The Mysterious Planet: Ranking - 245

   The Mysterious Planet

(Season 23, Dr 6 with Peri,  6-27/9/1986, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Robert Holmes, Director: showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Nicholas Mallett) 

Rank: 245

Dr: ‘My this courtoom is a large set’
 Valeyard: ‘Well, I’ve had no complaints so far!’
Inquisitor: ‘If I had a case to present against you Doctor would you hold it against me?’
Dr: ‘Not in that outfit inquisitor, nudge nudge wink wink’
Inquisitor: 'Ooh Doctor, you are awful but I have some misgivings about the trial'
Valeyard: 'I think you can gets some tablets to cure those up nowadays inquisitor [Sid James Laugh]'
Dr: ‘I’m flabbergasted! My gast has never been so flabbered!’
Katryca: ‘Can you get back to me please? Aliens today they’re only interested in one thing’
Doctor: ‘I’m quite interested in the other one too’
Katryca: ‘Cheeky! I’ll slap you so hard you’ll regenerate mister’
Dr: ‘Ooh Matron..esque warrior queen!’
Valeyard: ‘Infamy infamy! Ravalox has got it in for me, err I mean The Doctor!’

First an explanatory note: Technically this story’s official title is ‘Trial Of A Timelord episode 1-4’, with the individual story names only ever used in BBC paperwork. That’s how many guidebooks treat it if you’re tyring to cross-check these reviews with others. However reviewing this as one long lumpy four-part story in one go feels wrong and the abuse heaped on this season as a whole makes me sound even grumpier than usual so I’ve stuck with the individual names. After all, they’re quite good ones and most fans know them this way anyway (even if the DVDs and Blu-rays don’t technically call them anything other than ‘Trial Of A Timelord’). 

 
By season 23 Dr Who was on the naughty step. With hindsight not because of anything it had actually done wrong but because the new controller of the BBC didn't like it. Nowadays it seems odd that any one individual had the power to do anything about a guaranteed ratings winner outright, but then Michael Grade didn't directly cancel the show either. Instead he fiddled with the timeslot so people couldn't find it, put Dr Who up against Coronation Street where all programmes traditionally go to die and pointed to a small handful of complaints it was 'too violent'. Most fans were left scratching their heads: in 1985 Dr Who might not have had the ratings of its glory days but it regularly placed in the top 100 programmes for the week and considering the appallingly small amount of money that was spent on it more than recouped it in merchandise (just take the first batch of Dr Who home videos, released from the end of 1983 that were all best sellers despite the first one costing £80 and being ‘Revenge Of the Cybermen’). Had the show lost its core audience? Not gained enough newcomers? Could it be that, as a 1960s programme promoting equality, justice and hope this series just didn’t fit the BBC’s vision of the future in the 1980s when they were making programmes about making moolah and being yuppies? (you can measure Who by what it follows in the ‘family’ slot in any era: in the 1960s it was mostly The Telegoons, 1960s updates of 1950s surrealist Goon humour, in the 1970s it was family favourite The Generation Game with a dash of wise-cracking fox Basil Brush. In this era it’s arrogant know it puppet Roland Rat superstar). Even the privy few who knew what was really going on (Michael Grade just happened to be dating Colin Baker’s ex Lisa Goddard and wanted to give the actor a hard time) didn’t think he’d really do it. The plan was to drop Dr Who quietly, to simply not renew the contract and make only vague mutterings about when it was coming back – only Grade’s masterplan backfired. He misunderstood that Dr Who wasn’t like the BBC’s other programmes, watched when it was on and then forgotten and that there was a growing industry of magazines and fanzines all of whom hung on every last morsel of news. Horrified at the cavalier way they’d been treated producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward ‘accidentally’ leaked their termination notices to the press anonymously who kicked up a huge fuss. Outraged Whovians jammed the BBC switchboards for days leaving complaints that varied from polite Sensorite level to outright screaming Davros. Fan consultant Ian Levine even used his music contacts to put together a charity single ‘Dr In Distress’ using as many popstar Dr Who fans as he could find (including two Moody Blues, the drummer from The Jam, someone from Ultravox and Faith Brown who’d just been in ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’). And like all good tyrants and dictators Michael Grade caved in, claiming that he’d never wanted to cancel the series, honest and was only ‘resting’ it to make it better when it did come back in eighteen months’ time. When it was going to be better by having all the things that was holding it back removed. Like the violence. And the amount of episodes it contained which were cut in half. At no point did anyone ever contemplate giving the series more money. 

 
This left the production team in something of a pickle, like gherkins in a jar. They now had double the time to make half the amount of programmes, after being told to scrap most of what had already been lined up for season 23 (annoyingly the most consistent bunch of scripts the show had had in years – although there’s nothing to say they wouldn’t have been messed up in translation to screen it’s worth perusing the ‘prequels/sequels’ section to see that it was in any case a stronger and much more original run than Colin Baker’s first year as The Doctor). JNT and friends also now had to have everything okayed personally by Grade or the equally Who-hating head of serials Jonathan Powell before he could proceed. Only nobody was telling him what to do: the pair gave contradictory answers to everything. No sooner was Michael Grade demanding they cut all violence and make the series ‘jokey’ then Jonathan Powell was criticising the prospective scripts for being too ‘silly’ and why didn’t they put more realism into them? Feeling as if they were on trial somebody (JNT? Saward? Levine? Glen McCoy the writer of ‘Timelash’ whose the only person to have claimed the idea even if he doesn’t seem to have been considered for either the cancelled or screened season 23 so everyone doubts it?) decided to mirror what was happening in real life with what was happening in the show, putting the Doctor on trial for his life (JNT then added the idea from ‘A Christmas Carol’ that we would see adventures form The Doctor’s past, present and future). After all, it had worked the last time Dr Who had been on trial at the end of 1969, when ‘The War Games’ saw The Doctor exiled to Earth and condemned to lower budgets and higher ratings. As per last time the outward charge was to be ‘interference’ from The Doctor’s own timelord race, but really it was everything The Doctor stood for as a true child of the 1960s: the desire to help people, to overthrow monsters, to keep people safe, to never let anyone suffer if you could do something to put it right, to fight hard for peace. Maybe, by letting The Doctor show what he stood for, he could defend himself against Thatcherist Britain that had no use for values like his and convince a jury of his peers that he was right and they were wrong? Whether by accident or design  its very in keeping where the show started, as a sort of discussion between different age groups about the best way to live your life. The idea was, after hearing stories from his past present and future the Doctor would be found innocent and win the day triumphantly along, hopefully, with the show itself. 

Only there was another problem. Eric felt that if this was to be the death throes of Dr Who then the best person to write for the show was its one time script editor and still well beloved writer Robert Holmes who’d already caused quite a stir with fan favourite story ‘The Caves Of Androzani’. Few people had written more words for The Doctor than him and yet nobody was more critical of what the show had become either – if anyone could steer the ship back on course then it was Bob, who was duly hired to write the first and last parts, that set up the mystery then tied all the loose ends up at the end. Only Bob was poorly, all those years of hard drinking and smoking taking their toll on his liver. Though he’d taken the commission Bob wasn’t really in a position to write it and he certainly wasn’t the right writer for the new-look sanitised funny violence-free series that the BBC seemed to be demanding. Always the trooper he soldiered on with ‘The Mysterious Planet’, turning it into a re-write of sorts of his first Who script ‘The Krotons’ with lots of room to show how the series and society had changed in the interim. His illness meant there were less drafts than usual though, his writing less sharp. Powell savaged the drafts when he got them, attacking all the humour that Holmes had been asked to put in and ripping them to shreds. Holmes then wasted the last few precious months of his life re-writing the story until all the joy was taken out of it, Saward re-writing it further to make it jump through the last few hoops his bosses had given him while everyone else ran around like headless Ergons, with nobody fully in charge because nobody quite knew what to do. At least the story would dovetail into the gripping finale Holmes was being asked to write though, right? Who knows, maybe school bullies Grade and Powell would be beating up on some other poor unsuspecting TV show by then? (Surely that Roland Rat would be out of favour and in need of a kicking by then? Please?) Only Holmes was sicker than he knew. Midway through writing ‘The Ultimate Foe’ he was rushed to Stoke Mandiville hospital, where he died at the horrifically young age of sixty four months before the first episode was due to go out. The Trial was now left without The Doctor’s main defence counsel, the man who knew the character and series better than anybody, with the script editor left to re-write and modify his words while still mourning the death of his friend and without fully knowing what the ending would have been. 

 
That leaves ‘The Mysterious Planet’ as one of the more mysterious Who stories, the only one where the writer died before it was transmitted and so never got the chance to talk about it at length or the trial idea as a whole. Today's story is the first part of that trial, from the 'past' - even though, compared to where we left off before the 18 month hiatus, it’s the 'future'. Confused? me too. This story is a quick jaunt across the planet Ravalox, a ravaged Earth-like planet in the far future. On the one hand it’s an obvious dud, as the audience of loyal Whovians groaned when it went out, with several sticks with which to beat up the show laid out in full view: it uses all the series clichés like a race of savages who turn out to be from our future after a nuclear war (yawn), led by a clumsy robot with walking problems who treats them as his slave race (yikes) while the trial itself was both unclear and deeply annoying, interrupting what little action there was with lots of endless talking. For many fans the worst elements of season twenty-two had been the way The Doctor just wouldn’t shut up and spent too long bickering with the people around him rather than doig things; sticking him in a courtroom drama, that by its own rules has to be static and full of people bickering at each other, just made a bad situation worse. The characters all felt recycled from earlier scripts, the dialogue was mostly lacking Holmes’ dazzling wit and the twist at the end (spoilers but it’s not that much of a twist) is that this planet that’s just like earth used to be is…Earth in the future. Which might just be one of the most obvious twists the show ever did. It’s a series that would ask a lot from the production team to be realised properly on a normal budget. What with its robot-built caves, great wastelands full of extras and indeed the robot itself; on a slashed budget it was asking for trouble and looked as cheap and tacky as Grade and Powell insisted it did all the time, honest. Lots of fans were disappointed and a few more casual ones recognised that we were beaten and went off to watch something else. Maybe even Roland Rat.  

At the same time, though, there’s a great script in here trying to be let out and even in bastardised form it’s still one up on Holmes’ last for ‘The Two Doctors’. One of Homes’ pet peeves was institutionalised learning in classrooms which put people off really learning about things for life, something that had got decidedly worse under Thatcher’s budget cuts that ripped out half the arts and humanities, so the story repeats that plot from ‘The Krotons’, about how an intelligence test saw the brightest and best killed off turned ‘establishment’. Only this time round its ever more deadly because things are worse and the stakes are higher, with teachers who don’t understand what they’re teaching delivering it to pupils. There’s a  wonderfully damning and oh so Holmesian moment when it turns out that this culture has been built on three ‘sacred’ texts that nobody understands anymore: Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’ Charles Kingsley’s ‘The Water Babies’ and in one last great gag ‘The Habitats Of The Wild Canadian Goose by H M Stationary Office’ (treated as if it’s the name of an author, rather than public information publishing with the Royals as a figurehead).The joke is that, in this ravaged planet where nobody leaves the tribe, the human slaves don’t even know what water or seas are anymore and knowledge about all of Canada has been lost, never mind its wildlife on the other side of the world. All meaning has been lost because the context has been lost: readers in Melville’s day knew that it wasn’t ‘just’ about a whaler for instance but mankind’s stubbornness in reaching for unobtainable dreams that destroy him in the end. Readers in Kingsley’s day knew that ‘The Water Babies’ was, above all else, a Christian text about a boy turned chimney sweep and used as a robber by a bunch of thugs (one of them played by Bernard Cribbins in the film version – Jon Pertwee is a Scottish lobster, I kid you not!” And a high cockalurum to you if you’ve seen it as its one of my favourite films. No that isn’t as rude as it sounds) who ends up redeemed when he tries to stop the robbery only to die/be reborn in water that turns him ‘clean’ and baptises him into a new person who wakes up in a sort-of Heaven. And everyone knew what geese were. Note that the people in charge don’t understand these books and the people aren’t allowed to read them because they’re ‘sacred’; of all the things Holmes believed in most it was the idea that there was no such thing as high art and culture and that what we created as a species belonged to all of us no matter where on the food chain we were. As much as we’re meant to think that Earth became a hellhole when Drathro came along, really its because the people stopped reading and aspiring to do better.

I like to think, too, that Holmes was getting one last dig in at the new bosses for ‘meddling in things that didn’t concern them’. After all this is the writer who turned most things he hated into Dr Who monsters, from his tax returns (‘The Sunmakers’) to his slight discomfort that his job was getting people to gawp at people the way people did at animals in zoos (‘Carnival Of Monsters’), not to mention the grisliest story about vegetarianism ever made (‘The Two Doctors’). Drathro the robot is a really thick kind of robot. He’s like The Krotons in the sense that he has an oversized head that he doesn’t bother to apply, instead using humans to do the work he can’t do himself because he’s pretty useless. Above all, he takes the smartest and the best of the nation that he himself has trained…and then keeps them for himself, refusing to educate the rest. I’m convinced this is a damning comment from someone who really cared about the nations’ children about what The BBC had turned into by the mid 1980s when everything of use was imported, not made. I grew up as a child in the 1980s and I well remember how bad the programming for children was (I learnt far more from older programmes made in the 1960s and 1970s, including Who, than I ever did from stuff made for me). Surprise surprise, it gets better when Grade quits in 1987.  I think it goes even further than that though: both Grade and Powell are the ‘monsters’ who put The Doctor on trial and already plan to have him executed despite the fact that they lie and make up evidence and cheat and try to paint our hero out as the bad guy while not having the first clue what he stands for. Oddly enough both Grade and Powell approved of the ‘trial’ idea even though, in Homes’ hands at least, the monstrous prosecuting Valeyard and the supposedly but not very neutral Inquisitor are a mouthpiece for his bosses. They shut The Doctor up whenever he’s trying to show what good he can do and what he stands for, ignores all the evidence he gives about what hope and joy he’s brought to the cosmos, criticising him and blaming him every time he points out a fault with the way Ravalox/Earth are being run, they criticise his violence while threatening him with execution. The gall of it: The Doctor waits (im)patiently for justice to be delivered  but it never is, because how could it be when the people in charge are crooked? And how can the people under them grow up anything but crooked with leaders such as these? I’ve never read Holmes’ original ‘Ultimate Foe’ (nobody has, apart from Eric Saward, not even Pip and Jane Baker who were asked to rewrite it) but we do know that he wanted to end the series on a very dark note that was perfectly in keeping with this story, with The Doctor and Valeyard locked in mortal combat falling through time. JNT was probably right to nix it (fearing it would give the bosses an excuse to drop the series altogether) but it makes perfect aesthetic sense based on this story: The Valeyard is a shadow of The Doctor ‘between his 12th and 13th regenerations’ ; it’s how he’ll end up in the future the way the world is shifting, as a cruel corrupt sadistic character because that’s what The BBC is and what they’re turning the viewers into, clones of themselves. It would have pleased Holmes no end that, as it turns out, the ’shadow’ between the 12th and 13th regenerations is considered as being David Tennant turning into Matt Smith at ‘The End Of Time’ (or was till the ‘Timeless Child’ cycle mucked it up anyway) when he has his own moment of prima donna shouting but then does the right thing. Because society had turned the right way by 2010 after all (now 2023 on the other hand…)   

There’s a downside to all this allegorising though; in fact there’s two. One is that there’s no time to tell a ‘proper’ story, one that’s really gripping for people who haven’t got the first clue what it’s really about and on that scale ‘The Mysterious Planet’ is a letdown. ‘The Krotons’ is criticised by many but at least that story is properly scary in places and with characters you care for. Nobody in this story feels real including the robot and there’s no Phillip Madoc in the cast to gee things up, just another of JNT’s bizarre bits of ridiculous stunt casting, as Carry On comedian Joan Sims ends up as the softest warrior Queen ever. Katryca should be like Missy, bonkers and unstoppable and the only person here enough of a threat to Drathro and all his technology defeating him by being in touch with the land and the people. She ought to be properly scary, with the might of humanity behind her. Only she’s a bit like your nan when she gets hangry, not a threat at all once you’ve taken her zimmer frame away. It doesn’t help that the edict from on high says no violence – so we have a warrior Queen who doesn’t do anything except threaten and shout, tackling a robot whose scariest feature is his oversized head holding his oversized ego and a Doctor who can’t practice Venusian karate or get into much of a fight scene (well, only a very timid bit of light strangling). There’s not enough plot to go around either: The Doctor and Peri don’t actively do much except wander in and out of trouble – they don’t get their hands dirty the way they need to. As brilliant as it is to see the 6th Doctor and Peri as actual friends, playing their characters the way they should always have done, as friends who know each other really well and like to tease rather than mortal enemies (a decision not in the script but taken by the actors, who figured there’s no way they’d still be travelling however long it’s been since ‘Revelation Of The Daleks’ and still be at each other’s throats) and wonderful as Colin and Nicola are (it can’t have been easy stuck at home with nothing to do with no work booked as they assumed they’d be making more Who; Colin considered it ‘paid paternity leave’ as daughter Lucy had just been born) they don’t get nearly enough to do, just end up in trouble and escape it.

The other is that this allegory is relentlessly sad. We’ve had dark and cynical from Holmes lots of times. Heck ‘The two Doctors’ is as dark a story as any, where everyone is just meat to somebody else and (in stark contrast to the Steven Moffat period) everybody dies (even Jamie in the first draft). But few are as dark as ‘Mysterious’. All that hope in Dre Who, all that belief that things will get better if only we wait and hold on, has been replaced by misery and a feeling of ‘what’s the point?’ That nuclear war that The Doctor’s been fighting since ‘The Daleks’ in 1963 actually happens – not on some distant planet for some life lesson but on this planet. Everything that mankind ever stood for, everything we built up with our bare hands, has been forgotten, reduced to the rubble of a corner of Marble Arch train station in an era when nobody remembers what a train is (if nothing else I love the very British twist that the signifier for a dead Earth is the corner of a small tube station rather than the statue of Liberty as it is in ‘Planet Of The Apes’; of course they completely miss the point when they try this sort of gag again in the even more wretched ‘Orphan 55’), vegetation covering the tracks of everything our species ever did. The people here aren’t free or happy or even educated, they’re just slaves to the machine. All those great works of fiction have been reduced to three that people don’t understand and which most of the population are forbidding from reading anyway. And this time even The Doctor’s not allowed to help (though he does anyway, because he’s The Doctor, even though it feels futile). The best bit of the story by far (though they could have sold even this bit better by keeping up the mystery till later) is when Peri is confronted with the death of her own planet and gets quite tearful thinking about all the possibilities and people that are now lost, that everyone’s struggles to survive counted for nothing in the end. It was all for nothing. The bad guys have finally won. No other Dr Who story makes me quite as depressed as this one – even in darker stories like ‘The Waters Of Mars’ The Doctor learns valuable lessons and even in stories when he regenerates there’s always that wonderful moment when you realise that the story can begin again with new chances (Dr Who is more like ‘The Water Babies’ than fans give that book credit for, actually). 

For most fans the standouts of the story are one last Holmesian double act of opposites in Glitz and Dibber, the first of whom gets to appear in two more stories. Glitz is as big a chancer as they come, he can talk the talk but isn’t so good at walking the walk, neither goody nor hero but someone in the middle doing what he needs to do and trying to survive another day (which is why his sudden conversion to good in ‘The Ultimate Foe’ is so irritating!) If anything Dibber is the more interesting of the two though: he can’t talk the talk at all and has none of his partner’s charm or charisma, regularly picked on because everyone assumes he’s a pushover. But he can walk the walk much better than Glitz, being the hardened one underneath it all the one with the guts to actually kill people if he has to. Glitz doesn’t work in future stories because you can’t have one without the other and honestly I find his reputation amongst fans over-rated, but here they do at least make sense. They’re the only people besides The Doctor and Peri who can see clearly through the lies of this planet (and are, so I reckon, Holmes’ comment on what viewers needed to do to survive the 1980s: pretend to stop being peace loving and go with the flow, waiting your chance till you can put things right). Tony Selby gets all the love for putting more into the script than was really there but for me it’s Glen Murphy’s scowling as Dibber that stands out (it’s his first TV job a year before ‘London’s Burning’ turned him into a big a star as any that launched their careers on Who alongside Pauline Collins and Martin Clunes). Both are a bit off though: for a start its weird that they both talk in cockney, hinting that language has somehow survived the future intact better than, say, structures that have already survived millennia in our tine, when we know how quickly dialogue changes (plus everybody on this planet speaks in The Queens’ English). They’re also both terribly odd characters to write if you’ve been told to cut back on the violence though, gun-slinging mercenaries who shoot to kill, somehow changed into comedy relief. They were, I suspect, much funnier in Holmes’ first draft before Powell made him take all the jokes out but even in the rewrites still steal all the best lines.  No for me the standout is the robot: yes it’s a poor copy of both ‘The Krotons’ and The Giant Robot from, erm, ‘Robot’, with poor actor Roger Brierly, hired for his voice, forced to spend hours in an overdubbing suite because it took all his acting skills not to fall over. It still looks good though, exactly the sort of thing that no other series would offer and is the best acted part besides the regulars. Had director Nicholas Mallett shot it properly, towering over, say, Peri in a dimly lit cave full of huddled quaking extras, then this would be have got people talking about Dr Who again the way they used to. Even shot to look on a par with Colin Baker, in an over-lit room with a few straggling bored extras, though, Drathro still feels like at least a bit of a threat. Shame they had to give him the same vocoder voice effect as ‘Marvin The paranoid Android’ in ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To Te Galaxy’ though as it makes it even harder to take him seriously.   

One wise-cracking mercenary and a robot still aren’t enough to save this story, however. There are parts that simply don’t work or tie together, whether because Holmes was too poorly to do them justice or Eric misunderstood them in re-drafting or his bosses made him take them out. The idea of putting The Doctor on trial for things he did from his past present and future is a clever idea on paper but stupid in practice  anyway (it’s there because Dr Who the series was on trial  partly because of what it might become, which is equally stupid). Not Holmes’ fault, but the way he handles this ‘past’ segment doesn’t do the trial idea any favours. This was a chance for The Doctor to do either do something kind that utterly backfires in face or make a mistake that sees him do something truly bad. After all, it has to be something colossal: The Valeyard has his entire lifespan to choose from in submitting evidence; even if he only wants to frame this particular regeneration for whatever reason he could have chosen The Doctor strangling Peri (‘The Twin Dilemma’),  committing genocide on The Cybermen (‘Attack Of the Cybermen’), murdering Shockeye (‘The Two Doctors’) or accidentally letting Earth in on the secrets of time travel by letting H G Wells on board The Tardis and leaving him free to write about what he saw (‘Timelash’ – that last one alone should have been consecutive life sentences). Surely too the biggest charges would be from the days of the 4th Doctor, when he let first The Vardans then Sontarons invade Gallifrey (‘The Invasion Of Time’) or was accidentally responsible for entropy destroying great swathes of the universe (‘Logopolis’). Instead The Valeyard chooses this story. What does The Doctor do that’s so wrong exactly? He kills a robot and frees some slaves. Even in the topsy-turvy muddled morality of the mid-1980s that was a good thing, surely? It’s a problem throughout all four trial stories but particularly this one as it has to set up so much backstory: it’s just not interesting.  Court dramas just aren’t interesting. Every time this story finally gets moving it stops. Holmes (or whoever really wrote the last draft) also uses it as a get out of jail free card too many times. Not enough jeopardy happening in the story with a cliffhanger coming up? Not to worry lets’ have The Valeyard say something incredibly rude and then threaten The Doctor with something new and have quick zoom in on Colin Baker’s face. Honestly by the end of the trial I knew Colin’s face better than my own they use the effect that much. It’s even dafter when we’re meant to get worried about how events on Ravalox might conspire to kill The Doctor…when he’s sitting watching it with us, in the future, from the courtroom! And yet whenever we rejoin the story next week The Doctor doesn’t seem anymore scared. He should be: he knows what a corrupt bunch the timelords can be and what they can do to him (even if its only exile on Earn again that would be even more horrid to this restless crusader than the 3rd Doctor and he would be even more resentful at having his face and character changed than the comparatively humble 2nd). Yet he still bickers his way through this story as if he’s having a bit of a giggle. He needs to be scared. He ought to be fighting (especially in the context that we don’t want our series taken off the air). Instead he seems resigned in a way we’ve never seen him before. Ah well. Twenty-three years wasn’t a bad run. Maybe he’s had his time. 

It’s that feeling of ‘that’ll do’ that’s most damning from first to last. The new theme tune is pretty awful: Dominic Glynn sent in demo tapes oif his synth-heavy compositions to the BBC who passed one to JNT who hired him on the spot even though the composer wasn’t actually ready yet – he had to do it as a rush job in five days, on a spare synth in his girlfriend’s spare bedroom because there wasn’t time to get his full equipment ready and it shows (though its still better than many of the ones to come; it’s a sad fact that the theme tunes has got increasingly worse with every single arrangement since the original and best). The ending is pathetic, something signposted as early as the first few scenes and done without any sense of climax or resolution. Somewhere along the way, by avoiding the twin demands of avoiding violence and avoiding comedy ‘The Mysterious Planet’ ends up falling into the real trap that had been holding Who back, ending up a story of weird looking extras doing incomprehensible things in front of a set that looks as if its falling apart. The result is a story that’s like lots of other Bob Holmes classic without ever coming close to being a Bob Homes classic. This story, more than ever before, needed to be brilliant. It needed fans to fall in love with the series all over again. It needed to wow newcomers into being committed. It needed to sell so many spin-off videos and bits of merchandise that the BBC’s own finance department would find it cheaper to cancel Michael Grade than they did Dr Who. Instead it’s kind of alright. Nothing here soars. The scenes in the wilderness fall flat as a pancake. Drathro still seems like a pale copy of other bigger better robots we’ve had down the years. The’ twist’ of what Ravalox might be is given away so clumsily it’s one of the worst ‘secrets’ in the series. The trial scenes make you reach for the fast forward button, full of plot-numbing exposition the action gets interrupted every time it gets going, the charges against the Doctor seem to change every few episodes  and we have some particularly daft cliffhangers (because if the Doctor is there in the courtroom in the future, safe and well, there can't possibly have been anything that bad happening to him in his past in this story). Queen Elizabeth Country Park in Horndean, Hampshire is one of the most boring places the show’s ever been to – they might as well have filmed it in the gravelly car park. Even indoors the sets are awful (due to a mistake the courtroom was erected in the wrong studio and had to e torn down and rebuilt in a hurry for much smaller specifications. That’s why it looks more bashed and bruised than usual. To think they had eighteen months to prepare for this story!) 

The supporting characters are as one dimensional as any in Dr Who despite being written by one of the best writers of supporting people going, with even as fine an actor as Tom ‘City Of Death’ Chadbon kind of faceless (and clearly hired with a funnier script in mind than this one). I know a lot of fans like them but Lynda Bellingham and Michael Jayston are awful, bland actors who have all the charisma and power of a gravy boat full of Bisto. If you can’t have actual violence anymore then you should at least be sure that the people in power have violence at their disposal; they come across as substitute teachers no one respects, never mind someone as experienced with tyrants as The Doctor. As for the trial, the worst scenes in Dr Who were always the ones where characters shouted at people while running down a corridor; that problem is ten times worse by sticking everyone in a rigid courtoom set.  With Dr Who on its last legs and its episode count cut in two every story matters and you can’t get away with bland filler stories that don’t quite come off. And that’s what this one is. Honestly had Glenn McCoy’s name been on it rather than Holmes’ most fans wouldn’t have been surprised. The fact its written by our hero, albeit a poorly dying hero, somehow makes it worse. If even the man who lied and breathed this series for so long has given up then maybe so should we? Honestly there are times watching ‘The Trial Of A Timelord’ as a whole when I can’t believe it came back on the air the next year at all; this show feels defeated, like a bouncy puppy that once brought so much joy whimpering in the corner. Even though there are another three years after this one and another fifteen stories to go till the full cancellation in 1989 this right here is the story that killed Dr Who. Because if this had worked and been as great as we were all willing it to be then Dr Who might have run forever. But even when it does get wonderful and amazing and brilliant again in a couple of years’ time people have stopped watching because they tried this story and it failed miserably. And amazingly this season actually gets worse from here. A lot of people responsible for making this monstrosity have taken blame for it down the years but somehow the real villains have escaped: this is all Grade and Powell’s fault. Dr Who was doing great before they interfered. If anyone should be put on charges of interference, it’s them. 

POSITIVES +To think it all started off so very well! Knowing that all eyes would be on the opening scene JNT make sure it was the most expensive shot in the ‘classic’ series ever, costing a whopping £8000 in 1986 money (that’s a tenth of the entire episode budget spent on something that lasts forty seconds), made to be as show-offy as possible, as if to say 'look, Michael Grade's wrong – Dr Who can look fabulous!' Model shots were pretty much all static camera shots in anything in 1986 but here the camera actually pans round the model space station and follows the Tardis as it gets pulled in by a tractor beam and pulled through a doorway. It's a difficult shot to pull off now, never mind back then. In 1986 it looked like magic. Everyone really wanted to prove how good Dr Who could be when it was given love, money and attention and they were right too - for all of three minutes, until the 'Trial' section started in earnest. Of course something had to give to pay for it and that was the fact that it ends up being (sob!) the last ever shot of Dr Who recorded on film inter-spliced with scenes on sets filmed onto videotape (bar the special case of ‘The TV Movie’ in 1996 anyway, which is all on film). From now on everything outside will be filmed on cheaper videotape by the BBC’s outside broadcast units and Dr Who will never look this glossy again till it comes back in 2005. Sadly the scene is itself going to be recycled so many times during this year you’ll soon get sick of it. Even more sadly the very excellent model was lost in a fire along with other exhibits at a Dr Who museum in London.   

NEGATIVES – I know, I know, we’ve mentioned her already but seriously how bad was Joan Sims in this? She’s one of my favourite comediennes (mostly thanks to her radio work) and usually word perfect even when talking rubbish, but she’s clueless in the role of Katryca and nobody stops to put her right. She’s hopelessly wooden, mumbles all her words and doesn’t ‘get’ her character at all, making her cold and conservative rather than passionate and outrageous. She really shouldn’t have been there at all of course. One of the biggest complaints from the DW fanbase, as opposed to Michael Grade, was the producer's love of hiring big names in the acting world and then changing parts to fit them, rather than the other way around. The past two years had given us gun-toting Dalek rebel Rula Lenska, gun-toting Dalek warrior Rodney Bewes and frazzled, violent starship captain Beryl Reid. Somehow Joan Sims as a gun-toting freedom fighter who takes time out from shooting people to engage in comedy banter manages to be worse. If they'd ever filmed 'carry On Doctor Who' as opposed to 'Carry On Doctor', you suspect it would look just like this, only with Sid James in the clashing coat of many colours and Barbara Windsor as Peri in an even lower cut top. Oh and Bernard Bresslaw back as an Ice Warrior, of course.
BEST QUOTE:  ‘Planets come and go. Stars perish. Matter disperses, coalesces, reforms into other patterns, other worlds. Nothing can be eternal’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The way ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ was marketed was a measure of how new-look Dr Who was desperate to seen as child friendly rather than adult and violent. For instance the programme on before the first episode of ‘The Mysteriuous Planet’ was the puppet show ‘Roland Rat – The Series’, about a rodent with an ego the size of a planet who thinks he’s marvellous even though to everyone else he’s basically vermin. Come to think of it, he’s not actually that different in personality to the 6th Doctor (it must be a 1980s thing). Colin Baker filmed some special continuity announcements on the ‘trial’ courtroom set, sort of in character as The Doctor, announcing both Roland (‘Across immeasurable distances in space, through the vast tracts of time, amongst the furthest flung of the galaxies I have met with the strangest creatures in the universe: Daleks, Cybermen, even the dreaded Wogan from the planet Shepherd’s Bush, and long green slimy things with tentacles and stingers and strange orifices that leaked unpleasant liquids and now the slimiest of them all – Roland Rat The Series’, Colin ending it with a bang-on Roland Rat impression) and his own show (‘and now back to BBC One for Dr Who – The series!’) Despite all the fuss about the violence in Dr Who Colin the fires a pistol at Roland’s annoying sidekick Kevin the Gerbil and explodes him to kingdom come (immediately making him a hero to millions). Wendy Richard was guest on the show, good preparation for ruining her career further still in ‘Dimensions In Time’. Copyright reasons means it’s not on the ‘Trial’ DVD set but it is on the season 23 ‘Collection’ blu-ray.  

Season 23 was a surprise choice for a relatively early blu-ray collection, being short and slightly fishy (not unlike its main supporting monster Sil) but in many ways it’s the best one so far stuffed with extras both serious and fun with ten hours of unseen footage that get to the heart of why The Trial Of A Timelord turned out to be a bit of a, well, trial. The trailer, officially known as ‘The Trial’, is the shortest, the most fun and yet most flippant of the lot, with Colin Baker standing in the cock and demanding an end to this travesty and farrago of injustice, etc etc and offering to show the courtroom evidence that The Matrix has been tampered with (using his mobile, which has a screenshot from the 1986 annual on it). It turns out that Colin’s just been booked for a speeding ticket and is duly placed in a cell alongside Nicola Bryant (her crime? Marrying Brian Blessed!) Not exactly Leela returning to Gallifrey or Jo Grant down a Welsh mine type of standard but all great fun  and very in keeping with the earnestness of this often very silly season.

So, you may be thinking, what might the original season 23 have looked like had it not been changed to the postmodernist idea of the show on trial? Frustratingly, rather good: it’s always hard to tell purely from scripts but even acknowledging the odd duff effect that would surely have ended up in there somewhere the five, maybe six scripts ready to go made for one of the most consistently good seasons in years (possibly for a decade). Of course we don’t know for certain what stories would have made the grade of Michael Grade or what order they would have been in as Dr Who was postponed when it was still in a state of flux. There are scripts we know were strong possibilities though and which were all in various stages of progression before being abandoned. As the first stories intended to be made ‘The Nightmare Fair’ and ‘Mission To Magnus’ were all ready to start rolling, others like ‘The Ultimate Evil’ and ‘The Hollows Of Time’ were polished first drafts and only Bob Holmes’ ‘Yellow Fever And How To Cure It’ and ‘Children Of January’ were still at the planning stage and is the least known story of the lot. ‘Children Of January’. ‘Point Of Entry’ was an outside choice: it was being worked on with an eye to either this season or the next, as a backup if one of the other scripts fell though (as happened quite regularly). So far all of these stories have been used in the excellent Big Finish ‘lost stories’ range with the exception of ‘Fever’  and ‘January’, while the first three and most complete of these stories were also published as part of the Target range of books re-written by their authors. 

We know that ‘The Nightmare Fair’ was planned to be first, given that the Doctor claims at the end of ‘Revelation’ that he wanted to take Peri to ‘Bl-‘ – the full word was Blackpool, which got trimmed when the series’ future looked in doubt. A fine return for The Celestial Toymaker, written by former producer Graham Williams whose love for the series shines through, it would have been an explosive opener with Colin Baker squaring up with Michael Gough against a backdrop of Blackpool illuminations and with the Toymaker’s games updated to a 1980s amusement arcade. Inspired by the Dr Who team being invited to turn the Christmas lights on, it belies it’s obvious publicity-grabbing origins to be a really taut and gripping story much recommended in both book and audio form (see ‘The Celestial Toymaker’ for more).       

‘The Ultimate Evil’ by newcomer Wally K Daly is a bit overshadowed, beaten to the Target range by ‘Nightmare Fair’ (in an adaptation by Who director Fiona Cumming) and delayed in the audio lost stories range until 2019 (when Daly adapted it himself), being a more straightforward traditional Who adventure without the attention grab of Blackpool or a returning monster. It’s just as good in its own way, though, with the Doctor again trying to take Peri on holiday and ending up in even more danger on a holiday planet Tranquela that’s fallen under the spell of an alien named the Dwarf Mordent. A sales-monster arms dealer (think Margaret Thatcher’s son in the middle East when this story would have been on air) with a ‘hate gun’, he’s amongst the most Batman of Dr Who villains but there’s a real sense of jeopardy and threat as the Doctor becomes possessed and Peri ends up left for dead (and for much longer than the usual ‘cliffhanger in peril’ scene too). A weird cross between the campness of ‘The Macra Terror’ and the horror of ‘Caves Of Androzani’ it works well as both book and audio but it’s the story that would have been the hardest to pull off on telly without looking a bit, well, silly.

  
We know ‘Mission To Magnus’ would have looked good, given the high standards set by Phillip Martin’s other two stories ‘Vengeance On Varos’ and eventual replacement ‘Mindwarp’. A classic in book form it suffers a bit in the audio adaptation even with Nabil Shaban back as Sil (it is a very visual story after all) but Martin is one of the best 1980s writers and has a lot of fun with Who’s legacy in a way he never did with his other two scripts. Originally this was a story written purely for The Ice Warriors (who would have been making their first appearance on the show since ‘Monster Of Peladon’ in 1974), who finally get to invade the Earth fully and tilt the axis to make everywhere cold enough to take over. As ever with Martin’s work, however, it’s really an extended metaphor for how cold Thatcherist Britain and Reagan America were becoming and how caring so little for each other has left our planet vulnerable to attack from inside forces. The real villain of the piece turns out to be Sil and his fellow businessmen trying to make a profit out of our misery, the Mentor a last minute substitution when the character proved to be so popular with viewers. It’s a typically witty, barbed story perhaps not as strong as ‘Varos’ but had this story gone out in 1985 as planned, when people were actually living this sort of a life, it would have made quite the impact I suspect, especially with non-Who regulars that might have caught it. 

‘Yellow Fever And How To Cure It’ would have been Bob Holmes’ contribution and the only three-part forty-five minute story of the run. A writer who traditionally wrote close to deadlines it seems that Bob never got all that far with this story but he did leave behind an outline that’s quite fascinating and a sequel, of sorts to ‘Terror Of The Autons’: not least the planned return of Bob’s creations The Autons for the first time in fourteen years, working alongside the Rani and The Master who are organising a travelling theatre group that’s a bit like the circus of the original. The story of the season earmarked for overseas filming, we know it would have been shot in America somewhere, possibly New Orleans (though JNT was keen not to have jazz) although the script does specify Peri seeing The Statue of Liberty on the Tardis scanner, only to find out she’s in an alien re-creation, a sort of theme park come memorial garden. She and the Doctor would bump into a bewildered Brigadier there somewhere too in a script that with any other writer’s name attached to it might have been impossibly schmaltzy but with Holmes you’d think would have a dark twist in there somewhere, possibly the yellow fever bit (and if you’re wondering hydration is the official cure in ‘our’ world: maybe in the Whoniverse it would be something more…plasticcy?) Hopefully one day someday someone will finish it. Maybe. 

‘The Hollows Of Time’ would have seen Christopher H Bidmead return to the series with a long awaited follow-up to ‘Frontios’ (and see the review of that story for more). Not much was known about this one until its author extended his first draft into a full audio story for Big Finish in 2010 where it was a revelation. More ‘human’ than Bidmead’s other stories, slower paced and more thoughtful (and less mathematical) than ‘Logopolis’ or ‘Castrovalva’ and less overtly creepy than ‘Frontios’ it’s a character piece that sees The Doctor and Peri trying to piece together hazy memories of an adventure they can’t quite remember. It turns out that The Tractators have invaded a sleepy English village,  but by stealth not by attack. The Doctor knows something is going on but the adults are all in denial; it’s only when Peri helps a boy who has nightmares of giant woodlice that they end up tracking down the Tractators to their source: a Professor Stream whose been playing around with time corridors and let the creepy crawlies through. A tense finale, that couldn’t possibly be as good or as gruesome as it sounds on audio, sees the universe reduced to nothingness as the Tractators tear the Professor apart with gravity before going on their way. The story of the year Mary Whitehouse would have hated, ‘The Hollows Of Time’ might well have got Dr Who cancelled anyway for 18 months but it would have been a memorable way to go out. Recommended. 

We know almost nothing about ‘Children Of January’ by newcomer writer Michael Feeney Callan, except that it would have been the season finale and that it would have featured a new monster race known as the Z’ros, Human-size bees, and the rebel outcasts of a world who were so sick of war that they’d escaped down their own parallel universe. It’s one of those stories that could have gone either way (would the costumes have been as good as the bird-Peri in ‘Varos? Or like the costumes of ‘The Web Planet’?) 

I like to think that room would have been found for Barbara Clegg’s much anticipated return ‘Point Of Entry’ too, a story adapted by Marc Platt for the ‘Lost Stories’ range in 2010. A historical, this story would amazingly have seen playwright Kit Marlowe get his own story before his arch rival William Shakespeare! And quite right too: Marlowe’s a fascinating character part artist, part spy, part drunkard and Clegg/Platt have done their homework, setting the story at a time when he’s trying to write Dr Faustus’ (about a pact with the Devil) when it appears to come true, an alien arriving in search of a lost artefact that seems to have been stolen from the Aztecs (but is actually alien, from a race known as the Omnim). A clever piece about cultural appropriation, with lots of room for period Elizabethan detail, it’s a story that keeps you guessing and takes time out to do some most unexpected things (Peri travels on the astral plane for one cliffhanger: not sure how that would have looked on TV in 1985; like the pink skies of ‘Mindwarp’ maybe?) One of the real highlights of one of Big Finish’s best ranges, which in a parallel universe somewhere where these stories were actually made is surely one of the highlights of one of Who’s best seasons.  

Previous ‘Revelation Of The Daleks’ next ‘Mindwarp’