There is a moment in the Fawlty Towers episode 'The Kipper and the Corpse' when Polly refuses to be part of one of Basil Fawlty's face-saving schemes. "If you want to be a Marx Brothers movie, that's up to you..." she tells him. She is thinking of Love Happy which did, among other things involve the concealment of a dead body. It also, entirely irrelevantly, featured an early walk-on by a so-credited Norma-Jean Monroe.
It's a curious moment of lucidity. Polly is the one naturalistic character in a world of extremes and grotesques; she anchors the sit-com in reality. But at this one moment, she seems to see what is happening: she understands that she is the straight woman in a farce, and she tries to run away from it. If she had actually been in a Marx Brothers movie, she wouldn't have known. The boys were at their best when they brought their mayhem to melodramatic storylines which were played relatively straight: surrounded by politicians, opera impresarios and police officers who don't know that a Marx Brothers movie was what they were in. Margaret Dupont based a career on never seeing the joke. (As a matter of fact, she saw it very well.)
Tom Baker, with his grin and his hair and his pockets and his props, is often compared with Harpo Marx. The duel with Grendel in Episode Four of Androids of Tara strongly recalls Harpo's duel with "Kurt" in Night at Casablanca, particularly in the early scenes where he is nonchalantly fending off the sword-master's attacks. The BBC have borrowed a nice castle for the actors to run around, but it can't afford enough cameras or editors or stunt-men to stage a really impressive cinematic sword-fight. So, pretty sensibly, they make it about character: the villain is villainous while the hero won't take the villain seriously.
If you want to press the point, you could say that the Doctor's repartee and one-liners come out of Groucho's play-book -- although without Julius Marx's quick wit, they tend slightly more to cynicism. And I suppose Chico was often portrayed as a good-natured hobo, drifting from job to job and generally coming to the aid of some innocent party. Which may make Romana Zeppo.
The Doctor goes fishing. He goes fishing on Prince Reynart's land. The novelisation says that he doesn't have a licence. Zadek the sword-master zaps him with his electric lightsabre and tries to physically restrain him.
"Do you mind not standing on my chest?" says the Doctor "My hat's on fire."
Did that line come from David Fisher, the skilled TV script writer? Was it an addition by script editor Anthony Read who we suspect approves of silliness and is functioning as a proto-Douglas? Or did it arise from Tom Baker's disruptive, Marxist foolery? Is the actor not taking his role seriously? The script editor not taking the script seriously? Or was the script not very serious to begin with?
I was once lucky enough to watch Tom recording an audio episode (Hornets Nest). On the day I was in the studio, he was convinced that the line "Benton, lend me your handkerchief!" would be hugely improved if he was allowed to change it to "Benton, lend me your trousers!" ("What's wrong with trousers? Go to the BBC and you'll find it's full of people wearing trousers!") He was entirely professional and allowed himself to be overruled by the producer and the script writer, and of course, audio allows for a lot more improv than TV. But it is clear that the Fourth Doctor is sometimes created in the moment by Tom Baker.
The Doctor wants to be a Marx Brothers movie. He's the anarchic, farcical element erupting into a TV show and a universe which takes itself far too seriously. Next season he will be cut lose. The season after that, a new producer will ask him politely if he wouldn't mind sticking to the script. And the whole show will unravel.
William Hartnell put his back out and missed Episode Four of the Dalek Invasion of Earth. (Also Episode Three of The Tenth Planet, and nearly the whole of Celestial Toymaker.) Frazer Hines caught chicken pox and was temporarily recast during the Mind Robber. William Russell ceded a whole episode of Sir Lancelot to Brian the squire; Bud Collyer spent a whole week locked in a box with a lump of Kryptonite. So perhaps, in the world of counterfactuals, the Doctor really did just go fishing and Romana really did carry the whole of Androids of Tara by herself. She went into the adventure full of confidence; gradually got into more and more trouble; escaped by the skin of her teeth; realised that being the Doctor was not nearly as easy as it looked; but still reported back to the TARDIS saying how straightforward it had all been.
But in our universe, that is not what happened. What happens is that Romana goes for a pleasant stroll. Androids of Tara is filmed on location in the grounds of Leeds Castle; so we have to swallow an alien planet which looks like an English Heritage site. But at least it looks consistently like an English Heritage site: there is no jumping between BBC sets and location shots, no juxtaposing of interiors and exteriors. In those innocent days when no-one could flip the channel or look down at their phones, the director is allowed to linger on the visuals, and there is a picture postcard loveliness to many of the scenes. Romana in silhouette trips through the woods and over some stepping stones. One almost thinks of Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin.
She comes upon a statue. St George and the Dragon, or St Michael and Satan, or the Taran equivalent thereof. The dragon part of the statue if the Fourth Segment. Romana changes it to the puzzle-piece, and picks it up. And there you have it: all done and dusted in eight minutes.
"Romana locates the fourth segment of the key to time with ease" says the Radio Times.
And again, skip through the path we did not take and through the door we never opened. Romana takes Segment Four back to the Doctor. She joins him on his picnic. There were episodes of Z-Cars and Hill Street Blues in which the protagonists sat around waiting for a 999 call that never came. Whole dramas have been based on that kind of premise. A layabout sanitation engineer and a hard light hologram, sitting under a tree, filling the time waiting for someone they know will never arrive. The Doctor and Romana's dialogue would have been funny enough to fill an episode. The BBC has never gone in for clip-shows; but maybe the Doctor and Romana could have traded flash-backs about past adventures?
Of course, this isn't what happened. Probably no-one watching even noticed that the premise of Doctor Who was being mucked around with. No-one expects post-modernism in the gap between Larry Grayson and Basil Brush.
What if they gave a Doctor Who story and no-one came? What if the Doctor and Romana simply opted out of the plot? Romana is attacked by literally the worst monster ever to appear on Doctor Who. To call it a Muppet would be overgenerous: it looks as if it is going to demand a bowl of Sugar Puffs. And suddenly a caricature knight, with a helmet and a literally flashing blade pops up and scares it away. The Doctor has told Romana to be the hero of this week's story; but she falls straight back into the role of damsel in distress. Count Grendel (for it is he) literally lifts her up in his arms and carries her back to his castle of evilness. Before long, she is tied up and his android engineer is about to cut her head off with a buzz-saw. (She draws a dotted line on her neck to make it easier.) Romana, to her credit again, doesn't scream; she is as disdainful of the proceedings as the Doctor would have been under the circumstances.
Meanwhile, the Doctor falls in with Reynart's people. They are definitely nicer than Grendel's team; but the Doctor is uninterested in the power struggles on Tara. He keeps trying to leave; but Reynart's faction refuse to let him go.
What would happen if the Doctor and Romana opted out of the plot? Then the plot would have to come and grab them. Just as it has every Saturday for the last fifteen years.
In Episode 4, the Doctor, passing through Grendel's android laboratory, picks up something and puts it in his pocket. As they are about to leave, Romana suddenly admits that she has forgotten the Key to Time: exactly what she accused the Doctor doing in Episode 1. After a brief panic, it turns out that the key was what the Doctor picked up in the lab. Fisher, like Adams, is an honourable scriptwriter who believes in fair-play foreshadowing.
The message could hardly be less subtle. The Umbrella Theme was a terrible idea. No-one cares about the meta-plot. The last thing Doctor Who ever needed was a McGuffin.
A guard with a crossbow walks across a castle wall on a moonlit night. A man paddles a boat across the moat. Two double doors swing open; a man in a red uniform holding a helmet strides through and addresses a hunch-back.
"There must be no hitches"
"No master."
We could absolutely be watching a BBC 1 teatime historical serial. Except for one thing. The man in the boat has a silly scarf. And a robot dog.
Androids of Tara is not a Doctor Who story. But at this point in the show's trajectory, the word "story" hardly applies. The story -- personified by the Guardian -- is the adversary; the thing which the Baker-Doctor rejects and refuses to take seriously. The plot is a boundary for the Doctor to push against; the universe is his straight man. Not exactly self parody. Not exactly camp. Joyful, mad, incongruous absurdity. Anthony Hope with Robots.
One of these things is not like the other one.
"Could you move your foot; my hats on fire." The BBC did Prisoner of Zenda straight in 1984: I bet it was no where near this much fun.
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