The Leisure Hive: Ranking - 189

   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 4^th 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 4^th 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.

Which is a shame because they would have missed some really great concepts underlying everything, with a script that remains clever and imaginative despite having so much of the fun taken out of it. Like many a 20^th century Dr Who the cold war is very much on people’s minds and we have a war here that, soberingly, was a long time coming but lasted just 20 minutes before 2000 nuclear warheads put an end to it (a war that happened ‘forty years ago’ just to rub it in, or 1941 and the middle of WW2 for viewers on first transmission). Rather than give us the usual sermon about two superpowers at loggerheads with access to nuclear weapons who don’t deserve the, though,  we get the equally pointless aftermath. On the one hand the nuclear war has changed everything, it’s ravaged the planet and forced the Argolins to live in a dome behind a sheet of protective glass. It’s altered their culture forever and made them all sterile, unable to have babies, so that they’re facing a long drawn-out death. Yet on the other it’s changed nothing: everyone still has to live and the only way the Argolins can make money is by hosting a holiday break, not in a Macra ‘creepy Butlins holiday camp gone wrong’ way either but as an actual business proposition. There are two great ironies to this: one is that the Foamasi, their old rivals who ‘won’ the war, are some of their best customers so they end up having to be nice and negotiate the way they could have done without the war and the other is that all the visitors from other worlds, who come for a relaxing time away from it all, can see the destruction and devastation if they stare out of the windows in the right direction. The Argolins, are a triumph for the costume department and are well drawn scriptwise too, a bunch of individuals rather than a species who all think the same, which is refreshing, with good and bad and left and right (as this is Dr Who no prizes for guessing which is which) and a backdrop of political machinations and tensions that are fully believable. It’s such a great idea: morally bankrupt aliens are two a penny on Dr Who but this lot are financially bankrupt instead, with Fisher basing this part of the story on news reports of Britain’s declining status as an international hotspot (because who wants to come to a seedy glorified leisure centre when you can just stay at home?) They’re kind of like the Native American Indians too, Fisher having great fun pointing out the similarities of the Foamasi and the European cowboys in going ‘oops, sorry we destroyed your entire world and population and culture and are on the verge of wiping you out but in order to make it up to you here’s some tax rebates and legislation to help run a casino/holiday’. 

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).  

Talking of transformation, the invention of tacyonics is a great little idea, one added to the script last minute when Bidmead finally arrived and requested commissioned writers use as much ‘real’ science as possible, handing out copies of ‘New Scientist’ magazine in the production office for ideas. Fisher was particularly intrigued with this actually real (if alas only theoretical to Humans) concept that by aiming a lazer at a person or object travelling at the speed of light you could somehow artificially ‘time travel’ by having that person or object move at a different speed and age at a different rate. Better than the usual technobabble in Dr Who it’s a concept that at least has its roots in science (and is a lot better than the ‘soundwaves’ in ‘The Lazarus Experiment’ for a kickoff), although no one (not Fisher or the scientists) can ever properly explain how that person or object could then interact with the rest of us moving at ‘normal’ speed. It’s neat twist on the cloning idea then in the news too as scientists got nearer to perfecting the idea, of growing a new being out of a single cell: Dr Who had been here already a few times (notably ‘The Invisible Enemy’) but this one feels a lot more plausible: the tachyon machine basically creates a computer avatar that’s still attached to you and can somehow feel what you feel, sold to us in 1980 as ‘photocopies’ of people because it was such an inventive groundbreaking concept there wasn’t a word for it back then (a hugely new and exciting concept in 1980 when home computers weren’t everywhere yet: if anything modern viewers have been robbed of how good this idea is simply because we’re surrounded by it all the time). It’s a clever way of getting round the fact that the Argolins are sterile and exactly the sort of technological ploy a desperate race dying out would reach out and grasp, even though we at home know before the Doctor tells us that it’s unstable and won’t work as well they want it to. It’s a concept that also provides one really great cliffhanger (and one great joke), as the Doctor enters the box and is torn into bits, screaming in agony (we don’t know that it’s just ‘fake’ self yet) and then comes out the box looking aged, impossible old and wizened (another case of JNT trying to shape the series, after thoughts that the Doctor was getting too invincible and felt unstoppable, ridding the show of so much of it’s drama and tension. As for the joke an Argolin asks the Doctor how he got out: ‘Through the hole in the back’ the timelord says. ‘But there is no hole in the back’ is the reply. ‘Well there is now’ the Doctor says, brandishing his sonic screwdriver). 

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 11^th Doctor in ‘The Time Of The Doctor’, Clara in ‘Last Christmas’ or Amy in ‘The Girl Who Waited’ it makes you wonder why the 21^st century could never do this as well as the 20^th). 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.  

POSITIVES + There’s a small detail that make the Argolins come alive that no other Dr Who alien race posses: they walk around permanently reminded of their ticking biological clock via the balls that fall from their head on reaching certain ages (sped up by stress or illness). It’s a bit like human hair falling out, but far more disastrous – especially the panic when the characters get down to their last one or two and know their time is up, worrying about what sort of a life they’re going to leave for their children. This seems like a plausible evolutionary jump too not just a gimmick: after all you wouldn’t want to mate with an alien who’d nearly lost all their balls and couldn’t take care of a child, umm as it were. It’s one of those clever concepts that has nothing to do with the plot and most scifi shows wouldn’t bother with, but like the best of Dr Who it makes everything here feel so ‘real’ as well as heightening the drama and tension.

NEGATIVES - At the start K9 reads out a list of the best holiday planets in the universe to go to: Yegros Alpha has atavistic therapy (medicines from an earlier age, to you and me), Zaakros specialises in alien plants, Zeen 4 does historical re-enactments from all sorts of planets, while Limnos 4 and Abydos have non-gravity swimming pools, sleep reading stations (so that you can learn while relaxing: just like this book if you read it with a pangalactic Gargleblaster to hand, honest!) and mini artificial gladiators that sounds to all the world as if Dr Who invented ‘Robot Wars’. Why oh why didn’t we go there to any of these places instead of a planet with a squash court and tachyonics?! I know they could never have afforded to make them for real but don’t tease us like that…

BEST QUOTE: ‘Five hundred years goes by so rapidly’. 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: By and large the Dr Who stars didn’t do much advertising: the BBC were prohibited from it directly and only after the show was cancelled did we start getting the odd ad campaign (usually involving Daleks acting out of character).One exception are the two Australian-only adverts for Prime Computers, officially titled ‘Step In To The 1980s’ and ‘On Through the 1980s’,  aired in the gap firstly between seasons 16 and 17 and then another two in the gap 17 and 18 which sees the 4^th Doctor and Romana in ‘mufti’ and with a far more casual laidback approach than they were ever allowed on TV. Legend has it that Tom Baker was asked to do them during a booked tour to the country and signed a contract, then forgot all about it until the day of recording when a limo turned up at his hotel waiting for him. Tom revealed recently in Dr Wjho Magazine that he hated the scripts so much he considered not doing them, before getting permission to re-write them in a hurried afternoon in consultation with the advert producer, who was only too eager to let him do anything if it meant he had a workable product. It is, in many ways Tom’s last hurrah: freed from any producer control this was a brief moment in time when he was relatively free of responsibilities and he gets to do all the jokey ad lib sort of things he’d tries to put in the main (series (and which his producers kept taking out). He’s in his element, writing lots of Doctory gobbledegook for Romana to say, getting his favourite line about Gallifrey being ‘in the constellation of Kasterborous’ into almost every advert and even adding a joke about his forthcoming marriage to Lalla (the computer reading ‘marry the girl!’ just before their wedding): this is the end of their super-loved up era andwithouta producer to get the to turn it down they do more flirting in each thirty second ad than whole series of ‘Love Island’.     A white blank set, except for the computer and one lone chair, is also very Dr Who: clearly low budget yet distinctive. As for the plots: 1) Romana shows off her new purchase of a Prime computer which the Doctor comments is used by the all-powerful all-knowing timelords back on Gallifrey and asks it some questions (his scarf is ‘7.013 metres exclusi ve of loose threads’ if you’re wondering) before telling it ‘you’re going to be alright kid’ and the message ‘don’t patronise me Doctor!’ lights up on screen 2) the Doctor uses a prime computer to stop the world exploding within sixteen seconds (it takes longer than that for mine to turn on!) 3) All that power at his fingertips rather goes to the Doctor’s head in a scene like the end of ‘Armageddon Factor’ where he has the key to time at his fingertips, only to be calmed down by Lalla placing a gentle restraining arm round his shoulders and saying ‘ask it how to handle a woman!’ 4) An unseen foe from the familiar-sounding ‘Leprogopolis’ (had Tom just got his script for the season finale?) with a not terribly scary voice demands to know the name of Earth’s ’supreme computer’ while on the computer monitor the Doctor sees a kidnapped Romana, a primate-like hand reaching around her while she delivers easily her best scream in the series, before it turns out the aliens just wanted to buy one (‘Who were they Doctor?’ asks Romana. ‘Just a couple of excited prime buyers’ he replies). Prime indeed. Numbers 1 nd 3 were included o the ’More Than 30 Years In The Tardis’ documentary DVD (included in a double-pack with the unfinished version of ‘Shada’) and all four were included, anachronistically, on the ‘Destiny Of The Daleks’ DVD. 

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