it, with the telesnaps suggesting that the last person to wear it is Polly…

Although they get to do lots of dressing-up – rubber guards’ uniforms for Ben and Jamie, a shell suit for Polly – it’s not a particularly good story for the Doctor’s three companions. They start well, in a fun little TARDIS scene where everyone thinks about where they’d like to land (it’s difficult to know for sure without the proper episode, but this may feature the rare device of hearing someone’s voice ‘inside their head’ – used in The Moonbase, The Mind Robber and The War Games, but for only one story outside of Troughton), but once they go outside and everyone suddenly wants to explore, now Bill Hartnell’s gone, they rapidly run out of useful things to do after a one-off attempt to use foreign languages. Given that Ben and Jamie have basically the same ‘running around not saying very much’ part, already suggesting too many similar companions, it’s startling how much one-off characters Jacko and Sean are ‘extra companions’, doing companiony things like rabble-rousing the Fish People into striking. Did Geoffrey Orme just not like Ben and Jamie, even in their little rubber outfits? Ben may notice the threat, as he teases new boy Jamie like a younger brother. That’s nothing compared to the distressing fall for Polly, though, as she goes from being a fantastically capable companion to utterly useless here. She’s taken in by Zaroff’s ridiculous bluff to jump the priest Ramo (asking for Ramo to come over so he can “feel the aura of your goodness”), then while they fight she could easily pitch in, but shamefully just squats in the corner looking scared (at least she tries to hit him with a rock later on). Still, the two sexy blondes Ben and Polly look good together, and Joe Orton clearly fancied Jamie in the guard’s outfit, as he wanted to cast Fraser Hines as Mr Sloane on the strength of it!

The Hats of Doom

Despite many attempts by Terry Nation, this is the closest Doctor Who ever gets to the original Flash Gordon film serial, and not always in a good way; the Fish People, the mixture of stereotyped religion and mad science, the hokey dialogue and design work (it’s difficult to believe the executioner with the mask and shell on his chest isn’t from Flash Gordon). Add in elements of Journey to the Centre of the Earth and a horrible physical transformation that’s even less convincing than that in Vengeance on Varos, and you’ve got a story that’s mostly not deliberately funny, but invites being sent up mercilessly by several of the actors and in Nigel Robinson’s novelisation. It’s the reverse of some Hartnell stories written as comedy and ‘straightened out’ in the studio, from a man who also wrote a very forgettable episode of The Avengers. It’s enlivened by Professor Zaroff and his occasional demented exclamations but, as he’s given the brilliant and detailed motivation of being ‘mad’, I can’t help thinking he should be more over the top. He’s not exactly Brian Blessed in full-on shouty mode – more just sniggering. It’s not a good story for Atlantean religion, either, with it all a big con (shock) and the fat priest Lolem apparently played by Christopher Biggins’ funny uncle in a huge hat made of curly bits of newspaper. His bitchy “May the wrath of Amdo engulf you!” to Zaroff is fun, though. At least it’s an exciting story for milliners. And shouldn’t the Atlanteans be able to spot the TARDIS crew aren’t local because they don't have silly eyebrows like everyone else?

The cliffhanger to Episode 1 doesn’t seem too bad, surprising you by not being about sharks after all but instead with Polly about to be operated on and a Fish Person peering in, but stick a load together in the ‘Dance of the Fish People’ and they’re jaw-droppingly silly. It’s probably the longest non-speaking sequence in the show up to that point, complete with strings and a terrible electric piano. The only time they look good is in a marvellously colourful DWM Time Team illustration of Zaroff and Nemo the octopus, though the Troughton’s not too good (with a huge nose that looks like a villain from TV Comic). Doctor Who writer Rob Shearman also has a particularly spectacular go at the story, which you may enjoy. The gormless King Thous gets one dignified line as the water surges into Atlantis at the climax, “The everlasting nightmare is here at last,” but the budget doesn’t really allow enough playing with water either, despite an effective image of the goddess Amdo ‘weeping’ as the idol gives way (I’m not sure about leaving nasty Mengele-figure Damon as the new visionary, though).

After all that you might be surprised that this ill-judged attempt to replace history with fantasy in the series was directed by the co-creator of EastEnders, so she probably didn’t put it high up her CV. Another echo of the future is that the whole Atlantis thing and the ‘villain from outside with the crazy destructive plot’ who ‘the ruler is chatted up by and realises is actually a bad thing and “the Doctor was right” too late’ ideas are blatantly ripped off for The Time Monster, which frankly makes you worry about Barry Letts… There is, at least, a great final cliffhanger into The Moonbase as the TARDIS goes out of control: “Do something!” “I seem to have done something!” but overall I’m left with two conclusions. It’s undoubtedly the lowest Doctor Who has aimed so far into the series… But though I don’t usually believe in the ‘so bad it’s good’ theory, this is at least ‘so bad it’s highly entertaining’!

The Underwater Menace – I Should Like A Hat Like That

The scene I’m probably keenest to see from the newly returned episode – given that it’s sadly not one with the stovepipe hat, nor a soaking wet Ben, nor with the probable inner-voiceovers – is probably the full version of the clip on the BBC website, which is delightful. This was only Patrick Troughton’s third story as the new Doctor, with the part only ever having been played by William Hartnell, and as I said above it does him a great favour by casting a villain next to whom he tones it down a bit, before finding his ‘mission statement’ in The Moonbase and then nailing his Doctor perfectly in the sublime The Macra Terror. And it’s fascinating to watch him in that minute that’s been made available, orbiting Zaroff in the background, watching, before he comes into close-up, all the while probing in a deceptively mild manner, hands held close to his chest in quite a Hartnellish mannerism, provoking the mad scientist into his second-most memorable outburst:

“Bang! Bang, bang!”

So, if you happen to have any old friends and relatives with dusty film cans in their attics, why not check to see if they have any more episodes themselves? Oh, and those two unusual things the monsters from each oldly new episode have in common: neither breathes our air; and, unlike the human-looking villains in each story, neither are really monsters at all. You can also read a brief review of the episodes at the British Film Institute yesterday from a lucky blighter who was there.

In the meantime, Andrew Hickey has just reviewed another – far from missing – piece of Dr Who from 1965, while if your appetite’s been whetted for Christmas Doctor Who, there’s a cartoony Reconstruction of the deeply silly 1965 Christmas episode The Feast of Steven online (worth watching for its marvellous closing line), or – from the other end of Doctor Who – the Prequel to this Christmas’ The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe.

Where Do We Go From Here?

2011-12-09T13:52:00.003Z

Well, that was a depressing headline to wake up to. And a depressing throwback to Tories of years past as they go mad again on Europe.

I voted for the Coalition Agreement at our Special Conference last year; I still support it. Some of what the Government’s doing is heartening Liberal; some of it’s revoltingly Tory; but most of it’s unpleasant but necessary. And though I’m never going to like David Cameron, he’s certainly been a far better Prime Minister than I expected, in part through mostly striking a more reasonable and conciliatory tone than the likes of Mrs Thatcher (while Labour have made up for their complete lack of policy by howling more bitterly than the Trots of the ’80s).

So I can only think that the pressure’s got to him and he’s finally gone mad.

The central purpose of the entire Coalition has been to secure the economy. To restrain the vast deficit that Labour flew into long before the financial crisis – and before they pretended to be Keynesians only in crisis, having been bankrupts instead when times appeared to be good – and to make the economy sustainable. The biggest threat to our economy today has changed from the insanity of the US Republican Party to the ongoing crisis in the Eurozone. And David Cameron has this morning apparently shown that he’ll throw away the whole point of his Government to stop the Tory Party from eating him.

What happened to his past rhetoric about saving your neighbour when their house is on fire?

Now, maybe I’m wrong. I’ve not read the agreements that European Union countries came to, or didn’t, overnight. It may be that Mr Cameron’s position is sensible, and that it’s only twenty-six other countries that have instantaneously and collectively gone mad instead. I’d like that to be true. I hope someone can reassure me.

But when Mr Cameron walked into the ‘negotiations’ loudly proclaiming himself not the Prime Minister of the Coalition Government, still less of the whole of Britain, but only of the howling Eurosceptic nutters of the Tory Party, shouting in advance that he was going to be as big a knob as he could be and more interested in striking a pose than saving the economy, then – surprise! – came out of it striking a pose as an enormous knob, I can’t give him any benefit of the doubt. Let’s face it, he’s hardly given himself an alibi, has he?

Again, it seems that he’s gone mad. Or simply capitulated to the madness of his own party.

Which puts the economy and the Coalition in the most deadly jeopardy since Mr Cameron became Prime Minister. And even now, he surely can’t be mad enough to think his party will be satisfied for more than a few hours, so what’s it for? I know that the Tory Party’s ‘knowledge’ of European politics begins and ends with World War II, but anyone remotely better-read will have heard of Danegeld.

Back in 1999, I wrote an extended essay on my own Liberalism, Love and Liberty. In it, I contrasted our Liberal Internationalism with the petty crappery of the Tories over Europe:

“In government, the Tories were like a drunk at a party – not listening to anyone else, standing propped up in a corner, ranting away at the other guests, making our friends move away in embarrassment and those who didn’t want us invited in the first place say ‘See! We told you they couldn’t behave!’ Now they just want to sit at home and complain about the noise next door.”

And now we’re the other half at the party that has to wince and make excuses as they grab all the nuts and then throw up.

Update: Cicero asks a similar question, with considerably greater thought and analysis. He’s well worth a read.

And it’s difficult to disagree with John Kampfner, too.

Sunday Update: Feeling pretty grim, both physically and politically, while feverishly ill. But if you’re coming back here for more, I’d recommend three informative pieces: The Economist’s Bagehot suggests that Mr Cameron was not malign but simply grossly incompetent in blundering into Britain’s worst diplomatic defeat of my lifetime; The Independent offers “Clegg Rages At Cameron’s Spectacular Failure”; while Caron muses on Nick Clegg’s interview this morning.

Sherlock Holmes – Murder By Decree

2011-11-28T17:52:00.001Z

Last Saturday night, ITV3 showed Murder By Decree, the 1979 film pitting Sherlock Holmes against Jack the Ripper (not to be confused with Hammer’s earlier variation on the theme, A Study in Terror). Of all the many films that tried to make a serious attempt at defining Holmes between Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett, this is perhaps the most critically acclaimed and certainly the one that takes itself the most seriously. Yet though I rather like Christopher Plummer’s soulful Sherlock, the film’s achingly fashionable – for 1979 – Ripperology and conspiracy theories in general just test my patience. Spoilers follow…

“He seems to take a delight in keeping his subjects waiting. I suppose, since after all he is only the Prince of Wales, we should not expect the same degree of courtesy.”
“And since you are only the prince of detectives, Holmes, I don’t think you should presume to criticise a man who one day will be the King of England!”

My Puritan Streak

There are many reasons why this film gets on my wick, despite several fine actors, one or two of whom even give fine acting, and it’s to do with both style and substance. The narrative feel of the thing is a mess, not aided by a thoroughly unsatisfying excuse for an ending, nor in aiming for ‘realism’ by shooting almost the whole film in the dark until the last twenty minutes, making the picture even murkier than the script. But it’s the script that’s my main problem (just as it’s the reason many others praise it).

Essentially, the reason the narrative is a muddle, the reason the ending is an anti-climax, and the reason it takes itself so appallingly seriously all come down to the same central conceit: this purports to be an undiscovered adventure of the famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, but in fact he’s merely grafted on as a framing device for a very expensive docudrama of the trendy Jack the Ripper theory of the time.

My prejudices are showing here a little; I’m not one of nature’s great Puritans, but such a Puritanical streak as I have tends to come out about ‘true crime’. It’s probably not very logical to delight in many fictional murder mysteries and crime capers while sniffing at the tasteless exploitativeness of anything like the same plots if based on real criminals with real victims, but it’s my instinctive reaction. So while I can understand the idea behind this sort of film – hey! Let’s mash up the two biggest ‘popular legends’ of Victorian London to make big box-office! – I can’t help being a little biased against it from the start. A fictionalised stand-in for the Ripper, with a different name and in a work which promises nothing more than fiction, has nothing like the same effect on me, but if it’s purporting to be the real horrible misogynist murderer as ‘glamorous history’, I don’t like it. And so without the most extraordinary brilliance driving it, and it hasn’t, this film is almost precisely calculated by its po-faced presentation of both Sherlock Holmes and Stephen Knight’s schlock history book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (tasteful title, there) as ‘true’ to fall between two stools. It’s at the same time too serious, and not serious enough.

The Hairpiece From Hell

As well as being made to cash in on ‘ninety years of the Ripper’, this was the end of the ’70s, and glum conspiracy ‘thrillers’ in which the establishment is riddled with nasty murderers and the hero never wins and is lucky not to end up dead in a ditch at the end were very much in vogue. So it’s not surprising that the decade ended with a big conspiracy movie ‘exposing’ the entire British nobility as behind a Masonic conspiracy over the Jack the Ripper murders (the only surprise being that, unlike the book it’s based on and several later Holmes-less dramatisations, this film bottles it and changes the names of the aristocrats they claim committed the murders, while happy to slander openly various public servants of the time they name as the Ripper’s friends in slightly less high places. Surely not forelock-tugging by the producers?).

The problem, on its own terms, of making The Parallax View for the previous century is that they decide to put Sherlock Holmes in it so people will flock to the cinemas to see it. And Sherlock Holmes is in complete conflict with a grim, ’70s-style conspiracy movie. Those have to end up bleak, despairing and insoluble; he has to end up victorious by means of his brilliant brain, and not end up floating face-down in the Thames or framed for murder and blamed for it all in the end (he is, of course, arrested for murder at one point here, but it’s such a lacklustre attempt that the charge slides off him in the very same scene). Well, at least seeing as it’s not one of those books in which Holmes turns out secretly to be Jack the Ripper, Moriarty and Queen Victoria, or any other of those dreary ‘twists’ telegraphed from the cover. Shove these two immovable narrative forces up against each other, and what do you get? One of the most rambling, pointless and unintentionally hilarious scenes ever committed in a Sherlock Holmes film, as the film’s excuse for an ending shifts from briefly bloody to protractedly preachy against the “madmen wielding sceptres.”

Unable publicly to bring the Ripper to justice (just a bloody end in the dark that no-one can mention) or even to name him, but equally unable to have Holmes fail, the film’s ‘climax’ is twenty minutes of a handful of haughty men declaiming quite bad but very long dialogue at each other in a vast Masonic hall deep within the Palace of Westminster. No, seriously. Christopher Plummer is the only one who comes out of it with any dignity, and probably an award for being able to deliver this tosh with a straight face. His Holmes is compassionate, socially concerned, and thankfully clean-shaven; the Prime Minister, of course, is a stiff, cold liar who refuses to take any responsibility for having in effect said ‘Who will rid me of this troublesome woman?’; but even his ludicrous whiskers (concealing John Gielgud, and I bet he wished it was a full face-mask) can’t compete with Anthony Quayle’s giant curlicues of pubic hair arranged at random all over his head. In Hammer’s ‘Holmes versus the Ripper’ film A Study in Terror, Mr Quayle had played the decent, dependable moral heart of it; here, the difference in his part and performance are so blatantly mirrored in his appalling wig that I wonder whether the hamming was playing up to the hairpiece or vice versa. Along the way to this meandering shouting match, David Hemmings’ scheming closet Radical is almost as bad – and almost as ludicrously coiffured – as those he wants to bring down, while Donald Sutherland’s goggling psychic tries hard to be worse.

The decent, dependable moral heart of this film is, of course, Holmes, with Christopher Plummer giving rather more sides than the usual cold fish or hyper aesthete, actually carrying off a Holmes who weeps over Geneviève Bujold’s sad fate rather than making us go, ‘Oh, come on’. James Mason’s older, stiffer Dr Watson isn’t so lucky; contractual obligations for every Watson of the second half of the last century make them all ‘an attempt to move on from bumbling Nigel Bruce’ (though I rather liked him), but the elderly Mr Mason seems so weary that he gives the impression, once removing the shadow of Mr Bruce, of having nothing to put in his place. The only excuse I can think of is that with Watson usually taking the part of Holmes’ narrator, he’s the one ‘watching’ the whole thing on the part of the viewer and so is postmodernly as fed up with it as we are. Between them, they have one quite endearing scene with a pea, but it’s thin pickings in a very long two hours.

A Study In Terror and More

In all, it’s not a patch on Hammer’s more lurid but much more entertaining A Study In Terror from 1965, despite sharing the same case, murderous aristocrats and even some of the same cast (notably, not just the Jekyll and Hyde performances of Mr Quayle and his stylist but Frank Finlay as Inspector Lestrade). James Hill’s direction gives a much more lively and colourful film – and it’s a good half-hour shorter – while its utter disregard for historical accuracy and open desire just to tell a thrilling story means that it’s not just free of the later film’s visual sludge but its turgid narrative sludge, too, and is as a result far less offensive. The film has far more satisfying twists, details (despite the ludicrous title “the Duke of Shires”) and an exciting climax, none of them purporting to be true, and the actors are given much more interesting things to do than strike a pose and recite indigestible chunks of bad history at each other. The late John Neville’s Sherlock is quite sparky and energetic, if without Mr Plummer’s depth, while Donald Houston’s Dr Watson is, by contrast to Mr Mason, awake. John Fraser gives one of his most striking performances; Adrienne Corri is terrific; Robert Morley does the sort of enjoyable schtick he was always asked to do; and viewers who’ve come to this movie second may be surprised to find Anthony Quayle acting in this one.

Or, from the same sort of between-the-definitive-Holmeses period, there’s Robert Stephens’s languid detective in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which hopefully will be released on Region 2 one day with some of the mutilated bits restored, or Peter Cushing’s various and interestingly different takes – I do wish they’d release The Masks of Death, an eerie and little-known mystery that’s always stuck with me despite its jingoism. Or, if you must, From Hell, which nicks from the same Ripperology as Murder By Decree but doesn’t throw in Holmes to try and glamorise it (though Alan Moore and Johnny Depp going several rounds in the same sort of glum conspiracy thriller isn’t going to have anyone rise to the surface at the end).

On the bright side, if you want to compare legendary British icons of a particular sort of period that never really was but which we can all picture, then Holmes and history both got off lightly in Murder By Decree. Channel 4 this afternoon showed Siege of the Saxons, surely the worst King Arthur movie ever made that doesn’t have Clive Owen in it. It’s a pale shadow of The Black Knight, and it’s difficult to think of greater damnation than that.

If you want ‘canonical’ Sherlock Holmes, incidentally, I’m still rather proud of my piece on The Valley of Fear’s Visit From Porlock…

Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars

2011-11-23T19:11:00.039Z

Doctor Who is forty-eight years old today, and one of the series’ finest stories took place one hundred years ago (probably not today). On TV, Pyramids of Mars scared the daylights out of me when I was four as an inexplicable force drew Tom Baker’s Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith to the year 1911 to find a sinister priest summoning the awful power of an ancient god; then I grew up pleasurably terrified by Terrance Dicks’ novel, now gloriously read in audiobook by Tom. Both versions cast long shadows through today’s Doctor Who, for TV, other stories and toymakers alike. And watch out – there are many spoilers ahead…

Flap Your Fluffy Feet Before Sutekh

The Terror is Unleashed

1975 was probably the most exciting year Doctor Who has ever had – and I’m sure that I can judge that entirely objectively, having started watching it at the beginning of the year with the early days of Tom Baker. With more new stories broadcast that year than in any for a decade – or for another three decades to come – there was a mighty amount of Doctor Who, and of an astounding quality. In fan polls – and for me – two 1975 stories always make the top ten of all the two hundred and more broadcast so far, while another is said to be the personal favourite of both Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat. Pyramids of Mars is one of those two up there at the top, and from interviews and references in his stories as early as Queer As Folk onward clearly a favourite of Russell’s, if not the favourite. And it may say something about the age or taste of fans as to whether they prefer the different ‘raising dark gods’ stories of 1971’s The Dæmons, 1975’s Pyramids of Mars or 2006’s The Impossible Planet (which explicitly refers to the earlier two). For me, it’s the combination of 1975 and 1911 all the way.

On TV, it’s easy to see why Pyramids of Mars is so highly regarded. Looking great in the ideal setting of ‘about a hundred years ago’, it has perhaps the most perfect Doctor Who opening episode of the lot, climaxing in for me the series’ scariest ever cliffhanger, then introduces the TARDIS and big concepts around time travel, and finishes with the Doctor tempted – and taken – by the Devil, a mixture of science fiction, myth and pure horror that gives you big-scale ideas on a canvas small-scale enough to deliver them convincingly, the ultimate in ‘ancient horror on the rise’. Robert Holmes’ least funny, most scary script (with additional work by Paddy Russell, adding to her assured direction); a small but perfect cast including Bernard Archard, Michael Sheard, Peter Copley and Peter Mayock; a superb atmosphere created by filming at Mick Jagger’s stately home, gorgeous antique design and a career-best eerie music score from Dudley Simpson that can all compete with Hammer’s own Mummy movies; and, above all, probably Doctor Who’s greatest ever villain in a heart-stopping performance by Gabriel Woolf as the dark god Sutekh, dripping malice in a voice that rarely lifts above an agonised whisper. The whole thing was the single story that scared me the most, and though I loved returning to it, it was always with a thrill of fear – most vividly going down the stairs that led into the Blackpool Doctor Who Exhibition, finding Sutekh, mummies and sarcophagi in the dark at the bottom, and being seized with such terror that I gripped the banister and couldn’t be dragged inside for what felt like an eternity (probably two or three minutes of parental persuasion, or of patient prising my fingers away).

Pyramids of Mars has been repeated twice on BBC1 or BBC2 and released several times – it was one of the first Doctor Who stories available on VHS in the mid-’80s (and the first I bought), initially in a feature-length edit with not only cliffhangers but several other scenes sliced out, seemingly at random, then a few years later in full, and a fairly early DVD release, one of the first to have the sort of full selection of extras that set the standard for the range continuing today (complete with a scriptwriter being unfeasibly rude about Mary Whitehouse, as he should). And it’s the first ‘classic’ Doctor Who to be released on Blu-ray, in tribute to Elisabeth Sladen as an extra feature on The Sarah Jane Adventures Series Four – while if you missed it on CBBC last month, the very last and one of the finest of The Sarah Jane Adventures begins tomorrow on BBC1, so make sure you catch it. As a Blu-ray experience, though, Richard notes in Millennium’s excellent Mysteries of Doctor Who #23: Why Does Pyramids of Mars Take Place in ENGLAND? that the disc presentation could be better. One of the great things about that article, incidentally, is that it mirrors the Scarman brothers as both keys to Sutekh’s escape: everyone knows that Marcus’ archaeological bent is bent by Sutekh; but Laurence’s scientific invention becomes another fatal flaw. This was released on 31st October this year, appropriately, for what’s probably the most perfect Halloween Doctor Who story (its main competition being Image of the Fendahl, both adventures first shown at the end of October, both filmed at the same manor house, though the latter ironically set at Lammas). And though I can’t remember where I first saw this picture – several years ago – or give appropriate credit to the bright carver who created it, it’s remarkable what you can find on your hard drive, isn’t it?

Sutekh Lord of Pumpkins

The Return of Marcus Scarman

With all that to live up to, you might wonder how the book can compare without the actors, music, direction or location, particularly as the novelisations and Terrance Dicks especially tend to tone down the horror (Ian Marter’s The Ark In Space, on the other hand…). But you needn’t worry, even if he takes out the most controversial bit (it’s not the one Mary Whitehouse would think of). Though this doesn’t have quite the depth and power of his Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion – nor its thrill of horror that outmatches that story’s TV version, as I’ve recently written – it’s still one of Terrance’s best, telling the story with pace, occasional flourishes and fascinating extensions at either end, into the past and the future. Last week, I looked in detail at another childhood favourite, Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters, and noted that Terrance himself says he rose to his best when novelising Bob Holmes’ work, because those were simply the best scripts (and I’m pretty sure that it was when signing my copy of Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars that he told me that in pretty much those words).

I have many memories of the book in particular: when I was a little boy and only just starting on my life of obsessive collecting spreading out all my Doctor Who books (perhaps thirty or so) and trying to put them in ‘best’ order, with this always at or near the front; it being the first I chose to lend to another boy at primary school (Martin Campbell, down in The Valley; not the James Bond director) to show him why they were so brilliant… Before, I suspect, going overboard and adding a crate of others, not realising that not everyone would share my enthusiasm or indeed reading speed; and, of course, the book itself, from the mythic Prologue to the melancholy, eerie Epilogue of Sarah Jane alone in a library (a familiar part of my young life).

Chris Achilleos’ original cover, now used for the audiobook, is uncharacteristically stark – a grim-faced Doctor and even grimmer rifle-wielding Sarah Jane framed around a mummy (out of character for her, you might think, though arguably there’s nothing so Doctor Who as the juxtaposition of frock and gun). Alister Pearson’s cover for the reprint (adapted here into a video cover, and also used on Heathcliff Blair’s CD of Dudley Simpson Doctor Who music of the period) is one of his best, intense and expansive, seething with dark colours around the Doctor, Sutekh and his servants.

“For many thousands of years SUTEKH had waited . . . trapped in the heart of an Egyptian Pyramid. Now at last the time had come – the moment of release, when all the force of his pent-up evil and malice would be unleashed upon the world . . .

“The TARDIS lands on the site of UNIT headquarters in the year 1911, and the Doctor and Sarah emerge to fight a terrifying and deadly battle . . . against Egyptian Mummies, half-possessed humans – and the overwhelming evil power of SUTEKH!”

When I was a boy, I loved those exciting back blurbs; now I ask, only half-possessed? Though I also now realise that mentioning UNIT should have been much more jarring at the time, and only wasn’t because most of the early books were of Jon Pertwee stories. And yet that very cosy familiarity was clearly designed to be a deliberate statement in the original script – with the Doctor at last breaking away from his exiled Earth ‘home’, albeit less destructively than Sutekh, this firmly told anyone expecting a return to the early ’70s status quo that literally right where the comfortable familiarity of UNIT ‘ought’ to be there’s going to be a time-travel story of unspeakable horror instead (and in case you didn’t get the message, the substitute UNIT HQ gets burned to the ground). So at a glance, this is something bolder than usual. Terrance doesn’t even use any of his stock chapter titles, the most traditional – if effective – being “The Terror is Unleashed”, though few others could actually boast “The World Destroyed . . .” and “The Weapon of the Time Lords” has rather a ring to it. As does…

The Legend of the Osirians

Terrance Dicks rarely added scenes when novelising Doctor Who scripts, so his rare Prologues were always a treat for me. This one, “The Legend of the Osirians”, memorably gives his backstory for Sutekh and his people. It’s interesting to compare it to other interpretations: Justin Richards’ The Sands of Time pedantically ‘corrects’ the details to fit ‘proper’ Egyptian mythology and grinds down imagination with banal spaceships and explanations of psychic powers; Lawrence Miles’ Faction Paradox series offers a vast, non-linear mythos of rival gods that fits more with the cynical asides of Robert Holmes’ script. Terrance’s advantage here is that he paints with a broad brush as if an ancient story told many times, allowing you to fill in the details of a galaxy-spanning conflict in your mind’s eye without the bathos of spelling them all out in a couple of pages. His disadvantage I think is that he has a more comforting worldview than Robert Holmes’ dark universe; rather than everyone who isn’t evil being corrupt, Terrance tends to tell stories of bad apples but a basically trustworthy establishment, as in his tale of the godlike Osirians:

“As they grew in power, so they grew in wisdom – all but one.”

And yet in other ways Terrance makes his Universe every bit as dark as Bob Holmes’. The script, famously, kills off every character other than the Doctor, Sarah Jane, and the Egyptian labourers who flee in terror from Marcus Scarman’s ill-fated archaeological dig in the first scene; on the page, even they are swiftly caught and slaughtered by the Cult of the Black Pyramid, making the book – with Terrance’s own Horror of Fang Rock – the most merciless in the entire series. If anything, his deft little biographical notes that sketch in the likes of Marcus Scarman (“The year was 1911, and Englishmen abroad were expected to maintain certain standards”), Ibrahim Namin (“To his terror and delight, one of the Great Ones had spoken to him”) and especially Ernie Clements (who “regarded himself as the Scarmans’ unpaid gamekeeper”) make their gruesome fates all the worse for first having made us feel for the characters as people.

Against expectations, he maintains much of the feel of horror throughout, not least by being constantly aware that Marcus Scarman, walking around as the apparent villain of the piece for much of the story, is a perambulating, smouldering corpse under Sutekh’s control. He underlines the arrival of the ‘messenger’ by giving him bare feet as he steps out to dispose of Sutekh’s earlier servant, whose “shuddering scream” is as horrible a moment as any in the novels; he describes the charred hands that kill his brother, only hinted at on TV; most memorably, as Sutekh sends him the co-ordinates for the Pyramids of Mars, he picks up the despatch:

“The cylinder glowed with the fire of Sutekh and there was a horrible sizzling sound as Marcus touched it. But he felt no pain. Only the living feel pain.”

One change where Terrance could have done with rather more ambiguity is towards the end, as Marcus Scarman’s body finally collapses into ash: on screen, you can make your own reading as to whether it’s Marcus or Sutekh who at the last exclaims that he’s free. Yet perhaps that’s his surprising mercilessness coming through again; with Sutekh exultant, there’s not even the faintest crumb of comfort to take from the old archaeologist’s fate. Either way, there’s a terrible aptness in that, possessed, his last act is to be once more an archaeologist, in the service of a hideous patron. His friend Dr Warlock is a more striking but sensible change in the context of a novel: a ruddy-faced, hearty, typical village squire (given a bluff Yorkshire accent in Tom’s reading) in the book, fitting his self-confident to the point of bossy character but very different to Peter Copley’s fine TV performance. Think for a moment, though, and you can see how Paddy Russell might cast to suggest an elderly, ascetic gentleman who you could easily imagine as an old friend and contemporary of Bernard Archard’s Marcus Scarman, while Terrance has very reasonably made him a very different physical type so as not to end up describing two very similar thin old men.

Pyramids of Mars Doctor and Mummies

Sarah Jane shines through the book, as Lis Sladen did on screen in what was surely her most effective season as the Doctor’s companion – she even lifts the novel at points by taking the piss out of the Doctor, if less so than on screen, giving a bit of a release of tension when Terrance evokes the horror of the script with unexpected force but rarely manages to get across the moments of humour. One slight change, having not Warlock’s hat but the Doctor’s dropped for their pursuers to find, gives her a grimly amusing moment of mutiny over his outfits.

Without Michael Sheard’s childlike wonder and Lis Sladen’s grim defiance, the ‘escape’ to “1980” – mentioned six times on TV but tactfully trimmed from the book – doesn’t have quite the same punch, though the scene again stands out as one of those (as in The Masque of Mandragora) in which Robert Holmes decided it was time to say out loud those questions everyone put to him in the BBC canteen and up the tension with it into the bargain. In Doctor Who’s ultimate horror story, it’s not just all his favourite horror themes from the cinema that are on view, but new ones he introduces especially for a time travel series. We get fear of the living dead; fear of possession and loss of identity; fear of something horrible happening to a loved one, and even being done by a loved one; fear of confinement and pursuit, at the same time; we get several different types of horrible death, through burning, strangling and crushing; and if all that fear, existential horror and plain death isn’t enough to scare you, the trip to the alternate present day where, because the Doctor deserts his post, Sutekh has long since destroyed the world, gives new existential horror on a grand scale, not just of the end of the world but that you might have ceased to exist before you were even born.

In the Power of Sutekh

Though Terrance drops the ball a bit in having Sutekh’s voice sometimes rise “to a maddened howl” in typical OTT villain description, at other points he captures something of Gabriel Woolf’s quietly compelling portrayal – there’s “hideous strain” in his voice when holding in an explosion, and the first description of him is perfect:

“Sutekh’s voice was soft and ferocious at the same time, like that of some great beast.”

Neither the design nor the script quite deliver on the final episode’s voyage inside a trap-filled alien pyramid – the Pyramid of Mars promised from the first – on TV, but as ever it’s on a bigger budget on the page, with the added advantage that Terrance can use carefully ambiguous descriptions to imply far more devious traps and puzzles. While seeing the VHS in the late ’80s was for the most part an amazing thrill, I can still remember being rather disappointed by the inner chamber for which my imagination fed by the book had overlaid my actually having seen the programme, an awesome chamber of light in which “cradled in a silver tulip-shaped cup was what appeared to be a giant ruby, bigger than a man’s head. Four silver rods projected from it, like the rays of a stylised sun” – rather than, on screen, something that looks a bit like an item of garden ornamenture. Even throwaway details add to the design – such as the simple but rewarding moment where we ‘see’ that the deflection barriers around the Scarman Estate don’t just go straight up but form the pattern of a pyramid.

Those deflection barriers invite comparisons with The Dæmons in particular, showing a very different sort of worldview from when Terrance Dicks was lead writer on the show to Robert Holmes’ period; they’re very different stories, and the points of similarity only show up their differences (as if Hinchcliffe and Holmes were poking the Pertwee era in the eye with something very much tauter and darker). The vicar’s only bad in one because he’s been done away with and replaced by the Master; the priest is only a part of a nasty Cult in the other. The alien that looks like the Devil in one is a cross between an amoral scientist and a harsh Old Testament father God, who when he wakes up may destroy the world if we don’t meet his exacting standards; the demonic alien here is a cruel and twisted Lovecraftian dark god that will destroy the world once freed because he wants to. And while both stories have the scene hemmed in by an impassable force barrier, in one the barrier is merely an inconvenience that stops people getting in or out, while in this story it makes a whole country estate a place of claustrophobic horror because the grey ‘inanimate’ servants that have come to life are stalking rather than merely guarding, determined to kill everyone within. In both stories, too, the Doctor builds a clever machine to stop the enemy, but it’s destroyed before it can do the trick, but each is succeeded by a very different finale. Whereas in The Dæmons it’s human goodness that wins out, something it would be impossible to believe against Sutekh (or, some might say, full stop), in Pyramids of Mars, each of the last three episodes builds up a device that will foil Sutekh, each blown by the end except for the last one – the first a lash-up that fails, the second succeeding for the moment but at the cost of the Doctor, and the last invoking the might of the Time Lords, pitting (according to taste) one mythic race against another or pitting science against god… And Terrance’s novelisation improves the ending of Pyramids of Mars in two key ways. First, his chapter title naming Time “The Weapon of the Time Lords” makes it sound both rather grand and ponderous and as if it’s down to someone other than the Doctor (had he called that final chapter ‘The Doctor Shoots Sutekh With a Big Time-Gun’ it would have seemed both easier and much less in character). And then he gives us a proper aftermath.

While on TV we can sit back and watch the rising flames to give closure, the book grounds us with an appropriate coda, the Doctor musing over the fire as practical Sarah Jane wants to get out before “some heavily-moustached village policeman of the year nineteen eleven” arrives to ask questions, then back in the TARDIS the way she ponders one by one every death, including remembering Laurence’s “bright-eyed eagerness” looking round the TARDIS, “And most tragic of all, Marcus Scarman, taken over and burnt out by Sutekh’s horrible alien power.” With the Epilogue still to come, the end of the book really gives it a sense that it matters. And that elegiac Epilogue in which Terrance shows that he, too, can answer those questions asked in the BBC canteen (‘Didn’t anyone notice?’), is unique in the Target range, set “Later, much later,” once Sarah Jane has parted from the Doctor, where she visits the little country town close by the scene and looks up the newspaper files from 1911:

“BROTHERS DIE IN TRAGIC FIRE
“HOLOCAUST SWEEPS COUNTRY ESTATE…

“Sarah skimmed through the rest of the report. So that was what the Doctor had meant. The terrible events surrounding the return of Sutekh had found a natural explanation, a deplorable but soon forgotten tragedy in an English country village.

“Sarah looked through the window, out into the bustling high street of the little country town. She shivered at the memory of the desolate world she had seen through the doors of the TARDIS—the world Sutekh would have made if he had not been defeated. The sacrifice of all those lives had not been in vain. The pity was that no one would ever know.

“Sarah closed the heavy old volume and went into the summer sunshine of her own, unchanged, twentieth century.”

The Doctor Fights Back

Tom Baker read four complete audiobooks from Target novels before moving on to ‘new’ adventures, of which more later, but this is by a long stretch his best. Decades before, he’d created a reedy ‘old man’ voice for an abridged version of State of Decay that really doesn’t work for Solon when he digs it up after a quarter of a century, for example, while even the humour of The Creature From the Pit didn’t bring out the best in him.

In Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars, though, you can hear an actor who’s suddenly enjoying and engaging with his material, doing justice to an excellent book. His ‘old man’ gets new life for Laurence, while his bluff, Yorkshire Warlock is ideal and his ferocious Sutekh decidedly impressive. He gives an appropriate air of mythic grandeur to the Prologue, is entertaining on Sarah’s little asides, and even seems to engage with ‘his’ own lines, finding interestingly different readings for many of them – generally playing the Doctor a little lighter in 2008 than in 1975 (and still giving a pronounced ‘shh’ sound in the word “eviscerated”). Aided by its own musical motifs, this CD is surely the best way to enjoy it today (and the only one that’s not out of print).

Millennium and the Doctor

Epilogue

I was a little mean to Justin Richards’ Missing Adventures novel The Sands of Time above, but it’s frustrating in part because a lot of it’s so good – it would simply be much better if it had no connection to Pyramids of Mars. This sequel is brilliantly plotted, but follows its source material of Mummy movies and Egyptian mythology far too slavishly – not least, effectively saying ‘Doctor Who got it wrong and I’m going to get the legends right,’ getting in the way of a good story to try for spurious accuracy. A sequel shouldn’t make its original smaller. And then there’s the book’s stand-in for the all-hating, especially sibling-hating Sutekh. Justin would change Terrance’s line to ‘As they grew in power, so they grew in wisdom – all but one… And his Mum and his sister, with whom he remained best mates’, and I find that very hard to swallow (oh, his Mum? Actually, she’s in a Big Finish CD, which again is rather fun if you can ignore Pyramids of Mars, but it would be a spoiler to say which. E-mail me if you want to know).

Twenty-first Century Doctor Who stories owing a debt to Pyramids of Mars range from Steven Moffat’s “Timey-wimey” scripts or Sarah Jane reminding the Doctor that “A man has just been murdered!” while he only pays attention to millions being echoed in Rose to the outright references in The Impossible Planet, where the planet’s code number is ‘Sutekh’ backwards if you squint, the Doctor muses about Sutekh and the sinister voice of the great Beast is even provided by none other than Gabriel Woolf. “Don’t turn around,” indeed. And, in this time of wonders, you can now buy the toys that my eyes would have boggled out on stalks to see when I was little: two slightly different versions of Sutekh’s Mummies are available from Character Options, complete with either jackal-or-falcon-headed canopic jars with silver force generators inside; an inappropriately grinning figure of Tom Baker’s Doctor with the part of the TARDIS he wires up to Sutekh’s space-time tunnel to make him miss his station; and, next year, even a cuddly Sutekh, apparently.

Pyramids of Mars Doctor and Mummies Struggle

The most impressive variation on the theme, though, is undoubtedly a series of six linked audio dramas. Gabriel Woolf returned to the role of Sutekh alongside Julian Glover, Isla Blair, Philip Madoc and others in Lawrence Miles’ 2005-2009 Faction Paradox series from Magic Bullet (Coming to Dust / The Ship of a Billion Years, Body Politic / Words From Nine Divinities and Ozymandias / The Judgment of Sutekh), which expands the Osiran Court across time and space. You’ve probably not heard of it, but it’s a brilliant piece of work.

But Doctor Who fans have a lot to thank this novel for in two better-selling if less intense audio drama series. Listening to the audiobook, it felt like Tom Baker was getting into it in a way he hadn’t with his three previous readings – and it turns out he really had. After years of resisting, it was on doing this reading that he was at last enthused enough to agree to record new Doctor Who audio dramas, first with BBC Audiobooks and now with Big Finish. So Robert Holmes, Terrance Dicks and a novel from 1976 are still impressive enough to be pushing on new Doctor Who today.

Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters

2011-11-17T00:00:00.020Z

Terrance Dicks has had a huge impact on Doctor Who, both as lead writer during Jon Pertwee’s time as the Doctor and then in writing many more Doctor Who novels than anyone else. I grew to love his work on tales like this, his novelisation of Carnival of Monsters – a story which I first saw on TV thirty years ago tonight, repeated in BBC2’s The Five Faces of Doctor Who season. And for me this tale of thrills, comedy, posh trippers and Tories eaten by dragons is still one of the most entertaining, on DVD or on the page.

“One has no wish to be devoured by some alien monstrosity, Kalik. Even in the cause of political progress.”

The Five Faces of Doctor Who

It’s forty-seven years this week since the very first Doctor Who novelisation was published, and they’re still worth celebrating. Having come to Pertwee’s Doctor through the marvellous early Target Books, as far as I’m concerned many of them remain superior to the TV versions, with an inevitable gap in quality between prose, characterisation and my imagination on one hand and what I much later saw on screen. With BBC Books now reprinting some of those novels, I’ve written about that ‘Pertwee Gap’; and Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters sits right in the middle of it. The TV story is exciting, colourful, full of vivid performances and with a natural advantage for displaying a story in which the Doctor, at long last free of his exile to Earth, realises he is in effect still trapped inside a television programme… But it’s also tacky, silly and very variable in which bits work. So is the book, then, the best of it? In making some comparisons tonight – and running right through, so with many spoilers (grab the book or the DVD first if you can) – I’ll try to work out the answer on one of the Pertwee stories I love the most but find it most difficult to decide on.

When I was a boy, there were two sorts of novelisations that were my favourites, depending on the mood I was in. One sort had greater characterisation and background, and felt like they had a message to them; once I was a little older, I realised that these tended to be the ones by Malcolm Hulke. But the other sort, simpler, more stripped-down, but often telling a more exciting story, might best be described as cracking good stories told at a cracking pace, with cracking dialogue. Books like Pyramids of Mars, Terror of the Autons and, of course, Carnival of Monsters. And I grew to realise that these, too, had something in common: they were written by Terrance Dicks, from stories by Robert Holmes. Terrance has often said that he enjoyed novelising Bob’s work the most, because his were simply the best scripts, and even when I was as young as five or six, it showed. These days, the more in-depth novels have more to offer than the brisker works when – unthinkable back then – the TV stories are on hand to watch anytime you want, and yet the deceptively simple style of Terrance Dicks can still be rewarding.

Carnival of Monsters is an odd beast – which is why I enjoy it so much. Where most of Jon Pertwee’s stories are confined to Earth, working with the military forces of UNIT, and a bit po-faced, this was the story immediately after he regained the TARDIS’ ability to travel in space and time, and not only does it showcase that in an exuberant range of settings but it gloriously takes the piss. No wonder the BBC chose to show it among just five stories to sum up over a hundred so far in 1981 (I very nearly picked it for my own The Eleven Faces of Doctor Who); no wonder it’s been released this year on DVD for the second time, as part of the Revisitations 2 boxed set. By a long way the least Pertwee-like of all Pertwees, with a feel far more Who-ish and a Doctor far more Doctor-ish than usual, it takes the Doctor and his ditzy – or is she? – assistant Jo to a 1920s ship full of strangely repetitive British Empire stereotypes, to the grey, bureaucratic planet of Inter Minor and to the world of the terrifying swamp dragons, the Drashigs. What could connect all these people and places? Could it have anything to do with a disreputable interplanetary traveller with a plucky female companion and a box of times that seems bigger on the inside than the outside (no relation)?

The book is long out of print, though second-hand copies abound; as yet, this isn’t available as a BBC Audiobook either, but you may be able to find in the distant reefs of the Internet a much more primitive version from thirty years ago. Gabriel Woolf, the fabulous voice of Sutekh (from Pyramids of Mars, again), read three books on tape for the RNIB, and Carnival of Monsters happens to be the one I have a wobbly MP3 of (so should you happen to come across his Loch Ness Monster or Three Doctors, please let me know). It’s much brisker than the BBC readings these days – no music, no retakes on the fluffed lines, and rattled off at great speed. He’s got an authoritative voice; his Jo is quite perky (curiously like Katy Manning’s Iris Wildthyme); his Pletrac entertainingly tetchy… But it’s very clear they’d got him in to do a lot of work in a rush, and nobody’s trying to make anything much of it. An historical curiosity, but far from his best work, and it shows how good the modern ones are. Whether or not this is ever remade on CD, though, in this time of wonders, you will shortly be able to buy your very own Drashig toy!

Carnival of Monsters

Dangerous Arrivals

Chris Achilleos offers one of his most striking though least stylised covers, with a haughty Doctor picked out in black and white as a fabulous mottled green sea serpent twists round to attack a ship behind him. Super-pedants might argue that Pertwee’s pictured from The Three Doctors, or that the plesiosaurus looks little like the one on screen… But, let’s face it, there are two species of sea-serpenty thingy in this TV story, one of which looks terrific, and the other of which looks far better when Chris Achilleos paints it.

This was always one of my favourite novelisations when I was a boy – from the terrific cover to the terrific characters and lines. The book also adds lots of little polishes; it’s clearer, if less vivid, and uses the word “liberal” to mean good and “authoritarian” bad, so it’s appealed to me on many levels and from a very young age, along with the fabulously memorable tagline on the back:

“The Doctor and Jo land on a cargo ship crossing the Indian Ocean in the year 1926.
“Or so they think.”

Even that line presages the approach Terrance has in the book, of taking the television version and subtly refining it – I suspect he wrote the book’s back blurb, as I suspect he wrote the Radio Times teaser for the original transmission of the first episode:

“The Tardis lands on a cargo-ship in the Indian Ocean, in the year 1926.
“Or does it?”

Although Terrance Dicks isn’t known for major structural changes in the way that Malcolm Hulke, for example, would make in his novelisations, Carnival of Monsters is notable for a very different set of scenes to those on TV. I’d be fascinated to see what order everything was in the original script… Was it Bob Holmes, writing for TV, who chopped between lots of scenes ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ to give the TV story a strikingly modern feel of channel-hopping, with Terrance Dicks then collating them to make the book more coherent and straightforward, or did Barry Letts break up the longer passages of the script as director? With different stories running on different levels – in several senses – it’s possible to decouple and play around with them far more than in most Doctor Who stories, and they do, with each format deftly tailored to its own ‘grammar’.

The two versions are quite different from the very first page. The TV adventure begins with a cargo-thruster landing at the Inter Minoran spaceport while villainous Official Kalik sneers (and as his legs fuzz against a dubious blue landscape)… The book, as the TARDIS lands in the hold of the cargo-ship S.S. Bernice, the Doctor insisting they’re in the Acteon Galaxy, Jo indignant and poking around the chickens. Whichever version I’m reading / watching, I always expect to find it opening the other way. And very early, too, another contrast becomes clear. Jo gets more lines in the book – Pertwee probably nicking the good ones, famously as light-fingered over screen time as he was over nautical compasses – but is also more girly and helpless on paper, suggesting the script (or actress Katy Manning) took one view of her and Terrance Dicks another. Still, crossing to Inter Minor after Jo humphs at the end of page 9 that the Doctor’s landed them back on Earth, Terrance has a giveaway that’s as fourth-wall as the serial itself.

“As the terrifying adventure which followed was to prove, Jo had never been more wrong in her life.”

The planet Inter Minor is rather better-characterised than the TV at first, and has the advantage of considerably better special effects in your mind’s eye than on your actual eyes; we have the busy spaceport, an economic boom as trade opens up after centuries of isolation, and tales of long-ago Space Plague leading to “a hysterical over-reaction” (only hinted at on screen, when they could just as easily be warlike as terrified). The progressive party has come to power and changed things – but only because the Officials hope new President Zarb will save them from revolution by the unsettled masses. The Official caste is deftly sketched in:

“They were mostly tall and thin, grey-faced and grey-robed. Grey-minded, too, for the main part.”

Yet though the book has the edge, the TV has much more of a sense of place, of teeming business, and is startlingly vibrant even if some of it’s more enthusiastic than effective (even the wild electronic zig-zags slicing the air around a victim of a toasting-fork gun are far more interesting to watch than just another “blaster” is to read).

The S.S. Bernice certainly works best on screen, however, at least early on – the rather splendid old ship they film on, the music, and most of all the actors make it very watchable. Crusty old Major Daly is far more fun on TV, mainly because Tenniel Evans is hamming it up for all he’s worth – increasing his word-count exponentially simply by changing “What’s going on?” into “What? What? What what what?” as he wakes up! Jo gets some great lines here either way, frustratedly telling the Doctor he should have an L-plate on his TARDIS and explaining about her and her unseaworthy “uncle”… But skip ahead a few pages and (before Jo gets to be the dumb one as the Doctor patronises her over where and when they are, before she recovers with the skeleton keys) while in the book Jo grins cheekily at the first officer when he boasts he’s always stopped his crew making a fool of him and says “Don’t underestimate us,” on TV Pertwee blatantly nicks her line. The first monster, too, is already much better on the book cover, while the mysteries pile up better on the page: the octagonal plate leading somewhere else is very clear in the book; on screen, it’s very oddly directed. Did they not have it ready for that studio day? We keep seeing the Doctor squatting down to look at something that’s below the camera angle, and are only shown it for an instant in close-up. The cliffhanger to Part One / close of Chapter Three will make that distinction even clearer…

Back among the Inter-Minorans, dodgy travellers Vorg and Shirna have disembarked with their dodgier machine. Described in the book as a ‘What The Butler Saw’ machine (despite a much later reference to Jo feeling like an ant inside a television set), the MiniScope seems more tawdry than telly on paper, while on TV it’s obvious what it is – a TV. Or is it? With satirical Officials and Empire characters, I saw this as a boy as a satire on Britishness, while the channel-hopping TV version makes it clear that it’s still more about sending up TV – and one TV show in particular. And yet it’s impossible to overlook the statement

“‘Our purpose is to amuse,’ confirmed Vorg. ‘Nothing serious, nothing political…’”

…is a deliberate non sequitur, and that when conservative Official Kalik seethes at the lifting of the prohibition on “amusement” as “More anti-productive legislation” that will see the end of society as they know it, Terrance and Bob’s purpose is to amuse with something very political indeed.

The Giant Hand

The two places / stories come together at the climax of the first quarter of the adventure – when Vorg, detecting something new inside his Scope (given away far too early in the book, which gives the TV another head start), reaches in… And pulls out the tiny TARDIS. And that’s a brilliantly visual scene which, er, the book wins hands down. That cliffhanger / chapter climax as a section of the ship’s cargo hold opens out impossibly and an enormous hand gropes towards our heroes before they can get escape is, on screen, just a couple of seconds of a hand going straight onto the TARDIS (in itself a very poor cut-out with rotten yellow lines around it). Contrasting the two, perhaps the most disappointing moment of the whole TV story is that curiously unsatisfying delivery for what, conceptually, is a brilliant cliffhanger. In the excellent reviews book Running Through Corridors Volume 1, Rob Shearman notes how he originally scripted his TV episode Dalek to open with a huge face of the villain breaking open, as the helipad bay cover, but that they decided they wouldn’t be able to afford to make it look good enough – and that, in the old days, they’d have just done it for thruppence anyway. Which makes it all the more bizarre that Mr CSO himself, Barry Letts, bottled out of showing exactly that sort of shot.

It’s time for entertainer Vorg to explain about the Tellurians / Terrans in his collection as the story’s early questions are answered and new ones set up, and suddenly you can see Terrance’s slightly schoolmarmish habit of cleaning up the more dubious elements for children to read. Neither the book nor the TV version have the full scene of Vorg speculating on how we breed, of course, just as Doctor Who could never say so, though at least you can find the gag that he can’t talk about it in the DVD extra features (“Extended and Deleted Scenes” on the original release; integrated into the full “Episode Two – Early Edit” on the Revisitations 2 Special Edition). Perhaps it’s for similar fears of impropriety that Major Daly’s daughter Clare (missing an ‘i’ in the book) no longer calls herself a “silly flapper”.

And then the novel surges ahead again with its sharper politics, making the xenophobic horror of the Officials at unexpected alien animal importation much more palpable (and considerably less camp), which is very effective – and it’s a great improvement to have that law against weird biologies one that Zarb hasn’t dared repeal yet, making Vorg’s thoughtless transgression cut to the heart of Inter Minoran disease-paranoia, rather than the TV’s rather weak “The Interstellar Ecology Commission expressly forbids the transportation of live specimens”. Who believes Kalik would give a stuff about the Interstellar Ecology Commission? Still, it gets aggressive enough for Vorg’s clear plastic bowler hat to steam up…

Then the Carnival of Monsters on your screen pulls ahead again with the glorious techno adventure playground that is the inside of the Scope as the miniature Doctor and Jo crawl through the workings in search of the exit – only to find a swamp full of beasties. While the TV version is, of course, the best at sending up television, a prize for the best TV-analogue mention in the book from a man on the receiving end of Mary Whitehouse and co must come here, as Shirna switches channels to show the Drashigs (with new improved Terrans):

“Vorg noted sourly that the three Officials, however much they disapproved of the Scope, were as keen as anyone to savour its excitements.”

The Monster in the Swamp

Constantly talked up and a memorable design despite Bob Holmes’ lack of faith in BBC effects conceiving their name as an unflattering anagram, the Drashigs we see bursting from the swamp look absolutely terrific, beating the more prosaic dinosaur / dragon description of the book hands down. And, yes, if you think about it, beasts written to be near-blind probably shouldn’t have those eyes on stalks, but they’re fabulous, and with an extraordinary roar (uniquely, the work of both Brian Hodgson and Dick Mills as they swap over who does the series’ sound design). They clearly surprised and delighted the production team – to the unwise extent that Barry Letts commissioned a whole show full of dinosaurs to follow – and so, while they never starred in another story, they’re constantly mentioned through the rest of Pertwee’s time, not least in the following story (odd, isn’t it, that Carnival of Monsters and The Space War / Frontier In Space go together much better than the latter and Planet of the Daleks? Two feel like ’70s space excitement with lots of aliens, one like a ’60s rehash with Thals and an stock alien planet from the cupboard).

“Jo thought she had never seen anything more terrifying in her life.”

One small advantage the book gains even at this point, however, is in Terrance Dicks providing a flare pistol for the Doctor to pick up and make use of; a bit late, but he saw the problem he’d left in the script – that the sonic screwdriver sets off marsh gas for no apparent reason (bar hazily remembering that it blew things up in The Sea Devils, a story from the previous year in which sonic vibrations set off landmines, that being a plausible way to detonate a landmine but not a puff of gas) – and corrected it, enabling him to complain these days with a clearer conscience about the new series’ “magic wand”. That small advantage is outweighed by the point shortly after at which the book suffers a major loss of nerve. The Doctor either works out (TV) or breaks it to Jo (novel) that they’ve been caught inside a MiniScope, a peepshow… And while both versions confront the viewer / reader about the thoughtlessness of zoos, for which many would have been visitors at the time, only one sets out directly to make everyone uncomfortable, with Robert Holmes’ sense of humour much blacker than Terrance Dicks’. The only way in which the TV story doesn’t underline its most postmodern point is that Jo’s frightened face doesn’t actually stare right out of the television as she expresses her horror; the book carefully shifts the emphasis away from the personal and makes her outrage less strident. Compare the two:

“Do you mean that that Major Daly and all those people on the ship are in a sort of a peepshow? …And outside there are people and creatures just looking at us for kicks?”
“Very probably.”
“They must be evil and horrible!”

“Jo gave him a horrified look. ‘You mean Major Daly and all those people on the ship are specimens, in some kind of peepshow? And outside there are people—creatures—looking at them just for kicks? That’s terrible!’”

The second half of the story sees a bit of a decline for each version’s trump card: in the book, the lines begin to get shorter rather than longer than on TV; and the Drashigs, so effective seen in the swamp, are rather less well-served tearing around the ship. And so Terrance’s greater special effects budget of the imagination creeps ahead again, with a rather more impressive chase for the Doctor and Jo that ends at a huge shaft “like a great canyon” which is, er, completely missing on screen (we merely see them peering down, and nothing of what they’re peering into), and a lovely line as Jo takes “lateral thinking” a bit literally: “when in doubt, go sideways!” To regular readers, Terrance’s exciting “shattering roar” from the Drashigs and “long, raking burst” from a machine-gun have an air of both thrill and comfort blanket, too.

Jo’s a bit more pro-active on screen and the Doctor less of a git in leaving her when her enormous stacked heel is spotted back in the ship’s hold; rather than her being dragged away and the Doctor just sitting there, improbably undiscovered, Katy plays it that Jo realises she’s been spotted, signals to the Doctor to stay, and gets up. Back in the book, after a wait, the Doctor makes ready to go down into the Scope again, wondering if he should go back for Jo, “but decided against it.” Exactly the same words as he thought four pages earlier when she was grabbed, the cad. Though there’s a nicely characterised flash of vanity when the Doctor feels he’s evened things up for Jo’s skeleton keys when he produces the string file, then drama-queens it by complaining about his aching wrist. And I laugh at most of the crates falling on top of the Doctor. Far less postmodern than the screen version of the story, Terrance does manage one brilliant extra:

“Clare and Jo were sheltering behind a sofa.”

The close of Chapter 8 is quite effective, as Kalik the Inter-Minoran John Redwood plots with his rather dim sidekick Orum for a leadership bid and a war to unite the planet and stop the “liberal policies” “changing our ways”.

“And who will give us all this?”
“I will,” said Kalik quietly. “By leading a rebellion against my brother Zarb.”

The “quietly” rather sets it off, as for once a chapter climax doesn’t have someone screaming into an exclamation mark! Still, turning the page after that to discover that in Chapter 9 “Kalik Plans Rebellion” isn’t all that much of a shock.

Down in the Scope, the damage to the machinery is more effective in the book than altered lighting: “the great metal shapes were twisted and warped” and “the low hum of power [had become] an agonised groan.” There’s “the charred body of a Drashig” which “had bitten through a power cable”, then the Doctor’s dizzying climb to escape the Scope. He isn’t spotted here and almost stamped like a cockroach, disappointingly, but only causes panic on emerging and suddenly expanding to normal size, meaning a chapter climax a little later and more threatening than the cliffhanger – the Doctor free at last, only to face a great big gun…

In the book, we get an insight into the Doctor’s thoughts as he lambasts the Officials; worried about Jo, he reckons there’s “no time for all the nonsense of imprisonment and interrogation” that “usually” happens when he arrives in another of Terrance’s deadpan postmodernisms, and is utterly scathing about the inner weakness of “all authoritarians”. The re-ordering of the scenes to take out all the tiny cutaways rather draws attention to how little Jo has to do around here: she’s absent for two chapters while the ship’s crew chase her, forget her, chase her like a “jolly game of hide and seek” and forget her again, all the while unaware of “the danger which loomed over them all” once the power drops below critical, the artificial sun stops working and that, suddenly soberingly,

“Their world, and their lives, would end in choking darkness.”

Return to Peril

Perhaps the point where Terrance’s urge to simplify (and, perhaps, bowdlerise) most comes a cropper is at this point, when Vorg claims “I’ve worked many a Terran fairground” while at the same time thinking we’re animals fit to be exhibited, and Terrance even forgets which galaxy he’s in when trying (page 99) to explain the scene where he sidles up to the Doctor and speaks Polari as if chatting him up. On the page, it’s “the universal showman’s slang, which had spread out from Terra and across the galaxy”… When, for a start, back on page 43 we’re from “a distant galaxy” instead, and of course his Polari (or “Parlare”, here) is far less camp, far less jarring and very firmly a secret carnival speak and nothing else, so sadly you miss almost all the hilarity of Vorg’s assuming that the Doctor is some sort of fellow dodgy galactic traveller who’s always got a pretty young woman with him. Imagine! Similarly, Official Pletrac is only “tactless” rather than insulting, and far less blissfully camp. Still, even this late there are some smarter touches, as when Vorg goes to warn the Doctor, having failed to rat out on the next spaceship home:

“Since his attempt at self-preservation had failed, Vorg decided he might as well do the decent thing.”

As usual, Terrance handles action sequences deftly, with Vorg’s heroic spasm brief but rather exciting, and evoking what happens on screen both accurately and with greater clarity (the TV admits defeat when, in the event of a CSO effect so terrible even Barry Letts vetoed it, Kalik’s death is illustrated by just a close-up of Kalik bricking himself and then running, followed by a Drashig closing in and then sauntering off triumphantly). The “livestock” collapsing in the Scope as the power fails is quite grim in the book; first Jo falls, unable to breathe, and the Doctor has to hoist her unconscious body on to his shoulders; in the saloon, they worry that it’s getting cold, in the tropics, and dark too, then perhaps that Clare has collapsed from heat exhaustion and finally

“The three bodies lay motionless, while the little saloon grew colder and darker …”

The Doctor struggles to the top of the shaft, but knows he doesn’t have the energy to climb and slides to the floor, muttering a prayer to Vorg. On TV, of course, the moment’s rather less dignified as Pertwee’s nose hits the floor, which is always good for a laugh.

As with the collapsing Sahibs, we don’t see the other creatures dematerialising on screen as we do in the book, just the Drashig – exactly as “In the misty swamp, a Drashig raised its head, bellowed – and vanished.” The awkward questions of exactly what’s in the Scope are raised by the differences between formats: we see the ship itself vanish; we read that just the bodies fade quietly from the saloon. So, in the book, was it a fake ship, on a fake sea (the sea doesn’t vanish on screen)? They don’t drown, as we have that rather lovely little epilogue scene in Daly’s cabin. On screen, there’s rather good lighting around Clare’s eyes as she almost remembers… It’s a great illustration of the respective strengths of the screen versus the page; Clare’s the natural focus of one, while the book plays to its own strengths by following up on her Daddy’s finally finishing his own book:

“Daly yawned again. He reached out for his calendar and crossed off the last day of the voyage, then settled down to sleep. As he was drifting off, strange pictures floated through his mind. He heard the roar of guns, and the bellowing of monsters. There was something about a tall white-haired man, and a small girl with fair hair … stowaways … Daly couldn’t make any sense of it. Must be jumbled memories of some blood and thunder story he’d read a long time ago. Soon he was peacefully asleep. The S.S. Bernice steamed steadily towards Bombay.”

A lovely and memorable passage, and one that probably added “blood and thunder” to my vocabulary as a boy. Even if, like so much of the story, it’s difficult to reconcile with the description of the way the Scope works as a “simple temporal loop” (as in The Time Warrior, time travel isn’t something special but something everyone can use for a short cut that doesn’t necessarily make sense, with Bob Holmes writing less for plausibility than to send up the series)…

And finally, to the closing scene with the three magum pods and the yarrow seed (or, in our Tellurian terms, ‘Find the Lady’)… Points to the book for expanding Jo’s “He’ll probably end up President!” with the funnier comeback “That or Chancellor of the Exchequer,” which is certainly where I learned that title from; points to the TV for Vorg not merely beaming and winking at Shirna as Pletrac raises his wager to ten credit-bars, but for actor Leslie Dwyer positively pissing himself, which is a joy to behold. And points taken from Barry Letts for making such an incredible fuss about the dodgy hairpiece on one of his aliens. It’s just a crinkle as Pletrac’s eyebrows move, not a split, and much less noticeable than the yellow lines round the Drashigs that Barry left in. So the ‘director’s cut’ of the story (as shown in The Five Faces, returning to the first time I ever saw the TV story) rather spoils the ending by removing not just that wrinkled forehead but Vorg getting all his money. Like The Ribos Operation, it’s important in the final scene that we know the loveable rogues have got some cash, even though the Doctor’s taken their main livelihood.

The End of the Scope

All right, all right. So, after all that, which version is better?

It’s the only Pertwee story where I still don’t know. Both Carnivals are hugely entertaining, but as I read one I want to watch bits of the other, and as I watch one I remember better lines from the page. Despite many moments of invention and several sensible explanations, the book is just a little flat by comparison; notably, it’s far less funny, and it starts by giving us a bit more than is on screen, but by half-way through has settled into giving us a bit less. Terrance’s novel polishes some little moments and retains gems from the original script in others, but perhaps lacks enough sparkle on its own to be among his best – it’s good, solid fun, but not much more. Whereas on TV it’s far less good – at times, positively wicked – and considerably less solid, so gloriously over the top that it veers between fabulous and gaudy, and the direction between brilliant bits of framing and close-ups for impact, or clumsy inadequacy. But then, Vorg’s showman’s patter throughout is the hype before inevitable disappointment, so imperfection is part of the point. The definitive adventure, then, exists only in Robert Holmes’ conception and in our heads, but it’s great fun seeing either Barry Letts or Terrance Dicks stretch towards it.

The story as a whole, whichever one of it you take, always feels like it’s crashed in from another period of the show: a mid-Tom Baker piece of knowing fun; the TV references, tongue-in-cheek asides, continuity throwaways, a bit of politics and a lot of virtual reality, not to mention Bernice S.S., could make it a New Adventure twenty years early; and you could just as easily make it again today (in fact, on stage last year, they did). Flawed, tacky; inspired, hilarious; it’s Doctor Who.

DVD Detail: Doctor Who – The Trial of a Time Lord: Mindwarp

2011-11-16T00:00:00.009Z

Mindwarp is one of the most extraordinary-looking Doctor Who stories ever made – sometimes brilliantly, sometimes just breathtakingly ’80s. Bright pink! Bright blue! Bright orange! And as well as the scenery, some of the people look like that, too. Today* is officially Peri’s birthday, and this was her final story with the Doctor, building up to a shock ending… Or is it? Add a memorable villain, guest stars who return with David Tennant, and behind it all, the Doctor’s still on trial: has the evidence here been falsified? Why is he behaving so strangely? And can he out-act Brian Blessed?

A couple of months ago, I wrote about the opening four episodes of Doctor Who – The Trial of a Time Lord… And, twenty-five years ago this evening, that superb cast led by Colin Baker and Michael Jayston was still in the middle of it. Before you watch Mindwarp, the second set of four episodes, you’re best off watching those earlier ones, The Mysterious Planet – not that you have to go out of your way to do so, as they’re all part of the same The Trial of a Time Lord DVD box set. The two mini-stories have much in common: the same ‘Trial’ framing device; the same lead actors; the same postmodern attitude to the series being on trial by hostile BBC executives, as I wrote last time. What’s different about this one is that it’s a much less straightforward narrative – to the extent that even the actors and director didn’t know what was supposed to be going on for some of it. And so it’s possible to slightly unfairly sum up the four mini-stories that make up The Trial of a Time Lord two by two: the odd-numbered stories as not very odd at all, but a bit forgettable; the even-numbered stories as memorable messes, full of interesting ideas but few of them complementing each other. I don’t know if this explains the bulk of fans’ relatively low opinion of Mindwarp (while a few think it brilliant), but it’ll do for mine (and why I have a very high opinion of some of it). Back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – and placed the whole Trial of a Time Lord 142nd (about right, to me) but this second set of four episodes at a lowly 160ish (not far off for me either, though I might put it as much as ten places higher).

While this ‘Detail’ obviously goes into some detail, incidentally, my policy in these is not to be too spoilery. So read on without fear of finding out too many key twists from the end. Should there be such things (tip: if you’ve not seen this, don’t read the comedy sketch at the bottom).

Sil and Kiv Have Gone A Bit Floppy

That Golden Moment

“You’ll not die on me, you fish-faced monster!”

If you’ve ever seen Mindwarp, you’ll know that there’s one completely awesome scene. And why I can’t mention it. But I can mention one of the key characters in it, friendly neighbourhood surgeon Dr Crozier – in whose laboratory the chaotic story keeps snapping into focus. As do an Alien and a throbbing brain. That means that another brilliant sequence takes place there, half-way into the third episode (or Part Seven of The Trial of a Time Lord), as he performs his first big operation on Lord Kiv…

In the caverns of Thoros-Beta, profit is in progress, with Lord Kiv and the self-styled Mentors piling up trade with other cultures – if necessary, by lethal force (or even by recycling old costumes). And while the wriggling other Mentors led by Kiv’s aide Sil have no love or loyalty for their leader, they’re desperate to keep him alive for his brilliant business brain, without which they might all end up dead or, worse than that, poor. But that very brain is fatally expanding within his slimy skull, and only the greatest – as he’d be the first to tell you – doctor in the galaxy can transfer it to a new frame. The first ‘monster’ we meet in the story is a forewarning of this, as well as a basically terrible piece of design kept wisely in the dark, then almost redeemed by the way people chat about him afterwards like he was Harold down the chip shop.

Colin Baker makes the most of a wildly inconsistent script, Brian Blessed is at his most BRIAN BLESSED, and Nicola Bryant is terrific as she approaches her end, but it’s stolen from all of them by Patrick Ryecart as Crozier, playing it so intense and deadpan that he becomes much funnier – and more sinister – than anyone else. Confined mostly to one set, dressed for citrus insanity in lemon and then orange, he’s somehow still the centre of the story. An obsessive rather than the ‘mad scientist’ that the brain transplant storyline might suggest, he’s marvellously self-centred, regarding anything bar his medical experiments as an utter waste of his time. And, though with brilliant touches of eccentric charisma, as Patrick Ryecart has explained his part, he’s more Nazi than nice. Clipped, staccato, disturbing and funny, you can see how he can go on to give such a great sit-com performance as the awesomely continuity-error-in-reality-named Captain Hilary Duff.

Kiv rambles wonderfully about his donor body-to-be having an primitive sting at the end of its tail – and how “I could, perhaps, sting all my assistants to death!” – as they prepare to operate; the Doctor camps up his pleasure at being allowed to monitor the equipment; Crozier eyes the Doctor like a wolf assessing a tailored suit (in a threatening plotline that, unfortunately, never goes anywhere, built up until suddenly dismissed in a late aside, as if they’d just thrown the script in the air and picked the bits up at random… Similarly, the nature of Crozier’s experiments changes at the last minute and makes a nonsense of much of the earlier dialogue); piercing music echoes; Crozier’s eyes narrow in a fabulously crazed single moment as he begins the operation. Later, Kiv will come round and see a thing of beauty; later still, Crozier’s eyes shine as he sees his ambition to conquer death within his grasp… But my favourite moment of him is tiny, arrogant, and perfect, and brilliantly down to Patrick Ryecart and a bit of business. Once the operation’s complete and the spectators have drifted away, Crozier is simply how we imagine every brilliant surgeon to be: dismissive and rude to his patient, and only caring for his own achievement. In a scene framed by a gorgeous effects shot of the arching roof of his lab, he’s sipping a cup of tea when his assistant, Alibe Parsons’ glamorous Matrona Kani, alerts him to something going wrong. Crozier takes this in at a glance:

“Cardiac arrest. His body’s – reacting to the drugs.”

And in that gap in the middle of his sentence, in protest at being interrupted by what he clearly sees as his patient letting down his genius, instead of leaping to his feet he takes another sip of tea. It’s a perfectly calculated little moment, and the tiny stutter on the “F” as he calls his lord and master a “fish-faced monster!” allowing us just for a fraction of a second to think of another, more Brian Blessedy word, is the icing on the cake.

Patrick Ryecart and Brian Blessed spar deliciously in rival interviews in the ‘Making of’ – the former saying the latter needs to be licenced, the latter that the former never knew his bloody lines (and, to show he’s watched it, tipping his tea. Patrick Ryecart is still as reliable today; he didn’t turn up to a convention earlier this year, and was represented on stage by a dummy in his orange surgeon’s gown to wicked lines from Alibe Parsons). Other stories found on the disc will reveal a moment when Mr Blessed, too, may not have got his own lines word-perfect…

“The major thing was sort of replacing Brian Blessed’s brain. Which some people would argue is not a bad idea in real life – in fact, having replaced his brain, I think it might be what sent him up Everest without any oxygen.”

Something Else To Look Out For

While the postmodern commentary of the Trial impinging on the ‘main’ story got in the way on The Mysterious Planet, here it suddenly works better on a much more fragmentary story where the viewers, too, must be arguing about what’s really going on. Informed by Philip Martin’s groundbreaking series Gangsters (from whom it borrows Alibe Parsons), the hints of today’s interactivity make it seem far more modern. So while, for me, this isn’t the best segment of the Trial, it’s the one that makes best use of the overarching story in its own, with the interruptions resembling a DVD commentary in which cast members argue over the deleted scenes and try to salvage their own parts in a box-office disaster. It’s not the a clever noir-style plot the format could have led to, an unreliable narrator usually works better when the production end has more of an idea than the audience, and there are still riskily near-the-knuckle complaints such as calling it “inconsequential silliness” and “gratuitous,” but when the Valeyard counting the precise number of times the Doctor and his companions have respectively been in danger is a point-perfect echo of Mary Whitehouse, ticking off numbers of unsuitable incidents with no regard for narrative, and when Michael Jayston sarcastically invites us to watch “The Doctor’s next – frightening adventure,” you feel that they at least knew what they were doing better than Gerald Ratner.

The sparring between Colin Baker and Michael Jayston suddenly becomes more dangerous as the stakes rise: the Doctor becomes less playground and more lost; the Valeyard seems to know exactly where to twist the knife to stir up self-loathing in the Doctor; and his “Who else is there?” booming out of the sky is one of the few times he makes a telling point, a dramatic moment that almost anticipates the Doctor damning him as a second-rate god at the climax.

You can see how good Colin Baker is when the script deals him an almost crippling blow: as Colin glumly notes on the commentary, it takes him back to square one, completely destroying the character progression planned for his Doctor. Conceived as a ‘Mr Darcy’ who begins aloof and to whom we slowly warm, lead writer Eric Saward was utterly hopeless at writing that overarching story from the first, when The Twin Dilemma’s terrible writing blighted him. Just as finally, and far more thanks to the actor than his scripts, the Doctor has been mellowing, this story magnifies his ‘nice or nasty’ struggle without planning or revealing which bits are which. And the script editor had the nerve to blame other people? No wonder Philip Martin saw him as mentally fragile and “a bad guy pretending to be good” – which is when the lead writer should have stepped in to contextualise, rather than piss off. Mr Martin explains some of where he thought he was coming from on the commentary, but this is the first anyone’s heard of it – while the confusion of the Doctor being good, bad, mad or fake isn’t helped when none of the rest of the story can decide what it is, either (horror, comedy, sci-fi, barbarian swordplay, vivisection, a Dallas satire with green slugs as the Ewings, or a runaround with rebels?). On The Mysterious Planet, I talked about how seeing that when I was fourteen led to empathy with existential crises; something else I’d become very aware of at that age sprang to mind watching the ‘Doctor jiggles about too enthusiastically’ cliffhanger on broadcast, so I’ve always been amazed no-one said ‘Hang on…’ before it went out. What it looks like has always distracted me from the key turning point in the story, after which it’s anyone’s guess whether the Doctor’s in his right mind, in Brian Blessed’s, or simply invented. Though one scene, at least, is obvious, even if it was horrible for Nicola Bryant: the Doctor on the Rock of Sorrows saying ‘I am a wrong ’un and no mistake, I did it, guv’ like the notes of a provincial PC read out in court never fails to be a scream.

Peri’s Finest Hour?

Nicola Bryant gets a far better deal from the script than her co-star, and rises brilliantly to the opportunity of something more stretching than being chained to a rock (though as I’ve just noted, she has that too). Betrayed and abandoned, Peri seizes control of her own fate at key points rather than just suffer or revenge, and Nicola gives a truly powerful final scene, explaining on the commentary that she’d seen anaemic exits and decided that wasn’t for her. All that, despite being stuck in an electric pink smock after finally being allowed to dress as a grown-up in the previous segment – though it goes with the bright pink seawater. With so many others dressed in the same colour, they could make a camouflage bathing party that would be camouflage only ever on that one world (or in the ’80s).

The scene where the Doctor and Peri land at the seaside – the shocking pink seaside, with the brilliant indigo rocks and bright green sky – is a striking one, and not just to your eyeballs. Though it is a glorious example of finally having the technology to turn a cold British beach into an alien planet, and really going for it (thrillingly for fact fans, Peri goes out as she came in, with a story filmed on a nudist beach. And though she spends most of this one fully clothed, in one arresting respect she finishes up wearing much less than she started out, and it’s a fantastic look she’s much happier signing than a bikini shot). It gives Peri some oomph, and sets up many of the themes of the story: gun-running for profit; the great gag of ‘liquefied’ for ‘liquidated’ from the killer capitalists; and the in-joke and foreshadowing in one of the “Dirty old warlord!”

Which brings us to that old pulp SF cliché of ‘What is this Earth thing called love’, about which the kindest thing that can be said is that I’d rather have that than the horrible, horrible ‘Planet of Women’ script it replaced and on which Doctor Who once again dodged a CD phaser (it must be that they gaze into each other’s eyes and see the same taste in eye make-up. I say ‘taste’…).

Like the story, the supporting actors are absurdly variable – a mixture of over the top and totally flat. The Samurai-ish warlord Yrcanos (in a story that’s far more racially mixed than most Who, to its credit, both in the actors and in the costume influences it plays with) is played by Brian Blessed, at one end of the scale – you may be able to guess which – while his companion in rebellion, Gordon Warnecke’s Tuza, is gorgeous but you’ll need to watch My Beautiful Laundrette to realise he’s not always wood from the neck up. I suspect that the Valeyard may have got bored with doing a director’s cut on the Doctor and tinkered with King Yrcanos, too, as I can’t say I’m sold on the notion of a bloodthirsty hereditary warlord suddenly becoming Che Guevara. Mind you, something needed to gee up the galaxy’s least lively rebels, who make the Tribe of the Free seem full of character and multilayered performances in top fashions (meeting them even brings Peri out in a rash of terrible dialogue, while the idea of twenty-year-olds being aged to death seems less about vampirism or time experiments than a bit bunged in before a cliffhanger and then forgotten about). It’s impossible, though, not to enjoy the bizarre inventiveness – and shouting – of Brian’s performance, and his grumpy concession:

“Very well. Today, prudence shall be our watchword. Tomorrow, we shall soak the land in blood.”

Again with the themes of The Mysterious Planet, only more so, Mindwarp moves from mere Minder-in-mass-murder to a full-blown critique of big business exploitation and capitalism as conquest, with Nabil Shaban again outstanding as Sil, the poison dwarf Mini-Me of Jabba the Hutt with a great tail and a fabulous laugh (which he was pleased gave at least one Doctor Who writer of my acquaintance nightmares). Returning from the previous year’s innovative if flawed Vengeance on Varos, he has considerably better design – suggesting, as with Kiv’s new body, that the Mentors become greener as they age – but a much less powerful part, becoming more the comic relief than the principal villain. Sil’s boss Kiv is a future returnee, with The Young Ones’ Christopher Ryan to become a Sontaran General opposite David Tennant (and, briefly, Matt Smith), while bored (occasionally amusingly so) head of security Trevor Laird comes back as Martha Jones’ dad.

For once, director Ron Jones – the bane of many ’80s Doctor Who stories – creates a bit of atmosphere here, though not consistently: ironically, his two strongest achievements are respectively in the dark and in chaos. The epilepsy-inducing strobes in the tunnels mostly come across as distracting escapees from the Top of the Pops studio, but they work brilliantly in the second (or sixth) cliffhanger, where a perfectly timed flicker of light enlivens an otherwise stock moment. Even better, though, is the climax to the final (or eighth) episode, half a dozen minutes in which everything at last delivers as Thoros-Beta collapses into a hellish clamour of claxons and lost souls and the Doctor enters his own private hell. With Nicola Bryant and Colin Baker each perhaps giving their finest moments, it’s a stunning evocation of everything falling apart without the actual production doing so.

Brian Blessed Versus the Fuckerons

Leading a fine set of extras, the twenty-minute The Making of Mindwarp is excellent and very entertaining, particularly – as above – Patrick Ryecart and Brian Blessed (of whom a career summary notes his subtle and varied roles, “And then Flash Gordon happened”). Half the cast do their Brian Blessed impressions; Brian does the Queen, asking him to say “Gordon’s alive!” before thoughtfully observing that with Yrcanos, like Vultan, he could let his hair down. It’s just a shame there’s no Nabil Shaban. And, wonder of wonders, before flouncing off in a strop, absentee script editor Saward for once even praises Colin’s performance, while Colin brightly observes:

“And for once, I wasn’t the most over-the-top person in it!”

With this and the commentary between Colin, Nicola and writer Philip Martin, you can also enjoy tales of why Philip felt like an assassin, why he was told he couldn’t be political, which door cost more than Nicola, and how Colin observed BBC unions at work. In other extras, Lenny Henry stars as the Doctor in probably the ’80s’ key piss-taking clip, though it’s a shame they cut the sketch before his show’s end credits and lose him boogieing in the TARDIS (I wonder if anyone has the full version? Mine’s on a Betamax I’ve not been able to play for twenty years). I’m always unhappy when an ’80s Who story is released without the option of being able to listen to the musical score separately. Richard Hartley’s glistening and occasionally thumping incidental music here is the exception: it’s the only score of the decade for which the master tapes no longer exist, so it’s not cost-cutting nor lack of interest that means there isn’t one on this disc. I’m still miffed it’s the excuse for not making the scores for the other ten The Trial of a Time Lord episodes available, though. There’s an impressively comprehensive location feature, plus nine minutes of deleted and extended scenes which are interesting but don’t add much until the last couple, where Sil uses a vital word and Tuza half-remembers that there was someone else with him (with an appropriate idea of who it is from Yrcanos). Quite an extensive photo gallery, too, and thankfully the DVD menus helpfully don’t give too much away this time. My favourite extra, though, is the tiny additional commentary – for part of a later Trial episode – on A Fate Worse Than Death. Apologetic Colin. Appalled Nicola. Priceless.

The best anecdote, though, is obviously when Colin Baker is quoted – and asterisked out – in the mostly unthrilling text notes recalling how, at the visual effects-laden and stressful end for one day’s shooting, Brian Blessed cost a lot of money in setting it all up again next time by exuberantly forgetting the name of his slimy enemies in a way that will surprise few viewers of Fry’s Planet Word:

“Let’s find the Fuckerons!”

Businessbeing From Possicar and Time Lord Guard

These photos, too, are from the Blackpool Doctor Who Exhibition. A major part of my childhood, it was closed in 1986, making The Trial of a Time Lord its last new season of Doctor Who. A new version opened in the 2000s, but the BBC closed it and flogged off the exhibits two years ago rather than preserve them for the nation. Philistines. So even in these glory days, some BBC brass are still Fuckerons.

Philip Martin’s novelisation is not a happy experience. The other stories of the Trial had been published a couple of years earlier, so you got the impression he was struggling with it – though there’s more material, most of it was probably cut from the script, as his overwritten and ponderous prose style suggests he’s much happier with writing for television. Unusually for a book, though it’s not a perfectly plotted descent in quality, it’s easy to identify the best of it – the first page, as the Doctor muses over his trial and struggles with disturbing flashes of memory (flash-forwards, in the context of most of the narrative – and the worst, which with eerie symmetry is the epilogue’s comedy ‘afterlife’. Even the cover’s a mess: not matching the style of the three other Trial novelisations, and a pretty horrible painting that’s almost certainly the worst from the normally almost photorealistic brush of Alister Pearson (compare it to his gorgeous cover for the whole season-length story on VHS a few years later, for example). Rather more effective follow-ups to the end of the story, incidentally, can be found in Colin Baker’s own graphic novel The Age of Chaos, Big Finish’s audio play Her Final Flight and, certainly the best work overall though with the relevant echo its most self-indulgent part, the superb New Adventures novel Bad Therapy by future Doctor Who TV author Matt Jones.

Though I usually review a whole DVD release at once, and though The Trial of a Time Lord box set is in theory all one big story, again there’s more to come. So, Next Time… Er, with all the “Next Times” I’ve found online too spoilery, why not try this hilariously ’80s fan trailer?

The Trial of a Time Lord… In a Hurry (Continued)

And finally… Richard and Millennium have a few things to say about this story, too. Millennium’s (spoilerish, as it covers the next six episodes too) Mysteries of Doctor Who #15: What the TRUNK is going on at Dr Who’s Trial? Less seriously than the elephant, but also with a spoiler at the end if you look carefully, Richard has helpfully condensed the whole story into three scenes for your entertainment and delectation:

Part Two: Mind How You Warp

Scene 1: int. laboratory. CROZIER, a mad scientist, and SIL, a slimy gonk, are discussing immortality. THE DOCTOR and PERI enter

THE DOCTOR: I wonder what Sil is up to?

PERI: Oh golly, Doctor, this is Sil’s home planet, isn’t it?

THE DOCTOR: Er…

Scene 2: laboratory, later that day. THE DOCTOR is attached to A MACHINE

SIL: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again!

MACHINE: [FX] Fizz Bang Wallop

THE DOCTOR: I’m BRIAN BLESSED!

Enter Brian Blessed

BLESSED: Ooh, how very dare you!

MACHINE explodes for no readily apparent reason

Scene 3: the TRIAL ROOM. THE DOCTOR confronts THE INQUISITOR

THE DOCTOR: You killed Peri!

THE INQUISITOR: Yes, we did, we really really did. [Miranda Hart-style to camera] We didn’t really.

Roll titles

*All right, technically yesterday by the time I published this, but these things take time.

Wholly Unavailable On DVD Batman!

2011-11-09T20:22:00.011Z

Of all many incarnations of Batman, one of the best-known, best-loved, but most impossible to buy is the camp mid-’60s TV series starring Adam West and Burt Ward. While the spin-off movie’s available on DVD, you can’t buy any of the 120 episodes of the series itself (legal tangles? Embarrassment? Who knows). So if you ever want to get hold of it, right now’s the time to start. ITV4 is showing the whole lot daily, two episodes at a time, at 4ish in the afternoon and again at 10ish the next morning, from today. And some of it’s pretty good…

In the way of mostly-repeat TV stations, ITV4 finished showing the lot this morning with the rather fabulous penultimate episode and a slightly inadequate finale, so without any particular fanfare they’ve wound straight back to the beginning this afternoon. Last time they started the series, though, I was paying attention and have to admit that I’ve watched almost the full set, from the inspired to the drably repetitive. And to get you in the mood, their trailer makes me laugh.

The Dark Knight Re-Runs!

Now, I’m not a massive Batman fan, much less expert, though the character’s always been intriguing – from Adam West’s deadpan do-gooder to the near-psychotic, neo-fascist vigilante of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (well, at least he knows he’s a fascist; Superman just thinks he’s God). If you want detailed facts about comics and graphic novels, try Wikipedia and its references; if you want in-depth analysis, ask the brilliant Andrew Hickey (or, as my beloved suggests, try both at Hickeypedia! He’s auditioning to be the new Bat-Announcer). But this was one of the two Batman series I loved as a boy in late ’70s repeats, and though almost every iteration of Batman since then has been trying to get away from it and back to dark psychology, I still have a soft spot for it, and mainly, of course, the performances. Well, some of the performances…

Batman – The TV Series

Batman ran from 1966 to 1968 as an amazingly camp Pop Art comedy, and though it was so expensive that it was rapidly cancelled when it stopped being a hit, it was such a hit that it was remembered for decades, and spoofed in its turn (from The Avengers’ genius postmodern The Winged Avenger to The High Life’s Dunk, though Jon Pertwee’s Doctor inexplicably lacked the big exclamation billboards for his fight scenes).

Its incredibly formulaic nature was surely behind both its memorability and people getting tired of it: a teaser scene with helpless Commissioner Gordon ringing the Batphone, butler Alfred answering at Stately Wayne Manor and our heroes diving for the Batpoles; that horribly irresistible theme tune; the Caped Crusaders zooming to Police Headquarters from the Batmobile’s hidden entrance and instantly working out the clues that had stumped Gordon and improbably dense Oirish-utterancing Chief O’Hara; tracking the villains to their lair (usually a very large space with very big props and not much detail, getting increasingly Expressionist – or cheap – as the series went on); indulging in a fist-fight thrillingly punctuated by musical stings and impact-words only to be overcome by trickery and finish the episode hanging above the giant meat grinder, at which point the hysterical Bat-Announcer would tell us that “The worst is yet to come!” and to tune in again,

“Same Bat-Time! Same Bat-Channel!”

The second episode would follow much the same format, only starting with Batman brilliantly escaping certain doom (usually with the aid of a suspiciously relevant Grinder-Neutralising-Bat-Pellet from his Utility Belt) and closing with a fist-fight that isn’t overcome by trickery and a return to Stately Wayne Manor by the unfrocked Bruce and Dick to explain to Aunt Harriet exactly where they’ve been. Occasional triple-episode stories and the third season’s single episodes (closing not in an explicit “Next Time…” trailer but with one contained in the narrative, such as ‘Well, the Penguin will no doubt serve many years in gaol and the citizens of Gotham are safe once more… But look out of the window! Isn’t that the Joker crossing the street with a giant inflatable marmoset?’) followed much the same pattern at only varying length.

And, yes, when you put it like that, it could be said to lack diversity. But two things save it. A lot of it is very funny, aided by many of the lines, Alan Napier’s endearing Alfred (it’s always better when he suddenly gets a bigger role, not least impersonating Batman), and particularly Adam West, whose utter deadpan playing of the utter nonsense he gets to say is… Utterly sublime. He remains amazingly watchable. And while his grey bodystocking was much mocked, these days I find the benippled rubber queens of the later movies far more difficult to take seriously: comic-book costumes always look so much more stylish in comic books.

The other thing that saves the series is, of course, the villains, who supply almost all of its variety. There’s an almost total absence of character development: the third and final series introduces Batgirl, who’s at times a brilliant feminist move and at times, er, not, especially when listening to her special signature tune:

“Are you a chick who fell in from Outer Space?
“Or are you real, with a tender warm embrace?
“Yeah, whose baby are you, Batgirl, Batgirl?”

Somebody shoot them. But, as far as progress goes, that’s it. Ironically, the very first story stretches the format as far as it ever goes – hilariously for a series crammed with deadpan exposition, there’s no introduction nor concessions to anyone who’s never heard of Batman (save a brief mention by Bruce Wayne of his dead parents), and it dives straight in with everything established even down to Chief O’Hara’s endlessly repeatable:

“What idiots we are! Now, why couldn’t we have worked that out?”

The main business of this opening episode, Hey Diddle Riddle (concluded in Smack in the Middle, with most of the titles being inadequately punning rhyming couplets), is not a crime or heist of the sort that drives most of them, but a plot against Batman himself such as you’d have expected to find much later in the series: the Riddler tricks our hero into an unjustified attack; this Batman is so utterly square and law-abiding it hurts; these two elements crash together in a putative court case that Bruce Wayne will feel compelled to attend and blow his secret identity, lampshading the impossibility of uptight, upright vigilantism so that the subject need never come up again. “How I’ve waited for this,” the Riddler even gloats implausibly, knowing the audience will be as familiar with Batman as he is. And the episode goes straight to the nearest the series will get to a ‘bad’ Batman, as his drink is spiked and he dances the Batusi with naughty Jill St John before staggering towards the Batmobile and being prevented from driving after poor, kidnapped Robin by police officers who pronounce him “In no condition to drive” and don’t mention the Bat-Signal beaming from the roof of City Hall – “In his shape? Kinder not to tell him.” Even the Superman movies waited until Superman III, but by going as far as this to begin with, the Batman series is telling us that’s it’s never going to go any further.

Who To Catch?

Frank Gorshin’s the Riddler gets the series off to a terrific start with his puzzles, manic giggle and eel-like physicality, and all the others pretty much have to match up to him. Many don’t. So if you’re only tuning in for random episodes, his are among the ones to look out for – he comes back several times in the first season, then briefly in the third (substituted once in between by The Addams Family’s John Astin; great Gomez, lousy Riddler).

Now, I’ve read very few Batman comics or graphic novels, and I know which villain obviously stood out in those – but in this TV series, the Batvillain’s crown goes to someone else. For me, you just can’t beat Burgess Meredith as the Penguin. Charm, humour, viciousness, that fabulously imitable squawk, his brilliant schemes to sail just within the law (The Penguin Goes Straight / Not Yet, He Ain’t)… Penguin is far and away the best Batvillain of the ’60s series. And though sometimes, as always, his material’s not up to it – his sudden murderous grudge against Batgirl leaves a nasty taste in the mouth – the story that strikes me as a particular favourite is the second season’s political parody Hizzonner the Penguin / Dizzoner the Penguin, in which he runs for Mayor. Not only did this clearly inspire the second of the ’80s / ’90s Batman movies (however much they tried to get away from the TV series, they kept coming back to it: Penguin for Mayor in Batman Returns; the Batman-Theme-themed Batdance in Batman; the sheer campery of two blatant gay couples with opposing fetishes of Batman Forever… You can keep Batman and Robin in the ’90s, though), but Penguin’s political chicanery is mercilessly funny, and he’s a much better campaigner than Mayor Linseed, Governor Stonefellow or relentlessly stiff Batman, to say nothing of poor Harry Goldwinner down at 2%. And that’s without the inspired mudslinging – ask yourself: who do you always see Penguin pictured with? Our fine, upstanding police officers. And Batman? Always with criminals! The multiple telephone offers in the tag scene always make me laugh, too. You might also look out for Penguin’s splendidly ridiculous extended intrigue involving a fake film, Batman’s kiss-in with Carolyn Jones’ Marsha, Queen of Diamonds (not to mention her ludicrous witch mother) and a tank made out of solid gold.

No-one tops Burgess Meredith; Frank Gorshin’s brilliant; but there are at least two strong runners-up. Victor Buono as King Tut is a huge performance in every sense, a mild-mannered Professor of Egyptology at Yale who becomes a megalomaniac Pharaoh every time he’s hit on the head, and deserves a special award as the only Batvillain to twice discover Batman’s secret identity (the scene in Commissioner Gordon’s office after the first time, when no-one believes Tut as he rolls his eyes and postmodernly says all the things the viewers do about how obvious it is, is priceless). The other is Catwoman, unquestionably the strongest of many strong female opponents, though slightly hampered by being the most prominent recasting among the Batvillains: mostly Julie Newmar; Lee Meriwether in the movie; Eartha Kitt at the end. All are fabulous, but Julie Newmar seems both genuinely dangerous and the most feline – well, excluding Eartha Kitt’s irresistible purr – with a compelling capriciousness and an erotic charge with Adam West that racist ’60s sponsors were not going to allow with Eartha Kitt (despite Batman slipping in a few under-the-Bat-Radar mentions to Robin of how attractive she is, in her absence).

Others to look out for include Joan Collins’ Siren, much of whose episodes appear to have been left on the cutting-room floor, and Vincent Price’s delightful, mercurial Egghead, as well as the lead villain from the penultimate episode, the eponymous The Entrancing Dr Cassandra. Ida Lupino’s Cassandra Spellcraft has a brilliant alchemical scheme to mount a mass escape from the “Arch Criminals Only” wing of Gotham State Penitentiary (warning: may not contain real Batvillains). The extras pretending to be the big villains and trying to avoid us seeing their faces are a scream, especially the one who really gets into playing Victor Buono. It’s a far more appropriate finale than the rather limp actual last episode of mind-reading at a health spa, despite that story’s guest villain Zsa Zsa Gabor. You get the feeling she’d have been better-employed as a “Batclimb” cameo in the previous year, sticking her head out of her hotel window to see the Dynamic Duo scaling the wall as the likes of Lurch, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Edward G. Robinson had done.

Who To Leave In the Care of Liberal Warden Crichton of Gotham State Penitentiary?

Cesar Romero as the Joker. Now, I know he’s the iconic Batvillain, and some of his episodes are very entertaining (if others are frightful), and Cesar Romero isn’t that bad, but… He’s just never good enough. The few Batman comics I’ve read – or Heath Ledger on film, or Mark Hamill in the more prestigious animated series – capture a seriously deranged, compelling match for Batman; this isn’t it. I mentioned two Batman series I loved as a boy, and the other reunited Adam West and Burt Ward in the animated The New Adventures of Batman (usually paired with the equally exciting Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle). A hasty viewing of a few YouTube clips tell me I should leave the series to my cheating memory (though I have to admit I’d still like to get hold of Tarzan), but its Joker firmly grabbed my attention as a cackling spectre in vivid white and green and with unnaturally pointed features. A, ah, mature man with a rather full face upon which – unforgivably, when I was a boy and still spotted it a mile off – he’s applied an acre of make-up to inadequately conceal his moustache, scampering around with nothing of the threat of Penguin or Catwoman… No. Heretical, I know, but simply not up to the job.

One particular low point for Cesar Romero’s Joker sticks in my mind (and throat) because it perfectly illustrates something the series tried several times and each time got toe-curlingly wrong – ’60s youth culture. Surf’s Up! Joker’s Under! features the Joker’s attempt to become surfing champion of Gotham City and so control all the young people. Words fail me (and effects fail them), though there’s a little fun to be had with Joker talking into his hotdog and Batman straight-facedly inviting him into the locker room. But it’s terrible, and though my learned friend Andrew will (as with everything in this article) know better, wasn’t it a little late to be trying to cash in on the Beach Boys? Milton Berle’s Louie the Lilac, too, was an OK performance and had a memorably grisly end (…or is it?), but another middle-aged (to be generous) man attempting to become the pin-up for Gotham’s youth, this time to dominate the flower people, was a major misjudgement. The only remotely plausible counterculture idol is Catwoman rabble-rousing the student population in Catwoman Goes to College (but absolutely not when she kit-naps the voices of a popular beat combo and has a kitty apprentice who sings, played by the producer’s niece in hope of a pop career. Oh, dear me, no). You can’t help thinking that, while studio executives wanted to cash in on the youth happening, they both misunderstood and feared it, always portraying rebellious or even remotely unconventional young people as wannabe patsies to some evil but more intelligent adult in repeated and wearisome exposés of the frightening commie truth behind hippies. See also Star Trek’s The Way to Eden, in which the young space hippies (communists) are manipulated by an evil intellectual (communist) and wind up dying (after rightly being warned off by the clean-cut, caring military) on the planet they imagine to be Eden because, subtly, the grass is acid (and fruits are deadly) – or, embarrassingly, the UK’s very own Carry On Camping, in which the team inexplicably stop cocking a snook at authority and become the grumpy old establishment killing off anyone’s fun. At least at the same time Doctor Who’s The Krotons may have said that student rebellion doesn’t work, but that they had much to rebel against, and the Doctor saves the day by dropping acid.

Getting one ’60s movement badly wrong brings me inexorably to Nora Clavicle and the Ladies’ Crime Club, in which Barbara Rush’s Nora Clavicle uses her push for women’s rights to remove all male crime-fighters and replace them with women police – who will spend all their time talking about lipstick and be terrified of her mechanical mice, leaving the city open. No, it wasn’t a horrible dream. Oh, the number of times Doctor Who nearly did the ‘Imagine how frightful it would be if the girlies were in charge?’ story and managed to pull back at the last minute… It seems almost every ’60s series somehow thought ‘The frightening truth behind women’s liberation’ would be hilarious (or terrifying). Even The Avengers succumbed, once. Don’t go there.

Two unimpressive Batvillains it’s easier to forgive are the simply dull Colonel Gumm and his fake stamp factory, even if he is played by Roger C. Carmel; he was probably designed not to take attention from heroic guest stars the Green Hornet and Kato (Bruce Lee!). At least, that’s a halfway plausible excuse. Similarly, with Frank Gorshin having left the series and before they tried (and failed) to recast the Riddler, Maurice Evans starred as the Puzzler (no relation, I’m legally obliged to say). A fine actor whether disturbing as Dr. Zaius in Planet of the Apes, camping it up in Bewitched or not-Winston-Churchill-honestly in my favourite The Man From U.N.C.L.E. film (I wish they’d release that on DVD, too; I don’t have a copy of One of Our Spies is Missing), he’s lost here as producers try to camouflage his Riddler-clone status by rolling dice on their table of villainous attributes and adding to his love of ~~riddles~~ puzzles the bonus character traits of ‘obsession with Shakespeare’ and with, er, ‘airplanes’. Which go together so well.

I won’t forgive Lord Marmaduke Ffogg of the three-part story visibly set in South California The Londinium Larcenies, The Foggiest Notion and ~~Isn’t It Bloody Finished~~ The Bloody Tower. Swinging London? The only swinging to hope for here is at Tyburn, as Dick Van Dyke runs past holding a Batsign reading, ‘See? I wasn’t so bad after all’. Though I’ll grant you that renaming “Fleet Street” as “Bleat Street” raised a momentary and unwilling smile. At least Art Carney’s execrable Archer was an affectation. Even Murder She Wrote in the pea-souper was better than this. With so many British actors on the show, what were they thinking in getting Rudy Vallee to mutilate his accent? Still less in inexplicably casting urbane George Sanders, of one of the most gorgeous voices in the world, as heavily Mittel-European Mr Freeze. No wonder he didn’t come back – Freeze was the only villain recast twice on the TV series, and never worked, whether a misused Sanders, Otto Preminger, or Eli Wallach (who at least looked like he was having fun. Maybe it was the cheque). And I’ve not even sneered at David Wayne, whose Mad Hatter and worse accent turned Batman’s cowl pink.

But I’m telling you the plot. Why not tune in, Bat-Channel ITV4, Bat-Time 4ish in the afternoon or 10ish in the morning on weekdays to enjoy them for yourself, and discover all the other villains I’ve not even mentioned? It’s just a shame it’ll take you three months to record your own home-made equivalent of a DVD box set.

Tower Hamlets Council Presents… Fireworks (Fireworks Forbidden) Cold, Dark Night?

2011-11-07T00:00:00.000Z

I’m not the biggest fan of my local council, but I’d hope their Fireworks Night went with a Bang, rather than the damp squib they promised on blue, touchy paper.

As I was listening to shrieks and bangs echoing all around the Thames, particularly exploding over Blackheath, I couldn’t help thinking of Tower Hamlets Council’s forbidding signage committing to a dark and cold evening gathering across from Island Gardens.

If revellers were lucky, the cock-up will have been in what they said, not in what they did. But long experience of this council means I’ve not got my hopes up.

Tower Hamlets Fireworkless Fireworks 1

As you can see, the posters proclaimed:

“Tower Hamlets Council Presents… Fireworks Night”.

In which:

“Please note that fireworks will not be allowed into the park.”

In case we didn’t get the message, they then put up extra notices to make it clear.

Tower Hamlets Fireworkless Fireworks 2

Other stern notices put up in the last couple of days announced that there were going to be no open fires, either.

So did they mean to leave residents congregating in the dark and cold, a fireworks display with no fireworks; a Bonfire night with no bonfire? Were they planning on erecting a huge mirror, perhaps, to reflect the Blackheath display? Were they just hoping for cloud cover? Or could it be their signwriting compliance department get just a little overexcited by health and safety and forget that the Council might be supposed to be bringing a little something to the party, even if they didn’t want anyone else to?

Rick Perry – The Stupidest Tax Plan in the World?

2011-11-05T15:07:00.008Z

Have you heard of Mitt Romney? Herman Cain? Rick Perry? Almost certainly not Jon Huntsman? Or other damp squibs for Bonfire Night (though a fanatic who wants to blow up the legislature and install a theocracy isn’t a million miles from some of the contenders)? Yes, it’s the exciting world of the US Republican Party, and after studying the race, I can announce a winner. Not of the nomination, naturally, or (I hope) against President Obama. Step forward, instead, Texas Governor Perry, whose brand new “simple” tax plan is surely the most brain-meltingly stupid in the history of the world.

The Republican Frontrunners – More Halloween Than Bonfire Night

If you’ve not been following the race for the Republican Presidential nomination, the most consistently popular contender is former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney; but when I say “most consistently popular”, I mean he’s been bumping along at about 25% in the polls for the last year, while several other contenders have shot up, sometimes shot past him, and then fizzled out. It’s almost as if Republicans don’t actually want their ‘front-runner’, and are looking for anyone – almost anyone at all, as long as they’re ‘more conservative’ – to replace him. Romney is relatively competent, doesn’t mess up in debates, and almost completely uninspiring: famously, he’s changed his mind on almost every policy position and then denied it (as a slew of flip-flopping attack ads are now reminding people); he’s not ideologically batshit-crazy conservative (not least in that he was, following the previous point, against most conservative positions before he was for them); his Massachusetts healthcare initiative was the model for Obamacare (the number one evil for Republicans, whose support for life ends at birth); and perhaps most of all, because he’s a Mormon, and so automatically excluded from the swivel-eyed Christianist theocracy that has captured much of the Republican Party. He also has a 59-point plan for the economy, which is at least fifty-six points longer than Republican voters are going to read. On the other hand, he has a lot of money, tends not to self-destruct, and has the support of a lot of Republican grandees who are scared to death that the grassroots will pick someone who’s as nutty as a fruitbat.

So who are the main challengers to Romney? At least until tomorrow? For the last few weeks, they’ve been the macho conservative Governor of Texas – always a happy sign – Rick Perry, and business mogul Herman Cain. Depending on whether you think being US President is more like being a state governor or being a pizza boss, you may feel one of them has more relevant experience. Governor Perry was the last candidate so far to enter the race, sparking off over the summer to zoom high over the polls until he crashed to earth with a pitiful performance in his first TV debate. And again in his second. And by the time he slightly improved for his third, everyone was watching another spectacle, the amazing high-flying business saviour with a memorable policy plan where Rick Perry has a vacuum, while at the same time untainted by any actual political experience. So Mr Cain is, at the moment, still soaring in the polls while Governor Perry has mostly fizzled out – until the last week, during which both have exploded. The press have found details of Mr Cain expensively paying off several woman in his business empire who claimed sexual harassment by him; Mr Cain has fired off in all directions, the press, the liberal elite trying to lynch him for daring to be a black Republican, feminists – all of this playing well with the Republican base – but then, most dangerously, blaming the Perry campaign, who have of course strenuously denied this. Massive intra-conservative explosions followed. So the two leading Not-Mitt-Romney candidates are currently in the middle of making Mitt Romney look much safer (and saintlier).

Call 999 For Herman Cain

There are many elements behind Herman Cain’s sudden success, but the most policy-based is his patent “999 Plan” to reform America’s tax system (and bear in mind that “999” does not have the same connotations in America of ‘Call Mr Cain an ambulance’). Unlike Mr Romney’s 59-point plan for the economy, Mr Cain’s is short, simple and memorable: strip federal taxes to a 9% corporate tax rate, a 9% personal income tax rate and a 9% national sales tax. Problems with this include that it wouldn’t raise nearly enough to cover spending (but no Republicans are going to worry about that); that it would massively slash taxes on business and the very rich, leaving 90% of the population to pick up the tab (but not many Republicans are worrying about that either); and that there isn’t currently a federal sales tax at all. This last one is where he’s being attacked by other Republicans (wild-eyed Tea-Partier Michele Bachmann, a spent firebrand from earlier in the year, suggesting it’s a 666 plan. Yes, the Christian Right are always subtle). You see, it doesn’t matter if there are huge tax cuts elsewhere, or much bigger spending cuts on top – Republicans now regard any tax increase at all as original sin. So the other contenders are running around telling every state with its own sales tax that Mr Cain wants to double their VAT on top, and every state without that HE WANTS A NEW TAX AND MUST BE THE DEVIL! Yet still, the simplicity and apparent low levels of the “999 Plan” remain looking popular in the polls. So Rick Perry, desperate to get back off the ground, belatedly tried last week to come up with a tax policy of his own, his reliance on nothing but his winning personality having come unstuck.

The Republican debate a week and a half ago might well have laid the charges for the big explosion between Cain and Perry this week. Mr Cain, formerly so self-assured, looked distinctly rattled when his sudden front-runner status brought all the attacks that his previous also-ran rank hadn’t, stuck spouting that any criticism of his catchy gimmick was “comparing apples and oranges” (yes, Herman, we know your new sales tax will increase the price of fruit). But with Michele Bachmann hinting in her subtle way that he may be the antichrist, the attack that turned my stomach wasn’t the ridiculous one from the extremist (well, one of them) but the snake-oil slick from the please-can-I-be-the-frontrunner-again Governor: “Herman, I love you, brother, but…” Oh, Perry, please. Does anyone actually fall for that schtick? It’s a simple stratagem: get right behind your beloved brother; stab him in the back with praise for his naivety; unveil your own boldly unrealistic tax plan and hoover up all your beloved brother’s votes! And it was at the last point, of course, that Rick Perry’s own plan blew up in his face.

The Problem With Tax Plans

There’s only one sort of new tax plan that’s ever a brilliant, total success. That’s when you announce it from in government at a time of high growth, and with luck that means any losers will be lifted naturally and don’t notice it. This hardly ever happens, and pretending that it does goes some way to explain why, for at least the last thirty years, UK governments have been living beyond their real means.

Any tax plan – any at all – that you come up with in opposition will be open to one of two attacks (and usually both).

Some people will lose money!

Your sums don’t add up!

The first of these is invariably true, and the more you try to avoid it, the more the second will become true as a result.

Anyone involved in British politics can remember tax disasters both by government and opposition parties. I was a member of the Liberal Democrats’ Federal Policy Committee for many years, and tax proposals were always the policies were got to discuss last – usually after a Treasury Spokesperson had been dragged kicking and screaming into the room with bloodcurdling vows that the Party’s democratic policy-making process wouldn’t change a single penny of their grand design – and usually with the aid of numbered papers to be collected in at the end of the meeting. Because nothing can be more unpopular than taxing people more.

Tax has long been a particular problem for the Liberal Democrats for two simple reasons: for nearly two decades, we’ve been the only party that’s had all its policies costed so that election manifestos add up; and we’ve aimed to make the tax system fairer, which means those at the bottom paying less and those at the top paying more. Put those together, and what do you get? That some people are going to lose money, and that we’re going to tell them about it. Which is why, even though all our tax proposals for as long as you can remember have had far more gainers than losers, all the shrieking attention is usually on who’s going to pay more. Liberal Democrats plan to raise income tax thresholds so that the vast majority of low and medium earners will be better off, we said at the last election (and are now delivering in government). Of course, if you have to pay extra tax on the worth of your house above a couple of million pounds, that’s going to hit the very, very poorest, who haven’t a widow’s crotchet to rub together in their two million pound mansion! If you’re getting masses of cash from capital gains that Labour taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary working income and suddenly that rate rises to something almost fair, that’s going to destroy business, because how can bosses be expected to pay anything like the share that their employees do! And so on, as you probably remember. Or, most famously, Charles Kennedy came a cropper trying to explain how our council tax replacement plans stacked up in 2005 – change it to ability to pay and, corks, it turns out the people who are able to pay would have to. What is the world coming to? Even the council tax itself, replacing the poll tax, the most unpopular tax in living memory, was only swallowed because central government whopped in a massive subsidy with it (taking local government more under its control as it did so).

And so, used to running my beady eyes along the small print that tax planners hope you won’t notice, Herman Cain’s plan is… Well, laughable. It’s impossible to take seriously, and it would never have stood up for five seconds in a Liberal Democrat Policy Committee meeting. It doesn’t bring in nearly enough money to pay for the taxes it would replace. It gives a massive, massive tax cut to the very richest. And it brings in a great big additional tax hike that permanently increases prices for everyone else (remember the crappy VAT rise here? Under the “999 Plan”, it would have been nearly four times bigger). There are, though, three relatively good things to say about it. First, it would slightly simplify the Byzantine US tax system, and that’s a good thing. Second, it looks good on a leaflet, bollocks though it is to anyone who has a clue. And third… Third, it’s nowhere near as dumb as Rick Perry’s alternative.

Rick Perry’s Tax Plan – The Massively More Complicated Side of Simple

Mesmerised by the simplicity and popularity of the “999 Plan”, Rick Perry sat down with his crayons and, only months later and weeks after he’d already blown his best chance at the Republican nomination, he came up with his own “simplification” of the tax code. It’s a 20% flat tax.

In its favour, the good thing about a flat tax is that it’s simple (and the simpler a tax system is, the harder it is to dodge). Remember that.

OK, first problem. A flat tax. These are beloved of conservatives because they sound fair, but actually mean – by demolishing a progressive tax code in which you pay a larger share the more you earn – that, if you’re bringing in the same amount of money overall, the wealthiest get a massive tax cut and everyone else gets a massive tax rise. Still, ‘everyone should be treated the same’ has a ring to it – compare it to the Liberal Democrat ‘(almost) everyone gets the same increase in what they can hang onto before they pay any tax’, and they sound much the same. They’re actually almost exact opposites. Everyone paying the same percentage means the lowest earners get very little actual money and the richest get a fortune; everyone being able to keep the same actual money makes a great difference to the lowest earners and is barely noticed by the richest. And in this case, it would be a 20% flat tax on personal and corporate income but, here’s a thing, not on investments – Rick Perry would abolish the various wealth taxes altogether (great if you’re a mega-rich investor. Shame if you’re an ordinary Jo who has to pick up the shortfall).

But still, the one good thing in theory about a flat tax is that it’s simple, even if it’s not fair.

So, a flat tax is regressive. But it also has a lot of losers, if you’re going to set it at a rate that actually brings in the same amount as the various different rates currently do. And Rick Perry is a Twenty-first Century Republican running for the Presidential nomination in an ultra-conservative Tea Party atmosphere: increasing taxes, even on ordinary people, is unforgiveable evil. So he has a pathological fear (not least having seen his own attacks on Herman Cain’s extra sales tax) of people who’d lose out.

The answer is simple. Forget economic facts, and just set your tax rate well below what anyone could object to – 20%. This isn’t just below the rate at which he’d balance the books (in the UK, a flat tax would have to be at least 40%; even in the US, 20% is absurd, and that’s for current spending, ignoring the trillions of dollars of debts). This is ludicrously below the rate at which he’d balance the books. The technical term for it is ‘totally made up’. But, phew, never mind reality: it’s passed the first part of the ‘Republicans won’t call you Satan’ test, which is the most important one.

Yet even a 20% rate would mean not just cutting the rate for the richest in half, but increasing tax on the lowest earners – so, to his credit (and, under this plan, the US Government would need to run up a lot of credit), as well as the conservative dream of giving billionaires more billions, he’s followed the Liberal Democrat idea of a steep increase in tax thresholds to benefit low and middle earners. Of course, this would mean that a tax rate that already wouldn’t bring in anywhere near enough money would bring in much, much less than that. But so what? It’s only pretend, after all, not revenue-neutral or a plausible plan for government.

And, you still remember, it might not pay for what you’re actually spending, so you can’t begin to reduce your deficit (which Governor Perry’s promised to do, but that’s too absurd a claim even to start on), and that means you can’t even think about paying off your debts, but on the bright side, at least a flat tax should be simple.

But then Governor Perry hit on another problem. Because the US tax system is so complicated – almost as much as the UK’s after a decade of Gordon Brown knitting it – that it’s not just the headline tax rate that determines how much people pay. There are exceptions, and exemptions, and allowances. People get money back, or don’t pay it, or circle it around a bit, if they’re paying mortgages, or charitable donations, investments and so on. Now, Governor Perry’s plan wants to get rid of all tax on wealthy investments, so that’s nice and simple for the very rich, but ordinary people still have mortgages, and those poor billionaires might even have several. And if a flat tax is a proper, straightforward, simple flat tax that simplifies the tax code into one simple rate – remember, the big advantage is how simple it is – then suddenly people might have to pay more on all those sorts of things. People… might… have to… pay… more…‽‽ Oh, Governor Perry! Say it ain’t so (or be damned forever)! So he had another bright idea. All those exceptions, and exemptions, and allowances? They can stay.

Oh. Well… Um, the thing is, it might still need thousands of pages of tax code, oh dear, sorry, and lawyers, and accountants, and Congresspeople putting in loopholes, but at least the rate of the flat tax is still simple. That’s one thing. At least you know you only need pay at one rate. Er, that is it, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, at that point Governor Perry’s advisors found one more problem. It turns out that even with a tax rate so low that no-one can believe it, and a much bigger threshold, and keeping all the allowances and exemptions – even then, they found that there would still be losers. A lot of losers. Mostly from those pesky low-and-middle-earners. So what to do?

Because Governor Perry had told them that simplicity is nice, but the one thing that his tax plan must never, never, ever have is losers. Because he doesn’t have a teaspoon the political courage of a Liberal Democrat, not even one person should have to pay more, and only then would he be anointed the true [made-up] Republican messiah.

So his tax plan has one more idea to make it a brilliant, total success.

And that is…

If you don’t do better under the new tax system, you can file under the old one instead.

And that was the point at which Rick Perry became the undoubted winner of the Mr Shit-For-Brains-Maddest-Tax-Plan-Of-All-Time Award.

The one advantage – the one big reward that even a redistributionist like me can agree on – to a flat tax is that the sodding thing is flat. It’s simple.

Under Rick Perry’s plan, not only would the rich get a massive tax cut (and a more massive one through the genuinely flat 0% investments rate), not only would you still have to calculate all the same exemptions and extras that you do today, but you would have to do all your taxes twice. Just to check which version comes out best.

This is the only “flat tax” proposal in history which increases bureaucracy, increases complexity, and increases the time it takes to fill out your tax returns. All for the sake of a simple headline. Governor Perry appears to have confused simple with “simple”.

Rick Perry’s promise when setting out his tax plan was that Americans would be able to fill out their tax returns on a postcard.

Only if their writing is as small as his own microscopic brain.

The Other One

Incidentally, there’s one Republican in the race who has a solidly successful and fiscally conservative record as a governor, has been an ambassador, has no flip-flops, has his own tax plan and can string three words together without tripping over them. Unfortunately for the health of the Republican Party, Jon Huntsman is bumping along at the margin of error of nothing, so you can safely assume the sane sort of conservatism isn’t getting a look-in this year. Mainstream in every way save being a Mormon (ironically the least anti-gay candidate despite that), he might do well in a proper election, but by Republicans, for Republicans, he’s toast. He believes in science and climate change, he has a grasp of economics, he doesn’t pander to Christianist conservatism, he speaks Mandarin Chinese… He may as well be on a different planet to Planet Republican. Though as the ‘not nutty’ candidate he may have blown it himself by lacking the balls to stand apart from the pack at crucial moments of decision (putting his hand up with all the rest to the economic insanity of refusing deficit reduction by even one part tax rise to ten spending cuts; staying silent as the Republican audience booed a gay soldier). So I don’t spare him that much sympathy.

Update after the next GOP debate, night of 9th November: It turns out that I was badly underestimating Rick Perry’s problem with numbers. If only he hadn’t scrapped Education (arithmetic) and Commerce (numbers) first, he might have been able to count to three.

It surely can’t be long now before he withdraws from running for President of the United States of… of… Oops! I was sure there was a third word…

DVD Taster: Doctor Who – The Masque of Mandragora

2011-10-29T22:10:00.030+01:00

As the nights drawn in for the spookiest Saturday of the year, what could be more appropriate to turn to than Doctor Who’s finest and most Gothic season? First broadcast in Autumn 1976, Doctor Who – The Masque of Mandragora opened an outstanding set of stories with Tom Baker’s Doctor a freethinking adventurer fighting both mental and political tyranny in the form of terrific villains and superstition incarnate. In the rich period setting of the Italian Renaissance, the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith face scheming, swordplay and masked monks as they’re caught in a dark world of intrigue and sorcery…

Doctor Who’s finest season so far is its Fourteenth, a year of dark religion broadcast across 1976 and 1977. It opens with Elisabeth Sladen at the Doctor’s side for the penultimate time of her original run, and this story should feel secretly familiar to you if you’ve been watching her starring in The Sarah Jane Adventures. When BBC4 showed her final story (until all the others) this May, my review of The Hand of Fear included my overview of Season Fourteen and its uncannily echoing themes under producer Philip Hinchcliffe – who wanted to expand the show’s horizons – and lead writer Robert Holmes – who wanted to “frighten the little buggers to death”. The Masque of Mandragora isn’t the season’s height, but it lays out those themes like a declaration of intent, even down to setting itself during the Enlightenment: the leading battlefield is for and within the mind, here championing rationalism against a whopping great metaphor for superstition; characters and societies strive to grow up, with Marco’s fight here to outgrow his uncle mirrored on a grand scale in Mandragora’s desire to keep humanity as superstitious children; and religion underpins the story’s Gothic setting of new and old world despising and deposing one another. After a couple of years of exploring the themes in unfamiliar framings, masses of monks coursing through secret passages in late Medieval Italy made this Doctor Who’s most flagrantly Gothic story so far – only to be topped a couple of stories later as this portion of the series reaches its crescendo… Back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine Issue 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – voting The Masque of Mandragora up to number 85. I might put it ten or so places lower, largely because the competent but uninspired director doesn’t quite fulfil its potential, but either way it’s an excellent little story that takes one of the series’ firmest philosophical stands.

While this ‘taster’ may not be short, incidentally, my policy in these is not to be too spoilery, in order than you can read on without fear of finding out too many key twists from the end.

That Golden Moment

“It takes away from Man the only thing worth having… A sense of purpose, what else? The ability granted to every intelligent species to shape its own destiny. Once let Mandragora gain control, and Man’s ambition wouldn’t stretch beyond – beyond the next meal. It’d turn you into sheep. Idle, mindless, useless sheep.”

The story’s most breathtaking moment for me has always been the cliffhanger closing Part Three, offering a memorably scary death, fabulous rolled Rs and a major turning point. But for most of those reasons, it’s too much of a spoiler to describe here. A couple of scenes from Part One spring to mind – the old Duke’s deathbed openly establishing one of the story’s key plots while more subtly setting out the other, the Doctor’s arrival at the court with a warning and quicksilver wit – but it’s a few minutes into Part Four that the Doctor muses on the philosophical battle that’s going to expand into the slightly ungainly finale. The science is a bit uncertain, but Tom’s dynamic, and the philosophy spot-on.

In 1492, “the period between the dark ages of superstition and the dawn of a new reason”, at the court of one of Italy’s most progressive Princes, two gatherings are planned: one, of the greatest scholars of the new sciences looking for that new birth of reason; the other, a bloodthirsty Roman cult aiming to climb out of its long death to hold Earth under its spell. Yes, it’s the battle of the worldviews, each with a champion from the stars – angel or alien, demon or energy force, according to ideological stance. And unlike the Mandragora Helix’s titanic booming voice, the Doctor has a sense of humour, which proves he’s on the right side. Even as he uses a primitive telescope to calculate exactly when the Helix will be in position to make its attempt, even as he asks for the simple tools he’ll need for his last dangerous gamble to draw off its power, even after he grimly tells Sarah Jane exactly what control by this alien force would mean were it to become humanity’s substitute for science… He goes to sleep standing up, steals the scene utterly from the poor discombobulated Prince and replies to his worry about putting off the (besieged) masque with gay abandon:

“You’re going to hold a dance?”

The signal for the attack – or when the stars are right – is to be a total eclipse, foretold as “When Mandragora swallows the Moon…” Though it’s much less vivid now, this story was made only a few years after we had first landed on the Moon, when that was a potent symbol of our reaching outward; Mandragora swallowing it was not just a suitably mystical-sounding way to describe the eclipse, but a metaphor for what it would do to our aspirations. The story’s coda famously predicts that the Helix will be in position to try again five hundred years later – how disheartening that by the end of the Twentieth Century, nobody was going to the Moon any more, and humanity seemed to have lost interest in going anywhere else. Maybe the Helix did come back and succeeded in putting our ambition to sleep after all?

Something Else To Look Out For

Often said to be his favourite story, The Masque of Mandragora feels like producer Philip Hinchcliffe’s manifesto for what the Doctor’s about – he’s an intellectual, and everything about it says so: setting; plot; theme; TARDIS reinvented as wood-panelled study; even the new titles font (the stylish DellaRobbia, named appropriately for an Italian Renaissance artist, becomes the look of the programme’s credits through most of Tom; luckily not the similarly Italian-named Times New Roman, for which I have an irrational dislike). And yet he’s also a swashbuckling adventurer, turning his hand to duelling as easily as engineering, dashing through a crowded market and winding terraces that you might think Italian if you’d never seen The Prisoner, racing along on horseback in exciting stunts that you might think entirely convincing if you’d never seen Tom Baker. And if you want to relaunch the Doctor as a Renaissance man, where better than in the Renaissance? The story isn’t perfect – despite the philosophical power, lush feel and obvious inspiration from The Masque of the Red Death, it lacks some of the bite of the season’s finest stories to come, and of course the edge of the immediately preceding season finale, The Seeds of Doom; but as that story was set on going as far as it possibly could (if not necessarily in the right direction, as I posted in a somewhat overlong reply to TARDIS Eruditorum yesterday) thanks to its thrilling but ultraviolent director, anything would feel like it was pulling back a bit afterwards. So it’s a good job this is moving forward, too.

The new approach is greatly aided by Tom Baker’s performance, carrying off his serious and playful sides with equal assurance as his Doctor comes out of what had almost seemed a year-long sulk. The orange is mightier than the sword; a lion peeps over an altar; he gets to tell Hieronymous, “come off it – drop all that bosh”. He gets a great scene towards the end of Part One, taking responsibility for having taken the Helix to Earth – like Adam, or Prometheus – and trying to warn Count Federico and his court of the terrible danger. That should imply a grimly serious attitude from the Doctor, yet wonderfully as the toadies first wait to see the Count’s reaction, then laugh on cue with their lord, and he’s then presented with the local astrologer to test his credentials, we see the Doctor thinking on his feet – first cheerily convincing, then sharp and sombre when he’s not getting through (“Because you don’t have a future…”), then disgustedly swatting down all Hieronymous’ nonsense just to exercise his wits (“All it requires is a quick imagination and a glib tongue”). And it’s a great scene for Federico, too, in his casual power and ability to size up a character – if not to understand anything that challenges his worldview – even down to rewarding that mocking tongue with that prize so rarely given by villains, prompt execution (and it’s not his fault, of course, that it inevitably fails).

With the Doctor so heavily featured, Sarah Jane’s role is a little more muted than in some stories, though Elisabeth Sladen finds yet another – and perhaps her creepiest – way to play ‘brainwash woman’, as well as all the usual spikiness, exploration and not really taking to being laid out for sacrifice. Pre-empting The End of the World’s definitive Twenty-First Century explanation of how the TARDIS lets its crew understand any language, this story is infamously the one where Bob Holmes decided it was time to say out loud those questions everyone put to him in the BBC canteen, as not only does Federico notice the Doctor’s peculiar clothes but also Sarah Jane – or something else through her – asks how she can speak Italian. It’s rather out of character for Tom’s Doctor (if not Pertwee’s) to object to questions, but he takes this not as a sign of her journalistic inquisitiveness but a dark portent that she’s been hypnotised. Again. Even the TARDIS gets a new start, for both practical (as revealed in the extra features) and aesthetic reasons, with the chutzpah of pretending that its new dusty wooden control room was in fact an old one we’d seen previous Doctors potter about in. It’s an evocative design by Barry Newbery, at once a Sherlockian study and a little chapel (his arched Palace corridors, cleverly theatrical temple effect and simple but inspired way of disguising the Village Town Hall are great bits of design, too). Also of note on the production side, the screaming masks of the Cult of Demnos are very effective, particularly the cruelly opulent design for their leader, though Dudley Simpson’s musical score is a little too reminiscent of several of his earlier contributions (Pyramids of Mars in the sacrifice, The Ark In Space as Sarah Jane’s bewitched), if still with some lovely deep chiming as the Brotherhood plot or spidery percussive music while Sarah Jane’s stalking the Doctor, as well as rather a beautiful arching version of his Doctor’s Theme shortly after they land.

A Gothic Story

Tom Baker’s first three seasons, led by Hinchcliffe and Holmes, are often referred to as “Gothic Horror”; this story, and this first half of Season Fourteen, is the clearest point to get across what’s meant by that (if you have a copy of Doctor Who Magazine 282, you might also read Alan Barnes’ excellent article Tales From the Crypt). Though the Gothic elements start off very early in this three-year period, perhaps disguised by the relative late-coming of dark shadows and travels back to older times, they reach a peak here in dark religion, ancient tunnels and mad monks. Gothic scholars would instantly recognise that this story is all about the Old World versus the New Age with the Renaissance itself at stake, that it cuts a fine line between exploiting the supernatural and explaining it, and that it’s overflowing with the Gothic trappings of Medieval Europe, alchemy, tyranny (even by the wicked uncle of the rightful heir), dungeons, torture, ancient passageways and rituals… Though, ironically, the force of irrationalism is named for a play by that arch-rationalist of the time Niccolò Machiavelli, in one of many crafty references by writer and Renaissance academic Louis Marks (whose earlier Day of the Daleks also explored issues of free will versus determinism).

“You mean they could dominate Earth now through an ancient religion?”

The anti-Catholic excesses of Gothic literature are here, too, if masked – which makes it ironic that I felt it was speaking to me at the time, brought up a good half-Catholic boy and as steeped in religion as this year of Doctor Who, if of a rather more modern sort than hinted at here. Of course, the evil Roman religion through which Mandragora will dominate the world is the “pagan” Cult of Demnos and not any vastly larger and more temporally powerful denomination from that city, but to ask the question ‘Why didn’t Mandragora pick the big one?’ is to realise that it’s less an opponent than a stand-in. It’s not a very opaque attack on organised religion: Federico blatantly has in place of a chaplain his “Court Astrologer” Hieronymous (named for the monkly Catholic preacher who effectively ruled Florence around this time), with a non-speaking ‘proper’ priest seen at the old Duke’s deathbed for approximately seven seconds purely, I suspect, for the producer to establish plausible deniability (the Doctor even hangs a lamp on this later with his “No priest available. Will a brother do?”); the Cult is a Latin-chanting mass of monks; and the leader of the Brethren standing in a pillar of fire from above to lay hands on his followers and pass on the unholy spirit seemed entirely plausible to my half-Baptist side. It’s tempting to believe, too, that ex-monk Tom Baker’s newly fired-up performance had something to do with his seeing exactly the same quality in the script, and understanding it all too well.

The TARDIS landing in the crystal spiral mountains of Mandragora – in the void – amid unearthly sound makes an intriguing start to the story, though if the sound design is more impressive than the visuals, they are at least memorable (and more so than the Mandragora energy on the prowl; the DVD range seemed oddly unwilling to offer alternate CGI for Hinchcliffe’s stories as it did for, say, similarly underwhelming effects on The Time Warrior). Resisting its dizzying hypnotic spell from the first by saying the alphabet backwards seems an appropriate mix of fighting it with learning and turning a catechism upside-down, too. But that’s only the prologue; it’s when we go to Italy that the story really kicks off, in the perfect setting for this battle of ideas.

“You can no more tell the stars than you can tell my chamber-pot!”

It’s all beautifully filmed, with what appears to be a medieval Italian town (and works damned hard to stop you recognising it) and glamorous wooded paths (after rain, suggesting they’re British, with exotic rhododendrons which suggest childhood holidays to me, though admittedly no closer to the Mediterranean than Watford). There are even bustling street scenes! Doctor Who seems to mix rather well with Italy – The Romans and The Fires of Pompeii two thousand years ago, The Vampires of Venice and a bit of City of Death in roughly the same Renaissance period, while even the series’ first historical, Marco Polo, had a Venetian lead character. And though several of those later stories were in fact shot abroad and one even in Italy, this is still the one which for me feels most Italian, with its gorgeous architecture, lavish costumes and a setting that’s right at the heart of the story. Though it’s amusing that the DVD picture’s been cleaned up so perfectly that while Sarah Jane calls it “Nice, warm…” you can also see Tom’s breath steaming. Oddly, only one of the actors makes a stab at an Italian accent, the others ranging from RSC to fearful Cockney.

People usually kick against the aristocracy in Doctor Who, but its casual power is everywhere here without comment, from Count Federico’s chess match to nice Prince Giuliano casually ordering his companion to fetch wine. Only the outsiders the Doctor and Hieronymous fail to defer, and both are nearly killed for it. The court intrigue is very well choreographed, with different guards crossing over each other in a physical symbol of the intercutting political plots. The scene introducing the main characters over a death is especially well-written: the Count enters late for the late Duke, prompting a confrontation between him and his nephew Marco over whether he was “enjoying some sport” which clearly sets up the two rivals for the Dukedom; but while that’s the focal point, other, more important lines from subtly different opposing sides almost toss away what the story’s really about:

“Many do not believe it – but the decrees of Fate will be obeyed. We – have no choice.”

“You’re alone, now, Giuliano. Your uncle is strong and ruthless.”
“You forget, Marco, I am Duke now… We make our own lives, Marco. Not the stars.”

Young Prince Giuliano (Gareth Armstrong) and his “companion” “dear Marco” (the now much more famous Tim Piggott-Smith) are Doctor Who’s first obviously gay couple, though the most suggestive scene is when he’s clearly rather taken with the Doctor at first sight: “A most uncommon spy…” No wonder that Marco spends much of the final episode, even after being broken by torture into awful betrayal, offering jealous put-downs on whatever the Doctor’s doing. And when he exclaims “We have weapons of our own,” his eyes flicker downwards on Giuliano. Really. With the theatrical look of a BBC Shakespeare of the time and the principal actors playing it like that, it’s appropriate that top Shakespearean scholar and Doctor Who DVD text note-writer Martin Wiggins famously compared Giuliano to Hamlet – murdered father, wicked uncle, reluctance to act – with this one stronger in rejecting superstition if generally more wet, and lucky to be in a story where Machiavelli’s Prince can lose (if not exactly by divine intervention), or he’d be deadmeat. Marco’s advice to him throughout is to be more firm – steady! – and ruthless, while the Doctor’s is to “Keep an open mind.” Giuliano has the makings of an enlightened Prince, and is certainly on the right side of the crucial fight here between free will and determinism, but you can’t help feeling that Mandragora and the Doctor turning up was the best thing that could have happened to him. Without them, there’d be Duke Federico.

“If you fail me, Rossini, you shall breakfast on hot coals!”

I loved a good bloodthirsty R-rolling villain as a boy, and I still do today – despite so much fun on offer, Jon Laurimore’s Count Federico steals the show. He’s clearly having a whale of a time from the moment we first see him torching and tormenting the peasants, and he’s not just relishably hissable but one of the series’ most competent villains, only brought down in the end by in effect not realising what sort of story he’s in and that he’s actually irrelevant to the key struggle – things come to a climax where, were this a ‘pure’ historical, he actually wins, and the Doctor would be stuffed. His excellent guard captain, Anthony Carrick, is a sort of henchman in Yes, Minster, too (and here shows how villainous ID cards are by demanding the Doctor’s on peril of his life). Jon Laurimore’s given many of the best lines and does great work with them – Richard sighs fondly when I laugh like a hyena at “Before sunrise, I want to see Giuliano’s liver fed to the dogs!” – but he also has moments of surprising quiet, while his final is not just fear, but awe, a man who finally believes in something.

“You can kill me first.”
“No… But we may kill you afterwards.”

Will We Have Any More Trouble From Mandragora?

There’s a lot more to this story than just the story. The DVD special features are rather fabulous; the novelisation a little flat, but with its moments, and reinvigorated by its audiobook reading; it’s had perhaps as many as five different sequels in different media; and it’s even inspired some rather lovely artwork (most notably Alister Pearson’s gorgeous not-at-all papal reissue book cover, perhaps best presented on John Pettigrew’s DVD and video cover site, as is Mike Little’s less technically accomplished but memorable Tom hemmed in by screaming masks, while on the DVD you can see some striking paintings from the Radio Times in pdf – just don’t look too closely at the masked Cult leader’s glowing crotch on the DVD cover).

The novelisation Doctor Who and the Masque of Mandragora is by producer Philip Hinchcliffe, and while it’s not bad, his writing style doesn’t flow anywhere near as well as Terrance Dicks’, with the scenes and lines trimmed for length making it feel a little sparse. There are a few other changes, of varying effectiveness: the ‘straightening’ of Giuliano; a tensely snapping wire; Hieronymous’ escape employing more thrilling cauldron-dashing; and though the mention of the Pope works vividly for one stream of the story (“The Holy Father himself will kiss my hand for cleansing the state of San Martino” as Federico plots to frame his nephew as a worshipper of Demnos), it works against the other by muddying the waters on religion. Tim Piggot-Smith, though, is a powerful actor, who enlivens the CD reading of the novel with considerable panache and an interesting take on the Doctor, old but deep-voiced and authoritative.

As for the sequels, the promise that Mandragora would return in five hundred years’ time inspired several writers. The first and arguably the most ambitious was Doctor Who Magazine’s comic strip (and graphic novel) The Mark of Mandragora; Big Finish’s Sarah Jane Smith series had the Helix threaded through its whole second series, the most promising and the most disappointing of the sequels (scroll down this article to find my spoilerful explanation of its climax, or anti-climax); the BBC Books novel The Eleventh Tiger matched the Helix, unnamed and anachronistically, against the First Doctor; and most recently, generously name-checking the other three, Gary Russell’s novel Beautiful Chaos brings back the Helix against the Tenth Doctor, Donna and Wilf, and is a particularly good story for the Nobles. Unlike other new series BBC Books (monogamous hetero Captain Jack of The Not-Deviant-At-All Strain, I’m looking at you), but appropriately for the TV original, it’s also got a pair of gayers among all the couples, too. That leaves The Sarah Jane Adventures’ Secrets of the Stars, a rather good TV story first broadcast three years ago, a blatant sequel but with the serial numbers inexplicably filed off. I may be doing him an injustice, but though I can’t trace it I remember some years ago reading its (very talented) author Gareth Roberts snidely asking, “Why would anyone want to watch The Masque of Mandragora?” Well, to get paid for doing an uncredited sequel and a drag comedy feature on it, obviously. Which brings me to the DVD special features.

“I only found out recently that there were other Doctors.”
“We didn’t like to tell you.”

This DVD features a particularly entertaining and informative commentary from Tom (“It was a wonderful time…”) Baker, producer Philip Hinchcliffe and his assistant Chris D’Oyly-John (revealing his favourite Doctor), all thinking it looks very good, and joined by Gareth Armstrong, who Tom now calls “Devastatingly handsome” but who at the time called him and Tim “Gert and Daisy”. Bless him – my favourite moment is when Tom sighs orgiastically as Lis Sladen’s dragged into the temple, then enthuses over how wonderful it is that she now has a series of her own. Though his opinion on HD TV, except for art, or engineering plans, or neurosurgery, is also a treat:

“I was watching something in high definition, and it was so boring, that I just counted the blackheads on the leading man.”

The ‘Making of’, The Secret of the Labyrinth, is rather gorgeous, mainly shot on location in – gasp – it was Portmeirion all the time! Though, in the style of The Prisoner, you’ll soon spot that they didn’t take all of their interviewees there, with some pictured against backgrounds in the studio. It’s one of the best the Doctor Who DVDs have done, helped both by the number and quality of guests from behind and in front of the camera and by the visual style of it all. Gareth Armstrong, for example, now bearded, has aged very well, as well as being incisive; Tim Piggott-Smith still very enthusiastic about how ambitious it all is, disapproving of how young actors today don’t know how to wear a sword, and giggling at how “Tom was very naughty,” especially making him corpse under torture (and, after doing ‘his’ Doctor for the book, gives a very creditable Tom impression); Barry Newbery is great, and I think I’ve worked out that his (cleverly mirrored) detail for Giuliano’s room is taken from Carpaccio’s The Vision of St Augustine; Anthony Carrick has the best stuntman story (while the director remembers cigarettes in their codpieces); but, appropriately, it’s completely stolen by Jon Laurimore:

“It’s an actor’s delight, actually, to get hold of a part like that… Wonderful, wonderful character – he’s the epitome of all everything that’s evil in Renaissance history.”

You can also watch a Now and Then piece if you can’t get enough Portmeirion, and there’s a nice feature on the history and design of the TARDIS, with Tom Baker, designers, writers and kids, and an interesting conflict between them – acerbic writer Robert Shearman thinks “You want to explore Narnia, not the wardrobe”, while Tom and Christopher H. Bidmead want whole worlds inside there; I loved Chris’ idea that “We still haven’t really seen the TARDIS,” but are just working our way towards what the TARDIS might really be. Gareth Roberts’ and Clayton Hickman’s spoof documentary Beneath the Masque divides opinion, but I thought several bits of it were funny (and not least because, like me, they like to quote the sinister Radio Times blurbs from the time. You get all of those here on pdf, too, of course, with an excellent interview with Philip Hinchcliffe promising “science fantasy and romance” for viewers up to 90 and some fabulous pictures). I’m afraid I laughed aloud at the ’80s video compilation, “Valerie Singleton”, “Andrew Pixley” and particularly the map of Wales. But – sorry, Gareth – the best bit’s still Jim Sangster’s “Tricky Action Engels”.

I wonder if it sparks like the Helix?

Update: A week later, I engage with different arguments about this story from TARDIS Eruditorum, in which he’s astoundingly far more biased than I am; by turns ignores, misquotes and misunderstands the text; constantly repeats unfounded assertions with ever more shrill name-calling as a substitute for evidence; and as a result misses the point entirely. I make my case in the comments. He sticks his fingers in his ears and re-edits his own post to try and make himself look marginally less daft. I eventually decide to stop, but I suggest you simply watch the programme for yourself and decide by empirical observation rather than magic thinking that ignores the words.

Where Now For Travellers?

2011-10-28T22:33:00.004+01:00

Before taking a political stand, I usually know the facts. I read a lot, I listen, I think about it. I’m wary of politicians who appeal to ‘common sense’ or ‘gut instinct’ and don’t let the facts get in the way. But I have to admit that, while I followed some news stories about the Dale Farm Travellers, I don’t know a lot about Gypsy and Roma people, so I’m writing more from gut instinct than informed research. And my Liberal gut instinct’s that when the law singles out a particular group of people to bully, it’s just plain wrong.

I know people broke the law; I don’t have a simple solution. But ask yourself – in all the years you’ve heard of planning disputes, NIMBYism or flouted regulations, have you ever heard of someone who built a conservatory without planning permission having it pulled down by riot police at a cost of £18 million? Or the tanks being sent in to blow up those Tescos which are two hectares too big?

The argument about Dale Farm went on for ten years, as far as I can make out, so what was the hurry to send in over a hundred riot police to taser people, cutting the electricity supply where there are ill and dying people, and then the police dragging them out on stretchers? It seems less like enforcing the law and more just ‘Let’s show these awkward Gypsies who’s in bloody charge’. I’ve had ill and dying family members – most of us have. And even if they were guilty of terrible crimes, I wouldn’t want them treated like that in their dying days. But what were they guilty of? Not getting planning permission. It seems horribly wrong to do that to anyone, let alone mostly law-abiding people who just don’t happen to conform, or even to wish it on – to take a hypothetical example for which I would in no way wish – the Basildon Councillors who stuck their noses in the air and denied that planning permission to have a gang of thugs break into their hospices and drag them into the gardens when it’s their time, just so they know what it’s like.

And, look, I may not know much about travellers, but even I can spot the piss-taking in Basildon Council’s mealy-mouthed claims that they’d offered (bricks and mortar) accommodation to children and old people in pretence that they weren’t being evil. First, they’re travellers, so, yeah, great start. And second – take away people’s children? Lock up their aged parents? Send everyone in between to a completely different part of the country? Have you noticed that the more socially conservative politicians are, the more they’re the sort who prate about ‘family values’, the more they want to break up actual, real, breathing families? Just as it’s the ones who most shout about ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’ who gang up to destroy any old traditions and cultures of which coincidentally they personally are not members.

I’ve often heard people attack travellers on the grounds that they’re not prejudiced, goodness me no, but it’s just ‘for the sake of the children’. The Dale Farm eviction seems to have given the lie to that, with every evictee basically told to fuck off hundreds of miles away. So how does that go for kids’ schooling, or healthcare? I don’t know what arrangements travellers usually make for those things, but the organs of the state seem to be deliberately making it as difficult for them to sort it out as possible.

Bad Laws Are Made To Be Broken

Pretty much the founding principle of Liberalism is controlling arbitrary power – standing up to bullies. If I see a group of big bullies pushing around a vulnerable group that most people hate for no good reason, my instinct’s always with the underdog whether or not I know or like them. And when people have piously prated that the hundreds of taser-wielding riot police at dawn were only upholding the Rule of Law, they know fuck all about the Rule of Law. Because that’s a Liberal founding principle, too, and it depends on equality before the law and not having the law side with one group against another. If the law happens only to heavily penalise one group, then what reason do they have to obey it?

I’m a strong supporter of the Coalition Government, though I wish the first time we’ve been in government for the best part of a century didn’t coincide with the most god-awful economic mess for the worst part of a century. In trying to clean up that mess, the Coalition Government’s doing a lot of things that I don’t like, but which are necessary, or at least defensible, and people who pretend it’s morally rather than practically wrong are usually just posing (while my view of the Labour MPs who ran up the bill and now run away from it is rarely printable). There’s very little the Government’s done, even the more Tory enclaves of it, that I’d say ‘No, that makes me ashamed’. But last year, coincidentally the same week that the United Nations was criticising the French Government for being evil shits [that’s your actual UN report I’m quoting] to travellers, I heard that the Coalition was going to remove the requirement for local councils to provide sites for travellers, and I was sickened. There’s no excuse for rushing to do this. It’s been in place for decades; it seems inadequate and something that a lot of councils try to get around as much as they can anyway; and if you take it away, suddenly there’s a great excuse and great pressure to push around one of the few groups it’s still acceptable to be horribly racist about. How many other communities have their needs explicitly excluded by law? I remember it was a little over a year ago, because I remember when I asked a Liberal Democrat minister why we’d agreed to this, and then another. I’d tell you what they said, but it may be a sign of how indefensible this policy is that thirteen months later, I’ve yet to have an answer – and that’s the only time that’s ever happened, in two decades of my holding senior Lib Dems to account. So if you’re reading, consider this a public reminder, eh?

I should, however, direct you to the Statement on Dale Farm eviction by Liberal Democrat MP Andrew George on behalf of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Gypsies, Roma and Travellers, which while hardly forceful does at least regret what happened:

“We suspect that many of those who support the eviction would prefer it if the authorised site were removed as well.
“Bearing in mind reports on this case both from the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission and UN Human Rights Commission, we hope that this will give the country and the Government in particular, the opportunity to reflect upon the intense difficulties for Gypsy Roma Travellers to find lawful sites on which they can live. The Government acknowledges that at least 1 in 5 of all Travellers are forced to live on unauthorised sites because there are insufficient authorised sites nationwide.
“It should be noted that whatever is happening in respect of the eviction of Travellers at Dale Farm, the remainder of Dale Farm will continue to be an authorised Travellers’ site.
“We hope that the Local Authority will meet its statutory obligations to the families who will be evicted as a result of their actions.”

If regular readers are wondering why I’m blogging quite a bit at the moment, but much more with Doctor Who reviews rather than my usually more even balance of politics and TV, it’s because (hey ho) I’m not at all well. And when I’ve got pretty much no mental, physical or emotional energy to spare, that has a huge effect on my writing. Often I just don’t do any of it; but also, immersing myself in Doctor Who makes me less unhappy, while engaging in politics does the reverse. Despite that, I’ve been meaning to write about this all week, because – aside from Andrew George’s cross-party concern – I’ve not seen any other Lib Dems writing about it and, basically, I thought it was wrong and wanted there to be at least one.

Update: I’ve had this post by Matt Pearson recommended to me; it strikes a similar tone (if less sweary), but with more facts and a quite remarkable amount of Tesco (which makes Richard suggesting my line above even more appropriate than I thought).

DVD Taster: Doctor Who – Kamelion Tales

2011-10-24T16:00:00.010+01:00

Peter Davison’s Doctor battles Anthony Ainley’s Master in this DVD box set of the Doctor Who stories The King’s Demons and Planet of Fire. The Time Lords clash across the gorgeous locations of a medieval castle and the island of Lanzarote; each time, the Master takes advantage of the local religion (who is the true demon? A tricky one, with him on the cover) and a shape-shifting robot, Kamelion. Which of the Doctor’s companions will remove the most clothes? Which of them will announce that he’s not a naughty boy, but the messiah? And will Magna Carta die in vain?

Despite their very different settings, these stories from 1983 and 1984 have much in common, even on top of cementing the arch-enemy relationship between ’80s Master Anthony Ainley and, particularly, Peter Davison’s Doctor. Each of them is the final story written by a Doctor Who director-turned-author, respectively Terence Dudley and Peter Grimwade; each has stories from both the ’60s and the ’70s it might take as models; in both, religion takes a key role in how characters are treated, though ironically it’s the more anti-religious script that treats believers with more sympathy; and The King’s Demons and Planet of Fire turned out to be the only two stories featuring that most ill-fated and Tony Blair-related of the Doctor’s companions, Kamelion. Who, you might ask? Particularly as these stories give much more identifiable roles to fellow companions Turlough and Peri? Well, if you can’t remember the robot that inexplicably gives the title to this set, you’re not alone – the production team forgot about him for months on end, too… Back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine Issue 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – voting The King’s Demons down into 181st place, which unfortunately is about right, and Planet of Fire a just-about-middling 134; I’d pretty much agree again, or perhaps slightly lower. And yet that in itself shows me just how brilliant Doctor Who is, because when I come to award scores for stories, Planet of Fire is what I think of as the epitome of an ‘average’ mark – perfectly decent if, ironically, lacking a spark – and yet I’d put nearly three-quarters of Doctor Who stories above that ‘average’.

While this ‘taster’ may not be short, incidentally, my policy in these is not to be too spoilery, in order than you can read on without fear of finding out too many key twists from the end. This poses particular problems for The King’s Demons: the key twists are given away by the nature of this DVD box set itself; the DVD menu gives away the only cliffhanger; and it’s arguably difficult to give away the ending of a story when it doesn’t really have one… While if you’ve not seen Planet of Fire, stop reading before the final heading below.

Doctor Who – The King’s Demons

With arguably the silliest plan the Master ever comes up with – despite a lot of competition – The King’s Demons has one of the weakest scripts of the period, with plot, characters and dialogue at best iffy and often unintentionally hilarious, and after fifty minutes less an ending than the impression that someone’s looked at their watch and called, ‘Time! Everyone back to your TARDISes!’ as if in expectation of another round, only for the protagonists to shrug and go home. So you might expect me to lay into it mercilessly. And I will lay into it… But not without mercy. While plot, characters and dialogue are usually what matter to me, and while most TV stories since 2005 have shown how to do Doctor Who far more effectively over a similar time, it’s possible to watch and enjoy it without any sense of the plot, characters and dialogue at all (much like the writer). Thanks to the magic of DVD, you can watch the beautifully cleaned-up picture and let the setting lend it weight: instead of ‘another cheap spaceship, and the story’s even flimsier,’ you think, ‘Ooh, lush filming,’ ‘jousting’ and ‘that’s a real castle’. And it’s not just the filming that’s appealing, but Jonathan Gibbs’ incidental music, too. So for The King’s Demons’ critical stock to soar, just follow my advice and select the “Audio Option: Isolated Score” from the Special Features menu so that you can watch the pretty medieval pictures and just listen to the pretty medieval synthesizer.

Or, if you must listen to the whole thing, try to ignore the plot and focus on the sexual tension…

That Golden Moment

“Come, you cringing caitiffs, we tell you there’s naught to fear! Do our demons come to visit us?”

It’s the chilly morning of March the Fourth, 1215 – pay attention, there’ll be a test later – and spectators are massing in the lists for the tournament between local heir Hugh Fitzwilliam, with his sparkling blue eyes, and Champion of Bad King John Sir Gilles, with his shaggy red wig (just to confuse the viewer, Blue Eyes is the Red Knight, and Red Wig in Blue). It all looks terrific: the horses gallop; the knights tilt; a broken lance – and then, suddenly, the horses rear and shy as, with a wheezing, groaning sound, the TARDIS appears between them. Doctor Who’d not done anything like that since 1965 (46 years ago last week), and this time has the double bonus of the interrupted combatants being thrilling on horseback and of the BBC not having thrown the tapes in a skip.

Inside and outside the TARDIS, there’s consternation. The Doctor gives us notes on the period, Tegan asks awkward questions and takes satisfaction in his not taking everything in your stride – that’ll earn her some put-downs for not knowing who the King is, in a minute – and they emerge to find everyone running about in horror… All save the King. Blasé, he welcomes the TARDIS crew over as his demons, almost carelessly confirming that the Angevins are the Devil’s Brood. Even with the Doctor used to turning up at the wrong point in history, this is a bizarre reaction. Has the King been watching Doctor Who?

The knights take up the joust again, and this time young Hugh comes crashing to earth, lying prettily in full close-up, moaning, and crying “Come, sir!” – of which more later. Of course, the Doctor intercedes for his life… And, of course, in one of the script’s few neat bits of writing, this comes back to bite him from all sides. Meanwhile, Tegan is freezing in her new multi-coloured frock; David Brunt’s rather good text notes (with a surfeit of peaches) tell us that this was chosen by Janet Fielding in order to spare herself participation in bluescreen / greenscreen shots, actors always hating special effects taking up more time than the acting does. And that notion, too, will come back to bite everyone this story…

Something Else To Look Out For

Part One makes the best of its castle location and vaulted sets, streaming pennants and knights on horseback; Part Two falls to bits rather stunningly, but it does have one thing of note. And that’s Kamelion. Here we get our first sight of the android in his natural form, quite a nice piece of design and clearly without a man inside it, with a voice so arch and oily that he seems for all the world like C3PO’s untrustworthy and even gayer brother. Unfortunately, by his very nature he gets few lines of his own, swaying between the Master and the Doctor, and that’s the central problem with his character: if you’re a shape-changer whose mind is always in thrall to the strongest will in the area, how do you develop a life of your own? So, in so many ways, the problem with Kamelion is ‘What’s the point?’ How, exactly, will a shapeshifter be the key to the Master conquering the Universe? Autons and Axos didn’t do him much good, while he’s already had a walking TARDIS, and he can hypnotise most people he might want to duplicate – as well as himself being, and titter ye not for this story, a Master of disguise. Does he think Kamelion will conquer the pop charts with his ‘Tony Blair Song’? Or could it be that this is the point where he’s finally gone completely fruit loop? Doctor Who novels later came up with a similar idea of a walking, talking, shape-changing machine super-companion and relaunching the series with “After all, that’s how it all started.” They didn’t know what to do with her, either, though at least she couldn’t just be left in the TARDIS…

And it’s not just by singing in praise of total war that Kamelion resembles the last Labour Government. Behind the scenes, he was just like one of their IT contracts. As the DVD documentary Kamelion – Metal Man makes clear across its quarter-hour bitch-fest, the robot looked great when it was demonstrated to sell the producer on the idea, but that was just about the only time it worked (in part because of a tragedy, though it clearly could never do much of what was promised). Actors (Peter Davison’s snigger particularly memorably) and writers all talk about the endless problems: how you had to synch your performance to its pre-recorded speech, which either came too soon or after a long wait; how it could barely move its head, let alone walk, and what happened when it was programmed to malfunction; how he ends up the only companion who just lurks in the back of the TARDIS without ever being mentioned until it’s time to go. Well, that’s not completely true – there was a scene recorded for The Awakening of him creeping out Tegan in the TARDIS, ironically perhaps the one where he displays the most character of his own (just not a very nice one). This was cut for time, showing how vital he wasn’t, but the scene still exists. Frustratingly, there’s only a bit of it on here, with people talking over it. For the full scene, we had to wait a year later than the “Kamelion Tales” that were supposed to be the last word on him – a joke about the robot taking so long to respond after it was cued, perhaps? – and look in the Special Features for The Awakening, which like all the Davison stories released on DVD this year is rather better than The King’s Demons, as well as being paired with a story that has a much better song. All in all, you may join the Doctor Who team from the time in jeering when Kamelion oversells himself on screen:

“And very co-operative. I would make an excellent colleague.”

Turlough / Hugh

Just three stories earlier, the series had introduced another new companion, Turlough. You have to wonder how hard lead writer Eric Saward was working when you consider that both of these started off a bit dubious, working for an old enemy of the Doctor’s before coming out from under his wing, and both were aliens masquerading as humans on Earth – so it’s no wonder that Turlough finds himself forced to the sidelines in this story. It’s a great shame, as Mark Strickson is very good in the role, but while it’s only in his first three stories out of ten that the script has to separate him from the Doctor – charged with killing the Time Lord, Turlough can’t be alone with him too often for fear of short-circuiting his story arc either by doing so or finally deciding not to and confessing – with Mr Saward clearly having a short attention span, he carries on having him locked up with nothing to do in almost all of his other stories because that’s just the way he started, despite his then being on the Doctor’s side. The King’s Demons is one of the worst offenders: with Turlough now a goodie, suddenly they have no idea what to do with him and he’s thrown in clink. The Doctor only vaguely notices, while Tegan doesn’t give a stuff. And yet Mark Strickson works his school socks off to perfect a weapon more to his taste once he’s stopped trying to kill the Doctor. Turlough was rubbish with rocks, disengaging spaceships, pirate gang-ups and Brigadiers, but here we see him deploying sarcasm to deadly effect. Well, mildly hurtful effect, anyway.

“Can you not call on Hell?”
“I could. But then so could you – with a better chance of success, I fancy.”

Ignored by his new friends and the writers, Turlough is pulled off to the dungeons by young Hugh, who feels his manhood’s been threatened by being spared on the battlefield and compensates by waving his big sword at Turlough with every other line. Mark Strickson and Christopher Villiers strike such sparks off each other that if this was shown today, the Internet would be buzzing with Turlough / Hugh slash. No on-screen couple usually hurl so many arch remarks without ending up in bed together, so it’s a terrible shame Hugh’s mum is literally put between them to defuse the sexual tension. Worse, the Lady Isabella is played by Isla Blair, a fine actress given absolutely nothing to do but say “My Lord” in an increasingly concerned tone. Wearing an enormous cylindrical wimple over a chequerboard dress, too, she looks like she’s come dressed as the Castle and turned up a story early for the life-sized chess.

By contrast, Anthony Ainley has plenty to do, but this does him even fewer favours. Both as the Master and in his hilariously penetrable disguise – it’s blown in the DVD menu, and by, well, just looking at Anthony Ainley looking exactly like Anthony Ainley (with a slightly worse wig) – as Sir Gilles, the King’s Champion and a French knight, as you can tell from that outrrrrrageous accent. With the Doctor failing to be a Pythonian French Taunter in The Time Warrior, a story set in a similar period and with many similarities to this one save for being pretty good, here the Master instead seizes the opportunity to tell the Doctor that his mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries. And this performance is justly famed. Still, he and the Doctor have rather an exciting sword fight, slugging it out with heavy broadswords rather than rapiers, and if it’s not quite as strikingly choreographed as in The Christmas Invasion or as entertaining as in The Androids of Tara, it’s a huge improvement on when the Doctor and the Master last locked swords in The Sea Devils (a swordfight that was both less ambitious and ludicrously out of place).

But once you’re past his flashing sword, fromagey accent and ‘So you did escape from [insert planet name here]’, you’re left with the Master’s plan. This one is so ludicrous that it makes all his others look like models of strategy. The line about the Master’s “small-time villainy” here belongs in a much wittier script; mid-Tom Baker, yes, this might have been an entertaining caper with the audience in on the joke of how absurd the villain is. But when the rest of this is all so painfully earnest, it’s less ‘amusingly silly’ than just ‘stupid’. The real problem with the Master’s plot is not that it’s “inconsequential” – the same author’s Black Orchid was exactly that, but succeeded beautifully on its own terms – but that it thinks it’s really, really important, when it’s just daft. That strips the Master of any role but to snigger, leer and do ‘evil things’ just for the sake of it, which is an even greater drawback when Gerald Flood’s ‘Bad King John’ is rather better at each of those jobs here. I’d been hugely excited at the Master’s return in the early ’80s, and remember thinking at the time that, after three really good new Master stories, ‘maybe Time-Flight was just an off-day’. But following that with this lost Ainley’s Master the benefit of the doubt for me, and from then on more often than not his Master’s a joke.

“Twice in one day – it is most – embarrassing.”

For me, messing about in history is Doctor Who’s iconic story form, but this one is less messing and more mess. As well as The Time Warrior, this has more than a touch of the earlier The Time Meddler, though stupider, and also The Crusade with the King’s brother (if stripped to just the Doctor’s storyline and not Ian and Barbara’s). I quite like a bit of revisionist history, but somehow I feel that the argument’s lacking something when all it consists of is the Doctor saying ‘Oh no it isn’t’ about what everyone thinks of Magna Carta (though the Charter gets an entertaining and informative little documentary on the disc). With only two episodes in the story, none of the Norman lords get much character; praise must go to Frank Windsor of Z Cars for giving some bottom to a medieval Mitt Romney who spins his views round so often it’s a wonder they don’t stick him on his own castle roof to measure the wind.

Does Terence Put the Dud Into Dudley or Peter the Grim Into Grimwade?

The King’s Demons and Planet of Fire invite comparison between their writers, Terence Dudley and Peter Grimwade. Each was a BBC director with past work on Doctor Who who then turned to writing – each wrote just three Doctor Who stories, all for Peter Davison’s Doctor though neither is able to give him much fire, and these are the final stories for each of them. Unusually for Doctor Who scriptwriters, they tended to novelise their own work, too. And neither, for me, are top-notch writers, though Peter Grimwade was an outstanding director (while Terence Dudley very much wasn’t). Peter Grimwade’s scripts were often rather tangled, but at least had some interesting ideas in them and gave the impression that he cared; Terence Dudley’s had more of a ‘that’ll do’ attitude to them. For Mr Grimwade, I’d recommend Mawdryn Undead and suggest you leave Time-Flight until last; with Mr Dudley, Black Orchid is rather good, and neither of his other Doctor Who stories are much cop. Much worse, however, was his spin-off script for K9 and Company. The Sarah Jane Adventures have been a triumph; the first go at such a spin-off wasn’t. And with Terence Dudley the producer who forced the strong female lead off Survivors (replacing her with the bloke who’d guested as ‘man with stud farm of obliging women’), making Terry Nation look like a radical feminist, he was surely the worst possible person to write for Sarah Jane Smith.

So it pains me to admit that Terence Dudley was a far better novelist – two times out of three, anyway. Even he couldn’t be bothered novelising his own Four To Doomsday (which Terrance Dicks turns into a functional book peppered with contemptuous asides for the script), and his K9 and Company novel is atrociously written sexist bilge. Fortunately, both his Black Orchid and his The King’s Demons novels are rather good, and remarkably flesh out fifty-minute stories into some of the longer books in the Target range – of the Kamelion Tales, for example, his adaptation of the half-length story is significantly longer than Peter Grimwade’s Planet of Fire. Terence Dudley’s favourite word, incidentally, is “contumely”, which turns up in each of his books as if for a bet, and his novelising the two stories in the reverse order to their transmission shows in glaring mix-ups on the page. Despite that, they’re among the most enjoyable of the Peter Davison novelisations, expanding greatly on the scripts and sorting out some of their problems.

The better of the two and the only one that’s currently available – as an audiobook, impressively read by Michael Cochrane, accompanied by so-so music – is Black Orchid. It’s also the more flawed. On the entertaining side, the first part (and first disc) is rather lovely, making gorgeous use of cricket, and particularly of Nyssa, Adric and Tegan’s competing levels of social embarrassment, particularly the “duck farm” and “That Bisto”, and though he overdoes Tegan’s being Australian, he captures her determination to be detained in sympathy with the Doctor as a rare moment of strength for one of his female characters. Tony Masero’s cover painting is bright, sharp and physics-defying, too. Michael Cochrane is very suited to Mr Dudley’s narration – the slightly pompously overextended vocabulary to up the page count – and most of the voices, notably his very good Lord Cranleigh and an arrestingly crusty and old Doctor. He even makes me feel for Lady Bloody Cranleigh at the end, which is something of an achievement, and manages the innuendoes with admirable deadpan:

“All at once a wave of happiness overcame Adric. He was doing it. Yes, he was doing it and felt wonderful!”

Then, mere moments after “‘Ah!’ ejaculated the Doctor,” Nyssa hears from a young man “about how he stroked, as she understood it, eight men in a boat on a river called the Thames.” At least he’s spared saying “cox”. I mention all this, though, to put off the bad side of the book; Terence Dudley is perhaps the most socially conservative of all Doctor Who novelists, which shows in many ways. He’s such a blatant snob even when mildly critical of the Beauchamp family that I can’t help noticing what utter shits they and their set are, while the servants are only there to serve and be murdered. The extra detail and relentless sucking-up doesn’t hurt the scheming dowager Marchioness of Cranleigh (though there’s no reason beyond snobbery for the Doctor’s conviction she’ll do the right thing in the end), but several other characters come over much worse in the book: her younger son, “Lord Cranleigh,” exposed as a wickedly complicit fake for his own gain; his fiancée both heartless and shockingly thick (crawler Dudley puts down a working class policeman as an idiot but respectfully leaves the family alone, even when Ann here is given absolute proof that the Doctor can’t be guilty); and Sir Robert the Chief Constable a bias and incompetence well outside the course of duty, despite an amusing moment when he wonders if Nyssa is “some diabolical foreign plot… some anarchist plot to substitute a double for Ann and infiltrate the House of Lords?” in which both character and author utterly fail to notice that there is a dastardly plan to substitute a Lord here, and it’s worked for two years. Try to ignore, too, the entirely out of character God-fearing Doctor in a book dripping with C of E sentiment (despite a dash of Catholic history) but disapproving of Johnny Foreigner’s rites, and seeing no contradiction in that.

Ironically, the medieval one with a king and barons is Terence Dudley’s least snobbish book, with The King’s Demons lacking the comic flair of Black Orchid but also without kindling any desire for violent revolution. The first chapter, in particular, is gripping, dwelling on Sir Ranulf’s misery and how the King seems changed, then the aside in the following chapter’s joust about an answer to Sir Ranulf’s prayer is far more deftly done than Lady Cranleigh’s dubious pieties. Another change is an improvement, too – the Master’s ‘unmasking’ is seen only through the Doctor’s eyes. It’s just a shame that the novels of both The King’s Demons and Planet of Fire avert a death from their TV script’s end; this one comes off worst, as a downbeat moment that leaves everyone in the lurch is bathetically healed by the Doctor popping back with a bit of Savlon. You have to laugh, as indeed Isla Blair did on screen, as she admits in the commentary.

Peter Grimwade’s novels, by contrast, lack both the highs and lows of Terence Dudley’s; competent, readable, but rarely inspired. His opening to the book is quite exciting, juxtaposing two very different crashing ships in a way that almost carries off one as a prefiguring of the other rather than the on-screen aftermaths simply forgetting what planets they’re on when a modern-day beacon from a spacefaring civilisation inexplicably turns up on a long-sunken wreck. At one point, the Doctor rather felicitously quotes Paradise Lost; it had featured in the novel of Logopolis as a metaphor for Anthony Ainley’s Master and so gives a pleasing sense of bookending Davison’s Doctor, even if here it’s merely when the Doctor’s being rude about Birmingham. There’s a neat little aside to The Brain of Morbius, too. Mr Grimwade clearly didn’t think much of having to write for Kamelion, though; he has the Doctor sneer at him as a thing, rather uncomfortably (even if he’s nowhere near as interesting as Drathro), and reflects that the Doctor “had quite forgotten about the robot from Xeriphas”:

“It was some time now since Kamelion had declared himself the Doctor’s obedient servant and taken up residence in the TARDIS. But the obsequious automaton had none of the cheerful loyalty of K9 and the Doctor always felt uncomfortable in the presence of this tin-pot Jeeves.”

Doctor Who – Planet of Fire

Peter Davison’s penultimate story, Planet of Fire is saddled with some clearing of the decks, writing several characters in and out while at the same time given a glamorous location which had to stand in for two separate planets. No wonder writer Peter Grimwade is said to have got fed up with it after several drafts and left script editor Eric Saward to paper over the rest. A lot of it looks good, and there are excellent performances – including, surprisingly, perhaps Anthony Ainley’s best – but the script is distinctly uneven and lacking in edge, sandwiched between a would-be Dalek epic and the fifth Doctor’s glorious finale and with too much to do to keep up the accelerating pace towards the Peter’s climax. This is also the last Davison story without monsters, and the only one in 1984; his era is the only one after the ’60s to feature multiple monsterless adventures, which may be one reason that people often think of his time as bland. It’s the last of that peculiarly Davison sub-genre of the arthouse, meandering, meaningful, slightly cerebral sci-fi, though in this case neither weird nor deep enough to match the best of them (like the more inspired Castrovalva, for example, this features the Master, a skip between locations and a bulky silver suit that cuts it even less as an ‘are they aliens?’ stand-in than the Castrovalvan tribal costumes). And among all this, new companion Peri makes a thankfully wrong impression; Turlough finally gets something to do; and Kamelion really doesn’t…

That Golden Moment

“Wretched citizens of Sarn! You’ve turned your backs on the Lord of the Fire Mountain – and listened to his enemy!”

From the day this was first transmitted, one scene has stood out for me. While the script and actors pull many of their punches in the attack on religion you can see in the bones of the story, the climax to Part Two suddenly grabs the theme and glories in it. So often lumbered with absurd scheming and cackling “Heh-heh-heh” in the background, Anthony Ainley suddenly shows what he can do with the direct approach.

The volcanic planet Sarn has been stealthily settled and exploited for its resources by a more advanced alien culture, and the bewildered, endangered natives have made a religion out of the scattering of technology, constant threat of fire, and occasional crashed survivors. As things go increasingly pear-shaped for them, some of the community have become more fiercely and murderously theocratic; others, free-thinkers trying to make more reasoned sense of it all. When the Doctor and the Master arrive on the planet, guess which side each of them takes? The Doctor, helpful as ever, is just on the verge of getting things working and making people reasonable when a figure in a dapper black suit appears at the door…

Anthony Ainley is simply outstanding as a fire and brimstone preacher, charismatic, Satanic, effortlessly taking control and enjoying every moment as he fulfils the deepest desire of every hellfire preacher and consigns his opponents to the flames.

Something Else To Look Out For

Like The King’s Demons, this looks very pretty. But unlike The King’s Demons’ stately heritage, Planet of Fire looks hot. Mostly filmed on Lanzarote, it’s one of Doctor Who’s few trips abroad and has clearly had money spent on it: never has there been so much sun in the series; never have the actors worn fewer clothes; and so never has any story brought out the sexism in fandom as much as Nicola Bryant’s first appearance as Peri (though naturally I prefer the actor playing Roskal, at least if he had a head transplant – sorry, it’s the ’80s). It’s also one of Peter Howell’s most evocative soundtracks, with soaring awe for the landscape, haunting tones to match Peter Wyngarde’s surprisingly underplayed epiphany, and strangely twisted electronic notes in the heart of the volcano (all, thankfully, available as an isolated score).

Peter Davison’s rather good here, with occasional tart moments (“Shall we gaze upon it, too?”), showing off (“I’d hazard a guess by a pupil of Praxiteles”, appropriately a sculptor famous for the nude female form), or figuring things out in his brainy specs. He even manages to maintain his Doctor through suddenly out-of-character moments like taunting Kamelion (and worse), suddenly offering lifts in the TARDIS, or being crabby with Turlough (‘If you’re holding back about my ex, you’re dumped, girlfriend!’). But it’s Mark Strickson who gets the best of the story for the TARDIS crew, with Turlough at last given the chance to grow up, to get out of his uniform (and trousers), and to get a suddenly jarring sci-fi name. Turlough seems to lurch through several years of character development at once: near-psychotic when he thinks Kamelion’s in touch with his captors; reunited with the brother he never knew he had; and offering heroic self-sacrifice by calling on his scary Planet of My Dad to help (much as the Doctor did in The War Games). And, yes, as he bears the sign of the Chosen One, he’s impassioned and commanding when declaring that he’s not a naughty boy, but the messiah.

The Doctor’s other two companions are marked contrasts. Kamelion doesn’t so much struggle to grow into his own identity as to give up, and he’s given almost nothing of his own personality (or Gerald Flood’s fabulously fruity voice) here. He’s also let down by the evident inability of the blasted robot to work, with an actor visibly having to drop his arms into position to ‘transform’ and Kamelion being ‘himself’ largely shown not by his android form, but by Dallas Adams staggering about in silver body paint (he looks rather better as the buff stepfather). The Doctor comes out of this pretty badly, too, struggling with the Master to dominate rather than liberate Kamelion and being absurdly slow to work out what might be up with him in the first place (hmm, could it be the Master again? Better go on holiday instead of worrying).

Peri, on the other hand, has probably the most unflattering opening a companion ever has – even Turlough got to be interesting and was at least fighting his bad side. By contrast, Peri throws a tantrum because she wants to head off for an indeterminate period of months in a different country that minute, without even saying goodbye to her Mom, and is portrayed as nothing but greedy, snide and thoughtless. She’s clearly meant to suggest ‘hey, I’m open to adventure,’ but the writing makes her a spoilt could-be-platinum-digging brat with a strange fixation on an alien dildo. She instantly strips to her bikini (happily encouraging Mark Strickson into his trunks; though Nicola Bryant was the only one who wasn’t skinny-dipping in the hotel, she was famously ‘rescued’ from her drowning scene by a nudist from the next beach), apparently establishing her as a shallow exploitation stereotype. Nicola even mentions “slash” on the commentary, but it’s not what you think. But I’m telling you the plot. Ironically, she’s paired best here with the Master, who gives her something to be stroppy about (my favourite moment’s her shooting “You do realise this creature is about to do a bunk?” at the local religious leader just before the incarnation of evil does indeed run out on that gullible idiot), and luckily for Nicola Bryant, she gets a better part (and more clothes) in almost all of her later stories. So if you ever meet her, when I’ve queued for autographs I’ve heard her express considerable weariness at still being presented with bikini shots; I once cheered her with a picture of her in a very different look which she’d not previously been asked to sign, from a terrific scene first broadcast twenty-five years ago tomorrow. And yet Peri’s debut still inspires some Twenty-First Century companions, with her “Now that’s what I call a real spaceship” mirrored in “At last, some Spock” and the closing lurch shamelessly nicked for Smith and Jones.

Quite Masterly

Anthony Ainley remakes himself here as a much more physically involved Master and is clearly having a whale of a time, eyes sparkling, as he gets to do something different. And not just in the Part Two cliffhanger – he’s the focus of all three of them, magnetic in his different ways in each (the first is the most predictable and great fun, even if his sticky-on beard has never looked more sticky-coming-off). It’s a fitting send-off to the great pairing between him and Davison (famously pictured back-to-back, cream versus black; in the Kamelion Tales, they’re framed face-to-face) – his Master starts impressively in Logopolis, finishes well in Survival, but often loses it in between. He’s got more stylish props, too: we see his gun open up and fire; his sinister black TARDIS control room, unsubtle but striking; and he never looks better than in a smart black suit. It’s all enough to put up with his Master yet again having landed in a hole and looking a bit dumb – where Roger Delgado’s original version improbably emerged from every defeat without a scratch, Anthony Ainley’s Master is Wile E. Coyote, forever dropping off a cliff or being squashed by his own ten-ton weight, yet even more improbably always surviving without apparent consequences.

The key to the Master’s renewal is, of course, religion. Taken for an angel and doing his best to capitalise on it, despite his desire to be born again he’s at his happiest playing in a very Old Testament set-up. It’s hugely to Mr Ainley’s advantage that his scenes are right on the main seam of the story, as it’s the critique of religion that’s the script’s most effective and, unexpectedly, subtle writing. Though you can tell it’s been toned down from the author’s intent, less ‘angry’ than ‘slightly miffed’, much of this is powerful and still relevant, from the freethinkers’ fear as they make the difficult journey to disprove their god to proto-pope Timanov having a scary but credible point of view rather than being an eye-rolling loon. And in him we have another stand-out performance, as guest star Peter Wyngarde astounds everyone by being grave and subtle, played and written with a frighteningly plausible conviction when he explains the need to burn heretics. It’s refreshing when a script so firmly for free will and against religion has the wit to realise believers can be more dangerous precisely when they aren’t mere crazies, and to show shades of faith from his quietly moving epiphany through his fiery zealotry to his Vicar of Bray-like accommodation with the new messiah when his own position is threatened.

The story has problems when it wanders off that through-line, though, and with so much wilderness on screen there’s room for a lot of wandering. The need to add Peri to the line-up literally drags the story off-course; it makes the first episode almost a prologue, as the Doctor takes a completely unrelated side-step to ~~find a new companion~~, er, sit in a café for a bit. And unfortunately they couldn’t go for additional location filming of Peri on holiday in, say, London, where the Doctor might have run into her – to pick up a new companion from Earth, the Doctor has to be on Earth, so they all happen to be visiting Lanzarote (played by your actual Lanzarote). This wouldn’t present a problem were it not for the fact that they then all move on to the suspiciously familiar alien planet Sarn (played by, er, Lanzarote). It’s as if they’d started the story by accidentally broadcasting an episode of Doctor Who Confidential. Couldn’t the Doctor just have placed a contact ad? And even once they get to Sarn, the plot lacks drive – there’s a setting, and people with motivations, but they just amble about, leaving a location, going back there, occasionally clashing, until it’s time to stop. It doesn’t help that when Peter Grimwade runs out of ideas, he substitutes the Master trying to trade bits of the TARDIS no-one’ll ever mention again like a demented Swap Shop for drama (it worked so well in Time-Flight).

A middling story of the Master – surprise! – posing as an authority figure on a colony world to seek power deep inside the mountains, this has always rather reminded me of Colony In Space, albeit targeting religion rather than big business and with a less interesting alien culture but far more effective design. With its themes of the mind as battlefield – albeit, in Kamelion’s case, a battlefield no-one seems to much care about – growing up and religion, it’s also an echo of Doctor Who’s fourteenth season, though it doesn’t do well by the comparison (by comparison, short on horror, witty dialogue or inspiration). As with many Doctor Who stories, it owes something to The Deadly Assassin, in which an exile returns home, the Doctor is unusually violent, and the Master in particular has a similar role: grievously injured, he’s come to a planet whose technological past has become mythologised to heal himself with its unique resource, even if the resulting earthquakes destroy it – and he’s apparently killed at what should be the scene of his recovery. You might look out for his later fiery blue Hammer Rebirth of Voldemort in The End of Time, too…

The third disc in the Kamelion Tales box set offers Planet of Fire – ‘The Movie’ Special Edition, in which original director Fiona Cumming returns to the story with a pair of scissors and a CGI toybox. Cutting out a third of it to make it pacier and more like the modern series works rather less well than her slightly disappointing re-edit of Enlightenment, while at 66 minutes it’s less ‘The Movie’ than ‘The Episode’. The new pre-credits sequence is a brave but very cheap-looking try, and it’s distracting to keep joining in with lines that suddenly aren’t there (my first: “That girl, Doctor”). The omissions that most harm it, though, are giving Kamelion an even smaller part, removing the lines where the Doctor threatens Turlough (explaining why he might have to go) and where he lets people think the Chosen One is dead (explaining why everyone suddenly obeys Turlough as the new messiah), and most of all taking out most of the incidental music score, which even with masses of flaming CGI added leaves the story lacking atmosphere. To be fair, some of the CGI is effective, and it certainly makes Sarn look hotter and more alien – but someone should have told them where to stop with all the flames, as it’s impossible not to snigger at scenes like the high priest and the Chosen One standing, entirely comfortably and unconcerned in their flapping frocks, right next to a flaming great rock and not catching fire. For once, though, the menus are quite stylishly done, with the same scenes on both Planet of Fire discs but using the SE version on the second (a trick they missed on the recent ‘new’ version of Day of the Daleks). The rest of the extras are quite impressive and, for me, rather more watchable – particularly the ‘Making of’ leading the several documentaries, which is chatty and informative, even a return to Sarn / Lanzarote, and a quarter of an hour of deleted and extended scenes. There are some enjoyable anecdotes across the documentaries and commentary, though I’ve heard one of the best told in person with a fabulous punchline (and written about it here, if you scroll down to the cheery bit at the end). The most exciting extra, though, is the “Coming Soon” trailer for The Dominators. I’ve written that Doctor Who – The Dominators is not a great story, but it is one of their best trailers, with great use of tints, circling graphics and an unsettlingly grating mix of the Theme and TARDIS sounds. And, if you’re desperate to buy more from this story, there’s even a “Doctor and Master” toy set (actual size!).

Lassie Go Home – Or, the Death of (Spoiler)…

Poor old Kamelion. Hardly in any stories at all, and then – look away now, I’ve warned you – they kill him off. And when I say ‘they’, I mean not just the production team but the Doctor. Can you imagine the Doctor plotting to give a “heart attack” to any of his other companions, let alone shooting them? Kamelion’s last lines are much dumber and more mechanical than his rather fey Gerald Flood incarnation (does Gerald get any lines at all in the second half of the story? How positively Dodo); Dallas Adams’ “Kamelion – no good. Destroy me – please” sounds much more like an Ogron or a dim computer, dehumanised so the Doctor doesn’t look so much of a git. The tiny, twisted, sparking body is rather affecting, but not to the Doctor. The more I think about it, the more it seems a calculated decision. “I am Kamelion… Was Kamelion” is sadly evocative, but pronounced several episodes before his ‘death’. We carefully hear the last of Gerald Flood’s performance even before the Doctor’s anti-robot taunting, or it’d leave a still nastier taste in our mouths. Not giving voice in his final hour to Kamelion’s original oily but highly intelligent persona silences someone never who sounds trustworthy but who definitely sounds like a thinking individual. The ungrammatical, almost monosyllabic, dumb plea for death at the end is delivered by Dallas Adams in a much more warm, loyal – but very dim – voice, so you trust that the poor thing wants to be put out of its misery. The characterisation, in short, abruptly goes from ‘evil C3PO’ to ‘Lassie’, at which point it’s OK to have him put down.

And there really is no coming back from that as a Thundercat.

DVD Taster: Doctor Who – Paradise Towers

2011-10-20T00:00:00.013+01:00

Traditional Doctor Who often includes fascistic guards, killer robots and ancient evil struggling to awaken, but the brilliance of this 1987 tale was to combine these elements not on a shiny spaceship or in a stylised English village but within an insane sit-com run by Richard Briers, clashing youth gangs against Mary Whitehouse types and bureaucracy gone mad in a run-down tower block. Result! Witty and inventive, the script is an ideal mix of comedy and horror in a still-fresh urban setting. Paradise Towers won a lot of awards back in the 21st Century. But not from Doctor Who fans…

Twenty-four years ago this evening, Sylvester McCoy and Bonnie Langford were deep inside Paradise Towers. It was Sylvester’s first season as the Doctor, and the stories – all still finding their way with a new Doctor, a new lead writer and a new approach – have never been widely loved, with the general view that each of his seasons was a dramatic improvement on the one before (and I’d mostly agree, up to and including the fabulousness of the New Adventures that his Doctor gave rise to in the 1990s). The major exception for me was this story: a near-perfect template for the Seventh Doctor, I’d have loved to have had more like it. When it came out on DVD this summer, I was delighted – but it’s only fair to warn you that many others instead condemned it to a 327 Appendix 3 Subsection 9 death. Some people say this divides fans… Nah. Most of them just hate it! Even when it was first broadcast, the then-cheerleading Doctor Who Magazine put the boot in in a quite unprecedented way: “distinctly tired”; “isn’t much fun”; “PREDICTABLE”; “OVER-ACTED”; “frankly embarrassing”; and “Actually, watching Paradise Towers made me rather angry”. The Magazine was still reflecting that view back in September 2009, when DWM 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – in which Paradise Towers languished at a dismal 193rd. As I’d put it well over a hundred places higher, this story might well be the biggest gap between my taste and prevailing fan opinion. Though I’ve previously written about three of the bottom ten and found the odd nice thing to say about even the one that would be in my bottom ten, Paradise Towers is the only one of that “bottom ten” that absolutely shouldn’t be anywhere near there, where most fans are utterly wrong, and which should instead be celebrated.

While this ‘taster’ may not be short, incidentally, my policy in these is not to be too spoilery. So read on without fear of finding out too many key twists from the end. Which is just as well, as honesty compels me to warn you that, brilliant though much of this story is, the ending doesn’t quite live up to its promise…

That Golden Moment

“It’s – it’s – aaagghh!”
“Yes, I know.”

I was gripped from the first scene when this was first transmitted; ‘proper’ Doctor Who grammar, this, starting your sentence with a capital letter and your episode with a capital crime. But while the opening scenes juxtapose death in the Towers and curious bathos in the TARDIS – if the story were made today, you can easily imagine them as a pre-credits ‘teaser’ – the montage a little further into Part One considerably furthers both the adventures of the Doctor and Mel and the mysterious deaths.

Arriving to see the sights of the acclaimed architectural triumph Paradise Towers, the Doctor and Mel find it’s a right old sight, and run into a gang of girls who’ve created names, crossbows and a culture from their surroundings. I still can’t help laugh when the charismatic Annabel Yuresha sashays menacingly towards our heroes and declaims, “Bin Liner.” Nor at their inventive wordplay, or when she, a Red Kang, bitchily asks, “What is Mel’s colour?” Sylvester’s great introducing himself, too. But in another part of the graffiti-covered, litter-strewn Towers, there’s rather less jollity.

A caretaker is moving nervously along a darkened corridor, walkie-talkie in hand, as much to seek reassurance as to make his report. I loved the dirty set design, the low lighting, the sinister silhouette against the window – in a properly crapulent ’80s tower block, it always felt like Doctor Who had finally landed somewhere close to home, both bringing the series up to date and making it that much more unsettling. And, of course, like so many blocks of flats, the caretakers are bugger all use. Is he fixing the lights, cleaning the wall-scrawl, offering help and advice to visitors? No. He’s as scared as the rest of us. And it’s the running commentary of his fear that really makes this scene, with Joseph Young’s captivating performance as a minor authority figure out of his depth as he finds mounting evidence of murder. Even the sinister bass of the music adds to the atmosphere.

But if it’s not the Kangs fighting among themselves, what could have killed the young woman we saw scream her last in the opening moments? What should be on the side of the caretakers, under their control, but have become a law to themselves and almost a mythical sight? Surely not the Mark 7 Megapodic Cleaners? And while in many Doctor Who stories the sight of them might have been saved for the cliffhanger, and in many Doctor Who stories that take themselves more seriously the sight of an unconvincing robot might wound the story terribly (not that you might in any way be thinking of, say, Colony In Space), the essential absurdity that these are the cosy cleaners that have gone on the rampage prepares you for what is, basically, a very unthreatening hoover with ideas above its station. And the punchline – exactly on the line between horror and comedy – is pitch-perfect.

Poor Caretaker 345/12(3).

Something Else To Look Out For

Sylvester McCoy is immediately endearing as the Doctor, Martin Collins’ sets are spot-on, but for me the best thing about Paradise Towers is the script. Stephen Wyatt was a new young writer at the time, and still does a lot for radio (I caught his excellent two-hander Strangers On A Film on Radio Four a couple of weeks ago), and his invention, dialogue and basic desire to stick it to architects and jobsworths really shine. The innovation of sticking Doctor Who in a dirty old block of flats is one that the new series has often followed in the last few years, and while this is very ’80s as you watch it, in Who terms it’s still very much ahead of its time, with the script well-suited to the feel of Russell T Davies in particular. And yet the buried evil on the (High) rise again could be straight out of Philip Hinchcliffe’s early Tom Baker Doctor Who – this is one of two 1987 stories that feel like folk memories of Pyramids of Mars (imprisoned grandiose killer breaking out through possession and robot servants) – while the sheer camp entertainment could easily fit into the Graham Williams’ stories for the middle of Tom Baker (in which sense, this is probably my favourite Season 17 story). Pity Eric Saward, who as recently departed lead writer had become a one-man Bob Holmes tribute band, yet on his first attempt Stephen Wyatt delivers a script whose love of language, worldbuilding, inappropriate humour, scary horror and even cannibalism captures the spirit of Bob so perfectly that it walks all over Eric. Yet for all that, it doesn’t stuff itself with references to other Doctor Who stories, just gets on with telling one.

The TARDIS crew do very differently out of this story: it feels like the real start of one, and the last nail in the coffin for the other. It’s Sylvester McCoy’s second story as the Doctor, and this makes a far better start for him – his performance is quirky, inventive and very watchable, while a new habit of fast-talking bafflegab works better for him than the previous story’s misquotations (and to the later delusions of godhood, indeed). He’s got a great scene where he talks his way out of imprisonment, despite the director’s slow pacing making it less tense and funny than it should have been, and another literally reversing the position of interrogator and captive (not the only bit of this story that turned up in 2006’s The Idiot’s Lantern). You can already see how this Doctor will work so well in his later stories and the New Adventures, the whole setting not far from lead writer Andrew Cartmel’s urban nightmare Cat’s Cradle: Warhead, for example, with the added bonus that it’s far funnier and that the ‘Dark Doctor’ is not yet plotting from the start to make Kroagnon peck himself to death with his own cleaners, even if an over-elaborate trap is already in evidence.

Of course in custard, I’m practically undetectable

Bonnie Langford’s Mel, on the other hand, is very entertaining, but the story’s very cruel for her. Bonnie works her socks off here, but in that shocking outfit and with a near-pathological character you can’t help but see the Doctor as fidgety for a new companion. And look! Right on cue, lots of streetwise teenagers with improbable slang and a taste for explosives. He clearly thought Kangs were best, too. I was one of many who criticised Bonnie at the time and failed to see the talent she’s shown so often since – not least in Big Finish’s Doctor Who stories again starring her – but the show at the time tried too hard to make her play a caricature of her own image and not a character. This is her best story for all the wrong reasons, showing everything about her that’s utterly unreal: a prim young woman among feral girl-gangs and dangerously polite old ladies; law-abiding, stuck with caretakers who don’t care; and an over-enthusiastic optimist who, when all the optimism’s gone sour, simply looks unhinged. It’s not kind, but it’s very funny. Can you really believe Mel perking “It’s great!” and “Fantastic!” about an advert for a housing estate? “I can’t wait!” There’s enthusiastic, and there’s demented. Having arranged to meet at the pool – inevitably feared and revered as “The Great Pool in the Sky” and forbidden under pain of death, complete with a stunningly camouflaged cleaner robot for which I’ve nicked a famous DWM gag – she elevates this to an obsession as she makes her way towards it through three episodes of urban degeneration.

Build High For Happiness!

The various residents – tribes, really – of Paradise Towers are where the script alone can’t quite bring it all off. This story has the same director as the previous year’s The Trial of a Time Lord: The Mysterious Planet, and while the direction still has a lot of problems, he’s noticeably improved, with moody moments and some striking high shots. The set design here is quite a bit better; the costume design quite a bit worse. But it’s in his casting that you most wonder if he’s not still a bit shaky, because few Doctor Who stories have such an uncertain mix. It’s not unusual for, say, some big-name guest actors to ground a story while cheaper, younger actors try to make up in enthusiasm what they lack in experience; this is one of very few stories where that almost seems to be reversed. Some actors here are terrific; some miscast but doing their best; one simply taking the piss.

It’s time to take the plunge and come to the Chief Caretaker as played by Richard Briers, the figure at the centre of every terrible review this story has ever had. He inevitably reminds me of my recent review of Colony In Space, but where that alluded to The Good Life, this is Ever Decreasing Circles – and where that story, as I wrote, subverts Doctor Who’s love of the ancient evil awakening theme, this one gives it new life until, well, the ancient evil takes on its new life. A fine actor who decides he’s just going to enjoy himself as a literal Little Hitler, his best scene is that I mentioned where he interrogates the Doctor and you can see Sylv almost physically dragging a more contained performance out of him. He also works in the turnaround cliffhanger to Part One and the nearly-terrific cliffhanger to Part Three (going on just a little too long), one of the few points when the story leaves black comedy behind and it becomes genuinely unsettling. But then comes Part Four. It’s a shame that the script weakens here, as it means rather a lot of wheels comes off when suddenly Mr Briers gives one of the most blankwallandcleaneringly infamous performances in the series (at the time, Pyramids of Mars had just been released on VHS, and I remember vividly the unfortunate contrast of both actor and make-up for very similar roles in a not dissimilar story). Compare the appropriately named Joseph Young, like several of the caretakers miscast for what are clearly meant to be a decrepit old bunch and yet superb. Still, I can’t help but forgive Richard Briers for going off the deep end because he’s such a lovely man: I’ve met him twice, each time at the end of hours’-long autograph queues where most actors inevitably get tired and testy, yet he was charming, enthusiastic and interested. It also helps that at the first ever convention I attended he not only brought the house down by apologising for underplaying, but privately took a complete git of an actor down a peg. This man had been a big soap star but only a minor character in Doctor Who, and was volubly aggrieved that his queue was much shorter than those for people he’d never heard of. After embarrassing most of his fellow guests with a tirade in the green room against “bloody anoraks”, fans who didn’t properly appreciate him as the most important person in the hall, there was silence (by contrast, I also once met his on-screen soap wife, who was delighted and delightful in a similar setting). Then Richard Briers took a sip of tea, and looked up, with a mild but firm tone, to tell him: “Those ‘anoraks’ are paying your wages.”

At the risk of sounding sexist, the women here are generally far better than the men. The Kangs are great fun even if you can’t ignore their being perhaps the most ’80s roles ever created for TV – with their massive spray-painted wigs, it’s like Toyah versus the Bangles – and give the story much of its energy. They get many of the best lines, but also the story’s most creepily powerful tableau, a funeral without a body that makes us as mystified, horrified and drawn in as Mel, the audience like her thrown into the Towers’ twisted cultures at the deep end. Then there are the older twin-set-pearls-and-suspicious-cooking-arrangements ladies, far more politely behaved but ultimately far more subversive as they come into their own in the second episode, where the cliffhanger is an absolute scream. It’s an ideal opportunity to compare ‘young people today’ with readers of the Daily Mail (and just observe how the ‘police’ are far more interested in bullying graffiti artists than investigating mysterious deaths. Well, except for one of them, but you already know what happens to him).

The political attitude of Paradise Towers, then, is obviously one of the elements that make it appeal to me so much – and that make it so very much Doctor Who. The series has always been about standing up for people doing what they choose against huge, monolithic fascist authority that wants to force them into shape; the Daleks were often almost as much about tower blocks and the council as about the Nazis. Now Doctor Who’s doing a show about tower blocks and the council, it brings it home to the viewers by having pseudo-Daleks – like so many Dalek-substitutes, the cleaners are a flop, if here at least they have the excuse that they’re cleaners. It would be stretching it to say that local authorities being so slow to take any sort of action is satirised by most of the action sequences being so slow and feeble, though. In Paradise Towers, there are two rival authorities that boss people around and see them as inconvenient: one, that people are messy, and bossing them by the rules; the other, that people are in the way of a grand single vision. Either way, the story is quite a Liberal line of attack, even down to a ‘why can’t we all get along’ appeal. Add in a study of social alienation, a touch of the final Quatermass (breakdown of society in an urban nightmare a bit into the future, brutal authority that doesn’t have a clue, old people looking out for themselves and feral youth gangs), and of course lesbians who are simply delicious, and it’s very much to my taste. Build high for happiness!

‘Making of’, Music and Me

The extras for the DVD are mainly led by musician and sound engineer of the period Mark Ayres: although he didn’t do the music on this serial, it’s a significant part of the background story; he leads the ‘Making of’; and he chairs the commentary almost as an ‘In conversation with Mark Ayres’ piece. Nowhere is this more evident than on Part One, where the entire commentary is between him and writer Stephen Wyatt, which is an interesting change of style (I particularly enjoyed Mr Wyatt’s mention of the theory that the Yellow, Red and victorious Blue Kangs represented the political parties, and that the extinction of the Yellow Kangs was now outdated as they’re in government). They’re later joined by Resident Judy Cornwell, who’s marvellously anti-authoritarian and great on how sweet and nice old people aren’t, and plain-speaking sound designer Dick Mills. There are eight minutes of deleted and extended scenes, the ’80s segment of the Girls! Girls! Girls! documentary on the Doctor’s companions (thought-provoking points by Janet Fielding, amusing computer graphics, but definitely missing Nicola Bryant). I enjoyed the main ‘Making of’ documentary, too, which adds Richard Briers, lead writer Andrew Cartmel, David Snell – of whom more in a minute – and actor Howard Cooke, who’s aged rather well and gives an interesting account of his role as wet “Musclebrain” Pex. At the time, the obvious problem with him was that he didn’t have the pecs, but it’s easier to forgive the miscasting in hindsight: he doesn’t look the part, but he can act it, right from an opening scene that adds to the bizarre culture shock of the Towers (and which I quoted the last time I raved about this story), through the gradual disintegration and eventual redemption – or is it? – of his character. So why didn’t the director pick someone who looks like a massive musclebound Rambo? Mr Cooke could act, and none of the muscles they saw could (surprise!).

1987’s new musical discovery for Doctor Who was Keff McCulloch, whose frenzied drum machines have a fair bit to do with Season 24’s unpopularity. Even my love of Doctor Who incidental music often comes a cropper with him. And yet I’ve always sneakingly enjoyed some of the soundtrack for this story, even the crassly OTT overcompensating for the cleaners. The Paradise Towers score is infamous for another reason, though – the original composer, David Snell, was actually sacked after he’d completed it because the producer thought it wasn’t up to scratch. And after decades of reading about this, the extra I was most eager for was Mark Ayres’ painstaking restoration of that score as an optional alternate soundtrack. The ‘new’ old soundtrack is… odd. It’s almost sound effects, or at least sounds repeating (rather than themes) for different situations, sometimes overcoming the dialogue, and too often either silent or one-note overwhelming. It’s not ‘strange sounds’ – like The Daleks, say – but nor does it offer tunes. It’s somewhere in between, repetitive motifs to atonal bleepings, and strangely unsatisfying. Again, it makes me warm unnaturally to Mr McCulloch. Both musicians were clearly inspired by the creepy funeral, though, as the broadcast chimes are effective and Mr Snell’s low, slightly eerie tones for it work rather well too, and he sets a much better tone for the Kangs bullying Pex than Keff’s bouncing. By contrast, he badly overdoes the music for the fizzade, which you’d think was the monster (it doesn’t help that I’d always strangely liked the broadcast “Drinksmat Dawning” segue into the Chief and his little pet). Even The Sea Devils didn’t offer such a high-pitched buzz for the cliffhanger that would have children and dogs scurrying for cover. I’m very glad to hear this score at last, but commissioning another was the right decision. I have to make a minor complaint that there isn’t – yet again – an isolated score available on the DVD, let alone the two they could have included, but as five separate audio tracks would be a bit much I reckon they have more of an excuse than usual.

With author Stephen Wyatt the person whose involvement in this story I most admire, his was the voice I was most interested to hear in the extras, and he’s very informative. I was fascinated by his starting point for it – not just his experience of living in crappy tower blocks and dealing with petty control freaks, but about what he’d like to see in the series, too, thinking that it never had dirty corridors like those he walked, and that it had got to the point where you had to know everything about Doctor Who in order to watch it. And perhaps he had a point in thinking Doctor Who had got far too up itself to be watchable; in the previous year, the series had had fourteen episodes, taking A Christmas Carol to start off with and finishing without satisfactorily resolving most of the questions, absolutely definitely killing off one of the lead characters and then bringing them back, with another recurring character turning out to be a mysterious future relative, and the whole thing mucking about with the Doctor’s past, present and future, with a woman he meets in the wrong order. [Miranda Hart look to camera]

Alex and the Pool Cleaner

Rather disconcertingly, I once met Stephen Wyatt through his ex, who was my ex’s disturbing landlord. Said disturbing landlord heard I liked Doctor Who and promptly rang Stephen up and handed the phone to me. This was twenty years ago, and I’d not met authors before, nor spoken to them, so I was more than a little stilted and had no idea what to say when suddenly presented as demanding his attention over the phone. He asked me which story of his I preferred, and couldn’t believe it was this one – his other Who script is widely fêted, this widely hated – so I told him that, no, it wasn’t always delivered very well on screen, but I still loved the script. He also asked, cautiously, if I was his ex’s new boyfriend, which I was very quick to deny. If you can find a copy of Mr Wyatt’s novelisation, by the way, it’s rather good, though with less of a light touch than his script: he fleshes out a lot of the details, and my favourites Tilda and Tabby get an appropriately fairy tale buildup (“Surely not”) and witty asides.

The photos, incidentally, are more from the Blackpool Doctor Who Exhibition. A major part of my childhood, it was closed in 1986 with a new version opened in the 2000s, but the Philistine BBC closed it again and flogged off most of the exhibits two years ago rather than preserve them for the nation.

Why Max Normal Isn’t

I’m sorry, but I’ve got to get this off my chest. Paradise Towers was the first fruit of new lead writer Andrew Cartmel’s desire to see Doctor Who become more like some of the wilder comics of the time, and it often has a bit of a 2000AD feel about it. Like 2007’s even more fabulous Doctor Who story Gridlock, you can see some of The Ballad of Halo Jones here, with Paradise Towers itself a slightly sanitised version of Judge Dredd’s massive citiblocks (and all at least more upbeat than Doctor Who Magazine’s memorably wrist-slitting-tastic End of the Line). And because of that, and the bloke in the bowler hat in Gridlock, the one character people always seem to talk about (rather than, say, the more appropriate Swifty Frisko) is one from the early years of Judge Dredd. His name was Max Normal, he wore a bowler and a pin-striped suit, and every single Doctor Who fan who mentions him misses the point entirely (I suspect even Russell may have made the same mistake). To pick on About Time 6 unfairly purely because it happens to refer to him while comparing Gridlock and Paradise Towers and so a piece I read today while trying to avoid saying the same as everyone else, the ironically-named Max Normal is not “vigorously-average”.

I suppose if you’ve never read a strip in which Max Normal – “the pinstripe freak” – appears, it’s easy to mistake the name and the look of this inhabitant of the crazed world of the Mega-City of early 22nd-Century East Coast America for some sort of boringly ordinary character. That means you’ve missed the triple joke: when he first appeared in 2000AD in the late ’70s, people in suits and bowlers were ‘normal’, and shocked by the small numbers of young people dressed as punks – in Mega-City One, everyone looks like a punk, and are shocked at a young rebel dressed outlandishly in suit and bowler when nobody else does; it’s the 22nd Century, so this is like someone dressing as Beau Brummel today; and he’s Judge Dredd’s informer, who talks jive, so he’s also Huggy Bear incongruously turned white and dressed like an old City stockbroker, which is just as outrageous an outfit in Mega-City One as Huggy Bear’s pimptastic look was in old Bay City.

Which is why Max just isn’t Normal. Perhaps the much-anticipated About Time 7 can correct this misapprehension when it comes to Gridlock itself?

DVD Taster: Doctor Who – The Time Warrior

2011-10-17T21:46:00.015+01:00

It’s nearly time for Sarah Jane Smith’s final adventure. She was with the Doctor when I was three and first fell in love with the series, and it’s been wonderful to have her back on screen for five years in The Sarah Jane Adventures (with CBBC showing every single episode this week. Time to catch up). So with today’s and tomorrow’s finale looming, I’m excited but never been so heartbroken at new Doctor Who. Time to go back, then, to 1973 and Doctor Who – The Time Warrior, where both Sarah Jane Smith and the Sontarans made their first appearance… Along with Dot Cotton and Boba Fett!

Jon Pertwee is the Doctor in The Time Warrior, opening his final season, the last before I started watching. It’s a highly regarded and influential story – not just introducing Sarah Jane and the Sontarans, played brilliantly from the first by Elisabeth Sladen and Kevin Lindsay, but a witty script from top writer Robert Holmes that takes us to Medieval England and sets the template for the series’ signature aliens-crashing-into-Earth-history story (effectively rediscovering the earlier The Time Meddler and giving the story a boot up the arse). And, like many Pertwees, it made a terrific book, too. I even recommended it as a Pertwee choice for my Eleven Faces of Doctor Who selection. But I have to admit, I think it falls a bit short of its potential. It’s very good – but a few plot oversights, a tired air throughout Pertwee’s final season, and particularly a director whose attitude seems to be ‘that’ll do’ (albeit boosted slightly on DVD by some shiny CGI effects) all combine to make it flatter than it ought to be. And that’s a particular shame for the Sontarans – for me, a childhood favourite monster, yet none of their stories quite lift into ‘outstanding’ (while top-ranking arch-foes the Daleks, the Master and the Cybermen all have top-ranking adventures to champion them). All that slightly apologetic tone may explain why, though back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – and awarded The Time Warrior a sprightly 47th place, I’d put it at least fifty places lower, just about smack in the middle.

While this ‘taster’ may not be short, incidentally, though occasionally brutish, it would be nasty to be too spoilery. So read on without fear of finding out the ending.

Sontaran Spaceships

That Golden Moment

“What is this?”
“Eh? Oh, just a girl, taken in the forest.”
“Girl? You have two species on this planet?”
“How say you?”
“The girl is not of your kind, Irongron. The hair is finer, the thorax of a different construction.”
“Oh, Hell’s teeth! Have you no girls beyond the stars? No women to do the lowly work?”
“Ah, I understand. You have a primary and secondary reproductive cycle. It is an inefficient system – you should change it.”

For my previous Jon Pertwee story, Colony In Space – influential as his Doctor’s first proper journey in space, as this is his first proper trip back in time – I picked a particularly short ‘moment’, just a few seconds of sudden cliffhanger. Today, I’m turning to Part Two of The Time Warrior for one of Doctor Who’s longest continuous scenes, a good six minutes that suggests some of the ageing director’s preference for theatre. What’s unusual (but rather great) about it is the way that, rather than cutting between different scenes to illustrate different characters, they all come on and go off as if the castle great hall were a stage: ‘Enter IRONGRON, a DRUNKEN MEDIEVAL ROBBER BARON, and BLOODAXE, his even stupider HENCHMAN, with SARAH JANE SMITH, a JOURNALIST – she is angry’; ‘Enter HAL, an ARCHER, held by BRIGANDS’; ‘Enter LINX, a SINISTER ALIEN WARLORD…’; ‘Exit SARAH JANE, on tiptoe’. And while the Doctor pokes his nose about outside, this central scene explores the two big new characters, the new monster and the new companion.

Like a lot of the best drama or comedy (here, pitched neatly in between), the brilliant dialogue is all about people not listening to each other, and here they almost literally don’t speak each other’s language. Irongron and Bloodaxe carouse in cod Olde English idiom (lampshaded by Sarah’s “Let’s talk sensibly”), and don’t bother to try and understand the “crazed wench”; Linx is coldly analytical and alien, constantly realising that his medieval allies don’t have a clue and grasping instantly that Sarah Jane is not of their time; and Sarah Jane herself acts just like we would, suddenly thrust back in time – angry at being pushed around, a little afraid, but mainly trying to make sense of it all. And thankfully this isn’t Hollywood, so Sarah Jane doesn’t predict an eclipse, dazzle her captors with the wonders of nylon, nor show them how to breakdance.

Sarah Jane is spitting fire as she’s dragged in – “Get lost! That hurt, you fool!” – and then intelligent as she jumps to the obvious conclusions: play-acting, she thinks, and tells Irongron to “take off that ridiculous gear and go home to your butcher’s shop!”; a film set? No, no cameras; some kind of pre-theme park reconstruction?

“Mind you, I think you’re overdoing the sordid realism a bit.”

All that, yet still not quite as postmodern as Robert Holmes’ previous script, Carnival of Monsters. Another recurring Bob Holmes theme is that he doesn’t think much of Robin Hood: prefiguring his swipes at the legend in The Sun Makers and The Ribos Operation, here he has two Robins – Irongron the robber baron and his band of bloodthirsty outlaws, and Hal, the handsome archer in green… Who’s hauled before Irongron here after a failed assassination, for an interrogation full of (implied) sex and violence. No wonder Sarah Jane – Lis Sladen still brilliantly showing us her working it out in the background – is coming to the conclusion that things are as desperate as they seem even before Linx appears.

The stranded Sontaran’s performance is scene-stealing in quite a different way to the brigands’ coarse humour and Sarah Jane’s brightness – abrupt, functional and dismissive, his clone warrior’s perspective on sex (ironically, less sexist than the Doctor) pleased Terrance Dicks so much that he’s used it again several times since. And he grabs the attention when he uses cold technology to force the truth from Sarah Jane. But just as you’ve suddenly sobered up to take the scene more seriously, Linx brings on the last player in this scene, a robot knight he’s built as part of his rent to Irongron. A remorseless, unstoppable metal killer, this should be the most terrifying part of the alien’s careless toying with human history. But instead of a gleaming suit of armour, the budget only runs to a quilted jerkin for a robot so fabulously rubbish that Linx’s ludicrously oversized remote control looks like it’s compensating for something. Too young to see it as a boy, I read about it with hungry excitement in the novel, and was mystified at the lack of a picture in the Doctor Who robot compendium The Adventures of K9 and Other Mechanical Creatures: the text had it, so what could possibly explain this disappointing omission? I mean, when I was seven or eight, a robot crossed with a knight in armour?! What could possibly have been more exciting, except a robot that was a knight in armour that was also a dinosaur? On which point, I couldn’t understand why there were no pictures from the next story, either. Such innocent days.

Something Else To Look Out For

The Time Warrior starts thrillingly, setting out a new agenda for a new season – a stunning new title sequence (the prototype for Tom Baker’s), and boldly starting off not in the era’s UNIT comfort zone but in a medieval castle with a gang of scurvy cutthroats, then joined by a crash-landing alien warlord. It’s only when he realises that this bunch won’t be able to repair his ship that he reaches through time to capture modern scientists and, after a daringly long absence from the screen, we finally get to see anything resembling business as usual. When it’s the first fully-fledged trip back in time for five or more years, this is an outstandingly confident challenge to the audience – even if the overarching colour of brown in place of the previous year’s glam Technicolor is a more accurate hint to the mood of Pertwee’s final year. It’s just frustrating that an often audacious script so packed with witty dialogue suffers a time-serving BBC staff director with absolutely no spark, pace or energy.

Jon Pertwee gives one of his more engaging performances as the Doctor, and his character’s comparatively un-gittish. But then, with his TARDIS is working again, why is he acting like he’s still in exile? I’ve suggested before that it’s because by now he’s thoroughly institutionalised – this Doctor’s still staying where the Time Lords told him to go even when they’ve “forgiven” him, as if he’s lost all confidence in himself. He travels back in time not for pleasure, but to stop interference in history – naming and claiming his homeworld for the first time, he seems all too thoroughly ‘rehabilitated’ as he volunteers himself to the cause of the “Galactic ticket inspectors”. He’s now such a well-behaved little Time Lord that it’s surely time for a regeneration. Despite his establishment attitudes, perhaps I’m more on his side this time because he’s under fire from all sides – sometimes literally – with critiques not just from Linx and Sarah Jane but, amongst all Bob Holmes’ rude asides, few are as pointed as the Doctor hoping to save Sarah Jane – “I’ve got to go and find a young girl” – followed by Professor Rubeish saying on screen for the first time what everyone would say to that (and I’m with the Professor on wanting chocolate rather than an extended time-tour, too).

Infamous for his showy hand-to-hand combat, Pertwee here gets a huge fight sequence across the castle courtyard that’s assisted by the unusually large number of extras but hampered by the director’s static long-shots that demonstrate both that there still aren’t enough extras and that he’s running about in utterly aimless loops rather than trying to get away. Yet I still can’t help being excited by his casting a blazing torch into straw, and amused by Irongron’s description after Pertwee’s knocked him over:

“a long-shanked rascal with a mighty nose”.

He’s then clobbered by Sarah Jane, which is a first – there’s a neat idea that she thinks he’s behind everything and then, rather than just argue with him a bit, forms a commando team to nobble him. The actors pull it off, though the script doesn’t quite (being rather tangled on how much she knows about UNIT, or the Brigadier, and coming a cropper on her having witnessed Lethbridge-Stewart being a mate). Well, perhaps it’s a satire on how journalists always have a fixed idea for a story and won’t let facts get in the way. The script’s almost a deconstruction of Day of the Daleks from a couple of years earlier (a story ironically with the working title of “The Time Warriors”, and out on DVD last month): another starting with the premise of a ghost story and turning into a trick of the time, this one saunters in with a brilliant new alien rather than not quite relaunching an old one, is far wittier if less intelligent in its playing with time, and rather than helpless Jo being tied up by guerrillas makes Sarah Jane a guerrilla leader in her first story. Doctor Who stories often throw the Doctor and his companion into a situation to cause chaos – brilliantly, here it’s for each other. The only drawback is that the director of this story makes Day’s look like Peter Jackson.

Sarah Jane Smith: Awesome From the First

“Well, I thought all this might be a good story. I’m a journalist. Sarah Jane Smith.”

Sarah Jane Smith is a star from the word go, the insults she shoots at Irongron still unmatched for a companion’s ‘first confrontation with a villain’. She introduces herself to the Doctor as a journalist, an independent person investigating what UNIT’s up to of her own will, rather than being assigned to him to assist with the Brigadier’s investigations. And though her feminism’s occasionally so brashly written it’s dated, Lis Sladen pulls it off (and the punchline to downtrodden Meg in the castle kitchens is still brilliant, though Sarah’s ruthless “Look at that great spider!” will come back to bite her). In contrast, the Doctor’s oh-so-funny “fair sex” remarks just make him seem like a git, though he’s really at his most sexist in other ways than the one everyone points to: yes, he asks her to make a cup of coffee… But that’s after exposing her as a freeloading impostor who’s wasting everyone’s time and not doing the important scientific job ‘she’s’ being paid and given board for. So what else, in that context, is she qualified to do? Stowing away on the TARDIS and turning out to be brilliant, obviously, but not in a scientific way. No, it’s not the coffee that’s offensive in that scene, but two other underlying assumptions: the Doctor’s control freak hostility to Sarah Jane asking questions shows Pertwee’s incarnation, as ever, to be as terrible a scientist as she’s a good journalist; and that a space research centre should employ Sarah Jane’s aunt as a virologist when all the other scientists we see there are working on alloys and drive mechanisms. What’s the difference? Oh dear. Yes, they’re all men, but Aunt Lavinia’s specialism has to be ‘girly’ because ‘they can’t do engineering’. It’s difficult not to conclude that this scene’s sexist after all, just not in the bit you think it is.

Yes, I did get my Time Warrior set last Easter. Why do you ask?

Perhaps the most successful element of the story is that everything comes together first time for the Sontarans. Kevin Lindsay’s powerful performance makes Linx a character, not a monster, aided by a great part as scripted: he’s playing the third Doctor, take two, with an even more hirsute UNIT. An advanced alien with (contrived, improbable, but jolly handy) time travel capabilities stranded among warrior humans he thinks of as primitive and grumpy when they ask him to do them favours rather than get on with fixing his ship? And if you want a critique of the third Doctor, there are few so pointed as Linx being both a more effective scientific advisor and a more competent spaceship mechanic in an hour and a half than the Doctor managed in four years. His and his race’s background are deftly sketched in in dialogue – with more in the book – and, while the Sontarans were inspired by Teutonic soldiery, his way of marching in, ignoring the locals, planting a flag and claiming the planet is as much the British Empire as the Sontaran one. He’s a triumph of design, too, in costume, make-up and spaceship: that famous helmet coming off to reveal a head shaped just like it; that expressive face; that memorable golf-ball ship. I suspect they were all reasons why they were my favourite monsters as a boy, along with their brutality – all brilliantly simple designs that you could draw. So I have to admit they were the first major misstep for me in the Twenty-first Century series’ redesigns, despite excellent actors: making the Sontarans not rugby-player short and stocky but tiny and top-heavy ballet-dancer-legged; making their heads too small for their helmets and their armour too fussy; missing the point of a spherical ship and giving it a cockpit, rockets and go-faster stripes, so it can no longer veer off in any direction and boys can no longer draw it at speed. Here, the only false note for the first Sontaran is that his ‘gun’ is a great interrogation device but a pretty crummy weapon.

Mucking About In History

“Something very odd is happening here.”
“Oh, yes, well if I may say so, Doctor, that is not exactly news to me.”

I’ve always loved the uniquely Who-ish historical anachronisms of aliens or time meddlers when the Doctor travels back to a well-known period of Earth’s history, meets both exactly the sort of people we’d expect him to and some outer space people we really wouldn’t and everything collides. And if the most successful part of this story is the outer space person, the most entertaining parts are Irongron the sozzled bandit who’s squatting a castle and his adoring sidekick Bloodaxe, whose cod-Shakespeare and utter cluelessness make them loveable. Particularly when one’s roaring for wine, and the other’s lost in admiration at his boss’s “cunning plan”. I’m not the biggest admirer of director Alan Bromly, infamously so lethargic that on his only other Who he was one of the series’ few directors ever to be fired, but I can’t fault him on casting David Daker in both his stories. Irongron’s just as brilliant a double act as the Brigadier to Linx, constantly rowing with each other (and the human constantly coming off worst). They’re far more memorable than effete wounded crusader Sir Edward, though you can’t help but spot that his feisty, plotting wife (given some of the best lines, and described by the producer as a “goodie Lady Macbeth”) is June Brown, now Dot Cotton, just as the archer she sends to kill the uncouth next-door-neighbour is Jeremy Bulloch, famous as Boba Fett (and a regular in Robin of Sherwood, though not with a bow). Most of the actors are so good you can almost forgive the gate guard auditioning for the prize of most wooden performance in Doctor Who.

The story’s greatly helped by its location footage at a real fake castle, some of which looks gorgeous. It’s not much helped by the director often seeming to think just pointing the camera at the scenery and leaving it will make the best of it, not least in the big battle for Part Three. He has one good idea – with the two sides now established as the Doctor with Sir Edward and Linx with Irongron, the two aliens are playing chess with real pieces, and holding Linx in close-up as Irongron’s scruffy band try to storm Sir Edward’s castle in the background emphasises this. The trouble is, he doesn’t then make much of the Doctor on the battlements as the other ‘player’, and showing Irongron’s men in long shot again proves that, while there are more of them than in many Doctor Whos, there are nothing like enough. Even the script, though, falls down a little here: great at being witty, it’s not really thought through the pitched battle, with the grim Beau Geste idea of dead men at the embrasures (used to great effect in the following year’s series) made lightweight by having mere wooden ‘soldiers’ and the Doctor being better at tactics than strategy – he needed to combine his multiple ‘effects’ of full walls, Satanic attack and arrows, rather than spreading them out one by one so that anyone watching can see the trick of each. I suspect the joint reasons are so that the camera can gradually spin out the different stages of defence for maximum screen time, and that they didn’t want to show the Doctor killing people. But if that’s the case, mounting a medieval siege in the first place wasn’t the best notion. Called a “Norman ninny,” the Doctor doesn’t even pass muster as a Pythonian French Taunter. The script similarly bungles its sense of scale in Part Four, when the Doctor and Sarah Jane constantly yo-yo back and forth between castles with the same ease and in about the same time as Linx pops up and down the stairs. I wonder if the final two episodes might not have been better cut down to one, making a story already taut by Pertwee standards run at a proper clip? I know I shuddered at Barry Letts’ suggestion that because it was so enjoyable it should have been dragged out to six parts instead…

The DVD extras are pretty good, led by optional CGI that can’t do anything about the poor direction and jumpy editing but improves most of the lacklustre Linx effects (though disappointingly doing nothing with the dull teleport ‘fades’). The exception is a big explosion, where an inappropriate but exciting quarry blast is replaced by something that resembles a small dragon sneezing through some gates, with a notable absence of demolition. The excellent ‘Making of’ is shot mainly on location, with producer Barry Letts, lead writer Terrance Dicks and star Elisabeth Sladen (the same team as on the entertaining commentary) added to bit by bit by other players. Barry wins points for ensuring Sarah Jane was both brave and scared at the same time, but loses them for talking complete bollocks about historical adventures (as I’ve previously demonstrated), while Lis’ list for Sarah Jane’s character is a treasure. The nine minutes of photos, often famous ones, are only let down by having none from the Radio Times Doctor Who Tenth Anniversary Special that’s trailed on here – not even the iconic, story-specific ones of Sarah Jane being stalked by Linx. The text notes aren’t bad for Richard Molesworth, largely because of the masses of extra script there wasn’t room for in Part One, and with a script this good, it’s great to see more of it. After opening well, though, he irritates by noting the story’s surprisingly early start date (a “New Year” season beginning on the 15th of December) but giving us no idea why, by cutting and pasting repetitive details, and by a myriad silly errors that should have been proofread. The Dr Who Annual 1974 in pdf isn’t bad, with uninspired stories but some pretty decent artwork – particularly for the comic strips – that’s improved if you overlook the artist’s clear lack of authorised likenesses for anyone bar Jon Pertwee. I’m forced to admit, though, that the rather wittily edited Coming Soon trailer is my favourite extra on here: “The Key to Time is mine, miiine!”

Sarah Jane Smith Radio Times Special

Humpty Dumpty flew in a ball
Humpty Dumpty had a big fall
All the thug’s horses and all the thug’s men
Got guns and shit.

Richard, after Chaucer

Doctor Who and the Time Warrior

“Linx was his name. He was a microsecond from obliteration.”

I’ve reviewed several of the Target novelisations recently, so I’ve already set out my view that most of the Pertwee stories are much better on the page than the screen; Doctor Who and the Time Warrior is no exception. Written by Terrance Dicks with Robert Holmes, it gets two massive and immediate boosts, first from Roy Knipe’s outstanding cover painting of Linx, and then from the extended Prologue, all that Bob Holmes completed before he thought it was too much hard work, but a thrilling action piece that provides much of the Sontaran backstory (and, I realised many years after first reading it, is the only Doctor Who book that describes an orgasm). Terrance Dicks rises to the challenge of this opening and makes what was already a very witty story a cracking adventure tale as well, enhanced by much more of the script than made it to screen, both in dialogue and in action (and young Eric’s heroic mission has always been appealing).

Jeremy Bulloch does rather a good job reading the audiobook, the easiest way to get hold of it today, and it’s a real thrill to hear that Prologue. So why not pick this up, too? The TV version’s good – but the book’s better. You might also look out the DVD of Horror of Fang Rock from four years later: Bob Holmes’ revenge on Terrance for making him do homework about history; Terrance Dicks taking inspiration in the crashing spaceship and bringing to the screen the Sontaran’s arch-enemies created here only in dialogue; and even one of the same actors. And, of course, you should be watching The Sarah Jane Adventures. If you missed today’s repeats, Invasion of the Bane and Whatever Happened To Sarah Jane? are particularly outstanding to look out on iPlayer (or, indeed, the whole lot again next week on CBBC). But first, and last, there’s tomorrow…

The Art of the Trailer

2011-10-12T09:00:00.006+01:00

Charlie Brooker laid into the BBC the other day for spending too much money on glossy trailers at a time of cuts. And that sounds reasonable, in the way that a 22-word summary can be more persuasive than a thousand original words of bile (along with a subtle and reasoned critique of David Cameron, sure to sway wavering voters). But it’s not just that he goes increasingly over the top to hide the fact that his argument’s a bit short – I know the technique only too well – but that I don’t agree with it. I actually like trailers.

Mr Brooker’s acceleration runs from questioning how much the BBC spends on promotional trails with “I'm not talking about the on-air trails consisting of edited highlights” to frothing at the very idea of trailing programmes:

“All that time and money to advertise a show which everybody knows about anyway. You could hold a bit of cardboard with "STRICTLY'S COMING BACK" scrawled on it in front of the lens for 10 seconds and it would have 10 times the impact. Madness.”

You know, I’m not sure it would. But either way, it certainly wouldn’t be as much fun to watch. So is it not really just “bespoke mini-movies” of “specially-shot glossy nonsense” that he’s against, but trailers in general? And isn’t it difficult to trail a live show like Strictly Come Dancing in advance with “footage from the shows themselves”, which he puts as an alternative? Personally, I’d go for more exciting trailers between programmes to keep us watching, and fewer simple cards saying ‘This is going to be on’ covering the end credits of shows, which is when they tend to appear on TV and wind me up.

The heart of his argument, though, is that he loves the BBC and thinks it’s throwing money away when it really needs not to. I love the BBC, too, and think it should always be alert not to throw money away – but, for me, the trailers aren’t doing that (and I’d much rather licence fee money is spent for something on screen, rather than managers’ salaries). Obviously, they’re encouraging people to watch programmes; not just letting us know they’re on, but creating a feel for them that makes us want to watch them. And that’s where I disagree with Mr Brooker:

“These things turn me silver with rage. Yeah, silver. I TURN SILVER. And they turn me silver not because they're bad – on the contrary, they're often very well made indeed – but because they have absolutely no right to exist in any civilised universe.”

Well, that’s me told. But doesn’t that just boil down to ‘This is something I don’t like to watch. Make something to my taste instead!’ And shouldn’t the BBC be a bit more diverse than just Charlie Brooker’s personal taste?

‘Preposterous,’ you might say. ‘No-one watches TV for the trailers.’ Not entirely, perhaps. But the more that trailers are creative works in their own right, the more likely I am to enjoy them. Yes, that’s often about the anticipation, where tantalisingly edited highlights can make a fine trailer, often cut to specially selected music (oh no! That costs money to license!) – I thought the thrilling music on the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy trailer really made it, for example – but there’s something about a “bespoke mini-movie” that often appeals to me more than the programmes it’s shown between. I realise regular readers may be amazed at this, but who says for something to be any good it has to go on a bit?

I don’t like every trailer, just as I don’t like every other sort of programme, but if you’ve never thought, ‘Ooh, that looks good,’ or ‘Actually, that’s better than the programme,’ I worry about your critical taste. Over the years, I’ve several times drifted in and out of watching Hollyoaks: sometimes it’s an unusually stylish and creative soap (I’m not an habitual soap watcher); sometimes the relentless teenery bores me and I turn off for a year or two. Recently, I’d picked it up again after a long gap after someone told me Jeff Rawle was in it as a quietly underplayed psychopath, and I’d started to lose interest again now he’s off in France. But I love the Hollyoaks – The Wedding trailer. In part, that’s because of the anticipation: hooray! Evil Jeff Rawle’s back. But largely, it’s because it’s nothing like Hollyoaks, and is almost certainly more entertaining than the episode it’s trailing. But so what? It’s a miniature masterpiece of Gothic camp, brilliantly conceived and put together. And, yes, it probably cost quite a bit of money. It’s probably driving Mr Brooker spare. Entertaining me as it does whenever I watch Channel 4, for me it’s money well spent.

Just in case you think that this is all about art, though, and that Mr Brooker is against one form on artistic grounds, it’s also, of course, about money. Not saving it – making it. ‘Oh,’ you might think. ‘Charlie thinks all these trailers make the BBC too commercial, and he’s got a point.’ But no. In fact, he’s against them because they’re not commercial enough:

“And it's not just madness in the short-term: what about legacy? If all that time and money and street-closing and dancing and filming had been used to create a show instead of an advert, they might've created something they could broadcast again, or sell on DVD, or flog to the Swiss and the Kenyans. Instead they blew it on a promo that'll air for a few weeks before getting tossed on to the ever-mounting stack of other never-to-be-shown-again adverts, which sit there gathering dust in nobody's memories…”

A lot of trailers linger in my memory, as it happens – because that’s what they’re intended to do. Short, stylish, attention-grabbing? No wonder that for many people they’re more memorable than the programmes. But also, what contradictory rot. How does criticising a trailer as something that can’t be “broadcast again” and admitting it airs “for a few weeks” stack up? And should the BBC only ever aim to repeat, or sell, rather than produce something new, for ordinary viewers? Most BBC programmes are never shown again. Most BBC programmes are never sold to other countries. Most BBC programmes are never released on DVD. Yet trailers are shown many times – so, if it’s a financial argument you’re after, surely they often give more bangs for their buck than the programmes do? And, again, sometimes the trailers are better than the show – because some of us like some trailers as works of art in their own right.

Lost in the middle of his article, Mr Brooker makes some effective points about how cuts and pressure for “value for money” make it less likely the BBC will take risks, yet it’s taking risks that creates many of the best programmes. But that has nothing to do with the rest of his argument. After all, one of the examples he cites of a risky programme was Doctor Who, which the BBC thought an enormous risk in 2005 and almost everyone expected to fail. And what was the biggest way the BBC encouraged people to start watching it? A brilliant bespoke mini-movie, The Trip of a Lifetime. Which was then sold as part of the DVD, and which I still watch and enjoy today. How’s that for a legacy?

DVD Taster: Doctor Who – Colony In Space

2011-10-11T15:52:00.020+01:00

There are a lot of fights going on in Colony In Space, last week’s Doctor Who DVD release, with guns, fists and ideologies. The Doctor fights to prevent the Master from gaining control of the most deadly weapon in the galaxy, but that’s not the only battle: individualists versus big business; the DVD versus the book; even EastEnders versus Corrie. But perhaps the toughest is whether the story can overcome its own reputation as long, drab and dull. It’s Jon Pertwee’s first crack at facing the unknown dangers of an alien planet, and it’s a quarry. Is there anything deeper?

I grew up reading the novels of the Pertwee Doctor first, and was inevitably disappointed when I got to see what I could only think of as the TV adaptations: last week I reviewed the newly-reprinted novels of two exceptionally good TV stories that quite lived up to the page; with this story, though, the ‘Pertwee Gap’ is at its widest. Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon was always a thrilling book (now also available on CD), full of character and politics – its TV original, Colony In Space, is grey, with occasional brown highlights. Even the fabled Doctor Who Monster Book’s pictures couldn’t make it look exciting. It came near the end of Doctor Who’s eighth season, in 1971, in which every story featured the Master and more location filming than any other, and is the first Pertwee story to get away from his exile on Earth. Less happily, it’s the first of the six-part stories with too little plot to cover their length that dominate his time (after, surprisingly, starting with three rather brilliant seven-part stories and one earlier action-packed six). If you’ve been watching new TV sci-fi this year, the good news is that it’s still much shorter and more exciting than Outcasts (though not Doctor Who – Frontios, also out on DVD this year), while the trailer for the next DVD release is the same story as Terra Nova. Back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – and awarded Colony In Space a lowly 171st place, which isn’t unfair (if anything, slightly too kind). Almost universally, it’s seen as worthy but dull: “like watching socially aware paint dry”, in the words of CornellToppingDay. But it still has its moments, as I go sifting through the mud in search of glints of duralinium…

It’s my usual aim in these ‘tasters’ not to be too spoilery, so you read on without fear of finding out too many key twists from the end. But this time the ending gave me some extra ideas, so be careful to stop at the warning sign if you’ve not seen it.

That Golden Moment

“I’ve got to try and stop this senseless killing!”
“It won’t do any good, Doctor, they won’t listen to you. It’s always the innocent bystander who suffers eventually.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m afraid you are both about to become the victims of stray bullets!”

Roger Delgado’s Master is used relatively sparingly in this story, but lights up the screen, not least because he’s still caught between wanting to kill the Doctor to stop him getting in the way and being desperate to get the Doctor to be in his gang. So the obvious choice for a Golden Moment would be their big scene together in Episode Six, as he offers the Doctor not a rose and some chocolates but a half-share in the Universe; except that I’ve already picked this scene, as it’s quoting not just Goethe but Doctor Who – The War Games, in which the same authors gave us exactly the same ‘villainous seduction’, but done rather better.

So turn, instead, to the end of Episode Four. I wouldn’t usually pick a cliffhanger, for reasons of spoilers, but that this one is neither a surprise (you know the Master’s going to try to kill the Doctor) nor a turning point (you know he isn’t going to manage it). In theory, it’s an example of the least inspired form of cliffhanger, where the episode has no natural climax and so someone points a gun at the Doctor and declaims, ‘I shall kill you – next week!’ before inevitably finding a reason to do nothing of the kind. In practice, it’s remarkably entertaining: swift, stylish, and in character.

The Master has arrived, impersonating an Adjudicator, and made an excellent case against ID cards for the viewer: he has them (forged, of course, but immaculate), and makes the Doctor look shifty by asking to see his credentials. He rules in favour of the nasty mining corporation, IMC; he uses this to prompt the hapless colonist leader to tell him about the alien ruined city that he’s really come for; the other colonists rebel, and start shooting it out with IMC. So what would the Doctor do? Try to stop the killing. And what would the Master do? See it as an opportunity. A perfect little moment.

Something Else To Look Out For

With Meglos the first ‘classic’ Doctor Who DVD release of 2011 and this the last, the year starts and ends with doomsday weapons, but this does a rather better job of setting one up. Colony In Space even has multiple prologues: with the Time Lords on screen; with the old Keeper in the book; even in comic strip form in the Radio Times. You know which is the coolest, as the several stunning pages of Frank Bellamy art here on pdf show (certainly my highlight). With the Doctor still exiled to Earth and just an undignified cameo for the Brigadier, the Time Lords are responsible for getting the TARDIS working, temporarily, to cover up one of their cock-ups, though this story does its best to convince us we don’t really want travels in time and space back after all.

Remarkably, being on a new world again suits Pertwee’s Doctor: his desire for adventure and exploration fulfilled for a moment, he’s much more enthusiastic and much less of a git to Jo, if still insufferably smug to the colonists. Though he does get several pointless ‘action’ scenes in the style of the Batman TV series which make you worry for his companion: in her big stripy top, she looks like one of the Penguin’s henchmen, and could be in danger of a ‘Kerpow’. Hilariously, the Penguin’s actual henchman, Morgan, beeps the Doctor after one fight as if to say, ‘Oh, get on with it!’ Though Jo’s top is clearly a popular style, as the alien city’s decked out in just the same scheme, in tackier plastic (her home-made titanium chastity belt hasn’t caught on, though). The Master, meanwhile, gets a simply enormous frock that he can’t wait to get out of, clearly deciding that keeping his disguise comes second to not banging his head on his own collar. He has his dim moments, notably an incredibly slow-moving ‘cliffhanger finger’ that you’ll know when you see it, but for once has learnt from an earlier mistake: after the Doctor broke into his TARDIS in Terror of the Autons, he’s had an alarm fitted (Jo, on the other hand, tempts fate by staring right into a giant plastic flower, having clearly learnt nothing). And with this release, there are now only two more Master stories to go on DVD, both from the same season and both exceptionally good.

I can’t beat Tachyon TV’s review of the colonists as all men with mid-life crises (and WH Auden), and though characters called “Norton” and “Winton” aren’t as camp as you might think, this is surely the Who story with the largest proportion of ’taches, among both the pioneers and the miners (when Caldwell, with his hard hat and ’tache, is tempted away from his duty by Winton’s winsome charms, he’s already dressed to sing ‘IMCA’). There’s much detail of the overcrowded, authoritarian life back on Earth from which the colonists have escaped to set up their own lives amid the stars, and I suspect reading the book gave me an early mistrust of giant corporations, though no great love of rugged pioneers. The IMC Captain Dent is a superbly dead-eyed and threatening boss (though less a pointy-haired than a completely-unbelievably-haired one). And perhaps no moment is better-characterised than when IMC think they’ve won and have a piss-up, something very few villains take time to do on Who. And just to reinforce the rivalry between the two sides, one actor on each side does indeed become a major character in, respectively, EastEnders and Coronation Street.

The “monsters,” on the other hand, aren’t a terrific success. The “giant lizards” have an excellent reason not to be (unlike all the other dodgy giant lizards in this period of Who); the “Primitives” are all right, with interestingly gnarled faces and green-with-red-tracery bodies; their priests stumble about uselessly; and their ultimate ‘Guardian’ looks like a glove puppet in a toga, even though the ‘Making Of’ astoundingly reveals that there was an actor behind the face. His lines, pretty much those of a starchy Star Trek alien, are no better than his looks, though at least there’s some amusement to be had at the end of a particularly bad dialogue with the Doctor when our hero, having been let off scot-free, proclaims himself “overjoyed to find that justice prevails” in a tone suggesting the Guardian’s just crapped on his breakfast. It’s the “Primitives” that are the main problem, despite that, and not just because – in a score that’s easily among Dudley Simpson’s worst – they’re accompanied by exceptionally awful music. The planet is a bit of a mash-up of American colonial history, less the stereotypical Wild West than Puritans versus corporate land-grabs, with each side populated by different grumbling ’70s middle-class Britons, the ultimate evolutionary forms of the Goods and the Leadbetters. In this context, the deliberate lie against the “Primitives” that “They’re all the same, treacherous,” is very much playing on fears of stereotypical “Red Indians”… But Malcolm Hulke’s attempt to portray them as other than dumb villains is slightly undermined by none of them being able to talk, and their acting villainously. Some of the other politics in the story works, though there’s plenty crammed in: dystopia, overpopulation, capitalism, nuclear power, starvation, colonialism, one of the series’ earliest takes on ecology… Though not sexism, as none of the three women colonists get to do anything, there are no female “Primitives”, and BBC sexism infamously banned a woman IMC thug as “kinky”.

This was the first story directed by Michael E Briant, one of the series’ most enthusiastic and inventive directors and a lovely man to meet, and though he goes on to do far better, there are moments: great lighting as Jo is taken inside the city; an extraordinary fight in the mud (the poor actors); some interesting angles on location. He’s the star of the (pretty awesome ensemble) commentary and ‘Making Of’, too, particularly paired with Graeme Harper, his assistant on this and later another of the series’ most enthusiastic and inventive directors both in the 1980s and the 2000s. Even they can’t liven up such stretched-out plots as gunfight-wait-fifteen-minutes-swap-places-another-gunfight, though, and most of the design is pretty poor. The colonists’ geodesic domes are all right, but an astoundingly rubbish robot, a very cheap-looking alien city, and all the worst of the ’70s on the IMC ship fail to impress. While Pertwee’s UNIT stories have dated relatively ordinarily as ‘the day after tomorrow’ they aimed for became ‘the day before yesterday’, here Earth’s technology of “five hundred years in the future” sticks out like a giant claw: film projectors; open-reel tape recorders; and all the villains have an exciting new gadget they’d clearly only just heard of called a remote control.

“Grow a moustache, and see the stars!”

The ‘Making Of’ documentary IMC Needs You! is hugely entertaining all the way from its Fanfare For the Common Man knock-off and South Park-style IMC men, steering exactly the right course between enthusiasm and mockery, with an impressive array of writers, actors and directors. Poor Katy Manning on the portaloo… Though I now wonder if Excelis was inspired by her real handbag. Michael, lovely, voluble chap that he is, is very much the star of this, though, particularly as he brightly recalls how it absolutely had to be shot in Tenerife (a clue: no) or just why he wept at Hello, Dolly! The commentary has most of the same people in a lively mix; there are text notes throughout; several minutes of extra film sequences; the story itself has four seconds ‘restored’ to it that I’ve never seen before, but I haven’t a clue which; and, as I’ve already mentioned, just about the best Radio Times ever – several pages of comic adaptation, two in full colour, with much more sinister Time Lords and a groovy time vortex.

Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon

“As Dent sat there, touching the controls of the IMC spaceship, he felt happy and secure in the fact that he was an IMC man, with an IMC wife, IMC children, with a beautiful four room IMC home. His present and his future were as secure as IMC, and IMC would go on for ever.”

Malcolm Hulke’s renamed novelisation, on the other hand, was a triumph. One of the reasons I like his work is that, while several of his scripts don’t really cut it, a few years later he’s had a chance to mull them over and does far better second drafts in book form – I like to think about things for a bit, too! And this one was amazingly influential, first in offering the “chameleon quality” of TARDISes which Terrance Dicks then named “chameleon circuits” in another book and which eventually made it to the telly, but not least in providing the first part of a Pertwee era ‘future history’ of Earth and its Empire, in expansion and then decline: an innovation picked up in the ’90s for the superb New Adventures, with Adjudicators in such novels as Lucifer Rising, Original Sin and Cold Fusion, and even joining the Doctor on his travels. Even on its own, it’s still one of my half-dozen or so favourites of all the Target Books, and now Master Geoffrey Beevers does a silkily brilliant job of bringing it to life on CD, too (though Roger Delgado graces Jeff Cummins’ striking cover).

I must have gone through three different phases of falling in love with the book, for three different reasons, roughly every 15 years or so: on first reading it in 1979 and loving it for itself; on seeing the actual story at last sometime in the mid-’90s, and realising how much better the book is; and then that gorgeous new audiobook reading a couple of years ago. For the book itself, I loved the characters – most of all Captain Dent’s three-page biography, but everyone down to the sarkier, sparkier Jo (who gets a different ‘origin’ here) and the scene-stealingly urbane, charming and rather camp Master (Malcolm Hulke seemed to love writing gayish villains). It’s so compellingly but readably written that it just sweeps you along – while the moral arguments at the end, something at which you’d expect the actors to have the edge, are given far more force on the page once Mac had had a few years to decide how to improve his very under-par scripting. Though one moral element that’s rather a surprise is how much old communist Mr Hulke adds not just an anti-capitalist tone but a religious one; like the novel of The Aztecs (coincidentally another story with the excellent John Ringham on TV), it brings in Christian preaching, though here at least the contrast is with Dent parrot-quoting every word of his IMC rulebook while Ashe is provoked to think about his.

The CD’s one of the best interpretations in the range, too – with the added bonus that while on TV you think, ‘Oh, it’s the Master (again),’ here you think, ‘Ooh! It’s the Master!’ when he turns up and lets Mr Beevers really get going. There’s one moment that sticks in my mind for adding something to the book, and one that strikes me as not quite as good as I’d imagined, so here are both. Mr Beevers has a great piece of delivery that gives a line an added meaning: when Captain Dent asks the Master for ID on first meeting him, he’s told “I am the… Adjudicator for this section of the galaxy”, which I’d always read simply as him putting Dent in his place, but here is given more than a hint of “I am the Master, and you will obey me” – after which nearly-the-magic words, Dent forgets to ask for his ID again, as if hypnotised. On the other hand, one line that had always stuck in my head has a reading that doesn’t quite fit for me; the Master’s “The Doomsday Weapon. It will never be mine” is desperate and a little high-pitched, rather than deep, bitter and slightly stunned, as I’d always imagined it. But that’s just down to individual interpretation, so I’m not going to say it’s “wrong,” like David Howe’s imaginationlessly pedantic liner notes about Chris Achilleos’ illustration of the Guardian. Yeah, it’s “wrong” for the TV. Or, alternatively, it’s the way it’s described in the book, and – more importantly, like the title, and much of the story – better.

Something Interesting About the Doomsday Weapon (Spoilers)

This hasn’t been a very surprising (or even exciting) Doctor Who story, and many of its metaphors have somehow managed to be both dull and unsubtle. But there’s something about the story that’s at least worth a second look. The end – I’m not sure it’s quite the ‘climax’ – does something very odd with the planet’s inhabitants; the “Primitives”, the Native Uxarieans, whatever you call them. And it’s even odder when you consider that the script’s by the same author as the previous year’s Doctor Who and the Silurians, in which he pioneered the idea that green scaly people are people too, and much odder still in retrospect compared to ‘usual’ Doctor Who. There’s this alien race… And the Doctor’s pretty much happy to see them all die at the end, in fact suggesting it. How jarring this is is particularly obvious in the TV version that you can now watch on DVD, as the Doctor’s moral ‘debate’ with the Guardian of the Doomsday Weapon / City is very poorly thought through by comparison to that in the book that I grew up with (the dialogue’s so bloody awful it doesn’t even stand much comparison with Doctor Who – The Dæmons, the story which followed it on television and the infamous ending of which it closely resembles). Particularly before Russell T Davies’ weary last Time Lord, how often did the Doctor just gently ask moderate, if not benign, aliens to die, and they just think about it and say, ‘Oh, all right, then’?

If you come to this having seen a lot of later Doctor Who, particularly the Hinchcliffe years of the mid-’70s (or even read Harry Potter), you’ll see what’s deeply strange about it. In one of the most-told types of Doctor Who story, ancient forces of evil – either races or individuals – try to conquer or kill all before them, are to all intents and purposes killed, and then ages later turn out not to have been killed quite enough and try to rise from the grave to pick up where they left off. This is usually where the Doctor arrives, and spends a long time trying to explain to everyone else in the story that this ancient evil is, in Tat Wood’s phrase, insufficiently dead, and has to convince them all in a race against time while the ancient evil is becoming less sufficiently dead by the episode. And, usually, for the ancient evil to rise, it needs to get something back: a new body to walk around in (someone else’s will do); an old body rebuilt; or get hold of its all-powerful doomsday weapon so that it can carry on laying waste to the Universe in the way it was before it was so rudely interrupted. And the Doctor’s job is generally to make sure that old interruption is permanent this time.

But Colony In Space turns this whole theme on its head. And, confusingly (as with a comedy reference to Jim’ll Fix It before that programme started), it does this before it became perhaps Doctor Who’s best-known trope. Take Doctor Who – Meglos, for example: far from Doctor Who’s best ‘ancient evil rising’ story, but the one I reviewed most recently, and the other bookend to this year’s DVD releases. It follows several of the standard patterns to the point of cliché: the last survivor of an ancient race, buried for aeons on “the dead planet”; suddenly wakes up and possesses someone else’s body; once had an hideously powerful doomsday weapon which has since been picked up by someone else who doesn’t realise its true potential, and spends the story attempting to reclaim it and, with it, his position of megalomaniac supremacy. Colony In Space has many things in common: a megalomaniac super-villain; a planet that something has mysteriously laid waste to; an ancient but fallen alien race; and another planet-blasting doomsday weapon, so famous that they named the book after it. But just this once, these elements all appear in the wrong order.

The key to it is that there wasn’t some heroic battle by the forces of light that almost but not quite killed the ancient evil, so it hasn’t spent all the time since slowly regathering its strength. It isn’t really even evil, and it hasn’t lost its doomsday weapon. And the brutal capitalists and the inept drop-outs aren’t the only representations of ‘us’ in the story. Perhaps Malcolm Hulke doesn’t try hard to defend the natives from colonialism here because these aliens are ‘us’, too, having risen to a technological peak, discovered how to build a doomsday weapon, built it… And, rather than hearing about how they went on a terrible war of conquest and devastation that eventually provoked their victims to rise against them and cast them down, simply building the weapon meant they’d created a power source that would slowly poison them (picking one of the author’s many subtitles at random: A BIT LIKE NUCLEAR WASTE, DO YOU SEE?). They weren’t suddenly blasted to an inch of death and spent the centuries crawling back; they were just slowly eaten away until they forgot who they were. They didn’t disappear to vanishing point, only left as an ancient fear, and they didn’t lose their doomsday weapon; they’re still there, just ignored as they decline, and it’s been there all along, not being used as a weapon, but still very gradually killing them and their planet bit by bit, the series’ only doomsday weapon that does, indeed, destroy worlds, but not just in the way you expect. They weren’t – as far as we know – megalomaniacs, and they’re now no longer capable of producing megalomaniacs; the megalomaniac villain has to come in from somewhere else and try to exploit what’s left. But the Master doesn’t understand this story: it’s saying that even wanting empires consumes you, that a doomsday weapon isn’t about power but simply extinction, and that the Uxarieans have been sliding down and don’t want to soar back up to terrible glory. They’re no longer capable even of imagining it. The Doctor doesn’t try to kill the ancient evil again: he just asks it, understanding its lingering decline, knowing it’s not really evil at all, whether – after all this time painfully dying – it might be time to just die.

The Sky Is Falling – Result!

2011-10-05T09:00:00.003+01:00

Good news for TV viewers, small business and Europe – bad news for Rupert Murdoch and big money. And perhaps the first time I’ve ever cheered a story about football. So congratulations to pub landlady Karen Murphy for standing up for herself against the big business bullies, and to the European Court of Justice for saying that big cartels can’t stop free competition. She bought a legal decoder, paid tax on it, and used it to show football on her pubs – only for greedy monopolists to shriek and fine her. Well, I hope Sky has to repay her £8000. And that someone in the vast corporation (not a Murdoch, obviously) feels slightly ashamed at pretending a small pub in Portsmouth that’s paid a proper subscription is a rival “broadcaster”, as if they were another giant.

I’ve never liked football and would choose a different pub, but I know what it’s like to be a fan, and I know that standing up to bullies is right and that big business monopolies are wrong. And a lot of football fans I know are far from happy at the big money that runs the Premier League and its unholy bargain with Rupert Murdoch (not least when it doesn’t matter how many millions you play a footballer if the spoiled brats decide they’d rather take the money but refuse to play anyway).

If Mr Murdoch and the Premier League want to charge Sky-high prices to let people watch football when it can be watched more cheaply under absolutely legal agreements in other European countries, the point of the EU’s free trade laws is that you can shop around. No wonder all the Murdoch press hate the EU, eh? Competition like this might force some of Sky’s prices down, put a brake on Murdoch power, and perhaps even throw some cold water in the faces of the Premier League fat cats. All good things from where I’m standing. This isn’t about not paying – it’s about not paying through the nose when someone else is selling the same thing more cheaply (like Sky, legally; like Sky, the Greek broadcaster has nothing to do with ‘making the product’ and is just selling on someone else’s work).

Apparently lawyers for the combined forces of monopolist fatcattery are aiming to mount a fresh challenge on “copyright” grounds – as if they invented footballers. Let’s hope the courts continue to uphold competition for consumers over the vested interests of bullying greed.

Doctor Who In Some Exciting Adventures With BBC Books

2011-10-04T20:00:00.008+01:00

Now that Doctor Who has finished again – and started again, gloriously, with The Sarah Jane Adventures back – perhaps you’re in the mood for more Doctor Who? When I was a lad, the only way to get more (with no spin-off shows, DVDs or BBC3) was to read the thrilling Target Books novelisations, a series so successful they sold over six million books. And not all to me. Many are now selling as talking books for CD and download, and now six have been reprinted and relaunched by BBC Books as actual books (and downloads). Are they worth getting?

BASED ON THE POPULAR BBC TELEVISION SERIALS

Having been much too ill to get to most Doctor Who events in the last year, my first of 2011 was this July, when I managed to haul myself along to Forbidden Planet London for the launch of the BBC Books Classic Reprints line – and I’m very glad I did. With Terrance Dicks, who wrote more of the Target Books than anyone else, Chris Achilleos, whose stylish cover paintings I endlessly redrew, and Carole Ann Ford and Fraser Hines, who played perhaps the ’60s companions of whom the Doctor was fondest, it was a dream line-up from my childhood, and all on good form (despite one of them being as hay-feverish as I was, at which I gave him a little blue pill. No, not that little blue pill). All were enthusiastic about the well-loved old books being back in the shops, though none of them had any idea if more were planned – so I hope they’ve sold well.

The six books have been chosen carefully both for quality and nostalgia value: the first two books written for each of the first three Doctors, all amongst Target’s first printings in the mid-’70s (and two of those originally written in the ’60s, when the range stretched to three rather than climbing past 150), most given different, more exciting names to the TV versions. All were amongst the first to be released on CD, too, each read with verve by talented actors and accompanied by music and sound effects (though later releases have more of each, and more of Nick Briggs doing the monster voices). And, though all these books are too early to feature Sarah Jane Smith, it’s noticeable how resourceful – now we’d say proactive – the Doctor’s women companions are in most of these. No wonder I grew up thinking so highly of Barbara, even Polly, and particularly that Dr Liz Shaw was the business. And she still is. You might also notice that the “monsters” from four of these books have been back in Doctor Who on telly just in the last couple of years, and that you can even get some of their CDs with the action figures. And all were among the first ‘proper’ books I ever read, including the very first. But they’re not merely nostalgic reprints.

Each book has been carefully rejacketed with a stylish design complementing Chris Achilleos’ gorgeous original covers (though the Seal of Rassilon on the back’s a bit much), and they look terrific – though I suspect that the embossed soft covers may not stand up to batterings in the way the cheap old laminated ones did. And each has been given a number of DVD-style extra features: new introductions by today’s writers, and scene-setting notes about the characters, authors and background by Justin Richards and Steve Tribe (most notably on Doctor Who and the Daleks, with its very different opening to the TV version). Even a bit more proof-reading – no longer will I expect Channing to finish a paragraph with the stirring declaration, “We must find the swarm eader!” – and several touches of pedantry. Each has also reproduced the original interior illustrations at their proper size, a relief after the postage stamps in the CD booklets, though they’ve curiously omitted all the captions. So I’ve included below one original, captioned, illustration that was one of my favourites, despite the caption being both unfortunate and a spoiler for the climax (watch out).

BBC Books On Target For Doctor Who

Doctor Who and the Daleks

It had to be this one. The Doctor’s second ever adventure – the one where he first meets the Daleks, and the reason why the series is still going strong today (you can buy Doctor Who – The Daleks as part of the Doctor Who – The Beginning DVD Box Set). So, it’s the first monster; was the first novelisation (and becomes a different ‘first story’ in that, as you can read); the first feature-film adaptation; the first Target produced as a talking book on CD. And it was first published as Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With the Daleks – which, remarkably, it still is.

“I began to feel better. The Doctor had told me the wisest thing to do would be to open my mind and accept what had happened.
“I did.”

Author David Whitaker was one of Doctor Who’s founding geniuses; the series’ first lead writer, an excellent scriptwriter (later writing two of the best TV Dalek stories) and, here, the show’s first novelist. This book is still among the best, and almost the only one to use first-person narration, here by Ian Chesterton – one of the reasons why William Russell’s audiobook reading works so well, as he’s not just great at acting the other parts but is here given more to do with his own original role than any other Doctor Who actor. Chris Achilleos’ cover is very striking – not technically a great likeness of William Hartnell, with almost cartoonishly stylised Daleks and TARDIS… And yet that style is gripping, creating one of the most iconic covers in the series. Arnold Schwartzman’s internal illustrations are more detailed and ‘correct’, yet somehow less memorable: give me Mr Achilleos’ eye-catching style, flaming guns and a great picture of the Doctor if not the actor, making him mysterious, dangerous and unforgettable, rather than the neatly executed sketches inside the book that make him sometimes look more like a nice old lady (while if you ever find the ’60s Armada paperback, this is the only Who novel to have two completely different sets of illustrations rather than just different covers: Peter Archer offers a very buff Temmosus being shot, for example, and a memorable glass Dalek). On its first publication back in 1964, Kingsley Amis observed that “the kids should eat it,” while in his 2011 introduction Neil Gaiman, one of those 1964 kids, loves the food machine (I always wanted the shower) and is absolutely right for me about the power of books back in the day, even though I’m a decade younger than he is.

It’s difficult to over-praise David Whitaker here: he was script editor on Terry Nation’s original story which catapulted Doctor Who to success; in writing such a great first Doctor Who novel, he’s second only to Terrance Dicks in making the Target books such an incredibly successful series; and, perhaps most of all, he turns a story that’s far more powerful for its design than its words into an improbably terrific novel. On screen, this is a world of strange and brilliant invention, captured in Brian Hodgson and Tristram Cary’s eerie soundscapes and, above all, Ray Cusick’s fantastic designs both for the petrified jungle and metal city that make up the world of Skaro itself, but for creating the Daleks. And yet Mr Whitaker makes the story just as powerful without any of that, not just by giving us Ian’s compelling voice but by devising new elements which were so memorable they became part of the TV series decades later, such as that glass Dalek, or Ian and Barbara falling in love with each other (before we heard about them as a still-young married couple in The Sarah Jane Adventures last year, some grumbled this was just a fan invention; had they never read David Whitaker telling us, back in 1964?). Though these days no new Doctor Who book would include our heroes smoking, even to introduce the Doctor’s “everlasting matches”, and would think twice about making the Doctor such a git.

Doctor Who and the Crusaders

David Whitaker’s second novel is the most unadulterated work of his we have, and probably the best surviving version of his own rather fine script: Doctor Who – The Crusade was among the stories the BBC threw into a skip, though some of it’s been recovered since (you can buy the Doctor Who – Lost In Time DVD Box Set with two surviving episodes and the soundtracks of the two missing episodes, or a CD of the whole soundtrack with narration to make it easier to follow). It’s certainly the most old-fashioned of the books and an old-fashioned romance to boot, both in the sense of a ripping yarn and the burgeoning love story between Ian and Barbara. It could easily have been a fairly progressive ’60s take on a familiar historical adventure story – in fact, that’s exactly what it is – with a modern even-handedness between Crusaders and Saracens and its heart in the right place (if its terminology isn’t). And it has a very different view of time travel to modern Doctor Who…

“‘Poor Sir Ian,’ he repeated. ‘What dreadful anguish and despair you must be suffering now.’”

The TARDIS crew land in Palestine amid the Crusades, and are caught up trying to survive the plotting on both sides; the most interesting characters here are the two leaders, Richard and Saladin, each very differently drawn but each displaying a mixture of dangerousness, nobility and moral ambiguity, and the best lines and the most gripping parts of the story are when these two are involved. Unfortunately, not wanting to get too involved in history, the story weakens towards the end when both Richard and Saladin’s parts have to reduce in favour of a key warlord serving under each of them, men who are fictional, potentially disposable, and – not to put too fine a point on it – utter bastards. So the latter part of the book both reads less lyrically and seems less ‘important’. And readers who grew up in the ’80s might enjoy a character called Thatcher performing some 12th-Century privatisations.

Chris Achilleos’ cover is pretty good, if a bit too busy (though I never say no to Julian Glover, who played King Richard), and the book’s illustrated generously by Henry Fox, whose picture of Ian duelling perfectly fits his place as the very definite hero of the novel. Again, and appropriately, this is one that William Russell reads aloud with gravitas for CD. Charlie Higson’s new introduction is merely OK (though you can tell he wasn’t as successful as Russell at relaunching a classic series). Possibly the most striking part of the book today is the Prologue, however, in which David Whitaker’s very authored, almost didactic view of time travel is far closer to predestination than the series has embraced ever since – and in which there’s a famous misprint, kept in for the new edition, that makes Susan’s partner at the end of The Dalek Invasion of Earth suddenly very disturbing indeed…

Doctor Who and the Cybermen

Gerry Davis was another Doctor Who script editor, co-creator of the Cybermen and co-author of this story when it was on TV as Doctor Who – The Moonbase; again, the BBC burnt some of it (and again, you can buy the two surviving episodes and the soundtracks of the two missing episodes on the Doctor Who – Lost In Time DVD Box Set, or a CD of the whole soundtrack with narration). And this is the book about which I have the most mixed feelings from this whole selection. With my critical brain switched on, this is clearly less inspired a script and a novel than the other five… But it was the first book I ever bought and the first book I ever read – in fact, the book that made me learn to read – and I can’t help but love it.

“‘Here’s our holy water,’ said Polly, holding up the small bottle of nail varnish remover. ‘I’m going to do an experiment… Voilà cocktail Polly!’”

The first Cyberman story so pleased the Doctor Who production team that they did it again right away – and this is it, with a lot less inspiration, but a far better part for the Doctor (including Patrick Troughton’s most defining ‘mission statement’). And Gerry Davis carries the plot along well with his functional but endearing prose, making the TARDIS a ship in a stormy sea, making her crew memorable throughout (particularly Polly, asking pointed questions about the Doctor’s qualifications and weaponising Clarins to stop any sexist comments dead in their tracks), making the Cybermen less B-Movie than they were on TV and making a right mess of their history, though also with the first outing for the iconic Prologue: The Creation of the Cybermen. The Doctor starts off here with the TARDIS out of control and finishes by slipping away quietly, which feels exactly like the way things should be. And the next story, though not the next book, was absolutely brilliant – if the book misses one thing, it’s ending with a giant claw.

Gareth Roberts – who just ten days ago brought Cyber-chops back to TV in Closing Time – captures the experience of reading in his Introduction, while the fabulous Anneke Wills, who played Polly on TV, is the main reader for this audiobook – with Nick Briggs on the Cybervoices – and is terrific at it. While this may be the weakest of the six books, it might be the strongest of the readings, and all the more so when almost all the voices Anneke does, as she pointed out rather witheringly, are for men. She’s got a lovely voice: quite deep, intimate and reassuring – great for a storyteller, and though not all her accents are spot-on, she does rather a good breathy Troughton, particularly capturing his determination near the end (though they should probably have gone for a second take when she creates a novel colour as a side-effect of a word being split across two lines: “red-
dish coloured lights”). A passage that stands out as really quite threatening is Ralph being stalked by the Cyberman in the food store, aided by the music, even if it doesn’t sustain the mood by being made the end of Disc One. Chris Achilleos’ cover is particularly fine as long as you’re not a Cyber-pedant, with a threatening monster, a thrilling fizz around the Moon and a great Patrick Troughton. The illustrations by Alan Willow are more serviceable than gifted, but I’ve always loved this one of the Cybermen lifting off from the surface of the Moon; but see if you can work out why, in this one instance, it might be better as reprinted, without the original caption I’ve shown here.

Rise of the Cybermen

When I was five, I fell seriously ill and was hospitalised… Which turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. I’d just bought my first book – this book – at the school bookshop, and my Mum brought it into the hospital. The various primary school books I’d been meant to be learning to read on had been having precisely zero impact on me through their banal ‘narratives’ of going to school, sometimes by bus, sometimes in the rain; I did that. Why would I want to read about it? But when my Mum, who’s never loved Doctor Who, got half-way through reading Doctor Who and the Cybermen to her little invalid and could stand no more, she did something that changed my life (and, within a couple of months, changed my measurable reading age from ‘off the bottom of the scale’ to more than double my actual age). Thanks, Mum; thanks, Gerry Davis. Bored beyond the call of duty, she told me to read it myself.

I did.

Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen

Terrance Dicks, again a former lead writer on Doctor Who, wrote much of the Target range single-handed – ten times as many books as anyone else – and his deceptively simple prose is hard to beat for telling a cracking good story. This one is a cracking good story, from Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln’s script, surprisingly on TV as Doctor Who – The Abominable Snowmen, and sadly this time, the BBC burnt most of it (you can buy the sole surviving episode on the Doctor Who – Lost In Time DVD Box Set, or a CD of the whole narrated soundtrack).

“A vision of the cave on the mountain filled the Master’s mind. The glutinous living mass still seeped from the pyramid. More and more and more… it filled the cave… it was filling the tunnel. When would it stop? How much territory would it cover? ‘You said only the Mountain for your Experiment,’ shrieked Padmasambvha. ‘If you do not stop, you will cover the planet. You have lied to me… tricked me.’ The sound of hellish cosmic laughter seemed to fill his ears. The old Master slumped in his chair. In an appalled whisper, he said, ‘I have brought the world to its end!’”

The Doctor is commanding, Jamie heroic, and Victoria – not always one of the most memorable companions on screen – vividly naughty. No wonder I liked her; the ‘prim Victorian lady’ is the one who leads the prim monks into temptation and explores all the interesting places (the story has an interesting take on faith, treating Buddhism with respect not for the last time in Who, but also showing up superstitious misogyny – perhaps it’s an appropriately split response when one of the key characters spends most of his time arguing with himself in something eerily between schizophrenia and prayer). And Victoria is certainly more appealing than the typical ‘lost British explorer’ who, refreshingly, is a bit of a git. Like the other Second Doctor book in this line-up, it’s often called a ‘base under siege’ plot – but it’s really rather more interesting than that. It’s a ghost story, and as for the purpose of a siege… I suspect one of the reasons it was such a strong childhood favourite of mine, too, is that I liked my Doctor Who scary. I started watching in the early Tom Baker Years, of cold science and gothic horror, and this book and the next two below have something in common that struck a chord: they are almost the only three Doctor Who stories in which someone is so terrified that they lose their reason. Scary enough to turn you into a dribbling wreck? I want to read that! So here, particularly, what Travers discovers on the mountain and the effect it has on him is easily the closest to Lovecraftian cosmic horror in all of Doctor Who. Oh, and watch out, retrospective readers: not for the only time in the ’60s, one of the main characters in this story is the Master, but not the Master.

Terrance Dicks’ solid storytelling lifts an already strong script, giving it clarity, pace, and added detail from the vivid opening backstory dream, to actual snow, to making the pyramid’s gloop terrifying instead of stubble-reducing (even if he loses the TV’s meanest but funniest joke). It’s always fired my imagination with horrifying evil, sweeping landscapes and unsettling special effects; perhaps even more than The Evil of the Daleks, if a Doctor Who story were ever to be remade for the big screen as a modern answer to the ’60s movies, this should be it. On a less spectacular budget, David Troughton does a great job in bringing the audiobook to life – to the extent that it might just be my favourite version of the story. I’ve often heard people say that he sounds just like his father and thought it nonsense, because though his voice as he’s got older has gained something of the same husky quality, it’s very much his own. But just this once, the first word the Doctor says is “Marvellous!” and a shiver went down my spine. On that, and tantalising other snatches of dialogue, he’s clearly doing an eerily close impersonation of Pat. For the story itself, perhaps it reaches its peak – unexpectedly – on the third disc of the four, with the plot thickening, Padmasambvha’s appalled realisation and Travers’ horror in the cave, atmospherically read and scored. Chris Achilleos’ cover is an excellent companion piece to his Doctor Who and the Cybermen, with the Earth rather than the Moon, Pat Troughton, a monster and a vignette of Jamie and Victoria. Again, it’s plainly illustrated by Alan Willow. Stephen Baxter takes you back, excitedly, to watching the story – if only we could, too – but he shows us how evocative the book can be. I bought this book, as well, from the racks they used to keep in the St Simon’s RC Primary School entrance hall, with my saved-up 5p tokens on the card from the “Wise Owl Book Club”. Awwhh. And not only does my timing for this piece tie in with a new series of The Sarah Jane Adventures, but (I note thanks to Newsround before today’s episode) with the start of the biggest expedition to find the Yeti for half a century – let’s hope they have better luck than Professor Travers, eh?

Doctor Who Audiobooks

Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion

Terrance Dicks script-edited the original version of this Robert Holmes story, Doctor Who – Spearhead From Space, a terrific tale that’s just been re-released on DVD (as part of the Doctor Who – Mannequin Mania DVD Box Set, labelled a “Special Edition”… But it’s wrong. This book is the special edition), and you can tell that he loves it. Of all his many books, this was his first, and it still shines as perhaps his best. I grew up reading the novels of the Pertwee Doctor first, and was inevitably disappointed when I got to see what I could only think of as the TV adaptations; just this week, the far-inferior TV version of a fantastic book is out on DVD to illustrate that Pertwee gap like no other. But not here. In picking Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion and Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, this series cannily chooses probably the best two Third Doctor books, inspired by probably the best two Third Doctor TV adventures.

“‘We are the Nestenes. We have been colonising other planets for a thousand million years. Now we have come to take Earth.’
“‘But what’s going to happen to us—to Man?’ The full horror of it suddenly came over Hibbert. ‘You’ll destroy us.’
“Channing’s voice was soothing. ‘Not you, Hibbert. You are our ally. You have helped us.’
“Hibbert said dully: ‘And you… you’re not human.’
“‘I am part of the whole, Hibbert. Nestenes have no individual existence. This body is merely a container, Hibbert. You should know that. You made me.’
“And Channing smiled a terrible smile.”

That always gave me a thrill of horror when I was a boy, but there are many other memorable moments: the extended Prologue with the Doctor’s trial; the nurse’s down-to-Earth “pure terror” at Dr Lomax; “Now I don’t know whether that makes me a doctor, a vet or a raving lunatic, but as far as I’m concerned those are the facts”; “…and there were no fingernails”; “A sizzling bolt of energy whizzed past Ransome’s head”; the Nestene itself, so perfectly described that readers and artists knew exactly what it looked like, and could forget what they’d seen on TV; a stunning tour-de-force action sequence taking the Auton invasion from the high street, to ordinary people, to orders going mysteriously wrong and ending in “a curious pointing gesture” on Whitehall. Like the similarly outstanding novel of Remembrance of the Daleks, it makes even the series’ most lavish action sequences seem broader, bigger-budget, and more compelling. On screen, Channing is an excellent performance by a top guest star, and the Autons impressive – but on the page, his “burning eyes” are far more charismatic, and the Autons far more odd. There are certainly things about the TV version that the book lacks – superb direction, three outstanding leads (particularly the Brigadier), the music, memorable sound design for the Autons (shame it’s not used in the audiobook), making the word “facsimile” scary before Yuppies did, Liz being hilariously embarrassed by the Doctor in Madame Tussauds, the much-copied Auton invasion itself – and it’s probably right to lose the visual pun of a ‘hand-gun’ for the book. But great as the TV serial is, this book still tops it.

Caroline John seems more comfortable with her second CD reading, so she improves on her performance from Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters – it rattles along with great energy. These CDs always lack the Doctor Who theme, and this time the sound effects are a bit disappointing – though the combination of music and sound as Meg confronts the Auton are really quite chilling – so hurrah for Caroline really finding her voice, and doing justice to the massive final battle. Chris Achilleos’ excitable cover has Nick Courtney’s Brigadier (his only appearance in the original range until right at the end), meteorites and a hideous alien monstrosity – one that really doesn’t look great on TV, but for Terrance’s evocative description here has inspired many, many artworks – and here he does the illustrations, too, with the Auton blasting at Ransome, Scobie’s revelation (nothing like that on telly, but a terrifically ominous smile) and that huge, many-tentacled Nestene that’s something between spider, crab and octopus bursting out again of particular note. Russell T Davies writes perhaps the most telling Introduction, growing into a concept of “fandom” and picking out his favourite bit – a chilling moment that’s always been mine, too. And, of course, this story was the one he borrowed from to relaunch Doctor Who, brilliantly, six years ago – not just staging an Auton invasion on a bigger budget, but lifting details directly from this book (“Students, he thought vaguely” – and the bits that Russell didn’t use in Rose, Steven Moffat borrowed for The Eleventh Hour).

Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters

The last of these six books – only so far, I hope – for me vies with the other Pertwee novelisation as the best of the six, and was the best of the TV serials on which they were based, too. Ironically, the “Cave Monsters” is an even less appropriate title for the original ‘green scaly rubber people are people too’ story than TV’s Doctor Who and the Silurians (available to buy in the Doctor Who – Beneath the Surface DVD Box Set, and with an atypically spoiler-filled review from me). I’ve even said that this is probably the book that turned me into a Liberal. Malcolm Hulke wrote several of the hugely influential early Doctor Who novelisations, and it’s fair to say that his are probably the most loved.

“She realised how terribly fond she was of Dr Quinn, even if she had started to doubt whether he was at all fond of her.”

Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters is one of the series’ most passionate moral fables, and the one closest to my heart – literally, indeed, on the day I bought my first copy, as pictures of little curly blond me clasping it excitedly to my little bosom on the way home from Blackpool will testify. It ranges from a terrifyingly apocalyptic sequence in which the population of London start dropping from plague, through off-kilter office romance and spy drama, to making the viewer take the viewpoint of a reptile person who’s slept for 65 million years and is none too impressed with their planet now being overrun with ape-descended upstarts (and “reptile people” is a far simpler, more accurate name than “Silurians”; Millennium has an excellent theory on how Dr Quinn may have named them, and suggests the alternative Prehistoric Indigenous Xenomorphs Interred Entire Species). There are few Doctor Who stories about which I have such a wealth of feeling and which have had such profound effects on me, and Malcolm Hulke’s prose and extraordinary boldness in reworking his own original script had almost as much to do with that as the central story: of all of these novels, even including the first, it’s the one that makes the most striking changes, discarding much of the plot in favour of adding much greater depth to the characters and drawing the reader into their lives, fears and ambitions. So it really doesn’t matter that, on top of some scientific howlers that you can ignore for the sake of the parable, he adds a particular political one in the book. The fatal flaws in the characters are far more interesting than the minor factual ones. I’ve raved about how the TV version of this story was why Doctor Who was brilliant in 1970, and recommended the novel for “Bloggers’ Summer Reading” in 2008 (with tongue in cheek only in how I was writing, and not what I was writing about).

This time, Chris Achilleos pulls out all the stops for his cover, with Silurians, a T-Rex and even volcanoes, going back in time to the book’s prologue, while his illustrations (one rather badly reprinted, but the rest nicely cleaned up) are a superb range: a map; Okdel’s chat show; figures in the dark moving toward Major Barker; a letter from a Chief Constable; and my very favourite, for the chapter Goodbye, Dr Quinn, which is such a brilliant spoiler that you’ll have to buy the book to see it. Terrance Dicks’ Introduction is quite different in tone from all the others; a voice from the time, written for his old friend. Caroline John was terrific as – and very proud of playing – Doctor Elizabeth Shaw, and is a good choice to read her stories on CD, where she’s brilliant again as Liz four decades later (particularly when she comes close to murdering the Doctor in his smugger moments) and has fun with her pompous Doctor and Brigadier voices, but is slightly uncertain as a narrator, though noticeably gaining confidence as she goes along. One of the things that may have thrown her balance was having to do a Scots accent when, like that other fine actor Derek Jacobi on his reading of Doctor Who – The Mind Robber, she comes a cropper with it, and greatly improves in the telling once the character involves departs the story! She’s a pleasure to listen to in the DVD commentary on the TV version of this adventure, too, where (if you skip to Episode 5, the one after where Terrance Dicks sums up the story’s attitude by calling the Doctor “an incorrigible liberal”) she not only involves the other actors in discussing the story’s politics but delightfully fills them in on the extra characterisation each of their roles have in the book: Geoffrey Palmer is particularly amused by his character stiffing another over their old school ties. The CDs, incidentally, offer the original back cover blurb, but these new paperback editions write their own: wisely, in this case, in not reproducing the infamous “…and a 40 ft high Tyrannosaurus Rex, the biggest, most savage mammal which ever trod the earth!”

For more about the Target Book series that was – and, hopefully, the expanding BBC Books Classic Reprint line that is to come – two of the authors here have rather fine features about their novels as part of the DVD range. The War Games DVD has On Target – Malcolm Hulke, while On Target –Terrance Dicks is part of the Peladon Tales DVD box set.

Making It Easier To Follow Liberal Democrat Conference

2011-10-03T10:00:00.002+01:00

Another Liberal Democrat Conference recedes into the distance: holding government ministers to account; debating policy (even nearly managing the rare feat of throwing out a policy paper); catching up with friends. But while it’s still fresh in Conference Committee’s minds, I have some small suggestions for next time. Talking to Lib Dems who may not have read every word of the Agenda or Conference Daily updates, and to people who were watching at home on BBC2 or BBC Parliament in their vast ratings of one or two, just a few simple changes could make Conference a lot easier to follow.

Have you ever come into a Conference debate having left your Agenda in your hotel room, by accident or through not wishing to add five minutes to your ‘physical security check’ by bringing a bag? Have you ever forgotten to pop by the information stand and pick up the Conference Daily sheets? Or have you ever watched some of Conference on TV, in which all of those items are conspicuously missing from the screen? Then rather than looking down at us as if we’re all insufficiently committed, perhaps the powers that be should consider admitting reality and making it easy for people to find out what’s going on at a glance, or in a sentence. And most of the work is already there – it just needs bringing together.

There is already an @LibDemConf Twitter account that announces the name of each debate as it starts. And there is already a supply of all the Conference papers online, if you know where to look and can navigate through all the many screens to get to them. But no attempt is ever made to bring these together. Why not tweet a bit.ly link to the appropriate policy paper with the announcement of the start of each debate? And another, with a link to the Conference Agenda, also telling you on which page to find the motion under debate? And again, a link to the relevant Conference Daily to find any amendments, again highlighting the page number? All of this paperwork is already available online in pdf form, and it would be the work of moments to actually show people how to find it when it’s needed.

The same could be done within the Conference Hall, for the aid of representatives there and of people watching at home (or in their hotels). Perhaps BBC Parliament might be frosty about putting up non-BBC links, but it’s worth asking; if not, each debate speaker has a ginormous screen behind them onto which the Party projects their image and information about them. Why not add a web address and the simple message, ‘If you want to know what’s going on in this particular debate, enter this and it’ll tell you’?

You may well argue that every representative should assiduously read every bit of paperwork, that no-one should vote on an issue without hearing the whole debate, and that if proposers and summators of motions and amendments should be able to express clearly what their motions and amendments are about, and if they can’t, that’s their own lookout. But if you’re scrambling to find the bit of paper that would explain what line 4 of Amendment 3 says when the Chair of the session is briskly running through the votes, or if you’re at home without a steward standing by you to thrust paper into your hand, that’s not a lot of help.

So wouldn’t it be better if the Chair and Aide of each debate were not just to announce which website to go to, but to agree in advance a one-line factual description of each motion and amendment with their proposers? So that each debate could open not merely with a nebulous ‘Motion F72, More Regulation For A Freer Britain’, but with one scene-setting sentence that captures the main thrust – and, more importantly, the Chair could give those explanatory lines about the amendments at the end. Wouldn’t that blizzard of numbers make more sense if each vote on each amendment was preceded by one simple sentence that summarises in neutral terms what each contains? Particularly for all those debates where an amendment was not opposed and there’s not even a summator to remind you what you’re voting on. And for TV viewers, the combination of a simple guide from the Chair and a visible link to more information on the website would make the Conference a lot less incomprehensible.

These are simple changes, not time-consuming, with all the work of creating pdfs and putting them online already done. Why not just make them easier to find?

Of course, they all usually dry up sometime after each Conference, making it difficult to locate our policy once we’ve actually passed it, and there are no hyperlinking cross-references in the online papers (note the several just this year that referred to the excellent but long-deleted Policy Paper 50: It’s About Freedom from a decade ago, removed from the Party website and sold out from the Party publishers, as if we all have it kept by our bedsides as light reading matter). But making the current Conference paperwork more accessible would be a start.

This article was written last week as I slowly recovered from the previous week’s Conference, and submitted on spec for publication on Liberal Democrat Voice, where it went up yesterday. It’s a little more constructive than the piece I wrote at the same time about the Conference Hotel…

Which The Avengers DVDs Should You Buy?

2011-09-30T10:30:00.005+01:00

The Avengers is fifty years old this year, and at last it’s all available on DVD. But where to start? Strangely (but for both practical and quality reasons), not at the beginning. Last night, I celebrated one of the most important anniversaries in Twentieth Century British history in saying Why The Avengers Matters, how it changed television and society too. Today, I have a simple guide to those extraordinary agents’ DVDs for you to watch one of the greatest TV series ever. And if you buy The Avengers Complete 50th Anniversary Collection box set today, you can get a bargain!

Choosing Between The Avengers DVD Boxed Sets

You’ve got a choice of half a dozen The Avengers DVD boxed sets, and if you don’t want to get everything at once, well, I don’t blame you, and I’ll pick which are best to dip into first in a minute. But bear with me. If you don’t have any of The Avengers – and you have a bit of spare cash – obviously I’ll recommend you buy the 39-disc limited edition DVD box set The Avengers Complete 50th Anniversary Collection, which is complete. Completely complete. The lot… Well, except for The New Avengers, which has a different rights owner and which you have to buy separately (but quite cheaply), and for most of the first season of The Avengers from 1961, which unfortunately doesn’t exist any more. So it’s as complete as you’re likely to get, and it’s worth buying if you can afford it. And if you can afford it today, it’ll be slightly cheaper.

The Avengers Complete 50th Anniversary Collection has several advantages over buying all five of the one-season sets. It’s expensive – but it’s cheaper than buying the lot. And while there’s not a lot of range between different sellers, according to this price comparison site, if you order it by the end of today from one site there’s a 10% off code, which for this one stacks up to more than a tenner. It’s quite a nice case, though the packaging’s even more difficult to get into without leaving your prints all over the disc than it is to shake out the jammed-in slim cases from the season boxes. It has a whole extra disc of still more bonus features that they couldn’t fit on the earlier releases (though, and kudos to Optimum for this, they’re having the decency to bring that out separately later in the year so people who’ve already bought the individual seasons can buy it too). And – and this is embarrassing – if you buy them like this, all the discs work properly. For all these sets, for all 139 episodes, the picture’s been restored as well as it can be; there are commentaries, rare little clips, scripts and other pdfs, huge stills galleries (but not much in the way of subtitles). And then some prat at the DVD authoring house managed to let production faults slip through on most of the boxes. Now don’t panic: they’ve fixed them all, and each of the ones they buggered up can be replaced. But it’s a palaver, isn’t it? So get them at once, and because this big set came out last, you don’t have to exchange any of it.

But, OK, buying the individual season box sets has its advantages too. You get a few more extras to hold in your hands – exciting little reproduction press handouts, and not just on pdf. And you don’t have to shell out so much at once, just in case (in some Bizarro-world) you turn out not to like it. And if encourages you to start in the middle, which if you’ve never seen The Avengers, might be wise. There were six seasons broadcast through the Sixties, 1961 to 1969; two more of The New Avengers in the mid-’70s. In six boxes. That’s because they some of the early ones went out live, and some of those they recorded, they threw away, so the few bits left of the first season are in with the complete second, and The New Avengers only ran half as long, so both seasons are boxed together. That’s six. So which to choose? Start in the middle. The Complete Series 2 is historically fascinating, has flashes of brilliance (not least Mr Teddy Bear), and changed TV – but compared to the rest, it’s much cruder, and it suddenly hits its stride a year later. The New Avengers starts well and has a handful of terrific episodes, but hits a steep decline. So be counterintuitive, and leave the first and last until a little later.

Which Avengers Episodes To Watch?

So if you were to buy just one The Avengers season box set, which should it be? And which episodes from it are especially tempting?

Most people would pick The Complete Series 5. It’s “The Avengers – In Color” for the first time, with Diana Rigg and American money, a massive international hit. And it’s brilliant. Or you might go for The Complete Series 3, the height of Honor Blackman, the original breakthrough, the strongest of all the Avengers women, much cheaper but inventive and with the scripts starting to leave the ground. And that’s nearly as brilliant. But I’m a bit strange, so I’ll draw your attention to the two others. The Complete Series 4 was the first with Diana Rigg, the first shot on film, and stylish as anything in black and white. The Complete Series 6 stars Linda Thorson, and is satisfyingly weird in blazing colour. Both hit just the right note for me between camp and sinister. But whichever you pick, some episodes are better than others, so to help you pick your year, or to give you somewhere to start once you’ve got it, here are a few to set you on your way…

The Avengers – The Complete Series 4: introducing Diana Rigg as Emma Peel, witty, gorgeously shot in black and white, and the perfect balance of suspense and silliness. If you choose this DVD boxed set, I think you’ll find it’s the most consistently brilliant of all the seasons, though some episodes are more wobbly towards the end. And the very first episode in the set is the perfect introduction to The Avengers. As I’ve often said, The Town of No Return is a strong episode, though certainly not the best, but its first seven minutes are flawless: the first blast of that famous fanfare theme tune; a bizarre mystery played utterly deadpan; meeting our heroes as they trade barbs and make their way to the scene. Together, those seven minutes make up the most perfect encapsulation of what The Avengers is about, not least in letting you know that unlike every other crime-fighting / spy-busting duo, they just do it for fun.

“Are you sure you won’t have a marzipan delight?”

And once that’s – holding my breath – grabbed your attention, here’s my variety assortment (in no particular order, but with a one-line sketch so you can see which might be most to your taste) of the other episodes you might want to dive in with:

Dial a Deadly Number – sex, big business and Peter Bowles; high finance, high camp and the best duel in TV history. It’s not with what you think… Or, rather, it is.

The Cybernauts – straightforward, quite a bit of action, outstanding music and the most sci-fi the series ever gets: watch out for the killer robots!

Quick-Quick Slow Death – silly froth. Simply fun. With murder, obviously.

The House That Jack Built – Op-art craziness for Emma! It looks terrific, and so is she (stuck in an evil TARDIS).

Too Many Christmas Trees – haunting and brilliant, though Steed’s character is off-key for important reasons; not completely the season of goodwill.

The Avengers – The Complete Series 6: Tara King is younger, more earnest – sometimes – and very easy to root for, growing as she goes along. So do the stories; like the black and white Mrs Peels, these superbly blend suspense and silliness, but here the earlier episodes tend to be the rockier ones. It’s more of a mixed bag, but its heights are fabulous. My personal favourite’s Pandora, but even for The Avengers, that’s out of the ordinary, so if you pick up this particular box, here’s my pick of a variety of episodes you might consider starting with:

Game – iconic Avengers: outrageously surreal sets and plotting, giant killer games, Peter Jeffrey… And I’ve written about it in detail, too, with a whole list of reasons why you should watch this postmodern extravaganza.

Look – (Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One) But There Were These Two Fellers… – a comedy of murders, with surreal style, John Cleese, Bernard Cribbins and killer clowns.

My Wildest Dream – threatening psychodrama, with superb action sequences and score, plus one of the most barking sets.

Who Was That Man I Saw You With? – the first I ever saw, and it got me hooked. Slippery double-crossing spies, murder and setting our heroes up.

The Avengers – The Complete Series 5: the most famous, the most repeated, the height of the series’ wackiness and depiction of Britain as a fantasy ‘Avengerland’, this is Emma Peel “In Color”. Simply iconic, though the last third of this season were made after a bit of a break and (comparatively) run out of steam a little. And if you choose this particular boxed, here are my suggestions for a variety of different episodes you might want to start with:

Escape in Time – inventive, entertaining, colourful, a great use of other times and cuddly toys, and a magnificent villain in Peter Bowles.

The Hidden Tiger – archetypal ‘first half setting up the threat, second half going to the villains’ Avengers plotting, and the height of comic fantasy (with Ronnie Barker).

Dead Man’s Treasure – like a week off, driving around the countryside to breezy music. Fun.

The Superlative Seven – one of the most sinister colour Mrs Peels, rather brilliant, loads of guest stars… Not a lot of Mrs Peel, though (perhaps The Joker if you want an unsettling one with more Emma).

The Avengers – The Complete Series 3: a little more ‘realistic’ than the others, becoming a big hit in the UK but still with a limited budget, this gives the first, most physical of The Avengers women her finest hours. Steed’s often at his best, too, and Honor Blackman terrific; the downside is a much less polished production and the original theme tune, which isn’t bad, but disjointed and nowhere near as classy as that famous fanfare introduced with Mrs Peel. And finally, if this is the boxed set you pick up, here’s my pick (as with all of these, in no particular order, spanning various tastes) of the episodes you might want to try first:

Esprit de Corps – great fun, with a twisty-turny plot, a striking central idea and some superb guest stars (Roy Kinnear, John Thaw).

The Charmers – very witty, a brilliant spy spoof, and even better than the later colour remake (though that’s fun, too).

Man With Two Shadows – a really rather dark thriller, and arguably the best of the series’ ‘doubles’ episodes.

November Five – assassination at the by-election, political manipulation and dastardly plots inside the House of Commons. Who’d have thought? Vote Gale to sort it all out!

Of my previously-written Avengers articles I’ve linked to above, incidentally, my picks for the best would be The Town of No Return, Game and The House That Jack Built, as I think I did rather well for each of them. But what are you sitting down reading them for? Go out and find the episodes themselves! And whichever you pick, enjoy, and watch out for diabolical masterminds.