Masterpiece Theatre
#1
The Power of Kroll
Opinion would have you believe that The Power of Kroll is bad. Almost Season Twenty-Four bad.
In the 2009 Doctor Who Magazine Mighty 200 poll, Kroll
lurked in the depths of the survey at number 174, down in the Who equivalent of
the Marianna Trench with the likes of Colony
in Space, Warriors of the Deep
(Kroll versus the Myrka – there’s my idea for the Fiftieth Anniversary special,
if you’re listening, Mr Moffat. You lot can keep your multi-Doctor dreams;
mine’s a Brussels sprout/ pantomime horse smackdown. It’s possibly Gareth
Roberts’ dream too) and Meglos .
Sure, the direction
is incredibly flat, I give you that, but throw producer Graham Williams a bone
here. After all, Graeme Harper was still just a lowly Production Assistant and
Nick Hurran was only nineteen, and probably busy chasing girls and drinking
cider. Poor hapless Norman Underworld
Stewart was the only man daft brave enough to take it on.
Sadly, the actors involved fail to see Kroll for the
towering masterpiece it so nearly is. Philip Madoc, the World’s Greatest Welsh
Actor™,
said of the story: ‘I didn’t find it a particularly interesting story.’ Mary
Tamm thought it was ‘The worst filming experience that I had.’ Even Graham
Williams griped that ‘The only Key to Time story that I didn’t much care for
was The Power of Kroll. Most of the
effects in that were actually rather tacky, and the sequence with the monster
in the swamp was one of the worst effects shots that we ever had.’ (All quotes
from Doctor Who Magazine: In Their Own Words Volume 3. If you’ve not read it,
find it on eBay and buy it!).
Sadly they are all wrong.
For a start, Kroll as a monster is pretty successful,
considering it (he? she?!) came during an era where money was too tight to
mention, and fellow dodgy classic monsters from around that time
included everybody’s favourite Taran Wood Beast, the king prawn takeaway of The Invisible Enemy and Erato.
At this point I have to make my declaration of vested
interest. The image of Kroll rising out of the swamp is my first Doctor Who
memory. It seared its way into my five-year-old brain so powerfully that even
today I can’t see the matt lines that people say mar the effect so badly. Okay,
I can really, and it is pretty poor, but it’s no worse than the Skarasen in Terror of the Zygons. Doctor Who has
never been about the effects, otherwise nobody would love any of the Jon
Pertwee stories. It’s about the imagination and the intent. In this case, the
design of Kroll sells it, with that huge pulsating head and little rippling
mouth bits, supported by strange squeaking noises. I don’t care that it appears to be at best a
quadtopus rather than the usual eight-tentacled variety. It’s an ace design,
and one that terrified me as a kid.
10 Reasons why The
Power of Kroll is mighty.
1.
Neil McCarthy, giving Thawn a sense of
suppressed violence and dangerous bloodlust.
2.
Kroll attacks the refinery. There’s nothing
wrong with the model work here.
3.
Rohm-Dutt, the original gunrunner, spiritual
father to Stotz. A man who delivers faulty guns to a bunch of savages and then gets
them to sign for them, but also a man with a conscience as he allows his
affiliation to the Swampies to lead him into supporting them and to his
inevitable death.
4.
The way the Doctor is given a drink by Mensch in
Episode One, looks at it disdainfully and then puts it in his pocket, and
nobody notices, including Norman Stewart probably.
5.
Philip Madoc, the World’s Greatest Welsh Actor™, lending
a part he didn’t actually sign up to play a quiet boredom that grounds the
story in the real world. The man was a genius, I tell you.
6.
The Swampies. It would have been so easy to
write them just as ignorant savages, but every so often they confound
expectations, putting the so-called civilised characters back in their places.
Besides, the god they worship is real. They have proof of Kroll’s existence.
That makes them more rational than most people.
7.
Rohm Dutt’s drillfly speech, another less-celebrated
example of Robert Holmes’ gift for throwaway background detail.
8.
The sacrifice to Kroll dance. Why it never
caught on in discos up and down the country, I’ll never know. An inspired mix
of Adam and the Ants’ Prince Charming
arm gestures and MC Hammer’s U Can’t Touch This running on the spot.
Obviously it was too far ahead of its time.
9.
John Abineri painted green, a colour that he
remained for a few weeks after filming when the chemical remover didn’t work
properly. He works wonders as Ranquin, despite being green and being lumbered
with generic savage dialogue.
10.
Without Kroll, there would be no Caves of Androzani. After all, Androzani
is made up of partially recycled squid, with a battle over something that in
truth isn’t worth much, a lack of allies for the Doctor, bored psychopaths,
matter of fact deaths, gunrunning. The themes in both stories are practically
identical, but only one has a giant squid. All Kroll needed was Graeme Harper.
Doctor Who’s failures sometimes
inform its biggest successes, and that’s why The Power of Kroll merits defending, because the power of its ideas
were let down only by the execution, and that’s not Kroll’s fault.
Next Time on
Masterpiece Theatre: Paradise Towers
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