Attack Of The Cybermen: Ranking - 166

                        Attack Of The Cybermen

(Season 22, Dr 6 with Peri, 5-12/1/1985, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Paula Moore (or is it?), director: Matthew Robinson) 

Rank: 166

In an emoji: 🥶

'Today on Cryon Blue Peter we're going to be blowing up a cyrogenic freezer to destroy the Cybermen using some sticky-backed plastic and a bomb, but first here's how to get the latest manicure for your fingernails to keep them long. Later, live in the studio after everything has successfully destroyed the cyber invasion of our home world, Peter Purves will be re-creating his time as Steven Taylor in Dr Who and Cryon Yvette Fielding's ghost will be contacting us from the afterlife as part of a 'Most Haunted' special...'  

Recycling is good for the planets and Cybermen must be the best recyclers in the universe; what with all the reusing of Human spare body parts (usually while the Humans are still using them) they probably get a badge from the intergalactic council for keeping Mondas tidy. Recycling tends to be less good for fans and ‘Attack’ recycles more than most without necessarily doing any of those parts better than the originals, so therefore it must be a bad Dr Who story. That’s how most analysis of this story tend to go with ‘Attack’ being, well, attacked by reviewers for featuring half an episode of Cybermen running around in sewers and an episode and a half of an ice tomb with Cybermen being defrosted following ‘The Invasion’ and ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ respectively, plus an overall plot of the Cybermen trying to prevent the events of ‘The Tenth Planet’ by diverting Halley’s comet so that it crashes into the Earth and destroys humanity. I can see why this story tends to get short shrift because it’s such an easy target, a story that goes to such lengths to throw in continuity to stories most people watching didn’t know which then gets the basics wrong (these are patently not the same ice-tombs on Telos we saw in 1967 no matter how many times we’re told they are, while the whole point of ‘The Tenth Planet’ is that it’s the planet that’s been draining Mondas’ resources, not humanity, so crashing a comet into it isn’t going to change a thing). Throw in a Doctor that the viewing public had taken a dislike to in his debut story ‘The Twin Dilemma’ whose still arguing every other sentence and a companion dressed in the most 1980s colour pink leotard possible (even on an ice planet – poor Nicola Bryant nearly got frostbite) and you can see why so much of the casual viewing audience fell away by episode two, never to return (at least until the Paul McGann TV movie 11 years later which put everyone off even more). And amazingly this story’s luck is worse with modern viewers: why watch a lurid noisy 1980s remake with that dialogue, that music and most of all that coat in technicolour when you can watch the more nuanced 1960s originals in monochrome so easily on video and DVD? 

 I have a real soft spot for this story though, which is one of the most misunderstood stories in the Who canon and whose biggest crime is fulfilling a need we just don’t have now that we’ve got everything out on multiple formats emblazoned with the Dr Who logo on it but which is exactly what I’d have been crying out for them to make had I been a viewer back in 1985. For at the time this story went out there seemed about as much chance of seeing these glorious adventures of the past stories ever again as there was for Earth’s twin planet to come out from behind the sun and invade us: if we couldn’t see ‘Tomb’ or ‘Tenth’ or ‘The Invasion’ (and we couldn’t in 1985, not least because 7/16ths of those episodes didn’t exist any longer) then I would want to see them have a go at re-making them with 1980s money. Such is the attention to detail they even hire the actor who played the cybver controller back in th 1960s and hasn’t been seen in Who since and filmed everything in the same quarry as ‘Tomb’ – Gerrard’s Cross Sand and Garvlpits in Wapsy’s Wood (not far from TV centre). It’s not the writers’ fault that the BBC choose this moment to clamp down on the budget and that the people getting it from script to screen don’t have the same intricate knowledge the authors do. 

 And they clearly do: whoever they are. Let me explain: who wrote this story is one of the series’ biggest mysteries. On the credits and the official contracts and all the correspondence that exists in the archives it’s the work of one Paula Moore nee Woolsey, an English teacher who wrote a few radio plays and just happened to be an ex of script editor Eric Saward. She certainly got the wages for it. We know that she helped out on the research with Eric’s earlier script ‘The Visitation’ too so it’s not implausible, even if this is her only TV credit. However, behind the scenes it’s been claimed that this story is really Eric’s work alone – only if he’d been credited he’d have got into trouble with the Writer’s Guild because as script editor he wasn’t meant to commission himself to write stories. The guild were lenient if a script was in crisis and they could fudge the contract details so the script editor effectively wrote stories ‘on holiday’ between contracts or if a story fell apart – only Eric had already used that card up this year writing ‘Revelation Of The Daleks’. Some other series would have just gotten away with it anyway, but two of the writers on Dr Who this year are old friends of producer John Nathan-Turner Pip and Jane Baker who in 1985 were co-chairmans of the Writer’s Guild. What’s more, Eric is not getting on with JNT at all yet desperately wants to keep his job: the last thing he wants is an excuse for his producer to get rid of him and JNT has made it clear he’s reluctant to let Eric write one script a year, never mind two; as it happens he’s out at a convention the month that ‘Attack’ was mostly taking shape so wasn’t paying that much attention (although if this was just a made up scenario than Paula was coached enough to run up to at least one script meeting where the producer was present and talk about ‘her’ work, with just enough of a paper trail to make the ruse seem real and the money all going into Paula’s bank account). To add to this the director never met Paula, only Eric and nor did any of the behind the scenes staff or cast. To add to the confusion longterm fan and missing episodes hunter Ian Levine deserves at least part credit too: the general assumption is that Eric wanted to write a Cybermen story, wanted to get the history right and went to Ian for ideas of old stories and tapped into his encyclopaedic knowledge of what went before(some sources say it’s Ian who wrote all of this and Eric only edited it). Only JNT was reluctant to credit Ian too, because if known Who fans were going to get their names on screen then the production team were going to get inundated with submissions. Let’s face it too: this is the sort of story only a true blue Who fan could have come up with, including more continuity references than almost any story, as well as a whole host of Saward trademarks (violence, Lytton, the Doctor doesn’t arrive till midway through and a big showdown complete with sacrifices that kill off most of the supporting cast) although these could have been added in the edit. The general agreement amongst most fans is that the Earth and Halley’s comet and Cryons and Lytton stuff is Eric’s, the Telos and Cyberman stuff is Ian’s, JNT threw the ‘chameleon circuit’ bit in as a ruse to keep the newspapers interested with a potentially big story and Paula just read the scripts when they were finished. Although Eric for one disputes all of this and says while he re-worked everything as per normal he actually touched this story less than most episodes this year. It might be significant, however, that he’s the one who wrote the novelisation of this story, not Paula or Ian. 

 This isn’t just three old plots lazily stapled together either: the best parts are the ones that have nothing to do with the olden days, particularly the sub-plot written to connect everything together with a whole new race The Cryons to enjoy, a rare Dr Who alien species who are victims every bit as much as the Earthlings and cute rather than killers, at least until a shock twist when injustice makes them more ruthless and inhumane than the Cybermen. They’re also a rare Who race that are all girls, a clever detail added by director Matthew Robinson who was worried that the script was all a bit ‘macho’, what with its constant gun battles and mercenaries and general grimness. An under-rated race if ever there was one, the Cryons get more depth than most new races in the 1980s, an emotional and warm race who can’t handle temperatures above zero so are confined to the ice-tombs of Telos. They have a very distinctive look with their long fingernails and ice-heads (complete with (moustaches) and a nervous tic that means they are forever waving their arms around (in other races this would just look stupid, but it makes sense for a race that would freeze up if they stayed still for too long). I’m half surprised they don’t have their own reiki tiktok channel: they’re that kind of a race, feminine and pretty but weird and deadly. Blue Peter presenter Sarah Greene and comedienne Faith Brown are two of the best examples of John Nathan-Turner’s weird tendency for stunt guest casting and putting familiar faces in the unlikeliest of roles and are way better than two ‘light entertainers’ ought to be, really selling Varne and Flast with just their voices and hands to do all the work. For a while mid-1980s pin-up Koo Stark was all set to join them and the publicity team went as far as leaking this to the papers, but they had a bit of a falling out (reportedly she was eager to do it until she turned up for the costume fitting and, horrified, demanded more money that the BBC just couldn’t pay). After hanging around a macho wannabe who seemed to come from another world at the time with ideas above their station who liked re-writing the past to fit their decaying memories who apparently had faulty body parts that didn’t notice changes in temperature (this is the year she was dating Prince Andrew after all) she would have been right at home It’s a real shame we never see them again as their crystalline DNA and femininity make them really stand out in the 1980s pantheon of male monsters, sisters to the Sisterhood of Karn and along with the Drhavins the only other all-female race we ever get to see in the whole of Dr Who. 

 I rather like the new sub-plot of Halley’s comet too, which the Cybermen hope to use in 1986 to destroy humanity (and which played a much bigger role in the draft script, with most of the Telos scenes being set there and the comet being used as a bomb rather than explosives in a cell– they should have kept that bit). The year 1986 was picked by Cybermen creators Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler for cyber-debut story ‘The Tenth Planet’ partly because twenty years in the future was plausibly in the lifetimes of every small child watching but also because 1986 was meant to be a year of ‘big catastrophes’ thanks to the ‘curse’ of Halley’s comet, that circles the solar system in an elliptical orbit and returns to shoot past the Earth every 75 years without fail. A lot of these 75 years happen to coincide with upheaval, so much so that back in the past before science knew what it was the comet was greeted as a sign from God: you can see it in the Bayeux Tapestry returning in 1066 for instance and if ever there was a year when England, at least, was undergoing turbulence it was then (with three different Kings that year from three separate tribes). There was a lot of anxiety in 1985, when this story went out (in January) that something big and scary was about to happen: remarkably 1986 seems to have been about a quiet a year as any in the 20th century, with no new wars and not much movement in old ones. The comet did indeed turn up in 1986 not long after this programme went on the air, but without the tie-in cyber invasion I’m pleased to say. The poor writers (whoever they were) also weren’t to know that a scientific mission to find out more about the comet discovered that the comet was mostly made up out of dust and wasn’t actually ice at all as was commonly thought – given the scientific evidence of the day it’s actually a neat idea to link an ‘ice’ comet with the Cybermen who’ve come from ‘ice’ planet Telos (this isn’t the first time real science screws up a more poetic use of science in a Dr Who story). A ‘real’ event suggesting impending catastrophe ‘borrowed’ for fictional purposes is exactly what DW should have been doing, making fiction out of established facts, even if they don’t make anywhere near enough of it (comets don’t seem a natural fit for cyber-technology and didn’t in ‘Tenth Planet’ either). 

 All that works well. So does the idea of cyber-conversion, which was much talked about in the 1960s but rarely seen on screen, bar a bit of wavy red lines that appeared on victims in ‘The Moonbase’ and wasn’t even mentioned in the Cybermen’s three appearances in colour before this (‘Revenge’ ‘Earthshock’ and ‘The Five Doctors’). It’s good to have it there as a plot element again because it’s what makes the Cybermen creepy and more than just an unstoppable army, this story looking in more detail at just what it means to have your body ripped open by a race who want to convert you but who care nothing for the pain you’re in. Some incidental character needs to go through the process to show us just how awful it is – and Lytton is that person. He’s a strong addition to this story, even though I wasn’t keen on the character at all when he was in Eric’s equally violent script for ‘Revelation Of the Daleks’ the previous year. He’s a far more interesting character than he ever had a chance to be in his first appearance here though, apparently working for the Cybermen the way he once worked for the Daleks, but secretly working undercover for the Cryons and such a good actor even the Doctor doesn’t realise until the end when it’s all too late. I have a theory, too, that Lytton is to Saward what Donna is to Russell T and Amy is to Moffat: their mouthpiece and representative in a story that’s really about clashes behind the scenes a la ‘Invasion Of Time’. In an era when the 6th Doctor is acting like producer JNT (down to the curly hair, sense of showmanship and love of bright colours – note how Eric’s scripts always use the Doctor as little as possible and keep him apart from the action until it’s absolutely necessary) and the pair weren’t getting on at all it’s interesting that Eric writes in a ‘polar opposite’ whose calm, almost cold and equally up for a fight. A lot of those working for the production team at the time said they could never work out which side Eric was on: that’s not necessarily a criticism, just a sign of a man keeping tight-lipped because he wanted to keep his job. This is the year when Eric really really really doesn’t want to come into work anymore even though he loves Dr Who and writes out ‘his’ character in a blaze of glory that makes him the ‘hero’ far more so than the Doctor and whose revealed to be a ‘goody’ all along (despite being a shady character in ‘revelation’), the story ending with the Doctor lamenting his death and ‘how I don’t think I ever misunderstood anyone as badly as I did Lytton’ (the words Saward most wants to hear from his colleague?) Notably no 1960s Cybermen story ever tries anything quite like this twist that keeps us guessing to the end (they’re far more black-and-white, in every meaning of the phrase). As for the other actors look out for three other small parts: that’s John Ainley, nephew of Master actor Anthony, as one of the Cybermen (he’d asked JNT to give his relation his big TV break and they looked so similar it was decided to put him behind a mask in case the viewers thought this was a Master story), while Terry Molloy gets to appear for the only time without his Davros mask as Russell and that’s Esther Freud as third Cryon Threst: she’s either the daughter or niece of comedian and MP Clement Freud (depending which guidebook you consult) and was married to David Morrissey at the same time that he was the Doctor (well, sort of – it’s complicated) in Christtmas special ‘The Next Doctor’. 

 Honestly the recycling from the olden days isn’t as blatant as this story’s detractors say either and makes some sort of sense, if only because a lot of the children watching in the 1966 were still watching in 1986 and maybe remembered what they thought the future was going to be like when it got here (twenty years really isn’t that long to forget; it’s every so nearly the gap between the ’comeback’ series of 2005 and now). Besides, while much the same things happen, with ice tombs and sewers and Cyber home planets acting weird in close proximity to Earth, things feel very different to how they did in the 1960s, starting with the Doctor. The 2nd incarnation worked in the shadows, in a series that was still in monochrome, turning the monsters against each other, whilst the 6th Doctor’s personality is as bright and overbearing as his coat so he’s in the thick of things trying to be heroic and sort things out. More than that though, you can see the differences in the two decades and what they feared most, even though ostensibly they’re about the same thing, the stories all made in perhaps the two hottest periods of the cold war. The 1960s was an era of spies and traitors when the biggest threat to our well-being was someone selling you out over something you didn’t even know about and when exploration of the unknown was fraught with danger but had to be done to beat your enemies, in a universe so big it cared nothing for the individual or human squabbles. The 1980s was an era of the ruthless dictator demanding people did things because they said so, nasty people making other people become nasty and not caring who gets caught up in the middle of it all while exploration is for power and control, pure and simple, when even nature can be tamed. The Cybermen fill both remits, but the emphasis on who they are and what they do is different (the Cybermen don’t lurk in the shadows anymore either). Like the Doctors the result is much the same (a big ol’ battle) but the way of going about that fight is very different. I miss the subtleties of the storytelling in the older versions, but I understand the feel of the newer one too having lived through that era and recognise the comments being made by everyone involved how different (and more graphically realistic) things were now. 

That said there’s nothing here that ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’ does better than its predecessors and most things it does worse, for all it’s bigger budget and colour. The ice tombs in 1967 were magical – while JNT might have been right in his rebuttal to criticism of this era in general and this story in particular being worse than the old days that ‘the memory cheats’ given that ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ didn’t look quite as good on screen as in our heads when it was returned in 1992, nevertheless what they did with those sets on a lower budget was magical, an Egyptian tomb-like freezer full of lumbering silver giants, arranged like an insect hive. This ice tomb is just decoration, with none of the mystery. The sewer set too is wretched, brightly lit (allegedly because they tried shooting it in the dark and the Doctor’s coat and Peri’s leotard were so bright they kept making the shots look weird) and stupidly clean (there were meant to be rats but they were too docile to move on cue and they looked silly so they were taken out; even so a bit of dirt or paint or gunge wouldn’t have gone amiss). We might get oodles of back story on a plate but the Cybermen still don’t feel as well-explained and we don’t feel for their plight the way we did in the 1960s, even though they’re victims as much as invaders, at the mercy of their planet’s destruction no matter what they do. It’s great we have Michael Kilgarriff back in costume again, last seen in ‘Tomb’, teamed up with 1980s Cyber Leader David Banks and they act their socks off. I’ll even defend the much chortled fact that the Cyber Controller has clearly put on weight in the past eighteen years (and why not? He still has organic parts that need exercise and Cybermen don’t march very fast to burn off calories). However the voices are awful: the director didn’t know how they were relayed into the recording from the control room so all we hear for the most part is the actors’ voices muffled in their costumes – it wasn’t till late on in the recording that the actors explained how things were usually done and the voices improve by the end. Just in time to hear the,, erm scream: not very Cybermen that, given this race isn’t meant to feel pain or emotions post-conversion. Thankfully one idea planned and budgeted but dropped before recording was giving the Cybermen blue costumes and even hats on Telos to keep out the cold: a daft idea, as Cybermen don’t feel temperatures either (so Koo Stark would have been even more at home, up against a being that can’t physically sweat). The one and only cliffhanger of the Cyberman entering the Tardis is all too obviously there because we’ve reached the halfway point and need some random jeopardy thrown in. I don’t believe the 6th Doctor’s era is as violent as naysayers say but there are two big exceptions to that: the whole of ‘the two Doctors’ and the literally bloody scene here where Lytton’s hands are crushed by the Cybermen as the actor screams and crushes bags on tomato ketchup in his hands so they run through his fingers (and more lifelike as blood than you might think). There are whacking great plotholes too: the Doctor is kept in a prison cell with a known terrorist Cryon that just happens to be full of explosives. Had this been a stupider race prone to making mistakes I’d forgive this for being an oversight or a bit of character, but these are the Cybermen – they’re meant to be logical. There’s another wqhacking great flaw in their plan, that od time-traveller’s complex: if they do take over Earth so Mondas survives they’ll wipe the timeline that meant they invaded Telos which means their plan using the resources on Telos can’t happen. That’s even more illogical. The solution, when it comes, really is ridiculously simple and the ending far too rushed. 

 So, yes, there’s a lot wrong. ‘Attack Of the Cybermen’ is no classic and doesn’t have the same magic, imagination or grace as the stories it tries to emulate. Honestly, though, it’s not that bad either. In an era filled with so many production team mis-steps trying to find a legitimate way forward with such a very 1960s series (about kindness and exploration and optimism) in its very opposite 1980s period (when everything is dog-eat-dog and plundering and the world felt as if it was all going wrong and could never be right again), this reverential and respectful nod to the past is a better response than most of the stories around it. Yes the writer(s?) and director are telling very different stories, the cast don’t seem altogether comfortable and there are little mistakes galore, but there’s a lot of little bits this story gets very right too. Certainly if it was a choice between the older stories being lost and unseen or mere entries in some guidebook and not having them in any form at all then I’m all for this story re-doing it all and even if the recovery of ‘Tomb’ and most of ‘Invasion’ and ‘tenth Planet’ in the years since makes so much of ‘Attack’ irrelevant now they sit together in our collections, well, irrelevant doesn’t mean valueless. See it as the bygone of another age, remembering another bygone age and accept it on its own terms as a one-off and you might yet be ‘converted’. 

 POSITIVES + Someone (allegedly JNT himself) has remembered that in ‘An Unearthly Child’ the Tardis used to be able to change its appearance before it got stuck in the shape of a police box (for budgetary reasons, although the incongruity of something so at-first contemporary then anachronistic landing on an alien planet, sums up this show as well as any other image so they kept it even after they could afford to change it). I might be alone in this, but I really like the much-mocked opening scenes with the landing in Totter’s lane junkyard for the first time since 1963 and that opening story, as the Doctor hits the re-set button and then struggles to find the Tardis door now that it’s a church organ, before going back to the original police box shape anyway. Colin Baker really should have been given more comedy moments – the look of horror on his face every time he acts pompous, only to be proved wrong and Nicola Bryant’s attempts not to giggle and make him feel bad are amongst my favourite Tardis scenes. The part that didn’t work was the producer’s rumour that the change to the Tardis was going to be permanent, drumming up extra publicity before the first episode, even though nobody considered it seriously and notably everyone switched off again by episode two when it was clear that was just a gimmick. In this volatile era Dr Who fans really didn’t need an excuse to lash out at the production team or BBC and this was just adding fuel to a fire that didn’t need to be lit. 

 NEGATIVES - . The Doctor-Peri relationship, still fragile after the Doctor’s regeneration the story before, is at an all time low here as they bicker and quarrel their way across alien planets without any of the love the second Doctor had with Jamie and Victoria or Zoe (by comparison with Cybermen stories past). The 6th Dr-Peri relationship might have improved since ‘The Twin Dilemma’ (I mean, he doesn’t strangle her this time, so that’s a plus) but with this regeneration now apparently as stable as he’ll ever be there’s less excuse for the constant bickering. Scene-setting character bits in the Tardis are usually my favourites but once we’re out the junkyard these seem to go on forever. The production team have had a whole off-season to re-think their approach after the backlash of the 6th Doctor’s debut, but have barely softened it. It’s not the actors’ fault: I’ll go to my grave defending Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant who in real life (and on audio in Big Finish now they’ve softened the characters) have all the chemistry of the olden days, but the script isn’t allowing them to show it, because it thinks ‘arguments’ equates to ‘drama’. Good job then that Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant’s natural and genuine affection for each other shines through despite the script – had they really hated each other as much as their characters then this would all have been unwatchable. Some fans say it still is. 

BEST QUOTE: Russell ‘Who are You?’ Dr ‘I’ve already told you. I am known as The Doctor. I’m also a timelord from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterberous’. Russell: ‘You’re bonkers’ Dr: ‘That’s debatable’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The Cybermen’s revenge for the events of 1^st Doctor story ‘The Tenth Planet’, recycle their plan for invading the Earth via the sewers from ‘The Invasion’ and have ice tombs last seen in ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’.

The 1986 Dr Who Annual features a sort-of sequel ‘Time Wake’ in which the 6^th Doctor and Peri research a ‘time-wake’ where time keeps breaking through from 1720. Peri is most upset to find that the break happens to be in the exact same sewers she’s just left in ‘Attack’!