Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

"Unlimited Rice Pudding"

I'm glad it's Davros pretending to be the Emperor - even if he does look utterly ridiculous in that bin liner - because the infamous rice pudding scene wouldn't work if he was talking to a giant golf ball. It's as simple as that.

The Doctor talking the dalek to death, on the other hand, is simply embarrassing. I just don't get it. It looks like it evaporates into a time-warp or something equally bizarre when a simple shut-down might have been more poignant. It's supposed to be dark and mysterious (and perhaps even Godlike) but at the end of the day it's still a dalek being spun round really, really fast like a demented waltzer.

Am I concerned that the Doctor commits genocide - an act that has probably provoked more retro-continuity than any other moment in the series? Certainly not. Bring it on, I say. He's been too easy on the bloody daleks for years, if you ask me. It's not so much a case of "do I have the right?" as "how much am I allowed to enjoy it?"

In summary, Remembrance reminds us that Rose won't be as revolutionary as the popular press would have us believe. We have a female companion who is just as heroic as the Doctor, flying daleks, a plot tied directly to the concerns of Earth, an truly alien Doctor and, to top it all, impressive special effects and sets.

I don't know what all the fuss is about...

Ashes to ashes...

If this had turned out to be the last ever appearance of the Daleks on British television, then it would have been a fitting end. In many ways, as with Evil of the Daleks twenty years earlier, it almost feels as if the production team were deliberately trying to give them "the final end." Skaro is blown up (well, unless you're John Peel - no not that one); both factions of Daleks utterly destroyed, the only slight glimmer of hope for the pepperpots being that Davros escapes at the end. In fact, Davros' survival is one of the few weak points in an otherwise excellent conclusion to a thrilling serial - "Emperor activating escape pod." Subtle, Ben...

The high production values keep going here - the Dalek battles are truly impressive, even if they can't seem to actually hit each other from about six feet away for most of the time, until the wonderfully-realised Special Weapons Dalek hoves into view. Perhaps the Imperials do win a little too easily once it's deployed, and maybe it is a bit of a plot device, but you've got to love the way it blows those gates open! (Even if the DVD does reveal that it also blew the knobs off most of the Imperial Dalek props in the process!).

Is the Hand of Omega also too much of a plot device, allowing the Doctor to basically stand back and do nothing while this technobabble in a coffin wipes out an entire solar system? Possibly, but I like the epic feel it gives to proceedings, even if perhaps the idea of an entire planet of Daleks being wiped out is too big for such a small-scale production to cover. The Doctor talking the Dalek Supreme to death I also like - it's often been criticised, this scene, but I think the sense of mental instability in the mind link between the little girl and the Dalek creature is well-esablished, and really rather creepy. As the girl goes barmy so thus does the Dalek, and their pair of them end up blowing their minds, rather more literally in the case of the Dalek Supreme...

The ending's gorgeous too - the funeral, and there's a very real funeral atmosphere to it. Burying Mike, but burying the Daleks too, and as we move towards the dying days of the original series, burying the fine tradition of a quarter of a century of adventures, albeit back then fans didn't know that there would be a future. Time would tell - it always did.

Overall, superb stuff from one of the finest Doctor Who stories - the ship may have been going down, but just occasionally, the band was still playing loud and clear.

And don't Sylvester's eyes look blue as he delivers that last line...?

Springtime for Davros and Ska-a-ro.

I'm not too sure that this is in anyway an original thought regarding the production of the programme during the 7th Doctor's reign but I'm often reminded of the Mel Brooks film "The Producers" when considering what was happening during this period of show's history. It does sometimes feel (particularly with season 24) that they were going all out to create the worse programme in history, in the hope that it would be so bad that it might actually turn out to be good. You can just see JNT cast as Max Bialystock (with some slight alterations to the basic character!) with Cartmell as Lee Bloom.

The relative inexperience of some of the main players leads you to wonder why JNT brought them in and reading the DWM-published snippets from Cartmell's recently published diary on the making of the programme from 1986 to 1989 ("occasionally a little self-serving", not my words but the words of Dreamwatch) he says that he was often left up to his own devices. Surely this combination of inexperience was going to have some major effect on the production of the series?

Now I know earlier I said that the thing that was different about this story was that there weren't too many scenes that relied on Dalek action, but now they're doing what they do best, not talking and filling in vital plot information (as the Doctor says Daleks are boring conversationalists) but just blowing things up in rather loud explosions. The Special Weapons Dalek is superb. And when the builders yard gates go up, wow.

The revelation that the main man Dalek on the mother-ship is actually Davros, now not much more than a head in a jar, was slightly unexpected. And the fact that Davros is revealed with less than 10 minutes of the final episode left is quite refreshing. Although it could have just as well been any Dalek and need not necessarily have been Big D.

A rare thing this, a good story in the dying days of the classic series. Some good effects for a change, an atypical Dalek story and one that did something different with Davros and some lovely continuity references that didn't get too much in the way of the story. And even if they did I hope that Aronovitch would have said "I am the author. You are the audience. I outrank you!"

'We did good, didn't we?'

It’s funny how sometimes you remember the ‘Doctor Who’ episodes you missed first time round more than the ones you saw. Like Part 2 of ‘The Pirate Planet’, which I had to make do with by listening to a crackly recording - those were the days - off my Grandfather’s top-loading tape-recorder (replete with one of those microphones you could swing around while pretending to be Alvin Stardust). Or Part 4 (or maybe 5) of ‘The Armageddon Factor’, when - believe it or not - that week’s double-episode of ‘The Incredible Hulk’ was a more enticing prospect.

So we come to ‘Remembrance’ 4, which I missed on account of spending October week holidays in Blackpool with my Mum and Gran. Sure there was a TV in the B&B, but almost as though they were representative of the nation as a whole, the other residents wanted to watch Alan Bradley treating Rita like shit over on Coronation Street. How times don’t change…

Inevitably, the story’s pace slackens over these twenty-five minutes. The whole ‘fascism’ subtext seems to peter out with the deaths of first Ratcliffe, then Mike (although his line ‘we just wanted to keep the outsiders out’ no doubt had a dozen prospective New Adventures authors drooling). Much better is Ace’s explanation of why the rival Dalek factions don’t get on - they’re both blobs, it’s just that one set is pure, while the other has been watching too many cosmetic surgery programmes. Says it all really…

There are some more atypically great battle scenes as well - particularly with the introduction of the Imperial Daleks’ new toy, the Special Weapons Dalek (although it’s clearly a cannibalised Dalek from earlier on in the story, with gunk still all over its lower casing). The way in which its Dalek-cannon literally just blows away enemies is particularly satisfying (and seeing as it just disappears from the episode halfway through, wouldn’t it be nice to think it’s still out there somewhere, obliterating cockneys by the shed-load?)

Which leads us to the story’s two major confrontations. Let’s get the bad one out of the way first, shall we - why, oh why bother having Davros appear under the Emperor Dalek’s dome? I mean, could we simply not cope without him in a Dalek story? Used well, he was an essential mouthpiece for the Daleks’ admittedly dull and laborious ranting. But it’s not as if ‘Roy Tromelly’ even gives a decent performance here (and, inexplicably, changes his voice just as he’s revealed). ’Tromelly’ was good in ’Resurrection’ and, appropriately enough, ‘excellent’ in ’Revelation’. Here he’s just a ranting ham, matched only by McCoy’s one descent into Season 24-style buffoonery (unlimited rice pudding, indeed!). It’s also painfully obvious - except, apparently, to Davros himself - that the Doctor wants Davros to use the Hand of Omega. (Although I had to laugh when the Daleks left on the bridge literally give the viewer a running commentary as he escapes, surely to fight another day). But as a culmination of the Doctor and Davros’ embittered rivalry, it’s as much of a let-down as Davros’ ‘revelation’ in the first place.

Much better is the stand-off between the Doctor and the Black Dalek - has there ever been another time when the viewer was meant to feel sympathy for these monstrosities (at least, until Rob Shearman’s upcoming episode)? McCoy excels here as much as he disappoints earlier - there’s a sense of real pleasure in his voice as he literally talks this Dalek to death. Morally dubious his destruction of Skaro may be - what happens to the Thals after all? - but as a payoff to twenty-fives years of the Doctor’s battles with his most renowned enemies, it’s difficult to imagine anything more apt than this.

The Doctor/Black Dalek stand-off is also neatly paralleled by Mike’s death and Ace’s resultant fight with the still Dalek-controlled girl. (Although where Mike’s mum has got to, who knows). It’s also neat that, as the Dalek self-destructs, so too does its hold over her; resulting in a believable conclusion which could have so easily become a cop-out.

It also makes a change in this era that the regulars don’t depart as soon as the work is over. The fact that the Doctor and Ace attend Mike’s funeral gives their involvement in things a much weightier feel - for this is a Doctor as much about consequences as he is action.

All in all, ‘Remembrance’ is a remarkable story on account of it all but wiping away memories of the (‘Revelation’ aside) four years of dross that came before it. While I’m not quite sure it deserves the mantle of ‘classic’ in the way of a ‘Pyramids’ or ‘Caves’, it is nevertheless ample proof that there was plenty of life in the old Doc yet. But, as we all know, most of the general public were long past caring to have even noticed.

‘We did good, didn’t we?’ Yes we did; but as time would tell, good was never going to be good enough…

The Cockring of Omega

Bit of a naff resolution to the cliff hanger, Doctor comes in and showers Daleks in confettii. But at least we get to see some Daleks killed in really loud explosions. As a child, the insides of these Mark Three travel machines has always intreagued me. Although the remenants of this one does remind me of a particularly traumatic Italian meal I once ate in That London.

Enter a Dalek mothership. The characters appearing over the Dalek screen are very reminisint of the Matrix interface with the cascading green lettering falling over the screen. There's something else they "borrowed", as if lifting the entire Matrix concept directly from The Deadly Assassin wasn't enough.

Sexual undertones aplenty here - you just know Ratcliffe's wearing suspenders under that overcoat, as he struts through the graveyard. Even the symbol on the tombstone looks like a pair of firm breasts. Or perhaps they are Dalek bumps.

So the Dalek thing wasn't Davros but the kiddy. Ratcliffe turns from Prime Nazi into Cowardly Custard in the course of two scenes. Hadn't he realised that he'd slung his lot in with ET's nastier neighbours? Actually, I've wished so many more times than I care to mention that ET's illumating finger would turn into a blue ray of death that then slices young Eliott in twain in the schmaltzy Speilberg vomfest. That would make Drew Barrymore run screaming.

Now is it me or does nothing say alien technology quite like the Innovations catalogue? No? Well it's just me and the props department at the BBC circa 1988. I'm not even sure I was that impressed by the Time Controller back in 1988. The Doctor starts letting slip little things about him no being perhaps just any old Timelord. To have that played out in the TV series might have been very interesting - or could have easily gotten very boring for the casual viewer.

As successive Tory Chancellors might have said the green shoots of recovery are there..

This, that and The Other

There are certain things that I never, ever want to know for sure about Doctor Who, and if Marc Platt claims to have written a book telling me what certain of them are then I'm sticking my fingers in my ears and not listening. As per usual this week... Anyway, what I do not want to know:

1) The Doctor's name.
2) The intimate details of his family history.
3) Why he left Gallifrey to go roaming about the universe
4) A thousand and one tediously convoluted explanations of why Anthony Coburn was mistaken and Susan wasn't *really* his granddaughter. Get over it, lads.

Having said all of that, as I said yesterday, what I don't mind - indeed, what I love about the show - are hints about the past, the bigger picture, who the Doctor really is and where he comes from. It should never be spelled out, but we should be teased, left to excitedly try and work out our own abstract ideas, and wonder at the grand tapestry of this unseen mythology.

I think this is exactly what Remembrance of the Daleks manages to do with the little winks and nods to Rassilon and Omega and so forth here. The "We... I mean, they..." may perhaps be a little on the over-obvious side, but their heart was in the right place. Perhaps in a way it's fortunate that the series came off the air before the 'Cartmel masterplan' could ever be unveiled in its true glory, as it meant we got the nice suggestion of mystery and enigma without the disappointing and rather flat 'revelations' Platt finally came up with in the print version of Lungbarrow. Dare I even suggest that John Nathan-Turner made a good storytelling call in insisting Lungbarrow was dropped as a TV script idea, giving us Ghost Light in its place?

Anyway, back to Remembrance, part three. Another side to this idea of the suggestion being more interesting than the revelation is the long-held belief that a monster is more frightening if kept hidden, which is why I adore the scene of the Doctor being stranged by the Dalek creature so much - every child must surely be wondering, what *is* sitting at the bottom of that broken casing? Christopher Eccleston often talks about being intrigued as a child by what lurked inside the Daleks, and I think it's always nice to see a little of them, but not perhaps the rather pathetic-looking - albeit well-constructed - little mutants we sometimes saw in the likes of The Five Doctors.

The serial continues to flow along at a nice old pace, and as has been mentioned by myself and others is very well directed by Andrew Morgan, who seems curiously uncelebrated as a Who director despite this fine effort. Is this perhaps because he is too tainted with the brush of Time and the Rani?

"I wish Bernard was here..." - I love this. I suspect that if Nigel Kneale had seen it he'd have had a fit and been on the phone to his lawyer, given that he probably has almost as much regard for Doctor Who as the average person has for car park attendants. The suggestion that Who and Quatermass exist in the same fictional universe is tricky continuity-wise of course, but still a rather endearing prospect, and one taken up in other media - watch out for Bernard as a TV pundit alongside Patrick Moore in Lance Parkin's Eighth Doctor New Adventure The Dying Days, for example. (Well, in a Remembrance-TV style moment someone who we miss the beginning of the introduction to and come in on the "-ermass,", anyway...).

I think that the shuttle landing in the playground may well be one of the most impressive visual effects ever undertaken for the show - can you imagine building such a full-sized prop and lowering it into the playground on a crane? Madness! No wonder there was an effects overspend of something in the region of £20,000 for this story.

It was well worth it, though...

"Only a fool argues with his Doctor"

Twenty reasons why you should watch Remembrance of the Daleks Part Three:

1) The Daleks are disarmed by the Doctor waving a portable disco at them. Fancy.
2) Then they explode! Even fancier.
3) And then they throttle the Doctor! Er...
4) The Dalek mothership set looks like it escaped from a motion picture soundstage.
5) Pamela Salem. Purrrrrrrrr.
6) "Only the Doctor knows what is going on" - hello Virgin NA's!
7) The Emperor Dalek!
8) Quatermass gags!
9) Stuff about Gallifrey and shit!
10) There is no number 10.
11) Racists and Asians hanging out together in sheds.
12) It isn't Davros! Thank the Lord!
13) A whatsit from the Gadget Shop!
14) Dalek Hunting.
15) The Roni Size soundtrack! Or are the Street fans back with their slow hand-clapping?
16) Low angle Daleks! On tracks!
17) The green tent from Spearhead in Space! So Paul Hayes does remember them after all!
18) Mike is a traitor! He'll be a Bhuddist next!
19) We've got a springboard and we're gonna use it!
20) The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Well, a playground, but you've got to start somewhere.

'I think I may have miscalculated'

As Paul pointed out yesterday, those Daleks really do take too long to exterminate Ace; like Bond villains, they’d rather talk about what they’re going to do than actually do it. And the less said about McCoy’s actions with that electric heater gizmo he’s ‘spraying’ the Daleks with, the better.

There’s then some quality gurning by the Doctor as he’s strangled by the - strangely hidden - Dalek mutant; followed by some bizarre ‘zebedee’ noises from the baseball bat as Alison unceremoniously brains it to death. Why didn’t Mary Whitehouse start a campaign about that?

McCoy’s on fine form in this episode - all rolling Rs and Buster Keaton physicality. Not too sure about all that Carmel Masterplan stuff suggesting the Doctor was somehow a contemporary of Omega, though. While we fans now know that this was all an attempt to instil some mystery back into the character - ultimately revealing that the Doctor was in fact the reincarnation of some Time Lord bigwig called ‘The Other’ - audiences who probably never even heard of the New Adventures never got the payoff. And probably just wondered what the bleeding hell he was on about.

Lovely panning shot by Andrew Morgan to establish the Dalek mother-ship, spoilt only slightly by the increasingly OTT Dalek voices (especially that of one ‘Roy Tromelly’). Now, we of course find out in the next episode that Mr Tromelly is in fact playing ‘Sorvad’ (do please keep up), but the fact he sounds nothing like Sorvad is rather irritating. Why would Sorvad use a different voice in front of his fellow Daleks, anyway? It’s not as if he’s hiding from them is it?

In fact, episode 3 has its fair share of illogical moments now I come to think of it. Take Mr. Ratcliffe, for instance. Where exactly is his exhumation order to dig up the Hand of Omega (or do 1963 builder’s merchants frequently go around robbing graves?). And why doesn’t he recognise the girl as the Dalek controller sat in his own office (surely he must have been tempted to take a peak at some time). Though the excuse for both could be that he was left senseless by Jasmine Breaks’ Children Film Foundation quality of acting…

Nice to see a lot more Daleks in this episode - always liked those battle-damaged grey ones - although the move to location does see them wobble about rather alarmingly at times. The upped ante in the action stakes does have the unfortunate side-effect of completely sending Keff McCulloch’s score off the deep-end it’s been tap-dancing along for the past two episodes. If music composition has a kitchen sink, then this is the bathroom suite thrown in for good measure. How contemporary dance acts of the late 1980s failed to sample this story for a whole album’s worth of techno-migraines, I’ll never know.

And it’s another cracking cliff-hanger, making it three on the bounce (surely some sort of ‘80s record). The full size Dalek shuttlecraft descending is a genuinely breathtaking sight in ‘Who’ terms and - despite McCoy’s Baker-style ad-lib to camera - perfectly rounds off this above-par example of an episode three.

What a travesty that only about five million people saw this back in 1988, when toss like ‘Attack of the Cybermen’ got a couple million more just a few years earlier. There really is no justice…

"Who're you calling small?"

I was just reading Sean's comments about episode two before typing my own, and was surprised to hear just how highly he rates the cliffhanger, as Ace is cornered on the ground floor of the school by the Dalek assault squad. I can forgive Remembrance of the Daleks a very great deal - the daylight at 5pm in December; the wobbly Renegades; even the acting abilities of Jasmine Breaks.

But come on - three Daleks, point blank range, and all they do is stand around her chanting "Exterminate!" for a minute or so? It's bad enough at the beginning of the episode where one single Dalek hovers up the stairs and fails to exterminate the Doctor, but I'm afraid to me the cliffhanger here just comes across as silly.

I get the strong impression that the fault lays more at Andrew Morgan's door than anybody else's, which is a shame given how stylishly the rest of the serial is directed. I say this because in the novelisation of Remembrance, Aaronovitch goes to some lengths to rescue the scene and make it seem as if the Daleks are actually making some kind of sense - the commander of the Dalek force, recognising that Ace is clearly not a native of the 1963 timezone, decides that it would be more prudent to find out more about her before they kill her so instructs the Daleks to "use an old Earth tactic" of attempting to intimidate her into surrender.

Yes, I know this is probably on a par with Ian Briggs telling convention-goers they'd have to "read the book" to find out why the Doctor dangles from his brolley in Dragonfire, but it does at least give me an excuse to mention Aaronovitch's novelisation. It's another of the major reasons I have such tremendous affection for this story as a whole - it was, I think, the first ever piece of Doctor Who merchandise I owned as a child, as opposed to hand-me-downs from my brother in the form of a couple of battered old annuals.

I can remember well the day I got it - it must have been quite soon after it came out in 1990 I think, when I was about six. I was down town in Worthing with my father for some reason or other, and being a keen reader one of his stops was the now much-missed Volume One bookshop on Montague Street. While browsing he told me that I could pick something out and he'd buy it for me, so off I ran to the children's section to excitedly pick something.

My memory is that they had an enormous stock of Who books, but I suspect this is simply a child's eye perspective added to fifteen years worth of misremembrance, and in reality it was probably nothing more than a couple of shelves. The Target books were never really as huge a part of my fandom as they were for the children of the 1970s and 80s - I suspect that this was getting on towards the end of the time when they were a mainstay of children's sections. I only ever owned a few, most of those bought second hand at various early 90s jumble sales, but here I was, six years old and allowed to pick a brand new one all for myself.

Remembrance caught my eye because of the cover - the transmission of the story was a couple of years beforehand by this point, an eternity when you're that young, but seeing the illustration brought back those fragments of memory of seeing the story, and I knew that this was the one I wanted. It was years before I was able to pronounce the name of the writer correctly, but the book itself did not disappoint. Steeped in the intriguing mythology I mentioned being such an appealing part of the series for me yesterday, and describing with great seriousness and drama all those scenes I remembered from seeing the story. Dad, I recall, seemed pretty impressed with my choice - I don't know if a Target book would be considered in any way advanced for a six year-old, but later that day he was talking to my grandmother about it and enthusiastically telling her that "it's a proper book!" Odd how these things stick in your mind...

Goodness only knows how often I read and re-read that book or parts of it over the following few years. It still sits up on the shelf of my room at home to this day, although as University approaches its end and 'proper' moving out comes ever nearer, I suspect it may well find itself up in a box in the attic before too long. I'd never get rid of it though, not ever - dog-eared and creased as it may be, it's a solid lump of my childhood, right there in physical form.

As I suspect is the case for many fans, the novelisation was so good that when I finally saw the story again about three years later, it didn't seem as good somehow. I'm over that these days - I can watch and enjoy the episodes on their own merits - but there was this nagging feeling that it could never be quite as good as the multi-million poud blockbuster the book had been in my head.

Hmmmmmm, I do seem to have rather gone off on one here and waffled more about other things than the episode itself. Still, never mind, this Stripping Down is all about various perspectives I suppose, and that's just one of my perspectives on Remembrance of the Daleks.

"War is Hell"

And so to episode 2. I think that the reason why this is working quite so well is because we're not just depending upon pure Dalek action. Let's face facts here, yer average Dalek lends about as much conviction to the action adventure as would having Charlie Drake playing the lead role in the fourth Die Hard film. It's actually focusing upon people and their individual situations, as well as the wider social environment that existed in the 60's. Although I do find that the coupling of some fairly typical attitudes to women with two, strong, female characters from the period, in fairly important positions, slightly at odds.

That Dalek thing in Ratcliffe's office - is it Davros, is it Bobby Davro, who knows - says "May their shells be blighted." which is a very strange un-Dalek thing to say. It's like the Dalek equivalent of "A pox on thee, sire". And poor Michael meets another untimely end. Plus ça change. They do say that all of Desmond Llewelyn's scenes from his Bond films can be stitched together to make one complete Q-centric Bond film, I suppose the same is true of Michael's Who appearances.

And then they go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like...

"The time is a quarter past five, and Saturday viewing continues with an adventure in the new science fiction series, Doc.."

Just what in the Whipsnade World of Adventure did they think they were doing here? Oh it makes me mad. Why not have some Dalek bubble bath in shot and have the Doctor prancing about in a pair of Doctor Who y-fronts. Oh for the love of Bod, all they needed was to hire Peter Serafinowicz to make the bleedin' announcement and it would have been perfect. Then the action switches to a chattering teleprinter, and the Doctor rips off the printout to read the football scores. Zeiton 7 Nitro 9 etc...

And another corker of a cliffhanger. The assistant, not screaming, being menaced by three Daleks. Bearing down on top of her. Like some scene from the Skarosian porn industry's best selling snuff vid-disk of 3054, "Daleks Do Dallas". Of course every single female companion, and even some of the sissier male ones, would say that they were the one who broke the mold and pioneered a stronger traveling companion and would bravely face a ton of hot'n'horny Daleks as they attempted to get it on with you. But they're all pretenders to the tiara of Ace.