Day of the Daleks

Chapter the 321st, which - if you think about it - features two separate days of the Daleks, with the Daleks time-travelling from one to the other (but that's not as snappy a title, obviously). 

Plot:

The dire political situation of the 1970s or maybe 1980s (depending on the dating protocol) makes a third world war seemingly inevitable. Sir Reginald Styles is arranging a peace conference at Auderly House, a government owned country pile. Before the conference, a guerrilla soldier appears from thin air as Styles is working there, raises a gun as if to shoot him, then disappears again "like a ghost". UNIT investigate while Styles leaves to ensure the global delegates attend the conference. Evidence found suggests the guerrilla came from the future. The Doctor and Jo spend the night in Auderly, and in the morning three more guerrillas arrive and threaten the Doctor, thinking him to be Styles. They have come from the 22nd century to kill Styles as their history states that he tricked those attending the conference, then blew up the house killing everyone including himself. This started years of wars, then the weakened Earth was invaded by Daleks. Realising they have the wrong man, the guerrillas send one of their number to get new orders, but he does not return. Jo accidentally operates one of their personal time machines and is sent to the 22nd century. Ogrons, back from the future, attack the house. The Doctor chases after the fleeing guerrillas and travels with them to the 22nd century. He is captured and reunited with Jo and meets the local controller, a human who does the Daleks' dirty work. The guerrillas rescue the Doctor and Jo, and ask them to go back to the 20th century and kill Styles. The Doctor realises that it was the remaining guerrilla not Styles who blew up the house, as a last ditch effort to complete his mission. He and Jo go back, and evacuate the house. The Doctor persuades the guerrilla to instead use his explosives to destroy the Daleks and Ogrons who are attacking the house. UNIT fall back and let the invading aliens in. Auderly promptly goes boom, righting the timeline.

Context:

I was lucky enough to get tickets to the latest BFI Doctor Who event (see Deeper Thoughts section below). It does require a lot of luck. For the uninitiated, it involves being a member of the BFI (well worth the money, if you are even vaguely geographically close to London) but also wrestling with the BFI's website. When the monthly programme opens for members, all events in that programme - not just Doctor Who ones - sell out quickly. For those few minutes, the website gets hammered and sometimes responds in quirky ways. For the February programme's launch, the website for the first time had added rate limiting / queuing functionality; this meant that visitors that morning were shown a holding page until tickets became available, then were added to a queue. The weird thing was, it added people to a queue in a random order, rather than first come first served. The amount of luck required to get these tickets therefore increased even further. Even though our queue position was supposedly 6000+, two tickets were bagged; if the photos look further away than usual and from an awkward angle, though, this is why. This blog is all about using random factors to pick the next story. The box set schedule and the mad carousel of the BFI website had to be chance enough; I had no choice but to then blog Day of the Daleks, as it is the final Jon Pertwee story remaining to align with the write-up of the event. I watched the special edition version of Day (originally made for DVD in 2011) from the Blu-ray an episode an evening during a week of early February.

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 completion of another Doctor's televisual era; Jon Pertwee's third Doctor joining the fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth, making eight Doctors completed to date. This also marks the completion of another season, the 34th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3-5, 7-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

In February 1988, both Spearhead from Space and Day of the Daleks came out on VHS and I bought them (from W. H. Smith in Worthing) and watched them for the first time. In fact, the date of the BFI event was exactly 37 years to the day of the VHS release date of Spearhead; Day of the Daleks came out a little later on the 15th February in 1988. In those days, I had no idea what was coming out when, so walking into a shop and finding new tapes on sale was an unexpected pleasure. Before that, my Doctor Who collection was only four tapes, one of them another Jon Pertwee Dalek four-parter (Death to the Daleks) and one of them a definite crowd-pleaser (Pyramids of Mars). These new releases in February (The Robots of Death came out at the same time as Day), though, felt like a real step up in quality and excitement; plus, seven tapes felt like more of a collection than four.

Reaction:

It was a very hard choice whether to watch the as transmitted version or special edition of the story. When I first saw it in 1988, it didn't occur to me that anything in Day of the Daleks needed to be fixed; I didn't notice anything wrong with the Dalek voices, nor the climactic sequence of the attack on a country house. I still don't think the latter is that bad: yes, there are only three Daleks involved, but one could chalk that up in the story universe to each Dalek being so powerful that that's all they need (rather than the paucity of props that was the real reason). The filmed additions the special edition makes (shot using the same type of cameras used by the original crew) to that and other action sequences are done fairly seamlessly, anyway. No, it was the Dalek voices that swung the decision for me. Over the years since my first watch, I've seen all the other Dalek stories, such that the very different approach taken by the voice actors in Day have stuck out more and more. The story was made many years after the last Dalek had featured in Doctor Who, and nobody on the production knew exactly how to achieve their discordant delivery. The tendency in Day is for the dialogue to be done slowly, haltingly, without the shrill aggression, so it gets a bit boring (particularly as secondary alien foes the Ogrons also deliver everything slowly). New series voice actor Nicholas Briggs recorded new voices for the edition in 2011 that are much more in keeping with the other Dalek stories of the 1970s, and with those switched on I was able to watch without being distracted from the action quite so much. I won't cover any of the other changes or new material here, but will concentrate on the majority of the story material that is in common to both versions.

There are a few things that could do with fixing in the story that the special edition couldn't address. It can't just be me (though a quick google search doesn't find anyone else bothered by it at least enough to post somewhere online), but isn't the exterior footage quite soft? Maybe bordering on out of focus in places? I don't think (though I've not got an expert eye by any means) that this has been created by transfer of the film to video before broadcast, it looks to have been burnt in when the film was originally shot. It's a shame, as the locations used (both for the house and its grounds, and the gone-to-seed vistas of the future Earth) are good enough to want to see them with pin-sharp clarity. It was possibly a deliberate choice, as presumably was the decision to include the 'sting' from the end credits in the recap of the cliffhanger of the following parts (when I first got the story on VHS it was a stitched-together omnibus version losing all the interstitial credit sequences, and when I heard the end theme start to play for a few seconds over the action, I assumed it was somebody's editing error). Some of these aspects might be down to the inexperience of new director Paul Bernard. He does, though, get some good performances from the regulars and the guest cast playing the guerrillas (particularly Anna Barry as their leader Anat). Aubrey Woods as the Controller makes some more questionable choices. He's very theatrical, with some deliberately exaggerated physicality. Again, this may have been deliberate on the part of actor and director, the better to counterpoint those cooperating in the Daleks' Vichy regime against the more naturalistic freedom fighters bringing that regime down. I can't think of any other reason why the technicians working for the controller speak like they're hypnotised zombies.

The storyline could be said to be generic Pertwee, playing a lot of the beats that had been established in his first two years (a conference under threat, an obstructive government representative, a couple of UNIT action sequences), and it has a good few 'moments of charm' humanising its military-scientific squad (the Brig early in the morning needing coffee, Benton on the search for some food only for it to be taken by Yates because "Rank Has It's Privileges", the Doctor and Jo on ghost watch in a supposedly haunted house). Some visual moments are created at the expense of logic: the guerrilla's time travel devices behave a little differently each time they're used, depending on the needs of the plot. A lot of the scenes of world building are a bit too leisurely in their pacing. But none of the quibbles matter; the story as a whole is protected by the strength of the underlying plot of people travelling back in time to try to change the future, only to end up creating it. It's wonderful and innovative, and the moment the Doctor reveals the twist ("Styles didn't create that explosion and start the wars - you did it yourselves") is goosebumps central. Yes, in 1972 a few viewers may have known of such a story structure from an SF short story, but for the vast majority this would have been something brand new. Even in 1988 when I first saw Day of the Daleks, it was new to me and I'd guess many others buying that video (1984 film The Terminator, which uses exactly the same plot 12 years after Day, was not as well known in 1988 as it would be a few years later when its sequel came out, and I hadn't seen it at that point). The biggest selling point of the story is of course that it features the Daleks, but they are just icing on the cake (the original drafts of Louis Marks's script did not feature them). This one serves up big timey-wimey.

Connectivity:

After two stories which didn't (really) feature the Brigadier comes one that empathically does, with Nick Courtney's character not away in Geneva or Peru, or stuck inside a cyber-suit, but fully present instead in the South East of England where all the alien action happened in those days. Other than their both at least mentioning the Brig, and featuring lead characters that first appeared on Doctor Who in the 1970s, Day of the Daleks and The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith also both have denouements that feature an attack on a big and mostly unoccupied building in its own grounds.

Deeper Thoughts:

From one Jon Pertwee season opener to another: BFI Spearhead from Space event, 1st February 2025. It was a crisp, bright February morning as I walked along the South Bank to the BFI. As well as myself, others of the usual crowd that come to these events in attendance were Alan, Chris, Dave and Tim. The NFT1 screen's auditorium was packed out, as is usual for these Blu-ray box set tie-in events, and the hosts as ever were Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy. The former started proceedings by welcoming Doctor Who fans back to the BFI after four months, and telling us that he was "Very happy not to be presenting The Happiness Patrol". "Well, fingers crossed," added Fiddy. Jokes about the snafu at the BFI event for that story in August 2024 (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more details) seem to have replaced jokes about Fiddy's first name as go-to gags for warming up an audience. Later, we were still encouraged to "Shout for Dick" if we thought we knew the answers to the quiz, and as an aside Fiddy asked fans to stop shouting the same at him during conventions as the hotels involved didn't like it. Before that, Johnson read a few of the more choice comments related to the day's event on twitter. There was the obligatory tweet from a fan planning to trawl the event for cute guys (the feeling of our hosts was, not in exactly these words but definitely in their spirit, 'good luck with that'). Another regular favourite was a post from a person wearing a tie-in item of clothing; this time it was a gentleman in our row who was wearing a Silurian jumper. There were quite a few cosplayers dressed as Jon Pertwee's Doctor too. My favourite online comment read out was from someone who said that the event would be scary because "I have to be around other Doctor Who fans for hours".

The event did not have a panel per se. There are so few people to invite, as most involved in the story from both behind and in front of the cameras have passed. Instead, there were a series of one person interviews on stage. The first, before any episodes screened, was with Mark Ayres. Billed as "Sound Impresario", Ayres is responsible for restoring the audio of stories for the Collection Blu-ray box sets. He joked that the story we were about to see "follows on directly from The War Games In Colour". The recent version of the final Patrick Troughton story, now with added regeneration into Jon Pertwee, was also worked on by Ayres. Spearhead from Space is the only classic series story made in a format, 16mm film, that is compatible with HD standards. As such, it has already had a stand-alone Blu-ray release, over a decade ago. For the box set, audio restoration started again from scratch. The restored audio was described by Ayres as a "patchwork quilt" made from various sources. The original 16mm sound mags disintegrated long ago, but there are safety copies (though they were also mostly unusable) and CD copies in the archive, and all of these were reviewed. Ayres is given a rough cut of the video to work with and takes its audio track as a guide, using the best sources he has and a lot of skill to produce a restored version. He mentioned that he'd just received the guide videos for the episodes in the next box set; Johnson asked him what season that was, but Ayres would only say that it was "Season X ... or season XX". One early scene of the Brigadier and Liz Shaw had a lot of echo on the vocals, and Ayres did a lot of work to reduce that, and hopes people will now have nothing to complain about. Johnson joked that they'd probably complain thus: "You've not taken off the echo effect for God's sake?!!!".

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Ayres

The first two episodes were shown next. I don't think you can go wrong with Spearhead from Space, really, and the story seemed to go down well with the audience. There was applause when Caroline John first appeared as Liz Shaw, and her first dialogue scene is now completely devoid of any distracting echoes. Fleetwood Mac's Oh Well is present and correct on the second episode's soundtrack (rights issues have meant it has appeared and disappeared from home video releases over the years). People laughed in all the intended places, and some unintended ones: the wheelchair chase at the end of episode one garnered some titters, but I think it is a rather good example of some dynamic editing. What came over most was the high quality of the characters and the dialogue. When the lights went up after the end of episode two, a cast member was invited onto stage; Robin Squire had portrayed uncredited an Auton, so hadn't got to display much character, and certainly no dialogue. He was an engaging interviewee, nonetheless. Squire's real job on the series was as assistant script editor, and he had also been mucking in on location for the filming of Spearhead as a driver, picking up and conveying actors to where they were needed. The person originally booked to play the Auton had "freaked out" on being presented with the costume and head of the creature, so Squire mucked in again. His abiding memory of playing the role was of refreshment breaks during the filming wearing a head without any mouth hole, and pining about "what it must be like to have a nice cup of tea". He got to stay with the cast and crew in the hotel on location, asking Jon Pertwee one day over breakfast to run through all his famous funny voices.

Squire (R)

Squire recalled that the shoot in October 1969 had been blessed with marvellous weather. He also remembered Caroline John coming up to ask him, having been sent by producer Derrick Sherwin, what polymer chains were (these are mentioned by Liz Shaw in dialogue). Squire didn't know why Sherwin thought he would have a clue, and assured John that as long as she was pronouncing the words right it would all be okay. His tenure as assistant script editor was relatively short. He got to see the recording of a Patrick Troughton story when he'd just started and was surprised by the tattiness of the sets; it was explained to him that "in black and white, the tattiness doesn't show". Later, he'd pitched a story idea - presumably for Inferno - but didn't get to write the screenplay, "They used a proper writer, who'd worked for Hammer". In later life, he has returned to writing, penning a non-fiction book "The Life and Times of a Doctor Who Dummy", and very recently a screenplay which he is hoping will be filmed soon. Squire left the stage, and the final two episodes were shown. There were many more unintended laughs in the second half, some of which I didn't really share in. The total destruction effect - where film is played backwards and then sharply edited to show a person imploding and then vanishing - looks a bit Monty Python, I suppose, but the moment where Channing appears distorted through the glass of a door got a big laugh too, and I think that's an effectively creepy visual. The Nestene creature - felt by most commentators over the years to be rubbish - got off lightly by comparison. After the story ended, the person responsible for the visuals looking as good as they did was interviewed. This was Peter Crocker, who billed himself as "The Emperor of Pixel Wrangling".

Crocker (R)

Crocker is to the video as Ayres is to the audio; he confirmed on stage what Ayres had also hinted at: season 7 was the most tricky season to clean up for a box set so far, as the archive holdings are relatively poor. Spearhead presented the least issues, as it had been worked on for the stand-alone Blu-ray release in 2013. The technology available improves; also, as Crocker explained, all such restorations are time limited and so are never exhaustive. There was still more clean up to do this time, and he'd also noticed when watching the episodes shown that day some things that had still been missed; he said they would likely get fixed " the next time it comes out, in 2035". He confirmed in answer to a question from Johnson that whatever small issues remain, the Blu-ray versions will be much better than anything seen on a TV in 1970 ("We know this from recordings done at that time"). After a brief introduction of the Colour Recovery process, Crocker showed on NFT1's big screen a fascinating four-way comparison. The same clip from The Ambassadors of Death played in four different versions in each corner of the screen: top left was the black and white film version, top right was an off-air US colour video tape version, bottom left was the raw colour as created by the recovery process, and bottom right was the final restored version. It was an extreme example, but still highlighted the amount of effort that goes into this work. The colour in the bottom left section was patchy, and in the top right was barely there at all. Through technology and graft the bottom right version, which looked splendid, was created. Crocker believed that final version should pass muster with everyone barring pedants and BBC engineers (though he did concede that the former group will contain a lot of Doctor Who fans).

Next to be shown was a selection of sneak peaks at the Value Added Material: as usual it ended with a humorous selection of responses from the Behind the Sofa watchers, this time viewing season 7's finale Inferno; before that there were clips from documentaries about writer Malcolm Hulke and actor Nicholas Courtney, a clip from a Robin Ince fronted documentary on contemporary science's impact on Who, an emotional John Levene In Conversation, and a clip from a documentary about Who's relationship to suburbia. Matthew Sweet, involved in the last two on that list, was the next guest. He's often in the audience for these BFI events, but I've never seen him on stage before. He was as entertaining and humorous an interviewee as he is interviewer, though he couldn't help turning the tables a couple of times: "So, how did you two get together?" he asked of Johnson and Fiddy at one point, and later in a tiny lull smilingly barked "Come on then, ask me a question?". When it was suggested that the clip of John Levene showed a gamut of emotions, Sweet hinted that we hadn't seen anything yet, "The gamut goes on". He outlined his theory that Doctor Who is one of the most researched things there's ever been; when future alien archaeologists reflect on evidence they've found on Earth, he expects they'll think that Who "must have been ... as important as America." There was particular focus on the detail of his approach for his ' In conversation' interviews with Doctor Who alumni. There is a limit to how much time they will spend with any interviewee, as the one-to-one interview is an exhausting experience, so it's important to create a space where people feel comfortable to share. From the vantage point of age, interviewees seem to be more free to speak, can be more reflective, and less worried about speaking about some topics.

Sweet (R)

Sweet was asked what it's like as interviewer and long-term fan when an interviewer gets details of their long ago activity wrong; he recalled having to gently remind Michael Grade three times - for the interview on the Season 22 box set - that Grade hadn't cancelled the programme, merely taken it off the air for a few months. Sweet had differing responses to some comparisons about his interviewing style (Russell Harty was fine, but he was not so keen on Piers Morgan). There was an amusing but off topic reminiscence about interviewing Norman Wisdom at his house ("We called it an interview but it was more like a hostage situation"); then, finally he touched on what Doctor Who means to him ("I consider myself profoundly afflicted... it's in my DNA... in my dreams"). Once he'd left the stage, another guest was introduced who could also make the claim that Doctor Who was in their DNA. Daisy Ashford is the daughter of Caroline John, who played companion Liz Shaw in season 7, and Geoffrey Beevers, who had a smaller role in season 7 and later played the Master in the series. Now, Ashford plays the character her mother originated in Big Finish Doctor Who audios. I think I've met Daisy briefly: as recounted in the blog post for Spearhead linked a few paragraphs above, I once met John and Beevers (with family members, one of which I'm sure was their daughter) waiting for the lift at a Doctor Who convention. Ashford asked the audience for a show of hands of who had met her mother, and I was able to put my hand up. She also recounted John's leaving the show thinking she hadn't done well in the role, as I touch on in the Spearhead post. It took joining the convention circuit, starting with one in Manchester in the 1990s, to persuade her otherwise; "Being back in the fold meant a lot to her".

Ashford (R)

Ashford thought the newly restored episodes she'd seen that day were "beautiful" and "stunning"; she has had to view the season as a whole previously in preparation for the Big Finish role as Liz. "How many people here know Big Finish?" she asked. Almost all hands shot up. "You're speaking to the right audience" said Johnson. When she was offered the role, she instantly said yes (and imagined her late mother saying "I'm going to sort out some acting work for you"). The responsibility of what she was doing only hit her once she was in the studio, but Tim Treloar (who plays the third Doctor for audio) and Jon Culshaw (who was a guest actor in her first audio) helped her adjust. She understands what a privilege it is, and enjoys how it's a connection to her mother. She talked a bit about what her mother was like as a person and an actor, including an anecdote about seeing her on stage at the National Theatre catching a bee that had been buzzing around the actors, and releasing it away from the stage, all the while staying in character. Ashford confirmed that she had been a Doctor Who fan as a child, her era was Sylvester McCoy with Sophie Aldred as Ace, but she didn't "connect the dots" to her mother's era, "It was like a different show". One audience question related to the feminist angle of Liz Shaw's character, something Ashford appreciated in the 1970s stories, thinking that her mother's character was " a trail blazer" who "had to defer to men somewhat, but didn't do it willingly". She recounted how her mother had met female fans who had been inspired to become scientists because of Liz. Of the season 7 stories, Ashford's favourites are the Silurians story and Inferno (both see "The good guys being not that good, the bad guys not being all that bad").

How did these two get together?

After Ashford's interview, the box set trailer was shown, and the event was over (apart from the obligatory few post-screening drinks in the BFI bar). The next event at the end of February 2025 is a screening of the animated version of The Savages, and I'm lucky enough to have a ticket to that one too, so all being well should be able to share a write-up of it here in a few weeks.

In Summary:

An innovative plot, which has been used elsewhere so much since 1972 that we don't give Day of the Daleks the credit it deserves.

The Mutants

Chapter the 261st, It's... Marshal's plotting on flying Skybase.

Plot:

The Doctor and Jo are sent by the Time Lords to deliver a box, contents unknown, to someone, also unknown, on the planet Solos in the 30th Century (the box will only open for the right person). The planet's atmosphere is poisonous to humans during daylight hours, so the Overlords, as the colonising Earthmen style themselves, live on a space station called the Skybase. (They are all Earth - and Solonian - men, by the way, no women on Solos.) There seems to be a plague mutating Solonians into monstrous "Mutts", and a faction of the locals led by Ky are agitating for their freedom. Earth government has decided to pull out and grant independence, but the Marshal - who has been experimenting with a Professor Jaegar on how to make the planet's atmosphere suitable for humans - doesn't want this. He arranges the assassination of the colony Administrator during a meeting with the Solonians. Chaos ensues, and martial (and, for that matter, Marshal) law is declared. In the confusion, the Doctor passes near Ky, and the box starts to open. Before the Doctor can talk to him, though, Ky escapes to the planet's surface. The Marshal uses threats to Jo's safety to coerce the Doctor into helping Jaegar's experiments. There's lots of escapes and recaptures, and travel back and forth between the Skybase and Solos. The Doctor finds Ky and the box is opened to reveal ancient tablets. They find a scientist Sondergaard working in a hidden lab in some caves, and he helps to translate them. The mutations of the Solonians are a part of their normal lifecycle, but have been brought on prematurely by Jaegar's experiments. An investigator from Earth is en route to Solos, so the Marshal forces Jaegar to accelerate his work, but the Doctor is able to put right the damage done. Ky fully mutates into a floating, rainbow telepathic creature and kills the Marshal.

Context:

Because of a pre-existing commitment, I again had to miss a BFI screening and panel connected to the release of a Doctor Who season Blu-ray box set. This time it was a showing of The Sea Devils connected to the release of season nine (Jon Pertwee's third year in the role) in early March 2023. Two weeks later, the pre-ordered set popped through my letter-box. I did my usual randomly guided decision as to whether I would blog a story from the set (flipped a coin and it came up Heads) and which of the two stories it would be (it came up Tails this time, meaning The Mutants rather than Day of the Daleks, the only other story from season 9 that I haven't yet blogged). The Mutants doesn't have the best reputation for engaging an audience, so I didn't inflict it on anyone else. I watched it, as I watched all the episodes from the box set, an episode a night on average. There's 26 episodes in the season, and loads of extras that I wanted to view also to inform the overview (see Deeper Thoughts section below) so it took a few weeks.

First Time Round:

I saw a few clips of this story over the years between becoming a fan in the early 1980s and when I finally got to see the whole story a couple of decades later. It does seem eminently clip-able, perhaps because of the striking creature design or the moody location work in Chislehurst caves. Or maybe, if one were less charitably minded, one might think that short clips are the best way to experience The Mutants because anything longer than that is a chore. This impression, right or wrong, is probably why its release was put off until it was one of the last few Doctor Who stories to come out on VHS. It was released in the final year of the range, when other stories were already being re-released on DVD with regularity. I would have bought it on the day, 17th February 2003. Assuming I was at work, and I think I very probably was, I would have got the Doctor Who DVD that came out that day (Patrick Troughton tale The Seeds of Death) in the morning, as I walked from London Bridge station into the City of London for work. There was an MVC on the north end of the bridge that had the Doctor Who DVDs, but rarely the videos. At the end of the working day, after having commuted back down to Brighton where I lived at the time, I would have rushed down from the station to the MVC in the centre of town that did stock Who on VHS and snapped up The Mutants. I then would have gone home, probably called my friend Phil (mentioned many times before on the blog) who would have come and watched at least one of the stories with me. We would almost certainly have drunk wine as we did. This would have helped The Mutants go down better, I'm sure.

Reaction:

It's not that bad. In fact, it's pretty good mostly. I think every time I watch the story I'm pleasantly surprised, so awful is its reputation. As an example, Rick James comes in for a lot of flak for the quality of his performance, but he's perfectly okay for the most part. Then, every so often he stumbles over a line and. Delivers it as if. It. Has been punctuated. Randomly. It's unfortunate too, as Doctor Who didn't cast people of colour that often back then, that he's appearing in this colonial parable as a character called Cotton (this is picked up in the documentary on diversity from the DVD that's been ported over to the new Mutants disc, but was clearly inadvertent). Other actors are good, with the regulars on fine form, and Garrick Hagon great as Ky. The other performance that's a bit questionable is Paul Whitsun-Jones as the Mashal. I don't think this is his fault, the script just doesn't give him sufficient motivation for the enormity of his actions. In a way, George Pravda as his sidekick, the scientist Jaegar, has a better time of it. He's just obeying orders, so can play the banality of evil and be a bit more chilling because of that. The Marshal comes over as a one-dimensional panto villain; it's hard to underplay when your character goes to such lengths (he's going to commit genocide on a global scale and change a planet's entire atmosphere). The script eventually falls back on the usual Who stand-by that he's mad. Writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin do get a couple of nice lines in there related to this, "Madmen lose... I've won", but it means the actor can only go large.

The story would be improved with a more grounded and reasonable villain backstory, and it's there for the taking. The Marshal could realistically imagine he's being merciful, if he were presented as truly believing that the mutations the Solonians are experiencing would kill them anyway (at some points the script seems almost to be toying with this idea, but never develops it). The look of the monsters is perfect, costume designer James Acheson providing the first example of his stellar 1970s work on the series; the monsters are frightening, but also elicit sympathy. The design work throughout is strong. Jeremy Bear's Skybase interiors are innovative and solid-looking (the mould he made to create the Buckminster Fuller effect on the walls was reused in Doctor Who and elsewhere forever after). Most of the effects work is impressive, and there's a lot of film - director Christopher Barry shoots the caves well, and good dressing decisions on location from Bear sell this as an alien environment. The trippy interiors of the radiation cave filmed in the studio work for me too. No word of a lie, when it all comes together - scenes in the caves fighting off the mutant Solonians, chase scenes in the Skybase - this looked closer to Doctor Who doing a high-tech adventure like Star Wars (before Star Wars existed, of course) than anything from Doctor Who in the 1980s.

The only moment that really doesn't work visually is the end of episode four where various characters including the Marshal risk being sucked out of a breach in the Skybase wall into space. The blocking is wrong - the Marshal's too close to the breach so it's implausible that he could hang on; Whitsun-Jones can't really act fighting against the pressure escape from the position he's in, and doesn't really try; this looks a bit silly and reduces the jeopardy for our heroes who are much farther away from danger than him. The camera barely catches him moving away from the breach either, so when he turns out to be alive in the next scene it looks like a cheat. It's just one moment, though. The very first scene of episode one comes in for some stick too as it inadvertently looks like the beginning of an early episode of Monty Python - the elder Solonian rushing towards camera is a dead ringer for Michael Palin's "It's man" from the comedy series. This probably wouldn't have registered for the target audience at the time, though. The pacing, which is a big part of its negative reputation, was perfectly fine, even when watching at the accelerated rate of an episode per day. For the weekly episodic pace for which it was intended, the story has enough going on, presented well. If one were to watch it all in one go, the to and fro from Solos to Skybase and the running about would probably get a bit repetitive, but this is true of almost all stories of six or more episodes. The addition of the subplot of the Earth investigator for the last two episodes helps to keep things moving.

Thematically, The Mutants stands out from other Jon Pertwee stories in how seriously it treats its subtext. A lot of stories around this time use the trappings of colonisation and empire as window dressing, but here it is fully explored. This creates some issues, though; for example: because of the general structure of Doctor Who as a series, with a single titular hero, it inevitably becomes a "white saviour" story, with the Doctor - and to a lesser extent Sondergaard - the ones with agency, coming from outside Solos to rescue the natives from their fate. The script tries to make this work better, as the Solonians are just being reunited with their own history and culture, having lost sight of this because of the negative impacts of occupation. To make this plausible it requires the Earth empire to have been in charge for a number of generations (500 years is the figure given in the story). This feels like too long a stretch of time for the situation as presented in the story; the impacts of imperialism can still be felt after centuries, of course, but in more subtle ways than those shown in The Mutants, to my mind. I'm aware, though, that this opinion may be affected by my being white and aligned to the society of the oppressor rather than the oppressed. The same is true, though, of the writers, directors and producer of The Mutants. In the end, the colonised race turn out to be multi-coloured butterfly super-beings, so maybe any serious reading is undermined anyway. Generally, though, the story's heart is in the right place, and it's much more watchable than I remembered.

Connectivity:

The Mutants like Midnight features a floating enclosed space where squabbling humans are protected from a planet's harmful atmosphere. There's also a performance in each by an actor playing a professor who had previously appeared in the Troughton era story The Enemy of the World (George Pravda is Professor Jaegar in The Mutants and had played Denes in the earlier story; David Troughton is Professor Hobbes in Midnight and had appeared as a non-speaking guard in Enemy).

Deeper Thoughts:

Mutts, monsters and a Minotaur: Doctor Who - The Collection Season 9 box set overview. The two-person creative force behind the scenes during the Jon Pertwee era, producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks, inherited the earthbound format where the Doctor helped out a scientific and military organisation investigating the mysterious. They didn't like the restrictions this brought, and so every year they tweaked things a little bit more to move Doctor Who back out to travel the universe again. This is the middle year of their tenure and watching the stories in order, not that long after watching the set for season 8 (see here for more details), this process is very visible. Each of the new set of regulars established the previous year continues into season 9, the 'UNIT family' of Doctor, Brigadier (Nicholas Courtney), Jo Grant (Katy Manning), Captain Yates (Richard Franklin), Sergeant Benton (John Levene) and the Master (Roger Delgado). But, having realised they were overused in season 8, here they appear in different combinations, rarely all at the same time. This, plus having two stories off Earth (one more than in the previous year), means that UNIT have much less presence than before. As is pointed out poignantly in the new Making-of documentary for The Time Monster, partway through that finale's run is the last time all six characters would appear in the same episode.

Nice packaging

As both the UNIT stories at either end of season 9 involve time travel by some means or other, there's only one story for the year where the Doctor doesn't explore either a different time or a different world; this would remain the template for the following two seasons with Pertwee as the Doctor, and would stay more or less the same for the first two Tom Baker years (after which UNIT was written out completely). In Season 9, the one story where the Doctor doesn't escape Earth in the roughly contemporary period where he's been exiled still innovates. This is The Sea Devils, and it features the Doctor allied with military bods in blue rather than green uniforms, with significant help from the Royal Navy providing visual interest on screen. There's some nice bits of contemporary material from the filming included as special features (a radio interview with Pertwee who had served in the Navy, and cine camera footage made at the time) and most of the big new documentaries for the set are on the Devils disc, and are aligned to the story at least in part. The first is another in the Location Location Location series of docos by Chris Chapman, which sees Katy Manning meeting cast or crew at the locations used for filming The Sea Devils, as well as The Mutants and Day of the Daleks. She is also reunited with the three-wheeler bike featured in a chase scene in the Dalek story, and takes it for a ride (you can feel the documentary makers' insurance concerns burning through the screen during that sequence).

Defenders of Earth! The short used as a trailer for the set.

The other two documentaries are by Ten Acre Films, produced by Stuart Manning and Richard Latto. Both focus on career retrospectives of individuals, director Michael E Briant who's accompanied as he takes a sailing boat out onto the water, and stuntman Stuart Fell who visits a nice vintage cinema in Fordingbridge (if this is representative of each gentleman's hobbies then yours truly, who gets seasick in dry dock, is thinking he's more like Fell than Briant). Both are interesting and feature a lot of clips from other programmes (sometimes the same other programmes as both men's work coincided multiple times). The other main new features are five more episodes of Behind the Sofa, classic Who's version of Gogglebox. Here, Briant and Manning represent the people involved at the time, plus two other watching groups - Peter Davison (even more grumpy than usual) with his companion actors Sarah Sutton and Janet Fielding, and a couple of other randomly paired companion actors, Wendy Padbury and Sophie Aldred. It's as fun as ever. The restoration of the episodes is up to the expected standard (we're very spoilt, us Doctor Who fans). They can't do anything about the somewhat soft quality of a lot of the film inserts for Day of the Daleks (what happened when that film was first shot / printed, I wonder?) just as it can't make The Time Monster an enjoyable story to sit through. Apart from working miracles, though, this is the best these episodes have ever looked, and possibly will ever look.

With this set, 50% of 20th Century Who is now on Blu-ray

There's also an effort to provide every conceivable version of the stories that exists. A different restoration method was used for a number of the episodes presented in the set when they came out on DVD earlier this century. Any that only existed as broadcast masters in the 525-line video format used abroad (which is quite a lot of season 9) had that picture data put back in using a process called Reverse Standards Conversion. This is no longer favoured as an approach as it introduced different picture issues, but the DVD versions are included as extras. Additionally, there's the DVD special edition of Day of the Daleks with new effects, newly filmed sequences and redubbed Dalek voices, and recreations of edited omnibus versions of that Dalek story and of The Sea Devils that were shown as repeats in the 1970s. Day of the Daleks in 60 minutes is a bit choppy, but the 90-minute Sea Devils is a good, tight telling of the story that still retains the spirit of the episodic original. Rounding off the additional material are a couple of filmed convention panels. The panel with Ingrid Pitt interviewed in 1992 is very informative, unless you're interested in her work in Doctor Who as she can barely remember any of it - she talks a lot about Eva Peron, though. The date I published this blog post gives an indication of how long it took to enjoy the volumes of material on this set. I recommend buying it, if you can still find it, or getting the cheaper non-limited edition that'll come out before too long.

 

In Summary:

A metamorphosis is taking place: The Mutants looks better and better, the more I watch it.

The Sea Devils

 

Chapter The 206th, where there's a fishy situation going on with some underwater creatures, plus a Masterful prison break.

Plot:

The Doctor and Jo visit the Master, who is incarcerated in an island prison. The Doctor's also there to investigate ships that have sunk without a trace in the vicinity (or it may have been just a coincidence). The Master has secretly persuaded the governor of the prison Colonel Trenchard that enemy agents are responsible for the sinkings, and that together the two of them can foil this plot. The enemy agents turn out to be another group of reptiles woken from long hibernation, who were the dominant species on Earth before man evolved, the same that were previously incorrectly called Silurians, and here are politically incorrectly called Sea Devils. They are in underwater chambers, and have been woken by work being done on an old sea fort for the nearby secret naval base. (Just a tip for any fictional government in an adventure story that might be reading this: don't imprison your super-criminals near secret naval bases - it's just asking for trouble). The Master has learned all about the reptiles from Time Lord files he stole, and so somehow engineered to be imprisoned nearby where some might be awake (or it may have been just a coincidence).

The Master steals parts from the naval base and builds a communications device, bringing Sea Devils to attack the prison and kill Trenchard. The commander of the naval base, Captain Hart, having sent out and lost contact with a submarine to investigate underwater, allows the Doctor to descend in a diving bell. The Sea Devils take the Doctor into their underwater stronghold, and he offers to negotiate a peace between them and the humans, but the Master is also there - having offered his services to mend their faulty mass-revivification system - and agitates for war. Unfortunately, the UK government in the form of Permanent Private Secretary Walker has ordered an attack, which explodes around them just as the Doctor was starting to persuade the Sea Devil leader. The Doctor escapes, frees the submarine crew and goes back to the Naval base, but the Sea Devils attack and take over. The Master gets the Doctor to help him build a device to wake up the Sea Devils, and both Time Lords are taken back to the Sea Devils' underwater base. The Doctor has sabotaged the device, though, and after giving the creatures one more opportunity to seek a peaceful solution, which they refuse, he allows it to be set off. The Doctor and Master escape just before the Sea Devil base explodes, and are picked up by a Navy hovercraft. When everyone else is back on shore, the Master hijacks the hovercraft and escapes.

Context:

Watched an episode a day with a break or two over the course of around one week in October 2021. This followed a longer than usual gap after watching the last story for the blog, which may have had something to do with my catching up finally with Squid Game on Netflix in the interim (it's a good show, but it's no The Sea Devils!). Watching from the DVD, though the restoration work is very good, there's still an appreciable lift in picture quality for the latter three episodes, for which the original videotape masters exist (the first three are converted from the NTSC format). Members of the household joined me for different episodes, but no one managed to go the whole distance - six-parters can be a bit of an endurance test for the younger generation even when spread out across a week. The youngest (girl of of 9) was around most watching the first two episodes before getting a bit bored, but rejoining me for the end. She was very pleased with herself when she predicted how the action would play out a few times. When the two workers alone on the sea fort heard a noise, she said "You're going to get killed. Probably". As the cliffhanger for episode one was approaching (the Doctor and Jo hearing someone or something approaching them), she said "It'll be the man who escaped - he survived" and looked very smug next episode when it did indeed prove to be the case. Her eldest brother (boy of 15) only commented to wonder why the prison staff's vehicles didn't have doors, and I had to admit that I hadn't the foggiest.

First Time Round:

For six weeks starting in March 1992, BBC2 showed a repeat of The Sea Devils. It was the third of a series of repeats, one per Doctor, that had kicked off at the beginning of the year with The Time Meddler. The Sea Devils hadn't yet come out on VHS, so it was an exciting opportunity to see some new (to me) Doctor Who during the so called "Wilderness Years" period when the show was not being made as a regular ongoing concern by the BBC. I was at university in Durham at this point, armed with blank tapes, and would go to my friend Mike's room at 6.50pm-ish on each Friday evening to watch with him, and use his recorder (Mike was blessed to have a single room and his own TV and VCR) to make a copy of each episode to rewatch (until the official VHS came out and replaced my home-made copy later in the 1990s). This was a time before most people had access to other fans and series news on the internet, so I was somewhat surprised and miffed when the repeats season abruptly stopped after the Sea Devils had concluded. The story for the fourth Doctor Tom Baker would not be broadcast until January the following year. I must have watched that copy of The Sea Devils four or five more times in the next couple of years. A repeat of any Who was such a rare event at that point, and made such a proportional impact compared to the volume of my Who collection, which consisted then only of the few titles released   on official VHS, and the few more I'd taped from the TV in the late 1980s. As such, The Sea Devils has always held special place in my fan affections - a little extra gift from the scheduling gods.

Reaction:

Malcolm Hulke, writer of The Sea Devils, was the dependable workhorse of the Pertwee era, commissioned for six episodes per year like clockwork. Generally, his were the stories with deeper political themes than other Doctor Whos, dealing with colonialism, the impacts of multinational corporations, media manipulation of wars, etc. In his first story for Pertwee, Doctor Who and the Silurians (the only time he got to write a story longer than six episodes) he'd turned the tables on the invaders from outer space format, creating a race of reptiles that invaded from within the Earth, and - having ruled the planet long before humans - had a claim to the planet that gave rise to interesting discussions within the plot. The Silurians story looked at colonialism from a different angle, highlighted scientific and bureaucratic blindness, touched on the struggle between war and peace, the paranoia of a particularly cold war version of the dislike of the unlike, and lots more besides. The Sea Devils, a sequel to that story, dispenses with all that, dials down the nuance and just goes for action and adventure. It is the Hulke script that comes closest to - for example - Robert Holmes's way of working: no nonsense, no deeper theme, just thrills and spills. And it works a treat.

Particularly helpful to this are the monsters themselves. The only issue is the difficulty in naming them (Silurians is wrong, Eocenes is wrong, Sea Devils is just the rambling of one person in shock after being attacked), and it's a confusion that continues to this day (Homo Reptilia is super wrong). Otherwise, they are great: great masks, great vocal performances delivering their lines in a whisper, and - even though it was a relatively last minute decision as they looked too 'nude' to director Michael E Briant - the string vest costumes they wear are iconic. The early episodes do the traditional Doctor Who trick of holding off from the full monster reveal for as long as possible, just showing glimpses of a hand here and there. The big build up leads to the sequence where one Sea Devil emerges from the sea at the cliffhanger ending of episode 3. In my memory before this watch, and I'll gamble I'm not the only one, this was a whole group of Devils emerging all at once, but that happens (a couple of times) in the next episode, and isn't a cliffhanger; it is nonetheless an enduring image of early 1970s Who up there with shop window dummies coming to life, or giant maggots wriggling about on a coal heap. In general, Briant and crew shoot the Monsters well throughout, and get some good shots elsewhere too. I love the overhead shot of the ladder in the fort that various characters descend, for example. The sound design, with echo and metallic footfalls added, shouldn't be overlooked either, in selling the reality of these scenes.

Another key factor in the story's favour is the input of the Royal Navy. The production gets the most bang for their buck from what the RN provide, with hardware, stock footage and personnel all used to great effect. The final episode, which is mostly just a set of action set pieces utilising these resources, even features a hovercraft - I think the first of the Pertwee era, but it would not be the last. There's stunts and explosions and someone doing a fall from a height. There's a charmless civil servant character (the odious, food-obsessed Walker), there's lots of tinkering to build electronic devices, which then blow things up. The phrase "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" is said by the Doctor for the first time. It would be archetypal if it weren't for the absence of UNIT. It's essentially the same structure as a UNIT story, though, just with blue uniforms instead of green ones; Captain Hart takes the Brigadier role, and Blythe "lays on" sandwiches and tea. No disrespect to Nicholas Courtney and the boys, but it's refreshing to do something different, and the Naval characters are all good - the submarine crew, for example, featuring early performances by recognisable actors Donald Sumpter and David Griffin. Colonel Trenchard is another in Hulke's line of misguided patriots, but - in keeping with the reduction of nuance throughout - he's a less complex character than his others, such as Major Baker in The Silurians. It's difficult to see how he could have been fooled quite so thoroughly by the Master except to assume that he's very stupid (and Clive Morton pretty much plays him as such, but it's still very watchable).

The three regulars are all on fine form too. Pertwee doesn't have any moments of charmlessness that sometimes creep in (though he does steal all Jo's sandwiches, the cad); the script and the performances of him and Katy Manning are gently sending things up just a little, the series now exuding confidence in its winning set-up. Roger Delgado is magnificent throughout, and The Sea Devils is a definite contender for the best Master story of this period. He even gets to have a swordfight with the Doctor, in a fun scene. His best moment is joshing with Trenchard that he believes the characters in the kid's TV show The Clangers on his cell's TV are real - just look at Delgado's impression as the Master turns away from Trenchard after realising the duffer doesn't realise he's joking. There's also great location work filmed in the Isle of Wight, and there's great model work (so realistic was this that the production got into trouble with the Ministry of Defence who thought they must have seen top secret plans for a new propeller). And there's fantastic music by Malcolm Clarke. This is a contentious view, as many dislike the experimental all-synthesised score but they're all wrong: it's perfect, in keeping with the action, and rarely obtrusive. So there!

 

Connectivity: 

Both this story and The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People feature action set on an island with a repurposed old building (a castle as prison in the Jon Pertwee story, a monastery - though actually filmed at a castle - as acid processing facility in the Matt Smith one). 

Deeper Thoughts:

The Paradise of Death. In the early 1990s, Jon Pertwee became the current Doctor again. After The Sea Devils repeat on BBC2 (see First Time Round section above), some clever methods were devised of restoring the colour to his stories only held in broadcast standard as black and white film copies, and he was on telly again in another repeat that had had this treatment (The Daemons in the autumn on BBC2). The following year, one of his stories was chosen as the repeat shown to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Doctor Who, on BBC1 no less. Even the tie-in Children in Need sketch around the same time, in which he featured heavily, was introduced by him in costume and in character. From all the available evidence, any Earth reptile awakening after hibernation would have thought that Pertwee was the incumbent. He looked like he was loving it too, which was great to see. At around this time, the third Doctor also featured in Doctor Who episodes that weren't second-hand. In August and September of 1993, BBC Radio 5 broadcast five weekly audio episodes of a story called The Paradise of Death, written by Pertwee's 1970s television producer, Barry Letts, and directed by Phil Clarke (later a successful television comedy producer). Returning with Pertwee were Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, and Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier, and it had a good guest cast including Harold Innocent and Peter Miles. I remember the excitement of sitting waiting for the first episode, poised to record it onto a cassette; I'd forgotten this, but Wikipedia tells me the story started on my birthday. By the time the fourth and fifth episodes went out, I had much less enthusiasm, and it wasn't because it was no longer my birthday.

I never bought the story on CD when it was reissued this century, such was my indifference towards it. I did recently however - prepare for the contradictions of the collector's mindset - shell out a reasonable amount of money for the story in paperback form. It didn't count (at least in my mind) as a CD to collect, as I only collect missing televised story audios; the book, though, plugged the final gap in my Target collection. This was the run of paperback novelisations published on the Target imprint throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and now I own at least one copy of them all! I'd collected all the titles over the years except three from the early 90s that were harder to come by. In 1991, there were almost no titles left to writet hat didn't have complications blocking their inclusion in the Target range, and a new range of original novels (the Virgin New Adventures, or VNAs) featuring the Sylvester McCoy Doctor (who the publishers insisted was the current one, despite everyone else knowing it was Jon Pertwee) had started. As something of an afterthought, though, three novelisations came out a few years later, well into the run of VNAs. The first two were adaptations of the two Patrick Troughton Dalek stories, which I recently bought, read and reviewed in the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post. The final one of the three, the last one of the range until it was resurrected this century, Target Library number 156, and the final book I had left to complete my collection, was Barry Letts's prose version of The Paradise of Death. It was published in early 1994, when I had finals looming and not enough cash to collect Doctor Who books (mainly because I spent it all on Doctor Who videos). 

The story sees the Doctor and Brigadier investigating a new space themed amusement park on Hampstead Heath where a body has been found killed by something not of this Earth. Sarah, seeking a scoop, tags along accompanied by a colleague from Metropolitan magazine, Jeremy Fitzoliver, an upper class twit added to the regular cast to make mistakes, get into trouble and twist his ankle. The amusement park is run by the Parakon Corporation, whose sadistic Vice Chairman Tragen had an intruder killed by one of his pet monsters, hence the body. The corporation are trying to negotiate a business deal with world leaders using the soft power of their Experienced Reality (ER) technology - immersive first-person movies where you feel the feelings of the protagonists - showcased in the amusement park. They are running a kind of intergalactic pyramid scheme. The Earth would plant a wonder crop called rapine that can be used for everything from buildings to food, providing a percentage of that crop back to Parakon, and for a while everyone would be in paradise enjoying their ER. But rapine rapidly makes the land in which it is planted barren, leaching the nutrients from the soil, and more and more fertiliser is needed to get it to grow. The planet would have dwindling growing space eventually, and fall into wars (for which the Parakon corporation would sell them arms), and finally the wounded and the refugees would be rounded up by the corporation and turned into fertiliser for another planet not as far through the grim cycle. Sarah is investigating in the amusement park and finds herself trapped aboard a spaceship that heads back to Parakon. The Doc, Brig and Jeremy chase after her in the TARDIS, and piece all of this backstory together.

On Parakon, the kindly President is oblivious to what his planet's corporation is up to, and won't easily be persuaded as the Chairman of the corporation is his son Freeth. Luckily, our heroes, reunited with Sarah, find a resistance group and manage to defeat the baddies and show the president evidence, and he halts the work of the corporation (well, we have to assume he does, as the story ends before all that tedious clearing up); he's even okay when his son gets killed. Tragen is killed also. Sarah had become smitten with one of the president's guards, Waldo, but he's killed too and she's sad. The End. It's quite a lot of plot, firing off in a lot of directions. In a way, it serves as a greatest hits of Pertwee's era, apt for the anniversary year in which it was broadcast. The aliens bearing gifts that are too good to be true echoes The Claws of Axos, and the image of a spaceship landing on Hampstead Heath is lifted from an early draft of the Axos story. The material going into the politics of corporations and colonialism is very like the work of Malcolm Hulke, and the spirituality versus capitalism message is very like Letts's own stories for Pertwee writing with Robert Sloman. The creature in the latter part that will follow the scent of its (human) prey forever until it catches up is like the Drashigs in Carnival of Monsters. There's also the Doctor crooning his Venusian lullaby one more time, and the polarity of the neutron flow gets reversed at one point.

In some ways, though, it departs from the Pertwee era, particularly tonally. Sarah's crush on Waldo, for example, does not fit well nor feel right to me; it would have worked for Jo Grant's character but Sarah Jane never displayed any romantic inclinations towards any characters in the whole of her time on the show. It goes beyond romantic, too, there's a passage of her thoughts as she admires the shape of Waldo's bum! This and a few other moments more earthy in outlook would be more at home in the VNAs than in a Target novelisation. It was written, as mentioned above, in a time of transition between the two ranges and has the page count of a VNA, substantially thicker than the Targets of old. A few months after its publication, another Virgin range started, the Missing Adventures, original novels for the six Doctors before McCoy. It might have been better to save The Paradise of Death a while so it could have been part of that range (the radio play sequel to Paradise, The Ghosts of N-Space, was novelised and published a few years later as a Missing Adventure). One tonal problem with the radio series is solved when rendered into prose, though. There's a tendency because one's doing fantasy on the wireless to make all the vistas and creatures bigger and stranger than they possibly could be if created in a Television Centre studio. I think this is the wrong call, and that radio plays work much better when they are localised and intimate. Otherwise you suffer from dialogue like "Oh my goodness look at that giant creature swooping down toward me, it looks like a bat but it's six-foot tall and orange" and the radio version of Paradise suffers a bit from that. In a book, though, it works fine.

There are a few more quibbles: the story might have done better to just concentrate on taking the dangers of ER to a logical conclusion (as it seems to be about to do in the earlier part of the story) or have the rapine gift in from the beginning instead of ER: as it is, the story switches in the middle and the dangers of ER aren't dwelt on in the second half of the story. There's also a bit of a judgemental pious tone about people enjoying violent entertainment that suggests that it leads to violence, which I don't believe is the case. The hippy resistance characters are quite dull, and learning their backstory slows down the latter part of the action. Plus, the ending is quite abrupt: the villains are killed and everything put right in the last two pages. All told, though, I enjoyed it much more than expected, and greatly more than the radio play. It wasn't a bad way to finish off my Target collecting, something I've been doing even longer than I have been collecting Doctor Who on video or shiny disc. The end of all that has felt a bit abrupt too. I'm not going to be tempted to start collecting the New Adventures, though; life's too short.

In Summary:

Atypical (given the replacement of UNIT with the Navy) but nonetheless traditional Pertwee action fare.