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Storytelling, sins and Terminus (1983)

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Forgive me Terminus fans (yes, both of you, haha)  but I’m not quite finished with City of Death. On that DVD’s “making of” featurette, a number of Who luminati line up to talk about how great the story is, but when it comes to Douglas Adams’ stint as script editor, their reviews are decidedly mixed. The consensus seems to be that he was a prolific generator of good ideas, but didn’t understand story structure. That anyone can say this with a straight face on a documentary about City of Death is slightly bewildering. Apart from a few languid breaks for sections of travelogue footage around Paris, that story is one of the most tightly plotted the show ever produced.

And while we’re about it, think about the rest of the stories in Season 17. Despite any of their other pros or cons, they are all well structured stories, well told (save for, perhaps, The Creature from the Pit, with its odd narrative dogleg in Part Four). Sure, these were written by some of Doctor Who‘s old hands, but they’re shaped and formed by Adams. If he really is shaky on story structure, I see little evidence of it in his year as script editor.

Compare it, though, to Terminus, and there’s a story whose storytelling is all over the shop (despite its merits, of which, contrary to popular opinion, I think there are several). And because we haven’t done a listicle in while, let’s list the 7 deadly storytelling sins in Terminus.

  1. Too many characters. Most obviously illustrated by the way that companions Tegan (Janet Fielding) and Turlough (Mark Strickson) are relegated to clamber through miles of underfloor ducting for the whole story. What makes this even more annoying is that there are two surplus characters: glam rock space pirates Kari (Liza Goddard) and Olvir (Dominic Guard). Their contribution to the plot is minimal and there’s no reason their places couldn’t have been taken by Tegan and Turlough. Then we’d have had a story which involves all the regulars substantially. And in Turlough’s case, this would have kept him closer to the Doctor. Given that his character’s whole raison detre is to kill the Doctor, it might have helped to have actually been within chucking distance if him.

2. There’s no villain. The story tries to cast our suspicion on the Vanir, a group of disheveled men who act as porters for the cargo of Lazars destined for treatment on board Terminus. But as it eventually pans out, the Vanir are simply drug addicted slaves. The real bad guys are here at the Company, the Vanir’s employers and Terminus’s operators. They are the ones who process the Lazars without care or satisfactory cure, (presumably for profit) and they are the ones who keep the Vanir enslaved through the supply of glow sticks of their drug of choice, Hydromel. Problem is, we never see anyone from the Company, so we have no-one to epitomise the threat they represent. Think, for example, of the Tom Baker story The Sun Makers, where the odious Collector represented all that was corrupt in that enslaved society and gave us a villain to hate. There’s no such figure in Terminus, only a half-hearted attempt to build up the character of Vanir leader Eirak (Martin Potter) into a ruthless bully, but in reality he’s just as big a victim as everyone else on this ship.

3. The problem Nyssa wants to solve isn’t shown. Nyssa (Sarah Sutton) contracts Lazars’ Disease which makes her pale and weak and too hot to wear anything but her underwear. She’s manhandled into the big furry paws of the Garm (RJ Bell) whom we’re led to believe will torture her. As it turns out, the Garm actually administers the treatment which cures Nyssa, but she’s not grateful. The treatment, she says, is haphazard. Some live and some die, but for those who live the treatment might lead to unforeseen secondary illnesses. The process needs refining, she says. But we’re told all this, never shown it, so it’s hard to visualise what the problem actually is. In fact, the only thing we do see, is Nyssa being cured, which seems to suggest there’s no real problem here.

4. The big bang plot is unconnected to the rest of the story. Throughout the story, the Doctor (Peter Davison) is intrigued about Terminus’s position at the exact centre of the Universe. This doesn’t seem to worry anyone else, but later he deduces (somehow) that the explosion of Terminus’s engines millennia ago caused the Big Bang, and a second impending explosion may cause its destruction. Cue Part Three cliffhanger! Then the doggy Garm comes and flicks a big red switch and it’s all fixed again. Then it’s back to the main plot about the Lazars, which is completely untouched by all this flim flam. (For other, more relevant, instances of destructive, history altering events, see The Visitation, Earthshock and indeed City of Death. That can be our LINK).

5. It’s unnecessarily complicated. The sabotaged TARDIS locks on to a Lazar carrying ship. The ship is then boarded by the space raiders from funky town. The raiders’ ship then scarpers. Then the Lazar ship lands on Terminus. What ever happened to just landing the TARDIS in the place where the story’s happening? (One of the problems here, is that the set designs for the Lazar ship and for Terminus are drably similar, so there’s no sense that these are different places. Even the production team was confused. In the next story, Enlightenment, Turlough says, “I explained what happened on Terminus!” but in fact, he never boarded Terminus. To coin a phrase, “all these corridors look the same to me.”)

6. Its climax is hugely unexciting. Because there’s no real threat or villain to overcome, everyone just agrees to Nyssa’s plan to synthezise some Hydromel (in a home made meth lab, I presume) and start a hospital. Eirak is outraged a bit, but that’s all the resistance it meets. It’s a quiet, drama-less revolution.

7. It’s too long, but somehow still runs out of time. It’s quite a feat, but this story maintains a gentle languid, pace during Parts Two and Three, with much corridor wandering and aimless chatter. But suddenly, half way through Part Four, it seems to run out of time. The Vanir, including the previously belligerent and murderous Valgard (Andrew Burt) are swiftly won over. There’s no time to explain how Kari and Olvir will get back home. A quick goodbye to Nyssa and suddenly were back to the TARDIS for a closing snarl from the Black Guardian (Valentine Dyall, see problem 1). In short, its pace is all over the place.

Now cast your mind back to City of Death. The right amount of characters, a clear and present threat, no unnecessary subplots, a strong climax… you get the idea. It’s just a better told story than Terminus.

In fact all of season 17’s stories are better told than Terminus. It’s just one comparative example – there are many other stories both better and worse – but when we look at story telling which is genuinely a mess, we can see that Adams wasn’t half bad at his job.

NEXT TIME: Build high for happiness. We move into Paradise Towers.

Australia, ancestry and Four to Doomsday (1982)

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ADVENTURES IN SUBTITLING (INFO-TEXT EDITION): “New South Wales is just outside Sydney, in Australia”

I love that little snafu on the Four To Doomsday DVD info text with its shaky grasp of Australian geography (for the record, international readers, New South Wales is not ‘just outside Sydney’. Sydney is the capital of the state of New South Wales, one of six states and two territories which make up the Commonwealth of Australia). And it’s apt that it’s adhered indelibly to Four To Doomsday, a story which demonstrates another strange idea about Australia.

Yes, I’m talking about the bit where Tegan (Janet Fielding) reveals that she can speak an ancient Aboriginal language (one of those unusual talents sometimes displayed by companions). I’ll get to that, but let’s go back a bit to who Tegan is, and why she’s in our favourite show in the first place.

John Nathan-Turner, who took over as producer show about a year before Four To Doomsday was made, created Tegan and specified that she should be Australian. This was not a random choice. JN-T was the first producer to consider how Doctor Who could be an international show; it was he, in his role as Production Unit Manager, who suggested and facilitated the show’s first international location shoot for City of Death.

JN-T must surely have had Australia in mind as the next potential Doctor Who location shoot. In 1979, Tom Baker had undertaken a promotional tour of Australia (oh so many awkward TV interviews. The Molly Meldrum one is fun, but the killer one is with John Singleton of all people), and he’d done TV commercials here for Keep Australia Beautiful and Prime Computers. Peter Davison has joked that Tegan was created as an air hostess in order to get cheap flights from Qantas. If true, it wouldn’t have been the wackiest plan JN-T ever embarked upon. In fact, I seem to remember a Sydney Morning Herald interview, which kicked off with Nathan-Turner saying, “I have a vision of the TARDIS landing on top of the Sydney Opera House”. It’s the kind of headline grabbing thing he might have said, but surely there was a grain of truth in it.

So Australia was on Doctor Who’s radar in 1981. And the expression of it was strident sidekick, Tegan Jovanka.

*****

We all know how that name got chosen. JN-T was deciding between two names for his new companion: Tegan or Jovanka. Script Editor Christopher H Bidmead read it as one name, and so it became. Both are uncommon, but not unheard of names. I’ve met a few Tegan/Teagans around the joint and I’ve met a couple of Jovankas.

Tegan’s surname marks her as an exotic outsider among Doctor Who companions, who are generally speaking a lot of Smiths, Jones, Wrights, Grants and Browns. But here’s the thing: Jovanka’s not a surname. It’s a first name of Serbian origin. JN-T got the name from then Yugoslav first lady Jovanka Broz. So why is Tegan using it as a surname?

Which leads us to the question, just who is Tegan?

When we meet her, she’s in her early twenties and living in London. So far, so much the lived experience of many young Australians. She’s on the first day of her job as an air hostess (cabin crew, we call them these days), so we can perhaps assume she’s been living in England for a while since moving from Australia.

Whereabouts in Australia? Well, she talks occasionally of Brisbane, and certainly she has the brash, straight talking approach of a Queenslander (Queensland being just outside Brisbane, in Australia, y’know). In Castrovalva, she says that if the Doctor wanted to go somewhere cut off from the rest of the Universe, Brisbane would be the go. (It’s a nice joke, but Australians might have chuckled a bit more if she’d nominated Adelaide.)

She refers to her father’s farm, which her Aunt Vanessa says is ‘hardly the outback’. I wonder where this not-quite-the-outback-farm within cooee of Brisbane was. Toowoomba? Not far out enough maybe. Roma?

Either way, it’s the only mention of Tegan’s father. Who was he? What did he farm? Was he Serbian by birth, or was his wife, or both? Or neither? There is certainly a long history of Yugoslavs settling in Australia, particularly post World War Two. But they mainly settled in Sydney and Melbourne.

Here’s my theory. A little bit of ‘head canon’, as the Moff calls it.

Tegan’s grandfather (Andrew Verney) comes to Australia from England and marries a woman called Jovanka, a Yugoslav by birth. They have at least two children, Tegan’s Dad and her Aunty Vanessa. Tegan’s Dad buys a farm in Queensland. Somewhere along the line, Jovanka dies and Verney and Vanessa move to England.

That’s the Serbian/Australian/English heritage, but how can Tegan speak an Aboriginal language? It’s highly unlikely that a white Australian growing up in 60s and 70s Australia would learn one. So perhaps the answer is that Tegan is part Aboriginal herself, and her Dad married an Aboriginal woman.

So under this scenario, Tegan is born and given the middle name Jovanka, after her grandmother. She grows up on the farm and the Aboriginal side of her family teaches her some language. When she leaves school, she moves to Brisbane for a couple of years, before moving to London.

And at some stage, she decides to give up her surname and use Jovanka as her surname.

And on Monarch’s spaceship, she speaks confidently with Aboriginal android Kurkutji (Illarrio Bisi Pedro). Even though he hasn’t been on Earth for 35,000 years.

Though I have no idea why she says ‘rabbits’ as an expletive. I’ve never heard anyone – Australian or otherwise – say that.

*****

As for JN-T, he never got to film a story in Australia. Qantas never gave him any cash, although the ABC did, to help him make The Five Doctors.  Was his creation of an American companion to follow Tegan a second attempt to broker international support? Probably

At any rate Tegan’s inclusion in the show was a big acknowledgement that Doctor Who had an international audience. Maybe even that outside the UK, Australia was the show’s biggest market. Sure, it didn’t get many of the details right, but that’s not really the point. Tegan Jovanka, the girl with the loud voice, the oblique ancestry, the mystifying surname and the knack for long dead Indigenous languages can actually be seen as Doctor Who’s first move from being a British show to an international show.

LINK TO The Androids of Tara: more androids.

NEXT TIME: Yo ho ho! It’s The Curse of the Black Spot, ya scurvy rabbits… um, dogs.

Inside, outside and Castrovalva (1982)

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castrovalva

Act 1: Part One and half of Part Two

Perhaps the oddest way to start a new Doctor’s era is with a re-tread of Inside the Spaceship. In that curious little adventure from Doctor Who’s dawn, the Doctor and his three companions are trapped in the Ship and have to deduce that the rickety old thing is careering towards the creation of a sun. In the first act of Castrovalva, much the same thing happens, and in both, the theme is of strangers getting to know and respect each other through adversity.

The Doctor (Peter Davison) is suffering from the post-regenerative tremors and Adric (Matthew Waterhouse) has been kidnapped by the Master and replaced with a mathematical model of himself (this is presumably what CGI is going to lead to. Somewhere in his TARDIS the Master must have the future equivalent of Andy Serkis in his green body sock trying to mimic Adric’s body language. “Put your hand in your pocket now, walk stumblingly forward now”. Hopefully he wouldn’t have had to mimic the young lad during his famously priapic moment suffered whilst caught in the Master’s hadron web. Yup. Totes awks, boy wonder.)

With the blokes out of action, our heroes of this segment are bold and brash Tegan (Janet Fielding) and prim and proper Nyssa (Sarah Sutton). These two become mainstays of the Davison era, but in this story’s terms, they have only just met, sharing precious few scenes together in the previous story, Logopolis. So it’s an interesting decision to put these two women – strangers to themselves and to us – at the heart of the story, and put the fate of the TARDIS and the Doctor in their hands.

Luckily, Tegan and Nyssa make for a surprisingly interesting paring. They are certainly smart, proactive characters: it’s they who steal the ambulance in Part One to rescue the Doctor, they who work out that the TARDIS is in the middle of a death plunge and they who eventually have to jettison 25% of the Ship to escape oncoming disaster. It’s refreshing for Doctor Who to so prominently place two female characters and for them to take charge while the Doctor plays a diminished role.

I love this first segment of Castrovalva and a lot of it is down to Sutton and Fielding selling the dangerous situation they’re in. Which is no small feat considering all they’ve got to help them is some ‘it’s too hot’ acting, a few TARDIS lurches and some overlaid smoke. The new Doctor wandering around the TARDIS interior and impersonating his former selves is entertaining too, but it’s the idea that the two newcomers are in charge while everything goes to hell with roundels which maintains the tension. Paddy Kingsland’s music and Fiona Cumming’s direction help to sell it as well. If only they have turned down the lights a bit we would have got a real sense of our safe, familiar spaceship truly being on the edge of destruction.

Act 2: The rest of Part Two and a bit of Part Three

Castrovalva is continually about getting lost and finding a way out. In the first act, the Doctor and his companions lose themselves in the labyrinth of TARDIS interior, the second time in as many stories for Tegan. In the third, they’re befuddled by the kaleidoscopic dimensions of Castrovalva. The second act is set in the lush, airy outdoors of the planet, but even here our heroes struggle, with their destination seemingly moving about mid journey. You can’t trust any of this story’s settings to stay stable or make sense.

This second act is the most sedate of the three, a kind of mid-story breather. It consists of an increasingly strenuous stroll through the woods for Nyssa and Tegan, while they carry the Doctor in a faux coffin. Writer Christopher H Bidmead seeks to liven things up with stumbles into creeks and misdirection about a hunting party who turn out to be gentlemen, but there’s no hiding that this is the picturesque but otherwise dull shuttle between two more interesting stops. I mean, at least have our TARDIS crew pursued by a Castrovalvan wood beast or something.

Act 3: Most of Part Three and Part Four

Once we actually get to Castrovalva, the story turns into something unique. A gentle puzzle of a story, set in a quiet, refined castle/city filled with librarians, pharmacists and washerwomen (gender stereotypes are hard to shift, clearly). Presumably there’s a milliner around somewhere too because nearly everyone wears elaborate hats. In addition, all the Castrovalvans speak in a lyrical, arcane style which means there’s a sense of poetry being interrupted whenever the regulars have some dialogue. So there’s must be a dialogue coach about the place too.

It’s here that the Doctor realizes the Master (Anthony Ainley, heh heh heh) has maneuvered him into a trap, and that trap is Castrovalva itself. As traps go, it’s elaborate: ‘on the off chance that the Doctor survives the tumble into Event One, I’ll just use space maths to create a fake city which will collapse in on itself, and lure the Doctor into it. I’ll go as far as to populate it with oddly hatted characters who speak like 19th century butlers. Hell, I’ll even dress up as a doddery old codger and wander about in it myself.’ You’ve got to give it to him, he puts some thought into these things.

The Master’s plan is undone when the Doctor realises that the accumulated history of Castrovalva is faked, because although the books appear old, they are also paradoxically up to date. It’s an oblique point to rest a plot on, but there you go. Personally I wonder what 23 volumes of fake Castrovalvan history had in them. Tegan claims unconvincingly that the history is ‘fascinating’, but what could those dusty tomes possibly say? “Day 10,003: clothes were washed, medicants were prepared, wild boar for dinner again.” Surely the Master never expected anyone to actually read those books, as he stayed up, carefully staining the pages with cold tea.

In the end, Adric is torn out of the web, Castrovalva goes to pieces and the Master has his fancy dress torn from his body by angry fake people. The Doctor mobilises his friends into a brisk jog back to the TARDIS. Hard to imagine Tom Baker agreeing to that, and indeed although this hasn’t been an action packed story, it has consigned the fourth Doctor to hazy  memory. A hungover Matthew Waterhouse looks very queasy in these scenes, and while the cameras weren’t rolling, he had a spew on some of that delightful scenery. Poor lad. An erection and gastric ejection in one story. That never happened in Inside the Spaceship.

LINK TO The Enemy of the World: in both stories, the villain keeps a small community of people in ignorance of the shocking true nature of their world.

NEXT TIME: This is a WARNing! We become companions of The Krotons. Great jumping gobstoppers!

Transitions, technobabble and The Keeper of Traken (1981)

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keeper1

The Doctor (moody, burgundy clad Tom Baker) and boy companion Adric (nerdy, mustard clad Matthew Waterhouse) can be forgiven for not being up on current affairs on planet Traken. They have, after all, just emerged from an entirely different universe when this story stirs into life. But luckily the wizened old Keeper of Traken (Denis Carey) materialises directly in the TARDIS console room to play Xbox on the scanner screen. Well, he already has the chair.

No, he’s there to show some home movies and bring our heroes up to speed with the backstory. Traken, he says, is a world of peace and harmony. Well, that’s his first problem right there. In Doctor Who, idyllic, peaceful worlds are always one step away from total mayhem. In Traken’s case, a portentous statue called Melkur has landed in the grove and become calcified by the planet’s wholesomeness. Or it might be that he clashes with everything around him. Traken’s all very art nouveau, while Melkur’s pure futurism.

The ancient Keeper is reaching the end of his reign, as indeed the fourth Doctor is reaching his. “The passing ages have taken their toll on me,” the Keeper says and the Doctor replies, “yes, I know that feeling”. The Keeper senses trouble approaching during the transition. He urges the Doctor to come to assist, which of course the Doctor makes his number one priority. Right after he’s found some old books. Then read some old books. And wittered on to Adric for a while. Jeez, I’d hate to be waiting for him to rescue me.

Meanwhile on Traken, most of the first episode has past. But we’ve met kissing Consuls Tremas (Anthony Ainely) and Kassia (Shelia Ruskin, who from her accent is quite posh but has a name which sounds like she’s from somewhere west of Wagga Wagga) on their wedding night. Tremas is a scholarly type, who wanders around, playing with electronic gadgetry and talking technobabble. Naturally enough, he and the Doctor get on famously.

Kassia, however, has developed a far less scientific obsession with Melkur. She’s a bit like one of those folk who fall in love with inanimate objects, and end up marrying chairs and clocks and the like. To be honest, the husband/wife combination is a little old fashioned: Tremas is the scientific, rational male, Kassia the passionate, corruptible female. And like Eve, she’s seduced by evil in the Grove, a verdant garden in the middle of Traken. Gardens are interesting symbols of change and fertility and it can’t be by accident that one’s at the centre of things here. It’s the growing heart of Traken, while everything around it is as clean and sterile as an antique shop.

In story terms, the Grove’s polar opposite is the sterile but gaudy Source, a device which seems to hold Traken together, although exactly how we’re never told. The Keeper, apparently uses it to ‘organise the whole Traken Union’ and the Doctor says it has ‘limitless organising capacity refined to a single frame’. Who knows what that means? It must be more than just a nifty spreadsheet, but its significance is hard to grasp. Particularly when it looks like an oversize light fitting with fairy floss whizzing around inside it. Because we never get a decent explanation as to what it does, we never get a sense of what the consequences are of it being destroyed. ‘We can destroy Melkur,’ Adric says very seriously to Nyssa (Sarah Sutton, on debut) at one stage. ‘But only by completely destroying the Source.’ Wow, we might even care if we had the faintest idea what it did.

(Young Adric, by the way, is undergoing a change. He’s got a greater share of the plot now, since fellow TARDIS travellers Romana and K9 have left. But this means he suddenly picks up a level of scientific genius left behind by those braniacs. He’s able to deduce that there’s another TARDIS on Traken by looking at some gadget and muttering about Fourier analyses. He follows the Doctor’s brief bafflegab about nixing the Source so well that he can singlehandedly construct the device to do the job. Well, not quite singlehandedly; he has Nyssa to help. So typical of Adric. Left alone with a girl in the TARDIS and all he wants to do is play with his Meccano set.)

All the meaningless faux technical talk really puts the brakes on what’s a better than average Doctor Who story, with far better than average design work. For all the textbook Who imagery like the glowing eyed statue stalking the gloomy court, suffocating necklaces and black gloved villains watching events from the shadows, there’s an equal amount of blathery chat about fold back flow inducers, energy signatures and warp crossovers. It’s an odd mix of science manual and theatre, and I’d take the latter any day.

This collision of ideas is on display in the story’s climax, when Melkur’s grasp on the Keepership is broken, and a Shakespearean tempest is unleashed. Amidst all the sound and fury, the Doctor and Adric struggle to restore the natural order of things… by punching a number into a machine. By any measure, entering your PIN into a Trakenite ATM is no dramatic climax to a story.

Anyway, it all ends up OK, with the Doctor defeating his old enemy the Master (he was the Melkur all along!) and winning through to save the planet, the Keepership and the whole Traken Union from destruction. The successful end of an epic battle with some epic frocks. The future of Traken is assured.

Well, at least for the next three episodes, after which it will be casually destroyed by a big black stain. Well, you win some, you lose some.

*****

This story’s LINK to our last Random, Earthshock, is worth a bit of attention. Both feature the shock reveal of an old enemy. It’s a trick that comes to characterise 1980s Who, but it starts on Traken. The show had brought back old enemies in unexpected ways before – your Frontier in Space, your Deadly Assassin – but here the return of the Master feels like a showcase moment.

The Master, played with delicate menace by the silky voiced Geoffrey Beevers, lurks inside the Melkur, in fact his TARDIS. He’s in his decrepit state we witnessed in The Deadly Assassin, and that in itself says something about the series’ newfound love for continuity, heralded by producer John Nathan-Turner. He could have ignored the backstory, and simply bought the Master back in full bodily form. Yes, it would have disregarded the notion that the Master had run out of regenerations, but the series had performed more brazen u-turns than that in the past.

But the Master’s reappearance went down well with fans, and so Nathan-Turner repeated it the following year with the Cybermen in Earthshock. And found lots of excuses to bring back other old enemies, though never again with the same revelatory impact. New Who‘s not immune to that tactic. Far from it; there’s rarely been a post 2005 series without some familiar monstrous faces from the old days returning.

But as Nathan-Turner found, it’s a well you can only go back to so many times. Right now, I struggle to see which of the big, classic foes are left in the toybox for new Who to pull out. I think this opens the door for a few B graders to make come back. And if the Macra and the Zygons and the Sisterhood of flippin’ Karn can all be pushed back into service, I see no reason why the Melkur can’t one day ride again.

NEXT TIME… Dreams within dreams and sweet Papa Chrimbo. Every Christmas is Last Christmas.

 

The boy, the boom and Earthshock (1982)

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adric1

The accepted wisdom about Peter Davison’s first year of Doctor Who goes something like this. The production team realised that having three companions was too many, so one had to go. And the obvious choice was Matthew Waterhouse’s Adric, because he was the weakest of the three.

I’ve always been a little skeptical of this reading. Firstly, if the production team really felt that three companions were too many, why did they go straight back to that line up, albeit briefly, the following season? (Twice, if you include Kamelion as a companion). I suspect that the reservations about having three companions (which as I’ve noted before I don’t automatically share) came long after the fact and was influenced more by critiques some years after broadcast, rather than at the time.

Secondly, because fandom now generally looks back at Adric with much criticism and disdain, it seems clear that he would be the prime candidate for the chop. I think it could actually have been a much closer run thing and that one of his fellow travellers, Nyssa or Tegan, may well have taken his place. Sarah Sutton’s Nyssa had been a last minute addition to the line up and even Janet Fielding’s Tegan was initially only guaranteed for the change over between Doctors. I suspect that the now popular view of Adric as a poorly performed and annoying companion was not widely held at the time. Certainly, I can’t remember much poor press about him during the 80s. It was only later we all seemed to unite in hatred of the poor doomed boy.

*****

Let’s head back a bit and consider Adric’s origins. Before I started my random trek through Who, I completed a marathon viewing of each story in order. Eventually, as must inevitably happen, I reached season 17’s The Horns of Nimon. One thing that struck me was the small group of youngsters playing the tributes for Aneth. Suddenly, Doctor Who had teenagers in it. Something it hadn’t had since the 1960s. It was arresting to realise that a series with clear appeal to a young audience, had until then resolutely avoided representing these viewers on screen.

One of those tributes was a young man called Seth, played by Simon Gipps-Kent. Seth teams up with Romana for much of the story and they form an effective partnership. Perhaps Gipps-Kent caught the eye of soon-to-be producer John Nathan-Turner (stop it), and the thought crossed his mind for a more permanent role for a young, male character in the show. So in short, we might have The Horns of Nimon to thank for Adric.

Whatever the character’s genesis, Matthew Waterhouse, a fledgling young actor of 18, was thrust into the highly fraught world of making Doctor Who, complete with the moody and unpredictable Tom Baker who was having a tempestuous affair with co-star Lalla Ward. Stormy waters for anyone to navigate let alone a kid of limited experience and nous. He’s out of place so much in this TARDIS crew because despite what Nathan-Turner said about it being a team of know alls complete witha  robot dog, there was nothing wrong with the existing line up. It fact, it was a brilliant team. It didn’t need an Adric.

Then there’s the added complication highlighted by The Horns of Nimon. Teenagers in Doctor Who were highly unusual. No one knew how to treat them. Certainly not the writers who failed to build a consistent and compelling character around Adric. Eccentric Doctors and glamorous female companions are part of the series’ DNA. Quite where a young boy, let alone one who was an uncomfortable mix of Artful Dodger and child prodigy, fitted in the series was unclear.

So let’s not kid ourselves that playing Adric was in any way easy. The odds were stacked against Waterhouse from the start and the material he got was highly variable. Try, for instance, saying any of Adric’s lines from Four to Doomsday convincingly. Now imagine having to say them convincingly while wearing green and yellow space pyjamas.

His finest moments are at the end of the Tom Baker era, The Keeper of Traken and Logopolis. Here Adric is the primary companion, smart and personable and Waterhouse gets his best material. But once Baker turns to Davison, there’s much more competition for screen time, characterisation and dialogue. There’s an exciting new Doctor for a start, plus two attractive new girls, one of whom’s a technical whiz like Adric once was. As a result, our boy wonder slips into sulky teenagerdom.

By the time we get to Earthshock, his time is up. And he’s not just dropped off on another planet or left behind with a new beau, he’s blown up. As emphatic an exit as you can get. Even Doctor Who‘s time travel format won’t allow him a return visit. In the next story when Tegan suggests just that, the Doctor rules it out utterly. The boy’s never coming back.

*****

You occasionally read someone suggesting naïveté on behalf of the production team in seeking to elicit an emotional kick from the audience by killing off the character they had the least affection for. Again, I think it’s a revisionist view. I think at the time, any young people watching, be they boys and girls, would have been deeply traumatised by Adric’s demise. In fact, we know that was the case from a number of Who notables interviewed for the DVD doco Putting the shock into Earthshock. You don’t have to like Adric to be touched by his death. In fact, there’s the added pang of guilt in someone dying about whom you were never very nice.

A freshed faced young Steven Moffat, as yet unravaged by years of making Doctor Who, appears in that documentary to gently criticise those who made Doctor Who. Why, he wonders, did sci-fi shows insist on including boy geniuses? Well, I suspect they thought they were providing an audience identification figure to spotty, awkward teenage boys who made up a large proportion of the audience. But they forgot a crucial point: spotty, awkward teenage boys generally have chronically low self esteem. The thing they hate doing most is looking in the mirror.

But as I say, I think those boys’ hatred of Adric came later, when they’d all grown up, become sophisticated and successful, and left their spotty, awkward past behind. Revisiting Adric’s adventures would be like looking back on awful family photos of themselves. That’s the guy they used to be? What a loser. That boy’s never coming back.

ADVENTURES IN SUBTITLING: “The year is 2526,” Adric announces, “in the time scale you call anno domino” apparently. Why do I suddenly feel like pizza?

SACRIFICIAL BLAM! No points for guessing.

LINK TO Ghost Light: produced by JN-T, as is our next stop…

NEXT TIME: I used to know an ancient remedy for mad dogs. We stick with the Doctor, Adric and Nyssa to meet The Keeper of Traken.

Conniving, complications and Black Orchid (1982)

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What a complicated life Lady Madge Cranleigh (Barbara Lane) leads. Her mutilated, mentally ill son George (Gareth Milne) is repatriated from South America, accompanied by a local tribesman, Dittar Litoni (Ahmen Khalil). So she imprisons said son within her enormous home, employing the tribesman as his nurse. Cut off from the love of his family and fiancée, confined 24 hours a day, is it any real surprise that George goes a little troppo?

He longs for contact with his fiancée, Ann (Sarah Sutton). But Ann has moved on, and is about to marry George’s brother Charles (Michael Cochrane). Madge, unwisely, keeps them all under the one roof. In hindsight, not the best move.

Things get out of hand when George, desperate to make contact with Ann, crashes a costume party. For a madman, he’s surprisingly calculating. Finding his way through a labyrinth of secret passages, he steals a fancy dress costume meant for the Doctor (sporty Peter Davison), one which fortunately conceals his face, and uses it to crash a party Madge is holding. Having stolen a dance with Ann, he attempts to steal away a few moments with her. When she takes fright, there’s a struggle with a footman, who is killed. But George has enough presence of mind to return the costume back to the Doctor’s room. Handy, and unlikely, I think.

Madge meanwhile makes a few odd choices of her own. She and the Doctor discover the body of another servant, hidden in the secret tunnels. Now would seem like a good chance to fess up. Instead, she decides to keep the whole thing to herself, and weirdly, the Doctor agrees to keep her secret. She doesn’t want to disturb her party guests with news of a murder, which is some extreme lengths to go to avoid social embarrassment. But then this is the woman who locked up her injured son to avoid social embarrassment, so she has form.

Inevitably, the footman’s murder is discovered. With two men dead, you might expect that now Madge will finally come clean. But you see, because George was wearing the costume allocated to the Doctor, she sees an opportunity to allow the Doctor to take the fall. Why she feels the need to do this is never explained. As she says herself once the Doctor is arrested, “He will come to no harm. He is innocent”. So at best, she has bought herself a little time. But to do what exactly? Perhaps she is hoping the mystery will go unsolved and she can go back to imprisoning her disabled son.

But no, it can’t be that because her next step is to confess all to Charles. The audience is kept away from that revelation, but perhaps it went like this:

LADY CRANLEIGH: So Charles, I have some news. Your brother’s not dead. He’s alive and horribly disfigured. Goodness knows the fuss this would cause, so I’ve been holding him captive in a secret room in this house. No, it’s fine, I’ve given him a private nurse. Yes sometimes he has to be tied to the bed, but it’s for his own good, don’t you agree? Anyway, it was all going swimmingly until he killed a servant, escaped, dressed up in the Doctor’s costume, assaulted Ann (whom he still believes he’s engaged to. Yes, that will need sorting out at some stage.) and killed James the footman. Anyway, it seemed best to let the police think the Doctor was responsible and Sir Robert’s such a dear old friend, I’m sure he won’t charge me with obstructing a murder investigation. While they work out that the Doctor’s innocent, we should work out some way of making both murders look like unfortunate accidents and then we can go on keeping George locked up out of sight. So thinking caps on! Shall we get James to fetch us some tea? Oh no, that’s right, he’s dead.

*****

The Doctor leads a pretty complicated life too. But sometimes the situations he finds himself in seem served up to him a little too conveniently. In The Doctor’s Wife we find out that the TARDIS chooses many of his destinations. Surely Black Orchid is one of those occasions. How else would the cricket loving Fifth Doctor be manoevered so neatly into a scenario where he can indulge in his favourite sport? And where his companion Nyssa (Sarah Sutton again) can meet Ann Talbot, her exact double? As this Doctor said in another adventure, “what worries me is the level of coincidence in all this.”

Look, Black Orchid doesn’t make a lick of sense. But if we wrote off Doctor Who stories on that basis, we’d be condemning a large swathe of the series. Still, there’s stuff to admire here. Sure, Part One is full of unlikely incidents (the Doctor takes the place of another cricketing Doctor, the Cranleighs readily accept that the Doctor has no name), but in Part Two when these oddities finally start to be questioned they serve to increase suspicions about the Doctor and we feel him sliding into real trouble. Also, the silent killer in the harlequin’s costume is nicely spooky and it gives the story its most enduring image. And the whole thing looks very handsome in an acclaimed BBC period drama kind of way.

Plus it gives Sarah Sutton a chance to display her versatility, playing a gushier, more ebullient character than prim and proper Nyssa. (Although points must be deducted for the perfunctory and confusing way we’re shown Ann before the TARDIS arrives. Where’s the big reveal when Ann turns around and we see she’s Nyssa’s twin?)

Sutton’s a capable actress and Nyssa is a pleasant enough character, so it pains me to say that Nyssa’s a little too bland to be a fully engaging companion. Peter Davison’s on record as saying he thought she should be his Doctor’s sole companion, but surely Nyssa just doesn’t have enough spunk to hold an audience’s interest?

Davison was comparing Nyssa favourably to fellow companion Tegan (Janet Fielding), who too often was left to complain her way throughout a story. But in Black Orchid she’s a delight; feisty but fun loving and fun to be around. She’s exactly the companion you want Tegan to be, but she rarely is. However you have to question her judgement when late in the story she hotly declares that “the Doctor is no imposter!”. When actually, having taken that tardy cricketer’s place and kept quiet about it, that’s the one thing he clearly is and everyone knows it. Better lay off those screwdrivers, Tegan.

Adric (Matthew Waterhouse) fairs worst of all the regulars. He should have been left behind in the TARDIS to do some sums or something, as he’s completely surplus to requirements here. The most he gets to do is eat his own body weight in BBC buffet during the fancy dress ball. Terence Dudley’s vivid novelisation of this story at least offers him a smidgen more interest when he gets asked to dance by a man. 

A conflicted Adric then sets about overcoming his fear of dancing, and despite his earlier reluctance finds he has something of a latent talent in the toe tapping department. “All at once a wave of happiness overcame Adric,” the book gushes. “He was doing it. Yes, he was doing it and felt wonderful!”. I like to think of it as Adric’s out and proud moment. If only to liven the whole thing up a bit.

ADVENTURES IN SUBTITLING: “Top hole,” says Charles in Part One. “Top ho,” say the subtitles. Where is this ho exactly?

LINK TO Invasion of the Dinosaurs. Both feature misguided, rather than evil villains.

NEXT TIME: This is the day the Sun expands. Welcome to The End of the World.

Old, New and The Visitation (1982)

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visitation

Set in the seventeenth century, but scored throughout with twinkly electronic music,The Visitation  feels both old and new – or at least 1980s new.

It also has one the best opening scenes in Doctor Who. A gentrified family in restoration England are home at night. We get to know this little family; grumpy father, son, daughter and manservant. We start to like them. Then their house is infiltrated by an alien something and all are killed. We fade through a few shots of the empty house in daylight, as alien machinery thrums. Tightly written, stylishly directed.

But leisurely. New Who does these sort of opening gambits – monstrous nasty kills people we’ve just met – all the time, but they’re much shorter and pacier and usually done before the opening credits. Think Tooth and Claw, Gridlock or The God Complex, to name but a few.

But back to The Visitation. After the opening scene, it’s over to the TARDIS to see what our heroes are up to this week. The Doctor (Peter Davison, early in his term, but firmly established as the Time Lord next door), awkward teenager Adric (played by awkward teenager Matthew Waterhouse) and alien noblelady Nyssa (Sarah Sutton, in the sensible shoes) are preparing to take mouthy air hostess Tegan (Janet Fielding, all hair and purple power uniform) back to Heathrow Airport in 1982. It’s all very domestic: the Doctor and Adric are bickering about things which happened last episode. Tegan is busy putting on some very 1980s make-up. Nyssa is standing in the console room reading a magazine (of all things. Woman’s Day? DWB?).  There’s a family squabble when they realise that they’ve landed at the right spot, but three hundred years early. Tegan cracks it and storms out of the TARDIS in a huff. The other three follow her out and into the story proper.

Scenes like that one – Neighbours with roundels, I think they’ve been called – seem too inconsequential for modern tastes. Enough with the day-to-day dramas of the TARDIS crew, and get on with telling the story, the argument goes. And fair enough too. But it’s worth remembering that this sort of interaction between TARDIS crew members, unnecessarily argumentative though it is, was a novelty by Doctor Who’s 19th season. For years, the Doctor and his companion would just leap out into a story, leaving us no hint of any life lived between adventures, let alone any ramifications of such. It’s refreshing to briefly peep through that console room door, and see what goes on when they’re not battling power mad loons or giant frogs.

Once outside, our pals quickly meet actor turned highwayman Richard Mace (a fruity performance from Michael Robbins). Now as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve no beef with having three companions on board, and The Visitation – at least in its first two episodes – does a good job of splitting the action up between them. But I find it perplexing when writers feel a need to add a de facto fourth (The Impossible Astronaut, I’m looking at you too). It’s clear that writer Eric Saward is more interested in Mace than any of the three companions he has to hand, and gives him all the best lines.  “It is only with the aid of these properties,” he says waving his flintlocks around, “that I am able to command the attention of an audience nowadays.”

He also performs useful plot functions such as explaining the set up. He’s on hand to describe the strange events of the last few days, from which the Doctor can deduce that there are likely to be survivors nearby. And so there are, the reptilian Terileptils. As Doctor Who monsters go, they’re not bad, their leering lizardy heads being most effective. Unfortunately their arms seem permanently affixed to their bodies down to the elbow, making them look like they’re continually miming the carrying of a box. When they lash out at someone it’s not done with a savage swipe of a claw, more a gentle nudging of the forearm.

Still, everything rolls along at quite a clip in those first two episodes. Tegan and Adric are captured by the chief Terileptil, giving the Doctor a chance to escape in the TARDIS with his favourite companion. He doesn’t though. He decides to attempt to elicit help from the local Miller and sends Nyssa back to the TARDIS to build a machine which will vibrate (stop it) the Terileptil’s bejewelled android to pieces.

This leads to some of the dullest scenes ever committed to videotape. Nysaa collects her tools. Nyssa puts the frame of the machine together. Nyssa pushes the frame from the console room to her bed room. Nyssa tinkers with the machine. And so on. This is her whole contribution to Part Three. On and on these scenes go, with only the incidental music to (and I use the word cautiously) enliven them.

Adric drops by briefly, having escaped from the Terileptils, but he’s of no use building the machine and after a quick mope leaves again and is quickly recaptured.  ‘Poor old Adric’, sighs Nyssa in that first TARDIS scene, and I can’t help but agree. There’s a gradual degrading of Adric’s character over his time in the series. Back in season 18, he was technically competent; remember it was he who built the story ending gizmo in The Keeper of Traken with Nyssa’s help. But here their roles have reversed; Nyssa is the technician, Adric the assistant. ‘And I try so hard’, he sulks at one point, his outsider-ness a neat foreshadowing of his forthcoming demise in Earthshock.

Anyway, back to Nyssa and her box of tricks. She puts on some big ear muffs and tests the machine, vibrating a few nik naks of her dressing table. Goodness know how she plans to attack an android with this thing, which is the size and shape of a small petrol-powered generator. Luckily, in an extremely contrived bit of plotting, the Android comes to her. It boards the TARDIS, helpfully walks rights into Nyssa’s room and is shaken to death. It lies smoldering on the floor. Nyssa rushes to get a fire extinguisher. Nyssa puts out the fire. Nyssa sits on her bed and quietly wonders why she never got her own spin off series.

The story picks up towards the end when the Doctor and his four companions take the TARDIS to London where they blow up the Terileptils and their hideout. There’s a particularly gruesome shot where the lead lizard’s face bubbles and pops in the heat of a freshly started fire. Leaving Mace to fight the fire, the Doctor and company leave, and the final shot is of the sign ‘Pudding Lane’, instantly indicating to anyone au fait with the period that the fire in question is the Great Fire of London (but leaving little 9 year old Spandrell watching in Australia completely mystified).

And like The Visitation’s opening scenes, its closing scene is something special. It’s Doctor Who‘s first use of the ‘closing moments’ surprise reveal. And it’s still an impressive trick if you can pull it off; Steven Moffat’s The Girl in the Fireplace repeats it years later, right down to the tell tale writing on the wall.

Something old, something new and half an hour of Nyssa building a story stalling gizmo. The Visitation is ahead of its time, but also deeply embedded in it.

LINK to The Smugglers. Both are set in the seventeenth century. And both feature Squires. Love an easy one.

NEXT TIME… Suffering catfish, it’s The Time Monster. Come Kronos, Come!