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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