#DoctorWhoLockdown - The Davison Years

After the giant-sized ranking wrangling that was the Tom Baker years, Peter Davison’s twenty stories feel like a far smaller affair. It’s notable however, when trying to order them that the gulf between the best and worst of the era seems far wider than that of the Tom stories. Even The Invisible Enemy and Underworld are not hindered by nonsensical scripts or poor plotting. Here, we go from the very, very worst of Doctor Who to some of the very best, sometimes between stories that fall side by side in broadcast order. Great highs and great lows. Here we go!

20. WARRIORS OF THE DEEP

This might go down as my all-time least favourite Doctor Who adventure, including both old and new iterations of the show. However, I can still find things to love in it, a testament to the great joy that this crazy programme brings. The music is terrific, some of the sets are extremely impressive (the bridge over the water tank you can believe is beneath the ocean) and the TARDIS regulars are on top form. But it beggars belief that John Nathan-Turner and Pennant Roberts, given the production problems they encountered before filming even started, put their heads together and decided, “Full steam ahead!” The show - to be blunt - sails straight into a mattress-shaped wall. If the monsterless Season 20 had proven difficult enough to produce, I’m not sure how a script which demanded underwater filming, model shots and not one, not two but three brand new monster builds was felt to be in any way achievable. The Silurians are resolutely not the same guys we met back in 1970 and the Sea Devils are resolutely not the same guys we met back in 1973. If John Nathan-Turner was trying to score brownie points with a small but adoring fanbase who loudly celebrated Earthshock’s Cyber return, he was on dodgy ground. Worst offender of all though, is that dreaded Myrka of Room 101 legend. Ill-designed, badly shot and its paint still drying: that a team not used to monsters didn’t think this might be the best aspect to drop from an already overambitious script for any smooth running production is jaw-dropping. By the time Part Three of Warriors of the Deep hits the half-way mark, there’s no turning back. This is wretched television. Even the Sea Devils suffer pains in the neck getting through this.

19. THE KING’S DEMONS

Not particularly offensive (it looks too pretty for that) but pointless. If there were ever a disposable Doctor Who story, it would be The King’s Demons. The Master’s plan is insane. When the time comes for the story to climax (you know, that fateful moment when the Magna Carta itself is about to be signed and the Doctor and friends must race to stop their nemesis destroying history), instead we’re watching Anthony Ainley claim the Doctor’s willy’s weak. Although the design work does a fair job of disguising it, and Gerald Flood plays it like he means it, there’s nothing going on here. It might look like Shakespeare but it certainly doesn’t sound like it. The Master’s half-arsed getaway in the Iron Maiden is the last tepid moment in this meaningless divergence in which precisely nothing of consequence happens, Turlough stresses the wrong word when he says “he is the evil one” and the Master’s new ginger beard is as see-through as his toupee. It does look nice though. We could perhaps watch it with the sound down?

18. TIME-FLIGHT

Here’s the thing about Time-Flight: it has all the hallmarks of a modern season finale. The Big Bad Master from the opening story returns for the climax. After a series’ worth of attempts to get Tegan back to Heathrow, the TARDIS finally ends up there, bringing her story to a natural conclusion. Some old enemies from throughout the season show their faces again and the ghost of a dead companion turns up in an emotional moment. There’s a huge, jaw-dropping cliff-hanger halfway through. There’s a lot of money spent here on the lavish location work and there’s a big bold idea at Time-Flight’s centre: one of our Concordes has gone missing. The problem is it isn’t written like a modern season finale. It’s too obsessed with TARDIS circuitry, the nature of the Plasmatons, psychic connectivity and bafflegab to be even remotely endearing. In short, it’s dull. It’s weak in all the places it needs to be strong. This could be the emotional first voyage without Adric. The Master could use the loss of the maths wiz as a weapon; as it happens, he doesn’t even mention him. Adric’s return could be a projection with actual resonance, rather than an excuse to get Matthew Waterhouse’s name in the Radio Times. And Tegan could seriously struggle with the idea of being and going home. There needs to be some human conflict here for our regulars. By Part Four, even the otherwise breathless and magnetic Peter Davison looks bored.

17. ARC OF INFINITY

There’s some gorgeous location work and the last act, as Omega is chased across Amsterdam is a strangely alluring affair: the moment when he sees the little boy smiling and hears the organ and something, something crosses his face. Humanity? There is a nice romantic darkness to the penniless tourists sleeping alongside the dead. Those scenes have a lovely, dank atmosphere. Unfortunately, Johnny Byrne makes all the same mistakes he did writing Traken. He seems to think that alien worlds are interesting if they have protocols and rituals, but rather than dramatise them, he simply presents them in all their insipid, arduous glory. The Part One cliff-hanger symbolises what is wrong with Arc of Infinity. It’s the first show in a new season. What headline grabbing cliff-hanger are we going to go for? Oh. The Doctor gets shot. It’s drab. A word that typifies this tedious Time Lord tussle. A return to Gallifrey should be stirring. Instead, it feels like being stuck in a waiting room as the paperwork gets filled in next door.

16. BLACK ORCHID

A friend challenged me to watch Black Orchid once and tell him what was wrong with it because I was adamant it didn’t work. He loved it. It’s true I couldn’t quite pin down where the story went wrong but then, neither could he define any greatness therein. Like many a JNT story, it looks gorgeous: the costumes, the sets, the cast, the filming – all shine. But there’s no script here to work from. It presents itself as an Agatha Christie murder mystery type but there’s no mystery to solve. The revelations at the end pose more questions than they answer. Whose portrait is in the book, for instance? Lord Cranleigh’s or George’s? Were the brothers twins? Is this what George used to look like? Is the portrait there to protect George’s modesty by presenting his brother instead? It’s typical of all the revelations put forward at the tail end of the show. Rather than have us go “Ooooh!” as we realise what’s been going on, they instead elicit an “Uh?” as we are confused by what’s been going on instead. And to present the police with the TARDIS as proof that you’re telling the truth feels like abject cheating. Surely the mysteries and explanations should be confined to Cranleigh Hall? Terence Dudley’s script is lazily written, underpowered and not nearly as clever as he seems to think it is.

15. PLANET OF FIRE

Like Arc of Infinity, sumptuous location filming is offset by an undercooked script and like Time-Flight, Peter Grimwade seems obsessed with tittle-tattle rather than hammering home those big moments. This is the story that introduces Peri, kills Kamelion and says goodbye to Turlough. Quite astoundingly, all three of those moments actually land but are plagued by nonsense dialogue elsewhere like the Master’s, “Go to the Doctor’s machine and materialise that preposterous box inside my TARDIS.” It all gets a bit techy, a bit fiddly and undramatic. It’s a shame also that by sheer coincidence Sarn looks so much like Lanzarote. When Timanov and Malkon stroll into shot, dressed in desert-wear, they could well be some of the Spanish island’s residents and certainly in one of the hotels. Surely, it would have been far better to have split the location work across episodes so that perhaps, Frontios might have benefited from some outdoor filming? Who knows? It’s a peculiar quirk of Doctor Who that when too much money is spent on it, its filmic language doesn’t quite compute. We’re seeing an alien world, yes, but seeing Lanzarote is perhaps more weird?

14. FOUR TO DOOMSDAY

The first half of this leisurely pondersome tale is fairly pleasant viewing. There are some curious mysteries and the cliff-hangers are well-judged, timed at natural pivots in the plot which change our understanding of events. There’s no great propulsion. The regulars wonder around without any noticeable urgency and the villains are unusually chilled out. But this is a palette cleansing story. This is a new TARDIS team in a simple tale which gives them all a decent amount to do, unlike other stories in the season and indeed, the two most recent TV series. The guest characters are interesting and memorable but there’s no real jeopardy until the climactic space work (Surprisingly well done!) which itself isn’t the real climax of the narrative – that would be Monarch’s final stand outside the TARDIS which is terribly fudged. It’s slight and he is dispatched far too quickly. Four to Doomsday is pleasant viewing if you’re in a philosophical mood but it’s never going to get you even close to the edge of your seat.

13. THE AWAKENING

What do we remember about The Awakening? The fantastic church set, the face in the wall, the ghost in the barn, the blue musketeers, the beheading, the location work: and it’s only two episodes long! The problem is The Awakening only amounts to a series of strong images. There’s no one to truly care about. Like the worst of the era, it doesn’t know how to dramatise its story. There are strong ideas in play but no real structure, the plotting too boringly complicated to be utterly forgettable. Time and again, the stories of the era become bogged down in the technicalities of what’s happening rather than telling simpler, faster moving tales. Imagine Time-Flight without the TARDIS circuitry or The Awakening without the visit to the console room to talk about psychic projection. It looks gorgeous – just like the other two-parters of the era – and there are some striking and memorable moments but in the end, it amounts to nothing. We don’t even get to meet Tegan’s Grandad, who should surely be at the heart of this. Perhaps that’s the problem here: The Awakening is essentially heartless.

12. THE VISITATION

On transmission, The Visitation was the first pseudo-historical story for a long, long time. Its plague era set script, full of old mansions, burning buildings, dungeons and stalking death made for fresh, visceral viewing after a year and a half of more philosophical sci-fi orientated shows. It seemed like a return to what people remembered as “classic” Who. However, freed from its 1982 context, it’s clear that not a lot of worth goes on in The Visitation. The owners of the house killed at the start of the story should have been met by Death, not the disco android. The rats should have been seen to infect. We should have had scenes of them scurrying through the London streets. We shouldn’t have spent an inordinate amount of time in the TARDIS building a rubbish machine or indeed, just as the story should be reaching its zenith, doing a spot of map reading. There’s no urgency about The Visitation and it doesn’t play to all its key strengths – the plague, the darkness, the death. Instead, it’s content to have boring scenes of companions being locked up, talked at and casually pottering between the roundels. There’s a sense that The Visitation would have been a better story without the Doctor and his companions, in which Richard Mace is the star and ends up battling it out on that fabulous Stuart-London set. A story called Invasion of the Plague Men perhaps? 

11. TERMINUS

It’s unfortunate that both Steve Gallagher’s scripts for Doctor Who seem to have been beset by production issues. In the first instance, that made for an avant-garde and abstract experience in Warriors’ Gate. Here, though, the production issues are more problematic. The Garm is a bit of a disaster, although as it holds its head in triumph at the story’s conclusion, you can’t help falling for the old dog. There are some very grey sets and some badly-choreographed fight sequences. Terminus usually gets lambasted more though for being a bit dull and there are indeed moments of tedium, not helped by Roger Limb’s dreary, irritating score. For the most part however, it’s a doom-laden and indeed, depressing story. That’s rare in Doctor Who. Surrounded by the dead and the dying, the world of Terminus is possibly the bleakest in the whole of the programme’s history, making Steve Gallagher’s final entry into the canon unique. If you can learn to love the grey and allow it to envelop you, you might find there are some rather beautiful science fiction ideas hidden beneath the oppression.

10. FRONTIOS

Christopher H Bidmead wrote three beautiful, beautiful Doctor Who stories, with rich ideas, huge concepts and poetic resonance. That he managed it without any regard for the rules of dramatic writing is perhaps miraculous. Look at what Frontios has to offer: “the appetite beneath the ground”; “the earth was hungry”; “deaths unaccountable.” Creeping, unsettling phrases which get under the skin and make this world all the more mysterious, frightening and alien. In each of his stories, Bidmead constructs a society which works, which has its own rules, far removed from human norms and procedures. In Logopolis and Castrovalva, however, perhaps criminally we don’t reach them until the half-way point. Here, we spend half of the first episode looking for a battery. In any textbook, this would be an example of how not to write. And yet this remains beguiling, strange and memorable. Perhaps because Bidmead is so off-the-wall and his story structure so elusive that his tales seem to come to life. Whereas lots of the Davison era feels quite beige and talky, Frontios is anything but.  

9. RESURRECTION OF THE DALEKS

Unwieldy, bull-headed, unforgivably strutting and macho, Resurrection of the Daleks is by no means the thinking man’s Doctor Who story. It is, however, undeservedly exciting, rockets along and fires thrill after thrill after thrill at the viewer. Looking for a Dalek in the creepy warehouse; it’s under the blanket; oh no it isn’t, it’s just a cat; but the Dalek’s over there killing someone! The action sequences are written and directed with deliberate pacing, moments compounding one on top of the other. The arrival of Davros is, as Matthew Robinson says on the story’s commentary, “a classic Doctor Who moment,” Malcolm Clarke’s music building wonderfully to the reveal. The moment in which Osborn’s partner turns around to show her his melting fingers is horrific. The murder of the metal detector man is brutal and unnecessary. Resurrection can’t help being stupid though: when the Daleks announce their plans to duplicate the Doctor and his companions and send them to kill the Gallifreyan High Council, it elicits a groan rather than a dramatic intake of breath. Just how does it connect to the warehouse and why indeed is the warehouse being used at all? Explanations don’t matter to Eric Saward though; he’s too busy composing his next slaughter. Braindead but incredible fun, Resurrection is a story best not thought too deeply about; rather enjoyed for what it is – a glorified killing machine.

8. ENLIGHTENMENT

There’s a lovely moment in Enlightenment when the Doctor asks Captain Striker what, as an Eternal, the sailor is racing across space for. Keith Barron delivers his response subtly: “The wisdom which knows all things and which will enable me to achieve what I desire the most. Do not ask what it is. I will not tell you.” Barron in his distant and strange way embodies the frightening mystery of the Eternals. We never truly find out their motivation. In a show that usually relishes delivering its answers, this moment of restraint is hard-hitting. Barbara Clegg’s ethereal script is haunting and dramatic in a way that many other stories of the season aren’t. She uses the memory of Tegan’s Auntie for the first time as a story-telling device and gives Tegan a humanity she has hitherto been lacking. Her strange relationship with Marriner is thrilling in its development. Turlough’s attempted suicide above decks is extraordinary and shot on film looks breath-taking. Apart from the obvious problem of Leee John, which is easy to overlook given his short screen time, Enlightenment is an altogether rather magical piece of television.

7. MAWDRYN UNDEAD

For all Mawdryn Undead’s plotting complications (and as in Grimwade’s other tales, there’s a lot of techno-guff that needs wading through), this is the moving story of what became of the Brigadier. The image of him, alone in his wooden bedsit making tea and reminiscing about his glory days, his memories confused and fragmented, is torturously sad. As the Doctor helps the Brig to regain those vital lost moments, and Nicholas Courtney in an uncharacteristically faraway tone says, “Somebody just walked over my grave,” it provokes a definite chill-up-the-spine. There is much to enjoy elsewhere. David Collings is on top form, Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton have lots to do and new boy Mark Strickson makes for an unusual, charismatic new star. But this is Nick Courtney’s story: what could have been a nostalgic return to the UNIT days, instead gives way to something more mature, more real. The world has left him behind and he’s left with only fractured splinters of those heroic days. And Courtney proves without a shadow of a doubt that he has very definitely still got it. And the design work's lovely too!

6. THE FIVE DOCTORS

There’s a modern fan myth that multi-Doctor stories don’t work. Arguably The Day of the Doctor rectified that idea but actually, it was already an untruth. The Five Doctors is a glorious celebration and a fine one too, and the multi-Doctor aspect of the story absolutely works. Terrance Dicks composes a fiendishly simple plot to get our Doctors together: so simple it perhaps seems childish. But he’s a past master at this. He knows the simplest ideas are often the best. Into any fifth of his Death Zone, he can now place any Doctor-Companion dynamic and he knows they’ll work. This is a man whose understanding of Doctor Who travels through his veins. He has the joy of it, the feel of it, that “indefinable magic” so often attributed to it. If there’s a man who could define that magic, it’s Terrance Dicks. Perhaps that's what that indefinable magic is: the Terrance Dicks touch. Eminently quotable, well-paced and with so many punch-the-air moments, The Five Doctors is the ultimate in comfort Who, the happiest celebration and the least cynical. If only they’d packed Kamelion away in a cupboard in that first scene, it would feel like a perfect continuation of the show rather than the star-filled variety show it probably really is. What an unalloyed joy this 20th anniversary special is.

5. SNAKEDANCE

Snakedance is everything The Five Doctors isn’t. Despite being a sequel, it’s a very new world being explored here. Lon and his withering mother are the establishment; fortune tellers and mirror men are the commonfolk but slithering through all the walks of Manusan life is the metaphorical evil of the Mara. Christopher Bailey’s script is effortlessly rich, he seems to know the society so well. Like a good playwright, there are layers of character exposed in his briefest lines. Best of all though, and a scene which goes curiously uncelebrated in Doctor Who, is the one in which Lon takes Ambril to the cave to seek his treasure, only to be met by the possessed Hawker and his “roll up - roll up” patter accompanied by Peter Howell’s devastating hurdy-gurdy score. It’s moments like this you know you’re watching a programme with such rich capacity to present in a new context the strange and the nightmarish. Here, in Snakedance, those nightmares represent something not just weird and exciting, but a darkness inside all of us.

4. CASTROVALVA

Like Frontios, Christopher H Bidmead’s scripts don’t obey the rules. There’s no talk - at all - of what Tegan or Nyssa have just been through. The disappearance of Adric is mentioned and then forgotten. Events have no dramatic effect on these characters. And yet, that’s not what Bidmead is interested in. He doesn’t want this to be the story of how Nyssa comes to terms with the death of all the people she has ever known or how Tegan comes to terms with being a long way from Heathrow or how Adric copes with this suddenly new Doctor. No, he’s interested in mathematical structure. Resultantly, the companions are given designations which are, after Castrovalva, never used again. Tegan, for instance, here becomes the co-ordinator. Not a character; a role within a structure. Bidmead is interested in recursion, a theme which extends even to the way all of the characters speak. Instead of mourning the loss of a beloved aunt, Tegan is instead ruminating on the recursive power of If. Mergrave attests that he is telling the truth, “because Sir, I maintain I am and I am a man of my word.” A perfect example of recursive. Even the Master has “a trap inside that trap.” As a showpiece for a new Doctor, it’s possible that Castrovalva does not remotely work. As an exploration of the language of mathematical structure, it verges on the poetic.

3. EARTHSHOCK

There’s little to say about Earthshock that wasn’t said at the time. That isn’t an assertion that it can’t be revisited and enjoyed. On the contrary, the further away we get from Earthshock, the more spectacular it is that this was made in the first place. It’s an action thriller shot in the same way as Crossroads and, as has been said before, it changed the trajectory of Doctor Who. It meant the showrunners saw this sort of thing as achievable (and probably accounts for Warriors of the Deep). But it’s only so often in Doctor Who that all the stars align like this. First, you need a script that rockets along like this, a director of supreme capability (Enter Peter Grimwade or Graeme Harper), then you need lighting to be on their side, costumes and music to be A-plus and the performances to be vital. All that is achieved here and in the next story in this list. Earthshock has so many stars: Peter Davison, Peter Grimwade, David Banks, James Warwick, Eric Saward, Beryl Reid (Yeah, she’s great!), Dinah Collin, Bernard Lloyd-Jones, Fred Wright, Malcolm Clarke, John Nathan-Turner, and in his final proper outing, Matthew Waterhouse, giving the performance of his Doctor Who career. In that final sad shot, he isn’t acting any more than he never was, he’s silently saying goodbye. It’s genuine sadness and we feel it more manifold because secretly we’ve never much liked him. Earthshock’s killing of Adric finally gave him a place in our hearts.

2. THE CAVES OF ANDROZANI

That bloody Magma Beast. In a story of such cast iron greatness, that awful monster wasn’t even needed. It is written about in true Bob Holmesian style though: “There’s some sort of creature down there,” says Salateen doomily, placing the beast on a pedestal it absolutely cannot live up to. It’s a costume that highlights the failings of the others on display here. Start to think about it and you realise the rest of the cast’s costumes are drab and don’t even fit with what’s needed. Why are the soldiers dressed like dentists? It’s a feeble thing but surely they should have swapped with Maurice Roeves’s lot? How long have they been down those tunnels? Shouldn’t they be filthy? And when we think about it even more, shouldn’t those caves look like caves in the same way that those in Earthshock did? As it happens, they look pretty much like studio props on wheels. It’s a testament to the great skill of Graeme Harper and the brilliance of Robert Holmes’s majestic return-to-glory script that none of the above matter. Androzani is a Jacobean tragedy of the highest order. It’s a dark, spiralling decline into death, the lead character killed by his surest trait – curiosity. Characters are rich, dialogue sings, deaths matter, politics are real, guns are real, the dangers are real. As that spaceship hurtles towards the planet, the Doctor at gunpoint, his commitment unwavering, this is as emotionally real as the Davison years get. A friend of mine, introduced by me to Doctor Who whilst we were at university in the mid-2000s, uses Androzani as the benchmark for all other stories. If I recommend a title to him, he’ll ask, “But is it Androzani Good?” In 2020, it’s still that good.

1. KINDA

It’s so clearly a poorly made of television: the studio floor is achingly apparent; the lighting is game show levels of jungle; the Mara is an inflatable tube and the TSS machine is by no means the metal warrior it should be. However, Kinda still sparkles. Peter Howell is an unsung star of this show, providing frightening shrieks of electronica to accompany the most frightening scenes, his building music throughout the ticking clock sequence generates worrying tension and his rarely heard “Kinda” theme is sparingly but wondrously used. Many people praise Richard Todd and Nerys Hughes, quite rightly, but it’s Simon Rouse who should be taking the BAFTA home. His unstable and child-like Hindle is a defining character of the Davison era. Our lead too is unbeatable here: gentle, curious and awkward, this is the Fifth Doctor at his best. Amongst all the garden centre potted plants (so annoying in a series that never usually fails with its jungles – surely a lighting and designers’ dream?), the most sparkling star of all, however, is the lyrical, scary, rousing script from Christopher Bailey. It’s bold, profound and unlike much Doctor Who of this era, a theatrical take on the show, meaning that the plastic trees don’t matter. Because Planet Deva Loka is so purposefully unreal, a metaphorical stage on which to play out the philosophical considerations and very real dramas. Kinda defies its awkward production standards with its brilliance, proving the maxim that all that sparkles does not shine.

JH