‘Why do I have to sit here watching Peri getting upset, while two unsavoury adventurers bully a bunch of natives’
So ‘Doctor Who’ has been away for a year and a half. When we left it, the TARDIS was about to leave Necros after a pretty decent story – it was Blackpool bound. We re-join the show after the ‘hiatus’, a period of no real guidance from executives or any change in production personnel – just a load of scrapped scripts and wasted preparation work by directors (Graeme Harper, Fiona Cumming, Mathew Robinson – so much better than the ones we ended up with) – begging the question what was the point of the it all? It achieved nothing for anyone involved – BBC, Production Team, viewers, fans. It is the shows’ own equivalent of BREXIT – a pointless, costly mess that nobody seems to be able to get out of without some horrible cludgy compromise that makes nobody happy. But don’t worry, all is not lost – Eric’s had an idea, and it’s a doozy.
Firstly though, let’s concentrate on this story, rather than the arc and well, some positives.
Straight away the space station effect is a cut above anything seen in the show before. Giving a lie to the view (shared by the key execs) that the show couldn’t deliver this sort of quality – it could, it just needed some money spending on it, a degree of love and care that the senior execs at the BBC are seemingly incapable of at this time. It must have been incredibly frustrating being part of the BBC Special Effects unit – knowing this is the sort of quality that you are a capable of, but never having the time and money to achieve your potential, having to produce inferior output which you know you could do better. I remember seeing Mike Tucker and some of the other team from the late 80’s interviewed and they talked about meeting some girls on a night out, they asked them what they did and they said they did the effects on ‘Doctor Who’ and the girls just laughed at them and said ‘but they are always rubbish’ – I can see that might be a bit of a downer for a young bloke out on the pull! The sequence itself is visually stunning – it still works well now, dark and gothic, the camera tilts as the TARDIS is pulled down to the space station.
‘The Mysterious Planet’ is also clever. That might seem an odd thing to say, maybe it is just me, but to my mind even the most lauded of modern drama’s aren’t really that clever, they are emotionally literate and very well-crafted drama, but they often lack a cleverness that I like and really rather miss. Holmes’s script is literate and intelligent – the society built on three books – ‘Moby Dick’ by Herman Melville, ‘Water Babies’ by Charles Kinsley and ‘UK Habitats of the Canadian Goose’ by HM Stationery Office. Now that is a smart idea, funny too. As is the society outside of the ‘castle’ (the remains of Marble Arch station – Marb station) – those who were supposed to be culled to maintain the population balance of the society.
Entwined in this we have the ‘sleepers’ from Andromeda and their Time Lord secrets – an ‘immortal’ robot running a society just to keep him ‘alive’ and a couple of typical 80’s British TV entrepreneurs/mercenaries that were all the rage during the mid-80’s (think Arthur Daley, or Del Boy or maybe our own earlier Garron and Unstoffe). All set on a planet (the ‘Mysterious Planet’ Ravolox of the story title) that appears to be Earth, but is light years from where it should be. If this were season 14 it would be ‘Face of Evil’, if it were season 15 it would be ‘The Sunmakers’ – nice, clever stories but maybe just a bit average. Unfortunately, it isn’t, the show simply isn’t capable of even that sort of quality at this point.
Sadly, Bob Holmes is ill, suffering from Hepatitis B and his script has just been savaged by Jonathan Powell – someone who achieved a lot in his career, but who I have come to loathe. Thanks to him, Robert Holmes spent the end of his life seriously upset by the sort of criticism that he had never had during his career. Holmes had added the extra humour that he was told Grade required, only then to be told to cut it as Powell didn’t like it. Given all of that, the script isn’t too bad – the character work is good, we get the usual sets of double-acts that Saward appropriated and used in the last transmitted story. Holmes pairs up characters and furnishes them with some lovely, sometimes archaic dialogue. None of the characters quite shine in the same way as those of the past, although some of that is because the casting isn’t as good, but there is good stuff in there all the same.
Another positive is that the relationship between the leads is much better than season 22 – there are a few really nice moments where the obvious friendship between Colin and Nichola really shines through, in a way that it never really did in the previous season – so at least that lesson has been learned. The moment in episode one when they share a smile and walk arm in arm is really rather touching, season 22 would have benefitted from more of that. So that is a definite improvement and is very important in a show with two leads.
So far, so good.
However, as Colin Baker says in the ‘Making of’ documentary perhaps the money from the opening shot could have been spent better elsewhere. He is proved right as things really come crashing down to earth in the very next scene and the quality of the production nosedives. After the beauty of the motion-controlled model shots, we then come to the ‘Trial’ framing device.
The trial set looks cheap and tatty and really is poorly designed. And unbelievably our lead manages to look even worse than he did in season 22. It really beggar’s belief that they didn’t even try to tweak the costume for this season, but to top it off with what looks like a yellow fright wig, well the appearance of the lead just cheapens the production every time he appears. Colin doesn’t even look like the same person who was rolled out before the press in 1984. I can take a cheap effect or piece of set design or a monster build that doesn’t quite work – they are complex, time-consuming, costly things to do – but getting something as simple as a costume for your leading character so badly wrong, something that is cheap and easy to get right, well it never ceases to amaze or annoy me. I would love not to be have to mention it ever again – but it visually ruins every scene it is in. To be fair to Colin he did try to argue for a change in costume, but JNT vetoed this, compounding his original mistake, one of many he makes during this period.
And at this point things start to go horribly wrong. You see, the pointless bickering has only been displaced. Peri has been let off bickering duties, Colin hasn’t. He gets to bluster ineffectually and bicker incessantly in an increasingly unfunny way with the Valeyard. It is awful stuff. Genuinely dispiriting to watch. Probably the main reason why this season contains the stories that I’ve watched least across the whole 55 years of the show. Michael Jayston is decent here, he is a class act – but ultimately wasted in the horrible court banter. Lynda Bellingham is fine, but not really strong enough to lift the courtroom scenes. She shouldn’t have to – but they are interminable and just dreadful stuff and really need someone to. I can’t work out whether Eric wrote these scenes or Bob. In the documentary Eric says that he wrote the linking scenes between stories. I’d like to think that it wasn’t Bob, it is poor stuff, but they are also poorly played by Baker and play to the worst aspects of his performance, rather than his strengths.
Actually, what is wrong is the whole idea of the trial – who thought it was a good idea to have scenes were someone point out how rubbish everything is? I can’t believe JNT allowed the idea to go ahead – did the show not already have enough critics without having the Doctor himself criticise it on screen? Beyond that issue, the trial scenes also take the viewer out of the story. And this is a story which already has Drathro and his two rubbish henchmen (almost as irritating as the Sylvest Twins or Angie and Artie) watching it via a monitor. So, you have the Doctor and the court watching a screen showing Drathro watching the Doctor on a screen. Great, one problem, by this point back in 1986, my TV screen had already been turned off and I’d buggered off to the pub.
Ultimately it is an odd story to the try to re-boot the show with after a reprieve. If made properly, it would be a perfectly adequate mid-season story. However, the show really needed to come back with something really strong and build an audience again – this really isn’t it. It isn’t Robert Holmes’s finest script, it doesn’t really have enough going on for 4 episodes and there isn’t really enough incident or drama in there to hold interest. Combined with this, the production is also pretty awful. The direction is weak and the cast not really strong enough. I have a fair amount of affection for Joan Sims from her ‘Carry On’ days, but she never convinces as Katryca. Her and her tribe bumbling around the woods reminded me of a Children’s BBC production – something like ‘Maid Marion and her Merry Men’, it is almost a parody of ‘Doctor Who’, a spoof. Glitz and Dibber are classic Holmes, but Tony Selby and Glen Murphy are miles away from Iain Cuthbertson and Nigel Plaskitt or Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter or even only a year earlier William Gaunt and John Ogwen in Saward’s ‘Revelation’.
Across the season, the colour palette seems to be based on Colin’s costume. This month, the yellow from his trousers seems to be the colour of choice here. Whilst Peri finally has some clothes on, she is instead dressed like a holiday camp rep from Maplins – why? The ‘rebels’ are the usual pallid, dreary lot (they’ve spent ages underground), again the colour yellow features as it does in the set design and on the robot. Talking of which, effects-wise, Drathro and the L7 Robots look nice enough, but Drathro has little movement and the L7 moves along at the speed of ‘an asthmatic ant with some heavy shopping’ to quote Blackadder.
Overall, there is good stuff in this story, but its failings outweigh them unfortunately. That was something that the show really couldn’t afford at this point. And it doesn’t really get the Trial season off to a particularly strong start.
Oh and make these cliffhangers stop, please just make them stop…
A Journal of Impossible Things 