Art Gallery: The Deadly Assassin

Art Gallery 7

The Target novelisation of The Deadly Assassin has a great cover. The Doctor’s pensive face looms out of the blackness, a look in his eyes that could either be rising panic or dawning realisation of terrible danger. The two Time Lords flanking him are captured in the archetypal pompous schoolmaster pose that only comes with wearing a set of curtains and an orthopaedic neck brace. And above them, the Master in all his decomposing glory, his lidless fish eyes staring straight at the reader, a lopsided skull-grin suggesting his imminent and assured victory. With a gloriously grisly touch, cover artist Mike Little allows droplets of blood to fall from the Master’s hood, dropping downwards onto the two Time Lords, suggesting their imminent bloody demise. Even the Doctor Who logo is blood-red. It’s yet another of those fantastic borderline-horror covers that led to such good sales of the novelisations.

Mike Little only painted four covers for the Target range; The Deadly Assassin, Planet of Evil, The Masque of Mandragora and The Brain of Morbius. Assassin is by far his best cover. Yet it was originally the second choice until John Geary’s original design went unused. Geary’s work is well-executed, but doesn’t give a sense of the macabre excesses of The Deadly Assassin in the same way the Little’s eventual cover manages. It also appears to be unfinished as there is a large area of the picture that is blank. Perhaps it was due to feature some of the nightmarish images from the Matrix sequence and was left off after the furore that developed over that particular part of the story.

The Deadly Assassin is one of the strangest stories ever broadcast. It’s a real marmite story; you either love it or loathe it. There’s plenty there to warrant its tag as a true classic of the Tom Baker era, but equally there are some fundamental issues with it. It opened the door to Gallifrey and the gradual demystification of the Time Lords and by extension the Doctor himself. In a way, it opened the way to the eventual cancellation of Doctor Who. It is here that the series’ backstory becomes overcomplicated with far too many elements for the casual viewer to recall. With every subsequent visit to a Gallifrey based on Holmes’ ancient senators, a little bit of mystery was sacrificed and the audience became that little bit more disinterested. By the eighties, everyone knew who the Time Lords were and they turned up every few stories, each successive new Time Lord less interesting than the last. The casual audience thought the same and simply turned over to watch The A-Team instead.

When the series returned in 2005, Russell T. Davies did the only sensible thing; he destroyed Gallifrey off-screen and completely wiped out all possibility of its return. Davies and his successor Steven Moffat have wisely maintained this new backstory, apart from Gallifrey’s brief return in The End of Time and the briefest of flashbacks in The Sound of Drums. Both are fan-pleasing moments, but what has been apparent since Doctor Who returned is that Gallifrey and other Time Lords simply aren’t needed. Only the Master is a strong enough creation to make occasional returns and only when there is a story that could only be told with him. It’s hard to reconcile the Time Lords we see in The Deadly Assassin and each subsequent Gallifrey story with a race strong enough to take on the Daleks. Hopefully Timothy Dalton’s Rassilon simply glove-of-doomed every last one of them into oblivion, starting with Drax from The Armageddon Factor. After spitting on them  first of course.

There’s no sense either in The Deadly Assassin that this is a people who have mastered Time itself, whose power is coveted by a million other races. What we get instead is a subterranean society of university professors and Vatican cardinals who don’t even know from where their power emanates. This is a stagnant and old society that is also fundamentally misogynistic in that there are no females to be seen in the entire story. It is stated that a Time Lord is a rank and title bestowed on a Gallifreyan and clearly no woman is capable of wielding that responsibility according to Assassin.

It’s debatable whether or not Gallifrey should ever have been visited in the first place. After all, a series that originally ran for twenty-six years was bound to run out of ideas one day and the temptation of seeing where the Doctor came from was no doubt irresistible. But then this was one serial amongst hundreds. Why should we remember this one above so many others? If the story demanded that we saw the Doctor’s homeworld, then that is reason enough to show it. But the bottom line is that The Deadly Assassin is not that story.

The biggest problem with the story is also its finest section. Episode Three is an initially creative and bizarre house of mirrors ride through the surreal madhouse of the Matrix. It’s the Doctor in Wonderland, with memorable images like the one below, one of the scariest things ever in any medium.

Then it abruptly turns into a tense, gritty and realistic fight for life as we watch our hero bleed and bruise. We are presented with the uncomfortable sight of a role model to millions of children actively seeking to murder his opponent. It’s a tonal shift that’s hard to accept as being anywhere near suitable for a teatime audience and is definitely misjudged. Sadly it finally gave TV campaigner Mary Whitehouse and her brigade of biddies enough ammunition to force the BBC to alter Doctor Who’s approach, in essence blunting one of its most powerful tools; the ability to scare children behind the sofa. The era of the ghost train was over. Now we would have the Tom Baker comedy half-hour in its place; a necessary compromise. But the simple fact is that real physical violence and Doctor Who should and must never go together. It didn’t work in 1976 with this story and it was the death knell of the series in 1985.

Yet Episode Three is quite brilliant. It’s the sense that we’re watching something we shouldn’t be seeing. It’s the sense that this could very definitely be the end of the Doctor. It’s the sense that he might actually lose. It’s the virtual reality equivalent of The Caves of Androzani, and it’s one of the best things I have ever seen.

There was a time when I would have put The Deadly Assassin in my all-time top ten, but nowadays there’s a nagging sense that it conflicts with what Doctor Who should be. There’s a fundamental sense of optimism in the programme amidst the monsters and mayhem that’s completely missing from The Deadly Assassin.  Furthermore, the character of the Doctor is not served well by showing his home-world to be so corrupt and senile. It merely shows that he left because he was bored, not from any real desire to explore. On the other hand it does square quite well with the defensive and intolerant Doctor we first met in 1963. And despite it being so tonally wrong, I firmly believe that Episode Three is a work of art. It’s just not necessarily Doctor Who as we know it or would want it. However experiments like this are the life-blood of Doctor Who, ever-changing and ever-evolving, and for that reason The Deadly Assassin deserves the classic status in which it is held.

(Original cover drawing by John Geary reproduced from The Target Book by David J. Howe, available from Telos Publishing).

Mary Tamm 1950 - 2012

I’ve just heard the terrible news that Mary Tamm has passed away after a long battle with cancer. She played the first Romana during the Key to Time season in 1978. Words cannot express what a loss this is. I will leave the eulogies to those better placed than me to comment.

http://www.sfx.co.uk/2012/07/26/doctor-who-assistant-mary-tamm-dies-aged-62/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-18995370

This, the latest in a seemingly endless run of companion deaths, has really hurt. I never saw it coming. Mary seemed such a vibrant and alive lady. Suffice it to say, I loved Mary’s performance in Doctor Who. I loved her wit and her charm which came through in her interviews. Another piece of my past has been lost today and I mourn her greatly. She will be sadly missed.

RIP Mary.

Masterpiece Theatre: Timelash

Masterpiece Theatre

Number 9: Timelash

Like The Space Pirates before it, Timelash is a story I had actually never seen before. In fact it was the only story transmitted during the eighties that I either hadn’t seen on its initial broadcast or caught up with later on video or DVD. I have been deliberately avoiding it, warded off by a huge amount of negative comments about the story.

To say that Timelash has a bad reputation is something of an understatement. We are talking about the story that finished second-to-bottom in the 2009 Doctor Who Magazine Mighty 200 Survey. Of all the Doctor Who stories ever broadcast, across close to fifty years of adventures, only The Twin Dilemma is statistically worse. It scores lower than K9 and Company, for goodness’ sake.

It’s a story about which nobody seems to have a good word. Director Pennant Roberts thought it was weak. Sixth Doctor Colin Baker once said about it, ‘I wonder how they thought of this crap?’ Nicola Bryant bemoans the fact that she seems to spend most of the story tied to a pole. Eric Saward has stated that it probably should have been rejected, although surely as part of his role as script editor he might have attempted a rewrite? Even writer Glen McCoy recently told DWM that there are a lot of things he should have done differently.

And yet...

It turns out that popular opinion is (slightly) wrong. It turns out that I shouldn’t have avoided it for so long. It turns out that I actually quite enjoyed Timelash. Maybe it was because my expectations were so low, but I certainly preferred it to The Two Doctors, Vengeance on Varos and The Mark of the Rani from the same season, none of which mercifully appear in the bottom fifty stories in the Mighty 200 survey.

It’s pretty obvious that Timelash was made with a handful of pennies found down the back of the Production Office sofa, but a lack of budget shouldn’t necessarily mean a bad story. There have been many other cash-strapped productions during Doctor Who’s long life. Some of them have been featured in this blog, but others have successful despite having less money. Doctor Who has been, and always will be, an ideas-led programme. Timelash’s budget issues mean that there are problems with the set design, but Karfel’s seemingly endless series of identical corridors are no worse than similar sets in other studio-bound tales. Certainly they are overlit, like so many sets before them, but for every scene in a featureless location, we have the atmospheric green ambience of the Borad’s lair or the lovely period detail of Herbert’s cottage to lift the production values to another level. We mustn’t forget that at least Timelash provides a reason for sterile corridors, as if aware of its failings before it was even filmed.

The biggest set sins are in the design of the titular Timelash itself – a glorified cupboard with a sparkly front – and in the vertical chasm that exists beyond it. This may well be the worst set ever shown in Doctor Who. Poor Colin Baker, a well-built man to put it mildly, inches his way along dangerously sagging polystyrene beams surrounded by tinsel, gingerly straddling each beam with a look of consternation on his face. The scenes inside the Timelash offer edge of the seat viewing; not because of the peril the Doctor faces, but rather because there is a very real sense that the set might break at any moment.

The story is not helped by uninspired direction from Pennant Roberts. He was welcome to criticize the script, but to then not inject any dynamism into his work smacks of laziness and a lack of care from the powers-that-be in the BBC. He allows Paul Darrow to get away with one of the most scenery-chewing guest turns in television history (at least we know that the dull sets of Karfel are edible – Darrow scoffed the lot) yet fails to draw out anything approaching a performance from Jeananne Crowley as Vena. Crowley’s still quite hypnotic though. It’s like she’s permanently stoned. She’s so far out of it that she just wanders across the set in the middle of action sequences. As the Doctor dangles precariously amongst the tinsel and tat, Vena dully states ‘He’s dangling on the edge of oblivion!’ as if she is pointing out that the kettle has boiled. Then she totters off vacantly, clearly in a search for more illegal Karfelan drugs that she can smoke, inject or insert. She’s breathtaking in her ineptitude.

As well as failing to marshal his actors, Roberts directs the story’s action sequences particularly poorly. He insists on filming everything as wide as possible, lending a theatrical air to proceedings. There’s no urgency to any of the scenes. It’s all so pedestrian. The fight scenes appear clunky and under-rehearsed, and there’s never any feeling that people are in actual jeopardy.

The Bandrils, the story’s imminent invading force were envisioned as men in costumes by McCoy, but again money stymied that idea and meant that the War of the Worlds allusion was lost. Instead we have a cobra puppet on a screen doing an impression of Professor Dumbledore. He’s quite cute really and much better than the rubbish Luke-tree in The Mark of the Rani. The only real problem with making the Bandrils puppets is that the ending had to be rewritten so that they are not seen in person, twitching away on Rod Hull’s arm like Emu's cobra cousin. This makes the last few minutes a dull plod totally free from peril. The story in effect finishes after half an hour of the second episode.

The biggest hurdle the story has to jump is in the script. Not because it is particularly badly written by McCoy, although there are one or two moments of very clunky exposition (including the mother of all ‘I’ll explain later’ moments) and the sudden nonsensical reappearance of the Borad at the end of the story. The faults of the script are more to do with the era in which it was being produced. There’s a typical Season 22 opening, where scenes on a planet about which we know nothing and care for even less are intercut with endless TARDIS scenes of the Doctor and Peri bickering. In this case it is a full 22½ minutes before the TARDIS even arrives on Karfel, making the delayed entrance of the Doctor in The Space Pirates pale in comparison. That’s an entire episode where the Doctor does not interact with the plot. This would reach a whole new nadir in the next story, Revelation of the Daleks, where the TARDIS team are marginalised for nearly the entire ninety minute duration. By this point, the Saward and Nathan-Turner dream team had lost all touch with what the public actually wanted, dressing the Doctor as a clown and treating him as a supporting character rather than the intelligent and dynamic hero we all know him to be.

As well as reducing the Doctor (and Peri as well – like the obnoxious Tegan before her, why is she even there? She clearly doesn’t even like the Doctor) the whole Doctor Who universe has been reduced. Everybody and their auntie are aware of the Time Lords by now, and the TARDIS’ materialisation on Karfel surprises nobody. They all know who he is already. There’s no power to the Doctor or to the Time Lords any more. There’s no myth to the series by this point. It’s all been frittered away in a series of rehashes and reheated offerings. By this point, John Nathan-Turner thought he was offering the fans what they wanted. This season alone saw return visits by the Cybermen, Lytton, The Master, the Second Doctor, Jamie, the Sontarans and the Daleks. There were virtually no new ideas. The well had been allowed to run dry. The point is that nostalgia is actually a good thing in some cases. After the initial frisson of seeing an enemy from the past shuffle onto the screen, there’s the realisation that they’ve got nothing new to offer, but are simply going through the same motions they did ten or even twenty years before. Therefore they lose that magic that only nostalgia can provide. That’s why Sutekh, the Zygons and Magnus Greel are so revered. They never came back for more. The general audience realised this faster than the producer, so that when the inevitable hiatus actually occurred, only the fans and John Nathan-Turner were surprised.

This obsessive need to link everything to the past means that Timelash finds itself somehow positioned as an unnecessary sequel. Not only that, it’s a sequel to a story we never saw in the first place. That’s a stupid idea in anyone’s book. For it then to make so many errors in referencing the past is utterly unacceptable. The Doctor is asked why he only has one companion with him on this visit, when on no occasion did Jon Pertwee ever travel in the TARDIS with more than a single other person. Equally Peri’s recognition of Jo Grant and her knowledge of Dalek technology just smack of continuity references for the sake of it, when there is no plausible reason why she would know about either. If you’re going to make a story into a sequel, at least be bothered to check the most basic of facts. I’ve stated this before, but it’s worth saying again. This period of Doctor Who treated its past with no regard whatsoever.

This was also a period where creative control seemed to be almost completely absent. The Borad’s sudden emergence after his apparent death at the end of the story is explained away as the first Borad being a clone. This clone was a decoy in case anyone tried to assassinate him, and was exactly the same thing that Davros would do in the very next story. The Borad also falls in love with Peri and wants to alter her appearance, like Sil did in Vengeance on Varos, three stories previous. This repetition of ideas is shoddy to say the least. It seems that Eric Saward was so focused on his own writing that he had no time for anyone else’s. Simply put, he wasn’t fulfilling the role of script editor and JN-T wasn’t supporting him in the slightest in terms of script selection and development. They should have walked away with Peter Davison. A new Doctor, a new start – the way it has always worked best.

However to place Timelash as the second-worst story ever broadcast is distinctly unfair and ignores many of the story’s virtues. I can think of at least ten adventures that are worse just off the top of my head. Unfortunately it’s a story that’s currently fashionable to hate, just as The Gunfighters was in the eighties before people actually realised that it wasn’t half-bad and was actually meant to be a comedy. It’s never going to be a classic, but there are a lot of moments that make it a lot of fun. It also provided a wholly unexpected revelation that has meant I have had to reconsider something I truly believed (see Reason 4 below).

Ten Reasons why Timelash is not an unpleasant journey

1.       The make-up on the Borad is one of the best classic Doctor Who ever managed. He’s kept off screen for a long time, in the tradition of many Doctor Who monsters, and his reveal is quite well-handled. Robert Ashby provides a good performance under the make-up, giving the Borad a sense of yearning loneliness which is quite similar to Sharaz Jek in The Caves of Androzani. His aging ray is also a good effect for the time.

2.       Paul Darrow gives one of the most arch and over-the-top performances ever showcased on Doctor Who. Therefore he is by some margin the most entertaining element of the story. He clearly took one look at the material and the set and decided that going overboard was the only logical approach. Famously he decided to play Tekker as Richard III as played by Laurence Olivier. What he actually ended up doing was playing Avon from Blake’s 7 with slightly longer hair. When his inevitable death comes halfway through episode two, the story is all the weaker from his absence.

3.       The sight of Vena ghosting through the TARDIS after she falls into the Timelash is subtly eerie, helped in part by Jeananne Crowley’s unblinkingly blank stare. It’s a pity this was her default setting. It’s also a pity that by this point in the eighties, every enemy and their aunt had the power to enter the once safe interior of the TARDIS, so Vena’s materialisation doesn’t quite have the power it deserved. That’s no fault of Glen McCoy.

4.       And so to my moment of epiphany. Throughout all my years of being a fan of Doctor Who, I’ve always believed Colin Baker to be the weakest of all the actors to play the Doctor. I find him too bombastic and prone to speechifying for my tastes. I think that his Doctor was too hard to identify with and his lack of charm was a major factor in the series being put on hiatus and why he was eventually sacked. I also think that I was wrong in my opinion of Colin. My thoughts on the Sixth Doctor and Colin Baker had merged together, which means I have done a massive disservice to Colin. The Sixth Doctor is a mess of a character, and I stick by my opinion that he is the poorest Doctor, but that is the fault of JN-T and Eric Saward in not developing a consistent personality or plotting his growth through Season 22. Colin, though, gives everything in his performance, not helped by some weak scripts and certainly not helped by his bosses. The man shines in Timelash, adding something to every scene he is in. You can’t take your eyes off him, and that’s not the effect of his ill-judged costume. He is the first true madman with a box in this story. You can see the mind working at a hundred mile an hour. You can see that he is the smartest man in the room. You can see the beginnings of Matt Smith’s incarnation. Colin was a victim of circumstance. He was the Doctor in the wrong era, asked to close the stable door after the horse had bolted. Watching Colin Baker in Timelash, I was reminded of something the writer Gareth Roberts once said: ‘The Doctor has never been miscast. If any Doctor has stumbled it was always the fault of the people behind the cameras.’ And he’s right, you know. Colin was a good choice for the Doctor, but he was never allowed to be the Time Lord he should have been. He was stifled by a series of poor creative decisions, starting with his costume. I seriously need to download some Big Finish audios to give him another chance.

Colin Baker, I apologise. I was wrong about you.

5.       Dean Hollingsworth gives his strange blue-faced android staccato movements and strange vocal inflections which go a long way towards convincing us that this is a robot rather than a person. He conveys a huge amount through his body language, but I particularly like the scene when the Borad gives the robot instructions to attack the rebels but to keep Peri alive. The previously impassive robot twitches its mouth into a little smile of understanding. It’s a really creepy moment from what is actually one of Doctor Who’s finest androids.

6.       Good old earnest Mykros, the latest in a long line of Doctor Who rebels, fighting for his rights and battling against a system he knows is corrupt. Eric Deacon adds a great deal to what is a slimly written and clichéd character. Mykros’ love for Vena is mystifying though – perhaps he supplies her with drugs and pimps her out to Bandril Ambassadors. He gets a slightly odd scene at the end of the story where he appears to have unilaterally declared himself the new Maylin leader. Perhaps Karfel isn’t freed from dictatorship after all.

7.       The use of H.G. Wells almost pays off. You can see Glen McCoy’s efforts to link elements of Timelash with Wells’ stories; War of the Worlds, The Time Machine and The Island of Dr Moreau are all referenced quite overtly, with The Invisible Man evoked in the Doctor’s otherwise pointless time-altering crystal. However, it seems to show a lack of regard for Wells’ pioneering fiction by implying that he was merely writing from experience rather than his imagination. That said, David Chandler is endearing and engaging as Herbert, and his interactions with the Doctor give Colin Baker a chance to show a different facet to his character. The two work so well together that it’s a shame that Herbert didn’t stay on as a companion. We never see him returned home and having a famous historical figure on board the TARDIS would have provided an interesting new dynamic that the series has never explored on TV.

8.       Unlike Janet Fielding as Tegan, Nicola Bryant’s Peri somehow manages to stay likeable amongst the constant arguments and whinging. Although this story is a retrograde step for Peri, who seems to spend the majority of both episodes tied up in some way, Bryant never allows her to become weak. Peri’s escape from a guard, when she thrusts an acid-squirting plant into his face, having already been told that it causes blindness, is pushing at the limit, and the effects of her actions are never explored. For even a caring and humane companion such as to resort to casual consequence-free violence sums up where Doctor Who was getting it so wrong in Season 22.

9.       The scenes set in 1885 are a cut above the rest of the story, both in terms of set and idea. The Ouija board spells out Vena before she arrives and Herbert attempts to ward off the Doctor with a crucifix. There’s a wit here that is missing from most of Timelash. It’s a shame no more of the story was set there, although it’s amusing to think that the victims of the Timelash were simply deposited in Scotland in the past. I can think of a good many worse punishments than that.

10.   The Sixth Doctor is a grouchy old man at heart. He’s quick to irritation and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. So when he is stuck in the TARDIS with Herbert and his incessant questioning, it’s no wonder his temper frays and finally snaps. What we get is Colin Baker finally allowed to be comedically and likeably grumpy with some magnificent facial expressions. There's a nice Frank Herbert joke snuck in there too.

It’s difficult to see why Timelash is so hated. Negative reviews tend to point to the run-around scenes in the corridors as being the very worst of Doctor Who and ammunition for comedy sketches about the programme. While there is an element of that, there are no more corridor scenes than any other story and little basis for Timelash to be singled out for criticism. It’s more to do with the era in which it was produced and the attitude towards the programme at the time. Timelash is a scapegoat for the failings of a production team that had lost its way. A story should never be vilified for external issues, so give Timelash another go – there’s so much more to this tale than its reputation allows.

Next Time: The Smugglers

Art Gallery: Revenge of the Cybermen

Art Gallery 6

I have a great deal of affection for Revenge of the Cybermen, possibly more than it actually deserves. It was the second BBC Video I bought, after Pyramids of Mars, so it was subjected to multiple viewings that inevitably turned it into something of an audience participation event as I learned the dialogue off by heart.

 Revenge of the Cybermen has the misfortune to follow Genesis of the Daleks and is unable to match the quality of that classic. But then how many stories actually could? Revenge is a good, solid tale with some great guest performances and a villain who, when realising he has been discovered, pulls out a light machine gun. There’s much to like, but on closer inspection, there’s the distinct lack of an iconic moment in the story. It takes place on the set of a previous story and in the dark dank tunnels of Wookey Hole. So when it came to the cover of the novelisation of Revenge of the Cybermen, Chris Achilleos was in a spot of bother. That’s why we get the rather curious cover he painted. It’s not one of his best, not by a long way.

The three images don’t seem to link in any cohesive manner. The Vogan appears to be aiming his gun at the Cyberman, but the perspective is all wrong. The Cyberman is much closer to the foreground so the Vogan’s aim is a tad off. There’s no shared eye-line for either of the characters. Then we have the Doctor’s head, apparently exploding off his body, possibly from spontaneous combustion caused by impossibly high blood alcohol levels. What the explosion is supposed to signify is hard to judge. After all, neither Nerva Beacon nor Voga are destroyed, and the only two things that explode in the story are the tiny Cybership and noble self-sacrificing Lester in Revenge’s finest moment. It is very unlikely that Achilleos would put an exploding suicide-bomber on the front cover of a children’s book, so I assume it is meant to be the anticipated explosion of Voga. Whatever his intention, the cover is weak and muddled, but he wouldn’t be alone in struggling to define Revenge of the Cybermen in a single image.

Alister Pearson didn’t fare any better when he painted the cover for the re-release. Much like Achilleos’ effort, it’s one of Pearson’s weakest compositions. Whilst Vorus (‘My Skystriker! My glory!’) is beautifully rendered in Pearson’s usual photo-realistic style, both he and the Cyberman in the main image appear to be staring at something just off-screen. The missing iconic image, one presumes. Again the images don’t seem to be linked in any way, but are more of a buffet of disparate elements that don’t necessarily go together. It’s indicative of the story’s issues.

The best cover actually comes from an American version of the novelisation, published by Pinnacle Books. It’s a gloriously stylized image, complete with a psychotic wild-eyed clown-Vogan and a Skystriker zooming in towards Voga, which appears to have its own moon, despite being the remains of a planet floating in space. It even has a rare quote from Harlan Ellison where he doesn’t threaten to sue somebody for stealing his ideas.

Pinnacle Books created at least ten Americanized imprints of Target novelisations, with ever more ludicrous covers. It’s a fight between the cross Zygon with the squashed face and the roaring Ogron ape-man for which is my favourite, although I am also fond of the Conan-type who apparently appears in an infinitely more interesting alternate reality version of Colony in Space/ The Doomsday Weapon and the screaming prostitute menaced by Fu Manchu and the Phantom of the Opera on the cover of The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Artist David Mann deserved a shot at an actual Target cover, because some of his visualisations are more gloriously insane than the actual televised stories. I’m definitely going to have to track these down on eBay.

Masterpiece Theatre: Nightmare of Eden

Masterpiece Theatre 8

Nightmare of Eden

Here’s my theory: if Nightmare of Eden had been made at any time other than during Graham Williams’ reign as producer, it would be one of Doctor Who’s most highly-regarded serials. Think about it for a moment. The theme of drug addiction and mistreatment of animals would have fitted in well in the Jon Pertwee era as another story with a strong moral and environmental message. During the golden age of Philip Hinchcliffe or during the pints-of-spurting-blood-red age of Eric Saward, Tryst and Dymond would have been hardened mercenaries in the style of Scorby from The Seeds of Doom or Stotz from The Caves of Androzani. Fisk would have been a grizzled soldier like Scott in Earthshock, and Tom Baker would have been denied his performance excesses. Likewise, a broadcast today, with Matt Smith, would allow the story to be tightened up and also give explicit reference to its drug theme, giving the strength of Nightmare’s concept the gravity it required.

Alas, Nightmare of Eden was broadcast in 1979, during the Seventeenth Season of Doctor Who, at a time when the budget didn’t stretch to more than a few battered Daleks and a jolly to Paris. It was a period when Tom Baker was out of control, knowing it all and refusing to listen, whilst Graham Williams and Douglas Adams were busy failing to understand that Doctor Who was a programme for families, not just for university undergraduates.

So Nightmare of Eden finds itself ranked 167th in Doctor Who Magazine’s Mighty 200 survey of 2009, a lowly position that is more to do with its visualisation than any fundamental flaw in the script. It ranks way behind Destiny of the Daleks from the same season, which I find difficult to reconcile, and nearly 160 places behind City of Death, which is not the classic it thinks it is.

Nightmare had a very troubled production, which does impact greatly on what appeared onscreen. Director Alan Bromly either quit or was fired midway through the filming, leaving Graham Williams to pick up the pieces and salvage yet another story. Poor old Graham seems to have been fated to have this happen to him over and over again – budget issues ruined Underworld and The Invasion of Time, whilst Shada was hit by a strike and eventually lost. The man just never caught an even break. However he hired Alan Bromly, who didn’t seem to be on the same wavelength as his cast and crew, with the whole production degenerating into a series of arguments, led by Dictator Tom Baker, about Bromly’s approach and his lack of understanding about what was required. Indeed, this is the story where Williams decided he had had enough as producer and resigned his post at the end of the season, taking Douglas Adams with him. When production on the story wrapped, the crew wore T-shirts reading ‘I’m relieved the Nightmare is over’, which has shades of the ‘You can’t scare me – I work for James Cameron’ T-shirts sported by crewmembers who have been on the receiving end of one of the Avatar and Aliens director’s legendary tantrums.

The lack of creative direction probably caused the effects work to be remarkably shoddy; particularly considering City of Death’s impressive spider-ship was only two stories before Nightmare of Eden. Apparently Nightmare was the first story in which the model effects were recorded on video rather than film. Graham Williams was impressed by them, mainly because they were cheaper to film. I think he was alone in that opinion, as in the future model shots would be recorded on film again. It’s not just the effects that needed better direction; on occasion there are some real howlers on show, such as the Mandrel that is clearly breathing when the Doctor pronounces it dead, or the moment when the Doctor is mauled by a Mandrel as Stott stands about five feet away looking in the opposite direction for the duration of the attack.

However the acting is mostly well up to scratch. David Daker in particular impresses in a multi-faceted role as Captain Rigg. It’s a real pity Rigg dies towards the end of episode three, although he gets a good menacing scene with Lalla Ward’s Romana, as he doesn’t get an opportunity to redeem himself which his character deserves. Rigg dies a junkie, begging for drugs and throwing money at Romana. It’s a bleak and adult moment.

There have been many complaints about Lewis Fiander’s  choice to employ a Germanic accent as Tryst, but it is no less ludicrous than Denis Lill’s Austro-Dutch Fendleman in Image of the Fendahl, which isn’t vilified half as much. Personally I quite like Fiander’s attempt to bring something different to the part, and, accent aside, he doesn’t take his performance over the top unlike some guest stars. In fact, at times his portrayal seems positively restrained compared with Tom Baker’s. Baker can’t resist adlibbing and, despite some of his unscripted contributions being pretty good, there are moments when he is a long way from the gravitas and magnetism he possessed at the start of his tenure. It’s clearly a year too far for him already, and he is struggling to find new facets of his character. He’s proof, if any were needed, that three or four years is long enough for any actor playing the Doctor.

The weakest character is Della, played by Jennifer Lonsdale, who is so stilted and unresponsive that when she is shot in the face in episode four, clutches at her stomach instead. Della survives somehow – clearly it would take more than a laser blast to destroy something that wooden. She never really shows any sort of feelings for Stott, with whom she is supposed to be in love, particularly when she discovers he is still alive against all hope. Nor does she project any sense of danger when she is being threatened. However, that could be a fault of the direction issues more than Lonsdale’s inability.

But the biggest issue Nightmare of Eden has is with its monsters. I’ve already discussed them here, but the Mandrels are poor, especially when shown in harsh studio lighting – a condition known in Doctor Who parlance as Myrka-itis. Yet when they are shown in their natural habitat on Eden, with its spooky ambient lighting, you get glimpses of what the designer was intending. Plus, if nothing else, they get one of the best back-stories of any Doctor Who monster ever, and you can’t help feeling sorry for them by the end of the four episodes.

Any weaknesses in the story cannot be blamed on Bob Baker though, who in Nightmare of Eden submitted his best script for the series. This is his only Doctor Who script without Dave Martin, and there is a distinct lack of catchphrase in the story, leading to the realisation that Dave was there for the snappy one-liners rather than the plot. There’s no ‘Eldrad must live!’ or ‘Contact has been made!’ or (thank heavens) ‘The Quest is the Quest’. The drug theme, although watered-down for a teatime audience, is a risky topic for Doctor Who. Goodness knows how many parents had to explain to their children what was making Rigg behave so out-of-character after his drink is spiked. But that’s a good thing; it meant that 1979 Doctor Who was still relevant and could mine good stories from current affairs. There are numerous good examples of dialogue exchanges and the twist is well-handled, as is the eventual reveal of the identity of the drug-traffickers.

There’s a lot to admire in Nightmare of Eden. It manages to achieve a timeless quality despite the paucity of the budget, mostly due to the continued relevance of drugs in modern society. Doctor Who is nothing if not forward-thinking, and Nightmare is certainly that.

Ten Reasons why Nightmare of Eden is addictive viewing

1.       David Daker as Captain Rigg brings a sense of realism to his character’s descent from decent working man to shivering drug addict, albeit in a family-friendly way. His initial interactions with the Doctor and Romana are great, and he is one of the few characters I can recall who actually bother to do a background check on the Doctor’s credentials. This contrasts with his Vraxoin-addled attempts to procure more of the drug from Romana, charting a path that leads from a simple persuasion to outright begging to the very real threat of violence. You believe in Rigg throughout all those phases. His presumed death, shot almost casually by Fisk, is given an added tragedy by the fact that nobody acknowledges it.

2.       The script for Nightmare of Eden is strong. It’s an oft-forgotten fact that amid the general tattiness and silliness of late seventies Doctor Who, many of the scripts were among the best the classic series ever produced. Nightmare’s script stands alongside City of Death and The Androids of Tara as a literate, intelligent piece of writing that doesn’t talk down to its audience. There are so many gems of dialogue that all ten reasons listed here could be a quote, but I’ll settle for Dymond’s weary response to Fisk’s banal question. When looking for the Doctor and Romana, Fisk and his fellow customs officer Costa Coffee burst into Tryst’s quarters. Unable to see him and highly perplexed, Fisk indicates the only locked door in the room. ‘What’s that?’ he asks, not choosing his words carefully enough in the heat of the chase. ‘It’s a door,’ Dymond quickly retorts, showing a humour that his serious demeanour has so far hidden.

3.       Rigg: ‘And I’d like to know just who you are.’ The Doctor: ‘I told you. I’m from Galactic.’ Rigg: ‘Galactic went out of business twenty years ago.’ The Doctor: ‘I wondered why I haven’t been paid.’ Rigg: ‘That’s not good enough.’ The Doctor: ‘That’s what I thought.’ Both Daker and Baker are obviously relishing this exchange and it sings off the screen.

4.       It had been a long time since Doctor Who had presented a social issue in such a stark and explicit manner – not since Barry Letts had called the shots as producer in the Pertwee era. In fact, Nightmare can stand proud alongside Vincent and the Doctor for addressing a mental disorder unflinchingly. One imagines that if Nightmare of Eden were remade today, it would also require a helpline number after broadcast like Richard Curtis’ Van Gogh tale had.

5.       The set for the planet Eden, although on a smaller scale, rivals the celebrated Zeta Minor jungle set in Planet of Evil. The lighting is unsettling, and the use of sounds conveys an alien world superbly. Even the Mandrels look quite good when they are in their natural environment.

6.       Another cracking dialogue exchange. The Doctor and Romana have escaped pursuit by jumping through the CET window onto the planet Eden. Romana asks the Doctor what they should do.  ‘Let’s go east,’ the Doctor says, indicating a forward direction. He makes to move off, but Romana asks, ‘How do you know which way is east?’ The Doctor pulls up abruptly, caught off-guard by the question. ‘Well I don’t. We’ll go that way and we’ll call it east,’ he tells her. ‘Why not call it north?’ Romana asks, sensing a small victory. The Doctor shrugs amiably. ‘Alright, we’ll call it north,’ he concedes. In one exchange you get the older brother and slightly-irritating superior little sister act the Doctor and Romana had, until real-life love and hate spoiled this relationship.

7.       The idea behind the Mandrels is one of the best classic Doctor Who ever came up with. From the mystery of what they are to the realisation of what they become after death, never has a monster been given such pathos and empathy. Bob Baker takes the clichéd idea of marauding monsters and twists it completely around so that you actually feel sorry for them. A lot of writers could learn much from that notion.

8.       Geoffrey Hinsliff’s customs officer Fisk is a small-minded man in charge of his own little world. When the bigger picture comes crashing in and Fisk’s little empire is found lacking, he reacts in the only way he can; he nitpicks and fusses over the men under his command, making a series of decisions that become more and more divorced from the reality of the situation. Hinsliff portrays Fisk’s odiousness and narrow-mindedness very well indeed, and manages to walk the fine line between character and pastiche quite expertly.

9.       Hidden away in the midst of all the Baker-quips is this simple and very powerful exchange between the Doctor and the recently-arrested Tryst, who attempts to justify himself to the Time Lord. It’s proof that, when properly controlled, Baker was still capable of finding new aspects of his Doctor even six years into his tenure.

10.   I don’t care what anybody else thinks; I like Lewis Fiander as Tryst. I like the way his pompous proclamations are continually shot down by the Doctor ad Romana. I like his genuine befuddlement at their clearly superior science. I like the way he can justify his crimes in the name of conservation. And his accent never once grates on me; it makes him memorable. That’s why Doctor Who fans still know who he is. He’s managed to cement his place in Doctor Who’s overcrowded firmament. It’s better to be remembered badly than not be remembered at all.

Nightmare of Eden is undeserving of its meagre reputation. The story gets so many things right that the cracks in production values are pretty well hidden. It’s definitely ripe for reappraisal, and can rightly be regarded as one of the best stories in the Graham Williams era.

Next Time: Timelash

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Harrison Ford Syndrome

Harrison Ford Syndrome

Number 1: Paul Jerricho

Star Wars creator George Lucas has long been scorned for having a cloth ear when it comes to dialogue. For all their brilliance, each of the six Star Wars films occasionally lumbers its actors with a line so stilted and difficult to say that it detracts from their performance. After reading the script for what would eventually become A New Hope, Harrison Ford famously said to his director, ‘George, you can type this shit, but you sure as hell can’t say it.’

Doctor Who actors are sometimes lumbered with such dialogue, from the lines of text that bear little resemblance to the English language, particularly in the Colin Baker era, to sentences have never been spoken in history and never will be again, to expository dialogue that only exists to move the plot along because the writer has dug themselves a hole that needs filling. This feature exists to honour those actors, who jumped right in and said the line anyway.

‘No, NOT the mind probe!’

‘NO, not the MIND probe!’

‘Noooo, not the MIND PROBE!’

Poor Paul Jerricho, reprising his role as the Castellan in The Five Doctors, must have felt his heart sink when he turned the page of his script and saw this zinger. He must have lost sleep wondering exactly how to say it. He must have tried all the variations above. It’s one of the most famous bad lines in Doctor Who history, as a quick search on the interweb will prove, yet Jerricho chooses to deliver it seriously and actually manages to convey something of the Castellan’s fear and therefore the agony the mind probe must generate. He chooses to emphasise the last word, but only slightly, and I cannot think of a better way to say such a line. The man deserves an award for that delivery alone.

‘No, not the mind PROBE!’

Still, look on the bright side, Castellan. At least mad old Lord President Borusa didn’t authorise the use of the anal probe as well...

Art Gallery: Snakedance

Art Gallery 5

The very first two Target Doctor Who novelisations I purchased were Kinda and Snakedance, bought from a little shop (‘You’ve got a little shop. I like a little shop!’) in Pilgrim Hospital in Boston, when I was about twelve and my brother had been admitted as a patient, suffering from pneumonia. There were about seven or eight books to choose from, but I only had enough money for two. I vaguely remembered Kinda from its broadcast a couple of years earlier and the photo cover helped me place the story. Snakedance, though, had been broadcast on days when I was out at various clubs and tennis tournaments. I had missed it in its entirety and actually chose to buy the book because of its front cover. It was a complete fluke that it happened to be the sequel to Kinda.

I suppose it’s another example of a lurid cover pulling me in, just like Terror of the Autons. A giant snake, mouth unhinged and gaping, ready to swallow a planet that looks remarkably like Earth, and depicted against a lurid purple background that just feels wrong.

The cover, by Andrew Skilleter, captures the Mara’s desire to devour worlds through its evil and rationalises it as actual world-swallowing. It takes the premise and boils it down into a simple pulp image designed to hook in its target audience. That it grabs hold of script-writer Christopher Bailey’s subtle themes and mature explorations and bludgeons them to death with a giant rubber snake is neither here nor there. The cover does the job for which it is intended, and leaps out from the bookshelf, as it did for the twelve-year-old me back in that hospital shop.

At the time, novelisations of Peter Davison stories were being issued with predominantly photographic covers that didn’t really sell the concepts of the stories they were representing. Nor were the images particularly heroic shots of the Doctor, and in the case of Arc of Infinity actually gives away an important plot point. The proliferation of photographic covers was initially down to Peter Davison’s agent rejecting a piece of art from David McAllister because it was not a good likeness of Davison. In fairness, I can see why it was rejected. It’s not the greatest painting in the world and is clearly taken from a publicity still that could do the job far more effectively. Plus Peter Davison looks as if he has about five chins, as if he has turned into Colin Baker three years too early.

Thereafter, Target adopted the use of photographs for Fifth Doctor tales, feeling it gave the range a more modern look, until they realised they had to pay the actors on the covers for the use of their photograph, which was prohibitively more expensive than artwork.

So the remainder of the Davison stories were given covers featuring their principal monsters or villains, and in actual fact the Fifth Doctor, Tegan, Turlough, Peri and Adric did not feature on any cover in painted form. Kamelion adorned the cover of The King’s Demons, meaning that he was the only TARDIS traveller between 1982 and 1987 to adorn the cover of a Doctor Who novelisation (Nyssa managed to make the cover of The Keeper of Traken, but that was of course Tom Baker’s penultimate story). Before anyone points it out, I know that technically Peter Davison appeared on the cover of The Five Doctors, but this was only in a tiny silhouette image and therefore not a true likeness of his face.

Snakedance was the first of those Davison era stories to feature an art cover, despite the Fifth Doctor lurking in the Doctor Who logo, so it had immediate power as being different from those stories that preceded it. It was quite probably the best cover on a Target novelisation since Terror of the Autons, and heralded in a new era of higher quality artwork, spearheaded by Andrew Skilleter and Alister Pearson, that would see the range through the remainder of the eighties until its eventual demise. No wonder I bought it then.

Two days later, when my brother was ready to come out, my Dad gave me five pounds to go to the shop again as a reward for behaving myself during the long hours in the hospital. This time I bought Earthshock and Four to Doomsday. It was the pivotal moment I moved from being a watcher of Doctor Who to a fan.

(Image of The Visitation reproduced from The Target Book  by David J Howe (Telos Publishing) Find it on Amazon if you've never read it!).