Enlightenment

Chapter the 266th, in which there's a chase during a race in space to a place of utmost grace. And the video picture is interlaced... (that's enough - Ed).

Plot:

The Doctor's new travelling companion Turlough has done a deal with the Black Guardian, agreeing to kill the Doctor, but can't go through with it. The White Guardian appears in the TARDIS, draining its power and dimming the lights to project himself, warning the Time Lord of impending danger: someone must be prevented from winning a race. The TARDIS arrives below decks in what appears to be an Edwardian racing yacht, but it's really a space ship with sails to catch solar winds. Many vessels styled after different Earth historical periods are in competition for the ultimate prize: Enlightenment. The officers of each are Eternals, beings that live outside time and cannot ever die, who use humans (or Ephemerals as they call them) for entertainment, and have brought groups of sailors from various times to crew their ships. The TARDIS team are on the Shadow, captained by the mysterious Striker; First Mate Marriner takes a shine to Tegan. The Black Guardian telepathically taunts Turlough that he is abandoning him to a fate of perpetual confinement on the ship, so Turlough jumps overboard. He is picked up by the Buccaneer, a pirate ship captained by the Eternal Captain Wrack. Wrack appears to be destroying other ships to gain advantage, by harnessing the Black Guardian's powers and focusing them on jewels she has tricked the other Captains into receiving as a gift. Striker is too wily to accept anything from her, though, so - at a party on the Buccaneer that everyone is invited to - Wrack hypnotises Tegan, and hides a jewel in the tiara she's wearing.

The others return to the Shadow without Turlough, who's taking his chances with Wrack. The Doctor manages to get the jewel overboard before it destroys the ship. Wrack has all the other Captains walk the plank, so the race is between the Shadow and the Buccaneer. The wind dies and the Shadow is becalmed, but the Buccaneer's sails are better. The Doctor goes back in the TARDIS to help Turlough, and from the Shadow Tegan sees two people ejected from the pirate ship. It is Captain Wrack and her First Mate Mansell that have been thrown overboard, though, and the Doctor and Turlough bring the Buccaneer over the finishing line. The Black and White Guardians are waiting for them. Striker, Marriner and Tegan come over to congratulate the winners. The Guardians send the Eternals back to their own dimension and offer Enlightenment to the Doctor, but he turns it down as not something he - or anyone else - is ready for. Turlough is offered part of Enlightenment, but the Black Guardian reminds him that he still owes a debt of the Doctor's life. Turlough has to choose, and gives the Black Guardian the portion of Enlightenment, which appears to burn the Black Guardian up. The Doctor explains that Enlightenment wasn't the glowing diamond thing they were presented with but was actually the friends they made along the way, or something.

Context:

Blogging this story, I have completed the 20th anniversary season of Doctor Who from 1983, 40 years on during the 60th anniversary year for the show. It's a shame that the - long rumoured - Blu-ray box set of this run has not been announced (at least at time of writing); I have a feeling it won't be too long before it comes out, and Enlightenment could well have been the story chosen for a BFI screening to tie-in. It would have been nice, assuming I would have been able to get a ticket, to cover that as part of any blog post. Unfortunately, the Blu-ray release schedule can't keep pace with my blogging frequency. Season 20 is the tenth now completed for the blog (following seasons 3, 8, 14, 15, 17, 23 and 25, and new series 6 and 13). If I keep up my three posts a month average, it's going to become more and more common to close these gaps, until I catch up with currently broadcast stories (some time in 2024, depending on when Ncuti Gatwa's first season airs). Anyway, I watched from the DVD as the best quality version available, an episode a night across a few days in May 2023. I was accompanied by the Better Half, who had no memory of watching these episodes since she first saw them 40 years ago. She expressed sororal admiration at Janet Fielding's ability to keep a boob tube up ("'Cos that's a hard thing to do if you haven't got much of a bust"), and moaned a lot about Peter Davison's hair being too long. She is a big All Creatures Great and Small fan (both original and the new Channel 5 version) and was moaning that Tristan's hair was too long in the 1983 ACGAS Christmas Special, which I told her was probably because Davison appeared in that between Doctor Who seasons and therefore couldn't get it cut. She has another thing to blame Doctor Who for now.   

First Time Round:

I watched this when it first went out in early March 1983, when I was just a callow schoolboy. I can only remember one thing about that first watch, and - sorry to raise the ick factor - but it was my going through another stage of my pre-pubescent sexual awakening upon watching Janet Fielding in her Edwardian decolletage be hypnotised by Lynda Baron as Captain Wrack. Enlightenment has more mature emotional and psychosexual subtexts than the average Doctor Who story, and the 10-year old me definitely caught something of that at some level of my psyche / hormones. Curiously, it wasn't so rare for stories shown around this time featuring Janet Fielding; earlier in the season was Snakedance, the sequel to the previous year's Kinda (watching which started the aforementioned pre-pubescent sexual awakening in the first place).

Reaction:

Doctor Who Magazine has structured its 60th anniversary poll of all broadcast stories differently to previous polls it has run over the years, perhaps to avoid upsetting Colin Baker again (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this early blog post for more details). This means that each Doctor will have their top three most voted for stories go into another poll, through which the overall final order of that second round subset will be chosen. There's still a chance that a Colin Baker story could come last of those, of course, but it won't be The Twin Dilemma this time at least (though that one did come last out of Colin's stories, as it always does, as confirmed in the most recent DWM at time of writing). As usual, I am avoiding any pressure of picking my top three by not entering the poll at all; if I were choosing, though, I'd coincidentally probably pick the last three I had left to blog at this point, with Kinda and The Caves of Androzani as well as Enlightenment getting my top marks. Randomness has saved my best for last, but my taste does not quite accord with everyone else's. Caves is a shoo-in, it's been in the top five of all Who stories in every one of the polls run to date, including nabbing the coveted number one spot in 2009. It was Peter Davison's top story in the first round of this latest poll as expected. My other two, though, didn't make it to the final. More action-oriented stories Earthshock and The Five Doctors - predictably - completed the top three instead (this is consistent with all the previous polls over the years). The more thoughtful, lyrical stories like Enlightenment are lower down, even though, in my humble, they are the ones that Doctor Who, and in particular this period of the show, do most well.

Every aspect of Enlightenment is effective at worst, superlative at best. From the first scene, one aspect is clearly better than normal, particularly for this period of the show, and that's the lighting. Watching the atmospheric TARDIS scenes at the beginning makes one wonder (as Davison himself says on one of the DVD extras) why they can't light the set like that every time. It's not just there, though; the scenes in the Eternals' ships are lit well in Television Centre, as are the top deck scenes filmed at Ealing. The nature of the race plot, involving groups of Eternals cosplaying from various periods of Earth history, means various creatives on the crew can utilise their skill and the stored resources of the BBC to produce great costumes and sets. This is particularly evident in the party scenes in part three that bring all the various ships' inhabitants together. The spacesuits, reminiscent of those in 2001 A Space Odyssey, are good too, it's not just the period stuff that's done well. Make-up and hair is also top class (Tegan does look stunning in her Edwardian party outfit and wig). Sailing craft in space is a big ask of model-work, but again the people behind the scenes come through. The reveal at the end of part one cliffhanger of multiple vessels hanging in space is a triumph of incongruous imagination, and one of the best in the series' history. Effects work throughout is strong, with only a couple of exceptions (but every Doctor Who story has some flaws, and here they are tiny); sound design and music are exquisite (more on the music in the Deeper Thoughts section below).

None of this would work without a good script and good performances. Enlightenment automatically has potential for a unique viewpoint as it is both written by a woman, and directed by a (different) woman. This would be the only time in the 26 years of the classic series such a thing happened, and it's only happened a couple of times since, and those very recently. Neither of those females are relying on any novelty, though, both work incredibly hard and deliver the goods. Director Fiona Cumming is a perfect match for this more lyrical story (having helmed stories like Castrovalva and Snakedance before this). She puts together one of the best ensemble casts Who has had, even though she had to react to some last minute changes when shooting dates were altered. I think that was a piece of luck; as good as Peter Sallis, originally cast as Striker, would have no doubt been, the series would have been deprived of what I think is one of the best performances of the classic era, Keith Barron's restrained but intense turn as the captain of the Shadow. At the time, I knew him only as a comic actor from a sit-com, so I was blown away, and am every time I watch this story again. Even something like raising a glass of wine to his lips is imbued with suppressed, inscrutable energy. The other recast role was Leee John, at the time known only as a pop singer in the band Imagination, as the baddie's sidekick Mansell. The performances of him and Lynda Baron - as pirate queen Wrack - come in for criticism, but I think they are both pitched perfectly. They are both playing characters who are playing characters, and gleefully.

The regulars all get served well. Davison gets a lot of good scenes facing off against the amoral Striker in righteous dudgeon, with the dialogue between them crackling ("Living minds are contaminated with crude emotions, organic, irrational, creative, entertaining" ... "A Lord of Time - are there lords in such a small domain?" etc. etc.) This is probably Turlough's best material, still struggling between good and bad choices, up to the end when he sits between a good and bad angel, almost literally, and finally decides which side he's on. Even a minor subplot like his betrayal of Tony Caunter's teetotal sailor Jackson is written and performed seriously, just one of many magical moments with which the story is blessed. The scene when Mark Strickson is thrown to the floor in front of Baron's Wrack for the first time, gets to his knees and looks up, with Cumming choosing low and high POV shots, is probably as close as Doctor Who could go to highlighting a sub-dom sexual subtext - it's almost like something out of a Frankie Goes to Hollywood video. The love subplot between Christopher Brown's Marriner and Tegan is sensitively handled but emotionally rich, and gives Janet Fielding her best scenes in any show that's not a Mara story. Barbara Clegg's complex and layered scripts contain many such resonances. The Eternals using the Ephemerals could be seen as a comment on gender (Marriner's unwanted advances ultimately being rejected by Tegan as he's only interested in himself) or class (the rich officer class exploiting the toil of those below decks to make them rich) or just as an interesting science-fiction concept in and of themselves.

I've barely scratched the surface of all the wonderful elements in this story. Unlike Earthshock or The Five Doctors, conflict is mostly at an interpersonal level; there's not much running around and zapping, and any monstrousness is not overt. Fans may have been disappointed that the big confrontation between the Black and White Guardians (something teased for five years but not seen on screen before Enlightenment) comes down to two men sitting on chairs, while the action is all internal, one person's choice. I think this is perfect, though, and much more effective than any attempt at pyrotechnics might have been. There's wonderful creepiness too, in scenes of space-suited Edwardian sailors queueing up for grog, or Marriner's hands and face appearing on the TARDIS scanner screen as he climbs up the outside of the TARDIS and then looks inside, sensing Tegan for the first time, with a sick smile on his face. Maybe this isn't traditional enough for some fans, but it obviously speaks to a good few including me: the story came fifth in the recent poll (Kinda was fourth); not too shabby.

Connectivity:

Both Enlightenment and The Idiot's Lantern feature female villains beginning with W (Wrack and Wire, The) and references to sailors (Rose's Mum's ex with incorrect flag advice in the Tennant story and a full ship's complement in Enlightenment). 

Deeper Thoughts:

Malcolm Clarke and the Musical Movements. The late, great Barry Letts was someone with the best claim to being a Doctor Who expert in its classic era, having performed pretty much every key role (directing before and after his time as producer, writing stories during that time and after, and finally returning to briefly be the executive producer at the beginning of the 1980s, a couple of years before Enlightenment was made). He also lived long enough to see the programme come back (indeed, was an honoured guest at the 2005 press screening of relaunch episode Rose) and share his wisdom in many interviews for DVD range releases. I barely have ever had the temerity to disagree with him on any view about the programme, as he's almost certainly going to turn out to be right. There have been a couple of times, though, that I've been convinced that he's wrong. One of these is in his opinions about the incidental music for The Sea Devils by Malcolm Clarke. At the time that music was first recorded, Barry Letts decided he didn't like it, and remained vocal about this thereafter. Having just finished working through all the extras from the Blu-ray box set of the season containing The Sea Devils, I heard him reiterate that he hated it on camera in a making-of documentary, and I heard him reiterate that he hated it on audio during commentaries. As ever, I heard all this thinking "How can he say this, when The Sea Devils has the best score of any classic Who story?!' It's innovative, exciting and in keeping with the action - Clarke somehow makes the electronically produced noises he creates supremely nautical.

While criticising The Sea Devils music, Letts praises Tristram Cary's just as experimental (but a bit more tasteful and therefore boring) score for the following story The Mutants. I hope this was Letts' honest reaction to the material and not him being blinded by status. Cary was a famous composer, but Letts sniffily refers to Clarke at one point essentially as a sound designer for the Radiophonic Workshop with ideas above his station. Of course, most of those working at the Workshop were composers too, and Clarke went on to score a good few Doctor Who stories, including Enlightenment. The cue used for the party sequences on Wrack's ship, for example, is beautiful, and a hell of an earworm. I defy anyone to say it's not the work of a real composer. His 1980s work was less divisive than his first score for the series, but it's fair to say that it was still quite divisive. Some might feel that there's not much point in creating something if it's not challenging; others might think that incidental music isn't the place for anything that stands out too much. I am sympathetic with the latter view, but this is Doctor Who we're talking about. It has always innovated in every aspect, particularly sonically, from the very first moments of the very first episode, and the Radiophonic Workshop was always a big part of that. Special sound was always within their remit, and even without their direct involvement the incidentals were often electronic and experimental (like Cary's score for the second ever story, The Daleks).

Generally, there are phases in the music used for periods of Doctor Who's life, where the sound is distinctive of that era. The 1960s splits into three for me, but as more experimentation was going on from one story to the next, it is not so clearly delineated. At the start of the show's life there was a tendency towards using new original scores, anywhere on the axis between traditional and experimental. Towards the end of the William Hartnell period, stock music becomes more prevalent, with clever use of repeating motifs (like the Space Adventure track that underscored the early stories of the Cybermen, becoming their de facto theme tune). Finally, as the 1960s progressed towards the end of Patrick Troughton's time in the title role, there's a period where the phenomenon of no music at all was tried. Maybe budgeting was more challenging, but even without music, there's usually something interesting to hear. Brian Hodgson's background soundscapes for stories like The Krotons can lay claim to be the Workshop's first incidentals, a few years before Malcolm Clarke's undersea opus. Into the 1970s, there's another brief period of experimentation, including The Sea Devils, before it rapidly becomes standard for stories to have traditional scores, almost always composed by Dudley Simpson. This is how things stayed for the rest of the decade. Producer for the 1980s John Nathan-Turner went a different way, giving Simpson the push, and engaging composers wholesale from the Workshop.

Clarke scored six stories in this period, alongside other composers like Peter Howell, Paddy Kingsland, Roger Limb, and others. He contributes the final workshop Doctor Who score in 1986, when the final classic series musical movement is already underway. Individual freelance composers working on their own synthesisers are responsible for the music of the final four years of classic Who, technology having caught up to make this possible. In the 21st century, there's been much less movement. Apart from Segun Akinola's scoring of Jodie Whittaker's episodes, every story's music has been written by one person, Murray Gold. The level of experimentation has only been whatever Gold brought to each new score. Though he's challenged himself to keep things fresh, it does seem a shame that Gold is now coming back, seemingly for every episode henceforth. It might have been nicer to try something new, and it does seem a bit backward looking. Still, the Russell T Davies writing the stories will be a different man than the one that wrote his last Who story in 2009; so, perhaps we'll see an all-new Gold to the one that last produced music for the show in 2017. Time will tell, as it always does. 

In Summary:

It's better than Earthshock and The Five Doctors put together; so there!

Terminus

Chapter The 139th, concerns Terminus, definition - noun: the end of the line.

Plot:

The Doctor has welcomed Turlough aboard the TARDIS, not knowing that this new young companion is a somewhat unwilling agent of the Black Guardian tasked with assassinating the Time Lord. Only Tegan suspects Turlough, but no one listens to her as she's always moaning about something. Anyway, Turlough's attempts at time machine sabotage cause the TARDIS to lock on to a nearby craft, which is decorated with pictures of skulls everywhere, so obviously must be a safe haven. Nyssa's room is nearest to the ensuing cosmic disturbance, so she escapes into the craft and the others follow her, getting split up as is the fashion. The Doctor and Nyssa meet up with a couple of space pirates, a raiding party whose (space)ship-mates have abandoned them, as it turns out they've raided a plague (space)ship - ferrying victims of space leprosy to a space station called Terminus. In Space.

Nyssa has caught the disease (somehow), and gets taken off by guards called the Vanir. The others follow. Once there, they aren't really in any jeopardy, except for some minor league bullying from the Vanir, as everyone - even a giant glowing red-eyed man-dog called the Garm - actually does want to help cure the people that arrive there. It also turns out that Terminus is at the exact centre of the universe (!) and its engines firing were responsible for the big bang because of some timey-warping (!!). The Black Guardian tricks Turlough into another act of sabotage which starts the Terminus engines again, threatening to destroy the universe, and everything comes to a crescendo with the giant dog-man pushing a lever back to its off position (!!!). Tegan and Turlough spend 90% of the story crawling around in air ducts, by the way, with the former only emerging at the end to be told by Nyssa that she's leaving the TARDIS, and is sticking around to help run Terminus. Tegan gives her a big hug, thereby offering her arms to an ex-leper. Arms to an ex-leper? No? No... I'll see myself out.

Context:

When Terminus came up next on the randomiser, I groaned inwardly. It's one of those stories I never find too appealing for a rewatch. A tired and tatty reputation proceeds it, but being stuck in the middle of a loose trilogy of stories, and writing out a companion, it can't be skipped; so, it tends to be watched only out of a stubborn and gruelling sense of duty. Watched alone without the bookends of the far more fun stories either side (Mawdryn Undead before, and Enlightenment after) is particularly hard. Poor Terminus. If Nyssa didn't leave in this story, I don't know if anyone would ever watch it all, as it's got naff all to do with the 'Black Guardian trilogy' really, as a friend of mine once observed (see below). My unfavourable feeling going in may have been subconsciously broadcast to my viewing mates, as all the children (boys of 13 and 10, girl of 7) bailed after episode 1, never to return. I watched the remainder of the story from the DVD, an episode a night, on my own. It does get a bit better as it goes along. (I watched without the enhanced CGI, by the way, because - to be honest - I'd completely forgotten until after I'd seen the episodes and was exploring the disc that there were any replacement CGI effects for Terminus).

First time round:

I did catch this on its BBC1 broadcast in February 1983, but don't remember anything significant about that viewing. I wasn't madly in love with Nyssa like some of my peers at that time, so neither her leaving, nor the sight of her in a camisole and petticoat, meant much to me. I remember more about the VHS release, which came out approximately ten years later. This was during my second year at university in Durham, when I'd gravitated towards a group of like-minded (or at least tolerant and slightly nostalgic) individuals who would watch Doctor Who with me. I bought the tape in Volume One in Worthing, my usual supplier of the time, and watched it at home before term started. Then, a month or so later, as I remember it, a few of us visited a group of friends' student digs in Neville's Cross on a Sunday, and watched my tapes of the whole of the Black Guardian trilogy back to back. God, we knew how to live back then. David, long-term fan friend mentioned many times before on this blog, was there, as was Kev B, another friend from his year group. They both must have been visiting for the weekend as they had left Durham the previous year. l remember having a discussion on the day with David about whether it was still worth watching a terrestrial repeat of Doctor Who if you already have it on video  - they were showing old Whos on BBC2 on Friday evenings, but it was something like Genesis of the Daleks or Caves of Androzani on at the time, which I had on tape, so I didn't bother watching; David, on the other hand, thought that any Doctor Who being shown 'live', as it were, was exciting and I should support it. Three-quarters of the way through watching Terminus, Kev B spluttered in frustration "This has got nothing to do with all the Black Guardian stuff". And he was right.

Reaction:

The author of Terminus, Steven Gallagher, is a pretty good writer, and one of only a handful of classic series Doctor Who writers who made a big name for themselves with significant work away from the show (novels and TV series, in his case). His previous script, Warrior's Gate, certainly had some problems during its production, but on the page it sings. So, why's Terminus such a mess? It too had a cursed production, where it seemed everything that could possibly go wrong did, but there's major issues with the script too. No production, however swish, could save it. Just to take one example, consider the mysterious company Terminus Inc. that runs this healthcare institution. As we find out later, the cure they offer does work, although it's hit and miss. So, why does nobody ever return? Why do people keep paying them, if their reputation is so bad (as pretty much every character confirms - it's not just the pirate Olvir's bias). Olvir says that the company continues operating, and nobody complains, because having a relative with the disease is too shameful for anyone to make a fuss. Do we buy that? If someone with enough money or clout paid for someone with the disease to be cured, and they disappeared without a trace, surely they would investigate? How likely is it that only un-rich or un-influential people are affected by Lazar disease?

Well, maybe it is possible, as Lazar disease doesn't seem to be one of those dull diseases that follows logic or anything; instead it claims only the person in the cast whose contract was coming to an end, leaving lots of other people unaffected who had as much or more contact with infected people or atmosphere. It also strikes insanely rapidly, which makes one wonder how anyone could survive an intergalactic trip once they came down with it. Let it also not be forgot that one of the symptoms is to take one's clothes off, wander around in one's undies for a bit, then don some medieval peasant rags. It is indubitably an unusual and interesting disease.

The Garm's motivations at least make sense, but he is woefully badly realised. This era (and pretty much all of classic Doctor Who, to be honest) has its fair share of monster creation being fumbled on the journey from script to screen, but they're not always so damaging to the intent of the story. The Garm as he finally appeared looks like a cuddly big teddy bear. He looks friendly, which of course - he is! He's supposed to look terrifying, so that when we find out later that he's friendly, it's a surprise twist. A key part of the story is fatally undermined, plus, you know, the Garm looks embarrassing throughout too - everyone's a loser. Gallagher's gone on record saying that the original script had the Garm remain unseen, just a pair of glowing eyes in the darkness; that would definitely have worked better, but would have been hard to realise in the studio, and eventually the whole costume would have had to be revealed as the Garm has to help save the day at the end.

Without the terrifying version of the Garm as originally intended, Terminus doesn't even have a pretend antagonist. That's not necessarily a fault, though; I think it's one of the story's few strengths is that Nyssa stirs up a quiet and small revolution amongst characters that aren't big and bad and evil, but just normal - if slightly desperate - people; it suits her character, and it's refreshing that the stakes don't always have to be high. Other positives: Bor is a good character, and nicely played by Peter Benson. And Liza Goddard trying her hardest to make her hard-bitten space pirate character believable, despite everything around her, from her costume and make-up outwards, working against that, is a triumph of determination.

Connectivity: 

Not very much links the black-and-white historical The Reign of Terror to the 1980s space adventure that is Terminus. All I can think of is that their respective first episodes both have a lot of wandering around exploring, with only a couple of guest characters appearing, then the rest of the cast - and the plot - turns up from episode two onwards.

Deeper Thoughts:

Vanessa Feltz's Grandmother. There's clearly much that is risible in Terminus, but a moment that  - though it is indeed silly - had never much registered previously, was part of an early scene. Peter Davison rushes into a room to see the door on the far side rapidly closing, so throws a chair with almost supernatural accuracy into the gap, stopping the door from slamming shut altogether. British TV whimsy-merchant Harry Hill and his writing team must have been tickled by this when researching material for an appearance of Peter Davison on Hill's Alien Fun Capsule programme last year. The result was a game / sketch called Chair Jam in which Peter and the other guests compete to best recreate this historic television event. The clip is online here and it's a lot of fun. If you haven't seen it, a note of caution before you click on that link: you won't be able to see that moment of Terminus the same way ever again. Now, I know that often gets said, but this time I think it's true: every time I watch Terminus from now on (which probably won't be that often, but you never know) the chair moment is going to stick out, and I'm going to think of Harry Hill.

This is a phenomenon of which I'm very familiar: there are lots of moments or lines of dialogue in films or TV shows that have become stuck in my mind by association with something else. Normally, it's experienced the other way round, though; rather than be reminded of something when watching a show, I'm reminded of the show when doing something else. This normally then elicits a quote in recognition, at least in our house. I don't know if 'normal' people do this. A couple of examples: whenever the Better Half or I are involved in any risky or thankless endeavour, one will say to the other "It won't work, will it, Ted?" and the other will reply "No, but we have to try" - this is based on the exchange between Ted and Dougal in the series two Father Ted episode Tentacles of Doom.  When there's no food in the house, and we need to do a big supermarket run, it is consistently known as a 'lentils and wallpaper' shop, after the shopping list Neil starts to write when they need "everything" in The Young Ones episode Flood. There's loads of others too - the semiotic thickness of our day-to-day dialogue is such that, were we not allowed our meta-textual references, it would probably get a lot quieter in our house.

There are obviously lots of Doctor Who instances too, some of which I've mentioned in the blog before. Whenever someone says anything patently obvious in our house, they receive an impression of Mr. Sneed in The Unquiet Dead: "The whole blummin' world can see that!". At least once a day throughout our summer holiday this year, someone sitting at the poolside but not getting in would be told by someone in the pool "You shouldah come intah the wartah wiv us, then we'dah bin tuggevah", parroting what is, I think we can all agree, the finest line of dialogue in The Curse of Fenric. Whenever, there's a discussion about 'fire' or 'leaders' it won't be long before "There were leaders before there was fire; fire will kill us all in the end" makes its entrance (Old Mother's dialogue from An Unearthly Child, done in an exaggerated impression of Eileen Way's delivery).

I'm going out on a limb here a bit, but I think that Doctor Who fans understand this behaviour; a particular Doctor Who fan - Russell T Davies - wrote about it. In an exchange between Lance and Henry in episode six of his 2015 series Cucumber, Lance tells how he once read an article by Vanessa Feltz about her grandmother doing the washing-up, always with the water too hot to the touch. This is also how Lance likes to do the washing up, so: "Every time I wash up, I think of Vanessa Feltz's grandmother. Isn't that ridiculous? Every single day of my life, just for a second, I think of Vanessa Feltz's grandmother. Cos she's in there, she's stuck - she's this tiny little fact that won't go away". Like all good bits of dramatic observation, this made me feel understood, and part of something wider. Since then, all our little family catchphrases and the regular events that invoke them have become known as Vanessa Feltz's Grandmother moments. The only drawback with this is the cognitive pile up: when it's cold and someone wants the fire put on I am reminded of Old Mother's portentous pronouncements in An Unearthly Child which reminds me of Lance and Henry in Cucumber which reminds me of Vanessa Feltz's grandmother. It's a wonder I get anything done!

In Summary:

If Terminus didn't exist, there would be no Chair Jam, and Chair Jam's quite funny; so, that's in its favour.

Mawdryn Undead

Chapter The 106th, you wait ages for the return of the Brigadier and then two come along at once...

Plot: 
1983. In a minor English public school, a mysterious pupil called Turlough (who's really an alien) does a deal with a man with a stuffed bird on his head in a whirly dreamscape. In return for safe passage away from the Earth, he has to kill some fellow called The Doctor. One of Turlough's teachers is TV's The Brigadier. The Brig's somehow forgotten all about the Doctor since a nervous breakdown he suffered in 1977 (so, sometime around Terror of the Autons - Inconsistent dating of UNIT stories Ed.) The Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa meanwhile land on the Starship Technobabble, which is travelling in perpetuity through a warp ellipse, or something, and is seemingly deserted. Through a complicated set of coincidences, which are being influenced by vengeful Mister Stuffed Bird on Head, AKA the Black Guardian, Tegan and Nyssa end up meeting the Brig back on Earth in 1977, and the Doctor ends up meeting him in 1983. Both parties end up back on the ship, with Turlough tagging along with the Doctor and Brig '83, and half-heartedly trying to kill the Doctor every so often.

On the ship are a handful of scientists led by a brainy chap called Mawdyn; they have experimented on themselves with Time Lord technology, and now cannot die, enduring in a state of continuous torment. They want the Doctor to euthanise them using his Time Lord energy (somehow). But this will mean he ceases to be a Time Lord and can't regenerate anymore. For some reason - his moral compass being a little bit scrambled by the warp ellipse maybe - the Doctor is very reluctant to do this selfless and heroic act; you'd think it would be right up his alley. Just as he's finally persuaded to do so, though, the two Brigadiers - who've been kept apart up to now with French farce style near misses, going in one door just as the other's coming in the opposite door and the like - meet each other, and release lots of plot expediency which allows Mawdryn and the others to kark it, and causes Brig '77's 'nervous breakdown'. Both Brigs are returned to their time zones. Turlough joins the TARDIS team, but nobody asks him about his background as the writers haven't worked it out yet. Everyone is fine with snatching a kid from his school and leaving the Brigadier - someone who had various grudges against the boy, and was the last person to see him alive - to presumably be suspected of his murder forever more.

Context:

The whole family had been very busy with this or that for quite a few weeks; so, we recently decided to have a weekend when we busily did nothing in particular, just hung around the house playing video games, drinking cups of tea and such. Lovely. On the Saturday, the whole lot of us (me, the Better Half, boys of 12 and 9, girl of 6) watched Mawdryn Undead from the DVD in one go. It's rare for nobody to get restless and want a break at some point during 100 continuous minutes, so Mawdryn Undead must be doing something right. The CBBC level (in a good way) dilemma made for good engagement with the kiddos; more than one of them was chanting "don't do it, don't do it" when Turlough was wrestling with selling his soul to the Black Guardian. And all the kids were mortified when he casually lies to deflect attention from himself and get his schoolmate Ibbotson into trouble. What a cad! Companions are not supposed to behave that way. 

First-time round:

The 20th Doctor Who series was the second run that I watched as it went out on BBC1. Unlike Peter Davison's previous year, I did not have to miss every other episode to go to cubs, as I was too old by then. It must have been the autumn of 1982 that I'd had a few taster sessions for sea scouts, one of which involved being chucked out of a boat and having to swim to shore in very cold water. Needless to say, this TV-loving geek did not take up such a punishing pastime on a permanent basis. So, from the start of the series at New Year in 1983, I was free to watch every story, including Mawdryn Undead, without having to get a precis in the playground of the odd numbered episodes. You might think that the sudden doubling of my episodic intake would have made it memorable, but casting my mind back I have only a few strong memories from watching the season, and none to do with this story in particular. A moment that sticks in my memory from watching Mawdryn was from many years later. In the mid-1990s, I was watching the VHS with the Better Half in my family home; my sister walked in, gave the TV screen and Turlough's antics upon it a long, withering look, and said "Why is that 30-year old dressed up as a schoolboy?". That was her one-line review.

Reaction

The stories of 20th century "Classic" Doctor Who were mostly multi-part stories with four or more episodes; in those days, I'll wager it was rare for one's favourite episode of any story to be part 2. Beginnings and ends are often favoured; lots of Doctor Who stories start well, and fewer but still many have a great ending. Robert Holmes, prolific 20th Century Who writer whose praises I was singing last post, said that episode 3 out of a 4-parter had "dog-legs", meaning that the plot would go off in a surprising direction, so there's some memorable episode 3s too; but, stories where episode 2's the best? Only Mawdryn Undead, that I can think of. The whole of that second episode is formally and emotionally rich: writer Peter Grimwade's script provides a solid and surprisingly modern usage of a guest character returning from the series' past. The Brigadier's memories of the Doctor are mysteriously blocked by some past trauma. During the second episode, they are unlocked in a wonderful character moment, and there follows lots of fan pleasing but non-gratuitous old clips. Then, as the Doctor teases the details of the mystery out of his old friend, the actions of his past as he retells the memories in the present are presented as intercut sequences. It works very well.

The original idea - before actor William Russell proved unavailable - was that it would be original 1960s companion Ian Chesterton teaching at Turlough's school. This might have fit better based on the cold hard facts of previous exposition, but Ian's character was solid and dependable; any kind of nervous breakdown would have seemed out of place. The Brig, however, near the end of his first ever story, The Web of Fear, starts to break down after an encounter with the Yeti has wiped out most of his men, and babbles about his formless, shapeless foes. The events of Mawdryn are entirely in keeping with that glimpse. Nicholas Courtney delivers perhaps the best performance from his many years on the show, giving us subtly different versions of Brig the Elder and Brig the Younger, and deftly performing the vulnerability masked by the stiff upper lip of a military man. William Russell would have been great too, I'm sure, but having Ian take a regenerated Doctor in his stride, seeing him without William Hartnell's Doctor and - crucially - without Barbara, would not have been as good as developing the Brigadier's story. All in all then, a happy accident.

The earlier portion of the tale concentrates on Turlough's selling his soul, which is an interesting concept but we don't know him well enough yet for it to resonate as much as the Brigadier's plot. Episodes 3 and 4 concentrate more on Mawdryn and his fellow scientists, who need to escape from the eternal life they've trapped themselves in. Again, this is a more distinctive motivation and richer emotional arc than usual, but the characters involved are not drawn in any detail, and are anyway a slightly immoral lot, not necessarily deserving of audience sympathy. It's a satisfying closure when they achieve their final rest, though. Think on this for a moment: for all its prototype Steven Moffat-esque timey-wimey structure, Mawdryn Undead contains three plots, all of which are propelled by understandable human emotions. It's admirable, and definitely not the norm for this era.

It's not perfect. There's a major misstep at the end where the Doctor's threatened fate is not to die, giving up his life for others; instead, he is just going to cease being a Time Lord. It's a more abstract concept, and one that requires awareness of obscure series continuity. And it's unnecessary: why not just have him risk death, it would be a simpler and more immediate threat that anyone could understand. Other minor negatives: despite the efforts of the script to sell it, nobody would have thought for a second that the charred Mawdryn was a regenerated Doctor (he wasn't wearing a loin cloth when last they saw them, was he?!); whatever his identity, dragging a burns victim along the floor and then wrapping him in blankets to "keep him warm" probably does not qualify as good nursing. Also, all the stories of this era have the same issue when watched in a random order: they always have an intrusive early TARDIS scene talking about the previous story - here it's the aftermath of Snakedance. It would be much better to forget about all that and get stuck into the new adventure. All in all, though, it was a very nicely constructed and performed piece, with plausible enough explanations for the huge coincidences at play. I was pleasantly surprised.

Connectivity: 

The Space Pirates and Mawdryn Undead both contain a space-faring object upon which the series regulars get stuck, which is subsequently blown apart. In both stories, being gullible is taken to an extreme (it's clear to the audience but not the characters who's behind the piracy, and that the bloke in the transmat capsule is clearly not the Doctor).

Deeper Thoughts:
A musical exercise. Shortly into Mawdryn Undead, Paddy Kingsland's otherwise excellent incidental music breaks in to a jaunty number to accompany Turlough and Ibbotson's grand theft auto, joyriding in the Brigadier's vintage car. It's a bit like the music that played on a Gameboy during Super Mario Land in the 1990s, both in terms of timbre and character. This cue remains a source of hilarity in our house, long after watching the episode; the Better Half sarcastically hums it occasionally to get my goat (though, I usually just laugh along with her). The odd lapse aside, though, I love most Doctor Who music. But I'm really bringing the subject up not to extol the virtues of the early chilly 60s electronica, nor Dudley Simpson's mid-period chamber incidentals, 1980s radiophonic synth anthems, nor recent romantic orchestral scores; I'm just using it as an excuse to tell you that I've lost two stone of weight.

It's not just a sweeping generalisation, more a sweeping, dusting, vacuuming and scrubbing the kitchen surfaces one: Doctor Who fans are not known for a predilection for exercise. Having been a pallid geek since the age of 9, and having piled on the years since then, I was until recently overweight and unfit. With some prompting from the Better Half, I decided to do something about this. Once we'd returned from our holiday this year (where I'd drunk a lot of wine and ate a lot of nice food), I have been moderating my diet, and doing more exercise. Part of the new regime has been doing Couch to 5K. This is an NHS-approved programme, that gradually takes a beginner over a 9-week period to the point where they can manage a 5K run. There's an app, of course, where a choice of voices can be selected to give you instruction and encouragement as you run. We both use the default voice of Laura, someone who previously did the programme herself (but who doesn't seem to have a surname, or at least not one she wants to make a big deal of online).

Most people have their favourite pop music music playing underneath too, helping to energise them. I'm not most people, though - I am exclusively using Doctor Who music. Three recent releases from Silva Screen records are currently loaded onto my phone, and I've tried running to all of them: the Capaldi series 9 original soundtrack by Murray Gold, Peter Howell's music from The Five Doctors, and Don Harper's music from The Invasion. Though always a favourite listen, the last of these has proved a bit too jazzy and laid-back for accompanying exercise, though there's something nice about starting a run to the original Delia Derbyshire arrangement of the Doctor Who theme, which kicks off The Invasion track-list. The Five Doctors is mostly fitting for fitness, particularly the track where Jon Pertwee is racing Bessie away from a pursuing triangle. I have, though, mostly concentrated on the most recent of the three, and a very specific part of it.

 

One disc of the series 9 CD release is given over to the full score of Heaven Sent, and it's this that has proved the best to accompany my Couch to 5K runs. Something about the metronomic nature of the story's main themes (as the Doctor explores his clockwork prison) helps me keep a steady pace. At the time of writing, we are on week 6 out.of 9, and still going. My main aim, apart from the better cardiovascular fitness and whatnot, is to time it perfectly so that the very wonderful cue 'The Shepherd's Boy', which crescendos as the Doctor slowly but surely punches his way free, is finishing just as I complete the run (and doesn't have Laura talking all over it). Not managed it yet, but a challenge like that keeps me trying, no matter what the weather. I shall report back when I chalk up this significant personal achievement.

 

In Summary:

A clever, and surprisingly emotional story; but, why is that 30-year old dressed up as a schoolboy?