Love & Monsters

Chapter The 162nd, which details how Blue Peter delivered a green Victor.

Plot:

Elton Pope narrates his home-made video journal about the Doctor. He was haunted by seeing the skinny, spiky-haired tennis shoe-wearing version of the Doctor visit his house years before, when he was a young child. More recently, he has experienced weird goings on (show window dummies coming to life, spaceships roaring overhead and crashing into Big Ben, even bigger spaceships hovering over London on Christmas Day). Online searching brings him to Ursula Blake's blog, where he sees a photo of the man he remembers seeing as a child; Ursula introduces him to a small group of like-minded enthusiasts all searching for the Doctor too. They become LINDA (the London Investigation n' Detective Agency) and meet regularly to compare theories about the mysterious figure. After a while they are having fun as friends without it needing it to be about the Doctor any longer. This lasts for a while, but then a new member - Victor Kennedy - joins the group, providing information to help LINDA track down their elusive prey, getting them back to their original focus, but sucking out all the fun in the process. Then, members of LINDA stop turning up one by one.

The group's attempts at searching lead Elton to Rose's mum, Jackie Tyler and the Powell Estate. His mission from Victor is to seduce Jackie to get information on the Doctor, but he can't bring himself to do it, as he realises he's in love with Ursula. He instead tries to cheer Jackie up; she's sad at being left on her own with Rose off travelling. Unfortunately, Jackie finds a photo of Rose in Elton's pocket, realises his ulterior motive, and chucks him out of her flat. Elton confronts Victor, leaves the group, and boldly asks Ursula on a date. Alas, all this is cut short when Victor reveals himself to be a green monster from the planet Clom (or possibly Klom) who absorbs people, including all the missing members of LINDA who are semi-digested, sticking out of his globby torso. He absorbs Ursula as Elton watches in horror. Running to escape the same fate, Elton runs into the Doctor and Rose (the latter has come to tell him off for upsetting her Mum). The Doctor encourages the semi-absorbed members of LINDA to pull in different directions; they pull Victor apart, and he explodes, dribbling down into the pavement. The Doctor reminds Elton of the day in his childhood when they met - it was the day his mother died; the Doctor wasn't able to save her from some invading monster or other. The Doctor also manages to partially resurrect Ursula, as a paving stone face. She and Elton now live together, and even have something of a love life.

Context:

Watched from the DVD by the whole family (me, the Better Half, boys of 14 and 10, girl of 8) one day when we were all enjoying a week's holiday at home (no air corridors or 14 days quarantine for us this Summer). This story has a bad reputation, which I'll talk about more below, but everyone loved it. The Better Half didn't even intend to watch it all, but sat down after watching the pre-credits sequence and stayed for the duration. Apart from a bit of scoffing at the idea that anyone would approach a mysterious police box ("You'd run away!"), there was nary a criticism voiced by any of them. 

First time round:

Watched live as it went out on its first BBC1 broadcast, Saturday 17th June 2006, accompanied by my heavily pregnant Better Half, who was expecting our first child (boy, of minus 2 weeks old at the time). This marked the end of a particular tradition of watching Doctor Who that I had indulged in for nearly 20 years: fumbling around with video recorders and tapes in anticipation of the show starting. Ever since 1986 and episode 1 of The Trial of a Time Lord, I had been attempting to record Doctor Who episodes, and Doctor Who themed programmes, as they went out. And missing the very beginnings of episodes, and taping over the ends, and causing all sorts of other accidental injuries to my home made and felt-tip labelled collection. From the next story after Love & Monsters and onwards to this day, I have used a PVR to capture the broadcast video onto a hard drive, and - despite the fact that the technology was in its relative infancy then - the automaton instantly managed to record each episode better than I ever could manually.

Reaction:

Peter Kay overplays it; not by that wide a margin compared to the tone of the work of the rest of the cast and crew around him, but he overplays it. I'm saying this up front as this is probably the only aspect of Love & Monsters I don't wholly adore, or at very least wholly admire. Curiously, when comparing notes with the Better Half afterwards, she thought that he was fine once he was revealed as the Abzorbaloff, but overplaying it when doing the Victor Kennedy persona; I thought it was the other way round. So, maybe both aspects are not a problem for some. That tone that I mentioned before is certainly heightened, though this is explained away by the script. We see the flat boring scenes of Elton's video diary, but much else is a depiction of his recall and - perhaps - his imagination. The script leaves us guessing as to how reliable a narrator Elton is, but hints very strongly up front - when Elton admits that he's packaging things up to be as exciting as possible - that we're not getting 100% verity of reportage. The script is even coy about how much of what we're seeing is actual footage - the cutaway to Elton John is something real Elton could have sourced online, but the pre-credits chase with the Hoix monster is unlikely to be. There was nobody making cine camera recordings during Elton's childhood, but what we see is presented in that format. Most likely, we're seeing the standard TV convention - illustrations of what is being narrated, as it runs through Elton's head, interspersed with shots of him at his desk.

Things move so fast that probably none of this occurs consciously to the audience on first watch. The cast would presumably have needed some direction though, on how to pitch it. This is where it's a shame that modern Doctor Who doesn't get extensive pre-shoot rehearsal as used to be the standard. The line between comedy and drama is a narrow one here, difficult to discern, but it's got to be walked with precision. Kay is just a tiny bit outclassed by the rest of the cast, who deftly balance things, at least to my mind. As an actor, Kay is obviously a little bit less experienced than the rest of them, and rehearsal would have ironed this out. One could watch the story and miss all of its subtlety and depth, just see a comedian in a silly green outfit who appears to be mugging for the camera, and write the whole thing off instantly. I think that's indeed what has happened with a lot of people who rate this show very poorly (more on that anon). But it's fantastic! Honestly it is. Clever and original, and plumbing emotions that Doctor Who normally never touches, and few other dramas that I can think of do either. Writer and showrunner Russell T. Davies uses the constraint of the 'Doctor lite' format to showcase an ordinary person, a little bit socially awkward, who finds a nice group of mates - that's the light side of it - and then loses them all as the group is torn apart - because there's a seam of darkness, chaos and melancholy too. (Side note: even without rehearsal, the five members of LINDA do come across as if they're a gang who've know each other for a while; it's lovely and seemingly effortless - particularly when they're all performing ELO songs.) 

Davies has to incorporate the ultimate in plot shopping list items, as he has to make room for a Blue Peter competition-winning monster, designed by a 9-year old. William Grantham's creation, the Abzorbaloff, is a fun villain with an original hook, and the costume and effects work to realise the creature efficiently delivers what was on the page. It's just that what was on the page was a bright green blob thing drawn by a primary school kid. If you don't know this - or if you do, and have an uncharitable stony heart - it might again cause you an instant knee-jerk reflex of distaste. Davies uses this, consciously or not, as a metaphor for that person that takes over, thinking he's making things more efficient, and absorbs all the joy out of any endeavour. This could be taken as just an extended in-joke about Doctor Who fans: Elton is hooked on the Doctor from when young, and then when older joins a fan group. The members of LINDA reflect different types of fans too: Ursula is the investigator (one can imagine her trying to track down missing episodes or production paperwork), Bliss is the younger fan who uses the show as a spur to her creativity, Mr. Skinner is the intellectual, coming up with theories, and Bridget is the sort of fan that likes the escapism, as it helps her deal with the sadness elsewhere in her life. To be honest, though, LINDA could be any kind of group. We've all known a Victor Kennedy at some point from childhood onwards; the guy who doesn't get it, and ruins the group dynamic. I've just never seen this put on screen before - or since. As the first, best and final words on a subject, it is refreshing and interesting.

Rumours have abounded about whether Davies had a specific real world model in mind for the Doctor Who fandom equivalent of Victor - the big guy who doesn't really get it, and stops things being fun - but it's neither here nor there. The parable applies universally. This is probably why it doesn't matter too much how the interloper is played. It was crucial, though, for the everyman central character to be cast and performed right. Marc Warren is a revelation; cast against type, as Elton is far away from the wide boys he tended to be playing at this point in his career, he shines in every scene. The love story with Shirley Henderson's Ursula is beautifully done too. I don't know to this day whether Ursula's resurrection at the end is a bum note or a stroke of genius. Either way, it's very dark, and the script doesn't shy away from that. The best performance though is from Camille Coduri as Jackie Tyler. Every scene she's in is a gift to her, as she gets to play sweetly conniving, faux naif, sultry seducer, mother dealing with an empty nest, and then finally to do the anger of the betrayed as she realises Elton's been using her all this time. I think this is her best story, and the performance she gives one of the best in the show's 50+ year history.

People who hate Love & Monsters, and there are many, will probably think I'm mad to give it this much due. It is undeniably experimental, though: whatever you think of it, you can't deny it blazes a trail for a new style of story that would later bring Blink and Turn Left to the screen amongst others. It is also something of a nexus point for these early years of the relaunched show in that it is the only one that contains a reference to Bad Wolf (the name of the virus that has supposedly removed references from the Doctor from databases), Torchwood (the source of the files of intel that Victor brings to LINDA) and Harold Saxon (who's mentioned on the newspaper that the Abzorbaloff hides behind).

Connectivity: 

Another Doctor Lite episode with very little material featuring the Doctor (or companion either, in this case), so the story could be 'double-banked'. i.e. filmed by another crew simultaneously with work proceeding elsewhere on another one (in this instance the Ood / Black Hole 2-parter). Both this story and The Girl Who Waited also both contain references to the planet Clom (the Abzorbaloff's home planet, and the site of a Disneyland which could be virtually experienced by patients stuck on Apalapucia).

Deeper Thoughts:

Polls and punctuation. I've mentioned before that the so called 'Marmite' Doctor Who story - one you either love or hate - is a mythical beast up there with dragons, bandersnatches, slithy toves and the crowned Saxe-Coburg. Despite the advertising, some people are indifferent to Marmite, and there's no such thing as a Doctor Who story that splits the audience evenly along a love/hate fault-line. A gut feel interpretation would point to Love & Monsters being the most likely candidate if such a thing were possible, but the numbers don't back this up. The appreciation index, a metric collected by the Beeb soon after broadcast, which gauges how much the people who are watching like what they see, was at a historic low of 76 for this story. Since the show's return in 2005, no episode has ever received a score so low (the appreciation index methodology for 20th Century Who was different so can't be directly compared). In the two official Doctor Who Magazine polls held since the story's 2006 broadcast, the "Mighty 200" in 2009, and the "First 50 years" poll in 2014, the story languished in the lower section - it also dropped significantly in the five years between these polls, only just avoiding a place in the bottom 20 in the more recent one. Obviously, some people adore it (it's not just me, there are glowing reviews from the time of its broadcast and since that you can find with a quick google), but it seems clear that a larger majority of people feel the opposite.

If there was a story that divided the lovers and the haters evenly, it would make mathematical sense for it to be midway down those poll results tables. But a quick look at the ten or so stories either side of the midway point in either poll shows no stories with particularly bad reputations, nor gives any hint of any discernible connecting logic between the stories at all; none of the middle stories is the same between the two polls. One can see a pattern looking at the bottom of the polls; there's usually something embarrassingly naff about them. Not necessarily a big thing, but if the rest of the story isn't of world-beating pedigree, it's enough to relegate it. Day-glo decor and Bonnie Langford impressions in Time and The Rani, for example; a bad performance by a child actor in Fear Her; day-glo decor and bad performances by child actors in The Twin Dilemma. But mid-table are the stories where there's nothing too offensive, but nothing particularly exciting either. Looking at the midway point of the stories in descending order of Appreciation Index makes even less sense: Fear Her, the post-2005 Who whipping boy, which always comes bottom of any poll, is squarely in the middle, alongside other stories with much better reputations - it's obviously more hated by fans than the general public, whereas Love & Monsters is disliked by both. The only sensible message one can take from this quantitative analysis is that a divisive story won't divide the audience evenly - it's more likely to be less loved.

Should programme makers hold off from taking risks and experimenting, though? Of course not; that way blandness lies. So, ultimately this was probably a pointless exercise (like most if not all attempts to quantify the artistic and subjective). More interesting to me as I scoured these lists of story titles was noting that - containing as it does an ampersand - Love & Monsters is one of very few that has a "special character". It's much rarer than I'd thought. A few stories have apostrophes (The Daleks' Master Plan, Father's Day) and numbers (Galaxy 4, 42, Orphan 55). Two stories in the history of Doctor Who have a hyphen - Time-Flight and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe is the only story title with a comma, but at least one individual episode title in the William Hartnell era had a comma too (Small Prophet, Quick Return - part 2 of The Myth Makers). Then, there are three more special cases, each with their own unique use of punctuation. For many years, Love & Monsters was the only one, but in the last couple of seasons - one per season, so maybe it's part of Chibnall's master plan - a new one has been added. In Jodie's first year, Kerblam! claimed the exclamation mark, and this year Can You Hear Me? was the first to be phrased as a query. Think of that. For the whole of the 1980s, the Doctor had a question mark or two constantly on display as part of his costume, but it's taken until 2020 for one to appear in a story title. I will be disappointed if we don't get a story with an @ or a $ next time a series of Doctor Who airs.

In Summary:

I love Love & Monsters, but most seem to find it monstrous.