Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

Frankly, I Don't Give a Damned

Voyage of the Damned

It's like old times.  I'm full of cold, dosed-up on Day Nurse and close to hallucinating.  And so here is my Voyage of the Damned review.

It takes a strong will and an angry mind to apply criticism to Voyage of the Damned.  The show itself was so lightweight, fluffy and sloppily written that the overwhelming instinct is to shrug and say “Why bother?”.  And since Neil vented his spleen so entertainingly and accurately a few days ago, there's even less of an impetus to waste electrons on a similarly-minded review.  Worst of all there are the majority of massed denizens of the Doctor Who Forum standing on the sidelines waiting to wag their collective finger while saying “Well eight billion people watched it, and it had an AI of 2 x 10¹⁰ so by all means have your crazy opinion but don't for a moment think it actually counts for anything”.

I felt more of an emotional attachment with Mario in 'Super Mario Galaxy' then I did with either Astrid or Alonso the Chimp Boy

So I'll keep it brief.  I liked the first 30 minutes or so, and I loved Clive Swift.  Judging by their on-screen chemistry I imagine that David Tennant was distraught to learn that Mr Copper won't be continuing as a new companion.  As a disaster movie fan, I loved all The Poseidon Adventure stuff, but I didn't really see it in terms of an Eric Saward “dark” massacre as disaster movies are just another Christmas staple.  Deaths in such films are just not the same as deaths in anything else, and as most of this story looked like a Playstation3 game then I doubt that the kids watching were particularly disturbed either.  Certainly I felt more of an emotional attachment with Mario in 'Super Mario Galaxy' then I did with either Astrid or Alonso the Chimp Boy.

Phil Collinson is clearly a man at the end of his tether as he was the only person on the planet who didn't realise that Max Capricorn was going to be the villain.

The last forty minutes have already been demolished by better men than I, but something so unsound only needs a tap with a hammer to bring it crashing down.  What is really odd is how much of this was also revealed by the BBC audio commentary on the programme. It may not seem like it sometimes, but I actually have a boundless admiration for Russell T Davies, Julie Gardner and Phil Collinson and their achievement in bringing back Doctor Who. But my word they sound tired.  Davies commented on how pained he felt when he read Blink and realised it featured angels, and who wouldn't sympathise with his eventual rationalization about the hosts “They've got nothing in common with weeping angels”.  Of course they haven't.  Apart from being angels.  Phil Collinson is clearly a man at the end of his tether as he was the only person on the planet who didn't realise that Max Capricorn was going to be the villain. Even Davies sounded stunned by that.     Later on both Gardner and Collinson murmured supportively as Davies explained his technique for rescuing his original ending “He's got to be a cyborg and she's got to attack him in a fork-lift truck”.  Somebody get them a holiday!

camp frothy nonsense

So it's all about context in the end. A creative decision has been made: “Christmas specials must be about spectacle” and in stretching to achieve that some of the holes show through.  The script looked rushed and didn't make sense a lot of the time, and some of the effects (especially Astrid and Max toppling into the engines) looked poor.  Apparently the BBC wanted an extra ten minutes, whereas the whole thing would have been better over fifty minutes at most.  But in many ways (despite Davies's weird messiah stuff – I'm not even going there as doubtless we'll be wading through it in series 4) Voyage of the Damned was still an achievement.  When it worked it was engaging, funny and spectacular which made its many lowpoints all that much lower.  I'd still rather have the nation watching Doctor Who on Christmas night than Holby “It's a Wonderful Life” City, but I suspect, a la Ricky Gervais, a lot of the nation is saying “Did you see Doctor Who on Christmas Day?  Just what we wanted – a bit of camp frothy nonsense.”  And as between Christmas 2008 and Christmas/New Year 2009/10 we'll only be getting specials, I do hope that they aren't all in the vein of Voyage of the Damned as that'll mean for a whole year Doctor Who really will be nothing but camp frothy nonsense.

Now where's that Day Nurse?  None left. OK – pass the Vosene, that'll do.

An Important Announcement

After lots of soul searching it is my sad duty to inform you all that Behind the Sofa - in its current incarnation - is coming to an end. It's been one hell of a ride, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed over the last 2 and a half years. It's been emotional.

You have until January 7th, 2008 to post your last reviews and then this blog will be frozen for posterity. Don't worry, it's not going anywhere but new posts will not be accepted after this time.

But don't despair - on January 7th we'll also be announcing some news about the next phase of BTS and Tachyon TV. I can guarantee that it's going to be a very busy year!

Many thanks,

Damon, Neil (and John)

I Don't Believe in an Interventionist God...

Here are some heartwarming photos from last night's premiere.  I never thought I'd see Nick Cave and Andrew Marr photographed together - only Who has the power to bring together such strange bedfellows.

And I love Cribbins.

Behind the Sofa - in association with The Guardian

Yet another reference to Behind the Sofa in The Guardian.  What's your arrangement with them Damon?  It's Sean who has the honour of being quoted this time around:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/organgrinder/2007/09/blink_i_miss_it.html

Tachyon TV Needs You!

UPDATED (0715 17 July)...

Wow! Simply, wow! We've been really bowled over by the response we've had to this post, after around 12 hours we've almost reached our target (the Dalek totalizer to the left should be showing you the current state of play) and we'd like to thank the hell out of each and everyone of you who have responded. It has been truly amazing and I certainly feel very humbled by such a response.

Ratings. Zounds!

Ratings down at 6.8 million  but I bite my thumb at thee saucy fellow!  Verily ratings were down across the board, and Grease was not much of a word getting only 4 million, etc.

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag...

The Shakespeare Code 

At last! It’s about time that we finally got to see the Doctor meet Shakespeare after years of only the occasional reference or brief glimpse on the Time-Space Visualiser. Apart from anything else fandom and Shakespeare scholars have an awful lot in common, even if the Shakespeare crowd have been at it a lot longer, so it's about time that they got together. For every argument about the correct name of The Edge of Destruction there’s an equivalent debate about the two distinct versions of King Lear or the authorship of Henry VIII, and for each new radical work of research by Howe/Walker/Stammers or Wood/Miles there’s the scholarly bombshell like the Oxford Complete Works edited by Wells and Taylor. Critical movements rise and fall in the blinking of an eye. One minute the New Adventure crowd are riding high like the New Historicists, and then suddenly it can all fall away and you’re about as relevant as A C Bradley.   

Francis Mere (a sort of Jeremy Bentham/Andrew Pixley in tights and a ruff)

Even while he was still alive Shakespeare had people writing about him and starting to document his output, and Francis Mere (a sort of Jeremy Bentham/Andrew Pixley in tights and a ruff) made a list of Shakespeare’s plays in his commonplace book Palladis Tamis. This has had scholars scratching their heads for years as it refers to Love Labours Wonne, which is probably another name for a known play (candidates include Much Ado About Nothing or The Taming of the Shrew) but more interestingly could be a missing play. Gareth Roberts seems to have had a whale of a time using it as the basis for The Shakespeare Code, and I’m glad to say that I had a whale of a time watching it. 

There was more than a sniff of Shakespeare in Love about it but I don’t mean that as an insult. Tom Stoppard is a hard act to follow (“I had that Christopher Marlowe in my boat once”), but there were some absolutely cracking lines in this, particularly Shakespeare’s own description of the end of Love Labours Wonne “It was as funny and as thought-provoking as usual” and the Doctor’s “57 academics just punched the air”. In fact there were so many references, in-jokes and slightly laboured (excuse the pun but it’s catching) badinage about Shakespeare’s future plays, that I got the feeling that Roberts was overindulging himself a little. But just when I thought the script got a bit bogged down, it won me over again with the crazy lines the witches inserted into the play. I loved the idea that the actors and indeed the audience were used to finding chunks of Shakespeare difficult to follow, and so accepted the incomprehensible instructions as par for the course. There are whole generations of schoolchildren who could sympathise with that. 

The Doctor and Martha seem more light-hearted than the Doctor and Rose – just having fun rather than Just 17

I was more impressed by the wordplay than the story though, and the older witches reminded me of Statler and Waldorf sitting in their box seat jeering at the performance. But in the scheme of things that hardly seemed a big deal – the whole thing looked great, Lilith the young witch was heart stopping in more ways than one, and David Tennant uttered nary a shriek nor a titter but got on with the job in his new toned-down style. I’m also keen on the fact that the Doctor isn’t giving Martha the goo-goo eyes despite her best efforts to encourage him, and even Shakespeare (an acute man) told her that “the Doctor will never kiss you.” I wasn’t averse to the Doctor/Rose love interest, but it would have been a mistake to do the same thing again, and this new dynamic has given the series a lift. The Doctor and Martha seem more light-hearted than the Doctor and Rose – just having fun rather than Just 17.

for the second week running Murray didn’t give me a headache

All in all I thought this was another very enjoyable episode. OK, it was a bit thin on story, but full of fun, good performances, and for the second week running Murray didn’t give me a headache. The director Charles Palmer deserves credit for his great work on two consecutive episodes, and as a Shakespeare nut I like the fact that Gareth Roberts took his chance to “do” Shakespeare in Doctor Who and really went for it. He might even have encouraged me to resume my Shakespeare studies again, after having all my post-degree enthusiasm knocked out of me by years of shit RSC productions.

Tron. With added cats

This is all getting a bit too positive isn’t it? What’s on next week? Oh yes. Tron. With added cats. That’s more like it.

What's the Bleeding Time?

Smith and Jones

This episode was excellent in so many ways that I thought I might as well start with Roy Marsden.

Here we have a stalwart actor who hasn't been in a sci-fi series since a brief role in the ill-fated LWT show The Adventures of Don Quick (I'm discounting his appearance in Space 1999 because you have to draw the line somewhere) and he's given about five minutes in Doctor Who to show what he can do.  And as Mr Stoker, a sort of milder-mannered Sir Lancelot Spratt, he was great - a slightly pompous consultant who goes from being more concerned than he's letting on about the static electricity to wistfully contemplating his lost retirement and seeing his daughter again before succumbing to a grisly fate at the hands of Ken Barlow's ex-wife. 

Now in old Doctor Who, Marsden would have had a couple of episodes worth of nuances while the plot went nowhere or in circles for a bit before he met a similarly unpleasant end.  No such luxury in current Who, and on balance I think this is a change for the better, except it's hard to find writers who are skilled as RTD at building characters quickly while also banging in the crash bang wallop of the action sequences.  Most of the writers last year had their scripts rewritten for (probably) this very reason, and let's face it RTD himself has slipped up massively on a number of scripts with episodes ending up looking rushed or padded, or sometimes both.  Everyone in production is constantly thinking "What's the bleeding time?".

Like most people, I was knocked out by Freema Agyeman, and not just because for the first time since Peri copped off with the Emperor Augustus I can at last fancy a companion again

But unlike last year's opener, Smith and Jones was a simple story told well while also doing the difficult job of introducing a new companion.  Like most people, I was knocked out by Freema Agyeman, and not just because for the first time since Peri copped off with the Emperor Augustus I can at last fancy a companion again.  She gave a lovely performance that was complemented by David Tennant reining himself in and giving us a more sustained portrayal of a broodingly psychotic Doctor that we only saw in flashes last season.  The scene where Martha listened to the Doctor's hearts had more chemistry between the two leads in three minutes than we've seen in the series since Nicola Bryant tried to resuscitate Peter Davison with her magical breast power.  Even Murray had stopped listening to Bod and discovered the volume control.

you had such delights as Anne Reid's plasmavore being electrocuted in what I hope was a homage to Val Barlow's death by hairdryer in Coronation Street

Not everything was perfect.  When the people in the hospital realised that they were on the moon they lapsed into the kind of mass hysteria that might have been fun to do but looked more like an audition for Runaround.  But it's churlish to pick at the odd false note when you had such delights as Anne Reid's plasmavore being electrocuted in what I hope was a homage to Val Barlow's death by hairdryer in Coronation Street, and David Tennant's uncannily accurate impersonation of Bruce Forsyth's pet parakeet.  And the Judoon were a great monster because

• they looked superb with really mobile mouths that were as drooly as mine just after I've woken up from a nap,
• they weren't just nasty baddies and were even happy to pay compensation for their roughhouse tactics
• they used magic markers.  I'm a sucker for that high-technology/low technology gag everytime

Part of the enjoyment of this episode was also a quiet sense of relief at being free of Rose's extended family and her "journey".  I liked quite a bit of that journey over the last two years, and I understand why RTD needed to use Rose as some kind of touchstone for a new audience.  But the show has its audience now, and it felt genuinely liberating to have a new companion (not saddled with a boyfriend?) with a family that already show signs of being less dominating than the last lot.  The other liberating thing was being in space - it took me a while to realise it but I had a big smile on my face for a lot of the episode because big spaceships were landing on something other than the Earth and aliens were marching across a lunar landscape.  Perhaps I'm not that sophisticated a viewer after all.

So this opening episode has even put a smile on the face of the mighty Lancelot Spratt aka James Robertson Justice.  What a Doctor he would have made! But he's still saying "What's the bleeding time?'

Caught on Film

Coming soon to a podcast near you (if we can edit out the libellous bits).

(Thanks to Simon Scott for these images which can also be seen at Bentham and Wood)

The other interviewees must remain shrouded in mystery at the present time. 

But neither of them were Colin Baker.

Zarbi Trauma

The Web Planet 6: The Centre

Never stand in front of a loaded larvae gun.  At least I've learned something from these episodes, although I didn't have to learn the lesson quite as harshly as poor old Hroster.  When I recently watched this episode for one of the Tachyon TV podcasts I hadn't seen it for years and was weak with hysteria during the "Zarbi...eeeech!" scenes.  But now, after watching the five episodes that preceded it, I've become positively blase about the madness.  Barbara defeats the Animus with a boule, and the whole thing dwindles into anti-climax.  I mean if the Doctor and Vicki can fall asleep during the episode then I don't see why I can't catch the odd 40 winks now and again.

See you via T-Mat.

Code Word Electron

The Web Planet 5: Invasion

I was wrong about the lead Optra, his voice was clearly the inspiration for Brian Croucher's masterly performance as Shivan the grotesquely disfigured rebel leader in Blake's 7.  Every sound they utter is horrible, and even when you work out what they're saying it's demented "Then it will speak more light!"

Other than that Martin Jarvis is a very dashing miitary moth, and I'm glad to see some web make an appearance, especially if it shuts up the Doctor and Vicki.  I'm otherwise out of words.

Is the Gun Dead?

The Web Planet 4: Crater of Needles

Apart from the unfortunate opening scene where we hear a production assistant who's wandered in from the next studio laughing her head off at the Optra, this episode starts like a BBC public information film trying to let kids know that pulling the wings off a daddy long-legs is cruel.  Barbara is clearly upset about mothy losing his wings but she's also concerned about being stuck in the crater of ("two hours away!") needles feeding vegetation into the acid streams.  I mean we all know that job's on a par with retrieving lobsters from Jayne Mansfield's bum, so she has our sympathy.

The only light-hearted moment is when Ian has his hands stuck together by white goo, and ends up looking like a man who's been locked in a room for a week with a only a pile of Hustler for company

I would have sympathy for Ian "I love the silken rustle of a lady moth' Chesterton if he'd have been captured by any species other than the fucking awful, incomprehensible, tedious and stupid Optra. A friend of mine claims that he first encountered this episode in audio form, and when the Optra made their entrance he'd assumed that a group of lost Japanese tourists had wandered onto the set.  If only. The Optra leader sounds like Terry Gilliam's Cardinal Fang ('my old man said follow the van') crossed with late-period Olivier - only even more unintelligible.  The rest of these scenes are almost too much to take with the woodlice spending ages to decide whether they'll kill Ian and Ms Mothy while their captives fight to stay awake.  The only light-hearted moment is when Ian has his hands stuck together by white goo, and ends up looking like a man who's been locked in a room for a week with a only a pile of Hustler for company.  It's left to Ms Mothy to sort things out by forcing the woodlice to worship her wings.  Her tactics are sound, but her words confused me.  "Your wings withered as you crawled underground...like slugs."  It's the simile that confuses me.  Does this mean that the Menoptra are familiar with slugs?  And if so, are they normal slugs like on Earth, or are they a separate race of giant slugs that are different to the Optra and somehow inferior?  What is the insect/mollusc pecking order exactly?  If they don't want me to think about these things then don't have a bunch of giant insects employing similes that drag in potentially non-diegetic species.  Then we can all calm down.

After all that Optra stuff the unending surreality starts to seem normal.  Even the dialogue "Is the gun dead?" scarcely causes me to raise an eyebrow.  The only thing that would surprise me now is if Martin Jarvis turned up as one of the moths.  With Diane Keen as his wife.

Mr Lover Lover

The Web Planet 3: Escape to Danger

The Zarbi run around wrecking the studio, and the giant moths that haven't had their wings chewed off are swooping around the set like nobody's business.  I need a lie down.

You have to admit that Chesterton knows how to charm a lady moth.

Ian's great in this episode, isn't he?  He get's taken into the TARDIS because the Doctor is more concerned about Ian's blistered face than leaving Vicki in the clutches of the Zarbi.  Once his face is sorted, Ian has some dark reminiscences about his time in his Coal Hill lodgings "I've seen a colony of ants eat their way right through a house."  Obviously this sheds light on why the Doctor and Susan stayed in a junkyard - the rest of the Coal Hill area was so infested that Trotters Lane was paradisial in comparison.  Ian's experience with ants presumably explains why he adapts so well to life on Vortis and particularly how quickly he bonds with the Menoptra.  In fact, bond is an understatement, as no sooner has he met Vrestin then he's flirting with her.  They lie down, and Ian's soon turning over and gazing into her eyes, which Vrestin clearly enjoys.  You have to admit that Chesterton knows how to charm a lady moth.  Between them Ian and Barbara have done their fair share of breaking down some taboos about inter-species romance, but it's a shame we don't get to see how some of the practicalities play out.  If Ian took Vrestin to the cinema and moved in for a kiss and cuddle, then how would he cope with all that powder that moths have on their wings?  It'd get everywhere, and potentially damage the moth's flying capabilities in the future.

But the romantic spell can't last forever, and is broken when Ian finds out that the crater of needles is two hours away.  His heart sinks, our heart sinks, and rather than put up with more of this, the two of them throw themselves into a pit seeking oblivion.  But that's too easy for us. I can't go on.  I'll go on.

Moth Balls

The Web Planet 2: The Zarbi

They don't hang around with these recaps do they?  In this case it's probably because they needed to do a bit of a "Crash Corrigan" with the cliffhanger, since in the last episode it didn't look much like the feeble wave of a Zarbi leg would save Barbara from a dip in the acid.  Similarly, the limp web of mild peril that was holding Ian appears to have vanished, even though he has picked up a virulent form of herpes in the meantime with sores erupting all over him.  Hardly have we had time to adapt to this before the moths make their appearance, and I was grateful for Ian's words in the following scene: "Breathe slowly, deeply, like a diver".  His sage advice got me through the trickier moments of this episode, and there were plenty of them.

Barbara shows admirable sang-froid when she is woken from her bracelet trance to find herself surrounded by moths and doesn't scream or fall to the floor racked by mocking laughter.

The Zarbi aren't that bad, although I'm still not sure exactly where their threat lies when they're without the larvae guns.  Can they bite?  Or are they like British black ants and a bit rubbish?  If they are black - they could be red I suppose.  But it's the moths that I find hard to take.  On the plus side they have a funky crystal communicator/wireless, and voices that must have been fun to imitate in school on Monday, but I cannot believe that they can build and fly spaceships.  Barbara shows admirable sang-froid when she is woken from her bracelet trance to find herself surrounded by moths and doesn't scream or fall to the floor racked by mocking laughter.  But she gets her revenge anyway.

Doctor Who has delved into some niche areas over the years, but explicit ant-on-moth sado-masochistic footage is a step too far even for 21st century eyes.

The genuinely good thing about the episode amidst the madness is that the Menoptra debate whether or not to kill Barbara, and because they delay she escapes, gets mesmerised (this time with a giant golden wishbone) and leads the Zarbi back to slaughter her mothy captors.  This is quite effective in dramatic terms, but the constant problem in this story is that it's hard to care about or identify with these stupid dancing moths.  On the face of it, there are lots of other bleak and stressful moments in the episode if you can get past the very prominent distractions.  The TARDIS defences are easily and repeatedly breached up until the point where Vicki accidentally activates the force-field, and in one of the most disturbing scenes both the viewer and Barbara are forced to witness some Zarbi - Menoptra S & M.  Doctor Who has delved into some niche areas over the years, but explicit ant-on-moth sado-masochistic footage is a step too far even for 21st century eyes.  Even for 30th century eyes come to that. At least we can turn it off, but Barbara is forced to watch by her cruel captors.  How transgressive can you get?

Do the larvae guns need to be exercised?

My stomach was starting to turn at this point, and so I was ill-prepared for the next scene where William Hartnell transports himself into the Vortis version of Give Us a Clue (great minds eh Sean?) and mimes frantically to the Zarbi equivalents of Lionel Blair and Una Stubbs.  "Time vessel - what's the symbol for that?  One word, two syllables.  First syllable, sounds like hard...Oh forget it - whole thing I'll do the whole thing..."   Ian takes the words out of your mouth with hysterical understatement "Oh the Doctor's not getting through to them".  Nothing is getting through at this point, and I'm left with a few fractured questions.  Do the larvae guns need to be exercised?  They're like labradors in many ways, always pushing against your leg, only labradors that spit forth venom as opposed to just slobbering on you.  I'm grateful at the end for the soothing voice of the Animus "Why do you come here now?" - I'm asking myself the very same question.  But we must press on regardless.

Drink Deep From the Acid Pool

The Web Planet 1: The Web Planet

What on earth did 13-odd million people make of this when it went out in 1965?  On the one hand you'd think there should have been riots in the streets, but on the other hand the viewing millions had absorbed Space Patrol, Supercar and assorted Gerry Anderson madness with no obvious ill-effects.  Perhaps the audience in those days were more well-versed in the art of the surreal, or, as seems more likely, cheap production values then equals Salvador Dali on a bad day to our modern eyes.  Either way, the very alien stories (of which this is probably the acme) are always a bit worrying to Doctor Who fans, because when it comes down to it Who is popular television sci-fi rather than hard-core ramblings about Tholian armpit mites and their struggles against super-intelligent shades of the colour blue.  We see that tension all the time in the new series, and it affects both the fans and the writers.  Before The End of the World was shown I was convinced the high alien quotient would scare off viewers, and The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit didn't alleviate the worries when it got comparatively poor ratings.  It's ironic that The Web Planet is reportedly one of RTD's favourite stories, which leads you to think that he might be a bit conflicted over putting out the stories he'd personally like to see, against putting out the stories that will work for a modern popular television audience.  It's a tricky task, especially as it's been argued elsewhere that a large proportion of the audience for The Web Planet not only walked away from the series, but forever had the idea that Doctor Who meant rubbish effects, twittering aliens and massive ennui.

The blurred cameras make seeing anything virtually impossible, the echo on the sound drives you mad, and the characters themselves seem so demented that you can't help coming out in sympathy. 

The episode itself is everything you might imagine.  It's either a brilliantly made piece of work which so confuses the viewer that we sympathise with the disorientated state of the TARDIS crew, or it's a load of cack-handed rubbish.  I was watching it late at night in my cosy study, but I still felt stifled, slightly panicked and had a headache by the end.  The blurred cameras make seeing anything virtually impossible, the echo on the sound drives you mad, and the characters themselves seem so demented that you can't help coming out in sympathy.  Perhaps becoming demented is a side-effect of working with Richard Martin, because (as has been pointed out elsewhere) this is very reminiscent of The Edge of Destruction.  Here, Barbara is similarly trapped in the TARDIS with a precocious child, and although she didn't know Susan that well in the earlier adventure, Vicki is probably even more of a stranger as they spent most of the previous story apart.  You have to feel sorry for Barbara as she tries to give Vicki an aspirin only to be given a lengthy lecture on education systems of the future while at the same time struggling to maintain control of her arm.  If I'd have been faced with this futuristic Ruth Lawrence I'd have given up and allowed myself to be dragged off to the giant ants much sooner.

The only people not laughing are in the audience.

The weirdness is not helped when Vicki has to stifle her laughter at Barbara's arm trouble as if Ms Wright is a female version of Jack "Alf Ippititimus" Douglas.  And the laughter is certainly contagious.  The Doctor in particular finds everything hysterical: Ian's pen flies through the air - rib-tickling; Ian's tie dissolved by highly corrosive acid - gut-busting; hearing the odd echo - thigh-slappingly amusing; the TARDIS vanishing - oh hang on he's concerned now.  The acid pool fumes must be wearing off at last.  The only people not laughing are in the audience.

But just as we are getting used to this madness, the director decides to ramp things up again.  Barbara marches purposefully towards the acid, Ian is strung up by a web, Vicki stops laughing long enough to realise something is wrong, and the TARDIS console - that symbol of all things solid and  reassuring - starts spinning like a whirling dervish.  Nowadays, if any piece of television drama makes me feel uncomfortable, slightly shakey, and question some of my core beliefs, I'd call it a triumph.  The Web Planet does all of these things, so on that basis I'd have to say it's a winner, though like Barbara I feel like marching purposefully towards the acid pool to drink deeply and try to clear my head.  Where can the programme makers go after this?

The Bumper Book of Made-up Doctor Who Facts has this to say about The Web Planet 1: The TARDIS beds were IKEA’s first foray into furniture design outside of Scandanavia.  Founder Ingvar Kamprad and chief designer Gillis Lundgren personally negotiated the deal with Verity Lambert, and the success led to the creation of their Stockholm store, with the bed being redesigned as the triumphant Poang chair.  Lambert later said that the deal with IKEA "ensured the TARDIS crew had tremendous posture, but they did get tired of living on meatballs and lingonberry jam."

Col-Gate Update

The day has flipped around.  Thanks to Sean, the Tachyon TV team broke bread with Andrew Pixley this afternoon, and as ever he was lovely.  All is now well with the world, and the Tachyon team have put the lesser Baker's smears behind us.  We understand from a close contact that even Andrew's wife enjoyed the fanzine.  With luck we might not blow it again.

Shame at 9.30am

A stunned Tachyon TV team were verbally assaulted by Colin Baker at 9.27 this morning.  The stocky Sixth Doctor (pausing only to wipe black pudding from his heavy chops) accused the Tachyon TV fanzine of representing the worse kind of "undergraduate humour", and that he personally would only rest when the perpertrators were chased from the convention and slaughtered on the widest high street in Europe.  The two hundred strong audience rose as one to cheer his mauling of these "parasites".

Tachyon TV would like to make it clear that they strongly support his views, and are currently working out the best way of disbanding before the lynch mob gets too close.  We would like to point out that Tachyon TV only indulges in sixth-form humour, and are pleased that the lesser Baker credits us with better A Levels than we possess.

P.S.  Anyone like to buy 300 spare fanzines?

Haiku Who Review

She sees the young him,
Bright blue gem in a green haze.
Takes her leave.  Boo Who.

Next week:  City of Death in Spenserian sonnets.

BSG and DW

It's getting late and I may be hallucinating, but I believe that season 2/27 has been confirmed for transmission on the US Sci-fi channel for the end of September.  Even more strikingly,it will run alongside the new series of BSG in the old Stargate slot! 

The merits of BSG and DW - sometimes BSG vs DW - have been discussed quite often on this blog over the last year.  Interesting that the US sci-fi watching public will be able to make a very direct comparison week after week.

New Companion Announcement

The BBC are announcing the new companion at midnight - well 12.01 at any rate.  The speculation is already rife, but the current front runner is - the girl who used to be in Spooks.  Not Keeley Hawes or Jenny Agutter.  I'm trying to generate some excitement.

The announcement should appear at http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pre...05/index.shtml but it's bound to be out before then as the newspapers have the embargoed details.

Meet the Authors: John Williams

Age: 37
Location: Whitley Bay
Homepage: http://www.vintagetimes.org.uk is probably the nearest to my home page at the moment.  Designed by Q of course
Earliest Dr Who memory: The Sea Devils
Favourite Doctor Who TV Story of all-time: The Caves of Androzani
And on the opposite end of the spectrum:  Of those I've seen probably The Twin Dilemma.  I haven't seen much of the McCoy era.
Favourite Doctor: Tom Baker
Favourite Companion: Sarah Jane Smith
Favourite Doctor Who Novel: Never read one.  Novelisation - Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon. 
Favourite Doctor Who Audio: Does Genesis of the Daleks count?
Favourite Doctor Who Website: This one
Favourite non-Who Website: http://www.the-mausoleum-club.org.uk/xmb/index.php but its glory days are in the past
Favourite Film: Performance
Favourite TV Show: The Singing Detective (but Bill Brand is coming up on the rails)
I enjoy listening to: The Streets, Kate Bush, Led Zeppelin, Frank Sinatra, et al
I enjoy reading:  Yes, very much especially if it's obscure, difficult and bleak
Other sci-fi I enjoy: The BSG reboot, Blake's 7, small doses of Star Trek at infrequent intervals
Thing that irritates me the most: Me being irritable; an inability to blog about new Who
Favourite joke: How can you tell there's an elephant in bed with you?  By the big "E" on his pyjama pocket
Guilty Pleasures: There's nothing guilty about it, but I suppose Crossroads is the kind of thing you're after.
Reasons for Blogging: The nagging sense I haven't been creative or expressed myself enough over a large chunk of my wastrel life

LRB and Who

My favourite periodical the London Review of Books has an article on Who this month.  I'm going to read it over my tuna mayonnaise sandwich.  Yum yum.

T****w**d

Long ago, I bumped into a friend of mine coming out of his final exams for Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and knowing that his idea of revision was examining the racing pages through an amber blur at the bottom of his pint, I nervously asked him how things had gone.  "Well John - a possible pass - I've decided to abandon the essay form in favour of structured notes" was his considered reply, and so off we went in search of more amber.  In that vein I'd like to present my structured notes on Tooth and Claw:

• It was great.  A very traditional Who story, obviously in the Hinchcliffe/Holmes mould, and similarly skating very close to the edge in terms of its horror content.  So many moments were classic Who, from the very specific Horror of Fang Rock reference, the sacrifice of a supporting character with just a brief but sincere "good man" from the Doctor, to the fabulous lick of the wood panelling in the library.
• Superb direction and a focussed narrative.  The chase sequence that began with Father Angelo chanting at the window and ended with the main characters finding sanctuary in the library was totally enthralling.  My only quibble is that I'd seen too many elements of it because of the trailers.
• Neil is right about Rose and the Doctor, and they are clearly heading for a fall.  Victoria's comment "How much longer will you survive this terrible life" was about as portentous as it gets, and her disapproval of them both was very clear from virtually the first moment that they met. 
• RTD must have been rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer before starting on series two - it's almost as much of an influence on the show as classic Who.  The scene in the library with the characters searching dusty tomes for answers was an obvious nudge towards BTVS, with the bespectacled Doctor taking the Giles role, but there are subtler references.  The Doctor and Rose are treating their voyages like a big game, and they seem almost drunk with their own knowingness and supposed indestructability.  This is very reminiscent of BTVS season three, where Faith and Buffy become increasingly intoxicated with their power until it all comes crashing around their head in Consequences.  As this is Doctor Who, when the Doctor and Rose get their comeuppance it will probably result in many people dying, just as it surely means there will be some form of redemption at the end of the season.  Oh, and if there wasn't enough Buffy, just look who the guest star is next week.
• There is a direct steal from Mrs Brown (which was on BBC4 not long after Tooth and Claw) when the Doctor says "you must miss him".  This is the first thing Billy Connoly says to Judi Dench's Queen Victoria and her response is much more violent than the contemplative Queen in T & C.  The Doctor's reaction to her grief about Albert was another nicely judged scene.
• RTD likes dropping in references to 21st century popular culture.  They fall flat a lot, but he isn't going to stop doing it because he does it on everything.  Even Casanova had all that stuff about the lottery ("release the balls") and against the odds that somehow worked.  It's part of the package. 

Tooth and Claw seemed like good old-fashioned Doctor Who to me.  And I'm really looking forward to Torchwood.  They've cast the wonderful Guppy from Bleak House, and RTD is actually bothering to set up an antagonism between the Doctor and the Torchwood Institute, which as well as being narratively interesting also serves to distance the respective shows from each other.  Quite a clever move I think, but maybe he should have done it all entirely in code rather than say the "T" word.

Speak of the Devils!

This isn't the best Doctor Who story.  It might not even be the best Jon Pertwee story - which is fairly damning.  But it remains a great favourite of mine because apart from being the earliest real Doctor Who memory that I have, it also happened to be shown at one of those moments when I couldn't believe my luck. 

Imagine the scene:  Spring Bank Holiday Monday 27th May 1974.  I'm 5.5 years old (aaah!) and I'm enjoying the fact that for once my dad is not at work, and I'm able to maraud around the house mucking about with him.  One problem - telly isn't much cop.  There's the Galloping Gourmet on ATV, Play School on BBC2, but at least The Pink Panther is on BBC1.  Wonder what's on next?  And then came the twelve most beautiful words I have ever heard from a BBC continuity announcer:  "In place of the scheduled cricket...Doctor Who faces The Sea Devils!".  How many times does that happen in a lifetime?  Faced with nothing but the prospect of Larry the Lamb and Inigo Pipkin at midday, and suddenly Doctor Who crops up.  And the monster that really scares the crap out of me as well.  Result!

I'm intrigued now as to just how young I was when I first saw The Sea Devils, as I can so distinctly remember knowing I'd seen them before when this repeat turned up.  Old listings demonstrate that I either saw the original transmission in early 1972 (when I was three and a bit) or the Christmas 1972 repeat when I was a tender four year old.  Just when does the memory kick-in?  My brother liked the show so I would have been plonked in front of it regardless - maybe I became a fan by osmosis.  But if I had to choose the magical moment that made me a devotee, it was when a grave-voiced continuity man made an announcement because of industrial action.

The programme itself was full of great stuff.  Minefields, sea forts, submarines, hovercrafts, diving bells, and, of course, very scary monsters.  These bits still held up strongly when I saw it again on UK Gold recently, but there was so much else I missed when I was younger. Malcolm Clarke's brilliant music, a convincingly malevolent civil servant (unlike Chinn in The Claws of Axos), and a wonderful turn by Roger Delgado.

Whether he's rowing his exercise bike, chatting with the Doctor and Jo (a nice scene), putting up with the exasperating Trenchard, or imitating a Clanger he simply doesn't put a foot wrong.  Rewatching a lot of these Pertwee episodes recently has convinced me more and more that either UNIT should have arranged an "accident" to befall the Doctor, and through force of circumstance taken on the Master as their scientific adviser; or that the Barry Letts/Terrance Dicks gestalt should have simply written a scenario where an alien force puts the Doctor's mind into the Master's body, but the "Master" is then killed off.  Hey presto!  A regeneration without losing a lifecycle, and you end up with a richly ambiguous, dark and charismatic Doctor without the unfortunate tendency to get on everybody's wick.  Oh well.

I'll never forget my first proper look at a Sea Devil.  Lots of programmes have changed my life over the years, but this was the first.  Nice and simple - childish terror at the sight of a froggy eyed ghoul creeping out of the surf.  The complex bit is why on earth I'm still hooked into this stuff thirty-two years later.  Anal retentive angry loner with OCD, or still filled with a child-like capacity for wonder?  Or both?  Roll on New Earth, but it will never quite be the same again.

All the Sights of Wheelie World

I'm probably offline for the next few days so please excuse the untimeliness and brevity of this review.

So...Scream of the Shalka eh?  I'll get the obvious question out of the way first:  why was there a robotic Master in the TARDIS?  Was he a free gift with some Sugar Puffs?  I'd genuinely be interested to hear where they were planning to go with this Doctor before the new series intervened.  The script is peppered with cryptic references to past events, and if one word could sum this Doctor up it would be ennui.  But maybe that's just the performance of Richard E Can't.  I liked episode five because I like zombies, and also because the Doctor spends a lot of his time squeezing a giant zit on Alison's forehead. 

On the whole I found it a strangely dispiriting experience because (apart from the comedy cheeky soldier) it was somewhat po-faced.  A bit like Monkey Dust without the laughs.  I think Cosgrove Hall should have thrown in the odd character from their old cartoons to lighten things up a bit.  Maybe Penfold could have been the Doctor's companion as they took on Baron Greenback, or perhaps rope in Wordsworth the dog from Jamie and the Magic Torch.  If things are looking black and the story is faltering then you can always rely on Chorlton to brighten your day.

Come on Chorlton!  Fenella the witch is in league with the Shalka.  Bring the inexplicable robotic Master with you, and we'll defeat them in the space of approximately eight minutes.

Couldn't fail surely?

Teeth Acting

I should just say that there are absolutely loads of Doctor Who stories that I love, and I even watched The Time Monster this weekend and found it strangely enjoyable.  Thinking about it, that might have been because:

a) It had Ingrid Pitt in it
b) It wasn't The Mutants

But all my positivity is crushed into a corner when faced with Survival: Part Three...

It's amazing what an impact rewatching these old episodes has had on me.  The last one in particular had me revisiting the bad old days when I was getting sick of the series but hanging on out of some weird sense of duty, as well as being reluctant to give up on something in which I had invested so much emotional energy.  The casting of Sylvester McCoy was the last straw.  I had nothing against him personally, as I had been a huge fan of him when he was in Tiswas, but to my mind he was the diametric opposite of the kind of actor that might have saved the show.  And so I washed my hands of Doctor Who, watched the first five episodes in a totally detached manner, and went off to University not exactly desperate to see the second episode of Paradise Towers.  I don't think I watched Doctor Who again until The Tomb of the Cybermen came out on VHS.  The only McCoy episodes I have seen since then are the ones released on DVD, and nothing there makes me think I missed anything.

But as Sean said in one of his reviews, to an extent we should now be able to look back at the bad days and find it less painful.  The series is back, made with love, and popular with the mainstream audience, so there's no need to worry as much about this sorry end to the classic series back in the dog days of Thatcherism.  I've done with the post-traumatic stress and have moved on, and its time to consider the real issues raised in Survival.

Why does the Master keep doing an impression of Bruce Forsyth?  Is there some deep significance to this, or is he just trying to keep his false teeth in?  Ainley was famous for his "teeth acting" (probably seen to best effect in The Five Doctors), but here he's developing "false teeth acting" which is an altogether more unruly beast.  But at least Ainley's presence reminds me that I'm watching Doctor Who, because otherwise it looks like one of those piss-poor ITV children's shows like The Tomorrow People, Into the Labyrinth or The Feathered Serpent.  Why couldn't they get unconvincing teenagers that could actually act?  I mean Press Gang was on at this point, and seemed to have an endless supply of excellent actors working alongside Dexter Fletcher.  And although it's bad when the supporting cast stumble about like half-wit refugees from an unreleased Children's Film Foundation production circa 1972, things get so much worse when the regulars aren't fit to lead by example.

When my dad had to put up with substandard thespians he used to quietly comment that "They couldn't act daft!".  This phrase was ringing in my ears when I watched episode three of Survival.  McCoy is an embarassment - even I'd heard about the infamous delivery of "If we live like animals we die like animals" but I hadn't appreciated the full horror until I saw it with my own eyes, and Aldred is scarcely any better.  The 1980s were a bleak decade in many ways, but television drama was as good as it had ever been, and even the soaps had raised their game with the coming of EastEnders.  Doctor Who just wasn't fit to be a peak-time programme anymore.  Hang on...maybe the post-traumatic stress is still around.  I can feel my blood pressure rising, so I'll have to undergo the Janov-style primal scream aversion therapy techniques I first tried in 1990.  It involves living in a room full of flashing lights (a la Invasion of the the Dinosaurs) while David Dimbleby intones the titles of all Doctor Who adventures from the start until The Caves of Androzani.  If I refer to any adventure subsequent to this, then I have to watch Time and the Rani while enduring shock treatment with a soundtrack of Bonnie Langford as Violet Elizabeth Bott thcreaming until she is sick.  Couple of weeks of that, and I'm usually sorted.  It's just the pesky real world that keeps getting in the way.

The Crushing Boredom of Eternity

Thomas Moore would be feeling pretty grim if he weren't already dead.  His popular poetic sequence Lalla Rookh (1817) contained the story of Paradise and the Peri which was later adapted by Robert Schumann for his 1843 oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri. After a few decades his work went out of fashion until he was virtually forgotten.  But maybe that's preferable to being prominently quoted in The Twin Dilemma. From Schumann to Anthony Steven is one hell of a comedown, especially when the reference was probably shoved by the script-editor because of the fortuitous reference to Peri.  Or was Peri named after the poem because Saward was keen on 19th century poets?  That would at least explain why the Doctor later strolls around in episode two bellowing Longfellow for no good reason, and why he spends most of this episode using the kind of florid vocabularly that marks him out as a complete tit.

The production team seem to have pulled out all the stops to make this episode as unappealing as possible.  Everything about it alienates even Doctor Who fans, so God knows what the average viewer of normal television programmes must have thought.  The Jacondans are rubbish; stupid horns, risible whiskers and pointless floppy bits on the side of their heads.  They are so tired-looking you almost expect the actors to light up and sit there with a fag hanging from their ridiculous mouths.  And then there are the good actors like Maurice Denham and Kevin McNally who have not only to cope with a bad script, but also have to try and deal with the hapless twins and the hopeless director.  I didn't think this episode would seem as bad as when I first watched it hot on the heels of The Caves of Androzani, but it really stinks and not just because of bad monsters and an unappealing storyline involving smartarse twins.  The real problem is the Doctor himself, and Colin Baker's performance.

You can understand why the production crew wanted to make the Doctor a harsher character if only as a contrast with Peter Davison, and as they were continuity-obsessed by this point they naturally decided to further emphasise the post-regeneration instability by making the Doctor erratic and even psychopathic.  The problem is that the Doctor is more sympathetic as a psychopath than when he's "normal", since normal in this context consists of Baker spouting arch and unfunny "witty" lines like he's delivering them to row M in the stalls at the Nottingham Theatre Royal.  I find it uncomfortable to watch now, as it reminds me of that horrible sinking feeling I had at the time, combined with the obligatory desire to put a brave face on it and like the new Doctor despite everything screaming that he was actually rubbish.

The mammoth (and recently closed) Ian Levine thread on Outpost Gallifrey, in spite of all the nastiness, included a rather touching anecdote about Robert Holmes being told (on the set of The Twin Dilemma) that Douglas Camfield had died.  Holmes was very upset, and quietly shed a tear.  One of the contributors to the thread blithely commented that he couldn't think of anything worse than being told about the death of a friend while on the set of The Twin Dilemma, and I'm still not sure whether they were joking or not.  But Holmes, even before hearing about Camfield, was horrified by what he had seen, and reportedly commented that "this isn't Doctor Who."  Well who's going to argue with him?  Thomas Moore had a few other lines that were relevant to the Doctor at this point:

One who in life where'er he moved,
Drew after him the hearts of many;
Yet now, as tho' he ne'er were loved,
Dies here unseen, unwept by any!

I Can't Stand the Confusion in My Mind!

Relax Rodney, that's how everyone felt when they read the script.  Boom boom.  They say you should trust the tale not the teller, but in this case I'll make an exception, and won't bother arguing with Eric Saward's own opinion of this farrago of non sequiturs and general guff.  In fact it's quite useful to watch the second episode in isolation as you can pretend that the story makes sense except that you must be missing crucial information supplied in the first episode. But the plot holes, or even the Daleks, aren't all that scary when compared to the massed rank of light entertainment stars that the Doctor has to face in this episode.  A murderous soap star, a former Rock Follie, and a rubbish Play School presenter would be bad enough, but Rodney Bewes for the love of God!  And I haven't seen Rodney look as uncomfortable as this since he first moved into the Elm Lodge Housing Estate with Thelma.  When he's a brainwashed Dalek agent he recites his lines woodenly.  When he's not a brainwashed Dalek agent he recites his lines woodenly, but inexplicably throws in a bit of stuttering Arkwright from Open All Hours.  Still at least he got over it and now lives a relatively normal life.  Leslie Grantham wasn't so lucky, and recently lost his job on Eastenders for feeling himself up in front of Abduction of the Daleks.  Some people never recover from the psycho-sexual trauma of Dalek love.

But I suppose Resurrection of the Daleks looks more like the new series than most episodes of classic Doctor Who, and not just because of its length.  There's the procession of familiar guest stars with widely varying talent, lots of action that leaves no time to ask questions, and a fairly random bit about Time Lords v Daleks.  But at least the new series has decent writers and a sense of humour, whereas this is so po-faced as to be unintentionally comic.  The death count is so pointlessly high that you begin to wonder if Saward had shares in Co-op Funeral Services. 

The most gratuitous death has to be the hapless and blameless beachcomber who takes a head shot from a duplicate copper for no other reason than being 200 yards away from a very confusing alien invasion. Now that's unlucky.  And he'd just found the film can of episode seven of Evil of the Daleks which, thinking about it, is presumably why Saward had him swiftly dispatched.  But having said all that the whole thing remains strangely watchable, and that's because Peter Davison is a very good actor who can even carry a long sequence being wired up by Rodney Bewes.  When you have a good actor in the lead role, you can get away with almost anything.

It's even better when there's a great supporting actor as well, and for once JNT's scattergun approach to casting came up trumps with the mighty Maurice Colbourne as Lytton.  Colbourne's performance as Lytton is tremendous - the only man in history who could wear that crazy helmet and rubber gloves and still come out looking cool.  They had to bring the character back.  Unfortunately they brought him back in Attack of the Cybermen and pissed the opportunity up a wall.  Instead they should have given him a blank cheque and open-ended contract as a new companion.  As well as changing the future of Doctor Who, he would have avoided Howards' Way which, while great fun, was not Colbourne's finest moment.  He might not go down in television history for his performance in Resurrection of the Daleks, but there's a strong chance he will for his starring role in Gangsters which is shortly to be released on DVD.  This frankly bonkers BBC drama, written by Philip "Vengeance on Varos" Martin has to be seen to be believed, and Colbourne carries the whole thing off brilliantly.  A great actor, sadly missed, whose presence in Resurrection of the Daleks is about the only reason I could occasionally raise an affectionate smile when watching it. 

The other reason to raise a smile was finally seeing the back of Tegan.  "It's stopped being fun Doctor."  When did she ever have fun?  I think I only saw her smile twice, and both of those occasions were in Black Orchid.  Good riddance.

Verwandlungsinhalt!

Things are quiet in the Doctor Who universe.  On a Spiridon beach, the happy native holidaymakers are having a quick game of volleyball.  The ball flies through the air seemingly unsupported, footprints appear unexpectedly in the sand, and occasional squeals of pleasure float through the empty air.  Meanwhile on Mechanus, assorted Mechanoids trundle around burning things and constructing flat-pack furniture using their handy integrated Allen key and screwdriver sets.  When all of a sudden a tinny voice fills the air "People of the Universe your attention please...".  Understandably startled a Spiridon drops the volleyball, and a Mechanoid slips and damages the MDF of a new DVD cabinet he's building.  They try and listen to the barely audible voice, but after a few seconds it fades away.  Both civilizations are understandably puzzled and worried by this phenomenon, but after a couple of months it is relegated to the inside pages of both the Spiridon Gazette and the Mechanus Argus before being forgotten.  Is this the kind of thing we're meant to imagine is going on throughout the Universe when the Master transmits his ultimatum?  What was in Bidmead's mind? 

Logopolis is full of things like this.  Its much vaunted "atmosphere", though admittedly effective in the first episode, has dwindled by the end, and is only present at all by virtue of Tom Baker's increasingly haggard face.  In place of atmosphere we have risible moments such as Adric and Nyssa outside of time and space watching Traken destroyed.  Seconds later, Nyssa has cheered up no end and Adric takes them back into the cosmos by operating the switch that opens the TARDIS door!  The Doctor and Tegan battle through the dot-matrix printers of Logopolis to arrive on Earth, only for the Doctor to end his fourth incarnation battling painted backdrops, half-arsed tilting platforms, and hanging from a pylon in some grotesque parody of a public information film.  No Doctor deserves to go out surrounded by child actors from the Sylvia Young Theatre School, especially those that failed to pass the audition for Emu's World.  There are half a dozen of his earlier adventures that would have given him a better exit.  Daring to confront Sutekh, escaping the Dalek bunker in the nick of time, or even giving up the elixir to save Sarah in The Brain of Morbius.  But not scrabbling for a dubious cable.  Tom deserved more.

Bidmead's time on the show still manages to generate a ton of controversy, not helped by the fact he sounded like such a horse's arse on the recent DVD of The Leisure Hive.  I can heartily recommend Dave Rolinson's forthcoming essay "Who done it: Discourses of authorship during the John Nathan-Turner era" soon to be published by Manchester University Press in the eagerly awaited Time and Relative Dissertations in Space: Critical Perspectives on Doctor Who for a comprehensive analysis of this period.  But the final episode of Logopolis is a shoddy piece of work all round, full of padding, and the cutaways of the companions standing against a brick wall reacting to events are as bad as Doctor Who gets.

And as for all this stuff about entropy, or verwandlungsinhalt, it's interesting that Thomas Pynchon published his short story "Entropy" in 1960, and much later criticised his younger self: "It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it...Since I wrote this story I have kept trying to understand entropy, but my grasp becomes less sure the more I read."  Pynchon agrees with the mathematician Willard Gibbs, who believes entropy in written form is "far-fetched, obscure and difficult of comprehension".

Are you listening Christopher? 

Back to the Day Nurse - this Avonian flu is a real bastard.

Mashed Weetabix Dreams

I can't help watching this episode without thinking how bittersweet it must have been for the 1973 version of the disenchanted fan.  A mere four years earlier he would have been cheerfully ensconced in front of The Krotons, happy in the knowledge that since Doctor Who was on virtually all year a better adventure would soon be along.  Life was good.  And then the bombshell, that bloke from The Navy Lark and Carry on Screaming is taking over, and it's only going to be on six months in every year!  I don't care who they have in the role, he thought, but why on earth don't they pick an actor rather than a comedian?  Bloody stunt casting. 

Episode two starts by banishing Pertwee and some girl to the gravel pit, thus leaving Troughton to assume his rightful place at the console.  And what a console room!  Our disgruntled fan has had to put up with various TARDIS indignities in the intervening years, not least that sodding scanner botched into the roundel via the Letts Patented CSO-Matic from Ronco.  Now there is a proper monitor, the weird transporter things are back, and Troughton is at the wheel again.  It's just like the old days.  Except hang on, the Brigadier has had a lobotomy, and for some reason cannot accept the obvious truth of the situation (despite two witnesses) and swiftly retreats into a fantasy world.  Would the sharply intelligent military man of late Troughton and season seven have behaved like this? 

And it's downhill all the way from there.  Pertwee is so unsympathetic it beggars belief - just listen to the way he hisses "Up! Up!" at the hapless Tyler after the world's most tedious escape attempt.  He sucks the joy out of a room more effectively than Maureen O'Brien.  It's hard to believe that this is the same story as the novelisation, and it's increasingly clear that the Target range existed solely so that Terrance Dicks could infect the brains of a generation by conning them into thinking that all Pertwee stories were made on a budget equivalent to Ben Hur or Cleopatra.  I applaud his actions in some ways, but he is entirely responsibe for that horrible feeling in my 13-year old belly when I realised that the Doctor's duel with Omega's dark side was not quite the same as the novelisation, i.e. rather than a massive arena with a scorching hot sun and a savage beast, there was a black BBC studio with an opponent that would not have been out of place on ITV with a Kent Walton commentary.  Shame on you Terrance.

Those of us scarred by novelisations (and our numbers are legion) should perhaps avoid watching the programmes in future.  I'd like to propose that we form a Target Book Club with groups of four or five meeting once a month in nice city-centre restaurants.  There we can discuss the Terrance Dicks' deconstruction of syndicalism in Doctor Who and The Monster of Peladon, Malcolm Hulke's technological slant on Fanon's anti-colonialism in Doctor Who and The Doomsday Weapon, and finally come to terms with Ian Marter's random "bastard" in Doctor Who and the Enemy of the World.  Anything to avoid more stuff like Omega's palace.

In fact, I got much more pleasure from inserting this Gellguard into my Weetabix alien landscape than I ever did from watching the programme.  So if you'll excuse me, I'm going to dust off the box, pile up four Weetabix from the 1970s, and pour Day Nurse all over them.  Let the insertion commence, just as soon as I find my Wirrn.

Full Furry Jacket

This is a bit late, but what with Star One, hair-touching and a bad case of Avonian flu (Strain H1-Star-1 according to Dr Querry) I feared for my sanity. A cocktail of buttercup syrup, ibuprofen and paracetamol seems to have sorted me out though – possibly.

I thought this was a cracking episode. The casual opening scene, where the Doctor and crew dismiss Salamander’s hideous death as they chomp on a sandwich, sets the tone, and things progress nicely via inexplicable webs and cranky fake old men until the Doctor loses his mind and recklessly follows an obviously dangerous cable. Did they not have public information films on Gallifrey? No child in Britain would have followed a bomb cable down a dark tunnel, and expected some kind of random webby substance to conveniently muffle the explosion. Oh no – they would naturally have expected to be gorily decapitated by the blast and their twitching corpse fried on the live rail.  Because the PIFs said so.

But it’s Camfield’s episode. He directs the action wonderfully, and really gets the best out of the legendary underground sets. More importantly, you can believe the soldiers are really in the army, and this and the early UNIT stories make the most of that shadowy paramilitary organisation before they became the ludicrous Boys’ Brigade outfit skipping around during the worst excesses of Pertwee’s era. Camfield would surely never have let their hair get quite so long for a start.

Hold on a minute – time for a quick dose of Day Nurse. That’s better.

All of that aside, I have been a fan of this episode ever since I saw the clip of Silverstein’s death during the Did You See? item in 1982. Afterwards, I re-read the Target novelisation, and imagined that the whole series had been directed like a Universal horror film from the 1930s. Now I realise that Camfield was ramping up the gothic for just that one scene, but it’s a great set piece, and demonstrates that when those making it could be bothered, Doctor Who could handle a host of different styles not only in the course of a series but in the course of an episode. There’s even a suit of armour in shot at one point.

Day Nurse doesn’t seem to be working. I obviously need Night Nurse after 6pm. Mmmm!  Feels different this time.

It’s obvious that Doctor Who played a big part in Stanley Kubrick’s life and work. Look at the evidence. Kubrick’s crew on 2001: A Space Odyssey got in touch with the Who production team about Camfield’s work on The Daleks’ Master Plan, and therefore the detail-obsessed Kubrick would obviously have kept an eye on Camfield’s subsequent work on the series. And so is it entirely fanciful to suppose that when the K man decided to ditch Wendy Carlos’s score for The Shining he remembered a brief but brilliant scene in The Web of Fear that also used Bela Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta so effectively? Get Andrew Pixley on the phone.

Was Kubrick a Doctor Who fan? I like to think that somewhere in his rambling mansion in St Albans, the great Stan had a huge bank of televisions picking up TV channels from around the world, including all UK regional variations of course. Maybe Kubrick was a secret Gus Honeybun fan, in addition to having a yen for the Doctor’s thrilling adventures. In fact, he almost certainly had an assistant (who looked like Dr Strangelove complete with wheelchair) who busily recorded every Doctor Who adventure for Kubrick’s vast archives. Kubrick even modelled his later appearance on the Yeti in The Web of Fear.

 

Hold on – this is how rumours start. I don’t want to be responsible for Kubrick’s widow being harassed by Ian Levine and the army of sinister individuals on the Missing Episodes forum. Though a fitting punishment would be to strap a fanboy to a cinema seat, pin open his eyelids and force him to watch The Sensorites and Time and the Rani for a week. Without the eyedrops. Viddy well my brothers. Any Night Nurse left?

You Dirty Old Man

There’s only one programme it could be.  A crotchety and manipulative old man lives in a junkyard, and in an act of monumental selfishness refuses to let the only person he loves live a normal and fulfilled life.  And is that a Ron Grainer theme tune?  It could only be Steptoe and Son.

I know, I know, that’s hardly original, but despite Kim Newman’s recent curate’s egg of a book (“Doctor Who” - published by the BFI) erroneously telling us that Steptoe and Son was first transmitted the year after An Unearthly Child, it’s hard not to notice the similarities between Susan Foreman and the unfortunate Harold Steptoe.  It’s not all similarities of course, as Harold wants to be freed from the confines of the Goldhawk Road and escape to a world of art and culture, whereas Susan wants to be freed from the vastness of time and space, and live in the confines of twentieth-century London.  But if they are each to achieve their own kind of freedom, then they both have to be rid of a baleful old man.

Or at least Susan seems to want this freedom in the transmitted version of An Unearthly Child.  Imagine at the time of first transmission, just how the dynamic would have appeared to the viewer.  The Doctor hates being on earth “I tolerate this century, but I don’t enjoy it”, but he has put up with it for the five months that Susan claims “to have been the happiest of my life”.  Has he put up with this enforced stay because he knows he will lose her otherwise?  She is so quick to offer to leave with Ian and Barbara, that it’s likely she’s used the threat before, and their relationship seems very fragile in this first episode.  It’s not just because of a traditional generation gap; instead they have the strained emotions of people who have been trapped together almost as captor and captive rather than as grandfather and granddaughter.  When the Doctor betrays Susan again by taking the ship away from her beloved Earth, they are both traumatised by the betrayal.  The emotion on their faces is nothing to do with the rough take-off, and they don’t utter a word or look each other in the eye. 

Of course, we now know that none of this stuff goes anywhere, and that in future episodes Susan never even hints of any yearning for twentieth-century London and Coal Hill School, but that begs the question of what it’s doing there in the first place.  Well, the Pilot version gives plenty of clues.  It’s much more “hard” sci-fi for a start.  Susan is a sulky-faced space-vixen from the 49th century complete with a shiny silver space top.  When Barbara and Ian try and reason with her she gives them the classic “primitive earthlings” half-smile of contempt, and there’s no way that she is going to offer to leave the TARDIS with them.  She wouldn’t so easily give up the many alien equivalents of John Smith and the Common Men lurking elsewhere in the galaxy.  And when the Doctor tells Susan he can’t let Ian and Barbara go, it isn’t (as in the transmitted version) because he is worried about the authorities, but because he has the superior being concern that it will affect the welfare of the lesser species:  “what would have happened to the Ancient Romans if they’d possessed gunpowder”.  As soon as he says that, you know you’re watching real Doctor Who.  It’s a sci-fi series about time travel, rather than a children’s version of Armchair Theatre.

The Pilot may have ropier acting (Hartnell is very stilted) and sets, but it does have aliens.  And although the Doctor and Susan aren’t the “bug-eyed monsters” Sydney Newman despised, I think he still recognised their overtly alien presence as distorting his vision for the series.  After he gave his notes, the episode was remade, and became much more of a teen angst/generation gap story with moderate fantasy trappings.  Fascinating stuff and brilliantly produced for sure, but Harold Steptoe and others would testify that its basic dynamic was hardly original.  Fortunately for us, the Daleks came along, and Newman was in no position to protest when the production crew unceremoniously dumped all of the emotional baggage of An Unearthly Child, and got on with the job of giving us lot something to talk about for the next forty odd years.

Oh, and in my opinion Hussein’s cut when Barbara runs into the TARDIS is the television equivalent of Kubrick’s bone/spaceship cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey