Full Circle

Chapter the 291st, where the Doctor artfully dodges having to return Romana to Gallifrey.

Plot:
The Doctor, Romana and K9 are in the TARDIS en route to Gallifrey, but things go wibbly when they pass through a highly-scientific (magic) portal that leads to another universe, e-space. Instead of Gallifrey, they land on Alzarius. This is seemingly a temperate paradise where people harvest fruits and swim in rivers and the like. Then, Mistfall comes - an environmental change every five decades or so caused by the planet's orbit in space. This is a time where the people must shelter inside the Starliner, a ship that crashed on the planet years before bringing castaways from another world, Terradon. The people are told the atmosphere becomes poisonous during Mistfall, but it's merely a time when homicidal creatures emerge and roam around. The authorities of the people on the Starliner, a three-person committee called the Deciders, are cagey about sharing any details of these Marshmen with the people. Why could that be? A few young rebels, the Outlers, are stuck outside the ship when it is closed up, and meet with the Doctor and Romana. Two of these Outlers are Varsh and his brother Adric. The Marshmen knock K9's head off, and a marsh spider bites Romana which puts her under the Marshmen's control. The Doctor meanwhile enters the Starliner. The Outlers are separated from Romana in the TARDIS, and accidentally materialise it inside the Starliner. Romana helps the Marshmen break into the Starliner.

The Doctor confronts the Deciders and discovers some truths: the ongoing Starliner maintenance work that the people are engaged in is pointless busy work: the ship has been ready to take off for centuries, but nobody knows how to fly it - the records that survived were all about maintaining the ship, but nothing survived about operating it. The other revelation is that the people on the Starliner did not come from Terradon, they are instead descendants of Marshmen who invaded the ship many generations before. As someone had gnomically pointed out early on, they've come "Full Circle". Although, if they'd come full circle, wouldn't they be evolving into Marshmen again? I'm not getting how they've come full circle. This is like people getting a 180 mistaken for a 360; the people of the Starliner have only come "Semi-Circle", if you ask me. Anyway, Varsh is killed fighting to hold back the invading Marshmen, The Doctor manages to cure Romana, repel the Marshmen, and to get the Starliner in the air to take the evolved Starliner dwellers off into the stars. When he, Romana and K9 leave, Adric stows away on board the TARDIS.

Context:

I watched this from the Blu-ray across two weekends in January and February 2024, two episodes at a time with a week between them. The younger two of my kids (boy of 14, girl of 11) were in attendance for some periods, but it didn't hold their attention throughout. The youngest was particularly enamoured of K9 and his adventuring around Alzarius accompanied by Paddy Kingsland's jaunty motif. She was very unhappy when he was beheaded and took no further active part in the story, as she thinks - quote unquote - that "K9 is the best!". I wonder that a lot of children watching thought the same when this was first shown; the production team appreciated the metallic mutt much less than the audience, and continually - and often brutally - wrote him out of stories, before finally getting rid of him altogether a couple of stories after Full Circle.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with current stories being broadcast serially. This story marks another season of Doctor Who completed, classic series 18, Tom Baker's seventh and final run from 1980/81. This is the 20th season completed out of the total of 39 to date (at the time of writing). In full, I have now completed classic seasons 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23 and 25, and new series 2, 6, 10, 11 and 13).

First Time Round:

One of my earliest glimpses of Doctor Who ever was from this story, when I was changing channels on the TV. This was before I became a fan and regular viewer, but exactly how long before I cannot tell as I'm not certain whether this glimpse was during the original broadcast in the autumn of 1980 or the terrestrial repeat in Summer 1981. It was a moment with Romana under the influence of a Marsh Spider bite with tendril lines over her face, which seared itself onto young me's memory. I watched the complete story from a reasonably good tape-to-tape copy from fan friend David (mentioned many times before on the blog) in 1992; then, in the years thereafter, I collected it in incrementally better fidelity on sell-though VHS when it came out in 1997, then DVD in 2009, and finally Blu-Ray in 2019.

Reaction:

Famously, Full Circle was written by a teenage fan. Andrew Smith was 17 years old when it was made, 18 when it was shown, but he'd been pitching ideas to the production office for many years before this one was finally developed and produced. Smith is undoubtedly therefore responsible for making all teenage fans for the next ten years wrongly believe they could be in with a shot of getting their Doctor Who story made (and yes, I was one of them); more positively, a few of those young scribblers ended up creating Who stories for books and audio during the wilderness years when Doctor Who was not on TV, and this was one of the things that kept interest in the show alive such that it could eventually return. If Full Circle hadn't been made, maybe Doctor Who would not still be a going concern now, showing as it did that the writing of Doctor Who didn't have to be an old man's game? What's curious though, is that it's not exactly an idea bursting with youthful vigour. If you didn't know, you'd probably guess it was written by a middle-aged man, with its themes of indecision, impotence and fear of getting replaced by another incoming generation. This may be because Smith was a preternaturally mature talent (and he was), but it might also be connected to the script editor Christopher H. Bidmead. In every one of the three stories in the loose e-space trilogy that kicked off with Full Circle - for all of which Bidmead was screenplay midwife as he was for all the stories during the year - there's a spacecraft that can't take off, usually crewed by ineffectual men (often with beards). This is one of the more energetic of this type of story in season 18 - often the visuals during this season are aiming for operatic grandeur (The Leisure Hive, Warrior's Gate) rather than thrills and spills.

The vitality in the story, and the excitement in the visuals, comes mainly from the director Peter Grimwade's approach to the material. Grimwade had worked on Doctor Who in various capacities before, but this was his first director gig, and he would make his mark with Full Circle and a number of other stories over the next couple of years as either director or writer. The script gifts him one great sequence, where the marshmen arise from the depths and advance, and a couple of juicy story reversals. Grimwade gets the most out of these. The first of these reversals is that the Starliner has been ready to take off for centuries, but nobody knows how to fly it; the second, that the inhabitants of the Starliner are not the descendants of the original crew and passengers that crashed generations ago, but are instead descended from the hyper-adaptive Marshmen that broke in many years before. Again, this is satisfying as presented, but the lifecycle gets more confusing if one gives it any thought after watching. The main issue I think is the inclusion of the marsh spiders. If the idea is that they evolve into Marshmen, then why are both presented as existing in the same environment at the same time? Is the spiders' power to control people whom they bite significant to the evolution? Or is it, as I suspect, just to add another monster and create some frightening moments? To be fair, a lot of those moments work (one was so effective it stuck in my mind for many a few years - see First Time Round above), and it's good to give Lalla Ward the chance to do some possessed acting, which she almost never got to do (other companions would be hypnotised left, right and centre).

In general, Grimwade is better at getting effective sequences on location film than he is in the multi-camera studio (he'd get better at creating dynamism in the latter environment in subsequent stories he helmed). A few of the scuffles on the Starliner are a little messy. The performances Grimwade gets out of his cast are generally of high quality. George Baker, James Bree and Alan Rowe (the last of whom had previously been in many Doctor Who stories including Horror of Fang Rock - see Deeper Thoughts section for more on that story) as the Deciders do solid work; Tom Baker gets to do some nice righteous anger scenes confronting them. The younger members of the cast playing the Outlers all comport themselves well, even Matthew Waterhouse as incoming regular Adric, who was inexperienced with TV work. The character he's saddled with doesn't do a new young actor any favours. Initially conceived by the production team as a kind-of Artful Dodger in space, the scripts subsequently produced for him just don't present the character as anything like that. He's instead a precocious member of the elite, with intellectual skills, but no street smarts, who - one assumes from the scenes in Full Circle - will gradually learn during his travels with the Doctor (in other words, exactly the same arc as Romana when she was introduced). Adric isn't eventually developed that way either, and ends up as a character without a raison d'etre.

Adric is, though, the first new regular character of a new regime, and they would get a bit better at creating such characters anon. With these first signs of changes to the regular cast, bringing in younger actors, Full Circle feels like the first proper John Nathan-Turner story. The scripts for the previous two stories (The Leisure Hive and Meglos) would not have been out of place in seasons run by the previous producer, indeed the first was a script from the go-to writer of that previous era given a 1980s paint job. Full Circle, with a new young writer, a new young director and a new young regular was the point where things really started to change.

Connectivity:

Both Full Circle and The Caves of Androzani are four-part 1980s stories produced by John Nathan-Turner. In both, there is a plot point about the orbit of the planet on which the story is set periodically causing environmental changes (Mistfall on Alzarius, mudbusrts on Androzani Minor).

 

Deeper Thoughts:

From Alzarius to Ruta 3: Season 15 screenings at the BFI Southbank, 4th February 2024. Some milestones one passes without noticing. In July 2023, with the blog post for The Power of Kroll, and without any fanfare, I finally covered the entire Doctor Who oeuvre of producer Graham Williams. This write-up of a Williams-related BFI day has therefore to be attached to a Tom Baker story from after his time, albeit only the third story to be broadcast after Williams had left and the producer job had been taken on by John Nathan-Turner. The next story broadcast after Full Circle was a reworking of a Terrance Dicks script that Williams had commissioned to be his first produced story (eventually being replaced by Horror of Fang Rock). Despite some differences of look and feel where Nathan-Turner wanted to distance his stories from the previous era, 1980s Who generally builds on what Williams achieved. The three seasons where Williams was in charge, from 1977 to 1980, saw a widening out of the styles and tones of tales that could be told compared to Tom Baker's early stories, including more literary and lyrical styles. Chris Chapman, director of a new feature-length documentary Darkness and Light - The Life of Graham Williams made this point in his introduction to the doco, praising Williams's "intergalactic imagination". The screenings at the BFI were to tie-in to the latest Collection Blu-Ray box set, season 15, on which Darkness and Light was to be a special feature. But the day - and in particular the doco - also served as a long overdue tribute to everything that Williams achieved with Doctor Who.

Chris Chapman

It was almost a full audience in NFT1 hearing Chapman speak despite it being a 9.30am start on a cold Sunday. He explained that the project could only go ahead with the blessing of the Williams family; happily, when he approached them and explained his intentions they agreed to go ahead. The narrative of the documentary is propelled only by the interviewees and the lion's share of material comes from the family, Graham's window and three children, each with a subtly distinct perspective on a man who's been absent from their lives, but not their hearts, for over three decades now. Before the screening started, Chapman entreated us to avoid sharing too many details on social media, to better allow people to find out any new information provided within the context of the documentary itself. It was the right advice, which makes it difficult to share much more. I will just note two things: one is that Williams died in Summer 1990, which happened to be a point where I was re-embracing my fandom after a few years of more casual enthusiasm for the show. The tragedy coincided with my joining the Doctor Who Appreciation Society and re-subscribing to Doctor Who Magazine, so I saw a lot of detailed career retrospectives and other tributes to him then. Despite all that, I learned a lot from this documentary. Second, after it had ended - just like with Chapman's JNT documentary Showman (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more details) - I needed a moment or two to process it. Be prepared for it to provoke some emotion. As it was, there was a full 45 minutes before the next screening, a showing of a new version of Horror of Fang Rock with new effects, made for the Blu-ray box set.

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Ayres 

The hosts for this event were as usual Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy. They brought all the usual trappings of these events, including many a double entendre: talking about a recent podcast they did together that had done good numbers, Johnson said "Dick does always boost the ratings". They invited Mark Ayres up for a brief chat about the 5.1 mix we were about to hear (which was very effective). Then, Johnson read out some of the twitter activity connected to the screening. Someone was moaning that their train was delayed because of a trespasser at Slough, "Don't they know I have Louise Jameson to see". Someone else was wondering if "any cute boys" might be in attendance. "You're not going to find them in this audience" said Johnson, eliciting a chorus of Panto boos from the assembled. The quiz followed, with answers to trivia questions getting the person that could shout "Dick" first and loudest some swag. After that there was an impromptu chat with fan and comedian Frank Skinner, who is sometimes in the audience for these events and is cajoled onto the stage to give a fan's view, or to make the audience laugh, both of which he did on this day. He talked mainly about Terrance Dicks, his onetime neighbour, about whom was made the magnificent documentary Terrance and Me that Skinner fronted ("Though not one deemed good enough to be shown at the BFI" he added in mock hurt, though the Blu-ray set that the documentary was on never got a BFI screening as it came out in the middle of Covid restrictions). He also shared an anecdote about spending a night in what he thought was a disused lighthouse with his partner, that turned out not to be disused at all. This culminated in the punchline "Those glow in the dark condoms were a waste of money."

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Skinner

The first two episodes of Fang Rock were then shown. My blog post on the story, form early on in the blog's life, can be found here. The new effects for the crash of the ship at the end of episode one are much better, but they still run as long as the original (which infamously holds on the model-work far too long). I'd have been tempted to trim it down, but that's probably impossible given the way the new effects are presented on the discs (as branching versions of the episodes rather than as a separate versions on their own). The main thing that stood out on this watch, though, was just how good the story is, with whatever effects. A slightly duff model shot notwithstanding, Horror of Fang Rock is top drawer Who, one of the best. It might get forgotten that it's quite so good, as it's never been in the top ten of polls, up there with Talons or Genesis or Caves; but, watching it again I realise, as the youth might say, that it slaps (more on slaps in a moment). Invited on stage in between the two halves of the story was the person responsible for the new effects Chris Thompson. Chris has worked on many of Pete McTighe's short films that act as trailers for the box sets (including the one for season 15 that was shown later on that day in the BFI). He had to view lots of footage of boats crashing into one another for research, which was "weirdly therapeutic". Apart from the boats, the first two episodes had a lot of subtle improvements of rotoscoping in the lamp room scenes, but the major contribution to the story had not yet been seen by the audience, as it featured only in episodes three and four: a new version of the Rutan creature. Thompson had successfully pitched to do the creature as a practical effect using puppetry, which I think was a great decision: the texture of the skin and the tendrils would never have been as easily achievable on a budget if it had been done CG.

Thompson (L) shows Johnson the Rutan puppet

The final two episodes were then shown, and the new Rutan looked great; it was also accompanied in the new sound mix by some farty, squelchy noises that amused a lot of the BFI audience. The only other major audience reactions were related to the (deliberately) irritating character of Adelaide - there was a round of applause when Leela slaps her during a hysterical outburst, and another when she died. The episodes being done, Thompson came back on the stage to display the model Rutan in all its green glory. Next up was a selection of clips from the Blu-ray box set's Value Added Material. We were shown excerpts from the new Making Of for Fang Rock, from Darkness and Light (for those that hadn't been around earlier), some funny moments from Behind the Sofa, and the short film / trailer depicting Leela on Gallifrey fighting Daleks during the Time War. This last one was then discussed by Pete McTighe and Louise Jameson, who both came up, one after the other, onto the stage. McTighe had wanted to right the historical wrong of Leela's (and Louise's) half-hearted exist from the series, and also take the opportunity to have Leela meet the Daleks (something she never did in her time in the TARDIS on TV). Asked about a spin-off featuring the older Leela, Jameson told the audience to "Ask Russell" as in T. Davies, and added that she'd be back "in a nanosecond" if she was asked. McTighe, when asked about the budget for this latest short film, which - from what was on screen - looked to be larger than usual, said it was "20 quid and a ham sandwich". He also attempted some expectation management, suggesting that people couldn't expect big productions every time, and that he might have to produce a more traditional clips-based trailer occasionally in future. This was over-excitedly reported online later with headlines suggesting the trailers were being "rested", but that wasn't what he was saying.

Johnson (L) and McTighe (R)

McTighe left the stage, and a couple of the guest cast of Horror of Fang Rock joined Jameson: John Abbott (Vince) and Annette Woollett (Adelaide). Jameson touched on some subjects she's covered many times before. Her difficult relationship with Tom Baker when making Doctor Who, which has come semi-circle since then to the point that they're now good friends (Johnson mentioned that in 2013, when they had BFI screenings for the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, Baker only agreed to attend if Jameson was coming too), and her hasty exit from the programme. Graham Williams was hoping to persuade her to stay until the very last moment, so she didn't get the kind of ending for the Leela that she'd have desired, dying heroically saving the Doctor's life. Woollett confirmed that on her insistence Jameson gave her a full-on slap rather than use any stage fakery. She also thanked everybody for the work they'd done on the new version, which made it in her opinion a "completely different show". Abbott gave a shout out to the late Colin Douglas for his significant contribution to the story as Rueben and as the Rutan mimicking him, and for giving him acting advice during its making: "Always be doing something before they shout action". Woollett revealed that she'd played the sister of Abbott's character on Emmerdale Farm, many years after working on Doctor Who, but Abbott had no memory of this. Tom Baker seemed to have been challenging to work with for both these guest actors: he did lots of improvisations with Abbott in rehearsal, then suddenly threw them all out when it came to recording. He stood on the hem of Woollett's dress as she was entering a scene, as he thought it was funny.

(L to R) Johnson, Jameson, Abbott, Woollett

A discussion about Leela being one of the first Doctor Who characters to have an action figure (in the Denys Fisher range of the 1970s - Jameson's mother put it atop their Christmas tree) led to Jameson sharing a joke that a collector should say at her funeral, as the coffin comes in, that she's "worth more in the box". During audience questions, Woollett explained that she thought Adelaide was just as much of a pain as the audience did; Abbott thought that "Vince was lovely" and didn't deserve his fate. Nobody could remember a row documented in the story's production file between the actor playing Lord Palmerdale, Sean Caffrey, and director Paddy Russell - all remembered her as exacting, but sympathetic and open to ideas from the cast. Jameson was asked about any advice - or warning - she gave to Mary Tamm, who followed her in the companion role playing Romana mark one. Jameson and Tamm had both been in the same year at RADA. The first question Tamm asked her was "How much were you being paid?". Jameson didn't warn her off, and in the end Tamm got on very well with Tom, which Jameson put down to Tamm being more well-read than herself. She broke all our hearts when she said, with a crack in her voice, "I miss Mary". That goes for all of us too, I'm sure. Once the panel left the stage, the last treat was a brand-new clips trailer for the set, then it was off to the BFI cocktail bar for a drink with the fan friends that attended alongside me (the aforementioned David, plus Chris and Scott). I haven't been to a Blu-Ray event at the BFI for some time (I had clashes for the one at the end of 2022 and both of those that took place in 2023), and this refreshed my memory about how enjoyable they are. I look forward to trying to get tickets to the next one, whenever that may be.

In Summary:

Efficient, and a little bit showy; the first real salvo of the John Nathan-Turner era. Should be called "Semi-Circle", though.