The King's Demons
(Season 20, Dr 5 with Tegan, Turlough and Kamelion, 15-16/3/1983, producer: John Nathan-Turner, writer: Peter Grimwade, director: Tony Virgo)
Rank: 148
'Once again we sing in praise of total war,
With what you might call an unwanted encore,
Never mind eternal scrutiny,
This Robot's caused a flipping mutiny,
This is what we found later,
Our The nobles attacked by tissue compression eliminator,
Now I find our own King John,
Who was here a minute ago is surely gone,
Sir Gilles Estram also departed the Doctor too,
As is the funny little box painted so blue,
And served with gold a robot,
that looked like our King - the stupid clot,
Word doth tell we were all fooled,
'Twas not The King who on us ruled,
Well 'pon my soul and rip my garters,
Thank goodness we still have the Magna Carta'
Gadzooks! That accursed bounder The Master is at it again, in surprisingly enough only the second Dr Who to feature an English Medieval castle and only the third to feature Errol Flynn style swordplay even though everyone thinks Dr Who stories do this sort of thing all the time. Surrounded by bigger shoutier longer stories this two-parter is a low key jape that almost nobody remembers and even the Doctor himself calls ‘small time villainy’, but it is somehow endearing and under-rated all the same, perhaps because it doesn’t pretend to be anything more space-filler between space-stories. Which seems an odd thing to say about a story surrounding King John singing ‘The Magna Carta’, the cornerstone of modern English democracy and a candidate for one of the most important documents at least in Europe and the Americas (a lot of whom ‘borrowed’ ideas of state from us – and did it better, for the most part, getting rid of Royalty altogether). It is, you could say, one of the most obvious Dr Who stories you could do, the moment when cruel tyrannical overlords agreed to give some of their power away to the people they ruled and the start of the sort of utopian ideal that this series is always striving to present. After all the Doctor has destroyed so many feudal systems in space by now that it would be wrong if this monumental moment, this first step towards a fair and equal society, wasn’t shown in the series somewhere and it’s actually rather odd that the Hartnell era, which did stories like this all the time, never got round to it. By this point in Dr Who I was crying out for the series to get away from the mad futuristic stories that make no sense and see how the most gentlemanly of Doctors fared back in the past so this story set in 1214 (the furthest back the series had gone since season two!) ticked all the boxes what with some Doctor-Master fighting against a backdrop of castles, playing out their feud of equality v dictatorships in an English medieval setting that just feels right. The story is a lot of fun that never hangs around long enough to get boring or take itself too seriously. It’s certainly a lot more entertaining than the ‘Knight’s Tale’ film that ripped off almost this entire plot (minus, y’know, the two timelords and the android) and filled the soundtrack with a lot of horrible anachronistic Queen songs (shudder). Of course it helped that I knew it first from Terence Dudley’s Target novel of his own script, which has the space to do just that thanks to being a two-parter given the usual 180-ish page word count had oodles of space to develop characters and back story in a way the TV series never could.
On TV it’s a slightly
different story, not least because the adventure gets so much wrong. This is
isn’t the sort of lavish historically accurate story Dr Who used to do every
other month – it’s an ongoing chapter in Dr Who: the soap opera, in which The
Doctor and The Master pick things up from where they started and carry on as if
they were still on some alien planet, while Tegan and Turlough don’t get to
explore this world at all, instead being shut up in various dungeons to keep
them out the way. It’s also way too simple, a children’s history-book version
of events because the production team genuinely think their audience can’t cope
with anything too clever, which is as far away from where Dr Who started as you
can get. Rather than a story where the past is re-created in loving detail and
shown as a complex, confusing, nuanced tangled web of motivations where no
character is entirely right or entirely wrong we get The Master and his pet
robot pretending to be ‘Bad’ King John while the Doctor sides with the ‘good’
barons trying to stop him. It’s every cliché those older historical stories
avoided, a storybook version of England that blatantly isn’t true, with events
that never happened and language that would never have been spoken (even with
the aid of Tardis translator circuits: everyone would still have been speaking
French for starters), even after you take the two timelords and the android out
of the equation. Back in the days of old history used to be a more complicated
place than the viewers might have realised but here it’s all diluted to an
easily digestible form that, well, isn’t quite right with ‘The King’s Demons’ a
candidate for the least accurate Dr Who historical of them all (at least until
Queen Victoria turned out to be part-werewolf in ‘Tooth and Claw’ and The
Master ended up as Rasputin in ‘Ascension Of The Cybermen’ despite looking
nothing like him). You only need to compare this story back to back with ‘The Crusade’ from 1965, set in a similar
time period and featuring John’s better loved brother Richard The Lionheart to
see the differences: in that story you agonised over Richard’s need for funds
even when you were appalled at him talking about selling his own sister out to
broker peace; equally for all the talk of the good Christian Englanders fearing
him the Muslim baddy Saladin turns out to be every bit the gentleman Richard
wants to be, fair and courteous. Both men are trying to do what’s best for
their kingdoms and are sad that to do that they have to attack the other. But
‘The King’s Demons’? The history books all call him ‘Bad King John’ and nobody
liked him (with many calling him a ‘demon’ for real compared to his brother) so
he’s clearly the baddy and the people standing up to him must be the good guys.
The truth was far more complex again: John was the ‘bad guy’ because he kept hiking up the taxes and tried to negotiate with the hated King Phillip of Spain when Richard was imprisoned (a kind thing to do as a brother, if not a wise idea as a Monarch) while it was Richard who was fighting the costly losing battle of The Crusades; by the standards of his day he was a pretty kindly tolerant King, one who was prepared to do what was best for the country not just his throne. Oh and he disagreed with the Pope over a choice of Archbishop of Canterbury, the second most powerful position in England at the time, thus leaving the post open and causing England to be temporarily ‘heathen’, the ultimate sin. Compared to the random slaughter and excessive misery of some other monarchs, though, John was a stand up dude (even the Doctor sticks in a random line that ‘he was a good King – for his time’, as if Dudley finally got around to doing some research late on and realised this too late). John’s reputation still persist though: he’s a cowardly lion in the Disney film ‘Robin Hood’ released just six years before this story, which tells you all you need to know (and yes he did have some right bad ‘uns on his staff, The Sheriff Of Nottingham amongst them most likely: again portrayed by Disney as a wolf, which tells you all you need to know). The barons didn’t treat the working classes any better than The King and arguably less so in this era; their negotiations were to help themselves not the whole of England. No one was thinking of democracy, merely their own pockets.
You can just imagine
Peter Grimwade pitching the idea and everyone on the Dr Who production team
getting excited by the thought of doing a Who story about democracy – until he
dropped into the library, did some research and found how slow, boring and
non-visual the process of democracy was in the 13th century and then deciding
to do it anyway. Because you see the big elephant in the room in the suit of
armour is that The Magna Carta isn’t what people think it is. Far from being
the document that created democracy straight away to all deserving people it
was a vague truce between The King and the richest dudes in the land, an
agreement made in the wake of a disastrous battle of the Bouvines (which wasn’t a fight over a
field with cows; it was in Flanders, which must surely have had more skirmishes
per square inch than any other place in Europe) that The King wouldn’t keep
asking for money over and over in return for the loyalty of the people most
likely to give it and some quick cash. At the time it was even seen as quite a
coup for King John, pretty much because that’s what it seemed to rule out; in
return they got the tiniest flimsiest agreement that the King couldn’t take
away all their rights on a whim– although he still could take away most of
them. Both sides ignored the paper repeatedly within weeks of signing it (at Runnymede,
where the ‘real’ King John is when this story is taking place). Many dismiss
the King’s ‘cavalier’ attitude but in the context of the times he was benign,
the first monarch to ever contemplate handing over any of his power (Cromwell
should be so lucky). Besides there never was just one Magna Carta: it was added
to, developed and changed over time so that it was only by the end of the
century, in 1297, under Edward I, that it looked anything like an actual
agreement between a King and his people. And even then there’s nothing about
treatment of 95% of the population, the serfs who toiled the land and kept the
animals, just a bunch of posh guys and soldiers (and absolutely definitely no
women or foreigners). The Magna Carta was never quite what people take it for
now: that was an invention by 16th century historians who started
seriously looking into English history for the first time and wanted to whip up
hostilities against their current enemy (France, again) by claiming that
England was once a peaceful place of individual kingdoms getting along, with
peace treaties between each other until The Normans came along and messed that
all up. It really helped their cause if they had proof of a later document of
English kingdoms coming together as a democratic union and The Magna Carta was
the closest they could find, cue lots of texts about how The English are better
than their heathen neighbours etc etc. It changed absolutely nothing: the peasants
were still revolting in more ways than one for a good few years yet while the
Royals stayed stinking rich for the next, well, till right now if you’re really
asking (if anything it’s worse nowe The King has more palaces and land and tax
breaks John could only dream of). In truth had The Master got away with
interrupting the signing of The Magna Carta it would have changed absolutely
nothing, never mind ‘the foundations of democracy’ as he thinks: people were
still too scared to stand up to a King, put on the throne by the divine right
of God after all (so everyone thought back then) so it was never challenged or
put into action. Not to mention the fact that disrupting the Magna Carta would
only change English history: much as we like to tell ourselves we were rulers
on an international stage at most it would cut out The British Empire and cause
a lot of other countries to speak French or Spanish or Dutch and probably not
even that. Well may The Doctor call The Master’s meddling ‘small time
villainy’; it wasn’t so long ago (in ‘Logopolis’) when The Master felt like the
only real threat he was scared of. This scheme is a bit of a nuisance by The
Meddling Monk, not a universe-shattering event by The Master and cheapens the
character by lowering his ambition so much.
Even with so many of the
details wrong though this ‘feels’ like something Who should be doing for this
plot is exactly what so many of those 4th Doctor stories in space
were about (making sure democratic equality prevails against tyrants) turned up
a notch because we know firsthand just what’s at stake if it all goes wrong. There
really was a 13th century myth that John was a demon come to test
the nerve of his subjects, something many people have felt under many a King
but few ever spoke out as loudly as this and thus a perfect gap to slip a Dr
Who story into.
As for The Magna Carta this may have only been a tiny step but
it was a first step on the road away from dictatorships, taking away a ruler’s
right to just do whatever the hell they wanted. So it makes perfect sense that
The Master, of all people, should step in and do whatever the hell he wants
anyway – he’s the ultimate autocrat to The Doctor’s democrat. Considering that
both script writer and script editor didin’t like The Master (producer John
Nathan-Turner did though and put Ainley on a regular retainer, on condition he
appear in at least one story a year – Dudley got the short straw, at least
partly because Saward didn’t want to saddle one of his preferred writers with
a character he didn’t like) but he
writes for him well, with The Master a scheming manipulator and master of
disguise again, even if there’s no reason for either his scheme (which is
piddling by master standards) or the disguise (now he’s just dressing up in
case The Doctor turns up so he can gloat: goodness knows what the locals think
is going on in the scene where he changes appearance, as nothing is more likely
to make him seem like a ‘demon’ than changing your face, yet he still seriously
thinks he can keep them on side). The story feels right for their latest
showdown: more right than stealing Concorde or transforming into a CGI snake
that possesses people anyway. This really is a battle between good and evil in
its barest terms, one fought not with sci-fi gadgets but with actual swords,
The Doctor and Master fencing each other for the second and final time
(carrying on their feud from ‘The Sea Devils’, though note how much better The
Master has become and how much rustier The Doctor has, despite his quick fight
as the 4th Doctor in ‘The Androids Of Tara’; he’s not used to
fighting with this regeneration’s hands). Though not up to the fight scenes in
either of those stories Ainley and Peter Davison did do it themselves with no
stunt doubles so that’s a bonus mark right there, the actors giving it their
all while the awed locals stare on, scared to intervene in what seems like a
‘divine battle’ between two demons fighting over their souls.
This isn’t true history,
this is storybook history, more like the influential series ‘The Adventures Of
Sir Lancelot’ starring William Russell (the most famous British export if you
were American in the 1950s and 1960s) than the Dr Who stories starring William
Russell as Ian Chesterton. Even if it isn’t the most accurate representation of
early 13th century England, though, I love the fact we’re back here
at all. It had been a full six years since the last Dr Who story set before the
20th century for longer than a few minutes at a time (The
Renaissance of ‘The Masque Of Mandragora’) and the 5th Doctor makes
a lot more sense in this land of chivalry and charm than he does fighting
monsters in the future or hanging around in the present day.
While The Magna Carta itself is a red herring representation of it this is an era all about change and it’s a fascinating period to visit. The past is changing, new ideas are coming in and there’s a sense that life will never be the same again. In this pre-science pre-technology pre-psychology era, when religion was still seen as the leading cause of everything, every last alteration seemed like the act of either God or The Devil and the most accurate part of ‘The King’s Demons’ is the very real re-action the locals have to everything, as if it’s some sort of test that might damn them and their country to Hell if they fail and trust a ‘demon’ by accident. Do they trust this swordsman and his way with words? I mean he is a favourite of The King who does all his bidding, but then again – he is French (a nice detail that everyone always laughs at, mostly because poor Anthony Ainley has never had to speak French in his life and doesn’t feel very comfortable with it, but in context the absolute first sign that someone was a demon to a Middle Age Englishman). Some of those laws are clearly daft but should they trust him anyway because God appointed him? Or do they trust the new interloper, who acts even less like a King and arrived in the sky in a flaming blue chariot and is clearly the work of witchcraft? These people are in shock, unsure what to think and winning them over is a lot harder for The Doctor than it is in most other stories set in the future, because the stakes for trusting the ‘wrong’ person are that much bigger.
The big worry of the day
was that you could be replaced by an evil doppleganger, a demon who would cause
misery in your name and destroy your reputation in an era when it was pretty
much all you had and your only chance of ever finding work and getting food.
Dudley cleverly taps into that with a story about a shape-shifting robot. Fans
(and script editor Eric Saward) can and have complained about Terence Dudley’s
scripts and the way he seems to have got the gig on the back of his friendship
with producer John Nathan-Turner (after they worked together on ‘All Creatures
Great and Small’) but in his defence he didn’t half get saddled with the
difficult commissions. Because ‘The King’s Demons’ is the only Dr Who story in
history deliberately written round an expensive prop. ‘The King’s Demons’ only
exists because JNT was contacted by electronics expert Richard Gregory and
software designer Mike Power in a moment of desperation: they’d created roughly
two-thirds of a prototype real life robot that could independently walk and
talk with the money from a promised car advert, only for the company to get
cold feet and cancel it, leaving them in debt. Then they switched to making a
low budget horror movie in the vein of ‘Westworld’, but that too got cancelled.
The pair needed some quick money and the best way would be to use more money to
finish it off properly, but what company would need a robot? Then somebody
suggested Dr Who. Most producers would have turned it down straight away –
especially on a budget the size of Dr Whos in the 1980s – and JNT still gets a
lot of backlash now for being reckless with the idea of Kamelion, including
most of the people who worked with him (Saward and Davison amongst them). But
for all his (many) faults JNT could be brave when he thought a gamble was worth
taking and he genuinely thought Kamelion was. He’d been after a companion who broke
the mould and, after a botched attempt to make Turlough a would-be murderer, an
actual robot was a good idea, plus it would put one over on C3PO from ‘Star Wars’
and make Dr Who look ‘current’. Calling Gregory and Powers into his office he
was impressed with the unfinished robot (dressed in a 1950s bathing suit
complete with bathing cap for the bits they hadn’t finished yet) and agreed to
fund it. And the robot really should have worked: it could walk (sort of,
almost, though in truth it was a long way from waling convincingly), it could
talk (after a lot of pre-programming, lip-synching to a prepared cassette tape)
and it was different and distinctive and new and bold and everything he wanted
Dr Who to be. It was also a sort of compromise in the growing feud between
producer and script editor: Saward was adamant that four 25 minute segments
only gave him enough space to flesh out one companion while JNT, a lover of
soap operas, wanted a whole team: with the robot along they could make a
‘second character’ who could be anyone they wanted it to be! Dudley was asked
to write a story specifically for Kamelion and there were plans to have him in
every story for the next year or so. Most guidebooks will tell you Kamelion was
always a stupid idea that should never have been tried and that this cutting
edge development should have been cut. After all, we can’t do what Kamelion was
intended to do now in 2023 so having him perform exactly the way he was pitched
in 1983 seems courageous bordering on foolhardy. Honestly though it could have
worked – the developers had done the hard work by having it’s lips move in time
with speech - and if it had it would have been brilliant; no other series had a
real life robot and it would have been a colossal feather in Dr Who’s cap at a
time of falling viewing figures when it badly needed one (as well as being a
substitute K9 for a young audience that had never quite forgiven the show for
getting rid of their favourite companion). He fits in too with the hard-science
and visions-of-the-future the production team were going for in 1983 and in an
era when computers were changing by the month its not that far-fetched (at
least until they try to make it walk). Sure it was a risk (not least because
all scripts had to be programmed two weeks before broadcast, with no robot
available for rehearsal, in an era when stories were often being changed right
up to the day before deadline) but so were The Daleks, so was The Tardis, so
was regeneration: if the people in charge of making this show always paid
attention to the people warning them things couldn’t be done there wouldn’t be
a show at all.
Only something awful
happened that no one could have foreseen. In between that first meeting and the
first draft of the script and the episode going into full production Powers
died in a freak boating accident (what with longtime Who director Lennie Mayne
dying in his own boating accident in 1977 this seems statistically awfully high
for one show). While the robot was Gregory’s baby in the sense that he was the
visionary it was Powers who had all the technical knowhow and could say if things
could or couldn’t be done and him that got the robot actually working. Powers
hadn’t left any notes figuring he didn’t need to: he was part owner of Kamelion
and wasn’t going anywhere while Gregory wouldn’t have understand how the thing
worked and no one else was interested. So by the time of recording the series
had a colossal problem: the main part of the story simply didn’t work, at least
now how he was envisioned. He could sort of talk, a bit, but he couldn’t walk
or even stand up and he certainly couldn’t carry off a whole story. Hence these
hurried re-writes that had Kamelion changing into other personalities as
quickly as possible (played by the wonderful Gerald Flood as King John some
twenty years after starring in the single biggest influence on Dr Who
‘Pathfinders In Space’ in which the first astronaut find a couple of children
and even a guinea pig stowed away in his space rocket, plus Ainley and Davison)
and where the robot has to be used he’s doing the simplest thing they can find
for him to do (strum a lute) and always sitting down. No wonder ‘The King’s
Demons’ seems so rushed then, especially in episode two after the robot ruse is
revealed and with a particular weak ending (where, basically, the Doctor makes
him ‘nice’ then scarpers with him into The Tardis before The Master can get
him). If the first version of ‘The King’s Demons’ has survived then sadly I’ve
never seen it but what with the hints in the novel (which isn’t that different,
just longer) I’m willing to bet it was a lot better and polished than what we
got. After all it’s a good idea to have a robot that can impersonate people and
is so clearly technologically independent, not run by wires or a man in a sit
(because no actor has legs like Kamelion!) It’s a rotten shame it wasn’t to be
and that, as seen on screen, Kamelion looks so flimsy and is so badly
under-used, barely doing anything at all. I mean, even Turlough isn’t scared of
him – and you know something’s gone wrong when that happens! He’s clearly a
failure, for all the good intentions and the fact he doesn’t work means the
story written around his introduction can never work either. Alas Gregory never
did get the money needed to properly finish him as JNT distanced himself from
the project. Instead Kamelion is abandoned after this story, dumped in a
cupboard (a cut scene from ‘The Awakening’ apart that was never used) until his
finale in ‘Planet Of Fire’ in another Doctor-Master showdown that left most
fans asking ‘eh? What was the point of that then eh?!’
The failure of Kamelion
has rather come to dominate how people see this story, usually as a colossal
failure and that’s not helped by a
couple of other things that go wrong in a production that seems to have been
cursed by a real demon (there is, indeed, a longstanding rumour of an actual
Kamelion curse on everyone who ever played him, with Powers’ early death quickly
followed by Flood a few years later in his early 1960s, the actor who plays
him/Howard in ‘Planet Of Fire’ dying very young, while Ainley wasn’t exactly elderly
at seventy-one – Davison ought to be feeling nervous). This story was written to
be followed by ‘The Return’, a big season finale starring a big surprise (well
OK, not that much of a surprise – it was The Daleks) but a production strike
meant that story was cancelled, resurrected as ‘Resurrection Of The Daleks’ the
following year. The fanbase didn’t know that though: they saw this story was a
season finale, hoped for big things and then were far more disappointed with
the anticlimax of ‘The King’s Demons’ than
they would have been had they just seen it as story six out of seven. A problem
they really should have done something about was the fact that this story ended
up a two-parter: from what I understand it was always planned as such from the
start which seems ridiculous given the new toy to play around with and The Master
to fit in and Dudley gets no time to flesh out any of the characters that well.
There are way too many whacking coincidences where The Doctor just happens to
stumble on the action when he needs it (oh look it’s a joust and oh look it’s
The Master and I wonder what’s behind this door and oh look it’s a robot and
gosh is that iron maiden I’m pointing to really The master’s Tardis? Who’d have
thought it!) The Doctor over-powering The Master to take away his tissue
compression eliminator seems a bit easy too (the Ainley incarnation must have
been eating too many banquets; there’s no way the Delgado regeneration would
have given up when fighting The Doctor). There’s no chance to explore this
world and see people do anything that doesn’t directly relate to the plot and
when you’re somewhere as interesting as 13th century England that’s
a shame. Particularly for the companions who barely say a word (and when they
do it’s awful, Saward adding a lengthy final scene in the Tardis where the
Doctor emotionally blackmails Tegan into staying when she doesn’t trust the
robot and thinks The Master will just take it over again– as it turns out she’s
utterly right but won’t be around when it happens, robbing us of the chance to
see The Doctor admit she was right). This is Turlough’s first story where he
isn’t under the influence of The Black Guardian and he’s not untrustworthy
enough to be interesting anymore but not an interesting reliable reformed
goodie either, he’s just a bored passenger. Plus Turlough’s uncharacteristically
constantly whinging about wanting to go home and Tegan even more uncharacteristically
keeps running away from danger – they’ve started turning into each other!
In terms of supporting characters
too it’s a waste of a good cast, with Frank Windsor as Ranulf barely finding it
worth getting into Medieval garb and Isla Blair barely getting a line despite
being a leading actress of her day (by coincidence she was married in real life
to Julian Glover, who’d played John’s brother Richard in ‘The Crusade’ eighteen
years earlier!) Flood, as good a candidate for a Doctor prototype as any in ‘Pathfinders
In Space’ mostly asked to eat or sing. It’s a shame because this, of all stories,
is about the importance of the little people who matter and shape history every
bit as much as Kings or barons and how the Doctor is their champion, there to
see justice and fairness done rather than simply suck up to the highest people
up the food chain. As things with Kamelion turn out having less screentime is
probably a blessing, enough to make me wonder if this story was actually
planned as a four-parter and cut down, though I can’t see any evidence for it
(and one story this year had to be given the mount of episodes granted by the
BBC for 1983 and it certainly wasn’t going to be Saward’s cancelled baby). Had Kamelion
worked I have an awful feeling it would have felt even more rushed and the
ending even more sudden. Because that’s
the biggest problem with this story: the action happens and then it just simply
ends, with the Doctor running away and The Master free to run after him. There’s no resolution, no sight of what happens when
the real King John signs the real Magna Carta and no sense of how this episode
with demons changing the people in this kingdom who never quite knew who to
trust and probably hate The King with a vengeance now (nice one Doctor, maybe
that’s where the rumours of him being a ‘demon’ come from!) Oh and one real
oddity somebody really should have noticed: the script references Ranulf
as a king of 45, his wife Isabella 28 and Hugh their son is 20. Eh??? She’s not
his second wife, she’s his first. They had children young back then but not
that young! (Besides it would have been physically impossible for the most part:
girls actually went through menstruation at a later age, mostly because of poor
diets). There’s a massive plotehole too: I mean, what does The Master need
Kamelion for? He’s already a master of disguise (hence why the Doctor couldn’t
see through it) so why doesn’t he just become King John himself? Or better yet
have Kamelion change into someone who really mattered to Earth history (he
could impersonate the 3rd Doctor in the 1970s/1980s for a start and
cause all sorts of trouble at UNIT HQ. Maybe he did and that’s why the Brigadier
is always in such a bad mood?!)
The problem is what could and should have been an epic, looking at the age-old struggles of mankind to overcome their limitations and club together to overthrow their tyrannical persecutors, all ends up feeling a bit small, as if someone took a nicely epic looking story and shrunk it with a tissue compression eliminator. The result could have been a tragedy tour de force like ‘The Crusade’ and it’s unfortunate it ends up feeling uncomfortably close to pantomime with its ‘behind you!’ disguises and sudden fights and escapes. Both by design and by accident ‘The King’s Demons’ keeps pulling a lot of the punches it should have been giving, so that it comes off feeling like less than a full story and more like an excuse to give Ainley some work and tick another quota box about travelling back in time, rather than making the story it should be telling like in the olden days. By rights ‘The King’s Demons’ should be much more than what it is and what with the main prop it was written for no wonder people write it off as a failure. But I still like this story, both for what it could have been and for what it is. See this story as it was meant to be though, as a two-part bit of historical breathing space in the middle of pair of hard-hitting futuristic stories, and it makes a lot more sense. There are individual scenes that soar (Grimwade is an under-rated writer I think, with some classy lines sprinkled throughout, such as The master commenting ‘quite…masterfully’ when Kamelion takes his form) and the cast and costume and set departments that are trying hard to make this story shine even when the circumstances are trying to pull everything back to the dark ages. No this lightweight story really isn’t the heavyweight champion it should have been, but if you treat it as being ‘joust for fun’ it’s not bad at all. Better than its reputation anyway.
POSITIVES + It looks gorgeous
and it’s almost a shame we have to have a plot: the best parts of this story by
far are the jousting and the eating, the bits of colour of ordinary 13th
century English life. No one can do medieval banquets like the BBC and this one
beats the rather paltry finger buffet in ‘The Time Warrior’ hands down. It all feels
lush and excessive and gives the starving peasants every reason to hate the
nobility. The styles, all gothic castles and tunics, also makes this the single
most new wave and 1983 Dr Who story possible even if it is set in 1215 (this
was the era of Adam and The Ants as highway robbers after all). The jousting
scenes outside Bodlam Castle in Sussex (sadly the indoors is a set, albeit a
very good one) look impressive too, with a lot more extras than we normally see
milling around with banners and flags. Though Grimwade was careful to make this
story historically accurate in the sense that he specified it was set in Odiham
Castle in Basingstoke, the actual place Magna Carta was signed. Bodlam was an
excellent practical alternative to what was, by 1983, a crumbling ruin: it was
nearer to TV centre so cheaper and looked the part, very close to Tunbridge
Wells where that year’s JNT Christmas panto ‘Cinderella’ was taking place
(allowing both Davison and Ainley to knock off work early and travel there
quicker: Davison was Buttons and Ainley Baron Hardup).
NEGATIVES - There’s
another ruddy song, one that’s better performed than ‘The Ballad of The Last
Chance Saloon’ in ‘The Gunfighters’ but is even poorer in construction, the
only part of the score completed by longtime composer Peter Howell before
moving on to other work (newcomer Jonathan Gibbs did the rest and that’s not quite
right either, all twinkly anachronistic synths and winks to camera). I mean, look at
those ridiculous words: ‘no riches here on Earth’, ‘scutage in eternity’? What
does it even mean? Well not that 99.9% of the audience would have known but ‘scutage’
was a tax paid by knights who didn’t want to fight in wars so they would send money
instead. So basically this is a song about taxes: how thrilling. In the context of the Crusades its natural
that a King should sing a rousing song about how they’re going to defeat the
Saracen infidels with God on their side but...this song doesn’t really say
that. It’s basically a pirate treasure song praising the idea of having money
while quoting bits from the Bible which seems an odd thing for a King to be
doing, even an android one. And why build an android and go to such trouble to
make him learn how to play the lute if you didn’t have to? As we know from
today’s AI its fairly easy to get them to make small talk like a Human or do
something logical like play chess, but the minute you start putting fine hand
gestures in there too you’re in trouble. Well, The Master does have time on his
hands in this century I suppose. The thing is though, if you had all eternity
and nothing better to do than programme an android then surely you’d come up
with a better song and/or singing voice than this bizarre Leonard Cohen type
growl? If John wasn’t a King he’d be put in the stocks for making that
caterwauling din!
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Amazing we’ve still never had the full
story of how The Master, trapped on Xeriphas, first met Kamelion: a sign,
perhaps of how much Whovians want to distance themselves from Kamelion. He
doesn’t feature in as many extra-curricular stories as you’d think either, given
that on radio or in print they can actually make a robot work properly. There’s
just one main one: ‘The Crystal Bucephalus’ (1994) is one of the ‘Missing
Adventures’ novels that fills in a lot of the gap between this story and
‘Planet Of Fire’ and fills in a bit more of the back story of Kamelion and what
happened to him while he was lurking on board The Tardis not doing much between
episodes. It’s probably not what you expect! Craig Hinton’s Who debut, it’s a
sort of spin on the second of Douglas Adams’ ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The
Galaxy’ with an intergalactic restaurant run by Goat-like aliens not at the end
of the universe but one that’s, well, everywhere, being timeless. It also
happens to be owned by the Doctor, sort of. A very Moffat-style time travel in
reverse story, it does the usual Dr Who thing of the regulars being kidnapped
and rescued but in deeply unusual, surreal settings. It feels at times like a
nervous breakdown put into words, at others like a drug-induced fantasy and is,
perhaps, a little too ambitious for its own good but when this book works its
brilliantly insightful to the main leads (putting some flesh on the metallic
bones of Kamelion, for instance, by showing how lifeless he feels after so long
with The Master’s dominant personality inside him and having him taken over
again, leading to his sort-of banishment to the back of the Tardis across his
next few stories), brilliantly self-indulgent (there’s a Dr Who continuity
reference every other page – and on the pages between that there’s most likely
a Star Trek one, as well as an explanation for why the Tardis interior never
looks like this again) and often brilliantly funny (the restaurant toilets, for
instance, have silhouettes of different alien races on them, with jug-handled
loos for Cybermen and a pithy comment on there being no female toilets for the
Draconians). There’s a cameo for Ace, too, working in a McDonalds a few months
before being whisked to Ice World, not that Tegan knows who she is or vice
versa! If this story had sustained the plot long enough to go with all the
insights and one-liners it would have been brilliant; instead it’s just a bit
odd with long stretches where nothing really happens.
Previous ‘Enlightenment’ next ‘The
Five Doctors’
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