Love and Liberty

Doctor Who fans were given a spectacular early Christmas present yesterday, when a surprise screening at the BFI revealed that there were two more episodes in existence than everyone had thought there were. For all of us born after the ’60s, this is the first time we can see these performances from William Hartnell in Galaxy 4 and Patrick Troughton in The Underwater Menace – an exciting prospect, even if neither story is universally loved. But in anticipation of these tales of Dalek wannabes and Flash Gordon-style hammery, I have reviews I prepared earlier based on the soundtracks of each. When I see the new old episodes on release next year, how wrong will I be?

The BBC website already has tantalising clips of Galaxy 4 Episode 3: Air Lock and The Underwater Menace Episode 2 to watch, with articles on how they were found both there and on the Radio Times site. If you know nothing about these two stories, be warned that each clip contains spoilers for its story’s key plot point – one implicitly, one directly – and so, unusually, do my reviews below. If you want to wait and see things for yourself, then, stop before the main headings. I will say that both stories, though very different in tone and setting, have monsters with two unusual things in common – and that both were designed to be four-part, ‘typical’ Doctor Who stories of the time and, incredible as it may sound, had comparatively significant cash spent on them to make them look good; it’s widely thought that this may have been more successful in one case than the other. And yet while Galaxy 4 is the one with a particularly well-respected director, of the two clips it’s the one from The Underwater Menace that’s compelling. That even makes up for this, the earliest surviving episode with Patrick Troughton’s Doctor, not being one in which he has his most famous hat – though he does get an outrageous replacement – nor a topless Ben. The clip from Galaxy 4, on the other hand, is visually interesting more in its design than its direction, so perhaps Julia Smith will win out over Derek Martinus after all. Now I’m wondering if the Chumblies are oscillating or merely wobbling (only seeing more of them will tell). Both clips, though, already display a little of what their stories are famous for: painful earnestness saved by Bill Hartnell in one, and an over-the-top mad scientist dragged to Earth by Pat Troughton in the other.

Missing – Presumed in the Skip

Half a dozen years ago, watching the whole of Doctor Who when there was considerably less of it – at both ends, it now happily transpires – I wrote reviews of all of William Hartnell’s stories as the Doctor and the first few of Patrick Troughton’s for an online discussion, and this seems an appropriate day to reprint these two for the first time where more than about half a dozen people can read them below, even if it’s inviting ridicule should things not look as they sounded. But how can I have reviewed these already without ever having seen them, you might ask, being born half a dozen years after their only airing in Britain? Well, I’ve written before about the BBC’s barbarous purges in which they destroyed many of their TV shows from the ’60s, creating what are now disingenuously referred to as “lost” or “missing” episodes. These two are the first surviving episodes to turn up for nearly eight years, since The Daleks’ Master Plan Episode 2: Day of Armageddon back in 2004. Until yesterday there were (or weren’t) 108 of them; now there are only 106 to go, and at least one of them would probably scrape into most fans’ top 100 to be found! Fortunately, for every single story, people recorded the soundtrack at the time, so you can now get the full adventures on CD with linking narration to make them clearer, while there are also many off-screen ‘telesnaps’ which mean we can get a fair idea of what the whole thing looked like for free, assembled into photonovels on the BBC website – and, unofficially, the two have been combined into Reconstructions, which you can get hold of for free as long as you don’t tell the BBC about it.

Of the six seasons broadcast in the ’60s that starred William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton as the Doctor, the middle ones were the worst hit; while most stories survive intact from each of Seasons One, Two and Six, there are only four complete adventures from Seasons Three and Five put together and, as I wrote earlier this year when publishing a review of Doctor Who – The Smugglers, not one story still exists in full from Season Four. These two finds don’t complete any stories, but they do offer an ‘orphaned’ episode for Season Three’s Galaxy 4, of which only a clip had previously been known to exist, and add another ‘orphaned’ episode to the already existing one from Season Four’s The Underwater Menace. Both are sure to be released on DVD next year, probably with soundtracks for the “missing” episodes (and, if we’re very lucky, perhaps partial Reconstructions or even, just maybe, animation for the now half-complete The Underwater Menace). Already today, you can buy the other material on the DVD collection Doctor Who – Lost In Time, which includes that extended clip from Galaxy 4 (peculiarly, presented in the middle of a documentary rather than as a menu item on its own) and the infamous Episode 3 of The Underwater Menace, or you can get the soundtracks for the whole stories both as separate releases and in newly remastered box sets, respectively Doctor Who – The Lost TV Episodes Collection No 1 (1964-1965) and Doctor Who – The Lost TV Episodes Collection No 3 (1966-1967). In which each is probably the weakest story…

For DVD reviews, this is usually the point at which I mention that back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine Issue 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – and how high they and I scored the stories I’m coming to. And they didn’t think much of these, but, hey, they’re the only episodes with arguably my two favourite Doctors that I have never seen, so my enthusiasm’s racing. Even if the DWM vote put Galaxy 4 down into 172nd place and The Underwater Menace even lower at 194; I might put each of them as much as ten places higher, but no more than that. At the moment, I’m much more ill than usual, and Richard had to wake me with the glad tidings yesterday afternoon; when I crawled from bed to watch the clips some time later, though, even my sounding like a Dalek couldn’t hide my excitement. I promptly rang one of my oldest friends with the news, who was audibly thrilled when I told him two episodes had been found. And then said, “Can’t we ask them to put them back where they found them?” when he found out which two. Yet still, the DVD releases can’t come soon enough! And remember, before you read on – spoilers…

Doctor Who – Galaxy 4

“I told them soldiers were no good for space work. All they can do is kill. But they wouldn’t listen. If you are to conquer space, they said, you will need soldiers. So here I am confronted with danger. I’m the only one able to think!”

Season Three of Doctor Who is a strange one even by the standards of the series as a whole. Like the first two seasons, it’s highly innovative and experimental, but with a new production team (the first ‘new’ production team) it has a very different feel. Companions chop and change far more abruptly and the dangers the Doctor faces continue to get ‘bigger’, with this the first of many exploding planets, all making it an unsettling year – but the ideas get bigger, too, with a lot of ‘big concepts’. The downside is that the endearing characterisation and dialogue-driven drama of the first couple of years doesn’t always fit in with the new brooms. And Galaxy 4 is definitely a sign of things to come…

Mini-Skirts Are In Fashion; Complexity Is Out

There are two ‘big ideas’ that everyone knows about Galaxy 4, from the skimpiest story summaries: the Rills are ugly but good, while the Drahvins are wicked but ‘beautiful’ (in a very ’60s way – the book’s cover of highly posed ‘beautiful space women’ against a blazingly pink sky is easily the campest thing ever painted by Andrew Skilleter); and, linked to that, the Drahvins are the nearest broadcast Doctor Who has ever got to the horrendous old sci-fi cliché of ‘the planet of women’. The trouble is, there’s very little else to know about the story, especially as there’s very little made of the ‘evil women’ side of the plot. Naturally, it’s a relief that Steven doesn’t snog them into being good (as is the norm in such stories in other series), and that they’re mostly just dim and for a good reason, rather than behaving as screaming girlies who happen to have large Freudian weapons (admittedly, Maaga bullies her soldiers and makes them cry, but at least she’s a strong character), but in the gaping hole left by the omission of sexist blather is… Not much.

It’s nice that for once Doctor Who is doing a story where ‘ugly’ doesn’t mean ‘evil’; right from The Daleks, the series has a strong current against fascism which is slightly undermined by, for example, the ‘good race’ being blond and ‘perfect’ while we know the others are evil because they’re mutated horrors with funny voices. Unfortunately, while the Rills seem quite an interesting piece of design from the two photos we have of them, all we ever hear is how ugly they are, as if we could miss the moral. Surely the Rills themselves wouldn’t think of themselves as ugly (one of the novels even suggests that Rill social advancement is based on their ugliness, which seems to miss the point)? It doesn’t help that the Rill has the plummiest voice yet heard in the show, which appeals to my own prejudices by suggesting Shakespearean ham, or possibly Lord Melchett. The Doctor has a great moment when he calls this giant alien monstrosity “Young man”, though – we could do with more of that. Their “warning” ammonia bomb is perhaps supposed to recall World War I gas warfare, but (coupled with the Rill’s stern, schoolmasterly tones in telling naughty Maaga to stay indoors) I can’t help but think of it as a stinkbomb. There’s also a teeny bit of a plot hole, where – before we find out the Rills are generous and friendly – they decide to blow up the TARDIS, for no good reason, especially as they’ve deliberately not attacked the spaceship of the Drahvins, who they know are hostile. It’s difficult to imagine any other reason for them to do this than faux-villainous plot convenience in advance of the ‘twist’.

Hands Off My Chumblies

On the bright side, the particularly good Loose Cannon Recon both greatly improves the long clip that’s left of the story by putting it in context and proves that one of the reasons it’s so sad so much of Season Three was tossed into skips and burnt by the BBC is that it seems to have some lovely visuals. Ironically, the first two seasons’ dialogue generally makes them more suited to audio releases, while it looks like there are ‘lost’ higher production standards in the third, where every planetscape appears an improvement on The Chase. The Recon shows some superb design for the time, with great scenery and a very solid ship, as well as re-enacted scenes for the Chumblies, the cuddly little robots that the BBC once again hoped they could cash in on as much as the Daleks (plus someone ‘playing’ Bill Hartnell as, er, a hand waving a knobbly stick). They look quite jolly as they telescope up and down, so again it’s a shame that most of what we have of them is their irritating sound effect on the CD. Ah well [the rediscovered episode means I shall have to take back my observation that if I never hear another Chumblie “oooo-up-ooooom”, it’ll be quite soon enough].

In the end, this is a story with its eye on the big picture; the first planet destroyed in the series, much talk of galaxies, alien races and some rather nice scenery all there to illustrate a big ‘message’. You can’t fault its sci-fi ambition, but it’s as if they spent so much time making it seem ‘big’ that they forgot to fill in any of the details. The galaxy-spanning view makes little sense seen up close, when we realise that the name of the story merely refers to where Maaga comes from and tells us next to nothing, or that her mission to “conquer space!” (and before Sarah Brightman) seems a tad improbable in a backward ship with just a handful of more backward clones to staff it. Added to that, the sheer obviousness of the ‘point’ undermines itself; the story has its heart in the right place, but it goes on and on with little happening, and Season Two’s characters have given way to cardboard that spouts moral messages. It’s never actively bad, but it’s much, much too slight for its length. Photos of Drahvins and Chumblies may look camp and rather exciting, but as we’re drearily reminded, don’t judge by appearances – a simple moral for an even more simple story.

In mitigation, with its proto-Jagaroth spaceship and froody alien vegetation, and of course its (sigh) threatening dolly-birds and cute robots, this was clearly made to be seen, so perhaps the plot was secondary and it was deliberately designed as a ratings-grabber to look at? So will seeing it at last save or damn Galaxy 4? I can’t wait to find out. As then-companion Peter Purves has always said how much he hated this story, his commentary will surely be entertaining, too.

Looking back at it now, there is at least one way in which Galaxy 4 – ’50s B-Movie as it is, with its beehived alien Baaaad Girls – feels slightly ahead of its time. By mostly ignoring the gender reversal dynamics and focusing on Maaga, it’s an early example of TV’s Magnificent Bitch, even though she’s played by Stephanie Bidmead rather than Stephanie Beacham (now there’s a thought: Steven Moffat’s already had a Drahvin spaceship making a cameo last year in a story about a more grandiose but more improbable exploding Universe, undoubtedly because he likes women in micro-skirts, so if he ever does a full-on Drahvin story, how’s she for casting…?). For the most part, this makes it camply amusing at the expense of what little credibility it has – even the first episode title, Four Hundred Dawns, suggests she fuels her ship with her wooden compatriots (‘Throw another Dawn in the furnace! …I’m almost out of disposable Drahvins’, as Richard has it) – and it’s difficult not to imagine it turning up the Planet of Women dial to something like the Two Ronnies’ The Worm That Turned, not least because if it had been made in 1980 they wouldn’t have dared call the villain Maaga. Not only is her name often pronounced so it’s just a shade short of The Good Life’s anti-hero, but it’s uncannily similar to that of another blonde Leader, too.

And yet the scene I’m most keen to see from Air Lock – other than the surely unmissable spectacle of Rills reeling about – is one that’s always gripped me on audio, where Maaga gives a virtual soliloquy, barring the occasional dumb comment from one of her dumb subordinates. She starts off merely grumbling about them, and indeed gives her most infamous line, but it carries on to something much better, a proper bit of villainous spite, delivered in a gripping undertone:

“It may be that we shall kill neither the Rills nor these Earth creatures. Not with our own hands, that is. It may be better for us to escape in the Rills’ spaceship and leave them here. And then... When we are out in space… We can look back. We will see a vast, white, exploding planet... And know that they have died with it!”
“But we will not see them die.”
“You will not. But I, at least, have enough intelligence to imagine it.”

Her having an imagination is quite the best thing in it, which you could even take as a postmodern commentary that the special effects are never going to live up to your mental picture… And at the end, of course, we get to imagine in exactly the same way about her last moments – which might make it an even more postmodern commentary on the bloodthirstiness of the viewers, who watch all these things for their entertainment.

Or she might just be being beastly.

Doctor Who – The Underwater Menace

“You’re not clumsy, Doctor. You did it on purpose.”

The TARDIS lands at the entrance to what’s left of Atlantis and does Flash Gordon.

Of all the stories with missing episodes so far, this is the one where people seem most likely to want the surviving episode lost, too, as it might be better-regarded if only the short ‘censor’s clips’ had survived to suggest a grim and dangerous story about horrible operations, rather than the load of old codswallop we get to see in the surviving Episode 3 in all its ludicrous glory. Even fans who’ve never seen it tend to know that the final line of that involves the mad scientist exclaiming,

“Nothing in the world can stop me now!”

I’ve read several reviews excusing the story by saying this is the worst episode of the four, but that’s nonsense – both soundtrack and Recon make clear that Episode 1, for example, moves very slowly, the TARDIS crew act like idiots and it’s not even funny. Despite all that, it’s still possible to defend it, simply because the surviving episode is often fun. Is it good? Nah. Is it a pleasure to watch? Go on, go on…

Good News For Troughton, Bad News For His Friends

Though at times he’s just as extravagant as in his first two stories, everyone wanting ‘the new Doctor’ toned down a bit is in for a stroke of luck. Opposite Joseph Furst’s Professor Zaroff, he seems relatively underplayed, and not only is he funnier than Furst, at least with the hero we’re laughing with rather than at him. He’s both sharp and funny, particularly when puncturing Zaroff’s plans: “Oh, have I dropped a brick?” or calling his bluff on the explosion being unstoppable and not requiring his finger on the button with “Miss your big moment? I think not.” He’s already getting other people to play on his strangeness, most entertainingly when the lovely Ben bluffs his way past a guard using the old ‘I’ve got a prisoner’ trick: “He’s just not normal, is he?” He tries to bring down Zaroff by suggesting the Fish People strike (a major contrast with Pertwee in The Monster of Peladon), but when it comes down to it, he’s back to what’s clearly already his usual way of foiling an evil plan: blow everything up, as he did on the Vulcan Colony the landing before last. With this strange mix of the gentle and the utterly destructive – ‘Better safe than sorry!’ he seems to think, to make sure the plan’s thoroughly knocked down – you have to feel relieved that Scotland survived in the previous story, or that he didn’t at least blow up the cells and scupper Trask’s boat. By contrast, he also tries to save Zaroff from his horrible end. Meanwhile, with the most ludicrous array of hats seen so far in the series, we see the Doctor delighting in a huge priest’s hat, wearing a fish mask on a stick, and dressed as a gypsy in groovy shades for a very funny ‘action’ scene in the market. You can see why he’s Matt Smith’s favourite Doctor. It’s also the last story he wears his arresting stovepipe hat that appeared in all his early publicity shots, and a little sad that the only surviving episode from one of the ‘stovepipe stories’ is devoid of it, with the telesnaps suggesting that the last person to wear it is Polly…

Although they get to do lots of dressing-up – rubber guards’ uniforms for Ben and Jamie, a shell suit for Polly – it’s not a particularly good story for the Doctor’s three companions. They start well, in a fun little TARDIS scene where everyone thinks about where they’d like to land (it’s difficult to know for sure without the proper episode, but this may feature the rare device of hearing someone’s voice ‘inside their head’ – used in The Moonbase, The Mind Robber and The War Games, but for only one story outside of Troughton), but once they go outside and everyone suddenly wants to explore, now Bill Hartnell’s gone, they rapidly run out of useful things to do after a one-off attempt to use foreign languages. Given that Ben and Jamie have basically the same ‘running around not saying very much’ part, already suggesting too many similar companions, it’s startling how much one-off characters Jacko and Sean are ‘extra companions’, doing companiony things like rabble-rousing the Fish People into striking. Did Geoffrey Orme just not like Ben and Jamie, even in their little rubber outfits? Ben may notice the threat, as he teases new boy Jamie like a younger brother. That’s nothing compared to the distressing fall for Polly, though, as she goes from being a fantastically capable companion to utterly useless here. She’s taken in by Zaroff’s ridiculous bluff to jump the priest Ramo (asking for Ramo to come over so he can “feel the aura of your goodness”), then while they fight she could easily pitch in, but shamefully just squats in the corner looking scared (at least she tries to hit him with a rock later on). Still, the two sexy blondes Ben and Polly look good together, and Joe Orton clearly fancied Jamie in the guard’s outfit, as he wanted to cast Fraser Hines as Mr Sloane on the strength of it!

The Hats of Doom

Despite many attempts by Terry Nation, this is the closest Doctor Who ever gets to the original Flash Gordon film serial, and not always in a good way; the Fish People, the mixture of stereotyped religion and mad science, the hokey dialogue and design work (it’s difficult to believe the executioner with the mask and shell on his chest isn’t from Flash Gordon). Add in elements of Journey to the Centre of the Earth and a horrible physical transformation that’s even less convincing than that in Vengeance on Varos, and you’ve got a story that’s mostly not deliberately funny, but invites being sent up mercilessly by several of the actors and in Nigel Robinson’s novelisation. It’s the reverse of some Hartnell stories written as comedy and ‘straightened out’ in the studio, from a man who also wrote a very forgettable episode of The Avengers. It’s enlivened by Professor Zaroff and his occasional demented exclamations but, as he’s given the brilliant and detailed motivation of being ‘mad’, I can’t help thinking he should be more over the top. He’s not exactly Brian Blessed in full-on shouty mode – more just sniggering. It’s not a good story for Atlantean religion, either, with it all a big con (shock) and the fat priest Lolem apparently played by Christopher Biggins’ funny uncle in a huge hat made of curly bits of newspaper. His bitchy “May the wrath of Amdo engulf you!” to Zaroff is fun, though. At least it’s an exciting story for milliners. And shouldn’t the Atlanteans be able to spot the TARDIS crew aren’t local because they don't have silly eyebrows like everyone else?

The cliffhanger to Episode 1 doesn’t seem too bad, surprising you by not being about sharks after all but instead with Polly about to be operated on and a Fish Person peering in, but stick a load together in the ‘Dance of the Fish People’ and they’re jaw-droppingly silly. It’s probably the longest non-speaking sequence in the show up to that point, complete with strings and a terrible electric piano. The only time they look good is in a marvellously colourful DWM Time Team illustration of Zaroff and Nemo the octopus, though the Troughton’s not too good (with a huge nose that looks like a villain from TV Comic). Doctor Who writer Rob Shearman also has a particularly spectacular go at the story, which you may enjoy. The gormless King Thous gets one dignified line as the water surges into Atlantis at the climax, “The everlasting nightmare is here at last,” but the budget doesn’t really allow enough playing with water either, despite an effective image of the goddess Amdo ‘weeping’ as the idol gives way (I’m not sure about leaving nasty Mengele-figure Damon as the new visionary, though).

After all that you might be surprised that this ill-judged attempt to replace history with fantasy in the series was directed by the co-creator of EastEnders, so she probably didn’t put it high up her CV. Another echo of the future is that the whole Atlantis thing and the ‘villain from outside with the crazy destructive plot’ who ‘the ruler is chatted up by and realises is actually a bad thing and “the Doctor was right” too late’ ideas are blatantly ripped off for The Time Monster, which frankly makes you worry about Barry Letts… There is, at least, a great final cliffhanger into The Moonbase as the TARDIS goes out of control: “Do something!” “I seem to have done something!” but overall I’m left with two conclusions. It’s undoubtedly the lowest Doctor Who has aimed so far into the series… But though I don’t usually believe in the ‘so bad it’s good’ theory, this is at least ‘so bad it’s highly entertaining’!

The scene I’m probably keenest to see from the newly returned episode – given that it’s sadly not one with the stovepipe hat, nor a soaking wet Ben, nor with the probable inner-voiceovers – is probably the full version of the clip on the BBC website, which is delightful. This was only Patrick Troughton’s third story as the new Doctor, with the part only ever having been played by William Hartnell, and as I said above it does him a great favour by casting a villain next to whom he tones it down a bit, before finding his ‘mission statement’ in The Moonbase and then nailing his Doctor perfectly in the sublime The Macra Terror. And it’s fascinating to watch him in that minute that’s been made available, orbiting Zaroff in the background, watching, before he comes into close-up, all the while probing in a deceptively mild manner, hands held close to his chest in quite a Hartnellish mannerism, provoking the mad scientist into his second-most memorable outburst:

“Bang! Bang, bang!”

So, if you happen to have any old friends and relatives with dusty film cans in their attics, why not check to see if they have any more episodes themselves? Oh, and those two unusual things the monsters from each oldly new episode have in common: neither breathes our air; and, unlike the human-looking villains in each story, neither are really monsters at all. You can also read a brief review of the episodes at the British Film Institute yesterday from a lucky blighter who was there.

In the meantime, Andrew Hickey has just reviewed another – far from missing – piece of Dr Who from 1965, while if your appetite’s been whetted for Christmas Doctor Who, there’s a cartoony Reconstruction of the deeply silly 1965 Christmas episode The Feast of Steven online (worth watching for its marvellous closing line), or – from the other end of Doctor Who – the Prequel to this Christmas’ The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe.

Labels: BBC, Christmas, Doctor Who, Fandom, Matt Smith, Patrick Troughton, Recons, Reviews, William Hartnell

Well, that was a depressing headline to wake up to. And a depressing throwback to Tories of years past as they go mad again on Europe.

I voted for the Coalition Agreement at our Special Conference last year; I still support it. Some of what the Government’s doing is heartening Liberal; some of it’s revoltingly Tory; but most of it’s unpleasant but necessary. And though I’m never going to like David Cameron, he’s certainly been a far better Prime Minister than I expected, in part through mostly striking a more reasonable and conciliatory tone than the likes of Mrs Thatcher (while Labour have made up for their complete lack of policy by howling more bitterly than the Trots of the ’80s).

So I can only think that the pressure’s got to him and he’s finally gone mad.

The central purpose of the entire Coalition has been to secure the economy. To restrain the vast deficit that Labour flew into long before the financial crisis – and before they pretended to be Keynesians only in crisis, having been bankrupts instead when times appeared to be good – and to make the economy sustainable. The biggest threat to our economy today has changed from the insanity of the US Republican Party to the ongoing crisis in the Eurozone. And David Cameron has this morning apparently shown that he’ll throw away the whole point of his Government to stop the Tory Party from eating him.

What happened to his past rhetoric about saving your neighbour when their house is on fire?

Now, maybe I’m wrong. I’ve not read the agreements that European Union countries came to, or didn’t, overnight. It may be that Mr Cameron’s position is sensible, and that it’s only twenty-six other countries that have instantaneously and collectively gone mad instead. I’d like that to be true. I hope someone can reassure me.

But when Mr Cameron walked into the ‘negotiations’ loudly proclaiming himself not the Prime Minister of the Coalition Government, still less of the whole of Britain, but only of the howling Eurosceptic nutters of the Tory Party, shouting in advance that he was going to be as big a knob as he could be and more interested in striking a pose than saving the economy, then – surprise! – came out of it striking a pose as an enormous knob, I can’t give him any benefit of the doubt. Let’s face it, he’s hardly given himself an alibi, has he?

Again, it seems that he’s gone mad. Or simply capitulated to the madness of his own party.

Which puts the economy and the Coalition in the most deadly jeopardy since Mr Cameron became Prime Minister. And even now, he surely can’t be mad enough to think his party will be satisfied for more than a few hours, so what’s it for? I know that the Tory Party’s ‘knowledge’ of European politics begins and ends with World War II, but anyone remotely better-read will have heard of Danegeld.


Back in 1999, I wrote an extended essay on my own Liberalism, Love and Liberty. In it, I contrasted our Liberal Internationalism with the petty crappery of the Tories over Europe:

“In government, the Tories were like a drunk at a party – not listening to anyone else, standing propped up in a corner, ranting away at the other guests, making our friends move away in embarrassment and those who didn’t want us invited in the first place say ‘See! We told you they couldn’t behave!’ Now they just want to sit at home and complain about the noise next door.”

And now we’re the other half at the party that has to wince and make excuses as they grab all the nuts and then throw up.


Update: Cicero asks a similar question, with considerably greater thought and analysis. He’s well worth a read.

And it’s difficult to disagree with John Kampfner, too.


Sunday Update: Feeling pretty grim, both physically and politically, while feverishly ill. But if you’re coming back here for more, I’d recommend three informative pieces: The Economist’s Bagehot suggests that Mr Cameron was not malign but simply grossly incompetent in blundering into Britain’s worst diplomatic defeat of my lifetime; The Independent offers “Clegg Rages At Cameron’s Spectacular Failure”; while Caron muses on Nick Clegg’s interview this morning.

Labels: British Politics, Coalition, Conservatives, European Politics, The Golden Dozen

Last Saturday night, ITV3 showed Murder By Decree, the 1979 film pitting Sherlock Holmes against Jack the Ripper (not to be confused with Hammer’s earlier variation on the theme, A Study in Terror). Of all the many films that tried to make a serious attempt at defining Holmes between Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett, this is perhaps the most critically acclaimed and certainly the one that takes itself the most seriously. Yet though I rather like Christopher Plummer’s soulful Sherlock, the film’s achingly fashionable – for 1979 – Ripperology and conspiracy theories in general just test my patience. Spoilers follow…

“He seems to take a delight in keeping his subjects waiting. I suppose, since after all he is only the Prince of Wales, we should not expect the same degree of courtesy.”
“And since you are only the prince of detectives, Holmes, I don’t think you should presume to criticise a man who one day will be the King of England!”

My Puritan Streak

There are many reasons why this film gets on my wick, despite several fine actors, one or two of whom even give fine acting, and it’s to do with both style and substance. The narrative feel of the thing is a mess, not aided by a thoroughly unsatisfying excuse for an ending, nor in aiming for ‘realism’ by shooting almost the whole film in the dark until the last twenty minutes, making the picture even murkier than the script. But it’s the script that’s my main problem (just as it’s the reason many others praise it).

Essentially, the reason the narrative is a muddle, the reason the ending is an anti-climax, and the reason it takes itself so appallingly seriously all come down to the same central conceit: this purports to be an undiscovered adventure of the famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, but in fact he’s merely grafted on as a framing device for a very expensive docudrama of the trendy Jack the Ripper theory of the time.

My prejudices are showing here a little; I’m not one of nature’s great Puritans, but such a Puritanical streak as I have tends to come out about ‘true crime’. It’s probably not very logical to delight in many fictional murder mysteries and crime capers while sniffing at the tasteless exploitativeness of anything like the same plots if based on real criminals with real victims, but it’s my instinctive reaction. So while I can understand the idea behind this sort of film – hey! Let’s mash up the two biggest ‘popular legends’ of Victorian London to make big box-office! – I can’t help being a little biased against it from the start. A fictionalised stand-in for the Ripper, with a different name and in a work which promises nothing more than fiction, has nothing like the same effect on me, but if it’s purporting to be the real horrible misogynist murderer as ‘glamorous history’, I don’t like it. And so without the most extraordinary brilliance driving it, and it hasn’t, this film is almost precisely calculated by its po-faced presentation of both Sherlock Holmes and Stephen Knight’s schlock history book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (tasteful title, there) as ‘true’ to fall between two stools. It’s at the same time too serious, and not serious enough.

The Hairpiece From Hell

As well as being made to cash in on ‘ninety years of the Ripper’, this was the end of the ’70s, and glum conspiracy ‘thrillers’ in which the establishment is riddled with nasty murderers and the hero never wins and is lucky not to end up dead in a ditch at the end were very much in vogue. So it’s not surprising that the decade ended with a big conspiracy movie ‘exposing’ the entire British nobility as behind a Masonic conspiracy over the Jack the Ripper murders (the only surprise being that, unlike the book it’s based on and several later Holmes-less dramatisations, this film bottles it and changes the names of the aristocrats they claim committed the murders, while happy to slander openly various public servants of the time they name as the Ripper’s friends in slightly less high places. Surely not forelock-tugging by the producers?).

The problem, on its own terms, of making The Parallax View for the previous century is that they decide to put Sherlock Holmes in it so people will flock to the cinemas to see it. And Sherlock Holmes is in complete conflict with a grim, ’70s-style conspiracy movie. Those have to end up bleak, despairing and insoluble; he has to end up victorious by means of his brilliant brain, and not end up floating face-down in the Thames or framed for murder and blamed for it all in the end (he is, of course, arrested for murder at one point here, but it’s such a lacklustre attempt that the charge slides off him in the very same scene). Well, at least seeing as it’s not one of those books in which Holmes turns out secretly to be Jack the Ripper, Moriarty and Queen Victoria, or any other of those dreary ‘twists’ telegraphed from the cover. Shove these two immovable narrative forces up against each other, and what do you get? One of the most rambling, pointless and unintentionally hilarious scenes ever committed in a Sherlock Holmes film, as the film’s excuse for an ending shifts from briefly bloody to protractedly preachy against the “madmen wielding sceptres.”

Unable publicly to bring the Ripper to justice (just a bloody end in the dark that no-one can mention) or even to name him, but equally unable to have Holmes fail, the film’s ‘climax’ is twenty minutes of a handful of haughty men declaiming quite bad but very long dialogue at each other in a vast Masonic hall deep within the Palace of Westminster. No, seriously. Christopher Plummer is the only one who comes out of it with any dignity, and probably an award for being able to deliver this tosh with a straight face. His Holmes is compassionate, socially concerned, and thankfully clean-shaven; the Prime Minister, of course, is a stiff, cold liar who refuses to take any responsibility for having in effect said ‘Who will rid me of this troublesome woman?’; but even his ludicrous whiskers (concealing John Gielgud, and I bet he wished it was a full face-mask) can’t compete with Anthony Quayle’s giant curlicues of pubic hair arranged at random all over his head. In Hammer’s ‘Holmes versus the Ripper’ film A Study in Terror, Mr Quayle had played the decent, dependable moral heart of it; here, the difference in his part and performance are so blatantly mirrored in his appalling wig that I wonder whether the hamming was playing up to the hairpiece or vice versa. Along the way to this meandering shouting match, David Hemmings’ scheming closet Radical is almost as bad – and almost as ludicrously coiffured – as those he wants to bring down, while Donald Sutherland’s goggling psychic tries hard to be worse.

The decent, dependable moral heart of this film is, of course, Holmes, with Christopher Plummer giving rather more sides than the usual cold fish or hyper aesthete, actually carrying off a Holmes who weeps over Geneviève Bujold’s sad fate rather than making us go, ‘Oh, come on’. James Mason’s older, stiffer Dr Watson isn’t so lucky; contractual obligations for every Watson of the second half of the last century make them all ‘an attempt to move on from bumbling Nigel Bruce’ (though I rather liked him), but the elderly Mr Mason seems so weary that he gives the impression, once removing the shadow of Mr Bruce, of having nothing to put in his place. The only excuse I can think of is that with Watson usually taking the part of Holmes’ narrator, he’s the one ‘watching’ the whole thing on the part of the viewer and so is postmodernly as fed up with it as we are. Between them, they have one quite endearing scene with a pea, but it’s thin pickings in a very long two hours.

A Study In Terror and More

In all, it’s not a patch on Hammer’s more lurid but much more entertaining A Study In Terror from 1965, despite sharing the same case, murderous aristocrats and even some of the same cast (notably, not just the Jekyll and Hyde performances of Mr Quayle and his stylist but Frank Finlay as Inspector Lestrade). James Hill’s direction gives a much more lively and colourful film – and it’s a good half-hour shorter – while its utter disregard for historical accuracy and open desire just to tell a thrilling story means that it’s not just free of the later film’s visual sludge but its turgid narrative sludge, too, and is as a result far less offensive. The film has far more satisfying twists, details (despite the ludicrous title “the Duke of Shires”) and an exciting climax, none of them purporting to be true, and the actors are given much more interesting things to do than strike a pose and recite indigestible chunks of bad history at each other. The late John Neville’s Sherlock is quite sparky and energetic, if without Mr Plummer’s depth, while Donald Houston’s Dr Watson is, by contrast to Mr Mason, awake. John Fraser gives one of his most striking performances; Adrienne Corri is terrific; Robert Morley does the sort of enjoyable schtick he was always asked to do; and viewers who’ve come to this movie second may be surprised to find Anthony Quayle acting in this one.

Or, from the same sort of between-the-definitive-Holmeses period, there’s Robert Stephens’s languid detective in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which hopefully will be released on Region 2 one day with some of the mutilated bits restored, or Peter Cushing’s various and interestingly different takes – I do wish they’d release The Masks of Death, an eerie and little-known mystery that’s always stuck with me despite its jingoism. Or, if you must, From Hell, which nicks from the same Ripperology as Murder By Decree but doesn’t throw in Holmes to try and glamorise it (though Alan Moore and Johnny Depp going several rounds in the same sort of glum conspiracy thriller isn’t going to have anyone rise to the surface at the end).

On the bright side, if you want to compare legendary British icons of a particular sort of period that never really was but which we can all picture, then Holmes and history both got off lightly in Murder By Decree. Channel 4 this afternoon showed Siege of the Saxons, surely the worst King Arthur movie ever made that doesn’t have Clive Owen in it. It’s a pale shadow of The Black Knight, and it’s difficult to think of greater damnation than that.


If you want ‘canonical’ Sherlock Holmes, incidentally, I’m still rather proud of my piece on The Valley of Fear’s Visit From Porlock…

Labels: Film, History, London, Reviews, Sherlock Holmes

Doctor Who is forty-eight years old today, and one of the series’ finest stories took place one hundred years ago (probably not today). On TV, Pyramids of Mars scared the daylights out of me when I was four as an inexplicable force drew Tom Baker’s Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith to the year 1911 to find a sinister priest summoning the awful power of an ancient god; then I grew up pleasurably terrified by Terrance Dicks’ novel, now gloriously read in audiobook by Tom. Both versions cast long shadows through today’s Doctor Who, for TV, other stories and toymakers alike. And watch out – there are many spoilers ahead…

The Terror is Unleashed

1975 was probably the most exciting year Doctor Who has ever had – and I’m sure that I can judge that entirely objectively, having started watching it at the beginning of the year with the early days of Tom Baker. With more new stories broadcast that year than in any for a decade – or for another three decades to come – there was a mighty amount of Doctor Who, and of an astounding quality. In fan polls – and for me – two 1975 stories always make the top ten of all the two hundred and more broadcast so far, while another is said to be the personal favourite of both Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat. Pyramids of Mars is one of those two up there at the top, and from interviews and references in his stories as early as Queer As Folk onward clearly a favourite of Russell’s, if not the favourite. And it may say something about the age or taste of fans as to whether they prefer the different ‘raising dark gods’ stories of 1971’s The Dæmons, 1975’s Pyramids of Mars or 2006’s The Impossible Planet (which explicitly refers to the earlier two). For me, it’s the combination of 1975 and 1911 all the way.

On TV, it’s easy to see why Pyramids of Mars is so highly regarded. Looking great in the ideal setting of ‘about a hundred years ago’, it has perhaps the most perfect Doctor Who opening episode of the lot, climaxing in for me the series’ scariest ever cliffhanger, then introduces the TARDIS and big concepts around time travel, and finishes with the Doctor tempted – and taken – by the Devil, a mixture of science fiction, myth and pure horror that gives you big-scale ideas on a canvas small-scale enough to deliver them convincingly, the ultimate in ‘ancient horror on the rise’. Robert Holmes’ least funny, most scary script (with additional work by Paddy Russell, adding to her assured direction); a small but perfect cast including Bernard Archard, Michael Sheard, Peter Copley and Peter Mayock; a superb atmosphere created by filming at Mick Jagger’s stately home, gorgeous antique design and a career-best eerie music score from Dudley Simpson that can all compete with Hammer’s own Mummy movies; and, above all, probably Doctor Who’s greatest ever villain in a heart-stopping performance by Gabriel Woolf as the dark god Sutekh, dripping malice in a voice that rarely lifts above an agonised whisper. The whole thing was the single story that scared me the most, and though I loved returning to it, it was always with a thrill of fear – most vividly going down the stairs that led into the Blackpool Doctor Who Exhibition, finding Sutekh, mummies and sarcophagi in the dark at the bottom, and being seized with such terror that I gripped the banister and couldn’t be dragged inside for what felt like an eternity (probably two or three minutes of parental persuasion, or of patient prising my fingers away).

Pyramids of Mars has been repeated twice on BBC1 or BBC2 and released several times – it was one of the first Doctor Who stories available on VHS in the mid-’80s (and the first I bought), initially in a feature-length edit with not only cliffhangers but several other scenes sliced out, seemingly at random, then a few years later in full, and a fairly early DVD release, one of the first to have the sort of full selection of extras that set the standard for the range continuing today (complete with a scriptwriter being unfeasibly rude about Mary Whitehouse, as he should). And it’s the first ‘classic’ Doctor Who to be released on Blu-ray, in tribute to Elisabeth Sladen as an extra feature on The Sarah Jane Adventures Series Four – while if you missed it on CBBC last month, the very last and one of the finest of The Sarah Jane Adventures begins tomorrow on BBC1, so make sure you catch it. As a Blu-ray experience, though, Richard notes in Millennium’s excellent Mysteries of Doctor Who #23: Why Does Pyramids of Mars Take Place in ENGLAND? that the disc presentation could be better. One of the great things about that article, incidentally, is that it mirrors the Scarman brothers as both keys to Sutekh’s escape: everyone knows that Marcus’ archaeological bent is bent by Sutekh; but Laurence’s scientific invention becomes another fatal flaw. This was released on 31st October this year, appropriately, for what’s probably the most perfect Halloween Doctor Who story (its main competition being Image of the Fendahl, both adventures first shown at the end of October, both filmed at the same manor house, though the latter ironically set at Lammas). And though I can’t remember where I first saw this picture – several years ago – or give appropriate credit to the bright carver who created it, it’s remarkable what you can find on your hard drive, isn’t it?

The Return of Marcus Scarman

With all that to live up to, you might wonder how the book can compare without the actors, music, direction or location, particularly as the novelisations and Terrance Dicks especially tend to tone down the horror (Ian Marter’s The Ark In Space, on the other hand…). But you needn’t worry, even if he takes out the most controversial bit (it’s not the one Mary Whitehouse would think of). Though this doesn’t have quite the depth and power of his Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion – nor its thrill of horror that outmatches that story’s TV version, as I’ve recently written – it’s still one of Terrance’s best, telling the story with pace, occasional flourishes and fascinating extensions at either end, into the past and the future. Last week, I looked in detail at another childhood favourite, Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters, and noted that Terrance himself says he rose to his best when novelising Bob Holmes’ work, because those were simply the best scripts (and I’m pretty sure that it was when signing my copy of Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars that he told me that in pretty much those words).

I have many memories of the book in particular: when I was a little boy and only just starting on my life of obsessive collecting spreading out all my Doctor Who books (perhaps thirty or so) and trying to put them in ‘best’ order, with this always at or near the front; it being the first I chose to lend to another boy at primary school (Martin Campbell, down in The Valley; not the James Bond director) to show him why they were so brilliant… Before, I suspect, going overboard and adding a crate of others, not realising that not everyone would share my enthusiasm or indeed reading speed; and, of course, the book itself, from the mythic Prologue to the melancholy, eerie Epilogue of Sarah Jane alone in a library (a familiar part of my young life).

Chris Achilleos’ original cover, now used for the audiobook, is uncharacteristically stark – a grim-faced Doctor and even grimmer rifle-wielding Sarah Jane framed around a mummy (out of character for her, you might think, though arguably there’s nothing so Doctor Who as the juxtaposition of frock and gun). Alister Pearson’s cover for the reprint (adapted here into a video cover, and also used on Heathcliff Blair’s CD of Dudley Simpson Doctor Who music of the period) is one of his best, intense and expansive, seething with dark colours around the Doctor, Sutekh and his servants.

“For many thousands of years SUTEKH had waited . . . trapped in the heart of an Egyptian Pyramid. Now at last the time had come – the moment of release, when all the force of his pent-up evil and malice would be unleashed upon the world . . .

“The TARDIS lands on the site of UNIT headquarters in the year 1911, and the Doctor and Sarah emerge to fight a terrifying and deadly battle . . . against Egyptian Mummies, half-possessed humans – and the overwhelming evil power of SUTEKH!”

When I was a boy, I loved those exciting back blurbs; now I ask, only half-possessed? Though I also now realise that mentioning UNIT should have been much more jarring at the time, and only wasn’t because most of the early books were of Jon Pertwee stories. And yet that very cosy familiarity was clearly designed to be a deliberate statement in the original script – with the Doctor at last breaking away from his exiled Earth ‘home’, albeit less destructively than Sutekh, this firmly told anyone expecting a return to the early ’70s status quo that literally right where the comfortable familiarity of UNIT ‘ought’ to be there’s going to be a time-travel story of unspeakable horror instead (and in case you didn’t get the message, the substitute UNIT HQ gets burned to the ground). So at a glance, this is something bolder than usual. Terrance doesn’t even use any of his stock chapter titles, the most traditional – if effective – being “The Terror is Unleashed”, though few others could actually boast “The World Destroyed . . .” and “The Weapon of the Time Lords” has rather a ring to it. As does…

The Legend of the Osirians

Terrance Dicks rarely added scenes when novelising Doctor Who scripts, so his rare Prologues were always a treat for me. This one, “The Legend of the Osirians”, memorably gives his backstory for Sutekh and his people. It’s interesting to compare it to other interpretations: Justin Richards’ The Sands of Time pedantically ‘corrects’ the details to fit ‘proper’ Egyptian mythology and grinds down imagination with banal spaceships and explanations of psychic powers; Lawrence Miles’ Faction Paradox series offers a vast, non-linear mythos of rival gods that fits more with the cynical asides of Robert Holmes’ script. Terrance’s advantage here is that he paints with a broad brush as if an ancient story told many times, allowing you to fill in the details of a galaxy-spanning conflict in your mind’s eye without the bathos of spelling them all out in a couple of pages. His disadvantage I think is that he has a more comforting worldview than Robert Holmes’ dark universe; rather than everyone who isn’t evil being corrupt, Terrance tends to tell stories of bad apples but a basically trustworthy establishment, as in his tale of the godlike Osirians:

“As they grew in power, so they grew in wisdom – all but one.”

And yet in other ways Terrance makes his Universe every bit as dark as Bob Holmes’. The script, famously, kills off every character other than the Doctor, Sarah Jane, and the Egyptian labourers who flee in terror from Marcus Scarman’s ill-fated archaeological dig in the first scene; on the page, even they are swiftly caught and slaughtered by the Cult of the Black Pyramid, making the book – with Terrance’s own Horror of Fang Rock – the most merciless in the entire series. If anything, his deft little biographical notes that sketch in the likes of Marcus Scarman (“The year was 1911, and Englishmen abroad were expected to maintain certain standards”), Ibrahim Namin (“To his terror and delight, one of the Great Ones had spoken to him”) and especially Ernie Clements (who “regarded himself as the Scarmans’ unpaid gamekeeper”) make their gruesome fates all the worse for first having made us feel for the characters as people.

Against expectations, he maintains much of the feel of horror throughout, not least by being constantly aware that Marcus Scarman, walking around as the apparent villain of the piece for much of the story, is a perambulating, smouldering corpse under Sutekh’s control. He underlines the arrival of the ‘messenger’ by giving him bare feet as he steps out to dispose of Sutekh’s earlier servant, whose “shuddering scream” is as horrible a moment as any in the novels; he describes the charred hands that kill his brother, only hinted at on TV; most memorably, as Sutekh sends him the co-ordinates for the Pyramids of Mars, he picks up the despatch:

“The cylinder glowed with the fire of Sutekh and there was a horrible sizzling sound as Marcus touched it. But he felt no pain. Only the living feel pain.”

One change where Terrance could have done with rather more ambiguity is towards the end, as Marcus Scarman’s body finally collapses into ash: on screen, you can make your own reading as to whether it’s Marcus or Sutekh who at the last exclaims that he’s free. Yet perhaps that’s his surprising mercilessness coming through again; with Sutekh exultant, there’s not even the faintest crumb of comfort to take from the old archaeologist’s fate. Either way, there’s a terrible aptness in that, possessed, his last act is to be once more an archaeologist, in the service of a hideous patron. His friend Dr Warlock is a more striking but sensible change in the context of a novel: a ruddy-faced, hearty, typical village squire (given a bluff Yorkshire accent in Tom’s reading) in the book, fitting his self-confident to the point of bossy character but very different to Peter Copley’s fine TV performance. Think for a moment, though, and you can see how Paddy Russell might cast to suggest an elderly, ascetic gentleman who you could easily imagine as an old friend and contemporary of Bernard Archard’s Marcus Scarman, while Terrance has very reasonably made him a very different physical type so as not to end up describing two very similar thin old men.


Sarah Jane shines through the book, as Lis Sladen did on screen in what was surely her most effective season as the Doctor’s companion – she even lifts the novel at points by taking the piss out of the Doctor, if less so than on screen, giving a bit of a release of tension when Terrance evokes the horror of the script with unexpected force but rarely manages to get across the moments of humour. One slight change, having not Warlock’s hat but the Doctor’s dropped for their pursuers to find, gives her a grimly amusing moment of mutiny over his outfits.

Without Michael Sheard’s childlike wonder and Lis Sladen’s grim defiance, the ‘escape’ to “1980” – mentioned six times on TV but tactfully trimmed from the book – doesn’t have quite the same punch, though the scene again stands out as one of those (as in The Masque of Mandragora) in which Robert Holmes decided it was time to say out loud those questions everyone put to him in the BBC canteen and up the tension with it into the bargain. In Doctor Who’s ultimate horror story, it’s not just all his favourite horror themes from the cinema that are on view, but new ones he introduces especially for a time travel series. We get fear of the living dead; fear of possession and loss of identity; fear of something horrible happening to a loved one, and even being done by a loved one; fear of confinement and pursuit, at the same time; we get several different types of horrible death, through burning, strangling and crushing; and if all that fear, existential horror and plain death isn’t enough to scare you, the trip to the alternate present day where, because the Doctor deserts his post, Sutekh has long since destroyed the world, gives new existential horror on a grand scale, not just of the end of the world but that you might have ceased to exist before you were even born.

In the Power of Sutekh

Though Terrance drops the ball a bit in having Sutekh’s voice sometimes rise “to a maddened howl” in typical OTT villain description, at other points he captures something of Gabriel Woolf’s quietly compelling portrayal – there’s “hideous strain” in his voice when holding in an explosion, and the first description of him is perfect:

“Sutekh’s voice was soft and ferocious at the same time, like that of some great beast.”

Neither the design nor the script quite deliver on the final episode’s voyage inside a trap-filled alien pyramid – the Pyramid of Mars promised from the first – on TV, but as ever it’s on a bigger budget on the page, with the added advantage that Terrance can use carefully ambiguous descriptions to imply far more devious traps and puzzles. While seeing the VHS in the late ’80s was for the most part an amazing thrill, I can still remember being rather disappointed by the inner chamber for which my imagination fed by the book had overlaid my actually having seen the programme, an awesome chamber of light in which “cradled in a silver tulip-shaped cup was what appeared to be a giant ruby, bigger than a man’s head. Four silver rods projected from it, like the rays of a stylised sun” – rather than, on screen, something that looks a bit like an item of garden ornamenture. Even throwaway details add to the design – such as the simple but rewarding moment where we ‘see’ that the deflection barriers around the Scarman Estate don’t just go straight up but form the pattern of a pyramid.

Those deflection barriers invite comparisons with The Dæmons in particular, showing a very different sort of worldview from when Terrance Dicks was lead writer on the show to Robert Holmes’ period; they’re very different stories, and the points of similarity only show up their differences (as if Hinchcliffe and Holmes were poking the Pertwee era in the eye with something very much tauter and darker). The vicar’s only bad in one because he’s been done away with and replaced by the Master; the priest is only a part of a nasty Cult in the other. The alien that looks like the Devil in one is a cross between an amoral scientist and a harsh Old Testament father God, who when he wakes up may destroy the world if we don’t meet his exacting standards; the demonic alien here is a cruel and twisted Lovecraftian dark god that will destroy the world once freed because he wants to. And while both stories have the scene hemmed in by an impassable force barrier, in one the barrier is merely an inconvenience that stops people getting in or out, while in this story it makes a whole country estate a place of claustrophobic horror because the grey ‘inanimate’ servants that have come to life are stalking rather than merely guarding, determined to kill everyone within. In both stories, too, the Doctor builds a clever machine to stop the enemy, but it’s destroyed before it can do the trick, but each is succeeded by a very different finale. Whereas in The Dæmons it’s human goodness that wins out, something it would be impossible to believe against Sutekh (or, some might say, full stop), in Pyramids of Mars, each of the last three episodes builds up a device that will foil Sutekh, each blown by the end except for the last one – the first a lash-up that fails, the second succeeding for the moment but at the cost of the Doctor, and the last invoking the might of the Time Lords, pitting (according to taste) one mythic race against another or pitting science against god… And Terrance’s novelisation improves the ending of Pyramids of Mars in two key ways. First, his chapter title naming Time “The Weapon of the Time Lords” makes it sound both rather grand and ponderous and as if it’s down to someone other than the Doctor (had he called that final chapter ‘The Doctor Shoots Sutekh With a Big Time-Gun’ it would have seemed both easier and much less in character). And then he gives us a proper aftermath.

While on TV we can sit back and watch the rising flames to give closure, the book grounds us with an appropriate coda, the Doctor musing over the fire as practical Sarah Jane wants to get out before “some heavily-moustached village policeman of the year nineteen eleven” arrives to ask questions, then back in the TARDIS the way she ponders one by one every death, including remembering Laurence’s “bright-eyed eagerness” looking round the TARDIS, “And most tragic of all, Marcus Scarman, taken over and burnt out by Sutekh’s horrible alien power.” With the Epilogue still to come, the end of the book really gives it a sense that it matters. And that elegiac Epilogue in which Terrance shows that he, too, can answer those questions asked in the BBC canteen (‘Didn’t anyone notice?’), is unique in the Target range, set “Later, much later,” once Sarah Jane has parted from the Doctor, where she visits the little country town close by the scene and looks up the newspaper files from 1911:

“BROTHERS DIE IN TRAGIC FIRE
“HOLOCAUST SWEEPS COUNTRY ESTATE…

“Sarah skimmed through the rest of the report. So that was what the Doctor had meant. The terrible events surrounding the return of Sutekh had found a natural explanation, a deplorable but soon forgotten tragedy in an English country village.

“Sarah looked through the window, out into the bustling high street of the little country town. She shivered at the memory of the desolate world she had seen through the doors of the TARDIS—the world Sutekh would have made if he had not been defeated. The sacrifice of all those lives had not been in vain. The pity was that no one would ever know.

“Sarah closed the heavy old volume and went into the summer sunshine of her own, unchanged, twentieth century.”

The Doctor Fights Back

Tom Baker read four complete audiobooks from Target novels before moving on to ‘new’ adventures, of which more later, but this is by a long stretch his best. Decades before, he’d created a reedy ‘old man’ voice for an abridged version of State of Decay that really doesn’t work for Solon when he digs it up after a quarter of a century, for example, while even the humour of The Creature From the Pit didn’t bring out the best in him.

In Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars, though, you can hear an actor who’s suddenly enjoying and engaging with his material, doing justice to an excellent book. His ‘old man’ gets new life for Laurence, while his bluff, Yorkshire Warlock is ideal and his ferocious Sutekh decidedly impressive. He gives an appropriate air of mythic grandeur to the Prologue, is entertaining on Sarah’s little asides, and even seems to engage with ‘his’ own lines, finding interestingly different readings for many of them – generally playing the Doctor a little lighter in 2008 than in 1975 (and still giving a pronounced ‘shh’ sound in the word “eviscerated”). Aided by its own musical motifs, this CD is surely the best way to enjoy it today (and the only one that’s not out of print).

Epilogue

I was a little mean to Justin Richards’ Missing Adventures novel The Sands of Time above, but it’s frustrating in part because a lot of it’s so good – it would simply be much better if it had no connection to Pyramids of Mars. This sequel is brilliantly plotted, but follows its source material of Mummy movies and Egyptian mythology far too slavishly – not least, effectively saying ‘Doctor Who got it wrong and I’m going to get the legends right,’ getting in the way of a good story to try for spurious accuracy. A sequel shouldn’t make its original smaller. And then there’s the book’s stand-in for the all-hating, especially sibling-hating Sutekh. Justin would change Terrance’s line to ‘As they grew in power, so they grew in wisdom – all but one… And his Mum and his sister, with whom he remained best mates’, and I find that very hard to swallow (oh, his Mum? Actually, she’s in a Big Finish CD, which again is rather fun if you can ignore Pyramids of Mars, but it would be a spoiler to say which. E-mail me if you want to know).

Twenty-first Century Doctor Who stories owing a debt to Pyramids of Mars range from Steven Moffat’s “Timey-wimey” scripts or Sarah Jane reminding the Doctor that “A man has just been murdered!” while he only pays attention to millions being echoed in Rose to the outright references in The Impossible Planet, where the planet’s code number is ‘Sutekh’ backwards if you squint, the Doctor muses about Sutekh and the sinister voice of the great Beast is even provided by none other than Gabriel Woolf. “Don’t turn around,” indeed. And, in this time of wonders, you can now buy the toys that my eyes would have boggled out on stalks to see when I was little: two slightly different versions of Sutekh’s Mummies are available from Character Options, complete with either jackal-or-falcon-headed canopic jars with silver force generators inside; an inappropriately grinning figure of Tom Baker’s Doctor with the part of the TARDIS he wires up to Sutekh’s space-time tunnel to make him miss his station; and, next year, even a cuddly Sutekh, apparently.


The most impressive variation on the theme, though, is undoubtedly a series of six linked audio dramas. Gabriel Woolf returned to the role of Sutekh alongside Julian Glover, Isla Blair, Philip Madoc and others in Lawrence Miles’ 2005-2009 Faction Paradox series from Magic Bullet (Coming to Dust / The Ship of a Billion Years, Body Politic / Words From Nine Divinities and Ozymandias / The Judgment of Sutekh), which expands the Osiran Court across time and space. You’ve probably not heard of it, but it’s a brilliant piece of work.

But Doctor Who fans have a lot to thank this novel for in two better-selling if less intense audio drama series. Listening to the audiobook, it felt like Tom Baker was getting into it in a way he hadn’t with his three previous readings – and it turns out he really had. After years of resisting, it was on doing this reading that he was at last enthused enough to agree to record new Doctor Who audio dramas, first with BBC Audiobooks and now with Big Finish. So Robert Holmes, Terrance Dicks and a novel from 1976 are still impressive enough to be pushing on new Doctor Who today.

Labels: Books, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Faction Paradox, Jon Pertwee, Julian Glover, Mary Whitehouse, Music, Personal, Philip Madoc, Pictures, Religion, Reviews, Sarah Jane Smith, Tom Baker, Toys

Terrance Dicks has had a huge impact on Doctor Who, both as lead writer during Jon Pertwee’s time as the Doctor and then in writing many more Doctor Who novels than anyone else. I grew to love his work on tales like this, his novelisation of Carnival of Monsters – a story which I first saw on TV thirty years ago tonight, repeated in BBC2’s The Five Faces of Doctor Who season. And for me this tale of thrills, comedy, posh trippers and Tories eaten by dragons is still one of the most entertaining, on DVD or on the page.

“One has no wish to be devoured by some alien monstrosity, Kalik. Even in the cause of political progress.”

It’s forty-seven years this week since the very first Doctor Who novelisation was published, and they’re still worth celebrating. Having come to Pertwee’s Doctor through the marvellous early Target Books, as far as I’m concerned many of them remain superior to the TV versions, with an inevitable gap in quality between prose, characterisation and my imagination on one hand and what I much later saw on screen. With BBC Books now reprinting some of those novels, I’ve written about that ‘Pertwee Gap’; and Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters sits right in the middle of it. The TV story is exciting, colourful, full of vivid performances and with a natural advantage for displaying a story in which the Doctor, at long last free of his exile to Earth, realises he is in effect still trapped inside a television programme… But it’s also tacky, silly and very variable in which bits work. So is the book, then, the best of it? In making some comparisons tonight – and running right through, so with many spoilers (grab the book or the DVD first if you can) – I’ll try to work out the answer on one of the Pertwee stories I love the most but find it most difficult to decide on.

When I was a boy, there were two sorts of novelisations that were my favourites, depending on the mood I was in. One sort had greater characterisation and background, and felt like they had a message to them; once I was a little older, I realised that these tended to be the ones by Malcolm Hulke. But the other sort, simpler, more stripped-down, but often telling a more exciting story, might best be described as cracking good stories told at a cracking pace, with cracking dialogue. Books like Pyramids of Mars, Terror of the Autons and, of course, Carnival of Monsters. And I grew to realise that these, too, had something in common: they were written by Terrance Dicks, from stories by Robert Holmes. Terrance has often said that he enjoyed novelising Bob’s work the most, because his were simply the best scripts, and even when I was as young as five or six, it showed. These days, the more in-depth novels have more to offer than the brisker works when – unthinkable back then – the TV stories are on hand to watch anytime you want, and yet the deceptively simple style of Terrance Dicks can still be rewarding.

Carnival of Monsters is an odd beast – which is why I enjoy it so much. Where most of Jon Pertwee’s stories are confined to Earth, working with the military forces of UNIT, and a bit po-faced, this was the story immediately after he regained the TARDIS’ ability to travel in space and time, and not only does it showcase that in an exuberant range of settings but it gloriously takes the piss. No wonder the BBC chose to show it among just five stories to sum up over a hundred so far in 1981 (I very nearly picked it for my own The Eleven Faces of Doctor Who); no wonder it’s been released this year on DVD for the second time, as part of the Revisitations 2 boxed set. By a long way the least Pertwee-like of all Pertwees, with a feel far more Who-ish and a Doctor far more Doctor-ish than usual, it takes the Doctor and his ditzy – or is she? – assistant Jo to a 1920s ship full of strangely repetitive British Empire stereotypes, to the grey, bureaucratic planet of Inter Minor and to the world of the terrifying swamp dragons, the Drashigs. What could connect all these people and places? Could it have anything to do with a disreputable interplanetary traveller with a plucky female companion and a box of times that seems bigger on the inside than the outside (no relation)?

The book is long out of print, though second-hand copies abound; as yet, this isn’t available as a BBC Audiobook either, but you may be able to find in the distant reefs of the Internet a much more primitive version from thirty years ago. Gabriel Woolf, the fabulous voice of Sutekh (from Pyramids of Mars, again), read three books on tape for the RNIB, and Carnival of Monsters happens to be the one I have a wobbly MP3 of (so should you happen to come across his Loch Ness Monster or Three Doctors, please let me know). It’s much brisker than the BBC readings these days – no music, no retakes on the fluffed lines, and rattled off at great speed. He’s got an authoritative voice; his Jo is quite perky (curiously like Katy Manning’s Iris Wildthyme); his Pletrac entertainingly tetchy… But it’s very clear they’d got him in to do a lot of work in a rush, and nobody’s trying to make anything much of it. An historical curiosity, but far from his best work, and it shows how good the modern ones are. Whether or not this is ever remade on CD, though, in this time of wonders, you will shortly be able to buy your very own Drashig toy!

Dangerous Arrivals

Chris Achilleos offers one of his most striking though least stylised covers, with a haughty Doctor picked out in black and white as a fabulous mottled green sea serpent twists round to attack a ship behind him. Super-pedants might argue that Pertwee’s pictured from The Three Doctors, or that the plesiosaurus looks little like the one on screen… But, let’s face it, there are two species of sea-serpenty thingy in this TV story, one of which looks terrific, and the other of which looks far better when Chris Achilleos paints it.

This was always one of my favourite novelisations when I was a boy – from the terrific cover to the terrific characters and lines. The book also adds lots of little polishes; it’s clearer, if less vivid, and uses the word “liberal” to mean good and “authoritarian” bad, so it’s appealed to me on many levels and from a very young age, along with the fabulously memorable tagline on the back:

“The Doctor and Jo land on a cargo ship crossing the Indian Ocean in the year 1926.
“Or so they think.”

Even that line presages the approach Terrance has in the book, of taking the television version and subtly refining it – I suspect he wrote the book’s back blurb, as I suspect he wrote the Radio Times teaser for the original transmission of the first episode:

“The Tardis lands on a cargo-ship in the Indian Ocean, in the year 1926.
“Or does it?”

Although Terrance Dicks isn’t known for major structural changes in the way that Malcolm Hulke, for example, would make in his novelisations, Carnival of Monsters is notable for a very different set of scenes to those on TV. I’d be fascinated to see what order everything was in the original script… Was it Bob Holmes, writing for TV, who chopped between lots of scenes ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ to give the TV story a strikingly modern feel of channel-hopping, with Terrance Dicks then collating them to make the book more coherent and straightforward, or did Barry Letts break up the longer passages of the script as director? With different stories running on different levels – in several senses – it’s possible to decouple and play around with them far more than in most Doctor Who stories, and they do, with each format deftly tailored to its own ‘grammar’.

The two versions are quite different from the very first page. The TV adventure begins with a cargo-thruster landing at the Inter Minoran spaceport while villainous Official Kalik sneers (and as his legs fuzz against a dubious blue landscape)… The book, as the TARDIS lands in the hold of the cargo-ship S.S. Bernice, the Doctor insisting they’re in the Acteon Galaxy, Jo indignant and poking around the chickens. Whichever version I’m reading / watching, I always expect to find it opening the other way. And very early, too, another contrast becomes clear. Jo gets more lines in the book – Pertwee probably nicking the good ones, famously as light-fingered over screen time as he was over nautical compasses – but is also more girly and helpless on paper, suggesting the script (or actress Katy Manning) took one view of her and Terrance Dicks another. Still, crossing to Inter Minor after Jo humphs at the end of page 9 that the Doctor’s landed them back on Earth, Terrance has a giveaway that’s as fourth-wall as the serial itself.

“As the terrifying adventure which followed was to prove, Jo had never been more wrong in her life.”

The planet Inter Minor is rather better-characterised than the TV at first, and has the advantage of considerably better special effects in your mind’s eye than on your actual eyes; we have the busy spaceport, an economic boom as trade opens up after centuries of isolation, and tales of long-ago Space Plague leading to “a hysterical over-reaction” (only hinted at on screen, when they could just as easily be warlike as terrified). The progressive party has come to power and changed things – but only because the Officials hope new President Zarb will save them from revolution by the unsettled masses. The Official caste is deftly sketched in:

“They were mostly tall and thin, grey-faced and grey-robed. Grey-minded, too, for the main part.”

Yet though the book has the edge, the TV has much more of a sense of place, of teeming business, and is startlingly vibrant even if some of it’s more enthusiastic than effective (even the wild electronic zig-zags slicing the air around a victim of a toasting-fork gun are far more interesting to watch than just another “blaster” is to read).

The S.S. Bernice certainly works best on screen, however, at least early on – the rather splendid old ship they film on, the music, and most of all the actors make it very watchable. Crusty old Major Daly is far more fun on TV, mainly because Tenniel Evans is hamming it up for all he’s worth – increasing his word-count exponentially simply by changing “What’s going on?” into “What? What? What what what?” as he wakes up! Jo gets some great lines here either way, frustratedly telling the Doctor he should have an L-plate on his TARDIS and explaining about her and her unseaworthy “uncle”… But skip ahead a few pages and (before Jo gets to be the dumb one as the Doctor patronises her over where and when they are, before she recovers with the skeleton keys) while in the book Jo grins cheekily at the first officer when he boasts he’s always stopped his crew making a fool of him and says “Don’t underestimate us,” on TV Pertwee blatantly nicks her line. The first monster, too, is already much better on the book cover, while the mysteries pile up better on the page: the octagonal plate leading somewhere else is very clear in the book; on screen, it’s very oddly directed. Did they not have it ready for that studio day? We keep seeing the Doctor squatting down to look at something that’s below the camera angle, and are only shown it for an instant in close-up. The cliffhanger to Part One / close of Chapter Three will make that distinction even clearer…

Back among the Inter-Minorans, dodgy travellers Vorg and Shirna have disembarked with their dodgier machine. Described in the book as a ‘What The Butler Saw’ machine (despite a much later reference to Jo feeling like an ant inside a television set), the MiniScope seems more tawdry than telly on paper, while on TV it’s obvious what it is – a TV. Or is it? With satirical Officials and Empire characters, I saw this as a boy as a satire on Britishness, while the channel-hopping TV version makes it clear that it’s still more about sending up TV – and one TV show in particular. And yet it’s impossible to overlook the statement

“‘Our purpose is to amuse,’ confirmed Vorg. ‘Nothing serious, nothing political…’”

…is a deliberate non sequitur, and that when conservative Official Kalik seethes at the lifting of the prohibition on “amusement” as “More anti-productive legislation” that will see the end of society as they know it, Terrance and Bob’s purpose is to amuse with something very political indeed.

The Giant Hand

The two places / stories come together at the climax of the first quarter of the adventure – when Vorg, detecting something new inside his Scope (given away far too early in the book, which gives the TV another head start), reaches in… And pulls out the tiny TARDIS. And that’s a brilliantly visual scene which, er, the book wins hands down. That cliffhanger / chapter climax as a section of the ship’s cargo hold opens out impossibly and an enormous hand gropes towards our heroes before they can get escape is, on screen, just a couple of seconds of a hand going straight onto the TARDIS (in itself a very poor cut-out with rotten yellow lines around it). Contrasting the two, perhaps the most disappointing moment of the whole TV story is that curiously unsatisfying delivery for what, conceptually, is a brilliant cliffhanger. In the excellent reviews book Running Through Corridors Volume 1, Rob Shearman notes how he originally scripted his TV episode Dalek to open with a huge face of the villain breaking open, as the helipad bay cover, but that they decided they wouldn’t be able to afford to make it look good enough – and that, in the old days, they’d have just done it for thruppence anyway. Which makes it all the more bizarre that Mr CSO himself, Barry Letts, bottled out of showing exactly that sort of shot.

It’s time for entertainer Vorg to explain about the Tellurians / Terrans in his collection as the story’s early questions are answered and new ones set up, and suddenly you can see Terrance’s slightly schoolmarmish habit of cleaning up the more dubious elements for children to read. Neither the book nor the TV version have the full scene of Vorg speculating on how we breed, of course, just as Doctor Who could never say so, though at least you can find the gag that he can’t talk about it in the DVD extra features (“Extended and Deleted Scenes” on the original release; integrated into the full “Episode Two – Early Edit” on the Revisitations 2 Special Edition). Perhaps it’s for similar fears of impropriety that Major Daly’s daughter Clare (missing an ‘i’ in the book) no longer calls herself a “silly flapper”.

And then the novel surges ahead again with its sharper politics, making the xenophobic horror of the Officials at unexpected alien animal importation much more palpable (and considerably less camp), which is very effective – and it’s a great improvement to have that law against weird biologies one that Zarb hasn’t dared repeal yet, making Vorg’s thoughtless transgression cut to the heart of Inter Minoran disease-paranoia, rather than the TV’s rather weak “The Interstellar Ecology Commission expressly forbids the transportation of live specimens”. Who believes Kalik would give a stuff about the Interstellar Ecology Commission? Still, it gets aggressive enough for Vorg’s clear plastic bowler hat to steam up…

Then the Carnival of Monsters on your screen pulls ahead again with the glorious techno adventure playground that is the inside of the Scope as the miniature Doctor and Jo crawl through the workings in search of the exit – only to find a swamp full of beasties. While the TV version is, of course, the best at sending up television, a prize for the best TV-analogue mention in the book from a man on the receiving end of Mary Whitehouse and co must come here, as Shirna switches channels to show the Drashigs (with new improved Terrans):

“Vorg noted sourly that the three Officials, however much they disapproved of the Scope, were as keen as anyone to savour its excitements.”

The Monster in the Swamp

Constantly talked up and a memorable design despite Bob Holmes’ lack of faith in BBC effects conceiving their name as an unflattering anagram, the Drashigs we see bursting from the swamp look absolutely terrific, beating the more prosaic dinosaur / dragon description of the book hands down. And, yes, if you think about it, beasts written to be near-blind probably shouldn’t have those eyes on stalks, but they’re fabulous, and with an extraordinary roar (uniquely, the work of both Brian Hodgson and Dick Mills as they swap over who does the series’ sound design). They clearly surprised and delighted the production team – to the unwise extent that Barry Letts commissioned a whole show full of dinosaurs to follow – and so, while they never starred in another story, they’re constantly mentioned through the rest of Pertwee’s time, not least in the following story (odd, isn’t it, that Carnival of Monsters and The Space War / Frontier In Space go together much better than the latter and Planet of the Daleks? Two feel like ’70s space excitement with lots of aliens, one like a ’60s rehash with Thals and an stock alien planet from the cupboard).

“Jo thought she had never seen anything more terrifying in her life.”

One small advantage the book gains even at this point, however, is in Terrance Dicks providing a flare pistol for the Doctor to pick up and make use of; a bit late, but he saw the problem he’d left in the script – that the sonic screwdriver sets off marsh gas for no apparent reason (bar hazily remembering that it blew things up in The Sea Devils, a story from the previous year in which sonic vibrations set off landmines, that being a plausible way to detonate a landmine but not a puff of gas) – and corrected it, enabling him to complain these days with a clearer conscience about the new series’ “magic wand”. That small advantage is outweighed by the point shortly after at which the book suffers a major loss of nerve. The Doctor either works out (TV) or breaks it to Jo (novel) that they’ve been caught inside a MiniScope, a peepshow… And while both versions confront the viewer / reader about the thoughtlessness of zoos, for which many would have been visitors at the time, only one sets out directly to make everyone uncomfortable, with Robert Holmes’ sense of humour much blacker than Terrance Dicks’. The only way in which the TV story doesn’t underline its most postmodern point is that Jo’s frightened face doesn’t actually stare right out of the television as she expresses her horror; the book carefully shifts the emphasis away from the personal and makes her outrage less strident. Compare the two:

“Do you mean that that Major Daly and all those people on the ship are in a sort of a peepshow? …And outside there are people and creatures just looking at us for kicks?”
“Very probably.”
“They must be evil and horrible!”

“Jo gave him a horrified look. ‘You mean Major Daly and all those people on the ship are specimens, in some kind of peepshow? And outside there are people—creatures—looking at them just for kicks? That’s terrible!’”

The second half of the story sees a bit of a decline for each version’s trump card: in the book, the lines begin to get shorter rather than longer than on TV; and the Drashigs, so effective seen in the swamp, are rather less well-served tearing around the ship. And so Terrance’s greater special effects budget of the imagination creeps ahead again, with a rather more impressive chase for the Doctor and Jo that ends at a huge shaft “like a great canyon” which is, er, completely missing on screen (we merely see them peering down, and nothing of what they’re peering into), and a lovely line as Jo takes “lateral thinking” a bit literally: “when in doubt, go sideways!” To regular readers, Terrance’s exciting “shattering roar” from the Drashigs and “long, raking burst” from a machine-gun have an air of both thrill and comfort blanket, too.

Jo’s a bit more pro-active on screen and the Doctor less of a git in leaving her when her enormous stacked heel is spotted back in the ship’s hold; rather than her being dragged away and the Doctor just sitting there, improbably undiscovered, Katy plays it that Jo realises she’s been spotted, signals to the Doctor to stay, and gets up. Back in the book, after a wait, the Doctor makes ready to go down into the Scope again, wondering if he should go back for Jo, “but decided against it.” Exactly the same words as he thought four pages earlier when she was grabbed, the cad. Though there’s a nicely characterised flash of vanity when the Doctor feels he’s evened things up for Jo’s skeleton keys when he produces the string file, then drama-queens it by complaining about his aching wrist. And I laugh at most of the crates falling on top of the Doctor. Far less postmodern than the screen version of the story, Terrance does manage one brilliant extra:

“Clare and Jo were sheltering behind a sofa.”

The close of Chapter 8 is quite effective, as Kalik the Inter-Minoran John Redwood plots with his rather dim sidekick Orum for a leadership bid and a war to unite the planet and stop the “liberal policies” “changing our ways”.

“And who will give us all this?”
“I will,” said Kalik quietly. “By leading a rebellion against my brother Zarb.”

The “quietly” rather sets it off, as for once a chapter climax doesn’t have someone screaming into an exclamation mark! Still, turning the page after that to discover that in Chapter 9 “Kalik Plans Rebellion” isn’t all that much of a shock.

Down in the Scope, the damage to the machinery is more effective in the book than altered lighting: “the great metal shapes were twisted and warped” and “the low hum of power [had become] an agonised groan.” There’s “the charred body of a Drashig” which “had bitten through a power cable”, then the Doctor’s dizzying climb to escape the Scope. He isn’t spotted here and almost stamped like a cockroach, disappointingly, but only causes panic on emerging and suddenly expanding to normal size, meaning a chapter climax a little later and more threatening than the cliffhanger – the Doctor free at last, only to face a great big gun…

In the book, we get an insight into the Doctor’s thoughts as he lambasts the Officials; worried about Jo, he reckons there’s “no time for all the nonsense of imprisonment and interrogation” that “usually” happens when he arrives in another of Terrance’s deadpan postmodernisms, and is utterly scathing about the inner weakness of “all authoritarians”. The re-ordering of the scenes to take out all the tiny cutaways rather draws attention to how little Jo has to do around here: she’s absent for two chapters while the ship’s crew chase her, forget her, chase her like a “jolly game of hide and seek” and forget her again, all the while unaware of “the danger which loomed over them all” once the power drops below critical, the artificial sun stops working and that, suddenly soberingly,

“Their world, and their lives, would end in choking darkness.”

Return to Peril

Perhaps the point where Terrance’s urge to simplify (and, perhaps, bowdlerise) most comes a cropper is at this point, when Vorg claims “I’ve worked many a Terran fairground” while at the same time thinking we’re animals fit to be exhibited, and Terrance even forgets which galaxy he’s in when trying (page 99) to explain the scene where he sidles up to the Doctor and speaks Polari as if chatting him up. On the page, it’s “the universal showman’s slang, which had spread out from Terra and across the galaxy”… When, for a start, back on page 43 we’re from “a distant galaxy” instead, and of course his Polari (or “Parlare”, here) is far less camp, far less jarring and very firmly a secret carnival speak and nothing else, so sadly you miss almost all the hilarity of Vorg’s assuming that the Doctor is some sort of fellow dodgy galactic traveller who’s always got a pretty young woman with him. Imagine! Similarly, Official Pletrac is only “tactless” rather than insulting, and far less blissfully camp. Still, even this late there are some smarter touches, as when Vorg goes to warn the Doctor, having failed to rat out on the next spaceship home:

“Since his attempt at self-preservation had failed, Vorg decided he might as well do the decent thing.”

As usual, Terrance handles action sequences deftly, with Vorg’s heroic spasm brief but rather exciting, and evoking what happens on screen both accurately and with greater clarity (the TV admits defeat when, in the event of a CSO effect so terrible even Barry Letts vetoed it, Kalik’s death is illustrated by just a close-up of Kalik bricking himself and then running, followed by a Drashig closing in and then sauntering off triumphantly). The “livestock” collapsing in the Scope as the power fails is quite grim in the book; first Jo falls, unable to breathe, and the Doctor has to hoist her unconscious body on to his shoulders; in the saloon, they worry that it’s getting cold, in the tropics, and dark too, then perhaps that Clare has collapsed from heat exhaustion and finally

“The three bodies lay motionless, while the little saloon grew colder and darker …”

The Doctor struggles to the top of the shaft, but knows he doesn’t have the energy to climb and slides to the floor, muttering a prayer to Vorg. On TV, of course, the moment’s rather less dignified as Pertwee’s nose hits the floor, which is always good for a laugh.

As with the collapsing Sahibs, we don’t see the other creatures dematerialising on screen as we do in the book, just the Drashig – exactly as “In the misty swamp, a Drashig raised its head, bellowed – and vanished.” The awkward questions of exactly what’s in the Scope are raised by the differences between formats: we see the ship itself vanish; we read that just the bodies fade quietly from the saloon. So, in the book, was it a fake ship, on a fake sea (the sea doesn’t vanish on screen)? They don’t drown, as we have that rather lovely little epilogue scene in Daly’s cabin. On screen, there’s rather good lighting around Clare’s eyes as she almost remembers… It’s a great illustration of the respective strengths of the screen versus the page; Clare’s the natural focus of one, while the book plays to its own strengths by following up on her Daddy’s finally finishing his own book:

“Daly yawned again. He reached out for his calendar and crossed off the last day of the voyage, then settled down to sleep. As he was drifting off, strange pictures floated through his mind. He heard the roar of guns, and the bellowing of monsters. There was something about a tall white-haired man, and a small girl with fair hair … stowaways … Daly couldn’t make any sense of it. Must be jumbled memories of some blood and thunder story he’d read a long time ago. Soon he was peacefully asleep. The S.S. Bernice steamed steadily towards Bombay.”

A lovely and memorable passage, and one that probably added “blood and thunder” to my vocabulary as a boy. Even if, like so much of the story, it’s difficult to reconcile with the description of the way the Scope works as a “simple temporal loop” (as in The Time Warrior, time travel isn’t something special but something everyone can use for a short cut that doesn’t necessarily make sense, with Bob Holmes writing less for plausibility than to send up the series)…

And finally, to the closing scene with the three magum pods and the yarrow seed (or, in our Tellurian terms, ‘Find the Lady’)… Points to the book for expanding Jo’s “He’ll probably end up President!” with the funnier comeback “That or Chancellor of the Exchequer,” which is certainly where I learned that title from; points to the TV for Vorg not merely beaming and winking at Shirna as Pletrac raises his wager to ten credit-bars, but for actor Leslie Dwyer positively pissing himself, which is a joy to behold. And points taken from Barry Letts for making such an incredible fuss about the dodgy hairpiece on one of his aliens. It’s just a crinkle as Pletrac’s eyebrows move, not a split, and much less noticeable than the yellow lines round the Drashigs that Barry left in. So the ‘director’s cut’ of the story (as shown in The Five Faces, returning to the first time I ever saw the TV story) rather spoils the ending by removing not just that wrinkled forehead but Vorg getting all his money. Like The Ribos Operation, it’s important in the final scene that we know the loveable rogues have got some cash, even though the Doctor’s taken their main livelihood.

The End of the Scope

All right, all right. So, after all that, which version is better?

It’s the only Pertwee story where I still don’t know. Both Carnivals are hugely entertaining, but as I read one I want to watch bits of the other, and as I watch one I remember better lines from the page. Despite many moments of invention and several sensible explanations, the book is just a little flat by comparison; notably, it’s far less funny, and it starts by giving us a bit more than is on screen, but by half-way through has settled into giving us a bit less. Terrance’s novel polishes some little moments and retains gems from the original script in others, but perhaps lacks enough sparkle on its own to be among his best – it’s good, solid fun, but not much more. Whereas on TV it’s far less good – at times, positively wicked – and considerably less solid, so gloriously over the top that it veers between fabulous and gaudy, and the direction between brilliant bits of framing and close-ups for impact, or clumsy inadequacy. But then, Vorg’s showman’s patter throughout is the hype before inevitable disappointment, so imperfection is part of the point. The definitive adventure, then, exists only in Robert Holmes’ conception and in our heads, but it’s great fun seeing either Barry Letts or Terrance Dicks stretch towards it.

The story as a whole, whichever one of it you take, always feels like it’s crashed in from another period of the show: a mid-Tom Baker piece of knowing fun; the TV references, tongue-in-cheek asides, continuity throwaways, a bit of politics and a lot of virtual reality, not to mention Bernice S.S., could make it a New Adventure twenty years early; and you could just as easily make it again today (in fact, on stage last year, they did). Flawed, tacky; inspired, hilarious; it’s Doctor Who.

Labels: Books, Christopher Eccleston, Doctor Who, DVD, In-Depth Doctor Who, Jon Pertwee, Liberalism