Friday, September 30, 2011
Which The Avengers DVDs Should You Buy?
The Avengers is fifty years old this year, and at last it’s all available on DVD. But where to start? Strangely (but for both practical and quality reasons), not at the beginning. Last night, I celebrated one of the most important anniversaries in Twentieth Century British history in saying Why The Avengers Matters, how it changed television and society too. Today, I have a simple guide to those extraordinary agents’ DVDs for you to watch one of the greatest TV series ever. And if you buy The Avengers Complete 50th Anniversary Collection box set today, you can get a bargain!
You’ve got a choice of half a dozen The Avengers DVD boxed sets, and if you don’t want to get everything at once, well, I don’t blame you, and I’ll pick which are best to dip into first in a minute. But bear with me. If you don’t have any of The Avengers – and you have a bit of spare cash – obviously I’ll recommend you buy the 39-disc limited edition DVD box set The Avengers Complete 50th Anniversary Collection, which is complete. Completely complete. The lot… Well, except for The New Avengers, which has a different rights owner and which you have to buy separately (but quite cheaply), and for most of the first season of The Avengers from 1961, which unfortunately doesn’t exist any more. So it’s as complete as you’re likely to get, and it’s worth buying if you can afford it. And if you can afford it today, it’ll be slightly cheaper.
The Avengers Complete 50th Anniversary Collection has several advantages over buying all five of the one-season sets. It’s expensive – but it’s cheaper than buying the lot. And while there’s not a lot of range between different sellers, according to this price comparison site, if you order it by the end of today from one site there’s a 10% off code, which for this one stacks up to more than a tenner. It’s quite a nice case, though the packaging’s even more difficult to get into without leaving your prints all over the disc than it is to shake out the jammed-in slim cases from the season boxes. It has a whole extra disc of still more bonus features that they couldn’t fit on the earlier releases (though, and kudos to Optimum for this, they’re having the decency to bring that out separately later in the year so people who’ve already bought the individual seasons can buy it too). And – and this is embarrassing – if you buy them like this, all the discs work properly. For all these sets, for all 139 episodes, the picture’s been restored as well as it can be; there are commentaries, rare little clips, scripts and other pdfs, huge stills galleries (but not much in the way of subtitles). And then some prat at the DVD authoring house managed to let production faults slip through on most of the boxes. Now don’t panic: they’ve fixed them all, and each of the ones they buggered up can be replaced. But it’s a palaver, isn’t it? So get them at once, and because this big set came out last, you don’t have to exchange any of it.
But, OK, buying the individual season box sets has its advantages too. You get a few more extras to hold in your hands – exciting little reproduction press handouts, and not just on pdf. And you don’t have to shell out so much at once, just in case (in some Bizarro-world) you turn out not to like it. And picking and choosing encourages you to start in the middle, which if you’ve never seen The Avengers, might be wise. There were six seasons broadcast through the Sixties, 1961 to 1969; two more of The New Avengers in the mid-’70s. In six boxes. That’s because they some of the early ones went out live, and some of those they recorded, they threw away, so the few bits left of the first season are in with the complete second, and The New Avengers only ran half as long, so both seasons are boxed together. That’s six. So which to choose? Start in the middle. The Complete Series 2 is historically fascinating, has flashes of brilliance (not least Mr Teddy Bear), and changed TV – but compared to the rest, it’s much cruder, and it suddenly hits its stride a year later. The New Avengers starts well and has a handful of terrific episodes, but hits a steep decline. So be counterintuitive, and leave the first and last until a little later.
So if you were to buy just one The Avengers season box set, which should it be? And which episodes from it are especially tempting?
Most people would pick The Complete Series 5. It’s “The Avengers – In Color” for the first time, with Diana Rigg and American money, a massive international hit. And it’s brilliant. Or you might go for The Complete Series 3, the height of Honor Blackman, the original breakthrough, the strongest of all the Avengers women, much cheaper but inventive and with the scripts starting to leave the ground. And that’s nearly as brilliant. But I’m a bit strange, so I’ll draw your attention to the two others. The Complete Series 4 was the first with Diana Rigg, the first shot on film, and stylish as anything in black and white. The Complete Series 6 stars Linda Thorson, and is satisfyingly weird in blazing colour. Both hit just the right note for me between camp and sinister. But whichever you pick, some episodes are better than others, so to help you pick your year, or to give you somewhere to start once you’ve got it, here are a few to set you on your way…
Introducing Diana Rigg as Emma Peel, witty, gorgeously shot in black and white, and the perfect balance of suspense and silliness. If you choose this DVD boxed set, I think you’ll find it’s the most consistently brilliant of all the seasons, though some episodes are more wobbly towards the end. And the very first episode in the set is the perfect introduction to The Avengers. As I’ve often said, The Town of No Return is a strong episode, though certainly not the best, but its first seven minutes are flawless: the first blast of that famous fanfare theme tune; a bizarre mystery played utterly deadpan; meeting our heroes as they trade barbs and make their way to the scene. Together, those seven minutes make up the most perfect encapsulation of what The Avengers is about, not least in letting you know that unlike every other crime-fighting / spy-busting duo, they just do it for fun.
Tara King is younger, more earnest – sometimes – and very easy to root for, growing as she goes along. So do the stories; like the black and white Mrs Peels, these superbly blend suspense and silliness, but here the earlier episodes tend to be the rockier ones. It’s more of a mixed bag, but its heights are fabulous. My personal favourite’s Pandora, but even for The Avengers, that’s out of the ordinary, so if you pick up this particular box, here’s my pick of a variety of episodes you might consider starting with:
The most famous, the most repeated, the height of the series’ wackiness and depiction of Britain as a fantasy ‘Avengerland’, this is Emma Peel “In Color”. Simply iconic, though the last third of this season were made after a bit of a break and (comparatively) run out of steam a little. And if you choose this particular boxed, here are my suggestions for a variety of different episodes you might want to start with:
A little more ‘realistic’ than the others, becoming a big hit in the UK but still with a limited budget, this gives the first, most physical of The Avengers women her finest hours. Steed’s often at his best, too, and Honor Blackman terrific; the downside is a much less polished production and the original theme tune, which isn’t bad, but disjointed and nowhere near as classy as that famous fanfare introduced with Mrs Peel. And finally, if this is the boxed set you pick up, here’s my pick (as with all of these, in no particular order, spanning various tastes) of the episodes you might want to try first:
Of my previously-written Avengers articles I’ve linked to above, incidentally, my picks for the best would be The Town of No Return, Game and The House That Jack Built, as I think I did rather well for each of them. But what are you sitting down reading them for? Go out and find the episodes themselves! And whichever you pick, enjoy, and watch out for diabolical masterminds.
Choosing Between The Avengers DVD Boxed Sets
You’ve got a choice of half a dozen The Avengers DVD boxed sets, and if you don’t want to get everything at once, well, I don’t blame you, and I’ll pick which are best to dip into first in a minute. But bear with me. If you don’t have any of The Avengers – and you have a bit of spare cash – obviously I’ll recommend you buy the 39-disc limited edition DVD box set The Avengers Complete 50th Anniversary Collection, which is complete. Completely complete. The lot… Well, except for The New Avengers, which has a different rights owner and which you have to buy separately (but quite cheaply), and for most of the first season of The Avengers from 1961, which unfortunately doesn’t exist any more. So it’s as complete as you’re likely to get, and it’s worth buying if you can afford it. And if you can afford it today, it’ll be slightly cheaper.
The Avengers Complete 50th Anniversary Collection has several advantages over buying all five of the one-season sets. It’s expensive – but it’s cheaper than buying the lot. And while there’s not a lot of range between different sellers, according to this price comparison site, if you order it by the end of today from one site there’s a 10% off code, which for this one stacks up to more than a tenner. It’s quite a nice case, though the packaging’s even more difficult to get into without leaving your prints all over the disc than it is to shake out the jammed-in slim cases from the season boxes. It has a whole extra disc of still more bonus features that they couldn’t fit on the earlier releases (though, and kudos to Optimum for this, they’re having the decency to bring that out separately later in the year so people who’ve already bought the individual seasons can buy it too). And – and this is embarrassing – if you buy them like this, all the discs work properly. For all these sets, for all 139 episodes, the picture’s been restored as well as it can be; there are commentaries, rare little clips, scripts and other pdfs, huge stills galleries (but not much in the way of subtitles). And then some prat at the DVD authoring house managed to let production faults slip through on most of the boxes. Now don’t panic: they’ve fixed them all, and each of the ones they buggered up can be replaced. But it’s a palaver, isn’t it? So get them at once, and because this big set came out last, you don’t have to exchange any of it.
But, OK, buying the individual season box sets has its advantages too. You get a few more extras to hold in your hands – exciting little reproduction press handouts, and not just on pdf. And you don’t have to shell out so much at once, just in case (in some Bizarro-world) you turn out not to like it. And picking and choosing encourages you to start in the middle, which if you’ve never seen The Avengers, might be wise. There were six seasons broadcast through the Sixties, 1961 to 1969; two more of The New Avengers in the mid-’70s. In six boxes. That’s because they some of the early ones went out live, and some of those they recorded, they threw away, so the few bits left of the first season are in with the complete second, and The New Avengers only ran half as long, so both seasons are boxed together. That’s six. So which to choose? Start in the middle. The Complete Series 2 is historically fascinating, has flashes of brilliance (not least Mr Teddy Bear), and changed TV – but compared to the rest, it’s much cruder, and it suddenly hits its stride a year later. The New Avengers starts well and has a handful of terrific episodes, but hits a steep decline. So be counterintuitive, and leave the first and last until a little later.
Which Avengers Episodes To Watch?
So if you were to buy just one The Avengers season box set, which should it be? And which episodes from it are especially tempting?
Most people would pick The Complete Series 5. It’s “The Avengers – In Color” for the first time, with Diana Rigg and American money, a massive international hit. And it’s brilliant. Or you might go for The Complete Series 3, the height of Honor Blackman, the original breakthrough, the strongest of all the Avengers women, much cheaper but inventive and with the scripts starting to leave the ground. And that’s nearly as brilliant. But I’m a bit strange, so I’ll draw your attention to the two others. The Complete Series 4 was the first with Diana Rigg, the first shot on film, and stylish as anything in black and white. The Complete Series 6 stars Linda Thorson, and is satisfyingly weird in blazing colour. Both hit just the right note for me between camp and sinister. But whichever you pick, some episodes are better than others, so to help you pick your year, or to give you somewhere to start once you’ve got it, here are a few to set you on your way…
The Avengers – The Complete Series 4
Introducing Diana Rigg as Emma Peel, witty, gorgeously shot in black and white, and the perfect balance of suspense and silliness. If you choose this DVD boxed set, I think you’ll find it’s the most consistently brilliant of all the seasons, though some episodes are more wobbly towards the end. And the very first episode in the set is the perfect introduction to The Avengers. As I’ve often said, The Town of No Return is a strong episode, though certainly not the best, but its first seven minutes are flawless: the first blast of that famous fanfare theme tune; a bizarre mystery played utterly deadpan; meeting our heroes as they trade barbs and make their way to the scene. Together, those seven minutes make up the most perfect encapsulation of what The Avengers is about, not least in letting you know that unlike every other crime-fighting / spy-busting duo, they just do it for fun.
“Are you sure you won’t have a marzipan delight?”And once that’s – holding my breath – grabbed your attention, here’s my variety assortment (in no particular order, but with a one-line sketch so you can see which might be most to your taste) of the other episodes you might want to dive in with:
- Dial a Deadly Number – sex, big business and Peter Bowles; high finance, high camp and the best duel in TV history. It’s not with what you think… Or, rather, it is.
- The Cybernauts – straightforward, quite a bit of action, outstanding music and the most sci-fi the series ever gets: watch out for the killer robots!
- Quick-Quick Slow Death – silly froth. Simply fun. With murder, obviously.
- The House That Jack Built – Op-art craziness for Emma! It looks terrific, and so is she (stuck in an evil TARDIS).
- Too Many Christmas Trees – haunting and brilliant, though Steed’s character is off-key for important reasons; not completely the season of goodwill.
The Avengers – The Complete Series 6
Tara King is younger, more earnest – sometimes – and very easy to root for, growing as she goes along. So do the stories; like the black and white Mrs Peels, these superbly blend suspense and silliness, but here the earlier episodes tend to be the rockier ones. It’s more of a mixed bag, but its heights are fabulous. My personal favourite’s Pandora, but even for The Avengers, that’s out of the ordinary, so if you pick up this particular box, here’s my pick of a variety of episodes you might consider starting with:
- Game – iconic Avengers: outrageously surreal sets and plotting, giant killer games, Peter Jeffrey… And I’ve written about it in detail, too, with a whole list of reasons why you should watch this postmodern extravaganza.
- Look – (Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One) But There Were These Two Fellers… – a comedy of murders, with surreal style, John Cleese, Bernard Cribbins and killer clowns.
- My Wildest Dream – threatening psychodrama, with superb action sequences and score, plus one of the most barking sets.
- Who Was That Man I Saw You With? – the first I ever saw, and it got me hooked. Slippery double-crossing spies, murder and setting our heroes up.
The Avengers – The Complete Series 5
The most famous, the most repeated, the height of the series’ wackiness and depiction of Britain as a fantasy ‘Avengerland’, this is Emma Peel “In Color”. Simply iconic, though the last third of this season were made after a bit of a break and (comparatively) run out of steam a little. And if you choose this particular boxed, here are my suggestions for a variety of different episodes you might want to start with:
- Escape in Time – inventive, entertaining, colourful, a great use of other times and cuddly toys, and a magnificent villain in Peter Bowles.
- The Hidden Tiger – archetypal ‘first half setting up the threat, second half going to the villains’ Avengers plotting, and the height of comic fantasy (with Ronnie Barker).
- Dead Man’s Treasure – like a week off, driving around the countryside to breezy music. Fun.
- The Superlative Seven – one of the most sinister colour Mrs Peels, rather brilliant, loads of guest stars… Not a lot of Mrs Peel, though (perhaps The Joker if you want an unsettling one with more Emma).
The Avengers – The Complete Series 3
A little more ‘realistic’ than the others, becoming a big hit in the UK but still with a limited budget, this gives the first, most physical of The Avengers women her finest hours. Steed’s often at his best, too, and Honor Blackman terrific; the downside is a much less polished production and the original theme tune, which isn’t bad, but disjointed and nowhere near as classy as that famous fanfare introduced with Mrs Peel. And finally, if this is the boxed set you pick up, here’s my pick (as with all of these, in no particular order, spanning various tastes) of the episodes you might want to try first:
- Esprit de Corps – great fun, with a twisty-turny plot, a striking central idea and some superb guest stars (Roy Kinnear, John Thaw).
- The Charmers – very witty, a brilliant spy spoof, and even better than the later colour remake (though that’s fun, too).
- Man With Two Shadows – a really rather dark thriller, and arguably the best of the series’ ‘doubles’ episodes.
- November Five – assassination at the by-election, political manipulation and dastardly plots inside the House of Commons. Who’d have thought? Vote Gale to sort it all out!
Of my previously-written Avengers articles I’ve linked to above, incidentally, my picks for the best would be The Town of No Return, Game and The House That Jack Built, as I think I did rather well for each of them. But what are you sitting down reading them for? Go out and find the episodes themselves! And whichever you pick, enjoy, and watch out for diabolical masterminds.
Labels: DVD, DVD Tasters, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 1, The Avengers Season 2, The Avengers Season 3, The Avengers Season 4, The Avengers Season 5, The Avengers Season 6, The New Avengers, Top Tips
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
DVD Taster: Doctor Who – Meglos
Tom Baker was often rather spiky in rehearsals, but it was only at the end of his time as the Doctor that he actually broke out as a cactus. In Doctor Who – Meglos, first broadcast thirty-one years ago this week, the Doctor, Romana and an increasingly knackered K9 face religious fundamentalists, scruffy space pirates and a megalomaniac succulent. Its DVD release earlier this year completed one of Doctor Who’s finest seasons (for the lot, watch The Leisure Hive first, then The E-Space Trilogy and New Beginnings afterwards) with a mixture of good ideas, clichés, entertaining performances and feeble gunfights. What secret lies beneath the sands? A pressing appointment awaits you…
Doctor Who’s Eighteenth Season, broadcast across 1980 and 1981, was terrific. Tom Baker’s last, it’s still among the best, and one of the two most thematically coherent (the other, fittingly, Tom Baker’s first), seasons the series has ever produced. Some fans wrongly dismiss Season 18 as solemn science – rather, it’s something wonderful and strange. I may be the only person who loves both this and The Key To Time’s Season 16 to bits equally, and sees that amid their very different tones, both are making their own sci-fi fairy tales (and if one lacks a sense of playfulness, the other more than makes up for it). The ultimate in Who ‘concept albums’, if ever there was a season that works best when you watch it all the way through, this is the one. Events cast shadows before them, and with Season 18 the long shadow of Tom’s departure, no wonder it’s so often hymned as “Change and Decay”. But it’s really the other way round – just as it’s wrong to see regeneration as a funeral, in a season of Decay and Change, every story features things set in their ways before collapsing, then ends in rebirth, whether people, societies or ultimately our heroes (this DVD’s extra Entropy Explained takes you through the end). Sombre yet still wittily quotable; beautiful but scary; with gorgeous music and every penny seeming well-spent on great design… Only one of these stories fails to meet such high standards. Obviously, it’s Meglos. Back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – and placed all but two of the Season 18 stories far too low. Meglos was one of those, and while its feeble 188th place is a bit harsh, even on a good day I’d put it barely twenty steps higher. But even though it’s best when watched as a weaker link in a very strong run than as a story dangling alone, some of it’s very entertaining.
It’s my usual policy in these not-exactly-underrunning ‘tasters’ not to be too spoilery, so you read on without fear of finding out too many key twists from the end. But this time I couldn’t hold back an ‘…And another thing!’ at the end, so be careful to stop at the warning sign if you’ve not seen it.
That
One of the more appealing elements of Meglos’ Golden Moment is that it’s all contradiction – it really shouldn’t work, but it does. Meglos himself is the season’s least well-characterised villain on paper, the clichéd megalomaniac his name suggests, yet another last-of-his-race without any noticeable related trauma but with an array of lazily improbable technical achievements for someone whose only other achievement is to sit and sulk for millennia, yet on screen he blossoms when playing Tom Baker. And while the logic of the once-standard four-part Doctor Who story is that the first episode is the most interesting, setting up the mystery, and the final the most exciting, with its thrilling climax, while the second and third of running around a bit tend to sag, Tom’s turn as Meglos impersonating the Doctor begins at the surprisingly brilliant first cliffhanger and flowers through those middle episodes but in Part Four detumesces like Meglos’ original cactus body before it. And the reason’s very simple: a clichéd megalomaniac ranting to his dim henchmen about ruling the Universe only goes so far, but a wily villain impersonating the Doctor in what’s until the end a far more controlled performance, ratcheting up the tension as to which of them will get caught, and by whom, is far more interesting to watch. And both the script and Tom are clearly far more interested in this criss-crossing than in the uninspiring big finish.
The Doctor is en route to the planet Tigella; evil Meglos delays him, and impersonates him in order to take advantage of their goodwill to steal their giant glowing MacGuffin. And after a surprisingly lacklustre first episode, this is absolutely where the fun starts. Tom always cuts a bold figure in this season’s deep red coat and scarf, but here he becomes sinister with it, climbing stairs like Dracula rising from a crypt, his usual grin dying into something sickly, and most of all a ghoulish, predatory figure turned green. He’s superb as Meglos turning the Doctor’s know-it-all charm into aloof condescension, correcting an old friend’s
It’s no surprise that Meglos gains an opening when the real Doctor arrives and is, obviously, mistaken for himself, nor that the real Doctor gets both good moments trying to talk his way out of it by setting out three perfect possibilities as to what’s happened, and some bad puns (the old “Doctor – who?” gag has rarely had so many outings). What is a surprise is how stylishly the loquacious Tom we all know is intercut with a silent and alien Tom we don’t. And that, early in Part Three, is absolutely my favourite moment of Meglos, shot almost as a silent horror movie – albeit one powered by a striking soundtrack – when spiky-faced Tom looms and takes Caris by the hands. It’s an electric scene, helped by her being one of the few other characters with a character (the most down-to-earth, or up-to-surface, of the priggish Savants), played almost as a dance, but his pulling her back into the shadows is a disturbingly sexual threat.
It doesn’t last, of course. It’s ironic that the last moment of Tom’s Meglosian intensity is at the start of Part Four, as he breathes his reply to “Approaching full potential”: “Precisely… Precisely.” While plenty of opportunities are squandered in the middle episodes in the scenes where Tom isn’t double-handedly propping up the story, and they inexplicably ignored his doppelgänger to choose the least interesting aspect piece of the ‘action’ for the middle cliffhanger, any potential it has drains away in Part Four even when Tom inevitably meets himself and, with neither of him given anything to go on in the script, is reduced to staring at himself in disbelief at his own acting. When this anti-climactic moment is reached, viewers can appreciate Lalla Ward’s breathless reaction to two Toms, where one glance manages to say so much: ‘Well, that’ll be interesting for sex. But in the other twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes of the day, it’ll be unbearable. And think of the gin bills.’ And while for most of the story, Meglos-Tom’s stunning facial make-up makes up for the rather inadequate cactus gloves, the Tom-to-Tom face-off ends with one of the series’ most gob-smacking ‘special effects’. But, like the Nimon, I still remember spiky Tom looking amazing in Madame Tussauds, so I’ll always have a pointy place in my heart for him.
Aside from Tom, and Tom, Meglos is rather thin; despite all the slow running about, all the extended ‘last time’ reprises, and even playing one scene half a dozen times within the narrative, the episodes both underrun and feel overstretched. So the most important “Something Else To Look Out For” is, obviously, the rest of Season 18: the striking new approach of The Leisure Hive before it, though looking very much ahead of it (the two stories have much in common beyond Season 18’s overarching themes, from a near-dead civilisation destroyed by war, reduced to sand and ashes but with something tourist trap-y about the sights, to a sole human who’s a secretly green impersonator, even to multiple Toms – and yet while I can believe Argolis is a world, Tigella is just a studio); the season continuing after Meglos with The E-Space Trilogy of Full Circle, State of Decay and Warriors’ Gate, and then climaxing in the New Beginnings box set’s The Keeper of Traken and Logopolis, all soaring above Meglos. And with Meglos’ first broadcast starting back on September 27th, 1980, watching it yesterday it was difficult not to reach instead for a far more atmospheric space jungle that was first revealed on the same day in 1975 for Doctor Who – Planet of Evil. And yet there are a few other elements worth noticing Meglos for.
Lalla Ward’s Romana has far less to do than in The Horns of Nimon, but is still worth watching: could there possibly be any ulterior motive for the way she overemphasises the word “Lush!” as she aims it twice at temporary-husband-to-be Tom Baker? K9, doomed by this point, gets an infamous kick from guest star Bill Fraser that amounts to little more than a feeble tap, though much of his performance as a Gaztak space mercenary is more entertaining – with bits of the script designed as a satire on Doctor Who, even if mostly far less successfully than the whole of the previous year, a few gags work, and it always cracks me up when Fraser’s General Grugger hears a line of incomprehensible technobabble and grunts, “Oh, yes. Good,” like an uneasy viewer at home. The main problem with the Gaztaks is that, as villains, they’re not supposed to be the ones we identify with – and yet, greedy, grubby and dim as they are, a bunch of individual characters with different costumes and even some mixed-race casting seem more like people than the planet Tigella’s two castes of identical prim Savants and differently identical fundamentalist Deons (yes, I’ve just told you everything about their ‘characterisation’). Between those two factions is inexplicable ‘leader’ Zastor, played by an ill Edward Underdown, and it’s difficult to tell if his ineffectitude is more in the script or the actor. Wetter than a bell-plant salad, he was – many years and surely much lost charisma and beauty (of which I’d love to see any evidence) before – the inspiration for Mad About the Boy, but here he merely fails to interrupt other actors on time and throws away several of the script’s few good lines, most famously on the Doctor:
With most of the production values a good deal shakier than in the rest of the season, the music lifts it all – for once, a combination of both Paddy Kingsland and Peter Howell, probably ’80s Who’s most gifted composers. The Deon chant; Meglos’ own spiky theme; the dancing music as Meglos’ lair rises between the giant Screens (‘The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has this to say about the Screens of Zolfa-Thura: just don’t go there’)… Each composer has done greater work elsewhere, but I’ve still listened to the isolated score over and over, and it’s splendid enough to transport you when, say, planets are hanging in the sky a little too literally, or a spaceship that looks like a cross-breed of a brick and a chicken flies as elegantly as neither. And while the jungle design is both cramped and unconvincing, there’s some impressive design work in the dark labyrinth of the underground city, split across different levels, well-lit, and with interesting spaces.
Almost the nadir of the story comes in a moment that’s entirely predictable by thinking about what Doctor Who could and couldn’t do at the time: given impressive acting and music, a tense internal struggle for possession of a body works; given listless extras, feeble special effects and feebler direction, a Star Wars-style gunfight utterly doesn’t. I was only eight when I first saw this, and still thought all Doctor Who was utterly brilliant, but even I could see something was very wrong with a lot of faffing about with naff ray-beams and a limply held giant pencil that apologetically stands in for a battering ram. Pennant Roberts must have been livid: he’d tried so hard and so often to win the title of ‘world’s crappiest gunfight’ (as you can see in, for example, The Sun Makers, another of this year’s releases), then Terence Dudley swans in and steals the title on his only crack at Who direction. Now I’m a bit older than eight, I can see that the script is almost as limp as the director, desperately looking for something to pass the time and make sure all the people who’ve been ambling about aimlessly for two episodes can now meet up at exactly the same time as each other by ‘coincidence’.
Much as I adore Christopher H Bidmead’s brilliantly auteurish year across Season 18 as Doctor Who script editor, almost the equivalent of today’s all-powerful lead writer (without the power, or the pay, but with much the same creative impact), I have to wonder what he saw in Meglos’ twin writers John Flanagan and Andrew McCulloch – particularly when he then had to rewrite so much of their work anyway. It’s like a script by a Terry Nation tribute band who think it’s somehow funny and original, with a ludicrous villain, improbable superweapon, several different deadly plants, dying and dead civilisations and characters fashioned from the purest cardboard, but with added Steven Moffat, as they think Doctor Who requires them to make it all about Ti…me (with little tributes to the story appearing in Russell T Davies’ spiny Vinvocci, and nearly a sequel in last year’s The Lodger, which had its own sequel just last Saturday in which poor Gareth Roberts was still unable to get the rights to the classic Meglos and had to make do with Cybermen).
Unfortunately, long-held fan claims that the authors were really terribly witty and only threw in clichés in clever, knowing mockery of Doctor Who are now faced with the Meglos Men themselves, both on their own DVD extra here (weird as all buggery, or, as they’d say, boogery) and John Flanagan as part of one of the range’s more offputting, self-aggrandising and unintentionally revealing commentaries, in which they stand exposed as piss-takers with a profoundly delusional sense of self-worth. Gasp as Mr Flanagan claims the badly written hoary old cliché of religion versus science stuff as wildly original and ahead of its time; laugh as he praises himself for ‘clever’ ideas he takes deadly seriously but which are clearly intended as jokes (and must surely have been written as such by someone else); restrain the urge to kill as he blames the script editor and the “very fast pace” – oh, my sides – for his very skimpy script underrunning; simply explode as he claims to have personally invented the concept of time loops and inspired Groundhog Day; fall asleep as he relentlessly not explains but summarises the plot of the story we’re actually watching. He even manages to alienate his supporter Lalla Ward – always looking for an excuse to kick this period of the show, but raising the tone occasionally by comparing the jungle to a Douanier Rousseau painting – by solipsistically getting her character’s name wrong, such is his grasp of detail. Thankfully, the two musicians also appear on the commentary and know what they’re talking about, though sadly they don’t get the chance to discuss working off each other.
The highlight of the DVD’s extra features for me is the rather lovely Jacqueline Hill – A Life In Pictures, a tribute to the late Doctor Who star with her husband and friends, and as affecting as the commentary is sour and ill-informed. Add features on the story’s special effects breakthrough and a reasonably decent essay style of text notes, and of course the lovely isolated score, and it’s quite a good little DVD package. The menus are as cobbled together as ever, though, and Richard points out that they absurdly miss the opportunity to have the scene that endlessly repeats with “Oh, blast, here we go again” (as every household in the country echoed at the time) endlessly repeating on a menu loop. If you have the novelisation, it’s not bad at all, notable for fleshing out the “Earthling”, George Morris, and for Terrance Dicks showing his script editor background by performing a number of neat little salvage jobs on the plot – I love Jesus H Bidmead for his vision, but you can’t beat Uncle Terrance for making things work.
I said the paltry attempt at a pitched battle for three and a half quid and early closing was “almost the nadir of the story”. Well, there’s one scene that makes me snarl and swear so much that I can’t help but lay into it here, even though I shouldn’t – have you seen the story? No? Then look away now.
It is, of course, fantastic to have the great Jacqueline Hill back, but though she looks striking it’s not the most consistent part ever written as it all falls to pieces in Part Four: sigh as she dismisses Zastor and Romana as heretics, then two seconds later goggle as she asks his advice and trusts his simple word to justify not only his own sudden freedom but that of the most appalling blasphemer of the lot as well. And that’s not even the worst of it. Having spent the whole story as an utterly inflexible religious bigot itching to bring back the days of bloody tyranny, not only does she drop her new theocratic state within minutes of mounting the coup she’s spent so long salivating for, but she then sacrifices her life for one of the upstart scientific heretics she hates. As if to say that murderous fanatics are all right, really. And it isn’t just the shockingly poor scripting of Jacqueline Hill’s last moments in Doctor Who that’s offensive, but that it’s directed as if deliberately trying to illustrate a textbook on how to get every basic element of TV storytelling wrong. The Gaztaks have complained of their heavy casualties, which turn out to be just three people, and one of them still alive; having not been seen for an episode, he raises himself up at a handy moment to shoot at Romana; the ensuing ‘special’ effect is a single weedy ray from a clearly multi-barrelled blaster; it appears to take several seconds to fly a couple of metres, as we see him fire, then cut to Lexa shouting “Romana” and then move in front of her – and we don’t even see the beam hit her. It’s one of the most completely inept scenes in the history of the show.
And finally, many have noted that the entire Tigellan civilisation depends on a power source which no longer exists, in order that they can cower underground from the people-eating bell-plants which do still exist. So the Doctor saying a jolly goodbye to the comatose Zastor and wishing him well with a spot of gardening seems like rather an offhand death sentence. However, I have the solution to what happens next. There are three problems: the power having gone; the plants on the prowl; and the Deons, who five minutes ago were rounding up all the non-believers for death, and are now without their inexplicably deathbed-nice leader to restrain them. And on top of all that, no-one’s mentioning that the next-door planet has just exploded. So what the Savants need to do is to turn their power-absorption screens to the outside to soak up the massive radiation explosion – which means that living underground would be even more sensible, and that it could fry the plants, too; and also persuade the Deons to pop upstairs and wait for something else to descend from the heavens. And ideally squash them.
Or they could export a TV cookery show in which Tigella leans towards the camera and pouts, ‘Today, I’m going to be preparing bell-plants. Which look almost as rude as I do.’
Doctor Who’s Eighteenth Season, broadcast across 1980 and 1981, was terrific. Tom Baker’s last, it’s still among the best, and one of the two most thematically coherent (the other, fittingly, Tom Baker’s first), seasons the series has ever produced. Some fans wrongly dismiss Season 18 as solemn science – rather, it’s something wonderful and strange. I may be the only person who loves both this and The Key To Time’s Season 16 to bits equally, and sees that amid their very different tones, both are making their own sci-fi fairy tales (and if one lacks a sense of playfulness, the other more than makes up for it). The ultimate in Who ‘concept albums’, if ever there was a season that works best when you watch it all the way through, this is the one. Events cast shadows before them, and with Season 18 the long shadow of Tom’s departure, no wonder it’s so often hymned as “Change and Decay”. But it’s really the other way round – just as it’s wrong to see regeneration as a funeral, in a season of Decay and Change, every story features things set in their ways before collapsing, then ends in rebirth, whether people, societies or ultimately our heroes (this DVD’s extra Entropy Explained takes you through the end). Sombre yet still wittily quotable; beautiful but scary; with gorgeous music and every penny seeming well-spent on great design… Only one of these stories fails to meet such high standards. Obviously, it’s Meglos. Back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – and placed all but two of the Season 18 stories far too low. Meglos was one of those, and while its feeble 188th place is a bit harsh, even on a good day I’d put it barely twenty steps higher. But even though it’s best when watched as a weaker link in a very strong run than as a story dangling alone, some of it’s very entertaining.
It’s my usual policy in these not-exactly-underrunning ‘tasters’ not to be too spoilery, so you read on without fear of finding out too many key twists from the end. But this time I couldn’t hold back an ‘…And another thing!’ at the end, so be careful to stop at the warning sign if you’ve not seen it.
That Golden Greeny-Yellow Moment
“I am Meglos! The last Zolfa-Thuran.”There’s one compelling reason to watch Meglos, and it’s staring you in the face. Some might call this a spoiler, but when Tom’s staring back at you even from the DVD cover (quite a nice one, as usual a fussier version of the Target book painting, making the Screens look like wings) in his full spiky glory, it’s difficult not to come to the story knowing that, somehow, Tom Baker has chosen to interpret his role as a green cactus.
One of the more appealing elements of Meglos’ Golden Moment is that it’s all contradiction – it really shouldn’t work, but it does. Meglos himself is the season’s least well-characterised villain on paper, the clichéd megalomaniac his name suggests, yet another last-of-his-race without any noticeable related trauma but with an array of lazily improbable technical achievements for someone whose only other achievement is to sit and sulk for millennia, yet on screen he blossoms when playing Tom Baker. And while the logic of the once-standard four-part Doctor Who story is that the first episode is the most interesting, setting up the mystery, and the final the most exciting, with its thrilling climax, while the second and third of running around a bit tend to sag, Tom’s turn as Meglos impersonating the Doctor begins at the surprisingly brilliant first cliffhanger and flowers through those middle episodes but in Part Four detumesces like Meglos’ original cactus body before it. And the reason’s very simple: a clichéd megalomaniac ranting to his dim henchmen about ruling the Universe only goes so far, but a wily villain impersonating the Doctor in what’s until the end a far more controlled performance, ratcheting up the tension as to which of them will get caught, and by whom, is far more interesting to watch. And both the script and Tom are clearly far more interested in this criss-crossing than in the uninspiring big finish.
The Doctor is en route to the planet Tigella; evil Meglos delays him, and impersonates him in order to take advantage of their goodwill to steal their giant glowing MacGuffin. And after a surprisingly lacklustre first episode, this is absolutely where the fun starts. Tom always cuts a bold figure in this season’s deep red coat and scarf, but here he becomes sinister with it, climbing stairs like Dracula rising from a crypt, his usual grin dying into something sickly, and most of all a ghoulish, predatory figure turned green. He’s superb as Meglos turning the Doctor’s know-it-all charm into aloof condescension, correcting an old friend’s
“You haven’t changed, Doctor. A little older, a little wiser.”then unexpectedly crawling to the local religious leader, then outmanoeuvring her by turning her own plotting against her, then consumed with lust for an object… All played with a dangerous control for the moment, all accompanied by eerily spiky music. But he really comes into his own when his theft is discovered before he has a chance to escape, and the stress brings some of Meglos’ cactus form through his skin – or even allows the person whose body he’s possessing for his perambulations to struggle half-free. It’s an impressive, ambiguous performance: does he look frightened, or tortured? Is he embracing the victim that tries to break out of his body, or trying to throttle him? And when he insists that “I am Meglos!” in between moments when his host (the John Major-a-like from House of Cards) struggles to take his own body back, it only underlines that he isn’t, less a self-aggrandising boast than a desperate attempt to cling to his identity, teetering under the strain of using someone else’s body to impersonate someone else again.
“Oh, much wiser.”
It’s no surprise that Meglos gains an opening when the real Doctor arrives and is, obviously, mistaken for himself, nor that the real Doctor gets both good moments trying to talk his way out of it by setting out three perfect possibilities as to what’s happened, and some bad puns (the old “Doctor – who?” gag has rarely had so many outings). What is a surprise is how stylishly the loquacious Tom we all know is intercut with a silent and alien Tom we don’t. And that, early in Part Three, is absolutely my favourite moment of Meglos, shot almost as a silent horror movie – albeit one powered by a striking soundtrack – when spiky-faced Tom looms and takes Caris by the hands. It’s an electric scene, helped by her being one of the few other characters with a character (the most down-to-earth, or up-to-surface, of the priggish Savants), played almost as a dance, but his pulling her back into the shadows is a disturbingly sexual threat.
It doesn’t last, of course. It’s ironic that the last moment of Tom’s Meglosian intensity is at the start of Part Four, as he breathes his reply to “Approaching full potential”: “Precisely… Precisely.” While plenty of opportunities are squandered in the middle episodes in the scenes where Tom isn’t double-handedly propping up the story, and they inexplicably ignored his doppelgänger to choose the least interesting aspect piece of the ‘action’ for the middle cliffhanger, any potential it has drains away in Part Four even when Tom inevitably meets himself and, with neither of him given anything to go on in the script, is reduced to staring at himself in disbelief at his own acting. When this anti-climactic moment is reached, viewers can appreciate Lalla Ward’s breathless reaction to two Toms, where one glance manages to say so much: ‘Well, that’ll be interesting for sex. But in the other twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes of the day, it’ll be unbearable. And think of the gin bills.’ And while for most of the story, Meglos-Tom’s stunning facial make-up makes up for the rather inadequate cactus gloves, the Tom-to-Tom face-off ends with one of the series’ most gob-smacking ‘special effects’. But, like the Nimon, I still remember spiky Tom looking amazing in Madame Tussauds, so I’ll always have a pointy place in my heart for him.
Something Else To Look Out For
Aside from Tom, and Tom, Meglos is rather thin; despite all the slow running about, all the extended ‘last time’ reprises, and even playing one scene half a dozen times within the narrative, the episodes both underrun and feel overstretched. So the most important “Something Else To Look Out For” is, obviously, the rest of Season 18: the striking new approach of The Leisure Hive before it, though looking very much ahead of it (the two stories have much in common beyond Season 18’s overarching themes, from a near-dead civilisation destroyed by war, reduced to sand and ashes but with something tourist trap-y about the sights, to a sole human who’s a secretly green impersonator, even to multiple Toms – and yet while I can believe Argolis is a world, Tigella is just a studio); the season continuing after Meglos with The E-Space Trilogy of Full Circle, State of Decay and Warriors’ Gate, and then climaxing in the New Beginnings box set’s The Keeper of Traken and Logopolis, all soaring above Meglos. And with Meglos’ first broadcast starting back on September 27th, 1980, watching it yesterday it was difficult not to reach instead for a far more atmospheric space jungle that was first revealed on the same day in 1975 for Doctor Who – Planet of Evil. And yet there are a few other elements worth noticing Meglos for.
Lalla Ward’s Romana has far less to do than in The Horns of Nimon, but is still worth watching: could there possibly be any ulterior motive for the way she overemphasises the word “Lush!” as she aims it twice at temporary-husband-to-be Tom Baker? K9, doomed by this point, gets an infamous kick from guest star Bill Fraser that amounts to little more than a feeble tap, though much of his performance as a Gaztak space mercenary is more entertaining – with bits of the script designed as a satire on Doctor Who, even if mostly far less successfully than the whole of the previous year, a few gags work, and it always cracks me up when Fraser’s General Grugger hears a line of incomprehensible technobabble and grunts, “Oh, yes. Good,” like an uneasy viewer at home. The main problem with the Gaztaks is that, as villains, they’re not supposed to be the ones we identify with – and yet, greedy, grubby and dim as they are, a bunch of individual characters with different costumes and even some mixed-race casting seem more like people than the planet Tigella’s two castes of identical prim Savants and differently identical fundamentalist Deons (yes, I’ve just told you everything about their ‘characterisation’). Between those two factions is inexplicable ‘leader’ Zastor, played by an ill Edward Underdown, and it’s difficult to tell if his ineffectitude is more in the script or the actor. Wetter than a bell-plant salad, he was – many years and surely much lost charisma and beauty (of which I’d love to see any evidence) before – the inspiration for Mad About the Boy, but here he merely fails to interrupt other actors on time and throws away several of the script’s few good lines, most famously on the Doctor:
“He sees the threads that join the Universe together, and mends them when they break.”I’d like to claim that the scary religious Deons are a clever prediction of, say, the Christian right ignoring global warming, but unfortunately the only drearier stereotypes are the pompously scientific Savants, with whom we’re meant to sympathise but who look ridiculous and send us to sleep. Even for a piece of badly constructed anti-religious propaganda, it fluffs it; the scientists are so naff no-one could side with them, and then the writers lose their bottle and at the end by suddenly deciding one character – of who more later – may be a murderous theocratic bigot, but meant well. Even such a crude analogy has its heart in the right place, if not its brain, and manages a few glimmers of, say, topical Republican Primary: the way someone threatened with death for blasphemy gets told off for mocking religious laws, but not the arch-bigot, so as not to give offence to her beliefs; or how ‘compromises’ with the fanatics involve giving way to every religious demand, but still end up with the appeaser condemned as a heretic for not going far enough. It’s not the script, but two other choices that almost save the Deons from drowning in cliché – Jacqueline Hill, first and greatest of the Doctor’s companions, returning to the series to guest not as sensible teacher Barbara but charismatic high priestess Lexa (fabulously declaiming “It descended from the Heavens!”), and the strange, gorgeous chant that accompanies them.
Don’t Shoot the Piano Player – Shoot the Director and Writers Instead
With most of the production values a good deal shakier than in the rest of the season, the music lifts it all – for once, a combination of both Paddy Kingsland and Peter Howell, probably ’80s Who’s most gifted composers. The Deon chant; Meglos’ own spiky theme; the dancing music as Meglos’ lair rises between the giant Screens (‘The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has this to say about the Screens of Zolfa-Thura: just don’t go there’)… Each composer has done greater work elsewhere, but I’ve still listened to the isolated score over and over, and it’s splendid enough to transport you when, say, planets are hanging in the sky a little too literally, or a spaceship that looks like a cross-breed of a brick and a chicken flies as elegantly as neither. And while the jungle design is both cramped and unconvincing, there’s some impressive design work in the dark labyrinth of the underground city, split across different levels, well-lit, and with interesting spaces.
Almost the nadir of the story comes in a moment that’s entirely predictable by thinking about what Doctor Who could and couldn’t do at the time: given impressive acting and music, a tense internal struggle for possession of a body works; given listless extras, feeble special effects and feebler direction, a Star Wars-style gunfight utterly doesn’t. I was only eight when I first saw this, and still thought all Doctor Who was utterly brilliant, but even I could see something was very wrong with a lot of faffing about with naff ray-beams and a limply held giant pencil that apologetically stands in for a battering ram. Pennant Roberts must have been livid: he’d tried so hard and so often to win the title of ‘world’s crappiest gunfight’ (as you can see in, for example, The Sun Makers, another of this year’s releases), then Terence Dudley swans in and steals the title on his only crack at Who direction. Now I’m a bit older than eight, I can see that the script is almost as limp as the director, desperately looking for something to pass the time and make sure all the people who’ve been ambling about aimlessly for two episodes can now meet up at exactly the same time as each other by ‘coincidence’.
Much as I adore Christopher H Bidmead’s brilliantly auteurish year across Season 18 as Doctor Who script editor, almost the equivalent of today’s all-powerful lead writer (without the power, or the pay, but with much the same creative impact), I have to wonder what he saw in Meglos’ twin writers John Flanagan and Andrew McCulloch – particularly when he then had to rewrite so much of their work anyway. It’s like a script by a Terry Nation tribute band who think it’s somehow funny and original, with a ludicrous villain, improbable superweapon, several different deadly plants, dying and dead civilisations and characters fashioned from the purest cardboard, but with added Steven Moffat, as they think Doctor Who requires them to make it all about Ti…me (with little tributes to the story appearing in Russell T Davies’ spiny Vinvocci, and nearly a sequel in last year’s The Lodger, which had its own sequel just last Saturday in which poor Gareth Roberts was still unable to get the rights to the classic Meglos and had to make do with Cybermen).
Unfortunately, long-held fan claims that the authors were really terribly witty and only threw in clichés in clever, knowing mockery of Doctor Who are now faced with the Meglos Men themselves, both on their own DVD extra here (weird as all buggery, or, as they’d say, boogery) and John Flanagan as part of one of the range’s more offputting, self-aggrandising and unintentionally revealing commentaries, in which they stand exposed as piss-takers with a profoundly delusional sense of self-worth. Gasp as Mr Flanagan claims the badly written hoary old cliché of religion versus science stuff as wildly original and ahead of its time; laugh as he praises himself for ‘clever’ ideas he takes deadly seriously but which are clearly intended as jokes (and must surely have been written as such by someone else); restrain the urge to kill as he blames the script editor and the “very fast pace” – oh, my sides – for his very skimpy script underrunning; simply explode as he claims to have personally invented the concept of time loops and inspired Groundhog Day; fall asleep as he relentlessly not explains but summarises the plot of the story we’re actually watching. He even manages to alienate his supporter Lalla Ward – always looking for an excuse to kick this period of the show, but raising the tone occasionally by comparing the jungle to a Douanier Rousseau painting – by solipsistically getting her character’s name wrong, such is his grasp of detail. Thankfully, the two musicians also appear on the commentary and know what they’re talking about, though sadly they don’t get the chance to discuss working off each other.
The highlight of the DVD’s extra features for me is the rather lovely Jacqueline Hill – A Life In Pictures, a tribute to the late Doctor Who star with her husband and friends, and as affecting as the commentary is sour and ill-informed. Add features on the story’s special effects breakthrough and a reasonably decent essay style of text notes, and of course the lovely isolated score, and it’s quite a good little DVD package. The menus are as cobbled together as ever, though, and Richard points out that they absurdly miss the opportunity to have the scene that endlessly repeats with “Oh, blast, here we go again” (as every household in the country echoed at the time) endlessly repeating on a menu loop. If you have the novelisation, it’s not bad at all, notable for fleshing out the “Earthling”, George Morris, and for Terrance Dicks showing his script editor background by performing a number of neat little salvage jobs on the plot – I love Jesus H Bidmead for his vision, but you can’t beat Uncle Terrance for making things work.
Warning! Spoilers – The End
I said the paltry attempt at a pitched battle for three and a half quid and early closing was “almost the nadir of the story”. Well, there’s one scene that makes me snarl and swear so much that I can’t help but lay into it here, even though I shouldn’t – have you seen the story? No? Then look away now.
It is, of course, fantastic to have the great Jacqueline Hill back, but though she looks striking it’s not the most consistent part ever written as it all falls to pieces in Part Four: sigh as she dismisses Zastor and Romana as heretics, then two seconds later goggle as she asks his advice and trusts his simple word to justify not only his own sudden freedom but that of the most appalling blasphemer of the lot as well. And that’s not even the worst of it. Having spent the whole story as an utterly inflexible religious bigot itching to bring back the days of bloody tyranny, not only does she drop her new theocratic state within minutes of mounting the coup she’s spent so long salivating for, but she then sacrifices her life for one of the upstart scientific heretics she hates. As if to say that murderous fanatics are all right, really. And it isn’t just the shockingly poor scripting of Jacqueline Hill’s last moments in Doctor Who that’s offensive, but that it’s directed as if deliberately trying to illustrate a textbook on how to get every basic element of TV storytelling wrong. The Gaztaks have complained of their heavy casualties, which turn out to be just three people, and one of them still alive; having not been seen for an episode, he raises himself up at a handy moment to shoot at Romana; the ensuing ‘special’ effect is a single weedy ray from a clearly multi-barrelled blaster; it appears to take several seconds to fly a couple of metres, as we see him fire, then cut to Lexa shouting “Romana” and then move in front of her – and we don’t even see the beam hit her. It’s one of the most completely inept scenes in the history of the show.
And finally, many have noted that the entire Tigellan civilisation depends on a power source which no longer exists, in order that they can cower underground from the people-eating bell-plants which do still exist. So the Doctor saying a jolly goodbye to the comatose Zastor and wishing him well with a spot of gardening seems like rather an offhand death sentence. However, I have the solution to what happens next. There are three problems: the power having gone; the plants on the prowl; and the Deons, who five minutes ago were rounding up all the non-believers for death, and are now without their inexplicably deathbed-nice leader to restrain them. And on top of all that, no-one’s mentioning that the next-door planet has just exploded. So what the Savants need to do is to turn their power-absorption screens to the outside to soak up the massive radiation explosion – which means that living underground would be even more sensible, and that it could fry the plants, too; and also persuade the Deons to pop upstairs and wait for something else to descend from the heavens. And ideally squash them.
Or they could export a TV cookery show in which Tigella leans towards the camera and pouts, ‘Today, I’m going to be preparing bell-plants. Which look almost as rude as I do.’
Labels: Doctor Who, Douglas Adams, DVD, DVD Tasters, Fiction, Matt Smith, Music, New Beginnings, Reviews, Tom Baker, William Hartnell
Thursday, August 25, 2011
DVD Taster: Doctor Who – The Dominators
This Saturday, Doctor Who comes back for Autumn – the second-earliest it’s ever returned, only beaten by 1968’s The Dominators, in which the Doctor and his companions land on the peaceful planet Dulkis and encounter the cruel Dominators and their deadly servants. So just how terrible are its politics? Which actors nearly save it? What do Doctor Who writers old and new think of it? What exciting work by Paul Cornell do I reprint below? What connects it all to The Da Vinci Code? What’s my shameful secret? And is it worth buying on DVD? Look out! It’s the Quarks!
Doctor Who – The Dominators may not set the happiest of precedents for this weekend’s Let’s Kill Hitler. With mediocre ratings and bad reviews, it may be set on an obscure planet in a distant galaxy rather than in the recognisable history of the Third Reich, but its authors would claim it’s all about what happens when a culture lacks the moral backbone we showed in 1939, while its detractors point out that the authors set up a fight between fascists and hippies, then side with the fascists. I once wrote about How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal; ‘not like this’ would be a start. Even the less political broad sweep of fandom don’t much care for this story: back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – and placed this at a lowly 191 (at 49.99%, the first to score under half marks). Against all reason, I’m fond of it, so I might put it 20 or so places higher…
While this ‘taster’ may not be short, incidentally, my style in these is not to be too spoilery. So read on without fear of finding out the key twists.
This argument comes to a head early in Episode 4, in a much more tense mirror of a scene in Episode 2, both set in the Dominators’ incredibly groovy spaceship control room. In that earlier scene, the Dominators subject the Doctor and Jamie to a series of physical and intelligence tests, a disturbing sequence that might tip into unpleasantly sadistic but for Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines’ inspired ability to clown around and make things entertaining. Toba, on the other hand, is not one of nature’s jollifiers (despite providing some mirth by apparently peering up Jamie’s kilt in Episode 2). The drama when Toba oversteps the mark and gives Rago reason really to slap him down is more gripping than anything else in the story: the ambitious young subordinate makes the mistake of calling his boss weak during an unfavourable performance review, and suddenly finds himself subjected to exactly the same treatment as their victims. Officially, there’s no music in this story, but quite a bit of it’s actually supplied by Brian Hodgson of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the deep clattering tones as a Quark (of which more later) closes threateningly on Toba are very effective. It’s a vicious humiliation, and you wonder just how far Rago is going to push it – the half-crazed joy that comes into Rago’s eyes when he unleashes just a tiny bit of the sort of sadism Toba’s been boasting shows that he is a far more dangerous individual.
Senior Dominator Rago is for me the performance of the story, played by guest star Ronald Allen – a playboy in The Avengers, a send-up in The Comic Strip, and a mainstay of… Crossroads. Yet whatever you’ve heard about that soap, he has massive charisma that’s all the more effective for being underplayed. Playing one of the two characters who has a brain – and doomed by never quite realising that the Doctor is the other – he’s made up to look almost like a zombie, with staring, sunken eyes. Ironically, not only is he far less of a zombie than the Dulcians, and not only does he notice the Doctor’s eyes when his are the most noticeable in the show, but also, out of scary make-up he returned to Doctor Who a couple of years later (in a much better story) and turned out to be very handsome when being laid-back instead of intense. This time round, though, his charisma is very cold indeed.
Forty-three years ago this evening, The Dominators was broadcasting its… Middle bit. At the risk of giving the impression that the production was a bit sloppy, what would have been “Episode 3” is forever untitled, as they forgot to stick the caption on it. Inauspicious, you might think (though Terror of the Zygons and The Leisure Hive also began in late August and they were both terrific, so take your pick). At the time, The Dominators was broadcast between a repeat – something so rare, before BBC3 and DVD, that they worked it into the story – of The Evil of the Daleks, Patrick Troughton’s best story, and the first broadcast of The Mind Robber, his next-best story. So it was just one of many stories, with a brilliant one either side. Today, it’s one of the rare survivors of the BBC purges that burnt most of Mr Troughton’s time as the Doctor, forcing attention onto it as it never was in 1968.
This opened the third and last season for Matt Smith’s favourite Doctor, and Mr Troughton’s variable here: brilliant thinking on his feet with the Dominators, entertaining taking an aircraft to bits while flying in it or doing other bits of business with Frazer Hines’ Jamie; bizarrely fond of Dulkis, a planet of dull, two-hearted reactionaries who never do anything, particularly in view of their far scarier counterparts at the opposite end of the season; and noticeably losing interest and hamming it up at some points, having grown the catchphrase “Oh my word!” over the summer. His other companion Zoe gets a bit of a raw deal, as (the special features reveal) did the actress, so no wonder she doesn’t look like she’s having much fun. And another new member of the team, the sonic screwdriver, already has amazing magic powers way beyond its design specs – to think, Deputy Script Editor Terrance Dicks complains about how they use it these days…
Arthur Cox – later seen in last year’s The Eleventh Hour – is often slagged off for his part here as Cully, Dulkis’ James Dean, the oldest, plumpest, most follically challenged teenage rebel in space, but for me he’s up with Beryl Reid as Sigourney Weaver, Bernard Cribbins as Luke Skywalker and using Weta’s The Lord of Rings army-building CGI to make cute waving alien babies as perfectly wonderful Doctor Who casting. And he’s very entertaining, too, from his early “An adventure with Cully is something never to be forgotten” to a glamorous woman (they’ve clearly shagged, and she looks embarrassed about it) right through his exasperation at his civilisation to turning into a gleeful bomber. Cully gets involved by sailing into a danger area in a dodgy ship (it looks like a lemon-squeezer, making one of his party’s use of the word “zest” difficult, difficult, lemon difficult to get away with. Still, it blows up spectacularly, in what may be Doctor Who’s earliest example of serious BBC pyromania) and getting his handsome but dumb passengers killed; they also include a very camp handsome young man who’s clearly heckling because he’d expected to get the part and the girl, who in later life becomes a leading Shakespearean actor and the despicable Bruno Kransky in Brogue Male, and a dumpier, grumpier actor who also had a significant part in The Horns of Nimon, yet didn’t turn up at any of last year’s signings. Perhaps he’s embarrassed. No, for me the only thing about Cully that doesn’t work is that his part of the story was inspired by The Boy Who Cried Wolf: we never hear of his earlier pranks, just that he breaks the rules and so people sneer at him; everything he says on screen is the truth; and, undermining the fable entirely, not only does he never cry wolf, but the whole point of the story is that the Dulcians would never come running to deal with a threat, anyway.
Another element of the story that everyone slags off is the Quarks, the Dominators’ terrifying robot servants (not a spread, a subatomic particle nor a Star Trek character). And, all right, they’re not very terrifying, but they’re an attempt at something different, and I love them. Short boxes with spinning spiked heads and arms that pop out at strange angles, they have memorable voices: intended to sound like homicidal children (and with real schoolboys, mental state unmeasured, within their boxes), their giggling mania is mostly so high-pitched as to be incomprehensible. And then there’s the famous sound effect Quark Goes Berserk and Explodes. They were expressly commissioned as a marketing rival to the Daleks, but this was their only major appearance; as, despite their obviously 360-degree sensors, by the end of the story they’re being tripped up and destroyed in ways so pathetic that you can’t help going ‘Awwhh’ at them, they split fandom. Essentially, some fans think they’re completely rubbish… And on the other side, there’s me. You see, when I was a little boy, I saw photos of three green Quarks striding across the Radio Times Doctor Who Tenth Anniversary Special, and I thought they looked brilliant. Sources differ as to whether they were actually green or grey, but I know for a fact they’re really maroon and orange. Because those were the two colours of paint my Dad had enough of when I was a schoolboy, mental state uncertain, in a home-made Quark box – aged eight, I came second in the local fancy dress competition to my mate Ste’s fantastic Dalek creation (which had the curves). And they’re still really groovy. Even now I’ve seen them.
The Quarks have some great point-of-view shots, at least – used to fabulous effect in the brilliant DVD Coming Soon trailer (though this DVD really needs a trailer for The Mind Robber, too) – and an eerie electronic bubbling sound as they open fire; the first, and most expensive, time they kill someone is a chillingly memorable effect. Andrew Skilleter’s moody cover for Ian Marter’s taut and gripping Target novelisation of the story helped, too, and the book encouraged me to play with chemistry sets (I bet one friend’s bedroom ceiling is still covered in marks after I persuaded him to let me mix the more poppable substances in his). I can’t see them coming back on telly this Autumn, or next, though. Not least because after the Macra returned in 2007’s marvellous Gridlock, I wrote about how I’d redesign the ‘homicidal children’ Quarks in the forms of spheres with spikes and expandable implements, like evil penknives… And then along came the Toclafane two months later.
I like Cully. I like the Quarks. And yet even for me, The Dominators remains fatally flawed. I’ve not gone over how dull the script can be, how repetitive the ‘action’ ping-ponging between Island and City, how jaw-droppingly unflattering the dresses the Dulcians wear, how it’s not remotely as kinky as the title might make you hope. The problem is deep in the story’s very conception. I have problems with the series’ moral compass for this year’s stories, but this story’s moral compass isn’t uncertain – it’s pointing in absolutely the wrong direction, save the points where the producers intervened or the writers simply messed up their own conservative allegory. The production team wanted ‘the new Daleks’; the writers wanted to write a Terry Nation story, with much of it taken from the original The Daleks and The Dalek Invasion of Earth (though later Doctor Who borrows from The Dominators, too; not just the Toclafane, but look at the plot behind Aliens of London, or at The Sontaran Experiment, telling a similar story at 40% the length, with more style, but not as fab a robot). And what they took from The Dalek Invasion of Earth is not just the solution, and not just ‘what if the Nazis had landed,’ but ‘what if the Nazis had landed after those bloody hippies had taken over’.
The intimidatingly prolific Doctor Who blog TARDIS Eruditorum loathes The Dominators with a fiery passion and a plausible argument:
Whether it’s just the nature of Doctor Who or the writers making a hash of it, there are points at which the series’ innate Liberalism breaks through. Though Dulkis is presented as a world long after the hippies have taken over – men in frocks, horrors – they’re also rich and conservative, and while the younger generation (well, one of them) are rebelling to rediscover excitement, asking questions and resisting authority is not just Liberal but, well, counter-cultural. Not only do they not ‘get’ what the hippies stand for nor the courage of non-violence, but they don’t understand that backing a youth rebellion against stuffy old men undermines their attempt to pit the series against ‘young people today’. Even the younger Dominator does it; hopefully, the writers failed to spot that he is, in practical terms, right – the more intelligent, analytical Dominator is brilliantly played and written like the grown-up, but if he’d just shot everyone in a spasm of bloodlust as Toba wanted, he’d have won. So the script’s ‘We should stand against the Nazis and the hippies!’ message manages to fall apart both in a more Liberal and in an even-more-fascist-than-it-thinks-it’s-being direction. And as for the sexual politics… Well, the text notes reveal what the BBC thought of the purposes of their actresses, while star student Kando on screen is so blatantly as thick as two short planks that when she’s praised by her tutor after not even getting her parrot-fashion lines right, it’s difficult not to conclude that he must be shagging her (add that Jamie suddenly knows what “homework” is and that Zoe, with her perfect recall, shouldn’t think much of her). Though perhaps she is qualified to Dulcian standard, as Educator Balan turns out to be absurdly literal to the point of idiocy, too.
Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln having previously written two rather good stories, this is where they hit a brick wall and never wrote for the series again – the latter, hilariously, starting the whole Knights Templar / Holy Grail / Jesus’ bloodline conspiracy fad with The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail – though not necessarily for their politics being watered down, nor for their final couple of episodes being shredded. No, it was because they and the BBC fell out over who would profit from the Quark goldrush. Titter ye not. I’d still love a toy Quark, but I bet Character Options won’t touch those two’s contracts with a barge pole.
If this hasn’t been a wholehearted recommendation of the DVD, there are more reasons to buy it – not least because it has one of the biggest leaps in picture quality from the VHS. I watched my twenty-year-old tape recently, and it’s shocking how almost unwatchably fuzzy the first episode was, in particular; the improvement for the opening titles and space fleet is fantastic. Some of the old film stock remains quite perished, but if you have the story on tape, compare and marvel. Slightly more of the picture’s been captured here, too, as I suddenly noticed on spotting part of Barry Newbery’s lovely sets that I’d never seen before. There’s also about half a minute of ‘new’ footage, all from late in Episode 4 and the start of Episode 5 where censors slashed the shooting of Brian Cant (Brian Cant!), the torture of Teel – even in this restored version we only hear it, but if anything watching Toba’s greedily gleeful face is more disturbing – and Balan’s killing, which now goes on horribly long but is still very badly edited, not to spare our feelings but because it was just clumsily cut between shots in the first place.
As well as a photo gallery, pdfs and a feature on press clippings, Recharge and Equalise is a proper ‘Making of’ which essentially turns into one big bitching session about who’s to blame between the co-writer and the script editor, on separate cameras! Frazer’s a sweetie, though, while Brian Hodgson is handsome and dignified, and the late director comes across as a horribly sexist martinet. The commentary is similar but more variable, thanks to swapping people in and out – it only really catches light when teaming companions Wendy Padbury (now an agent, who discovered Matt Smith) and Frazer Hines, and that’s not often enough. Episode 4’s is probably the best, but perhaps I just enjoyed the shagging gossip and young David Troughton’s long-suffering reaction to one glamorous woman… I enjoyed the text notes revealing just how much Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines worked out between them in rehearsal, too – including the laxative joke that About Time and TARDIS Eruditorum claim helped put him off the part – but am disappointed that, given that the sixth episode was dropped and the fifth written by the script editors rather than the writers, who took their names off it, there’s absolutely nothing about the storyline of the original ending.
I remain very fond of bits of The Dominators, but there’s a lot that just doesn’t work on screen (and sometimes that’s a blessing). Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping’s seminal Doctor Who – The DisContinuity Guide (the first to include analysis – and mockery – rather than just an episode guide) called it sadistic and dull, and those two words stuck in my head. I remember some years ago talking about the story – goodness knows why – with Doctor Who writer Rob Shearman. Now, Rob’s written a great many erudite and a great many more piss-taking Who reviews in his time, and it’s sometimes difficult to tell which is which. There’s no other person I know with such a talent for barefaced Devil’s Advocacy. But when, unconsciously echoing Cornelltoppingday’s words, I told him how much I’d like to like it, but whenever I watch it, it just seems sadistic and dull, “But that’s what I like about it,” he replied judiciously, “its dullness, and its… sadism…” At which point he corpsed, defeated. Not even Rob could lie with a straight face about enjoying The Dominators.
Finally, these days Paul Cornell is a major TV and comics writer and author of the superb Doctor Who TV stories Human Nature and Father’s Day. Back in 1995, he was known to a smaller audience for short stories, reviews and silly songs, and author of the superb Doctor Who New Adventures novels Human Nature and Timewyrm: Revelation. While he didn’t think much of The Dominators in 1995’s The DisContinuity Guide, at around the same time that was published, the story and Blur’s Parklife inspired him to write some lyrics to a possibly familiar tune. As it’s hard to find these days, Paul’s kindly given me permission to reprint it here…
(from the tune by Blur)
Doctor Who – The Dominators may not set the happiest of precedents for this weekend’s Let’s Kill Hitler. With mediocre ratings and bad reviews, it may be set on an obscure planet in a distant galaxy rather than in the recognisable history of the Third Reich, but its authors would claim it’s all about what happens when a culture lacks the moral backbone we showed in 1939, while its detractors point out that the authors set up a fight between fascists and hippies, then side with the fascists. I once wrote about How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal; ‘not like this’ would be a start. Even the less political broad sweep of fandom don’t much care for this story: back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – and placed this at a lowly 191 (at 49.99%, the first to score under half marks). Against all reason, I’m fond of it, so I might put it 20 or so places higher…
While this ‘taster’ may not be short, incidentally, my style in these is not to be too spoilery. So read on without fear of finding out the key twists.
That Golden Moment
“It is not unknown for a leader who is unfit to be replaced.”Easily the most striking figures in The Dominators are the two Dominators themselves, representatives of an empire that stretches across galaxies and towering above the rest of the cast, both physically and in acting presence. We never hear about this empire again, so it’s easy to assume they fall into civil war (possibly giving way to their thrilling robot servants) – the two of them are arguing from the very first scene to the end of the story. Probationer Toba, of the hungrily sadistic expression, wants to destroy everything in sight. His boss, Navigator Rago, is the intelligent one who wants to evaluate and make use of things before just blowing them to bits, and it’s thank to a superb actor that he doesn’t come across entirely as the junior Dominator’s mum, given that most of his role consists of coming home and finding that young Toba’s broken another toy or impatiently directing Toba’s attention to yet another vital fact he’s failed to spot.
“It is not unknown for a mutinous subordinate to be executed!”
This argument comes to a head early in Episode 4, in a much more tense mirror of a scene in Episode 2, both set in the Dominators’ incredibly groovy spaceship control room. In that earlier scene, the Dominators subject the Doctor and Jamie to a series of physical and intelligence tests, a disturbing sequence that might tip into unpleasantly sadistic but for Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines’ inspired ability to clown around and make things entertaining. Toba, on the other hand, is not one of nature’s jollifiers (despite providing some mirth by apparently peering up Jamie’s kilt in Episode 2). The drama when Toba oversteps the mark and gives Rago reason really to slap him down is more gripping than anything else in the story: the ambitious young subordinate makes the mistake of calling his boss weak during an unfavourable performance review, and suddenly finds himself subjected to exactly the same treatment as their victims. Officially, there’s no music in this story, but quite a bit of it’s actually supplied by Brian Hodgson of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the deep clattering tones as a Quark (of which more later) closes threateningly on Toba are very effective. It’s a vicious humiliation, and you wonder just how far Rago is going to push it – the half-crazed joy that comes into Rago’s eyes when he unleashes just a tiny bit of the sort of sadism Toba’s been boasting shows that he is a far more dangerous individual.
Senior Dominator Rago is for me the performance of the story, played by guest star Ronald Allen – a playboy in The Avengers, a send-up in The Comic Strip, and a mainstay of… Crossroads. Yet whatever you’ve heard about that soap, he has massive charisma that’s all the more effective for being underplayed. Playing one of the two characters who has a brain – and doomed by never quite realising that the Doctor is the other – he’s made up to look almost like a zombie, with staring, sunken eyes. Ironically, not only is he far less of a zombie than the Dulcians, and not only does he notice the Doctor’s eyes when his are the most noticeable in the show, but also, out of scary make-up he returned to Doctor Who a couple of years later (in a much better story) and turned out to be very handsome when being laid-back instead of intense. This time round, though, his charisma is very cold indeed.
Something Else To Look Out For
Forty-three years ago this evening, The Dominators was broadcasting its… Middle bit. At the risk of giving the impression that the production was a bit sloppy, what would have been “Episode 3” is forever untitled, as they forgot to stick the caption on it. Inauspicious, you might think (though Terror of the Zygons and The Leisure Hive also began in late August and they were both terrific, so take your pick). At the time, The Dominators was broadcast between a repeat – something so rare, before BBC3 and DVD, that they worked it into the story – of The Evil of the Daleks, Patrick Troughton’s best story, and the first broadcast of The Mind Robber, his next-best story. So it was just one of many stories, with a brilliant one either side. Today, it’s one of the rare survivors of the BBC purges that burnt most of Mr Troughton’s time as the Doctor, forcing attention onto it as it never was in 1968.
This opened the third and last season for Matt Smith’s favourite Doctor, and Mr Troughton’s variable here: brilliant thinking on his feet with the Dominators, entertaining taking an aircraft to bits while flying in it or doing other bits of business with Frazer Hines’ Jamie; bizarrely fond of Dulkis, a planet of dull, two-hearted reactionaries who never do anything, particularly in view of their far scarier counterparts at the opposite end of the season; and noticeably losing interest and hamming it up at some points, having grown the catchphrase “Oh my word!” over the summer. His other companion Zoe gets a bit of a raw deal, as (the special features reveal) did the actress, so no wonder she doesn’t look like she’s having much fun. And another new member of the team, the sonic screwdriver, already has amazing magic powers way beyond its design specs – to think, Deputy Script Editor Terrance Dicks complains about how they use it these days…
Arthur Cox – later seen in last year’s The Eleventh Hour – is often slagged off for his part here as Cully, Dulkis’ James Dean, the oldest, plumpest, most follically challenged teenage rebel in space, but for me he’s up with Beryl Reid as Sigourney Weaver, Bernard Cribbins as Luke Skywalker and using Weta’s The Lord of Rings army-building CGI to make cute waving alien babies as perfectly wonderful Doctor Who casting. And he’s very entertaining, too, from his early “An adventure with Cully is something never to be forgotten” to a glamorous woman (they’ve clearly shagged, and she looks embarrassed about it) right through his exasperation at his civilisation to turning into a gleeful bomber. Cully gets involved by sailing into a danger area in a dodgy ship (it looks like a lemon-squeezer, making one of his party’s use of the word “zest” difficult, difficult, lemon difficult to get away with. Still, it blows up spectacularly, in what may be Doctor Who’s earliest example of serious BBC pyromania) and getting his handsome but dumb passengers killed; they also include a very camp handsome young man who’s clearly heckling because he’d expected to get the part and the girl, who in later life becomes a leading Shakespearean actor and the despicable Bruno Kransky in Brogue Male, and a dumpier, grumpier actor who also had a significant part in The Horns of Nimon, yet didn’t turn up at any of last year’s signings. Perhaps he’s embarrassed. No, for me the only thing about Cully that doesn’t work is that his part of the story was inspired by The Boy Who Cried Wolf: we never hear of his earlier pranks, just that he breaks the rules and so people sneer at him; everything he says on screen is the truth; and, undermining the fable entirely, not only does he never cry wolf, but the whole point of the story is that the Dulcians would never come running to deal with a threat, anyway.
Another element of the story that everyone slags off is the Quarks, the Dominators’ terrifying robot servants (not a spread, a subatomic particle nor a Star Trek character). And, all right, they’re not very terrifying, but they’re an attempt at something different, and I love them. Short boxes with spinning spiked heads and arms that pop out at strange angles, they have memorable voices: intended to sound like homicidal children (and with real schoolboys, mental state unmeasured, within their boxes), their giggling mania is mostly so high-pitched as to be incomprehensible. And then there’s the famous sound effect Quark Goes Berserk and Explodes. They were expressly commissioned as a marketing rival to the Daleks, but this was their only major appearance; as, despite their obviously 360-degree sensors, by the end of the story they’re being tripped up and destroyed in ways so pathetic that you can’t help going ‘Awwhh’ at them, they split fandom. Essentially, some fans think they’re completely rubbish… And on the other side, there’s me. You see, when I was a little boy, I saw photos of three green Quarks striding across the Radio Times Doctor Who Tenth Anniversary Special, and I thought they looked brilliant. Sources differ as to whether they were actually green or grey, but I know for a fact they’re really maroon and orange. Because those were the two colours of paint my Dad had enough of when I was a schoolboy, mental state uncertain, in a home-made Quark box – aged eight, I came second in the local fancy dress competition to my mate Ste’s fantastic Dalek creation (which had the curves). And they’re still really groovy. Even now I’ve seen them.
My Secret Shame: I Was A Pre-Teen Quark
The Quarks have some great point-of-view shots, at least – used to fabulous effect in the brilliant DVD Coming Soon trailer (though this DVD really needs a trailer for The Mind Robber, too) – and an eerie electronic bubbling sound as they open fire; the first, and most expensive, time they kill someone is a chillingly memorable effect. Andrew Skilleter’s moody cover for Ian Marter’s taut and gripping Target novelisation of the story helped, too, and the book encouraged me to play with chemistry sets (I bet one friend’s bedroom ceiling is still covered in marks after I persuaded him to let me mix the more poppable substances in his). I can’t see them coming back on telly this Autumn, or next, though. Not least because after the Macra returned in 2007’s marvellous Gridlock, I wrote about how I’d redesign the ‘homicidal children’ Quarks in the forms of spheres with spikes and expandable implements, like evil penknives… And then along came the Toclafane two months later.
How To Make Doctor Who A Bit Fascist
I like Cully. I like the Quarks. And yet even for me, The Dominators remains fatally flawed. I’ve not gone over how dull the script can be, how repetitive the ‘action’ ping-ponging between Island and City, how jaw-droppingly unflattering the dresses the Dulcians wear, how it’s not remotely as kinky as the title might make you hope. The problem is deep in the story’s very conception. I have problems with the series’ moral compass for this year’s stories, but this story’s moral compass isn’t uncertain – it’s pointing in absolutely the wrong direction, save the points where the producers intervened or the writers simply messed up their own conservative allegory. The production team wanted ‘the new Daleks’; the writers wanted to write a Terry Nation story, with much of it taken from the original The Daleks and The Dalek Invasion of Earth (though later Doctor Who borrows from The Dominators, too; not just the Toclafane, but look at the plot behind Aliens of London, or at The Sontaran Experiment, telling a similar story at 40% the length, with more style, but not as fab a robot). And what they took from The Dalek Invasion of Earth is not just the solution, and not just ‘what if the Nazis had landed,’ but ‘what if the Nazis had landed after those bloody hippies had taken over’.
The intimidatingly prolific Doctor Who blog TARDIS Eruditorum loathes The Dominators with a fiery passion and a plausible argument:
“…instead of pacifists being good people who can be made better, pacifists are deluded fools and it's funny to watch them die. It is easily the most cynical and mean-spirited scene I have seen yet in Doctor Who. It is a scene that exists only to take people who are acting out of a genuine moral conviction and mock them for their own morality.”And that’s about the toned-down version of the story, once the production team had taken a hatchet to it. If you read his article, you’ll find my partial defence underneath, though there’s not much I can do to salvage the politics. Basically, writers Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln hated hippies and thought their peacenik ways a threat to all that made Britain great, so wanted to write a story showing them rightfully getting their noses bloodied. It’s the horribly misbegotten Doctor Who equivalent of Carry On Camping, which made exactly the same mistake at almost exactly the same time of putting a resolutely anti-authoritarian series on the wrong side of the youth divide (though if you want to see Wendy Padbury’s Quarks, you’ll have to watch The Blood On Satan’s Claw). In part, they were toned down by the production team; in part, they just weren’t talented enough right-wing polemicists not to torpedo their own message. But it’s bad enough, and, yes, “mean-spirited” probably hits it, and that’s just not something Doctor Who should be.
“It is an overt attack on the ethical foundations of Doctor Who. Not only is it an attack on the entire ethos that underlies the Doctor as a character, it's an attempt to twist and pervert the show away from what it is and towards something ugly, cruel, and just plain unpleasant.”
Whether it’s just the nature of Doctor Who or the writers making a hash of it, there are points at which the series’ innate Liberalism breaks through. Though Dulkis is presented as a world long after the hippies have taken over – men in frocks, horrors – they’re also rich and conservative, and while the younger generation (well, one of them) are rebelling to rediscover excitement, asking questions and resisting authority is not just Liberal but, well, counter-cultural. Not only do they not ‘get’ what the hippies stand for nor the courage of non-violence, but they don’t understand that backing a youth rebellion against stuffy old men undermines their attempt to pit the series against ‘young people today’. Even the younger Dominator does it; hopefully, the writers failed to spot that he is, in practical terms, right – the more intelligent, analytical Dominator is brilliantly played and written like the grown-up, but if he’d just shot everyone in a spasm of bloodlust as Toba wanted, he’d have won. So the script’s ‘We should stand against the Nazis and the hippies!’ message manages to fall apart both in a more Liberal and in an even-more-fascist-than-it-thinks-it’s-being direction. And as for the sexual politics… Well, the text notes reveal what the BBC thought of the purposes of their actresses, while star student Kando on screen is so blatantly as thick as two short planks that when she’s praised by her tutor after not even getting her parrot-fashion lines right, it’s difficult not to conclude that he must be shagging her (add that Jamie suddenly knows what “homework” is and that Zoe, with her perfect recall, shouldn’t think much of her). Though perhaps she is qualified to Dulcian standard, as Educator Balan turns out to be absurdly literal to the point of idiocy, too.
Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln having previously written two rather good stories, this is where they hit a brick wall and never wrote for the series again – the latter, hilariously, starting the whole Knights Templar / Holy Grail / Jesus’ bloodline conspiracy fad with The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail – though not necessarily for their politics being watered down, nor for their final couple of episodes being shredded. No, it was because they and the BBC fell out over who would profit from the Quark goldrush. Titter ye not. I’d still love a toy Quark, but I bet Character Options won’t touch those two’s contracts with a barge pole.
New Bits!
If this hasn’t been a wholehearted recommendation of the DVD, there are more reasons to buy it – not least because it has one of the biggest leaps in picture quality from the VHS. I watched my twenty-year-old tape recently, and it’s shocking how almost unwatchably fuzzy the first episode was, in particular; the improvement for the opening titles and space fleet is fantastic. Some of the old film stock remains quite perished, but if you have the story on tape, compare and marvel. Slightly more of the picture’s been captured here, too, as I suddenly noticed on spotting part of Barry Newbery’s lovely sets that I’d never seen before. There’s also about half a minute of ‘new’ footage, all from late in Episode 4 and the start of Episode 5 where censors slashed the shooting of Brian Cant (Brian Cant!), the torture of Teel – even in this restored version we only hear it, but if anything watching Toba’s greedily gleeful face is more disturbing – and Balan’s killing, which now goes on horribly long but is still very badly edited, not to spare our feelings but because it was just clumsily cut between shots in the first place.
As well as a photo gallery, pdfs and a feature on press clippings, Recharge and Equalise is a proper ‘Making of’ which essentially turns into one big bitching session about who’s to blame between the co-writer and the script editor, on separate cameras! Frazer’s a sweetie, though, while Brian Hodgson is handsome and dignified, and the late director comes across as a horribly sexist martinet. The commentary is similar but more variable, thanks to swapping people in and out – it only really catches light when teaming companions Wendy Padbury (now an agent, who discovered Matt Smith) and Frazer Hines, and that’s not often enough. Episode 4’s is probably the best, but perhaps I just enjoyed the shagging gossip and young David Troughton’s long-suffering reaction to one glamorous woman… I enjoyed the text notes revealing just how much Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines worked out between them in rehearsal, too – including the laxative joke that About Time and TARDIS Eruditorum claim helped put him off the part – but am disappointed that, given that the sixth episode was dropped and the fifth written by the script editors rather than the writers, who took their names off it, there’s absolutely nothing about the storyline of the original ending.
I remain very fond of bits of The Dominators, but there’s a lot that just doesn’t work on screen (and sometimes that’s a blessing). Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping’s seminal Doctor Who – The DisContinuity Guide (the first to include analysis – and mockery – rather than just an episode guide) called it sadistic and dull, and those two words stuck in my head. I remember some years ago talking about the story – goodness knows why – with Doctor Who writer Rob Shearman. Now, Rob’s written a great many erudite and a great many more piss-taking Who reviews in his time, and it’s sometimes difficult to tell which is which. There’s no other person I know with such a talent for barefaced Devil’s Advocacy. But when, unconsciously echoing Cornelltoppingday’s words, I told him how much I’d like to like it, but whenever I watch it, it just seems sadistic and dull, “But that’s what I like about it,” he replied judiciously, “its dullness, and its… sadism…” At which point he corpsed, defeated. Not even Rob could lie with a straight face about enjoying The Dominators.
Finally, these days Paul Cornell is a major TV and comics writer and author of the superb Doctor Who TV stories Human Nature and Father’s Day. Back in 1995, he was known to a smaller audience for short stories, reviews and silly songs, and author of the superb Doctor Who New Adventures novels Human Nature and Timewyrm: Revelation. While he didn’t think much of The Dominators in 1995’s The DisContinuity Guide, at around the same time that was published, the story and Blur’s Parklife inspired him to write some lyrics to a possibly familiar tune. As it’s hard to find these days, Paul’s kindly given me permission to reprint it here…
Quarklife
(from the tune by Blur)
Resilience is a preference for the spiked practitioners of what is known as…– Paul Cornell, 17th April 1995
Quarklife!
And big-shouldered suits should be avoided if you want to make it through what is known as…
Quarklife!
Toba’s got a padded suit, he gets intimidated by the Dulcians, they’d love a bit of him.
Who’s that fat Time Lord snooping? You should cut down on your porklife, mate, get some exercise!
Dominators
The Dominators
They both go hand in hand
Hand in hand through their
Quarklife…
I activate when my power’s replenished, except on Wednesday when I’m rudely awakened by Dominator Rago.
I check my disintegrator, flap my arms about, and then think about leaving the saucer.
I spin my head, I sometimes spin my whole body. It gives me a sense of enormous well-being.
And then I’m happy for the rest of the day, safe in the knowledge there will always be a part of my programming devoted to it.
Dominators
The Dominators
They both go hand in hand
Hand in hand through their
Quarklife…
It’s got nothing to do with your Ka Faraq Gatri, you know…
And it’s not about you Chumblies who go round and round and round…
Labels: Carry On, Digby Spode, Doctor Who, DVD Tasters, Matt Smith, Music, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Patrick Troughton, Personal, Pictures, Reviews
Friday, May 20, 2011
DVD Taster: Doctor Who – Myths and Legends
Saturday’s Doctor Who – The Doctor’s Wife showed the TARDIS with a life of its own and TARDISes inside TARDISes; so did The Time Monster, broadcast 39 years ago today. Available with Underworld and The Horns of Nimon in the Myths and Legends DVD boxed set, starring Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker, K9 and the Master, these three stories offer a distinctively ’70s interpretation of the Greek Myths. So do they build on those myths to make Doctor Who a still more legendary epic? No. All Doctor Who is, of course, brilliant, but some of it’s more brilliant than others. None of these stories are the worst least brilliant Doctor Who ever made… But all three are in the running! And yet even here, there are marvellous things to treasure.
While this ‘taster’ may not be short, incidentally, my policy in these is not to be too spoilery. So read on without fear of finding out the key twists.
I’d certainly rate The Doctor’s Wife very much more highly than The Time Monster, though the 1972 story’s take on the fall of Atlantis was at least more interesting than BBC1’s dreary docu-drama Atlantis a couple of Sundays ago (terrible dialogue, but prettier – both the special effects and the Atlantean male lead). That aside, few fans have a good word to say for these three tales. Some Doctor Who DVD boxed sets just offer stories sequentially; others have stories from different years based around some more or less distinct ‘theme’. Those themed are usually a mix – Beneath the Surface, the other ‘trilogy’ boxed set with Pertwee and another Doctor, runs from absolutely brilliant, to exciting but flawed, to pretty shonky – but this box is all of pretty much the same unfortunate quality. Officially called “Myths and Legends,” it’s been given a lot of other names from fans. As I try to be positive, I can’t repeat any of them. However, back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200 TV Doctor Who stories to that point (I made it 204). So what did the mass of fandom make of these stories? Not a lot. Out of 200, The Time Monster flaps in at 187, and I can’t argue with that; Underworld is at 197 and The Horns of Nimon 189, and though I might put each of those perhaps 10 or 20 places higher on a good day, that still leaves them deep in the lower reaches.
Between them, the Myths and Legends borrow from the Titans and the fall of Atlantis, the Argonauts, the Minotaur (twice) and several other elements from Greek legend, but you’ll probably have gathered that none of them quite hit the spot. The Time Monster has a more ‘magic’ take on it – or, at least, New Age hippiedom – while the other two both sci-fi it up and largely miss the point. The Time Monster and The Horns of Nimon are the minotaur stories, the latter more thoroughly (try to ignore it not being real in 1968’s The Mind Robber, and note that – in DVD order – The Creature from the Pit was one month later, which almost makes sense of the Doctor mentioning the labyrinth); the Nimon isn’t the series’ most successful monster, but it beats the others here – a flappy thing, men with tin tea-cosies on and the most disappointing “dragon” ever conceived. Underworld and The Horns of Nimon both play with asteroids / clashing rocks, gravity / whirlpools, lost ships and fallen empires, the former merely tedious (though I loved it when I was six) and the latter teetering into ‘so bad it’s good’ – though less so, for either category, than many reviews would have you believe. Ironically, The Key To Time saga was first broadcast between those two and does a far better job of being legendary, despite only a sideswipe at Greek myth. So, really, if you’re short of Doctor Who boxed sets, you should buy that first (and if you want a thrilling volcanic historical tragedy from Doctor Who, why not try The Fires of Pompeii?). But, anyway, the prologue…
This one’s the full house for your Greek Myths: Doctor Who does both Atlantis and the Minotaur three times, and The Time Monster hits the jackpot as the only story to feature both, showing exactly how much this jackpot’s worth. Ingrid Pitt steals the show, though it takes a while for her to turn up; Darth Vader’s involved, too – but don’t get your hopes up; and who could the mysterious “Professor Thascalos” be? Oh… You guessed (and even he overacts mightily here). Like Planet of the Spiders, this is co-written by Barry Letts and Roger Sloman: that one, apparently, the most ‘Barry’ of their scripts together, this the most ‘Slo’; though they do have much in common (changes of scene half-way through, the Doctor’s guru and ‘magic crystals’), this one has the more achingly trendy hippy ending. And there are six interminable episodes to crawl through before you get to it.
Purists may well say that this premonition doesn’t have much of a logical connection to the plot of Episode One – well, there isn’t much of a logical basis to what passes for the plot of Episode One, anyway. It’s disappointing that when we reach the inevitable destruction of Atlantis at the end of the story, it doesn’t look anywhere near as good as this, but by then we’ll have had nearly six episodes to get used to this particular story not looking anywhere near as good as it should. The first signal of this is when the Doctor wakes to find Jo Grant wearing one of her most early ’70s and most hideous outfits (brown and yellow!), with lines that send up how badly she’s usually written (“Look, I know I’m exceedingly dim, but would you mind explaining?”). Before long, though, one of his companions gets revenge on the patronising Pertwee – the Doctor demands agents be alerted world-wide because he’s just seen the Master, only for the Brigadier to deliver the perfect put-down when his advisor lets slip the source of this ‘intelligence’:
The Time Monster is from dead in the middle of Jon Pertwee’s five-year run as the Doctor, while he’s still exiled to Earth and working with UNIT, and it finishes the series’ ninth season with one of its very few deliberately epic season finales – but, though it tries so hard, it’s probably the second-biggest flop the series has ever had at achieving any such thing. As I’ve intimated above, it doesn’t really get going until about two-thirds of the way in before petering out again at the climax (as I said the other week, exactly the reverse of Planet of the Spiders), and very little of it makes much sense. It’s impossible to believe that the Brigadier and Sergeant Benton wouldn’t recognise the Master, particularly when he shouts his head off for no reason other than his Time Lord powers sensing an approaching cliffhanger – and what are they doing attending a research project in Cambridge, anyway? Why does UNIT, rather than just the ministry, send an observer? Why are this UN team suddenly part of the UK government? Why doesn’t their scientific advisor go along, just the military side, who know naff all about science? Why does Dudley Simpson compose that hideously ‘jaunty’ theme for the Doctor’s car Bessie? Why is Dr Ingram astonished at the crystal being “the actual crystal” from Atlantis, when she could never have heard of Kronos or its bling, so she should be shocked that it’s ‘the actual Atlantis’? Why are modern troops and Roundheads perfectly matched in battle, with the New Model Army never having to reload and, equally magically, no-one dying? How come the TARDIS can suddenly move about as much as it likes, as if they can’t be arsed remembering the Doctor was supposed to be ‘grounded’? Where did it get its ‘Get out of cliffhanger free’ lever? And what on Earth were they thinking when they spent ten minutes of gibberish with the Doctor saying, ‘No, wait, wait, this is really cool, I used to do a lot of it when I was a student,’ involving an empty wine bottle…? No, actually, I think that one may have answered itself.
This story may also win a special prize for Doctor Who sexism. The series in the ’60s was mostly moderately ahead of its time in giving good parts to the women leads, not least because the very nature of the series made it impossible for them to just stay at home; Pertwee’s first, best season had Dr Liz Shaw, cool, brainy and more than able to hold her own against the Doctor. She was then succeeded by Jojo Grant (as she’s dubbed here), the series’ first companion deliberately designed to be nowhere near as good as her predecessor, so the Doctor could ‘take her under his wing’. Much of the time, Katy Manning is so sparky in the role that she saves the character – but 1971’s hugely sexist shift back was a terrible idea, and by 1972 producer (and co-writer here) Barry Letts was thinking that maybe he’d better ‘do feminism’. Unfortunately, rather than ’60s Who’s attitude of simply having intelligent, competent women who were rarely put down or indeed commented on for being women, Barry’s brilliant plan was to have a career woman whose standing up for herself is followed by exclaiming “Men!” and then threatening to cry. Last time we watched this story together, my reaction to the line “May God bless the good ship Women’s Lib and all who sail in her” was apparently so volcanic that Richard laughed like a hyena (not at the line itself, you understand). Despite this, there are two saving graces: patronise her he may, but the Master still trusts Dr Ingram to do important work for him, which is more than the überpatronising Doctor ever does with Jo; and in the novel by Terrance Dicks – not himself the series’ leading feminist standard-bearer – he nails that the Master “didn’t assume that he was superior just to women. He was superior to everybody.”
Bizarrely, Queen Galleia of Atlantis comes across far better than the attempt to write a ‘modern’ woman, though to be fair to the authors each is given a callow male counterpart who’s not nearly as good at what they do as the women (Stuart a less impressive scientist; Hippias a far less charismatic tarty piece – the other week’s Atlantis docudrama was dreary, but at least their equivalent eye candy was prettier). And with Ingrid Pitt’s fabulous Galleia comes sex, in a way that hadn’t really before in Doctor Who – while the Doctor wasn’t allowed snoggage until 2005, here the Master seduces the Queen. It’s something of a relief, actually, as from Nick Courtney’s relish in exclaiming “Tom-TIT!”, the shape of the time sensor and Jo wearing a floppy belt instead of a skirt, until this point in the story you get a sense that someone on the production team wasn’t getting any. Or, as we always remark on hearing “You dare mock the High Priest?” Oooh, TOMTITter ye not!
So, yes, there are some things here worth watching after all. The glamorous, strong Queen and the wise, surprisingly bitchy King of Atlantis are the two best things in it, and worth waiting for. The King, in particular, gets some tantalising scenes on film before the action’s fully shifted to Atlantis, setting up the mystery of his age and his Age, and some very funny put-downs of the Master, followed by a subtle test disguised as gallantry to Jo. The Master is often very entertaining railing against his rubbish henchmen, even if “I’ve never seen a more inept performance” may be giving a hostage to fortune, and charismatic when he chats up the Queen, though in between Delgado is by far at his hammiest. And when Sergeant Benton and his ‘crack team’ of severe Dr Ruth and florid-shirted slacker Stuart are running about, all they’re missing is a big dumb talking dog (actually – that’s Benton). It’s a shame they waste the story’s initial idea of excitingly anachronistic attacks on making them merely a device to slow down the plot in the middle, but from the same part of the story, if you’ve bought Spearhead From Space (re-released just last week) you might forgive a comedy yokel: you’ll recognise he was a UNIT soldier in the earlier story, so clearly he’s lost his mind and been farmed off to the country. The story’s high point for many fans is a ‘charming’ Buddhist parable in a dungeon; unfortunately, having seen it cross-cut with a Monty Python sketch to Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, I find it very difficult to sit through – as would Jo, if she wasn’t chained down.
On top of some pretty remarkable picture restoration, the DVD has a middling set of extras – a considerably more experimental commentary than usual (swapping between several different teams of people to get different perspectives for each episode), text notes, photo gallery and so on, with the highlight a ‘Making of’ that majors on the science, with Professor Jim Al-Khalili (in truth, the MASTER! Not really) bravely trying to make sense of it all. And, utterly absurdly, the story’s soon to have its own range of action toys. But the real ‘extras’ for The Time Monster are to be found in other stories – one in particular that it rips off and several that, incredibly, it inspired…
‘Jason and the Astronauts’. The magic silhouettes of the bloke in the scarf, the woman in the leather bikini and the tin dog are the old series’ most iconic line-up, and you get all three – Tom Baker, Leela and K9 – in this story. It’s from Season 15, a troubled time for the series: Mary Whitehouse had seen off a brilliant producer; the brilliant script editor had just left; and their replacements, while promising, were dropped in it at the last minute at exactly the moment all the BBC’s money ran out (it’s also a season where most stories end in great big explosions: ‘Boom and Bust’, you might call it). So this isn’t the most polished story ever made, and they’ve not yet come up with the wit in their scripts that replaces the horror the old regime was told off for. The result is a story that lacks verve, lacks skilled hands knowing what’ll work and what won’t, and perhaps more famously than any other Doctor Who adventure lacks a budget. And whereas most Who stories that look a bit threadbare have a strong script and lively actors to fall back on, here both underperform. This is perhaps the only Tom Baker story that’s just plain dull.
Though Terrance Dicks’ novelisation mostly tells the story more briskly, it opens with a five-page Prologue setting out how the Time Lords were welcomed as “gods” by the Minyan people, who picked up technology too fast, kicked out their “gods” and then destroyed themselves – giving one of my favourite offhand lines: “A hundred thousand years went by.” And that’s where we are in Part One: the doomed Minyans sent off a ship to settle a new world… Which was never seen again, and the crew of the ancient ship the Doctor finds have been looking for it ever since. Not unreasonably, they’ve got very weary along the way, not least because it’s been the same people throughout: they don’t have the Time Lords’ natural ability to shake themselves up and gain a new self when they die, but borrowed from them a machine-driven, mercilessly efficient form of regeneration that simply makes your old body young again, not a rebirth but merely an endless repeat.
After Part One, there’s a very distinctive look to Underworld – or rather, a very indistinct one. Without the cash to build the ‘underworld’ itself, for the first time all the actors are shot against bluescreen for most of the ‘action’, with cave images added behind them. And what dull caves they are, too (similarly inlaid backgrounds for some scenes just three stories earlier had shown how interesting the results could be, or at least different, for The Invisible Enemy). With a design sense that passes understanding, people in brown and grey outfits are pasted onto a brown and grey background, and then it all goes a bit fuzzy to make absolutely sure it all looks like a dull smear. Perhaps it’s a visual metaphor for taking a legend and sucking all the excitement out of it. The similarly indistinct plot of the next three episodes largely consists of remarkably incompetent ‘action’ sequences: half the cast forgotten behind one door (which opens instantly after the cliffhanger), with the Doctor unable to work another then staggering around in the fog making the first Williams-era blow job gag until the editor takes pity on him and runs the end titles; a wobbly energy blast that gets kids’ hopes up by being called a “dragon” (and, on screen, makes even less sense than the script); shoot-outs with energy beams so lethargic that you could yawn and step out of their way. On the bright side, the “shield guns” that fire those beams were very cool when I was six, and I still think they’re the best-realised idea in it.
Tedious as the fight scenes are, the best character for the story is a fighter: Herrick, played by Diana Dors’ husband Alan Lake, is the only person here who gives it some welly. In Part One he’s almost insanely hostile to the Doctor, the Minyans being rather split in opinion over their former colonial masters and responsibility for their civil war – when one crewmember wonderingly recognises the TARDIS’ wheezing, groaning sound as “the time-ships of the gods,” Herrick is furious that they’ve turned up again and gives a glimmer of how it would feel to be caught in a Greek legend: “They use us for their sport!” Later, he almost single-handedly makes a fight sequence come to life, holding off the bad guys while seeming invulnerable, yet his bravado misses the point – surely the reason he should be a carefree berserker is if his mates are ready to drag him off to regenerate, not if they’ve all run away! Yet while one warrior enlivens the story, another drags it down. It’s no fault of the marvellous Louise Jameson, but no companion of the Doctor’s has ever had such potential wasted as Leela. Born into a warrior tribe, she was the heretic who asked the awkward questions – highly intelligent, just untutored. Unfortunately, once her creators left the building, later writers saw no further than her leather bikini and made Leela a stupid, infantile savage. Did they ever watch the show, or just Louise Jameson’s cleavage? And this story is perhaps her nadir, especially when zapped by the ‘cannabis ray’. No, it’s nowhere near as exciting as it sounds, and for once – incredibly – the series seems to approve of mind control (in just the previous story, the Doctor thought a similar pacification programme an abomination).
The Tom Baker Show offers us the Doctor in a painter’s smock and lots of scarf-wafting (and it’s a particularly impressive version of the scarf, worn almost as a toga), but he rarely seems engaged; he’s unusually happy for both Leela and K9 to shoot things, and the writers similarly miss the point at what should be his sparkiest moment: “Who are you to question me?” roars the megalomaniac villain. “Who do I have to be?” he retorts, just as you would to, say, Tony Blair outraged at some little person daring to ask impertinent questions… But then the script goes and spoils it by the Doctor pulling rank (back in the days when that was out of character), as if the writers didn’t realise they’d written a good line. They don’t even make it hurtful – if he’s going to tell the villain he’s a Time Lord, in this story that should really have made it lose control: ‘I’m one of the Minyans’ real fake gods, as opposed to only the fake fake god they made in our image’. At least the principal villain has an impressive voice (and groovy disco lighting), as opposed to the dispirited delivery and design disasters of everyone else. Hurrah that, unusually, Tom does the DVD commentary with Louise Jameson, who he’d usually avoided – though don’t get your hopes up for one with ex-wife Lalla Ward on the final DVD in the set (of all his stories, this is the one I’ve heard K9 voice John Leeson slag off most unmercifully, so he’s unsurprisingly missing from the line-up). Of the other extras, the ‘Making of’ is rather well done, evoking sympathy for the poor director (“And then he had rather a lot of scotch”), though most terrifying is the 17 minutes of extra studio footage – if you ever wished for more of Underworld, and more blurrily…
Fond as I am of several of their scripts, the blame for much of what went wrong here has to rest with Bob Baker and Dave Martin, who reach their low-point here, and not merely because as the budget collapses, their ambition expands (I won’t even start on their ‘science’). As well as fatally misunderstanding Leela, they treat the TARDIS as just a spaceship, not a “timeship”, and having created K9, they make him an amazing cure-all here, jump-leaded into the Minyans’ ship to run all their drives and power it all – DIY Earth kit being so much better than Time Lord-derived technology. They make a serious mess of the series’ morals, too; not just the Doctor’s sudden self-aggrandizement, but that the Minyan questors’ cold determination to survive at any cost while rejecting their less silvery relatives reminds me of the Cybermen, except we’re meant to sympathise with them. You wonder what will happen on Minyos II after 100,370 years’ obsessive questing (will they have died out? Had another civil war? Or will Jackson just shoot them all for not being true Minyans?), and after all, in Bob and Dave’s The Hand of Fear – ironically achieving a far more successfully ‘mythic’ feel with an ancient tale that’s all their own – the “race bank” was the empty obsession of a fascist.
But it’s the way they’ve borrowed this story from three main sources – Greek myths, Doctor Who: The Face of Evil, and Star Trek – and managed to make it far less interesting than any of them that really lets it down. It makes Greek legends dull and prosaic, taking the shape of them but emptying them of meaning. The ‘underworld’ is not death but just under the ground; ‘dragons’ just an electrified door; the ‘golden fleece’ a test tube (or a couple of dildos). Why is an ordinary sword, rather than something technological that’s been used as a sword, significant? And it entirely misses the point of the Sword of Damocles (I seem to be using that phrase so often that I may as well have headed this review ‘Mything the Point’). Of all their wordplay – the lost starship “P7E” the best, and Quest starship “R1C” the most forced – why name a hero “Jackson”? It’s even less ‘spacey’ than “Jason”. I learnt to swim (through water, not zero-gravity air) down the Jackson’s Lane Baths, and there were no space aliens there. You’d have noticed in the changing rooms. The idea of the Time Lords’ most tragic mistake has potential (and, shh, don’t notice that it’s nicked from Marvel Comics), but the crew seem bored by it and it’s just forgotten after Part One. They’ve clearly remembered bits of the far superior Season 14 and wanted to do the ancient history of the Time Lords from The Deadly Assassin, as well as the whole thing basically being a remake of The Face of Evil with its brain scooped out (making it all the more aggravating that Leela doesn’t get the concept of great-great-great-great grandfathers)… And, astonishingly, what isn’t taken from legend or Doctor Who is from Star Trek – a touch of The Cloud Minders (is it just me who’s always thought that has to be a typo, as like this story it’s about troglodyte miners?), and a whole lot of For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky. When Doctor Who steals from Star Trek and one of the Treks is better, you really have to wonder why they bothered. And yet, when I was a boy – or when I’d not seen it for a long time, but remembered the basic ideas – Underworld still caught my imagination. You can see what they were trying to do, but you can’t help wishing they’d done it so much better…
This part’s mostly written, but I’m in a lot of pain right now and it’s The Time Monster’s birthday, so I’m posting most of it this evening – it’s all taken so long to write; who would have thought a Chronovore would eat my time? – and hope to have the Nimon’s Great Journey of Life arrive tomorrow. So, if you’re reading this tonight, don’t forget to return later… As The Horns of Nimon is the one I like best of these three, it may even be worth coming back for!
The day after tomorrow (near enough, eh?): “Lord Nimon! Lord Nimon! It is I, Sandy!”
The last story of Myths and Legends was once widely regarded as the worst Doctor Who story ever, and both its detractors and defenders still often describe it as “pantomime” – either as an insult, or claiming that it went out over Christmas and was intended as a load of silly fun. They’re both wrong. I’ve been to pantos and it’s nothing like one, though with its marvellously stormy Wagnerian skies and some of the flamboyant costumes it might resemble an opera. I’m enormously fond of The Horns of Nimon (not least the book), though it’s often not funny enough to be comedy nor serious enough to be drama (even in the book) and very few of the ‘bad’ bits are deliberately so, even if several of them are entertaining. On the other hand, for some years it was the only Doctor Who Richard wouldn’t have in the flat, and when once I asked him for a reason why (as with all Who) it was brilliant, his stony reply was that “After a hundred minutes, it ends.” Though even he’ll occasionally admit to the cleverness of the deadly hustle involved, despite not being able to bear watching what they make of it.
Oh, and if you’ve not seen this before, don’t watch the DVD menu [“Or, indeed, the DVD,” growls Richard] – just stick it straight in and press “Play”. In fact, I’d make that general advice. Quite a few Doctor Who DVDs carelessly toss away twists in the menu clips; this is one of them.
The last story of the ’70s, it’s easy to see that the money’s run out – though the story is, itself, about what happens when the glory runs out and you won’t take it lying down. Something about fallen empires has always fascinated me, so the empire of Skonnos and their desperation to rise again is a gripping backstory. A Second Empire, for only the price of a tribute to the great Nimon… And while opinions are decidedly mixed about the Nimon, too, it’s still an exciting monster to me – at least from its bullish front. Former script editor Anthony Read, who’d previously crafted the superb Key To Time season, provides a decent script, this time edited by Douglas Adams; on screen, it’s brought to life on the cheap with moments of horror and minutes of ham, some of which works surprisingly well and some of which doesn’t work at all. And a lot of that’s down to the Doctor – both Tom Baker, nominally, and the actor who takes on the role for much of the story…
Though much of the design is very cheap, it makes up for it with an astute colour sense of blacks and greys with vivid red and yellow highlights, and thanks to brilliant costume designer June Hudson nothing stands out more strikingly than Lalla’s hunting pink, a splash of red that’s surely her best outfit (though, strangely, the straight guys seem to prefer her ‘school uniform’). Her part and her performance have just the same impact. When the Doctor’s around, she comes up with the ideas, quotes Oscar Wilde and has a better sonic than he does; without him, she asks all the pertinent questions – such as “Have you seen it?” and “How many?” – and brings back the crucial information in Part Four; she’s both calming and ironic with the hostages in Part Two, giving a brilliant assessment of where the Nimon lives; she leads them into the Labyrinth and makes a gruesome discovery; and most memorably, she confronts wannabe-Emperor Soldeed first in his pomp, then again as his power drains away.
Perhaps surprisingly, Graham Crowden was considered for the Doctor when Tom Baker got the part in 1974; perhaps even more surprisingly, I think he’d have been perfect casting, but not then. He was an actor who, for me, hit a certain age – old age – and, from having been perfectly good, suddenly became a towering talent. Twenty-five years ago this week, Graham Crowden ran away with the dark comedy-drama A Very Peculiar Practice with his doom-laden, half-demented authority as Dr McCannon; a few years later, he brought a childlike delight in life to Tom Ballard in sit-com Waiting for God. And while Lalla Ward plays an outstanding one-off Doctor in this story, if I’d been casting for a new Doctor Who series in the 1990s, I couldn’t think of any better choice than Graham Crowden to combine the elements of those two great roles into the Doctor.
So what about Tom Baker? Well, this was the last story shown in his penultimate season, a time when he was widely regarded as doing pretty much what he wanted, and here he gets to sit back and watch Lalla do all the work for a treat. No, that’s not entirely fair; in the first episode, he calms some of the frightened juveniles with a jelly baby (his last on screen), saves a ship with some tinkering and gets some very Doctorish moments:
Most of the script is pretty good – and tells the cautionary tale at a much faster pace than a very similar one for the Centauri in Babylon 5 – but it isn’t just the production that’s a bit ropy. A story that’s solidly plotted for three episodes, and even introduces some impressive twists and a guiltily sympathetic new character in Part Four, significantly lets itself down with a clever plan that turns dumb at the end: on the large scale there’s an extremely unwise “final contingency plan” that’s also the first resort; on the small scale, that’s when the Nimon gets to say, “Kill him – but not yet.” Never a good sign. Yet on top of more Underworld-style wordplay, there are some clever reverses to the myth, and Teka’s a commentary on how myths start (but more on her later). And I still love the Nimon, mainly for Clifford Norgate’s vocal acting and the deep, surging rumble all the way through its speech – while almost everybody’s voices in Underworld were dreary and dull, that’s not a fault you can find here – it’s also impressively tall, and I enjoy the bull face and horns. So why do so many people hate it? Well, I think a lot of that’s to do with something in a draft of the script that never quite made it to screen: that the bull-head was artificial, with another creature within. Perhaps too expensive (or too daft) an idea to be realised, apparently the designer tried to make it look artificial to prepare for this – and, yes, it does. Particularly from the back. So whether it’s meant to be a creature, a cyborg or a mask, try not to see the join. Still, it’s better than the Minotaur in The Time Monster. Some might say that this deft treatment of the legend from an uncommonly more-or-less safe-for-work Oglaf is better than either…
People often called old Doctor Who stories “cheap”; well, on this one it’s deserved. With 1979’s Season 17 as a whole reduced to just 60% the real budget of Season 14 thanks to inflation forcing BBC cuts, this was planned to be the cheapest of the year. And yet it sometimes does remarkably well for it. Like Underworld, it has a memorable gun design, this time with twin barrels (I was eight, and a boy. I remembered the guns). The story starts with a pretty poor spaceship model; it ends with a pretty impressive explosion. There’s rather a good ‘extruding defence shield’ special effect, homaged in last year’s The Time of Angels, and a form of space travel that’s both clever and rather effectively realised; there’s an unimpressive flashing light for a “furnace”, and an overacting man meeting his doom with split pants. A spaceship set is built to judder about in a meteorite-hit gravity whirlpool; bless them, it’s deliberate, but it unfairly looks just like a wobbly set. Things are better on Skonnos, under operatic skies (and operatic hats), with great big yellow arches like an evil McDonalds. Well, more evil. I’ve praised Lalla’s outfit; Soldeed’s is fabulous, looking even better in the Photo Gallery where you can make out the brocade; one character in the final episode looks fascinatingly like a Skeksis; and the Anethans are in pyjamas, which sums up how exciting they are. So if you want to say it looks good, or terrible, all you need do is pause your DVD at the appropriate point to ‘prove’ either case.
The actors are mixed in a different way. The Skonnons, survivors of an empire fallen in civil war, divide between weary old soldiers and a fanatical younger generation brought up on stories of greatness without having seeing how it all turned out; it’s a great backstory [Richard thinks I infer much of it from the book, and suggests replacing “weary” and “fanatical” with “bored” and “nuts”], and though even the shoutier Skonnon actors aren’t that memorable – save, obviously, Soldeed – you almost side with the nasty bunch of fascists over their next-door neighbours, the “Weakling scum!” from Aneth (intended to make you think of ‘Athens’, when unfortunately the actors prompt ‘Anaesthetic’). This insipid bunch who are being used unwittingly to enable an invasion of their own planet – hmm, sounds a clever plan – do so little that you’re left to find something else to say about the actors: doesn’t that one with the perm look like Dominic Monaghan? As on DVD you can see a bit of chest hair, is it quite right to call Seth “chicken”? Teka is played by future Blue Peter legend Janet Ellis, which is the most noteworthy thing about her – you barely notice when at one stage she’s captured and put into cold storage, poor frozen Teka.
Janet Ellis is one of the stars of this disc’s lead extra feature. Who Peter – Partners In Time takes us through Blue Peter’s work with Doctor Who across the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s with sex symbols from three generations, silver fox Peter Purves (delightfully described as having played “Outer Space bloke Steven Taylor”), naughty Janet Ellis and sex-on-a-stick Gethin Jones (she genuinely shocks him at one point with a revelation of her wiles and a Blue Peter badge). Legendary producer Biddy Baxter is both praised for saving so many Doctor Who clips and terrifyingly Stasi-like in her tracking down the secret files on Sophie Aldred. Rather than a ‘Making Of’, there’s an interesting but rather too short piece on writer Anthony Read – the same is true of Peter Howell’s Music Demos. There’s quite a good commentary with Janet and the two stars (I don’t mean Tom, obviously), and some OK text notes – shame they keep hinting at interesting little nuggets, then not giving them any detail (such as Douglas Adams’ theory of time travel for the series, apparently worked out with Graham Williams, which would have been nice to read rather than just have mentioned).
So of all the ‘minor’ Target novelisations, The Horns of Nimon is the one I’d love to have Tom or Lalla read aloud on CD. I doubt it’ll happen, because I’m very unusual in being just fond of the story. The chances are that those choosing which books should be released are fans who either hate or love the story for what it was – or when it was – on screen, and the book fits neither worldview. More than any other story, this still splits fandom today, and much less because of the story itself than as a symbol, a frontier in time…
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While this ‘taster’ may not be short, incidentally, my policy in these is not to be too spoilery. So read on without fear of finding out the key twists.
I’d certainly rate The Doctor’s Wife very much more highly than The Time Monster, though the 1972 story’s take on the fall of Atlantis was at least more interesting than BBC1’s dreary docu-drama Atlantis a couple of Sundays ago (terrible dialogue, but prettier – both the special effects and the Atlantean male lead). That aside, few fans have a good word to say for these three tales. Some Doctor Who DVD boxed sets just offer stories sequentially; others have stories from different years based around some more or less distinct ‘theme’. Those themed are usually a mix – Beneath the Surface, the other ‘trilogy’ boxed set with Pertwee and another Doctor, runs from absolutely brilliant, to exciting but flawed, to pretty shonky – but this box is all of pretty much the same unfortunate quality. Officially called “Myths and Legends,” it’s been given a lot of other names from fans. As I try to be positive, I can’t repeat any of them. However, back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200 TV Doctor Who stories to that point (I made it 204). So what did the mass of fandom make of these stories? Not a lot. Out of 200, The Time Monster flaps in at 187, and I can’t argue with that; Underworld is at 197 and The Horns of Nimon 189, and though I might put each of those perhaps 10 or 20 places higher on a good day, that still leaves them deep in the lower reaches.
Between them, the Myths and Legends borrow from the Titans and the fall of Atlantis, the Argonauts, the Minotaur (twice) and several other elements from Greek legend, but you’ll probably have gathered that none of them quite hit the spot. The Time Monster has a more ‘magic’ take on it – or, at least, New Age hippiedom – while the other two both sci-fi it up and largely miss the point. The Time Monster and The Horns of Nimon are the minotaur stories, the latter more thoroughly (try to ignore it not being real in 1968’s The Mind Robber, and note that – in DVD order – The Creature from the Pit was one month later, which almost makes sense of the Doctor mentioning the labyrinth); the Nimon isn’t the series’ most successful monster, but it beats the others here – a flappy thing, men with tin tea-cosies on and the most disappointing “dragon” ever conceived. Underworld and The Horns of Nimon both play with asteroids / clashing rocks, gravity / whirlpools, lost ships and fallen empires, the former merely tedious (though I loved it when I was six) and the latter teetering into ‘so bad it’s good’ – though less so, for either category, than many reviews would have you believe. Ironically, The Key To Time saga was first broadcast between those two and does a far better job of being legendary, despite only a sideswipe at Greek myth. So, really, if you’re short of Doctor Who boxed sets, you should buy that first (and if you want a thrilling volcanic historical tragedy from Doctor Who, why not try The Fires of Pompeii?). But, anyway, the prologue…
Doctor Who – The Time Monster
This one’s the full house for your Greek Myths: Doctor Who does both Atlantis and the Minotaur three times, and The Time Monster hits the jackpot as the only story to feature both, showing exactly how much this jackpot’s worth. Ingrid Pitt steals the show, though it takes a while for her to turn up; Darth Vader’s involved, too – but don’t get your hopes up; and who could the mysterious “Professor Thascalos” be? Oh… You guessed (and even he overacts mightily here). Like Planet of the Spiders, this is co-written by Barry Letts and Roger Sloman: that one, apparently, the most ‘Barry’ of their scripts together, this the most ‘Slo’; though they do have much in common (changes of scene half-way through, the Doctor’s guru and ‘magic crystals’), this one has the more achingly trendy hippy ending. And there are six interminable episodes to crawl through before you get to it.
That Golden Moment
“Welcome! Welcome to your new Master!”It would be very unfair to pick the opening scene of Episode One as my golden moment, and say that the story largely goes downhill from there. But that’s not going to stop me. For various reasons, the most entertaining stretch of the story is undoubtedly Episode Five, and this is essentially a trailer for that part of the story: the whole thing opens with the Doctor having a terrible dream of the Master, and unlike most of The Time Monster this is “terrible” in its more impressive meaning. Roger Delgado steals the scene unmercifully as a giant, laughing Master, surrounded by lightning and labyris, while volcanoes erupt all around. It looks tremendous, and gets your attention. It even subliminally calls to mind without aping two of Pertwee’s far better early stories, Inferno explaining why the Doctor would have nightmares of the world’s fiery end and The Mind of Evil why the Master would be so keen to be a tower of terror in the Doctor’s dreams.
Purists may well say that this premonition doesn’t have much of a logical connection to the plot of Episode One – well, there isn’t much of a logical basis to what passes for the plot of Episode One, anyway. It’s disappointing that when we reach the inevitable destruction of Atlantis at the end of the story, it doesn’t look anywhere near as good as this, but by then we’ll have had nearly six episodes to get used to this particular story not looking anywhere near as good as it should. The first signal of this is when the Doctor wakes to find Jo Grant wearing one of her most early ’70s and most hideous outfits (brown and yellow!), with lines that send up how badly she’s usually written (“Look, I know I’m exceedingly dim, but would you mind explaining?”). Before long, though, one of his companions gets revenge on the patronising Pertwee – the Doctor demands agents be alerted world-wide because he’s just seen the Master, only for the Brigadier to deliver the perfect put-down when his advisor lets slip the source of this ‘intelligence’:
“A dream. Really, Doctor, you’ll be consulting the entrails of a sheep next!”
Something Else To Look Out For
The Time Monster is from dead in the middle of Jon Pertwee’s five-year run as the Doctor, while he’s still exiled to Earth and working with UNIT, and it finishes the series’ ninth season with one of its very few deliberately epic season finales – but, though it tries so hard, it’s probably the second-biggest flop the series has ever had at achieving any such thing. As I’ve intimated above, it doesn’t really get going until about two-thirds of the way in before petering out again at the climax (as I said the other week, exactly the reverse of Planet of the Spiders), and very little of it makes much sense. It’s impossible to believe that the Brigadier and Sergeant Benton wouldn’t recognise the Master, particularly when he shouts his head off for no reason other than his Time Lord powers sensing an approaching cliffhanger – and what are they doing attending a research project in Cambridge, anyway? Why does UNIT, rather than just the ministry, send an observer? Why are this UN team suddenly part of the UK government? Why doesn’t their scientific advisor go along, just the military side, who know naff all about science? Why does Dudley Simpson compose that hideously ‘jaunty’ theme for the Doctor’s car Bessie? Why is Dr Ingram astonished at the crystal being “the actual crystal” from Atlantis, when she could never have heard of Kronos or its bling, so she should be shocked that it’s ‘the actual Atlantis’? Why are modern troops and Roundheads perfectly matched in battle, with the New Model Army never having to reload and, equally magically, no-one dying? How come the TARDIS can suddenly move about as much as it likes, as if they can’t be arsed remembering the Doctor was supposed to be ‘grounded’? Where did it get its ‘Get out of cliffhanger free’ lever? And what on Earth were they thinking when they spent ten minutes of gibberish with the Doctor saying, ‘No, wait, wait, this is really cool, I used to do a lot of it when I was a student,’ involving an empty wine bottle…? No, actually, I think that one may have answered itself.
This story may also win a special prize for Doctor Who sexism. The series in the ’60s was mostly moderately ahead of its time in giving good parts to the women leads, not least because the very nature of the series made it impossible for them to just stay at home; Pertwee’s first, best season had Dr Liz Shaw, cool, brainy and more than able to hold her own against the Doctor. She was then succeeded by Jojo Grant (as she’s dubbed here), the series’ first companion deliberately designed to be nowhere near as good as her predecessor, so the Doctor could ‘take her under his wing’. Much of the time, Katy Manning is so sparky in the role that she saves the character – but 1971’s hugely sexist shift back was a terrible idea, and by 1972 producer (and co-writer here) Barry Letts was thinking that maybe he’d better ‘do feminism’. Unfortunately, rather than ’60s Who’s attitude of simply having intelligent, competent women who were rarely put down or indeed commented on for being women, Barry’s brilliant plan was to have a career woman whose standing up for herself is followed by exclaiming “Men!” and then threatening to cry. Last time we watched this story together, my reaction to the line “May God bless the good ship Women’s Lib and all who sail in her” was apparently so volcanic that Richard laughed like a hyena (not at the line itself, you understand). Despite this, there are two saving graces: patronise her he may, but the Master still trusts Dr Ingram to do important work for him, which is more than the überpatronising Doctor ever does with Jo; and in the novel by Terrance Dicks – not himself the series’ leading feminist standard-bearer – he nails that the Master “didn’t assume that he was superior just to women. He was superior to everybody.”
Bizarrely, Queen Galleia of Atlantis comes across far better than the attempt to write a ‘modern’ woman, though to be fair to the authors each is given a callow male counterpart who’s not nearly as good at what they do as the women (Stuart a less impressive scientist; Hippias a far less charismatic tarty piece – the other week’s Atlantis docudrama was dreary, but at least their equivalent eye candy was prettier). And with Ingrid Pitt’s fabulous Galleia comes sex, in a way that hadn’t really before in Doctor Who – while the Doctor wasn’t allowed snoggage until 2005, here the Master seduces the Queen. It’s something of a relief, actually, as from Nick Courtney’s relish in exclaiming “Tom-TIT!”, the shape of the time sensor and Jo wearing a floppy belt instead of a skirt, until this point in the story you get a sense that someone on the production team wasn’t getting any. Or, as we always remark on hearing “You dare mock the High Priest?” Oooh, TOMTITter ye not!
So, yes, there are some things here worth watching after all. The glamorous, strong Queen and the wise, surprisingly bitchy King of Atlantis are the two best things in it, and worth waiting for. The King, in particular, gets some tantalising scenes on film before the action’s fully shifted to Atlantis, setting up the mystery of his age and his Age, and some very funny put-downs of the Master, followed by a subtle test disguised as gallantry to Jo. The Master is often very entertaining railing against his rubbish henchmen, even if “I’ve never seen a more inept performance” may be giving a hostage to fortune, and charismatic when he chats up the Queen, though in between Delgado is by far at his hammiest. And when Sergeant Benton and his ‘crack team’ of severe Dr Ruth and florid-shirted slacker Stuart are running about, all they’re missing is a big dumb talking dog (actually – that’s Benton). It’s a shame they waste the story’s initial idea of excitingly anachronistic attacks on making them merely a device to slow down the plot in the middle, but from the same part of the story, if you’ve bought Spearhead From Space (re-released just last week) you might forgive a comedy yokel: you’ll recognise he was a UNIT soldier in the earlier story, so clearly he’s lost his mind and been farmed off to the country. The story’s high point for many fans is a ‘charming’ Buddhist parable in a dungeon; unfortunately, having seen it cross-cut with a Monty Python sketch to Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, I find it very difficult to sit through – as would Jo, if she wasn’t chained down.
On top of some pretty remarkable picture restoration, the DVD has a middling set of extras – a considerably more experimental commentary than usual (swapping between several different teams of people to get different perspectives for each episode), text notes, photo gallery and so on, with the highlight a ‘Making of’ that majors on the science, with Professor Jim Al-Khalili (in truth, the MASTER! Not really) bravely trying to make sense of it all. And, utterly absurdly, the story’s soon to have its own range of action toys. But the real ‘extras’ for The Time Monster are to be found in other stories – one in particular that it rips off and several that, incredibly, it inspired…
Doctor Who – Underworld
‘Jason and the Astronauts’. The magic silhouettes of the bloke in the scarf, the woman in the leather bikini and the tin dog are the old series’ most iconic line-up, and you get all three – Tom Baker, Leela and K9 – in this story. It’s from Season 15, a troubled time for the series: Mary Whitehouse had seen off a brilliant producer; the brilliant script editor had just left; and their replacements, while promising, were dropped in it at the last minute at exactly the moment all the BBC’s money ran out (it’s also a season where most stories end in great big explosions: ‘Boom and Bust’, you might call it). So this isn’t the most polished story ever made, and they’ve not yet come up with the wit in their scripts that replaces the horror the old regime was told off for. The result is a story that lacks verve, lacks skilled hands knowing what’ll work and what won’t, and perhaps more famously than any other Doctor Who adventure lacks a budget. And whereas most Who stories that look a bit threadbare have a strong script and lively actors to fall back on, here both underperform. This is perhaps the only Tom Baker story that’s just plain dull.
That Golden Moment
“None of us likes it. But the Quest is the Quest.”Part One is the most coherent, the most straightforward, and possibly the least interesting part of Underworld; in effect, it’s a prologue to the main story, a vignette in the never-ending lives of a crew that have been travelling so long they’re fatigued beyond endurance. In its favour, this is where all the money went, on a large starship bridge set and some quite decent special effects (I rather like the whirlpool nebula), and while actors playing been exhausted and bored stiff after a hundred thousand years makes for every bit as dynamic drama as you’d imagine, there’s one idea in it that’s hauntingly effective.
Though Terrance Dicks’ novelisation mostly tells the story more briskly, it opens with a five-page Prologue setting out how the Time Lords were welcomed as “gods” by the Minyan people, who picked up technology too fast, kicked out their “gods” and then destroyed themselves – giving one of my favourite offhand lines: “A hundred thousand years went by.” And that’s where we are in Part One: the doomed Minyans sent off a ship to settle a new world… Which was never seen again, and the crew of the ancient ship the Doctor finds have been looking for it ever since. Not unreasonably, they’ve got very weary along the way, not least because it’s been the same people throughout: they don’t have the Time Lords’ natural ability to shake themselves up and gain a new self when they die, but borrowed from them a machine-driven, mercilessly efficient form of regeneration that simply makes your old body young again, not a rebirth but merely an endless repeat.
“Each one of us has regenerated a thousand times… And now we’re like the ship, regenerating faster than we can regenerate ourselves. Not the body, not the mind – but the spirit. A ship of ghosts, Doctor.”Just as the Doctor comes on board, one of the tiny crew – Tala – collapses through extreme old age, and is taken off the flight deck to be force-regenerated for the thousandth-plus time (she’s the one being carried on the DVD cover picture, so they thought this was a key scene, too). And the chilling moment is that she wanted to die: “She’s gone past her regeneration point, deliberately – just like all the others.” As she’s taken to the sleeping bays to be rejuvenated, we see why the crew’s so small after all this time – it’s a huge, vaulted chamber with dozens of pallets stretching away… All empty. It’s understated, but most of the crew have already despaired of the Quest and committed suicide. Not that ‘you’ve made something marvellous merely prosaic and bored yourself to death’ carries any warning for the viewer. The novel lacks the telling shot of the empty couches, but has Tala wake in that despair, rather than the TV version’s suddenly improbably perky newly-young-again woman:
“As she looked at her smooth unwrinkled skin and dark, shining hair, her face filled with despair. ‘Again!’ she whispered softly.
Once again, she had been sentenced to life.”
Something Else To Look Out For
After Part One, there’s a very distinctive look to Underworld – or rather, a very indistinct one. Without the cash to build the ‘underworld’ itself, for the first time all the actors are shot against bluescreen for most of the ‘action’, with cave images added behind them. And what dull caves they are, too (similarly inlaid backgrounds for some scenes just three stories earlier had shown how interesting the results could be, or at least different, for The Invisible Enemy). With a design sense that passes understanding, people in brown and grey outfits are pasted onto a brown and grey background, and then it all goes a bit fuzzy to make absolutely sure it all looks like a dull smear. Perhaps it’s a visual metaphor for taking a legend and sucking all the excitement out of it. The similarly indistinct plot of the next three episodes largely consists of remarkably incompetent ‘action’ sequences: half the cast forgotten behind one door (which opens instantly after the cliffhanger), with the Doctor unable to work another then staggering around in the fog making the first Williams-era blow job gag until the editor takes pity on him and runs the end titles; a wobbly energy blast that gets kids’ hopes up by being called a “dragon” (and, on screen, makes even less sense than the script); shoot-outs with energy beams so lethargic that you could yawn and step out of their way. On the bright side, the “shield guns” that fire those beams were very cool when I was six, and I still think they’re the best-realised idea in it.
Tedious as the fight scenes are, the best character for the story is a fighter: Herrick, played by Diana Dors’ husband Alan Lake, is the only person here who gives it some welly. In Part One he’s almost insanely hostile to the Doctor, the Minyans being rather split in opinion over their former colonial masters and responsibility for their civil war – when one crewmember wonderingly recognises the TARDIS’ wheezing, groaning sound as “the time-ships of the gods,” Herrick is furious that they’ve turned up again and gives a glimmer of how it would feel to be caught in a Greek legend: “They use us for their sport!” Later, he almost single-handedly makes a fight sequence come to life, holding off the bad guys while seeming invulnerable, yet his bravado misses the point – surely the reason he should be a carefree berserker is if his mates are ready to drag him off to regenerate, not if they’ve all run away! Yet while one warrior enlivens the story, another drags it down. It’s no fault of the marvellous Louise Jameson, but no companion of the Doctor’s has ever had such potential wasted as Leela. Born into a warrior tribe, she was the heretic who asked the awkward questions – highly intelligent, just untutored. Unfortunately, once her creators left the building, later writers saw no further than her leather bikini and made Leela a stupid, infantile savage. Did they ever watch the show, or just Louise Jameson’s cleavage? And this story is perhaps her nadir, especially when zapped by the ‘cannabis ray’. No, it’s nowhere near as exciting as it sounds, and for once – incredibly – the series seems to approve of mind control (in just the previous story, the Doctor thought a similar pacification programme an abomination).
The Tom Baker Show offers us the Doctor in a painter’s smock and lots of scarf-wafting (and it’s a particularly impressive version of the scarf, worn almost as a toga), but he rarely seems engaged; he’s unusually happy for both Leela and K9 to shoot things, and the writers similarly miss the point at what should be his sparkiest moment: “Who are you to question me?” roars the megalomaniac villain. “Who do I have to be?” he retorts, just as you would to, say, Tony Blair outraged at some little person daring to ask impertinent questions… But then the script goes and spoils it by the Doctor pulling rank (back in the days when that was out of character), as if the writers didn’t realise they’d written a good line. They don’t even make it hurtful – if he’s going to tell the villain he’s a Time Lord, in this story that should really have made it lose control: ‘I’m one of the Minyans’ real fake gods, as opposed to only the fake fake god they made in our image’. At least the principal villain has an impressive voice (and groovy disco lighting), as opposed to the dispirited delivery and design disasters of everyone else. Hurrah that, unusually, Tom does the DVD commentary with Louise Jameson, who he’d usually avoided – though don’t get your hopes up for one with ex-wife Lalla Ward on the final DVD in the set (of all his stories, this is the one I’ve heard K9 voice John Leeson slag off most unmercifully, so he’s unsurprisingly missing from the line-up). Of the other extras, the ‘Making of’ is rather well done, evoking sympathy for the poor director (“And then he had rather a lot of scotch”), though most terrifying is the 17 minutes of extra studio footage – if you ever wished for more of Underworld, and more blurrily…
Fond as I am of several of their scripts, the blame for much of what went wrong here has to rest with Bob Baker and Dave Martin, who reach their low-point here, and not merely because as the budget collapses, their ambition expands (I won’t even start on their ‘science’). As well as fatally misunderstanding Leela, they treat the TARDIS as just a spaceship, not a “timeship”, and having created K9, they make him an amazing cure-all here, jump-leaded into the Minyans’ ship to run all their drives and power it all – DIY Earth kit being so much better than Time Lord-derived technology. They make a serious mess of the series’ morals, too; not just the Doctor’s sudden self-aggrandizement, but that the Minyan questors’ cold determination to survive at any cost while rejecting their less silvery relatives reminds me of the Cybermen, except we’re meant to sympathise with them. You wonder what will happen on Minyos II after 100,370 years’ obsessive questing (will they have died out? Had another civil war? Or will Jackson just shoot them all for not being true Minyans?), and after all, in Bob and Dave’s The Hand of Fear – ironically achieving a far more successfully ‘mythic’ feel with an ancient tale that’s all their own – the “race bank” was the empty obsession of a fascist.
But it’s the way they’ve borrowed this story from three main sources – Greek myths, Doctor Who: The Face of Evil, and Star Trek – and managed to make it far less interesting than any of them that really lets it down. It makes Greek legends dull and prosaic, taking the shape of them but emptying them of meaning. The ‘underworld’ is not death but just under the ground; ‘dragons’ just an electrified door; the ‘golden fleece’ a test tube (or a couple of dildos). Why is an ordinary sword, rather than something technological that’s been used as a sword, significant? And it entirely misses the point of the Sword of Damocles (I seem to be using that phrase so often that I may as well have headed this review ‘Mything the Point’). Of all their wordplay – the lost starship “P7E” the best, and Quest starship “R1C” the most forced – why name a hero “Jackson”? It’s even less ‘spacey’ than “Jason”. I learnt to swim (through water, not zero-gravity air) down the Jackson’s Lane Baths, and there were no space aliens there. You’d have noticed in the changing rooms. The idea of the Time Lords’ most tragic mistake has potential (and, shh, don’t notice that it’s nicked from Marvel Comics), but the crew seem bored by it and it’s just forgotten after Part One. They’ve clearly remembered bits of the far superior Season 14 and wanted to do the ancient history of the Time Lords from The Deadly Assassin, as well as the whole thing basically being a remake of The Face of Evil with its brain scooped out (making it all the more aggravating that Leela doesn’t get the concept of great-great-great-great grandfathers)… And, astonishingly, what isn’t taken from legend or Doctor Who is from Star Trek – a touch of The Cloud Minders (is it just me who’s always thought that has to be a typo, as like this story it’s about troglodyte miners?), and a whole lot of For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky. When Doctor Who steals from Star Trek and one of the Treks is better, you really have to wonder why they bothered. And yet, when I was a boy – or when I’d not seen it for a long time, but remembered the basic ideas – Underworld still caught my imagination. You can see what they were trying to do, but you can’t help wishing they’d done it so much better…
Doctor Who – The Horns of Nimon
This part’s mostly written, but I’m in a lot of pain right now and it’s The Time Monster’s birthday, so I’m posting most of it this evening – it’s all taken so long to write; who would have thought a Chronovore would eat my time? – and hope to have the Nimon’s Great Journey of Life arrive tomorrow. So, if you’re reading this tonight, don’t forget to return later… As The Horns of Nimon is the one I like best of these three, it may even be worth coming back for!
The day after tomorrow (near enough, eh?): “Lord Nimon! Lord Nimon! It is I, Sandy!”
The last story of Myths and Legends was once widely regarded as the worst Doctor Who story ever, and both its detractors and defenders still often describe it as “pantomime” – either as an insult, or claiming that it went out over Christmas and was intended as a load of silly fun. They’re both wrong. I’ve been to pantos and it’s nothing like one, though with its marvellously stormy Wagnerian skies and some of the flamboyant costumes it might resemble an opera. I’m enormously fond of The Horns of Nimon (not least the book), though it’s often not funny enough to be comedy nor serious enough to be drama (even in the book) and very few of the ‘bad’ bits are deliberately so, even if several of them are entertaining. On the other hand, for some years it was the only Doctor Who Richard wouldn’t have in the flat, and when once I asked him for a reason why (as with all Who) it was brilliant, his stony reply was that “After a hundred minutes, it ends.” Though even he’ll occasionally admit to the cleverness of the deadly hustle involved, despite not being able to bear watching what they make of it.
Oh, and if you’ve not seen this before, don’t watch the DVD menu [“Or, indeed, the DVD,” growls Richard] – just stick it straight in and press “Play”. In fact, I’d make that general advice. Quite a few Doctor Who DVDs carelessly toss away twists in the menu clips; this is one of them.
The last story of the ’70s, it’s easy to see that the money’s run out – though the story is, itself, about what happens when the glory runs out and you won’t take it lying down. Something about fallen empires has always fascinated me, so the empire of Skonnos and their desperation to rise again is a gripping backstory. A Second Empire, for only the price of a tribute to the great Nimon… And while opinions are decidedly mixed about the Nimon, too, it’s still an exciting monster to me – at least from its bullish front. Former script editor Anthony Read, who’d previously crafted the superb Key To Time season, provides a decent script, this time edited by Douglas Adams; on screen, it’s brought to life on the cheap with moments of horror and minutes of ham, some of which works surprisingly well and some of which doesn’t work at all. And a lot of that’s down to the Doctor – both Tom Baker, nominally, and the actor who takes on the role for much of the story…
That Golden Moment
“Despicable worm!”…thunders Romana as she storms onto a spaceship bridge at the end of Part One like a force of nature, confronting the cowardly, ungrateful and hammy Co-Pilot because he’s just abandoned the Doctor. And yet for much of this story the script, and Tom Baker, do exactly the same – and it’s the making of it. Lalla Ward, usually pretty good as the Doctor’s Time Lady companion, is suddenly awesome when for large parts of The Horns of Nimon she’s called upon in effect to play the Doctor (strikingly, both when he’s stranded for much of the second episode, and when she is in the last). Though Tom Baker is still around, in Tat Wood’s memorable phrase able “to prat about like he always wanted to and find out how unsatisfying it is,” this would feel like a modern ‘Doctor-lite’ story were it not for Lalla stepping into the void and stealing the show with every bit the authority of a Time Lord.
Though much of the design is very cheap, it makes up for it with an astute colour sense of blacks and greys with vivid red and yellow highlights, and thanks to brilliant costume designer June Hudson nothing stands out more strikingly than Lalla’s hunting pink, a splash of red that’s surely her best outfit (though, strangely, the straight guys seem to prefer her ‘school uniform’). Her part and her performance have just the same impact. When the Doctor’s around, she comes up with the ideas, quotes Oscar Wilde and has a better sonic than he does; without him, she asks all the pertinent questions – such as “Have you seen it?” and “How many?” – and brings back the crucial information in Part Four; she’s both calming and ironic with the hostages in Part Two, giving a brilliant assessment of where the Nimon lives; she leads them into the Labyrinth and makes a gruesome discovery; and most memorably, she confronts wannabe-Emperor Soldeed first in his pomp, then again as his power drains away.
“You – you meddlesome hussy!”Romana’s real finest moment, though as it’s part of the climax it would give away too much to describe it in detail, is in her ferocious final face-off with Soldeed, one which sums up the story. It’s not just a clash of two personalities, but almost of two different productions: where Lalla is fantastic taking it absolutely seriously, Graham Crowden as Soldeed is gleefully hamming it up like mad. Both dreadful and dreadfully entertaining here, he’s the other leading performance, playing a self-styled genius who’s out of his depth and desperate for power in one of the most over-the-top acting turns ever seen in Doctor Who, where even those who hate him and the story can’t resist joining in with a chorus of “It is I, Soldeed…”
Perhaps surprisingly, Graham Crowden was considered for the Doctor when Tom Baker got the part in 1974; perhaps even more surprisingly, I think he’d have been perfect casting, but not then. He was an actor who, for me, hit a certain age – old age – and, from having been perfectly good, suddenly became a towering talent. Twenty-five years ago this week, Graham Crowden ran away with the dark comedy-drama A Very Peculiar Practice with his doom-laden, half-demented authority as Dr McCannon; a few years later, he brought a childlike delight in life to Tom Ballard in sit-com Waiting for God. And while Lalla Ward plays an outstanding one-off Doctor in this story, if I’d been casting for a new Doctor Who series in the 1990s, I couldn’t think of any better choice than Graham Crowden to combine the elements of those two great roles into the Doctor.
Something Else To Look Out For
So what about Tom Baker? Well, this was the last story shown in his penultimate season, a time when he was widely regarded as doing pretty much what he wanted, and here he gets to sit back and watch Lalla do all the work for a treat. No, that’s not entirely fair; in the first episode, he calms some of the frightened juveniles with a jelly baby (his last on screen), saves a ship with some tinkering and gets some very Doctorish moments:
“Have you noticed that people’s intellectual curiosity declines sharply when they start waving guns about?”But for much of the story, he’s Tomming it up with K9 (I’d say the dog plays his straight man, but it’s difficult to do that from under a cloud of multi-coloured computer printout), dismantling the TARDIS for fun, putting two fingers up to Lalla (watch for it)… And yet it’s only in the final scene when he really gets my back up, not as Tom Baker but as the Doctor, casually dismissing races of people and satisfied about genocide: that’s not the fault of the actor, but of the usually very talented writers. And it’s Mr Read and Mr Adams who are most to blame for the final episode falling to bits, too.
Most of the script is pretty good – and tells the cautionary tale at a much faster pace than a very similar one for the Centauri in Babylon 5 – but it isn’t just the production that’s a bit ropy. A story that’s solidly plotted for three episodes, and even introduces some impressive twists and a guiltily sympathetic new character in Part Four, significantly lets itself down with a clever plan that turns dumb at the end: on the large scale there’s an extremely unwise “final contingency plan” that’s also the first resort; on the small scale, that’s when the Nimon gets to say, “Kill him – but not yet.” Never a good sign. Yet on top of more Underworld-style wordplay, there are some clever reverses to the myth, and Teka’s a commentary on how myths start (but more on her later). And I still love the Nimon, mainly for Clifford Norgate’s vocal acting and the deep, surging rumble all the way through its speech – while almost everybody’s voices in Underworld were dreary and dull, that’s not a fault you can find here – it’s also impressively tall, and I enjoy the bull face and horns. So why do so many people hate it? Well, I think a lot of that’s to do with something in a draft of the script that never quite made it to screen: that the bull-head was artificial, with another creature within. Perhaps too expensive (or too daft) an idea to be realised, apparently the designer tried to make it look artificial to prepare for this – and, yes, it does. Particularly from the back. So whether it’s meant to be a creature, a cyborg or a mask, try not to see the join. Still, it’s better than the Minotaur in The Time Monster. Some might say that this deft treatment of the legend from an uncommonly more-or-less safe-for-work Oglaf is better than either…
People often called old Doctor Who stories “cheap”; well, on this one it’s deserved. With 1979’s Season 17 as a whole reduced to just 60% the real budget of Season 14 thanks to inflation forcing BBC cuts, this was planned to be the cheapest of the year. And yet it sometimes does remarkably well for it. Like Underworld, it has a memorable gun design, this time with twin barrels (I was eight, and a boy. I remembered the guns). The story starts with a pretty poor spaceship model; it ends with a pretty impressive explosion. There’s rather a good ‘extruding defence shield’ special effect, homaged in last year’s The Time of Angels, and a form of space travel that’s both clever and rather effectively realised; there’s an unimpressive flashing light for a “furnace”, and an overacting man meeting his doom with split pants. A spaceship set is built to judder about in a meteorite-hit gravity whirlpool; bless them, it’s deliberate, but it unfairly looks just like a wobbly set. Things are better on Skonnos, under operatic skies (and operatic hats), with great big yellow arches like an evil McDonalds. Well, more evil. I’ve praised Lalla’s outfit; Soldeed’s is fabulous, looking even better in the Photo Gallery where you can make out the brocade; one character in the final episode looks fascinatingly like a Skeksis; and the Anethans are in pyjamas, which sums up how exciting they are. So if you want to say it looks good, or terrible, all you need do is pause your DVD at the appropriate point to ‘prove’ either case.
The actors are mixed in a different way. The Skonnons, survivors of an empire fallen in civil war, divide between weary old soldiers and a fanatical younger generation brought up on stories of greatness without having seeing how it all turned out; it’s a great backstory [Richard thinks I infer much of it from the book, and suggests replacing “weary” and “fanatical” with “bored” and “nuts”], and though even the shoutier Skonnon actors aren’t that memorable – save, obviously, Soldeed – you almost side with the nasty bunch of fascists over their next-door neighbours, the “Weakling scum!” from Aneth (intended to make you think of ‘Athens’, when unfortunately the actors prompt ‘Anaesthetic’). This insipid bunch who are being used unwittingly to enable an invasion of their own planet – hmm, sounds a clever plan – do so little that you’re left to find something else to say about the actors: doesn’t that one with the perm look like Dominic Monaghan? As on DVD you can see a bit of chest hair, is it quite right to call Seth “chicken”? Teka is played by future Blue Peter legend Janet Ellis, which is the most noteworthy thing about her – you barely notice when at one stage she’s captured and put into cold storage, poor frozen Teka.
Janet Ellis is one of the stars of this disc’s lead extra feature. Who Peter – Partners In Time takes us through Blue Peter’s work with Doctor Who across the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s with sex symbols from three generations, silver fox Peter Purves (delightfully described as having played “Outer Space bloke Steven Taylor”), naughty Janet Ellis and sex-on-a-stick Gethin Jones (she genuinely shocks him at one point with a revelation of her wiles and a Blue Peter badge). Legendary producer Biddy Baxter is both praised for saving so many Doctor Who clips and terrifyingly Stasi-like in her tracking down the secret files on Sophie Aldred. Rather than a ‘Making Of’, there’s an interesting but rather too short piece on writer Anthony Read – the same is true of Peter Howell’s Music Demos. There’s quite a good commentary with Janet and the two stars (I don’t mean Tom, obviously), and some OK text notes – shame they keep hinting at interesting little nuggets, then not giving them any detail (such as Douglas Adams’ theory of time travel for the series, apparently worked out with Graham Williams, which would have been nice to read rather than just have mentioned).
“Next to the crumbling Palace of the Emperor, on the edge of the sprawling ruins that were the capital of Skonnos, there rose the Power Complex.”It’s notable that none of the novelisations of these three Myths and Legends stories have yet been made as part of the expanding range of talking books from BBC Audiobooks – and The Horns of Nimon is the shortest and most typo-spattered of the three, so I suspect it’s the least likely of them for an audio adaptation. That’s a shame, as it’s probably the reason why, back when I was eight, this was – yes – my favourite story of the season. Steve Kyte’s cover picture was vibrant and exciting (far more so than the more ‘accurate’ but dreary VHS composition). The decaying empire had a grandeur on the page, and there’s another Prologue from Terrance Dicks to fill in some of the history and emphasise that Soldeed is rubbish, and knows it. The Pilot and Co-Pilot are far more memorable simply for being named Sekkoth and Sardor (and for being better actors when you read them). It’s not a great book – Romana is far less striking without Lalla being determined to seize the story, the plot problems with Part Four are if anything more noticeable without her and Graham Crowden to distract you, and even the back cover blurb uses the word “enslave” when it really means “consume” – but it’s very enjoyable, a good story told engagingly. Childhood visits to London made the book still more fondly remembered; I spent my 85p on it in the book arcade that used to be in the front corner of Barkers, the day I mortified my Mum by deciding I had to have the Dalek advertising standee from next to the Target display. Pestered to distraction, she asked, expecting a “No”, then had to walk along Kensington High Street with a four-foot cardboard Dalek under her arm as well as a small boy grasped in each hand… And a year later, the rumbling voice of the Nimon in its lair welcomed me to a Doctor Who Exhibition at Madame Tussauds, which was terrifically exciting.
So of all the ‘minor’ Target novelisations, The Horns of Nimon is the one I’d love to have Tom or Lalla read aloud on CD. I doubt it’ll happen, because I’m very unusual in being just fond of the story. The chances are that those choosing which books should be released are fans who either hate or love the story for what it was – or when it was – on screen, and the book fits neither worldview. More than any other story, this still splits fandom today, and much less because of the story itself than as a symbol, a frontier in time…
Labels: A Very Peculiar Practice, Doctor Who, Douglas Adams, DVD, DVD Tasters, Fantasy, Jon Pertwee, Personal, Reviews, Star Trek, The Brigadier, The Key To Time, The Master, Tom Baker
