Shada, by Gareth Roberts and Douglas Adams
(Continuing my policy of reviewing every new book I buy and read, I’m crossposting this to Amazon UK)
It’s difficult to know how much information to give in a review of Shada, the latest in the BBC’s line of Doctor Who prestige hardbacks, because it’s aimed at at least three different, though overlapping, audiences – Doctor Who fans, Douglas Adams fans, and people who would, when in a bookshop, be interested in a book about Doctor Who if it’s got the name of someone they recognise on the cover but wouldn’t otherwise consider themselves a fan. I am, of course, a member of both the first two groups.
In the late 1970s, Douglas Adams (who almost everyone reading this will know was to become the best-selling author of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and Dirk Gently series before dying too young) wrote three scripts for Doctor Who, as well as script-editing the TV series for a year. The first of these, The Pirate Planet, is a passable romp, while the second, City Of Death, is often regarded as the single best story the TV show ever did. Shada was the third, and was meant to be broadcast at the end of the series Adams script-edited, but filming was stopped two-thirds of the way through because of strike action, and the story was never completed.
It’s not quite as lost as the publicity material around this book suggests – a VHS release about twenty years ago, now long-deleted, with Tom Baker doing linking narration, and a remake as a cartoon for the BBC website featuring eighth Doctor Paul McGann (the soundtrack CD of which is available from Big Finish for five pounds, and is well worth getting) mean that many of us have experienced this story in a relatively complete form already. However, it is true that it was never completed in the way Adams intended – and it’s also true that Adams was unhappy with his scripts and thought they needed more polishing – so it’s a perfect candidate for novelisation.
Gareth Roberts, the author of the book, will be less familiar than Adams by a long way, but is a reasonable choice for the job. I’m not a huge fan of Roberts’ work, but he’s what is generally called a safe pair of hands. He’s written for Doctor Who on TV, audio dramas, novels and comics before, including a novel (The Well-Mannered War) featuring the Fourth Doctor, who appears here, and his usual style is a sort of whimsical mildly parodic SF that is clearly influenced by Adams.
Roberts is nowhere near the writer that Adams was, but he doesn’t need to be for this. What he *is* good at is functional storytelling, and structure, two things that were among Adams’ weaker points. So while he keeps all the plot beats and important scenes from Adams’ script, and at least 90% of Adams’ dialogue, he fixes at least one big plot hole, completes a sub-plot that Adams seemed to start and then give up on, and provides a lot of back-story and character motivation.
For the most part, Roberts’ inventions fit perfectly with the Adams material, to the point where I’d challenge anyone unfamiliar with the source material to say what came from where. And it’s still recognisably the same story – the story of Skagra trying to turn the entire universe into his own mind in a Darkseid-like fashion, and of his search for the ancient Time Lord criminal Salyavin, and how the Doctor gets involved with this when visiting his old friend Professor Chronotis at St Cedd’s College, Cambridge. Reading it at times does feel spookily like reading a ‘new’ late-period Adams book – like a third Dirk Gently novel. (The first Dirk Gently novel, of course, used some characters and dialogue from Shada, along with the basic plot of City Of Death).
There are a couple of places where it goes wrong, though. For the most part, Roberts’ prose is functional, but he occasionally tries to ape Adams’ style, with predictably poor results. Adams’ tics are very easy to emulate, the sensibility behind them much less so – Roberts actually feels far more like Adams when he’s not copying his prose style but just telling Adams’ story.
Also, the jokes Roberts adds in the descriptive passages are nowhere near up to the standard of those in Adams’ dialogue, and often descend into an almost Peter Kay like “Remember the late 1970s? Things were slightly different then, weren’t they? What’s that all about?”. The occasional pun (the status quo one stands out in the memory as particularly bad) seems to be put in more because this is ‘a Douglas Adams book’ and therefore has to be funny, rather than because it makes any kind of artistic sense.
Even less excusable are the occasional continuity references, thrown in merely in order that people like myself will recognise them – “Wow, the Fourth Doctor mentioned the Rani!” There are quite a few knowing winks to the status of Doctor Who as a national institution, as well, which quite frankly just feel smug (and a rather more forgivable single one acting as a tribute to Adams).
But this is, fundamentally, nit-picking. What we have here is the best actual story Douglas Adams ever wrote for Doctor Who, adapted as well as one could reasonably expect. If it’s not as funny, clever, or exciting as it thinks it is, it’s still funnier, cleverer and more exciting than it has any right to be given its tortured genesis.
If Amazon allowed half-stars in reviews I’d probably give this three and a half, because it’s not going to change anyone’s life or make anyone think differently about the world. But it’s a very pleasant way to spend a few hours, and that’s still worth a lot, so I’ll round up to four.
6: Klarion
This essay appears in a revised form in my book An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers. Paperback, Hardback, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), other ebook formats
Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide the gate, and broad the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.
Because strait the gate, and narrow the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
Matthew 7:13 – 7:14 (King James version)
Note – the paragraphs of this essay before the first illustration contain discussions of stories which deal with abortion, in a quite unpleasant way. If you have strong feelings on this subject or are otherwise likely to be ‘triggered’ by this, please skip to the illustration. You should be able to pick up from there.
In 1975, Harlan Ellison wrote a short story called Croatoan. It came shortly after the Roe v Wade court decision which legalised abortion in the USA, and was part of a minor wave of anti-abortion Science Fiction that came out around that time – for years I confused it with Philip K Dick’s much better-written (and less nasty, though more misogynist) The Pre-Persons from 1974. Ellison, with his customary intellectual cowardice, said his story was neither pro- nor anti-abortion (possibly because of Dick’s experience, when he received a ton of hate mail, most notably from the feminist academic and SF writer Joanna Russ) but, well…
The plot of the story is that our narrator’s girlfriend has had an abortion. And the narrator flushes the aborted foetus down the toilet (apparently in Ellison’s world, it is common practice for people to be given the foetus after an abortion). His girlfriend, being a hysterical emotional woman, not a manly man like Harlan Ellison, starts screaming at him to go down into the sewer and get the foetus, so the narrator agrees.
He travels into the sewers of New York, where he finds ‘Croatoan’ written on the wall, a la the Roanoke colony. He also finds that the urban legend about crocodiles (which have been flushed down the toilet once they became bigger than babies) living in the sewers is true – but they’re pets. They’re being ridden by the aborted foetuses that get flushed down the toilet. It ends:
“I am the one they have been looking for all along…They call me father.”
Ellison claimed this was about ‘parental responsibility’, and to be fair it does seem to be about the search for a father-figure, especially in the flashbacks, but it’s really just a nasty little piece of grand guignol, albeit an effective one.
Missing or dead fathers appear all over Seven Soldiers, of course – Zatanna’s father, Klarion’s father, Larry Marcus, but also the missing or absent Gods that appear throughout the text. And one of the great works of English literature is about the search for God-the-father, even as it’s about a father who abandons his own child.
The man therefore read it, and looking upon Evangelist very carefully, said, Whither must I fly? Then said Evangelist, pointing with his finger over a very wide field, Do you see yonder wicket-gate? The man said, No. Then said the other, Do you see yonder shining light? He said, I think I do. Then said Evangelist, Keep that light in your eye, and go up directly thereto: so shalt thou see the gate; at which, when thou knockest, it shall be told thee what thou shalt do.
The Pilgrim’s Progress From This World To That Which Is To Come, John Bunyan
Like most of the symbolism in Seven Soldiers, the ‘wicket gate’ here has at least two meanings – one that will be noticed by ‘geeks’ of the type who read superhero comics, and one that will be noticed by others. I’ll talk about the first one first.
In the book Life, the Universe, and Everything, by Douglas Adams (part of the famous Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy series), the English game of cricket turns out to be a folk-memory of an evil, genocidal race who come from the planet Krikkit. In order to prevent the Krikkitmen from escaping, they are locked away from the rest of the universe, unable to see the stars in the sky, in a bubble of slow time. While time passes by for the rest of the universe, they are stuck in the past, and unable to know about the rest of the universe, unless they can open the Wikkit Gate and escape.
Like most of Adams’ jokes, this works on a couple of levels. Most obviously, it’s a reference to the game of cricket, and the wickets that are used in that game. But it’s also a nodding acknowledgement to one of Adams’ influences.
Adams was, before becoming the writer of the Doctor Who serials The Pirate Planet, City Of Death and Shada (as well as some other, more minor, works), a student of English Literature at Cambridge, and his work often features obscure literary references. In particular, the main character of the Hitch-Hiker’s series is named after a 17th century writer of Puritan tracts.
Arthur Dent was the author of The Plain Man’s Pathway To Heaven, Wherein Every Man May Clearly See Whether He Shall Be Saved Or Damned, Set Forth Dialogue-Wise, For The Better Understanding Of The Simple, a catchily-titled Puritan tract. A cheery work, it has chapters such as “On Man’s Corruption And Misery”, “On Regeneration”, “On Contempt Of The Gospel” and “On Whoredom And Adultery” (the latter subdivided into “whoredom and the dangers thereof”, “excuses of whoredom”, “the fearful effects of whoredom”, “the punishment of whoredom”, “the causes of whoredom” and “remedies against whoredom”).
Written as a conversation between two rather earnest Calvinists (who are later joined by an atheist and someone who is ignorant of religion) the book sets out the basic theology of the puritans:
Phil. What reason is there that we should be thus punished for another man’s offence?
Theol. Because we were then all in him, and are now all of him: That is we are so descended out of his loins that of him we have not only received our natural and corrupt bodies, but also by propagation have inherited his foul corruptions, as it were by hereditary right.
Phil. But forasmuch as some have dreamed that Adam by his fall hurt himself only, and not his posterity, and that we have his corruption derived into us by imitation, and not by propagation; therefore I pray you shew this more plainly.
Theol. Even as great personages, by committing treason, do not only hurt themselves, but also stain their blood, and disgrace their posterity, for the children of such nobles are disinherited, whose blood is attainted, til they be restored again by act of parliament; even so, our blood being attainted by Adam’s transgression, we can inherit nothing of right, til we be restored by Christ.
(I find that this stuff becomes more readable if you substitute the names Vladimir and Estragon for Phil. and Theol.)
At the time, Dent’s book was a massive success, selling in excess of a hundred thousand copies – which in the largely illiterate society of the early Stuart monarchs was a huge number (and indeed would be a spectacular result for any book in the largely-illiterate society of the late Windsor monarchs). But these days it’s best known for its effect on one reader. Along with one other book, it made up the dowry of John Bunyan’s first wife (whose name history does not record) and became one of the principal influences of a book that influenced both Adams and, more to the point of this essay, Grant Morrison.
The Pilgrim’s Progress From This World To That Which Is To Come by John Bunyan is one of the great works of English literature. Bunyan was a Baptist, one of the many religious sects which tend to be lumped in under the name of ‘Puritanism’ (along with the Quakers, the Presbyterians, the Arian revivalists, the various Calvinist groups and others). These groups were actually more different than they were similar, but all were strongly opposed both to Catholicism and to what they saw as elements of ‘Popery’ within the established Church. Most also valued the conscience of the individual over any authority – at least as long as they were not the ones in authority.
For they eat the bread of wickedness, and drink the wine of violence.
But the path of the just as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.
The way of the wicked as darkness: they know not at what they stumble.Proverbs 4:17 – 4:19 (King James version)
In The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan tries to set out his view of how to get to Heaven, which is represented in his allegory as a Celestial City.The story tells of a man called Christian, who leaves his wife and children to travel to the Celestial City and get eternal life, but who is beset by such characters as Mr Worldly Wiseman, Adam The First, Giant Despair and Ignorance. To get to the Celestial City one has to travel through the Slough Of Despond, Vanity Fair and the Valley Of The Shadow Of Death.
After various travels through elements representing aspects of the Old Testament and Jewish Law, Christian finally reaches the Wicket Gate (a type of small gate set into a wall), through which one has to pass in order to get on the Straight And Narrow Path that takes one to the Celestial City. This Wicket Gate is opened by Goodwill, a fairly obvious representation of Jesus.
Having to stay on a straight and narrow path is, of course, one of the morals one picks up from fairy tales. As Chesterton points out in The Ethics Of Elfland (an essay everyone should read, in which he manages somehow to juggle Forteanism, anti-science Romanticism, literary criticism, arguments for Liberalism and democracy, and Catholic apologism), “In fairyland there had been a real law; a law that could be broken, for the definition of a law is something that can be broken.”, contrasting it to what he considers the false laws of science:
The man of science says, “Cut the stalk, and the apple will fall”; but he says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up to the other. The witch in the fairy tale says, “Blow the horn, and the ogre’s castle will fall”; but she does not say it as if it were something in which the effect obviously arose out of the cause.
We may come back to this fairy-tale lack of cause and effect, and arbitrary punishment, later. The point is that in Bunyan, like in Little Red Riding Hood, straying off the path leads to certain doom.
“Guide us along the Straight Way. The way of those whom You have bestowed Your Grace. Not of those who earn Your anger, nor of those who go astray.” (Qur’an, 1:5-7)
While it’s obviously inspired by other works of Christian art (notably the Lyke Wake Dirge), most of Pilgrim’s Progress’ influence has been on purely secular works – notably in Slaughterhouse Five or The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy or Gulliver’s Travels (and is it just me or is it striking that *such* a Christian book would be so influential on books with such a nihilistic worldview as those three?), but also on many fairy-tales and superhero comics.
Grant Morrison has referenced Pilgrim’s Progress many times, of course – it’s a constant theme throughout Seven Soldiers, but it’s also an obvious inspiration for the Limbo scenes in Animal Man. He’s also described Seaguy (possibly his most interesting recent work other than Seven Soldiers, and certainly his most personal), with its conflicts with ‘the Anti-Dad’ and chess games with Death, as “a sci-fi Pilgrim’s Progress”.
But I don’t think it’s just Morrison. The whole ethos and aesthetic of superhero comics fits perfectly with Bunyan. We have worlds with strictly demarcated good and evil, with a central character who goes through immense struggles, sometimes loses his (and it almost always is a he) way, and eventually overcomes it all with the help of his allies. So far so Joseph Campbell.
But the need to pitch the storytelling at small children in the early years of the genre has meant that all the characters in comics could come out of Bunyan virtually unchanged. One can easily imagine Christian having to deal with The Joker or The Riddler or Two-Face or Doctor Psycho or Mister Mind, and just as easily imagine him being aided by Captain Marvel or Superman.
Of course the king of this kind of naming, as of so much else, was Jack Kirby, the creator of Klarion (and the Guardian and Mister Miracle). His Fourth World stories, in which the good gods of New Genesis like Lightray and Highfather battle the evil gods of Apokolips like Darkseid and Desaad, are the ultimate in bludgeoning obviousness – but manage to go so far in that direction that they get immense power by that very obviousness.
Character names in superhero comics, for the most part, are simple labels – characters in superhero universes operate by a principle of nominative determinacy, so if you’re born Edward Nigma you’re going to end up having a supervillain career based on riddles and there’s nothing you can really do about it. The names of characters in superhero comics function as little more than labels saying ‘goodie’ and ‘baddie’.
Almost five thousand years ago, there were pilgrims walking to the Celestial City, as these as these two honest persons are; and Beelzebub, Apollyon, and Legion, with their companions seeing that the path of the pilgrims lay through this town of Vanity, set up a fair; a fair where they would see all sorts of vanity, and it should last all the year long. Therefore at this fair are all such things sold as houses, lands, trades, places, honors, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not.
The Pilgrim’s Progress From This World To That Which Is To Come, John Bunyan
You may here be reminded of Sir Justyn being followed by the Monster Guilt in Shining Knight. Morrison has spun a much, much denser referential-symbolic web here than even the most dilligent of annotators have realised, and just because Klarion (with its references to the wicket gate, trip to Vanity Fair, and subtitle for issue one) is the only miniseries within Seven Soldiers to have direct references to Pilgrim’s Progress, doesn’t mean its influence doesn’t permeate everything.
I have argued before (in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! ) that Morrison is a modernist at heart, and while I hadn’t realised the connection until relatively recently [FOOTNOTE I am here indebted to Space, Time And The Pilgrimage In Modern Literature by K.M. Scheel, a PhD dissertation which can be found at http://ir.lib.sfu.ca/retrieve/2113/etd1745.pdf, which should be read by anyone who finds this and the next few essays interesting.], one of the distinctions between Modernism and the more conventional narratives that preceded it (and still dominate comics and the cinema) is that Modernism moved away from quest narratives (the type of narrative that tends to follow the Hero’s Journey of Joseph Campbell) and toward pilgrimage narratives.
To quote Scheel:
A pilgrimage is substantially different from a quest, offering a radically altered worldview…As mentioned earlier, pilgrimages are undertaken as a form of penance, as a devotion, to give thanks, to appeal for healing, or to re-enact a religious event. Where the hero of a quest is traditionally a warrior aristocrat who displays excellence in fulfilment of some idealized behaviour, pilgrims may be foolish, confused and uncertain of their identity…Further, while the quest is well characterized as a masculine enterprise, pilgrims are neither necessarily male, nor heroic. While knights traveled in a hierarchical organization, no class was excluded from the pilgrimage… the pilgrims of The Canterbury Tales include among their professions, a knight, religious men and women, tradesmen, a doctor, the Wife of Bath, and a cook, to name a few. The quest is an individualistic enterprise – only one man can be the hero – but pilgrims often traveled together for protection, and, as we see in The Canterbury Tales, for the joy of companionship on what could be a long and tedious journey.
Modernism sees a turn away from quest narratives and toward a parody of the form – Ulysses recasts Odysseus as an advertising salesman from Dublin, The Waste Land has been described as ‘a Grail narrative with no Grail’, and as Eliot realised, Grail narratives with no Grail or hero come very close to pilgrimage narratives. Which is why The Waste Land starts:
April is the cruelest month,
breeding Lilacs out of the dead land,
mixing Memory and desire,
stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
in clear homage to the start of the Canterbury Tales:
Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
In many ways Seven Soldiers is to superhero comics as The Waste Land is to epic poetry – the same dense levels of reference, the same multiple viewpoints – and while its stories might present themselves in the quest narrative format, reading them one can clearly see that rather than questing for an external goal, almost every character is either trying to change something about themselves (especially obvious in Seven Soldiers #0, where all the characters get themselves killed for no better reason than that they’re bored with the lives they’re leading) or has no goal at all. They journey for the sake of the journey, or because it’s their job, not because they are in search of a goal.
Partly this is astute commercial sense on Morrison’s part. The idea was to reinvent these characters and allow them to become serialised comics, and having the characters have a clear objective means that objective can be fulfilled – *must* be fulfilled for a satisfactory heroic quest narrative – and so having the goal of defeating the Sheeda being essentially incidental to the characters’ lives is a way of keeping each character’s story open.
But there’s also an aesthetic reason. The quest narrative is essentially linear – time based – this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens, and then the goodies win. The pilgrimage, on the other hand, is a space-based form – it’s about the places visited. The goal, such as it is, is merely to exist in one place at at least one moment in time. Given the way Morrison plays with time and space, taking perspectives outside time, implying an essentially cyclical time (the Sheeda feeding on the past from the future, the many falls of Camelot) and showing the same events happening over and again – and given that Seven Soldiers is so rooted in place, in a New York that both is and isn’t our New York (the “Cinderella city”), the pilgrimage narrative – and the choice of Pilgrim’s Progress as a source of inspiration – is far more appropriate than it may at first appear.
The Pilgrim’s Progress itself, of course, is in some ways closer to the Hero’s Journey than to the pilgrimage narratives, at least in its first part. But where a Hero’s Journey story would end with the hero having reached his destination, there is a whole second book of Pilgrim’s Progress in which Christian’s wife, Christiana, her neighbour, Mercy, Christian and Christiana’s four sons, and the four wives they pick up along the way all also decide to go to the Celestial City too. Bunyan wrote this second part – which unfortunately is not as well-known as the first part – in order to show that women could be pilgrims just as much as men could.
And this – carrying on after what would normally be the ‘end’, having multiple equally important characters of multiple genders – is a characteristic of both Modernism and the Pilgrimage narrative, but emphatically not of the Quest form. The Lord Of The Rings doesn’t suddenly switch half-way through to being about Mrs Baggins and the four little(r) Baggins going to Mordor because Frodo accidentally left a second ring at home. The quest narrative is about how the world is fundamentally right except for one thing that needs fixing, with one man who can fix it. For all its literal-mindedness, Bunyan’s work doesn’t make that obvious a mistake. Neither does Morrison.
Bunyan’s work was a fundamentally revolutionary one – as Bernard Shaw pointed out, all his representations of sin were in the form of the rich, while his good characters were uniformly poor, and Puritanism was bound up tightly with the revolutionary politics of the time. This is something William Blake responded to, more than a century later, when he provided his famous illustrations to Pilgrim’s Progress.
Blake is often talked about as a Romantic, but really he’s a man of the seventeenth century, born a century too late. His reaction against science is not, as that of for example Keats (one of the greatest cretins in English literature), born out of a desire to return to a simpler Golden Age, but out of a religious radicalism that is of a piece with Bunyan and Milton.
Which is why it’s a shame he was so blinkered when it came to Newton.
But we’ll come to that when I write on Frankenstein.
O see ye not yon narrow road,
So thick beset wi’ thorns and briers?
That is the Path of Righteousness,
Though after it but few inquires.
And see ye not yon braid, braid road,
That lies across the lily leven?
That is the Path of Wickedness,
Though some call it the Road to Heaven.
Comic issues Klarion #1-4
Artist Frazer Irving
Other credits Pat Brosseau (letters), Harvey Richards (asst editor), Peter Tomasi (editor)
Connected Morrison works Marvel Boy has some of Klarion’s flavour, while he returns to big-hatted stern-looking Puritans drawn by Frazer Irving in Return Of Bruce Wayne.
Look Out For Missing fathers, parasitism on the work of previous generations, missing gods.
Still to come in Seven Soldiers More stuff inspired by 17th century religious literature!
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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