Although I try not to pass judgement on Doctor Who stories on this blog, I have to make an exception on this occasion. Because I bloody love The Happiness Patrol.

I love its wit and its brash design which masks so many darker themes. I love how it reveals hidden depths in its cast of comic book characters. I love its masterful musical score and its zingy dialogue. And I love its message, that to stop people expressing their true selves is as wrong as a totalitarian regime or a TARDIS painted pink. It’s glorious. I wouldn’t change a thing about it.

Well, maybe there are just a couple of things I’d like to tweak.

I’d probably start with the scenery. Don’t get me wrong, I love the faded theatrical jollity of the sets, which give the place a strange, abandoned funfair feel… but oh, it would be great to have this shot on film, at night, in the backstreets of a real city. The trappings of enforced cheerfulness could remain, but wouldn’t that lift the whole affair?

That would mean we could get rid of those awful motorised buggy things, particularly the one which the Doctor (a crafty performance from Sylvester McCoy) and Ace (the ever vibrant Sophie Aldred) use to escape from the waiting zone in Part One. Noisy, awkward and above all, ludicrously slow. Yes, they can go.

A quick tidy up of the plot wouldn’t hurt either. Ace gets captured and escapes a lot in three episodes – twice in Part One alone. Ideally, you’d use her to drive a subplot with the protesting worker drones, so that then we could see them taking over the sugar factories (the act which truly spells the end for this confected regime) instead of hearing this reported to us in voice-over.

Also, I’d clarify the difference between the late show at the Forum and the Happiness Patrol auditions. These seem to be the same thing and a fate worse than death for whomever goes through it. Ideally, we’d see someone attempt this terrifying ordeal, so we know what it is. As it is, it’s just so much word peril (a phrase I’ve deliberately nicked from Flight Through Entirety, as an excuse to link to their episode on this story, which is particularly brilliant).

There’s also a need to put back all those deleted scenes and extend the truncated ones. Fantastic though it is, this story does suffer from some particularly choppy editing. As a result, things happen very abruptly. Susan Q (Lesley Dunlop) for instance, goes from Ace’s jailor to her confidante and bestie in the blink of an eye. We lose a crucial bit where the Kandy Man (David John Pope) force feeds Earl Sigma (Richard D. Sharp, born to play a musician as he has a musical note in his name) his deadly sweets, and so the result – a blissfully catatonic Earl – appears without explanation during Part Two.

While we’re talking of him… the Kandy Man. Many commentators have suggested they would have preferred him in his original conception as a pasty faced, humanoid clinician type. You’d have got Peter Miles in to play him. Personally, I rather like the walking hodgepodge of lollies he became (particularly the spinning spiral eyes), but perhaps a leaner, more sinister concoction would have the air of a Tim Burton creation, truly the stuff of nightmares. It would help if we could turn down the lights in the Kandy Kitchen – like the gloom of the rest of the planet – and make it altogether more suspenseful.

We can also lose that stagey bit where the Doctor sticks the Kandy Man to the floor using lemonade. While we’re at it, let’s lose that second stagey bit where the Doctor sticks the Kandy Man to the floor using lemonade. It doesn’t make a lick of sense either time. And in other kitcheny matters, we can do with fixing up that bit where the oven unexpectedly shoots out a jet of flame because the Doctor’s puts a hot knife in front of it. And in fact, it would be better if the hot knife didn’t look like a wooden prop with pink gloop on one end.

I think we can make some changes to Fifi too. She’s an ingeniously designed puppet creation, but the shots of her in the pipes bring about some confusingly different suggestions of scale. Plus, even if Fifi is meant to have some piranha-like deadliness about her, she never looks terribly formidable. So let’s give her some transformational abilities. She can be the adored lap dog of Helen A (Sheila Hancock) one minute, but when unleashed into the pipes to track down our heroes, imagine if she morphed into an enormous, slavering hell hound.

While we’re down the pipes, we had better do something about those Pipe People. They’re a nice element to include; the remnants of the indigenous population, stunted and oppressed. But their design needs to be much more appealing. They should be Ewoks, not stunted little gargoyles. And naturally, we’d rerecord their dialogue because they are, frankly, unintelligible.

Nearly done. That brilliant climactic scene… where the Doctor finally makes Helen A confront the folly of trying to eliminate sadness from your life, just before she collapses in grief over the corpse of her pet. With two beautifully measured performances, that haunting music and director Chris Clough’s sweeping crane shot at the end, it’s the perfect way to end the story. So let’s end it there, and not with the charming but pointless wrap-up scene.

And I’d change its title back to The Crooked Smile.

But apart from all those things, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Well, what’s the point of a good Doctor Who story if you can’t change it?

ADVENTURES IN SUBTITLING: whoever wrote the DVD subtitles had their work cut out for them with the Pipe People. At one point, where Ace escapes down the drain pipe with one of them,  they just give up and keep guessing “foot pit” until the sequence ends. What is a foot pit, I wonder?

LINK TO Extremis: both feature Popes!

NEXT TIME… Randomwhoness’s 250th post.