Timeless Adventures

by Brian J. Robb

  Nathan-Turner continued playing with icons of the series in Planet of Fire. It climaxed with the Master in a no-escape situation (once again), burning in the numismaton flame. He utters the unfinished line (to the Doctor): ‘Won’t you show mercy to your own…?’ Fan speculation had long proposed that the Doctor and the Master were not just Holmes and Moriarty or contemporaries at the Academy on Gallifrey (as the series had established), but might actually be related, even brothers. The line seems to play into that speculation, especially as the story has Turlough discovering his own lost brother. Russell T Davies would play with this speculation in The Sound of Drums in 2007, when the Master (John Simm) returns and Martha speculates about his relationship to the Doctor (a family connection dismissed by the Doctor, accusing Martha of watching too many soap operas).

  Davison exited the show on a high in Robert Holmes’ The Caves of Androzani, a morality tale in which the Doctor tries to save his poisoned companion at the expense of his own life, while around him an interplanetary war reaches its climax. While the gunrunning and corporate scheming neatly reflected growing 1980s concerns, even Holmes finds himself falling into the postmodern trap of playing with icons of the past. The semi-sympathetic villain of the piece is Sharaz Jek, a scarred, masked figure who lurks in caves, and is another reprise of The Phantom of the Opera (as was Holmes’ own The Talons of Weng-Chiang).

  Unfortunately, the full reveal of Sixth Doctor Colin Baker the following week in The Twin Dilemma was a huge step backwards. The regeneration was another big event and, to make it different from any of the previous colour series, Nathan-Turner had the new Doctor debut in the final story of the season. The Twin Dilemma was a poorly written and poorly realised adventure, resulting in a controversial debut for a new Doctor whom a lot of viewers professed to dislike. It would be a while before Baker had an opportunity to develop his Doctor and The Twin Dilemma left a bad taste with many viewers, one that would be long lasting.

  John Nathan-Turner’s event-television and publicity strategies came to dominate Doctor Who by the middle of the 1980s. Approaching his fifth year in charge – almost all previous producers had moved on by then – Nathan-Turner and his script editor Eric Saward had an uneasy working relationship. While Saward struggled to compile a coherent narrative, Nathan-Turner was on trips to conventions in the UK and US, authorising Doctor Who merchandise and creating ‘shopping lists’ of elements that future stories should include.

  The twenty-second season continued to be influenced by big-screen science fiction, but there was at least a theme running through it: loss of identity and physical transformation. New advances in cosmetic plastic surgery and unnecessary operations (especially cosmetic breast enlargements) were often featured in the news or in the growing consumer and ‘lifestyle’ sections of Britain’s expanding newspapers. Each story saw a major character undergo significant physical change, some more permanent than others. About the only character who wasn’t physically altered was the one whose physiology regularly allowed for just such transformation: the Doctor.

  In Attack of the Cybermen, a convoluted, continuity-ridden adventure, the mercenary Commander Lytton (Maurice Colbourne) returns from Resurrection of the Daleks, forms an alliance with the Cybermen and is partially Cyber-converted. Vengeance On Varos, a smart critique of video violence, saw companion Peri (Nicola Bryant) transformed into a birdlike creature as part of a mad scientist’s experiments, while The Mark of the Rani had the Master teaming up with villainous Time Lady the Rani (Kate O’Mara) to alter history in nineteenth-century Britain. This tale saw a character transformed into a tree, thanks to a bio-mine. The Two Doctors had Troughton’s Second Doctor changed into an Androgum, one of a race of hungry carnivores. In Timelash, HG Wells joined the Doctor and picked up various story ideas (the very stories that partly influenced the development of Doctor Who). The villain was the Borad, a hideous fusion of man and monster. Finally, Revelation of the Daleks featured a well-executed scene that saw the father of a young rebel encased in a transparent Dalek frame, mid-conversion, pleading with his daughter to kill him.

  The series’ format had been transformed, too, from (mostly) serials comprising four episodes of 25 minutes each to two-part stories where each segment lasted 45 minutes (more suitable for transmission on US TV). Previously, Resurrection of the Daleks, made as a four-episode tale, had been forced into a 45-minute format due to scheduling problems caused by the BBC’s coverage of the 1984 Winter Olympics. In an attempt to update the series to the mid-1980s, it was decided that the entire twenty-second season would be in the 45-minute episode format, so Attack of the Cybermen was the first story to be written specifically to this style. It was the first story since Logopolis to air on a Saturday, with the BBC abandoning the twice-weekly screenings that had run throughout Peter Davison’s three years.

  By now, continuity was threatening to swamp original storytelling, and would prove to be a major off-putting factor for the audience as Doctor Who entered its declining years. The confusing storytelling of Attack of the Cybermen lost the show almost two million viewers between episodes. Serving as a sequel to several stories, notably the Cybermen’s debut, The Tenth Planet, and The Tomb of the Cybermen, Attack of the Cybermen was action packed and stylish. However, it was impossible to understand without a crib sheet detailing Doctor Who history. Cannibalising its own past, the show featured redone set pieces from previous decades, recast with a glamorous 1980s sheen. Ostensibly set in environments first seen in long-deleted stories like The Tomb of the Cybermen, little effort was expended on remaining faithful to the original designs (many reference photos existed, even if the actual episodes were lost).

  Attack of the Cybermen was criticised for its gratuitous violence (with many Cybermen dismembered and Lytton’s gory conversion). Ironically, Vengeance on Varos – the following story – was a critique of video violence and its effects on society (a hot-topic debate in the British media in the early-to-mid-1980s). The ‘video nasties’ controversy saw movies for home rental subjected to prosecution and eventual classification. This was the subject matter for Philip Martin’s tale of a society addicted to watching torture on TV and voting on the outcome. Well in advance of the rise of reality TV and the interactive, participatory television culture of the 1990s and twenty-first century, Doctor Who presented a cliff-hanger that relied on a knowing pastiche of television technique. As the Doctor appears to be dying on a video screen, the Varos Governor orders the vision controller to ‘cut it, now!’ as the episode cuts to the closing titles. The story ends with the Greek-chorus characters of Arak and Etta (who’ve been watching – and voting on – the action of the story, without ever meeting anyone else involved) deprived of their entertainment and lamenting, ‘What shall we do now?’

  Rather than feeding off its own narrative past by restaging its greatest hits, or creating sequels and overusing returning monsters, finally the show used its own off-air past and current news headlines (as it had always done previously) to create a truly innovative story. Drawing on the 1970s attacks by Mary Whitehouse (who’d continued to campaign to ‘clean up TV’ into the 1980s), Martin created a society that used violent imagery to keep the population entertained and sated, thus reducing the likelihood they’d revolt. This was the first Doctor Who story for a long time to directly comment on the news headlines. Martin had experienced censorship directly himself when his late-1970s series Gangsters was attacked for being too violent. That series also featured several postmodern touches that would recur in Vengeance on Varos, including characters commenting on the fiction they were participating in and the creation of the drama being witnessed by the audience (Martin was seen in later episodes of Gangsters writing that particular episode’s script, while in Vengeance on Varos various TV tricks are used to structure the narrative – an idea Steven Moffat would adapt into the ‘narrative edits’ sequence of Forest of the Dead in 2008).

  It’s a shame that such political commentary did not feature more often during the 1980s, alt
hough it could be argued that the following story, The Mark of the Rani, dealing with Luddites battling mechanisation, saw the show mirroring the recent industrial turbulence and unrest in Britain. Primarily the story was about the introduction of the Rani, a female equivalent to the Master, and an excuse for more stunt casting by Nathan-Turner, bringing in soap star Kate O’Mara.

  Similarly, The Two Doctors was entirely constructed around the gimmicks of bringing back Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines, following their appearances in 1983’s The Five Doctors, and location filming in Spain (after New Orleans fell through). Additionally, the story featured the stunt casting of Blake’s 7’s Jacqueline Pearce and the return of 1970s’ Doctor Who monsters the Sontarans. However, threaded through the story is a vague concern for animal welfare as the origins of human food are considered, with aliens called Androgums (an anagram of ‘gourmand’) out to sample Earth’s finest delicacies. It’s hardly a paean to vegetarianism, but it is a theme that runs through several of the season’s stories, from the use of people as raw materials (in Attack of the Cybermen) and using the dead as the basis of food (in Revelation of the Daleks), to cannibalism on Varos and comments from the Rani about the deaths of animals. With vegetarianism becoming a growing ‘lifestyle choice’ (alongside other ‘health’ issues) in the mid-1980s, it is no surprise that it should be reflected in Doctor Who. The consistency with which the theme is referenced (even if only in passing) would suggest a deliberate policy by script editor Saward or writer Holmes (who was more used to incorporating this kind of real-world commentary in scripts for the 1970s version of the show). The Doctor does turn vegetarian himself as a result.

  The poorly written and realised Timelash offered a guest-starring role for another of the Blake’s 7 cast: a suitably melodramatic Paul Darrow (who’d appeared briefly in Doctor Who and the Silurians in 1970). The season climax saw the return of the Daleks and Davros in a Saward-written story crafted in the style of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, with a dash of Soylent Green (1973). Davros is discovered posing as ‘the Great Healer’, whose base at the Tranquil Repose funeral home is providing him with all the raw material he needs to feed a hungry galaxy and create a new race of malevolent Daleks. Like Vengeance on Varos, the story featured a narrator in the form of Alexei Sayle’s radio DJ, commenting on the action before being exterminated.

  During the transmission of The Two Doctors the BBC announced that Doctor Who would be taking a longer break than usual. The unusual announcement sparked a media frenzy, with The Sun running a front-page story headlined ‘Dr Who Axed in BBC Plot!’ The break, as a result of a funding shortfall at the BBC after the launch of daytime TV and EastEnders, was seen by those outside the executive floor of Television Centre as cancellation, especially as the show had been criticised from within (mainly by Head of Drama Jonathan Powell and BBC1 Controller Michael Grade) as too violent and having lost its way. The controversy was partially instigated by producer John Nathan-Turner working through ‘continuity consultant’ Ian Levine, who could plant stories in the press while leaving the BBC producer with a clean pair of hands. Once it was explained that the series would be back after an 18-month break, The Sun claimed to have ‘saved’ Doctor Who, even though it appears there was no actual intention of permanently dropping the show.

  Nonetheless, when season 23 did air, Doctor Who was felt to be on trial, a fear that pervaded the production team. This led to the season-long umbrella theme of the Doctor on trial by the Time Lords. The original plans for the next season were abandoned, even though writers had been commissioned, in favour of four interlinked stories that would be transmitted across 14 episodes under the overall title banner The Trial of a Time Lord.

  The decision marked the climax of Nathan-Turner’s event-television approach: the entire 14-episode season would be the event. The resulting series made many concerned fans and casual viewers wonder what had gone on during the 18-month period the production team had to prepare the show. The growing tensions between Nathan-Turner and Saward were apparent. While Saward had been struggling to find new directions, Nathan-Turner had become increasingly caught up in such extracurricular activities as attending fan conventions (especially in the US), and producing Christmas pantomimes, often starring the main Doctor Who cast. Saward had increasing misgivings about the casting of Colin Baker and was extremely worried about the way that Nathan-Turner was running the show, his sixth year in charge (the longest-running Doctor Who producer to that date). The casting of child star Bonnie Langford as the Doctor’s companion (she’d arrive mid-trial) fuelled Saward’s worries.

  The Trial of a Time Lord was unrewarding for viewers, despite the gimmick of foregrounding the show’s own ‘on-trial’ status in the onscreen narrative. This took Saward’s obsession with Greek choruses (characters within the drama who comment on the action) within the programme (Vengeance on Varos, Revelation of the Daleks) to a new extreme as the Doctor himself settled down to watch his own adventures on a big screen in the Time Lord courtroom. The trial format – conjured up in a moment of desperation by Saward and enthusiastically adopted by Nathan-Turner – was intended to mirror Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, with adventures from the Doctor’s past, present and future. The opening story (known as The Mysterious Planet) was written by old Doctor Who hand Robert Holmes to be more humorous following a brief from Grade, but was dismissed by Powell as being ‘lightweight’. This contradictory feedback further alienated Saward from the production and would ultimately lead to his acrimonious departure before the completion of the season. The Mysterious Planet is a soft Mad Max in which mankind has reverted to primitive ways on a planet revealed to be a relocated Earth. It was an inauspicious and low-key re-launch for a series living on borrowed time.

  The second adventure (known as Mindwarp) provided the high-light of the season, bringing back Sil, the villain of Vengeance on Varos, showing the surprising removal of the Doctor from time, and climaxing with the shocking death of companion Peri in a brain-swap operation. A colourful story, Mindwarp once again saw Doctor Who used as a technical test bed, this time for the HARRY Paintbox digital-effects system, which resulted in Sil’s planet boasting a green sky, purple rocks and a pink sea!

  Bonnie Langford arrived aboard the TARDIS in the Agatha Christie-style, murder-mystery ‘future’ segment (known as Terror of the Vervoids), set onboard doomed space liner Hyperion III. This led into the final two-part wrap-up of the Trial season (known as The Ultimate Foe, though all these episode titles were not seen onscreen, and only used for novelisations and DVD releases). By the time these final episodes were produced (before the Vervoids story was made), Saward had decided to leave the show. When he quit he gave a scathing interview to SF magazine Starburst in which he criticised Nathan-Turner’s ‘light-entertainment’ style of Doctor Who, his poor casting decisions and his obsession with peripheral minutiae like merchandising and conventions, rather than well-written scripts or properly thought-out characters. ‘I was getting very fed up with the way Doctor Who was being run, largely by John Nathan-Turner – his attitude and his lack of insight into what makes a television series like Doctor Who work,’ said Saward. ‘After being cancelled and coming back almost in the same manner as we were before, [with] the same sort of pantomime-ish aspects that I so despised about the show, I just think it isn’t worth it.’

  As a result of Saward’s departure, his original script for episode 14 could not be used, so a hastily created replacement (by Nathan-Turner stalwarts Pip and Jane Baker) was put together. ‘When I left, I was writing the last episode,’ confirmed Saward. ‘We had talked about this ending and he had agreed, in principle, to a hard, cliffhanging thing. The episode went in and John said, “I don’t like the end; we can’t go out on that end.” He wanted the happy pantomime ending.’ As a result, the climax to the 14-week-long trial was an incoherent narrative that only escaped greater criticism because much of it took place in the fantasy environment of the Matrix (The Deadly Assassin), so logical storytelling was not a st
rong point. The conclusion revealed the prosecuting Valeyard (Michael Jayston) to be a future, evil incarnation of the Doctor himself, in collusion with the Time Lords to cover up their criminal actions (which involved the moving of Earth in the opening story, The Mysterious Planet). As a result of Saward’s walkout, his original cliff-hanger ending – in which the Valeyard and the Doctor tumbled into a ‘time vent’, their survival (and that of the show itself) uncertain – could not be used. Nathan-Turner felt this ending would be a hostage to fortune, giving the BBC an opportunity to cancel the series. Viewers who had stuck with the trial through 14 weeks would require a satisfactory ending. He didn’t quite deliver that, but Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor left the scene intact, along with new companion Mel (Langford).

  The Trial of a Time Lord had been a brave experiment, but one that failed to address the criticisms that had resulted in the show being put on hiatus. The behind-the-scenes and onscreen narrative chaos in which the production ended only added fuel to the criticisms, many now voiced by the show’s own script editor. Despite the latest of his annual attempts to leave, producer John Nathan-Turner was ‘persuaded to stay’ as the show’s producer, although he had no script editor, no scripts, and was about to lose his leading man. Although the BBC decided to continue with Doctor Who, Nathan-Turner was instructed to replace the star, a fact revealed after the broadcast of the final episode of The Trial of a Time Lord.