The Visitation
(Season 19, Dr 5 with Adric, Nyssa and Tegan, 15-23/2/1982, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Anthony Root, writer; Eric Saward, director: Peter Moffat)
'Ring-A-Ring-O-Roses
Reptilian aliens with no noses
Atishoo! Atishoo!
Till London burns down'
Ranking: 219
For some reason fandom got it into their head that ‘The Visitation’ was a major story. It was, after all, Dr Who’s first trip back in time (on Earth at least) for five years, since the Tardis had left ‘The Horror Of Fang Rock’(give or take a brief trip to ask Da Vinci to paint some extra Mona Lisas). The debut of the writer who will become a future script editor and who will end up shaping more words of Dr Who across the 1980s, Eric Saward. A Dr Who story linked to one of the biggest events in British history, The Great Fire of London. There was even a book about how this story was put together, ‘The Making Of A TV Series’, part of a long-running series by Alan Road that covered all sorts of things (an early volume was about Paul McCartney and Wings on tour). Yet ‘The Visitation’ might well be the most ‘average’ story Dr Who ever did. It’s not that it’s bad by any means, it’s a competently made story that at least makes sense and nothing major goes wrong (well, only a badly choreographed final fight where Tegan beats up a Terileptil with an obviously rubber branch), which is more than you can say for a lot of the lower ranked stories. But really it just got lucky. Eric Saward’s fiancé of the time Paula Wolsey (co-writer of ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’ to come) happened to be studying 1666 as part of her university dissertation so it was an obvious thing to write about. Saward got the script editor post mostly because nobody else wanted it and he was at least a writer who had proven himself able to complete scripts on time and make revisions at speed without too many complaints. The big revelation only happens at the end, in a gag that’s almost a throwaway. And the book chose this story because the author wanted a combination of studio, film and location footage featuring all four regular cast members, which meant ‘The Visitation’ was the only option available.
To be fair Saward does
‘get’ Dr Who a lot better than a lot of the other newbies in this era.
Considering that he wasn’t that much of a Dr Who fan (and had stopped watching
in the early Tom Baker era) he nevertheless nails this series. This is an
old-fashioned triumph of good over evil in a series that makes good use of the
Tardis’ abilities to go back in time (ignored for far too long) and has The
Doctor as a moral crusader in an era when writers often forgot to make him
that. He also gets the mix of drama and comedy about right, even if a lot of
the comedy falls flat. Saward is a great mimic, able to work in lots of
different styles very quickly: it’s him that should have been first in John
Nathan-Turner’s contacts book when scripts fell through, not the poor script
editor trying to commission them. The trouble is, though, ‘The Visitation’ does
such a good job of being an android-like copy of other Who stories that it
doesn’t have much of an identity of its own. It feels like lots of other
stories passed through a blender: the aliens on the run hiding out on Earth,
the juxtaposition of their technology against the primitive locals, the robot
android, the brainwashed locals, the postmodernism with the washed-up actor
guest role who thinks everything is an illusion like those seen in the theatre.
Basically it’s every Robert Holmes story ever (Saward’s favourite writer) along
with the early Hartnells where Susan always twisted her ankle at the wrong time
(though here it’s Adric. Of course it is. Those two are more alike than fans
will admit). Especially ‘Time Warrior’ though: the plot is virtually identical,
it’s just the setting and monster that’s slightly different – they even have a
similar denouement involving a robot. However ‘The Visitation’ lacks any deeper
thrust behind the messages. ‘The Time Warrior’
for instance was really a story about how barbarism continues across
generations in different forms, it’s just the weapons that change form. ‘Carnival Of Monsters’ was about your
place in the food chain, as humans end up in a timeloop zoo. ‘Spearhead From Space’ and ‘Terror Of The Autons’ were about consumer
culture, people who don’t think for themselves hijacked by a bigger personality
and manipulated for the wrong reasons. ‘The Visitation’ has some aliens doing
something bad and The Doctor and co stopping them. That’s it, that’s the entire
story. Even the so-called great twist, that this story led to The Great Fire of
London, is really an accident that The Doctor decides not to go back and change
(on-screen because it’s a set moment in Earth’s history; off-screen because the
fire helped kill off the rats that were carrying the plague. Though The Doctor
never thinks to go back and save the eight or so people who died in the flames
he himself caused (one of them is the Miller we’ve met, unless he escapes off-screen
but nobody thinks of telling him the place is on fire). That incidentally could
have been the whole crux of the story: how did only eight people die in a
fast-moving fire that started at night and devastated half the capitol in days
before smoke alarms and fire brigades? Surely The Doctor gave a helping hand?)
Instead this is a story more interested in the Doctor undoing what the villains
do than the bigger implications behind everything and what they do is the usual
Dr Who monster stuff: possess, rebuild technology, kill, wear a death mask
disguise when out and about scaring the locals. Which actually they don’t much,
at least that we see – they really are a most uncurious bunch, whilst this is
one of those rare Dr Who stories where everyone is automatically accepting of
everything they see: time travellers, androids, walking reptiles, ‘tis all the
work of The Devil and no mistake.
At least the monsters are
pretty decent though. Of all the 1980s monsters the Terileptils should be top
of the queue for a re-match. Saward is at least sharp enough to make his
baddies more than just another evil race. They’re actually criminals on the run,
sentenced to life on the Tinclavic mines on the penal planet Raaga, rather than
a bad race per se, something people tend to think new Who invented but didn’t
(what with their love of disguises and living amongst Humans the Terileptils
are very much the Slitheen without the fart jokes). What’s more they’re not
your average petty scruffy criminals either but a race who love art and culture
and think of themselves as being refined, snobbish rather than slobbish like so
many (the reason why people miss the fact they’re just a re-write of the
original Sontaron, Lynx, from ‘The Time Warrior’). Instead of dressing in a
costume like 99% of times we see more than one baddy in Dr Who they dress in
their own individual colours, red yellow and blue, like they’re mutant ninja
turtles. A series which might well have copied this story, given that the
Terrileptils are also reptiles, lizards whose distinctive name is a reduction
of the words ‘Territorial Reptile’. Their android, especially, is a thing of
beauty not the usual sort of barely functioning robots we see in this series.
Everything they do is neat and elegant and in Michael Melia the lead Terileptil
has the perfect actor, someone who instinctively understands that his character
would be softly spoken and confident, rather than emotional and yelling. The
only part that doesn’t work is the idea they’ve been releasing a deadly plague
to colonise the Earth via rats. Where did they get that from on their way on
the run from the law then? This is far from the first outbreak of plague in
England too (and England was never the epicentre). For this script to work this
race must have been hiding since 1348. And look at them: they’re not built for
hiding are they? Even dressed as the grim reaper someone would have been
curious enough to have rumbled them by now (and out of all the many variations
across Europe of what he might have looked like n one ever drew him looking
anything like this). Even so, at least they have a back story and it’s (mostly)
a good one. They really deserve a comeback and it’s amazing, after spending all
that money on the costumes and having their creator on staff, that they didn’t
come back: they deserve far better than being stuck in this story (and there’s
an obvious sequel to be had, given how much Terileptil and indeed Gallifreyan
technology is left behind at the end of this story for archeologists to find). The
Terileptils are so good you almost find yourself cheering them on.
After all, the Human (and
Gallifreyan) characters really aren’t very well drawn. Due to the difficulties
trying to come up with a workable Peter Davison opening story (‘Castrovalva’ being made fourth in the
run) this is only the second time this quartet have worked in front of the
cameras together and Adric is the only companion who’s been around longer than
four. They still didn’t quite know who the 5th Doctor was and who
was going to be playing him when Saward first sat down to write a full-length
script and there are times when it really shows that he first sent in this
story for Tom Baker’s more alien Doctor and Romana’s more savvy companion. None
of these people are the way we know them. In Tegan’s case that’s at least
understandable, given that this most bolshie and argumentative of companions is
brainwashed for roughly three-quarters of the plot and you’re meant to be
shocked at how pliable and malleable she suddenly is. That’s actually an
improvement in Adric’s case, who develops sudden moments of conscience and
courage we’ve never seen in the Alazarian before, when he tries to stop the
Android going into the Tardis and attacking Nyssa (getting beaten up for his
trouble) and actually stops to ask Tegan ‘what about you?’ rather than running
away. However sweet Nyssa turns suddenly bloodthirsty, spending two episodes in
the Tardis creating a disintegrator gun and even if she’s sad to use it, use it
she does. We’re used to Adric being annoying – that’s his thing – and Tegan too
when the writers don’t know how to write for her properly, but Nyssa is
incredibly whingy or once and spends half the story pouting. It’s The Doctor
though who’s most out of character, sniping at his companions, telling them to
shush, being a patronising bully. Even when he isn’t he’s written all weird,
veering from being wet and passive, suffering from Jodie Whittaker syndrome
where the bad guys explain stuff to her while she stands there listening and
having a crisis. They really don’t know how to write for this Doctor yet and
the revolving chairs of script editors means nobody will till a few recordings
down the line. Honestly I’d have asked the Terileptils if I could join them
instead given that they’re not really doing anything all that bad. If I was
Tegan I’d have a lot more faith in their ability to take me home too, as The
Doctor misses Heathrow 1981 by a mere three centuries!
Then there’s Richard
Mace. A lot of what you think of this story will depend on whether you see this
out of work thespian, who’s convinced of his own brilliance but is in reality a
homeless chancer, as a hilariously original bit of writing played by that nice
Michael Robbins from ‘On The Busses’ or whether you find him an irritating
conman, a thick person’s idea of someone intelligent, someone who’s ill-suited
to the story, annoying and less funny than being sat on by an Abzorbaloff. This
being a Saward script (and in a sign of what’s in store the next few years) the
writer is way more interested in what Mace has to say about anything than the
Doctor or companions and he ends up becoming the lead character at times. He’s
just not strong enough to carry the story. It’s as if Saward saw how many Dr
Who stories look like some other TV programme and moulded this one to make it look
like his own plays; at times everything else is subservient to this one
character. There’s only so many times the ‘I don’t believe in aliens and
science, it’s all trickery’ gag can work and the only significant thing he does
in the plot is tell The Doctor about some weird goings on. It all makes sense
when you learn that Saward sent this story to the Dr Who team partly so that he
could use a character he’d really liked writing for before. Mace appeared in
three BBC radio plays ‘The Assassin’
(1974) in which Mace helps solve the case of Jack The Ripper (again?!
See ‘The TV Movie’ for how close were
to the Dr Who version), ‘Pegasus’ (1975) where Mace helps a detective uncover a
missing airship and ‘The Nemesis Machine’ (1976) where, now drunk and
unemployable, Mace helps track down an x-ray machine being used by spies to
smuggle secret codes. There were two more written and ready to go as well but
even Radio Four can have too much of something and turned them down. However
one person who was impressed by them was their producer who passed Saward’s
name on when he heard Christopher H Bidmead was looking for new writers. So
maybe Eric felt he owed the old boy a favour for getting him the job? John
Nathan-Turner for one thought Mace was a send-up too far that would make the
series look silly (and this from a man who had as his second story a tale of a
talking green cactus trying to take over the universe) and the pair had their
first of many (many) clashes. However Eric was a favourite of Bidmead (being
the one of his newbies who’d caused him the least trouble) so he urged Eric to
put his name forward for the script editor’s job when he left, though it
actually went to the more experienced Anthony Root at first till he left after
three months when a vacancy came up working on Juliet Bravo.
Which left Eric free to
join the production team just in time to tweak his own scripts. Which is the
problem with ‘The Vistation’ really: the pieces are all there for a really good
story and Saward is a decent enough writer, but it’s like there’s no production
team to put the oven on and make the most of things. It’s a problem that will
follow him across his other stories in the series, a case of both going too far
and not going far enough. Take the setting: it’s prime Dr Who and a really good
idea! We don’t get nearly enough Dr Who stories set in the middle ages, a time
of great change when everything was up in the air and lives were nasty, brutal
and short even without aliens running around. The backdrop of the black death
is born for Dr Who: the last remnants of humanity struggling for survival, not
sure who will go next! It’s a plague that no one back then understood, that
some saw as a punishment from God and others saw as the end of the world as
they knew it. Especially this year which had the ‘mark of the devil’ 666 being
the number of the beast at the end and when a number of comets had been spotted
in the skies the year before (always a sign of impending doom). Only The Doctor
knows that isn’t true and that it’s all caused by germs not superstition and
him being a Doctor ought to see him go round keeping as many people as he dare
without changing the timelines. They could have done so much with this by
having one of the companions grow ill and having to be rescued from what passed
as medicine in the 17th century. It’s also perhaps the era children
are most likely to have studied in school, after Romans Victorians and 1066 so
the audience watching would have identified with this story more immediately
than most and seen it come alive. But we don’t get any of that. Other than
Richard Mace we don’t hear what any of the locals think. We mostly only see
them when they’re possessed and they don’t even have actual names (there’s one
credited as ‘Villager’ one as ‘Poacher’ one as ‘Headman’ and one as ‘Miller’
while even The Squire is only known as ‘The Squire). This isn’t real living
history, the way the story is at its best, it’s a backdrop for a Dr Who story.
A story that mostly
consists of capturing and escaping and not much else. There are two more
problems that’s going to hurt Saward’s time as script editor – having too many
characters to juggle and the side effect from that of pacing s story so that it
stretches across all the episodes it has to neatly. With Mace here too there
are five characters that Saward needs to find things to do, so Nyssa is
literally parked out the way and Tegan gets to move some boxes (presumably
Adric is left as he’s the only character who stayed the same from the first
draft). Nobody really mixes in this story either: The villagers stay outside
muttering, The companions go exploring, the android chases half of them and The
Terileptils mostly talk amongst themselves, sharing only three scenes with The
Doctor. Things don’t build up to any climax, they just sort of happen, with the
reveal of the Terileptil particularly poor with none of the usual buildup (even
the otherwise decent score has gone to sleep!) The dialogue doesn’t do much
(the best line is one Peter Davison ad libbed as he mentions ‘flying off the
handle’ at the same time he tugs on a piece of the Tardis set he found was
loose at camera rehearsals; everyone else is trying so hard not to laugh!) The
climax comes after The Doctor uses the Tardis to track down the Terileptils and
there’s no reason at all why he doesn’t leg back and do this in episode one the
minute he traces anachronistic sulphur in the air. There are only really two
big action sequences: Nyssa destroying the android and The Doctor-Terileptil
showdown where they do the old ‘hide behind the door’ trick and The Doctor
accidentally sets them alight instead of sending them back into space as he
originally planned. That leaves an awful of talking and not much happening. The
talking too isn’t anything to write home about, which leads us on to the other
problem with the Saward era: that he seems to think Dr Who works the same way
other series do, where the drama all comes from people. So we have the real
beginning of the era when the Tardis crew don’t get on and start bitching about
each other both to each other’s faces and behind each other’s backs. Things
will get outright silly when the 6th Doctor and Peri knock great
verbal lumps out of each other but already here the fact that all three
companions are in various stages of wanting to go home (though they can’t
because Adric leaves in e-space, Nyssa’s homeworld Traken was destroyed and the
Tardis keeps missing Tegan’s home by miles or centuries) to make it seem as if
they hate being here. That’s exhausting. I mean it’s 1666, Tegan especially
should be wanting to go and explore. I know we at home do. But somehow we never
do beyond some trees and an old barn.
They are, at least, some
very lovely trees and a nice old barn. Because one god reason ‘The Visitation’
is remembered as much as it is comes down to the effort putting this on screen.
The BBC always found historical stories easier to put on than futuristic ones
and no expense is spared. There’s a gorgeous atmospheric opening where The
Squire is enjoying a posset (as made famous by the Patrick Troughton series
‘Box Of Delights’ a couple of years later) before bed when he and his family
are attacked by a…thing, the monster from the future invading a nice
traditional Stuart house (Tithe Barn in Hurley, Maidenhead, with some strategically
placed ivy to cover up the modern drainpipes and burglar alarm!) in the sort of
juxtaposition Dr Who does so well and which you simply wouldn’t get anywhere
else. It really looks as if we’ve gone back in time and it’s a real surprise to
fans too young to remember that the series used to do this sort of thing all
the time. It’s even a bit of a surprise to older fans who recognised John Savident’s name in the
credits (a big name from his lengthy stint on Coronation Street at the time) and
didn’t expect him to die within the opening few minutes. The location filming
is nicely done too, with Heathrow looking very different covered in trees
(Black Park, near Iver, round the back of Pinewood Studios so you see the same
trees in all sorts of British films, especially Hammer Horror ones; the marshes
of Alzarius were filmed round the corner for ‘Full
Circle’ too). Ironically filming had to be stopped regularly to cope with
the traffic from Heathrow flying overheard – the very thing Tegan was trying to
get back to! Though for once industrial
action worked in the series’ favour as there was a flight control strike that
meant less delays than expected (and an all too rare early finish for the day,
with all scenes completed early!) This isn’t some skimpy little bit of
scene-setting either, but a whole three days of shooting which was a lot back
then. Even in the studio, where things so often come unstuck, it all looks
good. Ken Starkey gives the Terileptil spaceship insides a nice sea-green décor
to fit with the aquatic theme and a piece of gauzing over each wall, that clever
allows characters to come and go through the wall thanks to the wonders of CSO.
The android too might
well be the best looking robot in all of Who, a soft spot for K1 (‘Robot’) and
K9 aside. It’s an art deco creation, made out of coloured bits of glass that looks
both nicely futuristic and nicely in period with the post-punk, new romantic
age of 1982 when people got pretty for the sake of it again but in a more
androgynous way. No wonder Nyssa is so upset at having to destroy it, it’s a
real thing of beauty. They disguise the usual Dr Who problem that it can only
lumber around slowly better than most too, even if there is an awkward scene in
episode two where everyone basically shuffles past it. The Terileptils too look
as good as men in rubber suits ever can. Costume designer Odil Dicks-Mireaux
has properly sat down and thought about both the concept and what would work on
telly, so he makes the Terileptils reptiles from the top half and Humanoid from
the bottom, rather than having them swim or walk on flippers. They look like
something that might plausibly have been ‘us’ if we’d evolved a different way
and maybe swum to land later in our evolutionary life. They ‘breathe’ their own
air too, something a lot of writers usually forget about alien races, with Dr
Who’s first ever use of animatronics (by outside firm Imagineering) as their
gills flap up and down and their lips curl. It looks pretty funny now we’ve had
so many better things on similar themes, but for 1982 it’s such a leap forward
that had I been born and watching I would have seen it as ‘witchcraft’ myself. There
are some highly clever studio sets (with real working downstairs and a
‘painted’ upstairs, matched so well you can’t see the join even on DVD) that
make it feel as if London is still surrounded by forests and people are living
in wooden slums that are just waiting to be attacked by fire.
Turn the sound down and
it’s easy to believe you’ve just taken a real trip through time. It was nice to
take a trip back into the past (maybe a little less so when the Tardis went to
the 1920s in the very next story. Dr Who historicals are like busses and come
along at once!) Turn the sound back up, however, and it’s all a little less
edifying, full of people acing oddly and talking even more oddly (especially
Mace). ‘The Visitation’ is a great looking show with some truly excellent
starting ideas. It just doesn’t do enough with any of them. I mean, this is a
story about the biggest epidemic in British history, where you had a one in
three chance of coming out alive, and a fire that decimated the city, it should
be thrilling! What’s more the Terileptils have a tragic back story, with a
forced crash landing on a backwards planet that killed one of their crew and
for which they seem to loosely resent the locals. There’s a lot in there ripe
for a story we don’t see.
Personally I can’t wait for the inevitable sequel to this one in a few decades time, when the Perriteptils (close cousins who are giant space pangolins, who grew up near ‘The Leisure Hive’) unleash covid on planet Earth to kill of humanity and add to global warming, which can only be solved by ventilation and wearing masks. In fact, I’m going to pitch that to Big Finish right now before somebody else does... Back in 1982, though, not much happens, very very slowly. The production team thought they were being clever by having the twist at the end about the Great Fire Of London but the minute the date is mentioned we know exactly where we’re heading. Eric alone by the sound of things thought Richard Mace was a truly brilliant creation but he isn’t he’s a one-line gag that gets in the way and should have been left behind after giving The Doctor directions (Michael Robbins tries hard to make the rogue lovable but there’s just nothing in this pig-headed narcissist worth liking. The actor reportedly hated his experience working on this story – setting off a longterm knee injury again by being pushed to the grounds a little too forcefully didn’t help - and at times it shows, though Saward was ticked off he kept changing his lines).Everyone thought they were giving fans what they wanted with a story that felt like ‘proper’ Dr Who, but most fans felt this was a step backwards after the inventive heights of ‘Kinda’. It’s a particularly sad way for Stuart Fell to bow out the stuntmen and part-time Katy Manning double, who’d been involved with the series longer than anyone by this point but who gets one clumsily ending climax and not much else. There just isn’t any ambition here, no sense of wanting to do anything than pay the bills and fill 100 minutes of television. It’s not bad by any means and there’s a lot worse stories in this book where you have to wonder what everyone was thinking. But this isn’t really an iconic memorable iconic story full of exciting events it’ s a visit forgotten after the aliens die. Still, it is a debut story that had to be heavily re-written to accommodate a revolving door cast and even Saward’s beloved Robert Holmes took three scripts to get there, however fond I am of ‘The Krotons’. In some ways it might be Saward’s best: it’s a lot more likeable and less violent than ‘Resurrection’, a lot more fun than ‘Earthshock’ and less confusingly bonkers than ‘Revelation’. There is promise here after all (more so than close cousin ‘Black Orchid’, which doesn’t play it safe but doesn’t really have a story at all), even if the script ending up going in the wrong direction so a few clunky scenes and particularly the bloodthirsty ending end up knocking it down to average. A plague on it!
POSITIVES + This is the
first score Paddy Kingsland ever worked on from home as a freelancer and you
can tell that he’s enjoying having the extra time to think about things and let
the score grow organically. Best of all is the way the ‘villager’ parts are
presented by a more traditional instruments that would have been around (in
some form) in the 17th century, while the Terileptils are represented
by an all-synth score. It makes more of a difference than you’d think having
different textures like this rather than a one-size-fits-all-score that often
ends up suiting nothing.
Previous ‘Kinda’ next ‘Black
Orchid’
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