Love and Liberty

With the “Classic” Doctor Who DVD collection hurtling towards completion in next year’s fiftieth anniversary year, most of the remaining stories are due out during 2012. There are long-awaited favourites; “missing” stories restored; others it made sense to leave ’til last. I’ll probably review several of them in detail later, but here to start with are single-paragraph summaries in which I reveal which are the most exciting (and which the… slightly less exciting) 2012 releases, and predict some as yet-unannounced releases*. Unconvincing Daleks! Unconvincing dinosaurs! The Master at his best! Billy’s big hat! Tom’s deadly jelly babies! Sylv’s hot arse!

The 2012 Doctor Who DVDs In Brief(ish)

The UNIT Files: Invasion of the Dinosaurs / The Android Invasion
(starring Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker; out since January)

Not the year’s strongest stories, but rather good DVDs with engaging and extensive extras, these two stories have much in common with each other – though neither is what you’d expect from the Doctor’s military chums in the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. In both, the Doctor’s already finished his exile to Earth and so is only dropping in; each has an “Invasion” title that rather gives the game away; each stars the great Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith. Yet only one has Nick Courtney’s Brigadier, and it’s not too much of a spoiler to suggest this might be called the ‘UNIT Goes A Bit Iffy’ box set. Both stories have some superb location footage; both have uneven scripts (one a striking central story with quite a bit of politics but some pretty poor plotting, the other intriguing but often dumb); only one has the least convincing dinosaurs known to humanity. Well, I’ve warned you. And yet I have a massive soft spot for them both, and have been enjoying them hugely.
Try the DVD Coming Soon Trailer today!

The Sensorites
(starring William Hartnell; out since January)

Starring the original and best Doctor and from the end of the original and one of the best seasons, this is… Still a contender for the weakest release of the year. It’s not that the story is bad, exactly, as that the way it’s done is long, dull and the most aimed at rather dim and undemanding children that the series has ever been. Nearing the end of a nine-month-long first season, even the superb TARDIS crew look like they need a holiday (and one of them gets one. You can get a great suntan cooped up on a spaceship). Along the way, though, there are some nice pieces of design – both architecture and aliens that inspired the Ood – a few creepy moments and the series’ first steps from ‘monsters’ to aliens with individual characters. Very small steps. With very big feet. The extras are a bit light, but one of them’s fascinating, too (probably best to watch it before the current massive luxury overdose of the lovely-but-ubiquitous Toby Hadoke puts you off).
With another exciting DVD Coming Soon Trailer…

Revisitations 3: The Tomb of the Cybermen / The Three Doctors / The Robots of Death
(starring Patrick Troughton / Jon Pertwee, with Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell / Tom Baker; out since February)

This boxed set might well be the best release of the year, an absolute must-have purchase… At least, if you don’t have them already. Picture restoration techniques, DVD technology and expectations of extra features have all improved strikingly since the first Doctor Who DVD was released in 1999, and so it’s no surprise that some of the earlier releases have been scheduled for up-to-today’s-standard “Special Editions”, based on their having video quality that could now be sharply improved, documentaries that could now be made, or egregious cock-ups that could now be corrected. Like its two predecessors, this boxed set features three stories that may already be on your DVD shelves, and it’s a great improvement on last year’s Revisitations 2. Though The Three Doctors is less impressive than the other two, that’s largely because they’re among the best the series has ever produced. The Tomb of the Cybermen is probably the definitive story for the steel giants, really getting across what they’re about and copied ever after. It sounds and looks fabulous, from location filming in a quarry that, for once, could pass for ancient Egypt, to the Tombs themselves, almost a temple to maths. As you’d guess from the title, this has a strong horror inspiration – but, most importantly, it’s probably Patrick Troughton’s best performance as the Doctor, and possibly the best by anyone. It’s the story that Matt Smith saw and decided Pat was The Man, and that bow ties were cool (though you might gloss over many dated attitudes. And accents. Points for homoeroticism, though). The Three Doctors has more variable design, but many utterly loveable performances, and an operatic villain whose moment of despairing realisation clutches my heartstrings like no other – and finally, The Robots of Death is another superb story, a masterpiece of design with gorgeous décor and robots, a tightly twisted murder mystery (though don’t look too hard when you’re only meant to see a bit of the murderer) and a terrific script.
Ooh. Another DVD Coming Soon Trailer. Cool, but in just that one respect Revisitations 2’s was better.

The Face of Evil
(starring Tom Baker; out in March)

Next week’s DVD release completes Doctor Who’s best ever season (so far) on DVD and introduces Louise Jameson as bright, questioning, heretic action hero Leela – who too many people think was just a dumb savage, because they can’t see past her leather bikini. Slightly oddly, as with three of last year’s releases, this is coming out back-to-front: The Robots of Death and The Face of Evil are out in consecutive months and were indeed broadcast right next to each other, but they’re out in reverse order. Originally titled The Day God Went Mad, the story’s a particularly intelligent piece of sci-fi, with twists, political in-fighting and such a blatant religious theme that it must have been trying hard to get up Mrs Whitehouse’s nose (and end up climbing Tom’s), though also with considerable wit, including a strategically deployed jelly baby. The Doctor is cast as Satan, predating Mr Moffat’s ‘Doctor as mythical figure’ by several decades and, thankfully, much shorter. It’s just a shame that the design and direction aren’t nearly as impressive in the rest of the season…
And the latest DVD Coming Soon Trailer so far available; it still seems weird to have this on The Robot of Death for the story before it…

The Dæmons
(starring Jon Pertwee; out in March)

Surely the most anticipated release of the year and possibly the best, this is an iconic story of the Doctor fighting the Master’s plan to raise the Devil (or is it?) in an archetypal English village. The religion / science story isn’t as intelligent as The Face of Evil (and has a famously wobbly ending), but it looks an awful lot better and the characters are much more memorable. Unfortunately, the Doctor is mainly memorable in this one for being a patronising git, so it’s easy to warm to the Master (Pertwee is far more likeable in the two new releases out already). Terrific cliffhangers, a bit of TV satire, a much more cosily familiar use of UNIT than either of The UNIT Files… I admit I’m looking forward to it. The only thing I can’t understand is the timing: after courting controversy by releasing last year’s terrorism-themed Day of the Daleks on September 12th because that was the exact date on which it was set (though no-one noticed, still less took offence), why not release this Beltane tale on April 30th?

Nightmare of Eden
(starring Tom Baker; out in April)

The 2012 release most likely to split fan opinion – and I’m on its side. A script from an Oscar winner, hilariously, has many strong ideas and some grim reality (if overdoing its ‘Drugs are BAD!’ message), with many fewer laughs than you’d expect from this 1979 season with Douglas Adams in charge of the writers. The images are more of a mix, from some striking spaceships to over-lovable monsters, while the acting is… Variable. No, scratch that: Tom Baker is variable (with some outstanding moments but one scene infamous and another on which he’s previously been recorded laughing and telling the camera, “But it was funny, wasn’t it?”); most of the others are just bad, with the notable exception of David Daker, who gets a priceless scene watching TV. Romana seems overwhelmed by her hideous frock, but K9 has plenty to do. Still, don’t let that put you off…

There’s a possibility that the final story planned for that season, the Cambridge-set famous ‘unfinished’ Shada by Douglas Adams – unfinished, surprisingly, not because he didn’t finish the script in time but because of strikes at the BBC – may be released, completed in some way or other, later in the year as part of a Doctor Who – The Legacy box set. Or that may be next year. I admit I’ve never warmed to Shada, thinking it probably Mr Adams’ weakest work, but I’m hoping I’ll change my mind when there’s more of it. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to Gareth Roberts’ decades-delayed novelisation of it next month.

Ace Adventures: Dragonfire / The Happiness Patrol
(starring Sylvester McCoy; out in May)

Did I say that Nightmare of Eden was the release most likely to split fan opinion? How quickly I’m proved wrong. Sophie Aldred’s Ace is a popular companion, but these two of her stories (one introducing her) have more controversial reputations. For me, Dragonfire is the more mixed of the two, with great villains – and terrible bit-part actors; feeble sets – and a spectacular special effect; and a tone that veers wildly from film noir sex to ineffectively macho ’80s. The Happiness Patrol, with its high politics, high camp and sweet villain, is either loved or hated. I love it, and it’s one of Sylvester’s most marvellous performances. The question is, will they include the more-than-twenty-years-later Newsnight ‘scoop’ from last year that it didn’t like Mrs Thatcher?

Death to the Daleks
(starring Jon Pertwee; out in June)

It has been observed among Doctor Who fans that any story with “Time” in the title is a stinker, and though that’s a catty and unfair generalisation, it’s usually true. I’d add the presence of the word “To”, after which every story seems to give up all hope (the execrable ‘radio’ adventure Death Comes To Time seems to prove both effects). The most tired story of Doctor Who’s most tired season, this is another obvious contender for the weakest release of the year, and arguably the worst Dalek story (when I reviewed every Dalek story a couple of years ago, there were three or four in with a shot at that. Though I still picked this one). It’s also probably the story that treats Sarah Jane Smith least well. And as for the music… Yet even the feeblest of Doctor Who stories has much to enjoy in it, with some interesting ideas under the mud: ancient alien cultures falling to dust; an elegiac ending; religious maniacs determined to wipe out their non-conformist naturist cousins (the ones who looked so thrillingly like living rock when I first saw their photos in The Doctor Who Monster Book as a kid). Nick Briggs loves it, bless him.

The Reign of Terror
(starring William Hartnell; probably out later in 2012)

The rest of the DVD schedule for the year hasn’t yet been announced, though this one’s been given as very likely; at the least, there are bound to be several more releases when the series returns in the Autumn, as the DVDs sell more copies when Doctor Who’s on the telly. But while the continuing Who stories since 2005 all exist in their prime and are no harder to find than looking at BBC3 every single day, the stories made back in the Twentieth Century are a little more erratic, with many requiring time-consuming restoration work before they can be released and some no longer even existing on video. So if you’ve ever wondered why the “Classic” Who DVD range isn’t released in sequential order, this is a prime example. It’ll have some Doctor Who that I’ve never seen before – that no-one has seen before. Because a third of The Reign of Terror was among those episodes the BBC call “missing” and that other people call ‘the ones the BBC had burnt before they realised they could make money out of them’. Fortunately, the soundtrack still exists for every story, and this release will include all-new animation to match it on the “missing” parts. The Doctor lands in revolutionary France and struts about loving it in a massive hat; his companions have rather a rougher time, involving gaol, the guillotine and, worst of all, being chatted up. But, basically, Bill Hartnell is fabulous in this, not least crossing wits with the enigmatically sinister Lemaitre (the series’ first character with that name and, no, it’s not him yet) and – this will be one of the ‘new’ bits I’m looking forward to – Robespierre, as well as giving the rather lovely closing monologue that finishes the first season.

The Greatest Show In the Galaxy
(starring Sylvester McCoy; probably out later in 2012)

This will be a milestone in the DVD range – with this, every story from the ’80s will be available to buy. It’s rather good, with both this Doctor’s and Ace’s performances strong (I’d say it’s a better part for her than either of the “Ace Adventures”, and he gets arguably his coolest moment – which, ironically, involves his arse being on fire). Shot entirely on location, by accident and then clever design, it has many ideas, impressive guest stars and a striking look. I like the theme of the hippy dream turned sour; I enjoy the pokes at the ’80s and the enforcement of ‘family values’; I marvel at the pre-emptive strike on The X-Factor. But I don’t like the ending at all, and I’m the one person on Earth who prefers the same author’s Paradise Towers. Still, if you want to see the show’s real target, just imagine if they’d cast Jon Pertwee instead of TP McKenna…

Vengeance On Varos
(starring Colin Baker; probably out later in 2012)

Another “Special Edition”, this is a sort of Revisitations Three and a Half (though I’d have swapped it with The Three Doctors, personally, both to balance the decades and because that story’s more likely to sell more on its own). It’s one of Colin Baker’s best stories, and another that presciently swipes at reality TV – as well as introducing possibly ’80s Doctor Who’s most memorable villain, Nabil Shaban as gurgling slimy alien Sil. Martin Jarvis is excellent as a suffering politician; Jason Connery is… pretty, half-naked; few of the other actors are worth bothering with. It starts a bit slowly, and for an ’80s story about the corrupting influence of big business and the powerlessness of the ordinary person against market forces, the ending doesn’t have a clue about supply and demand. Still, ‘Press the red button to electrocute the Prime Minister’ might catch on…

The Krotons
(starring Patrick Troughton; probably out later in 2012)

The first story from Doctor Who’s greatest writer; outstanding chemistry between the three regular leads (and more chemistry later); guest-starring the mighty Philip Madoc. Pity it’s not very good. Cheaply made even by Doctor Who standards of the time and with infamously unimpressive monsters (to show how ’60s they are, they have mini-skirts and do acid, but neither fetchingly), much of the characterisation is poor and many of the actors worse. On the bright side, the sound design’s good, one of the other guest actors is much more lively than he was in The Reign of Terror, and the Doctor gets a fabulous scene making a mess of standardised testing.

Planet of Giants
(starring William Hartnell; probably out later in 2012)

Visually ambitious though rather banally plotted, this started Doctor Who’s second season and, comparing it with the first, you’re now left in no doubt that the Doctor’s the unmistakeable star, taking all the actions and having all the ideas, while Ian is staggeringly slow and unobservant and Barbara just gets to… come over all faint. The latter two are a shame, but I can’t resist Bill Hartnell taking such delight in his arson around. It’s described as an early ecological fable, but really that’s just a hook to hang the ‘giants’ on; the giant fly’s the high point. Still, I may find myself re-evaluating it; of all the completely existing Doctor Who stories, it’s probably the one I’ve watched least often, and I suspect it may be similarly obscure to many other fans – with the video release long ago deleted, this is the only Who story of the ’60s that you can’t get hold of in the shops today, with all the others out on DVD, CD (notably for the “missing” story soundtracks), or both.

The Ambassadors of Death
(starring Jon Pertwee; probably out later in 2012)

This story was originally planned for release last year, but delayed for more restoration work; while every Jon Pertwee story still exists in full, they don’t all exist in their original full colour, and this is one of the worst-hit. Apparently, though, the colour restoration is now going rather well, so I’m hoping to see it by the end of the year. While two of this year’s Pertwee releases are from his last and most lacklustre year, The Ambassadors of Death would complete his first and by far his best – uniquely, set entirely on Earth (even if two of the stories suggest in their different ways that it may not be Earth), this is the nearest we get to adventures in space, as the Doctor makes a brief rocket trip. It’s long, strange, but exciting, packed with intriguing characters and thrilling mini-adventures, far more episodic than usual, and ahead of the ’70s fashion for conspiracy thrillers. It’ll probably be the fourth or fifth story released this year to feature its own TV-show-within-a-TV-show (and they’re all good), as well as at least the second to nick major set-pieces shamelessly from The Avengers. A splendid story to finish the year with. If indeed it does.


*Having already got some wrong, as it turns out we’ll have to wait until 2013 for the newly-discovered episodes.

Labels: Colin Baker, Daleks, Doctor Who, DVD, DVD Details, Jon Pertwee, Matt Smith, Patrick Troughton, Reviews, Sarah Jane Smith, Sylvester McCoy, The Brigadier, The Master, Tom Baker, William Hartnell

I see that Lord Lee of Trafford (a figure of such great repute that I’m sure you’ve all heard of him) is threatening to resign his Liberal Democrat duties because the party is threatening to fulfil a democratic promise that it’s held steady to for a century. That of abolishing his cosy job for life (but no personal interest, of course).

Anyone would have thought that this might be some cautionary tale about how even the Lib Dems have treated the Lords just as some sort of patronage-a-go-go by doling out peerages to every time-serving Tory who happens to join us after their career is over in the pathetic hope of encouraging more defections, rather than thinking of the Second Chamber as a serious part of Parliament that might need people in it with Liberal principles that might make legislation more Liberal and not more conservative.

And that the moral of the story would be that unelected patronage running part of our laws sucks, whoever appoints the old cronies to their jollies, and that therefore Lord Lee is accidentally making the precise case as to why he and all his peers should be abolished – even the good ones.

But, no, that would be madness talking.

Labels: British Politics, Corruption, Liberal Democrats, Lords

Labour opposed every single move towards Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender equality before they were for it. The Labour Government spent millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money fighting to keep discrimination in the armed forces and age of consent before the European Court found against them and they were forced to change the law. Now they shamelessly claim credit, like a crook caught by the cops and found guilty after a long trial they tried to escape… Then pretending they turned themselves in out of their own goodness. They voted against civil partnerships and in favour of Section 28, too, before belatedly U-turning and pretending they’d been in favour of equality all along.

Labour’s civil partnership laws were designed as a second-rate same-sex marriage, so they deliberately exclude mixed-sex couples; the original Liberal Democrat proposals that the Labour Government voted down in Parliament years earlier were gender-neutral and non-discriminatory. At the same time, the Scottish version of Section 28 was scrapped by Lib Dems in the Scottish Government while the Labour Government at Westminster kow-towed to the bigots for several extra years.

Today, the Labour Party continues to pretend it’s in the lead to the LGBT communities, while being very different to other audiences. The Liberal Democrats in Coalition Government are acting on putting Lib Dem policy in favour of equal marriage into law, while Labour tells the LGBT press they’re “pressing the Government” for it… Except that the Labour Party has no policy in favour of equal marriage, and explicitly opposed it when they had absolute power in government for thirteen years.

And just in the last week, we’ve seen yet again that Labour politicians are against homophobia when it suits them… But homophobic themselves again and again as long as it’s against someone they don’t like, like a Tory or a banker. ‘Some of my best friends are gay’ doesn’t cut it this century.

The Lib Dem position on LGBT rights is simpler and more principled – for equality when Labour was opposing it, for liberty before it was fashionable, Always Been There, Always Will.

Labels: British Politics, Coalition, Gay, Labour, Liberal Democrats, The Golden Dozen, Things To Remember About Labour

In thirteen years of authoritarian government, the Labour Party inflicted 4,400 new laws on the UK – more than any other government in British history.

Though Labour is all over the place on almost every policy in Opposition – alternating between Tory and Trot – there’s one thing in which they’re consistent.

Labour is still determined to be to the far right of the Libera-Tory Coalition on law and order, immigration, civil liberties… Basically, they’ll say anything to please a Tory or a Trot, but the one thing that keeps them together is that they’re never, ever Liberal.

Labels: British Politics, Labour, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Things To Remember About Labour

Would rent controls be the worst method of controlling housing benefit aside from all the others?

With its mixture of good ideas and painful ones, the Welfare Reform Bill going through Parliament is causing more anguish among Liberal Democrats than anything since… Well, since the last horrible compromise the Coalition Government came up with. The logic is relentless: Labour wrecked the economy and stiffed us with the bill; government is still spending vastly more than it has coming in; the NHS and benefits dwarf all other government spending; the Coalition is committed to NHS increases; benefits need to be cut. It’s just that that means taking money from the people who, by definition, have least – and with the Coalition also committed to pension increases and (a Lib Dem victory) to increasing benefits with September’s high inflation rate, that narrows mightily the field of possible cuts.

Amid all the pain about how wrong it is to restrict benefits and the echoing question of where else to find the money when there’s simply none left, that old political cliché of ‘thinking the unthinkable’ – usually spoken by the unspeakable – is being trundled out on a daily basis. So, looking at where the soaring costs are in the benefits system, one element stands out as a massive problem for which no-one is proposing any action.

I come, inevitably, to the elephant in the room, and Millennium’s howl of pain which, amongst other points, reiterated his support for a Citizen’s Income – at least the Universal Credit is a small step in the right direction – but noted the biggest problem with it:

“And since I've been saying for AGES that I would support a flat Citizen's Income if only I could make the maths add up – the problem remains the disproportional effect of Housing Benefit in a housing market that is still massively over-inflated, which is why that's proving such a botherer in the current debate about a "cap" on benefits…”

If the Coalition Government wants to make really big savings on the welfare bill, arbitrarily finding relatively small groups from whom money can be clawed back (often because they can’t fight back) just isn’t going to do the job. And while I support the Universal Credit as a way of simplifying the benefits system and making work pay, this has its limits when there’s not much work to be had (the government needs to cut benefits more as there’s not enough tax coming in. But there’s not enough work about for being to move off benefits into and pay taxes on. So the government needs to cut benefits more as there’s not enough tax coming in. But…).

Everybody knows there is one big problem in the benefits system, and nobody knows how to tackle it. Which drives me to an unthinkable thought.

Shouldn’t we look at how rent controls might work, a quarter of a century after they were abolished?

And, yes, it’s a bizarre and heretical thought for a free-marketeer in one of the two free-market parties and in coalition with the other one. But there’s a simple answer to the gut-instinct complaint, ‘But that would distort the free market!’ No. It can’t. Because the rented sector reliant on housing benefit isn’t a free market at all. Either you abolish housing benefit and let all the consequences of an untrammelled free market in housing erupt, or recognise that this is a market that is warped out of all recognition by subsidy at the bottom, and that it therefore needs an equivalent pressure downwards.

The obvious solution is a vast new build of social housing, but – though the Coalition Government, incredibly, is building much more than Labour did – to pull that off in a couple of years is both financially and physically impossible. Previous governments have put limits on housing benefit but, blatantly, this hasn’t worked. Whether it’s people having to pay top-ups to their landlords or simply that the problem is too big for controls on the benefits side to handle. Government is still paying out vast sums with no effective control, not going to the people in the greatest need but instead subsidising businesses (some small, some large) in the way that we don’t for any others, yet that endless subsidy distorts and makes unaffordable for many people not just the housing market but the whole of government spending.

Look, the idea of price controls makes me cringe. It summons up ideas of post-War drudgery or Gordon Brown salivating, neither of them attractive images. But with massive cuts needed to government spending, the Coalition is having to do a lot of things that either or both parties don’t want to. So what’s the religious objection to the government setting up trials looking at benefits cuts from the other end of the telescope?

I admit that I don’t much like talking about either housing or benefits policy, either. With housing, in my many years on the Lib Dem Federal Policy Committee, there was no other issue that came up so many times to so little effect, and it was, I’m afraid, boring – not because of the vital issue itself, but because over a decade and a half it became clear that I could pretty much deliver all the speeches on either side, and the summing-up that always failed to come to a conclusion:

• ‘This is a really big issue’;

• ‘It costs lots of money and where do we get it from?’;

• ‘But it’s really important’;

• ‘Yes, Simon, but where do we get the money from?’;

• [Half an hour later] ‘Next business’.

And I don’t like talking about benefits because, very simply, I’m on them. I’ve been too ill to work for many years, and I feel ashamed, so I’d prefer to keep my head down. But I noticed in my diary that it was twenty-three years ago tonight that my political career, such as it was, started very small (joining my local party Exec) before its meteoric rise and then health-related complete crash, after which I gave up standing for FPC and now rarely stir myself to write from my pit. But I remember why I started in politics, and it wasn’t to take away benefits from people even worse-off than I am.

Besides, taking money away from landlords might be more popular than taking it away from people with cancer. Who knows?

Of course any rent controls would take a lot of looking at. I don’t want a return to the monolithic sort running for half the last century, or ones that do little for the poorest but give you the jackpot if you’re renting a penthouse. Even regional setting would be far too crude, and any system would probably have to be restricted to rents paid by housing benefit and to bear down very gradually, year by year, so as not to depress the housing market too far (because that inflated bubble is still holding up what’s left of the economy). And I’m prepared to believe – especially after thirteen years of Gordon Brown – that the amount of micro-managing bureaucracy involved would make it impossible to pay off. So it may well be that, after carefully examining the costs and effects, after feasibility studies and pilot schemes, the government might find that it wouldn’t work.

But I still have to ask the question, and propose that we try those feasibility studies and pilot schemes. Would micro-managing bureaucracy for landlords be worse than micro-managing bureaucracy for people who can’t find work, or who are too ill for it? Because that goes on all the time. Would distorting the housing market with a downwards pressure be so shocking, when governments have for decades distorted it with hundreds of billions of pounds of upwards subsidy? And if you have to do something drastic to make savings in the benefits bill, who is better-placed to bear them?



Note: Good grief. Apparently, this is my six hundredth blog post and, thanks to having fallen much more ill than usual (as usual) in December and still being rather worn down, only my second so far this year – this January was only the second month in six years of blogging that I failed utterly to publish a single word on here. Oops. For those of you interested in such things, last year’s 145,792 (ish) words came in uneven bursts of between 37,715 and 314 a month, but none of them were as poor as zero.

Labels: Blogs, British Politics, Coalition, FPC, Health, Ideas, Personal, Stupid Ideas, The Golden Dozen

Anything new the Labour Party claims they’d do if only they were in government now?

It’s a great big lie.

They had a booming economy* and absolute power for thirteen years**.

So if they gave a flying fuck about it, they’d have done it.


*Later revealed to be a debt-fuelled disaster that’ll probably take another thirteen years for the Libera-Tory Coalition to repair and pay off Labour’s bills.

**The Labour Party, on its own, had massive Parliamentary majorities, so they could do whatever they wanted – and did. Even though the large majority of people voted against them each time. Neither the Tories nor the Lib Dems have anything like that power, so each has to compromise.

Labels: British Politics, Coalition, Labour, Things To Remember About Labour

Doctor Who fans were given a spectacular early Christmas present yesterday, when a surprise screening at the BFI revealed that there were two more episodes in existence than everyone had thought there were. For all of us born after the ’60s, this is the first time we can see these performances from William Hartnell in Galaxy 4 and Patrick Troughton in The Underwater Menace – an exciting prospect, even if neither story is universally loved. But in anticipation of these tales of Dalek wannabes and Flash Gordon-style hammery, I have reviews I prepared earlier based on the soundtracks of each. When I see the new old episodes on release next year, how wrong will I be?

The BBC website already has tantalising clips of Galaxy 4 Episode 3: Air Lock and The Underwater Menace Episode 2 to watch, with articles on how they were found both there and on the Radio Times site. If you know nothing about these two stories, be warned that each clip contains spoilers for its story’s key plot point – one implicitly, one directly – and so, unusually, do my reviews below. If you want to wait and see things for yourself, then, stop before the main headings. I will say that both stories, though very different in tone and setting, have monsters with two unusual things in common – and that both were designed to be four-part, ‘typical’ Doctor Who stories of the time and, incredible as it may sound, had comparatively significant cash spent on them to make them look good; it’s widely thought that this may have been more successful in one case than the other. And yet while Galaxy 4 is the one with a particularly well-respected director, of the two clips it’s the one from The Underwater Menace that’s compelling. That even makes up for this, the earliest surviving episode with Patrick Troughton’s Doctor, not being one in which he has his most famous hat – though he does get an outrageous replacement – nor a topless Ben. The clip from Galaxy 4, on the other hand, is visually interesting more in its design than its direction, so perhaps Julia Smith will win out over Derek Martinus after all. Now I’m wondering if the Chumblies are oscillating or merely wobbling (only seeing more of them will tell). Both clips, though, already display a little of what their stories are famous for: painful earnestness saved by Bill Hartnell in one, and an over-the-top mad scientist dragged to Earth by Pat Troughton in the other.

Missing – Presumed in the Skip

Half a dozen years ago, watching the whole of Doctor Who when there was considerably less of it – at both ends, it now happily transpires – I wrote reviews of all of William Hartnell’s stories as the Doctor and the first few of Patrick Troughton’s for an online discussion, and this seems an appropriate day to reprint these two for the first time where more than about half a dozen people can read them below, even if it’s inviting ridicule should things not look as they sounded. But how can I have reviewed these already without ever having seen them, you might ask, being born half a dozen years after their only airing in Britain? Well, I’ve written before about the BBC’s barbarous purges in which they destroyed many of their TV shows from the ’60s, creating what are now disingenuously referred to as “lost” or “missing” episodes. These two are the first surviving episodes to turn up for nearly eight years, since The Daleks’ Master Plan Episode 2: Day of Armageddon back in 2004. Until yesterday there were (or weren’t) 108 of them; now there are only 106 to go, and at least one of them would probably scrape into most fans’ top 100 to be found! Fortunately, for every single story, people recorded the soundtrack at the time, so you can now get the full adventures on CD with linking narration to make them clearer, while there are also many off-screen ‘telesnaps’ which mean we can get a fair idea of what the whole thing looked like for free, assembled into photonovels on the BBC website – and, unofficially, the two have been combined into Reconstructions, which you can get hold of for free as long as you don’t tell the BBC about it.

Of the six seasons broadcast in the ’60s that starred William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton as the Doctor, the middle ones were the worst hit; while most stories survive intact from each of Seasons One, Two and Six, there are only four complete adventures from Seasons Three and Five put together and, as I wrote earlier this year when publishing a review of Doctor Who – The Smugglers, not one story still exists in full from Season Four. These two finds don’t complete any stories, but they do offer an ‘orphaned’ episode for Season Three’s Galaxy 4, of which only a clip had previously been known to exist, and add another ‘orphaned’ episode to the already existing one from Season Four’s The Underwater Menace. Both are sure to be released on DVD next year, probably with soundtracks for the “missing” episodes (and, if we’re very lucky, perhaps partial Reconstructions or even, just maybe, animation for the now half-complete The Underwater Menace). Already today, you can buy the other material on the DVD collection Doctor Who – Lost In Time, which includes that extended clip from Galaxy 4 (peculiarly, presented in the middle of a documentary rather than as a menu item on its own) and the infamous Episode 3 of The Underwater Menace, or you can get the soundtracks for the whole stories both as separate releases and in newly remastered box sets, respectively Doctor Who – The Lost TV Episodes Collection No 1 (1964-1965) and Doctor Who – The Lost TV Episodes Collection No 3 (1966-1967). In which each is probably the weakest story…

For DVD reviews, this is usually the point at which I mention that back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine Issue 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – and how high they and I scored the stories I’m coming to. And they didn’t think much of these, but, hey, they’re the only episodes with arguably my two favourite Doctors that I have never seen, so my enthusiasm’s racing. Even if the DWM vote put Galaxy 4 down into 172nd place and The Underwater Menace even lower at 194; I might put each of them as much as ten places higher, but no more than that. At the moment, I’m much more ill than usual, and Richard had to wake me with the glad tidings yesterday afternoon; when I crawled from bed to watch the clips some time later, though, even my sounding like a Dalek couldn’t hide my excitement. I promptly rang one of my oldest friends with the news, who was audibly thrilled when I told him two episodes had been found. And then said, “Can’t we ask them to put them back where they found them?” when he found out which two. Yet still, the DVD releases can’t come soon enough! And remember, before you read on – spoilers…

Doctor Who – Galaxy 4

“I told them soldiers were no good for space work. All they can do is kill. But they wouldn’t listen. If you are to conquer space, they said, you will need soldiers. So here I am confronted with danger. I’m the only one able to think!”

Season Three of Doctor Who is a strange one even by the standards of the series as a whole. Like the first two seasons, it’s highly innovative and experimental, but with a new production team (the first ‘new’ production team) it has a very different feel. Companions chop and change far more abruptly and the dangers the Doctor faces continue to get ‘bigger’, with this the first of many exploding planets, all making it an unsettling year – but the ideas get bigger, too, with a lot of ‘big concepts’. The downside is that the endearing characterisation and dialogue-driven drama of the first couple of years doesn’t always fit in with the new brooms. And Galaxy 4 is definitely a sign of things to come…

Mini-Skirts Are In Fashion; Complexity Is Out

There are two ‘big ideas’ that everyone knows about Galaxy 4, from the skimpiest story summaries: the Rills are ugly but good, while the Drahvins are wicked but ‘beautiful’ (in a very ’60s way – the book’s cover of highly posed ‘beautiful space women’ against a blazingly pink sky is easily the campest thing ever painted by Andrew Skilleter); and, linked to that, the Drahvins are the nearest broadcast Doctor Who has ever got to the horrendous old sci-fi cliché of ‘the planet of women’. The trouble is, there’s very little else to know about the story, especially as there’s very little made of the ‘evil women’ side of the plot. Naturally, it’s a relief that Steven doesn’t snog them into being good (as is the norm in such stories in other series), and that they’re mostly just dim and for a good reason, rather than behaving as screaming girlies who happen to have large Freudian weapons (admittedly, Maaga bullies her soldiers and makes them cry, but at least she’s a strong character), but in the gaping hole left by the omission of sexist blather is… Not much.

It’s nice that for once Doctor Who is doing a story where ‘ugly’ doesn’t mean ‘evil’; right from The Daleks, the series has a strong current against fascism which is slightly undermined by, for example, the ‘good race’ being blond and ‘perfect’ while we know the others are evil because they’re mutated horrors with funny voices. Unfortunately, while the Rills seem quite an interesting piece of design from the two photos we have of them, all we ever hear is how ugly they are, as if we could miss the moral. Surely the Rills themselves wouldn’t think of themselves as ugly (one of the novels even suggests that Rill social advancement is based on their ugliness, which seems to miss the point)? It doesn’t help that the Rill has the plummiest voice yet heard in the show, which appeals to my own prejudices by suggesting Shakespearean ham, or possibly Lord Melchett. The Doctor has a great moment when he calls this giant alien monstrosity “Young man”, though – we could do with more of that. Their “warning” ammonia bomb is perhaps supposed to recall World War I gas warfare, but (coupled with the Rill’s stern, schoolmasterly tones in telling naughty Maaga to stay indoors) I can’t help but think of it as a stinkbomb. There’s also a teeny bit of a plot hole, where – before we find out the Rills are generous and friendly – they decide to blow up the TARDIS, for no good reason, especially as they’ve deliberately not attacked the spaceship of the Drahvins, who they know are hostile. It’s difficult to imagine any other reason for them to do this than faux-villainous plot convenience in advance of the ‘twist’.

Hands Off My Chumblies

On the bright side, the particularly good Loose Cannon Recon both greatly improves the long clip that’s left of the story by putting it in context and proves that one of the reasons it’s so sad so much of Season Three was tossed into skips and burnt by the BBC is that it seems to have some lovely visuals. Ironically, the first two seasons’ dialogue generally makes them more suited to audio releases, while it looks like there are ‘lost’ higher production standards in the third, where every planetscape appears an improvement on The Chase. The Recon shows some superb design for the time, with great scenery and a very solid ship, as well as re-enacted scenes for the Chumblies, the cuddly little robots that the BBC once again hoped they could cash in on as much as the Daleks (plus someone ‘playing’ Bill Hartnell as, er, a hand waving a knobbly stick). They look quite jolly as they telescope up and down, so again it’s a shame that most of what we have of them is their irritating sound effect on the CD. Ah well [the rediscovered episode means I shall have to take back my observation that if I never hear another Chumblie “oooo-up-ooooom”, it’ll be quite soon enough].

In the end, this is a story with its eye on the big picture; the first planet destroyed in the series, much talk of galaxies, alien races and some rather nice scenery all there to illustrate a big ‘message’. You can’t fault its sci-fi ambition, but it’s as if they spent so much time making it seem ‘big’ that they forgot to fill in any of the details. The galaxy-spanning view makes little sense seen up close, when we realise that the name of the story merely refers to where Maaga comes from and tells us next to nothing, or that her mission to “conquer space!” (and before Sarah Brightman) seems a tad improbable in a backward ship with just a handful of more backward clones to staff it. Added to that, the sheer obviousness of the ‘point’ undermines itself; the story has its heart in the right place, but it goes on and on with little happening, and Season Two’s characters have given way to cardboard that spouts moral messages. It’s never actively bad, but it’s much, much too slight for its length. Photos of Drahvins and Chumblies may look camp and rather exciting, but as we’re drearily reminded, don’t judge by appearances – a simple moral for an even more simple story.

In mitigation, with its proto-Jagaroth spaceship and froody alien vegetation, and of course its (sigh) threatening dolly-birds and cute robots, this was clearly made to be seen, so perhaps the plot was secondary and it was deliberately designed as a ratings-grabber to look at? So will seeing it at last save or damn Galaxy 4? I can’t wait to find out. As then-companion Peter Purves has always said how much he hated this story, his commentary will surely be entertaining, too.

Looking back at it now, there is at least one way in which Galaxy 4 – ’50s B-Movie as it is, with its beehived alien Baaaad Girls – feels slightly ahead of its time. By mostly ignoring the gender reversal dynamics and focusing on Maaga, it’s an early example of TV’s Magnificent Bitch, even though she’s played by Stephanie Bidmead rather than Stephanie Beacham (now there’s a thought: Steven Moffat’s already had a Drahvin spaceship making a cameo last year in a story about a more grandiose but more improbable exploding Universe, undoubtedly because he likes women in micro-skirts, so if he ever does a full-on Drahvin story, how’s she for casting…?). For the most part, this makes it camply amusing at the expense of what little credibility it has – even the first episode title, Four Hundred Dawns, suggests she fuels her ship with her wooden compatriots (‘Throw another Dawn in the furnace! …I’m almost out of disposable Drahvins’, as Richard has it) – and it’s difficult not to imagine it turning up the Planet of Women dial to something like the Two Ronnies’ The Worm That Turned, not least because if it had been made in 1980 they wouldn’t have dared call the villain Maaga. Not only is her name often pronounced so it’s just a shade short of The Good Life’s anti-hero, but it’s uncannily similar to that of another blonde Leader, too.

And yet the scene I’m most keen to see from Air Lock – other than the surely unmissable spectacle of Rills reeling about – is one that’s always gripped me on audio, where Maaga gives a virtual soliloquy, barring the occasional dumb comment from one of her dumb subordinates. She starts off merely grumbling about them, and indeed gives her most infamous line, but it carries on to something much better, a proper bit of villainous spite, delivered in a gripping undertone:

“It may be that we shall kill neither the Rills nor these Earth creatures. Not with our own hands, that is. It may be better for us to escape in the Rills’ spaceship and leave them here. And then... When we are out in space… We can look back. We will see a vast, white, exploding planet... And know that they have died with it!”
“But we will not see them die.”
“You will not. But I, at least, have enough intelligence to imagine it.”

Her having an imagination is quite the best thing in it, which you could even take as a postmodern commentary that the special effects are never going to live up to your mental picture… And at the end, of course, we get to imagine in exactly the same way about her last moments – which might make it an even more postmodern commentary on the bloodthirstiness of the viewers, who watch all these things for their entertainment.

Or she might just be being beastly.

Doctor Who – The Underwater Menace

“You’re not clumsy, Doctor. You did it on purpose.”

The TARDIS lands at the entrance to what’s left of Atlantis and does Flash Gordon.

Of all the stories with missing episodes so far, this is the one where people seem most likely to want the surviving episode lost, too, as it might be better-regarded if only the short ‘censor’s clips’ had survived to suggest a grim and dangerous story about horrible operations, rather than the load of old codswallop we get to see in the surviving Episode 3 in all its ludicrous glory. Even fans who’ve never seen it tend to know that the final line of that involves the mad scientist exclaiming,

“Nothing in the world can stop me now!”

I’ve read several reviews excusing the story by saying this is the worst episode of the four, but that’s nonsense – both soundtrack and Recon make clear that Episode 1, for example, moves very slowly, the TARDIS crew act like idiots and it’s not even funny. Despite all that, it’s still possible to defend it, simply because the surviving episode is often fun. Is it good? Nah. Is it a pleasure to watch? Go on, go on…

Good News For Troughton, Bad News For His Friends

Though at times he’s just as extravagant as in his first two stories, everyone wanting ‘the new Doctor’ toned down a bit is in for a stroke of luck. Opposite Joseph Furst’s Professor Zaroff, he seems relatively underplayed, and not only is he funnier than Furst, at least with the hero we’re laughing with rather than at him. He’s both sharp and funny, particularly when puncturing Zaroff’s plans: “Oh, have I dropped a brick?” or calling his bluff on the explosion being unstoppable and not requiring his finger on the button with “Miss your big moment? I think not.” He’s already getting other people to play on his strangeness, most entertainingly when the lovely Ben bluffs his way past a guard using the old ‘I’ve got a prisoner’ trick: “He’s just not normal, is he?” He tries to bring down Zaroff by suggesting the Fish People strike (a major contrast with Pertwee in The Monster of Peladon), but when it comes down to it, he’s back to what’s clearly already his usual way of foiling an evil plan: blow everything up, as he did on the Vulcan Colony the landing before last. With this strange mix of the gentle and the utterly destructive – ‘Better safe than sorry!’ he seems to think, to make sure the plan’s thoroughly knocked down – you have to feel relieved that Scotland survived in the previous story, or that he didn’t at least blow up the cells and scupper Trask’s boat. By contrast, he also tries to save Zaroff from his horrible end. Meanwhile, with the most ludicrous array of hats seen so far in the series, we see the Doctor delighting in a huge priest’s hat, wearing a fish mask on a stick, and dressed as a gypsy in groovy shades for a very funny ‘action’ scene in the market. You can see why he’s Matt Smith’s favourite Doctor. It’s also the last story he wears his arresting stovepipe hat that appeared in all his early publicity shots, and a little sad that the only surviving episode from one of the ‘stovepipe stories’ is devoid of it, with the telesnaps suggesting that the last person to wear it is Polly…

Although they get to do lots of dressing-up – rubber guards’ uniforms for Ben and Jamie, a shell suit for Polly – it’s not a particularly good story for the Doctor’s three companions. They start well, in a fun little TARDIS scene where everyone thinks about where they’d like to land (it’s difficult to know for sure without the proper episode, but this may feature the rare device of hearing someone’s voice ‘inside their head’ – used in The Moonbase, The Mind Robber and The War Games, but for only one story outside of Troughton), but once they go outside and everyone suddenly wants to explore, now Bill Hartnell’s gone, they rapidly run out of useful things to do after a one-off attempt to use foreign languages. Given that Ben and Jamie have basically the same ‘running around not saying very much’ part, already suggesting too many similar companions, it’s startling how much one-off characters Jacko and Sean are ‘extra companions’, doing companiony things like rabble-rousing the Fish People into striking. Did Geoffrey Orme just not like Ben and Jamie, even in their little rubber outfits? Ben may notice the threat, as he teases new boy Jamie like a younger brother. That’s nothing compared to the distressing fall for Polly, though, as she goes from being a fantastically capable companion to utterly useless here. She’s taken in by Zaroff’s ridiculous bluff to jump the priest Ramo (asking for Ramo to come over so he can “feel the aura of your goodness”), then while they fight she could easily pitch in, but shamefully just squats in the corner looking scared (at least she tries to hit him with a rock later on). Still, the two sexy blondes Ben and Polly look good together, and Joe Orton clearly fancied Jamie in the guard’s outfit, as he wanted to cast Fraser Hines as Mr Sloane on the strength of it!

The Hats of Doom

Despite many attempts by Terry Nation, this is the closest Doctor Who ever gets to the original Flash Gordon film serial, and not always in a good way; the Fish People, the mixture of stereotyped religion and mad science, the hokey dialogue and design work (it’s difficult to believe the executioner with the mask and shell on his chest isn’t from Flash Gordon). Add in elements of Journey to the Centre of the Earth and a horrible physical transformation that’s even less convincing than that in Vengeance on Varos, and you’ve got a story that’s mostly not deliberately funny, but invites being sent up mercilessly by several of the actors and in Nigel Robinson’s novelisation. It’s the reverse of some Hartnell stories written as comedy and ‘straightened out’ in the studio, from a man who also wrote a very forgettable episode of The Avengers. It’s enlivened by Professor Zaroff and his occasional demented exclamations but, as he’s given the brilliant and detailed motivation of being ‘mad’, I can’t help thinking he should be more over the top. He’s not exactly Brian Blessed in full-on shouty mode – more just sniggering. It’s not a good story for Atlantean religion, either, with it all a big con (shock) and the fat priest Lolem apparently played by Christopher Biggins’ funny uncle in a huge hat made of curly bits of newspaper. His bitchy “May the wrath of Amdo engulf you!” to Zaroff is fun, though. At least it’s an exciting story for milliners. And shouldn’t the Atlanteans be able to spot the TARDIS crew aren’t local because they don't have silly eyebrows like everyone else?

The cliffhanger to Episode 1 doesn’t seem too bad, surprising you by not being about sharks after all but instead with Polly about to be operated on and a Fish Person peering in, but stick a load together in the ‘Dance of the Fish People’ and they’re jaw-droppingly silly. It’s probably the longest non-speaking sequence in the show up to that point, complete with strings and a terrible electric piano. The only time they look good is in a marvellously colourful DWM Time Team illustration of Zaroff and Nemo the octopus, though the Troughton’s not too good (with a huge nose that looks like a villain from TV Comic). Doctor Who writer Rob Shearman also has a particularly spectacular go at the story, which you may enjoy. The gormless King Thous gets one dignified line as the water surges into Atlantis at the climax, “The everlasting nightmare is here at last,” but the budget doesn’t really allow enough playing with water either, despite an effective image of the goddess Amdo ‘weeping’ as the idol gives way (I’m not sure about leaving nasty Mengele-figure Damon as the new visionary, though).

After all that you might be surprised that this ill-judged attempt to replace history with fantasy in the series was directed by the co-creator of EastEnders, so she probably didn’t put it high up her CV. Another echo of the future is that the whole Atlantis thing and the ‘villain from outside with the crazy destructive plot’ who ‘the ruler is chatted up by and realises is actually a bad thing and “the Doctor was right” too late’ ideas are blatantly ripped off for The Time Monster, which frankly makes you worry about Barry Letts… There is, at least, a great final cliffhanger into The Moonbase as the TARDIS goes out of control: “Do something!” “I seem to have done something!” but overall I’m left with two conclusions. It’s undoubtedly the lowest Doctor Who has aimed so far into the series… But though I don’t usually believe in the ‘so bad it’s good’ theory, this is at least ‘so bad it’s highly entertaining’!

The scene I’m probably keenest to see from the newly returned episode – given that it’s sadly not one with the stovepipe hat, nor a soaking wet Ben, nor with the probable inner-voiceovers – is probably the full version of the clip on the BBC website, which is delightful. This was only Patrick Troughton’s third story as the new Doctor, with the part only ever having been played by William Hartnell, and as I said above it does him a great favour by casting a villain next to whom he tones it down a bit, before finding his ‘mission statement’ in The Moonbase and then nailing his Doctor perfectly in the sublime The Macra Terror. And it’s fascinating to watch him in that minute that’s been made available, orbiting Zaroff in the background, watching, before he comes into close-up, all the while probing in a deceptively mild manner, hands held close to his chest in quite a Hartnellish mannerism, provoking the mad scientist into his second-most memorable outburst:

“Bang! Bang, bang!”

So, if you happen to have any old friends and relatives with dusty film cans in their attics, why not check to see if they have any more episodes themselves? Oh, and those two unusual things the monsters from each oldly new episode have in common: neither breathes our air; and, unlike the human-looking villains in each story, neither are really monsters at all. You can also read a brief review of the episodes at the British Film Institute yesterday from a lucky blighter who was there.

In the meantime, Andrew Hickey has just reviewed another – far from missing – piece of Dr Who from 1965, while if your appetite’s been whetted for Christmas Doctor Who, there’s a cartoony Reconstruction of the deeply silly 1965 Christmas episode The Feast of Steven online (worth watching for its marvellous closing line), or – from the other end of Doctor Who – the Prequel to this Christmas’ The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe.

Labels: BBC, Christmas, Doctor Who, Fandom, Matt Smith, Patrick Troughton, Recons, Reviews, William Hartnell

Well, that was a depressing headline to wake up to. And a depressing throwback to Tories of years past as they go mad again on Europe.

I voted for the Coalition Agreement at our Special Conference last year; I still support it. Some of what the Government’s doing is heartening Liberal; some of it’s revoltingly Tory; but most of it’s unpleasant but necessary. And though I’m never going to like David Cameron, he’s certainly been a far better Prime Minister than I expected, in part through mostly striking a more reasonable and conciliatory tone than the likes of Mrs Thatcher (while Labour have made up for their complete lack of policy by howling more bitterly than the Trots of the ’80s).

So I can only think that the pressure’s got to him and he’s finally gone mad.

The central purpose of the entire Coalition has been to secure the economy. To restrain the vast deficit that Labour flew into long before the financial crisis – and before they pretended to be Keynesians only in crisis, having been bankrupts instead when times appeared to be good – and to make the economy sustainable. The biggest threat to our economy today has changed from the insanity of the US Republican Party to the ongoing crisis in the Eurozone. And David Cameron has this morning apparently shown that he’ll throw away the whole point of his Government to stop the Tory Party from eating him.

What happened to his past rhetoric about saving your neighbour when their house is on fire?

Now, maybe I’m wrong. I’ve not read the agreements that European Union countries came to, or didn’t, overnight. It may be that Mr Cameron’s position is sensible, and that it’s only twenty-six other countries that have instantaneously and collectively gone mad instead. I’d like that to be true. I hope someone can reassure me.

But when Mr Cameron walked into the ‘negotiations’ loudly proclaiming himself not the Prime Minister of the Coalition Government, still less of the whole of Britain, but only of the howling Eurosceptic nutters of the Tory Party, shouting in advance that he was going to be as big a knob as he could be and more interested in striking a pose than saving the economy, then – surprise! – came out of it striking a pose as an enormous knob, I can’t give him any benefit of the doubt. Let’s face it, he’s hardly given himself an alibi, has he?

Again, it seems that he’s gone mad. Or simply capitulated to the madness of his own party.

Which puts the economy and the Coalition in the most deadly jeopardy since Mr Cameron became Prime Minister. And even now, he surely can’t be mad enough to think his party will be satisfied for more than a few hours, so what’s it for? I know that the Tory Party’s ‘knowledge’ of European politics begins and ends with World War II, but anyone remotely better-read will have heard of Danegeld.


Back in 1999, I wrote an extended essay on my own Liberalism, Love and Liberty. In it, I contrasted our Liberal Internationalism with the petty crappery of the Tories over Europe:

“In government, the Tories were like a drunk at a party – not listening to anyone else, standing propped up in a corner, ranting away at the other guests, making our friends move away in embarrassment and those who didn’t want us invited in the first place say ‘See! We told you they couldn’t behave!’ Now they just want to sit at home and complain about the noise next door.”

And now we’re the other half at the party that has to wince and make excuses as they grab all the nuts and then throw up.


Update: Cicero asks a similar question, with considerably greater thought and analysis. He’s well worth a read.

And it’s difficult to disagree with John Kampfner, too.


Sunday Update: Feeling pretty grim, both physically and politically, while feverishly ill. But if you’re coming back here for more, I’d recommend three informative pieces: The Economist’s Bagehot suggests that Mr Cameron was not malign but simply grossly incompetent in blundering into Britain’s worst diplomatic defeat of my lifetime; The Independent offers “Clegg Rages At Cameron’s Spectacular Failure”; while Caron muses on Nick Clegg’s interview this morning.

Labels: British Politics, Coalition, Conservatives, European Politics, The Golden Dozen

Last Saturday night, ITV3 showed Murder By Decree, the 1979 film pitting Sherlock Holmes against Jack the Ripper (not to be confused with Hammer’s earlier variation on the theme, A Study in Terror). Of all the many films that tried to make a serious attempt at defining Holmes between Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett, this is perhaps the most critically acclaimed and certainly the one that takes itself the most seriously. Yet though I rather like Christopher Plummer’s soulful Sherlock, the film’s achingly fashionable – for 1979 – Ripperology and conspiracy theories in general just test my patience. Spoilers follow…

“He seems to take a delight in keeping his subjects waiting. I suppose, since after all he is only the Prince of Wales, we should not expect the same degree of courtesy.”
“And since you are only the prince of detectives, Holmes, I don’t think you should presume to criticise a man who one day will be the King of England!”

My Puritan Streak

There are many reasons why this film gets on my wick, despite several fine actors, one or two of whom even give fine acting, and it’s to do with both style and substance. The narrative feel of the thing is a mess, not aided by a thoroughly unsatisfying excuse for an ending, nor in aiming for ‘realism’ by shooting almost the whole film in the dark until the last twenty minutes, making the picture even murkier than the script. But it’s the script that’s my main problem (just as it’s the reason many others praise it).

Essentially, the reason the narrative is a muddle, the reason the ending is an anti-climax, and the reason it takes itself so appallingly seriously all come down to the same central conceit: this purports to be an undiscovered adventure of the famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, but in fact he’s merely grafted on as a framing device for a very expensive docudrama of the trendy Jack the Ripper theory of the time.

My prejudices are showing here a little; I’m not one of nature’s great Puritans, but such a Puritanical streak as I have tends to come out about ‘true crime’. It’s probably not very logical to delight in many fictional murder mysteries and crime capers while sniffing at the tasteless exploitativeness of anything like the same plots if based on real criminals with real victims, but it’s my instinctive reaction. So while I can understand the idea behind this sort of film – hey! Let’s mash up the two biggest ‘popular legends’ of Victorian London to make big box-office! – I can’t help being a little biased against it from the start. A fictionalised stand-in for the Ripper, with a different name and in a work which promises nothing more than fiction, has nothing like the same effect on me, but if it’s purporting to be the real horrible misogynist murderer as ‘glamorous history’, I don’t like it. And so without the most extraordinary brilliance driving it, and it hasn’t, this film is almost precisely calculated by its po-faced presentation of both Sherlock Holmes and Stephen Knight’s schlock history book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (tasteful title, there) as ‘true’ to fall between two stools. It’s at the same time too serious, and not serious enough.

The Hairpiece From Hell

As well as being made to cash in on ‘ninety years of the Ripper’, this was the end of the ’70s, and glum conspiracy ‘thrillers’ in which the establishment is riddled with nasty murderers and the hero never wins and is lucky not to end up dead in a ditch at the end were very much in vogue. So it’s not surprising that the decade ended with a big conspiracy movie ‘exposing’ the entire British nobility as behind a Masonic conspiracy over the Jack the Ripper murders (the only surprise being that, unlike the book it’s based on and several later Holmes-less dramatisations, this film bottles it and changes the names of the aristocrats they claim committed the murders, while happy to slander openly various public servants of the time they name as the Ripper’s friends in slightly less high places. Surely not forelock-tugging by the producers?).

The problem, on its own terms, of making The Parallax View for the previous century is that they decide to put Sherlock Holmes in it so people will flock to the cinemas to see it. And Sherlock Holmes is in complete conflict with a grim, ’70s-style conspiracy movie. Those have to end up bleak, despairing and insoluble; he has to end up victorious by means of his brilliant brain, and not end up floating face-down in the Thames or framed for murder and blamed for it all in the end (he is, of course, arrested for murder at one point here, but it’s such a lacklustre attempt that the charge slides off him in the very same scene). Well, at least seeing as it’s not one of those books in which Holmes turns out secretly to be Jack the Ripper, Moriarty and Queen Victoria, or any other of those dreary ‘twists’ telegraphed from the cover. Shove these two immovable narrative forces up against each other, and what do you get? One of the most rambling, pointless and unintentionally hilarious scenes ever committed in a Sherlock Holmes film, as the film’s excuse for an ending shifts from briefly bloody to protractedly preachy against the “madmen wielding sceptres.”

Unable publicly to bring the Ripper to justice (just a bloody end in the dark that no-one can mention) or even to name him, but equally unable to have Holmes fail, the film’s ‘climax’ is twenty minutes of a handful of haughty men declaiming quite bad but very long dialogue at each other in a vast Masonic hall deep within the Palace of Westminster. No, seriously. Christopher Plummer is the only one who comes out of it with any dignity, and probably an award for being able to deliver this tosh with a straight face. His Holmes is compassionate, socially concerned, and thankfully clean-shaven; the Prime Minister, of course, is a stiff, cold liar who refuses to take any responsibility for having in effect said ‘Who will rid me of this troublesome woman?’; but even his ludicrous whiskers (concealing John Gielgud, and I bet he wished it was a full face-mask) can’t compete with Anthony Quayle’s giant curlicues of pubic hair arranged at random all over his head. In Hammer’s ‘Holmes versus the Ripper’ film A Study in Terror, Mr Quayle had played the decent, dependable moral heart of it; here, the difference in his part and performance are so blatantly mirrored in his appalling wig that I wonder whether the hamming was playing up to the hairpiece or vice versa. Along the way to this meandering shouting match, David Hemmings’ scheming closet Radical is almost as bad – and almost as ludicrously coiffured – as those he wants to bring down, while Donald Sutherland’s goggling psychic tries hard to be worse.

The decent, dependable moral heart of this film is, of course, Holmes, with Christopher Plummer giving rather more sides than the usual cold fish or hyper aesthete, actually carrying off a Holmes who weeps over Geneviève Bujold’s sad fate rather than making us go, ‘Oh, come on’. James Mason’s older, stiffer Dr Watson isn’t so lucky; contractual obligations for every Watson of the second half of the last century make them all ‘an attempt to move on from bumbling Nigel Bruce’ (though I rather liked him), but the elderly Mr Mason seems so weary that he gives the impression, once removing the shadow of Mr Bruce, of having nothing to put in his place. The only excuse I can think of is that with Watson usually taking the part of Holmes’ narrator, he’s the one ‘watching’ the whole thing on the part of the viewer and so is postmodernly as fed up with it as we are. Between them, they have one quite endearing scene with a pea, but it’s thin pickings in a very long two hours.

A Study In Terror and More

In all, it’s not a patch on Hammer’s more lurid but much more entertaining A Study In Terror from 1965, despite sharing the same case, murderous aristocrats and even some of the same cast (notably, not just the Jekyll and Hyde performances of Mr Quayle and his stylist but Frank Finlay as Inspector Lestrade). James Hill’s direction gives a much more lively and colourful film – and it’s a good half-hour shorter – while its utter disregard for historical accuracy and open desire just to tell a thrilling story means that it’s not just free of the later film’s visual sludge but its turgid narrative sludge, too, and is as a result far less offensive. The film has far more satisfying twists, details (despite the ludicrous title “the Duke of Shires”) and an exciting climax, none of them purporting to be true, and the actors are given much more interesting things to do than strike a pose and recite indigestible chunks of bad history at each other. The late John Neville’s Sherlock is quite sparky and energetic, if without Mr Plummer’s depth, while Donald Houston’s Dr Watson is, by contrast to Mr Mason, awake. John Fraser gives one of his most striking performances; Adrienne Corri is terrific; Robert Morley does the sort of enjoyable schtick he was always asked to do; and viewers who’ve come to this movie second may be surprised to find Anthony Quayle acting in this one.

Or, from the same sort of between-the-definitive-Holmeses period, there’s Robert Stephens’s languid detective in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which hopefully will be released on Region 2 one day with some of the mutilated bits restored, or Peter Cushing’s various and interestingly different takes – I do wish they’d release The Masks of Death, an eerie and little-known mystery that’s always stuck with me despite its jingoism. Or, if you must, From Hell, which nicks from the same Ripperology as Murder By Decree but doesn’t throw in Holmes to try and glamorise it (though Alan Moore and Johnny Depp going several rounds in the same sort of glum conspiracy thriller isn’t going to have anyone rise to the surface at the end).

On the bright side, if you want to compare legendary British icons of a particular sort of period that never really was but which we can all picture, then Holmes and history both got off lightly in Murder By Decree. Channel 4 this afternoon showed Siege of the Saxons, surely the worst King Arthur movie ever made that doesn’t have Clive Owen in it. It’s a pale shadow of The Black Knight, and it’s difficult to think of greater damnation than that.


If you want ‘canonical’ Sherlock Holmes, incidentally, I’m still rather proud of my piece on The Valley of Fear’s Visit From Porlock…

Labels: Film, History, London, Reviews, Sherlock Holmes

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…

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 . . .

“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!”

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 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