Love and Liberty

The Horror Channel goes back to the very beginning of Doctor Who today as it starts showing forty-seven stories across the following months, beginning with the very first. So here are my idiosyncratic picks for the thirteen best stories showing (or just watch the lot, obviously). Horror’s now on both Freesat and Freeview, so everyone can watch it.

Liberal Democrats: activate your TV recording devices of choice and bookmark this article as number 337 of things to catch up with post-election.

Active members of other parties: sit down, put your feet up, watch Doctor Who and argue with my tendentious choices online!




If you’ve never watched Doctor Who before – just pick one, and watch one. This selection suggests which ones I most enjoy watching, but if you need something to tell you who is this Doctor anyway, here’s one I prepared earlier.

The Horror Channel has been broadcasting Doctor Who since last Easter under the banner #WhoOnHorror – initially a selection of stories from the first seven Doctors, they’ve been a ratings hit and so bought the rights to show more. It’s on every weekday in a double bill at around 10am, 2.40pm and 7.50pm, in more or less the original story order, with random movie-format stories (that is, with the cliffhangers and credits taken out) at the weekend. This is the first time their whole cycle of Doctor Who stories has started up again since the Horror Channel arrived on Freeview, so why not begin at the beginning?

The Thirteen Best of #WhoOnHorror

These are my choices. No doubt every other fan will disagree, so why not champion your own? You can point out (and I usually do) that every story has its faults – but I’m looking at what excites me this time. And why choose thirteen? Well, it is the Horror Channel…

1 – The Deadly Assassin
Tom Baker versus the Master and all the Time Lords in the greatest Doctor Who story of them all. It’s got Gothic horror, political satire, film noir, a major reimagining of the Time Lords (and the Master)… And just when you think you know what’s going on, it changes completely into gritty surrealism.
Reasons to watch: the Part One cliffhanger (you keep being told it’s coming, but still the series’ best WTF moment); it enters the Matrix (20+ years before The Matrix); one of the most bitter face-offs between the Doctor and the Master; it’s constantly inventive; it looks amazing (even if Horror’s print is a bit grubby and cuts a bit. If you enjoy it, buy the DVD).
My (surprisingly short) review here.
A brilliant scene here for the Master.

2 – The Curse of Fenric
Sylvester McCoy versus Evil From the Dawn of Time and vampires from the future. A multi-layered story intermixes the World War Two, Norse mythology, Dracula and a touch of The Arabian Nights, and contrasts the 1940s and the 1980s.
Reasons to watch: a brilliant villain; what really repels vampires; the Part Three cliffhanger twist and many other twists and turns; another one fizzing with ideas.
A brilliant scene here under water.
A brilliant line and a bit of a subtext here.
A brilliant scene here where the Parsons’ in trouble.
Yes, it has quite a few brilliant scenes. And keep that last page open, as several more I’ve written about there are coming up…

3 – The Talons of Weng-Chiang
Tom Baker versus good taste. ‘Doctor Who in the inner city: gangs, guns, stabbings and drugs’. But all in the Victorian era, so there were fewer complaints despite even more to offend everyone. From murders in the fog to a night at the theatre, it revels in Victorian cliché – and is probably the most utterly entertaining Doctor Who story of all (Russell T Davies: “It’s the best dialogue ever written”).
Reasons to watch: it looks like perfect horror, but is horribly funny throughout; the Doctor does Sherlock; the Doctor’s friend Leela takes no s**t; a double-act so brilliant they now have their own long-running series, Jago and Litefoot; one whole episode a brilliant conjuring trick.
A brilliant scene here with a comedy of manners.

4 – An Unearthly Child
William Hartnell – the Doctor – versus stupid humans for the very first time. Two teachers investigate a strange old man’s granddaughter… Their lives, and ours, are never the same again, as they fall into the TARDIS and into history. A brilliant beginning that starts off the series’ anti-authoritarian bent by showing how little teachers know – but at least they know slightly more than Stone Age tribespeople…
Reasons to watch: the first episode might just be the greatest piece of television ever; a fantastic introduction to the TARDIS; the Doctor as an hilarious git with brilliant facets; “Have you ever thought what it’s like to be wanderers in the fourth dimension? Have you? To be exiles…?”
My review here (made of many one-liners).
A brilliant scene here where the Doctor invents Columbo.
And it’s on tonight!

5 – Genesis of the Daleks
Tom Baker versus Davros, the Daleks and history. A superbly filmed and scored war story. Perhaps the Doctor’s sharpest moral dilemma is whether to destroy the Daleks at their birth, but this is essentially the story of Davros, a fascist with depth and intelligence, who engineers his own destruction.
Reasons to watch: a completely compelling villain; the Daleks shot like tanks, as they should be; doubt as essential, and certainty essentially fascist; the big confrontation between the Doctor and Davros might be the most electric in the whole series.
My review here of the politics of the story (and of the CD).
My mini-review in the context of the stories it was first broadcast with and how they all fit together here.
A brilliant scene here where the Daleks exterminate for the first time.

6 – The Mind Robber
Patrick Troughton versus some very weird s**t indeed. Funny, silly, literary, intelligent… Our heroes find themselves first in a void where they get a massive shock, then marooned in a Land of Fiction.
Reasons to watch: the shocking Part One cliffhanger; the Doctor’s playfulness turning into steely determination; Jamie losing face; Zoe going all The Avengers (UK) against someone who might be from The Avengers (US).

7 – The Androids of Tara
Tom Baker versus the wicked Count Grendel. Imagine a Doctor Who summer holiday, with fabulous frocks, fishing and fencing with electric swords, where the big, serious quest is dealt with in a five-minute joke. Add Peter Jeffrey as a moustache-twirlingly wicked Count, a bargained-down bribe and a dash of sex, then sit back and enjoy.
Reasons to watch: it’s just about the least ‘horror’ Doctor Who gets; it’s sheer fun; it finishes with a proper duel. “Next time, I shall not be so lenient!”
A brilliantly ‘romantic’ scene or two here that should put you off weddings (we had it at ours).

8 – The Caves of Androzani
Peter Davison versus death (and versus big business, gun-runners, the army, poison, the phantom of the opera…). A cynical desert war, noirishly twisted love and revenge drama: an extraordinary mixture of the Fifth Doctor’s competing ‘arthouse’ and ‘macho’ styles, with a terrific script, dazzling direction, rattlesnake-eerie music and compelling actors.
Reasons to watch: pride comes before a fall in a fabulously nasty Part Three scene; brilliant debut for a director so good he did a lot of the 2000s stories too; an explosive regeneration before they were fashionable.
A brilliantly long-suffering moment here.

9 – Logopolis
Tom Baker versus the Master and the end of everything. A small-scale story of the TARDIS itself becoming perilous turns into portents of doom and the unravelling of the entire Universe – before the threat telescopes back in to the Doctor himself.
Reasons to watch: making the familiar sinister; a gorgeous, funeral music score; the Doctor’s most hearts-rending regeneration.
A brilliant scene here for the Master.

10 – The Dæmons
Jon Pertwee versus the Master, a great big Dæmon and the English village; science versus magic. If ever there was a Doctor Who story you’d expect to see on the Horror Channel, this is it. It’s not quite Dennis Wheatley or The Wicker Man, but it does have a Satanic vicar – in truth, the MASTER – and evil Morris dancing.
Reasons to watch: the victim of the Part Three cliffhanger; the perfect locations; the Brigadier and the rest of UNIT getting out and about; the pub. “Five rounds rapid!”
My in-depth review of the novelisation and how it compares here.

11 – The Ark in Space
Tom Baker versus Alien. This is much less comfy Doctor Who horror, out in pitiless space where the last humans are being devoured by giant insects – or possessed by them.
Reasons to watch: it was the first Doctor Who I saw all the way through, and it worked on me – it gave me nightmares; the Doctor’s friends Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan are wonderful; a huge influence on both Ridley Scott and Doctor Who’s 2005 relaunch.
My mini-review in the context of the stories it was first broadcast with and how they all fit together here.
A brilliant scene here after the end of the world.

12 – The Two Doctors
Colin Baker versus the Sontarans. And versus aliens who live to eat everyone in sight. With guest star Patrick Troughton being turned into one of them… Appallingly funny black humour. Like some of the other #WhoOnHorror, this was originally in forty-five-minute episodes, so Horror’s split it into their own twenty-five-minute episodes. Thrill at aliens attempting to order dinner before the music screams in!
Reasons to watch: the Sixth Doctor at his most charming and wistful; the Second Doctor at his most disturbing; Sontaran ships on the march to a great musical march.
A brilliant scene here in which the Doctor is interested in everything.

13 – Planet of Evil
Tom Baker versus a terrible scientific mistake at the edge of the Universe. More deep-space horror, more body horror and possession, a seriously convincing and icky alien world.
Reasons to watch: the series’ most alien planet; a Part Three cliffhanger that gave me the most recurring nightmares.
And here is what I think of that brilliant cliffhanger.

The Rest of #WhoOnHorror

As far as I’m concerned, they’ve made an excellent set of choices. The current forty-seven Horror Channel Doctor Who stories include twenty-three that I’d give nine or ten out of ten to – which is as dead-on half as makes no difference – and just six I’d score lower than five out of ten (which I suspect may have been chosen for their famous monsters rather than their quality). I won’t go into detail about the remaining thirty-four stories, but if you’re interested, here’s one line on each, from the completely brilliant to the, er, not completely brilliant, in roughly descending order of enthusiasm…

• Doctor Who and the Silurians – Jon Pertwee versus ignorance and racial hatred. The first appearance of Madame Vastra’s Earthlien race, an apocalyptic disease plot and a tragic ending. My review here, and in its message that green scaly rubber people are people too, one of the stories that made me a Liberal.
  

• The Keeper of Traken – Tom Baker versus an eerie walking statue. A fairy-tale love story turned Faustian pact, it’s like a film noir Shakespeare, with the underlying Liberal message of just how very wrong things go if you make everyone’s decisions for them. My review here, and a brilliant scene here for the villain (spoilers).
  

• The Daleks – William Hartnell versus the Daleks, for their very first time. The series’ first monsters, a dead planet after a war, and a wonderfully gittish Doctor starting to discover his morals. My review here (made of many one-liners), and, here, the most important cliffhanger the series has ever had.
  

• The Brain of Morbius – Tom Baker versus an obsessive scientist and a Time Lord war criminal. Another story perfect for Horror: it’s Doctor Who Does Frankenstein. A brilliant scene here (just how many Doctors are there?).
  

• Snakedance – Peter Davison versus a snake-demon from the Dark Places of the Inside, the rather better sequel. A busy world looks forward to its biggest festival, but some party poopers claim everyone’s forgotten its true meaning. It’s true, but no-one’s happy when they find out what it is. Snakemas treats include future sit-com stars, memorably scary images and the Demonic Antiques Roadshow.
  

• The Robots of Death – Tom Baker versus, well, mechanical people who are killing the non-mechanical people. But at whose behest? A futuristic murder mystery where robots are the weapon, not the real murderers, gorgeously designed and featuring a particularly memorable ‘explanation’ of the TARDIS for the Doctor’s sceptical, skin-clad companion Leela.
  

• Carnival of Monsters – Jon Pertwee versus great screaming dragons, UKIPpers, and television. The TARDIS lands on a cargo ship crossing the Indian Ocean in 1926… Or does it? My in-depth review here of the novelisation and how it compares, and though it’s mostly very funny, there’s also a brilliant cliffhanger with those alien dragons.
  

• The Ribos Operation – Tom Baker versus an ex-warrior-emperor who’s one very big jewel short of a crown. Hustle on a marvellously imagined world with its own Galileo. My review here, plus a brilliant scene here where the Doctor doesn’t like being sent on a mission from god, and another here with a brilliant con-artist double-act.
  

• The Pirate Planet – Tom Baker versus a cyborg pirate captain. Douglas Adams’ first script for the series, fizzing with ideas, as funny as you’d expect, but with brilliant and deadly serious twists. Follows on from The Ribos Operation and with even more blatantly gay characters (wait until you get to the third from this season…).
  

• Kinda – Peter Davison versus a snake-demon from the Dark Places of the Inside, the first time. Fantastic scenes inside the Doctor’s friend Tegan’s head. My review here.
  

• City of Death – Tom Baker versus Scaroth, last of the Jagaroth, who both as a tentacle-faced alien and as urbane but subtly green Julian Glover is a fabulous villain. Great filming in Paris, beautiful music, much of the script from Douglas Adams, the Mona Lisa and even a cameo from John Cleese. A brilliant opening scene here, plus another very witty moment here.
  

• The Three Doctors – Jon Pertwee versus Patrick Troughton, mainly, and against legendary Time Lord Omega. The series’ tenth anniversary special, with guest appearances from William Hartnell and a titanic but ultimately tragic villain.
  

• The Masque of Mandragora – Tom Baker versus the Mandragora Helix, and science versus magic in a very big way. Gothic horror in Renaissance Italy, dastardly villains and a terrible fate for one of them (or is it both?) in the Part Three cliffhanger. My full review here, and a brilliant scene here where the Doctor takes down astrology.
  

• Remembrance of the Daleks – Sylvester McCoy versus the Daleks. Revisiting 1963 with more politics and much, much bigger explosions (though I have problems with the ending on both counts). My short review here, and several brilliant scenes: a shock in one cliffhanger here, though less so today; a miscalculation in another here; and a thrilling battle here, but where you’re rooting for neither side.
  

• The Green Death – Jon Pertwee versus big maggots and big business. With a fabulously gay evil computer and a strong environmental message. And it builds on the Doctor’s friend Jo Grant’s story which began in…
  

• Terror of the Autons – Jon Pertwee versus the Master, for the very first time. And the Autons, for the second. Don’t even think of hiding behind the sofa, and never trust a daffodil! My in-depth review here of the novelisation and how it compares, and a brilliant scene here for the Master.
  

• Horror of Fang Rock – Tom Baker versus the tentacular Rutans. A claustrophobic thriller where an alien killer stalks victims in an Edwardian lighthouse. I don’t care that other fans seem to like him – the Tory MP deserves it, and I say why in my review here (as well as revealing a bit of sexual gossip about the characters).
  

• Inferno – Jon Pertwee versus fascists and the end of the world. With a thrilling diversion in which the Brigadier is more blinkered than ever before. At times almost unbearably tense, though it goes off the boil towards the end. My review here, and one for the book here.
  

• Frontios – Peter Davison versus gravity. Surviving humans are in trouble on a barren new world – but where’s the trouble really coming from? A brilliant scene from after the end of the Earth here.
  

• Planet of the Spiders – Jon Pertwee versus the final enemy. Great spiders, especially in the big confrontation, great moments for Sarah Jane Smith, a compellingly embittered minor villain, and try to ignore the villagers. My review here, and my favourite brilliant Third Doctor scene here.
  

• The Greatest Show in the Galaxy – Sylvester McCoy versus the Gods of Ragnarok (or the TV audience). If you don’t like clowns, look away now. Eerie, strange and often very bitchy. The greatest scene here.
  

• The Sontaran Experiment – Tom Baker versus the Sontarans. The shortest of Horror’s picks, this one’s just two twenty-five minute episodes. A brilliantly creepy first episode on a blasted Earth and a slightly rushed second one, though with a great villain, for my money still narrowly the best Sontaran. Best watched after The Ark In Space. My mini-review here in the context of the stories it was first broadcast with and how they all fit together, and a brilliant scene here from after the end of the world.
  

• The Time Warrior – Jon Pertwee versus the Sontarans. An influential adventure in history with aliens, taking the p**s out of Robin Hood, guest-starring Dot Cotton and introducing Sarah Jane Smith, who’s fab from the off. My review here, and a brilliant Sarah Jane moment here.
  

• The Stones of Blood – Tom Baker versus the Cailleach. An ancient Celtic goddess whose modern-day followers still sacrifice to her and her mobile menhirs? A Lesbian of Evil living quietly in a cottage with a scientific but slightly unaware Lesbian of Good (like the Guardians, but only Evil has a crow on her head)? Or an alien criminal with a massive passion for Clarins?
  

• The Sun Makers – Tom Baker versus big business and big government. Tax satire and revolution featuring Doctor Who’s most iconic silhouettes: the bloke in the scarf, the woman in the leather bikini, and the tin dog. A brilliant scene here.
  

• The Sea Devils – Jon Pertwee versus the Master and the Sea Devils. Thrilling sea-based adventure with the Navy, a prison that should’ve failed its inspections and a dumbed-down sequel to Doctor Who and the Silurians.
  

• Attack of the Cybermen – Colin Baker versus the Cybermen. The Sixth Doctor striding around London is a joy to watch. Horror’s home-made Part Three cliffhanger comes at the end of the three best scenes in it and is very nearly where I’d have put it. And it’s a sequel to…
  

• Resurrection of the Daleks – Peter Davison versus Davros and the Daleks. A grim tale of mercenaries, death and Docklands, much of this looks terrific and it has a great score. On the downside, after a gripping first episode the plot falls apart, and the Doctor is unable to answer Davros’ moral arguments. Horror’s exciting Part One cliffhanger is, again, just a few seconds later than I’d have put it, and has the Doctor rushing to give a Dalek a cuddle (but not in a Katy Manning way).
  

• The Android Invasion – Tom Baker versus the Kraals and their androids. Like The Sontaran Experiment, this has a title which rather gives it away. The Part Two cliffhanger is still awesome, and it’s lots of fun, despite making remarkably little sense. My loving but critical review here.
  

• The Mark of the Rani – Colin Baker versus the Rani, who’s Kate O’Mara and rather fabulous. And versus the Master, who isn’t, and isn’t. The Sixth Doctor is at ease and is constantly diverting, there’s lovely location filming in the Eighteenth Century, and dialogue that needs to be heard to be believed. No, actually, you still won’t believe it.
  

• The Seeds of Death – Patrick Troughton versus the Ice Warriors. A fabulous chase with a still more fabulous line at the end, a great if sadly prescient central idea about space travel, a great villain… But also a bit saggy, and I don’t just mean everyone in the future wearing their nappies outside their trousers.
  

• Silver Nemesis – Sylvester McCoy versus the Cybermen, the Nazis and a sorceress. The sorceress is fabulous, the Nazis are a bit of a mistake and the Cybermen surprisingly vulnerable. Best watch Remembrance of the Daleks, which is a) the same and b) very much better.
  

• Planet of the Daleks – Jon Pertwee versus the Daleks. Have you seen The Daleks? This is like that, and other ’60s Dalek stories, but in crayon. Bright, colourful, crude and sometimes quite exciting, but you probably don’t want to put it on display. The moment where the Daleks work out who the tall stranger who’s been causing trouble is and brick themselves is worth the money, though.
  

• Death to the Daleks – Jon Pertwee versus the Daleks. All Doctor Who is brilliant. But some of it’s more brilliant than other bits. Even the music here is unspeakable. And yet even this most tired of Dalek stories has much to enjoy in it: ancient alien cultures falling to dust; Sarah Jane Smith; and the religious maniacs determined to wipe out their non-conformist naturist cousins. So, yes, I still watch and love this one, too. I am doomed.

The Next of #WhoOnHorror?

First thirty stories… Then forty-seven… Which Doctor Who adventures will the Horror Channel choose next? In the sure and certain knowledge that they won’t read and follow my advice, I’m tempted to say – just buy the rest of the Tom Baker stories and show the lot in order, you’ve got half of them already! But in the spirit of diversity I used for my top picks, here are a further thirteen that I reckon the Horror Channel should consider next. Or that you should, if you’ve got hooked and are looking for a DVD.

• The Rescue – William Hartnell versus the hideous Koquillion. Because it’s very short (two episodes, about the length of one modern episode) but is still a cracking story and displays many more facets of the First Doctor than his first appearances do – stern, kindly, vulnerable, intelligent, embarrassed, and often funny here, too. A brilliant scene here.
  

• The War Games – Patrick Troughton versus war. Which, by contrast, is very long, but keeps building its revelations throughout. It plays around with history and introduces the Time Lords as the biggest villains of the lot, too. My short review here.
  

• The Mind of Evil – Jon Pertwee versus the Master, who’s at both his most Bond-villain and his most slashtastic here (just watch his deepest fear, and his open concern). Jo Grant gets to be kick-ass, there’s lots of UNIT army action, and as it’s recently been restored to full colour, isn’t it time someone got to show it on TV again?
  

• Robot – Tom Baker versus fascists and a Robot. This was the Fourth Doctor’s first story – and mine. Three-year-old me’s first episode was part-way into this, and if the whole of the last forty years are anything to go by, it worked. My mini-review here in the context of the stories it was first broadcast with and how they all fit together, and here, the brilliant scene it closes with.
  

• Image of the Fendahl – Tom Baker versus the Fendahl. An embodiment of death from his own mythology, this is a Time Lord ghost story and probably the story it’s most surprising Horror haven’t snapped up yet, as it’s really their sort of thing. Mine, too. My review / snarky answer to a much-asked question here, and a brilliantly scary first cliffhanger here.
  

• The Power of Kroll – Tom Baker versus a really, really giant squid (and big business again). Horror have shown the first four stories in The Key To Time (The Ribos Operation, The Pirate Planet, The Stones of Blood and The Androids of Tara), and though admittedly this is a bit of a dip after those, it’s still rather fun.
  

• The Armageddon Factor – Tom Baker versus war and the Black Guardian. And this story closes The Key To Time story arc, so come on, Horror, show us the ending. I rather like the actual ending to this, which is very Doctor-ish, and the sinister early parts, though the middle is rather saggy.
  

• Full Circle – Tom Baker versus… Well, we’re meant to think scary Marshmen and big spiders, but versus ignorance, really. A fiercely intelligent evolutionary fable where elders decide everything by revealed truth, only for the Doctor to ask all the awkward questions and take a moral stand, and it looks great, too. A brilliant scene here.
  

• State of Decay – Tom Baker versus vampires. Another one that seems like it should have ‘Deliver to Horror Channel’ marked all over it. This and the stories either side form a looser arc lost in E-Space, but as both Full Circle and Warriors’ Gate are brilliant, that shouldn’t discourage Horror from showing them.
  

• Warriors’ Gate – Tom Baker versus weird s**t and slavery. Brilliantly weird visuals, haunting music, a strong story of exploitation and cyclical history, a Part Three cliffhanger that’s one of the series’ very best what-we-call-now-timey-wimey-I’m-so-sorry moments… Go for it.
  

• Castrovalva – Peter Davison versus the Master. The Fifth Doctor versus the Master became almost as much A Thing as the Third, and this gorgeously designed and scored story even forms the end of a loose trilogy with The Keeper of Traken and Logopolis.
  

• Vengeance on Varos – Colin Baker versus the slimy Sil, television, the voters, and big business. With an outstanding villain, this is usually described as satirising reality TV like Big Brother years before it existed, but right now I’m thinking The Governor is a dead ringer for Nick Clegg: blamed for not doing the impossible. A brilliantly meta cliffhanger here.
  

• Ghost Light – Sylvester McCoy versus Victorian Values. Psychopathic would-be businessmen, science-hating zealots, destroying angels and all, but it’s the Doctor versus his friend Ace that causes him the most trouble. A brilliantly intricate script, a claustrophobic Victorian house, bats in the belfry and husks in the cellar. Horror with a heart, a brain and a bowl of soup.

There were six stories that I was so tempted by I would probably have picked most of them – The Aztecs, The Tomb of the Cybermen, Spearhead from Space, Pyramids of Mars, Earthshock and Revelation of the Daleks – but they’re occasionally shown on another channel, so I suspect the rights may not be available. Obviously, I thought of lots of others, too. The Time Meddler, a first-again outing for The Enemy of the World (though I bet the budget wouldn’t stretch to animating the one missing bit of The Web of Fear), Terror of the Zygons, The Hand of Fear, The Face of Evil – oh, just the whole of Tom, again – Survival, The Trial of a Time Lord… But that way madness lies. Particularly with the last one.

But the fresh thirteen above would be a good start, eh, Horror Channel? Go on.

Labels: Colin Baker, Doctor Who, Horror Channel, Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton, Peter Davison, Sylvester McCoy, Tom Baker, Top Tips, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?, William Hartnell

It’s finally come: the official end of the 2010 Parliament, and the official start of the campaign (“Not ’til now?” said Tegan, dismayed). And though you might think Doctor Who is all about the Liberal philosophy and not pounding the streets with Focus leaflets, I’ve found evidence of one of the Doctor’s companions standing for election is just the way Lib Dems do.

By chance, the Doctor Who story starting today on the Horror Channel is Snakedance. And there’s a photo-op from that story that shows exactly what I’m talking about. The Doctor tends to be a bit rough and ready in sorting out the big problems and then leaving before he has to do the clearing-up, but Nyssa, one of his friends from the time, was raised in a tradition of public service and proper tidying up (Cleaning up the Mara’s Mess! After Cleaning up the Melkur’s Mess! A Record of Sweeping, A Promise of More!).

We don’t see the TARDIS leave at the end of Snakedance, but you can bet the Doctor goes and hides in it while Nyssa takes over doing her thing. Or, at least, campaigning to be put in charge in the proper #LibDemsPointing way.


RELEASE: IMMEDIATE

What Have the Federation Ever Done For Us?

Nyssa of Traken [pictured, pointing] is standing for Market Ward, Manussa, and campaigning for a new deal for the Scrampus System.

“The Federation have been in charge round here for five hundred years – today! And what have they done since ridding Manussa of the Mara? Nothing but lounged around fondling suggestive antiques on expenses. Market taxpayers have had enough.

“It’s time for a change. We can start by cleaning up this unsightly graffiti that’s all over Manussa’s ancient monuments.”

/ENDS

Labels: Doctor Who, General Election, Lib Dems Pointing, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Peter Davison, Snakedance

Remember the fiftieth birthday of Doctor Who late last year? Of course you do! I had been counting down towards the great event with my choice of Fifty great scenes… Then, let’s say, things went mildly awry. But I still have Fifty marvellous moments to champion, and Doctor Who goes on too. Tonight, I bring a great cliffhanger and a massive spoiler (so get your The Ark DVD now) as I go back to the youngest-oldest Doctor (William Hartnell), and forward to – well, failing to write a blog isn’t the end of the world, you know. But this is…

“The last moment has come.”

Hello again, possibly extinct regular reader! I hope you’ve been hibernating for the Winter, or perhaps in suspended animation. I won’t go into it all, but – short version – Richard is lovely, and most of the rest of life hasn’t been. It is, chasteningly, six months ago today that I last wrote anything on this blog (an article that, in retrospect ironically, was titled “Speeches I Didn’t Make”), and seven months yesterday since I posted Number 35 in my exciting Doctor Who Fifty countdown. A happier anniversary is that tonight is the 48th anniversary of (mild spoiler) The Return, the third episode of Doctor Who serial The Ark and the one that goes on to explain just what the security kitchen was going on at the end of the brilliant cliffhanger I’m about to celebrate. This much-delayed blog post is also, it turns out, my 700th on Love and Liberty, and 700 is a significant number in this particular plot. It’s time for the excitement, the adventure and the really wild spoilers, and, I mean, you may think it’s a long time down the blog since I published, but that’s just peanuts to this Ark in space…

Back in March 1966 – or forward at least* ten million years from another point of view – the Doctor (William Hartnell) and his friends Steven ‘Space Pilot of the Future’ Taylor and Dodo ‘Aptly Named Walking Extinction Event’ Chaplet materialise on a huge space Ark carrying some of the last of humanity and their friends colleagues servants the Monoids. The Monoids have already lost their world and came to humanity as refugees; with the Earth about to burn up, humanity seized the opportunity to be the upper-class refugees (something which surely will not come back to bite them on the bum). They’re on a 700-year voyage to a new planet, one which seems lush and uninhabited but about which several of the humans are deeply paranoid in case there turns out to be anyone there who wants to boss them around, presumably meaning that despite what you might expect there is no “A” Ark following on to perform that function nor “C” Ark en route to perform all the practical functions that the Arkists we meet are patently unsuited to.

Naturally, the Doctor and his friends are the ones who treat the Monoids as people, while some of the Ark humans explode with xenophobic panic against our heroes, merely because Dodo infects them all with her antediluvian cold and threatens to wipe out what’s left of humanity (and, you know, Monoidony, nothing to see there). With, inexplicably, no telephone sanitisers to hand, it’s left to the Doctor to find a cure while the Ark sails from the Earth and the torches start burning.

Doctor Who – The Ark is a strange beast. It’s brilliantly structured, and has an epic sci-fi feel to it rare in the series’ early years (with impressive visuals for the time, too)… But the ambition doesn’t extend to creating much in the way of characters, and the second half trails off into B-Movie shonkiness. It also inspired a fabulous YouTube video to “Get Back!” which has sadly long since been double-copyright-bombed off the Internet, but if any readers happened to take an illicit copy…? But I’m looking for what’s most brilliant about the story and that, unusually, comes exactly in the middle. It’s something that Doctor Who was able to do to viewers in the 1960s and, if you don’t read the Internet too much, today – when stories aren’t given a simple title and an episode number, but an individual title each week that might leave you guessing how long each particular plot will run. This third season of Doctor Who had already had a story that consisted of just one episode and another that lasted for twelve, so when in the last few minutes of the second episode the cure is found, the moral expounded and the Earth de-rounded, there was no reason not to think that the TARDIS would be off to a completely different adventure the following week after this fortnight’s sci-fi parable.

But the TARDIS crew, and the viewer, were back on the Ark after the Hartnell era’s second and most inspired false ending.

The TARDIS materialises and Dodo, her undeterred eagerness to explore nothing to be sneezed at, rushes off to see the new sights. To everyone’s surprise, they’re more like the old sights. The TARDIS hasn’t moved at all – an important and popular fact that is wrong in all important respects – but the Ark’s vast indoor jungle is suddenly looking rather overgrown (and, still more disturbingly, no longer seems to host elephants). The Doctor explores rather gingerly, noting:

“Well, that’s strange. Something must have gone wrong. It appears we’ve landed back in the same place.”

Dodo, on the other hand, bursts into the huge control area, expecting to see their friends and previous persecutors, but is puzzled by the apparent lack of humans as well as elephants, assuming “They can’t be far away” because “We’ve only been gone a few seconds.” Steven, taking his cue from the Doctor and more used to time travel, wonders just how long their “few seconds” may have been for the Ark.

If you’re familiar with Shelley’s poem Ozymandias and the statue which inspired it, I like to credit The Ark with inspiration rather than coincidence in throwing that idea into reverse just as it throws the TARDIS far forward in time. While most humans and Monoids are to sleep through the Ark’s seven-hundred-year voyage, the great ship’s dedicated guardians set themselves a task to mark the journey: that while generations lived and died in space to build humanity’s future (oh, and the Monoids’, nothing to see), they would build a vast statue, an embodiment of humanity’s greatness that would at last be completed for the Ark’s arrival. When we saw the Ark setting out from Earth, only the mighty feet were complete.

Unlike Ozymandias, the feet are a sign of hope and promise; the reversal and despair of the mighty only comes when the statue reaches its height.

Dodo sees, towering above the Ark’s deserted centre…

“Doctor – Steven – look! …The statue. They’ve finished the statue.”

The camera follows Dodo’s gaze up the chiselled muscles of the nearly-nude figure that holds a new world in its hand in a thrilling exploitation shot… To the great Monoid’s head at the top.


*The Doctor, told this is the Fifty-Seventh Segment of Time by the Arkists’ reckoning, and told that two particular historical events took place in the First by the same reckoning, instantly calculates that (providing the Segments are of equal duration) “We must have jumped at least ten million years” from the TARDIS’ previous landing in the 1960s. Mathematically inclined readers will note that given this minimal information, it is possible to deduce a minimum period of time but not a maximum one, and that this is exactly what the Doctor does. This may prove handy, in a different segment of time.


Astute readers may have deduced that in the last few weeks I’ve been assisted in my faint desire to make life more helpful and intelligible by watching and listening to at least five different variations of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy, some of them even legal. This is not the story of that book, or even of the mind behind it and his contributions to Doctor Who. However, you may also be aware that Douglas Adams began with the idea of a series of quite different stories, all of which would end with the destruction of the Earth. Doctor Who has had much the same idea, with the exception that all of its many versions of the ends of the Earth can, if you squint generously, be said to agree with each other (just don’t get started on Atlantis). In this spirit, rather than just one bonus quotation below, I’ve picked out a selection that all more or less relate to the destruction of our small, blue-green world, though not necessarily all to the same destruction. There’s one related event that I’ve omitted, not because I can’t find a gorgeous line about it but because – in a more minor failure of forward planning than the general one of being a year late – I’ve already used it as a bonus quotation for a completely different one of the Fifty. Arguably, the title of the Doctor Who story involved may maintain some mystery about the planet and its fate (Richard isn’t entirely convinced, if you scroll down to his “… In A Hurry”), so I shan’t spoil it for you here, instead inviting you to click this link and read the Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation only if you feel yourself thoroughly prepared. This story may safely be made the subject of suspense, since it is of no significance whatsoever.

Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – Frontios

Early in Part One, the Doctor (Peter Davison) has decided to sort out the TARDIS. His priorities and efficiency in doing so are uncannily similar to when I aim to tidy our flat, and for the TARDIS, too, things are going to get far more untidy before long. His friends – well, it’s 1984 (or ten million / five billion and forty, etc), so perhaps I should call them ‘his bitching contestants’ – Tegan (Australian) and Turlough (alien, and therefore British but a bit fey) just think he’s gone completely hatstand. On the sunny side, at least I don’t drive; here, the driverless TARDIS has drifted above the planet Frontios, where the forecast is less sunny than cloudy with a hint of meteorites. Turlough and Tegan try to bring this to the Doctor’s attention, though their main interest remains in sniping at each other. She’s louder, but he’s more cutting. And he can read…

“Doctor? Something’s happening to the controls.”
“BOUNDARY ERROR
“TIME PARAMETERS EXCEEDED”
“Ah. We must be on the outer limits. TARDIS has drifted too far into the future. We’ll just, ah, slip into hover mode for a while.”
“We’re in the Veruna System… Wherever that is.”
“I had no idea we were so far out. Veruna! That’s irony for you.”
“What is?”
“Veruna is where one of the last surviving groups of Mankind took shelter when the great – ah – yes. Well, I suppose you’ve got all that to look forward to, haven’t you?”
“When the great what, Doctor?”
[Sheepishly] “Well, all civilisations have their ups and downs.”
“Fleeing from the imminence of a catastrophic collision with the Sun, a group of refugees from the doomed planet Earth—”
“Yes, that’s enough, Turlough.”

Tegan wants to visit – “Laws of Time,” the Doctor weasels, and changes the subject to wanting a pair. That’s not unusual for this Doctor. Guess where they end up? Only to find that this group of fleeing humans are, if anything, even more useless than the first lot, with a total, brilliant ship in a worse state than the TARDIS – for a while….

Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – The End of the World

The Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) takes Rose – and most of the audience – on her first trip in the TARDIS to the far future… An elegant, spacious chamber; a huge, shuttered window; a mystery. Momentarily. What a magnificent vista for a pre-credits teaser: the shutters retreat to reveal the wide Earth below and, looming beyond, the swollen Sun…

“You lot… You spend all your time thinking about dying. Like you’re going to get killed by eggs, or beef, or global warming, or asteroids. But you never take time to imagine the impossible. That maybe you survive. This is the year Five Point Five Slash Apple Slash Twenty Six, five billion years in your future. And this is the day… Hold on. [Glances at watch to time the Sun’s sudden blazing red] This is the day the Sun expands.
“Welcome to the end of the world.”

Like The Ark, this story has multiple perspectives on time. It’s set at the same moment as the mid-point of the earlier story (of course it is); it was, mind-expandingly, the future, not just on screen but conceptually for its promise of a whole new Doctor Who; it loved and learned from the past (not least The Ark, The Ark In Space and Douglas Adams); and today it seems so dizzyingly long ago. Back in the olden days of nine years ago or five billion years in the future, in the dawn of Russell T Davies when actions had consequences and stories had endings, I loved it for its perfect collision of soaring optimism with sobering wisdom:

“Everything has its time, and everything dies.”

Incidentally, I saw the ‘film poster’ above years ago online, as you do, and thought it rather lovely. I’ve not been able to find the site since, though, so if you happen to know who created it, could you drop me a line in order that I can say ‘Thank you’ and they can say either ‘You’re welcome’ or ‘Take it down, impudent worm’?

Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – The Ark In Space

In early 1975 (or, again, the far future, but not quite as far as the others), Tom Baker had just started to be the Doctor, and I’d just started to watch Doctor Who. This was the second story for both of us, and it scared me so terribly that I had recurring nightmares of it for years afterwards. It was marvellous. But there’s a famously hopeful moment amid the horror, and ironically it comes just as we realise that the Earth has been scoured of all life…

The Doctor (Tom Baker) and his friends Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan spend the first episode alone (save something lurking, green and horrible), exploring an apparently deserted space station that still manages to suffocate, shoot at or freeze-dry them in turn. Some chambers hold records of Earth; others, its unliving animal life; then, to a swirl of sober, eerie music, the Doctor and Harry find themselves amid cold towers of cold people, each in their own compartment. While Harry faffs about, humansplaining about massive mortuaries, the Doctor realises that the station and the ‘bodies’ are waiting until the Earth can live once again:

“Homo sapiens… What an inventive, invincible species… It’s only a few million years since they’ve crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk. Puny, defenceless bipeds. They’ve survived flood, famine and plague. They’ve survived cosmic wars and holocausts, and now here they are amongst the stars, waiting to begin a new life, ready to out-sit eternity. They’re indomitable. Indomitable!”

Tom Baker’s speech near the end of Part One is utterly magnificent – both script and performance – establishing him as the Doctor even more than the manic energy of his first story. And in a story all about humanity, the Doctor reasserts an alien point of view which like so much of this story echoes across future series.

Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – The Sontaran Experiment

In this short but smart sequel to The Ark In Space that swaps claustrophobia for agoraphobia, the Doctor (Tom Baker) and his friends beam down to Earth to see if it’s ready for the return of humanity yet. Good news: it is. Bad news: others found it first. There’s going to be a sinister alien, whose species I shall keep secret for the moment (what’s that? Oh, damn!), but first we meet some other humans. Not the clinical, compartmentalised people of the previous story who slept in the sure and certain hope of resurrection and the even surer certainty of superiority, but a rougher, tougher breed who weren’t among the Chosen and had to work for it, viewing the Earth their distant ancestors fled not as their manifest destiny but a useless and long-junked irrelevance. They’ve only been lured here to become prey, so, just for a change, they don’t trust the Doctor…

“I’m sorry to keep contradicting you, but there is a transmat beam from Space Station Nerva.”
“From where?”
“Space Station Nerva.”
“Is he crazy?”
“A joker.”
“You don’t expect us to believe that.”
“Nerva – transmat beam – Earth. It’s as simple as that. Why don’t you believe me?”
“Because Nerva doesn’t exist, that’s why. There’s no such place.”
“Fascinating. You don’t believe it exists, yet you’ve obviously heard of it…?”
“Everybody’s heard of the lost colony.”
“Lost colony? Ahhh. You mean it’s become a legend, like lost Atlantis?”
“Like what?”
“Lost Atlantis. It’s a legendary city… A go— Never mind. This is extremely interesting. Are you going to cut me loose?”

Shhh. He mentioned Atlantis once, but I think he got away with it.

And in sharp contrast with the Doctor’s previous rhapsody, they’re not impressed. The budget didn’t stretch to a statue, but Ozymandias is back in spirit:

“Listen. If you are one of the Old People, we’re not taking orders from your lot. While you were dozing away, our people kept going – and they made it. We’ve got bases all across the galaxy now. You’ve done nothing for ten thousand years while we made an Empire! You understand? …We’re not taking any of that ‘Mother Earth’ rubbish!”

Surprising Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – Doctor Who and the Silurians

After The Sontaran Experiment’s cold-water-in-the-face upending of The Ark In Space’s assumptions and the Doctor’s paean to its self-important survivors or even the importance of Earth itself, and going back right to the realisation that perhaps the Monoids might have something to say rather than just seeing everything from humanity’s perspective, I thought it appropriate to finish after the world ended and nobody noticed. Well, nobody you know, anyway. In 1970, or probably about 1976, or the 1980s, or – look, sometimes it’s easier to agree that ten million is the same as five billion – the Earth’s original owners woke up, and they weren’t happy. The different perspective of the Silurians / Homo Reptilia / Earth Reptiles / Indigenous Terrans is a three-eyed rather than a one-eyed one, but in this story the series had come on a long way in the four TV years since 1966. Going into sleep for millions of years, only to find the end of their world hadn’t quite wiped out all the little mammals, this was a story where the ‘aliens’ had as much of a claim to ‘our’ world as we did. But while the Doctor (Jon Pertwee) could see both sides by Episode Four, try telling that to either people…

“I spoke to it. And it understood me.”
“What was it like?”
“Reptilian. Biped. A completely alien species.”
“And it didn’t attack you?”
“Liz, these creatures aren’t just animals. They’re an alien life form, as intelligent as we are.”
“Why – why didn’t you tell the Brigadier?”
“Why? Because I want to find out more about these creatures; they’re not necessarily hostile.”
“Doctor, it attacked me.”
“Yes… But only to escape – it didn’t kill you. It didn’t attack me when I was in Quinn’s cottage. Well, don’t you see? They only attack for survival. Well, human beings behave in very much the same way.”

Next Time… The Next Time is out of joint – this one might have been ‘I had a little drink seven hundred years ago…’ – so while in the past I’ve offered a not terribly cryptic clue each time about what each time I was confident would be a planned, specific entry at the same time next week, I’m aware that this has been both a different Number 34 to that hinted at last August and that had I written it the next week it would have been, well, last August. So in the light of my impressive record so far, I will make no rash commitments. But if I do get to Number 33, and I do feel that you might need something cheerier after multiple and among them possibly even final apocalypses, it could be:

Next Time… Daylight! Music! Romance!

Labels: Christopher Eccleston, Colin Baker, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 50, Douglas Adams, Jon Pertwee, Personal, Peter Davison, The Ark, Tom Baker, William Hartnell

Counting down towards the fiftieth birthday of Doctor Who with Fifty great scenes… This one’s from 2008 and 79AD, one of Doctor Who’s most visually stunning stories, set around a terrible disaster and a terrible choice. My favourite part has Phil Davis (back when he was merely serving the gods of the Underworld rather than the Devil himself) duelling with words and prophecies against a rival Soothsayer across a fantastic few minutes that transform from sit-com to mystery to impossible revelations, all directed like a breathless action scene.

“This is the gift of Pompeii: every single oracle tells the truth.”

The Fires of Pompeii bowled me over when I first saw it, and for me it’s still one of the very best stories since the series returned to TV – and among the best across all fifty years. The most gripping scene has a lot in common with my favourite from Day of the Daleks: it’s built on stunning dialogue and revelations about time – though, here, it’s the beginning of the mystery and not the solution to it, so it’s not the Doctor working it all out but being caught out. And while in Day of the Daleks it was a relief that the drama was so intense because the big action scene following was such a let-down, here the whole episode looks bloody awesome, from shooting on borrowed Roman sets, to Vesuvius erupting, to flaming great monsters. Yet despite all that, the episode’s most brilliant scene is all dialogue, in one beautifully designed set that’s still just one room, and could have been just as spellbinding for any Doctor from William Hartnell (especially William Hartnell) on.

The Doctor (David Tennant) takes newly enthused friend Donna (Catherine Tate) to Rome for her first trip back in human history. She’s delighted – until she spots the volcano. It’s not Rome but Pompeii, the 23rd of August, 79AD – just one day to go – and the TARDIS has gone missing. If that’s not enough trouble for the Doctor, Donna knows he saves people, and faces him down on why he can’t save the people of Pompeii. But first, they’ve got to track down the TARDIS, which has been sold as “Modern art” to marble merchant Caecilius (Peter Capaldi)…

It’s ten minutes in when the Doctor and Donna bluff their way in to meet Caecilius and his family, introducing themselves as Spartacus. And Spartacus (they’re not married). And the six minutes that follow in the atrium of Caecilius’ house are really three scenes in one, all moving so fast and so packed with ideas that I watched it over and over for weeks, thrilled every time. At first, it’s a funny sit-com of social climbers. Caecilius mines, polishes and designs marble and, though they’re pretty well-off to start with, he’s anxious to make it big; his beautiful wife Metella (Tracey Childs) is getting everything ready for their important guest… But, oh no! Little earthquakes keep knocking over the showpieces, their very pretty son Quintus is lolling about drinking and bored, and now in come the marble inspectors at just the wrong time! What larks (served with larks’ tongues)! And of course we know the latter are really there to con them out of their expensive new piece of modern art. Or, at least, the Doctor is – it’s comedian Catherine Tate whose character suddenly brings the scene crashing out of comedy by urging them to leave the city, only to be hauled off by the Doctor for a quiet, fierce argument about the ethics of interference when people are about to be burned to death.

It seems to swing back to sit-com as a stately fanfare – grand, Roman, and (like shooting on someone else’s much more expensive set) with just a touch of Carry On Cleo – announces Lucius Petrus Dextrus, Chief Augur of the City Government (Phil Davis), his right arm swathed in his cloak. Caecilius and Metella turn from the inconvenient interlopers to turn the social climbing up to XI, fawning over their distinguished visitor’s banal obscurancies as we laugh, knowing it’s all superstitious nonsense:

“The birds are flying north, and the wind is in the west.”
“Quite. Absolutely. …That’s good, is it?”
“Only the grain of wheat knows where it will grow.”
“There now, Metella. Have you ever heard such wisdom?”
“Never. It’s an honour.”

The Doctor can’t resist interrupting with some clever wordplay of his own, but he can’t stand around embarrassing the Caeciliusus all day, not when there’s a perfect distraction to let him and a protesting Donna slope off to the TARDIS. And so they do… But the Doctor takes just one look back, and sees what Lucius has come for: Caecilius has sculpted a giant circuit to the Augur’s design. Made of stone. How did he dream that up two thousand years early? And as he explains the job of official superstition to Donna, talking quickly to cover his mind racing at what’s going on, Caecilius’ daughter Evelina (Francesca Fowler) enters and makes the situation stranger still.

Pale, sweating, her right arm swathed in bandages, Evelina too looks pretty but ill – no, even before she totters towards them sneering and insulting people like a malicious drunk, she looks like she’s on something. And she is. Her ambitious mother’s had her consuming the vapours from underground, stimulating visions to win her a place in the Sibylline Sisterhood. And now the focus suddenly shifts from the clever Doctor running rings round Caecilius or showing off with Lucius, and to a gripping face-off between Francesca Fowler and Phil Davis, the Doctor only important as something new they can strip impossible truths from.

The duelling Soothsayers start low, as does the quietly ominous music as Evelina exposes the Doctor’s offhand mockery, which might just be a drunken daughter putting her foot in it – prompting another side to Quintus, distressed at her apparent illness, and to Lucius, sneering at a rival, and only a woman at that: “Only the menfolk have the capacity for true perception.” Donna lashes out at the sexism; the Doctor questions the “strength” the vapours have given Evelina. Evelina doesn’t appreciate it.

“Is that your opinion – as a doctor?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Doctor. That’s your name.”

How did she know that? Or that Donna is “Noble”? Or that they both come from so far away…? The music starts to swirl, stranger, stronger, underscored by the mountain’s rumbles, and the camera slowly to close in at twisted angles, all making this now a very different sort of scene. Lucius sneers again at women’s vagaries, and the Doctor enjoys putting him down for it. Unwisely. For it goads him to spit harsher and more unsettling secrets at the Doctor and Donna, the camera closing in on them claustrophobically as the strings rise to a climax and Evelina steps in again at last to top him, the effort making her sway and fall…

“Oh, not this time, Lucius. No, I reckon you’ve been out-soothsayed.”
“Is that so – man from Gallifrey?
“What?”
“The strangest of images… Your home is lost in fire, is it not?”
“Doctor, what are they doing?”
“And you, daughter of… London.”
“How does he know that?”
“This is the gift of Pompeii: every single oracle tells the truth.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Doctor – she is returning.”
“Who is? Who’s she?”
“And you, daughter of London. There is something on your back.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Even the word ‘Doctor’ is false. Your real name is hidden. It burns in the stars – in the Cascade of Medusa herself. You are a Lord, sir. A Lord of Time.”

Everything comes together to make this long, talky scene utterly electrifying – and though I love Phil Davis really giving it some welly (and as the episode continues, he’s awesome as he dials it up his villainy with ‘I am in an old-fashioned Doctor Who and I will do some old-fashioned Doctor Who shouty acting!’), Francesca Fowler more than holds her own against him, both of them aided by Murray Gold’s score and Colin Teague’s direction. The Doctor sometimes deserves to be given a shock for showing off, and the escalating revelations slashing in at him from either side clearly leave him off balance. This early in the season, too, the prophecies for each of them still have a thrilling promise to them (Metebelis spider! Oh. Plastic beetle) that even now makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Though there’s also one last comedy moment as Lucius puzzles out an unfamiliar prophetic word “Daughter of… London” in the thickest London accent of the season.

But those are only competing prophecies in the same marketplace, selling the same future – Donna’s about to make a prophecy that’s a real challenge, and that’s when things get really dangerous… Though its most brilliant piece of messing about in history only comes in retrospect, when Donna – the Doctor’s last full-time companion before Amy – is dragged away by a sinister squad of Soothsayers led by one Karen Gillan. She really wants that job.

Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – The Masque of Mandragora

The Doctor usually scoffs at soothsaying on principle, because it’s a con-job on the credulous. If it starts to come true, he only gets more cross – regarding it as some sort of con-job on time. Towards the end of Part One of The Masque of Mandragora there’s a great example of the former, before he notices that the latter’s creeping up on him, too. The Doctor (Tom Baker) has accidentally brought part of an intelligent alien energy force, the Mandragora Helix, to Earth, and in attempting to deal with it tries to warn Count Federico and his toadying court of the danger. On trying to express the concepts in Fifteenth-Century language, Federico takes him for an astrologer and summons his own, Hieronymous to test him. It’s a great, snappy exchange with all three impatient and none bothering to see the others’ points of view: Federico thinks the Doctor’s trying to con him (and he’s wrong); Hieronymous thinks the Doctor’s offending his beliefs (and he’s right, but only as an aside); the Doctor’s exasperated at wasting his time having to jump through hoops (and so recklessly intellectual and contemptuous of this nonsense that he forgets to persuade, and gets cut off).

“Now, answer me this: what does it signify when Venus is in opposition to Saturn, and a great shadow passes over the Moon?”
“This is all a great waste of time.”
“Answer him.”
“Well, it depends, doesn't it?”
“On what?”
“On whether the Moon is made of cheese, on whether the cock crows three times before dawn, and twelve hens lay addled eggs.”
“What school of philosophy is that?”
“I can easily teach him. All it requires is a colourful imagination and a glib tongue.”
“And you, Doctor, have a mocking tongue. Prepare the execution.”

Extra Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – The Caves of Androzani

“I am telling the truth. I keep telling the truth. Why is it no one believes me?”

Doctor Who features two famous Cassandras – one who says “Woe,” but is too late to say “Whoa,” the other of whom sees her own future without realising it – but Peter Davison’s often painfully honest Doctor clearly sees himself in the role, too. It’s a line that could be this Doctor’s epitaph. It comes half-way into Part Three of his final story, and while physically he’s chained up and restricted to a fuzzy hologram, his voice cuts through with such frustrated force that you can tell that nice Doctor Peter is finally on the verge of erupting: ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m going to turn into Colin Baker!’


Next Time… “I’m the Doctor.”


Which, as it turns out later, Caecilius could say…

Labels: David Tennant, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 50, History, Peter Capaldi, Peter Davison, The Fires of Pompeii, Tom Baker

Counting down towards the fiftieth birthday of Doctor Who with Fifty great scenes… Tonight’s is an especially fine cliffhanger moment, so if you’ve never experienced Enlightenment, meditate. Or, to remain unspoilered, pop in the third DVD from Doctor Who – The Black Guardian Trilogy and play Part One. Now you can safely look at the screenshot and the snippet of script below, and read just what captivates me aboard a mysterious Edwardian clipper. It’s from an eerie 1983 tale, Doctor Who’s first to be both written and directed by women, visually and emotionally unsettling, and the most striking revelation is…

“Electronics – on an Edwardian racing yacht?”
“Look at the screen. We’re not on a yacht – we’re on a ship. A spaceship.”

There’s no way to conceal that reveal in any meaningful picture or quote, but I hope you’ll still enjoy with me how the puzzle builds up. It’s an old-fashioned Part One were the mystery slowly develops as our heroes explore, though introduced by a more unusual raising of the stakes.

The TARDIS has been caught in mid-flight by mixed signals from god and the devil – more or less, but certainly among the more blatant authorial voices to introduce a story – and the Doctor (Peter Davison) charged with intervening in a race that no-one must win. They materialise unexpectedly on an Edwardian racing clipper where what seems a perfectly ordinary crew are kept below, matey enough but strangely ignorant of the object of the race – while reading newspaper reports of the first British submarine launch to keep themselves occupied. Can this be the right place? They’re hardly a threat to the peace and harmony of the Universe. And surely neither are the officers, even if they seem to be taking the Edwardian upper class to extremes, stiff-faced, clipped-voiced and not the mingling type. The Captain (Keith Barron) seems to take a cold interest in the Doctor; the First Mate, Mr Marriner, an unnerving one in Tegan; and bluff old hand Jackson (Tony Caunter, Eastenders’ Roy) a protective one in Turlough.

The men are whistled aloft, and Turlough ducks out of following them on deck and up the rigging – you can’t blame him, as a crewman’s scream of terror echoes from above. Perhaps it’s just his first time. As Tegan’s taken to the wheelhouse, she sees what seem to be wetsuits hanging in the companionway. And why is it so dark outside? While the Captain and Mate attend to the race, the Doctor recognises the race marker buoys on the chart as something rather more significant… As Malcolm Clarke’s music plays a deceptively innocent watery dance, Marriner opens a lacquered wooden panel. Beneath, a decorously concealed set of controls and, with a touch and a proud fanfare, wooden shutters open to reveal a line of ‘sailing ships’ in the styles of different Earth historical periods all floating effortlessly in space, ready to sail round the planets of our solar system in a race to win… What?

Back when I reviewed this on the DVD’s release, I chose another, less spoilery golden moment to protect anyone who’d not seen it, but I still had to allude to this one – all three of Enlightenment’s cliffhangers are crackers, but the first is one of the most memorable cliffhangers of the ’80s. It’s a distinctive Doctor Who ‘What the hell’s going on?’ twist: not just a strange juxtaposition or something going wrong with time, but the revelation that what’s really going on in what looks like history is so weird that it’s beyond even time travel. Even Doctor Who offers just a handful of such stories, but they tend to be among its best. Enlightenment is, for me, certainly one of most interesting stories in Peter Davison’s time as the Doctor, and similar claims can be made for its two most notable predecessors.

The War Games apparently begins with the Doctor (Patrick Troughton) arriving in one of the most terrible times in Earth’s history, the trenches of the First World War – but, while mud, artillery barrages and an Adjutant shocked that soldiers fighting for their lives should fail to fill out forms keeping track of shovels are all present and correct, the General is not merely brutal but sinisterly hypnotic, and what’s that video screen, or strangely TARDIS-like machine? At the cliffhanger to Episode Two, our heroes team flee in an ambulance with an officer and a nurse who’ve sensed that something’s wrong – only to go literally off the edge of the map and find themselves, disorientatingly, attacked by a chariot and legionaries.

“Doctor, who were those people who attacked us just now?”
“Oh, they were Romans.”
“But that’s impossible!”
“Oh, lots of impossible things happen when you pass through time.”

Arguably stranger still is Carnival of Monsters, in which the Doctor (Jon Pertwee)… Well, the best way to introduce it is still with the book’s brilliant tagline:

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

And yet, for me, brilliant as both of those stories and their own bizarre cliffhangers are, for its perfectly building mystery and visual style, Enlightenment still beats both of them.

Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – The Curse of Fenric

A story that’s not just one of the best for its Doctor, but for any Doctor; a ship that’s not flying, but drowned; and a chilling build-up to a stunning cliffhanger moment. So why haven’t I picked this as one of the Fifty in its own right? Well… It has a stunning cliffhanger moment – but it’s not the cliffhanger. The Curse of Fenric is outstanding in so many ways – a complex drama, a horror story, a World War II and pre-emptively Cold War action thriller – but just about the only element it fumbles is the first cliffhanger, choosing instead the banal cliché of ‘Doctor and companion surrounded by men with guns who will predictably not kill them next week’. As a result, to reveal these lines as the Golden Moment they deserve to be would require excavation and careful archaeological reconstruction, sunken as they are around the end of Part One and the beginning of Part Two or deep in the murky structure of the Special Edition. One day, I’ll get hold of some DVD-editing software and hold up that marvellous cliffhanger (its climax some two and a half minutes into Part Two, or twenty-nine into the feature-length version) to the light. Until then, there’s the skein of a marvellously atmospheric narration running through it.

Strange happenings surround the secret base on the East Coast where Dr Judson toils over a thinking machine devised to unearth enemy cyphers. A crack force of Russian soldiers aims to steal the device, but too many of them are going missing in the sea mist, or found drained of blood. Obscenely warped metal-coral artefacts found on the shore are seized by obscenely warped claws from under the waves. And the Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) seems fascinated by the carvings made by doomed Viking pirates a thousand years ago. Judson, too, has his codebreaker’s curiosity stirred by the Ninth-Century runes in the old vaults beneath the parish church. Then the frightened vicar – a superbly underplayed Nicholas Parsons, already featured in my Eleven More Great Scenes – brings the Doctor his grandfather’s translation of the Viking inscriptions…

In a story bursting with memorable words and images, one of the most atmospheric sequences has – very rarely for Doctor Who – a voice-over, written by the long-dead, passed between different characters and all absolutely mesmerising. The Doctor begins the narration, sober but leaping into excitement; he passes the Victorian vicar’s work to Judson, who takes it up greedily, unable to resist the answer to the puzzle; the base commander speaks a few lines in sick dread; and Judson reads to the end as, all the while, cross-cutting images suggest that to excavate the words and speak them aloud is to resurrect the demonic enemy buried with them. Swimmers watched from under the water… The great old stone slabs carved with runes… The barnacled dragonship long sunken beneath the waves of Maidens’ Point, the fresh corpse of a Russian soldier ensnared by the weeds round the long dragon neck… The final stone slab left suggestively smooth… The bloated claw caressing the head of the dragon…

We hope to return to the North Way,
carrying home the Oriental treasures
from the Silk Lands in the East,
but the dark curse follows our dragonship.

Black fog turned day into night,
and the fingers of death
reached out from the waters
to reclaim the treasures we have stolen.

I carve these stones in memory of
Asmund, Grimvald, Torkal, Halfdan.
Brave Viking warriors slain by the curse.

We sought haven in Northumbria,
and took refuge at a place called Maidens’ Bay,
but the curse of the treasure
has followed us to this place.

Night is the time of the evil curse,
and no man is safe alone.
The waters are most dangerous.

The dark evil lies waiting in the sea.
It has followed the treasure we stole.
We cannot see it, but we know it is there,
beneath the surface,
beyond seeing,
but it is there.

And one by one,
our crew is being killed.

I warn of the day when the Earth shall fall asunder
and all of Heaven too.
The Wolves of Fenric shall return for their treasure
and then shall the dark evil rule eternally.

I am the only one left alive now.
I raise these stones to my wife Astrid.
May she forgive my sin.
The day grows dark and I sense
the evil curse rising from the sea.

I know now what the Curse of Fenric seeks.
The treasures from the Silk Lands in the East.

I have heard the treasures
whisper in my dreams.
I have heard the magic words
that will release great powers.
I shall bury the treasures for ever.

Tonight, I shall die.
And the words die with me.

Fire bursts from the last of the old stones beneath the church, carving out the last of the runes…

And, beneath the waters of Maiden’s Point, the eyes of the drowned Russian commando suddenly spring open.


When I drew up the full Fifty, this entry was going to begin three weeks where, out of sheer perversity, I picked something strange happening with time. Well, I didn’t expect to get quite so far behind, so it won’t be three time in a row: the other two will come shortly, but for the next one I’m skipping straight to the scene I had planned for last weekend and Number 41…

Next Time… An unhelpful boss (but a genuinely lovely man).

Labels: Doctor Who, Doctor Who 50, Enlightenment, Peter Davison, Sylvester McCoy, The Curse of Fenric

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.

Labels: Christopher Eccleston, Colin Baker, David Tennant, Matt Smith, Michael Jayston, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Paul McGann, Peter Davison, Sylvester McCoy, Tolkien, Tom Baker

Peter Davison’s Doctor battles Anthony Ainley’s Master in this DVD box set of the Doctor Who stories The King’s Demons and Planet of Fire. The Time Lords clash across the gorgeous locations of a medieval castle and the island of Lanzarote; each time, the Master takes advantage of the local religion (who is the true demon? A tricky one, with him on the cover) and a shape-shifting robot, Kamelion. Which of the Doctor’s companions will remove the most clothes? Which of them will announce that he’s not a naughty boy, but the messiah? And will Magna Carta die in vain?

Despite their very different settings, these stories from 1983 and 1984 have much in common, even on top of cementing the arch-enemy relationship between ’80s Master Anthony Ainley and, particularly, Peter Davison’s Doctor. Each of them is the final story written by a Doctor Who director-turned-author, respectively Terence Dudley and Peter Grimwade; each has stories from both the ’60s and the ’70s it might take as models; in both, religion takes a key role in how characters are treated, though ironically it’s the more anti-religious script that treats believers with more sympathy; and The King’s Demons and Planet of Fire turned out to be the only two stories featuring that most ill-fated and Tony Blair-related of the Doctor’s companions, Kamelion. Who, you might ask? Particularly as these stories give much more identifiable roles to fellow companions Turlough and Peri? Well, if you can’t remember the robot that inexplicably gives the title to this set, you’re not alone – the production team forgot about him for months on end, too… Back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine Issue 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – voting The King’s Demons down into 181st place, which unfortunately is about right, and Planet of Fire a just-about-middling 134; I’d pretty much agree again, or perhaps slightly lower. And yet that in itself shows me just how brilliant Doctor Who is, because when I come to award scores for stories, Planet of Fire is what I think of as the epitome of an ‘average’ mark – perfectly decent if, ironically, lacking a spark – and yet I’d put nearly three-quarters of Doctor Who stories above that ‘average’.

While this ‘taster’ may not be short, incidentally, my policy in these is not to be too spoilery, in order than you can read on without fear of finding out too many key twists from the end. This poses particular problems for The King’s Demons: the key twists are given away by the nature of this DVD box set itself; the DVD menu gives away the only cliffhanger; and it’s arguably difficult to give away the ending of a story when it doesn’t really have one… While if you’ve not seen Planet of Fire, stop reading before the final heading below.

Doctor Who – The King’s Demons

With arguably the silliest plan the Master ever comes up with – despite a lot of competition – The King’s Demons has one of the weakest scripts of the period, with plot, characters and dialogue at best iffy and often unintentionally hilarious, and after fifty minutes less an ending than the impression that someone’s looked at their watch and called, ‘Time! Everyone back to your TARDISes!’ as if in expectation of another round, only for the protagonists to shrug and go home. So you might expect me to lay into it mercilessly. And I will lay into it… But not without mercy. While plot, characters and dialogue are usually what matter to me, and while most TV stories since 2005 have shown how to do Doctor Who far more effectively over a similar time, it’s possible to watch and enjoy it without any sense of the plot, characters and dialogue at all (much like the writer). Thanks to the magic of DVD, you can watch the beautifully cleaned-up picture and let the setting lend it weight: instead of ‘another cheap spaceship, and the story’s even flimsier,’ you think, ‘Ooh, lush filming,’ ‘jousting’ and ‘that’s a real castle’. And it’s not just the filming that’s appealing, but Jonathan Gibbs’ incidental music, too. So for The King’s Demons’ critical stock to soar, just follow my advice and select the “Audio Option: Isolated Score” from the Special Features menu so that you can watch the pretty medieval pictures and just listen to the pretty medieval synthesizer.

Or, if you must listen to the whole thing, try to ignore the plot and focus on the sexual tension…

That Golden Moment

“Come, you cringing caitiffs, we tell you there’s naught to fear! Do our demons come to visit us?”

It’s the chilly morning of March the Fourth, 1215 – pay attention, there’ll be a test later – and spectators are massing in the lists for the tournament between local heir Hugh Fitzwilliam, with his sparkling blue eyes, and Champion of Bad King John Sir Gilles, with his shaggy red wig (just to confuse the viewer, Blue Eyes is the Red Knight, and Red Wig in Blue). It all looks terrific: the horses gallop; the knights tilt; a broken lance – and then, suddenly, the horses rear and shy as, with a wheezing, groaning sound, the TARDIS appears between them. Doctor Who’d not done anything like that since 1965 (46 years ago last week), and this time has the double bonus of the interrupted combatants being thrilling on horseback and of the BBC not having thrown the tapes in a skip.

Inside and outside the TARDIS, there’s consternation. The Doctor gives us notes on the period, Tegan asks awkward questions and takes satisfaction in his not taking everything in your stride – that’ll earn her some put-downs for not knowing who the King is, in a minute – and they emerge to find everyone running about in horror… All save the King. Blasé, he welcomes the TARDIS crew over as his demons, almost carelessly confirming that the Angevins are the Devil’s Brood. Even with the Doctor used to turning up at the wrong point in history, this is a bizarre reaction. Has the King been watching Doctor Who?

The knights take up the joust again, and this time young Hugh comes crashing to earth, lying prettily in full close-up, moaning, and crying “Come, sir!” – of which more later. Of course, the Doctor intercedes for his life… And, of course, in one of the script’s few neat bits of writing, this comes back to bite him from all sides. Meanwhile, Tegan is freezing in her new multi-coloured frock; David Brunt’s rather good text notes (with a surfeit of peaches) tell us that this was chosen by Janet Fielding in order to spare herself participation in bluescreen / greenscreen shots, actors always hating special effects taking up more time than the acting does. And that notion, too, will come back to bite everyone this story…

Something Else To Look Out For

Part One makes the best of its castle location and vaulted sets, streaming pennants and knights on horseback; Part Two falls to bits rather stunningly, but it does have one thing of note. And that’s Kamelion. Here we get our first sight of the android in his natural form, quite a nice piece of design and clearly without a man inside it, with a voice so arch and oily that he seems for all the world like C3PO’s untrustworthy and even gayer brother. Unfortunately, by his very nature he gets few lines of his own, swaying between the Master and the Doctor, and that’s the central problem with his character: if you’re a shape-changer whose mind is always in thrall to the strongest will in the area, how do you develop a life of your own? So, in so many ways, the problem with Kamelion is ‘What’s the point?’ How, exactly, will a shapeshifter be the key to the Master conquering the Universe? Autons and Axos didn’t do him much good, while he’s already had a walking TARDIS, and he can hypnotise most people he might want to duplicate – as well as himself being, and titter ye not for this story, a Master of disguise. Does he think Kamelion will conquer the pop charts with his ‘Tony Blair Song’? Or could it be that this is the point where he’s finally gone completely fruit loop? Doctor Who novels later came up with a similar idea of a walking, talking, shape-changing machine super-companion and relaunching the series with “After all, that’s how it all started.” They didn’t know what to do with her, either, though at least she couldn’t just be left in the TARDIS…

And it’s not just by singing in praise of total war that Kamelion resembles the last Labour Government. Behind the scenes, he was just like one of their IT contracts. As the DVD documentary Kamelion – Metal Man makes clear across its quarter-hour bitch-fest, the robot looked great when it was demonstrated to sell the producer on the idea, but that was just about the only time it worked (in part because of a tragedy, though it clearly could never do much of what was promised). Actors (Peter Davison’s snigger particularly memorably) and writers all talk about the endless problems: how you had to synch your performance to its pre-recorded speech, which either came too soon or after a long wait; how it could barely move its head, let alone walk, and what happened when it was programmed to malfunction; how he ends up the only companion who just lurks in the back of the TARDIS without ever being mentioned until it’s time to go. Well, that’s not completely true – there was a scene recorded for The Awakening of him creeping out Tegan in the TARDIS, ironically perhaps the one where he displays the most character of his own (just not a very nice one). This was cut for time, showing how vital he wasn’t, but the scene still exists. Frustratingly, there’s only a bit of it on here, with people talking over it. For the full scene, we had to wait a year later than the “Kamelion Tales” that were supposed to be the last word on him – a joke about the robot taking so long to respond after it was cued, perhaps? – and look in the Special Features for The Awakening, which like all the Davison stories released on DVD this year is rather better than The King’s Demons, as well as being paired with a story that has a much better song. All in all, you may join the Doctor Who team from the time in jeering when Kamelion oversells himself on screen:

“And very co-operative. I would make an excellent colleague.”

Turlough / Hugh

Just three stories earlier, the series had introduced another new companion, Turlough. You have to wonder how hard lead writer Eric Saward was working when you consider that both of these started off a bit dubious, working for an old enemy of the Doctor’s before coming out from under his wing, and both were aliens masquerading as humans on Earth – so it’s no wonder that Turlough finds himself forced to the sidelines in this story. It’s a great shame, as Mark Strickson is very good in the role, but while it’s only in his first three stories out of ten that the script has to separate him from the Doctor – charged with killing the Time Lord, Turlough can’t be alone with him too often for fear of short-circuiting his story arc either by doing so or finally deciding not to and confessing – with Mr Saward clearly having a short attention span, he carries on having him locked up with nothing to do in almost all of his other stories because that’s just the way he started, despite his then being on the Doctor’s side. The King’s Demons is one of the worst offenders: with Turlough now a goodie, suddenly they have no idea what to do with him and he’s thrown in clink. The Doctor only vaguely notices, while Tegan doesn’t give a stuff. And yet Mark Strickson works his school socks off to perfect a weapon more to his taste once he’s stopped trying to kill the Doctor. Turlough was rubbish with rocks, disengaging spaceships, pirate gang-ups and Brigadiers, but here we see him deploying sarcasm to deadly effect. Well, mildly hurtful effect, anyway.

“Can you not call on Hell?”
“I could. But then so could you – with a better chance of success, I fancy.”

Ignored by his new friends and the writers, Turlough is pulled off to the dungeons by young Hugh, who feels his manhood’s been threatened by being spared on the battlefield and compensates by waving his big sword at Turlough with every other line. Mark Strickson and Christopher Villiers strike such sparks off each other that if this was shown today, the Internet would be buzzing with Turlough / Hugh slash. No on-screen couple usually hurl so many arch remarks without ending up in bed together, so it’s a terrible shame Hugh’s mum is literally put between them to defuse the sexual tension. Worse, the Lady Isabella is played by Isla Blair, a fine actress given absolutely nothing to do but say “My Lord” in an increasingly concerned tone. Wearing an enormous cylindrical wimple over a chequerboard dress, too, she looks like she’s come dressed as the Castle and turned up a story early for the life-sized chess.

By contrast, Anthony Ainley has plenty to do, but this does him even fewer favours. Both as the Master and in his hilariously penetrable disguise – it’s blown in the DVD menu, and by, well, just looking at Anthony Ainley looking exactly like Anthony Ainley (with a slightly worse wig) – as Sir Gilles, the King’s Champion and a French knight, as you can tell from that outrrrrrageous accent. With the Doctor failing to be a Pythonian French Taunter in The Time Warrior, a story set in a similar period and with many similarities to this one save for being pretty good, here the Master instead seizes the opportunity to tell the Doctor that his mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries. And this performance is justly famed. Still, he and the Doctor have rather an exciting sword fight, slugging it out with heavy broadswords rather than rapiers, and if it’s not quite as strikingly choreographed as in The Christmas Invasion or as entertaining as in The Androids of Tara, it’s a huge improvement on when the Doctor and the Master last locked swords in The Sea Devils (a swordfight that was both less ambitious and ludicrously out of place).

But once you’re past his flashing sword, fromagey accent and ‘So you did escape from [insert planet name here]’, you’re left with the Master’s plan. This one is so ludicrous that it makes all his others look like models of strategy. The line about the Master’s “small-time villainy” here belongs in a much wittier script; mid-Tom Baker, yes, this might have been an entertaining caper with the audience in on the joke of how absurd the villain is. But when the rest of this is all so painfully earnest, it’s less ‘amusingly silly’ than just ‘stupid’. The real problem with the Master’s plot is not that it’s “inconsequential” – the same author’s Black Orchid was exactly that, but succeeded beautifully on its own terms – but that it thinks it’s really, really important, when it’s just daft. That strips the Master of any role but to snigger, leer and do ‘evil things’ just for the sake of it, which is an even greater drawback when Gerald Flood’s ‘Bad King John’ is rather better at each of those jobs here. I’d been hugely excited at the Master’s return in the early ’80s, and remember thinking at the time that, after three really good new Master stories, ‘maybe Time-Flight was just an off-day’. But following that with this lost Ainley’s Master the benefit of the doubt for me, and from then on more often than not his Master’s a joke.

“Twice in one day – it is most – embarrassing.”

For me, messing about in history is Doctor Who’s iconic story form, but this one is less messing and more mess. As well as The Time Warrior, this has more than a touch of the earlier The Time Meddler, though stupider, and also The Crusade with the King’s brother (if stripped to just the Doctor’s storyline and not Ian and Barbara’s). I quite like a bit of revisionist history, but somehow I feel that the argument’s lacking something when all it consists of is the Doctor saying ‘Oh no it isn’t’ about what everyone thinks of Magna Carta (though the Charter gets an entertaining and informative little documentary on the disc). With only two episodes in the story, none of the Norman lords get much character; praise must go to Frank Windsor of Z Cars for giving some bottom to a medieval Mitt Romney who spins his views round so often it’s a wonder they don’t stick him on his own castle roof to measure the wind.

Does Terence Put the Dud Into Dudley or Peter the Grim Into Grimwade?

The King’s Demons and Planet of Fire invite comparison between their writers, Terence Dudley and Peter Grimwade. Each was a BBC director with past work on Doctor Who who then turned to writing – each wrote just three Doctor Who stories, all for Peter Davison’s Doctor though neither is able to give him much fire, and these are the final stories for each of them. Unusually for Doctor Who scriptwriters, they tended to novelise their own work, too. And neither, for me, are top-notch writers, though Peter Grimwade was an outstanding director (while Terence Dudley very much wasn’t). Peter Grimwade’s scripts were often rather tangled, but at least had some interesting ideas in them and gave the impression that he cared; Terence Dudley’s had more of a ‘that’ll do’ attitude to them. For Mr Grimwade, I’d recommend Mawdryn Undead and suggest you leave Time-Flight until last; with Mr Dudley, Black Orchid is rather good, and neither of his other Doctor Who stories are much cop. Much worse, however, was his spin-off script for K9 and Company. The Sarah Jane Adventures have been a triumph; the first go at such a spin-off wasn’t. And with Terence Dudley the producer who forced the strong female lead off Survivors (replacing her with the bloke who’d guested as ‘man with stud farm of obliging women’), making Terry Nation look like a radical feminist, he was surely the worst possible person to write for Sarah Jane Smith.

So it pains me to admit that Terence Dudley was a far better novelist – two times out of three, anyway. Even he couldn’t be bothered novelising his own Four To Doomsday (which Terrance Dicks turns into a functional book peppered with contemptuous asides for the script), and his K9 and Company novel is atrociously written sexist bilge. Fortunately, both his Black Orchid and his The King’s Demons novels are rather good, and remarkably flesh out fifty-minute stories into some of the longer books in the Target range – of the Kamelion Tales, for example, his adaptation of the half-length story is significantly longer than Peter Grimwade’s Planet of Fire. Terence Dudley’s favourite word, incidentally, is “contumely”, which turns up in each of his books as if for a bet, and his novelising the two stories in the reverse order to their transmission shows in glaring mix-ups on the page. Despite that, they’re among the most enjoyable of the Peter Davison novelisations, expanding greatly on the scripts and sorting out some of their problems.

The better of the two and the only one that’s currently available – as an audiobook, impressively read by Michael Cochrane, accompanied by so-so music – is Black Orchid. It’s also the more flawed. On the entertaining side, the first part (and first disc) is rather lovely, making gorgeous use of cricket, and particularly of Nyssa, Adric and Tegan’s competing levels of social embarrassment, particularly the “duck farm” and “That Bisto”, and though he overdoes Tegan’s being Australian, he captures her determination to be detained in sympathy with the Doctor as a rare moment of strength for one of his female characters. Tony Masero’s cover painting is bright, sharp and physics-defying, too. Michael Cochrane is very suited to Mr Dudley’s narration – the slightly pompously overextended vocabulary to up the page count – and most of the voices, notably his very good Lord Cranleigh and an arrestingly crusty and old Doctor. He even makes me feel for Lady Bloody Cranleigh at the end, which is something of an achievement, and manages the innuendoes with admirable deadpan:

“All at once a wave of happiness overcame Adric. He was doing it. Yes, he was doing it and felt wonderful!”

Then, mere moments after “‘Ah!’ ejaculated the Doctor,” Nyssa hears from a young man “about how he stroked, as she understood it, eight men in a boat on a river called the Thames.” At least he’s spared saying “cox”. I mention all this, though, to put off the bad side of the book; Terence Dudley is perhaps the most socially conservative of all Doctor Who novelists, which shows in many ways. He’s such a blatant snob even when mildly critical of the Beauchamp family that I can’t help noticing what utter shits they and their set are, while the servants are only there to serve and be murdered. The extra detail and relentless sucking-up doesn’t hurt the scheming dowager Marchioness of Cranleigh (though there’s no reason beyond snobbery for the Doctor’s conviction she’ll do the right thing in the end), but several other characters come over much worse in the book: her younger son, “Lord Cranleigh,” exposed as a wickedly complicit fake for his own gain; his fiancée both heartless and shockingly thick (crawler Dudley puts down a working class policeman as an idiot but respectfully leaves the family alone, even when Ann here is given absolute proof that the Doctor can’t be guilty); and Sir Robert the Chief Constable a bias and incompetence well outside the course of duty, despite an amusing moment when he wonders if Nyssa is “some diabolical foreign plot… some anarchist plot to substitute a double for Ann and infiltrate the House of Lords?” in which both character and author utterly fail to notice that there is a dastardly plan to substitute a Lord here, and it’s worked for two years. Try to ignore, too, the entirely out of character God-fearing Doctor in a book dripping with C of E sentiment (despite a dash of Catholic history) but disapproving of Johnny Foreigner’s rites, and seeing no contradiction in that.

Ironically, the medieval one with a king and barons is Terence Dudley’s least snobbish book, with The King’s Demons lacking the comic flair of Black Orchid but also without kindling any desire for violent revolution. The first chapter, in particular, is gripping, dwelling on Sir Ranulf’s misery and how the King seems changed, then the aside in the following chapter’s joust about an answer to Sir Ranulf’s prayer is far more deftly done than Lady Cranleigh’s dubious pieties. Another change is an improvement, too – the Master’s ‘unmasking’ is seen only through the Doctor’s eyes. It’s just a shame that the novels of both The King’s Demons and Planet of Fire avert a death from their TV script’s end; this one comes off worst, as a downbeat moment that leaves everyone in the lurch is bathetically healed by the Doctor popping back with a bit of Savlon. You have to laugh, as indeed Isla Blair did on screen, as she admits in the commentary.

Peter Grimwade’s novels, by contrast, lack both the highs and lows of Terence Dudley’s; competent, readable, but rarely inspired. His opening to the book is quite exciting, juxtaposing two very different crashing ships in a way that almost carries off one as a prefiguring of the other rather than the on-screen aftermaths simply forgetting what planets they’re on when a modern-day beacon from a spacefaring civilisation inexplicably turns up on a long-sunken wreck. At one point, the Doctor rather felicitously quotes Paradise Lost; it had featured in the novel of Logopolis as a metaphor for Anthony Ainley’s Master and so gives a pleasing sense of bookending Davison’s Doctor, even if here it’s merely when the Doctor’s being rude about Birmingham. There’s a neat little aside to The Brain of Morbius, too. Mr Grimwade clearly didn’t think much of having to write for Kamelion, though; he has the Doctor sneer at him as a thing, rather uncomfortably (even if he’s nowhere near as interesting as Drathro), and reflects that the Doctor “had quite forgotten about the robot from Xeriphas”:

“It was some time now since Kamelion had declared himself the Doctor’s obedient servant and taken up residence in the TARDIS. But the obsequious automaton had none of the cheerful loyalty of K9 and the Doctor always felt uncomfortable in the presence of this tin-pot Jeeves.”

Doctor Who – Planet of Fire

Peter Davison’s penultimate story, Planet of Fire is saddled with some clearing of the decks, writing several characters in and out while at the same time given a glamorous location which had to stand in for two separate planets. No wonder writer Peter Grimwade is said to have got fed up with it after several drafts and left script editor Eric Saward to paper over the rest. A lot of it looks good, and there are excellent performances – including, surprisingly, perhaps Anthony Ainley’s best – but the script is distinctly uneven and lacking in edge, sandwiched between a would-be Dalek epic and the fifth Doctor’s glorious finale and with too much to do to keep up the accelerating pace towards the Peter’s climax. This is also the last Davison story without monsters, and the only one in 1984; his era is the only one after the ’60s to feature multiple monsterless adventures, which may be one reason that people often think of his time as bland. It’s the last of that peculiarly Davison sub-genre of the arthouse, meandering, meaningful, slightly cerebral sci-fi, though in this case neither weird nor deep enough to match the best of them (like the more inspired Castrovalva, for example, this features the Master, a skip between locations and a bulky silver suit that cuts it even less as an ‘are they aliens?’ stand-in than the Castrovalvan tribal costumes). And among all this, new companion Peri makes a thankfully wrong impression; Turlough finally gets something to do; and Kamelion really doesn’t…

That Golden Moment

“Wretched citizens of Sarn! You’ve turned your backs on the Lord of the Fire Mountain – and listened to his enemy!”

From the day this was first transmitted, one scene has stood out for me. While the script and actors pull many of their punches in the attack on religion you can see in the bones of the story, the climax to Part Two suddenly grabs the theme and glories in it. So often lumbered with absurd scheming and cackling “Heh-heh-heh” in the background, Anthony Ainley suddenly shows what he can do with the direct approach.

The volcanic planet Sarn has been stealthily settled and exploited for its resources by a more advanced alien culture, and the bewildered, endangered natives have made a religion out of the scattering of technology, constant threat of fire, and occasional crashed survivors. As things go increasingly pear-shaped for them, some of the community have become more fiercely and murderously theocratic; others, free-thinkers trying to make more reasoned sense of it all. When the Doctor and the Master arrive on the planet, guess which side each of them takes? The Doctor, helpful as ever, is just on the verge of getting things working and making people reasonable when a figure in a dapper black suit appears at the door…

Anthony Ainley is simply outstanding as a fire and brimstone preacher, charismatic, Satanic, effortlessly taking control and enjoying every moment as he fulfils the deepest desire of every hellfire preacher and consigns his opponents to the flames.

Something Else To Look Out For

Like The King’s Demons, this looks very pretty. But unlike The King’s Demons’ stately heritage, Planet of Fire looks hot. Mostly filmed on Lanzarote, it’s one of Doctor Who’s few trips abroad and has clearly had money spent on it: never has there been so much sun in the series; never have the actors worn fewer clothes; and so never has any story brought out the sexism in fandom as much as Nicola Bryant’s first appearance as Peri (though naturally I prefer the actor playing Roskal, at least if he had a head transplant – sorry, it’s the ’80s). It’s also one of Peter Howell’s most evocative soundtracks, with soaring awe for the landscape, haunting tones to match Peter Wyngarde’s surprisingly underplayed epiphany, and strangely twisted electronic notes in the heart of the volcano (all, thankfully, available as an isolated score).

Peter Davison’s rather good here, with occasional tart moments (“Shall we gaze upon it, too?”), showing off (“I’d hazard a guess by a pupil of Praxiteles”, appropriately a sculptor famous for the nude female form), or figuring things out in his brainy specs. He even manages to maintain his Doctor through suddenly out-of-character moments like taunting Kamelion (and worse), suddenly offering lifts in the TARDIS, or being crabby with Turlough (‘If you’re holding back about my ex, you’re dumped, girlfriend!’). But it’s Mark Strickson who gets the best of the story for the TARDIS crew, with Turlough at last given the chance to grow up, to get out of his uniform (and trousers), and to get a suddenly jarring sci-fi name. Turlough seems to lurch through several years of character development at once: near-psychotic when he thinks Kamelion’s in touch with his captors; reunited with the brother he never knew he had; and offering heroic self-sacrifice by calling on his scary Planet of My Dad to help (much as the Doctor did in The War Games). And, yes, as he bears the sign of the Chosen One, he’s impassioned and commanding when declaring that he’s not a naughty boy, but the messiah.

The Doctor’s other two companions are marked contrasts. Kamelion doesn’t so much struggle to grow into his own identity as to give up, and he’s given almost nothing of his own personality (or Gerald Flood’s fabulously fruity voice) here. He’s also let down by the evident inability of the blasted robot to work, with an actor visibly having to drop his arms into position to ‘transform’ and Kamelion being ‘himself’ largely shown not by his android form, but by Dallas Adams staggering about in silver body paint (he looks rather better as the buff stepfather). The Doctor comes out of this pretty badly, too, struggling with the Master to dominate rather than liberate Kamelion and being absurdly slow to work out what might be up with him in the first place (hmm, could it be the Master again? Better go on holiday instead of worrying).

Peri, on the other hand, has probably the most unflattering opening a companion ever has – even Turlough got to be interesting and was at least fighting his bad side. By contrast, Peri throws a tantrum because she wants to head off for an indeterminate period of months in a different country that minute, without even saying goodbye to her Mom, and is portrayed as nothing but greedy, snide and thoughtless. She’s clearly meant to suggest ‘hey, I’m open to adventure,’ but the writing makes her a spoilt could-be-platinum-digging brat with a strange fixation on an alien dildo (an innuendo even more blatant in Grimwade’s novelisation, especially when a wet Turlough grips its bulbous head). She instantly strips to her bikini (happily encouraging Mark Strickson into his trunks; though Nicola Bryant was the only one who wasn’t skinny-dipping in the hotel, she was famously ‘rescued’ from her drowning scene by a nudist from the next beach), apparently establishing her as a shallow exploitation stereotype. Nicola even mentions “slash” on the commentary, but it’s not what you think. But I’m telling you the plot. Ironically, she’s paired best here with the Master, who gives her something to be stroppy about (my favourite moment’s her shooting “You do realise this creature is about to do a bunk?” at the local religious leader just before the incarnation of evil does indeed run out on that gullible idiot), and luckily for Nicola Bryant, she gets a better part (and more clothes) in almost all of her later stories. So if you ever meet her, when I’ve queued for autographs I’ve heard her express considerable weariness at still being presented with bikini shots; I once cheered her with a picture of her in a very different look which she’d not previously been asked to sign, from a terrific scene first broadcast twenty-five years ago tomorrow. And yet Peri’s debut still inspires some Twenty-First Century companions, with her “Now that’s what I call a real spaceship” mirrored in “At last, some Spock” and the closing lurch shamelessly nicked for Smith and Jones.

Quite Masterly

Anthony Ainley remakes himself here as a much more physically involved Master and is clearly having a whale of a time, eyes sparkling, as he gets to do something different. And not just in the Part Two cliffhanger – he’s the focus of all three of them, magnetic in his different ways in each (the first is the most predictable and great fun, even if his sticky-on beard has never looked more sticky-coming-off). It’s a fitting send-off to the great pairing between him and Davison (famously pictured back-to-back, cream versus black; in the Kamelion Tales, they’re framed face-to-face) – his Master starts impressively in Logopolis, finishes well in Survival, but often loses it in between. He’s got more stylish props, too: we see his gun open up and fire; his sinister black TARDIS control room, unsubtle but striking; and he never looks better than in a smart black suit. It’s all enough to put up with his Master yet again having landed in a hole and looking a bit dumb – where Roger Delgado’s original version improbably emerged from every defeat without a scratch, Anthony Ainley’s Master is Wile E. Coyote, forever dropping off a cliff or being squashed by his own ten-ton weight, yet even more improbably always surviving without apparent consequences.

The key to the Master’s renewal is, of course, religion. Taken for an angel and doing his best to capitalise on it, despite his desire to be born again he’s at his happiest playing in a very Old Testament set-up. It’s hugely to Mr Ainley’s advantage that his scenes are right on the main seam of the story, as it’s the critique of religion that’s the script’s most effective and, unexpectedly, subtle writing. Though you can tell it’s been toned down from the author’s intent, less ‘angry’ than ‘slightly miffed’, much of this is powerful and still relevant, from the freethinkers’ fear as they make the difficult journey to disprove their god to proto-pope Timanov having a scary but credible point of view rather than being an eye-rolling loon. And in him we have another stand-out performance, as guest star Peter Wyngarde astounds everyone by being grave and subtle, played and written with a frighteningly plausible conviction when he explains the need to burn heretics. It’s refreshing when a script so firmly for free will and against religion has the wit to realise believers can be more dangerous precisely when they aren’t mere crazies, and to show shades of faith from his quietly moving epiphany through his fiery zealotry to his Vicar of Bray-like accommodation with the new messiah when his own position is threatened.

The story has problems when it wanders off that through-line, though, and with so much wilderness on screen there’s room for a lot of wandering. The need to add Peri to the line-up literally drags the story off-course; it makes the first episode almost a prologue, as the Doctor takes a completely unrelated side-step to find a new companion, er, sit in a café for a bit. And unfortunately they couldn’t go for additional location filming of Peri on holiday in, say, London, where the Doctor might have run into her – to pick up a new companion from Earth, the Doctor has to be on Earth, so they all happen to be visiting Lanzarote (played by your actual Lanzarote). This wouldn’t present a problem were it not for the fact that they then all move on to the suspiciously familiar alien planet Sarn (played by, er, Lanzarote). It’s as if they’d started the story by accidentally broadcasting an episode of Doctor Who Confidential. Couldn’t the Doctor just have placed a contact ad? And even once they get to Sarn, the plot lacks drive – there’s a setting, and people with motivations, but they just amble about, leaving a location, going back there, occasionally clashing, until it’s time to stop. It doesn’t help that when Peter Grimwade runs out of ideas, he substitutes the Master trying to trade bits of the TARDIS no-one’ll ever mention again like a demented Swap Shop for drama (it worked so well in Time-Flight).

A middling story of the Master – surprise! – posing as an authority figure on a colony world to seek power deep inside the mountains, this has always rather reminded me of Colony In Space, albeit targeting religion rather than big business and with a less interesting alien culture but far more effective design. With its themes of the mind as battlefield – albeit, in Kamelion’s case, a battlefield no-one seems to much care about – growing up and religion, it’s also an echo of Doctor Who’s fourteenth season, though it doesn’t do well by the comparison (by comparison, short on horror, witty dialogue or inspiration). As with many Doctor Who stories, it owes something to The Deadly Assassin, in which an exile returns home, the Doctor is unusually violent, and the Master in particular has a similar role: grievously injured, he’s come to a planet whose technological past has become mythologised to heal himself with its unique resource, even if the resulting earthquakes destroy it – and he’s apparently killed at what should be the scene of his recovery. You might look out for his later fiery blue Hammer Rebirth of Voldemort in The End of Time, too…

The third disc in the Kamelion Tales box set offers Planet of Fire – ‘The Movie’ Special Edition, in which original director Fiona Cumming returns to the story with a pair of scissors and a CGI toybox. Cutting out a third of it to make it pacier and more like the modern series works rather less well than her slightly disappointing re-edit of Enlightenment, while at 66 minutes it’s less ‘The Movie’ than ‘The Episode’. The new pre-credits sequence is a brave but very cheap-looking try, and it’s distracting to keep joining in with lines that suddenly aren’t there (my first: “That girl, Doctor”). The omissions that most harm it, though, are giving Kamelion an even smaller part, removing the lines where the Doctor threatens Turlough (explaining why he might have to go) and where he lets people think the Chosen One is dead (explaining why everyone suddenly obeys Turlough as the new messiah), and most of all taking out most of the incidental music score, which even with masses of flaming CGI added leaves the story lacking atmosphere. To be fair, some of the CGI is effective, and it certainly makes Sarn look hotter and more alien – but someone should have told them where to stop with all the flames, as it’s impossible not to snigger at scenes like the high priest and the Chosen One standing, entirely comfortably and unconcerned in their flapping frocks, right next to a flaming great rock and not catching fire. For once, though, the menus are quite stylishly done, with the same scenes on both Planet of Fire discs but using the SE version on the second (a trick they missed on the recent ‘new’ version of Day of the Daleks). The rest of the extras are quite impressive and, for me, rather more watchable – particularly the ‘Making of’ leading the several documentaries, which is chatty and informative, even a return to Sarn / Lanzarote, and a quarter of an hour of deleted and extended scenes. There are some enjoyable anecdotes across the documentaries and commentary, though I’ve heard one of the best told in person with a fabulous punchline (and written about it here, if you scroll down to the cheery bit at the end). The most exciting extra, though, is the “Coming Soon” trailer for The Dominators. I’ve written that Doctor Who – The Dominators is not a great story, but it is one of their best trailers, with great use of tints, circling graphics and an unsettlingly grating mix of the Theme and TARDIS sounds. And, if you’re desperate to buy more from this story, there’s even a “Doctor and Master” toy set (actual size!).

Lassie Go Home – Or, the Death of (Spoiler)…

Poor old Kamelion. Hardly in any stories at all, and then – look away now, I’ve warned you – they kill him off. And when I say ‘they’, I mean not just the production team but the Doctor. Can you imagine the Doctor plotting to give a “heart attack” to any of his other companions, let alone shooting them? Kamelion’s last lines are much dumber and more mechanical than his rather fey Gerald Flood incarnation (does Gerald get any lines at all in the second half of the story? How positively Dodo); Dallas Adams’ “Kamelion – no good. Destroy me – please” sounds much more like an Ogron or a dim computer, dehumanised so the Doctor doesn’t look so much of a git. The tiny, twisted, sparking body is rather affecting, but not to the Doctor. The more I think about it, the more it seems a calculated decision. “I am Kamelion… Was Kamelion” is sadly evocative, but pronounced several episodes before his ‘death’. We carefully hear the last of Gerald Flood’s performance even before the Doctor’s anti-robot taunting, or it’d leave a still nastier taste in our mouths. Not giving voice in his final hour to Kamelion’s original oily but highly intelligent persona silences someone who may never sound trustworthy but who definitely sounds like a thinking individual. The ungrammatical, almost monosyllabic, dumb plea for death at the end is delivered by Dallas Adams in a much more warm, loyal – but very dim – voice, so you trust that the poor thing wants to be put out of its misery. The characterisation, in short, abruptly goes from ‘evil C3PO’ to ‘Lassie’, at which point it’s OK to have him put down.

And there really is no coming back from that as a Thundercat.

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