Planet Of The Dead: Ranking - 253

 Planet Of The Dead

(Easter Special, Dr 10, 11/4/2009, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writers: Gareth Roberts and Russell T Davies, director: James Strong)  

Rank: 253

''It looks like the 200 bus failed to turn up again, wonder what planet it's ended up on this time? I would get the time-travel bus but chances are three will turn up at once again and then detour me to blooming Skaro. Oh here it is - a single universe-explorer-master please...'

Nowadays Dr Who can be off the air for a year or more and nobody thinks twice about it, but the announcement that for 2009 we were only getting four specials spread throughout the year up to Christmas rather than the usual thirteen part series was met with horror by us fans who remembered the eighteen month hiatus in the mid-80s that led to a full cancellation by the late 80s. Would the time off air kill our favourite show just when it was at the peak of its popularity? Would the quality drop? Would people stop caring? Would the BBC find some excuse that ‘scifi isn’t popular’ by dint of the wibbly wobbly timey wimey logic that there was less of it around to watch? Thankfully not, but ‘Planet Of The Dead’ is clearly something of a wobble. It’s the one time in the original Russell T years when it feels as if everything is on auto-pilot: that the writing, the acting, the production and even the CGI are ticking over by mirroring something we’d had before and doing it just well enough to get away with it. Had this been a ‘normal’ episode it might have gotten away with it more but somehow ‘The Planet Of The Dead’s biggest crime is that it never feels quite, well, ‘special’ enough to be a special. Never mind (as was much ballyhooed online) a special 200^th story (depending how you break up both ‘The Key To Time’ and ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ never mind semi-official stories like ‘Shada’ ‘Dimensions In Time’ ‘Timecrash’ etc): that’s why the bus is the ‘number 200’ in case you were wondering, although they don’t really make as much out of this aspect as they could. Even for a ‘normal’ episode though it would have been disappointing. After all, the gap between episodes meant that anticipation for this story was sky-high and what do we get? A bus that breaks down and ends up stranded while the rowdy passengers get attacked by insects. That’s not a Dr Who story, that’s something that was happening to me all the time on my daily journeys into Skelmersdale at the time this story went out on air. Where was the magic?

Well, you see, that’s where this otherwise serviceable story breaks down. Because the BBC only worked out budgets in terms of series not pricier ‘specials’ the only way that money could be raised for the final four episodes of the Russell T era was through **BBC worldwide, effectively selling the specials to all the countries that were interested enough in Dr Who to show it overseas. In order to do that they had to market this story slightly differently by drawing on the big budget names: That’s why David Tennant’s name appears bigger than usual, why Russell T gets a co-credit for little more than idea suggestions and proof-reading on Gareth Roberts’ script, why so much of this story is based around the ‘special guest’ and IT girl of the moment Michelle Ryan (fresh off a stint on Eastenders) who even gets her name as big as Tennant’s in the cast list, special ‘comedian’ guest Lee Evans (then at the peak of his international fame) and why the big selling point is Dr Who’s first ever ‘proper’ location filming outside Europe (if a few establishing seconds of ‘Daleks In Manhattan’, shot during a ‘Dr Who Confidential’ stopover, don’t count). Oh and after a year of trying it out on other dramas (including Torchwood) this is the first time the BBC decide to go all-out with their new toy, High Definition, asking the production team for more spills, thrills and sort-of Mandrils than ever before (well, a talking wasp anyway). None of these big selling points quite come off, all for different reasons.

For starters David Tennant isn’t quite himself, just when a story makes him the de facto ‘star’ and gives him the majority of lines for the first time outside ‘Midnight’.  Even though ‘The Next Doctor’ was four months ago for ‘us’ for David it had been seven months for him, during which time he’d been busy playing Hamlet. By his own admission he found to his horror he’d ‘forgotten’ how to play The Doctor and spent his time off in rehearsals watching old videos and trying to get both the higher-pitched voice and run ‘right’. He pulls it off for the most part, but it also feels for the first time as if he’s ‘playing a part’ rather than making The Doctor an extension of himself had he been granted near-immortality and multiple powers, as his nine-year-old self had long dreamed of.  As for Russell, despite his name being the big selling point and the ‘wormhole’ the bus flies through being his idea, he arguably had less to do with this script than any other during his run (due to his commitments to the previous and following specials and his husband’s ailing health) and it shows. The characters, especially, don’t come to life in a few fully rounded phrases the way they usually do. They’re caricatures: the bossy posh totty, the slightly spooky mystic, the trainee garage mechanic who comes good and…who else was there? I’ve literally just stopped watching this episode this second and I can’t remember. The chase scenes all run twice as long (well, it is a special) and there are no small slow bits of emotion that are the ‘real’ selling point of the story, the way that there are in most of the scripts he handled (and are usually the parts that live long in the memory long after the noisy climax has faded).  

Usually Gareth Roberts is a reliable pair of hands, someone for whom at the time (before certain controversies) was genuinely in the running for the next showrunner’s seat – so much so it’s hard to think that this commission wasn’t some form of consolation prize (there was no guarantee, after all, that Steven Moffat would keep the same writers on). However Russell’s pitch to Gareth was basically ‘give us something like in your ‘New Adventures’ novels; it is indeed the perfect cross between ‘The Highest Science’ (one of the range’s best: an ordinary it of public transport is stranded on an exotic planet) and ‘Zamper’ (alien insects: the stingray, especially, is straight out of that book). All the good bits of this story come from the ‘Science’ book, tweaked, although in the earlier version the bus is a train, the companion is Bernice Summerfield (that Cartmel companion, whose basically an upgraded Christina) and the baddies are the Chenolians, a far more interesting group of mutant and presumably teenage alien tortoises with X-ray vision who were sadly too expensive to reproduce on screen  (though they were there for a first draft). After all, it’s very Dr Who to take something ordinary and place it somewhere extraordinary and the best lines in the script by far are about how something extraordinary is going on just out of reach of the mundanity of life (such as The Doctor trying to get the stranded passengers to hold on to the ordinary little things they were planning to do when they got home). There were a few abandoned drafts along the way that sound interesting too (if expensive): a ‘Frontier In Space’ style cosmic war, time-freezing centaurs in a time hotel (abandoned because of similarities to ‘Waters Of Mars’), when the slot got moved to Easter another hotel variant with an ‘Alien’ style plot about extra-terrestrials hatching ‘eggs’ inside customers’ tummies, a story that revolved around a ‘dogfight in space’ (‘borrowed’ for part of ‘The End Of Time’), even a long awaited Star Trek crossover (before the production team found out that the last series of ‘Enterprise’ had been cancelled and there was no longer a Star Trek production team and/or sets to liaise with). In the end it was decided to drop the expense and stick with the bus, Russell asking for a storyline closer to the books that had made him hire Gareth in the first place. 

The thing is though, a novel is a very different beast to a TV story. Roberts is a really good writer at getting inside a character’s inner mind, exploring their thoughts and workings and then having all those contradictory motivations rub up against each other. That’s much harder to pull off in terms of pure dialogue (and especially when the Tritovores – loosely based on Roberts’ far more multi-dimensional race the ‘Chenolians’ – are another in the small handful of races that don’t speak; The Doctor, weirdly, can translate even when separated from the Tardis translation circuits, which becomes a paper thin plot point even if it does result in lots of funny David Tennant vocal clicks). So the characters that live large in the (generally excellent) books just sit there on TV. Had he been more present Russell would no doubt have had the talent to make them work anyway, but with mounting deadlines and difficulties it’s no wonder that the general feeling seemed to be ‘well it worked in the book, so I’m sure it will be fine’, without understanding that to get the most of these characters and this story you need to have read both source materials to get any sense of danger or deeper layers than just a ‘runaround, chased by a wasp’.

The one character we do get to know is one that – largely  we wish we hadn’t. It’s maybe not a coincidence that Dr Who got cancelled the first time round just when 1980s script editor Andrew Cartmel had a similar idea about a posh cat-burglar in the unmade season twenty-seven (when Raine would have been a big fat disappointment after the streetwiseness and likability of Ace judging by the Big Finish ‘lost stories’, full new scripts based on ideas being banded about the production office at the time of cancellation). I don’t know why two writers thought it was a good idea: in their heads Roberts and Russell were thinking ‘Romana II’, someone haughty but capable who knew as much as The Doctor but that character worked because we had time to see her grow, to unlearn all the reasons she thought she was superior and to see her do the right thing after learning from The Doctor (not that Romana would ever admit it!) Lady Christina De Souza only gets an hour and our first impressions are not good: far from thinking ‘you go girl’ when she starts the episode nicking a priceless heirloom from a Museum you think ‘blimey, that’s going to put the admission fee up to account for all the extra security’ and far from being impressed you’re more shocked at how thick all the guards have to be not to have at least one of them with an eye trained on the ceiling (so the ‘Mission Impossible’ film franchise ends whatever year this episode is set then, otherwise there’s no way anyone would fall for that). A sort of cross between the two versions of ‘The Avengers’ (ITV and Marvel Comics) she is reportedly modelled by Russell on ‘Black Canary’, from the Flash comics (which figures as to why she’s a bit…one dimensional) but is also clearly Emma Peel (a character created entirely as ‘em appeal’ i.e. man appeal, and nothing more – till Diana Rigg got hold of her). Fun as the museum opening is, it basically means Christina is robbing the local district (presumably somewhere in London) of their cultural heritage (she’s the British Museum with a getaway bus). They never quite know what to do ith her: at times she’s a battle-hardened unphased criminal who’s seen everything; at others she’s spooked by having dead things in her hair. Are we meant to admire her, hate her or feel sorry for her? The writers don’t know so we don’t either. What makes things worse is that Christina hands over her hapless assistant Dmitry over to police to save herself: the ultimate Dr Who no-no. Okay you think, she’s another Turlough: The Doctor is meant to be too blinded to her vices by her virtues and then we discover some retrospective thing that will make us like her anyway. Or possibly another Adam: a companion who we’re shown is deeply unsuitable to a life of morality with The Doctor, exploring the universe for all the wrong reasons. Except we get mixed messages instead, as if the writers liked her too much to make her ‘all bad’. We’re clearly meant to admire Christina’s capability and the way she takes charge (even more than The Doctor), not to mention her sly humour, while her courage is never in doubt. At the same time, though, she’s arrogant and rude and admits at the end that even though her family have fallen on hard times and needed the money, mostly she stole things ‘for kicks’. She just swings too far into the ‘bad’ column: snooty is okay, lawbreaking is okay, but a lawbreaker who’s smug about what she does? No thankyou. No wonder The Doctor doesn’t quite know what to do with her, standing back both when the police try to capture her back in the present day and when she makes her escape, letting fate take its course. That’s one hell of a risk with a one-story companion who gets the majority of the lines The Doctor doesn’t get. Far better, surely, would have been to make her a sympathetic ‘Robin Hood’ type, stealing from some billionaire who  has more trinkets than sense and is about to demolish the local orphanage and turn it into a bus park or something. Some actresses could still have got something out of the character, made her larger than life and a bit cheeky chappy, but with all the love in the world Michelle Ryan was hired to be a ‘big name’ not because she was right for the part and is clearly there because she can talk posh and look glamorous without falling over. It’s all a bit of a lost opportunity, to say the least. Goodness knows what she'd have done if she'd become a full companion - nicked something off the Bowie base and called The Master a right geezer, or something like that probably. Interestingly for the first draft Christina couldn’t have been more different: she was a clutsy but sweet larger than life shop assistant named Rebecca who kept everyone hopeful (and turned down a trip in the Tardis to make sure everyone got home safely); not unlike Nicola Coughlan’s character in ‘Joy To The World’ in fact, a Russell script from 15 years later.  Frankly, that would have worked better.     

As for ‘comedian’ (the term is used loosely) Lee Evans, he’s worse. A trial go at ‘Osgood’ (who was never quite so relentlessly irritating) with elements of ‘Whizzkid’ (from ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ but even more relentlessly nerdish) his ‘Malcolm’ is one of those very few Dr Who characters you want to punch whenever he is on screen. Once again he falls between two stools: more than The Doctor you have to believe this hapless scientist is fully capable of bringing the bus back home, but how we can take seriously someone who seems to have problems changing a plug? Lee plays him as a caricature of a Dr Who fan eager to meet his hero (and he turned up to filming with a generic fandom caricature pair of false sticky-out teeth – a panicked production team phoned Russell up at home; he is said to have laughed for five full minutes then said ‘no!’ in no uncertain terms). His habit of labelling everything to his own ‘system’ is not the sort of thing UNIT would have tolerated (in case you’re wondering the ‘Bernard’ reference is yet another homage to ‘Quatermass’). Even the 3^rd Doctor (the regeneration most likely to agree with fawning and praise) would have found it OTT while you wonder how bad the UNIT staffing levels must be that someone this utterly clueless got such a big position. Even the late Pertwee ‘UNIT’ were never quite as relentlessly ‘Dad’s Army’ amateurish as this. We’re at the unfortunate point in time where the idea of having an ‘international’ (albeit Welsh) name and a ‘comedy’ moment to break up the action are being deliberately introduced to a story in order to help ‘sell things to the masses’. At it’s best, like 90-odd per cent of this book, Dr Who stories feel organic and even the worst ones seem to grow up quite naturally out of the plot elements. But not this one: it feels forced.

The biggest mistake, though, is the one thing everyone was banking on to make the audience go ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’, one clearly here to show off the new High Def format: the trip to the deserts of Dubai. The plan was to have an ‘endless horizon’ that would show off the HD to its greatest extent. It was a bad idea for all sorts of reasons: the one everyone mentions is because it still looks (despite the expense) as if they simply filmed it down the road in the usual quarry, with nothing in the background but sand anyway. Then there’s the cost involved (for the transport money of sending so many actors overseas they could have paid for another medium budget episode). Not to mention the risk, something that came unstuck when the bus that had been exported from London at vast expense (not even a ‘current’ bus but a red routemaster officially ‘retired’ in 2005, used because the production team wanted one that as recognisably red)  was damaged in transport at the Dubai dockyards when an 18 foot crane accidentally rammed into the side of the palette where it was being stored unprotected. Whoops! That did at least make for arguably the best episode of ‘Confidential’ that went out in tandem with the episode though as the production office have kittens and discuss the costings of flying out another bus and how they can possibly tell their showrunner, by then off home (and caring for his hubby). Russell’s chuckle amidst all the chaos and his single line rewrite that the ‘cosmic storm’ has damaged the bus shows that not every production mountain is as big as it seems.

There were problems even getting to the ‘set’ though: a taxi, carrying David Tennant and Michelle Ryan, was stopped by police for speeding (leading to the two actors turning up bewildered and late) while another containing production members got lost in the sand and was heading the wrong way, to Oman, before eventually realising their mistake and turning up late. Once everyone had finally turned up a bigger problem was the wind: everyone’s hair whipped round their faces continuously (apart from David Tennant’s, who’s hair gel was strong enough to keep it in place, but did attract lots of sand grains – just what you don’t want in your first episode going out in high definition!) and the constant storms drowned out most of the dialogue, which had to be added in post-production. Even back in Britain the scenes of the wormhole were shot in the midst of the biggest snowstorm the country had seen in years and the foggy breath mist was so obvious on camera that Russell had to include a line about ‘adverse weather conditions’ (yep, just like old times and ‘The Claws Of Axos’!) Even in post-production things didn’t go smoothly: originally the bus had an ‘Easter Egg’ for ‘Neon Naismith 3G’ (Naismith being the de facto baddy of ‘The End Of Time’ before The Master comes along), only in between filming and screening there really was a Vodafone service titled ‘Neon 3G’ that would have got the BBC into trouble for advertising, so all the banners around the bus had to be removed. This was, it’s fair to say, a troubled production, but it’s one of those where the troubles didn’t bring people together to make a better production (a la ‘Shada’ or ‘’The Daleks’) but rather drove people mad. There are tales of poor director James Strong on his first day, with only a minute of useable footage in the can, already so behind schedule he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Then of course there’s the bigger question of whether a forward-looking equality-loving series like Dr Who should ever be anywhere near the United Arab Emirates with their poor human rights reputation and giving them taxpayers’ money. The decision to go to Dubai at all is, it’s safe to say, not one of Who’s better ideas.

That wouldn’t matter if the characters were up to standard, but they’re not. You only need to contrast this episode with ‘Midnight’ (less than a year old at this point) to see what’s gone wrong. I can guarantee that I have sat on a bus next to each of those characters: the dominant dad pretending to be smart, the nervy son pretending to be thick rather than get in a fight, the dotty arrogant professor, the assistant who knows more than he ever will. Each one of those characters had inbuilt relationships (mostly power struggles) that seemed to have existed long before the cameras started running. None of the people on this bus seem quite ‘real’ and I’m not sure if I’ve ever sat next to any of them. What’s more they don’t behave the way people normally would en masse in a crisis: there should be screaming, confusion, a bit of paranoia (just like ‘Midnight’). Instead everyone sits around wondering what to do and agreeing to keep calm to keep the ‘sweat levels’ on the bus down (surely the last thing anyone wants to worry about when stranded on an alien planet). In ‘Midnight’ even The Doctor had trouble fighting against the sheer panic of a group of people who feel they’ve been cut off from home and safety forever; here they’re all polite enough to accept even Lady Christina calming them down without a murmur.   

Things don’t get any better when we go outside. The Tritovores don’t really get to do much and are one of the most ‘wasted’ of Dr Who monsters, there to look ‘pretty’ rather than move the plot forward (had this been the ‘classic’ series they’d be there to sell the first cliffhanger then run out of uses, like The Krotons or Monoids before them). Clearly there to ‘sell’ the HD, they do look impressive but even there they just look like the Vespiforms from ‘The Unicorn and The Wasp’ with leggy bits from ‘The Hath’ from ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’, only lacking that first race’s sting and, umm, waspiness. They’re actually nice despite their appearance – something that’s always welcome in a Dr Who story – but we don’t get to know them well enough for this ‘twist’ to really matter. Instead it’s the oncoming swarm that’s the real jeopardy in this episode and these flying parasites have even less screentime or motivation: they’ve  opened up a wormhole, just because (shouldn’t there be lots of cases like this on Earth then? Shouldn’t there be lots of busses and cars and planes and things on this desert planet? Is that what happened with the Bermuda triangle? After all, even by the convention of Dr Who storytelling coincidences needed to drive a plot on it’s one hell of a coincidence the first time they’ve done this a timelord just happens to be onboard the 200 route bus). They could at least have made them killer Spring chickens or something: though set over Easter in…some unspecified year there’s absolutely nothing here to make this an ‘Easter Special’. Not even an alien egg.

It’s more than that though: other episodes have dropped the ball in far more spectacular ways than this episode. The real problem with ‘Planet Of The Dead’ is that nothing really comes together, not one part. There’s a wormhole that shouldn’t be there – not the most original idea the series has ever had and the ‘rhondium particles’ part is never fully explained. There’s a catburglar who’s sort of bad but sort of good – not the greatest idea ever. There’s a ‘visionary’ who can see things going wrong – who isn’t useful to the plot in anyway whatsoever (the one time she’s ‘useful’ is when warning Dr 10 of what’s coming in the series finale).  It’s nice to see UNIT again, but wouldn’t Torchwood be of slightly more help than a hapless scientific advisor? The aliens don’t really do anything. The solution when it comes, is depressingly ordinary: UNIT fire a rocket at it (just imagine the arguments the 3^rd Doctor would be having with the Brigadier for pulling a stunt like that!) The real big problem with all of this though: there’s absolutely no sense of danger here at all. You always have faith the Doctor will get everyone home, because he always does, while a few insects and a bus are hardly the sort of thing to keep the Doctor up at night. There’s no such thing as an ‘ordinary’ episode of Dr Who, of course, but this is a special: the stakes are meant to be higher, not smaller.  The overall feel is an episode where everyone’s minds were on other things (it was about now the handover to Matt Smith and Steven Moffat was confirmed) and this special just got lost in the shuffle. Fans have long wondered what a series 5 under Russell might have looked like in some timey wimey spacey wacey parallel universe, but for every indication that Davies was hitting new strides in confidence and taking more risks (‘Waters Of Mars’) there’ll be another story like this one that suggests we would have had a year of playing it safe (a bit like series two then, but with less excuse for a ‘victory lap’).

Whisper it quietly, but don't you think it looks a bit tired? Still packed full with strong ideas and great lines, but going through the motions a bit? We'd had worse episodes since the Who revival certainly, but they tended to fall apart because they were trying something bold, new different - and wrong. 'Planet' feels like lots of other episodes cobbled together, a series playing it safe. Why, at the peak of such success? Was it the need not to scare the sponsors of the new budget? The distraction for actor and showrunner?  Writer paralysis of trying to come up with a new idea that hadn’t been tried before? The worry about everyone looking at a ‘special’ without being able to rely on Christmas Day indulgence? It’ as if, a bit like The Doctor, Christina  and UNIT in this story, everyone is looking to someone else to save it: Russell is distracted, Gareth is in untried waters (on TV at least), the director is facing a sandstorm of his own and even David Tennant has lost his usual bounce and is clearly missing Catherine Tate as much as his character misses Donna. The writing is as close to numbers as two of the series' most inventive and talented writers can get, all the worst parts from Gareth’s books recycled rather than the best. Even the music and direction fall a bit flat, like a memory of better episodes rather than being one.

All this is a shame because the bits of this special that work really stand out. The starting point for all of this was the big red London bus on an alien planet. Russell said that, even long after the audience have forgotten everything else about the story, he wanted the children of the day to remember that image and they have, more or less. It is, after all, such an incredibly strong ‘Dr Whoy’ image: forget your bus routes, forget your timetable, forget your set Humans rules and  things going on the same way day after day: there’s another whole universe going on out there blinking just out of reach, if only you knew and looked up from your mundane world. In retrospect that accident was one of the best things that could have happened to this episode and maybe should have been there in the first place: of course the bus would have been wrecked in transit. This isn’t a safe journey down to the shops, this is a trip through space and space is big and dangerous and scary and full of things beyond your wildest dreams (I must admit my first thought on seeing it was ‘wow, how’s that for realism, they actually wrecked a bus!’ before reading ‘Confidential’  revealed all the things that had gone wrong). This episode isn’t, sadly, for the most part, but for a moment there you feel as if anything is possible again and for that moment at least the journey is worth it. Roberts, too, might not have included as many cracking one-liners into this episode as his others (and he feels oddly lost in the futuristic setting, that was his bread-and-butter in the novel range, even more than the comedy historicals) but there are some really good lines sprinkled throughout. Especially between The 10^th Doctor and Christina smart-alecking each other in a 4^th Doctor-Romana way, two people long used to getting in the ‘last word’ (though the best one, sadly,  got cut, Christina looking up at the stars and talking about all the impossible worlds she imagined were out there somewhere, thus giving more depth to her story and revealing why she isn’t as overawed as all the others; then the Doctor comments he used to look up[ at the stars imagining ‘that part might be Wolverhampton!’)  The pair change places too in a  clever way: Christina is the cynical one who despairs at first while The Doctor is used to being in tough situations and talks her round (‘I live in hope’ says The Doctor rushing off to fix things. As for the rest there’s nothing a re-write from a less distracted script editor couldn’t have fixed: make Christina a bit softer, make Malcolm a bit sharper, the threat a bit stronger and make the passengers into ‘real’ people and this could yet have been one of the stronger Whos, one where everyone goes on a ‘journey’ of discovering new reserves of courage and hope (just not the one they were expecting to take when they woke up that morning). Like many an Easter present, though, it all ends up feeling a bit hollow, its treats buried away under too many layers of sugar. We give it maybe half a Malcolm for effort (which isn’t very much of a Bernard at all).

POSITIVES + The opening scene makes you think you’re in for a very different kind of story. It’s a measure of how much goodwill there was for Dr Who in Wales that the national Museum in Cardiff allowed so much opening filming there, even when the scene made their security men look like the biggest bunch of losers since Adric. The ‘British’ location filming is strong all round, actually: the tunnel with the wormhole is really the Queen’s Gate Tunnel on the A4232 in Butetown and the Tritovore spaceship is really the Alpha steelworks in Newport. Rather than the expense of filming in London the brief scene in London’s Oxford Street is really St Mary’s in Cardiff, redressed. Oh and you remember DI MacMillan, the police officer who pops up at the beginning and end of the episode? He has no less than three links to Who: one of David Tennant’s best friends after the pair appeared as brothers in the play ‘Vassa – Scenes From Family Life’ in 1999 together, he’s the son of Polly James (who guest-starred in ‘The Awakening’) and also happens to be close  to the Pertwee family and Jon was his godfather!

NEGATIVES -  Michelle Ryan was a big name at the time after some high profile roles in Eastenders, The Bionic Woman and the ever under-rated Merlin (she plays a witch in at least one of these series, possibly all three). After being in everything at once her career crashed and burned after being in Who, much like the London bus, when she used the international appeal of the series to leave Britain to make a name for herself in Hollywood and burnt most of her bridges. It's not that she's bad (her dialogue and character are a bigger problem than her acting) but she plays Christina (who could have been such a multifaceted character) with very broad strokes and practically winks at the camera when she's up to something, which is out of place when everyone else is aiming for the feel of a rugged kitchen sink drama. At least she did most of the stunts herself though, the one time she seems perfectly at home amazingly: you don’t get to do that on ‘Eastenders’!

BEST QUOTE: Lady Christina: ‘You look Human’ Doctor: ‘You look timelord’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Russell T asked Gareth Roberts to base this story on his ‘New Adventures’ story ‘The Highest Science’ (1993), his most popular book amongst Whovians during the ‘wilderness’ years. It’s certainly his most ‘Dr Whoy’, with the 7^th Doctor and Benny exploring time portals and at the mercy of a race. The Chelonians, who feel like the big insect alien overlords every Who production team has tried over the years at least once (though in the books they can actually do things the TV versions could only dream of!) The book was one of Russell’s favourites and you can see why: it’s colourful, imaginative and in places very silly indeed, though unlike a good half of the ‘New Adventures’ it also feels rooted in the ‘real’ world, with characters you meet in everyday life rather than weird aliens with unpronounceable names and complicated back-stories. This element naturally enough got transposed to ‘Planet Of The Dead’ in the form of everyday people trapped in a bus on an alien planet, which is exactly what happens in the novel even if those people are actually very different. For a draft or two The Chelonians were the baddies too before it was decided to simplify them (not least because anyone wearing a physical costume in the Dubai heat would surely have died of dehydration!) and turn them into the far weedier Tritovores, who were much easier to write in using CGI and didn’t have long lines of dialogue for extras to react to. Alas that’s a shame: they could have made them work, as a brief cameo as one of the many aliens present at the cliffhanger at the end of ‘The Pandorica Opens’ shows. Though I can see why they had to dumb the story down it’s the complexity of the Chelonian scheme and their playfulness as monsters that makes the book ‘work’ as well as it does. While it isn’t Roberts’ masterpiece in my opinion, the way so many fans reckon (that’s Hartnell missing adventure ‘The Plotters’) it is a really good book and in many ways the most enjoyable ‘New Adventures’ page by page; other books have better ideas, better chapters and better lines of dialogue but this is a page-turner to get lost in, every it, Dr Who at its most ‘colourful’ as Russell enthused to the media around this story. 

Considering its relative unpopularity there are a surprising amount of sequels to ‘Planet Of The Dead’, all of them starring Michelle Ryan as Lady Christina De Souza. How come you might ask given that they parted company at the end of that story? Well, she’s a traveller and they do seem to have an uncanny knack of bumping into each other in the Doctor’s ‘gap year’ avoiding his fate with the Ood and ‘The End Of Time’, this one set after the shock of ‘Waters Of Mars’ where Christina finds a much sourer, bitter timelord even less given to second chances. ‘Last Chance’ (2018) was part of the Big Finish box set ‘The Tenth Doctor Chronicles Volume Four’, a set that sadly doesn’t feature David Tennant – hard as Jacob Dudman tries he never quite get Dr 10’s voice quite right. Set on the African plains it features the Doctor trying to do good with his last few years, using his feelings as the last of his kind to inspire him to save animals from across the universe from extinction. There’s a fun opening scene of him riding on the back of a rhino and a fun detour in Iceland but really this is quite a dark and brooding story, very different in feel to the whimsy of ‘Planet’, with a baddy alien bounty hunter known as The Deagle chasing after them. Lady Christina is just as irritating though and the plot never really progresses beyond saving animals. A box set too far maybe?

The return was popular enough for Big Finish to give Lady Christina her own series, which has run for two series to date between 2018 and 2020, with Michelle Ryan having adventures of her own without any pesky timelords trying to push her down the straight and narrow. She does, however, have UNIT chasing her and her red London bus instead and for the first time since ‘Mission To The Unknown’ you’re clearly meant to root for the baddy rather than the rather bland soldiers on her path. Along the way lady Christina solves a cat-burglary in the French Riviera, steals a painting, a heist at Edinburgh Castle during a UNIT military tattoo (!), clashing with the Slitheen over a robbery, searching for a Great Aunt in the Australian outback and, erm, betting on the horses. The best story is the second  (in volume one), ‘Skin Deep’ in which Christina befriends Donna’s mum Sylvia when she suddenly comes into money but gets snubbed by all the posh people in town!

Lady Christina also turns up in the Big Finish anthology ‘Protector Of Time’(2022), with the loose theme of people whose lives have been ‘changed’ by the Doctor (isn’t that everybody?) where she bumps into The Doctor’s Daughter Jenny at an exclusive party she’s about to rob. They don’t get on! There’s a confusion about a diamond, which ends up being Jenny’s new spaceship  in a story that’s one part drama and one part farce.  

Lady Christina turns up in the Big Finish anthology “Two’s Company” (2023), part of the company’s 60^th anniversary celebrations that sees the 6^th Doctor injured during the time war and brought to a hospital planet suffering from the effects of a ‘degeneration weapon’ that’s sent him a bit doolally with memories of other incarnations. He’s visited by a lot of old faces from the past, including the unlikely match-up of Lady Christina and Jackie Tyler – and promptly has a relapse. Can’t say I blame him.  

‘Smiley’s Mirror Exhibit’ by Janelle McCurdy is a short story from the anthology ‘Prequels’ book ‘The Adventures Before’ (2024). The fun of ‘The next Doctor’ has worn off now and The Doctor is feeling lonely, wondering what his friends from ‘Journey’s End’ are up to now. he decides to cheer himself up by stopping off at the fair and the exhibition in the title takes his fancy. It’s not what he expected: it’s a big smiling face, like the sort 1990s ravers used to wear on badges, in a hall of mirrors that distort it’s reflection and make it’s innocent gaze seem evil. The next door exhibit, named ‘Strange’ is closed for repairs and surrounded by security guards. The Doctor bumps into a thirteen-year-old girl called Nova looking for her friend who has mysteriously disappeared in scenes very like ‘The Nightmare Fair’ (only then it was a sister looking for her brother at Blackpool fairground) Her comment when he reveals he’s a timelord alien: ‘You do talk too much for a normal person!’ It turns out that the smiley face is a real entity than can trap people and absorb their souls (the way the Abzorbaloff does bodies) but changes character with each new person it traps. The Doctor defeats it by…taking it’s photo and then holding it up to the mirrors as it destroys itself trying to absorb what it already has. A rather weird and rather basic story. Oh and if you’re wondering why it’s a prequel to ‘Planet Of the Dead’ there’s a cameo from lady Christina De Souza at the end as she tries to steal the trophy on display in the fairground, the Cup of Athelstan.    

Previous ‘The Next Doctor’ next ‘The Waters Of Mars’

The Two Doctors: Ranking - 254

  The Two Doctors

(Season 22, Dr 6 with Peri and Dr 2 with Jamie, 16/2/1985-2/3/1985,  producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Robert Holmes, director: Peter Moffat)  

Rank: 254

'Food glorious food, tender Terranians and custard!

Tuck in Vespiform guest, chewing on Colonel Mustard

No, watch out, the Abzorbaloff

All my food he’s going to scoff

I just can never buy enough

He’ll spoil the mood of all of this food, glorious food!

Wait, why is that baked potato on my plate shooting at me and going ‘Sontar-Ha’ over and over again?! And why does my salad look like a Vervoid?!?'

Take one (1) conversation between producer and former star, whereby Patrick Troughton mentioned to John Nathan-Turner at a convention ‘I had such fun making ‘The Five Doctors’ and Frazer Hines tells me he’ll be on leave from ‘Emmerdale’ soon. What fun it would be if we were to do another Who together – and I would love to work with Colin Baker who’s an old friend of mine’. Take one (1) conversation between the current script editor and a previous script editor, as ‘The Caves Of Androzani’ goes down so well Eric Saward brings back his favourite Who author Bob Holmes to write another one. Add in a monster that looks just like a baked potato. Mix together and bake in the Spain sunshine. But unfortunately what should be a classic recipe, an exercise in nostalgia, turns out both under-baked and over-cooked.

You see here’s the problem: both these conversations are legitimate reasons for making this story. There’s room in Dr Who’s elastic format for a self-indulgent anniversary story where the 2^nd Doctor and his faithful companion Jamie get to strut their stuff one more time. There’s room for another dark sombre twisted Bob Holmes take on the world (given that he wrote ‘Androzani’ partly because he thought the show had become too light and frothy lately  - and audience reaction and ratings seemed to agree with him). Only the script editor thought returning to the past with returning actors was a bad move and the producer thought the same about writers (or indeed anyone returning from the past who might understand the show better than he did). On paper you can see why they tried to hash this stalemate out by putting both in the same story, especially given that Bob Holmes had started his career writing for the 2^nd Doctor. The trouble is, though, people change. Troughton’s Doctor is no longer the moral crusader of Holmes’ first script ‘The Krotons’ hiding his piercing intelligence and ruthlessness behind a silly persona that makes all the monsters write him off: he’s the clown brought out for anniversary stories to say all the funny lines. Holmes is no longer writing stories that are as deep and dark as you want to make them (‘The Krotons’ features adult concepts of extermination, rebellion and annihilation but in a tale using stink bombs and treating the sequestered adults like children). The two don’t mix. At all.  So what we have is a story where audience’s delight at seeing our old friends sparring against each other one last time is tinted by the fact that Jamie is sent on a harrowing journey of isolation and grief and The 2^nd Doctor is incapacitated and turned into the monster halfway through. Yet at the same time this gruesome dark take on how all living beings are animals and all of us are just meat to someone further up the food chain is hampered by the pure saccharine of the friendship between our old friends. It’s like seeing characters from children’s television turn up in a video nasty, or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre happening in Trumpton. It’s just wrong.

Individually though both aspects work, at least when they’re allowed to. Troughton and Hines look a bit older (well okay a lot older in Jamie’s case) but they slip right back into their old roles with no problems at all, bouncing off each other like the old giggly friends they are and with enough nods to old eras to make you feel nostalgic (they even start the first scene in black and white, with the 2^nd Doctor and Jamie at the controls of the old Davison Tardis interior, before everything fades to colour - a lovely addition from the vision mixer, while Frazer adds in the line ‘look at the size of that thing Doctor!’ as an injoke – something he was scripted to say in ‘The Evil Of The Daleks’ and liked so much he ad libbed it in ‘The Seeds Of Death’. There’s a nice bit of egotistical banter from Troughton that’s just like Colin Baker’s Doctor too, as he tells us he’s going off to a conference of some of the greatest minds in the universe (just like ‘The Mark of The Rani’ two stories ago, but never mind) and that he’s going in the ‘back way’ because they’ll only pester him for autographs. Unfortunately that’s more or less we’ll see of these two together as The 2^nd Doctor is kidnapped, held hostage for his time-travelling DNA (which is a colossal mis-reading of how timelords work uncharacteristic for Holmes and oddly uncorrected by Saward) and then midway through the story when it’s sagging the plan changes and he gets turned into an Androgum, growing big hairy red eyebrows and talking about dinner. And if that sounds like just the sort of comedy thing the 2^nd Doctor would be doing, well no: Androgums are vicious carnivores who delight in inflicting pain and though they’re the gourmands of the universe (their name is literally an anagram of that word) they’re happiest when they’re cutting up meat with a cleaver. The 2^nd Doctor wasn’t above a bit of violence, committing genocide on races in self defence, but there was never any blood, rarely any gore and the violence was all parked at the end. It’s everywhere in this story and doesn’t suit his Doctor one little bit. It’s a waste of Troughton’s brilliant comic timing and our first full length chance to see the old team back together in fifteen years.

Similarly there’s a strong story to be had here about ‘meat is murder’ and how everyone is on the food chain somewhere that’s Holmes at his most brutal and dark. He’s recently become a vegetarian himself, horrified at the treatment of animals bred for food (and Nicola Bryant was one already). So much for this being a namby-pamby story about being nice to cuddly animals though: never has a Dr Who story had this much blood and gore (except the ones about Vampires anyway and even then in many ways). The ‘joke’ is that the Androgums see everything below them in the pecking order as food, including Humans (or ‘Tellurians’ as Holmes often has aliens call Earthlings) but would never dream of eating their superiors, the scientist Dastari or a fleet of Sontarons. Yet even we baulk at eating our close relatives like monkeys and chimpanzees – Androgums are clearly related to Humans, being identical in every way except the red eyebrows and red faces (I like to think ‘The Two Doctors’ invented the concept of ‘gammons’ going red faced with anger as they do that too). They’re an interesting creation, Holmes figuring that carnivores are always shown in scifi as being savage and primal yet Humans are carnivores and they think of themselves as ‘refined’ – so the Androgums really are ‘us’, despite the eyebrows. It’s all survival of the fittest: Humans can’t complain at being eaten by a superior species when they’ve been doing that themselves on Earth for so long. Holmes makes us outraged that anyone should try to eat Jamie or Peri, but then throws in some dark jokes that we do exactly the same: there’s Oscar with his collection of moths (he doesn’t even eat them, just sprays them with cyanide then collects them) and Shockeye trying to ‘tenderise’ the meat with instruments of torture before telling everyone that ‘it’s a well known fact that inferior life-forms don’t feel any pain’ (something a lot of meat-eaters argue). Holmes tries to portray the wonderfully named Shockeye O’ The Quancing Grig as if he’s one of those mass murderers in horror films, with director Peter Moffatt giving us lots of close-ups of John Startton grinning evilly or looking sinister (he’s one step away from yelling ‘Heeeeeer’es Shockeye!’) and yet in other ways the script goes, fair enough. Androgums aren’t trying to take over the universe: they’re just hungry. There’s even one brilliant scene where Chessene –the haughty,snooty Androgum with airs and graces who has been ‘augmented’ to make her more ‘posh’ – breaks down in part three and becomes a savage, licking up The Doctor’s blood, because that’s who she is deep down. It’s a motivation many a Human has had in their treatment of ‘lesser’ species. ‘Not so fun having the tables turned is it?’ asks Holmes. No wonder the 6^th Doctor and Peri both take a vow of vegetarianism ever since (broken only once on screen, when the 9^th Doctor orders a steak in ‘Boom Town’ – something Russell T Davies agonised over before figuring he had enough rightwing trolls attacking the series without making the Doctor a ‘wokey vegetarian’ on top. Then again since then the 12^th Doctor goes on all sorts of rants about meat-eaters so perhaps that was a momentary lapse?)

The 6^th Doctor and Peri team are the ‘right’ sort of Tardis team to be in this story. Sixie is the regeneration most likely to give long moral speeches then brutal in his attack anyway and he gets to do both here in a way none of his predecessors could have gotten away with. The speeches are strong too, Holmes using all of his intelligence and wit to have The Doctor comment on the absurdity of any advanced society still taking it out on others when they no longer need to. Unfortunately the brutality is on shakier grounds. The Sontarons are blown up in high gory detail (alas they dropped an intended shot of a sawn off leg hurtling towards the camera for going too far!) The Doctor himself gasses Shockeye with cyanide, then stands around making quips about ‘just desserts’ (the 2^nd Doctor would never ever have done that).  Oscar is the sort of character who would usually be ‘safe’ in stories like this, the comic relief who really wants to be an actor while looking after his moths part-time, but he’s running a restaurant to make ends meet when Shockeye and an altered 2^nd Doctor take issue with the size of the bill and he’s stabbed, drying a horrible and bloody (and gratuitous) death. Other characters die in agony and pools of blood. There’s one gruesome scene where Shockeye tears the head off a rat (a taxidermy prop filled with damsons and jam you’ll be pleased to know). Even the 6^th Doctor gets stabbed with a nasty looking wound in the thigh that drips blood (red if you’re wondering, though Tom Baker always tried to make it blue in his stories, usually vetoed by whichever director he was with). The part that will stay with you and haunt you though: a feral Jamie who thinks ‘his’ Doctor is dead turned feral and crawling about Dastari’s research station, hiding out in ventilation shafts and howling like a primal beast out of hunger, fear and grief. So much for the light happy-go-lucky reunion we expected: arguably all of these scenes go too far. Way too far. Remember Dr Who is still largely seen as a children’s series, is on at the child-friendly time of 5.20pm and will be on ‘Jim’ll Fix It’ in just a few weeks. Remember too that Dr Who has already been in such trouble for violence and with murmurs at the top that the series isn’t safe it needs to ‘behave’ more than ever. This story is an own goal. I’m no Mary Whitehouse (I wouldn’t look good in that wig) but there is a line and this story doesn’t just step a toe over the line, it marches across it, Sontaron style.   

The real problem, though is the tone of this story is all over the place. The few times our four heroes are together this story is great fun: Colin Baker had been best friends with Patrick’s son David (they used to share a flat and watch Who together including Colin enviously watching his friend in ‘The Curse Of Peladon’ and saying out loud he wanted to be on the show more than anything - while Colin was best man at David’s wedding) and he knew dad well, but they’d never acted together. They delight in each other’s company here and the bickering between them is a lot more ‘fun’ and spontaneous than the sometimes forced banter of other reunion stories. Jamie instantly fancies Peri (perfectly in character) while she quite enjoys having a Human hanging on her every word rather than an alien and there’s much fun to be had seeing how the series has changed, as the Highlander can’t quite decide whether to protect her from the monsters or protect the monsters from her! The quartet divide into different pairs along the way too, so that we see Sixie delight at being back with Jamie again, someone he sees as loyal, while Jamie quips to Peri ‘I think yours is even worse than mine’ (it’s just a shame the 2^nd Doctor and Peri don’t share a scene without the others). The four quickly became firm friends with endless tales of backstage frolics and endless practical jokes (the most notorious: the scene where Sixie wakes up Peri with a cup of water and he and Jamie replace it with an entire jug – a spluttering Nicola Bryant acted her socks off while gasping before realising everyone was laughing and the cameras weren’t whirring;  arachnophobic Colin was teased with a ‘fake’ script with a scene of fighting spiders and a crate full of rubber ones were tipped into his dressing room; it became a game who could wheel Pat in his wheelchair the furthest; Colin and Nicola both had fun in the scene Frazer is tied up by urging cameramen for close-ups down his kilt!; Colin entertained everyone on the wires needed for the episode one cliffhanger by doing his Flowerpot Men impression; Pat delighted in calling Colin ‘Miss Piggy’ due to his weight, until Colin got his own back and called him Gonzo ‘due to his appearance’!)  There are plenty of scenes where, if you know, the cast are forever on the verge of breaking into giggles. Switching from one of these scenes with great larks to ones where people properly die in the most ugly awful ways is unsettling – and not in a good way. Not since Donald Cotton in the 1960s have we had a story where the audience at home is so confused, not sure whether to laugh or cry (and even he used to save the violence for the last episode).

It doesn’t help that these adventures are taking place in time and Spain and often look as if we’re watching somebody’s home movies of actors re-enacting Who on their holidays, with eight whole days of overseas filming (a record at the time). Why Spain? Good question. It all made sense initially, back when this story was set in New Orleans. ‘The Five Doctors’ was a success partly because JNT had bought some extra money in from Australia, who got a special advance screening to Britain in return for some extra money. The lucrative market JNT really wanted to break was in America though – the Tom Baker stories and the early Davison stories had done well but the series’ reputation was slipping. Hence a concerted effort to have as many Dr Who conventions over there as possible. One the producer particularly enjoyed was in New Orleans during Mardi Gras season: he loved the colour, the noise, the spectacle and figured if only he could get some of that feel across on screen he would have an atmospheric story to remember (plus another excuse for a holiday there). He struck up a friendship there with someone from Lionheart Studios, a relatively new production company who were interested in being part of a known franchise like Who. So JNT hired a local writer to write a story amongst the local settings and as early as 1981 had the scene breakdown for a story named ‘Way Down Yonder’ by Lesley Thomas on his desk.  However she’d never actually seen Dr Who and – though her story breakdown has never been revealed – apparently it showed, producer and script editor in agreement for more or less the last time that the story was unworkable. So Holmes was asked to write that into the story too and finding a good reason for the setting. Unfortunately it couldn’t be for the mardi gras because that was in February (when actors weren’t free and crowd control would be hopeless). Holmes toyed with jazz-loving aliens but JNT hated jazz and turned it down (see ‘Silver Nemesis’ for why that’s weird – and whether he had given up being so  hands on by the end of his run). That’s why Holmes ended up at food – because the only thing he could think of was the cuisine.

Then: a problem! Lionheart pulled out at the 11^th hour. For a while the story was still on, with JNT securing a stopoff at Disneyland USA for some free publicity in return for some cash – forty years before Dr Who ends up on their streaming service (the mind boggles with Holmes in such a wicked dark mood. Which of the Disney characters do you think would snuff it first?!?) Only that fell through too. JNT went to the BBC for extra funding but was told no – this is the era when Michael Grade has just got his grubby paws on the corporation and suddenly everyone else stops being co-operative along with him. So it was decided to go somewhere else – Venice was the front runner for a while but the crowd control would be a nightmare there too. It was production associate Sue Anstruther who suggested Seville in Spain after holidaying there. It was nearer, cheaper – and hotter! The problem with that was that Holmes’ script had been written with America in mind, with Peri the local lass showing everyone else around and lots of funny quirky Holmesian quips about the differences between language even with the Tardis translator. There were also lots of scenes specially written round landmarks and while some were changed (becoming Spanish haciendas rather than American shacks) not everything was that easy. JNT didn’t see the problem: writers were endlessly doing re-writes on Who, but then Holmes wasn’t your ‘normal’ writer used to working on thousands of interchangeable programmes the way the producer’s favoured choices usually did. He was an instinctive ‘first draft’ kind of a writer who liked having a point to make and letting his imagination soar. His good friend Terrance Dicks realised this and let him write pretty much whatever he wanted provided it didn’t break the budget too much and Holmes was asked to add very few changes along the way. Here he’s been given a shopping list of things to get (old characters, that setting, even the Sontarons weren’t his choice despite creating them – JNT wanted a ‘returning monster’) and now they were being changed again. He just can’t be bothered, his attention elsewhere and Saward is too much in awe of Holmes to change them for him. Holmes was the sort of writer who loses interest with every re-write and everyone who saw the original script agree that the end result is a pale retread of what it once was. It’s also a complete and utter waste of the background: this story made sense in New Orleans but it has nothing to do with Spain. It looks as if hard-earned taxpayer’s money is being spent to give the Dr Who team a week off. The solution seems obvious in retrospect: film this one somewhere local and keep the money over for the following year when you can get a writer to actually write a story around Spain. Indeed, it was dangerous: Frazer’s schedule meant he had August off then he had to be back on ‘Emmerdale’ so there they were, in arguably the hottest country in Europe in arguably the hottest month (at least in 1984 – lately the climate seems to have shifted to June/July), dying of heat. Especially the poor actors in the Sontaron costumes.

Ironically for a story full of foodies stuffing their faces the Sontarons look anaemic and starving – a side effect of the newly made costumes that have been re-designed to be thinner and cope in the hot weather. Though practical (the poor actors were collapsing with heat stroke left right and centre) they look stupid in the final product. The actors’ mouths no longer measure up to the masks which hang limply off their faces, while the necks are a little too obvious sewn into their armoured collars. Throw in the fact that Holmes can find no reason to include them in this story and this is the story that becomes the true source of them being the butt of all the jokes, the ‘comic relief’. A real shame as Holmes agreed to include them partly so he could ‘make up’ for other writers making them ‘a bit silly’ in stories like ‘The Sontaron Experiment’ and ‘The Invasion Of Time’. It’s a waste of a really good monster. I feel the same way about the others. Laurence Payne wraps up the third in his trilogy of Who guest appearances but makes far less impact as the bland scientist Dastari as he did as Johnny Ringo the outlaw in ‘The Gunfighters’ (funnily enough a part that was turned down by Patrick Troughton!) and  Morix in ‘The Leisure Hive’. Jacqueline Pearce tries hard with Chessene, the augmented Androgum, but it’s very much not apart built for her: the script calls on someone rotund and working class and she plays it posh and snooty, like Servalan from Blake’s 7 (she took the job partly as she was a big fan of ‘The Brothers’ and was sad not to have been in the Blake’s 7’ episode with Colin Baker). Elizabeth Spriggs was cast in the part but, depending which source you hear, either quit at the eleventh hour over a dispute with money or a changed timetable, or was sacked by the director for refusing to turn up to location rehearsals (she didn’t seem to hold a grudge anyway: she’ll be back for ‘Paradise Towers’). Poor Jackie Pearce is back in front of the cameras for the first time since Blake’s 7 ended three years earlier, a cancellation that resulted in a great depression and a nervous breakdown and she wasn’t at all sure she ought to do the part but did it as a favour as much as anything else. And there she is, boiling hot in Spain, wearing a wig that was made for Spriggs that kept falling off her head. 

The problems kept mounting up during the making of this story. Nicola Bryant bruised herself badly in an accident with the ‘station defence computer’, all sticky out scaffolding pipes and had to sit out the end of a day’s filming with ice packs on her leg. Costumes didin’t fit and actors and actresses refused to wear them. The wigs and Androgum eyebrows were lost in customs and were eventually tracked down in Germany (I like to think there was a confused customs man in Germany opening an unclaimed parcel and trying them on before terrorising the local restaurants after becoming part Androgum. Actually I’m amazed the production team got through Spanish customs given they were carrying a spare prosthetic Sontaron leg, capsules of blood-red paint and a crystal that emitted a gas when water was poured on it to replicate cyanide), so everything you see in Spain is a last minute cobbled together substitute (while Pearce, Payne and Stratton got an extra two days by the pool waiting for them to turn up). The heat caused the Androgum makeup (done with Rice Krispies) to melt. Other scenes, scouted out a month earlier by JNT beaux Gary Downie, looked nothing like as good due to a drought, so that scenes that were due to take place against beautiful looking rivers and waterfalls look like a pathetic trickle. Translation problems hit most aspects of the filming, especially the Spanish stuntman who wasn’t quite sure what was being asked of him (the production team brought in a translator, Mercedes Carnegie, who turned out to be the daughter of Seville’s richest family. An awed JNT thanked her with a cameo – she’s the woman who throws a rose up to a balcony window. The director and costume designer, meanwhile, have cameos eating outside Oscar’s restaurant).  As Oscar dies midway through the third episode the actors playing him and Anita were paid off early and sent home, only to be recalled at great expense when it was discovered that there was a scratch on the negative of one scene that had to be filmed again (though once he was back at TV centre and viewed it JNT couldn’t notice a thing and blew his top – it would have been cheaper to pay the actors to stay on and enjoy a holiday).

There are more fundamental reasons though. Holmes is clearly still capable of writing the 2^nd Doctor and Jamie, so why doesn’t he do that more? It takes way too long for the Doctors and companions to meet (Jamie arrives at the start of part three, the two Doctors don’t meet till part three) even though this isn’t the same as in the ‘Three Doctors’ and ‘Five Doctors’ days when everyone was nervous how the leading actors might get on: this story was written partly to make the most of Pat and Colin’s very real friendship. There’s a moment in part three where the 6^th Doctor finally meets his 2^nd self and ticks him off for getting into trouble and you think ‘aha, finally’ – and then everyone runs and hides and Dr 2 gets turned into an Androgum, the pair ending up with just two scenes together. Rumours have always spread that Troughton did this story because he feared his time was short and he was growing weaker (he died three years later) which is why he’s confined to a wheelchair for so much of it. Not true, as you can see in the dozen different projects Troughton made between now and his death (‘Box Of Delights’ being the highest profile) and he was in fine form. The story makes a right mess of continuity that both Holmes and Saward should have known backwards by now: Jamie only learned about the timelords when we did, in his last story ‘The War Games’ and this Doctor was so scared of his own kind finding him there’s no way he would have run around doing ‘errands’ for them (that’s a mis-remembering of the Pertwee era). The only solution fans can come up with is a ‘missing season 6B’ after the War Games’ where the 2^nd Doctor gets a brief reprieve (like the one he had in TV Comic to fill the gap between seasons) but would the timelords really bring Jamie back? And why mention that they’ve been travelling with Victoria (but have, in a much mocked line, dropped her off to study graphology – Victoria has shown no signs of any interest in graphology and besides, this in the days when the Tardis was unreliable and never landed where it was meant to). The Sontarons might as well not have bothered to turn up. There’s also something quite…disturbing underneath it all and not the meat stuff either. Dr Who is a series about aiming upwards, of defying categorisations and becoming your true self. Yet Holmes keeps laughing at the Androgums, specially bred to be the universe’s chef slaves, for daring to have ideas above their station. What’s worse is that he has both Doctors comment on it (‘you could augment an earwig to the point where it understood nuclear physics – but it would still be a very stupid thing to do!’) This is The Doctor, who’s raison daitre is to give enslaved races their freedom. He should be setting Shockeye and Chessene free, not killing the former with cyanide. It all feels wrong – untrue to the 1960s and 1980s model, both. Timelords invented time travel, it’s not a part of their genetics any more than electricity and the BBC i-player are in Human genes. The Sontarons are obsessed with developing time travel even though they mastered it centuries ago. The 6^th Doctor gets weak and senses one of his past selves is in danger so rushes to their distress call…only it turns out to be a hologram (this is never explained, unless it’s Jamie’s pain he’s picking up on – they were close after all. But Sixie was in space at the time and he picks up every time every past companion is in pain he would do nothing else with his life all day. ‘What’s wrong now Tegan? What do you mean your plane’s delayed take-off for an hour? Go buy some duty free and get a grip!’) Why is Shockeye dressed as a Scottish Highlander?(And isn’t a bit of a coincidence in a story that also features Jamie?) How come the Androgums don't at least try to have a nibble if they like Human flesh so much? I mean, Humans don't look tasty but the Sontarons resemble baked potatoes on legs. Perhaps the biggest mistake of all: how come they did an entire story about food in Seville and never mention marmalade once?

For all that there are some lovely scenes ingredients that are perfectly preserved: It’s such a Holmesian idea, a writer who loathed and detested authority figures being respected because of who they are not what they’ve done, taking a noblewoman with airs and graces and making her an animal. Chessene dropping her airs and graces to lick the ground, all that conditioning gone, is perfect, a worthy end to the character (even if that scene is reputedly Pearce’s own idea). The banter between the main four is hilarious. The 2^nd Doctor being pushed by Dastari into losing his rag with an outburst of insults while Jamie deadpans ‘I’m just admitting your diplomatic skills’ is the most 2^nd Doctor-Jamie bit of banter ever. Holmes comes hilariously close to using the old gag ‘do you serve crabs?’ ‘Sit down Sir, we serve anyone’ when Shockeye asks about serving Humans and Oscar understandably gets the wrong end of the stick. There’s a nice scene where The Doctor accidentally starts a hologram machine and thinks Peri’s in terrible trouble, the most concern we ever see him demonstrate for her – until he presses a button and sees his own face, as well as that of Dastari and his 2^nd self. The sweet ‘n’ sour way Holmes makes us laugh at aliens in space eating Humans then has Humans eat meat leaves a bitter taste in the mouth but series like Dr Who are perfect for telling uncomfortable truths in imaginative ways and a lot of season twenty-two tells much the same story: ‘The Two Doctors’ is at one with the corpses of ‘Revelation Of The Daleks’, the Rani’s mistreatment of Humans in ‘Mark Of The Rani’ and the cannibals in ‘Vengeance On Varos’. Peter Howell provides one of his best scores, adding Spanish guitarist Les Thatcher alongside his usual synth work that sums up Spain a lot better than these random lakes and empty fields do.

However,  unusually for the more sure-footed Holmes and perhaps because of all the enforced changes the balance isn’t right this time and this story ends up making too much of a meal out of its main point which ends up dominating every scene, even the supposedly fun ones. For every scene that ‘works’ there are another five that don’t: Oscar’s death and Peri’s toe-curlingly embarrassing attempts to cheer him up, that ‘he’ll make one more curtain call’; long shots of Sontarons looking silly marching like an army when there are only three of them; Oscar and Anita’s unlikely and very silly theatrical romance that seems even more out of place than the outright comedy; a lengthy unfunny scene where Shockeye and the 2^nd Doctor discuss food and order from menus like British tourists from hell. I'm not convinced it works - this is the sort of story that will tell you off for eating meat, then linger on every gruesome detail of the cast about to be skinned alive and eaten, then throws in a joke to make you laugh. John Stratton (who hasn’t done scifi since our old friend ‘Quatermass and The Pit’ thirty years earlier) sends the whole thing up as Shockeye – not his fault, that’s the part as written but it makes his death scene seem even more brutal than it would with a true baddie. Definitely not one to watch over dinner in other words; you need  strong stomach and a wicked  sense of humour to get the most out of this one, for all the many things it gets right. There’s way too much padding and talking with the plot not moving – it’s weird that JNT should have insisted so much on this being a three parter (back in the days when episodes lasted 45minutes, making it a six parter in ‘old money’) for the first time since ‘Shada’ and for the last time in the show until ‘Utopia/Sound Of Drums/Last Of The Timelords’ (if you want to see it that way) twenty-three years later. Holmes always thought the longer running time was stupid and was the script editor in charge of axing it, preferring four and two parters where possible. There are no end of stories this season that deserve extra space (‘Vengeance on Varos’ or ‘Revelation Of The Daleks’ particularly) but ‘The Two Doctors’ could have been told better in one part, never mind three.

So all those great things get wasted. Bob Holmes is back writing for Dr Who again at last after six years away...a story that's quite unlike his usual style. We get the return of the 2nd Doctor!...Who after spending episode 1 totally nailing the part he's only played twice in 16 years then has to spend most of the story out of character as a 'part Androgum'. He's back with Jamie...who turns savage partway through and barely says a word. Bob Holmes writes for his most famous creations The Sontarons for only the second time...under heavy protest at having to have a monster at all, so they might as well not be here too (also, how come the Androgums don't at least try to have a nibble if they like Human flesh so much? I mean, Humans don't look tasty but the Sontarons resemble baked potatoes on legs). There's a great and nuanced cast headed by John Stratton and Jacqueline Pearce (a Blake's 7 baddy stronger than any humanoid we see in Who, except perhaps Roger Delgado's Master)  ...Who are given a script that all but encourages over-acting and throws subtlety out the window. We get a lot of location filming in Spain...But for all the difference it makes to the script it could have been filmed in Croydon (the original plan, to film in New Orleans, made a lot more sense, but the budget got cut and the script re-worked at the last minute). I can just about imagine a 'normal' 6th Dr story in this setting, as its not that far removed from the 'video nasty' theme of 'Vengeance on Varos' which worked really well and gave Colin Baker a chance to get on his high horse a lot, the moral outrage his doctor does so well. But the 2nd Dr is completely wrong for this sort of story - a cuddlier, funnier yet underneath it all a subtler and often a more manipulative Doctor - is just the wrong setting for him to come alive. Far from being the best of both worlds and eras it’s like neither. Rather than the claustrophobic ‘base under siege’ Troughton story we get one in the open air that seems to cover the whole of Spain, all tension gone as we watch the characters stroll around as if, well, they’re on holiday. Especially the usually unstoppable Sontaron army who look as if they’ve just spend the day at the beach paddling (and no doubt shooting at the tide demanding it go back King Cnute style).Yet rather than a 6^th Doctor story of moralising and squaring off to the villains they barely meet the whole story. The 2nd Dr quickly becomes a passenger caught up in circumstances and that's something he never was in the 1960s (or indeed till Peter Davison came along).

The idea of what would happen if Humans were seen as nothing special and just another group in the food chain by an alien species gives the Androgums a whole new clever reason for coming to Earth, but it also makes for a really gruesome little story where everyone wants to kill everyone else, most of the time in sets resembling giant kitchens with slabs of meat hanging from hooks. Also it’s all very well telling that story with people we don’t know or like but the 2^nd Doctor and Jamie are our friends, it seems disrespectful bordering on blasphemy to have them turned into meat. It’s an oddly ugly unlikable lumpy story without any of the usual Holmes flair for memorable characters or brilliant witty dialogue and even his ability to create organic, brilliantly paced plots seem to have deserted him. The only part of this story worthy of the name is the bite of the ‘everyone is meat’ storyline which really does give the audience ‘food for thought’ but even that’s one which would be far better served in another story (it is, after all, a story he came up with while script editor and has had plenty of chances to use in between). The result is a tonal mess, disappointing to fans of the ‘old’ series who were nostalgic for old times and who tuned in and thought the current series had gone to the dogs and to the ‘new’ fans who wanted to know what the olden days (with a Doctor and companion lost to the ether with no videos yet on sale) looked like and still didn’t know beyond the opening scene. It’s one of those stories that looks as if it was one hell of a lot more fun to make than it was to watch and one where an awful lot of people put an awful lot of effort into something that makes nobody look as if they’re at all bothered about anything. The end result becomes a big fat expensive waste: of the reunion of the Sontarons, of the location, of everything. The result is easily Holmes’ worst work, though it’s not really Holmes’ fault – instead this is a case of too many cooks, with JNT and Saward and changes needed overwhelming a story that already had too much fat and which dilutes the taste, to the point where it’s in danger of saying nothing at all beyond a few awkward bits of gristle. Dr Who won’t risk going abroad again until ‘Fires Of Pompeii’ twenty-four years later (a story that, unlike this one, couldn’t have been filmed anywhere else).

POSITIVES + The best bits by far are the all-too brief interactions between the two Doctors and two companions. Colin Baker and Patrick Troughton’s affection and easy chemistry lights up the screen, though their banter is spicy and icy even for a multi-Dr story. It's impressive how completely Pat Troughton revives his character and the start in black and white could easily be taken for a 1960s episode give or take the odd wrinkle.  Jamie and Peri make a great double-act too and it’s interesting to see how despite being two very different characters from entirely different centuries they both end up resembling each other: loyal, brave, but slightly clueless.

NEGATIVES -This is such an oddly plotted story for anyone, but particularly by one of the most prolific Who writers and one-time script editor, a story that gives you horrible while you're still laughing from the previous scene and conversely something funny while you're still reeling in horror. Combining the two is what made Dr Who stand out from its peers, but it’s never been done quite as black and white as this before. Take Oscar, the pretentious insect collector - an obvious bit of comic relief with his penchant for quoting Shakespeare at inopportune moments and ideas above his station. He's the sort of character who always survives to the end then tells the authority figure what really happened while they don't believe a word of it. Here even he dies, a quite gruesome and gratuitous death, while still in character and coming up with pretentious quotes. The point being made is that, for all his high culture, to Shockeye he's just another piece of meat, but how are we meant to respond to that scene? Laugh at him for still being pretentious on death or cry because no one is safe?

BEST QUOTE: ‘Give a monkey control of its environment it will fill the world with bananas’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: One piece of Dr Who that will almost certainly never see the light of day again is ‘In A Fix With Sontarons’, an actually rather good sketch from an episode of ‘Jim’ll Fix It’ broadcast on February 23^rd 1985, mere hours before episode one of ‘Revelation Of The Daleks’ (though given it involves Sontarons and appears on the ‘Two Doctors’ DVD makes more sense being listed here). The revelations since Jimmy Savile’s death about what the disgraced DJ have got up to in life have coloured many of my favourite childhood memories: BBC4 are endlessly skipping past episode of ‘Top Of The Pops’ they just can’t show anymore because Savile was the presenter that week, not to mention happy memories of writing into his children’s series hoping to get picked (my mate got off lucky: he once wrote in asking to paint a picture with Rolf Harris!) The biggest calamity though is this sweet little extra which shows just how good and child friendly Colin Baker’s Doctor really was when left to his own devices and how gosh darn kind the production team under John Nathan-Turner could be. Young viewer Gareth Jenkins (guidebooks can’t agree about his age, being anywhere from seven to eleven, so let’s say he’s around nine) wrote into Jimmy and his stuffed contacts book, asking to meet his hero The Doctor (sensible lad!) Rather than simply meet Colin for a quick handshake, though, he got to appear in an entire mini Dr Who story, written by script editor Eric Saward and made with a lot more love and care than most of season twenty-two. You’ll have read elsewhere in this book just how many seemingly insurmountable problems kept happening and how tight for time and harassed everyone was, so to make this more than the tiny cameo it might have been is all credit to them. Like ‘The Two Doctors’ this is in effect another multi Doctor story, with Colin joined by Gareth (in a mini version of his costume, knitted by Gareth’s nan so legend has it) and, weirdly, Tegan – Nicola Bryant was busy on stage at the time but Janet Fielding had stayed close to the production team and often helped them out (she helped audition Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor too). The Doctor needs a hero and gets Tegan to press a big blue button (no, not that big blue button, the other one!’) while thinking of conjuring up a hero ‘someone of great courage, vast intellect and incredible perspicacity – someone not unlike myself’. Cue Gareth in his nan’s impressive replica of the 6^th Doctor’s coat. Poor Gareth is clearly over-awed by all the studio lights and being next to his hero (bee careful what you wish for) but the two actors take great care in looking after him and are clearly having great fun too, with the acerbic 6^th Doctor-Tegan relationship far more fun than the 6^th Doctor-Peri one (as the feisty air stewardess doesn’t feel as much of a natural ‘victim’ as poor Peri). Why Sontarons? Well, they wanted a big monster and the Dalek and Cybermen props were a bit fragile while Eric really enjoyed working on ‘The Two Doctors’ and greatly admired Bob Holmes’ creations, hoping to have a crack at using them himself one day. The Sontarons also take less back story to set up: they’re relentless warriors from outer space, which is all casual viewers who might not necessarily have ever watched Dr Who needed to know. The plot is simple and silly of course, resolved far too easily, concerning two Sontarons who have planted a bomb on board the Tardis, full of big explosions and epic death scenes. But then that’s exactly what it needed to be: the joy comes from the dialogue and performances, The Doctor gently guiding his new companion (beamed on board the Tardis by ‘mistake’ – though as we all know the Tardis never makes mistakes with its companions) and the sweet reveal that Gareth will grow up to be a brave leader of Earth who foils a second Sontaron plan (no evidence of that on screen in new Who yet but equally there’s nothing to contradict it either). Gareth presses a button and the Sontarons melt and turn into green goo. Gareth even gets to keep his prop gun as a souvenir, making an entire generation of Whovians deeply jealous. The Doctor asks how he knew what to do and the lad replies ‘well, I’ve seen you do it on telly’. Favourite moment: a stampeding horde of Sontarons (well, two of them) walk through the door and Gareth waves ‘hello’. Second favourite moment: the mock-serious entry Gareth Jenkins gets on Tardis wiki! As an advert for Dr Who to a younger audience it’s great, but as the chance to make a little boy’s dream come true it’s superb: whatever age you are you still want to be Gareth sooo badly. Whisper it quietly but I’m far more fond of this mini story than I am ‘The Two Doctors’ and while it’s understandable that this story has since been excised into the wilderness (missing from the re-issued print DVD of the story) it’s a tragedy that we’ve lost something this good. After all it would have been easy enough to cut Savile out from the beginning and end as he isn’t in the sketch himself (update: the blu-ray does just that, including the ‘story’ trimmed to exclude Savile and with a replacement CGI ending). For the record even when tracked down as an adult post-Savile revelation, Gareth says he had no idea of anything untoward going on behind the scenes, although JNT was on record as saying he found Savile ‘creepy’ even before the wider world knew what he’d got up to (which might be why when Savile appears on the scanner, The Doctor and Tegan jokes ‘it’s monstrous it’s revolting’ – how right they were. A shame they couldn’t be sure enough to rid the universe of another monster). ‘In A Fix’ was a success, popular with young fans and introducing a few (just in time for one of the most violent adult stories in the show’s history…tone is really are all over the place in this era!) and got 10.1million viewers, higher than anything Who had managed since ‘Black Orchid’ and 3million more than even the highest rated episode of ‘The Two Doctors’ (the third).

‘The First Sontarons’ (2012) is a ‘genesis of the Sontarons’ story from Big Finish’s ‘Lost Stories’ range. Unlike all the other Colin Baker stories in the range, however, it’s one that was written for season twenty-two, not twenty-three and seems to have been dropped purely because Eric Saward asked Robert Holmes to include his creations in ‘The Two Doctors’ instead. Ever since ‘Full Circle’ Andrew Smith had been submitting stories to the production team on a regular basis and this was the closest he got to having a second story made. Though not as strong and definitely not as original as his first, it’s still way better than an inexperienced twenty-year-old would be expected to write, with an instinctive understanding of Dr Who and what it stood and indeed stands for that few writers could match. The 6^th Doctor and Peri discover a strange signal coming from the English countryside in 1897 which turns out to be a Rutan spaceship. The Sontarons get there first however and consider the Humans expendable in their great conquest. So far as expected, but it’s a really thoughtful piece that showed a new side to the Sontarons (or would have done at the time anyway) asking questions about whether they’re really as arrogant and tough as they let on; they’re a long way from the comic relief of the modern series here in a story all about whether the greatest warrior in the world, Human or Sontaron, really has what it takes to fight in amidst the heat of battle and the horrors of war for all sides. There’s a bit too much locking up and escaping for my tastes while the forty-five minute episode format of the day (recycled, more or less, on audio) does funny things with the pacing, but there are some great ideas here and Dan Starkey is as excellent as ever as Field Marshall Jaka. You don’t often get emotional with Sontaron stories but you will in this one.

The 7^th Doctor never officially met The Sontarons on telly, but he did in the books and in  another of the official-as-long-as-they-don’t-use-the-Dr-Who name BBV videos. Both are called ‘Shakedown’ and both are interconnected but not quite the same. First up the novel: released in 1995 it’s one of Terrance Dicks’ rare returns to the Who fold and number #45 in the ‘New Adventures’ range. Ace has left the Tardis by now with newbies Chris and Roz making for a very full Tardis alongside Benny Summerfield. Perhaps because Uncle Terry was so used to juggling UNIT this book uses the quartet better than most books: the 7^th Doctor is his usual manipulative self starting a rebellion on the Sontaron-invaded world of Jekkar, while Benny is busy using her historian skills on the library planet Sentarion (very like the one in ‘Silence In The Library’) and Chris and Roz track down a Rutan spy before the Sontarons can get to it. The end result is a very Terrance Dicks book: the plot unfolds at speed and is certainly never boring with lots of little gems of dialogue along the way, but neither do you really get any deep sense of emotion for what the characters are feeling and nor are there any real surprises. That idea you have in your head about what this book might be like now you’ve just read about the plot? That’s the book. Some of these plot summaries are really hard to cut down to size with all the plot beats and atmosphere intact but most of Terrance’s work can be summed up in a sentence or three and this is one of them. 

As for the video, officially titled ‘Shakedown: Return Of The Sontarons’ (1994), it features (for copyright dodging reasons) rather odd looking Sontarons that appear to have had an anvil dropped on them from up high, while simultaneously dipped in a tin of lighter brown paint. They’re a tad distracting so it’s hard to keep your eye on the plot, but actually Terrance writes this script better: far from being an exercise in economy this story is full of surprises and will even make you feel for the Sontarons in their relentless quest for the unobtainable. This is basically the same story but told from their point of view withut the Doctor (missing for copyright reasons), as they pursue Chris and Roz on their spaceship ‘The Tiger Moth’. Only they’re not on a Sontaron ship but a commandeered Human one, with Captain Lisa Derrane a sort-of Doctor substitute and one of Terrance’s more interesting characters, so used to being in charge and now a prisoner of relentless military beings very like her in every way but species. She’s also trying to keep her amateur crew together and morale intact despite the terrible circumstances they find themselves in. Being set on board a spaceship pretty much throughout also makes this one of the more ‘Star Trek’ of Dr Who stories, with the contradiction of a crew trying to find peaceful situations while dressed in military regalia. All in all one of the better BBV productions, if you can get past the usual low budget music and effects and how the Sontarons look, with Jan Chappell (telepath Cally in Blake’s 7) superb as always in her one and only Dr Who crossover alongside her one time rival Brian ‘Travis’ Croucher. Other luminaries in smaller parts include Michael Wisher, Sophie Aldred and Carole Ann Ford, none of them playing their ‘Who’ characters sadly. Terrance later adapted this story into a novel, confusingly also titled ‘Shakedown’ even though it’s different to the other one, so be careful when ordering to make sure you get the right ones (this was a standalone novel, not a ‘New Adventures’ and doesn’t have the ‘Dr Who’ logo anywhere, if that helps).

This also seems like a good place to mention ‘Battlefield’ (1999), not the 7^th Doctor story but another non-Doctor Sontaron release, this one by Reeltime Productions and the first volume in the ‘Mindgame’ trilogy. On the plus side we get a nice lot of Sontaron backstory and character  without the need for The Doctor getting in the way and, unlike most of their appearances in the ‘modern’ series or indeed ‘Shakedown’, they look pretty good, all copyright issues apparently resolved by now. Terrance clearly enjoyed writing for his old pal Bob Holmes’ creations and enjoyed keeping their reputation alive after his death and once again he writes for them well. Like ‘Shakedown' but unlike so any of their appearances since this is a tragedy not a comedy as we follow a race bred for war who know their destiny from the moment of their birth and have no choice in the matter (as Bob Dylan would have sung if he was a Sontaron, he who isn’t being cloned is busy dying). On the downside, compared to the relative depth of ‘Shakedown’ it feels as if Terrance wrote these scripts in about half an hour, while the usual Reeltime issues of non-existent budget and some quite static stories based around what are mostly one-person performances. ‘Battlefield’ is arguably the best of the trilogy, as Commander Sarg dies slowly and both longs and secretly fears death, the sort of monologue Alan Bennett would write if his villains were deadly battle-hardened fighters the Rutans rather than nosy neighbours with doilies and tablecloths.   

Previous ‘The Mark Of The Rani’ next ‘Timelash’

One piece of Dr Who that will almost certainly never see the light of day again is ‘In A Fix With Sontarons’, an actually rather good sketch from an episode of ‘Jim’ll Fix It’ broadcast on February 23^rd 1985, mere hours before episode one of ‘Revelation Of The Daleks’ (though given it involves Sontarons and appears on the ‘Two Doctors’ DVD makes more sense being listed here). The revelations since Jimmy Savile’s death about what the disgraced DJ have got up to in life have coloured many of my favourite childhood memories: BBC4 are endlessly skipping past episode of ‘Top Of The Pops’ they just can’t show anymore because Savile was the presenter that week, not to mention happy memories of writing into his children’s series hoping to get picked (my mate got off lucky: he once wrote in asking to paint a picture with Rolf Harris!) The biggest calamity though is this sweet little extra which shows just how good and child friendly Colin Baker’s Doctor really was when left to his own devices and how gosh darn kind the production team under John Nathan-Turner could be. Young viewer Gareth Jenkins (guidebooks can’t agree about his age, being anywhere from seven to eleven, so let’s say he’s around nine) wrote into Jimmy and his stuffed contacts book, asking to meet his hero The Doctor (sensible lad!) Rather than simply meet Colin for a quick handshake, though, he got to appear in an entire mini Dr Who story, written by script editor Eric Saward and made with a lot more love and care than most of season twenty-two. You’ll have read elsewhere in this book just how many seemingly insurmountable problems kept happening and how tight for time and harassed everyone was, so to make this more than the tiny cameo it might have been is all credit to them. Like ‘The Two Doctors’ this is in effect another multi Doctor story, with Colin joined by Gareth (in a mini version of his costume, knitted by Gareth’s nan so legend has it) and, weirdly, Tegan – Nicola Bryant was busy on stage at the time but Janet Fielding had stayed close to the production team and often helped them out (she helped audition Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor too). The Doctor needs a hero and gets Tegan to press a big blue button (no, not that big blue button, the other one!’) while thinking of conjuring up a hero ‘someone of great courage, vast intellect and incredible perspicacity – someone not unlike myself’. Cue Gareth in his nan’s impressive replica of the 6^th Doctor’s coat. Poor Gareth is clearly over-awed by all the studio lights and being next to his hero (bee careful what you wish for) but the two actors take great care in looking after him and are clearly having great fun too, with the acerbic 6^th Doctor-Tegan relationship far more fun than the 6^th Doctor-Peri one (as the feisty air stewardess doesn’t feel as much of a natural ‘victim’ as poor Peri). Why Sontarons? Well, they wanted a big monster and the Dalek and Cybermen props were a bit fragile while Eric really enjoyed working on ‘The Two Doctors’ and greatly admired Bob Holmes’ creations, hoping to have a crack at using them himself one day. The Sontarons also take less back story to set up: they’re relentless warriors from outer space, which is all casual viewers who might not necessarily have ever watched Dr Who needed to know. The plot is simple and silly of course, resolved far too easily, concerning two Sontarons who have planted a bomb on board the Tardis, full of big explosions and epic death scenes. But then that’s exactly what it needed to be: the joy comes from the dialogue and performances, The Doctor gently guiding his new companion (beamed on board the Tardis by ‘mistake’ – though as we all know the Tardis never makes mistakes with its companions) and the sweet reveal that Gareth will grow up to be a brave leader of Earth who foils a second Sontaron plan (no evidence of that on screen in new Who yet but equally there’s nothing to contradict it either). Gareth presses a button and the Sontarons melt and turn into green goo. Gareth even gets to keep his prop gun as a souvenir, making an entire generation of Whovians deeply jealous. The Doctor asks how he knew what to do and the lad replies ‘well, I’ve seen you do it on telly’. Favourite moment: a stampeding horde of Sontarons (well, two of them) walk through the door and Gareth waves ‘hello’. Second favourite moment: the mock-serious entry Gareth Jenkins gets on Tardis wiki! As an advert for Dr Who to a younger audience it’s great, but as the chance to make a little boy’s dream come true it’s superb: whatever age you are you still want to be Gareth sooo badly. Whisper it quietly but I’m far more fond of this mini story than I am ‘The Two Doctors’ and while it’s understandable that this story has since been excised into the wilderness (missing from the re-issued print DVD of the story) it’s a tragedy that we’ve lost something this good. After all it would have been easy enough to cut Savile out from the beginning and end as he isn’t in the sketch himself (update: the blu-ray does just that, including the ‘story’ trimmed to exclude Savile and with a replacement CGI ending). For the record even when tracked down as an adult post-Savile revelation, Gareth says he had no idea of anything untoward going on behind the scenes, although JNT was on record as saying he found Savile ‘creepy’ even before the wider world knew what he’d got up to (which might be why when Savile appears on the scanner, The Doctor and Tegan jokes ‘it’s monstrous it’s revolting’ – how right they were. A shame they couldn’t be sure enough to rid the universe of another monster). ‘In A Fix’ was a success, popular with young fans and introducing a few (just in time for one of the most violent adult stories in the show’s history…tone is really are all over the place in this era!) and got 10.1million viewers, higher than anything Who had managed since ‘Black Orchid’ and 3million more than even the highest rated episode of ‘The Two Doctors’ (the third).

‘The First Sontarons’ (2012) is a ‘genesis of the Sontarons’ story from Big Finish’s ‘Lost Stories’ range. Unlike all the other Colin Baker stories in the range, however, it’s one that was written for season twenty-two, not twenty-three and seems to have been dropped purely because Eric Saward asked Robert Holmes to include his creations in ‘The Two Doctors’ instead. Ever since ‘Full Circle’ Andrew Smith had been submitting stories to the production team on a regular basis and this was the closest he got to having a second story made. Though not as strong and definitely not as original as his first, it’s still way better than an inexperienced twenty-year-old would be expected to write, with an instinctive understanding of Dr Who and what it stood and indeed stands for that few writers could match. The 6^th Doctor and Peri discover a strange signal coming from the English countryside in 1897 which turns out to be a Rutan spaceship. The Sontarons get there first however and consider the Humans expendable in their great conquest. So far as expected, but it’s a really thoughtful piece that showed a new side to the Sontarons (or would have done at the time anyway) asking questions about whether they’re really as arrogant and tough as they let on; they’re a long way from the comic relief of the modern series here in a story all about whether the greatest warrior in the world, Human or Sontaron, really has what it takes to fight in amidst the heat of battle and the horrors of war for all sides. There’s a bit too much locking up and escaping for my tastes while the forty-five minute episode format of the day (recycled, more or less, on audio) does funny things with the pacing, but there are some great ideas here and Dan Starkey is as excellent as ever as Field Marshall Jaka. You don’t often get emotional with Sontaron stories but you will in this one.

The 7^th Doctor never officially met The Sontarons on telly, but he did in the books and in  another of the official-as-long-as-they-don’t-use-the-Dr-Who name BBV videos. Both are called ‘Shakedown’ and both are interconnected but not quite the same. First up the novel: released in 1995 it’s one of Terrance Dicks’ rare returns to the Who fold and number #45 in the ‘New Adventures’ range. Ace has left the Tardis by now with newbies Chris and Roz making for a very full Tardis alongside Benny Summerfield. Perhaps because Uncle Terry was so used to juggling UNIT this book uses the quartet better than most books: the 7^th Doctor is his usual manipulative self starting a rebellion on the Sontaron-invaded world of Jekkar, while Benny is busy using her historian skills on the library planet Sentarion (very like the one in ‘Silence In The Library’) and Chris and Roz track down a Rutan spy before the Sontarons can get to it. The end result is a very Terrance Dicks book: the plot unfolds at speed and is certainly never boring with lots of little gems of dialogue along the way, but neither do you really get any deep sense of emotion for what the characters are feeling and nor are there any real surprises. That idea you have in your head about what this book might be like now you’ve just read about the plot? That’s the book. Some of these plot summaries are really hard to cut down to size with all the plot beats and atmosphere intact but most of Terrance’s work can be summed up in a sentence or three and this is one of them. 

As for the video, officially titled ‘Shakedown: Return Of The Sontarons’ (1994), it features (for copyright dodging reasons) rather odd looking Sontarons that appear to have had an anvil dropped on them from up high, while simultaneously dipped in a tin of lighter brown paint. They’re a tad distracting so it’s hard to keep your eye on the plot, but actually Terrance writes this script better: far from being an exercise in economy this story is full of surprises and will even make you feel for the Sontarons in their relentless quest for the unobtainable. This is basically the same story but told from their point of view withut the Doctor (missing for copyright reasons), as they pursue Chris and Roz on their spaceship ‘The Tiger Moth’. Only they’re not on a Sontaron ship but a commandeered Human one, with Captain Lisa Derrane a sort-of Doctor substitute and one of Terrance’s more interesting characters, so used to being in charge and now a prisoner of relentless military beings very like her in every way but species. She’s also trying to keep her amateur crew together and morale intact despite the terrible circumstances they find themselves in. Being set on board a spaceship pretty much throughout also makes this one of the more ‘Star Trek’ of Dr Who stories, with the contradiction of a crew trying to find peaceful situations while dressed in military regalia. All in all one of the better BBV productions, if you can get past the usual low budget music and effects and how the Sontarons look, with Jan Chappell (telepath Cally in Blake’s 7) superb as always in her one and only Dr Who crossover alongside her one time rival Brian ‘Travis’ Croucher. Other luminaries in smaller parts include Michael Wisher, Sophie Aldred and Carole Ann Ford, none of them playing their ‘Who’ characters sadly. Terrance later adapted this story into a novel, confusingly also titled ‘Shakedown’ even though it’s different to the other one, so be careful when ordering to make sure you get the right ones (this was a standalone novel, not a ‘New Adventures’ and doesn’t have the ‘Dr Who’ logo anywhere, if that helps).

This also seems like a good place to mention ‘Battlefield’ (1999), not the 7^th Doctor story but another non-Doctor Sontaron release, this one by Reeltime Productions and the first volume in the ‘Mindgame’ trilogy. On the plus side we get a nice lot of Sontaron backstory and character  without the need for The Doctor getting in the way and, unlike most of their appearances in the ‘modern’ series or indeed ‘Shakedown’, they look pretty good, all copyright issues apparently resolved by now. Terrance clearly enjoyed writing for his old pal Bob Holmes’ creations and enjoyed keeping their reputation alive after his death and once again he writes for them well. Like ‘Shakedown' but unlike so any of their appearances since this is a tragedy not a comedy as we follow a race bred for war who know their destiny from the moment of their birth and have no choice in the matter (as Bob Dylan would have sung if he was a Sontaron, he who isn’t being cloned is busy dying). On the downside, compared to the relative depth of ‘Shakedown’ it feels as if Terrance wrote these scripts in about half an hour, while the usual Reeltime issues of non-existent budget and some quite static stories based around what are mostly one-person performances. ‘Battlefield’ is arguably the best of the trilogy, as Commander Sarg dies slowly and both longs and secretly fears death, the sort of monologue Alan Bennett would write if his villains were deadly battle-hardened fighters the Rutans rather than nosy neighbours with doilies and tablecloths.   

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