Image Of The Fendahl
(Season 15, Dr 4 with Leela, 29/10/1977-19/11/1977, producer: Graham Williams, script editor: Robert Holmes, writer: Chris Boucher, director: George Spenton-Foster)
Rank: 183
'Well, that should cure the Fendahl, Leela – I’ve just been back in time and left some giant slug pellets at the time of The Big Bang! Of course it was a struggle to get them to fit with all those Racnoss eggs left there already. Oh I said hello to Azal while I was there too, nice chap with horns…I wonder why so many people are trying to control humanity? And why, with all that control from Godlike beings, humanity ended up like that! wait, what? I’m being charged with a crime for killing off the Fendahl? For as-salt? Life in prison – oh nice one Doctor, right at the start of all existence too, that’s a very long wait…’
You can divide most of
the Tom Baker stories into two categories: the deeply nuanced complex ones
where there are no easy answers and the aliens are just doing what comes
naturally in a haunting tale of miscommunication and loss, or the silly stories
where the Doctor gets menaced by an animal/insect/alien in a game of
intergalactic hide and seek. There are also, however, that special brand of
story that manages to do both. ‘Image Of The Fendahl’ is one of those stories
that seems to change depending on your mood when you watch it. Sometimes it’s
an intricate story about mankind’s path in life and how much of it has been
outside our control due to our baser more primal instincts and the darker
shadow side we keep hidden, a debate on how much of our suffering comes from a
species curse that has been lying in ait for us since the beginning of time and
how much is by our own hand, asking big questions about whether we’re able to
throw off the shackles of pre-destiny and forge a newer, better path. And
sometimes it’s a run-around with giant slugs from outer space. While a few
other stories have tried a similar thing (Russell T Davies has a soft spot for
this story, naming Rose Tyler and Martha after characters in it and ‘The
Runaway Bride’ is virtually a re-write, with
alien spiders in place of alien slugs. (I like to think that Rose was a
distant relative – though this is probably the more working class and
labourer-driven side of the family mum Jackie tried to distance herself from, I
suspect) few have handled this in quite the way that ‘Fendahl’ does, a story
that almost casually re-writes the entirety of the Human race for a four part
runaround fans only really remember for the slugs. This should be one of the
most important Dr Who stories of them all, explaining as it does the entire
history of human civilisation and a nasty end altered only by the completely
random arrival of the only being in the universe who can stop it, but a lot of
fans just remember it for the rather odd model (where the Fendahl look as if they
have a mouth stuffed ful of strawberry lace sweets) and the possessed Human
with painted on eyelids.
The story came at a time
of great change, not for humanity (1977 was a boring year, whatever punk said
it would be) but for the Dr Who production office. Producer Phillip Hinchcliffe
was being moved on by the BBC to the harder-edged and more adult series
‘Target’ after a number of complaints (half of them by Mary Whitehouse) that Dr
Who had become too violent and gruesome for children, in a straight swap with
Graham Williams who was instructed to be more ‘whimsical’ in his approach.
Script editor Bob Holmes had got bored and was in the process of moving on too,
with new recruit Anthony Read stepping into his shoes. With the old team
distracted and deadlines looming the new boys wanted a safe pair of hands who
could write in a hurry and turned to Chris Boucher, the recently deceased and
much-missed writer who’d delivered two of Dr Who’s more esoteric and thoughtful
scripts with ‘The Face Of Evil’ and ‘The Robots Of Death’. He was a real Who
success story, who sent a bunch of scripts to the production office on the back
of nothing more than a couple of comedy gags and magazine articles. His first
two programmes, broadcast back to back, are amongst some of the highest
regarded Tom Baker stories of them all and he had a way with words few could
equal, making alien and distant worlds feel as real as anything in this world.
As any Blake’s 7 fan will tell you (Terry Nation’s next TV series), his ability
to create grey areas where make baddies seem good and goodies seem bad made him
stand out in a genre that tends to take black and white views of such things,
even in the colour era. Unfortunately this is his last Who script, where it
feels as if he takes his eye off the boil slightly. ‘Fendahl’ is his farewell
at least partly because of how he felt he was treated on this show, with an
inebriated Tom Baker (a former supporter) who had great fun tearing into his
script and making fun of it and milking it for every double-entendre it was
worth during a rare getting-to-know-you dinner with the new production team. As
everyone went home the usually genial and friendly Boucher had to go back to
his office and back to re-drafts, something he really didn’t want to do now and
so, after a hard hour trying to take away every possible sexual line that Baker
could get hold of and laugh at (he still missed one incidentally: ‘don’t touch
her – not like that!’) instead Boucher attacked his filing cabinet and smashed
it into a pulp, slugging it out with an inanimate object that couldn’t answer
back (I like to imagine he came back and added the scene of the Doctor losing
his temper locked in a cupboard too: one of my favourite scenes is the cut from
Leela singing his praises and how ‘courageous and gentle’ he is to the Doctor
looking stupid in a fit of pique). Understandably Boucher’s final draft of this
story was never quite as polished as his first two: I don’t hold with some
people who claim this is his best script as it certainly the most ‘unfinished’
but without that interruption whose to say how brilliant it might have been?
No one’s ever said it but
I have a feeling that after this everyone else then took the script over to
finish it off, as it’s a script that has the feel of too many cooks working on
it and the hallmarks of five separate people: it has Boucher’s thoughtful
debate about whether God can exist in the Whoniverse and what it means to be
Human, Hinchcliffe’s love of horror and dark shadowy lurking things, Holmes’
acerbic and sarcastic view of humanity and Williams’ belief that comedy belongs
in drama. It’s one of those stories that is brilliant in individual short
scenes, whether it be the rare night shoot of the Doctor being pursued through
the woods from the point of view shot of a thirty foot tall ‘thing’, the
Doctor’s growing chemistry with Leela a Boucher creation who gets many of the
story’s best lines, the gruesome death of a hitch-hiker (one of the last Dr Who
deaths that feels deliciously gratuitous rather than a deep emotional turning
point of a script), the woman with the painted eyes morphing into a skull
that’s been around since the beginning of time or one of Boucher’s brilliant
one-liners, of which there are a lot in this story (one of my favourite lines
in all of Who, the extraordinary and ordinary hitting each other head on: ‘You
must have been sent by providence’ says the Doctor as a disturbance sees of an
attack by slug. ‘No, I was sent by the council’ says Ted Moss). As a whole,
though, none of these parts quite line up. Almost every scene has the sort of
rational scientific explanation the Hinchcliffe era preferred, the more
mystical abstract one Boucher preferred and then a silly one for good measure
that we’ll be getting a lot of in the Williams era. It leaves the viewer
wanting to scream: ‘Which one is it? Does magic exist, or is it a form of
ancient science, or is everything random? You can’t have all three! I mean,
what even is a ‘telepathic gestalt’? It sounds like science, could plausibly be
magic, but mostly is a stupid way of covering up plothole cracks with gobbledegook
that means nothing. ‘Image’ has an image problem: no one can making it can quite
decide if they’re making comedy, drama, scifi, horror, a philosophical debate
about the path of mankind or a simple children’s show. We’re in the era before
the ‘tone meetings’ of the 21st century, where every person working
on the show can be on the same page from the beginning and the result is
stylistically a mess. A really fun mess, with some great laugh-out-loud moments
that will have you running for the back of the sofa and thinking deep thoughts
when you go to bed at night, but still a mess.
Take the Fendahl - they’re one of the silliest monsters Dr Who ever had. Common or garden slugs with intelligence they don’t look that convincing either as the small scale models used to loom in shot or the gigantic tall prop they actually built. They can’t run down a corridor after you at speed – heck they can’t even talk directly – and it’s only through the age-old standby of possessing Humans and having them talk that we ever hear what their plan is about. What a plan though! They aren’t just invading us Humans like every other common or garden monster but our chief creators who’ve les us on our evolutionary path since the dawn of time. It’s a plan that borrows heavily from the ‘Quatermass’ series of the 1950s on which so much of Dr Who is based, but a little more badly than normal (the idea of something impossibly old controlling mankind is straight out of ‘Quatermass and the Pit’ while the idea of giant alien slugs is from ‘Quatermass II’ where they terrorise Carlisle!) This is a very 1970s story too though. This decade was the era when the ‘ancient astronaut theory’ was first raised (by Erich von Dannikken in a series of now rubbished but genuinely intriguing and captivating series of books ‘The Chariot Of The Gods’ purloined for the seemingly endless ‘Ancient Aliens’ series on TV). A lot of serious academics and archaeologists, who’d never seen the bigger picture till now, began asking serious questions about how so many different cultures, without access to each other, all began to create such similar and similarly impressive buildings around the world at roughly the same time, a time when the history books told us we should have been primitives living in caves. A lot of this was pure smugness, the idea (first raised by Who in the very first story ‘An Unearthly Child’ in the cavemen episodes) that 20th century man was a peak of civilisation rather than another crest of an ever moving wave one of ignorance as much as anything else (our ancestors may not have had our technology but they were just as smart. Looking at our world elders around today arguably smarter). But a lot of it was true: there were endless re-enactments in this era of how they might have made the pyramids or Aztec temples or Stonehenge and while the people involved making them varied in their success rate the one thing they all agreed on was that it must have been jolly hard work and taken a large percentage of the population many years to make them. Why? By and large we still didn’t know and yet there the artefacts were, dated with a degree of certainty thanks to modern technology. Boucher, a history buff, wrote this story shortly after reading about the life of archaeologist Louis Leakey and all his many finds that filled in missing gaps in human civilisation – Boucher had the dog in this story named ‘Leakey’ after him (too late realising that in a dog ‘leakey’ had another meaning!)The year 1975 also saw the discovery of ‘Lucy’, the oldest Human skeleton and the oldest Human anything ever discovered, 3.2million years old, in a rock stratum (she was named ‘Lucy’ because The Beatles’ ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ was playing on the team radio when she was first uncovered). Suddenly the growth of our civilisation looked puny compared to irrefutable proof that mankind had been around for ever such a long time. Surely something had to happen to fill that missing time in? And what better than a timeless ageless Dr Who monster showing us what to build, giving us the tools to build it and waiting for us to hatch and be of use to them, like a scientist growing us in his laboratory. How very Dr Who, taking that central belief that we were at the peak of our civilisation and showing us to be the work of the sort of giant slug we all think our ancestors were really like. You can also throw in the very earliest days of humans genetically adapting animals, breeding things in test-tubes to help us rather than them – and it’s a very Dr Who jump to go from there to humans being bred on a planet-wide test tube by aliens keen to adapt our genetic DNA to their needs.
A truly brilliant and
very Dr Whoy set of ideas, but with two very major problems. One is that
Boucher can’t explain why the Fendahl exist at all. We get a strange backstory
about how they evolved so far they became ‘death itself and started aging
backwards to the point where they became a ‘gestalt’ of twelve slugs and a
central ‘core’ that reached back to the dawn of time…Eh, how does that work
then? And then we have to fit this story into those billions of years of
evolution somehow. The Tardis just arrives here, at this point when humanity is
finally cooked, out of ‘pure coincidence’. Hmm. There are major plotholes too:
I mean, who does let the Doctor out of that cupboard?! (The Target novel of the
story, by Terrance Dicks has the Doctor break the lock ‘by accident’ and find
the door open when he finally tries again but that’s not what happens on
screen). How come being telepathic also means you can
physically transport your body anywhere in space? We haven’t had a plot this
nonsensical at a core level since ‘The faceless Ones’ (and Wanda Ventham was in
that story too, weirdly). And if
the Fendahl know everything about humanity then surely they would have come
across the Doctor before and factored his meddling into their plan?
This ambiguity does, at
least, help the age-old Dr Who debate of science versus magic. It had been a
few years since ‘The Daemons’ had the 3rd Doctor insisting science
was the only way of the world and white witch Miss Hawthorn constantly proving
him wrong. Now we get another go: magic is a leftover side effect of alien slug
control. Lots of supernatural things are ‘explained’ in this story in such a
way that gives them a sort of plausible rationality within the context of the
story while allowing us to still believe in magic. As ‘psychovores’ the Fendahl
could play with our mind. They gave us an inbuilt ‘race memory’ of their power,
passed on genetically from generation to generation, so that we feared slugs,
beings with ‘horns’ and the number thirteen (because that’s how many Fendahl
make up a gestalt. It only takes one to possess a Human to change a lightbulb
for them if you’re wondering). Even the skull, while not made of crystal, is
very much in the mould of the Mitchell-Hedges skull allegedly dug up in Mayan
country in the 1930s which ‘broke’ the dating spectrograph by reportedly dating
from ‘the future’ when they scientifically tested it in the 1990s – and still
the single most obvious Dr Who plot we haven’t had yet). We find out surprisingly late in Dr Who’s
run, what happened with the asteroid belt of rocks in the gap between Mars and
Jupiter (it was the Fendahl’s ‘fifth planet’ destroyed in an ancient cosmic
war, the surviving skull sent on to Mars and then to Earth. Goodness only knows
what The Ice warriors made of that – they’re not mentioned). It also explains
what ghosts are, a side effect of a ‘time portal’ that’s buried in the woods
near Fetch Priory and caused by the Fendahl-manipulated businessman Fendalman
who could have been off enjoying his money but is instead spending it on
experiments with esp and telepathy, both remnants of the Fendahl too (it
explains a lot about Elon Musk’s weird business decisions in our world too).
‘Fetch’, by the way, is an archaic term for ‘apparition’ while the road it’s
in, ‘Hobb’s Lane’, is an archaic term for ‘the devil’, which it’s hinted The
Fendahl sort of are (goodness knows what ‘The Daemons’ or the creature down the
pit, both of whom are also impossibly old and there since the beginning of time
manipulating mankind make of that). This also results in the finale, which
makes perfect sense in context but is nevertheless one of the daftest and
silliest solutions of any Dr Who story: our biggest most brilliant baddy with
such all-consuming power can be defeated with… table salt. Just like a common
slug (apparently it ‘interrupts electrical impulses and conductivity’. Whereas
I just use it add some flavour to my meals and have never used it to conduct
electrical anything. Am I doing it wrong? Goodness only knows what aliens will
do if you hit them with pepper as well. Other than sneeze). Most people have to
take this plot point – or indeed the whole story - with a dose of salt
themselves but it’s a bit much when the hero starts doing that too. I mean, it
kind of makes sense in context of the story and it’s kind of creepy leading up
into the last showdown but it’s also one
of the silliest Dr Who scenes you’ll ever see.
That’s this story in nut
(mollusc) shell: all those great ideas, all that brilliant imagination, all
those adult topics and still it ends up a childish yarn about a man in a scarf
running around after a melting giant slug. A monster he’s known since
childhood, which has terrified by him, with a plan that’s been millions of
years in the making, ends abruptly just because the Doctor happens to be here
in ‘near contemporary Britain’ (according to the script), on ‘Lammas Eve’ (the
first harvest of the Christian Calendar, traditionally given over to the church
for the poor of the town) just in the nick of time. Phew! What’s a shame is
that it takes away from what the ‘real’ finale and what the moral message
should be: that we are all being manipulated or manipulating somebody because
it’s all part of the ‘human condition’ and that we are free to shrug off all
slugs on our shoulder and be our true selves. Thanks to the Doctor’s timely intervention
we as a species have now defeated that being whispering dark thoughts and
giving us shadowy orders about how to behave – now we are free of its influence
mankind can truly be great and evolve to where we should be, getting greater
and greater with every passing year. Though the rest of this story has
absolutely nothing in common with punk’s year zero (I would stake a case that
the production team were never more out-of-touch with how real teenagers, the
traditional Dr Who demographic, really felt than in the Williams era, which is
why so many dislike it) this bit fits perfectly: we’re all encouraged to go out
and live our true and proper lives without manipulation. And that’s a Dr Who
moral if ever there was one.
Things are similarly mixed in the way ‘Image’ is shown on screen. Inflation meant that this series had to be produced for less money per episode than ever before and all sides of the production (the costumes, the sets, the effects, the casting) were slugging it out for attention. It’s not that any one aspect of this production is bad and lets it all down so much as everything looks a bit tired and in need of more money: goldengirl Thea Ransome is meant to be the most powerful Human alive for half the story and yet she’s obviously painted an unconvincing gold with the all-seeing eyes that can view everything of mankind with impossible certainty too obviously painted on (actress Wanda Ventham once auditioned for the title card of Bond film ‘Goldfinger’ and was really disappointed not to get it so she jumped at the chance to be gold in Dr Who. Watch out too for the first uncredited appearance of Benedict ‘Sherlock’ Cumberbatch too – and if you’re thinking ‘blimey he must be young’, well, technically he’s not been born yet; Wanda is his mum and was pregnant with him here; she has a cameo in Sherlock as the character’s mum alongside husband Timothy Carlton. They say that what you hear in the womb affects your career, so maybe Benedict heard all these terribly nice posh people who were really secretly evil and channelled it for his run of English baddies in Hollywood films lately?) The skull that’s impossibly old and has existed since the beginning of time is the sort of flimsy prop every acting society has in their props cupboard. The Fendahl look like every sluggish (if you excuse the pun) Who monster ever. Far from looking like the most powerful beings in the Whoniverse this lot look more feeble than normal and when your biggest special effect involved some wavy lines and some paint you know you’re in serious trouble.
For all that, though,
this is one of those stories played with such conviction that you barely notice
and the acting in this story is sprinkled with gold-dust, raising it far and
away above any such failures. Wanda goes from sweet scientists to properly
creepy in minutes (it’s a really good female part for the 1970s too, though in
another sign of this story going both ways the production team still made Wanda
wear a brunette wig on the assumption that ‘no one would take a blonde female
scientists sensibly’. The year 1977 has never seemed more long ago). Denis Lill
acts his socks off as Fendlaman, the driven scientist who seems so control of
his life, until it becomes clear his every impulse (and even his name) has been
driven by an alien slug, so different to his other Who role in ‘The Awakening’
or ‘the grumpy one’ in Terry Nation’s period TV series ‘The Survivors’ that
it’s a struggle to believe it’s the same actor. Adam, the male scientist in the
pair who discovers man’s true origins (and is thus aptly named) could easily
have been played for laughs but Edward Arthur brings a quiet dignity to the
role. Daphne Heard, one of Russell’s all-time favourite creations, steals the
show as the batty old woman who turns out to know a lot more than even the
Doctor does as ‘Martha Tyler’ (a combination of no less than two of his
companions!) Edward Evans makes the most of the everyman Ted Moss that will do
the impossible and make you root for a council worker. Tom Baker might have
pulled the script to pieces and made Chris Boucher cry but he nails a script
that allows him to veer so often between flippant and intense, messing around
with skulls and delivering quips but also looking more scared and sombre than
we usually see him (at least in this era). It’s Leela though who shines. Louise
Jameson always considered that her creator Boucher understood her character
more than the other writers and he adds in layers the others wouldn’t think to
add. Far from being ‘only a savage’ and therefore stupid Leela is often the
smartest person in the room, right on the edge between the scientists and
magicians without quite believing in either of them: she knows enough from the
Doctor to trust in the science but she also lives off her instincts and ‘knows’
that something funny is going on long before he does. We also see Leela be
kind, in a Leela sort of a way, leaving the Doctor to handle the bigger picture
and tending to the hurt and needy in the here and now he seems to forget.
They’re a great pairing in this era whatever their problems as actors,
characters who need each other but can act alone and independently and drive
the plot along on in two different strands before colliding together at the
end. This is a story that wouldn’t work anywhere near as well with a different
Doctor and companion (which might be why there are so few re-matches around):
you need this Doctor’s straight-talking to cut through the Fendahl’s
manipulation, while he too can confuse and connive just as well as they can;
Leela too is the one companion you can rely on not to be manipulated (bar
brainwashing) – she’s always in search for the truth no matter how any people
try to pull the wool over her eyes. Sadly there’s not much K9 though, the robot
dog spending most of his second ever story lying on the Tardis floor with his
insides pulled about being mended (because Boucher, being such a quick writer,
got his draft sent off before it was ever decided the one-off character from
‘The Invisible Enemy’ would make a good companion). It’s a real shame as the
witches in this story have their own ‘familiars’ of various dogs and owls; it
would make more sense than usual if, in this story, the Doctor had a scientific
robotic ‘familiar’ of his own to fight with. Plus I’d have loved to have seen
what K9 would have been like in Boucher’s hands (would he be as uppity as Orac
in Blake’s 7’ whom the writer loved and made sparkle so much?) Boucher’s level of character and dialogue
remains unsurpassed for the era and he’s only outdone jokewise by Douglas Adams
(no wonder Russell is such a fan - he got more from Boucher’s version of this
series than just some character names, he developed the whole Boucher feel of
how to do Who). As silly as everyone might have found this in pre-production
everyone is playing it straight on screen and it is, I would say, the very last
time in ‘classic’ Who where absolutely everyone in the cast is giving it their
all and playing their parts with conviction.
‘Fendahl’ is a
potentially great story then with much about it to love and it’s certainly
atmospheric, full of dark woods and looming baddies and a pervading sense of
menace throughout. I just wish it was paced a little better, with a delightful
opening episode combining horror and comedy with aplomb giving way to a
sluggish middle section devoted mostly to talking through the plot and an
action filled finale that’s oddly slapstick. The mood of this story is
genuinely scary and yet the cliffhangers always seem to come at the ‘wrong’
time, just after a gag. After a superb build-up there’s also nothing to justify
what we’re told about this conquering all-powerful monster: we see a woman
painted gold shake a few times but not a lot more; this are beings that can change
the course of humanity, our de facto creator. You think they’d at least be able
to find better means to keep the Doctor out the way than locking him in a cupboard.
For every brilliant scene there will be one that’s absolute nonsense and for
every moment of genuine tension and power there will be another that even the
acting can’t prevent looking stupid. ‘Fendahl’ feels like a series of
compromises, a tug of war over control of what it should look like from several
opposing ideas, which is ironic when you consider that the theme was about
mankind trying to break the power of control the Fendahl have over him. The
result is a story that fans can never quite agree on: for such an all-powerful
foe and a story with so much riding on it this story seems to have made
surprisingly little impact on both the general public at large and the fandom
at little; you can get Fendahl models (one in a fancy box with a model Leela)
but they were surprisingly far down the range; the video and DVD were somewhere
towards the end of the 4th Doctor runs; the modern series has never
brought them back (although at the time of re-writing I’m beginning to wonder
if all those clues in series fourteen/1A about an impossible being shaping
humanity with man-trap slugs is a clue for this year’s big bad – it is Russell
in charge again after all and as we’ve seen he’s pilfered everything else from
this story already). They’re a monster that had such a huge impact on humanity
and with such power you’d think they’d be forever coming back but no, not
really – they had a cameo in a novel and re-appeared in a Big Finish audio (but
then which 1970s monster hasn’t?) but so the fanbase has left them alone.
Perhaps that’s because like
a lot of Dr Who in general and season 15 in particular, you have to make a lot
of allowances for this story to enjoy it, but then few other shows would be
this brave and this bold with such little money or put together a plot with
this much scope with so few resources. I love the big themes of aliens
exploiting mankind for slave labour that’s played out across time and space
reduced to a battle over a tiny farmhouse and a priory, with references to
crystals and skulls and witchcraft, all achieved on a budget that seems to
consist of rubber slugs and bits of string. There are so many brilliant ideas
here, even if the final story doesn’t make the most of quote a few of them. As
perfect as Boucher was for Blake’s 7, creating even more real-seeming imaginary
worlds on an even smaller budget and making the most of having a regular set of
complex characters to get his teeth into, it’s a real loss for Dr Who that we
never got another script from him as, like his first two, this one ripples with
great gags and proper scares and believable characters, even the giant space
slug; it’s just the way it looks that lets this down a little. If only the
Fendahl were real eh? Then they’d have been able to manipulate the BBC
accountants into giving them more money and creating models that look every bit
as brilliant as their concept is. Instead, in this slugging it out between the
brilliance of its abstract ideas and the crushing realities of the world in
which it was made, ‘Image Of the Fendahl’ ends up a mildly disappointing draw.
POSITIVES + Actually the
one part of the story that seems lavish is the location filming which, like
‘Pyramids of Mars’, was partly filmed in Mick Jagger’s mansion ‘Stargroves’ and
while we don’t see as much of the grounds as we did last time it was used we
see a lot more of the house itself. This was a grade II listed building in
Hampshire that Jagger had bought with his Stones money mostly so his dad Joe
would have somewhere to stay (he was the ‘caretaker’ in charge of the Who shoot
while his son was away on tour) and that could be leant out for some extra cash
as a ‘mobile recording unit (several classic albums of the 1970s were recorded
here, including ‘Sticky Fingers’, Led Zeppelin’s ‘Houses Of The Holy’ and
‘Physical Graffiti’ and a lot of Small face Ronnie Lane’s solo recordings, as
well as The Who’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. A tale of anonymous rulers who care
nothing for their underlings and who are all the same no matter who gets into
power, it’s a song that has the Fendahl written all over it; though let’s hope
no one told the Fendahl about the Stones song ‘Salt Of The Earth’, which the
giant alien slugs could take the wrong way).Whovian as he was and is, Jagger
waived his fee for the location in favour of a copy of the finished programme
he could watch when he got home and an autograph from the cast for any of his
family who wanted one! He gave the production team far more access than most of
the snootier Lords and ladies who leant their precious ancestral home out ever
did, although he did request that they avoid blowing it up for real, given that
it was a listed building and all (weirdly it is blown up, in model shots, in
both of its Who stories). This all led to one of those funny stories
behind-the-scenes I love so much: during the night shoot the generator powering
up the electricity failed and ended up on fire nearly setting the building
alight until a quick-thinking production crew got it under control. Even so
they were left without power and, this being a night shoot when actors and crew
were on extra pay, they really needed to get the shots done. An SOS was sent
for a backup generator all the way from London but the lorry was big and heavy
and made a lot of noise on the country lanes. It finally arrived two hours
later, at 4am, waking up Jagger’s next door neighbour (a retired army major) who
sent in a very rude letter about rockstar neighbours having late night parties,
the only complaint the actually quite respectful singer ever had. It was left
to the director to write a personal grovelling apology explaining the
situation!
NEGATIVES - There’s a
moving passage in the novel where Dr Fendelman realises there’s no way out and,
with no words being spoken, has an understanding with the Doctor that he won’t
make it out of this adventure alive and that, in order to avoid the Fendahl
taking over the world, he has to commit suicide while possessed. You can feel
the Doctor’s pain as he hands over a gun himself without a word being spoken,
realising too that it is one live versus many and that not everyone can be
saved. It’s a gripping, tense, awful moment as people do the right thing in
impossible situations. On screen? The BBC were worried about depicting suicide
on television (BBC head Graeme MacDonald had them alter the original script
after a preliminary ne landed on his desk) so we never see what these
characters are thinking or what they really do. All we see is Tom Baker quickly
handing over a gun for no apparent reason with a big grin on his face (for all
we know at the time Dr Fendalman is taking a bit of time out to do some grouse
hunting).
BEST QUOTE:
Adam: ‘What are you exactly? Some sort of wandering Armageddon pedlar?’
PREQUELS/SEQUELS:
Pass the salt! The Fendahl have come back for three more appearances in the
wider Whoniverse. ‘The Taking Of Planet Five’ (1999) is the 28th in
the run of the 8th Doctor novels, a collaboration between Simon
Bucher-Jones and Mark Clapham. It turns out that there was another Fendahl
skull, which has survived twelve million years in the ice under the Antarctic!
Ooerr. It’s the starting point for a rather odd novel, one that – like many a
1990s novel – is much more about the timelords than the Fendahl. Given that Dr
Who is, by 1999, a cult commodity that has practically zero chance of ever
going mainstream again the authors take a lot of liberties by tying the series
in to H P Lovecraft’s stories, stuffing the novel full of references and
in-jokes; while more than a few Who stories are Lovecraftian (‘The celestial
Toymaker’ the e-space trilogy or the Cartmel years with a parade of God-like
figures especially, but really any story where humanity is a tiny cog in a
bigger cosmic wheel) but having so much of one authors influence rather
overbalances the work and takes away from the Dr Whoyness of it. The Fendahl,
despite waiting 22 years for a sequel, barely appear.
‘Island Of The Fendahl’ is an 8th Doctor
Big Finish story, the last in the box set ‘The Further Adventures Of Lucie
Miller’ (2019) that saw Sheridan Smith returning as Paul McGann’s companion twelve
years after she was last in the role. This story follows on from the
cliffhanger of previous adventure ‘The House On The Edge Of Chaos’ with an
electrocuted Doctor piloting a failing Tardis. Landing on Earth Lucie rushes
for help but the first person she asks attacks her with chloroform and knocks
her out. Typical of the Doctor’s luck he’s landed on a remote island called
Fandor that’s a little like the one in ‘The Prisoner’ with brainwashed locals
acting weird and a giant slug on the loose. A lot of familiar elements from the
original are there: the skull has been somehow rescued from the priory and one
of the locals is Thea Ransome who survived to start a Fendahllian cult on the
island. The Fendahl’s plan when the Doctor arrives is to use him to resurrect
the ‘Fendahl core’ and use his body to
manifest the giant slug. It’s a very traditional Who episode this one despite
having the 1990s Doctor around for the ride – fans who rate the original and
always wanted more are sure to love it but there’s nothing here to convert us
non-believers into thinking this story a classic. The title is a bit of an
in-joke by the way: The Dr Who Appreciation Society fanzine proudly published
that the title of the actual story was ‘The Island Of Fendor’ in a preview of
season 15 because editor Gordon Blows misheard what Bob Holmes told him down
the phone!
Torchwood seems a natural home for giant
supernatural slugs intent on world domination somehow and the Fendahl are
indeed one of the few ‘classic’ series monsters to appear with them (the only
ones, besides the Cyberwomen?) ‘Night Of The Fendahl’ (also from 2019) is truly dotty story, even for Torchwood.
There’s a porno company trying to make an adult film to cater for a fetish of
‘nasty things happening to girls’ and figure the legends of that night in fetch
priory are perfect, not realising that the Fendahl are real and their fake
magic for the film has brought them back to life. Gwen is the only Torchwood
regular in this story – a lot of the Torchwood audios only feature one or other
for reasons best known to their schedulers – but the extra attention given to
her character works and like a lot of the Torchwood audios I actually prefer it
to most of what ended up on TV.
Previous ‘The Invisible Enemy’
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