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.

This is the third 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.