Elizabeth Sandifer

In many ways, every single thing I could possibly say about this story is encoded thematically within this image. All of which said, whose hand is on waxwork Tom Baker’s shoulder, exactly?

It’s November 23rd, 1983. Lionel Richie is at number one with “All Night Long (All Night),” as for one of only two times in Doctor Who we are forced to use the American charts, as this story actually aired two days earlier in the US than it did in the UK. This fact reflects the way in which Doctor Who, in the 1980s, was increasingly turning into a global export – a massive brand that raked in money for the BBC. This, of course, is not what you expect. In any other context global success would matter tremendously and would justify the show’s continued existence. But the BBC is beholden to different rules, as is appropriate given the nature of its funding. The license payers deserve not to be ignored in favor of Americans. And so far from being a reason to keep the show on the air, Nathan-Turner’s mad quest to chase American cult television fans at the expense of the license payers is, increasingly, a major problem.

Not, however, here – a story that is rightfully and properly delightful when it airs on November 25th, 1983. Billy Joel is at number one with “Uptown Girl,” with Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson below him with “Say Say Say.” The Cure are also in the top ten with “The Love Cats.”

In real news, since March sci-fi and the real world have merged uncomfortably with Ronald Reagan announcing the space-based and comically unfeasible Strategic Defense Initiative, derisively nicknamed “Star Wars.” Samantha Smith manages the impressive feat of being used as a cheap propaganda tool by both the USSR and the US. Her resulting celebrity is the only reason she is on the plane whose crash kills her at the age of thirteen two years later.

Margaret Thatcher wins reelection in June in a landslide whereby an outright majority of voters opted for more liberal parties, resulting in Thatcher having a 61% majority in the House of Commons. This massive vote of confidence emboldens Thatcher’s government, and the Thatcherism we all know and loathe really begins here. Pioneer 10 flees the solar system four days later.

The Famicom, known in the US as the Nintendo Entertainment System, launches in Japan. The Global Positioning System is announced to be opened for civilian use. The GNU project is publicly announced. 38 IRA prisoners escape from Maze prison. And US cruise missiles arrive at Greenham Common.

While, of course, on television we have a big one. The Five Doctors.

The problem with occasionally doing what I think of as the gonzo entries is that there is occasionally the sense that I’m expected, for a given “big” story, to provide one. In practice it’s a bit more idiosyncratic than that. What makes a classic story and what makes a story that lends itself to an over the top gonzo entry do not, in fact, completely coincide.…

Continue Reading

At least someone stepped in and stopped Nathan-Turner from his original plan of using Twiki.

It’s March 15th, 1983. Bonnie Tyler remains at number one with “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” with The Eurythmics “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” nipping at its heels, and the rest of the charts being a similar burst of pure and unadulterated 1980s of the sort that you really probably need to cut with some do-wop or something lest you risk an overdose. Also in music news is the debut of Michael Jackson’s moonwalk dance two days prior to this story beginning transmission. In real news, Thatcher’s government passes massive tax cuts. That’s about all we’ve got.

Speaking of not having much, it is difficult to say anything about The Kings Demons, which stands as one of the most strikingly unambitious scripts of the Davison era. It was, admittedly, not supposed to be the season finale, so we can at least give it a break on those grounds and acknowledge that this is not another case of the foolishness that led to things like Time-Flight and The Twin Dilemma being used as finales. But it does represent the degree to which the two-episode stories that every season of the Davison era is saddled with are unfortunate at best.

One gets the intense sense that this script is a dumping ground. Terence Dudley, with whom Saward did not get on, is brought back and given the short script. Anthony Ainley’s Master, who here becomes nearly impossible to take seriously, gets abandoned in it. And so too is the introduction of Kamelion. To be fair, not all of this is intentional. The degree to which Kamelion was not going to prove at all workable was not really clear until the story filmed, and the decision to keep bringing Ainley back demonstrates that he was not intended to be snubbed with this assignment. But intentionality counts for less than one might hope in these things. Shoved after the Black Guardian trilogy, at the end of the season, and a two parter to boot, this story gives nothing so much as a sense of all the steam going out of Doctor Who.

For the most part the “something old returns in every story” idea this season has not been the disaster it could have been. Everything, at least, had a fresh take on its returning concepts, even if, in the case of The Arc of Infinity, that fresh take was to abandon all notion of the concepts themselves in favor of soul-crushing tedium. But here we’re back to the awkwardness of The Visitation’s redoing of The Time Warrior – an ugly case of everything in this story having been taken from other stories and just redone with an “it worked before so it must work again” attitude.

This contributes to something I’ve been accusing Doctor Who of for a while now, which is the use of simulacra of actual content. Whether it be Earthshock’s hollow aping of the form of a dramatic death, Arc of Infinity’s empty recitations of past concepts or, really, several other bits over the past two years.…

Continue Reading

Yes. Total Eclipse of the Heart really was at number one when this image was on television. And you thought Doctor Who had lost touch with the zeitgeist.

It’s March 1st, 1983. Michael Jackson is at number one insisting that Billie Jean is not his lover. Lower in the charts are the Eurythmics (with “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” of course), Bananarama, Toto, and Tears for Fears. But for the purposes of this entry perhaps the most significant fact about the charts is Bonnie Tyler hitting number one in the second week of this story with “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which is notable for several reasons, one of which is that it is one of the gayest songs ever written, so, you know. Thematically apropos, that.

In real news, there’s not a lot. The compact disc goes on sale in England sometime in March, so let’s give that to this story. The final episode of M*A*S*H aired between Terminus and this. Bob Hawke becomes Prime Minister of Australia, and the IBM PC/XT is released.

So on television we have Enlightenment. Which is a fantastic little story with one of the most wonderfully captivating central images in Doctor Who. Barbara Clegg is, of course, not the first person to put tallships in space, but it’s such a reliably wonderful image that she really ought to get proper amounts of praise for it. On top of that you have a story that effortlessly moves from historical texture to science fantasy in a way that offers one of the most thorough blurring of genres in Doctor Who, has a bunch of clever ideas and good characters, and is all around one of the gems of the Davison era. None of which I want to talk about today, because it’s well covered by other sources and I don’t have a ton to add to the discussions of why this is good. I want to talk about Turlough.

The first thing we should establish is that Turlough is the first companion that it is overwhelmingly easier to read as homosexual than not. There have been homoerotic undertones to companions before, and there’s been the unfortunate consequence of being played by Richard Franklin, but there’s never before been a companion who is so consistently and from the top down conceptualized in gay tropes. It’s not, in the case of Turlough, a subtext. Turlough is gay. Through and through, Turlough is gay.

For the sake of completion, let’s enumerate the various ways in which this is coded. Turlough is overtly “cowardly,” deliberately played as an unmasculine character. He’s repeatedly shown to be delicate and fragile. He’s introduced in the context of an all-boys school, and seen leading another boy to temptation and ruin. And that’s before you get to moments like his first scene with Captain Wrack in episode three of Enlightenment. He’s thrown to the ground by strapping young men and told to “crawl.” He slowly makes his way across the floor to come to the leather boots of an unseen figure.…

Continue Reading

A frame from the recording of the commentary track this time.

It’s February 15th, 1983. Kajagoogoo are finally at the top of the charts, prancing about for both weeks of this story with one of the great pieces of 80s trash. Michael Jackson and Tears for Fears also chart, making this perhaps the single most 80s chart we’ve dealt with yet. Fitting, that.

News is relatively quiet. Some particularly bad fires in Victoria and South Australia, a multiple homicide in the robbery of the Wah Mee gambling club in Seattle, and the Environmental Protection Agency announces plans to completely and permanently evacuate Times Beach in Missouri due to an excessive amount of deadly poison in the soil.

While on television, Terminus. There was, in the drawer of VHS tapes that constituted the initial guiding principles of my Doctor Who fandom, a tape on which the words “Terminus” and Enlightenment” were written and crossed out. The tape now contained a track meet. This is one of several standing grievances between my parents and me, along with my not being allowed to trick or treat when I was a child and their failure to buy a life-size Dalek when they had the opportunity. Some day I will put them in homes and laugh at them.

The result of this is that when I finally got my hands on a copy of Terminus I was positively chomping at the bit to watch it. The fact that I remembered virtually nothing about it going into rewatching it for the blog, then, was a bit unnerving. As I’ve noted, there are few worse omens when talking about a Doctor Who story than to say that it was forgettable as a child.

And this is doubly true of the Nathan-Turner era. Every era of Doctor Who has its poor stories. The realities of BBC production mean that sometimes Doctor Who has no choice but to go to air with a story that self-evidently sucks. And there’s an inverted history of Doctor Who from the one we’ve usually followed, in which eras are described and understood by the best of what they strove for. We could instead ask what various eras do when it’s clear they have a turkey on their hands. And it is, in many ways, just as revealing as the optimistic history of the show. Verity Lambert, for instance, tries with a sort of manic desperation to do something interesting. The Lloyd/Bryant/Sherwin era just grimly grinds out the story figuring that the audience doesn’t actually care what’s on screen, leaving Patrick Troughton to shout “oh my word” a lot. The Pertwee era tries desperately to avoid ever making a turkey, slowly sacrificing quality at the altar of not fucking up until they make a horrific string of turkeys as a result. The Hinchcliffe era maintains reasonable production standards throughout, and its turkeys are defined almost entirely by whether or not Robert Holmes could be bothered to even try to fix the script. And the Williams era just dials up the charm in a frantic effort to salvage script after script that goes wrong.…

Continue Reading

Red velvet lines the black box…

It’s February 1st, 1983. Men at Work are at number one with “Down Under,” remaining there all story. Kajagoogoo, U2, and Echo and the Bunnymen also chart, which starts to look like one of the best charts we’ve seen until you look a the second week when it’s Joe Cocker, Wham, and Fleetwood Mac charting. Bauhaus, however, are in the lower reaches of the chart, and a post-breakup rerelease series means that The Jam occupy fifteen spots of the top hundred. So that’s nice.

In real news, unemployment in the UK reaches its record peak. The Australian parliament is dissolved in preparation for elections. Klaus Barbie is actually charged with war crimes. And that’s about it, I’m afraid.

On to television, then. Mawdryn Undead is another one of those stories that I was unaware was controversial and not widely liked until well after I’d seen it, and where I am thus unable to quite dislodge the way in which I was initially taken by it. I quite liked this story on the VHS tape, and was gutted that the back two parts of the Black Guardian arc had been taped over with a track and field meet by my parents, leaving me unable to watch them for a good two years or so after becoming a Doctor Who fan. Rewatching it, as with most classic Doctor Who, its flaws are evident, but as with much of the Davison era its virtues are evident as well, with the embryonic forms of what Doctor Who could and would become on plain display throughout the story.

Let me first say that I am mostly going to set Turlough aside until Enlightenment. I have a lot to say about the character, but I don’t think it’s going to be well-served by being split among three entries or by treating the early scenes of his character without reference to the later ones.

Second, let me deal very efficiently with the Brigadier. He’s obviously not the right character for this story, but in this story’s defense, he’s also the third choice character. The correct character is, obviously, Ian. They wanted to do the story for Ian. But William Russell wasn’t available and they had to do fallbacks, and ended up with the Brigadier. Nicholas Courtney is, of course, wonderful, but the fact of the matter is that this is to the story’s detriment and that very little about the story is meaningfully about the Brigadier. He is serving here as a stand-in for “generic past companion” and I’m mostly going to treat him that way, especially since there actually is a story in the future that deals with the Brigadier as the Brigadier and that, furthermore, is just as much a work of flawed genius as this one, so I’ll just hold all of that for Battlefield. (As for UNIT dating, I don’t really have anything to add to what I said on the subject in The Invasion.)

Those set aside, then, let’s start with Peter Grimwade, a strong contender for the most underrated writer in Doctor Who’s history.…

Continue Reading

“I’m sorry, Ms. Jovanka, but the passengers have been complaining that instead of directing them to the toilets you send them to a chamber occupied by a horrifying snake god. We’re going to have to let you go.”

It’s January 18, 1983. You can’t hurry Phil Collins off the number one spot, but given time Men at Work dispatch him, replacing him with “Down Under.” The lower portions of the charts are somewhat more optimistic, with Madness’s “Our House” and Kajagoogoo’s “Too Shy” both appearing. OK, optimistic might be selling that one a little too strong. But both are, at least, wholly valid guilty pleasures.

In real news, Klaus Barbie, who represents what is possibly the biggest disparity between quality of name and quality of human being in history, is arrested in Bolivia. And hey, I totally just found a Wikipedia page for years in history that’s specific to the UK, so that’s useful. Between the end of Arc of Infinity and this story the police manage to shoot a perfectly innocent man named Stephen Waldorf, seriously injuring him. The police officers involved are eventually cleared of attempted murder despite, having shot Waldorf five times out of the thirteen times they’d fired at him, holding a gun to his head and calling him a cocksucker before finding out that they were out of ammo and just pistol whipping him a bunch. Oops. In cheerier news, Breakfast Time debuts on the BBC, their first attempt at a morning program. The first broadcast passes without anybody being shot or called a cocksucker.

Snakedance, I can vouch first hand, is one of those bits of Doctor Who that properly gets into your head and unnerves you. I’ll admit to a longstanding distaste for mind control plots, simply because I tend to just not like stories in which people are out of character – I tend to have a similar lack of enthusiasm for body swap plots and the like. But as mind control plots go, Tegan’s possession in this story is particularly creepy and memorable. And though the rubber snakes in it are still not great the image of snake tattoos that crawl off of your flesh are downright fabulous.

It is, in that regard, one of what, as an adult, I recognize as perfect pieces of childhood Doctor Who – a story that is remembered vividly without being loved (and, of course, without being hated as well). Though it’s by no means universally the case that these are the stories that then grow into beloved classics in adulthood, they’re certainly prime candidates for it. And Snakedance is certainly an example of this. As a child, it gets in your head. As an adult, you see why it got in your head in ways that make it even more compelling.

Much of Snakedance involves taking conventions of Doctor Who and looking at them from slightly oblique angles. (A suitable hat tip here to Lawrence Miles, whose analysis of the story in About Time underpins much of this) The story essentially takes what The Daemons tried and almost but not quite succeeded at and inverts it.…

Continue Reading

So that’s what Stephen Thorne looks like.

It’s January 3rd, 1983. Renee and Renato are at number one with “Save Your Love,” which is… a song. Phil Collins removes it from number one in the second week of this story with “You Can’t Hurry Love.” Culture Club, Men at Work, Madness, Malcom McLaren and the World’s Famous Supreme Team, and David Bowie and Bing Crosby also chart.

In real news, ooh, we get to do a big wrap-up since last time, don’t we. OK. So there’s the Falklands, obviously. Canada fully patriates its constitution and achieves full political independence from the UK. Ronald Reagan addresses a joint session fo the British Parliament. There’s a World Cup. England does well in its first group stage, then manages a series of two 0-0 draws in a second group stage, knocking it out of the tournament. The Equal Rights Amendment fails, to the delight of Phyllis Schlafly, who is basically the American version of Mary Whitehouse. Like all American adaptations of British source texts, she is bigger, louder, and stupider. The queen’s bodyguard, Michael Trestrail, resigns over excessive use of male prostitutes. The first lethal injection is carried out in Texas, the first emoticons are posted, and Time Magazine’s Man of the Year is the computer.

Also, at this particular moment in time I am exactly one hundred and sixteen days old, and this is the first episode of Doctor Who to air in a world I exist in. So I guess this is all my fault. Really, really sorry.

I talked, last time we did a television story, about the way in which it is at times helpful to watch Doctor Who without remembering actively that there is such a thing as a bad story. And that’s true to an extent. But another aspect of childhood watching of Doctor Who – or of any television series, really – is that rubbish episodes pass you by forgettably. Time-Flight, for all its flaws, was oddly memorable. Arc of Infinity, on the other hand? Here are my childhood memories of Arc of Infinity: it had Time Lords, it brought Omega back, and it had Colin Baker being as horribly unpleasant as I assumed his eventual Doctor would be. I remembered virtually nothing else about it. This, as it happens, is a very bad sign. While not every story that fails to make an impression as a kid is, in fact, wretched it is striking just how often a failure to remember a story at all on my part coincides with it being a truly and epically awful one.

To be fair, of the things I did remember, I was not quite right about any of them. My initial dislike of Colin Baker was motivated purely by my parents badmouthing him on the grounds of his strangling Peri in The Twin Dilemma. In truth the character improved and was not as wretched as Commander Maxil, and it is by now clear that the problem with the character was not, in fact, Baker himself.…

Continue Reading