Learning to Love: Silver Nemesis

When I was a boy I was the proud owner of a mere eight Doctor Who stories: Remembrance of the Daleks, The Happiness Patrol, Silver Nemesis, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, Battlefield, The Curse of Fenric, Ghost Light and Survival. I adored each of those creaky VHS recordings. Deeply. Beyond measure. I watched them over and over again. Had my Doctor Who viewing experience begun a year earlier, perhaps I wouldn’t be here writing now (my crushing disappointment at seeing Syl’s first season on video a few years later was also similarly deep and beyond measure).

So for a long while that run from Remembrance to Survival represented the Very best. Doctor Who. Ever. In fact, for a long while, to my very young self, it represented the Only. Doctor Who. Ever. And it was only a few years later when I started collecting videos with The Five Doctors and City of Death that the chinks in Seasons 25 and 26’s respective armours started to reveal themselves, namely in Silver Nemesis.

To be blunt, Silver Nemesis is astonishingly bad. There are so many tiny things that irritate throughout, and that’s before the crimes of Keff McCulloch are even mentioned. (While I’m at it though, how ironic and face-palmingly wonderful that the Master of Straight-Blowing Jazz Courtney Pine and the Master of Nothing at All Keff McCulloch share a credit on a Doctor Who episode. But seriously, what is with that awful, awful Nee-Naw, Nee-Naw awfulness synthing its way across Windsor as Lady Peinforte and Richard take an awkwardly costumed stroll in Part Two?) The plotting is utter madness: Why do the Doctor and Ace visit Windsor Castle twice in Part One either side of a trip to Lady Peinforte’s house? Why are the Cybermen having a Musical Statues competition in the middle of the woods before DeFlores and his lover arrive nonchalantly before asking if they can become bosom buddies? Why does Lady Peinforte show Richard his grave and why does she then go mad? Things in Silver Nemesis simply happen. In quick cuts. Suddenly, Ace and her Professor are having a little whistle in a field. Suddenly, the skinheads have been all but skinned. Suddenly, some duff policemen get gassed.

A few years ago, I decided to attempt to find something to like in Silver Nemesis. I sat down with a mate to see if we could learn to love Silver Nemesis.  Because Silver Nemesis had become that most dreadful of things: a soiled childhood memory. It had once been just as affecting and exciting as The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. Once, I had absolutely thrilled to see Ace racing through the hangar in Part Three dodging fireworks and firing golden nuggets. Now, it had become just what is was: a dreadfully written, cheap-looking mess. An embarrassment. And I wanted that childhood memory back. I wanted to see the Silver Nemesis I saw so long ago.

How we laughed at it.

I found that I’d missed the point. Surely, Silver Nemesis is an out and out comedy. I mean, surely it is! By accident or design, we asked ourselves? Truthfully, we didn’t care; we were in hysterics.

My new favourite thing in the world has got to be the absolute earnestness with which Gerard Murphy utters the line, “On my life Ma’am, I guarantee it” to her mad question: “You’re sure the poison is well mixed?” He gives such enormous weight to the first half of the line, “On my life, Ma’am.” There then follows a huge dramatic pause before he almost whispers the message he is actually attempting to relate: “I guarantee it.” Such mental line readings are prolific in Silver Nemesis. It positively hums with mental line readings. Anton Diffring is as incoherent and indecipherable as George Pravda in The Mutants. “It vill be decisive,” he blurts out in Part One with all the passion of a wet trump. This is followed by “I give you the Fourth Reich” which neither the character nor the actor make any attempt to believe in.

“Dorothea Remington did bribe away my cook,” is another crazed favourite. In fact, that whole scene in the limo, apart from being entirely pointless is such enormous fun. Gerard Murphy becomes the star of the episode again in his emphatic delivery of the rejoinder to Remington’s, “I just came over from London,” when he sincerely drives through with a breathy “Two days ride.” And later on, when Remington tells us she’s “checking out [her] roots,” Gerard Murphy gives his sage, earnest advice: “Tis wise with crops this time of year, Ma’am.” What makes these instances of Gerard Murphy’s sincerity so priceless is the fact that Kevin Clarke’s attempt at Shakespearean dialogue is so cod, so dire, so massively inadequate that Murphy’s delivery seems even more ill-matched. He doesn’t even try to send up such poor material: like a good, old pro, he goes for it. With full abandon. And it’s gloriously funny. “As my Lady knows, before I entered your service I was found guilty of a large number of offences!” he cries wildly in Part One. Indeed you were, Gerard. To the acting profession. Most beautifully of all, Gerard Murphy is given the show’s last gag: “We have none of this jazz whereof you speak but I think you will like this.”

My brothers and I continue to act out the glorious skinheads scene. What the hell is it all about? What were Messrs Clarke and Cartmel thinking when they wrote, read and presumably re-read this:

SKINHEAD 1:      “You looking at me?”
LADY P:                 “Stand aside.”
SKINHEAD 2:      “What are you, social workers?”
RICHARD:            “Out of my lady’s way.”
SKINHEAD 1:      “We want to tell you our problems.”
LADY P:                 “Would you be turned into rats?”
SKINHEAD 2:      “We already have been.”
SKINHEAD 1:      “Poor ones.”
SKINHEAD 2:      “That’s our problem.”
SKINHEAD 2:      “Money!”

And the remarkable hero that Gerard Murphy is ends the scene with a lurid reading and a half smile of, “Money, say you?” It’s blisteringly good television. I wonder if Clarke or Cartmel had ever met a skinhead. Presumably, they’d met a couple who greeted them with the declaration that they wanted to tell the two gents their problems? Who can be sure?

Speaking of poor dialogue, I love the Cybermen in this. They are so unlike Cybermen they might as well just be… well, men. “The fact of her death will drive her insane,” the Leader intones mechanically in an uncharacteristic off-day for David Banks. And later, his namby-pambying curious underling asks politely, “Is this the human condition known as madness, Leader?” The Leader replies with, “It is.” Yeah, of course he recognises madness. He’s a Cyberman, for heaven’s sake. Why wouldn’t he? And how stupid is his curious underling if he doesn’t recognise madness when he hears a woman shouting “Where?!” from across a field through a castle wall? In fact, it’s a good job they spent ages planning for Peinforte’s madness as the Leader’s very next instruction relies completely on her being mad. “Kill them.”

There is so much to enjoy in Silver Nemesis that it’s become almost preferable to The Curse of Fenric. Almost. And whilst that childhood memory of excitement and derring-do has not quite been rekindled, I have come to fall in love with it again albeit in a different, more ridiculing kind of way.

In conclusion, as Gerard Murphy would shamelessly exclaim, without the slightest hint of embarrassment: “It sounds like a bear. BUT WORSE!”

JH