Nightmare of Eden (4)

 

Creature From the Pit was a costume drama with some mock-gothic horror and a quite imaginatively stencilled in alien world. That’s the kind of thing that Doctor Who does, and the kind of thing that Doctor Who does pretty well. But Nightmare of Eden, with its corridors, monsters, ray-guns, space-ships, and gobbledegook, is much closer to the Doctor Who which resides in the popular imagination. The BBC was never very good at this kind of thing, and Star Wars had raised the bar considerably. When Michael Grade wanted to cancel Doctor Who, it was things like Nightmare of Eden that he pointed at. 

Creature of the Pit was very silly. But it owned its silliness. Rightly or wrongly, it adopted an arch, pantomime tone, and ran with it. I didn’t much care for the Doctor teaching himself mountaineering from a book while dangling over the edge of a precipice: but it is reasonably funny and reasonably in keeping with the character we understand Tom Baker’s Doctor to be. Nightmare of Eden has some aspirations to be a science fiction story. It deals with a very serious subject. But comedy keeps inveigling itself into a basically serious script. Not light relief; but baked-in silliness which tells us that this is not the kind of story about genocide and drug-abuse that we ought to be taking seriously. 

Lewis Flander was hardly a big name: but he was an experienced and presumably competent actor. (His CV includes Henry Higgins, Pier Gynt, Shylock and Mr Darcy.) His character, if you take it at all literally, is as evil as anyone who the Doctor has come up against. He’s talking in terms of kidnapping whole species and using their desiccated remains to hook whole planets on civilisation-destroying drugs. And yet someone — possibly Tom Baker himself — must have taken him to one side and said “Lewis, Lewis, we think it would be absolutely marvellous if you played Prof Tryst as Peter Sellers playing Doctor Strangelove. We’ll even get make-up to find some evil glasses for you.”

What is going on? Is this a seasoned actor forced to play a script he doesn’t think a great deal of, and deciding a silly accent is the only way to make it bearable? Or has someone higher up made a decision that if we are going to make a kids TV show involving a genocidal drug-pusher, he had better be a comedic, parodic genocidal drug-pusher? 

In Episode Four, we see the ship’s security guards and the horrible customs men drive the mandrels  along the corridors, using their ray guns as cattle prods. From time to time one of the mandrels gets out of line and gets a jolly good zap. (This is another scene that would be more comfortable if the aliens had been more beast-like and less humanoid.) One of the guards cries out  “the guns are failing” and the mandrels turn around and start to attack them. Just in the nick of time the Doctor appears, and gently takes control of the aliens using his K9 dog whistle. It isn’t clear if he is trying to be a sheep-dog or a school-crossing-patrol officer or the Pied Piper: but he ushers the mandrels through the screen and back into their own world. 

As we watch the Screen on the Screen, we see the Doctor disappear out of frame, pursued by the mandrels , which attack him, out of shot. We don’t see the attack, or the fight: but we hear the Doctor’s reactions. He says “oo” and “ouch” and “aargh”, rather as if he was stepping into a bathtub that was slightly too hot. Lumps of foliage are thrown from the wings onto the stage. The Doctor says, and I promise I am not making this up “Oh my arms! My legs! My everything!” before reappearing with his jacket in tatters (but otherwise, so far as we can see, uninjured.)

This is pure pantomime. More specifically, it is the kind of thing that would happen in a Carry On movie or Crackerjack skit. You don’t show the fight: you show the hero exiting and re-entering in a dishevelled state. It’s the equivalent of making Andy Capp and Flo disappear into a whirlwind when they are having a domestic fight. 

Why would you do this? Is it Tom Baker’s own input? One can imagine him refusing to play the gobbledegook straight, and improvising a slap-stick routine of his own. Is it conceivably a conscious post-modern conceit? The CED looks like a movie screen or a proscenium arch; so perhaps characters crossing the threshold ought to start obeying theatrical or pantomime conventions? Or is it simply a  signal to not take any of this nonsense seriously  — to soften a script which is both conceptually heavy and intellectually demanding? 

And then we have the aliens. 

You would have to have a heart of stone to see the climax of Episode One, when a mandrel appears through a hole in the spaceship wall, without laughing. The chase through the corridors in Episode Four regularly showed up in  “wasn’t Doctor Who terrible in the olden days” clip-shows. 

But let’s be clear: there is nothing inept about the actual construction of the creatures. No wires or actorly Y-fronts come accidentally into shot. The performers seem to be able to move around without bumping into each other; they even try their hardest to mime, a bit. The costumes are not obviously made of bubble-wrap and they studiously avoid resembling giant cocks. 

I theorised that the unfortunate monster in Invisible Enemy was the result of a simple transcription error: someone ordered a Nucleus of the Swarm and received a Nucleus of the Prawn. I have no immediate explanation for the mandrels. I can only assume that they were  intended to look like this. Someone read the script, and said “This calls for some frightening, but slightly tragic aliens, who the bad-guy is going to melt down and turn into cocaine. Let’s do them as Muppets.” 

We know that there was disquiet, among the production team and some of the actors, about the thematic content of Nightmare of Eden. Maybe children’s TV shouldn’t be dealing with drugs at all; and if it is, it definitely shouldn’t glamourise them in any way. So is it impossible that the script was intentionally sabotaged to hold the difficult subject matter at arms length? The idea of turning a sentient life form into a recreational chemical is pretty horrible: so perhaps Graham Williams  adopted the sensible strategy of depicting the mandrel as obviously cartoon creatures that you couldn’t possibly feel sorry for? 

My only other conjecture is that Tryst is so obviously evil; and the results of the Vraxoin so extreme; and the customs men so ludicrously over-zealous that Bob Baker intended the story as a satire against unrealistic and paranoid “just say no” propaganda. But I can’t construct a consistent reading based on that premise. 

 To the extent that I have worked out what is meant to be going on, I now think Nightmare of Eden contains the embryo of a perfectly good episode of Star Trek or Blakes 7, even if it isn’t quite the kind of thing Doctor Who does best. It is a pity that in 1979, the BBC still thought that “doing Star Wars badly” was a viable direction for their venerable franchise. Almost no-one loves the Fourth Doctor more than I do, but in these episodes he comes across as petulant and annoying and rather bored. (“Nothing is inexplicable” “Then explain it” “Its inexplicable.”) 

And I am approaching the story from the point of view of a fan and scholar, who is prepared to freeze-frame I-Player and switch on the subtitles when it is not at all clear who has been killed by what in the interface between the ships. The original target audience didn’t have that option.

Nightmare of Eden is quite a good Doctor Who story. But it is an absolutely terrible piece of television.