K9 and Company: A Girl's Best Friend

Chapter The 119th, where the blog spins off its normal course!

Plot:

Sarah Jane Smith stays at her Aunt Lavinia's house in the Cotswolds for Christmas. Her aunt moved to this village a couple of years earlier, and started a market gardening business with some of the locals. Lately, its been going through a bit of a slump, so those locals - unbeknown to their business partner - decide to have a human sacrifice to Hecate, goddess of witchcraft, to improve turnover. Or, they may be planning the sacrifice as revenge because Lavinia wrote a letter to the local paper denouncing witchcraft. It's not clear. Apparently all this sacrifice and witchcraft is traditional round these parts. When Sarah arrives, Lavinia has mysteriously gone on her planned lecture tour of the US a month early, which puts Sarah on her guard. In Lavinia's absence, Sarah has to look after her aunt's ward Brendan. With him, she finds K9 Mark 3, who's been crated up at Lavinia's place after having been delivered by the Doctor as a gift for Sarah many years before. They get K9 to help them solve the mystery of Lavinia's whereabouts.

Despite having been put on her guard, Sarah still leaves Brendan on his own and goes to a party for a pair of local swingers, Pip and Jane - sorry, I mean Howard and Juno - Baker. Gardener George Tracey and his son Peter attempt to kidnap Brendan, but K9 sees them off. Sarah - now even more on her guard - doesn't notice when Peter comes back the following night and kidnaps Brendan for realsies. She's not much of a guard, really. With K9's help, she finds all the locations where a ritual might be happening, and they check them out one by one, arriving just in time to save Brendan. Later, Sarah and Brendan are round at the Bakers for Christmas lunch, laughing about Brendan's near death experience and subsequent trauma. Ho ho. Aunt Lavinia calls, and she's safe and well. Meanwhile, K9 practises singing a Christmas carol.

Context:

Another new Doctor Who blu-ray boxset arrived, covering season 18, Tom Baker's final year. This one is not so close to my heart as the previous release (Peter Davison's debut and the first episodes I ever watched live on broadcast). I was still a non-believer watching Buck Rogers on ITV at the time of Baker's swansong run. I snapped up the set on release anyway, as it is a set of stories I've subsequently come to respect, rather than necessarily love. As usual, I planned to roll a die to decide which show from the set I would blog. I've already covered three of the season 18 stories, so I had a choice of four remaining. I also like to leave open the option not to blog a story at all, to preserve something of this experiment's random selection raison d'etre. That made five choices, but there's no such thing as a five-sided die. Then I remembered K9 and Company was tacked on to this release, on the Bonus Material disc - it could take up space number 5. I rolled a standard six-sided die, hoping for Logopolis with new special effects (4), or maybe Warrior's Gate, my favourite story of the year (3). I rolled a 5. K9 and Company?! Sorry, gods of Chance, but faced with that prospect, I rolled again. Another 5. And again. Yet another 5. The universe must really hate me: in short order, I am to complete the Doctor Who oeuvre of writer Terence Dudley, four of the silliest Who or Who-related stories there ever have been.

I watched the story with the Better Half and all three kids (boys of 12 and 9, girl of 6). Everyone had a little shimmy to the theme tune, but it went downhill from there. The action was holding the kids' attention early on, but - despite managing to sit through two middle-aged women talking about the local postmistress, and endless, endless discussions about soil - they'd had enough before the climactic sequence, and drifted off. The Better Half and I managed to the end. My youngest is usually quick to spook, but had no problem with any of the coven scenes. The Better Half and I tried keeping a tally of the sheer number of costume changes Liz Sladen goes through, but we lost count. I'm not sure she's dressed the same in any two contiguous scenes.

First Time Around:

I didn't know K9 and Company was silly when I first saw it. I thought the beginning title sequence was exciting and the story was magical. I was only ten years old, mind. This would have been on Christmas Eve 1982 when it had a repeat showing on BBC2. The original showing, on 28th December the previous year, came shortly after the Five Faces of Doctor Who repeat season, a set of vintage stories showcasing old Doctors which ran on week-nights in Autumn 1981, which was what had hooked me in to Doctor Who in the first place. I no doubt would have loved to have had an extra 50 minutes of Who-related goodness to enjoy before starting on my first broadcast season proper, but I had no knowledge that K9 and Company existed. It wasn't trailed at the end of any of the repeats, and I must have missed any advertising of it in the yuletide rumpus. Watching a year on, not knowing that this wasn't its premiere, I enjoyed it. But I was a full-on fan by then, and had watched simply loads of Doctor Who, including Earthshock, so it probably wasn't as special to me as it would have been a year earlier. My only clear memory was that I was viewing it on my own on the portable TV in my Mum and Dad's bedroom, which suggests that the rest of the family were watching some other channel's festive fare in the living room.

Reaction

One thing you can say for Terence Dudley is his Doctor Who scripts never resulted in anything boring. Bewilderingly odd - yes; stuffed with unintended subtext because of loose writing - often; operatically bonkers - sometimes. But never dull. Recently, I grappled with Black Orchid, and shortly before that Four to Doomsday. Both were peopled with characters whose motivations were completely dislocated from reality, where the plot happened in random fits and starts amidst distracting scenes unconnected to the overall thrust of the narrative. K9 and Company is reassuringly consistent: instead of the action halting for a dance or a buffet, this time it's for a discussion of market gardening (I'm undecided on whether that's better or worse). K9 and Company is probably Black Orchid's closest rival, in fact, for Doctor Who's Circus Freak story award: both provoke a guilty fascination, and give scope for almost endless unhealthy analysis. (Interestingly, Dudley's final script, The King's Demons, is a bit more coherent and sensible - he never wrote for the show again after that.)

It's not all bad, though. On the positive side, and starting right at the beginning, Ian Levine and Fiachra Trench create a sparky theme tune that contains significantly more energy than the rest of the story. The beginning credit sequence that accompanies it may be risible, but it is fun. My favourite moment is the succession of stuttering zooms towards Elizabeth Sladen perched atop a stone wall, which they just about get away with, but then it's followed - like a punch line following a feed line - by the same succession of stuttering zooms towards the same stone wall, but this time it's her co-star, a plastic prop, teetering atop there. It's howl out loud hilarious, and if you haven't ever experienced it, I recommend googling it and watching the sequence in full on youtube. But the cut from that sequence and theme to a hackneyed Junior Hammer House of Horror scene of a hooded black magic coven members chanting in the dark is such a downer that watching it you can feel the life draining out of you. It's the televisual equivalent of a slow groan.

It would be difficult not to improve from there, but it still takes a good few scenes. We see lots of dull grown-ups talking about business, but no excitement. Sladen tries to work some warmth into her performance, but it's impossible as the script depicts her as irritable from the very beginning, before she even knows there's a conspiracy; it even goes to the trouble of having other characters remarking on it a couple of times ("Don't be so touchy" for example). Brendan, played by Ian Sears, is a nice and well-acted character, but he gets very little to do. John Leeson's K9 characterisation lifts every scene he performs in, and it's a relief when the metallic mutt finally appears. But it's astonishing how few scenes our eponymous tin hero appears in after that. With a series, everyone would no doubt have settled in, they'd have worked out a way to feature K9 a bit more, and all would have been fine; but, in a one-off - as this turned out to be - the regulars do not come over as a team one would want to spend more time with.

There are a few other positives - music and sets are good throughout, for example, and the festive setting is nice. The negatives are, well, everything else; most egregious, though, is the script. Dudley is attempting the same trick he would do in Black Orchid, including tropes and images from a supernatural monster horror to spice up what is underneath just a humdrum crime story. He didn't have much choice: the scope of this pilot episode was set from the production team, and there was a strict no magic, no monsters rule. We can only speculate whether this would have been relaxed for a series, but in this pilot episode there was a challenge: do it as a straight crime investigation show and risk putting off the Doctor Who fans tuning in expecting something similar to their favourite show, or try to fudge it. Probably the latter course, although less brave, was the right one to take.  But how it is handled creates problems from the off.

A large part of the early narrative is an interminable examination of the mystery of the unsent cable. Sarah Jane is worried because her aunt is not at home to meet her as planned, and didn't contact her in advance. She has supposedly left early for a lecture tour of the US; right at the start, though, we've been shown a black magic rite which included the aunt's photograph. This should be intriguing: has she come to a sticky end through the criminal or supernatural activities of a coven she had recently written about? Unfortunately, in between there's a scene of her alive and well explaining to someone that she's going to have to leave early for a lecture tour of the US! Why include that scene at all if it damages the mystery? Well, probably because the audience has no idea who she is - she's a new character, who only has relevance because she's a relative of the protagonist. The interim scene of Lavinia spouting exposition to her neighbour is needed to set all that up. Considering that the coven's ire has been stoked up by something written in a newspaper, and our protagonist is someone who writes for newspapers, it would have been surely better to start with the coven burning a photograph of Sarah Jane, then dissolve to her arriving and finding her aunt missing. You wouldn't need to feature the aunt at all until the end, and there'd be intrigue that she's been nobbled in revenge against her pesky journalist niece.

Aunt Lavinia's disappearance is a complete red herring: when we finally get an explanation of the missing cable, we find that it's because the bad guy never sent it. But why? It doesn't help the coven in any way to stir Sarah Jane's curiosity; in fact, it can only hinder them. Why not just send the cable as Lavinia asked? The only reason is to fool the audience, not fool any character. The story is full of loose ends like these. The policeman dies in what is made to look like a supernatural attack, but can't be. So, we're left with the explanation that he had a heart attack in shock when he saw a goat. It's ridiculous. If one's going to have a pretend supernatural story that turns out to have a rational explanation, the rational explanation has to be, well, rational. Scared to death by a goat?!!!! Elsewhere, the script is trying to make the Bakers look suspicious, but doesn't have anything to work with. The actors do their best to add some subtext to help this along, but that has the unfortunate side effect that Juno Baker is essentially coming on to Sarah Jane in every scene they're both in. There's a dangerous point in the middle where any older audience member can't help but believe that there's going to be the sudden inclusion of a subplot where the Bakers spike Sarah's punch, then lock her in their underground sex dungeon.

Luckily, this doesn't happen. In fact, very little happens really, once you extract all those loose ends: the coven wants revenge on Lavinia, but they don't achieve that - she's just left the country for legitimate reasons. The coven wants to silence the policeman, but they don't - he's just randomly died of a heart attack. At the end, they're just about to commit a ritual murder of a public school boy... for what reason exactly? Maybe to get back at Lavinia, maybe to make their crops grow. The script explicitly states that this isn't something they've ever done before, so why are they starting now? Members of the local community with jobs and families - and a very peculiar hobby, admittedly - suddenly want to perform a human sacrifice. There isn't even sufficient justification for one person to behave like this, let alone thirteen. It's just silly. I can much more easily believe a techno-dog from the year 5000 with a laser in his nose. 

Connectivity: 

Both stories see the protagonists investigating in a closed-off community which is conspiring against them, and uncover a dark secret keeping the members of that community in thrall.

Deeper Thoughts: 

The history of spin. For the sake of my own sanity, I'm not proposing to cover every episode of every Doctor Who spin-off for the blog; this post can be considered a one time only experiment. Just doing all the old and new series episodes is more than enough. It's nice to have an embarrassment of riches, though. In the 1990s, when Doctor Who wasn't in production, the idea that there would be episodes produced for another fourteen years and counting would have seemed unlikely enough; telling a fan back then that, beyond that, there would be two very successful spin-offs running for many years too - as well as another slightly less successful spin-off and two factual strands about the making of the programme - you'd have been met with disbelief and derision. You wouldn't even need to wait for the 1990s, it would have seemed outlandish even in 1982, shortly after K9 and Company's broadcast, in the wake of the show's failure to get picked up for a series. It was a shame, as a sister show aimed at a younger audience in the 1980s might have helped balance things out against the main show, which had turned a bit more cult-ish and was aimed more at an older, more obsessive audience in that decade.

For all its faults, the K9 and Company format - unlike its titular hero - had legs. This is demonstrated by the success of one of those later spin offs, The Sarah Jane Adventures, which is an only very slightly retooled version of K9 and Company. The other main success, Torchwood, had early episodes every bit as ridiculous as A Girl's Best Friend, but care and attention to develop the format stabilised things, and it paid off. Even Class, the least loved of any 21st Century spin-off, got a full series. It might be fun to blame it all on the awful script for the pilot, but K9 and Company's stumble on trying to move from pilot to going concern was less about the quality and more about the powers that be at the Beeb. So, this one 50-minute episode was destined to be the only example of a Doctor Who spin-off that ever got made in the 20th Century, but that wasn't necessarily for the want of trying in earlier decades.

In the later part of the 1960s, Dalek creator Terry Nation expended a lot of energy trying to get a Doctor-less  Dalek TV series off the ground, but it didn't quite make it. In 1970s, there was talk of doing a UNIT series, or a series featuring Jago and Litefoot, two large-than-life supporting characters from 1970s story The Talons of Weng-Chiang. That talk might have only been a brief conversation in the BBC bar, but it didn't stop audio company Big Finish from later creating long-running ranges based on both these ideas, as well as many more. They even did their own version of the adventures of Sarah Jane too, a few years before Elizabeth Sladen returned to play the character again on TV. This was all long after 20th Century Doctor Who finished, though. The closest there was to a spin-off in non-TV merchandise during the life of the show was a short-lived set of books on the Target imprint (home of Doctor Who novelisations) called The Companions of Doctor Who. These books were published in 1986 and 1987, but there were only three: a new adventure for Harry Sullivan, another for Turlough, and finally a novelisation of K9 and Company (Sarah Jane and her dog get everywhere!). Alas, for some reason, Terence Dudley's story of simple country folk planning to murder teenagers to improve the pH of their soil put an end to the continuing series. It seems to be good at that.

In Summary:

Great title sequence (I'm serious!); shame about the show.

The Macra Terror

Chapter The 118th, when the Macra become a bit more animated at last!

Plot:

The Doctor, Ben, Polly and Jamie arrive at a human colony in the future. Everyone seems very happy, there's festivals and dancing, and muzak fills the air jollying everyone along in their work in the not-sinister-at-all gas mines. Only one person, Medok, is not happy; he believes the colony is being overrun by giant crab creatures called Macra. The Doctor frees Medok from a cell where he'd been imprisoned, and they witness the creatures wandering around a deserted area outside the main colony buildings. Medok is recaptured, and is taken off for some definitely not-sinister-at-all correction procedure in the hospital. The Doctor returns to his friends in their temporary quarters to find that they have been subjected to hypnosis during their sleep. He vandalises the equipment applying this process; Polly and Jamie seem unaffected, but Ben has succumbed and is now a loyal Colony drone. He reports the Doctor to the Colony guards. The other three are put to work in the mines, with Ben sent to spy on them. They discover that the Macra are in charge, and have been controlling the humans to harvest the gas they need to live. Ben breaks his conditioning and helps the Doctor manipulate the gas supply, blowing up all the Macra. The colony wants to elect the Doctor as their new leader, so the TARDIS team make a quick getaway.
 

Context:

I watched the colour animated version on the big screen at the BFI South Bank in London. I was accompanied by fan friend Trevor, mentioned several times before on this blog; other fan friends old and new, Chris and Alan, were also in the audience. Alas, my longest-term fan friend David, also mentioned many times before here, had a prior engagement for the weekend, and was very miffed not to join us; we raised a glass or two to him in the BFI cocktail bar afterwards (in fact rather too many more than two were raised in all, it was a good night). Anneke Wills, who played Polly and did an onstage Q&A after the screening (see below for more details), was around in the bar until quite late too. I saw Christel Dee and Gary Gillatt around the building earlier, but that was it in terms of spotting anyone vaguely well-known. There was a good turn out of cosplayers, with a smattering of Troughtons and a very realistic Hartnell in attendance. It was a good atmosphere, all told. I think there was a lot more buzz than for any story shown at the BFI since the first animated release, The Power of the Daleks.

First-time round:

I bought the cassette tape - cassette tape!!! - version of the soundtrack in the summer of 1992, and likely listened to it first at home, as I would have been on my hols from University at that time. It had linking narration by Colin Baker written in the past tense in character: a later Doctor recounting a story from his past. This was the standard approach of those early releases; the script and Colin's delivery were markedly better than others at that time, but it still didn't really work. When the CD version was released in the year 2000, it was the only one where they retained the original narration: all the other re-releases updated the script and got a companion actor from the story in to perform vocal duties. A few clips had surfaced in between those two releases, and I first saw them when they were included on the 1998 Missing Years VHS that came with The Ice Warriors. Finally, I saw the full animated version at the BFI as described above. They did release a CD version in 2012 with narration by Anneke Wills, but I never purchased it. It's included on the DVD as an extra, though. As a copy of the DVD was included in the BFI event's ticket price, I will get to experience that version before too long.   

Reaction

Though the choice of The Macra Terror as the latest candidate for animation was likely dictated by logistics - limited number of episodes, few guest characters, most of the regular cast already had character design work banked from The Power of Daleks animation - the story has a lot to recommend it anyway. It was rated sufficiently by BBC Worldwide to be one of the earliest official audios on tape, and then again later on CD. It has an intriguing premise and memorable baddies. Plus, since those clips were discovered in the 90s, another key factor has came to light: there was so much room for visual improvement.  To be fair, fans were under no illusions that Macra Terror scored high in the production values stakes before we had the footage as evidence, but seeing was disbelieving: a wobbly claw threatening the aged Controller, Anneke Wills gamely shuffling herself into the clutches of a listless Macra, and a few other disappointments. The animation meanwhile delivers creepy scuttling creatures that can tower over people, pick them up, swing them around, and threaten them with a drop into a mighty chomping maw. This was never going to be possible with the expensive but static lump of fibre-glass made to represent the monsters in 1967.

There are lots of similar improvements and surprises, right from the off. It's a nice touch to create a pre-credits prologue, using the last lead-in scene of previous serial The Moonbase. Then, the colourised beginning credits kick in, unexpectedly featuring the Doctor's face appearing in its cartoon art version; I think this is the first time that's been done. The superlative backgrounds depicting various different locales help to expand out the world of the Colony, and create a greater sense of place than the original sets managed (at least from the remaining photographic evidence). As ever when watching on a big screen with a large audience, one gets surprised by the number of laughs. The animation retrieves wonderful moments, such as when we see the Doctor's indignant reaction to the suggestion that he, of course, would "like his clothes cleaned". You can't enjoy that gag when looking at a still image while some narration plays out; it's thus that the animation adds the most value. Ditto the sequence where Jamie has to do a highland fling to make his escape, which was never much fun to listen to, but now is an absolute joy.

There are places where the animation has to compromise and so ends up losing points compared to the original. Notably, an entire sequence is excised early on where the TARDIS team are pampered at a sort of day spa, and the Doctor is smartened up (much to his chagrin). It avoids a very complicated effort of animation, but robs the piece of some humour, and removes the only lengthy demonstration of the enticements that this society uses to keep its populace subdued. The ending too snips out a nice call-back moment when everyone has to emulate Jamie and dance their way out of the Colony to escape. This version instead does a lengthy, slow pull out through a window, to a long shot of a Colony building exterior, giving us a mini-cliff wondering how the Doctor will extricate himself from this planet's cloying gratitude. It almost works, but not quite. The jury's out on one other moment, the capture by Jamie and Ben of Medok at the start of episode 1. As per the narrated audio, Medok's trying to grab the stick that Jamie's wielding, and the TARDIS crew members think he's coming in for an attack. As it's animated, though, it just looks like they've piled on poor Medok for no reason. It could, however, have looked just as bad in the original production - we'll probably never know.

Apart from those minor points, the animation is an absolute triumph. The only other issues are inherited from the original production. Like a very similar later story The Happiness Patrol, the fantastic concept is let down a bit by the slightly clumsy narrative constructed to illustrate it. There's a lot of pointless to- and fro-ing, Jamie seems to spend ages wandering round caves, and Polly doesn't get a whole lot to do (the curse of the three companion story). Medok is a great character and early on is presented as a significant ally for the Doctor; the story makes an implicit promise that this disbeliever will triumph and be proved right. But then he dies abruptly, and is not mourned nor even mentioned again. Head of Police Ola is good too, a memorable henchman; but, he presents us with a bit of a plot hole. This society is being hypnotised into being mindless happy worker drones, so why would the Macra need guards, particularly guards whose leader is so aggressive? Maybe Ola's sleep hypnosis tape was turned up a little too loud. One also has to suspend a lot of disbelief to accept that giant crab creatures have managed to set up the intricate technology required to sustain the illusion of the happy colony. The ending is very bloodthirsty too. The Doctor blows up every member of a sentient species without hesitation or apology.

That's not to say there aren't many positives in the original production: the sinister atmosphere of cheerful banality works well, with empty slogans, blank-eyed positivity and tinny muzak, and is an interestingly different backdrop. When the music isn't deliberately being irritating, it is very good mostly (but sometimes veers towards being unintentionally irritating). Fraser Hines as Jamie starts to come into his own in this story too; but, the best performance and the best part of the story by far is Ben's subplot. Michael Craze gets to give a different shade of performance when under the influence, in sharp relief to his usual cheeky chappy character. He then gets to play the arc of Ben fighting against this brainwashing to go from betraying his friends to saving them. It's the best opportunity a script gave him during his time on the show, and Craze makes the most of it, in his last full story (he would leave alongside Anneke halfway through the following serial, The Faceless Ones).

Connectivity: 

Both stories feature a dance where one or more of the regulars make an escape after being pursued by the baddies. The cloudy forms of the Family of Blood before they take over a host look quite similar to the gas being mined by the colony members. That's about it.  

Deeper Thoughts:

Johnson (L), Fiddy (R)

Pilot's report to Control: the BFI Macra Terror screening and Q&A, 16th March 2019. The ever dependable duo of Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy were our hosts as usual. They again had a handful of Doctor Who products to give away for the correct answers to Doctor Who trivia questions. I managed five out of six correct answers this time (couldn't remember the name of the spaceship the Doctor and Jamie land on at the start of The Wheel in Space - it's the Silver Carrier, of course) but I never put my hand up or "shouted for Dick" to come over with the roving microphone, as: a) I'm shy, and b) I have all the products already. After stating that they didn't have any copies of the Jodie  Whittaker box set this time, there was a solitary cheer from off. At the BFI's Logopolis screening in February (which I didn't attend as I didn't know it was happening until too late - was it advertised anywhere?) there had been a contentious negative reaction to the idea of winning the newest series on DVD, reports of which were doing the rounds on twitter afterwards. Reading some accounts, you'd come away thinking that the audience that previous time had been all middle-aged white fellows booing diversity, but it seems like it was just this one bloke in the audience both times. Don't believe the hype.

Director John Davies (in middle)

After the quiz, Justin held a cheeky "non-binding referendum" of the audience on whether they would like to see the colour or black and white version of The Macra Terror. The colour one did seem to win by volume of cheers, but it was the only one cued up to be played anyway (a referendum with an inevitable result now matter how people voted - who'd believe such a thing could ever happen?!). Before the first two episodes were shown, there was a brief onstage interview with the serial's original director, John Davies. Macra was his only Doctor Who, early on in a long directing career. He told an anecdote about how during pre-production the then producer Innes Lloyd gave him the advice to "Make it frightening, old boy", but later insisted a sequence was cut for being too frightening. Davies had clearly done his job too well. He also, like everyone who worked with the actor has, I think, spoke of how wonderful Patrick Troughton was. He'd been "sweet and gentle" encouraging Davies, who was young and inexperienced at the time, helping the director along the way.

(L to R) Fiddy, Salmon, Geraghty, Norton

The first two episodes were then shown, followed by a panel Q&A with members of the animation team: director Charles Norton, and artists Adrian Salmon and Martin Geraghty. Highlights of their chat included how they use the audio rather than the shooting script as a guide for the animation, which means that they can sometimes be scouring the soundtrack wondering what tiny noises might have been. Finding reference material for character design is something of a scavenger hunt, often using photographs from other non-Who productions the actor was in, sometimes these being from years later and having to be 'de-aged'. Colour reference is sometimes very hard to come by too; for Macra, the only basis for colours to use was what the cast could remember. Eye colour is a challenge, as it can be hard to make out even if you have colour footage or photos (Norton related that in the end he had to ring up Daniel Hill, guest actor on the previous animated story Shada, to ask him what colour his eyes were). Norton also confirmed that doing the animation in colour was a commercial consideration that they had no choice in; but, a black and white version is available on disc. The final question was the inevitable  'Which story next?' and the team were as tight-lipped as expected. Someone in the audience suggested the 12 episode behemoth The Daleks' Master Plan, and all three members of the panel visibly shuddered at the thought of such a workload.

Johnson (L), Wills (R)

Before the next two episodes were shown, there was a nice moment where a round of applause was held for the late Graham Strong, the person who recorded all the soundtracks in good quality when they were broadcast in the 1960s. He'd been in the audience for The Power of the Daleks screening to take his praise, but alas has passed away since. It's down to him, and a few other amateur pioneers like him, that Doctor Who fans are blessed with a complete audio archive of their favourite show. Once the final two episodes had been shown, Anneke Wills bounded onto the stage and, after only a moment joyously greeting the audience and telling us she loved being here with us, said she hated her animated character's look. The remainder of her interview was the same mix of the candid and the enthusiastic. Early on, she mentioned that a favourite part of The Macra Terror was when she was paired up with Pat but without the other boys: "It was nice not having to share". I got the impression the same was true on the day; alone on the stage, she was freed up to say some things she might not have been able to otherwise, to be "wilful" as she put it!

Amongst the gems wilfully revealed was the tale of watching back her first story, The War Machines, and seeing Hartnell check her out with an appraising up and down glance when they're introduced, and later on have his arm a bit too low around her waist: "He fancied me." She recalled on a visit to the set of the 2013 drama about the making of early Doctor Who, An Adventure in Time and Space, that she had been fussing around David Bradley (who was playing William Hartnell) making sure he was feeling okay, asking if he needed anything, just like she had done with the real Bill back in the day. Another anecdote from the filming of the show was a moment where Anneke ran into shot when Reece Shearsmith arrived playing Pat, shouting "No, no, no" and redid his hair which was all wrong. The crew were apparently very shocked, but the fans watching with her all said "Well Done". Convention circuit appearances and events like this BFI screening were clearly something Anneke loved; conversely, when Doctor Who was broadcast back then, she recounted, the only feedback you got as a regular was the odd comment from someone in a pub, but there was complete freedom with no getting hassled.

Maureen Lane (in the middle)

Despite Anneke wanting to go to the bar ("Just one more question, then it's glass of wine time, much as I love you all"), Maureen Lane, who played the Drum Majorette, was brought up on stage for a few more minutes at the end. Maureen made a self-deprecating gag about how there was not much choice, as she's the only one of the guest cast left. Her scene had been filmed in isolation, and she hadn't met anyone else in the cast or even seen a crab. When she mentioned that she'd only first met Fraser Hines recently (as part of the publicity drive for the animation), Anneke said "Uh-oh!". This was part of a general good-natured joshing about Fraser's womanising ways, but he was also the topic of the most interesting comment at the event. When Anneke had been asked about him earlier, rather than her giving the theatrical luvvie answer I'd expected about how wonderful it was to work with him and so on, Anneke instead touched on the real hurt she and particularly Michael Craze had at the time, that the inclusion of this new guy was going to spoil the good thing they had going on. She described Fraser as arriving with spaniel-like enthusiasm and full of jokes, but Craze was very threatened having another actor playing another male Doctor Who companion role, and did not like having to share out his lines with this interloper. It did come to pass that Craze's contract was not renewed, and rather than stay on as she was offered, Anneke left in solidarity with her workmate.

Another great screening, then, and another great recreation of a lost story. When Doctor Who started to be released as sell-through home videos, there were only five Patrick Troughton stories that could be released in full, out of 21 that were made in the 1960s. The Macra Terror's release makes the total available to buy 14. This is because of reconstructions, finds and - not least - because of superlative work by different animation teams. Two thirds of the way through, and no reason not to think that they might all one day be released. I'll drink to that, and indeed I did, into the evening after the screening in the overpriced but pleasant environs of the BFI bar. Looking forward to the next one!

In Summary:

A crab-tastic cartoon that's a welcome addition to the canon!

Human Nature / The Family of Blood

Chapter The 117th, where the Doctor is only human, of flesh and blood he's made.

Plot:
A villainous family of aliens, who want to use a Time Lord's powers to help them live forever, are hunting the Doctor and Martha. Our heroes hide out in an English public school in 1913. Martha is posing as a maid, but the Doctor has been fully converted into a human by a piece of Time Lord tech never previously mentioned called a Chameleon Arch, and thinks he's a teacher called John Smith; his Time Lord self is meanwhile stored in something that looks like a pocket watch. Over the course of a few months, John Smith falls in love with the matron of the school, Joan. Not knowing how to stop this, Martha has to just watch it happen. On the night John is taking Joan to a local dance, a pupil at the school, Tim, with a low level telepathic ability, takes the watch - he can hear it whispering to him. The family arrive, and take over the bodies of a mixed bag of local types including another boy from the school, Baines. They also animate an army of scarecrows and corner John Smith at the dance.

With Tim and Martha's help, John and Joan escape, and everyone hides at the school. The pupil cadet squad defend against the family, and so they retreat to their spaceship and start using heavy artillery. Tim returns the watch to Smith, but John doesn't want to turn back into the Doctor.  It appears that he has betrayed everyone, going to the spaceship and handing the family the watch. But it's a bluff: it's the Doctor pretending to still be John Smith, and he manages to make the family's spaceship blow up. Characteristically, he then hunts each member of the family down, one by one, dispensing cruel, unusual and everlasting punishments. Just like he does, you know? Typical Doctor. Trapping people in eternal torment - it's so him. Anyway, there follows an emotional goodbye with Joan, who's a bit miffed with the Doctor to say the least, and a visit to Tim in the future when he's a veteran, having survived WW1.

Context:

This was the first story in what seems like ages chosen from a straight random selection from the whole remaining history of Who, and fate has settled on an absolute corker. When I put on the DVD (from the series 3 boxset), the Better Half planned to do some work, not really able to spare the time. She asked me which story it was, and cursed me when I told her: there was no way she could sit this one out. So, we sat down as a family on a Sunday afternoon and watched the first episode. To let her get back to her work without too much disruption, I saved the second part for another day. The build up towards the end of the episode, the cliffhanger, and the post credits trailer were all so exciting for the children (boys of 12 and 9, girl of 6) that I had a lot of pleading and even mild threats when I took the disc out of the machine. But I stood firm, and we watched the next episode after a week's gap (as nature intended). All the children enjoyed the story, but the scenes where Smith and Joan discuss his imminent sacrifice, and wonder what their life together would have been like, were accompanied by groans and moans of "Just open the watch already" from our eldest. The emotion might have passed him by, just a tad.

First-time round:

I first experienced this plot some time in spring or Summer of 1995, when I read the Virgin New Adventures novel that the story is based upon. I remember struggling to find it anywhere at first, but it finally turning up in Volume One Bookshop in Worthing a few months after it was published. That was time enough, even in those days when news travelled at slower than dial-up speed, for the buzz about how good it was to have reached me. It was thought to be something very special, and after reading it I could only agree. Twelve years later, I watched the television adaptation live as it went out on BBC1, as I suspected it would be very special too. After watching, I thought it more than lived up to the book's quality. The TV version has turned out to be popular ever since, being in the top ten of both the two big Doctor Who Magazine polls held since its broadcast.

Reaction

There's something wrong with Human Nature. Now, at the outset, I want to say: I very much like this story. There are quite a few shows that are generally rated highly that I can't get on board with at all (this one, would be a recent-ish example). I don't mind taking pot shots a sacred cows, so I wouldn't pretend if I didn't mean it: it's a great story, which I enjoy. But from one angle - a significant angle, too - it's bollocks. The underlying concept of the Doctor giving up his Time Lord essence and living as a human - Paul Cornell was inspired by an enduring story format used everywhere from the New Testament to Superman II - is a very strong one. It's just that the narrative doesn't give a plausible reason why the Doctor's decided at this precise moment to do it. In the novel, it's to better understand his companion's emotional state (the New Adventures companion, Bernice Summerfield, having suffered a terrible loss in the preceding book). There's no such motive here. It's explicitly stated that his actions were not dictated by any enhanced threat the Family may have posed; instead, he was being kind to them. This is borne out by the speed at which he dispatches them at the end. But it's also explicitly stated that by hiding out, he's caused innocent people to be killed. Why didn't he stand his ground and get it over with, instead of making the situation worse with his capricious desire to cosplay as an ordinary chap in pre-war England?

If you can get past that, then it's all wonderful. It's so wonderful, in fact, that as one watches, the programme compels one to ignore that fundamental flaw: let it pass, and enjoy the impact of the Doctor's experiment, don't fixate on why the hell he's doing it in the first place. Look the other way. If you do, you're rewarded with a cracking love story, an interesting anti-war subplot, and a lot of nice existential material about the nature of self. Plus spaceships, explosions and ray guns. To fit all this in, everything is economically written, and propelled by magnificent contributions from cast and crew across the board. Obviously, many plaudits have to go to Jessica Hynes, who achieves a wonderful chemistry with her leading man / Time Lord. Freema Agyeman takes up another side of the bizarre love triangle doing some emotional heavy lifting without it looking like too much effort. She was, perhaps unavoidably, much better served during her first full year as a companion than during her guest spots in the subsequent series. Once the engine of her unrequited love arc is gone, there isn't much for her to do, and the performances seem a lot more wobbly. Here though, she's great.

The guest cast are excellent. Thomas Sangster and Harry Lloyd give scene-stealing turns as members of the school (though both young in 2007, they were still pretty experienced having worked as child actors from an early age). Rebekah Staton and Gerald Horan have less to get their teeth into, but nonetheless give solid support. Pip Torrens is as good as he always is. There's a magnificent confrontation between his Headmaster and Lloyd's Family of Blood member in the second episode. It was so mesmerising that I only realised after it was done that it was a lengthy scene from a long way into a story that didn't contain any regular characters; such a set-up is a rarity in Who, but carried off well here. Any amount of grandstanding from anyone else, though, as nice as it might be, is going to be overshadowed: this episode belongs to David Tennant. He plays his two roles, sometimes switching between them in the space of one scene, with brio and finesse. The story was structured, at least in part, to be a showcase for the leading man to show off a bit of his range, and it works spectacularly. The agony of his situation - just as he's enjoying his life, he finds out it's all a lie, and he has to sacrifice himself - could wring outpourings of emotion from the stoniest of hearts.

There are too many wonderful moments to mention, but one I can't finish without highlighting is the sequence where the futility of war is framed in a perfect visual metaphor: an army of schoolboys shooting at hollow straw men. The script does not rush to judgement either, and is stronger for remembering that any narrative about armed conflict, even one that has all the hindsight of the terrible impact of the Great War, does better when it presents both the pro- and the anti- in a balanced way, before it finally does pick a side. No character or motive in this story is a stereotype just to be mocked or blamed: there are no straw men arguments here.

Connectivity: 

Another story where the TARDIS team take a trip into twentieth-century history; like Rosa, this is a historical period on the cusp of a major shift (the beginnings of the civil rights movement, the first World War). In both stories, the Doctor's black companion experiences the everyday racism of the time. 

Deeper Thoughts:

One for the Dads / Mums / Shippers. Human Nature / The Family of Blood is all about what it means to be human, and what could be more human than fancying people off the telly? I've spoken before, with a smidgen of embarrassment, of my crush on Jodie Whittaker. It's difficult to write about without seeming either sexist or a bit of a prat or both, but I think it may prove instructive, so I must continue. I've always thought Jodie was very good looking, and her personality comes over as attractive in interviews too. I wondered whether I would be put in the position for the first time that the Better Half was in throughout the David Tennant era, that of fancying the Doctor. But the way that Jodie plays the Doctor is completely asexual, or so it seems to me. There's lots of childlike wonder and big sister-ish energy, but no sexuality in there at all. This is in contrast to Tennant's take on the role, which - presumably with some encouragement from his showrunner - is very similar to his performance as the younger version of the title role of Russell T Davies' Casanova, to the point that that adaptation, screened in 2005, looks a lot like an extended audition. It seems unlikely that Doctor Number Ten was not intended to have a least some of the Venetian sybarite's sexual magnetism, if not his insouciance.

This would be standard practice of Doctor Who for long periods of its run. It was often stated, to put it crudely, that certain regular cast were put there, and skimpily costumed, for the benefit of the Dads watching. Later, in a ham-fisted attempt at equality, there was a bit of stuff for the Mums too (Mark Strickson as 1980s companion Turlough, for example, stripped down to his speedos in his last story). It's all nonsense of course. It was all played so innocently - as it had to be, family show and all that - that no adult could be even slightly titillated by anything in Doctor Who. Even in the sex-starved 1970s.

It's more likely that the Doctor Who companions, male and female, gave fan service instead to the more hormonal segment of the audience. When I first started watching Doctor Who, in 1981, I fell madly in love with Tegan Jovanka from pretty much the first episode I saw her in. My friend Jamie at school only had eyes for Nyssa, and thought I was crazy, but Tegan was the one for me. Watching Kinda was a seminal moment: Janet Fielding, her character's mind having been taken over by the Mara - a giant snake - plays as close to the erotic subtext as she can get away with in the pre-watershed timeslot. I needed a lie down after that episode, though I was too young to know exactly why. (Sorry - smidgen of embarrassment - probably I'm sounding sexist or a bit of a prat or both, but these things are nonetheless true.)

Looking back, though I regret my clumsy pre-pubescent thought processes, I don't regret my choices. Tegan is strong and self-possessed and refuses to be defined by the Doctor, or anyone else. Ultimately, it comes down to the personality of the character (or perhaps the personality one is projecting on to them; Doctor Who scripts didn't have much time or space to allow characters to become that well rounded, so there was room for one's imagination to play). A curious illustration of this was that the Better Half, during this re-watching of the Human Nature two-parter, found David Tennant much more attractive as John Smith. When he started remembering his true self and spouted confident Mockney patter, it put her right off.  This is understandable: Smith's vulnerability and bravery are precision-tooled to make viewers of a certain disposition go doe-eyed and melt. And there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, that sort of thing gives rise to creativity, which is always a good thing. There is a whole strata of fan fiction focusing on 'shipping', i.e. making up stories about characters in your favourite shows getting it on. There have even been official tie-in stories about obvious pairings such as Ian and Barbara, Ben and Polly, Adric and K9. Okay, I may have made that last one up, but probably there isn't any likely combo out there that someone hasn't conceived and documented (though I'm not searching online to check). The unfolding text of Doctor Who knows no boundaries...

In Summary:
An excellent edifice built on a slightly wobbly premise.