Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars
Doctor Who is forty-eight years old today, and one of the series’ finest stories took place one hundred years ago (probably not today). On TV, Pyramids of Mars scared the daylights out of me when I was four as an inexplicable force drew Tom Baker’s Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith to the year 1911 to find a sinister priest summoning the awful power of an ancient god; then I grew up pleasurably terrified by Terrance Dicks’ novel, now gloriously read in audiobook by Tom. Both versions cast long shadows through today’s Doctor Who, for TV, other stories and toymakers alike. And watch out – there are many spoilers ahead…
1975 was probably the most exciting year Doctor Who has ever had – and I’m sure that I can judge that entirely objectively, having started watching it at the beginning of the year with the early days of Tom Baker. With more new stories broadcast that year than in any for a decade – or for another three decades to come – there was a mighty amount of Doctor Who, and of an astounding quality. In fan polls – and for me – two 1975 stories always make the top ten of all the two hundred and more broadcast so far, while another is said to be the personal favourite of both Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat. Pyramids of Mars is one of those two up there at the top, and from interviews and references in his stories as early as Queer As Folk onward clearly a favourite of Russell’s, if not the favourite. And it may say something about the age or taste of fans as to whether they prefer the different ‘raising dark gods’ stories of 1971’s The Dæmons, 1975’s Pyramids of Mars or 2006’s The Impossible Planet (which explicitly refers to the earlier two). For me, it’s the combination of 1975 and 1911 all the way.
On TV, it’s easy to see why Pyramids of Mars is so highly regarded. Looking great in the ideal setting of ‘about a hundred years ago’, it has perhaps the most perfect Doctor Who opening episode of the lot, climaxing in for me the series’ scariest ever cliffhanger, then introduces the TARDIS and big concepts around time travel, and finishes with the Doctor tempted – and taken – by the Devil, a mixture of science fiction, myth and pure horror that gives you big-scale ideas on a canvas small-scale enough to deliver them convincingly, the ultimate in ‘ancient horror on the rise’. Robert Holmes’ least funny, most scary script (with additional work by Paddy Russell, adding to her assured direction); a small but perfect cast including Bernard Archard, Michael Sheard, Peter Copley and Peter Mayock; a superb atmosphere created by filming at Mick Jagger’s stately home, gorgeous antique design and a career-best eerie music score from Dudley Simpson that can all compete with Hammer’s own Mummy movies; and, above all, probably Doctor Who’s greatest ever villain in a heart-stopping performance by Gabriel Woolf as the dark god Sutekh, dripping malice in a voice that rarely lifts above an agonised whisper. The whole thing was the single story that scared me the most, and though I loved returning to it, it was always with a thrill of fear – most vividly going down the stairs that led into the Blackpool Doctor Who Exhibition, finding Sutekh, mummies and sarcophagi in the dark at the bottom, and being seized with such terror that I gripped the banister and couldn’t be dragged inside for what felt like an eternity (probably two or three minutes of parental persuasion, or of patient prising my fingers away).
Pyramids of Mars has been repeated twice on BBC1 or BBC2 and released several times – it was one of the first Doctor Who stories available on VHS in the mid-’80s (and the first I bought), initially in a feature-length edit with not only cliffhangers but several other scenes sliced out, seemingly at random, then a few years later in full, and a fairly early DVD release, one of the first to have the sort of full selection of extras that set the standard for the range continuing today (complete with a scriptwriter being unfeasibly rude about Mary Whitehouse, as he should). And it’s the first ‘classic’ Doctor Who to be released on Blu-ray, in tribute to Elisabeth Sladen as an extra feature on The Sarah Jane Adventures Series Four – while if you missed it on CBBC last month, the very last and one of the finest of The Sarah Jane Adventures begins tomorrow on BBC1, so make sure you catch it. As a Blu-ray experience, though, Richard notes in Millennium’s excellent Mysteries of Doctor Who #23: Why Does Pyramids of Mars Take Place in ENGLAND? that the disc presentation could be better. One of the great things about that article, incidentally, is that it mirrors the Scarman brothers as both keys to Sutekh’s escape: everyone knows that Marcus’ archaeological bent is bent by Sutekh; but Laurence’s scientific invention becomes another fatal flaw. This was released on 31st October this year, appropriately, for what’s probably the most perfect Halloween Doctor Who story (its main competition being Image of the Fendahl, both adventures first shown at the end of October, both filmed at the same manor house, though the latter ironically set at Lammas). And though I can’t remember where I first saw this picture – several years ago – or give appropriate credit to the bright carver who created it, it’s remarkable what you can find on your hard drive, isn’t it?
With all that to live up to, you might wonder how the book can compare without the actors, music, direction or location, particularly as the novelisations and Terrance Dicks especially tend to tone down the horror (Ian Marter’s The Ark In Space, on the other hand…). But you needn’t worry, even if he takes out the most controversial bit (it’s not the one Mary Whitehouse would think of). Though this doesn’t have quite the depth and power of his Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion – nor its thrill of horror that outmatches that story’s TV version, as I’ve recently written – it’s still one of Terrance’s best, telling the story with pace, occasional flourishes and fascinating extensions at either end, into the past and the future. Last week, I looked in detail at another childhood favourite, Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters, and noted that Terrance himself says he rose to his best when novelising Bob Holmes’ work, because those were simply the best scripts (and I’m pretty sure that it was when signing my copy of Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars that he told me that in pretty much those words).
I have many memories of the book in particular: when I was a little boy and only just starting on my life of obsessive collecting spreading out all my Doctor Who books (perhaps thirty or so) and trying to put them in ‘best’ order, with this always at or near the front; it being the first I chose to lend to another boy at primary school (Martin Campbell, down in The Valley; not the James Bond director) to show him why they were so brilliant… Before, I suspect, going overboard and adding a crate of others, not realising that not everyone would share my enthusiasm or indeed reading speed; and, of course, the book itself, from the mythic Prologue to the melancholy, eerie Epilogue of Sarah Jane alone in a library (a familiar part of my young life).
Chris Achilleos’ original cover, now used for the audiobook, is uncharacteristically stark – a grim-faced Doctor and even grimmer rifle-wielding Sarah Jane framed around a mummy (out of character for her, you might think, though arguably there’s nothing so Doctor Who as the juxtaposition of frock and gun). Alister Pearson’s cover for the reprint (adapted here into a video cover, and also used on Heathcliff Blair’s CD of Dudley Simpson Doctor Who music of the period) is one of his best, intense and expansive, seething with dark colours around the Doctor, Sutekh and his servants.
Terrance Dicks rarely added scenes when novelising Doctor Who scripts, so his rare Prologues were always a treat for me. This one, “The Legend of the Osirians”, memorably gives his backstory for Sutekh and his people. It’s interesting to compare it to other interpretations: Justin Richards’ The Sands of Time pedantically ‘corrects’ the details to fit ‘proper’ Egyptian mythology and grinds down imagination with banal spaceships and explanations of psychic powers; Lawrence Miles’ Faction Paradox series offers a vast, non-linear mythos of rival gods that fits more with the cynical asides of Robert Holmes’ script. Terrance’s advantage here is that he paints with a broad brush as if an ancient story told many times, allowing you to fill in the details of a galaxy-spanning conflict in your mind’s eye without the bathos of spelling them all out in a couple of pages. His disadvantage I think is that he has a more comforting worldview than Robert Holmes’ dark universe; rather than everyone who isn’t evil being corrupt, Terrance tends to tell stories of bad apples but a basically trustworthy establishment, as in his tale of the godlike Osirians:
Against expectations, he maintains much of the feel of horror throughout, not least by being constantly aware that Marcus Scarman, walking around as the apparent villain of the piece for much of the story, is a perambulating, smouldering corpse under Sutekh’s control. He underlines the arrival of the ‘messenger’ by giving him bare feet as he steps out to dispose of Sutekh’s earlier servant, whose “shuddering scream” is as horrible a moment as any in the novels; he describes the charred hands that kill his brother, only hinted at on TV; most memorably, as Sutekh sends him the co-ordinates for the Pyramids of Mars, he picks up the despatch:
Sarah Jane shines through the book, as Lis Sladen did on screen in what was surely her most effective season as the Doctor’s companion – she even lifts the novel at points by taking the piss out of the Doctor, if less so than on screen, giving a bit of a release of tension when Terrance evokes the horror of the script with unexpected force but rarely manages to get across the moments of humour. One slight change, having not Warlock’s hat but the Doctor’s dropped for their pursuers to find, gives her a grimly amusing moment of mutiny over his outfits.
Without Michael Sheard’s childlike wonder and Lis Sladen’s grim defiance, the ‘escape’ to “1980” – mentioned six times on TV but tactfully trimmed from the book – doesn’t have quite the same punch, though the scene again stands out as one of those (as in The Masque of Mandragora) in which Robert Holmes decided it was time to say out loud those questions everyone put to him in the BBC canteen and up the tension with it into the bargain. In Doctor Who’s ultimate horror story, it’s not just all his favourite horror themes from the cinema that are on view, but new ones he introduces especially for a time travel series. We get fear of the living dead; fear of possession and loss of identity; fear of something horrible happening to a loved one, and even being done by a loved one; fear of confinement and pursuit, at the same time; we get several different types of horrible death, through burning, strangling and crushing; and if all that fear, existential horror and plain death isn’t enough to scare you, the trip to the alternate present day where, because the Doctor deserts his post, Sutekh has long since destroyed the world, gives new existential horror on a grand scale, not just of the end of the world but that you might have ceased to exist before you were even born.
Though Terrance drops the ball a bit in having Sutekh’s voice sometimes rise “to a maddened howl” in typical OTT villain description, at other points he captures something of Gabriel Woolf’s quietly compelling portrayal – there’s “hideous strain” in his voice when holding in an explosion, and the first description of him is perfect:
Those deflection barriers invite comparisons with The Dæmons in particular, showing a very different sort of worldview from when Terrance Dicks was lead writer on the show to Robert Holmes’ period; they’re very different stories, and the points of similarity only show up their differences (as if Hinchcliffe and Holmes were poking the Pertwee era in the eye with something very much tauter and darker). The vicar’s only bad in one because he’s been done away with and replaced by the Master; the priest is only a part of a nasty Cult in the other. The alien that looks like the Devil in one is a cross between an amoral scientist and a harsh Old Testament father God, who when he wakes up may destroy the world if we don’t meet his exacting standards; the demonic alien here is a cruel and twisted Lovecraftian dark god that will destroy the world once freed because he wants to. And while both stories have the scene hemmed in by an impassable force barrier, in one the barrier is merely an inconvenience that stops people getting in or out, while in this story it makes a whole country estate a place of claustrophobic horror because the grey ‘inanimate’ servants that have come to life are stalking rather than merely guarding, determined to kill everyone within. In both stories, too, the Doctor builds a clever machine to stop the enemy, but it’s destroyed before it can do the trick, but each is succeeded by a very different finale. Whereas in The Dæmons it’s human goodness that wins out, something it would be impossible to believe against Sutekh (or, some might say, full stop), in Pyramids of Mars, each of the last three episodes builds up a device that will foil Sutekh, each blown by the end except for the last one – the first a lash-up that fails, the second succeeding for the moment but at the cost of the Doctor, and the last invoking the might of the Time Lords, pitting (according to taste) one mythic race against another or pitting science against god… And Terrance’s novelisation improves the ending of Pyramids of Mars in two key ways. First, his chapter title naming Time “The Weapon of the Time Lords” makes it sound both rather grand and ponderous and as if it’s down to someone other than the Doctor (had he called that final chapter ‘The Doctor Shoots Sutekh With a Big Time-Gun’ it would have seemed both easier and much less in character). And then he gives us a proper aftermath.
While on TV we can sit back and watch the rising flames to give closure, the book grounds us with an appropriate coda, the Doctor musing over the fire as practical Sarah Jane wants to get out before “some heavily-moustached village policeman of the year nineteen eleven” arrives to ask questions, then back in the TARDIS the way she ponders one by one every death, including remembering Laurence’s “bright-eyed eagerness” looking round the TARDIS, “And most tragic of all, Marcus Scarman, taken over and burnt out by Sutekh’s horrible alien power.” With the Epilogue still to come, the end of the book really gives it a sense that it matters. And that elegiac Epilogue in which Terrance shows that he, too, can answer those questions asked in the BBC canteen (‘Didn’t anyone notice?’), is unique in the Target range, set “Later, much later,” once Sarah Jane has parted from the Doctor, where she visits the little country town close by the scene and looks up the newspaper files from 1911:
Tom Baker read four complete audiobooks from Target novels before moving on to ‘new’ adventures, of which more later, but this is by a long stretch his best. Decades before, he’d created a reedy ‘old man’ voice for an abridged version of State of Decay that really doesn’t work for Solon when he digs it up after a quarter of a century, for example, while even the humour of The Creature From the Pit didn’t bring out the best in him.
In Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars, though, you can hear an actor who’s suddenly enjoying and engaging with his material, doing justice to an excellent book. His ‘old man’ gets new life for Laurence, while his bluff, Yorkshire Warlock is ideal and his ferocious Sutekh decidedly impressive. He gives an appropriate air of mythic grandeur to the Prologue, is entertaining on Sarah’s little asides, and even seems to engage with ‘his’ own lines, finding interestingly different readings for many of them – generally playing the Doctor a little lighter in 2008 than in 1975 (and still giving a pronounced ‘shh’ sound in the word “eviscerated”). Aided by its own musical motifs, this CD is surely the best way to enjoy it today (and the only one that’s not out of print).
I was a little mean to Justin Richards’ Missing Adventures novel The Sands of Time above, but it’s frustrating in part because a lot of it’s so good – it would simply be much better if it had no connection to Pyramids of Mars. This sequel is brilliantly plotted, but follows its source material of Mummy movies and Egyptian mythology far too slavishly – not least, effectively saying ‘Doctor Who got it wrong and I’m going to get the legends right,’ getting in the way of a good story to try for spurious accuracy. A sequel shouldn’t make its original smaller. And then there’s the book’s stand-in for the all-hating, especially sibling-hating Sutekh. Justin would change Terrance’s line to ‘As they grew in power, so they grew in wisdom – all but one… And his Mum and his sister, with whom he remained best mates’, and I find that very hard to swallow (oh, his Mum? Actually, she’s in a Big Finish CD, which again is rather fun if you can ignore Pyramids of Mars, but it would be a spoiler to say which. E-mail me if you want to know).
Twenty-first Century Doctor Who stories owing a debt to Pyramids of Mars range from Steven Moffat’s “Timey-wimey” scripts or Sarah Jane reminding the Doctor that “A man has just been murdered!” while he only pays attention to millions being echoed in Rose to the outright references in The Impossible Planet, where the planet’s code number is ‘Sutekh’ backwards if you squint, the Doctor muses about Sutekh and the sinister voice of the great Beast is even provided by none other than Gabriel Woolf. “Don’t turn around,” indeed. And, in this time of wonders, you can now buy the toys that my eyes would have boggled out on stalks to see when I was little: two slightly different versions of Sutekh’s Mummies are available from Character Options, complete with either jackal-or-falcon-headed canopic jars with silver force generators inside; an inappropriately grinning figure of Tom Baker’s Doctor with the part of the TARDIS he wires up to Sutekh’s space-time tunnel to make him miss his station; and, next year, even a cuddly Sutekh, apparently.
The most impressive variation on the theme, though, is undoubtedly a series of six linked audio dramas. Gabriel Woolf returned to the role of Sutekh alongside Julian Glover, Isla Blair, Philip Madoc and others in Lawrence Miles’ 2005-2009 Faction Paradox series from Magic Bullet (Coming to Dust / The Ship of a Billion Years, Body Politic / Words From Nine Divinities and Ozymandias / The Judgment of Sutekh), which expands the Osiran Court across time and space. You’ve probably not heard of it, but it’s a brilliant piece of work.
But Doctor Who fans have a lot to thank this novel for in two better-selling if less intense audio drama series. Listening to the audiobook, it felt like Tom Baker was getting into it in a way he hadn’t with his three previous readings – and it turns out he really had. After years of resisting, it was on doing this reading that he was at last enthused enough to agree to record new Doctor Who audio dramas, first with BBC Audiobooks and now with Big Finish. So Robert Holmes, Terrance Dicks and a novel from 1976 are still impressive enough to be pushing on new Doctor Who today.
The Terror is Unleashed
1975 was probably the most exciting year Doctor Who has ever had – and I’m sure that I can judge that entirely objectively, having started watching it at the beginning of the year with the early days of Tom Baker. With more new stories broadcast that year than in any for a decade – or for another three decades to come – there was a mighty amount of Doctor Who, and of an astounding quality. In fan polls – and for me – two 1975 stories always make the top ten of all the two hundred and more broadcast so far, while another is said to be the personal favourite of both Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat. Pyramids of Mars is one of those two up there at the top, and from interviews and references in his stories as early as Queer As Folk onward clearly a favourite of Russell’s, if not the favourite. And it may say something about the age or taste of fans as to whether they prefer the different ‘raising dark gods’ stories of 1971’s The Dæmons, 1975’s Pyramids of Mars or 2006’s The Impossible Planet (which explicitly refers to the earlier two). For me, it’s the combination of 1975 and 1911 all the way.
On TV, it’s easy to see why Pyramids of Mars is so highly regarded. Looking great in the ideal setting of ‘about a hundred years ago’, it has perhaps the most perfect Doctor Who opening episode of the lot, climaxing in for me the series’ scariest ever cliffhanger, then introduces the TARDIS and big concepts around time travel, and finishes with the Doctor tempted – and taken – by the Devil, a mixture of science fiction, myth and pure horror that gives you big-scale ideas on a canvas small-scale enough to deliver them convincingly, the ultimate in ‘ancient horror on the rise’. Robert Holmes’ least funny, most scary script (with additional work by Paddy Russell, adding to her assured direction); a small but perfect cast including Bernard Archard, Michael Sheard, Peter Copley and Peter Mayock; a superb atmosphere created by filming at Mick Jagger’s stately home, gorgeous antique design and a career-best eerie music score from Dudley Simpson that can all compete with Hammer’s own Mummy movies; and, above all, probably Doctor Who’s greatest ever villain in a heart-stopping performance by Gabriel Woolf as the dark god Sutekh, dripping malice in a voice that rarely lifts above an agonised whisper. The whole thing was the single story that scared me the most, and though I loved returning to it, it was always with a thrill of fear – most vividly going down the stairs that led into the Blackpool Doctor Who Exhibition, finding Sutekh, mummies and sarcophagi in the dark at the bottom, and being seized with such terror that I gripped the banister and couldn’t be dragged inside for what felt like an eternity (probably two or three minutes of parental persuasion, or of patient prising my fingers away).
Pyramids of Mars has been repeated twice on BBC1 or BBC2 and released several times – it was one of the first Doctor Who stories available on VHS in the mid-’80s (and the first I bought), initially in a feature-length edit with not only cliffhangers but several other scenes sliced out, seemingly at random, then a few years later in full, and a fairly early DVD release, one of the first to have the sort of full selection of extras that set the standard for the range continuing today (complete with a scriptwriter being unfeasibly rude about Mary Whitehouse, as he should). And it’s the first ‘classic’ Doctor Who to be released on Blu-ray, in tribute to Elisabeth Sladen as an extra feature on The Sarah Jane Adventures Series Four – while if you missed it on CBBC last month, the very last and one of the finest of The Sarah Jane Adventures begins tomorrow on BBC1, so make sure you catch it. As a Blu-ray experience, though, Richard notes in Millennium’s excellent Mysteries of Doctor Who #23: Why Does Pyramids of Mars Take Place in ENGLAND? that the disc presentation could be better. One of the great things about that article, incidentally, is that it mirrors the Scarman brothers as both keys to Sutekh’s escape: everyone knows that Marcus’ archaeological bent is bent by Sutekh; but Laurence’s scientific invention becomes another fatal flaw. This was released on 31st October this year, appropriately, for what’s probably the most perfect Halloween Doctor Who story (its main competition being Image of the Fendahl, both adventures first shown at the end of October, both filmed at the same manor house, though the latter ironically set at Lammas). And though I can’t remember where I first saw this picture – several years ago – or give appropriate credit to the bright carver who created it, it’s remarkable what you can find on your hard drive, isn’t it?
The Return of Marcus Scarman
With all that to live up to, you might wonder how the book can compare without the actors, music, direction or location, particularly as the novelisations and Terrance Dicks especially tend to tone down the horror (Ian Marter’s The Ark In Space, on the other hand…). But you needn’t worry, even if he takes out the most controversial bit (it’s not the one Mary Whitehouse would think of). Though this doesn’t have quite the depth and power of his Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion – nor its thrill of horror that outmatches that story’s TV version, as I’ve recently written – it’s still one of Terrance’s best, telling the story with pace, occasional flourishes and fascinating extensions at either end, into the past and the future. Last week, I looked in detail at another childhood favourite, Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters, and noted that Terrance himself says he rose to his best when novelising Bob Holmes’ work, because those were simply the best scripts (and I’m pretty sure that it was when signing my copy of Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars that he told me that in pretty much those words).
I have many memories of the book in particular: when I was a little boy and only just starting on my life of obsessive collecting spreading out all my Doctor Who books (perhaps thirty or so) and trying to put them in ‘best’ order, with this always at or near the front; it being the first I chose to lend to another boy at primary school (Martin Campbell, down in The Valley; not the James Bond director) to show him why they were so brilliant… Before, I suspect, going overboard and adding a crate of others, not realising that not everyone would share my enthusiasm or indeed reading speed; and, of course, the book itself, from the mythic Prologue to the melancholy, eerie Epilogue of Sarah Jane alone in a library (a familiar part of my young life).
Chris Achilleos’ original cover, now used for the audiobook, is uncharacteristically stark – a grim-faced Doctor and even grimmer rifle-wielding Sarah Jane framed around a mummy (out of character for her, you might think, though arguably there’s nothing so Doctor Who as the juxtaposition of frock and gun). Alister Pearson’s cover for the reprint (adapted here into a video cover, and also used on Heathcliff Blair’s CD of Dudley Simpson Doctor Who music of the period) is one of his best, intense and expansive, seething with dark colours around the Doctor, Sutekh and his servants.
“For many thousands of years SUTEKH had waited . . . trapped in the heart of an Egyptian Pyramid. Now at last the time had come – the moment of release, when all the force of his pent-up evil and malice would be unleashed upon the world . . .When I was a boy, I loved those exciting back blurbs; now I ask, only half-possessed? Though I also now realise that mentioning UNIT should have been much more jarring at the time, and only wasn’t because most of the early books were of Jon Pertwee stories. And yet that very cosy familiarity was clearly designed to be a deliberate statement in the original script – with the Doctor at last breaking away from his exiled Earth ‘home’, albeit less destructively than Sutekh, this firmly told anyone expecting a return to the early ’70s status quo that literally right where the comfortable familiarity of UNIT ‘ought’ to be there’s going to be a time-travel story of unspeakable horror instead (and in case you didn’t get the message, the substitute UNIT HQ gets burned to the ground). So at a glance, this is something bolder than usual. Terrance doesn’t even use any of his stock chapter titles, the most traditional – if effective – being “The Terror is Unleashed”, though few others could actually boast “The World Destroyed . . .” and “The Weapon of the Time Lords” has rather a ring to it. As does…
“The TARDIS lands on the site of UNIT headquarters in the year 1911, and the Doctor and Sarah emerge to fight a terrifying and deadly battle . . . against Egyptian Mummies, half-possessed humans – and the overwhelming evil power of SUTEKH!”
The Legend of the Osirians
Terrance Dicks rarely added scenes when novelising Doctor Who scripts, so his rare Prologues were always a treat for me. This one, “The Legend of the Osirians”, memorably gives his backstory for Sutekh and his people. It’s interesting to compare it to other interpretations: Justin Richards’ The Sands of Time pedantically ‘corrects’ the details to fit ‘proper’ Egyptian mythology and grinds down imagination with banal spaceships and explanations of psychic powers; Lawrence Miles’ Faction Paradox series offers a vast, non-linear mythos of rival gods that fits more with the cynical asides of Robert Holmes’ script. Terrance’s advantage here is that he paints with a broad brush as if an ancient story told many times, allowing you to fill in the details of a galaxy-spanning conflict in your mind’s eye without the bathos of spelling them all out in a couple of pages. His disadvantage I think is that he has a more comforting worldview than Robert Holmes’ dark universe; rather than everyone who isn’t evil being corrupt, Terrance tends to tell stories of bad apples but a basically trustworthy establishment, as in his tale of the godlike Osirians:
“As they grew in power, so they grew in wisdom – all but one.”And yet in other ways Terrance makes his Universe every bit as dark as Bob Holmes’. The script, famously, kills off every character other than the Doctor, Sarah Jane, and the Egyptian labourers who flee in terror from Marcus Scarman’s ill-fated archaeological dig in the first scene; on the page, even they are swiftly caught and slaughtered by the Cult of the Black Pyramid, making the book – with Terrance’s own Horror of Fang Rock – the most merciless in the entire series. If anything, his deft little biographical notes that sketch in the likes of Marcus Scarman (“The year was 1911, and Englishmen abroad were expected to maintain certain standards”), Ibrahim Namin (“To his terror and delight, one of the Great Ones had spoken to him”) and especially Ernie Clements (who “regarded himself as the Scarmans’ unpaid gamekeeper”) make their gruesome fates all the worse for first having made us feel for the characters as people.
Against expectations, he maintains much of the feel of horror throughout, not least by being constantly aware that Marcus Scarman, walking around as the apparent villain of the piece for much of the story, is a perambulating, smouldering corpse under Sutekh’s control. He underlines the arrival of the ‘messenger’ by giving him bare feet as he steps out to dispose of Sutekh’s earlier servant, whose “shuddering scream” is as horrible a moment as any in the novels; he describes the charred hands that kill his brother, only hinted at on TV; most memorably, as Sutekh sends him the co-ordinates for the Pyramids of Mars, he picks up the despatch:
“The cylinder glowed with the fire of Sutekh and there was a horrible sizzling sound as Marcus touched it. But he felt no pain. Only the living feel pain.”One change where Terrance could have done with rather more ambiguity is towards the end, as Marcus Scarman’s body finally collapses into ash: on screen, you can make your own reading as to whether it’s Marcus or Sutekh who at the last exclaims that he’s free. Yet perhaps that’s his surprising mercilessness coming through again; with Sutekh exultant, there’s not even the faintest crumb of comfort to take from the old archaeologist’s fate. Either way, there’s a terrible aptness in that, possessed, his last act is to be once more an archaeologist, in the service of a hideous patron. His friend Dr Warlock is a more striking but sensible change in the context of a novel: a ruddy-faced, hearty, typical village squire (given a bluff Yorkshire accent in Tom’s reading) in the book, fitting his self-confident to the point of bossy character but very different to Peter Copley’s fine TV performance. Think for a moment, though, and you can see how Paddy Russell might cast to suggest an elderly, ascetic gentleman who you could easily imagine as an old friend and contemporary of Bernard Archard’s Marcus Scarman, while Terrance has very reasonably made him a very different physical type so as not to end up describing two very similar thin old men.
Sarah Jane shines through the book, as Lis Sladen did on screen in what was surely her most effective season as the Doctor’s companion – she even lifts the novel at points by taking the piss out of the Doctor, if less so than on screen, giving a bit of a release of tension when Terrance evokes the horror of the script with unexpected force but rarely manages to get across the moments of humour. One slight change, having not Warlock’s hat but the Doctor’s dropped for their pursuers to find, gives her a grimly amusing moment of mutiny over his outfits.
Without Michael Sheard’s childlike wonder and Lis Sladen’s grim defiance, the ‘escape’ to “1980” – mentioned six times on TV but tactfully trimmed from the book – doesn’t have quite the same punch, though the scene again stands out as one of those (as in The Masque of Mandragora) in which Robert Holmes decided it was time to say out loud those questions everyone put to him in the BBC canteen and up the tension with it into the bargain. In Doctor Who’s ultimate horror story, it’s not just all his favourite horror themes from the cinema that are on view, but new ones he introduces especially for a time travel series. We get fear of the living dead; fear of possession and loss of identity; fear of something horrible happening to a loved one, and even being done by a loved one; fear of confinement and pursuit, at the same time; we get several different types of horrible death, through burning, strangling and crushing; and if all that fear, existential horror and plain death isn’t enough to scare you, the trip to the alternate present day where, because the Doctor deserts his post, Sutekh has long since destroyed the world, gives new existential horror on a grand scale, not just of the end of the world but that you might have ceased to exist before you were even born.
In the Power of Sutekh
Though Terrance drops the ball a bit in having Sutekh’s voice sometimes rise “to a maddened howl” in typical OTT villain description, at other points he captures something of Gabriel Woolf’s quietly compelling portrayal – there’s “hideous strain” in his voice when holding in an explosion, and the first description of him is perfect:
“Sutekh’s voice was soft and ferocious at the same time, like that of some great beast.”Neither the design nor the script quite deliver on the final episode’s voyage inside a trap-filled alien pyramid – the Pyramid of Mars promised from the first – on TV, but as ever it’s on a bigger budget on the page, with the added advantage that Terrance can use carefully ambiguous descriptions to imply far more devious traps and puzzles. While seeing the VHS in the late ’80s was for the most part an amazing thrill, I can still remember being rather disappointed by the inner chamber for which my imagination fed by the book had overlaid my actually having seen the programme, an awesome chamber of light in which “cradled in a silver tulip-shaped cup was what appeared to be a giant ruby, bigger than a man’s head. Four silver rods projected from it, like the rays of a stylised sun” – rather than, on screen, something that looks a bit like an item of garden ornamenture. Even throwaway details add to the design – such as the simple but rewarding moment where we ‘see’ that the deflection barriers around the Scarman Estate don’t just go straight up but form the pattern of a pyramid.
Those deflection barriers invite comparisons with The Dæmons in particular, showing a very different sort of worldview from when Terrance Dicks was lead writer on the show to Robert Holmes’ period; they’re very different stories, and the points of similarity only show up their differences (as if Hinchcliffe and Holmes were poking the Pertwee era in the eye with something very much tauter and darker). The vicar’s only bad in one because he’s been done away with and replaced by the Master; the priest is only a part of a nasty Cult in the other. The alien that looks like the Devil in one is a cross between an amoral scientist and a harsh Old Testament father God, who when he wakes up may destroy the world if we don’t meet his exacting standards; the demonic alien here is a cruel and twisted Lovecraftian dark god that will destroy the world once freed because he wants to. And while both stories have the scene hemmed in by an impassable force barrier, in one the barrier is merely an inconvenience that stops people getting in or out, while in this story it makes a whole country estate a place of claustrophobic horror because the grey ‘inanimate’ servants that have come to life are stalking rather than merely guarding, determined to kill everyone within. In both stories, too, the Doctor builds a clever machine to stop the enemy, but it’s destroyed before it can do the trick, but each is succeeded by a very different finale. Whereas in The Dæmons it’s human goodness that wins out, something it would be impossible to believe against Sutekh (or, some might say, full stop), in Pyramids of Mars, each of the last three episodes builds up a device that will foil Sutekh, each blown by the end except for the last one – the first a lash-up that fails, the second succeeding for the moment but at the cost of the Doctor, and the last invoking the might of the Time Lords, pitting (according to taste) one mythic race against another or pitting science against god… And Terrance’s novelisation improves the ending of Pyramids of Mars in two key ways. First, his chapter title naming Time “The Weapon of the Time Lords” makes it sound both rather grand and ponderous and as if it’s down to someone other than the Doctor (had he called that final chapter ‘The Doctor Shoots Sutekh With a Big Time-Gun’ it would have seemed both easier and much less in character). And then he gives us a proper aftermath.
While on TV we can sit back and watch the rising flames to give closure, the book grounds us with an appropriate coda, the Doctor musing over the fire as practical Sarah Jane wants to get out before “some heavily-moustached village policeman of the year nineteen eleven” arrives to ask questions, then back in the TARDIS the way she ponders one by one every death, including remembering Laurence’s “bright-eyed eagerness” looking round the TARDIS, “And most tragic of all, Marcus Scarman, taken over and burnt out by Sutekh’s horrible alien power.” With the Epilogue still to come, the end of the book really gives it a sense that it matters. And that elegiac Epilogue in which Terrance shows that he, too, can answer those questions asked in the BBC canteen (‘Didn’t anyone notice?’), is unique in the Target range, set “Later, much later,” once Sarah Jane has parted from the Doctor, where she visits the little country town close by the scene and looks up the newspaper files from 1911:
“BROTHERS DIE IN TRAGIC FIRE
“HOLOCAUST SWEEPS COUNTRY ESTATE…
“Sarah skimmed through the rest of the report. So that was what the Doctor had meant. The terrible events surrounding the return of Sutekh had found a natural explanation, a deplorable but soon forgotten tragedy in an English country village.
“Sarah looked through the window, out into the bustling high street of the little country town. She shivered at the memory of the desolate world she had seen through the doors of the TARDIS—the world Sutekh would have made if he had not been defeated. The sacrifice of all those lives had not been in vain. The pity was that no one would ever know.
“Sarah closed the heavy old volume and went into the summer sunshine of her own, unchanged, twentieth century.”
The Doctor Fights Back
Tom Baker read four complete audiobooks from Target novels before moving on to ‘new’ adventures, of which more later, but this is by a long stretch his best. Decades before, he’d created a reedy ‘old man’ voice for an abridged version of State of Decay that really doesn’t work for Solon when he digs it up after a quarter of a century, for example, while even the humour of The Creature From the Pit didn’t bring out the best in him.
In Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars, though, you can hear an actor who’s suddenly enjoying and engaging with his material, doing justice to an excellent book. His ‘old man’ gets new life for Laurence, while his bluff, Yorkshire Warlock is ideal and his ferocious Sutekh decidedly impressive. He gives an appropriate air of mythic grandeur to the Prologue, is entertaining on Sarah’s little asides, and even seems to engage with ‘his’ own lines, finding interestingly different readings for many of them – generally playing the Doctor a little lighter in 2008 than in 1975 (and still giving a pronounced ‘shh’ sound in the word “eviscerated”). Aided by its own musical motifs, this CD is surely the best way to enjoy it today (and the only one that’s not out of print).
Epilogue
I was a little mean to Justin Richards’ Missing Adventures novel The Sands of Time above, but it’s frustrating in part because a lot of it’s so good – it would simply be much better if it had no connection to Pyramids of Mars. This sequel is brilliantly plotted, but follows its source material of Mummy movies and Egyptian mythology far too slavishly – not least, effectively saying ‘Doctor Who got it wrong and I’m going to get the legends right,’ getting in the way of a good story to try for spurious accuracy. A sequel shouldn’t make its original smaller. And then there’s the book’s stand-in for the all-hating, especially sibling-hating Sutekh. Justin would change Terrance’s line to ‘As they grew in power, so they grew in wisdom – all but one… And his Mum and his sister, with whom he remained best mates’, and I find that very hard to swallow (oh, his Mum? Actually, she’s in a Big Finish CD, which again is rather fun if you can ignore Pyramids of Mars, but it would be a spoiler to say which. E-mail me if you want to know).
Twenty-first Century Doctor Who stories owing a debt to Pyramids of Mars range from Steven Moffat’s “Timey-wimey” scripts or Sarah Jane reminding the Doctor that “A man has just been murdered!” while he only pays attention to millions being echoed in Rose to the outright references in The Impossible Planet, where the planet’s code number is ‘Sutekh’ backwards if you squint, the Doctor muses about Sutekh and the sinister voice of the great Beast is even provided by none other than Gabriel Woolf. “Don’t turn around,” indeed. And, in this time of wonders, you can now buy the toys that my eyes would have boggled out on stalks to see when I was little: two slightly different versions of Sutekh’s Mummies are available from Character Options, complete with either jackal-or-falcon-headed canopic jars with silver force generators inside; an inappropriately grinning figure of Tom Baker’s Doctor with the part of the TARDIS he wires up to Sutekh’s space-time tunnel to make him miss his station; and, next year, even a cuddly Sutekh, apparently.
The most impressive variation on the theme, though, is undoubtedly a series of six linked audio dramas. Gabriel Woolf returned to the role of Sutekh alongside Julian Glover, Isla Blair, Philip Madoc and others in Lawrence Miles’ 2005-2009 Faction Paradox series from Magic Bullet (Coming to Dust / The Ship of a Billion Years, Body Politic / Words From Nine Divinities and Ozymandias / The Judgment of Sutekh), which expands the Osiran Court across time and space. You’ve probably not heard of it, but it’s a brilliant piece of work.
But Doctor Who fans have a lot to thank this novel for in two better-selling if less intense audio drama series. Listening to the audiobook, it felt like Tom Baker was getting into it in a way he hadn’t with his three previous readings – and it turns out he really had. After years of resisting, it was on doing this reading that he was at last enthused enough to agree to record new Doctor Who audio dramas, first with BBC Audiobooks and now with Big Finish. So Robert Holmes, Terrance Dicks and a novel from 1976 are still impressive enough to be pushing on new Doctor Who today.
Labels: Books, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Faction Paradox, Jon Pertwee, Julian Glover, Mary Whitehouse, Music, Personal, Philip Madoc, Pictures, Religion, Reviews, Sarah Jane Smith, Tom Baker, Toys
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
DVD Detail: Doctor Who – The Trial of a Time Lord: Mindwarp
Mindwarp is one of the most extraordinary-looking Doctor Who stories ever made – sometimes brilliantly, sometimes just breathtakingly ’80s. Bright pink! Bright blue! Bright orange! And as well as the scenery, some of the people look like that, too. Today* is officially Peri’s birthday, and this was her final story with the Doctor, building up to a shock ending… Or is it? Add a memorable villain, guest stars who return with David Tennant, and behind it all, the Doctor’s still on trial: has the evidence here been falsified? Why is he behaving so strangely? And can he out-act Brian Blessed?
A couple of months ago, I wrote about the opening four episodes of Doctor Who – The Trial of a Time Lord… And, twenty-five years ago this evening, that superb cast led by Colin Baker and Michael Jayston was still in the middle of it. Before you watch Mindwarp, the second set of four episodes, you’re best off watching those earlier ones, The Mysterious Planet – not that you have to go out of your way to do so, as they’re all part of the same The Trial of a Time Lord DVD box set. The two mini-stories have much in common: the same ‘Trial’ framing device; the same lead actors; the same postmodern attitude to the series being on trial by hostile BBC executives, as I wrote last time. What’s different about this one is that it’s a much less straightforward narrative – to the extent that even the actors and director didn’t know what was supposed to be going on for some of it. And so it’s possible to slightly unfairly sum up the four mini-stories that make up The Trial of a Time Lord two by two: the odd-numbered stories as not very odd at all, but a bit forgettable; the even-numbered stories as memorable messes, full of interesting ideas but few of them complementing each other. I don’t know if this explains the bulk of fans’ relatively low opinion of Mindwarp (while a few think it brilliant), but it’ll do for mine (and why I have a very high opinion of some of it). Back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – and placed the whole Trial of a Time Lord 142nd (about right, to me) but this second set of four episodes at a lowly 160ish (not far off for me either, though I might put it as much as ten places higher).
While this ‘Detail’ obviously goes into some detail, incidentally, my policy in these is not to be too spoilery. So read on without fear of finding out too many key twists from the end. Should there be such things (tip: if you’ve not seen this, don’t read the comedy sketch at the bottom).
In the caverns of Thoros-Beta, profit is in progress, with Lord Kiv and the self-styled Mentors piling up trade with other cultures – if necessary, by lethal force (or even by recycling old costumes). And while the wriggling other Mentors led by Kiv’s aide Sil have no love or loyalty for their leader, they’re desperate to keep him alive for his brilliant business brain, without which they might all end up dead or, worse than that, poor. But that very brain is fatally expanding within his slimy skull, and only the greatest – as he’d be the first to tell you – doctor in the galaxy can transfer it to a new frame. The first ‘monster’ we meet in the story is a forewarning of this, as well as a basically terrible piece of design kept wisely in the dark, then almost redeemed by the way people chat about him afterwards like he was Harold down the chip shop.
Colin Baker makes the most of a wildly inconsistent script, Brian Blessed is at his most BRIAN BLESSED, and Nicola Bryant is terrific as she approaches her end, but it’s stolen from all of them by Patrick Ryecart as Crozier, playing it so intense and deadpan that he becomes much funnier – and more sinister – than anyone else. Confined mostly to one set, dressed for citrus insanity in lemon and then orange, he’s somehow still the centre of the story. An obsessive rather than the ‘mad scientist’ that the brain transplant storyline might suggest, he’s marvellously self-centred, regarding anything bar his medical experiments as an utter waste of his time. And, though with brilliant touches of eccentric charisma, as Patrick Ryecart has explained his part, he’s more Nazi than nice. Clipped, staccato, disturbing and funny, you can see how he can go on to give such a great sit-com performance as the awesomely continuity-error-in-reality-named Captain Hilary Duff.
Kiv rambles wonderfully about his donor body-to-be having an primitive sting at the end of its tail – and how “I could, perhaps, sting all my assistants to death!” – as they prepare to operate; the Doctor camps up his pleasure at being allowed to monitor the equipment; Crozier eyes the Doctor like a wolf assessing a tailored suit (in a threatening plotline that, unfortunately, never goes anywhere, built up until suddenly dismissed in a late aside, as if they’d just thrown the script in the air and picked the bits up at random… Similarly, the nature of Crozier’s experiments changes at the last minute and makes a nonsense of much of the earlier dialogue); piercing music echoes; Crozier’s eyes narrow in a fabulously crazed single moment as he begins the operation. Later, Kiv will come round and see a thing of beauty; later still, Crozier’s eyes shine as he sees his ambition to conquer death within his grasp… But my favourite moment of him is tiny, arrogant, and perfect, and brilliantly down to Patrick Ryecart and a bit of business. Once the operation’s complete and the spectators have drifted away, Crozier is simply how we imagine every brilliant surgeon to be: dismissive and rude to his patient, and only caring for his own achievement. In a scene framed by a gorgeous effects shot of the arching roof of his lab, he’s sipping a cup of tea when his assistant, Alibe Parsons’ glamorous Matrona Kani, alerts him to something going wrong. Crozier takes this in at a glance:
Patrick Ryecart and Brian Blessed spar deliciously in rival interviews in the ‘Making of’ – the former saying the latter needs to be licenced, the latter that the former never knew his bloody lines (and, to show he’s watched it, tipping his tea. Patrick Ryecart is still as reliable today; he didn’t turn up to a convention earlier this year, and was represented on stage by a dummy in his orange surgeon’s gown to wicked lines from Alibe Parsons). Other stories found on the disc will reveal a moment when Mr Blessed, too, may not have got his own lines word-perfect…
While the postmodern commentary of the Trial impinging on the ‘main’ story got in the way on The Mysterious Planet, here it suddenly works better on a much more fragmentary story where the viewers, too, must be arguing about what’s really going on. Informed by Philip Martin’s groundbreaking series Gangsters (from whom it borrows Alibe Parsons), the hints of today’s interactivity make it seem far more modern. So while, for me, this isn’t the best segment of the Trial, it’s the one that makes best use of the overarching story in its own, with the interruptions resembling a DVD commentary in which cast members argue over the deleted scenes and try to salvage their own parts in a box-office disaster. It’s not the a clever noir-style plot the format could have led to, an unreliable narrator usually works better when the production end has more of an idea than the audience, and there are still riskily near-the-knuckle complaints such as calling it “inconsequential silliness” and “gratuitous,” but when the Valeyard counting the precise number of times the Doctor and his companions have respectively been in danger is a point-perfect echo of Mary Whitehouse, ticking off numbers of unsuitable incidents with no regard for narrative, and when Michael Jayston sarcastically invites us to watch “The Doctor’s next – frightening adventure,” you feel that they at least knew what they were doing better than Gerald Ratner.
The sparring between Colin Baker and Michael Jayston suddenly becomes more dangerous as the stakes rise: the Doctor becomes less playground and more lost; the Valeyard seems to know exactly where to twist the knife to stir up self-loathing in the Doctor; and his “Who else is there?” booming out of the sky is one of the few times he makes a telling point, a dramatic moment that almost anticipates the Doctor damning him as a second-rate god at the climax.
You can see how good Colin Baker is when the script deals him an almost crippling blow: as Colin glumly notes on the commentary, it takes him back to square one, completely destroying the character progression planned for his Doctor. Conceived as a ‘Mr Darcy’ who begins aloof and to whom we slowly warm, lead writer Eric Saward was utterly hopeless at writing that overarching story from the first, when The Twin Dilemma’s terrible writing blighted him. Just as finally, and far more thanks to the actor than his scripts, the Doctor has been mellowing, this story magnifies his ‘nice or nasty’ struggle without planning or revealing which bits are which. And the script editor had the nerve to blame other people? No wonder Philip Martin saw him as mentally fragile and “a bad guy pretending to be good” – which is when the lead writer should have stepped in to contextualise, rather than piss off. Mr Martin explains some of where he thought he was coming from on the commentary, but this is the first anyone’s heard of it – while the confusion of the Doctor being good, bad, mad or fake isn’t helped when none of the rest of the story can decide what it is, either (horror, comedy, sci-fi, barbarian swordplay, vivisection, a Dallas satire with green slugs as the Ewings, or a runaround with rebels?). On The Mysterious Planet, I talked about how seeing that when I was fourteen led to empathy with existential crises; something else I’d become very aware of at that age sprang to mind watching the ‘Doctor jiggles about too enthusiastically’ cliffhanger on broadcast, so I’ve always been amazed no-one said ‘Hang on…’ before it went out. What it looks like has always distracted me from the key turning point in the story, after which it’s anyone’s guess whether the Doctor’s in his right mind, in Brian Blessed’s, or simply invented. Though one scene, at least, is obvious, even if it was horrible for Nicola Bryant: the Doctor on the Rock of Sorrows saying ‘I am a wrong ’un and no mistake, I did it, guv’ like the notes of a provincial PC read out in court never fails to be a scream.
Nicola Bryant gets a far better deal from the script than her co-star, and rises brilliantly to the opportunity of something more stretching than being chained to a rock (though as I’ve just noted, she has that too). Betrayed and abandoned, Peri seizes control of her own fate at key points rather than just suffer or revenge, and Nicola gives a truly powerful final scene, explaining on the commentary that she’d seen anaemic exits and decided that wasn’t for her. All that, despite being stuck in an electric pink smock after finally being allowed to dress as a grown-up in the previous segment – though it goes with the bright pink seawater. With so many others dressed in the same colour, they could make a camouflage bathing party that would be camouflage only ever on that one world (or in the ’80s).
The scene where the Doctor and Peri land at the seaside – the shocking pink seaside, with the brilliant indigo rocks and bright green sky – is a striking one, and not just to your eyeballs. Though it is a glorious example of finally having the technology to turn a cold British beach into an alien planet, and really going for it (thrillingly for fact fans, Peri goes out as she came in, with a story filmed on a nudist beach. And though she spends most of this one fully clothed, in one arresting respect she finishes up wearing much less than she started out, and it’s a fantastic look she’s much happier signing than a bikini shot). It gives Peri some oomph, and sets up many of the themes of the story: gun-running for profit; the great gag of ‘liquefied’ for ‘liquidated’ from the killer capitalists; and the in-joke and foreshadowing in one of the “Dirty old warlord!”
Which brings us to that old pulp SF cliché of ‘What is this Earth thing called love’, about which the kindest thing that can be said is that I’d rather have that than the horrible, horrible ‘Planet of Women’ script it replaced and on which Doctor Who once again dodged a CD phaser (it must be that they gaze into each other’s eyes and see the same taste in eye make-up. I say ‘taste’…).
Like the story, the supporting actors are absurdly variable – a mixture of over the top and totally flat. The Samurai-ish warlord Yrcanos (in a story that’s far more racially mixed than most Who, to its credit, both in the actors and in the costume influences it plays with) is played by Brian Blessed, at one end of the scale – you may be able to guess which – while his companion in rebellion, Gordon Warnecke’s Tuza, is gorgeous but you’ll need to watch My Beautiful Laundrette to realise he’s not always wood from the neck up. I suspect that the Valeyard may have got bored with doing a director’s cut on the Doctor and tinkered with King Yrcanos, too, as I can’t say I’m sold on the notion of a bloodthirsty hereditary warlord suddenly becoming Che Guevara. Mind you, something needed to gee up the galaxy’s least lively rebels, who make the Tribe of the Free seem full of character and multilayered performances in top fashions (meeting them even brings Peri out in a rash of terrible dialogue, while the idea of twenty-year-olds being aged to death seems less about vampirism or time experiments than a bit bunged in before a cliffhanger and then forgotten about). It’s impossible, though, not to enjoy the bizarre inventiveness – and shouting – of Brian’s performance, and his grumpy concession:
For once, director Ron Jones – the bane of many ’80s Doctor Who stories – creates a bit of atmosphere here, though not consistently: ironically, his two strongest achievements are respectively in the dark and in chaos. The epilepsy-inducing strobes in the tunnels mostly come across as distracting escapees from the Top of the Pops studio, but they work brilliantly in the second (or sixth) cliffhanger, where a perfectly timed flicker of light enlivens an otherwise stock moment. Even better, though, is the climax to the final (or eighth) episode, half a dozen minutes in which everything at last delivers as Thoros-Beta collapses into a hellish clamour of claxons and lost souls and the Doctor enters his own private hell. With Nicola Bryant and Colin Baker each perhaps giving their finest moments, it’s a stunning evocation of everything falling apart without the actual production doing so.
Leading a fine set of extras, the twenty-minute The Making of Mindwarp is excellent and very entertaining, particularly – as above – Patrick Ryecart and Brian Blessed (of whom a career summary notes his subtle and varied roles, “And then Flash Gordon happened”). Half the cast do their Brian Blessed impressions; Brian does the Queen, asking him to say “Gordon’s alive!” before thoughtfully observing that with Yrcanos, like Vultan, he could let his hair down. It’s just a shame there’s no Nabil Shaban. And, wonder of wonders, before flouncing off in a strop, absentee script editor Saward for once even praises Colin’s performance, while Colin brightly observes:
The best anecdote, though, is obviously when Colin Baker is quoted – and asterisked out – in the mostly unthrilling text notes recalling how, at the visual effects-laden and stressful end for one day’s shooting, Brian Blessed cost a lot of money in setting it all up again next time by exuberantly forgetting the name of his slimy enemies in a way that will surprise few viewers of Fry’s Planet Word:
These photos, too, are from the Blackpool Doctor Who Exhibition. A major part of my childhood, it was closed in 1986, making The Trial of a Time Lord its last new season of Doctor Who. A new version opened in the 2000s, but the BBC closed it and flogged off the exhibits two years ago rather than preserve them for the nation. Philistines. So even in these glory days, some BBC brass are still Fuckerons.
Philip Martin’s novelisation is not a happy experience. The other stories of the Trial had been published a couple of years earlier, so you got the impression he was struggling with it – though there’s more material, most of it was probably cut from the script, as his overwritten and ponderous prose style suggests he’s much happier with writing for television. Unusually for a book, though it’s not a perfectly plotted descent in quality, it’s easy to identify the best of it – the first page, as the Doctor muses over his trial and struggles with disturbing flashes of memory (flash-forwards, in the context of most of the narrative – and the worst, which with eerie symmetry is the epilogue’s comedy ‘afterlife’. Even the cover’s a mess: not matching the style of the three other Trial novelisations, and a pretty horrible painting that’s almost certainly the worst from the normally almost photorealistic brush of Alister Pearson (compare it to his gorgeous cover for the whole season-length story on VHS a few years later, for example). Rather more effective follow-ups to the end of the story, incidentally, can be found in Colin Baker’s own graphic novel The Age of Chaos, Big Finish’s audio play Her Final Flight and, certainly the best work overall though with the relevant echo its most self-indulgent part, the superb New Adventures novel Bad Therapy by future Doctor Who TV author Matt Jones.
Though I usually review a whole DVD release at once, and though The Trial of a Time Lord box set is in theory all one big story, again there’s more to come. So, Next Time… Er, with all the “Next Times” I’ve found online too spoilery, why not try this hilariously ’80s fan trailer?
And finally… Richard and Millennium have a few things to say about this story, too. Millennium’s (spoilerish, as it covers the next six episodes too) Mysteries of Doctor Who #15: What the TRUNK is going on at Dr Who’s Trial? Less seriously than the elephant, but also with a spoiler at the end if you look carefully, Richard has helpfully condensed the whole story into three scenes for your entertainment and delectation:
Part Two: Mind How You Warp
*All right, technically yesterday by the time I published this, but these things take time.
A couple of months ago, I wrote about the opening four episodes of Doctor Who – The Trial of a Time Lord… And, twenty-five years ago this evening, that superb cast led by Colin Baker and Michael Jayston was still in the middle of it. Before you watch Mindwarp, the second set of four episodes, you’re best off watching those earlier ones, The Mysterious Planet – not that you have to go out of your way to do so, as they’re all part of the same The Trial of a Time Lord DVD box set. The two mini-stories have much in common: the same ‘Trial’ framing device; the same lead actors; the same postmodern attitude to the series being on trial by hostile BBC executives, as I wrote last time. What’s different about this one is that it’s a much less straightforward narrative – to the extent that even the actors and director didn’t know what was supposed to be going on for some of it. And so it’s possible to slightly unfairly sum up the four mini-stories that make up The Trial of a Time Lord two by two: the odd-numbered stories as not very odd at all, but a bit forgettable; the even-numbered stories as memorable messes, full of interesting ideas but few of them complementing each other. I don’t know if this explains the bulk of fans’ relatively low opinion of Mindwarp (while a few think it brilliant), but it’ll do for mine (and why I have a very high opinion of some of it). Back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – and placed the whole Trial of a Time Lord 142nd (about right, to me) but this second set of four episodes at a lowly 160ish (not far off for me either, though I might put it as much as ten places higher).
While this ‘Detail’ obviously goes into some detail, incidentally, my policy in these is not to be too spoilery. So read on without fear of finding out too many key twists from the end. Should there be such things (tip: if you’ve not seen this, don’t read the comedy sketch at the bottom).
That Golden Moment
“You’ll not die on me, you fish-faced monster!”If you’ve ever seen Mindwarp, you’ll know that there’s one completely awesome scene. And why I can’t mention it. But I can mention one of the key characters in it, friendly neighbourhood surgeon Dr Crozier – in whose laboratory the chaotic story keeps snapping into focus. As do an Alien and a throbbing brain. That means that another brilliant sequence takes place there, half-way into the third episode (or Part Seven of The Trial of a Time Lord), as he performs his first big operation on Lord Kiv…
In the caverns of Thoros-Beta, profit is in progress, with Lord Kiv and the self-styled Mentors piling up trade with other cultures – if necessary, by lethal force (or even by recycling old costumes). And while the wriggling other Mentors led by Kiv’s aide Sil have no love or loyalty for their leader, they’re desperate to keep him alive for his brilliant business brain, without which they might all end up dead or, worse than that, poor. But that very brain is fatally expanding within his slimy skull, and only the greatest – as he’d be the first to tell you – doctor in the galaxy can transfer it to a new frame. The first ‘monster’ we meet in the story is a forewarning of this, as well as a basically terrible piece of design kept wisely in the dark, then almost redeemed by the way people chat about him afterwards like he was Harold down the chip shop.
Colin Baker makes the most of a wildly inconsistent script, Brian Blessed is at his most BRIAN BLESSED, and Nicola Bryant is terrific as she approaches her end, but it’s stolen from all of them by Patrick Ryecart as Crozier, playing it so intense and deadpan that he becomes much funnier – and more sinister – than anyone else. Confined mostly to one set, dressed for citrus insanity in lemon and then orange, he’s somehow still the centre of the story. An obsessive rather than the ‘mad scientist’ that the brain transplant storyline might suggest, he’s marvellously self-centred, regarding anything bar his medical experiments as an utter waste of his time. And, though with brilliant touches of eccentric charisma, as Patrick Ryecart has explained his part, he’s more Nazi than nice. Clipped, staccato, disturbing and funny, you can see how he can go on to give such a great sit-com performance as the awesomely continuity-error-in-reality-named Captain Hilary Duff.
Kiv rambles wonderfully about his donor body-to-be having an primitive sting at the end of its tail – and how “I could, perhaps, sting all my assistants to death!” – as they prepare to operate; the Doctor camps up his pleasure at being allowed to monitor the equipment; Crozier eyes the Doctor like a wolf assessing a tailored suit (in a threatening plotline that, unfortunately, never goes anywhere, built up until suddenly dismissed in a late aside, as if they’d just thrown the script in the air and picked the bits up at random… Similarly, the nature of Crozier’s experiments changes at the last minute and makes a nonsense of much of the earlier dialogue); piercing music echoes; Crozier’s eyes narrow in a fabulously crazed single moment as he begins the operation. Later, Kiv will come round and see a thing of beauty; later still, Crozier’s eyes shine as he sees his ambition to conquer death within his grasp… But my favourite moment of him is tiny, arrogant, and perfect, and brilliantly down to Patrick Ryecart and a bit of business. Once the operation’s complete and the spectators have drifted away, Crozier is simply how we imagine every brilliant surgeon to be: dismissive and rude to his patient, and only caring for his own achievement. In a scene framed by a gorgeous effects shot of the arching roof of his lab, he’s sipping a cup of tea when his assistant, Alibe Parsons’ glamorous Matrona Kani, alerts him to something going wrong. Crozier takes this in at a glance:
“Cardiac arrest. His body’s – reacting to the drugs.”And in that gap in the middle of his sentence, in protest at being interrupted by what he clearly sees as his patient letting down his genius, instead of leaping to his feet he takes another sip of tea. It’s a perfectly calculated little moment, and the tiny stutter on the “F” as he calls his lord and master a “fish-faced monster!” allowing us just for a fraction of a second to think of another, more Brian Blessedy word, is the icing on the cake.
Patrick Ryecart and Brian Blessed spar deliciously in rival interviews in the ‘Making of’ – the former saying the latter needs to be licenced, the latter that the former never knew his bloody lines (and, to show he’s watched it, tipping his tea. Patrick Ryecart is still as reliable today; he didn’t turn up to a convention earlier this year, and was represented on stage by a dummy in his orange surgeon’s gown to wicked lines from Alibe Parsons). Other stories found on the disc will reveal a moment when Mr Blessed, too, may not have got his own lines word-perfect…
“The major thing was sort of replacing Brian Blessed’s brain. Which some people would argue is not a bad idea in real life – in fact, having replaced his brain, I think it might be what sent him up Everest without any oxygen.”
Something Else To Look Out For
While the postmodern commentary of the Trial impinging on the ‘main’ story got in the way on The Mysterious Planet, here it suddenly works better on a much more fragmentary story where the viewers, too, must be arguing about what’s really going on. Informed by Philip Martin’s groundbreaking series Gangsters (from whom it borrows Alibe Parsons), the hints of today’s interactivity make it seem far more modern. So while, for me, this isn’t the best segment of the Trial, it’s the one that makes best use of the overarching story in its own, with the interruptions resembling a DVD commentary in which cast members argue over the deleted scenes and try to salvage their own parts in a box-office disaster. It’s not the a clever noir-style plot the format could have led to, an unreliable narrator usually works better when the production end has more of an idea than the audience, and there are still riskily near-the-knuckle complaints such as calling it “inconsequential silliness” and “gratuitous,” but when the Valeyard counting the precise number of times the Doctor and his companions have respectively been in danger is a point-perfect echo of Mary Whitehouse, ticking off numbers of unsuitable incidents with no regard for narrative, and when Michael Jayston sarcastically invites us to watch “The Doctor’s next – frightening adventure,” you feel that they at least knew what they were doing better than Gerald Ratner.
The sparring between Colin Baker and Michael Jayston suddenly becomes more dangerous as the stakes rise: the Doctor becomes less playground and more lost; the Valeyard seems to know exactly where to twist the knife to stir up self-loathing in the Doctor; and his “Who else is there?” booming out of the sky is one of the few times he makes a telling point, a dramatic moment that almost anticipates the Doctor damning him as a second-rate god at the climax.
You can see how good Colin Baker is when the script deals him an almost crippling blow: as Colin glumly notes on the commentary, it takes him back to square one, completely destroying the character progression planned for his Doctor. Conceived as a ‘Mr Darcy’ who begins aloof and to whom we slowly warm, lead writer Eric Saward was utterly hopeless at writing that overarching story from the first, when The Twin Dilemma’s terrible writing blighted him. Just as finally, and far more thanks to the actor than his scripts, the Doctor has been mellowing, this story magnifies his ‘nice or nasty’ struggle without planning or revealing which bits are which. And the script editor had the nerve to blame other people? No wonder Philip Martin saw him as mentally fragile and “a bad guy pretending to be good” – which is when the lead writer should have stepped in to contextualise, rather than piss off. Mr Martin explains some of where he thought he was coming from on the commentary, but this is the first anyone’s heard of it – while the confusion of the Doctor being good, bad, mad or fake isn’t helped when none of the rest of the story can decide what it is, either (horror, comedy, sci-fi, barbarian swordplay, vivisection, a Dallas satire with green slugs as the Ewings, or a runaround with rebels?). On The Mysterious Planet, I talked about how seeing that when I was fourteen led to empathy with existential crises; something else I’d become very aware of at that age sprang to mind watching the ‘Doctor jiggles about too enthusiastically’ cliffhanger on broadcast, so I’ve always been amazed no-one said ‘Hang on…’ before it went out. What it looks like has always distracted me from the key turning point in the story, after which it’s anyone’s guess whether the Doctor’s in his right mind, in Brian Blessed’s, or simply invented. Though one scene, at least, is obvious, even if it was horrible for Nicola Bryant: the Doctor on the Rock of Sorrows saying ‘I am a wrong ’un and no mistake, I did it, guv’ like the notes of a provincial PC read out in court never fails to be a scream.
Peri’s Finest Hour?
Nicola Bryant gets a far better deal from the script than her co-star, and rises brilliantly to the opportunity of something more stretching than being chained to a rock (though as I’ve just noted, she has that too). Betrayed and abandoned, Peri seizes control of her own fate at key points rather than just suffer or revenge, and Nicola gives a truly powerful final scene, explaining on the commentary that she’d seen anaemic exits and decided that wasn’t for her. All that, despite being stuck in an electric pink smock after finally being allowed to dress as a grown-up in the previous segment – though it goes with the bright pink seawater. With so many others dressed in the same colour, they could make a camouflage bathing party that would be camouflage only ever on that one world (or in the ’80s).
The scene where the Doctor and Peri land at the seaside – the shocking pink seaside, with the brilliant indigo rocks and bright green sky – is a striking one, and not just to your eyeballs. Though it is a glorious example of finally having the technology to turn a cold British beach into an alien planet, and really going for it (thrillingly for fact fans, Peri goes out as she came in, with a story filmed on a nudist beach. And though she spends most of this one fully clothed, in one arresting respect she finishes up wearing much less than she started out, and it’s a fantastic look she’s much happier signing than a bikini shot). It gives Peri some oomph, and sets up many of the themes of the story: gun-running for profit; the great gag of ‘liquefied’ for ‘liquidated’ from the killer capitalists; and the in-joke and foreshadowing in one of the “Dirty old warlord!”
Which brings us to that old pulp SF cliché of ‘What is this Earth thing called love’, about which the kindest thing that can be said is that I’d rather have that than the horrible, horrible ‘Planet of Women’ script it replaced and on which Doctor Who once again dodged a CD phaser (it must be that they gaze into each other’s eyes and see the same taste in eye make-up. I say ‘taste’…).
Like the story, the supporting actors are absurdly variable – a mixture of over the top and totally flat. The Samurai-ish warlord Yrcanos (in a story that’s far more racially mixed than most Who, to its credit, both in the actors and in the costume influences it plays with) is played by Brian Blessed, at one end of the scale – you may be able to guess which – while his companion in rebellion, Gordon Warnecke’s Tuza, is gorgeous but you’ll need to watch My Beautiful Laundrette to realise he’s not always wood from the neck up. I suspect that the Valeyard may have got bored with doing a director’s cut on the Doctor and tinkered with King Yrcanos, too, as I can’t say I’m sold on the notion of a bloodthirsty hereditary warlord suddenly becoming Che Guevara. Mind you, something needed to gee up the galaxy’s least lively rebels, who make the Tribe of the Free seem full of character and multilayered performances in top fashions (meeting them even brings Peri out in a rash of terrible dialogue, while the idea of twenty-year-olds being aged to death seems less about vampirism or time experiments than a bit bunged in before a cliffhanger and then forgotten about). It’s impossible, though, not to enjoy the bizarre inventiveness – and shouting – of Brian’s performance, and his grumpy concession:
“Very well. Today, prudence shall be our watchword. Tomorrow, we shall soak the land in blood.”Again with the themes of The Mysterious Planet, only more so, Mindwarp moves from mere Minder-in-mass-murder to a full-blown critique of big business exploitation and capitalism as conquest, with Nabil Shaban again outstanding as Sil, the poison dwarf Mini-Me of Jabba the Hutt with a great tail and a fabulous laugh (which he was pleased gave at least one Doctor Who writer of my acquaintance nightmares). Returning from the previous year’s innovative if flawed Vengeance on Varos, he has considerably better design – suggesting, as with Kiv’s new body, that the Mentors become greener as they age – but a much less powerful part, becoming more the comic relief than the principal villain. Sil’s boss Kiv is a future returnee, with The Young Ones’ Christopher Ryan to become a Sontaran General opposite David Tennant (and, briefly, Matt Smith), while bored (occasionally amusingly so) head of security Trevor Laird comes back as Martha Jones’ dad.
For once, director Ron Jones – the bane of many ’80s Doctor Who stories – creates a bit of atmosphere here, though not consistently: ironically, his two strongest achievements are respectively in the dark and in chaos. The epilepsy-inducing strobes in the tunnels mostly come across as distracting escapees from the Top of the Pops studio, but they work brilliantly in the second (or sixth) cliffhanger, where a perfectly timed flicker of light enlivens an otherwise stock moment. Even better, though, is the climax to the final (or eighth) episode, half a dozen minutes in which everything at last delivers as Thoros-Beta collapses into a hellish clamour of claxons and lost souls and the Doctor enters his own private hell. With Nicola Bryant and Colin Baker each perhaps giving their finest moments, it’s a stunning evocation of everything falling apart without the actual production doing so.
Brian Blessed Versus the Fuckerons
Leading a fine set of extras, the twenty-minute The Making of Mindwarp is excellent and very entertaining, particularly – as above – Patrick Ryecart and Brian Blessed (of whom a career summary notes his subtle and varied roles, “And then Flash Gordon happened”). Half the cast do their Brian Blessed impressions; Brian does the Queen, asking him to say “Gordon’s alive!” before thoughtfully observing that with Yrcanos, like Vultan, he could let his hair down. It’s just a shame there’s no Nabil Shaban. And, wonder of wonders, before flouncing off in a strop, absentee script editor Saward for once even praises Colin’s performance, while Colin brightly observes:
“And for once, I wasn’t the most over-the-top person in it!”With this and the commentary between Colin, Nicola and writer Philip Martin, you can also enjoy tales of why Philip felt like an assassin, why he was told he couldn’t be political, which door cost more than Nicola, and how Colin observed BBC unions at work. In other extras, Lenny Henry stars as the Doctor in probably the ’80s’ key piss-taking clip, though it’s a shame they cut the sketch before his show’s end credits and lose him boogieing in the TARDIS (I wonder if anyone has the full version? Mine’s on a Betamax I’ve not been able to play for twenty years). I’m always unhappy when an ’80s Who story is released without the option of being able to listen to the musical score separately. Richard Hartley’s glistening and occasionally thumping incidental music here is the exception: it’s the only score of the decade for which the master tapes no longer exist, so it’s not cost-cutting nor lack of interest that means there isn’t one on this disc. I’m still miffed it’s the excuse for not making the scores for the other ten The Trial of a Time Lord episodes available, though. There’s an impressively comprehensive location feature, plus nine minutes of deleted and extended scenes which are interesting but don’t add much until the last couple, where Sil uses a vital word and Tuza half-remembers that there was someone else with him (with an appropriate idea of who it is from Yrcanos). Quite an extensive photo gallery, too, and thankfully the DVD menus helpfully don’t give too much away this time. My favourite extra, though, is the tiny additional commentary – for part of a later Trial episode – on A Fate Worse Than Death. Apologetic Colin. Appalled Nicola. Priceless.
The best anecdote, though, is obviously when Colin Baker is quoted – and asterisked out – in the mostly unthrilling text notes recalling how, at the visual effects-laden and stressful end for one day’s shooting, Brian Blessed cost a lot of money in setting it all up again next time by exuberantly forgetting the name of his slimy enemies in a way that will surprise few viewers of Fry’s Planet Word:
“Let’s find the Fuckerons!”
These photos, too, are from the Blackpool Doctor Who Exhibition. A major part of my childhood, it was closed in 1986, making The Trial of a Time Lord its last new season of Doctor Who. A new version opened in the 2000s, but the BBC closed it and flogged off the exhibits two years ago rather than preserve them for the nation. Philistines. So even in these glory days, some BBC brass are still Fuckerons.
Philip Martin’s novelisation is not a happy experience. The other stories of the Trial had been published a couple of years earlier, so you got the impression he was struggling with it – though there’s more material, most of it was probably cut from the script, as his overwritten and ponderous prose style suggests he’s much happier with writing for television. Unusually for a book, though it’s not a perfectly plotted descent in quality, it’s easy to identify the best of it – the first page, as the Doctor muses over his trial and struggles with disturbing flashes of memory (flash-forwards, in the context of most of the narrative – and the worst, which with eerie symmetry is the epilogue’s comedy ‘afterlife’. Even the cover’s a mess: not matching the style of the three other Trial novelisations, and a pretty horrible painting that’s almost certainly the worst from the normally almost photorealistic brush of Alister Pearson (compare it to his gorgeous cover for the whole season-length story on VHS a few years later, for example). Rather more effective follow-ups to the end of the story, incidentally, can be found in Colin Baker’s own graphic novel The Age of Chaos, Big Finish’s audio play Her Final Flight and, certainly the best work overall though with the relevant echo its most self-indulgent part, the superb New Adventures novel Bad Therapy by future Doctor Who TV author Matt Jones.
Though I usually review a whole DVD release at once, and though The Trial of a Time Lord box set is in theory all one big story, again there’s more to come. So, Next Time… Er, with all the “Next Times” I’ve found online too spoilery, why not try this hilariously ’80s fan trailer?
The Trial of a Time Lord… In a Hurry (Continued)
And finally… Richard and Millennium have a few things to say about this story, too. Millennium’s (spoilerish, as it covers the next six episodes too) Mysteries of Doctor Who #15: What the TRUNK is going on at Dr Who’s Trial? Less seriously than the elephant, but also with a spoiler at the end if you look carefully, Richard has helpfully condensed the whole story into three scenes for your entertainment and delectation:
Part Two: Mind How You Warp
Scene 1: int. laboratory. CROZIER, a mad scientist, and SIL, a slimy gonk, are discussing immortality. THE DOCTOR and PERI enter
THE DOCTOR: I wonder what Sil is up to?
PERI: Oh golly, Doctor, this is Sil’s home planet, isn’t it?
THE DOCTOR: Er…
Scene 2: laboratory, later that day. THE DOCTOR is attached to A MACHINE
SIL: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again!
MACHINE: [FX] Fizz Bang Wallop
THE DOCTOR: I’m BRIAN BLESSED!
Enter Brian Blessed
BLESSED: Ooh, how very dare you!
MACHINE explodes for no readily apparent reason
Scene 3: the TRIAL ROOM. THE DOCTOR confronts THE INQUISITOR
THE DOCTOR: You killed Peri!
THE INQUISITOR: Yes, we did, we really really did. [Miranda Hart-style to camera] We didn’t really.
Roll titles
*All right, technically yesterday by the time I published this, but these things take time.
Labels: Big Business, Books, Brian Blessed, Colin Baker, David Tennant, Doctor Who, DVD, DVD Details, Mary Whitehouse, Michael Jayston, Music, Pictures, Reviews, Richard
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Doctor Who 45th Anniversary – Why Was 1987 Brilliant?
Sylvester McCoy is the Doctor in a series that’s brightly coloured and inspired by comics and modern life. Dragonfire brings streetwise new companion Ace and a host of film references (from zombies to noirish love and betrayal, and a villain’s horrible death from Indiana Jones), but I particularly love…
This one’s not out on DVD yet, so it’s worth tracking down the novelisation or the VHS… Rather disconcertingly, I once met the author through his ex, who was my ex’s disturbing landlord (‘with hilarious results’).
Paradise Towers
“Are these old ladies annoying you?”A scintillating script and grimy sets make good, old-fashioned Doctor Who inventive again – no longer in a stylised English village, but a stylised tower block. Bureaucracy gone mad, urban gang warfare, cannibal Mary Whitehouse types who’ll do anything to maintain their lifestyle… It’s a scream!
“No.”
“Are you annoying these old ladies?”
“No, she isn’t! …And I do wish you wouldn’t keep breaking down our door to ‘save’ us.”
“That’s the third time we’ve had it repaired, and it’s not as if we’ve ever been in any trouble!”
This one’s not out on DVD yet, so it’s worth tracking down the novelisation or the VHS… Rather disconcertingly, I once met the author through his ex, who was my ex’s disturbing landlord (‘with hilarious results’).
Labels: Comics, Doctor Who, Indiana Jones, Mary Whitehouse, Reviews, Sylvester McCoy, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Doctor Who 45th Anniversary – Why Was 1977 Brilliant?
One newcomer writes mad messiah murder mystery The Robots of Death and the series’ finest ghost story, Image of the Fendahl; others include the woman in the leather bikini and the tin dog, who with the bloke in the scarf become Doctor Who’s most iconic silhouettes… I learn to read on books like The Dalek Invasion of Earth and the horror-and-ellipses-packed The Ark In Space… While in Victorian London…
Second-hand shopping might turn up a novel with an hilarious cleaning-up of an obvious on-screen prostitute, a script book, an edited video… But you want the double-disc DVD, one of the best releases going and with some superb extras. For some, the height would be the 26 minutes of Blue Peter teaching you how to make a model theatre with Lesley Judd, but for me it’s something amazing: a special behind-the-scenes documentary on Doctor Who, with loads of clips of old stories to pack it out, and all from 1977, a year that also saw complaints about the BBC, the economy going bust and Doctor Who being incredibly popular – how times change, eh?
But that’s not all. This year, my inner gleefully bloodthirsty five-year-old self was overjoyed to see that The Talons of Weng-Chiang has now also inspired the most unsuitable toys for children ever to hit the supermarkets (well, the Slitheen dress-up skin suit comes close, but it doesn’t come in Slitheen size for me to wear it). Nearly two decades ago, I saw a boy in a video shop trying to decide between this and a Who story I don’t think much of (I only write nice things in these posts, so I won’t name it); I knelt and convinced him that this story was dark and scary, then stood and convinced his mum that it was half as long again for the same price. These new figures are much the same. Tell parents that you get a full-sized figure and a half-sized figure for the same price as the other single figures; tell kids that you get a knife-wielding psychopathic doll and a sex killer war criminal with interchangeably masked and hideously scarred heads. As I said, a fabulously unsuitable toy purchase, which I recommend to every household this Christmas.
Some months ago, incidentally, I wrote of a faulty component on assembling my ‘collect and build’ K1 Giant Robot, part of which comes with the unbeatably unsuitable Magnus Greel and Mr Sin. I’m delighted to report that Character Options’ customer service team got back to me within a week, and not only replaced the faulty part but sent me a complete, fully assembled Robot (so I now have some spare arms and legs. Sigh. If only I did). Here it is, looming in the background of those two psychotic star figures and an assortment from 1975 and 1977.
And finally… Eagle-eyed viewers may have spotted that my plan to write one of these every day through to the end of the year came to a grinding halt three weeks ago, when I got very ill for a week and very washed-out afterwards. Last week my embarrassing ailments scored a hit with a broken toe. Tonight, a little less grumpy, two toes strapped together and trying to catch up a bit, I’d like to say particular thank-yous to Neil Fawcett and the lovely Nick, who respectively posted an encouraging blog piece on why Doctor Who was brilliant in 1977 and wrote me a fantastic e-mail doing every year from 1963 to 2008 in one go. Both warmed the cockles of my heart, and both picked The Talons of Weng-Chiang as certainly as I did.
The Talons of Weng-Chiang
“On my oath! You wouldn’t want that served with onions – never seen anything like it in all my puff. Urrhh, make an ’orse sick, that would. Oh!”‘Doctor Who in the inner city: gangs, guns, stabbings and drugs’. Hurrah! Feast on the richest of dialogue, fruitiest of characters and vilest of villains, with one whole episode a brilliant conjuring trick. It’s one of the most utterly entertaining pieces of television ever made.
Second-hand shopping might turn up a novel with an hilarious cleaning-up of an obvious on-screen prostitute, a script book, an edited video… But you want the double-disc DVD, one of the best releases going and with some superb extras. For some, the height would be the 26 minutes of Blue Peter teaching you how to make a model theatre with Lesley Judd, but for me it’s something amazing: a special behind-the-scenes documentary on Doctor Who, with loads of clips of old stories to pack it out, and all from 1977, a year that also saw complaints about the BBC, the economy going bust and Doctor Who being incredibly popular – how times change, eh?
But that’s not all. This year, my inner gleefully bloodthirsty five-year-old self was overjoyed to see that The Talons of Weng-Chiang has now also inspired the most unsuitable toys for children ever to hit the supermarkets (well, the Slitheen dress-up skin suit comes close, but it doesn’t come in Slitheen size for me to wear it). Nearly two decades ago, I saw a boy in a video shop trying to decide between this and a Who story I don’t think much of (I only write nice things in these posts, so I won’t name it); I knelt and convinced him that this story was dark and scary, then stood and convinced his mum that it was half as long again for the same price. These new figures are much the same. Tell parents that you get a full-sized figure and a half-sized figure for the same price as the other single figures; tell kids that you get a knife-wielding psychopathic doll and a sex killer war criminal with interchangeably masked and hideously scarred heads. As I said, a fabulously unsuitable toy purchase, which I recommend to every household this Christmas.
Some months ago, incidentally, I wrote of a faulty component on assembling my ‘collect and build’ K1 Giant Robot, part of which comes with the unbeatably unsuitable Magnus Greel and Mr Sin. I’m delighted to report that Character Options’ customer service team got back to me within a week, and not only replaced the faulty part but sent me a complete, fully assembled Robot (so I now have some spare arms and legs. Sigh. If only I did). Here it is, looming in the background of those two psychotic star figures and an assortment from 1975 and 1977.
And finally… Eagle-eyed viewers may have spotted that my plan to write one of these every day through to the end of the year came to a grinding halt three weeks ago, when I got very ill for a week and very washed-out afterwards. Last week my embarrassing ailments scored a hit with a broken toe. Tonight, a little less grumpy, two toes strapped together and trying to catch up a bit, I’d like to say particular thank-yous to Neil Fawcett and the lovely Nick, who respectively posted an encouraging blog piece on why Doctor Who was brilliant in 1977 and wrote me a fantastic e-mail doing every year from 1963 to 2008 in one go. Both warmed the cockles of my heart, and both picked The Talons of Weng-Chiang as certainly as I did.
Labels: Books, Doctor Who, DVD, History, London, Mary Whitehouse, Personal, Pictures, Religion, Reviews, Sherlock Holmes, Tom Baker, Toys, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Doctor Who 45th Anniversary – Why Was 1976 Brilliant?
Twisted religion and black comedy suffuse a stunning year, transforming body horror into battles for the mind and rich colours into darkness as writer Robert Holmes and producer Philip Hinchcliffe (masters of kiddie-scaring) reach their peak, while Terrance Dicks’ new The Making of Doctor Who inspires every guidebook written since. From The Brain of Morbius’ funny fascist Frankenstein to The Hand of Fear’s crawling eeriness, all the stories are marvellous, and the greatest of them all begets not just Time Lord mythology but even The Matrix movies…
There’s no DVD yet, though you may have seen clips from and discussion of it on Doctor Who Confidential 4.10, the one after Midnight. In the meantime you should look for second-hand copies of the novel or the VHS: if you can track down WH Smith’s The Time Lord Collection, that includes videos of not only this story, but also The War Games and The Three Doctors; on the other hand, the original VHS release has the most gorgeous cover painting in the range… And back on its original transmission, the Radio Times trailed the story with one of its most shiver-down-the-spine lines:
The Deadly Assassin
“I am the creator here, Doctor. This is my world.”Exploding with ideas for both story and storytelling, this starts as film noir political satire, then swerves into virtual reality and gritty surrealism. Superb cliffhangers, visuals, dialogue; the Master stripped to his essentials… It’s my favourite story, and Mary Whitehouse’s biggest complaint. An unbeatable recommendation!
“The Master’s consumed with hatred. It’s his one great weakness.”
“Weakness, Doctor? Hate is strength.”
“Not in your case. You’d delay an execution to pull the wings off a fly.”
There’s no DVD yet, though you may have seen clips from and discussion of it on Doctor Who Confidential 4.10, the one after Midnight. In the meantime you should look for second-hand copies of the novel or the VHS: if you can track down WH Smith’s The Time Lord Collection, that includes videos of not only this story, but also The War Games and The Three Doctors; on the other hand, the original VHS release has the most gorgeous cover painting in the range… And back on its original transmission, the Radio Times trailed the story with one of its most shiver-down-the-spine lines:
“Death strikes in the dark cloisters of the Time Lord Capitol. The Doctor, alone now, is a hunted fugitive in a city that was once his home…”
Labels: American Politics, Books, British Politics, Doctor Who, Film Noir, Ideas, Mary Whitehouse, Personal, Philip Madoc, Religion, Reviews, Style, The Master, Tom Baker, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?
Monday, August 04, 2008
Shouldn’t Reviewers Watch the Programmes They’re Paid To Review?
It’s no secret that I like watching TV. And, rather than be a passive viewer, I like to engage my critical faculties – sometimes to find buried treasures in a programme, sometimes to pull it apart. I do this for pleasure, but some do it for a living. One of these had appeared to be Mr AA Gill, who writes about television for The Sunday Times; after yesterday, I can’t honestly use the word “reviews”. If you’ve been watching The Tudors… Well, you’ve got one up on Mr Gill, as you might just spot if you read his latest “review”.
I grew up with a pronounced dislike of those followers of Mrs Mary Whitehouse
(“I think she was the worst thing – one of the worst things, after [Mrs] Thatcher, to happen to this country,” according to the author of Image of the Fendahl)for many reasons, but one of those I felt most keenly was when they’d attack a programme without watching it. They’d just assume their beliefs about something to be true on the basis of, er, what they believed, rather than any evidence. Worse, they’d then use their unfounded opinions as the basis on which to order everyone else not to watch the programme, when (even when they bothered watching what they were complaining about) their own personal preferences were no reason to ban anything.
AA Gill is not Mary Whitehouse. I’ve not read anything from him advocating censorship – though, as my own special Mrs Whitehouse memorial, tender-vocabularied readers should be aware that I will later quote a satirical observation involving words and concepts that the old TV-hater would have had more than usual reason for objecting to – but it does look very like Mr Gill has followed in her footsteps by speaking from a position of self-styled authority about a television programme without watching it.
I will confess up-front that I’ve not read most of Mr Gill’s reviews. I’ve not particularly liked those I have read, but it’s quite possible that I’ve only read what he has to say on an off day, or when he’s been constructing a character for satirical effect. So I’m not making any unfounded generalisations about him; my mind is open to the possibility that Mr Gill is witty, well-informed, completely secure in his sexuality and not remotely a raging snob. On the basis of his article in yesterday’s Sunday Times, however, the one which purports to review the new series of The Tudors, I have a well-founded scepticism that he actually watched the opening episode of the second series. Or the final episode of the first series. It’s probable that he’s watched some episode of it, sometime, but I can’t rule out the possibility that he’s extrapolated all his opinions from having merely seen a trailer for the series at some point and taking a dislike to Jonathan Rhys Meyers looking a bit flouncy.
What’s the dead giveaway? That, set amongst the fear that Friday’s Sixteenth Century soap opera features men who make such effort to have sex with large numbers of women that they must be a bit gay, the series is spoilt by having Sam Neill in it. So, in a three-paragraph review that breaks down roughly half about the frocks and half about his catty dislike of a particular actor, there’s no evidence that he’s watched the programme. To clarify; going on about the outfits could have been picked up from the trailers and the glossy magazines. But making the key part of a review going into one about Mr Neill poses a much bigger evidentiary problem.
Now, as it happens, I have a fairly similar view of Mr Neill’s screen talent to that of Mr Gill. He was surprisingly bland in The Omen III, and he hasn’t matched that peak in anything I’ve seen him in since. I have a vague half-memory of Tom Baker being very rude about him, though not as strongly as that of his magisterial put-down of Jeremy Irons (that he looks wonderful and would have made a marvellous silent movie actor, but that then he opens his mouth and you fall asleep). So I’m not disagreeing with Mr Gill out of some knee-jerk fan-worshipping loyalty to Mr Neill. My problem here is much more simple.
Sam Neill isn’t in it.
This wasn’t obvious to Mr Gill. If he’s watched the series, I can’t imagine how. The absence of Sam Neill is obvious to anyone who has a passing acquaintance with the opening episode of The Tudors’ second series, which doesn’t star Sam Neill, or with the final episode of the first series, in which Sam Neill’s then character Cardinal Wolsey died, or with the history by which the series was nominally inspired, in which Cardinal Wolsey was dead (though probably not in the way depicted in The Tudors) by this point in the reign of Henry VIII. So, though I’m not violently opposed to some lazy git scamming Mr Murdoch, wouldn’t Mr Gill have been more polite to his readers and more protective of his reputation to write about The Tudors by, you know, watching it?
The Tudors – Filth, Fun or History?
I watch The Tudors, though I think it’s nonsense, probably because I just have something of a predilection for history even when it’s as garbled as this. Jonathan Rhys Meyers is a bit weaselly for me (he was better as more of a weasel in Gormenghast), but quite impressive at times as the young Henry, and Peter O’Toole’s Pope Paul III is fabulous – already far more entertaining in one episode than Sam Neill was in ten – and it’s entertaining, but schlocky.
It has its problems. For something that so desperately wants to follow the expensive ’80s American soaps – The Tudor Die-Nasty – it can move incredibly slowly. That’s the problem with stripping out all the fiddly details from history, but still keeping to the rough outline across the multiple ten-hour series you’re milking: the first enables you to tell a fast, dumb story, but the second slows it right down again. Someone who watched the first few hour-long episodes of the first series, missed the rest, and comes back on Friday will be going, ‘What? He’s not managed to divorce his first wife yet?’ There was more sex, plotting, history and – incredibly – narrative speed in I, Claudius, made entirely in the studio three decades ago for a fraction the budget, because it let the characters and the story lead it.
What replaces the historical details, character development and story in The Tudors is, of course, the sex: pretty young men with silly stick-on beards and handsome young women with silly stick-on bodices. Lawrence Miles has suggested that the programme can be boiled down to Anne Boleyn gasping, “Cum on my tits and abolish the monasteries!” and though that line may have been considered too vulgar even for the comedy sketch show he submitted it to, and will doubtless both appal my readers and get my blog blocked by my local library’s ‘stern peering over glasses’ software, I’m afraid it’s true.
The other problem I have with the series is its particular line of bias. Pretty much all of reported history has its own slant, but this is going a bit far. Richard suggests that the programme may as well have a sign on it saying ‘Sponsored by the Estate of Katherine of Aragon,’ so holy, virtuous and badly treated does she appear. I have an even more basic historical objection: as it’s supposedly “The Tudors”, rather than ‘Henry the Shagger’, I’d have liked them to start with the founder of the Tudors as a ruling dynasty, young Henry’s father, Henry VII. Why didn’t they? Well, he’s not as famous; he doesn’t have all the wives*; and he’s far more difficult to make look like a nice guy. You don’t have to be a Richard III revisionist (though I am, rather) to regard Henry Tudor as a murderous usurping git. He executed and otherwise persecuted loads of people who’d fought for Richard – the legal king – through the intriguing legal trickery of declaring after the fact that he, Henry, was King before the fact of the Battle of Bosworth, so the people fighting him were traitors and rebels. And he was far more ruthless than even Richard’s sternest detractors say Richard III was in removing rival claimants to the throne: most of the others with a claim were alive and free under Richard, but sentenced and executed under Henry. Not that it was difficult to find rivals with better entitlement to the crown than Henry’s laughably distant and complicated one. Technically, Henry Tudor was barely closer to the throne than you or I, dear reader, so it’s no wonder he had to slaughter so many people in the way. So, in all, I’d have loved to see how they made him a soap leading man. He could have been a J.R. for the Noughties. After all, Ian McKellen’s Richard III is one of my favourite films – it’s fiction.
A hat-tip is due, by the way, to a friend of mine who read Mr Gill’s review yesterday and pointed it out to me in an e-mail headed “oh what a howler!” He has, however, asked me not to mention him. In case this starts a witch-hunt, he doesn’t work for The Times.
*Two, according to Stephen Fry. That QI’s got a lot to answer for.
Update: Lawrence asks me to point out that the line was in fact
“Come on my tits and dissolve the monasteries.”I was, of course, unbelievably dim not to have remembered that, but readers anxious to know why this is funnier (which it is) can e-mail me for an explanation.
Labels: History, Mary Whitehouse, Newspapers, Reviews
