Time-Flight
(Season 19, Dr 5 with Nyssa, Tegan and the ghost of Adric, 22-30/3/1982, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, director: Ron Jones)
'I'm afraid there's been a delay in the planned fight involving Concorde, by some 140 million years, due to a technical hitch involving a renegade timelord and some plasmatons. We'll try putting you on a different flight...Whoops, there were some sentient leaves on the line...No wait, it was just some Vervoids. Now there's too much snow...but we shooed the Great Intelligence out the way and we're back on schedule again now...Alright, apparently it's now a replacement bus service, only the Happy Hearts Holiday Club from Bolton have themselves been hijacked by the Chimerons. I give up, let's switch you over to Gatwick... Oh great, now we've all lost our identities in a giant explosion. Well, at least it saves money on the duty free I suppose'
Ranking: 215
Well dear readers, we’re going to go on a long journey – a very long journey – and not just the flight back to prehistoric London. You see, more than perhaps any other Dr Who story, there’s such a gulf here between what is and what could have been. I first got to know ‘Timeflight’ from the novelisation, given to me by my local library van because the person who’d had it before me hated it so much they’d thrown it across the room and ripped it nearly in half so they couldn’t keep it in stock it anymore, which didn’t instil me with an awful lot of confidence in it I confess. So it was with some trepidation I read it even before knowing about this story’s poor reputation and I really enjoyed it: back in the days before ‘The New Adventures’ had properly got going here was a book that did things differently to the other ‘Target’ novelisations. It was abstract, existential, with less emphasis on the physical threat and more on the philosophical angle of what it meant to be the last collective remnants of a civilisation all fighting for control over the same body. It’s still the same old fight between good and evil, but in a way that doesn’t evolve a shoot-em-up with lazers but rather the debate about the selfish needs of the individual versus the collective, or the ‘ego versus the id’ that I later found was Peter Grimwade’s starting point. There was nothing to tear a book to pieces for: ‘Timeflight’ still did everything your typical Dr Who book did, just with more thoughtfulness than usual and a stroll through a collective psyche is scarier than any robot army.
Then I got to see it on TV and, well, it didn’t feel like the same story at all, even though all the same nuts and bolts scenes and dialogue are there. All the mystery had been removed, the esoteric nature of the characters replaced by the sort of cheap bacon-foil suits Dr Who always seems to dig out the canteen when we’re at the end of a season and money is running short, while prehistoric London looks tatty and threadbare, rather than the vast terrifying wilderness of the book. The Xeraphins look stupid, their guards the Plasmatons look even stupider and the shorts of a model Concorde flying across a borrowed backdrop of empty preshistoric Heathrow (one that seems to come with suspiciously modern-looking birds if you look closely) is one of the most misjudged shots in the series’ history. Even The Master, who’s back to heights of ruthlessness and who’s revelation is a complete and utter shock in the book, ends up being two episodes of Anthony Ainley in an all-too obvious fat suit putting out an outrageous accent, apparently purely for the cliffhanger. To say that it was disappointing after carrying this story around in my head all those years was an understatement and if videos had been easier to tear than books then, well, I would have been tempted to do just that and suddenly had sympathy for my predecessor.
However unlike some
corners of fandom that think everything about this story is atrocious I still
hold that original idea of what the story could have been in my head. It’s
still a good one, even if in retrospect it’s writer Peter Grimwade (who’d
already directed three stories by this time) must have known it was never going
to work on screen on a Who budget in a Jurassic era of Sundays. A good friend
of both Peter Davison and producer John Nathan-Turner after the trio worked on
‘All Creatures Great and Small’ together, he’d become JNT’s go-to director for
stories that needed a light and delicate touch: ‘Logopolis’ ‘Kinda’ and ‘Earthshock’,
three stories that all did things slightly differently with big emotional
scenes. Grimwade, though, had started his career as a writer and had an
imagination that was always bursting with ideas so even before he got the gig
had been submitting ideas to script editor Christopher H Bidmead and asking
‘what about this?’ The idea that Bidmead liked the most was about a villain
causing a peaceful race, reduced to a nucleus of collective thoughts, fighting
amongst itself, a sort of scifi twist on Goethe’s ‘Faust’ with shades of
‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ as part of a struggle to be better one’s self and refuse
to give in to evil impulses. The story needed something else though, so Bidmead
invited Grimwade to a meeting, where by chance they happened to bump into each
other on the same tube. Bidmead still had an errand to run, so they made a
detour that happened to go past Heathrow airport where they got to talking
about Concorde, the supersonic plane that was in the nearby hangar. It had been
one of Britain’s biggest talking points since the 1950s, a source of national
pride that the country was still at the technological forefront and building
things that even the Americans and Russians weren’t, tampered with a sense of
uneasiness that the only way it could be made economically viable was by
teaming up with old frenemies France. Even so, it’s a very Dr who style story
of ambition and technology and putting differences aside for the greater good
of all.
Grimwade realised it
reflected the story he was submitting and that Concorde would work well with
his story, with a very Dr Whoy juxtaposition of what was in 1982 the cutting
edge of technology with his prehistoric setting. Before the Tardis gets dragged
off course The Doctor starts the story by talking about taking everyone to The
Great Exhibition, the Victorian showcase for British technology and invention
created by Prince Albert that encouraged such a sense of national pride that it
extended the British Empire by a good few decades. Concorde was the closest the
second half of the 20th century Britain had to something to be proud
of and as Dr Who was still the most British show on telly it made sense to
combine the two. Just as with ‘The Seeds Of
Death’, though, there’s the very Dr Who sense of time passing and how
technology fades, with Concorde sent back to a prehistoric past where it’s as
out of place as anything could be, taking us ‘down to Earth’ just inc ase we’re
all getting a bit too smug the same way the Troughton story did with the moon
landing (only it’s even more British to be self-deprecating about a British
invention). Also as with ‘The Faceless
Ones’ fifteen years earlier travelling by plane was the closest most of the
viewing audience would ever come to the thrill of travelling in a Tardis and
landing in a foreign world (albeit still on Earth), with the themes of putting
your life in the hands of strangers you didn’t know personally but trusted to
do their job without killing you. In a development since then, though, some
high profile hijackings meant that you had an extra thing to worry about
nowadays when you got on a plane – how very Dr Who to make a plane hijacked not
by terrorists but timelords. Not since the very first story ‘An Unearthly Child’ had Who done a story
about how far mankind had progressed yet stayed the same in so many ways,
divided into tribal war (note the mentions of the actual cold war across the
story, when everyone assumes the missing plane has been hijacked by Russians,
while the Xerpahins suffer from radiation sickness in the exact same way
viewers would have recognised from dramas and documentaries on what would
happen if nuclear war broke out; actually very few Who stories mention the cold
war directly, even though roughly half the classic series refers to it in some
ways – which is why the episode ‘Cold War’
seemed so odd to oldie fans, even before an Ice Warrior takes his shell off).
There’s also the very Dr Whoy joke that Concorde travelled quicker than other
planes and could get there faster, arriving earlier than passengers often
realised – the twist in this story being that it arrives 140 million years too
early! There may be another joke in there too, in that Xeraphins might talk
about radiation but are effectively travel sick, despite having no actual
bodies (where do they put the paper bags?!) It’s also perfect for Tegan too of
course, after a year of muttering about wanting to get back to Heathrow, although
given that Grimwade pitched this story before Tegan’s first appearance the
character might only have become an air-stewardess because of this story anyway
(at least, the first draft of ‘Timeflight’ existed before the first draft of ‘Logopolis’). If nothing else
‘Timeflight’ explains why planes always seem to take off late – they went back
in time 140 million years where the crew and passengers were enslaved then
hypnotised to forget about it! So that’s what jetlag really is…With all that to
base the story on, wouldn’t it be great if they could get permission to film in
the real Concorde? Especially, as Grimwade later admitted, he got a free ticket
(sadly he didn’t!)
As it happens they could
give permission to film, but it was all far from ‘plane sailing’. Security was
tight and Concorde had never featured in a mere drama programme, while there
had only ever been one in-house documentary film ‘Speedbird’ (which the BBC
transferred to professional video editing for them in an attempt to sweeten the
deal). Grimwade learned that they needed permission from two separate
authorities, The British Airports Authority who were surprisingly enthusiastic
and offered supervised filming round one of their hangars as long as everyone
kept to their tight schedule and British Airways who typically, dragged their
feet and caused endless delays. Along with Grimwade’s directing duties he was
too busy to write the script up anyway so time went by and the series changed
both Doctors and script editors. Bidmead’s replacement Eric Saward, always a
more physical hands-on writer, thought the idea was stupid but JNT was keen to
‘reward’ Grimwade for all his work on the series and besides, the publicity blitz
from being the first drama to use Concorde was just too good to pass up. So
they kept pushing, finally getting British Airways to commit to a single day’s
shoot involving one Concorde take-off and one landing in return for some
low-key ‘product placement’ that made the airline look good (it helped that
JNT, always a savvy negotiator you’d want on your side in a war, hinted that
the show would simply go to their rivals Air France if they said no!) Grimwade
was even invited to a staff training day and even had a fun hour on a flight
simulator computer (like the sort on 1980s gameshow ‘Krypton Factor’), picking
up on the lingo. The first draft of the script even named the aircrew after his
new friends to say thankyou, before the usual BBC policy of not naming fictional
characters after real people came into play (one reason they all have such
unlikely names is that there are a lot of pilots in Britain and some poor soul
had to go through the flight lists to check they hadn’t accidentally copied a
real one). Then disaster #1: Thatcher’s daft economic policies were beginning
to really bite and the budget kept getting smaller and smaller, which meant a
scaling back of the original intentions. Remember the last week of term when
the student loan has run out and you only have baked beans to eat for a week?
That’s this story. And disaster #2: the day the production team were all set to
film Concorde there was a blizzard which meant the day had to be postponed
(that’s what you get for filming in January! If the regular cast look fatter
than normal in the airport scenes that’s because they’re all wearing thick
thermal underwear).Not to mention disaster #3: it was discovered that the bits
they did film had a scratch running through the negative and it was the one
shoot they couldn’t go back and do again (they had to take the worst bits out,
which led to the episodes under-running and being padded out, especially the
third). Even so, against all odds (and the supreme doubts of BBC high-ups) film
it they did thanks to a hurried remount – for the plane spotters amongst you or
anyone who actually flied on one Concorde or another it’s fleet number ‘G-BOAC’
(there were twenty planes altogether at different times, eighteen of which are
in museums now – this one is at Manchester Airport and was de-commissioned in
2004). I’m still amazed Heathrow agreed to it by the way: I mean, they don’t
come out of it that well – who wants their flight to be late by 140 million
years and hijacked by aliens? It’s not the best advertisement ever, even if the
Airways staff are shown in a good light, level headed and Brigadier like in the
way they take everything in their stride. British Airways also insisted on
being able to vet the script, which meant another anxious wait, though in the
end their only objection was one of the pilots calling the passengers ‘punters’,
something that went against their ‘we’ll take care of you’ tagline seen in all
British Airways adverts (passengers often muttered a rejoined about how ‘they
won’t take care of your luggage though’ for gritted teeth when it was on).
One other semi-disaster
was JNT’s last minute realisation that he was paying Anthony Ainley a regular
fee on the condition that they could get two years’ worth of stories out of him
if they wanted to and he’s only done the one this year. With other stories
closer to completion and Grimwade an old friend, it was picked that this story
should be the one to feature The Master, even though Grimwade’s original
version with the Kalid a separate entity we’d never met before with special
powers, made so much more sense. He’s even described as tall thin and haughty
in the original script, more like The Celestial Toymaker than the giggling
Michelin Man we get on screen. It should work differently to anything we’ve
ever seen before, but just looks like a prehistoric and les exciting version of
‘The Daemons’ once The Master gets
involved (it’s basically the same story, only with Xeraphins instead of Devils
and Concorde instead of a maypole). Even by The Master’s standards this is a
mighty convoluted way to basically change a battery: abduct a race from the
future and a bunch of Humans via a time corridor to use as a space-time
corridor. Why doesn’t he go underground and knock on the Silurians’ door for
help? Many fans have been confused at the way The Master is all dressed up in
oriental garb even though he’s trapped in prehistoric London where nobody knows
who he is. For once, too, the Doctor’s arrival is pure accident, the Tardis
caught up in the Master’s desperate attempts to create a ‘time corridor’ to
make up for effectively draining his own Tardis battery and being stranded; the
costume isn’t for his old foe’s benefit this time. It’s kind of in character
that The Master would dress up for the hell of it anyway, but it’s a shame
because the first draft makes so much more sense, with Kalid the original
‘genie’ written about in The Arabian Knights, with special ‘magic’ powers (that
all happen to come from technology; his ‘crystal ball’ for instance has wires
sticking out of it). Putting The Master in that role just isn’t the same thing
at all – this story was meant to be a new way of doing things for Dr Who.
Having a returning baddy making it more of an ongoing feud with The Doctor robs
the story of its original intention, as a morality tale about the dangers of
listening to the ‘wrong’ people. We know The Master is ‘bad’ and the Doctor
‘good’ because we’ve seen them before. In the original version you’re meant to
be kept guessing which is which.
It could have been better
then. What should have been a scary journey through the soul, about finding
your own identity and not giving in to the peer pressure of s Nucleus or the
words of a sweet-talking evil tyrant who literally wants to shrink you in size
a walk down some typical Dr Who corridors. What in the book is a frightening
tug of war between half a collective that believes The Doctor and half that
believed in The Master becomes two actors painted silver standing next to each
other and bickering for what feels like an age. This is a story all about
truths and illusions, with passengers undergoing mass hypnosis to become The
Master’s slave labour force (once again, I’m amazed Heathrow said yes…) and a
theme of not getting anything for free (those Concorde tickets weren’t cheap),
to be careful of a genie granting wishes. Not least for Tegan who instantly
regrets wanting to go home when The Tardis finally takes her home in episode
four (even though it’s as cheap cliffhanger gimmick given she rejoins in the
very next story!) One other thought is that, if the airport that all the
passengers are brainwashed into seeing, is a fake then how do they climb down
steps that aren’t there? They should freeze in mid air before falling, Looney
Tunes style, to the ground in a heap. Yet none of this intriguing theme really
comes over on screen with a plot so convoluted and complex it’s hard to follow
even for 1980s Who. It wastes all the big emotional moments that are so
powerful in the book too: the sheer shock of being kidnapped and arriving in
prehistoric London, the revelation of The Master and what this means to Tegan
(who’s aunt died because of him) and Nyssa (who’s whole planet was destroyed by
him) never mind what this means to The Doctor; Nyssa being possessed by
mysterious voices that claim they have to killer her to communicate (err, not
true as it comes over on screen given that they’re using her actual voice to
speak to The Doctor!); Nyssa’s fright on seeing a hallucination of Melkur (The
Master’s disguise in ‘Keeper Of Traken’) that
signified ‘calcified evil’ to her planet. One odd point too: Concorde is the
one place Dr Who could have gotten away with stuffing chockfull of celebs
(either real or fictional) and yet this lot of passengers look blooming
ordinary (they’re the extras playing the plasmavored for the most part, plus
assistant floor manager Val MacCrimmon getting another cameo): it’s not like
JNT to miss a chance at publicity like that and might have led to a better
story if we’d got to knows the passengers and their desperate need to get home.
It’s also quite a terrifying story in the book, with several scary scenes, even
though on screen it all looks silly. BBC head of serials in this era David
Reid, who generally left JNT to get on with things (such a contrast to his
replacement Jonathan Powell!) was so worried on reading the script with
decomposing bodies that he pleaded with JNT to be careful not to scare the
kiddywinkles and was told regretfully it had already been filmed; had Reid seen
the rushes chances are he’d have laughed at ever being concerned as it’s one of
many special effects in this story that really don’t come off at all.
Most wasted of all is the
moment Nyssa and Tegan realise that the ghostly Adric they see guarding the
Xeraphin’s nucleus is just an illusion and they have to effectively ‘kill’ him
a second time. It was actually a last minute decision to write Matthew
Waterhouse back in: a JNT idea so that buyers of the Radio Times wouldn’t turn
to the credits for ‘Timeflight’, see that Adric wasn’t there and guess the
ending to ‘Earthshock’ on the week before. However it works so much better than
that: this abstract story about facing up to things you don’t want to is in
some ways the perfect coda to his story, with the others haunting by Adric’s
ghost in part one even before he turns up as one. Grief is a journey and while
The Doctor has been on enough of them death is still new and raw to Nyssa and
Tegan who really struggle to come to terms with their loss. Admittedly the journey
of grief doesn’t usually involve badly dressed Orientals talking gibberish
against the backdrop of Concorde on prehistoric Earth but hey, everyone’s story
is different. It’s a lot better than just getting on with another story anyway –
even though Nyssa and Tegan’s eagerness to explore in part one does seem out of
place if you assume it really is just minutes since Adric died. Clever as that
idea might be, I so feel for Matthew in what must have been a soul-destroying
day’s work: he hadn’t wanted to go in the first place and there his friends
were carrying on without him. Anyone who ever had to work out their notice
after leaving/being sacked knows the weird feeling that you’re somewhere you
know really well but don’t belong in
anymore. It’s one of his best scenes though, as if he had the time to properly
learn it rather than the endless rush of a Dr Who schedule (he also sounds
quite upbeat about it in interviews, pleased he didn’t have to hang around for ‘such
a dreadful story’). The story badly messes up the ending: it closes, like every
holiday seems to, with a traffic jam in the airport carpark, as The Doctor
pre-empts The Master’s plan to materialise in space above Heathrow by pinching
his ‘space’ first (though it usually results in a car crash, not being ejected
into space back to Xeraphis as happens in this story, for reasons I still don’t
quite understand). Everything is painfully low budget, from the flimsy sets to
the pathetic alien costumes, to air traffic control becoming a tiny set with
one computer and one employee (no wonder those planes are always late!) Perhaps
most of all, despite being a story about a plane that can travel at supersonic
speeds, it’s all woefully slow, with characters standing around explaining
things to each other without actually doing anything. At times too this is a story
that has a ridiculous amount of padding – and I’m not just talking about The
Master’s fat suit!
Even so, What I found on
finally viewing this story was a set of episodes that isn’t anywhere near as
bad as its reputation: flawed certainly, weirdly plotted as a lot of Peter
Davison stories are (that’s the problem of having episodes on twice a week and
– on every story of the first Davison story except this one as it happens -
finding things to do for three companions, with ‘companion’ duties here given
to the Concorde crew), with a convoluted plot (that’s the problem with having
to find things to do that an all-powerful character hasn’t done before) and
budgeted for economy class (as pretty much all 1980s Dr Who stories are,
particularly season finales when the money’s all run out). I could say that
about maybe half the 5th Doctor stories though and there’s nothing too wrong
here that isn’t also wrong with the rest of the era though and a few things
that are maybe a little better. Grimwade was always good on character and just
look what he does with Tegan; she’s normally written as antagonistic and bitchy
but here she feels like a real person, finally getting to Heathrow airport
after a whole series of trying to get there and the false-ending when she
realises this isn’t what she wanted after all following multiple stories of
nagging for just this is such a great twist to the character (ruined by the
arbitrary way she falls into the Doctor’s life again in ‘Arc Of Infinity’). She was always way too
emotional for the level head you need for an airsteward’s job but Grimwade’s
extra research has helped him see a different take on the character – the
training that kicks in during difficult circumstances so you run on automatic
pilot staying cal for the sake of those around you (a nicer, more benevolent
form of ‘brainwashing’ than what The Master does). Take Nyssa too: she’s more
pro-active than normal, able to see through the psychic conditioning to work
out what’s really going on even more than the Doctor and with latent telepathic
powers we haven’t seen in a companion since Susan. She’s emotional too and even
screams at one point – very un-Nyssa like – but then whereas Tegan’s all been
about protecting the ‘self’ she’s always had more empathy and crumbles not when
she’s in danger but when she senses the misery of an entire race dying out. They’re
a great double act, Nyssa sentimental, Tegan sceptical, in a way they haven’t
been since ‘Castrovalva’. Only The
Doctor isn’t terribly well catered for, shoved into a sideplot battling against
The Master.
Take Concorde: basing a
whole story in a series that can go anywhere in time and space round a mere
aircraft that the production team only got a few snatched hours filming on is
indeed a crazy idea, but its Dr Who crazy and gives us some new focal point to
run around. Take The Master: Yes, I don’t know why he went to all the trouble
of disguising himself on a planet where nobody lived either just in case the
Doctor comes along either, but it makes for a great cliffhanger (and another
daft Radio Times entry, when Anthony Ainley was credited as Leon Ny Taly so as
not to give away who he was, even though it’s the sort of name that screams out
that it’s a pseudonym for somebody). Take Professor Hayter…Please, somebody
take Professor Hayter…No, I’m kidding, as much as other fans find him
irritating and as much as he has one of the all time OTT death scenes in the
series, I like my dotty professors (being, y’know, quite close to one myself)
and he’s one of Dr Who’s dottiest. I love how his re-actions are the exact
opposite of how a ‘normal’ person would re-act at being whisked so many epochs
from home. The fact he’s played by Nigel Stock was quite a coup for the
programme too: in 1983 he was one of its most famous faces and had so many Who
links it’s a surprise he hadn’t been in the series before: he was the Dr Watson
to Peter Cushing’s Sherlock Holmes in the 1960s adaptation (on at the same time
Cushing was battling Daleks at the cinema) and had starred in ‘Brighton Rock’
alongside William Hartnell. He’s as good as the part lets him be, with a
knowing twinkle in the eye that suggests he’s not as out of it as all that,
even if the joke is he’s walking round in as much of a daze as the brainwashed
passengers. Of course to a modern viewer he just looks like he’s cosplaying as
the 11th Doctor, in his tweeds and bowtie (no fez though, but then
Professor Hayter very much isn’t ‘cool’).Yes Captain Stapley and crew are a bit
too, well, stiff-upper-lip and all too ready to believe that Concorde has
travelled to a distant world (a condition of the filming at Heathrow perhaps,
to make the flight crew look like heroes?), but I even like the way their
British pluck lasts even on an uncivilised planet; it’s a new twist Dr Who has
never really done since the UNIT days that the supporting cast simply roll up
their sleeves and get on with things (and UNIT never travelled to exotic worlds
– exotic worlds came to them). There are some nice witty jokes in there too,
another strong suit in Grimwade’s scripts, from the 5th Doctor on
freezing prehistoric Heathrow lamenting taking off his scarf in this
incarnation to joking that the Concorde luggage hold is ‘smaller on the inside’!
In the end the passengers
go on a journey alright, even if it’s not the ones they intended when they set
off. The same goes for the production team: ‘Timeflight’ isn’t the memorable spiritual
journey it was meant to be and ended up memorable often in all the wrong ways. Metaphorical
stories can work in Who and we’ve even had one this year that did (‘Kinda’)
with Grimwade as director no less, so he knows this sort of thing is possible.
But you can’t treat these sort of abstract stories the same lazer-shooting
corridor-running monster-evading way you do the others. It just won’t work. You
suspect that director Ron Jones just didn’t understand this story, perhaps
because of so many changes that had been made to the original plan to dilute it
(and even though his work on the simpler ‘Black
Orchid’ was exceptional) – it’s the irony of ironies that it is the direction
that scuppers so much of this story, when Grimwade himself was a director
generally regarded as one of the better ones who made other people’s scripts
better (he pushed hard to make this story himself, but it was against BBC
guidelines for a writer to direct his own work. Even though Barry Letts found a
loophole and did it anyway with a few of his). It’s all an awful mis-match, so
ambitious on the one hand and so clumsy in even the basic ways on the other –
fittingly perhaps sometimes it feels as cutting edge as Concorde – and other
times stuck in prehistoric times. Clearly it’s all far too muddled for ‘Timeflight’
to be a classic (a lot of 1980s Master stories are) and parts of it indeed look
embarrassing when the production resources have to create a whole primeval
planet out of threepence, but you get used to that as a Dr Who fan. After
hearing so many rude and unprintable things about ‘Timeflight’ though I was all
poised to reach for the emergency exits and it’s really not that bad at all,
just misunderstood. If nothing else its ambitious again, after a year of
stories that have been mostly playing things safe (apart from ‘Castrovalva’ and
‘Kinda’ anyway): after all, no other story in the show’s history has such
lengthy scenes set a full 140 million years apart; only ‘The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang’
comes close and that was thousands of years, not millions. Maybe I’m more fond
of it than most because my sights were set lower before I saw it. Maybe I’m
fond of it because that novelisation is actually one of the best, even if I
couldn’t always read the top line of half the pages where it had been squished.
Maybe I’m fond of it because it was the last part was the episode broadcast
nearest to when I was born (which of us has aged better? Well‘Timeflight’
obviously, even with the lycra and casual oriental racism). Or maybe I’m just a
little bit monkeynuts, the Kalid’s hypnotised me and it really is that
dreadful, I don’t know, but somewhere here in the ranking – eighty to a hundred
places higher than most fans would put it – seems about right to me.
POSITIVES + Of all the
many people connected with the series I ever met at Dr Who conventions as an
often overwhelmed seven year old, Anthony Ainley was easily the nicest and most
likeable. I adored him: he always had time, he was always funny, he stepped
into character so effortlessly and always went the extra mile to treat you as a
person, even at events when there was a conveyor belt of fans waiting for
autographs. even when there was a long queue. He was one of the best actors the
show ever had too, with a subtlety and class even when the scripts insisted on
turning his Master into a pantomime villain. A lot of fans laugh at his
portrayal in this story but the disguise fooled everyone I watched it with the
first time and probably me too had I not already read the novel. I love it when
he gets the chance to prove that The Master is just a part and he can do so
much more with the role and, by virtue of being another character altogether
initially, we see The Master doing things in this story he’s never done before. He
deserved more stories like this one.
Previous ‘Earthshock’ next ‘Arc
Of Infinity’
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