Dragonfire: Ranking - 210

 Dragonfire

(Season 24, Dr 7 with Mel and Ace, 23/11/1987-7/12/1987, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Andrew Cartmel, writer: Ian Briggs, director: Chris Clough) 

Sometimes I wonder what might have happened if other DW characters had ended up on Ice World?... 'Hello I'm Jo...Whoops, there goes another tray of drinks over your customers' 'I'm Vicki and I've befriended the dragon everyone is scared of and named him Mr Wufflepuff'   'I'm Rose and I'll be your waitress for the day but I'm only serving chips'. 'I'm Rose's mum and I've heard of mum's gone to Iceland but this is ridiculous, bring me back!!!' 'Hello I'm Amy and here's my Dragon I've nicknamed Roary'. 'I'm Osgood and I'm reheating a soufflé using a dragon. Now dangle off a cliff for no reason, clever boy - and remember!'

Ranking: 210

 
Of all the 328ish Dr Who stories ‘Dragonfire’ is perhaps the most misunderstood for ‘Dragonfire’, at least in my reading of it, isn’t really meant as a story at all. It’s a postmodernist critique of television, full of sly references and in-jokes, written on such a grand scale it’s as if it’s laughing at the fact that the BBC have no possible means of doing it justice and particularly not for kids at a Saturday teatime. It’s the sort of script that dangles Sylvester McCoy off a cliff for no other reason than because ‘it’s a cliffhanger’. The sort of story that names most of its characters after film and TV theorists, an in-joke that in 1987 maybe three people still watching Dr Who at a time of its regular lowest ratings would actually get (although sadly the one called ‘Eisenstein’ got changed at the last minute, in case people thought the use of a foreign name racist, which would have made it more obvious). The story that actually quotes from the earliest and still most pompous Dr Who guide ‘The Unfolding Text’ (‘the semiotic thickness of a performed text…’) made unofficially without BBC input but handed out to writers new to the show. The kind of TV that includes the Star Wars trope of showing off that you can film a bar full of intergalactic aliens who are all different and who you’ve never met before, at a time when - accounting for inflation - pound for pound, DW was never being made cheaper (thanks again Thatcher!) The kind of story that throws in a dragon almost as an after-thought, cobbled together out of odds and ends that couldn’t look less dragony if they trued, where in most other eras in Dr Who the production team would not only make it the central character but cut down on expense by bulking the story out to a seven parter. This is, in fact, the sort of story made for people like me who want to pontificate about what might have been intended rather than what’s really there, a multi-layered story based around symbols and metaphors, done on the cheap for a children’s audience and off-putting for the general public which makes it a more than odd choice considering the series’ future was in such peril at the time. 

 Best of all writer Ian Briggs made this a coming of age tale, of finding your way in the world, of the thin line between childhood and adulthood that everyone expects you to cross with no problems that’s exactly what a programme that’s only really being watched by a few loyal teenagers ought to be doing. A lot of fans read about the philosophers and critics and think it’s just an excuse for being clever, but it isn’t – each of those critics see society as a set of rules that humanity agrees to play by and each have slightly different views on how they work. For the record they’re Bela ‘Belazs’ (a Hungarian film theorist and critic), Siegfried ‘Kraceur’ (a German film critic), Andrew ‘Bozsin’ (a French film critic),Marshall ‘McLuhan’ (a Canadian documentary maker) who replaced Sergei ‘Eisenstein’ (Russian film director), Vsevelad ‘Pudavkin’ (Russian film maker), Rudolh ‘Arnheim’ (German film and art critic) while there are references to two of the then-most discussed films in film studies class: ‘The Wizard Of oz’ and ‘Citizen Kane’. The thing is, those codes we live by are artificial, every bit as much as characters acting a certain way in films because their surrounding smean they ‘have’ to – they’re a relatively modern idea of civilisation, where we agree to offer services in return for the money we need to survive, rather than running around in furs hunting mammoths (as in ‘An Unearthly Child’). They’re philosophers looking from up high as to how the world works while everyone else in the world has to just grit their teeth and work hard. ‘Dragonfire’ is about that disconnect between how the world should work and the way it does. The key scene of this story comes when Ace takes an odd liking to Mel and tells her about all her hopes and dreams and fears – that she was bored by the restriction of the classroom so messed around and got expelled, then ended up in the dead-end world of fast food waitressing but never felt like she belonged so dreamed of the stars, only to be uprooted by an ice storm and dragged out to an alien planet…Where she ends up waitressing, because that’s how the world works. The rest of Iceworld, too, is full of people selling food and stacking shelves, not the big dream of adulthood every child has when they’re little. It doesn’t need dreamers, it needs people to wait on other people. The only person happy in this world is the little girl who accidentally causes all the mayhem wandering round looking at all the monsters oblivious to the very adult showdown between money and control that’s going on above her head. 

 A quick word about that conversation the Doctor has distracting the guard, where they discuss the ‘semiotic thickness of a performed text’. As well as a neat twist on the old ‘bop the guard on the head and give them a jelly baby’ routine the series had done to death by 1987 it’s one huge in-joke. Wanting his writers to think more ‘cleverly’ about their script Cartmel eagerly handed his new recruits with a new guidebook that had just been written, ‘Dr Who: The Unfolding Text’ by John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado. The first real book that treated this series as high-falluting genius rather than children’s telly that books like this one stand on the shoulders of, it’s simultaneously revealing and infuriating (I love books that treat my favourite things seriously – but not that seriously; even as an English student who specialised in postmodernism and used to read books like this all the time I could barely understand a word). Briggs decided to include an actual quote from it as proof to Cartmel that he’d sort-of read it! The ‘semiotic thickness’ line has become synonymous with this book even though it’s all like that: it turns up in a discussion about ‘City Of Death’ and is (I think) saying that the story gets it comedy from the fact that it’s so many different types of stories laid on top of one another: when you first see it you think you’re watching a travelogue, then it’s a period gangster series, then the scifi turns up, then throws I a curveball by going back further in time to visit Da Vinci, then at the end you get that John Cleese and Eleanor Bron cameo that makes it all seem like a ‘Monty Python’ style spoof. The tension and the jokes both come from the fact that all these different viewpoints are being held together – and they’re all ‘true’. ‘Yes’ is the Doctor’s confused response when asked before going about his day and getting on with saving the world. 

 All the other people in this story has found out how to work out how to play the capitalist system, by exploiting those underneath them. Admittedly this is Dr Who so that capitalist system is being run by an alien exiled to an ice planet selling frozen foods and trapped by a jailor whose treated like a dragon but is really a biomechanoid, but hey, it’s the same thing (sort of). This is a world where in order to survive you have to be cold, to stop your warm hearted wanting to help the people around you and instead see everyone as a competitor. It’s very much a vision of Thatcher’s Britain in the 1980s (and may well have been influenced by Briggs’ friendship with script editor Andrew Cartmel – the pair first met on a BBC writer’s course where they bonded over moaning how few opportunities there were for hungry talented youngsters and what a mess their new prime minister was making of the world). The only solution is to warm your heart, to become the dragon you were meant to be instead of the cold-blooded reptile the world demands you become, to melt the ice around you and live how you were meant to live. 

Everyone on Iceworld, the fast food chain from hell, was thrown there through some natural disaster rather than by choice and is making do while trying to get out, literally putting their dreams ‘on ice’ while they make do. Like ‘Frozen’, too, ‘Dragonfire’ is a tale about loneliness as coldness – about the need to keep your heart oen and warm even when people are cold to you. Kane is the rotten sort of first boss teenagers get in their job out of school when they’re on minimum wage, who got where they did through being cruel and sadistic, turning all his ‘employees’ into slaves whenever they take the ‘gold coin’ he thrusts into their hand and which leaves a mark on them for life (because once you accept the money and give in to the system you’re a prisoner to capitalism in exactly the same way, as exiled from your true self as any ice tyrant). He isn’t like earlier ice creatures seen in Dr Who, from the reptilian Ice Warriors to the Cryons of Telos from ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’: the joke there, in both cases, is how emotional and warm-blooded they are, but Kane is cold through and through (the script emphasises how like a snake he is). Belazs is portrayed as Ace as she might be in the future, who talks about coming to Iceworld when she was sixteen too, but choosing to work for Kane and push her way up through the chain of command for an easier life, only to find life doesn’t get any easier; instead she ends up a burnt up mess at forty that Kane doesn’t think twice about killing when she gets in his way. Kracauer hides his personality down low so as if he doesn’t feel anything for anyone, disassociating until he doesn’t know who he is anymore. In some ways Glitz is the worst, because he’s less open about what he’s up to, wheeling and dealing and ducking and diving and pretending to be everyone’s friend before exploiting them in comparison to Kane who everyone knows is evil but have no choice but to work for. He’s a last minute substitute for Briggs’ original character Razorback changed to Glitz after producer John Nathan-Turner read the script and thought how similar the characters were. I’m really pleased they did in one sense because it was also a sweet gesture to send some royalties to Robert Holmes’ widow for him creating the character (JNT was good like that) but on the other it’s a real shame because that isn’t quite who this character is: when we first time on ‘The Mysterious Planet’ Glitz was a chancer who could have gone either way and by the time of ‘The Ultimate Foe’ he’s sided with good, helping The 6th Doctor over The Master. Here he lapses again, looking for a quick buck by following clues to a treasure – which, because this is a Dr Who story loaded with symbolism isn’t money (much to Glitz’s disappointment) but freedom, of the Dragonfire that will melt the prison walls that surround ice world and let your warm heart free, ready to be who you are. Ace leaves with the Doctor (perfect!), Glitz leaves with Mel (not so perfect…It’s amazing she doesn’t end up with him selling her body parts on the black market by the next time we see her in ‘Power Of The Doctor’), Iceworld melts (hurrah!) and Kane explodes (triple hurrah). And how do people get their lives back again? By Dragonfire, the dragon’s head. Which in Asian folklore, is said to contain a jewel that gives men the power to fly. Well, it lets Ace travel in the Tardis anyway. 

 On paper this should be thrilling and everything I love about Who, a complex clever script sneaked in under the radar so that even the people making it don’t see what they’re doing. If you read the novelisation, which isn’t all that different to the script, it is. You can see exactly what Briggs is up to, how playful he’s being but in a very dark sarcastic way. Only the downside is that, well, nobody sees what they’re doing, so we get the sort of hammy acting that you only get in this era of Dr Who, a weary production team taking short cuts and thinking ‘that’ll do’, costumes and sets so badly hit by budget issues they look as if they’re going to fall apart the moment anyone breathes on them (and that goes double for the dragon…even when he’s not breathing fire). It looks a mess, like all the worst bits of Dr who stapled together Never has there been a greater gulf between what’s in the scripts and how people say it than this one. The director thinks he’s making a ‘comedy’ (seriously: as far as producer JNT and the directors were concerned it was quite the other way around. Watch the horrific ‘melting’ of Kane’s face though, one of the most frightening Dr Who horror movie moments, and tell me this is meant to be ‘funny’). The actors think they’ve all been booked to appear on children’s telly so are enunciating and over-acting as if this they want the five-year-olds at the back to stop eating crayons and pay attention to all the bright colours. The dragon is exactly the sort of crummy last minute monster job Dr Who was notorious for, which far from being a fire breathing monster shuffles like an old man and looks as if even I could beat him in a fight (and I’d have struggled beating off an Ergon, me). The costume designer noticed the funny names in the script and decidesd they all sounded German, so gives everyone a sdort of Nazi uniuform that’s just wrong for a story about a supermarket (I mean, there’s a reason the Gestapo didin’t walk around with name badges; although once nice detail is that Ace is the only ne whose ‘lost’ hers. The focal point is a little girl whose so young it’s unfair to criticise her acting (because she’s not old enough yet to know the difference between reality and fantasy), an ice world made on a budget of about 50p, some (hopefully deliberately) atrocious lines, ridiculous plot twists that come out of nowhere and some of the ropiest acting in the entire series. Everything feels rushed as if we’re watching a rehearsal where everyone is holding their energy back and nobody seems quite sure whether to play it for laughs or not, so they do anyway just in case. It’s as if everyone saw ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and assumed Shakespeare only wrote farcical comedies so played his next play in exactly the same way. Even though that play was ‘Henry IV’. Honestly, given that we’re on a food planet, I totally expected the final episode to end in a big food fight : it’s that kind of a story. 

In circumstances like this people usually take their cue from the Doctor, but Sylvester McCoy was hired to be silly and play the spoons – he hasn’t yet sat down with Andrew Cartmel and made the big discovery about his darker Doctor yet so he plays this for laughs, sliding up and down the ice corridors like he’s seven and just been granted a day off school (which is actually unintentionally apt given the theme of the story). Even Sophie Aldred, in future one of the most reliably consistent actresses Dr Who ever had, starts off playing this one as if she’s auditioning for Blue Peter (well, she was announced to the press as the new companion actually in the Blue peter garden as no sets were available at the time…) is so new at this job that, when torn between her instincts and following her orders from the director, follows everyone else (which again is very apt, really, given the theme of this story but not that helpful on screen). What you see on screen is firmly in the embarrassing ‘I hope no one else catches me watching this nonsense’ fair, along with stories like ‘Horns Of Nimon’ ‘Time and The Rani’ ‘Timelash’ ‘Orphan 55’ and ‘The Dominators’ that even we have to concede looks a bit rubbish. Never before or since (though ‘Love and Monsters’ is very much the modern equivalent) has there been such a gulf between what this story is trying to do and how it looks. 

 Ah yes, Ace. She’s fantastically new, a more realistic, more streetwise version of the companions that had been in Dr Who till then. While every production team updates their idea of feminism, Ace is the one whose most recognisable to modern eyes, fierce but flawed. She’s the first attempt to write a ‘Generation X’ regular character, angry at what the baby boomers have done to the world and too cynical for Dr Who’s usual hippiness (as a baby boomer series through and through) to work.It’s hard to believe now that nobody was too sure whether to make her a companion or not: Bonnie Langford was in two minds about staying on or not so the two writers who hadn’t got in their first drafts yet were asked to incorporate two stand-alone single-story companions who may or may not end up leaving in the Tardis at the end (and back at this point in time nobody was quite sure which way round the stories would be transmitted this year). For the longest time everyone though it would be ‘Ray’ from ‘Delta’ – she’s written in as a sympathetic but plucky girl, like Mel but more natural and using her travels in the Tardis to get over her heartbreak at her boyfriend wandering off with a green alien Queen bee (as you do). But as the drafts piled up and Ace came to life and even more after Sophie Aldred was cast fresh out of drama school (having initially auditioned for Ray before the casting director figured she’d be better suited to Ace) they decided to go with her. It’s the only sensible choice. Maybe because she’s from an ice world full of wage slaves who’ve dampened their personality down she shines out the screen. Ace is easy to identify with: she’s a natural rebel who hates authority (much like the Doctor and very unlike Mel, whose a stickler for the rules), clearly not made to be one of life’s waitresses serving other people and the wonder isn’t that she dumps a tray of drinks over her customers but that she lasted as long as she did before throwing a wobbly. She’s Dr Who’s most realistic companion in so many ways, whose as streetwise and tough s anyone we’ve seen yet drawn in deeper, darker, more complex strokes than Leela after a tough background we only hear about bit by bit, afraid to be vulnerable and tough out of necessity not choice. 

Based by the author on three teenagers her knew (Annmarie and Juno, one of which he taught in drama class and one of whom, a schoolfriend named Joanna, genuinely blew up her science classroom at school – by accident so she says – and all of whom are thanked in the dedication in the novel) she’s more complex than most companions are ever allowed to be and spends this story alternating between being wise beyond her years, a big overgrown kid and a typical teenager love-hating her newly found independence/responsibilities. One thing that really bothered me on first seeing this story was how such a fully realised character could end up arriving in this story in such a ‘fairytale’ way, carried across the universe on an ice-storm after ‘accidentally conjuring it up mixing nitro-glycerine and gelignite. Ace might have blown something else up along with her classroom and might have been kicked ut by her mum for setting her bedroom alight, but she wouldn’t have conjured up an ice storm. Instead it felt – and in many ways still feels – like a metaphor too far, with Ace (real name ‘Dorothy’) sent on a long journey away from home with crazy characters whose saved by a mad ‘professor’ and shown the value of the things she left behind at home, just like film studies favourite ‘The Wizard Of Oz’. However even that makes more sense two years later when Ian Briggs writes his second Who story ‘The Curse Of Fenric’ and reveals that her arrival was all part of a chess game being played by an ancient God with the Doctor across time and who needs Ace as part of his plans (although quite why he sent her to Iceworld instead of sending the Tardis top Perivale is anyone’s guess). Ace will get tougher and more realistic in the hands of other writers (including Briggs’ second go ‘Curse Of Fenric’) but already she’s far more ‘real’ than Mel ever was, forging a bond with the Doctor while thinking for herself. 

 A quick word here about Ace’s costume. Sophie read the script and turned up to the audition in the sort of dress she thought Ace would wear. In the olden days Dr Who production teams used to frown at that sort of thing, but Andrew Cartel was more actor-friendly than most and really loved her outfit, all Doc Martins and yellow stripy leggings (changed to red when it was found they flared on the camera). Together they came up with the idea that Ace would have a jacket covered in badges, like teenagers Cartmel knew and sent Sophie out with the costume designer down Camden market to buy some, as well as badges taken from Sophie’s own collection. Her bomber jacket, with her name specially initialled by an outside company, has become synonymous with the character in a way few others have. It really paints the portrait of a life that existed before we met her and points at the inner child and nerd hidden behind Ace’s tomboy exterior: there are badges for pirates, NASA, Rupert Bear, motorbikes, a double-necked guitar, Charlton Athletic, ‘Fanderson’ (the Gerry Anderson Fanclub – Sophie was such a fun she wrote her acting school dissertation on ‘Thunderbirds’), and, most controversially, two coveted Blue Peter badges that Sophie was awarded in real life (Blue Peter producer Biddie Baxter, always protective over who got those badges – even Ray Cusick had to request one after his Daleks were shown in so many features because his children wanted one so badly, which took a lot of negotiation – only allowed it after checking in the department records to check that she really was eligible; to get the blue badge Ace had to have done something creative – my guess is designed a bomb out of sticky-backed plastic– and to get the gold one she must have done something ‘amazing’ that benefits someone else, like fundraising, volunteering or ‘speaking out against injustice’ – did she create a sponsored explosion or help her friend Manisha from ‘Survival’ see off bullies?) 

So far so, well, Ace. This wouldn’t be the first Dr Who episode that was scuppered by bad acting, poor effects or a low budget and we Dr Who fans are used to letting our imaginations overcome what’s on screen (especially in the 1980s). Yhere’s something deeper not quite right about this story though. Briggs has had such fun writing about semiotic symbols and meta-textualisation that he’s forgotten to write in much of a story. All that happens in this story is that we watch a little girl running around a mall while a treasure hunt goes on (and one that the Doctor, notably, has very little to do with: it’s left to Mel and Ace to solve while Glitz is rescuing the Doctor, whose doing all the ‘in peril’ things that usually happen to the companion). That’s not a Dr Who plot, that’s the aisles in Iceland on a weekend or a school holiday. The resolution really is stupidly simple: the ‘dragonfire’ that Kane so craves to set him free is under his nose the whole time, hidden in the head of his jailor. Kane is many bad things but he certainly isn’t thick: did he really not work that out when he had 3000 years to stew? As much as it works as a metaphor, in plot terms he must be the only tyrant in Dr Who that ever took out of his grand evil scheme to…turn his home of exile into a supermarket. On a list of a quadzillion likely things an evil tyrant is likely to do with their spare time that, well, wouldn’t make the list really. What next? Davros working at Dixons or selling pimped up wheelchairs? The Cyber Leader selling heart transplants? The Sontarons selling potato chips? It feels like there’s some part of the backstory missing here that we never got to see (all these episodes badly over-ran for starters: unlike ‘Delta’, which was perfect at three episodes long, this story desperately needs a fourth to tie everything together and flesh stuff out). Having a dragon, even a biomechanoid one, is all ‘wrong’ aesthetically too. I mean, this is an ice-world and there’s no end of volcano planets on Dr Who, he should be on Karn or Sarn or Dulkis. The twist, too, that the dragon turns out to be nice is one that Briggs seems to think is a really clever twist but which literally every single viewer of Dr Who and/or anyone whose ever read or seen ‘The Reluctant Dragon/Pete’s Dragon’ (Disney’s two most under-rated features: for some reason their dragons were never as popular as they should have been) could have seen coming from outer space. A lot of the plot depends on this being a big reveal, that the dragon picks up the little girl and saves her returning her to her mother when it’s no surprise at all. There’s also the infamous moment when the Doctor dangles off a cliff for no apparent reason at the end of part one – in the script the Doctor doesn’t realise that the ledge he’s climbing down narrows down to nothing but as filmed he just seems to put himself in peril because there’s a cliffhanger coming up. Even without those individual points going wrong the pacing is all wrong: episode one takes too long to set up the action, episode two (by far the best) has all the big talking sequences and episode three is all action. This story has a better script than all the other stories this season but it looks like the worst combination of all of them it’s as fake as ‘Time and The Rani’, as weird as ‘Paradise Towers’ and lurches from genocide to comedy even more comfortably than ‘Delta and The Bannermen’. And I wouldn’t wish that combination on a series I hated, never mind one as dear to my heart as Who. 

 It’s not just the plot either but the characters. Again, it’s all very clever naming your cast after un-pronounceable film theorists but none of the people in this story feel quite ‘real’, up to and including Ace for the first half of the story. They’re people who pontificate and scheme rather than talk – another reason the cast think this story is a parody not a serious drama. Much as I’d like to blame this on bad acting and praise the writer it’s more than that, these characters speak the sort of lines that people only speak in bad dramas when the camera is watching and don’t act normally to any situation. I did wonder if the writer was making a point about how you can’t reduce warm-blooded people to the coldness of a TV studio (or indeed an ice-world) and real life isn’t a story where people fulfil their potential because most people are just making do, given that ‘Curse Of Fenric’ proves Briggs is rather good at characters when he wants to be. Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor is caught halfway between the fool he is in the rest of this season and the darker ‘more than a timelord’ shenanigans that comes later without being satisfyingly either. He gets into trouble often throughout this story seemingly for no reason (where he usually gets other people out of it), skips his usual long lectures in favour of doffing his hat at all and sundry and he seems more interested in treasure-hunting than saving people. The script should really make more use of the worried mum, played by Shirin Taylor nine years after her other hapless Who role, beaing eaten by an Orgron stone in the opening minutes of ‘Stones Of Blood’. Bless her little cotton socks as a child actress too but Miranda Borman as the little girl Stellar is altogether too ‘Shirley Temple’, all curls and cuteness and saccharine. She looks, indeed, like nothing more than Violet Elizabeth Bott, the character from the ‘Just William’ stories as played by Bonnie Langford which saw her typecast in roles like Mel despite being, a highly capable actress. A lot of this story depends on you caring for the girl and wanting to see her reunited with her mum. Instead most viewers just want to see the dragon eat her up. 

 As for Mel herself, until now her only redeeming feature (indeed, possibly her whole character) has been her bubbly enthusiasm but in this final story she moans and groans like Peri with a hangover, falling over and getting in the way a lot even for her (while most commentators think she gets better in this story just as she leaves, by pairing her off with Ace to lay up the contrasts, to these eyes she gets worse and has lost the caring heart and timid independence of ‘Delta’).Briggs, you suspect, doesn’t quite know what to do with her: Mel doesn’t belong in this world – or rather, she does, which is a problem when he’s trying to write characters who resent being here. Mel’s a natural fast-food waitress, all smiles and grins and extra helpings and leaving your troubles at the door while wishing everyone has a nice day: she’s built for the capitalist trap Briggs is trying to destroy and ‘Dragonfire’ would have worked better all round if she’d chosen to stay behind at the end. Instead she gets a sudden leaving scene when she chooses to run off with Glitz, which seems most unlikely, not just because it’s her polar opposite but because it’s not like Mel to do something for herself without being told to. That life surely isn’t going to be much fun for either of them with her constant high ground and his so-low-it’s underground moral compasses (I mean, she’s the sort of person where butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth and he’s the kind of dude that would sell his Granny for some of that cheap fake margarine stuff). It could have been worse though; before she became a regular that left in the Tardis at the end this was Ace’s fate with the hint in the book that they were a sort-of couple before the Doctor turned up; poor Glitz, she’d have eaten him for breakfast. One of the best scenes in the story wasn’t by Briggs at all but Cartmel and added at the insistence of McCoy who’d really loved the audition speech he’d been given a year ago about time being relative that he thought was a much better farewell scene than, basically, ‘goodbye Doctor’. Cartmel thought it was a bad idea, Briggs hated it and JNT wasn’t sure but McCoy was right (and Clough, to his credit, agreed after someone got him a copy of it out the archives, his best decision as a director on this story by far) and Sylvester’s performance both makes his relationship with Mel appear deeper than it really was and provides him with his first real chance to bring some emotion to his Doctor. Picking up on show good this is, it helps Cartmel shape the more thoughtful 7th Doctor as we get to know him across the next two years. 

 I still can’t work out if Briggs’ first, even cheekier go would have been better or worse. There were a number of drafts that made the capitalist angle more blatant: the first was named ‘Absolute Zero’ and referred to the temperature of an Iceworld like planet, the profits being made and the ‘chance of making it out alive’. A small contained simple story about overthrowing a corrupt but faceless regime, Briggs was asked to go away and think bigger. So he tweaked the story and had it run by an evil teenage capitalist (think Luke Rattigan in ‘The Sontaron Stratagem’ or Elon Musk) named ‘Fatboy’ who walked around in loud Hawaiian shirts and ruled everyone with an iron fist. Cartmel recognised what Briggs was up to as a critique about making television and thought it was hilarious (clue; JNT was never seen without a Hawaiian shirt) but also wanted to keep his job, so asked Briggs to write the baddy out and think bigger still. In the next draft Iceworld was a giant pyramid floating in space which had impossible near-magical properties and where the merchandise itself could hold conversation with buyers, a little like the TV version of Douglas Adams’ ‘Hitch-Hikers’ series (where Peter Davison, back then an unknown hired as he was the husband of Sandra Dickinson playing Trisha McMillan, is the ‘dish of the day’ and dressed like an alien pig). Some of the names for produce were carried over to ‘Dragonfire’: Crab Nebula Pasties, Komet Krakkers and Free Range Phoenix Eggs (faced with that diet Ace probably told them to BOGOF…by which she meant Boy One Get One Free of course). Cartmel, now worried about the budget and concerned about product placement even for fake products on the BBC, told Briggs to think smaller. Which is how we ended up at ‘Dragonfire’ which sort-of took the best from all drafts(my favourite gag, which is there in the final version but is somewhat hidden, is that Kane – who thinks he can see everything – is really in the dark about a lot of things. Including the supernova that’s trapped him on Iceworld. Because a supernova means the sun’s gone in and…well, I found it funny anyway. My second favourite? Tony Selby’s improvised ‘This is the real McCoy’ as he points to the map while staring at Sylvester). One other favourite anecdote: Clough suddenly realised that the star system hadn’t been named so asked Cartmel, who happened to be lunching in the BBC canteen with Briggs. They couldn’t think on the spot and went back to their lunch. Next minute in walks two of the other writers of the season, Ben Aaronovitch and Stephen Wyatt, who’d come in to check on their scripts and happened to bump into one another – the four writers then spent the next hour trying to come up with a name but were stumped (Cartmel settles for the more generic ‘Astral Cascade’ for the finished draft). 

 To be fair, too, not all of this story is a case of great script poor realisation. The ending, with Kane’s face melting (a timelapse motion of eight minutes sped up to last ten seconds using a cast of actor Edward Peel’s face made out of wax and melted imposed over the actor’s face along with a body that was actually a sex doll; the eyeball popping out was a lucky accident and is actually a second take as on the first ‘his’ trousers fell down) is the last time in the original run that Dr Who is properly scary. It’s a good job that Mary Whitehouse had given up kicking Dr Who and moved on by 1987 because she’d have had a nervous breakdown watching it back – the effect was better than anyone hoped for at the time (as, like a lot of model effects on Dr Who, it was a whole new invention of something nobody has ever asked the BBC team to make before). Indeed the effect got six complaints from concerned parents, which as a percentage of who was left watching the show was practically an avalanche. The similar effect, in Indiana Jones film ‘raiders Of The Lost Ark’ looks way more dated now – and that was done on a budget perhaps a hundred times higher than this. In certain shots, too, the ice in the set looks a lot more realistic than it should – even if in other shots it just looks like the plastic sheeting it is. The various monsters gathered together at the bar and made out of odds and ends (pig masks, lizard masks, one rogue Argolin left over from ’The Leisure Hive’ and a mask the props lady had made for a costume party the director liked so much he put it front and centre) work better than they should, mostly because we sensibly don’t linger on them (all apart from the glove puppet anyway, which never work in productions with real humans in them). Dominic Glynn’s score, too, is his best out his small handful for the series, demonstrating more care than usual. His new ‘toy’ is an emulator which could take a recording of any sound and change the pitch as you played: figuring Iceworld was big and cavernous he mostly samples church organs but also found a children’s toy that sounded just like little taps on glass. The makeup, too, is done with care, glycerine mixed with white foundation to give everyone the impression of looking cold despite being under hot studio lights. Even so, a lot more goes wrong in this story than goes right. A lot more. 

 There’s a story, in his book ‘Script Doctor’, that Cartmel and Briggs sat down to watch the rushes together and Andrew commented ‘They turned it into a B movie – but at least it’s a good B movie’. That’s what it’s like: what should have been ‘Citizen Kane’ (right down to the name – another film studies reference) turned out one of those 1950s scifi films where the flying saucers are held up with strings and the monsters are made out of carpet. Once again, I also have a sneaking suspicion that nobody else involved in the making of this story - not the actors, not the producer, not the director, not even script editor Andrew Cartmel whose usually the ‘brains’ in this era - realised that this was what was going on. Maybe if they had they might have stopped it? Or maybe they might have made it better? Who knows. I mean, this is the sort of show that’s at its best when exploring high falluting cerebral concepts where there’s more happening than meets the eye (think ‘The Mind Robber’ ‘Warrior’s Gate’ ‘Castrovalva’ ‘Vengeance On Varos’ ‘Ghostlight’ or the Mara twins). But sometimes you need other people to at least have a clue that’s what you’re doing – like the treasure hunt in this story people see to miss the obvious over and over. In short, this story’s a hot mess despite being set on ice and I’m never quite sure what to think of it. Is this Dr Who’s most intellectual script or it’s stupidest? Is this work full of great characterisation or lousy characterisation? Is it a work of genius or madness? The answer is I think somewhere in between: it’s a sloppy bit of television based on a great meta-script that veers from insultingly simple to too clever by 12/13ths. That’s ‘Dragonfire’ all over: sometimes it’s amongst the smartest Dr Who stories ever made. At other times it’s the stupidest. Sometimes it feels as if it’s being written for the intellectual head, sometimes for the emotional heart, sometimes for the funny bone, but then it remembers this is supposed to be ‘only’ children’s telly and puts on a clown suit and falls flat on its face.

 Now this was my era of children’s telly when I actually was a child and this was part of a wider problem because a lot of it was like that. This was an era when big drama series that were more emotional and hard hitting than anything being made for adults (a lot of it made by Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat) rubbed shoulders with series that were full of gunge and games. No two series back to back seemed to be made for the same market at all. In just three years there’ll be a TV series that’s almost exactly like ‘Dragonfire’, ‘Spatz’, about teenagers grappling with growing up while working in a fast food chain for a female equivalent of Kane that didn’t know from week to week if it was meant to be slapstick or high drama so was often both at once. ‘Dragonfire’ is like that: there’s no other story in the original run made for children quite as blatantly as this and yet the only way to make any real sense of it is to read multiple film theory texts before watching it too. ‘Dragonfire’, like Ace, doesn’t belong here, as part of season twenty-four: it’s a u-turn to try and make Who intellectual again made by a production team who are ever further down the road to making this ‘just’ a bit of silly fun. The sad fact is that in the end the ice people win: for all this episode’s heart there just isn’t quite enough fire to thaw the ice of all the era’s trappings. The result is one of those stories that’s a lot more fun to think about (and write about!) than it actually is to watch, a tale of great promise that leaves you feeling sad not because it’s bad but because of how much wasted potential is just frittered away. I can totally see why ‘Dragonfire’ leaves so many fans cold. At the same time, however, something about this story and the risks it takes, so often needlessly, warms my heart. Both sides, the heat and the cold, cancel each other out, leaving you with a story that leaves you lukewarm instead. Although of course lukewarm is really just another way of saying ‘ice hot!’ 

 POSITIVES + Sophie Aldred is already the best thing here by a country mile. What with tantrums, meltdowns, mock-politeness, fights, courage, comedy and the scenes in her bedroom where she’s suddenly dropped the act and is so small and vulnerable, Sophie has to carry a lot of this story and she nails all of it, even though her character still doesn’t feel like a fully functional person until ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’. I’m sad they dropped the idea of Ace giving everyone nicknames the way she does in this story however: some of them are quite telling and show that she has really good observational skills (I’ve called many a baddie ‘bilgebag’ under my breath in my time, Mel is clearly a ‘Doughnut’ and ‘Professor’ suits the Doctor maybe even better than ‘Doctor’ does, especially in this incarnation – it fits with the ‘Wizard of Oz’ motif too). Naming things is, if you’re into the sort of film theory seen in this story, a way of controlling the narrative, of having power over someone and how you think of them. And therefore perfect for a 16 year old who hates her job and family and has lost control of everything else in her life (there’s a lot – a lot! – in these sort of texts about how, say, naming ‘Blake’s 7’ ‘freedom fighters’ or ‘terrorists’ gives a subtle direction to how other people are meant to think of them). Doubly so for a character who has to wear a uniform with a name badge: playing by different rules, by giving people different names, is one tiny small crumb of rebellion left to Ace. Sophie got the news that she’d passed the audition while she was appearing in an adaptation of ‘Fiddler On The Roof’, where one of her co-stars and good friends happened to be John Scott-Martin, the Dalek operator whose unbroken association with Dr Who outlasted everyone else, who pinned a Dalek postcard her dressing room wall telling her well done (he’ll be back with Sophie the following year for ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’; she also received another postcard, long treasured, from Briggs thanking her for bringing Ace to life and so reminding him of the three people who inspired - that one was, fittingly, a ‘Wizard of oz’ film still on the other side). 

 NEGATIVES - I love dragons. Dragons are great. From ‘Falkor’ the cute font of all knowledge/transportation in surely the world’s greatest film ‘The Neverending Story’ (itself a work of postmodernist genius) to the really cute imaginary ‘Elliott’ in ‘Pete’s Dragon’ (the original, not that horrid remake) to the scary ones in ‘Game Of Thrones’ to the moral heart of the ever-under-rated series ‘Merlin’ as played by John ‘War Doctor’ Hurt, you can’t go wrong with a dragon and I can’t think of a single story that wouldn’t be improved for having a dragon added (seriously. ‘Of mice and Men’? Add a dragon, now that’s your American dream right there! Citizen Kane? Rosebud was a dragon from lost youth. ‘Gone With The Wind’? Frankly my dear I don’t give a dragon!’) Except this one, which looks like a leftover costume from the ‘aliens’ film franchise (another comment on how stupid it is doing scifi on a BBC budget?) and which doesn’t even have a proper tail. To quote: ‘That’s not a dragon – those are lazer beams!’ Pity poor Leslie Meadows inside what must surely be the heaviest costume ever worn in the series too – as well as the thick bulky outer casing he had to have his head perched next to a battery and a gas canister so the dragon could belch smoke. So no wonder he waddles like a duck. Briggs was so horrified by how it turned out he wrote to Target books cover artists Alistair Pearson and pleaded with him not to put the dragon on the front cover next to his name as he felt il every time he saw it; Pearson agreed. 

 BEST QUOTE: Ace: ‘Do you fancy arguing with a can of deodorant that registers nine of n the Richter scale?!’ 

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