It was incredibly difficult to
rank Colin’s time on the show. Right up until publication, I was chopping and changing the order. One season is embedded in the clutches of the
dreaded Trial, the other season is one of 45-minute instalments and his
other story is a traditional four-parter. It doesn’t feel as if you’re
comparing like for like. What’s more, as committed and bravura a performance as
Colin gives, he’s laboured with some tedious, tedious scripts, only one of
which – in my humble opinion of course – achieves true greatness. His era is
fascinating, however. The traditionally hated stories, I don’t find nearly as
offensive as some of his other baggier tales. Whatever the relative highs and
lows of the individual stories, and whatever the reasons for the back-stabbing
and back-biting backstage, there is one man who comes out of this dignity
intact – ironically the man who was asked to walk away. Here’s to you, Colin
Baker.
11. THE MARK OF THE RANI
So it looks nice. Like the
Davison two-part historicals, this has the feel of those upmarket BBC costume
dramas of the day. But the Doctor Who equivalents are criminally lacking in
terms of scripting. The Mark of the Rani should be a great tale – that’s
its biggest crime. This is a tale of historical meddling, the Master again
playing the Monk and attempting to change the course of the timelines forever.
However, the promised meeting of the great scientific minds never happens.
Instead, we’re arsing about in a forest of fake plastic trees, seeing our hero
at his most undignified, avoiding a mine from the shackles of his trussed-up
position. It’s decidedly unheroic, as Pip and Jane might have said. They would
go on to perfect their verbose, edifying scripts into something approaching
charming but here their over-articulate and repetitive dialogue is plain
annoying. Why does the Master say aloud the story title to himself twice?
The three Time Lords may not be written in the human tongue, but neither are
they written in a particularly welcome one. They talk like snotty cleverdicks
so keen on excluding those who they see as intellectually inferior, those
outside their prissy circle, by speaking in words their present company would
never understand. It’s frankly alienating. When I reviewed Shada, I
applauded the cleverness of that TARDIS crew, the joy of being around great
minds, but they never patronised us nor made us feel small. Here, that’s what
this feels like. If Pip and Jane had written something which actually worked, I
might forgive them for being a big highfalutin, but The Mark of the Rani is
a mess. Look the climax. Are we to see a tale which sees the Luddites and the
scientists clash dramatically? No. We get a dinosaur on a spaceship
(not nearly as good as that prospect will turn out to be) and then it’s all
depressingly over. Ah well. At least Anthony Ainley got to do his Worzel
Gummidge bit for absolutely no reason.
10. ATTACK OF THE CYBERMEN
Eric Saward is incredibly
frustrating. How can he go from Earthshock to Attack of the Cybermen,
or from Resurrection to Revelation of the Daleks? Maybe he has
one story on, one story off? Attack has lots going for it: the sewer
scenes, the filmic sequences in the London streets and on Telos, the character
work and the Cybermen themselves. But they’re strung together with such arbitrary
plotting that they end up feeling like beads on a string. It’s such a brittle
narrative that one false move and those beads go rolling all over the shop. Why
exactly are the Cybermen hiding in a base under the sewers? It must have taken
them ages to build that thing. It’s as if Saward has a list of things to
include (probably supplied by Ian Levine) and is sewing them together to make a patchwork as unworkable as the Doctor’s coat. But then, this is a sequel to a
story from twenty years beforehand, a story nobody (aside from probably Ian
Levine) could have had the luxury of re-watching and also sees a return to 76 Totters Lane for reasons best guessed at. So whatever possessed Eric
Saward to even begin writing this at all is something I don’t think any of us
could even begin to understand. Attack of the Cybermen is a mess.
9. TIMELASH
Much lambasted, but Timelash
proves to be great fun if approached in the right frame of mind. Paul Darrow,
the fabulously camp Maylin Tekker is the undoubted star of his own show. On the
DVD documentary, Darrow advises the viewer to “switch off after I’m dead; it’s
boring.” As cocksure as his instructions are, he has a point. There is a
luxuriation in his performance which demands to be seen. He introduces Maylin
Renis at the opening of the story and is the only member of the cast committing
to applause. He prowls through scenes smugly and knows absolutely who we are supposed
to be keeping our eyes on; it’s certainly not Colin Baker with whom he seems to
be vying. Colin takes it up a notch; Darrow takes it up two. The last quarter of
the story - after his death - is not only emptier and less fun, but also more
badly written. New writer Glen McCoy has been asked to shorten his scripts to
bring them in on time but he’s been ill-advised. There’s another fifteen
minutes which needs filling. We end up, therefore, with those awful, awful
scenes of Colin overacting with the bumbling young David Chandler, doing his
best to be charming and in doing so, quite possibly succeeding. The society of
Karfel is simplistic and some of the dialogue notoriously nosedives but this is
one of only two stories in Season 22 not reliant on past adventures and
returning villains. It therefore has a freshness about it. Timelash inadvertently invents
the celebrity historical, has a lovely monster in the shape of the Borad (and
indeed, that android!) and the music’s cool. It’s underrated and can be an
enjoyable experience if you think of it as a piece of fluff and try to get past
the unforgiveable “I’ll explain later” explanation as to how the Doctor manages to outwit a missile.
8. THE MYSTERIOUS PLANET
I like this script a lot. Had it
been given to Graeme Harper, he might have found a way to make the underground
look like the underground and make the tube trains look like tube trains. But
with Nicholas Mallett and John Anderson on directing and designing duties, it
looks cheap and nasty. (Funnily enough, this would happen again to Mallett the following
season.) Tom Chadbon looks embarrassed to be associated with the show – a far
cry from his engaged and funny Duggan. Everybody dresses in a uniform, Tony Selby
is grossly miscast as the Del Boy pirate mercenary, Glitz. He can’t even get
his lips around Bob Holmes’s characteristically eloquent script. “To rrrender
the rrrobot non-operational...” he starts, rolling his rs to buy him time as he
thinks about where this line is going. Even the location work looks as drab as
the story’s would-be title. It’s a shame because with a better director, a better
cast and a bit more money, this could well be one of Holmes’s best – and that’s
saying something.
7. THE TWIN DILEMMA
Another underrated Colin story. I
don’t know why it always manages to reach the very bottom of the polls. It’s never
in the bottom half; it’s always right at the very bottom by some distance: the
supposed nadir of Doctor Who. True, it introduces the coat, the glitz and Old
Sixie, who sadly remains not quite so universally loved as other Doctors. But
to me, the only true mis-step in The Twin Dilemma is the Doctor’s unwillingness
to apologise to Peri. This doesn’t make him dangerous or unpredictable; it
makes him an arsehole. That last scene in the TARDIS should be reassurance that
he’s still under there, both hearts still beating. It should be a reconciliation
between Doctor and Companion. Colin and Nicola wisely play it that way (The
clever people – that’s why they’re our new stars!) but that’s not how it’s written.
Instead, it sounds like a mission statement. “You thought that was bad? Well,
it’s about to get a whole lot worse!” There should have been some empathy here.
If Colin’s Doctor had simply admitted that he’d done some terrible deeds, said
some foul things, we might be more ready to travel with him. It wouldn’t take away
from his behaviour in Season 22 as he still takes a while to settle but it
would be a reassurance to the viewer that we’re not about to travel the
universe with an oaf who can’t admit when he is wrong. Aside from that, which I
admit is an issue of some magnitude, The Twin Dilemma is fresh,
colourful, zippy and fun. I don’t even think the twins are that bad and Maurice
Denham puts in a quite beautiful performance.
6. THE ULTIMATE FOE
Its production issues are widely
noted, but Pip and Jane Baker actually manage to write Eric Saward out of his
corner. Cleverly, they use the screen through which we’ve been enjoying the
Doctor’s adventures for the last 14 weeks as the weapon that will kill the
members of the courtroom. With three days to spare ‘til deadline, that’s an ingenius piece of plotting. The first half is full of startling imagery, the like of
which probably hasn’t been seen since Kinda or failing that,
understandably, The Deadly Assassin. Geoffrey Hughes is great support as
the mysterious Mr Popplewick and Michael Jayston oozes star quality. There’s
also the terrific moment in which Anthony Ainley casually throws in the
Valeyard’s true identity. But ultimately, there’s no saving the fact that after
fourteen episodes, nobody has decided how this thing is going to finish. It’s an
example of a season of utter cohesive failure. Getting his best team on it seemed
like Eric Saward’s grand idea but events would conspire against him. His striker
was taken ill and died; his mid-fielder didn’t seem to have a grasp of precisely
what his role in the game was and his substitutes were Pip and Jane Baker. Bless
them.
5. MINDWARP
As mentioned above, Philip Martin
isn’t quite sure where his story fits in the narrative of The Trial of a
Time Lord and seemingly neither does Eric Saward. It’s not clear, nor is it
made clear later, which of the Doctor’s activities here are matrix simulations
and which are real. With any other Doctor, it might have been obvious but with
Colin’s still erratic and unstable incarnation, it’s not the best timing.
Seeing him torture Peri on the beach is unsettling viewing and another obstacle
to our connecting with him because it might, just might, be real. In the
courtroom, his witless bantz becomes irritating quickly. Everything the script
is throwing at Colin seems to be doing its best to sabotage his Doctor. It’s
a credit to Colin that he comes out of this with head held high. In his realisation
that Peri has died, this is his finest moment. Indeed, the best thing about
Mindwarp is its moody, despairing atmosphere and cynical hard-hitting
ending. Occasionally, the tone is undercut by some ill-judged humour (such as
Sil’s “more attractive” line) but for the most part, the lighting design, the
incidental music and the tragic structure of events leads to a story of grim atmospherics.
Despite its confusing unreliable narrator set-up, there is something alluringly
dark about Mindwarp.
4. THE TWO DOCTORS
At three 45-minute episodes, The
Two Doctors is a cumbersome beast. There are scenes which seem to last an eternity,
the worst being the Sixth Doctor’s reasoning at the start of Part Two. He has a
theory about an embolism which he pontificates about for a good while before dismissing
it and starting from scratch on an entirely different thesis. Far from
enriching the scripts, the longer scenes make it look like the show has put on
unnecessary weight. Having said that, there is still a sprinkling of Bob Holmes
magic all over the dialogue and characterisations. Typically, he’s more
interested in his new creations than those John Nathan-Turner has lumbered him with.
His Second Doctor is all wrong. His Sontarans barely feature (although when
they do, their voices are the highlight of the respective scenes). No, his clear
favourites are Shockeye and Oscar Botcherby, tellingly even given the best
names. They are such luscious creations, a language all of their own, their own
sets of identifying behaviours. They are the perfect contrast to one another too: Shockeye’s “gratification of pleasure” being his sole purpose and Botcherby
exhibiting nothing but the perfect manners the better to save offending. It is as
if Holmes himself is battling out his own inner demon and angel. Other moments
of boyish devilment delight too: the eating of the rat, the licking of the
blood, the shepherd’s pie line. There’s much to enjoy in The Two Doctors.
But like any good meal, it’s probably best digested one episode at a time
rather than trying, like Shockeye, to digest all three courses at once.
3. VENGEANCE ON VAROS
Possibly the cleverest of the Sixth
Doctor’s stories, Philip Martin’s first script for Doctor Who has a very
specific job: to tell the story of a world devoted to the selling of home media,
filmed as – essentially - a series of snuff movies. Doctor Who might never be
able to get away with such a concept today and it’s quite staggering that they managed
it in 1985. But it might have even more relevance now. In our age of I’m a
Celebrity and TOWIE, we delight in watching real tragedies, genuine
terrors. As a society, we bask in the pain of others, as long as we know they’re
in no real danger. We’re only one step away from Varos – a world where its inhabitants
binge watch executions and vote simply In or Out when it comes to key decisions. Sadly, like most
Colin Baker stories, it’s not without its deficiencies. The Doctor and Peri
take an age to turn up, the Doctor instead preferring to sulk in his hitherto
unseen blue, plastic TARDIS chair. The climax with the poison tendrils doesn’t
work at all and the transmogrification scenes seem like an unnecessary jeopardy
rather than something which, like everything else, is playing out the satire. But
it’s all worth it for Martin Jarvis’s fabulous performance, for Nabil Shaban’s grotesque
Sil, for the nightmare of the purple zone or the acid baths scenes (which nobody
should have ever complained about), for that riveting cliff-hanger, appropriately perfectly shot. “And cut it… now!”
2. TERROR OF THE VERVOIDS
This is the best Sixth Doctor story.
By that I mean, this is Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor at his very best. Easily. He’s
charming, bright, alert and finally, in his last filmed story, finds his voice.
I’ve been quite hard on Pip and Jane Baker elsewhere in this article but say
what you will about them, they give their leading man his very best material in
Terror of the Vervoids. This is a Doctor who isn’t busy with put-downs,
embarrassing his companions or letting the world know how much he knows.
No, here he charms the stewardess with magic tricks, cleverly sounds the fire
alarm, sending the guard off in the wrong direction as he fancies a bit of
trespass, and comes up with intelligent solutions to problems such as using the
marsh gas against the lunatic Bruchner. After the false start that was The Mark
of the Rani, Pip and Jane prove to be the perfect writers for Colin Baker and
in Mel, they provide the perfect companion. I’d have loved to have seen a
season with them together. It’s worth noting that the recent Blu Ray presentation
of the story, divorced from the Trial and with a new title sequence,
gives us an indication of what that might have been like. It also highlights the
albatross that was the Trial format itself. This version is so much more fun.
1. REVELATION OF THE DALEKS
Eric Saward’s masterpiece, Revelation
is an all-time favourite. I prefer it to Androzani, to Talons, to
Blink, to all those big hitters. This feels like the sort of thing he
was always trying and failing to produce, the sort of thing he wanted to eek
out of his writers but could not quite manage. This is Saward Unbound. His
characters are free, wild and imaginative, the world of Necros constructed with
care and rich, sprawling understanding. Scene after scene impresses with its revelling dialogue, fiendish wit and barbed drama. Each of the inhabitants of Necros
are self-dramatising. Look at Vogel, for instance: “And I would give them
willingly,” he says of his bones. It’s almost as if he’s begging those Daleks
to kill him. William Gaunt’s tremendous Orcini talks about nothing but his
honour and his strategy. Jobel is so in love with himself he is blind to how
detestably he comes across. Alexei Sayle’s DJ does nothing but talk to
himself and then, in the end, proves to be quite a shy, endearing Liverpudlian.
Terry Molloy’s Davros is a deliciously evil creation, far removed from the ranting
megalomaniac of Resurrection. Here, he’s a sadist, delighting in causing
Tasembeker pain before he orders her unnecessary death. This is the story that
cemented Davros’s reputation as one of Doctor Who’s greatest villains and textbook
nutjobs. With such vital character work in abundance, it’s a shame that Revelation
doesn’t end completely conclusively, with Davros escaping for another day after
being kidnapped by Daleks from another story entirely. Were it to feel more divorced
from Doctor Who’s wider context, Revelation might well stand up as a
piece of art in its own right. As it happens, Graeme Harper does such a fine
job of making this full-bloodied, violent thriller, poetically arty enough.
This is classic Doctor Who pushing the boat out, flexing its wings, at the very
limits of what is achievable. It’s ambitious and confident and ultimately one
of the very, very best. Well done, Eric Saward!
JH
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