Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 31 (The Singing Detective, Edge of Darkness)

The weakness of Doctor Who in 1985-86 would be one thing if it were a weak period for British television in general. Instead, however, two of the most acclaimed British television productions of all time aired during the Colin Baker era. The first, at the end of 1985, was Edge of Darkness. The second, airing at the tail end of Trial of a Time Lord, about 26 hours after each of the last four episodes and then for another two weeks after, was The Singing Detective.

For those not reflexively versed in the nuances of British television, Edge of Darkness is a conspiracy thriller written by the creator of Z-Cars and directed by Martin Campbell, who went on to be a serious director who did such high profile work as the Daniel Craig Casino Royale and, less satisfyingly, the recent Green Lantern film. If the name sounds vaguely familiar as a Mel Gibson film, I'm very sorry for you, as that's Martin Campbell remaking the series as a film a few years back and very much not good. The plot concerns a police detective whose daughter is gunned down in front of him and the nuclear conspiracy that unfolds as he investigates her death and discovers that she, not he, was the target.

The Singing Detective, on the other hand, is one of the two things that people point towards when picking the masterpiece of Dennis Potter, himself the consensus best writer in British television history. It stars Michael Gambon as a writer with a debilitating skin condition (one that Potter himself also suffered from) who drifts among his stay in the hospital, the detective novel he's writing in his head (in which Gambon also plays the  lead, the eponymous singing detective), and memories from his childhood.

It goes without saying that both are very, very good. Less clear is whether they're meaningfully comparable with Doctor Who. Certainly both have wildly higher production standards. Indeed, in the case of The Singing Detective the production standards were actually too high - Dennis Potter had wanted the hospital scenes shot on video to look like a sitcom, but he was overruled and the whole thing was done on film. As a result, both are much better looking than Doctor Who.

And this is not, to be clear, just a special effects thing. Television is a visual medium. We Doctor Who fans are used to overlooking bad effects, but in doing so we can be prone to blinding ourselves to just how much good directing can matter. (Consider the degree to which Revelation of the Daleks was salvaged by Graeme Harper. Even in the new series directors matter to a great extent - consider how much The Girl Who Waited and The God Complex were elevated by Nick Hurran's revelatory direction.) It's not just that Edge of Darkness and The Singing Detective look ritzier, they're fundamentally better and more complexly shot pieces of television. Doctor Who didn't have the money to let directors cut loose the way they can in these shows, and as a result struggled to get directors as good as these - one of the few claims in the infamous Eric Saward Starburst interview I have no trouble believing. As a result, yes, of course these shows look far better than Doctor Who. The long tracking shots that pop up throughout the start of Edge of Darkness, for instance, are just something that Doctor Who was never going to do.

So on that level, at least, looking at Doctor Who next to two of the legend of British television is terribly unfair to Doctor Who. But that's never been the way in which Doctor Who has compared to the highlights of British drama. Look back to the Troughton era, when Doctor Who was succinctly an thoroughly outshone by The Prisoner. Doctor Who in the 1960s never had an episode that looked half as good as The Prisoner looked, even ignoring the color issue. But eventually, starting, really, as early as The Mind Robber, Doctor Who managed to get bits of writing that could stand toe-to-toe with The Prisoner. In many ways this is the default mode for Doctor Who - production values far below other shows but writing and, at least much of the time, acting that goes beyond it.

The central example here remains The Ark in Space, which looks incredibly bad but is played with utter conviction such that it works. And, more than that, it thrives such that its most visible faults become virtues. When done right, Doctor Who is actually more likable for its shoddy elements simply because of the determination to make good television despite the limitations that they put on display. Because The Ark in Space cannot simply casually be good the ways in which it is good are even more vivid. And at the heart of why The Ark in Space works is the fact that it was written by Robert Holmes, a writer who, as the cliched observation goes, never quite got that he was actually one of the best writers at the BBC.

So in this regard we can compare Edge of Darkness and The Singing Detective to Doctor Who. Because even if Doctor Who was never going to look like either production, it could at least be written like them. I mean, OK, maybe not quite as good Dennis Potter, but Troy Kennedy Martin, though a very good writer, is firmly the sort of writer that Doctor Who, in order to work, needs to be in the same league as. And even Dennis Potter, well, even if Doctor Who's writers aren't going to be quite as good as Dennis Potter they can at least contend for the open spaces in the ranking immediately below him. And more to the point, they have to. Doctor Who has always relied on having genius writers, whether they be ones capable of mass acclaim or more troubled, oddball geniuses who need a show like Doctor Who to thrive.

Of course, Season 22 had two writers who were at least plausible entries into the leagues in question: Robert Holmes and Philip Martin. And it's telling that Vengeance on Varos is the one script in Season 22 that plausibly belongs on a list of truly great Doctor Who stories. (Holmes, on the other hand, is clearly in open rebellion against the show as conceived.) But on the whole Doctor Who is not only lacking in writers who threaten to break out into genius at any moment (and even at its best it has only had enough of those for one or two stories per season), it's lacking in writers who can noodle along confidently at a level just a bit below genius.

And in the case of The Singing Detective one can even suggest that Doctor Who is trying to aspire towards it. The central conceit of The Singing Detective is its switching among three distinct narratives and its use of ambiguous gaps among the narratives that allow the strands to blur together. It's worth pointing out, then, that both Vengeance on Varos and Revelation of the Daleks were overtly playing with similar ideas. The Singing Detective took it further, yes, but it's absolutely the case that Doctor Who is in the same context as The Singing Detective from a writing perspective.

So let's look at Edge of Darkness and The Singing Detective and ask what good writing in 1985-86 looked like. For the most part the two shows are very, very different. Edge of Darkness is a relatively straightforward thriller. It doesn't use any massively complicated narrative tricks save for some ambiguity at times over whether or not the main character is really seeing his dead daughter's ghost or just cracking. What is perhaps most notable about it is that there's next to no effort to spend a lot of time on exposition. The world has its rules and largely gets on with the business of storytelling within it. It's not until the sixth episode that people really start getting into lengthy philosophical speeches with one another.

The Singing Detective is less straightforwardly a mystery, but it also shares this style of letting its world unfold for the audience. The normal term for this is, I suppose, "show don't tell," but there's more to it than that. What's interesting about how The Singing Detective and Edge of Darkness unfold isn't just that they avoid clumsy exposition for the most part, it's that they carefully control the audience's knowledge and expectations without ever having to resort substantively to telling instead of showing.

This is a key approach for Edge of Darkness, because at its heart Edge of Darkness is a mystery. Over time we're meant both to figure out the conspiracy behind Craven's daughter's death and the nature of the world Edge of Darkness is set in (which is, Quatermasss-like, almost but not quite our world). So it very much just depicts the world it's set in in an ostensibly straightforward manner. It's not actually nearly as straightforward as it appears, but it's a method of storytelling that shifts an enormous weight onto the audience.

This is, to be frank, something Doctor Who has not come close to doing at this point. The Edge of Darkness approach requires a tremendous amount of respect for the audience - something Doctor Who hasn't had in a long time. I mean, the show has tremendous, even excessive faith in the audience's ability to remember who the Sontarans are and to think they're very cool. But there's very little respect for the audience's ability to fill in gaps on their own. The show very rarely just shows things without lengthy exposition sequences or infodumps. And that's largely a straightforward mark of maturity. The audience is more than capable of understanding the basic outline of science fiction worlds, especially after twenty-two years of Doctor Who and at this point nearly a decade of post-Star Wars culture, the fact is that Doctor Who displays a distressing lack of confidence in the ability of the audience to understand the worlds it depicts without exposition.

As a result, it's miles from being able to tell a story where we learn about a mystery progressively by watching people interact with it. And this is a real thing. It's easy to draw an arbitrary line between "highbrow" television and trash and put Doctor Who, as a ropey sci-fi series, on the trash pile. But first of all, neither Edge of Darkness nor The Singing Detective particularly support a highbrow/trash dichotomy given that one is massively indebted to low culture iconography and the other is also a piece of science fiction. Second of all, just because the highbrow/lowbrow line is sometimes arbitrary and silly doesn't mean that there isn't real content to it sometimes. And this is one place where the line really does start to assert itself - highbrow media is much more likely to hold to a "show don't tell" principle while still carefully managing audience expectations and knowledge. It's a technique that, when successfully used, almost guarantees a highbrow reception to this day.

It's not even that Doctor Who is melodrama and thus not prone to that. The Singing Detective is firmly melodramatic at key points. There are aspects of it that aren't played for melodrama, but melodrama is absolutely central to what that show is doing. Because Doctor Who has played it in the highbrow manner before - The Massacre is the most obvious example, but even more recently something like Warrior's Gate unfolded that way. It can be done - it just isn't at this point in time.

The other thing that Edge of Darkness and The Singing Detective do that Doctor Who never really does in this period is focus the drama on the experiences of characters. In both series the most powerful moments are those in which we watch uncomfortably as Michael Gambon or Bob Peck suffer visibly. Most of the best moments of Edge of Darkness's first episode are those in which we watch Peck portray Craven's grief at his daughter's death. The show resolutely refuses to speed through it, instead showing Craven's bereavement in aggressive detail. Similarly, much of the thrust of The Singing Detective is capturing Gambon's humiliation and agony at his condition. Even as we delve into his psyche and understand more and more of why he's the way he is, the series is at its most powerful when we see the raw misery of Marlow's illness and the way in which he's callously marginalized and mistreated for it.

This is something Doctor Who never really does. It doesn't take the time to show an extended treatment of a single character's experience. And this is a real wakness. One of the best and subtlest moments of Vengeance on Varos is when we find out that Peri secretly wants wings. But what's powerful is that this is the one moment where Peri starts to be more than "generic human female" as a companion and to acquire some character traits. But the fleeting nature of it just exposes the way in which thought of actual emotional experience is sidelined. So much of what was horrible about the strangulation scene in The Twin Dilemma is that no space was ever provided to see Peri's reaction to it or to allow the audience to empathize with her. Instead she forgave the Doctor readily and the incident was brushed under the rug. When the thing that needed to exist for that idea to have any chance of working was an extended treatment of Peri and her reactions.

Again, this isn't something totally foreign to Doctor Who - it did it as recently as Kinda with the extended focus on Tegan's dreamscape. But it's been largely and conspicuously absent - most obviously in the failure to have Nyssa or Tegan ever react to the Master in a meaningful sense. And, to look ahead, as awkward as some of the Ace sequences in the latter part of the McCoy era are they're major improvements simply because they're instances of the show trying to focus extensively on imagining the experience of being in the world's it depicts. (Actually, it's worth remarking in the general case on the influence of Edge of Darkness on the McCoy era. Andrew Cartmel infamously declared in his interview for the position of script editor that his ambitions for Doctor Who were to bring down the government. Given John Nathan-Turner's visible resistance to overtly political Doctor Who over the seasons immediately prior to hiring Andrew Cartmel the fact that he then hired Cartmel after that interview seems surprising to say the least. But it is worth remembering that Nathan-Turner was always a savvy viewer of television. He'd have been well aware that Edge of Darkness was by miles the most successful piece of science fiction on the BBC in half a decade. And the hiring of Cartmel goes, I think, hand in hand with that. For all his poor judgment in the latter days of the Davison era and the Baker era, Nathan-Turner was not a fool.)

In the end, then, it's all too clear looking at what top notch British drama in 1985-86 is next to Doctor Who that there were serious problems with the show. The problems the series suffered are not, much as one might suggest, that it's badly of its time. Rather, it's that the series was hopelessly out of touch with what worked at the time. The simple, damning fact is that Doctor Who badly missed a trick in this period. It's not that it wasn't as good as two of the best series the BBC ever made. It's that it wasn't even trying to be.

You Were Expecting Someone Else 11 (Slipback)

With Doctor Who off the air for eighteen months everyone involved was, for obvious reasons, interested in finding some way to get some new Doctor Who out. And so they ended up doing a radio series of six ten minute episodes written by Eric Saward. The end home of this series was part of a BBC Radio 4 children's magazine show entitled Pirate Radio 4. Since he was writing for an overtly children's audience Saward, to his credit, recognized that his usual space marine action approach was a no go. Accordingly, he channelled Douglas Adams.

Wait, what?

Let's not forget that one of the foundational myths of the Nathan-Turner era is that the show was irrevocably broken by the Graham Williams era and that it was "silly." Eric Saward was among the pilers-on, accusing the Williams era of insulting the audience. Now, suddenly, he's trying to mimic the approach of Williams's script editor?

The problem is that between the time when that myth was laid down - 1980 or so - and 1985 - there'd been a necessary reevaluation of things. In 1980 Douglas Adams was a comedy writer who'd had a decent success with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with the novel coming out towards the end of his time on the show. Accordingly, he could be dismissed as having made the show silly. But 1985 he'd gotten to book four of the trilogy and was a reliably best-selling author. And suddenly he was a major point of legitimacy for Doctor Who - someone the program wanted to boast about its association with instead of boasting about moving past.

But more than that, there is something odd about the spectacle of Eric Saward writing light comedy. I mean, he attempted dark comedy on a regular basis - there's a great moment in the infamous Starburst interview when, pressed on the idea that Doctor Who isn't funny anymore, he pointed out that Vengeance on Varos, The Two Doctors, and Revelation of the Daleks are all comedies. Which, I mean, they technically are, but... this is clearly not what those critics meant. This, though, is the only real instance of him doing an extended piece of straightforward comedy in Doctor Who on his own initiative (as opposed to in the course of a salvage job).

It's not very good, but it's not very good in the same ways that The Visitation is not very good - a case of the whole being markedly less than the sum of its recycled parts. Many, if not most, of the ideas are genuinely funny, but the story is in many ways wholly encapsulated by the drunk ditz computer, a funny idea that overstays its welcome by a considerable margin. Still, it's nowhere near as bad as its reputation. Doctor Who has always faltered when people attempt explicitly "for children" versions of it. This is no worse than The Pescatons before it or The Infinite Quest after it, if we're being honest. Indeed, it's probably better than either.

No, here once again we have something where the biggest factor in its critical reception seems to be what era it's a part of as opposed to a judgment of quality as such. Which is not to mount a defense of Slipback so much as to note that as Eric Saward's weakest bit of Doctor Who writing by far it acquires all of the excess hatred of Eric Saward. But what's interesting about it is that it provides a good window into Eric Saward himself, a figure who has been much contested over the past few seasons on this blog.

The trouble with Saward, at least from a critic's perspective, is that he's not quite as bad as would be useful. I mean, obviously we all want to find someone to blame for the train wreck of the Colin Baker years and the squandered potential of the Davison years. John Nathan-Turner, having presided over the quite good Bidmead and Cartmel years, can't absorb all of the blame, though he certainly gets given a large portion of it. Which means that we want to direct the blame at Saward. He, after all, oversees the bulk of the parts of the 80s where the show doesn't work. If we really want to get creative and blame Season 24 on him, that's certainly doable (though I much prefer enjoying Season 24). So, you know, if it looks like a goat and bleats like a goat you may as well send it out into the desert.

But there are some problems here, and the main one is that Saward isn't that bad a writer. Yes, all five of his stories came in for some sharp criticism on this blog, but of them he has only one abject turkey, and even it's better than the two season openers before it. The faults of Saward are maddeningly hard to pin down. Even the most obvious - that he's more interested in the violence around the Doctor than in the Doctor himself - doesn't quite stick after Revelation of the Daleks given that the violence around the Doctor is so interesting there. Still, it's difficult to ignore the fact that the program takes a dramatic downturn that coincides almost precisely with his tenure as script editor. So what, exactly, is the problem if not that Saward is a rubbish writer?

Back when Saward first arrived on the scene I suggested that even from the beginning his work was best understood as a weak imitation of Robert Holmes. Now, with Slipback, we have the same phenomenon with a different source writer: weak imitations of Douglas Adams. We can add to that the weak Evelyn Waugh imitation in Revelation of the Daleks. All of this begins to shape up to a pattern gestured at from the start - Saward's taste exceeds his talent. He tries to write like good writers and can't quite pull it off.

Or perhaps more accurately, Saward's taste exceeds his confidence. If anything, I think Saward's work and tenure on the series tends to demonstrate a real anxiety about other writers. It's easy to observe that for all of his complaining about having to use writers like Pip and Jane Baker or Glen McCoy that the good writers he had found tended to vanish after one or two stories. The Lost Stories line shows that rejected scripts by Bailey, Bidmead, and Clegg existed. He shows a similar aversion to importing well-known writers from elsewhere. We've seen how good The Song of Megaptera actually was, and Saward's behavior in and around the Christopher Priest debacle is easy to criticize. (About Time quotes a letter to a fan inquiring why the show didn't use writers like Priest that says "the names of writers you quoat are novalists. Infact one of them has attempted to write a Doctor Who script with disasterous results. That is why we don't use novalists." Priest received a formal apology for this, apparently.) Equally, he was quick to ally with Robert Holmes, and clearly had respect for Philip Martin, so it's not as though he only surrounded himself with hacks, but equally, any suggestion that the writers just weren't there in the Saward era is, as we've seen, nonsense.

I am loathe to take the psychoanalytic tack when dealing with writers, but it is difficult to ignore the sense of Saward as desperate to prove himself the equal of writers he admires, terrified of being outshone, and unable to escape his influences enough to distinguish himself. But in this regard Saward is not so much the scapegoat on which to pin the era's failures but a tragic figure.

Let's consider, first of all, Eric Saward's television experience prior to writing The Visitation. Well. That was a short list. OK, let's move on to his television experience prior to becoming script editor then: The Visitation. If ever there was a case of promoting someone too fast, this is surely it. Even Douglas Adams had a few miscellaneous television credits stretching back a few years. If we look at The Visitation as what it is - the first produced television script of a writer - it's got considerable potential. Yes, it's a Robert Holmes knock-off, but it's mostly capable and he's ripping off the right stuff. It's just that nothing about it screamed "this is the man who should be in charge of shaping the writing for Doctor Who for the next five years." It may have screamed "take this writer under your wing and in three years you'll have a good writer," but that's not what the program did.

We've also talked about the sheer size of the task facing the program in this era. With the family audience it had catered to for twenty years evaporating, science fiction making massive leaps and bounds as the doors opened by Star Wars are casually walked through on a regular basis, and the increasing rise of a wide variety of alternative culture along with some exceedingly divisive politics of the sort science fiction was all but made to comment on the business of making Doctor Who exciting and interesting in the mid-80s was as difficult as at any time in its life. It needed a very steady pair of hands in 1981, and that's not what it got.

So yeah, the untested writer at the start of his television career couldn't cut it on that big a stage. But, I mean, this is hardly surprising. It's worth asking whether a writer we've mostly praised like Terrence Dicks could have cut it in the mid-80s either. There's a moment on the Trials and Tribulations documentary where Ian Levine accuses John Nathan-Turner of deliberately avoiding older Doctor Who writers who, as he puts it, could write Doctor Who in their sleep. It's true, but surely, in the mid-80s, when Doctor Who needed nothing so much as bold new ideas, the last people you want to write it are ones who can do conventional Doctor Who reflexively. The other writer Levine mentions - Holmes - certainly could do Doctor Who in his sleep, but notably hardly ever did. But Dicks, much as I love his writing, is a solid source of extremely traditional straight-up Doctor Who yarns. None of his skills would have helped in 1985 either. He was, in many ways, as fortunate to work on the program in the early 1970s as Saward was unfortunate to be working on it in the early 1980s.

To Saward's credit, then, he was trying the right stuff. We'll look next time at what top notch BBC drama in 1985/86 looked like, but it's not nearly as far from what Saward is trying to do with the program as his critics would have you believe. It's just that, well, Saward isn't good enough to pull off what Dennis Potter or Troy Kennedy Martin can do either.

Unfortunately, between his meltdown criticizing Nathan-Turner in the aftermath of Trial and his being at the helm for the hiatus, Doctor Who marked the end of his television career. And the thing is, Slipback really suggests that this is maddeningly unfortunate. Because for all of its multitude of faults and sins the reality is that Slipback is, much like The Visitation, a merely half-bad Douglas Adams knockoff. Which suggests that Saward has both taste and versatility. And, let's be honest, no small measure of talent. What he never got the chance to develop was experience and style.

Because frankly, crap scripts are what writers do early on. Robert Holmes had to get The Krotons and The Space Pirates out of his system before he became the Robert Holmes we all know and love. Does anyone seriously believe that if he'd been put in as script editor after The Krotons and had to mastermind the Pertwee era it would have gone off without a hitch? People have rough starts to writing. Hell, go look at the early entries in this blog - my Marco Polo entry as it appears here is absolutely cringeworthy. (The book version ain't half bad, if I may say so myself.)

In the end, Saward had very, very good instincts on who to imitate and what to try to do. He didn't have the execution down early in his career, and he was put in far too high a position far too quickly, and, crucially, before he'd had a chance to develop his own style instead of attempting mimicry. It's easy to imagine an Eric Saward whose career was allowed to develop normally and who became quite a good television writer in the mid-to-late 80s. But that's an Eric Saward who didn't get tapped for one of the hardest jobs in television wildly prematurely.

Saward, in the end, tried the right things. Better writers than him would have floundered as well. Yes, Saward's failings were exceedingly bad for the show. But of the two of them, Saward fared the worse, and we ought give him no small measure of sympathy for it.

Time Can Be Rewritten 22 (The Nightmare Fair)

Right. So, a little over a year ago I had a blog that was just starting to get some attention. And I came upon a story that, well, kinda sucked. And the thing is, it was a story that had a surprisingly good reputation, but the story itself was really, really rubbish. Plus there were some really uncomfortable racial elements to it, and it was the second story in a row to have those, and I wrote an entry that tore the story to shreds. And writing it, I was getting a nice build-up going, so I went for broke in the conclusion and suggested that the story should be exiled from the canon on the grounds that it's racist and terrible.

So, funny thing, it turns out that if, right when people are just starting to take notice of your blog, you viciously slaughter a mildly sacred cow this rapidly becomes one of the things you're best known or. It's not actually one of my most read posts, which I'm fine with, but to this day if I see a link in my referral logs from something I haven't heard about before and I click through, over half the time it's someone citing my blog to say that the story is a bit racist. It is unmistakably the case that The Celestial Toymaker (or, really, the combination of that and The Daleks' Masterplan three entries earlier) is where my blog made itself. Because apparently nobody had really made the observation that The Celestial Toymaker was a piece of racist crap. (And it was. And it's deliberate. I didn't quote the novelization in the entry, but I'd like to point out the quote I've been pointing to since writing the entry: "The Toymaker was lounging in a black Chinese chair behind a laquered Chinese desk inlaid with mother-of-pearl and scenes of chinese life," and, its counterpart a few sentences later, "The Toymaker stood up, a tall imposing figure, dressed as a Chinese mandarin with a circular black hat embossed with a heavy gold thread, a large silver red and blue collar and a heavy, stiffly embroidered black robe encrusted with rubies, emeralds, diamonds and pearls set against a background of coiled Chinese dragons." Also, the Toymaker is Chinese.)

So you can imagine that it was somewhat comforting to open up Graham Williams's The Nightmare Fair and discover that someone actually had noticed this problem before me. After a bunch of referring to the Toymaker as a Mandarin, Williams, at about the halfway point of the book, drops all pretense and just becomes a wonderfully snarky jerk about the fact that watching Michael Gough pretend to be Asian is kind of horrifying. My favorite bit, for what it's worth, is "Stefan carefully tore off the printed sheet and made his way towards the Mandarin, who was standing, listening attentively to a technician in a white coat who looked distinctly as though he had the better right to the eastern style wardrobe the Mandarin favoured." Oh snap, as they say.

This concludes the race and racism portion of our program. I don't think the Toymaker should have been brought back, but he was. Given that, I'm at least pleased that his return openly acknowledged the most searing flaws of the original. And, more than that, it seems to attempt to address the more fundamental problems of the story, namely that there was nothing resembling a plot or a concept beyond "Michael Gough makes people play inane games." A problem that Graham Williams, who may have been many things, but who understood the basic standards of entertainment, would have noticed the problems with the surviving episode immediately.

Actually, let's look at the basic phenomenon here. We'll talk about the oddness of Graham Williams being brought back in 1985 next entry (or, at least, about a closely related topic), but let's look more broadly at the fact that this marks the second reversal of John Nathan-Turner's reluctance to use writers from before his time. The first, Robert Holmes, was largely down to Eric Saward's staunch advocacy of him, but it's difficult to imagine either Saward or Nathan-Turner demonstrating a deep and abiding love of Graham Williams's work.

It's telling to look at the planed scripts for Season 23 as a whole. Four of them featured clear returns of past story elements, but one of these - Mission to Magnus - was at least partially Philip Martin reusing his own idea. The other three - The Nightmare Fair, Yellow Fever and How to Cure It, and Gallifray - featured ideas created prior to Nathan-Turner's time. One (The certain to be renamed Yellow Fever and How to Cure It) featured a writer revamping his own concept, but Holmes writing Autons fifteen years after Terror of the Autons in a story that also had the Master and the Rani is clearly another example of the kitchen sink script that he dealt with in Season 22. The Bakers doing the Time Lords with Gallifray is odder, but that script, from what is known about it, looked set to heavily revamp the concept. Which means, in other words, that the two kitchen sink scripts in which a pile of pre-selected elements had to be cobbled together into a story were both given to extremely experienced Doctor Who writers.

This marks a change from past policy, when kitchen sink scripts were dealt with by relatively new writers like Saward, Grimwade, or Byrne. Given how poorly many of the past kitchen sink scripts had worked, the decision to use writers well versed in Doctor Who for them was eminently sensible, and it marks a real improvement from how things were done in past seasons.

Ironically, though, the turn towards an older and more experienced writer meant that the resulting story was less connected with the original source material than the kitchen sink scripts of past had been. This is not to say that any of the kitchen sink scripts of the past had been wholly faithful, but The Nightmare Fair is much more of an overt reboot of the Toymaker concept than, say, The Arc of Infinity was of Omega. There is, as I said, a clear sense that Graham Williams looked at The Celestial Toymaker, saw that it was nowhere near as good as people said, and began stripping the concept down until he found something that worked and went from there.

His resulting idea - Doctor Who does Tron - was timely, and the absence of an overt video games/computers story in the mid-80s is a strange gap for Doctor Who given that everything similar in the 80s did at least one, if not more. He doesn't necessarily have a huge number of new takes on it, but his ultimate resolution whereby the solitary nature of the lone video game protagonist fighting off waves of monsters parallels the Toymaker's isolation is genuinely clever.

The structure of the book also suggests a level of mastery over the 45-minute episode that so vexed many of the Season 22 writers. The video game stuff is largely in the latter half, with the first half being an insane evil carnival that satisfied the "set in Blackpool" requirement of the checklist Williams was handed and the second half being the actual plot. It's welcome, in part because it keeps Williams from dealing with video games for long enough to have time to make any of the endearingly embarrassing mistakes that characterized the subgenre of "mid-80s video game/computers episode." Instead there are two distinct concepts, both of which are right up Doctor Who's alley, and neither of which are set to outstay their welcome. And with the location filming in Blackpool set to make the nightmare carnival stuff relatively easy to do on a Doctor Who budget, there's a real chance that this could have been done well.

It's not, to be clear, revolutionary or brilliant Doctor Who. But the last piece of relatively straightforward Doctor Who to work well was Frontios, and even that aggressively broke the rules in places. The one thing that Doctor Who has been occasionally getting right lately is radial breaks from tradition and reconceptualization of what the show is. So to see that there was a real chance of Season 23 opening with what would have felt like good, solid, classic Doctor Who is heartening. And note that one of the big problems of last entry is alleviated here as well. This may not be an overtly political story, but the use of video games as a primary point of reference at least makes it directly relevant to 1986 in a real and cultural sense. This is Doctor Who that's about the viewer's world again.

The biggest problem, frankly, is the presence of the Toymaker. And not because of the racial issues, but just because, much like Arc of Infinity, the story clearly assumes that the audience is going to automatically care that this character from the past is there. Williams has necessarily had to reconceptualize large swaths of the Toymaker, giving him an origin story, establishing him on Earth, and changing what he does rather significantly. All of this is well and good, and the joke in which it turns out that the Toymaker hasn't been hanging around Earth to capture the Doctor, he's been doing it because he really likes Earth was, in particular, a delightful subversion of expectations.

But the point remains - what about this story would be made worse if it used a new villain? What's the argument against innovation here? Surely more of the audience is going to be perplexed as to why they're clearly expected to care about the Toymaker than is going to do so reflexively. And for all the reconceptualization it's notable that there isn't a scene in which the Toymaker is really well-justified as a threat. Not even his iconography works this time. Michael Gough in a Mandarin costume amidst a bunch of Victoriana was part of an overall aesthetic that was at least plausible effective. Michael Gough in a Mandarin costume in Blackpool, on the other hand, has little to recommend it. It's just a guy in a funny costume acting menacing. The good ideas this story has - nightmarish carnivals and evil video games - are good ideas without an obscure 60s villain coming back.

And this gets at the real problem with this story as conceived. It demonstrates incremental improvement over Season 22, yes. But incremental improvement in 1986 would surely have been too little too late. The decision to hire an experienced writer to handle the hellish continuity porn brief is sensible, but we're still left with a program more interested in servicing 1960s nostalgia than anything else. We're still left with a program that's trying to polish the particulars of what it's doing in an era when the very center of the show was rotting.

It's unfair to expect the aborted Season 23 to be a radical reconceptualization of the show - incremental change is all that it's plausible that Nathan-Turner would have wanted to pursue. But equally, it's clear that something substantial was necessary and its absence implicitly justifies the need to put the series on hold. In the end, it's tough to miss these stories. That there were three stories planned that were bringing back concepts that hadn't been seen in over a decade is difficult to get excited about even if the writers were better. What we have here is mostly an argument for Graham Williams's skill as a writer - he makes something that works despite being sandbagged with a nightmarish assignment.

It's also, of course, worth reflecting on the fact that this is a novel and not a television episode. The novel works, but at least some of that is the fact that Graham Williams has a light and witty prose style. It's an open question whether the direction, which sandbagged no shortage of stories in Season 22, would have kept the story as lively as Williams's prose does. In the end about the best one can muster for this story is that despite being misconceived in some fundamental ways it could have turned out quite well.

New Adventures: Draft List For Discussion

The big document in which I keep the schedule for upcoming stretches of the blog is rapidly getting short (by which I really just mean that it only goes out to the end of July, but by the standards of the document that is, in fact, short). And since we're in the midst of a big section of not-television anyway, it seemed like a good time to have the talk about what novels I cover in the Virgin era. I've got a draft list below. But I want to get input from the rather delightful community that's sprung up on this blog as well.

The list is already a bit larger than I'm happy about, so while suggestions for what to add are more than welcome please note that some argument as to why I should add it and, better yet, an argument for something I should cut will help the case tremendously. (Of course, so will raw populist appeal - if I get a wave of comments demanding I cover Shadowmind then I will. Weeping.)

I also want to be clear - this is not a list of the best NAs or of the most important ones. They're the ones I think I can get the most interesting and thorough coverage of the Virgin era through. So there are choices that are there because I think I'm likely to have a fair bit to say about them, and important books like Death and Diplomacy that are left out because I think I'll struggle to get to 2000 words. 

That said, here's the tentative list:

Timewyrm: Genesis/Exodus (as one entry)

Timewyrm: Apocalypse/Revelation (ditto)

Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible

Cat's Cradle: Warhead

Love and War

Transit

The Highest Science

Deceit

Lucifer Rising

White Darkness

Birthright

Blood Heat

The Left-Handed Hummingbird

Conundrum

No Future

All-Consuming Fire

Blood Harvest

First Frontier

Warlock

Set Piece

Sanctuary

Human Nature

Original Sin

Head Games
The Also People

Warchild

SLEEPY

Happy Endings

Christmas on a Rational Planet

Return of the Living Dad

Damaged Goods

So Vile a Sin

The Room With No Doors

Lungbarrow

The Dying Days

I want to also nod at some of what I'm imagining will be the obvious comments and questions. To wit:

Nightshade: Yes, it's Gatiss's first published piece of Doctor Who and the first NA to be written by someone who went on to write for the series. Honestly, though, I just don't like Gatiss enough to want to cover another book of his. I fear running out of things to say about Gatiss on the basis of his four episodes. Adding a book doesn't thrill me. That said, I remember very little about the book - is it interesting on merits beyond being by Gatiss?

The Pit: I know William Blake is in it. All I would have to say is that this is a terrible portrayal of William Blake that completely misses everything about why a Blakean Doctor Who is interesting. Having already written infamously on why a Blakean Doctor Who is interesting, I don't see 2000 words here.

Theatre of War: The main reason I'd consider this is the Braxiatel stuff. But I'm going to do three Bernice books - Oh No It Isn't and the two Lawrence Miles books. I don't think there's enough meat on the bones to justify being completist about Braxiatel. Unless, again, there are other reasons to consider it?

The Also People: Not on the list simply because I don't know enough about it to justify it on my own. But the one I feel most like I probably should add. What's the argument here? (Edit: I'm now persuaded to add it. List updated.)

Just War: This was on the list prior to my adding The Also People, and seemed the most cuttable thing on there. Arguments for why it must be restored are welcome.

But, of course, comments on any book people think I should or shouldn't include are welcome. (And keep in mind, the majority of these I've either not read all of or haven't read in a decade - so I readily believe I've got things on the list that aren't nearly as interesting as I hope or that I'm missing real gems.)

Time Can Be Rewritten 21 (The Song of Megaptera)

Among the many services Big Finish provides for Doctor Who at large is a helpful testing of various pieces of fanlore regarding unmade stories. There are, for instance, people who wonder whether Prison in Space would really have been as unbearably terrible as it sounds. And as it happens (and we'll cover this in the Troughton book this fall), yes, yes it would have been. But there is perhaps nowhere this service is more valuable than in the Saward era. One of the less resolvable debates surrounding the Saward era, and one that will play into the next two entries heavily as well, is the nature of the writers. Simply put, there's some solid evidence of some very good writers having scripts rejected during this period while people like Glen McCoy and Anthony Steven had scripts made. It's one thing when Pip and Jane Baker, two writers who are at least fast and reliable, get repeated commissions. It's quite another when they're actively commissioned over Christopher Bidmead and PJ Hammond, as, in Season 23, they were.

Of what I'd consider the big three of baffling rejections - the twin rejection of Christopher Priest's Sealed Orders and The Enemy Within, PJ Hammond's Paradise Five, and Pat Mills's Song of the Space Whale, two - Hammond's and Mills's - have subsequently been recorded by Big Finish. Since the fan lore has Hammond's rejection being down to Nathan-Turner and not Saward, whose influence I am more interested in tracking at the moment, let's opt for Mills's script, now renamed Song of Megaptera.

For those who don't obsessively memorize every detail I cover on this blog, Mills, along with John Wagner (who was a co-author on earlier drafts of this script) co-created Judge Dredd with artist Carlos Ezquerra, and co-wrote the earliest Doctor Who Weekly comic strips. Song of Megaptera was, originally, a story for a Tom Baker comic strip, but Mills was persuaded that it was too good for that and instead sent it to the production office where it was, at various times, considered for Tom Baker, Peter Davison, and, finally, Colin Baker before finally being abandoned. In discussing its scrapping Pat Mills has stated that one of the reasons Saward gave for objecting to it was that Saward didn't like Mills's decision to portray the ship's captain as working class, preferring the idea of a classless future.

Let's get one thing out of the way first - in a litany of poor creative decisions that can be laid directly at Eric Saward's feet, making Timelash over this is one of the most inexcusable. It is flat-out inconceivable how any remotely sane or reasonable script editor could look at Timelash next to this script and conclude that Timelash was going to work better. The Twin Dilemma was an aggregate of brain-searingly bad decisions, but I'm not convinced that any given decision, and particularly any given one of Saward's decisions about The Twin Dilemma was prima facie worse than this.

It is not that Song of Megaptera is a flawless story. Its flaws are relatively evident - it displays an almost Baker and Martin level of obsession with cramming in new ideas, and like Baker and Martin it fails to explore most of them in the depth they deserve. This is, to be fair, simply the way Pat Mills is as a writer - his 2000 A.D. work displays the same hyperactivity, as do his Doctor Who comics. Unlike the comics (which combine this with an at times puerile machismo), however, this script feels altogether more suited to Doctor Who.

It's also an example of politics done well in Doctor Who. The five-year incubation of this project coincided with the heyday of the "save the whales" campaign, and the year after its final abandonment marked the decision to put a moratorium on whaling that is still in place. This story is unrepentantly and unambiguously an anti-whaling screed. I've admittedly always been in favor of overtly political Doctor Who, but if there's been a season that's made that case for me more successfully than Season 22 it's tough to think of it - the best story in the season was by miles the most political one, and virtually every stab at quality it had stemmed from efforts to be more immediately relevant.

But more than its politics The Song of Megaptera has two things going for it that are significant. On the one hand, it wears its politics on its sleeve and builds outwards from them instead of building towards them. The question of whether or not the Doctor is going to oppose whaling is never seriously raised - of course the Doctor opposes it. This is refreshing. After all, a political story like this tends to telegraph its intentions early on, so holding off on having the Doctor's inevitable moral stand on the issue (in either direction - it's not impossible to imagine a story about defending a whaling vessel from ecoterrorists, after all) in favor of having that be the climax would have been dumb anyway.

But equally importantly, it does actually build from that. Yes, the story is anti-whaling, and yes, that's very blatant and up front. But because it takes that as a starting point it's able to go somewhere from that. The working class captain that Saward apparently didn't like is, in this regard, a fantastic character because one is able to understand why he's the way he is. Yes, he's the villain of the piece, but he's an utterly sympathetic villain. Because Mills is so up front about making whaling a loathsome practice, in other words, he's freed from the obligation to make anything else equally loathsome. There's no moustache-twirling villain in the piece. The captain is an over-aggressive Ahab because he's desperate both to prove himself and because he wants revenge on the company that he feels exploited him. The whaling practices take place not on anyone's overt command but out of a systemic failure of anyone to care about motives beyond profit. The sequences in which the Doctor impersonates an inspector making sure regulations are followed are fantastic largely because of the sheer banality of evil on display here and the way in which that banality makes for a far more nuanced game of manipulation than basic "bad guys try to hide the plot from the Doctor." Instead it becomes a game of the villains trying to pull off a PR job on the Doctor, which is far more complex and involving.

The second thing the story does that's exceedingly satisfying is play for willfully low stakes. For most of the story the dramatic tension hinges entirely on the survival of the space whale. Eventually there are a decent number of lives at stake, but we're still talking about hundreds of human lives and a herd of whales. This is an exceedingly small scale - there's not even a planet at stake, and there's no iconic foe to ratchet up the stakes artificially either. The last time we played for such small stakes is the story that replaced this in Season 20, Mawdryn Undead, and even there we had the Black Guardian lurking around in the b-plot. But on the whole this is refreshing - a reminder that Doctor Who's power comes in part from its ability to change scales and focuses week to week. When every single story is about massive planet/galaxy/universe/species-imperilling danger, well, frankly it gets a bit overwhelming. A story where what's at stake is "a whale" is nice simply because it's a reminder that Doctor Who can do more than this.

There are failings - the fungus monster who's also a stand-in for indigenous people who whale is unfortunately under-explored in a way that's troublingly xenophobic. But on the whole this is a script with its heart in the right place that's trying to make the program do interesting things, and that constantly pushes to make sure there are things happening in the story and things are exciting.

So why the hell was Timelash made and this rejected? We can posit personal and psychological reasons - and in two entries' time we will - but for now let's stick with aesthetic reasons.

It could simply be that the 2010 version of this is better than the 1985 version was. In the interviews at the end of the story Mills talks about changing scenes to work better on audio, and one of the highlights of the story (Peri's delirious ramblings when infected with the fungus) is one he specifically mentions adding. Perhaps this just wasn't that good a story. Or perhaps nobody had the heart to point out that a giant whale is difficult to do on a BBC budget. At least some allowance has to be made for the fact that this is not the 1985 script but a polished up 2010 adaptation of it.

It could also be stylistic. There is something odd about Mills's hyperactive approach. It's something I'm more inclined to file as an authorial idiosyncrasy than as a failing, but it would have stuck out like a sore thumb. Perhaps Saward favored the logorrhea of the Bakers or the lack of any distinguishing style or characteristics whatsoever of McCoy to this. There is something markedly different about this script compared to anything else from the time. That basic fact is, in some sense, a reason for rejection.

But I think the real issue is likely something very close to what Mills has said all along. The Saward era, even in Season 22, was never fond of politics. Take Vengeance on Varos out of the mix and Season 22 becomes marginally more political than what had come before, but we're still basically left with Robert Holmes and Philip Martin as the only solidly political writers of the bunch, with Saward himself poking at it (very) lightly in Revelation of the Daleks. Yes, it's impossible not to read Mark of the Rani as having political implications, but it takes pains to avoid having to make the connection directly. And Philip Martin recalls being warned off of politics rather angrily by Nathan-Turner prior to writing Vengeance on Varos. A script this political was out of step with the rest of the era.

In a few entries we'll deal with the television program that most flagrantly showed how foolish this approach was, but even here it's safe to say that it's a problem. As I noted, almost everything good about Season 22 came from its eagerness to engage more in the material world. And more broadly, in a world so dominated by material politics any piece of science fiction that turns away from that is at least somewhat problematic. This is where my long-standing opposition to escapism as an aesthetic goal becomes clearest. Escapism tacitly abandons changing the status quo in favor of purely imaginary pleasures. Whereas what the culture needed in 1985 was material change - a clear vision of something other than a Thatcherite hell. There is, I think, a direct line from the sociopathy of escapism to appropriating the methods of famine relief for complaining that you have to wait eighteen months for your favorite television program.

But at the end of the day, the why matters less in terms of understanding the program in this era than the basic fact that one of the central defenses of the program in this era - that better writers weren't available - just isn't true. Good scripts by proven writers were rejected while the litany of debacles goes on. There's an alternate Davison and Baker era where the stories that do work are accompanied not by Arc of Infinity, Warriors of the Deep, and Timelash but by stories by Pat Mills, Christopher Priest, PJ Hammond, and more scripts by Bidmead, Clegg, and Bailey. And if The Song of Megaptera is any indication, those scripts would have been better. For all the defenses we can mount of this era, it's difficult to ignore the fact that there were better alternatives right under the production team's noses and they hadn't the sense to use them.

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 30 (Doctor In Distress)

So apparently this is now my second most popular post ever, and within striking distance of becoming my most popular ever. I have to admit, I'm not entirely thrilled with that. I mean, I stand by the piece and what I say in it, but it's one of the most starkly negative and critical things I've written on this blog, and in that regard isn't really representative of a blog I try to keep focused on the many things that are good about Doctor Who. Which is to say that if you're new to the blog, as the author, I'd politely say that this isn't where I'd prefer people start. All of which said, it's your reading experience. Do as you will. 

I have for the most part avoided significant discussion of Ian Levine, typically gesturing to the fact that eventually I'd do this post. So let's take the bull by the horns here and lay this question out in its most damningly blunt form: can Ian Levine be blamed for Doctor Who's cancellation?

This is, of course, terribly unfair. Although no Gareth Jenkins, there's something that leaves a bad taste in my mouth about a sustained attack on Ian Levine's role in the series' history. At the end of the day, Levine in 1985 was a 30-year-old geek and acted the part. He was a poor spokesman for Doctor Who in the public eye, yes. But more than anything one feels bad for him for being put there in the first place. His biggest problem, in many ways, was that he played the role that the cancellation crisis cast him in - slightly maladapted uberfan - too well.

I'd also be lying if I said that, as a 29-year-old socially maladapted Doctor Who fan, I didn't have at least some visceral understanding of where Levine was coming from. Being an angry geek in 2012 is easy. There's a whole Internet for hard-headedly arguing on. And adamant as I am that one argues on the Internet for the entertainment of the lurkers, I'm not nearly daft enough to pretend that I don't like getting to vent obsessively on forums. Where do you think I learned to write 2000 words a day? I've been drawn inexorably into being a hard-nosed tit in Internet arguments too many times not to understand Levine. Time warp me into 1985 with no Internet to argue on and give me an in with the production office of Doctor Who and I'd probably smash a television as a publicity stunt too. At least Levine holds down steady employment, which is, let's face it, more than we can say for my overeducated ass.

And so to some extent one is left wanting to let sleeping dogs lie. 1985 was a long time ago. Ian Levine is nearly 60 now. At some point one has to stop blaming someone for dumb shit they did in their early 30s. And if nothing else, the 1985 crisis is a footnote in the history of a wildly successful show. Perhaps lingering axes to grind exist among those who were making the show - or at least those who are still with us - but it's tough to say that we the chattering public still have anything at stake in this fight. We're not so much beating a dead horse as beating the empty space where once a horse carcass lay. These days Levine is mostly just another bloke with a Twitter who says stupid things about Doctor Who or DC Comics occasionally. So really, I'm one to talk.

And so I've avoided going too far into Ian Levine. But he can't be avoided entirely. For one thing, he presents himself as a central player in this time period to this day. If he's going to be one of the major interviews on the Trials and Tribulations documentary about the hiatus and the wreckage of the Colin Baker era, well, fine. He implicates himself in the judgment. For another, he's only mostly just another bloke with a Twitter. I've occasionally entertained myself by, when Ian Levine has come up in passing on the blog, noting that he has personally told me to go fuck myself. The context of this is illustrative - I rather indecorously called him out on Twitter over his fearmongering in the wake of the whole Private Eye/shortened series kerfuffle with regards to the new series last summer (I shouldn't have @replied him, for what it's worth - that was rude of me). Which is to say, if he's going to repeat the errors of 1985 and raise fearmongering panics over the future of Doctor Who, well, that, at least, remains perfectly fair game to criticize him for.

But perhaps most importantly, if most tragically, Levine serves as too useful a metaphor to let go of. He's not the only person to have views on Doctor Who like his. But he's the most high profile. And he was at the wrong place at the wrong time. His views caused measurable, definable damage to Doctor Who. I think a very compelling case can be made that were it not for some of his actions Doctor Who could have returned from its hiatus in a stronger position and that it needn't have gone off the air in 1989. Is he the sole architect of that failure? God no. But he's inexorable from it. And because he, both through his own actions and through the actions of others, got positioned as the archetype of a particular type of Doctor Who fan he serves, in many ways, as a symbol for a particular set of destructive impulses within fandom and their problems. Which is to say that, as with Gareth Jenkins, our collective disdain for Ian Levine is largely self-loathing.

Unlike Jenkins, though, I can't get around the need to deal with what Levine is a symbol of. And unlike Jenkins, there are things in his adult life that are valid sources of criticism. So with the knowledge that in 30 years time someone is going to nail me to the wall as the archetype of a disastrously smug postmodern turn in fandom, and that I will fully and completely deserve this fate, here's my one post of obligatory Levine skewering.

At the heart of my criticism of Levine, at least, is the fact that he is a shining example of why conflicts of interest are dangerous. He is, within Doctor Who, the original professional fan. But his professional status was enormously contested. He was the continuity advisor to the early John Nathan-Turner era, but this was explicitly and deliberately an unofficial role. In blunter terms, he was paid with access instead of money. This is just one example of what I've more broadly called the fan-industrial complex, but it's a real problem - Levine was simultaneously serving as the high profile voice of fandom while getting perks from the show. The result was that one of the go-to sources for quotes about Doctor Who fandom was, by and large, happy to serve as a mouthpiece for the producer.

What gives all of this an upsettingly cynical tinge is the fact that in the aftermath of the suspension crisis Levine was one of the large bloc of fandom that turned aggressively on Nathan-Turner. In Levine's account the breaking point was the casting of Bonnie Langford, but the fact remains that the overwhelming bulk of fandom abandoned Nathan-Turner following the cancellation crisis and Trial of a Time Lord. (Indeed, there's still traces of a fan orthodoxy that viewed the McCoy era as a disaster. While it's overstating the case to suggest that anybody who dislikes McCoy is guilty of this, the fact remains that a significant thread of McCoy bashing has its roots in nothing more than the fact that fandom decided in 1986 that anything Nathan-Turner did was rubbish.) This is, in many ways, Levine's modus operandi, and it's a fair part of why he comes in for so much criticism - he's reliably among the first on the scene when there's some visible glory to be snatched, has an astonishingly bad track record in picking what horses to back, and is ruthlessly swift with blame-shifting once it becomes obvious that he's involved in a turkey.

As I noted at the time, then, there is perhaps no fact more revealing about Ian Levine than that he seeks to take the credit for Attack of the Cybermen. It is, after all, something of a rarity - the only other thing he actively takes a lion's share of the credit for is missing episode recovery, and there his contributions have pretty conclusively been shown to be overstated. (He did indeed find a few, but fewer than he says, and his self-proclaimed role in stopping the junkings ignores the tremendous role that Sue Malden played. This isn't to say, as some people attempt to, that he was uninvolved - he had some real contributions - but the legend exceeds the reality. Richard Moleworth's alarmingly definitive Wiped the number of episodes Levine both actually discovered and returned promptly to the BBC instead of sitting on them for several years is six. Levine did serve as a clearinghouse - the people who did find the episodes often went through him in returning them to the BBC - but his actual find count numbers six. This is still a lot, but it's considerably less than he claims. More troubling is the fact that in several cases Levine sat on missing episodes for some time before returning them to the BBC. Ostensibly this is because of collectors who had missing episodes but would only trade them for other missing episodes instead of selling them. The problem with this assertion is straightforward: no episode has ever been recovered in that manner.)

It is, of course, a mistake to suggest that Levine is purely or even primarily responsible for the series' continuity fetishism from seasons 19-22. But equally, the fact that Levine is actually eager to take the credit for Attack of the Cybermen points to the fact that he is as strong an advocate for such an approach as exists. Certainly all records of what suggestions over the course of his unofficial tenure as continuity advisor indicate this. And this gets at the heart of where Ian Levine, to my mind, starts to acquire some active blame for the series' cancellation. Because he believed the primary audience of Doctor Who was Doctor Who fans, and at a key moment in the course of the suspension the production team, using Ian Levine as their mouthpiece, doubled down on that view catastrophically.

Before any discussion of the suspension crisis it's necessary to try to square away exactly what happened. On February 27th, 1985, it was announced that Doctor Who would not be coming back for eighteen months after Season 22. Central to any interpretation of what follows, however, is what we think this announcement actually meant. The conventional wisdom is that the eighteen month delay was a front for an actual cancellation of the series. The reason this is widely believed, however, is deceptive: both Michael Grade and Ian Levine say it was, and since they're on polar opposite sides of this kerfuffle everyone believes it.

The trouble is that the actual evidence is thin on the ground. Certainly the initial announcements when the story broke were that it was an eighteen month break. Is it possible, as both Levine and Grade imply, that this was a case of breaking the bad news into small chunks and that after eighteen months the show was still not going to come back? In theory, yes. But it's worth noting that Doctor Who wasn't the only show cancelled in this period. So far as I can tell, Crackerjack and the other shows cancelled around this time were not announced as delayed - they were cancelled outright. So the very fact that Doctor Who's suspension was announced as a delay suggests strongly that it was, in fact, a delay all along. To think otherwise is to assume that the BBC was capable of long-term conspiracy. Put simply, there's very little evidence they were that composed or competent in 1985.

This raises the question of why Levine and Grade, who are otherwise proponents of seemingly irreconcilable positions, find themselves allies on this point. The answer is much like the answer every other time, in the course of looking at history in this blog, we've found a fundamental alliance between two seemingly diametrically opposed positions - that there's another alternative position that both sides want erased. Because there's one tacit point of agreement between Levine and Grade, which is that Doctor Who is primarily for fans.

It's obvious enough why this position suits Levine, but one might fairly ask why it suited Grade. The answer is simple: Grade needed a pantomime villain to position his broader reforms of the BBC against, and Doctor Who fans were an easy target. Grade's mandate was to make the BBC more like a commercial broadcaster and less like the public service broadcaster it was. This is an unsurprising position to come upon in the height of the Thatcher years, where the idea of a public service broadcaster - particularly one that stubbornly refused to just be a mouthpiece for the government - was anathema. It was tremendously convenient for Grade to be able to position himself in opposition to a group as visibly pathetic as Doctor Who fans. Doctor Who was, after all, easily mocked. So Grade had a show he could rail against the production values of and have everyone acknowledge that he was right, then make a joke about how a small number of people stayed up all night in their parents' basement writing letters to complain and hit a known stereotype of Doctor Who fans. And then poof - he's saving the BBC for the masses from the clutches of some entitled man-children. How very convenient. And this is what people should hate Michael Grade for - not for cancelling Doctor Who, but for using its fans as his own private Arthur Scargill.

But we know that, by all appearances, he didn't really want to cancel the show outright. Or, at least, he didn't try to cancel it outright in 1985. Which leaves us with the uncomfortable implication that it was the Levine-fronted fan campaign to save Doctor Who that gave Grade the opportunity he needed to make Doctor Who into his punching bag of choice. And here we begin to approach the erased alternative to what actually happened.

It is worth noting that there was, in fact, a massive wave of popular attention directed towards Doctor Who during the suspension crisis, with both The Sun and The Daily Star running "save Doctor Who" campaigns. The former is explicable enough - they were fed an almost certainly fictitious line about how the BBC was trying to bluff the government into giving them money and jumped on it as part of their standing hostility to the BBC. (The fact that Michael Grade's later career is as a Tory peer in the House of Lords suggests that any theory based on him wanting to start a fight with the government is speculative at best.) But The Daily Star is not a particularly political paper, and even The Sun, for all its overt political agenda, won't touch something without a strong populist angle. That both would launch "Save Doctor Who" campaigns, in other words, suggests that Doctor Who was still beloved by a wider public.

This is the position, of course, that's excluded from both Ian Levine and Michael Grade's account. Levine is so utterly obsessed with Doctor Who's cult fandom aspects that he genuinely doesn't seem to care about a mass audience. And this is why Attack of the Cybermen, though not even the worst story of its season, is the one that's such an easy target - it's the one that doesn't even pretend that there's a reason to watch the show other than a Whoniverse fetish. And this is what's staggeringly absent from all of Levine's defenses of the program in 1985 and 1986 - the actual defences of the program. Levine takes it almost completely for granted that Doctor Who is fantastic and wonderful, and just lays into the BBC for not appreciating its splendor. When, in truth, there are clearly a large number of people who want to like Doctor Who but who are, at the moment, failing to actually do so.

The issue here, and it's a big one, is that Doctor Who was never a cult show in the UK before 1985. It had its embarrassing fans, sure, but it was mainstream entertainment. Even in 1985 there's an odd tension between its return to Saturdays (its supposed "proper" timeslot, and one targeted at a family audience) and its descent even further into the cult-TV rabbit hole of the Whoniverse. Even in the US - where it actually was an obscure cult show - it didn't work like a traditional piece of cult science fiction. Certainly it was never the show Ian Levine wanted it to be, and the good will of the public that had sustained it for twenty-two years had nothing to do with any of the things Ian Levine liked about the program. In this regard Levine was the exact wrong face for the public campaign to save the series simply because the series he loved wasn't one the public wanted saved. If they had, they'd have watched it. They didn't, and the ratings showed that.

And this isn't, to be clear, a swipe at fans. Clearly Doctor Who had plenty of fans in the 1980s who knew what the public loved about the series. You can tell because, well, they're writing it now and the public loves it. Ian Levine was no more representative of fandom than he was of the general public. Levine represented the fan-industrial complex, not fandom. And that position - that blindness to the quality of the show - is what set him up for the epic pratfall that was his public defense of it.

In this regard, it can't be ignored that the press campaign spearheaded by Levine was done with the explicit approval of Nathan-Turner, who, for reasons of obvious propriety, couldn't blast his bosses in the press personally. But equally, this reveals the show's "save Doctor Who" campaign for what it was - a "save John Nathan-Turner's reputation" campaign that adamantly denied that the series had gone off the rails in the first place. And what's tragic is that all of this was avoidable. It's not just Levine's failure, nor even just the production staff's - Jonathan Powell has been open about how there was no institutional will to reinvent Doctor Who.

But for that matter, its not all that clear that in late February of 1985 there was a sense in the BBC that Doctor Who needed a reinvention. Again we come back to the seeming fact that the suspension was never supposed to be that permanent. Yes, it was a vote of no confidence in the production team, but it clearly wasn't a full one or else there would have been an alternative in place. In reality it looks like budgets were tight for that year and so they took some long-running programs off the air to free up money for other things. (We'll talk about those other things in a few entries, but it's worth noting that 1985/86 was a phenomenally good period for BBC dramas.) They always intended to put the program back, and accepted, broadly speaking, that it was going to be a program they thought was crap but that other people seemed to like. It was just a program they didn't care enough about to keep on the air when they were short on cash. And in this regard, going ballistic at the BBC over it forced the BBC's hand. At that point they had to defend their actions, and between the program's low quality and the gigantic bullseye Ian Levine was painting on his back, well, the defense of the BBC's actions wasn't hard - they blamed the low quality of the series.

Which brings us to "Doctor In Distress," Ian Levine's charity single to save Doctor Who. That the song and lyrics are appallingly bad has been pointed out enough that I have no need or reason to join the pile. Less often noted, but still significant, is that the song is yet another example of too perfect a metaphor. Here are a bunch of pathetic C-list celebrities singing a terrible song about how good Doctor Who is. The result is confirmation of how bad Doctor Who is - so bad that it inspires crap like this and that people like this like it.

But there's a larger and more interesting problem. Let's, for the moment, take "Doctor In Distress" seriously, if only because nobody else ever has. Inasmuch as the song forms an argument for the series' existence, what is the argument? Let's look at the first verse: "It was a cold wet night in November 22 years ago / It was a police box in a junkyard - we didn't know where it would go / An old man took two teachers into time and space / It started off a legend that no other could replace." What is telling here is that it is the legend, it seems, that is irreplaceable, not the show itself. This is reflected in the chorus - it is the Doctor who is in distress and whose SOS is being answered. Not the show, but the fictional character. Similarly, the lines "If we stop his travels, he'll be in a mess / The galaxy will fall to evil once more / With nightmarish monsters fighting a war" are puzzling in that they seem to suggest that the biggest danger of Doctor Who's' cancellation is that imaginary species will run riot without him.

Indeed, what is strangest about the song is that the Doctor himself is curiously absent from it. The only point where he's described is in the line "We learned to accept six Doctors with companions at their side," as if the Doctor is some imposition on his own show that gets in the way. The companions fare little better, with the line "Each screaming girl just hoped that a Yeti wouldn't shoot her" suggesting an almost total extraneousness to a show that is really about monsters. And let's be more explicit - specifically about recurring monsters. The lyrics don't focus on bits of the show that are well-remembered by the public (or else Autons and maggots would appear) but on bits that have appeared multiple times.

All of this bespeaks a larger hubris implicit in the song. It's overtly modeled on songs like "Do They Know It's Christmas" (released a few months earlier) and "We Are the World" (released a week earlier). But, well, "Do They Know It's Christmas" and "We Are The World" are about famine in Africa. There's something phenomenally, jaw-droppingly wrong about appropriating a format created to fight famine in Africa for the purposes of bitching that you have to wait eighteen months for the next episode of your favorite sci-fi show. And this blindness mirrors itself uncannily in the lyrics themselves - most obviously when the line "That police box takes him everywhere" is followed by "Oh! Bring him back!" in a way that oddly implies that the basic and expansive premise of Doctor Who - the ability of it to do anything - is antithetical to what its fans want. The song is, in the end, a monument to nothing more than fan privilege in such a distended and warped form that the very thing that it ostensibly calls for is excised. If we treat Doctor Who over Season 22 as having gone through an exorcism, "Doctor In Distress" is the horrifying moment when fandom looks at all of the putrescent material that the season exposed and shouts "Yes! That's what we love! Bring it back, don't hesitate!"

And in all of this, it's difficult not to see the fan-industrial complex, and by extension Levine, as very much to blame. Because let's face it - The Daily Star, if not The Sun, were going to pick this one up either way. The Sun had fought to save K-9 only five years earlier. But had that campaign not been the one we had, with offensive charity singles and photographs of angry-looking men smashing televisions, it's easy to imagine a wave of populist pressure to reinvent Doctor Who instead of preserve it. Hints of it existed at the time. Jon Pertwee, for instance, went hilariously off-message in suggesting that they bring back past Doctors for a season each. Though this would probably have been disastrous, it again gets at the fact that there were other angles to take - that people wanted Doctor Who, they just didn't want John Nathan-Turner and Eric Saward's Doctor Who. The idea that they wanted Barry Letts's again in 1985 was ludicrous, sure. But had fandom not been so blinded by the fan-industrial complex and the dishy access to their idols it granted them one can easily imagine a fan response to the suspension that was based not on "bring it back now we won't take less" but on "can we please have a worthy program again with some proper writers?"

But instead we got the John Nathan-Turner Legacy Preservation Campaign. And by the time Levine went off-message and leaked the cut in episode order for the return, an incident that seems to have been more or less where he and Nathan-Turner stopped getting on, the damage was irrevocable. Michael Grade had a convenient enemy, John Nathan-Turner had ensured his job and that he could just carry on as he had been, and we were all set for the disastrous reinvention that wasn't of Trial of a Time Lord. It would take just a year more for the show to begin its turnaround, and by 1988, as we'll see, it got to where it was a show that the public could plausibly have embraced. But by then it was too late. Public outrage had been squandered on defending the desiccated corpse of a series left at the end of Season 22. The show was, as of April of 1985, finally completely doomed.

Outside the Government 3 (A Fix With Sontarans)

All right chums, time's up. Let's do this.

This was written both before the Jimmy Saville scandal broke and before anything from Richard Marson's book about John Nathan-Turner leaked. The former alone would have required a complete rewrite of the post. The latter would have required some discussion somewhere in the blog. In tandem, they render this post almost completely beside the point, and it will receive a full rewrite in the book version eventually. Until then, enjoy the most obsolete post on the blog.

Doctor Who fandom is spectacularly bitchy. Sometimes - even often - this is a virtue. Mind  you, it's an often misunderstood virtue. For one thing, the bitchiness is often mistaken as actual dislike, sometimes to puzzling effect. (The most obvious example here is people who take Moffat's somewhat infamous interview comments about the classic series as actual dislike for the classic series) It's not, and the central joke of almost all of fandom's bitchy, snarky comments about bits of Doctor Who is that despite the obvious faults of the series we love it to pieces. Even with the really terrible episodes that we claim to actively hate there's the underlying joke that we've watched them a dozen times and have a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of how crap they are. The fact that this involves being vicious to Doctor Who is almost incidental - after all, for most of the active history of fandom everybody thought Doctor Who was kind of crap. Doctor Who fandom, unusually for a fandom, has tended to favor ostentatiously loving the show in spite of it being crap over trying to defend Timelash, and really, who's going to fault them for it.

But, and it's a big but, there are times when the bitchiness of fandom tips into a bit of a dark side. And to be frank, this is one of them. A Fix With Sontarans is widely mocked and hated. And this is, if not inaccurate, more than a little unfair. Let's start with the context. A Fix With Sontarans is a mini-episode shot for the show Jim'll Fix It, in which the late Jimmy Saville extravagantly grants the wishes of people who write in. And in the case of A Fix With Sontarans, a kid named Gareth Jenkins wanted to be on Doctor Who, so Eric Saward lashed together a little TARDIS-set mini episode featuring the Sontarans, which they had around at the time for The Two Doctors. Nicola Bryant wasn't available for filming it, so they roped in Janet Fielding. The plot is exactly the sort of thing that people do for something like this - the Sontarans and Gareth both get teleported onto the TARDIS, Gareth helps save the day, there's a cute bit about how he'll apparently someday be a great military leader against the Sontarans.

It's crap, of course, but it's crap in the exact ways you'd expect it to be. Gareth Jenkins can't act at all and is utterly timid. Colin Baker got the script late enough that he was forced to scribble lines on the console. Janet Fielding has unfortunate hair. The Sontarans get a particularly poor execution of green slime dribbling death. Blah blah blah. Nevertheless, this miniepisode is the source of an alarming amount of vitriol, no small portion of which is focused on the erstwhile Mr. Jenkins, which... look, he's a kid who's a Doctor Who fan that got picked for a dopey reality show. He's not an actor. And A Fix With Sontarans, in its actual context, doesn't require him to be. He's not supposed to be an actor in a Doctor Who story, he's supposed to be the subject of some schmaltz. To be perfectly frank, extensive criticism of him is at best only barely above bullying, and at worst outright bullying that's been carried on some 25 years after the poor kid got "fixed." At this point this is like the general public mocking a middle aged man for a poor performance in a school play once.

That said, the bitchiness of Doctor Who fandom is, as we just noted, a complex and misleading thing. We don't complain bitterly and angrily about the show because we dislike it. (Or, at least, most of us don't - as with any fandom there are those who seem to measure how much they love the show by how much of it they're capable of hating.) So even if the mockery of Gareth Jenkins is ill judged - and it is, I think - that doesn't mean that the fan reaction to this sketch has much to do with the content of it in any direct sense. Rather, I think this story is hated largely because, well, it had staggeringly bad timing. It aired during The Two Doctors (right after its second episode, in fact) four days before the suspension was announced.

This in and of itself isn't a problem. But think back to The Two Doctors entry and consider the sequence of events. We have a story that's aggressively shredding audience expectations while fairly openly attacking the audience for expecting them in the first place. So right off the bat there's a massive tonal shift between that and this sort of sentimental celebration of child-like fandom. At its heart A Fix With Sontarans is about an uncritical love of the series as a broader part of British culture. Whereas the series, in practice, isn't only visibly cratering in its popular appeal but is immediately critiquing and rejecting its own premises and the act of loving it. One of the cleverest moments of About Time comes when Tat Wood suggests that to really understand the Thatcher years you should watch Vengeance on Varos and then imagine a world in which it is followed by Jim'll Fix It. Similarly, to really understand the nature of the suspension crisis, watch The Two Doctors and imagine it being followed by A Fix With Sontarans.

There's a larger issue going on here about the series' relationship with children and its supposed status as children's television. Simply put, the series doesn't seem to take its status as children's television very seriously or credibly anymore. That's not to say it's not still for children, but there's a difference. In this regard the green slime dribble death is illustrative. It's flagrantly there out a prurient love of gross stuff. And while I'm loathe to pretend that the past of Doctor Who is an unambiguous festival of highbrow children's entertainment, it does seem to me that there's a material difference between a visceral money shot approach to children's entertainment and what Doctor Who has historically done. And it's not as though the snot dribbling in A Fix With Sontarans is an outlier. A week later we'd get a bunch of Sontarans exploding in just as much generic viscera. So yes, Doctor Who still thinks of itself as "for children," but in an appallingly cynical way.

And let's not pretend that there isn't a cynicism to this as well. For all the touching schmaltz of Jim'll Fix It's approach, there is something cynical about it. In reality, wishes are granted based more on sponsors wanting the publicity than on the supposed merit of the wishes. John Nathan-Turner, ever the publicity maestro, saw an opportunity to appear on a better known show and took it. This is part of why criticizing Gareth Jenkins himself seems so off - in many ways he's just an innocent kid who gets caught in the teeth of a publicity machine. Certainly his actual desires seem irrelevant to the process, and he spends most of the episode looking scared and like this isn't really what he wanted. Which, of course it isn't. Wishing to be in an episode of Doctor Who and actually wanting to be are two very different things.

Had this not coincided with the suspension crisis so perfectly, of course, it would just be a slightly embarrassing curiosity. But instead it comes when the series is in obvious crisis, in the midst of an extended attack on itself, and, let's be honest, not very good. So for it to come prancing out saying "oh look, aren't I a good little iconic part of children's culture" just leaves everyone wanting to slap it in the face and say "no, you're bloody well not, you're utter crap." And so fandom did. And poor Gareth Jenkins gets caught in the crosshairs, simply because, standing there, awkwardly, in a replica Colin Baker coat his grandmother made for him, he's the perfect target. The coat, really, is the crux of it. It's too good a symbol. Everybody recognized almost immediately that the coat was a disaster. It's about the only thing even John Nathan-Turner admitted in hindsight was a mistake. And Gareth Jenkins awkwardly in it and clearly unaware of how silly it looks is just too perfect a symbol for how everything has gone wrong. It's a sudden, horrible glance in the mirror for fandom - our collective Borad moment. This is what loving the show is like now. How unfortunate.

But on the other hand, if boiled down and distilled, most of the preceding paragraphs come down to this: we hate Gareth Jenkins for being able to uncritically love Doctor Who when we couldn't anymore. Even if we stand by our judgments - and I certainly do - it is difficult not to view this with a trace of envy.

The other thing about A Fix With Sontarans is that it's the final appearance of Janet Fielding on the program. And I never really focused much on Tegan as a character while she was on the show, nor when she left, so this is as good a time as any to do it. Well, better, really, since getting two thousand words out of A Fix With Sontarans is a challenge without it.

There's a stretch of time, starting with Leela, in which the program tried very hard to avoid the standard Doctor Who companion. Actually, this is a bit misleading. We act as though the single human female companion is the default mode of Doctor Who, but there are actually only five of them in the whole of the classic series - Jo, Sarah Jane, Peri, Mel, and Ace. It's really just that the new series has normalized this mode. So the interruption that began with Leela is, in many ways, the last flourishing of the model of companions where something other than the single earth female was in place.

What's interesting about Tegan, then, is that she sits almost exactly on the halfway point between those. Not only is she one of the last companions to go before single human female reasserted itself, she's also a human female companion herself, just one who never got a solo adventure with the Doctor.

And this is the key thing about Tegan. Because she is a human female companion we tend to think of her as being in the standard mode. But she's not. In many of her stories, in fact, her primary role is actively in opposition to the Doctor. Her job is to give voice to a position that isn't quite the reverse of the Doctor's, but that is nevertheless unambiguously informed by a completely different set of values and judgments. This leads, in some accounts, to Tegan being a bit thick. The show, after all, is fairly steadfastly aligned to the moral perspective of the Doctor. So Tegan, as a character who is atively set on a different perspective, is fairly consistently proven wrong by the series.

But there's also a dignity this lends Tegan. She's one of only two female companions in the classic series to never really drift from her initial interesting "strong female character" conception into a bland peril monkey. She still gets captured with irritating regularity, but there's basically nothing that really knocks her off of her role. In this regard she ends up filling a role we haven't really seen since the earliest days of the series - she's basically the only companion to fill the Barbara role.

And much of the credit for this must go to Janet Fielding, who has proved herself, especially in her time after the series, to be an unrelentingly strong advocate for feminism and for the importance of strong and dignified female characters. She gets an unfortunate amount of flack in fandom for being "strident" about her criticism of how her character was treated and of sexism on Doctor Who in general. The term "strident" being, when applied to women, one of the last refuges of people who are having their privilege challenged and don't like it. A strident woman is, by and large, one who's doing and saying what needs to be said.

And here, paired with little prep with Colin Baker, she manages to demonstrate how a companion can be paired opposite an arrogant and argumentative Doctor. I don't mean this as a criticism of Nicola Bryant - I'll have plenty of good things to say about her when she departs - but Peri, as conceived, was never a good match for Baker's Doctor as originally conceived. Janet Fielding, as has been pointed out by several commenters, would have been. And was. The two of them are by far the best part of A Fix With Sontarans, and in some ways the story is worthwhile for that alone.

Am I Becoming One Of Your Angels (Revelation of the Daleks)

"Actually, come to think of it, Eric Saward has never
written for vegetables. That does kind of make me jealous."

It’s March 23rd, 1985. Philip Barley and Phil Collins are at number one with “Easy Lover.” Madonna, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Sarah Brightman and Paul Miles-Kingston,  David Cassidy, and Nik Kershaw all also chart. Lower in the charts, Billy Bragg, The Smiths, and The Damned chart. In real news, ummm... actually all I’ve got, and I regret that I am not making this up, is that production of the Sinclair C5 electric tricycle is suspended. That’s all we’ve got. Sorry. Let’s move to television and Revelation of the Daleks.

What is most interesting about Revelation of the Daleks is that, other than the fact that it’s rubbish, it’s one of the greatest Doctor Who stories ever. This is, to some extent, just a restatement of our theme for Season 22 - that every story in it is a brilliant story about how terrible a story it is. Consider, for instance, the sequence in the first episode that pulls back from the Doctor and Peri to the DJ watching the Doctor and Peri to Davros watching the DJ watch the Doctor and Peri. It’s a thing of absolute beauty - one of the most narratively complex sequences in the classic series. And it’s merely the most clever of a bunch of intense clevernesses. This whole story is about passing control of the narrative around and about who does and doesn’t have authority over what’s going on.

The best Dalek stories involve unleashing the Doctor and the Daleks into someone else’s story - a drama about a space colony, the Forsythe Saga, a World War II movie (I’m talking about Genesis, not Victory), or, more recently, a bunch of reality programs, The Invasion, or Torchwood, the Sarah Jane Adventures, and a sitcom starring Catherine Tate that Catherine Tate is taking a week off from. Superficially, at least, Revelation of the Daleks mirrors that structure. Indeed, it’s on the whole a very straightforward and competent execution of that structure, well-directed by Graham Harper. Episode one shows us the world of Necros, episode two shows us Daleks slaughtering everybody on the world of Nekros. But there’s something ever so slightly wrong about this, and for that we need to look deeper at the notion of control of television.

There’s an important technological shift to note in a discussion of control over television that happened over the course of the early 1980s, which was the mainstream adoption of the remote control. It’s easiest to compare this to earlier television technology. When, in 1971, Doctor Who did a story with a bunch of very fast cuts among things and called it The Claws of Axos, the effect was that of a strange assemblage of imagery. That is, the somewhat confusing, rapid cuts around the Axon spaceship had the effect of creating an overall collage. This is because a 1971 television wasn’t built to change channels quickly - you had to get up and change it. And so the idea of switching between radically different things wasn’t part of what television did. Television presented a continual transmission of a thing. If that thing was a collage, fine, but it was still clearly one collage, if you will, and the audience focused on the overall spectacle of the thing.

But the remote control, and forgive the obviousness of this observation, invented channel surfing. Suddenly one way of watching television - arguably the default way - was to switch among different things. So when Revelation of the Daleks begins fast cuts among different parts of Necros it doesn’t look like a collage of images from one thing, it looks like flipping among multiple television programs. All of which are, due to the structure of the story (and the obsession with surveillance states that flares up this season - note that this is the third story this season to involve lots of watching people watch people), about people watching the other television programs.

This is the key thing to realize about Revelation of the Daleks and about Necros. Look at how everybody is kept apart in the story - you have Natasha and Grigory’s plot, Kara’s plot, the DJ’s not-actually-a-plot, and Jobel’s plot. In the second episode you further spin off Orcini’s plot from Kara’s plot. None of these are recognizably part of a single milieu. The usual accusation is that this is a story that is far more interested in its world than in the Doctor or the Daleks, but that misses the point - there is no world to this story. There’s just a collection of bits and bobs from other places. (This apparently even extends to the physical world of Necros - the sets are mostly repurposed from other shows.)

So the Daleks aren’t actually unleashed into anything as such. There’s no “there” to Necros. But this can’t be framed as some complaint about the inadequate fleshing out of Necros. Too much really clever effort has gone into making Necros not function as a coherent place. So this isn’t the traditional Dalek story paradigm, but it’s also not a failed execution of it. It’s something else - an active inversion of the normal paradigm.

Given everything going on within Doctor Who at this moment in time, there’s something frighteningly apt about having Doctor Who confronted with a vast assemblage of other television. The suspension is going to have a large number of entries to unfold over, but one of the major concerns underlying it was a shift towards a more overtly commercial BBC. (This ignores, of course, Doctor Who’s overseas success. As I’ve noted, the question of how overseas success ought be considered by the BBC is complex at best. Similarly, at the time of the suspension crisis Colin Baker hadn’t yet debuted in the US. The assumption that he’d tank in the US as badly as he had in the UK was not entirely unreasonable.)

So here we have a slightly absurd reiteration of the series’ actual travails. Doctor Who is actually pitted against everything else on television here. Instead of the Daleks and the Doctor being injected into other shows we get a straightforward Dalek story that is invaded by some half-dozen other television shows. This process turns out to play out substantially differently from the normal approach.

For one thing, neither the Doctor nor the Daleks actually do much in the first episode. The Doctor spends the first episode walking from the TARDIS to Tranquil Repose as various misadventures fail to happen to him. (There is that wall he climbs.) The Daleks, meanwhile, are almost entirely sidelined in the first episode, with Davros anchoring their aspect of the plot. Or, rather, his seemingly severed head in a vat. With all of them sidelined, the first episode is freed up to focus almost entirely on its other plotlines. And it's actually quite good.

This is a real problem. Whatever frustration one might have with the fact that the show is Doctor Who and that maybe the Doctor should be in it, the truth is that he’s just about the least interesting thing in the first episode. And, worse than that, the bits with other characters are markedly more interesting than anything we’ve seen since Martin Jarvis was on screen. Yes, the deck is stacked against the Doctor here due to him having nothing to do, but really, most of the first episode is the best the show has been all year.

But just as the infusion of Doctor Who into another show does not erase the conventions of that show, the infusion of a host of other shows into a Dalek story does not mean that the conventions of a Dalek story are not observed. And if you have a bunch of Daleks in the first act you have to have a bunch of exterminations in the second. And so all of the cleverness that gets set up over the first forty-five minutes gets violently slaughtered over about twenty minutes of the second.

This is unfortunate, if inevitable. Because, frankly, the resulting Doctor/Davros confrontation and the Dalek civil war isn’t nearly as interesting as most of what came before. The collapse of the DJ from omniscient narrator commenting wryly on events to a generic character hiding from the Daleks and then getting exterminated is particularly bleak, although if we’re being honest, blowing up Daleks with rock and roll is possibly the most charming idea Eric Saward ever came up with. But for the most part this story amounts to the series confessing and demonstrating that, actually, the Daleks are less interesting than everything else on television.

This, on its own, would serve as an adequate final admission in the course of the exorcism. Having explored all of the failings of the series, the series finally and conclusively demonstrates that it’s behind the times and that the bits of other programs that assemble to make Necros are far more interesting even than Dalek action. The supposed best of Doctor Who goes up against the rest of the televisual landscape and is found wanting. Clearly it’s time to take a break and reevaluate things a little.

Except it’s worse than that. Continuing our alchemic themes, it is worth pointing out something significant that has not happened since Day of the Daleks, which is that the Daleks do not recognize the Doctor. There we read it as a commentary on the inadequacy of the earthbound format and the fact that the Doctor, in that story, isn’t quite the Doctor. It’s especially notable in contrast with Power of the Daleks where, notably, being identified by the Daleks was what defined Troughtons Doctor as the Doctor.

So within the existing grammar of the show, not being recognized by the Daleks is a cutting insult to this version of the show. It’s a final pox on the show. If the Daleks - who, let’s face it, dominate the conclusion here, since it was never really that Davison’s Doctor was ineffective so much as that the Doctor when written by Eric Saward are ineffective - aren’t able to stand up to the rest of what’s on television, well, fine. At least they’re still able to fulfill their function. The Daleks have never worked without the Doctor anyway, as Terry Nation spent the late 60s and early 70s discovering. So if they can’t cut it in the televisual world of 1985, well, who’s fault is that?

But let’s be clear here. Even the Daleks are doing better than the Doctor here. They may not be terribly interesting without the Doctor, but it’s worth noting that they’r still able to exterminate the rest of television, even if they’re not up to the task of doing it in a compelling manner. So the Daleks don’t need the Doctor to function and television needs neither of them.

The funny thing, if you want to call it that, is that this is wholly consistent with Saward’s apparent intentions. He saw the Daleks as no longer interesting, and he genuinely believed the worlds the Doctor visited were more interesting than the Doctor himself. Yes, this is almost certainly a self-fulfilling prophecy, but, well, prophecy fulfilled. The show is clearly not working even at the most basic level. It is, in fact, providing almost the exact opposite of compelling drama. Virtually all of the good bits of Revelation of the Daleks come in spite of it being a Doctor Who story, not because of it.

A central alchemical concept is the notion of putrefaction, previously dealt with in the Green Death entry. At its most basic concept, putrefaction is the process by which death becomes a creative process. Here we have the process in spades. Our season of exorcism ends at a funeral home in which the dead are literally repurposed, most obviously into Daleks. (Physical death, of course, is strictly optional) The Doctor is confronted with his apparent actual death - he even comments that it looks like this will be his last regeneration, which, to be fair, it very nearly was. The cliffhanger is him being crushed by his own death. In one sense, all that’s missing from this story is the moment in which the Doctor is reborn through his own death. Instead we get something stranger - the putrefaction breaks free of this story and grabs the series in its own maw for the next two and a half years. The thing most obviously missing from this story instead appears vividly over the next eighteen episodes of the series, as well as over the next eighteen months of the calendar as Doctor Who grapples, in real time, with a simultaneous death and recreation. And when we get to the next season, well, that’s where we’ll pick up - the idea of Trial of a Time Lord as the productive decomposition of a series that was meticulously killed this season.

But for now, this ends the main thrust of the Colin Baker era. He does, of course, get another season. In fact, we’ll still be in his era for a solid month and a half. But this is the main of it - the part that was able to play out exactly as Nathan-Turner and Saward had imagined it. The next season, despite all the extra lead time given to it, is an ungodly mess. And despite that, even at the end of it, it’s not clear what the idea of this season was supposed to be. I admit that there’s a bit of cheek to my “consciously demonstrating everything that’s wrong with Doctor Who” theme to this season, but it’s not entirely clear that a better explanation of what’s supposed to be happening here exists. Behind the scenes, as any of the myriad of accounts of this period will show, the show spent this era tearing itself apart. There isn’t what can accurately be called a creative vision here, and in many ways it’s a pleasant surprise that in the course of all of this that the program managed to articulate as clear a self-critique as it did. Now, however, we have to turn to the question of what the series could have been in this era. There are a lot of parts to this question - what it materially was during the hiatus, what else was on television at the time, what people have suggested it could have been after the fact, and what it nearly was at the time. So for the next eight entries that’s what we’ll look at.