Silver Nemesis: Ranking - 168

  Silver Nemesis

(Season 25, Dr 7 with Ace, 23/11/1988-7/12/1988, producer: John  Nathan-Turner, script editor: Andrew Cartmel, writer: Kevin Clarke, director: Chris Clough) 

Rank: 168

'Hey man, dig these crazy beats! We've just been hired as the new companions so we can play our trumpets at any aliens we meet because the whole universe needs jazz. Why only today we conquered the Krotons with Coltrane, Jelly Roll Mortoned the Abzorbaloff, Benny Goodmanned the Cyberman into submission and then after we hung out with some cool cats at New New New New York. There was a worrying moment when The Meddling Monk turned out to be disguised as Thelonious Monk, but we defeated him too by taking away his piano-shaped Tardis and turning it into a xylophone. Now the universe is all grooved out and our work here is done' - Miles T Davis and Chet 'Tom Or Is It Colin?' Baker

 

 

 

 

 Doctor Who’s 25th anniversary was an oddly muted affair compared to the big guns that were pulled out for the 10th and 20th anniversaries. John Nathan-Turner, always a producer for every publicity going, tried to interest the BBC in a one-off special (with a one-off fund to go with it) but was turned down flat. The Radio Times sent a photographer round but figured the world needed to see more of an unconvincing rat puppet and a lion with crazy eyes instead (it was week two of the first series of ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’ – sadly not the one with Tom Baker as a Marshwiggle. I blame Michael ‘scifi isn’t popular if I put it up against Coronation Street and stick my fingers in my ears and go la la la really loudly’ Grade). The BBC trailer decided to play up the anniversary with a big flashy trail which stressed the long-running status of the series by…showing some clips from ‘The Web Planet’, a story even fans admit looks a bit silly (that settles it: it just has to be sabotage).  Even behind the scenes the all-important story was handed over not to a big name or a hero of fandom but someone who, by his own admission, had only ever seen a couple of episodes of Dr Who (and hadn’t thought much of those).  In fact Kevin Clarke didn’t even know Dr Who was still on the air when he met a mutual friend named Caroline Alton on a BBC writer’s course who said that script editor Andrew Cartmel was in search of promising new writers and he’d ended up with the anniversary story by default because all the other slots were filled. Even then Clarke originally wrote this story for the Daleks, until Cartmel sheepishly pointed out they already had one of those this season (‘Remembrance’). Clarke had never heard of the Cybermen until JNT suggested the silver giants as a pun on the ‘silver anniversary’ (oh ho ho, how we laughed. For about three seconds). The all-important anniversary date meant this story had to go out when it did even when the BBC messed with the schedules so ‘Nemesis’ ended up not even being the all-important season opener but shunted to slot three out of four. Overshadowed by the ghosts of better Dr Who stories past (‘Remembrance’ set where it all began in 1963), present (‘The Happiness Patrol’ might be about an lien planet in the future but it’s really about Thatcherist Britain in the present) and future (the meta ‘Greatest Show In The Galaxy’, about how the series will wind up if it continues along its current path) there just isn’t a niche for ‘Silver Nemesis’ to slot into, no real reason to exist.  Everything  it has to say has been said before, better.

But it’s an anniversary story right? So everybody party! Except even the making of this story was a struggle. As with jazz, timing in Dr Who is everything and ‘Silver Nemesis’ is one of those stories that was just unlucky at every turn. Clarke, still new to television and Cartmel, still fairly new to script editing, kept hitting problems, signing off reluctantly on draft ‘sixty-four’ of this story to Clarke’s memory (although writers do have a tendency to exaggerate!)  because they’d run out of time. The discovery of asbestos at the BBC meant that ‘Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ was running late, with everyone tired after spending weeks in a tent in the BBC car park, with Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred too busy filming that story to attend rehearsals for this one, so instead of the usual welcoming atmosphere the supporting cast mostly rubbed shoulders with each other and didn’t really find a lot in common to enjoy (or, in Anton Diffring’s  case, anything to enjoy: he rubbished the script every chance he got and admitted that he only took the part to do some paid filming in England while the Wimbledon tennis championships were on: he couldn’t get coverage where he lived in France). Throw in delays in the pre-planning stage (it was Windsor Castle’s turn to mess the BBC around, finally deciding that it would be ‘undignified to let a fictional story be filmed on their grounds and figuring Prince Edward had ‘better things to do’ than cameo in the story) and delays in the filming stage (guest star Dolores Grey accidentally left her wig behind and on the last day, when everyone was behind already, it rained buckets, leading to a last minute switch of scenes and a lot of very drenched actors. The crew took to calling it ‘Black Friday’) and you can see why not many people remember this story too fondly. ‘Silver Nemesis’ is the nemesis of this late period of the ‘classic’ show which showed up all the ways that the show was under-funded, under-loved and misunderstood.

But, separated of the problems making it and the giant strides Dr Who was making in the rest of one of their better seasons, it’s really not that bad, a story that’s unlucky more than anything else. Being fresh to the series means that Clarke has an entirely different view to the series than most people and he makes connections that fans of the series would never have made, all of which make sense. Clarke’ big passion in life is music and he sees all these characters through different genres. The Doctor reveals to Ace that he’s a jazz fanatic and by chance she’s one too – which seems unlikely given what we know of both of them but also sort of fits; Clarke’s handle on The Doctor being a time traveller is that he sees time in a different way to other people: he plays loose with time but with the faith that he’ll somehow hit all the ‘beats’ right on the time they’re needed, which is indeed The Doctor to a tee. Ace, too, doesn’t play by the rulebook so while it seems odd at first that a hip young teenager from a poverty-stricken part of London in the 1980s should be a jazz freak, we also know that Ace would delight in loving something so perverse and unfashionable (and mocking all her peers into 1980s empty synth pop to boot). Clarke, who got to know the Cybermen on a crash course of videos and old scripts Cartel sent him in the post (he liked the black-and-white ones best), equated them with being the opposite of jazz, rigid thinkers who marched to the same beat and had stopped thinking for themselves, which is a pretty good summation to their character. Clarke also threw in two groups of incidental characters in musical terms. De Flores and his troops of ‘German-speaking paramilitaries’ (the BBC is still a bit edgy about saying ‘Nazis’ but everyone knows who they mean) are music’ equivalent to the Cybermen, Wagner, grandiose and racist, spouting Third Reich spiel about the Cybermen as ‘Gods’ and themselves as ‘supermen’ (nobody seems to have had the heart to tell Clarke that Dr Who already had a race of Nazis in The Daleks). Lady Peinforte and her servant Richard, meanwhile, come from the 17^th century and are an interesting case: to us they represent old worlde Renaissance music, with hints of a nostalgia that never was, but that’s only because we’ve forgotten theirs was ‘battle’ music, designed to be played in the enemy’s face while they died a brutal death. Only The Doctor really ‘gets’ the music, meaning he’s the only person who really gets ‘life’: he’s playing cool, daddy-O, while everyone else is stuck playing the same tune over and over. As a fully paid up musicophile myself I love this new way of seeing the Whoniverse.

I just wish Clarke was writing for a different Doctor. You see, Clarke wasn’t enough of a fan to keep abreast of where Cartmel wanted to take the show and I suspect a majority of drafts were Cartmel (one of the kinder, more empathetic script editors) trying to find a middle ground between keeping Clarke’s individual writing style and his own visions for the series. To Cartmel the Doctor is ‘more than just a timelord’ and never more than here, a scheming ruthless regeneration that lures the Cybermen into a trap with the Validium, a sort of ‘magic bow’ that’s related to a comet he himself sent into orbit round Earth, and sees the Humans who come along for their own evil ends as fair game as casualties go. As much as he pretends to Ace that he’s a jazz fan who likes to play things cool (and as well as that sums up the 4^th Doctor in perfectly) he’s not that man anymore. In this generation at least he’s Bach, someone treating music, someone treating life, like a mathematics puzzle that has to be won at all costs. Clarke took to this idea when it was pointed out to him to a degree, taking part in what of the oddest writer’s meetings in Dr Who history where he announced to the script editor and producer that he wanted to make the Doctor mysterious again, offering his theory that he was ‘God’, walking amongst us and ‘saving our souls’ with the occasional sacrifice for our benefit (JNT looked panicked and got Clarke to promise that even if he wrote The Doctor like that he would never actually hint to that on screen; Cartmel admitted he’d been secretly thinking along similar lines).  That’s the problem with ‘Silver Nemesis’ as I see it: the Doctor defeats The Cybermen with freeform jazz, blocking their cyber-signals with music they could never ever understand – and because he’s set a trap for them that’s been years, centuries, perhaps multiple regenerations in the making (he admits to ‘forgetting’ he’d set u this trap, suggesting it’s another Doctor who did it but he could be lying; at a push the 2^nd Doctor - the closest to the 7^th - might have had a bash and Lady Peinforte mentions him being ‘small’ last time she met him, but you’d have thought Dr 2 would have written his future self notes in his 500 year diary). The two sides of this Doctor don’t belong in this same story. They try to cover it up with The Doctor’s comment he likes ‘straight blowing’ best (a nonsense made up phrase by the way, suggesting it’s a style from the future: there is such a thing as ‘straight ahead jazz’ though which started roughly when Dr Who did, a softer more acoustic style of jazz in retaliation to the growing 1960s trend of crossing over with rock and roll. But we all know the Doctor is rock and roll all through anyway, defying rules and authority and expressing freedom, not least because we’re only a year after ‘Delta and The Bannermen’. Which might be where Clarke got his ‘jazz’ idea in the first place). Having The Doctor be evil by trapping no less than three groups of people for effectively ‘being evil’ also makes him the biggest hypocrite since The Queen turned down a cameo on the grounds that she was ‘too busy’ (ditto Prince Edward; I wonder if she ever regretted that after she became a fan of the comeback, reportedly showing the family the series one box set when they came round for Christmas in 2005. Which if nothing explains the rather odd and out of character arrival of Queen Elizabeth X in ‘The Beast Below’ ). ‘Stay cool’ says the jazz and the opening and closing scenes. ‘Kill, kill, kill’ says everything in between, from the Cybermen and Nazis down to the Doctor himself.

On a similar ‘note’ Clarke has more problems than most writers trying to juggle the two very different sides of Dr Who. On the one hand it’s a deeply serious series about real-life problems designed to make you think and question your mortality and the state of the universe and humanity’s place in it; on another level it’s a series made for a family audience with children on a Saturday teatime before the watershed, with a section of the fanbase who tune in for fun. Clarke tries desperately to write for both, but he pitches some of the story as so hard and brutal (a Cyber-Nazi battle should be the most ruthless fight we’ve seen in the entire series, with no quarter given) and some as too light and fluffy (there are no less than three unfunny comedy moments across the story: the typical 1980s skinhead racists who think Lady Peinforte and her servant must be ‘social workers’ because they’re weirdly dressed and a bit posh little knowing they’re more evil and cruel than they could ever be; guest star Dolores Grey giving Lady Penforte a lift and misunderstanding everything they say, played as if it’s the funniest thing ever seen on TV even though it might just be the most cringeworthy scene in all of Dr Who; and The Queen – no not the real one, but a lookalike who seems less like Liz II than I do – walking her corgis while The Doctor fails to recognise her). They don’t belong in the same story, which means that the cyber-Nazi battle, the meeting of two of the most evil species in the universe, comes across as silly after what we’ve just seen, while we’re too shocked from the ramifications of this story to find any of the jokes funny, even if they were hilarious (which they very much aren’t).    

Then there’s the main story itself, which (like the worst of jazz) is so freeform it loses the plot somewhere along the way and forgets what it was trying to say. It looks as if it makes sense from the guidebooks: three groups of people trying to get hold of this week’s big bad object, each convinced of their own superiority, only to find out The Doctor is greater than all of them. But this story takes a weird route from A to B sometimes. There’s all that stuff about the comet being a trap, re-appearing in Earth’s orbit every ’25 years’ and starting all sorts of problems on Earth (except it didn’t: at best it tends to turn up shortly before things get nasty, like the English Civil War – which despite the presence of Roundheads and cavaliers started four years after the date of 1638 Lady Peinforte gives – WWI and WWII. The only date that actually hits is the assassination of JFK, but that was one lone incident that ended up not changing much on a global scale, not least because the next two or three presidents till Nixon knew it was a vote-winner to pledge to carry on Kennedy’s work and even as a big a ratbag as Tricky Dicky who hated JFK after losing to him in 1960 didn’t dare undo any of it).  There’s a stop-off at Windsor Castle because that’s where the comet fell, which seems unlikely to say the least and a sub-pot, relegated to the video and DVD extras, about a trip to the past that resulted in Ace having her portrait painted by Gainsborough. With so many groups to juggle a lot of this story is spent in getting one or more of them out the way they don’t find each other and fight too quickly, which results in such oddities as Lady Peinforte exploring 1988 while her servant gets spooked,  The Nazis discussing philosophy with The Cybermen (why aren’t they shooting at each other?!)  and The Doctor and Ace taking time out to groove along with Courtney Pine. It’s oddly paced this story, slowing down where it feels it ought to speed up and with only three episodes to play with runs out of time to tell the main story, despite all the extras that feel superfluous to the actual story.

It’s also a story we’ve had before. Lots. The bow and arrow with amazing powers the whole universe would like to get their hands on is just the latest macguffin to replace ‘The Time Destructor’ (‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’), ‘The Tomb Of Rassilon’ (‘The Five Doctors’, although for once that trap wasn’t The Doctor’s) and ‘The Hand Of Omega’ (‘Remembrance Of the Daleks’. Given that this last one was, ooh, all of two stories and a month ago every fan still watching noticed that one and given that the plot in ‘Nemesis’ is hazier, crazier and lazier most fans dismissed it as a poor sequel. For me, though, ‘Silver Nemesis’ is a closer cousin of ‘Battlefield’, a similar story full of people from the past lost in the present day, a scheming Doctor who turns out to have a reputation beyond the series and some really great ideas that somehow runs out of time to tell the great story that’s in there. Oh and The Brigadier’s there! (Though it’s  blink and you miss it cameo for Nicholas Courtney who turned up for a day out in Arundel Castle, Sussex, filling in for Windsor Castle as he lived nearby and it was a sort of unofficial ‘I’m leaving anyday now, honest’ wrap party for JNT. Who in the end will stay another year plus. Nick’s wearing a beret in the tourist scenes as it was feared fans might expect a Brig return and be disappointed – certainly The Brigadier fighting Nazi hordes is a much better story than the one we got, here or in ‘Battlefield’. Other members of the crowd include cameos for Clarke, past show directors Peter Moffat, Fiona Cumming and Andrew Morgan, past writer Graeme Curry, JNT’s pa Kathleen Bidmead and Blake’s 7 producer Vere Lorrimer, who knew so much about the castle and looked so vaguely knowledgeable he got a few lines as the tour guide. The master himself Anthony Ainley and writer Stephen Wyatt had planned to come too but heavy rain delayed them. Clarke, attending location filming to check on his story, is also the tourist who gives a comedy double-take when Lady Peinforte and Richard walk past). You’d never call either story the best of the McCoy era, yet the same things apply as to that story: you can tell that this is a lesser story made by a better production in a series that it’s in a much better place than it used to be. When things go wrong in ‘Silver Nemesis’ they go wrong because there are too many ideas, not too few. There’s an ambition about this story that reaches for the sky like all other stories in Who’s final two years, even if in this case it falls a bit flat. Most of all there’s a love and enthusiasm for this series that nearly pulls everything together. In short, like Lady Peinforte’s gold-tipped arrows (gold-tipped incidentally? Gold’s a soft metal, wouldn’t it fall apart? Although given the music motif I’m surprised it’s not a Murray Gold tipped arrow to sing everyone to death emotively) it’s aim is right even when it misses it’s target.

Let’s talk about some of the things ‘Silver Nemesis’ gets right: after 25 years of hinting and using other monsters as metaphors Dr Who finally puts the Nazis in the show (well, ‘paramilitaries from the 1940s with German accents’ as a nervous producer hastily renamed them just in case anyone’s upset, but we all know what they are – they even get Anton Diffring to play the head one who was always playing Nazis in films). In any other period this would have been a stupid move and I can already hear the letters of protest at Tom Baker making jokes and offering Nazis jelly babies or Colin Baker pontificating morals at them. But this is the 7th Dr, the one Doctor ‘dark’ enough to face such a threat head on, while Ace – as a brunette wildchild rebelling against a life of forced motherhood and who would and often tries to give her life for the name of freedom, equality and justice – is the perfect companion to fight back. Both are excellent despite having less rehearsal time than usual, McCoy really digging deep into his darker Doctor by now, going for mean, moody and sinister, a Doctor whose seen the darker forces of nature and isn’t afraid of unleashing them straight back to those who deserve it. Diffring might have thought the script was stupid (it didn’t help that Cartmel sent him a copy of ‘Dragonfire’ of all stories, when he asked for some background of what Dr Who was) but it’s better written than most WWII stories. The Nazis aren’t just your generic baddies: they’re racists with mystical overtones, who really are delusional enough to believe in a promised future when they get to have absolute power over everyone. Better yet the Nazis are shown to be weak simple morally corrupt wannabe cry-babies against the might of the Cybermen, the ‘super men’ they worship but who have no more use for kow-towing obsequious right wingers than they do all other weedy and puny Humans. Cybermen don’t do politics but, like many a monster, the right automatically think they must be one of ‘them’ because they’re ruthless, opportunistic and heartless, heavy on the trigger finger. What they miss is that Cybermen are survivors through and through, victims turned warmongers who became tough through hardship not ideology. I still can’t quite believe they got Courtney Pine to do a cameo; the only shame is that he isn’t in the show more but they genuinely didn’t seem to think he’d show up – actually Courtney was as big a Dr Who fan as any guest who’s been on the show and more than happy to play (especially when Clarke sent a nice letter asking for him specially). The quartet only play snatches of three songs (‘Pe Pi Po’ ‘Adrian’s Affair’ and ‘Frank’s Quest’, the latter used by Ace to jam the Cyber-signals)  and all are pre-recorded and mimed sadly (though specially done for Dr who: by coincidence they ended up being recorded in Lime Grove, with the TV studios where Dr who once started now turned into a soundstage for recordings like this) but they make an impact and are clearly having the time of their lives. If I had to name my favourite plot conclusion to any Dr Who story then it might well be the idea of random jazz signals played through Ace’s ghetto-blaster (cobbled together by The Doctor out of odds and ends in the Tardis, combining bits and pieces from different eras - there’s even a 1930s radio antenna on there) while the pair just sit on the grass quietly grooving.  What other series would even think of that? For ideas alone ‘Silver Nemesis’ is so much better than the bad old days of ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ and ‘Time and The Rani’ when everyone is vamping, looking around for inspiration that doesn’t quite come.

It’s just that, even with missing scenes added to the video (frustratingly they’re absent from the DVD) the plot still doesn’t make sense and relies on faith from the viewer that things happen just because they do. Like ‘Battlefield’ there’s an ancient artefact that everyone’s trying to get hold of that apparently the Doctor dealt with in Britain’s ancient past, only he stuck it way up in the sky this time instead of burying it underground (Why? Seriously, all those adventures and he’s only just got round to doing something about it?) It’s a device that the Nazis equate to the ‘spear of destiny’, a true Nazi legend that would bring about the Third Reich one day (yet nobody refers it to it as this and it doesn’t look like a spear. Why not make it a spear and have done with it? The Nazis clearly didn’t get their myth from this actual object so where did they get it from? And why has Dr Who still not done a story about the ‘bell’ shaped UFO Nazis believed would be their saviour, which is crying out to be a Dr Who story?) Why is the Validium important? Dunno really, it just is. Isn’t that just like the Halley’s comet plot of ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’ via ‘The Tenth Planet’? Why yes it is (what is it about Cybermen and plots involving elliptical orbits? And how weird is it that a writer should look to Dr Who’s most recycled script for ideas?) Oh and the metal in the comet turns sentient, looking just like Lady Peinforte when she merges with it (what the?!) The Cybermen hear about it (how?) and travel in time (how?) to try and get it, even though it’s a very un-Cyber thing to do want to do (they want to convert Humans to add to their numbers rather than have power for power’s sake). I’m guessing this plot strand was left over from the day when it was about The Daleks. Oh and by the way to do all this and get hold of the comet-bow thing The Doctor has to be a contemporary of Rassilon: the hated ‘Timeless Child’ arc might explain that away now, but at the time it left everyone scratching their heads, because we know he isn’t.

It’s not just the Doctor’s timeline this story doesn’t quite fit into either. Poor David Banks, who not only does his typically ‘excellent’ job as Cyber-leader but was so passionate for them he’d just finished writing the book ‘Cybermen’ about them, having to read out a script by someone who’d clearly never heard of them a month before and doesn’t understand them at all. While this is the only story that ever has them time travel. If indeed that’s what they do. Although the only other alternative is to have them come from a ‘second Mondas’. Which seems even less likely). Lady Peinforte and Richard are played with gusto by Fiona Walker (she always had a soft spot for Dr Who after it gave her her TV break in ‘The Keys Of Marinus’ and had always wanted to come back, but was so busy it took twenty-four years, a record for Who at the time!) and Gerad Murphy, but they’re peculiar characters all round. They feel more like pre-history characters than the ones from Camelot in ‘Battlefield’ and are at least a century out of date for the darker, harsher, more realistic feel of the 17^th century (think Cromwell and warts. Or indeed ‘The Awakening’ which covers the period far better despite being a ‘re-enactment’. Well, sort of). Their one plot function really is to show much the world has changed in 350 odd years and how humanity is always free-flowing like jazz, without a Cyber-style plan, but they even mess this up (a cut scene had Peinforte appalled that her nice house is now a pub full of half-dressed people, but this got changed when it became clear a night-shoot would be too expensive, so it became a café instead).

What’s more the Lady uses magic – not science from an alien culture in the far future that looks like magic, but real magic. The idea that you can time travel using some special words, blood and a chicken  (!) is so far out of kilter with everything else we’ve ever had in Dr Who that you’re left waiting for a denouement where we find out what really happened, but no: apparently that’s all you need for time travel (it’s undone somewhat by ‘The Curse Of Fenric’ saying it was his doing, but what’s odder than it happening is that The Doctor’s not even curious). Just compare this back to back with ‘The Daemons’ where he absolutely categorically says that magic does not exist; here The Doctor’s not even curious about it. Come to that you spend the entire story expecting to see the Cybermen massacre the Nazis and we never get that scene either, just Ace running away from both sets up some stairs (poor Sophie Aldred: she was terrified of heights but, game for anything, was just about okay when a 20 foot gantry and lots of rehearsal time was suggested; in the end a change of venues to the dingiest emptiest warehouse you’ve ever seen, with gantries put together an hour earlier by BBC propmen, meant she was 50 foot above the ground on the last day of filming with no rehearsal that she just had to get right or else. Actually a disused gasworks, it’s now the site of the Millennium Dome, so not the last disappointing event to be themed round an anniversary on that spot). As a three-parter, too, it feels as if everyone gets short-changed: Peinforte and Richard are barely sketched in, there’s barely any Cybermen action (and even when there is they get defeated by a teen from Perivale and a slingshot – not the most noble defeat in their long history.

Cybermen were also built for striding down corridors in black and white, not long shots walking across muddy fields in colour) and The Nazis are the quietest most well-behaved bunch of Nazis you ever saw, content to let De Flores be their mouthpiece even though he’s clearly mad even for a Nazi. It’s a real waste of the talents of  Leslie French, then eighty-four and on Verity Lambert’s list of 1^st Doctors if William Hartnell said no, to get a few short lines as the mathematician killed at the start of the story. The battle sequences are some of the poorest in the show’s history: how did a punch-up between Nazis and Cybermen ever end up looking like that, people in long shot vaguely looking at each other with a the odd mild explosion? Why are the Nazis wasted too – you only need to look at ‘Remembrance’ to see how well the theme might have been used, comparing them to the Cybermen, but it doesn’t happen – they’re foot soldiers and nothing more. The dialogue is a struggle at times too: Clarke goes to the struggle of giving everyone very different styles, even the trouble of writing Lady Peinforte and Richard’s dialogue in iambic pentameter (even though it’s the wrong century) but he’s hardly David Whittaker and it just sounds like people speaking gibberish in a different way to the gibberish the monotonous Cybermen and the flowery, delusional Nazis speak. Only Ace speaks ‘normally’, thanks to her creator Ian Briggs adding some dialogue of his own (there’s an injoke where Richard, overawed, prays for his sins and promises to ‘send Briggs his money’) – and when a sixteen year old girl who swears as poshly as she does is the most ‘normal’ character you know you’ve got problems. Then there are easily three of the twenty worst scenes in all of Dr Who. Social workers! Royals! Americans! It’s as if ‘Silver Nemesis’ is designed to impress all the people at home who have been put off Dr Who and think it’s silly, by organising a meeting of the biggest baddest bunch of creatures in the show’s and Earth’s history, then pins a sign in its front going ‘please exterminate me, I deserve it!’

In the end ‘Silver Nemesis’ is a collection of really great ideas (and one or two disastrous ones) rather than a really good story but, again like ‘Battlefield’, it’s a near miss so close to its target that you can feel what the production team were trying to do and you spend the story willing them to get a bullseye right up until the end. And yet the ideas are great: even if they belong in different stories for the most part there are some really brilliant Dr Whoy ideas here: the jazz, the metronomic Cybermen and the Nazis wannabes, even the (nearly) Civil War era witches at loose in the future – there could have been a great trio of stories there had they been done separately. Even together there’s a parallel universe story out there (preferably with an extra episode or more) where they all make sense in the same story. But for whatever reason (my guess; a newbie writer, a tired cast, a weary crew) ‘Silver Nemesis’ doesn’t make the most of any of the good things going for it. For all ‘Silver Nemesis’ promotion of jazz as free-form and timeless, the clock is this story’s real Nemesis: both abstract (the continuity problems) and physical (this story was made in almighty rush) time gets in the way. They had twenty-five years to prepare for this story yet they botch it by rushing at the last minute. Even the music idea, though brilliant, isn’t quite right (if they wanted freeform style music they should have had The Doctor hanging out with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane in Haight Ashbury being a hippie!)

I suspect any other era would have been able to cover up the cracks too, but it’s an oddly nervy story for a series that had been running twenty-five years and so ought to be confident of what it could do by now, but then these were strange and difficult times: there isn’t the celebration atmosphere of ‘The Three Doctors’ ‘The Five Doctors’ or even ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’ (the story that really should have been the 25^th anniversary special. Not least because it looks as if it was filmed in November, not mid-Summer as here with characters walking round in T-shirts. Unless the comet has done something really odd to the weather). The Doctor’s real nemesis is Michael Grade who seems ready to kill it however well it does and no matter how many good ideas it has. Nobody believes in this show anymore, especially the people in power, and that shows: however hard you act tough, like a Nazi or a Silver Giant, life goes in ups and downs and this is clearly a down, in public perception if not reality. The Doctor is trying hard to go with the flow, cooling to jazz, but there are dark clouds on the horizon and – twenty-five years after the first time the show was nearly cancelled – the vultures are circling again (I blame the comet). Few stories sum up the lack of confidence more than ‘Silver Nemesis’, a story that reaches for some big issues, then backs away from them scared. A story equating Nazis with Cybermen and bad luck that follows the human race every quarter century, every time they’re just getting their act together again, is a great idea for Dr Who with lots of philosophical ramifications to muse on. But you have to make those for yourself as they’re not in the script at all: we just have three only slightly different lots of bad guys, fighting the good guy who’s as evil and cruel as he ever gets. This isn’t one of those stories that was so hopeless it was never going to work – it’s just one where too much is working against it, from script problems to production problems to half a cast who clearly don’t want to be there (if you’re wondering by the way Stefan Edberg beat Boris Becker in a tense four set final, a day after Steffi Graff beat Martina Navratilova in one of the topsiest-turviest women’s final matches tennis ever saw. Let’s hope Diffring felt the sacrifice of appearing was worth it for that because boy does he glower on screen).

POSITIVES + Even at its worst and most incomprehensible, even when rushed into filming without a proper rehearsal and still posing for publicity photos in their lunch-break, seasons 25 and 26 glow because of Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred and the love they clearly have for one another. Their Dr-companion relationship is truly one of the best and they seemingly improvise their way round every script, making it feel natural and warm despite the lumpy way it can sometimes look on page (you wouldn’t know this was draft 64-ish, they lay it so naturally throughout). You can tell these two are having a whale of a time together as actors and characters (they bonded quickly after finding they shared a birthday of August 20th – it’s mighty tight which Doctors are which astrological signs by the way if you’re interested in such things with three Earth signs (Drs 1,4 and 7) four Fire signs (all Aries interestingly: 2 5 10/14 and 12), three water signs (3,8, and 11) and five air signs (6,9, war, 13 and 15); the Doctor himself says he’s a Sagittarius ‘probably’ - the sign of the carefree traveller – an in-joke as the series itself has a birthday on November 23rd.  Of all Tardis teams, this is the one that seems the most fun. At least until the 7th Dr goes all gloomy and dark again.

NEGATIVES - Oh God, those ‘comedy’ bits! There’s an American millionaire who wanders into the plot and out again, thinking that Lady Peinforte and Richard are a couple of eccentric Brits rather than a couple of time travellers from the Middle Ages. This scene is there, apparently, because producer John Nathan-Turner wanted a big name American superstar for his overseas cousins and went to the length of borrowing Kate O’Mara’s contact book and phoning around, but because Dr Who was so comparatively unknown there, even after a higher profile 1980s, he got turned down flat by almost everyone. Dolores Grey was a last minute bit of desperation: she was in London appearing on ‘Follies’ on Broadway and had made a name for herself in musicals in the 1950s (she’s in the film of ‘Kismet’ and originated the cowgirl herself in ‘Annie Get Your Gun’ on stage; she’s even won a Tony award and even John Barrowman doesn’t have one of those, albeit for a musical no one has ever heard of it because it was cancelled after just six shows).  JNT thought she was funny even though few Americans knew her at the time and no Brits did, giving her the lushest poshest treatment the BBC could afford. By all accounts, though, she was a pain: her limo was so expensive its owner insisted on driving her himself but was horrified when she treated him like a servant, insisting on having him carry all her mountain of bags even though she was only needed for a few hours. She was late because the driver had forgotten to put petrol in the car, then on arrival she discovered she’d forgotten her wig, causing a mad dash for something else, then handed notes to the lighting, camera and makeup crews on how they had to make her look her best. She also changed the script, refusing to be called ‘Miss Hackensack’ and settling for the ore generic ‘Miss Remington’. Most fans agree it’s not the best use of budget in the show’s history and really shouldn’t have made the final edit when so much got cut. Heck I’d settle for the scene of the duck entering the Tardis (actually a deliberate ‘fake’ for Noel’s House Party, though McCoy seriously argued to have it as a companion).

That’s pretty bad, but cringe anew when the poshest sounding skinheads you ever heard in your life see two people I medieval grab and declare them to be ‘social workers’ though I don’t think many social workers wander around in Medieval garb (why not assume they’re going to a fancy dress party?) They’re then strung upside down from a tree in their underwear. Yeah, that’s really making Dr Who ‘real’ again and appealing to the council estate kids there. The worst one though has to be the near miss with the ‘Queen’ walking her corgis, a look alike so bad I genuinely didn’t know who she was meant to be until I bought my first Dr Who guide book. We’re somehow meant to believe that The Doctor, who recognises pretty much everyone, doesn’t recognise her so that doesn’t help sell who she’s meant to be either. IT’s not just that it’s done so badly, it’s the fact that if this was ‘real’ Dr Who we know they would have been overthrown as part of a cruel tyrannical system with the land they horded and the taxes they took at great expense given back to the masses for free while they themselves get sent to Shada. But Dr Who’s on too much thin ice as it is, so instead it looks like a ‘tribute’ from people trying to get good marks with the teacher (or at any rate Michael Grade). Pah! The Queen was a last minute substitution for Prince Edward who nearly did it, the first time it was ever that way round in the history of the Royals when he was usually a poor substitute for her. Good job it wasn’t Prince Andrew is all I’m saying. Though Ace would have soon put him straight with some Nitro 9 if he’d tried anything on her. Although for once I do have some sympathy for the Royal Family: they spent the 1987 Royal Variety performance sitting through a star turn by…Dolores Grey. Ha ha ha who’s laughing now?!?

BEST QUOTE: Lady Peinforte: ‘This is no madness. Tis England’.

 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Silver Nemesis’ is the last time we see the Cybermen before their revival in ‘Rise Of The Cybermen/Age Of Steel’, but they had a sort of half-life in between the two. After it became clear the TV Movie would not lead to a new series after all and that the BBC still weren’t interested in making any new episodes there was a rush by several different groups to keep the flame alive in as many different ways as possible. ‘Cyberon’ was one of the more interesting revivals, a sort of unofficial augmentation of the Cybermen from BBV Productions that became an audio book, a video, a novel, an anthology and a webcast and another ‘halfway house’ towards the Big Finish production company that uses many of their talents. Given that the Cybermen were still sort of copyright the BBC and definitely the copyright of writers Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler a few changes had to be made to them. The Cyberon are slightly different to the Cybermen in that, while they’re still human beings augmented by cyber-technology, they’re controlled by a silver-coloured liquid drug that converts people from the inside and connects them to a single hive mind (like the Borg, or indeed the Cybermen of the future in ‘Nightmare In Silver’). They now wear white tunics and have three fingers on each hand, though happily they keep their metal handlebars and accordion chests and (less happily) their deadly allergy to gold. Nicholas Briggs’ ‘Cyber Hunt’ (1998) started the ball rolling on audio, a spin off of the excellent fan made ‘Audio Visual Adventures’ that had Briggs himself as the 9^th-Doctor-in-all-but-name (though frustratingly it’s not on archive.org website with the other Audio Visuals) accompanied by journalist Olivia as a Cyberwar spreads over the universe and towards Earth. ‘Cybergeddon’ (2000) features a part-robotic starship captain and his pet robot (a little like ‘The Pirate Planet’) desperately trying to fight off a Cyber invasion from space. Lance Parkin then wrote the direct-to-video story simply titled ‘Cyberon’ (2001), a logical extension of the series that made the most of the ‘monologue’ style low-budget no-frills style by being a prequel, following a Cyberon during the conversion phase as a Doctor (no, not that Doctor) offers it as an alternative to death (which is not unlike a low budget ‘World Enough and Time’). I don’t think its giving much away to say that the Cyberon slowly loses all trace of the patient’s  personality and instead starts having ideas of its own about world domination! The series was then left dormant until 2020 when it was unexpectedly revived again, with Parkin adapting the video in prose form as part of an anthology alongside short stories by other writers (again simply titled ‘Cyberon’). This story was promoted by way of a forty-second webcast ‘Cyberon Is Back!!!’ which resembled ‘Death Comes To Time’ ‘Real Time’ and the 8^th Doctor ‘Shada’ as a sort of audio adventure-with-pictures. The two audio adventures were then novelised with a second webcast ‘More Than Human’ and an audio anthology of the three. While none of these appearances were official the ‘Cyberons’ did appear alongside The Cybermen in the 1988 Dr Who Annual (a fan fundraiser to fill the gap on bookshelves that in reality came out in 2022!) All are worth reading/hearing/seeing and fill in a hole of what the Cyberman might have looked like post ‘Silver Nemesis’ if Dr Who had been around in the 1990s (they’re very heavily influenced by Star Trek: Next Generation and The Borg) and are readily available right now, though equally none are un-missable either if you’re reading this in the far future and struggling to get hold of a copy of any of them. 

Previous ‘The Happiness Patrol’ next ’The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’