Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

"Come on, Ace; we've got work to do!"

Details for the April release of Survival have been released by the BBC and it's a treat.  This was never my favourite of stories -- although I do like the suburbanism of the opening episode I find that it loses focus somewhat as it goes along.  Not it's fault, but what a shame that the show with that legacy ended with something this inconsistent.  I had forgotten though how lovely that final speech is, the one that was rushed in when the show had been canceled.  So brilliantly poetic and absolutely in-keeping with what show had been and would become:

"There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea is asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on, Ace; we've got work to do!"

The dvd extras are really quite intriguing.  Along with customary making of documentaries, a second disc looks at the what might have happened with a twenty seventh season and there's a retrospective look at the character of Ace.  I wonder if there'll be any mention of their ongoing Big Finish adventures or the Virgin New Adventures.  And Search Out Science!  Something I'd never thought I'd see and this seems like the perfect place for it.

The Restoration Team also now have an article up about their work and actually it wasn't as straightforward as you'd imagine because of the visual effects used during the scenes in the alien landscapes.  It's just a shame that the fan commentary only extends to the final episode.  Has anyone we know contributed to this?

Blunder Cats

People pretending to be talking cats! An adolescent girl who is just as important to the plot as the Doctor is! Special guest appearances from second-rate comedians! Scenes set on a council estate! An opening paragraph that telegraphs its punchline so far in advance that I can't bring myself to follow through with it!

It's impossible to watch Part 3 of Survival without succumbing to a growing feeling of anger and resentment, partly thanks to the idiot playing Midge, but mostly because you know it's going to end with the Doctor falling arse-over-tit into a rubbish tip (how embarrassing is that?).

And then nothing. For a very, very long time.

I remember exactly where I was when I originally saw this episode in 1989. "That was a bit shit, wasn't it?" I mumbled to my new girlfriend, who was still labouring under the illusion that I was only watching the programme out of idle curiosity and a hatred for Corrie. I hadn't the faintest inkling that what I'd just witnessed was it. The End. Finito.

To to add insult to injury, things really were looking up when the hammer finally fell. There's no doubt about it - Doctor Who turned a corner during Season's 25 and 26 (a couple of complete duffers notwithstanding), and Survival, despite its many flaws, still felt like Genesis of the Daleks compared to anything that had was transmitted between Seasons 22 and 24. I was eagerly looking forward to the next season as the end credits were rolling; if they could keep this up, I thought, it might even catch on again. I was certainly hooked.

If I had known the truth then I probably would have broken down into hysterical tears, instantly ending any chances I had with this new girlfriend (it was my collection of Target novelisations that she discovered six weeks later that was ultimately responsible for the break-up. Like it was a porn collection!). You see, I really like McCoy's interpretation of the Doctor. No, seriously - he really is my third favourite Doctor and I'm not ashamed to admit it, even if I did try to hide it in the middle of a tedious anecdote about an ex-girlfriend. There's something about the 7th Doctor that I find both charming and captivating. He's mercurial and mischievous, and McCoy displays a truly dynamic screen presence that can be electrifying, especially when all the words containing the letter 'r' have been removed from the script.

I believe every single word McCoy says and his exchanges with Ainley's Master are far more convincing and a thousand times more thrilling than anything hurled by his predecessors. You can feel the Doctor's anger, his barely disguised disgust, his unadulterated indignation as he confronts his arch enemy for what could be the very last time. And I love it.

And then he goes and spoils it all by shouting something stupid like "If we fight like animals..." and then I feel as if that last paragraph was a complete waste of my time. I mean, how can I defend this moment of madness without exhuming Graham Crowden's corpse and dragging him in for questioning?

In Andrew Cartmell's defence, Survival probably looked pretty damn good on paper: bringing the Doctor back to contemporary suburbia and imbuing the everyday with  a mysterious and dangerous threat was something the programme usually excelled at (both then and now), and choosing innocent pussy cats as harbingers of doom probably felt a teensy bit subversive, too. And then there's the age-old tradition of nicking plot-lines from Hollywood, so we get Planet of the Apes. With cats. All well and good.

It's just a shame they picked such a sunny day to film it on.

The incongruous moment where the Master turns up in a drab suburban sitting room should have been eerie and surreal (the closest we'd ever got to a Yeti taking a dump in Tooting Bec) but it's lit so brightly you can't help but find yourself analysing just how bad the wallpaper is.

The ordinary looks too ordinary - there's simply no contrast. Whether we're in a Yoof Club, on an alien planet, outside a council estate or in a playground - it all looks exactly the same: bland, over-lit and utterly devoid of atmosphere. I don't think I spotted one shadow in the entire 25 minutes, and as a result any attempts at scares or menace are blown out of the water with such devastating efficiency, Chief Brody would have been proud. In fact, by fortuitous accident or design, Survival's look and setting manages to bridge the gap between the BBC series and the fan produced videos perfectly. You can hardly tell them apart.

The acting is all over the shop, too. A couple of weeks ago we'd been treated to the sublime Sylvia Simms and Ian Hogg and now we're suddenly saddled with sub Grange Hill-ian yoof acting, the pantomime subtly of the Sarge, the unashamed snarling of Ainley and Will Barton as Midge (nuff said).

But what still irks me to this day it the fact that this story had the potential to wrap up the season (not to mention the series) with a bang instead of a miaow. I mean, come on! You've got a climatic battle between the Doctor and his arch-nemesis, the Master! To the death! On a planet that is tearing itself apart! It's the bleedin' Reichenbach Falls with volcanoes! Sounds far too good to be true, doesn't it?

Well, that's because it is - just as things begin to get interesting, and thanks to a plot device so tenuous and under-explained it still baffles me to this day, the Doctor conveniently finds himself back in Perivale where he repeats the same terrible line about "animals" again! Once is careless...

And what of the Master? Who bloody knows/cares? Maybe he went home too? Maybe he was putting the kettle on before the Doctor had time to collect Ace who was grieving over a woman who used to be a cat who used to be a woman. I think. Seriously, Survival's plot makes Ghost Light look like What's the Story, Ballamory?

Doctor Who and motorbikes just don't mix. either. Day of the Daleks, Delta and the Bannermen, The TV Movie, this. Are you listening, RTD? Don't go and do anything silly like sticking David Tennant on a Vespa or anything, OK?

Finally, I know it's ridiculous to start questioning the logic of a show that revolves around a trans-dimensional police box but I just have to ask:

a) why does the motorbike collision set off a small nuclear explosion?

b) why did the Doctor fly a couple of miles away from the impact zone?

c) Will the Restoration Team insert a flying CGI Doctor when they get around to releasing this on DVD?

It's a crying shame that Survival, Season 26 and the "classic" series had to end like this. It was all going so well....

The Bumper Book of Made-Up Doctor Who Facts has this to say about Survival: Ironically, when all the adverts and 'corporates' dried up, Gareth Hale and Norman Pace opened a small corner shop just outside Cricklewood. They have a permanent special on cat food and cheese combos if you feel like popping in. On a lighter note, the animatronic cat later found work on Nickelodeon's remake of Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

Bye Bye Bad Cat Man

After seeing the cat people in the first TARDISode, when you sit and watch Survival you realise what they could have made of the Cheetah people. It does seem, from reading interviews, that Rona Munro herself was not particularly enamoured of the way the Cheetah people were realised by the director and the costume designer. I wonder if she would have been happier with the New Earth style Cat people?

Survival was made nearly 17 years ago (my god, what it really that long ago?) now and when you think about it, at the time, they weren’t actually that bad. Sure, they look silly nowadays, but back then, I thought they were ok. If it were made today I am sure they would be much, much better and much more frightening as they weren’t exactly fierce looking were they? Perhaps that was the whole point though: making them look cuddly so as to disarm people into thinking they were not fierce. 

Episode three of Survival is probably the weakest of the three episodes and probably has the least amount happening in it. Being the final episode of the serial it has to pull all of the disparate threads of the story together and that it does quite well.

The episode was certainly full of set pieces the main one being the climactic motorbike duel between the Doctor and Midge, which was pretty well put together despite the fact that McCoy just doesn’t look right riding a motorbike. Also, the final fight scene between the Doctor and the Master was also quite well done. Although, I think in a fight between McCoy and Ainley, my money would be on Ainley every time!

At the time I genuinely did think that the Doctor might have been killed and would have ended up regenerating and was a little bit disappointed when a few minutes later I discovered that he was fine and just lying on a discarded sofa a few hundred metres away! 

One of the best things about this story was the performance of Anthony Ainley as the Master. Here is far better than he had been as the Master in a long, long time and showed what the Master could have been like if he hadn’t simply been shoehorned into a plot just so that he could appear at least once a year. Here he at least had a purpose and was not superfluous to the plot.

Even McCoy was quite good in this story (and this is from a person who is not a big fan of McCoy’s Doctor) apart from his hollering of “If we fight like animals, we die like animals” which I always find cringe-worthy, and Ace wasn’t so much of a spoiled brat as she could be in some stories.

You even get so see FHM favourite Adele Silva in an early role as snot-faced brat Squeak and, in the first episode, creators of The Stonk, Hale and Pace as two shop keepers. I guess that their casting was a prime example of the stunt casting people talk about today, or just symptomatic of JNT’s insistence on casting know names even in the smallest of roles.

The direction in this story is also pretty good and they actually succeed in making a quarry look like an alien landscape here with the clever use of filters and computer effects as they did in The Greatest Show In The Galaxy (also directed by Wareing and featuring the same quarry).

You could also comment on the fact that this story is almost like a blue print for the new series with it being set on present day Earth on a council estate (albeit a nice looking, middle class version of a council estate). I mean where are all the bikes left lying in the middle of the street, or cars with broken windows, the knocked down wheelie bins and the smell of burning tyres! Actually, I think that is where the comparisons between this and the new series end.

If the show had not come back last year, or the movie had not been made, this would have been a disappointing final episode, with a very tacky walking off into the sunset ending. Thankfully it wasn’t.

Please don't kill me!

I liked it.

There, I said it.

I always liked Sylvester McCoy, I would love him even if he went to Eastenders, or even *shudders* Hollyoaks. I like Survival. Admittedly, the last episode is the poorest of the lot, but I still liked it. I think the Cat people are well done, especially now that I've seen the new Cat people, who look like they've just had a fun day out at Butlins. The furry cats I believe are much more realistic than the new, "better than ever" clean shaven ones. I like the planet. Admittedly, just another quarry, but the lighting gives it an incredible glow that makes it feel alien. I like the Master, who at last gets the chance to escape from the shadow of Roger Delgado and play the character his own way. After all, the Doctor changes, why shouldn't the Master?

Admittedly, the bike scene does look silly. As does the Doctor sticking out of the heap of rubbish. As does the second "If we fight like animals, we'll die like animals!". Why did he say it twice?!? It would have been so much better if he'd just collapsed onto the road exhausted. Admittedly, there is a lot to criticise, but everything has faults. And this episode always entertains me, it always is an enjoyable piece of television. Oh, if only you all could see what I see: a final goodbye (well, it seemed like it) to an epic show, and the way I see it, as damn fine an ending as it could have had. Better to end here than with Twin Dilemma, right? Then it probably wouldn't have come back. When all is said and done, this episode really did give the show its best chance of Survival.

And I like the bit at the end as well. Nyaah!

The Bumper Book of Made-up Doctor Who Facts has this to say about Survival: The infamous "If we fight like animals, we'll die like animals!" line was an unscripted addition after McCoy got into a fight with Anthony Ainley over who should have the final voice over. The fight lasted for three days, and only ended when the quarry caved in. After they had been dug out, the loss of time meant that they couldn't film anything else, so the episode had to be hastily glued together with the material they had recorded.

You Are What You Watch

Good god, man, Survival. So our collective, collaborative, trip through the bargain bin of Doctor Who's Remnant World ends here... In an over-lit chip shop of a piece that looks so cheap it almost makes the recent remake of A for Andromeda look like a moodily shot film noir classic.

Now... Where to go with this? Should it be a diatribe about how Doctor Who will never, ever, die - no matter how shoddy it gets? Should it be a synergistic kitcsh-fest equating the show to the lyrics of the new British national anthem, I Will Survive by Gloria Gaynor? Or should it be, I know...

Just imagine what po-faced poo prodder, Dr Gillian McKeith (think of Debbie Magee taking part in a drug trial that's gone horribly wrong), would say if she turned her zany death stare towards someone who lived solely on a diet of Doctor Who. In the early years the diet was rich in variety and meaty goodness, the ideal way to feed developing brains. But towards the end, all the regular ingredients were there, except the way they were all mixed together, it just came out a sort of grey mush, unpalatable mush.

Fighting valiantly through this mess is the Master, a shadow of his former self and on the verge of being ousted by someone called Tipple. Stinking of cat's piss, like some old derelict, and, for reasons never explained in the show, seems to have his head poking through a doily. Thank the Omni-Potent Cartmell that we didn't have to watch the earlier episodes as I've got a vague recollection of some Hale and Pace action down there. Never a pleasant thought at the best of times.

Whilst there's undoubtedly some decent strands of a story lurking in here somewhere, it's lost amongst a collection of unconvincing, and completely unnecessary action pieces. I use the word action advisedly as most of it is just plain shoddy and out of place. Exhibit a) the motorbikes. Why? And everything from the youth club onwards looks like it's been shot on the set of some musical, with the rough street types about to break into a kids from FAME style song and dance routine. Strictly Dance Fever? Strictly Bollock-Brained Crap.

And the ending.... The moving, touching, tear-jerking ending was ultimately ditched from the end of the show and replaced with some quickly cobbled together dreamy wank. Fortunately, the Doctor Who Bumper Book of Made-up Facts has managed to reprint the original ending in full...

There are worlds out there where show is dying.
Where the script writer's unconscious and the viewer's in REM sleep.
People switching channels and Coronation Street is on.
Somewhere there's terrible dialogue,
Somewhere there's wooden acting
And somewhere else the vomit is getting cold.
Come on Ace, we've got audios to make.

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.

Survival Instinct

The TARDIS materialises on a London street where the Doctor has promised his young sidekick a chance to catch up with old friends. Elsewhere, strange happenings have seen several residents mysteriously disappear, while an old enemy waits to spring his trap.

Admit it - this sounds like an amalgamation of one or more of last year’s Ninth Doctor and Rose stories, or at the very least one of BBC books’ tie-in novels. But it is, of course, the plot of ‘Survival’, which as we all know was the last transmitted story in Doctor Who’s original 26-year run. What goes around comes around, it seems; even for Doctor Who. And it’s somehow fitting that - even when the death-knell had been called back in 1989 - the seeds of the programme’s resurrection were already in place in this very story.

I think it’s fair to say that Doctor Who - like much of Perivale’s residents in this story - just disappeared one December night at the end of the eighties. No fanfare, no outcry, just gone; with seemingly endless promises that it would, one day, return. Of course the BBC had learned their lesson four years previously: and this time there would be no tabloid-baiting talk of cancellation. Just a carefully worded statement of doors still being open and private companies being consulted.

But the thing is, would anyone have noticed even if they had admitted they were scrapping it. As I recall, most people didn’t know that Doctor Who was even still on by 1989, let alone bothered by it. Michael Grade’s original cancellation, it seemed, had condemned the show to the backwaters of people’s memories irrespective of whether it was permanent or not. And when Doctor Who finally didn’t return for the first time in twenty-six years, no-one but the hardcore seemed to bat an eyelid.

So, did it leave with a bang or a whimper? How you answer that will depend on where you sit on the whole question of Doctor Who’s final three years of Coronation Street-opposed adventures. Certainly ‘Survival’ is not the best example of these Andrew Cartmel-led attempts to drag Doctor Who kicking-and-screaming into the 1980s. But it’s perhaps one of the better examples of how the show was trying to fuse a modern aesthetic onto its timeless concepts. And ironically enough, where the new series has rooted itself firmly in an everyday arena for artistic reasons, back in 1989 the need to place domesticity before fantasy was for purely budgetary reasons. Which surely illustrates better than anything else the radical change in audience tastes and the dynamic of sci-fi / fantasy shows during Doctor Who’s sixteen-year sabbatical.

But to approach ‘Survival’ is to approach the whole of eighties Who in microcosm: big concepts with often poor realisation, all dressed up in some am-dram acting and the occasional famous face who really should have known better. On the plus side is some effective direction from Alan Wareing and a resonant - though rather heavy-handed - metaphor about survival of the fittest (one doubly resonant for a show literally on its last legs). On the minus side, there’s that old fault of the McCoy stories: insufficient material to fill even three episodes. Oh, and Hale & Pace.

Episode one is certainly the best - and most traditional. There’s a real belief in debutant Rona Munro’s script (hardly surprising given how the author’s career has gone from strength to strength) and Wareing brings a style and verve that only Graeme Harper would surpass this decade. And hindsight has only made us more aware of how little the current Doctor Who has really changed form this, despite the production team’s protestations otherwise. Feisty, relatable companion - check. Suburban setting - check. Gratuitous use of popular contemporary comedy act (dare I mention Peter Kay’s casting in ‘Love & Monsters’?).

God help us, even Anthony Ainley’s (mostly) excellent, while the whole ‘Show me’ shtick of part one could have been an ‘Are you my Mummy..?’ of its day had only anyone been watching. But as if to prove the law of diminishing returns, episodes two and three peter out quite markedly; with three in particular offering little more than the so-bad-it’s-good spectacle of the Doctor’s bike duel with Midge and the sight of future Emmerdale sex-siren Adele Silva as a snotty-nosed brat. Hard to believe, but apparently some Who fan-club has made her honorary president on the basis of this Before they were Famous outtake.

And so before we know it Ace is sobbing over a Big Finish extra and the Doctor’s pining for some cold tea. Yes, to add insult to injury Doctor Who isn’t even allowed a grandstanding finish to its record-breaking run; instead the Doctor and Ace wander away into the bushes to the strains of a poorly-dubbed voiceover. And somewhere Philip Segal is writing a letter to the BBC.

Doctor Who had certainly had its fair share of cancellation-worthy moments in the 1980s but - despite ‘Survival’ not being the best case for its defence - Season 26 saw a confidence and maturity which at last suggested a corner had been turned. As we know, the BBC thought otherwise and pulled the plug - leaving fan speculation as to the shape of another season (and the prospect of another Doctor) - to be one of the series’ many if onlys. And forever befuddle those who can’t believe that the final curtain came here instead of straight after ‘Timelash’…

(‘The Bumper Book of Made-Up Doctor Who Facts’ has this to say about ‘Survival’: the originally scripted end had Sylvester McCoy playing spoons to the tune of ‘It’s a Wonderful World’ until someone pointed out that Douglas Adams had already done this. But without the spoons.)