‘It all started out as a mild curiosity in the junkyard, and now it’s turned out to be quite a great spirit of adventure’
Let us take a trip back in time to 17:15 on Saturday 23rd November 1963. To a very different Britain, just 18 years after the end of the Second World War. It has already been an eventful year, coming after the Cuban Missile crisis and the narrow avoidance of a nuclear conflict the previous year, it was a cruel, cold winter (the Thames and parts of the sea had frozen), the resignation of John Profumo rocked the British political establishment and the popular young American president was assassinated the day before our first episode aired. The 60’s have yet to properly swing, the country is rebuilding after the war, rationing is in the (albeit recent) past now, the cities are still dark, coal-fired, smoggy places, but Britain is slowly shrugging off post-war austerity and is in the mood for change and for a party.
And change was in the air, the decade would soon switch from monochrome to technicolour – The Beatles had released ‘Please, Please me ‘ in the spring and the day before ‘An Unearthly Child’ aired, ‘With the Beatles’ was released, ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’ also arrived in May. And yet the times weren’t quite ready to change just yet, we are still really in the tail end of the 1950’s. Across the decade the pace of change would be incredible – from culture, to science and technology, to social changes such as the comprehensive education system and the legalisation of homosexuality. But we are at the very start of all of that.
A gap in the Saturday Night Schedule
Over at television centre, Sydney Newman, the Head of Drama newly arrived from ABC, has identified a gap in the Saturday night BBC schedule. If you look at the schedules – on November 16th 1963, airing between Grandstand (an afternoon of sport running from 13:00 to 17:00 and a fixture of the BBC Saturday schedule) and the TeleGoons was Deputy Dawg. This featured the cartoon adventures of a talking dog, who was a Deputy Sherriff in the southern US and his battles with Muskie (the Muskrat) amongst other ‘varmints’. The rest of the evening line-up was ‘Juke Box Jury’ (a hugely popular music show where the great and good rated the releases this week), ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ (Jack Warner as an old school policeman). There was a gap that needed filling to tide the audience over from Grandstand and into the Saturday evening schedule and to avoid losing viewers to commercial TV and Sydney has an idea…
Newman and Donald Wilson (who he has just made Head of Serials after breaking up his script department) are working with writer C.E. Webber on the format of a new show to fill that gap. Newman is a fan of science fiction and Wilson had already commissioned a couple of reports on the genre from Alice Frick and John Braybon/Donald Bull – their recommendation that Time Travel, along with telepathy were areas worth looking at. It is a rather protracted gestation for show – ideas, concepts and personnel waxing and waning (Rex Tucker, Webber, Coburn) and opposition and politics from within the BBC – principally the design department, the Children’s department, but with scrutiny from Donald Baverstock (Controller of Programmes) and Joanna Spicer (Assistant Controller of Planning). Spicer is a legendary figure at the BBC, but was largely responsible for the show ending up at Lime Grove. Luckily for us, Sydney Newman isn’t the type to be dissuaded and neither is his new producer – Verity lambert. And she has support from an intelligent, erudite script editor – David Whittaker and a bright young director – Waris Hussein.
Everything is flux at this stage as the show heads towards production – from the number of episodes committed to by Baverstock, to the back story and relationship between the Doctor and Susan, the character names (Biddy, Lola, Suzan, Suzanne, Cliff…), the nature and name of the ship and the casting. Webber’s initial script (‘The Giants’) makes way for Coburn’s caveman story – although nobody is that keen on it. The format of the show though is now taking shape – a series of serials (each of 4-10 25-minute episodes). Historical, future and ‘sideways’ stories – with an educational element – science and history (represented by the schoolteachers) and strictly no Bug-Eyed Monsters. What could possibly go wrong?
Out of all of this flux, emerges ‘Doctor Who’. Shaped by Wilson, Lambert and Whittaker, built on a lot of the work of Webber and Coburn (although some of their odder ideas are excised) and with guiding input from Newman. Across this creative process, despite the surviving production and series guidance documentation, defining exactly who created what is rather difficult. As things begin to transition from page to screen, after an initial stutter of the rejected pilot episode, in the primitive, cramped, inappropriate confines of Studio D Lime Grove filming on the first episode begins. The initial transmission date slips from August to the more appropriate November. There is something about that opening episode that feels intrinsically wintry and dark. With the first episode now accepted by Newman, the show is ready to air.
We will possibly return to some of this and maybe some of the somewhat overlooked heroes of the creation of the show later. I will try to keep these digressions to a minimum – but these first couple of stories really deserve some context. Hopefully from then on it will mostly just be the story reviews.
But now, it is time to visit 76 Totters Lane and peak behind the gates of I.M Foreman’s Scrap Merchants on a dark, foggy London evening in the winter of nearly 60 years ago…
Meat is Murder – an introduction to The Two Doctors
In 1983 Robert Holmes was commissioned to write the Doctor Who 20th Anniversary special – The Six Doctors. He came up with three potential outlines in a discussion document, but the most developed idea was that the Cybermen were looking to extract the biological component that allowed Time Lords mastery of time travel and operated on the Second Doctor to get this. The story didn’t get much further than that initial discussion, Bob went off to develop a script and came back with nothing much and suggested Terrance should take over and his script was written off.
So if you want to analyse the intelligence levels in the Doctor Who production office at this time, here’s a test for you:
When you last gave Robert Holmes a massive ever-changing shopping list of plot elements and returning characters he had to work into a script, he gave up and you had to commission another writer instead. In contrast when you left him to his own devices he came up with Caves of Androzani.
Do you a) give him another shopping list and constantly change these elements just like last time. Or b) let him come up with something himself?
OK geniuses, this is what I am going to do, I’m going to do what I did last time you messed me about – I’ll submit the same outline as I did last time too. And that is what we get the Six Doctors first story outline with Sontarans replacing Cybermen. Oh and a story that the genius producer decided was going to be set in New Orleans based on food, because the only other reason Bob could find to set it there was jazz. Oh and then they changed it Venice, oh and then they changed it to Seville. So that doesn’t work either. Oh and instead of Harper or Grimwade to give it all the pace and action it needs we’ll give you Peter Moffat, who is nice and affable (I met him at a convention when I was a youngster and he was lovely) but not very dynamic and has everyone blast through it very efficiently so that they can spend more time mucking about around the pool (maybe a bit harsh – but hopefully you get the gist). Bob you should have just walked at this point and left the ‘Chuckle Brothers’ to it. As it was Bob did quite well out of it all – he got paid to write the episodes twice, once with lots of puns about America and again without them. He couldn’t think of any other reason to set the story in Andalucia, so he stuck with initial idea about food.
Anyway, the programme ends up as Bob Holmes’s take on the treatment of animals in modern farming. He has offered a similar idea to writer back when he was script editor – a species that returns periodically to Earth to feast on humans (sound similar to the final Quatermass story). As it is, it becomes almost a treatise on vegetarian living. Although it appears that Holmes wasn’t vegetarian himself– just concerned about animal welfare. In Richard Molesworth’s biography of the great man, he is reported as saying:
“That story was basically a plea for animal rights and vegetarianism” “I had this vegetarian theme running through it. I was trying to point out how filthy it is to eat all of this meat, although I am not vegetarian. The things we do to animals….’
It’s treatment of humans as food for a more advanced species (yes even the Androgums in their un-augmented state are more advanced that humans here) and death for the table earns this its place in this thread. You are invited to imagine yourself as a cow or sheep or pig; fattened up to be butchered for the table by an Androgum chef. Anyone fancy a slice of Peri – or Jamie if that’s your preference? Tempting though that is, I’ll stick with veg.
Now I’ve got all of that out of the way – The Two Doctors review to follow! A bit different this time around – I’ll be looking at the TV show, but also the Target book at the same time.*
The Two Doctors by Robert Holmes
Space Station J7 defied all sense of what was structurally possible. Its architneers, revelling in the freedom of zero gravity, had created an ethereal tracery of loops and whorls and cusps that formed a constantly changing pattern as the station rotated slowly upon its axis. At one moment it looked like a giant, three-dimensional thumbprint; in the next perspective it resembled a cheap knuckleduster that had been used by Godzilla
The Two versions
There arent many ways to read the direct words of the great man Robert Holmes. There are few interviews available even fewer on-screen recordings of his thoughts in those pre-DVD years. We can see all of his stories, except for Space Pirates in full and there is the odd script available to peruse – the Season 12 script book for example. Beyond that we have some of the story outlines reproduced in the biography, which are very entertaining. And finally his limited contributions to the Target book range the opening chapter of Time Warrior, before he handed it over to Terrance Dicks to complete the rest of the story i.e. all of it! Finally, his novelisation of his own script for the Two Doctors which the excerpt above is taken from a mixture of clever wordsmanship and lowbrow pulp verging on grand guignol. It continues:
White radiance, blazing from its myriad ports and docking bays, rendered almost invisible the faint pin-points of light marking the distant civilisations that had created Station J7 the nine planets of the Third Zone,
They studied it on the vid-screen, the Doctor and Jamie McCrimmon, and even the Doctor looked impressed. But while he was identifying tempered opaline, laminated epoxy graphite, and an interesting use of fused titanium carbide, the young Scot sought for a comparison from the eighteenth-century background; twenty castles in the sky, he decided
A really nice turn of phrase and also something that Robert Holmes is great at, coming up with convincing sounding neologisms and future or alien terminology. All this to build a world and set a young mind off, thinking about what a chacaw might be or what a future war between Iceland and the Philippines might look like in a world of automata made from pig brains.
In comparison on TV that opening sequence doesnt quite translate. Instead we get look at the size of that thing Doctor, yes, it is a big one Jamie! Anyone guess that the old team were improvising again? Those words are missing from the novel. It reminded me of being at Excel on the 50th anniversary and watching Dr Mathew Sweet manfully trying to get something different out of Frazer Hines during an interview (remember Web and Enemy had just come back), while old pro that Frazer is, he just kept moving it back to stories about Wendy Padburys knickers! It is terrific to see Pat and Frazer together here again. They make a fantastic team one of my favourites, two naughty schoolboys off to see the universe together and get into all sorts of trouble. The opening – starting with them in black and white again, in the TARDIS, before the colour bleeds back in works very well.
Unfortunately in the TV version, the first episode goes down hill a bit from there we do have some good stuff still, but it just has something missing. I think they are slightly struggling with a) its a 6-parter in length and b) it is a 3 part 45 minuter. The amble through the space station infrastructure should probably have been the end of episode 1, but at the end of a 25 minute episode one, rather than 45 minutes. So episode 1 could have had a similar feel to Ark in Space, our two heroes exploring a space station, which becomes hostile and uncovering a mystery, then the reveal that the Doctor has been there in a previous incarnation, then the attack. Then the mystery deepens and we switch to Spain. It may just be me, it just feels like that takes too long to get out of the space station infrastructure and get on with the story.
The problem is by 1985 they really shouldnt have been trying to make 6 (or 3 in the new money) parters at all. The pace of TV was quicker even at this point and even the 4 parters were soon to give way to 3 parters in the McCoy era – although even then they often got the pacing wrong and ended up with loads of stuff left over hence the special editions which include minor things like the plot and explaining whats going on! I think with the 6-parts we probably needed the 2 Doctors and their companions on two entirely different adventures and then some clever twist in 5/6 that brings them together and we realise that the two stories are linked. That way you get a brand new 2nd Doctor and Jamie story (hurray!), a sixth Doctor story (if I have to..) and then the two together to resolve the problem. What we get is a variation on that, which lumbers the sixth Doctor, Peri and Jamie on the space station for ages and the second Doctor asleep on a trolley in Spain.
The book version in comparison zips along. It is Bob Holmes untamed some of his descriptions are quite revolting, reminding me of the story Terrance Dicks tells of the line of Bobs that he had to removed in Time Warrior about his wife shall crunch on his eyeballs in her soup ere morn!
Behind her the body of the duty officer twitched grotesquely and then slumped to the floor as the krylon gas contracted its tissues and dissolved the bones. Chemically filleted, curled into a question mark, the remains of the Watcher looked very small, like those of a long-dead child
Now that really isnt very nice.
The Two Monsters
So whilst this one is a bit of a mixed bag, theres much to enjoy. The augmentation of Chessene is a great idea and Jacqueline Pearce is terrific in the role. For something that could be a bit Terry Nation – aliens with a name that is an anagram of gourmand, Robert Holmes gives us quite a bit of detail about them. Nice little bits of world-building the karam name the Franzine Grig or Quawncing Grig, presumably similar to a clan system. Chessenes augmentation is also used very cleverly to highlight the nature and motives of the Androgums, because she is impure. This avoids too much unnecessary info-dumping, as it basically provides a reason for Shockeye to tells us precisely what he is.
SHOCKEYE: I have a desire to taste one of these human beasts, madam. The meat looks so white and roundsomely layered on the bone, a sure sign of a tasty animal. CHESSENE: You think of nothing but your stomach, do you, Shockeye. SHOCKEYE: The gratification of pleasure is the sole motive of action. Is that not our law? CHESSENE: I still accept it, but there are pleasures other than the purely sensual. SHOCKEYE: For you, perhaps. Fortunately, I have not been augmented. CHESSENE: Take care. Your purity could easily become insufferable. SHOCKEYE: These days, you no longer use your karam name, do you, Chessene o’ the Franzine Grig? CHESSENE: Do you think for one moment that I forget that I bear the sacred blood of the Franzine Grig? But that noble history lies behind me, while ahead? Oh, ahead lies a vision.
DASTARI: You are no longer an Androgum, Chessene. I have raised you to a superior plane of life. CHESSENE: There are blood-ties between the Franzine Grig and the Quauncing Grig, Dastari. Shockeye does not yet know the full nature of my intentions. When he does learn the truth he is going to feel that I have betrayed our Androgum inheritance.
Shockeye is also really quite menacing and scary in both the TV version and book advancing on Jamie or Peri even with the ridiculous red eyebrows and warts. John Stratton is terrific here. The novel describes him as:
Shockeye’s sparse thatch of ginger hair topped a heavily-boned face that sloped down into his body without any apparent necessity for a neck. His skin was grey and rugose, thickly blotched with the warty excrescences of the denizens of high radiation planets. But it was not the face, nor the expression on it, that caused the back of Jamies neck to tingle; it was the sheer brute power packed into the massive body. Every line of it, from the mastodon shoulders and over the gross belly to the tree-trunk legs, spoke of a frightening physical strength.
He is physically very strong, but squat and short enough to later visually make a very good double act with the second Doctor. His on-going quest to butcher, cook and eat Jamie of Peri is really quite repugnant.
In comparison, the Sontarans are ill-used I cant work out if this is a script problem or whether it is just how they are represented on screen. Apparently Robert Holmes thought they had been badly used in Invasion of Time, but I dont think they fare that much better here. The costumes and masks are a bit rubbish and they lack a Kevin Lindsay or Dan Starkey to lift them. It is amazing how much of a difference the actor makes for these types of role, even for a character where they are barely visible it is laid bare here and Invasion of Time. Im not entirely sure what they are doing in this story and why Chessene needs them. It all feels a little bit like Bob having to fulfil his obligations to JNTs shopping list and amidst the returning Doctor and companion they are maybe one element too many. Now another Robert Holmes Sontaran story, I would love to have seen that, this just isnt it.
The Two Doctors
One of the things that reading the book really brought home to me is that Robert Holmes just writes the Doctor. There is no difference to how he depicts either of the two here. On the page both of them bluster, are mock pompous, self-opinionated and reckless, but also clever and good fun to be with. So why do I love the Second Doctor on TV and not particularly the Sixth?
Well I am afraid it just comes down to how they are played and how they work with the companion they are paired with. With the Second as he reaches the space station we get him slipping in through the kitchens to avoid the scientists all wanting his autograph and him boasting of his diplomatic skills all of which then are completely undercut as he ends up in a blazing row with Dastari. Jamie plays off this, rolling his eyes and they are all great pals and they are both in on the joke one isnt a victim. Their relationship just works, they havent been together since 1969, but they just know how to do this stuff much better than the incumbent pair. In comparison at times Colin is smug and overbearing, over annunciating every line and a right pain in the arse. Actually as the story progresses he does get a lot better and there is the odd quiet, reflective moment :
She can’t comprehend the scale of it all. Eternal blackness. No more sunsets. No more gumblejacks. Never more a butterfly.
Good night, sweet prince.
There just arent enough of these moments to balance the other stuff – he is so much better when there are. From the script there are things like sending Peri into the hacienda to cause a distraction, knowing that it contains not just Androgums, but also Sontarans, he puts her in terrible danger but in the book, we find out that he regrets this and realises what he has done. In the TV version we also have the horrible James Bond Just desserts quip after killing Shockeye – which is interestingly missing from the book I wonder if it was an ad-lib? The balance needed is on the page here in Robert Holmess book it just isnt really portrayed on TV.
The structure of the story means that we dont get to see much of the two Doctors together, which is fine, you only need so much of that anyway. However we also dont get to see too much of the Second Doctor and Jamie together either, which just feels like a missed opportunity.
The Two Companions
There is also a difference between the novelisation and as presented on TV around the Doctor and Peris relationship. It is as if Holmes realised the Sixth Doctor and his relationship with Peri didnt work. In the book, the Doctor has just made up Gumblejacks they dont actually exist. He isnt really fishing; he just wanted to spend some time sitting by a river. He is lighter, when he claims it was his idea to see a Doctor, she sees him chuckle to himself he shares the joke with Peri they are both in on the joke. It is that simple all it had to be was a joke that they were both in on, something shared, rather than a whining victim and he an overbearing bully. The thing is Colin and Nicola are obviously very close and seem to get on very well together – it is just a pity that doesn’t always translate on screen in these stories. Im not sure why it doesnt, but it is sad.
Oh and picking up on something else that I mentioned in the Attack of the Cybermen review – I spent an awful lot of time being distracted by the amount of her cleavage on display again, particularly in the slightly dull space station scenes. Is this just me? Tell me it isnt? I could have inserted another screencap here, but after the last one, well I think the point has already been made.
The two dedicated trenchermen of Seville
In amongst all of this, there is something quite glorious, Shockeye who has been betrayed by Chessene and the Second Doctor, who is now part Androgum heading into town for a bite to eat!
DOCTOR 2: Capercaillies in brandy sauce. SHOCKEYE: What? DOCTOR 2: With a stuffing of black pudding made of live pig’s blood, herbs, and pepper. And the breasts of the birds should be slit and studded with truffles. SHOCKEYE: You know the cuisine of this planet? DOCTOR 2: Of course I do. I have eaten pressed duck at the Tour d’Argent. They are fed only on corn, fruit pulp and molasses. They’re exquisite, Shockeye. Why am I thinking of food? SHOCKEYE: Because you are now an Androgum. Can you lead me to one of these eating places to sample the local dishes? DOCTOR 2: Of course I can, but you will need proper clothes. SHOCKEYE: Proper clothes? DOCTOR 2: A collar, a neck tie, at least. SHOCKEYE: Oh. I know where there are clothes.
They remind me of two of the sort of lardy, dew-flapped food critics that appear on things like Masterchef, drooling over some over-rich concoction involving offal. In reality they are a very clever grotesque version of the Doctor and Jamie, physically quite short, best of pals off exploring a new world, the Doctor leading Shockeye astray, arm in arm. It is just the intent that is different and because of them people die.
But can they suffer?
‘The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny.
…the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’
Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832)
Today (as I write this) I went to see Richard Dawkins at the Cheltenham Science festival. There was a question about vegetarianism and he answered that he was trying, sometimes unsuccessfully to adopt a vegetarian diet. The question – which is from the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, which is also central for me, was – but can they suffer? Dawkins gave this some thought and came up with a hypothesis that there is a possibility that the pain reflex may be actually heightened in less intelligent species – since pain is instructional warning individuals to avoid doing things that damage or aren’t good for them, it is possibly more important for those less able to reason. No evidence for this, just food for thought.
Holmes essentially asks the same question as Bentham in The Two Doctors:
DASTARI: What are you doing? SHOCKEYE: Tenderising the meat. Oh, see how the flesh is marbling. That’s the fatty tissue breaking up. DASTARI: You should kill him first, surely? SHOCKEYE: It works better on a live animal. DASTARI: It looks very painful. SHOCKEYE: That’s simply a nervous reflex. I’ve been butchering all my life. Primitive creatures don’t feel pain in the way that we would.
That last line ‘that’s simply a nervous reflex’, is the key to this aspect of the story and directly asks us to imagine that we are being prepared for the table and about to be die for it. It is a lie that some carnivores tell themselves or in many cases just prefer no to think about. I wonder how Shockeye felt as the cyanide slowly took effect?
All the way through this story, Shockeye has been fantasising about butchering and eating a ‘tellurian beast’, preferably a ‘jack’. Even in her augmented state, Chessene is curious to taste one – she is still an Androgum. This is central to Dastari’s eventual rejection of her, is the very memorable image of her on the ground, lapping at the blood of a Time Lord from the wound inflicted on the Sixth Doctor by Shockeye. Amongst all the other frippery, this is the central part of the story for me. Shockeye isn’t alone either – we have the Doctor dreaming of pan-fried Gumblejack and Oscar killing his ‘Painted beauties ’ with cyanide. At the end the Doctor proposes a vegetarian diet. Eventually this is reversed with ‘man of the people’ the Ninth Doctor eating his ’normal’ steak and chips. His compassion for the Gelth or the Nestenes, obviously doesn’t extend to cattle, they get the same treatment as the Slitheen or Daleks.
I’ve never really talked about being vegetarian, certainly not for a very long time now, most people who need to know about it already do and have done for years. This year is the 30th anniversary of me giving up meat – that is pretty much since I’ve cooked for myself. I’m not perfect, far from it and I have no desire whatsoever to tell anyone else how to behave. I never really wanted to eat meat even as a child, I couldn’t really stand the idea of killing animals to eat. The trigger for me though was a South Bank Show Special on The Smiths – apparently it aired on the 18th October 1987. There was a very short clip of a cow sliding down a metal ramp at an abattoir, I haven’t seen it since then – but in my mind it’s eyes rolled showing white and it’s tongue hung down to one side. I gave up there and then.
So beyond all of that we have some pretty unpleasant deaths – the Dona Arana’s neck is snapped, Oscar Botcherby stabbed in the restaurant (which feels like it should be more affecting than it is), the lorry driver murdered randomly and Shockeye killed by the Doctor with cyanide. The act of killing, well I personally think that may have been better left to Jamie, as an act of revenge for his treatment by Shockeye. As horrible as Shockeye is, this doesn’t quite sit right. On top of that the entire crew of the space station are massacred. So the deaths do clock up, just maybe not as obviously as Attack, Resurrection or Warriors of the Deep.
Overall, there is a lot to like about The Two Doctors in both its forms, but it is on reflection it is a bit less than the sum of its parts. The location work is nice enough, without really justifying itself. The direction is nice in places, but a bit pedestrian and the story never entirely justifies the return of the Second Doctor and Jamie, nice as it is to see them again. The Sontarans are wasted, but it is the central story of the Androgums and what it is like to be regarded as a beast for the table that I really like. The story also gives me something else that I can cling onto from the wreckage of the Sixth Doctors era on TV, so poor old Revelation isn’t entirely alone. Oh and it gives us a rather nice novelisation by Robert Holmes, a chance to read the great man’s words, if not to glimpse what he might have produced if he hadn’t been given a shopping list of spurious stuff by a producer who was a bit too keen on such things.
I’ll leave the last words on things to Robert Holmes, the last line is interesting, with regard to the attempted cancellation and that it was Holmes who reported the rumours to the production office:
‘Nobody ever discovered quite what had happened at the hacienda of the Dona Arana. Because Father Ignatius had suffered a slight stroke it was many weeks before he felt well enough to visit her again. He called the police when he found the condition the house was in and they and they carried out a desultory investigation over several more weeks. It was obvious that there had been an explosion- the foundations of the hacienda had been shattered and much of the building had subsided into the cellars, completely blocking them, but quite what had caused it and what had happened to the Dona were mysteries that were never solved.
The file eventually went into a cabinet next to the unsolved murder of Botcherby, Oscar, restaurant manager.
It is the 50th anniversary year. BBC Worldwide brings out a rather brilliant set of mugs – each with a montage of images from a different Doctor and their first and last words in the role. At the moment I’m having a cup of tea out Jon. It is a simple pleasure, a glimpse of my domestic life when I am working from home. I spend a few moments choosing which Doctor – the completist in me would like a John Hurt and Peter Capaldi in the same style, but I can live with that. At the back of cupboard lies Colin Baker. The rest of the mugs are a pleasant colour inside – light blue, grey, mauve, scarlet etc. Colin’s is a sort of horrible mustard yellow colour, the sort of colour that Austin Allegro’s and Princess’s came in in the 1970’s. His first words are ‘Change my dear and it seems not a moment too soon’ and his last ‘Carrot juice, carrot juice, carrot juice’ – saying everything three times was his ‘thing’ right until the bitter end.
I only very occasionally drink from the mug of Colin, my partner refuses – she wants Jon or David, Matt or at a push Peter or Paul and would rather do the washing up than use that particular mug. The thing is the design is quite nice – in the shape of Colin’s face, we have Davros and a white and gold Dalek and Peri wearing a low cut top from the Two Doctor’s, but mostly it is an unloved thing, there for completeness and because it came free with a DVD order from the now sadly defunct BBC Shop. For a week or so, I am going to reach to the back of the cupboard, reach for that mug and empty out the enormous Metebelis 3 size spider that has set up home there and drink deep from the cup of Colin!
I’m generally a nice sort of person, well at least I hope so and I really like Doctor Who. I tend to mark an awful lot of it in the 6-8 out of 10 bracket, I have lots of favourites in the 9-10 range and very few get marked 5 or below. It pains me to just laugh at the show, especially since for every one of the few stories that I dislike, they are someone else’s jumping on point, a happy childhood memory or something similar that just makes them feel better. For the first time in this thread I am going to write about something that I think is pretty rubbish. And it still hurts a little bit. I did think of skipping it, this marathon allows me to pick and choose, unlike the more usual format, but I thought why not – maybe something good might come out of it? Last time I tried to watch Attack of the Cybermen a year or so ago, I only got through half of episode one and I shamefully have to admit I spent nearly all of that staring at Peri’s top – more of that later. I generally try my best to produce balanced reviews and I normally dislike hyperbole or hatchet jobs – but I’ll admit I’ve really struggled with this one,
Anyway, for good or ill, here goes. It starts out like Doctor Who meets ‘Minder’.Resurrection did The Sweeney, this one does the 1980’s equivalent. I don’t mind the early scenes with Lytton – Maurice Colbourne is a pretty classy actor and Brian Glover is always good for a laugh or two (‘Time travel in an organ’). They are organising a bank raid in 80’s London – a cockney diamond blag with shooters and everything. The opening scenes in the sewers are also classic Doctor Who stuff, the unsuspecting workers being attacked would fit pretty much into any era.
Then it all goes horribly, horribly wrong. What has happened to our two regulars? The Sixth Doctor is just horrible here – utterly unlikeable in every way (unstable, Unstable, UNSTABLE!) – I’ve tried, but I am struggling to find any redeeming features to this section. If I was just to look at this story and Twin Dilemma (all there was to go on at the time of transmission) the only conclusion I could possibly come to – is that the Doctor has for the first time been horribly miscast. Sorry, I don’t like saying that – I have posted nicer things about Colin’s performance in this thread before and actually will do again soon, but he isn’t great here. At least in the first episode, he gets better moments towards the end of the second episode – but I was already lost by that point. If you don’t enjoy spending time with the Doctor and I am aware that others could level this at Doctor’s that I really like, then what is the point? Likewise the Doctor companion relationship – shout, whine, bluster whine, be obnoxious, whine. She wasn’t like this with the Fifth Doctor – if any Doctor and companion bring out the very worst in each other it is these two. To one degree or another most other production teams managed to get this relationship right – I can’t think any other point from 1963 until 1985 where this aspect has been got so disastrously wrong – it is painful to watch. This is especially perplexing when you consider their obvious chemistry off screen.
The Doctor’s ‘look’ has been covered more than adequately a million times before, so I won’t dwell on that. However I will talk about costume design in general. The show sometimes does amazing things on a miniscule budget and no time – creating the Silk Route, Tenochtitlan or Jaffa in a studio with back cloths, building design classics like the Daleks or K9, the TARDIS interior, monster sculpts like the Draconians or the original Davros. Costume design for your regular cast costs a fraction of those things, I’ve no doubt it takes skill, judgement and taste to do the job and pick or make clothes that work, I’m not decrying that – but in comparison with trying to create the surface of Vortis and 5 species of giant invertebrates for 50p it has to be easier surely? How is it possible to get this one aspect that should be easy to get right so very, very wrong? It is the least would expect from the show – the very least. Now I don’t know how much of this is down to JNT’s interference or is genuine output from the costume department – but the work here is just atrocious and it isn’t just because ‘that’s was how the 80’s was’.
What can I say?
Take Peri – she has two costumes here – both seemingly designed to clash as much as possible with everything on the screen, including the leading man and make everything look as cheap as possible – a horrible, garish mess. Her first, a bright pink leotard top and shorts, utterly distracts me in every scene that she is in, that isn’t just down to the colour though. There’s no getting away from it – she is extremely sexy (maybe not in the cliffhanger though!), I know something for the Dad’s (and teenage boys) was a thing back then and still is to some extent – but has it ever been made to look this obvious? Look, I do my best, but if I’m entirely honest I won’t turn down the opportunity to look at a beautiful woman in a very tight, low-cut top if offered – here though it is just really, Really, REALLY – said in the style of Colin Baker – distracting. There is a seemingly unintentional, truly brilliant moment in this story when Peri goes off with a Cyberman into another room in the TARDIS and comes back wearing an equally horrible bright (bright, BRIGHT!) red jump suit. It just looks like the Cybermen have had a word amongst themselves and decided to ask her to put some clothes on. Even the emotionless Cybermen think she should dress more appropriately.
The plot lacks narrative drive (where is the ‘Attack’) and the script this time around all feels like re-heated leftovers – a cul-de-sac that the show has driven up when Resurrection should have been the end of that particular line. There is very little dialogue, apart from that given to Brian Griffiths, or character work that is memorable or particularly good to balance this. People die again. The Cryons, who again look terrible – costume hang your head in shame – they are wearing plastic shower curtains, well charitably maybe they add some much needed pathos to the piece, but are in reality a failure in depiction. Unless I am missing something, did the Cybermen lock the Doctor up in a cell full of explosives? Really? I don’t know maybe all this looked better on paper, but I just can’t see past the production – a decent production might have papered over some of the cracks. The costumes in particular just clash horribly with the downbeat violence of the piece – creating a glaring uncertainty of tone – including in the denouement when the Doctor shoots the Cyber-controller. I think the piece does need something to lift it – to give light to the shade, as did Resurrection, but just putting the leads in bright colourful costumes isn’t it.
I don’t find the continuity a problem on reflection – the Cybermen want to go back in time to stop their home planet from being destroyed – we have far more complex, intricate, interlinked plots these days, often spanning several series. Unless I am missing something, knowing about Tenth Planet. Tomb of the Cybermen or The Invasion isn’t really required? The problem is that the story itself isn’t worth telling and the clashing of tone, production design issues and problems with the regular cast and their relationship that compound this. When Doctor Who truly fails for me – it is because it fails on multiple levels at the same time (I can forgive a dodgy effect or performance or two) and this one ticks off most of them.
Oh, Michael Kilgarriff you are so much better than this – looking a bit porky and doing ‘The Robot’ in a silver flight suit – like a somewhat rotund Peter Crouch (I can imagine the terrace chant). Hasn’t he noticed that no other Cybermen are joining in? Just slightly sniggering behind this back at the one with the big, bald headed one with the muffin-top, middle-aged spread. OK, a cheap shot I know – but it is important that the lead villain looks the part and he really doesn’t.
If anything can be salvaged out of this garish, overly violent mess it is probably Lytton. His redemption as a good guy of sorts working for the Cryons (a bit too sudden a change really, but I’m clutching at straws somewhat here) and death through his cyber-conversion and attack on the Cyber controller is actually pretty decent, although the crushing of his hands into a bloody mess goes too far. Also Cyber conversion is shown here for the first time in a long time – it is a core part of what the Cybermen are and for my money isn’t shown or exploited enough. Actually while on a more positive roll – the scenes on the surface of Telos look really good and the model work is excellent. So there is some good stuff from the returning Mathew Robinson here amongst the problems.
My overarching feeling watching this again was – that this one is a bit rubbish and I am going off to spend my time more profitably elsewhere. Which is pretty much what I said to myself in 1985 and pretty much what I did – it hasn’t aged any better. Still makes me sad though…
‘I’ll say one thing for you, Eric. Your stories are totally predictable. You’re like a deranged child, all this killing, revenge and destruction
The theory goes like this – Earthshock changed everything. It was all returning monsters and continuity after that. Then Resurrection changed everything it was all shoot-em-ups and huge death counts after that. Or the theory goes like this – Caves of Androzani changed everything – it was all mercenaries and cynical stuff after that. And all of that pandering to fans – continuity, returning monsters and flashback sequences – makes the show more niche and is a big factor in what eventually leads to cancellation. Bollocks – I really don’t buy any of that – sorry.
There are just good stories and not so good stories, well made stories and stories that aren’t so well made, Doctor’s and companions that are well cast and work together and those that aren’t and don’t. If returning monsters and continuity was such a big issue for the general viewing audience why hasn’t the new series been cancelled again by now? We have had masses of returning monsters and tortuous continuity for years now – again and again, every year more and more – this year we have The Daleks, Missy, the Master and others already announced, even a tiny glimpse of the Movellans and who knows what else will turn up by the end. The series re-started very light touch for the less committed viewer, then we had returning monsters, returning companions, Time Lords, flashback sequences etc. Eventually this all culminates in The Magicians Apprentice – Daleks old and new, Davros, the war on Skaro from Genesis, UNIT and the Master. Really? That is any less tortuous than the Eric Saward 1980’s stories – Earthshock, Resurrection, Attack of the Cybermen? No it really isn’t – it is however better made and generally better written.
To blame the likes of Earthshock or Resurrection for the cancellation and ‘hiatus’ is in my view to paraphrase the Doctor ‘arrant nonsense’. The show was cancelled because a) the regime at the BBC had changed and they hated it, all executive level support was lost and b) because by Season 22 it looked terrible, had a regular cast that didn’t work, it wasn’t written well enough and had a producer who wanted to move on, should have moved on and wasn’t for some reason allowed to move on. If you want a sneak peak at why the series was eventually cancelled after the mortal wound was inflicted in ’85 take a look at the final story of Season 21 – it provides all the ammunition that Grade or Powell needed.
This is my version of what these stories (good or bad) actually do – they provide balance. Doctor Who in 1982 was at a bit of crossroads – the ratings magnet that was Tom Baker had left, cleverly and let’s give JNT credit here had cast the hugely popular Peter Davison – an actor who was very popular with people outside of Who’s usual core audience. The stories themselves, well they still owe a lot to Chris Bidmead’s version of the show. Now I like these stories very much – I’ve reviewed quite a few of them, but they lack a hook or pace or action or anything much for the less committed audience – they are thoughtful, quite slow, very talkie and along with set design, costume and incidental music they have a sort of soft, reflective, pastoral quality. There are lots of these across seasons 18,19, 20 and even into 21 – past Earthshock and Resurrection and deep into Saward’s time as script editor. Keeper of Traken, Logopolis, Castrovalva, Four to Doomsday, Kinda, Black Orchid, Snakedance, Mawdryn Undead, Enlightenment, The Awakening, Planet of Fire etc. Season 20 without ‘The Return’ or ‘Warhead’ or whatever Resurrection would have been called is quite a strange beast and the original Peter Grimwade version of this would at least have injected some much needed pace and action into the anniversary year and provided balance. It works in that context.
Elsewhere in the early 80’s things were changing in the world of science fiction Film/TV. Science Fiction in cinema had exploded from 1977 onwards after Star Wars and the expectations of not just the likes of Michael Grade, but with the audience as a whole had radically changed. Before these the best effects you were going to see as a child were from Ray Harryhousen films – stop motion stuff or at a push possibly Gerry Anderson (Space 1999 etc.). But it isn’t just about effects – it is also about the type of storytelling – the pace and levels of action and the big set pieces. The impacts of this aren’t felt straight away, but then you then have the mass audience switch from Doctor Who to the glossier US production Buck Rogers during Season 18, followed by the reaction to this – the move to Monday/Tuesday night in season 19 and the new Doctor, which brings the ratings back up to much more respectable, if not quite season 17 levels. It wasn’t that people expected Star Wars from their TV shows, just that they expected more. Doctor Who has to react in some way to this change in the zeitgeist, but absorb some of this (those elements that it can afford) into the shows core DNA – but still do things in a typically ‘whoish’ way. So we start to have thrilling adventures with set piece battles and butch space captains – but instead of Harrison Ford, in Doctor Who these are played by Beryl Reid with a red rinse. It didn’t last long.
All of which leads us to ‘Resurrection of the Daleks’. First of all, I don’t think this is anything much like Earthshock. Ok, I know it has the same author, was supposed to have the same director and has a sort of butch-ness to it, However Earthshock was quite a straightforward story given scale by the return of the Cybermen and the death of Adric and injected with pace by a very capable director. The plot basically was the Cybermen want to destroy the Earth to stop a conference aimed at building an alliance against them, when one method fails they try another method, In some ways it is the most straightforward plot of any Cyberman story – certainly in comparison to the likes of Wheel in Space. It also has a small, well-defined, if not hugely engaging cast of characters. Resurrection by comparison doesn’t really have one plot it has lots of them, all sort of happening at the same time and tangled together. It has a huge cast of characters – most of who die very quickly and are therefore not worthwhile investing much of your time in.
In short it is Doctor Who’s first proper attempt at an action packed blockbuster sci-fi adventure film. It has some quite impressive set pieces for its time and budget, but not much of a coherent plot to hold them together. Now I am a bit of an art-house film type person, Ok a bit snobbish I’ll admit it, so it is very rare that I see a big blockbuster film. I don’t like much in the way of sci-fi fantasy film – you could probably guess the ones that I do like – Blade Runner, Solaris, 2001 etc. I do occasionally out of interest watch a big sci-fi/fantasy action film on a flight or on TV if I find myself alone with time on my hands – just out of interest, a peak into a world that I don’t normally visit. The last one I saw was one of the Avengers films, no idea which. They make me sad. Sad that so much money and talent – acting, production design and build and effects should go to produce something quite so vapid and worthless. The randomness of the action barrelling from set piece to set piece with little to connect these seemingly random events, things just sort of happening to allow yet another fight sequence that looks like a computer game. There is a sort of brainless ‘ it will do quality’ about the most important thing – the script. Now Resurrection isn’t anywhere as bad as that, at least I don’t think it is – those films are the product of 30 years more ‘development’ in that space. Resurrection at least has some worth – but it is the nearest thing I can think of from Doctor Who to those films. I personally think it is aiming more for the Doctor Who version of ‘The Empire Strikes Back’.
So, stepping back from all of this, there are parts of all of this that I really rather like. The start is brilliantly Euston Films – Shad Thames looking grim, British and wet as the policemen gun down the fugitives from the time corridor and an unfortunate tramp. Tramps don’t have a long life expectancy in Doctor Who do they? or I suppose for that matter, sadly in the real world. These sequences are straight out of The Sweeney or Long Good Friday and are really tightly directed. I really rather love them – give me 2 episodes of this please, I would be very happy. Being shot on film gives them a really classy quality and Mathew Robinson deserves a fair bit of praise for these. Likewise the sequences with the Army bomb disposal squad – these are well acted and directed and the sequences hunting the Dalek mutant are tense and scary – directly lifted from Alien or the John Carpenter remake of The Thing, but repurposed for a Doctor Who audience. The problem is these are a side-show not the main piece here. Which is the prison station and Davros and for me therein lies the problem.
So we switch the station where Davros is being held prisoner after the events of Destiny. The station has that falling apart weariness of day-to-day living in space, which was big back then – it’s just a normal job. Alien seemed to trigger that off and Doctor Who had done it a few times – starting with Warriors Gate, it was a newish thing back then. It can work really well – or alternatively just make everything quite dreary. We have people in space moaning all of the time – we don’t care if your job is crap – most of us do crap jobs. Don’t take us out into space and keep showing us how dreary it is – Terminus is the worst culprit for this. Or at least do it better than this and in a more entertaining way. It is nice to see a multi-cultural crew, this was the part of the 1980’s when things really started to change for the better on that front as a new generation of black and Asian actors start to come through – it has to be said though that they aren’t all that brilliant here though, not Rick James bad – just straight out of drama school and inexperienced – and most of them (Mercer aside) die quite quickly in a hail of Dalek fire or deformed horribly by the poison gas. The death toll in the first episode must be up there with any in the programmes history.
The sets are all pretty decent – perhaps not quite matching the decrepit description give in the script, but let’s talk about costume design. Lytton and the trooper reveal the influence of Star Wars on this – they are straight out of the Death Star and are pretty decent. However the Dalek ‘hats’ – they are just bloody awful – absolutely ridiculous – I remember thinking that at the time. And Tegan’s got a new costume. Really around this time you have to ask what is going on with the costume department or maybe the producer – she appears to be dressed as an erm, how to say this delicately – a ‘Lady of the Night’. Was that the look they were looking for? The leather skirt means that every time she has to reach down for something, well I’m sure I saw the moment where Rodney Bewes gets an eyeful in one scene. Then there’s Davros – that mask isn’t great – how can it be worse than the sculpt John Friedlander did nearly 10 years earlier? So a bit of a mixed bag – some good some not so great.
The plot threads – time corridor, Dalek duplicates to de-stabilise Earth, bomb disposal squads, release Davros from prison, cure Movellan virus, assassinate the Lord President of the Time Lords, Tegan leaves. All Eric had to do was write that list on a piece of paper to realise it is too much. Stick to a couple of them and develop them a bit better. I’d personally stick with the bomb disposal squad and the contemporary Earth stuff that looks like The Sweeney, Lytton and his police henchmen and a few Daleks. But then I like The Sweeney. And if you add Daleks to it, it is bound to be better isn’t it?
Peter Davison is good as usual and at least gets a decent set of scenes with Davros, not quite the equivalent of the ‘small things’ speech from Earthshock. He works rather well in this context – an innocent, decent man in amongst all this death. Without him it would all just be too much as indeed it was a year later. Davros, again like the Cyber Leader in Earthshock, manages to get under The Doctor’s skin. Turlough is short changed again, spending most of his time wandering about the station and apart from the entertainment of how she’s gong to deal with running around in those heels and that skirt, Tegan doesn’t do much other than the end scene. Maurice Colbourne is great as Lytton, while Terry Molloy is decent enough as Davros – not Michael Wisher, but good enough. The rest of the cast are a mixed bag.
That’s it I’ve run out of things to say about it. No great insights really, my analysis is Eric was trying to do Star Wars on a budget. There are some good bits, some not so good bits and the plot doesn’t completely hold together. It is well directed, has lots of pace and action, some good set pieces, some of the acting is a bit substandard in places and some that is decent and the plot needs focus and a trim of the unnecessary elements. Lots of people die, almost everyone, I don’t care hugely for any of them so there isn’t a huge impact, just lots of deaths. It is there for people who like that sort of stuff and I suspect that lots of teenage boys did, I am sure I did and in that respect it did its job. As for contemporary reaction – it came top of the DWM Season Survey that year, beating Caves of Androzani and Gary Russell in the review in DWM 89 called it a ‘flawless classic’. So there you go – it was popular with fans at least at the time, but has fallen out of favour since. If you want something better from that season watch Frontios or Caves of Androzani. If you want to watch something considerably worse watch Twin Dilemma.
‘It was on the planet Skaro that my old enemy the Master was finally put on trial. They say he listened calmly as his list of evil was read and sentence passed. Then he made his last, and I thought somewhat curious, request. He demanded that I, the Doctor, a rival Time Lord, should take his remains back to our home planet, Gallifrey.’
So when we last left our heroes, they were walking off into the (metaphorical) sunset and there were cities made of song and the tea was getting cold. Whilst back at TV Centre their enemies were massing. Grade had gone in 1987 but his legacy still lingered on in Jonathan Powell and Peter Cregeen, as did the bad smell surrounding the show. Eventually, as the 80’s turned into the 90’s, the stars aligned again (similar to 2004 in that respect) and Alan Yentob hoved into view as controller of BBC1, a man who understood the potential of the show and its place in British cultural life. A man who was also intrigued by what was on offer from the US (he had brought Star Trek: The Next Generation to BBC2) and a young British ex-pat, Philip Segal, had dangled the bait of Doctor Who as made by Steven Spielberg in his direction.
The gestation of the TV Movie is important, it explains some of its flaws, it also makes you appreciate more that a) it ever got made and b) that what we ended up with is not completely awful and hugely damaging to Doctor Who as an ongoing enterprise. It is almost the story of the triumph of one man’s will – Philip Segal, as he negotiated for almost 7 years, the studio systems of the BBC, Amblin, Columbia, Fox and Universal, along with BBC Worldwide and all of the conflicting interests and politics. Even once Powell and Cregeen were out of the way and whole thing freed up at the BBC end and production began, the process was far from easy – with entirely different sets of script notes from all of the conflicting, interested parties. I’m not sure who would have survived trying to get the thing to series. Segal, Yentob and Jo Wright come out of this with great credit.
From a scripting perspective, there are some very good source materials on the evolution of the story. Gary Russell’s excellent Regenerations book is one – it is beautifully lavish (like the movie itself) and a quick read will make you appreciate the Movie more for what we did get, in comparison with the Leekley bible and the de Laurentis re-write of Leekley’s script. Those are examples of someone looking at the show, latching onto certain elements (Gallifrey, the Time Lords, the Master), but completely missing the point and the whole ethos of the show. All of that was junked (except the Master) and a British ex-pat writer, Mathew Jacobs brought in to do a page one re-write.
So, watching the story itself, the first time for quite a few years, the main thing that struck me was that it is much easier to watch now, after 12 years of the new series and that most of the traditional criticisms of the story could also be levelled at a range of stories since 2005. Let’s take a look at some of these:
• The kisses – well we have had that numerous times, but I’d say that the closest to this is probably Madam de Pompadour in Girl in the Fireplace • The Doctor as half-human – he’s been completely human • A rather camp Master – John Simm, Michelle Gomez? • The ending, everything goes a bit glowy and people inexplicably come back to life – do I need to go any further on that one? I will later. • It is too American – well we’ve had plenty of new series stories set in the US • It feels like we have Doctor Who embedded in another show (ER meets the X-Files) – well I’ve just watched a Doctor Who story embedded in Superman, set in in New York. • The orchestral theme – it struck me while watching this that the titles and theme are very similar to those used in RTD’s time, just slowed down. • The Doctor as biblical or ‘Jesus’ figure – Last of the Time Lords, Voyage of the Damned, Fires of Pompeii? • The wig – well Matt Smith’s wasn’t that great!
I can’t help thinking that the TV Movie, if not hugely influential on the new series, was at least highly important in clearing the decks of some of the traditional thinking about the series that also in some ways limited what it could be. By the time we get to Girl in the Fireplace and Human Nature, we are at least warmed up for the idea of a more human Doctor capable of love.
The other main issue brought up, usually in comparison with Rose, is that it starts out with a different Doctor and wastes a lot of its airtime on the regeneration, rather than just starting with McGann’s Doctor arriving in San Francisco. That is a fair point, but watched in isolation here, it isn’t actually all that relevant and there probably isn’t enough story to go round for the 90 minutes anyway. McCoy is terrific and the regeneration (gurning effect aside – which is rubbish) is very well handled. The BBC were against McCoy’s involvement, even suggesting Tom Baker instead! Segal fought for it, but it does explicitly tie the Movie into the fabric of the ongoing series and subsequently in return the new series has cemented its place in the cannon, whether people like this or not – they just now ignore the half-human bit!
There is a lot of info dumping at the start the story (not always that artfully done), which is sort of understandable given that one of its main aims was to launch the show into what was (PBS aside) a largely new territory – the US mainstream audience. So this is a re-launch that had a different job to do than Rose – it was closer in time to the original run, for all but the youngest of British viewers to not really need the detailed explanations of regeneration, Time Lords, ‘cloaking devices’ etc. and although some of the concepts belong more in Star Trek, in some ways relating them to a series that is understood by the US audience is understandable. Rose was also planned and executed as one of 12 episodes and didn’t really need everything to be explained within its 45 minutes, it tells you the bare basics and all of the Time Lord/Daleks/Time War stuff can wait until later in the series. Also in the end I don’t think it turned out to be that much of an issue with the Movie – the 9m British audience was largely brought up on regeneration, bigger on the inside etc. and the American audience was mostly watching Roseanne, rather than being confused by what it all meant.
Well let’s look at what it does get right. There are moments of pure ‘Whoness’ – I am thinking about the Doctor taking the policeman’s gun and pointing it at himself, rather than using it as a traditional action hero would – subverting the rather bog-standard US TV motorcycle chase scene. The banging of the TARDIS console and key in the cubby hole above the ‘P’ also contrast and undercut the lavish TARDIS set. The other scene that I really like is set at the Vancouver, sorry ‘Sausalito’ Rowing Club as the Doctor re-discovers his memories:
DOCTOR: ‘No. No, no, no, no. Wait, wait. I remember I’m with my father, lying back in the grass. It’s a warm Gallifreyan night. ‘ GRACE: ‘Gallifreyan?’ DOCTOR: ‘Gallifrey! Yes, this must be where I live. Now, where is that?’ GRACE: ‘I’ve never heard of it. What do you remember? ‘ DOCTORr: ‘A meteor storm. The sky above us was dancing with lights. Purple, green and brilliant yellow! Yes!’ GRACE: ‘What?’ DOCTOR: ‘These shoes! They fit perfectly. Yes.’
This is the TV Movie’s equivalent of the ‘World’s turning’ speech from Rose. Then he steps straight through the glass door, stretching the fabric of the glass like water. The other very Doctor-ish moment is offering the Master his hand as he is about to get sucked into the eye of harmony.
Daphne Ashbrook works extremely well with Paul McGann and makes Grace a very likeable companion. I love the way that the Doctor literally steps into Brian’s shoes! Talking of the man, I think that Paul McGann is terrific in this. His casting is very astute, it was championed by Jo Wright at the BBC and to look at ‘Withnail and I’ and to pick McGann instead of the more superficially ‘Doctorish’ Richard E. Grant was very clever and I think pays off here in spades. I was really happy at his casting back in the 90’s having seen him in the wonderful ‘Monocled Mutineer’ and having loved Withnail. The casting call list for the movie makes fascinating reading, but it is difficult to imagine Tony Slattery or John Sessions kissing Grace in the San Francisco night! This new Doctor is well written, a slightly new type of Doctor – although Davison was young, he played the part slightly as an old man in a young man’s body – here the new Doctor is youthful, energetic, perpetual motion, but also capable of depth. He is also quite beautiful and the fact that Grace is so taken with him despite doubting his sanity is plausible.
The other heroes of this production are British director Geoffrey Sax and production designer Richard Hudolin and the design team. From a production perspective, this might still be the most handsome Doctor Who story. The TARDIS set is a thing of beauty – I think that it is my favorite. I love the ceiling that opens out to the stars, the wood and ironwork, the library, the huge expanse of the cloister room (and the bats!) and the whole Jules Verne-ness of it all. I can only think that the panorama ceiling hasn’t been repeated in the new series due to cost, but it is truly a thing of wonder. The lighting is also beautiful, the candlelight and braziers in the TARDIS, the lights on the trees in the kiss scene and the fireworks on New Years Eve. The direction is terrific, I am think of things like the fish head cut scene, one of a number of things that references Spearhead from Space (the jump to the doll’s face in the plastic factory, but also the hospital setting, the clothes scene etc.) and there are some beautiful shots – simple moments like shooting the Doctor and Grace through opposite sides of the time rotor.
The script, whilst not brilliant and not entirely making sense (understatement there!), could have been an awful lot worse, given both its predecessors and the number of interested and conflicted parties that it has to try to satisfy – especially in comparison to Rose with it’s clear creative vision from Russell. It also has double the runtime to fill, as much if not more work to build the world for new viewers. Also I think that its target audience is quite different –an older US Sci-fi literate audience – viewers of the X-Files, Next Generation etc. in comparison Rose is very much pitched at a family audience. Whereas Rose smuggled Doctor Who into an RTD popular drama, this tries the same trick with a US medical procedural show, the combination of ER and X-Files basically covers two of the main US TV dramas of the time. The hospital stuff, whilst quite well done, does go on for too long. Jo Wright asked for this to be cut back, so I assume there was even more of this at one point. The gangster shootout at he start also just doesn’t feel like something that should be in Doctor Who – all of this, along with the setting contributed to the alienation that I felt as a British Viewer (with more than 20 years of Who watching behind me at this point). I can’t help thinking that if San Francisco were substituted for London, the clock based at Greenwich, that back in ’96 I would have felt a lot better about it.
I have mostly been quite positive about this, but at the time, watching it in a B&B in Tobermory on the Isle of Mull, I was very unsure of it, actually I was sure about McGann and McCoy and the design work, just not about anything else. I also felt the same way about Rose, it was only later episodes that cemented my views on the new series, a luxury that the TV Movie never had. Even now, I think I could very easily write an acerbic review condemning most of it – I’ve just chosen to be more positive this time around and I think that the new series just helped me to view this slightly differently. So 20 years after the event, who would have thought it, this is the story of Doctor Who or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the TV Movie. If you really hate it and can’t learn to live with it, watch the documentaries on the DVD, even if you don’t sympathize with those trying to get the thing made, you will at least have the option of giggling childishly every time someone mentions ‘back-door pilot’….
Life and death in San Francisco
A few words about how death and mortality are used in the story. Well it is a regeneration story and is thus about death and re-birth (overtly so here), This is interesting as the Doctor appears to die twice – in a hail of gangland bullets (I’ve never really liked that – it doesn’t really feel like Doctor Who) and then on the operating table and the resurrection is the most overtly biblical of all of them – emerging wrapped in a shroud from a tomb, but is also tied into that more modern tale of resurrection by scientific means – Frankenstein. Grace has a relationship with death here as well here via her childhood dream to hold back death (not entirely sure what that means?), which has lead her to this point in her life. The Master is also explicitly linked with death – trying to steal the Doctor’s remaining lives so that ‘he may live and the Doctor die’.
DOCTOR: ‘Hello, Grace. Well, how does it feel to hold back death? ‘
DOCTOR ‘Well, congratulations. You’ve both been somewhere I’ve never been. ‘ GRACE: ‘It’s nothing to be scared of, Doctor. ‘ DOCTOR ‘Glad to hear it.’ GRACE: ‘Did we go back far enough?’ DOCTOR: ‘Either that or I’m talking to a couple of ghosts and I don’t believe in ghosts.’
Then we have the most contentious deaths – Grace and Chang Lee. Later reborn amidst the autumn leaves (love those leaves in the TARDIS!) in a swarm of golden particles from the eye of harmony, very similar to Rose looking into the heart of the TARDIS in Parting of the Ways or the regeneration energy effect in that and subsequent new series episodes. I don’t really understand their resurrection – Mathew Jacobs and Philip Segal both admit that the ending was never quite right. To me the death of a companion or close friend of the Doctor should only happen very infrequently and should really count as a dramatic moment within the architecture of the series. When this is thrown away and people come back to life, I think that we are cheated and well this to me cheapens death as a concept within the series. I know it is a fantasy, but it is still a drama and drama has rules and these companions and friends are us, the audience – our way into the series, as opposed to the Doctor – he gets to live again, it has been part of the architecture of the series since 1966. Where is jeopardy when ordinary people die and then just appear again?
I recently reviewed Daleks’ Master Plan – despite its bizarre ’outer-spaceness’ and silliness at times, viewers must really have thought that no one was safe after the deaths of Katerina, Bret and then Sara. It engendered a sense of danger and desperation amidst the silliness of the story and gave it an epic and elegiac quality that much of the rest of the material did not warrant. I don’t really want or need to see companions or close friends of the Doctor die, but when they do, it should count for something. I’m quite happy for them to go off to live their lives, to have changed and learnt from their experiences, whether that is dropped off in Aberdeen, on the bus to White City, the Amazon jungle with a dishy Professor or as a surgeon in San Francisco – that’s great. If they die (well Romana apart), let them die, it doesn’t matter if that is heroic or foolish (Adric’s death is both, as is Katerina’s), just let them go. In real life people just die, we mourn them, miss them, remember them, but they leave a hole in our lives that is rarely ever filled again – they are unique and cannot be brought back in the golden glow of CGI.
Eighth man bound
Ultimately, the gift that the TV movie gives us as Doctor Who fans is the Eighth Doctor. He is quite one of my favourites and McGann is brilliant in the role. Whether that is from Big Finish, the DWM Strip, the EDA books or just Night of the Doctor – we had a great new Doctor. It re-invigorated fandom and all of the spin-off media, bridging the gap between the classic show and new series and paved the way for a new, modern version of the show. It is easy to pull it apart for it’s obvious faults, but I’d prefer to remember it for everything that it has given me – Izzy, Fitz, Charley, Lucie, Liv and Helen, Chimes of Midnight, Alien Bodies, The Flood, Absent Friends, A Life in a Day, Snow, UNIT Dating, A Fairytale of Salzburg, The Silver Turk, The Red Lady, Palindrome and so many more.
There are two events in everybody’s life that nobody remembers. Two moments experienced by every living thing, yet no one remembers anything about them. Nobody remembers being born and nobody remembers dying.
As you come into this world, something else is also born. You begin your life, and it begins a journey towards you. It moves slowly, but it never stops. Wherever you go, whatever path you take, it will follow. Never faster, never slower, always coming. You will run. It will walk. You will rest. It will not. One day, you will linger in the same place too long. You will sit too still or sleep too deep, and when, too late, you rise to go, you will notice a second shadow next to yours. Your life will then be over.
‘Heaven Sent’ might just be the greatest ‘Doctor Who’ story ever made, it is certainly the most profound and affecting and I am going to try to justify that statement across this review. It is an extraordinary piece of TV drama – beautifully acted, featuring an electric solo performance by the lead, exquisitely written – rich in theme and image, beautifully directed, designed and lit and featuring a score that has never been bettered in the shows history. And yet, I still can’t quite consider it my personal favourite story. Don’t get me wrong, it’s up there with the very, very best, but it is just too difficult a watch, too bleak, too melancholy (even for my tastes), despite also having moments of light and hope, for me to think about it quite in that way. I’ll try to reconcile those two perspectives as we go along.
The Day you lose someone…
More than any other ‘Doctor Who’ story, ‘Heaven Sent’ is about death, loss and grief. It is a reaction to the Doctor’s own very recent loss and examines how he deals with bereavement – by fighting back against the world and in the end, in the following story ‘Hell Bent’ ultimately going far too far. At the same time, it is also a ‘Doctor Who’ story and there are monsters to be fought – personal and real. Grief might be the Doctor’s principal enemy here in this story, but there are still actual monsters to be found and fought – those responsible for Clara’s death and for imprisoning the Doctor in his own torture chamber. To face them he has to survive this ordeal and in doing this he relies on the same methods that most of us use to survive loss, the memories of his loved one help him though it and urge him on to survive and ‘win’.
This isn’t even subtext – it is all there front and centre in this most unusual of stories. Steven Moffat was interviewed on the subject in DWM and spoke about wanting to depict grief and loss in a story and some of the difficulties of doing that within the show’s format and why he felt he had failed to do this adequately in previous attempts:
“‘The problem is, ‘Doctor Who’ is always about the new adventure, not the aftermath of the last one. Structurally, that’s incredibly important to how the show works. So you have to make grief he centre of the story, not a hangover from last week getting in the way of a new adventure. Grief has to be be the new adventure I thought ‘If he Doctor loses Clara in the most horrific circumstance, a circumstance where events pass out of his control, but which is partly his own fault because he’s made somebody think that they can act like him, and they can’t.. Essentially I was thinking “What is grief How do I make grief the monster of the week in ‘Doctor Who'”
“People always talk about grief as being alone, so I made the Doctor absolutely alone. Grief comes and finds you every time you stop or rest, so I gave him the Veil. And grief is waking up to the same pain every day, and trying to smash through it, so I gave him a diamond wall to punch for the rest of time. Basically he wore away the mountain with his tears. I was aiming for poetry. Tried for poetry, ended up with a gimmick. I’ve defined myself!“
It wouldn’t be Steven Moffat if there wasn’t also a gag attached to it, he goes on to compare the Doctor’s ordeal to the lot of the showrunner – “I do think that there is a reading of it that living the same life over and over again while you smash your face against a wall of pure diamond is roughly what it is like making ‘Doctor Who’. You kill yourself every time and then you get up and do it again. You never stop!”
That is Steven though, adding gallows humour to a profound and serious piece of work that just happens to be framed within a children’s action adventure sci-fi show. It really is a beautiful, truthful piece of writing – one he should be truly proud of. For me, the key line about grief and loss in the story is both brilliant and cruelly truthful:
‘The day you lose someone isn’t the worst. At least you’ve got something to do. It’s all the days they stay dead.’
Anyone who has suffered personal loss will understand that. That ache. That hole in your life. Something that can only be made better by adding time and the memories of happier times spent together. That day though, there is so much to do, so much to organise, it is as much about practical details of dying as it is about loss. A funeral is the traditional, ritual marker of the end of that period – from then on it is just loss and how you deal with it. Sadly, I don’t think that Steven Moffat or anyone else writing for the show for that matter, ever wrote anything more truthful.
Facing the consequences of ‘Face the Raven’
To recap, in the previous story, ‘Face the Raven’, the Doctor’s best friend Clara dies, killed by the Quantum Shade in what was really just a trap for the Doctor – a literal ‘Trap Street’. And brutally, Clara dies because of the Doctor, she has become too close to his world, because she tried too hard to be like him, to act in the way that he would, using everything she had learned of his methods. All to no avail. So, he feels not only the loss of a close friend, but also responsibility for creating this situation – something that he hinted at in ‘Face the Raven’ and even earlier, really at least since ‘Flatline’ – she had been enjoying the danger far too much and becoming reckless with it. It is an echo of Rory’s words to the Doctor in ‘Vampires of Venice’: ‘You know what’s dangerous about you? It’s not that you make people take risks, it’s that you make them want to impress you. You make it so they don’t want to let you down’. It is etched in his sad, old face in ‘Heaven Sent’ – ‘That sad old smile’ – his loss and his sense of guilt.
It isn’t only his grief at the loss of Clara though. This story is more about death than almost any other – more than even ‘Death in Heaven’ with its journey into the afterlife, the underworld of Orpheus – as not only is the Doctor stalked through his own personal prison by his own personal representation of death – ‘The Veil’, he also dies, only to be reborn, billions of times in a loop. The ever-growing pile of skulls in the sea surrounding the castle as evidence of this. Every time digging his own grave. Holding his own skull in his hand on the castle walls overlooking the sea – his very own Elsinore, the Doctor as Hamlet. Or running the sands of time through his hands – his own mortality trickling away. Or exiting via a tunnel leading to a bright light. Does any other ‘Doctor Who’ story have as many deaths? Maybe ‘Logopolis’ as the entropy field wipes out countless worlds? Well, in this case it is the same death, looped billions of times, resurrected by the transmat (sort of ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’ via the ghosting of ‘Silence in the Library’) but even so. And yet despite all of this ‘Heaven Sent’ manages to be deeply personal, intimate and almost small in scale. And through the story the Doctor finds the strength to go on, to fight and to win, all via his memories of Clara – the person he has lost.
So, we have images of death running right through the core of this, billions of deaths, a personification of death and the grief of a hero for his friend. It is fair to say that this isn’t ‘Doctor Who’ as light comedy. It also isn’t an easy watch. It is however extremely compelling drama and despite the darkness and subject matter it is a story I keep returning to time and time again, finding new aspects and nuance to it with every watch.
The Castle – my own bespoke torture chamber
Sorry I’m late. Jumped out of a window. Certain death. Don’t you want to know how I survived? Go on. Ask me! No, of course I had to jump! The first rule of being interrogated is that you are the only irreplaceable person in the torture chamber. The room is yours, so work it. If they’re going to threaten you with death, show them who’s boss. Die faster. And you’ve seen me do that more often than most. Isn’t that right, Clara? Rule one of dying, don’t. Rule two, slow down.
The Doctor is trapped in a bespoke prison. A clockwork castle, the rooms rotating and changing position, much like the TARDIS in that respect – it is after all Time Lord technology. I recently heard a podcast where Steven Moffat discussed ‘Once upon a Time‘ – the penultimate episode of ‘The Prisoner‘ and this piece has something in common with that series – albeit pushed in a different direction tonally. The very British whimsy of the Village, replaced by a much darker, more baroque setting. It shares the confinement, the righteous anger and relentless pacing of the hero (Peter Capaldi would make an amazing No. 6, should someone decide to remake the series again) and sense of escape and retribution against your captors. It also shares the high concept, philosophical feel of the 1960’s drama and ultimately it probably confused the wider audience just as much..
The location of a castle set in the sea though, taps into a much more timeless source than the Village, it harks back to fairytale and classic stories of the noble hero imprisoned without hope. And also to Hamlet and Elsinore and soliloquies on life and death and the nature of mortality. It is an incredibly astute setting for all of those reasons. And then because this is ‘Doctor Who’ and because it is Time Lord technology it has yet more layers – we have time and the looping of the Doctor’s life in prison and his death and we have a castle in the sea that can fit in the palm of your hand. In a confession dial in fact. A device cunningly set up earlier in the season and one that explains the raison d’etre of the piece. It is a device to force the Doctor to tell the truth, to confess. Part religious – confession is good for the soul, part torture device – confess or face your own worst fear, your own bespoke personification of death. And let’s be honest, it just looks beautiful – all courtesy of the brilliant direction of Rachel Talalay, lighting of Director of Photography Stuart Biddlecombe and perhaps one of the great unsung heroes of ‘Doctor Who’ – the quite brilliant design work of the late Michael Pickwoad.
Parting, piercing or lifting the veil
I always think of ‘Heaven Sent‘ as a solo performance (and what a performance) from Peter Capaldi, possibly the single best performance by anyone playing the role. We also have a brief appearance from as Clara and of course we have his nemesis – the Veil. An image from his childhood nightmares – the frankly grotesque ‘when I was a very little boy, there was an old lady who died. They covered her in veils, but it was a hot, sunny day, and the flies came. It gave me nightmares for years’. The Veil slowly and deliberately pursues the Doctor around the castle and can only be stopped by a confession. It also ends his life each time in the loop, triggering another cycle. The Veil – well the phrase ‘piercing’ or ‘lifting’ or ‘parting the veil’ has a number of meanings (even a corporate legal definition), but generally it can be characterised as meaning opening a door to the ‘other’ – to some truth, to something supernatural or the next life or whatever lies beyond death. In that regards its name reveals its function within the narrative.
The Prisoner
It would be remiss of me not to single out Peter Capaldi in all of this. He is simply astonishing in ‘Heaven Sent‘. Switching effortlessly between a brutal depiction of loss, to a wistful sad old smile, to righteous anger, to maniacally solving the intellectual puzzle of this world, all whilst about to be killed by the Veil or when leaping from the castle window into the sea below or punching a diamond wall or crawling, slowly and painfully back to the transmat to start the process all over again. He is incredible – I”m struggling to think of another actor in the role that could match this – only John Hurt or Christopher Eccleston would come close I think. But really this is all about Peter Capaldi – it is precision built to showcase his talent, to play to his specific strengths and he really grasps the opportunity and delivers an acting masterclass.
The Shepherd Boy, the sea, the stars, the mountain and the bird
At the centre of the story is a fairy tale. One written by the Brothers Grimm, published in 1815 – ‘The Shepherd Boy‘. Elements from the story are scattered across “Heaven Sent‘ and one is so important to the resolution of the narrative, that without knowing the source story (nobody watching in our house did), “Heaven Sent‘ is much, much less effective, if not downright confusing!
There was once on a time a shepherd boy whose fame spread far and wide because of the wise answers which he gave to every question. The King of the country heard of it likewise, but did not believe it, and sent for the boy. Then he said to him, “If thou canst give me an answer to three questions which I will ask thee, I will look on thee as my own child, and thou shalt dwell with me in my royal palace.” The boy said, “What are the three questions?”
The Sea
`The King said, “The first is, how many drops of water are there in the ocean?” The shepherd boy answered, “Lord King, if you will have all the rivers on earth dammed up so that not a single drop runs from them into the sea until I have counted it, I will tell you how many drops there are in the sea.”
In ‘Heaven Sent‘ The castle is surrounded by the sea, it is an essential part of the Doctor’ initial escape from the veil and his dawning realisation of the rules of the world he finds himself in. Of the significance of the pile of skulls he finds as he dives down into the depths. It is less the counting of drops of water in the sea, but rather the skulls that helps the Doctor understand his predicament and measure time passing.
‘One hope. Salt. Thought I smelled it earlier. When I broke the window, I was sure. Salty air. This castle is standing in the sea. Diving into water from a great height is no guarantee of survival. I need to know exactly how far I’m going to fall, and how fast. Why do you think I threw the stool? Fall time to impact seven seconds. Because you won’t see this coming!
The Stars
The King said, “The next question is, how many stars are there in the sky?” The shepherd boy said, “Give me a great sheet of white paper,” and then he made so many fine points on it with a pen that they could scarcely be seen, and it was all but impossible to count them; anyone who looked at them would have lost his sight. Then he said, “There are as many stars in the sky as there are points on the paper; just count them.” But no one was able to do it.
And the Doctor looks at the stars and realises that they are all wrong – wrong for the time period and he realises that seven thousand, a million or a billion years have passed. That he hasn’t travelled in time, but rather taken the long way home, looping in billions of iterations of life and death until this point.
And the stars, they weren’t in the wrong place, and I haven’t time travelled. I’ve just been here a very, very long time. Every room resets. Remember I told you that? Every room reverts to its original condition. Logically, the teleporter should do the same. Teleporter. Fancy word. Just like 3D printers, really, except they break down living matter and information, and transmit it. All you have to do is add energy. The room has reset, returned to its original condition when I arrived. That means there’s a copy of me still in the hard drive. Me, exactly as I was, when I first got here, seven thousand years ago. All I have to find is some energy.
The Mountain and the bird
“The third question is, how many seconds of time are there in eternity.” Then said the shepherd boy, “In Lower Pomerania is the Diamond Mountain, which is two miles and a half high, two miles and a half wide, and two miles and a half in depth; every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on it, and when the whole mountain is worn away by this, then the first second of eternity will be over.”
And the Doctor realises the significance at the end of the cycle of the word ‘BIRD” etched in the sands of time in the teleport chamber. The meaning of the tale of the Shepherd Boy, the bird sharpening its beak on a diamond mountain every hundred years, wearing it slowly down and its relation to eternity, its sense of scale as a marker of the passing of time. The wall in this case is azbantium, marked ‘Home’ and the exit from this prison. The route to the Doctor’s reckoning with the people who have trapped him here and taken away his best friend. The Doctor is the bird and through a million or more years he punches his way through the wall and towards the bright light at the end of the diamond tunnel. To Gallifrey and a reckoning with Rassilon.
All of this is made explicit in the beautiful montage sequence where the Doctor loops endlessly through the cycle, punching the wall, mortally injured, left for dead at the hands of the Veil, dragging himself in agony back to the transmat, giving his last energy to operate it once more to repeat the cycle, is simply an astonishing piece of work from all concerned. Murray Gold’s music ‘The Shepherd Boy‘ is his finest work I think. Credit must also go to the editor of this section, it is so artfully done, cycling through events, but in a beautifully curated way, each cycle slightly different, pacing perfectly choreographed matched to ‘The Shepherd Boy‘ theme, a dance to the of music time.
Home – the long way round
Go to the city. Find somebody important. Tell them I’m back. Tell them, I know what they did, and I’m on my way. And if they ask you who I am, tell them I came the long way round.
Until finally, having carved a tunnel through the diamond wall, following the heavenly light, the Doctor breaks free. The Veil as a marker of time, falls like a previous Steven Moffat motif into a pile of clockwork cogs. And the Doctor, full of righteous anger is on his way to his own home, having taken the long way around, not quite the return he planned in ‘Day of the Doctor‘ or a heroes return for the ‘man who won the Time War‘. There is reckoning to be had and it might not have been Clara’s wish, but the Doctor will have his revenge.
‘You must think that’s a hell of a long time, Personally, I think that’s a hell of a bird.’
A common issue with ‘Doctor Who’ stories, particularly those in the 45 minute format is the rushed ending or the unsatisfying magic potion plot resolution or the dreaded ‘Deus ex Machina’. Nobody could accuse “Heaven Sent‘ of that. It is nearly all resolution, an escape billions of years in the making, not exactly ‘with one bound he was free‘. At the most you could accuse it of being a most non-‘Doctor Who’-like ending, albeit one it shares with ‘City of Death‘, one that involves the use of a fist – a punch that saves the universe.
So, “Heaven Sent‘ a beautifully constructed symphony to loss and grief, wrapped up in a structure built from a fairytale and with elements in common with ‘The Prisoner’. A thing of dark, melancholic beauty and hope in the face of seemingly boundless adversity. And quite simply the greatest ‘Doctor Who’ story ever made.
Coda
Life doesn’t follow the usual Steven Moffat narrative structure. It isn’t a dark fairytale, where in the end ‘everybody lives‘ or comes back to life or gets to live on in another form. It isn’t ‘Hell Bent‘, it is rather ‘Heaven Sent‘, where everyone dies and those left behind are left to grieve and to remember those who are gone. In that respect ‘Heaven Sent‘ is the greatest ‘Doctor Who‘ story – based on a fairytale by the Brother’s Grimm, but resolutely adult and unflinching in its depiction of death, mortality, and the numbing sadness of loss and grief. It is brutal in that respect, but also very, very beautiful and life affirming.
Last month was the 16th anniversary of ‘Rose’, of the show returning to TV (26th March 2005). A time before the iPhone or iPad, before streaming services or smart TV’s. When broadband and wifi were just starting to be widespread and the sound of modems firing up could still be heard in some quarters. Way back when, assuming that you could afford a widescreen TV, it weighed a ton and took 2 people to shift. When VHS was giving way to DVD and hard drive recorders. Britain was slowly emerging from 5 channel TV – BBC 3 and 4 were just a couple of years old. Pre-digital switchover, Freeview was relatively new and many people were still watching via analogue TV tuners. iPlayer was still a couple of years away. Whilst across the TV landscape, soaps and reality TV ruled the roost.
In some ways, it wasn’t a very promising time for the show to return. In other ways it absolutely, resoundingly was. You see, ‘Doctor Who’ fandom had cunningly sent sleeper agents into the UK’s media sphere. We knew about some of them – Russell T Davies, Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat and some of them where in deeper cover – Jane Tranter for example. Now we had a woman on the inside and bosses who were up for the idea – the likes of Lorraine Heggessy and Mal Young. People determined enough to unravel the rights issues and even withstand the return of that old enemy of the show and all-round pantomime villain – Michael Grade. Attempts were made to quietly kill off the revival at its re-birth in the wake of his return – thankfully they were fought and overcome. Meanwhile critics and cultural commentators, who generally loved the drama heavyweights behind the relaunch – Russell T Davies and Christopher Eccleston, were also of the right age – a heady mix of their own childhood nostalgia and also looking for something else to write about instead of ‘Big Brother’ or the latest talent show. It shouldn’t be underestimated how important the reputations of Russell and Chris were in the acceptance of the new version of the show – reputations are there to lose, but these were about as fireproof, as cast iron, as you could get in the mid 2000’s.
But what of the audience? Well it turned out that people had simply forgotten how much they loved the series – and many of those people now had young children, a new generation who were free of the burden of the baggage of the final years of the show. They were ripe for a homegrown sci-fi adventure series, for them it was all brand new and British TV was offering them very little in this space. Audience research had showed that there was no real appetite for the show returning – guess what, that audience research was wrong – people wanted it in their lives, they just didn’t know it yet. Luckily the production team quietly buried these negative responses. The rumours of the death of shared family programming were also exaggerated (they are probably much truer now). Russell and the team were in the right place, at the right time – and had just the right writers and right production techniques (CGI, prosthetics, single camera filming, post-production grading etc.) available to re-launch the show.
The timeline for all of this was somewhat convoluted and protracted. There seemed to be such a long time between the rumours and then the announcement of the show’s return (23rd September 2003) and the eventual screening of ‘Rose’ (March 2005) or the Canadian leak of the early cut if that was the way you chose to watch it. We had the casting of Billie Piper (May 2004) to mass consternation, although I’d recently seen her in ‘Canterbury Tales’, so at least I knew she could act. Her casting had been rumoured as far back as September 2003. And then I remember the announcement of the casting of Chris Eccleston as the Doctor – it was on Saturday the 20th March 2004 – a year before we would get to see him in action.
I remember I‘d been working away from home and my partner woke me up early to tell me the news I was so happy, Chris was one of my favourite actors, I could barely have picked anyone I would have wanted more. for the role. And you’ll hopefully see why as I review these stories, I’ll also include some thoughts on his other work – including extraordinary ‘The Second Coming’ which he worked on with Russell. Well I will if all goes to plan, which things very rarely do in a marathon! Hopefully this one is short enough to get through – if only he doesn’t do something mad and return to the role unexpectedly and record a whole load of audio episodes in the meantime…
Firstly an explanation. I wasn’t sure how to approach Earthshock, I am not entirely sure what else remains to be said about it – some people like it, some don’t, quite a few people don’t like what happened after it’s ‘success’. I could be wrong but I don’t think anyone is radically going to change their mind about it, no matter what anyone else says.However there is something that I find fascinating about the story – in particular whether it is possible to watch or review something which relies on surprise and shock, as if it were new, when you already know what happens.
Of all the Doctor Who stories aired in my lifetime, this is the story that most suffers from knowing two key moments in advance – perhaps only the regeneration at the end of The Stolen Earth comes anywhere close. I would be quite surprised if anyone who saw Earthshock at the time would disagree that a lot of its effectiveness is lost without that sense of shock. Simply put, I don’t think people watching it today with foreknowledge are watching quite the same story that I did in 1982 – I don’t mean that in some sort of ‘you had to be there’ elitist sort of way, more that it is difficult for me to overstate how important the surprise factor was.
JNT understood the importance of the shock I think, maybe it appealed to his showman side? The public gallery at TV Centre was closed during filming and probably for the first time, every effort was made to avoid spoilers. The Radio Times summary for episode one/two were the less than promising ‘ What do the silhouettes guard’ and ‘What is behind the hatch?’ (the episodes were aired twice weekly). The producer was offered and turned down a Radio Times cover for this one – a big deal in those days and something that the programme hadn’t had since Jon Pertwee was the Doctor. So he sacrificed the potential ratings boost for episode one, just for the shock. The story belongs in a time when it was just about possible to keep spoiler-free, things changed very soon after this, with fandom often knowing what was to come and now people are lining up to tell you every important plot twist – something each of the modern show runners know all too well.
1982 in context
Some context. In 1982 the past was a foreign country. We had the Master return in Keeper of Traken in 1981 and in 1979 the Daleks had appeared in Destiny of the Daleks, but apart from that returning old enemies hadn’t really been a feature of Doctor Who for quite some time. In the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era after season 12, (commissioned by Barry Letts) we only had the Master (who was unrecognisable in any case) in Deadly Assassin. In Season 15 the Sontarans, nothing in Season 16. Just think about the years since the show came back – we’ve had the Daleks every year, the Cybermen almost as often – Silurians, Sontarans, the Master, the Ice Warriors have also made repeat appearances – so we haven’t had much of a thrill of a returning foe for quite some time probably since Series One or Two. The Cybermen are back, oh really that’ll be nice then.
In 1982 the Cybermen hadn’t been in the programme for 7 years. I know that doesn’t sound that long, but the whole ethos of the show had really changed in that time (actually a number of times) and it was half my young lifetime. The lack of being able to see stories again, meant that 7 years felt far longer than it would now. Up until that point in Season 19 we had the Castrovalva, Four to Doomsday, Kinda, the Visitation, Black Orchid all quite sedate, almost pastoral, cerebral stories, fitting the pattern established in season 18. The then recent Williams era was also very much its own animal, with very little acknowledgement that anything much had come before it. Earthshock was going to change all of that.
I’m struggling to entirely understand the influences of Earthshock, I think I’ve had them all jumbled up and slightly wrong for some time. In my mind for a while now I’ve had it down as Doctor Who does ‘Aliens’ in a multi-camera studio in TV centre with Beryl Reid, on a sitcom budget. However that clearly isn’t true – I could understand if it had been made in 1987, but it predates Aliens or Predator or Terminator or any of the other military grunts get massacred films, even the Carpenter remake of ‘The Thing’ only came out in 1982. Was it Alien, a far more sinister, creepy film, lacking the military presence?
Outside of the zeitgeist of the early 80’s, it does also feel like Eric Saward had watched the Troughton Cybermen stories and absorbed them into the stories DNA, re-purposed for an 80’s audience – we’ve since added all of Tomb of the Cybermen and 1 episode of Wheel in Space, but the rest were available in 1982. Saward certainly watched old stories – he talks about that in the context of wanting to get Robert Holmes back as writer, Ian Levine apparently selected the clips for the flashback sequence. Anyway, whatever the influences were, it injects a huge amount of pace, action adventure and a certain amount of horror into what was then quite a sedate, talkie, studio-bound, often over-lit show in 1982. It was very, very startling to us kids back in 1982. The feeling was very much that for a few weeks Doctor Who had got its mojo back. For a few short weeks the show was hip with the kids in school again (or at least until episode 1 of Time Flight..) – those who had deserted the good Doctor for Buck Rogers back in season 18.
Anyway, in order to review this I feel that I have to be able to do two very different things at the same time – remember what it was like to see this for the first time and the initial context and secondly to step back and critically view it as an adult – for all I have already written, it is still just a Doctor Who story. So with all of that in mind I am going to have to draft in a guest co-reviewer, my 13 year-old self – not a place or time that I would normally chose to visit, but for this thread I will go to that dark and disturbing place one more time. 1982 – Thatcher was in charge, the Falklands War was just about to start and Johnny Marr was about to form The Smiths. Oh and somewhere in Merseyside a teenage boy was about to tune in to Doctor Who on Monday (!) 8th March and was about to leap about the living room in surprise.
Episode One
It is difficult to explain just how different this episode is from the stories surrounding it – after all, it follows on from Black Orchid, a sedate country house murder mystery. Here, right from the start we are straight into the action and the central mystery, with the troopers preparing to enter the cave system to investigate the attack on Professor Kyle’s team of palaeontologists and geologists. The technology and costumes feel like they are part of the real world – chunky, practical, built for wear and tear and a bit knackered – in contrast to early 80’s over lit pastel shades and beige of the likes of Castrovalva. I’ve been watching a lot of the Fifth Doctor recently – from Logopolis to Black Orchid and then the Black Guardian trilogy and Caves of Androzani. Only the latter matches and exceeds the pace and atmosphere of this episode.
There are parallels between the work of Peter Grimwade here and Graeme Harper – they both direct from the floor with energy, characters properly run through the sets – stumbling and falling, taking a bit of a beating – both stories have a grim realism that most of the rest of the era lacks and so the contrast is rather heightened. There is a pace and energy to proceedings and somehow both Harper and Grimwade managed to persuade someone to turn the lights down, lending atmosphere and tension to their respective sequences in the caves. These two manage to get the most out of a BBC multi-camera studio in way not seen since Douglas Camfield or David Maloney.
There are two plot strands to this episode. One the progress of the Professor Kyle, Lieutenant Scott and his troopers back into the cave system where Kyle believes her colleagues have died. The second strand is the argument between Adric and the Doctor, leading to the Doctor Nyssa and Tegan exploring the cave system, while Adric tries to plot a course back to e-space. It was years before I realised that fans really didn’t like Adric. I didn’t think much about him at the time – here he just seems like a typical stroppy, self-obsessed teenage boy. I rather like the references to the loss of his new surrogate parents – the Fourth Doctor and Romana, along with the family dog K9 – he had already lost all of his real family, including his brother Varsh in Full Circle. He almost treats the Fifth Doctor like a new step dad, you almost expect him to stomp off to his room saying ‘you’re not my real Dad’. These elements just about work in the context of episode one (some of the dialogue and delivery is just a little bit clunky here), but make a lot more sense by the end of the story and are a nice addition – a few human moments before it all gets very grim.
The big change (at least it felt like this at the time) is the casting of so many women – the troopers – Mitchell, Snyder and Professor Kyle (who unfortunately is a bit wet). So although it is often accused of being macho (which to be fair is true), there is at least this element to balance that – along with Briggs and Berger in later episodes and the two female companions. Also Scott aside (who is so macho you might expect to see him on a night out with shirt open, medallion and chest-hair on show Burt Reynolds-style) , the men in this episode are not a very butch bunch at all – from Walters, through to the Doctor and Adric.
The cave sequences with Walters on the surface monitoring the progress of the troop are very atmospheric. There is one unfortunate sequence where the shadows of the ‘silhouettes’ are still visible when a trooper turns around, but this is studio TV made at speed, unfortunate but easily forgiven. One by one we see the scanner flare and first Snyder, then Mitchell and their fellow troopers end up as steaming pools of green slime, with only the scraps of overall and name badges identifying them. These sequences are really quite grim, but I think work very well to raise the stakes – especially the moment when an unfortunate trooper steps in the remains of Snyder.
‘What sort of weapon can do that to a person?’
The two plot strands meet in the cave system, when Scott and the Doctor go head to head. This really works with the more vulnerable, innocent Fifth Doctor – I can’t imagine Scott aggressively physically abusing and threatening the Third or Fourth Doctor’s like that – Jon would have just applied Venusian aikido with an accompanying bon-mot and Tom (in Seeds of Doom mode) would have just punched him. Despite all of that in a short sequence culminating in the attack by the ‘silhouette’ androids (which work well in this I think) and the reveal of the hatch in the cavern, the Doctor manages skilfully to win Scott over. Why the androids? Well to delay us finding out who is behind all of this of course – the same reason for the audience as it is within the fiction of the story.
The Cliffhanger
The ending of episode one is probably one of the best in the history of the programme. After the troopers have managed to destroy the androids and burn through the hatch, the bomb inside activates. That electronic music as the screen turns red and the handheld camera searches and zooms in on the Doctor’s face, the pulls back and with a metallic clanging shows the big reveal.
‘DESTROY THEM, DESTROY THEM AT ONCE!’
Cue titles.
Sad though it might seem, that was one of the most exciting moments of my childhood! After the credits had rolled, I remember wishing that we had a video to wind back just to confirm that what I had seen definitely was a Cyberman. Except we didn’t have a video recorder, so I wound back the audio tape back quite a few times, but that didn’t help much. Fortunately, we didn’t have a week to wait – just one night later episode two was broadcast. On Tuesday, for the first time for a very long while, it seemed like everyone was talking about Doctor Who.
Episode Two
‘Explode the bomb…’
So we didn’t have long to wait for this episode – the next night in fact, which just doesn’t seem right, we should at least have had to wait until the following Saturday. There’s probably a whole piece to be written on the loss of the delayed gratification of the multi-part serial in an age of box-set binge watching, but for me it simply boils down to sometimes having to wait for something is a good thing. Anyway, episode two really cranks up the tension, the troopers battling with the androids, while the Cyber-leader and lieutenant watch and comment on events like a Greek cyber-chorus and then we switch to the freighter and start to join the two plot threads together.
It’s only Episode Two and I’m struggling to say anything much original about the story – it just rockets along and if you like the sort of thing it does, you’ll love it and if you don’t well you won’t. It is very strange in that it is startlingly different to the stories surrounding it, very well made and directed, but not hugely original, pace aside – at least not when viewed from the standpoint of having seen every surviving episode of the show. The pace relents a little bit, but not much in episode two, actually this happens almost immediately as ‘Destroy them, destroy them at once’ is followed by a few seconds hesitation before the androids actually do anything – today that would be edited out – charitably you could put it down to the time the signal takes between the freighter and Earth!
I haven’t mentioned the new Cybermen yet – they are just a brilliant piece of design – classic in the way that the bronze Daleks from the new series are – they take all of the basics of the original design(s) – don’t lose any of the good bits, but just add in more detail and make the whole thing chunkier and more real. The only downsides are the moon boots, but the helmet, chest unit and flight suit more than make up for that – I miss Cyber-shoelaces! I even like the voices – David Banks is great – and although it is really obvious, up until recently I hadn’t thought of the Darth Vader connection. First time around I had no idea how Cybermen were supposed to sound like – I hadn’t heard one in about 7 years, so I had no preconceptions that it should be more electronic.
Back in the cavern, the Doctor wins Scott over very quickly, with Nyssa helping to exploit the logic dilemma in the androids between survival and protecting the hatch. Both are destroyed in a hail of gunfire that is strangely reminiscent of pink and white Blackpool rock. Adric’s contribution in dropping a rock on one of the androids is interesting in that we get to see the Doctor’s pride in him ‘It’s Adric!’ – the pride of a Dad for when his errant child has finally done good. This act is quite brave but a bit inept and clumsy- which is very Adric – more of that later. The sequences of the bomb counting down while the Doctor tries to block the signal and the Cybermen trying to break through are pretty tense and this whole sequence cranks up the tension before the switch of location to the freighter – the caves having done their job. It is also a typical delayed gratification episode as we wait for the two halves of the stories to meet and the Doctor to a) realise who is behind the bomb (he has a hint later – ‘I’ve seen injuries inflicted like this before’) and confront the Cybermen.
The sequence that this episode is best known for is the ‘chat’ between the Cyberleader (David Banks is great in this) and his Lieutenant as they logically work through what has happened in the aftermath of the bomb failing to explode and review some archive footage, including a clip of Wheel in Space pretending to be from Tomb! By that point I knew the state of the archives from the DWM 1981 Winter special – which seems to have been a collective bad day for a lot of fans of my generation – it squashed our hopes and dreams of being able to see all of this for ourselves one day. This time around this sequence made me wonder if they just recorded their own adventures with the Doctor, in which case we’ll have a bit of a wait while UNIT recover the missing episodes of Tenth Planet and The Invasion from the dead Cybermen they have in storage and much longer for Wheel – perhaps they also have Marco Polo, the Massacre and Myth Makers? Anyway I absolutely love this sequence – so for no other valid reason than it makes me happy here it is in all its glory!
CYBER LIEUTENAT: A Time Lord. But they’re forbidden to interfere. CYBER LEADER: This one calls himself the Doctor, and does nothing else but interfere.
Emotions. Love, pride, hate, fear. Have you no emotions sir?
(I love this clip – Bill is fantastic here – and I love him calling the Cyber leader sir!)
CYBER LEADER: It was in this regenerated form that he confined the Cybermen to their ice tomb on Telos.
I imagine you have orders to destroy me.
(again this is well chosen – it captures Pat’s downbeat, slightly shifty aspect really well)
CYBER LEADER: And as this, he defeated us in our attempt to destroy Voga, the planet of gold.
You’ve no home planet, no influence, nothing. You’re just a pathetic bunch of tin soldiers skulking about the galaxy in an ancient spaceship.
(Again – pure Hinchcliffe/Holmes era Tom)
CYBER LIEUTENANT: I did not see any of these men in the cave. CYBER LEADER: It appears he has regenerated again, but whatever his form, he must be found and destroyed.
Finally on the freighter we get to meet the odd trio that is the rather useless Ringway, the ‘severe’ Berger and everyone’s favourite Nan as butch space Captain Briggs (the inestimable Beryl Reid). The casting of Beryl Reid is one of the other areas of debate – it seems to attract as much praise as ridicule, not least from the cast and crew – Peter Davison and Eric Saward seemingly a bit nonplussed at JNT’s casting choice. To be fair she had been in much, much better stuff than Earthshock, she was about to reprise her role of Connie Sachs in Smiley’s People, which she had first played to much acclaim in 1979’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Personally I can’t decide whether her casting here is inspired or terrible – it is certainly very Doctor Who, so perhaps that is enough. The only thing I would comment on is her appearance – she has the sort of dyed red hair that you only saw on old women down at the Bingo – this is then combined with the sort of ‘World of Leather’ jacket that Blake’s 7 blew their entire budget on in season 2 (probably why the effects are less than special). Part of me just loves Who for this stuff, even the new series isn’t immune – Peter Kay waddling about in a fat suit in broad daylight springs to mind. On that subject the bit that really made me laugh in this episode is the following bit:
CYBER-LIEUTENANT: The Earthlings are attempting to break through the hatch. LEADER: Are their weapons capable? CYBER-LIEUTENANT: Yes, Leader.
On the page nothing that wrong with that (apart from earthlings – I love that detail) – in reality Mark Hardy as the Cyber-Lieutenant delivers ‘Yes. Leader’ in a downbeat, crestfallen, shuffling of the feet sort of way – such that you just want to give him a hug and cheer him up a bit – from that point on he knows that part of their plan is buggered!
We do get a moments respite for a scene between the Doctor and Adric where the two of them talk in a stilted British male way about their argument and it is interesting that the Doctor takes Adric with him to explore the freighter – leaving the others behind.Perhaps recognising he has slightly neglected him.
DOCTOR: Look, I’m very grateful for your help with deactivating the bomb. ADRIC: That’s all right. DOCTOR: It was very brave of you also, the way you tackled the android. ADRIC: All part of the daily routine. DOCTOR: Hmm. Look, I’ve been thinking about your wish to return home. ADRIC: And? DOCTOR: Well, I thought that if we could work out a satisfactory course, I might give it a try. ADRIC: Well, I’ve already done so, Doctor. DOCTOR: Really? ADRIC: As you can see here, I’ve even managed to calculate the way into the CVE, the gateway through E-space. DOCTOR: You’ve done extremely well. ADRIC: Thank you. DOCTOR: Look, er, I’m sorry about our argument earlier. ADRIC: So am I. I over-reacted. DOCTOR: Do you really want to go home? ADRIC: No, of course not. There’s nothing there for me any more. DOCTOR: So you’ve done all these calculations for nothing. ADRIC: Well, it made a point, didn’t it? Besides, who knows? I might change my mind again.
After one absolutely top-notch cliff-hanger, as is typical with Who, we get the following damp squib:
‘On this ship we execute murderers.’
Great!
Episode Three
This episode is probably the point at which I think that the structure of this isn’t quite right. You want the big meeting between the Cybermen and the Doctor, but it takes 2 ½ episodes to arrive, when their arrival should probably have been the cliffhanger to episode 2. It seems slightly churlish to say that about a story that is already the paciest of this era by a long way, but it just feels like it is delayed slightly too long.
To be honest it isn’t really helped by the fact that I’m not in the slightest bit interested in Ringway, Berger and Briggs. Ringway makes a poor traitor – not even in the same league as Kellman and light years away from the likes of Vaughn. Briggs just wants to get her bonus and to verbally abuse Ringway and I’m not sure what Berger is – which is fine but really these are just random people that we meet rather than anyone who drives the story along or engenders any sympathy – I don’t really care if they are massacred or not. Actually I think Beryl Reid’s hair at least would be able to withstand cyber firepower. She does have a reasonable line in putdowns, but it isn’t quite Robert Holmes level stuff:
RINGWAY: I’ve apprehended two stowaways. BRIGGS: Apprehended. Why can’t he say caught? So melodramatic.
The Cybermen are still watching the story on TV, it’s about time now that they get involved in it:
CYBERMAN: Which one is the Doctor? LEADER: The tall one with the fair hair. Even under the threat of death, he has the arrogance of a Time Lord. CYBERMAN: Now the Doctor is a prisoner, it is time to secure the freighter. LEADER: Indeed, but the Doctor must be taken alive. He must suffer for our past defeats.
The sequences here that do work really well is the Doctor coming up with a really clever solution to keeping the Cybermen out, using the anti-matter containment system – which is really well thought through and a quite brilliant effect. Only then to have completely overlooked that they might just blow the other door up!
Also the massacre of the crew, whilst not perfectly executed, does raise the stakes, as does the fact that their rifles don’t have any effect on the Cybermen. This sequence reminds me of Parting of the Ways where you know those trying to hold off the Daleks are just doomed.
Things pick up considerably once they arrive on the bridge (they also have the good taste to shoot Ringway):
CYBER LEADER: Our records indicate that you have a fondness for Earth. DOCTOR: Fondness? I’m surprised your emotionless brain understands the word. CYBER LEADER: It is a word like any other. And so is destruction, which is what we are going to do to that planet. DOCTOR: You’ve tried before. CYBER LEADER: This time we shall succeed, and you will live just long enough to witness it
And when the troopers and a rather brave Tegan re-join the story after just fretting about it in the TARDIS for the first half of the episode. Tegan is wearing Kyle’s overalls (looks like she’s had them taken in a bit and cleaned as well) rather more fetchingly than the wet professor who’s opted out and decided to stay with perennial stay-at-home Nyssa in the TARDIS.
My army awakes, Doctor!
Thank God for that. The shots of them bursting out of the silos is very well done, but even back in ’82 I thought that having them wrapped in clear plastic bags, like a fridge being delivered wasn’t that great an effect, the photos of Tomb of the Cybermen looked better. Anyway a decent second half to the episode – on to episode 4 and the main reason why this story is in this thread .
Episode 4
‘If the freighter crashes into Earth with you on board, won’t that make it rather difficult for you to carry out your task? I mean, you would be very crumpled.’
This episode finally gets to the confrontation scenes between the Doctor and Cyber Leader that the story needs. It is well worth waiting for and Peter Davison and David Banks are superb in these scenes. The Cybermen are a massive, towering, powerful presence here, dwarfing the rest of the cast. The Fifth Doctor might be slightly bashful, sheepish and blown about by events, but give him a confrontation with a monster or villain and he really steps up – in some ways more impressively than the previous 4 incumbents – mainly because of the contrast. He’d rather be playing cricket in Stockbridge, but instead he has to take on a Cyber Leader or Davros or the Master and when he does that he is utterly fearless – I really rather love that about him.
In the DVD documentary, which features a young Mark Gattis and Steven Moffat (before they wrote for the new series), there is much hilarity at the ‘eating a well-prepared meal’ part of the speech! And yes it is funny – but that speech is great and nails what the Cybermen have lost/given up just to survive better than any point since Tenth Planet. Sometime in another thread I will cover Spare Parts – quite my favourite Cyberman story in any medium and one that really shows this aspect of them – the tragedy of them – their sadness and the sense of what they have lost – probably the most interesting thing about them, but the least explored. That again features Peter’s Doctor – something that resonates more strongly with this Doctor and Nyssa due to the events of this story:
CYBERLEADER: I see that Time Lords have emotional feelings. DOCTOR: Of sorts. CYBERLEADER: Surely a great weakness in one so powerful? DOCTOR: Emotions have their uses. CYBERLEADER: They restrict and curtail the intellect and logic of the mind. DOCTOR: They also enhance life! When did you last have the pleasure of smelling a flower, watching a sunset, eating a well-prepared meal? CYBERLEADER: These things are irrelevant. CYBERDOCTOR: For some people, small, beautiful events is what life is all about! CYBERLEADER: You have affection for this woman? DOCTOR: She’s a friend. CYBERLEADER: And you do not consider friendship a weakness? DOCTOR: I do not. CYBERLEADER: Kill her.
He isn’t wrong – here he reminds me slightly of Chris Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor, where the small things in life are elevated in amongst the universal or global threat – in Father’s Day for example or the ‘chips’ scene in the ‘End of the World’. The simple things in life – our happy memories of those silly, insignificant little moments when we were happy.
And so to Adric. I’ve a theory about him, I’m not sure that it is entirely or maybe even at all original – the reason why fans dislike him so much is that there is a little bit of Adric in all of us and watching him just uncomfortably reminds us of that. We don’t like to admit it – the clumsy, bumptious, awkward, opinionated, self-important, unlikeable swot who tries his best, but is a bit rubbish, never gets the girl/boy and can’t even manage to walk convincingly, but who is good at maths. We all like to think that we are cooler than him, it gives us someone to look down on – I used to be a bit like him when I was 13 sort of thing – thank God I’m not like that now. Stop, think about it, you are reading this on a Doctor Who forum – of course you are still a bit like him – he’s even played by a fan! If we tried to save the world we’d end up like this. This week I watched a documentary where scientists were on a drilling platform in the sea over ground zero of the K/T boundary event asteroid strike – all I could think of was – there’s probably bits of Adric in those rock core samples. To paraphrase Quatermass and the Pit – we are the Adric’s now!
DOCTOR: I’m not going without him. CYBERLEADER: The boy will stay here. If you do not cooperate, I shall have the Earth woman destroyed. TEGAN: We can’t leave without him! ADRIC: Take Tegan with you. I’ll find my own way. Please? BRIGGS: The boy’s right. There’s a chance. Leave now. ADRIC: Please, Doctor. CYBERLEADER: There is no chance. ADRIC: Just leave! DOCTOR: Good luck, Adric.
‘Now I’ll never know if I was right.’
He’s very brave here – staying to try to save the day, but the sad thing is that Adric doesn’t know that he’s about to cause the extinction of the dinosaurs and the K/T boundary event when he ducks back out of the escape pod. Nothing that he does after that point is going to change anything – he might as well have left in the pod with the others instead of being smeared across pre-historic Mexico. Even his badge of honour – for maths – is used to save the Doctor, broken into pieces in the Cyber Leader chest unit – the logical monster defeated by a symbol given to a human (or as near as human) for prowess in logic – rather fitting. Like any good swot and I say this as one and I suspect that all of us here would qualify for some academic badge of excellence or other, his final thought is just not knowing whether his resolution to the final logic problem would have worked – Adric’s Last Theorem lost forever in time. His final act is to hold his Alzarian outler’s plait- a reminder of his lost brother Varsh, as the rather touching Outler’s theme from Full Circle plays. And then silence.
Earthshock Coda no. 1
So what do I think about Earthshock – well first off I don’t think that it is quite the shoot-em up of legend – sure, lots of troopers die in the ambush and later on the ship as do the crew and later Kyle – but it feels less so than say ‘Dalek’ or ‘Parting of the Ways’ or Eric’s own ‘Resurrection’. Eric does love girls with guns doesn’t he? Here we have the troopers – Mitchell, Snyder and the other silent ones – then later Tegan uses the cyber gun, even Kyle tries to save Nyssa with one and then eventually even Nyssa uses one to shoot the Cyber Lieutenant. I’m not sure whether this is a step forward in the depiction of women in the show or not, I’m a man – I’ll leave it for others to decide.
In some ways this is meat and potatoes Doctor Who. I was going to say that there isn’t anything much profound in it, however the more that I think about it that really isn’t fair. Some of the dialogue is a bit clunky, but it does occasionally stop and have something to say. The main obvious example is the Doctor’s confrontation with the Cyber Leader. The speech could be better written (surely a cricket reference in here for the Fifth Doctor – the sound of leather on willow at Lords on mid-summers morning?) – but it does illustrate very well what he’s fighting for – simple moments of joy in life against a life without emotion, encased in steel and plastic.
And then we have Adric’s death. This really upped the stakes in a way that probably hadn’t been seen since Daleks’ Mater Plan (then 17 years away and lost somewhere apart from a Blue Peter clip of Katarina’s death) – but then Katarina, Sara and Bret had only just joined – Adric has been annoying us (or otherwise) for nearly 2 years. The show had felt quite safe for a long while – particularly when we had the invulnerable Tom in full flow with Romana and K9 – nothing could stop them. From now on – at least for a while – no one would feel safe.
I’ll cover the aftermath of his death and how the regular’s grief and sense of loss in another post – here I’ll confine my thoughts to how I felt about it at the time. I’ve seen fans sneer at the silent credits at the end as cheesy – but they really worked at the time. The DVD documentary has quite a decent discussion on this. My view is simple – it worked in 1982 for my 12-year old self and any weary old adult who wants to be cynical about this in the 21st century can sod off – this is my thread and I can cry if I want to!
It is easy to be cynical about the death of a largely unloved (at least that is the perception today) character. That is a very 90’s trait – look back at the past, poke fun, sneer (think all of those I love 1982 type programmes) and for all the great things about the 90’s and there are many – that is one of least edifying. Doctor Who suffered from it massively, people in their 20’s taking the piss out of something they loved, but were too embarrassed to admit. Only then to all come back around in 2005 and say they loved it all along – even showrunners aren’t immune to this. And neither was I, nowadays DWM arrives in my letterbox in a clear plastic sleeve, back then if that had happened, I would have been mortified. Mathew Sweet rather brilliantly summed this up in his piece for the Late Review before Rose aired – almost comparing DWM to other specialist publications that arrived in brown paper envelopes! Now we are both out and proud.
I didn’t dislike Adric back in 1982, or realise that some of the acting wasn’t that great (it didn’t seem unusual in comparison with the other stuff I watched – Grange Hill etc.), I don’t think I thought much about him at all either way. Watching it as an adult it is easy to see the issues, the comments of those colleagues on the production (Peter Davison, Janet Fielding in particular) haven’t helped either and often make quite unpleasant and unedifying reading/viewing – just let it go.
I’ll leave the final words on the story to my 12-year old self:
‘That was absolutely brilliant! I loved the bits in the caves. And the bit where the Cybermen came back and they looked really good. And the clips of the old Doctors. Me and my sister were very sad when Adric died and when there was no music at the end, just his broken badge’
Earthshock Coda no. 2
A Brief history of Time Flight. Or how we learned to live without Adric.
Adrics dead (look sad for a bit), wow Concorde!
Coda no. 3
Ok. Theres more
This is the scene from Time Flight in the aftermath of Adrics death presented in full, in all of its glory:
DOCTOR: Crew of the freighter safely returned to their own time. NYSSA: Cyber fleet dispersed. TEGAN: Oh, great. You make it sound like a shopping list, ticking off things as you go. Aren’t you forgetting something rather important? Adric is dead. NYSSA: Tegan, please. DOCTOR: We feel his loss as well. TEGAN: Well, you could do more than grieve. You could go back. NYSSA: Could you? DOCTOR: No. NYSSA: But surely the Tardis is quite capable of TEGAN: We can change what happened if we materialise before Adric was killed. DOCTOR: And change your own history? TEGAN: Look, the freighter could still crash into Earth. That doesn’t have to be changed. Only Adric doesn’t have to be on board. DOCTOR: Now listen to me, both of you. There are some rules that cannot be broken even with the Tardis. Don’t ever ask me to do anything like that again. You must accept that Adric is dead. His life wasn’t wasted. He died trying to save others, just like his brother, Varsh. You know, Adric had a choice. This is the way he wanted it. TEGAN: We used to fight a lot. I’ll miss him. NYSSA: So will I. DOCTOR: And me. But he wouldn’t want us to mourn unnecessarily. NYSSA: Where are we going? DOCTOR: Special treat to cheer us all up. NYSSA: 1851, Earth, London. What’s so special about that, Doctor? DOCTOR: Hyde Park, the Crystal Palace. TEGAN: 1851. The Great Exhibition? DOCTOR: All the wonders of Victorian science and technology. TEGAN: Well, the Tardis should feel at home. DOCTOR: All the wonders of Victorian science and technology. TEGAN: Well, the Tardis should feel at home. DOCTOR: How about opening day? Pass the time of day with the foreign royals. We could even drop in at Lords, see a few overs from Wisden and Pilch. I wonder if the Lion will be bowling?
I think that explains how much everyone misses Adric on the production! Cricket, brilliant! There should have been another way. Something that linked in to the events that had just happened or helped with the loss or acknowledged it in some sort of clever way, whilst allowing the new adventure to start and everyone to start to move on. I don’t know what – probably the reason why I’m not a writer. The Massacre doesnt acknowledge the events of Daleks Master Plan, but at least the feel of the piece does feel appropriate, we aren’t straight into something like The Gunfighters.
In fairness when I thought about this, this problem is not just confined to old Doctor Who it is deliberately built into a lot of new series finales as a way of saying the adventure goes on Catherine Tate appears after were all in floods of tears leaving Rose on Bad Wolf Bay, the Titanic appears after Martha has left to pick up the pieces of her family, only Ben Cook spares us Cybermen after Donna has lost all her memories of her travels, Santa turns up as the Doctor leaves the grieving Clara in the café.
I hate all of those scenes with a passion. I know why they are there, In understand the reason, but maybe it is just me, but I cant stand it when the series does that, it is the dramatic equivalent of the picture being squeezed into a corner of the screen and someone telling you about some ¤¤¤¤e TV show that you have no interest in, ruining the moment like some demented Graham Norton avatar. After the credits are over tell us the show will go on but leave us a minute at least before we move on.
Anyway, Ill return to that very idea of saving someone who should have died and its consequences in a later review. So Ill save discussion about that aspect of Adrics death for then. To be fair to the production team, there is this later in Time Flight, a rather disturbing passage (clunky dialogue and all), where Adric appears in front of Tegan and Nyssa and tries to stop them. Adrics scream here is really quite haunting:
TEGAN: Adric! NYSSA: No. Adric’s dead. TEGAN: How can we be sure? ADRIC: Go back, Tegan, or you will destroy me. NYSSA: It’s only imagination. It’s the only power Kalid has left to stop us. ADRIC: If you advance, you will kill me, Nyssa. TEGAN: We can’t take that risk. NYSSA: The badge. TEGAN: What? NYSSA: Adric’s wearing his badge. TEGAN: But it was shattered when the Doctor destroyed the Cyberleader. NYSSA: Exactly. TEGAN: Come on.
Adric screams and they walk straight through him as he vanishes. Rob Shearman talks about this scene – they are walking through Adrics ghost and just how disturbing the scream is. All of which is true, but it feels like reaching a bit for meaning amongst all of this. Time Flight is a mess on many levels, so it isn’t just this aspect that is fumbled.
Next season we see Adrics room in Terminus in a scene where Turlough dismisses his things as childish a kids room, to Tegans disgust and promised to chuck everything out.
And then finally, Adric appears before the dying Doctor in Caves of Androzani as I pointed out in that earlier review Adric? is the final word that the Fifth Doctor says before he dies. Which is rather fitting, he hasn’t forgotten him after all, just moved on.
As a coda to the Fifth Doctor’s time, we have a strange, but in the end rather beautiful little tale where Winter comes to the Fifth Doctor. The play starts with Doctor living the life of a rural farmer, with his wife Anima and children Tegan and Adric. It is a harsh, brutal winter (hence the title) and a blizzard is raging outside the farmhouse (which has aspects of the TARDIS in its design). A long way away, Nyssa, now grown up, is also a mother of one and a wife to Lasarti. Nyssa has been dreaming of the Master and the Doctor, her husband is a specialist in dreams and she uses a device he is working on to explore her dream, fearing that it might be real and the Master is attempting to contact her telepathically. Instead she appears to have entered the Doctor’s dream. She and Lasarti meet the Doctor, which leads to a very funny piece of dialogue:
Doctor: You’ll wake up Tegan Nyssa: Tegan’s here? Doctor She’s upstairs, in bed – with Adric Nyssa: Oh…
Across the play, we start to realise that what we are actually seeing is the prelude to the Doctor’s regeneration. His brain is shutting down under the Spectrox Toxaemia – he is calling out to his friends – Nyssa, Tegan, Adric, Turlough and Kamelion for help. In the dream, the Master is trying to use Kamelion to stop the others from giving him the help he needs to regenerate. Tegan offers to give anything – including her life to help him. Nyssa takes the Doctor out to his barn to his ‘coffin’, which turns out to be a zero cabinet he has constructed from his memories, climbing into it his mind begins to clear. He tells her that he is in the TARDIS, dying on Androzani Minor, having saved his new companion Peri. Out in the snow in the forest the Watcher is waiting for the Doctor, after saying goodbye to her, he runs towards the white figure, falling into him and becoming a new man.
Ultimately, Winter isn’t quite as successful as Autumn, the opening setup is confusing – deliberately so, but for me doesn’t quite hang together. It is a concept explored much more fully in Human Nature – an ordinary life lost, than this play really has time for. It is interesting nonetheless, with Doctor at one point bemoaning the fact that he never has time for cricket and that he has always wanted a normal life in linear time with a wife and children. This fits with the Doctor of the DWM strips, spending time as an English gentleman in Stockbridge for which the Time Lords upbraid him in ‘The Stockbridge Horror’. We also gain an insight on The Master directly from the dying Doctor – he does the things he does because he hates being alone so much – something the TV series returns to later.
In the end the whole piece is strangely uplifting and the central conceit that the Doctor’s mind actively sought out help from his friends in his moment of need, to give him the strength to go on and that is what we see during his regeneration – them helping him through his death and re-birth is really rather affecting. There are also glimpses of the man to come – the Doctor perceives ‘and what a person he will be – all of those colours inside the white’ (of The Watcher) and in re-affirming his wandering spirit he uses the same Kipling quote from The Cat That Walked By Himself Just So Story that Colin Baker used in interviews when talking about the cat badge on his costume:
‘He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him’
The return of the Watcher, the zero cabinet and his friends give a lovely sense of completeness to the life and death of the Fifth Doctor (the Circular Time of the title – where heroes die and are resurrected) and it is rather a nice coda to Caves of Androzani.
I’ll leave the last rather elegiac words to Nyssa, in some ways they are reminiscent of the sad ending of The House at Pooh Corner where Christopher Robin says goodbye to his childhood friends:
‘He took my hands and he kissed my forehead. Then he started to walk forwards towards the white figure. He turned back once and looked around And somehow he found where all of us where looking at him ‘Thank you, all of you, Goodbye!’ he said And then he started to run with determination, without a hint of reluctance, because he still had things to do. He had someone to save back in the real world, he had a whole other self that he had to be to do that. He ran right into the white figure of The Watcher and he fell, spiralling down until he was lost in the distance… I suppose if I never meet him again and grow old myself, I’ll have to say that was the last time I saw him – in a dream. But without evidence, I’ll say to people that I know, that I know he’s still alive, somewhere out there, I’ll know he’s still travelling, I’ll know that he’s still having adventures, I’ll know he always will be…’
The usual spoiler warning applies as to all the Big Finish stories that I review, although this was released in 2007 and to be honest most of what happens involves Autumnal end-of-season cricket and first-love. It is complex, lyrical and simple – all at the same time and a hugely impressive piece of writing that is well worth 25 minutes of your life.
‘Something is added to cricket by the angle of the sun as it stands at four o’clock in early September. The shadows are longer, there’s a suggestion of colder days approaching, of circular time, of aspects of our lives dying away and returning.
The other sort of time is called linear time, modern time, life is hard and then one dies, if that’s something one is liable to do. Cricket, seems to me, to stand for the former and against the latter. It’s something that dies but returns and writes mortals into history, in stories and statistics. Perhaps that’s why it appeals to me – I also die and return, like a hardy perennial.
However, linear time is currently impinging on the Hampshire town of Stockbridge in the form of an end-of-season struggle to avoid relegation from the top-most league of village cricket. They are raging against the dying of the light, they need wins not draws. They need umpires to take the brightest possible view of those stormy skies overhead. They need to play in horizontal rain if they have to. I’ve seen them do just that in the last couple of weeks, but I’ve joined them so late this year that I may not be much help.”
Thus we open with the thoughts of the Fifth Doctor. It is autumn in the Hampshire village of Stockbridge (the Fifth Doctor’s second home from the DWM strips), the nights are drawing in and the shadows lengthening and the cricket season is drawing to a close. The Doctor has turned up just in time to try to save Stockbridge from relegation. His appearance in the village appears to be a regular occurrence and fits with the opening of the ‘The Tides of Time’. The locals have accepted his breezing in and out of village life for generations.’
While the Doctor attempts to save the day in a more orthodox fashion than usual, Nyssa sits in their guest house writing a novel – the story of a princess from a land where everyone is nice to each other (sound familiar?). One of laudable things about Big Finish is the lives that they have given companions that were often left overlooked on TV and it is fair to say that Nyssa had a bit of a raw deal in the programme. Sarah Sutton is clearly a talented actor, but was often given very little to do, spending a lot of the time as part of a trio of companions. Nyssa has areas of her life almost completely un-tapped, apart from the occasional references to the loss of her home and family and her obvious friendship with Tegan – which viewed again I found rather touching. We also have the loss of her Father – his body parasitized by the Master – the snake at the heart of her novel. On TV, she was slightly trapped in amber as a teenage girl – a fairy princess, bright and intelligent, controlled, slightly aloof and almost pre-pubescent. This story starts to address that, but in a sensitive way, in contrast to the sometimes rather crass ways that some of the novels have dealt with developing companions for a more adult audience.
So this is as a coming of age story for Nyssa, a time when she starts to allow emotion, new experiences and love into her life. Whilst writing at the guest house, she meets Andrew, a student working there for the summer. He is perfect for her – bright, intelligent, but uncomplicated. He doesn’t overcomplicate or overthink his actions and is persistent, straightforward and light hearted even in the face of her initial frostiness and rejection. He persuades her to go out with him for the day to a nearby village called Traken, which he assumes she is from and their relationship starts to bloom. We hear her first kiss and her starting to open up to new experiences. Later, there is a rather lovely, if slightly embarrassing scene (when isn’t being a teenager embarrassing?), where the Doctor stumbles across Nyssa and Andrew in the woods at night – ermm stargazing… The Doctors fussy, slightly indignant response is just priceless and rather reminiscent to the First Doctor finding Susan and David together in Dalek Invasion of Earth. It is a brilliantly awkward scene – two people from different planets, behaving in such an English way.
The other plot strand is the Doctor’s attempts to save the season for the cricket team. Amongst the English rural idyll, he has some uncomfortable encounters with the ways that village life can sometimes be. Paul Cornell, like me, lives in rural Gloucestershire and I think grew up in Wiltshire. As with anywhere, a trip to the pub and a chat with locals can lead to some uncomfortable conversations. Here we have the cricket team’s former Lancashire professional – Don, giving his views on the Estonian barman and ‘pikeys’ and telling racist jokes. The maturity of the storytelling also makes Don a sympathetic figure though, in life you hear people express views that you find contemptible, even loved-ones, but they aren’t simply bad – life is far more complicated than that. Here we see the Doctor’s non-conformity (lemonade instead of beer) and inability to turn a blind eye to the prejudice of others at odds with fitting into the team ethic. He is more of a maverick, dilettante gentleman cricketer – a David Gower type figure. One thing that I love here are the references to the Ashes series of 2005 (the play was released in early 2007) – so we get Don’s views on Ian Bell and Kevin Pietersen. 2005, what a year – definitely a vintage not a table wine – Doctor Who was back on TV, my team Liverpool won the Champions League in an amazing come-back in Istanbul and England won a very hard fought Ashes series against a truly great Australia team – happy days and great memories of times shared with loved ones who are no longer with us.
The tension (such as it is!) is whether Stockbridge can avoid relegation and whether the Doctor and Nyssa will stay long enough to go to the end of season ball – dancing until late to ‘Good Times’, a band with two of the first eleven on bass and keyboards! Then the central dilemma, will the newly jean-clad Nyssa stay with Andrew and will the fairy princess give it all up to work in the pub, losing her mystique in the process? Aside from the jeans, the tryst in the forest, drinks and lunch at a gastropub, we also get to hear Nyssa in the shower! I love the mixture of the alien and the real-life here – it doesn’t have to be the Powell estate or particularly urban to achieve this – not everyone lives a metropolitan life and that doesn’t reflect the reality of everyone in Britain, but often does the writers and producers of our television. While real-life reaches Nyssa, Andrew in turn starts to believe in her alien origins and life before Stockbridge. In an affecting scene she shows him the light of the destruction of Traken in the night sky near Orion – everyone she knows is dead, except one person and he is also lost to her.
In the end Nyssa completes her novel and story, leaving the book for Andrew to read. She has learned a lot, new feelings and experiences, but the thought of staying with him and him losing interest in her as everyday life takes over, means that she moves on with the Doctor. She leaves the story changed. The Doctor and Don win the final match and Stockbridge are saved from relegation. In the process though Don collapses at the crease, knowing he has done just enough to win the match. The season ends, the ball is cancelled out of respect for Don and Autumn turns to Winter. The Doctor’s final epitaph for Don is:
‘He doesn’t have to be there for the ending, he wrote it’
Circular Time:Autumn is one of my favourite pieces of Doctor Who in any format – concise, lyrical and affecting and suffused with an Autumnal melancholy. It is beautifully written and Peter Davison, Sarah Sutton and the supporting cast are superb. Part of me sometimes wishes that the TV series could more often find a few moments away from the rushing around and pause for thought in a similar way. Hopefully later in the thread I will review a couple of stories that do that more than most. Until then though a change of gear and the Doctor faces his final over:
A Journal of Impossible Things 