Paradise Towers

Chapter the 297th, never mind the Ballards, here's Paradise Towers.

Plot:
The 22nd century on an unnamed planet (which could be Earth, I suppose, things are left a bit vague - the inhabitants are described as human, and wherever they travelled from to get to the Towers they took a 'ship' but it's not definitively referred to as a space-ship). The Doctor and Mel journey to Paradise Towers, a supposedly luxurious apartment complex that has fallen into disrepair. They meet various groups of characters: gangs of girls wearing specific colours called Kangs, officious Caretakers who are bound by a vast set of rules, and the older female residents known as Rezzies. All were brought to the Towers for their safety when a war broke out, while the remaining people (including all males younger than middle-age) fought in the war. The only younger man around is Pex, a self-styled action hero, who stowed away with the others as he was too scared to be drafted into the conflict. Since then, the Towers has become a battleground. The Kangs fight each other, but do not take life, but they are being killed off by the Towers' cleaning robots. The Chief Caretaker has been programming the robots to kill Kangs and Caretakers and feed the bodies to his 'pet' in the basement - a vat containing an unseen entity that speaks to him a la Audrey from The Little Shop of Horrors.

The two time travellers are split up. The Doctor is captured by the Caretakers, but manages to escape, and meets up with the Red Kangs. Mel meets two seemingly nice Rezzies, Tilda and Tabby, but they have turned to cannibalism, having their eyes on Mel as a potential meal; she only escapes because of the arrival of Pex, breaking the door down; in that moment of distraction, a cleaning robot grabs and carts off both Tilda and Tabby. The robots are starting to kill people without the Chief Caretaker's knowledge, controlled by the thing in the basement. This turns out to be the disembodied mind of the Great Architect who designed Paradise Towers, and who treats those who live there as pollutants of his precious building. The architect has been trying to reanimate the corpses brought to him with his own mental force, and finally manages it by taking over the Chief Caretaker. As the Great Architect and the cleaners work floor by floor of the building 'cleansing' it of people, the Doctor and Mel bring together the remaining Kangs, Caretakers, Rezzies and Pex at the swimming pool on the 304th floor. They hatch a plan to lure the Chief Architect out of his base, and blow him up. It works, but only at the cost of Pex's life, who finally finds his courage. All the inhabitants of the Towers mourn Pex, and the Doctor and Mel leave for further adventures in time and space.

Context:

I watched this on my own from the disc in the Season 24 Collection Blu-ray box-set (the edition as broadcast, rather than the extended versions of the episodes that are also available on that set) over four days in April 2024. To prompt memories of the time of broadcast, I also watched the Trailers and Continuities special feature that these sets comprehensively provide for 1970s and 80s stories. I'd forgotten that later episodes of each story of season 24 were preceded by recaps of the story so far, an innovation retained from the previous year. It had made more sense to provide them in 1986 as the season was one long story (The Trial of a Time Lord); in 1987, there was only two or three weeks of narrative for viewers to recollect, and from the following year the recaps would be dropped. It was fun in 2024, though, to listen to a no-doubt nonplussed continuity announcer reading out things like "the Doctor drops into the Red Kangs brainquarters" while a couple of grainy photo slides were shown on screen.

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 the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the 24th season completed out of the total of 39 to date (at the time of writing). In full, I have now completed classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25, and new series 2, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

I watched this on its BBC1 broadcast in October 1987, recording each episode onto a VHS tape that I then watched over and over again. At the time, I thought this was the best a Doctor Who script had been for many a year, and the story was refreshingly new (despite the visuals not necessarily being quite up to the level of imagination of the writing, which I'll cover more below, but that is anyway par for the course with Doctor Who). I know now - only from stumbling across the information subsequently rather than having any strong memories of the time - that in between the broadcast of parts two and three of Paradise Towers there was the great storm of 1987. I'd gone to bed on Thursday 15th October, slept fine, and woken up on the Friday to find the greenhouse in our back garden crushed under a fallen tree; luckily that was the extent of it for us (it could have been a lot worse). I got a day off school and explored the neighbourhood, where there was many a fallen tree. By the Monday, school was back on; by the evening of that Monday, the storm was probably long forgotten history to the 15-year old me as he sat down to watch the latest episode of Doctor Who go out in the evening.

Reaction:

I have not read High-Rise by J G Ballard; add it to the unread pile along with The Prisoner of Zenda (inspiration for Doctor Who story The Androids of Tara) and The Loved One (inspiration for Revelation of the Daleks). I have however seen the movie adaptation directed by Ben Wheatley (who also directed for Doctor Who many years after the time of Paradise Towers, helming Peter Capaldi's first two stories just before moving on to filming this 'unfilmable' novel). There are clearly elements and themes in Paradise Towers taken from Ballard's tale of a high-rise building and its residents' disintegration. The biggest clues are the importance placed in both upon a swimming pool and a mysterious unseen architect, but the influence goes deeper than that. This was a time of an influx of new imagination into Doctor Who with the arrival of a new script editor, Andrew Cartmel, with Paradise Towers as his first commission after taking up the role. The show had been through a time of chaos; the writing and production of the stories of the previous year had been beset by difficulties and conflicts bigger than the show had perhaps ever faced, but Cartmel - supported by long-term producer John Nathan-Turner, seemingly reinvigorated by a new working relationship far less dysfunctional than he had with Cartmel's predecessor - would steer the show out of these turbulent waters and towards the North Star of a new level of story quality. As the first tentative attempts at this navigation, Paradise Towers is fascinating: writer Stephen Wyatt and Cartmel sat down as newbies in charge of a British institution and decided that they would make a family friendly version of an infamously dark, disturbing and violent novel, with a kids' TV aesthetic and a BBC LE cast. It seems excitingly like both genius and folly.

Cartmel and Wyatt, in their freshness and newness, may not of course have realised at first that it would end up with a kids' TV aesthetic and a BBC LE cast; they can't, though, have been so naive as to not get even the slightest inkling, even before production started. If what was on the page was filmed straight without any heightened visual abstraction - if, for example, the cleaning robots were rusty, oily machines with sharp blood-encrusted blades instead of being giant, brightly-coloured Tonka toys, or if Richard Briers's Chief Caretaker was played as banally evil rather than sit-com bureaucrat, an administrator at Belsen, say, rather than Blakey from On the Buses - the programme wouldn't be suitable for children. It also, I think, wouldn't be as interesting. There is an energy that propels the programme arising from its textual/visual contradictions. This can most clearly be seen by watching the episodes with their initial incidental music (which is an audio option on the Blu-ray); David Snell's ultimately discarded score is doomy and dark as per Paradise Towers on the page. It kills any action is accompanies stone-dead; whereas, Keff McCulloch's replacement - for all its 80s day-glo spangles - lifts such scenes. So, what ends up on screen is a set of incredibly well-constructed and dressed sets of the decrepit floors of the towers used as a backdrop for a theatrical show featuring camp larger-than-life characters. This gives people an instant and obvious way to ignore or berate the story, but I think this is a mistake. I'm in a minority, I suspect, but I think that it has more than its fair share of greatness.

Paradise Towers has more than its share of not so great elements too, where the text and visuals are misaligned in a way that is definitely (as confirmed in interviews over the years) inadvertent. The supporting artists playing the caretakers are supposed to be middle-aged and out of shape, or else they'd have been off fighting in the war that entailed the very young and old being shipped off to the Towers - someone missed a memo. Pex is supposed to have a body-builder physique (hence the punning name) the better to counterpoint his cowardice - everyone of the right proportions who was auditioned couldn't act well enough to get a handle on the character. The Caretaker's rule book is supposed to be massive, as per multiple lines in dialogue - lack of attention or time from the production design team means it is presented as a thin pamphlet. This is a bit damaging, but probably not that big a deal in the scheme of things. Cartmel has kept banging on to date about the shortcomings on other departments in realising scripts from his Who tenure, and its understandable he would find that frustrating; but, he seems to take no responsibility for his part in it. Some of the issues with Paradise Towers are on the page. The Kangs are intended to be teenagers, but it would be impossible to cast them as such, and consequently - inevitably - they are 20-something actors playing teenagers who act like tweenagers as they are suffering from arrested development. That would be challenging to perform and watch for one actor, but the script needs hordes. As it is, the actors playing the Kangs comport themselves reasonably well; but if it all gets a bit like a dozen noisy principal boys on screen, as it sometimes does, that's built into the script and not the fault of any other contributor.

Where do the cannibalistic Rezzies get their supplies to make biscuits and cakes? What happened to the young boys of the Kangs' generation - did they really get kept behind to fight it the war, or did they come to the Towers and get killed there somehow? How long has everybody been there? Were the Kangs babies or toddlers or older infants when they arrived? The backstory is very sketchy, not precise enough; we can assume the war was real, though at times it's presented almost like the B-Ark plot from the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, i.e. an excuse to get rid of people. It seems unlikely that a society would voluntarily be separated from their children, so they wanted to keep them safe. If so, why would they deliberately house a malevolent force in the building with them? Why wouldn't they just kill the Great Architect? Beyond the why, there's the how. Was the Great Architect an alien of a different species to the other inhabitants of the Towers, and that's how his consciousness can exist outside his body? Is it a disembodied consciousness or the physical brain of the architect in the container in the basement? It's never shown and the script uses both 'mind' and 'brain' interchangeably. What is the container in the basement, and how does it allow the the architect to talk? Did the architect somehow arrange for it to be built or did the people who trapped him there provide it? Why does the Chief Caretaker think it's some kind of pet? Is he somehow under the influence of the architect's mental powers, or just naive? How exactly has the architect been able to develop skills of "corpoelectroscopy" in his very restrictive circumstances? It's all maddeningly unclear.

High-Rise - at least in adapted form - relies on a woozy, nightmare logic (why don't people just leave the building?), so maybe Paradise Towers is just following suit. Anyway, the Who story's relatively simple through-line is much clearer and logical than its backstory: the Doctor and Mel bring a group of squabbling factions of distinctively drawn, albeit exaggerated, characters together to defeat a common enemy. It's an optimistic plot, and the lack of cynicism is refreshing. The clumsy action scenes (the Cleaners never ever look even slightly threatening) don't harm such a plot too much. Only the one particular performance is impossible to watch, and that's only for one episode of four: when Briers's character is taken over by the Great Architect he overacts so much his performance can be seen from three hundred and four floors up; heck, it could be seen from space. He needed reining in, and sadly the director couldn't or at least didn't do it. All this has to be balanced against the many great scenes: all the fun had with language in scenes with the Kangs; the Doctor using the Caretaker's rule book against them, bamboozling them such that he can escape; Tilda and Tabby turning on Mel, their old lady accoutrements of knitted net blanket and toasting fork suddenly converted into weapons; the repeated scene of Pex breaking through the oldsters' door, played first for laughs and then for real when Pex inadvertently rescues someone for the first time; the Doctor bringing hope and joy to the Towers by dusting off a drinks dispenser machine; and, finally, the end with the camera zooming in on the "PEX LIVES" wall-scrawl. When these are all weighed up, the balance tips in Paradise Towers' favour. 

Connectivity:

Paradise Towers, like Scream of the Shalka, features a Doctor investigating an isolated community of residents cut off from anyone else, and an alien intelligence that transplants itself into another person's body.

Deeper Thoughts:

Horseshoes and prisms. I watched Paradise Towers at the same time as working my way through the latest wonderful and comprehensive Blu-ray box set of a season-long chunk of Doctor Who's back catalogue. The latest set is for season 15, the classic series run broadcast from 1977 to 1978 starring Tom Baker (in his fourth year as the Doctor) and Louise Jameson (in her first and last full year playing the character of Leela, having joined the show midway through season 14). As well as the stories of the season, there are many extras including oodles of archive recordings of Jameson - there are interviews and/or commentaries on the set featuring her recorded in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. In these, she is consistent regarding her favourite story, and it's The Sun Makers, because of its political subtext. Jameson feels that the story has a left-wing message (in at least one recording she calls it Marxist) about the encouragement of workers to rise up against an oppressive regime. Elsewhere in the content, though, it is confirmed that the writer of The Sun Makers Robert Holmes was prompted to write the story at least in part by the high UK tax rates of the time, which were set by a left-wing government (led by Labour Party Prime Minister Harold Wilson and with Denis Healey as Chancellor of the Exchequer). The script contains a reasonably positive allusion to Das Kapital, but also a villain seemingly modelled on Healey (the Collector's look includes the sort of excessive eyebrows that were Healey's trademark). So, is The Sun Makers a satirical barb aimed at left-wing or right-wing? What even are left-wing and right-wing, anyway?

Maybe it would be more useful to differentiate between the two poles in a more precise manner. This is just my personal take, but I plot things on an axis of more responsibility on the state on one side, and more on the individual on the other; additionally, one side is more likely to want to change norms (economic or social), while the other side is more likely to preserve them: larger state progressive versus smaller state conservative. With that in mind - and accepting that there is a Gaussian distribution with most approaches to government in a centrist zone with a flatter range tapering off to the two extremes - where on these axes would we plot the plot of The Sun Makers? The state apparatus on Pluto depicted in the story is overpoweringly large, with little room for individual freedom; every action is aggressively enforced and regressively taxed; this is done, though, to maximise profit for a large enterprise that has control of the government. The enterprise isn't operating in a free market, as one company has a total monopoly - there's no state intervention to break this monopoly. so in that way the state is small. The state applying minimal regulation on business is not a common feature in large state progressive approaches. Additionally, there is a lot of evidence in The Sun Makers that little has changed or is desired to change in the way that power is exerted (until the Doctor arrives) suggesting a more conservative approach. So, one could make a case either way, that the government on Pluto is a left- or a right-wing one. Is this the horseshoe theory in action? This is the theory that suggests that the most extreme left or right positions are much closer in their approaches and their impacts than any in the centre.

I generally dislike the horseshoe theory. The approaches at such extremes that would prove the theory are such that any instigating ideology has been left far behind. At those extremes, government isn't truly government at all, it's just the maintaining of power for its own sake, whatever ideals its leaders might once have believed in, or which books they may once have read. If approaches now look similar, it's because they have jettisoned anything that might have made them different, and is nothing to do with how the approach may have started. The theory also feels defeatist, smacking of the old adage that "politicians are all the same". The centre ground might contain policy areas that have smaller and more subtle graduations of difference between left- or right-wing approaches, but these differences can nonetheless have a great impact on the lives of the people being governed. It's in the nature of a television show like Doctor Who to show extreme positions, though, which throws a great horseshoe into the works of any analysis and perhaps obscures any party political reading (even if it was in the writer's mind). To take Paradise Towers as another example: governmental authority is represented by the Caretakers, who have a straight-jacket of infinite and infinitesimal rules and regulations (suggesting large state), but there is no mechanism for ever changing the rules (not so progressive). The ending has every different faction working together, which could be a model of socialism or of old-fashioned small-c conservative community in action. Viewing either story through a political prism, the light of each plot point is refracted such that one can see whatever one wants to see. Perhaps this is a good thing, whether it is deliberate or not. Doctor Who is aimed at a mass audience, and any political position is bound to put off as many people as it pleases.

In Summary:

It's not perfect by any means, but it is the first sign that the series was starting to build high for happiness once again.