‘A town is full of buildings – some tall, some short, some wide, some narrow. The buildings are flats and houses and factories and shops … do you live in a town?’
‘Mary, Mungo and Midge live in a tall block of flats – right at the top, in the flat with the flowers growing in a window box. They have a large sunny room to play in…’
When the universe was less than half its present size or rather just felt that way, there was a BBC Children’s programme called ‘Mary, Mungo and Midge’ about a young girl, her dog and a mouse living in a tower block. Back then my family lived in a semi on a housing estate built for working class people moving out of inner-city Liverpool. I grew up surrounded by the families of electricians, plumbers and welders – no one was well off, but it was all nice enough. ‘Mary, Mungo and Midge’ however offered the gleaming tower block and the excitement of going up and down all day in a lift, all of which seemed impossibly glamorous at the time. The programme was made at the tail end of the 60’s and represented the optimism of the decade and post-war housing policy. In fact it was almost propaganda for government housing policy for children – ‘Build high for happiness‘.
A Design for Life
It was the gleaming concrete of modern, brutalist, concrete towers, le Corbusier’s dream – ‘Towards an Architecture’ made real. People, my family included were being moved en masse from the communities based around terraced ‘slum’ housing, often damp, cramped houses without indoor toilets or anything in way of the modern facilities. Places where the large working class extended families of the 20’s and 30’s (my grandparents included) had had to sleep 6 children in one bed, tin baths once a week, back yards to run the gauntlet of in the middle of the night just to get to the toilet. By the 40’s and 50’s these had been raised to the ground, first by the Luftwaffe and then by the much-feared town planners. In contrast, the optimistic concrete vision of the future was open and light, airy and modern – ‘Machines for living in’ and set against green fields. They looked great in artists impressions. Even then though, the cracks in the white concrete were beginning to show.
There are two British TV shows that highlight this time perfectly for me – the first ‘Our Friends in the North’ shows the corruption and mismanagement of the housing projects and the direct impact on those living in the conditions that resulted from that. If you haven’t seen it, well it’s a hard watch sometimes, but it is an amazing piece of work – the story of our lives in Britain from the 60s to the 2000s, my family and others in the post-war era – the story of what went wrong. The ‘bent’ housing developer was something very familiar in the North West of England where I grew up – one even went as far as to use the waste dug up from his latest housing development to build a dry ski slope, funded by the council, only one problem it was allegedly constructed facing the wrong way – directly onto the motorway – an unpleasant end for any unsuspecting skier. Unsurprisingly it never opened, the surface started to break up and there were fears it would collapse onto the motorway anyway – not even 1970’s planners were that insane.
The other programme is ‘Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads’ – a comedy by Clement and Le Frenais, dealing with the social changes in the late 60’s and early 70’s. One half of the duo (the aspirational Bob) embracing change and moving to the Elm Lodge Housing estate, slightly more upmarket than where my family moved to, but pretty recognizable none the less, the other (Terry) stuck in the past mourning the terrace houses, old pubs and dance halls being pulled down and replaced by concrete towers. The sitcom also shows the move from the large extended families of the old working class communities towards the more middle-class ‘nuclear family’ and the ensuing loss of social cohesion.
By 1987 when ‘Paradise Towers’ was transmitted, the wheels had well and truly come off. A few miles (might as well have been a million) away from where I grew up, was an estate of tower blocks, which by this time had percentage unemployment rates over 50%, youth unemployment over 80%. People had been forcibly moved out from Liverpool and dumped somewhere with nothing to do and not much in the way of transport links – no thought had been given to anything other than the blocks themselves. And by the 1980’s the accommodation itself was falling apart, graffitied and vandalized and heroin was rife, resulting in dealing and crime. In amongst it all though, there were good people. I don’t want to name the estate, as I’m an outsider looking in and have no first-hand knowledge – but good people also came from there, better than the ones running the country at the time – or now for that matter. They talk fondly about it and a recent documentary on the area provoked a real backlash from residents talking about the community spirit and the good things about growing up there. So, as ever, things aren’t simply black and white.
When J.G Ballard wrote ‘High Rise’, the source text for ‘Paradise Towers’ in the mid 70’s, a series of scandals had already broken. He knew a couple of the key ‘New Brutalist’ architects. Another inspiration was Erno Goldfinger, who like Anthony Royal the architect in ‘High Rise’, briefly moved into the apartment on the top floor of Balfron Tower in the East End and threw parties at the top of the tower. Ballard’s work though comes from a different place than the social housing projects and belongs more in the gleaming world of 80’s Docklands redevelopment. In the real world the opportunity that the horrors of war had given the country to transform the lives of its people had been well and truly squandered. The depredation of one type of neglected housing was replaced by another, but one where too often the sense of community and extended family had been broken as well. One by one the towers started to come down. Years later, in 2017 the blackened remains of Grenfell Tower in West London shows the world that those lessons still have yet to be properly learned.
All of which has neatly put off having to talk about Paradise Towers…
Paradise Lost
I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. How best to write this? I generally have a positive attitude to most of ‘Doctor Who’ – there isn’t much of it that I don’t like or can at least find some good in. The show is something that I love and cherish – I don’t especially like criticising it. Also, I don’t like to piss on other people’s chips – it isn’t nice having someone say how terrible something you love is. Why would I deliberately crush the cherished childhood moments of others, the thing that made them fall in love with the show in the first place? Also, why would I waste my time writing about something that I don’t love? Another factor is that when it comes to Doctor Who I’m also a trier. I don’t consciously give up on something, especially something that some other people seem to like. I periodically re-watch ‘Twin Dilemma’ or ‘Timelash’ or ‘Time and the Rani’, hoping to get something new out of them. I haven’t yet, but it hasn’t stopped me until now. I’ve seen all of these quite a few times now and it is time for me to admit that for me there isn’t really anything more to find, I just don’t think they are that good. If other people like them good for them – they win. That’s my loss.
I also like to talk about stories from a personal perspective, but here that presents a problem. Between seasons 23 and 24, I barely watched the show and I couldn’t really tell you what I saw live and what I didn’t watch at all. It is all a bit of a blank. I do know I saw enough of ‘Time and the Rani’ to decide that it wasn’t for me. Beyond that I know I recorded ‘Remembrance’, ‘Fenric’ and ‘Ghost Light’ and mostly liked them. So, I have no stories to tell, just a space when I was doing the things I was supposed to be doing while I was a student.
Anyway, my theory is that I can routinely overlook failings in the show – how could you not – it was made cheaply and quickly and the same manner as soaps and sitcoms. When it works really well, it is because of the great imagination and refusal of individuals to allow these circumstances to stop them delivering the best results they can. It is a testament to the professionalism of the people working on the show and at the BBC at the time and it is frankly amazing that we have so many great or good stories, not that some fail. The show was mostly made with love and anyone who watches archive British TV should know how well the show stands up against other TV of that time across a range of measures.
Having said that, almost all stories have faults – for example great direction really stands out by exception across the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, but the things that are ‘cheap’ to do well – acting, script, costume etc. generally make up for other production weaknesses. When a story completely fails, for me it is not because of one aspect of the production, but more because multiple aspects fail at the same time – script, acting, design, effects, direction. I can overlook multiple failings, it isn’t ideal, but when almost every aspect fails – then we are into bottom 10 territory. We may not agree on the list of those stories on this section of the forum – but taking the pulse of fandom, via surveys and polls, the usual suspects are ‘Time and the Rani, ‘Twin Dilemma’, ‘Timelash’ and the like. This story I would say while it polls very poorly, also divides opinion and has its strong advocates, I’m just not one of them.
Anyway, ‘Paradise Towers’, I’m struggling with this one to think of a single aspect of the production that is adequate. It is pretty poor television – something that ‘Doctor Who’, on death row at this point really couldn’t afford. However, I am reviewing it here for a reason, partially because aspects of it fit the theme of the thread – but also because something about it just intrigues me. I struggled for a long time trying to work out what that was, but now I think I’ve nailed it – is trying to make ‘High Rise’ for kids a terrible idea or the work of a twisted genius? I had a hard time deciding, so once the review is out of the way, I’ll concentrate on that aspect of the story because that is what interests me about it.
So, my original thinking behind this was that possession or body horror is typically played to be psychologically disturbing and horrific, but occasionally it can also be played for laughs. In my wisdom I thought that I would cover ‘Paradise Towers’ at this stage, after a few stories that I really like, to highlight this. On watching the story again though, I realised that this wasn’t the aspect of change or transformation in the story that interested me and I had really nothing interesting at all to say about it, only negative comments. The change that is interesting unfortunately we don’t even get to see – more of that later. Another factor in covering this one is that I am aware of my threads, is that since I chose which stories to cover across TV, audio, books and comics, that can lead me to just chose stories that I like or interest me. That isn’t entirely a healthy situation, so I thought covering one that I don’t think much of, but which has aspects that still intrigue me, would be an interesting thing to do. In retrospect I’m not so sure about that now – you tell me. I think that I would always prefer to post out of love, I’d rather read a review from someone who loves ‘Paradise Towers’ and articulates why I should love it too, than one that just trots out all the things that are crap about it.
Acting up…
Talking of which, let’s start with acting – something that most ‘Doctor Who’ stories do pretty well on, the odd performance aside. The guest cast here are universally poor. This applies to even decent actors who I respect like Clive Merrison, who isn’t great – his performance though feels like a reaction to the ‘size’ of the chief culprit in this story – more of that in a minute. The Kangs are BBC posh drama school students cast as feral street kids – the BBC really doesn’t do ‘street’ that well at this point in time, nobody is terrible or all that good either. I won’t go on, I’ll concentrate on the worst offender, who is without shadow of a doubt Richard Briers.
I have no problem with a ‘Doctor Who’ performance with some ‘size’ and after his performance as Martin Bryce in ‘Ever Decreasing Circles’ the casting actually makes sense, but his performance is so bad – both before and after his possession that it is embarrassing that he was paid for it. I actually feel annoyed that any of my licence fee or royalties from my VHS or DVD purchases went to him. I’ve seen him on stage, doing good, subtle work and that makes me even more annoyed – he isn’t just someone who can’t really act or aren’t actors like Leee John, who at least are trying their best, Briers made a decision to play the part this way – even going so far to ignore the edict of the producer and director. Even worse is his performance after being possessed by Kroagnon – which he plays like someone who simultaneously has ¤¤¤¤ his pants and has problems pumping blood to the important parts of his brain. Meanwhile some hopeless, time serving berk has painted his face silver – he’s like a robot you see… It is an awful, embarrassing performance and I honestly think JNT should have just sacked him, maybe if he wasn’t a star turn at the time, guaranteeing some publicity, he would have.
Normally in a Doctor Who story at least the regulars or at least one of the regulars is decent. I can only think of a handful of times where that isn’t true. Here though – well Sylvester is still at the stage where he isn’t really an actor, more someone learning on the job. At this point he is a children’s entertainer who someone has given one of TV’s leading acting jobs. And before I get lots of stick for this, I do actually like his Doctor and yes that approach can work – it just doesn’t at this stage for me, he improves as the season wears on and comes back stronger after the break after a bit of help and guidance from the script editor. There are glimmerings of what he might be capable of, but mostly he looks like someone floundering, without support or clear direction. Bonnie, is well Bonnie, she does that well, she’s slightly like an over-excited child after drinking too much tartrazine-infused orange drink, if you like that sort of thing, it isn’t really my thing and I just think it probably belongs in a West End musical rather than Doctor Who. And that is unfortunately where she has pitched her performance. More a matter of taste than any issue with Bonnie herself, I quite like her older performance as Mel in the Big Finish audios – but to my mind those aren’t that much like her efforts here.
Corridors of uncertainty
The overall production ranges from the poor to vaguely adequate. For example, the direction from Nick Mallett is perfunctory at best, amateurish at worst. The production design work doesn’t really work either. Aspects of it do, but each of the design teams work almost completely against each other. Mel’s horrible polka dot costume clashes completely against the chintz of the Rezzie’s apartment, which should be an oasis of bright kitsch in a dark world. As it is she simply out-chintz’s them. The cleaners don’t look like they are designed for or belong in this world. The world simply isn’t coherent, which is the sort of thing I would easily forgive if a lot of the other aspects of the production also weren’t so poor. Another example – the colour co-ordinated Kangs – matching hair colour and outfits – they are supposed to be feral street kids. Or poor, cheap production design – Kroagnon’s light bulbs for example.
So, the actors can’t act, the director can’t direct and it looks pretty bad. So, if the production is terrible what about the script. I had a theory that the script actually might be quite good. Well to strip the effects of the awful production, I decided to read Stephen Wyatt’s novelisation. Unfortunately, it wasn’t all that good either and it didn’t really help, I simply decided that I vaguely liked the idea, but not really any aspect of its execution.
Struggling for positives outside of the central concept, I quite liked the ending. Not in a sarcastic sort of way, just for some unfathomable reason I quite enjoyed watching the last episode. I can’t really articulate why, which isn’t helpful for this review. Don’t get me wrong I don’t think it is that good, but I think it might be possibly because the ending is ‘Who-ish’ and positive and whilst poor old Pex dies and is cowardly up until pretty much the end, he does get his redemptive moment.
Overall, it feels like a tentative step towards something new, but one that is hamstrung by the baggage of the recent past, BBC senior management that had stopped caring about the show and also a producer who whilst supporting and encouraging his new script editor maybe wasn’t ready for the show to be pushed too far in this new direction. I think an issue with it within the context of season 24 is that to do a story like ‘Paradise Towers’, off-beat, grotesque and absurd, well you need to earn the right first I think. That means getting the trust of the viewing public, get them to the point where they are willing to go with you. So, for example Russell T Davies waits until towards the end of series 2 to unleash ‘Love and Monsters’, by then the viewers trust him to deliver a show, they know even if they don’t like this week’s show, next week’s will probably be good. Here, this comes on the back of the hiatus, the Trial season and a pretty poor opening story for the new Doctor – if the team had hit the public with ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ and other popular stories and then pulled ‘Paradise Towers’ out, then this might work better. As it is, the heightened, grotesque, absurd performances and theatrical set design probably just felt like ‘Doctor Who’ looking a bit cheap and the poor performances part of the myth of ‘rubbish acting’ and cardboard, wobbly sets.
So up next and in some senses another positive for this story, it made me read J.G.Ballard’s ‘High Rise’, which was an interesting experience and re-watch ‘Brazil’ which is superb. ‘High Rise’ is the source text for the piece and I am going to have a look at the relationship between the two stories. Maybe that is it – maybe the positive I am looking for in ‘Paradise Towers’ is that it inspired youngsters to read Ballard and watch ‘Brazil’ when they were older – who knows, I only have a sample size of one and I’d seen ‘Brazil’ before ‘Paradise Towers’ anyway. If it achieved that, well that is something worth celebrating.
Build high for happiness – ‘High Rise’ and ‘Paradise Towers’
So, I had one last theory about ‘Paradise Towers’ – that it was really good idea for a Doctor Who, just poorly executed. In some ways, season 24 isn’t the easiest of seasons to get anything done well in, new inexperienced script editor, tired producer who wants to leave, new young writers and directors, change of lead actor imposed in the team, no budget etc. The poor execution of things maybe isn’t all that surprising, it could have all been an injection of new drive, or just a lot of people without any experience fumbling about in the dark or more likely a bit of both.
To test that theory, I thought I would go back to the source material – ‘High Rise’ and see whether I thought that there was a good basis there for a ‘Doctor Who’ story. The novel and the film ‘Brazil’ had been the starting point of the conversation between Cartmel and Wyatt after all. I think when ‘Doctor Who’ works best with a clear source text, it often converts (or subverts) it into something overtly ’Whoish’ in the process – sometimes by adding a second or third ‘borrowed’ element or possibly for example by taking something supernatural and grounding it in a rational, scientific Who universe explanation. So, there is absolutely no reason per se why ‘Paradise Towers’ should slavishly adhere to its source (I don’t see how it could in his case anyway) and just be a junior lite version of ‘High Rise’. I think a more interesting examination is whether the things that make ‘High Rise’ tick are used well in ‘Paradise Towers’ and if they aren’t whether the story replaces them with something equally as interesting.
What I found when reading ‘High Rise’ was that almost everything I liked about it was missing from ‘Paradise Towers’. The transformation or change that is fascinating about the story isn’t the chief Caretaker being possessed by Kroagnon, but rather the transformation from the brave new world that the architect has designed into barbarism and social collapse. We don’t see that at all in ‘Paradise Towers’, it has already reached its end-state. We are given only a few clues to how it might have happened – as far as I can see an entire age class (caretakers aside although they are supposed to be old men, just the director seems to have forgotten/not given a ¤¤¤¤ about it) has been removed to go and fight in a war. In ‘High Rise’ the tiny annoyances and disputes that start the erosion, leading to full scale assault, rape, murder and eventually cannibalism IS the story. The story is about the problems of living in close proximity to so many other humans and having to get on with each other and share living and leisure space. I can understand that – confinement, without nature, surrounded by so many others would drive me insane. To the inhabitants of High Rise it is also attractive – they eventually stop going out to work because the barbarism is more fascinating than the order of their professional lives, they realise that there is yearning to strip away the veneer of civilisation. In ‘Paradise Towers’ we join the story after most of the interesting things have happened.
‘High Rise’ itself isn’t perfect, I actually think a weakness is that it finds itself with nowhere really left to go about three quarters of a way through, the ending is almost inevitable. The middle-class, well to do residents of the building, have descended down the path of human civilisation to clans based on groupings around the floors of the tower and finally to small, discrete family groups eking out an existence, basically living in caves. Human social evolution stripped away. Most of the interest is then over. There is no more horror left to mine – what is worse than murder, rape, cannibalism, incest and using human remains as art? There isn’t anything left in the tank, so it runs out of steam. The thing is ‘Doctor Who’ can’t show any of this – well we have murders by the cleaners and some comedy attempts at cannibalism, but a core part of the story cannot be addressed in a ‘Doctor Who’ on TV in 1987 context. It doesn’t have the time to depict the descent anyway – so all we have is a tower block gone wrong. And we don’t really know how or why.
I actually think that Ballard choosing a middle class, exclusive apartment block is very astute, it removes the story from its source inspiration and stops it being just another story of a working-class area gone bad. Instead it is about human nature, how thin the veneer of civilisation is and how close we all are to acting barbarically given the right stimuli. It is also about how this can sometimes be appealing – breaking free from all the restraints that civilisation creates that hold us back. The residents choose to stay throughout the madness of ‘High Rise’ – what is going on in the tower is more interesting than their middle class high-achieving lives outside. This also provides the opportunity for the black comedy of accountants, lecturers, journalists, physicians and airline pilots going off the rails and joyfully going primitive.
This makes the point that human nature is classless – in the camp in China where Ballard was imprisoned by the Japanese during the war, wealth and social status counted for nothing – the de-humanisation and humiliation applied equally to all – class was stripped away. I can’t see that ‘Paradise Towers’ has nothing to say about class, there are 3 divisions – Kangs, Caretakers and Rezzies, if anything it feels more about disaffected youth. However, this is the BBC in the 1980’s and it really doesn’t do that well – either in portrayal (everyone is a bit posh stage school) or by pursuing this angle with any sort of conviction. This is a lost opportunity really, especially given the state of things back in ’87 – but not that surprising given the politics surrounding the BBC at the time.
And that is the thing that beyond the execution issues, I don’t really know what “Paradise Towers’ is about. With many stories that wouldn’t be an issue – think of the stories with similar literary or film roots – they are just great action adventure stories, gleefully using source material with abandon – there are lots of examples across the years – at random mashing up ‘Thing from Another World’, ‘Day of the Triffids’, ‘Quatermass Experiment’ and ‘The Avengers’ to give us ‘Seeds of Doom’ – which isn’t about anything really – but I love it. So why does it matter for me with ‘Paradise Towers’ – it shouldn’t? Well, I think in this case given the context, it feels like it should have something to say, even in the lightest touch way, about society, about housing, about youth, about Thatcher’s Britain, about anything. Can someone tell me as to what it actually trying to say? The nearest it gets is a vague comment form the Doctor to Kroagnon:
‘Anyway, I’d heard so much about Paradise Towers I thought I’d come and take a look and, believe me, I’m very disappointed. It displays exactly what everyone says is your usual failure as an architect. Not making allowances for people.’
That last point is a valid critique of post-war housing policy, but it is thrown away – that should be the whole point and needed emphasising. Also we aren’t really shown in what way ‘Paradise Towers‘ has failed its occupants – just that it has. So, a children’s version of Ballard – yes I sort of get that – what is it about though? I also understand the limitations imposed by JNT, but why do this, if you can’t say anything useful? Also, regardless of personal preferences, many of those other stories are well written, acted and directed, but if as with ‘Paradise Towers’ you are going to do something really rather poorly, then you at least you’d better be about something, have interesting to say and have a good central idea at the core of things. At least then I could say, well the execution wasn’t great, but what a great set of ideas, in another season that would have been brilliant. I’m struggling slightly with that here – it needs far greater clarity than it displays – but there at least is a germ of decent, different idea in there – I’ll give it that, it is just underdeveloped.
So, ‘Doctor Who’ is generally pretty good when it takes source material as an inspiration and absorbs and transforms it. However here the original writer wrote that particular story for a specific set of reasons. In Ballard’s case the trigger of post-war housing, but really his experiences of being in a Japanese camp during the war, where he saw human beings stripped of all semblance of civilisation, really informs his work, an aspect that it is lost necessarily here. However, the inspiration of the 60’s/70’s housing policies still very much holds true in 1987, Britain was still reaping the ‘benefits’ of post-war housing policy. That sense of humanity being stripped away is lost, it is almost as if the trappings have been kept (the tower), a bit of cannibalism, a swimming pool, but the whole point has been lost in the process. So, here it isn’t telling the same story, which would be fine if it were transformed into something else equally as interesting, but more Doctor Who-ish. However, it isn’t for me, the world isn’t well enough defined, built or presented in ‘Paradise Towers’ and so it doesn’t really work.
Another example, something else that ‘High Rise’ does very well is have the tower block itself become a character in the story – it has a sense of place, but more than that is a really oppressive presence in the story. Ballard manages to convey the feeling of the weight of the building bearing down on its residents, particularly those on the lower floors. Not just the building itself, but the weight of humanity of all of the floors above – the ¤¤¤¤ and waste and rubbish all flowing downwards. The geography of the building is important in ‘High Rise’, the higher achievers are in the upper floors, closer to clear air and the roof garden, these residents have dogs and no children, in the lower floors live the families with children and others like air stewardesses, still middle class, but maybe not as wealthy or successful as the higher floors. At the top of the tower is the architect looking down on all he surveys – like Erno Goldfinger, in this Kroagnon is buried in the basement – which I guess sort of works in a creepy ‘Doctor Who’ sort of way – but again the class aspect is lost in this context.
So, in ‘High Rise‘ clusters of grievances start to grow around floors, those in the middle caught in the extremes of the upper and lower floors. Broken lifts, blocked rubbish chutes, dog ¤¤¤¤ in the stairways, bottles dropped from parties above– all the grievances of too many people living too close together – even in supposed luxury. Again, all of this is lost in ‘Paradise Towers’, it has no real sense of place at all, no geography, no thematic unity. Instead there are just really odd vestiges of ‘High Rise’. The most obvious being Mel’s sudden and rather odd obsession with swimming pools – if you don’t know ‘High Rise’ that is just a really strange aspect to the story. Now in ‘High Rise’ some of the pivotal moments are around the tower’s two swimming pools – the first death (a dog), the disputes of children’s access and access times and various assaults, murders and liaisons. The pools are a status symbol, of luxury – they are important in that self-contained world and are fought over. In ‘Paradise Towers’ Mel just randomly fancies a swim, even after she’s seen the state of the rest of the towers, it is just plain weird and another way in which the world built in the story just doesn’t quite work– it doesn’t even manage to be properly dysfunctional.
I used to think that ‘Doctor Who’ does ‘High Rise’ was an inspired idea, but poorly executed. Now I think I have refined that opinion, it might be a great ‘Doctor Who’ idea, but not necessarily for TV and especially not the ‘Doctor Who’ on TV in 1987. It would make a terrific Doctor Who comic strip (I’m thinking of the ‘End of the Line’ the Doctor Who Weekly strip) – a character like Pex works much better in that context as would the Kangs – stripped of their 80’s BBC does Yoof culture aspect. I could also see it working as a novel, maybe a New Adventure with the time to build up the social collapse, adding the back-story and maybe the ability to add some of the horror required from an enclosed situation where the population have descended into barbarism. Even just a more accomplished production would help, even if it had been made a year or two later it would probably have been more successful. As it is, for my money it just doesn’t really work. A shame really, I should love it.
Bureaucracy, the grotesque and absurdism, Brazil and ‘Paradise Towers’.
I once had a conversation about Industrial sociology with an ageing alcoholic, Marxist Scouse lecturer – think Ricky Tomlinson and you are half way there. He was nicotine-stained veteran of the strikes of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s from the docks, to Ford at Halewood to the Miner’s strike. This was 1987 – the year that ‘Paradise Towers’ was broadcast. He was on his way out, he was getting on a bit, alcoholism wasn’t doing much for his career and his face just didn’t fit much any more. He bore the scars of too many battles lost and by that year (a bit like now in that respect), it felt like the war itself was lost. And worse of all, his hand shook with the telltale signs of the DT’s. I’ll always be grateful as he gave a list of books to read – all that I would ever need to read if I wanted to know about state and corporate bureaucracy – books to arm yourself with – lemon against the CS gas. Some, I’d already read some and some were already on the list for future reading – in the end I read all of them. I can’t remember them all now – but well they included the likes of ‘The Trial’, ‘Catch 22’, ‘1984’, ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ – and films like ‘Brazil’, ‘Doctor Strangelove’ and some of the film versions of the books that I’ve already mentioned. Some I’d seen or read already, but some were new to me.
I don’t need to use a much bigger budget film to hammer the clearly much underfunded ‘Paradise `Towers’ – I mean that just isn’t fair. Any more than using Ballard and ‘High Rise’ to beat it with is either. However, it is an interesting comparison – like the book, it was a key influence on the story given by the author and script editor. And I really rather love it – it is one of my favourite films – so what is it that makes me love one and not especially the other? If nothing else it is interesting to look at roots of something and revisit the themes, writing and performance codes.
‘Paradise Towers’ in some respects, like ‘High Rise’ and ‘Brazil’ represents the dystopian future of the likes of 1984. Amongst the pick and mix of elements in the story, it also tries to incorporate state bureaucracy in the form the Caretaker’s and their slavish adherence to the rulebook, in spite of the absurdity and pointlessness of it all. However, rather like the story of the societal collapse within the tower block, it really fails to address this with any real conviction, much less so than one of its forebears in these respects – ‘The Sunmakers’ and also less successfully than Graeme Curry’s companion piece from the next season – ‘The Happiness Patrol’. To my mind that is a much more successful production (despite often looking just as cheap) and piece of story-telling, but in some ways because of that it is maybe less interesting to write about.
What we are left with in ‘Paradise Towers’ is dialogue like this example, which while fine, amounts to nothing much more than them tiresomely quoting the rulebook:
DOCTOR: You can’t condemn me without trial, without evidence, without proof. I mean, I don’t even know who this Great Architect is.
CARETAKER: The three two seven appendix three subsection nine death, I think.
DEPUTY: Three two. Very good, Chief.
CARETAKER: Oh, that would happen just now. Yes? Oh dear, oh dear. Poor Caretaker number three four five stroke twelve subsection three. What, now? Yes, all right, all right, there’s no need to quote the rule book at me, Caretaker number five seven nine stroke fourteen subsection eight. I’ll come.
DOCTOR: Anything the matter?
CARETAKER: Nothing that isn’t under control, thank you, Great Architect. An unfortunate accident has happened to Caretaker number three four five. I am required by the rulebook to go and investigate. The three two seven appendix three subsection nine death will be postponed till I return. In the meantime, you will guard the Great Architect here with your lives. Understand?
DEPUTY: Yes, Chief, no problem.
It quickly becomes quite tedious stuff and is very wearying after a while, with Briers in particular adopting a dreary monotone voice, redolent of TV jobsworths. Taking the already ‘Martin Bryce’ performance and dialling it up to eleven. I mean it does the job in the broadest sense, it is shorthand for ‘Little Hitler’. Really all that was needed was a heightened, more grotesque version of his character from ‘Ever Decreasing Circles’, not something off the scale – Briers is a decent comic actor – he should know how to pitch these things.
However, what it really lacks is a central thread of state bureaucracy that pulls this all together and drives the plot – the rulebook is just window dressing. While in ‘Brazil’ or some of the other texts I mentioned (‘Catch 22’ for example, ‘The Trial’ or even ‘One Flew Over..’) the bureaucracy drives the story and has consequences for the characters. In ‘Brazil’ an insect crawling on a typewriter causes the change of a name on an arrest order from Archibald Tuttle or Archibald Buttle. The terrorist plumber Tuttle (rather wonderfully Robert de Niro) is left to operate, whilst our hero (Jonathan Pryce) sees his neighbour arrested and killed. All of which results from a bureaucratic mistake and causes a chain of events that will eventually lead to the torture and lobotomisation of our hero. Something like that would work well in the context of this story, not as extreme, but something maybe as absurd – for example that the whole situation had been caused by an admin error – there was no war or maybe an inversion of the Golgafrincham B Ark plot in ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide‘ – the Caretakers have sent all of the useful people away so they can create their own bureaucratic paradise, free to be jobsworths pushing around the young and elderly – something useful to do with the bureaucracy and rulebook aspect of the piece, which would also beef up the premise of the malformed nature of the society of Paradise Towers.
Now Sylvester’s Doctor – like Troughton’s is almost the perfect figure to put in a rampant bureaucracy – to subvert and undermine it. At this stage he is an anarchic figure, similar to early Troughton. He should be like throwing a bomb into this world – similar to McMurphy in ‘One Flew Over..’. We do get a bit of that – but nowhere near enough, even a year later, a more confident McCoy and creative team would do that aspect better. It is almost there – the ingredients are all in place – but for me it isn’t sharply written enough or well enough played, at this point, his Doctor isn’t well enough formed or well enough played to carry this production. Conversely, his companion isn’t ‘normal’ enough to stand out in this world of grotesques, rather her performance and costume are just as heightened as the rest of the characters.
On that last point, the story also has the absurdist sense of grotesque that ‘Brazil’ has – the mother with her horrific plastic surgery, turning every younger and eventually acquiring a coterie of young male admirers. Then we have her even more grotesque friend who’s face starts to fall apart. These feel like they provide some of the inspiration to the rezzies, the chintzy cannibals of ‘Paradise Towers’. Whilst the state employed bureaucratic killers and torturers of ‘Brazil’ (Michael Palin and Bob Hoskins) clearly influence the Caretakers.
‘Brazil’, like ‘High Rise’ has a very well developed sense of place, the world fits, all the component parts feel part of the world – even though they range from the baroque plumbing of our heroes apartment or his office at work (tubes delivering paperwork) all the way to the swanky restaurants that his mother frequents. The performance, design and writing all complement each other and work together, which they never quite do in ‘Paradise Towers’.
Again, one is a major film, written by the likes of Tom Stoppard (a master of this sort of writing) and directed by Gilliam with a stellar cast and adequate funding. ‘Paradise Towers’ has none of these things going for it – although the cast list is pretty impressive for a TV show – but somehow that hasn’t stopped ‘Doctor Who’ before. My brain is capable of editing out those bits and subliminally replacing them with better effects etc. it is part of being a fan of ‘Classic Who’. No, for me it’s back to my view that to do this sort of thing successfully, the writing and performances need to be sharper and better pitched than on display here and convey a coherent world to set the grotesques in.
Overall, ‘Paradise Towers’ is a story that interests me greatly – largely thanks to its influences, but always disappoints me. This viewing just served to cement that view, much as I enjoyed writing about it.
A Journal of Impossible Things 