The Happiness Patrol

Chapter The 99th, wherein happiness may not prevail...

Plot: 
The Doctor takes Ace to a planet he's heard nasty rumours about, Terra Alpha, a human colony in the future where sadness is outlawed and everybody has to smile all the time. People get killed or  disappear at random by government order, and capitalism - or maybe communism - is represented by metaphors about sweets. The TARDIS team find quite a few allies (a bit too many, and too quickly given it's only three episodes long and set over the course of one evening, but there you go). Together they foment rebellion again the despot ruler Helen A, and her hench-robot made of sweets, the Kandyman. She's overthrown and finally cries over the death of her pet puppet dog-rat, Fifi.

Context:

I had high hopes for this one; it's popular with most fans of the Sylvester McCoy Doctor Whos, and - perhaps because of some of the over-stylised visuals, or the prominent satire - is well remembered by the casual viewers of the time as well: it's the only Doctor Who story to my knowledge to be mentioned, more than twenty years after broadcast, separately on Newsnight and in a speech by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It's fine as a memory, but how would it work to actually sit down and watch the episodes? I asked the Better Half to watch with me, and she was cautiously optimistic as I started up the DVD. McCoy was her childhood Doctor, and Ace her favourite companion. What could go wrong? Alas, dear reader, she bailed after one episode, and I watched the other two without her. Sample comments, or at least the repeatable ones, as follows: "Look at the shiny studio floor", "Crud!", "Why are we watching this?!", "Is it supposed to be noir? Call the Midwife is more noir than this,", and "It's just so awful." If she'd stayed the course, she may have found the final two episodes better - I definitely noticed an improvement. The kids joined me instead (daughter of 6 years old from episode 2, her brothers, aged 9 and 12, for the final part) and were not nearly so critical.

First-time round:
Why was home video-taping so difficult for some people in the 1980s? It can't have been just me, as there was a mini-industry of joke-telling on the subject involving stand-up comedians and sitcoms of the time. My memories of late 1980s Doctor Who are dotted with episodes that I tried to record but missed, or those where I only caught half, or those which I did record correctly but then accidentally got recorded over later because someone had rewound the tape a little. My first glimpse of The Happiness Patrol was shown on a Saturday morning kids show ('Going Live!' I assume) when Sylvester McCoy was being interviewed. I didn't - as many fans did - have a tape ready for such occasions to record these Who-related odds and sods - too inept to record things with no warning, you see.

I was out ward visiting, collecting dedications, on the evening of episode 1's broadcast, during my brief period as a Hospital Radio DJ; I remember catching a glimpse on a TV in a ward of the bit where Cy Town is drowning in a pipe of fondant. It was an intriguing excerpt, I suppose, but I wouldn't have wanted to extrapolate the whole story from just those few seconds; luckily, the recording did work. Episode 2, I watched as it was broadcast, but somehow failed to get onto tape even though I was sat in the same bloody room as the VCR. I remember reading reviews years later talking about how good was the scene between the Doctor and the two snipers, but I couldn't remember it at all. I was only over-familiar with the first and last parts. 

Reaction

The three-parter stories (two per year) were an interesting structural innovation of Sylvester McCoy's tenure in Doctor Who; faced with a reduced yearly episode count, the producer used a money stretching technique to give him four substantial serials: instead of doing a six episode story made up of a mix of studio and location work, they would do three episodes on location, and three in the studio, both as self-contained stories by different writers. It definitely got more bang for the buck; but did the stories themselves suffer? Before this point, it was rare to have a Doctor Who story with an odd number of episodes: 4s and 2s were common in the 1980s pre-Slyv, 4s and 6s before that; maybe there's a structural reason. For me, the 3-parters rarely work well. In The Happiness Patrol episode 1, for example, Ace gets angry that someone she's befriended has been killed; but she's literally exchanged four sentences with him over the course of a couple of minutes: the reaction is disproportionate, and therefore feels unearned and crudely melodramatic. Perhaps another episode of build up might have bedded in some relationships, and made this moment work better. Or perhaps it's just badly written and / or directed.

The Happiness Patrol suffers like most of the three-parters I've viewed for the blog previously (Silver Nemesis, for example, or Delta and the Bannermen) from too much going on - too many characters, too many subplots -  for any one of them to have resonance or depth. Why, when there's only three parts, was the trend to stuff in so much? What does Silas P contribute to the overall plot? Or Trevor Sigma? Or even the Kandyman, for that matter? It's a great idea for a villain, great costume, great performance, some great lines. But all of that fuel burns outside of an engine, because the character has nothing to do, and doesn't propel any part of the plot forward. He's also criminally introduced mid-episode, doing something non-threatening in a dull long shot, with no build up. This may not be wholly down to bad direction, as there were so many scenes deleted from the overrunning episodes; one of those could have been a better intro for the main villain (I couldn't muster enough enthusiasm to check the DVD). Still, they held back revealing the rubbish pipe people but not the Kandyman - they didn't have a clue what they had.

Talking of characters that don't propel the plot forward: what do the Doctor and Ace do in this story exactly? There are some little bits of business here and there, but mostly they just get captured, escape and get recaptured again. There's a big build up (including the episode 2 cliffhanger) about Ace's imminent gladiatorial turn in Happiness Patrol auditions, but then it doesn't happen. It doesn't happen! The Doctor meanwhile inspires a rebellion. Maybe. A bit. Does he, though? When exactly? We don't really see it on screen, except for an implausible bit where he persuades a Patrol squad that they can't shoot people who are smiling. Why don't they just go ahead and shoot them anyway? There are no witnesses, and the Patrol have been shown to be ruthless in previous scenes. Perhaps there are witnesses - it takes place in the forum, which we've been told it is mandatory for the populace to attend, but there's nobody in the audience (unless they were supposed to be quietly off-screen)? In the end, the dictatorship falls as it just must have been its time to do so, and all those factory workers and guards rebel on their own with no help from our heroes. It's hardly satisfying.

Sheila Hancock's barnstorming performance as Helen A, a caricature of then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, is rightly praised, but - the nice analogy about sweets as emblems of unfettered capitalism, and the miner's strike parallels, notwithstanding - Helen A's regime isn't like Thatcher's; and, though their soundbites are very similar, she doesn't act much like Thatcher either.  The disappearances are more like Pinochet, the factories are reminiscent of Stalin's 5-year plans. Lack of focus blunts the satire. But then there's the final scene, with the Doctor confronting Helen A, and her breaking down into tears, with a crane shot pulling up just a little, the music swelling, and it all comes together, and one feels like forgiving the many sins. There are a few other moments that are similarly wonderful amongst the mess: Gilbert M and the Kandyman squabbling, the scene with the Doctor and the snipers, of course; plus, the music is outstanding - one of the best scores of the 1980s, composed by Dominic Glynn. It wouldn't normally be enough to save it, but it's just such a great concept that it doesn't seem to need to be a great narrative. No Archbishop of Canterbury is ever going to write a sermon about Silver Nemesis, after all. (Though I have to say, if one did, I would want to hear it!) 

Connectivity:

Both this story and the last have an underlying theme about shallow things being used to placate the masses, and both take this to the extreme of depicting thematic killings by mechanised creatures: death by sweets in The Happiness Patrol, death by game shows in Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways.

Deeper Thoughts:
The Politics of Dancing (around the schedules). The Happiness Patrol's satirical focus could easily be a prompt for me to go off on one in the Deeper Thoughts section about UK politics again, but all of Doctor Who is political. Everything is political. Moving a popular TV show that's been shown on the same night of the week for more than a decade is, in some small way, a political act. Yes: Doctor Who's 11th series since it returned in 2005, Jodie Whittaker's first run, is not going to be a Saturday night adventure, but a Sunday night drama. It's been over a week since the announcement of this (which also confirmed that the series starts on Sunday 7th October) and I'm still processing it. There were presumably howls of outrage from some quarters of online fandom about it, but - and this is becoming a regular pattern - I've not seen any signs of negativity. Maybe we're all getting more mature; or, maybe the usual suspects are all outraged out, having already exploded in recent times about the Doctor being female and the Doctor Who Magazine Time Team being too young.

How do I feel about it? Slightly, just slightly, mentally dislocated. It is another bit of evidence to add to the accumulated weight that suggests that the new production team is making a hell of effort to do things differently, and make this a true relaunch: new Doctor, new gender, new number and length of episodes, new showrunner, all new commissioned writers, all new directors, new house composer, new logo, etc. etc. Now, a new day of the week to view it on. There is no precedent for a new series of Who to change so many things from the previous year, all in one go. When Steven Moffat took over in 2010, a lot of things changed, but the music and some of the writers at least provided continuity. And it was still on Saturday. Going back further, the closest analogue might be when John Nathan Turner took over, and revamped almost everything. It was still on Saturday, though, but it moved from that traditional slot the following year. To be presented with something so unprecedented now is refreshing, but ever so slightly scary.

Why scary? Well, that move in 1982, from the traditional Saturday slot where Doctor Who had resided for eighteen years to two early evening weeknight slots per week, is seen by some as the point where it all started to go wrong, the beginning of the end. After that, Doctor Who bounced around the schedules without a proper home: different weeknights for a couple of years, back to Saturday for a couple more, then finally the last death rattle before cancellation when the show was back on weeknights but opposite ITV's highest-rating programme at the time, Coronation Street. It was as if the schedulers didn't know what to do with it, couldn't understand why people were watching, and were a little bit ashamed of the show.

Any comparison of that situation to what's happening now is probably ridiculous, but we don't like change, we long-term fans, and we worry still that any day now, the BBC could decide to just stop making the show. It's understandable, as the last four or five years the show was on in the 1980s, that's how it felt, that's how it was - every series could have been the last. It's not the only political shadow that fell during the 1980s that is still potentially affecting my generation's feelings and behaviour now, it was a turbulent but never boring time to be young. The good news is I very much  doubt that's going to happen this year or any time soon: every little hint and glimpse we're being given - the latest being the wonderful 'glass ceiling' teaser - has been confident and successful. Roll on Sunday the 7th...

In Summary:

Conceptually, it makes me happy; but the actual story brings on mostly frowns.