Saturday, September 01, 2012
Um… Of the Daleks
Doctor Who’s back on TV in half an hour, and to celebrate, Richard and I have put up our questions and answers about the first of one of Doctor Who’s greatest eras – the New Adventures. So, click here to find out more about Timewyrm: Genesys, and reviews are likely to follow within the next week.
We’re also celebrating the 33rd anniversary this evening of the first broadcast of Destiny of the Daleks, the last story written for the show by Terry Nation and the first script-edited by Douglas Adams. Of course, back in 1979 Doctor Who was very different.
At the end of the previous season-long story arc that threatened time itself with disintegration, the Doctor had randomised the TARDIS’ journeys so that his enemies could never, ever find him in all the infinite Universe – then, starting in Destiny of the Daleks, turned up straight away on the two planets he visits most often. Tonight, in a completely fresh twist, you will remember that at the end of the previous season-long story arc that threatened time itself with disintegration, the Doctor had faked his own death so that his enemies could never, ever find him in all the infinite Universe – and now, starting in Asylum of the Daleks, gets picked up straight away by the enemies he’s run into most often.
Still, at least the plot seems completely different: in 1979, the series was back with a bang in an attempt at a Dalek epic in which they face their greatest threat and have to seek out the one individual in the Universe who can help them, someone who’d tried to destroy the Daleks before and who they, in turn, had tried to exterminate, whereas tonight, er, er…
Later: Of course, where Destiny of the Daleks is different is that the writer, who should have known better, visually established the organic Dalek mutant and then u-turned the Daleks into dumb robots that are easily programmed (and so beaten) en bloc. Thank goodness we didn’t have anything so stupid today.
We’re also celebrating the 33rd anniversary this evening of the first broadcast of Destiny of the Daleks, the last story written for the show by Terry Nation and the first script-edited by Douglas Adams. Of course, back in 1979 Doctor Who was very different.
At the end of the previous season-long story arc that threatened time itself with disintegration, the Doctor had randomised the TARDIS’ journeys so that his enemies could never, ever find him in all the infinite Universe – then, starting in Destiny of the Daleks, turned up straight away on the two planets he visits most often. Tonight, in a completely fresh twist, you will remember that at the end of the previous season-long story arc that threatened time itself with disintegration, the Doctor had faked his own death so that his enemies could never, ever find him in all the infinite Universe – and now, starting in Asylum of the Daleks, gets picked up straight away by the enemies he’s run into most often.
Still, at least the plot seems completely different: in 1979, the series was back with a bang in an attempt at a Dalek epic in which they face their greatest threat and have to seek out the one individual in the Universe who can help them, someone who’d tried to destroy the Daleks before and who they, in turn, had tried to exterminate, whereas tonight, er, er…
Later: Of course, where Destiny of the Daleks is different is that the writer, who should have known better, visually established the organic Dalek mutant and then u-turned the Daleks into dumb robots that are easily programmed (and so beaten) en bloc. Thank goodness we didn’t have anything so stupid today.
Labels: Daleks, Doctor Who, Matt Smith, New Adventures, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Tom Baker
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen
Tomorrow sees the publication of Boneland, Alan Garner’s second sequel to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, a novel that puts “long-awaited” into perspective: half a century. Of the many fantasy books I loved as a boy, the Weirdstone perhaps always felt closest to home, and in the last year I’ve found myself rediscovering it – as has our friend Nick, who’s encouraged several of his friends (including author Paul Magrs) to re-read the originals in preparation for tomorrow. He interwove our views last week, including a few of mine, and this is the full stream of consciousness that I sent him. Nick’s is rather a lovely piece – as is his new one returning the favour for our Time’s Champions blog this morning – and Paul Magrs’ thoughts on Atlendor and Durathror’s Capulets and Montagues (or is it Sharks and Jets?) relationship are particularly enlightening. Look out, though; if you’ve not read the Weirdstone, there are spoilers below, even if only about the end itself and not how to get there…
I grew up with several fantasy books – first my Dad reading them to us, then reading them for myself – but I think The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was the one that felt most personal. I was born about ten years after it was written, and raised about ten miles from where it was set, in a town at the top of Cheshire or the bottom of Manchester… So more than any other story I knew, this one seemed to have an immediacy, one that was almost familiar, only just out of reach in space and time. There’s something about a lot of adventure stories that grab you as a child, the feeling that it could happen to you, in a place you know – one of the reasons I have a soft spot for little-loved Doctor Who story The Android Invasion is that it felt, watching it, like the sort of village Mum and Dad might drive us to on a Sunday – but this was different. I think we only actually went to the Edge a few times when I was a child, but knowing that it was there, and real, almost close enough to touch, gave this tale a special magic. So many of the stories I loved, even if they were set in our world, seemed distant from us: the mystic fringes of Wales, Scotland or Cornwall; England always somehow meaning ‘South-East England’ on the page or on TV. But no legend was as powerfully evocative as that of King Arthur (greatest of our four great national myths), and to find that he was buried not at the other end of the country somewhere but in our own North West, now, that was marvellous.
For Richard, who I met in London and fell in love with half my life ago and only then found he’d gone to school not much of a walk from my parents’ and grown up almost on the edge of the Edge, the book is even more powerful. As a boy, he’d lived not ten miles away (close, but beyond the travelling power if not the imagination of a child), close to Lindow, not quite in one of those “mean dwellings” that Cadellin disparages but only just up the road. So if it was special to me, it was literally close to home for him – and, building on that strange coincidence into sheer improbability, for the lovely Nick’s other half Jon, who Richard knew as a boy and who Londoner Nick met quite separately long after we had, in turn, become friends.
I read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen many times when I was a boy, and it stayed part of me – instinctively, getting the train up north to see family I always look out for Shuttlingslow as I get towards the end of my journey – but I’d not thought consciously of it for some years, despite having discovered Mr Garner’s Red Shift in a peculiarly vivid way in the early ’90s as a relationship of mine was nearing its end (with his even, improbably, taking me to visit Mow Cop for the only time in my life). Then, in the last year, it’s strange – first I felt the Weirdstone pressing on my mind, with details suddenly flashing back to me, and then almost as if it was intruding insistently into reality. For the first time in decades, I re-read it and its first sequel, The Moon of Gomrath, last September, a little before turning 40, still thrilled.
Then I discovered CDs of both books read by Philip Madoc, always a favourite actor of mine, and gave them to Richard for his birthday early this year. I’d not anticipated just how thrilled he would be, and we listened to them swiftly, enraptured at Madoc’s marvellous voice telling such marvellous tales (and, after a lifetime for each of us pronouncing “Gowther” with a hard ‘th’, changing our minds).
And then, astonishingly, after so many years, Alan Garner announced that he was writing the third – and not just that, but around Jodrell Bank. Alderley Edge was a magical place from Richard’s childhood; both of us had always admired Jodrell, a marvellous scientific achievement of the area; but even more, over the last couple of decades my Dad’s worked there, deploying his natural charisma in public speaking (something I’ve always had to work at) in enthusing and informing people at the Planetarium. Last month I visited my parents; my Dad had just glimpsed an old gentleman who he thought was Alan Garner being shown around, ready for a big event there on the release of Boneland. I found a picture online: “Oh, yes, that was him.” It was all I could do not to squee. And “Do you know the Wizard?” asked my Mum just last Monday. They’d just been to the Inn for a wedding reception at the weekend, for an old college friend of mine for whom Richard and I had attended a very different dedication ceremony some years ago. So it’s as if the trilogy is closing in around me, slipping through the interstices of folk memory to press on my reality.
I’m hugely excited by the looming Boneland. My one regret is that poor old Philip Madoc passed away this Spring, and will never be able to gift it his marvellous voice.
I’d meant to write about The Weirdstone of Brisingamen itself. I haven’t. I’ve always been one for plot, but somehow this book’s always been most present for me in feelings, in moods and mental images. Just as I felt on the edge of its world, it feels between ours and somewhere else, and not just because of its plot, that like much of the best of Doctor Who it’s not about a great event but on the fringes of it, seeing the knights of one war and preserving them for the next. Think of Selina Place, both something like the Cailleach of legend and a modern woman using the highest technology in the novel – a car – and at the heart of a witch brood that’s also a conspiracy of ordinary blokes you might meet down the pub (or be listening in one as the local gossip gives you away). Think of Gowther and Bess, earthy, reassuring, thoroughly normal… But, into the ’60s, almost the last time you can imagine it in ordinary life (I can just, just remember a rag and bone man calling at our road when I was very small), still driving a horse and cart, as if for all their ordinariness they’re half in a time of legend and not awake to the fact.
And the moods and images are because the story deliberately takes you into fears and places that a child could or would get into, of course. The cause of a Wizard’s sorrow may impress itself into ordinary people naming it a “Tear,” and the hooded one in his mist may be right out of a horror film and a pleasurable thrill of fear – with what’s under the hood always staying with you as worse than all the horrors you imagined, because you imagine your own – but it’s the fears of things that could get you playing out in the woods, or the mud, or in caves, even under skies of birds, that strike at the familiar and make your own life feel claustrophobic. Though almost everyone feels utterly claustrophobic after Plankshaft. Throughout my childhood, I loved, but also somehow felt threatened by, winding my way through tiny caves and passages. I’ve been a fat man for a long time, but I was a very thin and gawky boy, and I found a strange satisfaction in twisting my way through places that I couldn’t really twist through. I still have vivid memories of trying to get around a ‘chimney’ in an educational museum that I was really too tall for, or my parents wearily calling me to give up as I forced myself around tiny, chilly cracks between caves in the Peak District. I suspect all that, both fun and fearful, something I enjoyed but dreaded, was a child’s way of dealing with that extraordinarily long, unforgiving account of Colin trying to make it through the dwarves’ improbably horrible tunnels Where no Svart will ever tread.
Coming back to the book as an adult, many of the people and images are still as powerful as ever – putting your trust in Cadellin, being unable to forget being part of his world, the black and terrible storm of the climax as the Morthbrood fly from something greater that we only have a whisper of. I can also feel things to kick against, and wonder if I’m meant to, torn between agreeing with the condemnation both spoken and metaphorical of pollution, and thinking that if elves and dwarves shut us off from magic and then slag us off when we find other ways to live, aren’t they just insufferably up themselves (oh, just wait ’til the sequel)? And the most distinctive, most jarring thing structurally about Alan Garner’s writing, that you’ll find here and throughout his early children’s books: where you might expect a moment to catch your breath after the climax, a coda, some resolution that takes in the aftermath of the grand adventure and adjusting back to our world, for both the children taking part and the children reading… None of that. Every time, within a few short lines of the big finish, the book simply stops – the wrath of Nastrond is coming, it’s coming, it’s nearly here… Firefrost withstands it, it blows itself out, and seventy words later all the bodies have been swirled away,
Childhood
I grew up with several fantasy books – first my Dad reading them to us, then reading them for myself – but I think The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was the one that felt most personal. I was born about ten years after it was written, and raised about ten miles from where it was set, in a town at the top of Cheshire or the bottom of Manchester… So more than any other story I knew, this one seemed to have an immediacy, one that was almost familiar, only just out of reach in space and time. There’s something about a lot of adventure stories that grab you as a child, the feeling that it could happen to you, in a place you know – one of the reasons I have a soft spot for little-loved Doctor Who story The Android Invasion is that it felt, watching it, like the sort of village Mum and Dad might drive us to on a Sunday – but this was different. I think we only actually went to the Edge a few times when I was a child, but knowing that it was there, and real, almost close enough to touch, gave this tale a special magic. So many of the stories I loved, even if they were set in our world, seemed distant from us: the mystic fringes of Wales, Scotland or Cornwall; England always somehow meaning ‘South-East England’ on the page or on TV. But no legend was as powerfully evocative as that of King Arthur (greatest of our four great national myths), and to find that he was buried not at the other end of the country somewhere but in our own North West, now, that was marvellous.
For Richard, who I met in London and fell in love with half my life ago and only then found he’d gone to school not much of a walk from my parents’ and grown up almost on the edge of the Edge, the book is even more powerful. As a boy, he’d lived not ten miles away (close, but beyond the travelling power if not the imagination of a child), close to Lindow, not quite in one of those “mean dwellings” that Cadellin disparages but only just up the road. So if it was special to me, it was literally close to home for him – and, building on that strange coincidence into sheer improbability, for the lovely Nick’s other half Jon, who Richard knew as a boy and who Londoner Nick met quite separately long after we had, in turn, become friends.
I read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen many times when I was a boy, and it stayed part of me – instinctively, getting the train up north to see family I always look out for Shuttlingslow as I get towards the end of my journey – but I’d not thought consciously of it for some years, despite having discovered Mr Garner’s Red Shift in a peculiarly vivid way in the early ’90s as a relationship of mine was nearing its end (with his even, improbably, taking me to visit Mow Cop for the only time in my life). Then, in the last year, it’s strange – first I felt the Weirdstone pressing on my mind, with details suddenly flashing back to me, and then almost as if it was intruding insistently into reality. For the first time in decades, I re-read it and its first sequel, The Moon of Gomrath, last September, a little before turning 40, still thrilled.
Then I discovered CDs of both books read by Philip Madoc, always a favourite actor of mine, and gave them to Richard for his birthday early this year. I’d not anticipated just how thrilled he would be, and we listened to them swiftly, enraptured at Madoc’s marvellous voice telling such marvellous tales (and, after a lifetime for each of us pronouncing “Gowther” with a hard ‘th’, changing our minds).
Rediscovery
And then, astonishingly, after so many years, Alan Garner announced that he was writing the third – and not just that, but around Jodrell Bank. Alderley Edge was a magical place from Richard’s childhood; both of us had always admired Jodrell, a marvellous scientific achievement of the area; but even more, over the last couple of decades my Dad’s worked there, deploying his natural charisma in public speaking (something I’ve always had to work at) in enthusing and informing people at the Planetarium. Last month I visited my parents; my Dad had just glimpsed an old gentleman who he thought was Alan Garner being shown around, ready for a big event there on the release of Boneland. I found a picture online: “Oh, yes, that was him.” It was all I could do not to squee. And “Do you know the Wizard?” asked my Mum just last Monday. They’d just been to the Inn for a wedding reception at the weekend, for an old college friend of mine for whom Richard and I had attended a very different dedication ceremony some years ago. So it’s as if the trilogy is closing in around me, slipping through the interstices of folk memory to press on my reality.
I’m hugely excited by the looming Boneland. My one regret is that poor old Philip Madoc passed away this Spring, and will never be able to gift it his marvellous voice.
I’d meant to write about The Weirdstone of Brisingamen itself. I haven’t. I’ve always been one for plot, but somehow this book’s always been most present for me in feelings, in moods and mental images. Just as I felt on the edge of its world, it feels between ours and somewhere else, and not just because of its plot, that like much of the best of Doctor Who it’s not about a great event but on the fringes of it, seeing the knights of one war and preserving them for the next. Think of Selina Place, both something like the Cailleach of legend and a modern woman using the highest technology in the novel – a car – and at the heart of a witch brood that’s also a conspiracy of ordinary blokes you might meet down the pub (or be listening in one as the local gossip gives you away). Think of Gowther and Bess, earthy, reassuring, thoroughly normal… But, into the ’60s, almost the last time you can imagine it in ordinary life (I can just, just remember a rag and bone man calling at our road when I was very small), still driving a horse and cart, as if for all their ordinariness they’re half in a time of legend and not awake to the fact.
And the moods and images are because the story deliberately takes you into fears and places that a child could or would get into, of course. The cause of a Wizard’s sorrow may impress itself into ordinary people naming it a “Tear,” and the hooded one in his mist may be right out of a horror film and a pleasurable thrill of fear – with what’s under the hood always staying with you as worse than all the horrors you imagined, because you imagine your own – but it’s the fears of things that could get you playing out in the woods, or the mud, or in caves, even under skies of birds, that strike at the familiar and make your own life feel claustrophobic. Though almost everyone feels utterly claustrophobic after Plankshaft. Throughout my childhood, I loved, but also somehow felt threatened by, winding my way through tiny caves and passages. I’ve been a fat man for a long time, but I was a very thin and gawky boy, and I found a strange satisfaction in twisting my way through places that I couldn’t really twist through. I still have vivid memories of trying to get around a ‘chimney’ in an educational museum that I was really too tall for, or my parents wearily calling me to give up as I forced myself around tiny, chilly cracks between caves in the Peak District. I suspect all that, both fun and fearful, something I enjoyed but dreaded, was a child’s way of dealing with that extraordinarily long, unforgiving account of Colin trying to make it through the dwarves’ improbably horrible tunnels Where no Svart will ever tread.
Coming back to the book as an adult, many of the people and images are still as powerful as ever – putting your trust in Cadellin, being unable to forget being part of his world, the black and terrible storm of the climax as the Morthbrood fly from something greater that we only have a whisper of. I can also feel things to kick against, and wonder if I’m meant to, torn between agreeing with the condemnation both spoken and metaphorical of pollution, and thinking that if elves and dwarves shut us off from magic and then slag us off when we find other ways to live, aren’t they just insufferably up themselves (oh, just wait ’til the sequel)? And the most distinctive, most jarring thing structurally about Alan Garner’s writing, that you’ll find here and throughout his early children’s books: where you might expect a moment to catch your breath after the climax, a coda, some resolution that takes in the aftermath of the grand adventure and adjusting back to our world, for both the children taking part and the children reading… None of that. Every time, within a few short lines of the big finish, the book simply stops – the wrath of Nastrond is coming, it’s coming, it’s nearly here… Firefrost withstands it, it blows itself out, and seventy words later all the bodies have been swirled away,
“And this tale is called the Weirdstone of Brisingamen. And here is an end of it.”I’ve never known if that abruptness was a deliberate choice, an unpolished craft before books on storytelling structure abounded, or a sign of an author exhausting himself. To me, such Garner books feel like they finish before their time, almost a slap in the face, yet it’s that very incompleteness – a sense of certainty about the big things, and merciless uncertainty about everything else going back into ordinary life – that’s a strangely powerful signature, telling us that, no, people don’t live happily ever after, or if they do, it’s no business of ours, and not easy to find out. The end of the book, like Colin and Susan being separated from the magic, feels like loss rather than comfort in victory. And if anything I’ve heard about Boneland is true, it sounds like Colin’s felt as unresolved for several decades as the readers.
Labels: Alan Garner, Books, Fantasy, King Arthur, Personal, Philip Madoc, Richard, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen
Dallas – Jumping the Shower
After two decades in limbo, Dallas’ new series will get its UK premiere a week tonight, in what is surely the third-most-anticipated return of the next week, and probably achieve the impossible – get people watching Channel 5. Tonight, John Barrowman meets the cast for an exciting advertising feature; the trailer gives the best line, of course, to J.R.; and now seems the moment to confess that I’ve been watching the old series on the even more obscure channel CBS Drama, where it’s now back in 1986-7 and in the middle of the supersoap’s most turbulent, improbable and infamous stretch.
Dallas’ most famous moment? The end-of-season cliffhanger: who shot J.R.?
Dallas’ most infamous moment? The end-of-season cliffhanger: how showers Bobby?
Famously, Patrick Duffy having decided to leave the series and insisting on Bobby Ewing being killed off in front of so many witnesses that he couldn’t possibly be brought back, ratings dived for the following season… So they brought him back. In that most disappointing of all narrative devices, ‘It was all a dream’ (don’t tell Mr Moffat). So it’s generally said that the series has a problem with its ‘Dream Season’, which everyone now has to ignore. The problem for me is that the season that never was was rather more fun than those either side… And that it’s really all three of those seasons that look shaky as a result. Never mind Bobby; two years earlier, his mother Miss Ellie went on honeymoon with Clayton at the end of the season, and came back a new woman. For the dream season, the gaping void of a screen presence that was Donna Reed vanished with as little explanation as she came, with Barbara Bel Geddes returning to the role that rarely gave her any decent lines or character beyond looking a bit forlorn, but that at least she managed to give a bit of oomph to. So was that all a dream, too?
With CBS Drama currently about half-way through the series’ tenth season, the one that started with the morning after, it’s clear that you can’t just go right back and pretend a season never happened. You’d have to assume viewers remember where every plot had got to and then make each of them go in a different direction so as still to be a surprise, and to undo a year of characterisation, in itself more jarring to many viewers than the plotting. So what we get is an uneasy mix that picks up some strands, drops others and generally ties itself in knots.
The 1986-7 season’s first episode a couple of weeks ago had a big job to do, and was in its way one of the funniest pieces of television of the ’80s, as everyone but Bobby (who wasn’t in it) and Pam (who, waking to find her year-dead lover in the shower, dreamt it all) struggled not to mention anything about the previous year, while the writers threw in masses of exposition and randomly chose which plotlines to carry on with or go back to. So, to match his brother Bobby in the shower, we first see J.R. naked in bed with Mandy explaining at length how Sue Ellen is back to being a hostile drunk he wants rid of and not the love of his life she was last time anyone tuned in, as you know, mistress of mine; cousin Jack and J.R. share exposition about how Jack owns 10% of Ewing Oil and he’s not evolved into being a part of the family that J.R.’s gone through hell and several assassination attempts with, just a con-man; but Bobby’s ex Jenna, having slowly deteriorated over a full year from capable, independent woman into helpless hysteric, now manages to take exactly the same fall in approximately three minutes to get her to where audiences expect her to be. Pam, on the other hand, was a bit stronger than usual the previous year, but has now instantly turned into blancmange who can only say “Oh, Bobby!” in tearful soft focus (that’s nothing to how ‘Pam’ will be at the beginning of the next season, in the series’ most breathtakingly out-of-character plotline). Other cousin Jamie, on the other hand, is back to being the one despicable turd Cliff only married for two-thirds of Ewing Oil and now finds is the only Ewing without any of it, so he’s putting her down at every opportunity. More of that story later.
Three lines stood out for me.
While Pam is gushing and crying about her horrible nightmare in the first scene (“And there was so much more! It seemed so real!”), wet Bobby – who may be just out of the shower, but is far, far less wet than his fully-clothed fiancée – holds her at manly arms’-length, looks compellingly into her eyes (which is the only reason he’s not holding the camera at manly arms’-length and looking compellingly into our eyes, possibly with a wink), and says, with the heaviest emphasis on every word of a sentence ever uttered by an actor:Damien Christopher asking excitedly if they can, because he can play with John Ross and the horses and it’s got so much… Victoria Principal, bless her, having talked a few minutes before about the reactions of Bobby’s brother J.R., who hates her, and her brother Cliff, who hates all Ewings, manages to put a lot of meaning into one line, as she answers her son:
The biggest immediate change for me was in the feel of the characters and their relationships; while the writers did their best to have Jenna disintegrate on cue, they don’t seem to have thought so clearly about everyone else. With most couples by the end of the previous season having grown together as characters as far as soap couples ever do, all they could do was mark a right turn on each of them by everyone instead getting nasty with each other.
The second-biggest loser, character-wise, is Pam, who it’s difficult to take seriously when one potential husband had improbably returned from the dead only for her to wake up and find it was the other one who’d done it. This leaves the dangling plot of two years’ earlier – that terminally ill fiancé Mark Graison might not in fact have killed himself in an air crash in massively ambiguous and bodiless circumstances, particularly with mysterious people obstructing Pam’s search for him in sinister-but-compassionate ways – forever dangling, and only minutes of screen time after they had for once ponied up for a Southfork wedding rather than it happening, as was the usual custom, between ad breaks, with the minister blessing the happy couple, ‘I now pronounce you moustache, and beard’.
The biggest loser as a character is J.R., who in his brother and rival’s absence had had to become a more rounded individual than the clichéd pantomime villain, however enjoyable; his meanness and petulance in the first episode post-Dream came across as a real let-down after he’d really stretched his impressive acting chops in depth the previous year, despite Larry Hagman as a person being far happier with his friend to spark off against than in carrying the series on his own. One scene since, at least, has stayed with me as evidence other than merely Larry Hagman’s charisma vs Ken Kercheval’s weaseldom that J.R. is a better man (rather than just a better operator) than Cliff Barnes; in one of last week’s episodes, two scenes following close on each other showed both Cliff and J.R. being whining sexists to their estranged wives. Except that when Jamie was clearly proved right, Cliff doubled down as an objectionable jerk. But when Sue Ellen revealed that she was in fact a devious Machiavellian and business genius rolled into one, the person behind a long-laid plot that both despatched J.R.’s mistress (and Mandy being by far the most memorable of those, to boot) to Singapore and made a ton of money… For a few seconds, Hagman looked mean, and sullen, and angry. Then he gave a slight smile and, for the first time all season, quietly congratulated her as being quite brilliant. Then absolutely beamed, simply appreciating her achievement. He’s had too few moments like that since his brother and rival got better from death. Linda Gray really shone, too.
In the meantime, I became suddenly very aware of this season’s main plot arcs and coming mad guest star with bomb – I’m only surprised they didn’t get Barbara Carrera back to play the psychotic mercenary. Or have her as Jock, and Steve Forrest’sBen Stivers Wes Parmalee as the villain. I miss her – she was so much fun last year, making such a little Fatima Blush go such a very long way, in costumes by TRAVILLA (probably Travis in huge red shoulderpads and a diamanté eyepatch). Anyway, at that point we’d not met this year’s loony yet, to be played as you’ll know if you’ve been watching since by an actor who rejoices in the name “Hunter Von Leer”, but everyone’s talking about how low the price of oil is, and how it’s all OPEC’s fault. Tedious tosser Cliff has been saying how there’s nothing anyone can do about it; Jamie has a brilliant idea; Cliff pours scorn on her as an idiot who knows nothing; Cliff then nicks the idea and has a big press conference with the Cartel. And this brilliant concept, that nobody says ‘Hang on…’ about? Protectionism. She wants all the Texas oil businesses to get the US government to put tariffs on foreign oil so that they can sell at the price they want and not be undercut. How clever! To which no-one, oddly, says, ‘But won’t that mean counter-tariffs that will hurt our trade back the other way, and surely Congress isn’t going to vote to massively increase the pump price for the gas-guzzling ordinary American anyway just so the oil barons can rip them off some more?’
J.R. stands at the back and says what a stupid idea it is, but only because it’s come from Cliff, before finding someone competent to run it instead (and, coincidentally, to get them out of his hair). Shame. I’d have liked him to say some of the above, because he’s meant to be the bright one. But no, it was merely because a/ it was Cliff's (nicked), and b/ do you think he might have some slightly more direct action in mind that could go disastrously wrong?
And the final arc plot to be crippled by the missing season involved… A much-loved member of the Ewing family returning from the dead. I wonder why they eventually decided people might not swallow it? You get the feeling they only decided to bring Bobby back at the very last minute, as only in the last couple of episodes of the Dream Season were we introduced to rugged old oil-and-cattleman Ben Stivers, played by grey-white-haired Steve Forrest, who everyone is strangely drawn to but who hides an enigmatic secret (or does he?). Pam may be wetter than a very wet thing, but she has at least gained psychic powers: for into this completely different and not-dreamed season comes rugged old oil-and-cattleman Wes Parmalee, played by grey-brown-haired Steve Forrest (no relation), who everyone is strangely drawn to but who hides an enigmatic secret (or does he?). Well, if you’ve been watching, you’ll have found out that he doesn’t, but several of the conflicting reports of what the writers had been planning suggest he really was going to turn out to be the long-lost and heavily plastic-surgeried Ewing patriarch who was not in fact killed in an air crash in massively ambiguous and bodiless circumstances some years earlier. His storyline has been chuntering along for a dozen episodes or more, making it increasingly likely that he was Jock (and with Forrest’s gravelly timbre and manner at times capturing something eerie of Jim Davis, even if his slighter frame never did)… And then, suddenly, it stopped, with a tedious three episodes of exposition afterwards proving that, in fact, the only thing less credible than having someone suddenly return from the dead with minimal explanation is having him suddenly turn out not to have done. Every awkward exposition piled on makes it seem increasingly and incredibly unlikely that he’d ever have been able to pull it off in the first place (he just happened to be there and taking notes while Jock told him his life story in a fever! And so on through all the uncanny physical similarities) and more unlikely still that he’d have thrown it all away.
I suppose we were at least spared Donna Reid crying out in torment to Steve Forrest, ‘But you don’t look like Jock!’
One other scene stays with me eerily from early on in this season. With Pam and Bobby remarried and Christopher back at Southfork too, naturally by this week’s episodes J.R.’s son John Ross was beating up the smaller kid. While viewers across the land reeled at how such ugly children could ever grow up to be such buff adults (they crashed into Desperate Housewives and had plastic surgery), Pam became massively overprotective and accused John Ross of becoming just like his father. Later, Christopher asks Bobby if he can teach him how to use a gun. Now, that’s more like J.R. (are we quite sure the abandoned plotline in which Christopher was J.R.’s son as well – no, I won’t go into it, things are complicated enough – truly expired?). But Bambi-eyed Pam’s bouncing from insane optimism to molly-coddling could never compare to Sue Ellen, whose own psychic powers came to the fore a fortnight earlier. That scene had Sue Ellen pouring cold vodka on Pam’s plan to remarry in lines that should surely make the trailers for the new series:
Dallas’ most famous moment? The end-of-season cliffhanger: who shot J.R.?
Dallas’ most infamous moment? The end-of-season cliffhanger: how showers Bobby?
Famously, Patrick Duffy having decided to leave the series and insisting on Bobby Ewing being killed off in front of so many witnesses that he couldn’t possibly be brought back, ratings dived for the following season… So they brought him back. In that most disappointing of all narrative devices, ‘It was all a dream’ (don’t tell Mr Moffat). So it’s generally said that the series has a problem with its ‘Dream Season’, which everyone now has to ignore. The problem for me is that the season that never was was rather more fun than those either side… And that it’s really all three of those seasons that look shaky as a result. Never mind Bobby; two years earlier, his mother Miss Ellie went on honeymoon with Clayton at the end of the season, and came back a new woman. For the dream season, the gaping void of a screen presence that was Donna Reed vanished with as little explanation as she came, with Barbara Bel Geddes returning to the role that rarely gave her any decent lines or character beyond looking a bit forlorn, but that at least she managed to give a bit of oomph to. So was that all a dream, too?
With CBS Drama currently about half-way through the series’ tenth season, the one that started with the morning after, it’s clear that you can’t just go right back and pretend a season never happened. You’d have to assume viewers remember where every plot had got to and then make each of them go in a different direction so as still to be a surprise, and to undo a year of characterisation, in itself more jarring to many viewers than the plotting. So what we get is an uneasy mix that picks up some strands, drops others and generally ties itself in knots.
A Dream To Some…
The 1986-7 season’s first episode a couple of weeks ago had a big job to do, and was in its way one of the funniest pieces of television of the ’80s, as everyone but Bobby (who wasn’t in it) and Pam (who, waking to find her year-dead lover in the shower, dreamt it all) struggled not to mention anything about the previous year, while the writers threw in masses of exposition and randomly chose which plotlines to carry on with or go back to. So, to match his brother Bobby in the shower, we first see J.R. naked in bed with Mandy explaining at length how Sue Ellen is back to being a hostile drunk he wants rid of and not the love of his life she was last time anyone tuned in, as you know, mistress of mine; cousin Jack and J.R. share exposition about how Jack owns 10% of Ewing Oil and he’s not evolved into being a part of the family that J.R.’s gone through hell and several assassination attempts with, just a con-man; but Bobby’s ex Jenna, having slowly deteriorated over a full year from capable, independent woman into helpless hysteric, now manages to take exactly the same fall in approximately three minutes to get her to where audiences expect her to be. Pam, on the other hand, was a bit stronger than usual the previous year, but has now instantly turned into blancmange who can only say “Oh, Bobby!” in tearful soft focus (that’s nothing to how ‘Pam’ will be at the beginning of the next season, in the series’ most breathtakingly out-of-character plotline). Other cousin Jamie, on the other hand, is back to being the one despicable turd Cliff only married for two-thirds of Ewing Oil and now finds is the only Ewing without any of it, so he’s putting her down at every opportunity. More of that story later.
Three lines stood out for me.
While Pam is gushing and crying about her horrible nightmare in the first scene (“And there was so much more! It seemed so real!”), wet Bobby – who may be just out of the shower, but is far, far less wet than his fully-clothed fiancée – holds her at manly arms’-length, looks compellingly into her eyes (which is the only reason he’s not holding the camera at manly arms’-length and looking compellingly into our eyes, possibly with a wink), and says, with the heaviest emphasis on every word of a sentence ever uttered by an actor:
“None of that happened.”J.R., having been told by Bobby that he’s remarrying Pam:
“You are the dumbest brother any man could ever have.”And Pam, in her own little palace, having been railroaded by Bobby telling everyone she’ll live at Southfork, and even her ugly little son
[Pause, considers]
“Aside from Gary and Ray, of course.”
“Yes,” she says. “It has everything.”
The Biggest Losers (apart from the viewers)
The biggest immediate change for me was in the feel of the characters and their relationships; while the writers did their best to have Jenna disintegrate on cue, they don’t seem to have thought so clearly about everyone else. With most couples by the end of the previous season having grown together as characters as far as soap couples ever do, all they could do was mark a right turn on each of them by everyone instead getting nasty with each other.
The second-biggest loser, character-wise, is Pam, who it’s difficult to take seriously when one potential husband had improbably returned from the dead only for her to wake up and find it was the other one who’d done it. This leaves the dangling plot of two years’ earlier – that terminally ill fiancé Mark Graison might not in fact have killed himself in an air crash in massively ambiguous and bodiless circumstances, particularly with mysterious people obstructing Pam’s search for him in sinister-but-compassionate ways – forever dangling, and only minutes of screen time after they had for once ponied up for a Southfork wedding rather than it happening, as was the usual custom, between ad breaks, with the minister blessing the happy couple, ‘I now pronounce you moustache, and beard’.
The biggest loser as a character is J.R., who in his brother and rival’s absence had had to become a more rounded individual than the clichéd pantomime villain, however enjoyable; his meanness and petulance in the first episode post-Dream came across as a real let-down after he’d really stretched his impressive acting chops in depth the previous year, despite Larry Hagman as a person being far happier with his friend to spark off against than in carrying the series on his own. One scene since, at least, has stayed with me as evidence other than merely Larry Hagman’s charisma vs Ken Kercheval’s weaseldom that J.R. is a better man (rather than just a better operator) than Cliff Barnes; in one of last week’s episodes, two scenes following close on each other showed both Cliff and J.R. being whining sexists to their estranged wives. Except that when Jamie was clearly proved right, Cliff doubled down as an objectionable jerk. But when Sue Ellen revealed that she was in fact a devious Machiavellian and business genius rolled into one, the person behind a long-laid plot that both despatched J.R.’s mistress (and Mandy being by far the most memorable of those, to boot) to Singapore and made a ton of money… For a few seconds, Hagman looked mean, and sullen, and angry. Then he gave a slight smile and, for the first time all season, quietly congratulated her as being quite brilliant. Then absolutely beamed, simply appreciating her achievement. He’s had too few moments like that since his brother and rival got better from death. Linda Gray really shone, too.
In the meantime, I became suddenly very aware of this season’s main plot arcs and coming mad guest star with bomb – I’m only surprised they didn’t get Barbara Carrera back to play the psychotic mercenary. Or have her as Jock, and Steve Forrest’s
J.R. stands at the back and says what a stupid idea it is, but only because it’s come from Cliff, before finding someone competent to run it instead (and, coincidentally, to get them out of his hair). Shame. I’d have liked him to say some of the above, because he’s meant to be the bright one. But no, it was merely because a/ it was Cliff's (nicked), and b/ do you think he might have some slightly more direct action in mind that could go disastrously wrong?
Back From the Dead – Haven’t We Already Done This (in two ways)?
And the final arc plot to be crippled by the missing season involved… A much-loved member of the Ewing family returning from the dead. I wonder why they eventually decided people might not swallow it? You get the feeling they only decided to bring Bobby back at the very last minute, as only in the last couple of episodes of the Dream Season were we introduced to rugged old oil-and-cattleman Ben Stivers, played by grey-white-haired Steve Forrest, who everyone is strangely drawn to but who hides an enigmatic secret (or does he?). Pam may be wetter than a very wet thing, but she has at least gained psychic powers: for into this completely different and not-dreamed season comes rugged old oil-and-cattleman Wes Parmalee, played by grey-brown-haired Steve Forrest (no relation), who everyone is strangely drawn to but who hides an enigmatic secret (or does he?). Well, if you’ve been watching, you’ll have found out that he doesn’t, but several of the conflicting reports of what the writers had been planning suggest he really was going to turn out to be the long-lost and heavily plastic-surgeried Ewing patriarch who was not in fact killed in an air crash in massively ambiguous and bodiless circumstances some years earlier. His storyline has been chuntering along for a dozen episodes or more, making it increasingly likely that he was Jock (and with Forrest’s gravelly timbre and manner at times capturing something eerie of Jim Davis, even if his slighter frame never did)… And then, suddenly, it stopped, with a tedious three episodes of exposition afterwards proving that, in fact, the only thing less credible than having someone suddenly return from the dead with minimal explanation is having him suddenly turn out not to have done. Every awkward exposition piled on makes it seem increasingly and incredibly unlikely that he’d ever have been able to pull it off in the first place (he just happened to be there and taking notes while Jock told him his life story in a fever! And so on through all the uncanny physical similarities) and more unlikely still that he’d have thrown it all away.
I suppose we were at least spared Donna Reid crying out in torment to Steve Forrest, ‘But you don’t look like Jock!’
Sue Ellen Predicts New Dallas
One other scene stays with me eerily from early on in this season. With Pam and Bobby remarried and Christopher back at Southfork too, naturally by this week’s episodes J.R.’s son John Ross was beating up the smaller kid. While viewers across the land reeled at how such ugly children could ever grow up to be such buff adults (they crashed into Desperate Housewives and had plastic surgery), Pam became massively overprotective and accused John Ross of becoming just like his father. Later, Christopher asks Bobby if he can teach him how to use a gun. Now, that’s more like J.R. (are we quite sure the abandoned plotline in which Christopher was J.R.’s son as well – no, I won’t go into it, things are complicated enough – truly expired?). But Bambi-eyed Pam’s bouncing from insane optimism to molly-coddling could never compare to Sue Ellen, whose own psychic powers came to the fore a fortnight earlier. That scene had Sue Ellen pouring cold vodka on Pam’s plan to remarry in lines that should surely make the trailers for the new series:
“You’re even moving back to Southfork!”
“Christopher can hardly wait. You know, he and John Ross are going to be great friends.”
“Another generation of Ewing boys. What a picture. Maybe the oil industry will be just a memory by the time they grow up – there won’t be any competition. Miss? Would you bring me another, please?”
Labels: Dallas, Reviews, Soaps, Tax
Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)
Something exciting came out of that Olympics closing ceremony after all! Kate Bush re-recorded her second-biggest hit for the event and, astonishingly, Running Up That Hill shot up the charts to become her fifth-biggest hit as well, zooming in at Number Six, with lower but still improbable chart placings for the likes of the Who’s Baba O’Riley, the Kinks, ELO and Annie Lennox Vs Cthulhu (all discovered last week while laid up with painfully inflamed ligaments in my left ankle, a change from the occasional tendonitis: running up that hill? If I only could). But what’s the song about? Well…
All right, so she’s now running down the charts again this week, but it still seems miraculous that a twenty-seven-year-old song from Kate should suddenly be a smash all over again. And, this time, making a point of subtitling it “A Deal With God,” the original title refused by the record company for fear of airplay-death back in the ’80s, when it was the lead single from what turned out to be Kate’s most critically and commercially successful album, Hounds of Love.
Now, I have to admit that Hounds of Love isn’t quite my favourite Kate Bush album – I’d put The Sensual World ahead of it – and nor is Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) my favourite single from that album – I’d put Hounds of Love itself above it. All right, so Hounds of Love is a less complex, less ambiguous track, but its melodrama always thrills me, and between Kate’s famous two ’80s Doctor Who TV scripts and all her New Adventures it has more than a little Doctor Who feel, too – quoting from an old horror film, not entirely convincing monsters out to get you and an awful lot of running. Listening to her more recent work, I do wonder if Kate’s a particular Troughton fan, doing the Yeti with King of the Mountain and Wild Man, and on her Fish People label, to boot. But that’s another story. And Running Up That Hill is still a terrific, and a very powerful song.
Another minor miracle is that Kate’s new vocal on her remixed Running Up That Hill is a change from but if anything more gripping than the original; I’ve been a bit disappointed with most of her recent Director’s Cut revisitings of old songs, feeling they lack the power and excitement of the previous versions – and, heretically, I’d have said that the harsh, bombastic, very ’80s production on the Hounds of Love might have stood more revisiting than the more inviting sound of The Sensual World (though I don’t know how she’d unpick any of her Arthurian odyssey The Ninth Wave, a continuous piece making up the whole second half and a tour-de-force, much like her later Aerial’s A Sky of Honey).
Ironically, Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) may have had so many requests from people who weren’t born when it first charted and become a hit all over again because its powerful beat and chorus sounds like it symbolises the Olympics. I say ironically, because such a prosaic explanation runs against arguably Kate’s most layered and ambiguous lyrics for one of her hits.
On the surface, it might sound like it’s about athletics – and it might be, of a sort – but Kate’s previously said when pressed for an explanation that it’s about a wish for a woman and a man in a relationship to reach greater understanding by literally changing places, and that she went for a deal with God rather than the traditional deal with the Devil because, obviously, that would be more powerful. So the meaning presented at the time, to ward off music-burners outraged at the mention of God, was a tender prayer for a more perfect union between a man and a woman. What could possibly be more praiseworthy for lovers of traditional values?
And yet… Some of the words may say that, but the music doesn’t. I’ve read people saying it’s an even more tender wish for a partner, that the “bullet” is about taking on his pain, a song of self-sacrifice. But it doesn’t sound like, say, Deeper Understanding or This Woman’s Work. This isn’t Kate in her tender, frail achingly beautiful mood; this is Kate sounding raw and powerful, and all the more so for not being as fabulously bonkers as she often seems in that style (though bonking may come into it). No – this isn’t a love song, but a march. Listen to those drums, banging away; watch the video, where Kate and a male dancer writhe hip to hip while miming shooting a bow and arrow. If the meaning’s what Kate said it is, then read between the lines and listen to the music: it’s Kate saying ‘How would it feel for me to fuck you for a change?’
All right, so she’s now running down the charts again this week, but it still seems miraculous that a twenty-seven-year-old song from Kate should suddenly be a smash all over again. And, this time, making a point of subtitling it “A Deal With God,” the original title refused by the record company for fear of airplay-death back in the ’80s, when it was the lead single from what turned out to be Kate’s most critically and commercially successful album, Hounds of Love.
Hounds of Love
Now, I have to admit that Hounds of Love isn’t quite my favourite Kate Bush album – I’d put The Sensual World ahead of it – and nor is Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) my favourite single from that album – I’d put Hounds of Love itself above it. All right, so Hounds of Love is a less complex, less ambiguous track, but its melodrama always thrills me, and between Kate’s famous two ’80s Doctor Who TV scripts and all her New Adventures it has more than a little Doctor Who feel, too – quoting from an old horror film, not entirely convincing monsters out to get you and an awful lot of running. Listening to her more recent work, I do wonder if Kate’s a particular Troughton fan, doing the Yeti with King of the Mountain and Wild Man, and on her Fish People label, to boot. But that’s another story. And Running Up That Hill is still a terrific, and a very powerful song.
Another minor miracle is that Kate’s new vocal on her remixed Running Up That Hill is a change from but if anything more gripping than the original; I’ve been a bit disappointed with most of her recent Director’s Cut revisitings of old songs, feeling they lack the power and excitement of the previous versions – and, heretically, I’d have said that the harsh, bombastic, very ’80s production on the Hounds of Love might have stood more revisiting than the more inviting sound of The Sensual World (though I don’t know how she’d unpick any of her Arthurian odyssey The Ninth Wave, a continuous piece making up the whole second half and a tour-de-force, much like her later Aerial’s A Sky of Honey).
Ironically, Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) may have had so many requests from people who weren’t born when it first charted and become a hit all over again because its powerful beat and chorus sounds like it symbolises the Olympics. I say ironically, because such a prosaic explanation runs against arguably Kate’s most layered and ambiguous lyrics for one of her hits.
Deeper Understanding… Yeah, Right
On the surface, it might sound like it’s about athletics – and it might be, of a sort – but Kate’s previously said when pressed for an explanation that it’s about a wish for a woman and a man in a relationship to reach greater understanding by literally changing places, and that she went for a deal with God rather than the traditional deal with the Devil because, obviously, that would be more powerful. So the meaning presented at the time, to ward off music-burners outraged at the mention of God, was a tender prayer for a more perfect union between a man and a woman. What could possibly be more praiseworthy for lovers of traditional values?
And yet… Some of the words may say that, but the music doesn’t. I’ve read people saying it’s an even more tender wish for a partner, that the “bullet” is about taking on his pain, a song of self-sacrifice. But it doesn’t sound like, say, Deeper Understanding or This Woman’s Work. This isn’t Kate in her tender, frail achingly beautiful mood; this is Kate sounding raw and powerful, and all the more so for not being as fabulously bonkers as she often seems in that style (though bonking may come into it). No – this isn’t a love song, but a march. Listen to those drums, banging away; watch the video, where Kate and a male dancer writhe hip to hip while miming shooting a bow and arrow. If the meaning’s what Kate said it is, then read between the lines and listen to the music: it’s Kate saying ‘How would it feel for me to fuck you for a change?’
“Come on, angel, come on, come on, darling,That’s the less ambitious version. But with Kate being so insistent that she wanted it called A Deal With God, and the ambiguity of some of the lyrics, on top of the pounding music…? This is about power. And it’s not just saying, ‘If I were a man, I’d make so much more use of that power than he would,’ though the physicality of the lyrics might well stand in for other goals. No, to me some of it suggests that Kate merely wanting to take a man’s place would be a chronic lack of ambition. You can read the chorus more than one way – is the “our” referring to an ‘us’ of Kate and her partner, or just Kate and the Almighty? It’s always sounded to me that Kate’s fed up with the lack of ambition on a cosmic scale, and if she only could, would swap places with God.
“Let’s exchange the experience, oh…”
“And if I only could,But it’s probably about shagging.
“I’d make a deal with God,
“And I’d get him to swap our places…”
Labels: Doctor Who, Kate Bush, Music, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Olympics, Patrick Troughton, Religion, Reviews, Running Up That Hill, Sex
Friday, August 10, 2012
London Seethes With Olympic Business – Exclusive Photos!
Yesterday afternoon our router decided it would compete with me for conking out in the heat, so aside from a few minutes this morning this is my first internet access for 24 hours (it’s like a desert, honestly). So here’s a piece of quick news I hope I can get up in time before it rolls over with its tongue in the air again…
Exclusive photos of the bonus shopping frenzy that the Olympics has brought to Central London!
You can tune in to the radio version of the documentary from which these pictures originate at 6.30 and 12.30 each evening on Radio 4 Extra.
In other news, while I don’t do sport, and I don’t do jingoism, long-term readers will know there’s one team I do root for – and another I cheer every time they get smashed. So go Team Beeb, and hurrah for the Olympics giving ITV their worst day ever!
Labels: John Wyndham, London, Olympics, Pictures, Triffids
Friday, August 03, 2012
Baby-Banned at the Bamford (but Back a Bit)!
This week (part of a fortnight of holiday indulgence), I ate for the first time in a Stockport hostelry I’ve been aware of all my life but, I’d thought, never crossed the door of before. And it turns out that the reason behind my always having looked askance at the Bamford Arms is the one time I’d previously gone in and been thrown out… Long before I could remember it. My Mum has a longer and sharper memory, but thirty-nine years and several changes of management later, she’s rescinded her boycott and took my niece and me for dinner there.
The Bamford Arms now has quite a pleasant restaurant. The tomato and courgette soup was thick and tasty (if a bit too much basil), the garlic bread vibrant and crunchy, the steaks and sauce fine, with plenty of chips. A very friendly woman took our orders, offered little Caitlin things to play with while she went for the world title in the slowest-ever ice cream-eating stakes, and generally looked after us. She even put aside the photos Mum left behind and the fairy Caitlin left behind and instantly went to the drawer when she saw me come back for them (though when, suggesting that the family was under a bit of a curse that afternoon, I in turn managed to drop Caitlin’s fairy outside, not notice until I came to give it to her, and have to go back for it again, she didn’t appear like a fairy godmother with it in her hand and I had to look up and down Nangreave Road for it, so clearly her magic powers are limited to within the pub).
So I won’t criticise the Bamford Arms of 2012. The inn of four decades ago, though, is a different matter. I was mildly surprised when Mum suggested we go there, having a vague idea that there was something wrong with the place, but I wasn’t sure why. However, Mum said she’d gone there with friends and it was fine – and it was. I don’t know if she sensed my mild scepticism before or mild surprise afterwards, or just wanted to pass on some up-to-the-minute gossip, but after we left I was treated to just why we spent many years never going there and passing by with a cold stare and a disparaging word.
Back when I was thirteen months old, my Nana and Grandad came down to stay for a couple of weeks while my brother Rory (who long since insisted on Richard and then re-shortened to Rick, much as I shed Sandy in favour of Alexander and then Alex) was born. The day our grandparents were due to drive home, Mum booked a dinner for us all minus new baby at the Bamford Arms, which had been recommended, taking care when she phoned to make sure it was all right to bring my pushchair. So Dad drove all five of us to the Bamford, Mum wheeled me out… And a horrified manager stopped her as I trundled over the threshold.
Still, I’ve forgiven them now. But while I’ve not been able to blog while away with very limited internet access first in North Yorkshire and then at my parents’, and must soon work out just how much fatter I am as a result of rather more meals out than just the Bamford, I have to tell you that, shh, while they were all right, they’re not a patch on the Whitestonecliffe Inn, which is an excellent inn and restaurant and serves the finest pâté known to humanity. So it’s a good job that, at 90-odd miles apart, they’re not really in competition or the baby-banning bastards would lose (did I just say that out loud?).
The Bamford Arms now has quite a pleasant restaurant. The tomato and courgette soup was thick and tasty (if a bit too much basil), the garlic bread vibrant and crunchy, the steaks and sauce fine, with plenty of chips. A very friendly woman took our orders, offered little Caitlin things to play with while she went for the world title in the slowest-ever ice cream-eating stakes, and generally looked after us. She even put aside the photos Mum left behind and the fairy Caitlin left behind and instantly went to the drawer when she saw me come back for them (though when, suggesting that the family was under a bit of a curse that afternoon, I in turn managed to drop Caitlin’s fairy outside, not notice until I came to give it to her, and have to go back for it again, she didn’t appear like a fairy godmother with it in her hand and I had to look up and down Nangreave Road for it, so clearly her magic powers are limited to within the pub).
So I won’t criticise the Bamford Arms of 2012. The inn of four decades ago, though, is a different matter. I was mildly surprised when Mum suggested we go there, having a vague idea that there was something wrong with the place, but I wasn’t sure why. However, Mum said she’d gone there with friends and it was fine – and it was. I don’t know if she sensed my mild scepticism before or mild surprise afterwards, or just wanted to pass on some up-to-the-minute gossip, but after we left I was treated to just why we spent many years never going there and passing by with a cold stare and a disparaging word.
Back when I was thirteen months old, my Nana and Grandad came down to stay for a couple of weeks while my brother Rory (who long since insisted on Richard and then re-shortened to Rick, much as I shed Sandy in favour of Alexander and then Alex) was born. The day our grandparents were due to drive home, Mum booked a dinner for us all minus new baby at the Bamford Arms, which had been recommended, taking care when she phoned to make sure it was all right to bring my pushchair. So Dad drove all five of us to the Bamford, Mum wheeled me out… And a horrified manager stopped her as I trundled over the threshold.
“You can’t bring that in here!”And that’s why I didn’t go back in there for nearly forty years, having been barred from a pub at a far younger age than everyone else manages it.
“What do you mean? I rang to book and asked specifically. We were told it was all right.”
“Who did you speak to? That’s not our policy.”
“Well, I don’t know her name, but I asked if it was all right to bring a pushchair, and I was told ‘Yes’.”
“Ah, that explains it. You can have the pushchair in here. But we don’t allow the baby.”
Still, I’ve forgiven them now. But while I’ve not been able to blog while away with very limited internet access first in North Yorkshire and then at my parents’, and must soon work out just how much fatter I am as a result of rather more meals out than just the Bamford, I have to tell you that, shh, while they were all right, they’re not a patch on the Whitestonecliffe Inn, which is an excellent inn and restaurant and serves the finest pâté known to humanity. So it’s a good job that, at 90-odd miles apart, they’re not really in competition or the baby-banning bastards would lose (did I just say that out loud?).
Sunday, July 08, 2012
BBC Lèse-Majesté: Hollow Crown, Hollow Schedule and Hollow Laughter
Last weekend, the BBC’s new Shakespeare series The Hollow Crown was given a fanfare on the cover of the Radio Times. This weekend, it was given a raspberry as a Sixteenth Century fictionalisation of Fifteenth Century history was sabotaged by Twenty-first Century programming, weather and sport. When these days all you should need to record a TV show is to select its Electronic Programme Guide entry and let your digital device activate on broadcast, the BBC managed to mess up both broadcast and EPG, leaving recordings across the nation as less Henry IV, Part 1 than Henry IV, Part 0.5.
Regular readers may be aware that I’m not exactly a fan of sport. However, I do understand that live sport will occasionally run over time and delay other programmes. In the olden days, when people were out they had to set their own video recorders and hope that the TV schedules advertised might bear some relationship to reality. In theory, these days the channel’s programmers can update the EPG for a delayed programme and everyone’s digital recorders will simply act on the new information.
This requires, as do all computers for the information you get out of them, that the people putting in the information aren’t completely incompetent.
There are many different varieties of digital recorder, so I won’t claim to speak for them all, but ours is fairly standard: it’s a dumb box that assumes its users are dumber, so there’s no manual override. In theory, this is to prevent someone setting a recording going, forgetting about it, and using up all the memory in one great lump. In practice, when TV stations are rarely known for sticking to the precise minute of their schedules, this would usually mean missing the end or the beginning of programmes, as almost all start a minute or two early or finish a minute or two late. There’s no option to press a button that says, ‘Keep recording until I stop, you bastard!’
To correct this obvious problem, the manufacturers do allow you to change the default setting on the machine so as to top and tail your timer recordings with a few extra minutes (ours is set to start three minutes ahead and finish five after; sadly, you can’t set it by channel so that the BBC gets the full five at the end for running over time, while channels carrying advertising finish on time so most recordings don’t end in an extended ten minutes of ads and unwanted programming). But this only applies to shows you’ve checked by EPG in advance; if you simply press “Record” for something going out live, it will stop recording the very second that the EPG (that again) says it’s scheduled to finish, and no amount of swearing at it will extend that.
I tuned in a few minutes before 9 last night to catch BBC2’s broadcast of Henry IV, Part 1. Or not, as they were still showing Wimbledon. Richard was away; I was meant to be, but not well enough; fortunately, this meant I could at least stop our EPG recording from saving us the tennis. So it clicked on at 8.57, and I switched it off, and waited. Within a few minutes, the EPG had changed to indicate a start time for the play of 9.15. So I selected the new EPG, and our machine started again at 9.12. It was still tennis. I stopped it again. Within another few minutes, the EPG had changed again to start Henry at 9.30. By this time, people who claim that live sport needs special treatment were losing the argument: the simultaneous broadcast on BBC2 and BBCHD was showing a mixture of interminable post-game sports babble, bits of game in daylight (and so clearly not live, unless the Isle of Dogs has suddenly switched to a different time zone from Wimbledon) and even minutes-long shots of the stadium in darkness from high above, cars driving away from it. Yet 9.27 and then 9.30 passed, still with no move to the scheduled programme.
By 9.35, the EPG had updated yet again to suggest a start time of 10pm. So I reset my digital recorder yet again… But noticed something was wrong. Henry IV, Part 1 was scheduled to show from 9pm to 10.55; on the first new EPG, all the programme times for the rest of the night were put back by 15 minutes; on the second, by half an hour; but this time, although the start time had been altered to encompass the hour’s delay, the BBC munchkins setting the EPG hadn’t altered the end time, with the next programme claimed to be starting at the original 10.55. Even though this couldn’t possibly be true, unless they were going to play the two-hour Shakespeare at double speed.
So I spent the next quarter-hour on hold with the automatic voices at the BBC, which eventually auto-hung up on me ironically mid-way through telling me for the 463rd that my call was important to them. Because I could see what was coming, even if the people who were paid to couldn’t.
You see, if you set a recording by EPG, then it starts when the EPG tells it to, and finishes when that EPG tells it to. If the EPG changes later, it’s too late – the machine’s had its instructions. So when the EPG changed a few minutes after 9, for anyone who’d set in advance and their machines had started recording at the proper time, it was too late. And the same for when it changed at about 9.20, and then 9.35. Had the people paid to programme the EPGs changed them in advance of the due time, even by a few minutes when it was bleeding obvious that they needed changing, then recorders would have sat patiently waiting for the live EPGs to tell them to start.
And if they’d bothered to put the correct end time for the eventual 10pm showing before about quarter past ten, by which time it was of no earthly use, my recording wouldn’t had stopped on the dot of 11pm, as I’d predicted it would an hour and a half earlier but the incompetents at the BBC hadn’t.
So, despite trying not to watch the play because I was hoping to wait and watch it with Richard, I had to watch half-way through for the moment when it stopped part-way into Henry telling off Hal. Then look again at 11.55 because, of course, it finished 3 minutes late on top of all the other lateness, which meant that the manual recording I’d had to start of the second half had neatly stopped, again, at precisely the moment the EPG said it was due to stop, half-way through Falstaff’s soliloquy. Splitting the play into three separate recordings, all because the EPG programmers didn’t do their jobs properly.
Richard is now home, and we’re now watching the hastily-arranged repeat on BBC4. It was announced immediately after the chopped-about first broadcast. The EPG wasn’t updated until today, of course, so you couldn’t set up for it right then.
Some might say that you can watch these things on the iPlayer. Well, yes, but if I’m going to spend two hours watching something, I’d rather do it on my big screen with no blurring and no buffering, and that’s what EPG recordings are meant to be for. And if you wanted to watch The Hollow Crown in HD, you’re stuffed. If you’re very, very lucky, the BBC might eventually release it on Blu-Ray – but, irritatingly, despite now making so many programmes in high definition, and ‘protecting’ them from copying with signals that mean you can’t back most of them up, those programmes they do release are usually just on DVD and not Blu-Ray. So, congratulations again, BBC, for making programmes in HD and then going to such lengths to prevent people watching them or keeping them that way.
And if you think that’s a rant, you should have heard me last night. Patrick Troughton used to say he didn’t do theatre because it was just “Shouting in the evenings” – I think our neighbours might agree.
After all that, the infamous ‘tennis as insult’ scene in The Hollow Crown’s finale Henry V in a fortnight is going to see almost bitterly satirical.
Regular readers may be aware that I’m not exactly a fan of sport. However, I do understand that live sport will occasionally run over time and delay other programmes. In the olden days, when people were out they had to set their own video recorders and hope that the TV schedules advertised might bear some relationship to reality. In theory, these days the channel’s programmers can update the EPG for a delayed programme and everyone’s digital recorders will simply act on the new information.
This requires, as do all computers for the information you get out of them, that the people putting in the information aren’t completely incompetent.
A Dumb Box and Dumber at the BBC
There are many different varieties of digital recorder, so I won’t claim to speak for them all, but ours is fairly standard: it’s a dumb box that assumes its users are dumber, so there’s no manual override. In theory, this is to prevent someone setting a recording going, forgetting about it, and using up all the memory in one great lump. In practice, when TV stations are rarely known for sticking to the precise minute of their schedules, this would usually mean missing the end or the beginning of programmes, as almost all start a minute or two early or finish a minute or two late. There’s no option to press a button that says, ‘Keep recording until I stop, you bastard!’
To correct this obvious problem, the manufacturers do allow you to change the default setting on the machine so as to top and tail your timer recordings with a few extra minutes (ours is set to start three minutes ahead and finish five after; sadly, you can’t set it by channel so that the BBC gets the full five at the end for running over time, while channels carrying advertising finish on time so most recordings don’t end in an extended ten minutes of ads and unwanted programming). But this only applies to shows you’ve checked by EPG in advance; if you simply press “Record” for something going out live, it will stop recording the very second that the EPG (that again) says it’s scheduled to finish, and no amount of swearing at it will extend that.
Last Night’s Stopping and Starting
I tuned in a few minutes before 9 last night to catch BBC2’s broadcast of Henry IV, Part 1. Or not, as they were still showing Wimbledon. Richard was away; I was meant to be, but not well enough; fortunately, this meant I could at least stop our EPG recording from saving us the tennis. So it clicked on at 8.57, and I switched it off, and waited. Within a few minutes, the EPG had changed to indicate a start time for the play of 9.15. So I selected the new EPG, and our machine started again at 9.12. It was still tennis. I stopped it again. Within another few minutes, the EPG had changed again to start Henry at 9.30. By this time, people who claim that live sport needs special treatment were losing the argument: the simultaneous broadcast on BBC2 and BBCHD was showing a mixture of interminable post-game sports babble, bits of game in daylight (and so clearly not live, unless the Isle of Dogs has suddenly switched to a different time zone from Wimbledon) and even minutes-long shots of the stadium in darkness from high above, cars driving away from it. Yet 9.27 and then 9.30 passed, still with no move to the scheduled programme.
By 9.35, the EPG had updated yet again to suggest a start time of 10pm. So I reset my digital recorder yet again… But noticed something was wrong. Henry IV, Part 1 was scheduled to show from 9pm to 10.55; on the first new EPG, all the programme times for the rest of the night were put back by 15 minutes; on the second, by half an hour; but this time, although the start time had been altered to encompass the hour’s delay, the BBC munchkins setting the EPG hadn’t altered the end time, with the next programme claimed to be starting at the original 10.55. Even though this couldn’t possibly be true, unless they were going to play the two-hour Shakespeare at double speed.
So I spent the next quarter-hour on hold with the automatic voices at the BBC, which eventually auto-hung up on me ironically mid-way through telling me for the 463rd that my call was important to them. Because I could see what was coming, even if the people who were paid to couldn’t.
You see, if you set a recording by EPG, then it starts when the EPG tells it to, and finishes when that EPG tells it to. If the EPG changes later, it’s too late – the machine’s had its instructions. So when the EPG changed a few minutes after 9, for anyone who’d set in advance and their machines had started recording at the proper time, it was too late. And the same for when it changed at about 9.20, and then 9.35. Had the people paid to programme the EPGs changed them in advance of the due time, even by a few minutes when it was bleeding obvious that they needed changing, then recorders would have sat patiently waiting for the live EPGs to tell them to start.
And if they’d bothered to put the correct end time for the eventual 10pm showing before about quarter past ten, by which time it was of no earthly use, my recording wouldn’t had stopped on the dot of 11pm, as I’d predicted it would an hour and a half earlier but the incompetents at the BBC hadn’t.
So, despite trying not to watch the play because I was hoping to wait and watch it with Richard, I had to watch half-way through for the moment when it stopped part-way into Henry telling off Hal. Then look again at 11.55 because, of course, it finished 3 minutes late on top of all the other lateness, which meant that the manual recording I’d had to start of the second half had neatly stopped, again, at precisely the moment the EPG said it was due to stop, half-way through Falstaff’s soliloquy. Splitting the play into three separate recordings, all because the EPG programmers didn’t do their jobs properly.
Richard is now home, and we’re now watching the hastily-arranged repeat on BBC4. It was announced immediately after the chopped-about first broadcast. The EPG wasn’t updated until today, of course, so you couldn’t set up for it right then.
Some might say that you can watch these things on the iPlayer. Well, yes, but if I’m going to spend two hours watching something, I’d rather do it on my big screen with no blurring and no buffering, and that’s what EPG recordings are meant to be for. And if you wanted to watch The Hollow Crown in HD, you’re stuffed. If you’re very, very lucky, the BBC might eventually release it on Blu-Ray – but, irritatingly, despite now making so many programmes in high definition, and ‘protecting’ them from copying with signals that mean you can’t back most of them up, those programmes they do release are usually just on DVD and not Blu-Ray. So, congratulations again, BBC, for making programmes in HD and then going to such lengths to prevent people watching them or keeping them that way.
And if you think that’s a rant, you should have heard me last night. Patrick Troughton used to say he didn’t do theatre because it was just “Shouting in the evenings” – I think our neighbours might agree.
After all that, the infamous ‘tennis as insult’ scene in The Hollow Crown’s finale Henry V in a fortnight is going to see almost bitterly satirical.
Labels: BBC, Patrick Troughton, Shakespeare, Technology, Theatre
Friday, June 29, 2012
Government Porn Filter Collapses In Security Nightmare
The Government yesterday erected a consultation page about online porn. It’s down now. A spokesperson said, ‘Look… This is really embarrassing… It’s never happened before*. Try again later?’ I’d rather they didn’t, but if they do get it up again, steel yourself, look at the horrid thing, and insert your… contribution.
This bloody stupid idea, cooked up like so many others ‘For the sake of the children’ by bullying social conservatives – it’s like the Labour Party were still in Government – is to automatically block porn through everyone’s ISPs and treat every adult as if they were a child, including the two-thirds of households that don’t have children in them.
What do they think the Internet is for, anyway?
I can’t help thinking that this is a sop from Mr Cameron to his raving right-wing backbenchers who weren’t happy with the last consultation, on same-sex marriage. ‘No, we’re still frothing conservatives who like sticking our grubby fingers into people’s bedrooms, honestly!’ is the message. ‘Let’s turn the PC clocks back to when everyone just had floppies!’ Never mind personal responsibility for parents; never mind that we’re having to put up with a lot of horrible things the Tories are doing because there’s much, much less than no money and we have to live with some cuts; there’s just no excuse for this. It’s illiberal, it’s bureaucratic, and it costs a lot more money. And, today, when the Government wants to get its jollies by costing a lot more money, it had better have a bloody good excuse.
Instead, this proposal is a proven car-crash less than a day into the consultation period – long before any law might come into force. Yes, shockingly, they launched the consultation just yesterday. And now they’ve had to suspend it because the online questionnaire has blown open the Data Protection Act by publishing people’s names, contact details and replies.
Yes, astonishingly, this cock-up has already proved why having a Government register of porn users is a terrible idea (even if you’re stupid enough not to read that sentence and work it out from first principles). There are already so many, many reasons why getting ISPs to hold everyone’s “Porn filter” records on their databases is wrong, whether it’s forcing every Internet user – or, rather, bill-payer – in the land to opt in in order to view porn. Such filters are a grotesque state-run invasion of privacy, when whether you look at consenting adults’ porn or not is nobody else’s business. Such filters are well-known for blocking medical sites, or helplines – so, far from child protection, they do genuine and provable harm. And just imagine going into your local mobile phone emporium to sign a new contract:
At this very moment forty-three years ago, the Stonewall riots – that’s proper Stonewall, not the Labour-licking corporate lobbyists – were into their second day. They were the start of modern lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender radicalism, and I’ve been listening to the Tom Robinson Band’s excellent Long Hot Summer in celebration. I don’t think there’ll be riots if the Government starts fiddling with people’s porn, though I’d be tempted, but it would certainly harm LGBT people, from LGBT kids unable to look up helpful sites to leaked information being of help to queerbashers. These proposals are simply wrong.
I have previously suggested as our core message: “Liberal Democrats – The Party That Thinks Sex Is All Right”. We should very much leave micro-management of people’s lives to the Tories (who want to boss you about because you’re bad) and Labour (who want to boss you about because it’s good for you). And Lib Dem Ministers, you should tell the Tories how daft they’re being.
I have a simple, cost-saving alternative.
If the government wants a list of masturbators in the UK, one already exists: the census. It’s guaranteed to be a far more accurate list than any wildly expensive new self-‘incriminating’ infrastructure would be.
Whereas if they want a list of wankers, just look at the register of MPs supporting this new censorship idea.
*Except for every single time any UK Government ever puts confidential information into a new IT system. You’d think they’d have learned by now.
This bloody stupid idea, cooked up like so many others ‘For the sake of the children’ by bullying social conservatives – it’s like the Labour Party were still in Government – is to automatically block porn through everyone’s ISPs and treat every adult as if they were a child, including the two-thirds of households that don’t have children in them.
What do they think the Internet is for, anyway?
I can’t help thinking that this is a sop from Mr Cameron to his raving right-wing backbenchers who weren’t happy with the last consultation, on same-sex marriage. ‘No, we’re still frothing conservatives who like sticking our grubby fingers into people’s bedrooms, honestly!’ is the message. ‘Let’s turn the PC clocks back to when everyone just had floppies!’ Never mind personal responsibility for parents; never mind that we’re having to put up with a lot of horrible things the Tories are doing because there’s much, much less than no money and we have to live with some cuts; there’s just no excuse for this. It’s illiberal, it’s bureaucratic, and it costs a lot more money. And, today, when the Government wants to get its jollies by costing a lot more money, it had better have a bloody good excuse.
Instead, this proposal is a proven car-crash less than a day into the consultation period – long before any law might come into force. Yes, shockingly, they launched the consultation just yesterday. And now they’ve had to suspend it because the online questionnaire has blown open the Data Protection Act by publishing people’s names, contact details and replies.
Why A Porn Filter Would Harm People (Kids Included)
Yes, astonishingly, this cock-up has already proved why having a Government register of porn users is a terrible idea (even if you’re stupid enough not to read that sentence and work it out from first principles). There are already so many, many reasons why getting ISPs to hold everyone’s “Porn filter” records on their databases is wrong, whether it’s forcing every Internet user – or, rather, bill-payer – in the land to opt in in order to view porn. Such filters are a grotesque state-run invasion of privacy, when whether you look at consenting adults’ porn or not is nobody else’s business. Such filters are well-known for blocking medical sites, or helplines – so, far from child protection, they do genuine and provable harm. And just imagine going into your local mobile phone emporium to sign a new contract:
‘Jan-ice! Pass me the porn register! This one looks like he’s not getting any…’But, as today’s security disaster has proven beyond doubt before the filter databases themselves are created, they are insecure. I can’t even say ‘An accident waiting to happen’ because, well, it’s just happened. They present a danger to people. A danger of being embarrassed for no good reason. A danger of being excluded from, say, your religious membership if they preach against pornography and – heavens! – your name is found to be on the list. A danger of being bombarded with unwanted ‘offers’ from the sex industry. Even the real physical danger of being targeted by extremist religious or other groups. These lists are by nature insecure and dangerous, whether the danger is simply of being forced into social conformity when in your own home for fear that your name will ‘get out’, or that people who want to market to you or do you harm will pay good money to get hold of such records.
At this very moment forty-three years ago, the Stonewall riots – that’s proper Stonewall, not the Labour-licking corporate lobbyists – were into their second day. They were the start of modern lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender radicalism, and I’ve been listening to the Tom Robinson Band’s excellent Long Hot Summer in celebration. I don’t think there’ll be riots if the Government starts fiddling with people’s porn, though I’d be tempted, but it would certainly harm LGBT people, from LGBT kids unable to look up helpful sites to leaked information being of help to queerbashers. These proposals are simply wrong.
Government – Get Your Hands Off Our… Hands!
I have previously suggested as our core message: “Liberal Democrats – The Party That Thinks Sex Is All Right”. We should very much leave micro-management of people’s lives to the Tories (who want to boss you about because you’re bad) and Labour (who want to boss you about because it’s good for you). And Lib Dem Ministers, you should tell the Tories how daft they’re being.
I have a simple, cost-saving alternative.
If the government wants a list of masturbators in the UK, one already exists: the census. It’s guaranteed to be a far more accurate list than any wildly expensive new self-‘incriminating’ infrastructure would be.
Whereas if they want a list of wankers, just look at the register of MPs supporting this new censorship idea.
*Except for every single time any UK Government ever puts confidential information into a new IT system. You’d think they’d have learned by now.
Labels: Coalition, Conservatives, Gay, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Sex, Stupid Ideas, Technology, What the Lib Dems Stand For
Thursday, June 21, 2012
What Doctor Who – The New Adventures Mean To Us: Alex
Twenty-one years old today, the New Adventures were, and are, one of the greatest eras of Doctor Who. There are, I think, three crucial reasons. At the time for the series, they were a lifeline for Doctor Who after the TV show was cancelled, continuing, innovating, reaching into the future with authors like Paul Cornell, Mark Gatiss and Russell T Davies; at the time for me, I was going through a period of explosive change and they act as milestones for me along the way; and, more importantly still, they were brilliant at the time – and they still are.
The first New Adventure was published on June 20th, 1991. A year and a half earlier, Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor and Sophie Aldred’s Ace had walked off into the sunset at the end of Survival, the last Doctor Who TV story of the original run. And then Virgin Publishing saw them walk back into the TARDIS for what turned out to be sixty-one New Adventures (fewer with Ace, more without the Doctor).
I was probably the perfect audience for the New Adventures; part of probably the second generation of Doctor Who fans, I’d always followed both the TV series and the Target novelisations – since I was three and five respectively, a decade and a half by then – and with both versions of Doctor Who equally important to me, with no new TV stories what could be more natural than to continue the Doctor’s travels on the page?
But what really kept these Doctor Who stories exciting and made them the most brilliant, influential and coherent continuation of Doctor Who between 1989 and 2005 was the extraordinary influx of eager new writers, most writing their first novels, full of ideas, determined to make an impression. Kate Orman, Andy Lane, Jim Mortimore – and people who have worked on the TV series since its return in 2005 like Paul Cornell, Mark Gatiss, Gareth Roberts, Gary Russell and Simon Winstone. Even, towards the end, a book each from the two biggest creative forces behind the next two big waves of Doctor Who – Lawrence Miles and Russell T Davies.
The New Adventures are a far more evocative memory for me than any other non-TV Doctor Who line, in part because for me they were so much better than any other, and in part because of the time they spanned, a uniquely transitional few years in my life. From Tom through to Sylv on TV, the stories are powerful memories but the setting usually at my parents’ in Stockport; from Chris to Matt so far on TV, the stories are powerful memories but the setting almost without exception with Richard in our Isle of Dogs flat. But the NAs summon up memories of the bookshops where I bought them (Colchester where I studied, or didn’t, London for politics or partners, strangely often the WH Smiths at Liverpool Street Station as I travelled in between), of starting to mix with fans, and much more so of university, people or politics. And as I spent a lot of my time at uni hitch-hiking up and down the country to help out the Liberal Democrats at by-elections back when I still had the health to do it, many NAs for me crystallise into reading them late at night while crashing on people’s floors in between days of leafleting and canvassing in different campaigns.
My favourite eras of Doctor Who have long been Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe’s, my first and still the best, then discovering William Hartnell’s early days… And the New Adventures, most of all as they really get into their stride from about 1994-96. There’s much more Who that I love – 1978, 1980-81, 1989, 2005, 2007 all spring to mind; oh, really, the whole lot of it – but those are the benchmarks for quality I keep returning to. With the New Adventures in particular, I can simply think of more terrific books from that range than I can from all the other book ranges put together. Every set of books has its ups and downs, but the NAs were both unambiguously the Doctor’s continuing adventures and fortuitously had more consistent depth and inspiration than any other non-TV line of Who.
Loved or hated, the New Adventures were massively important; neither the BBC Books Doctor Who line that took over from them nor Big Finish’s Doctor Who audios would be around without them, and the TV series that returned, had it returned at all, would probably look very different. I loved these groundbreaking adventures that dragged Doctor Who into the ’90s and cast the Doctor as “Time’s Champion”, the books becoming his own champions striding into an exciting future.
This is cross-posted from Richard’s and my new blog, Time’s Champions, a day later – so, happy -528th birthday, Bernice Summerfield!
You can read Richard’s heartfelt paean to the New Adventures here.
Incidentally, the new blog’s still very much a work in progress as we decide what to make of it, so should anyone have a Blogger template that looks like the New Adventures front and back cover designs, could you get in touch?
Doctor Who’s Lifeline
The first New Adventure was published on June 20th, 1991. A year and a half earlier, Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor and Sophie Aldred’s Ace had walked off into the sunset at the end of Survival, the last Doctor Who TV story of the original run. And then Virgin Publishing saw them walk back into the TARDIS for what turned out to be sixty-one New Adventures (fewer with Ace, more without the Doctor).
I was probably the perfect audience for the New Adventures; part of probably the second generation of Doctor Who fans, I’d always followed both the TV series and the Target novelisations – since I was three and five respectively, a decade and a half by then – and with both versions of Doctor Who equally important to me, with no new TV stories what could be more natural than to continue the Doctor’s travels on the page?
“When is a lightning bolt not a lightning bolt?”The first three books were all written by established novelisers for the Target range (which had itself by the end been taken over by Virgin, establishing a continuing thread from 1973 into the new books): John Peel, Nigel Robinson and, most importantly, Terrance Dicks. For the more conservative fans – and I started off more towards that direction – it was reassuring that the second novel was written by Terrance Dicks (then the grand middle-aged man of Who, writing for the seventh of seven Doctors), giving his blessing. It was also a help that Terrance’s Timewyrm: Exodus was clearly the best of the three, as well as notably experimental in its time-hopping. Within the next few books published, outstanding TV authors from the Sylvester McCoy era had joined the range – Marc Platt, Andrew Cartmel, Ben Aaronovitch (with a new book out today that’s set to be another bestseller) – to make it clear that this was taking up where the TV series had left off with the BBC’s official stamp, all three not just providing continuity but driving on with the books’ original tagline of “Full-length, original novels, too broad and too deep for the small screen”.
But what really kept these Doctor Who stories exciting and made them the most brilliant, influential and coherent continuation of Doctor Who between 1989 and 2005 was the extraordinary influx of eager new writers, most writing their first novels, full of ideas, determined to make an impression. Kate Orman, Andy Lane, Jim Mortimore – and people who have worked on the TV series since its return in 2005 like Paul Cornell, Mark Gatiss, Gareth Roberts, Gary Russell and Simon Winstone. Even, towards the end, a book each from the two biggest creative forces behind the next two big waves of Doctor Who – Lawrence Miles and Russell T Davies.
“Everything is history, if you look at it from the right perspective.”Nothing dates like “New”, and it’s a bit startling to think that when they began I was a few months away from turning twenty, and now they’ve just turned twenty-one. I remember Paul Cornell at a signing about five years ago exclaiming with a shock that they’ve yellowed and started to smell like old books. But though it seems odd to look back from more than half my life ago at “New”, they still justify the title for always keeping the series going forward, rather than just dwelling comfortably on Doctor Who ‘as it used to be’ – because it never used to be just unoriginal, repetitive and comforting. The New Adventures opened up new vistas; I didn’t always like them, but I realised that when Doctor Who can go anywhere and do anything, it can’t sit still. Fans talked about Doctor Who’s own version of the Political Compass, with “Rads” vs “Trads”, “Frocks” vs “Guns”, and I found myself opening up with the NAs from Trad-Gun tastes to preferring Rad-Frocks. From the start, the New Adventures favoured story arcs before Babylon 5 made them fashionable, and as they increased in breadth and confidence they told cyberpunk future histories, turned the series inside-out with a new, old mythology and introduced the series’ defining companion, archaeologist Professor Bernice Summerfield, then later the Thirtieth Century police officers blond, heroic Chris Cwej and grumpy Xhosa aristocrat Roz Forrester, all with the Daleks seeming more powerful than ever by never appearing but always casting their shadow across the stories. And, yes, the books came to define their own clichés (Ace shooting and shagging, Benny drinking, Sylv’s angst and killer eyes, and lots of Kate Bush), yet they remain one of the series’ most creative ever periods. And traditionalists and radicals, Target-lovers and experimenters were all part of the same run, all playing in the same sandbox, and that made the series so much stronger striking out into the future.
Part of My Lifetime
The New Adventures are a far more evocative memory for me than any other non-TV Doctor Who line, in part because for me they were so much better than any other, and in part because of the time they spanned, a uniquely transitional few years in my life. From Tom through to Sylv on TV, the stories are powerful memories but the setting usually at my parents’ in Stockport; from Chris to Matt so far on TV, the stories are powerful memories but the setting almost without exception with Richard in our Isle of Dogs flat. But the NAs summon up memories of the bookshops where I bought them (Colchester where I studied, or didn’t, London for politics or partners, strangely often the WH Smiths at Liverpool Street Station as I travelled in between), of starting to mix with fans, and much more so of university, people or politics. And as I spent a lot of my time at uni hitch-hiking up and down the country to help out the Liberal Democrats at by-elections back when I still had the health to do it, many NAs for me crystallise into reading them late at night while crashing on people’s floors in between days of leafleting and canvassing in different campaigns.
“You mean I’m dead?”So amongst the most vivid memories for me – among many others – are Timewyrm: Revelation in Lancaster for a few days with a brief fling; being frightened by Doctor Who for the first time since 1977 by Nightshade in a very tall, very dark room at friends’ in Portsmouth; Deceit at the Newbury by-election; Lucifer Rising in my physical office and at the end of my term of office as a students’ union President, sometimes surreptitiously, under the desk, because I’d much rather be reading a brilliant Who book than organising a handover; White Darkness at the Christchurch by-election; Shadowmind in East London, as my then relationship was breaking up; Conundrum at a local by-election in rural St Neot’s; Theatre of War at the Eastleigh by-election; a god-awful hitch-hike to Bradford South with only All-Consuming Fire to keep me warm in long, lonely hours stuck outside service stations along the way; St Anthony’s Fire being a very disappointing book but still a vividly exciting memory of finding my way on bus round the Isle of Dogs as I started going out with Richard (or, as I’m sure he’d prefer me to remember, reading the far better The Also People in what was by then our flat); Christmas on a Rational Planet in a coach back from giving a speech in Utrecht, having forced myself to put it to one side and write the speech on the way there; Damaged Goods at the Wirral South by-election and around Merseyrail; The Dying Days in short breaks as I was being driven from place to place as the candidate myself, strangely appropriate as a finale, in Stevenage on General Election day, then late at night when I should have been getting a nap in before the count…
“…Oxygen starvation, brought about from finding yourself on the moon having believed the place to be Norfolk. I do believe that’s unique.”
Brilliant
My favourite eras of Doctor Who have long been Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe’s, my first and still the best, then discovering William Hartnell’s early days… And the New Adventures, most of all as they really get into their stride from about 1994-96. There’s much more Who that I love – 1978, 1980-81, 1989, 2005, 2007 all spring to mind; oh, really, the whole lot of it – but those are the benchmarks for quality I keep returning to. With the New Adventures in particular, I can simply think of more terrific books from that range than I can from all the other book ranges put together. Every set of books has its ups and downs, but the NAs were both unambiguously the Doctor’s continuing adventures and fortuitously had more consistent depth and inspiration than any other non-TV line of Who.
“‘In that case,’ said Bernice, ‘I’ll have an exaggerated sexual innuendo with a dash of patriot’s spirit and extra mushrooms. Roz?’A few years ago, I wrote a series of short pieces on Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant? Several New Adventures featured prominently. We hope to be reviewing the whole range in time – that’s the plan – but in lieu of you reading every NA to discover for yourself how brilliant they are (though you should), here are a few of the standouts, should you happen across them in your local second-hand bookshop:
“‘I’ll have the same,’ said Roz. ‘But with an umbrella in it.’
“‘Coming right up,’ said the table.”
- The cream of the crop for me are Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore’s Lucifer Rising, in which the TARDIS crew get a fair bit of character development, oodles of future history is explored, there are huge sci-fi ideas and it’s a murder mystery that’s sometimes very funny into the bargain;
- …And Ben Aaronovitch’s The Also People, for which I could write a similar précis – more confident character exploration than development, but with other huge sci-fi ideas, another murder mystery and much funnier – but which is a very different book, a small-scale film noir at heart amidst the epic setting and with arguably the most gorgeous prose in the series;
- The most influential novel was the fourth NA published, Paul Cornell’s Timewyrm: Revelation, which exploded the boundaries and showed that you could write something very different to the TV series; like the following book, Marc Platt’s equally brilliant Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible, it’s a journey of sorts to the Doctor’s heart, one metaphysical, one technological, both in their own ways mythological. With the NAs’ penchant for pop culture references, I think of them as Blue Monday and West End Girls, the one that luckily came out first setting the standard for a new wave;
- Then there’s Andrew Cartmel’s intense ‘War’ trilogy, with its dystopian near future and übermanipulative Doctor;
- Paul Cornell’s Love and War, just as political and striking out boldly with the introduction of Professor Bernice Summerfield, who celebrates her -528th birthday tomorrow and is still going strong in her own series;
- Mark Gatiss’ scary Nightshade, where nostalgia kills;
- Gareth Roberts’ The Highest Science and Andy Lane’s Sherlock Holmes crossover All-Consuming Fire (he now writes his own bestselling Holmes series), both of which are enormous fun;
- Jim Mortimore’s Blood Heat and Kate Orman’s The Left-Handed Hummingbird, both of which put everyone through the wringer;
- Paul Cornell, again’s, Human Nature, which tells an intimate, compelling story that was successfully made part of the TV series over a decade later;
- Andy Lane’s Original Sin, introducing Adjudicators Roz and Chris;
- Lance Parkin’s Just War, with appalling real-world horrors but one pricelessly funny moment;
- Lawrence Miles’ Christmas on a Rational Planet, which overturns much of the NAs’ own mythology with an alternate look at the History of the universe;
- Russell T Davies’ urban, gripping Damaged Goods that finally makes the NAs as gay as their detractors complain;
- Ben Aaronovitch and Kate Orman’s So Vile a Sin, a big climax, followed by Matt Jones’ moving Bad Therapy;
- And the ultimate New Adventure, Marc Platt’s Lungbarrow, in which the seventh Doctor goes back home for his swansong and many questions are answered (with just as many new ones posed).
Loved or hated, the New Adventures were massively important; neither the BBC Books Doctor Who line that took over from them nor Big Finish’s Doctor Who audios would be around without them, and the TV series that returned, had it returned at all, would probably look very different. I loved these groundbreaking adventures that dragged Doctor Who into the ’90s and cast the Doctor as “Time’s Champion”, the books becoming his own champions striding into an exciting future.
“At the far end of the street, hostile armed men came to the party, and twenty minutes passed.”Richard and I were both in the middle of following and loving the New Adventures when we met and fell in love with each other, so the NAs have an even more special place in our hearts. We started re-reading them this time last year, starting each New Adventure all over again on its twentieth birthday; for the series’ twenty-first today, we’re starting this new blog to look at them all in turn.
This is cross-posted from Richard’s and my new blog, Time’s Champions, a day later – so, happy -528th birthday, Bernice Summerfield!
You can read Richard’s heartfelt paean to the New Adventures here.
Incidentally, the new blog’s still very much a work in progress as we decide what to make of it, so should anyone have a Blogger template that looks like the New Adventures front and back cover designs, could you get in touch?
Labels: Big Finish, Blogs, Books, Doctor Who, New Adventures, Personal, Professor Bernice Summerfield, Reviews, Richard, Sylvester McCoy, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Equal Marriage Consultation – Supporting Equality Before the Law and Personal and Religious Freedom
The Coalition Government’s consultation on making marriage more equal closes today. If you’ve not supplied your own response, don’t leave it to the massive vested interests of the bigots, their money and their lawyers to enforce discrimination on everyone else. Back equality before the law and personal and religious freedom instead.
You can respond to the consultation here until later today (either 5pm or midnight according to different sources, so better make it 5); here are the consultation paper and the impact assessment; if the Home Office website crashes, email your answers to equalcivilmarriage@geo.gsi.gov.uk before the deadline. Here are mine.
You can respond to the consultation here until later today (either 5pm or midnight according to different sources, so better make it 5); here are the consultation paper and the impact assessment; if the Home Office website crashes, email your answers to equalcivilmarriage@geo.gsi.gov.uk before the deadline. Here are mine.
Question 1: Do you agree or disagree with enabling all couples, regardless of their gender to have a civil marriage ceremony?
Agree
Question 2: Please explain the reasons for your answer. Please respond within 1,225 characters (approx 200 words).
In 21st Century Britain there’s simply no justification for the law discriminating against people – it should treat everyone the same. It’s wrong for the state to decide that some citizens are second class and must be forced to use separate facilities (no-one who talks about “separate but equal” in order to exclude people ever wants to be on the “separate” side). We wouldn’t countenance banning mixed-race marriages today; same-sex marriages are exactly the same case.
Marriage – and civil partnerships – should be based on the principle of equality before the law. That makes the law simpler as well as fairer, and stops such awful ‘anomalies’ as forcing transsexual people to divorce in order to be pushed into the right ‘category’, or UK law not recognising people married in other countries.
It should be up to any couple (same-sex, mixed-sex, same-race or mixed-race) to decide how to celebrate and protect their relationship, and the law simply to recognise that. Both marriage and civil partnerships should be open to all, on the same basis, and there should be simple legal procedures to convert either into the other.
Put simply, it’s no-one else’s business but a couple’s to decide if they get married.
Question 3: If you identify as being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transsexual would you wish to have a civil marriage ceremony?
Yes
Question 4: If you represent a group of individuals who identify as being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transsexual would those you represent wish to have a civil marriage ceremony?
This question doesn’t apply to me
Question 5: The Government does not propose to open up religious marriage to same-sex couples. Do you agree or disagree?
Disagree – religious marriage should be opened up to same-sex couples
Question 6: Do you agree or disagree with keeping the option of civil partnerships once civil marriage is available to same-sex couples?
Agree
Question 7: If you identify as being lesbian, gay, bisexual and were considering making a legal commitment to your partner would you prefer to have a civil partnership or a civil marriage?
Civil marriage
Question 8: The Government is not considering opening up civil partnerships to opposite-sex couples. Do you agree or disagree with this proposal?
Disagree – civil partnerships should be opened up to opposite-sex couples
Question 9: If you are in a civil partnership would you wish to take advantage of this policy and convert your civil partnership into a marriage?
This question doesn’t apply to me
Question 10. We would not propose introducing a time limit on the ability to convert a civil partnership into a marriage.
Agree – there shouldn't be a time limit
(This question and answer was contradictorily worded in the paper, but has been clarified on the site).
Question 11: Do you agree or disagree that there should be the choice to have a civil ceremony on conversion of a civil partnership into a marriage?
Yes, there should be an option
Question 12: If you are a married transsexual person, would you want to take advantage of this policy and remain in your marriage while obtaining a full Gender Recognition Certificate?
This question doesn’t apply to me
Question 13: If you are the spouse of a transsexual person, would you want to take advantage of this policy and remain in your marriage whilst your spouse obtained a full Gender Recognition Certificate?
This question doesn’t apply to me
Question 14: Do you have any comments on the assumptions or issues outlined in this chapter on consequential impacts? Please respond within 1,225 characters (approx 200 words).
Rules for pensions should be equalised between marriages and civil partnerships, men and women.
In particular, the law should recognise a continuing relationship for pensions and other benefits any civil partnership that converts to a marriage (or vice versa – both should be made simple), and provide recompense for the financial harm added to the emotional harm in forcing trans people to divorce because of the current discriminatory marriage laws.
Question 15: Are you aware of any costs or benefits that exist to either the public or private sector, or individuals that we have not accounted for? Please respond within 1,225 characters (approx 200 words).
Your own quoted research suggests that more LGBT people would wish to marry than currently take up civil partnerships; many civil-partnered couples would wish to change their status to a marriage; if civil partnership, too, was made gender-neutral, many mixed-sex couples who do not wish to marry might still want the legal security of a formal partnership. All of this implies a significant gain to the Exchequer and to the many industries which make money out of marriage ceremonies, particularly in the first few years after a change in the law.
I do not agree with setting a time limit on conversion from civil partnership to marriage (or vice versa) – how can the law set a clock on people’s changing feelings? – but there should be a major discount on registration fees for people currently in civil partnerships converting to marriage within, say, the first year, as they were previously denied the right to marry and paid for the only option legally available.
Question 16: Do you have any other comments on the proposals within this consultation? Please respond within 1,225 characters (approx 200 words).
The proposals do not go far enough, and are unnecessarily complicated – likely to lead to further changes in the law in future. Why not take the opportunity now to simply enact equality before the law?
Let every couple choose for themselves whether to enter a civil marriage or a civil partnership, without the state laying down extra gender-limited rules.
Further, the state should be neutral on religious marriage. Many large religious bodies wish to enshrine discrimination. Well, that’s their business for their own churches, but not for everyone’s. All churches should be given religious freedom to marry people or not on their own doctrines. The proposals would stop religious freedom for denominations (such as Quakers or Reform Judaism) who wish to recognise equal marriage, and allow bigger religious special interests to bully them. It’s religious discrimination by the law. That can’t be right.
Labels: Bigotry, British Politics, Coalition, Gay, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Religion
Saturday, June 02, 2012
Doctor Who – The Idiot’s Lantern
Queen Elizabeth II was crowned sixty fifty-nine years ago today. Not being much of a royalist (having been responsible for a political party debating the monarchy for the first time in centuries), I’d been intending to review an appropriately celebratory Doctor Who story such as Jubilee or Snakedance (in which the Doctor doesn’t enjoy the festivities) or perhaps The Pirate Planet or State of Decay (in which old Queens just keep hanging on). We went to a movie instead. Fortunately, here’s one I prepared earlier; Doctor Who Magazine’s Time Team marked the occasion this week with David Tennant’s The Idiot’s Lantern. And as well as an electric piece of art from Adrian Salmon, they printed a line from me in DWM 448 alongside their main review! So I’m chuffed.
What a shame that William Shatner’s festive cover of God Save the Queen (as sung on Have I Got News For You a week ago) doesn’t seem to be available to buy, and so tragically won’t be the Number One it deserves to be this weekend. Never mind – I’ll just have to put on those jolly carousers the Sex Pistols instead.
The idea of DWM’s Time Team is that – starting right at the beginning of Doctor Who and more than a decade ago in real time – they get four regular reviewers to sit on the couch and watch every story (including, these days, the lovely Mr Will). And to one side, they feature comments sent in by readers. When I get round to sending in one-liners to Time Team, I watch the story to brainstorm a lot of quickie ideas so that, hopefully, that way at least one of them’ll be something no-one else has come up with. The latest issue’s the first for three Doctors that I’ve had comments in two consecutive issues, and a letter about Philip Madoc, too. Coo. A few years ago, I was encouraged to set up a blog printing all of these; well, all right, I need a bit of a prod to get that going, but it’s not going to happen tonight, so I thought I’d leap ahead and publish what I sent in last month (try and spot how much I’ve nicked from Richard’s review on Millennium Dome, Elephant). If you read my usual reviews, this is something very different… Shorter, punchier and – a consequence of trying to keep the word count down – much cattier. Or, at least, not dressing it up. Actually, when I watched this a month ago, I quite enjoyed it, and having not seen it for a few years, some of it seemed quite fresh. But not all of it…
Tonight, Richard and I are watching and greatly enjoying the story that followed The Idiot’s Lantern, The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit. It’s the day before its sixth anniversary, for a story full of sixes; it’s time (slightly past time, probably) for the next Time Team… But, mainly, because we’ve just been to see Prometheus, which in no way recalled this story with its sensible black captain, industrial future chic, tepid comments about faith, giant carved face down in the darkness, Cthuliana and Alien feel. Completely different. I’d say what I thought of it, but I suspect someone else’ll be along shortly with something a lot more incisive and insightful than I’d be after one viewing…
What a shame that William Shatner’s festive cover of God Save the Queen (as sung on Have I Got News For You a week ago) doesn’t seem to be available to buy, and so tragically won’t be the Number One it deserves to be this weekend. Never mind – I’ll just have to put on those jolly carousers the Sex Pistols instead.
The idea of DWM’s Time Team is that – starting right at the beginning of Doctor Who and more than a decade ago in real time – they get four regular reviewers to sit on the couch and watch every story (including, these days, the lovely Mr Will). And to one side, they feature comments sent in by readers. When I get round to sending in one-liners to Time Team, I watch the story to brainstorm a lot of quickie ideas so that, hopefully, that way at least one of them’ll be something no-one else has come up with. The latest issue’s the first for three Doctors that I’ve had comments in two consecutive issues, and a letter about Philip Madoc, too. Coo. A few years ago, I was encouraged to set up a blog printing all of these; well, all right, I need a bit of a prod to get that going, but it’s not going to happen tonight, so I thought I’d leap ahead and publish what I sent in last month (try and spot how much I’ve nicked from Richard’s review on Millennium Dome, Elephant). If you read my usual reviews, this is something very different… Shorter, punchier and – a consequence of trying to keep the word count down – much cattier. Or, at least, not dressing it up. Actually, when I watched this a month ago, I quite enjoyed it, and having not seen it for a few years, some of it seemed quite fresh. But not all of it…
The Idiot’s Lantern – Not the Time Team
The tone’s all over the place, it’s hardly original, and the Doctor’s lost the big picture… But Maureen Lipman’s scene-stealing fabulousness makes the most fun villain since the series came back. And showing her frock properly even justifies Doctor Who Confidential!
I’m no royalist, but “Are you suggesting that the Queen does the housework?” is a brilliant way to puncture ’50s sexism. And did you time this Time Team for the Jubilee specially?
It almost gets across the feel of 60 years ago, when TV was rare and the Royals aloof. Before it all just became meaningless, greedy, third-rate celebrities. And TV’s nearly as bad.
They should leave Billie out of half the story more often if it means she concentrates what she has into flashes of pure impishness – taking the mickey out of Eddie and vanishing like a sprite is the best she’s been all season.
Mr Gatiss likes his Autons, doesn’t he? Blank faces, Doctor’s lash-ups needing a quick fix, New Domestic Thing Turns Evil at Evil Signal from Transmitter of Evil… Filling in the rest with dashes of Quatermass and Sapphire and Steel. Still, it’s more original than Night Terrors.
The only bit that doesn’t feel nicked is the family, and that just because it’s not very good – it might name-check Corrie, but can’t do it. And as for Dad… Not as well-rounded and subtle a working-class character as Sam Seeley.
The Wire’s sheer fun but also a real threat – Mr Connolly should be scarier, if anything, a more immediate brutish bully, but his terrible ‘My old man’s a dustman’ schtick makes him just a prat.
Eddie’s fine to start with, deliberately overdoing it like a dad when he marvels that it’s like the TV people are in the room with you. Shame that that’s as underplayed as he gets.
It’s charming but not really threatening – too cosy, save that scene where the Doctor suddenly goes off the deep end. Usually he’s just all teeth and lack of curls, not psychotic.
Tommy seems much younger than he is – not just the actor, but after children in School Reunion and the Fireplace, suddenly this seems an oddly child-populated season. It doesn’t quite suit the horror.
It might be laid on with a trowel in Tommy’s soliloquy, but it’s good to have such an unambiguously Liberal message again – in the Wire and Eddie, the Doctor stands up to bullies, big or small.
In a story from a child’s perspective, I can see the arbitrariness of authority excusing Bishop flashing between violent fascist and trusty Dixon copper, but I still don’t believe it.
I know ‘Feed me’ has been done before, but how Paradise Towers is this? That line, the disembodied villain, the Doctor reversing the interrogation… Towers still seems much fresher and wittier, though I’d take Lipman over Briers any day.
Cosy and horrific; domestic and pomp and circumstance; perhaps the tone’s at its most uncertain when it tries ‘Lovely Fifties nostalgia’ and ‘Things shouldn’t live on beyond their time’ at once. The obvious love of TV while sending up ‘It rots your brain!’ is a fab juxtaposition, though.
Lipman does a great lip-smacking single megalomaniac villain, but there just aren’t enough characters or time to pull off a ‘Florizel Street’ soap – and it doesn’t help that each member of the family appears to be acting in a different series or, in the case of Dad, a school play.
Bizarre that a ‘smaller’ historical seems so much less believable than the more ‘important’ ones – is it because we don’t all know queens (well, not all), but we can all tell when a family isn’t convincing?
The Wire’s probably the most OTT villain since the series came back, while Eddie’s just like every brute who beat you up. He should be the real scary monster. But ‘arch’ beats ‘hammy’ hands down.
I don’t think much of the Doctor being blasé over the whole of London but psychotic losing Rose. Get over yourselves!
Oh, dear, the Doctor’s ‘armed’ and the sonic much too handy. But I forgive this for sending up the psychic with “The King of Belgium, apparently”. A scream!
So how exactly does everyone get their face back…? It’s just a bit too easy – ‘Don’t worry, once TV people leave, everything returns to normal’. A more modern take would say ‘TV people do you, move on, and you’re left in a right old mess’.
It’s quite an elaborate revenge on continuity announcers always talking over the credits, isn’t it? If only they were all that cool (and had such killer frocks).
Bizarre fact: this is the episode most likely to be repeated without the “Next Time…” at the end. So it lets the continuity announcers in quicker.
Alex Wilcock
Isle of Dogs
And a few from Richard Flowers
I love the Doctor constructing a video recorder out of spares whilst on the run. A perfectly Doctor Who moment.
Is Tommy gay? I only ask because the script slaps you around the face with the obviousness of it and then pulls the punch.
In spite of the proprietor being vaporised by the Wire, Mr Magpie’s business is going to go from strength to strength, seen to still be in business aboard Starship UK in the Thirty-whatever-ish Century. I guess catering to those early Betamax adopters really paid off!
Tonight, Richard and I are watching and greatly enjoying the story that followed The Idiot’s Lantern, The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit. It’s the day before its sixth anniversary, for a story full of sixes; it’s time (slightly past time, probably) for the next Time Team… But, mainly, because we’ve just been to see Prometheus, which in no way recalled this story with its sensible black captain, industrial future chic, tepid comments about faith, giant carved face down in the darkness, Cthuliana and Alien feel. Completely different. I’d say what I thought of it, but I suspect someone else’ll be along shortly with something a lot more incisive and insightful than I’d be after one viewing…
Labels: Cthulhu, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Doctor Who Magazine, History, Republic, Reviews, Richard, The Idiot’s Lantern
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Five Posts From Five Years At Five
Last week, the lovely Caron Lindsay came up with a meme – what were we blogging on about this date for each of the last five years? I’ve still had my horrible ear infection and not been blogging much but, having managed a monster Doctor Who review this morning, I’ve been nudged by Millennium to take a look through the back catalogue. It turns out I’ve never blogged on May 23rd before, but aiming for mid-May has reminded me of an exciting variety of old posts: Doctor Who; politics; politics; and Doctor Who (few of them short). Who’d have thought?
Going back slightly further, 2006 was my first and in fact my most productive year blogging, so I took a look at that May, too: still nothing on the 23rd. But it turned out that we’d just had some local election results that had disappointed many Liberal Democrats (ha bloody ha, comparing the figures) but where Labour were relying on nothing but hatred of the Tories; that the Green Party were looking to nick votes from us; that Lib Dems were in fact much better on green action than they were; and that I was making a suggestion for how to get across, in part, what the Lib Dems stand for. How strange and long ago that all seems.
- 2011: The BBC were doing one of their rare repeats of old Doctor Who, this time in honour of the late Elisabeth Sladen. I reviewed Doctor Who – The Hand of Fear and took a look at the show’s greatest ever season…
- 2010: I was more horribly ill than usual that May and didn’t blog much past the first week; my nearest to mid-May was about the Coalition negotiations, but having written quite enough about that recently, I’m going back to Lib Dem Fair Taxes: The Reverse Poll Tax. It turns out that all the tax cuts for ordinary working people under the Coalition are thanks to the Lib Dems, and the Tories opposed them. Who knew?
- 2009: Remember the expenses scandal? Nick stood up to the establishment; too many of them got away with it; and I asked some awkward questions of our own MPs – which ones were taking the piss? Come to think of it, it might be worth asking the same questions at regular intervals. Here’s Parliament In Crisis: A Good Day For Nick, But A Lot More Questions To Come.
- 2008: Excited by a comedy historical episode with Agatha Christie and a giant wasp on the horizon, I took a look back through Doctor Who’s adventures in history, and particularly the fifth Doctor’s surprisingly clever little mystery Black Orchid. It’s Doctor Who and the ‘Celebrity Historical’.
- 2007: May of that year brought a tragic announcement… oh, who am I kidding? This one, of all the posts I’ve re-read this afternoon, still brought a smile to my face. All together now: Ding Dong! The Witch is dead!
Going back slightly further, 2006 was my first and in fact my most productive year blogging, so I took a look at that May, too: still nothing on the 23rd. But it turned out that we’d just had some local election results that had disappointed many Liberal Democrats (ha bloody ha, comparing the figures) but where Labour were relying on nothing but hatred of the Tories; that the Green Party were looking to nick votes from us; that Lib Dems were in fact much better on green action than they were; and that I was making a suggestion for how to get across, in part, what the Lib Dems stand for. How strange and long ago that all seems.
Labels: Blogs, British Politics, Doctor Who, Environment, History, Liberal Democrats, Memes, Top Tips
DVD Detail – Doctor Who: UNIT Files Box Set
The Doctor Who UNIT Files DVD Box Set features two stories, Invasion of the Dinosaurs and The Android Invasion. One starring Jon Pertwee, the other Tom Baker, and both Elisabeth Sladen, each makes unexpected use of the Doctor’s soldier friends for an intriguing, introspective (and infamous) adventure in which the Doctor and Sarah Jane find themselves back in England. But all is far from well. There is a frightening stillness everywhere… Then, in one, the least convincing dinosaurs known to humanity, behind which is deep politics. And for both, I have exclusive, ambitious (and absurd) photos at the original locations.
This year’s first Doctor Who DVD release, neither story in the UNIT Files is among the year’s strongest, though they’re both impressive as DVDs, with engaging and extensive extras. You can see the DVD Coming Soon Trailer here (spoilers for the conspiracy). Given their reputation amongst fans – one praised only by revisionists, the other not praised at all – it may be a surprise that each got the highest audience ratings in its season. Both stories have some superb location footage; both have uneven scripts, one a striking central story with quite a lot of quite thought-provoking politics but some pretty poor plotting (better-captured when reworked into a novelisation with an incredibly memorable cover), the other intriguing but often dumb; yet I have a massive soft spot for them both, and have hugely enjoyed the DVDs. Perhaps it’s because of fond childhood memories, or because both stories are as close as Doctor Who comes to doing The Avengers, albeit colliding with a more distinctively ’70s paranoia. So I was slightly chastened to see that I’d apparently marked them lower than other fans; back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – which placed Invasion of the Dinosaurs at 131 and The Android Invasion at 123. Fond as I am of them, the list I made of my own preferences at the time put them respectively about forty and thirty places lower. So perhaps today I’ll convince myself as well as you that they’re worth a kinder look.
What you might expect of a UNIT box is stories set back when the Doctor was exiled to Earth, where the Brigadier would come in with a problem and the Doctor would set out to investigate it, aided by the chummy soldiers of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. That’s not the case for either of these (if you want a more ‘representative’ UNIT set, here’s one I prepared earlier as a selection for the Brigadier; you might perhaps swap out The Green Death for The Dæmons). Both of these come once the Doctor’s exile to Earth has been lifted and he’s only dropping in for a visit, the Brigadier himself – played by Nicholas Courtney, and central to the UNIT set-up – is only in one of them, and, even more startlingly, both times the Doctor becomes a fugitive, hunted by the army he expected to help him. So while they’re far from the best of UNIT, they’re certainly stretching them in different ways; you might call this the ‘UNIT Goes A Bit Iffy’ box set. The actual story titles, of course, tell you far more than that…
While this ‘Detail’ obviously goes into considerable detail, incidentally, my usual policy in these is not to be too spoilery, so you can read on without fear of finding out too many key twists from the end. That’s a problem with these two stories, as for each of them the major twist is given away by the title (at least it’s held back for Part One of the first one but, well, you can’t avoid reading it on the box). Each has one or two more twists, though both times there’s not much more to say past the half-way point; as a result, watch out for the menu on Invasion of the Dinosaurs, which gives away most of what’s left (I’d say ‘just press “Play All”’, though I’ll explain later why you may want to detour first), and for the spoiler sections I’ve had to include below, otherwise I’d have to shut up pretty early…
Doctor Who – Invasion of the Dinosaurs
Prolific writer Malcolm Hulke’s final story for the series, this started life as a political fable about Britain giving way under a Vichy-style government. Producer Barry Letts didn’t think this exciting enough, but he had a solution: the previous year, Doctor Who – Carnival of Monsters had featured the Drashigs, giant space dragons that looked better than they had any right to. So, clearly, this meant they could now do a story full of dinosaurs! And for the rest of his life, poor Barry told everyone how much he regretted it. Hulke, despite having featured dodgy reptiles in each of his annual scripts for Pertwee’s Doctor, was unimpressed by these ‘terrible lizards’ even at the writing stage – so brilliant scientist Professor Whitaker is Hulke’s Mary-Sue, constantly telling everyone that he’s got a great plot, but is pissed off at having to stick dinosaurs in it. And, to be fair to him, it is a great plot – much of it inspired by Seven Days To Noon and, separately, The Avengers – The Morning After, but with the added frisson of post-Watergate conspiracy thriller, some strong characterisation and a powerful, unusually complex political central idea that’s one of Hulke’s best. Unfortunately, Invasion of the Dinosaurs displays not just his strengths but his weaknesses as a scriptwriter, with a strong story stretched out so far that it snaps, in repetitive (and unimpressive) cliffhangers and the penultimate episode probably the most empty of plot in the entire series to that point. The key problem with the plotting is that he’s simply run out of anything to say by five minutes into Part Four, something that wouldn’t be so noticeable in a four-part story where he could then dash to the climax, but which here gives the impression that Hulke had delivered his first three scripts and then exclaimed, ‘What do you mean, it’s meant to be a six-parter? Oh, Christ.’
Of these two stories, though, Invasion of the Dinosaurs is certainly the one that gets the attention – because with an interesting idea and some disastrous special effects there’s always something to talk about (The Android Invasion is much less noticeable on either count). It’s also from a season of just five stories, mostly very mediocre ones, so people take what they can get, whereas the other adventure was part of a season of six stories, mostly brilliant, so people can afford to ignore one. It’s even talked about in one of the stories in the latest Doctor Who DVD release, Ace Adventures’ The Happiness Patrol, which starts with Ace asking the Doctor about his encounters with a pterodactyl and a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Lots of them (or the same one, every twenty-five minutes). And it has rather an impressive cast, with most guest stars – Martin Jarvis, John Bennett, Peter Miles – better-known for later appearances in much better stories, the exception Noel Johnson, who is superb here in a plot with considerably more dignity than his previous Doctor Who story…
Director Paddy Russell and her trusted film cameraman Tony Leggo deserve most of the credit here, going out guerrilla filming at 4am with neither BBC nor police permission, but Jon Pertwee and Elisabeth Sladen carry it well once they arrive, resulting in one of the best quarter-hours of the third Doctor’s period. New to travelling with the Doctor, Sarah Jane’s already got an idea of how unreliable he is – and he admits they’re back when they left… “Give or take a few weeks.” But what’s been happening in those few weeks? She’s a local – give or take her spots of Scouse, but she lives there and then, at least – and clearly feels the dislocation more than he does; she’s right, of course, that they aren’t back to normality. The more blasé he gets, the more the evidence piles up: the phones don’t work (which he, typically, takes as the opportunity for a put-down); there are no buses, just a lone, reckless driver who nearly hits them; when they walk to the nearest shops, the only sign of life is a looter – who threatens them and runs, but soon comes to a bloody end, his car caved in. Meanwhile, rather than soldiers being presented to us as the lovable bunch we know sitting around with mugs of tea, the jeep full of squaddies zooming by looks a palpable threat, with their big guns and someone hiding from them. It’s all gripping until the dinosaurs turn up, not just terrible but blown long before their scripted reveal at the cliffhanger (an inexplicable change the director fails even to try to explain in the special features).
This grim opening was rendered grimmer still for many years, until the DVD came out. The BBC’s infamous purges destroyed many Doctor Who (and many other TV series’) episodes from the 1960s; from Tom Baker’s first story as the Doctor in 1975 onwards, every Doctor Who episode exists in its original format. Jon Pertwee’s stories are in between both chronologically and in their state of repair, all originally made in colour but with many destroyed, leaving only black and white copies exported to countries which didn’t yet have colour TV in the early ’70s. Almost all of these have had their colour restored with painstaking work from fuzzy overseas recordings, but Part One of Invasion of the Dinosaurs is the most notorious exception, with fans often saying it looks better in black and white – though for me that’s less to do with monochrome moodiness than the relative lack of dinosaurs. Now, however, most of the colour has been recovered from patterns in the black and white copy, though it’s a bit patchy and lacking in blue. As a result, the hard-working but pedantic Restoration Team who clean up old stories for DVD release chose to start the story in black and white if you press “Play All”, not wanting it to look as if they’d not done a good job: if you want the muddily coloured version closer to the original, you must first select “Special Features” and then “Episode 1 Colour On / Off”. Which is a bit fussy. If they’re that pedantic, you’d think they’d be able to read that it’s called “Part One” on screen, wouldn’t you…
I confess that I often find this season of Doctor Who – Season Eleven, Jon Pertwee’s last – rather weak and tired in comparison to others. There are times when both Pertwee and the production team give the impression they’re just going through the motions, and though not all the stories are bad, there’s no one adventure that I can point to and champion as ‘the terrific one’. So you might expect me to lay into this story – except that, for all that it often fails, it tries. It has ambition to do something different. And it suits Pertwee, who mostly gives an impressive performance, helped enormously by being out of his comfort zone. After four years as part of the establishment, it’s a refreshing change for both audience and, perhaps unwillingly, actor as his Doctor’s put in jeopardy by the army rather than bossing them around for most of it (though I could do without his sanctimonious sermonising going into overdrive in the final episode: the first, “There never was a golden age,” is well-played and to the point. But then there’s the second homily, which goes on rather longer. And the third…). Like season opener The Time Warrior, where he’s suddenly uprooted from his time and place with UNIT, and aided by new companion Sarah Jane Smith still having the sharp edges to her character, shaking up the format does the series good. Even the Doctor’s new Time Lord superpower at the climax is both appropriate and rather well done.
That’s not to say that the Doctor is perfect here – though there are several points where his arrogance is deliberately shown up (not least all the times that Sarah Jane’s right and he doesn’t listen to her), in others the actor’s over-indulged. An attempt late in the story to reinvigorate the ‘deserted London’ setting because they’ve run out of plot isn’t effective once we know all the mystery, and even the Brigadier visibly almost corpses at the sight of the Doctor’s (and Pertwee’s) new car. That’s nothing to the director’s reaction when presented with it, and it has been called “the world’s only vagina-shaped penis substitute”. Part Five’s extended chase sequence is for me the outrageous padding that others unfairly associate with Planet of the Spiders Part Two, not remotely advancing the plot, not a hint of mystery, and nothing left in the script. That can make it deeply tedious… Or, with my brain switched off, I can appreciate some impressive filming, effective music and inspired use of stock helicopter footage: there’s even a moment where the Doctor himself looks quite sinister, stalking his own pursuers like the Viet Cong. His other main new gadget is a stun-gun best known for a posed picture in which he holds it like a mandolin, though after much build-up on screen the special effect it produces is… Nothing. At least there’s an element of poetic justice when the Doctor suffers ‘guilt by gadget’ at one not completely coherent cliffhanger, though he also gets a magnificently self-unaware moment where he blows a whacking great hole in a roof and then claims he can’t bring the Brigadier because on his own he’ll be inconspicuous.
Sarah Jane Smith gets some strong moments in only her second story – and many frustrating ones, telling the Doctor that a desolate London’s wrong and being ignored, telling the Doctor about a suspicious scientist and being ignored, telling the Doctor about a nuclear generator and being ignored… But while the Doctor’s eagerness to be clubbable with more male and establishment figures than his companion gets its own comeuppance, Sarah Jane is already both less self-reliant and more impetuous; introduced as resourceful enough to break into a top secret base and impersonate someone for a scoop, here she waits for ages, asks if she can have a camera, rebels very slightly by taking one, then screams and forgets it – before rushing off into peril and escaping (rinse and repeat twice a week). She’s also firmly established as the Hypnotism Queen of Who, ironically under the influence in 55% of all her original stories despite their almost precisely bracketing a time without the Master. She does, however, get two outstanding moments. One’s a perfectly judged character scene between her and UNIT Captain Mike Yates in which the audience could easily side with either of them, Mike poetic about suddenly clean, empty London but Sarah Jane sceptical (“And nightingales in Berkeley Square?”) and missing the busy, dirty city that was. Mike Yates gets by far his best scenes here, with more later, while Sarah Jane’s other one comes much later and more sparkily when, rejecting that hypnotism, she ‘disruptively’ insists:
The longest-cherished, least likely fan dream for the Doctor Who DVD range also judged the story on its looks. It was that, when Invasion of the Dinosaurs was finally released, it would replace the terrible lizards with lovely new CGI, so that casual viewers would stop laughing at them (and, more woundingly, us). The story’s producer, Barry Letts, had exactly the same wish, seeing them as a huge failure. But it was never going to happen: the DVD range’s occasional replacement CGI of adding a prettier glowy effect to a death-ray is simply on nothing like the level of rendering a menagerie of photorealistic Primeval-esque dinosaurs. I wish it could have been done, too, but short of finding a couple of million quid down the back of the sofa, it was impossible. Because when I was little, I loved The Doctor Who Monster Book and couldn’t understand why, otherwise packed with exciting photos of Who monsters from TV, for the dinosaurs it republished Chris Achilleos’ thrilling cover painting for the novel. Much as it mystified me that there was no picture of the previous story’s robot knight in The Adventures of K9 and Other Mechanical Creatures. It simply never occurred to me that this was because they looked rubbish. But they did.
Most of the ambitious range of dinosaurs here look pretty bad staying still, and far worse moving about (though never very much). Worse, the most-featured dinosaur – inevitably, the Tyrannosaurus Rex, as for obvious diegetic and extradiegetic reasons the selection covers the ‘most famous’ ones – is the worst of the lot, despite appearing repeatedly at moments of ‘threat’ and in far too many cliffhangers. It roars, it wobbles, it moves like a novice ice-skater; most infamously, at one point it has what was conceived as a Ray Harryhausen-style monster smash with a “Brontosaurus” (Apatosaurus). Instead, as they rub up against each other, they look like two inanimate pieces of rubber making out, and in one merciless fan video they were edited into place as part of Jurassic Park, as the scientists drive up and look on in wonder at their first sight of a prehistoric creature – with, playing over the snogging toys, the seductive tones of Je T’aime… Moi Non Plus. I wonder if the Radio Times illustration was sending it up even then, or if the artist’s own dinosaur sex was just lucky chance? Or there’s the close of Part Five, in itself an utter waste of space that almost redeems itself with the principal villain calmly explaining his vision, then moves into a ‘terrifying’ monster montage that culminates in a prolonged, wobbling, mouth-flapping T-Rex. What were they thinking? Even the script makes a mess of them: “Bullets are having no effect,” says a soldier. Why not? These aren’t alien beasties, and the fact that humanity has a destructive impact on other Earth species turns out to be one of the main points of the villains’ plot.
The pterodactyl is probably the best of them – shocking, sudden, and at least it moves about a bit, all of which are improvements on the camera just being frozen in incredulous horror while a beastie stands there and wobbles slightly, which is what happens with all the other dinosaurs. It still has its problems: introduced midway through Part One, it blows the surprise; “the best of them” still doesn’t mean ‘good’; it’s particularly hilarious when Pertwee later tries to fend it off with one of his old wigs; and, given that of all the dinosaurs it’s the one you’d expect to find it not just outside but swooping through the air, it’s a little odd that this pterodactyl is only ever seen hiding indoors in the dark. I bet you’ll always find him in the kitchen at parties, too.
When I was a boy, Invasion of the Dinosaurs was simple to judge: the third Doctor, UNIT and Sarah Jane Smith obviously equalled a classic, and the excellent novel proved it. Many others felt the same way. When I grew up and the original story became widely available on video, its critical standing plummeted as fans ran screaming in terror from the dinosaurs. Then, over the past few years, it’s rallied again, with revisionist opinion saying that effects don’t matter, however terrible, and that in fact it’s a brilliant script. I know the lovely John Dorney, a talented actor, writer and reviewer, and his piece on Invasion of the Dinosaurs opens with a plausibly argued summary of the revisionist case:
To be fair to John, he does go on to look at the story in more detail, and praises a key turning point here as one of “three great twists in Doctor Who history” (his first comes in The Enemy of the World, a story from which this one arguably borrows quite a bit too; I don’t know his third). And that twist is that – and here comes the spoiler, last chance to look away – UNIT’s Captain Mike Yates, a regular in the series for the last three years, is working against UNIT from the inside as part of the “Operation Golden Age” conspiracy. Though he’s reluctant to expose his old friends to danger, by the end he’s a starry-eyed true believer who doesn’t even worry if he himself survives: “I’m not important.” It’s a terrific twist, well-characterised and believable, with his having a conscience about one person, but not about billions, familiar to Stalin. The problem is, it takes place half-way through Part Two. Then the Government’s Minister in charge of the emergency while the rest run off to Harrogate, Noel Johnson as Sir Charles Grover, appears in the exact next shot and within a few seconds of the ‘traitor Mike’ revelation, and may as well be carrying a sign that says ‘I’m the next villain’. There’s also the Brigadier’s near-fascist superior, General Finch, so keen on a shoot-to-kill policy that it’s almost a sign that he sees everyone else as expendable… Outed by Mike, for no particular reason, a couple of minutes into Part Four. The Brigadier puts his finger on it:
While Sarah Jane is taken into the secret base beneath London – appropriately, a relic of the Cold War – and, sent to the spaceship, can’t do anything useful with the information, the Doctor finds his own way in… Only for no-one to believe him, which strains credulity. Even more driving around would be preferable to his actually having found the villains weeks before the end and then faffing about. Hulke does, at least, fix the gaping hole in his previous story and have the place covered with CCTV so that he’s spotted and the Kklaxons go off, while the sinister machine music is something novel from Dudley Simpson – but it all looks shoddy and makes the script’s failings literal by having the Doctor go round in circles and never get anywhere. Much as when, deeper within that base, Grover explains the plan to Whitaker, the man who invented the technology and who has been putting that plan into operation for weeks, then Whitaker demonstrates the technology to Grover, the man who came up with the plan and who has been overseeing the reaction to that technology for weeks. You’d think that with so many people in on it, they could have found someone who might not know everything already to do the exposition to.
That spaceship: a brilliant development, eh, sending the story somewhere different entirely? Unfortunately, this gobsmacking twist lasts about as long as it takes to read the previous paragraph, as no sooner is Sarah Jane welcomed to the People, a cult looking forward to settling a New Earth, than she realises it’s all a con, that the spaceship’s a fake, and that even if they’ve been taken in, they’re still not a nice lot. Though they’re often simplistically described as an example of the counterculture and ‘left wing’, while obviously informed by both, the script is in fact much more subtle than that, letting you see a much wider range of politics in them. If anything, the People more resemble Christian movements of the time with the religion taken out, the counter-counterculture: they’re rigidly hierarchical, not freethinking hippies; they’re uniformly middle-aged, middle class and white, with at least as much about them of fascism as of communism. Just because the current Green Party is on the extreme left, many critics carelessly assume the People must be the same – ignoring that the conspirator who formed them is a leading Government Minister, the very heart of the establishment, in concert with a top general to mount a military coup through martial law, which also might just send the teeniest of signals the other way. It’s part of the laziness that tries to fit all politics on a left-right economic spectrum, which as far as I can see has no bearing on the People; they are, however, clearly positioned on the liberal-authoritarian scale and the green-ungreen one. Ecological politics has been found all the way across the left-right axis (and opposed from all the way across it, too): the far left might see green economics to replace capitalism; liberals see environmentalism as linked to internationalism and opportunity for future generations; conservation is a value of old-fashioned landed Toryism; and of course many fascists see one type of ‘purity’ in concert with another.
I suspect it’s the impossibility of pinning green politics to any one point in ‘traditional’ politics that leads people simply to label it countercultural, but it strikes me that, within the story, that might have enabled a Cabinet Minister and deeply establishment politician who’s clearly at the top of a ‘traditional’ party to found the “Save Planet Earth Society” which could then act as a cult appealing to people from any political background, usefully dodging any left-right questions about society by setting up an entirely new world instead. And that appeal to ecologically concerned suckers across the board within the story, even taking in the Brigadier’s aide-de-camp, is exactly why the story can be an uncomfortable experience to watch for ecologically concerned viewers across the board. In 1974, the programme was usually siding with us, but the one time ecologists get into power, they behave just like the would-be totalitarian standard Who establishment always do; taking over the world, but in a patronising way. No wonder people find it easier to say, ‘Well, it’s just the far left / far right,’ rather than dealing with Hulke’s complexities that are actually saying to many viewers, ‘This could be you’. With their lack of concern for human life and love of bossing people about, for example, I find it most comfortable to think of them as New Labour. In retrospect, it’s also unsettling that the ‘greens stage fake disaster to frighten people’ plot (though the fakery is nothing to do with environmental damage) takes a similar line to today’s anti-green propaganda from US conservatives. Even without that, when the script simultaneously tries to persuade us of the harm humanity is doing to the world and that there’s very much a wrong way to go about dealing with it, it’s not surprising that any viewer might have a conflicted reaction to it. It’s certainly one of the series’ most in-your-face warnings against utopianism and the idea that the ends justify the means.
The celebrity recruits in charge of the ‘spaceship’ have given themselves Biblical names – Ruth, Adam, Mark – with both the act and style of renaming implying a religious cult without too-sensitive-for-BBC religion ever being mentioned (at least they don’t name their new world ‘Eden’, though they clearly think of humanity as fallen and themselves as the second coming). Self-styled leaders Ruth and Adam are even called the “Elders”. And while many viewers can’t help but notice Mark’s very impressively tight jeans, it’s Ruth who grabs the attention with not messianic but a rather more down to Earth sort of zeal (and try to forget her in ’Allo ’Allo ). While you may assume that Ruth is also known as ‘-Less’, it turns out that her actual other name was “Lady Cullingford”, a member of the House of Lords and probably an old-fashioned Conservative conservationist taking the most drastic possible ‘Get off my land!’ action. The People and the conspirators behind them are all deeply authoritarian, but Ruth positively revels in it, and at the time was presumably intended to smack of Mary Whitehouse (now, more Ann Widdecombe). Sarah Jane’s finest moment in the story comes challenging Ruth in a dark mirror of that conversation with Mike, with Sarah Jane once again defending modernity:
The key to Ruth is that she’s terrified of losing control; even in her little bubble of hand-picked fanatics, all thought to be true believers, the presence of a single heretic exposes Ruth as having so little faith in her own creed that she fears Sarah Jane “could corrupt the whole of our group” and may have to be destroyed. For the moment, she has her locked up in the Reminder Room, where the soothing voice of Martin Jarvis (he’s their favourite, but, ironically, outside the spaceship, the violent henchman) reads endless columns by Polly Toynbee over TV images of humanity’s evils. It’s another of the story’s preoccupations with television – Sarah Jane looks at colour TVs, the Doctor’s watched on CCTV, and most significantly Tat Wood in his About Time 3 points out that the technology of time travel here is that of TV, with “roll-back” revealed as the ultimate plan… Though, of course, it’s also very much in tune with conservative dreams of rolling back the state and turning the clock back on modern life. But where are they rolling back to? While it’s tempting to want to see the dramatic irony of Grover and Whitaker appear in the Jurassic Period only to be gobbled up by an unconvincing T-Rex, making this story’s inspiring of Primeval’s main story arc absolutely explicit, Ruth does in fact make it clear that they will “guide” some “simple, pastoral people”, so they intend to boss around people anywhen from early homo sapiens to Stone Age humans, rather than corralling dinosaurs (in the novel, they compare themselves to the Pilgrim Fathers, and give Sarah Jane short shrift for suggesting “I don’t think the Red Indians liked the Pilgrim Fathers very much”).
The ultimate secret behind the fake ‘spaceship’ is that calm, reasonable Cabinet Minister Sir Charles Grover, convinced that humanity is destroying the Earth, has decided to ‘save’ it by the greatest genocide ever conceived. In many ways, he’s the best thing about this story – so quiet, reasonable and determined that he doesn’t regard himself as a monster, convinced he’s right and utterly chilling for it. The horrible truth of “Operation Golden Age” is that the dinosaurs are only a device to frighten people away from London – but that the time technology used to do so is crucial to the plot, and will be used to roll back time to a ‘purer’ age. Only the People still secretly in London will be carried back; the rest of humanity, and for many centuries previously, “would never have been born”. And the ‘spaceship’ at the dark heart of this plot has been created to ensure the “New Earth” will have an inspiring history and not one of terrible guilt. Sarah Jane confronts the People’s leader, concerned not just about mass murder but even about the People who castigated and imprisoned her:
Perhaps they’re just counting on the People not to clock anything; if ever there was one bit of sci-fi that inspired Douglas Adams to create the Ark Ship B, full of useless whingeing middle-management types conned onto a spaceship and sent off to patronise the cavepeople into changing the future of humanity, then surely this was it. And it does make the subsequent Dalek story even more worthless, pre-spoofing its Von Dänikenism with humanity aspiring to become its own ‘space gods’. The man who sounds most like he’s delivering Golgafrinchan lines from The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (“I used to be a bank manager… I went into it all very thoroughly. I sold my house”) even turns up again in Doctor Who a year later, having fallen for literally the next bunch of eco-fascists to come along – well, perhaps it’s just the same actor, but it’s funnier to assume it’s the same man – in Robot, a more tautly delivered story that’s clearly influenced by this one. Which in is turn followed by The Ark in Space, another story in which the chosen are taken up from Earth in a techno-Rapture in order to create it anew, though that time it’s done for real.
Remarkably for a story that’s nearly forty years old, the DVD release presents several deleted scenes – though, irritatingly, on the second disc, so you have to faff about swapping them – with some no great loss but one droll one where Grover’s charmingly perfect memory of “Miss Sarah Smith” is neatly undermined. Way back in 1999, in the days when the BBC regarded Doctor Who as a shameful joke rather than a ratings juggernaut, BBC Choice (pre-BBC3) repeated the whole story, largely to take the piss out of it, but including for the only time an extended edit of Part Three incorporating five cut sequences. Brilliantly, the sarky continuity man announced that Part Four was the one which has “Footage never before seen in public,” when in fact viewers alerted by this would have just missed it.
There’s a slightly odd commentary, with half the episodes a conversation between moderator Toby Hadoke and stiff old director Paddy Russell – though she warms up considerably for Part Five, where she stops talking about Doctor Who altogether and ranges across the rest of her fascinating career (the BBC’s first woman director). Toby refers to the “very left wing” baddies, which shows he’s not quite considered all the implications… The other half have a more standard commentary, featuring script editor Terrance Dicks, villainous scientist Peter Miles and turncoat Captain Richard Franklin, among others, starting off rather movingly the day after Nicholas Courtney’s funeral, which is even sadder in retrospect as they go on to praise Lis Sladen. The exception is Franklin, who tells a story about how funny he was, and Nick wasn’t, and how Nick then claimed credit. What a graceless hack (who, naturally, fails to see any connection between his character’s descent into deluded fascism and his own drift into ever-more extremist politics). Much more winning is Terrance getting in immediately on the dinosaur designers – “They said they could do it, and they lied. They lied in their teeth” – then expressing satisfaction that they went out of business, or Peter loving Noel Johnson as a “smoothie” villain like that “beautiful actor” Claude Rains. There’s even an especially fannish anecdote about a young actor called David Tennant… John Levene, not in any way an actor who nobody else will speak to, gets to do a bit of commentary too. Recorded separately. Supplied on a different disc.
Just this once, though, the text notes on the episodes are far more interesting than the commentary. All right, so there’s rather more jeep-spotting than I can bother with, and it starts off by mentioning that there was a separate Welsh transmission but not if that was included in the high audience ratings just given… But there are some marvellous snippets from the script, where Malcolm Hulke is persistently on the side of the dinosaur (making the Doctor implicitly the villain to the poor “victim” he wants to capture), with details of the many cut scenes and, before them, the original and very different storylines. There are amusing snippets of BBC indulgence – the TARDIS had just been renovated, for example, “at a cost of just over £10” – or the series’ history, such as the news that Pertwee was leaving having broken during transmission. The comment in Part Six about a single-frame close-up of Ruth isn’t right, though through no fault of the text notes; I noticed this clumsy edit on my old copy recorded from TV, but the Restoration Team have removed it for the DVD. Where the production notes’ researcher / writer David Brunt really comes through, though – and even makes Part Five worth watching, with this coming half-way into it – is having finally traced the never-to-be-revealed truth of who was originally cast as Sarah Jane Smith and then sacked. It’s a genuine scoop, and wittily set out, too.
Writer and broadcaster Matthew Sweet’s People, Power and Puppetry is a fascinating half-hour video essay, rather than a conventional ‘Making of’. While there are many of the expected views – Terrance Dicks the harshest on the dinosaurs, the late Barry Letts the most hurt – Sweet is firmly in the revisionist camp, walking the London locations as he puts the case for the defence, the message that a better world can’t be imposed. It’s one of the most authored pieces in the DVD range, and persuasive with it as he zooms in on the politics, the crossover between the Soil Association and the British League of Fascists, a form of holocaust where the time travel element means you don’t have to watch anybody die… Though he makes the usual assumption that the Golden Age is a trip back to the Jurassic, rather than preventing the Industrial Revolution. It’s lovely to get a snippet of old interview with Jon Pertwee in there, too. My favourite bit of gossip is Terrance Dicks recounting his one big row with old friend Malcolm Hulke: Mac outraged by changes to his script; Terrance an indulgent uncle telling the story from his own point of view, of how these writers take offence at “a completely trivial point,” “a difficult person, very sensitive, very tetchy,” who really should just calm down because wise old script editors know best. This is much funnier when you consider that it was during this very story that Terrance begins handing over that job to another writer friend, Robert Holmes, who takes over in earnest as Tom Baker takes over from Jon Pertwee. Writer Terrance provides the first script for new script editor Bob, and all is sweetness and light… Until his next script, a year later, which wise new script editor Bob famously decided needed a few changes of his own. So when it was writer Terrance’s script being dicked about with, did he take it more blandly? Guess.
Doctor Who Stories: Elisabeth Sladen Part 1 is a rather lovely interview that ranges across several of Lis’ early stories, accompanied by witty animations. The “CSO knickers” story and the Sontaran impressions are a scream. It’s a shame, though, that there’s no The UNIT Family Part Three, which should surely have been the companion piece to Lis’ behind-the-scenes stories for the late UNIT period, completing earlier features on the Inferno and Day of the Daleks DVDs. Other extras include a Photo Gallery, Radio Times pdfs (with a Peter Brookes cartoon of a smashing jeep and pterodactyl) and, as you may have guessed, a Now and Then piece on the London locations. With its sterling aid, I brought a triceratops back to Moorgate Station with my own timescoop… Only to discover that to take a photo of the most recognisable street from the most recognisable angle, I’d need to stand in the middle of the road. And in the middle of a building site. So, I went to the guy in the hard hat at the security gate and asked a small favour that he was unlikely to hear very often, brandishing the tools of my ‘special effects shoot’. He pissed himself, then ushered me in; while self-consciously positioning camera and terrifying beastie, I felt the back of my neck prickle. A semi-circle of goggling men in hard hats was behind me, trying not to fall about.
Malcolm Hulke’s novelisation expends on much of the characterisation, giving us more of an insight into many of the main villains while thankfully shrinking down the second half and letting you see far more impressive dinosaurs in your head, demonstrating the novels’ Pertwee Gap at its most remarkable. Yet however compelling his prose and however convincing his reworking of the story to help the plot, for this one book that most beloved of Target novelists’ contribution is forever overshadowed by the cover painting.
The most famous – and infamous – example of Chris Achilleos’ work on the early Doctor Who novels, his bosses at Target were horrified by the Pop-Art sound effect and told him never to do it again. It was only years later that he started to hear from fans meeting him how thrilling it had been to them as kids, the caption, oddly, far more memorable than the actual pterodactyl. It’s a cool Pertwee and an awesome Tyrannosaur against the sun setting on London, but it’s the “KKLAK!” that we all took to our hearts (I still wouldn’t pay £105 for an A2 print, though). I once met Chris Achilleos and asked him about it; he was amazed people loved the cover and the word, it having caused him nothing but trouble, but he set me right on the pronunciation – and startled everybody else in the shop – with a very loud demonstration. I’d always thought of it as a sharp, percussive sound, the beak closing as it attempts to bite the Doctor, but it is in fact a shrill bird-scream, more of a ‘Kklawwwkk!’
Later editions of the book had different covers, but none had the same impact. The last, Alister Pearson’s 1993 edition, is the most striking of them; David Mann’s American edition for Pinnacle less so, despite the skulls (the US printing itself claims it features the fourth Doctor, but they’ve put in no effort to change him: he talks like Pertwee throughout, is still called a “great dressed-up twit”, and the only rewriting appears to be to Americanise the spellings and remove a “frock” from his coat, ironically as Tom’s Doctor was more often found in one than Pertwee’s). Jeff Cummins’ painting of a T-Rex in front of St Paul’s Cathedral is technically excellent but just not as exciting; intriguingly, like Hulke reworking his scripts into something much more satisfying in his novels, many years later Cummins’ cover painting for Doctor Who: The New Adventures – Blood Heat comes across as his having another go at the same idea, his second rearing Tyrannosaur in front of St Paul’s being far more exciting and dynamic. If only the Blood Heat dinosaur was going “RROAR!” as well, it would surely be one of the most-beloved of all Who covers! Following his gorgeous cover for 1975’s The Doctor Who Monster Book, incidentally, Achilleos went on to paint more dinosaurs for 1976’s almost as exciting The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book; both are worth looking out for second-hand, though the spin-off factual series Doctor Who Discovers… was never as big a hit, despite some fascinating topics.
The book itself opens with an unusual but neatly considered prologue – titled simply The Dinosaurs, it’s a factual account, ending in questions about their sudden extinction:
Prolific writer Terry Nation’s penultimate story and producer / director Barry Letts’ last hands-on story for the series, this is never as deep as Invasion of the Dinosaurs, but is shorter and much more fun. This time, producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes asked back the two old hands as writer and director because that would let them do more work on other stories, and what could go wrong? The ideas are mostly shallow but exciting; the effects generally all right (a couple brilliant, a couple crummy); while the problem with the penultimate episode here is that it probably makes less sense than any other in the entire series to that point. Prompted by a friend to justify this claim, I once wrote a rather cruel 30 Holes in the Plot of The Android Invasion which, having already spent far too long on Invasion of the Dinosaurs, I’ll spare you here. On the bright side, there are plenty of twists and turns – it’s just that few of them make any sense, and most of those that do have already been given away by the title (improbably, the first android ‘reveal’ isn’t even kept for the cliffhanger, but about a quarter of an hour in, just like the first dinosaur; fortunately, it looks very much better). Just imagine it’s called something different, that you don’t know it’s androids, and put your brain in neutral, and it’s very entertaining, particularly with Tom Baker and Lis Sladen sparking off each other in a great partnership.
The story benefits from some gorgeous location shooting in a little English village, used to give the first episode a marvellous sense of the uncanny and unnerving. Most iconically, the Doctor is bound to the war memorial (with, of course, a ticking bomb) by a group of blank-faced mechanics / astronauts, an image that held me watching it on TV when I was four – it looked like it could happen in any village Mum and Dad took us to as kids – then was reinforced by the cover of the novel and, now, the DVD. Yes, for me the village of East Hagbourne is more evocative than even that of Aldbourne, and four years ago my lovely Richard drove us down a great many winding little roads to make a brief visit there. I’d love to go again and try the pub, but I fear it’ll take a lot of lemon meringue fudge and Lego to persuade him, particularly as he’s not nearly as fond of this story as I am. And while it goes some way to proving that the heart and soul of UNIT, despite being a large international organisation, really was the Brigadier – because while it’s meant to feel wrong, it feels much more wrong than it should simply because Nick Courtney’s not there – at least one bit-part actor gets a decent send-off. No, not John Levene; Dave Carter had taken many roles in Doctor Who over the previous decade, largely unspeaking and uncredited, but in these two stories he finally gets some lines and, here, a role in the climax. So let’s hear it for the Dave Carter Box Set!
There are many moments to love here, often better as moments, too, rather than knitting them into a plot. The fantastic cliffhanger to Part Two, suggested by producer Philip Hinchcliffe – the Doctor losing his temper and Sarah Jane losing face, easily the story’s most forceful moment? But that one’s a bit of a spoiler, so how about the Doctor and Sarah Jane coming into the picturesque village only to find it empty – then suddenly filling up? But, no, three Golden Moments in a row of unnervingly deserted streets might be a bit much. There’s another moment I love for its turning the familiar and trusted unfamiliar and wrong. Turn to Part Four to find several eerie mirrorings, not least of Part One – again, Sarah Jane rushes through the woods; again, she finds the TARDIS, a long pod nearby; again, she shows her relaxed rapport with the Doctor…? She gives a gasp as there’s a tap on her shoulder:
Oddly, at times Terry Nation seems to write better for the duplicate Doctor than the proper one: after being curiously establishment in his military-centred approach in Part One (as ludicrous as Liberal Democrats making excuses for the security state would be), here it turns out the ‘real’ Doctor has gone looking for the authorities before looking for Sarah Jane, then even shows the sentry his pass – surely suggesting it’s not the Doctor at all. Thank goodness Tom can tell which of him is which, as can the villains, one of whom at least gets the point:
The themes and influences of The Android Invasion are less political than those of Invasion of the Dinosaurs, but still vivid – perhaps most strikingly, while both stories were written by former Avengers writers, the earlier tale borrows from one Avengers episode in particular, while this deliberately evokes the ambience of The Avengers in general and a string of episodes from The Town of No Return to They Keep Killing Steed. Part One has an especially Avengersish feel, with strange goings-on in a sleepy English village and Sarah Jane at her strongest, even supplying information from her own area of expertise rather than leaving all the exposition to the Doctor. The traditional red phone booth enhances the sense of Britishness and of being filmed on the outskirts of AvengerLand, as does the village shop / Post Office (the sign actually says “A.V. & N.G. Kirby”, but at a glance…) – and when Nick Courtney’s place in charge of our heroes’ secret organisation is taken by Patrick Newell, you could almost call it ‘The Androids of Tara’. Add in strong dashes of The Prisoner and of creepy situations as far back as Quatermass II and Invasion of the Body Snatchers or as then up-to-the-minute as The Stepford Wives, and there’s a strange familiarity in… Well, the strange familiarity of a village and villagers that are nearly but not quite right.
Of course, a lot of the familiarity here is even closer to home. Writer Terry Nation may, unusually, not be using the Daleks (though you can find at least five infiltrating this disc), but he makes up for it by including many of his other favourite thingumajigs – android doubles (obviously), radiation, viruses, countdowns, twisted ankles, contrived separation from the TARDIS – while Barry Letts’ last hurrah in the director’s chair makes it seem all the more plausible early on that this is going to follow Spearhead From Space and Terror of the Autons into ‘The Auton Invasion III – This Time It’s St Mary Mead’ (even if the structure’s the other way up: hand-guns first, meteorites later), while the excellent audio play Brave New Town has even stronger echoes. Most strikingly of all the Doctor Who influences, there’s a lot of this that mirrors Terror of the Zygons, broadcast just three months earlier to open 1975’s Season 13, making these two the most nearly duplicated stories until Season 25 – though at least it’s thematically sound here, as both of these two stories are about duplicates. They also both feature a pub with a secret spy-camera, hi-tech hi-jinks with a big chunky cable in a cell, a spaceship launching at the same crucial cliffhanger, a playful offer of a lift in the coda and the Doctor tortured in technicolour agony, amongst much more.
The excellent Frank Collins identifies that torture scene here as part of another, much older, underlying influence. Tom Baker’s superb first three seasons under Hinchcliffe and Holmes played with many Gothic themes, most blatantly in the dark religion of their final season in charge but previously seeded throughout many less traditional settings than catacombs massing with evil monks. While many more shallow critics claim that ‘Gothic horror’ doesn’t apply to this story, Frank argues convincingly otherwise, based on the key Gothic theme of the doppelgänger and the sadomasochistically sexual overtones of torturing the hero. There’s betrayal, too (unlike in the other UNIT Files story, more from pique than conviction, though Frank describes it in more Romantic and spoilery terms); secret passages; and, though it may be stretching the point, a version of the doomed inheritance in which a radiation-soaked world carries its own legacy of death.
Season 13 is, for me, Sarah Jane Smith at her absolute best. At last paired just with the Doctor as they travel the Universe together (technically, this is a very UNIT-heavy season, but just watching stories like this shows you otherwise), Lis Sladen and Tom Baker have reached such a brilliant rapport that you can see exactly why the young journalist is the most fondly remembered of all the Doctor’s companions, and the one to return to first the series and then a new one of her own. Unusually, Terry Nation writes an excellent part for a woman, giving Sarah Jane a lot to do this time – even rescuing the Doctor, more than once – in contrast to his usual wet girlies or occasional butch stereotype. And though on top of his macho sci-fi scripts Terry Nation was an accomplished writer for both comedy and comedy-drama such as The Avengers, and script editor Bob Holmes is still the finest dialogue-writer ever to have worked on Doctor Who, the DVD’s text notes make it clear that an unusually large number of exchanges between the Doctor and Sarah Jane were rewritten by the actors in rehearsal. Their scenes in the woods that top and tail the story are particularly gorgeous, with the latter almost an Avengers tag scene. Though not quite as clothes-proud as a pair of Avengers, they both get striking new outfits here, too: him a sudden change from dark jackets to a more summery oatmeal, her a pink trouser suit with white accessories (coincidentally close to Romana’s main wardrobe in Terry Nation’s next and last script for the series).
Just take a look at Part Three for both of them in the villains’ base: Sarah Jane startlingly resourceful and dangerous (there’s a neat reverse in the writing, where something innocuous is meant to kill Sarah but she uses it instead to mount a wholly different attack, with both her and her target unaware of their respective dangers); the Doctor, shockingly, physically picked up and shackled in a garish video-effect torture porn chamber with his adversary promising him “a most – disagreeable death”, and particularly horrible it sounds, too; then both of them simply fantastic, Sarah Jane saving the day and the Doctor (and, indeed, an ad-libbing Tom Baker) dazedly mixing together Chekhov and Carroll in treacle. It’s inspired, exciting, and very funny.
With the Doctor and Sarah Jane so much fun, the UNIT boys who formerly co-starred with them… Don’t. That the Brigadier is missing is an early moment of tension that’s simply thrown away – because, in Nick Courtney’s absence, there’s nowhere for it to go save for introducing the appropriately-named Colonel Faraday. Patrick Newell’s Faraday is something of a disappointment; in theory great casting, like Patrick Macnee replacing Leo G Carroll in The Return of the Man From U.N.C.L.E. – The Fifteen Years Later Affair, but poorly written and with the actor looking rather poorly, too (not half the man his Mother was). Just how the man whose memory supplies all the security details knows the Brigadier’s away in Geneva at this precise moment is open to question, but then, asking almost any questions about the androids is unwise, whether it’s their taste buds, their scarves or their ‘invulnerability’ (comparing that boast with how many of them cop it, I suspect Oseidon of having really lax advertising standards). And it would have been funnier for them to have built a Doctor android that looks like Pertwee and, when Tom turned up, gone ‘Bugger!’ This is much less a UNIT story than an anti-UNIT story, a ‘UNIT Unbound’ where everything’s seen from the wrong angle. Invasion of the Dinosaurs might have one officer gone rogue, but here the whole organisation’s the problem, with little contact with the Doctor and of no use to the plot, its head gone AWOL and, jarringly, the last appearance of two friendly servicemen being as pitiless doppelgängers. The explanation lies in double-booked actors and slightly careless scripting, but if it had been a master plan to wean the audience off UNIT, it couldn’t have been more cleverly or cruelly structured. The villains even satirise the cosy old relationship of blustering scientific adviser and frustrated military man.
Milton Johns is great fun as their human ally, the slimy traitor – he does a lot of those – Guy Crayford, which is handy, as his performance has a lot of ‘characterisation’ to paper over. He starts off cold and snippy; before long, he’s puppyishly explaining the Kraal plan, a strangely sympathetic sort of Stockholm’s Syndrome wheedling. And along the way, he’s so desperate to kill the Doctor that he seems almost feverishly psychotic – until Styggron finally decides to go along with him, at which point he becomes Mr Brainwashed Peacenik, clinging to a promise of no killing. The androids, which have even less will of their own, are just as bad, shooting at the Doctor only until he stops in front of them, at which they too, sportingly, stop in order to give him a ‘Take me to your leader’ moment (though Tom’s ad-lib is a better line). And as for the ‘too much information’ android who blabs at the finale… I won’t give my full list of 30, but Lawrence Miles’ and Tat Wood’s About Time 4 is representative of critical opinion: “Things That Don’t Make Sense: The Kraal plan. All of it. Where do we start?”
I’ll start and finish my more measured pick of nonsenses here with a couple of my favourites which are also (taking them more seriously) Terry Nation’s. Sarah Jane asks the Doctor about radiation: “Wouldn’t that make us ill?” “Well, it’s not that bad, yet,” then “Any level of radiation is too high,” as well as “Soon it’ll be uninhabitable.” These can’t all be true, but they’re all in the same scene. There’s also one of those Doctor Who viruses in a bottle where one drop could kill the whole human race (as I can’t help thinking each time I drip in my eye-ear drops) but which, when inevitably spilled, stays exactly where it’s required to be rather than even the most minute particles spraying out and killing everyone in the room – much the same as in an early ’80s story which shares a similar but much more dull plot and, remarkably, has very much less convincing androids. So you get the feeling that to destroy humanity, the androids are going to have to run about the world and personally touch everyone with individual drops of virus, like a deadly game of tag. For such a genocidal bunch, too, the Kraals seem very squeamish: they keep just tying up humans who they’re going to kill anyway, hope Sarah Jane will drink something nasty out of sight rather than killing her outright, and shy away from a tiny but crucial mutilation. As for the infamous twist at the end… Well, you won’t believe your eyes. Or his.
Barry Letts’ direction has many of his signature touches in it, the good and the bad: his rapid intercutting of heavy close-ups is very effective; his enthusiasm for the magic of matting-in by CSO bluescreen is as misplaced as ever. The great locations include one of the series’ more intriguing-looking big concrete installations, but it’s not improved by plonking a huge and hugely unconvincing dish on top. For three weeks now (plus two different courses of antibiotics, and one of eye drops in my ear – yes, you read that right; no, I don’t know why) I’ve had a painful and dizzying ear inflammation, a mixture of perforated eardrum, middle ear infection and outer ear infection, and as I feel it throb and swell I keep picturing it as a giant CSO tin ear sticking out of my head. Or at least one of Styggron’s. Sadly, the strange concrete outside isn’t matched by the studio corridors of the Space Defence Station, which are exceptionally naff (and the spyholes hilarious, particularly alongside CCTV). The Kraal base is quite interesting, like an old battleship not so much welded as melted together, though its jagged ‘teeth’ are insane as airlocks or blast doors. You might enjoy the patriotic red, white and blue flickering missile tube-like lights within – Top of the Pops did; I’ve seen a clip of them behind the Jam, a few years later. On a less tuneful note, regular ’70s Doctor Who composer Dudley Simpson had been at a high point in 1975, with his previous score – Pyramids of Mars – arguably a career best. Despite the odd eerie tickings and whirrings, though, he suddenly has an unfortunate off-day here, with most of his music overplayed and a particularly inappropriate kitchen sink bombast when androids – or even Sarah Jane – wander in the woods.
The DVD commentary is once again hosted by Toby Hadoke, here with producer Philip Hinchcliffe, villains Milton Johns and Martin Friend and assistant director Marion McDougall (a “very great fan” who simply loved working on the series). Milton steals it with his anecdotes and his attitude, not least in remembering that he did a Patrick Troughton story with a good Doctor and an evil Doctor – that’s all of his, really, isn’t it? People still stop him at the National and ask about the series – one year he was very excited about doing a BBC Wednesday Play with a young Ian McKellen and an ailing Jack Hawkins, he says, but nobody remembered that three months after it went out, while everyone still watches Doctor Who. He praises Tom Baker, Nick Courtney, Paddy Newell and scary stories for kids, too. I like him. So does Toby. And Milton likes Toby liking him:
A secret Dalek in the extras is Nicholas Pegg, who writes this disc’s production subtitles – not quite as striking as the previous set, but still an entertaining and informative read. He likes taking us through Terry Nation’s tropes; he doesn’t like a stock BBC backcloth. There are details of cuts, ad-libs and Kenneth Williams – as well as the most in-depth history of the non-speaking extras (including, naturally, one who was usually a Dalek) I’ve read on one of these. I think I recognise pretty, dark-haired, vividly blue-eyed “Young Farmhand” Simon Christie in his splash close-up as someone who got another shocked close-up as the Autons attacked, but the Spearhead From Space notes are less comprehensive… There aren’t quite any deleted scenes here, but we do get the soundtrack of several alternative takes from “The Enemy Within” (now, why didn’t they keep that title? Or any other?).
Two excellent half-hour special features vie for your attention. Nick Briggs, another Dalek, hosts The Village That Came to Life from East Hagbourne – and from the pub, with some of the children who mobbed Tom in 1975. It’s good for the producers, a little short on actors, nicely held together by Nick, but my favourite part’s still the first few seconds, done in the style of The Avengers. Ahhh. Life After Who with Philip Hinchcliffe, presented by his daughter Celina, is a terrific overview of arguably Doctor Who’s most successful producer’s extraordinary career, relaxed, informative and even having shelled out a bit of cash to get clips of some – but not all – of his later work. Private Schulz is a favourite of his and, I have to admit, one I’d love to see again now I’m old enough to appreciate it. But the most exciting extra for me, improbably, is a pdf for which there’s even an absurd TV ad – complete with, at last, a fully-fledged Dalek (with someone both expected and unexpected doing the voice). Yes, this DVD boasts not just Radio Times clippings but two whole sets of cut-out-and-keep Weetabix Doctor Who card ‘figures’ and games. I was thrilled by those as a boy – and not just me, as these fantastic new versions from Vworp Vworp! illustrate – despite loathing the cereal itself to the point that it was one of only two foods that physically made me gag. Shockingly, my Mum refused to buy a ton of the boxes and just throw the disgusting stuff away, so I only ever had a handful of them. Thank you, BBC DVDs!
I have a soft spot for the novelisation, too, though in a different way to the TV version; while television’s The Android Invasion is exciting, fun, and bright in one sense but definitely not in the other, the book is brisk, more serious, and tries to patch up a few of the holes… But has a terrific cover (Tom lashed to the war memorial again, memorably captured by Roy Knipe. And Styggron. Even the Pinnacle line-up’s pretty good) and an intriguing set of questions on the back blurb, only partly frustrated by every reader knowing the A-word before reading them:
On the whole, it’s an efficient book rather than an outstanding one, but in the closing few chapters there’s another cut – or series of cuts – that shows Terrance has thought about the story structure as well as his flurry of plot fixes on the final page. It’s true that on TV there’s a tiny peek that gives away the ‘evil Doctor’ android too early, but Terrance goes quite the other way. Don’t look for my “Golden Moment” in his book, because it isn’t there; he clearly made the decision that the best moment to reveal the android Doctor to the reader was when it first confronts the real one, making a dangerous turn in the plot for him suddenly much worse, and so simply drops all its earlier appearances. This makes for one dramatic moment, but at the price of losing one of my favourites, several others… And rather arbitrarily having Sarah Jane vanish for a whole chapter. If I’d rewritten that bit, I’ve sometimes thought, I’d at least have written something for her to do in the meantime. But then, if I’d been rewriting The Android Invasion, I’d make a few more changes than that. Like some other stories I loved as a boy that don’t seem much cop now, wouldn’t it be fun to rework them and make the good bits shine? Revenge of the Cybermen, for example, I’ve had a think about; Underworld, I’ve even published some ideas for on here; but the one I’d most love to have the time, energy and creativity to take over is The Android Invasion. Starting with the title. Let’s see, now… What are Terrance’s chapters? Well, there’s Takeover, of course, among some of his more familiar ones (Hunted, Captured, The Countdown), but Strange Arrival has a ring to it, or Village of Terror for the traditional Doctor Who schlock. How about Hero’s Return…?
*I saw this photo and, as (spoilers) even the villains join in with the catchphrase this time, was instantly reminded to nick this joke. Then had to search about online to remember who made it first. Turns out it was the Wife In Space.
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This year’s first Doctor Who DVD release, neither story in the UNIT Files is among the year’s strongest, though they’re both impressive as DVDs, with engaging and extensive extras. You can see the DVD Coming Soon Trailer here (spoilers for the conspiracy). Given their reputation amongst fans – one praised only by revisionists, the other not praised at all – it may be a surprise that each got the highest audience ratings in its season. Both stories have some superb location footage; both have uneven scripts, one a striking central story with quite a lot of quite thought-provoking politics but some pretty poor plotting (better-captured when reworked into a novelisation with an incredibly memorable cover), the other intriguing but often dumb; yet I have a massive soft spot for them both, and have hugely enjoyed the DVDs. Perhaps it’s because of fond childhood memories, or because both stories are as close as Doctor Who comes to doing The Avengers, albeit colliding with a more distinctively ’70s paranoia. So I was slightly chastened to see that I’d apparently marked them lower than other fans; back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – which placed Invasion of the Dinosaurs at 131 and The Android Invasion at 123. Fond as I am of them, the list I made of my own preferences at the time put them respectively about forty and thirty places lower. So perhaps today I’ll convince myself as well as you that they’re worth a kinder look.
What you might expect of a UNIT box is stories set back when the Doctor was exiled to Earth, where the Brigadier would come in with a problem and the Doctor would set out to investigate it, aided by the chummy soldiers of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. That’s not the case for either of these (if you want a more ‘representative’ UNIT set, here’s one I prepared earlier as a selection for the Brigadier; you might perhaps swap out The Green Death for The Dæmons). Both of these come once the Doctor’s exile to Earth has been lifted and he’s only dropping in for a visit, the Brigadier himself – played by Nicholas Courtney, and central to the UNIT set-up – is only in one of them, and, even more startlingly, both times the Doctor becomes a fugitive, hunted by the army he expected to help him. So while they’re far from the best of UNIT, they’re certainly stretching them in different ways; you might call this the ‘UNIT Goes A Bit Iffy’ box set. The actual story titles, of course, tell you far more than that…
While this ‘Detail’ obviously goes into considerable detail, incidentally, my usual policy in these is not to be too spoilery, so you can read on without fear of finding out too many key twists from the end. That’s a problem with these two stories, as for each of them the major twist is given away by the title (at least it’s held back for Part One of the first one but, well, you can’t avoid reading it on the box). Each has one or two more twists, though both times there’s not much more to say past the half-way point; as a result, watch out for the menu on Invasion of the Dinosaurs, which gives away most of what’s left (I’d say ‘just press “Play All”’, though I’ll explain later why you may want to detour first), and for the spoiler sections I’ve had to include below, otherwise I’d have to shut up pretty early…
Doctor Who – Invasion of the Dinosaurs
Prolific writer Malcolm Hulke’s final story for the series, this started life as a political fable about Britain giving way under a Vichy-style government. Producer Barry Letts didn’t think this exciting enough, but he had a solution: the previous year, Doctor Who – Carnival of Monsters had featured the Drashigs, giant space dragons that looked better than they had any right to. So, clearly, this meant they could now do a story full of dinosaurs! And for the rest of his life, poor Barry told everyone how much he regretted it. Hulke, despite having featured dodgy reptiles in each of his annual scripts for Pertwee’s Doctor, was unimpressed by these ‘terrible lizards’ even at the writing stage – so brilliant scientist Professor Whitaker is Hulke’s Mary-Sue, constantly telling everyone that he’s got a great plot, but is pissed off at having to stick dinosaurs in it. And, to be fair to him, it is a great plot – much of it inspired by Seven Days To Noon and, separately, The Avengers – The Morning After, but with the added frisson of post-Watergate conspiracy thriller, some strong characterisation and a powerful, unusually complex political central idea that’s one of Hulke’s best. Unfortunately, Invasion of the Dinosaurs displays not just his strengths but his weaknesses as a scriptwriter, with a strong story stretched out so far that it snaps, in repetitive (and unimpressive) cliffhangers and the penultimate episode probably the most empty of plot in the entire series to that point. The key problem with the plotting is that he’s simply run out of anything to say by five minutes into Part Four, something that wouldn’t be so noticeable in a four-part story where he could then dash to the climax, but which here gives the impression that Hulke had delivered his first three scripts and then exclaimed, ‘What do you mean, it’s meant to be a six-parter? Oh, Christ.’
Of these two stories, though, Invasion of the Dinosaurs is certainly the one that gets the attention – because with an interesting idea and some disastrous special effects there’s always something to talk about (The Android Invasion is much less noticeable on either count). It’s also from a season of just five stories, mostly very mediocre ones, so people take what they can get, whereas the other adventure was part of a season of six stories, mostly brilliant, so people can afford to ignore one. It’s even talked about in one of the stories in the latest Doctor Who DVD release, Ace Adventures’ The Happiness Patrol, which starts with Ace asking the Doctor about his encounters with a pterodactyl and a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Lots of them (or the same one, every twenty-five minutes). And it has rather an impressive cast, with most guest stars – Martin Jarvis, John Bennett, Peter Miles – better-known for later appearances in much better stories, the exception Noel Johnson, who is superb here in a plot with considerably more dignity than his previous Doctor Who story…
That Golden Moment
“There’s no bus.”The eerie opening moments remain the story’s most visually effective, suggesting the coming debt to Seven Days To Noon (not least in a ‘moral’ motivation for at least some of those behind the threat) and, like The Avengers – The Morning After, having our heroes suddenly appear in an evacuated area where the authorities offer hostility rather than exposition (that one has the advantages of doing the story with more verve, one third the running time and no bloody dinosaurs). Though the sequence isn’t as creepily crafted as The Avengers’ equivalent, it has an added punch and immediacy through the deserted locations being so familiar – the first shots pan around an empty Westminster to establish a dead London. After the one-off episode title “Invasion”, we’re clearly supposed to think of aliens, and I wonder about a third source that may have inspired this, or if it’s just serendipity that so many of the sites and angles echo the series’ first ever major location filming for The Dalek Invasion of Earth. We see a dog eating out of a car that’s been left behind with its door open, then trotting off towards a couple of ruined houses; the camera pulls out from an abandoned satchel full of money, to broken milk bottles, to a milk float left carelessly in the road; it pans up from lonely toys on the grass to the TARDIS materialising in a park. Dwelling on this sort of domestic detail is rarely seen in Doctor Who, and for us now to see it but all smashed up, especially following on from the sights of familiar London landmarks gone wrong, has a powerful double impact.
“There’s no anything. No, nothing’s moving. No bicycles, no pedestrians, no cars, nothing.”
“Why?”
“Well, perhaps it’s Sunday. Great Britain always closes on Sundays. Come on – I think we’d better walk.”
Director Paddy Russell and her trusted film cameraman Tony Leggo deserve most of the credit here, going out guerrilla filming at 4am with neither BBC nor police permission, but Jon Pertwee and Elisabeth Sladen carry it well once they arrive, resulting in one of the best quarter-hours of the third Doctor’s period. New to travelling with the Doctor, Sarah Jane’s already got an idea of how unreliable he is – and he admits they’re back when they left… “Give or take a few weeks.” But what’s been happening in those few weeks? She’s a local – give or take her spots of Scouse, but she lives there and then, at least – and clearly feels the dislocation more than he does; she’s right, of course, that they aren’t back to normality. The more blasé he gets, the more the evidence piles up: the phones don’t work (which he, typically, takes as the opportunity for a put-down); there are no buses, just a lone, reckless driver who nearly hits them; when they walk to the nearest shops, the only sign of life is a looter – who threatens them and runs, but soon comes to a bloody end, his car caved in. Meanwhile, rather than soldiers being presented to us as the lovable bunch we know sitting around with mugs of tea, the jeep full of squaddies zooming by looks a palpable threat, with their big guns and someone hiding from them. It’s all gripping until the dinosaurs turn up, not just terrible but blown long before their scripted reveal at the cliffhanger (an inexplicable change the director fails even to try to explain in the special features).
This grim opening was rendered grimmer still for many years, until the DVD came out. The BBC’s infamous purges destroyed many Doctor Who (and many other TV series’) episodes from the 1960s; from Tom Baker’s first story as the Doctor in 1975 onwards, every Doctor Who episode exists in its original format. Jon Pertwee’s stories are in between both chronologically and in their state of repair, all originally made in colour but with many destroyed, leaving only black and white copies exported to countries which didn’t yet have colour TV in the early ’70s. Almost all of these have had their colour restored with painstaking work from fuzzy overseas recordings, but Part One of Invasion of the Dinosaurs is the most notorious exception, with fans often saying it looks better in black and white – though for me that’s less to do with monochrome moodiness than the relative lack of dinosaurs. Now, however, most of the colour has been recovered from patterns in the black and white copy, though it’s a bit patchy and lacking in blue. As a result, the hard-working but pedantic Restoration Team who clean up old stories for DVD release chose to start the story in black and white if you press “Play All”, not wanting it to look as if they’d not done a good job: if you want the muddily coloured version closer to the original, you must first select “Special Features” and then “Episode 1 Colour On / Off”. Which is a bit fussy. If they’re that pedantic, you’d think they’d be able to read that it’s called “Part One” on screen, wouldn’t you…
Something Else To Look Out For
I confess that I often find this season of Doctor Who – Season Eleven, Jon Pertwee’s last – rather weak and tired in comparison to others. There are times when both Pertwee and the production team give the impression they’re just going through the motions, and though not all the stories are bad, there’s no one adventure that I can point to and champion as ‘the terrific one’. So you might expect me to lay into this story – except that, for all that it often fails, it tries. It has ambition to do something different. And it suits Pertwee, who mostly gives an impressive performance, helped enormously by being out of his comfort zone. After four years as part of the establishment, it’s a refreshing change for both audience and, perhaps unwillingly, actor as his Doctor’s put in jeopardy by the army rather than bossing them around for most of it (though I could do without his sanctimonious sermonising going into overdrive in the final episode: the first, “There never was a golden age,” is well-played and to the point. But then there’s the second homily, which goes on rather longer. And the third…). Like season opener The Time Warrior, where he’s suddenly uprooted from his time and place with UNIT, and aided by new companion Sarah Jane Smith still having the sharp edges to her character, shaking up the format does the series good. Even the Doctor’s new Time Lord superpower at the climax is both appropriate and rather well done.
That’s not to say that the Doctor is perfect here – though there are several points where his arrogance is deliberately shown up (not least all the times that Sarah Jane’s right and he doesn’t listen to her), in others the actor’s over-indulged. An attempt late in the story to reinvigorate the ‘deserted London’ setting because they’ve run out of plot isn’t effective once we know all the mystery, and even the Brigadier visibly almost corpses at the sight of the Doctor’s (and Pertwee’s) new car. That’s nothing to the director’s reaction when presented with it, and it has been called “the world’s only vagina-shaped penis substitute”. Part Five’s extended chase sequence is for me the outrageous padding that others unfairly associate with Planet of the Spiders Part Two, not remotely advancing the plot, not a hint of mystery, and nothing left in the script. That can make it deeply tedious… Or, with my brain switched off, I can appreciate some impressive filming, effective music and inspired use of stock helicopter footage: there’s even a moment where the Doctor himself looks quite sinister, stalking his own pursuers like the Viet Cong. His other main new gadget is a stun-gun best known for a posed picture in which he holds it like a mandolin, though after much build-up on screen the special effect it produces is… Nothing. At least there’s an element of poetic justice when the Doctor suffers ‘guilt by gadget’ at one not completely coherent cliffhanger, though he also gets a magnificently self-unaware moment where he blows a whacking great hole in a roof and then claims he can’t bring the Brigadier because on his own he’ll be inconspicuous.
Sarah Jane Smith gets some strong moments in only her second story – and many frustrating ones, telling the Doctor that a desolate London’s wrong and being ignored, telling the Doctor about a suspicious scientist and being ignored, telling the Doctor about a nuclear generator and being ignored… But while the Doctor’s eagerness to be clubbable with more male and establishment figures than his companion gets its own comeuppance, Sarah Jane is already both less self-reliant and more impetuous; introduced as resourceful enough to break into a top secret base and impersonate someone for a scoop, here she waits for ages, asks if she can have a camera, rebels very slightly by taking one, then screams and forgets it – before rushing off into peril and escaping (rinse and repeat twice a week). She’s also firmly established as the Hypnotism Queen of Who, ironically under the influence in 55% of all her original stories despite their almost precisely bracketing a time without the Master. She does, however, get two outstanding moments. One’s a perfectly judged character scene between her and UNIT Captain Mike Yates in which the audience could easily side with either of them, Mike poetic about suddenly clean, empty London but Sarah Jane sceptical (“And nightingales in Berkeley Square?”) and missing the busy, dirty city that was. Mike Yates gets by far his best scenes here, with more later, while Sarah Jane’s other one comes much later and more sparkily when, rejecting that hypnotism, she ‘disruptively’ insists:
“I’ll say whatever I like!”The rest of UNIT, coming in later than usual, at first seem as cosy as ever and a bit slack. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, in particular, has been sniffing the mind-rubbers again, calling the Doctor’s testimony “pretty unbelievable” despite all they’ve been through and, in a scene that better deserves the description “pretty unbelievable”, announces:
“I never thought I’d find myself blowing up Tube stations.”Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart, of course, spent quite a bit of time blowing up Tube stations in his first appearance in Doctor Who, but The Web of Fear otherwise has little in common with Invasion of the Dinosaurs, being a story in which Lethbridge-Stewart enforces martial law in a London already evacuated before our heroes arrive because of lost-world beasties on the rampage, there’s a secret base under Central London accessible via the Tube network, a traitor in the ranks and a devious plan behind it all for which the beasties are largely window-dressing [Miranda Hart look to camera]. Besides, this is only 1974, and that was set in 1975… Fortunately, he’s much more on the ball at other points, asking Sergeant Benton – who gets some unexpectedly watchable moments himself – the crucial questions, standing up to his superiors and with several droll lines. Or, at times, camp ones, as when he and the Doctor note that Sarah Jane’s gone (“She went off in the General’s car.” “Ohh!”) like a couple of gossipy old things across Les Dawson’s washing line, or when the Doctor invites him into the closet only to find his knob’s fallen off. Of course, the Doctor also gives a catty “Yes, I’m sure he’ll enjoy that” when Sarah Jane says she’s going to chat up Captain Yates, which seems almost to be saying ‘Mike’s gay’ to camera and makes me wonder just what Malcolm Hulke’s agenda was: from the War Chief trying to seduce the Doctor onwards, his stories (particularly his novelisations) have more than a few subtle little touches, and this story more than the rest – while some of the villains rant against “moral degradation” and “permissiveness”, Professor Whitaker is lightly coded on TV and, in the book, blatant. His ideal historical figures to talk to are Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward, while he repeatedly judges men (but not women) on how handsome they are, to the extent of Martin Jarvis picking up the subtext in his audiobook version and rather overdoing it with Whitaker’s reaction to the Doctor given an extra first word in the reading as “Ooh, he’s terribly handsome!”
The Terrible Lizards
The longest-cherished, least likely fan dream for the Doctor Who DVD range also judged the story on its looks. It was that, when Invasion of the Dinosaurs was finally released, it would replace the terrible lizards with lovely new CGI, so that casual viewers would stop laughing at them (and, more woundingly, us). The story’s producer, Barry Letts, had exactly the same wish, seeing them as a huge failure. But it was never going to happen: the DVD range’s occasional replacement CGI of adding a prettier glowy effect to a death-ray is simply on nothing like the level of rendering a menagerie of photorealistic Primeval-esque dinosaurs. I wish it could have been done, too, but short of finding a couple of million quid down the back of the sofa, it was impossible. Because when I was little, I loved The Doctor Who Monster Book and couldn’t understand why, otherwise packed with exciting photos of Who monsters from TV, for the dinosaurs it republished Chris Achilleos’ thrilling cover painting for the novel. Much as it mystified me that there was no picture of the previous story’s robot knight in The Adventures of K9 and Other Mechanical Creatures. It simply never occurred to me that this was because they looked rubbish. But they did.
Most of the ambitious range of dinosaurs here look pretty bad staying still, and far worse moving about (though never very much). Worse, the most-featured dinosaur – inevitably, the Tyrannosaurus Rex, as for obvious diegetic and extradiegetic reasons the selection covers the ‘most famous’ ones – is the worst of the lot, despite appearing repeatedly at moments of ‘threat’ and in far too many cliffhangers. It roars, it wobbles, it moves like a novice ice-skater; most infamously, at one point it has what was conceived as a Ray Harryhausen-style monster smash with a “Brontosaurus” (Apatosaurus). Instead, as they rub up against each other, they look like two inanimate pieces of rubber making out, and in one merciless fan video they were edited into place as part of Jurassic Park, as the scientists drive up and look on in wonder at their first sight of a prehistoric creature – with, playing over the snogging toys, the seductive tones of Je T’aime… Moi Non Plus. I wonder if the Radio Times illustration was sending it up even then, or if the artist’s own dinosaur sex was just lucky chance? Or there’s the close of Part Five, in itself an utter waste of space that almost redeems itself with the principal villain calmly explaining his vision, then moves into a ‘terrifying’ monster montage that culminates in a prolonged, wobbling, mouth-flapping T-Rex. What were they thinking? Even the script makes a mess of them: “Bullets are having no effect,” says a soldier. Why not? These aren’t alien beasties, and the fact that humanity has a destructive impact on other Earth species turns out to be one of the main points of the villains’ plot.
The pterodactyl is probably the best of them – shocking, sudden, and at least it moves about a bit, all of which are improvements on the camera just being frozen in incredulous horror while a beastie stands there and wobbles slightly, which is what happens with all the other dinosaurs. It still has its problems: introduced midway through Part One, it blows the surprise; “the best of them” still doesn’t mean ‘good’; it’s particularly hilarious when Pertwee later tries to fend it off with one of his old wigs; and, given that of all the dinosaurs it’s the one you’d expect to find it not just outside but swooping through the air, it’s a little odd that this pterodactyl is only ever seen hiding indoors in the dark. I bet you’ll always find him in the kitchen at parties, too.
The Plot – Spoilers
When I was a boy, Invasion of the Dinosaurs was simple to judge: the third Doctor, UNIT and Sarah Jane Smith obviously equalled a classic, and the excellent novel proved it. Many others felt the same way. When I grew up and the original story became widely available on video, its critical standing plummeted as fans ran screaming in terror from the dinosaurs. Then, over the past few years, it’s rallied again, with revisionist opinion saying that effects don’t matter, however terrible, and that in fact it’s a brilliant script. I know the lovely John Dorney, a talented actor, writer and reviewer, and his piece on Invasion of the Dinosaurs opens with a plausibly argued summary of the revisionist case:
“If you don't like Invasion of the Dinosaurs, I think you have your Dr Who priorities wrong.”This argument has two key weaknesses. First, there’s something slightly iffy about telling other people what their critical priorities should be, like an edict from the Reminder Room; not only would most kids say ‘It’s about the monsters’, but it acts as if reading a script is the same as watching a TV programme, as if Oscar Botcherby’s definitive Hamlet is identical to Kenneth Branagh’s and should be afforded the same applause. It’s also essentially saying ‘Barry Letts’ priorities were wrong’, which in this case is a perfectly tenable position, but it really starts with him rather than fans. There are some terrific Doctor Who stories with terrible monsters that a lot more people give a pass to because the monsters are essentially window-dressing that went a bit wrong; they don’t work, but they’re not central to the story and so it still does despite their brief appearance. Invasion of the Dinosaurs does not use dinosaurs as a momentary, disposable peril: it was commissioned as a showcase for dinosaurs; everyone in it goes on about the dinosaurs; it’s structured around repeated appearances by dinosaurs. They were, explicitly, the priority, which is why Barry Letts always singled them out for such pained criticism. Now, I often go against received ‘fan opinion’ and would love to go along with the revisionist case but, though I can find a lot to admire in it to balance ‘Worst dinosaurs evahhh!’, for me there’s another massive weakness in the revisionist argument, and that’s in how much it omits. Much of John’s case – and Matthew Sweet’s, on the main DVD extra feature – is to polarise: to put on one side the central concept (brilliant!) and on the other the terrible dinosaurs (bad but immaterial!), and to judge not the story but anyone shallow enough to weigh the effects over the ideas. But there’s more than that in between – there are two and a half hours of television, in which some of the direction is good, some not; some performances are strong, some not; and, crucially for me, some of the script and characterisation good, but a lot not.
“Doctor Who is all about the stories. The characters. That's why you should be watching. …Because it's got a great story.”
To be fair to John, he does go on to look at the story in more detail, and praises a key turning point here as one of “three great twists in Doctor Who history” (his first comes in The Enemy of the World, a story from which this one arguably borrows quite a bit too; I don’t know his third). And that twist is that – and here comes the spoiler, last chance to look away – UNIT’s Captain Mike Yates, a regular in the series for the last three years, is working against UNIT from the inside as part of the “Operation Golden Age” conspiracy. Though he’s reluctant to expose his old friends to danger, by the end he’s a starry-eyed true believer who doesn’t even worry if he himself survives: “I’m not important.” It’s a terrific twist, well-characterised and believable, with his having a conscience about one person, but not about billions, familiar to Stalin. The problem is, it takes place half-way through Part Two. Then the Government’s Minister in charge of the emergency while the rest run off to Harrogate, Noel Johnson as Sir Charles Grover, appears in the exact next shot and within a few seconds of the ‘traitor Mike’ revelation, and may as well be carrying a sign that says ‘I’m the next villain’. There’s also the Brigadier’s near-fascist superior, General Finch, so keen on a shoot-to-kill policy that it’s almost a sign that he sees everyone else as expendable… Outed by Mike, for no particular reason, a couple of minutes into Part Four. The Brigadier puts his finger on it:
“Is everybody in this conspiracy?”At one chilling moment the Doctor doubts even the Brigadier but, that paranoia aside, the script falls off a cliff just half-way through when it runs out of members of the cast to reveal as conspirators. It desperately needs another twist… And it has one, and a good one, but unfortunately that, too, has been blown by a few minutes into Part Four. Which is why the Doctor must spend an episode driving around to get as far away from the plot as possible, and Sarah Jane an episode running as far into the plot as possible so that she then has to escape from it. Again. By far the most effective cliffhanger is to Part Three, when – having been captured by the conspirators – Sarah Jane wakes up… From suspended animation. On a spaceship. Three months out in space. I’ll let that sink in…
While Sarah Jane is taken into the secret base beneath London – appropriately, a relic of the Cold War – and, sent to the spaceship, can’t do anything useful with the information, the Doctor finds his own way in… Only for no-one to believe him, which strains credulity. Even more driving around would be preferable to his actually having found the villains weeks before the end and then faffing about. Hulke does, at least, fix the gaping hole in his previous story and have the place covered with CCTV so that he’s spotted and the Kklaxons go off, while the sinister machine music is something novel from Dudley Simpson – but it all looks shoddy and makes the script’s failings literal by having the Doctor go round in circles and never get anywhere. Much as when, deeper within that base, Grover explains the plan to Whitaker, the man who invented the technology and who has been putting that plan into operation for weeks, then Whitaker demonstrates the technology to Grover, the man who came up with the plan and who has been overseeing the reaction to that technology for weeks. You’d think that with so many people in on it, they could have found someone who might not know everything already to do the exposition to.
The Politics – More Spoilers
That spaceship: a brilliant development, eh, sending the story somewhere different entirely? Unfortunately, this gobsmacking twist lasts about as long as it takes to read the previous paragraph, as no sooner is Sarah Jane welcomed to the People, a cult looking forward to settling a New Earth, than she realises it’s all a con, that the spaceship’s a fake, and that even if they’ve been taken in, they’re still not a nice lot. Though they’re often simplistically described as an example of the counterculture and ‘left wing’, while obviously informed by both, the script is in fact much more subtle than that, letting you see a much wider range of politics in them. If anything, the People more resemble Christian movements of the time with the religion taken out, the counter-counterculture: they’re rigidly hierarchical, not freethinking hippies; they’re uniformly middle-aged, middle class and white, with at least as much about them of fascism as of communism. Just because the current Green Party is on the extreme left, many critics carelessly assume the People must be the same – ignoring that the conspirator who formed them is a leading Government Minister, the very heart of the establishment, in concert with a top general to mount a military coup through martial law, which also might just send the teeniest of signals the other way. It’s part of the laziness that tries to fit all politics on a left-right economic spectrum, which as far as I can see has no bearing on the People; they are, however, clearly positioned on the liberal-authoritarian scale and the green-ungreen one. Ecological politics has been found all the way across the left-right axis (and opposed from all the way across it, too): the far left might see green economics to replace capitalism; liberals see environmentalism as linked to internationalism and opportunity for future generations; conservation is a value of old-fashioned landed Toryism; and of course many fascists see one type of ‘purity’ in concert with another.
I suspect it’s the impossibility of pinning green politics to any one point in ‘traditional’ politics that leads people simply to label it countercultural, but it strikes me that, within the story, that might have enabled a Cabinet Minister and deeply establishment politician who’s clearly at the top of a ‘traditional’ party to found the “Save Planet Earth Society” which could then act as a cult appealing to people from any political background, usefully dodging any left-right questions about society by setting up an entirely new world instead. And that appeal to ecologically concerned suckers across the board within the story, even taking in the Brigadier’s aide-de-camp, is exactly why the story can be an uncomfortable experience to watch for ecologically concerned viewers across the board. In 1974, the programme was usually siding with us, but the one time ecologists get into power, they behave just like the would-be totalitarian standard Who establishment always do; taking over the world, but in a patronising way. No wonder people find it easier to say, ‘Well, it’s just the far left / far right,’ rather than dealing with Hulke’s complexities that are actually saying to many viewers, ‘This could be you’. With their lack of concern for human life and love of bossing people about, for example, I find it most comfortable to think of them as New Labour. In retrospect, it’s also unsettling that the ‘greens stage fake disaster to frighten people’ plot (though the fakery is nothing to do with environmental damage) takes a similar line to today’s anti-green propaganda from US conservatives. Even without that, when the script simultaneously tries to persuade us of the harm humanity is doing to the world and that there’s very much a wrong way to go about dealing with it, it’s not surprising that any viewer might have a conflicted reaction to it. It’s certainly one of the series’ most in-your-face warnings against utopianism and the idea that the ends justify the means.
The celebrity recruits in charge of the ‘spaceship’ have given themselves Biblical names – Ruth, Adam, Mark – with both the act and style of renaming implying a religious cult without too-sensitive-for-BBC religion ever being mentioned (at least they don’t name their new world ‘Eden’, though they clearly think of humanity as fallen and themselves as the second coming). Self-styled leaders Ruth and Adam are even called the “Elders”. And while many viewers can’t help but notice Mark’s very impressively tight jeans, it’s Ruth who grabs the attention with not messianic but a rather more down to Earth sort of zeal (and try to forget her in ’Allo ’Allo ). While you may assume that Ruth is also known as ‘-Less’, it turns out that her actual other name was “Lady Cullingford”, a member of the House of Lords and probably an old-fashioned Conservative conservationist taking the most drastic possible ‘Get off my land!’ action. The People and the conspirators behind them are all deeply authoritarian, but Ruth positively revels in it, and at the time was presumably intended to smack of Mary Whitehouse (now, more Ann Widdecombe). Sarah Jane’s finest moment in the story comes challenging Ruth in a dark mirror of that conversation with Mike, with Sarah Jane once again defending modernity:
“Don’t you think that people have a right to choose what kind of life they want?”Note that of all the ills of modern life that Ruth wants to roll back, the environment’s not the main thing that riles her. When she talks about going to a place that’s still pure and undefiled, it’s not just technology she’s thinking of. She wants to be free of pollution, but much more so free of other people’s views – and when Sarah Jane is the serpent in her Eden, Ruth instantly starts persecuting the pure who aren’t pure enough. “Moral degradation, permissiveness, usury” weren’t key words restrained to the environmental movement but to people who felt that, like Lady Cullingford, after centuries of being on top, now other people were getting a look in, and they didn’t like it. It’s hard not to see these as code for ‘the gays and the Jews’ (maybe she’s not necessarily a Conservative; that sounds just like Ken Livingstone).
“People on Earth were allowed to choose. And see what kind of a world they made. Moral degradation, permissiveness, usury, cheating, lying, cruelty.”
The key to Ruth is that she’s terrified of losing control; even in her little bubble of hand-picked fanatics, all thought to be true believers, the presence of a single heretic exposes Ruth as having so little faith in her own creed that she fears Sarah Jane “could corrupt the whole of our group” and may have to be destroyed. For the moment, she has her locked up in the Reminder Room, where the soothing voice of Martin Jarvis (he’s their favourite, but, ironically, outside the spaceship, the violent henchman) reads endless columns by Polly Toynbee over TV images of humanity’s evils. It’s another of the story’s preoccupations with television – Sarah Jane looks at colour TVs, the Doctor’s watched on CCTV, and most significantly Tat Wood in his About Time 3 points out that the technology of time travel here is that of TV, with “roll-back” revealed as the ultimate plan… Though, of course, it’s also very much in tune with conservative dreams of rolling back the state and turning the clock back on modern life. But where are they rolling back to? While it’s tempting to want to see the dramatic irony of Grover and Whitaker appear in the Jurassic Period only to be gobbled up by an unconvincing T-Rex, making this story’s inspiring of Primeval’s main story arc absolutely explicit, Ruth does in fact make it clear that they will “guide” some “simple, pastoral people”, so they intend to boss around people anywhen from early homo sapiens to Stone Age humans, rather than corralling dinosaurs (in the novel, they compare themselves to the Pilgrim Fathers, and give Sarah Jane short shrift for suggesting “I don’t think the Red Indians liked the Pilgrim Fathers very much”).
The ultimate secret behind the fake ‘spaceship’ is that calm, reasonable Cabinet Minister Sir Charles Grover, convinced that humanity is destroying the Earth, has decided to ‘save’ it by the greatest genocide ever conceived. In many ways, he’s the best thing about this story – so quiet, reasonable and determined that he doesn’t regard himself as a monster, convinced he’s right and utterly chilling for it. The horrible truth of “Operation Golden Age” is that the dinosaurs are only a device to frighten people away from London – but that the time technology used to do so is crucial to the plot, and will be used to roll back time to a ‘purer’ age. Only the People still secretly in London will be carried back; the rest of humanity, and for many centuries previously, “would never have been born”. And the ‘spaceship’ at the dark heart of this plot has been created to ensure the “New Earth” will have an inspiring history and not one of terrible guilt. Sarah Jane confronts the People’s leader, concerned not just about mass murder but even about the People who castigated and imprisoned her:
“What you’re doing to those people is cruel. You told them they were going to a new world.”Grover’s ambition for “innocence” can only work if its People are kept in the dark about genocide. And here, even in the most powerful part of the script, there’s a problem. Never mind the stars looking suspiciously similar, nor the landmasses when they come to map them. They’ve cleared the whole of Central London even of troops, to stop absolutely any riff-raff being dragged along. So… What is in the “zone”? Yates’ lines suggest the time field will sprawl right across London, from Westminster to as far out as UNIT’s field HQ, close to Perivale. I can see that Lady Cullingford has her eye on a palace to strut about in, and with most of the People seeming pretty useless it would be a sensible practical step to crate around a pre-assembled city… Except that wouldn’t it be full of all manner of nasty humanity-created things that would corrupt their purity, even ignoring the biggest one – its very presence would be a great big prompt to ask questions (which is pretty much original sin for the Elders)? The other alternative is that just the people are transported (ignoring the usual questions about clothes and things)… Which would also make them ask questions. ‘Where did the spaceship vanish to?’ So, either ‘spaceship gone’ or ‘London present’. Either takes a bit of explaining.
“And so they are. But their new world is ours, swept clean and restored to innocence.”
Perhaps they’re just counting on the People not to clock anything; if ever there was one bit of sci-fi that inspired Douglas Adams to create the Ark Ship B, full of useless whingeing middle-management types conned onto a spaceship and sent off to patronise the cavepeople into changing the future of humanity, then surely this was it. And it does make the subsequent Dalek story even more worthless, pre-spoofing its Von Dänikenism with humanity aspiring to become its own ‘space gods’. The man who sounds most like he’s delivering Golgafrinchan lines from The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (“I used to be a bank manager… I went into it all very thoroughly. I sold my house”) even turns up again in Doctor Who a year later, having fallen for literally the next bunch of eco-fascists to come along – well, perhaps it’s just the same actor, but it’s funnier to assume it’s the same man – in Robot, a more tautly delivered story that’s clearly influenced by this one. Which in is turn followed by The Ark in Space, another story in which the chosen are taken up from Earth in a techno-Rapture in order to create it anew, though that time it’s done for real.
Special Features and an Extra-Special Location Shoot
Remarkably for a story that’s nearly forty years old, the DVD release presents several deleted scenes – though, irritatingly, on the second disc, so you have to faff about swapping them – with some no great loss but one droll one where Grover’s charmingly perfect memory of “Miss Sarah Smith” is neatly undermined. Way back in 1999, in the days when the BBC regarded Doctor Who as a shameful joke rather than a ratings juggernaut, BBC Choice (pre-BBC3) repeated the whole story, largely to take the piss out of it, but including for the only time an extended edit of Part Three incorporating five cut sequences. Brilliantly, the sarky continuity man announced that Part Four was the one which has “Footage never before seen in public,” when in fact viewers alerted by this would have just missed it.
There’s a slightly odd commentary, with half the episodes a conversation between moderator Toby Hadoke and stiff old director Paddy Russell – though she warms up considerably for Part Five, where she stops talking about Doctor Who altogether and ranges across the rest of her fascinating career (the BBC’s first woman director). Toby refers to the “very left wing” baddies, which shows he’s not quite considered all the implications… The other half have a more standard commentary, featuring script editor Terrance Dicks, villainous scientist Peter Miles and turncoat Captain Richard Franklin, among others, starting off rather movingly the day after Nicholas Courtney’s funeral, which is even sadder in retrospect as they go on to praise Lis Sladen. The exception is Franklin, who tells a story about how funny he was, and Nick wasn’t, and how Nick then claimed credit. What a graceless hack (who, naturally, fails to see any connection between his character’s descent into deluded fascism and his own drift into ever-more extremist politics). Much more winning is Terrance getting in immediately on the dinosaur designers – “They said they could do it, and they lied. They lied in their teeth” – then expressing satisfaction that they went out of business, or Peter loving Noel Johnson as a “smoothie” villain like that “beautiful actor” Claude Rains. There’s even an especially fannish anecdote about a young actor called David Tennant… John Levene, not in any way an actor who nobody else will speak to, gets to do a bit of commentary too. Recorded separately. Supplied on a different disc.
Just this once, though, the text notes on the episodes are far more interesting than the commentary. All right, so there’s rather more jeep-spotting than I can bother with, and it starts off by mentioning that there was a separate Welsh transmission but not if that was included in the high audience ratings just given… But there are some marvellous snippets from the script, where Malcolm Hulke is persistently on the side of the dinosaur (making the Doctor implicitly the villain to the poor “victim” he wants to capture), with details of the many cut scenes and, before them, the original and very different storylines. There are amusing snippets of BBC indulgence – the TARDIS had just been renovated, for example, “at a cost of just over £10” – or the series’ history, such as the news that Pertwee was leaving having broken during transmission. The comment in Part Six about a single-frame close-up of Ruth isn’t right, though through no fault of the text notes; I noticed this clumsy edit on my old copy recorded from TV, but the Restoration Team have removed it for the DVD. Where the production notes’ researcher / writer David Brunt really comes through, though – and even makes Part Five worth watching, with this coming half-way into it – is having finally traced the never-to-be-revealed truth of who was originally cast as Sarah Jane Smith and then sacked. It’s a genuine scoop, and wittily set out, too.
Writer and broadcaster Matthew Sweet’s People, Power and Puppetry is a fascinating half-hour video essay, rather than a conventional ‘Making of’. While there are many of the expected views – Terrance Dicks the harshest on the dinosaurs, the late Barry Letts the most hurt – Sweet is firmly in the revisionist camp, walking the London locations as he puts the case for the defence, the message that a better world can’t be imposed. It’s one of the most authored pieces in the DVD range, and persuasive with it as he zooms in on the politics, the crossover between the Soil Association and the British League of Fascists, a form of holocaust where the time travel element means you don’t have to watch anybody die… Though he makes the usual assumption that the Golden Age is a trip back to the Jurassic, rather than preventing the Industrial Revolution. It’s lovely to get a snippet of old interview with Jon Pertwee in there, too. My favourite bit of gossip is Terrance Dicks recounting his one big row with old friend Malcolm Hulke: Mac outraged by changes to his script; Terrance an indulgent uncle telling the story from his own point of view, of how these writers take offence at “a completely trivial point,” “a difficult person, very sensitive, very tetchy,” who really should just calm down because wise old script editors know best. This is much funnier when you consider that it was during this very story that Terrance begins handing over that job to another writer friend, Robert Holmes, who takes over in earnest as Tom Baker takes over from Jon Pertwee. Writer Terrance provides the first script for new script editor Bob, and all is sweetness and light… Until his next script, a year later, which wise new script editor Bob famously decided needed a few changes of his own. So when it was writer Terrance’s script being dicked about with, did he take it more blandly? Guess.
Doctor Who Stories: Elisabeth Sladen Part 1 is a rather lovely interview that ranges across several of Lis’ early stories, accompanied by witty animations. The “CSO knickers” story and the Sontaran impressions are a scream. It’s a shame, though, that there’s no The UNIT Family Part Three, which should surely have been the companion piece to Lis’ behind-the-scenes stories for the late UNIT period, completing earlier features on the Inferno and Day of the Daleks DVDs. Other extras include a Photo Gallery, Radio Times pdfs (with a Peter Brookes cartoon of a smashing jeep and pterodactyl) and, as you may have guessed, a Now and Then piece on the London locations. With its sterling aid, I brought a triceratops back to Moorgate Station with my own timescoop… Only to discover that to take a photo of the most recognisable street from the most recognisable angle, I’d need to stand in the middle of the road. And in the middle of a building site. So, I went to the guy in the hard hat at the security gate and asked a small favour that he was unlikely to hear very often, brandishing the tools of my ‘special effects shoot’. He pissed himself, then ushered me in; while self-consciously positioning camera and terrifying beastie, I felt the back of my neck prickle. A semi-circle of goggling men in hard hats was behind me, trying not to fall about.
Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion by Malcolm Hulke (and, more importantly, Chris Achilleos) – “KKLAK!”
Malcolm Hulke’s novelisation expends on much of the characterisation, giving us more of an insight into many of the main villains while thankfully shrinking down the second half and letting you see far more impressive dinosaurs in your head, demonstrating the novels’ Pertwee Gap at its most remarkable. Yet however compelling his prose and however convincing his reworking of the story to help the plot, for this one book that most beloved of Target novelists’ contribution is forever overshadowed by the cover painting.
The most famous – and infamous – example of Chris Achilleos’ work on the early Doctor Who novels, his bosses at Target were horrified by the Pop-Art sound effect and told him never to do it again. It was only years later that he started to hear from fans meeting him how thrilling it had been to them as kids, the caption, oddly, far more memorable than the actual pterodactyl. It’s a cool Pertwee and an awesome Tyrannosaur against the sun setting on London, but it’s the “KKLAK!” that we all took to our hearts (I still wouldn’t pay £105 for an A2 print, though). I once met Chris Achilleos and asked him about it; he was amazed people loved the cover and the word, it having caused him nothing but trouble, but he set me right on the pronunciation – and startled everybody else in the shop – with a very loud demonstration. I’d always thought of it as a sharp, percussive sound, the beak closing as it attempts to bite the Doctor, but it is in fact a shrill bird-scream, more of a ‘Kklawwwkk!’
Later editions of the book had different covers, but none had the same impact. The last, Alister Pearson’s 1993 edition, is the most striking of them; David Mann’s American edition for Pinnacle less so, despite the skulls (the US printing itself claims it features the fourth Doctor, but they’ve put in no effort to change him: he talks like Pertwee throughout, is still called a “great dressed-up twit”, and the only rewriting appears to be to Americanise the spellings and remove a “frock” from his coat, ironically as Tom’s Doctor was more often found in one than Pertwee’s). Jeff Cummins’ painting of a T-Rex in front of St Paul’s Cathedral is technically excellent but just not as exciting; intriguingly, like Hulke reworking his scripts into something much more satisfying in his novels, many years later Cummins’ cover painting for Doctor Who: The New Adventures – Blood Heat comes across as his having another go at the same idea, his second rearing Tyrannosaur in front of St Paul’s being far more exciting and dynamic. If only the Blood Heat dinosaur was going “RROAR!” as well, it would surely be one of the most-beloved of all Who covers! Following his gorgeous cover for 1975’s The Doctor Who Monster Book, incidentally, Achilleos went on to paint more dinosaurs for 1976’s almost as exciting The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book; both are worth looking out for second-hand, though the spin-off factual series Doctor Who Discovers… was never as big a hit, despite some fascinating topics.
The book itself opens with an unusual but neatly considered prologue – titled simply The Dinosaurs, it’s a factual account, ending in questions about their sudden extinction:
“Perhaps no one will ever know.This means that the memorable opening sequence to the story itself, though I always think of it as the Prologue, is actually the beginning of Chapter 1 and flows straight on into the TARDIS’ arrival; rather than just describe the empty streets of London, Malcolm Hulke vividly evokes the last few days of drunken Glaswegian football supporter Shughie McPherson, long-abandoned by his wife, abandoned by his friends as the emergency’s declared, and taking six bottles of whisky as his only companions for the four days until he staggers outside, and… Several critics have found this a remarkable leap in children’s fiction, but perhaps it’s because it was so inappropriate that it’s always stayed with me. At the other end of the social scale, before Sir Charles Grover’s secret agenda is revealed he too gets a little character moment that ought to ring multiple alarm bells for the reader – not only does it recall the villainous Stevens in Hulke’s Doctor Who and the Green Death novel but the second sentence, innocuous early in the book, is chilling once you’ve read his revelation at the climax of Chapter 8. He’s remembering a time before he went into politics:
“Certainly no one ever expected them to come back.”
“They were happy days when the future seemed full of hope. He wished he could have that time over again.”Later, he’s more cynical (or, perhaps, just more self-aware):
“Grover was pulling on the heavy trousers over his expensive suit. ‘Twenty years in politics has taught me that people only believe what they want to believe.’ He paused to think. ‘I suppose that goes for us all in a way.’”The book makes plain several of the TV version’s subtexts, and not just in Professor Whitaker being the most blatantly gay character in all the Target range. When Mike Yates reveals himself as a traitor to the Doctor and the Brigadier very long after he’s done so for the reader, we sadly lose the edge of Yates’ fanaticism but the Doctor’s biggest homily makes explicit rather than through the metaphor of Silurians his view that “you can treat people with different coloured skins as equals,” while the Brigadier gets a deft punchline to finish the chapter. Hulke ups his religious metaphors, too, closing the novel by suggesting that some Biblical visions may be sightings of aliens or time travellers (though not of Grover and Whitaker) and, along the way, underlining the Elders’ fanaticism:
“Adam, ignoring Sarah’s reply, continued: ‘We shall take the good, but leave the evil behind.’Mark, formerly an athlete, had here been famous for running the three-minute mile – a more plausible record for Sarah Jane to remember than the TV’s points of a metre jumps. And with Hulke favouring the production team’s concept of UNIT stories as some way in the future, this one’s clearly set many years after 1974: there’s a reference to John Stonehouse as a long way in the past and something a young journalist like Sarah Jane wouldn’t know about. He also slashes down ‘Part Five’ to just a few pages through a series of radio reports of the hunt for the Doctor, as well as dumping his ‘new car’ in favour of a more easily imagined motorbike. And, of course, he gets inside the dinosaurs’ tiny heads:
“‘And who decides which is which?’
“‘It’s all so obvious.’ Adam’s eyes began to look like those of a prophet who was in personal communication with God.”
“A giant stegosaurus was standing peacefully outside Westminster Underground Station contemplating the Houses of Parliament. It thought that the great grey buildings were other monsters; if it stayed very still perhaps they would leave it alone. Then a small and very mobile monster came hurtling round the corner making a lot of noise and smell. It stopped with a screech. An even smaller creature jumped out of it and threw something. There was a loud bang and a flash of fire that disturbed the stegosaurus’s peace of mind.The CD version – the easiest way to get hold of the book today – is read by Martin Jarvis, a superb choice for far more than having played the character “Butler” on screen. On TV little more than a sneering henchman, Richard always regrets that the one time in Doctor Who the Butler did it, so did everyone else. In the book, his role is greatly expanded, as well as being given a distinctive scar so that the reader can recognise him even as other characters don’t when he’s creeping about doing his dirty work. There’s a good pay-off to the scar, too, almost an anti-twist… And, of course, where on TV one of Butler’s more unusual hench-duties was to read the interminable sermons for the Reminder Room, in the audiobook this reaches marvellously metatextual heights: Martin Jarvis, known in the decades since as the nation’s favourite reader of audiobooks, now reads the audiobook of a story in which he originally starred, reading his own lines, and including Martin Jarvis reading in audiobook form the talking book lines that Martin Jarvis originally read within the story. Well, it tickles me, anyway. And he’s good at everyone else, too.
“‘It’s doing you no harm, Brigadier,’ shouted the Doctor. ‘Leave the poor thing alone.’”
Doctor Who – The Android Invasion
Prolific writer Terry Nation’s penultimate story and producer / director Barry Letts’ last hands-on story for the series, this is never as deep as Invasion of the Dinosaurs, but is shorter and much more fun. This time, producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes asked back the two old hands as writer and director because that would let them do more work on other stories, and what could go wrong? The ideas are mostly shallow but exciting; the effects generally all right (a couple brilliant, a couple crummy); while the problem with the penultimate episode here is that it probably makes less sense than any other in the entire series to that point. Prompted by a friend to justify this claim, I once wrote a rather cruel 30 Holes in the Plot of The Android Invasion which, having already spent far too long on Invasion of the Dinosaurs, I’ll spare you here. On the bright side, there are plenty of twists and turns – it’s just that few of them make any sense, and most of those that do have already been given away by the title (improbably, the first android ‘reveal’ isn’t even kept for the cliffhanger, but about a quarter of an hour in, just like the first dinosaur; fortunately, it looks very much better). Just imagine it’s called something different, that you don’t know it’s androids, and put your brain in neutral, and it’s very entertaining, particularly with Tom Baker and Lis Sladen sparking off each other in a great partnership.
The story benefits from some gorgeous location shooting in a little English village, used to give the first episode a marvellous sense of the uncanny and unnerving. Most iconically, the Doctor is bound to the war memorial (with, of course, a ticking bomb) by a group of blank-faced mechanics / astronauts, an image that held me watching it on TV when I was four – it looked like it could happen in any village Mum and Dad took us to as kids – then was reinforced by the cover of the novel and, now, the DVD. Yes, for me the village of East Hagbourne is more evocative than even that of Aldbourne, and four years ago my lovely Richard drove us down a great many winding little roads to make a brief visit there. I’d love to go again and try the pub, but I fear it’ll take a lot of lemon meringue fudge and Lego to persuade him, particularly as he’s not nearly as fond of this story as I am. And while it goes some way to proving that the heart and soul of UNIT, despite being a large international organisation, really was the Brigadier – because while it’s meant to feel wrong, it feels much more wrong than it should simply because Nick Courtney’s not there – at least one bit-part actor gets a decent send-off. No, not John Levene; Dave Carter had taken many roles in Doctor Who over the previous decade, largely unspeaking and uncredited, but in these two stories he finally gets some lines and, here, a role in the climax. So let’s hear it for the Dave Carter Box Set!
That Golden Moment
There are many moments to love here, often better as moments, too, rather than knitting them into a plot. The fantastic cliffhanger to Part Two, suggested by producer Philip Hinchcliffe – the Doctor losing his temper and Sarah Jane losing face, easily the story’s most forceful moment? But that one’s a bit of a spoiler, so how about the Doctor and Sarah Jane coming into the picturesque village only to find it empty – then suddenly filling up? But, no, three Golden Moments in a row of unnervingly deserted streets might be a bit much. There’s another moment I love for its turning the familiar and trusted unfamiliar and wrong. Turn to Part Four to find several eerie mirrorings, not least of Part One – again, Sarah Jane rushes through the woods; again, she finds the TARDIS, a long pod nearby; again, she shows her relaxed rapport with the Doctor…? She gives a gasp as there’s a tap on her shoulder:
“Oh, Doctor, don’t do things like that!”In sudden full-face close-up, the Doctor looks very cold – then, having cautioned Sarah Jane, switches on a brilliant smile. Our heroes have been reunited, she’s glad to see him, and everything’s all right. Then Sarah Jane notices more signs of the incoming invasion, and makes ready to hurry to warn everyone… But the Doctor doesn’t seem in a hurry at all. It’s an electric moment.
“I’m sorry. I had to be sure. You see, there’s a replica of you around somewhere.”
“It would suit our purposes better if no-one was warned.”Behind him, the pod on the ground opens, coffin-like… And this time an identical Sarah Jane rises from it, face cold. The real one runs back into the woods as the fake Doctor helps his fellow android stand, then tells ‘her’ they have much to do as he strides towards us… Tom Baker gives a very different performance as his duplicate, distant rather than robotic, and the whole scene’s a lesson in how to be sinister even in summer sunshine and beautiful countryside. And with this story one in which Tom and Lis’ easy chemistry with each other is particularly strong, undermining it like this in the final episode is especially unnerving.
Oddly, at times Terry Nation seems to write better for the duplicate Doctor than the proper one: after being curiously establishment in his military-centred approach in Part One (as ludicrous as Liberal Democrats making excuses for the security state would be), here it turns out the ‘real’ Doctor has gone looking for the authorities before looking for Sarah Jane, then even shows the sentry his pass – surely suggesting it’s not the Doctor at all. Thank goodness Tom can tell which of him is which, as can the villains, one of whom at least gets the point:
“The data that was drained from the girl shows the Doctor’s long association with libertarian causes. His entire history is one of opposition to conquest.”
Something Else To Look Out For
The themes and influences of The Android Invasion are less political than those of Invasion of the Dinosaurs, but still vivid – perhaps most strikingly, while both stories were written by former Avengers writers, the earlier tale borrows from one Avengers episode in particular, while this deliberately evokes the ambience of The Avengers in general and a string of episodes from The Town of No Return to They Keep Killing Steed. Part One has an especially Avengersish feel, with strange goings-on in a sleepy English village and Sarah Jane at her strongest, even supplying information from her own area of expertise rather than leaving all the exposition to the Doctor. The traditional red phone booth enhances the sense of Britishness and of being filmed on the outskirts of AvengerLand, as does the village shop / Post Office (the sign actually says “A.V. & N.G. Kirby”, but at a glance…) – and when Nick Courtney’s place in charge of our heroes’ secret organisation is taken by Patrick Newell, you could almost call it ‘The Androids of Tara’. Add in strong dashes of The Prisoner and of creepy situations as far back as Quatermass II and Invasion of the Body Snatchers or as then up-to-the-minute as The Stepford Wives, and there’s a strange familiarity in… Well, the strange familiarity of a village and villagers that are nearly but not quite right.
Of course, a lot of the familiarity here is even closer to home. Writer Terry Nation may, unusually, not be using the Daleks (though you can find at least five infiltrating this disc), but he makes up for it by including many of his other favourite thingumajigs – android doubles (obviously), radiation, viruses, countdowns, twisted ankles, contrived separation from the TARDIS – while Barry Letts’ last hurrah in the director’s chair makes it seem all the more plausible early on that this is going to follow Spearhead From Space and Terror of the Autons into ‘The Auton Invasion III – This Time It’s St Mary Mead’ (even if the structure’s the other way up: hand-guns first, meteorites later), while the excellent audio play Brave New Town has even stronger echoes. Most strikingly of all the Doctor Who influences, there’s a lot of this that mirrors Terror of the Zygons, broadcast just three months earlier to open 1975’s Season 13, making these two the most nearly duplicated stories until Season 25 – though at least it’s thematically sound here, as both of these two stories are about duplicates. They also both feature a pub with a secret spy-camera, hi-tech hi-jinks with a big chunky cable in a cell, a spaceship launching at the same crucial cliffhanger, a playful offer of a lift in the coda and the Doctor tortured in technicolour agony, amongst much more.
The excellent Frank Collins identifies that torture scene here as part of another, much older, underlying influence. Tom Baker’s superb first three seasons under Hinchcliffe and Holmes played with many Gothic themes, most blatantly in the dark religion of their final season in charge but previously seeded throughout many less traditional settings than catacombs massing with evil monks. While many more shallow critics claim that ‘Gothic horror’ doesn’t apply to this story, Frank argues convincingly otherwise, based on the key Gothic theme of the doppelgänger and the sadomasochistically sexual overtones of torturing the hero. There’s betrayal, too (unlike in the other UNIT Files story, more from pique than conviction, though Frank describes it in more Romantic and spoilery terms); secret passages; and, though it may be stretching the point, a version of the doomed inheritance in which a radiation-soaked world carries its own legacy of death.
The Doctor and Sarah Jane
Season 13 is, for me, Sarah Jane Smith at her absolute best. At last paired just with the Doctor as they travel the Universe together (technically, this is a very UNIT-heavy season, but just watching stories like this shows you otherwise), Lis Sladen and Tom Baker have reached such a brilliant rapport that you can see exactly why the young journalist is the most fondly remembered of all the Doctor’s companions, and the one to return to first the series and then a new one of her own. Unusually, Terry Nation writes an excellent part for a woman, giving Sarah Jane a lot to do this time – even rescuing the Doctor, more than once – in contrast to his usual wet girlies or occasional butch stereotype. And though on top of his macho sci-fi scripts Terry Nation was an accomplished writer for both comedy and comedy-drama such as The Avengers, and script editor Bob Holmes is still the finest dialogue-writer ever to have worked on Doctor Who, the DVD’s text notes make it clear that an unusually large number of exchanges between the Doctor and Sarah Jane were rewritten by the actors in rehearsal. Their scenes in the woods that top and tail the story are particularly gorgeous, with the latter almost an Avengers tag scene. Though not quite as clothes-proud as a pair of Avengers, they both get striking new outfits here, too: him a sudden change from dark jackets to a more summery oatmeal, her a pink trouser suit with white accessories (coincidentally close to Romana’s main wardrobe in Terry Nation’s next and last script for the series).
Just take a look at Part Three for both of them in the villains’ base: Sarah Jane startlingly resourceful and dangerous (there’s a neat reverse in the writing, where something innocuous is meant to kill Sarah but she uses it instead to mount a wholly different attack, with both her and her target unaware of their respective dangers); the Doctor, shockingly, physically picked up and shackled in a garish video-effect torture porn chamber with his adversary promising him “a most – disagreeable death”, and particularly horrible it sounds, too; then both of them simply fantastic, Sarah Jane saving the day and the Doctor (and, indeed, an ad-libbing Tom Baker) dazedly mixing together Chekhov and Carroll in treacle. It’s inspired, exciting, and very funny.
“I feel disorientated.”There’s plenty of wit throughout the story, both in the script and in the performances, with Tom overcoming what sounds like a nasty sore throat to treat every threat with delight, from an “Oh! Hello” on being seized to “Those are the first friendly words I’ve heard since I got here” on being held at gunpoint (though the following chase has the camera unwisely show a machine gun shoot him squarely in the back to no apparent effect). The only point at which he doesn’t seem at all happy is ordering ginger pop. The Doctor’s ill temper is because he’s already told the landlord; Tom’s, clearly because he’s ordering ginger pop. What a let-down, after the sheer exuberance with which he exclaims:
“You’re in the Disorientation Chamber!”
“That makes sense.”
“Let’s try the pub!”The pub itself is at first deserted, full only of disconcerting clues, then filled with silent, still patrons, then, after a tense countdown to the stroke of noon… Doomsday? No. Just a set of drinkers who suddenly come to life and make Sarah Jane so unwelcome with their “We don’t have strangers here” that she postmodernly tells them how ridiculous they’re being. Perhaps this is entirely a postmodern story, where everything is deliberately designed to make sense only on the surface, to encourage you to think beneath it? Probably not but, even as the Doctor comes across as a bit dim for coming up with the wrong answers when the audience has been ahead of him from the opening credits, he’s still in with the postmodern swing, telling Sarah Jane not to worry – “Who’d notice me?” And so, between them, they carry many parts of the story that really shouldn’t get off the ground. Lis Sladen’s voice breaking on “Don’t leave me” almost makes you believe the TARDIS’ incredibly contrived “pause control”, but nothing else does – it’s not a web page that resets if you’ve taken too long with your password, and surely it can’t navigate by peeking around the Universe at random for what looks right?
With the Doctor and Sarah Jane so much fun, the UNIT boys who formerly co-starred with them… Don’t. That the Brigadier is missing is an early moment of tension that’s simply thrown away – because, in Nick Courtney’s absence, there’s nowhere for it to go save for introducing the appropriately-named Colonel Faraday. Patrick Newell’s Faraday is something of a disappointment; in theory great casting, like Patrick Macnee replacing Leo G Carroll in The Return of the Man From U.N.C.L.E. – The Fifteen Years Later Affair, but poorly written and with the actor looking rather poorly, too (not half the man his Mother was). Just how the man whose memory supplies all the security details knows the Brigadier’s away in Geneva at this precise moment is open to question, but then, asking almost any questions about the androids is unwise, whether it’s their taste buds, their scarves or their ‘invulnerability’ (comparing that boast with how many of them cop it, I suspect Oseidon of having really lax advertising standards). And it would have been funnier for them to have built a Doctor android that looks like Pertwee and, when Tom turned up, gone ‘Bugger!’ This is much less a UNIT story than an anti-UNIT story, a ‘UNIT Unbound’ where everything’s seen from the wrong angle. Invasion of the Dinosaurs might have one officer gone rogue, but here the whole organisation’s the problem, with little contact with the Doctor and of no use to the plot, its head gone AWOL and, jarringly, the last appearance of two friendly servicemen being as pitiless doppelgängers. The explanation lies in double-booked actors and slightly careless scripting, but if it had been a master plan to wean the audience off UNIT, it couldn’t have been more cleverly or cruelly structured. The villains even satirise the cosy old relationship of blustering scientific adviser and frustrated military man.
Behind the Androids
“Science, Chedaki! Science will make the Kraals invincible!”Who – or what – is behind this take-over? Intelligent machines rebelling against humanity? Home-grown mad scientists, mounting an invasion of the Earthmen? Or could all those distorted shots hinting at a hideous form – before the director fluffs their big reveal as ‘two of them having a chat’ – mean that there’s an alien threat behind it all? Well, yes. It’s the rough, ugly Kraals. Considering the other UNIT Files story, the Kraals have a bit of a look of a highly – well, moderately – evolved triceratops, but they’re really more like rhinoceroses. It’s one of those moments to weigh up different periods of Doctor Who: if you want a space rhino, the Judoon are a better design than the Kraals, but if you want a decent Sontaran, go to 1975, not the ballet dancers of 2008. Come to think of it, the Judoon don’t just make better rhinos but better Sontarans than the modern Sontarans, too. And just to complete the circle, next month a several-times-Sontaran is going to be playing a Kraal… This is one of the few Who stories that points up the tension between organic and mechanical but separates them – the grumpy Kraals and the passionless androids – rather than combining them in one body like the Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans and others. Yet there’s a touch here, too, of Terry Nation’s first Dalek history: Martin Friend as Kraal leader Styggron is the original Dalek to whom cold, destructive science is the answer; Roy Skelton as his military subordinate Chedaki is the warlike but dumb original Thal, and of course he’s best known in Doctor Who for playing Daleks (you may recognise his voice from other famous TV roles, too; good, good. That is a good idea).
‘And Clarins will make us beautiful!’
Milton Johns is great fun as their human ally, the slimy traitor – he does a lot of those – Guy Crayford, which is handy, as his performance has a lot of ‘characterisation’ to paper over. He starts off cold and snippy; before long, he’s puppyishly explaining the Kraal plan, a strangely sympathetic sort of Stockholm’s Syndrome wheedling. And along the way, he’s so desperate to kill the Doctor that he seems almost feverishly psychotic – until Styggron finally decides to go along with him, at which point he becomes Mr Brainwashed Peacenik, clinging to a promise of no killing. The androids, which have even less will of their own, are just as bad, shooting at the Doctor only until he stops in front of them, at which they too, sportingly, stop in order to give him a ‘Take me to your leader’ moment (though Tom’s ad-lib is a better line). And as for the ‘too much information’ android who blabs at the finale… I won’t give my full list of 30, but Lawrence Miles’ and Tat Wood’s About Time 4 is representative of critical opinion: “Things That Don’t Make Sense: The Kraal plan. All of it. Where do we start?”
I’ll start and finish my more measured pick of nonsenses here with a couple of my favourites which are also (taking them more seriously) Terry Nation’s. Sarah Jane asks the Doctor about radiation: “Wouldn’t that make us ill?” “Well, it’s not that bad, yet,” then “Any level of radiation is too high,” as well as “Soon it’ll be uninhabitable.” These can’t all be true, but they’re all in the same scene. There’s also one of those Doctor Who viruses in a bottle where one drop could kill the whole human race (as I can’t help thinking each time I drip in my eye-ear drops) but which, when inevitably spilled, stays exactly where it’s required to be rather than even the most minute particles spraying out and killing everyone in the room – much the same as in an early ’80s story which shares a similar but much more dull plot and, remarkably, has very much less convincing androids. So you get the feeling that to destroy humanity, the androids are going to have to run about the world and personally touch everyone with individual drops of virus, like a deadly game of tag. For such a genocidal bunch, too, the Kraals seem very squeamish: they keep just tying up humans who they’re going to kill anyway, hope Sarah Jane will drink something nasty out of sight rather than killing her outright, and shy away from a tiny but crucial mutilation. As for the infamous twist at the end… Well, you won’t believe your eyes. Or his.
Barry Letts’ direction has many of his signature touches in it, the good and the bad: his rapid intercutting of heavy close-ups is very effective; his enthusiasm for the magic of matting-in by CSO bluescreen is as misplaced as ever. The great locations include one of the series’ more intriguing-looking big concrete installations, but it’s not improved by plonking a huge and hugely unconvincing dish on top. For three weeks now (plus two different courses of antibiotics, and one of eye drops in my ear – yes, you read that right; no, I don’t know why) I’ve had a painful and dizzying ear inflammation, a mixture of perforated eardrum, middle ear infection and outer ear infection, and as I feel it throb and swell I keep picturing it as a giant CSO tin ear sticking out of my head. Or at least one of Styggron’s. Sadly, the strange concrete outside isn’t matched by the studio corridors of the Space Defence Station, which are exceptionally naff (and the spyholes hilarious, particularly alongside CCTV). The Kraal base is quite interesting, like an old battleship not so much welded as melted together, though its jagged ‘teeth’ are insane as airlocks or blast doors. You might enjoy the patriotic red, white and blue flickering missile tube-like lights within – Top of the Pops did; I’ve seen a clip of them behind the Jam, a few years later. On a less tuneful note, regular ’70s Doctor Who composer Dudley Simpson had been at a high point in 1975, with his previous score – Pyramids of Mars – arguably a career best. Despite the odd eerie tickings and whirrings, though, he suddenly has an unfortunate off-day here, with most of his music overplayed and a particularly inappropriate kitchen sink bombast when androids – or even Sarah Jane – wander in the woods.
Special Features and Secret Daleks
The DVD commentary is once again hosted by Toby Hadoke, here with producer Philip Hinchcliffe, villains Milton Johns and Martin Friend and assistant director Marion McDougall (a “very great fan” who simply loved working on the series). Milton steals it with his anecdotes and his attitude, not least in remembering that he did a Patrick Troughton story with a good Doctor and an evil Doctor – that’s all of his, really, isn’t it? People still stop him at the National and ask about the series – one year he was very excited about doing a BBC Wednesday Play with a young Ian McKellen and an ailing Jack Hawkins, he says, but nobody remembered that three months after it went out, while everyone still watches Doctor Who. He praises Tom Baker, Nick Courtney, Paddy Newell and scary stories for kids, too. I like him. So does Toby. And Milton likes Toby liking him:
“I can take any amount of criticism, as long as it’s unalloyed praise. Like most actors.”Milton’s observation that “Give an actor an eyepatch and you can’t go wrong” sets Toby off on how much of this story has been borrowed by Steven Moffat; he’s right, of course, and though last year’s eyepatch was more plausible, I have to admit I prefer watching this to several of those. Shhh. Philip’s at his best cackling at scaring kid visitors, though mostly a little more downbeat, regretting not giving a better send-off to Ian Marter’s Harry Sullivan and being rather bleak about the Kraal design, thinking them too crude for surgeons – Martin disagrees, having enjoyed being frightening (and having a laser gun, which Toby really ought to know wasn’t one). But the last word has to go to Milton: the only notice he’s ever treasured was a Yorkshire paper calling his death in King Lear “baroque”.
A secret Dalek in the extras is Nicholas Pegg, who writes this disc’s production subtitles – not quite as striking as the previous set, but still an entertaining and informative read. He likes taking us through Terry Nation’s tropes; he doesn’t like a stock BBC backcloth. There are details of cuts, ad-libs and Kenneth Williams – as well as the most in-depth history of the non-speaking extras (including, naturally, one who was usually a Dalek) I’ve read on one of these. I think I recognise pretty, dark-haired, vividly blue-eyed “Young Farmhand” Simon Christie in his splash close-up as someone who got another shocked close-up as the Autons attacked, but the Spearhead From Space notes are less comprehensive… There aren’t quite any deleted scenes here, but we do get the soundtrack of several alternative takes from “The Enemy Within” (now, why didn’t they keep that title? Or any other?).
Two excellent half-hour special features vie for your attention. Nick Briggs, another Dalek, hosts The Village That Came to Life from East Hagbourne – and from the pub, with some of the children who mobbed Tom in 1975. It’s good for the producers, a little short on actors, nicely held together by Nick, but my favourite part’s still the first few seconds, done in the style of The Avengers. Ahhh. Life After Who with Philip Hinchcliffe, presented by his daughter Celina, is a terrific overview of arguably Doctor Who’s most successful producer’s extraordinary career, relaxed, informative and even having shelled out a bit of cash to get clips of some – but not all – of his later work. Private Schulz is a favourite of his and, I have to admit, one I’d love to see again now I’m old enough to appreciate it. But the most exciting extra for me, improbably, is a pdf for which there’s even an absurd TV ad – complete with, at last, a fully-fledged Dalek (with someone both expected and unexpected doing the voice). Yes, this DVD boasts not just Radio Times clippings but two whole sets of cut-out-and-keep Weetabix Doctor Who card ‘figures’ and games. I was thrilled by those as a boy – and not just me, as these fantastic new versions from Vworp Vworp! illustrate – despite loathing the cereal itself to the point that it was one of only two foods that physically made me gag. Shockingly, my Mum refused to buy a ton of the boxes and just throw the disgusting stuff away, so I only ever had a handful of them. Thank you, BBC DVDs!
Doctor Who and the Android Invasion by Terrance Dicks
I have a soft spot for the novelisation, too, though in a different way to the TV version; while television’s The Android Invasion is exciting, fun, and bright in one sense but definitely not in the other, the book is brisk, more serious, and tries to patch up a few of the holes… But has a terrific cover (Tom lashed to the war memorial again, memorably captured by Roy Knipe. And Styggron. Even the Pinnacle line-up’s pretty good) and an intriguing set of questions on the back blurb, only partly frustrated by every reader knowing the A-word before reading them:
“The Doctor and Sarah arrive safely back on Earth – or do they?By the time he came to this in 1978, Terrance Dicks was writing rather a lot of books and no longer fleshing them out very much: it’s down to what would be the standard 25,000 words and rather than additions (save for one cut scene being reinstated), surprisingly, loses a fair bit of what was on TV. Mainly, it misses – and suffers from missing – the ad-libbed banter between the Doctor and Sarah Jane, making the lines much less interesting and losing the whole lovely coda between them. That makes for the most abrupt ending of any Terrance book, replacing a relaxed stroll with a determined full stop of a final paragraph in which the old script editor wraps up the loose ends with a thud, just as he throws in a line just above it to fix the complaint everyone has about the Doctor android but that doesn’t bother me. Earlier on, he has the Doctor announce, “Let’s try the village inn,” which is somehow more old-fashioned and safer than letting Tom loose on the pub. And yet there are many deft touches – what’s under the mechanic’s visor, an aside on Kraal history, a very effective sequence as Sarah Jane is rushed to a nightmarish ‘hospital’, and one sly in-joke on when poor Tom’s a-cold:
“Why does the mysterious soldier march straight over a cliff – and then reappear unharmed?
“Why is a picturesque country village at first deserted – then filled with mindless zombies?
“And why are their best friends suddenly trying to kill them?”
“The Doctor squelched towards the village, thankful that at least some of his clothes were still dry. Luckily his Time Lord constitution was strongly resistant to colds.”
On the whole, it’s an efficient book rather than an outstanding one, but in the closing few chapters there’s another cut – or series of cuts – that shows Terrance has thought about the story structure as well as his flurry of plot fixes on the final page. It’s true that on TV there’s a tiny peek that gives away the ‘evil Doctor’ android too early, but Terrance goes quite the other way. Don’t look for my “Golden Moment” in his book, because it isn’t there; he clearly made the decision that the best moment to reveal the android Doctor to the reader was when it first confronts the real one, making a dangerous turn in the plot for him suddenly much worse, and so simply drops all its earlier appearances. This makes for one dramatic moment, but at the price of losing one of my favourites, several others… And rather arbitrarily having Sarah Jane vanish for a whole chapter. If I’d rewritten that bit, I’ve sometimes thought, I’d at least have written something for her to do in the meantime. But then, if I’d been rewriting The Android Invasion, I’d make a few more changes than that. Like some other stories I loved as a boy that don’t seem much cop now, wouldn’t it be fun to rework them and make the good bits shine? Revenge of the Cybermen, for example, I’ve had a think about; Underworld, I’ve even published some ideas for on here; but the one I’d most love to have the time, energy and creativity to take over is The Android Invasion. Starting with the title. Let’s see, now… What are Terrance’s chapters? Well, there’s Takeover, of course, among some of his more familiar ones (Hunted, Captured, The Countdown), but Strange Arrival has a ring to it, or Village of Terror for the traditional Doctor Who schlock. How about Hero’s Return…?
*I saw this photo and, as (spoilers) even the villains join in with the catchphrase this time, was instantly reminded to nick this joke. Then had to search about online to remember who made it first. Turns out it was the Wife In Space.
Labels: Books, British Politics, Doctor Who, Douglas Adams, DVD Details, Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Jon Pertwee, London, Pictures, Reviews, Sarah Jane Smith, The Android Invasion, The Avengers, The Brigadier, Tom Baker
