The Masque of Mandragora

Chapter The 107th, which features lots of masks, but only one masque.

Plot: 
The Doctor accidentally delivers a malevolent energy ball, the Mandragora Helix, to San Martino, Italy in the 15th century where it threatens to divert the renaissance and plunge history into an ever-lasting dark age. Careless of him that, really. The Helix has some affinity with the local court astrologer Hieronymous, who is secretly the leader of the Cult of Demnos, a group of blokes who like to dress in robes and masks like the lot in Eyes Wide Shut, but actually not much like the ones in Eyes Wide Shut, thinking about it. Anyway, the Doctor stops Sarah from being sacrificed, defeats the Helix's servants by draining off their energy with some wire, and has a lot of sword fights. Job done.

Context:

Another one enjoyed by the whole family (me, the Better Half, boys of 12 and 9, girl of 6); this time we watched an episode a night from the DVD stripped across the week. Perhaps because it's not one that anyone's familiar with (because, fairly or unfairly, I always imagine it's a bit dull, so never put it on), everyone loved it. Middle child was playing a game on his tablet instead of watching episode 2, but moaned and moaned when we started on episode 3, insisting that he be allowed to catch up. And every cliffhanger was followed by the traditional chorus of "Next ep, next ep..." which is always a sign that something's going down well. The Better Half very much liked the clobber, including the boots, that Liz Sladen wears as Sarah Jane for most of the running time ("much better than the awful Andy Pandy outfit"); the frock she dons at the end wasn't felt to be too bad either.

First-time round:

I bought the VHS during 1991 in the long Summer holiday between finishing my A-levels and starting at St. Aidan's College, University of Durham. It was an interesting time; I had planned to work through the Summer to earn some money for the new adventure ahead, but soon after finishing at Worthing Sixth Form College, I became very unwell with chicken pox. I'd caught it before when I was a child, but apparently, it is possible - but rare - to get it twice. I was told this in an isolated room at the Doctor's surgery after I'd walked down there from home wrapped up like the Elephant Man because of my crusty visog. I had to go back again a few days later, as it turned out that a secondary infection caused each pock to swell up to something like a bubo. I remember spending the Summer worrying that I wouldn't be well enough to start University, but luckily I made it (just about). It left me nothing much to do for those weeks except watch Doctor Who videos while feeling awful. Mandragora was one of a few videos released in those weeks that took my mind off my ailments. It came out at the same time as The Three Doctors VHS, in a "Bad guy's mask is taken off and there's nothing underneath" box set... or else I've just made that up.

Reaction

It's rare for any Doctor Who story of the classic era to be flawless in its visual execution. Production values were just as important to the crew then as they are now, but the method of making the programme (weekly in-studio grind with only brief sections filmed as single-camera set-ups) made achieving a good-looking show more challenging. The budget allocated also could never be enough for a show whose reach had to exceed its grasp. The hackneyed observation is that Doctor Who's sets were always wobbling (usually followed by comments to the effect that this didn't matter, as you just had to use a little imagination to suspend your disbelief). The sets, though, were usually very well made and wobbled no more than any other contemporaneous show. If you want to see a set wobble, look at 'The Builders' episode of Fawlty Towers for some egregious examples; nobody (with the exception of disgruntled Doctor Who fans like what I am) ever makes a fuss when John Cleese does it!

No, usually Doctor Who got those basics right; it's far more likely, to stumble over one particular element where the resources available cannot match the script's ambition, which then mars an otherwise solid production. The Giant Rat in The Talons of Weng-Chiang is a famous example. It's commendable then that The Masque of Mandragora avoids this: every element looks better than average, some reaching unprecedented levels of excellence. The location footage makes very good use of the architectural follies of Portmeirion in Wales; the sets and costumes are rich and authentic seeming; the cast - including sterling work from a young Tim Pigott-Smith - is uniformly competent and directed well. Though a little less convincing, the sci-fi sequences early on where the TARDIS has its encounter with the helix energy in space are still serviceable, and aren't on screen for very long. There's even a jester doing some fire-eating - what more can one ask? Some scares might have been nice - it's not one to send kiddies behind the sofa, with only the brethren's masks being a bit creepy, and the reveal of Hieronymous's "blank look" a nice shock moment. The rest, though it looks great and the plot rarely drags, never really sets the pulse racing.

The sheer quality of the production might just be a sign that they were playing it safe, that the reach never was exceeding the grasp. The BBC at the time had a lot of expertise at depicting this sort of costume drama, with outfits and props available in stock that had likely been used for a Sunday Shakespeare previously. It would be churlish, though, to criticise its makers for boxing clever, and making the strengths of the corporation work for the good of the production. And it did go down very well with a jaded 2018 audience, so it can't be bad. Perhaps the final episode runs out of steam a bit. Two larger-than-life villains have driven the plot of the first three episodes: Count Frederico, played with relish by Jon Laurimore, and Norman Jones more than matching him playing Hieronymous. At the end of part 3, though, the mechanics of the plot have killed off the former and reduced the latter to a voice-only presence. Impetus is therefore lost, with the episode left treading water with the Doctor engineering a trap and everyone else having a dance.

Connectivity: 

Both Mawdryn Undead and The Masque of Mandragora feature no monster, but have instead a human antagonist corrupted by a dark force from beyond time or whatever (one looks like a sparkler, the other has a stuffed bird on his head - the banality of evil?!).

Deeper Thoughts:
Pronunciation let me down, and I'm left here. Thousands and thousands of Doctor Who reference books, articles and reviews have been written over the years, and I don't think I've ever seen any make note of one particular glaring huge Doctor Who fact: everyone in The Masque of Mandragora pronounces Mandragora wrong. It's not man-DRAG-or-a, it's MAN-dra-GOR-a - a couple of trochees. It's not like it's a made up alien name, it's in Shakespeare (Othello to be precise). If it weren't pronounced as above, Iago's line "Not poppy, nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, can ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep which thou owedst yesterday" would not scan. No, I don't know these things because of any high-falutin' classical education, I know them because the 12-inch mix of Pet Shop Boy's 1991 single Jealousy has this quote spoken over the intro by Neil Tennant. And before recording it, Neil queried the M-word with Ian McKellan who told him how to say it, and he resolutely does not say it like any of the cast of Doctor Who, so there!

It annoys me every time I watch: I see it written down in the credits and hear it in my head the correct way, but then the first time the Doctor says it wrong in episode 1, it always pulls me instantly out of the story. And it's not the only piss-monunciation in Doctor Who. Perhaps inevitably, there's lots of cases where it's a made-up name: callbacks to planets Metebelis and Spiridon in stories many years later get them wrong; Kevin Lindsay, the actor to first play a Sontaran, changed the pronunciation from what was intended by script and director, announcing something along the lines of "It's my bloody planet, mate, I'll say it how I like". But there's just as many instances where the word is a real one that they could have just looked up. For example, clearly neither Jon Pertwee nor the director knew how to pronounce 'chitinous' which the Doctor's scripted to say in 1973 story The Green Death. His incorrect take was broadcast, and this prompted one wag to write in to the producer, starting the letter "The reason I'm writin' is how to say 'chitin'".

Worst culprit of all to my mind is Tom Baker. 'Mandragora' is consistently misspoken, so that was a decision cast and crew must have come to in rehearsal, not down to Tom alone. But in other stories, he seems to be going out of his way to say things wrong, just for the sheer hell of it. In The Horror of Fang Rock, a story that features a shape-shifter, he talks about "the chameleon factor", but pronounces it Shameleon. It's just before a cliffhanger, so gets recapped the next week, doubling the wrong. In The Robots of Death, he describes some "Terran insects", but says it like 'Tehran', as if bees only come from the capital of Iran. Worst of all, as it just boggles the mind, is a discussion with a trickster character at the end of The Ribos Operation where he refers to some fingersmithery as "sleigh of hand". He just misses the 't' off the end of 'sleight' and says a completely different word! This one perplexed me for a long time; I was convinced that my knowledge of the phrase must be faulty, and it must derive from something sleigh-based. Perhaps the quickness of the hand when ringing a sleigh-bell is enough to fool the eye? No, it was just Tom being silly. During the recording of these programmes, had Mister Baker - I hesitate even to suggest it - had a very good lunch, perhaps?! 

Getting too pedantic about this would be no fun, of course, just as it wouldn't be to criticise other people's grammar too harshly. I always loved Kingsley Amis's division of people into two groups: Berks and Wankers, which is instructive enough to be quoted in full: "Berks are careless, coarse, crass, gross and of what anybody would agree is a lower social class than one’s own. They speak in a slipshod way with dropped Hs, intruded glottal stops and many mistakes in grammar. Left to them the English language would die of impurity, like late Latin. Wankers are prissy, fussy, priggish, prim and of what they would probably misrepresent as a higher social class than one’s own. They speak in an over-precise way with much pedantic insistence on letters not generally sounded, especially Hs. Left to them the language would die of purity, like medieval Latin." The best place to be, as ever, is the middle ground, accepting that language changes and evolves through usage. The trouble is, that feels a little bit too much like leaving things to the 'will of the people', something that certain people in the UK, like me, think we've had quite enough of lately!

In Summary:
Solid, entertaining and very well made, but - despite the depiction of the Mandragora Helix early on - this story is lacking a bit of sparkle.