The Androids Of Tara: Ranking - 226

  The Androids Of Tara

(Season 16, Dr 4 with Romana I, 25/11/1978-16/12/1978, producer: Graham Williams, script editor: Anthony Read, writer: David Fisher, director: Michael Hayes) 

'Ah! But a Taran Wood Beast cannot be held to write down in cold blood the wild and black thoughts that storm it’s brain when an uncontrolled passion has battered a breach for them. Yet, unless he sets himself up as a saint, he need not hate himself for them. He is better employed, as it humbly seems to me, in scaring time-travelling maidens so that they run into the arms of Count Grendel and fretting over his wicked impulses, extorting unwilling hospitality from the weakness of his nature. In other words: Roaaaaaar!’  

Rupert, Woodbeast of Hentzau

In an emoji: ⚔

Ranking: 226

‘Androids Of Tara’ then. Or ‘The Romana In The Iron Mask’ as they might have called it with just a few tweaks. Well swash my buckles! If you’re the sort of viewer who loves plots involving android doubles and swordfights in a great big ol’ castle then this is the story for you! For what it is, it’s an impressive 100 minutes of everything you’d expect from that description done with aplomb: boo-hiss villains, exotic location filming, Tom Baker getting a rare chance to be a dashing hero rather than a lovable eccentric and a plot that nips along at high speed if you don’t think about it too much. Everything looks exquisitely lush (with some of the best location filming of the era), the performances are all solid, some of the lines especially witty. It’s hard to find fault with something this entertaining and nothing that important goes wrong, which in itself makes a nice change for a story in the Graham Williams era, which was beset by problems more than most. At the same time though it’s just one of those Dr Who stories that’s not for me, my buckle having never swashed and being so bored by android replica stories in scifi in general that I’m considering building an android double to watch them all for me and report back so I don’t have to see them myself. So soon after ‘The Pirate Planet’ this feels like a step back to the Dr Who dark ages, a story that doesn’t go wrong mostly because it plays things so safe everyone can achieve this sort of thing in their sleep. From the moment five minutes in when Romana happens to bump into the baddy (who seems so charming he can’t possibly be that nice) and a couple of minutes later when the Doctor happens to bump into the goody (surrounded by such pro-active guards that he can’t possibly be that nasty and inspire such confidence) you know where this story is going to go, doubly so if you know the source material ‘The Prisoner Of Zenda’ (the working title for David Fisher’s story was as unimaginative as Dr Who names comes: it was literally called ‘The Prisoner Of Zend’ and set on a planet called ‘Zend’, before script editor Anthony Read thought he’d better add at least some imagination). Weirdly the two big unexpected twists – that we’re in a civilisation from the future not the past, despite the Medieval trappings and that there are androids afoot – are revelations casually tossed aside in the middle of part one. There’s a decided feel of ‘everyone knows what to expect anyway so we might as well give it to them straight out’ this week. For once the extraordinary world of Dr Who comes over as a little too ordinary, without the series’ customary imagination to spice things up. 

Nevertheless, just because it’s not high on my list and doesn’t have the twists and turns of this series at its best that doesn’t make this a bad story. With a show that’s this varied and run for this long there are always going to be stories made for factions of the fanbase who aren’t me. I still get to enjoy the lovely location filming in Leeds Castle and the Doctor crossing swords and indeed crossing words with a human antagonist who is for once pretty much his equal (Peter Jeffrey’s Count Grendel somehow manages to stay just the right side of Pantomime Dame despite being larger than life – or larger than a Taran Woodbeast anyway). Everyone does the most they can within the format, from the actors (Romana effectively plays four parts here, including android doubles – Mary Tamm jokes on the DVD commentary she should have asked for four pay-packets) to the set designers (this really feels like a castle even when it’s a TV studio set, as if it’s all shot on location) to the script (which has some classic lines, most of them added by Tom Baker and Mary Tamm), everyone rattling off the clichés with such aplomb they still somehow feel fresh and new.

Even so, it blatantly isn’t. The 4^th Doctor era is chock full of stories that take a particular source material and do something ‘Dr Whoy’ with it. The mixture varies, but it’s generally somewhere around 50:50 what’s recycled and what’s new. In the case of ‘Androids Of Tara’ the lifting is slightly lazier, so it’s nearer 90:10 source material to Dr Who stuff. Anthony Hope’s original is a heavy, rather dull read livened up by occasional bursts of action and with some good lines, the best of which is ‘Fate doesn’t always make the right men Kings’. You can say much the same about ‘Tara’, a story that contains practically everything you see in ‘Zenda’ (all the plot beats of impersonations and poisonings and kidnappings and doppelgangers) that’s a bit ploddy and repetitive, livened up by the action sequences and a couple of laugh out loud moments  – the only things added are the ‘Key To Time’ bits (which Romana gets out the way a few minutes in this week) and the fact that at least two of these characters are really androids. The film version of the book even starts with an eccentric English gentlemen who turns out to be the hero fishing in a local stream, which explains why at the start the 4^th Doctor suddenly takes up an uncharacteristic interest in the sport and abandons Romana to take the day off, never to show the slightest bit of interest again for a couple of regenerations.

To be fair to the writer there’s a good reason for all of this. Until the last minute this slot was meant to be filled by a story, based around the same booked location shoot, about the Doctor and Romana meeting an ‘evil’ variation of Robin Hood (some thirty-five years before a similar idea in the 12^th Doctor story ‘Robots Of Sherwood’, this story’s closest cousin in  modern Who for all sorts of reasons and similarly mixed), script editor Anthony Read coming up with the idea that myths and legends were the way to go, material that everyone recognised but which still gave him wriggle room to surprise the audience by not having to fit historical stories to a set timeline of events. Author Ted Lewis was hired to write it and he was quite a feather in the cap for the series at the time: he was a ‘serious’ writer, whose second novel ‘Jack’s Return Home’ (the source material for the film ‘Get Carter’ about gang-members trying to become respectable) made a big stir in the 1960s. Only, unbeknown to everyone in the Who production office at the time, the reason thatLlewis took the commission was that his life was falling apart and he needed the money in a hurry: he was on the verge of splitting with his wife and had just been diagnosed with a terminal illness, hitting the booze to cope with his problems. There are tales that he turned up to a ‘let’s see how you’re getting on now you should have finished the first draft’ tone meeting blind drunk, admitted that he’d not done much at all and was sent home – even if, as you suspect, it’s one of those tales that’s been exaggerated with every re-telling (and there’s a lot of that in this series, with so many fanzines looking for juicy stories from production team members pleased at the extra pay cheques) it must have been bad for an era of Dr Who filled with such heavy drinkers as producer Graham Williams and writer Douglas Adams to have seen his drinking as a problem worth dropping him over, rather than being patient. Fisher was hired at the last minute and asked to come up with a replacement story on the same lines using the already-booked location. It seems odd that he wasn’t just hired to write the same story, about an evil Robin Hood, but maybe Read thought that Lewis might get his act together to write that one in the future (sadly he never did, dying in 1982) or maybe he was just superstitious about the idea now it had fallen apart. Given the brief time and the strict brief, Fisher actually does really well – and given the speed you can forgive him for borrowing so heavily from existing literature. It’s easy to imagine him getting the panicked phone call (he’d only just finished work on ‘Stones Of Blood’ after all, being one of only the writers in the ‘classic era of Who to compose back-to-back stories) and looking round his library for a book with a plot he could re-hash quickly and directly.

That’s fitting really because superstitions and customs are what ‘Androids Of Tara’ are all about. This is a world that’s based around sixteen astrological signs and has sixteen hour days, one for each sign. Things happen by routine and tradition here, based around the stars and constellations, such as who gets to be monarch at any one particular time. There’s a good reason for this that sadly the script only touches on lightly: plague wiped out 9/10ths of the population (with androids built to fill out the workforce as needed): at times like this all the science and logic in the world won’t stop survivor’s guilt and wondering why you were spared and not your ancestors’ nearest and dearest, so people look for signs everywhere, something Count Grendel is relying on in his quest for power. The key to time segment that Romana finds so quickly is hidden as a statue of a lion-like animal that Count Grendel says is a sort of family mascot, with a legend attached to it that danger will befall his family if something happens to it (such as, say, it disappearing altogether and transforming into a supernatural crystal). We at home know differently of course: its easy to see why a story about one of the six segments of time meant to protect the universe and disguised by an immortal being with special powers would have grown, down the years, to the point where all sorts of legends have grown up around it. And as ever in Dr Who those myths and superstitions turn out to be true – it’s probably not much of a spoiler (but I’ll throw one in anyway) to say that the Doctor defeats Count Grendel in the end so the superstitions all come true. It seems that odd Count Grendel himself should mention this to Romana (and us) though, given that he’s the only person on Tara who doesn’t seem to be superstitious: instead he’s a pro-active schemer who thinks he can defy fate, going to such lengths as kidnapping the Taran Royal Princess Strella.  Wouldn’t you know it – she turns out to be Romana’s exact double (it’s funny just how often that happens to timelords; given what we now know about Gallifreyans having the ability to sub-consciously shape the face they grow into, something that wasn’t a tradition yet in 1978 when this story was made, it’s somehow fitting that Romana of all people subconsciously based herself on a princess she might have read about somewhere: she has that kind of upper class caste vibe. Indeed its hard to imagine this story working as well with any other companion as she’s the only one who would naturally mix with Royalty, especially in her first regeneration – I mean, just imagine this story with, say, Ace or Bill in the Tardis). Grendel’s plan is to put his own specially programmed version of Strella onto the throne, marrying her and thus inheriting the right to rule the planet with all the riches and privileges that come with it. The only person who can stop him is the man who is betrothed to her, Prince Reynart, whose holed up with the Doctor (who helps make him his own android double) and who Grendel is desperate to kidnap too.

Tara is, like many a medieval setting in Dr Who, something of a mixture. We never truly find out where in space this planet is or what the date is, but it’s generally accepted by all concerned that we’re somewhere in our future. Like ‘The Ribos Operation’ three stories earlier it looks old-fashioned to us (and indeed viewers of the 1970s), full of such anachronisms as Royalty, castles and a deeply ingrained class system (it’s a general rule in Who that the more civilised a planet is the more equal the hierarchy is). At the same time though this is an actually quite rare species that have actually mastered the art of making robot replicas, ones so accurate down to the last detail that they can walk and talk and even their chief creator assumes Romana is an android having a malfunction rather than a time-travelling body double (despite what she says). It’s a neat twist that a companion is saved this week precisely because she sprains her ankle escaping a monster (the swelling proving that she really is flesh after all). The weaponry on this planet might look old-fashioned, with its cross-bolts and bows and fencing swords, but these are weapons laced through with electrical currents. What we have here then is a society that once had immense technological powers but which has fallen into disarray for unknown reasons, either collapsing or rejecting the idea of progress to go back to the good ol’ days. Everyone always quotes ‘Star Wars’ as an influence for this story (as lightsabers are just Medieval swords with a funky sound effect) but I think a bigger impact is the Von Danikan books ‘Chariots Of the Gods’ and its many many squeals, the very Dr Who sense that we ourselves once had great civilisations from ancient times that crumbled into dust and left only a word of mouth legend of their existence. Honestly, it would be keeping with this stage of the series if this planet turned out to be Earth in the future (but it doesn’t, for a change). In a series that’s all about time being a constantly shifting force, with the Tardis darting about seeing the ripples and causes of one era impacting another, it’s a neat idea to go full circle and a planet whose future looks just like our past.

One neat detail you don’t often get in stories like these is that it’s the peasants who understand all the technology, which has become just another art form practised alongside the Blacksmiths and Tailors in the town. The aristocracy haven’t got the first clue how it works: they only care that it does. Generally speaking, in Dr Who technology is hoarded by the people in charge so the everyday workers are kept under tight control; it’s a neat twist on the usual formula to add that detail. Even having Royalty is quite unusual for this series (as it happens we’ll have yet another princess in a couple of stories’ time – and wouldn’t you know it, she looks like the ‘other’ Romana! – but the only other ones in Who are in stories definitively set in the past). I like the idea of an android replacing a Royal. It would be easy. All they’d have to do is be programmed to wave and ask ‘what do you do?’ every few minutes. King Charles (oh that still feels funny to type even a year on from his, sadly much duller coronation than the one on Tara) acts like a malfunctioning android now. Would that we had this lot instead: Prince Reynart is my favourite of the handful of royals in Dr Who. He’s willing to put himself in danger for others, looks out for his men and most of all is unusually humble. Despite being a Prince he’s genuinely worried about being worthy enough of Princess Strella as a man, beyond his powers as a Prince. This is no nepo baby but someone who takes his inherited power very seriously and worries too about what sort of King he’d become (which is how you tell a good ruler in Dr Who: the more confident they are about how brilliant they are, the more useless they tend to be). I reckon his King’s Christmas messages every year (and Tara is so close to Earth I bet they have Christmases, with chocolate wood beast replicas opened in front of a roaring electronic fire and a benevolent white bearded robot animal named ‘Sandy Claws’ who delivers gifts to all the Tarans who’ve been good) would be really uplifting and comforting. Even when chained up and half-starved the Prince still has more moral backbone than any of our Royals (Count Grendel, of course, would so have an alibi from Tara Pizza Express to cover himself at a time when he was actually working on an android in secret and locking the Princess up in a dungeon). I find it interesting how close the Prince is to the only other candidate in Dr Who, Prince Peladon, who is also new to the throne and a little wet behind the ears. Even more interestingly we never find out what happened to either set of parents and both plots don’t revolve around it: given events here it would totally make sense if Count Grendal had bumped off King or Queen Reynard too, but if they do then we never hear about it and obody even questions it.

There’s another source text that often gets overlooked for this story (perhaps David Fisher found two books on his shelf and couldn’t choose between them?) ‘Grendel’ is one of the (many) baddies in ‘Beowulf’, the 10^th century poem that’s one of the oldest in the English language. A giant, the cursed descendent of Cain from the Bible, he’s the ‘wicked Uncle’ who wouldn’t accept being a spare, not a heir (so in modern times he’s a mixture of Prince Harry’s position and William’s scheming personality). He’s not worthy of ruling though: he doesn’t love his people, he loathes and detests them, particularly the happy singing that goes on in their kingdom every night. So he attacks by stealth, kidnapping or killing the people one by one to make them scared of him, because if he can’t rule through love maybe he can de-throne his brother out of fear. Only there are too many people in the kingdom so that even after twelve years of doing this night after night there are still too many peasants around and he’s seen as a minor irritant rather than a mass murderer. So Grendel loses his temper and goes on a giant massacre, to make sure the people he thinks of as ‘his’ fear him –by which time he’s lost their respect and ends up being rejected again, banished before being killed.  Unlike ‘Prisoner Of Zenda’, which is a modern-ish Tale (1920s) set in Ye Olde Ancient Past this is a genuinely old legend, told round campfires and spread and expanded on by word of mouth. For all we know it may well be older than we know, a tale of something real that happened in ancient times. Either way, ‘Androids Of Tara’ feels like a morality play that’s been played out over time: every generation, every planet has a Count Grendel who thinks they can thwart justice but they always get found out in the end. There’s a sense of cathartic relief when the Doctor defeats him (with a snazzy swordfight no less) and a very funny pay-off line that Grendel, humiliated, having toppled from the castle into the moat, is still spouting furious denials (‘next time I won’t be so lenient!’) unable to accept that someone’s outsmarted him.

Another of the more interesting aspects of this story is that it’s a rare Dr Who romance. There really aren’t that many – take the long-running story arcs of the Doctor and Rose plus Amy and Rory out the equation and all you’re really left with is ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’ (and that’s a gonzo love story if ever there was one). There are more snogs per screen minute in this story than any other classic Who story (and no I haven’t counted them all, but let’s face it there aren’t many competitors – even Jo and Cliff just swap hugs and pecks on the cheek) – it’s not until David Tennant comes along, kissing people in more stories than not, that this record gets thrashed. Prince Reynart and Princess Strella are a good match: this might be an arranged marriage but they both stay loyal under pressure and risk a lot to keep the other safe and there’s eefinite chemistry between them, as if they’ve enjoyed a life together before we joined the story. You sense the Kingdom of Tara is in good hands when the Doctor leaves (and yes there is a debate over whether Tara is the kingdom or the planet given the ambiguous way people refer to it; in my head it’s both: Tara is a planet with just one great big land mass and both are named the same, because why would you give a planet a different name if the land is all one thing anyway?) Honestly I don’t know why we don’t get more romances in Dr Who as it’s something that works really well: it adds a touch of humanity to the supporting cast that makes you care for them, gives the plot an extra gear of jeopardy for reasons (at least some) viewers can relate to and the idea of ordinary people doing extraordinary things to be together is something that fits well with the Dr Who elastic format. Oh and talking of romances, one of my favourite behind-the-scenes stories concerns ‘Tara’:  bored between filming, Mary Tamm got talking to stuntman Terry Walsh about how he stayed so fit and Walsh mentioned his love of martial arts, partoicularly aikido. He offered to show some moves to Mary and was showing her a particularly close body position when Mary’s husband Marcus walked in early, ready to pick her up, and naturally assumed they were embracing until the mistake was unravelled. The only thing that would make that story funnier is if he was dressed as the Taran Wood beast at the time!

That’s the real motivation for ‘Androids Of Tara’: misunderstandings. This story would be cleared up a lot sooner if the peasants could see through Grendel for who he is, but they’ve learnt to trust in fate, not the truth of what’s before them. Everyone is too polite to say anything to stop the events that nearly lead to their doom: it takes the Doctor’s perspective, as  an outsider, to see through the customs and traditions that are restricting rather than liberating. This all lends itself to a story that, despite being about a culture with scientific knowhow, really feels more like a fairytale: this is a story about good people out of their depth somehow coming good against evil scheming people with all the power and knowledge. It’s not just the locals though; Romana too is a little too trusting and naïve, booksmart instead of lifesmart (really, the Doctor should know better than to leave her alone – of all the ‘Doctor and companions get split up’ subplots this one happens particularly early). If people are just going to take things on trust without thinking about them, the plot says, they might as well be unthinking androids.
That’s a very Dr Who message and a worthy idea for the show. The problem is it’s all a bit too Dr Who and even more it’s a bit too ‘Medieval drama morality play’. It’s  story aeguably closer to the source material of ‘Prisoner Of Zenda’ than the BBC’s own 1984 adaptation (one written by former Who script editor Terrance Dicks no less, which must have given him a real sense of déjà vu given that he wrote the rather bland novelisation of ‘Tara’ just four years earlier).  It’s all very watchable but oddly unsatisfying by the time you get to the end of it and everything goes exactly the way you suspected once you saw through the twist of this being in the future looking like the past (a twist that comes roughly five minutes into a 100minute story). There are some lovely moments along the way: seeing Tom Baker handle a sword is fun (and while it’s not as good as the fight in ‘The Sea Devils when Jon Pertwee eats a sandwich while defeating The Master one-handed, it beats the one in ‘The King’s Demons’ easily), some fun gags (Romana, having never seen a horse before, assumes it’s another mechanical beast) and you get the sense the cast are having a brilliant old time making it (especially Peeter Jeffrey as Count Grendel, an actor once considered as the second Doctor before Patrick Troughton said yes and so enthusiastic about the shoot he even did his own stunts, jumping into the moat – but admittedly not from as great a height as the camera makes out). Something about this story always lands flat though: the pieces of the jigsaw are there and the acting and some of the dialogue and the sets and scenery are first-rate: it’s just that this is such a simple jigsaw to solve you’re left wanting more and you can’t help feeling that it should be more fun to watch than it is.

Maybe it’s the script, which was certainly rushed (with many of the lines reportedly changed by the cast during filming). Or maybe it’s the direction (Michael Hayes looked down his nose at Dr Who and wanted to be known for making ‘serious drama’ – he agreed to do this partly as a favour to family friend Who producer Graham Williams who’d been nagging him for ages and to please his fourteen year old son Patrick who was a guest on location and even got to rustle the bushes as a stand in for the Woodbeast in episode one, but you can tell dad would rather be elsewhere; it seems odd that of all the ‘Key To Time’ scripts the most overtly ‘fun’ and childish one was given to a director who already considered Dr Who childish). Or maybe this is just one of those stories that was never meant to soar in this format. Ultimately the biggest problem is simply that ‘Androids Of Tara’ feels like a very minor tale indeed, dispensing with the series arc of the key to time within the opening minutes and being a mixture of at least three very obvious Dr Who plots: robot doubles, people getting captured and recued and having tyrants overthrown due to their own stupidity and negligence. It just never quite connects, as if its part android itself, a clever replica of another tale rather than the real thing. 

POSITIVES + The story was filmed on the lush grounds of the very lovely Leeds Castle. Which, despite what some guide books might accidentally tell you, is nowhere near Leeds (it’s in Kent, so much nearer to BBC TV centre). A 9^th century genuine Saxon manor (with additions made in the 13^th century), it really looks the part and has been used in all sorts of films down the decades. Dr Who nearly lost it too: the Castle became the unlikely scene of a frantic two-week peace conference held about the war in the Middle East (some things never change eh? Talk about history repeating itself…We’re probably under the same Taran star sign we were in 1978 again in 2023), held between American, Israeli and Egyptian dignitaries (it’s fun to imagine Henry Kissenger walking down the exact same steps Tom Baker swordfights peter Jeffreys on just a couple of days earlier, although that’s a very different kind of a story). There was a danger the talks might have over-run and the show cancelled; in the end the biggest casualty was the matte paintings used to depict the castle: the poor artist planned to drop into the grounds and paint it leisurely over two weeks before filming but he was barred entry due to the extra security and ended up having most of a single morning instead. Considering that, it’s not a bad effort at all, only looking fake when the camera shoots it from the ‘wrong’ angle.

NEGATIVES – The Taran Wood Beast is notorious in Dr Who fan circles, despite only having around two minutes of screen time (and to be honest he might as well not be there: the plot just needs Romana to be scared enough to run off towards Count Grendel; a sound effect would have done). A sort of Ewok with teeth crossed with a teddy bear, it seems very much the afterthought of a production team who thought 'oops, forgot to put a monster in for the kiddywinkles, lets have a rummage round the back of the cupboard on the morning of filming and then get it out the way'. As it happens, they’d booked a bear costume already from BBC stock but hadn’t bothered to look at it and found to their horror that it was moth-eaten and in disrepair and had to be hastily patched up, with a new mask fitted at the last minute. Unlike some Dr Who costume disasters that inspire last gasp moments of genius, this one looks just like a damaged costume improvised at the last minute and the Wood Beast is one of the few Dr Who ‘monsters’ that’s never been turned into a toy (amazingly there is a figurine, added to the long running model collection but not till as late as 2022). Even so, if they ever make a cuddly toy version of it I’m first in the queue. I think I’ll name mine ‘Taran the Toothy’.

BEST QUOTE: One of my favourites, The Doctor’s ‘Do you mind not standing on my chest? My hat’s on fire’, something I use in everyday life more often that you might suppose.

 

  

In 1995 Paul Cornell
A future Who writer that apparently wasn’t feeling too well
Wrote a whole 50 page story in iambic pentameter verse
‘The Trials Of Tara’: could have been better – could have been worse
It was published in volume two of ‘Decalog’
A compilation as varied as a pond of Sea Devils and Urbankan frogs
A Shakespeare spoof, with several in-jokes
It showed that Paul was a clever and funny bloke
The 7^th Doctor arrived with Benny dressed as a boy
Arriving in the middle of another fiendish ploy
By Count Grendel who, with lessons still unlearned
Is still after Strella despite being burned
But she’s lording over a champion fight for her heart
In which the Doctor must play a part
Before who turns up but the sweetest soul
‘Tis The Kandy Man from ‘The Happiness Patrol!
A robot sent to do his bidding
He’s set up a Taran Kandy kitchen
Before being defeated with Taran red wine
And suddenly his circuits aren’t feeling very fine
Soon everyone is pulling off their disguises
And running off with various matrimonial prizes
And soon order is restored, for now at least
Exit pursued by a Taran wood beast!
It’s certainly different: aye ‘twill give it that
And Cornell is clearly a well read chap
But I’m rather grateful it’s only a one-off
What next? Romero and Juliet with a Racnoss and Abzorbaloff???