Doctor Who Live
There have been several attempts to bring Doctor Who to the stage, some more successful than others, but all very typical of the time in which they were made. Curse Of The Daleks was a gripping base-under-siege story by Terry Nation and David Whittaker, with Daleks but no Doctor, from the 1960s. In the 1970s, on the other hand, we had Seven Keys To Doomsday, by Terrance Dicks,where the Doctor has to collect MacGuffins before the Daleks do. And in the 1980s there was The Ultimate Adventure, a ludicrous pantomime by a past-it Dicks, a lot of fun but making no sense whatsoever.
And in 2010 we have Doctor Who Live, an arena show full of explosions and spectacle, with almost no dialogue, little plot, and tons of special effects, but with a flying Dalek and a Dalek-vs-Cybermen fight, and lasers…
That sounds a little cruel, and it really shouldn’t. Doctor Who Live isn’t aimed at me, and nor should it be. It’s a circus by any other name, with people in costumes, music, silly jokes, and a light show and fireworks, and it’s aimed at very small children, who were there in droves. My own favourite Doctor Who stories are things like Genesis Of The Daleks, The Aztecs, The Keeper Of Traken or The Massacre – small-scale, character-driven, dialogue-heavy stories about ideas. Doctor Who Live was never going to be any of those things.
What it is – and all it is – is pure spectacle. There’s an attempt to give it a plot (a sequel to the 1973 Robert Holmes story Carnival Of Monsters), but really it’s just an excuse for as many monsters (all from the post-2005 series, obviously, and with a heavy weighting towards Stephen Moffat’s stories) to come through the audience and scare the children, for pyrotechnics, for loud rock music (Murray Gold’s music for the new series, rearranged very effectively by Ben Foster for a 16-piece band and choir, improved immensely from Gold’s original overblown arrangements).
That’s not to say there’s nothing to recommend it to adults- Nigel Planer gives as wonderful a performance as you would expect as the showman Vorgenson, and Nicholas Briggs does a rather magnificent Churchill, and Planer’s live interaction with Matt Smith on film has a real Doctor Who feel to it (reading a recent DWM interview with Smith where he mentioned that Peter Sellers is the actor he most admires unlocked something about Smith’s performance for me, and this is the first time I’ve seen any of his work since reading that, and I’m a lot more impressed now) – but it’s really best suited for adults who have brought their children along with them.
It’s very hard for me to judge the show, because what I want from art or entertainment is very different from what it was offering. In the comments to a recent post, various of us have been talking about how much of modern entertainment is geared towards the facile and childish, and how the highbrow is being devalued in favour of the trivial. This show would not have been something I’d have chosen to do by myself (a gang of friends were going) and it’s about as trivial and childish as you can get, with absolutely no intellectual content whatsoever.
But at the same time, while there’s probably something wrong with someone in their thirties or forties who lives off Flumps and Curly-Wurlies, there is nothing wrong with having those things *on occasion*, and this show is the equivalent of eating a Sherbet fountain – not something you would want to do every day, and something you might feel a bit embarrassed about doing at all, but as a little bit of a nostalgic treat it’s fine on occasion.
The show is much better put-together, with much higher production values, than it needed to be to satisfy its target audience of children. There were a number of points where I was genuinely highly impressed by the craft and thought that had been put into the performance. But there’s a bit in one of the About Time guidebooks where Wood and Miles talk about how Doctor Who toys would have been missing the point, because the best bits in Doctor Who weren’t spaceship races or light-sabre battles but elderly character actors being frightfully clever at each other, so you couldn’t recreate them with toys, you had to recreate them by reading the books. This show, on the other hand, is almost designed for action-figure recreation, while the script probably barely fit onto five sides of A4.
I am not so totally grown-up that I can fail to appreciate the show – so many of my formative years were spent thinking about Daleks and Cybermen that seeing Real Live Ones!!!, even if they look different from the ones I liked as a kid, is enough to put a grin on my face – but I’m adult enough that, while this is an extraordinarily well put-together, charming, spectacular show, I wouldn’t recommend it to any adult who doesn’t have a deep-seated, irrational love of Doctor Who.
This seems like a deeply ambivalent review, and it is. I thoroughly enjoyed myself while I was there – and I really did – but where I can fit most other things I enjoy into an aesthetic or intellectual framework, this had about as much for the rational part of my mind (by far the biggest part) to latch on to as a fireworks display would. And seen *as* a fireworks display – as a bunch of pretty images, flashing lights and loud bangs – it’s as good as any I’ve seen. But whereas the TV show at its best could appeal to children while still having some genuinely intelligent writing worth repeat viewing as an adult (and while I’m not one of those who thinks Doctor Who is the best TV programme ever made, I would certainly say that at its best, in stories like City Of Death or An Unearthly Child or Vengeance On Varos it was in the top rank of TV of its time), tonight’s show was a spectacular for the kiddies.
That I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it to the readers of this blog (who, I flatter myself, like something with a little more intellectual roughage most of the time, rather than just sweets) merely says that we’re not its intended audience. That I still managed to have an enjoyable evening (and that despite having a migraine, meaning I was doped up to the eyeballs on painkillers) shows how well it does what it does. Nicholas Briggs in particular is to be commended – as well as his Churchill, he also provides all the Dalek, Cyberman and Judoon voices (at least some of them apparently live) and this show demonstrates what a fine voice actor he actually is. And Nigel Planer, who for most of the show is the only live-action performer on stage with any lines, carries off what is almost a one-man show at times superbly. I didn’t come out thinking I’d wasted my time and my money, which I was seriously worried I would do ahead of time.
But the people who enjoyed it most were the thousands of tiny children in their cardboard cyberman masks.
Doctor Who And Batman Week Day 3: Seven Quick CD Reviews
A few weeks back, the Daily Torygraph had a week of giveaways of Doctor Who CDs. I didn’t get them because I refuse to buy that wretched snotrag of a paper, but they have recently announced an offer to get rid of their back stock, and are selling all seven CDs for ‘P&P only’ – although thirteen quid seems a lot for P&P.
However, less than two quid per CD is a great deal, and so I picked these up.
Mission To The Unknown (by Terry Nation, narrated by Peter Purves ) is a Dalek story from the first Doctor’s era. I won’t go into great detail about it here, as I plan to review the story in full when I get to it in a few months, but this was a single-episode story which was the only Doctor Who story not to feature the Doctor – though it set up a later story, The Daleks’ Master Plan.
As the story was burned, the only way to experience it is to listen to off-air audio-tape recordings made at the time, with linking narration by Peter Purves, who does a decent job. The story itself, intended by Nation as a backdoor pilot for a Dalek spin-off series, is genial hokum about Agent Marc Cory of the Special Space Service fighting deadly Varga plants. Taken for what it is – 45-year-old children’s adventure TV – it’s fun, though hardly at the same level as the first couple of Dalek stories. But before listening, forget everything you know about astronomy, as neither Nation nor David Whittaker (the script editor) knew the difference between a galaxy, a solar system and a constellation, so at one point you get several galaxies teaming up to try to take over the Earth.
Genesis Of The Daleks (by Terry Nation, starring Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen, Ian Marter, Michael Wisher, Peter Miles et al)
This was the first Doctor Who story to get any kind of repeatable home release. In the days before videos, this, an album containing a one-hour abridgement of the two-and-a-half-hour TV story’s soundtrack, with linking narration by Tom Baker, was the first time people could buy a Doctor Who story that had been on TV.
It’s obviously less necessary now that you can buy the whole thing on a double-DVD set with documentaries, commentaries, outtakes and so on, but it still has a nostalgic appeal to many Who fans, which is why it’s still available on CD.
Listening to the abridgement, a few things become clear.
Firstly, the TV show depended hugely on David Maloney’s visual sense. Without his Bergman rip-offs and the sense of oppression his visuals give, the story is much more the Typical Terry Nation script than it appears when watching it. And the abridgement does the plot few favours. It cuts out all the nonsense ‘perils’ that Nation stuck in more or less at random – the landmines, the giant clams and so on – but without those distractions, you can see that the plot makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
But everything changes whenever Michael Wisher and Tom Baker get to do their thing (either together or separately). There’s a rumour that Baker and Wisher substantially rewrote their dialogue together in rehearsals, recasting some of it into iambic pentameter to make it more Shakespearean . Certainly, at crucial moments, this is *NOT* Terry Nation dialogue – this is a script that has been worked on by diverse hands, including Terrance Dicks and, most crucially, Robert Holmes.
Even in this cut-down form, then, the set pieces (“to hold in my hand…” , “Have I the right?”) still have an immense power, and this is still a fantastic story. In what should have been a fairly conventional Dalek story, someone (presumably Holmes) managed to sneak in a morality play straight out of Dostoevsky, but written for eight year-olds. And even without the Bergmanisms and gas masks, that’s pretty special.
Exploration Earth (by Bernard Venables, starring Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen and John Westbrook)
This is a trifle, a little over twenty minutes long, that doesn’t really deserve its own CD. Originally broadcast for schools’ radio, it’s an educational programme trying to tell the story of the Earth’s creation, using the Doctor Who characters to provide a dramatic framework. Sarah Jane is completely out of chaacter as Generic Companion (“Doctor, I’m scared”) though Lis Sladen still does wonders with some awful dialogue. A historical curio, not really made for repeat listening.
Slipback (by Eric Saward, starring Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant)
Or the Blitch-Blikers Buide to the Balaxy. During the show’s ‘gap year’ in 1985, BBC Radio4 commissioned a serial in six fifteen-minute parts for their children’s strand, Pirate Radio 4, starring the then-current Doctor/companion team and written by the show’s then-script editor Eric Saward.
While in his scripts for TV Saward seems obsessed with trying to be like Robert Holmes but with more violence, when writing for the radio he seems instinctively to have turned to another former Who writer/script-editor, Douglas Adams, and as a result you could play any of the scenes in this that don’t feature the Doctor to anyone and they’d think it was a bit they’d forgotten from the second Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy radio series.
Saward’s attempts at humour aren’t great – he’s someone who’s clearly more at home writing action-movie wisecracking than actual wit – but the cast is fantastic, featuring voices that anyone who has ever listened to Radio 4 will recognise instantly, like Valentine Dyall and Nick Revell. And while the plot makes no sense, the fifteen-minute-episode format means it keeps moving quickly.
Incidentally, the computer voice in this, which is supposed to sound like an ‘airheaded bimbo’, sounds suspiciously like an impersonation of Sandra Dickinson, who played Trillian in the TV (but not the radio) version of Hitch-Hiker’s. Dickinson was then married to Peter Davison, and had apparently not been hugely popular among the production staff of Doctor Who. I wonder if this was a slight dig at her…
Pest Control (by Peter Anghelides, read by David Tennant)
This is a two-disc audiobook (as opposed to radio play), and is *much* better than I expected. I loathe Tennant’s Doctor, but here, reading in his own accent, he gives a masterful performance. I still find his Doctor irritating (and from the voice and characterisation of Donna Noble I was very correct to not watch the fourth RTD series, or I would have smashed whatever I was watching it on), but he does more and better acting in the two-and-a-half hours of this audiobook than in the entirety of his TV career as the Doctor, providing a range of distinctively-voiced, subtly-characterised characters.
The story itself is a fairly standard Doctor Who plot – in fact as a plot it’s far more the kind of thing one would expect from Saward than Saward’s own story is – about a war between the Earth and a bunch of aliens, but then the Earth soldiers are being turned into giant insects, and then a killer robot turns up… you know the kind of thing.
It’s a routine, formula story, but it’s an *extremely well executed* routine, formula story, and as such would fit far better with the Moffat series than the Davies series to which it is a coda. And I’ll give it a lot more leeway for being formulaic than the TV series, because as an audiobook the production costs of this consist of little more than the cost of a microphone and a cup of tea, while the TV series cost several million quid. The expectations are correspondingly lower.
This was actually the big surprise for me, and easily the most enjoyable of these as a pure listening experience, and that’s coming from someone who loathes Tennant as the Doctor.
And I will love Anghelides forever, because unlike the people at Big Finish, he uses the word DISORIENT! NOT DISORIENTATE! DISORIENT! THE PROPER ACTUAL WORD! NOT THE ILLITERATE NEOLOGISM. I know disorientate is now in dictionaries, and I hate linguistic prescriptivism as much as anyone, but that’s always been one of my bugbears. Mr Anghelides repeatedly using the proper word made me very happy.
The Runaway Train by Oli Smith, read by Matt Smith
I only listened to this today, and I remember nearly nothing about it, except that Matt Smith can’t do American or Scottish accents, and Smith’s voice is a lot less tolerable than Tennant’s when doing a dramatic reading. There’s some stuff about the future-Doctor setting things up in the past to happen to him in the present, but other than that I couldn’t tell you anything about it. It all just turned into “bleh bleh bleh bleh” between the headphones and my eardrums.
Overall, this is a very mixed bag, but for thirteen quid it’s worth it for Genesis and Pest Control alone. Then you’ve got a couple of fun-but-silly children’s programmes (Slipback and Mission) and a couple of duds, but everything is at least worth a listen. Possibly even The Runaway Train…
Doctor Who From The Beginning: The Daleks
The Daleks.
Writer: Terry Nation
Directors: Christopher Barry and Richard Martin
DVD Availability: As Disc 2 of The Beginnings Box Set
While An Unearthly Child was the start of Doctor Who, The Daleks is the story where what we now think of as Doctor Who actually started.
Well, sort of.
More than any other story from the first year of Doctor Who, it’s impossible to watch this story and get any sense of what it must have been like to watch at the time. Even the episodes that have been burned arguably stand up better, because we don’t have anything to compare them to – the Doctor never met Marco Polo again, and even the whole historical genre quickly disappeared, so when we watch that story we do it without any prejudices.
With The Daleks, on the other hand, we’ve seen the Doctor fight the Daleks dozens of times. Even for those of us who grew up in relatively Dalek-free eras of Doctor Who (and despite the way the Welsh series has managed to have them turn up every five milliseconds, only two of the proper Doctors actually met the Daleks on TV more than twice, and the last three only had one Dalek story each) have always known that The Doctor Fights The Daleks.
Not only that, we’ve seen *this story*. Not only did Terry Nation write almost identical scripts several times more (most blatantly in the Third Doctor story Frontier In Space Planet Of The Daleks), but this story was the first to be adapted to other media, appearing both as the novel Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks and the slightly more snappily titled film adaptation Doctor Who And The Daleks, which has been shown on Channel 4 every bank holiday since time immemorial.
So watching this now, it’s hard to watch it for what it was at the time – an exciting piece of children’s entertainment – rather than what it looks like now, which is someone doing a Dalek story and not getting it quite right. They don’t even say “exterminate!” for God’s sake!
Truth be told, even at the time this probably wouldn’t have held the attention of anyone much over the age of twelve. It was written in a rush by Terry Nation, a hack writer who felt the job was beneath him and was only doing it because he’d been sacked by Tony Hancock and needed the money. The story, such as it is, is essentially the wine of a couple of 50s Dan Dare strips decanted into the bottle of an old Flash Gordon serial. Susan has gone in four short weeks from being a spooky, mysterious figure to an hysteric who can’t walk two steps without screaming.
And watching it as a whole makes it seem worse than it should. This was designed for serial viewing, a week between each episode, not for watching in one two-hour-and-fifty-four-minute sitting. Watched all in one, it becomes incredibly obvious that nothing at all happens for much of episodes five and six, apart from a standard Terry Nation speech on how pacifism is evil.
DVD picture quality does the programme no favours, either, allowing us to see that most of the Daleks in the ‘crowd scenes’ are rather unconvincing cardboard cutouts.
And then there’s the message – judging people by their appearance is wrong, and ‘dislike for the unlike’ is terrible, say the blonde-haired blue-eyed muscular Adonises as they fight the squat ugly creatures inside their metal cases…
But despite all that, it still works, somehow.
Partly it’s the Doctor’s continuing moral evolution (his character definitely has what people nowadays call an ‘arc’ in these early stories) – breaking the fluid link and endangering the people who are travelling with him at the beginning, but being utterly outraged by the Daleks’ attitude towards murdering the Thals by the end. Partly it’s the music – almost musique concrete, sound effects blending in with the music so you’re not sure what is ambient sound of Skaro and what’s soundtrack music. The music for this story was by Tristram Cary, one of the great pioneers of electronic music and one of the few musicians at the time who could actually compete with Delia Derbyshire’s astonishing rendition of the title music.
But mostly what sticks with the viewer after watching this is the *look* of the thing. Raymond Cusick’s designs still astonish -and not just the Daleks, incredible though they still are as a design, but the whole Dalek city. The model work is particularly spectacular, and it’s also one of the few Doctor Who stories to have corridors that look like they’re designed for aliens rather than humans. (And indeed if you look, at one point Susan writes a letter to the Thals that’s clearly in an alien script, though where she’s had the chance to learn their writing isn’t made clear).
And there are odd images that still have a power – and strangely, not just those in Christopher Barry’s episodes (like the Dalek eyestalk coming towards Barbara at the end of episode one) , but even in the episodes directed by Richard Martin. Widely regarded as something of a hack, while Barry is regarded as one of the better directors to have worked on the show, Martin still gives us the odd evocative moment like the Kaled mutant (as they’re not yet called) claw coming out from under Susan’s cloak.
At these moments, for a second, one can get a flash of what it was like to watch this during the 1963 Christmas holiday. You can see why the Daleks became the big playground craze of the year, why there were toys, films and comics – why, in short, we have everything from the Welsh series to Faction Paradox novels to Big Finish audios to the new computer game that won’t work on GNU/Linux to birthday cards with voice chips with Nicholas Briggs’ voice in them. All this ultimately stems from a script thrown together in five minutes, that the executive in charge of the programme hated, and with a great monster design. On such things does the world turn.
Doctor Who – Victory Of The Daleks
OK, this is weird…
For the first time ever I find myself actually having enjoyed an episode of the Welsh Series rather more than most people, rather than sitting there spitting bile while everyone else goes “SQUEE!”
Victory Of The Daleks was far from a great story, but its main problem was that it clearly should have been an old-style four parter. You can even see exactly where the cliffhangers would be – first reveal of the Daleks, Doctor threatens to blow up Dalek ship with him on board, Doctor given the choice of whether to save Earth or destroy the Daleks. In this scheme, the ‘running around corridors episode’ would have been replaced with the ‘Star Wars space battle’ episode, but that’s the only real difference.
Unfortunately, in cutting the story down to 45 minutes, most of the narrative glue has been lost, and only the big set-pieces remain. Now this is a criticism many – not least myself – have made of Russel Davies’ stories, but the difference – and it is a big one – is that Davies’ stories are just fundamentally incoherent. I challenge anyone to say, for example, what *actually happened* in New Earth.
On the other hand, stick in two lines of explanation – literally two lines – and the whole story here made sense. You just have to say “We just need to get his positronic brain to override its self-destruct program! We need him to *WANT* to live!” or something. And quite frankly, that’s a leap of logic it’s easy enough to make by yourself. Yes, it’s a plot hole, but it’s just a hole, not the kind of black hole of plot that sucks all narrative coherence into itself that Davies used to specialise in. (I also suspect that it’s something that we’ll be coming back to in future episodes, if my guesses as to the overarching story of this series are correct).
More annoying is – as my friend Stu (who loves Spitfires almost as much as he loves Daleks, and who was practically orgasming in anticipation for this episode, but still felt it fell a little flat) pointed out – all the pilots were presented as ‘tally-ho! Chocks away!’ types, with no representation of the real mix of classes that did that job. I’m less bothered about the caricature of Churchill, because we were never, realistically, going to get anything like the real man (simultaneously a war criminal himself and the person who probably did more to save Western Europe from dictatorship than anyone else), but really we could have had at least a token Cockney or Northern pilot (and, indeed, it would have been a *VERY* good idea to have a Polish one, given the Polish contribution to the Battle of Britain and their current demonisation).
And I’m still not at all happy with the Doctor’s characterisation – he hasn’t got one. Much like Tennant, Smith is doing a brave job at trying to breathe life into a generically-written character (though some of the lines in this, oddly, sounded written for Eccleston). The character of the Doctor is the big sticking point for me with the Welsh series as a whole – no-one involved seems to have a handle on the character at all, and they seem determined to make him into the hero in Joseph Campbell’s monomyth or something – turning the character who should be closer to Obi-Wan or Gandalf into Luke Skywalker or Frodo. (Of course, he should not be Obi-Wan or Gandalf either, but they’re a much closer first approximation).
But with all this, there’s still some good stuff in this episode. In particular, the production design. While I’m not completely sold on the new Dalek designs, the Dalek *spaceship* was perfect – reminiscent of TV Century 21 and the Cushing films, while not actually sharing many design elements with them. And Gatiss can write Dalek dialogue properly – unlike pretty much every writer for the proper series, who would resort to Davros monologuing for the last decade or so of Dalek stories. And the battleship-grey wartime Daleks were wonderful.
In fact, I suspect the production design was one of the reasons this made me feel much better about the programme than everyone else I know, and this is really the nub of the matter. It looked *cheap* in many ways – but in the *right* ways.
The budget for Doctor Who has been cut this year, but you’d never know it by looking at the big set-piece special effects pieces in this – the space battle stuff looks good, and the new Daleks must have cost close to a million quid to produce. The way the budget cut appears to have impacted most severely is that the story here was entirely centred around a few big sets. I’d have to watch again to be sure, but I think there was *NO* location/outdoor filming whatsoever here – everything was done in studio. And there was no real attempt to hide it – London, with the lights going on or off, looked like a painted backdrop.
Now, Doctor Who – the proper series – was part of a long line of British TV drama that was more theatrical than filmic – what Americans would refer to as a ‘TV Movie’ would be referred to as a play in the UK until well into the 80s – and the strengths and weaknesses of that kind of technique led to a particular kind of writing – dialogue-heavy, reliant on implication rather than action – which you can see in everything from sitcoms like Porridge or Steptoe & Son to drama like I, Claudius or Boys From The Blackstuff.
That kind of dialogue-driven writing is what I, personally, miss from TV today (and the lack of it is the main reason I don’t own a TV). Not just the ‘great TV dramatists’ like Bleasdale or Dennis Potter, but even people like Bob Holmes (who, when not writing for Doctor Who, was writing for everything from Blake’s Seven to Juliet Bravo pretty much interchangeably) would write like this as second nature, and it’s something that was lost in the late 80s.
(For those who are interested, you can see the precise moment this skill got lost if you compare series two and three of Red Dwarf. The first two series of Red Dwarf are the kind of TV show I’m talking about – quite close to Steptoe & Son In Space, a dialogue-driven sitcom based around two or three grey sets. From series three onwards, the show is closer to modern ‘cult TV’, and it slowly lost the wit and intelligence that had driven the first two series in favour of catchphrases and explosions).
That’s a skill that’s lost now – British TV has changed so much as a medium that one simply can’t imagine anything like the programmes that are routinely trotted out as ‘classics’ ever getting commissioned – but seeing that ‘theatrical’ look immediately made me, at least, feel far more at home with this episode than with the previous ones, and more willing to forgive its faults. And maybe, if they have to stick to low budgets, the writers will have to relearn the lost skills of TV writing.
There’s a lot more to say about this – we can now see running themes in the series (choice is the recurrent theme so far, and for the second week in the row the Doctor has done bugger-all, leaving Amy to save the world) and we can speculate about things being set up for future stories (in particular, one line makes me think that Amy is a robot), but those things will be more interesting to talk about when the series is completed, rather than a quarter of the way through.
At this point, I’m still not at all sure if I like this new series. But that’s a hell of a lot better than the absolute hatred I felt at this point in the first two Tennant series, so that’s an improvement. I’ll give it at least a few more episodes, but it still doesn’t feel like Doctor Who to me. But it doesn’t feel too awful for what it is, either…
A Big Finish A ‘Week’ 21 – The StagePlays
Well, I know it’s been a little more than a week… in fact some pedants might say it’s been closer to a month… since I did one of these (just as some might say that I still owe a proper Final Crisis summing up) but to make up for that I am going to review (albeit in less detail than usual) three newish Big Finish adventures.
Last year, Big Finish decided to produce audio adaptations of the three official Dalek stage plays that had been produced over the years, sticking as closely to the original scripts as possible and, where possible, using original cast members. As two of these were by Terrance DIcks, and the third by Terry Nation and David Whittaker, you would be forgiven for not going in with the highest expectations. But as you can currently download all three for twenty pounds, I thought I’d give them a go.
The first to be released, and by far the worst, is Dicks’ The Ultimate Adventure from 1989. This was originally staged with Jon Pertwee in the lead, with Colin Baker taking over in the later versions, and here Baker reprises the part, along with a companion with a rrreedeeculuz Frrrainch eczent. Unfortunately, the part doesn’t seem to sit right with him here – possibly because the show was originally written for Pertwee’s very different Doctor, or possibly because Dicks had never written for Baker (the sixth Doctor was the first one never to have a TV story written by Dicks (he never wrote for Hartnell, either, but did write the First Doctor in The Five Doctors)).
The story itself is a pantomime rather than a serious story, with several terrible songs (“Business Is Business” being the least-worst, but it should have been cut to roughly a fifth of its present length), a plot involving Daleks and Cybermen teaming up with mercenaries to take over the earth for what I’m sure must be good and adequate reasons, and the Doctor working for Mrs Thatcher. I imagine it must have been great fun for any young children in the audience at the time, but it’s inessential at best. Baker does his best, but this is quite weak stuff.
Doctor Who And The Daleks In Seven Keys To Doomsday, another DIcks story, this time from 1974, is much better. Written at a time when Dicks was the script editor for the show, it very much has the feel of late Pertwee about it (the original stage show was on during the gap between Pertwee’s last episode and Tom Baker’s first, and starts with a regeneration sequence), though both stage show and audio release starred Trevor Martin as the Doctor. If you listen to this and The Ultimate Adventure back-to-back you may get a sense of deja vu, as a couple of plot points (notably a companion getting into a Dalek travel-machine and using a handy ‘make your voice sound Dalekky’ machine that the Doctor just happens to have on him) are reused. But the difference is that here there *is* a plot. Not a hugely interesting or original one – the Doctor and his companions turn up on an alien world where they have to recover the Seven MacGuffins Of Doom before the Daleks can, aided by some locals (one of whom is a traitor!) and hindered by some spiderlike creatures called Clawrentulars.
It’s a thin plot, and its not helped by one of the companions (Jimmy, the other being called Jenny) being absolutely insufferable. Some of this is intentional – the Doctor gets exasperated at him on a regular basis – but some of it is down to actor Joe Thompson’s utterly horrible Mockney (it may be his real accent, in which case I feel sorry for the poor man, but I doubt it…). However, the plot suffices, and the play is made enjoyable by Trevor Martin’s frankly wonderful performance. At times he sounds scarily like Patrick Troughton, and while his Doctor is written like Pertwee’s, Martin plays it much more like the first two Doctors. He inhabits the role in a way that few others have (I’d put him behind Hartnell, Troughton and the Bakers, but ahead of Pertwee, Davison, McCoy and McGann). I’d be very interested in hearing more of Martin as the Doctor – maybe in Big Finish’s Unbound series?
The final one, though the first to be staged, is 1965′s Curse Of The Daleks by Terry Nation and David Whittaker. As you would expect from those writers at that date, the science is wrong, it’s laughably sexist, it makes no sense if you examine it for a moment – and it’s absolutely great. Even though this story doesn’t feature the Doctor at all, being the first of Nation’s increasingly desperate attempts to cash in on Dalekmania separately from the show, it has much of the feeling of the early series.
This is possibly explainable by the fact that while Terrance Dicks said he had to learn to write for the stage after having written for the TV, early-60s Doctor Who was essentially done as live, at a time when the medium was essentially broadcast theatre rather than the miniature cinema it later attempted to be (and Dicks’ vision of the Doctor was always more cinematic than his predecessors and successors on the original series). Nation in particular had started out as a writer of stage shows, and the character of Rocket Smith (a name which now makes me think of Computer Jones or Synthesiser Patel) has a lot of the speech rhythms of Tony Hancock, for whose stage show Nation was a writer before writing The Daleks.
Curse of the Daleks is also helped by the fact that, due to its writers’ deaths, it has not been updated for the audio release, so Nicholas Briggs reads the stage directions for purely visual events. This gives it the feel of a partly-dramatised audiobook of a Target novelisation, which again makes it feel more like ‘proper Doctor Who’ to me than the other stories which actually have the Doctor in them. As a return trip to Skaro, it’s well worth a listen, even though it’s just good pulpy adventure in an early-60′s Eagle manner.
None of these are up to even Big Finish’s slightly diminished recent standards, let alone their best work, but given that you can download all three for not much more than the cost of a single download of one of their other audios, they’re definitely worth a shot – even the worst has fun moments in it.
Linkblogging for 22/01/09
We’re going out tonight, so I don’t have time to do a review of Superman Beyond 3D until tomorrow (suffice to say I now know what I want on my gravestone, should I die). In the meantime, some quick links:
Pillock and the Mindless ones talk about how great I am. There’s some other stuff in there, about comics and libertarianism and Fukuyama, but I think what everyone will take away from it is that basically, I’m great.
Jon Morris does a comic of one day in his life. Featuring Daleks, ducks and Aquaman.
Fred Pohl’s started blogging. Here’s the story of his recent book, a collaboration with the late Arthur C Clarke.
Oskar Morgenstern’s account of Kurt Godel’s application for US citizenship. Includes Einstein’s cruel practical jokes.
And Mark Waid talks about how to do a pitch to a comic editor, and includes the sample pitch he wrote for an Aquaman series.
A Big Finish A Week 17 – The Genocide Machine
Sorry for the lack of posts this week so far. Not only am I staying with my in-laws, with only dial-up internet access on Windows XP, but a combination of jetlag and a sinus infection has made me basically unable to think for a few days (an unfortunate thing about my wife working at a hospital is that even though I can get rid of most infections the same day I get them, there’s always another one coming along…)
We did, however, get to visit a few friends on Tuesday, and Prince Mu-Chao very kindly lent me several old Target novelisations, so I’ve spent the last few days journeying back to my childhood, counting the number of synonyms for ‘said’ that Ian Marter can use in a single page, and generally engaging in intellectual comfort-eating (as well as physical comfort-eating – I always put on weight in the US…)
More RIP/FC stuff tonight/tomorrow (I’m not entirely sure of what day it is any more…) but for now, I’ll be looking (briefly) at another example of intellectual comfort-eating, Mike Tucker’s The Genocide Machine.
Previously when looking at Big Finish audios I have mostly concentrated on those that contained some actual original ideas – one of the things I like most about Big Finish’s Doctor Who range is that at least a third of them or so have genuinely strong central ideas, and both plot and characterisation are arranged around these ideas – Rob Shearman’s better work, for example, is far better summed up by discussing its themes than by recounting its plot. The Holy Terror isn’t ‘about’ a castle created to torture an old man, but rather is about the obligations of a creator to the creation. Other times the idea is a scientific (or pseudo-scientific) one, or a counterfactual history, or just a neat way of structuring a plot. Even when these ideas aren’t fully integrated (as in The Council Of Nicea, which appears to be written by someone who can’t take the ideas under discussion terribly seriously) they’re there.
One gets the impression that the favourite Doctor Who era of the Big Finish producers was probably Christopher Bidmead’s short tenure as script editor – while Bidmead’s stories didn’t always make as much sense as they should (there is a gaping hole in Logopolis for example – why use the Earth technology?) they’re about ideas – recursion, entropy and so on – and when they work (they didn’t always) they’re remarkably successful at getting those ideas across.
However, it took time for Big Finish to really find a unique voice, which probably didn’t happen for the first year, and in those first dozen or so stories, while some new things were done (the introduction of Evelyn being the most important), they were essentially pastiching the old show, either in terms of genre (a historical, a multi-Doctor story and so on) or by bringing back old villains like the Ice Warriors and the Daleks.
The Genocide Machine is one of the latter, a straightforward ‘old-school’ Doctor Who story, with even a title that you can imagine the announcer in Toby Hadoke’s Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf reading out – “And now, The Genocide Machine. In which there is a machine. And some genocide.” – the only surprising thing is that, given that it features the Daleks, it’s not called Resolution Of The Daleks or something.
But even here, in one of the most generic Doctor Who stories Big Finish have ever done (The Daleks attack a gigantic repository of all knowledge, which hides a deadly secret… that’s it) you can still see the audios starting to diverge from the TV programme.
The Big Finish audios are unique in my experience of spin-off media in that they manage to straddle a number of lines. They retain the feel of the original show for the most part ( odd exceptions like Master and Flip Flop aside – and note here that I’m not talking about the McGann audios, which are a slightly different beast) but still have their own unique identity. They also are generally of a far higher quality than the TV series itself was during the time of the Big Finish Doctors (my opinion of the Nathan-Turner era is higher than many people’s, but even I would argue that there was never a Davison story as good as The Kingmaker or Spare Parts, and the Sixth Doctor was never as good on TV as in Jubilee or Davros). Here we see the very first stirrings of this, in the decision to do the first Dalek story without Davros in it for 25 years.
I remember as a kid being quite surprised when reading novelisations of old Doctor Who stories to find that Davros didn’t always appear with the Daleks – I thought the whole point of a Dalek story was for the bit where the Doctor confronts Davros – and so Big Finish’s decision to go back to the stories of the first three Doctors, and tell most of their Dalek stories without Davros, was quite a brave one. It’s both a strength and a weakness in this case – without their distinctive appearance the Daleks could be Anymonster, and they could easily be replaced in this story with, say, the Cybermen, without any major plot changes. But on the other hand, they don’t look anything like as clunky in the imagination as they did in some of the TV adventures…
Everything’s done competently enough here – the story is a fun romp, with nothing more to it than that – but it’s nowhere near as good as Big Finish later became capable of, and still shows a conservatism that is perhaps understandable in a company that was just starting out and had to persuade the fanbase of its legitimacy.
Remember Remember The Fifth Of October
A lot of important things happened for the first time on the fifth of October. On the fifth of October 1962, the Beatles’ first single, Love Me Do, was first released. On the fifth of October 1969 the first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus was broadcast. On the fifth of October 1978 I was born (which was important to me, even if not so much to the rest of you reading this – almost as important as those other things). And on the fifth of October 1988, Daleks went upstairs for the first time.
Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor has a better reputation than Colin Baker’s among Who fandom, but a much worse one among the general public (those of the general public who care enough to remember the different Doctors) and in this case the general public are definitely the ones in the right. Baker was the better actor, and neither actor was blessed with the greatest scripts in the world. The reputation of McCoy’s Doctor rests more on the series of novels written about the character after the show was cancelled than it does on the episodes he was actually in.
McCoy was hired to replace Colin Baker, who was sacked under rather unpleasant circumstances (BBC management only agreeing to continue the show if they sacked their lead actor, and Baker refusing to return to film his regeneration scene) and his first series was an absolute embarassment. McCoy himself was not particularly happy with his early scripts (unsurprisingly, as they were drivel), which lumbered him with the worst companion in the history of the show (Melanie Bush, played by Bonnie Langford, a horribly miscast stunt ‘celebrity’ casting) and turned the Doctor into a buffoonish character who spoke in malapropisms and played the spoons at the slightest provocation, and the 1987 series is generally regarded as the absolute nadir of the show’s 26-year run (it was certainly bad enough that even as a nine-year-old I felt that my intelligence was being insulted).
For the next series, script editor Andrew Cartmel, in collaboration with various scriptwriters, came up with what later became known as ‘the Cartmel masterplan’ – a plan to make the Doctor darker and more mysterious over several years (a plan which was later transferred to the novels once the TV show was cancelled). For some reason Cartmel seemed to think that ‘darker’ meant ‘turn the Doctor into a manipulative sociopath’ and ‘more mysterious’ was ‘tell people every single detail of the Doctor’s past life, and every tedious detail of the internal politics and history of his home planet’, but as the ‘masterplan’ was meant to take several years, the early signs of these changes were mostly positive.
The twenty-fifth series of Doctor Who began with Remembrance Of The Daleks by Ben Aaronovitch (brother of the liar and hypocrite David Aaronovitch, who I actually once played on TV), which was by far the strongest thing that had been done in the show for many, many years. The story (about two warring factions of the Daleks searching for the MacGuffin of Omega, which had been planted by the Doctor, who was secretly doing a ‘don’t throw me into the briar patch’ trick to make the Daleks blow themselves and their home planet up) was a tight one, the humour, while still present, was much more subdued, and the story was genuinely scary at times.
Remembrance was also the first story to feature Sophie Aldred’s Ace (who had been introduced in the previous story) as the main character. Aldred is not a particularly good actor, and Ace sometimes gets some well dodgy lines (as she would no doubt put it), but the central idea of the character (a streetwise tomboy who likes playing with explosives and weaponry) was a refreshing change from the normal screamers – in this story, she gets to beat the shit out of a Dalek with a baseball bat, for example, which one can’t really imagine Jo Grant doing.
The effects were some of the best ever seen in the show (one or two very minor bits of dodgy CSO with the floating coffin, but the Dalek spaceship is done wonderfully, and the Daleks look sleeker and more menacing than ever before), although having the Daleks’ communication device being a plasma lamp ( £9.99 from Maplins – you too can have an interstellar communicator for Christmas! ) was frankly risible. It’s also structured well, especially the first episode, where what would normally be the big reveal (the fact of the Daleks being the villains) is thrown out casually, with the *real* big reveal (that the Daleks can float and are coming up the stairs after the Doctor) being the cliffhanger.
The story also tries to do something rather interesting with the central Nazi imagery of the Daleks, having the war between two Dalek factions essentially be a racial war, and having one faction ally themselves with a white supremacist group on Earth. These points are made too heavy-handedly (Ace looking disgustedly at a ‘no coloureds’ sign in the window of the B&B where she’s staying) and the production team seem far too proud of what were essentially just a couple of platitudes thrown in to the story, but I’m willing to give a lot more slack to people who are trying for something more interesting and falling short of their ambitions than I am to people who aren’t trying to push things at all. And, of course, even platitudinous anti-racist statements still need making, unfortunately.
This rather adolescent political point-making (“bad things are bad!”) is however symptomatic of the failures of the story – and it has some, despite being a well-above-average Doctor Who story. The new script editor and writer were both very young, rather nerdy men, and they were writing the kind of story that is liked by young, nerdy men. This involved an obsession with continuity minutiae.
The story involves a return to the junkyard where the TARDIS was first seen, and is set in 1963. This is OK (even though the junkyard had only been seen three years earlier in Attack Of The Cybermen, another overly-continuity-obsessed story) because the story involves the Doctor following up on a plan that had been put in motion by his first incarnation. But the Daleks’ base is the school where Ian and Barbara taught, for no real reason, and the story also references “the yeti in the underground, the zygon gambit, the loch ness monster”, the Dalek Invasion Of Earth, shows a TV set introducing an episode of “the new science fiction series, doc-” and references the Quatermass stories. While these references individually are fun little things, there is a feeling after a while of deliberately trying to keep out those who aren’t as familiar with the show’s history.
The next story, The Happiness Patrol, contained some heavy-handed allegory about Margaret Thatcher and had the Doctor fighting a robot Bertie Basset. The rest of this series veered between the poor and the average, which made it an improvement over the previous series, but this was the only *really good* story in the 25th series.
The next series was an improvement, but it came too late, both for me (my mum got sick of me wanting to watch Doctor Who when she wanted to watch Coronation Street, and I couldn’t in all honesty argue that the show was good enough to stop her turning over) and for the show, which was cancelled in 1989.
It’s a shame, because the show was quite clearly getting better after the horrible 25th series – writers like Aaronovitch and Marc Platt were doing work which, while having too much of the moody adolescent about it for my personal taste, was clearly a cut above the drivel churned out by people like Pip & Jane Baker. The show was essentially trying to go from Batman & Robin to the Tim Burton Batman and while my tastes are more toward Christopher Nolan or Adam West, I’ll take Tim Burton over Joel Schumaker any day.
While everyone has a favourite and least favourite Doctor or Doctors, I think a dispassionate examination of the series shows that it fluctuated in quality every few years, more or less irrespective of who was in charge. Every one of the first seven Doctors had an opportunity to shine, and every one of them had stories that were tasteless, forgettable or just plain nasty. But throughout the 26 years the original show ran (and the TV Movie and the audios – I’m less than convinced by nuWho, which seems to know the words but have forgotten the tune), the character of the Doctor – five parts Sherlock Holmes to one part each John Steed, Groucho Marx, Bugs Bunny and Mr Spock – shines through, one of the truly great fictional creations of all time.
Childe Peter To The Dark Tower Came – The Five Doctors
John Nathan-Turner, the producer of Doctor Who for most of its last decade, gets a bad rap from much of the fanbase. Sometimes this is deserved – some of the worst episodes of the show ever produced were done on his watch, and often at his instigation.
It is possibly going to appear over the next few days that I am joining in this chorus of disapproval, mostly due to my choices of episodes, so before I do that, I just want to say firstly that for every bad decision Nathan-Turner made he also made a good one; and secondly that Nathan-Turner’s Doctor Who is the version of the show I grew up on.
And that means a lot to me. I was a Doctor Who fan of the most obsessive kind before I was in primary school (the obsession dropped down between the ages of 12 and 25 or so, but much of my love for the programme dates from a very young age). I knew Nathan-Turner’s name written down before I knew how to pronounce it (I still half-consciously read it as Natthan (with a short a) in my head). Peter Davison and Colin Baker were ‘my’ Doctors in a way that Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker were to earlier generations. And my love as a child for that show – flawed as some of it undoubtedly was – inspired my passion for reading (give a Target novelisation to a five-year-old who doesn’t know he’s not meant to be able to read it and you’ll be surprised how quickly his vocabulary expands…), fantastic fiction, eccentric characters in the Sherlock Holmes tradition, non-violent solutions to problems, physics, evolutionary biology, linguistics (specifically a bit in the novelisation of State Of Decay where the Doctor explains to Romana about consonantal shift), logic… while I am actually nothing like the Doctor (in real life I am more like the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons, but without the social graces and physical attractiveness) , the idealised self-image I have comes from wishing to emulate the Doctor as a child.
So whatever Nathan-Turner’s faults as a producer (and how much he can be blamed for the problems the show had during his tenure is definitely open to question) his years on the show did make at least one small child extraordinarily happy, and that’s something to keep in mind…
The Five Doctors, the show’s twentieth-anniversary special, is the first episode I have a conscious memory of watching when it was broadcast, a little over a month after my fifth birthday (though I’d definitely seen earlier episodes – it’s just no others remain in my memory). I remember being absolutely thrilled – Daleks! Cybermen! K-9! The Master! All the old Doctors who I’d only heard about! – and for years later I could remember the black triangle getting the Doctors, and Peter Davison collapsing, and a couple of other moments, even though I didn’t have a clue what the plot had been.
That is, of course, because there wasn’t one – or at least not one to speak of. While the tenth anniversary show, The Three Doctors, had had a simple brief – do a story with all three Doctors in it – The Five Doctors had to do more – it had to ‘celebrate’ the show by featuring as many old villains and companions as possible, as well as all five Doctors to date. The need to do this made one scriptwriter, Robert Holmes, quit early in the process – Holmes simply couldn’t come up with a coherent story featuring everything that the production team decided was necessary for the show. So Terrance Dicks – another former Who script editor, and at the time a freelance writer who made his living from novelising the TV show (mostly just adding the words ‘he said’ to the scripts if my memory of his books is correct – he was not someone who was known for labouring over his prose in an effort to turn out an exquisitely memorable phrase if instead he could just type “The Dalek shot the prisoner, who screamed and died”) took on the job.
Dicks was actually even more insistent that the production feature *everything* than the production staff themselves were – he had to do a story with Time Lords, the Master and Cybermen because that’s what Nathan-Turner and Eric Saward (the script editor) wanted, but he also insisted that it had to feature at least one Dalek (who gets killed in a most perfunctory manner after about ninety seconds of screen time), K-9 (who gets about two lines) and the Yeti (who most people don’t even notice).
Dicks was entirely right about this, incidentally, from the point of view of absolutely captivating small children, but it gives the story the same flavour as much of nuWho – a bunch of exciting moments strung together by something pretending to be a plot but without any real coherence.
Of course, it can’t have helped that Dicks had to do a story about Five Doctors when he only had three available. The absence of William Hartnell, who had died years earlier, was expected, and they got round it by casting Richard Hurndall to play his part (Hurndall did a passable impersonation of Hartnell, who hadn’t been seen on TV for many years, though the effectiveness of it was hampered by a little pre-credit snippet of Hartnell reminding people what he actually looked and sounded like). What hadn’t been expected, though, was for Tom Baker to turn the story down (mostly because he’d left the show less than two years earlier, but also because he didn’t get on very well at the time with Nathan-Turner). This absence was eventually also covered – by using some footage from the unaired Douglas Adams story Shada (with much better dialogue than the rest of the show) and saying that Baker’s Doctor was caught in a time distortion – but it meant that the script needed extensive rewriting.
Parts of the show work extremely well – especially the interplay between Troughton’s Doctor and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (with Troughton ad-libbing furiously most of the time, coming out with stuff about the Terrible Zodin and beasts that used to hop like kangaroos), and the show comes alive in the last few minutes, when all the Doctors are brought together at last (Nathan-Turner thought there’d be ego problems, and so made sure they only had one day of filming together) – the performers get over a mediocre script and spark wonderfully off each other, in a way that makes you wish just for an hour and a half of Davison, Troughton and Pertwee trapped in the TARDIS rather than this disjointed mess.
Most of the classic Doctors could rise above a bad script with a great performance, and Terrance DIcks was familiar enough with the characters to provide them with opportunities to do that, and the script contains several pretty good lines (“A man is the sum of his memories, you know… a Time Lord even more so”) – although several of the best were inserted by the actors. It was great fun for kids at the time, and it has a lot of nostalgia value – I’ve probably watched it more than any other episode, because if you don’t concentrate and just look up for the good bits it can deliver a great rush of childhood affection for the various characters – but it’s just a disposable children’s romp, not something that should be given a ‘twenty-fifth anniversary special edition’ DVD release on two discs with two different edits of the show and three different commentaries.
Destiny Of The Daleks – Or Douglas Adams Was No Robert Holmes
While most people think of Doctor Who‘s different eras in terms of the different actors playing the Doctor – and this is how I’ve broken up my Doctor Who week this week – the show went through far more radical changes when the production team changed, especially the producer/script editor combination. Those two between them would have far more control over the feel of the show than any star could – even Tom Baker, who dominated the show for seven years.
Baker’s tenure as the Doctor was split into three very different eras. His first three years, with Philip Hinchcliffe producing and Robert Holmes as script editor, are widely regarded among the show’s fanbase as the best the series ever had – combining black humour with grand guignol violence, occasionally experimental storytelling, and ‘homages’ to classic adventure fiction from Frankenstein to Fu Manchu. The next few years, which were dominated by producer Graham Williams, were pure pantomime, veering at times closer to the feel of the 1960s Batman series than anything else (they were actually tremendous fun at times, and gained the show its highest ratings). And his final year, after John Nathan-Turner took over as producer, was an attempt to do gothic-tinged ‘mature’ SF, with an air of seriousness and decay over the show.
Baker is the most fondly-remembered of all the Doctors – and on a good day he’s my favourite – and i suspect part of the reason for this is the amount of inventiveness in the show during his period. In the seven years he was the Doctor, he only did two Dalek stories and one Cyberman one (and two of those three were in his first year and had been commissioned by the outgoing team) – the vast majority of his stories were one-off stories featuring new antagonists.
However, Baker’s two Dalek stories do provide a very good baseline for comparison between the relevant production teams. Both were nominally written by Terry Nation. Both were set on the planet of Skaro, featured Tom Baker as the Doctor, featured both Davros and the Daleks, and centred on a stalemated war in which the Doctor ends up embroiled. So comparing the two should put the differences between production teams into sharp relief.
The reason for the similarities is, of course, Terry Nation. Nation was one of the luckiest men ever to have lived – a hack writer who was lucky enough to have the monsters in his script for a new children’s TV show designed by Raymond Cusick with an inventive voice treatment by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, this meant that he had control over all the rights to the Daleks, and could essentially do whatever he wanted.
What he wanted, it seemed, was to essentially churn out the same script every time. Nation had half a dozen… motifs is probably not the best word for them… that he re-used in pretty much every single script he ever wrote. Nazis are bad; diseases that can destroy all life are also bad. Nuclear war, too, is bad. And women sometimes fall over and hurt their ankle. His first couple of Dalek scripts were genuinely good examples of their kind. The rest… weren’t.
Every year or two, Nation would turn in a four- or six-part story featuring the Daleks, usually with a very simple hook (“the one where the Daleks’ guns don’t work”) and featuring all his usual topics, always in the form of a very skimpy first draft, and it would be left to the script editor at the time to turn it into something watchable.
At the time of Tom Baker’s first series, the previous producer and script editor (Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks) had become quite sick of Nation doing this, and had required him to actually hand in a *new* story, which was then passed on to the incoming team of producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes to turn into Genesis Of The Daleks. It still featured every one of Nation’s usual themes, but it had a new plot (telling of the creation of the Daleks), and featured a very strong central character in Davros, the Kaled scientist who created the Daleks – a half-Mengele, half-Strangelove megalomaniac.
How much of the final script Nation can take credit for, and how much is the work of Dicks (who was the script editor most concerned with tight plotting and shared Nation’s obsession with Naziesque villains), Holmes (whose flair for dialogue, wild imagination, and taste for Gothic melodrama pervade the show) and actors Tom Baker and Michael Wisher (who apparently used to sit in the studio canteen together and rework their dialogue into a more pseudo-Shakesperean form) is unclear, but either way, Genesis managed to be a minor masterpiece – overlong and unnecessarily padded, but with many fine moments and some classic ideas.
Baker wouldn’t appear in another Dalek story until 1979 – Hinchcliffe and Holmes disliked the Daleks and didn’t want to rely on old monsters – and when he did, it was in the first story script-edited by a young writer called Douglas Adams. The story in this case was a rehashing of every single cliche Nation plot element, including all the ones mentioned above, with the addition of robotic rivals in a war with the Daleks (an idea Nation had first used in 1964). Apparently large chunks are *also* recycled from Nation’s then-current TV series Blake’s Seven, but having never seen the episodes in question I can’t really comment on that.
However, while Nation is credited as writer, and the plot is certainly Nation-by-numbers, he appears to have had little to do with the final script (as director Ken Grieve puts it on the DVD commentary “He didn’t quite get around to writing the dialogue”), which seems to be mostly the work of Adams and producer Graham Williams, with some contributions by Grieve. The result is a mess – while Adams was one of the finest comic dialogue writers of his generation, he couldn’t really do plot, as anyone who’s read much of his work knows. So what we get is a series of great one-liners, and some wonderful characterisation, laid like a cheap coat of paint on a half-baked plot that they just don’t fit
The performances of the leads help to sell the story – Baker is always watchable, just for the sheer joy he brings to the performance, and he also had the most consistently interesting set of companions (Sarah Jane and Leela both having had actual interesting personalities), but Romana , a fellow Time Lord and the Doctor’s intellectual equal, is the strongest of the lot. This story features the introduction of the second Romana, in a regeneration scene written by Adams, and the chemistry between Lalla Ward, the actress playing her, and Baker is apparent straight away (the two later married briefly, but divorced soon afterwards, and she is currently married to the egregious Richard Dawkins). Aided by some really strong dialogue, the two rise above the workmanlike performances of the rest of the cast (why David Gooderson, the second actor to play Davros, tried to impersonate Michael Wisher but with an added faint Scottish accent, is a question for the ages) and the frankly appaling effects (the Daleks are *very* clearly made of painted wood in this one, and on several occasions the Doctor has to drag Davros about) to make this into a fun romp, and a great piece of children’s TV, but something that really doesn’t even stand up to the slightest scrutiny.
Adams would do better work for the show (City Of Death in the same series, which he co-wrote with Williams, is generally regarded as one of the best stories the show ever had, though I’m not hugely impressed with it myself) but Destiny Of The Daleks shows up the difference between a good script editor and a good writer who was himself often in *need* of an editor – Adams was in the wrong job, and left after only one series.
Destiny Of The Daleks is available on a single DVD, but if you want to watch it you’re best off buying the Davros box set (which you can get for £40 from Big Finish’s website), which includes all four of Davros’ other TV appearances (all of which are better than this one) and all the audio adventures of the character (including the superb Davros and the pretty good The Juggernauts). In that context, it’s a nice little bonus, and an enjoyable brainless way to spend an hour and a half. But taken on its own merits, it’s just what it was meant to be – disposable entertainment that was never meant to be seen again after a one-off broadcast in 1979.
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