Enlightenment

Chapter the 266th, in which there's a chase during a race in space to a place of utmost grace. And the video picture is interlaced... (that's enough - Ed).

Plot:

The Doctor's new travelling companion Turlough has done a deal with the Black Guardian, agreeing to kill the Doctor, but can't go through with it. The White Guardian appears in the TARDIS, draining its power and dimming the lights to project himself, warning the Time Lord of impending danger: someone must be prevented from winning a race. The TARDIS arrives below decks in what appears to be an Edwardian racing yacht, but it's really a space ship with sails to catch solar winds. Many vessels styled after different Earth historical periods are in competition for the ultimate prize: Enlightenment. The officers of each are Eternals, beings that live outside time and cannot ever die, who use humans (or Ephemerals as they call them) for entertainment, and have brought groups of sailors from various times to crew their ships. The TARDIS team are on the Shadow, captained by the mysterious Striker; First Mate Marriner takes a shine to Tegan. The Black Guardian telepathically taunts Turlough that he is abandoning him to a fate of perpetual confinement on the ship, so Turlough jumps overboard. He is picked up by the Buccaneer, a pirate ship captained by the Eternal Captain Wrack. Wrack appears to be destroying other ships to gain advantage, by harnessing the Black Guardian's powers and focusing them on jewels she has tricked the other Captains into receiving as a gift. Striker is too wily to accept anything from her, though, so - at a party on the Buccaneer that everyone is invited to - Wrack hypnotises Tegan, and hides a jewel in the tiara she's wearing.

The others return to the Shadow without Turlough, who's taking his chances with Wrack. The Doctor manages to get the jewel overboard before it destroys the ship. Wrack has all the other Captains walk the plank, so the race is between the Shadow and the Buccaneer. The wind dies and the Shadow is becalmed, but the Buccaneer's sails are better. The Doctor goes back in the TARDIS to help Turlough, and from the Shadow Tegan sees two people ejected from the pirate ship. It is Captain Wrack and her First Mate Mansell that have been thrown overboard, though, and the Doctor and Turlough bring the Buccaneer over the finishing line. The Black and White Guardians are waiting for them. Striker, Marriner and Tegan come over to congratulate the winners. The Guardians send the Eternals back to their own dimension and offer Enlightenment to the Doctor, but he turns it down as not something he - or anyone else - is ready for. Turlough is offered part of Enlightenment, but the Black Guardian reminds him that he still owes a debt of the Doctor's life. Turlough has to choose, and gives the Black Guardian the portion of Enlightenment, which appears to burn the Black Guardian up. The Doctor explains that Enlightenment wasn't the glowing diamond thing they were presented with but was actually the friends they made along the way, or something.

Context:

Blogging this story, I have completed the 20th anniversary season of Doctor Who from 1983, 40 years on during the 60th anniversary year for the show. It's a shame that the - long rumoured - Blu-ray box set of this run has not been announced (at least at time of writing); I have a feeling it won't be too long before it comes out, and Enlightenment could well have been the story chosen for a BFI screening to tie-in. It would have been nice, assuming I would have been able to get a ticket, to cover that as part of any blog post. Unfortunately, the Blu-ray release schedule can't keep pace with my blogging frequency. Season 20 is the tenth now completed for the blog (following seasons 3, 8, 14, 15, 17, 23 and 25, and new series 6 and 13). If I keep up my three posts a month average, it's going to become more and more common to close these gaps, until I catch up with currently broadcast stories (some time in 2024, depending on when Ncuti Gatwa's first season airs). Anyway, I watched from the DVD as the best quality version available, an episode a night across a few days in May 2023. I was accompanied by the Better Half, who had no memory of watching these episodes since she first saw them 40 years ago. She expressed sororal admiration at Janet Fielding's ability to keep a boob tube up ("'Cos that's a hard thing to do if you haven't got much of a bust"), and moaned a lot about Peter Davison's hair being too long. She is a big All Creatures Great and Small fan (both original and the new Channel 5 version) and was moaning that Tristan's hair was too long in the 1983 ACGAS Christmas Special, which I told her was probably because Davison appeared in that between Doctor Who seasons and therefore couldn't get it cut. She has another thing to blame Doctor Who for now.   

First Time Round:

I watched this when it first went out in early March 1983, when I was just a callow schoolboy. I can only remember one thing about that first watch, and - sorry to raise the ick factor - but it was my going through another stage of my pre-pubescent sexual awakening upon watching Janet Fielding in her Edwardian decolletage be hypnotised by Lynda Baron as Captain Wrack. Enlightenment has more mature emotional and psychosexual subtexts than the average Doctor Who story, and the 10-year old me definitely caught something of that at some level of my psyche / hormones. Curiously, it wasn't so rare for stories shown around this time featuring Janet Fielding; earlier in the season was Snakedance, the sequel to the previous year's Kinda (watching which started the aforementioned pre-pubescent sexual awakening in the first place).

Reaction:

Doctor Who Magazine has structured its 60th anniversary poll of all broadcast stories differently to previous polls it has run over the years, perhaps to avoid upsetting Colin Baker again (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this early blog post for more details). This means that each Doctor will have their top three most voted for stories go into another poll, through which the overall final order of that second round subset will be chosen. There's still a chance that a Colin Baker story could come last of those, of course, but it won't be The Twin Dilemma this time at least (though that one did come last out of Colin's stories, as it always does, as confirmed in the most recent DWM at time of writing). As usual, I am avoiding any pressure of picking my top three by not entering the poll at all; if I were choosing, though, I'd coincidentally probably pick the last three I had left to blog at this point, with Kinda and The Caves of Androzani as well as Enlightenment getting my top marks. Randomness has saved my best for last, but my taste does not quite accord with everyone else's. Caves is a shoo-in, it's been in the top five of all Who stories in every one of the polls run to date, including nabbing the coveted number one spot in 2009. It was Peter Davison's top story in the first round of this latest poll as expected. My other two, though, didn't make it to the final. More action-oriented stories Earthshock and The Five Doctors - predictably - completed the top three instead (this is consistent with all the previous polls over the years). The more thoughtful, lyrical stories like Enlightenment are lower down, even though, in my humble, they are the ones that Doctor Who, and in particular this period of the show, do most well.

Every aspect of Enlightenment is effective at worst, superlative at best. From the first scene, one aspect is clearly better than normal, particularly for this period of the show, and that's the lighting. Watching the atmospheric TARDIS scenes at the beginning makes one wonder (as Davison himself says on one of the DVD extras) why they can't light the set like that every time. It's not just there, though; the scenes in the Eternals' ships are lit well in Television Centre, as are the top deck scenes filmed at Ealing. The nature of the race plot, involving groups of Eternals cosplaying from various periods of Earth history, means various creatives on the crew can utilise their skill and the stored resources of the BBC to produce great costumes and sets. This is particularly evident in the party scenes in part three that bring all the various ships' inhabitants together. The spacesuits, reminiscent of those in 2001 A Space Odyssey, are good too, it's not just the period stuff that's done well. Make-up and hair is also top class (Tegan does look stunning in her Edwardian party outfit and wig). Sailing craft in space is a big ask of model-work, but again the people behind the scenes come through. The reveal at the end of part one cliffhanger of multiple vessels hanging in space is a triumph of incongruous imagination, and one of the best in the series' history. Effects work throughout is strong, with only a couple of exceptions (but every Doctor Who story has some flaws, and here they are tiny); sound design and music are exquisite (more on the music in the Deeper Thoughts section below).

None of this would work without a good script and good performances. Enlightenment automatically has potential for a unique viewpoint as it is both written by a woman, and directed by a (different) woman. This would be the only time in the 26 years of the classic series such a thing happened, and it's only happened a couple of times since, and those very recently. Neither of those females are relying on any novelty, though, both work incredibly hard and deliver the goods. Director Fiona Cumming is a perfect match for this more lyrical story (having helmed stories like Castrovalva and Snakedance before this). She puts together one of the best ensemble casts Who has had, even though she had to react to some last minute changes when shooting dates were altered. I think that was a piece of luck; as good as Peter Sallis, originally cast as Striker, would have no doubt been, the series would have been deprived of what I think is one of the best performances of the classic era, Keith Barron's restrained but intense turn as the captain of the Shadow. At the time, I knew him only as a comic actor from a sit-com, so I was blown away, and am every time I watch this story again. Even something like raising a glass of wine to his lips is imbued with suppressed, inscrutable energy. The other recast role was Leee John, at the time known only as a pop singer in the band Imagination, as the baddie's sidekick Mansell. The performances of him and Lynda Baron - as pirate queen Wrack - come in for criticism, but I think they are both pitched perfectly. They are both playing characters who are playing characters, and gleefully.

The regulars all get served well. Davison gets a lot of good scenes facing off against the amoral Striker in righteous dudgeon, with the dialogue between them crackling ("Living minds are contaminated with crude emotions, organic, irrational, creative, entertaining" ... "A Lord of Time - are there lords in such a small domain?" etc. etc.) This is probably Turlough's best material, still struggling between good and bad choices, up to the end when he sits between a good and bad angel, almost literally, and finally decides which side he's on. Even a minor subplot like his betrayal of Tony Caunter's teetotal sailor Jackson is written and performed seriously, just one of many magical moments with which the story is blessed. The scene when Mark Strickson is thrown to the floor in front of Baron's Wrack for the first time, gets to his knees and looks up, with Cumming choosing low and high POV shots, is probably as close as Doctor Who could go to highlighting a sub-dom sexual subtext - it's almost like something out of a Frankie Goes to Hollywood video. The love subplot between Christopher Brown's Marriner and Tegan is sensitively handled but emotionally rich, and gives Janet Fielding her best scenes in any show that's not a Mara story. Barbara Clegg's complex and layered scripts contain many such resonances. The Eternals using the Ephemerals could be seen as a comment on gender (Marriner's unwanted advances ultimately being rejected by Tegan as he's only interested in himself) or class (the rich officer class exploiting the toil of those below decks to make them rich) or just as an interesting science-fiction concept in and of themselves.

I've barely scratched the surface of all the wonderful elements in this story. Unlike Earthshock or The Five Doctors, conflict is mostly at an interpersonal level; there's not much running around and zapping, and any monstrousness is not overt. Fans may have been disappointed that the big confrontation between the Black and White Guardians (something teased for five years but not seen on screen before Enlightenment) comes down to two men sitting on chairs, while the action is all internal, one person's choice. I think this is perfect, though, and much more effective than any attempt at pyrotechnics might have been. There's wonderful creepiness too, in scenes of space-suited Edwardian sailors queueing up for grog, or Marriner's hands and face appearing on the TARDIS scanner screen as he climbs up the outside of the TARDIS and then looks inside, sensing Tegan for the first time, with a sick smile on his face. Maybe this isn't traditional enough for some fans, but it obviously speaks to a good few including me: the story came fifth in the recent poll (Kinda was fourth); not too shabby.

Connectivity:

Both Enlightenment and The Idiot's Lantern feature female villains beginning with W (Wrack and Wire, The) and references to sailors (Rose's Mum's ex with incorrect flag advice in the Tennant story and a full ship's complement in Enlightenment). 

Deeper Thoughts:

Malcolm Clarke and the Musical Movements. The late, great Barry Letts was someone with the best claim to being a Doctor Who expert in its classic era, having performed pretty much every key role (directing before and after his time as producer, writing stories during that time and after, and finally returning to briefly be the executive producer at the beginning of the 1980s, a couple of years before Enlightenment was made). He also lived long enough to see the programme come back (indeed, was an honoured guest at the 2005 press screening of relaunch episode Rose) and share his wisdom in many interviews for DVD range releases. I barely have ever had the temerity to disagree with him on any view about the programme, as he's almost certainly going to turn out to be right. There have been a couple of times, though, that I've been convinced that he's wrong. One of these is in his opinions about the incidental music for The Sea Devils by Malcolm Clarke. At the time that music was first recorded, Barry Letts decided he didn't like it, and remained vocal about this thereafter. Having just finished working through all the extras from the Blu-ray box set of the season containing The Sea Devils, I heard him reiterate that he hated it on camera in a making-of documentary, and I heard him reiterate that he hated it on audio during commentaries. As ever, I heard all this thinking "How can he say this, when The Sea Devils has the best score of any classic Who story?!' It's innovative, exciting and in keeping with the action - Clarke somehow makes the electronically produced noises he creates supremely nautical.

While criticising The Sea Devils music, Letts praises Tristram Cary's just as experimental (but a bit more tasteful and therefore boring) score for the following story The Mutants. I hope this was Letts' honest reaction to the material and not him being blinded by status. Cary was a famous composer, but Letts sniffily refers to Clarke at one point essentially as a sound designer for the Radiophonic Workshop with ideas above his station. Of course, most of those working at the Workshop were composers too, and Clarke went on to score a good few Doctor Who stories, including Enlightenment. The cue used for the party sequences on Wrack's ship, for example, is beautiful, and a hell of an earworm. I defy anyone to say it's not the work of a real composer. His 1980s work was less divisive than his first score for the series, but it's fair to say that it was still quite divisive. Some might feel that there's not much point in creating something if it's not challenging; others might think that incidental music isn't the place for anything that stands out too much. I am sympathetic with the latter view, but this is Doctor Who we're talking about. It has always innovated in every aspect, particularly sonically, from the very first moments of the very first episode, and the Radiophonic Workshop was always a big part of that. Special sound was always within their remit, and even without their direct involvement the incidentals were often electronic and experimental (like Cary's score for the second ever story, The Daleks).

Generally, there are phases in the music used for periods of Doctor Who's life, where the sound is distinctive of that era. The 1960s splits into three for me, but as more experimentation was going on from one story to the next, it is not so clearly delineated. At the start of the show's life there was a tendency towards using new original scores, anywhere on the axis between traditional and experimental. Towards the end of the William Hartnell period, stock music becomes more prevalent, with clever use of repeating motifs (like the Space Adventure track that underscored the early stories of the Cybermen, becoming their de facto theme tune). Finally, as the 1960s progressed towards the end of Patrick Troughton's time in the title role, there's a period where the phenomenon of no music at all was tried. Maybe budgeting was more challenging, but even without music, there's usually something interesting to hear. Brian Hodgson's background soundscapes for stories like The Krotons can lay claim to be the Workshop's first incidentals, a few years before Malcolm Clarke's undersea opus. Into the 1970s, there's another brief period of experimentation, including The Sea Devils, before it rapidly becomes standard for stories to have traditional scores, almost always composed by Dudley Simpson. This is how things stayed for the rest of the decade. Producer for the 1980s John Nathan-Turner went a different way, giving Simpson the push, and engaging composers wholesale from the Workshop.

Clarke scored six stories in this period, alongside other composers like Peter Howell, Paddy Kingsland, Roger Limb, and others. He contributes the final workshop Doctor Who score in 1986, when the final classic series musical movement is already underway. Individual freelance composers working on their own synthesisers are responsible for the music of the final four years of classic Who, technology having caught up to make this possible. In the 21st century, there's been much less movement. Apart from Segun Akinola's scoring of Jodie Whittaker's episodes, every story's music has been written by one person, Murray Gold. The level of experimentation has only been whatever Gold brought to each new score. Though he's challenged himself to keep things fresh, it does seem a shame that Gold is now coming back, seemingly for every episode henceforth. It might have been nicer to try something new, and it does seem a bit backward looking. Still, the Russell T Davies writing the stories will be a different man than the one that wrote his last Who story in 2009; so, perhaps we'll see an all-new Gold to the one that last produced music for the show in 2017. Time will tell, as it always does. 

In Summary:

It's better than Earthshock and The Five Doctors put together; so there!

The Idiot's Lantern

Chapter the 265th, where London police detain people who've committed no crime to protect the image of a coronation (could never happen in real life, of course).

Plot:

The Doctor and Rose travel to north London on the 1st June 1953, the day before the coronation of Elizabeth II. In a terrace street, they notice that too many households have TV aerials for the time, and then witness a police raid, where someone is forcibly removed from their home and bundled off in a car. They talk to a family living near to the raid, the Connollys. The family are clearly hiding something, and the Doctor and Rose sense that the mother and teenage son, Tommy, want to talk, so they distract the husband by attacking his values from the lofty vantage point of their more modern assumptions. Ha, ha, look they're gratuitously undermining what they know he holds dearest, and telling him he's named the UK flag wrong (he calls it a Union Jack, which Rose says he's not allowed to unless it's flown at sea, but actually she's incorrect). Anyway, it turns out people - including Tommy's Gran - have been rendered faceless and catatonic by forces unknown. The police arrive and cart Gran off; the Doctor pursues. Rose notices a crackling force emanating from the Connolly's TV set, and investigates the nearby shop that provided it, Magpie Electricals. An alien entity called the Wire that lives in the TV signal has taken over Mr. Magpie, and is using his television sets to eat people's brains and also faces (somehow).

The Doctor tracks down the hapless police inspector ordering the raids, and finds he has no real plan and is just keeping the blank-faced people in a holding pen to avoid any disruption to the coronation. Another victim is brought in; it is Rose. The next morning, the Queen is on her way to Westminster Abbey, and the Wire is planning to feast on everyone watching the ceremony on TV. The Doctor goes to the Connolly's house again, and Tommy agrees to help him. Tommy's Mum kicks the Dad out of the house when she finds out that he is the one that has been informing the police of new victims of the Wire and getting them taken away. Tommy and the Doctor go to Magpie's shop with the inspector. The Wire attacks, blanking the inspector, and Magpie disappears off with the Wire stored on a portable TV that Magpie has made under instruction from his extra-terrestrial master. The Doctor uses his sonic to free himself and Tommy, and they give chase to the nearby Alexandra Palace transmitter. They defeat the Wire before it can boost itself into everybody's home. All the blank-faced people return to normal. The Doctor and Rose attend a street party, and encourage Tommy to make peace with his Dad.

Context:

I overrode the usual randomised method of picking the story this time. In the UK, the King's coronation was fast approaching (the day Chas gets a new hat, as I was calling it). I didn't want anything to do with the event, and had no plans to watch. I'm resolutely anti-monarchist, though I know some people appreciate the pageantry or the history of such events. I don't like the cost to the public purse, and particularly don't like the police state tendencies such events bring out (beloved local institute the Metropolitan Police tweeted in the run up that their "tolerance for any disruption, whether through protest or otherwise, will be low" and on the day - as they'd just been given powers to stop and search anyone if they believed that person was even thinking of protesting - their bar for what constituted disruption proved to be even lower, the charming and worthwhile bunch of people). Anyway, Doctor Who Magazine did a cover cashing in on the royal event for its current (at the time of writing) issue, which reminded me there was a coronation-themed Doctor Who story, and one I hadn't yet blogged. Enter: The Idiot's Lantern. I could watch this on the 6th May instead of the nonsense dominating the live TV schedules that I wasn't interested in. I proceeded to do just that from the DVD, accompanied by all three children (boys of 16 and 13, girl of 10) in the afternoon, after the actual crowning but when the TV was still full of post-match analysis that nobody in the household was interested in. All three children had a lot of questions about the plot, which I think is a sign that there are script issues (will go into that in a bit more detail in the Reaction section below).

First Time Round:

I watched this live on its debut BBC1 broadcast on the 27th May 2006 accompanied by the Better Half, who was in the later stage of pregnancy with our first child at the time (he'd be born a month later). I remember thinking that this story and the two Cyberman episodes before it had seen a bit of a slump in quality from the show compared to the earlier stories that year, which themselves were slightly less good than those shown the previous year (Doctor Who's relaunch with Christopher Eccleston and its first modern Christmas special introducing David Tennant). I put this down to difficult second album syndrome, and trusted it would get better (and it did). The Idiot's Lantern was probably my least favourite story of the year, alas. Yes, I liked Fear Her and Love & Monsters much more, sue me!   

Reaction:

One question that each one of the kids asked during the final act of The Idiot's Lantern was some variation on the theme of "Where's the Dad?". It's a question that writer Mark Gatiss might not have thought anybody would be asking; compels me though. Eddie Connolly is thrown out of his home at a moment when everyone else is inside intently watching the coronation, so he can't exactly drop in on anyone else, and the streets of Muswell Hill are presumably deserted. Saving face is important to him, so what does he do? Were the pubs open, and would he have dared show his face in the local anyway? Maybe he just wanders the streets, or heads south towards Westminster Abbey to join the crowds. It's not a great sign that this was a more intriguing question to those watching than anything about how the Doctor and Tommy would defeat the Wire and get Rose's face back. What could be the reasons for this? Well, the Dad is presented for the first two-thirds of the running time as being a key character (the actor playing him, Jamie Foreman is second credited guest star) and he's the only one of Tommy's family not in jeopardy. Will he redeem himself by saving them? Well, no, he won't, he'll just disappear completely for a long period, turning up only after the story climax. The author presumably intended the character to be unsympathetic such that nobody would care what had happened to him. Unfortunately, the script pulls its punches (perhaps literally) about Eddie's behaviour to the point that he doesn't do anything that bad.

The scene where the Doctor and Rose barge into Eddie's home, not knowing whether he's done anything wrong, and proceed to humiliate him in front of his family, makes them look like the smuggest of smug gits. The whole season has them guilty of exuding smugness, but it's at it's absolute worst in this story. It's particularly annoying that Rose's pedanticism about the Union Flag is flat out wrong (it's perfectly acceptable to refer to the UK flag as the Union Jack whether one is on land or sea). Connolly Senior's attitudes towards his wife and child are only ever demonstrated to be, if anything, a little softer than would be the average attitude of a man in his place and time. He's overbearing and a bit patriarchal, yes, but it's 1953. The big accusation from the script is that Eddie has been informing on his neighbours and getting them taken away by the police. This is highlighted as something akin to Stalin's Russia, but it's not. One hapless police officer was just doing something to avoid panic during the coronation, and that police officer - the one who actually was forcibly removing the affected from their homes and locking them up - is presented much more heroically, and gets to team up with the Doctor to confront the villain. Simply put, the Eddie that is on screen doesn't deserve the treatment he gets, and the script eventually acknowledges this with the 'have cake and eat it' end where the Doctor and Rose encourage Tommy to make peace with his Dad. Jamie Foreman turns in a slightly duff performance probably because what's on the page doesn't add up, and the theme has to be hammered home with the far too on-the-nose speech from Tommy about fighting against fascism.

As the intention of the story was to show the impacts on one family's domestic set-up, the family story being fumbled in this way damages everything around it catastrophically. If the family story had worked, it wouldn't matter that the villain is static and scenes featuring her are talky. Maureen Lipman is good as the Wire (at least when she's being calmly menacing, it all goes a bit too large when she gives it the "I'm Hungry" bit), but because of the nature of the character, she can't interact properly with anyone else. It really needed the Ringu moment of her character emerging from the TV into the real world, corporeal at last. The nearest the story gives us is her going briefly from black-and-white to full colour, which is a nice moment but doesn't help the character become more tangible a threat. The modus operandi of the Wire doesn't make any sense either. Feasting on the electrical impulses from the brain leaving people catatonic, that fits, but why would that leave people with faces without any features? And why would the faces end up on TVs in the Magpie Electricals shop (as good a visual as that is)? Another thing that the eldest kept asking throughout was why there were so many dutch angles, and I have absolutely no idea. It doesn't evoke the era depicted either as it would have been captured in reportage or the cinema of the time. I can't help but think it was an attempt to make the somewhat lacklustre material seem more interesting. A misfire then, and a bit of a shame, but the stories would get better as the season progressed (yes, including Fear Her and Love & Monsters - sue me!).

Connectivity:

The villains in both The Idiot's Lantern (The Wire) and The Invasion of Time (Vardans) can exist as wave forms and travel by broadcasting themselves. The investiture of the Doctor as Gallifrey's president in the Tom Baker story is very like a coronation, with the Doctor having the Matrix circlet placed on his head ceremonially.

Deeper Thoughts:

Musical Who. The original idea for the story to fill this slot was more aural than visual. The equivalent to the Wire would have transmitted itself through a catchy 1950s song, rather than a TV picture, and Magpie would have run a record shop rather than an electrical store. Lead writer and exec producer Russell T Davies put this idea to Mark Gatiss as 'Mr Sandman', and Gatiss did at least one draft (named 'Sonic Boom') before things were reworked and early TV, Ally Pally and Elizabeth II's coronation were introduced. A vestige of this idea remained in what made it to screen with the Doctor and Rose at the start in their 1950s outfits talking about Elvis and Cliff Richard. There's also an echo in a later Gatiss script, Sleep No More, which uses the song Mr Sandman to underscore the transmission of a villainous signal from mind to mind (but that's more to do with a sleep acceleration process than the song itself, which is just an extra bit of creepiness layered on top). Aside from that, the idea of a more music-focussed episode was lost. Over the years, Doctor Who has sampled almost every kind of genre and fashioned them into effective stories; it's never, though, done a full-blown musical. Well, it's never done a full-blown musical on TV, I should say. It's done a musical on audio (Big Finish's The Pirates is a riff on Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas, HMS Pinafore particularly) and on stage (The Ultimate Adventure, a late 1980s touring production starring first Jon Pertwee then Colin Baker featured a few tunes). On TV, though, there have been flirtations but the series has never gone all the way.

As with all Doctor Who's TV subgenres, the experimental and adventurous storylines of William Hartnell's era got there first. As something of a trial for a story using musical interludes, there was The Gunfighters in Doctor Who's third season towards the end of Hartnell's tenure. It frequently punctuates the action with a song that complements the non-musical action in presenting the plot. It's one song rather than a variety of different ones, but the lyrics do keep changing. It's usually not sung by any of the characters, instead sounding out as a voiceover by a narrator performer who does not appear elsewhere in the action. The companion characters of Steven and Dodo do sing it in one scene, but naturalistically, tthe characters really performing a song to other characters in the scene. There seems to be a barrier that the series cannot transgress about showing characters break out into song super-naturalistically, when the song may be representative of thoughts or a conversation, or maybe representative of an in-story world where everyone does break out into song occasionally and nobody bats an eyelid. This is a musical theatre mainstay, but seems a step too far for Doctor Who. This may be because the show already incorporates a lot of artifice by its very nature, and incorporating a true musical theatre style on top of all that may push things over the edge, or over the top. It could though just be because The Gunfighters wasn't a particularly popular story, and so nobody wanted to do something similar again. The nearest the classic series came was many years later with the music heavy 1950s-set story Delta and the Bannermen, which had some naturalistic musical performances of era contemporary songs, and one original non-diegetic song.

From 2005 on, the regular composer for the new series years Murray Gold got into the habit of writing one or two songs a year as well as every episode's incidental music. They were always presented as diegetic and naturalistic, though. They might be played in by a DJ (Love Don't Roam in The Runaway Bride), or a band (The Stowaway in Voyage of the Damned) or as a full-on Broadway number, albeit within the universe of the story (My Angel Put The Devil In me in Daleks in Manhattan). When Matt Smith took over from David Tennant as the Doctor, things edged towards stepping over that naturalistic line (the character played by Katherine Jenkins in A Christmas Carol sings Abigail's Song, but who in the world of that story is performing the stirring orchestral accompaniment?). The closest the new series has come to a full-on musical is probably the story The Rings of Akhaten, the plot of which revolves around performing a big production number involving a chorus of pretty much all the guest cast. In more recent years, things have tailed off. Peter Capaldi's Doctor often used to strum an electric guitar, but Gold wrote no original songs for him to play; then, the composer for the Jodie Whittaker era Segun Akinola seemingly had no inclination towards songwriting. With Gold returning to the series from this years specials onwards, has the time finally come for Doctor Who to go the whole hog with a musical episode? Buffy, a major inspiration for the new series when it returned in 2005, famously blazed a trail with the episode Once More With Feeling, and that was over 20 years ago now. Musical stars Jinkx Monsoon and Jonathan Groff have both been recently announced as appearing in Ncuti Gatwa's first series. Could it be? Only time and time signatures will tell...

In Summary:

Some TV maybe does rot your brain!

The Invasion of Time

Chapter the 264th, David Agnew's first script for Doctor Who (his next one would be better).

Plot:

The Doctor is behaving erratically and keeping secrets from Leela. He has a mysterious meeting on a spaceship with persons unknown, then materialises on Gallifrey claiming the title of president (which he got on a technicality during his last visit home). He's erratic and rude to everybody, particularly his old tutor Borusa, and seems to be working for some baddies called the Vardans whom he helps invade. The Vardans appear to be made of light bouncing off sheets of aluminium foil. As part of his investiture, the Doctor is connected up to the Matrix (famous Time Lord MacGuffin / computer) which gives him some knowledge, but he also needs the Great Key (famous Time Lord MacGuffin / key). His erratic and rude behaviour was a tactic for blocking the Vardans from reading his thoughts, and he plans to get them to fully materialise and then trap them in a time loop. Borusa hands over the Great Key, and the Doctor opens a small gap in the forcefield around Gallifrey. The Vardans materialise and in person they are much less interesting than aluminum foil. Leela, who has been banished outside the Time Lord Citadel, allies herself with some Time Lord drop-outs; they attack and the Doctor is successful in his plan to get rid of the Vardans. As everyone's celebrating, some Sontarans appear on Gallifrey, having used the Vardans to get the forcefield gap opened, then snuck in while everyone was distracted. The Sontarans run around after the Doctor and friends for a bit, first in the Citadel and then within the TARDIS. The Doctor builds a powerful weapon, the Demat gun, and uses it against the Sontarans. Leela and K9 Mark 1 decide to stay on Gallifrey. The Doctor leaves, and starts building K9 mark 2.

Context:

This completes another season of Doctor Who, covered peripatetically over the years for this randomly ordered blog. Season 15 (Tom Baker's fourth, middle year as the titular Time Lord) is not the most popular with fandom, but it certainly has its moments. Although the middle stories were muddled up, I did start the journey to completing this set with the opening story Horror of Fang Rock back in May 2016, and have ended here with the season finale. As The Invasion of Time is six episodes long, and isn't that well thought of, I didn't even ask the children or Better Half to watch with me, but caught up with an episode every other evening or so (from the DVD, without the optional new CGI effects) across the course of a couple of weeks in late April and early May 2023. I tried to have an alcoholic tipple to accompany each episode (if you've ever seen the story, you'll know why). I realised after watching it that this also completes another set of stories more personal to me (see First Time Round section below for details).

First Time Round:

The first time I saw The Invasion of Time was exciting. Not because of the story, of course, but because of the medium. It was the 20th July 1997, and I'd just paid for cable to be connected in the flat where I was living in Worthing. This was the first time I'd ever received anything beyond terrestrial channels (of which, if I remember rightly, there were only four available to me - Channel 5 had started earlier in the year, but couldn't yet be picked up in my area by a normal aerial). I didn't want sports or movie channels, I just wanted and got a channel package that included UK Gold, who showed repeats of Doctor Who stories some of which were not yet out to buy. I paid for the channel for three months; weekly on a Sunday morning during that time, a full story would be shown as an omnibus edition, with advert breaks to separate the episodes rather than full beginning and end credits. The first weekend I was connected up, I got to watch (and tape to watch again and again), this Gallifrey and Sontaran epic in all its shabby-chic glory.

I'd timed things badly, as there then followed eight weeks of stories I already had on official BBC VHS. (An aside: the planned showing of The Armageddon Factor on the 31st August was pulled because of the breaking news a few hours earlier of Princess Diana's death - it features a princess in jeopardy - and replaced by Planet of the Spiders, which I also had on official BBC VHS.) I then watched and taped the three remaining stories I needed from season 16, and then Meglos, before I cancelled the package. I think they put the prices up, I don't think it was just because every Who story they happened to be showing at that time was sub-par. I finally got to see the full story including all those interstitial sets of credits three years later when it came out on official BBC VHS. I bought the tape, even though I had the UK Gold copy already, just for those sets of credits and a nice box, because of course I did. With this post, I have finally blogged every one of the set of five stories I taped off cable TV channel in 1997. What a milestone!  

Reaction:

Just when you think The Invasion of Time's story is going to run out of steam, it does. A bit later it throws a lovely narrative curveball by introducing the Sontarans at the episode four cliffhanger, and changes the focus of its last two episodes. There's not, though, anywhere near enough story to sustain the first four episodes, or the last two either. Given the circumstances, one has to forgive this to a certain extent. The script for this story was a rush job after another one fell through. Like for the later story in producer Graham Williams's tenure when this happened, Williams and his script editor worked together to assemble a screenplay at speed, crediting the resulting story to the in-house pseudonym David Agnew. That latter story was City of Death. As part of a 60th anniversary poll, the latest Doctor Who Magazine at time of writing contains a full scored rundown of the Tom Baker stories. City of Death is at the number one position, the most popular; as the accompanying commentary to the poll says, sometimes it's possible to spin gold out of straw. Sometimes, though, you just get slightly tangled straw, as in the case of The Invasion of Time which languishes at position 36 of 41. It's not entirely a fair comparison: when Douglas Adams and Williams created City of Death they already had a plot that David Fisher had constructed. If anything, their job was more to pare away material (and add lots of jokes and good lines too). Williams and Anthony Read, the script editor when The Invasion of Time was required to plug a gap, started from an empty page. They get some jokes and good lines in there, but the plot can't help but look like what it is, something constructed in a hurry.

It starts with an intriguing idea: could the Doctor have gone rogue? Tom Baker's particular take on the main character is well suited to create some moral ambiguity, and he's always been at odds with his own people. It could work, but isn't sustainable for long; unfortunately, like everything in the story, it nonetheless has to go on for a long time, stretched out to fill a lot of pages. If you don't buy it, every scene where the Doctor is being unpleasant with people is difficult to watch as you know it's not real and there's going to be a plot switcheroo at some point; if you do buy it, it's just unpleasant to watch one's hero behave in this way. It also doesn't make much sense. Before the events of this story, the Doctor somehow bumps into the Vardans and realises that they can travel along any wavelength including thought, and he does a deal with them to let them in to Gallifrey. This is part of a plan to defeat them, but why bother doing the deal and letting them in to Gallifrey if that's what they want? Why not just leave them where they are? What threat are they if the Doctor just goes about his business and never travels back to his home planet? Any explanations given are muddled. They don't travel to Gallifrey in the Doctor's head as thoughts, as if they did, the Doctor wouldn't need to drop the transduction barrier to let them in. What is a transduction barrier, anyway? It can't be a forcefield, because in later episodes, the Doctor needs to drop the forcefield too, to let the Vardans in, erm, again (but more so). The script is rife with these repetitious beats, with just one more meaningless MacGuffin - the Matrix, the rod and sash of Rassilon, the Great Key, the Demat gun, the primary refraction tube of the fail safe controls - to be collected and used before this threadbare plot can finally be switched off.

With this intrinsic confusion, I don't think the Vardans would work as villains with even the most big budget style of visual realisation. Needless to say, they don't get this. Like everything in this story where the money looks like it's run out, they are rubbish. In their early form, they are light reflected onto some kind of foil on one camera, mixed into the picture of another; in their final form, they're just some dudes in dull uniforms. The mask of lead Sontaran Stor is okay, but the hands are very fake and plasticky. Both lead villains are essentially hidden from view, so needed very good vocal performances; unfortunately the people cast in the roles are just not strong enough vocally. It might not matter, anyway, as villains are only as good as what they do, and neither the Vardans or Sontarans do anything in the narrative. Whole episodes are taken up with characters just walking around. Maybe all the budget went on shoe leather? It's hard to call these chase scenes, as moving too fast would mean they would be over too quickly, and that can't happen in The Invasion of Marking Time. Balanced against this, the model work is particularly fine. The reused Gallifrey sets are good, but they have been embellished with tacky-looking plastic chairs and cushions, or very tatty looking desks and computer units. Controversially for fans, the final two episodes set in the TARDIS were filmed in a location rather than using specially made sets, meaning some rather drab brick walls. There's the odd interesting idea (the TARDIS power room being disguised as an art gallery) but again it all goes on far too long, and with the déjà vu gag of characters walking the same corridor and staircase over and over, is horribly repetitive too.

What bright points there are come from some of the performances. Baker has some good moments, but it's not his finest hour. Oh, how I wish this story only lasted an hour. As it is, there's plenty of time for lapses, like various scenes of maniacal laughter, or Baker staring into the camera and breaking the fourth wall with a "Not even the sonic screwdriver can get me out of this one!". John Arnatt as Borusa gives a solid performance despite some inconsistencies in his character's behaviour from scene to scene. Milton Johns is on fine, oleaginous form as the comic relief Castellan Kelner, who - as a running gag - adapts to offer his utmost loyalty to whichever n'er-do-well is in charge of Gallifrey for that episode. Apart from this, though, he doesn't really contribute anything to the plot, and he's not the only one. All the drop-out ex-Time Lords living in the wilds of outer Gallifrey meet up with Leela when she's been cast out by the Doctor (to keep her safe / stop her from needing to be involved in the slight plot). They then storm the Citadel, achieving not very much that Leela couldn't have done on her own. In the final two episodes, they pretty much disappear altogether. If Leela had to fall in love with someone to leave the show, surely it should be one of these people who are slightly wild hunters just like her, rather than an effete guard with whom she barely shares any scenes. Properly scripting the outer Gallifrey scenes as part of a romantic subplot would have made them much more worthwhile an inclusion.

As it ends up, Leela's exit is ridiculously abrupt. Reportedly, Graham Williams didn't want Louise Jameson to leave and put off creating a proper ending until it was too late, hoping she could be persuaded to stay. He was right that she was worth the programme holding on to, as she's the best thing in The Invasion of Time. Watching these episodes was the most uncomfortable I've ever been at how she is objectified by the skimpy outfit. There's a scene where Leela swims that doesn't serve any plot function; yes, it was undoubtedly included like everything else in the story in a desperate attempt to fill time rather than for titillation, but it still strikes one as odd that it's in there. Various times that Leela is running round in her chamois underoos, I was very anxious that there was going to be a wardrobe malfunction. The only good thing about Jameson leaving the show was putting an end to that nonsense. Her performance rises above it, though, and it's a shame to see her leave. The character of Rodan, a prototype Romana, is paired with the Doctor often throughout, as a sign of things to come.

Connectivity:

Like Boom Town, The Invasion of Time features someone being held in the TARDIS (this time for their own protection), and a device being connected to the ship that threatens breaking it apart. Both stories also feature the companion character going on a date. Well, alright The Invasion of Time doesn't, but Leela's date must happen off camera between scenes, or else her falling in love with Andred after having barely looked at him previously doesn't make any sense.

Deeper Thoughts:

The High Street - My Part in its Downfall. There's not much more to say about The Invasion of Time, is there?! I already discussed its accidental forming of a subgenre of Doctor Who stories set on Gallifrey in the Deeper Thoughts section of the post about Logopolis. A couple of reminiscences recently for the blog perhaps suggested another topic of interest. Well, interest to me, at least. Be warned: this is probably the most trivial subject for investigative journalism imaginable. Above I demonstrated clear recall about my first experience of The Invasion of Time on TV and on VHS. What about on DVD? The story came out in that medium in May 2008, the final one of the four classic series Sontaran stories to come out on DVD. As well as appearing as a single disc release, it was also collected with those other three stories in the 'Bred for War' box set; this was a rare example of the DVD range tying in to something broadcast in the new series, as revamped Sontarans had just appeared on TV in the one with the killer Sat Navs. I know this because I was often online on the old Restoration Team forum (part of the website of the team who worked on the Doctor Who releases), where these things were discussed. As the 1990s turned into the 2000s, and the new millennium wore on, talking about Doctor Who with like-minded fans online gradually and then rapidly became mainstream. It had been feasible to do this throughout the 1990s, but those old newsgroups were analogous to a niche telecommunications hobby like ham radio. As things became more commoditised, another new activity then became available - buying Doctor Who stories online.

Long term readers of the blog (Hi Mum!) will know that I had preferred suppliers of Doctor Who on VHS and then DVD, and these were bricks and mortar shops. This may have been a UK thing, but I don't remember any bespoke sell-through VHS stores, neither chains nor smaller independent businesses. My favourite place to buy Doctor Who and other cult TV videos was a section within a local bookshop in Worthing called Volume One; lots of other big chains that sold books and/or music would also stock them. VHS had started as a medium for rental, and lots of rental places existed - Blockbuster for example having first arrived on our shores in 1989 - but no dedicated stores that just sold tapes. This changed in the early 2000s, with DVD seen as more of a sell-through medium than VHS. Chains adopted DVD alongside VHS to buy, but smaller shops sprouted up too. They were mainly focussed on film, and usually more expensive than places like MVC where I would regularly buy Doctor Who DVD titles in those early days, but it was nice that they were there for the rarer and less mainstream films that I was also collecting at the time. Sadly, such enterprise already had a finite life expectancy because of something else that was taking hold, that at the time I would have called e-commerce. It wouldn't be too long before the e- became superfluous; for a vast array of products that up to then would have been purchased in person, online sites became the default place and way to do commerce.

Physical media for music, TV and films were obvious early options for online purchasing as they were easy to distribute by post, and didn't require a customer's detailed, in-person scrutiny before the decision to buy. I was a relatively early adopter, making my first online purchases in 2000. Availability was a main driver rather than cost; shopping with clicks would supplement shopping in stores made of bricks for a book or a record you couldn't easily find, or an imported region 1 DVD of a film not yet released in the UK. What is lost to my memory is when I first bought a Doctor Who DVD online. Availability for the discs wasn't a problem in those days. I know that I was still purchasing Who traditionally in 2003 (bought the final ever Doctor Who VHS box set in the London Bridge MVC) and 2004 (I remember reading the inlay of the Ghost Light DVD on a commute back to Gillingham, the first new Doctor Who DVD I'd bought to watch in my newly-wed pad with the Better Half). By autumn 2007, I was 100% pre-ordering online for delivery on the day of release (it was a big deal cancelling my pre-order of The Key to Time DVD box set to save some pennies, only to find that I couldn't buy it thereafter because of its limited edition nature). So, I've narrowed it down to sometime in 2005 or 2006 that I made the change. The trouble with investigating this is that none of the companies I was buying from is still trading, so I can't just check my order history on a website.

A good summary of the 'etailers' around in these years can be found on the marvellous Film Stories by the marvellous Simon Brew, link here. I purchased for a while from Sendit.com (and had got non-Who product from there when they were called Blackstar). Later I used play.com (and again had purchased non-Who product from them when they were called play247. What prompted the full move to online I'm not 100% sure on, but I think it probably was the loss of that convenient MVC on London Bridge. My day job office moved out of the City of London to the nearby Royal Mint Court in 2005, meaning it was out of my way to walk across London Bridge. That didn't matter for that long though, as the shop closed anyway shortly after and MVC went into administration. They wouldn't be the last traditional retailer to suffer this fate, and it would happen to etailers too. Sendit.com no longer exists. Play.com were taken over by Japanese company Rakuten in 2011, and stopped selling direct (becoming instead a marketplace for smaller vendors) two years later. I moved on to the online BBC Shop and was still purchasing DVDs from them when this blog started, though by then I was wondering how long Doctor Who on physical media would stick around (see Deeper Thoughts of The Underwater Menace post for more details). The BBC Shop then itself closed in early 2016. Non-physical sell-through was obviously becoming a bigger and bigger thing at that point, which influenced the BBC decision with them trying out a short lived download-to-own model with the BBC Store instead. The smaller etailers closing probably had more to do with their not being able to compete with the Amazon behemoth.

I have somewhat begrudgingly used Amazon for Doctor Who Blu-rays since 2016 as the only reliable option for getting titles on the day of release (but never earlier - one of my small joys in the pre-Amazon days had been the rare early arrival on a Doctor Who story on the Saturday before the release date, giving me a weekend to start on it). Amazon has a comprehensive order history for me, so I can see that the first story I purchased from there was the Blu-ray of The Power of the Daleks animation late in 2016. Purchases are less frequent now than back in the day, of course, with only the box sets of new series, and classic ones as part of the Blu-ray Collection, plus a smattering of animated stories here and there. Armed with this investigation into my personal history, I can answer the question about The Invasion of Time: I would have pre-ordered it from play.com, and received it on release day in the post. I can't tell for sure what my first story purchased online was, though. It would probably have been sometime in the Summer of 2005, so could have been one of the four single-disc volumes of the new Eccleston episodes, or a classic story that was released around then such as Revelation of the Daleks or The Web Planet. Whichever it was, it marked my first blow against the High Street, which would take many blows from many others from then on. It may well be having a bit of a renaissance of late, though. As I was writing this, I saw the good news announced that the big Oxford Street HMV store, that had been closed and replaced by one of those American candy stores / possible money-laundering fronts, is coming back. Whether it'll tempt me enough to even visit there again, let alone to buy any Doctor Who product there, remains to be seen.

 

In Summary:

It deserves some leeway because of the circumstances of its creation, but nonetheless is around one episode's worth of story (including a couple of nice moments and lines) stretched over six.