We don’t unfortunately get to choose our ‘birth story’ – it is chance – it really wasn’t in any way considered or planned during your conception. Not even fans do that surely? Children are growing up called Nyssa or Leela or Rose or Martha – but surely nobody thought in 2013 if we work back nine months from the 23rd of November he/she will have the 50th anniversary story as their ‘birth story’? Surely? Unfortunately, I can’t say I’m hugely proud of my birth story – it is more of a table wine than a vintage and a rough one at that – the sort of wine that makes your teeth hurt and gives you a headache just behind your eyes. I feel like I missed some of my favourite stories by a whisker – Season 5 by a few months (I love a base under siege, the rest of you are wrong) and ‘The Invasion’ by a few months the other way, even ‘Mind Robber’ would have been better. Such is life. But, yes having posted a positive review of ‘Battlefield’ I’m on a roll now – I can do this. So, I am going to tell you why ‘The Dominators’ is brilliant. Deep breaths, right I’m going in…
Actually, I really enjoyed watching it this time around. I mean it isn’t much good and episode 3 (I was born the day after) is especially crap, but it is rather fun. So, in that spirit…
The power of three
The best thing by a mile about ‘The Dominators’ are our three regulars. To my mind, there are fewTARDIS teams that is more fun to spend time with than the 2nd Doctor, Jamie and Zoe. I like the melancholy edge that Victoria provides in season 5, which works in contrast to the Doctor and Jamie, but Zoe is rather brilliant in her own way and just works really well with the two of them. In this one, Pat and Frazer give one of their best turns as a comedy double-act, while Zoe gets to be the responsible adult – travelling to the dullest heart of terminally dull Dulkis. While she’s away, the Doctor and Jamie are basically two naughty school boys bunking off school. The whole section of the story at the Dominators ship, were the Doctor and Jamie ‘pretend’ to be stupid is particularly glorious:
RAGO: Brittle skeletal structure. Reasonable flexibility. A certain amount of muscular force. Could be marginally useful. Vulnerable, only one heart.
TOBA: Intelligence?
RAGO: A simple brain. Signs of recent rapid learning. Still, somewhat crude.
JAMIE: What were you up to? That puzzle was easy!
DOCTOR: An unintelligent enemy is far less dangerous than an intelligent one, Jamie.
JAMIE: Eh?
DOCTOR: Just act stupid. Do you think you can manage that?
JAMIE: Oh aye, it’s easy.
RAGO: Test complete?
TOBA: These creatures are useless.
At the start of this the Doctor is on holiday. There is form for this, it normally never ends well. But this actually does feel like a bit of a holiday from the ‘reality’ of season 5, the menace here is so inept, so cardboardy and rubbish that it is genuinely like he’s having a few days off, mucking about. It feels a bit like a holiday special of a 1970’s sitcom where they all go on a day trip to Blackpool or Margate or maybe TV ‘Doctor Who’ has accidentally gone on holiday to the land of ‘TV Comic’ ‘Doctor Who’ – complete with really rubbish Dalek-replacement robots (see the Trods). Elsewhere Jamie gets to throw rocks at Quarks with a new friend who also wears a skirt and shows his pants off and in between moving polystyrene rocks, Zoe gets to wear something that looks a bit like a see-thru gym slip.
Brian Can’t
Second great thing. It has Brian Cant in it. Brian Cant. The voice of ‘Trumpton’, ‘Chigley’ and ‘Camberwick Green’. The man who earned a living arsing about on ‘Play Away’ through my childhood. I love Brian Cant. One of my favourite things in the world, is an episode of ‘Spaced’ (nearly the best comedy series in the world) where the whole story is basically that they get battered and go to a club. It is joyful and cheers me up every time I see it. As our heroes hit the dance floor captions flash up describing their moves. Brian, the experimental artist who doesn’t dance (after an incident involving Dexy’s Midnight Runners ‘Come on Aileen’ in the 1980’s) – it flashes up ‘Brian Can’t’ – which is very silly but makes me smile every time I think about it. As does meeting Brian at a thing about his children’s TV work at the Watershed in Bristol. He was lovely. Watching Windy Miller get pissed on Cider on a big screen in front of an audience was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. So, it has Brian Cant in it playing a complete arse, who irritates Rago so much that he decides to shoot him in the face and Rago really, really wants to conserve power – he spends the entire story telling us this, but Brian manages to annoy him so much he just thinks ‘¤¤¤¤ it – just this once’.
Rebel without cords
If you like attractive young women from the 1960’s in skimpy sci-fi outfits – then we have Zoe, Kando and Tolata. If you like attractive young men in skimpy sci-fi togas then you have Arthur Cox as Cully, sorry doesn’t quite work that does it? Unless of course you’ve always wanted to see Van Morrison wearing a toga? Cully – James Dean crossed with a chartered surveyor, Montgomery Clift does his accountancy exams. He’s the most rubbish rebel in the history of show littered with rubbish rebels. It is brilliantly British – this is the series that gave you Beryl Reid with orange hair as a butch Space Captain. Making Arthur wear a toga is just cruel, he is exposed in all his rotund plumpness, pants regularly on show in his ‘action sequences’. Give the man some trousers. Cully though is great, someone who has transcended his boring, indolent society and wants to see the world and have adventures and fun (sound familiar?). My favourite scene is the one where he pushes a massive boulder, that it would take a bulldozer to shift – unless of course it is actually made out if cardboard, done a ravine to flatten a Quark. Comedy gold. Talking of which.
A couple of shoe boxes, some toilet rolls and some sticky backed plastic…
The Quarks are brilliantly rubbish, but also pleasingly easy to draw when you are a kid. That is something that is underestimated in Doctor Who monsters I think. The Quarks though take that to another level, I reckon as a child I could have built my own Quark costume out of miscellaneous crap lying about the house. Actually, on that subject – Blue Peter – it really weeded out the middle class from the rest of us paupers – I had no idea what fabric conditioner or yoghurt was – or how you could get the containers for such exotic items. I did however know my way around a scrapyard aged 7 and had an uncle who was a welder. Given that, I probably could have made more realistic version of the Quarks than they managed in this. The costume would have weighed about a ton and since I weighed about 4 stone, I wouldn’t have got far in it. Actually, that would have made it about equally as effective as the costumes in this. They are walking fridges with flappy arms. At one point one is tipped over and disabled by Cully sitting on it – these are robots that the Doctor has described as ‘appallingly dangerous’ – really?
Their voices are even worse.
They almost exist only to show how good the design of the Daleks was and how difficult to achieve something like that is – design, writing, vocal performance all thrown into sharp relief by this.
One thing I do like about the Quarks if their line in comedy destruction though – the pair of feet left when one blows up or the aforementioned crushed one, feet still twitching under the ‘boulder’. Their presence and the general b-movie ambiance reminds me of the old black and white Saturday morning serials that used to be repeated when I was a youngster – ‘Flash Gordon’, ‘Buck Rogers’ and ‘King of the Rocket Men’.
The shoulders of giants..
The Dominators themselves are the Gallagher brothers in space aren’t they? If so, Dulcis is their difficult 4th album. Their attempt at the conquest of dreary bunch of reactionary old, toga wearing bores is as poor an effort as ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’. Rago is definitely Noel and Toba Liam. Liam is learning on the job and really isn’t very good at it. He sulks brilliantly like a YTS teenager (an exploitative work experience scheme for those too young or not British) each time he is told by Rago that he can’t just blow things up. Episode after episode of tedious bickering ensues – ‘how many times have I told you not to randomly blow stuff up’? – it feels a bit like ‘how many times have I said don’t throw the sharp chisels at each other’ or how many time have I told you not to leave all of the lights on – do you think I’m made of money? Like Oasis, soon afterwards Rago and Toba split up – just literally this time, in pieces in the Dulican atmosphere.
Give quiche a chance…
I could get into the whole debate about hippies and pacifism and whether you should stand up and fight against fascists or sit around a senate table and ask if they have an appointment! But I’ll just say that this was addressed in a more interesting, nuanced way in ‘The Daleks’, where the Thals are at least still active and vital, not indolent and unquestioning.
Anyway, there is a serious side to the story, but it is easier and actually makes the story much more enjoyable to just view it as a comedy. The sort of drawing room farce, where smart middle class people are appalled as their lives are ruined by accidentally meeting some working class people. I’m not sure who is to blame for that – Derrick Sherwin re-wrote it – so he’s one of the main culprits, he seems to think he made it better, but we’ll never know what the original scripts were like – for good or bad. The direction isn’t terrible, Morris Barry does his best, he tries shooting the Quarks and Dominators from below, to try to give then some menace/scale, but the script and design mean that this was never going to be salvageable. So, I can’t say this is brilliant – it isn’t, it is pretty shoddy and terrible, but it was fun and enjoyable. Luckily, I’m not superstitious as this wasn’t the most auspicious star sign to be born under. They were shooting ‘The Invasion’ when I was born – can I have that one instead?
A Journal of Impossible Things 