Scream of the Shalka

Chapter the 296th, a false dawn with a cartoon Alison.

Plot:
It is 2003. Three weeks after a meteor strikes Earth bringing an alien lifeform, an alternate ninth Doctor materialises in the small English town of Lannet, Lancashire. Everyone is behaving strangely. He meets Alison Cheney, a barmaid in a pub and the only person in the town that seems defiant rather than just terrified. She explains that weird worm creatures under the ground (the Shalka) have recently been controlling people by emanating high-pitched sound (the scream thereof). They've ensured nobody leaves or enters the town. The Doctor works out a way to explode the creatures by reflecting sound back at them, destroying Alison's home in the process. The danger is thought to be over, and the town's population feel free again. The Doctor calls in the army to evacuate the town, and to help him locate his TARDIS which has been dragged underground by the Shalka. The evacuees come under the control of the Shalka again, overpower the soldiers and travel to somewhere in the Pennines. Across the world, other groups of people from other towns who had been in the Shalka's power do the same, each group led by one person with a little Shalka embedded in the head. The Lannet contingent's leader is Alison. They emit Shalka screams, which will change the Earth's atmosphere accelerating the ecological damage that the Earth people have started themselves. The Doctor finds Alison and removes the mini-Shaka from her head. The two of them go underground; the Doctor and Alison both bond with the mini-Shalka allowing them to defeat the creatures. Alison elects to join the Doctor on his travels; his other companion is a robotic version of his old enemy the Master, who cannot leave the TARDIS.

Context:

I watched from the DVD accompanied by the younger two of the three children (boy of 14, girl of 11) on a Sunday in March 2024. The youngest needed a bit of explanation of the background of this one-off with someone completely different than usual playing the Doctor, but then she went with it. Middle child instantly recognised David Tennant's voice (the future Doctor has an uncredited cameo as a warehouseman). I discovered that there's a scratch on the disc that causes a short jump in part four, but I quickly found the episodes online and we watched a short section that plugged the gap. I don't know whether to buy a new DVD (it's very cheap to get a second-hand copy) or wait to see if Shalka ends up on a Blu-Ray at some point as an extra, or on the fabled Collection box set of 'wilderness years' material that some fans are convinced will happen one day.

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. I have completed 23 seasons out of the total of 39 to date (at the time of writing). I occasionally put off the point of catch-up a bit by including something like Scream of the Shalka that doesn't fit so neatly into the episode guide (although it did get an official DVD release ten years after its original web debut). There are a couple of other webcasts from this era that I could potentially cover in future too - stay tuned!

First Time Round:

I watched some of this story at the 2003 Panopticon convention in London, accompanied by David and Chris (long-term fan friends mentioned many times before on this blog). I very rarely did or do conventions, but as this one - the big official UK Doctor Who con of the time - was being held conveniently for me in London, and because it was the 40th anniversary, I thought I would give it a go. It was held at the London Hilton Metropole on Edgware Road over the weekend of the 1st and 2nd November 2023. Two sessions in the programme, one on each day, were kept secret, represented only by a tantalising question mark symbol. The first of these on the Saturday was a surprise appearance by Paul McGann in his first ever Doctor Who convention appearance. Through the Sunday, there was some wild speculation about what the second mystery evening session would be, with some guessing that it would be something linked to the new series being planned by Russell T Davies. There was a lot of buzz about that during the weekend, as it had only been announced just over a month earlier. In the end, it did turn out to be related to a new series, just not the one we were expecting. It was a screening of - if memory serves - the first two parts of Scream of the Shalka, which was accompanied by an all-pervading sense of disappointment from the assembled. This is the tragedy of Shalka in a nutshell; it was still two weeks from its online debut (it would be webcast weekly from mid November 2003 and I would struggle each week with my dial-up connection to watch it to the end), but it was already yesterday's news.

Reaction:

During the Panopticon 2003 Saturday night session (see First Time Round section above) Paul McGann expressed his surprise that his old mucker Richard E. Grant (they made 1980s cult comedy film 'Withnail and I' together) hadn't told him that he was playing the Doctor; as I remember, he said the following, or something very like it: if he (McGann) had been cast in something as the Scarlet Pimpernel - which Grant had played on TV in 1999 and 2000 - he would have told Grant in advance, rather than have him find out from a listings magazine or whatever. I don't know whether they ever spoke about it afterwards. One speculation from me is that perhaps Grant just didn't think it counted. I've stuck a picture of Marwood and Withnail at the top of this blog post as the miserable, sallow, long-coated look of Grant in the image seems to have been used as a template for the design of his animated Doctor, but also so I can look at that picture and imagine that it's some un-filmed adventure of the two Doctors. But is it, really? McGann didn't have long playing the role in his one proper outing, about the same as the duration of the 2003 animation, but it was on TV in live action and it was seen by millions. Grant might have thought that a little audio online thing with some Flash-animated visual accompaniment wasn't worth bothering McGann about. Some people have been a bit critical of Grant's performance since, including the person who had become the new Doctor Who TV showrunner around the time that Shalka was being prepared for its web debut, Russell T Davies. In an interview with Doctor Who Magazine (DWM) published in issue 360, he said "I wasn't a fan of Richard E Grant in it, I have to say. And yes you can print that! I thought he was terrible. I thought he took the money and ran, to be honest. It was a lazy performance."

There is a bit of evidence to back up Davies's views; not necessarily that Grant was being lazy, but maybe that he was keeping the role of the Doctor and the programme - the institution -  of Doctor Who somewhat at arm's length. DWM journalist - and a good friend of Davies, which may have coloured opinions somewhat - wrote up an eye-opening article a couple of years earlier in issue 336 about his being treated quite badly when he visited a Shalka recording. As someone writing for the official magazine of the show being made, one would think that the people making it would welcome him in with open arms, the better to get maximum publicity for their new Who venture. Instead, he was banned from the studio, then banned from the green room, then pushed out of the building. He's allowed back in from the car park only when it starts raining, waiting around for an interview shut in a stationery cupboard. Somehow, he managed to get in some chats with some of the cast, Jim Norton, Craig Kelly, Sophie Okonedo, and they all seem very nice, as does Grant after a slightly cool start. He seems to want to express strongly that he knows nothing about the series of Doctor Who, has never watched it, or any science fiction really. He's just an actor playing a part. There's a quote in there that is very telling "People have very strong ideas about Doctor Who, but I think it would be much more daunting to do it as a TV version." If Grant wasn't properly engaged with the material (and there are moments that to me feel like he's encountering the lines from the script for the very first time, reading them rather than speaking them), it was perhaps down to overcaution rather than laziness.

The producers of the story were certainly taking things seriously. It was a potential start of a series of web animations featuring Grant's Doctor (assuming they could persuade him back to record them); one might wonder if one didn't know the history why they didn't object to Cook's interview going out in all its grim detail. The clue is on the cover of DWM 336. A small inset circular caption sits next to the main image (a portrait shot of Richard E Grant pointing at the camera like Kitchener, taken in the same car park to which Cook had been banished); in the circle are the words "DOCTOR WHO SET FOR BBC TV COMEBACK!" It didn't matter that Grant seemed to be disowning his performance before the animation had even been finished; it didn't matter that a journalist who wanted to promote the animation was locked in a cupboard rather than be allowed to cover it; it didn't matter how good or bad the animation was, or the performances within it: elsewhere, Doctor Who was coming back on TV properly, relegating Scream of the Shaka to a footnote in history, a brief pitstop in a cul-de-sac on Who's journey. It's a shame for the people involved, but not necessarily any huge loss. The story is fairly generic Doctor Who fare. The things that are interesting about it are things that Davies's series (probably coincidentally) would also do, but on TV in live action and seen by millions. The events take place mostly in a limited space with a small group of characters that we get to know well, but there are quick cutaways in there to events happening around the world, to give things scale. That's textbook early Davies Who style. Shalka even casts Derek Jacobi as the Master, which would happen a couple of years later in Davies's Who.

There are many similarities to Rose, the first story of Davies's new era: a Doctor still shellshocked by a calamity in his recent past, hinted at but not spelled out, meets a woman first at her place of work, then later at her home when his investigations lead him there. The woman is in a relationship with a boyfriend that's clearly not working perfectly. The Doctor blows up this life (the companion character's home in Shalka, her place of work in Rose), and takes the woman on a whirlwind adventure. At the end, the woman steps up to assist in saving the world, then joins the Doctor in the TARDIS, leaving boyfriend behind. It's clearly a good structure for introducing the series anew. The Shalka story is not wholly being aimed at a new audience, though, including elements that only the hardcore could understand. Who else would know that the person in the TARDIS is the Master and know the significance of this, and be shocked when the Master turns out to be a robot? Who else would find it funny when the character almost says his famous catchphrase but turns it into something more friendly when the Doctor comes into the room "I am the Master, and you will... come to like me, when you get to know me"? Writer Paul Cornell couldn't count on so large an audience as to render the fan contingent meaningless, so he couldn't cut all those ties. It's probably not that much of a problem: a person coming to this fresh would probably just ignore those bits, or imagine that the Master's just the Doctor's robot butler, or sex toy. What's probably more damaging is the tone of the lead cast's performances. Christopher Eccleston's Doctor is haunted, but he still manages to be fun unlike Grant's doomy version; Sophie Okenodo's Alison is plucky, but with a downbeat cynical streak. It just needs to be a little more light, and fun. The most fun character in Shalka is a robot villain, which can't be right, can it?

Connectivity:

Scream of the Shalka is the third story on the trot (after The Sensorites and Nightmare in Silver) to feature an antagonistic alien race that are telepathically linked. Both this story and Nightmare in Silver see the Doctor travel with a female companion from Lancashire. 

Deeper Thoughts:

History v0.1. It might just be me, but I love the feeling of taking part in some small way in the progression of recent history. My day job is in technology work where things tend to move relatively fast, such that one can look back and see a significant amount of change in a short period that one wasn't fully aware was happening around one at the time. I find it fascinating, even though my contributions to the progression of this history are beyond peripheral. Scream of the Shalka, for example, contains the nice gag that the Doctor has a TARDIS-shaped mobile phone - note, not a smartphone, an ordinary mobile phone was seen as futuristic enough in 2003. Another thing that's changed in the same period is the rise of the social media behemoths. When Shalka was webcast, MySpace had only just started up, Twitter and Facebook didn't yet exist. The idea that Mark Zuckerberg would one day be worth hundreds of billions would have seemed silly to those people running the websites and message boards where people chatted online in 2003. For someone who worked in web technology, I was a somewhat late adopter at home (possibly because there was always an internet connection at work to use). I didn't get connected until late in the 1990s. I remember visiting David (fan friend mentioned many times before on this blog, including above) around 1995 and seeing my first ever Doctor Who website, probably using a Netscape browser; it was a collection of humorous bloopers from the show's history, including every time you ever caught an inadvertent glimpse of Jo Grant's knickers (which gives you a glimpse into the sort of person who was creating websites back then).

As best as I can estimate it, I first engaged properly with these burgeoning online communities - with my own dial-up connection and laptop and everything - around 1999 and got more and more engaged by 2001. One chapter ('The Velvet Web') of Paul Hayes's excellent book about Doctor Who during the years 1996 to 2003 helped me to date things. The book (for my fuller review, see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post) gives a lot of background detail about the long period of build up before Doctor Who finally went into production as a TV series again. Scream of the Shalka is covered, but also the history of the BBC's official Doctor Who website where Shalka was hosted. The book describes the particularly BBC decisions that led to there being two competing BBC Doctor Who sites for many years. I remember this; I remember generally getting my information from the BBC Online 'Cult' Doctor Who pages, but every so often also checking beeb.com's Who section to see if there was anything new there (there almost never was). I remember the disappointment of losing that tiny sliver of hope one day when beeb.com ceased hosting information pages and just became a place to buy things online. I remembering contributing to the Cult site's message boards; I thought they'd been around for a while before I discovered them, but this must have been in 2001, and the book tells me that the boards only started around then. For the next two and a half years or thereabouts, I was a regular reader and contributor there and occasionally on other forums around at the time. I never posted on Outpost Gallifrey, which was probably the biggest fan forum of the time, but I did lurk and read other people's posts there (until they stopped people from doing that if they hadn't signed up).

 

I don't remember any online discussions being that bad, really. There was as much positivity as negativity; people were opinionated, yes (they were Doctor Who fans, after all), but there wasn't much in the way of nastiness. Maybe I'm thick skinned, though, or maybe I have low expectations where my fellow fans are concerned. The people who moderated the sites were not so well disposed to them. In Pull to Open, James Goss - Doctor Who fan, writer, and one of the principle architects of the Cult sites' content - is quoted describing the forums of that time as "hate pits" and bemoans their cost that could have been used for some of the other innovations he spearheaded ('photonovels' of stories using off-screen snaps, e-books of out of print Who novels, webcasts with animation). He's consistent in this message, saying the same thing in different words on Interweb of Fear, a documentary about the BBC's early 'wild west' years of web content on the Shalka DVD. After Doctor Who was announced as returning to TV, it was probably inevitable that these boards would be shut down. Russell T Davies made the decision himself, and they closed in April 2004. I found other places to discuss Doctor Who, though I never went over to Outpost Gallifrey; reportedly, a lot of negativity migrated there (Davies mentioned many times over the years in his first period as showrunner that he advised other Who writers never to be tempted to visit the site); eventually, social media sites replaced all of this, and became toxic in their turn.

As I write this, it's towards the end of the Lent period in 2024, close to Easter; I chose to give up social media for that time, as something of an experiment, and I doubt I'll be going back. It's like the old days, I get my general news from the BBC news page, and my Doctor Who news from Doctor Who Magazine. The latest DWM was the first in years that actually provided me with information I hadn't seen first anywhere else - that Doctor Who is to return to TV with a double bill on the 11th May 2024. It also told of another small step in the development of history of the show's relationship to the internet. The two episodes and those that follow them weekly thereafter will for the first time debut on the BBC iplayer, a few hours before their broadcast on BBC1. The iplayer (as covered in Interweb of Fear) is something else that came out of those early years of innovation at the Beeb; it's fun to note that - like me for the last 40 days and 40 nights - things have reverted to a pattern from around 20 years ago; Ncuti Gatwa's episodes will start off as webcasts, just like Scream of the Shalka.

In Summary:

It's probably best if we don't mention it again.