Doctor Who - Season 25: Enter the mysterious manipulative Doctor...

It seems a bit mad to us these days, when Doctor Who is so accessible to anyone who wants to re-watch it endlessly, that the gap between one season and the next could go by and viewers may not have an instant recall of what had preceded it. I think that by 1988 I was probably in a fan minority in that I wasn’t committing every episode to home video tape when they were broadcast and creating my own library. But then I didn’t have any money for blank video tapes and I wasn’t being subsidised by parents, so it wasn’t even something I really thought about in all honesty.

That changed in 1988 though, when I learned that there would be a Dalek story to open Season 25. Cool. Then it was revealed that the Cybermen would appear too, in one of the three-parters – the one that would be the official 25^th Anniversary story. Nice – and with a Betamax machine seven episodes of Doctor Who fitted nicely on an L750 cassette without having to compromise titles, announcements and – if I was agile enough – the odd trailer where possible. So I blagged myself a tape and committed these masterpieces to be played over and over ad infinitum.

Remembrance of The Daleks literally exploded onto our TV screens in 1988. But watching Ace and the Doctor walk towards Coal Hill School at the start of episode one I realised I could recall virtually nothing about the companion. There was something at the back of my mind about an ice world, Ace as a waitress, a melting face and Mel and Glitz – but that was it. Then the ‘professors’ started and with a shudder I recalled that too. But Dragonfire had appealed so little to me the previous year that I’d pretty much wiped it from my conscience, not even bothering to watch my video recording of the last episode before it got taped over. I recall thinking maybe I’d been wrong in my judgment when it came top of the season poll in Doctor Who Magazine, but Doctor Who never got repeated in those days and the home video market was still very young and focussed on the 1970s stories, not the most recent material. Plus we were still Betamax…

Trailers for Remembrance looked awesome (I still get a thrill from the BBC1 Autumn Season ident with the ball-bearing rolling down the helter-skelter!) and there was a real sense of anticipation for a big return to form. For once this was borne out by the result – episode one in particular was incredible from start to finish, easily the best single episode of the season and possibly of the whole McCoy era. This was a show that had suddenly grown up from the lacklustre larking about and embarrassment of the previous year. This was atmospheric, intriguing, engaging and exciting. I even wrote to DWM and got part of my gushing review published on the letters page – no more hiding for me, I was now a named fan!

I loved Remembrance so much I even recorded the episodes onto audio cassette so I could listen to the story when the TV wasn’t available, or when I was paying snooker on my new table in the front room. I didn’t know this was something of a fan tradition in the days before home video. I’d done it twice before, recording two of the three stories that our local video rental place had on Betamax – Robots of Death and The Five Doctors. I’d not bothered with The Seeds of Death because when I’d watched it I’d found it rather dull. That is a ridiculous statement to me now – I adore the story and was pretty much blown away by it when I got the DVD. But the video release was old and grainy and had the whole story edited together in one long lump, which definitely didn’t play to its strengths.

I can find virtually nothing to criticise in Remembrance, except the inconsistent Dalek voices in the school in episode two which annoyed me at the time (the transmit monitor Dalek voice changes from one scene to the next, between Roy Skelton and Brian Miller, which is clumsy). The episode one cliff hanger is sublime in all respects. The episode two cliff hanger goes on a bit too long to be perfect – but then as a five year old I adored the Destiny of The Daleks episode one cliff hanger which probably has as much repeated yelling so maybe if I’d been five in 1988 I’d have felt different! The episode three cliff hanger is a lovely character moment for the Seventh Doctor and although it’s not as strong a ‘talky’ cliff hanger as, say, Fang Rock part three (thanks entirely to Tom Baker’s delivery) it’s a world away from Delta and The Bannermen episode two the previous year and McCoy shows he’s really nailing the part now.

The guest cast is strong and like in Dragonfire it doesn’t feel gimmicky, but unlike in Dragonfire all the performances are spot on. Old faithfuls such as Michael Sheard and Peter Halliday take minor supporting roles and prove the old adage that there is no such thing as a small part. Simon Williams, Pamela Salem, George Sewell all deliver solid, strong leading performances underpinning perfectly the regulars. We were promised a Dalek story without Davros for a change. We almost got it, but the production had a good audience tease with the Renegade Daleks’ battle computer giving John Leeson a chance to do a Davros-esque voice to add to the effect. Yes we get him in the end as a head concealed within the Emperor Dalek’s huge dome, but it kind of fits at that point. I should note here a courtesy mention for Roy Tromelly who plays the Emperor Dalek in episode three only and never gets a credit elsewhere. Great stuff sir! ;)

There’s ambition in this production, a sense that a statement is being made about what can be achieved. Even now, nearly thirty years later, much of it stands up well. And it’s from the pen of another writer new to Doctor Who, new to TV. Season 24 may have fallen into a chasm of pantomimical production but the new writers that came on board with their challenging new concepts were pushing in the right direction and that seems to bear fruit here in Season 25. Ben Aaronovitch was certainly hailed as a hero at the time and there’s a definite sense (more so in his novelisation) that the creative team behind the stories and ideas had new life they could breathe into the show. The Cartmel Masterplan, which bore fruit in the wilderness years of the 1990s Virgin New Adventures novels, started here, with Ben Aaronovitch and Remembrance of The Daleks.

I could gush about it and list everything that I like or that I think works well, but it’s probably more effective to just leave it at brilliant and move onto the next one.

Re-watching the season this time I’ve gone for the original planned running order. JN-T and Andrew Cartmel had great plans for this celebratory season and shaped it accordingly. That was screwed over by scheduling changes within the BBC. Whatever happened Remembrance had to open the season and Silver Nemesis part one had to air on Wednesday November 23^rd – the actual birthday of the programme’s first airing in 1963. These days, of course, if there’s a fixed date to aim for it’s more likely to be the final episode of the series airing on that date. But anyway, we should have had Remembrance, Greatest Show in The Galaxy, The Happiness Patrol and Silver Nemesis. It tops and tails the season with old monsters (and by and large the same storyline!), there’s continuity between Greatest Show and Silver Nemesis with Ace very clearly wearing Flower Child’s earring from the former as a badge in the latter, and the brighter blue of the TARDIS in Silver Nemesis nods to the repainting it gets at the end of The Happiness Patrol. Most of all Silver Nemesis ends on an obvious season closing teaser scene (like Survival would the following year). It does leave two ‘quirkier’ stories back to back in the middle but after Season 24 surely we could cope with anything? As it turned out we ended up with Remembrance, Happiness Patrol, Silver Nemesis then Greatest Show. The latter was, unfortunately, not crafted as a season closer and ends rather abruptly, so as I’m under no constraints with a re-watch I’ve gone back to the original running order.

 

I recall being slightly cautious about The Greatest Show in The Galaxy in the run up to the season. It’s a title that lends itself more to the Season 24 stories. On paper it has far more in common with Season 24 than it does with Remembrance of The Daleks, with quirky characters in a quirky setting and gimmicky casting; Peggy Mount, Daniel Peacock, Gian Sammarco and Jessica Martin were all known for light entertainment. Stephen Wyatt is also Andrew Cartmel’s first returning author and the shadow of Paradise Towers was still hanging heavy over fan perception.

I’ve never really warmed to this story, I’ll admit, and I think it belongs in Season 24 – or perhaps it’s the transitional story between the two? I’m thinking things through as I write. It does have a lot going for it but I think the negatives cancel out the positives leaving something that I’m rather apathetic about. I’m in two minds about the title for a start: The Greatest Show in The Galaxy. It came from JN-T whom, we know, occasionally chipped in with ideas or settings that he wanted included in some stories, but had little grasp of narrative structure or what constituted a ‘good’ story. (Let’s face it if he had he’d have thrown Trial of a Time Lord out on day one!) It’s a loaded title; we know it’s the series saying ‘this is what I am’, which of course at the time it wasn’t. So Wyatt and Cartmel disguise it and set the story in a small and very spartan circus.

Ace’s dislike of clowns is shovelled on with no subtlety whatsoever. TP McKenna’s Captain Cook is played so laid back as to be virtually horizontal – whereas someone like Christopher Benjamin, for example, would have energetically chewed the scenery with it and given it much more fizz. There’s a difference between a character being a bore and being just dull. TP McKenna is just dull on screen and he sucks all the energy out of his scenes – with the notable exception of the end of episode three. His best moment is the murmur of annoyance when the Doctor guesses his special blend of tea in episode one, after that he goes back to sleep. He does the same in the Blake’s 7 episode Bounty too.

The scenes with the Doctor entertaining the Gods of Ragnarok in episode four are silly and uncomfortable. It’s playing to the strengths of Sylvester McCoy the children’s entertainer and knockabout fool, not the Doctor he’d been working to develop, so coming anywhere after Remembrance of The Daleks makes it seem like a regressive step.

Peggy Mount - who I’d heard of but couldn’t recall seeing in anything - gets away with her character because she’s consistently disdainful of the whole shebang and an utter joy to watch. ‘You can’t lie down there!’ is easily the best line of the story, perfectly delivered as Bellboy falls at her feet to be picked up by the Chief Clown.

Chief Caretaker in Paradise Towers, Chief Clown in Greatest Show – Stephen Wyatt likes his villainous chiefs. Unlike Richard Briers the year before Ian Reddington is one of the things to appreciate in Greatest Show, though.

The cliff hangers all lack punch here. One and two are kind of walk through cliff hangers, which the series did a lot towards the end of the 'Classic' era. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. Episode three is a bit different but it goes on for far too long so the impact of the lycanthropic change has already worn off before the closing titles fizz in around the Doctor’s (alas) slightly comedic cringing face. Doctor Who had done a brilliant werewolf not long before in Season 23. Two years later it’s like we’re back to 1970, Inferno and Benton with his comedy plastic teeth as Jessica Martin writhes around undergoing ‘the change’. OK, this has a bit more saliva and slightly less grinning to camera but Mags as a werewolf is nowhere near as effective as The Lucoser from Mindwarp. It’s a shame, but that lack of consistency plagues the show throughout the 1980s – something that’s done really well for one story isn’t then replicated as a standard the next time something similar is attempted, so it’s very up and down.

But the worst of the characters in this story is Gian Sammarco’s Whizz Kid. Oh how the production office must have howled at this obvious and negative representation of your standard Doctor Who spod. But you don’t spit on your own doorstep, you don’t mock your own. How much more effective would a positive stereotype have been? It’s another instance of ‘it’ll do’; it’s a lazy gesture that is no more amusing to the casual viewer than it is to the fan. He doesn’t even lose faith in Captain Cook when Cook is sharp with him. That’s not just fan adoration, that’s an imbecile. If Cook had realised his error and had to talk Whizz Kid round to avoid going in the ring – maybe with a gift of  a souvenir or artefact from one of his adventures – how much more would we have disliked the Captain and how much more might we have pitied Whizz Kid? As it is he’s a willing gull and he adds nothing to the narrative at all beyond filling some time. Sammarco plays him capably enough, as he had done Adrian Mole on ITV previously, but it's a perfunctory performance of a perfunctory character.

I find Alan Wareing’s direction very flat and matter-of-fact - it doesn’t visually engage me as a viewer. Curiously, though, I loved his two stories the following season but even with that in mind I still feel Greatest Show is quotidian in its delivery. But perhaps I’m looking for something that just isn’t there, and I’m missing some skilful camera work instead, I don’t know? It’s very garishly lit for much of the time. Obviously the weather on location was excellent, but the internal scenes don’t have the oppressive quality and dull lighting that a heavy tent or gazebo give, which is a shame - and a surprise, considering much of it was filmed in a large tent in the car park at Elstree Studios thanks to an asbestos scare at Television Centre.

Mark Ayres comes in like a breath of fresh air with the incidental music here. It’s not his strongest score by any means (my personal favourite is the 1990's spin-off video drama Shakedown: Return of The Sontarans), but his music has a certain quality that underpins the essential drama and creates atmosphere in a way that the over-lit visuals don’t. I’m quite partial to Keff McCulloch’s score for Remembrance, but after that story I found his contributions samey and over-bearing, and he’d been used too much in Season 24. I’d like to have heard more from Dominic Glynn, but on the plus side I think giving him only one story per season for the final three seasons allowed him to focus all his creative energies appropriately and create some wonderful scores. Keff was probably spread too thinly too quickly so his pallet of sound is laid bare to us very quickly.

My biggest bugbear with Greatest Show is a bugbear with both of Stephen Wyatt’s Doctor Who stories – it’s a lack of clarity about time. The suggestion in both stories is that the TARDIS arrives at a point when activities have been ongoing for a very long time, but it’s difficult to establish how long and what that implies for the characters involved.

In Paradise Towers there was (possibly still is) a war going on somewhere, so that’s where all the fit healthy adults are. Fair enough. The elderly, the very young and the unfit have been dumped in this tower block to live in (assumed) safety until the end of the war when civilisation can return to normal. Some of the groups have nicknames that suggestion linguistic corruption over a period of time – Residents are now Rezzies, the kids' gangs have become Kangs. The children have grown up into teenagers / early twenties and are all girls. The Rezzies are all elderly. The Caretakers are (allegedly) unfit males. But memories seem hazy. Pex obviously should have gone off to fight in the war, so he can’t have been a young child when they were left there. And there’s no support structure for the girls who’ve become Kangs, suggesting they were old enough not to need it. No one talks of missing their parents, or children, or friends and loved ones. None of the disparate group members have shacked up with each other, which may happen over a period of time. So it’s very unclear and seems to suggest they’ve been there a long time and yet hardly any time at all, at the same time.

The Greatest Show in The Galaxy has a similar chasm at its centre. The indications are that the Psychic Circus has been going for years and years, yet the members are all relatively young. Even if they aren’t the original members Bellboy implies that it’s been years since they were out on the road touring. But the Whizz Kid, who is clearly only a teenager, talks about following the circus’ progress on previous tours and having been in correspondence with one of the founding members. So is he immortal or very long-lived, or has the circus only had the current line-up and actually they’ve only been parked up there for eighteen months? Their old touring bus hasn’t rotted away or anything. But if that’s the case surely Whizz Kid should be looking for the act he used to write to, or asking after them? He doesn’t even give his old pen pal a name when he mentions them to Morgana, which always jars with me. And if they’ve been settled on Segonax for a number of years surely someone somewhere would have noticed that their friend, colleague or loved one hadn’t returned from the Psychic Circus auditions and raised an alarm in some way? It may not be important but I find these things distracting in both stories; it shows a lack of cohesion in the thinking behind the creation of those worlds and the situations which the author is asking us to buy into.

 

If I wasn’t sure about The Greatest Show at the time I was positively horrified by The Happiness Patrol! What was this garish thing with a Bertie Bassett monster, punky pink wigs and miniskirts? I cringed back into the sofa for three weeks – particularly when the Doctor sings in episode three – argh!

The shadow of Season 24 was still lingering over my fan consciousness, and I became blinkered in my views. Some of the other kids at school had commented about how much they enjoyed the quirkiness of The Happiness Patrol, and how much they were enjoying the season as a whole (the Dalek story had started things off well). I didn’t really listen, conscious that it could all turn horribly wrong at any moment, so my natural inclination was to criticise and talk it down instead. I think this may have been a general fan reaction, as I recall a lot of negativity about the story in DWM at the time ('the lowest point in the series since The Gunfighters' springs to mind...)

I didn’t watch the story again for years. I couldn’t watch it again for years, it had appalled me so much. By the time I did I was aware of some revisionist thinking about the story. People had calmed down and actually watched the story properly, listened to it and understood it, rather than seeing and hearing what they thought they were seeing and hearing. I’ll hold my hand up as guilty in that respect.

The Happiness Patrol is brilliant; pure and simple. The garishness is essential to the story’s message. I’m not convinced on the miniskirts – it’s The Happiness Patrol not The Sexiness Patrol, but that’s a point about the objectification of women and not something I'm going to get into now. As with Remembrance any negatives really only feel like nits to pick - like the go-kart our heroes use to make their speedy getaway from the waiting area, that can be overtaken by foot at a healthy pace. Ho hum! The story suits its studio-bound production, it’s well lit (for a change) and – much like Thatcher’s Britain of the time – no amount of shiny gloss and fancy hair dos can hide the underlying grubbiness and dilapidated state of the surroundings.

The Kandy Man works; he may not have been written to resemble Bertie Bassett but he does and it's actually fine. The costume is clumsy at times and the Doctor incapacitates him too easily, but the larking about has an edge that was missing from Season 24 and The Greatest Show in The Galaxy. Fifi almost works, although it would have been fun to give her a ‘smiley’ muzzle and only reveal her scowl when the muzzle is removed for hunting. The Pipe People work too, because they’re generally well shot so the viewer can’t linger on any lack of detail around the masks.

The cast is SO strong. This is a cast that looks like a Season 24 gimmicky light-entertainment cast on paper, but they all deliver pitch-perfect, consistent and well-conceived performances - I think because they understand the programme and respect the material. Sheila Hancock, Ronald Fraser, Harold Innocent, Lesley Dunlop, Rachel Bell, John Normington, Georgina Hale – all in the main familiar faces if not familiar names to many households. Yes we can see that Sheila Hancock is delivering her lines in a distinctly Margaret Thatcher-esque way. But more important than the satire is the message that enforcing a viewpoint or ideology doesn’t create a utopia – and the world is still wrestling with that on a daily basis today.

Ace does well in this story without too much posturing, sudden mood swings or random opinions. She gets on with the job that she and the Doctor have clearly come here to do: they’re political terrorists come to bring down the Government, basically. There’s a real sense now that the Doctor has a list of wrongs to right, things to tick off one after another. It’s interesting and fresh at this point, but as with every justification for his wanderings after a while the novelty and charm wanes and this manipulative side to the Doctor became very weary in the Virgin New Adventures books. Sylvester McCoy is definitely in control of his Doctor now; even when larking about, he’s doing so in a much more controlled and manipulating way (except singing As Time Goes By - we can’t forgive that!)

And how haunting and effective is Dominic Glynn’s soundtrack? The plaintive harmonica - beautiful. I’ve played the music ‘suite’ from this story on the Silva Screen 50^th Anniversary 11 disc collection so many times.

I have to express my disappointment that when this story was finally released on DVD it didn’t have an optional extended edit. There was a lot of material filmed that had to be cut for timing reasons and although the story works well in its three parts there are some nice character moments that it was a shame to lose. The cliff hangers aren’t particularly strong so the story wouldn’t lose much being edited into one longer complete narrative.

The story ends suddenly, unconventionally and brilliantly. It foreshadows the following year’s Battlefield in many ways, by not needing to go so far as to see the lead villain killed. She can live to see the error of her ways, or pay her punishment to society. It’s more of an ideological climax than a narrative climax, but that fits because narratively the breakdown of Helen A’s political tyranny (in fact the breakdown of Helen A full stop) is the important climax for us, as viewers. What Terra Alpha does afterwards is up to them, we only came along with the Doctor and Ace to see the tyranny torn down. The audience can fill in the rest themselves…

The Happiness Patrol really has shown the value in reappraising stories for me. I had hoped that I’d find a similar rise in stature for Seasons 22 to 24 as well, but alas that’s not been the case. I think if there was a fault to the story it’s that it was very confident and advanced in its message, and that it required the audience to look beyond the superficial surface to what lay beneath. I’m not sure that enough of us did that or were able to do that at the time because this was so much of a shift from the superficiality we were accustomed to; I’m not sure that the Powers That Be at the BBC understood what was being done at the time either, and much of the political ‘fuss’ about the story has only come about years later from what Andrew Cartmel mentioned in his 2005 book Script Doctor.

 

And finally we come to Silver Nemesis.

Ahhh, Silver Nemesis! The trailers had clips of Ian Chesterton and the First Doctor from The Web Planet on them, paying tribute to the last 25 years. I hadn't seen The Web Planet at that point so this was fascinating for me. I am very fond of Silver Nemesis, and I watched it time and time again on my seven episode classic monster fest video tape. But it really is complete and utter rubbish. The thing is, whereas the stories in Season 24 turned out to be rubbish but purported on paper to be interesting, Silver Nemesis is just as rubbish on paper, so I’m inclined to forgive it a bit more. What actual story there is is basically a re-run of Remembrance of The Daleks – Ace even draws attention to the fact towards the end when the Doctor says he programmed the Nemesis statue to destroy the Cyber fleet and she pipes up ‘just like you nailed the Daleks!’ Ooh yeah! The real problem with it is that all the interesting stuff has already happened before the TV episodes. The adventure with Lady Peinforte and the validium statue from Gallifrey back in 1638 sounds much better. Or even finding out how the Nazis or the Cybermen found out about the statue – any of that would be more interesting than three episodes of the Doctor and Ace flitting here and there in the TARDIS while the other three parties move around the chessboard of locations until they’re in a position to mate – checkmate that is - and then predictably die in a grand final confrontation where all we learn is that the Cybermen aren't interested in idle gossip.

I’ll be bold here – this is another story that was disappointingly denied an extended edition on DVD (particularly since it had a slightly extended video release in 1993) – but I think it would work better, be far more fun to watch and much more of an Anniversary Celebration, if it had been shown as a one-off 90 minute special like The Five Doctors instead of three hacked up episodes where not everything quite makes sense and scenes don't always start or finish properly, leaving the viewer at times a bit bemused.

It’s a natural celebration story - it’s got light comedy, an old enemy, a National British enemy; it is progressive in offering hope and mysteries for the future, and most of all it has a strange habit of explaining itself, or providing a commentary on itself, as it goes along, to help the casual viewer. So much had the series reinvented itself that its 25^th Anniversary slot could be given to a young writer new to Doctor Who and not to an old hand, as there weren’t any old hands connected with the show any more. But I don’t think anyone would clamour for Kevin Clarke to write for the programme again.

So little actually goes on in these episodes that Ace is reduced to following the Doctor around everywhere. I appreciate they work rather well as a double act but there’s clearly virtually nothing for Sophie Aldred to do beyond asking a few questions. There’s another truly dreadful Ace moment in episode two where she suddenly decides to decide whether she’s scared or not. These sudden moments of reaction or decision are so clumsy, and Sophie Aldred can’t give them any kind of integrity because they just come out of nowhere and are gone again.

The Cybermen are there as a strong-arm force. As soon as they arrive the Nazi soldiers have to be killed off because they both perform the same function, so De Flores and Karl are left alive to carry the Nazi flame, but at the end of the day the Cybermen are only there to be blown up at the end. The Nazis are there because everybody hates Nazis. Lady Peinforte is, still, the most interesting character and she’s the one who knows all the Doctor’s secrets – which presumably the Nemesis statue told her.

In the background we’ve got comedy royals, comedy security guards, policemen who can’t cough convincingly, Leslie French (who was approached to play the First Doctor in 1963), Dolores Gray, comedy skinheads, the Courtney Pine Jazz Quartet, man-eating lamas… I don’t buy for a second that Ace would like jazz – nothing about her says this is a teenager who appreciates jazz. Peri maybe, Mel at a push, but Ace? No way. Lazy shoe-horning.

You get the impression that the cast and crew enjoyed making this story though – it’s got a kind of fun factor that it pulls off without being just silly. I think that’s because it’s consistent all the way through. But it’s still rubbish!

The ultimate low-point has to be Ace despatching an army of Cybermen with a catapult and a bag of gold coins. My fan heart sank at the time and nothing about it has raised it since. Is she a 16 year old girl from a broken home with ‘issues’ or is she Bart Simpson? The way she goes about it you’d think she used a catapult all the time, the saucy little tyke… It’s not that these things make Ace inconsistent, it’s that she uses the catapult with no sense of irony at all. I was at secondary school at the time, and catapults were something from old jolly hockey sticks Boy’s Own-type japes of yesteryear. I’d used one in a local pantomime the previous Christmas where I'd been a nuisance brat - that was where they’d been reduced to by 1988. If she looked ashamed at it, then realised it could be effective and actually got to enjoy it that would be good. But no, she’s got a killing shot from the start. And that's to say nothing of the Cybermen having an actual allergy to gold, instead of an aversion to gold dust which clogs their chest units, as originally established in 1975's Revenge of The Cybermen. Lazy research! Here even the touch of gold is enough to kill a Cyberman, it seems. Surely they could have got some kind of antihistamine cream or inoculation if it's that serious... *sigh*

Despite the obvious shortcomings of the story as a whole, the final scene is a great way to finish the season, and it’s a real shame that this wasn’t to be. It cements the ‘mysterious’ Doctor that we’ve been discovering over the fourteen weeks, and promises much for the future. If this had been the end of Doctor Who this would have been an acceptable scene to bow out on, at the end of three episodes of reasonably enjoyable run around rubbish!

As it turned out there would be a further stagger for another year - roll on Season 26...

More Murgala!

Okay people, three more Paul & Nessa's Happy Hour shows are now available to play on the Cranked Anvil website, and shows 3 & 5 feature more Murgala sketches by me.

Check it all out here:

http://crankedanvil.co.uk/happy-hour/

Enjoy!

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…

Murgala lives!

Hello all,

Greetings from darkest Aberdeen (don't ask!)...

The first two editions of Paul & Nessa's Happy Hour from Spark Sunderland are now available to listen to at your (and everyone's) convenience on Mixcloud via the link below:

http://crankedanvil.co.uk/happy-hour/

They feature some of my Murgala sketches and I'd be lying if I didn't say I was very pleased with the end results.

Check them out - the shows are great fun, and I hope they bring you as much joy as they've brought me...