Love and Liberty

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dangerous Arrivals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Giant Hand

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

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

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

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

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

The Monster in the Swamp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Clare and Jo were sheltering behind a sofa.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Return to Peril

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The End of the Scope

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

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

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

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

Tonight at 7.30, the lovely Doctor Who DVD people tweeting @classicdw invite everyone to watch 1982 thriller Earthshock, and I can see why. Ask any fan for the 1980s’ most exciting stories, and it’s bound to come up: brilliant direction; shock Cybermen return; Moffat-style ‘past Doctors’ clips montage; masses of action (and death); and a memorably tragic ending. Yet I never know if I’ll find it thrilling or disappointing to watch – and that’s not because of the collision of a certain member of the cast with planet Earth, but of Beryl Reid with the machismo stomping through the story. So here’s just why Earthshock is great… And why it isn’t necessarily good. Then, if you’re on Twitter, you can find out what other people think by following #cdwearth this evening.

1982 was a huge turnabout year for Doctor Who. As in 2010, a long-running Doctor who’d taken the series to new heights of popularity had just regenerated into the youngest actor yet to play the part, and people were wondering if the series could survive the change. There were more companions in the TARDIS than usual, one of whom gets killed off then briefly resurrected as a villain’s artificial creation (though at least in 1982 this had consequences – he didn’t then leap back from the dead altogether, just as the large chunks of the Universe destroyed at the close of the previous series stayed that way)… Well, all right, it’s not really very Moffatty in tone, with its incoming lead writer whose signature idea is ‘Just this once twenty-seven times, everybody dies!’ but in part that’s because it has a very unpredictable tone. Season 18 in 1980-81 had a striking thematic unity; Season 19, a year later, was all over the place, particularly in terms of the sudden chasm opening up between the ‘arthouse’ and the ‘macho’ stories, a divide I coined for a review of Kinda – the story that I was quite sure when I was ten was the worst of the season, and now might just be my favourite instead.

You see, one of the oddest things about Season 19 is that it’s one of the very, very few year’s-worth’s of Doctor Who where I’m not sure which I like best – or which is the best, which isn’t always the same thing. Back in 1982, I was absolutely sure that Earthshock was the best thing in the year… Yet now I could probably pick any one of five of the seven stories (not the other two, obviously). Is it still Earthshock, the ultimate in macho Doctor Who? Or Kinda, the epitome of the arthouse, along with Castrovalva – both exploring reality, identity and the dark places of the inside? Or, sometimes, my favourite of the year (more those I might like best, rather than consider the best quality) could step into history, with The Visitation’s sardonic aliens and gorgeous music – a feature of the year – or the sinister layers behind the jolly façade of Black Orchid.

So when I came to pick out why 1982 was brilliant for my series during the 45th anniversary year, obviously I chose Doctor Who Monthly’s masterpiece The Tides of Time.

So Why Is Earthshock Brilliant?

Slotting in the DVD, as we’ve been invited to do tonight, gives you a clue. Although it was quite an early release – out nearly eight years ago – the special features are much more in tune with those of the more advanced range. It was the first to feature its own special documentary, now almost a requirement: appropriately for a story that had made such a splash at the time, this was Putting the Shock Into Earthshock. And the story did indeed have an impact for its two big shocks – the well-hidden return of the Cybermen (not just for the first time in seven years, but the last time to date that a ‘returning enemy’ managed to stay a secret), and the ending, which I’ll be spoilering at the end of this section, so watch out… And which means I’d better not mention the cruelly funny “Episode 5,” still a rarity in being a ‘comedy’ DVD extra that’s actually amusing. Add to that the full isolated score, and an especially impressive one at that, a contemporary TV review, commentary, text notes, photo gallery, raw film sequences including deleted material, slightly underwhelming optional new CGI effects and all, and it still stands up as a particularly good DVD package. But to work out just why I thought so highly of the story, I have to go back not just eight years, but twenty-nine. What grabbed me the first time I saw it?

Put simply, the first episode is a brilliantly inventive horror piece. Perhaps presenting ‘scary shapes in the dark’ is more stylish than original, but what about the hi-tech scanner that becomes an old-fashioned portent of doom, or the weapons that melt people into pizza? When I was ten, that was the most memorably horrible form of death ever. Those opening twenty-five minutes are a superbly crafted build-up of tension, with great music, moody lighting and the threat building through troopers, then androids, then great gleaming uber-monsters that I recognised in delighted shock… While there’s no such thing as the ‘perfect’ episode of a series that takes you to any time and any place, in almost any style, this is as near to one type of it as you can get. Rarely had visual style and sound design come together so effectively to create an atmosphere of dark, echoing menace – and once the Cybermen were revealed at the cliffhanger, the march composed for them became one of the era’s most hummable pieces of ‘action music’. From the deep, low dripping echo acting as a bassline to eerier music dancing around it as troopers crawl through dark caves to the closing silver revelation, director Peter Grimwade, lighting operator Fred Wright, and – particularly – special sound designer and incidental musician Dick Mills and Malcolm Clarke do some of the best work the series has ever had.

The new design of the Cybermen, too, was both striking and seemingly powerful. Their last TV appearance had been when I was three, and it was one of the first stories I ever saw – while I loved it at the time, it’s fair to say it’s not generally considered a total, brilliant success. Before then, you had to go back to the 1960s, where they were the archetypal scary black and white monsters in the shadows. So this reinvention was stunning, if not without its own problems, as I’ll come to shortly. For me it’s still one of the four impressive Cyber-stories from the last century (though one’s yet to see a DVD release, the other three were once released together by Amazon in a handy boxed set as if to say ‘these are the ones to grab’ – as opposed to last year’s Cyber-box, which could have been labelled ‘these are the ones to avoid’). And yet the odd thing is that, in amid the excitement and despite much of it being made up of augmented parts from old Cyber-stories, you don’t really notice that there’s no particular reason for the monsters here to be Cybermen; they work, but they could have been almost any other monster, doing nothing to unearth the central terror of people who were once just like us.

There’s much less claustrophobic darkness after Part One, but the lighting’s still very effective, and the story remains packed with striking images. The silos the waking Cybermen punch their way out of may not stand up to a close look – but when those punches make such huge, echoing bangs, set to that riveting march, you don’t give it a close look; a perfect example of how sound design makes an image more impressive, add to the weight of what’s probably cardboard and assisting the build-up to a great cliffhanger of the steel giants marching remorselessly. Then there’s that fluid camera moving across all the dead crew on the stairs as the Cybermen march over them, or the Doctor’s finest moment in the story, as he does something clever to stop a Cyberman and create a cool and original image: for once, I’ll not say what it is, but it involves a door…

Earthshock also made a success of the programme’s new format. For Peter Davison’s three years as the Doctor, stories were shown not once a week but twice, with the 1982 adventures starting with twenty-five minute episode on Monday, continuing on Tuesday, and then carrying on the following week. This meant both that stories were over in half the time, and that they felt more like two halves than four quarters. Even now, Earthshock’s best watched not all in one go, but two episodes at a time, where it works almost as two two-part stories. One side-effect of this – heretical though it may be for a story most praised for its climax – is that Parts One and Three are vastly superior to Parts Two and Four. For me, both ‘first’ episodes are more interesting than the messy faffing around of their pay-offs… Though, cleverly, in each ‘first episode’ the Doctor meets a trigger-happy bunch who accuse him of murder, so we assume it’s a repeated meme when in fact (spoiler) the second accuser is complicit in the deaths. The one way in which the ‘two by two’ split fails is that, while you’d expect Part Two’s cliffhanger to be the strongest in order to keep your attention for the best part of a week, the three other episodes all have terrific climaxes, but Part Two’s is so banally clichéd that even Adric – who, unlike modern companions, has never ‘seen’ TV drama and can’t be genre-aware – can spot what’s going to happen and warns the Doctor, who at this point is so passive that he literally sits down and picks at his hat, waiting for someone to get killed. And the one you’ll care about isn’t for another week.

So Why Isn’t Earthshock Brilliant?

Adric and the Doctor are, of course, also at the heart of some of my problems with the story (and cover your eyes, folks, because here’s that big spoiler). I have no problem with a hero occasionally choosing to do a Zen sort of nothing, but it has to be the right sort of nothing. It isn’t, here. Instead, too often the Doctor comes across as simply not having a clue. Adric, on the other hand, has a terrifically memorable part in the story – because it’s still the only time that one of the Doctor’s long-running TV companion (as opposed to a few who’d been around rather less, or all of Russell and Steve’s modern ‘ooh, nearlies’) is killed. That’s the key reason so many people remember this story, and yet, and yet… For me, the final episode is its most obvious failure, even with that shocking emotional punch. It’s less that the Doctor fails to save Adric, but that he fails to do anything very much, spending most of the story wandering aimlessly in order to let the Cybermen make all the moves, hoist themselves by their own petards, and wait for the scriptwriter to put the pieces into place for a mechanically inevitable tragedy.

I considered mapping out some of the problems I have with the plotting of the story (if you’re interested, e-mail me for a screed), but I came up with such a list that it would distract from what really pulls me in two – that while Earthshock is fabulously exciting, there’s a lot about it that feels wrong, and that’s less about logic than ethos. It’s true, too, that Part Four was always less exciting for me, which counts against it. Just as we’re supposed to be running towards the climax, unfortunately by the start of the final episode now the Cybermen have ‘won’ and people are just being moved around according to their plan, while the actors are still working hard, the key behind the scenes people seem to have run out of ideas (and not just the writer). The formerly atmospheric team of sound design and music, particularly, suddenly runs out of steam – with no tension to be cranked up until the end, both the action and the sound underscoring it seems far more minor and directionless. And you’ll have gathered that sound cues have a big effect on me. For years, I’d assumed that ‘let-down’ feeling was because ten-year-old me preferred action to emotion. Now I realise I prefer action and tension to lots of aimless running around with a bit of emotion hammered onto the end of it.

My central problem with Earthshock’s ethos, though, isn’t one that I saw as any kind of problem when I was a bloodthirsty ten-year-old thrilled by Doctor Who violence. And yet, even then, I loved what many see as Earthshock’s biggest fault, and yet for me is its saving grace…

When Macho Wins, the Doctor Loses

I’ve explained a little (well, perhaps a lot, by most reviewers’ standards) of why Earthshock is one of the stories about which I have the most mixed feelings. Will it be thrilling? Will it be disappointing? And a lot of that’s simply down to the mood I’m in. Will I love the echoing caves? Will Part Four underperform? But as I’ve grown up with Earthshock, I’ve become increasingly uneasy with its unremittingly macho ethos.

Though it’s easy (and probably true) to argue that Earthshock turned out to have a negative influence on Doctor Who, I don’t blame it for all the excesses that it inspired – in part because it was so exciting and thrilling that people wanted to do it again, you could say it led to horrible, leaden messes like Warriors of the Deep and Resurrection of the Daleks, but you can’t judge a story by its wannabes. Earthshock is far better than any story I can think of that just ‘wants to be Earthshock’ – the direction, design, most of the performances and perhaps above all the music and special sound are all hard to fault, with gripping action and some of the most tense sequences of any Who story. Even the script, despite its faults, is a good deal better than that of its imitators.

My biggest problem with it is its ethos. It fetishises guns and macho values, and the Doctor rather gets lost in the mix. The literal poster boy for this sense of just not ‘getting’ the series is the infamous publicity shot of the Doctor kneeling and aiming a gun, as if that was what he was about. That’s scriptwriter Eric Saward’s unhappy signature piece – in every story he writes, the Doctor wields a gun and to some extent becomes just like every other ‘action hero’. What a failure of imagination.

There’s still a lot of the story I enjoy tremendously, but if I watch it with my brain on it simply feels wrong. There are four main groups of characters in the script – the Doctor and his friends, the troopers, the ship’s crew and the Cybermen. Three of the four are gun-wielding macho teams, while the Doctor either has to join in or be portrayed as weak. That’s a despairingly bad standpoint for a Who story.

Take the Cybermen. In their earlier stories, they’d always been a failing race hanging on to life and giving up their humanity for survival – there was something tragic about them, and their inherent weakness was illustrated through their low numbers, a people dying out, and their consequent need to mount insidious plots through infiltration and hypnosis. In Earthshock, this all changes (having started in The Invasion, where they may as well have been remote-controlled drones but where they’re far more forgivable in a story that’s not really about the Cybermen at all – even there, though, the Cybermen march impressively through streets they’ve stealthily put to sleep first). Mr Saward has a strange fascination with them, but as if protesting, ‘They’re my favourites, so they can’t be weak!’ has changed their character entirely into a thrusting military superpower. Clay Hickman can only have been thinking of this story when he described the Cybermen as the series’ most military monster – surely not, and clearly the Daleks or Sontarans, say – on their return in 2006. That simply wasn’t how they’d ever been presented, yet extreme butchness seemed desperately necessary to their new writer; Mr Saward’s obsession with Cybermen has been well-documented, but if you’ve missed it it’s at its most hilarious from Terrance Dicks on his The Five Doctors commentary (and I once heard him say much worse in person…).

Losing the ‘iron lung’ chest unit (and exoskeletal piping) isn’t just an aesthetic change – there’s no longer any mention of the Cybermen being a dying race putting themselves back together through cybernetics; their replacement parts are no longer a sign of weakness, but a butching-up to make augmented macho supersoldiers. The Doctor’s opposition to them is fatally undermined by his only being able to do so by hanging around with, er, another bunch of macho supersoldiers.

Similarly, Mr Saward obviously remembers that he loved the Cybermen when they were an insidious force of plotters conquering through hypnosis, so he has them doing some insidious plotting… But also makes them a big butch military power bloc with a ginormous fleet, because they have to be really macho and well hard. Ironically, this is also the one where they rely on terrorist bombings rather than their fleet, which as far as I can tell is just there to stand slightly off to one side of the story, willy-waving.

Contrast the testosterone-fuelled Cybermen with our neutered hero. Having thought up an exciting movie-style action adventure with several sets of exciting soldiers in it, Mr Saward appears to have no idea at all what to do with a lead character who doesn’t go for violence as his first choice.

Take this exchange from Part Three:

“Could that be the Doctor?”
“I hope not. Guns are not his style at all.”

Mr Saward’s script pays lip service to the Doctor’s ethos, but only as something to worry about because he’s so feeble – then has Tegan picking up a gun anyway, and relegates the Doctor to the narrator, while – closer to the action – Scott gets to say, “Set weapons to kill.” And within a couple of minutes the Doctor’s snapping up a pistol at the door, too (blink and you miss it, thankfully, unless you look at the horrible posters).

The moment where the Doctor really collides with Mr Saward’s preferred values and gets smashed to bits is Part Four – first metaphorically, in his debate with the Cyberleader, then pretty much literally, when Adric is blown up because the writer thinks the Doctor too weak to save him. He simply can’t believe in a hero who isn’t butch.

It’s not as if Mr Saward isn’t capable of writing some good lines for the Doctor – “always the perfect guests,” say, and he does have a memorable exchange with the Cyberleader about what’s wrong with being a Cyberman:

“I see that Time Lords have emotional feelings.”
“Of sorts…”
“Surely a great weakness in one so powerful?”
“Emotions have their uses.”
“They restrict and curtail the intellect, and logic of the mind.”
“They also enhance life! When did you last have the pleasure of smelling a flower? Watching a sunset? Eating a well-prepared meal?”
“These things are irrelevant.”
“For some people, small, beautiful events is [sic] what life is all about!”

It’s an argument against a brutish, macho script – which is why, in the end, Mr Saward from his viewpoint can’t think of an argument that would let the Doctor ‘win’. It’s easy to forget that this scene ends with the Doctor – the Doctor! – simply lost for words. Cue ‘woman as victim to be threatened and protected by young male hero’, one of the most B-Movie cliché absences of character the Doctor’s ever been submitted to, with the Cyberleader of course assuming the Doctor’s straight, only threatening him with Tegan, not reasoning that the Doctor might have any “affection” for the bloke he’s been with through the whole story. “Such a reaction is not a disadvantage?” “No,” replies the Doctor – and the script – hollowly. Absolutely no-one here is distinctive: Tegan reduced to a 1950s cipher; the Doctor to an ineffectual juvenile lead worried for ‘his girl’; the Cyberleader so blatantly macho that, rather than heralding a victory for machine logic, he’s merely a military cliché one step up from Scott.

So while Mr Saward can write some decent individual lines for the Doctor, he doesn’t seem to know what to do with him overall. Sure, the Doctor can’t win every fight, but he should at least have a reply to the Cyberleader saying how weak he is. The answer here appears to be, ‘Yes, being nice makes you puny. It’s a fair cop’. Zap! Pow! Grr! Aarrghh! Small, beautiful events aren’t what life is all about for Mr Saward, are they? Ironically, given that so many later stories borrow from Earthshock, one that doesn’t seem to resemble it at all (except for the hats) is Frontios, by Mr Saward’s infinitely preferable predecessor as lead writer – which does a very similar gag with the Doctor putting down Tegan to pretend he doesn’t care for her, and yet Chris Bidmead is also able to write the Doctor as outthinking the alien leader, something Mr Saward conspicuously fails to manage here.

“Can’t you do something?”
“Not at the moment.”

Or, indeed, at all, following on from not being able to better the Leader’s argument. The Doctor doesn’t save the day; it’s Adric with his Cyberman brain and Scott with all his big guns. The Doctor’s just left with the coda (not saving the Earth, and too late to save Adric); killing the Leader with, in effect, a bit of Adric would have a thematic rightness, but no, the gold star he grinds in only makes it grunt a bit. The Doctor then has to straddle it, pumping blasts and shooting to reclaim his masculinity.

The saving grace of all this is the not-macho-at-all Captain Briggs, who by accident or design (was it the producer going for a star name, the director putting a bit of personality into the story, or both?) almost single-handedly drags scenes back to being Doctor Who. As you’ll see in a moment.

I did a quick tot-up earlier of the Doctor Who stories that feature no guns at all. I make it very few – only about one in eight – but, interestingly, Russell T Davies’ period as lead writer’s was probably the one that manages it most often. When Mr Saward seemed so often to despair of his hero and have everyone else in the story tell him to ‘Grow a pair,’ it’s almost as if Russell told his writers, ‘You see how that Eric Saward did it? Try growing an imagination instead’.

Ironically, I think the easiest way to thoroughly enjoy this story is to adopt a particular frame of mind; you must first restrict and curtail the intellect, and logic of the mind, then also emotional feelings… Leaving you with the enthusiasm for excitement of an energetic boy. Surely a great weakness in a spectacle so powerful?

Or you can have some of whatever Captain Briggs is having.

Beryl Reid – No-one Else Would Dare

There are some word-associations by Doctor Who fans so common that they’re almost automatic. Long ago, when Target Books were our main way of experiencing the past, the first Doctor was always “crotchety” or the third always had “a shock of prematurely white hair,” for example. But surely few are so overused as the instant association of “Beryl Reid – miscast”.

I thought she was brilliant. And as I’ve got older and my view of Earthshock has become rather more complicated, I still think she’s brilliant. Not only is it a hugely enjoyable performance, but the space freighter’s Captain Briggs is the saving grace of a story that threatens to throttle the ethos of Doctor Who with its crashing (if often very exciting) machismo.

Unusually for a Twentieth-Century Who story, there are an impressive number of female characters in Earthshock – but you’d hardly notice. Nyssa, Kyle and Berger are all as bland as anything (no pun intended), while not just the men, and the Cybermen, but all the female troopers (even Tegan) are written to be played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

What an enormous relief, then, to have the character written for Sigourney Weaver played by a short, crabby older woman who takes the piss. How can people say Captain Briggs is miscast, when Beryl Reid and her put-downs are a complete joy? Can you imagine how unbearable it would have been if Briggs had been as grim as Lieutenant Scott, so they’d all been like that? Thanks to the casting of the thankfully not-mighty Beryl, Briggs comes across as much more of a Whoish character than as written (and far more than any of the other guests).

So let’s celebrate a series that’s not afraid to cast differently and more interestingly than a dourly macho American series stuffed with people in uniform would: that isn’t miscasting. It’s a series that’s true to its own different ethos, where people aren’t uniform – in either sense – and individuals have personalities rather than just being exactly what you’d expect.

Think of Bernard Cribbins as Luke Skywalker blasting ‘incoming’ out of the sky (The End of Time).

Or Arthur Cox as James Dean, the oldest, plumpest, most follically challenged teenage rebel in space (The Dominators).

And Beryl Reid as Ellen Ripley.

No other series could. No other series would even try. Let’s hail them all!

Martin Wiggins’ “Earthschlock”…?

One last thing: Martin Wiggins, now famous (ish) for writing the wittier of the DVD production notes (and as a, cough, minor sideline, being a senior Oxford lecturer, and allegedly killed in The Shakespeare Code), is reported to have written a thoroughly brutal review of Earthshock when the VHS came out under the title “Earthschlock” in the October 1992 DWAS magazine.

Does anyone have a copy of that savage critique (or know Dr Wiggins and be able to ask him)? I’d be interested to read it, as I enjoy his writing and am intrigued to know what he thought (though I suspect I enjoy the story very much more than he does). A web search hasn’t been fruitful.


Having spent all morning listening to Gerry Rafferty, this piece has been written to the soundtracks from Earthshock (unsurprisingly) and Tron: Legacy, which may have been made in 2010 but sounds even more 1982.

Labels: Doctor Who, DVD, In-Depth Doctor Who, Peter Davison, Reviews

A 1982 Peter Davison tale of jungle weirdness, Doctor Who: Kinda is still the source of ferocious arguments (just wait ’til it’s out on DVD and they explode across the special features). Is this a brilliant piece of art, or does it just have the most rubbish ‘snake’ ever broadcast? Is it a Buddhist metaphor, or borrowed from Ursula le Guin? Is it mind-expanding or mind-deadening, philosophically intriguing or just New Age socialism? I answer some of these questions in a highly partial and occasionally spoilertastic way…

“You will agree to being me… This side of madness or the other.”

Few Doctor Who stories have raised such wild passions for and against them as Kinda. Yes, I was one of those ten-year-olds who helped vote it bottom of Peter Davison’s first season for DWM’s poll back in 1982, largely through a vivid last memory of ‘that snake’; at the other end of the spectrum, some fans have announced that anyone who disagrees with their assertion that this is the best Who story ever is an emotional Nazi. I shall leave it to your own judgement any irony involved in people who use “Nazi” to decry those whose precise tastes do not absolutely accord to theirs…

I started a re-evaluation of Kinda through my wobbly audio copy, in those days before video. The old wise woman’s “Wheel turns” speech was quite hypnotic, and so I gradually found myself thinking Kinda was rather interesting – despite one of Uncle Terrance’s least lively novelisations trying to convince me otherwise [like the director, his prosaic prose isn’t in sympathy with the weird wonder of the story]. Nowadays, with repeated video viewings, I’ll admit that I can’t see how I ever thought the story worse than Four to Doomsday or Time-Flight, and I’ve got a lot closer to the adoring end of the spectrum than the embarrassed end I used to sit at. But will I go all the way? Well, I don’t think so, though I’ll waver between perhaps eight and nine out of ten. Let me explain.

On the whole, Kinda is interesting and refreshing, one of the Who stories with the most ideas, married to one of the Who stories that looks most like a pop video. The Dark Places of the Inside are fantastically imagined and realised, and the ‘time’ sequence is hardly less impressive. Unquestionably, the subversive ‘menaces’ of the trees, the “primitives,” Hindle, Dukkha and The Dark Places of the Inside or wherever, all combine tantalisingly to disrupt expectations and are carried off brilliantly.

In the story’s second half, however, and especially after the main hallucinatory effects sequences end, the action-based director and thoughtful script start to work against each other (notably from the blown cliffhanger to Part Three on), particularly as the author’s ideas become less successful. The fourth episode is definitely the weakest, despite quite a strong scene with Hindle’s toy madness and Panna’s consciousness passing on to demonstrate that no-one actually dies in the story (albeit the three ones who went missing…?). Studio floors, technobabble and ‘that snake’ summing up a glib and dull resolution – not to mention interminable Adric / Tegan bitching scenes – make it a curiously uninventive and unimpressive ending. This story is probably best watched as a whole, rather than an episodic let-down.

I’ve recently taken to watching Who again on an episodic basis. Yes, that’s right – as the BBC gods intended! As you might expect, with all stories written that way, most of them work much better that way. And it’s become clear that a key reason so many of us disliked Kinda on first watching – other than the shame of (all together now) ‘that snake’ at school the next day – was that this story didn’t. For a few stories where not all the episodes work, the resolution is the killer. Watch a rather good story with a poorer Part Four (Paradise Towers or The Creature From the Pit spring to mind to tease you with, or perhaps The Leisure Hive if you want one that fewer people hate so much), and it’s plain that only watching ‘the bad bit’ in one sitting leaves you with a nasty taste in your mouth that wouldn’t be so strong if you’d watched it as a ‘movie’. Watch Kinda episodically, rather than all of a bundle as video encourages you to, and it’s striking that it wasn’t just the increasing sophistication of the viewing fans that has led to Kinda’s startling turnaround since its original broadcast. It was the ‘poor Part Four’ effect at work in a peculiarly devastating way when we first watched it.

Oddly, watching Kinda episodically, I’m also struck that despite every review mentioning how the story centres on Janet Fielding, it isn’t a ‘Tegan story’ at all – more of an Adric story. He has quite a lot to do throughout the whole story (though achieving little, at least he only pretends to side with the villain this time; clearly Hindle responds to another boy to play with), while her strong role in the first two parts vanishes almost completely later on. She is superb when oppressed and then possessed by Dukkha (though an effective ‘rape’ scene apparently unlocking her sensuality is an unpleasantly disturbing message), but her appearance in Part Three is just that. Aris merely steps over her unconscious body at one point, and she neither moves nor speaks in a ‘blink and you’ll miss her’ cameo. As all the companions are buried way down in the cast list to start with, it seems particularly unfair on Matthew Waterhouse that he still gets later (and shared) billing than Janet Fielding for Part Three, and that Sarah Sutton gets no billing at all for the middle episodes.

My other reason for recently re-evaluating Kinda is that I’ve now read the book that’s said to be one of its main sources, Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest. Now, this isn’t a story that can simply be explained by reference to any one of the mountain of references it makes, whether Judaeo-Christian Garden of Eden symbolism, Buddhist analogies or Vietnam-era sci-fi. However, as the Buddhism’s been written about in great detail, I found comparisons with Le Guin’s book intriguing, and they helped crystallise why I don’t think Kinda is quite as clever as many take it to be – or quite as enjoyable.

Despite some clear similarities in the setup, including a sophisticated sexual division of labour in the “primitives,” “idiot” / “insane” colonial military leavened by a sympathetic anthropologist, and dreaming, sophisticated “primitives” (as well as blatant nods like “Planet S14” in Kinda for “World 41” in the book, Aris’ captive brother for Selver’s enslaved and murdered wife, or “ILF” – “Intelligent Life Form” – for “hilf” – “High Intelligence Life Form”), the story itself has remarkably little in common with The Word For World is Forest. Quite funny that the villain of the book is “Captain Davidson,” though, as it’s of course the Doctor who enables the snake to enter Eden! Kinda is far less successful in getting across an idea of the local people as sophisticated – with the dubious exception of Panna and the double helix jewellery, it’s merely told, rather than shown. How do they have access to molecular biology? On the face of it, nicking the necklaces from an alien spaceship crashed in the jungle would be more logical an explanation. Shouldn’t we have had some shared dreaming, or something to put the Box of Jhana in context? Instead, these “primitives” really are telepathic, which even the Mara correctly notes is a very boring way to communicate.

Instead of evidence of intelligent thought, the Kinda (surely everyone in this story bar the Doctor, Todd and Panna are just that – ‘children’?) follow Aris like sheep, and flee after a ludicrous attack on the Dome using a TSS-style ‘wicker man’ (instead, in Le Guin’s book Selver’s attacks on the Terrans use their own bombs against them, as well as showing the lethal effectiveness of ‘primitive’ weapons. The Kinda merely appear stupid). Of course, the whole effect is engineered by the Mara to bring about their misery, but instead of a powerful, co-dependent, co-defending (“the dreaming of an unshared mind”) group intelligence, they merely combine into a herd. This is especially obvious in contrast with Aris and Panna / Karuna, who are intelligent and resourceful because they are individuals. The extremely collectivist ideological slant of the story is objectionable both because it isn’t to my personal taste anyway, and because the author’s clear wish to impose it on us has not led him to consider whether it works – in the context of the story, it doesn’t, and it fails even to make an attractive case. It seems not only philosophically disagreeable, but artistically unsuccessful.

The message that progress is horrid and only leads to destruction, and that people are much better off as happy sheep, is despairingly poor. Even the ‘dangers of progress and exploration’ message of The Green Death, for example (which I rather like), is leavened by the saving grace of individuality, while even that other anti-questioning Buddhist parable, Planet of the Spiders, notices the danger of not having a mind of your own as well as of unrestrained ego. Again unlike The Word For World is Forest, which shows the destructive effect of ‘progress’ on the Athshean culture, Kinda is a zero-sum game – there has been no effect on the tribe by the end; again, intelligent life is changed by experience, while the Kinda appear like drones.

Perhaps Christopher Bailey should have read the author’s Introductions to The Word for World is Forest. Ursula Le Guin talks of art as the pursuit of liberty, “escapist” from reality into the freedom of imagination. She also warns of the power an artist has over their characters leaching into desire for the power to influence other people.

“The desire for power, in the sense of power over others, is what pulls most people off the path of the pursuit of liberty,”

she warns, and notes that when artists believe they can do good to other people, they forget about liberty and start to preach. Bailey has failed to heed her warning, and has been “inextricably confusing ideas with opinions”.

Another of my Summer holiday repeat season, originally written for the now-junked site Outpost Gallifrey in 2000 or 2001, I quite enjoyed that one, despite being more pompous than usual (these days I flatter myself I hide it better). As you can tell, I’d recently read The Word for World is Forest, and wanted to explore that ‘source’ for the story rather than go along with the fan meme that the story was all about Buddhism, despite both being mentioned in the famously po-faced and impenetrable media studies textbook Doctor Who – The Unfolding Text which studied Kinda at length a quarter of a century ago.

‘Arthouse’ Vs ‘Macho’ Peter

Unfortunately, Kinda isn’t out on DVD yet, so it’s not as accessible as some to make your own judgements over (though a second-hand VHS is probably cheap enough). I’ll bet it’ll be paired with its even better sequel Snakedance when it is released, but in the meantime, what I didn’t say above is that it may be the most striking example of one of the two warring styles found throughout Peter Davison’s time as the Doctor. While most Doctor Who seasons have a relatively consistent tone within them, Peter’s stories divide sharply between what I think of as ‘arthouse’ and ‘macho’ – wild imagery and gently elegiac tales versus the sort that, as Peter cackles on his commentaries, have more on-screen deaths than Rambo or The Terminator (and those stories that are neither ‘arthouse’ nor ‘macho’ are mostly just forgettable). Like I suspect most fans, I’m convinced that Peter’s best story is his final one, The Caves of Androzani, but less usually I reckon one of the reasons is that it finally unites those two styles, bringing vicious characters and extreme violence to the screen but with evocative dialogue, a deranged love story and dreamlike music and camerawork. That combination, as much as its extraordinary quality, makes it the ideal Peter Davison Who story. There are some, though, who champion Kinda, the ultimate arthouse Doctor Who – and I think I’ve explained why for me it’s good, but not that good. It is, however, a hugely important story, marking out a new direction in which the series could go, helping pull it away from the nothing-but-macho approach of the incoming script editor at the time – where Kinda’s ‘possession with added hippy weird shit’ Vietnam-flavoured existential crisis (directly following two other existential crisis stories) sometimes makes you wonder if the author was on the same drugs as Philip K Dick, Eric Saward appears to be mainlining nothing but testosterone.

Kinda has a lot going for it as an experience. There’s brilliant imagery, and the psychological horror of Tegan in the Dark Places of the Inside uses ’80s video effects like almost no other story (though, as Not the Nine O’Clock News might say, nice video, shame about the song). There’s a remarkable cast – Richard Todd (a major film star actively subverting leading roles he actually took, such as Sanders of the River), Nerys Hughes, Simon Rouse – with superb roles, and Peter Davison finds his feet as the Doctor by stepping aside for much of this story in a way that it’s difficult to imagine Tom Baker doing. Most criticism I’ve read of Kinda focuses on the design, but though the jungle’s not much cop and the giant snake at the climax is every bit as funny as you can imagine, it’s the ideas that let Kinda down for me – both that it runs out of them by the end, and that some of them aren’t very good in the first place. A lot of it’s compelling, but there’s something off-putting at the heart of it. The sledgehammer-unsubtle moral that it’s better to be passive and pastoral than ask questions, develop speech or even be an individual at all seems more Pol Pot than Doctor Who. The series is all about thinking for yourself, about finding new ideas and new places; this pits itself solidly against both, so it’s ironic that it’s often called one of Doctor Who’s most ‘intellectual’ stories it preaches so earnestly against the intellect.

Labels: Books, Doctor Who, Ideas, In-Depth Doctor Who, Outpost Gallifrey Reprints, Peter Davison, Reviews, Utopia

One of the best Doctor Who stories ever made, and one of the most atypical – unusually long, highly political (even highly liberal), with not even a mention of the TARDIS and refusing to side with the ‘humans’ against the ‘monsters’, I’ve often said this was the story that turned me into a Liberal. For the new producer at the time, though, Doctor Who and the Silurians was even more significant, as a technological breakthrough forty years ago this week demonstrated…

“There’s a wealth of scientific knowledge down here, Brigadier – and I can’t wait to get started on it.”

Warning: More Spoilers than usual…

There are few Doctor Who stories about which I have such a wealth of feeling and which have had such profound effects on me. This may, on the face of it, seem a little strange – after all, I wasn’t born when it was first transmitted, and didn’t actually see it until the not terribly impressionable age of 21. This is, of course, because when I watch it now, it seems inseparable from Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, a closely related story in novel form indelibly imprinted on me from the day I bought it (as pictures of little blond me clasping it excitedly to my little bosom on the way home from Blackpool will testify).

It’s a cracking story – slow and grim, but feeling unusually ‘real’ and undoubtedly the series’ best ‘world disaster’. One of the few seven-parters that seems epic enough for its length, this is easily the best Pertwee for me, and one of my all-time faves. It’s the only Third Doctor TV adventure I find as good as the book, a great relief after finding several of those other strange TV stories that came to me as ‘adaptation of the novel’ such a let-down.

Despite my delight in it, I can see a few flaws from the off. Some Who stories work best watched episodically rather than all in a bunch, but this is not one of those stories. It’s not hard to see why, stretched over seven weeks, it didn’t capture such a huge audience in the most recent BBC repeat (but it cheered me up, as at the time I was mostly working in Wallasey, hundreds of miles from my beloved and thoroughly cheesed off in a grotty hotel. Besides, it was jollier than listening to The Massacre on headphones). Although it builds up brilliantly by the end, it doesn’t start by following on from Spearhead From Space with anything like the same punch, verve or on-screen expense. It could do with a bit of a kick near the beginning to draw people in.

Starting off on colourised video, it immediately looks cheaper than the preceding story, and the dodgy T-Rex is no help. Not as dodgy as Bessie seems, though; with the Doctor tinkering to get his car going, you reckon that the Brigadier bought it for him from a scrap merchant to save on the budget. Once the story gets going, it’s terrific, but it seems to take an age to start up, and the ‘mystery’ of the opening episode isn’t pulled off as excitingly as it should be. But at least – despite the opening – it seems much more cerebral than last week (must be all the scientists about).

What makes Doctor Who and the Silurians work right from Episode 1 nonetheless is the quality of the characters, and the actors playing them, even before we come to the first not-all-bad ‘monster’ characters since Varga the Ice Warrior. It’s striking that no one character that can be labelled as just ‘utterly evil’, or ‘completely insane’ (at least to start with), the usual Doctor Who shorthands for the villain. Malcolm Hulke captures a fatal flaw in the Doctor here, perhaps more craftily than at any other point in the show. He writes for Pertwee at the perfect time when he’s still new and appealing and can get away with lines that make him less likeable, without coming over as merely unpleasant. Liz Shaw remains one of the most fabulous companions, despite being treated appallingly at times – already sidelined in just her second story, it’s sad that in a saga full of doctorates, only Dr Shaw is deprived of hers and made to work as a secretary: “Personnel will be handled by Miss Shaw.” Among many guest appearances, Peter Miles stands out in the first of many shrill, manic parts, and Fulton Mackay steals the show with the charismatic Dr Quinn. He’s frightfully good, very laid-back and with a little humour, though with an unmistakable undercurrent of bitterness. It’s a real shock when he dies so early, adding to the unexpected realism. Perhaps the standout performance, though, is Nick Courtney’s Brigadier, who in a story crammed with much better-drawn characters than we usually get still emerges as the most complex of the lot. While not playing the lead in the way he did in much of Spearhead From Space, he manages to move from hero to villain while remaining entirely true to the spirit of the man.

What story we get in the first episode largely consists of a spy plot, which might work a little better if it wasn’t dropped so quickly not because of underterrestrial evidence, but because the plot no longer needs it. Quinn and his would-be strumpet are briefly implicated, his throwaway line about knowledge to be gained providing the most intriguing moment. We hear about a planned programme of sabotage, but it never quite gets going. The Doctor, however, is on a planned programme of really winding everybody up. He’s already far less likeable than he was in Spearhead! “It’s not worth fifteen million pins if it doesn’t work, is it?” never fails to make me smile, but it’s not a line calculated to win co-operation. His threat to Dr Meredith that he can do whatever he pleases is also jarring; in the past, he may have said such things as a “Provincial Officer” or an “official Examiner,” yet that was play-acting, and our Doctor now appears to have become an authoritarian for real. Thank heavens the Brigadier is there to take him down a peg. Can you imagine anyone else getting away with dismissing all his clues and calling him “Dr Watson,” a bright remark which sends the Doctor into such a sulk that he decides to go down into the caves very suddenly. As if just for the cliffhanger.

It’s not as if the first cliffhanger is even much cop. We may have had a little tension from ancient mind-destroying horrors, all very At the Mountains of Madness and Quatermass and the Pit, but they lose their nerve and reach for the unconvincing T-Rex (or “some sort of dinosaur”) when it comes to something to bring us back next week. It’s then lured away by the sound of someone having sex on creaky bedsprings. I’m scared. As if to draw further attention to budgetary shortcomings, Lethbridge-Stewart admits he only has five or six men – and they really have a Brigadier in charge of them? The Doctor even returns from his deadly cliffhanger with no ill effects at all. Fortunately, it’s about this point that things really take off, with Baker swiped in the caves and the reptile person emerging into the light and wandering about so gorgeously shot it’s as if the director’s just woken up. Simmering tensions between Lawrence and Quinn come crashing on Miss Dawson, and all at once the stakes seem raised – it’s only Episode 2, and the director of the centre is already demanding UNIT be recalled.

Admittedly, Farmer Squire’s wife isn’t a patch on Meg Seeley, but I’m always a sucker for that Quatermass-style selective race memory, and the great three-eye-view of Liz as she’s attacked for the cliffhanger is actually rather gripping. Amazingly, the pace keeps up, and the Doctor both spots what’s suspicious and doesn’t help very much, forcing Quinn onto the defensive instead of gaining his confidence. And, gosh, they’ve got a ’copter for the search (which is done rather well). It all looks much darker than Spearhead, and the tone’s darker too, with very little comic relief and rather less pizzazz – but it no longer feels cheaper, and by now it’s drawn you in.

The Doctor’s baiting of Quinn at his cottage is well done, and finally gets under Quinn’s cool, but it’s a shame; if the Doctor had still been Troughton, he might have charmed him into something, not just got his back up. It’s a miracle that he nearly gets something out of Miss Dawson, given that she and Quinn are so blatantly both in love with the same person – Dr Quinn. It remains difficult not to feel rather sad and rather regretful at the Doctor’s tactics when we find Quinn dead, despite the rather good cliffhanger to introduce the new race. Given all that, the bathos of the following scene is shocking. Is “Hello – are you a Silurian?” the silliest line the Doctor’s ever uttered?

Hulke’s characterisation of the Doctor in regularly giving him such ‘foibles’ as being a git and lying to people, rather than making him entirely heroic, again come to the fore when his not informing the Brigadier of Quinn’s death instantly begins to undermine his position with Lethbridge-Stewart. While there’s perhaps a little much dodging in and out of the caves, Baker being trapped in the foaming rock pool looks rather nastily effective (and more interesting than the more prosaic mantrap of the book). The Doctor and Liz going down and then Liz popping up again seems a little easy, but it sets up the arguments which make up most of the next episode, and concludes, in effect, the first story. Yes, that’s right. It’s really two stories meshing in the middle, rather as if the Bob Holmes ‘split story’ technique had come in early: Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters (ooh, what’s going on in the caves?) followed by Doctor Who and the Silurian Plague, with a whole new set of issues once all the first have actually been resolved. Perhaps it’s this aspect that makes the serial seem to go on far less long than many other six-or-seven-parters, even if it means one story ends with a rather unimpressive gurning cliffhanger.

Perhaps resting on the cliffhanger point itself is a little unfair. Watching it now, it’s striking that the real revelation – and of course the ‘message’ – that we have by the end of Episode 4 is that both sides are very similar people, and not in a very attractive way. The immediate ancestors of this story are not the more straightforward monster tales of the Troughton era, but David Whitaker’s earlier-starting historicals and accounts of high-ranking intrigue. I wonder if Galaxy 4 would have had the same effect on me? I suspect not, with its simpler ‘Beautiful can be bad, ugly can be good’ reversal rather than shades of grey and two races each split into myriad fears and hopes, and without the critical innovation of the ‘prior claim’ on what we think of as our planet. It’s on these people that the story turns: a politician trying to do what’s best but with the minimum of embarrassment; young Silurian Morka arrogantly refusing to see any other view than that the planet belongs to his people; the Brigadier increasingly frustrated as the Doctor’s behaviour and lack of trust forces him into a corner; old Silurian Okdel hesitantly prepared to exchange knowledge; Miss Dawson gunning for the ‘monsters’. Having said all that about ‘character’, it’s interesting that Vietnam-era aggressor Morka (the book providing so much more memorable a name than ‘Young’ – presumably he wears a leather jacket and, aged only 65,226,801, is much more hip than Old Okdel’s ungroovy 65,226,858) is the only reptile person that sounds like he’s doing an American accent. Satire, or just bad acting?

Altogether, this patch has got some splendid dialogue, with actors mainly arguing in twos – Young Silurian and Scientist, Doctor and Old Silurian, Lawrence and Masters (a youngish Geoffrey Palmer), plus that great debate, with Liz speaking for the liberals, Miss Dawson subbing for the Daily Mail (‘String the monsters up! It’s the only language they understand!’), Masterly inaction and the increasingly deranged Dr Lawrence hilariously accusing everyone else of delusions. Who says ‘talky’ means dull? The argument between Liz and Dawson fair blazes, for example, while the discussion between the Doctor and Okdel is far calmer, with the revelation of the Moon – and Baker shouting “traitor” (off) at him. Admittedly, I suspect the Saudis would have something to say about humanity giving away hot places, but at least it saves the Brigadier (ironically). It’s still not got quite everything going for it, though, as some splendid reptile people plotting and Baker’s near-escape are made far less watchable by the music reaching new lows – this is ‘When Kazoos Go Bad’. They’re so intrusive, you could call it ‘The Power of the Kazoos’, couldn’t you, making the ear-splitting Sea-quel ‘The Evil of the Kazoos’…

It’s a good job there are so many character moments about, of course, as once again the action seems to consist of people going into the caves and coming back out again. When the mucky Brigadier responds to another childish diatribe with “I lost a lot of men in those caves, Dr Lawrence,” there’s a calm pain about him that’s really impressive, and only slightly undermined by the way he’s already admitted he has very few men, none of whom were seen to die there. Meanwhile, back in the reptile people’s shelter, things are no more harmonious. There’s quite a savage row between the cave leaders, with Okdel basically saying ‘Shut up or I’ll kill you’. He’s clearly shaken by the time he gives the Doctor the bacteria, though (as well as shaking!), and then Morka does the equivalent of shooting him in the back. It’s not even a trial of strength! It’s a shame, as Hulke has given some thought to ‘creature character’, yet neither their characters nor culture are as complex as the humans’, and Morka in particular often comes over as caricatured (but I suppose you can’t get it all right first time). Let’s face it, this is hardly a very stable or civilised system of government. Mind you, the Cabinet might be more fun with third eyes; Brown boggles Blair while he’s not looking, Beckett blasts Brown over dinner, but is toasted by Jack Straw with his three-eyed glasses, and Straw’s then savaged by Blunkett’s guide dinosaur… Which all makes it rather odd that, up top, Masters remains an unusually subtle and well-meaning Doctor Who politician (or possibly civil servant, as it’s never made clear on screen, and the book gives him a civil servant’s rank but makes him an MP!). “My report will of course exonerate you completely – I’m sure you did everything in your power,” though, is just the sort of kindly way of saying ‘Bang goes your funding, good luck finding a university post’ that actually makes you sorry for Lawrence, a wretched man with no faith but suddenly acquiring Job’s job description.

This episode having been stuffed full of more drama than you find in most whole Doctor Who stories, it’s glorious to reach the end and discover that the climax lives up to it. The Doctor arguing about confining Major Baker and not putting him into hospital is done with real conviction, and it’s notable that once he returns to the surface, all the talking starts to pay off. His leaving the caves triggers Morka’s coup, and gets everything moving up top. Baker is very eager to convince himself that he escaped… But it’s hardly surprising, as he’s been self-delusional all along, with his saboteur obsessions. Then he staggers out to die, for a staggeringly grim cliffhanger – surely the scariest in the series so far. And there are still two episodes to go…

Facing the gravest threat to humanity since the Black Death (or possibly the last story), the Doctor immediately trusts the Brigadier to act, and Lethbridge-Stewart appears to trust the Doctor again to get the problem sorted – though he’s not forgotten the trouble his scientific adviser’s been earlier. The Brigadier’s worth his weight in gold, doing the right thing immediately at the hospital (even though that happens to be ordering people about with a gun), and the Doctor sets up his regimen of injections. Part of the implicit bargain here appears to be that when the Brigadier tells the long-suffering Liz to staff the phones and she protests, once again the Doctor backs him up! No wonder she ends up leaving so soon, and of course sooner still it’s all the more ironic that the Brigadier completely stiffs the Doctor at the end, with Liz his apologist – as if even she finally loses patience with the Doctor, despite agreeing with his views (and in the book, of course, she’s pissed off with him throughout).

Even the Brigadier’s unusually efficient bit of martial law is unable to prevent Masters reaching London, and while the journey there may be less tense than in the novel, the arrival is stunning. The Marylebone scenes are extraordinarily well-mounted and scary; aliens with rayguns are one thing, but this is even worse than the more obviously memorable Autons on the high street; this is an everyday place ravaged by a horrible illness, and is horribly plausible in its turn. It looks like a documentary or some disaster drama. It makes you really proud of Doctor Who, that it can be so depressing! Oh, hang on… As the guard pitches over and the camera follows the blue lamp, it looks like the end of the world is approaching.

Mass death and panic are brought home by also focusing on the death of poor Masters, staggering around London before toppling down, and accompanied by Morka’s most chilling line so far, a whispered “I am the Leader now” that finally sounds in control, just as Lawrence is on the verge of finally losing his in winding up Dr Shaw. The effect is to suggest the Wenley Moor director is stupid and the new shelter leader isn’t, but viewers will of course know they share the same critical error of disregarding the Doctor: “They’re only apes,” says Morka.

Lawrence’s final end is striking in a number of ways – it’s yet another real character who hasn’t even made it to the final episode, let alone out of the final credits, and as well as his ghastly blistering from the plague helping bring home its threat, his raving is highly disturbing. As with the disease, this unusual story first warns, then illustrates – it doesn’t just tell us that the place is riddled with nervous breakdowns, but actually shows us one, and very squirmy it is to watch, too. The story’s length and well-drawn characters mean that almost uniquely in the series, Lawrence has time to descend into paranoid madness, and we care about it.

This is perhaps the most frightening episode of Doctor Who, because it’s the most believable. We see the spread of the disease; we see people we ‘know’ die from it or lose their minds from the horror; we see our heroes desperately struggling to find a cure, or the Brigadier trying to keep the country afloat on the ’phone. Extraordinarily, rather than becoming dated, the modern advance of combined drug treatments to check the effects of viruses like HIV only adds greater plausibility – though the same can hardly be said for the line,

“Some of these drugs are so new we don’t even know their properties yet.”

So they could be, what, dancefloor fun, or antifreeze?

So caught up can you be by the terrifying culture shock of the biological warfare that it’s easy to forget its instigators. Unwise, of course, but so do the regulars, and although it’s interesting to see ‘young stallion’ Morka cutting through rock from the front, it’s difficult not to feel that the cliffhanger reintroducing a less virulent threat and carrying off the Doctor with his most unconvincing boggle actually lowers the dramatic tension rather than raising it as a climax should. Still, more room for the Brigadier to come over well (“With respect, sir, I don’t think you understand the gravity of the situation. …But there’s no time to refer it to the Defence Committee!”) before making something of a tactical blunder in allowing his men to be lured out.

In the endgame, it’s obviously easier to convey the drama of a big ticking bomb / gun / molecular disperser than it is to show a disease being cured all round (thrilling zooms on: hospital beds and Horlicks!), even if it still feels like a lower gear than last week’s. More interestingly, you can see points at which the trust between the Doctor and the Brigadier deteriorates further; after being kept waiting so long for the antidote formula, Lethbridge-Stewart would be only human to entertain the odd doubt on the Doctor disappearing in the company of ‘the enemy’. The Doctor then reappearing, in white, framed by psychotic reptile people, not only looks scary – he actually shows no sign of being bothered at first that they’re going to kill UNIT’s CO. It’s Hawkins’ attack that saves him, and only then does the Doctor appear to make up his mind (but, some might say, at least Avon gets killed).

The reptile people’s random killing of base staff at the end is actually quite chilling, too. Monsters usually threaten; they don’t just scythe down characters straight away! It’s rather more like a modern terrorist drama than typical Doctor Who, and serves to emphasise both this serial’s unusually high body count and how few of those have actually died in the ‘thrilling shoot-out’ action you’d normally expect. We’re still some way off the end credits for Episode 7, yet most of the people in Episode 1 are long-dead, and half the cast who made it this far will be dead by the end. It also serves to emphasise the deadly intent of the rather uninspiring prehistoric microwave with which the human race is to be cooked, though in fairness the machine also supplies more evidence of the so far somewhat sparse reptile civilisation. A bit of art wouldn’t hurt, a bit more technology, or more than two sound effects while they do everything by third eye ‘magic’.

“Doctor, what do you think you’re doing?” asks the Brigadier, who by now is clearly far from convinced that the Doctor is play-acting when he goes to help the Elder Earthlings (and in that rather unwise t-shirt, he does look a bit shifty). “You mustn’t help him!” he even orders Liz, who – like the audience – has more faith, but the skilful writing and Courtney’s performance make his not trusting the Doctor an inch perfectly understandable. It’s also rather impressive that the Doctor really does have to overload the power core to scare off the reptile people – for once, it’s not just a bluff – and that the same thing that wakes the reptile people in the first place becomes the cause of their downfall, rather than the power being merely a background detail.

With the machine blown up, the monsters in retreat and the Doctor saying “Yes, I know, I’ll try fusing the control of the neutron flow” (admittedly not then the cosy nod that that sort of line has become in retrospect), you’d expect this to be the end, but the last few minutes are brilliant – just when every other Who story would finish, we get great stuff like Morka finally showing he’s not just a violent egomaniac, as he realises that leadership involves responsibility. It makes his death suddenly poignant, and rather graphic. The Doctor is really, well, Doctorish with his pursuit of scientific knowledge, and what a joy it is to see that – except for the Brigadier, who is having none of it, but not yet blustering. Lethbridge-Stewart gives him a seriously evil look as the Doctor contemplates a reptile revival, and while I’m on the Doctor’s side through and through, now I can see what’s brought the Brigadier to this point, I wonder if the Doctor couldn’t have retained his trust, and so kept Morka’s people alive. It isn’t really their disagreement that precipitates the final crisis, but their distrust – it’s not impossible that the Brigadier’s sealing of the caves is not inevitable, but in part a lesson to the Doctor, to show him ‘who’s boss’. Both actors are at their very best, with shock meeting quiet, deadly efficiency. Has Jon Pertwee a finer moment than that appalled look at the exploding caves, in a fantastic Doctor scene that lures you into thinking it’ll just be the comic relief?

The Doctor loses. He actually loses. And the first person to beat him since The Aztecs’ Tlotoxl is to become his friend; it’s easy to conclude that it’s a shame they had to get on after this. I’m no longer sure that’s true. Perhaps this is simply a better story than any that follow with the Doctor and UNIT, and none of the rest could cope with this level of drama. But perhaps also the Doctor realises that UNIT is in the right place at the right time, and could be doing the right thing if he changed tactics and tried harder to persuade them; it’s a better excuse for his becoming the ‘establishment’ Doctor than any other I’ve heard, and despite his loud distaste for politicians, for once it’s an argument for working ‘inside the system’. This Doctor’s instincts have been spot-on, and he’s tried to do good throughout, but it’s all undermined by his own fatal flaw: arrogance. Ironically, the Doctor realises that the solution is for everybody just to get along with each other, but his confrontational approach and unwillingness to trust people with information shows that he’s incapable of following his own advice. In life, in politics and in Doctor Who and the Silurians, getting everyone’s backs up rarely gets you results, even if you’re right.

Run end credits – and notice how much shorter they are than for than Episode 1. Oh, and I have to get this out of my system: he’s not Doctor Who. They’re not Silurians. But it’s still a cool title.

This story has a lot to answer for… Reading its message that green scaly rubber people are people too turned me into a Liberal. Appropriately, it’s one of the few [Twentieth Century] Doctor Who stories I saw first as an adult that I can remember exactly where I was when I saw it for the first time. It was five am the day after it was released by BBC Video, and I was crashing in a sleeping bag on someone’s floor (the glamour of politics) and blearily determined to get it all watched before it was time to go out for another day’s trudging the streets to canvass and deliver leaflets in the 1993 Christchurch by-election, which turned out to be a great Liberal Democrat victory over the Tories. Devoted as I was to the cause, this story was still something I desperately wanted to make time for as early as possible, and I was thrilled – even though it had actually been a life-changing experience many years earlier. And without having read the book, who knows? Perhaps I wouldn’t have been there at all…

So that – originally written in 2002 – was where my crucial political breakthrough took place, probably aged about seven when I found a copy of the novelisation on holiday. I still love both the book and the TV story, though I often wonder what I’d have made of the Doctor (Jon Pertwee, of whom I have mixed feelings) suddenly stuck on Earth and working for the military rather than travelling through history and to alien worlds if I’d already been watching the series at the time. I might have hated it. But I wasn’t born by 1970, and with the Doctor long since freed to wander again through time and space by the time I was captivated by first seeing Doctor Who, it’s easy to be fond of a time that had finished. I love Doctor Who for its variety – and the period during which he was exiled to Earth, while denying that variety when it was all there was, is now an interesting part of it when I can look back across the lot.

Doctor Who In 1970, In Colour (Separation Overlay)

1970 was an extraordinary year for Doctor Who. A bold relaunch for the series, in colour, with a new Doctor exiled to modern-day-after-tomorrow Earth, it’s by a long way the most Earthbound the series has ever been. Again, you’d think that means I’d hate it. And yet… Each one of the stories is just so good. Doctor Who and the Silurians is undoubtedly the best of them, but I’ve also written reviews of Spearhead From Space and Inferno, and I’m sure I’ll be excited enough to do the same when The Ambassadors of Death makes it to DVD, so I can’t think of any other season where every single story is of such consistently high quality. It’s certainly not my favourite year of Who – yes, I do prefer those with more variety, with different times, different worlds, and a different tone to the fairly relentless butch soldiery – but that’s not any of the individual stories’ faults; the season’s hugely impressive, but it’s a little less than the sum of its parts.

I mentioned a technological as well as a political breakthrough above – on 6th August 1969 there was a five-hour test session at the BBC for a new technique called Colour Separation Overlay, or CSO. Well, it was called that at the BBC; everyone else called it “Chromakey,” or more commonly these days “greenscreen” or “bluescreen”; it’s when you programme a video camera so it doesn’t capture anything in a particular colour, usually green or blue, so you can insert the bit the camera does ‘see’ onto another shot (for example, have someone mime flying against a blue background, then add them to a picture of the sky). But in Doctor Who, of course, the colour of monsters is green and the TARDIS is blue, so in the early ’70s they used a lot of disappearing yellow backgrounds instead. As Doctor Who and the Silurians was the first of the series to be shot on colour videotape (Spearhead From Space, the first colour Who story, was on film, which needs different techniques), it was the first to use CSO. It’s to make the caves look bigger in Episode 6, if you’re wondering, but the man in charge of that August 6th effects test was Barry Letts, who took over as producer of Doctor Who with …and the Silurians and devoutly believed that you could use CSO to do anything. So, over the next five years, he tried to prove it…

Bye-Bye, But Why? Outpost Gallifrey

But back to my review above. It’s a little odd reading it after about seven years. My style’s changed a great deal, and so has the context. I originally wrote it for Outpost Gallifrey, at the time the biggest Doctor Who fan site. Regular readers of my summer repeats season (stalled in the last few weeks) will be aware that, as well as that site’s owner closing down its associated private forum and its successor forum, in an act of vandalism, he’s now obliterated the main site, too. I really can’t see the point: he’s said that the closed forums had to be deleted for privacy’s sake, but the thousands of reviews and articles people had contributed to Outpost Gallifrey were always free for use of the public. I had only eight pieces on there, but one bloke had reviewed every single Twentieth Century Who TV story, and many others as well – and, unlike a lot of Internet reviews, his were rather interesting. That’s about 200 just from one chap that I enjoyed reading and can’t any more, for no particular reason save selfish destructiveness, and the fact that the site domain still exists as a big advert for a money-spinning convention makes it seem like two fingers up to all the people whose work for free had made the original site a success.

Grr.

But anyway, back in 2002 I wrote this review for what I assumed was an audience of Doctor Who fans who’d be intimately familiar with the story, or at least with the general details surrounding it. So the main thing that struck me was that now I wouldn’t write something quite so utterly preaching to the converted; enthusiastically insular as I may still be, these days I at least make the odd concession to readers who don’t know exactly what I’m talking about before I start (and I’ve added the odd expositionary word above to make some of it marginally less impenetrable). Following on from that, it’s also a lot more spoiler-heavy than many of my pieces now, and without any spoiler warnings for those who’ve not seen the story.

The other huge stylistic difference is how linear it all is. Were I starting out on a detailed review of Doctor Who and the Silurians today, I might base it around the themes, or the characters – I wouldn’t just plough through the story in order any more. In many ways, my reactive approach above (and particularly the funny asides I thought of and crowbarred in) reads like a ‘not the DVD commentary’ years before the story was released on DVD.

It’s not just the DVD release that’s changed the context since I wrote it, of course – Doctor Who’s come back on TV, and I’d assume that people interested in the show would be a far wider group, but also far less knowledgeable of every single story from the series’ whole forty-six years (and, of course, today I’d imagine very different members of the Cabinet slaughtering each other).

Beneath the Surface On DVD

If you want to experience Doctor Who and the Silurians for yourself, then – and, for me, it’s still one of the best Doctor Who stories ever made, even aside from its personal effect on me – pick up the Beneath the Surface DVD box set, which has been out a couple of years now and so you should be able to find fairly cheap. The two sequels with it decline sharply (one exciting but dumb, the other rather less exciting and dumber), though the three collected ‘reptile people’ stories have the distinction of all having their own isolated scores on the DVD, which in the case of the two ’70s stories makes them exceedingly rare – though the quality of the scores rises sharply, in inverse proportion to the stories themselves (perhaps fortunately, listening to the music for this story in isolation you realise how very little there is of it, however shonky the crumhorns are when they sound). You’ll also find that Doctor Who and the Silurians has inconsistent picture quality; restored from a good black and white print and a very, very poor colour home video, it’s a massive improvement on the old VHS restoration, but you can still tell there’s something a bit iffy about it. Despite that, some scenes are arrestingly impressive with the new treatment – Jon Pertwee no longer looking like he’s been coloured in with felt-tips for the terrific Episode 5 cliffhanger, for example, or the sweeping helicopter shots and fantastic zooms for the UNIT search across the moors now looking far more expensive and expansive than they did in grainy near-black and white.

The other advantage of seeing Doctor Who and the Silurians on DVD, of course, is that it’s packed with extras. There’s a particularly fine commentary, mixing people from before and behind the camera. That means it can move naturally from details like the director explaining his painting the upper third of the lens red for a Silurian-eye view – in a story all about seeing things from different people’s points of view – to moments of dry humour like Peter Miles admonishing Caroline John over her flippant wish for a third eye with which to shut people up (“Some of us died because of these things”), or the marvellous Geoffrey Palmer bringing it right up to date with

“My son would have been hiding behind the sofa while watching this… And in the last series that went out, he directed four of them.”

And, back to the different points of view, the actors all constantly debate the story’s politics, often though not always siding with their characters’ viewpoints, while script editor Terrance Dicks calls the Doctor “an incorrigible liberal” and “a Guardian-reading liberal”. Hurrah! The text notes are informative and often amusing – thankfully, over seven episodes, they’re written by Martin Wiggins, definitely the best of the DVD annotators, deftly explaining such elements as the slightly confused science without either getting defensive or just slagging the programme off; after sketching out the Silurian Era, he concludes, “So why are the reptiles in this serial known as Silurians? Simply because Malcolm Hulke liked the sound of the name!” Which is as good a writer’s reason as any. And, amongst all the on-screen documentaries and other extras – photo galleries, “Now and Then” location features, the music, the restoration – there’s arguably the best single DVD extra the range has yet offered, What Lies Beneath, a BBC4-style visual essay on the issues behind the story, splendidly narrated by Geoffrey Palmer (I mention him again, but he does have a marvellous voice and knows how to use it), featuring Doctor Who writers from the ’60s to today and even Roy Hattersley. Well, he’s not bad in this.

Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters

Given that the novelisation Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters had such a profound effect on me, though it’s long out of print, I should of course mention that it’s now available on a shiny silver disc of its own, read by Caroline John (Dr Liz Shaw) as a talking book. She even plugs it on the DVD commentary, bringing in some of its extra details. It’s well worth picking up and a rather good reading of an outstanding book that adds much extra depth to the characters and situation, though not perfect. It suffers from printing the novel’s gorgeous original internal illustrations not at full-page size, but rather smaller than postage stamps, which reduces their impact. Caroline’s brilliant as Liz, particularly when she comes close to murdering the Doctor in his smugger moments, and has fun with her pompous Doctor and Brigadier voices, but is slightly uncertain as a narrator, though noticeably gaining confidence as she goes along.

The biggest let-down of both elements is Dr Quinn; the most fascinating character for me growing up, tensely written like the spy drama double agent who’s got the secret communications device from his handlers, ambitious to make his own scientific mark, manipulating Miss Dawson, then finally dying in a thrillingly written sequence accompanied by an outstanding illustration. Neither has quite the same effect when you have to squint at a tiny picture and, unfortunately, Caroline’s terrible cod-Scots accent makes it less poignant and more of a relief for Quinn to be killed off. Still, if you can ignore what Dr Quinn sounds like, I’d thoroughly recommend the book either on the page or on CD – and when I picked it as one of my summer reading choices for another site last year, people even seemed to like my writing…

Labels: Doctor Who, DVD, Fandom, In-Depth Doctor Who, Jon Pertwee, Liberalism, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Outpost Gallifrey Reprints, Personal, Reviews, The Brigadier, The Golden Dozen