The Curse of the Black Spot

Chapter The 234th, is just what we never knew we needed, a prequel to The Smugglers. 

Plot:

The Doctor, Amy and Rory follow a distress call to the Fancy, a becalmed 17th century pirate ship captained by Henry Avery. The crew are picked off by a siren who emerges from the sea whenever anyone gets injured or sick: the affected crew member has a black spot appear on one palm, the siren appears and uses her song to turn them drunk / horny, they go to her, and she touches them apparently zapping them to destruction. Rory suffers a slight injury, and Avery's son - found stowing away on the vessel - has typhoid. The Doctor surmises that the siren travels within water, so they bar themselves in to the driest room on the ship, the armoury; but, the Doctor's wrong - it instead can travel through any reflections, so they have to throw all of the looted (and shiny) treasure overboard, much to Avery's annoyance. The TARDIS team, Avery and his son attempt to man the sails when the wind picks up in a rain storm. A stray piece of treasure that Avery had kept is released from its hiding place, which allows the siren back, and it claims his son. Rory falls overboard, and the Doctor decides that the people taken are still alive somewhere, so they allow the siren to take the drowning Rory from the water, then each prick their fingers to be captured by the siren too. They find themselves on a spaceship occupying the same space as the Fancy, but on a different astral plane or something; this was the source of the distress call. The siren turns out to be a medical program, the spot is a tissue sample, and the song a form of anaesthetic. Avery and his crew, who are all still alive, pilot the spaceship off into the stars, implausibly, and Amy saves Rory with some CPR, implausibly.

Context:

On a Saturday morning early in July 2002, I put on the disc containing this story, from the Complete Sixth Series Blu-ray box set. I'd planned to watch alone, but - maybe because of the unusual timing, my watching stories for the blog normally done in the evening - a number of family members came in and watched long sections with me. At the most populated, the living room contained me, the Better Half and the two younger of the kids, boy of 12, girl of 10, though none of them stayed to the very end. The Better Half and boy child had a long discussion about the Doctor's smashing of all the ship's mirrors and windows being a bad idea, as it will just create more, smaller reflective surfaces not less. The Better Half was also bemused, presumably like everyone else that's every watched this story, at what happened to Lee Thingy from Press Gang. He's the second most famous of the guest cast after Hugh Bonnerville, he's foregrounded in the action leading up to a dramatic scene where he's stuck as an unwilling ally of the regulars, unable to escape; then, in the next scene, he's vanished and nobody mentions him again. Presumably there was a scene deleted as he turns up with the rest of the crew in the space infirmary at the end, but it is a bit jarring.

First Time Round:

I have a blank spot when it comes to remembering The Curse of the Black Spot; I don't have strong memories of many of my first watches of the Matt Smith stories. I would have watched this on or near to its UK BBC1 debut, at or near to the time of broadcast. As is usual on the blog in these instances, I will share another unconnected Doctor Who memory, and this one is itself about sharing. I've mentioned many times before that when I got to university in 1991 I rapidly found a cohort together with whom I could watch stories from VHS tape. Before that, though, watching Doctor Who was a solitary activity. No one in my house was a fan, so I never experienced the family viewing ritual during the classic series years. My schoolfriends in the mid-to-late 1980s who were Who fans, Dominic, Zahir, and Alan G, talked about the latest stories with me after they'd aired, and we occasionally swapped the new VHS tapes that had just started coming out, but we never got together to watch them. When the four of us did meet, we would play RPGs instead. I remember once bringing along a pirated version of a great recent film I had seen at the cinema called Back to the Future, but I couldn't drum up much interest in that, let alone us all watching Revenge of the Cybermen for what was likely the 20th time for some of us. My other close friends were not as into Doctor Who. I once - this must have been in 1990 when it came out on VHS - tried to interest my friends Andrew D, Alex and Paul in watching The Five Doctors, but they just wanted to fast-forward (fast forward!) to the action sequences, instead of watching the whole thing. We tended to watch Paul's Blakes' 7 videos instead (I was outvoted); these were the long edited compilation videos that were out at that time. Blakes' 7 got roundly mocked on these viewings. In particular, a line reading of Paul Darrow as Avon "This one is dead also" from Space Fall tickled the assembled throng (except Paul); who knows what they would have made of Darrow's much riper performance in the Doctor Who story Timelash!

Reaction:

This is not really a prequel to William Hartnell's 1966 story The Smugglers of course. As a plot point in The Curse of the Black Spot involves the tossing of Avery's accumulated treasure overboard, it's difficult to see how a large hoard of it came to be hidden in a crypt in England; maybe the villainous Pike from the Hartnell story was a crew member of Avery's before the events of the Black Spot, and Avery gathered two hoards over the years, one of which he hid in Cornwall, and one he kept onboard his ship. Apart, though, from creating minor issues for continuity-enamoured enthusiasts like myself, the story is fairly inoffensive to my mind. It is deliberately positioned as a self-contained genre-sampling romp, a palate-cleanser after the big two-parter series launch of The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon. It does everything you'd expect, swordfights, treasure, stowaway cabin boys, mutinous swarthy knaves, the plank. Costume, staging and music combine to perfectly evoke the genre. The use of a real ship in dock for the above deck sequences adds an extra few Duobloons worth of production value, but the sets that represent below decks (and the siren's spaceship) are pretty good too. The pirate guest cast is the epitome of the solid, UK character actor and supporting artist ensembles that one would put together for such a production (just like the similar crews of all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, put together from similar quality stock). The regulars all get something fun to do - Karen Gillan as Amy gets to cosplay and wave a sword around, Arthur Darvill gets to do the comedy dope act that he excels at when taken over by the siren's song, and Matt Smith gets lots of scenes with the biggest guest star Hugh Bonnerville, bouncing off one another with 'Captain envy' as a theme.

Underpinning this is an interesting science fiction idea, which efficiently explains lots of the trappings of pirate curse legends. It's not a particularly original science fiction idea, of course, being one of the go-to inspirations of this era: abandoned / out of place technology seeming to be an evil monster. Writer Stephen Thompson even brings in a role for a child actor too, only unable to squeeze in any timey-wimey paradoxes to make it the hat trick of Showrunner Steven Moffat's favourites. The depiction of the siren is great, which helps enormously, with Lily Cole as a beautiful floating wraith who before you can say "that early scene in Ghostbusters" turns into a fearsome projection in attack mode. There's also a bit of humour mined from the initially ludicrous situation of the big, butch pirates frightened of getting so much as a scratch. Taken on its own by the random sampling of the blog's approach, it is much more effective than when seen in situ of an ongoing series. At the time, the obvious thing that was glaring was why the Doctor isn't following up on the many loose ends of the ongoing Silence / mysterious girl in Spacesuit plot set up in the first story of that year. There's obviously long-form serial drama sequencing reasons why this story has to be a palate-cleanser, but they're not story or character reasons. Interestingly, though, in isolation without those worries, another issue becomes more obvious: the script has a couple of sizeable holes.

I'm not talking so much about Lee Thingy from Press Gang disappearing, as - I'm assuming but pretty confidently - that that was an editing snafu, not a script problem. It doesn't exactly help matters, though. No, there are other holes. For example, all the way through the first section of the narrative, the siren is assumed by audience and characters alike to be a killer; the Doctor advises everyone on his changing theories for how best to protect themselves from being attacked by the siren, including by getting rid of all the reflective surfaces in the ship, and they look to escape. The TARDIS gone, their only escape is to wait for the winds to pick up, and when that happens - and Rory goes overboard - apropos of nothing, with no build up, the Doctor decides the siren isn't dangerous after all and they should all get zapped by her. I mean maybe the scene of his growing awareness that things are not what they seem was cut out along with Lee Thingy from Press Gang's comeuppance scene, but I doubt it - it just seems like a switch is flipped and the Doctor then knows the plot needs to move on to its next phase. Perhaps the deleted scenes also included a convincing explanation for how the 17th century crew can pilot the futuristic spaceship at the end, or how an untrained Amy can save Rory with CPR. That last script decision seems a bit irresponsible, and also unnecessary. They can (and do) get Rory into the TARDIS which presumably has lots of devices to give a plausible scientific reason for saving Rory. Instead, the script goes for an unearned emotional crescendo where Amy is the only one to save Rory because of her love for him. I don't think it quite works. The Curse of the Black Spot is a story that doesn't expect to be taken seriously, but some of these issues (there's also a flippant tone from the Doctor throughout the early sessions that grates) means that as an audience member I could barely clear that low bar.

Connectivity: 

The Mechanoids in The Chase are the prototype for the regular Steven Moffat trope mentioned above (in stories he either writes or exec produces) of technology that appears to be evil but is just following the logic of its programming, just as the medical hologram / siren is in this story. Plus, both The Curse of the Black Spot and that 1960s Dalek story feature a sailing ship's entire crew forced to abandon the ship by an alien force.

Deeper Thoughts:

Beginnings and endings, but not necessarily in that order. Blogging The Curse of the Black Spot has completed another season of Doctor Who. Jumping around randomly to select stories as I do, the completion of any season is not a predictable event; but, having been covering stories for the blog for more than seven years now it becomes inevitable that - if I keep up the same rate of posting - it will happen more and more. Counting the classic and new series years together, there are a total of 39 seasons, or series if you prefer, as well as a number of specials in the gaps between. I have now completed six of them: season 3 (first Doctor William Hartnell's third year in the role), season 8 (third Doctor Jon Pertwee's second), season 17 (fourth Doctor Tom Baker's sixth and penultimate run), season 23 (sixth Colin Baker's second and final full season, which happened to act as one long linked story), and new series 13 (thirteenth Doctor Jodie Whittaker's third and final full season, ditto). The latest completed one is new series 6 (eleventh Doctor Matt Smith's second year). There are 33 to go (and soon there will be more, as new stories are being made as I write this). There's a philosophical conception from antiquity about time that suggest humans are walking backwards into the future - able to see the past and our beginnings receding before us, but turned against what's coming next, unable to peek at it. I wonder what will be the final story I ever cover for the blog. I have no way of knowing, though it's fun to speculate. In that past I see in front of me, though, I can see times when I've done something similar to this experiment before.

Any completist Doctor Who fan who wasn't lucky enough to watch the series from its first episode in November 1963 has had to catch up with stories as they were repeated, or as they came out on VHS, or DVD, until bit by bit - in random order inevitably - they reach the end. So, what were the first and last stories I watched for every Doctor? Let's start with the starts. From Colin Baker's first appearance in the title role (in late 1984), it's a fairly easy and prosaic journey, as that was when I was fully on the Who bus and making every regular stop. I'd finally been born (nine whole seasons of Who went out before I even existed, wasted), had grown up to an age when I could watch the programme, discovered it, and then become a regular viewer. There were always difficulties catching any particular episode, though - even in the video age, I ended up failing to record something and missing it on occasion. I was blessed (cursed?) though that I managed to see every minute of every episode of Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy's debuts, The Twin Dilemma and Time and the Rani, respectively. I'm only going to count whole stories for the purposes of this exercise: I caught many glimpses of stories before I properly started watching the series, and have watched many orphaned episodes and audio-only versions of missing episodes since; that doesn't reflect the original experience, though. Paul McGann's first (and last) story was fairly easy to catch, as it was available on sell-through VHS before it was even shown on TV. And from Christopher Eccleston on, it became impossible to miss (with regular repeats and then iplayer to fall back on). So, the first stories for every Doctor since Colin were the first ones originally broadcast. That goes for the last ones too (it's one and the same for Paul McGann, of course).

As I've mentioned many times, my indoctrination into Doctor Who was a series of repeats in late 1981 called The Five Faces of Doctor Who. As such, I know that my first stories watched for the second, third and fourth Doctors were - in order - The Krotons, Carnival of Monsters and Logopolis. This is where random sampling can get interesting: the first ever Tom Baker story I watched in full was his swansong in the role. I missed the first couple of episodes of the William Hartnell repeat in the Five Faces season, so the first ever full story I saw of his was the first Hartnell VHS release, The Daleks. Every other episode of Peter Davison's first series clashed with Cub Scouts, and we didn't have a video in my house in 1982; but, thanks to the power of malingering, I managed to catch all the episodes of Davison's third story Kinda, so that was my first of his (still random, but I couldn't have chosen better - it's one of the very best and a firm favourite to this day). Endings for Doctors Three to Five took a bit of detective work, but the situation is nonetheless relatively straightforward. If not being in full colour makes no difference, then my last Pertwee was Invasion of the Dinosaurs on VHS in 2003 (with the first episode in black and white); but, if all the colour has to be there, then it was the restored The Mind of Evil on DVD ten years later. If full colour is properly restored to the first part of Dinosaurs for Blu-ray though (the DVD had a semi-successful restoration that was not seen as broadcast standard), then that will re-take the final place instead. My final Tom Baker was The Sun Makers (see the First Time Round section of its blog post for more details), and my final Peter Davison was Time-Flight (of which I missed one episode when it was first broadcast, so I caught up when the VHS release came out in summer 2000).

The first two Doctors Hartnell and Troughton are a little bit more problematical. Do animations count? If so, I may never be done as all those missing episodes and stories might get animated eventually, but nobody can know when. Besides, as mentioned above, stories experienced wholly or partially in audio form are not the stories as originally made or broadcast, even if they are accompanied by wonderful moving art; also, any of the stories might get rediscovered in their original format after having been animated. Adhering to the 'as broadcast' rule, the final Hartnell story I ever watched was The Gunfighters, when it came out on VHS in 2002. It was in a box set with two other stories, but I'd already seen both of them by that point. The final Patrick Troughton story I caught up with was The Enemy of the World, which was rediscovered and released on DVD in 2013. Before that one was known to exist, it was The Tomb of the Cybermen, when that was rediscovered and released on VHS in 1992. Before Tomb was known to exist, the final story of Troughton's I caught up on (at least that I knew existed at the time) was The Dominators in 1990. Given that the VHS range only started in the mid-1980s, to have provided every Troughton story I hadn't seen as early as 1990 just shows how few of the stories of his tenure survived in the archives back then. I am therefore grateful for the animations, and hope they continue (rumour is that their budgets have been cut and so there might be a gap before new animations are worked on, but I live in hope). It also brings back the mystery, which is what Who's all about: after the announced The Abominable Snowmen, nobody knows which of those missing stories of the first two Doctors will be animated - or possibly even rediscovered - next, let alone last. Predictions are a mug's game; I could go out on a limb and guess that the last story I ever cover for the blog would be, ooh, I dunno, The Stones of Blood, and then find that's the very next story to come up randomly. Oh.

In Summary:

Yo-ho-plot-(ho)les! 

The Chase

Chapter The 233rd, where the Daleks and the TARDIS team have a ticket to ride, and they very much do care. 

Plot:

The Daleks have built or obtained a time machine so that they can find and kill the Doctor and his friends, Ian, Barbara and Vicki; picking up a broadcast of this intention on the Doctor's new gadget, the Time Space Visualiser, the time travellers embark on an extended chase. The TARDIS lands in a succession of times and places, pursued by the Daleks, and the TARDIS team face a variety of (quite minor) threats in each locale before they can escape. First is the planet Aridius, then the Empire State building in 1966, then the Marie Celeste in 1872, then an abandoned festival exhibit with anamatronic Frankenstein and Dracula in Ghana in 1996. Each stop, the Daleks close the gap with them a little more, but during the journeys the Doctor is able to build a Dalek-exploding device. In Ghana, Vicki gets separated from her friends, and stows away on the Dalek time vessel. There, she sees that the Daleks have built a robot copy of the Doctor indistinguishable from the real thing (except in medium and long shots). Both time craft land on the planet Mechanus, which the Doctor, Ian and Barbara decide will be the site of confrontation, their plan being to capture the Dalek's craft and use it to go back and rescue Vicki. Quickly, though, they find her and she tells them of the robot; there are a few altercations with it before everyone works out who is Who, and the robot is deactivated.

Dodging the hostile plant life of the planet, the four time travellers end up trapped in a cave surrounded by Daleks, but escape in a concealed lift with a Mechanoid - one of many such robots that have been preparing Mechanus for colonists that never arrived. They travel up to a city that has been built on stilts high above the surface of the planet, and meet Steven Taylor. He crash-landed on the planet two years earlier, and has been kept alive and studied in captivity by the Mechanoids, as he doesn't know the codes to demonstrate to the machines that he's friendly. The TARDIS team prepare to climb down from the high and unguarded viewing platform accessed from Steven's room using unfurled electrical cable. The Doctor sets off his device which explodes a Dalek and sets the city on fire. Steven, still dealing with shock and trauma, rushes back in to the burning prison room to fetch his stuffed toy mascot (his equivalent of a Wilson volleyball); the others climb down. The Daleks and Mechanoids battle on. Steven escapes the city (somehow) and finds his way to the TARDIS (somehow). The others discover the Dalek time-ship, now empty, and Ian and Barbara use it to travel home to London, a couple of years after they left. The Doctor and Vicki watch them return on the Time Space Visualiser.

Context:

Full disclosure: this story came up as a random selection before the last couple of stories blogged, but I held it back to tie in with the write-up of the two Cushing films at the BFI (see Deeper Thoughts below). There's obviously only a fairly loose connection between those spin-offs and The Chase, but I have already blogged the two stories that were used as the basis of those movies (The Daleks and The Dalek Invasion of Earth). As mentioned at the event and noted below, there was an option for a third Cushing Dalek film that was never taken up. The assumption has always tended to be that the filmmakers would have taken the obvious next step, and its script would have been an adaptation of this third William Hartnell ding-dong with the Skaro mutants. The last but one Doctor Who Magazine (at time of writing), which like the BFI event tied in to the Cushing Dalek films in honour of their new restorations, contained a fun comic strip Dr. Who & The Mechanoids written by Jacqueline Rayner and drawn by Russ Leach that suggested what such a story might be like in miniature. It's good that it exists in comic form, as an actual movie of The Chase might have been difficult to produce (more on that in a moment). Anyway, I watched The Chase, which ultimately was the inspiration for no movie screenplay at all, from the DVD an episode a night over the course of a week in June 2022.

First Time Round:

I first watched this story when it came out on VHS in September 1993, Doctor Who's 30th anniversary year. I waxed lyrical about shenanigans surrounding that anniversary in a recent blog post for The Green Death; a couple of things I didn't have space to mention there - which are both apt to provide me with a nostalgia rush whenever I see them - are the special anniversary Who logo that adorned merchandise, and a brief video intro showing each of the seven Doctors faces morphing into one another (google "doctor who 30th anniversary video intro" and you'll find it) that preceded the episodes on the Doctor Who VHS tapes released to buy in that year. The Dalek tin, and The Chase tape within it, feature these embellishments. Oh, I forgot to mention that too: a couple of VHS releases that year came in presentation tins for the first time, grouping together multiple episodes, either because that made sense (all the different sections of the Trial of a Time Lord that don't fully stand alone) or just to randomly pair together two wildly unconnected stories as in the case of the Dalek tin, which as well as The Chase contained Remembrance of the Daleks. I guess the celebratory concept was the start and end of Who's long heritage, the two stories being the oldest and most recent Dalek stories respectively that had yet to be released on video at that point. For the die hard collectors, there were four variants of the tin available, so you could blow a hideous amount of money collecting them all. The only difference was that a different photo appeared on the base of the tin, which I didn't even spot until a friend pointed it out to me. I still have the now rusty tin, and just got it out of a cupboard to check: my variant has a picture of a Dalek! The TARDIS-shaped tin containing Trial of a Time Lord had a whopping seven different variants, a portrait of a different one of the first seven Doctors on each copy. I did not have the money to collect all of these, so - a month later when that tin came out - I went to buy a tin with Colin Baker on its base, only to find they didn't have one in the shop, so I got a Tom Baker one instead (any Baker was better than no Baker to my twisted logic).

Reaction:

As can be seen when they're not bound by the needs of weekly episodic television scheduling and are tightened up to make 90-minute movie scripts, writer Terry Nation's first two Dalek tales are solid, exciting adventure stories. He had done the Doctor and his Earth friends visiting the Daleks, and he'd done the Daleks visiting the Earth. Where would he look for inspiration for his third Dalek story, a difficult second sequel? As he would many times in his future work for Doctor Who, he looked for inspiration in his own back catalogue, specifically reusing the structure of his non-Dalek story from Doctor Who's first season, The Keys of Marinus. Like Keys, The Chase is a peripatetic rush through many different locales that each provide the background to a Doctor Who scenario in miniature (in The Chase, the drama of these micro-narratives rarely rises above a minor squabble), the episodic parts held together as a whole by a straightforward - some might say sketchy - umbrella concept (a quest, a chase). As such, it's hard to imagine what Milton Subotsky (as writer and producer) and Gordon Flemyng (as director) could have made of this plot structure as a 90-minute film. If they'd cut out the bits that don't move the dramatic plot forward, then they'd have a film set almost 100% on Mechanus, which wouldn't give across the spirit of the original, but if they instead featured all scheduled stops of the TV chase in less running time, the resultant film would have been very bitty and the costs of all those different sets prohibitive. It's probably for the best that the second Dalek film didn't do as well as expected at the box office, so nobody had to wrestle with an adaptation of The Chase: it is mostly powered only by the charm of the regular cast's interactions, and the only major drama comes from changes to that regular cast; none of that would have been relevant to a film version.

If a movie budget would have struggled to create the many and varied settings of The Chase, how was the even more cash-strapped television production to fare? With difficulty. There are various B-team monsters - the Mire Beast, the Fungoids - that are barely mobile, and any goodie character has to manoeuvre themselves into trouble (Maureen o' Brien as Vicki basically wraps a Mire beast tentacle around herself in an early scene). I can understand why the Mechanoids are so enormous - they can't look too much like a Dalek, but someone's got to have room inside the props to propel them - but it's still very silly when one is in the lift with the four regulars, who are pressed back against the walls because of the lack of room. Like the Quarks in The Dominators, the voices have been pitched to be in sharp relief to the Daleks, but this unfortunately means one can't work out a word they're saying.  When Barbara asks to be released from the prison towards the end, I've always thought the machine replied "Rot" to her, which seemed a bit harsh. Apparently, it's saying "Threat". Also outsized is the Time Space Visualiser, which is ultimately only used to deliver two pieces of exposition, and some fun bits of business, before never being seen in the series again; it is so big, however, that it would dominate anyone's front room; perhaps this is where a lot of the budget went. As usual, Doctor Who's reach exceeded its grasp, but the design of what's on screen, though a bit cheap, is nonetheless mostly effective. The film work is good, with the early sandy scenes of Aridius shot in a quarry location adorned with weird twisted tree things a stand out, as is the studio-shot film of the Dalek Mechanoid battle at the end. The director Richard Martin seems to be having a few off days when in the TV studio, though; nothing is framed very well, and the actors' blocking doesn't appear to have been sufficiently worked out in rehearsal.

This somewhat clumsy look, plus the episodic nature (the script doesn't dwell in any place or on any threat for more than 15 minutes max), and the lack of urgency (in the middle of this breakneck do-or-die chase, the regulars stop for meals, changes of clothes, and sleep) combine to make The Chase seem a bit shambolic. The humour level is higher than usual too, and it all adds up to an overall unseriousness. There are so many changes of setting in The Chase that some jar when treated in a light-hearted, knockabout way. One example is the Marie Celeste section, which is presented as slapstick, but involves a crew of real historical people, including a mother and child, jumping to their inevitable death by drowning. Similarly, when the time travellers meet up with Steven Taylor in the final episode, he's been in solitary confinement for two years, and has clearly been traumatised by this (Peter Purves plays this very well, and is pretty good in the comic role of Morton Dill earlier in the story too); reacting to this broken man with jokes and giggling, the TARDIS team come over as uncaring. Mostly, though, the light-hearted moments are the best bits of The Chase. It's a shame that the beginning sequence where the quartet just hang out in the TARDIS has to end for something so dull as a Dalek plot to take over; Vicki wandering around aimlessly, bored, the Doctor tinkering with his time TV, Barbara making Vicki a dress, and Ian reading a book on Monsters from Outer Space ("A bit far-fetched"). Each choosing a historical scene to view on the Time Space Visualiser is nice too, allowing for a clip of the Beatles to be included, and for everyone to have a bit of a dance. There lots of nice lines; not laugh out loud funny but charming, like the exchanges about using Barbara's cardigan as part of a Dalek trap (Ian: "It's for the Dalek, not for me", Vicki: "I hope it suits him", then the Doctor's "My dear boy, we're trying to beat the Daleks, not start a jumble sale."

The chase structure means that most of the Dalek scenes show them on their own; this leads to more variety in the voices used to allow differentiation between the different Daleks speaking; that makes sense. It doesn't really make sense to make one a basso profundo but hesitant Dalek who starts every sentence with "Er... er...", but it must have been a deliberate choice, mustn't it? The same sort of choice as having another one cough and splutter as it emerges from the sand for the episode one cliffhanger. I thought it was funny, anyway, whether it was meant to be or not. The unevenness of presentation created questions in my mind related to the fourth episode 'Journey Into Terror'. The Doctor thinks he's entered the realm of nightmares, an environment of the collective unconscious, but he's really in a disused funfair house of horrors. As with any Doctor Who story of this vintage, a certain suspension of disbelief is required. But how much? Is the fake plastic bat that swings into view above our heroes the fake plastic bat of Doctor Who, or the Festival of Ghana? Are the Doctor and Ian supposed to see the string it's suspended on, or are we? Or should neither party acknowledge it? I got cognitive overload trying to work out whether I'm watching the designer's brave stab at a funfair haunted house or an actual haunted house, and came down in the end on the side of it being intended to be an artificial-looking space. As such, the Doctor is being a bit dim imagining his fanciful theories when the prosaic truth is obvious. The Doctor and Ian's next plan is to capture the Dalek time-ship to go back to this haunted house and rescue Vicki, who they think is stranded there. How exactly did they think they could pilot it into the world of the mind?! This, like the Time Space Visualiser, and other details such as the futuristic Vicki living near a castle with a drawbridge, is forgotten as quickly as it was introduced.

The story goes beyond overambitious and becomes operatic in its silliness. Why, for example, did anyone think they could attempt a robot doppelganger plot without access to split-screen, and where they were rationed for how many shooting breaks they could take in studio to move actors into different positions? The resultant solution - the robot is Hartnell in close-up, and a not-look-very-much-a-like in every other shot - is so wrong, it almost becomes right. Just at the point where one thinks the lightweight story might float away completely in a bubble of ridiculousness, it comes down to Earth, literally, with the departure of Ian and Barbara. The final remaining original members of the companion cast, there from day one, their departure was always going to be emotional for those invested watching at home (as well as for the Doctor - Hartnell's delivery of "I shall miss them, silly old fuss-pots" melts the heart), and it's handled magnificently. William Russell and Jacqueline Hill play the scenes with such joy, Russell's hearty and heartfelt exclamation that they have made it back to "London 1965" has such impact that it became a social media meme back when Doctor Who marathons were being shown on Twitch. The interesting touch of showing them having fun as a series of still photographs works well. Ian and Barbara are suddenly back in a world where they have to worry about road tax, bus fares and explaining where they've been hiding all this time. It's testament to the characters that one wants to see them spin off into their own show at precisely this moment; those scenes pile up in the plus column of The Chase, tipping things over to outweigh the minuses.

 

Connectivity: 

In both The Chase and The Haunting of Villa Diodati, the Doctor is accompanied by a three companion team; in each story there is an appearance by historical wordsmiths, references to Frankenstein's monster, and a trip to the 1800s. The force of antagonism comes from monsters encased in metal in both. Both stories see the TARDIS team leaving a location believing some kind of uncanny phenomena has just been witnessed; they're definitely mistaken about the creatures that they witnessed at the festival of Ghana in 1996, and may be mistaken about the ghosts Graham saw in the Villa Diodati.

Deeper Thoughts:

Dr. and Susie Who's Experimental Journal Entries: BFI Southbank Peter Cushing Dalek films double bill, 19th June 2022. It was a sunny London Sunday, and I made my way to the BFI on the South Bank of the Thames to meet a selection of the usual crowd with whom I attend these sessions, who have been mentioned many times before on the blog, David, Trevor and Scott (and later we caught up with Chris, Dave and Tim too). The event was a little different to the usual BFI Doctor Who screenings, as what was being shown wasn't a BBC product, but instead was Studio Canal property. Bought up amidst lots of archive library holdings over the years, the two 1960s Aaru Productions movies starring Peter Cushing and the Daleks have been given 4K restorations by Studio Canal, and were being given their first public outing in the largest BFI screen NFT1 that day. This meant that hosts Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy did not do the usual quiz (as there were no freebies to give away), and the programme was split into two sessions with a short gap in between, each separately ticketed: the first film Dr. Who and the Daleks with accompanying panel discussion, and later Daleks - Invasion Earth 2150 AD. Johnson and Fiddy also squeezed in a brief Q&A at the start of each session, to give us our money's worth. I settled down in to my seat in the full, sold-out theatre and realised that sat in front of me were Doctor Who writers Robert Shearman and Joy Wilkinson, which was nice.

Fiddy (L) and Johnson (R)

As one of the young viewers that saw the films on first release, Fiddy talked about the wonder of seeing the stories on the big screen, particularly with echoing sound better than he could get through the tinny speaker on his telly at home. He also was not bothered about the differences between the films and their TV inspirations (the Doctor being a human inventor, Susan being much younger, Barbara being related to the Doctor, Ian being a physical comedian instead of a teacher, etc.) as such not quite liberties were routinely taken with adaptations at the time, including those of folk tales like Robin Hood and King Arthur. The preliminary Q&A before the first film then took place; onto the stage came two of the people who had worked on the restoration, Anthony Badger (pictures) and Mark Ayres (audio). Badger told the audience that previous versions of the films on disc had not gone back to use the original negatives. A lot of detective work was required to locate these; the sequel's negatives were easier to find, and when the first film's were located, it was discovered they were heavily scratched. A wetgate process was used to repair them, so the restored versions of both films that we were about to see were therefore based on the best possible foundation of first generation pictures. Ayres explained how he had become custodian of the de facto masters of the films' audio elements. In the 1990s, he had worked on a VHS documentary about the Cushing films with director Kevin Jon Davies called Dalekmania, and was given at that point DATs of music reels and sound effects tracks. After becoming involved in audio soundtrack and Blu-ray releases for the films over the years since then, he had discovered that all other audio sources were of inferior quality to the DATs in his possession.

(L to R) Badger, Fiddy, Ayres

After the Q&A, the first film was shown. Because in the last few years I have only seen 4:3 TV Doctor Who episodes at the BFI, and I had never seen these two Peter Cushing Dalek movies on anything bigger than a TV screen before, it was doubly exciting when the NFT1's screen slowly extended out to its fullest widescreen size and Dr. Who & The Daleks started. The first thing to state is that the restoration is faultless; every frame looked perfect, even blown up to those unforgiving proportions. The two films are going to be shown in Picturehouse chain cinemas across the country in July 2022; if you're reading this in time, and you haven't seen the films on the big screen before, I recommend giving them a try. Apart from the changes to the main characters mentioned by Fiddy, there are a few other changes to the plot of note. The Daleks taking the TARDIS fluid link, a vital plot point, is foregrounded better in the film than in the TV version; unfortunately, the later realisation when our heroes have escaped that they don't have the fluid link and therefore have to go back into the danger of the Dalek city again is undercut by the contraction of the running time - it's not plausible that they would have forgotten so quickly, unlike in the TV version where lots more time has been shown to elapse by that point. The character Antodus, who in the original I thought was an obvious audience identification figure (see the blog post on the Daleks, linked to above in the Context section, for more details), gets a happy ending here. In general, the film adjusts scenes to be less bleak than in the TV version; the scene where the Doctor and Ian goad the Thals by threatening to abduct Dyoni and take her to the Daleks to exchange for the fluid link is played with much more humour.

Watching something with a large audience always highlights more laughs than one ever realised were there watching at home. Something I didn't find quite as funny as the rest of the audience was the Dalek voice rhythms; they are, I suppose, inherently a bit silly, but where they may have tickled me a tad, they led to guffaws from many others. Particularly (unintentionally) funny to the crowd was the poor Dalek at the denouement that doggedly keeps going with his long countdown to the irradiation of the planet, no matter what's going on around him. I did laugh out loud at the exchange where a character shouts "Dalek!, and a Dalek wheels around and says "Yes?" enquiringly. Mainly, though, the Daleks work dramatically, and this was the best they would be framed and shot for many a year, perhaps ever. A lot of the remaining humour, believe it or not, is intentional. Peter Cushing is adept at the 'absent-minded scientist' comedy. Most of Roy Castle's physical clowning lands; it's only at the end that it comes apart a bit, and that's not his fault. The script doesn't really have an ending: leaving Skaro, the TARDIS lands in ancient Rome, and Ian opens the door to see unconvincing stock footage of soldiers advancing. Ian slams the door and then Castle has to essentially busk, pulling lots of levers and so on, as there is a slow fade, but it's too slow and he looks to be getting a bit desperate before the credits roll. Once they had rolled, and the lights had come up, the main panel took place; onto the stage came Anthony Waye (First Assistant Director of both films), Jill Curzon (Louise, in the second film), and Roberta Tovey (Susan, in both films).

(L to R) Johnson, Waye, Curzon, Tovey

Sending apologies for a last minute change that meant he could not attend was Jason Flemyng, the actor son of Dalek films director Gordon, and probably still best known for Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels though he's got an extensive body of work. It was a great shame as his familial connection would have meant some strong and interesting recollections. It's fair to say that the remaining panel wasn't the most engaged or engaging, as for everybody on it the Dalek films were just a job or couple of jobs a long, long time ago. Jill Curzon did a few weeks of filming for Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD during a busy 1960s where she was in demand for films and TV, and she's 86 years old now. Anthony Waye is only a couple of years younger and he's worked on over 80 films in a stellar career, and - let's face it - many of those films are more important than two children's films based on a TV show in the mid-1960s (Star Wars, Bond films, The Elephant Man, etc. etc.). It fell mainly to Roberta Tovey to give more extensive answers to questions, but she was 10 years old during filming and so took some of the more bewildering things she was experiencing in her stride, as children often do. As such, there wasn't much depth of feeling expressed, but all three nonetheless gave it their best. Waye explained the role of a 1st AD is to keep everything on schedule and budget and keep everyone - from the shooting crew to the director - in line. He remembered there being tremendous budget and time pressure, but everyone handling it well. He couldn't remember specifics of the budget, but could remember that he was on 60 old pounds a week (he still had his old contract of employment).

Tovey was aware of the TV show and had watched a few episodes, but wasn't guided by anything she had seen, and wanted to make the part her own. She had to audition for Gordon Flemyng by reading from a book of Spike Milligan poems, and thought she'd messed it up, but the call telling her she'd got it came in before she'd even managed to get back from Shepperton. On set, the Daleks provoked more interest than fear for Tovey, who was curious as to how they worked (they were propelled by dancers inside the shells for the films). Everyone recalled the technical challenges of working with the colourful pepperpots, with Curzon recalling the scene where one fell down a ramp, went onto its side and caught fire, and the challenge of getting the operator out once the shot was finished. Johnson prompted Tovey about a particular method Gordon Flemyng had of keeping her focussed for the first film: he offered her a shilling for every scene of hers that didn't require a retake. At the end of the shoot, he presented her with a suede pouch containing 21 shillings with a note "To One-Take Tovey, love Gordon", which she has kept to this day. Everyone had nothing but praise for Peter Cushing, who from this session and everything else you can hear or read about him, was one of the business's true gentlemen, kind, patient and generous. Curzon recalled going to a museum in his honour in his old home town, and being given an enormous picture of the actor which was then auctioned for charity; Tovey told a sweet story of how she was asked to speak to him in his trailer on the first film, and he told her that he'd been asked to film a sequel, but he wasn't going to do it unless she did too. She agreed and he said "Okay, I'll tell them that we'll do it". This is probably why Tovey preferred the first film as she was together with Cushing and the cast throughout, unlike the second film where everyone was mostly split up.

(L to R) Johnson, Sergei then Dmitri Subotsky, Fiddy

The final audience question was about the song Who's Who that Tovey recorded contemporaneously with the films, and again she described it as being a professional interaction: into the recording studio to sing the song accompanied by an orchestra on day one, then the next day in again to record the B-side. Johnson joked that we would finish with a rendition from Tovey, but she demurred. The final word went to her, as she said "Hope you enjoyed it" to the departing crowd; and we did. After a brief break, everyone trooped back into NFT1 for the second film. Well, almost everyone; Chris, Tim and Dave had apparently screwed up getting tickets, so stayed in the BFI Riverfront bar while it played. The big thing they missed was an unadvertised Q&A with the Dalek films' producer and screenwriter Milton Subotsky's sons, Dmitri and Sergei. They had as talking points several documents related to the Dalek films that were left behind in their father's effects when he passed on. There was a Dalek blueprint for the first film, which is being held up in the photo, but alas I was too far away to capture any detail (it looked like a movie Dalek, unsurprisingly). There was an exchange of memos about the publicity stunt getting the Daleks to appear at the Cannes film festival. This allowed Fiddy to come in with a nice dad joke "You can see why Daleks would be wary of a Cannes opener". The biggest exclusive was the presence of a script for a third Doctor Who related film. This wasn't from the mid-1960s and based on The Chase, though (another document the Subotskys brought confirmed there was agreement for the third film at that time, but it was never made). Instead, this was from about 15 years later, showing that Doctor Who hadn't left Subotsky Senior's mind. It was an adaptation of a property that had gone by the unfortunate previous titles "King Crab" and "Night of the Crabs" that he'd adapted to feature the Doctor. Coming to Big Finish very soon, maybe?

2nd film's title card (note typo bringing the invasion forward 100 years)

The second film then followed, and it was clear that it was so much better than the first. It has a more serious intent, though still a nice balance of light and shade, with Bernard Cribbins in the comic sidekick role doing some dramatic work as well as clowning. The Thals in the first film, love them as I do, aren't roles with much scope to shine, unlike the various hotheads, misguided rebels, profiteers and quislings of the second film's script. This means we get superior turns from a cool Ray Brooks, and a gruff Andrew Keir. Best of all is Philip Madoc in one of his many Doctor Who roles on big and small screen, as the spivvy and smarmy black-marketeer Brockley. There are some great stunts throughout, and some very good explosions and model work. The Dalek Saucer (a model that left a bit to be desired on TV) is fabulous, though on the big screen restoration I was able to see the strings for the first time. Watching these cultural artefacts back to back, one can hear the development of a catchphrase: unless I missed it, the word "Exterminate" is not said once by any Dalek in the first film; by the time of the sequel, it's almost all they say! The film's not perfect, of course: there's some obvious product placement with prominent posters for Sugar Puffs seemingly everywhere early on; and there are some unintentional laughs - a big one was also early on, when the Doctor opens up a roboman helmet and says "Highly advanced" over a close-up of some very 1960s transistors. Overall though, it's fun and enjoyable. It even has an ending, with Cribbins' policeman Tom returned a little early so he can catch the villains that he let escape first time round - this breaks every rule of the time travel narrative, but who cares?! The film over, our entertainment was complete. We went back to the bar and enjoyed a few hours of food, drink and chat. Leaving, we all mused on what would be the next one of these BFI events. There's no word on the next Blu-ray box set, so it might be the animation of The Abominable Snowmen that is coming out sometime later this year. 

In Summary:

Lightweight but fun, just like the 1960s Dalek movies. 

The Haunting of Villa Diodati

Chapter The 232nd, presents Mary Shelly's Cyberman.

Plot:

The Doctor, Graham, Yaz and Ryan visit Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva on the stormy night in 1816 that Percy and Mary Shelley, Lord Byron and others told ghost stories that led to the creation of Mary Shelley's ground-breaking novel Frankenstein. The fam are under strict instructions not to drop any hints or otherwise influence her and just to soak up the atmosphere, but - who would have thought it - events are in play that involve a half-converted Cyberman who's a bit like Frankenstein's monster. Percy Shelley, who's missing, hiding in the cellar, accidentally absorbed a Cyber computer / superweapon / globby blob thing, which the Cyberman has been pursuing through time. The auto-defences built in to the device, coupled with Shelley's mind, create various horror movie tropes in the house, which the fam and the other poets, writers and entourage get frightened by until they can find Percy. Graham also experiences some actual ghosts, nothing to do with the Cyberman plot, who make him a sandwich (this is not explained). Despite having been given a warning not to give the lone Cyberman what it wants, the Doctor extracts its prize to save Percy, and hands it over. The Cyberman disappears. The TARDIS team leave to track it down using coordinates that Percy wrote down during his time under the influence.

Context:

I watched the story on my own one summery evening on the BBC iplayer, through the interface of an Amazon firestick plugged into our old but luckily still reliable TV. I'm waiting for the right story to come along to tempt the children back to watching with me; they're not too fussed about Doctor Who at the moment. Frankly, the right story might be the one (or one of the ones?) being filmed at the moment for broadcast in 2023 as part of the new Russell T Davies showrunner era, or probably Jodie Whittaker's big finale later this year. It might not be an old one - the next story lined up for the blog is a black and white 1960s six-parter, so whenever it may be that they rekindle their enthusiasm for the good Doctor, it probably isn't going to be soon.

First Time Round:

I watched with the whole family on the Sunday night of this story's debut BBC1 transmission on 16th February 2020, at the beginning - if I remember rightly - of a week off for the kids' half-term. I can remember no details of that watch, but I remember that all through February there were rumblings in the wider world about a coronavirus that everyone was more and more worried about. Within a month, the UK would be in full lockdown, and in the interim circumstances dictated that I went to the most populous city within commuting distance (London), and used the associated overcrowded transport systems, about 40 times more frequently than I would have normally in any given month; a couple of weeks after The Haunting of Villa Diodati I was at the BFI for the screening of a Doctor animation (see here for more details) but there were also trips for a training course for the day job, other work events, going to shows with friends, and day trips with the family. I was lucky not to catch Covid (or at least, if I did, to get it asymptomatically - there was no test to check at that point). 

Reaction:

Obviously, contentious views are good for clicks, but that comes at a cost of coarsening our collective dialogue. As such, I always try to be kind, rigorous and thorough in my reactions to Doctor Who stories here. It might be more fun, and certainly would take up less time and energy, to just say of something "it was shit", but it's not very useful. I've probably come close occasionally to saying a particular disliked Doctor Who story is shit, but I hope I've fully expounded on my reasons for thinking so. I don't often disagree with the critical consensus just for the sake of it, either, and always try to explain my reasoning (as I did last time when admitting that, yes really, I think Time and the Rani is good). The Haunting of Villa Diodati is generally well thought of by fans as accurately as can be gauged from online commentary; writer Maxine Alderton is lauded (and was the only writer aside from showrunner Chris Chibnall to contribute to the following series when it was shortened as an impact of the Covid-19 pandemic); like that contribution to Flux, Village of the Angels, her series 12 story is big on horror, which tends to make a story popular with fans. In the Doctor Who Magazine series poll, it was mid-table - fourth out of eight, but it was beaten only by the big two-parter series opener and finale, plus mid-season twist episode Fugitive of the Judoon, which won the poll, and featured massive revelations and returns. I think it's fair to say that most fans like it; I am out of step with this feeling. I found the story utterly and totally unengaging, to such an extent that I can barely think of anything to say. Don't all cheer at once (!) as I will force myself over this mental block and put something into words.

It's a solid concept, the Doctor meeting Byron and the Shelleys on this famous night of horror stories, and them then getting caught up in a horror story of their own; the use of a Cyberman who's not as complete or finished as normal, so looks more like the reanimated creature of Mary's Modern Prometheus, is also good. Like any such narrative, the risk is that it robs the historical figure of agency, suggesting that their imagination needed a big prompt. The classic series did this in the story Timelash, giving a character only revealed at the end to be H. G. Wells the idea for a handful of his novels. At least here, the historical personages are depicted pretty accurately; in the classic series Doctor Who story, Wells was the bumbling comic relief. Bryon's not so bumbling but still is mostly there for the lighter moments, including lots of flirting with the Doctor. It raises a smile, and the guest performances are perfectly good throughout, as are the designs to evoke the period. It's most definitely competent, and directed well. I think the problem is focus. Perhaps because of the worries about a plot that suggests that a woman in the 1800s wouldn't be able to come up with Frankenstein on her own, the story doesn't lean in enough into the concept, to my mind. If one is going to do it, better to do it full-bloodedly. The lone Cyberman does not appear until halfway through the episode's running time. He should instead arrive right at the beginning, perhaps exhausted and needing to galvanise himself with electricity; the rest of the story should be the Doctor and Co with the Cyberman, trapped in the house, and in passing working through every Frankenstein's monster cliché before the reversal (which is there in story as it aired) that this is no figure of pathos but a vicious killer.

Instead of this, the script throws every haunted house trope imaginable into the mix for the first 25 minutes, excusing it with some technobabble about defence mechanisms that is within an skeleton's hair's breadth away from "it was all a dream". The animated skull and bony fingers turn out to be a collective hallucination, just like the nightmare scenario of the building folding in on itself, so one could walk and walk and never escape (it made me, as a long-term fan, think of the Peter Davison story Castrovalva, of course). Throughout all that, I just wanted the script to pick one horror scenario for the characters to be in, rather than bombard me with several. There wasn't any particular moment that worked as an effective scare either - it's atmospheric, but never frightening or even surprising. One of the scenarios thrown against the hallucinatory wall to see if it'll stick is Graham's mini-subplot where he sees dead people; in some ways this is the most effective part of the story: it's fun to watch Bradley Walsh giving a down-to-Earth performance amidst the strangeness, trying to find the toilet and moaning about being hungry. The script seems to be jokingly suggesting the ghosts he sees were real, but the defence mechanism explanation is so confused and confusing there's no reason they can't be hallucination too, and this undermines the humour. Toisin Cole as Ryan is having an off-day and his humorous dialogue falls a bit flat too. Once the Cyberman finally arrives, it doesn't really do anything of note; almost all the guest characters cannot die as history notes that they survived the night, so only a couple of servants get bumped off; the ante can't get upped. The end sees the protagonists and antagonist leaving to continue the story elsewhere, which leaves The Haunting of Villa Diodati seeming like so much set-up, but not much more.

Connectivity: 

Both The Haunting of Villa Diodati and Time and the Rani feature famous historical Earth figures whose brains are collectively affected because of a returning classic series baddie.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Netflix of Analogies. I've tried to be a little less political in these sections of the blog recently, more for the sake of my blood pressure than anything else, but long term readers of the blog (Hi Mum!) will know that I very much dislike and disagree with the current Conservative government of the UK, the people that form that government, and their policies - if the drunken lurching from one half-baked reactionary slogan to another regressive tabloid headline can be called policy. At the time of writing, they are shaming my country by simultaneously granting themselves a flimsy legal cover for breaking international treaties while also recreating transportation, this time to Rwanda rather than Australia, and this time as punishment for the "crime" of seeking asylum at a time when the ruling party is unpopular and wants to feed red meat racism to the worst of its followers. It somehow makes it worse that they are as incompetent as they are vicious. By the time you read this, they will likely have stumbled on to something even worse. Compared to all that mess, and to every person impacted by the current cost of living crisis that their rabid posturing does nothing to alleviate, it probably seems churlish to concentrate on the vandalism they are doing in the area of broadcasting, but this is a blog about a TV show and I have to keep things vaguely on topic; plus, I think there's a sobering cautionary lesson to be learnt there.

Nadine Dorries, the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, from various pronouncements she has made in her time in post so far, has made two things very clear; first, that she - on behalf of her party - wants to do away with public service broadcasting; what other impact can there be from privatising Channel 4 and getting rid of the licence fee that funds the BBC, two things she has explicitly stated were going to happen on her watch? Second, she has made it clear that she is not qualified for the position of Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. I'm trying to be kind, but it's hard to do so when watching Dorries's slow motion vandalism play out: she is cultured only in the same way sour milk is. Channel 4 is doing very well at the moment, and the recent consultation on Channel 4's future had over 50,000 responses from members of the public and more than 96% of respondents did not want the channel to be privatised; Dorries reversed this in a recent select committee appearance, claiming that 96% were in favour; this was either deliberate misinformation or bumbling - neither option reflects well on her. The government's own summary of that consultation, which is available online here, uses many weasel words to explain why it isn't going to take any notice of the responses and is going to privatise anyway. It would have been more concise to write "We can do what we bloody well like, and we don't give a toss for the public good", but corrupt administrations are never known for their directness. I wonder why they went to the bother of having the consultation at all.

The summary admits that Channel 4 ain't broke but is still going to be fixed, thus "The government recognises Channel 4’s success in delivering on its remit and its current financial performance. However, we cannot be short-termist in our thinking and must consider the longer-term outlook for Channel 4." This long-term outlook bullshit means that imaginary risks and opportunities that might come along in the future can be conjured up to justify anything. Any populist government will have trumped up (pun intended) threats and enemies they inflate in rhetoric that they can say they are protecting "the people" from; it feels like another step towards the abyss, though, to go from exaggerating current known situations to imagining and not even specifying hypothetical future risks, and burning down anything with that justification. What is particularly galling is the comparisons that are often made, including by Dorries herself in a tweet, to Netflix. The thrust is that Channel 4 and the BBC have to be able to compete with Netflix and similar subscription-funded streaming services. Watching the Villa Diodati story on the BBC iplayer is a similar experience to watching, say, Stranger Things on Netflix, and that similarity allows this con of false equivalence. Netflix does not provide news for a start, let alone radio stations and local broadcast journalism, and online services and all the many other things that the BBC provides. Even more galling about the comparison related to Channel 4 is that while the latter - as even the government concedes - is in rude financial health, the same cannot be said of Netflix.

The current and future existential threats to Netflix are far from imaginary. It lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2022, and its own forecasts predict it will lose millions more in the next few months. When this news was public, the share price took a dive. Yet, it is still the UK governments analogy of choice. Months after those bad results, the government Health Secretary chillingly said "We Have A Blockbuster Health System In A Netflix Age". No matter that in a subsequent press briefing, a spokesperson - possibly too young to remember Blockbuster video - seemed to think he'd meant 'blockbuster' as a positive, and no matter that Netflix is currently not an exemplar of an institution to which anyone should necessarily aspire, the meaning was clear. The NHS, another UK public service, is at risk of being replaced by a subscription service. As Russell T Davies said on this topic, on the BAFTA red carpet accompanied by Ncuti Gatwa on the day of the announcement that Gatwa was taking over as the Doctor, if you don't want the sell off of Channel 4, or the removal of the licence fee, "Go and vote differently". Such an action has to be good for the NHS's chances too. The trouble is, how much damage is this government going to do before we get the opportunity to vote them out?

In Summary:

Not good enough to be this century's Castrovalva, maybe this century's Timelash?