Nightmare of Eden (4)

 

Creature From the Pit was a costume drama with some mock-gothic horror and a quite imaginatively stencilled in alien world. That’s the kind of thing that Doctor Who does, and the kind of thing that Doctor Who does pretty well. But Nightmare of Eden, with its corridors, monsters, ray-guns, space-ships, and gobbledegook, is much closer to the Doctor Who which resides in the popular imagination. The BBC was never very good at this kind of thing, and Star Wars had raised the bar considerably. When Michael Grade wanted to cancel Doctor Who, it was things like Nightmare of Eden that he pointed at. 

Creature of the Pit was very silly. But it owned its silliness. Rightly or wrongly, it adopted an arch, pantomime tone, and ran with it. I didn’t much care for the Doctor teaching himself mountaineering from a book while dangling over the edge of a precipice: but it is reasonably funny and reasonably in keeping with the character we understand Tom Baker’s Doctor to be. Nightmare of Eden has some aspirations to be a science fiction story. It deals with a very serious subject. But comedy keeps inveigling itself into a basically serious script. Not light relief; but baked-in silliness which tells us that this is not the kind of story about genocide and drug-abuse that we ought to be taking seriously. 

Lewis Flander was hardly a big name: but he was an experienced and presumably competent actor. (His CV includes Henry Higgins, Pier Gynt, Shylock and Mr Darcy.) His character, if you take it at all literally, is as evil as anyone who the Doctor has come up against. He’s talking in terms of kidnapping whole species and using their desiccated remains to hook whole planets on civilisation-destroying drugs. And yet someone — possibly Tom Baker himself — must have taken him to one side and said “Lewis, Lewis, we think it would be absolutely marvellous if you played Prof Tryst as Peter Sellers playing Doctor Strangelove. We’ll even get make-up to find some evil glasses for you.”

What is going on? Is this a seasoned actor forced to play a script he doesn’t think a great deal of, and deciding a silly accent is the only way to make it bearable? Or has someone higher up made a decision that if we are going to make a kids TV show involving a genocidal drug-pusher, he had better be a comedic, parodic genocidal drug-pusher? 

In Episode Four, we see the ship’s security guards and the horrible customs men drive the mandrels  along the corridors, using their ray guns as cattle prods. From time to time one of the mandrels gets out of line and gets a jolly good zap. (This is another scene that would be more comfortable if the aliens had been more beast-like and less humanoid.) One of the guards cries out  “the guns are failing” and the mandrels turn around and start to attack them. Just in the nick of time the Doctor appears, and gently takes control of the aliens using his K9 dog whistle. It isn’t clear if he is trying to be a sheep-dog or a school-crossing-patrol officer or the Pied Piper: but he ushers the mandrels through the screen and back into their own world. 

As we watch the Screen on the Screen, we see the Doctor disappear out of frame, pursued by the mandrels , which attack him, out of shot. We don’t see the attack, or the fight: but we hear the Doctor’s reactions. He says “oo” and “ouch” and “aargh”, rather as if he was stepping into a bathtub that was slightly too hot. Lumps of foliage are thrown from the wings onto the stage. The Doctor says, and I promise I am not making this up “Oh my arms! My legs! My everything!” before reappearing with his jacket in tatters (but otherwise, so far as we can see, uninjured.)

This is pure pantomime. More specifically, it is the kind of thing that would happen in a Carry On movie or Crackerjack skit. You don’t show the fight: you show the hero exiting and re-entering in a dishevelled state. It’s the equivalent of making Andy Capp and Flo disappear into a whirlwind when they are having a domestic fight. 

Why would you do this? Is it Tom Baker’s own input? One can imagine him refusing to play the gobbledegook straight, and improvising a slap-stick routine of his own. Is it conceivably a conscious post-modern conceit? The CED looks like a movie screen or a proscenium arch; so perhaps characters crossing the threshold ought to start obeying theatrical or pantomime conventions? Or is it simply a  signal to not take any of this nonsense seriously  — to soften a script which is both conceptually heavy and intellectually demanding? 

And then we have the aliens. 

You would have to have a heart of stone to see the climax of Episode One, when a mandrel appears through a hole in the spaceship wall, without laughing. The chase through the corridors in Episode Four regularly showed up in  “wasn’t Doctor Who terrible in the olden days” clip-shows. 

But let’s be clear: there is nothing inept about the actual construction of the creatures. No wires or actorly Y-fronts come accidentally into shot. The performers seem to be able to move around without bumping into each other; they even try their hardest to mime, a bit. The costumes are not obviously made of bubble-wrap and they studiously avoid resembling giant cocks. 

I theorised that the unfortunate monster in Invisible Enemy was the result of a simple transcription error: someone ordered a Nucleus of the Swarm and received a Nucleus of the Prawn. I have no immediate explanation for the mandrels. I can only assume that they were  intended to look like this. Someone read the script, and said “This calls for some frightening, but slightly tragic aliens, who the bad-guy is going to melt down and turn into cocaine. Let’s do them as Muppets.” 

We know that there was disquiet, among the production team and some of the actors, about the thematic content of Nightmare of Eden. Maybe children’s TV shouldn’t be dealing with drugs at all; and if it is, it definitely shouldn’t glamourise them in any way. So is it impossible that the script was intentionally sabotaged to hold the difficult subject matter at arms length? The idea of turning a sentient life form into a recreational chemical is pretty horrible: so perhaps Graham Williams  adopted the sensible strategy of depicting the mandrel as obviously cartoon creatures that you couldn’t possibly feel sorry for? 

My only other conjecture is that Tryst is so obviously evil; and the results of the Vraxoin so extreme; and the customs men so ludicrously over-zealous that Bob Baker intended the story as a satire against unrealistic and paranoid “just say no” propaganda. But I can’t construct a consistent reading based on that premise. 

 To the extent that I have worked out what is meant to be going on, I now think Nightmare of Eden contains the embryo of a perfectly good episode of Star Trek or Blakes 7, even if it isn’t quite the kind of thing Doctor Who does best. It is a pity that in 1979, the BBC still thought that “doing Star Wars badly” was a viable direction for their venerable franchise. Almost no-one loves the Fourth Doctor more than I do, but in these episodes he comes across as petulant and annoying and rather bored. (“Nothing is inexplicable” “Then explain it” “Its inexplicable.”) 

And I am approaching the story from the point of view of a fan and scholar, who is prepared to freeze-frame I-Player and switch on the subtitles when it is not at all clear who has been killed by what in the interface between the ships. The original target audience didn’t have that option.

Nightmare of Eden is quite a good Doctor Who story. But it is an absolutely terrible piece of television. 

Nightmare of Eden (3)

 

Who remembers the Banana Splits? 

They were a group of live-action anthropomorphic animals who played bubble-gum pop music, provided the frame for a Saturday morning cartoon anthology TV show, and had their theme tune covered by Bob Marley. 

At some point after the live action series had passed into folk memory there was an attempt to revive them as a cartoon with an actual storyline. The conceit was that the live-action characters jumped into, or through, a magic billboard and became part of the picture. They were cartoon characters when they were inside the bill-board, but returned to being live-action beasts when they emerged from it.

Children’s TV always did like to play around with the Fourth Wall. One of the big breakthroughs of Play School (the BBC 2 show for pre-schoolers) was that the presenters understood that they had to talk to the camera as if it was a child. This meant that every little boy in England thought that Brian Cant was addressing him directly; and Mr Cant, in turn, often pretended that he could hear the kids talking back at him. Blue Peter, with its emphasis on letters, badges, competitions, appeals, and pyromaniac Girl Guides arguably made that wall permeable in a rather more literal sense. 

When I was a child, I was a little bit too clever for my own good, and inclined to over-think TV shows and stories. Thank goodness I grew out of that. It troubled me that pantomime characters inhabited a world of their own (with a past and a future and rooms and corridors that we never saw) while at the same time being continuously aware of the audience. “Because it’s a theatrical artifice” was not an answer that I was prepared to accept, so I formulated a theory that the stories took place in, let’s call it, The Pantoverse, which suffered from the random occurrence of, for the sake of argument, dimensional rifts. Robin Hood was consciously aware that, near a particular tree in Sherwood Forest there existed a star-gate: a window-between-the-world through which he could watch the children of earth watching him, and solicit advice as to who may or may not have been behind him. Which is presumably why so much of the action manages to take place alongside that particular tree.

In Nightmare of Eden, this seems to be literally true. Tryst (the Zoologist with the silly accent) can look at alien lifeforms through the screen of his Magic TV: but there are rifts or dimensional portals or weak points or at any rate, something, through which the aliens can look out at him. 

Of course, Tryst doesn’t really have a Magic TV.  What he has (obviously) is a Continuous Event Transmuter, which “converts specimens into electromagnetic signals” and stores them on a crystal. It isn’t a mere recording device: the specimens “are actually in the crystal” where they continue to “live and evolve”. The projection screen allows Tryst to observe what is happening inside the crystal. The collision of the two ships creates an anomaly which allows two way traffic between the world inside the crystal and the world outside it, via the screen. As you would expect.

This isn’t an entirely original thought. In Carnival of Monsters, the side-show busker Vog displays captive aliens in a device called the miniscope, which appears to physically shrink specimens to microscopic size. Superman’s opponent Brainiac used to physically shrink cities and display them in bottles. I recall a Jackonory tale about an elf that turned actual buildings into tiny replicas. 

Google AI tells me that this was “almost certainly” After the Goat Man; “almost certainly” The Witch in Our Attic, and “almost certainly” and Older Kind of Magic. It is almost certainly none of the above. ChatGPT, to its credit, explained why it didn’t know.

There has been a certain amount of debate about how teleportation would work: do we envisage the cast of Star Trek being whooshed bodily from location to location through dimensional space tunnels; or is the device somehow dismantling the traveller’s atoms in one location, and reassembling them in the correct configuration somewhere else? And if it’s the latter, isn’t the teleport effectively destroying the original person and creating a new, indistinguishable replica? And if so, does that matter? 

One answer may be: if you believe in an immortal soul, then yes; if you do not believe in an immortal soul, then no. 

Or, put another way: if you think being killed and replaced with a copy is different from being instantly moved from one place to another, then perhaps something very like an immortal soul is what you in fact believe in. 

I can’t see how a set of signals stored on a very small crystal can be anything other than a data-set: an atomic recipe for making a very accurate replica of the environment you have destroyed. But the Doctor and Romana are clearly conceived of as stepping through the screen into a physical space beyond it. 

Granted that the creatures we see on the CET screen were already in danger of extinction, has Tryst preserved actual living specimens, or merely taken very lifelike 3D photographs of them? (Invisible Enemy equivocated about whether the “replicas” of the Doctor and Leela were to be thought of as clones, 3D photographs, or some kind of avatar.)

Nightmare of Eden is not remotely interested in these conundrums. The CET is simply a cog in a pretty complicated plot machine. We know that someone is smuggling drugs; and we know that there are no drugs on the ship: so it follows that the drugs must be hidden on one of Tryst’s crystals: that is to say, inside one of the simulated worlds on the big screen. But where? 

 By the end of Episode Two, a number of the aliens which have escaped from the CET are rampaging around the ship. The Big Reveal is that when they are killed, their bodies disappear, Yoda-like, and turn into huge piles of white powder. 

Well, if giant Sandworms can secrete Plot Device Powder as part of their natural life cycle, I suppose we shouldn’t balk at purple aliens who are literally made of cocaine. But I can’t help wondering if Bob Baker’s original idea might have been a bit less silly. It would have been much easier to swallow the idea that the Mandrel body happened to contain a substance that was addictive to humans, which could be refined and extracted by, say, a very well trained biologist? Perhaps the idea of them spontaneously turning into drugs at the moment of death was a visual representation of that more complex idea? And while we are speculating: supposing the Mandrel had not been semi-intelligent humanoids that stagger around the set on two legs. Suppose they had been animals — gerbils or buffalo or worms — that Tryst was planning to exploit? Would that have made the whole thing more plausibly dark and less grotesquely silly? (Conversely, had they been actual humans with personalities, would that have made Tryst more interestingly depraved?) 

Tryst’s plan is to transmit the contents of the Eden Crystal to his accomplice on the other ship; and then to use the CET to restore the digitised Mandrel to reality; with the intention of harvesting the drugs at a later date. The Doctor manages to reverse the process, so the smugglers are transmitted into the projection, from where they can be extracted and handed over to the authorities. 

Some writers say that science fiction is very easy to write. A mainstream writer needs to come up with a drug-smuggling plot that is at least somewhat related to drug-manufacture and distribution in the real world; and he probably needs to do some research into enforcement and detection methods to make their capture convincing. But the science fiction writer is free to just say “hocus pocus screen-o catch-o”. 

Bob Baker has actually set up something rather clever. But if you haven’t been paying full attention to the Doctor’s chat, you might suspect him of using arbitrary technobabble. 

Magic, or science? It is implied that the CET functions according to TARDIS adjacent principals: if a Police Box can be vastly bigger on the inside than the outside, then why shouldn’t Tryst’s Give-a-Show Projector be allowed to see a world in a grain of sand? The Doctor and Romana regard the machine as primitive and unsafe; but only at a technological level: they talk about its spatial integrator, its holistic retention circuit, and its dimensional osmosis damper. (I suppose if purple aliens made of heroin are spilling through the screen, you really should have dampened your dimensional osmosis.) 

I think this is a bit of a pity. Humans always treat the TARDIS dimensions as a thing of wonder, but it now seems that quite clever humans can build machines based on similar principles. But since Deadly Assassin, the Time Lords have been little more than a very advanced but correspondingly decadent alien race. Two stories ago a quite clever human with a silly accent constructed a perfectly viable Time Machine. 

What happened to the magic of Doctor Who? It turned out to be indistinguishable from any sufficiently advanced technology.

Nightmare of Eden (2)

 

Bob Baker is a lovely little plotter. And he has a knack for dreaming up out-there, borderline surreal science-fiction ideas. It was one of his scripts that injected a miniaturised clone of the Doctor into his own bloodstream to combat an evil, sentient microbe. Nightmare of Eden is a network of set-ups and pay-offs that culminate in a logically satisfying fourth episode. But is a densely plotted “Howdunnit” which depends on mind-bending sci-fi imagery necessarily what you want to watch between Basil Brush and Larry Grayson on a wet Saturday in November? 

So. There are two spaceships that have, due to a terrible hyperspace miscalculation become embedded or fused inside each other. This does weird but ill-defined things to the local structure of reality: when Tom Baker ventures into the interface between the two ships, the picture goes all wobbly, as sometimes happens on Top of the Pops. 

There is a brilliant scientist with a silly accent but no robot dog, who has invented a giant projection TV with a permeable screen. Monsters can get out of the picture and threaten people on the ship, and people on the ship can get inside the picture. He must be very brilliant indeed, because this invention is only a sideline: he’s primarily a zoologist, trying to catalogue every life form in the galaxy. Either the galaxy is very sparsely populated, or else Bob Baker is as confused as Terry Nation about the meaning of the word. 

Worse: someone is smuggling narcotics on board the big ship: the navigator is already an addict. It isn’t too hard to guess the identity of the drug-runners: the mystery is how they are getting away with it. The spaceship comes fitted with an infallible Drug Detector, according to which there are definitely no drugs on board. 

Was it TS Eliot who said that Doctor Who could communicate without being understood? There plenty of stories where the best approach is to sit back and enjoy the fact that the Doctor is having a sword fight in a remote castle, or that the Loch Ness Monster is menacing the Houses of Parliament, and not worry to much about the why’s and wherefore’s. And in fairness, plenty happens in Nightmare of Eden. The monsters galumph along corridors, killing people and getting killed. The Doctor and Romana are menaced by vicious foliage in a jungle on the other side of the Magic TV screen, and are rescued by an square jawed space agent who has been hiding inside the projection. They are arrested on suspicion of drug-running by two stupid and zealous customs men.  This is all fairly good fun. But Bob Baker seems to be labouring under the misconception that we are keeping track of how it all fits together.

In Episode One, we hear that Tryst (the zoologist) and Della (his colleague/assistant) spent time on a planet called, for no reason I can work out, Eden, and that during the expedition, a third member of the team was killed. Shortly after hearing this information, we see on the Magic TV  Screen that a human is hiding in the foliage. In Episode Two, we learn that the dead man was named Stott, and a very close friend of Della’s. In Episode Three, the Doctor and Romana jump through the screen into the Eden environment where they encounter a magnificently heroical space-agent named, you guessed it Stott. This is a perfectly good set up with a perfectly good pay-off. But the format drip feeds plot to us in twenty minute doses. There are no re-runs, synopsis, or even so much as a “Previously On…” voice over. And in those days, you couldn’t freeze frame, rewind, or switch the subtitles on, as I had to several times while writing this review. 

I am afraid in 1979, the most common response to the Episode Three reveal would have been “Who the hell is Stott?” 

In the final instalment, the Doctor catches the drug-runners. And he catches them in a genuinely clever and surprising way. They get entrapped on the wrong side of the Magic TV screen. I don’t recall having seen anything quite like this before. And it happens for a pretty good, witty, story-consistent reason. But if you’ve not been paying full attention, or if, god forbid, you had to go to the Sunday School concert rather than watch Episode Three, you may find yourself asking  “what the **** just happened.”

Nightmare of Eden (1)

 

People who don’t like science fiction sometimes claim that science fiction is difficult to understand.

Which is fair enough. Genre fiction targets particular demographics. The writer of horse-racing stories doesn’t go back to first principles and explain how betting odds work. A novelist whose hero is a premiership soccer star can assume an audience which knows the rules of English football. So the writer of a tale about space-ships and robots may take it for granted that his readership is au fait with basic scientific ideas. People who failed their general science A level might well find it all a bit bewildering. 

Is this what the people who “can’t understand science fiction” are complaining about? “One of the characters started talking about xenoforming and tachyons, and I have no idea what those words meant.” Maybe: but I think that in many cases, the people who “can’t understand” sci-fi have simply never learned to read it. 

I think that many of them have acquired the habit of  “zoning out” during exposition. In mainstream and literary fiction, that is often a  good strategy. Mainstream writers often feel the need to describe in some detail what the spy had for dinner; or to regale you with cheerful facts about the state of sanitation in early nineteenth century Paris. This information is rarely pertinent to the denouement. But if you skip the equivalent passages in the first chapter of a science fiction tale, then by chapter ten you won’t have the slightest idea where the hero is, or what he is being chased by, and why you ought to care.

I think the same thing happens when science fiction readers claim not to understand mainstream fiction. Space cadets and scientists do sometimes talk about their feelings and their relationships: nowadays they sometimes even have sex with each other. But those passages are often eminently skippable roughage; where in proper grown up novels they may be the whole point. If the sci-fi averse reader never learned to read science fiction, the hard-core fan may never have learned to read anything else.

A decade ago, a group of conspiracy theorists started to argue that emotions and feelings had been illegitimately insinuated into science fiction by a cabal of militant feminists as part of a plot to destroy western civilisation. That is an admittedly extreme position. But I think most of us have heard people saying things like “I get that there is a dude and a girl in a posh house who are interested in each other but keep pretending that they are not — but when is the story going to start?” 

The conspiracy theorists are  now running America. 

Terrance Dicks said that the purpose of Doctor Who was to ensure that the BBC did not have to transmit 20 minutes of dead air on a Saturday night. He was making a joke: but it was a joke with a serious point behind it. We now live in a media environment where every episode of Doctor Who takes on a massive, disproportionate significance: there can be an eighteen month build up to a single 45 minute episode, with speculations and post-mortems in the quality newspapers as well as the fan sheets. But it was not always thus. Nightmare of Eden came and went in an era when Doctor Who was pretty much explicitly the amuse bouche before the evening’s main bill of fair: Basil Brush, Doctor Who, Larry Grayson, Shirley Bassey, Secret Army and most importantly, Dallas. 

About a hundred thousand people bought Doctor Who Monthly. About a thousand paid an annual subscription to the Doctor Who Appreciation Society. But seven million people watched Nightmare of Eden. 

The question is not “Does Nightmare of Eden contain some fascinating and original science fiction ideas?” 

The question is not “Does Nightmare of Eden, watched in one go as an eighty minute movie, hang together as a narrative?” 

The question is not “Does the denouement contain ideas and images that you haven’t seen before?” 

The question is not even “Can you get past the sillier than usual monsters and the hammier than usual acting and appreciate what Bob Baker was driving at?” 

The question is: “What would the 99% of viewers who were not Doctor Who fans have made of it?” 

And the answer is “They would have been completely and utterly bewildered.” 

As, indeed, was I.

 

Almost definitely the worst Doctor Who story ever, or a neglected masterpiece?

The next in my series of retro-reviews of Season Seventeen of Classic Who will be appearing on this blog next week.

But subscribers to my Patreon have already got access to it. 

If you are a Special Fan who would like to support my writing, then why not join them? 

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Creature From The Pit [3]

In the black and white era, Doctor Who was simply one more piece of BBC drama. Not necessarily the greatest drama ever written; certainly not the greatest special effects; maybe not even the greatest cast. But the actors mainly portrayed Thals or Space Agents or Alien Ambassadors in the same way they would have portrayed Ancient Britons and Greek Noblemen in an historical play. By the time we get to Creature From the Pit, this is no longer the case.

People sometimes talk about “bad acting” (often when they want to close down a discussion about a particular show’s merits and demerits.) I am not sure that I know what bad acting means. I can spot people who are not acting, say in village hall pantomimes or school plays. I can identify very good acting: that’s usually the kind which doesn’t seem to be acting at all. Some modern young thespians can convince an audience that she is just improvised “the quality of mercy” on the spot and that no-one has ever spoken those lines before. But when people speak of "bad" acting I think they are more often talking about wrong acting: acting which doesn’t seem appropriate to the scene or genre or story that they are currently watching. Anyone capable of getting cast on the professional stage or prime time TV is perfectly capable of doing their job. And their job is to do what the director tells them. 

"Bad" acting is an artistic decision. 

At the end of Episode One, K9 is apparently dead—killed by giant carnivorous tumbleweed. Lalla Ward has been to the Royal College of Speech and Drama. I assume that if the director had said “I want you to convince us that a much-loved pet has just died” she would have been able to make a decent fist of it. Not necessarily an Oscar-winning performance that leaves audiences in tears, but something which convinced us viewers that she felt a bit sad. She would not have clenched her fists, crossed them across her breast, and said “Good BOY K9!” like a Blue Peter presenter offering a gold badge to a Cub Scout. Nor would she have wave her hands in a similar gesture while plaintively crying “Okay, NINE — Kaaay-NINE” without any human feelings at all.

Granted, Lalla is giving her lines to a tin box. And granted, although this was the third of her stories to be shown, it was the first to be filmed, so she is still finding her feet in the role. She’s delivering lines that were written for Mary Tamm before she has developed her on and offscreen chemistry with Tom Baker. But this is not an amateur trying and failing to appear grief struck. In six months time she will be doing Ophelia alongside Derek Jacobi and Patrick Stewart.

We know that K9 is not dead; and she knows that we know that K9 is not dead. And we wouldn’t care all that much if he was: the Doctor could presumably whip up a Mark III version in the TARDIS workshop. It’s never completely clear if we should think of K9 as a person or a piece of hardware, in any case. Romana spends are fair chunk of this story brandishing him like a phaser. There is not much point in attempting pathos: stylised theatrical camp is the way to go. Lalla ward is doing panto-grief because panto -grief is what the director wants her to do.

There is a similar artificiality to the scenes in which Romana is imprisoned by Torvin and his bandits: but these scenes embrace the theatricality much more effectively. In theory, it could all have been quite terrifying: a group of cut-throat robbers threaten to murder a vulnerable young woman. But of course, we know that this is the one thing that is not going to happen: and crucially, Romana knows it too. The bandits are one-note, comedic figures—almost Pythonesque in their silliness—and their prisoner treats them with complete disdain. While they quarrel about who is in charge, speculate about the value of her clothing, and wonder if she might have a metal leg, Romana tells them off like a supercilious school mistress 

“I am not used to being assaulted by a collection of hairy, grubby little men. I don't intend to get used to it, either. Sit down."

Of course, we don't believe a word of it: we aren't meant to. We don’t believe that anyone, however clever, could cow a group of thugs into submission by force of personality. We don’t believe that anyone, however stupid, could be bluffed that easily into blowing a whistle and summonsing a dog-shaped plot device. And we quite definitely don't believe the comedy bandits would really kill anyone, even after taking a card vote on the question. 

But that’s what makes the scene so watchable. Romana and the bandits don’t belong in the same story; and they both know it.

 

It is certainly regrettable that when actors are called on to play avaricious thieves, they reach for a Yiddish-Cockney accent out of Oliver Twist. But I would probably not put it any stronger than that.

Imagine a world where City of Death had been filmed, not in Paris, but in London, with men in berets on bicycles with onions on their handlebars passing by, while women bought huge loaves of bread? We would have known that it was not Really Paris; but then we knew Destiny of the Daleks was Not Really Skaro. Would it still be a classic story? Would it still be the same classic story? 

There is a black and white episode in which the Daleks and the TARDIS materialise at the top of what is very, very obviously not the Empire State Building. How would that scene have worked if they’d flown William Hartnell and Peter Purves out to New York? But conversely, how would Tom Baker and Lalla Ward’s banter about flying have come across if they’d been in a BBC studio standing in front of a sign saying Tour Eiffel : Etage Trois and not at the top of the actual real life Eiffel Tower?

Imagine a world where Creature From the Pit had the glossy production values that were going to arrive in Season Eighteen. Or, better: imagine it with the special effects budget of New Who. A massive CGI Erastos that really looks like a house-sized brain? Tentacles that undulate and wriggle and don’t remotely suggest a man’s john thomas? ILM quality shots of him flying off in a proton powered space egg? 

And while we are at it: imagine the producer had told John Bryans (the bandit leader) to drop the silly accent and remove the fake beard?

Imagine, in fact, that Graham Chapman had walked on and told everyone to stop being so silly.

Would a silliness amputation leave us with a decent, intelligent bit of science fiction that we don’t need to apologise for? Or would it just spoil the fun? 

Most of us are pretty sure that giant green alien amoebas don’t really exist: so would Tom Baker talking to what is obviously a three dimensional animation really be more “believable” than Tom Baker talking to what is obviously three men in a bag?

And then: imagine Creature From the Pit filmed in black and white, circa 1966. An artefact from a monochrome world where men wear ties and none of the Beatles are dead. Every scene in a studio; every background painted; the Creature portrayed by a puppet on a very visible string, which never appears in the same shot as William Hartnell apart maybe from a giant tentacle that emerges from just outside the frame. But the same script: exactly the same script, allowing perhaps for the lead actor's idiosyncratic improvisations. (“An astronomer, rather, astrologers, you say, my dear boy, dear oh dear.")

Would it sill be far too silly? Or would it be poignantly, nostalgically, touchingly of its time?

Is the silliness of Creature From the Pit the accidental result of deficiencies in the production? Or is it intrinsically there in the script? Is the silliness something we put up with to get at the nugget of science fiction that it contains? Or is the silliness the very thing that keeps us coming back each week?

Somewhere buried at the bottom of the Pit is a perfectly good tale. The planet Chloris is almost entirely forest; with only a single metal mine. The planet Tythonis has lots of metal, but not nearly enough plants to feed all the house-sized chlorophyll munching amoebas who live there. A trade agreement seems like a no-brainer: but Adrasta, who owns the mine, imprisons the trade ambassador in order to maintain her monopoly. In retribution, the other giants brains of Tythonis throw a neutron star at Chlrois. They have no way of recalling it once it is launched, so the Doctor, Erato the Alien and the non-evil Chlorisians have to work together to stop it. Adrasta could have been a quite canny, if callous, plutocrat; but she is mainly characterised by her habit of shouting “seize them” and “kill them” at everything that moves. The first three episodes are essentially light-hearted horror pastiche: genitals aside, the Creature’s Pit is an impressive, dark, bone strewn domain of evilness. But we transition into a space opera much too quickly: the entire Doc Smith routine about neutron stars and aluminium shells is dried and dusted in the last fifteen minutes of Episode Four. I don’t know if I believe that The Pit can have become a site of superstitious dread if the ambassador has only been held there for fifteen years. And I am not sure if I can so easily forgive the Creature for killing all those people because he didn’t really mean it. He wasn’t eating them: he was trying to make friends. He honestly thought that rolling on people and squashing them to death was just how humans communicated. The effects sequence in which Edrasto weaves his shell around the star is one of the least special ever to appear on Doctor Who. But there is something rather endearing about the way in which the whole scheme is put in jeopardy because the Monty Python bandits have pinched the alien’s proton drive. (They seem to be able to get in and out of the palace with astonishing ease.)

If you want to say that Creature From the Pit feels like a pantomime, by all means do so. Certainly the series has become more consciously camp since the departure of Phillip Hinchcliffe. Li-Sen Cheng (in Talons of Weng-Chiang) may have been a dreadful racist caricature and Jago and Litefoot were very broadly drawn indeed: but back then no-one is giving self-consciously ironic performances. You can’t imagine Adrasta making the speech about joining the ancestors in the Jade palace; you certainly can’t imagine Torvin and Edu having the conversation about not being so bally brave when it comes to it.

Perhaps it was an accident; the death of a thousand gags. Perhaps the other actors were forced to deliver broader and broader performances in a desperate attempt to make themselves visible in the face of Tom Baker’s ego. Perhaps the Fourth Doctor’s schoolboy flippancy infected the rest of the cast. But perhaps this was the direction that Williams and Adams honestly thought the show should travel in. The BBC largely caved in to Mary Whitehouse’s complaints about the Doctor Who being too frightening and violent for children. If real horror has been prohibited, then artificial horror may be the only direction left for you to go in.

A good script with a silly cast? A good cast doing the best it can with an irredeemably silly script? A post-modern take on the cliches of Doctor Who, or a genuinely terrible Doctor Who story? Script editor Douglas Adams first novel was climbing the best-seller chart: perhaps silly, absurdist science fiction was precisely what we wanted at the time.

This is the latest of my ongoing commentary on the Tom Baker era of classic Who. If you have enjoyed it, it would absolutely make my day if you click on the link and pledge £5 a month to my Patreon. It's that easy. One little click. You know you want to.  

Creature From the Pit (2)

Pantomime is a uniquely British form of theatre. Unlike Morris dancing and the Mummers’ play, it’s a living, popular tradition, as opposed to one curated by revivalists. Plenty of theatres only remain in business because the annual “panto” season is a guaranteed money-spinner. The BBC reckons there were 260 professional pantomimes in Britain in 2025.

So what is a panto? If you are from outside the UK you may find it hard to understand what all the fuss is about. It’s an annual Christmas entertainment for children; based on fairy tales like Cinderella or Jack and the Beanstalk or folk tales like Robin Hood or Dick Whittington. The storyline plays second fiddle to song-and-dance numbers, pie-in-the-face slapstick routines and “Who’s on first?” skits. Each tale has its own cast of stock characters: almost anyone in England would know that Cinderella’s father is called Baron Hardup and Aladdin’s mother is named Widow Twanky. Cinderella has an entire subplot about Buttons and Dandini that was entirely unknown to the Grimm brothers. There is no fourth wall: all the characters are aware of the audience the whole time, which leads to much raucous audience participation:

“Have you seen the Sheriff, boys and girls? Well if you do be sure and….”

“HE’S BEHIND YOU!”

Oh: and it does weird but entirely innocent things with gender. At least one of the older female characters will be a “dame”--a man in women’s clothes--and the heroic male lead or “principal boy” will often be played by a young woman.

One particular characteristic of a good panto is that it shifts effortlessly between genres and registers. In that respect it’s not unlike Gilbert and Sullivan, and indeed the later, MGM Marx Brothers movies. Although the show will be very broad farce, the protagonists—Cinderella or Aladdin or Prince Charming—will tend to deliver their lines relatively straight--playing romantic romantically and heroic scenes heroically. The giant might be a man on stilts; or a large pair of legs disappearing into the flies; or just the tallest actor the management was able to hire—but Jack will tend to dead-pan his reactions, even if his mother (“Dame Trott”) was making scatological innuendos about patting the cow in the previous scene.Even the smallest members of the audience aren’t remotely scared; but the scenes with the bad guys are played as if they were frightening. Babes in the Wood has largely vanished from the repertoire, because stories about child abduction are no longer thought to be very funny, even if everyone knows the kids are going to be saved by Robin Hood before the curtain call. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs can present difficulties in this regard: the trick is to create a narrative distance between the darkness of the fairy tale and the silliness of the performance. You might have an affable comedian saying “Boys and girls, I am the Huntsman, and my job is to kill Snow White! Do you think I will? Do you think I will?” Walt Disney played the heroine’s “death” for pathos, but the panto dwarfs often engage in comedic howling and bawling. I once saw one Warwick Davies essay the role of “Doc” and deliver an excellent speech beginning “Oh, if only this were a stage play, or perhaps even a classic movie, like, say, Return of the Jedi or Willow, which always have happy endings, but this is real life….”

Tolkien once saw a production of Puss In Boots that used smoke and lighting effects to transform a mouse into an ogre in front of the audience. He said that it was ingeniously done. But he added that if you could have convincingly effected the transformation, then either the audience would have been terrified; or they would have been baffled, as one sometimes is by a conjuring trick. They certainly wouldn’t have believed that they had seen actual magic. Fairy tales require secondary belief: special effects simply provide spectacle. This was one reason that he thought that a movie version of Lord of the Rings would be a terrible idea.

Now: very many Doctor Who fans, if asked what went wrong with Season Seventeen, would say that Graham Williams allowed the show to turn into a pantomime. And I think it is clear what the two formats have in common: the ignoring of the fourth wall; the highly stylised and theatrical acting; the villains who you boo and hiss but are not remotely frightened by; dark and serious stories presented as lighthearted comedy; and special effects where disbelief has to be “not so much suspended as hung, drawn and quartered.”

But surely, you can't blame Graham Williams and Douglas Adams for that? Doctor Who was like that from its very inception? 

Oh no, it wasn’t.

This is the latest of my ongoing commentary on the Tom Baker era of classic Who. If you have enjoyed it, it would absolutely make my day if you click on the link and pledge £5 a month to my Patreon. It's that easy. One little click. You know you want to.