Doctor Who - Season 24, a rant...

I’ve sat down and tried to write this post several times, and failed. I think the initial problem is overload – there’s just too much to say about Season 24. So I’m going to bite the bullet, ramble on and see where it takes me...

Context:

Doctor Who had been under threat. Initially cancelled during Season 22, then given a reprieve and put on ‘hiatus’ instead so the programme could be rested and overhauled, and then return as a fitter, leaner, better product. In theory.

It came back after 18 months for Season 23, The Trial of a Time Lord with the same production team as before deciding that art should misguidedly mirror real life, but virtually nothing about the show had changed. It pleased enough people to stagger on for another year. But from Trial onwards the seasons would only be 14x25 minute episode instead of 26x25 minute or the recent 13x45 minute experiment that failed in season 22. And it had been put back into a weekday slot.

Bonnie Langford is brought in as a promotional gimmick companion, with a character drawn up by producer John Nathan-Turner on the back of a postage stamp. She can’t have been cast seriously, otherwise they would have done her the professional courtesy of giving her a proper character, with proper character moments and not just a lot of theatrical posturing and quipping that played to the audience expectations of what Langford would deliver. She’s a computer programmer apparently. Is she? She’s got total recall (like Zoe had years before). Does she? You’d never know these things watching her stories, because she never gets to use those skills. She’s basically given a light entertainment ‘fitness fanatic’ character and plonked in a drama series that’s looking more and more like a light entertainment show the longer it goes on.

Colin Baker is told thank you and goodbye, you’ve done your three years now we want you to go away. And no, we don’t have anything else we’d like you to appear in instead.

Eric Saward finally flips, throws his toys out of the pram and walks. One can’t help thinking that this wasn’t just a reaction to working with JN-T. He wanted the Trial season to be the best of the best from his five years on the show, and it wasn’t, he couldn’t get the writers, he failed. Then Robert Holmes died, the writer he’d come to idolise. It’s likely his problems with JN-T at the end just tipped him over the edge. But he clearly needed to move on anyway and Trial shows how little capable he was of crafting or guiding a long ongoing narrative in a cohesive and focussed way – or even of coming up with a story arc that best served the programme.

By all accounts JN-T wants to go at this point too (and at points previous to this as well). But the BBC won’t let him get his hands on anything else, so it’s Who or nothing. He loved the series, so of course he agreed to do more.

 

So here he is, with no leading man and no script editor, and a new season to put together.

 

JN-T makes a bold move and recruits Andrew Cartmel into the script editor role, a writer with little experience and an unproven track record. Cartmel is what the show could have done with a few years previously – in fact it’s delicious to think what he would have done with the Trial scenario the previous year. He comes in to find that Sylvester McCoy has been cast as the Doctor – an actor familiar to many of my age group for his appearances in children’s television programmes such as Jigsaw. It’s curious that this casting comes after Sydney Newman (the series’ creator) suggested returning Patrick Troughton to the role, in that McCoy is also short and somewhat clown-like in the role at times, but with darker tones bubbling away underneath.

Cartmel also finds that JN-T has done what he had to do as a sensible producer and secured at least the first four-part script for the next season, Strange Matter (later to become Time and The Rani) by Pip and Jane Baker, who had helped JN-T out massively at the end of the Trial season when Saward withdrew his (frankly awful) final episode because he wouldn’t change the ending. So here we are. No writers from previous years return again to the programme from this point on, it’s all new blood. Pip and Jane are thanked by Cartmel and sent on their way with a pat on the proverbial. Cartmel has to allow Time and The Rani to go through into production without totally re-writing it because he needs to get the other three slots filled. Eric Saward always complained that it was so difficult to find writers who could engage with and actually write Who effectively. But Cartmel manages to recruit three new, young and potentially inexperienced writers but they deliver the goods and the season goes into production on schedule with some challenging concepts behind it. The following season three more new young writers come along and in the final season a further two. That’s either Andrew Cartmel being very fortunate, or knowing what to look for, or possibly doing a hell of a lot of work himself – but most likely a combination of the three. Whatever, when the show was finally cancelled the production team had set themselves up with a solid bank of script writers who could probably have fulfilled poor Eric Saward’s dream of submissions vying for the available slots so he could pick and choose the best, rather than scrabbling around for anything that came his way. Good work Mr C!

 

So that’s the background, as I see it. But there’s a sense that the show is still on trial here in Season 24. The allegations of tasteless violence that emerged after the hiatus when people wanted to know why Doctor Who had been shelved and the department couldn’t say ‘because we think it’s crap and we don’t like it’, could still have applied in places to Season 23. This changes in Season 24 completely: there is nothing as crass and tasteless as Mindwarp here, and the comedy touches are more heightened. What you get is a series that is more cohesive in its output – it’s just that the output is very very poor in terms of meaningful drama.

Seasons 23 and 24 have a look about them of the kind of light-hearted Children’s BBC dramas that were being produced at the time and shown around 5pm on weekdays. Season 23 at least felt like the material, albeit poor in itself for family drama, didn’t match the look. Season 24 feels like it ticks all the boxes: it’s got a funky new theme and titles with computer graphics, featuring a new ‘comic book’-style logo; its leading man is recognisable as a CBBC man, it has plenty of novelty guest stars, it has knockabout comedy and theatrical posturing, and the season culminates in a tale which introduces a teenager who, like most teenagers represented on TV in family / children’s viewing, feels embarrassingly unrepresentative of what teenagers were like at the time and obviously can’t be given realistic dialogue before the watershed.

So, despite the good work Andrew Cartmel had done in filling the available slots with what look on paper to be an interesting variety of stories, the actual execution of those stories is compromised by the house narrative and production style, which favours a broad-brush approach and a lighter tone. What one finds when watching these stories is that there are opportunities for moments of real drama and jeopardy, but the product delivered on screen never comes anywhere near creating that sense. That’s perhaps why Remembrance of The Daleks thunders in with such an impact the following season – there’s more atmosphere and excitement in its first episode alone than in the entire two seasons before, if not three.

Time and The Rani hits the screen with a garish, effects-heavy impact. Superficially it’s a great season opener, with pizazz, new theme arrangement, a new style of incidental music, new effects – a real ‘relaunch’ kind of feel to it. I think many people now would say they should have dispensed with a regeneration. The poor Doctor, who could be beaten to within an inch of his life and still recover years before now has to regenerate after a severe buffeting in the TARDIS. That’s middle-age for you I guess… But if JN-T felt they simply had to do a regeneration without Colin Baker present there were other options - they could have had Mel struggling back to the TARDIS with the Doctor’s ravaged body through a flaming wreck or something – anything – to suggest the end of a particularly gruelling adventure. Either he’d already regenerated or he regenerates as she lays him on the floor of the console room. Bam – there you go. I guess you still need to get him into the story, but maybe the Rani’s curious TARDIS tractor-beam thing could have operated then with Mel still not being sure what the new Doctor looked like.

When JN-T took over as producer he’s said in interviews that he wanted to get away from the feeling that ‘it’ll do’ - basically to try to make the productions the best they could and not just about getting in the can against all odds or finding the easiest way out of things. I think early on he probably found that it wasn’t as simple as that, but Season 24 and the whip-off-your-wig regeneration in particular are perfect examples of how he’d got to where he felt Graham Williams was failing – and I don’t think he realised it himself because he was no longer on the outside looking in. The regeneration sequence ‘will do’. But’s it’s not glorious, or heroic in any way, there’s no sense that he’s just done anything fabulous like saving the Universe, he’s just been thrown about a bit – even Mel has come out of it better than the Doctor, without a bruise or break, or a legwarmer out of place. It’s cheap, quick and easy and ultimately it’s insulting to Colin Baker.

Time and The Rani is pure superficiality, basically. I believe Pip and Jane said they’d never write for the show again after the response the story got. As professional writers it’s possible they met JN-T’s remit perfectly. But what about integrity? If that was truthfully the best they could do then the series was truthfully better off without them.

Superficiality is not necessarily a bad thing – it can be very comforting to sit down with some easy viewing that you don’t need to think about to while away a few hours. But there are plenty of TV shows and films that do superficiality much better than this. This is distractingly superficial – the worst kind, drawing attention to itself. The plot is silly, the reason the Rani needs the Doctor is contrived. Why is she only using genii from Earth’s history if she’s got the whole universe to pick from – particularly when as an audience we don’t get to engage with those genii in any way? The Rani has changed from a single-minded heartless genius into a female version of The Master. Sylvester starts brightly as the Doctor and I recall instantly liking him as he jumps off the table and claps his hands, looking SO much better in his predecessor’s costume than poor Colin ever did. But the pratfalls and goofing around are hideously staged and no one was ever going to take the action seriously once Kate O’Mara starts doing her Bonnie Langford impression. It’s the moment of supreme pantomime, where the good characters have to pretend they really don’t recognise the disguised enemy in their midst and the kids in the audience are encouraged to shout out warnings and advice.

Imagine how wonderful it would have been to start the story with the already-regenerated Doctor in situ, involved in the plan in a post-regenerative amnesiac state, for Bonnie Langford to be playing Mel, and for Mel to have suddenly ‘become’ the Rani at the end of part one. Then they could have back-pedalled in part two to fill in the gaps up to that point and for us to learn what really happened to Mel. Parts three and four would then have taken things forward in real time to the resolution. Would that have been too advanced for a weekday evening audience in 1987? I’d be amazed if it was – and this is me just throwing random ideas around as I type.

I recall liking the Tetraps at the time, with their funky vision, although their solid faces haven’t withstood the test of time as well as the garish Lakertyan sky or explosive bubble traps. I can’t help feeling sorry for Wanda Ventham, Donald Pickering and Mark Greenstreet trying to act their way out from under all that costume and make-up only to find the lines they’ve been given are awful. Bonnie Langford is still stuck in posturing mode from the end of Trial of a Time Lord. Poor Mel, she’d appeared in 10 episodes by the end of this story, nine of them written by Pip and Jane Baker, and she only had 10 left to go.

Are Doctor’s first stories representative of their eras, generally? An Unearthly Child isn’t, it’s part of a narrative across several stories that breaks us into the show and establishes the team dynamic. Marco Polo is the first story ‘proper’ in that respect. Similarly with Power of The Daleks it’s not a representative Troughton story. Spearhead From Space establishes the Third Doctor era well, so that’s an early exception, but Robot is definitely a last gasp for the old Pertwee era and although Baker is most definitely the Doctor by the end of part one, one looks to The Ark In Space as being much more representative of the Fourth Doctor’s output. Castrovalva is representative of the Peter Davison era inasmuch as it’s about a weaker Doctor struggling against the odds, with the Master in disguise although he’s not really the Doctor until the very end. The Twin Dilemma has the Sixth Doctor in crisis in a more demonstrable and dangerous way than Davison’s feeble dendrites allowed and was supposed to start a long journey of discovery. Unfortunately it lays down many of the ideas that was to plague the following season at least. Time and The Rani returns to earlier form; it stands outside the rest of the Seventh Doctor’s ongoing narrative as an oddity. Paradise Towers has our new Doctor begin to start investigating things, going somewhere on purpose.

Paradise Towers should be brilliant. It is a great (if borrowed) concept and in the main is well-realised. But it has a real feeling of gimmicky casting about it – Richard Briers, Clive Merrison, Brenda Bruce, Elizabeth Spriggs, Judy Cornwell and so on – all familiar figures to a standard family audience – but they’re all doing a ‘turn’. In an Agatha Christie adaptation such a collection of names would be a standard kind of cast and they’d immerse themselves into their roles. Here they’re very consciously theatrical, in keeping with the light-heartedness of the season as a whole, so the audience sees more clearly the mechanics of performance on display, and that keeps them at a distance. Conversely Sylvester McCoy is already calming his Doctor down, so he’s no longer an O-Man with Bonnie Langford instead of David Rappaport. Something curious happens to Mel here as well; she’s rather objectionable and uppity and she’s pretty sharp with Pex most of the time. In isolation this comes across as a bit odd for the audience recognition figure, but in context it at least gives Bonnie and the character somewhere slightly different to go.

Aside from the performances the cleaning machines are themselves too clean; they should be mucky, blood-spattered and showing signs of wear. And what exactly do they clean with a huge drill attachment? The ‘thing’ in the basement – why give it neon tube eyes? Why give it eyes at all? The voice and dry ice works well. The end of part three is almost chilling as the Chief Caretaker becomes possessed - and that’s the point at which the titles should have crashed in; yet house-style dictated that the Doctor or companion had to be the focus of the cliff hanger so we get a tacked on end with the Doctor being rather humorously throttled by a spotless cleaning robot.

The performances may be theatrical, but in the main they are consistent which at least makes them watchable – until part four, when Richard Briers just goes mad. Gimmicky casting backfires if you’ve got an actor who the director can’t control, or can’t get them to appreciate their point of view. Briers admits that he was aware JN-T thought he was sending it up, so he just did more of it. How very professional. He didn’t think he was sending it up, and he’s justified the performance to himself, but no one was showing him how he was overbalancing the piece. All he got was an authority figure to rebel against, so he rebelled. It’s misguided and its pure theatrical hamminess just blows any sense of drama or jeopardy or realism out of the water. He’s like Boris Karloff having a stroke.

Compare him with, say, Tryst in Nightmare Of Eden. Tryst has a silly German accent, agreed. But he’s consistent with it and thus more believable; we can’t ‘see’ him acting, it’s not pantomime – it fits within the universe created for that story.

With a few tweaks Paradise Towers would be brilliant – and this is pretty much the template for the remainder of the season.

Delta and The Bannermen (Flight of The Chimeron was such a better title and should have been kept!) runs along similar lines to Paradise Towers: the Doctor chooses to investigate something he finds intriguing. He’s a bit darker again in this story, a bit more manipulative. He’s happy for Mel to go off in the bus when it could be dangerous, he positions his pawns on his chessboard for the final defeat of the Bannermen, and so on. But again the tone is almost completely light-hearted. It’s shot very blandly, which does ham-hock chomping Gavrok no favours as the snarling villain the audience feel total apathy for. There’s plenty of gimmicky casting again and more light-hearted slapstick to remind you to ask yourself what you’re actually watching from time to time, and the holiday camp setting lends itself to this very easily. The period setting promotes the music of the time – except we don’t get the music of the time, we get some limp, soulless re-recordings of a few tracks by Keff McCulloch and chums making it feel like one of those £1 old classics CDs you get at service stations where you find they’ve all been re-recorded and sound dreadful.

This time we have Stubby Kaye, Hugh Lloyd and his bees, that guy from The Flying Pickets, Don Henderson of Bulman fame, Richard Davies who was often cast as the token Welsh guy in things, and of course Ken Dodd.

Poor Ken Dodd, reportedly desperate for direction, just being left to do his own thing because he was an old pro. He’s actually very good, but I can’t help feeling sorry for the poor tollmaster, having to wear a sparkly uniform every day for such a mundane job. Or maybe everyone dresses like ice skater Robin Cousins for menial tasks in space…

Besides the gimmicky casting here you’ve also got Sara Griffiths as Ray, another in a line of mid-80s actors to appear in Doctor Who who clearly doesn’t believe or understand the lines they’ve been given to say – you can see it in their eyes, there’s no conviction there and every line comes out with the same inflection, the same delivery, unless she’s pretending to cry. Mouth moves, eyes do nothing. There’s one sequence (in part three, I think) where Ray starts to ride off on Billy’s Vincent motorbike. All you can see on the actor’s face is ‘I must ride this bike correctly from there to here’ there’s nothing else going on at all and it’s not a natural look for someone who supposedly always rides a motorbike. Again, it’s about the mechanics of performance and ‘it’ll do’, and these are the moments that drag me out of the action as a viewer. (I won’t mention the fact that Sylvester McCoy is clearly wearing glasses in some of the longer shots of him on the bike too…)

The series possibly reaches an all-time low when the Bannermen army (about six of them) all stick their tongues out to camera with possibly evil glee. This moment would have been improved tenfold if at least one of them had eaten a raspberry Slush Puppy just before and displayed a blue tongue instead. Alas.

Meanwhile we’re expected to believe that Billy and Delta have fallen in love suddenly and that Billy is changing species to try to save Delta’s race thanks to some green food colouring he stole from the child. Nice one Billy. Obviously the fact that Delta lays eggs is a real turn-on for him. It’s all very twee, really.

Ray was a potential new companion for the Doctor, but in the end they opted for well-spoken teenage delinquent Ace from Dragonfire which is also famous for not being a traditional ‘Doctor versus baddie’ story, and for Kane melting at the end. Ian Briggs wrote it as a comedy, apparently. If it was played as a proper comedy it might be a lot better, but Doctor Who was playing it safer than safe this season and although the general tone overall is light-hearted they weren’t about to play Dragonfire properly for laughs. What we get instead is a promising mess, an intriguing idea that hides behind poorly-written characters which are poorly realised in an unconvincing studio.

Ace is straight out of the type of Children’s BBC 5pm weekday comedy drama series I mentioned earlier. Sophie Aldred does as well as she can with what she’s got, but it’s all very twee and troubled-teenager-by-numbers. Her curious mood changes and aggressive responses are laughable because there’s no consistency to the character, no clear depth. She basically responds to each scene and each situation in a way that the story requires in order to get her to where it wants her – she’s responding, not leading. Mel just slots in as Ace’s friend because the story has nothing better for her to do, it’s a real damp squib of a story and a completely unemotional exit for a companion who never had a proper entrance story either, and whom the production team and writers seemed to struggle all along to find anything meaningful for her to do or say.

Tony Selby returns again as Sabalom Glitz. Dear me, when Glitz popped back for the final two parts of Trial of a Time Lord he had already been reduced to a comic buffoon, a side-kick rather than an enabler. Dragonfire continues this trend, reducing his integrity further and turning him into an idiot.

What surprises me most about the guest cast here is that unlike the rest of the season it’s not really gimmicky, but strong reliable performers such as Patricia Quinn and Tony Osoba, or even Stuart Organ (who was known for Grange Hill at the time) deliver some really flat, unengaging performances, making this story feel like a box-ticking exercise. Sylvester McCoy, after a marked change in the last two stories, is back to square one here with obvious pratfalls and unfunny physical business, pretending that the ground on Ice World is slippery.

I like the concept of Dragonfire (the novelisation is brilliant), I like the dragon’s head (don’t look at its legs!) and I quite like Edward Peel as Kane, but it’s not enough to save this from being an awful three episodes.

I can’t even begin to explain how much I squirm at Ace pouring the milkshake over Shirin Taylor’s head, the pseudo-swearing that the character is given to say or the ‘Professor’ thing which was never quirky and cool and always upon always annoying. Then there’s the Doctor climbing over the edge of the ravine for the metatextual first cliff hanger or Ace jumping for joy and saying ‘Ace!’ in the TARDIS at the end in a way that no 16 year old worth their salt would have done in Britain at the time. Again, as I’ve said before, these are overtly theatrical or clumsily staged moments which show the mechanics of performance and drag the audience out of the moment.

Dragonfire came top of the Doctor Who Magazine season poll that year. But I think fans at the time remembered Kane’s melting face at the end (easily the most horrific moment on the show for some years) and the fact that it was a very different story, and that tipped the balance. Taken on balance with everything else that year I can’t find anything in Dragonfire to place it above any of the others, they’re all flawed and Dragonfire possibly more so that the others.

I didn’t have the money for blank video cassettes in 1987, but I had one that I would record each week’s episode on to so I could watch it a few times before taping over it with the next one. The following year I’d saved up enough to buy a blank cassette to keep Remembrance of The Daleks and Silver Nemesis on. A further year on and I could afford two blank cassettes so I could record all four stories. I mention this because Dragonfire episode three I only saw the once on broadcast and never bothered to re-watch it on video. It just didn’t really appeal to me as a despondent thirteen year old who was worried that his love of the show may not be enough anymore to maintain him as a regular viewer.

It’s a shame because looking back I started the season with such a positive attitude, but I finished it feeling the lowest I’ve ever felt as either a fan or a viewer…

Anyway I’ve gone on for far too long about this, so it’s time I shut up and thought about Season 25 instead…