Friday, December 21, 2012
The Hobbit Fantasy Casting
This time last week, Richard and I were watching and enormously enjoying The Hobbit – An Unexpectedly Small Proportion of It. Neither of us have been able to write reviews yet, sadly (though we might see it again), but I cheered at Sylvester McCoy appearing in big movie-star letters, and thrilled at his having not just a character cameo but major scenes: the gathering dark; the extended comedy action piece; the full-on action scene where he bests the most dangerous character in the entire film… So it got me thinking. Who else might Doctor Who fan Peter Jackson have cast?
The Hobbit
Starring
And in especially large letters at the end
Proper blogging may reappear soon. I’m having a crappy day and humming That Dwarf Song to keep warm.
The Hobbit
Starring
SYLVESTER McCOY as Radagast The Brown
MATT SMITH as Bilbo Baggins
COLIN BAKER as Thorin Oakenshield
TOM BAKER as Gandalf The Grey (look, I held out for him last time)
CHRISTOPHER ECCLESTON as The Blue Wizard (may not appear in actual film)
PAUL MCGANN as Galadriel (because he always loves wigs, and he’s not quite fey enough for Elrond)
And in especially large letters at the end
MICHAEL JAYSTON as Saruman The (spoilers) Turns Out Not As White As He’s Painted
With PETER DAVIDSTONE as The Pale Orc (harbouring a deadly vendetta against Thorin Oakenshield)
And DAVID TENNANT as Sebastian the Hedgehog (because he suffers so well)
Proper blogging may reappear soon. I’m having a crappy day and humming That Dwarf Song to keep warm.
Labels: Christopher Eccleston, Colin Baker, David Tennant, Matt Smith, Michael Jayston, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Paul McGann, Peter Davison, Sylvester McCoy, Tolkien, Tom Baker
Saturday, December 01, 2012
Doctor Who 50 – Eleven Great Cliffhangers
It’s Saturday the First of December, so what does that mean? That all of us faithful followers are looking forward to the very special day when he first came to save us – he looks like a man, but he’s a legend, and… And is that enough Advent blasphemy to make up for this morning? I’m counting down weekly to Doctor Who’s fiftieth anniversary, today with the definition of what gets you coming back next week: the cliffhanger. Before more of them enter my fifty great scenes across the year, here are eleven terrific scary moments to whet your appetite… Watch out for spoilers – often quite big ones!
It’s in the Daleks’ second story that they make perhaps their most iconic cliffhanger entrance (at least until 2006), shockingly rising from the Thames as masters of Earth in World’s End, but it was this cliffhanger that made Doctor Who an overnight success: bringing Barbara and the viewer to a pitch of tension, what could it be? Tune in next week! And the brilliance of it lies in part that it is not a monster reveal, but – after an episode of no-one else but our heroes exploring a strange world – the first intrusion of something else, a something or someone that we won’t see for another week. But Barbara’s seen it, and she’s terrified, and that reaction makes us desperate to know. It also establishes the iconic cliffhanger as something voyeuristic from the start – and rarely more so than in showing the climax not with the ‘viewers’ viewpoint character’ Barbara, but making us the very camera that threatens her.
You can see some of that cliffhanger in this excitingly spoilery fan-made Remembrance of the Daleks trailer – and it may be coming soon…
All the while, an impossible sphere has been hanging in their air, defying all analysis; and just as the Cybermen come through, just as the Doctor thinks it’s all about them, just as the Cyberleader tells him that they merely followed the hole the sphere made between universes… The void-ship starts to open at last. And though Mickey Smith has turned from cowardly Mickey the Idiot to confident Defender of the Earth – that’s the positive power of gay sex – even he’s not ready for what’s coming out. A year after she destroyed every last Dalek in existence, Rose recognises the four Daleks as they float out of their sphere, identifying their location, the life-forms, and their desire, as always: “Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminaaaaaaate!”
On a planet on the edge of the Universe, a scientific party has come to grief in the eerie living jungle, and the Doctor (Tom Baker) and Sarah Jane have inevitably taken the blame. There are more horrible deaths on the rescue ship; something is preventing it from leaving orbit; and something is very wrong with the expedition’s sole survivor, in a ghoulish sci-fi twist on the Victorian tale of Jekyll and Hyde. In the wrong place at the wrong time, the Doctor’s really not getting on well with the ship’s ambitious young commander, and things come to a head when, coming round from the Doctor socking him in the jaw, the commander finds him standing over yet another twisted corpse and shoots him down. We’ve already seen the ship’s dead ceremonially ejected into space; now the commander has the unconscious Doctor and the all too awake Sarah Jane strapped onto trays in the mortuary and presses the lever to send them the same way in a ghoulish sci-fi twist on the Victorian fear of burial alive, already out of sight down the tube as the music screams in… Claustrophobia, helplessness, arbitrary power and death all combine to make this the most horrifying cliffhanger of all when I was a little boy. For some reason, corpses and skeletons seemed exciting, but coffins frightening.
director governor orders a close-up on his death throes; a mini-Jabba gurgles with delight in the most fabulously evil laugh of the ’80s; we zoom in on Colin’s still face on all the screens… They cut. One of Doctor Who’s most postmodern stories, surely its most postmodern cliffhanger as we watch what we’d normally watch on the screen on a series of screens – fittingly for such a superb cliffhanger, it’s the story’s peak, unusually far better around the middle than at the beginning or end.
The Doctor (Tom Baker) has been blamed (as usual) for sabotage and murder on an alien world. This is a holiday world, run by a dying race, and it’s going bankrupt; the sabotage and murder, apparently by green lizardy things lurking in the shadows, doesn’t help. Nor does their wolfish human business partner Brock, who’s making them an offer too good to refuse. Suddenly, though, things turn inside-out: a friendly green lizard helps the Doctor out and he takes it to see the Board, just as the next Chairman is turning into a fascist messiah. But that’s the least of Brock’s worries as the lizardy thing, turning not so friendly after all, makes a grab for him. He screams in xenophobic terror for it not to touch him, which seems for once justifiable – as, in a series of brilliantly horrible fast cuts and close-ups, we see it seize him and tear his head off. To reveal the lizard within.
The Doctor turning evil? How about all of us? Perhaps overcompensating for disintegrating a git of a President last time the Master turned up, here we get some blatant hero-worshipping of Obama, Wilf gets Chekhov’s Button hidden behind the bluff of Chekhov’s Gun, and the man who thinks he’s the main villain gets to activate his big sparkly gate thing. But he’s not the main villain at all. The Master leaps into action and, with a burst of thrilling music, throws his self across the world and into every human. The Doctor (David Tennant) can only look on appalled as the Master’s laugh echoes from the entire formerly-human race, sometimes wearing rather stylish pink frocks, to the strains of the glorious music we always know as ‘Dance of the Macra’. But it’s a double cliffhanger, and even the Master this time isn’t the main villain either. We zoom out from Earth across the Solar System and far beyond as the President of the Time Lords (Timothy Dalton) promises the serried ranks of his people – all in Prydonian, or Dalek, colours, and whose death has been the only certain fact of the past five years – final victory, and the end of time itself.
Though the rest of the story survives, the final episode of The Tenth Planet is one of those the BBC “lost” (though in this case, rumours suggest in a less straightforward way than the usual skip or furnace). Fortunately, not only does the soundtrack exist, as for all “missing” episodes, but so do three clips of the climax – two filmed off-screen of the buildup, and the first regeneration itself in full quality. And in a strange way, the juddery flickering of those clips just adds to the sense of something weird and powerful happening. It’s marvellous that we still have that mesmerising shot of the Doctor near-swooning into camera as he tells Ben he’s wrong about it all being over, then all those overlapping shots of the Doctor and the ‘alive’ console amidst a catastrophe of sound remains spellbinding – even before the end of the story itself in a new Doctor, still such a fantastic idea! As you could describe both as ‘Holy shit! What’s that?’ scenes – with both then having such satisfying answers – this cliffhanger and the first one above are probably the two most crucial moments in explaining why we’re still watching Doctor Who five decades later.
Next week – a last teaser before the Fifty start in earnest…
The Daleks Episode 1 – The Dead Planet
“Aaaaaaaahhhh!”The Doctor (William Hartnell)’s first adventure had fine cliffhangers to close each of its four episodes, not least the creeping threat at the very end of the story – but it was his second story that introduced not just the iconic monster but the iconic cliffhanger: a mystery; a monster; and a scream. The first episode of The Daleks is an early design triumph, as the TARDIS lands in the midst of a petrified jungle on an apparently dead planet. Exploring a strange metal city, full of sinister shining corridors with low arched doorways and with an eerie soundscape of hums and whirrs, the crew split up to explore… But when it comes time for them to meet up again, not only are they all feeling suddenly, strangely exhausted, but Barbara isn’t with them. She’s lost in the gleaming city, clutching the walls for support as she weakens, made all the more claustrophobic as doors close by themselves around her as if to herd her into place, hemmed in by a city coming alive and her own distorted reflections – then, as she’s reaching the end of her tether, to a piercing whine of musique concrète something extends a probe towards her as it closes in, and she screams…
It’s in the Daleks’ second story that they make perhaps their most iconic cliffhanger entrance (at least until 2006), shockingly rising from the Thames as masters of Earth in World’s End, but it was this cliffhanger that made Doctor Who an overnight success: bringing Barbara and the viewer to a pitch of tension, what could it be? Tune in next week! And the brilliance of it lies in part that it is not a monster reveal, but – after an episode of no-one else but our heroes exploring a strange world – the first intrusion of something else, a something or someone that we won’t see for another week. But Barbara’s seen it, and she’s terrified, and that reaction makes us desperate to know. It also establishes the iconic cliffhanger as something voyeuristic from the start – and rarely more so than in showing the climax not with the ‘viewers’ viewpoint character’ Barbara, but making us the very camera that threatens her.
Remembrance of the Daleks Part One
“The stairs!”Another iconic Dalek cliffhanger, this time from twenty-five years later, now the mid-point of Doctor Who; exploring a school basement full of Dalek technology, the Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) and Ace manage to disintegrate a Dalek transmitting in… But the one already there closes in. The Doctor shouts to Ace the same thing everyone at home does, and she bounds up the stairs to escape. But before the Doctor can do the same, the cellar door’s slammed shut in front of him and, for the first time, we see a Dalek shockingly glide up the stairs behind him, his face captured in its computer display as it identifies the enemy of the Daleks and shrieks that he will be exterminated…
You can see some of that cliffhanger in this excitingly spoilery fan-made Remembrance of the Daleks trailer – and it may be coming soon…
Army of Ghosts
“That’s not Cybermen…”The centre-point of Army of Ghosts / Doomsday doesn’t quite manage to spread today’s three Dalek cliffhangers evenly across the whole of Doctor Who’s first fifty years, but it’s close. The Doctor (David Tennant) goes downstairs again to investigate strange goings-on… Why does he keep doing that? It’s a thrillingly long build-up of tension that still manages to have the cliffhanger moment itself the undoubted climax: first, the Doctor is captured by fabulous villain Yvonne Hartman and Torchwood; then the Doctor works out (in an inspired twist on The Tenth Planet, with parallel rather than perambulating worlds colliding) that the Cybermen are behind it all; then the Cybermen effortlessly capture the Doctor and his captors; then the ‘ghosts’ across the world suddenly achieve full corporeality, as the Cybermen take control. The music, the imagery, Graeme Harper’s direction as the camera passes across eerily still Cyber-faces in close-up… It would be a terrific cliffhanger. So, pity the Cybermen, who have had some great cliffhangers of their own (faces in the snow, taking London in front of St Paul’s Cathedral, an army bursting from their containers and marching through a spaceship), yet the most exciting moment in their most victorious cliffhanger isn’t about them at all. I even usually name multi-part Twenty-first Century Who stories to myself after their first episode, yet this story to me is always “Doomsday” – because that’s about the Daleks, while “Army of Ghosts” seems more just the Cybermen.
“Oh my God—!”
All the while, an impossible sphere has been hanging in their air, defying all analysis; and just as the Cybermen come through, just as the Doctor thinks it’s all about them, just as the Cyberleader tells him that they merely followed the hole the sphere made between universes… The void-ship starts to open at last. And though Mickey Smith has turned from cowardly Mickey the Idiot to confident Defender of the Earth – that’s the positive power of gay sex – even he’s not ready for what’s coming out. A year after she destroyed every last Dalek in existence, Rose recognises the four Daleks as they float out of their sphere, identifying their location, the life-forms, and their desire, as always: “Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminaaaaaaate!”
Planet of Evil Part Three
“You can’t do this! It’s murder!”Many of the cliffhangers I’m fondest of are those that most terrified me as a child. A man taking his wounded hand from his pocket and not recognising the half-Wirrn flesh it’s become; Sarah Jane recognising a Sontaran as it removes its helmet, or falling from a terrifyingly high gantry, or encountering the body, or brain, or body and brain of Morbius, or just not Sarah Jane at all; the Doctor caught in the merciless gaze of a dark god, or next to feel the blazing power of a cowled fanatic consumed by burning energy, or frozen underwater in the cliffhanger that most offended Mary Whitehouse (‘Finished, Doctor! The episode’s finished!’). Many more burned their way into my earliest nightmares – some of them will find their way into my Fifty Scenes across the next year, and it was very tempting just to fill up these eleven with more from the mid-Seventies. Instead, I’m going to write in detail about just one today, chosen – how else? – by virtue of being the one that gave me the most vivid and lasting recurring nightmare.
“She’s right. You have no evidence. You cannot do it.”
“How much evidence do you want? The whole crew dead? Eject! Eject!”
On a planet on the edge of the Universe, a scientific party has come to grief in the eerie living jungle, and the Doctor (Tom Baker) and Sarah Jane have inevitably taken the blame. There are more horrible deaths on the rescue ship; something is preventing it from leaving orbit; and something is very wrong with the expedition’s sole survivor, in a ghoulish sci-fi twist on the Victorian tale of Jekyll and Hyde. In the wrong place at the wrong time, the Doctor’s really not getting on well with the ship’s ambitious young commander, and things come to a head when, coming round from the Doctor socking him in the jaw, the commander finds him standing over yet another twisted corpse and shoots him down. We’ve already seen the ship’s dead ceremonially ejected into space; now the commander has the unconscious Doctor and the all too awake Sarah Jane strapped onto trays in the mortuary and presses the lever to send them the same way in a ghoulish sci-fi twist on the Victorian fear of burial alive, already out of sight down the tube as the music screams in… Claustrophobia, helplessness, arbitrary power and death all combine to make this the most horrifying cliffhanger of all when I was a little boy. For some reason, corpses and skeletons seemed exciting, but coffins frightening.
Vengeance On Varos Part One
“And cut it – now.”Colin Baker (the Doctor) is trapped in a voyeuristic world of TV where people delight to see the contestants suffer and everything is ruled by a TV vote. Make your own topical jokes. Here are mine. Tense music swells; the Doctor makes his way through a baking TV landscape, and we see people seeing him seeing Peri (yes, it is a bit meta); even the viewers at home feel thirsty watching; Peri is dragged into the studio and bursts out in horror at what she sees on the screen; the
The Space Museum Episode 1 – The Space Museum
“They’ve gone.”It’s another time where the cliffhanger builds and builds to a crescendo – before finishing in sudden silence and on a moment of quiet, charismatic authority. The TARDIS lands by the space museum to the triumphs of this planet’s conquerors – or does it? The Doctor (William Hartnell) and his friends explore, only to find no-one can see or hear them, to find they can’t touch anything, and ultimately to find… Themselves. Frozen exhibits alongside all the other monuments of conquest. It seems the TARDIS has been doing something very strange, by accident or design, and this eerie, intriguing opening episode closes with time catching up with its passengers: it never fails to send a shiver up my spine when to a sudden eruption of frankly barking, strident strings the TARDIS has another go at it, our heroes’ footprints belatedly appear, the display cases of doom fade away, Steven Moffat materialises and the Doctor ominously observes that they’ve at last arrived.
“Yes, my dear. And we’ve arrived.”
Carnival of Monsters Episode Two
“What was that?”When I think of Carnival of Monsters, I usually think of how funny it is, or how strange. The claim that it’s “Nothing serious, nothing political” even as it sends up xenophobic right-wingers; the high-concept weirdness that should mean the first episode’s cliffhanger is outstanding, though it doesn’t quite work on screen; the combination of the two in that what seems to be a puzzling mixture of times and places is revealed to be a peepshow satirising TV (and one show in particular). And yet the most memorable single moment is the most straightforwardly effective of all cliffhanger ideas: a simply brilliant monster reveal. The Doctor (Jon Pertwee) and Jo find themselves in part of an alien swamp, and as the entertainer and the alien planet’s MPs watch (plotting a good disaster but with no wish to be devoured by such monstrosities, even in the cause of political progress), there’s a terrific scream from a monstrous dragon bursting out of the water to menace our heroes… The Drashig is, in this shot, still one of the best monsters in the series, and completely lives up to its fourth-wall-breaking billing in all the ways we’ve already been told with grisly relish how scary it is.
“I don’t know – but it didn’t sound very friendly…”
The Leisure Hive Part Three
“I’ve got a surprise for you all.”Tom Baker’s final season as the Doctor is one of the series’ creative peaks: visually stylish; thematically brilliant; superb music; striking ideas. One of the elements it doesn’t get enough credit for, though, is its cliffhangers – it’s arguably Doctor Who’s most sustained run of terrific episode endings, whether in an outstanding mixture of villain revealed and turning point in the tale (not this one – a later one), fractured time suddenly crystallising as our hero arrives in danger (though differently to The Space Museum), or a lurch in the stomach of horror and delight at a mixture of fan-pleasing death and Tom solemnity. Two stories in particular stand out in every single cliffhanger. One of them’s made it to my Fifty. For the other, the Doctor’s pulled shockingly apart with a howl down a still shocking set of new titles; then aged to ancienthood; and in this third cliffhanger, the most shocking face-off of the lot…
The Doctor (Tom Baker) has been blamed (as usual) for sabotage and murder on an alien world. This is a holiday world, run by a dying race, and it’s going bankrupt; the sabotage and murder, apparently by green lizardy things lurking in the shadows, doesn’t help. Nor does their wolfish human business partner Brock, who’s making them an offer too good to refuse. Suddenly, though, things turn inside-out: a friendly green lizard helps the Doctor out and he takes it to see the Board, just as the next Chairman is turning into a fascist messiah. But that’s the least of Brock’s worries as the lizardy thing, turning not so friendly after all, makes a grab for him. He screams in xenophobic terror for it not to touch him, which seems for once justifiable – as, in a series of brilliantly horrible fast cuts and close-ups, we see it seize him and tear his head off. To reveal the lizard within.
The Trial of A Time Lord Part Thirteen – The Ultimate Foe
“This is an illusion. I deny it!”The Doctor (Colin Baker) has entered the Matrix – yes, just like that one. Doctor Who got there first, and this wasn’t even the first time (the first time was followed by a story with a great cliffhanger in which what looks like the Doctor’s evil self attacks him inside a computer. Completely different to this). Anyway, he’s gone inside this computer to track down his evil self, only to be enmeshed in dementedly Victorian bureaucracy. Told to go to a waiting room, he opens the door – and finds himself on a dour, windswept beach, the voice of his evil self (Michael Jayston) echoing down from the sky. He’s rather fabulous at that. Worried about his companion, the Doctor’s defiant – but threats boom like thunder to the Doctor himself, the music spirals, and below his feet the sand starts to heave as grimy hands erupt from it and, grasping at the Doctor’s legs, pull him to the ground. The Doctor tries to deny the reality of all this, but as the disembodied hands drag him deeper into the roiling sands, it seems all he can do is scream… The Doctor turning evil is one of the series’ great nightmares, so it’s appropriate that rarely has the Doctor been plunged into such nightmarish imagery.
“Not this time.”
“This – isn’t – happening!”
“You are dead, Doctor. Goodbye, Doctor…”
The End of Time Part One
“And so it came to pass, on Christmas Day, that the human race did cease to exist. But even then, the Master had no concept of his greater role in events – for this was far more than humanity’s end. This day was the day upon which the whole of Creation would change for ever…”OK. So not quite done with the Advent blasphemy. This is the longest buildup and cliffhanger in today’s choices (though not the longest scene in the Fifty, which will range from just a few seconds to…), as I will happily watch the last seven minutes or so of The End of Time Part One as one big climax. Russell T Davies has an amazing gift for great penultimate-episode cliffhangers, enthusing me for if usually outclassing the season finale that follows (here, neither the multiple Masters nor the Time Lords really seem to get a lot to do next time. But a great brink to teeter on). The Master (John Simm) is terrific, too, though I do rather prefer him more suave with occasional bursts of madness than the other way round, and so nearly went for the stunning images, music and charisma of his “Here – come – the drums!” …But it’s just possible that I may yet feature something else from that particular three-part story, and perhaps even another Russell pre-finale. What’s especially impressive about this cliffhanger is that, like Army of Ghosts’, it’s a double cliffhanger – setting up one huge menace that we expected, making it utterly victorious, and then topping it…
The Doctor turning evil? How about all of us? Perhaps overcompensating for disintegrating a git of a President last time the Master turned up, here we get some blatant hero-worshipping of Obama, Wilf gets Chekhov’s Button hidden behind the bluff of Chekhov’s Gun, and the man who thinks he’s the main villain gets to activate his big sparkly gate thing. But he’s not the main villain at all. The Master leaps into action and, with a burst of thrilling music, throws his self across the world and into every human. The Doctor (David Tennant) can only look on appalled as the Master’s laugh echoes from the entire formerly-human race, sometimes wearing rather stylish pink frocks, to the strains of the glorious music we always know as ‘Dance of the Macra’. But it’s a double cliffhanger, and even the Master this time isn’t the main villain either. We zoom out from Earth across the Solar System and far beyond as the President of the Time Lords (Timothy Dalton) promises the serried ranks of his people – all in Prydonian, or Dalek, colours, and whose death has been the only certain fact of the past five years – final victory, and the end of time itself.
The Tenth Planet Episode 4
“It’s far from being all over…”From the other end of time, and from another regeneration story before anyone had the faintest idea there could be any such thing, comes the biggest, most inspired shock cliffhanger in Doctor Who, for all that we’ve had so many years to get used to the idea: the Doctor (Patrick Troughton) is no longer the Doctor (William Hartnell). His old body wearing thin, exhausted by fighting against the Cybermen and their vampire world, the Doctor has won, but is in a state of collapse as he staggers back to the TARDIS. His companions Ben and Polly (good-looking guys) follow, only to find the TARDIS apparently working the Doctor rather than the other way round, and the Doctor himself, in a blaze of light and roar of sound – changing…
Though the rest of the story survives, the final episode of The Tenth Planet is one of those the BBC “lost” (though in this case, rumours suggest in a less straightforward way than the usual skip or furnace). Fortunately, not only does the soundtrack exist, as for all “missing” episodes, but so do three clips of the climax – two filmed off-screen of the buildup, and the first regeneration itself in full quality. And in a strange way, the juddery flickering of those clips just adds to the sense of something weird and powerful happening. It’s marvellous that we still have that mesmerising shot of the Doctor near-swooning into camera as he tells Ben he’s wrong about it all being over, then all those overlapping shots of the Doctor and the ‘alive’ console amidst a catastrophe of sound remains spellbinding – even before the end of the story itself in a new Doctor, still such a fantastic idea! As you could describe both as ‘Holy shit! What’s that?’ scenes – with both then having such satisfying answers – this cliffhanger and the first one above are probably the two most crucial moments in explaining why we’re still watching Doctor Who five decades later.
Next week – a last teaser before the Fifty start in earnest…
Labels: Colin Baker, Daleks, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 50, Jon Pertwee, Michael Jayston, Sylvester McCoy, The Master, Tom Baker, William Hartnell
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
Tuesday, September 06, 2011
DVD Detail: Doctor Who – The Trial of a Time Lord: The Mysterious Planet
It’s September, and Doctor Who’s back on TV, as it always was. Twenty-five years ago this evening, a superb cast led by Colin Baker and Michael Jayston launched into the longest and most postmodern of all Who stories, in which the Doctor is taken out of time and placed on trial alongside the show itself. Does the opening special effect still look as fantastic as it did in 1986? Can the Doctor convince the Inquisitor (and the audience) that he hasn’t been misusing his time? And might this existential crisis be a better DVD release than it is a story?
Back in 1986, the BBC high-ups had turned against Doctor Who. They cancelled it, then grudgingly allowed it back eighteen months later with a reduced running time, reduced budget and a series of directives from above that (as the excellent, if dispiriting, set of extras here reveal) were long on criticism and very short indeed in saying what they wanted instead. So when the punch-drunk series returned twenty-five years ago tonight with most of the executives wanting it to fail, it wasn’t a massive success. The Doctor Who production team fought back by giving all fourteen episodes one long story arc: in pretty much the most obvious and postmodern theme in the series’ history, the Doctor’s popularity is tested on a big TV screen while his corrupt superiors are completely stacked against him. It’s the ‘Trial’, symbolising a trial, and it’s sometimes a bit of a trial. So as to avoid swallowing the whole lot at once, it’s broken into several mini-stories as different parts of the ‘evidence’ (structured into past, present and future, inspired by A Christmas Carol), the first being sub-titled The Mysterious Planet. It’s possibly not the best of the Trial, but it’s probably the one of which I’m fondest… And what do other fans think 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 these first four episodes at a lowly 165ish (I’d put it about thirty places higher).
While this ‘taster’ may not be short, incidentally, my policy in these is not to be too spoilery. So read on without fear of finding out too many key twists from the end.
Everyone else rightly remembers this story for a special effects sequence that’s still striking a quarter of a century later, or for a star-studded guest cast boasting the likes of Michael Jayston, Lynda Bellingham, Tony Selby and Joan Sims. I remember it for all those things, too, but still more for Colin Baker facing off against someone you’ve probably not heard of in a big metal suit. Colin is a very theatrical actor, and one of the reasons I love his Doctor is that he’s at his best when giving speeches. Robert Holmes was the best of the Twentieth Century Doctor Who writers, and the two or three stories he wrote for Colin give him brilliant speeches that Colin rises to magnificently. The Mysterious Planet is the last more-or-less full story Bob Holmes wrote, and Colin gets superb material here particularly in the first episode – bubbling with enthusiasm then wistfully compassionate as he tells his companion that “nothing can be eternal” – and then again half-way through Part Four, trying to persuade a robot tyrant to let his people go, when the Doctor makes a mistake. Ironically, though you’d expect great speeches of a courtroom drama, not one of them is in the courtroom this time, despite this scene being fine advocacy from an actor who started as a lawyer.
And perhaps surprisingly, the character that I empathised with here even more than the Doctor was the robot tyrant, Drathro.
In September 1986, I was fourteen, and perhaps there’s something about being a bright teenager that leads to empathy with existential crises. The show was certainly in the middle of one, but from the very first time I saw this episode, I knew instinctively that Drathro was having one, too, and that that’s why the Doctor’s advocacy gets it wrong. I’ve never read another reviewer that came to the same conclusion; it may have been a theme of the script, or merely something that I read into it – making it a rare Doctor Who story that was rewritten better in my head as I was actually watching it – but ever since a man in 2000AD’s 1980 Robo-Hunter – Day of the Droids woke up, accidentally opened his face and discovered he was a robot, I’d been fascinated by existential questions. Long before I ever heard of the Turing Test, I was often on the side of robots in sci-fi, reasoning that if I didn’t know if they were sentient or not, perhaps neither did they, and that might be depressing them.
Drathro’s self-absorption is the (self-)centre of the story: the set-up of the two human tribes on the eponymous (or is it?) mysterious planet is a result of his rigid control; the threat of the black light explosion is down to his desire to take everyone with him; even his homoerotic servants Humker and Tandrell deserting him is triggered by his magnificent, hilarious reassurance that his armour means the Tribe of the Free don’t threaten him – “Their guns will destroy only you.” Drathro’s early observation that “organic” intuition often improves on his logic makes him sound slightly admiring and envious of the Doctor, while also seeking to control him – his existential crisis in a nutshell, like Taren Capel in reverse. He’s rather a good design, too, a massive robot with a curved head resembling both a signal receiver in a TV story about TV and a minotaur in a tale of a labyrinth (he looks even better next to his hench-robot, which is a bit rubbish). On the down side, he’s rarely directed to best advantage, but here he towers impressively over Colin as they debate on the crucial question of, if everything’s set to blow up, he should choose to be shut down five minutes early so that the five hundred humans he’s in charge of can live. And with Drathro entirely self-absorbed and far more charismatic than his vassals, it’s easy to miss just how appallingly he’s misused the power he gained through a state of emergency – it’s not just the explosive crisis presented here, but five hundred years in which he’s kept people enslaved by poverty, ignorance and conformity when none of it was necessary. Yet I still find him compelling.
The reason why I love the Doctor’s confrontation with Drathro to bits is that Drathro is tormented by not knowing if he’s self-aware or just programmed like that, which is why he has it in for the organics and why the Doctor’s tactless opening moral argument that he is “only a robot” is saying exactly the wrong thing. The brilliant Doctor winds him up, and the great big robot stops listening, because he doesn’t know whether he’s real or not and doesn’t like the Doctor rubbing it in. He’s such an underrated character, like Marvin the paranoid android done for real – a grumpy mechanical teenager with a marvellously flat, almost sulky delivery (Roger Brierley doing the voice, Paul McGuiness the physical acting).
And I’m certain, too, that the Doctor spots that he’s put his foot in it. His argument dances around Drathro, trying to find anything that will make him pay attention and think about anyone but himself. He offers a moral argument, then a logical argument, then one that’s both scientific and almost poetic; Drathro responds with a very ’80s Thatcherite argument, where he understands “value” only in the most limited sense, then with the sniffy thought that if no-one’s ever seen an explosion like this, well, there’ll be one soon. For me, it’s a major misstep by the script to suddenly inflate this internal debate with a threat to the world – the galaxy – the Universe!! – which seems less an exciting climax than a major loss of faith in the story’s ability to engage us so far, but I still think the misstep of dismissing Drathro’s personhood is a deliberate one: Colin plays it as if he realises what he’s said, and admits his humanity. Because he recognises that to be such a git, Drathro has to be a person – only an individual could be so selfish – and it’s at that point that Drathro’s earned the Doctor being angry at him.
In the background, Nicola Bryant’s companion Peri is great taking the initiative; usually fine guest star Tom Chadbon is inexplicably wooden; and a pair of galactic con-artists have some entertaining moments, quoting from old Who stories, setting up the clue that the ‘muscle’ may in fact be the clever one all along, and in the end providing the very ’80s twist that the Universe is saved not by logic, nor moral force, but by Arthur Daley (oh, no, spoiler!). Just a shame about the gunge tank. But it’s the Doctor and Drathro here that have always fired my imagination.
That opening special effects shot? It does still look as fantastic as it did in 1986. Turning around a Time Lord space station that’s like a baroque cathedral among the stars, it was the most complex and expensive model sequence mounted for Doctor Who in the Twentieth Century. Typically, that segues into a scene scripted as a moody procession down a darkened corridor, which ended up having to be shot in an emergency outside a brightly-lit, very tacky door. And that’s the problem with The Mysterious Planet: it can’t help lurching between brilliance and banality.
The lead actors definitely lift it. Colin Baker’s Doctor is not just a great speaker but endlessly watchable, full of entertaining business. He and Peri are at last firm friends, too; engaging and enthusiastic together rather than the previous year’s bickering, in no small part thanks to the actors deciding their characters were going to mellow. While the Doctor’s coat is as garish as ever and his hair more so, Peri now has clothes someone might actually wear, which help her into a far better role. Colin has a very different but just as watchable relationship with Michael Jayston, together turning rather tiresomely written courtroom sparring electric – “The crime was in being there, Doctor!” The coldly powerful Mr Jayston is terrific casting, cutting through Colin’s florid charm (though some of the reason for that, when I gushed over how brilliant he is recently, must remain clouded by spoilerphobia); usually it’s only the Doctor or the villain who light up the screen, but in this case…
Back in the script, several times there are sinister mentions of things that have already been revealed: both “the Immortal” and the fate of those in the Selection would have far more impact if we didn’t see them trolling along before we heard the terrible rumours, and that’s simply poor plotting. The case in favour of the Trial largely rests with its postmodern inventiveness, alternately playful, threatening and cheap, as various characters watch others on TV. It’s mildly amusing, but all the comments about violence, incoherence and dullness (“I would appreciate it if these brutal and repetitious scenes are reduced to a minimum,” “Why are we doing this?” “I tire of this empty banter”…) are surely rather Ratnerishly unwise, like singing ‘We’re ****, and we know we are’.
There’s more than poking fun at itself and Colin’s riveting set-piece speeches that make parts of the script shine, however. The pull-back reveal of Glitz and Dibber through the trees is one of the more stylish flashes, juxtaposing the newly relaxed Doctor and Peri pairing with the jarring dark comedy of a seedy, greedy version of the Doctor, a carelessly murderous traveller with immense but often misplaced self-confidence who keeps putting his companion down (the often dull text notes reveal that – rather than the excellent Tony Selby and Glen Murphy – the director had considered French and Saunders for the parts of Minder’s sociopathic future incarnations. I wonder if that’s why they did their sketch on the Trial set?). There are other clever juxtapositions, too – both sets of humans imprisoned by different dead dogmas while the Doctor tells us to “Never believe what is said” but find out for ourselves, and the different sets of hunters who swap places as to which is the threat to our heroes. The Reader of the Books (and, particularly, his books) is funny, and one of Bob Holmes’ best writing tics comes in, with snippets of a history that’s happened offscreen, though it’s a disappointment that the story of “the three Sleepers” is no sooner raised than it’s discarded.
You might also ask, is it a miscalculation or a brilliant gag to do Planet of the Apes for laughs, on a BBC budget, with the climactic revelation ten minutes in? Other sources obviously date the story to 1986 – the Minder-a-likes blasé about mass murder to make a fast grotzit, touches of Spycatcher when elements are excised as “Against the public interest,” the post-apocalyptic Tribe of the “Free” being a tyranny led by a single shouting woman and her mumbling male advisers, with Joan Sims playing both Margaret Thatcher and Tina Turner – but there’s also a spray of naughty Doctor Who allusions. Not only does Colin get to spoof Jon Pertwee (and Peri respond “You’re alive. I knew it” rather than weep over his body), but Bob Holmes writes an outrageous remake of both The Ark in Space (far future, solar flares, Earth abandoned, sleepers, rigidly autocratic rule of survivors) and The Sontaran Experiment (robot with grabbing tentacles, abandoned Earth, Doctor staring right into monstrous villain’s camera) but mixed with The Krotons turned upside-down and made deeper and more layered (from the postmodern games to Drathro’s identity crisis).
I’ve criticised set design that suddenly tumbles from intriguing to just not looking like it gives a toss, but perhaps the biggest single fault is in the direction, which while not actively bad is mostly flat, simply lacking flair, pace and energy. Not even the explosions are up to the usual maniacally dangerous level of BBC enthusiasm. Thank goodness, then, for the music. Dominic Glynn provides a new version of the Doctor Who Theme which has less punch than the two previous versions, but an ethereal, almost water-like sound that suits the rippling titles and is particularly effective on the echoing fade into the story. He’s also responsible for the incidental music, which is some of the best in the series and quite the most consistently good thing about the production. It’s a great shame that, because the master tapes of the music for the next four episodes of The Trial of a Time Lord are the only ones from the ’80s which no longer exist, they chose to include no isolated score on any of these discs: I’d love to be able to play the elegy for Earth under the ground, the piping and the stately march for the Tribe of the Free, the driving music for the otherwise feeble L1 robot… The expansive music as Peri and Glitz yomp their way to the second cliffhanger, for example, is far more thrilling than the cliffhanger itself (a misfiring line that can be taken either as inappropriate despair from the Doctor or a postmodern statement that doesn’t raise a laugh). So the soundtrack, like Colin, is a highlight throughout.
Colin Baker and Michael Jayston are more harmonious in the 25-minute The Making of The Mysterious Planet (and Colin is a splendid raconteur and ringmaster for the commentary itself), with a strong line-up of interviewees for candid discussions, revelations, and disagreements with the script editor. It’s rather good, and joined by a remarkable host of extra features even on just this first disc in the set: eight and a half minutes of deleted and extended scenes, including the TARDIS materialising in the rain (I’m glad they lost the bickering), the Doctor pointedly pointing out there are ways to come upon knowledge that don’t involve the Time Lords and a sweet scene of Humker and Tandrell skipping off as a couple; ten minutes of trailers and continuity setting the story in the terrifyingly ’80s context of Roland Rat, Noel Edmonds (for the moment…), Paul Daniels, Russ Abbot and – also twenty-five years ago tonight – the very first episode of Casualty… There’s even a cameo from a future incarnation of the Doctor! Add to that some theme remixes and a scored photo gallery which go a little way to making up for the absence of an isolated soundtrack, Wogan, Blue Peter, Points of View (Anne Robinson before she did that to her face and a very badly-written slagging-off letter from a self-important fan. How unlike the home life of our own dear internet). For once, even the DVD menus are quite well put-together, and not too spoilery. PDFs include Radio Times features and a press pack from the time; interesting that the listings threaten the Doctor with “If found guilty, he will forfeit his remaining lives!” – as if some figure from the Doctor’s future would muck about with such things these days – and advertises the new video release of Day of the Daleks (which coincidentally blows its Dalek reveal mid-way through its first episode just as this blows Drathro’s – had neither story heard of cliffhangers? – and does a different bit of Planet of the Apes), when it’s now due out on DVD almost exactly a quarter of a century later. So whatever verdict you reach on the story, it’s a terrific DVD release.
The photos, incidentally, 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 tossers to Doctor Who.
Should you come across the novelisation, it’s not Terrance Dicks’ best, but quite interesting; with more of the original authors taking over in the mid-’80s after a long period in which Terrance had written almost all the Target series, it was his only book for Colin’s Doctor, so his only crack at a description, and a cracking one. It starts well but doesn’t really sustain the style (as well as displaying rather more typos than usual), though fans may note that the chapter title for the climax is The Big Bang – well, it’s better than last year’s, at any rate. Oh, and that opening line Mark Gatiss thinks he made up? It’s here.
And finally… Richard and Millennium have a few things to say about this story, too. You might also like to read Millennium’s Mysteries of Doctor Who #1: Just What Is so Mysterious about Ravolox? which was the first in an extensive series that later returned with the (more spoilerish, as it covers the next ten episodes too) Mysteries of Doctor Who #15: What the TRUNK is going on at Dr Who’s Trial?
Less seriously than the elephant, and mindful that my articles tend to go on a bit, Richard has helpfully condensed the whole story into two scenes for your entertainment and delectation:
Back in 1986, the BBC high-ups had turned against Doctor Who. They cancelled it, then grudgingly allowed it back eighteen months later with a reduced running time, reduced budget and a series of directives from above that (as the excellent, if dispiriting, set of extras here reveal) were long on criticism and very short indeed in saying what they wanted instead. So when the punch-drunk series returned twenty-five years ago tonight with most of the executives wanting it to fail, it wasn’t a massive success. The Doctor Who production team fought back by giving all fourteen episodes one long story arc: in pretty much the most obvious and postmodern theme in the series’ history, the Doctor’s popularity is tested on a big TV screen while his corrupt superiors are completely stacked against him. It’s the ‘Trial’, symbolising a trial, and it’s sometimes a bit of a trial. So as to avoid swallowing the whole lot at once, it’s broken into several mini-stories as different parts of the ‘evidence’ (structured into past, present and future, inspired by A Christmas Carol), the first being sub-titled The Mysterious Planet. It’s possibly not the best of the Trial, but it’s probably the one of which I’m fondest… And what do other fans think 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 these first four episodes at a lowly 165ish (I’d put it about thirty places higher).
While this ‘taster’ may not be short, incidentally, my policy in these is not to be too spoilery. So read on without fear of finding out too many key twists from the end.
That Golden Moment
“Listen… You are only a robot. The people out there – the work units, the organics, whatever you choose to call them – they’re living creatures, Drathro. They have a right to their lives.”
Everyone else rightly remembers this story for a special effects sequence that’s still striking a quarter of a century later, or for a star-studded guest cast boasting the likes of Michael Jayston, Lynda Bellingham, Tony Selby and Joan Sims. I remember it for all those things, too, but still more for Colin Baker facing off against someone you’ve probably not heard of in a big metal suit. Colin is a very theatrical actor, and one of the reasons I love his Doctor is that he’s at his best when giving speeches. Robert Holmes was the best of the Twentieth Century Doctor Who writers, and the two or three stories he wrote for Colin give him brilliant speeches that Colin rises to magnificently. The Mysterious Planet is the last more-or-less full story Bob Holmes wrote, and Colin gets superb material here particularly in the first episode – bubbling with enthusiasm then wistfully compassionate as he tells his companion that “nothing can be eternal” – and then again half-way through Part Four, trying to persuade a robot tyrant to let his people go, when the Doctor makes a mistake. Ironically, though you’d expect great speeches of a courtroom drama, not one of them is in the courtroom this time, despite this scene being fine advocacy from an actor who started as a lawyer.
And perhaps surprisingly, the character that I empathised with here even more than the Doctor was the robot tyrant, Drathro.
In September 1986, I was fourteen, and perhaps there’s something about being a bright teenager that leads to empathy with existential crises. The show was certainly in the middle of one, but from the very first time I saw this episode, I knew instinctively that Drathro was having one, too, and that that’s why the Doctor’s advocacy gets it wrong. I’ve never read another reviewer that came to the same conclusion; it may have been a theme of the script, or merely something that I read into it – making it a rare Doctor Who story that was rewritten better in my head as I was actually watching it – but ever since a man in 2000AD’s 1980 Robo-Hunter – Day of the Droids woke up, accidentally opened his face and discovered he was a robot, I’d been fascinated by existential questions. Long before I ever heard of the Turing Test, I was often on the side of robots in sci-fi, reasoning that if I didn’t know if they were sentient or not, perhaps neither did they, and that might be depressing them.
Drathro’s self-absorption is the (self-)centre of the story: the set-up of the two human tribes on the eponymous (or is it?) mysterious planet is a result of his rigid control; the threat of the black light explosion is down to his desire to take everyone with him; even his homoerotic servants Humker and Tandrell deserting him is triggered by his magnificent, hilarious reassurance that his armour means the Tribe of the Free don’t threaten him – “Their guns will destroy only you.” Drathro’s early observation that “organic” intuition often improves on his logic makes him sound slightly admiring and envious of the Doctor, while also seeking to control him – his existential crisis in a nutshell, like Taren Capel in reverse. He’s rather a good design, too, a massive robot with a curved head resembling both a signal receiver in a TV story about TV and a minotaur in a tale of a labyrinth (he looks even better next to his hench-robot, which is a bit rubbish). On the down side, he’s rarely directed to best advantage, but here he towers impressively over Colin as they debate on the crucial question of, if everything’s set to blow up, he should choose to be shut down five minutes early so that the five hundred humans he’s in charge of can live. And with Drathro entirely self-absorbed and far more charismatic than his vassals, it’s easy to miss just how appallingly he’s misused the power he gained through a state of emergency – it’s not just the explosive crisis presented here, but five hundred years in which he’s kept people enslaved by poverty, ignorance and conformity when none of it was necessary. Yet I still find him compelling.
The reason why I love the Doctor’s confrontation with Drathro to bits is that Drathro is tormented by not knowing if he’s self-aware or just programmed like that, which is why he has it in for the organics and why the Doctor’s tactless opening moral argument that he is “only a robot” is saying exactly the wrong thing. The brilliant Doctor winds him up, and the great big robot stops listening, because he doesn’t know whether he’s real or not and doesn’t like the Doctor rubbing it in. He’s such an underrated character, like Marvin the paranoid android done for real – a grumpy mechanical teenager with a marvellously flat, almost sulky delivery (Roger Brierley doing the voice, Paul McGuiness the physical acting).
And I’m certain, too, that the Doctor spots that he’s put his foot in it. His argument dances around Drathro, trying to find anything that will make him pay attention and think about anyone but himself. He offers a moral argument, then a logical argument, then one that’s both scientific and almost poetic; Drathro responds with a very ’80s Thatcherite argument, where he understands “value” only in the most limited sense, then with the sniffy thought that if no-one’s ever seen an explosion like this, well, there’ll be one soon. For me, it’s a major misstep by the script to suddenly inflate this internal debate with a threat to the world – the galaxy – the Universe!! – which seems less an exciting climax than a major loss of faith in the story’s ability to engage us so far, but I still think the misstep of dismissing Drathro’s personhood is a deliberate one: Colin plays it as if he realises what he’s said, and admits his humanity. Because he recognises that to be such a git, Drathro has to be a person – only an individual could be so selfish – and it’s at that point that Drathro’s earned the Doctor being angry at him.
“Hubris – false pride. A human sin. You’ve controlled your pointless little empire for too long – now you can’t see anything beyond it.”Though the Doctor’s honestly talking to him as a person now, Drathro is too sunk in depression to notice – until the Doctor’s friends (and uneasy allies) turn up trying to get in the back way, aiming to persuade Drathro with Great Big Guns. Drathro, who’s been sulkily planning to let everyone else in the story die, then takes hilarious umbrage when he thinks the Doctor’s been having him on and snaps out of depression to malice, hoping to food-process and microwave the intruders to death. His angry response has far more believable undercurrents than any other villain I can think of who presses the button on the giant mincing machine: whether it’s someone tormented with doubt about whether he’s only programmed or ‘real’ and is taking out his existential crisis on everyone else, a superintelligent teenager in a strop, or displaying the self-absorbed hurt and outrage of the terrorist who suddenly twigs that their hostage negotiator is not, in fact, taking a genuine interest in them as an individual after all.
In the background, Nicola Bryant’s companion Peri is great taking the initiative; usually fine guest star Tom Chadbon is inexplicably wooden; and a pair of galactic con-artists have some entertaining moments, quoting from old Who stories, setting up the clue that the ‘muscle’ may in fact be the clever one all along, and in the end providing the very ’80s twist that the Universe is saved not by logic, nor moral force, but by Arthur Daley (oh, no, spoiler!). Just a shame about the gunge tank. But it’s the Doctor and Drathro here that have always fired my imagination.
Something Else To Look Out For
That opening special effects shot? It does still look as fantastic as it did in 1986. Turning around a Time Lord space station that’s like a baroque cathedral among the stars, it was the most complex and expensive model sequence mounted for Doctor Who in the Twentieth Century. Typically, that segues into a scene scripted as a moody procession down a darkened corridor, which ended up having to be shot in an emergency outside a brightly-lit, very tacky door. And that’s the problem with The Mysterious Planet: it can’t help lurching between brilliance and banality.
The lead actors definitely lift it. Colin Baker’s Doctor is not just a great speaker but endlessly watchable, full of entertaining business. He and Peri are at last firm friends, too; engaging and enthusiastic together rather than the previous year’s bickering, in no small part thanks to the actors deciding their characters were going to mellow. While the Doctor’s coat is as garish as ever and his hair more so, Peri now has clothes someone might actually wear, which help her into a far better role. Colin has a very different but just as watchable relationship with Michael Jayston, together turning rather tiresomely written courtroom sparring electric – “The crime was in being there, Doctor!” The coldly powerful Mr Jayston is terrific casting, cutting through Colin’s florid charm (though some of the reason for that, when I gushed over how brilliant he is recently, must remain clouded by spoilerphobia); usually it’s only the Doctor or the villain who light up the screen, but in this case…
“Hear how the Doctor condemns himself with his own words.”The script sets the tone – of being all over the place. Among the few things on which Colin Baker and script editor Eric Saward (who does his bitching in a separate commentary to everyone else, due to his immense popularity) agree is that Bob Holmes was a brilliant writer, though this isn’t his best. Some of the snags are clearly down to Eric’s idea of the Trial, though that’s not the only structural issue. The problem with the Trial set-up emerges very quickly. Although that’s where we start in Part One, soon we’re drawn into the Doctor’s exploration of the mysterious planet, with atmospheric long shots, lighting and music in a dark ruin before Peri makes her shocking discovery (guess) and she and the Doctor share some beautifully elegiac scenes together. It feels like the story’s hitting its stride… And then, with a grinding gear-change, the Trial not only interrupts but sneers at it:
“Can’t we just have the edited highlights?”As if, fourteen minutes into a new series, the production team have lost all faith in it and can’t help ruining any atmosphere the story had built up. And throughout not fourteen minutes but fourteen episodes, this keeps happening. Most of the story works, but interrupting it with the Trial stops it every time it gets started – you can see why they killed off the Time Lords for the next big relaunch two decades later. It doesn’t help that the production values take a tumble once we get back below. After the effectiveness of the subdued lighting and ruined stair as the Doctor and Peri talk of dead worlds, the Doctor is plonked into a brightly lit studio that doesn’t look at all as if it’s suffered five centuries of privation, where he’s jumped by condom-clad men who appear to have been huddled waiting for their cue. The only thing that could make the tunnels look naffer is if a really pathetic vehicle were to trundle through it… Oh. You’ll know, if you watch it, what sort of place this ought to look like. It doesn’t (if only someone had taken a look at Doctor Who Magazine’s End of the Line).
Back in the script, several times there are sinister mentions of things that have already been revealed: both “the Immortal” and the fate of those in the Selection would have far more impact if we didn’t see them trolling along before we heard the terrible rumours, and that’s simply poor plotting. The case in favour of the Trial largely rests with its postmodern inventiveness, alternately playful, threatening and cheap, as various characters watch others on TV. It’s mildly amusing, but all the comments about violence, incoherence and dullness (“I would appreciate it if these brutal and repetitious scenes are reduced to a minimum,” “Why are we doing this?” “I tire of this empty banter”…) are surely rather Ratnerishly unwise, like singing ‘We’re ****, and we know we are’.
“Well, if the rest of his presentation is as riveting as the first little epic, wake me when it’s finished.”With subtler irony, while the Court accuses the Doctor of violence simply because he’s caught up in trying to stop it, pastiching Mary Whitehouse, Joan Sims’ Katryca notices that the Doctor not carrying weapons makes him “unusual” amongst star-travellers; the people sitting in judgement and picking holes don’t understand the Doctor, but the people he meets do. Similarly, while many comments are as unsubtle as people just saying ‘ooh, this isn’t very good!’ and hoping the audience at home will disagree or titter rather than nod and switch over, having Handbag and Handrail expound on syllogisms immediately before Drathro jumps to a great big syllogism of his own is a clever touch. Though why, exactly, is the screen that the jury watch for most of their time in the Court directly behind them, so everyone has to crick their necks and squint? Surely the most appropriate place for the screen is the fourth wall.
There’s more than poking fun at itself and Colin’s riveting set-piece speeches that make parts of the script shine, however. The pull-back reveal of Glitz and Dibber through the trees is one of the more stylish flashes, juxtaposing the newly relaxed Doctor and Peri pairing with the jarring dark comedy of a seedy, greedy version of the Doctor, a carelessly murderous traveller with immense but often misplaced self-confidence who keeps putting his companion down (the often dull text notes reveal that – rather than the excellent Tony Selby and Glen Murphy – the director had considered French and Saunders for the parts of Minder’s sociopathic future incarnations. I wonder if that’s why they did their sketch on the Trial set?). There are other clever juxtapositions, too – both sets of humans imprisoned by different dead dogmas while the Doctor tells us to “Never believe what is said” but find out for ourselves, and the different sets of hunters who swap places as to which is the threat to our heroes. The Reader of the Books (and, particularly, his books) is funny, and one of Bob Holmes’ best writing tics comes in, with snippets of a history that’s happened offscreen, though it’s a disappointment that the story of “the three Sleepers” is no sooner raised than it’s discarded.
Stolen Secrets
You might also ask, is it a miscalculation or a brilliant gag to do Planet of the Apes for laughs, on a BBC budget, with the climactic revelation ten minutes in? Other sources obviously date the story to 1986 – the Minder-a-likes blasé about mass murder to make a fast grotzit, touches of Spycatcher when elements are excised as “Against the public interest,” the post-apocalyptic Tribe of the “Free” being a tyranny led by a single shouting woman and her mumbling male advisers, with Joan Sims playing both Margaret Thatcher and Tina Turner – but there’s also a spray of naughty Doctor Who allusions. Not only does Colin get to spoof Jon Pertwee (and Peri respond “You’re alive. I knew it” rather than weep over his body), but Bob Holmes writes an outrageous remake of both The Ark in Space (far future, solar flares, Earth abandoned, sleepers, rigidly autocratic rule of survivors) and The Sontaran Experiment (robot with grabbing tentacles, abandoned Earth, Doctor staring right into monstrous villain’s camera) but mixed with The Krotons turned upside-down and made deeper and more layered (from the postmodern games to Drathro’s identity crisis).
I’ve criticised set design that suddenly tumbles from intriguing to just not looking like it gives a toss, but perhaps the biggest single fault is in the direction, which while not actively bad is mostly flat, simply lacking flair, pace and energy. Not even the explosions are up to the usual maniacally dangerous level of BBC enthusiasm. Thank goodness, then, for the music. Dominic Glynn provides a new version of the Doctor Who Theme which has less punch than the two previous versions, but an ethereal, almost water-like sound that suits the rippling titles and is particularly effective on the echoing fade into the story. He’s also responsible for the incidental music, which is some of the best in the series and quite the most consistently good thing about the production. It’s a great shame that, because the master tapes of the music for the next four episodes of The Trial of a Time Lord are the only ones from the ’80s which no longer exist, they chose to include no isolated score on any of these discs: I’d love to be able to play the elegy for Earth under the ground, the piping and the stately march for the Tribe of the Free, the driving music for the otherwise feeble L1 robot… The expansive music as Peri and Glitz yomp their way to the second cliffhanger, for example, is far more thrilling than the cliffhanger itself (a misfiring line that can be taken either as inappropriate despair from the Doctor or a postmodern statement that doesn’t raise a laugh). So the soundtrack, like Colin, is a highlight throughout.
“I did my best. I only hope it’s enough…”Despite flashes of brilliance, too much of The Mysterious Planet feels uninspired, almost going through the motions – not bad, certainly, but not good enough to grab the audience and stick the two fingers up to the series’ BBC enemies that it needed. Ironically, though the direction looked distinctly unadventurous even in 1986, new Who viewers coming to the DVD might find the ‘DVD commentary’ style of the Trial more modern, with the Doctor and the Valeyard even arguing about the deleted scenes.
Classified Material
Colin Baker and Michael Jayston are more harmonious in the 25-minute The Making of The Mysterious Planet (and Colin is a splendid raconteur and ringmaster for the commentary itself), with a strong line-up of interviewees for candid discussions, revelations, and disagreements with the script editor. It’s rather good, and joined by a remarkable host of extra features even on just this first disc in the set: eight and a half minutes of deleted and extended scenes, including the TARDIS materialising in the rain (I’m glad they lost the bickering), the Doctor pointedly pointing out there are ways to come upon knowledge that don’t involve the Time Lords and a sweet scene of Humker and Tandrell skipping off as a couple; ten minutes of trailers and continuity setting the story in the terrifyingly ’80s context of Roland Rat, Noel Edmonds (for the moment…), Paul Daniels, Russ Abbot and – also twenty-five years ago tonight – the very first episode of Casualty… There’s even a cameo from a future incarnation of the Doctor! Add to that some theme remixes and a scored photo gallery which go a little way to making up for the absence of an isolated soundtrack, Wogan, Blue Peter, Points of View (Anne Robinson before she did that to her face and a very badly-written slagging-off letter from a self-important fan. How unlike the home life of our own dear internet). For once, even the DVD menus are quite well put-together, and not too spoilery. PDFs include Radio Times features and a press pack from the time; interesting that the listings threaten the Doctor with “If found guilty, he will forfeit his remaining lives!” – as if some figure from the Doctor’s future would muck about with such things these days – and advertises the new video release of Day of the Daleks (which coincidentally blows its Dalek reveal mid-way through its first episode just as this blows Drathro’s – had neither story heard of cliffhangers? – and does a different bit of Planet of the Apes), when it’s now due out on DVD almost exactly a quarter of a century later. So whatever verdict you reach on the story, it’s a terrific DVD release.
The photos, incidentally, 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 tossers to Doctor Who.
Should you come across the novelisation, it’s not Terrance Dicks’ best, but quite interesting; with more of the original authors taking over in the mid-’80s after a long period in which Terrance had written almost all the Target series, it was his only book for Colin’s Doctor, so his only crack at a description, and a cracking one. It starts well but doesn’t really sustain the style (as well as displaying rather more typos than usual), though fans may note that the chapter title for the climax is The Big Bang – well, it’s better than last year’s, at any rate. Oh, and that opening line Mark Gatiss thinks he made up? It’s here.
“It was a graveyard in space.”As this “Taster” has – as usual – spiralled out of control, you’ll be relieved that I’m being contrary this time: usually I do a whole DVD release at once, even if it’s made up of several stories; The Trial of a Time Lord box set is in theory all one big story, but I’m doing only the first disc with the opening evidence this month. As the Trial continues, the Doctor seems to be his own worst enemy… While the mini-stories alternate between straightforward but perhaps forgettable, and memorable messes of conflicting ideas. So, Next Time…
The Mysterious Planet… In a Hurry
And finally… Richard and Millennium have a few things to say about this story, too. You might also like to read Millennium’s Mysteries of Doctor Who #1: Just What Is so Mysterious about Ravolox? which was the first in an extensive series that later returned with the (more spoilerish, as it covers the next ten episodes too) Mysteries of Doctor Who #15: What the TRUNK is going on at Dr Who’s Trial?
Less seriously than the elephant, and mindful that my articles tend to go on a bit, Richard has helpfully condensed the whole story into two scenes for your entertainment and delectation:
Scene 1: ext. woodland. THE DOCTOR and PERI enter
THE DOCTOR: I wonder what this Mysterious Planet is?
PERI: Oh golly, Doctor, it’s Earth, isn’t it?
THE DOCTOR: Er…
Scene 2: int. underground lair. DRATHRO – a giant robot – is pottering around. QUEEN JOAN of SIMMS enters
QUEEN JOANIE: SIDNEY!!!!!
DRATHRO: Ooh, I feel a bit funny.
DRATHRO collapses on top of QUEEN JOAN; SABALOM GLITZ – a spiv – enters
GLITZ: Ooh, look at those >deleted< They’ll be worth a few grotzits.
THE VALEYARD: (off) Nothing to see here, Sagacity, move along.
Roll titles
Labels: BBC, British Politics, Carry On, Charles Dickens, Colin Baker, Comics, Conservatives, Doctor Who, Douglas Adams, DVD, DVD Details, Michael Jayston, Music, Pictures, Richard, Speeches
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Rogue Male and Michael Jayston
Radio 4 Extra is now rebroadcasting Michael Jayston’s superb reading of Geoffrey Household’s pre-World War II thriller Rogue Male (playing every weekday in half-hour slots, each episode four times daily and on iPlayer, so it’s easy to catch). The anti-hero spends the book on the run from sinister agents of a great power, each examining the moral questions of the ‘sporting’ event that opens the story… Stripped of all ambiguity, you might call the inciting incident ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’. Michael Jayston’s acting career includes, of course, Doctor Who’s Valeyard – there are spoilers, if you don’t know who he is…
Geoffrey Household’s original book was written in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, and neither the British antihero nor the European dictator he takes a fancy to stalking like big game are named; the only significant character with a name is Major Quive-Smith, and while that’s certainly a name, it’s certainly not his. Michael Jayston’s unabridged reading was made for BBC7 (as was) in 2004, and was instantly so acclaimed that it’s been a feature of the station’s programming every year or two since (I praised it last four years ago).
Rogue Male is a compelling thriller, its first-person narrative ideal for a talking book, but it’s Mr Jayston that makes it. I’ve always thought he was a terrific actor, and his reading is brilliantly sardonic – the perfect note for a central character’s voice that we can’t hate, or the story wouldn’t work, but that it’s impossible to like. He’s been perfectly cast as both heroes and villains; this anti-hero’s pretty much dead-centre in between. One of his most memorable roles for me was A Bit of A Do’s Neville Badger, almost the archetypal Mr Nice Guy; the Rogue Male is about as far from a nice guy as you can get, and yet his pursuers are very much nastier. In reading the character as slightly distanced from the action, he almost seems to be taking you into his confidence, and succeeds in getting you on his side – no mean feat for a “gentleman” both of and very much outside the establishment who’s best-known as a big game hunter, and whose ambition for the ultimate game seems to have precipitated a reversal in which the hunter becomes the hunted. Though, of course, it may not be as straightforward as that…
I still hold with what I said in 2007, that I generally prefer my old-fashioned heroic adventures more tongue-in-cheek than this gritty ‘test of manhood’, and yet the way the story turns from rugged pursuit to philosophical introspection to near-feral survival instinct – and above all the layers of moral question and the layers the central character does or doesn’t reveal about himself – utterly draw me in. Decades ahead of its time, there are points when it anticipates The Day of the Jackal, with just as much tension but in many more shades of grey. So give it a go.
Incidentally, if you happen to know what the keening, mournful music is that sets the scene for each episode, could you let me know?
Due to multitudes of ill health that it’s far too tedious to go into here, last weekend was the first time I managed to get to a Doctor Who convention for a full year. Two of them, in fact, and knackeringly (by the very reasonable Fantom Films people). The reason I swerve into this is that the biggest draw for me was special guest Michael Jayston, the weekend’s main Doctor. I jabbered excitedly about several of his roles as I got him to sign a bundle of DVD inserts, and regretted that there’s no CD of Rogue Male I could bring along to add to the pile. “Well, they’re always repeating it,” he suggested, with just a touch less enthusiasm than I might have expected, before moving on to ask if I’d heard the sequel, Rogue Justice; “I don’t think it’s nearly as good,” he commented. A bit of a relief, as I’m wary of telling people at signings which bits of their work aren’t so great, and though his performance was nearly as good when BBC7 got him in to record Rogue Justice in 2009, the novel really isn’t. A sequel written more than forty years later, abandoning the tension and claustrophobia of the original to leapfrog across different countries and this time blatantly pitting the main character against the Nazis, I told him I agreed: “It doesn’t have anything like the same intensity or ambiguity.” He nodded at that. But why the lack of enthusiasm for the original reading, when everyone I’ve talked to or read about it had loved it too?
Up on stage after he’d finished signing autographs, I had my answer. In a wide-ranging interview that only started at Doctor Who, Mr Jayston caught my eye in the audience and raised Rogue Male. At the time, he’d just spent two or three months doing audiobooks and was, as he said, “match fit”; they booked him for six days to record Rogue Male, and he did it in three, flying through that sort of work after a couple of months’ limbering up. So when it began broadcasting and friends in the business – directors, other actors – starting ringing him up to say how brilliant it was, he thought they were taking the piss. To him, it was just a job he’d galloped through with ease in three days, but because people rate it so highly and it’s frequently repeated, he feels mildly embarrassed at the attention it gets. The same is true of his Only Fools and Horses, again only a few days’ work, and the one drunks always recognise him for – he’ll go through most of his career, than say “I was the one who found the watch” last, and it’s always that.
Michael Jayston was the first actor to play James Bond on the radio in Britain, and (along with Patrick Mower and Anthony Hopkins) nearly got the big job in the ’70s; he’s the only actor to be both a partly apocryphal James Bond and a partly apocryphal Doctor. In 1986’s Doctor Who – The Trial of a Time Lord, he was the Valeyard, prosecuting counsel in the Doctor’s trial, and a title that’s said to mean ‘Doctor of Law’. In fact, it’s a wholly made-up word with a bogus definition as a hint: he’s really the Doctor’s future self, and has it in for himself in a big way, at least according to the orthodox interpretation – Millennium’s made a convincing case that he’s really the goodie. And asked if he’d like to return as the Valeyard – or simply Doctor – Mr Jayston was quite certain: yes.
And did you know that he’s been a friend of Tom Baker’s since 1969, often exchanging unprintable emails with him and describing Tom as “as mad as ever”? Though it wasn’t Mr Jayston (Tsar Nicholas) who got Tom his major role in 1971’s film of Nicholas and Alexandra: Peter O’Toole (ironically also the lead in the film version of Rogue Male that no-one’s ever seen) was cast as Rasputin, but it took a while for them to put the film together – so his contract ran out and he put up two fingers to the producer. Laurence Olivier suggested out of work actor Tom Baker, because he was very talented. And they could get him for a pittance, which they did.
Meanwhile, as I type, I’m half-watching and laughing at another episode of mostly fabulous sketch show Sorry, I’ve Got No Head on BBC1. Now in its third season, if you’ve ignored it because it debuted on CBBC or because it goes out on weekday afternoons, don’t; like every sketch show, some bits are better than others, but the better bits are great. If you’ve seen it this before, there are twists in how the complete git parents have developed, or Marcus Brigstocke’s overgrown French exchange student who’s been there twenty years; David Armand’s Witchfinder General still has anyone who winds him up even slightly, usually in a queue, carried off as a witch (a curious mixture of evil witch-hunt and, er, consumer champion); and while I don’t think much of the new ‘mousetrap’ sketches, Mel Giedroyc looking for her big dog makes me laugh (and beat Wilfred to it), you can’t fail to be moved by a deadly serious study of the misery of addiction (involving a clown’s reaction to custard pies), and they’ve dropped the tedious computer game characters. The snowman’s still a frighteningly Daily Mail sort of sketch, though. If you’ve got something against kids’ shows, bear in mind that the cast’s pretty much the same as for, say, The Armstrong and Miller Show and That Mitchell and Webb Look, and some of James Bachman’s characters tend to bleed into Harry Biscuit, which is a bonus (cakes. Why did it have to be cakes?).
As far as I’m concerned, though, nothing can beat the increasingly postmodern and multi-layered (and that’s just their blouses) Jasmine and Prudith. Look, if you can’t work your home recording device of choice (maybe my bees can help?), it’s on iPlayer, too, and that costs nothing more than your internet connection.
Oh, here we go. Money. Filthy lucre. Nothing’s free these days! Internet connections – with the telephone wires on top, and fibre-optics paid by the strand. The sound doesn’t come cheap, either. Extra for each pixel, too, I shouldn’t wonder. And a special supplement on the TV licence for using your is when you play them. When all’s said and done, I shouldn’t think you’d get much change out of a thousand pounds!
What?
Oh, I should say about a thousand pounds. It’s what these things cost these days.
No, no, it doesn’t cost –
A thousand pounds! It’s too much, a thousand pounds!
Geoffrey Household’s original book was written in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, and neither the British antihero nor the European dictator he takes a fancy to stalking like big game are named; the only significant character with a name is Major Quive-Smith, and while that’s certainly a name, it’s certainly not his. Michael Jayston’s unabridged reading was made for BBC7 (as was) in 2004, and was instantly so acclaimed that it’s been a feature of the station’s programming every year or two since (I praised it last four years ago).
Rogue Male is a compelling thriller, its first-person narrative ideal for a talking book, but it’s Mr Jayston that makes it. I’ve always thought he was a terrific actor, and his reading is brilliantly sardonic – the perfect note for a central character’s voice that we can’t hate, or the story wouldn’t work, but that it’s impossible to like. He’s been perfectly cast as both heroes and villains; this anti-hero’s pretty much dead-centre in between. One of his most memorable roles for me was A Bit of A Do’s Neville Badger, almost the archetypal Mr Nice Guy; the Rogue Male is about as far from a nice guy as you can get, and yet his pursuers are very much nastier. In reading the character as slightly distanced from the action, he almost seems to be taking you into his confidence, and succeeds in getting you on his side – no mean feat for a “gentleman” both of and very much outside the establishment who’s best-known as a big game hunter, and whose ambition for the ultimate game seems to have precipitated a reversal in which the hunter becomes the hunted. Though, of course, it may not be as straightforward as that…
I still hold with what I said in 2007, that I generally prefer my old-fashioned heroic adventures more tongue-in-cheek than this gritty ‘test of manhood’, and yet the way the story turns from rugged pursuit to philosophical introspection to near-feral survival instinct – and above all the layers of moral question and the layers the central character does or doesn’t reveal about himself – utterly draw me in. Decades ahead of its time, there are points when it anticipates The Day of the Jackal, with just as much tension but in many more shades of grey. So give it a go.
Incidentally, if you happen to know what the keening, mournful music is that sets the scene for each episode, could you let me know?
Michael Jayston and Rogue Male
Due to multitudes of ill health that it’s far too tedious to go into here, last weekend was the first time I managed to get to a Doctor Who convention for a full year. Two of them, in fact, and knackeringly (by the very reasonable Fantom Films people). The reason I swerve into this is that the biggest draw for me was special guest Michael Jayston, the weekend’s main Doctor. I jabbered excitedly about several of his roles as I got him to sign a bundle of DVD inserts, and regretted that there’s no CD of Rogue Male I could bring along to add to the pile. “Well, they’re always repeating it,” he suggested, with just a touch less enthusiasm than I might have expected, before moving on to ask if I’d heard the sequel, Rogue Justice; “I don’t think it’s nearly as good,” he commented. A bit of a relief, as I’m wary of telling people at signings which bits of their work aren’t so great, and though his performance was nearly as good when BBC7 got him in to record Rogue Justice in 2009, the novel really isn’t. A sequel written more than forty years later, abandoning the tension and claustrophobia of the original to leapfrog across different countries and this time blatantly pitting the main character against the Nazis, I told him I agreed: “It doesn’t have anything like the same intensity or ambiguity.” He nodded at that. But why the lack of enthusiasm for the original reading, when everyone I’ve talked to or read about it had loved it too?
Up on stage after he’d finished signing autographs, I had my answer. In a wide-ranging interview that only started at Doctor Who, Mr Jayston caught my eye in the audience and raised Rogue Male. At the time, he’d just spent two or three months doing audiobooks and was, as he said, “match fit”; they booked him for six days to record Rogue Male, and he did it in three, flying through that sort of work after a couple of months’ limbering up. So when it began broadcasting and friends in the business – directors, other actors – starting ringing him up to say how brilliant it was, he thought they were taking the piss. To him, it was just a job he’d galloped through with ease in three days, but because people rate it so highly and it’s frequently repeated, he feels mildly embarrassed at the attention it gets. The same is true of his Only Fools and Horses, again only a few days’ work, and the one drunks always recognise him for – he’ll go through most of his career, than say “I was the one who found the watch” last, and it’s always that.
Doctor Who and The Valeyard
Michael Jayston was the first actor to play James Bond on the radio in Britain, and (along with Patrick Mower and Anthony Hopkins) nearly got the big job in the ’70s; he’s the only actor to be both a partly apocryphal James Bond and a partly apocryphal Doctor. In 1986’s Doctor Who – The Trial of a Time Lord, he was the Valeyard, prosecuting counsel in the Doctor’s trial, and a title that’s said to mean ‘Doctor of Law’. In fact, it’s a wholly made-up word with a bogus definition as a hint: he’s really the Doctor’s future self, and has it in for himself in a big way, at least according to the orthodox interpretation – Millennium’s made a convincing case that he’s really the goodie. And asked if he’d like to return as the Valeyard – or simply Doctor – Mr Jayston was quite certain: yes.
“There’s no doubt about it – I am one of the Doctors.”That was when he played a figure not entirely unlike the Doctor or John Steed in UneXpected, one of the stranger episodes of Steven Moffat’s first TV series, Press Gang – and viewers of The Trial of a Time Lord might find the Doctor’s evil other self or a story inspired by A Christmas Carol not entirely un-Moffated in Amy’s Choice or, indeed, A Christmas Carol. But let’s hope he comes round to re-using Michael Jayston, too. I have to admit, seeing the Valeyard himself act out the final scene of Terror of the Vervoids live on stage on Sunday was a particular highlight…
“I keep sending messages to Steven Moffat… He was a very young writer when I worked for him and I thought, he’s good, he’s going places.”
And did you know that he’s been a friend of Tom Baker’s since 1969, often exchanging unprintable emails with him and describing Tom as “as mad as ever”? Though it wasn’t Mr Jayston (Tsar Nicholas) who got Tom his major role in 1971’s film of Nicholas and Alexandra: Peter O’Toole (ironically also the lead in the film version of Rogue Male that no-one’s ever seen) was cast as Rasputin, but it took a while for them to put the film together – so his contract ran out and he put up two fingers to the producer. Laurence Olivier suggested out of work actor Tom Baker, because he was very talented. And they could get him for a pittance, which they did.
“‘He’s working on a building site,’ said Sir Larry. ‘I admire his dedication – it’s marvellous for building up the muscle tone for parts.’ ‘Bugger muscle tone,’ said Tom. ‘I need the fucking money.’”
Sorry, I’ve Got No Head
Meanwhile, as I type, I’m half-watching and laughing at another episode of mostly fabulous sketch show Sorry, I’ve Got No Head on BBC1. Now in its third season, if you’ve ignored it because it debuted on CBBC or because it goes out on weekday afternoons, don’t; like every sketch show, some bits are better than others, but the better bits are great. If you’ve seen it this before, there are twists in how the complete git parents have developed, or Marcus Brigstocke’s overgrown French exchange student who’s been there twenty years; David Armand’s Witchfinder General still has anyone who winds him up even slightly, usually in a queue, carried off as a witch (a curious mixture of evil witch-hunt and, er, consumer champion); and while I don’t think much of the new ‘mousetrap’ sketches, Mel Giedroyc looking for her big dog makes me laugh (and beat Wilfred to it), you can’t fail to be moved by a deadly serious study of the misery of addiction (involving a clown’s reaction to custard pies), and they’ve dropped the tedious computer game characters. The snowman’s still a frighteningly Daily Mail sort of sketch, though. If you’ve got something against kids’ shows, bear in mind that the cast’s pretty much the same as for, say, The Armstrong and Miller Show and That Mitchell and Webb Look, and some of James Bachman’s characters tend to bleed into Harry Biscuit, which is a bonus (cakes. Why did it have to be cakes?).
As far as I’m concerned, though, nothing can beat the increasingly postmodern and multi-layered (and that’s just their blouses) Jasmine and Prudith. Look, if you can’t work your home recording device of choice (maybe my bees can help?), it’s on iPlayer, too, and that costs nothing more than your internet connection.
Oh, here we go. Money. Filthy lucre. Nothing’s free these days! Internet connections – with the telephone wires on top, and fibre-optics paid by the strand. The sound doesn’t come cheap, either. Extra for each pixel, too, I shouldn’t wonder. And a special supplement on the TV licence for using your is when you play them. When all’s said and done, I shouldn’t think you’d get much change out of a thousand pounds!
What?
Oh, I should say about a thousand pounds. It’s what these things cost these days.
No, no, it doesn’t cost –
A thousand pounds! It’s too much, a thousand pounds!
Labels: Books, Colin Baker, Comedy, Doctor Who, Fandom, James Bond, Matt Smith, Michael Jayston, Radio, Reviews, Tom Baker
Friday, January 23, 2009
The Psychedelic Spy and The New Avengers – Faces
At 11.55 tonight it’s BBC4’s latest episode of The New Avengers: Faces, an impressive adventure that reels you in slowly and really grabs you by the end. It’s the fourth and perhaps the best of The Avengers’ ‘doubles’ stories, going for broke with Steed, Gambit and Purdey all replaced by doppelgängers – or are they? Patrick Macnee and Joanna Lumley in particular are brilliant, and you can also catch Joanna on the iPlayer in The Psychedelic Spy, a drug-soaked, disturbing ’60s-set thriller that’s been playing on BBC7 all week (watch out for spoilers about both if you read on).
I’ll fill in the rest later, having given you a taste; my beloved came in late from work after a hellish journey, so I’ve been ministering to his needs and cooking a big meal in an attempt to revive him. Now I’m a little sleepy on it, so I’ll finish once I’ve had a while to digest. Possibly Monday!
And finally, a word on Andrew Rissik’s radio thriller, made in 1990, set very firmly in 1968, and broadcast in five parts this week on BBC7. If you missed it, it’s well worth tuning in on the BBC iPlayer; James Aubrey’s rather good as the lead, but ’60s legends Gerald Harper, Charles Gray and of course Joanna Lumley completely steal it.
I’ve been trying to work out in my head something to say about The Prisoner since Patrick McGoohan died last week – I fear it’s still in a bit of a tangle, but if you want to try unpicking the series yourself, it is of course being repeated twice every Tuesday on ITV4. It’ll only be four episodes in this week (depending on how you count them, which is trickier than it sounds), so the next one up’s as good a place as any to pick it up: Free For All is a relatively early episode, which means it explains some of the set-up, but it’s also the first to go utterly barking mad, so that gives you a flavour of what it can all turn into. This isn’t quite as much of a detour as it reads, as BBC7 has been repeating two of The Prisoner’s cousins. Each weekday morning at 9.30 they’re currently broadcasting Michael Jayston’s superb reading of Rogue Male, a 1930s thriller novel that’s a clear antecedent of Patrick McGoohan’s masterwork – it, too, has a magnificently egocentric lead character, a lone wolf at the top of his brutal profession, who’s trapped, repeatedly trying to escape, and persecuted physically and psychologically by anonymous servants of a mysterious service who want to find the purpose of his attention-grabbing opening action. And, of course, the starting point of The Psychedelic Spy is a top agent who resigns – only for his old bosses to try to bring him back in, sent against his will to a mysterious environment where no-one’s loyalties are entirely clear. With a lot of drugs.
The story is both an effective thriller in itself and a meditation on where the ’60s went sour, aided by a soundtrack including Jimi Hendrix, the Byrds and, most tellingly, the Who; the performances are uniformly excellent, the mood alternately grumpy and despairing, and the twists – all right. Look away to avoid spoilers, remember, as I turn to the outstanding actors. Robert Eddison, Michael Cochrane and Ed Bishop are all excellent as minor characters (particularly, I think, Mr Eddison’s fading old master of secret information), and James Aubrey’s rather good as Billy Hindle, the British secret assassin who wants out because he fears he’s turning into a psychopath. The first episode stars Gerald Harper, formerly Adam Adamant, as his manipulative boss Sir Richard Snark; no, with a name like that he’s not very nice, but he’s awfully good at it. The whole thing really gets going, however, when Hindle flies out to Temptation Island, run by dying charismatic genius Charles Gray and his glamorous wife Joanna Lumley. They are, in short, fantastic.
It feels very much like a ’60s thriller, not just for the stars but its mix of acid music, James Bond, The Prisoner, Callan and le Carré (with a dash of Apocalypse Now), but despite its quality, one aspect disappointed me. I think of women in thrillers being the ’40s and ’50s femmes fatale of film noir, or the powerful figures of the ’80s, or simply being treated much the same as the men since; the fact that my favourite series from the ’60s that can very roughly be described as a spy thriller is The Avengers has, I fear, rather spoiled me for a story like this that, in setting itself firmly in the feel of the time, pushes its women firmly into the background. So I admit I was disappointed as The Psychedelic Spy’s three significant women were one by one revealed to be much less interesting than I’d anticipated. In a very ’60s way, they are essentially pliant victims, and it’s notable that Hindle shags each of them. His rather drippy girlfriend whom he picks up after resigning, Marianne, was so utterly convenient that I assumed she was an enemy (or perhaps British) agent right until she was shot in his arms; I then instantly assumed, correctly, that she’d been the target rather than him, and probably at the order of either his ruthless employer or Joanna Lumley’s Tara (another Avengers name). Joanna’s performance is so magnetic – and, as she gives as good as she gets with Charles Gray and claims to be a very bad person – I assumed that she was an agent in her own right, probably responsible for the dodgy activities her husband’s implicated in. Again, I assumed that right up until the last minute… At which point it became dispiritingly clear that she was only there as unfaithful wife and then widow after all. The third woman in the story is Hindle’s ex, who’s disappeared while investigating Charles Gray’s character – our anti-hero characterises her as an evil, manipulative bitch, so I had high hopes that she’d have survived and be secretly engineering the whole thing. No such luck. It turns out, eventually, that she’s dead after all, leaving her undoubted abilities both of no use to the story and entirely framed by men who didn’t like her. I’d have liked us to meet her, instead.
The close is a little too neat – not happy, you understand, but missing a dash of ambiguity, as if what we hear in the final episode is the truth rather than leaving it likely to be another layer of lies – but still, despite being occasionally predictable and a let-down on some of the non-existent twists involving female characters I’d predicted in hope, it works on the whole. Oh, I’m underselling it now; I liked it. But you might want to listen when you’re on an upper.
‹Older
“Irreplaceable.”Doppelgängers were a staple of ’60s and ’70s series whose feet left the ground, especially science fiction or the more outré spy thrillers – and with The Avengers crossing the boundaries between both of those, with comedy, fantasy and more besides, it’s no surprise that the series had a go at the subject more than once. Two’s a Crowd did it as cod le Carré for Mrs Peel (and there’s a touch of it in her Who’s Who??? and Never, Never Say Die, too), while Tara King’s They Keep Killing Steed may just give you a hint as to which character is copied multiple times. The two that try for the most ‘realistic’ approach, however, are the best of them. Back in 1963, Man With Two Shadows pitted Cathy Gale against Steed, both when one of his associates tips her off that he’s a fake and when he’s shown at his most ruthless with the real doubles. More incredibly, Faces relies much further on coincidence, recovering slightly with talk of plastic surgery and a story spread over a five-year time period, but really succeeds in its intercourse between the regulars. There’s also arresting direction, and among three well-characterised villains you’ll find Edward Petherbridge, later to find fame as Lord Peter Wimsey. Oh, and before I go on with my usual spoilertastic analysis, have you got this week’s Radio Times? Ignore what it says. It’s not a spoiler, just almost completely wrong.
“I’d better have a word with him. Pull him back into line.”Like several New Avengers episodes, the opening scene’s set some years – five, it turns out – before most of the rest of the story. Unusually, this is without clearly identifying it as such, and the strong implication’s that the main part of the episode takes place over a period of weeks, if not months. Though neither script nor direction express that as well as they might, it gives the story added weight and credibility, and the director gives it real force. Two tramps see an obviously wealthy man drive past, the spitting image of one of them; after what we infer is a period of studying him, the pre-credits sequence ends with one of the series’ most striking freeze-frames, as the rabbit-poaching tramp shoots an arrow into the wealthy double who’s diving into his own private pool. It may not be a subtle way of killing, but it gets your attention.
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Hmm. He’ll just have to be replaced, won’t he?”
I’ll fill in the rest later, having given you a taste; my beloved came in late from work after a hellish journey, so I’ve been ministering to his needs and cooking a big meal in an attempt to revive him. Now I’m a little sleepy on it, so I’ll finish once I’ve had a while to digest. Possibly Monday!
The Psychedelic Spy
And finally, a word on Andrew Rissik’s radio thriller, made in 1990, set very firmly in 1968, and broadcast in five parts this week on BBC7. If you missed it, it’s well worth tuning in on the BBC iPlayer; James Aubrey’s rather good as the lead, but ’60s legends Gerald Harper, Charles Gray and of course Joanna Lumley completely steal it.
I’ve been trying to work out in my head something to say about The Prisoner since Patrick McGoohan died last week – I fear it’s still in a bit of a tangle, but if you want to try unpicking the series yourself, it is of course being repeated twice every Tuesday on ITV4. It’ll only be four episodes in this week (depending on how you count them, which is trickier than it sounds), so the next one up’s as good a place as any to pick it up: Free For All is a relatively early episode, which means it explains some of the set-up, but it’s also the first to go utterly barking mad, so that gives you a flavour of what it can all turn into. This isn’t quite as much of a detour as it reads, as BBC7 has been repeating two of The Prisoner’s cousins. Each weekday morning at 9.30 they’re currently broadcasting Michael Jayston’s superb reading of Rogue Male, a 1930s thriller novel that’s a clear antecedent of Patrick McGoohan’s masterwork – it, too, has a magnificently egocentric lead character, a lone wolf at the top of his brutal profession, who’s trapped, repeatedly trying to escape, and persecuted physically and psychologically by anonymous servants of a mysterious service who want to find the purpose of his attention-grabbing opening action. And, of course, the starting point of The Psychedelic Spy is a top agent who resigns – only for his old bosses to try to bring him back in, sent against his will to a mysterious environment where no-one’s loyalties are entirely clear. With a lot of drugs.
The story is both an effective thriller in itself and a meditation on where the ’60s went sour, aided by a soundtrack including Jimi Hendrix, the Byrds and, most tellingly, the Who; the performances are uniformly excellent, the mood alternately grumpy and despairing, and the twists – all right. Look away to avoid spoilers, remember, as I turn to the outstanding actors. Robert Eddison, Michael Cochrane and Ed Bishop are all excellent as minor characters (particularly, I think, Mr Eddison’s fading old master of secret information), and James Aubrey’s rather good as Billy Hindle, the British secret assassin who wants out because he fears he’s turning into a psychopath. The first episode stars Gerald Harper, formerly Adam Adamant, as his manipulative boss Sir Richard Snark; no, with a name like that he’s not very nice, but he’s awfully good at it. The whole thing really gets going, however, when Hindle flies out to Temptation Island, run by dying charismatic genius Charles Gray and his glamorous wife Joanna Lumley. They are, in short, fantastic.
It feels very much like a ’60s thriller, not just for the stars but its mix of acid music, James Bond, The Prisoner, Callan and le Carré (with a dash of Apocalypse Now), but despite its quality, one aspect disappointed me. I think of women in thrillers being the ’40s and ’50s femmes fatale of film noir, or the powerful figures of the ’80s, or simply being treated much the same as the men since; the fact that my favourite series from the ’60s that can very roughly be described as a spy thriller is The Avengers has, I fear, rather spoiled me for a story like this that, in setting itself firmly in the feel of the time, pushes its women firmly into the background. So I admit I was disappointed as The Psychedelic Spy’s three significant women were one by one revealed to be much less interesting than I’d anticipated. In a very ’60s way, they are essentially pliant victims, and it’s notable that Hindle shags each of them. His rather drippy girlfriend whom he picks up after resigning, Marianne, was so utterly convenient that I assumed she was an enemy (or perhaps British) agent right until she was shot in his arms; I then instantly assumed, correctly, that she’d been the target rather than him, and probably at the order of either his ruthless employer or Joanna Lumley’s Tara (another Avengers name). Joanna’s performance is so magnetic – and, as she gives as good as she gets with Charles Gray and claims to be a very bad person – I assumed that she was an agent in her own right, probably responsible for the dodgy activities her husband’s implicated in. Again, I assumed that right up until the last minute… At which point it became dispiritingly clear that she was only there as unfaithful wife and then widow after all. The third woman in the story is Hindle’s ex, who’s disappeared while investigating Charles Gray’s character – our anti-hero characterises her as an evil, manipulative bitch, so I had high hopes that she’d have survived and be secretly engineering the whole thing. No such luck. It turns out, eventually, that she’s dead after all, leaving her undoubted abilities both of no use to the story and entirely framed by men who didn’t like her. I’d have liked us to meet her, instead.
The close is a little too neat – not happy, you understand, but missing a dash of ambiguity, as if what we hear in the final episode is the truth rather than leaving it likely to be another layer of lies – but still, despite being occasionally predictable and a let-down on some of the non-existent twists involving female characters I’d predicted in hope, it works on the whole. Oh, I’m underselling it now; I liked it. But you might want to listen when you’re on an upper.
Labels: Joanna Lumley, Michael Jayston, Radio, Reviews, Spies, The New Avengers, The Prisoner
