Masterpiece Theatre # 2: Paradise
Towers
One of the mission statements of this blog is to celebrate
the lesser lights of Doctor Who.
Stories selected for Masterpiece Theatre must have finished in the bottom 50 of
Doctor Who Magazine’s 2009 Mighty 200
survey. Paradise Towers ranked number
193, making it officially the eighth-worst story of all time.
There are several reasons why Paradise Towers has such a low reputation. The chief problem is
Richard Briers. As the Chief Caretaker he is actually fine, giving the role the
slight sense of officious menace that it requires. Unfortunately by the time
the Chief Caretaker is killed and his lifeless body possessed by Kroagnon,
Briers makes the decision to go over-the-top when what the situation required
was something quieter and more dangerous. What we get is a stupid jerky
zombie movement and a silly voice. It undermines the whole story, possibly fatally.
Briers doesn’t seem too bothered by this: ‘Doctor
Who enabled me to overact, and I enjoy that. The producer worried that I
wasn’t taking the role seriously. He thought I wanted to send up Doctor Who. I
think he was frightened that I would start overdoing it... so I did!’ Richard
Briers, I enjoyed you in The Good Life
and even in Ever Decreasing Circles,
but you, sir, are a pillock.
The other major problem is the design of the Cleaners. They
just aren’t frightening in the way that robots can be. If they had been humanoid
in design like the Host in Voyage of the
Damned, or the Voc Robots in Robots
of Death, they would have been terrifying. Unfortunately what we have is a
cheap white plastic-looking wheelie bin that moves slower than a granny on a
mobility scooter. There’s no threat to them. They should have been hidden in
darkness and only glimpsed. Sadly, they patrol corridors that are lit by
merciless BBC lights, so that every penny saved shows up on screen. Howard
Cooke, who played Pex, said of them: ‘I thought they were terrible. They were
just a joke. The storyline lacked a particularly evil force.’
So has Paradise Towers
got any redeeming features? After all, the first Masterpiece Theatre stated
that The Power of Kroll was almost
Season Twenty-Four bad. For me, though, Paradise
Towers is by some distance the best of that season, and there are so many
good moments and ideas in it that mean it is ripe for reappraisal. Like all ‘bad’
Doctor Who, it is the execution that
is lacking.
Firstly, the actual concept of the story is perfect Doctor Who. A tower block, fallen into
ruin, populated by factions in permanent opposition to each other; that’s a
great setting and one that should easily have been achievable on a BBC budget,
even with the lack of support being given to the programme in 1987. The characters
are rich and layered. Just look at the guest cast: Richard Briers, Clive
Merrison, Elizabeth Spriggs, Brenda Bruce and Judy Cornwell. All fine actors
and all attracted by the strength of the script.
There’s a lovely sense of the grotesque in the imagery and
characterisation too, from the foot sticking out of the Cleaner’s trailer to
the menacing of Mel with a toasting fork (identical to one my parents had at
the time, so there was clearly resonance there) which was risky given the BBC
view that Doctor Who needed neutering
after the gory excesses of Season 22.
10 Reasons why Paradise
Towers builds high for happiness.
1.
Howard Cooke as Pex. Legend goes that Stephen
Wyatt wanted an Arnold Schwarzenegger-type for the role and was disappointed
when he saw the less-than-muscular Cooke, but that’s precisely what makes Pex
such a poignant and ultimately tragic figure. He’s incapable of being a hero,
both in his body and in his mind. He’s an object of ridicule, harangued by gangs
of teenage girls, and yet he rises to the occasion, giving his life for them,
becoming the hero in death that he could never hope to be in life. The image of
the Kangs at the end, honouring him is surprisingly powerful and moving.
2.
The Kangs are, to a girl, fantastic. The
actresses playing them seem slightly too old to be teenaged, but, actually,
that creates the impression that they have trapped in the Towers for a while
now, and have had no positive role model to break their endless cycle of gangland
violence. Moreover the gang culture is irrelevant and exposed as a pathetic
game when people actually die. It is good writing from Wyatt to allow the Kangs
to grow up through the story until ultimately they band together and look
beyond colour and creed.
3.
Clive Merrison, showing Richard Briers how it
should be done. His petty insistence that things should be done by the book
gradually falls away into perplexed bewilderment at the actions of his boss and
the loss of control in the Towers. His need to find someone else to tell him
what to do shows a man without imagination.
4.
Paradise Towers feels like a real place, beyond
the confines of what the studio set shows us. The set-dressing is full of
incidental detail, and each area feels different. You begin to get the idea
that, as the Cleaners advance, the characters are genuinely running out of
places to hide, against a foe who designed the building in which they are
trapped.
5.
The dialogue is almost Clockwork Orange or
Brazil in its design. How about these for starters: Alleviator (elevator),
Brainquarters (headquarters), Wallscrawl (graffiti) and Eye-spy (a lookout). It
takes the Doctor (and us) time to get to grips with what the Kangs are saying,
but by the end of the story their slang-terms make perfect sense.
6.
Sylvester McCoy, finding his feet as the Doctor
after the ridiculous Time and the Rani.
He invests the Doctor with a burgeoning sense of wisdom and a slippery quality
that makes it hard for us to see what he is really thinking. This story lays
the foundations for the mysterious, chess-playing, companion-torturing,
genocidal Doctor of the next two seasons.
7.
Bonnie Langford has never been anyone’s
favourite companion, but her naive insistence that she sticks to her plan and
her endearing relationship with Pex show that Mel, serviced with a better
writer than Pip and Jane Baker for the first time in her time on the series, is
a lot better than she is generally credited.
8.
Cannibalism at teatime. Not only that, but
cannibalistic grannies that lure unsuspecting companions in with promises of
cake and tea. I wonder how many children looked at their grannies with a degree
of suspicion after this story. Paradise Towers plays with the tools of fairy
tales and is all the stronger for it.
9.
A 327 Appendix 3 Subsection 9 Death – It’s almost
as good as anything dreamed up by Robert Holmes. It doesn’t take much stretching
to see the idea in The Sun Makers, for example.
10.
The Doctor abuses the rulebook is just
quintessential Doctor Who, solving
problems with mind rather than muscle. It’s so refreshing after the Saward-scripted
bloodbaths, and shows that Doctor Who
was busy rediscovering its mojo. This scene would have been lauded in the
Tom Baker or Patrick Troughton eras, and shows Sylvester McCoy taking his first
steps to bringing the Doctor back to the man who had been lost for a while; the
smartest man in the room.
Much like The Power of Kroll, Paradise
Towers has all the elements of good Doctor
Who, but the hand dealt to it was an unlucky one. It paved the way for the
darker stories of Seasons 25 and 26, and stands out from the dross around it
for that precise reason. You can see where it wanted to go, and what it wanted
to be. That Paradise Towers doesn’t
quite achieve those ambitions is no reason to dislike it. There are many
stories worse than Paradise Towers,
far more than the seven apparently indicated by the DWM survey. Time for a
re-evaluation, methinks. There’s gold hidden in the Towers.
Next time on Masterpiece
Theatre: The Keys of Marinus
