Timelash
(Season 22, Dr 6 with Peri, 9-16/3/1985, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Glen McCoy, director: Pennant Roberts)
Rank: 264
‘Now is the timelash
of our discontent, made glorious by this Summer on Karfel where grim visage war
hath smoothed his wrinkled front. A Borad! My kingdom for a Borad!...’
‘Paul you’re not
really going to perform this part as if you’re Richard III are you?’
‘Sorry what was
that? I couldn’t hear you over my hump…’
Poor ‘Timelash’. The
story that was on when the ‘hiatus’ was announced has become the whipping boy
for most of fandom ever since it was on, a silly insubstantial story that ended
up the runt of season twenty-two coming between three big blockbusters with
pricey location filming. It’s not the sort of story you ever show to your
friends to convince them to become Whovians so to have so many people tune in
after hearing the potential cancellation news (‘Timelash’ did really well in
the ratings) was unfortunate to say the least. Matters weren’t helped when
fandom realised that ‘Timelash’ was anagram of ‘lame shit’ (it’s also an
anagram of ‘hat slime’, but nobody ever seems to mention that one!) But it’s
not that bad. I mean, it’s definitely not good or anything, but unlike period
catastrophes that are more seriously flawed (the ‘nasty’ Doctor of ‘Twin Dilemma’, Kate O’Mara pretending to
be Bonnie Langford in ‘Time and The Rani’ or
even the revered Bob Holmes going a wee bit too far with the vegetarian angle
in the gruesome and violent ‘Two Doctors’)
there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with ‘Timelash’ that a bit more time, love
and especially money couldn’t have solved.
Unfortunately there isn’t
a lot of any of that going around. The story is a rare unsolicited script sent
in by Who fan Glenn McCoy, who had fallen in love with his favourite show again
now that he had children of his own of the right age to watch it.
Following Andrew ‘Full Circle’ Smith he’s the first writer to have grown up with the backdrop of Dr Who across his whole life (he was born in 1955 so just the right age for the first story ‘An Unearthly Child’) and had a particular passion for the 3rd Doctor, who turns up (sort of) in this story. McCoy (Dr Who’s ‘real McCoy’ by the way, not like that Percy James Kent Smith who played the 7th Doctor) worked as an ambulance driver by trade, but he’d got into writing through a book he’d made about his profession and written off to a few favourite TV shows, getting a couple of episodes of medical drama ‘Angels’. ‘Dr Who’ was an obvious choice, even though he’d never written scifi before and he concocted a story that was roughly like ‘Timelash’ but with The Daleks involved. Script editor Eric Saward, who was feverishly working on his own ‘Revelation Of The Daleks’ at the time, couldn’t use it as it stood (honestly they should have switched: Saward’s love of action would have made a lot more out of this plot, while McCoy’s writing is very close to Terry Nation’s epic but empty style well suited to the pepperpots) but Eric – who wanted to encourage new talent, the way he’d been encouraged - liked it enough to put it on the ‘maybe’ pile, the sort of story that was in a basically workable condition if something badly went wrong with another script. And it did – ‘The Space Whale’, planned as the season’s second story, wasn’t working (it’ll sort of end up as ‘The Beast Below’ a full twenty-six years later) so, with the script editor running late after an enforced holiday (the only way he could legally write a story of his own was if he was off contract) and a large pile of revisions to do, ‘Timelash’ got the okay even though nobody was terribly enthusiastic. Sward is said to have quickly regretted his choice while Producer John-Nathan-Turner, indeed, largely hated it, but they figured slipping it fifth into a six story season only longtime fans would notice it was on anyway, little knowing the glaring light of the media would mean all eyes were on it. Back in the 1980s it was Dr Who policy to always give the writers with the least amount of experience over to the directors with the most in the vain hope that the two would somehow cancel it out, so it was handed over to distinguished Who veteran director Pennant Roberts. Who reportedly loathed it more than words can express.
You see, unlike Andrew
Smith who’d used his fandom to push the series’ format in a way that it had
never gone before but knew it well enough to know that it could stretch itself
more, McCoy was a nostalgic fan who cobbled together lots of ideas that Pennant
had seen before. Sometimes close up: the central idea that The Tardis has
landed somewhere The Doctor has been before where he’s hailed as a hero is
straight out of the Roberts-directed ‘Face Of
Evil’. It’s something that left a lot of fans scratching their heads, as
the 3rd Doctor’s arrival on Karfel is treated as something we should
know – actually it’s a rare story we still don’t know, as no writer has been
brave enough to fully plug that gap yet (though a ‘missing adventures’ novel
comes closest – see ‘prequels/sequels’) and yet the series had done it before (‘The Rescue’ and ‘The Abominable Snowman’ also feature
The Doctor returning to places we never got to see him go).The big question is
why the writer did this: all three of those stories have The Doctor expecting a
heroic welcome and being locked up by a distrustful society who think he’s
lying and/or a problem, but here everyone accepts The Doctor straight away
without question, even though he looks so different to his 3rd self.
It could be that giving The Doctor a reputation already makes the Borad and
Tekker get jealous from the first, or that he already has some beef with the Borad
(who he reported for doing foolish things with his time experiments). I wonder
too if McCoy thought he was writing a ‘sequel’ for his child’s generation that
fitted into what he remembered from his own childhood: The Doctor turning up to
a subjugated world that he helps free, full of a whispering face-melted
scientist tyrant on one hand and a shouty dictator on the other during a cold
war still feud where two planets are at war (with elements from all sorts of
stories, particularly the computer war of ‘Armageddon
Factor’ and the tyrant Sharak Jek from ‘Caves
From Androzani’ – especially the disfigurement), along with an interlude in
Victorian Britain (as per ‘Evil Of The Daleks’
and ‘Talons Of Weng Chiang’). The ‘bandrils’
are a little bit like the ‘mandrels’ (‘Nightmare
Of Eden’), even though they were originally ‘Gurdles’ (something dropped
when Saward couldn’t stop laughing and asked if they needed to hold their tummies
in). Even the Morlock roar is Aggedor from the Peladon stories recycled. Oh and
there’s a blue-faced android with a squeaky voice (which hadn’t actually
happened before, but seemed so common to scifi it felt as if it had) and a
reptilian ambassador sock puppet (just like ‘Colony
In Space’), not to mention a ‘time corridor’ (something Pennant would also
have remembered from another story, ‘Shada’
– although I doubt the writer did, given that it had been left in the vaults
unfinished). It is, if you will, the sort of Dr Who story that feels like dozens
of others that have been squashed in a blender and come out the other side.
It’s also a story low on subtlety: I’ve never seen the original scene breakdown
but you suspect it’s one of those that has an exclamation mark at the end of
each line (‘And then The Doctor is hurled into the Timelash! …And then the
chair swings round to show The Borad’s melted face!...And then The Borad grabs
Peri by the neck!’) We’re a long way from Dr Who as poignant metaphorical
discussion and debate here and back to the show being a B Movie. Only with a Z
movie budget. The fact that the budget has run out spectacularly so that
everything here looks cheaper and more basic than any other time Dr Who did any
of these stories (although it could just be that Karfel is the sort of planet
that leaves it’s Christmas tinsel decorations up all year round, even in their
‘Timelash’ machine) doesn’t exactly leave fans a lot of things to warm to.
And yet, I quite like it.
I mean, it’s no great art or anything and it shows lots of signs of inexperience
(not least that too much happens in episode one and nowhere near enough in
episode two, to the point where it had about three false endings and fun with
clones of the baddy even after they’ve killed him and even without the panic
that set in when it was discovered the episode was under running by seven
minutes and they had to remount a whole Tardis scene during the middle of
making the next story) but at least something happens in ‘Timelash’ and – until
all the air goes out the tyres with ten minutes to go – it’s pretty pacy too. With
so many similarities fans miss what McCoy does that’s so different: Karfel is
more of a village than a planet, with only 500 inhabitants left, which makes
the power-hungry scheming of their Maylon overseer Tekker all the scary: this
is a planet barely holding on by its fingertips anyway, one tip of power the wrong
way and it could be a genocide. The fact that The Doctor is greeted as a hero,
yes it’s like ‘The Face Of Evil’ but that was a Doctor making amends for a
mistake he made when he was unstable; here the Doctor has to live up to his
reputation and, despite his bluster and arrogance (it is Sixie after all) you
can tell he’s worried in a way Pertwee’s Doctor would never have been. The
Borad and Tekker work together well as one of those typical power struggles
that play out: The Borad has all the power and strength physically and
metaphorically, but it’s Tekker who has all the ambition and is better at
manipulative public relations. The core concept of the ‘timelash’, into where
the rebels on this planet are thrown, is also great in theory, even if the lack
of money means it comes over as a giant Toblerone and no one can decide from
scene to scene whether it means the people thrown into it are expected to die
or expected to be exiled. Still, there is a story here worth telling and one
that seems familiar without being pure recycling (the way that ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’ blatantly is). The
Borad is a pretty chilling villain by the time he finally appears and one with
better motivation than most Dr Who monsters too after his 'disfigurement' in an
experiment that went wrong and the recycling from ‘The Macra Terror’, of giving him a more
public ‘face’ that everyone likes (Denis Carey, Professor Chronotis in ‘Shada’
and the titular ‘Keeper Of Traken’) is perfect
casting to play him – as in both his other performances he’s playing a being of
great power as a nice old gentlemen so he’s the last person you suspect. I even
quite like the idea of superstition and the ‘Dumbo’ style narrative of amulets
that are seen to hold power but don’t really do anything because the people had
the power to change their destiny all along, a very Who message I’m amazed the
show hadn’t tried before (and there’s a nice contrast between Tekker’s amulet
and Peri’s St Christopher necklace – given the amount of times the Tardis has
failed later the patron saint of travel hasn’t been doing her too many favours
lately).
‘Timelash’ is also one of
the most ‘explicit’ cold war stories out of a whole great run of them in the
classic show (which started roughly at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and
only ended around the time the Berlin Wall fell). Karfel and Bandrel are both
starving, their crops ravaged and both are trying to look to each other for
trade despite their chequered past with each other. But their leaders aren’t
interested, instead pouring all their resources into missiles, more interested
in blowing the other up than they are saving their own people. Watching this in
1985, at the height of Reagan’s talk of space wars, must have really hit home.
The sad thing about that is, too, usually in Who cold war parables it’s obvious
which side is which, but both America and Russia were doing this to their own
people (if anything the Bandril ambassador’s level of calm and reserve in the
face of impossible odds makes him the most British character in Colin Baker’s tenure.
You expect him to ask ‘and what do you do?’ to Tekker after being told the
missiles are on their way. The ‘About Time’ books even think he looks a bit
like Prince Phillip). Like Stalinist Russia nobody on Karfel is allowed to
mention the past regime (or even The Doctor) and yet they’ve not done a very
good job of it given how everyone remembers him and Jo and a mystery third other
that none of the locals seem to have drawn (possibly Mike Yates), though then
again the speed at which Karfel want to take over Bandrel’s crops screams
American capitalist foreign policy. Nobody on Karfel wants a war except Tekker,
who creates one to make himself look tough and the only Bandril we see (thank
goodness!) doesn’t want it either, but those are the rules of war: the leaders
get the final say, even if they’re deranged despots you wouldn’t allow you to
run a bath if you met them, never mind run a planet. I can’t talk for the
Bandrils but both the Karfellian rulers are clearly starved of love: Tekker is
a narcissist plain and simple, more interested in people’s adoration than their
welfare, while The Borad has gone to great lengths to cover up his disfigured
face, damaged in a science experiment, all but having a breakdown when he
kidnaps Peri to be his bride and The Doctor casually says she can never love
someone as hideous as him. If ever you want a flavour of what it felt like to
live through the 1980s, with seven minute warnings for nuclear attack and war
propaganda on both sides, ‘Timelash’ gets it better than most works of fiction
– not the scheming (nobody on Timelash is all that bright), but the general air
of confusion and helplessness, that our lives are in the hands of incompetents
who can’t be trusted and that our side is every bit as dangerous as the
‘enemy’. Ultimately there’s nothing more than that though: it’s a story that
offers problems not solutions, nobody ‘learns’ anything and The Doctor solves
things through gadget trickery as much as anything else. You don’t go away and
feel as if you’ve been told a great story, although there are far worse ones
out there that have been told.
You also have to wonder
if the writer boosted his memory with a look through TV Comic or perhaps the annuals,
as this is a story that feels a lot more like one of those than the rest of
season twenty-two stupidly ambitious on the one hand and oddly empty on the
other. The blue androids are exactly the sort of thing that would be a good joke
on the printed page but look stupid on television, while the Tardis seat-belts
are straight out of the early days with grandchildren John and Gillian (McCoy
may also have confused his memories, given how close this sequence is to
Pertwee’s ‘clunk-click’ adverts to make using seatbelts in cars and thus
cutting the risk of death and maiming ‘cool’). There’s that larger than life
visual sense too, as if everything has to fit round the giant pictures the
annual stories always had. The story is even paced like an annual story,
running out of steam towards the end as the word-count limit loomed (they went
through hell trying to cut down episode one to speed while beefing episode two
up, even though the main cut seems obvious: that lengthy opening Tardis scene
with endless bitching that doesn’t go anywhere until Vena’s ghost floats past.
It takes 22 minutes before the Tardis lands and the Doctor and Peri join the
adventure – a record at the time, even if it’s trounced by the very next story).
The end result is the one 6th Doctor story that isn’t trying too
hard, which can be refreshing – the problem is that it often isn’t trying hard
enough.
The trouble is, like most
fans with most stories from the annuals, no one is taking this story seriously
besides the writer. Paul Darrow’s performance is legendary: he took the job out
of a long running jokey ‘feud’ with Colin Baker after the soon-to-be Doctor
appeared in the role of Bayban The Butcher in ‘City On The Edge Of The World’,
the sweetest of all Blake’s 7 stories (resident comedy sidekick Vila, outsider
Goudry in yet another Pennant Roberts-directed Who story ‘The Sunmakers’, even gets the girl – for
ten minutes anyway: Pennant directed a lot of Blake’s 7 stories too). Brian
Blessed must have been busy that week as its very much a part written for him:
egocentric, overbearing, loud and shouty. Colin Baker plays it with the air of
a puppy who’s been let off his lead and can truly indulge in going as far out
as possible. To be fair that’s the part as written: it’s impossible to do a
caricature of a futuristic pirate turned biker with any sense of nuance. Eric
Saward, who thought JNT had lost the plot in casing Colin as The Doctor, liked
to bring it up as evidence that maybe they should find someone else. Paul
Darrow, used to being the centre of attention, laughed that he wanted to get
his own back and took to playing Tekker in rehearsals as Richard III, complete
with wig and hump, with his own puppy air of being let out into the wild after
years of playing the emotionless Avon. JNT, who didn’t quite realise what was
going on, was furious. Legend has it that Paul got more ‘producer’s notes’ than
anyone else in his nine year run as producer, toned things down in camera
rehearsals – then went back to doing things his way anyway. For years fans have
bemoaned that Darrow (who’d been so different in his other Who story, as a UNIT
soldier in ‘The Silurians’) was sending the whole thing up and being
silly. But he isn’t, not really: Tekker isn’t a part you can do subtlety. Had
Darrow played it in the same cold austere way as Avon, as the director and
producer wanted, he’d have been overshadowed by the whispering Borad. Tekker
needs to be overbearing and shouty and it’s another part that on paper seems
made for Brian Blessed. He’s really not that bad: certainly compared to Graham
Crowden (who eats the furniture and then has a go at the floorboards for
pudding in the actually very similar role of Soldeed in ‘The Horns Of Nimon’) he’s almost reserved. The
rest of the cast are actually really good too. Jeanne Crowley makes Vena
quietly defiant, a rarity on a planet with so many people declaiming at each
other all the time, and Robert Ashby is for my money on a par with Gabriel
Woolf’s similarly whispering Sutekh, with a makeup prosthetic that looks really
good. David Chandler even makes Herbert a bit of a twit rather than the deeply
irritating smug git he is on paper (like Adric or even more especially Sarah
Jane’s nephew Brendan from ‘K9 and Company’).
Ah yes, Herbert. Here’s
where ‘Timelash’ falls down because, apparently, the godfather of science
fiction H G Wells, got everything he ever knew from his travels with The
Doctor. That seems a tad rude, implying that one of our most imaginative
writers couldn’t come up with all this for himself, but actually Glenn McCoy
was an even bigger fan of HG than he was Dr Who. Which makes it all the more
odd that they should have got his character so spectacularly wrong (as if
someone doing the research muddled him up with bSir Aerthur Conan Doyle).
George Wells (only his parents and his enemies called him by his detested first
name Herbert, which is also why he used his initials on his books) was in real
life blonde and blue eyed, small and stocky, had an eye for the ladies and grew
a moustache as soon as he needed shaving. For his day HG Wells was scandalously
irreligious (so there’s no way the young lad would have greeted the Doctor’s
arrival with a Bible and an incantation), yet as a strict scientist neither was
he interested in the paranormal (so that opening scene of him with a Ouija
board is out). Nobody in 1885, not even someone as imaginative as H G Wells,
would ever have used the expression ‘holy mackerel’ – it’s a 1930s term
popularised by the comedy ‘Amos and Andy’. Plus he had a pronounced cockney
accent. Does any of that sound like ‘this’ Herbert to you? After all he’s,
well, a Herbert, a bit of a twit, who insists on Victorian niceties even in the
wake of impending chaos and who keeps getting under The Doctor’s feet all the
time. Perhaps the most annoying thing at all is that Herbert is painted as being
ordinary, a teacher down on his luck (they apparently paid newly qualified teachers
far more in those days – and no he didn’t have a rich uncle, well not rich
enough to have a luxurious cabin like this!). The real H G Wells was anything
but ordinary and stood out in a crowd even before he’d found fame, with a
string of girls this Herbert could only dream of meeting. The only thing the
script gets like is his Doctory curiosity, but that’s about all. Some fans have
been so dismayed at what has been done to one of the literary greats that
there’s an unofficial acceptance that he’s a ‘different’ HG Wells. But in that
case why are there so many parallels in this story and his works? Check out The
Doctor’s conjuring trick (so like ‘The Invisible Man’), the Borad’s hybrid
experiments (close enough to ‘The Island Of Dr Moreau) and the use of the names
Veena (Weena?) and the Morlocks (clearly
the Morlox) and of course the Tardis itself from the Earth’s first ever time
use of time travel ‘The Time Machine’. McCoy has been much criticised for this
and the final version doesn’t do him any credit, but if anything it’s a
surprise no previous writer had thought of doing this before and it makes much
more sense if you remember that his original draft script featured The Daleks.
Terry Nation pilfered lots from ‘The Time Machine’ in creating the first Dalek
story and the metal meanies and the Thals are very much based on the Morlocks
and Eloi from that story. It makes much more sense if ‘Herbert’ got the idea
from there. Though the idea that the Borad fell from the sky into Inverness and
became the loch ness monster (despite looking more like a human size melted gnu
than a dinosaur) is just stupid and presumably the Skarasen from ‘Terror Of The Zygons’ ate it as a snack. Colin
Baker, who preferred a more modern writer, slips in an ad lib that praises one
of his favourite writers when The Doctor says ‘to be Frank, Herbert…’) Incidentally
H G Wells apparently met another timelord in later life, as The Master has a
personally signed copy of ‘The Time Machine’ in Malcolm Hulke’s novel of ‘Frontier In Space’ (it must have sickened
him no end The Doctor got there first!)
Funnily enough there are
no links in the script to the most obvious H G Wells work ‘War Of the Worlds’,
which continues to cast a shadow over all science fiction nearly 150 years
on. They still keep remaking it every
few years and one sort of remake was the TV series ‘The Tripods’, based on a
book by John Christopher that is more blatant recycling than anything Dr Who
ever did (even in its most Quatermassy days). Proof of how much Michael Grade
hated scifi is that the series was cancelled two series in despite being billed
from the first as a ‘trilogy’ leaving the plot frustratingly unfinished
(basically one of our heroes is dead and the others escape to the mountains to
reconvene and plan their next attack, which never comes - on TV at least). I mention it here because,
as a cost saving device, Herbert’s shack by the loch in Scotland is the shack
on the mountains that was built at great expense for the end of series two of
‘Tripods’ and would have been used across series three. It was, perhaps, the only time the set
designers got lucky in this story, which really got the short straw in every
other detail: the sets are flimsy and empty, the costumes drab and uninspiring
and only The Borad has been made with care. Even there, though, the parts that
go so obviously wrong blind us to the small things that actually go right. I
like the use of triangles in the set that gives Karfel its distinctive look: so
many other sets are square, rectangular or circles that it at least shows a bit
of variety. The shot of a blown-up android actually set on fire (something the
budget doesn’t normally stretch to) is
really powerful. The effect of a ghostly Vena, sent through the Timelash and passing
through the Tardis console room is really good and easily the best in the
story. She looks as if she’s there but not there simultaneously, rather than
one or the other consecutively as in other times Who uses ghostly effects like
this. Jeanne Crowley’s look of unconscious panic is also exactly right for the
story, rather than the gurning lesser actors might have had. Even the simple act of having a production
assistant sitting under a table with a magnet to work the Ouija board is an
effect that would have fans raving in other stories (remember this next time
you see a paranormal haunting series with table-topping over a table-cloth).
Yet still the disasters
keep piling up. Given the extensive location filming for three stories around
this one ‘Timelash’ became one of the few 1980s stories not to have anything
that isn’t filmed in a TV studio: no model shots, no location filming, nothing
and that really doesn’t help the sense of realism. The mistakes in this story,
all caused by lack of funds, keep piling up: there were reportedly several goes
at getting the sets right, not because anything was wrong with them but just
because JNT kept revising the budget down to the point where the final versions
were made of tinsel and string and made in a hurry, without the customary time
to get them right. Most outrageous of all, the Bandril is a puppet and a very
poor one at that – somehow JNT got it into his head that he needed to save
another actor’s wages, even though the
puppet together with the lower fee for an off-screen voice recording meant it
probably cost as much anyway. They could just about get away with this sort of
thing during the first Karfel visit (i.e. when Pertwee was the Doctor) but not
in 1985. It’s so bad it’s laughable and everyone tuning in to see why Michael
Grade wanted to cancel the show had lots of ammunition right there. Compared to that the hose-pipe-with-a-face
Morlocks and the silly blue androids with the irritating sing-song voices
always seem to get short shrift but they shouldn’t: in any other production of
the 1980s they’d be the worst thing here, it’s only the Bandril that makes them
seem comparatively okay. At least when other stories in this era go so
spectacularly wrong, like ‘Time and The Rani’
and ‘The Twin Dilemma’, at least they
look good. More or less. Even the drawing of the 3rd Doctor,
provided by a fan named Gail Bennett that JNT met at one of the US conventions,
is pretty awful and given the anecdotes in the making of his own stories I’m
surprised Pertwee didn’t moan about the length of his nose; certainly there were
far better fan artists out there. Why not get one of the Target cover artists
to do it? In short, ‘Timelash’ looks so awful it would have needed a great
script to make you forget everything else – and it isn’t a great script. It’s
an okay one.
For instance, The Doctor
and Peri are both badly catered for here. McCoy wrote this story back when the
only thing he had to go on was their more angtsy relationship from ‘Twin
Dilemma’ and he’s captured it to the letter, every bit of sarcasm intact and
every opportunity for bitchiness fulfilled. Only the two aren’t like that
anymore: it was always the plan to soften this Doctor up over time, a plan sped
up when it became clear during the off-season how many fans hated it. Following
the relative pallyness of ‘The Two Doctor’s it seems weird and out of place. By
rights it’s the sort of thing the script editor should have picked up on, but
Saward is having a bad day: he’s fallen behind more deadlines than he can count
and his task is to get this thing makeable, not make it good. There’s no excuse
though for why the part he added (the seven minutes of padding towards the end
when The Doctor shoos Peri out the Tardis but finds that Herbert has stowed
away and is facing certain death with him instead) is the worst scene in the
story – and that’s from someone who semi-created both these characters and
ought to know them well by now. There’s a moment when Peri shows off her botany
skills in the face of some scary plants (that don’t need to be there from a
script point of view, but help sell the idea of Karfel as a ‘real’ world) but
otherwise she’s kidnapped, chained at the neck, groped, manhandled and very nearly becomes The Borad’s bride. Pretty
as Nicola Bryant is, it’s odd that so many aliens in her era seem to fancy her
– even the ones that aren’t Human. Incidentally, for those weird fans who feel
Peri is ‘asking for it’ by the way she dresses, she’s got something demure out
of the Tardis wardrobe so is all covered for once (it looks a bit like Nyssa’s
costume in fact: maybe it’s the presence of the ‘Keeper
Of Traken’?) The Doctor is by turns brash and oddly unassertive here,
alternating between out shouting the baddies and trying to be the still calm
centre the story needs. Colin is too good an actor to blow things completely,
but you can tell at times that he’s jetlagged and less energetic than usual
(both he and Nicola kept having to break off from filming, for American
conventions and one of JNTs endless pantos) and raises his gear only when he’s
against Tekker or The Borad. There’s little dialogue for either of them to get
their teeth into here as most of it is simple, bordering on puerile (though
this script was unlucky coming after the master, Bob Holmes; had it been on
straight after Pip ‘n Jane Baker we’d have been talking about what a relief it
is to have people speaking sentences that normal people would say). The on memorable
line is one added by Colin Baker in rehearsals (my third favourite Dr Who
insult, that Tekker is a ‘microcephalic apostate’ (it basically means ‘you generically
modified religious heretic’. As to the weird ‘Pillion of Ossa’ reference, which
is in the script, it’s when two twins stormed mount Olympus by putting Mount
Pillion on top of Mount Ossa yet still failed – basically it means ‘a double
whammy and yet you still couldn’t get the job done properly’.
Perhaps the biggest
problem with ‘Timelash’ is that, even though all the scenes run together quite nicely
and actually make a kind of sense (quite a rarity in the mid 1980s) the only memorable
things that happen are when something goes wrong: the Borad revelation should
be shocking but it’s just ho-hum, the cliffhanger of the Doctor pushed into the
Timelash should be horrific but is too easily solved. Only the rather gruesome scene
of the zapped rebel vapourised yet still falling to the ground with a thud and
the android set on fire stay in the memory – well, those and the clumsy reveal
of the androids, the morlocks and the Bandril anyway. No wonder the 3rd Dr and
Jo never bother to mention their off-screen adventures on Karfel to anybody- it’s
not a place where anything interesting ever seems to happen. The original
script had far more imagination, what with the Borad being another amphibious
monster who lived on a planet he’s terraformed into a series of rockpools, but
after paying for a recreation of the Industrial Revolution and a trip to Seville
and with the similar Sil so recently on TV there was no way that was going to
make it to TV. All this story has as a visual feast, post monster reveal and Bandril
puppet, are the Borad’s hatred of mirrors (making it even weirder the Timelash is
dressed in tinsel – itself recycling from the Mara stories where evil can’t
bear to look at itself) which isn’t really in the same league. It’s a shame:
people always talk about McCoy’s inexperience but he’s not a bad writer by any
means, just an inexperienced one who doesn’t yet know the tricks of writing
around a Dr Who budget and making the background so intrinsic to the plot
nobody could get rid of it to save a bit of cash.
The DVD range liner notes,
which are infectiously enthusiastic about even the worst of stories, can’t find
anything nice to say about ‘Timelash’ and are just a long list of all the
problems and faults of this story and a half-hearted ‘though it isn’t all bad’
at the bottom. Which must have really annoyed the fans who don’t know their fanlore
and bought it full price (perhaps because Paul darrow was on the cover). Even
so, I don’t mind it. ‘Timelash’ isn’t terrible and the worst story ever made –
it’s lacklustre and cheap that’s all. Frankly, it's scifi on the BBC. Even in
the 1980s, if you're watching Dr Who for FX and pricey model shots and scenery
then, honestly, you might be watching the wrong show. What looked horrific and
unwatchable in 1985 (and into the 1990s) doesn’t seem so bad now, part and
parcel in the fact that you’re watching telly from yesteryear. In fact ‘Timelash’
is one of those stories that’s aged rather better than some of those around it:
fans who’ve worked backwards from the modern series have been known to wince at
the casual sexism and racism of certain other stories but ‘Timelash’ has a
strong female role in the rebel Vena without having to resort to the clichés of
drama queen or ice maiden (The Rani being a curious mixture of both). The
treatment of the Borad’s self-inflicted disability is handled well, not done
purely for shock value but an intrinsic part of his character All these years
on. It also makes more sense now that we’ve had stories more like this one –
the treatment of H G Wells, which once seemed like sacrilege, is at one with
the 21st century’s treatment of Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, Charles
Dickens et al. Putting a big name in a story and writing a plot around someone
who’s featured on a banknote or a stamp is the Russell T Davies way of doing
things and even having people appear on screens to tell us the plot is a very ‘comeback’
way of doing things. If any viewer of the modern series was ever unlucky enough
to pick this story at random to start their watch of classic stories 1) they
probably never hung around to watch any others but 2) they’d have noticed a lot
of similarities in the 45 minute length’s ebb and flows and the way the plot
centres around it’s big centre pieces with more emotion than average for 1980s
Who to boot. Even back in the days when Russell T Davies was doing Children’s Ward’,
however, this didn’t seem as awful to me as it seemed to other people. There
are some Dr Who stories I’d rather be sent through the Timelash for than have
to watch again (in my nightmares I now see Kylie Minogue as a shouty dominator
yelling ‘Benny oh my Benny’ while the Titanic crash-lands into Ashildr’s Viking
hordes) but ‘Timelash’ isn’t one of them. It’s poor not bad, ordinary rather
than wretched, underfunded rather than repellent and with a story that’s overly
familiar rather than horribly written. It’s a story that deep down at the heart
of it is all about a lack of love, so it’s sad that so many fans have no love
for this story. You’d never show it to your best friend, but it’s not one you’d
show to your worst enemy either. All that said though it was the absolute worst
story to be running when Michael Grade announced the series was being ‘rested’
and everyone turned in to see if he was right and concluded he was. Most fans
wanted to scream, ‘it isn’t like this every week, honest!’ Almost as if the
Tekker of the BBC had read the scripts and knew just when to break the news to
everyone…
POSITIVES + ‘Timelash’
is – shockingly - the only story to date that had a female composer. It’s
rather a good one: though this is Elizabeth Parker’s only credit for the score
she’s worked on a lot of programmes as Dick Mills’ assistant at the Radiophonic
Workshop (taking over full time whenever he was on holiday as per ‘Stones Of Blood’) and knows Dr Who well (Paul
Darrow too – she was the regular composer on ‘Blake’s 7’ as well and, dare I
say it, their average score is better than Who’s average score). Her score is
as synthy and artificially 1980s as all the others in the period but it also
sounds like music rather than random computer generated noise. Other composers of
this era think the score is there to grab people’s attention but Parker is far
more subtle: she’s always there when she’s needed but the fact the music blends
into the background is a plus not a minus. They should have used her more. She’s
now more famous for her work on David Attenborough’s wildlife documentaries, so
Dr Who’s vast array of weird creatures was probably good practice.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Sadly we’ve
still never seen the full story of what the 3rd Doctor got up to on Karfel
for his picture to be plastered everywhere across the planet – and you can see
why no writer has yet wanted to write a sequel for such an unloved story - but
it is mentioned again in the ‘Missing Adventures’ novel ‘Speed Of Light’
(1996). Very briefly. The Tardis goes wrong as The Doctor plans to go there and
instead he talks about wanting to go ‘another day’ (this story is set right
before ‘The Green Death’ so The
Tardis must take off again more or less as soon as it gets home to UNIT HQ.
Possibly Mike is the ‘other’ companion mentioned in ‘Timelash’, but nobody on
Karfel thought to draw his picture, so for all we know it’s Benton or the
Brigadier!) Mostly though author Paul Leonard’s is more interested in his planet
Looma, one going through its own industrial Erath-like revolution, with Jo
persuading the Doctor to take Mike (very much her boyfriend in this brief
period between alien romances) with them in the Tardis. He ends up fighting a
brawl to the death while Jo is involved in a miner’s strike, so business as
usual really! Poor Mike is so shaken by events he never asks to travel in the
Tardis again! (Could it be, too, that seeing the damage the industrial
revolution causes in this story makes him join ‘Operation Golden Age’ in ‘The Invasion
Of The Dinosaurs’?) Plus
points: Looma feels like one of the more believable Who planets, with a low
gravity and weird wildlife and the author has clearly done at least some
homework about how such a planet would behave that makes it really come to life.
But the characters are behaving very oddly (especially Jo, who’s almost
bloodthirsty) and you kind of know where the plot’s going once it arrives and
there’s a very ‘Timelash’ sense of mediocrity about the whole thing. A lost
opportunity: Mike Yates’ only trip in the Tardis (as far as we know) ought to
be a much bigger deal than this!
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Two Doctors’ next ‘Revelation
Of The Daleks’
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