Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars
Doctor Who is forty-eight years old today, and one of the series’ finest stories took place one hundred years ago (probably not today). On TV, Pyramids of Mars scared the daylights out of me when I was four as an inexplicable force drew Tom Baker’s Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith to the year 1911 to find a sinister priest summoning the awful power of an ancient god; then I grew up pleasurably terrified by Terrance Dicks’ novel, now gloriously read in audiobook by Tom. Both versions cast long shadows through today’s Doctor Who, for TV, other stories and toymakers alike. And watch out – there are many spoilers ahead…
1975 was probably the most exciting year Doctor Who has ever had – and I’m sure that I can judge that entirely objectively, having started watching it at the beginning of the year with the early days of Tom Baker. With more new stories broadcast that year than in any for a decade – or for another three decades to come – there was a mighty amount of Doctor Who, and of an astounding quality. In fan polls – and for me – two 1975 stories always make the top ten of all the two hundred and more broadcast so far, while another is said to be the personal favourite of both Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat. Pyramids of Mars is one of those two up there at the top, and from interviews and references in his stories as early as Queer As Folk onward clearly a favourite of Russell’s, if not the favourite. And it may say something about the age or taste of fans as to whether they prefer the different ‘raising dark gods’ stories of 1971’s The Dæmons, 1975’s Pyramids of Mars or 2006’s The Impossible Planet (which explicitly refers to the earlier two). For me, it’s the combination of 1975 and 1911 all the way.
On TV, it’s easy to see why Pyramids of Mars is so highly regarded. Looking great in the ideal setting of ‘about a hundred years ago’, it has perhaps the most perfect Doctor Who opening episode of the lot, climaxing in for me the series’ scariest ever cliffhanger, then introduces the TARDIS and big concepts around time travel, and finishes with the Doctor tempted – and taken – by the Devil, a mixture of science fiction, myth and pure horror that gives you big-scale ideas on a canvas small-scale enough to deliver them convincingly, the ultimate in ‘ancient horror on the rise’. Robert Holmes’ least funny, most scary script (with additional work by Paddy Russell, adding to her assured direction); a small but perfect cast including Bernard Archard, Michael Sheard, Peter Copley and Peter Mayock; a superb atmosphere created by filming at Mick Jagger’s stately home, gorgeous antique design and a career-best eerie music score from Dudley Simpson that can all compete with Hammer’s own Mummy movies; and, above all, probably Doctor Who’s greatest ever villain in a heart-stopping performance by Gabriel Woolf as the dark god Sutekh, dripping malice in a voice that rarely lifts above an agonised whisper. The whole thing was the single story that scared me the most, and though I loved returning to it, it was always with a thrill of fear – most vividly going down the stairs that led into the Blackpool Doctor Who Exhibition, finding Sutekh, mummies and sarcophagi in the dark at the bottom, and being seized with such terror that I gripped the banister and couldn’t be dragged inside for what felt like an eternity (probably two or three minutes of parental persuasion, or of patient prising my fingers away).
Pyramids of Mars has been repeated twice on BBC1 or BBC2 and released several times – it was one of the first Doctor Who stories available on VHS in the mid-’80s (and the first I bought), initially in a feature-length edit with not only cliffhangers but several other scenes sliced out, seemingly at random, then a few years later in full, and a fairly early DVD release, one of the first to have the sort of full selection of extras that set the standard for the range continuing today (complete with a scriptwriter being unfeasibly rude about Mary Whitehouse, as he should). And it’s the first ‘classic’ Doctor Who to be released on Blu-ray, in tribute to Elisabeth Sladen as an extra feature on The Sarah Jane Adventures Series Four – while if you missed it on CBBC last month, the very last and one of the finest of The Sarah Jane Adventures begins tomorrow on BBC1, so make sure you catch it. As a Blu-ray experience, though, Richard notes in Millennium’s excellent Mysteries of Doctor Who #23: Why Does Pyramids of Mars Take Place in ENGLAND? that the disc presentation could be better. One of the great things about that article, incidentally, is that it mirrors the Scarman brothers as both keys to Sutekh’s escape: everyone knows that Marcus’ archaeological bent is bent by Sutekh; but Laurence’s scientific invention becomes another fatal flaw. This was released on 31st October this year, appropriately, for what’s probably the most perfect Halloween Doctor Who story (its main competition being Image of the Fendahl, both adventures first shown at the end of October, both filmed at the same manor house, though the latter ironically set at Lammas). And though I can’t remember where I first saw this picture – several years ago – or give appropriate credit to the bright carver who created it, it’s remarkable what you can find on your hard drive, isn’t it?
With all that to live up to, you might wonder how the book can compare without the actors, music, direction or location, particularly as the novelisations and Terrance Dicks especially tend to tone down the horror (Ian Marter’s The Ark In Space, on the other hand…). But you needn’t worry, even if he takes out the most controversial bit (it’s not the one Mary Whitehouse would think of). Though this doesn’t have quite the depth and power of his Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion – nor its thrill of horror that outmatches that story’s TV version, as I’ve recently written – it’s still one of Terrance’s best, telling the story with pace, occasional flourishes and fascinating extensions at either end, into the past and the future. Last week, I looked in detail at another childhood favourite, Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters, and noted that Terrance himself says he rose to his best when novelising Bob Holmes’ work, because those were simply the best scripts (and I’m pretty sure that it was when signing my copy of Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars that he told me that in pretty much those words).
I have many memories of the book in particular: when I was a little boy and only just starting on my life of obsessive collecting spreading out all my Doctor Who books (perhaps thirty or so) and trying to put them in ‘best’ order, with this always at or near the front; it being the first I chose to lend to another boy at primary school (Martin Campbell, down in The Valley; not the James Bond director) to show him why they were so brilliant… Before, I suspect, going overboard and adding a crate of others, not realising that not everyone would share my enthusiasm or indeed reading speed; and, of course, the book itself, from the mythic Prologue to the melancholy, eerie Epilogue of Sarah Jane alone in a library (a familiar part of my young life).
Chris Achilleos’ original cover, now used for the audiobook, is uncharacteristically stark – a grim-faced Doctor and even grimmer rifle-wielding Sarah Jane framed around a mummy (out of character for her, you might think, though arguably there’s nothing so Doctor Who as the juxtaposition of frock and gun). Alister Pearson’s cover for the reprint (adapted here into a video cover, and also used on Heathcliff Blair’s CD of Dudley Simpson Doctor Who music of the period) is one of his best, intense and expansive, seething with dark colours around the Doctor, Sutekh and his servants.
Terrance Dicks rarely added scenes when novelising Doctor Who scripts, so his rare Prologues were always a treat for me. This one, “The Legend of the Osirians”, memorably gives his backstory for Sutekh and his people. It’s interesting to compare it to other interpretations: Justin Richards’ The Sands of Time pedantically ‘corrects’ the details to fit ‘proper’ Egyptian mythology and grinds down imagination with banal spaceships and explanations of psychic powers; Lawrence Miles’ Faction Paradox series offers a vast, non-linear mythos of rival gods that fits more with the cynical asides of Robert Holmes’ script. Terrance’s advantage here is that he paints with a broad brush as if an ancient story told many times, allowing you to fill in the details of a galaxy-spanning conflict in your mind’s eye without the bathos of spelling them all out in a couple of pages. His disadvantage I think is that he has a more comforting worldview than Robert Holmes’ dark universe; rather than everyone who isn’t evil being corrupt, Terrance tends to tell stories of bad apples but a basically trustworthy establishment, as in his tale of the godlike Osirians:
Against expectations, he maintains much of the feel of horror throughout, not least by being constantly aware that Marcus Scarman, walking around as the apparent villain of the piece for much of the story, is a perambulating, smouldering corpse under Sutekh’s control. He underlines the arrival of the ‘messenger’ by giving him bare feet as he steps out to dispose of Sutekh’s earlier servant, whose “shuddering scream” is as horrible a moment as any in the novels; he describes the charred hands that kill his brother, only hinted at on TV; most memorably, as Sutekh sends him the co-ordinates for the Pyramids of Mars, he picks up the despatch:
Sarah Jane shines through the book, as Lis Sladen did on screen in what was surely her most effective season as the Doctor’s companion – she even lifts the novel at points by taking the piss out of the Doctor, if less so than on screen, giving a bit of a release of tension when Terrance evokes the horror of the script with unexpected force but rarely manages to get across the moments of humour. One slight change, having not Warlock’s hat but the Doctor’s dropped for their pursuers to find, gives her a grimly amusing moment of mutiny over his outfits.
Without Michael Sheard’s childlike wonder and Lis Sladen’s grim defiance, the ‘escape’ to “1980” – mentioned six times on TV but tactfully trimmed from the book – doesn’t have quite the same punch, though the scene again stands out as one of those (as in The Masque of Mandragora) in which Robert Holmes decided it was time to say out loud those questions everyone put to him in the BBC canteen and up the tension with it into the bargain. In Doctor Who’s ultimate horror story, it’s not just all his favourite horror themes from the cinema that are on view, but new ones he introduces especially for a time travel series. We get fear of the living dead; fear of possession and loss of identity; fear of something horrible happening to a loved one, and even being done by a loved one; fear of confinement and pursuit, at the same time; we get several different types of horrible death, through burning, strangling and crushing; and if all that fear, existential horror and plain death isn’t enough to scare you, the trip to the alternate present day where, because the Doctor deserts his post, Sutekh has long since destroyed the world, gives new existential horror on a grand scale, not just of the end of the world but that you might have ceased to exist before you were even born.
Though Terrance drops the ball a bit in having Sutekh’s voice sometimes rise “to a maddened howl” in typical OTT villain description, at other points he captures something of Gabriel Woolf’s quietly compelling portrayal – there’s “hideous strain” in his voice when holding in an explosion, and the first description of him is perfect:
Those deflection barriers invite comparisons with The Dæmons in particular, showing a very different sort of worldview from when Terrance Dicks was lead writer on the show to Robert Holmes’ period; they’re very different stories, and the points of similarity only show up their differences (as if Hinchcliffe and Holmes were poking the Pertwee era in the eye with something very much tauter and darker). The vicar’s only bad in one because he’s been done away with and replaced by the Master; the priest is only a part of a nasty Cult in the other. The alien that looks like the Devil in one is a cross between an amoral scientist and a harsh Old Testament father God, who when he wakes up may destroy the world if we don’t meet his exacting standards; the demonic alien here is a cruel and twisted Lovecraftian dark god that will destroy the world once freed because he wants to. And while both stories have the scene hemmed in by an impassable force barrier, in one the barrier is merely an inconvenience that stops people getting in or out, while in this story it makes a whole country estate a place of claustrophobic horror because the grey ‘inanimate’ servants that have come to life are stalking rather than merely guarding, determined to kill everyone within. In both stories, too, the Doctor builds a clever machine to stop the enemy, but it’s destroyed before it can do the trick, but each is succeeded by a very different finale. Whereas in The Dæmons it’s human goodness that wins out, something it would be impossible to believe against Sutekh (or, some might say, full stop), in Pyramids of Mars, each of the last three episodes builds up a device that will foil Sutekh, each blown by the end except for the last one – the first a lash-up that fails, the second succeeding for the moment but at the cost of the Doctor, and the last invoking the might of the Time Lords, pitting (according to taste) one mythic race against another or pitting science against god… And Terrance’s novelisation improves the ending of Pyramids of Mars in two key ways. First, his chapter title naming Time “The Weapon of the Time Lords” makes it sound both rather grand and ponderous and as if it’s down to someone other than the Doctor (had he called that final chapter ‘The Doctor Shoots Sutekh With a Big Time-Gun’ it would have seemed both easier and much less in character). And then he gives us a proper aftermath.
While on TV we can sit back and watch the rising flames to give closure, the book grounds us with an appropriate coda, the Doctor musing over the fire as practical Sarah Jane wants to get out before “some heavily-moustached village policeman of the year nineteen eleven” arrives to ask questions, then back in the TARDIS the way she ponders one by one every death, including remembering Laurence’s “bright-eyed eagerness” looking round the TARDIS, “And most tragic of all, Marcus Scarman, taken over and burnt out by Sutekh’s horrible alien power.” With the Epilogue still to come, the end of the book really gives it a sense that it matters. And that elegiac Epilogue in which Terrance shows that he, too, can answer those questions asked in the BBC canteen (‘Didn’t anyone notice?’), is unique in the Target range, set “Later, much later,” once Sarah Jane has parted from the Doctor, where she visits the little country town close by the scene and looks up the newspaper files from 1911:
Tom Baker read four complete audiobooks from Target novels before moving on to ‘new’ adventures, of which more later, but this is by a long stretch his best. Decades before, he’d created a reedy ‘old man’ voice for an abridged version of State of Decay that really doesn’t work for Solon when he digs it up after a quarter of a century, for example, while even the humour of The Creature From the Pit didn’t bring out the best in him.
In Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars, though, you can hear an actor who’s suddenly enjoying and engaging with his material, doing justice to an excellent book. His ‘old man’ gets new life for Laurence, while his bluff, Yorkshire Warlock is ideal and his ferocious Sutekh decidedly impressive. He gives an appropriate air of mythic grandeur to the Prologue, is entertaining on Sarah’s little asides, and even seems to engage with ‘his’ own lines, finding interestingly different readings for many of them – generally playing the Doctor a little lighter in 2008 than in 1975 (and still giving a pronounced ‘shh’ sound in the word “eviscerated”). Aided by its own musical motifs, this CD is surely the best way to enjoy it today (and the only one that’s not out of print).
I was a little mean to Justin Richards’ Missing Adventures novel The Sands of Time above, but it’s frustrating in part because a lot of it’s so good – it would simply be much better if it had no connection to Pyramids of Mars. This sequel is brilliantly plotted, but follows its source material of Mummy movies and Egyptian mythology far too slavishly – not least, effectively saying ‘Doctor Who got it wrong and I’m going to get the legends right,’ getting in the way of a good story to try for spurious accuracy. A sequel shouldn’t make its original smaller. And then there’s the book’s stand-in for the all-hating, especially sibling-hating Sutekh. Justin would change Terrance’s line to ‘As they grew in power, so they grew in wisdom – all but one… And his Mum and his sister, with whom he remained best mates’, and I find that very hard to swallow (oh, his Mum? Actually, she’s in a Big Finish CD, which again is rather fun if you can ignore Pyramids of Mars, but it would be a spoiler to say which. E-mail me if you want to know).
Twenty-first Century Doctor Who stories owing a debt to Pyramids of Mars range from Steven Moffat’s “Timey-wimey” scripts or Sarah Jane reminding the Doctor that “A man has just been murdered!” while he only pays attention to millions being echoed in Rose to the outright references in The Impossible Planet, where the planet’s code number is ‘Sutekh’ backwards if you squint, the Doctor muses about Sutekh and the sinister voice of the great Beast is even provided by none other than Gabriel Woolf. “Don’t turn around,” indeed. And, in this time of wonders, you can now buy the toys that my eyes would have boggled out on stalks to see when I was little: two slightly different versions of Sutekh’s Mummies are available from Character Options, complete with either jackal-or-falcon-headed canopic jars with silver force generators inside; an inappropriately grinning figure of Tom Baker’s Doctor with the part of the TARDIS he wires up to Sutekh’s space-time tunnel to make him miss his station; and, next year, even a cuddly Sutekh, apparently.
The most impressive variation on the theme, though, is undoubtedly a series of six linked audio dramas. Gabriel Woolf returned to the role of Sutekh alongside Julian Glover, Isla Blair, Philip Madoc and others in Lawrence Miles’ 2005-2009 Faction Paradox series from Magic Bullet (Coming to Dust / The Ship of a Billion Years, Body Politic / Words From Nine Divinities and Ozymandias / The Judgment of Sutekh), which expands the Osiran Court across time and space. You’ve probably not heard of it, but it’s a brilliant piece of work.
But Doctor Who fans have a lot to thank this novel for in two better-selling if less intense audio drama series. Listening to the audiobook, it felt like Tom Baker was getting into it in a way he hadn’t with his three previous readings – and it turns out he really had. After years of resisting, it was on doing this reading that he was at last enthused enough to agree to record new Doctor Who audio dramas, first with BBC Audiobooks and now with Big Finish. So Robert Holmes, Terrance Dicks and a novel from 1976 are still impressive enough to be pushing on new Doctor Who today.
The Terror is Unleashed
1975 was probably the most exciting year Doctor Who has ever had – and I’m sure that I can judge that entirely objectively, having started watching it at the beginning of the year with the early days of Tom Baker. With more new stories broadcast that year than in any for a decade – or for another three decades to come – there was a mighty amount of Doctor Who, and of an astounding quality. In fan polls – and for me – two 1975 stories always make the top ten of all the two hundred and more broadcast so far, while another is said to be the personal favourite of both Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat. Pyramids of Mars is one of those two up there at the top, and from interviews and references in his stories as early as Queer As Folk onward clearly a favourite of Russell’s, if not the favourite. And it may say something about the age or taste of fans as to whether they prefer the different ‘raising dark gods’ stories of 1971’s The Dæmons, 1975’s Pyramids of Mars or 2006’s The Impossible Planet (which explicitly refers to the earlier two). For me, it’s the combination of 1975 and 1911 all the way.
On TV, it’s easy to see why Pyramids of Mars is so highly regarded. Looking great in the ideal setting of ‘about a hundred years ago’, it has perhaps the most perfect Doctor Who opening episode of the lot, climaxing in for me the series’ scariest ever cliffhanger, then introduces the TARDIS and big concepts around time travel, and finishes with the Doctor tempted – and taken – by the Devil, a mixture of science fiction, myth and pure horror that gives you big-scale ideas on a canvas small-scale enough to deliver them convincingly, the ultimate in ‘ancient horror on the rise’. Robert Holmes’ least funny, most scary script (with additional work by Paddy Russell, adding to her assured direction); a small but perfect cast including Bernard Archard, Michael Sheard, Peter Copley and Peter Mayock; a superb atmosphere created by filming at Mick Jagger’s stately home, gorgeous antique design and a career-best eerie music score from Dudley Simpson that can all compete with Hammer’s own Mummy movies; and, above all, probably Doctor Who’s greatest ever villain in a heart-stopping performance by Gabriel Woolf as the dark god Sutekh, dripping malice in a voice that rarely lifts above an agonised whisper. The whole thing was the single story that scared me the most, and though I loved returning to it, it was always with a thrill of fear – most vividly going down the stairs that led into the Blackpool Doctor Who Exhibition, finding Sutekh, mummies and sarcophagi in the dark at the bottom, and being seized with such terror that I gripped the banister and couldn’t be dragged inside for what felt like an eternity (probably two or three minutes of parental persuasion, or of patient prising my fingers away).
Pyramids of Mars has been repeated twice on BBC1 or BBC2 and released several times – it was one of the first Doctor Who stories available on VHS in the mid-’80s (and the first I bought), initially in a feature-length edit with not only cliffhangers but several other scenes sliced out, seemingly at random, then a few years later in full, and a fairly early DVD release, one of the first to have the sort of full selection of extras that set the standard for the range continuing today (complete with a scriptwriter being unfeasibly rude about Mary Whitehouse, as he should). And it’s the first ‘classic’ Doctor Who to be released on Blu-ray, in tribute to Elisabeth Sladen as an extra feature on The Sarah Jane Adventures Series Four – while if you missed it on CBBC last month, the very last and one of the finest of The Sarah Jane Adventures begins tomorrow on BBC1, so make sure you catch it. As a Blu-ray experience, though, Richard notes in Millennium’s excellent Mysteries of Doctor Who #23: Why Does Pyramids of Mars Take Place in ENGLAND? that the disc presentation could be better. One of the great things about that article, incidentally, is that it mirrors the Scarman brothers as both keys to Sutekh’s escape: everyone knows that Marcus’ archaeological bent is bent by Sutekh; but Laurence’s scientific invention becomes another fatal flaw. This was released on 31st October this year, appropriately, for what’s probably the most perfect Halloween Doctor Who story (its main competition being Image of the Fendahl, both adventures first shown at the end of October, both filmed at the same manor house, though the latter ironically set at Lammas). And though I can’t remember where I first saw this picture – several years ago – or give appropriate credit to the bright carver who created it, it’s remarkable what you can find on your hard drive, isn’t it?
The Return of Marcus Scarman
With all that to live up to, you might wonder how the book can compare without the actors, music, direction or location, particularly as the novelisations and Terrance Dicks especially tend to tone down the horror (Ian Marter’s The Ark In Space, on the other hand…). But you needn’t worry, even if he takes out the most controversial bit (it’s not the one Mary Whitehouse would think of). Though this doesn’t have quite the depth and power of his Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion – nor its thrill of horror that outmatches that story’s TV version, as I’ve recently written – it’s still one of Terrance’s best, telling the story with pace, occasional flourishes and fascinating extensions at either end, into the past and the future. Last week, I looked in detail at another childhood favourite, Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters, and noted that Terrance himself says he rose to his best when novelising Bob Holmes’ work, because those were simply the best scripts (and I’m pretty sure that it was when signing my copy of Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars that he told me that in pretty much those words).
I have many memories of the book in particular: when I was a little boy and only just starting on my life of obsessive collecting spreading out all my Doctor Who books (perhaps thirty or so) and trying to put them in ‘best’ order, with this always at or near the front; it being the first I chose to lend to another boy at primary school (Martin Campbell, down in The Valley; not the James Bond director) to show him why they were so brilliant… Before, I suspect, going overboard and adding a crate of others, not realising that not everyone would share my enthusiasm or indeed reading speed; and, of course, the book itself, from the mythic Prologue to the melancholy, eerie Epilogue of Sarah Jane alone in a library (a familiar part of my young life).
Chris Achilleos’ original cover, now used for the audiobook, is uncharacteristically stark – a grim-faced Doctor and even grimmer rifle-wielding Sarah Jane framed around a mummy (out of character for her, you might think, though arguably there’s nothing so Doctor Who as the juxtaposition of frock and gun). Alister Pearson’s cover for the reprint (adapted here into a video cover, and also used on Heathcliff Blair’s CD of Dudley Simpson Doctor Who music of the period) is one of his best, intense and expansive, seething with dark colours around the Doctor, Sutekh and his servants.
“For many thousands of years SUTEKH had waited . . . trapped in the heart of an Egyptian Pyramid. Now at last the time had come – the moment of release, when all the force of his pent-up evil and malice would be unleashed upon the world . . .When I was a boy, I loved those exciting back blurbs; now I ask, only half-possessed? Though I also now realise that mentioning UNIT should have been much more jarring at the time, and only wasn’t because most of the early books were of Jon Pertwee stories. And yet that very cosy familiarity was clearly designed to be a deliberate statement in the original script – with the Doctor at last breaking away from his exiled Earth ‘home’, albeit less destructively than Sutekh, this firmly told anyone expecting a return to the early ’70s status quo that literally right where the comfortable familiarity of UNIT ‘ought’ to be there’s going to be a time-travel story of unspeakable horror instead (and in case you didn’t get the message, the substitute UNIT HQ gets burned to the ground). So at a glance, this is something bolder than usual. Terrance doesn’t even use any of his stock chapter titles, the most traditional – if effective – being “The Terror is Unleashed”, though few others could actually boast “The World Destroyed . . .” and “The Weapon of the Time Lords” has rather a ring to it. As does…
“The TARDIS lands on the site of UNIT headquarters in the year 1911, and the Doctor and Sarah emerge to fight a terrifying and deadly battle . . . against Egyptian Mummies, half-possessed humans – and the overwhelming evil power of SUTEKH!”
The Legend of the Osirians
Terrance Dicks rarely added scenes when novelising Doctor Who scripts, so his rare Prologues were always a treat for me. This one, “The Legend of the Osirians”, memorably gives his backstory for Sutekh and his people. It’s interesting to compare it to other interpretations: Justin Richards’ The Sands of Time pedantically ‘corrects’ the details to fit ‘proper’ Egyptian mythology and grinds down imagination with banal spaceships and explanations of psychic powers; Lawrence Miles’ Faction Paradox series offers a vast, non-linear mythos of rival gods that fits more with the cynical asides of Robert Holmes’ script. Terrance’s advantage here is that he paints with a broad brush as if an ancient story told many times, allowing you to fill in the details of a galaxy-spanning conflict in your mind’s eye without the bathos of spelling them all out in a couple of pages. His disadvantage I think is that he has a more comforting worldview than Robert Holmes’ dark universe; rather than everyone who isn’t evil being corrupt, Terrance tends to tell stories of bad apples but a basically trustworthy establishment, as in his tale of the godlike Osirians:
“As they grew in power, so they grew in wisdom – all but one.”And yet in other ways Terrance makes his Universe every bit as dark as Bob Holmes’. The script, famously, kills off every character other than the Doctor, Sarah Jane, and the Egyptian labourers who flee in terror from Marcus Scarman’s ill-fated archaeological dig in the first scene; on the page, even they are swiftly caught and slaughtered by the Cult of the Black Pyramid, making the book – with Terrance’s own Horror of Fang Rock – the most merciless in the entire series. If anything, his deft little biographical notes that sketch in the likes of Marcus Scarman (“The year was 1911, and Englishmen abroad were expected to maintain certain standards”), Ibrahim Namin (“To his terror and delight, one of the Great Ones had spoken to him”) and especially Ernie Clements (who “regarded himself as the Scarmans’ unpaid gamekeeper”) make their gruesome fates all the worse for first having made us feel for the characters as people.
Against expectations, he maintains much of the feel of horror throughout, not least by being constantly aware that Marcus Scarman, walking around as the apparent villain of the piece for much of the story, is a perambulating, smouldering corpse under Sutekh’s control. He underlines the arrival of the ‘messenger’ by giving him bare feet as he steps out to dispose of Sutekh’s earlier servant, whose “shuddering scream” is as horrible a moment as any in the novels; he describes the charred hands that kill his brother, only hinted at on TV; most memorably, as Sutekh sends him the co-ordinates for the Pyramids of Mars, he picks up the despatch:
“The cylinder glowed with the fire of Sutekh and there was a horrible sizzling sound as Marcus touched it. But he felt no pain. Only the living feel pain.”One change where Terrance could have done with rather more ambiguity is towards the end, as Marcus Scarman’s body finally collapses into ash: on screen, you can make your own reading as to whether it’s Marcus or Sutekh who at the last exclaims that he’s free. Yet perhaps that’s his surprising mercilessness coming through again; with Sutekh exultant, there’s not even the faintest crumb of comfort to take from the old archaeologist’s fate. Either way, there’s a terrible aptness in that, possessed, his last act is to be once more an archaeologist, in the service of a hideous patron. His friend Dr Warlock is a more striking but sensible change in the context of a novel: a ruddy-faced, hearty, typical village squire (given a bluff Yorkshire accent in Tom’s reading) in the book, fitting his self-confident to the point of bossy character but very different to Peter Copley’s fine TV performance. Think for a moment, though, and you can see how Paddy Russell might cast to suggest an elderly, ascetic gentleman who you could easily imagine as an old friend and contemporary of Bernard Archard’s Marcus Scarman, while Terrance has very reasonably made him a very different physical type so as not to end up describing two very similar thin old men.
Sarah Jane shines through the book, as Lis Sladen did on screen in what was surely her most effective season as the Doctor’s companion – she even lifts the novel at points by taking the piss out of the Doctor, if less so than on screen, giving a bit of a release of tension when Terrance evokes the horror of the script with unexpected force but rarely manages to get across the moments of humour. One slight change, having not Warlock’s hat but the Doctor’s dropped for their pursuers to find, gives her a grimly amusing moment of mutiny over his outfits.
Without Michael Sheard’s childlike wonder and Lis Sladen’s grim defiance, the ‘escape’ to “1980” – mentioned six times on TV but tactfully trimmed from the book – doesn’t have quite the same punch, though the scene again stands out as one of those (as in The Masque of Mandragora) in which Robert Holmes decided it was time to say out loud those questions everyone put to him in the BBC canteen and up the tension with it into the bargain. In Doctor Who’s ultimate horror story, it’s not just all his favourite horror themes from the cinema that are on view, but new ones he introduces especially for a time travel series. We get fear of the living dead; fear of possession and loss of identity; fear of something horrible happening to a loved one, and even being done by a loved one; fear of confinement and pursuit, at the same time; we get several different types of horrible death, through burning, strangling and crushing; and if all that fear, existential horror and plain death isn’t enough to scare you, the trip to the alternate present day where, because the Doctor deserts his post, Sutekh has long since destroyed the world, gives new existential horror on a grand scale, not just of the end of the world but that you might have ceased to exist before you were even born.
In the Power of Sutekh
Though Terrance drops the ball a bit in having Sutekh’s voice sometimes rise “to a maddened howl” in typical OTT villain description, at other points he captures something of Gabriel Woolf’s quietly compelling portrayal – there’s “hideous strain” in his voice when holding in an explosion, and the first description of him is perfect:
“Sutekh’s voice was soft and ferocious at the same time, like that of some great beast.”Neither the design nor the script quite deliver on the final episode’s voyage inside a trap-filled alien pyramid – the Pyramid of Mars promised from the first – on TV, but as ever it’s on a bigger budget on the page, with the added advantage that Terrance can use carefully ambiguous descriptions to imply far more devious traps and puzzles. While seeing the VHS in the late ’80s was for the most part an amazing thrill, I can still remember being rather disappointed by the inner chamber for which my imagination fed by the book had overlaid my actually having seen the programme, an awesome chamber of light in which “cradled in a silver tulip-shaped cup was what appeared to be a giant ruby, bigger than a man’s head. Four silver rods projected from it, like the rays of a stylised sun” – rather than, on screen, something that looks a bit like an item of garden ornamenture. Even throwaway details add to the design – such as the simple but rewarding moment where we ‘see’ that the deflection barriers around the Scarman Estate don’t just go straight up but form the pattern of a pyramid.
Those deflection barriers invite comparisons with The Dæmons in particular, showing a very different sort of worldview from when Terrance Dicks was lead writer on the show to Robert Holmes’ period; they’re very different stories, and the points of similarity only show up their differences (as if Hinchcliffe and Holmes were poking the Pertwee era in the eye with something very much tauter and darker). The vicar’s only bad in one because he’s been done away with and replaced by the Master; the priest is only a part of a nasty Cult in the other. The alien that looks like the Devil in one is a cross between an amoral scientist and a harsh Old Testament father God, who when he wakes up may destroy the world if we don’t meet his exacting standards; the demonic alien here is a cruel and twisted Lovecraftian dark god that will destroy the world once freed because he wants to. And while both stories have the scene hemmed in by an impassable force barrier, in one the barrier is merely an inconvenience that stops people getting in or out, while in this story it makes a whole country estate a place of claustrophobic horror because the grey ‘inanimate’ servants that have come to life are stalking rather than merely guarding, determined to kill everyone within. In both stories, too, the Doctor builds a clever machine to stop the enemy, but it’s destroyed before it can do the trick, but each is succeeded by a very different finale. Whereas in The Dæmons it’s human goodness that wins out, something it would be impossible to believe against Sutekh (or, some might say, full stop), in Pyramids of Mars, each of the last three episodes builds up a device that will foil Sutekh, each blown by the end except for the last one – the first a lash-up that fails, the second succeeding for the moment but at the cost of the Doctor, and the last invoking the might of the Time Lords, pitting (according to taste) one mythic race against another or pitting science against god… And Terrance’s novelisation improves the ending of Pyramids of Mars in two key ways. First, his chapter title naming Time “The Weapon of the Time Lords” makes it sound both rather grand and ponderous and as if it’s down to someone other than the Doctor (had he called that final chapter ‘The Doctor Shoots Sutekh With a Big Time-Gun’ it would have seemed both easier and much less in character). And then he gives us a proper aftermath.
While on TV we can sit back and watch the rising flames to give closure, the book grounds us with an appropriate coda, the Doctor musing over the fire as practical Sarah Jane wants to get out before “some heavily-moustached village policeman of the year nineteen eleven” arrives to ask questions, then back in the TARDIS the way she ponders one by one every death, including remembering Laurence’s “bright-eyed eagerness” looking round the TARDIS, “And most tragic of all, Marcus Scarman, taken over and burnt out by Sutekh’s horrible alien power.” With the Epilogue still to come, the end of the book really gives it a sense that it matters. And that elegiac Epilogue in which Terrance shows that he, too, can answer those questions asked in the BBC canteen (‘Didn’t anyone notice?’), is unique in the Target range, set “Later, much later,” once Sarah Jane has parted from the Doctor, where she visits the little country town close by the scene and looks up the newspaper files from 1911:
“BROTHERS DIE IN TRAGIC FIRE
“HOLOCAUST SWEEPS COUNTRY ESTATE…
“Sarah skimmed through the rest of the report. So that was what the Doctor had meant. The terrible events surrounding the return of Sutekh had found a natural explanation, a deplorable but soon forgotten tragedy in an English country village.
“Sarah looked through the window, out into the bustling high street of the little country town. She shivered at the memory of the desolate world she had seen through the doors of the TARDIS—the world Sutekh would have made if he had not been defeated. The sacrifice of all those lives had not been in vain. The pity was that no one would ever know.
“Sarah closed the heavy old volume and went into the summer sunshine of her own, unchanged, twentieth century.”
The Doctor Fights Back
Tom Baker read four complete audiobooks from Target novels before moving on to ‘new’ adventures, of which more later, but this is by a long stretch his best. Decades before, he’d created a reedy ‘old man’ voice for an abridged version of State of Decay that really doesn’t work for Solon when he digs it up after a quarter of a century, for example, while even the humour of The Creature From the Pit didn’t bring out the best in him.
In Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars, though, you can hear an actor who’s suddenly enjoying and engaging with his material, doing justice to an excellent book. His ‘old man’ gets new life for Laurence, while his bluff, Yorkshire Warlock is ideal and his ferocious Sutekh decidedly impressive. He gives an appropriate air of mythic grandeur to the Prologue, is entertaining on Sarah’s little asides, and even seems to engage with ‘his’ own lines, finding interestingly different readings for many of them – generally playing the Doctor a little lighter in 2008 than in 1975 (and still giving a pronounced ‘shh’ sound in the word “eviscerated”). Aided by its own musical motifs, this CD is surely the best way to enjoy it today (and the only one that’s not out of print).
Epilogue
I was a little mean to Justin Richards’ Missing Adventures novel The Sands of Time above, but it’s frustrating in part because a lot of it’s so good – it would simply be much better if it had no connection to Pyramids of Mars. This sequel is brilliantly plotted, but follows its source material of Mummy movies and Egyptian mythology far too slavishly – not least, effectively saying ‘Doctor Who got it wrong and I’m going to get the legends right,’ getting in the way of a good story to try for spurious accuracy. A sequel shouldn’t make its original smaller. And then there’s the book’s stand-in for the all-hating, especially sibling-hating Sutekh. Justin would change Terrance’s line to ‘As they grew in power, so they grew in wisdom – all but one… And his Mum and his sister, with whom he remained best mates’, and I find that very hard to swallow (oh, his Mum? Actually, she’s in a Big Finish CD, which again is rather fun if you can ignore Pyramids of Mars, but it would be a spoiler to say which. E-mail me if you want to know).
Twenty-first Century Doctor Who stories owing a debt to Pyramids of Mars range from Steven Moffat’s “Timey-wimey” scripts or Sarah Jane reminding the Doctor that “A man has just been murdered!” while he only pays attention to millions being echoed in Rose to the outright references in The Impossible Planet, where the planet’s code number is ‘Sutekh’ backwards if you squint, the Doctor muses about Sutekh and the sinister voice of the great Beast is even provided by none other than Gabriel Woolf. “Don’t turn around,” indeed. And, in this time of wonders, you can now buy the toys that my eyes would have boggled out on stalks to see when I was little: two slightly different versions of Sutekh’s Mummies are available from Character Options, complete with either jackal-or-falcon-headed canopic jars with silver force generators inside; an inappropriately grinning figure of Tom Baker’s Doctor with the part of the TARDIS he wires up to Sutekh’s space-time tunnel to make him miss his station; and, next year, even a cuddly Sutekh, apparently.
The most impressive variation on the theme, though, is undoubtedly a series of six linked audio dramas. Gabriel Woolf returned to the role of Sutekh alongside Julian Glover, Isla Blair, Philip Madoc and others in Lawrence Miles’ 2005-2009 Faction Paradox series from Magic Bullet (Coming to Dust / The Ship of a Billion Years, Body Politic / Words From Nine Divinities and Ozymandias / The Judgment of Sutekh), which expands the Osiran Court across time and space. You’ve probably not heard of it, but it’s a brilliant piece of work.
But Doctor Who fans have a lot to thank this novel for in two better-selling if less intense audio drama series. Listening to the audiobook, it felt like Tom Baker was getting into it in a way he hadn’t with his three previous readings – and it turns out he really had. After years of resisting, it was on doing this reading that he was at last enthused enough to agree to record new Doctor Who audio dramas, first with BBC Audiobooks and now with Big Finish. So Robert Holmes, Terrance Dicks and a novel from 1976 are still impressive enough to be pushing on new Doctor Who today.
Labels: Books, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Faction Paradox, Jon Pertwee, Julian Glover, Mary Whitehouse, Music, Personal, Philip Madoc, Pictures, Religion, Reviews, Sarah Jane Smith, Tom Baker, Toys
Monday, October 17, 2011
DVD Detail: Doctor Who – The Time Warrior
It’s nearly time for Sarah Jane Smith’s final adventure. She was with the Doctor when I was three and first fell in love with the series, and it’s been wonderful to have her back on screen for five years in The Sarah Jane Adventures (with CBBC showing every single episode this week. Time to catch up). So with today’s and tomorrow’s finale looming, I’m excited but never been so heartbroken at new Doctor Who. Time to go back, then, to 1973 and Doctor Who – The Time Warrior, where both Sarah Jane Smith and the Sontarans made their first appearance… Along with Dot Cotton and Boba Fett!
Jon Pertwee is the Doctor in The Time Warrior, opening his final season, the last before I started watching. It’s a highly regarded and influential story – not just introducing Sarah Jane and the Sontarans, played brilliantly from the first by Elisabeth Sladen and Kevin Lindsay, but a witty script from top writer Robert Holmes that takes us to Medieval England and sets the template for the series’ signature aliens-crashing-into-Earth-history story (effectively rediscovering the earlier The Time Meddler and giving the story a boot up the arse). And, like many Pertwees, it made a terrific book, too. I even recommended it as a Pertwee choice for my Eleven Faces of Doctor Who selection. But I have to admit, I think it falls a bit short of its potential. It’s very good – but a few plot oversights, a tired air throughout Pertwee’s final season, and particularly a director whose attitude seems to be ‘that’ll do’ (albeit boosted slightly on DVD by some shiny CGI effects) all combine to make it flatter than it ought to be. And that’s a particular shame for the Sontarans – for me, a childhood favourite monster, yet none of their stories quite lift into ‘outstanding’ (while top-ranking arch-foes the Daleks, the Master and the Cybermen all have top-ranking adventures to champion them). All that slightly apologetic tone may explain why, though back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – and awarded The Time Warrior a sprightly 47th place, I’d put it at least fifty places lower, just about smack in the middle.
While this ‘taster’ may not be short, incidentally, though occasionally brutish, it would be nasty to be too spoilery. So read on without fear of finding out the ending.
Like a lot of the best drama or comedy (here, pitched neatly in between), the brilliant dialogue is all about people not listening to each other, and here they almost literally don’t speak each other’s language. Irongron and Bloodaxe carouse in cod Olde English idiom (lampshaded by Sarah’s “Let’s talk sensibly”), and don’t bother to try and understand the “crazed wench”; Linx is coldly analytical and alien, constantly realising that his medieval allies don’t have a clue and grasping instantly that Sarah Jane is not of their time; and Sarah Jane herself acts just like we would, suddenly thrust back in time – angry at being pushed around, a little afraid, but mainly trying to make sense of it all. And thankfully this isn’t Hollywood, so Sarah Jane doesn’t predict an eclipse, dazzle her captors with the wonders of nylon, nor show them how to breakdance.
Sarah Jane is spitting fire as she’s dragged in – “Get lost! That hurt, you fool!” – and then intelligent as she jumps to the obvious conclusions: play-acting, she thinks, and tells Irongron to “take off that ridiculous gear and go home to your butcher’s shop!”; a film set? No, no cameras; some kind of pre-theme park reconstruction?
The stranded Sontaran’s performance is scene-stealing in quite a different way to the brigands’ coarse humour and Sarah Jane’s brightness – abrupt, functional and dismissive, his clone warrior’s perspective on sex (ironically, less sexist than the Doctor) pleased Terrance Dicks so much that he’s used it again several times since. And he grabs the attention when he uses cold technology to force the truth from Sarah Jane. But just as you’ve suddenly sobered up to take the scene more seriously, Linx brings on the last player in this scene, a robot knight he’s built as part of his rent to Irongron. A remorseless, unstoppable metal killer, this should be the most terrifying part of the alien’s careless toying with human history. But instead of a gleaming suit of armour, the budget only runs to a quilted jerkin for a robot so fabulously rubbish that Linx’s ludicrously oversized remote control looks like it’s compensating for something. Too young to see it as a boy, I read about it with hungry excitement in the novel, and was mystified at the lack of a picture in the Doctor Who robot compendium The Adventures of K9 and Other Mechanical Creatures: the text had it, so what could possibly explain this disappointing omission? I mean, when I was seven or eight, a robot crossed with a knight in armour?! What could possibly have been more exciting, except a robot that was a knight in armour that was also a dinosaur? On which point, I couldn’t understand why there were no pictures from the next story, either. Such innocent days.
The Time Warrior starts thrillingly, setting out a new agenda for a new season – a stunning new title sequence (the prototype for Tom Baker’s), and boldly starting off not in the era’s UNIT comfort zone but in a medieval castle with a gang of scurvy cutthroats, then joined by a crash-landing alien warlord. It’s only when he realises that this bunch won’t be able to repair his ship that he reaches through time to capture modern scientists and, after a daringly long absence from the screen, we finally get to see anything resembling business as usual. When it’s the first fully-fledged trip back in time for five or more years, this is an outstandingly confident challenge to the audience – even if the overarching colour of brown in place of the previous year’s glam Technicolor is a more accurate hint to the mood of Pertwee’s final year. It’s just frustrating that an often audacious script so packed with witty dialogue suffers a time-serving BBC staff director with absolutely no spark, pace or energy.
Jon Pertwee gives one of his more engaging performances as the Doctor, and his character’s comparatively un-gittish. But then, with his TARDIS is working again, why is he acting like he’s still in exile? I’ve suggested before that it’s because by now he’s thoroughly institutionalised – this Doctor’s still staying where the Time Lords told him to go even when they’ve “forgiven” him, as if he’s lost all confidence in himself. He travels back in time not for pleasure, but to stop interference in history – naming and claiming his homeworld for the first time, he seems all too thoroughly ‘rehabilitated’ as he volunteers himself to the cause of the “Galactic ticket inspectors”. He’s now such a well-behaved little Time Lord that it’s surely time for a regeneration. Despite his establishment attitudes, perhaps I’m more on his side this time because he’s under fire from all sides – sometimes literally – with critiques not just from Linx and Sarah Jane but, amongst all Bob Holmes’ rude asides, few are as pointed as the Doctor hoping to save Sarah Jane – “I’ve got to go and find a young girl” – followed by Professor Rubeish saying on screen for the first time what everyone would say to that (and I’m with the Professor on wanting chocolate rather than an extended time-tour, too).
Infamous for his showy hand-to-hand combat, Pertwee here gets a huge fight sequence across the castle courtyard that’s assisted by the unusually large number of extras but hampered by the director’s static long-shots that demonstrate both that there still aren’t enough extras and that he’s running about in utterly aimless loops rather than trying to get away. Yet I still can’t help being excited by his casting a blazing torch into straw, and amused by Irongron’s description after Pertwee’s knocked him over:
Perhaps the most successful element of the story is that everything comes together first time for the Sontarans. Kevin Lindsay’s powerful performance makes Linx a character, not a monster, aided by a great part as scripted: he’s playing the third Doctor, take two, with an even more hirsute UNIT. An advanced alien with (contrived, improbable, but jolly handy) time travel capabilities stranded among warrior humans he thinks of as primitive and grumpy when they ask him to do them favours rather than get on with fixing his ship? And if you want a critique of the third Doctor, there are few so pointed as Linx being both a more effective scientific advisor and a more competent spaceship mechanic in an hour and a half than the Doctor managed in four years. His and his race’s background are deftly sketched in in dialogue – with more in the book – and, while the Sontarans were inspired by Teutonic soldiery, his way of marching in, ignoring the locals, planting a flag and claiming the planet is as much the British Empire as the Sontaran one. He’s a triumph of design, too, in costume, make-up and spaceship: that famous helmet coming off to reveal a head shaped just like it; that expressive face; that memorable golf-ball ship. I suspect they were all reasons why they were my favourite monsters as a boy, along with their brutality – all brilliantly simple designs that you could draw. So I have to admit they were the first major misstep for me in the Twenty-first Century series’ redesigns, despite excellent actors: making the Sontarans not rugby-player short and stocky but tiny and top-heavy ballet-dancer-legged; making their heads too small for their helmets and their armour too fussy; missing the point of a spherical ship and giving it a cockpit, rockets and go-faster stripes, so it can no longer veer off in any direction and boys can no longer draw it at speed. Here, the only false note for the first Sontaran is that his ‘gun’ is a great interrogation device but a pretty crummy weapon.
The story’s greatly helped by its location footage at a real fake castle, some of which looks gorgeous. It’s not much helped by the director often seeming to think just pointing the camera at the scenery and leaving it will make the best of it, not least in the big battle for Part Three. He has one good idea – with the two sides now established as the Doctor with Sir Edward and Linx with Irongron, the two aliens are playing chess with real pieces, and holding Linx in close-up as Irongron’s scruffy band try to storm Sir Edward’s castle in the background emphasises this. The trouble is, he doesn’t then make much of the Doctor on the battlements as the other ‘player’, and showing Irongron’s men in long shot again proves that, while there are more of them than in many Doctor Whos, there are nothing like enough. Even the script, though, falls down a little here: great at being witty, it’s not really thought through the pitched battle, with the grim Beau Geste idea of dead men at the embrasures (used to great effect in the following year’s series) made lightweight by having mere wooden ‘soldiers’ and the Doctor being better at tactics than strategy – he needed to combine his multiple ‘effects’ of full walls, Satanic attack and arrows, rather than spreading them out one by one so that anyone watching can see the trick of each. I suspect the joint reasons are so that the camera can gradually spin out the different stages of defence for maximum screen time, and that they didn’t want to show the Doctor killing people. But if that’s the case, mounting a medieval siege in the first place wasn’t the best notion. Called a “Norman ninny,” the Doctor doesn’t even pass muster as a Pythonian French Taunter. The script similarly bungles its sense of scale in Part Four, when the Doctor and Sarah Jane constantly yo-yo back and forth between castles with the same ease and in about the same time as Linx pops up and down the stairs. I wonder if the final two episodes might not have been better cut down to one, making a story already taut by Pertwee standards run at a proper clip? I know I shuddered at Barry Letts’ suggestion that because it was so enjoyable it should have been dragged out to six parts instead…
The DVD extras are pretty good, led by optional CGI that can’t do anything about the poor direction and jumpy editing but improves most of the lacklustre Linx effects (though disappointingly doing nothing with the dull teleport ‘fades’). The exception is a big explosion, where an inappropriate but exciting quarry blast is replaced by something that resembles a small dragon sneezing through some gates, with a notable absence of demolition. The excellent ‘Making of’ is shot mainly on location, with producer Barry Letts, lead writer Terrance Dicks and star Elisabeth Sladen (the same team as on the entertaining commentary) added to bit by bit by other players. Barry wins points for ensuring Sarah Jane was both brave and scared at the same time, but loses them for talking complete bollocks about historical adventures (as I’ve previously demonstrated), while Lis’ list for Sarah Jane’s character is a treasure. The nine minutes of photos, often famous ones, are only let down by having none from the Radio Times Doctor Who Tenth Anniversary Special that’s trailed on here – not even the iconic, story-specific ones of Sarah Jane being stalked by Linx. The text notes aren’t bad for Richard Molesworth, largely because of the masses of extra script there wasn’t room for in Part One, and with a script this good, it’s great to see more of it. After opening well, though, he irritates by noting the story’s surprisingly early start date (a “New Year” season beginning on the 15th of December) but giving us no idea why, by cutting and pasting repetitive details, and by a myriad silly errors that should have been proofread. The Dr Who Annual 1974 in pdf isn’t bad, with uninspired stories but some pretty decent artwork – particularly for the comic strips – that’s improved if you overlook the artist’s clear lack of authorised likenesses for anyone bar Jon Pertwee. I’m forced to admit, though, that the rather wittily edited Coming Soon trailer is my favourite extra on here: “The Key to Time is mine, miiine!”
Jeremy Bulloch does rather a good job reading the audiobook, the easiest way to get hold of it today, and it’s a real thrill to hear that Prologue. So why not pick this up, too? The TV version’s good – but the book’s better. You might also look out the DVD of Horror of Fang Rock from four years later: Bob Holmes’ revenge on Terrance for making him do homework about history; Terrance Dicks taking inspiration in the crashing spaceship and bringing to the screen the Sontaran’s arch-enemies created here only in dialogue; and even one of the same actors. And, of course, you should be watching The Sarah Jane Adventures. If you missed today’s repeats, Invasion of the Bane and Whatever Happened To Sarah Jane? are particularly outstanding to look out on iPlayer (or, indeed, the whole lot again next week on CBBC). But first, and last, there’s tomorrow…
Jon Pertwee is the Doctor in The Time Warrior, opening his final season, the last before I started watching. It’s a highly regarded and influential story – not just introducing Sarah Jane and the Sontarans, played brilliantly from the first by Elisabeth Sladen and Kevin Lindsay, but a witty script from top writer Robert Holmes that takes us to Medieval England and sets the template for the series’ signature aliens-crashing-into-Earth-history story (effectively rediscovering the earlier The Time Meddler and giving the story a boot up the arse). And, like many Pertwees, it made a terrific book, too. I even recommended it as a Pertwee choice for my Eleven Faces of Doctor Who selection. But I have to admit, I think it falls a bit short of its potential. It’s very good – but a few plot oversights, a tired air throughout Pertwee’s final season, and particularly a director whose attitude seems to be ‘that’ll do’ (albeit boosted slightly on DVD by some shiny CGI effects) all combine to make it flatter than it ought to be. And that’s a particular shame for the Sontarans – for me, a childhood favourite monster, yet none of their stories quite lift into ‘outstanding’ (while top-ranking arch-foes the Daleks, the Master and the Cybermen all have top-ranking adventures to champion them). All that slightly apologetic tone may explain why, though back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – and awarded The Time Warrior a sprightly 47th place, I’d put it at least fifty places lower, just about smack in the middle.
While this ‘taster’ may not be short, incidentally, though occasionally brutish, it would be nasty to be too spoilery. So read on without fear of finding out the ending.
That Golden Moment
“What is this?”For my previous Jon Pertwee story, Colony In Space – influential as his Doctor’s first proper journey in space, as this is his first proper trip back in time – I picked a particularly short ‘moment’, just a few seconds of sudden cliffhanger. Today, I’m turning to Part Two of The Time Warrior for one of Doctor Who’s longest continuous scenes, a good six minutes that suggests some of the ageing director’s preference for theatre. What’s unusual (but rather great) about it is the way that, rather than cutting between different scenes to illustrate different characters, they all come on and go off as if the castle great hall were a stage: ‘Enter IRONGRON, a DRUNKEN MEDIEVAL ROBBER BARON, and BLOODAXE, his even stupider HENCHMAN, with SARAH JANE SMITH, a JOURNALIST – she is angry’; ‘Enter HAL, an ARCHER, held by BRIGANDS’; ‘Enter LINX, a SINISTER ALIEN WARLORD…’; ‘Exit SARAH JANE, on tiptoe’. And while the Doctor pokes his nose about outside, this central scene explores the two big new characters, the new monster and the new companion.
“Eh? Oh, just a girl, taken in the forest.”
“Girl? You have two species on this planet?”
“How say you?”
“The girl is not of your kind, Irongron. The hair is finer, the thorax of a different construction.”
“Oh, Hell’s teeth! Have you no girls beyond the stars? No women to do the lowly work?”
“Ah, I understand. You have a primary and secondary reproductive cycle. It is an inefficient system – you should change it.”
Like a lot of the best drama or comedy (here, pitched neatly in between), the brilliant dialogue is all about people not listening to each other, and here they almost literally don’t speak each other’s language. Irongron and Bloodaxe carouse in cod Olde English idiom (lampshaded by Sarah’s “Let’s talk sensibly”), and don’t bother to try and understand the “crazed wench”; Linx is coldly analytical and alien, constantly realising that his medieval allies don’t have a clue and grasping instantly that Sarah Jane is not of their time; and Sarah Jane herself acts just like we would, suddenly thrust back in time – angry at being pushed around, a little afraid, but mainly trying to make sense of it all. And thankfully this isn’t Hollywood, so Sarah Jane doesn’t predict an eclipse, dazzle her captors with the wonders of nylon, nor show them how to breakdance.
Sarah Jane is spitting fire as she’s dragged in – “Get lost! That hurt, you fool!” – and then intelligent as she jumps to the obvious conclusions: play-acting, she thinks, and tells Irongron to “take off that ridiculous gear and go home to your butcher’s shop!”; a film set? No, no cameras; some kind of pre-theme park reconstruction?
“Mind you, I think you’re overdoing the sordid realism a bit.”All that, yet still not quite as postmodern as Robert Holmes’ previous script, Carnival of Monsters. Another recurring Bob Holmes theme is that he doesn’t think much of Robin Hood: prefiguring his swipes at the legend in The Sun Makers and The Ribos Operation, here he has two Robins – Irongron the robber baron and his band of bloodthirsty outlaws, and Hal, the handsome archer in green… Who’s hauled before Irongron here after a failed assassination, for an interrogation full of (implied) sex and violence. No wonder Sarah Jane – Lis Sladen still brilliantly showing us her working it out in the background – is coming to the conclusion that things are as desperate as they seem even before Linx appears.
The stranded Sontaran’s performance is scene-stealing in quite a different way to the brigands’ coarse humour and Sarah Jane’s brightness – abrupt, functional and dismissive, his clone warrior’s perspective on sex (ironically, less sexist than the Doctor) pleased Terrance Dicks so much that he’s used it again several times since. And he grabs the attention when he uses cold technology to force the truth from Sarah Jane. But just as you’ve suddenly sobered up to take the scene more seriously, Linx brings on the last player in this scene, a robot knight he’s built as part of his rent to Irongron. A remorseless, unstoppable metal killer, this should be the most terrifying part of the alien’s careless toying with human history. But instead of a gleaming suit of armour, the budget only runs to a quilted jerkin for a robot so fabulously rubbish that Linx’s ludicrously oversized remote control looks like it’s compensating for something. Too young to see it as a boy, I read about it with hungry excitement in the novel, and was mystified at the lack of a picture in the Doctor Who robot compendium The Adventures of K9 and Other Mechanical Creatures: the text had it, so what could possibly explain this disappointing omission? I mean, when I was seven or eight, a robot crossed with a knight in armour?! What could possibly have been more exciting, except a robot that was a knight in armour that was also a dinosaur? On which point, I couldn’t understand why there were no pictures from the next story, either. Such innocent days.
Something Else To Look Out For
The Time Warrior starts thrillingly, setting out a new agenda for a new season – a stunning new title sequence (the prototype for Tom Baker’s), and boldly starting off not in the era’s UNIT comfort zone but in a medieval castle with a gang of scurvy cutthroats, then joined by a crash-landing alien warlord. It’s only when he realises that this bunch won’t be able to repair his ship that he reaches through time to capture modern scientists and, after a daringly long absence from the screen, we finally get to see anything resembling business as usual. When it’s the first fully-fledged trip back in time for five or more years, this is an outstandingly confident challenge to the audience – even if the overarching colour of brown in place of the previous year’s glam Technicolor is a more accurate hint to the mood of Pertwee’s final year. It’s just frustrating that an often audacious script so packed with witty dialogue suffers a time-serving BBC staff director with absolutely no spark, pace or energy.
Jon Pertwee gives one of his more engaging performances as the Doctor, and his character’s comparatively un-gittish. But then, with his TARDIS is working again, why is he acting like he’s still in exile? I’ve suggested before that it’s because by now he’s thoroughly institutionalised – this Doctor’s still staying where the Time Lords told him to go even when they’ve “forgiven” him, as if he’s lost all confidence in himself. He travels back in time not for pleasure, but to stop interference in history – naming and claiming his homeworld for the first time, he seems all too thoroughly ‘rehabilitated’ as he volunteers himself to the cause of the “Galactic ticket inspectors”. He’s now such a well-behaved little Time Lord that it’s surely time for a regeneration. Despite his establishment attitudes, perhaps I’m more on his side this time because he’s under fire from all sides – sometimes literally – with critiques not just from Linx and Sarah Jane but, amongst all Bob Holmes’ rude asides, few are as pointed as the Doctor hoping to save Sarah Jane – “I’ve got to go and find a young girl” – followed by Professor Rubeish saying on screen for the first time what everyone would say to that (and I’m with the Professor on wanting chocolate rather than an extended time-tour, too).
Infamous for his showy hand-to-hand combat, Pertwee here gets a huge fight sequence across the castle courtyard that’s assisted by the unusually large number of extras but hampered by the director’s static long-shots that demonstrate both that there still aren’t enough extras and that he’s running about in utterly aimless loops rather than trying to get away. Yet I still can’t help being excited by his casting a blazing torch into straw, and amused by Irongron’s description after Pertwee’s knocked him over:
“a long-shanked rascal with a mighty nose”.He’s then clobbered by Sarah Jane, which is a first – there’s a neat idea that she thinks he’s behind everything and then, rather than just argue with him a bit, forms a commando team to nobble him. The actors pull it off, though the script doesn’t quite (being rather tangled on how much she knows about UNIT, or the Brigadier, and coming a cropper on her having witnessed Lethbridge-Stewart being a mate). Well, perhaps it’s a satire on how journalists always have a fixed idea for a story and won’t let facts get in the way. The script’s almost a deconstruction of Day of the Daleks from a couple of years earlier (a story ironically with the working title of “The Time Warriors”, and out on DVD last month): another starting with the premise of a ghost story and turning into a trick of the time, this one saunters in with a brilliant new alien rather than not quite relaunching an old one, is far wittier if less intelligent in its playing with time, and rather than helpless Jo being tied up by guerrillas makes Sarah Jane a guerrilla leader in her first story. Doctor Who stories often throw the Doctor and his companion into a situation to cause chaos – brilliantly, here it’s for each other. The only drawback is that the director of this story makes Day’s look like Peter Jackson.
Sarah Jane Smith: Awesome From the First
“Well, I thought all this might be a good story. I’m a journalist. Sarah Jane Smith.”Sarah Jane Smith is a star from the word go, the insults she shoots at Irongron still unmatched for a companion’s ‘first confrontation with a villain’. She introduces herself to the Doctor as a journalist, an independent person investigating what UNIT’s up to of her own will, rather than being assigned to him to assist with the Brigadier’s investigations. And though her feminism’s occasionally so brashly written it’s dated, Lis Sladen pulls it off (and the punchline to downtrodden Meg in the castle kitchens is still brilliant, though Sarah’s ruthless “Look at that great spider!” will come back to bite her). In contrast, the Doctor’s oh-so-funny “fair sex” remarks just make him seem like a git, though he’s really at his most sexist in other ways than the one everyone points to: yes, he asks her to make a cup of coffee… But that’s after exposing her as a freeloading impostor who’s wasting everyone’s time and not doing the important scientific job ‘she’s’ being paid and given board for. So what else, in that context, is she qualified to do? Stowing away on the TARDIS and turning out to be brilliant, obviously, but not in a scientific way. No, it’s not the coffee that’s offensive in that scene, but two other underlying assumptions: the Doctor’s control freak hostility to Sarah Jane asking questions shows Pertwee’s incarnation, as ever, to be as terrible a scientist as she’s a good journalist; and that a space research centre should employ Sarah Jane’s aunt as a virologist when all the other scientists we see there are working on alloys and drive mechanisms. What’s the difference? Oh dear. Yes, they’re all men, but Aunt Lavinia’s specialism has to be ‘girly’ because ‘they can’t do engineering’. It’s difficult not to conclude that this scene’s sexist after all, just not in the bit you think it is.
Perhaps the most successful element of the story is that everything comes together first time for the Sontarans. Kevin Lindsay’s powerful performance makes Linx a character, not a monster, aided by a great part as scripted: he’s playing the third Doctor, take two, with an even more hirsute UNIT. An advanced alien with (contrived, improbable, but jolly handy) time travel capabilities stranded among warrior humans he thinks of as primitive and grumpy when they ask him to do them favours rather than get on with fixing his ship? And if you want a critique of the third Doctor, there are few so pointed as Linx being both a more effective scientific advisor and a more competent spaceship mechanic in an hour and a half than the Doctor managed in four years. His and his race’s background are deftly sketched in in dialogue – with more in the book – and, while the Sontarans were inspired by Teutonic soldiery, his way of marching in, ignoring the locals, planting a flag and claiming the planet is as much the British Empire as the Sontaran one. He’s a triumph of design, too, in costume, make-up and spaceship: that famous helmet coming off to reveal a head shaped just like it; that expressive face; that memorable golf-ball ship. I suspect they were all reasons why they were my favourite monsters as a boy, along with their brutality – all brilliantly simple designs that you could draw. So I have to admit they were the first major misstep for me in the Twenty-first Century series’ redesigns, despite excellent actors: making the Sontarans not rugby-player short and stocky but tiny and top-heavy ballet-dancer-legged; making their heads too small for their helmets and their armour too fussy; missing the point of a spherical ship and giving it a cockpit, rockets and go-faster stripes, so it can no longer veer off in any direction and boys can no longer draw it at speed. Here, the only false note for the first Sontaran is that his ‘gun’ is a great interrogation device but a pretty crummy weapon.
Mucking About In History
“Something very odd is happening here.”I’ve always loved the uniquely Who-ish historical anachronisms of aliens or time meddlers when the Doctor travels back to a well-known period of Earth’s history, meets both exactly the sort of people we’d expect him to and some outer space people we really wouldn’t and everything collides. And if the most successful part of this story is the outer space person, the most entertaining parts are Irongron the sozzled bandit who’s squatting a castle and his adoring sidekick Bloodaxe, whose cod-Shakespeare and utter cluelessness make them loveable. Particularly when one’s roaring for wine, and the other’s lost in admiration at his boss’s “cunning plan”. I’m not the biggest admirer of director Alan Bromly, infamously so lethargic that on his only other Who he was one of the series’ few directors ever to be fired, but I can’t fault him on casting David Daker in both his stories. Irongron’s just as brilliant a double act as the Brigadier to Linx, constantly rowing with each other (and the human constantly coming off worst). They’re far more memorable than effete wounded crusader Sir Edward, though you can’t help but spot that his feisty, plotting wife (given some of the best lines, and described by the producer as a “goodie Lady Macbeth”) is June Brown, now Dot Cotton, just as the archer she sends to kill the uncouth next-door-neighbour is Jeremy Bulloch, famous as Boba Fett (and a regular in Robin of Sherwood, though not with a bow). Most of the actors are so good you can almost forgive the gate guard auditioning for the prize of most wooden performance in Doctor Who.
“Oh, yes, well if I may say so, Doctor, that is not exactly news to me.”
The story’s greatly helped by its location footage at a real fake castle, some of which looks gorgeous. It’s not much helped by the director often seeming to think just pointing the camera at the scenery and leaving it will make the best of it, not least in the big battle for Part Three. He has one good idea – with the two sides now established as the Doctor with Sir Edward and Linx with Irongron, the two aliens are playing chess with real pieces, and holding Linx in close-up as Irongron’s scruffy band try to storm Sir Edward’s castle in the background emphasises this. The trouble is, he doesn’t then make much of the Doctor on the battlements as the other ‘player’, and showing Irongron’s men in long shot again proves that, while there are more of them than in many Doctor Whos, there are nothing like enough. Even the script, though, falls down a little here: great at being witty, it’s not really thought through the pitched battle, with the grim Beau Geste idea of dead men at the embrasures (used to great effect in the following year’s series) made lightweight by having mere wooden ‘soldiers’ and the Doctor being better at tactics than strategy – he needed to combine his multiple ‘effects’ of full walls, Satanic attack and arrows, rather than spreading them out one by one so that anyone watching can see the trick of each. I suspect the joint reasons are so that the camera can gradually spin out the different stages of defence for maximum screen time, and that they didn’t want to show the Doctor killing people. But if that’s the case, mounting a medieval siege in the first place wasn’t the best notion. Called a “Norman ninny,” the Doctor doesn’t even pass muster as a Pythonian French Taunter. The script similarly bungles its sense of scale in Part Four, when the Doctor and Sarah Jane constantly yo-yo back and forth between castles with the same ease and in about the same time as Linx pops up and down the stairs. I wonder if the final two episodes might not have been better cut down to one, making a story already taut by Pertwee standards run at a proper clip? I know I shuddered at Barry Letts’ suggestion that because it was so enjoyable it should have been dragged out to six parts instead…
The DVD extras are pretty good, led by optional CGI that can’t do anything about the poor direction and jumpy editing but improves most of the lacklustre Linx effects (though disappointingly doing nothing with the dull teleport ‘fades’). The exception is a big explosion, where an inappropriate but exciting quarry blast is replaced by something that resembles a small dragon sneezing through some gates, with a notable absence of demolition. The excellent ‘Making of’ is shot mainly on location, with producer Barry Letts, lead writer Terrance Dicks and star Elisabeth Sladen (the same team as on the entertaining commentary) added to bit by bit by other players. Barry wins points for ensuring Sarah Jane was both brave and scared at the same time, but loses them for talking complete bollocks about historical adventures (as I’ve previously demonstrated), while Lis’ list for Sarah Jane’s character is a treasure. The nine minutes of photos, often famous ones, are only let down by having none from the Radio Times Doctor Who Tenth Anniversary Special that’s trailed on here – not even the iconic, story-specific ones of Sarah Jane being stalked by Linx. The text notes aren’t bad for Richard Molesworth, largely because of the masses of extra script there wasn’t room for in Part One, and with a script this good, it’s great to see more of it. After opening well, though, he irritates by noting the story’s surprisingly early start date (a “New Year” season beginning on the 15th of December) but giving us no idea why, by cutting and pasting repetitive details, and by a myriad silly errors that should have been proofread. The Dr Who Annual 1974 in pdf isn’t bad, with uninspired stories but some pretty decent artwork – particularly for the comic strips – that’s improved if you overlook the artist’s clear lack of authorised likenesses for anyone bar Jon Pertwee. I’m forced to admit, though, that the rather wittily edited Coming Soon trailer is my favourite extra on here: “The Key to Time is mine, miiine!”
Humpty Dumpty flew in a ballRichard, after Chaucer
Humpty Dumpty had a big fall
All the thug’s horses and all the thug’s men
Got guns and shit.
Doctor Who and the Time Warrior
“Linx was his name. He was a microsecond from obliteration.”I’ve reviewed several of the Target novelisations recently, so I’ve already set out my view that most of the Pertwee stories are much better on the page than the screen; Doctor Who and the Time Warrior is no exception. Written by Terrance Dicks with Robert Holmes, it gets two massive and immediate boosts, first from Roy Knipe’s outstanding cover painting of Linx, and then from the extended Prologue, all that Bob Holmes completed before he thought it was too much hard work, but a thrilling action piece that provides much of the Sontaran backstory (and, I realised many years after first reading it, is the only Doctor Who book that describes an orgasm). Terrance Dicks rises to the challenge of this opening and makes what was already a very witty story a cracking adventure tale as well, enhanced by much more of the script than made it to screen, both in dialogue and in action (and young Eric’s heroic mission has always been appealing).
Jeremy Bulloch does rather a good job reading the audiobook, the easiest way to get hold of it today, and it’s a real thrill to hear that Prologue. So why not pick this up, too? The TV version’s good – but the book’s better. You might also look out the DVD of Horror of Fang Rock from four years later: Bob Holmes’ revenge on Terrance for making him do homework about history; Terrance Dicks taking inspiration in the crashing spaceship and bringing to the screen the Sontaran’s arch-enemies created here only in dialogue; and even one of the same actors. And, of course, you should be watching The Sarah Jane Adventures. If you missed today’s repeats, Invasion of the Bane and Whatever Happened To Sarah Jane? are particularly outstanding to look out on iPlayer (or, indeed, the whole lot again next week on CBBC). But first, and last, there’s tomorrow…
Labels: Bigotry, Books, Doctor Who, DVD, DVD Details, Jon Pertwee, Pictures, Reviews, Richard, Robin Hood, Sarah Jane Smith, Toys
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Doctor Who 45th Anniversary – Why Was 2008 Brilliant?
There’s more excitement from The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood (Joe Lidster writes interesting stories for both), and more surprises from Big Finish: The Haunting of Thomas Brewster; Brave New Town; The Bride of Peladon; old stage plays reimagined; and Home Truths just kills us. TV Doctor Who offers sheer entertainment in Partners In Crime and The Unicorn and the Wasp, a giant ‘robot’ and countless “Who” gags in The Next Doctor, and two simply outstanding dramas – Midnight’s claustrophobic, terrifying inventiveness, and…
This has three DVD releases: a vanilla disc along with Partners in Crime and Planet of the Ood; in a box set of the whole 2008 season, complete with extras; and in Autumn 2009, paired again with Partners in Crime, accompanied by a magazine as part of the newly-launched Doctor Who DVD Files. You can also buy a double-pack with a toy ‘Pyrovile Magma Creature’ and ‘Roman soldier’.
The Fires of Pompeii
“You fought her off – with a water pistol! I bloody love you.”Awesome. Filming in Rome, an exploding volcano, flaming great monsters – and a moral argument that recalls Billy’s stories. With tragedy, mystery, modern art, fabulous frocks (and nice legs), shouty villains and a superb ‘duelling soothsayers’ scene, you can almost forget how funny it is, too.
“Because that’s how I see the Universe. Every waking second I can see what is, what was, what could be, what must not. That’s the burden of a Time Lord, Donna. I’m the only one left.”
This has three DVD releases: a vanilla disc along with Partners in Crime and Planet of the Ood; in a box set of the whole 2008 season, complete with extras; and in Autumn 2009, paired again with Partners in Crime, accompanied by a magazine as part of the newly-launched Doctor Who DVD Files. You can also buy a double-pack with a toy ‘Pyrovile Magma Creature’ and ‘Roman soldier’.
Labels: Big Finish, David Tennant, Doctor Who, DVD, History, Reviews, Sarah Jane Smith, Torchwood, Toys, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?, William Hartnell
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Doctor Who 45th Anniversary – Why Was 2007 Brilliant?
Gosh. The Sarah Jane Smith Adventures’ opening Invasion of the Bane and Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane… Big Finish’s Circular Time, 100 and Immortal Beloved… The Pirate Loop’s enthralling read… And marvellously interweaved TV Doctor Who: vampirism; transformations; bad, bad angels; David Tennant suffering brilliantly; Gridlock’s Dance of the Macra*; Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (the Master’s awakening making the year’s most gripping quarter-hour); and Paul Cornell’s beautiful, small-scale, essential story…
Two forty-five-minute episodes make one story to get teary over, and – it’s wonderful. There are three DVD releases: a vanilla DVD along with Blink; in a box set of the whole 2007 season, complete with extras (though still mysteriously without John Smith’s anguished “I am not the Doctor” that was in all the trailers); and in Autumn 2009, paired respectively with 42 and Blink, each with magazines as part of the newly-launched Doctor Who DVD Files. You can buy the Doctor’s watch and toy scarecrows, too, while the original 1995 book on which the TV story was based is available for free as an eBook with notes from Paul Cornell.
*The piece of music most associated with this year is the terrific theme first used on the season’s trailer, its first appearance in a story for the blissful Gridlock. It opens 2007’s Original Television Soundtrack CD under the official title of All the Strange, Strange Creatures, but to us it’ll always be ‘Dance of the Macra’.
Human Nature / The Family of Blood
“But we need the Doctor.”Can 1913’s attitudes, institutions and individuals deal with love and war? The Doctor’s human self doesn’t want his other life; wild-eyed Son-of-Mine wants to steal it and the show for super, super fun; and while Daleks now have no problem with stairs, John Smith does.
“And what am I, then? Nothing? I’m just a story.”
“Have you enjoyed it, Doctor? Being human? Has it taught you wonderful things? Are you better, richer, wiser, hmm? Then let’s see you answer this – which one of them do you want us to kill? Maid or matron? Your friend, or your lover… Your choice!”
Two forty-five-minute episodes make one story to get teary over, and – it’s wonderful. There are three DVD releases: a vanilla DVD along with Blink; in a box set of the whole 2007 season, complete with extras (though still mysteriously without John Smith’s anguished “I am not the Doctor” that was in all the trailers); and in Autumn 2009, paired respectively with 42 and Blink, each with magazines as part of the newly-launched Doctor Who DVD Files. You can buy the Doctor’s watch and toy scarecrows, too, while the original 1995 book on which the TV story was based is available for free as an eBook with notes from Paul Cornell.
*The piece of music most associated with this year is the terrific theme first used on the season’s trailer, its first appearance in a story for the blissful Gridlock. It opens 2007’s Original Television Soundtrack CD under the official title of All the Strange, Strange Creatures, but to us it’ll always be ‘Dance of the Macra’.
Labels: Big Finish, Books, David Tennant, Doctor Who, DVD, History, Music, Reviews, Sarah Jane Smith, The Master, Toys, Utopia, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?
Friday, January 23, 2009
Doctor Who 45th Anniversary – Why Was 2006 Brilliant?
Fairy-tale monsters abound: under the bed in The Girl in the Fireplace; devilish on The Impossible Planet; Love and Monsters’ all-consuming fan; Tooth and Claw’s scary werewolf (and Queen Victoria); inspiring many wonderful toys. Children’s magazine show Totally Doctor Who launches, then spin-off drama Torchwood makes it four Who-related series, peaking with They Keep Killing Suzie. The Invasion’s lost episodes are reanimated for DVD; Bernice has a Summer of Love; gods battle on The Ship of a Billion Years… And who will win? Daleks or Cybermen?
Two forty-five-minute episodes, making one story, out on four DVD releases: a vanilla DVD along with Fear Her; in a box set of the whole 2006 season, complete with extras (including cut-down versions of Doctor Who Confidential); each on their own, once, as tabloid freebies; and in Summer 2009, paired respectively with Fear Her and The Runaway Bride, each with magazines as part of the newly-launched Doctor Who DVD Files.
Army of Ghosts / Doomsday
“I’m – the Doctor…”Edge-of-the-seat viewing as Torchwood rises under a fabulous villain, then falls to the Cybermen – thrilling music, tense build-up, electrifying cliffhanger and an action-packed climax to an epic season finale. Then the haunting last three scenes… Oh, and five million Cybermen against four Daleks? Easy. “Exterminate!”
“Oh, I should say! Hooray!”
Two forty-five-minute episodes, making one story, out on four DVD releases: a vanilla DVD along with Fear Her; in a box set of the whole 2006 season, complete with extras (including cut-down versions of Doctor Who Confidential); each on their own, once, as tabloid freebies; and in Summer 2009, paired respectively with Fear Her and The Runaway Bride, each with magazines as part of the newly-launched Doctor Who DVD Files.
Labels: Big Finish, Daleks, David Tennant, Doctor Who, DVD, Faction Paradox, Fandom, Music, Patrick Troughton, Professor Bernice Summerfield, Recons, Reviews, Torchwood, Toys, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?
Monday, January 19, 2009
Doctor Who 45th Anniversary – Why Was 2002 Brilliant?
Big Finish produces chilling audio dramas like Peter’s Spare Parts and Paul’s Embrace the Darkness, then an epic season climax in Neverland; Kaldor City’s intrigue deepens in Death’s Head and Hidden Persuaders; Daleks surprise in the comic strip as Children of the Revolution; and I can barely read Jealous, Possessive (Short Trips: Zodiac) or Beedlemania (A Life of Surprises) for laughing. But the best Doctor Who short story anthology of all technically contains neither Doctor Who nor short stories…
At last! The easiest way to get hold of this isn’t second-hand, for once, but still today by ordering direct from independent publisher Mad Norwegian – and, as if to show off that I’m finally recommending a book that isn’t out of print, it’s available in hardback and in paperback editions. We have both, of course, one particularly well-thumbed and with six pages of notes stuck into it. It’s described as “part story, part history and part puzzle-box,” you see, and though the A-Z structure means you tend to meander through stories in a distinctly non-linear way, there is a pathway of references that’ll take you through every entry but one and make – well, not sense, but slightly more coherence out of it. If you can’t find the ‘order’ online, drop me a line… As for the identity of the other side of the War from theTime Lords Great Houses: like The Prisoner’s Number One, it could be something you can work out from established opponents; something postmodern; or something the different writers (or even the visionary at the centre of it) all have contradictory views on. I could tell you our two most plausible theories, but there’s never going to be a right answer, is there? Unusually, some of the histories here were fleshed out into audio dramas, too, which you can get from BBV: The Eleven-Day Empire and The Shadow Play.
Faction Paradox – The Book of the War
“The coolest character is the one whose face you never get to see.”Lawrence Miles masterminds this metatextual Time War encyclopaedia, spinning some of the most inspired Who novels into a rich, bewildering tapestry of imagination. Amid distorted reflections of Ada Lovelace, Heaven, vampires, James Whale, The Phantom Menace, Morbius and the Bible, the most extraordinary reimagining’s ignored…
At last! The easiest way to get hold of this isn’t second-hand, for once, but still today by ordering direct from independent publisher Mad Norwegian – and, as if to show off that I’m finally recommending a book that isn’t out of print, it’s available in hardback and in paperback editions. We have both, of course, one particularly well-thumbed and with six pages of notes stuck into it. It’s described as “part story, part history and part puzzle-box,” you see, and though the A-Z structure means you tend to meander through stories in a distinctly non-linear way, there is a pathway of references that’ll take you through every entry but one and make – well, not sense, but slightly more coherence out of it. If you can’t find the ‘order’ online, drop me a line… As for the identity of the other side of the War from the
Labels: Big Finish, Books, Comedy, Daleks, Faction Paradox, History, Paul McGann, Peter Davison, Professor Bernice Summerfield, Reviews, Star Wars, The Master, Toys, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Doctor Who 45th Anniversary – Why Was 1977 Brilliant?
One newcomer writes mad messiah murder mystery The Robots of Death and the series’ finest ghost story, Image of the Fendahl; others include the woman in the leather bikini and the tin dog, who with the bloke in the scarf become Doctor Who’s most iconic silhouettes… I learn to read on books like The Dalek Invasion of Earth and the horror-and-ellipses-packed The Ark In Space… While in Victorian London…
Second-hand shopping might turn up a novel with an hilarious cleaning-up of an obvious on-screen prostitute, a script book, an edited video… But you want the double-disc DVD, one of the best releases going and with some superb extras. For some, the height would be the 26 minutes of Blue Peter teaching you how to make a model theatre with Lesley Judd, but for me it’s something amazing: a special behind-the-scenes documentary on Doctor Who, with loads of clips of old stories to pack it out, and all from 1977, a year that also saw complaints about the BBC, the economy going bust and Doctor Who being incredibly popular – how times change, eh?
But that’s not all. This year, my inner gleefully bloodthirsty five-year-old self was overjoyed to see that The Talons of Weng-Chiang has now also inspired the most unsuitable toys for children ever to hit the supermarkets (well, the Slitheen dress-up skin suit comes close, but it doesn’t come in Slitheen size for me to wear it). Nearly two decades ago, I saw a boy in a video shop trying to decide between this and a Who story I don’t think much of (I only write nice things in these posts, so I won’t name it); I knelt and convinced him that this story was dark and scary, then stood and convinced his mum that it was half as long again for the same price. These new figures are much the same. Tell parents that you get a full-sized figure and a half-sized figure for the same price as the other single figures; tell kids that you get a knife-wielding psychopathic doll and a sex killer war criminal with interchangeably masked and hideously scarred heads. As I said, a fabulously unsuitable toy purchase, which I recommend to every household this Christmas.
Some months ago, incidentally, I wrote of a faulty component on assembling my ‘collect and build’ K1 Giant Robot, part of which comes with the unbeatably unsuitable Magnus Greel and Mr Sin. I’m delighted to report that Character Options’ customer service team got back to me within a week, and not only replaced the faulty part but sent me a complete, fully assembled Robot (so I now have some spare arms and legs. Sigh. If only I did). Here it is, looming in the background of those two psychotic star figures and an assortment from 1975 and 1977.
And finally… Eagle-eyed viewers may have spotted that my plan to write one of these every day through to the end of the year came to a grinding halt three weeks ago, when I got very ill for a week and very washed-out afterwards. Last week my embarrassing ailments scored a hit with a broken toe. Tonight, a little less grumpy, two toes strapped together and trying to catch up a bit, I’d like to say particular thank-yous to Neil Fawcett and the lovely Nick, who respectively posted an encouraging blog piece on why Doctor Who was brilliant in 1977 and wrote me a fantastic e-mail doing every year from 1963 to 2008 in one go. Both warmed the cockles of my heart, and both picked The Talons of Weng-Chiang as certainly as I did.
The Talons of Weng-Chiang
“On my oath! You wouldn’t want that served with onions – never seen anything like it in all my puff. Urrhh, make an ’orse sick, that would. Oh!”‘Doctor Who in the inner city: gangs, guns, stabbings and drugs’. Hurrah! Feast on the richest of dialogue, fruitiest of characters and vilest of villains, with one whole episode a brilliant conjuring trick. It’s one of the most utterly entertaining pieces of television ever made.
Second-hand shopping might turn up a novel with an hilarious cleaning-up of an obvious on-screen prostitute, a script book, an edited video… But you want the double-disc DVD, one of the best releases going and with some superb extras. For some, the height would be the 26 minutes of Blue Peter teaching you how to make a model theatre with Lesley Judd, but for me it’s something amazing: a special behind-the-scenes documentary on Doctor Who, with loads of clips of old stories to pack it out, and all from 1977, a year that also saw complaints about the BBC, the economy going bust and Doctor Who being incredibly popular – how times change, eh?
But that’s not all. This year, my inner gleefully bloodthirsty five-year-old self was overjoyed to see that The Talons of Weng-Chiang has now also inspired the most unsuitable toys for children ever to hit the supermarkets (well, the Slitheen dress-up skin suit comes close, but it doesn’t come in Slitheen size for me to wear it). Nearly two decades ago, I saw a boy in a video shop trying to decide between this and a Who story I don’t think much of (I only write nice things in these posts, so I won’t name it); I knelt and convinced him that this story was dark and scary, then stood and convinced his mum that it was half as long again for the same price. These new figures are much the same. Tell parents that you get a full-sized figure and a half-sized figure for the same price as the other single figures; tell kids that you get a knife-wielding psychopathic doll and a sex killer war criminal with interchangeably masked and hideously scarred heads. As I said, a fabulously unsuitable toy purchase, which I recommend to every household this Christmas.
Some months ago, incidentally, I wrote of a faulty component on assembling my ‘collect and build’ K1 Giant Robot, part of which comes with the unbeatably unsuitable Magnus Greel and Mr Sin. I’m delighted to report that Character Options’ customer service team got back to me within a week, and not only replaced the faulty part but sent me a complete, fully assembled Robot (so I now have some spare arms and legs. Sigh. If only I did). Here it is, looming in the background of those two psychotic star figures and an assortment from 1975 and 1977.
And finally… Eagle-eyed viewers may have spotted that my plan to write one of these every day through to the end of the year came to a grinding halt three weeks ago, when I got very ill for a week and very washed-out afterwards. Last week my embarrassing ailments scored a hit with a broken toe. Tonight, a little less grumpy, two toes strapped together and trying to catch up a bit, I’d like to say particular thank-yous to Neil Fawcett and the lovely Nick, who respectively posted an encouraging blog piece on why Doctor Who was brilliant in 1977 and wrote me a fantastic e-mail doing every year from 1963 to 2008 in one go. Both warmed the cockles of my heart, and both picked The Talons of Weng-Chiang as certainly as I did.
Labels: Books, Doctor Who, DVD, History, London, Mary Whitehouse, Personal, Pictures, Religion, Reviews, Sherlock Holmes, Tom Baker, Toys, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Robots, War Machines and Why BoxClever Isn’t So Clever
If you’ve ever considered renting some appliance, a word of advice: unless you intend to keep it for ever, don’t hire it from Boxclever. I mentioned the other day that we’d bought a big new telly (working fine, and very happy with it) to replace the TV we’d been hiring, so the next step was to return the old one. Well, I rang Boxclever and said that, though it’s still working fine, we’d like them to take the telly back as we’d got ourselves a new one. They asked a few questions, they tried to persuade me… Then the stunner. The contract will be taken as a month’s notice. Fine, I said, thinking ‘Well, they’ve had enough money out of us over the last decade, a redundant £45 isn’t too bad a sting.’ A month’s notice from next charging date, so the end of September. Uh huh, I said. And that that’s when they’d pick up the TV. What?! So, I queried, they couldn’t take it any earlier than September 29th? No. Keep the money, I suggested, just take it off our hands? Not possible. Now, this isn’t a small TV set – it’s less wide than our new one, but very much deeper and heavier – and we do have a small flat, which is getting smaller all the time as it fills with stuff. And we could use an extra 490,000 cubic centimetres that aren’t being taken up by a large, heavy object that you can’t stack anything on top of.
I’m really not impressed by this customer service. But don’t worry, this entry gets onto more fun things as it goes on.
If you’re familiar with Character Options, who make all the rather impressive Doctor Who toys in every supermarket, you may know that they’ve just issued a tentative first set of “Classic” series figures (preceded by the Dalek Collector’s Set #1), and they look terrific. They’re also apparently taking the company by surprise and outselling the new set based on this year’s Doctor Who series by four to one. So, I suspect a second set of Classic figures may be confirmed – personally, I’m very much hoping that their ‘collect and build’ figure is the Morbius Monster, which would be both appropriate and funny. Oh, yes, that collect and build idea… The first set of eight individual Classic figures – or nine, as one pack boasts two figures – has a strong incentive to buy the lot, as each contains one part of the giant K1 Robot, so you need to buy every figure in order to assemble it. I’ve seen a fully assembled one, and it’s superb (even taking into account that it appeared in my first story and I have an instinctive bias).
However, my set had a problem. I was going to post a picture of the lot on here, but that’ll have to wait – because, when I came to assemble my K1 Robot, the first four sections locked together fine… But the right arm had nothing to lock into. The small plastic socket that should have been fixed inside the shoulder was missing, and unfortunately once you’ve snapped one of the components into place, they don’t separate. So if you collect the set and want to build your Robot, be careful. Look inside each of the holes around the torso to make sure they all have that little grey gripping socket before you start, and don’t fool around with putting things in the wrong sockets for a crazy weird robot before you settle down to build the proper look: the wind’ll change, and it’ll stick like that. As a result, I’ve had to ring Character Options’ Returns line and send the whole head and torso packaged up back to them for a replacement of all four components. Let’s hope they have better customer service than Boxclever. Belated update: they do!
In the meantime, I have eight rather cool figures; I’m particularly happy with the Zygon, as they’ve long been one of my favourite monster designs (even my Dad thought Broton looked impressive), and with a couple of others I’ll come to in another post [update: click on the link at the end of the last paragraph]. If you treat yourself, incidentally, don’t think you’re missing a bit with your SV7 Supervoc figure, another classy robot – though he’s pictured with a separate hand in the publicity, they abandoned that idea at a late stage, so they haven’t left it out by accident and you probably shouldn’t try pulling his hand off to see if it’ll fit back on again. The matching Dum robot figure should, however, come with a smashed robot’s head on a stick (a makeshift robot deactivator, if you’re familiar with the story The Robots of Death), the ‘dead’ robot’s brain parts painted inappropriately red to make it especially unsuitable for children (yay!), and a tiny little sliver of stickers should be somewhere in the pack in order for you to choose to label it “D84” or one of three other id tags.
Finally, if you can’t find these in the shops yet, after the sad demise of Tenth Planet I have three mail-order suggestions. There are those nice Voga people in Edinburgh, who are a little more expensive than recommended price but fast, reliable and with reasonable postage; there are Forbidden Planet, who are a bit cheaper than recommended price but post slowly and in dribs and drabs, as well as having a deeply eccentric website that tends to go down in the middle of orders; and there are Character Options themselves, who are dead in the middle of both elements of the other two, charging RRP as you might expect and delivering within about a week. If you order from them directly, you’ll find that they apply a £4.99 postage charge unless you spend over £50 (so if you order the whole set, postage is free)… So you may like to take note of two discount codes. If you’re spending under £50, entering “shipping2008AW” at the checkout will get you free p&p anyway, while if you’re spending over £50 in one go, you’ll have free postage anyway but you can enter “5discount2008OT” to give you a 5% discount. Happy shopping!
Should you fancy watching a few things on your computer rather than a big telly, here are a few recommendations from blogs I’ve been reading this week:
And finally… A couple of weeks ago we watched the latest in ITV’s Marple series, Towards Zero. Richard points out that we’d not normally have done so, as Towards Zero isn’t a Miss Marple story and ITV doesn’t make stories with Miss Marple (Marple is a place a couple of miles from where I was born; Miss Marple would under no circumstances abandon her spinsterdom to sound like a public schoolboy). However, we winced and bore it, mainly for the guest cast. You may have spotted the magnificent Tom Baker sprawling around telling rolling anecdotes, a bit like a much-cleaned-up version of himself. What you may not have noticed is that the character he was playing was called Frederick Treves. I was in my local library yesterday, and noted that in Agatha Christie’s play Towards Zero, the character is named Mathew Treves. By an uncanny coincidence, however, there’s a grand old actor by the name of Frederick Treves, who readers of this blog might remember from political thrillers The Politician’s Wife and To Play the King or, of course, from the Doctor Who story Meglos, in which he hammed it up opposite one Thomas Stewart Baker as a character called “Brotadac”. Which, as I’m sure none of the production team on Marple are aware, is an anagram of “bad actor”.
I’m really not impressed by this customer service. But don’t worry, this entry gets onto more fun things as it goes on.
Doctor Who and the Miniature Robots
If you’re familiar with Character Options, who make all the rather impressive Doctor Who toys in every supermarket, you may know that they’ve just issued a tentative first set of “Classic” series figures (preceded by the Dalek Collector’s Set #1), and they look terrific. They’re also apparently taking the company by surprise and outselling the new set based on this year’s Doctor Who series by four to one. So, I suspect a second set of Classic figures may be confirmed – personally, I’m very much hoping that their ‘collect and build’ figure is the Morbius Monster, which would be both appropriate and funny. Oh, yes, that collect and build idea… The first set of eight individual Classic figures – or nine, as one pack boasts two figures – has a strong incentive to buy the lot, as each contains one part of the giant K1 Robot, so you need to buy every figure in order to assemble it. I’ve seen a fully assembled one, and it’s superb (even taking into account that it appeared in my first story and I have an instinctive bias).
However, my set had a problem. I was going to post a picture of the lot on here, but that’ll have to wait – because, when I came to assemble my K1 Robot, the first four sections locked together fine… But the right arm had nothing to lock into. The small plastic socket that should have been fixed inside the shoulder was missing, and unfortunately once you’ve snapped one of the components into place, they don’t separate. So if you collect the set and want to build your Robot, be careful. Look inside each of the holes around the torso to make sure they all have that little grey gripping socket before you start, and don’t fool around with putting things in the wrong sockets for a crazy weird robot before you settle down to build the proper look: the wind’ll change, and it’ll stick like that. As a result, I’ve had to ring Character Options’ Returns line and send the whole head and torso packaged up back to them for a replacement of all four components. Let’s hope they have better customer service than Boxclever. Belated update: they do!
In the meantime, I have eight rather cool figures; I’m particularly happy with the Zygon, as they’ve long been one of my favourite monster designs (even my Dad thought Broton looked impressive), and with a couple of others I’ll come to in another post [update: click on the link at the end of the last paragraph]. If you treat yourself, incidentally, don’t think you’re missing a bit with your SV7 Supervoc figure, another classy robot – though he’s pictured with a separate hand in the publicity, they abandoned that idea at a late stage, so they haven’t left it out by accident and you probably shouldn’t try pulling his hand off to see if it’ll fit back on again. The matching Dum robot figure should, however, come with a smashed robot’s head on a stick (a makeshift robot deactivator, if you’re familiar with the story The Robots of Death), the ‘dead’ robot’s brain parts painted inappropriately red to make it especially unsuitable for children (yay!), and a tiny little sliver of stickers should be somewhere in the pack in order for you to choose to label it “D84” or one of three other id tags.
Finally, if you can’t find these in the shops yet, after the sad demise of Tenth Planet I have three mail-order suggestions. There are those nice Voga people in Edinburgh, who are a little more expensive than recommended price but fast, reliable and with reasonable postage; there are Forbidden Planet, who are a bit cheaper than recommended price but post slowly and in dribs and drabs, as well as having a deeply eccentric website that tends to go down in the middle of orders; and there are Character Options themselves, who are dead in the middle of both elements of the other two, charging RRP as you might expect and delivering within about a week. If you order from them directly, you’ll find that they apply a £4.99 postage charge unless you spend over £50 (so if you order the whole set, postage is free)… So you may like to take note of two discount codes. If you’re spending under £50, entering “shipping2008AW” at the checkout will get you free p&p anyway, while if you’re spending over £50 in one go, you’ll have free postage anyway but you can enter “5discount2008OT” to give you a 5% discount. Happy shopping!
For Your Viewing Pleasure…
Should you fancy watching a few things on your computer rather than a big telly, here are a few recommendations from blogs I’ve been reading this week:
- The lovely Andy Strange points us to Stephen Fry’s lecture on public service broadcasting. It’s witty, erudite and spot-on, and though Richard and I watched it at the time, as Mr Fry points out in his speech the viewing figures on BBC Parliament are not large, so thanks to Andy for finding it online. The lecture is a sterling defence of the BBC, which I have to admit is an institution I may have my problems with but still love passionately as the best of British, and which I fear is under deadly threat. If the Tories get back in, they seem hideously likely to dismember it – one of the few issues on which the vague noises that pass for policy emanating from the Tory bunker are actually even worse than the Labour Government.
- The lovely Simon Guerrier, to whom I owe several e-mails (sorry, Simon, if you’re reading) has analysis and a link to a rather terrific trailer for the BBC’s next Doctor Who DVD release, 1966’s The War Machines. It’s a super story with a great lead performance by Billy Hartnell, and one that was both heavily borrowed from the works of Terry Nation and was highly influential on the series’ future – taking the monsters to the streets of contemporary London for the first time. It also inspired in part Simon’s excellent novel The Time Travellers, which I also recommend. The world’s computers are joined together down phone lines and things (a racy, far-fetched sci-fi idea for 1966), at which point they fail to look at porn or send each other amusing clips of each other’s readouts, so far as we know, and instead built pseudo-Daleks with which to conquer the world. When the computers link up, humans will get completely hypnotised by them, too; well, they got that bit right.
- The almost certainly lovely – though I’ve not been formally introduced – Jennie brings a disturbing selection of reasons why John McCain should not be elected President, along with a devastatingly fine example of Rick-rolling. If you’re not sure who “Rick” is, he’s that gawky, lanky guy with the awkward dance moves who came out of nowhere to be suddenly incredibly popular and successful…
And finally… A couple of weeks ago we watched the latest in ITV’s Marple series, Towards Zero. Richard points out that we’d not normally have done so, as Towards Zero isn’t a Miss Marple story and ITV doesn’t make stories with Miss Marple (Marple is a place a couple of miles from where I was born; Miss Marple would under no circumstances abandon her spinsterdom to sound like a public schoolboy). However, we winced and bore it, mainly for the guest cast. You may have spotted the magnificent Tom Baker sprawling around telling rolling anecdotes, a bit like a much-cleaned-up version of himself. What you may not have noticed is that the character he was playing was called Frederick Treves. I was in my local library yesterday, and noted that in Agatha Christie’s play Towards Zero, the character is named Mathew Treves. By an uncanny coincidence, however, there’s a grand old actor by the name of Frederick Treves, who readers of this blog might remember from political thrillers The Politician’s Wife and To Play the King or, of course, from the Doctor Who story Meglos, in which he hammed it up opposite one Thomas Stewart Baker as a character called “Brotadac”. Which, as I’m sure none of the production team on Marple are aware, is an anagram of “bad actor”.
Labels: American Politics, Blogs, Digby Spode, Doctor Who, Stephen Fry, Technology, Tom Baker, Top Tips, Toys, William Hartnell
Saturday, August 02, 2008
If Sitemeter Is Destroying Your Viewing Pleasure, There Are Always Daleks
I wrote earlier on the unhappy phenomenon of many favourite websites crashing as soon as I looked at them. As I don’t possess the Hereditary Gaze of the Bishop of Zilbor, I mistakenly thought it to be a calamitous cock-up from Microsoft (I know – imagine!), but many helpful comments and Googling have revealed the culprit as Sitemeter. They changed their code yesterday, which for Internet Explorer users has torpedoed every Sitemeter-equipped blog (on any platform). So if you want to read a page, try hitting Stop as it visibly loads; and if you employ Sitemeter, please consider removing it. Apparently Sitemeter have yet to admit any error, but as of course I can’t read their own site either… How fortunate that I’ve always been too lazy er, cough, lacked the vanity to add a hit-counter of my own ;-)
So, to cheer up anyone experiencing problems with their Internet viewing pleasure, might I recommend tonight’s intermittent assortment of Dad’s Army on BBC2 this evening, somewhat overenthusiastically described as a “Dad’s Army Weekend” (half a dozen programmes tonight, broken up by the Proms, and one tomorrow). Still, the movie on at the moment’s mildly amusing, if lacking the intimacy of the series, and later on we’re promised the favourite episode of each of the writers. I’m hoping for Philip Von Madoc.
If you’re looking for cheer on the Internet, though, who doesn’t love Daleks (irony of putting them alongside Dad’s Army understood)? Well, thanks to the magic of online shopping, I received these in the post yesterday. Aren’t they brilliant?
The people at Character Options – who mass-produce the Doctor Who toys found in every supermarket – have just launched a new range of ‘Classic’ Doctor Who figures, which are likely to have a more limited release. First is the ominously-titled Dalek Collector’s Set #1, with three Daleks modelled respectively on the stylish silver originals with banded mid-sections from The Daleks / The Dead Planet / Whatever You Call The First One, the tank-like, gun-metal heavy soldiers of Genesis of the Daleks and the flashy Pimp My Supreme Dalek from Planet of the Daleks. I have to admit, I’ve wanted toys like these all my life, and unlike the crudely formed Dapol figures of the 1980s these are not just superbly detailed but each produced with slightly different moulds, from their dome lights to their lower bumpers.
The winner for me is the original design, which I’ve always thought looked very cool since seeing pictures in The Doctor Who Monster Book and is captured perfectly. The Genesis Dalek is very mildly disappointing; in theory a tank-like monster is the ideal Dalek for me, but rather than having a metallic finish it looks too matt and, well, plasticky (a bit like the grey Daleks in Remembrance). I’m surprisingly taken with the Dalek Supreme, though, which on screen is for me a rather tacky addition to a rather feeble story but in five-inch plastic looks rather fab.
Even better, the first wave of eight other ‘Classic’ figures includes such highlights as a K1 Robot to be assembled from eight parts (guess where you get them), the great Doctor I never thought I’d see as a figure looking absolutely smashing, a favourite monster that I’ve been pining to play with since I was about four, and – best of all – a double-pack of the most unsuitable-for-children Doctor Who toys ever yet produced (in the absence of anatomically correct Torchwood dolls with sixty-nine points of articulation). Hurrah! I’ll reveal which when I get them.
Ee, when I were a lad, the only Dalek you could get were a bright red one with a silly extra bit sticking out of the top of its head. There’s none of that nonsense these days, is there?
So, to cheer up anyone experiencing problems with their Internet viewing pleasure, might I recommend tonight’s intermittent assortment of Dad’s Army on BBC2 this evening, somewhat overenthusiastically described as a “Dad’s Army Weekend” (half a dozen programmes tonight, broken up by the Proms, and one tomorrow). Still, the movie on at the moment’s mildly amusing, if lacking the intimacy of the series, and later on we’re promised the favourite episode of each of the writers. I’m hoping for Philip Von Madoc.
If you’re looking for cheer on the Internet, though, who doesn’t love Daleks (irony of putting them alongside Dad’s Army understood)? Well, thanks to the magic of online shopping, I received these in the post yesterday. Aren’t they brilliant?
The people at Character Options – who mass-produce the Doctor Who toys found in every supermarket – have just launched a new range of ‘Classic’ Doctor Who figures, which are likely to have a more limited release. First is the ominously-titled Dalek Collector’s Set #1, with three Daleks modelled respectively on the stylish silver originals with banded mid-sections from The Daleks / The Dead Planet / Whatever You Call The First One, the tank-like, gun-metal heavy soldiers of Genesis of the Daleks and the flashy Pimp My Supreme Dalek from Planet of the Daleks. I have to admit, I’ve wanted toys like these all my life, and unlike the crudely formed Dapol figures of the 1980s these are not just superbly detailed but each produced with slightly different moulds, from their dome lights to their lower bumpers.
The winner for me is the original design, which I’ve always thought looked very cool since seeing pictures in The Doctor Who Monster Book and is captured perfectly. The Genesis Dalek is very mildly disappointing; in theory a tank-like monster is the ideal Dalek for me, but rather than having a metallic finish it looks too matt and, well, plasticky (a bit like the grey Daleks in Remembrance). I’m surprisingly taken with the Dalek Supreme, though, which on screen is for me a rather tacky addition to a rather feeble story but in five-inch plastic looks rather fab.
Even better, the first wave of eight other ‘Classic’ figures includes such highlights as a K1 Robot to be assembled from eight parts (guess where you get them), the great Doctor I never thought I’d see as a figure looking absolutely smashing, a favourite monster that I’ve been pining to play with since I was about four, and – best of all – a double-pack of the most unsuitable-for-children Doctor Who toys ever yet produced (in the absence of anatomically correct Torchwood dolls with sixty-nine points of articulation). Hurrah! I’ll reveal which when I get them.
Ee, when I were a lad, the only Dalek you could get were a bright red one with a silly extra bit sticking out of the top of its head. There’s none of that nonsense these days, is there?
Labels: Blogs, Comedy, Daleks, Doctor Who, Technology, Toys
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
You Will Obey Me!
Don’t Open the Watch!
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
The Time Meddler
…In which someone styling himself a Christian cleric devises a warped scheme to pick favourites and plunge England into a different century. But don’t worry – this villain’s rewriting of history is less demented than the Archbishop of Canterbury’s plan to turn the clock back, and you’ll find last week’s Doctor Who DVD release infinitely more entertaining than watching Rowan Williams. Set in 1066 (when the Church had a monopoly on reading and writing rather than just an Archbishop pretending they do), the centre of the story is a fabulous face-off between two Carry On stars, William Hartnell and Peter Butterworth. Oh, and skip to the end of this for a much less detailed set of previews of more of this year’s Doctor Who DVDs!
Last week, rather than watching this exciting new DVD from 1965, I was watching the DVD of a much more stodgy old story from 1985. Yes, the DVD release schedules feel like time travel, too. In both this and The Mark of the Rani, the actors playing the Doctor are superbly watchable – Billy Hartnell and Colin Baker – and the scenery’s an awful lot better in 1985 than the odd tree stuck round a studio in 1965. But how come the later story’s the one that feels so slow? To say nothing of its both nonsensical and hackneyed plot, the terrible dialogue and that the audience laughs with the Monk in 1965, but laughs at the Master in the 1985 story where all the mystery’s gone by half-way into Part One. So don’t let this far superior tale from 1965 and 1066 being black and white put you off.
As usual, the story’s been beautifully restored for DVD (complete with a feature about how they did it), though the patchiness of the old print is particularly noticeable in the final episode. Good news: it’s cheaper than usual. Bad news: because there are fewer extras than usual. Good news: there are still quite a few extras anyway. In addition to the usual photo gallery and informative text notes to play throughout the story, there’s a commentary with companion Peter Purves, script editor and terribly nice man Donald Tosh, designer Barry Newbery and producer and TV legend Verity Lambert, recorded just weeks before she died. There’s a small obituary and a photo gallery for her – let’s hope for a proper retrospective when they get more time to put one together, as production on this disc was already finished last November. The other standout feature is Stripped For Action – The First Doctor, looking at the comic strips based on the series’ early days, with their wacky plots, the Doctor’s different grandchildren and his recurring foes the villainous, vaguely cone-shaped, robotic, er… Trods. Daleks being a bit expensive to license. It’s an appropriate extra, as the Monk returned three times – once on TV, once in a novel and once in a comic strip (the latter really wasn’t very good, but you can buy it in a ‘Complete Fifth Doctor’ graphic novel and it’s well worth picking up for the fantastic title story The Tides of Time). Let’s hope they do more of these for the other Doctors, and commission documentaries about the books, too…
Watching The Time Meddler in 2008, it’s almost impossible not to look at it as an ‘important’ story introducing so many plot elements that would grow within the series from that point on. But I’m fairly sure that for viewers at the time, another change was much more important. From the series’ beginning in 1963, the Doctor had been accompanied by two teachers, Ian and Barbara, along with a teenager – and although his granddaughter Susan (apparently aged sixteenish) had left, she was instantly replaced by near-photocopy orphan Vicki. Well, at the end of the previous story, Ian and Barbara went back home to dear old Blighty and their claim to being the ‘parents’ in the TARDIS family was never replaced. If ever there was a debate about whether the Doctor was the lead character, with The Time Meddler it was definitely over and viewers knew that anyone else could come and go. How would the series carry on?
About four years ago, Richard and I watched the whole of William Hartnell’s time as the Doctor in order (with appropriate replacements for the bits the BBC chucked away). I’ve always found The Chase, the story before this one, a bit rubbish. It is, but after following the continuing story through I found myself tearful at the end because Ian and Barbara were leaving – and never tell me they didn’t marry and live happily ever after. By contrast, I’d loved The Time Meddler since I first saw it, and I wondered if now I’d be put off it by missing Mr Chesterton and Miss Wright. Then I started watching this story and found that I’m a fickle thing, much as the audiences at the time might have been (with another twenty-four years of the series’ original run to follow). This one is great fun from the start.
The Time Meddler has a marvellous first episode, doing exactly what it needed to – provide a particularly intriguing mystery, and show that the Doctor and the series can get on just fine with just young Vicki and sceptical space pilot Steven for company. And the dialogue between them is great, the Doctor being both off-balance and off the leash now the junior lead talks back rather than being the ‘straight man’, giving us all a treat as they fling put-downs at each other. When the series first began in 1963 and when it returned in 2005, the first episodes were taken up with introducing ordinary people to the Doctor’s life and astonishing them with the TARDIS – because those people, Ian and Barbara and then Rose, were exploring what this show was all about on behalf of the viewer. This time, as with last year’s Smith and Jones that brought Martha on board, there’s a new companion but most viewers already know what to expect, so the introductions are much briefer and played much more for laughs. If you thought the Doctor was cheeky to mouth “bigger on the inside than on the outside” behind Martha last year, wait ’til you see him exasperatedly point out to Steven such features in the TARDIS as:
Both William Hartnell and Peter Butterworth are actors with great screen presence, each able to play both comedy and drama with aplomb and switch between them with ease as they and their characters fight to get one up on each other. You can see why one was the first Carry On star and the other went on to star in several future Carry On films. The Doctor’s companions aren’t bad, either; Peter Purves (Stephen) later found greater fame in Blue Peter, while Maureen O’Brien (Vicki) went on to more acting fame and also writes a successful series of detective novels. She was signing DVDs of The Time Meddler at Tenth Planet last Saturday, and if you want future DVD speculation, she didn’t give anything away – though don’t put your bets on The Space Museum coming out this year. Of all the pictures from other stories she was given to sign, that was the one that rang no bells at all (“Everyone had big sideburns or strange eyebrows?” She shakes her head. “You started a revolution among teenagers in black pullies?” “Did I? I’m glad to hear it,” and so on). But anyway, the Monk…
This story wrong-foots the viewers more than any other since the first story, An Unearthly Child, going somewhere quite unexpected just as they’d got used to the idea of the ‘adventures in history’ and the ‘science fiction’ stories being completely separate. The rules change here, as the future gets mixed into the past to produce several ‘What the hell is going on?’ moments of the sort best summed up for the novel of the later story Carnival of Monsters:
When I was little, I didn’t know a lot about this story. I’d read that it had the Monk in it, who was ‘A Renegade Time Lord’ and therefore ‘Very Important’, but not played by Roger Delgado and so not as impressive as the Master (unless you take Cadfael as proof of the unlikely theory that the Monk and the Master are one and the same). But fan lists long before I ever got to see the story labelled it the first ‘psuedo-historical’ story, the first with ‘another Time Lord’ (aside from Susan, and still not named as such), the first ‘indication that time can be changed’, the first time what the word ‘TARDIS’ means is changed (it’s changed back again, these days, but the tiny alteration lasted a quarter of a century) and even, according to some po-faced people that didn’t like The Romans, the first ‘comedy story that works’. The last may tip you off that, unlike Last of the Time Lords, this story has a refreshing lack of self-importance. It’s the end of the second season of Doctor Who, but it feels like a fresh start rather than a ‘season finale’ – though the closing fadeout, with Billy’s voice-over and the TARDIS crew’s faces across a starfield, is sheer magic. Though with such innovation and revelation you’d expect an over-hyped, climactic end-of-season cliffhanger, instead it just gets on with telling a jolly story and taking the mickey, and I’m very glad. First the very funny novelisation came along in the ’80s, then I saw a repeat in 1992, and I realised that it’s terrific. Not epic, not awesome, not immense, but a great little story, with huge entertainment value.
These days I sit back and enjoy just how good these characters are, and all the twists and turns of the Monk’s plan. Is he helping the Viking raiding party, and betraying the friendly Saxon villagers? In which case, what’s that atomic cannon doing pointed at the Viking fleet he’s signalling towards land? Yes, he’s one of the Doctor’s people, but rather than just occasionally helping people out from moral conviction he has grand schemes to rework the whole of history because, ooh, it seems like a good idea at the time! He boasts of building Stonehenge with anti-gravitational lifts and he’s made multi-century investments for the compound interest (though the banks would surely switch him to a worse rate), while his ‘to do’ list is a scream. And here, he plans to obliterate the Viking fleet in order that King Harold’s Saxon army will be fresh, uninjured and ready to win the Battle of Hastings (JRR Tolkien might approve).
The details beyond the two main characters are worth watching, too. There are lashings of post-modern wit long before it was fashionable – whether it’s the way About Time 1 notes how everything works in the way TV does twenty years before Moonlighting was ‘ground-breaking’, that the Doctor’s missing for the second episode and the cliffhanger is that – shock – he isn’t there, or the way that most of the ‘technology’ the Monk has is from the ’60s things, just as Russell T Davies these days deliberately makes a series from ‘now’ appealing to and joking with the contemporary audience. And, like writer Dennis Spooner’s previous scripts, the humour is leavened by alarmingly grim elements like the villagers’ hard lives, the threat of the Vikings and, shockingly, the implied rape of a character we’ve got quite fond of, taken deadly seriously (for all those people who said Billy was just for the kiddies, and that sex was invented in the New Adventures, the repeat of this story was the most shocking sexual reference in Doctor Who in 1992). The depth and deftness aren’t just in the script and the performances, either, but in some inspired direction and impressive design that belie the story’s wafer-thin budget – you can believe the dirty Saxon huts, there’s one of the series’ better forests not filmed outside, and there are touches like filming actors from below against scudding clouds that make it much less plain the clifftop is in the studio. It’s not perfect, but nothing is; some of the scenes with the minor characters are a little dull, and the Vikings aren’t exactly sparkling. Their fight scenes are a bit feeble, too, but you can’t have everything.
This is a super little example of what makes Doctor Who Doctor Who – I’ve always loved the uniquely Who-ish historical anachronisms of aliens or time meddlers, a type of story that could almost be the backbone of the series. Right from this prototype through Pyramids of Mars and The Curse of Fenric to Tooth and Claw and Human Nature, there are great tales to be found when the Doctor travels back to a well-known period of Earth’s history, meets both exactly the sort of people we’d expect him to and some outer space people we really wouldn’t, and everything collides. If anyone’s come up with a better idea of the perfect basis for Doctor Who story, I haven’t heard it.
Today is the 77th anniversary of the première of Tod Browning’s Dracula, one of the great Universal horror movies and making an instant star of Bela Lugosi for his charismatic performance. This morning, I trudged out to the doctor – not the Doctor – after some of the latest dreary things wrong with me started to alarm Richard when I spent Saturday keeling over (thanks for driving me to Maureen O’Brien and back, love!), and found that there’s a two-week wait to see the phlebotomist for some tests. In 1931, they were keener to take blood…
While I was out, I nipped into the local supermarket and – among other bits of more necessary shopping – got myself a dinky half-price remote-control Dalek to cheer myself up with. Some readers familiar with more of Doctor Who’s second season than just The Time Meddler may understand (though the cashier didn’t) why I laughed on hearing that it all came to £21.64. On Saturday, though, I picked up a new Doctor Who toy at Tenth Planet that somehow particularly appealed to me, though; ‘the Doctor’s Fob Watch’. I know, it doesn’t sound like the top thing for kids, does it? But after the significance of the Monk’s dropped watch in The Time Meddler, you might remember how important and unfortunate a fob watch was to ‘John Smith’ in last year’s fantastic Human Nature. Well, now you can get one of your very own, with its rather lovely design (albeit in plastic), lights and squeakily played David Tennant quotes. It keeps terrible time, though. And it doesn’t even have the excuse that it’s on Malcassairo time. Here it is modelled by our Moomin, Billy:
To tell the truth, though, there’s something else that’s not quite as thrilling as it could be about the watch. Because, exciting though it is to have the nice Doctor speaking to me from it, what I’d really like them to bring out – and I suspect quite a lot of people will agree – is not the Doctor’s fob watch, but the Master’s. Because, though Human Nature was undoubtedly the most marvellous of all last year’s Doctor Who stories, the climax of Utopia as kindly Professor Yana opens his watch and becomes the Master was the most gripping quarter-hour of the year’s telly. So please, Character Options, next time let us press the button and hear Derek Jacobi:
The Time Meddler’s not the only Doctor Who DVD out this year – expect nearly a dozen releases – but since I rarely get round to doing these reviews, here are some quick previews of the stories coming up in the first half of the year. Oh, and the Beneath the Surface box that came out in January…
Now, here’s a mix. These three stories, which Richard, our friend Stephen and I all think of as ‘Under the Sea’ after Homer Simpson’s song, all feature different ethnic groups of the same species, intelligent reptiles (misnamed ‘Silurians’) that lived on Earth before humanity evolved and went into hibernation to escape a global catastrophe – but though the stories all try to make the same sort of moral point with each group that wakes up millions of years later and comes into conflict with the human race, they do it in a textbook example of diminishing returns. The first story in the box is absolutely terrific and the series’ moral centre, despite iffy science; the second often looks great and is dumbed-down fun, but makes a horrible mess of the ending; the last is pretty much a horrible mess all the way through…
Doctor Who and the Silurians
This story has a lot to answer for… Reading its message that green scaly rubber people are people too turned me into a Liberal. It’s worth picking up the book, originally titled Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, though it’s a lot easier today to get the talking book version on CD – it’s one of the finest Doctor Who novelisations ever written, with characterisation greatly expanded from the TV version into very much a story in its own right, though Caroline John isn’t as impressive a reader as she is playing the Doctor’s companion Liz Shaw on TV (her ‘Scottish accent’ has to be heard to be believed, but look out for her husband’s fantastic reading of another outstanding novelisation of the time, Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon). As far as the 1970 TV version starring Jon Pertwee as the Doctor goes, there’s a lot to treasure, despite a really naff T-Rex – a great guest role for Fulton McKay, some riveting dialogue as people (green and pink) divide into different sides about how to deal with the other species, and of course one of the series’ most memorable final scenes. Along the way, there’s a jaw-dropping documentary-style disaster in London, too. Really impressive extra: a documentary on the politics of the time and how it affected Doctor Who. Really, er, different extra: the earliest story to have its complete score presented as a separate music-only track, a feature which I love, always, and only slightly less when this one’s the attack of the killer kazoos. Probably the best of the stories so far announced for DVD release this year.
The Sea Devils
More Pertwee from a couple of years later, though I first saw it – like The Time Meddler – as part of a repeat season in 1992. This one, too, has a rare ‘early’ music-only score, and though I’m quite fond of it, it’s pretty notorious. The version released on CD has sleeve notes describing it as “uncompromising,” and if ever you notice an incidental score, you’ll notice this one. The story? Well, the Silurians’ cousins the Sea Devils are scarier but dumber and far less characterised, despite their rising from the sea giving a brilliant cliffhanger (one that inspired several more later in the series). The Doctor is increasingly unlikeable, if more flamboyantly dressed, and here faces off against Roger Delgado’s original Master, who’s in prison and claiming to be a reformed character. I suspect it’s not much of a giveaway to suggest he may be fibbing (watch out for a fabulous scene involving The Clangers that was remade with John Simm’s Master and more modern equivalents last year). On the down side, despite being slightly shorter than the previous story it feels much more flabby, it has the series’ crudest caricature of a politician, and the ending… Well, without spoiling it, it turns the morality of the previous story on its head, and that’s just wrong.
Warriors of the Deep
Bright lights; Cold War machismo; eyeshadow and morality applied with a trowel… It’s 1984, Peter Davison is the Doctor, and this is a story where very little goes right. The monsters fall apart – literally, in places – the cast are wooden, the script is clichéd and the Doctor’s stuck in a moral quagmire where the writer thinks agonising about it is the same as justifying it (even the much-praised final line is almost word-for-word from the final episode of The Daleks, twenty years earlier). On the good side, the Doctor’s companion Turlough is fun when screwed up to a pitch of twitchiness, the sets are impressive despite unmerciful lighting and the music-only score on this one is rather good… Probably the weakest of the stories so far announced for DVD release this year (though K9 runs it close).
Some series would have their 20th-Anniversary parties off-air. Doctor Who televised it, a story crammed with old friends – including Doctors Peter Davison, Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton, a bit of Tom Baker and someone pretending to be the late William Hartnell – and old enemies. It’s fun, but dumb, with as good a script as you could expect when asked to mix in so many ingredients, though significantly more plodding direction than you might have expected. This DVD is an all bells-and-whistles set, the 25th Anniversary Edition of the 20th Anniversary story, and includes both the original version and the 1990s ‘Special Edition’ (the only version previously released on DVD, though without any extras) with what are now much more dated special effects than those which were originally transmitted; will there be new new effects to cover up the old new effects? [R: NO! Ed] The best moments are probably Peter Davison’s emotionally affecting performance early on, underscored by evocative music, before the vivid cartoons of his other selves turn up – and the lovely pre-credits clip of William Hartnell, which is unfortunately more stylish than all the rest of it.
Sadly, despite all the extras that will be crammed onto this two-disc set (and probably due to shameless breakage of copyright), what’s by far the most exciting version of the story won’t be on the DVD – you can, however, enjoy both Part One and Part Two of it on YouTube. Do. It’s a work of genius, for fans of the old and the new series alike.
Tom Baker as the Doctor, Louise Jameson in leather bikini as Leela and the tin dog – probably the best-remembered of all the line-ups from the original series, and all good characters, but rather starved of good stories together. The Doctor returns to Gallifrey and turns into a mad dictator over the Time Lords – you may, readers, suspect it’s acting, or indeed overacting – where there’s a striking mix of fabulous and wooden characters, exciting and very dull monsters, exciting twists and long stretches that seem to be made up as they go along. A lot of it’s very entertaining and there’s a great surprise appearance by the same monsters who’ll be making a surprise appearance in this year’s Doctor Who on TV (for once, last year I correctly predicted this would be out, and that there’ll be a box set of these same surprise monsters’ previous appearances, also now due this year). A lot of it’s one of the most inept ‘political thrillers’ you’ve ever seen, it treats intelligent, independent-minded Leela dreadfully, and it has perhaps the most thoroughly wrong ending of any Doctor Who story (yes, worse than The Sea Devils), both morally and in requiring the viewer to remember details of a very much better story shown a year and a half earlier. One to watch in parts, then…
Peter Davison’s Doctor travels to 1926 for a comedy of manners crossed with Jane Eyre, all set at a country house. It’s short, it’s rather diverting and it has some marvellous frocks, but there’s not a lot of substance to it and it’s hardly up to Agatha Christie’s standards. Though it has one of the Doctor’s most widely ridiculed moments – ‘proving’ he’s not a murderer by saying, ‘Look at my TARDIS!’ – there is a strange sort of thematic sense to it; this story is all about masks and keeping up appearances, from the masked ball to the tragedy underneath, and the Doctor’s point is that he’s the only person telling the truth and so, literally, an innocent. Or it might just be very silly.
Tom Baker’s Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, 1976, and the first Doctor Who I ever saw in colour (aren’t hospitals marvellous?). And what colour! Mainly rich red, appropriately for the series’ most Hammer-toned Frankenstein pastiche, with more ‘unsuitable material for children’ than in almost any other Who story (naturally, I loved it). It gets away with the brains and the blood by being simply so funny. The dialogue is fabulous, Philip Madoc enjoying every word as an outstanding villain, and there’s some of the most stunning ‘architecture’ ever seen in the series for the interior of his castle (the ‘outside’ shots are less convincing, though). Of all those I know are still to come this year, this is the story I’m most looking forward to on DVD, and there are three things in particular to look out for: the way it turns the Frankenstein story that everyone else had done upside-down, by having the ‘creature’ in control from the start; the way it turns the ‘Hitler returns’ story that everyone else had done upside-down, by making Morbius the ex-dictator of the Time Lords and so making the Doctor not the standard ‘dashing British agent preventing them from rising again’, but a horrified ‘German’ stuck with the responsibility; and an enthralling climax as the Doctor and Morbius fight a mental duel to spine-tingling music (which, sadly, won’t be available on a separate track).
At some point in the year, there’s going to be a K9-themed twin pack featuring what are in effect his first and last stories from the series’ original run – the story that introduced him, and a one-off spin-off pilot for a series that, unlike Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, never got any further. On the basis of what we got, though, that was a bit of a relief – it’s not a patch on the two new spin-off series, let alone Doctor Who itself, and even The Invisible Enemy’s very patchy. Personally, I’d have gone for a three-pack of stories and bunged in another K9 tale that was more entertaining (Nightmare of Eden, say), but – as I said last year – if you want a box set that shows off K9 at his best, hunt down a copy of the brilliant Key to Time…
The Invisible Enemy
Tom Baker as the Doctor, Louise Jameson in leather bikini as Leela and the tin dog – probably the best-remembered of all the line-ups from the original series, and all good characters, but rather starved of good stories together. It’s still true. A new producer had just taken over in 1977, and broke the bank on this one – some of it looks great, but with inflation and the writers’ ambitions both spiralling out of control, some of it looks downright terrible. The first episode is intense, with abrasive music, a mysterious catch-phrase and oppressive horror, but it goes rapidly downhill: mistakes include an outer-space hospital with a Level ‘4X’, which makes you think they couldn’t give one; an unintentionally funny giant prawn; and one of the two Doctor Who scripts that always spring to mind as riddled with such plot and scientific ineptitude you wonder if anyone had read it (points for guessing the other). K9’s not the only change to the leads, though – playing in effect a double role, here’s where Tom Baker starts a very different and more comedic performance, but also where free-thinking, intelligent Leela is hideously dumbed down to nothing but a savage in a skimpy outfit… Still, these days, contamination by superbugs in hospital is very topical.
K9 and Company – A Girl’s Best Friend
From the opening sequence of perky pop over Sarah Jane jogging and K9 sat on a stone wall, you suspect this is going to be funny without meaning to be. Unfortunately, a lot of it’s just very dreary. Sarah is good as the lead, despite the title “Girl” rather doing down a successful career woman in her thirties and her having much less to work with from the script than in today’s smashing Sarah Jane Adventures, but this is fatally flawed. It can’t decide if it wants to be cosily ’50s Miss-by-a-mile Marple-style village mysteries, modern woman Avengers, transatlantic Hart to Hart, outright Wicker Man horror or something with a cute robot for the children. So it manages to be none of them. K9’s role is so minimal he could largely be replaced by a gun and a tape recorder, while the ‘clues’ to the double-murder-mystery (without any murders) seemed ridiculously clumsy even when I was ten. Still, the music always makes me chuckle.
Enjoy all of these, and whichever you buy, remember to pop your DVD into the player and hit play on each feature straight away, because – on past form – the menus always give away the key bits of the plot that I’ve tried not to.
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“So that’s it! You’re a time meddler – no wonder you wanted to get rid of me! …You know as well as I do the golden rule of space and time travelling. Never, never interfere with the course of history.”The Doctor’s certain the TARDIS has landed in Northumbria sometime around the Eleventh Century – so how has someone been able to mislay a Twentieth-Century wristwatch, and why does the monks’ chant drifting down from the local monastery alter speed like a recording? This is the first story with perhaps Doctor Who’s most distinctive idea, of someone or something anachronistic, advanced and usually alien on the loose somewhen in Earth’s history. It’s a great example of the sort of wit, invention and setting that the series practises right up to the new series today, though on just a tad higher budget – and just as in two of the high points of last year’s series of Doctor Who, a watch is unexpectedly important to the Doctor’s discovery that he’s not alone (but more on watches down below).
“And who says so? Doctor, it’s more fun my way!”
Last week, rather than watching this exciting new DVD from 1965, I was watching the DVD of a much more stodgy old story from 1985. Yes, the DVD release schedules feel like time travel, too. In both this and The Mark of the Rani, the actors playing the Doctor are superbly watchable – Billy Hartnell and Colin Baker – and the scenery’s an awful lot better in 1985 than the odd tree stuck round a studio in 1965. But how come the later story’s the one that feels so slow? To say nothing of its both nonsensical and hackneyed plot, the terrible dialogue and that the audience laughs with the Monk in 1965, but laughs at the Master in the 1985 story where all the mystery’s gone by half-way into Part One. So don’t let this far superior tale from 1965 and 1066 being black and white put you off.
As usual, the story’s been beautifully restored for DVD (complete with a feature about how they did it), though the patchiness of the old print is particularly noticeable in the final episode. Good news: it’s cheaper than usual. Bad news: because there are fewer extras than usual. Good news: there are still quite a few extras anyway. In addition to the usual photo gallery and informative text notes to play throughout the story, there’s a commentary with companion Peter Purves, script editor and terribly nice man Donald Tosh, designer Barry Newbery and producer and TV legend Verity Lambert, recorded just weeks before she died. There’s a small obituary and a photo gallery for her – let’s hope for a proper retrospective when they get more time to put one together, as production on this disc was already finished last November. The other standout feature is Stripped For Action – The First Doctor, looking at the comic strips based on the series’ early days, with their wacky plots, the Doctor’s different grandchildren and his recurring foes the villainous, vaguely cone-shaped, robotic, er… Trods. Daleks being a bit expensive to license. It’s an appropriate extra, as the Monk returned three times – once on TV, once in a novel and once in a comic strip (the latter really wasn’t very good, but you can buy it in a ‘Complete Fifth Doctor’ graphic novel and it’s well worth picking up for the fantastic title story The Tides of Time). Let’s hope they do more of these for the other Doctors, and commission documentaries about the books, too…
The Plot, With Spoilers – Skip to the Next Bit If You Don’t Want to Know Who Wins the Battle of Hastings
Watching The Time Meddler in 2008, it’s almost impossible not to look at it as an ‘important’ story introducing so many plot elements that would grow within the series from that point on. But I’m fairly sure that for viewers at the time, another change was much more important. From the series’ beginning in 1963, the Doctor had been accompanied by two teachers, Ian and Barbara, along with a teenager – and although his granddaughter Susan (apparently aged sixteenish) had left, she was instantly replaced by near-photocopy orphan Vicki. Well, at the end of the previous story, Ian and Barbara went back home to dear old Blighty and their claim to being the ‘parents’ in the TARDIS family was never replaced. If ever there was a debate about whether the Doctor was the lead character, with The Time Meddler it was definitely over and viewers knew that anyone else could come and go. How would the series carry on?
About four years ago, Richard and I watched the whole of William Hartnell’s time as the Doctor in order (with appropriate replacements for the bits the BBC chucked away). I’ve always found The Chase, the story before this one, a bit rubbish. It is, but after following the continuing story through I found myself tearful at the end because Ian and Barbara were leaving – and never tell me they didn’t marry and live happily ever after. By contrast, I’d loved The Time Meddler since I first saw it, and I wondered if now I’d be put off it by missing Mr Chesterton and Miss Wright. Then I started watching this story and found that I’m a fickle thing, much as the audiences at the time might have been (with another twenty-four years of the series’ original run to follow). This one is great fun from the start.
The Time Meddler has a marvellous first episode, doing exactly what it needed to – provide a particularly intriguing mystery, and show that the Doctor and the series can get on just fine with just young Vicki and sceptical space pilot Steven for company. And the dialogue between them is great, the Doctor being both off-balance and off the leash now the junior lead talks back rather than being the ‘straight man’, giving us all a treat as they fling put-downs at each other. When the series first began in 1963 and when it returned in 2005, the first episodes were taken up with introducing ordinary people to the Doctor’s life and astonishing them with the TARDIS – because those people, Ian and Barbara and then Rose, were exploring what this show was all about on behalf of the viewer. This time, as with last year’s Smith and Jones that brought Martha on board, there’s a new companion but most viewers already know what to expect, so the introductions are much briefer and played much more for laughs. If you thought the Doctor was cheeky to mouth “bigger on the inside than on the outside” behind Martha last year, wait ’til you see him exasperatedly point out to Steven such features in the TARDIS as:
“That is the dematerialising control, and that over yonder is the horizontal hold; up there is the scanner, those are the doors, that is a chair with a panda on it… Sheer poetry, dear boy. Now please stop bothering me!”Like Martha, Steven refuses to believe the TARDIS travels in time. As the Doctor was rather less able to steer it back then, rather than popping about to do tricks he merely argues waspishly with his new companion that, as they’re in the Eleventh Century, perhaps he should stop being sarky and notice. Picking up a Viking helmet with horns – you know, like they never wore, but forgive the historical inaccuracy for the gag – he waves it at his sceptical stowaway, exclaiming:
“What do you think it is? A space helmet for a cow?”The story’s a great showpiece for Billy’s magnificent Doctor, given the chance to be gentle with Vicki and Edith; much cleverer in finding out the date than later Doctors’ “What year is it” clodhopping; acerbic with Steven; and by turns amusing and authoritative with the Monk. He really dominates this story, despite spending a week of it on holiday! The entertaining script really comes to life, though, in the many confrontations between the Doctor and his counterpart the Monk. Every time they appear on screen together, the quality rockets.
Both William Hartnell and Peter Butterworth are actors with great screen presence, each able to play both comedy and drama with aplomb and switch between them with ease as they and their characters fight to get one up on each other. You can see why one was the first Carry On star and the other went on to star in several future Carry On films. The Doctor’s companions aren’t bad, either; Peter Purves (Stephen) later found greater fame in Blue Peter, while Maureen O’Brien (Vicki) went on to more acting fame and also writes a successful series of detective novels. She was signing DVDs of The Time Meddler at Tenth Planet last Saturday, and if you want future DVD speculation, she didn’t give anything away – though don’t put your bets on The Space Museum coming out this year. Of all the pictures from other stories she was given to sign, that was the one that rang no bells at all (“Everyone had big sideburns or strange eyebrows?” She shakes her head. “You started a revolution among teenagers in black pullies?” “Did I? I’m glad to hear it,” and so on). But anyway, the Monk…
This story wrong-foots the viewers more than any other since the first story, An Unearthly Child, going somewhere quite unexpected just as they’d got used to the idea of the ‘adventures in history’ and the ‘science fiction’ stories being completely separate. The rules change here, as the future gets mixed into the past to produce several ‘What the hell is going on?’ moments of the sort best summed up for the novel of the later story Carnival of Monsters:
“The Doctor and Jo land on a cargo ship crossing the Indian Ocean in the year 1926.When we first see the Monk, he’s a mysterious figure watching from a clifftop as the TARDIS appears (there’s a marvellous shot of it from above), and not only does he seem to recognise it, but he appears to be wearing a ring just like the Doctor’s (something that was occasionally significant in the early days, but which was soon dropped). Clues build around him as more and more anachronistic details are revealed, and he shows his capabilities as he traps the Doctor. When Vicki and Stephen investigate the Doctor’s disappearance, they discover the Monk’s mysterious plans regarding the Vikings (with help from that hoary old ‘one fatal mistake’ slip)… And then, in the cliffhanger to the penultimate episode, suddenly they and the audience find that the Doctor’s Ship is no longer the only TARDIS in the Universe. It’s a stunning moment, recently reworked to similar shock effect when the lonely Doctor of the new series was suddenly revealed to be not alone.
“Or so they think.”
When I was little, I didn’t know a lot about this story. I’d read that it had the Monk in it, who was ‘A Renegade Time Lord’ and therefore ‘Very Important’, but not played by Roger Delgado and so not as impressive as the Master (unless you take Cadfael as proof of the unlikely theory that the Monk and the Master are one and the same). But fan lists long before I ever got to see the story labelled it the first ‘psuedo-historical’ story, the first with ‘another Time Lord’ (aside from Susan, and still not named as such), the first ‘indication that time can be changed’, the first time what the word ‘TARDIS’ means is changed (it’s changed back again, these days, but the tiny alteration lasted a quarter of a century) and even, according to some po-faced people that didn’t like The Romans, the first ‘comedy story that works’. The last may tip you off that, unlike Last of the Time Lords, this story has a refreshing lack of self-importance. It’s the end of the second season of Doctor Who, but it feels like a fresh start rather than a ‘season finale’ – though the closing fadeout, with Billy’s voice-over and the TARDIS crew’s faces across a starfield, is sheer magic. Though with such innovation and revelation you’d expect an over-hyped, climactic end-of-season cliffhanger, instead it just gets on with telling a jolly story and taking the mickey, and I’m very glad. First the very funny novelisation came along in the ’80s, then I saw a repeat in 1992, and I realised that it’s terrific. Not epic, not awesome, not immense, but a great little story, with huge entertainment value.
These days I sit back and enjoy just how good these characters are, and all the twists and turns of the Monk’s plan. Is he helping the Viking raiding party, and betraying the friendly Saxon villagers? In which case, what’s that atomic cannon doing pointed at the Viking fleet he’s signalling towards land? Yes, he’s one of the Doctor’s people, but rather than just occasionally helping people out from moral conviction he has grand schemes to rework the whole of history because, ooh, it seems like a good idea at the time! He boasts of building Stonehenge with anti-gravitational lifts and he’s made multi-century investments for the compound interest (though the banks would surely switch him to a worse rate), while his ‘to do’ list is a scream. And here, he plans to obliterate the Viking fleet in order that King Harold’s Saxon army will be fresh, uninjured and ready to win the Battle of Hastings (JRR Tolkien might approve).
The details beyond the two main characters are worth watching, too. There are lashings of post-modern wit long before it was fashionable – whether it’s the way About Time 1 notes how everything works in the way TV does twenty years before Moonlighting was ‘ground-breaking’, that the Doctor’s missing for the second episode and the cliffhanger is that – shock – he isn’t there, or the way that most of the ‘technology’ the Monk has is from the ’60s things, just as Russell T Davies these days deliberately makes a series from ‘now’ appealing to and joking with the contemporary audience. And, like writer Dennis Spooner’s previous scripts, the humour is leavened by alarmingly grim elements like the villagers’ hard lives, the threat of the Vikings and, shockingly, the implied rape of a character we’ve got quite fond of, taken deadly seriously (for all those people who said Billy was just for the kiddies, and that sex was invented in the New Adventures, the repeat of this story was the most shocking sexual reference in Doctor Who in 1992). The depth and deftness aren’t just in the script and the performances, either, but in some inspired direction and impressive design that belie the story’s wafer-thin budget – you can believe the dirty Saxon huts, there’s one of the series’ better forests not filmed outside, and there are touches like filming actors from below against scudding clouds that make it much less plain the clifftop is in the studio. It’s not perfect, but nothing is; some of the scenes with the minor characters are a little dull, and the Vikings aren’t exactly sparkling. Their fight scenes are a bit feeble, too, but you can’t have everything.
This is a super little example of what makes Doctor Who Doctor Who – I’ve always loved the uniquely Who-ish historical anachronisms of aliens or time meddlers, a type of story that could almost be the backbone of the series. Right from this prototype through Pyramids of Mars and The Curse of Fenric to Tooth and Claw and Human Nature, there are great tales to be found when the Doctor travels back to a well-known period of Earth’s history, meets both exactly the sort of people we’d expect him to and some outer space people we really wouldn’t, and everything collides. If anyone’s come up with a better idea of the perfect basis for Doctor Who story, I haven’t heard it.
Watch Out!
Today is the 77th anniversary of the première of Tod Browning’s Dracula, one of the great Universal horror movies and making an instant star of Bela Lugosi for his charismatic performance. This morning, I trudged out to the doctor – not the Doctor – after some of the latest dreary things wrong with me started to alarm Richard when I spent Saturday keeling over (thanks for driving me to Maureen O’Brien and back, love!), and found that there’s a two-week wait to see the phlebotomist for some tests. In 1931, they were keener to take blood…
While I was out, I nipped into the local supermarket and – among other bits of more necessary shopping – got myself a dinky half-price remote-control Dalek to cheer myself up with. Some readers familiar with more of Doctor Who’s second season than just The Time Meddler may understand (though the cashier didn’t) why I laughed on hearing that it all came to £21.64. On Saturday, though, I picked up a new Doctor Who toy at Tenth Planet that somehow particularly appealed to me, though; ‘the Doctor’s Fob Watch’. I know, it doesn’t sound like the top thing for kids, does it? But after the significance of the Monk’s dropped watch in The Time Meddler, you might remember how important and unfortunate a fob watch was to ‘John Smith’ in last year’s fantastic Human Nature. Well, now you can get one of your very own, with its rather lovely design (albeit in plastic), lights and squeakily played David Tennant quotes. It keeps terrible time, though. And it doesn’t even have the excuse that it’s on Malcassairo time. Here it is modelled by our Moomin, Billy:
To tell the truth, though, there’s something else that’s not quite as thrilling as it could be about the watch. Because, exciting though it is to have the nice Doctor speaking to me from it, what I’d really like them to bring out – and I suspect quite a lot of people will agree – is not the Doctor’s fob watch, but the Master’s. Because, though Human Nature was undoubtedly the most marvellous of all last year’s Doctor Who stories, the climax of Utopia as kindly Professor Yana opens his watch and becomes the Master was the most gripping quarter-hour of the year’s telly. So please, Character Options, next time let us press the button and hear Derek Jacobi:
“It’s time travel! They say there was time travel back in the old days… I never believed… But what would I know? Stupid old man! Never could keep time. Always late, always lost – even this thing never worked…”Or the Doctor and his friends:
“Time and time and time again…”
“Oh, it’s – it’s only an old relic. Like me. I was found with it, an orphan in the storm…”
“Does it matter…?”
“That’s a TARDIS…”Or a wicked chuckle from Anthony Ainley, then Derek Jacobi being much more sinister and evil Roger Delgado:
“TARDIS… The time vortex…”
“Regeneration… Regeneration…”
“The drums, the drums, the drums, the never-ending drumbeat – open me, you human fool, open the light and summon me and receive my majesty!”
“Destroy him! …Then you will give your power to me.”
A Quick Peek At Forthcoming 2008 DVDs
The Time Meddler’s not the only Doctor Who DVD out this year – expect nearly a dozen releases – but since I rarely get round to doing these reviews, here are some quick previews of the stories coming up in the first half of the year. Oh, and the Beneath the Surface box that came out in January…
Beneath the Surface
Now, here’s a mix. These three stories, which Richard, our friend Stephen and I all think of as ‘Under the Sea’ after Homer Simpson’s song, all feature different ethnic groups of the same species, intelligent reptiles (misnamed ‘Silurians’) that lived on Earth before humanity evolved and went into hibernation to escape a global catastrophe – but though the stories all try to make the same sort of moral point with each group that wakes up millions of years later and comes into conflict with the human race, they do it in a textbook example of diminishing returns. The first story in the box is absolutely terrific and the series’ moral centre, despite iffy science; the second often looks great and is dumbed-down fun, but makes a horrible mess of the ending; the last is pretty much a horrible mess all the way through…
Doctor Who and the Silurians
This story has a lot to answer for… Reading its message that green scaly rubber people are people too turned me into a Liberal. It’s worth picking up the book, originally titled Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, though it’s a lot easier today to get the talking book version on CD – it’s one of the finest Doctor Who novelisations ever written, with characterisation greatly expanded from the TV version into very much a story in its own right, though Caroline John isn’t as impressive a reader as she is playing the Doctor’s companion Liz Shaw on TV (her ‘Scottish accent’ has to be heard to be believed, but look out for her husband’s fantastic reading of another outstanding novelisation of the time, Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon). As far as the 1970 TV version starring Jon Pertwee as the Doctor goes, there’s a lot to treasure, despite a really naff T-Rex – a great guest role for Fulton McKay, some riveting dialogue as people (green and pink) divide into different sides about how to deal with the other species, and of course one of the series’ most memorable final scenes. Along the way, there’s a jaw-dropping documentary-style disaster in London, too. Really impressive extra: a documentary on the politics of the time and how it affected Doctor Who. Really, er, different extra: the earliest story to have its complete score presented as a separate music-only track, a feature which I love, always, and only slightly less when this one’s the attack of the killer kazoos. Probably the best of the stories so far announced for DVD release this year.
The Sea Devils
More Pertwee from a couple of years later, though I first saw it – like The Time Meddler – as part of a repeat season in 1992. This one, too, has a rare ‘early’ music-only score, and though I’m quite fond of it, it’s pretty notorious. The version released on CD has sleeve notes describing it as “uncompromising,” and if ever you notice an incidental score, you’ll notice this one. The story? Well, the Silurians’ cousins the Sea Devils are scarier but dumber and far less characterised, despite their rising from the sea giving a brilliant cliffhanger (one that inspired several more later in the series). The Doctor is increasingly unlikeable, if more flamboyantly dressed, and here faces off against Roger Delgado’s original Master, who’s in prison and claiming to be a reformed character. I suspect it’s not much of a giveaway to suggest he may be fibbing (watch out for a fabulous scene involving The Clangers that was remade with John Simm’s Master and more modern equivalents last year). On the down side, despite being slightly shorter than the previous story it feels much more flabby, it has the series’ crudest caricature of a politician, and the ending… Well, without spoiling it, it turns the morality of the previous story on its head, and that’s just wrong.
Warriors of the Deep
Bright lights; Cold War machismo; eyeshadow and morality applied with a trowel… It’s 1984, Peter Davison is the Doctor, and this is a story where very little goes right. The monsters fall apart – literally, in places – the cast are wooden, the script is clichéd and the Doctor’s stuck in a moral quagmire where the writer thinks agonising about it is the same as justifying it (even the much-praised final line is almost word-for-word from the final episode of The Daleks, twenty years earlier). On the good side, the Doctor’s companion Turlough is fun when screwed up to a pitch of twitchiness, the sets are impressive despite unmerciful lighting and the music-only score on this one is rather good… Probably the weakest of the stories so far announced for DVD release this year (though K9 runs it close).
The Five Doctors (25th Anniversary Edition)
Some series would have their 20th-Anniversary parties off-air. Doctor Who televised it, a story crammed with old friends – including Doctors Peter Davison, Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton, a bit of Tom Baker and someone pretending to be the late William Hartnell – and old enemies. It’s fun, but dumb, with as good a script as you could expect when asked to mix in so many ingredients, though significantly more plodding direction than you might have expected. This DVD is an all bells-and-whistles set, the 25th Anniversary Edition of the 20th Anniversary story, and includes both the original version and the 1990s ‘Special Edition’ (the only version previously released on DVD, though without any extras) with what are now much more dated special effects than those which were originally transmitted; will there be new new effects to cover up the old new effects? [R: NO! Ed] The best moments are probably Peter Davison’s emotionally affecting performance early on, underscored by evocative music, before the vivid cartoons of his other selves turn up – and the lovely pre-credits clip of William Hartnell, which is unfortunately more stylish than all the rest of it.
Sadly, despite all the extras that will be crammed onto this two-disc set (and probably due to shameless breakage of copyright), what’s by far the most exciting version of the story won’t be on the DVD – you can, however, enjoy both Part One and Part Two of it on YouTube. Do. It’s a work of genius, for fans of the old and the new series alike.
The Invasion of Time
Tom Baker as the Doctor, Louise Jameson in leather bikini as Leela and the tin dog – probably the best-remembered of all the line-ups from the original series, and all good characters, but rather starved of good stories together. The Doctor returns to Gallifrey and turns into a mad dictator over the Time Lords – you may, readers, suspect it’s acting, or indeed overacting – where there’s a striking mix of fabulous and wooden characters, exciting and very dull monsters, exciting twists and long stretches that seem to be made up as they go along. A lot of it’s very entertaining and there’s a great surprise appearance by the same monsters who’ll be making a surprise appearance in this year’s Doctor Who on TV (for once, last year I correctly predicted this would be out, and that there’ll be a box set of these same surprise monsters’ previous appearances, also now due this year). A lot of it’s one of the most inept ‘political thrillers’ you’ve ever seen, it treats intelligent, independent-minded Leela dreadfully, and it has perhaps the most thoroughly wrong ending of any Doctor Who story (yes, worse than The Sea Devils), both morally and in requiring the viewer to remember details of a very much better story shown a year and a half earlier. One to watch in parts, then…
Black Orchid
Peter Davison’s Doctor travels to 1926 for a comedy of manners crossed with Jane Eyre, all set at a country house. It’s short, it’s rather diverting and it has some marvellous frocks, but there’s not a lot of substance to it and it’s hardly up to Agatha Christie’s standards. Though it has one of the Doctor’s most widely ridiculed moments – ‘proving’ he’s not a murderer by saying, ‘Look at my TARDIS!’ – there is a strange sort of thematic sense to it; this story is all about masks and keeping up appearances, from the masked ball to the tragedy underneath, and the Doctor’s point is that he’s the only person telling the truth and so, literally, an innocent. Or it might just be very silly.
The Brain of Morbius
Tom Baker’s Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, 1976, and the first Doctor Who I ever saw in colour (aren’t hospitals marvellous?). And what colour! Mainly rich red, appropriately for the series’ most Hammer-toned Frankenstein pastiche, with more ‘unsuitable material for children’ than in almost any other Who story (naturally, I loved it). It gets away with the brains and the blood by being simply so funny. The dialogue is fabulous, Philip Madoc enjoying every word as an outstanding villain, and there’s some of the most stunning ‘architecture’ ever seen in the series for the interior of his castle (the ‘outside’ shots are less convincing, though). Of all those I know are still to come this year, this is the story I’m most looking forward to on DVD, and there are three things in particular to look out for: the way it turns the Frankenstein story that everyone else had done upside-down, by having the ‘creature’ in control from the start; the way it turns the ‘Hitler returns’ story that everyone else had done upside-down, by making Morbius the ex-dictator of the Time Lords and so making the Doctor not the standard ‘dashing British agent preventing them from rising again’, but a horrified ‘German’ stuck with the responsibility; and an enthralling climax as the Doctor and Morbius fight a mental duel to spine-tingling music (which, sadly, won’t be available on a separate track).
The Invisible Enemy and K9 and Company Box
At some point in the year, there’s going to be a K9-themed twin pack featuring what are in effect his first and last stories from the series’ original run – the story that introduced him, and a one-off spin-off pilot for a series that, unlike Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, never got any further. On the basis of what we got, though, that was a bit of a relief – it’s not a patch on the two new spin-off series, let alone Doctor Who itself, and even The Invisible Enemy’s very patchy. Personally, I’d have gone for a three-pack of stories and bunged in another K9 tale that was more entertaining (Nightmare of Eden, say), but – as I said last year – if you want a box set that shows off K9 at his best, hunt down a copy of the brilliant Key to Time…
The Invisible Enemy
Tom Baker as the Doctor, Louise Jameson in leather bikini as Leela and the tin dog – probably the best-remembered of all the line-ups from the original series, and all good characters, but rather starved of good stories together. It’s still true. A new producer had just taken over in 1977, and broke the bank on this one – some of it looks great, but with inflation and the writers’ ambitions both spiralling out of control, some of it looks downright terrible. The first episode is intense, with abrasive music, a mysterious catch-phrase and oppressive horror, but it goes rapidly downhill: mistakes include an outer-space hospital with a Level ‘4X’, which makes you think they couldn’t give one; an unintentionally funny giant prawn; and one of the two Doctor Who scripts that always spring to mind as riddled with such plot and scientific ineptitude you wonder if anyone had read it (points for guessing the other). K9’s not the only change to the leads, though – playing in effect a double role, here’s where Tom Baker starts a very different and more comedic performance, but also where free-thinking, intelligent Leela is hideously dumbed down to nothing but a savage in a skimpy outfit… Still, these days, contamination by superbugs in hospital is very topical.
K9 and Company – A Girl’s Best Friend
From the opening sequence of perky pop over Sarah Jane jogging and K9 sat on a stone wall, you suspect this is going to be funny without meaning to be. Unfortunately, a lot of it’s just very dreary. Sarah is good as the lead, despite the title “Girl” rather doing down a successful career woman in her thirties and her having much less to work with from the script than in today’s smashing Sarah Jane Adventures, but this is fatally flawed. It can’t decide if it wants to be cosily ’50s Miss-by-a-mile Marple-style village mysteries, modern woman Avengers, transatlantic Hart to Hart, outright Wicker Man horror or something with a cute robot for the children. So it manages to be none of them. K9’s role is so minimal he could largely be replaced by a gun and a tape recorder, while the ‘clues’ to the double-murder-mystery (without any murders) seemed ridiculously clumsy even when I was ten. Still, the music always makes me chuckle.
Enjoy all of these, and whichever you buy, remember to pop your DVD into the player and hit play on each feature straight away, because – on past form – the menus always give away the key bits of the plot that I’ve tried not to.
Labels: David Tennant, Doctor Who, DVD, History, In-Depth Doctor Who, New Adventures, Philip Madoc, Reviews, Sarah Jane Smith, The Brigadier, The Master, Toys, Utopia, William Hartnell
