Revenge Of The Cybermen: Ranking - 222

 Revenge Of The Cybermen

(Season 12, Dr 4 with Sarah Jane and Harry, 19/4/1975-10/5/1975,  producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, script editor: Robert Holmes, writer: Gerry Davis with Robert Holmes (uncredited), director: Michael E Briant)

'Now that the cybermen have feelings, what next? Rage of the Cybermen? Grief of the Cybermen? Disgust Of The Cybermen? Boredom of the Cybermen? Smugness of the Cybermen? Shyness of the Cybermen? Love Of The Cybermen?' 

Ranking: 222

If you were to ask the average fan to come up with the perfect DW story...well they wouldn’t agree about anything because there is no such thing as an average DW fan and all episodes, stories, doctors, monsters and plots are loved by somebody and debating this stuff is an endless DW fan past-time. But just say they did, as a common denominator they would probably come up with Tom Baker (most popular Doctor?), Sarah Jane Smith (most popular companion?) up against a popular monsters (say for a second you can’t have Daleks…well that’s the Cybermen right?) with Kevin Stoney in the credits (most popular supporting humanoid?!) Behind the scenes you’d have Philip Hinchcliffe in as producer, Robert Holmes as script editor and maybe even re-use the sets from another really popular story (‘Ark In Space’). In short you’d have ‘Revenge Of The Cybermen’, the story that more than any other (outside possibly ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ from the same season) ticks all the boxes. BBC video certainly thought so, ignoring the advice of most fans and making this the first ever Dr Who video available, on the understanding that if it was a big flop there might never be another one. So if all the ingredients were there, what happened? How did ‘Revenge Of The Cybermen’ become the whipping boy for at least two different generations of Whovians?

Well, context and expectations are everything. Say you saw this on first broadcast, as the finale to the most gripping season of Dr Who there had been in years, directly after ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ so you’ve just seen how well Dr Who can do returning monsters. You’ve been waiting for a return of the Cyberman for six years since your older sibling/parent/neighbour/friend/ dog/pet cybermat told you how scary there were – and if they were that scary in black-and-white what the hell must they be like in colour? You’ve heard about that cast, fallen in love with that production team and especially the new Doctor, seen in the credits of the Radio Times that they’ve even got one of the original Cyber-writers. And you get…this, the B moviest Dr Who B movie that ever there was. Your expectations are just too high. Ditto if you saw this in the 1980s. You’ve just bought your first home video player and you’re the first in the street to own one. You search in vain for videos of science-fiction you’ve actually heard of and to your shock see a Dr Who video. It’s the only one and even though you’ve never heard of it, it must be good right? What sort of idiot would release an unpopular video first? It costs you £90, that’s £300 in 2025 money, you’ve saved up for ages and then you sit down to watch it and you watch…this. If E-bay had existed in 1983 there would be a lot of secondhand copies thrown away out of disgruntlement.  

So is it up to ‘Genesis’? Heck no. While I’m not the sort of fan who thinks ‘Genesis’ is the perfect story (far from it) there’s a tension, a seriousness, a higher level of storytelling that puts it above any small ambition to entertain that this paltry little story has. Is it worth £385? Gosh no. I’m not entirely sure it’s worth the price I paid for the DVD in the sale to be honest, but then it was a twin-pack with ‘Silver Nemesis’ (and that one isn’t anybody’s idea of a perfect Dr Who story). This story clearly has none of the ‘magic’ that’s there in all the other stories from Tom Baker’s first season, which whether you think it’s the pinnacle of Dr Who or not (and I don’t) clearly have…something special going on for it, a chemistry of the people in front and behind the cameras. However see it the way I did, in a jumble of stories from other eras, after reading in so any guidebooks about how this was the worst thing that happened to Dr Who ever and…it’s not that bad. ‘Revenge’ is actually quite good. The cast really are good, even if the characters they’re playing are as one-dimensional as those flexi-discs you used to get stuck to cereal cartons. The writing makes a few salient points, even if none of them are wholly original. There’s some really good location footage in Wookey Hole, a location that was crying out to be in a Dr Who story at some point. You certainly can’t accuse this story of being ‘boring’, the way you can a few of the ‘classic’ stories.This isn’t one of those flops where everyone is phoning it in either - everyone is trying their hardest to make this work. This is the thing though: you can only enjoy it if you already aren’t expecting much from it. If you come to ‘Revenge’ thinking it’s in any way special or inventive or important it will let you down. If you come to it expecting the worst you’ll be pleasantly surprised. 

Especially if you know the difficult circumstances behind making it. Worried that incoming inexperienced Phillip Hinchcliffe was inheriting a blank sheet of paper, outgoing producer Barry Letts put together a basic season, inviting lots of regular old hands to write scripts and ensuring that there were at least two big audience-pullers in Dalek and Cybermen stories. Alas, though that’s one-time script editor and Cyber co-creator Gerry Davis on the credits, the end result has very little to do with what he originally wrote and only a minimum of connection to what he was asked to re-write (which you can now hear thanks to Big Finish – see below in the ‘prequels’ column). Davis, having not seen the programme in a while or been updated how it worked now, sent in a very Troughton-esque script (complete with individual episode titles: ‘The Beacon In Space’  ‘The Plague Carriers’ ‘The Gold Miners’ and ‘The Battle For Nerva’) about a base under siege. Only it was a weird kind of base: asked to come up with an idea for what the ‘Nerva’ beacon set from ‘The Ark In Space’ used to be, Davis decided it was a giant floating casino in space where the players had been wiped out by a giant space plague. Just as a lot of casinos are run by undesirables on Earth as a cover up for something else (take your pick from mafia gangs and outright crooks) so this one is secretly run by the Cybermen luring Humans in with a promise of money and giving them a promise of death instead on their way to running the universe. If nothing else it would have been a fun and quirky script, big on the claustrophobia Davis made his name in (with just one set there would be nowhere for the survivors or the Tardis crew to escape), recycled in part in Gerry’s 1978 series ‘Vega$’ (which is a more down to Earth version set in a casino, without the silver giants or space plague). Script editor Bob Holmes wasn’t keen: he sent in a few notes, explaining that Dr Who actually had budget for more than one set nowadays and to drop the casino angle (weirdly he also suggested that Davis had pitched it for the same younger audience Dr Who used to have rather than the adult audience they were trying to grow – which makes you wonder what gambling obsessed pre-teens he was hanging around with).  Holmes liked the plague angle though, so that got moved to the front, with the casino now a base in an asteroid and with the addition of lots of new sets and a bunch of minor miner characters back on the nearest planet. Only Holmes wasn’t that keen on this version either. Eventually Gerry got paid off, with the option of keeping his name on the credits (which he kept) and Holmes set about tweaking the story, relegating the Cybermen to the sidelines and bringing the miners forward (who became the Vogans). If you’ve come here from our ‘Ark In Space’ story then you’ll know that, by a strange quirk of fate, that expensive space station set ended up being built for two stories – both of which were re-written so substantially that the events that were intended to take place there never actually happened! In the end neither of its authors were that fond of it: Davis didn’t like the changes Holmes made (despite being characteristically polite when asked by fans and interviewers, the correspondence between them shows a different story) while the Cyber-trappings he’d been handed to begin with were everything Holmes wanted to get away from.

The story as finished is a typically well made Holmesian story, full of entertaining double-acts and something extra going on under the surface, but it feels as if Holmes is so trapped by fitting already made sets and already cast characters in some cases that he has no room to breathe. More than any other of his written/re-written scripts (even ‘The Power Of Kroll’ has a gigantic squid) this one falls back on things Dr Who had done before without anything new to fill the gaps: a fight between the ‘old guard’ and the ‘new way’ (see ‘The Sensorites’ and the two Peladon stories), a space virus (just like ‘The Silurians’) and an exploding bomb (every other story), the Doctor thwarting a planned cyber invasion and Sarah Jane being possessed, all elements done many times elsewhere and usually better than here.You can tell that Holmes’ heart isn’t truly in it and hard as the cast try to make it seem as if this really could be the end of the world we’ve seen various Doctors escape far worse so many times you lose all manner of tension. It doesn’t help that you don’t actually care that much about what’s going on. The setting of Voga never really comes to life either: in the final draft it’s been changed to a military base orbiting Jupiter, where soldiers keep an eye on asteroids that might attack Earth, which must be one of the daftest settings in all of Who. The space station clearly needs to orbit a planet so they’ve chosen the biggest one, Jupiter, but any asteroid they see from there is going to be sucked in by Jupiter’s massive gravitational pull anyway, it isn’t going to hit the Earth: this setting needs to be a ship in outer space (only Holmes’ hands are tied, of course, with sharing the budget with ‘The Ark In Space’). Plus what are they going to do about it exactly? Blowing an asteroid up would just send large chunks scattering in all directions and while they might do less damage in one go it would surely cause a lot more damage in smaller pieces back on Earth (you only need one small chunk of asteroid to cause harm if it falls in the right place to wipe out all life, as the dinosaurs might or might not have found out, depending which scientist you read). Honestly the casino was a far less silly setting. The Vogans who live on the planet Voga and get mixed up in everything are a peculiarly faceless bunch too, despite some of the best casting around, not least because they’re wearing the weirdest masks ever seen on the series (asked to make them different to both the Cybermen and his own Draconians from ‘Frontier In Space’ mask maestro John Friedlander went for a half-way stage where the actors got to use their real mouths but everything else was covered; allegedly they were moulded on Arnold Ridley’s face, Godfrey from Dad’s Army, after the actor needed a cast for another role and the Dr Who story hadn’t been cast yet, but then that anecdote was from David Collings and he might just have been pulling our leg). You just don’t believe in this place or why people are there.

If the name ‘Voga’ rings a bell then maybe you recognise from Douglas Adams’ blobby green poets in ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ (he almost certainly got it from this story, though they’re nothing alike) or you recognise the mythological story about an island of gold. It’s what greedy ol’ Christopher Columbus was searching for when he accidentally discovered America instead (I’ve always wondered if he was working from  a genuine tip-off but overshot and went too far North and that the legend was actually about ‘The Aztecs’ further South, as for them gold was so common it was in everything – much to their downfall when the Spanish turned up). Which leads in to the story’s biggest clunker: The Cybermen, those invincible silver giants who are close to being indestructible, now have an allergic reaction to gold. Sadly it’s all downhill from them from now on, as The Doctor only has to waft a bit of gold in their faces and these impenetrable humongous forces do the cartoon equivalent of standing on a chair and going ‘ugh, get it away from me!’ They’ll never seem quite as scary again. Had the Doctor only known about their allergies to gold when he first met them in 1966 and invited them to, say, a ‘cash my gold’ kiosk their previous encounters would have been one heck of a lot shorter. Plus it’s daft: why would a bunch of cyborg conversions suddenly develop an allergy to gold? They’re not supernatural werewolves! Back in the days when this story was set on a casino that at least made some sort of sense: casinos are after all full of gold and it was meant to act as the werewolf equivalent of a ‘silver bullet’, with an explanation that the metal had particular magical pseudo-science properties that meant Cybermen were afraid of it, explaining away millennia of Mankind’s obsession with this rare and precious metal (which we’d just forgotten that we once hoarded to keep the Cybermen away rather than pay bills). Gold has no relevance to this story, except that it just happens to be what the Vogans have been mining on their amazingly accurately titled planet(which just happens to mirror an ancient Earth legend). But Holmes, with a deadline looming, has no time to rewrite the ending and can’t think of anything better, so in it goes. In fact its final ending is even worse, because how is it solved? (half-spoilers, because believe me you’re going to be disappointed anyway, it might as well be now…) Basically the Doctor gets tied up in the part of the cybership where he can communicate their dastardly plan to the planet Voga and the most ruthlessly efficient race in the universe basically neglect to tie him up properly. Oops! There is, at least, a decent plot twist in there that people often miss, buried as it is in all the nonsense: The Cybermen ‘lose’ not just because the Doctor tricks them but because their logical way of thinking means they never think for a second the Vogans would sacrifice themselves for a cause they won’t live to see. In an era of IRA bomb attacks and terrorism growing in the world it gave this story a contemporary sheen, the sense that you were dealing in a new era of fanatics, not tacticians.  

The way the Cybermen are treated in this story goes further than that though: Holmes doesn’t understand them at all. If you were a child watching this who was too young to see their last appearance (‘Wheel In Space’) you’d have no idea of their tragic backstory, that they were once ‘people like us’ (just a little taller) who’s planet was sent out of orbit through no fault of their own and who slowly converted their bodies to cope with the new climate, until there was nothing left but a logical brain that carried on trying to survive long after any real ‘Human’ (or ‘Mondasian’) part of them was left. Holmes thinks of the Cybermen as robots and that makes them far less scary. Colour has not been kind to them either: being silver they looked good in black-and-white, half in the shadows; in colour grey tends to fade into the background. The Cyber leader has had his jug handles painted black, just so we can see which one is which, something that just seems silly (it’s odd they didn’t go with an added dome the way the 1960s did). The costume department thought the ‘accordion ‘n’ cutlery’ look was silly so gave them a big redesign, one most fans think of as ‘the’ Cybermen (and which will still be around as late as ‘Silver Nemesis’ in 1988) but for me they don’t look as scary: the whole point of the early Cybermen was that they were home-made, put together out of desperation and were all slightly different; this lot just look like a faceless army. After six years away almost nobody who’d worked with The Cybermen was left in the show and it was discovered in a panic that nobody could quite remember the ring modular settings to distort the voices. Besides, director Michael Briant thought it would be better to have actors working in ‘real’ time rather than having people re-act to pre-recorded tape so a new voice was cobbled together, that lost the ‘bottom end’ of the actor’s voices in post-production and had added echo. It just sounds silly. Full marks to Christopher Robbie for his performance as the latest in a long line of Cyber Leaders though – it’s a shame he wasn’t invited back (you might remember him as superhero The Karkus in ‘The Mind Robber’!) Even without te vocal issues, though, they’re not right at all, with dialogue that’s full of wild fury (not unlike The Daleks) rather than cold, hard Cyber logic. Even the body language is all wrong: just check out the one who speaks with his hands on his hips as if he’s performing at Eurovision and about to whip his Cyber-trousers off. The Wookey Hole filming, which would have been perfect for any smaller monster, also causes problems with the six-seven foot actors having to stoop at times. You can’t be scared of a monster that stoops, it’s official. Worst yet is the way the Cybermen are treated in this story, expected to behave like any other villain and invade. Cybermen don’t have the legs for that, not in those bulky suits. They shouldn’t be walking and talking, they should be standing still and scaring. They were made to loom, not lumber. The Doctor, once more terrified of The Cybermen than any single other menace and who triggered his first regeneration is now reduced to mocking them for being ‘pathetic tin soldiers skulking round the galaxy’ – and if even he isn’t scared of them why should we be?

The Cybermats are treated a little better. I prefer their redesign compared to the Cybermen one, moving the metal rodents back to the original conception, which had been to have them like silverfish. Unfortunately they’re not very mobile though (a case of having so many electronics in the nose that it meant they kept toppling over, so most of the time you see them it’s the actor holding them up to their necks and going ‘aaaaah!’ and you can tell). I have a soft spot for cybermats though and if you’d never seen them before (it had been six years after all) you can understand why people’s instincts were to go towards them and touch them, before dropping down dead. Like the first wave of many a cyber invasion they make some kind of sense – it’s later things get a bit weird.

That plague plot never quite works either. Gerry Davis intended it to be like the ‘Moonbase’ virus, with the creepy look of people’s veins coming up red, as if they were slowly turning into Cybermen part by part, with cyber technology coursing through their body. Holmes, always more into hammer horror than science, just has a lot of corpses littering the floor which isn’t quite the same thing. We know, of course, from covid how quickly viruses can spread (and full marks to the Vogans for wearing masks, which is more than 99% of Humans seem to be doing despite the lives it would save, even if the numpties cover everything but their mouths) but there’s no sense of scale to this story. We’re told how scary the virus is – we don’t really see it. We don’t really know how many planets its spread to or how many people it’s killed. We don’t even know which life-forms are susceptible to it. Those of you who, like me, spent lockdown going through old Dr Whos looking for clues on how to ‘cure’ viruses are unlucky too: The Doctor sends sick patients through a transmit beam to safety, because ‘everything that isn’t Human gets taken out by the beams’. That seems an oddly specific thing for a Transmat beam to do but also leads to a rather unfortunate continuity problem: shouldn’t Sarah Jane be entirely naked when she passes through, with all her clothes left behind? And shouldn’t the Cybermen who use it be a collection of wired, gloves, boots and an accordion? Compared to the way plague is handled in ‘Dr Who and The Silurians’ and even ‘Praxeus’ (for all its other faults as a story) the threat just doesn’t come through.  At least we’re saved the equivalent of the giant prawn from ‘The Invisible Enemy’ I suppose.

Maybe the reason this story doesn’t quite wok is the end of term silliness, as the acting causes even seasoned professionals who should know what they’re doing to struggle to seem even vaguely believable. For one of the best things about ‘revenge’ is the great cast, while one of the worst is how they’re wasted. This is the only thing in his long career Kevin Stoney wasn’t  magnificent in, with Tyrum a poor third part in Who to go alongside such great roles as Mavic Chen (see ‘The Daleks’ Masterplan’) and Tobias Vaughan (‘The Invasion’), two of the greatest supporting roles in the series. But then he does have that dialogue to read out and he has a whacking great mask on his head for most of the story. David Collings, an actor who will go on to steal the show in both ‘The Robots Of Death’ and ‘Mawdryn Undead’ (and is perhaps best remembered for being ‘Silver’ in ‘Sapphire and Steel’ – this story would be over much quicker if they’d had a crossover with ‘Gold’!) struggles as Vorus. Which is a shame because their clash, over whether Voga should stay isolationist or expand into the outer universe, is a god hook to hang the script on and one that Holmes obviously cares about more than Cybermen. It’s that age-old debate that’s been running ever since the hippie Thals met the Nazi Daleks head on (in, umm, ‘The Daleks’), with Dr Who one of the few series children watched with their parents and which could discuss what sort of world they’d inherit. For once, though, it’s the other way around: it’s the elder man who’s the pacifist and the younger one who wants to go to war (a sign, perhaps, of how the audience were growing up and how dead the ‘hippie dream’ was by 1975 with punk on the way; perhaps things have changed enough for this to be a discussion between the hippie baby boomer children of the 1960s and their Generation X younger siblings?) For all the changes, though, Dr Who still chooses the hippie approach: Holmes clearly sides with Tyrum who might be boring but is a safe pair of hands (not that many Whovians can get past the idea of Kevin being a ‘goody’ for a change) over the reckless, hot-headed Vorus. That leads to an interesting debate in and of itself, though, because this isn’t just a discussion of war: Vorus wants Voga to take its place in the outer universe, to be part of things again, while Tyrum wants to separate it: in Brexit terms it’s a re-run of ‘The Monster Of Peladon’ that seems oddly un-Who like (practically every other story but that one is about how Earth especially is part of a bigger universe and can’t separate itself from other worlds). The other characters, alas, are just forgettable.

This is, at least, a really strong story for the regulars. Tom Baker has been straining at the leash to have more input into his Doctor and feels comfortable enough in the role to push for ideas against crew members more experienced than him. He got on particularly well with the director, who allowed all sorts of things future directors would just automatically say no to and many of the best gags in this rather sombre story are his: The Doctor emptying his pockets of all sorts of things and then spending the next few scenes playing with his re-discovered yo-yo while authority figures try to get him to be serious, something that endeared him to a generation of youngsters more than any other scene. The ‘three monkeys’ shot when he’s taking refuge with two Humans, Lester and Stevenson,his hands over his eyes (while theirs are over their mouth or ears). The banter with Sarah Jane Smith that makes them seem like the best of friends (which they really were by now, in real life). His impassioned plea that ‘Harry Sullivan is an imbecile!’ right after his friend has fallen into the biggest trap there is and set a bomb off on his head. Holmes has seen Ian Marter in action by now and tailored Harry’s good-natured bubbling to fit the actor better: he’s less jolly hockey sticks in this story and more a good-natured bumbler, behaving the way most of us probably would if we were whisked off into space (well, me anyway). Sarah gets the short straw, given that she’s infected early on and sent out the way as atypical damsel in distress, but even then Elisabeth Sladen makes the most of what she gets, making Sarah stoic rather than wet. They feel like a team, this trio, who really do have each other’s backs and who act as one even more than the Cybermen do.

If you have to have lumbering Cybermen, too, Wookey Hole is the place to have them despite the stoop. The director came across the Iron Age caves by chance on holiday in Somerset and thought they’d be a great idea for a Dr Who story, so the next time he got handed one he submitted a request for location filming there. It wasn’t too far out the way from TV centre (not like, you know, going to Scotland or something ridiculous – see next story ‘Terror Of The Zygons’, where West Sussex doubles for Loch Ness) and had caverns, caves, tunnels, lakes, stalagmites: everything you could ever need and which seemed suitably ‘alien’. What’s more the owners were actually Madame Tussauds – yes, the waxworks! – who were getting on famously with the production team now that they had a Tom Baker model that was one of their most popular exhibits (by a funny coincidence Tom Baker had sort of been there before in fact: Wookey Hole was where they kept the waxworks when the Museum was shut for repairs as the airy but dry conditions kept the waxworks in better nick than being indoors). So Dr Who was granted use of the opening three chambers and made very good use of them, while being ‘inside’ meant that the crew could control the lighting better, filming most of the day without having to worry about natural light (although the thick cave walls also blocked out the use of walkie talkies, which the floor manager traditionally used to pass on information from the director, causing holdups while they did things the old fashioned way by passing messages on). However even when the plot is being silly there’s a nice lot to look at across this story. However something didn’t seem to want them there. One of the chambers was named ‘The Witch’s Kitchen’ after an 18^th century myth about the biggest stalagmite which seemed to end in a pointy witch’s hat, said to be a witch who was turned to stone. One of the cave guides spooked cast and crew by telling them to be careful ‘because the witch doesn’t want you here’. An electrician between scenes decided he would show he wasn’t spooked by getting a cloak and hat from the costume department and placing them on top. Soon after a ladder broke without explanation and he tumbled to the floor, breaking his leg. Assistant floor manager Rosemary Hester collapsed out of the blue and a replacement had to be bussed in. Unit armour Jack Wells fell sick a day later and had to drop out too. During a night shoot the director, unable to sleep, came to look around for the next day and spotted a man in subterranean gear. Heading back to the main entrance he went to ask if they were doing maintenance work and if he should come back later, but the security guard was puzzled: no one had been in or out since his own team had left that day; Hinchcliffe was spooked when, asking around later, he found out a diver had died there not long before. The planned stunt with the boat on the lake went wrong: the boats always worked fine on the surface but always played up the minute they got into the tunnels. Stuntman Terry Walsh wasn’t required for it, but he felt that something bad was about to happen so dressed up in his frogsuit ‘just in case’ to much teasing. When Elisabeth Sladen went to move the boat it went out of control, heading straight for the cave wall. She had no choice but to leap out at the last moment into the lake and sank like a stone – that might have been her last scene if not for the quick-thinking Walsh. Other members of the crew kept seeing people out the corner of their eye or hearing whispers from people who weren’t there  (a real shame they weren’t doing, say, ‘Ghostlight’ or ‘Hide’ or ‘Listen’ one of those Dr Who scripts heavy on supernaturals or we’d be raving about the special effects to this day). So it was a jittery cast and crew that came out linking into the light and as such you can forgive a lot of them for not quite giving of their best and understand why Dr Who has never been brave enough to film there again since. Even so, as a location on screen the caves look fabulous.

So even if the plots a bit derivative and the actors aren’t used to their best at least it looks good – and goodness knows there are Dr Whos around with dumber ideas and more wasted actors (and monsters). ‘Revenge’ really isn’t that bad – perhaps more than any other Dr Who story certainly from the 1970s, it’s a B movie (one so Bond-like at times it even recycles a prop, the radio transmitter disguised as a clothes brush featured in ‘Live and Let Die’ a couple of years earlier: it was physically handed over by Roger Moore himself, at the BBC for an interview, for which he received the princely sum of two shillings and sixpence), one full of daft ‘it’s behind you’ thrills and spills you aren’t meant to think about too much. Give or take the duff masks (it is a sad fact that half this story is actors in blank Cyber masks talking to Vogans in near-blank masks, which doesn’t make for gripping telly) and variable performances it’s pretty handily made too, as B movies go, with a pace that never lets up and always something going on. It’s just sadly not that great either, certainly not that deep, without the usual ideas that linger in the mind after watching a really good story. Something that rather sums this story up is the archive shot of the Voga rocket sent into space…which still has ‘United States’ written on the side (because they got it from NASA). Great ideas, lots of mistakes in the execution of the details. ‘Revenge’ was an odd choice for a season finale (especially as it was recorded before ‘Genesis’) and an even odder choice as a first Who video (legend has it that, not quite knowing what they had in their archives yet, the BBC asked fans at a Longleat convention what story they most wanted to see again and ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ won. Only it was still missing in 1983 so they obviously couldn’t put that out and rather sheepishly went with a Cybermen story featuring the Doctor who won the poll votes as best instead). It’s a funny story this one: all the ingredients are there for a cracker but it never quite comes together.  The result is far from worthless. You still get all those ingredients working, particularly the 4th Doctor-Sarah Jane combo at their most instinctive and natural, it’s well acted (even behind masks speaking stilted dialogue this cast are too talented to be bad), the location’s nicely spooky and different (and suitably alien!) while there’s a lot of action to distract you from the plot. Certainly other Dr Who stories, even from the same era, mess up individual parts a lot more than ‘Revenge’ ever does, but then that’s arguably because they tried harder – this story isn’t really trying, just filling in a hole that everyone inherited from Barry Letts that nobody really wants to fill. It will be another seven years before we get another Cybermen story after the backlash this one got. Which is logical, but harsh. The thing is, though ‘Revenge’ doesn’t deserve the reputation it gets. This is a story too good to be awful and made to sit on the naughty step like the really bad stories; it’s made by one of the best writing/editing/casting/directing teams the series ever had. It’s just nowhere near as good as it should be with all that going for it.  

It’s sad that, if he’d still been watching (reports differ as to when he stopped), ‘Revenge Of the Cybermen’ would have been the last story William Hartnell ever saw before he passed away. This story got a boost in ratings for its last three episodes partly because of the news as a generation who’d moved away from Who became nostalgic. Though it’s fitting it should be during a Cybermen story (see ‘The Tenth Planet’) and in a way fitting that it should be one that recycled so many ideas created in the Hartnell era (plague, invasion, brainwashing) it’s a shame it wasn’t a better one to remember him by.

POSITIVES + The sets. It was a clever idea to recycle the pricey ones from ‘Ark In Space’ for the next story in production (with less manpower needed changing the sets over) and to set the action there again but thousands of years earlier and lighting and shooting it so that it looks very different at times. By 1975 standards it really does feel like a fully functioning space station rather than just a set and the 'missing' parts of the corridor with stars chromakeyed in are an extra touch most directors wouldn’t both with that’s really effective at making it look as if we’re in space. Even here, though, it felt as if ‘Ark’ used the same sets better, making them seem more claustrophobic and threatening. You might notice the distinctive spiral symbol on everything too and wonder when the timelords are turning up: actually this was designer Roger Murray-Leach’s first go at the Gallifreyan symbol for the ‘Seal of Rassilon’, which everyone liked so much here he decided to recycle for ‘The Deadly Assassin’, figuring everyone would have forgotten about the planet Voga by then. Of course, he reckoned without Dr Who fans who have been trying to retcon the two planet’s possible links ever since…

NEGATIVES - The title, which must be the silliest the show ever had. Cybermen famously don’t have feelings, so they’re the one alien race who shouldn’t feel the need for revenge, even against the Doctor. Why not give the ‘revenge’ title to the Daleks? They live for little else! Gerry Davis' working title 'Return of the Cybermen' wasn’t exactly poetic either but for the silver baddies’ first appearance in seven years it would have made a lot more sense (as the inventor of the Cybermen he was apoplectic this title got used, even more than what was done to his scripts. He never worked for the show again, a huge loss to the series).

BEST QUOTE: ‘The Cybermen disappeared after their attack on Voga at the end of the cyber-war. Not the same as dying out, commander. They’re utterly ruthless, total machine creatures’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Gerry Davis’ original abandoned script ‘Return Of The Cybermen’ was dug up by Big Finish for their ‘lost stories’ range in 2021 with Tom Baker returning to the role alongside Elisabeth Sladen’s daughter Sadie Miller as Sarah Jane and Christopher Naylor as Harry – not the first ‘casino’ script, sadly, but the rewrite halfway between Davis’ original ideas and Holmes’ re-write. What a revelation! This story might not be quite up there with past Davis classics like ‘The Tenth Planet’ and ‘The Moonbase’ but it is one heck of a lot better than ‘Revenge’ ever turned out to be, very different in feel and style despite being set on the same set (Space Station Nerva) and having much the same plot. Nerva has been placed into quarantine after a mysterious space plague, which adds an even greater air of helplessness when The Cybermen turn up. They’re very much the unstoppable force of old rather than the rather weak-kneed 1970s Cyber-versions, ruthless in the way they’ll do anything to stop humans getting near the one thing that can kill them. There are no Vogans and no mention of a civil war or even much mention of another planet beyond the space station bar the gold reserves (the regulars never leave Nerva, which only adds to the sense of claustrophobia the writer was so good at). Davis writes for the 4^th Doctor and his flippancy hiding seriousness well, but doesn’t really get Sarah or Harry quite right (to be fair it’s usually the script editor who tweaks those bits into shape: Harry hadn’t even been cast when the first draft was written, though Sarah’s more of a surprise having been around the longest of the three regulars by this stage; the new voice cast cope very well in difficult circumstances: no one can ever match the originals and Sadie especially must find it very hard playing her mother’s character, but these are more than impersonations and really get the flavour of the pair of friends). Had ‘Revenge’ gone out like this it would probably still have suffered comparisons to ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ but it would in time have gained quite a following I think, every bit as dark and sombre in tone unlike the sometimes jokey version that ended up on our screens. This adaptation by John Dorney isn’t strictly what might have ended up on screen either, being a composite of two of Davis’ rewrites and had to be okayed with the BBC first so that it didn’t infringe on the copyright of the existing episodes! Well worth hearing and much much better than what we got: honestly Holmes and co had a nerve changing this.   

‘Wolfsbane’ (2003) is a ‘Past Doctors’ novel by Jacqueline Rayner set after ‘Revenge’ and before the trio of adventurers get back to UNIT HQ when they’re still using the ‘time rings’. It’s a story that digs a bit deeper into why Harry so abruptly decides to leave time-travelling because he has a pretty rotten time of things in this book, split from the 4^th Doctor and Sarah once again and landing in Berlin in 1936. He does get to meet The Doctor sooner than he feared – unfortunately it’s the 8^th version, who’s just as confused and lost as he is. The pair are quickly involved in a weird plot involving Arthurian legends and werewolves, while the 4^th Doctor and Sarah, safe in the era of whenever the heck the UNIT stories take place, try to research what happened to their friend. Despite seemingly being un-aged in ‘Zygon’ and ‘Android’ it turns out Harry spent quite a few years waiting for either or both Doctors to get him home and he feels abandoned, with lots of dark nights of the soul wondering what the people he loves are up to. On the plus side you get to spend a lot of time in the head of one of the companions who was given shortest shrift on TV; on the negative side it never quite feels as if Rayner got Harry quite ‘right’; his well-meaning old fashioned-ness, which comes from a desire to do the ‘right thing’ and protect everyone, which ought to make more sense back in the 1930s, just makes him come over as patronising and you can kind of see why The Doctor leaves him behind to be honest. There aren’t nearly enough werewolves in this book either!    

Previous ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ next ‘Terror Of The Zygons’

The Twin Dilemma: Ranking - 223

 The Twin Dilemma

(Season 21, Dr 6 with Peri, 22-30/3/1984, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Anthony Steven, director: Peter Moffat)

'A Peri is a supernatural being of Persian folklore descended from fallen angels and cast out of paradise until atoning for their sins...Or it means a beautiful and graceful girl. Mind you, Tegan means 'darling' or 'loved one', Sarah means 'princess', Barbara means 'exotic' and Dorothea means 'God's gift' so ha, what does the dictionary know? 

Ranking: 223

 

 After the walking plants it seems only right to follow it with the story that gave us talking slugs. Also fittingly, I’ve got a bit of a twin dilemma with this story myself. You see, despite this story’s critical pasting to the point where it’s bottom of many fan lists, over the years I’ve grown quite fond of it and admire it in a way i don’t similar turkeys like ‘Time and the Rani’ ‘Orphan 55’ ‘The Timeless Child’ or ‘The TV Movie’. Those stories are all, for different reasons bad television and bad Dr Who, story ideas that were already flawed before production mishaps piled mistake on top of mistake. It’s hard to envision a version of any of these stories that ‘works’, even if they’d been by my favourite writers, given the perfect place in a series running order (Towards the end but not so much the end it matters if it all goes wrong) and given a budget Hollywood could only dream of. There is, however, a great story in ‘The Twin Dilemma’ somewhere that takes a lot of brave courageous moves but a combination of misdirection over who the new 6^th Doctor should be and getting the end of season short straw means that what does end up of those concepts on screen ends up becoming badly mangled, to the point where this relatively brave and mature story that takes a brave and mature stance on who this incarnation might be ends up looking like bad children’s television. Here there’s one fatal flaw that dominates everything: timing. See this episode out of context it looks a bit cheap, a bit wild and is a bit under par, suffering from the old 1970s problem that the last story of a season tended to be the one that made up the budget shortfall. See it in the order it was meant to go out (following Peter Davison’s heroics in ‘Caves Of Androzani’) and it’s the biggest slide from the sublime to ridiculous within two consecutive stories in the DW run. We needed a darker, edgier Doctor after Davison though and I like Colin Baker’s portrayal a lot: there’s an unpredictability about him that hadn’t been there since Hartnell and you’re never quite sure what this Doctor’s going to do in any given situation: fight, sulk, pontificate or save the universe which after three years of Davison talking about morals to monsters and then more often than not shooting them anyway makes a refreshing change. Finding something distinctive to do with the character after so many people have played them must be daunting, but the idea to seize on the pure theatricality of the Doctor that’s been lurking under the surface for four previous Doctors (and, let’s face it, all of them since) is a good call I think. There’s nothing that wrong with the actual story either I don’t think: the twins are a bit wet but then they are playing mathematical geniuses (and even then not as bad as some say, considering neither had much acting experience) and the Jacondans are a bit Sylvanian Families, but there’s a neat 'Village of the Damned' factor in there somewhere and Maurice Denholm’s Azmael, the Doctor’s old mentor, is a great character we should have seen more of. The dilemma is, though, some really bad mistakes are made along the way with the god ideas. The Doctor’s instability is pushed too far without explaining why. I mean, it makes perfect sense to me that this new incarnation would be snippy to Peri, the person that inadvertently caused his regeneration but we needed one or two scenes of him exploring his frustration, not a dozen scenes including him strangling her for good measure. This maybe wouldn’t matter if the story looked big and epic but the low budget only emphasises the wrong aspects: everyone pulled all the stops (and indeed the budget) out for Androzani, which feels as close to a big movie as you can have on a 1980s BBC budget and which made the 5^th Doctor seem more noble and moral than he ever got to be in the rest of this run. This story makes the new Doctor look like a git floundering around on a planet made out of tinsel full of bright colours and looks just like a pantomime. This is the one time we needed a whole season to get to know the Doctor again, to see how aspects of him that are unlikeable straight away calm down and change over time, but no – producer JNT didn’t want people to wait to see what the new Doctor would be like and so added this story to the end of the season, with a six month gap before anyone got to see sixie acting ‘stable’ (as much as he ever did). The plan was always going to be to soften the character by degrees after starting with a bang that made him unlikeable, but when your ‘hero’ has just been replaced by a big-headed twonk and it’s a wait between seasons so no wonder so many people thought DW wasn’t for them anymore and watched something else. Because of all this Colin Baker has gone down in folklore as the Doctor nobody liked, not least because that’s what the controller of the BBC said and sacked him.  But they’re all wrong: Colin’s great in all his stories, it’s his character that isn’t. Thankfully he’s become a popular Doctor now thanks to his Big Finish audios for many good reasons, several of which are already here in his debut. To appreciate his Doctor though you need to know what comes next including spin-off audios made a quarter of a century later, to not watch this story back to back with ‘Androzani’ and perhaps above all to read the novelisation instead.

+ There are a couple of rather good and impressively different monster designs in this story (and when did we last have two races who weren’t related in the same story?) The Jacondans are a really good 1980s design, very different to anything else the series ever did, velvety and whiskery.  The gastropods meanwhile are pure slugs, like a folk memory of the Optera crossed w the Tractators but much more workable than either. They have one of the best motives of monsters in DW too: instead of power or control or using the the planet’s core as a space shuttle to explore the universe with (?) they’ve run out of food and want some more.

- That costume. I’ve read the reasons behind why they gave Colin Baker such an outfit: this is a Doctor whose all about bad taste, who liked everyone staring at him and why would an alien wear just one thing when they can wear several clashing things at once? These arguments are all nonsense though: yes this Doctor likes making an entrance but through his own brilliance not what he’s wearing. He’s actually got good really good taste in other things and name-drops more theatre, literature and film quotes than the others - he just looks down on everyone else for not being able to match him. Plus no self-respecting alien with all of time and space at their disposal would choose something that so screamed ‘1980s Earth’ as this.

Terror Of The Vervoids: Ranking - 224

 Terror Of The Vervoids

(Season 23, Dr 6 with Mel, 1-22/11/1986, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: John Nathan-Turner (uncredited), writers: Pip 'n' Jane Baker, director: Chris Clough)

'I think we should go back to our 'roots' on this series of Dr Who...Oh that's what you've included in the script eh? Great...wait, walking plants wasn't quite what I meant!'

Ranking: 224

 

 

On the day that Trump gets indicted it seems apt to have a story where a brash man with no taste in clothes is put on trial for mass genocide, although I suspect the Doctor’s arguments about false evidence and tampering from the prosecution will stand up in court better than the orange menace’s. Yes, it’s the Trial of a Timelord part three, this time the defence which has been submitted by The Doctor from his future that he hasn’t lived through yet – and no, I don’t know how that works either (I would suggest if you ever end up in court not relying on the defence ‘I’m going to do better in the future’ because I don’t think it works at all on Earth). Nor can I explain how the Doctor ends up walking off at the end of the trial with the companion he’s never met before this future scenario, Melanie Bush. Nor why the production team thought they could a) get away with that name and b) get Bonnie Langford back in her immediate post-Violet Elizabeth Bott days in to play her (she doesn’t quite play the same character and doesn’t quite scream and scream until she’s sick,  but you sense it’s c lose-run thing at times).

 Remember, beyond the central character this is a series on trial for its life, with Michael ‘Valeyard’ Grade ready to axe it at the least excuse. More than ever before, Dr Who needs to prove that it’s a proper candidate in the ratings, that it can go toe to toe with the best dramas on offer in 1986, most of all that it’s a show to be taken seriously. This is not the time to go hire that sort of an actress  - the sort of person you assume was born with neon leg warmers and a chirpy false smile - to play this sort of a companion. Then again, this is not the time to turn to a pair of writers who’s standing with the fans was dubious at best and who’s last big success was getting on for forty years ago. Or to have some of the shoddiest sets ever seen in the series. Or to have the sort of monster that would never ever work in a quadzillion years with all the budget in the world: a walking plant. Not in a JFK conspiracy sense either, I really do mean a walking plant. 

The Vervoids are easily the rudest ever seen in Dr Who (just beating Erato, the Creature from the Pit in the final), resembling male genetalia poking out of female genetalia, with a gas pipe placed in a most unfortunate position. If Dr Who ever did a porno film (wait they did, with Zygons, erm if they ever did a second one…) then the Vervoids are first in the queue. They’d definitely win the ‘playalien’ centrefold commission. They’re the sort of things that you feel are surely there as a prank, at just the time when Who ought to be taken seriously and were Pip ‘n’ Jane Baker a different pair of writers, given that the basic description is in the script, I’d assume they were there for a bet or a prank or a risqué joke - but as they’re the most ‘establishment’ writers the series ever had it’s probably a design miscommunication. They are, apparently, meant to resemble tulips which they sort of do, but you have to question just how much action anyone in the production team was getting that everyone signed off on this and let it through. It’s not just the heads, though goodness knows they’re bad enough: they’re a curious and biologically unlikely mix of maple and ivy, a race of plants that seem to buy their trousers from sports shops, are one of those rare monsters not seen since the 1960s that come with their own  evolutionary unlikely zips (and remember TV reception was murkier back then so nobody was expected to see things like that in Who’s early days – Verity Lambert would have redone the whole lot if she’d seen HD coming) and they walk with a shuffling gait that makes them the easiest of monsters to escape from, despite an attempt to hire dancers to make them more graceful (many of them Bonnie Langford’s friends, which gave her the giggles throughout the making of this story).In pure looks the Vervoids rival The Gel Guards, the Ergon, The Fish People, The Myrka, The Bandrils and The Taran Wood Beast as Dr Who’s silliest monster (though I still say The Myrka wins in a close contest). They’re still looking silly though, daft enough to make you wet your plants.

Even if you try to wipe the look of them from your head and are somehow brave enough to buy or borrow the Target novelisation (when people who glance at the front cover might get the wrong idea, especially back then when Dr Who books tended to be kept in the children’s department) The Vervoids are a stupid idea. We’ve only ever had one sentient plant in Dr Who and the Krynoids are very different to the Vervoids, a more plausible sort of weed that grew from seed-pods and took over the nutrients on Earth, accidentally causing a few infected people to turn green and fall over. There’s a sort of logic to them, that they are only doing what all life does – try to grow until someone like The Doctor comes along and prunes them. The Vervoids are test-tubes (well, Demeter seed but it’s much the same thing) babies who’ve been genetically spliced and altered into becoming ‘real’ people. They can walk, talk (after a fashion) and can even turn door-handles and start showers, growing arms with stamen-like hands to do so. Despite the fact that they’re newborns who have never learned how to use their appendages because they’ve never needed them before. Then there are the voices: we don’t know what sentient plants might sound like but I doubt few people would have guessed this array of accents: some Geordie, some Brummie, some Scouse (they could have at least have come from Chelsea, given the flower festival). They’re an evolutionary cul-de-sac all round even before scientists like Professor Lasky and her cronies start tampering with them though: they have lungs to talk yet still use photosynthesis, are allergic to Oxygen yet stay fresh without the need for drink and yet somehow create gas without consuming any liquids, while their roots seem to have evolved into what look like shoes. Alien killer plants can work but the writers just haven’t thought their world or their monsters through at all. The inspiration apparently came when the Bakers heard a documentary on how plants and animals share DNA strands, specifically the one that creates hormones (which might also explain why they turned out Who’s horniest monsters) and a discussion of whether plants can have ‘feelings’ (I asked my houseplant about it had died of boredom by being made to watch this story. Pip ‘n’ Jane can’t have been listening too hard because, erm, that’s not how it works. Every living thing has certain DNA in common with each other but a small strand causes a lot of differences and having one that can take on a humanoid shape when plants aren’t made to walk or think or live or even breathe like we do is just silly. Especially walk: The Doctor speaks at one point about how a hydroponic chamber can cause hallucinations and I thought the first time round watching this story that has to be the explanation: a mass hallucination. Because these plants don’t shuffle like the Krynoids, they actually walk, one of the silliest sights in all of Who and one, remember, that could have been vetoed at any stage without immensely affecting the story at all. ‘Vervain’, incidentally, means ‘weedy plant’ which sums them up quite well. Even I reckon I could probably escape from one of these without much difficulty and when even I can defeat a Dr Who monster that’s a sign a design is in trouble.

In any other era it might not have mattered (Whovians have long since learned to look past the low budget monsters), but remember this is the year after the hiatus, when Michael Grade had attacked Dr Who partly because he thought its monsters were ‘silly’. The fact that he considered this season and this story in particular an ‘improvement’ on previous ones goes a long way to show you why no one should ever believe a word Grade says and yet this is was utterly the wrong time to do this. The same goes for all sorts of mistakes in this show. Bonnie is actually a fine actress. Considering this is the first television she’s done since she was tiny (after years on the stage) she’s surprisingly good at times. We know from Billie Piper that sticking someone in a box and assuming them to be awful at a particular type of acting isn’t fair. Had the right character come along to test her and show what she could do, had the director taken her by the hand and talked her through how to do it (Bonnie naturally has a tendency to ‘emote’ her lines, as if delivering them to the back of an auditorium) we might yet have had a brilliant companion. That’s what Russell T davies did with Catherine Tate, ignoring everything that had made her famous and building on the parts of her ‘character’ that he liked, making Donna as feisty and funny as the characters in her show but also sweeter and warmer, filling in the gaps with real personality. Bonnie is just asked to play herself, even though that’s exactly what she was singing up to get away from. Certainly Bonnie was up for it, eager to do ‘straight’ drama to get away from her reputation (a series of cruel contraceptive adverts ran suggesting the world might have been a better place without red-headed chirpy brats being born to the world) and enough of a fan of the show to want to get involved (it helped that she shared an agent with Colin Baker). But producer John Nathan-Turner wasn’t interested in revitalising her career. In a bit of a panic over the hiatus and pleasing his BBC bosses he fell back on the only things he knew anything about, publicity. He reckoned by hiring a big name Bonnie’s fans were sure to tune in and watch, even though Bonnie wasn’t the sort of performer to have ‘those’ sorts of fans and the sort of fans she did have would not be watching Dr Who. He wasn’t interested in who her character might be (although he did write a full synopsis, most of which wasn’t used, giving her the background of being a computer programmer from peas Pottage, skills Mel will use in Russell T Davies’ comeback and a few spin-off works but never on TV). Even the synopsis describes Mel as ‘fascinating, scintillating – and irritating’. If even the producer don’t like her, what chance to the viewers have?

That’s a sign in itself of what the real trouble is: behind-the-scenes the production team are collapsing. You never ever get a producer writing a character synopsis – that’s the work of the script editor. After all he’s the one who’s going to have to live with this character across successive stories, work out their character ‘arc’ and where the stories change them and work out just what the series needs at its heart. The script editor in this era is Eric Saward and he already feels at war with JNT: he didn’t approve of casting Peter Davison, seems to have hated Colin Baker (without actually saying anything to his face) and was appalled at some of JNT’s behaviour (basically that JNT was more interested in attending conventions and big name pantomimes using Dr Who cast members than he was with stories and day to day production). Saward, though, is not the sort of person to say any of this directly: he was aware that he was a junior writer who maybe got promoted too quick and till now he’s had just enough sway over his own stories to strike an uneasy truce (it doesn’t help that JNT, notoriously thin-skinned, often fired people for disagreeing with him). By now though he’s four years into a job and watching his show get attacked for the sort of decisions his producer is making and feels he’s earned more respect. The producer reckons that a time of crisis is not the time to rock the boat. Their uneasy working relationship finally comes to a crescendo about here. Saward’s favourite writer was Robert Holmes: he stood for everything Saward wanted in the show, bite wit and imagination that pushed the series to its limits. JNT always disliked working with people who’d been on the show before and treated Homes with disdain, ridiculing ‘The Mysterious Planet’ (admittedly not one of his best). JNT’s preferred writers were Pip ‘n’ Jane: safe reliable hands who could scripts in on budget and on time. 

Luckily for Eric, the Bakers were away just when JNT might have asked them to write the season’s all important finale: after writing a Dr Who ‘Choose Your Own Adventure' they’d taken a two month holiday in Spain (maybe they thought it looked nice on ‘The Two Doctors’) and back in those pre-email or mobile phone days nobody could get in touch with them. So Holmes got the job, against JNT’s better wishes, while Saward moved on to the penultimate slots. The original plan was to have two two-part stories where ‘Vervoids’ went. One was by Sexton Blake writer Jack Trevor who’s story ‘The Second Coming’ sounds a bit like ‘The Happiness Patrol’ turned out to be. Saward began to get a bit worried about how it might turn out however, when the central image Trevor passed on was a lonely old man trapped inside a gasometer. It might have worked in another era with les riding on it, but this maybe wasn’t the year for such a big experiment. That story should have led into a piece by a new writer, David Halliwell, ‘Attack Of The Mind’. A traditional Dr Who tale of ‘beauty and the beast’ and looks being less important than character, it featured the pretty but cruel ‘Penelopes’ at war with rat-like but sweet ‘Freds’, using hallucinations to make them turn mad and look like the baddies. It’s probably a mercy we didn’t get that one – what worked well in the 1960s (it’s as theme that crops up a lot, especially ‘Galaxy 4’ and ‘The Savages’) it would have been laughed off the screen for being too simple in the 1980s. Then, at Ian Levine’s suggestion, Saward commissioned ‘Sapphire and Steel’ writer P J Hammond who came up with ‘Paradise 5’, the only one of these stories to be made as a Big Finish ‘Lost story’ (adapted for Peri rather than Mel). It’s rather good, a claustrophobic tale of another leisure centre where rather more happens more sensibly than ‘Vervoids’ but JNT, suspicious of people with more TV experience than him, stopped it going any further. Beginning to panic as deadlines loomed, Saward contacted his predecessor Christopher H Bidmead who’s always been happy to write for the show and would surely understand the limitations and deadlines. Bidmead came up with a four-part story named ‘Pinacotheca’ which sounds right down my street, a sort of cross between ‘The Space Museum’ ‘Logopolis’ and ‘Joy To the World’ about a museum where all things existed in balance and could be visited with the right key, but when one of them collapses things begin to go wrong. Bidmead, aware of the problems that had happened, worked closely with Saward, sending him regular updates and keeping him aware of all the changes but Eric didn’t like this story either, feeling it too slow and without the action he always preferred. Only he took a month umming and ahhing to reject it, distracted by the fact that Holmes’ health was failing fast and it was becoming clear that the finale was in jeopardy. JNT thought he had the perfect solution to their problems when he bumped into Pip ‘n’ Jane by chance in a lift in the BBC and pleaded with them to write a story at short notice without consulting Saward first. The script editor had found working with them on ‘Mark Of The Rani’ a miserable experience and fought against it but without any alternative got back behind his typewriter and gritted his teeth. You might well ask why Saward didn’t write a story himself given that’s what script editors traditionally tended to do on Who when stories fell through: JNT wouldn’t let him seems to be the quickest answer.

It was then, in quick succession, that Holmes died and JNT hired Bonnie Langford. Saward didn’t officially quit his job but when Starburst Magazine  (America’s equivalent to the UK’s ‘TV Zone’, but less fun and even more opinionated) called up to ask the script editor’s feelings about the new series and caught him in a low mood. Asked to defend some decisions Saward considered stupid, the script editor let fly all those pent up feelings he’d been keeping: JNT only cared about the money, he didn’t care about the scripts, his idea of talent was Drip ‘n’ Pain not Robert Holmes and Bonnie Langford and his big casting decisions for the past two Doctors and new companion were dumb (Nicola Bryant and the Davison companions seem to have spared his wrath, but everyone else was fair game). For all his faults (Saward had a point with most of his comments) JNT was a loyal soul who would do anything for a friend but handled having enemies badly and seeing the script editor he’d plucked from relative obscurity turn on him was too much to bear. JNT went into a sulk, at just the time the show needed him most, abandoning Saward’s partly re-written Holmes finale and doubling down on his decisions and hiring Pip and Jane to not only write ‘Vervoids’ (with a basic idea of a Whodunnit on a spaceship suggested by Saward) but the replacement finale too, going so far as to bring lawyers in for writer discussions so he could ‘prove’ they didn’t lift bits from Holmes’ or Saward’s ideas.

Given all the behind-the-scenes difficulties, then, it’s a wonder ‘Vervoids’ isn’t worse. Pip and Jane wrote an episode a week, dropping them off at TV centre themselves rather than entrust them to the post (as if these scripts fell through there was no time for any replacement). They had no time for re-writes and the director was at work on episode one before seeing the rest of the story. Often that shows: it’s a story that feels rushed, implausible, full of red herrings that don’t go anywhere and plotholes that should have gone somewhere. It’s also recycled heavily. Pip and Jane weren’t big on scifi and had never seen the show before ‘Mark’ but clearly they’ve been doing some research since then as this script is like a Who’s Who Of Dr Who at times: There are the ‘Krynoids’ from ‘Seeds Of Doom’ of course. There’s the setting of ‘The Leisure Hive’ (plus ‘Orphan 55’ to come) and the same ‘fake’ front of a complex intended for pleasure that ends up with people running for their life. Though there are no plants in ‘Hive’ the Argolins are similar, with ‘leaf’ type appendages that turn brown and fall off when they get too old (just as the Vervoids do when accelerated through time). The two stories even end up sharing an actor, David Allister, who was Stimson in that and Brucher in this. Then there’s the ‘Whodunnit murder mystery angle of ‘Robots Of Death’, with people in a self-contained ship who can’t escape picked off one by one (and in the future ‘Unicorn and The Wasp’ won’t be just like an Agatha Christie murder mystery, it will be a murder mystery with Agatha Christie in it). Compared to all three of these stories (though not the wretched ‘Orphan 55’) ‘Vervoids’ is a failure: The Krynoids feel like a plausible potential threat in a true scifi mould rather than some people in silly costumes that represent an evolutionary impossibility. And something’s really gone wrong when Kyrnoids are the more sensible monster! ‘The Leisure Hive’ feels like a real world and The Argolins real people, with the murderer killing through the more plausible research into aging rather than plants. ‘The Robots Of Death’, like all the best murder mysteries, makes sense when you go back and watch it again knowing who the killer is (mostly anyway). In ‘The Vervoids’ the murder mystery angle is a total washout and feels as if the Bakers changed their mind partway through without the time to go back and change things. Here’s a big spoiler who the murderer is if you want to look away now: it’s Doland, Professor Lasky’s assistant, who creates the Vervoids to make cheap slave labour and kills anyone who tries to stop him. Which makes sense of some of the details (his attempt on Mel’s life when she’s close to uncovering the truth, the ‘accidental’ infection of fellow assistant Ruth, possibly the undercover cop Hallet, not that there’s any sign in the script that Doland has been rumbled) but not all (why does Doland electrocute Commander Edwards before he’s even tested his Vervoids out yet?) It speaks volumes that the revelation in the last episode took everyone working on this story – there was even an unofficial betting scheme going on - by surprise: some suspected Brucher (who does, after all, hold up a seemingly un-hijackable ship so easily), some Professor Lasky herself (she was due to make lots of Vervoid money and why else would they hire someone of the calibre of Honor Blackman for a relative bit part?), some the stewardess Janet (named perhaps for Janet Fielding) who is the typical ‘person without apparent motive but lots of opportunity’ that always tends to do the deadly deed in these sorts of things. Some even reckoned Mel couldn’t possibly be that relentlessly chirpy for real and had to have a darker side, but nope: it’s the person everyone least suspected. Precisely because he had the least to gain and the least opportunity. As a Whodunnit, as a Who story about a new and original world, as a pure monster story with an engaging threat, ‘Terror Of The Vervoids’ is a failure on all three counts. Throw in the ridiculous of the trial setup (if The Doctor is free to have future adventures then it’s obvious he’ll be acquitted, so all tension is gone) and (spoilers) The Doctor destroying them in an act of genocide/pesticide because they’re a ‘pest’ because they would take over the rest of the universe is out of keeping both for the rest of this story and the fact The Doctor is currently on trial for his life and defending himself by sharing an event that’s supposed to put him in a good light (if he really wanted an example from his future that put him in a good light with the timelords we know now he could have chosen ‘The World Enough and Time’ ‘The End Of Time’ or ‘Hell Bent’. The Doctor’s argument? He got involved because somebody ‘asked’. So that’s alright then. Trump will probably try the same argument. Although thinking about it I suspect he’s more Slitheen than Vervoid. The final sentence seems obvious. Throw away the key!

And yet ‘Vervoids’ isn’t utterly hopeless. The speed at which they’ve been forced to write means there’s less times for re-writing and more time for first instinct and the Bakers feel like the sort of writers who get worse with each draft, not better. There are no single scenes quite as cringeworthy as the ones in their two Rani stories and without Kate O’Mara overpowering everyone else this story has more of an ensemble feel. There are moments when this story is as watchable as anything in the ‘Trial’ season (the lack of actual trial scenes interrupting the action helps – partly due to time and partly because Saward used to write those). Perhaps because of how weather-worn the plot is ‘Vervoids’ ends up feeling more like ‘proper’ Dr Who than any of the other three. The Bakers’ dialogue sounds horribly overblown and theatrical when handed to most of this cast (especially poor Bonnie, who wants so hard to get away from this sort of thing) but it works well with Colin Baker’s Doctor at his most brash and pontificating. The writers ‘get’ the sixth Doctor and how his ego-trips and desire to be the focal point in every room is really defensive bluster for how unsure he feels and with this story coming from his ‘future’ he’s mellowed a lot since we first met him, Colin Baker nailing the subtle changes in the script. He works in a Whodunnit too. The 4^th Doctor in ‘Robots Of Death’ became a suspect for being so alien and distant, an obvious likely killer arriving from the outside, but the 6^th Doctor even more so: he’s always there, in the middle of the action (in a coat not exactly made for hiding), pausing to give long speeches rather than running away. Mel brings out his paternal side too and their banter is far more believable and gentler than the bickering that poor Peri had to put up with. Colin himself feels like the only person actually enjoying himself in this story, perhaps because he’s the only person pleased to be back at work and eagerly looking forward to many more years like this (tragically, without knowing it, this is his last story as filmed – all because Michael Grade married his ex). Baker the actor belongs in this story, right on the line between adult violence and childish pantomime, and the Bakers the writers know this well, using him better than most. It helps that JNT, unofficial script editor for this story and the next one clearly enjoys his company on the page more than Saward did too, always trying to push him off to the sides. There’s an alternate parallel universe where Michael Grade got sacked from the BBC canteen for stealing the sausages and Colin was always allowed to be this Doctor from the very beginning, beating Tom’s long stint in the role because he loved it so much and no one wanted him to leave. Even Bonnie isn’t that bad half the time, with Mel proactive in a way we hadn’t seen a companion since Romana and while she’s the same hyperactive optimistic overgrown toddler she always will be, here she’s also quite ‘Rose’ like, someone who cares for and is open-minded to all the aliens she meets and loyal to the Doctor to a fault. She even gets her definitive moment as early as her first episode when she screams at just the right pitch for the musical ‘sting’ at the end of the first cliffhanger (it’s in ‘F’) and have it seem entirely in character; not many actresses could pull that off (just try imagining the director asking that of Sophie Aldred or Janet Fielding with a straight face). 

When The Doctor and Mel are together on screen ‘Vervoids’ works. It’s only when the rest of the cast turn up things go wrong. Even ignoring the Vervoids (if you can) The Mogarians are some of the most inept and undeveloped races in the series. Apparently this is their ship but they can’t breathe Oxygen. Yet The Humans (who are the interlopers) stroll around in oxygen filled rooms while they walk around with gas masks on. You only need to look at the reaction to getting people to wear masks during covid (still an ongoing pandemic, by the way) to save their own lives to know that this sort of service seems unlikely, to save the least. The characters we meet are all caricatures too: either scheming or mad or possibly both. Professor Lasky is maybe the worst of all: during the course of this story we only ever see her at the gym or reading Agatha Christie novels in a meta injoke that just doesn’t work; we never see her supposed passion for her scientific creations. While she must also be mighty fond of showering and have a whacking suitcase that’s bigger on the inside given that she is at the gym multiple times with multiple changes of clothes when this story allegedly takes place in a single day. You wonder why Honor Blackman ever took this script, given that she has no moments to shine, some awful dialogue and absolutely no character growth whatsoever. Even ‘The Avengers’, the emptiest most soul-less TV show of the 1960s, gave her more to do than this. The characters also all talk like posh middle class lecturers who want to impress everyone with their knowledge, all the time – a problem of all Pip ‘n’ Jane stories but especially here without The Rani taking most of the dialogue. For The Doctor it’s natural, at a stretch Professor Lasky too, but her more working class assistants? The stewardess? The monsters? Bonnie Langford??? Not likely. People have stopped watching Dr Who mostly because Michael Grade keeps messing around with the schedule but partly because it’s remained a bit posh and middle class in an era that was tough and gritty. Viewers just didn’t feel represented by this show any more. This story’s the poshest the series has been since the first Romana was acting like a princess at a time when this show needs to connect with people more than ever.

The other difficulty too is, it’s more Midsummer Murders than Poirot or Sherlock, a cosy one-pipe problem, without many suspects to choose from and it’s a story that makes less sense when you know who did it than it did when you were watching it unfold. The whole point of murder mysteries is to see if the audience can solve the crime, but that’s impossible – not least because the means (the Vervoids) don’t even exist when Doland first kills off-screen.  The story’s big ‘clue’, which turns out to be a red herring, is that investigator Hallet forgets to turn his Magarian translator circuit on, but there are all sorts of alternative explanations for this, from faulty equipment to a Magarian doing his best to learn the Human language. Doland’s plan also seems to involve knowing that Brucher is going to go conveniently mad and fly into a black hole as cover, even though madness is hard to predict even a thousand years into the future and it’s not the easiest or most obvious means of destroying a spaceship.  It really is extraordinarily lucky that Morgar happens to be full of the only substance that accelerates Vervoid growth, with no thought given to vionesium and how it might be harvested or where it grows beyond the fact that it exists. And if the whole of the Doctor’s trial defence is that he’s relying on how brilliant he is in the future, on how much he uses his brains to save people, well, he doesn’t really do a lot does he? He doesn’t stop the bodies piling up, he effectively works out who the killer is when there’s not many people left (and where is everybody else by the way? Of all the stories to start reducing money by not having extras a luxury cruise spaceship open to the public is not the time).

The result, then, is a story that could have been good and in a few places is (the moment Mel seems like the obvious candidate and she gets quite scared, or the moment she gets put in the composter – and not for the reasons you might think either). But ‘Vervoids’ needs pruning, a whole different monster, a better bunch of suspects, less am-dram acting and a much happier behind-the-scenes atmosphere to truly work. This series desperately needs a story to be big and bold and spectacular – and instead it gets another one full of people flailing around not sure what they’re doing (all except the star, who’s the one who gets the axe). A lot of people think this is the best of the four trial stories. I’m not sure I agree as the dialogue really is tin poor at times and the Vervoids are a disaster, but at least these are the sort of mistakes fans are used to putting up with and less obvious than the all-round clumsy feel and Sylvia Sims casting of ‘Planet’, the Valeyard tampering that wrecked ‘Mindwarp’ and the ‘making it up as we go along’ feel of ‘Ultimate Foe’. There’s a proper ending and everything, where the bad guys lose and the good guys win (not something necessarily true of any of the others, especially what happens to poor Peri and the awkward ending to the season finale) – something we sadly don’t always get in real life (edit: I can’t believe Trump not only remained free but ended up president again. In fact, I don’t believe it. Let’s hope if Dr Who comes back on the air we get a story about scifi technology by greedy billionaires being used to exploit dangerous alien political systems where Davros gets elected head of Skaro again). For that alone ‘Vervoids’ deserves credit. Just watch it with your eyes closed. And the sound down for the most part.   

POSITIVES + This is the last story Colin Baker filmed in the role of the Doctor for television (this story being broadcast before but made after ‘The Ultimate Foe’) and as with so many of his stories he’s the best thing here by miles. He’s softened his Doctor from mean bully to tetchy and twitchy and he’s always doing something highly watchable that isn’t in the script, be it striding across a room to rolling his eyes to the comedy of pretending to follow Mel’s exercise bike regime to pulling the multiple faces needed in the endlessly repetitive ‘Trial’ cliffhangers. By now the 6th Doctor feels like a seasoned traveller with all the tough edges knocked off him, a benevolent Uncle with a hatred for injustice rather than an angry young man who loves clashing with others for the sake of it in everything from arguments to that sodding coat. His Doctor works a lot better with Mel’s than the 7th Dr’s character too I think – she needs a larger than life protective soul to bounce off, not an odd mysterious eccentric playing the spoons. In other words, while BBC controller Michael Grade was arguably right that some things had to change to make the series better in this era, the star was even more arguably the part that was working, at least by the end. Thankfully the Big Finish range of 6th Doctor series finally makes good on this most maligned of Doctors, returning to this later softer side and adding multiple years, several new companions and a lot more gentleness to his character.    

NEGATIVES – Most of the mistakes in ‘Terror Of The Vervoids’ can be excused by the behind-the-scenes dramas. Wonky script? It’s not all the writer’s fault, there was a deadline. Bad ham acting? The actors had less time to learn the words. Even the music can be excused as Malcolm Clarke is officially the last composer to use the Radiophonic Workshop, in the process of being dismantled. But the one person who had the usual amount of allotted time was the set designer. The spaceship is one of the most badly made in the show’s history and sadly we see a lot of it (given that the location budget has all been handled over to Foe’). The script makes big play of this being a ‘banana boat in space, a wonderful idea that should have given lots of room for imaginative design. The space age gym consists of a solitary exercise bike. We’d never had a futuristic gym on Dr Who before and for this story 9set a thousand years after transmission) you’d think that would be a golden opportunity to come up with all sorts of exotic exciting things (especially for non-humanoid aliens) but no, this looks like the cheap sort behind some industrial complex with peeling paint. The rooms are all so badly built this is one of the three occasions when you can actually see a set wobble (it’s when The Doctor picks up an axe in episode two). If I’d paid good money for a trip like this I’d demand my money back, even before  I was at risk of being Vervoided to death.

BEST QUOTE: Travers: ‘How long have you known this woman?’ Dr: ‘Time is a comparative concept, Commodore’. Mel: ‘Not now, Doctor. Just answer the question!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: In a nice bit of cross-over promotion The Doctor talks about how he’d much rather be on the planet Pyro Shaka – which Pip ‘n’ Jane Baker had just written in their ‘Make Your Own Adventure’ book ‘Race Against Time’, written before their Spanish holiday and published in between the broadcast of episode two and three of ‘Vervoids’ (1986). Pip ‘n’ Jane’s ‘talents’ work better on paper than they do on TV and this is actually one of the better in the ‘choose your own ending’ series of six (though Phillip ‘Mindwarp’ Martin’ and William ‘Galaxy 4’ Emms’ are best). There’s a tribe of aliens known as the Shikari, who are based on a real African tribe with almost no differences, who live on the planet and help The Doctor in his quest to find an antidote for the latest bonkers Rani plan: covering The Earth with slime. Some would say Thames Water beat her to it…

 ‘Business Unusual’ (1997) is a 6^th Doctor ‘Past Adventures’ novel by Gary Russell that finally tells the story of how the Doctor first met Mel. It’s probably not what you think. The Tardis lands in Brighton in 1989 and a nostalgic Doctor thinks about calling on the Brigadier. Only when he goes to track him down he finds that no one has seen him for days; the last thing anybody remembers was him telling his friends and family he was going to snoop around a suspicious new company known as Senenet that have taken the video gaming industry by storm. The Doctor knows almost nothing about computer games but he’d heard good things about a certain computer programmer from Peas Pottage so goes to ask for her help, even though she doesn’t know him yet. It seems unlikely that the Brig, of all people should be on the trail of shoot-em-up games and in retrospect this early post-TV Movie story seems far more in keeping with the ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ series than Dr Who than the series proper, well written but pitched about thirty years younger than the other books in the run without the usual sex or violence (which is a relief to be honest, though I also miss the deeper philosophy of the other releases around it). Like many a Gary Russell novel there are more continuity references than you could shake a perigosto stick at. Chief amongst them for fans are the 6^th Doctor meeting the Brig at all (the only ‘classic’ incarnation not to meet him give or take the 1^st where Nick Courtney’s other role as Bret Vyon in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ shows us what it might have been like) and the ending where The Doctor invites Mel on board and she looks to a now-rescued Brigadier for help: he gives her a crash course in what’s in store for her (and includes a reference to regeneration, which is why Mel is so unfazed when it happens for real in ‘Time and The Rani’!)   

‘The Wrong Doctors’ (2017) is the Big Finish version of how The 6^th Doctor and Mel met – twice! The Doctor knows that Mel is his future companion and the one he has when he regenerates but has been putting off the inevitable for as long as possible a la ‘The End Of Time’. After losing audio companion Evelyn he’s in contemplative mood though and decides that this incarnation has had enough and to get it over with, travelling to Peas Pottage and wondering how he can explain the fact that Mel knows him in his future. Only he’s already there – a later Doctor from the ‘Trial’ era has turned up with a later Mel. There’s an interruption when an iguanodon is run over by a car (no, seriously), there’s a time portal in the nearby woods and a hungry Baryonyx dinosaur that’s got loose. Introductions are the last thing this quartet need to worry about now and there’s a confusing middle and a bonkers end that involved the Blinovitch limitation effect and the older Doctor re-creating the Mel he knew in the Tardis (so the one running around with the 7^th Doctor is really a copy!) Exhausting, but fun. 

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