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.

Time and the Rani

Chapter The 231st, when Doctor Who reaches the Emulator orchestra hit sample era.

Plot:

The Rani has allied herself with some giant and not that quiet bat people, the Tetraps, and with them has enslaved the locals on the planet Lakertya, set up a laboratory there and installed a giant brain. This may already sound like a bizarre plan, but you ain't heard nothing yet! She plans to blow up an asteroid orbiting the planet that is composed of strange matter; this will turn the planet and brain into a time manipulator apparently. She has abducted various geniuses from across time and space, and linked them up to the brain to work on the chemical formula for a detonator for the asteroid. One of the geniuses she has left a space for is the Doctor. She causes his TARDIS to crash land on Lakertya, which brings about the Doctor's regeneration. She and a Tetrap bundle the new Doctor out of the TARDIS, leaving Mel unconscious lying on the control room floor. Before the Rani links the Doctor into the brain circuit, she drugs him to induce temporary amnesia, and pretends to be Mel (wearing a wig and dressing in the same costume); this is so he will unwittingly help fix her broken lab equipment. Mel befriends a Lakertyan rebel Ikona, avoids the Tetraps and the Rani's explosive bubble traps, and breaks into the lab while the Rani is elsewhere. At first, neither she nor the Doctor trust that the other is who they say they are. Persuaded at last, the Doctor plays along with the returning Rani for a while to try to get information on her plans, but she sees through this and connects him to the brain circuit.

The Doctor's eccentricities impact the collective genius brain, so the Rani disconnects him, and Mel traps her. It's too late, though, as the formula for detonating the asteroid has been found. The Rani escapes, sets the countdown to missile launch, and goes off towards her TARDIS to escape the planet. The Doctor and Mel remove the explosive anklets that the Rani has put on the Lakertyans to keep them in line, and place them round the giant brain. The Doctor sabotages equipment in the laboratory to jam the countdown. He confronts the Rani before she escapes and bluffs that the Lakertyans are waiting to attack. She activates the anklets, destroying the brain and causing the countdown to resume. Unfortunately, this kills Beyus the leader of the Lakertyans, who stayed to guard the brain. As there was a delay, the missile sails past the asteroid and the planet is safe. The Rani escapes in her TARDIS but the Tetraps, having learned that she was going to abandon them on the planet as it was destroyed, have broken in, and capture her to take her back to their home planet. The Doctor assures Mel that his new persona will grow on her; they say goodbye to the Lakertyans and resume their travels in space and time.

Context:

I didn't make an attempt to interest any of the family in a story with such a poor reputation (see First Time Round for more details of the regard in which Time and the Rani is generally held), so watched an episode every couple of nights on my own over a week in May 2022 from the Blu-ray disc in the Collection box-set. I watched the standard versions as transmitted* rather than the alternative extended episodes on another disc in the set. I then spent a couple of weeks not writing up my notes into a blog post; no particular reason for this, just a lot going on in the house at the moment. I have, for example, had to watch all seven episodes of Stranger Things 4 volume 1 twice over with my ST-enamoured middle child (boy of 12), and that takes up a lot of time, believe me. 

* The beginning credits of part 4 as transmitted had an early version of the title sequence where the Doctor's face is less visible, half faded into the starfield background; it is not reproduced on the Blu-ray. At the time, as a teenager overthinking it, I believed this was deliberate to tie in with the narrative, showing the Doctor is under threat in the story (as he's plugged into the Rani's brain drain circuit). It was, of course, just a mistake. 

First Time Round:

Time and the Rani is a very unpopular story. In the few whole series polls run by Doctor Who Magazine over the years, and in various other polls online that one could find with a google, it's consistently in the bottom 10, usually the bottom three. At the time it first went out, though, it didn't feel that way to me. This is very different to the other classic series story that regularly languishes at or near the bottom of polls, also coincidentally an introductory story for a new Doctor, The Twin Dilemma. The reaction of people I came into contact with first time round to Colin Baker's debut was in keeping with its reputation now (see the blog post here for the full gory details); Time and the Rani at the time felt like an exciting new start. I remember watching the first episode and enjoying a lot of it - it's always fun seeing a new Doctor in action (unless the script has him strangling his friend). A clear memory of the broadcast of the second episode is that I - having just started my final GCSE year at high school in September 1987 - was at a careers and education fair, in the masonic hall in Worthing - during the day, and made my own way home, excited to press record on the video to tape the next episode and see how they resolved the cliffhanger. I didn't think it was perfect by any means, and as the season progressed I thought later stories improved on Time and the Rani; but, I can honestly say that first time round I liked it, over-the-top camp in technicolour, risible dialogue and all.

Reaction:

I said above that this story felt like a brand new start, but it is talked about more as the last gasp of the previous era. The writers Pip and Jane Baker had previously written only for Colin Baker, and in the previous year had become the go-to team for putting together scripts for the production team when circumstances meant they were in a last minute rush. The story, so popular wisdom has it, was a hastily rewritten version of what was going to be Colin Baker's swansong, as he'd been offered one more go at the start of the next season to pass the baton on to the next Doctor. Coincidentally, in the gap between watching these episodes and writing up the blog post, I've finished reading Richard Molesworth's excellent recent work of Doctor Who research The John Nathan Turner Production Diary 1979-1990, which puts the commissioning of this story into context and casts some doubt on the popular wisdom. The book is the result of Molesworth's extensive analysis of a mountain of archived paperwork to create an approximation of the production diary of the final decade of Classic Who, and so gives the best illustration of what day-to-day working was like. From this, it's clear that when the scripts for Time and the Rani were commissioned on 22nd December 1986, Colin was already confirmed not to be coming back to do one story (he'd made that very clear several weeks earlier at the start of November). Undoubtedly, story discussions had happened prior to that date, and maybe Nathan-Turner was still hoping that he could tempt his previous leading man back. There were, though, still several months to go before production on the story started, during which time the new script editor Andrew Cartmel arrived to make his mark by encouraging rewrites.

On the whole, I think collectively he and the writers succeeded in making it more of a celebration of the new rather than the old. Apart from the presence of the Rani (who'd only appeared once before) and Sylvester McCoy's predecessor's outfit, which is dispensed with early on, there's no links back to the Baker era. The tone is very different, as one would expect when the script editor of all of Colin's tenure Eric Saward was no longer involved. There's a moment at the end where Donald Pickering's Beyus sacrifices himself a bit pointlessly, staying in the brain chamber until it's safely blown up, so he gets obliterated with it. A common theory is that this would instead have been the Doctor if Colin had come back for these four episodes, and that's what would have caused him to regenerate. I'm not massively convinced of this, though: Beyus dies on his own in a not particularly heroic way, while the main action - including the confrontation with the villain - is happening elsewhere. I think it's more likely that it's just a less effective bit of writing left in the final product. It's not made very clear why Beyus remains at the end to get blown up, as he doesn't actually do anything, then later dialogue seems to suggest he was being overcautious; "He must have been convinced that it was the only way to be certain of saving the rest of us" isn't exactly an endorsement of his actions. It's not the only less effective bit of writing. As in all their stories, Pip and Jane cannot do dialogue that sounds anything like anyone would actually ever say. There's enough to and fro, escape and recapture of characters that if you removed it and tightened up the script you could lose the entire third episode, but this isn't unique to this story by any means: there are very many classic Who four-parters where part three is just marking time. Weighed up against these negatives, though, is a lot of good stuff.

Things that are good about Time and the Rani: the new theme arrangement and title sequence, which uses CG elements for the first time in Who's history; the effects work throughout, particularly the combination of techniques used to create the bubble traps; Keff McCulloch's score, which - even more than Dominic Glynn's work the previous year - embraces the synth pop music of the time and brings a lot of energy, taking the series into its final musical era of the 20th century; the extensive location footage, and the use of models and set dressing elements at the location to create a unique alien world (it's not really correct for the world as outlined in the script, alas, but it is visually interesting); the colourful set design; the Lakertyans look great in terms of both make-up and costume, and the Tetrap design is great too - their long poisonous tongues are yuck, and the visualisation of their four-directional eyesight is also interesting and well done. There's one scene that is particularly strong, a stand-out of the era that never gets much attention: the Doctor and Mel dance around one another, each thinking the other is an imposter, then take each others pulse (the double heartbeat or lack thereof proving that they are or are not a Time Lord). It's lovely, and the relationship between them shown in this short section is so warm compared to the more antagonistic Doctor / companion dynamic of recent years. A lot of the reason for this greater warmth and tactility is new leading man Sylvester McCoy. He delivers a great performance here despite reportedly receiving little to no direction on how to attack the role. Already there is some clowning and some brooding (the proportions of each in the mix would be continually adjusted for the better in his future stories). The clowning should not be dismissed, as it is a vital ingredient to the character, and there are many great moments of physicality, like his Chaplin-esque haring around a corner to a halt bouncing on one foot.

Best of all is Kate O'Mara. Getting her back after a couple of years to play the Rani was a huge coup, as in the interim she'd become mega-famous in a recurring role in US soap Dynasty. It's hard to reconcile what the Pip and Jane Rani scripts tell about who the character is (amoral scientist who does not care about the repercussions of her experiments) and what's actually shown (glam panto villain with an epic lip curl), so my advice is not to try and just go with it. Overshadowed in her first story by having to share the antagonism with Anthony Ainley's Master, this story gives O'Mara space to shine, and I'm glad that the story exists just for that reason. I'm certain that many people think that the central idea of the first couple of episodes to have the Rani impersonate Mel is 100% cringe, but I think it's some kind of twisted genius. Bonnie Langford seemed game to have herself sent up, O'Mara attacks the task with brio, and the script gives her some great moments of switching being panto evil and Mel's ridiculously bouncy positivity within the same scene. Every moment that the Doctor's eccentricity annoys the Rani and she has to suppress it is a joy to watch (at least for me). None of this, or anything else in the story, is deep or dark, but that was all to come; also to come was a better thought-out companion character that wasn't just the one-note sketch of bouncy positivity with which poor Langford was saddled. It's sad that Colin was robbed of his regeneration story, but Sylv got a proper post-regeneration story, complete with all the beats (early confusion, picking a new costume, proving himself to his sceptical companion, defeating a returning villain to show he's still the same Time Lord), and it was just the start of a new phase of Doctor Who that would have its missteps for sure, but overall would get better and better.

Connectivity: 

Both Time and the Rani and The Dominators see at least one member of an invading race accompanied by some monstrous assistants arriving on a peaceful planet (that looks like a quarry) and using some of the populace as a workforce. In both instances, they don't intend to take over the planet long term, but instead are planning to blow something up to use for another purpose, which in both cases will mean the planet is destroyed but only as a means to an end. Dialogue in both stories mentions quarks (though it's referring to the actual sub-atomic particles in Time and the Rani, not some robots that happen to named after them).

Deeper Thoughts:

Joining in / plugging in. My memory has been jogged by the "back to school" associations of Time and the Rani, which like all of Sylvester McCoy's season openers kicked off early in a new academic year, and also by watching Stranger Things and working out that the young cast of high schoolers in the 1980s-set show are fictionally around the same age as me  (Dustin, Mike, Will and Lucas would all now have turned 50 in our present day, assuming none of them get killed by a Demogorgon in series 5); finally and most significantly, my eldest child has started his own GCSE exams (he's halfway through at the time of writing). This has made me reflect on when I was finishing high school and doing my GCSEs (I was part of the first year to do these exams after O-levels were phased out the previous year in the UK). What's markedly different between me and him is how much of a joiner I was in those days. He doesn't dabble in anything extra-curricular, but by the time I was his age I had been part of Worthing Hospital radio for a couple of years, presenting on Saturday afternoons as one of a posse (ugh! - I later briefly had my own show doing 50s and 60s rock and roll on Friday nights) plus doing many ward visits to take dedications, and fund raising, and even weekly committee meetings (I remember they were a bit dull for teenage me, even though I wasn't exactly a raver). I had also recently done public speaking competitions representing the school, and for the whole of my final year I was one a handful of pupils running a young enterprise company, Sox n' Box, that sold socks and boxer shorts with spray-painted slogans and logos on them. I was part of a group who regularly met to play role playing games, like the Stranger Things kids, and I was even writing a novel on the side (it wasn't very good, a sub par Douglas Adams thing). I don't know how I managed to get any schoolwork done, let alone how I managed to pass those exams.

What's interesting is that, despite being a massive Doctor Who fan in those days, I never joined anything related to the programme. The Doctor Who Appreciation Society was affiliated to a network of local groups, and many fans of my age have nostalgic stories of the first time they attended such a group, nervous at meeting fellow fans (who can be a bit scary en masse). I was never brave enough even to investigate if such a group existed nearby (there most likely was one in Brighton, if not Worthing). This also probably explains why I had joined some of those other things; I was essentially dragged along by my schoolfriend Andrew Dancey to hospital radio and to the young enterprise thing. He was presumably worried about turning up alone first time out. He certainly took to the radio thing afterwards, and made it his profession (as did another friend from that time who was also part of Worthing Hospital radio, Duncan Barkes). I was always better as a wingman than a squadron leader, though, so would never have tried to reverse the roles with Andrew or anyone else accompanying me to a Doctor Who group. Most people didn't share quite my level of enthusiasm for the show anyway, though Andrew and others had occasionally watched with me one on the seven whole VHS tapes that constituted my Doctor Who collection at the time. This paucity of entertainment probably explains why I stuck with things like hospital radio rather than duck out once Andrew had got his feet under the table: there wasn't a whole lot else to do in those days of four TV channels, and no world wide web.

This probably explains my eldest's lack of joining. If he wants to interact with his friends, entertain himself by watching a TV series or film, express his own creativity, or play a computer game, he can do all this without leaving his bedroom (if he has his tablet on charge within reach, he doesn't even need to leave the bed). Even for the middle-aged me, TCP/IP and HTML have helped me be more part of Doctor Who fandom than I otherwise would have been, even though I still keep a lot of it at arm's length because of shyness. This makes me less concerned about my son; his generation doesn't need to join in, as they are constantly plugged in. This can definitely be a positive. After a recent Maths paper, he came home still dwelling on one of the final questions, which seemed impossible to solve. In my day, if I was lucky, I might have had a brief chance as we left the exam hall and trooped off home to canvass a friend or two about what they thought about that difficult question about the intersecting circles. My eldest was able to just use his phone and search social media for "Edexcel Maths GCSE paper 1 circles" and find that everyone had hated that question, and some people were already making up memes about it. Like the geniuses wired up to the Rani's giant brain, we're all connected and it's very often a negative experience with a Babel of voices bickering; sometimes, though, the connected masses are greater than the sum of the individuals, and we get something that's an overall good. Loyhargil!

In Summary:

It's not cool, it's not deep, it's not dark, but I like it. So there!

Dragonfire

Chapter The 193rd, which features a quest for adventure, and someone venturing out after a long period of house arrest at risk of melting in the hot sun!

Plot:

3000 years ago, criminal masterminds Kane and Xana face capture on their home planet of Proamon. Xana kills herself to avoid arrest. Kane, upset by this as he was in love with Xana, is captured and imprisoned on the dark side of the planet Svartos. He needs a very cold climate to survive. The spaceship used to take him there is his gaol, with the power source removed and hidden in the head of a biomechanoid creature, armed with laser beams in its eyes. Presumably it's the same ship used to take him to Svartos, because otherwise why provide him with a spacecraft - albeit a deactivated one - that could help him escape? The biomechanoid disappears off into the depths of the planet beneath the ship and becomes the stuff of legend - a dragon. Over the centuries, Kane sets up a trading colony called Iceworld based in the iced-over ship, as one does when in prison. Space travellers visit Iceworld, and Kane recruits many of them to his private army; some help in the running of Iceworld, and some are in cryogenic sleep waiting for the day when he can take his revenge. He seeks the dragon, and plants a tracking device on a map to its location, then rigs a card game so Sabalom Glitz takes possession of the map, and confiscates Glitz's spacecraft so he is motivated to seek out the dragon's treasure.

The Doctor arrives on Iceworld having registered the tracking signal in the TARDIS, interested in an expedition to find the dragon. The Doctor and Mel team up with Glitz and a 20th century girl from Perivale called Ace who has somehow arrived in this future world in a timestorm. They find the dragon almost instantly. Kane sends a couple of his team who kill it and remove its head. There is a power surge booby trap that kills Kane's people so the Doctor takes ownership of the power source (or Dragonfire), but Kane has taken Ace as hostage. There's an exchange of Ace for the Dragonfire, and it is inserted into the circuitry; the ship breaks through the ice and takes off from Svartos. Kane's instruments betray to him that his home planet Proamon is gone, destroyed 2000 years earlier. Deprived of his revenge, Kane commits suicide by opening a screen on the ship and letting in unfiltered sunlight, which melts him. While all this has been going on there's been a massacre of all the people on Iceworld and Glitz's ship has been blown up. He takes ownership of Kane's ship. Mel decides to stop travelling with the Doctor and instead travels with Glitz. Ace joins the Doctor, who promises to take her back to Perivale by the scenic route.

Context:

I watched this on the big screen of NFT1 at the BFI Southbank; they had a Doctor Who event to launch the Blu-Ray boxset of season 24 that's being released at the end of June with a screening of Dragonfire (see the Deeper Thoughts section below for more details). It was the first time for 15 months that I've taken a long journey on a train or spent a day in the capital (or anywhere so far from home). That last time 15 months ago, was - perhaps not entirely coincidentally - the last time the BFI were able to arrange a Doctor Who event, for The Talons of Weng-Chiang. One shelved resolution I had for 2020 was to use my BFI membership to watch a wider variety of things than just Doctor Who, but clearly these events are the sort that motivate me to get out the house. The meaning and risk of getting out of the house has changed since early 2020, of course, and just as I did in March last year, I seriously considered the circumstances right up until the last moment before travelling up. I was watching with David and Trevor, fan friends mentioned many times before on the blog, and afterwards Chris joined us for drinks. All of us had had at least one and some both Covid jabs; there were also standard restrictions in place at the venue (it was at a third of maximum capacity, making little ol' Dragonfire the most select and quickest selling of these BFI events so far!).

My journey into London was quiet; there was space around me on every train I took. I decided to walk from Victoria rather than take the tube as it was such a nice Sunny day, one of the hottest of the year so far. Twice on the walk I was complimented on my bag (I was carrying my faux-retro Tom Baker and Dalek-festooned satchel that I got from the Earl's Court Doctor Who Experience many years ago). Once I was at the venue, I saw lots of other groups of fans meeting up for what was probably the first time in a long time. One of the best parts of the day was seeing that, and much more later as photos of happy young fans meeting up adorned my social media timeline. Pretty soon, we all were trooped in to the theatre through an outside door - they are operating a one-way system to get audiences in an out. Watching something with a larger (albeit reduced) audience is always a different experience. The feelgood factor of the event happening at all would probably protect the relatively unloved Dragonfire from too much of a mauling. But there were a good few laughs at events on screen that couldn't be called intentionally funny. The biggest was for Tony Selby's gritted teeth close-up in part 3 when he snarls "Kane!" A bit unfair that, as he gives it his best shot.

The sunny day continued after the screening, and many drinks were had outside for the whole evening afterwards. The BFI's Riverside bar doesn't get much sun, as all the outdoor seating is overshadowed by Waterloo Bridge, but that meant we didn't burn. We saw Derek Handley to say hello to, and had a drink with Ed Stradling and Phil Newman. A lot of conversation happened about exactly what's wrong with Dragonfire. Everyone enjoyed themselves at this screening, but the story we were watching was no more than a qualified success in people's eyes. I'm normally the most positive, but this time I found I enjoyed it a lot less than others, more on that below.

First Time Round:

I watched this live on its broadcast across three Monday nights in November and December 1987. I was 15 and had started my final year at high school, and remember a few weeks earlier during the broadcast of an early episode of the season going to a careers and further education fair at the local Masonic hall. This memory is in my mind as my eldest child is but a few months away from being in exactly the same point in his education, though he's already signing up for (still mostly virtual) open days. It may be that there's a lot more people going to Sixth Form than there were in my day 34 years ago so they have to start it all earlier. Anyway, this is obviously making me feel old, as is the simple fact of typing '34 years ago' just then. "I have started to say / 'A quarter of a century' / Or 'thirty years back' / About my own life"; just like Philip Larkin, I'm becoming more of a curmudgeon the older I get. When Dragonfire was first broadcast I thought it was the best story of the year; the music, visual effects and model work better than the previous three stories to my young mind, and the story overall more enjoyable. My reaction this time, though, was not so favourable, as I'll get onto next...

Reaction:

A curious thing happened to me during the BFI screening of Dragonfire. After the third episode finished, there were various clips from the imminent Blu-ray boxset, including many scenes from Time and the Rani. To say that his opening story of the 1987 run is unpopular is a bit like saying that Hitler is a little bit naughty; it regularly comes close to the bottom of every fan poll, and in terms of consistent fan dislike is beaten to the wooden spoon only by the first story of the previous Doctor Colin Baker. Dragonfire is not considered a classic by any means, but it consistently polls higher than Time and the Rani. I've always generally agreed with this consensus, so it was a shock to be watching the Rani clips on that big screen and finding them borderline enjoyable, and significantly better than Dragonfire. Now, at the time of writing this, the box set including Time and the Rani is still two weeks away from release. When it comes out, I'll watch all four episodes of the season opener, and may well change my mind. As of now, though, I need to unpack exactly what is so so wrong with Dragonfire; I'll try not to take all day, but - believe me! - there are many, many contributory factors. Of all these, Ian Briggs's script would possibly not be top of anyone's list; there are more obvious offenders. The more I think about it, though, the more it's clear that even if every other creative contributor was giving a career best, it still could only be okay, not great. This is because the story is so flawed.

Briggs merges two genre staples: bad guy revenge plot, and a fantasy quest with dragons and treasure. Normally, these would mesh together reasonably - the quest needs to be completed to facilitate the revenge. But Briggs creates two problems for himself. Firstly, in order presumably to bring some depth and irony to the bad guy's ultimate undoing, his home planet - and any hope for revenge - has been reduced to dust by the passing of time. To make this believable, the period of time elapsed has got to be reasonably lengthy; Briggs settled perhaps unwisely on an excessive 3000 years, but the problems would have been the same even if it were only say 30. It puts undue pressure on the quest plot to be extremely dramatic and harrowing and difficult, otherwise someone else would have found the Dragonfire in that long, long period of time. The quest already had to be wholly created within a studio in Television Centre, so that would be a tall order from the off; but, Briggs doesn't actually add much if any jeopardy in the quest plot. It's just a journey between different locations. There's one dead end that requires a climb down a sheer face of rock, but that's staged so poorly it has become infamous (the 'cliffhanger' sequence at the end of part 1). Aside from that, all the antagonism is borrowed from the revenge plot: cryo-zombies and guards are sent from Iceworld, the Doctor and Glitz go back to Iceworld and have confrontations with guards and exploding spaceships. This ease at which elements can go back and forth between the two genres - or two worlds - of the story fundamentally damages the quest plot. When one 'answers the call' to adventure, as per Joseph Campbell's lingo of quests, it's supposed to be an irrevocable decision. A protagonist isn't supposed to be able to commute back and forth from the new world of dangers and wonders.

It's so easy for the treasure to be discovered that it begs many questions. These are then exacerbated by Briggs's second main act of self sabotage: to make the setting for his adventure a trading hub for space travellers. The naff depiction of this as a being a Space Bejam isn't down to him as writer, admittedly, but even if it was realised by Ridley Scott with help from Moebius and H. R. Giger this setting still wouldn't make any sense for the story. Either Kane, a dangerous criminal prisoner lest we forget, has set all this up (why would he have been allowed to?) or it was already there and he took it over (but then, why exile him to such a place?). Why does he do it at all? Maybe to tempt people there so he can form his army. If so, though, why does he use them to continue his commercial enterprise for three thousand years rather than getting at least some of them to help him with his main project of escape? Many many spaceships visit Iceworld, and we know Kane can commandeer one quite easily. So, why doesn't he just use one of those to escape? Perhaps the dragon would have come out of hiding to stop him if he'd tried to escape in another ship. There's only one dragon, though, and in the end it only took a couple of Kane's troops to bring it down. It's plausible that Kane has to use the ship he's imprisoned in, as it's the only one that can keep him at the correct temperature. In that case, why not cut out the middle man and just send his own troops to find the 'dragon' and kill it. He's got a map. Why bother with all the subterfuge with trackers and rigged card games to get Glitz to do it instead?

There are loads of smaller questions. Who made the map? How did they do this, particularly as one thing marked on the map isn't a location but a living creature that can move around? Why has Kane not once in the last 2000 years enquired of any of the many staff and visitors to Iceworld about his home planet Proamon? Even if she was the youngest of her school year, how has Ace had time to start her A-levels, get expelled, work a job as a waitress, experiment with explosives, get caught in a timestorm, and then work another job as a waitress, but still not turn seventeen?  Why does everyone think that putting the treasure inside the 'dragon' is the safest place to stop Kane getting at it? The planet has a bright side to which he can never venture, so why not bury it there or send the creature there? It would make more, if not exactly complete, sense for the quest to take place in an environment that's really hot rather than cold. Kane likes the cold; why put the thing he's not allowed to access in a cold place? It's as wrongheaded as hiding something from Dracula not in a string of garlic but in a vat of blood. The final unfortunate culmination of all the script flaws is that Dragonfire has another thing in common with Raiders of the Lost Ark other than melting heads (see The Big Bang Theory episode The Raiders of Minimization for full details): like Indy, the Doctor and his friends don't do anything to contribute to the plot except make it easier for the villains to find the treasure.

I know that's four paragraphs of invective about plot holes, but I promise the script is not the biggest problem. My younger self was right about the music, visual effects and model work; it's all more than adequate by the standards of the time. The costume and production design are okay too. There's the odd bit that's out of the place - the treasure map, for example, is something straight out Pirates of the Caribbean (the amusement park ride, not the movie), whereas everywhere else has a futuristic aesthetic. TV at the BBC at that time was made on something of a factory line, project after project with pre- and post-production of other shows overlapping with whatever was in the studio that week; the departments didn't have the time for tone meetings, so some inconsistency was always a risk. There was comparatively generous amounts of rehearsal time, though, so there's no excuse for the wild inconsistency in the acting. This is the real weakness of Dragonfire. Everyone's pitching their performance in a different register, as if they are all appearing in different shows, and there's no cohesion.

This is doubtless in some cases down to the experience of the performer. Sophie Aldred comes over as a lovely person, and certainly improved in the role of Ace, which she started here when new to TV and very inexperienced. In Dragonfire, though, it pains me to say that she is mostly unwatchable; the script is doing a good job of showcasing the auditioning companion favourably in comparison to Mel: one screams, the other doesn't; one's a bit prim and won't sit on a big pile of clothes in a messy room, the other's down to earth and real. This is undermined though by the artificial performance of Aldred, which seems to reach the levels of an Eliza Doolittle pastiche: "I ain't got no Mum and Dad, an I never 'ad no Mum and Dad, not nor nuffin' nor nye-ver, up the old Kent Road, apples and pears". But seasoned performers like Tony Osoba don't fare much better; he delivers his (admittedly pretty thankless and expository) lines in a stilted manner throughout. McCoy has some good moments (the scene where he tells Patricia Quinn's Belazs that he doesn't think her debt can ever be repaid is an early standout of his time in the role, and a lot of his clowning also must work as it got people laughing in the BFI). 

Elsewhere, even down to the small roles, nobody seems to know how the story as a whole is being pitched on the realistic to theatrical, or drama to comedy, or kid-friendly to horror scales. There's a massacre sequence that has a certain energy and fear displayed, with a little girl put in danger; but, a couple of scenes later, the girl's Mum breezes in wondering where she's been, still performing in the light sit-com style of an earlier scene she appeared in when she had a milkshake tipped on her head. McCoy has told an anecdote over the years about how he came out of rehearsals thinking everyone was going to act slipping and sliding on the studio floors to sell their iciness, but then found that he was the only person in the studio doing it. In episode 3, there is a derivative sequence ripped off from Aliens where two guards hunt the 'dragon', but it's intercut with a scene of other characters sitting around bored playing I-Spy. (Also, and I know this is back to script problems again, but why kill off Patricia Quinn and Tony Osoba's characters in episode 2 of 3 when you need a male and female villain team in episode 3 to do the alien hunt? Couldn't Kane's sadistic revenge on the characters after they've betrayed him be to send them on this suicide mission rather than kill them swiftly? That's got to be better than losing two more experienced actors and bringing the subs on.)

 

To me, the job of making all these contradictory performances cohere falls to the director, so most of the blame for how Dragonfire turned out should be levelled at Chris Clough. It's a pattern I've noted in his other Doctor Who productions of this era. I think he clearly was a good guy and wanted to give it his all, but his focus was probably more on the technical than the cast. He might have been okay with a small number of players (as in The Ultimate Foe), but the tendency once script editor Andrew Cartmel took over was for larger casts of different characters spread out through the narrative: this is the model for not just Dragonfire but all Clough's stories for Sylvester McCoy and they (Delta and the Bannermen and Silver Nemesis particularly) suffer from the same issues with consistency of performance . It's not all bad: Quinn, Edward Peel as Kane and Tony Selby as Glitz comport themselves with something approaching dignity, bar the odd duff moment. And ultimately, the end of Dragonfire delivers the Doctor and Ace, a partnership of promise that will act (much better) as the engine driving the final two years of classic series Who.

Connectivity: 

Both Dragonfire and The Name of the Doctor are the final story of a season of Doctor Who that consists of 14 episodes (the latter being the 14th episode of a run starting with Asylum of the Daleks and including The Snowmen Christmas special that was broadcast in the middle of its interrupted run). Both see the Doctor make an emotional goodbye at the end to someone he's travelled with (Mel, River) and both include a scene of the Sylvester McCoy Doctor hanging off an ice face with his umbrella (it's the same clip reused in the later story, of course).

Deeper Thoughts:

Planetary Archives Criminal History Segment 93-12-0-4; BFI Dragonfire Screening, 12th June 2021. The biggest worry I had was whether my glasses would steam up with a mask on for several hours in a cinema, but it did not come to pass. Once the assembled crowd were settled, the first person that I saw on stage through my unmisted vision was Justin Johnson, our usual host for these events in the Before Covid Era. He got a lot of negatives out of the way up front in his introduction. As with the Talons screening last year, the ongoing pandemic impacted attendance by guests with Sophie Aldred and Patricia Quinn wanting to attend but being unable to make it. He also mentioned that they'd tried very hard to get an event together earlier this year to show Terror of the Autons when the season 8 Blu-ray boxset came out, but lockdown prevented it. Current restrictions mean no audience interactions, so the traditional quiz where people shout for Dick to answer Doctor Who trivia questions and win a DVD could not take place. All this was disappointing, but Justin cheered up the audience when introducing Dick Fiddy by saying "I haven't seen Dick in over a year" which elicited applause as well as laughter from the assembled fans who have no doubt missed this particular double entendre.

"I haven't seen Dick in over a year!" Johnson (L), Fiddy (R)

Before the first episodes were shown, a guest was invited on stage: William 'Bill' Dudman, film cameraman on a number of Sylvester McCoy stories; for Dragonfire, a story shot in the studio with video cameras, this meant that he was involved in shooting the work of the model effects team. He came prepared with a few notes for a technical but interesting talk, with the odd question being asked by Messrs Johnson and Fiddy. A lot of the tricks of the trade for shooting space miniatures (Dudman was involved in filming the magnificent model work for Star Cops shortly before starting on Doctor Who, so he's got form in this area) were familiar - shooting at high frame rates, suspending models on their side or upside down to avoid displaying gravity; but, he also discussed more subtle techniques. The shots of the planet Svartos were shot through a high-quality pane of glass that William had edged with an anti-flare paint; this was to give the illusion of the planet's atmosphere. He also revealed that in his role he would deal mainly with the effects designer not the director, and would never see a script. When doing the filming of the story before Dragonfire, Delta and the Bannermen, that meant his not knowing the context for why a Sputnik-a-like satellite should be colliding with a bus in space. A final anecdote involved his work on the series much earlier in his career on the Patrick Troughton story Fury from the Deep. The climax with the weed creature (actually an effects assistant in a suit) was supposed to involve said creature bursting through the door into the main set. When they came to shoot it, the man in the suit discovered that the hinges on the set door had been put on the wrong way round, so on the first take the fearsome creature had instead to open the door slowly and politely step through, no doubt waving a frond in greeting.

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Dudman

The first two episodes of Dragonfire were shown next, and after that a brief interview with Russell Minton, the executive producer of the Blu-ray boxsets. He has been mentioned many times on this stage at previous BFI events, and I think has been in the audience, but has never before been coaxed up onto the stage. He confirmed that every episode of the Season 24 series has an extended version included in the package, so it's really a 28-episode boxset. He talked about his original pitch for the range being like a set of encyclopedias of every year of the classic series; this aim for comprehensiveness of coverage drives which Value Added Material is created where there are "Still stories left to tell". For example, there was no sign of Patricia Quinn on the DVD release of Dragonfire, so an interview feature was created for the Blu-ray. What archive material exists is also a factor: there is enough studio and location footage from the making of season 24 to fill up multiple sets, so they have had to be selective, but there's still an extensive amount on the boxset that comes out later in June. Covid is still having an impact on shooting the accompanying features. The lockdown that started in December 2020 in the UK kicked in a few days before a couple of shoots; this time, it was still possible to do the work with restrictions, but there is also the question as to whether the contributors feel comfortable. Luckily, everyone did. Throughout the work on the many features for the range, everyone contacted has been happy to be involved, even if some were bemused at first as to why they were being asked about jobs from long ago, and everyone is generous with their time. The current Doctor Who office does not get involved editorially, but there is some discussion about timing of announcements so they don't clash.

Fiddy (L), Minton (R)

Following Russell, there was the final episode of Dragonfire followed by a highlights package of the boxset's Value Added Material. We were treated to long clips or clip selections of the following: the Behind the Sofa watch of Time and the Rani; The Doctor's Table with Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, Bonnie Langford and Clive Merrison enjoying a meal while answering questions; Holiday Camp, a new making-of documentary about Delta and the Bannermen; a career-spanning interview with Patricia Quinn which looks to be a highlight of the set (that segment got a round of applause in NFT1); Matthew Sweet in Conversation with Sylv; and the amusing '24 Carat' trailer for the set. All of it was very enjoyable, and I'm very much looking forward to watching every one in full. Once this was finished and the lights came up, the final interviewee of the day was invited onto the stage; this was Ian Briggs, the writer of Dragonfire, who was softly spoken and thoughtful throughout. He talked about working at the BBC Script Unit and receiving a stand-out script by a young writer called  Andrew Cartmel, then meeting with him; they hit it off immediately. Around this time, Briggs was interested in writing for Doctor Who (one of his "bucket list" jobs) and had already had a meeting with mid-1980s Who script editor Eric Saward that came to nothing. A little later, Briggs left the unit, and the tables turned: Cartmel, who had since replaced Saward, invited Briggs to send him a writing sample, and from that he was commissioned for the story that became Dragonfire.

Johnson (L), Briggs (R)

Briggs shared interesting and amusing glimpses of  writing Doctor Who at that time, for example how he had learned to limit his sets and indicated how they could be reused with different lighting to represent the lower and lower levels of Iceworld as our heroes journeyed downward. An anecdote recalled that producer John Nathan-Turner had been concerned that the main villain being called Hess (as he was until a late stage) might cause Rudolph Hess (Nazi war criminal who was then still alive, imprisoned in Spandau) to sue the BBC for defamation of character! The replacement name had to be four letters long as the scripts had already been typed out, and this allowed them to just tippex out 'Hess' and type over it with 'Kane'. When discussing the infamous cliffhanger of episode 1 - something you get the impression that Briggs has explained many times over the years - he talked about getting the balance right in a script between giving enough information versus being patronising to the creative departments working from the script, or cramping their style. For the cliffhanger moment, the climb down the ice face was supposed to be the only option open to the Doctor to proceed, but this was not reflected in the set that was created. It didn't help in Briggs's opinion that set building had to happen in parallel with rehearsals, meaning any learning from the actors and director blocking movements was too late to have an impact on the sets. It also wasn't supposed to be the cliffhanger; the episode was supposed to end with Mel and Ace coming face to face with the dragon creature. 

Briggs briefly talked about writing for the Doctor; he only had a 90-second screen test to go on in terms of tailoring the material to Sylvester McCoy; he thought of the characterisation as being something like a male Mary Poppins. More discussion centred on Ace, a character that Briggs created as a prototype companion. Until very late in the day it was unclear whether Bonnie Langford would be leaving or not in season 24, and which companion would replace her if she did. Briggs had prepared two endings with either Mel or Ace going off with Glitz and the other accompanying the Doctor. Ace and Sophie Aldred were a big hit during the production, so when that late decision was made, Briggs had to give up his copyright in the character. He said this was an easy decision to make: he wouldn't have made anything financially either way - if he hadn't surrendered the character to the BBC, the character would not have become a regular. As such, it was the only option to allow Ace to live on, and he was happy to do this and happy to develop the character further in The Curse of Fenric.

Returning to Doctor Who was something that at one point Briggs was not sure would happen: on Dragonfire, a problem had been reported up from the crew to the producer which entailed the cutting of a particular speech. Briggs had been briefed that the producer would ask him whether he was okay with this, but this was just a courtesy and he couldn't say No. If he played "silly buggers", word would get round that he was difficult and he would not work in TV again. When the moment came in the control room, though, he asked for the speech to be kept as it contained a vital piece of information for the audience. The room went quiet, the writer was telling the producer what to do, and this just did not happen; Nathan-Turner stared at him for a long moment, then said "The speech stays". Briggs speculated that Nathan-Turner's instincts would have been to agree because Briggs had been playing ball up to then, to the point of giving away the rights to one of his creations, so a sudden uncooperative decision must have been for a good reason. Briggs ended the interview with words of effusive praise for the much maligned 1980s producer of Doctor Who, telling us that he'd have gone to the ends of the Earth for John Nathan-Turner. It was a nice note of positivity on which to end a much welcome return of these events. I hope we see the next one very soon.

In Summary:

How close were they to creating a coherent production? Cold, getting colder, FREEZING!