Black Orchid: Ranking - 202

 Black Orchid 

(Season 19, Dr 5 with Adric, Nyssa and Tegan, 1-2/3/1982, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Sward, writer: Terence Dudley, director: Ron Jones) 

'Jane Exterminate, a Dalek love story in bonnets by Davros Bronte: I saw through the disguise at once: Daleks don't do very well with masked balls, not least because they don't have any eyes. We are also bad at keeping secrets. So after hearing strange noises from an unknown entity up above I cornered him and said 'What have you got hiding away in your attic? Who is that strange relative of yours? Why have you not exterminated them the way a good Dalek should?!?' I leaned in for a kiss and got my plunger caught on his death-ray. Then when his thoughts were occupied I said 'only the purest of races will be mine - show me where your mad relative is hiding'. He said no. And so, dear readers, I exterminated him. Exterminate!!!' 

Ranking: 202

In an emoji: ⚘

Well, strike me pink! In the alien garden that is ‘Dr Who’ ‘Black orchid’ is a rare delicate and unusual flower, one that gets lost amongst the bigger, brighter more colourful stories, the man-eating fly-raps, Triffids and, it has to be said, rather a lot of weeds. I love stories that do something a bit different to normal and there’s certainly never been a Dr Who story quite like this one before or since: a two-parter in an era of four parters, a historical set in the 1920s in an era when we tended to visit the future rather than the past (if not for the previous story set in 1666 it would have broken a six year drought in fact) and a sort-of ‘Doctor Who-dunnit’ in an era when the show was at its most space operay and straightforward. So many Who’s try to be big and bold and universe-destroying that it’s sweet to see a story with so little at stake: basically its Jane Eyre but set in the 1920s, with (spoilers) a mad disfigured relative trapped in the attic that, in one of the better DW twists you’re supposed to think is an alien/android/possessed by an alien/offspring of an alien but which turns out to be a British explorer who went mad while captured by a Brazilian tribe and is treated as an alien just because he’s disabled and a teensy bit mad. Which is meant to be an attack on posh society in the 1920s, but honestly could have been written in any era including this one we’re living in. The guidebooks will tell you there’s no scifi element to this story aside from the Tardis crew for the first time since ‘The Highlanders’ in 1966, but what they don’t always tell you is how charmingly this is done: almost every second teases you that we’re about to end up in a different kind of story, one where the mysterious creepy thing seems certain to have a scifi origin be him an alien/android/android alien/human hypnotised by an alien/an alien that turns out to be Human all along (there’s even a reference to ‘The Master’, which panics the Doctor no end until he realises they’re talking about cricketing ‘Master’ W G Grace). Only (spoilers) this week the great twist is that there isn’t a twist: this a story that’s very Earthbound, concerns a family not a society or a planet or a civilisation and which really is every bit as small as it seems on first appearance. In context, between a heavy story that unleashes the bubonic plague and burns down the whole of London and the one hand and murders the dinosaurs and a companion on the other, it’s a charming interlude and a chance to have a bit of a breather, to stop and smell the orchids as it were. 

Of course, the downside to this is that ‘Black Orchid’ feels like one of the most inconsequential Dr Who stories of them all, easy to miss amongst the more exotic alien plants and one which, due to a quirk of the scheduling for this season only when Dr Who went out on Mondays and Tuesdays, was over within twenty-four-and-a-half hours, the shortest turnaround of any Who story until the Paul McGann TV Movie (and that lasted double the length of this story). Ultimately nothing was really changed by the Tardis arriving at all and there’s no jeopardy whatsoever until the one and only cliffhanger (and even that’s a bit of mild peril for one of the supporting cast rather than something un-missable). Unless you’re big into the 1920s and want to see Tegan and Nyssa dance the Charleston while Adric stuffs his face you miss nothing much if you happen to skip this story except a bit of colour and charm. What works against this story even more is that this isn’t really a Dr Who plot – as much as ‘Black Orchid’ tries to give us mystery and intrigue most of it comes from a masked ball and the mad relative borrowing the Doctor’s costume, something which would make you feel short-changed watching ‘The Agatha Christie Hour’ never mind a show that’s usually full of explosions, monsters, time and space (and indeed explosive monsters in time and space). Privately Eric Saward, Peter Davison and, Janet Fielding all voiced doubts as to whether this story would work at all when they first read the scripts and had I been hanging around the production team in 1982 a) I’d probably have been more annoying with my suggestions than Ian Levine and b) I’d probably have had my reservations about this one too: it’s almost a spoof of Dr Who in so many ways, an indulgence at a time when falling ratings and concern over the new doctor replacing Tom Baker meant that the production team had to be very careful not to lose any viewers (not to mention the newly stretched budget: when you’re struggling to provide meat and potatoes it seems a strange time to be buying luxuries like flowers). Even John Nathan-Turner, who was old friends with writer Terence Dudley and invited him to send in this script (hot on the heels of ‘Four To Doomsday’) wasn’t all that sure about this one and probably okayed it because it solved a problem rather than because he had any faith in it (this is the year when we had the rather off ‘K9 and Company’ spin-off ‘A Girl’s Best Friend’, JNT’s attempt to get rid of the metal mutt in the main series but keep the smaller fans who only tuned in for him – technically this was on the preceding Christmas but counted for budgeting purposes as part of this season and the BBC bosses were adamant the money had to come out of the existing budget so one of the four parters had to be chopped in half). As the flimsiest story ‘Black Orchid’ was the obvious candidate for pruning (although I’m puzzled why they didn’t just do a six-parter and cover themselves that way). 

 The trouble is, it feels as if they pruned away too much. Literally all that happens in episode one is that the Tardis team are mistaken for a cricketing friend also named ‘The Doctor’ whose running late and get roped into a posh garden ball that’s happening in fancy dress. Even part two only gets perilous when the Doctor has his costume stolen and a substitute with breathing problems starts bumping off the staff, leaving him the prime suspect. Given that the plot revolves around the discovery of a black orchid (one signposted early on when the Doctor breaks all characterisation and comments on it sitting in a vase) many fans have claimed this story to be similar to all sorts of Agatha Christie stories about flowers and plants (about the one Christie cliché the new Who Agatha story ‘The Unicorn and The Wasp’ didn’t do!) There is, after all, a posh family with secrets they’re trying to keep hidden from the world at large and will go to any grounds to cover up. That’s where the similarities end though: the murders don’t, as it happens, occur because of people wanting to cover things up but through accidents by a man who doesn’t know his own strength or understand his own strength and the consequences of it. Generally an Agatha Christie book teases us with an obvious suspect who it turns out didn’t do it at all, a whole cast full of shady people with secrets of their own that end up merely red herrings and a big showdown in a library where all the clues are laid before us. Dudley doesn’t do any of this: we know that the chief suspect (The Doctor) can’t possibly have done it, yet we know the murderer is roughly the Doctor’s build and for the most part dressed in his costume, while instead of that ‘it was you!’ moment at the end the Doctor teases the truth out of Lady Cranleigh roughly two-thirds of the way through the story and then has to work out how to get her to stop lying to cover up the truth. It’s really much more like a combination of Bronte (the mad relative in the attic everyone’s ashamed of), Conan Doyle (the part about George Cranleigh being waylaid by Indians after stealing a precious flower and having his tongue cut out, going mad from the horror is straight out of Sherlock Holmes short story ‘The Crooked Man’) and Conan-Doyle’s brother-in-law E W Hornung’s ‘Raffles’ (in one story a jewel thief from the wrong side of the slums gains access to a stately home during a fancy dressed ball where he wins people over by being really good at cricket so they assume he’s ‘one of them’. What a Dr Who twist this person ends up being an alien instead!) So, not very original then and as a murder mystery it’s pretty limp, though it works in a Dr Who sense because there’s no other story quite like this one and the ‘red herrings’ are the fact we’re so used to scifi plot revelations that the real solution seems so obvious we all but miscount it. 

 Where this story sort-of works is in the bigger metaphors behind all this. Everyone in this story wants an easy life, but it doesn’t matter how much money you have you can’t hide from the brutal, more animalistic side of life (the working title for this story was ‘The Beast’ which is also how George is credited in episode one before the revelation of episode two – I wish they’d kept it as stressing the flower puts the emphasis on all the ‘wrong’ places). So much of this story concerns secrets and people not being truthful with one another out of guilt or shame, even though to the Tardis and indeed the viewers from the 1980s onwards none of it matters: the guilty secret everyone’s trying to hide doesn’t offend our sensibilities at all, however much shame there might have been in 1925. Had George been accepted into a loving family and integrated into the home then there would have been a happy ending – instead George, the ‘golden’ elder son who once seemed to have everything with the perfect fiancé and the perfect rich life, pays the price twice for being a bit too greedy (writing a book about this mysterious flower he found that wasn’t his – err, just when did he have time to publish it between being set upon by Indians and being sent to the Cranleigh estate exactly? That’s the really big mystery at work here! – and still chasing after the girl whose now engaged to his younger brother). The Doctor, too, pays for the air of mystery he likes to surround himself with when everyone finds out that he’s an imposter and Ann is an eyewitness to her kidnapping after recognising his party costume. Really, though, it’s a story about the games the rich play, hiding everything that’s slightly dark or uncomfortable or that doesn’t fit with their aesthetic out of sight, where the guests can’t see them. Even the little discussions we get over drinks and canapés point at how much the people of this world are itching to take off the fancy dress and be someone else without the same responsibilities of keeping up appearances (just look at how much Lord Cranleigh takes to Tegan, simply because she’s unlike anyone he’s ever met before, in much the same way posh privileged eternal mariner will in ‘Enlightenment’). Indeed, everyone’s oddly interchangeable in this upper class society: the Doctor is greeted as the missing person because the cricket team have never actually met him and only care about the level of his game, George inherits his brother’s things (with his fiancé very much a ‘thing’) without even questioning it and Nyssa and Ann are alike in temperament and character as well as looks with their only differences coming from their experience and marginally different upbringing (so Ann, for instance, sobs and runs away from danger whereas Nyssa nervously edges towards it). No wonder this is a society that loves masked balls: everyone’s hiding their real selves and pretending to be someone they’re not (it might be symbolic that Ann, in charge of picking out the costumes, chose two butterflies, a creature that’s all about metamorphosis and change, after years of being stuck in a family of caterpillars, although as scripted she’s no better than the rest of them). 

The victim in all this is poor George who, in the most Dr Whoy moment of the entire story turns out not to be the ‘monster’ we first think he is at all.  It’s not enough that the Brazilian Indians (who don’t usually call themselves Indians the same way the indigenous Americans and Canadians did but never mind) remove his tongue, the part of him that allows him to mix in these intellectual circles, removing his ‘voice’ as the Europeans symbolically removed theirs. The family he trusts and loves then remove his heart. He has to grow up in the family house watching everyone else go to the same parties while he watches sadly from the window, tortured, with only Latoni for company (an Indian whose learnt to speak perfect ‘posh’ English in his place, despite his oversized lip). Presumably as the eldest he was next in line to inherit all of this, which now belongs to his younger brother. His beloved Ann is also engaged to him, as for all she knows he’s dead (odd she doesn’t recognise George’s mannerisms however mauled his face might be, but then as fiancés they probably haven’t spent much time together un-chaperoned). It’s kind of like the Kennedys (a story with links stretching back to the very first Dr Who episode, postponed by the assassination): the elder brother Joe is groomed for greatness, gets killed in a war and his younger disfigured brother inherits everything even though he wasn’t born to it and has to keep up appearances with a smile and tranquilisers (if you didn’t know JFK wore a back brace for most of his life and that’s the reason his body does all sorts of weird things when sitting up in a car and shot by bullets in Dallas in November 1963). Unlike the Kennedy clan, though, the younger brother is oblivious to all this and the elder brother has to look on and watch everything he once had taken away from him. No wonder George went mad, but from family not what happened to him in the jungles. The way the story is written George appears to carry Ann away in both a fit of jealous rage and a moment of lust: both things that he wouldn’t ever be allowed to show as part of ‘proper’ society. The family even have the nerve to put the ‘Black Orchid’ that caused all the trouble on show in a vase in the hallway so visiting guests and errant timelords can notice it in pride of place. 

 Even after the Doctor discovers the truth and seems about to be questioned, if not hanged, Lady Cranleigh denies it all, covering the truth up rather than doing the ‘British’ (i.e. decent) thing. What kind of family is this? A very 1920s one sadly: though a lot of fans say this story would work just as well in another time period for me it has to be set in the ‘flapper’ age in between the wars and the era of the Great depression when the posh got posher, the poor got poorer and everyone thought dancing the night away and holding parties was a better antidote to fighting, as opposed to learning why the wars took place and making sure they could never happen again (you can add ‘The Great Gatsby’ to that long list of influences then, only this story is far and away better written and makes it point far more subtly). Dudley, by the way, was born in 1919 (the same year As Patrick Troughton for reference) and would have grown up in the 1920s as his childhood years, which makes this story a neat twist on both the ‘things were better in the olden times’ Who plot points and the ‘family watching this at war between the generations’ idea I keep banging on about by showing that a grand or even great-grandparent point of view that’s no more ‘respectable’ than what the ‘children’ are saying. A quick note here about the name Cranleigh too: it sounds archetypically English aristocratic, even though it isn’t actually one: Dudley probably borrowed it from a village near Guildford that’s not all that far from TV centre (and Guildford had, famously, been borrowed as the birth address of Ford Prefect in Douglas Adams’ ’Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To the Galaxy’; it would be very in keeping for Dudley to be going for a similar gag. Funnily and spookily enough Sarah Sutton moved with her family to this village in the year 2000 but never noticed the link until a fan pointed it out to her at a convention!) 

 So far so fun, but the main plot itself can be seen through without any masks at all. The script tries to liven things up with the fact that one of the girls in the story looks just like Nyssa, with a tease that this going to be an important plot point on a par with ‘Androids Of Tara’ (where Romana happened to look just like a princess) or ‘The Enemy Of The World’ (where the second Doctor looked just like the 21st century’s most evil tyrant – no, not Donald Trump, Salamander) but instead for all the good it does to the plot this is just the tease of ‘The Massacre’ all over again (where the first Doctor might have died in time for a quick cliffhanger, but turns out to be the double of The Abbott of Amboise instead). The doubling isn’t even done that well: it’s perfectly obvious to any regular viewer of television that Sarah Sutton is just talking to the back of her own head and she was less than amused that the actress chosen to be her double was both fatter and shorter than she was (which makes the few scenes where the two Nyssas are on together not through split-screen make it look as if she’s being trailed by her younger sister, not an identical twin). Nyssa isn’t even all that different to her doppelganger Ann Talbot either: they’re both a bit posh, from sheltered upbringings and polite even when in grave danger and while Sarah Sutton uses a slightly haughtier and deeper voice there’s no sense that these two characters are substantially any different in any way – had they made her more like Tegan it could have been fun. Talking of Tegan she’s not entirely herself either (perhaps it’s the ‘screwdriver;’ she knocks back – surprising they don’t make the obvious joke about it being ‘sonic’) the reluctant traveller whose now become the most eager to explore and who is happily flirting with married men instead of panicking about getting back to Heathrow in time to go back to work (for all her occasional jollility we’ve never seen Tegan even remotely this carefree again. I reckon the Mara’s turned up for a quick drink).

 That said, though, elsewhere this story is still strong on its characters, always Dudley’s strength as a writer over plots. Nyssa belongs in this world as a socialite Trakenite and takes to this world far more readily than her friends do even before she finds a ready-made sister. She still learns to let her hair down though and it feels very in keeping both that she’s a good dancer but in a more staid, traditional sense and yet picks up the Charleston very easily after watching Tegan dance it and then uses that knowledge to tease Adric with. Dudley gets Adric’s awkwardness better than most too: he’s also from quite a posh world like Nyssa but has grown up the complete outsider, more used to hanging round street urchins than toffs and doesn’t quite know how to behave. He’s actually game for trying to dance when Tegan asks him too but is quick to anger at their teasing and uncomfortable being round strangers (especially strange girls), being much happier stuffing his face (some fans have seen this character trait as a aside effect of his Alzarian nature and his need to consume more calories to heal: I don’t know about that but it fits the life of an urchin used to stealing food and not sat least he doesn’t (spoilers) die in the next story on an empty stomach). Nyssa was born for this world and embraces it; Adric was born for this world too and hates it; Tegan wasn’t born for anything like this world but figures she’ll never get another chance like this one and relishes every minute of it. 

 The Doctor would be at home in this world too but he barely gets the chance before his costume’s stolen and he ends up in more familiar territory, walking round corridors and trying to work out the truth behind what’s really going on. If nothing else this story cements the idea of the 5th Doctor as being an anachronistic gentlemen in a way that none of his predecessors were – it’s hard to imagine Tom Baker and Romana having such fun in the Roaring twenties or settling down to a game of cricket and afternoon tea or putting up with accusations of murder so meekly (even though that’s who the Tardis team were when this story was first submitted – they hadn’t even added Adric to the cast when Dudley first wrote this. Alas that first draft is buried under lock and key but I bet it’s very different in feel to this – and arguably better) . And yet Dudley gets the 5th Doctor better than any writer until Robert Holmes turns up right at the last minute: this Doctor is a gentlemen who plays by the rules (‘that wouldn’t be cricket!’ he protests when asked why he committed murder), who doesn’t like upsetting people and goes along with the status quo, breezing through time and space optimistically in the hope that this time nothing will go wrong (even though it usually does). The earlier Doctors were written so that they would be equally at home anywhere in time or space (which is why the 3rd Doctor is so angry at being Earthbound; the 2nd Doctor less than the others but even he’s painted as being on the fringes of every society rather than in the middle) but the 5th Doctor never feels entirely at home anywhere, he’s a wanderer. Even here, where his costume fits, he doesn’t, not quite, despite his prowess at cricket and love of trains. Davison complained that this story didn’t give him much to do except wander characters looking lost and bowl a few games of cricket but that’s who this Doctor is at his core – most other stories in his run have him as more of a reluctant hero than the others, doing good because he feels he ought to rather than out of a burning desire to fight injustice. For all his youth this regeneration is a weary Doctor who just wants everyone to get along so he can take a day off and have some tea and sandwiches. 

 The supporting cast all do as well as the script allows them, but the real actor going to great lengths here is stuntman Gareth Milne. That’s him diving off the Buckhurst roof –a fall of 100 feet, one of the most ambitious seen in the series, so it’s a shame it doesn’t look as impressive on film as perhaps it should (it went wrong too: Milne fell onto the mattress provided for him alright but hadn’t accounted for the momentum and bounced up into the air again, falling on the hard ground nearby – he was very lucky not to hurt himself). And also him grunting and panting as George. Despite having no dialogue he feels like the most rounded character in this story and you feel the pain of his dilemma as he stands on the roof, in a tug of war between love and madness (which, some would say, are really not all that different). 

There’s a lot to love about ‘Black Orchid’ then – just not enough to last even half a normal story length, with the ideas never approaching full bloom. Most puzzling of all is the way it drops the ball over obvious plot elements that could have made this story so much more. There’s no real mystery over who George ism whatever the billing in the Radio Times, to anyone whose ever read any Victorian/Edwardian fiction. There’s no one else at the party Peter Davison’s build or size and all the cricketting team seem to go home so it robs us of thinking its one of them. George doesn’t get to do anything very dastardly (even mad he’s too much of a gentleman) and rather than filling up cupboards with bodies and killing the staff of one by one, making us think our heroes might be next (the way fellow Dr Whodunnits ‘The Robots Of Death’ and ‘Terror Of The Vervoids’ do ) nothing really happens: the way the script’s presented the butler might just be out cold (I like the joke that the butler couldn’t have done it, because he’s the first body though!) The story tries to make us care over whether George has Nyssa or Ann in his grasp, but none of it really matters by the end when George looks below the roof and sees…someone in a mask whose vaguely like his fiancé but could be anyone (for the record, when Adric is left puzzled over which he’s talking to as both Nyssas are dancing the Charleston, it’s actually Ann). The plot is solved more or less by accident and would have happened in much the same way had the Tardis never landed and wouldn’t exactly be one of the hardest cases the Doctor’s ever been to even if he hadn’t stumbled across a body in a cupboard at just the right time (knowing him he was looking over the shoulders of Christie, Bronte, Conan Doyle and Hornung all when they were writing their stories). The policemen ought by rights to have the Doctor in a headlock and interrogating him over all the other crimes he’s committed, but instead rather meekly follow him to a train station to go inside the Tardis (uncharacteristic in itself given the lengths the Doctor used to go to in order to keep the secret of his space-time machine from mere Humans, as recently as ‘Logopolis’ four stories ago where he sort-of kidnapped Tegan) and their nonchalant reaction ‘stroike me pink!’ is by far the worst in sixty years of Tardis reveals (plus it’s the wrong design: police telephone boxes only started looking like this in 1929 so everyone should be as puzzled by the outside and what the word ‘police’ is doing on there when it’s not one of theirs, nearly as much as the inside). The plot is solved more or less by accident and wouldn’t exactly be one of the hardest cases the Doctor’s ever been involved in, even if he hadn’t read ‘Jane Eyre’ (which he surely has – he was probably there when Charlotte Bronte wrote it, knowing him). They could and should have done so much with the theme of mental illness in this story (something only done twice more in the whole of Who, the schizophrenic computer in ‘The Face Of Evil’ and ‘The Doctor and Vincent’ - Van Gogh, if you hadn’t guessed). Instead here George apparently goes mad because of the shame of his physical impairment, which might be a very 1920s view of it all but feels very out of touch with a 1980s sensibility. Oddly nobody suggests nipping back in the Tardis and fixing what would only have been a very minor change to history, legging it up the Orinoco to save George from himself which is an ending far more in keeping with the sort of uplifting morality Dr Who usually does. There really a lot of coincidences at work here too: the Tardis arrives at a station just outside this stately home just as a cricketing Doctor is expected and just when George decides to break his entrapment after years of captivity and when Nyssa is on board looking not just like one of the Cranleighs but one of the Cranleighs looking like the exact same age she is here. The thing is this script often teases us by feeling as if it’s reaching for something more interesting, with its hints of skulduggery and doubles but in the end takes the simplest, easiest option of every possibility that suggests itself in the script, being far less interesting when all is said and done and end credits roll. 

 In the grand scheme of things, then, ‘Black Orchid’ is as close to a minor story as ‘classic’ Who stories get, alongside ‘The King’s Demons’ ‘The Tsuranga Conundrum’ and ‘The Caretaker’ in the ‘what was the point of all that then, eh?!’ stakes. And yet you might notice that this story is much higher up the ranking than all of those, mostly because it tells its non-story with such charm. Though the main plot isn’t up to much there are lots of little lovely character moments, from Tegan surprising everyone by doing the Charleston (which she learnt at school, which seems an odd thing to teach in Australia in the 1960s but hey ho), to the prim and proper Nyssa finding a friend to giggle with to the Doctor getting to actually play cricket after nearly a full season of wearing cricket whites (The Doctor’s joy at scoring a wicket is real by the way: though the shot was meant to be re-edited so it would always look like Peter Davison was amazing at cricket the actor happened to score a wicket first time, which is why the Doctor seems way more delighted at a simple feat of hand-to-eye co-ordination than he does defeating whole armies of Daleks. Not until Matt Smith in ‘The Lodger’ will he be this sporty). Do these moments successfully fill the hole where the plot should go? Not at all. Yet seen in order as part of a season full of big gestures and epics the lightness of touch comes as a relief and though minor it’s still an enjoyable story, big on witty dialogue (I love the Doctor’s ramble about trains – and yes presumably they must have had something like them on Gallifrey or the ‘Matrix’ episode of ‘The Deadly Assassin’ make even less than it does already – and that gag about ‘The Master’ always makes me giggle). If anything this story is a better watch now than it was in 1982 when the new romantics meant half the music videos on MTV looked like they came from the 1920s: years of stories by Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat particularly have primed us to look out for clues everywhere, no matter how minor, but this story pokes fun at both the Doctor and us for thinking there has to be some giant mystery at the heart of every single story (I bet that shifty bloke is an alien burnt up by Earth’s atmosphere…or maybe these posh people are all malfunctioning androids…The Master? Aha I see where this going…No wait this is a doubles story…Oh so that doesn’t fit into the plot. Well, maybe Traken hasn’t been destroyed after all and there’s a whole universe of people who look like Nyssa on earth…Oh, OK then, I see). 

 POSITIVES + We’d never had a scene in Dr Who quite like the ‘party’ at the Cranleigh Manor’s estate before. The property, really Buckhurst Park in East Sussex, is a lovely place – its grounds were the inspiration for Winnie-The-Pooh’s ‘Hundred Acre Wood’, even if we only see the house here not the forest. The real owners, the De La Warrs, were big Whovians and had already loaned their grounds to the production team for the shooting of ‘Castrovalva’ and even waived their fee (though they did get an official BBC camera crew to take their photograph standing next to the Tardis prop!) They were only too happy to do the same – although after reading the script they did make the very sensible request not to have a fire lit on their property for real (instead it’s clever camera trickery, studio sets, a special raised platform, a smoke machine and a wind machine to blow the fire away from the house). It really helps make this feel like a lavish film production, with everyone not just in regular 1920s costume but masks and fancy dress on top and being a BBC period drama everything is done to a tee. At least until you look closely and see how few extras there are and that the lavish spread seems to consist of a handful of sandwiches, most of which seem to be eaten by Adric. Funnily enough Peter Davison will be back in this house again in just over two years’ time and his first big role post-Who, when he appeared in a production of 1920s detective show ‘Campion’ (yet another possible influence on this story, though more the mood than any exact plot; think a slower ‘Father Brown’ with Rory’s dad replaced by his son, only what his son would have been like if only he’d never met Amy and grown up a full nerd). 

 NEGATIVES - The whole point of giving characters dopplegangers is either a) giving the cast member something different to do or b) advancing the plot. ‘Black Orchid’ is unique in anything I’ve watched because it doesn’t do either; the story would work just as well if not better without the similarity and Ann is just a watered down-Nyssa (I mean, Traken even looks like inter-war England so it’s no surprise she fits in so well here) which given that she didn’t have all that much character to begin with is a real opportunity missed I think. Had they made Ann more like Tegan, reckless and boisterous and loud and fun, giving Sarah the chance to show off her acting skills, it could have been good, but Ann is just Nyssa in a corset. 

BEST QUOTE: Adric: ‘So, what is a railway station?’ Doctor: ‘A place where one embarks and disembarks from compartments on wheels drawn along these tracks by a steam engine - rarely on time’. Nyssa: ‘What a very silly activity’. Doctor: ‘You think so? As a boy, I always wanted to drive one’. Previous ‘The Visitation’ next ‘Earthshock’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Time  and Time Again’ is a fun 30^th anniversary comic strip from 1993 by Paul Cornell that sees 7^th Doctor companion Ace searching for the Key To Time all over again including many places from the Doctor’s past. One of these is the Cranleigh Estate where she dances with Tegan and gets chatted up by Adric (‘Do you come her often?’ ‘Do you enjoy limping?!’)  and even catches the Doctor out during his game of cricket before disappearing (leaving everyone wondering whether it counts or not!)

Previous ‘The Visitation’ next ‘Earthshock’