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The idea of St Patrick’s day parades and parties was mostly thought up by the Irish ex-pat community in New York, who (as you’d expect) wanted to celebrate their country of origin once a year. In Ireland, historically, it was mostly a day to visit family and go to church. 

Yes, quite often, legendary figures do differ from their historical prototypes. Dick Turpin was a nasty little horse thief who somehow got remembered as an heroic outlaw. Saint George the figure in the Mummers plays and the Fairy Queen is an English knight who rescues ladies from dragons, and fights duels with Turks. He may possibly have been based on a Cappadocian Christian martyr. This is absolutely fine. 

The Church of England is historically kind of a big deal in England. The Church of England is sort of kind of mostly Protestant. Protestants mostly think that the veneration of humans, even very holy humans, borders on the idolatrous and even pagan. Some Anglicans are okay with saying “and so, with Mary, Francis and Augustine we pray…” but Saints Days haven't been that big a deal in this country since the reformation. 

Go round some older English churches and you'll see statues of saints with their heads knocked off by puritans.

My first name is Andrew. I happen to know that Saint Andrew's day is on 30th November because Scotland. But I bet if you are named James or Phillip or for that matter Polycarp or Dysmas you have no idea when your name-day falls. 

Not that St Andrew is a very big deal in Scotland: the big day for tartan and bagpipes and disgusting meat products is Burns Night. 

Wales is different again: they celebrate being Welsh with leeks because the English spent so long telling them they ought not to be. 

While we are here: the English have a King and a national church and also a national health service and a national broadcasting corporation and a famous playwright and the Archers. Which is why the Union Jack has never been such a big deal for us as the Stars and Stripes is for Americans: we have other symbols. English people who put flag poles in their own gardens are adopting an American tradition, on the same level as kids who go trick or treating instead of pennying for the guy. Not that a thing is wrong because it's foreign and new, but you shouldn't pretend its traditional. 

The thing about it only being the Union Jack if it’s flying from a boat is a myth.

Yes, indeed the Union Jack is the British flag, not the English, and God Save the Queen I Mean King is the British national anthem, not the English one and the fact that everyone including me gets confused over that is a big part of the problem.

When I was a kid I was quite churchy and went to a quite churchy school, and no-one talked about St George's Day, ever. I think it was an extra holiday celebrated by Boy Scouts, in the same way that one or two children did a thing called Bah Mitzvah which the rest of us didn't. Individual teachers had different opinions about whether they could wear their Scout uniforms to school on Baden-Powell's birthday. 

I think that in some parts of the country there were genuine traditions of Morris and May-Pole dancing and maybe daft things like Yorkshire Pudding Rolling and Pork Pie Hurling in some areas. They have died out or are kept up by revivalists because in the cold light of day they were in fact a little bit silly. 

It is fun to sing Fields of Athernry and Dublin In the Rare Old Times and drink far too much Guinness even if the closest you have been to Ireland is Staffordshire. I like the way King Street turns into a good natured festival on March 17th. Although if I were Irish, I might find some of the blarney and leprechauns a bit annoying. I mean, why aren't mobs of people sitting in pubs reading Yeats and Joyce? 

But if some landlords want to sell people too much real ale while singing the British Grenadiers....er....Rule Britannia....er....England Swings Like a Pendulum Do....then I see no problem at all. 

To summarise 

-- Literally no-one is telling you you can't celebrate St George's Day, but historically, it hasn't really been that big a thing. 

— It is irrelevant and not at all a gotcha that St George came from what is now called Turkey, probably. (And it is not a witty riposte to say "ha-ha but Turkey didn't exist back then" either.) 

— Although I do think it a shame that Alban, who was a: English and b: real never gets a look in. Or Edmund, come to that. 

— I’d go with Jerusalem if I had to make a choice. Land of Hope and Glory is too jingoistic and associated with a particular party, and Rule Britannia requires too much contextualisation, although it’s actually a good tune. I mean, I joke about Place Called England but no-one outside the folk world has heard of it. 

— But if you try to make “having a beer on April 23rd” an Act of Resistance to Forces of Oppression that only exist in your head, then I will call you a racist twat and decline.

Also: Shakespeare's birthday.

More of this sort of thing

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.

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3: City of Death - iv

So: Scaroth is going to travel back in time and prevent the explosion that shattered him into twelve fragments and marooned him on earth. If he succeeds, all human history will be erased and life on earth will simply never have existed.

The Doctor, Romana and Duggan run across Paris, looking singularly unworried. Romana smiles, the Doctor holds her hand. Failing to get a taxi, the Doctor cries out “Does no one care about history?”

The TARDIS is parked in an art gallery. The TARDIS is parked in an art gallery purely to facilitate this scene. I had always assumed the gallery in question was the Louvre, but in fact, we see the exterior of the Denise René  -- which is all about modern, abstract art.

Our heroes run to the Ship. The bystanders continue to shrug. And at that moment; when the stakes have never been higher...

We pause for a celebrity cameo. 

In 1977 there had been a rather concocted controversy about Tate Gallery’s spending a great deal of public money on a minimalist installation, consisting of a pile of bricks and nothing else. It was sufficiently big news that John Craven covered it. The young lad in Children of the Stones threatens to sell the wreckage of his bike to the Tate Gallery. Even today the word "pileofbricks" is sometimes invoked by the kinds of people who think that Western Civilisation has been in permanent decline since the death of  Michelangelo.

As our heroes jump into the TARDIS, we hear a snippet of conversation between two connoisseurs who have mistaken it for a piece of modern art. One of them takes an essentially formalist line:

“Divorced from its function and seen purely as a piece of art, its structure of line and colour is curiously counterpointed by the redundant vestiges of its function."

But the other is more interested in it conceptually:

“And since it has no call to be here, the art lies in the fact that it is here.”

These would both have been perfectly sensible comments to have made about, say Equivalent VIII (the pile of bricks) or Fountain (the urinal). Either you are looking at the shape of the object: paying attention to what it looks like in a new way because of the new context. Or else you are amused by the paradox of something which is not art being exhibited as if it were.

But these perfectly sensible comments are being made by JOHN CLEESE, one of the most recognisable actors on British TV. Many people say that they find him funny even when he isn't doing anything particularly amusing. I used to think that the scene was hurriedly added to the script when it turned out that Cleese was filming Fawlty Towers in a nearby studio and was game for a laugh: but in fact the cameo had always been part of the script, with a number of celebrities in the frame. Because BASIL FAWLTY is speaking the words, we are apt to regard them as intrinsically ludicrous. But I wonder how we would have read the scene if it had been Alan Bennett or Jonathan Miller in the role?

When the Doctor went to the Louvre, he said that the Mona Lisa was one of the greatest treasures in the universe; when he finds out that people are plotting to steal it, he says innocently that it is a very pretty painting. Duggan tells him that there are at least seven millionaires who would buy a stolen Mona Lisa even though they could never show it to anyone -- as a "very expensive gloat". 

Scaroth has forced or persuaded Leonardo to make multiple copies of the picture. Presumably, all seven paintings are equally "pretty" -- as, indeed, would be any high quality reproduction. But the men on Duggan's list are only incidentally interested in its prettiness: what they attach a monetary value to is its rareness and authenticity -- not to look at, but to have. The existence of multiple copies put the whole notion of “authenticity” into question. Would the art collector view each painting as equally valuable because Leonardo painted all of them? Or are they all equally worthless since none of them are unique? [1]  In the event, all the paintings but one are destroyed: but the surviving portrait, which is returned to the Louvre, is one of the ones on which the Doctor wrote the words “this is a fake” at the time of Leonardo. So it is simultaneously an obvious fake and quite definitely authentic. The Doctor sticks to his original position: it makes no difference because the whole point of art is to look at it.

Romana, without realising it, blows the whole argument out of the water. On Gallifrey, art is produced by computers. (In Invasion of Time and Deadly Assassin, the Time Lords have quite a lot of very ornate upholstery, but little representative art.) The Doctor would presumably say that art counts as art if it is pretty, but not otherwise: we can reserve judgement on whether a computer could ever in fact create something as pretty as the Mona Lisa. This would also be Elenor Bron's view: Time Lord art would have value if it had the formal properties of art. To Scarlioni's customers, such art, however pretty, would be infinitely reproducible and therefore completely valueless. But on John Cleese's view, it would become art once we put in an art gallery and treated it as art. 

The last thing we see is Duggan buying a postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa: and we are left asking — what is the status of this cheap, mass produced, piece of cardboard? 

Doctor Who was ostensibly a children's show. Did Adams or Williams envisages children discussing the nature of art in the playground on Monday morning? Or were they intended to say, in effect "Here are a couple of silly grown ups talking complete gibberish -- which is, after all, what all modern art and all art criticism really is?" Is it intrinsically funny that anyone should talk in an informed way about modern art, or about any art at all? Or perhaps the thought was that we would be so busy saying "Hey -- isn't that Basil Fawlty"  that we wouldn't notice what was actually being said. 

Did Williams or Fisher or Adams realise that City of Death offered a pre-emptive debate about the validity of AI artwork? Perhaps not: but the interruption of an end-of-the-world space opera by an irrelevant pair of art aficionados is a clever piece of construction. The scene has no call to be there: the art lies in the fact that it is there.

[1] Paintings which were once quite valuable because they were painted by Rolf Harris are now quite unsaleable for the same reason.

This is the fourth 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.  

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.

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2: City of Death - II

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.

This is the fourth 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.  

The Pacifist, the Vivisectionist and the Humanitarian - Extended Edition

My latest collection of Serious Essays is now available as a 150 page PDF book.

It contains  -- 

The second part of my critique of CS Lewis's moral philosophy, this time diving deep into his theory of justice in The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment, Why I Am Not a Pacifist and Delinquent in the Snow. 

Plus:

What Did CS Lewis Make of Jesus Christ

The Cardinal Difficulty With Bulverism

and
Why CS Lewis Wasn't A Pacifist.

The PDF is currently available to all Patreon supporters.

2: City of Death (i)

City of Death is very good.

Perhaps not quite as good as its reputation suggests: but definitely very good.

On October 20th 1979, sixteen million people watched the final instalment of the story. Sixteen million. In 2026, a drama series is doing pretty well if six million viewers switch on.

Times were, of course, different. There were three channels, and one of those showed nothing but cricket commentaries in Welsh. There was no internet, cinemas showed the same movie for weeks on end, and the pubs didn’t open until 5.30. Kids (I am told) were allowed to play marbles and hopscotch unsupervised on street corners, but they had to come home when it got dark. 

So there was not much to do at quarter past six on a Saturday apart from watch Doctor Who.

The autumn of 1979 was unusual even by the standards of the time. ITV had replaced its regular programming with a card which said “We are sorry that programmes have been interrupted: there is an industrial dispute.” In August one of the ITV unions had gone out on strike in support of a perfectly reasonable 25% pay rise. They went back to work at the end of October, whereupon some of the BBC unions downed tools over an equally reasonable dispute about who was responsible for making sure the big hand and the little hand were in the correct positions on the Play School clock. (Or, according to some sources, that the Crackerjack clock was set to precisely five to five.) This resulted in the cancellation of Shada. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy includes a skit about the philosophers' guild threatening a walk-out over demarcation.

There is a widely dispersed oral tradition that a million people continued to watch ITV even when it wasn’t showing anything, and that there was a notable jump in the birth rate the following April.

But still, sixteen million is an awful lot of people. Enough to fill a line of double decker busses stretching from Lands End to John O’Groats. Or five entire Waleses.

What impression of Doctor Who did those sixteen million people come away with?

At the end of Episode One, the villainous Count Scarlioni pulls off a latex mask and reveals himself to be….a scaly green alien with one cyclopian eye.

This scene frequently turns up on compilation reels, alongside the Myrka and the Skarasen, as evidence of how primitive Old Who was and how right Michael Grade was to put it out of its misery. It’s actually not badly done: not as clever as the Sarah-Jane reveal in Android Invasion, but quite fun all the same. Julian Glover puts his hands to his actual face, we quickly cut to the mask being removed from what could well be a mannequin, and then back to Glover (or his stand-in) looking at his alien self in the mirror. The exact same shot is used when he unmasks again in Episode Four.

There is no particular reason for the Count to have pulled the mask off at that particular moment. Maybe, like the Slitheen, he just finds it uncomfortable to wear for prolonged periods. Julian Glover apparently did, hence the stand-in. [2]

But the cliffhanger does have a function. On the surface, Scarlioni is an urbane, Simon Templar bad guy: a witty, aristocratic art thief. But under the skin, he is decidedly a Doctor Who monster.

And that really tells us everything we need to know about City of Death. It appears to be a sit-com: a Wildean comedy of manners in which every line is a zinger or an aphorism. But under the bonnet, it is still very much a Doctor Who story.

Or, if you prefer: City of Death is a rather clever, high-concept science fiction romp which has cleverly disguised itself as a social comedy.

In the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams reduced the meaning of life to a punchline. City of Death turns on a similar conceit. When we were very young, human existence seemed to acquire new meaning and significance once you knew that an inscrutable alien stand-in for the Deity had been playing Strauss to cave-men since before the Dawn of Time. But that idea had become familiar through over-use, Daniken’s space-gods and Arthur C Clark’s Monolith were now ripe for parody. 

Count Scarlioni is really Scaroth of the Jaggeroth. Zillions and zillions of years ago, he blew up his warp drive, inadvertently kicking off the chemical reaction which gave birth to Life on Earth. As a side effect, he was split into twelve “splinters” of himself, scattered across time, and they have been clandestinely influencing human civilisation ever since. He wants to get humans to the point where they can help him construct a Time Machine, go back to the Dawn of Time and prevent the accident, and therefore the human race, from ever occurring.

As science fiction shaggy dog stories go, it’s quite a strong one. Alan Moore’s alien frat-boys DR and Quinch messed around with human evolution because they wanted the continents to spell out a very rude word in their own language. It’s a long way from the Star Child and Thus Spake Zarathustra.

These kinds of wibbly wobbly timey wimey plots were pretty rare in classic Who. Fans at the time felt that the use of the TARDIS to ferry the Doctor back to the Renaissance and then to the Dawn of Time was a severe breach of narrative etiquette. And to be honest, it is rather lame, given that it is only two stories since the Doctor relinquished control of the TARDIS to the Randomiser.

“Oh but Andrew, surely the Doctor can switch the Randomiser on and off when he wants to?” Yes: yes I am sure he can. And there might very well have been a scene in which he said that in order to save humanity he would have to make himself vulnerable to the Black Guardian. But there isn't.

In Episode Three, Scarlioni rants: “Can you imagine how a man might feel who has caused the pyramids to be built, the heavens to be mapped, invented the first wheel, shown the true use of fire, brought up a whole race?” In becoming a God Like Alien and taking control of human development, he is entering a fairly crowded field. The Daemons and the Fendahl and Sutehk have all had their turn. The Doctor is not above a bit of benign uplifting himself. In Pirate Planet he was claiming to have taught Newton about gravity (with a g); and this week he claims to have encouraged Shakespeare to write Hamlet. I imagine there is some fan-fic, or possibly a collectible card-game, in which the Doctor and the GLAs are engaged in an eons-long four-dimensional chess game, one heaving the human race hither and the other hauling it thither. Perhaps so many of them are at it that in the end it hardly makes any difference and Homo Sapiens is in control of his own destiny. Or perhaps it’s a huge philosophical metaphor: what we think of as  “human history” is merely the intersection of the self-interested schemes of forces far beyond our comprehension -- in the same way that what we like to think of as our “selves” is really the locus for an infinite number of malicious or benevolent “memes”.

But that line of thinking ruins the cosmic joke. While we are watching this story, we have to pretend that Life on Earth really is and always has been an accidental by-product of Scaroth’s scheming. City of Death is only fun if we pretend that Image of the Fendahl never happened. The Doctor travels sideways through multiple iterations of a single idea, not forwards and backwards along a singular timeline that gradually reveals itself.

Laugh at Doctor Who’s production values if you like: I am sure many of the Sixteen Million did.  But I don't think this kind of thing would have worked if it had been mounted on a more impressive scale. In Episode Four, the Doctor, Romana and their new friend Duggan arrive on Primeval Earth, seconds before the Jaggeroth ship accidentally gives birth to life as we know it. This is big, cosmic, biblical stuff. The Jaggeroth says let there be radiation and behold there is radiation. And yet what we are looking at is three actors and a guy in a mask in front of a painted backdrop in a studio. A perfectly good painted back-drop: not something you would single out as a terrible example of Doctor Who’s make-do-and-mend ethos. The model space ship is really nice and you can’t see the wire when it takes off. But it’s artificial: we have to suspend our disbelief and eke out its imperfections with our mind. If it had been a full-on CGI set piece, which we could swear had been filmed on location in the Archaeozoic epoch [3] we could never have bought into the preposterousness of the premise.

1: Creature From the Pit got a perfectly responsible ten million viewers, so in fact we are talking about six million people who would rather have been watching Mind Your Language.

2: One Richard Sheeky apparently, who has an impressive CV including such roles as Man at Reunion, Man, Policeman, and Man (Uncredited).

3: I looked it up.

This is the first 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.  

1: Destiny of the Daleks

Destiny of the Daleks is not very good.

It is quite hard to put your finger on what exactly is wrong with it. I think the answer is probably “everything.”

Perhaps we could have overlooked the story’s worse than usual production values if it had been based on some interesting or whacky idea. And if there had been some slickness and panache in the presentation, perhaps we could have overlooked the fact that the one idea it does contain makes absolutely no sense.

Wind back half a decade to, say, Planet of the Daleks, and you’ll find a similar ideas-famine: but that story manages to radiate a certain degree of Elusive Magic. Genesis of the Daleks, of course, was overstuffed with ideas and characters and astonishingly good writing, which makes up for the fact that it’s not particularly a Dalek story.

But Destiny of the Daleks is, well, just not very good.

It throws established mythos to the wolves. Doctor Who never had much in the way of canon or continuity, but there are things which everybody can be expected to know. The TARDIS travels through time; Time Lords physically change their appearance; stuff like that. Douglas Adams had watched Doctor Who when he was a kid; he snaffled scenes and ideas to use in his own Hitchhiker scripts. But he wasn’t necessarily a Fan, and he might have been labouring under the misconception that the Daleks had been hyper-logical automata for the last sixteen years. Terry Nation, who wrote the scripts, must have known better.

When Deadly Assassin debunked Established Time-Lord Canon, it was a conscious piece of iconoclasm, calculated to annoy a certain kind of fan. Genesis of the Daleks jettisoned Established Dalek Mythos because Terry Nation or Robert Holmes had thought up some new mythos which was more fun. Destiny seems to scupper the whole idea of Daleks without quite realising that that is what it is doing.

The production is bad. Laughably, can’t be arsed, who gives a shit bad. The interior of the ruined Dalek city feels like the Blackpool Haunted House exhibit during the off-season. There are some flats and some metal grills and strips of fabric standing in for doors. At the climax of Episode One a D-A-L-E-K smashes through a wall. It’s a pretty astonishing twist that no-one saw coming, given the title of the story. The wall is made of cardboard. No-one makes the slightest attempt to pretend that the wall is not made of cardboard. When we return to the same location a few episodes later, the wall is still made of cardboard.

I bet there is some fan fiction which reveals that the Dalek city literally was constructed from special anti-radiation cardboard, in the same way that the idea of bubble wrap was imprinted on human consciousness by ancient contact with the Wirrn.

There are a few tips of the hat to every previous Dalek story. Human slaves dig, dig, dig in a mine because as well as climbing stairs, automating drilling is one thing Daleks can’t do. The Daleks say that if one human tries to escape it will kill all of them, a bit like my old PE teacher. There is an interrogation scene with a lie detector, which at least means that no-one has to say “no, no, not the mind probe.” There is a Mexican stand off between the Doctor and Davros and the Daleks and the humans. And in fairness, Lalla Ward acts a lot. A lot. When the Daleks arrest and interrogate her she screams and yells and tries to make us believe that she is scared and angry and that these dilapidated props really are a species of outer space robot Nazi. In those scenes, I could almost convince myself that I was watching a Dalek story, that these beasts were as terrifying as I had always been promised they were.

Is it enough for the Daleks simply to be? Does Destiny of the Daleks exist simply to tickle our memories of chocolate and mint ice lollies and saying Extermenate, Extermenate in the playground? We see rows of Daleks gliding down corridors. We see them gliding past various windows and apertures. In the final episode we see kamikaze Daleks in formation in different parts of the quarry: background, foreground, middle distance, which makes the hearts of those of us who failed to pass the Anti-Dalek Force aptitude test three years running quicken. Just a little bit. The scene reminds us of something we used to love. 

If you had drilling machines, a slyther and an army of humankind slaves, you might be able to excavate an idea from Destiny of the Daleks. It’s admittedly the kind of idea that might have appealed to Douglas Adams. Two huge war fleets, controlled by computers: each computer able to foresee the next move of the other, locked in an eternal, centuries long-stalemate, to be broken only when one side turns off the computer and does something stupid.

I think it was a Star Trek plot. If it wasn’t, it certainly should have been.

But what should have been a premise is presented as a twist, revealed in the final episode with very little build up or foreshadowing. Should we not have seen the horribly be-weaponed starfleets staring at each other in the opening establishing shot? Daleks and McVillains doing nothing in their long echoey corridors, waiting centuries for the command to go over the top which will never come? Douglas Adams might even have introduced some lemon-soaked paper napkins.

But neither Terry Nation nor Douglas Adams seems to have the faintest idea what “logic” means. Granted, Leonard Nimoy sometimes used “illogical” to mean “untrue” or “foolish”, and granted, some schoolboys started to use the word in that way, to their parents' intense irritation. But there are quite a lot of episodes where Spock really does use logic to solve a problem.

Home computers were a year or two in the future: but surely Davros ought to have understood the “garbage in, garbage out principle”? Presented with the syllogism “All elephants are pink, Nellie is an elephant, therefore Nellie is pink” the brilliant scientist would have said “That is perfectly logical provided the premises are correct” or “Yes, but this tells us nothing whatsoever about elephants” or indeed, “What you have told me is logically valid, but I do not have sufficient data to know whether or not it is logically sound”. 

The Daleks opponents are the McVillains—a long hair dark skinned generic spaceship crew who are peculiarly embarrassed about the fact that they are robots in disguise. To demonstrate how the stalemate has come about, the Doctor teaches them to play paper/scissors/stone. Sometimes the Doctor beats Romana, sometimes Romana beats the Doctor. But the Doctor always beats the McVillains, and the McVillains always stalemate each other.

Perhaps a human could learn to consistently beat a machine at the game—complete randomness is relatively hard to simulate. But this doesn’t mean that the human would beat the machine on every throw of the hand; only that he would do better on average over hundreds of iterations. Darren Brown did a stunt where he appeared to consistently beat punters at the game: I assume he was closely observing "tells" to skew the odds in his favour or using misdirection to fractionally delay his choice. (Or he have just been cheating, like when he demonstrated his ability to toss ten consecutive heads by spending a week in a studio tossing the same coins several thousand times.) What does any of this have to do with logic, or intergalactic space-ship tactics?

In Genesis of the Daleks, Davros eliminated “pity” from the Daleks psychological make up: but “pity” is not the opposite of logic. He thought that the only way the Daleks could survive was by killing everything in the universe that was not a Dalek. This is pretty callous and quite possibly a bad evolutionary strategy: but “callous” and “logical” are not synonyms. Up to now, the Daleks have been driven, not by excessive rationality, but by hatred. ("Seething bubbling masses of hatred" the Doctor called them in Death to the Daleks.) Certainly at the beginning they were a very thinly veiled metaphor for fascism. Hitler and Mussolini were not renowned logicians.

The story can't make up its own mind about what's supposed to be going on. The Doctor says that the McVillains are “another race of robots, no better than the Daleks” and that “one race of robots is fighting another”. Davros says that the McVillains are “another race of robots” and therefore worthy foes of the Daleks. Romana, on the other hand, says that the Daleks “were humanoid, once”. And there is a strange, orphan scene in which the Doctor finds a lump of green goo which he claims is a Kaled mutation. “Of course! The Daleks were originally organic lifeforms. I think you've just told me what the Daleks want with Davros, haven't you?” Possibly: but he never shares the insight with us, and the subject is never mentioned again. 

The Cybermen were originally conceived as humans with such advanced transplant technology that they eventually replaced their entire bodies with prosthetics. This was also the original back-story for the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz. The question of whether a “prosthetic brain” is any different from a computer, and whether a Cyberman is any different from any other robot, and why, in fact, they need a supply of humans to turn into next generation Cyberpeople is never very clearly thought through. Latter iterations seem to assume that they retain a certain amount of human wetware inside them. 

Is the thought that the Daleks have somehow replaced their organic core with cybernetic brains and realised this is a step too far, but one which they cannot undo? And that they have to run back to Daddy so that he can restore the biological component into their make up?

Or is Terry Nation merely using the word "robot" in some esoteric way? Doctor Who scripts sometimes say "universe" when what they mean is "solar system."

“What a brain” says the Doctor as he dismantles K9, again. The Doctor certainly treats K9 as if he is a person; although he might just be being deliberately exasperating. If K9’s brain can generate a mind, then it doesn’t really matter if it evolved or was constructed: and that must apply to the Daleks and the McVillains as well. “It’s what’s on the inside that counts”. It transpires that K9 is suffering from laryngitis. The term computer virus wasn’t coined until 1983, but Douglas Adams has a fairly good track record as an accidental prophet. So is this scene a set-up for the rest of the story, making the point that, organic or cybernetic, it is the Dalek’s software that is at fault?

Actually, not. The scene is there because John Leeson is unavailable, and the voice of K9 will be played by one David Brierly in his three appearances in this Season. (Given that there is an eight month gap between Armageddon Factor and Creature from the Pit, it is doubtful if anyone would have noticed.)

Does the story have any redeeming features at all? Well, the script is edited by Douglas Adams: indeed, it seems probable that Adams wrote it from the ground up, working from a minimal treatment by Nation. And we do get glimpses of authentic Adamic humour. Romana goes back to the TARDIS to fetch K9, leaving the Doctor stuck under a big rock. 

“Don’t go away” she says. 

“I rather hoped you’d have resisted the temptation to say that” he replies. 

But most of Adams’ input seems to be rather puerile word play.

"Oh, seismic. I thought you said psychic."

"Sidekick?"

"Like it? I haven't seen it yet."

It is hard to tell which jokes come from one of the funniest writers of the twentieth century and which are just Tom Baker arsing around. When the Doctor gets a glimpse of the quarry on the TARDIS monitor screen, he exclaims “Oh look! Rocks!”, which is very funny if you happen to be a cheeky thirteen year old. Escaping from the Daleks through a raised tunnel, he remarks “If you're supposed to be the superior race of the universe, why don't you try climbing after us?” Hold the front pages: Daleks can’t climb up stairs! Whether from Tom Baker, Terry Nation or Douglas Adams, it’s an unforgivable breaking of the fourth wall. Oh, if only the "floating" special effect from Remembrance of the Daleks had been available in 1979, so the Dalek could have wiped the smug grin off the Doctor’s face!

The one thing I would be inclined would be the infamous regeneration sequence: in which Romana appears to “try on” a series of bodies before settling on that of Princess Astra from the previous story. The Doctor continues to tinker with K9, and Romana continues to act as if she were literally picking a new outfit. (“The arms are a bit long; I could always take them in.”) One wonders if the whole scene was suggested by a weak pun on the word "changing"?

The Doctor has "changed" three times in the history of the show: once through some kind of rejuvenation or renewal; once as a deliberate act by the Time Lords; and once through a process called Regeneration, conceived as a natural part of the Time Lords’ life cycle. Douglas Adams’ writerly instinct—not to pastiche the regeneration scene from Planet of the Spiders but to come up with something entirely different—is mostly harmless. A year and a bit later, the change from Doctor Tom to Doctor Peter will involve prophecies and a future zombie version of the Doctor. Romana is an up-to-date, fully qualified Time Lord, where the Doctor is an out of date fossil with a ton of field experience. The TARDIS is the place where two utterly alien beings retreat, out of the view of mere mortals. And we all know that there has been a change of cast. So instead of exposition, Adams gives us a quite funny sketch.

And in doing so, he gives us a perhaps needed signal. This is a playful riff. This is twenty five minutes of fun. This is entertainment. This is not an attempt to reveal new data about an emerging imaginary cosmos. This is not a programme you are meant to take seriously. But here is a glimpse of some battered old Dalek props as a consolation prize to your loyal old guard.

Is there an unintentional message here? The clunky old past it’s sell by date show running back to its roots to try to escape from the rut? A half-hearted pastiche of what the show had been like in the 1960s, while a spunky 1980 version struggles to be born? A clash in the actual script between what had been the voice of the old show, and what would be the voice of the new show? A cobweb shrouded version of Doctor Who twitches its fingers and comes back to life, but is shown to be comically out of its time, pushed around like an old relative in a wheel chair quite unaware how ludicrous it looks…

I wish I could say "but when I was thirteen years old I loved it; when I was thirteen years old I overlooked the faults; when I was thirteen years old it was enough that the Daleks were there, like that man who told Tom Baker that he was the only thing that made life in the orphanage bearable." But in fact I knew that people thought I was faintly absurd for identifying as a Doctor Who fan and I knew that this laughable amateurish piece of TV would be one more reason to bully me on Monday morning.

Destiny of the Daleks is really not very good at all.

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Shape of the Daleks

When I was very small indeed I had a set of skittles in the shape of Captain Snort and His Soldier Boys, who used to rattle along in an humpetty bumpetty army truck. There was also a farmer who had a modern mechanical farm with a tractor and a miller who milled the corn to make the bread in an old fashioned windmill and sometimes got drunk on cider. He really did sometimes get drunk on cider even though Trumpton was a show for pre-schoolers. (The thing about Master Bates and Seaman Stains is not true, though, and never was.) The soldiers wore red uniforms and Quality Street hats, with their musket, fife and drum. I see now that they were toys and hence could be Napoleonic and contemporary at the same time. It took me a long time to understand how the guard that periodically changed outside Buckingham Palace and the life sized khaki Action Men that you sometimes saw at county fairs were both soldiers.

The Daleks are a bit like that.

There were Dalek toys before ever there were Doctor Who toys. It was 1976 before you could get a Doctor Who action figure. It looked absolutely nothing like him. But you could buy little plastic Daleks in Woolworths as early as 1965. They cost a shilling, which is about £1.80 in modern money, which is quite a lot for what they were. I suppose Dinky or Corgi or someone made a die-cast Bessie?

Was Dalekmania actually a thing? The story about the little boy who slept under a Dalek sheet wearing Dalek pyjamas, washed with Dalek soap and did his homework in a Dalek exercise book with a Dalek pencil sounds like the kind of thing a journalist would make up. They told the same story about Roy Rogers in the 1940s. In the 1970s there was a slightly muted attempt to invent something called Womblemania.

There were definitely Dalek toys. Or there had been. I was born too late and missed out on all the good stuff.

There had always been Dalek toys. A child's bedroom, with a teddy bear and a rocking horse and some toys soldiers and a golly and some Daleks, what could be more natural? (I actually did have a golly. We have covered this previously.)

There was a slot machine Dalek in the penny arcade at Clacton where for a penny or a shilling or five-of-your-new-pence you could get spun around and say exterminate, exterminate, exterminate if it took your fancy. And people definitely ran round the playground shouting exterminate, exterminate, exterminate at each other. 

I still cannot hear that word without thinking of Daleks, whether in the context of pesticide or in — some other context.

In a way, the slot machine Dalek was the real Dalek because you could touch it and get inside it and the TV Dalek was small and fuzzy and usually still in black and white.

Of all the things that Father Christmas bought me in 1976, 1977, 1978 and 1979, the Dalek Annuals are the onwa I still own and which still live on my shelves. Terry Nation's Dalek Annual it said on the cover.  Terry Nation had a bloody cheek, or put another way, Terry Nation had a very shrewd business head. He was a very fine story teller and could spin a very fine yarn and would have never been out of work even if he hadn’t accidentally thought up the Daleks in 1963. Blake’s 7 and Survivors stand up better than most Doctor Who. But the comics and annuals and sweet cigarette cards sold in truck loads because of the Dalek’s shape, and the Dalek’s shape was invented by a BBC set designer who got a small bonus but no royalties. The Dalek Annuals contained reprints of the Dalek Comic strips from TV Century 21 and short stories about humans fighting Daleks which were probably pitches for a TV show he could never quite persuade the BBC to make and bits of free-floating mythos, maps of Skaro and cutaways of Dalek spaceships. The comic strips said Created By Terry Nation even though they were written by David Whittaker and drawn by Ron Turner and others. 

The mythos spilled onto the wrappers of a chocolate and peppermint lolly. (Not frozen ice popsicles but ice-cream on a stick, is there a word for that?) Dalek Death Rays: somehow the colour green was thought to signify Dalekhood. (There was a Dracula ice lolly at the same time, very dark blackcurrant ice, with white ice-cream and red jelly inside. Someone at Walls Ice Cream must have had a touch of the Willy Wonka about him.) They had plastic sticks, instead of wooden ones, with coded messages, not corny jokes. The wrappers told you facts about how the Daleks had tried biological warfare on the humans in the 1600s and how they had a special paint that made them invisible. I am not sure if that would work. Some of them might have been drawn by Frank Bellamy.

The Idea of the Daleks. Even the cartoon strip, which was cutting edge in England in the 1960s, evaporates like space-fog if you actually try to read it. Robot armies and space cruisers and floating hover pods and an emperor with a gigantic head and these obviously impractical mechanical creatures with a thing inside them you are never, ever, ever allowed to see. (Were there Dalek changing rooms or Dalek swimming pools where it was okay for them to take off their metal casings provided they didn’t stare?)

Someone once said that the Marx Brothers had never been in a movie as good as they were. The Daleks were like that.

But the Daleks were also this weeks adversary on a TV show that went out on BBC 1 which was normally good, occasionally excellent, but frequently not very good at all, a TV show that everybody watched but hardly anyone paid much attention to. It was The Merioneth and Llantisilly Rail Traction Company Limited, and it was all there was. And while it is true that the Daleks appeared more often than any other bad guy, it is also true that five out of six Doctor Who episodes didn’t have any Daleks at all in them.

The producers didn’t like them much because they were huge clumsy props; and the writers didn’t like them much because it is fairly hard to write monosyllabic staccato dialogue that doesn’t sound terrible, and the actors didn’t like them much because what actor does like acting at a prop where the voice is going to be dubbed in afterwards. Terry Nation was the only person who was allowed to write Dalek stories and he had long ago lost interest.

When I started going to Doctor Who conventions, there was a ritual question without which no production team Q&A panel was ever complete.

“Are you going to bring back any old monsters?”

By which we meant, of course, “Will we ever get to see the Daleks again?”

And the answer was always some polite variation on “Not if we can possibly avoid it?”

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