Meglos
(Season 18, Dr 4 with Romana II and K9, 27/9/1980-18/10/1980, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Christopher H Bidmead, writers: John Flanagan and Andrew McCulloch, director: Terence Dudley)
'Welcome to Gardener's World in the year 2123 with me, the second android replica of Monty Don (because the first one fell in a pond and got eaten by a Skarasen). On today's show we'll be showing you how to prune your Vervoids, how to make a trap to avoid the Rani turning you into a tree, how to stop crying over your Krynoids being composted, how to survive a Terry Nation petrified jungle until at least episode four and what do if a giant cactus from outer space ever possesses you body and soul. First, though, I want to show you how my privet hedge made out of Triffids has been getting on...'
Ranking: 211
Poor Tom Baker: in the course of playing the Doctor he was aged a thousand years, dressed up in bandages to play a mummy and possessed by more aliens than you could shake a perigosto stick at. ‘Meglos’ though is the ultimate indignity: he’s possessed by an alien cactus and covered in green spikes, which must have been a very long day in the make-up chair. It was not a happy time for the actor who was struggling to keep control of a show that just didn’t feel like his anymore: incoming producer John Nathan-Turner wasn’t listening, his co-stars were coming and going at warp speed (including Lalla Ward, who’s just handed in her notice to the show but said yes to a wedding with her leading man) and to top it all he fell badly ill in the off-season, struggling through a normal day (as much as any day on Dr Who was ever ‘normal’) without the hours in the make-up chair. No wonder he was a bit ‘prickly’, even when he wasn’t playing a giant cactus. I’ve wondered, too, if the script isn’t some kind of sequel to ‘The Invasion Of Time’ wherein producer Graham Williams got so fed up of his leading man contradicting him that he temporarily made him ‘evil’, a monster everyone was scared of – including his old ‘headmaster’ trying to bring him in line, with Tom turned into a spiky megalomaniac as a form of revenge. And yet Tom was also at the utter peak of his popularity, with the fanbase and the general public, with a fame and adoration that no one connected with the show has ever reached – not even David Tennant in 2006-2010 and the thought of Dr Who existing without him seemed impossible. And yet, it was during the making of this story, that he started talking about stepping down from the role hurt that nobody tried to stop him or offer him a pay rise after all he had done for a show he still considered as ‘his’ (one news report announced the news he was leaving the show with the scene where Brotodac asks ‘Do you think he’ll let me eaer that coat…now that he’s finished playing The Doctor?’, which is actually addressed to Meglos-in-disguise) . Given how he was feeling emotionally and physically, given the early mornings being painted green, given all the things against him, given that he felt as friendless and alien making this story as if he’d been a giant cactus for real, I still rate ‘Meglos’ as maybe the most extraordinary in a long line of performances the actor gave across seven very full years, with Tom word-perfect in not one role but two, in a story that asks one hell of a lot of its leading man and which relies more than normal on his charisma and watchability.
As a measure
of just how big Tom Baker was in 1980 one of my favourite bits of Dr Who trivia
is that Tom is still the only person to have ever been in Madam Tussaud’s
waxworks twice at the same time – once as the Doctor and once as Meglos,
complete with spikes. Nobody seems to knows quite why he was in there two times;
I mean, Tom Baker was famous but so were a lot of people in 1980. I like to
think that a sarcastic waxwork maker was commissioned to make a waxwork of
Margaret Thatcher and decided to make her look all green, spiky and alien in
protest before someone vetoed it, although I’m sure that’s just wishful thinking.
What isn’t a surprise is that, if the world needed a second Tom Baker, that
they should base it on this design. Meglos is a real triumph of make-up that
ticks all three boxes: it looks alien, it looks believably like a cactus and it
lets Tom Baker’s real features show through enough that it’s still obviously
him. The static cactus proper looks undeniably rubbery and false but mercifully
we don’t see much of it in cactus form and only when it possesses people and
turns them green, so that’s already one up on the ropey Vervoid effects or the
tree that starts fondling Peri in ‘Mark Of The Rani’.
A lot of fans
laugh at the Rocky Horror-ness of the villain turning out to be a sentient
plant, but it makes sense to me that somewhere in a universe as big as the Dr Who
one an alien plant from an alien planet would have developed intelligence. So
far we’ve had lots of semi-intelligent vegetation on Dr Who but this is,
amazingly, the first one that could actually talk. It came from desperation to
a degree: writers John Flanagan and Andrew McCulloch were old friends of script
editor Christopher H Bidmead from back in the days when all three had been
actors and they had been hired by their old mate as a fallback in case any
scripts at his new job fell through. Which they did straight away: Bidmead was
rather horrified to find how few scripts had been left behind and how few were
being worked on and felt that most of those weren’t to his tastes, pushing Dr
Who into more of a fantasy approach (the story ‘Meglos’ officially replaced,
‘Erinella’, even featured dragons) away from the pure science he wanted. So his
friends, who’d agreed in a sort of vague way maybe one day in the future, got a
panicked call asking them to start writing straight away. There was a slight snag:
they knew nothing about Dr Who. Heck, they’d never actually written for
television before this. They were, pretty much uniquely to this book (barring
the first series writers of course) writers who had never seen it and didn’t
quite understand what it was about. Luckily one of the first things Bidmead had
done on getting the Who job was to finally write out thoroughly what many
script editors in the past had only done half-heartedly: a proper ‘series
bible’ with pages describing the history, the style, the themes, the
characters. Bidmead had spent a lot of time on it and sent it over proudly,
only for his friends to be rather confused. Timelords? Aliens? A
time-travelling police telephone box? It sounded mad. Every story idea they
tried to pitch was reluctantly turned down, sometimes because of budget but
more often because Dr Who had done it somewhere already. Robots? Old hat.
Aliens taking over the Earth? Endlessly. Time travel to the future? Only every
other week! What Bidmead wanted with his first official commission was
something bold, new, daring, something Dr Who had never done before. In
desperation the writers stared round their writing room in desperation when
they spotted a succulent in the corner. ‘What about an alien cactus?’ they said
‘We bet you that’s never been done on Dr Who before!’It hadn’t. Many fans have
wondered if it was more a stroke of desperation than inspiration the idea got
passed but I can see why a scientist like Bidmead would have run with it: based
on the tiny bit of understanding we have about how life works, based entirely
on our own planet and a lot of guesswork, an alien that looks like a plant is
one of the most likely – and what sort of plant is closest to being invincible,
able to survive even on arid desert planets? A cactus!
Mind you,
there are several good reasons why cactuses haven’t, say, taken over the Earth
back in the days when we were all monkeys, none of which the writers can quite
explain. They don’t have any legs for a start, remaining rooted to the spot,
and it’s hard to go through the sort of technological progression that all
beings need to attain a level of technology if you can’t walk anywhere. It’s
even harder when you don’t have any arms so you can’t use any tools, press any
buttons or pull any levers. So the writers come up with the brainwave of making
their cactus mentally powerful, with the ability to possess anyone and take
them over (though they seem to like Earthlings best for some reason, with a
nifty trade in Human trafficking despite being on a planet where there are two
other perfectly adaptable humanoid races around. Meglos can also teleport
himself (and his plantpot) at will. So instead of having the alien cactus on
screen the whole time he can just overpower people and wee can have thwe actors
walking around talking funny. Problem solved! Except ‘Meglos’ ends up falling
into the trap of recycling and composting the script editor had been trying to
avoid in the first place, becoming yet another Dr Who story about brainwashing
and moving away from a planet of cactuses, the bright ideas turning to mulch. It’s
as if the writers, who only knew of Dr Who from Bidmead’s notes, were copying
all the past stories so closely they couldn’t find an original story of their
own (although on one hand why should they? Scifi wasn’t their forte: ‘Meglos’
is more a case of ‘how come everyone else gets it right?’ rather than ‘how come
they got it so wrong?’ It’s also one good reason why nowadays showrunners are
more likely than not to farm out their own ideas to other writers to flesh out,
in the hope that at least something in there somewhere will be in line with the
series and original. Well, ish: all three showrunners repeat themselves a fair
bit too).
There are a
lot of things ‘Meglos’ repeats from other Dr Who stories, a lot of them
apparently without the writers (or script editor, who was also new to the
series don’t forget) realising, enough to give many longterm fans déjà vu.
Sadly the cactus from Zolfa-Thura doesn’t have a friend called ‘Spike’ but it
does have, at least, one of the most fitting names in Who: ‘Meglos’ is, you
see, a bit of a Meglosmaniac with an ego that definitely needs pruning.
Like many a Who villain it’s a ranty shouty being that wants to take over the
universe starting with its home world. Despite the green face-paint its not
actually any different from, say, Omega or Sutekh or even Azal the Devil, only
less hard take seriously because, y’know, he’s a cactus. He ought to seem a
bigger threat if only because he has powers few other tyrants in Who ever
match: the ability to create timeloops and actually see into the Tardis (I bet
Davros and the Cyber Controller at al wish they had those powers!) However there’s
no real sense of fear – partly because he’s a walking talking cactus but also
partly because we’re never told why to be afraid. We never get any greater
motivation for Meglos’ actions, other than that he’s the sort of person who
believes that they’re better than anyone else and so ought to rule by de facto.
He doesn’t even pretend to be doing the planet a favour like other dictators in
Who or charming the pants off everyone like The Master: seriously, this guy’s
roots are showing a bit too much. Then there’s the ‘chronic hystersis’ timeloop
that traps the Doctor and Romana: on the one hand it’s quite original in that
the writers read the notes and naturally assumed that The Doctor would be a
famous figure known across the universe so that Meglos would have to work out
how to defeat the Doctor into his plan, something that hadn’t actually happened
on screen in a non-sequel story since ‘The Savages’ back in 1966; not original
in the fact that the 4th Doctor era is full of timeloops (see ‘The Armageddon Factor’ for the most
blatant) and the idea of repeating
scenes over and over again is obvious recycling, both to anyone who’d seen any
Dr Who recently and to any viewer asked to sit through the same sodding scene
four times over! Not to mention the side effect that, by the time the timelords
escape it, we’re halfway through episode two and the story only runs to four.
There’s
another obvious steal, direct or not, that seems to combine three already quite
similar stories together: ‘The Daleks’ ‘The Face Of Evil’ and ‘The Armageddon Factor’, with a little
bit of ‘The Hand Of Fear’ for good measure.
Because yes the writers sat down and thought about this script and thought
‘what might be novel is if we make this fictional futuristic world of
Zolpha-Fura like ours and make it a parable about what’s happening to us now,
with Earth in the middle of a cold war, bet no one’s ever thought of that
before!’ The background of a planet where a nuclear war has taken place is very
like Skaro when we first see it, while that planet also had killer alien
vegetation come to life. The two tribes are also like a diluted version of the
Dalek v Thal battle, divided into scientists and spiritualists, very like what
happens to Leela’s tribes of Sevateem and their deadly enemies the Tesh
(because science and religion don’t mix easily, one based on faith and one on
proof, neither side quite believing the other’s evidence). I wonder, too, if
the writers were sharp enough to pick up on the fact that, as a leaf through a
collection of past Dr Who plots would show, that this is a series finely
balanced between the two, where each week’s monster could turn out to be a
scientifically accurate alien or an entity from superstition like a God, with
stories of pure science with not many scifi overtones at all like, say, ‘The
Mind Of Evil’ rubbing shoulders with pure spiritual metaphors like ‘Planet Of
The Spiders’. How do you best work out which half of that style you’re going to
write for? You write characters that are one half and then characters who are
the other, it’s actually quite a clever solution which shows the writers were
thinking. Both sides are still fighting a war that should have been long since
over because they both want control of the object of impossible technology, the
Dodecahedron (just like the Armageddon computer). One bit I really like though
is that the two sides aren’t just fighting over it for the same reasons: The
Savants want it to rebuild their half of the world by harnessing it’s power and
might; the Deons see it as a gift that can help them rebuild their city. Both
sides are ‘wrong’ in that it’s not one thing or the other: it’s a part-natural
part-technological creation that’s both natural and shaped, one that’s not just
fuel for a weapon but neither is it just a mystical ball of energy, with the
leaders misunderstanding why they can’t control it the way they want to; the
boss of the Savants thinks his workers aren’t working hard enough; the priest
Lexa thinks that her people are ‘impure’ and their God is angry with them. In
that sense the Dodecahedron is surely a metaphor for nuclear power (yes, just
like ‘Hand Of Fear’: Eldrad must live. In cactus form), a source of power that
can be used for good or bad, depending on who is wielding it and so not
necessarily a bad thing outright. This was, in 1980, a time when superpowers
were beginning to get just a little bit panicky about all the little countries
(yes, including Britain) that were harnessing nuclear fuel instead of relying
on fossil fuels and the paranoia that they might start using it on one of the
others.
The Treaty On
The Non-Proliferation Of Nuclear Weapons had been signed in 1970, ten years
before this story went on air, but it was now with so many countries gaining
knowledge and building prototypes of their own that it was pushing its way up
the news bulletins and making both America and Russia nervous that one of the other’s
allies might use it on them. There’s a lot of that paranoia in Meglos, the
outsider opportunist who comes in from the outside to take advantage of a world
in disarray and use it himself for his own ends. And so all that learning, all
that rebuilding and healing from the last war (which is surely a metaphor for
WW2, which ended when nuclear weapons were dropped on Japan) might be all for
nothing, with history repeating itself again, as if the planet was on a chronic
hysteresis timeloop of its own. Just like Earth. Then there’s the Gaztaks, the
mercenary pirates who are thicker than everyone else but just as much of a
threat – in this context they’re kind of like the smaller dictators in the
Middle East who want to harness the power of nuclear power without ever quite
understanding the dangers to themselves or others if something goes wrong. So
that’s four separate batches of characters who all want the Dodecahedron
(originally a pentagram, before Bidmead reckoned a Dodecahedron would be easier
to turn into a design) for their own purposes, each one tripping over the other
and each one being undeserving because they can only see what it represents in
one dimension. Only the Doctor and Romana and local mystic Zestor (and K9, when
he’s working) can see it for the complete whole it is. Unlike some reviewers
who think the plot of ‘Meglos’ is nonsense I think it’s a fine idea, especially
given the worry of the day when it was written – it’s the fact that we’ve almost
but not quite had this story so many times before that lets it down slightly.
The plot
seems to give up totally by the final episode, which at 19 minutes is the
shortest episode of the entire run of Dr Who outside ‘The Mind Robber’ (and
there were several good excuses for why it happened with that story), as if
once they’d thought up the story the writers had nowhere to go: after all,
which side of the three should win when none of them deserve to? (The solution,
to have the two tribes come together to defeat Meglos, seems so obvious and yet
is done so half-heartedly it feels as if its here more to end the story
somewhere than to make a moral point, unlike all the other examples listed
above).You could argue that ‘Meglos’ is one of the emptier Dr Who stories: few
people learn anything and what they do are things characters have already
learned several times over in Dr Who. There’s little here that’s new, for all
of Bidmead’s claims to shape the series to scientific progress little here
that’s realistic and little here that’s worth watching for more than
entertainment. Compared to what this series does at its very best it’s all very
dry, as befits a story about a cactus: there’s not much here that’s ‘extra’,
just the bare basics, with characters who only ever talk about the plot and
nothing else, often in mind-numbing detail – and even then not quite all the
basics (there’s a lot of padding, notably in episode three when Bidmead found
to his horror at rehearsals it was under-running by seven whole minutes; that’s
why Romana suddenly gets the brainwave to lead the mercenaries round in
circles, only for her plan to fail). If you’re looking for a Dr Who to inspire
you, to shower you in its creative juices, ‘Meglos’ really isn’t it.
Nevertheless to
dismiss this story for that outright is to under-rated just how important the
odd purely entertaining story is to this series. ‘Meglos’ is a lot of fun that
doesn’t take itself too seriously and there’s as much a space in this most
elastic of series for silly stories about possession by megalomaniac plants as
there is for deep solemn symbolic metaphors for the state of the universe. No
one watching could possibly have more fun than the regulars – yes even Tom,
despite the misery of the makeup and the feeling that no one was on his side,
with possibly the last time he’s on screen and visibly really enjoying himself.
You can tell too, if you look closely, which episodes Tom and Lalla Ward as the
second Romana are passionately in love and which they’re at each other’s
throats and they’re not necessarily in a logical sequence – this is one of
their lovey-dovey stories a year or so before their marriage when their
chemistry is so intense their getting it together was as inevitable as a Dalek
story beginning with ‘R’; Lalla found to her surprise she rather liked taking
care of her co-star between filming days and even more to his surprise Tom
found he liked it too. As much as he grouched at everything from the makeup
down, somewhere beneath it all Tom is having a whale of a time, enjoying the
chance to be ‘bad’ again after so many years of being gooder than good. Though
not quite as distinct as the gulf between the Doctor in episodes 1-3 of ‘The
Invasion Of Time’ and episodes 4-6 Tom also plays Meglos so differently to the
Doctor that it proves what a good actor he is: Meglos is all impatience, anger,
he even holds his head funny like a chicken pecking at the world. The Doctor,
by contrast, is gloriously flippant, laidback to the point he nearly loses and
full of big wide flowing gestures. By having The Doctor be possessed by a plant
for half the story it’s down to Romana to be more Doctory than ever before and
at the time it was unusual indeed to see the companion taking charge and being
dashing; it’s hard to imagine almost any other actress doing this so naturally
but you believe it from Lalla Ward whose having great fun being the ‘teacher’
for a change rather than the ‘pupil’ (she’ll get a lot more chances before the
end of the year too). As much as ‘Meglos’
feels like every other Dr Who story ever made it’s also worth pointing out that
it’s actually comparatively rare for the Doctor to be possessed when the companion
isn’t.
One odd quirk
of this story, perhaps evidence of the writers’ limited experience of television
rather than the stage, is how all the characters appear in all four episodes,
more or less equally (experienced writers tend to bump a few off and introduce
others, partly to keep things fresh and partly to avoid them all being paid in
full out of the budget!) To emphasise how rare this is, apart from the obvious
exceptions of the one-part ‘Mission To The
Unknown’ and the two-part ‘Edge Of Destruction’
(which had no supporting characters anyway) it’s the only time in ‘classic’ Who
this happens. With so many characters running around the supporting cast don’t
have quite as easy a time of things, with all having one or two great lines but
no real background or motivation. Even though the casting is superb throughout,
with some of the best actors and actresses to appear in the series returning,
even the best of them have problems. Getting iconic actor Bill Fraser, veteran
of Hancock’s Half Hour and The Army Game (he was William Hartnell’s sort-of
replacement), was one of the first really big coups that John Nathan-Turner
pulled off in his quest to lure big name stars to the show (and milk all the
extra publicity he could get!) Unlike the writers he did know his Who and joked
to the press that he only took the part if they wrote him in a scene where he
could kick K9 because he found the tin dog irritating (JNT, who hated K9 with a
passion too, was only too happy to agree! Nobody recorded what his voice actor
John Leeson felt about this – or what he did in rehearsals, given Leeson’s
habit of acting out K9‘s parts on his hands and knees!) It’s a very broad part
as are most of the Gaztak mercenaries who are maybe an invention too far:
they’re another stereotypical bunch of opportunists, more fun and less
offensively stereotypical than the similar bandits in ‘The Creature From The
Pit’ but they still feel as if they’re wondering around a world that doesn’t
quite need them. They miss a trick
slightly too: their costumes were intended in the script to be made up of odds
and ends taken from all sorts of different planets they’ve visited, clashing
wildly, as if they’re a mongrel culture without a home of their own, something
which never quite comes over on screen (where they just look as if they got
dressed in the dark!) As a sign of how broad these characters are, one inspired
bit of casting was Frederick Treves, an actor traditionally cast in the role of
bank clerks and civil servants, who finds ways to play the incredibly OTT part
of Brotodac as someone almost normal; he’d been written in by the writers as an
anagram of ‘Bad Actor’, because they felt that was the only way they would ever
find someone to play him (they only admitted this right at the end of filming
when, luckily, Treves found it hysterical). Poor Edward Underdown is another
veteran film actor who’d appeared in at least a dozen things you’ve probably
seen whose not given much to flesh out with the past of Zestor, who as
all-seeing mystics goes can’t compete with Organon (also from ‘The Creature
From The Pit’) or Binroc (from ‘The Ribos Operation’): he doesn’t seem like the
calming presence the world needs but doesn’t listen to so much as a quiet man
being out-shouted. Many fans call his performance the story’s weak link and it
is, but understandably so: Underdown had just been diagnosed with a terminal
illness (thankfully one that he lived through for nearly a full decade) and was
struggling, but trooper that he was he refused to let his colleagues down.
The biggest
name for Dr Who fans, of course, is Jacqueline Hill, returning to Dr Who for the first time since ‘The Chase’ in 1965
when founding companion Barbara Wright finally got home to London. Only in this
story she’s playing a very different character: Lexa the high priest is kind of
the equivalent of her era’s Tloxtoxl from ‘The
Aztecs’, someone so convinced by the truth of their religion that they’re
intolerant to non-believers and wicked. She tries hard but it’s not a natural
bit of casting and the part doesn’t give her much to do except flare her
nostrils and proclaim: a waste of the talents of one of the greatest actresses
to ever be in the programme. Many fans get really annoyed by her casting in
such a very different role, which was the first time it ever really happened in
Dr Who (there’ll be lots in the modern series, when Peter Capaldi, - twice! - Karen
Gillan and Bradley Walsh all play very
different parts to their original one) and I’ve read many online reviewers
saying that the production team had gone mad, that they’d committed a cardinal
sin, that it was a colossal bit of stupidity. But actually it was an act of
kindness. Say what you will about some of JNT’s weirder decisions and bluntness
towards directives and the way he would happily throw people out after a petty
argument but he also saw Dr Who as one colossally big family and would gladly
help out the many people he met at Dr Who conventions when he heard one was
struggling for work. Jacqueline Hill had left acting soon after Dr Who to have
a baby with her famous director husband Alvin Rakoff but now her baby was a
teenager she wanted to work again, only found she was being forced to start at
the bottom again, as an extra, while facing the stigma that all women over
forty suffer in the acting business, of having no good parts available. JNT was
horrified that an actress of her calibre wasn’t being used properly and made
sure she got the first one available to show what she could do, which happened
to be this one. Not the best advert for her skills necessarily but a kind
gesture and what’s more it worked: Hill had a new lease of life in her career
for the next few years before breast cancer cut her career short again, most of
it thanks to Dr Who.
Overall,
then, ‘Meglos’ is a bit of a disappointment. So much of it feels like things we’ve
seen before and if even Tom Baker painted green with spikes sticking out of his
head and hands isn’t enough to keep a story moving you know you’ve got
problems. Typically the writers were hired by Bidmead partly because they were
so good at comedy and he wanted a story that was really funny given the serious
places he was about to take the series – all of which was then pruned back by
the producer, making what should have been a tongue-in-cheek script a
compromise that’s only funny in bits yet not serious enough to take seriously
either. It’s more than a bit repetitive even before the Doctor and Romana end
up trapped in a timeloop repeating themselves over and over again. There’s also
very little drama, a problem common to this era but especially this story: to
compare it to the script with which it most closely matches ‘The Daleks’ worked
partly because The Daleks seemed an unstoppable force, a well co-ordinated
species of such immense power that one old man, two schoolteachers and a
teenager seemed to have no chance of stopping. In this era its different: there
are two near-enough invincible timelords running around (what’s the worst that
can happen|/ They change their face), plus a tin dog computer that’s a genius.
The wonder isn’t that the Doctor solves it all but that he doesn’t wrap it all
up quicker. At the time, when both producer and script editor had promised that
the new series was going to be bold and daring and different and pioneering, it
seemed almost laughable in its retro-ness, like so many other Dr Who stories
stuck in a blender with cactus oil.
Now that we
know how the rest of the season turned out we can be kinder: there’s such a
huge sense of sorrow and melancholy across the second half of the year that
having one last adventure that’s fun and indulges Tom baker all his in-joked
and effervescentness seems more welcome than it did at the time. Even though ‘Meglos’
is far from my favourite story it still features many of my favourite scenes, whether
they be the invention of the writers, script editor or Tom Baker ad libbing
with some great little lines: I adore Zestor’s description of the Doctor which,
despite the writers having never seen the show, gets the essence of this show
and the Doctor better than practically any other sentence: He ‘sees the threads
of the universe and mends them when they break’. I love the farcical humour of
a confused guard asking the Doctor didn’t he walk past a few minutes earlier
(when he was possessed by Meglos). ‘You really have the most marvellous memory!’
gushes the Doctor, praising him to the hilt in a way only the 4th
Doctor can. The Doctor’s very McCoyish quip that ‘many hands make the lights
work’. And then there’s Grugger’s line ‘don’t think too hard you’ll bust
something’: sure we’ve heard variations of that jokes so many times down the
years since and its an instinctive thing writers come up with all the time
nowadays, but did anyone use it before ‘Meglos’? If they did I’ve never found
an example. Could it be that, in one of Dr Who’s most recycled scripts, the
writers came up with a line so original we’re still using it now? ‘Meglos’ is
also a story that surprises you whenever you re-watch it: as much as you’ve got
it in your head that it doesn’t quite work bits of it still do quite
brilliantly. That’s the thing about ‘Meglos’, it’s much like a cactus: you can ignore it for years, overlook it while
you tender the bigger brighter more beautiful specimens in your garden, but
when time has passed and all that beauty has passed you by its ‘Meglos’ that’s
still there, still doing its thing, still being the sort of story Dr Who was
for. Admittedly doing that last part a bit too well as there’s nothing this
story does better than any other Dr Who story out there, but if you can’t enjoy
a story about an alien megalomaniac cactus on some level, even for its pure absurdity,
then there’s something wrong with you. Madame Tussauds should bring their
waxwork of Meglos back I say.
POSITIVES + Well, actually there is one thing that ‘Meglos’ does that, even if it
isn’t quite the best example ever, is certainly up there amongst the rare privileged
few. The special effects are particularly special in this one and that’s partly
because the director has a new bit of kit he’s been asked to try out before
anyone else, free of charge as a guinea pig in return for the use of scenes in
the inventor’s advertising, something that often happened on Dr Who (when it
was seen as such an experimental programme anyway it could try new inventions to
be later used elsewhere without it looking too out of place). Previous producer
Graham Williams had been a great proponent of the CSO (Colour Separation Overlay)
green-screens, which were meant to super-impose real people onto mock-up sets.
Now I find this rather charming and a clever way of getting round the tight
budgets by not having to build entire sets, certainly no worse than the sort of
polystyrene rocks and painted tapestries that were being used in all
fantasy-driven programmes in this era and it’s a great cost saving device that
allows money to spent on more important things, the only downside being the
occasional leg or bit of hairdo that goes missing. JNT hated it though and was
keen to get his hands on a new toy, Scene-Sync, which goes one stage further by
allowing the cameras to pan round the model sets and the actors all at the same
time, giving an even greater feeling that they’re really ‘there’ than just
having one flat image. It works by having two locked-off boxes at opposite ends
of the studio that fitted over the cameras, measures to the millimetre.One was
the model set, the other the actors on a set. By preo-programming the cameras
to a pre-conditioned motion or tilt the camera could then move its way around
the box while the actors walked along a carefully choreographed path. The
device even allows for shadows that realistically move across the sets, which
in the days before computers were doing all this stuff felt like magic. There’s
a scene where the Gaztaks move across the Dodecahedron base: its colossal, as
befits an invention of such immense power, a sort of cross between The Crystal
Maze and a nuclear power station. You know it has to be a model because TV
centre just isn’t that big. And then General Grugger actually brushes past one
of the Dodecahedron screens (because they’ve built the bottom of the set and
attached the model part that much more easily than before) and then we turn the
corner and follow him – amazing even now, never mind back in 1980! It wasn’t
easy either: lots of hours were spent pain-stakingly lining the two parts up so
that they matched perfectly. It was money well spent. Of course there’s always
a downside though: the difficulties with the technology meant there was no way
they could do this on location as panned so everything in ‘Meglos’ is very
stagey, with sets that really do look like sets (and a jungle that can’t match ‘Nightmare Of Eden’, never mind the 1960s
terry nation stories that had the benefit of being in eerie black-and-white).
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Leisure Hive’ next ‘Full Circle’
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