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.

This is the last 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.