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.

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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.

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Creature From the Pit [1]

Creature From the Pit is good in places.

Creature From the Pit concerns a Pit. At the bottom of the Pit there lurks a Creature. The Creature spends three episodes being monstrous and (apparently) devouring victims; but in the final instalment it turns out to be a sophisticated alien ambassador. The monster is the real victim and the humans are the real monsters.

It’s not the worst idea I have ever heard. Neither, admittedly, is it the most original.

It’s the kind of thing someone who had never seen Doctor Who might have come up with. There are monsters and villains and cliffhangers. It’s nominally science fiction, but it inhabits a kind of fairy tale Ruritania where guards are endlessly being told to seize people and comedic bandits lurk in the woods. But David Fisher had written several perfectly good Doctor Who scripts (including the explicitly Ruritanian Androids of Tara). One would have thought he had a fairly good idea of how Doctor Who worked. In particular you might have expected him to understand the limitations of Doctor Who’s special effects technology.

I mean, honestly: gigantic alien brains, as huge as buildings?

With tentacles?

That weave metal cocoons around neutron stars?

Have you met the BBC visual effects department?

Creature from the Pit is quite silly. At the end of Episode One the Doctor jumps into The Pit; in Episode Two he is discovered hanging onto the side with one arm. He takes a book out of his pocket. We can’t see the title, so he reads it for us: Everest in Easy Stages: He opens it: “It’s in Tibetan”. Then he pulls another book out of his pocket. This time we can see the cover. Teach Yourself Tibetan.

It’s a bit like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan. Doesn’t Koko in the Mikado open a letter and exclaim “It’s in Japanese!” And it follows a kind of Marx Brothers logic. Remember the scene in Animal Crackers when Chico is going to apprehend the art thieves by questioning everyone in the house next door? “But there is no house next door.” “Then we’re a-gonna build a-one!”

On the other hand, it’s a fine piece of comic acting. Tom Baker has always been fond of delivering very serious lines in a light hearted way: and talking about trivia as if the fate of the universe depended on it. Throughout the scene, he acts as if he really is dangling over a pit with a monster at the bottom of it; he is slightly panicked as he tries to juggle two books with one hand, while hanging on for dear life with the other.

And the Doctor can canonically pull funny things out of his pocket. Remember in Stones of Blood how he just happened to have a lawyers wig when called on to defend himself? (Remember Harpo Marx’s swordfish in Horse Feathers? Baker’s curly hair and idiot grin was sometimes likened to Harpo.) I assume there is a six disc Big Finish boxed set in which the Doctor finds an orphan TARDIS and its chameleon circuit gets jammed in the form of a dimensionally transcendental jacket. Or perhaps the Doctor always nips into the future before an adventure and stocks his pockets with things he is likely to need.

But, but, but: why can’t he understand the text of the book? (Fan-fiction idea: "How the Great Intelligence arranged that Tibetan should be the one language opaque to the Time Lord telepathic translation gift”?) But if he can’t, how can he read the title? And can he really absorb that much information that quickly? And would a book on climbing mountains really help him to get out of a pit?

It’s a sight gag. Something has to happen while the Doctor dangles, and it might as well be this. I wonder if an earlier script had him remark that he learned mountain-climbing from a charming chap named Tenzin Norgay, and Douglas Adams substituted the mountaineering book because it was funnier?

Creature from the Pit contains literally the worst monster ever to appear on Doctor Who: and that is saying a good deal. The Creature is intended to be a giant green brain with tentacles. It looks like, and presumably was, some extras jumping up and down in a large green polythene bag. After this story, tentacles were informally banned from Doctor Who. There is no satisfactory way of not making them ridiculous. Wires? Some sort of sock puppet arrangement? Static props that the actors manipulate themselves? CGI was far in the future, so stop motion would have been the only way to go.

And there is no nice way of saying this: they look like willies. Most Doctor Who websites are surprisingly coy about this point. “The phallic appearance of the creature’s proboscis,” they write. “It resembled a giant phallus.” If you only know the story by reputation, you will be surprised at just how much like a man’s cock it actually looks. The joke is clearly not lost on Tom Baker, who has a lovely time seeing what he can get away with. At the beginning of Episode Three, he tries to communicate with the creature—which doesn’t have a mouth, or ears, or a head. He tries to put the tentacle in his mouth, talk into it, then puts it to his ear as if he were using an old-fashioned telephone. Or, if we are being honest, as if he were fellating it.

But it isn’t really the double entendre which is the problem. The problem is that the Doctor used to be clever. In Planet of Evil and Pyramids of Mars he was almost godlike. And, now here he is, sucking tentacles and climbing out of pits using a phrase book. If the creature’s appendage had looked less like a dick and more like, say, an ear, the scene would be scarcely less absurd.

But here is the thing.

The scene in which Tom Baker sucks alien foreskin is unforgivable; he and Matt Irvine ought to be ashamed of themselves. But what makes it worse is that it comes at the end of a scene which perfectly encapsulates everything which made me fall in love with Doctor Who in the first place. I am not here talking about elusive magic in the nostalgic sense. I am talking about Tom Baker, the benevolent alien, facing down a huge and terrifying monster—and treating it as if it were a terrified child. “I am not going to hurt you…how could I hurt you.” In the same episode, Lalla Ward has essentially to give her lines to a tin-box (the immobile K9) and she can’t do it with any conviction. But we can almost believe that the giant green sleeping bag is a strange alien life form, because, in that moment, Tom Baker seems to. It’s theatre; conceptual art: we respond to the idea, not the execution: that this man, this alien, this, if you insist, Time Lord, is treating a gigantic man-eating brain as if it were a rescue puppy. Other actors have played the Doctor. There were some months in 2011 when I was genuinely in love with Matt Smith. But it is this actor, this persona, and these kinds of scenes that makes Doctor Who such a core part of my identity.

Is Creature from the Pit bad? No: it’s like the proverbial curate’s egg. If the curate’s egg had been as big as a house, fitted with a proton drive and capable of weaving aluminium shells around neutron stars.

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The Dream Ends

I am at the annual school camp in the Peak District. There is a sweet shop down the lane, we are allowed to go there once a day. They sell Dalek Death Rays and Kendal Mint Cake. My tent-partner is reading a copy of Doctor Who In an Exciting Adventure With The Daleks. 

I don’t think the book was actually called Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks, any more than the Beatles first album was actually called Love Me Do With Please Please Me and Twelve Other Songs. Fans refer to it as the Armada Paperback. It was a very loose adaptation of the first Dalek Story, which was still called "The Dead Planet". It was published in 1965, the year I was born, eleven years in the past. If my tent partner still has it so many years later it is probably worth an awful lot of money.

The Armada Paperback eventually became Doctor Who And The Daleks, the first of the Target Paperbacks. All the Target Paperbacks were called Doctor Who and The Something even though Doctor Who is the name of the programme and not the character. They had a small bit of text on the fly-leaf explaining why the face of Doctor Who kept changing. My tent partner had hundreds of Target Books and I had a few. Even when I became a Fan, having them was more important than actually reading them.

I suppose I had seen the Peter Cushing movie by then? I suppose I could tell that it was a similar story but not quite the same story? I suppose I didn't think it mattered all that much? 

It looked like an Enid Blyton book or one of those books about wars and jungles and Jesus. I mean that it smelt like one of those books, though not necessarily with my nose. It was already even then an artefact a tangible connection to the olden days, when Doctor Who was real. The olden-days kid who had first handled this book had been there at the beginning. Had seen the whole story. Was not playing catch up.  I read all the Doctor Doolittle books in the school library, even writing the names of the ones I had missed on a blue card with a fountain pen and putting it in a box on the librarian's desk. It came from a time before the Daleks were the Daleks: when they were just scary new robots in a children’s book with pictures and there was a description of what the creature inside the Dalek actually looked like. I tried to sketch the creature: I have never been able to draw. 

I do, in fact, think that David Whitaker’s conception, of a creature that inhabits the shell and operates it like a vehicle is superior to the later conception that conceived them as more like cyborgs, robots with an organic component. There is a sketch somewhere of a grotesque little dwarf driving a pepper-pot.

This was before Jeremy Bentham but after the Making of Doctor Who.  

Fresh eyes, is what I am trying to say. Defamiliarisation. Seeing a thing as if for the first time. A yellowed press cutting: a display of action figures alongside Jubilee mugs.

Is this the whole of the Elusive Magic? We repeat the joke, over and over: "It isn't as good as it used to be; but then it never was." They have been making the joke since the death of Queen Victoria: “Punch was never what it used to be.” The graffito "Nostalgia ain't what it used to be" isn't particularly funny. If we go by linear, chronological time then school camp was no further from the Dead Planet than this essay is from Day of the Doctor. Do the eleven year olds of today hear the flapping of times chariot when they watch The Reality War? Did Michael Grade sever the cord? 

It's about time, as the fellow said. 

Don’t let’s call them Lost Stories. Let’s call them Never Having Existed In the First Place stories. Imaginary Stories is already taken.

The Radio Times Doctor Who Tenth Anniversary Special, again.

A black and white photo of a scary looking unshaven man in a military uniform. The title “The Nightmare Begins”. And the summary:

“The Doctor lands on the Planet Kemble in 4000 AD when the space security agent Brett Vyon is trying to warn that the Daleks are about to destroy the earth”.

Who was this Brett Vyon, and who was this Sara Kingdom who got killed and what was this nightmare that after twelve episodes was still only beginning?

The Nightmare Begins is in fact the title of the first episode of the Dalek Masterplan. The Radio Times Special referred to Doctor Who stories by the titles of their first episodes. This made them seem more interesting in some cases than they were: Four Hundred Dawns seems altogether more evocative than Galaxy Four. I think we would tolerate the Gunfighters much better if it was still called A Holiday For the Doctor.

In 1983 they found two episodes of The Dalek Masterplan in a Mormon Church in Tooting. No-one ever explained what they were doing there, and so far as I could tell from the phone book there was no Mormon Church in the vicinity at that time. One cannot help but picture them on golden tablets. I saw one of them at a showing at the National Film Theatre; I think to mark the twentieth anniversary, which would put me in the Sixth Form. It was one of Patrick Troughton’s first appearances at a fan event. It was the one with the Monk in agent Egypt; it starts with him, the Monk, disguised as a mummy. They showed the Dead Planet on the same day, and it very nearly lived up to my expectations, even the bit where they spent a whole episode trying to jump across a ravine. For some years afterwards I insisted that the Peter Cushing Film and the Armada Paperback lacked the high seriousness of the original episodes and should be ignored. I was twenty and a fan and very annoying like all twenty year olds and all fans. 

But the orphan episode of Masterplan turned out to be nothing more than an old episode of a black and white TV show in which the Doctor and the Daleks run around some historical back drops and the Monk, the Meddling Monk, the First Time Lord Apart From The Doctor (and Possibly Susan) was somehow inadvertently played by the manager from Carry on Camping (the one with the bra) and in roughly the same style.

If my memory is correct, then one of the Great Old Ones who was acting as MC admitted as much. It’s worth watching if only for the Dalek choreography. Which is pretty faint praise.

(Memory may not be correct. I can remember the tent and the kendel mint cake much more specifically than I can remember the National Film Theatre and Tooting Bec and the Sixth Form; so I may be confusing different showings and different conventions.)

The Nightmare Begins formed in our heads on the basis of one photo of Nic Courtney and a one sentence synopsis. The Dalek Master Plan emerged from a handful of fan-relayed oral traditions. The Longest And Most Epic Doctor Who Story of All Time. We imagined a Stan Lee George Lucas Stanley Kubrick Dalek Master Plan and lost sight of the fact that it was a teatime instalment of Doctor Who.

Doctor Who isn’t as good as it used to be. And even when it was, it wasn’t.

The Nightmare Begins

That opening credit; that wobbly line in the middle of the screen; when the theme tune was a pulse and a rhythm not a fanfare. When the opening credit itself was an abstract riff on the concept of monochrome TV.

Steven is sleeping.

If we didn’t know better, we would wonder if it is his nightmare which was beginning.

Except, of course, that I sill cannot see “Steven”: I can only see Peter Purves, with his badge and his makes table and his annual scheme to make assistance dogs out of silver bottle tops. I suppose there is now a whole generation of fans who know about very olden days Doctor Who but would have no reason to remember Blue Peter. 

“The Nightmare Begins”: those words, superimposed over the picture just like in any normal TV show. 

The first time I saw Unearthly Child in the great hall of Imperial College almost the biggest pang was seeing the words “Next Episode: The Dead Planet” hovering so neutrally on the screen.

“Written by Terry Nation.” Not in his handwriting though. Dalek Annuals and Blake's Seven annuals and even I think the Survivors novelisations printed his signature above the titles. A bit, it suddenly occurs to me, like Stan Lee’s signature, appearing above all those comic-book he didn’t actually write. Did Terry’s agent realise that?

Steven is sick, poisoned. The Doctor asks the black haired girl to take care of him.

We all used to think that the hostile scary Doctor of Unearthly Child was just how the Original Doctor was, and that the affable friendly Doctor was part of a gradual fall from grace that culminated in scarves and  jelly babies. At least, that was what the Great Old Ones taught us to believe. It was truly the jelly babies and the scarf that I loved. 

But this Doctor says “my child” and “that’s a good girl” and puts his chin thoughtfully in his hand. He is much more the eccentric Eagle-reading Peter Cushing than the elderly thug who threatened Ian and Barbara in the junkyard. Not even crotchety. More: doddery. 

What does crotchety even mean? I think it means “That quality possessed by the First Doctor.”

The line between an actor fumbling his lines and a character improvising is quite a wobbly one. The girl asks if they have reached the "place of perfection", and he replies “Ah…well…. I rather doubt it. At least….that is….we shall be stopping at a lot of places before that.”

In the beginning the show had been about a child who was not quite of this earth. Her replacement was from the Far Future. This third stand-in granddaughter is a refugee from the Siege of Troy and talks fluent old fashioned. The idea that they were audience-identification figures does not quite stack up. 

Adric died in 1982, in retrospect, perhaps punishing Matthew Waterhouse for being, by all accounts, quite annoying. And the world said “It’s the first time a Doctor Who assistant has been killed off!” and the fandom replied “No, Katerina was killed in the Dalek Masterplan!” and here we are, now, looking at her, Katerina, the first companion to be killed, before she has been killed.

Is she really a companion, given that she appears only in one story and is not given co-star billing. (Also: do Balrogs have wings, and where was Watson injured, and how many children had Lady McBeth?) 

Certainly, she behaves as if she were a companion, patronised by her stand-in grandfather and menaced by bad guys. 

The Doctor and Katerina and Steven in the TARDIS is barely a prologue; barely a recap. The Story Begins with two military men in the jungle, and we are suddenly, metaphorically and literally, in a different world.

Before there was Blue Peter, there was Play School, and it would be nice to say that in three minutes The Nightmare Begins encompasses the holy BBC trinity: Peter Purves and Brian Cant and a Dalek. Play School was a show for pre-schoolers, the closest the British had at that time to Sesame Street. Nursery rhymes and stories and suspiciously long lived gold-fish and counting games. Brian Cant also provided the voice over for Camberwick Green, the BBCs stop motion evocation of rural English life. I had a vinyl recording of one of the episodes when I was a toddler: Brian Cant’s voice is literally my earliest memory. But until the credits rolled at the end of Nightmare Begins I recognised neither his face nor his voice. Putting a gun to your commanding officers head is a very different proposition from pretending that your horsey’s feet are going clippoty clop.

The unshaven man from the magazine was, of course, Nicholas Courtney. Nicholas Courtney appeared with every Doctor in the original run apart from the one he didn’t; and he was Space Agent Brett Vyon before he was ever the Brigadier. His face looks different but his voice is unmistakable.

The biggest miss-step the Revived Series took was chucking the classic TARDIS design overboard. When I see that white room and the white mushroom I know that I am watching Doctor Who. The weird wobbley coral arrangement, not so much. The Doc and Steven and Katerina in the control room is clearly ninety seconds of Doctor Who; but then suddenly the channel flips. The Brigadier and Brian Cant are (briefly) tying to send a message to earth: and then we cut back to Mission Control on Earth, where everyone is studiously ignoring a flashing red light. (I assume it is a red light. Obviously, we are still in black and white.) Then we go back to the jungle planet. 

The stylistic channel hopping makes the episode feel more expansive that it actually is. The jungle scenes feel like Blake's Seven, or Survivors, or in short something written by Terry Nation.  On earth, all the technicians are bald: there are big perspex maps and banks of equipment but someone is still using a clipboard. People sometimes draw an analogy between the Dalek Masterplan and Dan Dare: but Dan Dare was set in a 1950s retro-future, where the Masterplan gives the 41st century a Things To Come Freemasonry of Science vibe. But the two characters with speaking parts (who aren't much more than a chorus) are arguing about what to watch on TV: a sporting fixture or a political speech. Which puts us more in the realm of the Jetsons. Even two thousand years in the future, people are still just like folks. 

People sometimes talk about Padding in Old TV. Other people say that New TV is far too rushed. Roald and Lizan spend several moments talking about their favourite make of space ship. He prefers the latest Flip T4; she prefers the Spar 7-40. “Elegance, plus technology." 

If you think that we should cut out everything which Doesn’t Advance The Plot, then certainly this scene should be cut. But I think I can still feel the eleven-year-old's thrill of glancing into a world where spacecraft are as common as cars. That’s what we did when we played spacemen, isn’t it? We did not imagine that we were fighting Daleks or setting foot on an alien planet, necessarily. We just constructed our space cockpit out of chairs and bean bags and maybe tin foil and cardboard, and said “We are on a spaceship isn’t it great being on a spaceship don’t you just love being on a spaceship.”

Mavic Chen is the Guardian of the Solar System. He’s a politician. Although the episode ends on a kind of a twist--Mavic Chen has betrayed the Solar System to the Daleks!--I don’t think that first generation viewers can have been entirely surprised that he was a wrong 'un. He has a sinister name. He looks a bit foreign. I might not go so far as to say a "racist caricature", but foreign, certainly. And literally the first thing he does when he comes on screen is twirl his moustache! 

While he makes his speech about peace and prosperity everyone ignores the flashing red light warning that the Daleks are about to invade the universe. Subtle is not the word.

And then we go back to the jungle. The extended two-handed scene between Brett and Kurt is genuinely one of the best bits of B-movie space-opera schlock I've ever seen. I mean that in an entirely positive way. I think that this is what the Old Fans wanted us to believe that the Dalek Masterplan was like all the way through. Brett remains calm and soldier like, while Kurt slowly disintegrates. Nation throws every suspense trick in the book at us. “You know we can’t fight… them” says Brett “Our weapons are useless against…  those things.” Granted, if we have read the Radio Times, or know the title of the story, or, indeed saw the stand-alone prequel five weeks ago, we know perfectly well who “they” are. 

There is something very Avon and Blake about a situation where the coward points a gun at the hero and demands to be left behind. Kurt knows he is going to die and we know that he knows, but we stay with him for a full minute after Brett leaves. And then he sees….

Well I guess we know what he sees. But it is a genuinely impressive bit of sci-fi TV. He points his gun into the jungle: we see it from his point of view. And again. And again. He falls to his knees, he looks up, and there it is. Looming. Less like a BBC prop and more like the cover of an annual. And of course, the gun fires, and the screen turns negative and he falls down dead.

It recalls the endings of the first two episodes of The Dead Planet: Barbara, lost in the city, waiting for the moment when the unseen presence would make itself known; and Susan running headlong through the Skarovian forest. A feeling of desperation; waiting for a bad thing to happen. Like the beginning of a nightmare. 

And then there is another point of view shift: two Daleks, in the jungle, talking in capital letters about who they are going to exterminate. It’s an effective transition: from the looming monster Dalek to the faintly absurd matter-of-fact artefacts trundling through the foliage. Things out of bad dreams: but also unwieldy, physically present, tactile objects. 

This is what made old Doctor Who so much like old Doctor Who, and why new Doctor Who has never been able to replicate the Elusive Magic. Every monster (and every planet, and every spaceship) has been physically constructed. Every monster is present in the room with the actor, and therefore feels present in the room with the audience.

(It has been said that 1960s “adult” TV is sexy in a way that much more explicit modern stuff fails to be, for a similar reason. Modern TV can do closeups and long shots and swift intercuts and show us nipples. Older TV had to point the camera at the bed, giving the viewer the impression that he was just watching two people doing it.)

The final shot of the dead Kurt is quite unsettling. Not X-Certificate body horror, of course, but strong stuff for a Saturday tea-time. 

Brian Cant does not stand up and say "It's all right children, I was just pretending." 

Some people have never stopped saying that Doctor Who feels like a pantomime: fake horror, fake violence, fake evil, fake death. This Doctor Who is being as real as it dares. 

We are halfway through the episode before the Doctor arrives. (There was of course a prologue or prequel, Mission to the Unknown, in which he didn't arrive at all.) We might almost forget what show we are watching. A new, grim-ish and moderately gritty Terry Nation space show--Vyon's Two, perhaps--into which Old Grandfather Who has incongruously materialised. 

Uncle Who natters away inconsequentially to himself. Or perhaps he is talking through the screen to us "kiddies" at home. “A city, or perhaps a town. I wonder where we are? All I have to do is get through that jungle and perhaps then I can get some help. I must say, it's a strange place to put a city.” (Who is that? It’s Windy Miller! Let’s see what he is going to do next....") And then the scary man in the uniform puts a gun to his head and says “Give me the key or I will kill you.”

(A clunky bit of construction, if ever there was one. Katerina, who has been told to stay behind and watch over Steven, comes out of the TARDIS with the Doctor purely so he can show her, and therefore Brett, the TARDIS key.)

Was Doctor Who always like this: whimsical safe kids TV rubbing up against dark, somewhat adult science fiction? 

This is the change that has come over Doctor Who in its first three seasons, I think. It isn't just that William Hartnell, as he put it, "mellowed" the Doctor. In those first three or four stories, the nasty hostile Professor Challenger figure who has kidnapped the two gormless school teachers comes from a similar world to the Thals and the Cavemen they encounter. But this Doctor and Brett Vyon are gate-crashers in each others stories.

Which world do the Daleks come from? The world of Space James Bond or the world of Childrens' Television?Perhaps the remaining episodes explore that. 

"DALEKS!" exclaims the Doctor, in the tone of voice of a form-master who has spotted someone chewing gum. One hopes that even the first night audience responded. "Yes, we can see that you doddery old duffer."

There is an old joke about the man with polaroids of UFOs. But come now, says someone of a skeptical bent: isn’t it obvious that one of those spacecraft is a hubcap and the other one is an ashtray? Yes, says the enthusiast, and when we understand why the human race designed their hubcaps and ashtrays to resemble alien spacecraft we may understand their ultimate mission.

The Dalek city is obviously a model. Furthermore, it is obviously a model made of bottle-tops and cardboard and tin foil: the kind of model that you could probably make yourself in a craft lesson given some effort. And yet I look at it now all those years on and I think: yes, that is what a space city is suppose to look like. That is what space cities used to look like. That was what the future looked like in the past. 

It is not a huge twist that Mavic Chen is a traitor: but it is a terribly good bit of narrative architecture. So much has been crammed into the last dozen minutes that when he appears we have temporarily forgotten about him. 

Aha, we say, now we see the point of the long digression in the earth control room. Now we see how everything fits together.

But we are watching Doctor Who, not a political space opera. The final cliffhanger is not that Earth’s Guardian is a traitor, but that the Daleks have surrounded the TARDIS. 

Do the Daleks know what the TARDIS is, or who the Doctor is? They have probably not encountered each other for a millennia and a half….

And now we are back in the present, and only half the episodes are on BBC IPlayer. I suppose there will soon be cartoons. Or perhaps if after seventy years you can find two tapes then there is no reason that any day now you may find six more. Katerina in the airlock. Space Agent Sara Kingdom aging to death. A merry Christmas to all of you at home. We have seen more than we ever hoped to see. 

A particular Doctor Who fan, who you may have heard of, expressed his disappointment that the Nightmare Begins has been found because it makes his own attempted reconstructions redundant. 

Enchantment, disenchantment, re-enchantment. You love the idea of the thing. You are disappointed that the Thing doesn’t live up to your idea of it. But then you learn to love the thing itself.

I learned to stop worrying and love Doctor Who. Not the idea of it: the thing with its imperfections. I am not one of those who says that I do not want to watch old episodes in case they spoil my memories of them. 

I think that there are some people, including that Very Famous Fan, who are only able to love the idea. I think that there are toxic fans who are permanently angry because the actually existing episodes are different from the ideas in their heads. There are people who find it easier to love an AI reconstruction of a Flag than the nation for which that Flag used to stand. 

'Tis mad idolatry which makes the servant greater than the god. Hmmm, hmmm my child: I hope you find your place of perfection. 

Public Service Announcement

The idea of St Patrick’s day parades and parties was mostly thought up by the Irish ex-pat community in New York, who (as you’d expect) wanted to celebrate their country of origin once a year. In Ireland, historically, it was mostly a day to visit family and go to church. 

Yes, quite often, legendary figures do differ from their historical prototypes. Dick Turpin was a nasty little horse thief who somehow got remembered as an heroic outlaw. Saint George the figure in the Mummers plays and the Fairy Queen is an English knight who rescues ladies from dragons, and fights duels with Turks. He may possibly have been based on a Cappadocian Christian martyr. This is absolutely fine. 

The Church of England is historically kind of a big deal in England. The Church of England is sort of kind of mostly Protestant. Protestants mostly think that the veneration of humans, even very holy humans, borders on the idolatrous and even pagan. Some Anglicans are okay with saying “and so, with Mary, Francis and Augustine we pray…” but Saints Days haven't been that big a deal in this country since the reformation. 

Go round some older English churches and you'll see statues of saints with their heads knocked off by puritans.

My first name is Andrew. I happen to know that Saint Andrew's day is on 30th November because Scotland. But I bet if you are named James or Phillip or for that matter Polycarp or Dysmas you have no idea when your name-day falls. 

Not that St Andrew is a very big deal in Scotland: the big day for tartan and bagpipes and disgusting meat products is Burns Night. 

Wales is different again: they celebrate being Welsh with leeks because the English spent so long telling them they ought not to be. 

While we are here: the English have a King and a national church and also a national health service and a national broadcasting corporation and a famous playwright and the Archers. Which is why the Union Jack has never been such a big deal for us as the Stars and Stripes is for Americans: we have other symbols. English people who put flag poles in their own gardens are adopting an American tradition, on the same level as kids who go trick or treating instead of pennying for the guy. Not that a thing is wrong because it's foreign and new, but you shouldn't pretend its traditional. 

The thing about it only being the Union Jack if it’s flying from a boat is a myth.

Yes, indeed the Union Jack is the British flag, not the English, and God Save the Queen I Mean King is the British national anthem, not the English one and the fact that everyone including me gets confused over that is a big part of the problem.

When I was a kid I was quite churchy and went to a quite churchy school, and no-one talked about St George's Day, ever. I think it was an extra holiday celebrated by Boy Scouts, in the same way that one or two children did a thing called Bah Mitzvah which the rest of us didn't. Individual teachers had different opinions about whether they could wear their Scout uniforms to school on Baden-Powell's birthday. 

I think that in some parts of the country there were genuine traditions of Morris and May-Pole dancing and maybe daft things like Yorkshire Pudding Rolling and Pork Pie Hurling in some areas. They have died out or are kept up by revivalists because in the cold light of day they were in fact a little bit silly. 

It is fun to sing Fields of Athernry and Dublin In the Rare Old Times and drink far too much Guinness even if the closest you have been to Ireland is Staffordshire. I like the way King Street turns into a good natured festival on March 17th. Although if I were Irish, I might find some of the blarney and leprechauns a bit annoying. I mean, why aren't mobs of people sitting in pubs reading Yeats and Joyce? 

But if some landlords want to sell people too much real ale while singing the British Grenadiers....er....Rule Britannia....er....England Swings Like a Pendulum Do....then I see no problem at all. 

To summarise 

-- Literally no-one is telling you you can't celebrate St George's Day, but historically, it hasn't really been that big a thing. 

— It is irrelevant and not at all a gotcha that St George came from what is now called Turkey, probably. (And it is not a witty riposte to say "ha-ha but Turkey didn't exist back then" either.) 

— Although I do think it a shame that Alban, who was a: English and b: real never gets a look in. Or Edmund, come to that. 

— I’d go with Jerusalem if I had to make a choice. Land of Hope and Glory is too jingoistic and associated with a particular party, and Rule Britannia requires too much contextualisation, although it’s actually a good tune. I mean, I joke about Place Called England but no-one outside the folk world has heard of it. 

— But if you try to make “having a beer on April 23rd” an Act of Resistance to Forces of Oppression that only exist in your head, then I will call you a racist twat and decline.

Also: Shakespeare's birthday.

More of this sort of thing

2: City of Death - v

Everyone knows what Doctor Who is like: monsters in rubber suits, cardboard sets, impenetrable techno babble, over-acting thespians. When Lenny Henry and Victoria Wood parodied the show; and when Rowan Atkinson fronted an affectionate tribute, that’s was what they made fun of. Even David Tennant’s appearance on Extras seemed to default to that universe.

But one in three of the adult population of the UK had seen City of Death. And whatever you say about City of Death, it is nothing like that. Why did Doctor Who not fixate itself in the public consciousness as a witty, self-knowing concept-heavy, but by no means ridiculous piece of character driven TV clearly intended to appeal to adults as well as children.

There is a moment in the 1970s when Marvel Comics were being written by a cohort of excellent writers who had grown up reading Stan Lee but were now quite clearly done with superheroes. They told the stories they wanted to tell: drugs and Viet Nam and social issues and Dylanesque psychedelia or just plain melodramatic soap opera: they put silly men with spandex suits and capes and masks into them because that was what they were paid to do. And superhero fans read them and only saw the superheroes and said that these were the best superhero comics they had ever read.

I do not say that Doctor Who ever quite reached that point. But I don’t think that Fisher or Adams or Williams had quite the attachment to spaceships and aliens and are-the-going-to-be-any old monsters that the fans had. Neither did Tom Baker.

So City of Death feels like a gradual unmasking, even a strip-tease; a Doctor Who story modestly covered with something which is not a Doctor Who story; something which is not a Doctor Who story that keeps turning into one for contractual reasons.

And the fans look and they see a Doctor Who story. According to Doctor Who Monthly, City of Death is the third best story of the original run, after Genesis of the Daleks and (inexplicably) Caves of Androzani. But the sixteen million…perhaps, in the end they felt cheated. They had been led up a garden path at the end of which the witty art dealing toff turns out to be an other one of the those rubbery aliens, and the art forgery story is a ruse to get us onto a cardboard cutout version of the primeval earth.

Aha, they said, this is what Doctor Who was always like. Next week, Lalla Ward will be over-acting at Fagin in furs and Tom Baker will be cracking jokes at a tentacle that can’t help looking like an enormous green willy. Of course Mind Your Language looked like the better bet.

“This isn’t Doctor Who….This isn’t Doctor Who… This isn’t Doctor Who….Okay, fooled you, this is Doctor Who.”

And I think that’s exactly what makes the City of Death such a good Doctor Who story.

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3: City of Death - iv

So: Scaroth is going to travel back in time and prevent the explosion that shattered him into twelve fragments and marooned him on earth. If he succeeds, all human history will be erased and life on earth will simply never have existed.

The Doctor, Romana and Duggan run across Paris, looking singularly unworried. Romana smiles, the Doctor holds her hand. Failing to get a taxi, the Doctor cries out “Does no one care about history?”

The TARDIS is parked in an art gallery. The TARDIS is parked in an art gallery purely to facilitate this scene. I had always assumed the gallery in question was the Louvre, but in fact, we see the exterior of the Denise René  -- which is all about modern, abstract art.

Our heroes run to the Ship. The bystanders continue to shrug. And at that moment; when the stakes have never been higher...

We pause for a celebrity cameo. 

In 1977 there had been a rather concocted controversy about Tate Gallery’s spending a great deal of public money on a minimalist installation, consisting of a pile of bricks and nothing else. It was sufficiently big news that John Craven covered it. The young lad in Children of the Stones threatens to sell the wreckage of his bike to the Tate Gallery. Even today the word "pileofbricks" is sometimes invoked by the kinds of people who think that Western Civilisation has been in permanent decline since the death of  Michelangelo.

As our heroes jump into the TARDIS, we hear a snippet of conversation between two connoisseurs who have mistaken it for a piece of modern art. One of them takes an essentially formalist line:

“Divorced from its function and seen purely as a piece of art, its structure of line and colour is curiously counterpointed by the redundant vestiges of its function."

But the other is more interested in it conceptually:

“And since it has no call to be here, the art lies in the fact that it is here.”

These would both have been perfectly sensible comments to have made about, say Equivalent VIII (the pile of bricks) or Fountain (the urinal). Either you are looking at the shape of the object: paying attention to what it looks like in a new way because of the new context. Or else you are amused by the paradox of something which is not art being exhibited as if it were.

But these perfectly sensible comments are being made by JOHN CLEESE, one of the most recognisable actors on British TV. Many people say that they find him funny even when he isn't doing anything particularly amusing. I used to think that the scene was hurriedly added to the script when it turned out that Cleese was filming Fawlty Towers in a nearby studio and was game for a laugh: but in fact the cameo had always been part of the script, with a number of celebrities in the frame. Because BASIL FAWLTY is speaking the words, we are apt to regard them as intrinsically ludicrous. But I wonder how we would have read the scene if it had been Alan Bennett or Jonathan Miller in the role?

When the Doctor went to the Louvre, he said that the Mona Lisa was one of the greatest treasures in the universe; when he finds out that people are plotting to steal it, he says innocently that it is a very pretty painting. Duggan tells him that there are at least seven millionaires who would buy a stolen Mona Lisa even though they could never show it to anyone -- as a "very expensive gloat". 

Scaroth has forced or persuaded Leonardo to make multiple copies of the picture. Presumably, all seven paintings are equally "pretty" -- as, indeed, would be any high quality reproduction. But the men on Duggan's list are only incidentally interested in its prettiness: what they attach a monetary value to is its rareness and authenticity -- not to look at, but to have. The existence of multiple copies put the whole notion of “authenticity” into question. Would the art collector view each painting as equally valuable because Leonardo painted all of them? Or are they all equally worthless since none of them are unique? [1]  In the event, all the paintings but one are destroyed: but the surviving portrait, which is returned to the Louvre, is one of the ones on which the Doctor wrote the words “this is a fake” at the time of Leonardo. So it is simultaneously an obvious fake and quite definitely authentic. The Doctor sticks to his original position: it makes no difference because the whole point of art is to look at it.

Romana, without realising it, blows the whole argument out of the water. On Gallifrey, art is produced by computers. (In Invasion of Time and Deadly Assassin, the Time Lords have quite a lot of very ornate upholstery, but little representative art.) The Doctor would presumably say that art counts as art if it is pretty, but not otherwise: we can reserve judgement on whether a computer could ever in fact create something as pretty as the Mona Lisa. This would also be Elenor Bron's view: Time Lord art would have value if it had the formal properties of art. To Scarlioni's customers, such art, however pretty, would be infinitely reproducible and therefore completely valueless. But on John Cleese's view, it would become art once we put in an art gallery and treated it as art. 

The last thing we see is Duggan buying a postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa: and we are left asking — what is the status of this cheap, mass produced, piece of cardboard? 

Doctor Who was ostensibly a children's show. Did Adams or Williams envisages children discussing the nature of art in the playground on Monday morning? Or were they intended to say, in effect "Here are a couple of silly grown ups talking complete gibberish -- which is, after all, what all modern art and all art criticism really is?" Is it intrinsically funny that anyone should talk in an informed way about modern art, or about any art at all? Or perhaps the thought was that we would be so busy saying "Hey -- isn't that Basil Fawlty"  that we wouldn't notice what was actually being said. 

Did Williams or Fisher or Adams realise that City of Death offered a pre-emptive debate about the validity of AI artwork? Perhaps not: but the interruption of an end-of-the-world space opera by an irrelevant pair of art aficionados is a clever piece of construction. The scene has no call to be there: the art lies in the fact that it is there.

[1] Paintings which were once quite valuable because they were painted by Rolf Harris are now quite unsaleable for the same reason.

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2: City of Death - iii

It’s set in Paris. It has to be set in Paris because it’s about the theft of the Mona Lisa: the theft of the Fighting Temeraire wouldn’t have had the same iconic punch.

Doctor Who wasn’t being shown in France at the time, so all those by-standers who shrug nonchalantly as the English guy in the long scarf runs past them are genuinely bemused Parisians. It would be an interesting fan project to track some of them down and find out if any of them knew what the hell was going on. Apparently, it was cheaper to film in Paris than to dress London streets to look Parisian.

Lalla Ward spent Destiny of the Daleks dressed in a feminised parody of Tom Baker’s outfit, but here she is wearing an English school uniform. For some reason. She says that it didn’t occur to her that some English gentlemen quite like looking at grown up ladies in school uniforms. 

Does Romana know what a school uniform is? Do they have uniforms or indeed schools on Gallifrey? Why does she think it particularly appropriate to Paris? Perhaps, like Ford Prefect, she thought it would be nicely inconspicuous?

With the exception of the cafe, all the interiors are filmed in London studios: so the main thing which the four days of filming produced was endless shots of the Doctor and Romana running through the streets. We see them on a metro with the Eiffel Tower visible through the window; sitting in a pavement cafe with Notre Dame behind them; and walking to and from the Louvre. You may find it all rather charming, or you may dismiss it as shameless padding. There is a full four minutes of Duggan tailing the Doctor and Romana in Episode Two. The filming is very pretty indeed.

Studio-bound stories can suffer from a lack of geography: we have no real sense of where the McVillains ship is in relation to Davros’s chamber, and the Doctor can move between them without seeming to pass through intermediate space. But in City of Death, no-one can say “back to the Louvre!” or “off to the Chateau!” without triggering an extended Paris street montage. One is tempted to wonder if this is intentional: a running gag.

In several of these scenes Romana and the Doctor seem to be holding hands -- not something the Doctor and the first Romana would have been likely to do. (It is also fairly hard to imagine Mary Tamm in a school uniform.) Tom Baker and Lalla Ward officially became an Item during the filming of this story. They got married a year later, although it sadly only lasted a couple of years. In the Whose Doctor Who? documentary, Tom remarked that one of the challenges about playing the Doctor (from a thespian point of view) is that the character doesn’t experience romantic emotions. In the present story, he says that the Countess is a good looking woman, "probably". But knowing what we know, it is very hard to avoid head canon-ing it into a honeymoon.

Or, at least, a dirty weekend.

I was today years old when I realised that Cité de la Mort and Cité de l'Amour is a play on words.

Shortly after City of Death, one of the Doctor Who fanzines published an interview with David Agnew. It was a not-very subtle in-joke: “Agnew” was a composite name attached to scripts that no-one person was prepared to take responsibility for. In this case it seems that David Fisher had submitted a kind-of follow up to Androids of Tara: a literary pastiche involving scams and detective work in 1920s Paris and Monte Carlo. But the script was deemed unworkable: for one thing, using time travel to cheat at roulette wasn't thought to be a quite suitable subject for what was ostensibly a children's TV show. So Graham Williams and Douglas Adams were locked in a room for a weekend and rewrote the story from scratch. (This kind of thing seemed to have happened to Douglas Adams rather frequently.) They excised the gambling and the historical setting, but held onto the idea of an alien having been fragmented through time.

We often talk about the special effects in Old Who having been “cobbled together”: but the same was often true of the scripts. There are a few places where you can see the joins. An artist in a cafe sketches Romana, with a broken clock where her face ought to be: he is never mentioned again. When the Count's scientist demonstrates his time machine, a chicken de-evolves into a Jaggarroth,  suggesting that life on earth evolved from Scaroth rather than merely haveing been kickstarted by his exploding spaceship. But we should not be too surprised when Old Who stories feel like concatenations of different scripts. We should rather be amazed that it hangs together as well as it does.

You can’t really expect Douglas Adams to be at his best, dosed up on coffee and whisky and writing to a hard deadline in the middle of the night: but there are recognisable flashes of his trademark wit. The Countess says that the more the Doctor pretends to be a fool, the more she will realise that he isn't; which recalls Trillians insight about Zaphod pretending to be stupid in order to look clever. The Doctor’s discussion with Duggan recalls Ford’s chat with the Vogon about shouting. 

--Are you just in it for the thumping

-- I'm in it mainly to protect the interests of the art dealers who employ me

-- I know, but mainly for the thumping.

And occasionally, you get pure quotable gobbets of the Book: 

— Where are we going?

— Are you speaking philosophically or geographically.

— Philosophically

— Then we’re going to lunch.

But rather too often, the dialogue is in the too-clever-by-half category 

--You should go into partnership with a glazier. You'd have a truly symbiotic working relationship.

--What?

--I'm just pointing out that you break a lot of glass.

It sounds a bit too much like a geeky schoolboy who thinks it's real clever to ask for a glass of H20 or put sodium chloride on his fish and chips. Who is, admittedly, the main target audience of the programme. 

A Gamble With Time would have been a fantastic title.

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2: City of Death - II

Tom Chadbon may have been cast as Duggan because he looked a little like Tintin. But the Sixteen Million — and me — would have instantly identified him as the vet who Nerys Hughes nearly married in the Liver Birds. He’s a detective in a long raincoat who does the kinds of things that detectives in long raincoats might be expected to do, only slightly more so. He comfortably assumes that the Doctor and Romana are mad when they talk about being aliens; and is only mildly nonplussed when they whisk him back to the dawn of time. He is not so very far removed from Harry, or for that matter Steven and Ian. [1] 

But mainly, he punches people, breaks things, smashes windows, and generally acts like a hard-boiled detective. In an earlier draft, he was an explicit parody of Bulldog Drummond (“Pug Farquhasan”) a character no-one under fifty would be likely to have heard of.

He may be comic relief, but he isn’t all that funny. Chadbon does his best to say things like “I give up, you’re crazy” and “locked in a cellar with two raving lunatics” with nuance, but comes across as a decent actor doing the best he can with rather thin material. All the humour comes from the Doctor and Romana's reactions to him. Which are very funny indeed. 

"Why is it that every time I start to talk to someone, you knock him unconscious?” asks the Doctor. 

“If you do that one more time, I'm going to take very, very severe measures…" 

"Like what?" 

"I’m going to ask you not to.”

But in the end, the Earth is saved, and human history proceeds along its proper course, because Duggan does indeed thump Scaroth, terribly hard. The universe and everything may still be obscure, but that is the answer to life. If this is a shaggy dog story, that is the punch-line.

Much the same could be said of Count Scarlioni. He is an extreme incarnation of a suave James Bond villain: entitled, rich and utterly callous: not unlike the original incarnation of the Master. He orders the most terrible things to be done without stooping to vulgar anger. “My dear, it was not necessary for you to enter my house by...we could hardly call it stealth. You had only to knock on the door. I've been very anxious to renew our acquaintance.” Scarlioni believes himself to be the cleverest person in the room, and indeed, on the planet, which annoys the Doctor no end, because he actually is. 

Fans at the time thought that Season Seventeen was Far Too Silly; and that Tom Baker had undermined the show’s credibility by treating the Doctor as a comedic role. And certainly, as the season progresses, the Williams/Adams Doctor becomes very silly indeed. Critics have sometimes said that we are looking at a very good actor who stayed in one role for too long and stopped taking it seriously -- or else at a repressed comic genius trying to remake a venerable show in his own image. But in fact, the "silliness" seems to be an entirely valid take on who the Doctor is. 

Which is the question every incarnation of the programme has to find an answer for. 

The City of Death Doctor is cheeky, rather than silly: which is one of the reasons he was such a bad influence on so many of us cheeky school-boys. He refuses to answer questions, wilfully misinterprets what people say, refuses to take the gravest matters seriously, and tells brazen lies without bothering to sound plausible. 

“Who sent you?” asks the Countess. 

“Who sent me what?” he replies.

Alan Moore described the aforementioned DR and Quinch as essentially the Bash Street Kids with thermo nuclear capacity. It would be a stretch to say that the Doctor is a naughty schoolboy with a magic box, but Tom’s version sometimes has more in common with the Meddling Monk that he does with the William Hartnell or Jon Pertwee Doctors. He is not, of course, really irresponsible: we know that he will, in the end, prevent Scaroth from retrospectively destroying the human race. But he will do so from a position of ironic detachment. It isn’t quite wit, or silliness: it's flippancy. The Doctor assumes as if the joke has already been told because he knows that the universe is, on some level, funny. 

Episode One opens with the Doctor and Romana at the top of the Eiffel Tower, talking about nothing in particular. We are told that Lalla Ward and Tom Baker wrote the dialogue themselves; and it certainly sounds like something two very good actors might have created in improv.

—That bouquet.

—What Paris has, it has an ethos, a life. It has...

—A bouquet?

—A spirit all of its own. Like a wine, It has...

— A bouquet.

— It has a bouquet. Yes. Like a good wine

It’s funny; but it’s slightly smug. It sounds like Pooh and Piglet talking about Nothing; or perhaps like Estragon and Vladimir trying to pass the time. Our heroes may like and admire Paris; but they are looking down on it, literally and figuratively. 

And then, there is this:

—Shall we take the lift or fly?

— Let's not be ostentatious. [2]

— All right. Let's fly then.

— That would look silly. We'll take the lift.

This is not what the young people would call a lore dump. You don’t need to amend your Series Bibles:  “Time Lords have the ability to fly, but they don’t like to use it.” There is no need for conceptual fan-fic about the levitation device Romana found among the Doctor’s junk and has been itching to try out. You don't need to wonder if Time Lords are like gelflings, and that the Doctor can't fly because he's a boy. [3] But neither should it be treated as a joke or a giveaway line or an unforgivable ad lib which should be struck from the record. It is a vision of who the Doctor and Romana are in the moment that the line is spoken.

In the cafe, the Doctor tells Romana that they are perpetual outsiders because of how frequently they have travelled through time. The Doctor has never felt quite this alien before.

In the final episode, they leave Duggan at the Eiffel Tower. They say goodbye to him at top and about twenty seconds later they wave to him from the bottom.

So perhaps they do indeed fly.

[1] I assume that Big Finish have done a 26 disc boxed set in a time line where he travelled off with the the Doc and Romana in Episode Four.

[2] I am reminded of the story Tom tells about when he was briefly a novice in a monastery. There was a kind of spiritual exercise in which the young men suggested the names of saints for the other’s to think about: “Saint Francis” “Yes, let us all be gentle.” Brother Tom summonsed up the courage to say “Polycarp of Smyrna” and after an awkward pause the novice-master said “Let us not be obscure”.

[3] I read that there is a semi-canonical story in which it turns out that the Romana who appeared in the regeneration scene was not Romana at all, but an illusion created by the TARDIS. I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate this kind of thing and also respect the hell out of the people who think them up.

This is the fourth of five mini-essays about City of Death. My Patreons have already read the entire essay. It would absolutely make my day if you click on the link and pledge £5 a month to join them. It's that easy. One little click. You know you want to.  

The Pacifist, the Vivisectionist and the Humanitarian - Extended Edition

My latest collection of Serious Essays is now available as a 150 page PDF book.

It contains  -- 

The second part of my critique of CS Lewis's moral philosophy, this time diving deep into his theory of justice in The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment, Why I Am Not a Pacifist and Delinquent in the Snow. 

Plus:

What Did CS Lewis Make of Jesus Christ

The Cardinal Difficulty With Bulverism

and
Why CS Lewis Wasn't A Pacifist.

The PDF is currently available to all Patreon supporters.