Arachnids in the UK

I love Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. I love the crassest of Chris Chibnall’s Torchwood episodes: I’m an absolute sucker for Cyberwoman. That probably makes me the worst person in the world to review Arachnids In the UK but… I bloody loved it.

After three episodes of a series which seems to have been desperately trying to ape Russell T Davies’s simpler template for Doctor Who without quite generating the same energy and swag, here is the first episode which feels truly like a vision from Chris Chibnall and it’s all the better for it. For the first time, the companions really do click. There is a place for each of them in the narrative. It’s easy to see why they should be working. Graham’s grieving for Grace has been a surface spattering of character up to now but here it defines him and the scenes in his house, with Grace out of focus, are the restrained highlights in an episode all about the monstrous visual spectacle. Ryan is funny in the face of adversity and along with last week’s “Thanks, Ryan. Nice one, Ryan” after his blasting away of Krasko and this week’s headbanging scene, he is fast becoming the comic relief we can relate to, the unexpected revelation of his reading his father’s letter coming at a vitally tense moment. For the first time too, we get to know Yaz and she’s quite lovely. Four weeks in, this is too little, too late, but as of now, we have a TARDIS team that have very clear motivations to travel and for the first time in a long time, the series feels freer, more open to the universe, with fewer reasons than ever to return home. The last TARDIS scene, despite some traditionally trite dialogue (“The thing with grief is it takes time.”) is the most spirited, hopeful and promising the show has been in years. That’s a lot of firsts for this series.

Special mention this week must go to Chris Noth as the loathsome Robertson. He is the very embodiment of a Doctor Who villain and along with the Stenza, Ilin and Krasko is forming a long line of Chibnall adversaries unafraid to be simply and unapologetically unpleasant. Evil bastards were notably absent from much of the Moffat era and despite my deep love of the Sherlock-writer’s years with our favourite Time Lord, it’s so lovely to have them back. Noth gives a perfectly pitched performance, snarling and ugly, terrifically funny and totally lacking in self-awareness, like the best pantomime villains. If he doesn’t hit the Number One spot of Favourite Male Guest Star in this year’s DWM poll, there must be ludicrously brilliant performances to come in the next six weeks. He is sensational.

I am terrified of spiders. They make my skin crawl and I spent much of the episode feeling a bit sick between belly laughs. Like Chibnall’s best work in the Doctor Who universe, he balances scares and laughs with aplomb. Perhaps it’s that Arachnids in the UK sets itself up as an archetypal B-Movie that his dialogue decisions really work this week. Yes, there are some very obvious, let’s say cheesy, choices, and the amount of times that someone declared that Sheffield/Yorkshire/this city had a problem with spiders was almost uncountable. But that heightened dialogue chimed with this world of Info-Dump Extraordinaire Dr Jade McIntyre and a man with a Personal Panic Room in every hotel across the world. When dealing with gigantic spiders and gigantic egos, who cares if the dialogue is similarly gigantic? And while I’m on the subject, this is the first time, despite a few flirtations, that Doctor Who has actually managed to make those gigantic spiders properly scary. They look convincing and gut-wrenching and I can’t quite believe I actually cared for one by the story’s conclusion.

Directorially, Sallie Aprahamian is the best we’ve had so far. She may not have the cinematic vistas of The Ghost Monument or Rosa to play with but she has a better sense of pace and spectacle, proving an ace at capturing a moment. The first few POV shots of scuttlings across the floor, the entire bathroom sequence and the explorations of the coal mine are stand-out achievements, and as classic, traditional Doctor Who as it’s possible to get. (Shades of The Green Death and Barry Letts’s Economist column, Hinchcliffe-era horror and RTD character drama all rolled into one.) Such scenes are the very essence of the show and it’s relieving and promising to know that Chris Chibnall seems suddenly to know exactly what he’s doing on this account.

Overall, this is the most unashamed Doctor Who episode in a long time. It’s shameless hokum, full of incident, thrills, laughs and scares. There’s nothing deep about it – although the environmental messages strangely manage to hit home in the middle of this operatic horror – but it has a very definite agenda: to entertain. This is perfect Saturday night entertainment broadcast on Sundays. Even Segun Akinola’s back on form. For the first time this season, I’m “with” Doctor Who again. And it feels bloody terrific.

8/10

JH

Rosa

Rosa represents the sort of material which makes it very, very difficult to review without wondering what sort of reaction you might get from the very vocal, paradoxically right-on left brigade. I am as liberal and lefty as they come, believing everything the Doctor believes in, but I endured a humiliating defeat when arguing with my – staggeringly intelligent – younger cousin when she spat the words, “You would say that because you’re a straight white male” at me. Onlookers may have seen me manually retrieve my jaw from the floor and force my opinions back inside my mind where they so obviously belonged. Now, I am neither a man of colour, nor a female, so I fear that whatever I have to say about Rosa may be rendered worthless by people who seem to think that straight white males are incapable of empathy with anyone other than straight white males. A straight white male wrote half this story alongside renowned author Malorie Blackman, and it’s only by the standards of his last few writerly efforts that I can judge Rosa.

To be fair, the first scene on the bus is pretty magnificent. Although the dialogue is as on-the-nose as dialogue is ever likely to be, it’s directed with furious intent. Trevor White plays the loathsome character of bus driver James Blake without fear of looking ugly and a truthful, hateful abomination of a man lives and breathes vividly on the screen. Vinette Robinson as the eponymous Rosa Parks is, by contrast, remarkably and powerfully understated, the strength of her performance in her quiet resilience and stoicism. 

Moments of brilliance abound over the next ten minutes. It’s a real thrill to see the TARDIS materialise in the alleyway of a truly all-American-looking 50s Montgomery and doesn’t the new exterior look completely delicious? There is the strongest sense of place here, wiping the floor with the likes of Daleks in Manhattan which made do with a few plate shots to simulate the USA. The scene in the street in which Ryan picks up the lady’s handkerchief and is slapped by her husband for being black is extraordinarily powerful in its illustration of the banality of such everyday racism. It’s almost impossible to believe that the mindset of the population of this town was as such a mere 63 years ago. Such contemptuous behaviour is unthinkable to the rational, modern even humane mind and it’s almost impossible to imagine why people decided to treat each other this way in the first place. The brief interchange here illustrates the issues faced by people of colour economically and with a hard-hitting, almost literal punch. The only problem with this scene is that it’s the most powerful one in the episode, saying everything this episode has to say in thirty seconds without feeling the need to explain itself.

The biggest issue with the show on the whole right now is the clunky dialogue. I worried about Chris Chibnall’s propensity for graceless, sledgehammer tactics and here, the lines could all be screamed at us and we wouldn’t notice the difference so aggressively unsubtle and expositional are so many of the passages. The worst offending scenes are Ryan and Yaz’s disclosure on racism behind the bins and that last TARDIS lecture, impotently importantly delivered by Jodie Whittaker. To see the events take place in themselves is enough to persuade any remotely empathetic human being that these acts are despicable. The running commentary is unnecessary and not a little patronising. Awkward dialogue elsewhere that isn’t making points at us feels amateurish too: signposting the means of Ryan’s defeat of Krasko in the hotel room so blatantly is toe-curlingly poor writing.

Aside from the very funny Banksy joke, there’s so little humour here that the subject matter starts to feel po-faced and over-reverential rather than important, thought-provoking and above all real. It is as if the writing team have made a list of What We Can’t Possibly Do Because It Might Offend Someone ideas and stymied their own creative flow. For instance, monsters would render the ideas on offer laughable, so we can’t have any of those. Imagine the headlines. (Worked for Vincent Van Gogh but he was only insane, not a person of colour.) We can’t have any of the characters from the future talk to Rosa about her decision because (even though that’s exactly what a person from the future might do and would make for extremely interesting conversations) it would render Rosa without agency. We have to have a person of colour aboard the TARDIS so that the team’s commentary isn’t from a white-only perspective. It feels like any other TARDIS team couldn’t have had this adventure without some corner of the internet feeling offended. It’s a sad reflection of society that every aspect of this production feels artificially constructed because it feels the need to tread as carefully around subjects as the TARDIS team do when stepping into history. The story is so busy telling us how obviously wrong racism is that it forgets to explore its roots and complexities and essentially its drama.

What’s more, we’re stuck with a villain lacking any kind of presence. He can’t possibly match Vinette Robinson’s stoic Rosa nor even Jodie Whittaker’s more affirmative Doctor. Granted, in a rather neat conceit, he can’t harm or kill anyone thanks to a nice nod back to Stormcage Prison and the intricacies of his scheming – the damaging of the bus and the mocked-up timetables – make for exciting, unusually small-scale problems to solve. However, Joshua Bowman looks like a Strictly dancer as opposed to a white, racist, criminal time-travelling supremacist. Surely casting someone as cranny, tortured and frightening looking as Ken Bones or Ian Hanmore would have made more sense than America’s next Top Model? The point might be that racism is invisible and that sexy young bucks can be racists too but Bowman isn’t remotely scary despite Segun Akinola’s valiant attempts to flag up the threat level with some discordant strings every time Bowman walks flaccidly into shot.

In fact, Akinola is suffering his first off-day. Last week’s Ghost Monument score was thrillingly industrial and other-worldly. Here, he provides a story about the evils of America with a saccharine cavalcade of We Love America horns. He’s even replaced in the last few minutes by Andra Day singing the embarrassingly over-produced Rise Up (probably from Chris Chibnall’s Spotify playlist along with that bloody awful Glorious song from the adverts), which criminally overwrites the closing theme tune, at the last minute making the powerful events of the climax seem distastefully mawkish. 

That final bus scene, however, has moments of supreme tension. (Doctor Who definitely has a history of brilliant bus scenes, even in this episode alone!) Jodie Whittaker makes her best performance choices so far here, unnerved that the bus is noticeably emptier than planned. The realisation that she and her companions must stand by and watch the most unjust prejudice unfold is gut-wrenching and were it not for the overblown musical choices, the sequence might have really hit home.

There’s no denying Rosa’s heart is in the right place. It’s exciting that Doctor Who wants to tackle the issues that matter. (The Sylvester McCoy era is my spiritual Doctor Who home and a part of that is down to its obsession with becoming socially relevant and dare I say it, trendily on-message.) But Rosa goes about its exploration of 1955 Montgomery in as blatant and unadventurous a way as possible. It’s striking that it dares to say Paki but it can’t bring itself to say the less anachronistic, more controversial Nigger. It’s walking so carefully on a tightrope that it never gets to say anything truly hard-hitting, other than the least controversial message conceivable: Racism is Still Bad. For a show as optimistic as Doctor Who, which in the past has relished the idea that racism in the future is all but defunct, Captain Jack for example refusing to notice species let alone skin colour, the bad guy here is disappointingly just another racist from the future. 

As is only proper, it is Vinette Robinson who perhaps leaves the drama with the most dignity intact. She brings heart, poise and reality to some hokey lines and says so much with facial expressions alone. In fact, she wipes the floor with the regular cast, bringing us to the show’s second biggest issue at the minute: the cast aren’t strong enough to sustain the clunky dialogue. They all of them, even the more experienced Bradley Walsh make the most obvious, “first-reading” choices and flag up the cliched, hackneyed nature of the ham-fisted lines they are dealt. Next week, we can be sure of three things: the title sequence will still look utterly gorgeous, the TARDIS set will still look utterly wretched and we’ll still be in the company of perhaps the most uncharismatic set of regulars we’ve ever had. Hopefully, Vinette Robinson has taught everyone, from writers to actors to directors, that less is so obviously more.

4/10

JH

The Delian Mode: The Radiophonic Music of Doctor Who

Before I ever had a CD player, I had two Doctor Who CDs: The Five Doctors and Earthshock, soundtrack CDs from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. It seemed like an eternity before a small Sharp ghetto-blaster arrived in my bedroom and oh, what sounds greeted me!

Despite the infuriating lack of Paddy Kingsland (Hello, Logopolis soundtrack! Where are you?), the likes of Malcolm Clarke, Peter Howell and Roger Limb were plenty for a young mind to immerse themselves in. Favourites included the Janissary Band from Snakedance, that Five Doctors Gallifreyan horn, Warriors of the Deep (the music of which is easily the best aspect of the whole production) and those exotic howls of the desert Planet of Fire. Earthshock’s March of the Cybermen was also an oft-repeated track in that little attic bedroom. My early Doctor Who experience is steeped in the aura of these two CDs. When I think of the time spent reading the books, magazines and comics of my youth, they’re entrenched in electronica. I even came to like Exploring the Lab from Four to Doomsday. 

My Dad was a private gardener when I was young and would often come home with nick-nacks gifted to him by his usually well-off clients. One day, he brought home a tape recorder. No mic was needed to record one’s voice, just some empty C90s and the ability to press two buttons at once. It was probably more of an early Dictaphone. But the recorder, along with the music and the issues of Classic Comics I’d been collecting meant for one thing: my brothers and I could record our own Doctor Who Audio Adventures! When I think back, this being well before the days of Big Finish and with only The Pescatons, The Paradise of Death and The Ghosts of N-Space to epitomise the auditory landscape, we must have been veritable pioneers.

I was always the Doctor because I was the eldest and most selfish. James, second eldest but with a ridiculously high voice, played the main villains: his Extortioner was to die for.  The youngest brothers, the twins, played the minor parts but usually one of them quit halfway through production after repeated failed attempts at the same couple of lines. Favourite scripts included Death Flower, The Urgrakks and the Troughton epic with the big spiders: “Die hideous creature, die!” Always, we used those two CDs as soundtracks to our adventures. Meglos, with its rattling screech, we had a particular fondness towards so it was nice to see a similar approach to music adopted by Steven Moffat and Richard Curtis’s team on The Curse of Fatal Death.

Sound effects was the major area in which we were decidedly inefficient although the feminists would have had a problem with our all-male casts despite there being only one female in the house (and Mum was not remotely interested). We tried desperately in the recording of Death Flower to make the sound of a twig snapping. We broke pencils in half over and over again, but the mic simply didn’t pick them up. In the end, we resorted to one of us actually saying, “Snap!” We joke squirmingly about this over dinner parties to this day.

My personal favourite production was a script I’d written myself: The Game Show of Death in which the Doctor, Jo Grant and the Brigadier were invited onto a panel show whose losers were killed. The cliff-hanger to my young ears sounded amazing. One of us screamed, “No Brigadier!” then we used the sound of Viner getting shot in The Tomb of the Cybermen and the music cut in, Spearhead from Space-style, without sting, all of a sudden. It was a ludicrously satisfying moment of childhood creativity. I do still love those Spearhead cliff-hangers just as much as I love a sting. And remain irrationally irritated when the sting criminally fades in. It’s nice to have a couple of shots over the top. The Robots of Death Part Two or even The Woman Who Fell to Earth are classic examples of how to do the sting well.

Being fascinated by the electronic music of Doctor Who - as close as humankind is likely to get to the music of the spheres - I am currently thrilling at composer Segun Akinola’s move towards incidental atmospherics as opposed to recognisable tunes. Look at his Ghost Monument score: the first seven minutes of the episode take a good while to form into solidly recognisable music, industrial clanging and an electronic bassline building and building to generate tension almost unnoticeably. By the time the spaceship is crashing, those alien drums are pounding. I so hope this is indicative of the rest of this season. Weird, synthetic musical confusion has been missing from the show since its return, apart from a few moments in Forest of the Dead and Heaven Sent, which remain orchestral for the most part. I must give a passing mention to Into the Dalek too here: that was a strikingly different score with plenty of 1980s electronic overtones. 

Someone noted recently that electronic scores are what a programme is granted before it has the money to find an orchestra. Doctor Who did things the other way round. Twice. JNT’s introduction of the Radiophonic Workshop mirrors Chris Chibnall’s appointment of Segun Akinola at the musical helm of our favourite show. I hope one day, somewhere in another little attic bedroom, some other children are finding their own ways to adapt the music of Doctor Who: to create new worlds and times, to act and imagine and live inside the rapture of the show, to make the show their own through the electronic majesty of its wondrous music. 

JH

The Ghost Monument

This week’s instalment of the brand-new, spruced up version of that show we used to know as Doctor Who starts with ten minutes of the most visually arresting material the series has ever put on screen. The new title sequence itself is beautiful, new and old at the same time, with a great underwater backwards dive a few seconds in before the ubiquitous musical howl kicks us into space. Its only problem as far as I can see is its brevity. Then we’re plunged headlong into a world of starships and planets.

Quite wonderfully, we witness the arrival of our heroes in the spaceships from the perspectives of our characters. We see more of the inside than the out of these craft – which look magnificent in all their CG glory – and the colour palette within is rich and deep and otherworldly.  Then we’re on an alien planet which feels genuine in a way that matte shots and CG vistas simply cannot emulate. Here we have a desert, a sea, a mountain range and an empty city, each location as convincing and bold as the one before, all real places. The money shot though is that furiously crashing spaceship. Graham, Ryan and Angstrom run desperately through the sand as the ship plummets through the sky towards them. Never has a spaceship felt so very present in a Doctor Who story and this is just the sort of visual flamboyance the show has perhaps missed over the last three years. It feels like a long time since Big Ben being destroyed or a hospital on the moon or even a giant dinosaur in London, but the opening of The Ghost Monument, together with last week’s crane stunts, suggests Chris Chibnall has an eye for a punctuating visual. 

The plot itself is intriguing but slight: a race to the other side of Desolation. For the most part the action is pacey though the stretch across the ocean threatens to knock the wind of its sails, for wont of a better term. Chibnall uses these quieter moments to look at his characters but the writing is a little on the nose and lacks grace. I found myself finishing Epzo’s predictable story for him and the scenes between Graham and Ryan are a little unpolished and lack truth. Chibnall writes with a lot of heart but he hasn’t got a great ear for dialogue. Still, better to have heart than pure purple prose. 

We also get to see our new Doctor in action, perhaps more stabilised than last week. To be frank, I still have major misgivings about Jodie Whittaker as Doctor Who. Her breathy, forced delivery feels patronising, as if she needs to explain her performance choices to us as she makes them. The technobabble doesn’t sound at all natural and she plays the cliched reading of her more dramatic lines every single time. I’m sincerely hoping I’ll either get used to her or she’ll get better. She simply needs to relax; treat the lines as if she says this kind of every day. At the minute, she is ploughing every ounce of energy into even the most mundane line and becoming grating. This is a woman who I thought was outstanding in Broadchurch so I’m struggling to see what’s gone so wrong. Perhaps Ms Whittaker is just very limited.

Tragically, after all the imaginative panoramas, beautiful landscapes and design innovation, the new TARDIS set is awful, isn’t it? For a kick-off, it’s far too small: the ceiling is too low and the room feels claustrophobic. It’s the only room in the show so far to have felt like a set. The over-sized, orange, crystalline plinths mean there’s no space for a four shot by the console. It almost looks as if it’s been shot against black drapes, so dark and seemingly non-existent are the walls. And the custard cream maker is neither funny nor kooky. When everything else this series is so wondrous to look at, it’s a shame the TARDIS doesn’t seem to stand for anything: it isn’t homely, atmospheric, sterile, magical or sensory. It’s just black and orange.

I must make mention of Susan Lynch and Shaun Dooley who bring a re-assuring and welcome earthiness to an entirely outlandish adventure, their regional accents routing the drama in reality. I’m still not convinced by our main cast, although Bradley Walsh stole all the glory this week after an unsure start in The Woman Who Fell to Earth. All in all though, for a story taking in so many alien environments, this was an easy-to-follow, linear adventure, full of exciting set-pieces and stunning visuals. It wasn’t a story that was actually about very much though and the set-pieces sometimes felt like the skeleton of a story that wasn’t really there. Hopefully, next week, we’ll have something just as beautiful but a little meatier to digest.

6/10

JH

Guest Stars #1: Philip Madoc

One of the greatnesses of both Classic and Nu-Who is the vast theatre of actors it employs in its guest spots. As Philip Hinchcliffe once ruminated: actors could rock up and “do a turn” as usually, Doctor Who afforded them a part slightly bigger than in other shows. Of course, there are several types of guest actor: the professional corker (Julian Glover; William Gaunt; Derek Jacobi), the ham-fisted joy (Michael Cochrane; Ian Cuthbertson; Mark Costigan), the would-be-extra (Prentis Hancock; Terry Walsh; Jimmy Vee) and the purely dreadful (Rick James; Jenny Laird; Mark Oliver). Best is the moment when a guest performer turns up purely for shits and giggles. For some bewildering actors, Doctor Who is quite clearly below them and they are required to turn up, lark about and get back to the pub where the next pint is already waiting. I love how John Savident has clearly failed to learn his lines well enough for his brief appearance in The Visitation. Regardless, he ploughs on confidently, coughing elaborately to give himself more thinking time. It’s the most beautiful, grandest folly: “Eeeeurgh eeeeuuuur, I don’t like the sound of it.” Some of my favourite actors make the universe of Doctor Who so much richer and funnier a place to live. In the first of an ongoing series, I’m going to celebrate a particular guest star’s performance or performances in the show to hopeful amusement and to give them the column inches they deserve.

This month: Philip Madoc

Philip Madoc was one of the great champions of Doctor Who in our house, growing up. Right now, one of my brothers is loving him in The Life and Times of David Lloyd George. Another brother is loving him in Last of the Mohicans. Another, along with me, is loving him in Doctor Who. Yes, we happy four, we band of brothers form a small but vocal Philip Madoc fan club. I am even the proud owner of a BBC poetry CD in which Madoc recites the great works of Chaucer in Medieval English. Oh, what a treat that it.

He cheers up Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150AD no end just as it’s in danger of becoming stale. The camera loves him: it lingers on him as he smiles cheekily before dragging on his spitty little fag, teeth pearly white, hair brill-creamed back and dressed like Columbo. His resolute lack of emotion - be that joy, callousness, envy, hatred (take your pick from the entire gamut) - as he kicks over Peter Cushing’s potential breakfast is priceless. Like his character, Madoc is one on his own here, seemingly refusing to integrate with the rest of the cast. When that shed explodes with him in it, so does a little part of that film’s beauty. 

In The Krotons, he is a portly, little thing, angry and taut. Truncated by a costume that would leave Daniel Craig looking awkward, it’s amazing that Madoc gets to the end of The Krotons with any dignity at all. Nobody else does, apart from perhaps Patrick Troughton and even he suffers a fish-eye close up of his elaborate chin. Madoc begins proceedings like a pantomime page boy, one foot jauntily angled towards the irritatingly bad James Copeland, presumably to put him off his dull speech. Madoc waits for Copeland to carry on about his “companyons of the Krotons,” lets him to finish, then gives a tiny, embarrassed, knowing nod before administering some gowns. It’s as if he’s aware how bad Copeland is and he’s on our side. He knows we’re finding it just as excruciating as he is. Madoc decides to duck Episode Two but returns in full force in Episode Three, delivering banal speeches about “a little more time” as if he’s giving us his Hamlet or even his Magua, dressed as he is, tomahawk by his waist. Here is a man whose slings and fireballs are in no doubt.

Quite miraculously, by the time The War Games comes along only a few months later, Madoc has completely transformed his physical frame. He is slimmer, shorter, lizard-like and alert, like a meerkat wearing googly eyes. He moves very little, only twitches of his head and widening eyes conveying his threat, which dazzlingly is tangible and felt (especially compared to the louder, more brash, less effective menace of the War and Security Chiefs). He seems to be doing so little and yet here is a fully-formed instantly believable and deeply sinister villain. When Madoc enters the fray in Episode Seven, The War Games gets a hell of a lot more interesting. His terror when looking to the heavens at the close of Episode Nine and muttering, “They are coming” is terrifically unsettling.

A few regenerations later, Madoc is back for The Brain of Morbius, perhaps his tour de force. Madoc plays Professor Solon archly, a definite twinkle spicing up his more banal lines. “Noooooo, that won’t do,” he whines early on before tersely snapping, “That is an insect!” His ability to bring life into the most melodramatic, sometimes clumsy line is incredible. “You’ve been looking for that arm again, haven’t you?” he murmurs at his one-armed bandit, Condo. The delightfulness of this ridiculously clunky moment is that Madoc carries it off with aplomb. Water off a duck’s back to him is this kind of awkward scripting blunder. As the Doctor arrives, Madoc breezes through his “What a magnificent head,” with an unusually ordinary and sharp relish. He never seems to realise, despite the Doctor and Sarah’s bemused looks, that he comes across as completely barking. It’s Madoc’s knowing ignorance that is the adorable charm of Professor Solon. 

His final appearance in The Power of Kroll may be the poorest part bestowed to this paragon of the acting world but his obvious disdain for the job shines through blissfully. “God, Philip looks bored, doesn’t he?” says Tom Baker on the DVD commentary and it’s true. Madoc’s face is a picture of bulldog apathy, his jowls forever curled downwards, his lines mumbled and without energy. “You know, I don’t particularly like the Swampies, but I can’t say I really hate them,” he snarks with all the commitment of a disaffected music teacher. It’s Fenner’s best line.

Now, you might be forgiven for thinking that the end of Philip Madoc’s Who career but it was to continue into the DVD range as well as a couple of Big Finish Productions. Notably though, his hour came in: Philip Madoc: A Villain for All Seasons. Orange faced and sporting a white beard, he appears to have regenerated again into a short Tom Jones with better teeth. A one-man interview show, Madoc is given his opportunity to shine once more and shine he does. He greets us with pearls of wisdom. “Peter Cushing was a true gentleman, one of the nicest human beings I have ever known.” His wilful glee when promoting the idea of the return of the War Lord is hilarious. “I wasn’t killed. I was dematerialised.” Long pause. “I like that idea,” and he smiles hugely. Of Fenner he states contemptuously, “He wasn’t coming from anywhere and he wasn’t going anywhere.” But in the end, for a man with a rich and varied career, he is charm incarnate: “I can’t say I hate you for only remembering me in these three or four shows.” He then reminds us of what we already knew. “They’re not bad shows. In fact, there are some very, very good shows.” Thanks Philip.

JH

The Woman Who Fell to Earth

So… the elephant in the room: a female Doctor Who? I’ll admit, I was extremely dubious. It looked to me like either a gimmick to get bums back on seats (which has clearly worked) or a shamelessly political move to feed a left-wing contingent who like to celebrate victories in places where no-one was fighting. However, Chris Chibnall does indeed prove that the Doctor can be anyone. The gender really isn’t an issue here. It doesn’t matter one jot and makes us worriers feel like we’ve undergone 18 months of angst for absolutely no reason. As Tom Baker famously noted, the part is “actor-proof” so long as the Doctor is well-written which she resolutely is here. No, I have no problem with a female Doctor; but I do have a problem with a Jodie Whittaker Doctor.

Whittaker’s performance reminds me of the secondary school children I used to be in drama classes with. Every line is given equal weight, hammered home aggressively to the point of sterility due to the fact that they don’t really understand what they are saying. Whittaker doesn’t make sense of her lines, finds no nuance, no invention. It’s all delivered at the same urgent frequency. Just look at her reactions when she’s asked about her family: There’s nothing there. No decisions have been made. She’s all at sea. Resultantly, one starts to switch off when she opens her mouth. My 14-year-old step-daughter guiltily looked up half-way through the story and said, “I’m sorry but I’m finding her kind of really annoying.” So was I. So was my wife. I inwardly cringed when Whittaker raised her hand proudly and boasted, “I would of!” It was almost as bad as Eccleston’s similarly mis-remembered, “Four most safest walls.” Now, I love a Northern accent; I’ve got a broad Oldham drawl myself. But within that accent there are all sorts of cadences, intricacies and details to play out. There’s none of that here. Whittaker’s performance is poor. And Tosin Cole, this episode’s leading companion Ryan, seems to be taking tips from her, as he’s equally flat and stilted. Resultantly, the show feels very grounded in its Sheffield landscape but populated by actors with accents which sap any drama out of proceedings and make stretches of the show boring to listen to.

Aside from our lead performer then, what else did The Woman Who Fell to Earth have to offer? Firstly, and most obviously, the show feels truly cinematic. The grading, the breadth and depth of the landscapes, the effects from new-boys DNEG: all shine. There’s an epic shot which starts over the football ground (Forgive me, footie fans, but I’m not sure if it was Wednesday or United.) and pans across to a van we’re following. Those open Sheffield vistas at the start of the story are impressive in their grandeur and the crane business at the climax of the show looks to rival Casino Royale in terms of scale. Directorially then, Jamie Childs does a splendid job, although there are some moments which don’t land: The Doctor’s entrance through the train roof is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot, the death of Grace falls whackingly flat (if you’ll forgive the pun) and there’s a money-shot missing of Whittaker leaping from one crane to another. On the whole, however, this looks like properly modern, 21^st century Doctor Who, feeling new, exciting and larger than ever before. There are creepy, lingering moments which have been strikingly missing from the show for a while too: the ball of energy creeping along the train carriages; the assassin “icing” his victims to death. These are scenes which feel like the very pulse of Doctor Who and if there’s more to come then the future feels very bright.

Most importantly of all though is the quality of what we all know to be the real star of the show: the script from new-boy showrunner Chris Chibnall. Bluntly, it’s a mixed bag. The episode was a refreshingly straightforward, linear narrative, easy to follow without continuity references, perfect for newcomers. Funny, little clevernesses like the DNA bombs and the microwave, which could easily have sprung from Chibnall’s better Torchwood episodes, pushed the show’s playful tone to the fore but it’s a shame there were fewer laughs. For the most part, there was a bleakness to this script: the difficulties of disabilities, terminal diseases, warehouse work and unfulfilled ambition providing a cynical skeleton to the character work. Even the smaller parts were everyday losers, rather than Russell T Davies’s everyday working class: a drunk throwing kebab around the place, a crane driver who listens to an app telling him how important he is, a nutcase obsessed with finding his dead sister. These archetypes may have brought the show down to Earth but they’ve made the world of Doctor Who a grim place to be. 

As for our three companions, I’m still not sure I believe any of them and I’m not quite sure why. There are some clunky dialogue choices from Chibnall (“Yaz to my friends,” indeed!) and he hasn’t quite got the skill to sketch them in with as much adroit alacrity as Russell T or even Steven Moffat. Compare Bill Potts’s first speech with Ryan’s dreary YouTube video for proof. Bradley Walsh looks and plays Graham like a kindly uncle but he’s written as a difficult-to-love Grandad. Ryan has dyspraxia and is full of angst. Yaz wants early promotion. And that’s about it. There’s not much charm radiating from these guys. In fact, the only keeper, I’d say, was Grace who was “really loving” the alien bit. The fact that I wasn’t remotely moved by her death and funeral perhaps says more about Chibnall’s workmanlike writing than the performances. I’m not sure I even like the companions let them alone fully believe in them. In fact, many things don’t stand up to scrutiny: Whose couch did the Doctor kip on while the funeral was being arranged and why are the team still allowed to use someone else’s garage?

Perhaps one of Chibnall’s key strengths though was in the originality and vividness of his monsters. Tim Shaw the Blue Tooth man was a properly evil badass and looked fittingly gross beneath his frightening armour, shot so well by Jamie Childs. The removal of his victims’ teeth and their subsequent implantation in his face was a macabre idea the like of which has perhaps not been seen since Deep Breath. The ball of energy was frightening too in its indistinct, aggressive nature. Chibnall hasn’t forgotten that Doctor Who is remembered for being scary and there were scenes here to really unsettle the children: always a great thing!

Our showrunner also has an eye for spectacle too: this was an hour of television which included a train crash, a climb across two cranes and an alien pod shaped like an onion hatching to reveal a cyborg. The pulling together of these elements might not quite have been as seamless as say, the set-pieces of Partners in Crime or The Eleventh Hour but there was still structural ingenuity to be had: that the DNA bombs had already been removed was a welcome surprise, showcasing the Doctor’s invention and forward-planning. The missing sister subplot looks to be the route the story is taking and then is abandoned after the shocking death of her brother, another opportunity for our villain to be thoroughly evil rather than a misunderstood robot. It makes for an even stronger tete-a-tete atop a tower crane with Jodie Whittaker in her best scene by a mile, although the “sorting out fair play across the universe” line was a little mawkish.

All in all, it’s a very difficult episode to review. There’s a freshness to the show, that’s for sure but the new world seems to adopt a cynical, sometimes dour, tone. The villains are tremendous and worthy of the Doctor’s mettle and Chris Chibnall delights in a set-piece. There’s a cinematic scope to the “alien vistas” of Sheffield and it must be said, a bloody cracking cliff-hanger. I’m unbelievably and disproportionately excited by the fact that the sting was played out in full over a couple of shots of our heroes in space, and I’m chuffed that the theme’s playing over the Next Time trailers for the first time in ages. (I wrote to DWM about this nitty-gritty issue a while back and I’m going to take full responsibility for its rectification!) The companions need more exploration and I hope Chibnall’s playing a long game in terms of their characterisation. The only great, glaring irritation for me was, sadly, Jodie Whittaker who I honestly feel doesn’t have the chops for this. I’m sure there’ll be millions who disagree but as my dad said last year, “If they were going to cast a woman from Broadchurch, why didn’t they cast the good one?” 

6/10

JH 

Are We Nearly There Yet?

I have eight bookcases and four CD racks in my living/dining rooms courtesy of IKEA. Doctor Who encompasses 5 bookcases and is creeping into the others. (That Complete History purchase my wife bought me is beginning to haunt her! And the Blu-Rays have to languish alongside the rest of television.) Two of the CD racks are top to toe Doctor Who and many of the bookcase shelves are taken up with CDs. I have bought every Big Finish Doctor Who-related CD. This includes The Main Range which started it all off: one a month from 1999. 240 releases later…and I’m still going. The Lost Stories were shows written for but unproduced on television; they’re all there too. The criminally undervalued Companion Chronicles – over 80 of those. Novel Adaptations, Stage Plays, Short Trips, Unbound and freebies sit alongside ranges of the Eighth Doctor, Fourth Doctor, Tenth Doctor, War, Third Doctor, First Doctor, Fifth Doctor, more. Then there’s Dalek Empire, Cyberman, Gallifrey, Bernice Summerfield, Jago & Litefoot, Counter-Measures, Charlotte Pollard, Sarah Jane Smith, UNIT, Torchwood, Class and the list goes on. I should say I probably have around 1500 CDs including the Target novels, soundtracks and other BBC output such as Nest Cottage. The question is: have I got enough yet?

When foolish members of the lay public casually ask about DWM, “What do they fill it with?” or even worse, “Is every page about Doctor Who?” I am wont to reply, “We managed to fill this magazine for 16 years with articles exclusively on Doctor Who when Doctor Who wasn’t even on the telly.” Arguably, if the show hadn’t returned in 2005, the magazine would still be alive and kicking, with covers devoted to the next Big Finish release, star interview or Blu Ray release. To be honest, I wistfully yearn for the days when the magazine was filled with articles on the four-act structure of a typical adventure or defining characteristics of a convention-going fan or press round ups from the 1960s. The point is, given the vast history of Doctor Who, there remain tonnes of unexplored avenues of discussion, archiving or insight. I still don’t know a bloody thing about Jackie Lane.

But the pursuit of furthering Doctor Who knowledge doesn’t necessarily equate to purchasing product. With a license fee, one can experience brand new episodes every year on BBC One. Why then do I have so many iterations of The Ark in Space in my house? Seriously, I have the Target book, a DVD, a Special Edition DVD with new documentaries, a Blu Ray edition with 5.1 sound, a script book, a Complete History section, a DWM archive feature, the soundtrack by Dudley Simpson arranged by Heathcliff Blair. I’m toying with the idea of buying the Target novel with the Steven Moffat introduction too. I had the VHS twice as well. And the great insanity of this collectormania is that I don’t even much like The Ark in Space. It’s over-lit and Part Two drags like a body-bag. Thank God I never had the laser disc.

However, with each re-watch or re-exploration of a beloved text, there is always something new to discover. Enjoying the Blu Ray recently, I learned that I needed to cut The Ark in Space some slack. Yes, Hinchcliffe and Holmes would do menacing far better a year later, but here it’s new and strange and in parts, very frightening. I realised that each episode has a problem to solve peculiar to those 25 minutes. Despite the white, white light, I did somehow marvel at those polystyrene designs and appreciate the intention far more than I have ever done before. As Who fans, we can enjoy a programme on its own terms rather than seeing only the joins in the sets. We can also enjoy programmes more than once. And here’s the thing, collecting shows is not just done for the sake of having them, it’s for revisiting and reappraising and witnessing them again with a good polish because we love them. It’s akin to restoring an old painting or buying a deluxe edition Yes album. One can always go back to them, appreciate them and discover more layers and interpretations. Every Doctor Who adventure is the same. I don’t particularly enjoy The Dominators but I imagine one day, I’ll look at it again and find in it something good. I’ve even re-bought Big Finish CDs as super-expensive but cover-lickingly beautiful vinyl editions.

I am quite aware that somehow the Doctor Who collection has become out of control. I have far too many books, more than I can ever read, but I love having them. “I like seeing them on the shelf but I never look at them,” said Tom Baker in 1999. Sometimes, a book can simply ooze grandeur. I only have to pick up a copy of The Also People or Blacklight or The Scales of Injustice to know how brilliant and special they are. I don’t actually need to read them again. The OCD gene is admittedly an itch that needs scratching though. A friend gifted me his copy of Lungbarrow for my 30^th birthday in an excessively kind act for which I’ll be forever grateful. So those gaping holes in the Virgin novels are now those other rare beasts: The Dying Days and So Vile a Sin. Oh, for a charity shop with good stuff in it; those tiny gaps gnaw away at my soul daily! I’d also like a copy of ..ish with the correct number on the sleeve, a couple of Titan script-books I never picked up, and The Second Doctor Handbook. But these purchases would be gluttony indeed for a man with three girls and a loving and lovely, ever-patient wife to support!

As 2019 approaches, it looks like it might be an even bigger year for Bigger Finish and this year was tight enough as it is. Can I bear to say no to a few boxsets? I’m sure I’ll find a way to get my grubby little protuberances on them. It just means I’ll need a new CD rack by February. And eventually a spare wall. (For the record, there are very few Big Finish releases I don’t actively enjoy – miraculous, given the scale of the output - so I’m justifying the expense with an enjoyment:expenditure ratio.) In the meantime, I might actually finish The Also People. 

JH

The Eighth Doctor: The Time War Volume 2

Generally, I have a problem with war stories. Quite often I feel writers treat stories of war as if they are already deeply emotional. They presume we care about the thousands, millions, of casualties and deaths without doing very much to make us care. They end up being as emotionally engaging as a newsreel: sad but distant. Simply saying “Millions will die,” is not enough to make us emote or indeed, increase the jeopardy. Look at The Parting of the Ways: Jack cries, “This is it, ladies and gentlemen, we are at war!” But Russell T Davies doesn’t show us the war on Earth, the continents being destroyed, homes being demolished. He focuses on a small outpost in space, full of people we know and we watch as their world is obliterated around them. It’s a canny move, because really, war is just a word. It’s the people who live through it we should focus on.

That said, it should be fairly easy to understand my disappointment with John Hurt’s War Doctor series. It felt loud and furious but uninvolving and samey. The stakes were high but the people to care about were few and far between. I was - as JNT would have it - surprised and delighted to find the Eighth Doctor Time War series so massively enjoyable. 

The first volume approached the idea of Time War very well indeed, from bootcamp training to worlds ravaged by time itself. It took the words Time and War and properly explored the ideas conceptually and dramatically. The only failing, I thought, was new companion Bliss, who was sketchily drawn, too quickly introduced and averagely performed. It has since come to light that Bliss was only conceived for the one box set but as storylines coalesced and the Time War saga rolled on, it became clear there were more stories to tell. On the evidence of the second volume, this is very true!

Here we have a wartime rebellion story, a fanservice-ing oddball tale, a prison-break drama and a submarine bottle story: all bar the second, traditional wartime staples. All, however, use the Time War twist well, to enlarge the playing field, slightly warp the rules and make these stories unquestionably Doctor Who, although Paul McGann sounds quite at home as Captain Jonah in the boxset’s fourth sojourn. 

The Lords of Terror is perhaps the weakest instalment and that only because it feels overly familiar. This is the entry most like a now-traditional Time War tale. (God, it has its own genre!) There’s the Doctor being appalled by Ollistra and a fleet of Daleks incoming. The story’s twist is sadly made hugely obvious by the title but the narrative is adroitly paced and thrilling. It’s such a shame though that this couldn’t be the story where we connect more strongly with Bliss. Her parents may never have existed thanks to the war, she and the Doctor learn. But it’s greeted with more of an “Ah well, let’s go somewhere else then” attitude rather than a human resonance. They even decide giving her a title like “An Orphan of the Time War” is perhaps the appropriate thing to do right now. Arguably, the scene in question is underwritten by Jonathan Morris but then Rakhee Thakrar does absolutely nothing to give her lines weight, no stiff-upper-lip brave face and Bliss resultantly ends up feeling as distant as those aforementioned newsreels. So she’s an orphan? So what?

Planet of the Ogrons is an instant tonal shift and insanely good fun. In short, an Ogron who believes himself to be the Doctor, dressed in velvet, arrives on Gallifrey in the TARDIS, the Doctor and Bliss meet The Twelve and head off to investigate… and hilarity ensues. Whilst not strictly a comedy, there are laughs aplenty here: the Ogron-Doctor’s uplifting rallying speech to his fellow Ogrons is a moment to treasure. Suddenly, the Doctor and Bliss feel as if they’ve been together forever and the addition of the Twelve and the Doctor-Ogron makes for a positive “gang” feel across the hour. Amidst all the laughs, Bliss - through her Ogron friend - learns more about the Doctor’s philosophy. Julia McKenzie is terrific as the Twelve, her sweet old lady act belying a subdued ferocity beneath. She’s a welcome change of pace from Mark Bonnar’s equally excellent but more manic Eleven. Even the ubiquitous Nick Briggs doesn’t sound like Nick Briggs in this a quite masterful and different turn. Special mention however, must go to Jon Culshaw’s cute Doctor-Ogron. For a series based amidst a devastating war, it’s bizarre that it ends up being this sad, funny, hybrid character who is the one, across the whole boxset, we end up feeling for the most.

In the Garden of Death has a delicious remit: how would the Doctor, Bliss and the Twelve escape from prison if they couldn’t remember who they were. Guy Adams, also author of Planet of the Ogrons, runs with this conceit and their memories remain missing for an enjoyably long time. The Daleks are used as they should be, a distant menace, and the dynamics within the prison inmates are realistic and dramatic. That the Doctor is in solitary means his reassurance is often missing where it ought to be a comfort. The only disappointment (SPOILER ALERT) is that the day is saved simply by tinkering with gadgets and not with some great cleverness more fitting for a couple of Time Lord genii.

Lastly, relative new-boy to Big Finish Timothy X Atack’s Jonah plummets the TARDIS team between the waves of an ocean planet. There is a definite sense of unease across this masterfully written finale. It is perhaps quieter and subtler than one might expect from the last of four tales but it’s no less excellent and still includes phrases like “depth charges.” The idea of Daleks falling through the depths towards a helpless submarine is a terrifying one and perhaps the best, most original use of the pepper pots for some time. The nature of the Twelve’s relationship with the Daleks is for the most part unclear and forms a tense narrative spine throughout the play’s entirety. It’s also a joy to hear Paul McGann enjoying himself so tangibly. Jonah ends this particular boxset with a very high bar for the next one to aspire to.

Overall, there are, perhaps unbelievably, more and more stories to tell of Russell T Davies’s once unimaginable Time War and these smaller skirmishes are proving far more effective than the brasher, harder War Doctor episodes. For a concept that once felt like it had nowhere left to go, the Eight Doctor’s Time War feels positively fresh with new ideas. 

8/10

Addendum: Just a quick word to celebrate the great Jacqueline Pearce who is, as ever, completely unassailable here. She will be truly missed, not just by the Doctor, but by Blake and Avon and all of us unworthy fans. Rest in Peace, Jacks.

JH

Cover Art: The VHS Years

Continuing my exploration of the world of Doctor Who cover art, I reach the VHS years. Honestly, the VHS covers hold the most nostalgia for me, far beyond the hallowed Target book paintings. I was at just the right age to treasure those video releases; they were the all-new Doctor Who episodes to a child of the wilderness years and each new cover was the equivalent of a movie poster, tantalising young eyes in their magnetism. Often, I wouldn’t see them until I unwrapped a birthday or Christmas present. I remember opening The Two Doctors on Christmas Day and thinking how wondrous it looked. Castrovalva was an Easter present (a substitute for eggs!) and Logopolis came along a little while later. (Imagine my confusion.) They were the most beautiful paintings. Here, hesitantly because there are so many I could choose from, are my Top Ten:

10: ROBOT

It seems like a simple painting, perhaps not even a particularly exciting one but it captures the optimism and charm of Robot in that Tom Baker portrait alone. It’s bright and forward-looking and Alister Pearson’s painting is, as ever, so photo-realistic it’s almost unbelievably a painting! His rendition of K1 gleams beautifully and its growth at the end of the story is implied in the cover, rather than spoilered. In its understatedness, the Robot cover is easily one of the finest.

9: THE THREE DOCTORS

I remember finding The Three Doctors in Rochdale’s TESCO. It must have been in the TV charts. I’d never seen it on the numerous occasions I’d be searching for videos in WHSmiths or HMV so it could only have been a new addition to the range. The cover stood out from the shelves: it seemed serious and weighty. To be honest, the painting is far more serious and weighty than the story itself but illustrates clearly the pure iconoclasm of the important adventure. And Omega looks terrifying and powerful in dark red.

8: THE TRIAL OF A TIME LORD

What a shame that this striking piece of art was buried inside the TARDIS tin and produced on cardboard! Alister Pearon’s portraits mirror the grandness of the story. Michael Jayston’s Valeyard points and accusing finger at the viewer, whilst Colin Baker’s Doctor looks scared but valiant. The three villains below represent excitingly the segments of the trial itself and the angry red background, complete with a matrix screen, feels dramatic and exhilarating. This is one of Pearson’s best works but it’s never talked about, probably because it was so well hidden!

7: THE MASQUE OF MANDRAGORA

It’s that man Alister Pearson again: he came up a lot when compiling this list and there were a whole handful of his covers I had to heartbreakingly demote to mere Top 20 status. His Masque cover is dominated by a backlit, eyeless, Pagan face, angry-looking but uncannily emotionless. Below, Tom Baker looks guarded and Hieronymus terrifying. With every Alister Pearson painting the likenesses must be mentioned. Here, there are four crackers. Although he perhaps only sells the period with the costumes - the helix forming the painting’s background - it’s a rich and vivid cover, selling the story far more thoroughly than the later DVD cover and even the Target book. Perhaps it’s only equalled by Pearson’s other attempt for the blue-spine Virgin reprint. Both are striking but then the VHS has that haunting, devastating face…

6: THE TOMB OF THE CYBERMEN

In 1992, The Tomb of the Cybermen burst back into our lives. I had no idea it had been missing but the cover painting sold its importance to this seven-year-old. Black and silver, it didn’t seem like any other 60s cover. The Hartnells and Troughtons were almost always light-grey, as if to reassure the buyer of their black and white archival status. Tomb looked so much more imperative, an urgent Troughton in the foreground, the Cyber-controller arms poised and ready to attack, and best of all, the two of them framed by the enormous tombs, Cybermen waking within. This was a cover that had something of the fable about it, the legend that had been The Tomb of the Cybermen writ large in black and silver.

5: RESURRECTION OF THE DALEKS

Bruno Elettori isn’t a name that has gone down in Doctor Who history but his covers for Resurrection and Dragonfire are so moody and well-lit. Whilst Dragonfire is slightly let down by the bright rays from the dragon’s eyes filling the page, Resurrection suffers no such impediment. The Davison portrait is a shadowy orange, Davros a picture in green. At the bottom, spacecraft explode and zoom away to safety and at the top, the Daleks are coming… This is a cover full, of incident, imaginatively composed and dripping in atmosphere, much like the story itself.

4: THE FIVE DOCTORS

This one had to be there : it was the first VHS I bought, and that on the strength of the cover. Looking at it now, Pertwee seems to be sporting a white afro and Davison has gone grey. Tom’s eyes are too close together and Troughton’s are almost shut. But there’s a grandness to the design that - in much the same way as The Three Doctors – mirrors the story’s importance. There may not be monsters here, but the sight of the five Doctors alone was enough to fuel this child’s imagination. Sometimes the hero, or at least five of them, is all a boy needs!

3: AN UNEARTHLY CHILD

There isn’t much to say about this totemic painting that hasn’t been said before. It is a thing of profound beauty. In one picture, it illustrates the strangeness of Doctor Who, particularly in those very earliest days, and the enigma of William Hartnell. The eponymous Susan is, for once, granted equal status to that of her grandfather and the image of the TARDIS on a barren landscape below them sums up their relationship without the need for words. But if the painting were to have a title, it’s probably be: Wanderers in the Fourth Dimension of Space and Time.

2: PLANET OF THE SPIDERS

At the last minute, the great Andrew Skilleter puts in a most welcome appearance. His illustration of Pertwee here is one of his best. The blue colour scheme is bold and complements the story itself. The composition, Metebelis 3 either side of Pertwee, the Great One below, the blue crystal central is simple and clever. I bought this from Woolworths in Blackpool, holidaying with my parents, and remember the sales assistant having trouble putting the videos in the plastic case – it seemed to take her centuries. But I didn’t care, because if there were ever a cover to thrill the curiosity of a child, it’s Andrew Skilleter’s tantalisingly effusive Planet of the Spiders.

1: THE DEADLY ASSASSIN

Easily one of the best portraits of Tom, unusually scared and desperate sans signature scarf and hat, the image marks out this cover and indeed story as something very different and very special. The skeletal Master creeping in from the left, over Tom’s shoulder, lends the cover an off-kilter nature, but the distant masked gunman in silhouette below grounds it. His weapon is no space ray gun either, it’s an earthly rifle, making the story feel unusually dangerous and realistic. This, coupled with Tom’s haunted expression, make Skilleter’s masterpiece the most unnerving, striking and vital VHS cover of the lot.

Near misses: What a shame for me not to have included any Colin Howard artwork. I loved his Key to Time covers and almost included his purple Androids of Tara. His Sylvester McCoy efforts are equally exciting: Paradise Towers and Survival are action-packed and thrilling. His Frontier in Space looks epic and his Sea Devils perfectly captures the story. Perhaps it’s that Howard’s portraits don’t quite capture the actors as sublimely as Alister Pearson but there were plenty of covers I seriously considered before settling on the Top Ten. His unused Time-Flight would have been a classic too! I’d also like to mention the bizarre illustration for Terminus which I thrilled at when finding in HMV: bright blue and with a smiling Davison, the cover nevertheless felt menacing and fresh. Finally, those aforementioned slate-grey Troughtons with their fabulous likenesses were all considered for the list: The Dominators, The Mind Robber and The War Games, as well as Hartnell’s Dalek Invasion of Earth. They really were utterly fabulous.

JH

Learning to Love: The Twin Dilemma

As a child, I blasphemously preferred The Twin Dilemma to The Caves of Androzani. I know: sacrilege. But it was faster, more colourful, louder and had better monsters – everything a child’s imagination needed. Caves was a bit grey and drab for a seven-year-old. As I grew into adulthood and indeed, fandom, it became apparent that everybody thought The Caves of Androzani was very, very good and The Twin Dilemma was very, very bad, poll toppingly and poll bottomingly good and bad. Since gaining awareness of this common fan consensus, I’ve always felt a little guilty about slipping Twin Dilemma into the DVD player. In fact, I’d avoided doing so in case a childhood favourite ended up looking a bit crap. With fresh eyes, I took to the tale this week and was in fact, very pleasantly surprised.

Of course, The Twin Dilemma is certainly not BAFTA worthy. It’s a cheap, standard, 80s TV sci-fi run-around but for once in 80s Doctor Who, it’s got a half decent plot. To summarise, twin genii are kidnapped from their home, their genius to be used to re-align planets, which will result in the super-heating and hatching of gastropod eggs enabling a new race to devastate the universe. It’s pretty simple but is told in a series of well-paced stages. The only problem from a plotting perspective is that the children’s genius is not used against leading gastropod Mestor at the story’s conclusion. The Doctor - as Troughton would have it – simply “bungs a rock” at the giant mollusc instead. What we (perhaps mercifully) lose in Romulus and Remus action however, we gain in a Colin Baker stand-off, and it’s only right that he be front and centre for this, his debut tour-de-force.

Colin Baker never, ever underperforms. Here, he is brash, bold and bombastic, many times on the verge of a ham haemorrhage, but always utterly charming even when the script is doing its best to make us hate him. After attacking Peri during one of his fits, the Doctor’s memory is affected. When Peri relays to him what he has done, does he apologise? No, he makes it all about him: he must atone, become a hermit and put Peri through a thousand years of mind-numbing boredom. That’s some apology. The Doctor does mention what a wonderful girl Peri is elsewhere in the story, but not when she’s in the room, and his lack of remorse is what is most off-putting about this incarnation. All he had to do was apologise sincerely at the story’s conclusion and I’m sure many of the problems fans have with The Twin Dilemma would have been avoided. Why Peri seems to want to live and let live in those last few seconds is baffling. Above all else, this new Doctor is irritating. His self-indulgent spiel about how old and lacking in fashion sense he is comes across as deeply unattractive. His entrance from the TARDIS on Jaconda, eyes wide shut, hands across his chest and face to the heavens is the behaviour of a pillock. And the less said about his craggy knob the better. It’s a testament to Colin Baker that he makes it through his material unscathed and undoubtedly the Doctor. Nicola Bryant, apart from some pour crying acting at the close of Part Two is terrific throughout. This could have been an almighty TARDIS crew, and Hugo Lang should have hopped aboard too, the better to temper the Doctor’s over-enthusiasm. He and Peri make for a great brother-and-sister team. He’d just have to lose the tinfoil.

Weird bits of dialogue abound throughout the script. “May my bones rot for obeying it,” is a line any actress would have difficulty with but one which Helen Blatch seems to devilishly relish. The Doctor’s firm insistence that he calls regeneration “a renewal” is bizarre but Colin drives on through the line over-earnestly anyway. “Death by embolism” becomes something of a catchphrase in the story’s latter stages and antiquated terms like “hue and cry,” “do not presume upon my patience” and “it’s very disconcerting to have a large void in the middle of one’s mind” are Anthony Steven’s seeming stock-in-trade. Nobody speaks in any way like a person, except Peri and even that’s only some of the time. Perhaps my favourite brief exchange given its bathos is this nugget:

AZMAEL: But Noma, he is a friend. He will save us from Lord Mestor. 

NOMA: The Lord Mestor is our friend. He is our enemy.

It’s almost as if these characters are quite aware that they’re in a cheap, standard, 80s TV sci-fi run-around. However, once one is keyed into the delivery - the very self-dramatisation of these characters - The Twin Dilemma becomes much more fun. We can bask in the stagey performances and glory in the audaciously ham-fisted dialogue. It’s quite something to hear speeches of such operatic nature and even rarer to watch performers tearing into them with misguided abandon. 

The terrific cast sports old dog Maurice Denham, Kevin McNally, Dennis Chinnery and Edwin Richfield. All give their absolute best. Barry Stanton has a small but sinister turn as Noma and Seymour Green’s Chamberlain is deliciously camp. Nobody here is sending up the show. Their tangible dedication allows the story to be at once extremely serious and extremely funny. Barry Stanton’s early delivery of, “I shall contact MESTOR” as if to let the viewer know this might be a name we need to remember is ludicrous. His later curiously high-pitched “Mestor is dead!” is also the choice of someone doing their very best and resultantly sliding out on their arse. Kevin McNally is also playing the odd-choices game too. He delivers loudly and probably intentionally “Does Mestor know this could happen?” but somehow manages to mispronounce Mestor with a hard “or” sound to rhyme with implore. He’s been hearing this name for weeks of rehearsal but decides, what the hell, I’m doing it my way as Peter Moffatt shakes his head and sighs up in his sad gallery. 

Design is certainly prouder than that of Androzani. Whereas Trau Morgus was happy with a plain, purply-pink wash across his office, and General Chellak liked his walls slate grey, on Titan 3 we have the full glam-glitz approach to walling. Mestor’s throne room has beautifully painted, colourful slug trails adorning the place like a red carpet. Azmael’s laboratory is a curious shade of orange and Romulus and Remus’s house looks nothing remotely like a house, even a future house, making their kidnap feel theatrical and unmoving. However, the multiple locations and inability in the script to settle on one planet, means that there’s always something to look at, and it’s usually bright.

Malcolm Clarke’s music is by turns wonderful and dreadful. The fairground fanfare when Peri enters the console room is diabolical in its inappropriateness. The final insane stab of Part One makes it clear that Lang poses no threat whatsoever. That shrill squeak when the Doctor places his cat brooch on the lapel is a wild choice. However, there’s the quite beautiful and strange Jean Michel Garre inspired “twins” refrain, as they play equations together. The music as Azmael dies lifts the scene from a rather lovely one to perhaps Colin Baker’s finest hour. Clarke’s last citing of the Doctor Who theme as Baker smiles at the camera is enough to reassure the viewer that this guy is going to be fine. Even the composer recognises that Baker is the man.

The Twin Dilemma is a dynamic, gaudy and crazed set of episodes. The intention was bold but the decision to go for an ultimately unlikeable Doctor was ill-judged. On the page, that’s what Colin’s Doctor is here: he’s not unpredictable, alien or bad-tempered, he’s simply annoying. It’s a credit to Colin Baker that he salvages the script with every ounce he has and even makes that coat I’ve refrained from mentioning look half-way reasonable. The episodes are terrifically well-paced and energetic, with only one short TARDIS scene feeling like padding. The narrative zips along excitingly and despite innumerable critiques to the contrary there’s much to applaud: Maurice Denham, the involvement of a police force (a massively underutilised idea for Doctor Who), a straight-forward, just challenging enough plotline, two great leading performers, some transcendental music, two sets of soft r's, and the melodramatic, mental dialogue. Watched in the right frame of mind preferably with a pint, dare I say it, The Twin Dilemma is much more fun than Androzani even to these adult eyes (and I do happen to completely love Androzani)! It's certainly much funnier.

Après nous le deluge!

JH