Following on from my post about the Davison era, here are my impressions of the delights (and otherwise) of Peter's debut series in 1982.
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| 'Knocked back into time and space like a straight six into the pavilion!' (Image copyright: BBC) |
1981 was a
good time to be young. I was having the time of my life in the Sixth Form and
The Skids, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes and The Stranglers were
all on fire musically.
The concept
of the 1980s as they they’re popularly known today – get rich quick in shoulder
pads – hadn’t really kicked in. There was a curious dichotomy emerging in
popular culture; on the one had it eulogised a mythical British golden age in
the TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead
Revisted and the film Chariots of
Fire; on the other, particularly musically, styles forged ahead with the
New Romantics and the new genre of pop video, notably Bowie’s
‘Ashes to Ashes’.
The new Doctor Who looked like it was going to
be somewhere inbetween. I was inordinately excited by the Peter Davison’s photo
call in his bright new costume – cricket stumps on the TARDIS! – but a bit disappointed
when his appearance on a float at London’s Lord Mayor’s Show revealed the continuation of the
question mark branding that screamed costume-rather-than-clothes in Season 18. No
tie, either; I’d have gone with a Marylebone Cricket Club number which would
have added that extra touch of class.
January 1982
seemed ages away then, but a lively Panopticon 1981 convention, in which just
about everyone from the Doctor Who production
office turned up, together with Anthony Ainley, Janet Fielding, Sarah Sutton
and Matthew Waterhouse, helped buoy things along. I’d drawn a cover for the
fanzine Wheel in Space featuring a
‘Tomb’ Cyberman and I remember the new script editor, Eric Saward, commenting
‘So, you like Cybermen, then?’ Funny how that turned out…
Castrovalva
If Doctor Who had still had individual
story titles in 1982, it would have been even more obvious that ‘Logopolis’ and
‘Castrovalva’ are one continuing story. If that was the case, the change of
locations via the TARDIS would be seen stops on a long journey and feel natural
instead of repetitive.
The back
story to the Master’s use of Block Transfer Computation is lost on anyone who
hadn’t seen Tom Baker’s final bow, but, for the regular audience, would have
been easier to relate to after the customary five month gap between seasons. Eleven
is pushing it, but in Christopher Bidmead’s defence, when he was commissioned
to write ‘Castrovalva’ he probably thought Doctor
Who would be back on in September 1981.
Castrovalvan
society is more convincing that some ‘real’ cultures in Doctor Who – Tigella from ‘Meglos’ springs instantly to mind –
which is why the twist at the end works so well. For me, the new Doctor sitting
down to quietly and calmly research the history of the town (above) defines his new character.
Four To Doomsday
Terence Dudley writes extremely well for the new TARDIS quartet. Years and
years before ‘The Long Game’, Tegan does what anyone would do in her situation
– she completely freaks out. Nyssa responds to what’s going on with cool
scientific inquiry and an outraged moral sense, while Adric is naïve and, not
wanting to be outshone by the girls, sides with Monarch (the convincingly
manipulative Stratford Johns). The new Doctor finds it hard to keep control of
the disparate group, to the point where Tegan hijacks the TARDIS. That would
never have happened with the omnipotent Fourth Doctor at the helm. Overall,
Dudley makes you believe that having a diverse, four-strong regular cast is going
to work.
Twenty
months into Margaret Thatcher’s historic election victory (whichever way you
look at it) in May 1979, Dudley delivers a story about a despotic leader who
wants to impose a uniform surveillance culture on us and turn us all into
robots (above). To paraphrase Bob
Holmes, ‘Four To Doomsday’’s writer was clearly not a man with a head full of
turnips.
Dudley (or script editor Antony Root) appears to have carefully considered the scheduling implications of the
new twice-weekly slot too, as the cliffhangers all revolve around a major plot
revelation, not simply peril or suspense. (The same was true of ‘Castrovalva’
and would continue with ‘Kinda’). It’s a skilfully crafted inducement to tune
in again later in the week.
Kinda
Very unusually for Doctor Who, a positive spin on
femininity is the dramatic step forward here. All the women in the story are
more than one step ahead of the men, from the scientist Todd, through the natives
Karuna and Panna (the ethereal Sarah Prince and Mary Morris) to a Tegan
possessed by an evil spirit. Todd (Nerys Hughes, fantastically good) is
presented as the intellectual equal of the Doctor. Significantly, she outwits
the deranged Hindle – Simon Rouse in a truly chilling performance – at the
climax, not the Doctor (above).
Previously
on Doctor Who, ‘mad’ meant villains
who wanted to blow up the world/conquer the Earth/galaxy/universe. Before
‘Kinda’, the series’ most mature examination of mental illness was General
Carrington in ‘The Ambassadors of Death’ (1970), who nearly caused an
interplanetary war because of a psychological trauma. Hindle’s problems aren’t on
that epic scale and his story is more compelling because of it: he’s a fragile,
ordinary man trying to act tough who has a nervous breakdown. The frightening hints
about his abusive – possibly strictly religious – childhood are more terrifying than a planet
full of Daleks.
If you’ve
ever experienced mental health issues, you’ll know exactly how authentic ‘Kinda’’s
handling of the subject is. This story increases in stature every time I watch
it. It really is remarkable.
Very long
term fans may have got a nostalgic, Hartnellesque pang at Nyssa being absent
for most of the story but, really, it’s the first sign that having four regular
cast members is a serious handicap for the writers.
The Visitation
Eric Saward has said
that he hadn’t watched Doctor Who ‘for
years’ before he was commissioned to write the script, and you can’t help wondering
that the last story to make an impression on him was ‘Terror of the Zygons’
(1975). Both that and ‘The Visitation’ have essentially the same plot: aliens
stranded on Earth use folklore to scare the locals, and you can substitute the
Loch Ness Monster for augmented plague rats as ‘the ultimate weapon’. The
Doctor’s chats with the Terileptil leader (Michael Melia, ably projecting a
personality through layers of rubber, above)
cover very similar ground to the Fourth Doctor’s conversations with Broton
(John Woodnutt) in ‘Terror’.
This was the
second story Davison made and his Doctor commands attention, refreshingly
exasperated with moaning humans and showing the first signs of this
regeneration’s sarcastic streak. The trashing of the sonic screwdriver is the
signature ‘fallible Doctor’ moment, but the point is made rather better when he
completely messes up the familiar Doctor
Who scenario of escaping from a cell, something that would have taken Tom
Baker approximately three minutes. Reinforcing the point, Adric and Tegan escape
from a locked room without any help from the Doctor.
You can see
why Eric was asked to stay on as Root's replacement as script editor. The first scene, with the well
characterised aristocratic family led by John Savident, makes you think they’ll
reappear but they don’t, a clever twist of the plot. He also writes well for
the large TARDIS crew, although this does mean the period feel is left to be
carried largely by one supporting role. Richard Mace (Michael Robbins, a
million miles away from his most well-known part in On the Buses) does it well, and as a character is vastly preferable
to the cynical military types Saward later became obsessed with.
Black Orchid
Davison has bemoaned
the lack of humour in his stories so he must have forgotten about ‘Black
Orchid’. For the second time this year, Terence Dudley proves himself a real
find, turning in a very funny script in which most of the humour revolves
around mistaken assumptions. The mystification of Charles Cranleigh (the
perfectly cast Michael Cochrane) over the location of Alzarius – ‘I never could
remember all those funny Baltic bits’ – still makes me laugh out loud. Nyssa’s
request for a screwdriver cocktail, neatly countered by Cranleigh’s discreet instruction
‘orange juice for the children’, is a great moment too.
Dudley again
proves he has a firm hand on the Fifth Doctor and his crew. The joke about ‘the
other Doctor… the Master’ (cricketing legend W.G. Grace) is spot on, as is
Adric and Nyssa’s confusion over cricket. Pleasingly, all the companions get to
throw some shapes, the first time that’s happened since Sarah Jane’s nimble footwork
in ‘The Masque of Mandragora’ (1976).
While ‘Black
Orchid’ works really well as an interlude where the main characters relax, it’s a shame that the
murder story, well plotted though it is, is a bit of an afterthought. After the
sophistication of ‘Kinda’, it’s downright offensive that the villain is a
physically and mentally scarred man whose family keep locked in the attic, even
if their attitude does fit the social context of the 1920s.
Terence
Dudley’s script is neatly metaphorical on the theme of doubles, ranging from
Nyssa’s physical double Anne (above,
allowing Sarah Sutton to show what a good actress she is), through the mistaken
identity of the Doctor’s pierrot costume to the double standards of Lady
Cranleigh (Barbara Murray): she holds a ball to (presumably) raise money for
disadvantaged children but is ashamed of her damaged son. Dudley’s novel of ‘Black
Orchid’ – and it is a novel – is excellent too.
Earthshock
There’s no getting
around it, I’m afraid: the new Cybermen (left)
are the worst thing in this story. Their fussy design and alarmingly bad panto
characterisation – butch voices, clenched fists and dull, repetitive
conversations – completely destroys the tension director Peter Grimwade
admirably creates in the scenes they’re not in. The disparity is so marked it
feels like you’re flipping between two different TV shows. The Cybermen
sequences are so flat, and Beryl Reid so obviously miscast as a tough space
freighter captain, that from Part Two onwards ‘Earthshock’ is robbed of so much forward momentum that I wasn’t bothered about watching the rest of
it. That isn’t the case with any of the other stories.
The siege of
the freighter’s bridge riffs on the Cybermen’s finest moments, but as the story is so thin, for once it’s glaringly apparent how nonsensical
their grand plan is. If they were going to blow up the Earth with a bomb, why
are they hiding on a space freighter going there? Once the bomb was detonated,
surely there’d be a complete security shutdown? And how did the Cyberbomb and
its protecting androids get to Earth undetected in the first place? If
‘Earthshock’ is the first time Doctor Who
put spectacle before story logic, it hasn’t worn at all well.
At the end,
there’s no comforting closing quip or fourth-wall breaking grin from the
leading man at the viewers. The rest is, literally, silence as the credits roll
over Adric’s smashed Badge for Mathematical Excellence. This was bold, dramatic stuff in 1982 and the
climax to Part Four still packs a traumatic punch.
Time-Flight
This was the last story of the season to be made and by now Davison has
completely nailed the character – in fact, he’s at the height of his powers and
you can tell he’s relishing being the Doctor. Frustrated with the scepticism of the
Concorde crew and Professor Hayter, forcefully challenging Kalid in his lair,
his confidence crashing as he thinks the Master has finally defeated him… the
highlights of Davison’s performance are many and various. It’s also good to see
a cricketing reference that isn’t plot driven; there’s a lovely moment when the
Doctor slips out of the TARDIS to buy a paper and check on the cricket scores.
OK,
‘Time-Flight’’s visual reach exceeds its grasp in places – although not as many
as I remembered – and imagine what it would like with the resources Doctor Who has now. Sixteen years on, I prefer
‘Time-Flight’ to ‘Earthshock’ even more.
****
Getting
Tegan to Terminal 3, Nyssa’s collapse, Adric’s death – there’s looser
continuity than in Season 18, perhaps, but you still get the sense of watching
an unfolding narrative (rather than individual stories with no connection to each other), now purposely written as twice-weekly serial. Fan
reviewers at the time bemoaned the clunky story-to-story references but
completely undervalued the character development. I remember one critic casually
dismissing it as ‘the Davison soap.’
Watching
Season 19 in 2016, the care and detail that went into writing and performing the main characters
is very striking, easily standing comparison with the modern series. More to
the point, these days every popular drama series – not just Doctor Who – has the evolution of the
main characters at the centre of it. It’s strange to think we ever lived in a
time when that was seen as a negative thing.
Remembering
my feelings about the series in 1982, I really liked ‘Castrovalva’, ‘Kinda’ and
‘Black Orchid’, but still had the nagging feeling that, no matter how good
Davison was – and, right from the off, he was excellent – something was missing. As an insecure young man, perhaps
subconsciously I didn’t want a fallible Time Lord who couldn’t prevent one of
his friends from being killed.
With the
benefit of hindsight, I now know I missed villains being trounced by
intellectual, witty one-liners and a wolfish grin more than I realised.
Next Time…
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