Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

Time-S*ite

Fasten your seatbelt it’s going to be a rough ride.

Time-Flight Part One

Time-Flight isn’t all that bad for the first twenty-minutes. It is actually quite interesting as first we see a Concorde go missing and then later on another Concorde also goes missing after repeating the last known movements of the first concorde. However this time the second Concorde had the Doctor, Nyssa, Tegan and the TARDIS on board.

Then from the moment they land on prehistoric earth it all goes tits up and starts getting very silly indeed with a rather laughable cliffhanger and a really badly made up Anthony Ainley playing the rather bizarre Kalid.

I can’t see how anybody was fooled by this disguise, it was even worse than the one in Castrovalva, at least that one was a bit more believable, but in this one you could tell it was the Master from the word go. I am not sure that it even fooled me at the time when I would have been 7 years old.

This story was set directly after the events in Earthshock with Tegan and Nyssa both still upset over Adric’s death and demanding that the Doctor go back in time and rescue Adric from the freighter but the Doctor insists that it can’t be done and, luckily for the Doctor, both Nyssa and Tegan buy it and pretty soon they carry on as if nothing had happened, so they can’t have been all that upset, can they?

The problem is we just don’t care.

Time-Flight Part Two

It doesn’t get any better in part two I am afraid. I do find the problem with a lot of Davison stories, particularily the earlier ones is that it takes till the end of the second episode to get to the point of the story and for the most part the majority of the first two episodes are just superfluous padding. About the only time this doesn’t happen is in the two part stories.

I think that the main problem is the writing really. Some of the stories just seem to take an age to get going and this is one of the worst culprits for that.

In this episode a lot of it is spent with Tegan and Nyssa wandering around corridors and the Doctor pretty much doing the same.

At the close of the episode the plot finally arrives and we are supposed to be surprised that Kalid is the Master in disguise. No shit Sherlock. I never would have guessed that in a million years.

The Master? Really?

I don’t believe it!

No John, It Doesn't

Time-Flight, part four

Ladies and gentlemen, we apologise for the delay; the quantum accelerator has been rectified and your programme is now ready for boring. Please take your sofas and make sure your TV dinner tray is in an upright position ready for throwing at the screen.

Our flight time today will be a hundred and forty million years at the cruising height of absurdity. Weather today is sunny and clear with the nip of an impending ice age, so wrap up warm all you Silurians. We anticipate a smooth journey, although the show may experience some technobabble at high altitude. Sickness bags have been placed in the seat in front of you for your viewing comfort.

At this time, all mobile phones and electrical devices should be switched off before takeoff, as these will interfere with the vision mix and make the sky wobble. We would also like to remind passengers that this is a No Smirking flight, and First Officer Grimwade gets upset easily. Smoke-and-mirror detectors have been installed in the lavatories, and disabling the story on budget grounds is prohibited by snore.

All shrunken corpses and molecularly-disintegrated passengers should be placed in the overhead lockers or under the seat in front of you. Please be careful when opening overhead lockers, as baggage from the previous episodes may have shafted us during the flight.

Please take a few moments to locate the nearest emergency exit, which is Wish You Were Here on ITV. Should depression occur, oxygen masks will drop down from above your seats. Place your fingers over your nose and wince normally. Secure your own mask and resuscitate yourself first before attempting to breathe life into the script next to you.

Should the episode make a damp squib landing, you will find an emergency lifeless jacket under your seat, which is operated by pulling strings to try and get more money. If this doesn't work, seat cushions and other such padding can be used as an appropriate device; pull the cushion from the seat and place it firmly over your face until the discomfort stops.

In the event of an end-of-season gimmick, please assume the bracing position with your hands on your head. In this position, should a previously written-out character come back next year for no adequate reason, you will be ready to rock back and forwards saying "Oh God, no".

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask the crew members who will explain later. On behalf of the production team, we would like to wish you all a pissant plight. Thank you for flying Squittish Airways.

The Bumper Book Of Made-Up Doctor Who Facts has this to say about Time-Flight, part four: Judith Chalmers sued this episode for libel.

The World According To Gawp

Time-Flight, part three

The vacant stare. The wide-eyed gape. The deer-in-headlights realisation that screams 'I've fucked up' at the universe. Call it what you like, but it's that look of disbelieving horror that characterises Peter Davison's tenure as the 'vulnerable' Fifth Doctor. Odd then, how seldom you see it in Season Nineteen. It's probably what Davison means by his early performance being 'bland'; there's some great quality gimble-acting in episode one of Castrovalva, but that's down to regeneration trauma, and doesn't really count. (Davison had already made three stories before that one, which itself is telling enough.)

The turning point is of course, the end of Earthshock. Oh yes, it's easy enough to take charge with a winning smile when facing utter wimps like Terileptils or Urbankans, but the wobbly Mickey Mouse falsetto is never far away, and we know from hindisght it's all going to hell very soon. And then suddenly confronted with a heavyweight, all the boyish overconfidence is blown away and we're all cheering along with the next two seasons of hurried neurotic urgency, a Doctor completely out of his depth who could crack again at any moment. Just watch Davison's 'what have I done' face at the end of part four. We love it.

"The vacant stare. The wide-eyed gape. The deer-in-headlights realisation that screams 'I've fucked up' at the universe"

There's no stopping the gawp after that. Well, maybe a couple of things. It takes Peter Moffat in the gallery box to suck all emotion out of Davison's face for the best part of ninety minutes, even when he's deliberately written that way in The Five Doctors. (Moffat gags never grow old.) The creme-de-la-creme of gawps tragically wasn't even broadcast; it was trimmed off the halfway mark of Resurrection Of The Daleks. Go buy the el-cheapo DVD, skip to the deleted scenes and watch Davison, menaced by the pepperpots, literally about to shit himself - you won't regret it. And let's not forget Mark Strickson's growing disillusionment with looking over his shoulder, and deciding that nobody's going to out-froth his big moment in Frontios.

Who cares though? It's still Davison's show, and this era will always belong to that look. Even Terminus, a story so unrelentingly grey and miserable that they hired Blake 7's Mary Ridge to direct it, contains the barest trace of gravitas to inspire a brief mug at the camera. "What is this horrendous place," indeed. Hell, in Snakedance, our hero manages to reduce himself to a ranting, paranoid maniac. How deeply satisying is that? A lot more so than when they tried the same shtick after The Caves Of Androzani, anyway. In fact Androzani, given the depth of shit Robert Holmes gleefully dump everyone into, is startlingly consipicuous by the absence of a good gawp. Little did we know it would be us pulling that face the following Monday.

So in its own small way it's comforting that when (and again, you can join in at home kids), "The Master has finally defeated me!" at the end of Time-Flight part three, it's a payoff almost worth gnawing your own legs off at the most gallumphingly ponderous twenty-five minutes of television you'll ever watch.

Because aside from a quick infodump natter with the Xeraphin, the rest of it is totally superfluous. Professor Hayter sticks his hand into the Top Of The Pops light socket rather than suffer another minute of Grimwade's superlucent stream of compressed technoballs. Angela Clifford, the world's least-reassuring stewardess, scarpers off to the Master's TARDIS once her contractually-obliged minimum of added plot is up, and is never seen again. Tea with two sugars, love. The knackered old Type-40 rather laughably turns into a helicopter by having bits swapped round in the same fashion that toy robots don't. And the Master apparently 'defeats' the Doctor by... hmmm, laying a power cable. We rang the electricity board for comment, but they told us to sod off, having got thoroughly sick of that sketch quoted at them since 1981.

The Bumper Book of Made-Up Doctor Who Facts has this to say about Time-Flight, part three: preliminary designs for the inner sanctum set were vetoed when Matthew Corbett turned out too expensive to hire as the Xeraphin operator.

Advance To Go. Destroy Adric. Collect £200.

Time-Flight, part two

(The scene: Velma of Traken and Daphne Jovanka have penetrated the inner sanctum. Kalid, caught in his own backfiring trap, is drenched in a torrent of Plasmaton snot. Doctor Freddy, with clueless comedy sidekicks in tow, prepares to unmask him.)

DOCTOR: And now let's see who the villain really is! (pulls off mask)

MASTER: Heh-heh-heh-heeeeeh.

DOCTOR: Oh Christ, not you again. Couldn't you have been Chancellor Goth?

MASTER: Yes Doctor, you're right. I wanted all the power in the sanctum for myself, so I set up those fake monster visions to scare your friends away. But how did you see through my brilliant disguise?

DOCTOR: Our first clue was Adric. You never realised that Matthew Waterhouse and the petulant little git in pyjamas were really one and the same character, and by making his vision try to act as a portent of doom instead of himself, despite just two lines of dialogue and an 'aaaargh' it totally humiliated itself over the course of six takes trying to get anything right. That's how we knew this Adric was a fake.

MASTER: Bah, Richard Todd could have arranged that. What was your other clue?

DOCTOR: Well that would be the general elaborate shitness of the entire scheme, it's got your handiwork all over it.

MASTER: You can't prove a thing, Doctor. A leering space-genie with gingivitis abducts Concorde using a time warp and some plasticene blobs? It's preposterous. No-one will ever believe you.

DOCTOR: Not so fast, Master. I think you'll find your dental pattern matches the marks on this chewed scenery, placing you at the scene of the crime. Take him away, Sheriff.

MASTER: Curses. But I might still get away with it in the last two epsiodes if not for these piddling scripts.

(The Master is led away in handcuffs)

ABSENT-MINDED PROFESSOR VOICED BY DON MESSICK: But Doctor, there's one thing I still don't understand. The Concorde crew and I don't know who the Master is, he wasn't expecting you to turn up, and all the other passengers were hypnotised. So what was all that with the Kalid disguise about?

DOCTOR: Oh, fuck only knows.

The Bumper Book of Made-Up Doctor Who Facts has this to say about Time-Flight, part two: Matthew Waterhouse is set to make a comeback as the voice of Snorky in the new series remake of The Banana Splits.

Supersonic

Fly Jurassic Airlines - we’ll take good care of you…

Time Flight Part One

Doctor Who and Concorde - two British institutions you never really expected to see married together in the name of art. And if you did, surely it would have been some naff 1980s advertising campaign on behalf of BA to illustrate that you didn’t have to have a time machine in order to get from one place to another in the quickest time.

But like the show’s credibility in the 1980s, Concorde is just a fading memory now, carted off to the great aeronautic scrap yard in the sky. I wonder what the modern show would use instead to try to gain some kudos with the general public - Tennant’s Doctor driving around in a Lamborghini perhaps; or chasing aliens up and down the streets of Cardiff on one of those disability scooters that pensioners drive like maniacs through your local shopping arcade. Let’s face it, there isn’t really anything like Concorde in terms of prestigious transport any more. Unless you were to set a story Cruise of the Gods style on some floating pleasure cruiser; the kind that particularly rich fans go on to meet Sylvester McCoy. And then jump overboard because - and this is actually true - nothing else in life could ever match that moment.

On a scale of one to ten, RIP Adric barely registers a zero.

All of which is of course just a feeble attempt to avoid talking about this story. ‘Time Flight’ is the ‘Twin Dilemma’ of Season 19, following a well regarded ‘classic’ with a budget-less, confused mess of too many ideas and too few script rewritings. Okay - deep breath - basically one of British Airways’ flagship planes goes missing during a routine touchdown while coincidentally the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa - still mourning the death of Adric for all of two minutes - land at Terminal One; having instead been planning to go to the Great Exhibition in 1851 to ‘cheer’ themselves up. Truth is the three of them look about as cut up about Adric as you would had you lost a particularly useful kitchen gadget and had to go to Do It All to get another one. While the new series has embraced the touchy-feely aspects of drama to largely good effect, this scene of moving on following a companion’s demise has all the emotion of a catatonic patient taking a doze.  And is about as thick with emotion you could cut it with a damp sponge. On a scale of one to ten, where ‘Doomsday’s finale is a nine, RIP Adric barely registers a zero.

Anyway, with the TARDIS crew looking about as inconspicuous as a bearded passenger tying his shoelaces, the Doctor starts name-dropping to almost television producer proportions and before you can yell ‘Security Alert’ him, Nyssa and Tegan are granted full access to Heathrow’s finest, planning to follow the first Concorde’s path down the time contour. At least I think that’s the plan. At one point the Doctor and Nyssa engage in such tortuous, techno-babblick bollocks that the AI figure sank by 50% for two whole minutes. Not that I’m saying that Sarah Sutton is a dull actress or anything, but it has been suggested that her survival of the JNT axe was down to more than just her pert bottom. Ahem.

Fancy that, actors more known for playing homosexuals in Doctor Who - those were the days, eh?

Moving on and the trio of intrepid time travellers - Christ, my mind’s slipping to The Good Old Days to avoid talking about this nonsense - are introduced to some of BA’s finest and campest employees. And Michael Cashman. First there’s Captain Stapley, who looks more at home behind a bank manager’s desk than at the controls of a supersonic aircraft. Then it’s either Bilton or Scobie who has a fine militaristic ‘tache (I can’t be arsed checking which one) and finally bringing up the rear (if you’ll pardon the expression) is Michael Cashman; later to play the first gay character in a British soap. Fancy that, actors more known for playing homosexuals in Doctor Who - those were the days, eh?

Soon enough the Concorde carrying the Doctor and co. disappears just like its predecessor did and the authorities back home are left trying to explain how they’ve lost not one but two £30 million aircraft without even a receipt to show for it. For the Doctor and his friends, however, things are even worse. While nominally they appear to have arrived back at Heathrow, soon both Nyssa and then the Doctor spot the tell-tale signs of particularly poor CSO; and ‘Heathrow’ is revealed to be little more than a Jurassic hillside replete with forced perspective citadel on the horizon. Where inside a very odd-looking chap, clearly making up his lines like Stanley Unwin, is commanding the passengers of the previous Concorde to go and nick the TARDIS, which is handily lying around the second Concorde’s hold.

And before you can say cliff-hanger, the Doctor is surrounded by grey blob monsters that whisk him off to God knows where. Luton airport perhaps..?

Next Time: Who is the Conjuror? Why have the two Concordes been abducted? What popular conventioneer of the 80s and 90s - and friend of John Levene - can you arrange from the anagram ‘Leon Ny Taiy’?

(The Bumper Book of Made-Up ‘Doctor Who’ facts has this to say about Time Flight 1: Paul Greengrass used this episode’s tense air-traffic control scenes as inspiration for his acclaimed film United 93)

Doctor Who And The Mincing Airmen

Time-Flight, part one

Peter Grimwade. Affectionately known as 'Grimmers' by the rest of the cast, or 'Grimmace' after they read his scripts. Why did Grimwade never direct his own utterly incomprehensible material, and show them all how to do it properly? Probably because once you've overseen that nauseating Alzarian's demise in living 24-bit BeebColour (TM), you know there's nowhere for your career to go but down. Sadly, the mines he planted around the keyboard failed to go off; arm's length wouldn't have saved the little sod's fingers then.

"I thought branded product placement was against the Corporation charter?"

The word that sums up the vast majority of Time-Flight is 'gay'. Well it is. Quite apart from Grimwade himself, the always-suspect Anthony Ainley and the Quentin Crisp Boys troupe as personified by Michael Cashman, there's the leotard Xeraphin body suits in episode three and the fact that millions of that-way viewers were still given the urge to offer Adric a great big paternal cuddle (gay icon that he is) despite him being reduced to mashed potato barely a week before. Not to mention the baffling question of what the hell possessed Grimwade that Concorde was in any way a plausible or workable hook around which to hang a time-travel story, or one that wouldn't date before the damn thing was even made, if it wasn't for the supposedly-upmarket yet trashy publicity and potential free flights (I thought branded product placement was against the Corporation charter?) to be gleaned from the most exemplary of John Nathan-Turner's camp-entertainment production decisions. That, and the strapping young men in uniforms.

That's assuming they could have pretended it was on a par with The Talons Of Weng Chiang, and chucked an entire season's finances at it to do it 'justice' like the end-of-term Phillip Hinchcliffe off his face on gin. It wasn't, and they didn't. If you thought the scenery looked fake in 1982 analogue fuzz-o-vision, you won't believe how blindingly obvious it is now on the remastered DVD that everyone's standing six inches away from a crap matte skyline, absolutely the worst bit of faked perspective since the Palitoy tank in Robot. There is not a single prop that doesn't wobble, including the TARDIS doors that need to be held shut from the inside while the prop is lying on its side. The digital restoration does this story absolutely no favours whatsoever.

"Derek Griffiths chimes in with a bouncy join-in-at-home song about words that end in -IT"

And neither does Roger Limb, who opts to score the accompanying rubbish in the same two-line, four/four time cheap-Casio fashion he was also doing for doing for dozens of BBC Schools programmes around the same time, as if to deliberately underscore the pitiful level of budget on show. Keep listening and you'll soon recognise his trademark synth-pipe instrument of choice that brings to mind one of those Melody Pop boiled sweets shaped like a whistle. Believe it or not, our Rog would set his sights even lower in the very next story with the screeching four-note nightmare that punctuates the whole of Arc Of Infinity.

And that's that for episode one. Twenty-odd minutes of twiddly Radiophonic tat, bottom-of-the-barrel CSO of characters floating about the studio, and disjointed film footage that feels like an entirely different serial put there for the rest of the programme to remark upon to the watching boys and girls. If that suddenly sounds at all familiar to the other thirty-somethings in the audience, it's because it's as near as dammit the format of Words And Pictures, which this whole enterprise feels exactly like. You almost expect Peter Davison to whip out a magic pencil with a light on the end as a replacement for the mangled sonic screwdriver, before Derek Griffiths chimes in with a bouncy join-in-at-home song about words that end in -IT.

The Bumper Book of Made-Up Doctor Who Facts has this to say about Time-Flight, part one: 'centuries of galactic radiation' was the programme's educational remit for the week, informing viewers to sit six feet away from the TV.