Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

Well I liked them...

It does seem trendy to criticise the hell out of original series Doctor Who these days, doesn't it?

When Logopolis first aired it was the done thing to think Pertwee was the best thing since sliced bread and that Graham Williams was a traitor to mankind. Oh how things have changed. There's a PhD in here somewhere, but I may just wander down to William Hill and place a bet on the exact day that people wake up and dare to utter the words: 'Boomtown was a bit shite really, wasn't it?'

Laver's Law suggests that fashion goes through a 160-year cycle:

10 years ahead of its time: Indecent
5 years ahead of its time: Shameless
Now: Smart
1 year after its time: Dowdy
10 years after its time: Hideous
20 years after its time: Amusing
50 years after its time: Quaint
70 years after its time: Charming
100 years after its time: Romantic
150 years after its time: Beautiful

I suspect Doctor Who inhabits its own cycle - similar categories, different timescale.

Well here's the thing. Logopolis is one of my favourite stories. I admit, the last episode's a bit poor but I forgive it for the quality of the first two (I'm ignoring the whole flushing the Master out story-line, mind you - brain the size of a planet and Bidmead thinks that's a good idea?)

So in true Behind the Sofa Fashion let's ignore the question as set and wander off on a tangent all my own (I failed my English Lit O-level for much the same reason).

The first two episodes of Logopolis are a wonderful exploration of depression. I must have worn down several Betamax copies of this story in my teens as it chimed so perfectly with my own sense of impending doom. I could recite the words, hum the music, feel the angst. Even the bad dubbing seems to fit perfectly, adding a layer of distance to the whole thing. Watching it as a nine year old at the time I, like others here, thought the world was coming to an end. The Doctor was dead.

Okay it all goes downhill with the introduction of Tegan (who ends up being a good companion) and Nyssa (who never does) and the 'oh-my-god-did-they-learn-nothing-from-season-8' appearance of the Master (the legendary 'fifth Beatle companion') but before then, before then I offer you 50 minutes of classic Who.

And then there's Resurrection of the Daleks. So the plot makes little sense, the guest cast clearly rehearsed the wrong script, and I could never quite understand how people can hear a Dalek coming from round the corner and hide. I'd be crapping myself so bad it would be audible.
But the opening of the story offers a splendid few minutes (even though it has no connection with the rest of the story so far as I can tell) that make you want to call your friends in and say 'look! Wobbly sets my arse!' It was FUN, damn you, and Doctor Who hadn't been that much fun since... well, a long time.

At the time - and this is the key factor here - Logopolis and Resurrection were top notch Who that I seem to remember I and my friends enjoyed immensely and watched time and time again. And I can still enjoy them now, for all their faults, because those faults are forgivable for the time.

In 150 years people will be fighting over these... Logopolis and Resurrection of the Daleks: beautiful.

No Logo

Ah damn it all to hell. I began writing this review three weeks ago, knowing that I'd be really busy this week. And what do I find? My Logo Police heading gone and I didn't actually finish the review. In fact as I write this paragraph, my review is looking a bit like Shada - not complete and the promise of any good bits sadly lacking.

So, I'm not going to do a full one now. Maybe I can pretend I have been hit by industrial action - actually... UNISON anyone? Anyway, apologies for the sense of deja vu with the logo police gag - I promise it's not plagiarised Adam.

Who were the logo police? Were they a crack team assigned to investigate the disappearance of the diamond logo and its subsequent replacement with that ‘futuristic’ moniker?

This was the episode that made me cry. This was the episode where I swore blind that I would never watch Doctor Who again. It was my experience of ‘death’. I’d heard of regeneration sure, but nothing could prepare me for my hero dying. A similar thing happened a few years later when I refused to see Search for Spock at the cinema for similar reasons, too young to realise that the clue was in the title and that the pointy-eared one would indeed return.

Unfortunately time and memory haven't been too kind to Logopolis. We love it because it's Tom Baker's last stand (or fall) which is curious - that we should hold dear so pathetic a send off. But it is Tom and his final glance to the companions he hardly knows (or likes) can soften the hardest heart as he turns into those rarest of 70s icons - a giant white dog poop, only to see the moth-like emergence of Davison.

Watching Logopolis now is like sitting through my GCSE maths exam - all those references to numbers and co-ordinates and none of it making any sense at all, but still leaving me with a few tears in my eyes.

Baker looks bored, Ainley looks GLEEFUL and Adric looks like he should have been under the Doctor's body when he fell. Let's face it, the Doctor didnt fall. He wasn't pushed. He just saw that little prat gawping up at him and thought he could squash the git flat with one well timed, well aimed jump.

Logopolis isn't as the stinker that the backlash have made out in recent years, but it's far from the classic some would have us believe.

Logo Police

I remember watching Logopolis on its original transmission. At least, I think it was the original transmission (it may, however, have been the Five Faces of Doctor Who repeat but that isn’t important) and I also remember sitting in front of the television watching it with my younger brother (who is now 29 and has two children, with another on the way) and not knowing what to make of the end when Tom Baker changed into this young bloke who looked like the guy who played that vet on All Creatures Great and Small. I mean I was 5 and a-half years old and at the time I had no idea that anyone else other than Tom Baker had played the Doctor and had no idea that he could change like that.

After that I watched the Five Faces repeats and all became clear to me. However years later when the videos started coming out I remember being surprised that Jon Pertwee had played the Doctor (I must have missed Carnival of Monsters or at least forgotten about it).

Logopolis was the last story to feature Tom Baker in the role of the Doctor after seven years and it is a fitting end to his era. One of the things I most like about this story is that you can tell from the first scenes that this is to be the end of something and that everything is leading up to a certain point and something bad is going to happen by the end of the story. You feel much the same way watching Caves of Androzani, as it is all about decay (literally in this story and not just metaphorically) and there is a foreboding atmosphere throughout, particularly in the final episode.

Tom Baker is truly excellent in this story as he spends most of the story in a sombre mood almost as if he knows that this is going to be the end of him and giving possibly one of this best performances as the Doctor, certainly his best for a number of years at that point.

Anthony Ainley also gives perhaps his best performance as the Master in this story. After Castrovalva Ainley’s master really became a caricature and a shadow of what he was here and pretty much became a stock moustache-twirling bad guy who would tie the girl to the train tracks, rather than the far more calculating character he was in this story and the next one.

I loved the cliffhanger to episode three where the Doctor and the Master shake hands. The Doctor can barely look the Master in the eye but knows that they must work together to save the universe from collapse. Of course the Master just uses this to his advantage (as he was wont to do) but that little scene at the end of the third part was just perfect for the story.

I do feel that the inclusion of three companions in this story was a little overkill as they became during the first year of the Davison era but here it seemed a little out of place. The introduction of Tegan was fine as was Adric (which I cannot believe I am saying) but there really was no need for Nyssa to be there.

Christopher H. Bidmead wrote an excellent and clever script that was full of scientific ideas and references (Huxley et al) and was often a little to cerebral for most people's tastes (especially a five and a half year old. Hell even now I still don’t understand a lot of it.) and provided some excellent lines and some good characterisation.

The direction by Peter Grimwade was generally good and gave the show that sense of foreboding that permeates through all four episodes.

The final episode is the best of the four episodes and everything comes together very nicely by the end. Even the regeneration scene is pretty good and you finally find out who the hell The Watcher is. Some nice effects accompany the regeneration and you get to see Peter Davison also. I also want to know why his hair was much darker here than it was in Castrovalva part one. I mean what was all that about. Did Nyssa and Tegan do his highlights for him just after he regenerated?

 

So, farewell then

Saturday, March 21^st 1981. A living room somewhere in North Wales.

A boy not quite nine years-old sits glued to his television set, just as he is every week for six months of the year. But for him, this is no ordinary day. Today something both magical and awful is going to happen.

Because today is the day when the boy’s hero dies.

Of course, he doesn’t really die. Because the boy’s hero is no ordinary hero. His hero can change his form at a whim; cheat death just when it seems that there’s no escape. And besides, the boy’s already read that that nice chap from the vet programme’s going to be his hero from now on.

But try telling that the boy. All he knows is that his hero of seven years (although he only remembers the last five) is going to die. And the boy’s never lost a member of his family before.

And - even when he does lose a member of his real family years later - it’ll never feel quite the way as this did then.

Let’s get the clichés out of the way first, shall we. ‘Logopolis’ is the end-of-an-era, the end of Tom Baker’s unparalleled seven-year stint and (if you’re being really picky) the end of Barry Letts’ on-screen contribution to Doctor Who. So many ends then that it’s little surprise there’s a funereal air hanging over not just this episode, but the whole of this story. It’s the closest (with perhaps ’Androzani’ aside) that Who fans have got to losing their hero by terminal illness: you know the end’s coming; the final moment is just a matter of time.

But in many ways the real end came some twelve months before. With the debut of its eighteenth season, Doctor Who was unrecognisable from the happy-go-lucky, made-on-a-shoe-string ‘Tom Baker show’ of the mid-to-late seventies. Out had gone the postgraduate humour and the asides to camera; in had come hard science and a subdued star. Even some of the stories looked as though they’d had proper money spent on them for once. And love or hate the short-lived Bidmead/Nathan-Turner era, you can’t deny that it had people taking Doctor Who seriously again.

Because years before a certain J Michael Straczynski had even coined the term ‘story arc’, here’s the culmination of a year-long treatise on change, decay and the terminal state of the known universe. ‘Logopolis’ - and season eighteen as a whole - is perhaps Doctor Who’s only successful foray into producing a thematically and intellectually cohesive narrative across a whole series. Forget ‘Bad Wolf’; this is the sort of layered subtext that Russell T Davies should be imbedding into his scripts.

But beyond the gravitas that a story such as ‘Logopolis’ instils, there is of course much to criticise in these final twenty-five minutes of Who’s boldest and most experimental of years up to this point. For despite the well-intentioned attempt to bring back some real science into the Doctor’s travels, the result is often clunky dialogue and clumsy rhetoric which even Tom Baker - a seven-year master of making exposition palatable - struggles to convince with. And with so many endings strewn about, it must be remembered that ‘Logopolis’ was also a time of beginnings. And the final stage in JNT’s new template for the show’s next five years: a TARDIS crewed by bickering teenagers and an over-reliance on the programme’s legacy which would swiftly come to choke its own creativity.

And that sense of change beyond recourse is no better illustrated than in Tom Baker’s swansong performance. Philip Hinchcliffe once put down the enduring success of his three halcyon years as producer to the performance of his leading man. And perhaps if you ever needed one defining reason as to why the mid-to-late seventies is the era that Joe Public most associates with their memories of Doctor Who, then it’s down to one thing: Tom Baker. In ‘Logopolis’, Baker acts as though he’s a man on the way to his own funeral (which, in a professional way, he was…at least for the next decade or so). And it’s the sheer moroseness of his central performance that dictates the tone of this final episode; and just manages to raise the story above the level of synaptically-troubling science into something truly epic.

It’s certainly no small achievement that the sheer spectacle of watching the fourth Doctor’s final fall overrides some of part four’s less cohesive elements. Such as why exactly does the Watcher take Adric and Nyssa out of time-and-space (only to allow them to return shortly after)? And does the Master really think that the entire universe is tuning-in on their trannies to hear his ransom demands? ‘Logopolis’ is hardly short on logic bypasses (episode two’s ‘flush-out-the-Master plan’, anyone?) but at least in episode four we get enough tension to override these quibbles. Or, as Spielberg once said about Jaws’ implausible denouement, ‘if I’ve got them after two hours, then I can do anything’.

Then there’s Waterhouse’s Adric, already showing signs of the irritating-little-shit collapse of his once promising character amidst the onslaught of the two girls’ arrival. And while I genuinely think that Ainley’s Master was never better than in this story (in which he only appears in two of the episodes, remember) there are still hints of the moustache-twirling panto-villain to follow. Speaking positively though, ‘Logopolis’ is unique in that it offers perhaps the most stark examination of the Doctor and the Master’s somewhat ambivalent relationship. With the Doctor almost physically repulsed by his presence one moment, and then trading intellectual Gallifreyan banter with him the next.

And in a story steeped with the foreshadowing of its hero’s fate, there are a few pointers for the show’s direction over the next few years as well. The judicious use of flashback here would soon descend into overkill, as any old excuse to raid the archives would become a Nathan-Turner signature. And the whole idea of making the Doctor’s regeneration a visual event also has its roots in this episode.

On which note, I’m not ashamed to say that it’s a moment that still makes me want to cry. Baker lying prone, with Paddy Kingsland’s ethereal music accompanying his final moments in the role, is still one of the formative images of my childhood. And as the companions and enemies of seven-years past each come to say goodbye - and the Doctor’s half Baker/half Davison transformation has him briefly resembling a baby (again reinforcing the concept’s birth/death metaphor) - there’s still a sense, twenty-five-years on, that this really was the end. And the moment, prepared for or not, really was here.

Because - to that not quite nine-year-old boy - Tom Baker was the Doctor. In fact, as Nyssa almost says, ‘he was the Doctor all the time‘.

And for the nine-year-old boy in many of us, he always will be.

(‘The Bumper Book of Made-Up Doctor Who Facts’ has this to say about ‘Logopolis’: some fans genuinely thought that the Watcher was Peter Davison dressed up. Genuinely. And some of these fans now have mortgages and families)

F**k The Polis!

"It's the end, but the moment has been prepared for. I've got Peter Davison on line two and I'm sure we can talk him round. Stop worrying! Yes, I'll leak it to The Sun that we're casting a woman. OK, lovey. Bye..." {click}

OK, I admit it, I cried. I still do. Even when I thought about it today, exactly twenty five years after the intial event, I still had a quick sob. Even though I continue to tell myself that it's just a telly-box programme, I just can't shake the raw emotions that engulf me whenever I think about this episode.

I mean - what the hell were they thinking???

Logopolis has always had a fairly easy ride in the fickle world of Doctor Who fandom. It's Tom's last story! He regenerates! It's got the Master in it! It must be brilliant, musn't it? Well, it isn't. It's a travesty; this ain't no swansong - it's the sound of a startled chicken having its feathers plucked out. This story doesn't just jump the shark, it para-glides over it. In short, it makes me want to hurt myself.

Apologists for this story - and this episode in particular - almost always refer to the fact that Tom Baker spends most of his time 'brooding' in it, ergo it must be good. "The weight of the universe is on his shoulders," they pine. "It's funereal," they huff. Call it what you like, but Baker is BORED STIFF. There he is, lost in a sea of whining brats as his legendary stint as the quintessential children's hero is about to come to an undignified and badly directed end. In a shit coat!

He's brooding about the fate of his career, not the universe!

Which reminds me: billions of sentient beings die in this story. And it's impossible to care about any of them. Now, how cack-handed is that? But that's nothing compared to the lack of skill required to suck the drama out of killing-off television's greatest ever hero.

So, how exactly does the Doctor succumb to his fate? How does this god-like mentor meet his match and give closure to seven years of excitement and adventure? Well, the Master does something evil with a Commodore Pet and the Doctor has to hit something with a spanner. And that's all, folks!

Oh, and the Master attempts to hold the entire universe to ransom with a public address system. However, unlike John, I believe that a few alien species probably did take this threat seriously (I bet the Zarbi were well narked). They probably spent decades amassing a devastating war-fleet to wipe out the source of the threat, but, thanks to a huge miscalculation in copyright law, when they finally reached our planet they were all eaten by Douglas Adams' dog.

But the final realisation that Logopolis is a steaming heap of sacred cow manure hits you when the Doctor "dies". It's just so incredibly naff. When the Gareth Hunt doll falls from the Pharos gantry and lands on some AstroTurf without a hair - not to mention a limb - out of place, you can't believe this is all that Bidmead and Co. have to offer.

It's like Moriarty and Homes at the Reichenbach Falls, only instead of a nail-biting fight to the death, Homes slips on a rock as he tries to tie his shoe-laces.

The 4th Doctor dies surrounded by people he's only just met. There's no emotional investment, no witty riposte, no final showdown crackling with wit, honour and pathos. Instead we get a cable, a spanner, a photo of Anthony Ainley, and the production team breaking the cardinal rule that you should never show clips from good programmes in the middle of your bad one.

"The Watcher was the Doctor all along!" exclaims Nyssa, in a last-ditch attempt to fool the audience into thinking they'd just witnessed a coherent denouement.  And then, to add insult to injury, some snot dribbles onto Tom Baker's head until he looks like he's been caked in semen.

It's enough to make a grown man weep.

The Bumper Book of Made-Up Doctor Who Facts has this to say about Logopolis Part 4: The 'H' in Christopher H. Bidmead stands for 'Horrendous'

Lego Police

I've finally worked out what this story's all about. At its heart it's not about Universal harmony, the war against entropy, or even the last cataclysmic battle between two old Timelords. No. It's all about TARDIS envy. Plain and simple. A series of increasingly preposterous situations in which the Doctor attempts to get his TARDIS behaving like the Masters in order to impress the chicks. Why didn't they just go for a dick swinging contest? Or a who can pee the highest competition? Much safer than involving some Lego Police in the destruction of the known Universe.

Logopolis - Episode 4

So seven years worth of adventuring boil down to this... There's an excellent reason why the Doctor's gone off to team up with the Master, he simply can't stand being around his three idiotic companions any more. The Doctor knows this is the end. Which is why he's scoured the cosmos to locate the three most annoying, drippy, companions ever:

Adric: What more can we say about him that's not already been said? Nothing. But it's always worth repeating. This boy is annoying. So annoying he would make a nun want to beat him to a bloody pulp with her copy of the old testament.

Nyssa: Never blinks once. Her eyes are actually painted on. She has the dull, lifeless stare of a 6 day old corpse.

Tegan: Not a very promising start. In this story, she's just plain crap. Looking like some reject from a meat-based, purely lavender, version of Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds, she hams and spams her way through the story. Bare witness to her delivery as she screams "Doct-a!" and "Earth!!!!". I've seen more realism from a blow-up sex doll (and more realistic hair, let me tell you). You can actually feel how many exclamation marks are in her lines, the quality of delivery really is that good.

It's small wonder that with three of the largest drips in the cosmos in the TARDIS, the Doctor, wasn't continually drowning. It's enough to make a chap regenerate, I tells ya. It's like the Doctor's been playing "Deal or No Deal" with 22 companions in the boxes - ranging from the power boxes containing the likes of Sarah Jane Smith and Jamie Mcrimmon, down  to the low end of the range with Vicki, Kamelion and Mel. Adric is definitely cut from the same cloth as the 1p club.

Sorry. I appear to have strayed somewhat off message, like a bifurcation plot descending into entropy - moments of clarity before the chaos. We're told in earlier episodes that the Logopolitains intone the nature of the Universe, and keep everything in check, by chanting. Their cousins use novelty ring-tones to do the same thing. The Logopolitains don't talk about their cousins much.

But how much store can be placed by a group who's leader looks like a cross between Noel Edmonds and the Thin White Duke? The Master, quite solemnly, delivers a three point plan of such stultifying technobabble that the Monitor is left with nowhere else to go, and promptly fades away. But never fear, with the Master's Backman Turner Overdrive to deliver some MOR rock at least the Universe will die humming and playing air guitar.

Having finally make it to Earth, or "Earth!!!" as Tegan would say, they find themselves too late as the entire planet has become invaded by lots of "wacca-wacca" music. The Master's weapon is dashed from his hands by the Doctor and then lands in some cow shit. Which leads the black-clad one to create a special mix tape for the entire cosmos. The Master's message to the Universe must have sounded like a PA request in a supermarket for cleaners to attend to a ketchup spillage in isle two.

Adric, Tegan and Nyssa appear to be watching the action of the Doctor dangling from the Pharos project dish from the relative safety of a Subway restaurant, as his past incarnation's life flashes before him. Neatly skipping over horrors like The Leisure Hive and The Horns of Nimon. If only the audience had been given similar powers...

The Bumper Book of Made-up Doctor Who Facts has this to say about part four of Logopolis: Anthony Ainely's on location catering requirements were legion. Every single day a convoy of trucks from Fortnam and Masons would deliver deviled swan neck, rack of turtle dove and chinchilla entrails to his trailer.

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.