‘From Ogros, their home planet. That’s in Tau Ceti. Repulsive place covered in great swamps full of amino acids, primitive proteins which they feed on by absorption. Hence their need of globulin. Which is the nearest equivalent on Earth, hence the blood sacrificed on the stones.’
If ever a ‘Doctor Who’ story could be given the football cliché ‘a game of two halves’ it is ‘The Stones of Blood’. It spends 2-3 episodes trying to convince you that you are in a Hammer Horror film for kids – all human blood sacrifice, stone circles, lords of the manor dabbling in the dark arts, corvids and demonic figures. Add in mobile, sentient, standing stones that pulse with life and drain their victims of blood, it doesn’t really sound much like Graham Williams reducing the horror and violence in the series does it? Sounds more like it should feature Christopher Lee and Ingrid Pitt.
I wonder what Mary Whitehouse thought of the infamous scene where two apparently post-coital lovers emerge from their tent in a state of undress and are attacked by the Ogri? The female camper has the life sucked out her – her hand turning into a skeleton as the screen turns a lurid red. Luckily then two thirds of the way through it turns into a comedy courtroom drama in space! Of course it does, why wouldn’t it? English folk horror to knockabout fun in hyperspace is a familiar enough story progression isn’t it? Just to make it clear that it isn’t meant to be taken too seriously, they’ve painted the alien villain silver for no real reason, Tom’s wearing a lawyers wig and we have some annoying flashy light legal computer type-things.
Whether this all works or not is really a matter of taste I think. I imagine some like the folk horror, some like the silliness, some like both, but either way it is one of the strangest story transitions (more like leap in the dark) in the show’s history. I’m not sure it works personally, but then I’m not the biggest fan of such tonal changes – for me, they have to be really well written and directed and much cleverer than we have here. I think on reflection I’d rather just have a story that does one thing well than compromises two different things. Whilst this story is mostly quite entertaining, I think the issue for me is that the scary bits – the camper’s scene aside – aren’t quite scary enough (the druidic lot look like they have wandered out of a BBC sitcom – Terry and June’s’ Sir Dennis or the cast of ‘Ever Decreasing Circles’) and the hyperspace scenes aren’t really funny enough. It is all quite good fun though, without ever really threatening to be in the top table of stories.
It does have one ace up its sleeve though…
EMILIA: In the cause of science, I think it our duty to capture that creature.
DOCTOR: How? Have you any plans?
(Pulls out a truncheon!)
EMILIA: We could track it to its lair!
DOCTOR: Come on!
And so we come to the highlight of all this – Beatrix Lehmann as Professor Emelia Rumford. She is a joy to watch. It is a brilliantly scatty performance, possibly because the actress herself is forever reaching for the lines somewhere in back of her mind… I think it was when Chris reviewed this story last year, that I did some research on Beatrix, I knew she had a connection with Christopher Isherwood and sure enough there she is in ‘Goodbye to Berlin’ – it is dedicated ‘To John and Beatrix Lehmann’. Isherwood is an observer of life in Berlin – ‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.. Someday, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed’. He knew her brother John, who was a poet and publisher who was also a friend of the likes of Auden and Spender. John and Beatrix’s older sister, novelist Rosamond were part of the Bloomsbury set (she had an affair with Cecil Day-Lewis) and so Beatrix moved in literary and theatrical circles. She spent a lot of time in Weimar Berlin with her brother and Isherwood and was there as the Reichstag burnt down and the Nazi’s took over. She really had quite some life, no wonder the likes of Tom and John Leeson were so enchanted by her. One thing I hadn’t noticed is that she died in 1979, a year after filming ‘Stones of Blood’, how terribly sad, she lights up this whole story with her presence.
There are some rarer beautiful images of her at the National Portrait Gallery links below:
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp05505/beatrix-lehmann
Anyway, back to ‘Stones of Blood‘! I should say however that, the camper scene aside, she is the most memorable thing about this story by a long way. Of the rest of the cast, Susan Engel is mostly fine as Vivien Fey/Cessair of Diplos/Cailleach – but she veers into pantomime villain at times, this happens before she is painted silver, but it goes a bit into overdrive after that, it all feels slightly ‘Blake’s 7’ season 2, which a lot of people love, but the level of campery is just a bit much for my taste. Her character is one of a series of female villains over the season 16 and 17, according to David Fisher largely because he had a lot of aunties that he didn’t much like and so based the likes of Vivien and Lady Adrasta on them!
Elsewhere the production is pretty decent. Darrol Blake does a pretty good job of directing this I think. Even the Ogri – moving stones are relatively well handled. They are quite effective, pulsing with light, apparently the original intention was to have actors dressed up in costumes, but what we have here is more distinctive. The director even manages to get K9 going, positively shooting along when looking for Romana! There is a lovely bit in the lead up to that scene when Tom says ‘you’ve always wanted to be a bloodhound’ – and in the background all you can hear is John Leeson contradicting him – ‘negative master, negative’! It all looks a bit less cheap than ‘Pirate Planet’, although the location work looks very soft, I am assuming that it is OB, not film.
Talking of which, I am rather fond of the Rollright Stones, I first went there years ago, when I moved to the area. Last time we went that way was on a diversion when driving back from Warwick late at night after the road we were on was closed and we ended up driving past them by accident – it was a full moon and it was still all a bit spooky – I think that scene with the campers stuck with me after all these years! I’m really not sure why the show hasn’t used more of these neolithic locations over the years – the ridgeway or Avebury or the likes of Silbury Hill would have been perfect for the show. All we have are some long barrows from ‘The Daemons’, this story and Stonehenge in ‘The Pandorica Opens’.
Anyway, ‘Stones of Blood’, I like it, love aspects of it, dislike some aspects of it, it is fun – pretty much par for the course in the Williams era. Oh and somewhere on the way they collected another segment, which isn’t really that interesting.
A Journal of Impossible Things 