The Curse of Fatal Death

Chapter the 308th, which may be taking the mickey a little bit.

Plot:

An alternative ninth Doctor and his companion Emma run into the Master. Leaving his speaker on when talking TARDIS to TARDIS, the Master gives away his plans to nobble his fellow Time Lord, but the Doctor isn't interested anyway. He invites the Master to join him in a castle on the planet Tersurus where he announces he's giving up his do-gooding to get married to Emma. The Master tries various attempts to capture the Doctor using many traps he has travelled back in time and bribed an architect to install in the castle. The Doctor, though, has also gone back and bribed the architect to undo the stuff that the Master insisted on. The Master keeps falling through a trap door into the Tersuran sewers, then taking hundreds of years to climb back out. Each time, he pops back to the right moment in his TARDIS having aged more and more. Fed up with this, the Master teams up with the Daleks who rejuvenate him with Dalek technology. The baddies plan to use a Zektronic energy beam to conquer the universe. The Doctor and Emma escape, but the Doctor is wounded and regenerates into a quite handsome Doctor. Fixing the out-of-control Zektronic beam causes the Doctor to regenerate into a shy Doctor and then a very handsome Doctor. He is then zapped again. With his powers of regeneration halted by the energy of the blast, it looks as if he's died after an emotional farewell to Emma. The Daleks and the Master vow to turn to good in memory of the Doctor. Then, miraculously another regeneration starts, and the Doctor becomes a woman. Emma is no longer attracted to the Doctor, but the Master is. As they walk off together, the new Doctor asks the Master how he got his nickname, and he says he'll explain later.

Context:

So, is this taking the mickey? As per the milestone watch below, I am running out of stories to cover on the blog, so am on the look out for spin-offs and non-canonical Doctor Who to keep things going a little longer (otherwise this blog will just be writing up Ncuti Gatwa's new stories one by one in order, spoiling the intended random approach). There's got to be limits, though: in a recent post I set out the questions that I would have to ask myself about any story included for the blog. Does it star the Doctor? This is answered by an emphatic 'Yes' in the case of The Curse of Fatal Death - it starts five of them. Does it have visuals? Yes. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or official spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes (after its broadcast as part of a telethon, it received a VHS release as part of the Doctor Who range). Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. Finally, though, there was this question: is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? I think that The Curse of Fatal Death goes beyond just being a skit. It's a BBC-commissioned live action version of Who, the only such between the Paul McGann TV movie and the 2005 relaunch; it's a love letter to the show, and has a structured narrative with beginning, middle and end as well as cliffhangers and surprises. Rowan Atkinson is playing it pretty straight too. I watched on Youtube one evening on my own (an extended Doctor Who sketch from 25 years ago would have been a hard sell to any of the family, so I didn't try).

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. Apart from a few extra bits and bobs like The Curse of Fatal Death that I throw in occasionally, I have completed 27 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25, and new series 2, 4, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

I had a strong memory of this, and it was completely wrong. I can remember very well having a discussion with mates about going to a St. Patrick's day night at a pub, but they were staying in to watch Comic Relief. I was astonished that anyone, even a Doctor Who fan anticipating some new televisual material, would choose to stay in and watch the - forgive me, I know it's for a good cause and all - protracted bore-fest that is Comic Relief when they could be drinking Guinness and singing an off key version of Dirty Old Town with complete strangers. But I got no takers. I went to the pub on my own, and did indeed drink Guinness and sing an off key version of Dirty Old Town with complete strangers. I thought this was 1999, when Doctor Who was forming part of Comic Relief's offerings, but looking at the date of the broadcast that year it was on the 12th March, too far away from St. Patrick's Day for any pub to have a tie-in. I'm guessing that I'm remembering events from two years later in 2001 when patron saint and charity telethon more closely aligned. I then remembered that I have access to my 1999 diary, so checked out the entry. I was instead at a leaving do for someone at my day job of the time. So, I did indeed skip the live broadcast, taping and watching back The Curse of Fatal Death at a later date (I must have had to use an entire E180 on LP mode to capture everything from the evening, fast forwarding to the Doctor Who bits). There's nothing in the diary entries of the next few days about the skit (I was 26, it's not the sort of thing I was writing about at the time) but I estimate I wouldn't have waited much after the 13th March to watch it.

Reaction:

Imagine a parallel universe where this was the last ever Doctor Who broadcast on television by the BBC. As I've mentioned in blog posts before, the period encompassing the end of the 1990s and start of the 2000s was a low point for my favourite show. The excitement of the 30th anniversary in 1993 and an American co-production TV movie in 1996 had faded; Doctor Who appeared to be dead, and there was nothing, not even the slightest hint, to suggest it was going to lurch back into life again. If the 2005 relaunch had not happened, and there's all sorts of reasons why it might have stalled, The Curse of Fatal Death wouldn't be the worst send-off one could imagine. It's full of love for the programme, has a couple of really rather good jokes, and some fun cameos of stars as the Doctor giving us a glimpse into how they'd play the role. At least a couple of those, Jim Broadbent and Hugh Grant, were - and I think still are - too big to take the role on properly; they were flippin' movie stars, we were briefly very blessed. Of all of the cameos, Hugh Grant plays it straightest, even more than Atkinson, and his death scene is almost emotional. He's still playing it a bit 'Edwardian' compared to the more modern and slightly more down-to-earth approach that became the norm from 2005 onwards; Doctor Who had not yet dumped that baggage. Who could still hold its own as an entertaining segment on primetime TV, though, which was a good sign for the future. Another sign of the future was its writer, Steven Moffat, someone who subsequently has written by far the most Doctor Who episodes to entertain audiences of primetime TV of anyone (as contributing writer and/or showrunner from 2005 to date); so, it's good that he started practising early.

Moffat's key aim is to generate jokes, and there's three types of these on show in increasing levels of specific geekiness. First, there's general humour: there's a lot of fart jokes, for example, emerging from the premise that the people of the planet Tersurus communicate by controlled release of methane. A lot of these jokes were - in my opinion, natch, humour is subjective - rubbish; but the line about how the Tersurans died out ("They discovered fire") is a 24-carat killer line. It still falls a bit flat, though - what the programme needs is an audience laugh track to lift it. I don't remember whether it did have as part of the telethon, but none of the versions I've found online do. The second type of humour is the generic, i.e. jokes about general science fiction tropes like Jonathan Pryce's cackling and monologuing as the Master. A long sequence that is gleefully ripping off Bill and Ted falls into this category, where the Doctor journeys back in time to undo the mischief that the Master has done, then the Master travels back to undo that undoing, and the Doctor travels back to undo that, and so on. Finally, there's the third category, humour specifically about Doctor Who: jokes about Daleks not having noses or chairs, for example, or jokes about the ubiquity of quarries. The running gag of waving away the need to clarify the action with an "I'll explain later" was presumably directed at Who too, though I don't think the programme does this as much as is made out. Just when Moffat looks to be overusing the phrase, he saves it by turning it into the Doctor's faltering final words as he is dying, then puts a cherry on it at the end by turning it into a bedroom double entendre about why the Master is so called.

Moffat is clever enough not to do any jokes about Doctor Who's sets wobbling. Firstly because he knows that was never really true anyway, but also because he was probably aware that - being for charity - his story would need to be done on the cheap. The sets, props and effects are as good as can be expected in those circumstances. The score uses many recycled cues from the Who archive, so even if one wasn't enjoying the comedy one could play a game of name that tune (and name the episode it comes from) as one watches. The overall result of all this is a little cheesy, but inoffensive and at times almost magical. It also gives Moffat a chance to road test some things he would return to in his future stories: the Doctor falling in love and getting married, a gender swap regeneration, a Time Lord aged by a thousand plus years, the Doctor miraculously regaining the power to regenerate when it was thought that he could do so no more, the Daleks having a chair for no apparent reason, a character quoting Terrance Dicks in saying that the Doctor was "never cruel or cowardly", having a character say a line something like "Look after the universe for me - I've put a lot or work into it". It's not just Moffat getting the benefit, though. At the time it seemed like Doctor Who needed Comic Relief, but looking back now I think that it was more likely that Comic Relief needed Doctor Who. There's something special about the programme that started in 1963 that makes it able to endlessly generate concepts and visuals and jokes (see Deeper Thoughts section below for more of this topic), which is exactly what the charity that started in 1985 consumes rapaciously to power good works.

Connectivity:

Both The Curse of Fatal Death and Rogue feature the Doctor attracted to someone, with hints about his getting hitched (wedding plans with Emma, a proposal on one knee from Rogue); they also both feature a fleeting appearance by Richard E Grant playing the Doctor.

Deeper Thoughts:

Sketchy History. The history of Doctor Who take-off skits and sketches is almost as long as the history of Doctor Who itself. This is literally true: Michael Bentine comedy show It's a Square World featured a sketch with Clive Dunn as a parody of the Doctor (in a William Hartnell style costume) that was broadcast on the last day of 1963 when only one complete Doctor Who story had yet been shown. Writing and production were even earlier than that, with pre-filming done on 9th December 1963 (when only three episodes of Doctor Who had aired) and studio shooting on 20th December 1963 (when only four episodes of Doctor Who had aired). The concepts and visuals of the show clearly had an instant impact such than any comedian or satirist could be sure that the audience would know what was being parodied; this was, of course, even before the Daleks had reared their ugly domes. Once Skaro's finest had glided into the public consciousness, the chances for making fun were multiplied. Through the 1960s and 70s, many comedy and variety shows would use the show's iconography, with and sometimes without Daleks: Bernie Winters, Wayne and Shuster, The Black and White Minstrels, Crackerjack, Basil Brush, Rod Hull and Emu, Spike Milligan, and many more - all did sketches, and some even resisted basing their material on the old canard that Daleks can't go upstairs. These were affectionate (towards Doctor Who, I mean, the Minstrels and Milligan's sketches were likely to offend in other ways), which represented how the show was thought of in wider society in those times. By the 1980s, it felt to me like something changed and the humour tended to be slightly more at the programme's expense, but it was a big programme by then and could take it.

Clive Dunn and Michael Bentine

A trio of late 1980s sketches from BBC TV programmes were included on the VHS release of The Curse of Fatal Death as extras, and so became most well known to fandom: a sketch from The Lenny Henry Show, a very short sketch from Victoria Wood As Seen On TV, and an unused sketch from French and Saunders (which was shot on the set of The Trial of a Time Lord). All these took some pot shots at the complicated continuity of the show, or its lack of good material for women, or its silly design, or its silly names. Some of the barbs were unfair, but it's hard to argue with most of that. Henry's portrayal of the Doctor, and a little anti-Thatcher political humour (a few years before the series did something similar itself in The Happiness Patrol), make his sketch one of the most worth watching. Once the show was off the air, there was still the odd skit being made occasionally. Doctor Who fans on the writing and performing sides of the Dead Ringers crew meant that show - on radio or TV - featured Doctor Who-related gags frequently, and this continued when their sketches were riffing on Doctor Who made after 2005. Though some talented people have made Doctor Who sketches in the 2010s and 20s (not least Harry Hill and Rhys Thomas) and Who-related material has featured again in Comic Relief nights over the years, there's been little to my mind that made as much impact as The Curse of Fatal Death, even the very funny and reasonably well budgeted The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot made by Peter Davison for the 50th anniversary. But there was one sketch that did draw a lot of attention, albeit partially for the wrong reasons, which aired only a few months after Steven Moffat's Comic Relief opus.

Lenny Henry

On BBC2 in November 1999, there was a Doctor Who Night, a few hours where the channel was given over to themed programming about the series. During the night, there were three sketches made by and starring Mark Gatiss and David Walliams, both Doctor Who fans and comedians who subsequently became much more famous than they were then (and both appeared in Doctor Who subsequently too, with Gatiss also writing multiple episodes). Moffat was magnanimous enough to say that the sketches were much funnier than The Curse of Fatal Death, and I felt the same (it was the difference between broad mainstream jokes on BBC1 and edgier humour on BBC2). Two of the sketches were innocuous enough, even though one did feature a couple of fans kidnapping Peter Davison ("Do you think it would be alright to kiss Peter Davison?" "Yes"). But then there was The Pitch of Fear. It was a clever sketch that involved Walliams pitching the whole of the 26 years of the classic series to the BBC as if it were fully planned in advance - a sample gag is that Jon Pertwee's agent had been approached and he's becoming free in 1970, but they have to release him in 1974 because he's "got Worzel Gummidge". Again, harmless stuff, but there was also another line in there about casting that caused more of a stir. "I don't want to do this show," says the pitcher, "Unless we get the most charismatic, talented actors to play the Doctor." "For the whole 26 years?" asks the Exec. "Nah, towards the end, just any old f**ker with an equity card." It's a very funny line, but - unlike the Doctor, according to Terrance Dicks's famous description - it was a bit cruel, and maybe also a bit cowardly.

Mark Gatiss in The Pitch of Fear

The writer-performers of the sketch were probably referring more to public perception of Doctor Who performances in the 1980s than their own views of their quality. A lot of people felt and still feel that Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy - and less but some think this of Peter Davison too - weren't as good hires as the earlier Doctors. It was also likely (given that pot shots had been taken earlier in the sketch about his costuming decisions) that it was John Nathan-Turner, the producer in those later years, that was the real target of any criticism. A celebratory night about Doctor Who, however irreverent, probably wasn't the place to suggest anyone who'd worked on the show in a prominent role was not charismatic or talented, though. Gatiss had worked with Davison, Baker and McCoy on fan projects when he was less well known, which made it personal for some involved. Gatiss expressed regret and the sketch was re-edited, shorn of its funniest line for its official release (as an extra on a DVD release a few years later). With new episodes regularly being made, turning in a short scene for Comic Relief or for Children in Need now is an easy ask, but obviously will be less special than in 1999 when any tiny fragment - even if played for laughs - would be all that fans had seen for years, and might be the last they ever saw. So, unless anyone is prepared to be outrageously rude about people who star in or make Doctor Who again, I can't see any future sketch having the impact of those broadcast in 1999. But maybe that's a good thing.

In Summary:

A bit naff, but it was for charity.