Fear Her

Chapter The 101st, which features a story with a fearful reputation.

 
Plot: 
On the day of the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games (as imagined from back in 2006), the Doctor and Rose visit a suburban road in London where several children have gone missing. The Doctor senses ionic energy emanating from the spots where the children disappeared, and investigation leads him and Rose to the house of Chloe Webber and her Mum. Chloe has mentally bonded with an Isolus creature, which has been stranded on Earth. The Isolus usually travel in groups of billions, and its extreme loneliness is affecting Chloe. Because the Isolus have superlative mental powers - abilities to create real worlds from pure imagination - Chloe's drawings have taken a sinister turn, trapping the children of the neighbourhood.

Things escalate (it's not immediately clear why, but they do) with Chloe trapping the entire audience of the Olympic opening ceremony in a drawing, making commentator Huw Edwards have a nervous breakdown live on air. With the Doctor also trapped in one of Chloe's drawings, Rose has to work out on her own where the Isolus's travel pod is, and that it needs heat and positive collective mental energy (or 'love') to power it. So, she bungs it into the path of the Olympic torch, as it makes it's way to the stadium. The torch-bearer is incapacitated by this (it's not immediately clear why, but he is), so the newly released Doctor takes up the torch, and lights the flame in front of the newly restored crowd (and presumably a slightly miffed handful of young athletes and Steve Redgrave). The Isolus flies off to join its billions of brothers and sisters, Chloe and Mum are back to normal, and the Doctor and Rose attend a street party (and presumably therefore miss Paul McCartney's performance of Hey Jude).

Context:

Reviewing Fear Her, I am faced with two barriers to objectivity. You could call them twin dilemmas (if you wanted to force assemble a flimsy comparison); for, the first of those barriers is that Fear Her is seen by many as The Twin Dilemma of new Who. Like that 1980s story, it consistently comes last out of its century's stories in polls. In the 50th anniversary poll in Doctor Who Magazine, which covered everything broadcast from 1963 to 2013, it came 240th out of 241, only being pipped by Colin Baker's disliked debut for the wooden spoon spot.

This is a story, lest we forget, from David Tennant's imperial era, where he's co-starring with the ever popular Billie Piper.  It's hard to come to it unaffected by the weight of negative opinion. I needed fresh perspectives. So, I corralled the kids (boys of 12 and 9, girl of 6) and even their au-pair (Spanish-speaking student of 18) to watch the DVD with me, at around 6.45pm on a Sunday evening. This is what I have always referred to as the Songs of Praise slot, but will have to get used very soon to calling Doctor Who time. The Better Half was under the weather, and sat this one out; but, I might have got her to join us too, had I remembered and told her that Tennant has his shirt unbuttoned and a bit of manly chest on display all through this story.

First-time round:
Fear Her's debut BBC1 broadcast in 2006 was the same day as the Better Half's due date for the birth of our first child. This was still a period where each new episode of Doctor Who was so exciting that I tuned in as it went out live. The following year, we had an infant demanding attention, and Doctor Who had become more routine. The need to watch live quickly evaporated. At the time,though, I was concerned with having to miss Doctor Who if we had to rush to the hospital. It seemed to me that the title of this story was an imperative aimed directly at me, referring to someone closer to home than Chloe Webber, if I were to dare to bring some portable method of watching TV into the delivery room. Yes, I was a ridiculous man child; I hope I've improved slightly in the years since. It wouldn't have mattered much anyway, as there were so many repeats of Doctor Who at the time it was nigh-on impossible to miss; plus, we'd just invested in our first PVR, with Fear Her being the first episode to be saved to a hard drive rather than recorded onto tape. Anyway, in the end, baby was a few days late, born midweek, and so has Army of Ghosts as his closest birth story, rather than Fear Her.

Reaction

I said above that there were two barriers to objectivity in reviewing Fear Her. The second barrier is more personal, and the Deeper Thoughts below will go into a bit more background on this: Fear Her was the only Doctor Who TV serial at the time (and one of only two to this day) written by someone I know. Perhaps this blog post will end up as an even-handed treatment, seeing as I have all the negative feeling of received fan wisdom on one side, but on the other I'm predisposed to like it because of its author. The reaction of my viewing mates this time - none of whom are familiar with writer Matthew Graham or his other work - was positive too, though. They payed attention throughout and didn't get restless (even the 18 year old!), they were scared by the scary bits, and they laughed at the funny bits: what more could one ask?

The scary bits were a bit too scary, if anything (not something you could say about The Twin Dilemma). Whatever you think of the execution, the idea of the main threat in Fear Her - Chloe's memories of her late abusive father becoming corporeal - is unsettling and original. The youngest had to watch from outside the room through the crack in the door for a couple of moments. I don't think anyone could find fault with the funny bits - there are some great funny lines, and the Doctor parking the TARDIS badly is a lovely gag. One moment - the Doctor getting a silent telling off from Rose after putting his fingers into a marmalade jar - made the whole room laugh (even the 18 year old!). The regulars perform this, and everything here, with gusto and charm. Tennant seems to have ironed out the more annoying tics from his first few stories, and found his groove.

Beyond the two regulars, however, the performances are a little dodgy. The actor playing Chloe, Abisola Agbaje, makes a brave stab, but the role is too much for someone of her inexperience. She only has Fear Her as her one dramatic entry in the imdb (the two non-dramatic entries are for Doctor Who Confidential and Totally Doctor Who). She was recruited from a school drama club, and - though it's of course possible that she's gone on to a big theatrical career, which just hasn't been linked to anywhere on the internet - it's most likely that she never acted professionally again. That's okay, though, and is a risk any production takes with child actors. What is more surprising is that the normally reliable director Euros Lyn can't get a consistent performance from any other guest actor either. Scenes such as the one at the beginning with all the residents of the street accusing one another are static and stilted.  Maybe they just didn't have the time to get it right. The script was pulled forward to replace Stephen Fry's abandoned effort, so maybe suffered for lack of rewrite time.

The budget is also clearly very low. There's a refreshing originality of the setting being one suburban street and house, which probably arose initially from budgetary pressures. Elsewhere, it's not such a positive impact. The threat to the Earth being represented by a girl drawing the planet on her bedroom wall works on its own. You don't need the entire stadium of people disappearing. Huw Edwards tries his best to convey a believable reaction to an extraordinary situation, but it's too much to ask, and should have been snipped out. Overall, though, a couple of minor issues have overshadowed what is for the most part a very good adventure. At the time, many online commentators criticised Tennant picking up the torch and lighting the Olympic flame, the humourless bar-stewards: it's a great moment. People also cried plagiarism about the similarities to the movie Paperhouse, but I doubt Matt Graham has seen Paperhouse. Really - who saw Paperhouse? I remember seeing trailers for it ad nauseum on videos I hired in the late 1980s / early 1990s, but I never saw it ever play in a cinema, and never saw it on VHS in any shop. Is it possible it was only ever a trailer?

So, is Fear Her the worst ever story of new Who? No. It's not even the worst story of Tennant's first Season. 2006 Who does suffer from 'difficult second album' syndrome; it's not quite as new or as strong as that exciting relaunch year with Christopher Eccleston, but hasn't yet developed into something slicker and different as it would in subsequent years. Quite a few of the stories to me were forgettable, or at least good enough to be forgotten. But not Fear Her.

Connectivity:

Both Closing Time and Fear Her are set within a domestic suburban context, and both sit in the same place and same role within their respective seasons: the last relatively light stand-alone story before the big finale, with a lead-in to that finale tacked on at the end. In both stories, love is said to have been responsible for the defeat of the forces of darkness.

Deeper Thoughts:
Name dropping. Recently, I was part of a brief fan WhatsApp group discussion on the etiquette of asking for autographs. David, long term fan friend mentioned many times before on this blog, was visiting another university friend, the son-in-law of Frances White (Cassandra in The Myth Makers, and dependable presence of TV casts over the years - I Claudius, Very Peculiar Practice, many others). Frances was coming round to babysit, and David wondered whether it would be acceptable form to ask for an autograph. I was split from the rest of the collective on this: I thought that the context of babysitting was definitely 'off-duty' but nobody else thought it would be an issue. He didn't ask in the end, but it turned out another member of the group, Chris (also mentioned a few times before here) had previously met Frances and used his connection to David as an 'in' to bag his own autograph from her ("My friend knows your son-in-law" sort of thing).

It struck me during this text conversation that I have very few autographs considering I'm a Doctor Who fan - I've only ever obtained them when they came as part and parcel of a book or event that I would have paid for anyway. I have never ever asked anyone for their autograph. Something about the process inhibits me. It doesn't help that I've met very few people involved professionally in Doctor Who, and know even fewer. One of the few I do know is the aforementioned and very talented Chris, who worked on the CGI of the first couple of series of 21st Century Doctor Who, including Fear Her. I also met a couple of other people who've written Doctor Who books or journalism when I was an aspiring and perspiring screenwriter. Also during this period, I met Matthew Graham.

I was doing an Arvon course on writing for television in 2002. For the uninitiated, these are residential courses held in some country retreat or other: a handful of students (including me) and a couple of experts in the subject (including Matthew) spent a week doing writing exercises, having work reviewed, etc. The rest of the time, you cook and eat your meals together, and - for a few of us, at least - drink wine and talk into the wee small hours. Matt and I were both in that happy few. At the time, he had written for Eastenders, Spooks, etc. Very impressive; but, I found out on the first evening that he'd also written some key (and superb) episodes of This Life, including introducing the character of Ferdy. And, right then and there - I'm slightly embarrassed to say - I fell to the floor and did the whole Wayne's World "We're Not Worthy!" bit. This probably explains my reticence to engage with famous people from Doctor Who since: first, I've embarrassed myself enough for one lifetime; and, second, none of them created Ferdy from This Life, so it would all be downhill anyway. In 2002, I did at least stop short of asking for Matt's autograph.

After that, we stayed in touch and met up a couple of times; Matt had been complimentary about my writing, and continued to give me pointers. He also kept me posted on what he was up to, including some very intriguing news about a time-travel cop show he was co-creating, which of course turned out to be Life on Mars. It was fantastic that he got to write for Who too. I've never broached the subject of Fear Her's reputation with him exactly, but I did once email him to say I thought it is marginally my more favourite of the two stories he wrote for the show (the other being the Ganger story for Matt Smith's Doctor). He replied to tell me I was "perverse". I took this as praise. Perverse or not, I absolutely loved Bonekickers, as well - so there!

In Summary:

Nothing to fear.