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.
Meanwhile, the Doctor and Peri…’
A Journal of Impossible Things 