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.
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