The Leisure Hive
(Season 18, Dr 4 with Romana II and K9, 30/8/1980-20/9/1980, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Christopher H Bidmead, writer: David Fisher, director: Lovett Bickford)
'Hello and welcome to the Leisure Hive! So you've been referred here by a Doctor have you? That's nice. Oh pardon me, The Doctor, even nicer. Well, let me show you around: That's Mel Bush over there skipping next to Professor Lasky on the rowing machine (doing more rowing than rowing if you know what I mean!), there's a Sontaron fitness coach - a very cross trainer if ever there was one! - Sil's hogging the sauna room over there, say hello to the Ice Warrior in the ice bath, the Silurian in the swimming pool and the Judoon doing Judo. Would you like to use the pommel-Myrka first? That's free. Just don’t karate kick it. Oh and don't forget your foam(asi) mat!'
Ranking: 189
At last, a break in the middle of all these reviews so we can unwind, dear reader, with the six ‘R’s: Rest, Recuperation, Relaxation, Rackateering, Radiation fallout from Nuclear War and Really fat lizard monsters. Yes it’s going to be one of those Dr Who stories and, on paper, it’s the sort of thing I can get properly behind because it’s so wonderfully different: the latest base under siege isn’t an isolated Human colony in the wilderness, it’s a leisure centre, the plot taking place against a background of lots of aliens playing lots of alien sports (I’m desperate to play zero-gravity squash, it looks such fun!). For once the biggest inspiration on the story isn’t the usual (Quatermass, Pathfinders In Space, Star Trek, Star Wars) but ‘The Godfather’. The monsters aren’t your two-penny invaders but alien lizard businessmen taking remuneration from the planet’s profits after winning a nuclear war there. There’s a side quest about what it means to grow old and extend your life form (yes again!) but it’s not a magic elixir or an alien head this time but a box of tricks that works exactly like a photocopier (or maybe an early fax machine given how the copies fade away so quickly). The real ‘baddy’ isn’t a dictator or a monster but someone whose grown up surrounded by peace for so long that they’ve got bored and fancy living in a war. David Fisher’s imaginative script is a highly sophisticated piece of writing that does what scifi is so good at: laughing at Human constructs that they could never ever get away with putting on TV as baldly if they told the real story and the Target novelisation of it is one of the best, with two very different yet linked alien cultures described in loving detail. Yet this is also one of those Dr Who stories that leaves me feeling underwhelmed whenever I see it, one that I always think I’m going to enjoy more than I actually do. Is it the convoluted story? The running around? The drab sets? The awful costumes? The editing that lost all the good jokes and filled it up with padding? The fact we’re in a story about the importance of changing and adapting to your environment and fear of growing old and sterile? Or the fact that we are at the start of a new era, with the biggest amount of behind-the-scenes changes in the show possibly ever (certainly since Troughton became Pertwee and the show changed from black-and-white to colour in 1970) and nobody in charge seems to know how to make Dr Who properly anymore, as if this season opener is the first day back at school and they’ve forgotten how to do this?
There’s a good reason for this: there’s a new producer in town. What’s more it’s a producer whose never been as involved with a single story as this one, thanks to Douglas Adams’ last minute decision to leave meaning that one of JNT’s first jobs was to hire a new script editor while both commissioning and then polishing this script in the meantime (Christopher H Bidmead arrives just in time for a few tweaks and a credit on the end titles. JNT had tried to get his old friend from another series he’d worked on ‘All Creatures Great and Small’ Johnny Byrne and had been turned down; Bidmead was his next choice but the writer turned him down too saying that Dr Who had become silly before JNT said that was what he most wanted to change: Bidmead’s response to his first story of this new grown-up regime being a bunch of alien gangster lizards around a leisure centre is, surprisingly, unrecorded). Until Russell T Davies changed the rules generally producers kept out of too much involvement at the writing stage (predecessor Graham Williams’ input to ‘The Invasion Of Time’ being the big exception) but there was no other choice: somebody had to step up and do something or the show wouldn’t have been made at all. The trouble was JNT had no writing experience and never did really understand writers, taking a lot of Fisher’s jokey suggestions seriously, including this plot about mafiosa space lizards. Fisher wrote a jokey script in the vein of what Douglas Adams would have asked him for, a freewheeling yarn high on metaphors and making good use of Tom Baker’s feel for light comedy, but JNT wanted to get away from Williams’ more comical era and kept taking the jokes out, until there wasn’t much left. Once again, read the novel for what this story could have been (which spends a lot of time making deadpan jokes about a shadowy secret racket run by a lot of podgy alien lizards who can’t hide very easily) and weep for what could have been.
Many guidebooks see John
Nathan-Turner’s takeover as equivalent to the Foamasi, an invading alien who
don’t quite understand what they’re taking over: he wasn’t new to the show at
all. He’d worked on it one capacity or another for twelve long hard years, since
he turned twenty, starting as production assistant on ‘The Space Pirates’ in
1969 (his twenty year more or less unbroken run on the series in some capacity
or another is easily the longest anyone’s ever spent on the show outside prop
makers, musicians and make up staff). He knew it better than anybody and
genuinely loved it and wanted Dr Who to grow, to be viewed in the same way
people viewed ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Battlestar Galactica’ and all those glossy
one-dimensional scifi franchises that couldn’t do what Dr Who did. Only he never
quite knew how to do that beyond throw money at it that he didn’t have or big
name actors that the show could no longer attract. JNT was chosen for the job
partly out of loyalty for all his support work down the years but also because
he knew everyone already and there wouldn’t be that awkward time of the ‘new
boy’ settling into his new role (although there were question marks about his
inexperience of running a show which saw the BBC bosses bring in our old friend
Barry Letts in an executive producer post as a ‘sounding board’ – he didn’t do
much though, bar a few suggestions to shape this story). He seemed to get on
well with Tom Baker too (often siding with the star about some of the sillier
aspects of Graham William’s run) so everyone crossed their fingers that things
would go on much the same as normal. Only JNT’s had twelve years to wait for
promotion and work out what he would do iof he ever got to be in charge of this
show and like a lot of people passed over for promotion who finally get the chance
to show what they can do he decides to change nearly everything, at once, in
one go. To be fair to him the ratings for Who had begun to fall and he didn’t
want to be the producer who killed Dr Who off (ironic, really, given what
happens in a decade or so) –he wanted to be the hero and far better to
over-correct things than let them carry on getting worse. You can tell some of
the differences immediately: new opening titles (not bad: the ‘tunnel’ sequence
was getting old and the ‘star’ effects look good), a rejection of William’s
‘randomiser’ idea (a very definite way of breaking free from the recent past), the
way everyone seems to be wearing a ‘costume’ rather than ‘clothes’ (Tom was
most unhappy with his new scarf and the question marks on his collar, a
worrying sign of things to come), the incidental music (which is now played on
synths rather than actual instruments, ending the show’s long partnership with
Dudley Simpson who’s written and conducted scores for a whopping 62 Serials
till now in the days when there had only been 117 stories total, oh dear) and
the opening theme itself (which was now played by Peter Howell on a synth
rather than Delia Derbyshire on…whatever the hell it was, which had remained
the same way since 1963, oh dear oh dear oh dear). In his need to modernise the
series and make it ‘slicker’ JNT threw out a lot of the timeless things that
people watched Dr Who for and the ratings continued to freefall over the course
of the year, until they were less than half of where we were at the end of last
year with ‘The Horns Of Nimon’ (although, admittedly, that story wasn’t the
best incentive to get people watching in the first place). A lot of longterm
fans took one look (the ratings for episode one of ‘Hive’ aren’t that bad),
figured the series isn’t for them anymore and switched over to Buck Rogers on
ITV in the same time slot (a show that promised to be the future, in all ways
down from the title, but was of its time in a way that Dr Who had never been
until, well, now when it looked like everything else around, well sort of),
That’s the problem with a show’s regeneration: you never know what you’re going
to get.
At some points, with the
oh so 1980s music and the fast paced cutting ‘The Leisure Hive’ does look
slicker and leaner. Some parts of it look really good in fact: JNT was always a
lot better with computers than he was with people and really makes the most of
modern technology like the Quantel 5000 computer with constant image flipping,
multiple shots as a collage in a single frame, screenwipes and intense zooms,
all sorts of things that felt ‘new’ at the time but are going to become far
more common from now on (there’s a shot of a moving Tardis materialising on
Argolis, rather than simply appearing in a crossfade, that would have seemed like
science fiction itself back in 1981). Especially the short compact scenes with
speeches cut in half. But
not all the time: there are odd moments when ‘The Leisure Hive’ is slower than
Dr Who ever was. Take the rather
self-indulgent opening: a pan across JNT’s beloved Brighton beach in a needless
‘introductory’ scene the producer wrote himself (he lived nearby and held a
party at his house for the first day of shooting). That lasts for ninety
seconds. And involves some deck chairs. And some snoring. Traditionally a lot
of Dr Who seasons put their most interesting or most expensive shots in first
to grab people’s attention: this one starts with the slowest section it will
have all year. Finally, after a length of time that feels as if you’ve been
aged in a tachyon machine, we see the 4th Doctor and Romana and
things briefly seem like business as usual: this is the first time in a while
that a new season opened with the same Doctor-companion team as the previous
one (since season fourteen began with Sarah Jane, for all of two stories), with
the 4th Doctor and Romana II enjoying a holiday. In terms of
dialogue they have much the same flirting-caustic interplay and witty
intelligent banter they always do, although even there it feels different. When
we last saw them, making the unfinished ‘Shada’, the Tom Baker-Lalla Ward love
story was in full swing and the production was a happy one but somewhere in the
off-season something happened (perhaps it was simply that without the programme
to respond to they found how little they had in common?) Lalla’s not speaking
to Tom except when she has to say her lines. For his part Tom’s sick, suffering
jetlag after a very troubled and long flight back from Australia (see the
‘prime computer’ adverts mentioned below: the first scene was on Brighton beach
where he turned up late for the only time on the show and went to sleep for
real) and feels as if he’s losing control of his show, passive and weary and
old even before he ends u being shoved inside a tachyon particle accelerator
and coming out of it 500 years older. As for K9 JNT hated the robot dog with a
passion (he wanted an older audience for the show, not a children’s one) and
has him run into the beach almost as soon as we see him so he gets waterlogged
and is out for the count for the rest of the story, due to a misunderstanding that’s deeply out of character for such a logical,
self-preserving machine (ironically the prop was nearly damaged beyond repair
for real albeit not by the water but the shingle). A lot of children, who only
tuned in to see what K9 was getting up to, gave up in disgust right there and
then.
The Foamasi are less well
written simply because we don’t get to know them: they’re one of only a handful
of alien races the Tardis telepathic circuits can’t translate so we never
really get to know what they’re saying, although it’s clear that they have good
and bad, left and right, peaceniks and war leaders on their side too so the
pair of races aren’t all that different. They’re a long
lived creatures with lots of time on their hands (well, sort of claws
technically) who can afford to play the long game. Though a lot of fans laugh at the Foamasi, ungainly
clumsy Pangolins with big feet, I’m rather fond of them. I mean, not every
alien race is going to be svelte and the idea, of having effectively two suits
so that one looks like ‘skin’ underneath and one an outer layer, is a neat
invention that makes them look plausibly reptilian and works well in still
photos, if not always on screen when they’re moving. I love too that they’re
treated in this story not like another set of invading monsters who want to
take over the universe but like a mafiosa gang, demanding protection money from
the Leisure Hive (no other show would think that, none!) Their name’s even an
anagram of ‘mafiosa’ too just to make the point clear without upsetting too
many people and, y’know, the production team waking up to find a Sea Devil head
in their bed or something. Director Lovett Bickford uses them well too i.e.
sparingly so that rather than going ‘gosh how big and lumbering and awkward they
are and they seem to have brought some big spotlights so we can see all the
joins in their costume where it’s been stapled together’ (see ‘warriors Of
Deep’ amongst lots of other examples) you’re intrigued by the little details
you do see: the claws, the feet, the eyeballs (actually worn by the actor
inside the costume as a sort of helmet, so they move when the actors’ heads
turn in a nicely lizard type way). Yes they suffer from the age-old Dr Who
problem that you can’t really be that scared of a shuffling unsteady monster
you can outpace but in context even
that’s quite nice: I mean, some things in this show never change in any era no
matter how many other elements are transformed. The one part that really doesn’t
work is that these fat lizards can somehow disguise themselves as svelte Humans
(it’s easy to think of an eighteen year old Russell T Davies watching this and
laughing, coming up with fart jokes to explain the deflation and writing this
as The Slitheen twenty years later. Russell also clearly nicked the unconvincing
ending where Pangol is reduced to a child to avoid a war – ‘Boom Town’ handles it better if only
because Pangol is, technically, still an adult in a child body with memories of
being wronged and can still cause all sorts of harm, in between nap times and
eating rusks).
This is also the era of
the test-tube babies, of the first Humans not born directly from a mother’s
womb, when they were still very much the odd ones out. Fisher turns that round:
at The Leisure Hive there’s only one Argolin whose managed to be born properly
for real and he’s the closest the story comes to a baddy, Pangol, who becomes
everything his eace-loving parents most fear: a warmonger. Not that he’s really
a baddy per se, he’s just a misguided idealist who wants to ring in too many
changes (so maybe he’s meant to be JNT…) Remember all those 1960s reviews where
we banged on about how Dr Who was a sort of safe debate between parents and
children in the decade of the greatest generational divide there’s ever been
and the war generations’ fear of what might happen when their baby boomer
children grow into adults and start running the world? Well, whether by
accident or design, ‘The Leisure Hive’ is that same argument, just between the
baby boomer adults and their Generation ‘X’ children, a sequel to such stories
as ‘The Abominable Snowman’ (hippies are led astray by strange voices and the
mystical East) and ‘The Space Museum’ (adults are in authority through
tradition and boredom and stagnating, we need a revolution now!) Pangol is the
only Argolin whose never grown up at a time of war and he’s bored of peace:
it’s so dull, all that talking and pontificating and people pretending to be
nice to one another. He wants action! Heroics! A do or die battle! He’s at one
with the small group of increasingly jingoistic Brits in 1981 who thought that
peace and love was stupid and we needed wars every so often to clear out the
cobwebs and be macho (The Falklands War isn’t for another year yet, but it
didn’t come out of nowhere). There were a lot of children turned young adults
who’d never known a time without living under the threat of nuclear
annihilation and they just wanted America and Russia to get on with it already
if they were going to, rather than let them build up a career and a family and
watch everything die. The solution? Skip the problem for another generation and
regress Pangol, so that he ends up a millennial because Generation X are too ‘scary’.
Fisher isn’t cruel though: he knows where Pangol is coming from and sympathises
with him to an extent, for how can you be scared of something you’ve never seen
firsthand? But he also knows that war isn’t a game and that any amount of
talking and negotiation is preferable to nuclear Armageddon. And that is how
you write characters properly: ‘The Leisure Hive’ is a rare story where you
sort-of agree or at least understand every argument in turn: you understand
Pangol’s turbulence, even while you sympathise with his stressed mother’s whose
hair is literally falling out (or the little baubles that signify what time she
has left anyway, a neat touch) and The Foamasi who aren’t scheming so much as
just trying to finish a business deal with a people they can get to pay at a
bargain price. One sweet detail: the baby Pangolin is the daughter of production
manager Angela Smith, the woman JNT brought in specially to replace his old
job, a real passing on of the generations there.
It’s just that you don’t
watch ‘The Leisure Hive’ and go ‘what wonderful concepts!’ Instead you go ‘eh?
What’s happening I’m confused’. Then sigh because it seemed as if something
seemed to be happening but now the story’s turned into people standing around
talking again and the long awaited monster looks daft, shuffling down a
corridor slowly and unconvincingly. The best parts of the story happen in the
dullest bits, when everyone is debating with each other and the Doctor’s trying
to work out what’s going on, even though on screen they’re the dullest parts.
The best looking parts, meanwhile, are the incidental details that don’t matter
to the plot at all: the game of alien squash with the Doctor and Romana walking
past upside down alien athletes in weird costumes or the Doctor aging, with
surely the best makeup and prosthetics out of all the many goes at this in the
series down the years (it’s so much better than, say, the 11th
Doctor in ‘The Time Of The Doctor’, Clara in ‘Last Christmas’ or Amy in ‘The
Girl Who Waited’ it makes you wonder why the 21st century could
never do this as well as the 20th). Normally you’d rely on the
Doctor to be the thread that keeps a story moving through the dull parts but
then Tom Baker’s not himself: both literally because he’s aged into a frail old
man who can do little more than sit but also because of events behind the
scenes: he’s lost control of his baby (I think he’d honestly expected JNT to be
more malleable than Williams and was shocked to find him an even harder
taskmaster less keen on his jokes and improvisations that made the part so
enjoyable) and Tom’s then lost his enthusiasm for the show. You can see in his
eyes and from his flippant throwaway delivery of a few of his lines that he’s
deeply fed up and not enjoying himself at all. Thankfully he’ll find his mojo again,
but not until after (and perhaps because) he’s handed in his notice to leave at
the end of the year. Lalla gets more to do and rises to the challenge as
always, but even she’s lost some of her sparkle: she’s one of those actresses
whose happiest when trading lines with another actor but Tom’s not playing ball
and most of the time she’s talking to mute Foamasis or talking to herself. Even she’s just standing around asking
questions and not really doing anything that much by her standards, just
watching as a plot of skulduggery and underhand deals takes place in another of
those occasional Who stories that would have carried on much the same had the Tardis
never landed and where, if anything, the regulars are just getting in the way.
There’s a great world here in other words but our hero and heroine don’t
interact with it much and when the Doctor does it mostly happens off camera,
with Romana left to explain some scientific gobbledegook and not much happening
between the big set pieces (which also take place off camera a lot). The rest
of this season (Tom’s last) is similarly slow-paced and funeralaic, but those
stories feel as if they couldn’t be told any other way, with a bittersweet
gloom of a life unravelling; this one just feels as if it was accidentally
recorded in slow motion. And that despite the constant camera cuts that leave
you frazzled and the lack of lengthy scenes or explanations that just leave you
confused. The guest cats, too, are similarly underused: Laurence Payne, the
show’s biggest name star, snuffs it
after one episode, while Adrienne Corri barely gets going as the aging
protective mother anxious for what might happen to her only son before the direction
cuts her off to go somewhere else less interesting. Most underused of the ot is
Klout, a really important character who oversees what the Argolins are up to
and who all change whenever he’s in the room, even though he’s near-unique in
Who for not speaking a word (like I say, JNT never was that au fait with
writers and cared more about how a story looked than how it sounded or what people
said).
In other words it’s a
50:50 split, with ‘The Leisure Hive’ either a good story done badly or a story
that manages to be half watchable despite getting so many things wrong. It’s firmly
at the halfway point of my rankings, with lots of things that go right and lots
of things that go wrong. If I didn’t know better I’d say the show just needed a
holiday (there’s a nice Leisure Hive that has some vacancies…) except that given the events behind the scenes
its more as if the holidays over and it’s the first day of a long new term with
a strict new teacher and everyone’s wishing they were back enjoying the sun. Or
at any rate Buck Rogers over on ITV, with Dr Who dropping out of the top 100
programmes of the week for the first time in a decade and the last episode
scoring its lowest ratings since the first broadcast of ‘An Unearthly Child’
right at the very start eighteen years earlier. The biggest problem with ‘The
Leisure Hive’ by far is that no one seems as if they want to be here, which is
a shame because the script delivers all sorts of exciting concepts to be
excited about and, taken purely as a script, is easily Fisher’s best as
finished for the series (‘Androids Of Tara’ and ‘Stones Of Blood’ are a bit
bland and while I’m deeply fond of ‘The Creature From The Pit’ it’s less
interesting as a story past the main great concept: ‘City Of Death’, meanwhile,
has very little to do with Fisher as transmitted). I love
the idea that an alien race even has leisure time in first place, never mind filled
it with fun activities for rest of universe to enjoy and a sort of intergalactic
gym is one of those ordinary ideas hitting the extraordinary that Dr Who does
so well. I particularly love the way that different people view the Hive as
different things depending on what they need: for the Argolins it’s a symbol of
peace and rebuilding for the Foamasi it’s a business opportunity, for visitors it’s
a change to mingle with different alien races in a cosmopolitan hot-tub, for
the scientists its an excuse to invent things and show off your wares, for some
it’s simply a way to fill in the drudgery of a long existence. There’s even the
detail that the Foamasi, a secret society like the freemasons, live in ‘Lodges’
not houses. As a believable imaginary
world the Leisure Hive is hard to beat, with a writer whose properly thought
about the implications of their world and delivered more than just the basics.
I just wish the dialogue had been as strong as the ideas and that Fisher had
been allowed to see this ideas through: too often this story feels like a
cheeky cheerful child whose been told to behave too many times by the grown ups
and isn’t free to be its true self, sulking instead in the corner and making
faces when JNT isn’t looking. The visuals just can’t match what the script’s
doing and no one working on this story is as confident about it as the writer,
even though he’s the one being told to shut up and make changes. No wonder it’s
a mess, but it’s a mess with such promise that it also gets away with it more
than other big messes in Who. It’s worth bearing in mind, too, ‘That ‘The Leisure
Hive’ seems very different since the covid pandemic, when the idea of mutant
pangolins bringing the world to a halt suddenly feels much more plausible.
Maybe that’s what really happened and the Earth just didn’t pay up enough
protection money?! A deeply flawed but fun and under-rated little story.
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