God Is In The Detail (12-01)

Rejoice, Doctor Who fans! After a year-long break – and then some – we’re back with another round of unearthed conspiracies, wild fan theory and VERY IMPORTAND AND SECRET INFORMATION, as we dissect and discuss the episodes in this year’s series.

For the uninitiated – and there may be a few of you – this aspect of Brian of Morbius all stems from a single episode of Sherlock – or, specifically, the interviews that followed it. Questioned, after the events of ‘The Reichenbach Fall’, as to how Benedict Cumberbatch could possibly have survived his topple from that roof, Steven Moffat replied that there was “a clue that everybody missed”. It prompted a flurry of speculation and enough wild goose chases to fill an Anna Paquin movie. But there was a truth to it, because Moffat did this sort of thing all the time, particularly when he was running Doctor Who, loading his stories with clues and signs as to the fantastical directions they were destined to take.

And so I set about finding them. Seven years later, we’re still going strong – it’s a mantle Chibnall seems to have inherited – and that’s why whenever a series comes out, you’ll find this blog filled with discussion about the SIGNIFICANT AND CLEARLY SIGNPOSTED CLUES AND HINTS as to where the series arc is going. Today we’re looking at part one of ‘Spyfall’, so I advise you not to read any further if it’s a story you have yet to see – but if you have, you may not have realised that it was full of hidden references, some of which took some considerable time and effort to dig up. Join us now, constant reader, as we take a tumble down the rabbit hole. Be warned that this way lies temporary madness, but also blissful enlightenment. And did you bring a tin opener?

We will start, as we almost invariably do, with a control panel.

“BE ALERT!” the monitor readout doesn’t quite say. “THE WORLD NEEDS LERTS!” I nearly compiled an annotated version of this, but there’s not an awful lot to do: note, however, a couple of things that may not be immediately obvious, particularly the 1959 in the top centre. 1959 was, of course, the year that the Seventh Doctor and Mel landed in Shangri-La, the Welsh holiday camp hiding a dark secret (no, not Michael Barrymore) – a CLEAR AND TRANSPARENT indication that Sylvester McCoy is set to make a return appearance, presumably alongside Belinda Mayne. There are a number of reasons why I’ve reached this conclusion, but one thing at a time.

Of significantly more interest is ‘G-BGUX’ on the right hand side, below the display. ‘Gux’, according to the Urban Dictionary, is a Swiss German colloquialism both for ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’. GB – referring, of course, to Great Britain – thus exists in a quantum state of both unification and division (did we mention Sylvester McCoy was Scottish and that parts of the show are still filmed in Wales?). Time is in flux, and our actions over the next twelve months could be crucial. And you thought Chris Chibnall was done with Brexit jokes.

The GR-AH reference, of course, should be self-explanatory, so I won’t waste my time unpacking that one. Now, have a look at this.

There are two key themes to this week’s collection of signs and portents: the Seventh Doctor (more of him in a bit) and the Master, whose sudden appearance at the end of the series 12 opener shocked and stunned the fandom. At least, it shocked and stunned those of us who didn’t know it was coming – something that was obvious in hindsight, or if you were simply paying attention. For instance, the computer monitor above contains three eye-shaped maps, corresponding DIRECTLY AND UNAMBIGUOUSLY to the first three Doctors – and it is during the reign of the Third Doctor, the highlighted map, that the Master first appears. Moreover the shape of the maps is significant on a number of levels, pertaining as it does to the Eye of Harmony, the portable black hole that powered the TARDIS, first seen in full in ‘The Deadly Assassin’, which featured the Master, and then later in Doctor Who: The Movie, which featured the Seventh Doctor and also…well, you can see where this is going.

But if you watch ‘Spyfall’ properly you’ll find there are clues to the Master’s return hidden right at the beginning, notably in the secret message that the unnamed agent reads in the toilet in the pre-titles teaser. I had to tinker with this to get the clearest image, but it was worth it, because there is a wealth of information embedded in those numbers.

You see? It was right there in plain sight, and you all missed it. Look carefully next time. I can’t do all this on my own.

Next: a map. I love maps. [Affects Yorkshire accent, does slightly leery grin]

So far, so so-so. Alas there is no way of actually ascertaining the precise coordinates to which this map refers: you will be reassured, constant reader, that I spent many fruitless hours perusing the internet, the London and Sheffield street atlases and the Ordnance Survey archive at my local library in order to glean this information, but to no avail. I got through six bottles of Ribena last night trying to figure this out and I really need a wee.

Hang on.

Right, back. No, listen: there’s a good chance that the location is important, and I’m still waiting for my network of Dark Web contacts (who go under the pseudonyms of Lamster, Hedgehog and Glumpy) to dig up the goods. But in the absence of that, I did a little drawing of my own, and look what happens if you connect the occurrences of the word ‘DIE’.

Bad…WF? WF? What does that refer to? Bad Wolf is an obvious answer, if we were to find an O and an L from somewhere (probably down the back of the sofa; that’s the last time I saw the TV remote). But here’s a thing. You may be interested to know that Ian Lavender, star of Dad’s Army (and once seen by this reporter in pantomime in Canterbury, the winter of 1994) celebrates his birthday on 16 February – a Sunday, and the same day that the as-yet untitled episode 8 of series 12 is due to air. And if we insert the initials IL into WF, we get…Wilf.

What could could this mean? Is an ageing Bernard Cribbins set to return to Doctor Who taking the role of a darkened, decaying version of Donna’s grandfather, perhaps someone who’s had his body stolen? Is there some sort of crossover coming involving the heart of the TARDIS and Billie Piper’s teeth? Do we take any significance from the fact that this is episode 8, and that the Eighth Doctor made his debut in 1996 – fifty years to the year, incidentally, after Ian Lavender was born – facing off against Eric Roberts? Do we further take any significance from the fact that the aforementioned Lavender starred in Eastenders alongside the aforementioned Bonnie Langford?  I don’t know, and neither do you. But lest we forget, Wilf made his final appearance at the beginning of 2010 – that’s ten years ago, folks, TEN – in which he urged the Doctor to take up arms and kill the Master. But you’ll have to draw your own conclusions, I’m afraid. I know I have.

We’re almost done but there are two more things to show you. The first is this.

 

Two things to note: the fact that ’89’ is clearly visible on the readout, referring UNAMBIGUOUSLY AND EXPLICITLY to the year that Doctor Who was cancelled, right after ‘Survival’ (which featured, as we have previously noted, both the Seventh Doctor and the Master), and also the two pale orange lights near the top of the dial. Because here’s how it works: taking these as season numbers, and where the very first blue light at the top of the dial refers to 1963’s season 1, these two amber lights refer respectively to seasons 38 and 39 – in other words, taking into account a continuous numbering from Hartnell through to Whittaker, this year’s series and next. In other words, constant reader, this is a long game, and one that won’t be over until Whittaker’s third and likely final run of episodes, and episode 10 (which may be denoted by the percentage sign, if you examine it at just the right angle) is going to end on a massive cliffhanger.

And it’s worth remembering, of course, precisely where Ryan and Graham’s roulette ball chose to land.

Anyway, the tea’s getting cold. See you next time.

Papa Louie Pals Presents: The Doctors

I’m the odd one out in our house. I seem to be the only one of the six of us – and yes, that includes Edward – who’s never played a Papa Louie game.

“That makes two of us,” I can hear many of you say, and who can blame you? For the Papa games – which began life as a Flash-based platform game that spawned a wealth of culinary spin-offs – are fun and popular, but they’re not exactly mainstream. It’s the sort of private joke that takes too long to explain: this notion of working your way through hundreds of customers who want hot dogs and sandwiches and pizza and…well, you name it, they’ve covered it. Papa’s Wingeria does chicken. Papa’s Freezeria deals with all things ice cream. Papa’s Donuteria does – look, I’m not going to read out the whole thing. Suffice it to say Flipline have done well out of this little franchise, although my own idea for a spin-off – a toilet maintenance game entitled Papa’s Diarrhea – has thus far been met with nothing but a resounding silence.

But I never got into it. I just didn’t have the time; there were too many other games to be playing. I was content to sit, lounged in bed or next to Emily on the sofa, while the tinkly music tinkled and my better half tried to get an even spread of tomato paste and cursed when I jogged the bed and made her drop her pancake. We got used to throwing our arms up in the air with a broad grin when evening meals arrived on the table. If you have played any of the games you will appreciate this. If you have not, I’m not about to explain it to you. Perhaps you had to be there, or at least be in the immediate vicinity of someone who was – a role I was (it seemed) more than content to play.

Still. Then they made Papa Louie Pals, which is the subject of today’s post. Papa Louie Pals enables you to create more or less anyone you like, from a series of pre-defined style templates, faces and skin tones and outfit variations. The basic humanoid shape is the same for everyone – with minimal adjustments to things like girth and neck length – but all that aside there’s a considerable amount of customisation potential, even more so if you’re prepared to pay for additional content (I’m not; the new stuff is largely cosmetic).

And of course, I’ve made an entire set of Doctors.

Actually, I didn’t stop at the Doctors. I did the companions as well. But that’s content overload so we will deal with them another time. Today, you can have fourteen incarnations of the Doctor, in no particular order, randomly paired according to the way the screen grabbing worked, which led to some interesting if not unpleasant juxtapositions. Some of them are better than others. But I did painstakingly adjust the height of each incarnation so it was more or less accurate. Colour me proud, Jack. Colour me proud.

 

First up: the War Doctor and the Thirteenth Doctor. I don’t think her shoes are quite right, but I’m quite pleased with the hair. (Look very closely and you’ll see a bum bag poking out from beneath her coat.)

—

We’ll have the two Bakers next. There’s no option for multi-coloured scarves, so I’ve gone for his Season 18 look, which is reasonably good, although he really ought to be a little more grumpy. The same colours problem occurred when constructing the Sixth Doctor, and what’s presented here is about as close as I could manage. There’s a little too much red, but you get the idea.

—

I’m not very happy with the Eighth; his hair is completely wrong but there really was nothing else that fit. There’s probably the capacity for creating his ‘Night of the Doctor’ look, of course – but then you’re basically in War Doctor territory, so a distorted 1996 take will have to suffice. Next to him is McCoy; the jumper is off kilter but the hat, at least, is quite good.

—

These two came out quite well, really, largely because of Troughton’s eyes, grin and trousers. The Eleventh Doctor is halfway through the events of ‘Flesh and Stone’.

—

The Twelfth Doctor is a tricky one to do because there are three of him, depending on which series you’re watching: of all the contemporary incarnations he’s been the one who’s arguably changed the most. Next to him is Pertwee, who has the wrong hair, although it’s the best I could come up with.

—

The old man and the Time Lord who lived too long. Tennant was about the easiest one to do, although I do think those trousers ought to be a little darker (and the stripes are a bit, I dunno, deckchair). Still, his hair, like the werewolf Warren Zevon saw at Trader Vic’s, is perfect.

—

I nearly skipped Nine, just to see how people would react, but he was such an easy one I didn’t quite have it in me. Davison – with a hat that’s a little flatter than I’d like – rounds off the set. Shame there’s no celery.

Have I Got Whos For You (Boris Bumpus Maximus)

We open in a quarry somewhere in the home counties. Following a disastrous headline-grabbing scandal, the producers of Doctor Who have elected to stage a photoshoot in order to salvage the reputation of the show, featuring current stars Sylvester McCoy and Bonnie Langford. Only the public smell a rat, and of course are having none of it.

Do I think Boris’s private life makes him a poor choice for prime minister? Not necessarily, no. It simply makes him a twat. There is, as Kenneth Clarke pointed out on Radio 4 this week, ample evidence of Johnson’s general cluelessness when it comes to Brexit and pretty much anything of political substance – The Sketch makes that clear, and it should be obvious to all but his most strident followers by now that the clownish exterior is going to wear very thin indeed once we all remember that we’ve just given him the keys to the Big Red Button. Kenny Roger’s Gambler made a career out of reading people’s faces; Boris has made a career out of having other people read his, and generally giggle. He exists in a state of perpetual frivolity, apparently unable to take either himself or anything else seriously; whatever he gets up to in his flat, do we really want a man like this running the country?

Anyway, there was something fishy about that publicity stunt the other day, as this leaked shot from behind the scenes attests.

Yes. Well.

The second half of this week’s instalment incorporates a bumper crop of birthdays – including mine, come to think of it, although I spent the day tidying and then driving to and from Oxford with the boy. For years I’d thought the piece de la resistance of my birthday-sharing duties was Igor Stravinsky (along with Methodism founder John Wesley, who was renowned for taking the gospels to localities other denominations couldn’t reach). But it eventually transpired that I share a birthday with none other than Jodie Whittaker.

—

Oh, and Arthur Darvill, who is pictured here with another Arthur.

Supposedly it was Paddington’s birthday yesterday – although the duffel-clad bear has two birthdays, rather like the queen..

(Hmm. I’m still not sure I pasted that TARDIS in quite the right place. It looks like it’s floating.)

Also celebrating a birthday this week: Tim Burton’s Batman, the film that arguably saved superhero films (at least for a while), although it opened a floodgate of Interesting Actors Playing Established Characters that, it could be coherently argued, was ultimately damaging to Hollywood’s ability to craft original stories. When was the last time you truly latched on to someone who saw their genesis on the big screen? No, I mean someone who isn’t in Star Wars? And let’s not forget that, for all its brooding brilliance, Batman is guilty of some pretty shocking departures from the source material. Alfred gives away Batman’s secret identity, for pity’s sake. Oh, and at the end of the film an injured, borderline psychotic caped crusader lunges at the Joker in the belfry of Gotham Cathedral, furiously announcing that he’s going to kill him. I mean, it’s good, but…well, had it happened today there would be a hundred and fifty BuzzFeed articles, all of them dreadful, so let’s be grateful it was back in the 80s and the worst you had to contend with was a bit of griping in the fanzines.

Anyway, here’s Batman on downtime in the Batcave.

Episodes used: ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’, ‘State of Decay’, ‘The Mind of Evil’, ‘The Romans’, ‘Caves of Androzani’, ‘Vampires of Venice’, (you will notice a bat theme going on here), ‘Twice Upon A Time’, and a couple I can no longer identify – oh, and ‘The Witchfinders’. Which is mostly there to annoy the Jodie haters. Who will doubtless leave angry emojis, JUST BECAUSE THEY CAN.

“OK, you wanna get nuts? C’mon. Let’s get nuts.”

Have I Got Whos for You (Indicative Vote edition)

Keep your eyes peeled for another video roundup coming not-exactly-live and by-no-means-exclusive to Brian of Morbius. That’ll be online in a week or so, once I’ve written it.

In the meantime, here’s a little something we made earlier. Well, several somethings, collated. In the first instance, it was National Potato Chip Day the other week. I didn’t even know National Potato Chip Day (or Crisp Day, if you’re British) was a thing. And while I love a bag of salt and vinegar as much as the next man, I’m really not sure whether their adulation warrants an entire day.

Still, any excuse, right?

Also, can I take this opportunity to say how much I miss Brannigans? Oh, I know you can still buy them on the internet. But it’s not the same as wandering down to your local Rusts and getting a packet of beef and mustard to have along with the wine gums and ginger ale you were going to scoff while watching Heat on rented VHS. Those were the days. I’d rent three videos and watch them over the course of a weekend, on my own, because I had no life. Or I’d buy them in the 3-for-£12 sales they’d have every week at HMV. I never saw anybody, except my parents. But I did become quite au fait with the classics, and enjoyed a great many of them, even if I still think Citizen Kane is mostly shit.

…Where were we? Oh yes, International Day of Happiness.

We could all do with a little happiness right now. Certainly it feels as if Britain is temporarily broken. It’s not so much a problem with whether or not we leave the EU – I am resigned to the fact that we probably will, and I can’t help thinking it probably won’t be as bad as the militant Remainers insist it will be. Nor will it be as rosy, of course, as the Leave campaign insist it will be, although that could all change if they keep shifting the goalposts – first it was going to be marvellous and we’d get a fantastic deal; then it wasn’t going to be quite so marvellous and yes the NHS figures were fabricated but it would still be great; then it was going to be difficult but worth it in the long run and we knew that when we voted; then we’d be better off with no deal, then the deal we had might be the best option after all, and then there’s a lot of vagueness about WTO from people who don’t actually know the first thing about it.

I mean, I don’t have a clue. I don’t! But I voted Remain not because of any particular affinity towards the EU – I am always one to err on the side of caution in these matters, and defend the status quo unless the boat is in severe need of rocking – but because I could see this referendum for what it was from the outset. It was a grab for power: a vote-winning fiasco made by a desperate man who jumped ship (to extend the metaphor) as soon as it didn’t go his way. I firmly believe that you shouldn’t let the man in the street decide this sort of thing in any case – at least not these days, when people are so unilaterally thick – but if it’s unavoidable it needs to occur under the right sort of circumstances, and this was a political hotbed. How many people do you know who voted Leave simply because they despised Cameron? Exactly.

We saw this again in the Commons, just last night: support for Theresa May’s deal improved when she said she’d resign if they voted it through. If you can’t trust MPs – who are supposed to be sensible about these things – not to be fickle and spiteful (or, if you’re Rees-Mogg, just a shade Machiavellian) when it comes to making incredibly important decisions, then what hopes for the rest of us? This was not something that should ever have been decided by the ballot box, at least not under the current administration, who are too out of touch, too insular and frankly too incompetent to carry this through. I knew that back in 2016, and that’s largely why I stuck to the Remain camp. And three years later, I turned out to be right.

Certainly there is a tangible sign of Referendum Fatigue – as up in the hills, despite the local area being a strong Leave constituency, there is a disappointing turnout on Nigel Farage’s March For Brexit.

Here’s the problem. It’s not so much the deal or no deal fiasco: we will, eventually, get through that and come to some sort of slim majority that will be heralded as a great victory by the winning side and a fraudulent travesty by whoever came second. Parliament will move on, and we’ll survive Brexit, in whatever capacity it occurs, or doesn’t. But there is a schism across our country now. You’re either a Brexiteer or a Remainer, and there is apparently very little room for middle ground. There is a sense of division, as espoused by both sides, and the fact that most of the arguing takes place on social media (which is, let’s be honest, an absolute cesspit) doesn’t help matters. Theresa May has been appealing for calm and unity – shortly before she gave up and announced “That’s it, I’m off” like a geography teacher who’s fed up with a rowdy class – but it doesn’t help that her idea of unity is that everyone do exactly what she says, however ludicrous it might be. I don’t know where we go from here. I truly don’t.

In the midst of this week’s chaos the ‘official’ Facebook page for Britain Bites Back ran a poll about whether we should leave or not, only to throw their toys out of the pram when it didn’t go their way. They then ran a second poll, which had a similar response, and then proceeded to vent about how you should only be on their page if you agreed with their views, dismissing anyone who didn’t as a ‘hacker’. You can read all about the saga here, although the jury is out as to whether this really is a genuine page or a spoof. If it’s a spoof, it’s frighteningly convincing and Poe’s law is in full effect, but I can’t help thinking the joke’s over now and they ought to back away, because somewhere along the line it stopped being funny.

At any rate, a friend of mine asked me to do something Who-related with it. So –

We end today’s little missive on a lighter note, with the news that the Toy Story 4 trailer has finally dropped. Those of you who felt that the story drew to a natural conclusion at the end of the last movie – as the characters found a new home and said goodbye to Andy – will undoubtedly consign this to the ‘sequel too far’ drawer (you know, the one that’s chronically overstuffed and has just about fallen off its runners). I can’t help thinking you’re probably right, but I’ll see this anyway because the concept fascinates me: given that the new guest star, Sporky, is a piece of living cutlery, at what point do creatures in the Toy Story universe gain sentience? Is it all about loving something enough to make it real, like it was in The Velveteen Rabbit? Do you have to cast a spell, or breathe over them like Aslan does at the end of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe? Or is it simply a matter of sticking a pair of googly eyes on something and then standing back to watch the fireworks? I think we should be told, and even if we’re not I suspect there will be several BuzzFeed articles about it.

In any event, if you think you’ve seen Sporky before, he crops up in a deleted scene in ‘The Doctor Falls’.

“I’M NOT A COMPANION!!!!”

“Garth. That was a haiku.”

This, dear children, is how I’ve been spending World Poetry Day. Because why not? And yes, a number of Doctors are missing, but I’ll write more next year. Probably. You might even get a sonnet.

In the meantime, have fun. And as a footnote, that last one is something that I actually read this week, and is perhaps the best example I can give right now of a fandom that is apparently broken.

Doctor Who meets Beauty and the Beast

Let me tell you a story, children. Once upon a time there was a concept called regeneration and it involved the transition of one actor to another. In the 60s, 70s and 80s this was achieved using filters and white-outs and whatever trickery the BBC could afford at the time. At its best, it was highly successful. At its worst, it was Sylvester McCoy in a blonde wig. In 1996, they experimented with facial morphing, presumably because of Terminator 2 and the ‘Black or White’ video. It was a little strange to behold – Doctor Who, in actual special effects shocker – but it sort of worked.

Then came the Golden Sparkly Energy thing. It’s been used ever since, in every disappointingly familiar regeneration (Smith’s aside; at least that one’s quick) and if it looks familiar, that’s because they nicked it from Disney. Specifically, that bit at the end of the otherwise splendid Beauty and the Beast where Belle succumbs to her Stockholm syndrome and her grizzly captor turns into an Aryan Chippendale. It’s a wretched scene, which – whilst nonetheless remaining true to the spirit of the original story – says an awful lot about Disney and its obsession with appearances, often at the expense of what was actually best for the customer. (You will know this if you visited Disneyland Paris, as I did, back in the early days: the place was immaculate, but the shuttle buses were an unruly scrum. They’d hired people to pick up litter, but no one who could facilitate a queue.)

There are other versions of this. It’s an obvious joke: cellular regrowth instigated by magical sparkliness. But this one attempts to match the dialogue. This involved an awful lot of chopping and changing and shifting things around, which is not in itself a bad thing because otherwise you have Disney on your back for copyright infringement. At the beginning Eccleston has a long monologue, which I opted to present as a voiceover while we established the castle: this is actually the opening pan out from the beginning of the film, reversed. Am I saying that the Ninth Doctor was the Beast and his impossibly sexy successor is the human (and incredibly vain) prince? You decide.

I sent the completed version to Gareth.

“It might have worked better,” he said, “if I knew anything about Beauty and the Beast!”
“You got the idea, surely?”
“She kisses him, and we learn that looks are more important than personality?”
“And that’s why I love Shrek.”

But I’d like to close by returning briefly to Colin Baker, who we were discussing over dinner just yesterday.

“So he didn’t film his regeneration?” Emily said.
“He didn’t,” I said.
“So what actually killed the Sixth Doctor?”
“We don’t know for sure. But the first thing that happens in that episode is that the TARDIS is attacked, and when the Rani steps on board, the Sixth Doctor is lying on the floor, face down. And then they turn him over, and – ”
“It’s Sylvester McCoy.”
“Yeah, in a wig.”
“And that’s all you get?”
“Well,” I said, “Big Finish eventually filled in the gaps. They gave him a proper send-off, and there was a whole story with the Valeyard and loads of other people. But on TV, just the wig.”
“So McCoy’s lying there,” she said, “and you can see it’s him, but in a wig?”
“The moment they turn him over, they stick a filter on the screen. One of those photo negative effects. So it’s obscured and you’re supposed to not be able to tell. Except of course you can. What can I say? They did the best they could under difficult circumstances.”
“Right, right,” she said. “But there’s no reason why the McCoy in a wig thing couldn’t have been an entirely new Doctor. You know, a secret regeneration.”
“What, another one? Who just happened to like the same clothes?”
“Yep. So you have the Sixth, and then he regenerates into the Seventh, but that’s not McCoy. Which would make – ”
“Which would make McCoy the Eighth,” I said. “Oh, I’m going to have sooo much fun trolling the fandom with this one.”

And I will, but in the meantime –

God bless you, Deviant Art. God bless you.

Return to Paradise Towers

Memory’s a funny thing. It’s literally not what it used to be. You can’t trust it. There are people in my family who will often claim the high ground in any argument with the words “I know what I saw”. To which the obvious answer is, in the words of Steven Novella, “No you don’t. You have a distorted and constructed memory of a distorted and constructed perception, both of which are subservient to whatever narrative your brain is operating under.”

For example, fellow blogger Frivolous Monsters once recounted a tale of how a slightly awkward exchange with Jon Pertwee, some two decades previously, was actually far less awkward in reality than it had been in his head. It is a good story, and worth reading. But his point – and mine – is that it’s very easy to look back at a not-so-terrible thing and make it far more terrible for the sake of dramatic emphasis, or perhaps because it somehow defines who you are. On a lesser scale, ‘Paradise Towers’ is thus what I am going to term ‘one of my Pertwee moments’, largely because when I watched it again the other week it was far less terrible than I remembered it.

1987 was a dark place in Doctor Who’s history. The new theme was plodding and tedious. The Rani – one of the most potentially interesting villains – was reduced to cosplay. The companion was all about stage school theatrics and a lot of screaming. A wig stood in for Colin Baker. Pip and Jane’s script for the series opener was a disaster, and ‘Delta and the Bannermen’ wasn’t much better. Until two weeks ago I used to tell people that ‘Dragonfire’ was the only half-decent story of the lot (and even that lost a lot in translation) but as it turns out, I rather misremembered my childhood. Because it turns out that the Doctor and Mel’s little foray into a derelict block of flats is, in fact, really rather good.

The story – such as it is – concerns a lot of back and forth between one lair and another, with groups of isolated factions locked in a stalemate that goes back decades. The building’s architect turned out to be a twisted maniac whose quest for perfection extended to murdering the people who wanted to live in his buildings, lest they should spoil them; the citizens of Paradise Towers thus banded together and left him trapped in the basement, creating a monster in the process. Meanwhile, the grown-ups have gone to fight a war (with the exception of the cowardly Pex – more on him later) leaving their children to spend adolescence roaming the complex in an extended game of capture-the-flag, while the caretakers clean up the graffiti and the elderly cower behind locked doors, eating the rats and occasionally each other.

It’s an intriguing premise, and it owes as much to the writer’s experience of council estate London as it does to J.G. Ballard. The lifts never reach the right floors. “Let me tell you,” says Stephen Wyatt in a Doctor Who Magazine interview, “about the lifts. They had no numbers for the floors on them. They were just tin boxes and you got into them. And you pressed a button and went up in them and a door opened and it may or may not have been the floor you wanted. But kids would get in the lift and press at random seven or eight buttons and get out again. So when you got into the lift it had six previous instructions to complete and in the end, in despair, I got out on a floor at random and walked up the rest of the stairs.”

Wandering the corridors are the Kangs, gangs of teenage girls (all the boys, presumably, off fighting the war) whose rivalry is based solely on what colour they do their hair. They have names like Bin Liner and Fire Escape, play games with the secret alleviators (no, that’s not a typographical error) and use the words “Ice hot” at every conceivable opportunity. The one remaining yellow Kang is killed at the start of the story, leaving only two gangs remaining: they’re much of a muchness, but one assumes that at every Doctor Who convention there is at least one argument over whether the Red Kangs or the Blue Kangs were best. (Curiously, the first series of Red Dwarf – which aired the following year – featured an episode wherein red and blue hats were the cause of a devastating religious war between two sects of a race of cat people. I would like to hope this is not a coincidence.)

Of course, when you actually go into one of the flats, you’re not necessarily any safer. The residences in Paradise Towers are occupied by British character actresses, including Elizabeth Spriggs and Brenda Bruce as the deliciously horrible Tilda and Tabby (so named, apparently, when Wyatt overcame writer’s block by glancing down at his keyboard), and Judy Cornwell (Keeping Up Appearances) as their timid-but-righteous neighbour. It is Tilda and Tabby who are the most fun to watch, particularly in the earlier scenes in which the cannibalistic undertones bubble under the surface like the bubbles in a witch’s cauldron. Pex and Mel even play Hansel and Gretel, after a fashion, although it’s Mel who almost ends up in the oven. This is, as I discovered, a wonderful way to frighten your children, if you show them the story in the evening:

MEL: You are joking, aren’t you? Tilda? Tabby?
TABBY: We don’t see this as a matter for humour, Mel dear. We mean every word.
[Tabby menaces Mel with the toasting fork while Tilda throws a shawl over Mel’s face.]
TILDA: In our experience, Mel dear, it is much better not to struggle too much. It only causes needless distress.
[Mel screams. Roll credits.]
ME: Right, bedtime.

Sadly Mel doesn’t get eaten. It might have evened up the narrative a bit: her behaviour throughout the story is so irrational it borders on the insane. The rot sets in as early as the first episode, with the irritating fitness freak sitting cosy and snug inside Tilda and Tabby’s apartment, greedily consuming cakes and crumpets by the dozen (this, lest we forget, is the woman who offered to make the Doctor carrot juice and put an exercise bike in the TARDIS). I could live with her dietary slips – although I imagine that next Weight Watchers’ meeting would be rather awkward – but not once does the odd behaviour of her hosts appear to faze her. It is like a scene from an Enid Blyton novel, with optional homicide (including a kitchen knife that would land the BBC in hot water come the following week’s Points of View).

But that’s not the worst of it. Some time later, Mel (in the company of Pex, here to put the world of Paradise Towers to rights) finally reaches her Mecca, which takes the form of the swimming pool on the top floor. It’s where she is supposed to meet the Doctor, but in spite of all that’s happened – homicidal robots, sadistic jobsworth bureaucrats and Twisted Sister’s entire fanbase – Mel’s first priority is to undress and go swimming. “Look, here it is!” she exclaims in delight. “Oh, it’s just how I imagined it.” It is, in fact, a rather run-of-the-mill swimming pool, and Mel’s exuberant enthusiasm is somewhat baffling – I appreciate that locations couldn’t be helped, but surely they could have toned it down? Five minutes later, and Mel’s in the middle of a dip – presumably she was wearing the costume under her clothes, which must have chafed a bit given all the ruffles – only to be attacked by a sinister yellow crab that’s been watching them the whole time and that nobody saw, despite it taking up half the pool. Not long afterwards, the bedraggled computer programmer is looking rather forlorn on a sunlounger. “Pex?” she says, mournfully. “I’m sorry.” So are we, Mel. So are we.

Most of this is not the fault of Bonnie Langford, even if she plays Mel the way she played just about everything in the 70s and 80s: as if she’s on a stage, rather than in front of a camera. Subtlety goes out of the window, down the road to the shops and then hops on a bus to Frinton. But the fact that the programme was in flux didn’t help matters: “There was a companion,” says Wyatt, “who had no definable character except she was played by Bonnie Langford, and so again the writing was very generic. This is no criticism of Bonnie at all, it’s just that Bonnie wasn’t given anything to do except what she’d always done – which was to scream.” By all accounts (all right, Gareth Robert’s account) she is currently very good in Eastenders. “Just imagine,” Roberts tweeted just the other week, “if she’d been given proper acting to do in Doctor Who“.

It’s not all Mel. Richard Briers’ performance is somewhat ham-fisted in the final episode and annoyingly twitchy in the first three. On the other hand, perhaps this is exactly what the story needs. Certainly his zombie mode is practically Shakespearian. He’s also hindered by poor characterisation: the chief architect, supposedly the mastermind behind the entire scheme, goes to his grave as an almost criminally underdeveloped villain. We know next to nothing about him save the manifestation of bloodlust; as in ‘The Satan Pit’ it’s left to the Doctor to provide all the exposition. This wouldn’t be a problem but the monster has a voice of its own – it just doesn’t say much beyond “HUNGRY!” and “DESTROY ALL HUMANS!”.

This is a shame, because other characters work very well. The Kangs are all basically nondescript clones, but Pex is an unexpected delight. I use the word ‘unexpected’ because in 1987, I absolutely hated Pex (and it’s this, I’m sure, that forms the bulk of my prior aversion towards the story). He struck me as irritating and ridiculous. With the benefit of almost three decades of hindsight, it’s far easier to see him for what he is: a lampoon of 1980s action heroes, brawny but ultimately useless. It’s partly the casting – the DVD documentary reports that several more muscular men were turned down because they looked ridiculous standing next to Bonnie Langford, but Howard Cooke has enough build to pop a seam while simultaneously managing to look (and sound) like someone who’s actually far less capable than he actually is. Pex’s character has a beginning (although that’s mostly backstory), a middle and an end – something comparatively rare in 1980s Who – and there’s something very satisfying about his final, rather uneven redemption. He dies a hero, but a suitably reluctant one, and this makes his journey all the more believable.

Other things: the Kangs’ tendency to misuse words echoes Orwell, but the mythology constructed from a lifetime of roaming derelict corridors is reasonably solid, and it’s quite fun to listen to them. Certain suspensions of disbelief are required – the adoption of ‘Build high for happiness’ as a greeting seems a little odd, given that the Kangs spend most of their time on the lower levels, and is it really likely that they would know ‘unalive’ but not ‘dead’? And my goodness, the counting. Half the script seems to be a recitation of numbers – rules, floors, Caretaker IDs. ‘Half’ is, of course, something of an exaggeration, but let’s just say we don’t go short. In fact there are so many that I took the liberty of putting them all together.

—

—

You see what I mean.

Look, some of it’s a mess. The lighting is all over the place – or rather it isn’t, taking its cue instead from the harsh studio lighting that blights much Classic Who (see ‘The Happiness Patrol’, which would have worked beautifully on film). Lines like “We’ll send the cleaners to the cleaners!” are cloying, and Mel’s spotty outfit is a train wreck. But there’s something infectiously silly about this whole setup – something that makes ‘Paradise Towers’ more, somehow, than the sum of its parts. Perhaps it’s McCoy, who makes the most of a script that could have been written for just about any Doctor, largely because the Seventh Doctor had yet to be fleshed out when Wyatt hit deadline. Perhaps it’s Howard Cooke, who steals most of the scenes he’s in. Or perhaps it’s Clive Merrison, who by turns manages to be menacing and ultimately heroic. In any event, ‘Paradise Towers’ works. You feel, somehow, that it shouldn’t. But it does. Rather like those alleviators.

Bright eyes, burning like the fires of Mount Doom

A review of The Hobbit, carried in The Independent (which hasn’t been since about 1996), contains the following text.

“Thankfully, Jackson’s flair for action sequences and bold and complex production design hasn’t deserted him. Huge, snarling dogs and a chase sequence involving a wizard played by Sylvester McCoy being pulled by a sledge of super-nimble rabbits add some bite to the storytelling.”

My initial thoughts ran along the lines of “How very dare you”. Then I sighed with resignation. It doesn’t really matter any more.

When I mentioned this to Laura, she said she was finding it hard to resist the temptation to imagine the scene with the were-rabbit from Wallace and Gromit, or the rabbits from Watership Down. When I mentioned it to Gareth, he said “I wouldn’t mind seeing Sylvester McCoy being pulled by rabbits. I’d just rather see it in Doctor Who.”

Anyway…

I know it’s scrappily done, but it almost works. Almost.

—

Then there’s this.

—

Oh, and this.

—

The image above is taken from the mother of all cliffhangers, in which the Doctor is seen hanging from a ledge by his umbrella FOR NO GOOD REASON AT ALL. (There’s a reason in the script, of course, but time constraints being what they were they never got round to shooting it.) It’s the end of episode one of ‘Dragonfire’, which also features a scene which is eerily reminiscent of Watership Down.

—

You see what I mean.

“It looks like you’re doing something with General Woundwort,” said Emily, in her best impression of Clippy, when she wandered into the kitchen. “Would you like help?”
“No, it’s fine, I was just looking at reviews of The Hobbit today and it talked about Sylvester McCoy being pulled along by rabbits. Then Gareth mentioned the possibility of it happening in Doctor Who. You know…the whole rabbits…Doctor Who connection.”

There was a pause.

“You don’t love me any more, do you?”

Radagast the not-so-brown

Behold: courtesy of my friend in New Zealand, I give you pointless Hobbit cameo appearance #37: Sylvester McCoy, who plays Radagast, who’s not in the book. There are plenty of shots of him in costume, but here he is at the premiere.

 

Apparently Victoria asked to shake his hand and he signed it instead, which was probably a Chinese whisper, understandable when you’re trying to make yourself heard in a screeching crowd clamouring for a view of Elijah Wood (who plays a character who’s not in the book) or Cate Blanchett (who plays a character who’s not in the book) or Orlando Bloom (who – oh, forget it).

Anyway: the jacket is truly amazing, and I said so. “It did make me stop and wonder,” responded Victoria, “whether his Doctor Who outfit was provided by the BBC costume department or his own wardrobe…”

Christmas jumpers? Pah.