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 2nd 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 2nd 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 2nd
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 2nd
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 2nd 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 2nd
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 2nd 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 6th Doctor and Peri
both take a vow of vegetarianism ever since (broken only once on screen, when
the 9th 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 12th Doctor goes on
all sorts of rants about meat-eaters so perhaps that was a momentary lapse?)
The 6th 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 2nd 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 2nd 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 6th
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 2nd 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 11th 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 2nd
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
6th Doctor finally meets his 2nd 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 2nd
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 6th 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 2nd 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 2nd
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 2nd 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 2nd 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 6th 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 2nd 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.
‘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 6th 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 7th 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 7th 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 7th
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 23rd 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 6th 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 6th Doctor-Tegan relationship far more fun than the 6th 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 6th 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.
This also seems like a good place
to mention ‘Battlefield’ (1999), not the 7th
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’
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