Delta And The Bannermen: Ranking - 135

  Delta And The Bannermen

(Season 24, Dr 7 with Mel, 2-16/11/1987, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Andrew Cartmel, writer: Malcolm Kohll, director: Chris Clough) 

Rank: 135

In an emoji: 🐝

  'Nooooo of course we're not hiding a Chimeron on this bus Gavrok,what could possibly make you think that? the radio? Not that's just The Beatles, an Earth band, singing, um, 'Let It Beeeee'. 'Delta' by Crosby, Stills and Nash. 'Karma Chimeron' by Boy George. That's Kermit The Frog singing 'It's Not Easy Being Green'. No no these aren't clues, they're actual Earth songs I promise. Now how about this next record? 'Doctor In Distress'...No aaagh don't shoot me....' 

This story is, roughly, where I came in – not quite on first broadcast but it was one of the VHSes I remember borrowing from a Dr Who meeting back when these things weren’t available to buy yet and I hadn’t seen that many. For many fans if they’d come in here they would have run away screaming and never touched this series again but...well...I was hooked, though confused. I really didn’t quite know what to make of a story that involved green alien children on the run in a 1950s Butlins holiday camp that never quite knew whether it was making a serious point about human (and Bannermen) tragedy or whether it was the most 1980s camp nonsense I’d ever seen. A sort of cross between Grease, Pulp Fiction, Wuthering Heights and Under Milk Wood you enter every scene not knowing if you’re about to endure silly frothy fun and laughs at a Welsh holiday camp in 1959 or watch brutes commit mass genocide against terrified innocents. The Doctor has been known to rock around the clock and has been in the company of a few comets in his time, but Bill Hailey singing the song on the soundtrack? This story certainly didn’t look like anything else I’d seen before as a six year old, I knew that much (interestingly enough the same Malcolm Kohll, one of the youngest writers to ever work on the series, really was in 1959). What I didn’t know then was that 35-(very) odd years later it still doesn’t look like anything else I’ve ever seen – and that includes all the other 327-ish Dr Who stories out there. Whimsical violence isn’t a combination other series would ever consider trying but in ‘Delta and The Bannermen’ it works. Sort of… 

Many fans, admittedly, can’t take this story seriously. This story is, to put it mildly, utterly daft. It’s the most ‘cartoony’, least realistic story since Professor Zaroff made the mer-people dance in ‘The Underwater Menace’ twenty years earlier but even that was set on Atlantis so it wasn’t supposed to feel normal; this story was set on Earth and not that long ago! (28 years that’s like setting a story in 1995 today, gulp! That was yesterday wasn’t it? Whose been messing with time and space again?) Nobody feels quite ‘real’ throughout this story and far from depicting the 1950s with the seriousness and detail Dr Who does in other eras its all a big joke and about as real and authentic as ‘Happy Days’. After all, the blobby Navarino aliens have headed to Earth for a good time (they were actually planning to go to Disneyland before colliding with the earliest satellite to be set up round Earth, in secret by the Americans – an easy mistake to make given that it wasn’t there last time they flew!) and there’s a party atmosphere in the room as everyone enjoys the rock and roll when it was fun and innocent. Plus it’s hard to take anything in a holiday camp seriously: just like close cousin ‘The Macra Terror’ it’s a place where the staff are pretending to have fun, covering up their worries with a smile, which in a series that so often uses brainwashing and making people act against character is creepy enough in itself. 

 Gavrok and his Bannermen, though, mean business. They’ve tried to destroy the Chimerons on their home world (the script never says why but the novel fills in a few more details about how the Bannermen have ruined the resources of their own planet and the seemingly peaceful Chimerons seem like easy prey) and only have the Queen to go. Only she’s legged it in a spaceship and disguised herself in the middle of the tourist party, mourning the loss of all her kind (except for the glowing green egg she’s carefully taken with her) while everyone is busy trying to amuse themselves. Of course there’s going to be a showdown and inevitably, given that Gavrok is quite a monster, innocent people are going to get hurt. As funny as this story is, as daft as much as it is, as filled as it is with big guest star names from light entertainment, there’s actually only of the highest body counts seen in the series and it’s not just the baddies who ‘deserve’ it who perish either: the scene of the tourist bus taking off and being mown down by Gavrok is one of the saddest in the show’s history. These people were just on holiday. But life doesn’t take holidays. Bad things can happen at any time – so you have to make the most of now. 

 And that is the essence of rock and roll. Not the sanitised silly fluffy version of ‘Grease’, but actual rock and roll. Though this story was originally set in 1956 and only moved to 1959 when the production team realised they wouldn’t be allowed to use a lot of their famous songs it’s perfect for this year when rock was at a turning point. Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper died in a plane crash that February. Elvis has been in the army doing his national service for a few months and fans genuinely worried their hero might die in combat (as if they’d send a star like Elvis to the front – there’d be an outcry that would topple a government! But teenage fans didn’t know that). Jerry Lee Lewis is being investigated for transporting his thirteen-year-old child bride across state lines. In December Chuck Berry is arrested for doing much the same with an underage girl he most certainly was not intending to marry. The cinemas still brave enough to show rock and roll films are finding that they often end in brawls between gangs, even in gentile placid places (like Runcorn and Carlisle – there was a riot in my local post office! Before it was a post office I hasten to add). The innocent and joy of what was only ever meant to be a brief and youthful movement feels long gone, with the biggest hits of the year mostly with an edge to them: ‘Mack The Knife’ ‘Stagger Lee’ (both about stabbings) ‘Tragedy’ ‘Lonely Street’ and tearful ballad ‘Only You’ (which, when covered in 1983, became a #1 hit for one of this week’s guest stars, Brian Hibbard of a capella doo wop group ‘The Flying Pickets’, who is the first person ever to be in Dr Who that got a #1 UK hit single, discounting the obvious exception of The Beatles in ‘The Chase’ who were merely on film. And weirdly enough this story features the second one too, Ken ‘Tollmaster’ Dodd. To this day there’s only ever been two more in Dr Who: Kylie Minogue and Billie Piper). Rock and roll starts becoming less about fun and more about injustice. And ‘Delta and The Bannermen’ is caught right on that knife edge. Even in weak-kneed re-recorded sanitised form (because the originals cost too much), like one of those cheap K-Tel promotional deals that were everywhere in the 1980s ‘Delta and The Bannermen’ has one of the best soundtracks in Dr Who: ‘Rock Around The Clock’ ‘Singing The Blues’ ‘Why Do Fools fall In love?’ ‘Mr sandman’ ‘That’ll Be The Day’ Lollipop’ and of course ‘Only You’(though given the insect-like Chimerons they missed a trick by not using ‘Let It Bee Me’. Even the title is a pun on 1950s-inspired 1980s band ‘Echo and The Bunnymen’, with ‘Echo’ one place away in the Greek alphabet from ‘Delta’). Regular composer Keff ‘Cacophony’ McCulloch recorded them all himself with the help of his girlfriend and some pals, credited as fictional band ‘The Lorells’, and while he’s no Dion (and he does tend to wander round the notes rather) he’s more than passable. For a while producer John Nathan-Turner even tried to get the soundtrack of this story released as an album – one that, given how this story was received, I suspect wouldn’t have sold too well. 

 You see, ‘Delta and The Bannermen’ is one of the great dividing stories in Dr Who. A lot of fans just don’t find it funny. A sizeable amount actively loathe hate this story and see it as the height of Dr Who not being made for them anymore but for a childish audience, but even as a child I sensed this wasn’t for me compared to the more straightforward stories around it. An odd thing’s happened though: as I’ve grown older it gets funnier and the switches between frivolity and genocide make more sense: it’s as real a portrayal of life as any film that’s serious all the way through. This is the story in the list that’s changed rankings in my personal list the most and one of the Dr Who stories that feels, well, cosy and familiar. After all, my first TV memories are all from a similar postmodernist mid-1980s that looked back at a ‘golden age’ with tongue firmly in cheek, lampooning as much as celebrating the 1950s. This is, for better or (probably) worse how my mind thinks of TV, having been shaped like all TV viewers by the era I grew up in, when every series seemed to be as elusive and postmodernly insincerely weird as this one. As a fully paid up rock and roll fan I fully approve of the only Dr Who story to be fully set round the world’s greatest genre too: it makes perfect sense that, given all of time and space to travel in, the Navarinos would want to go back in time (though I’d still go to the 1960s, obvs) – in a parallel world where I’m green and blobby (well, greener and blobbier) that’s totally me on that bus at the start of the story and even as a fully paid up Disney-phile it beats Disneyworld anyday. Throw in an away day to whatever star is playing the local town hall and I’ll buy season tickets and even throw in some extra insurance premiums to cover any busses hitting rogue satellites. 

 The 1950s are a fine, fun setting we’ve not had before - the last era that Dr Who can legitimately parody too in some ways, given that the series started in 1963 and has charted every change in public mood since then (including the books that cover the ‘missing wilderness years’ 1990-2004). All the clichés are here: polkadot dresses, motorbikes, tomboys, hoola hoops (the in-craze of 1958) and even the Bannerman child looks more like the sort of thing from a 1950s B-budget scifi slick than the usual Dr Who fare, being basically green covered bubble-wrap until it grows up (script editor Andrew Cartmel recalls in his cleverly titled book ‘Script Doctor’ his misery at excitedly showing this to a press preview, with this the first story he’d worked on that he’d been really proud of, only for everyone to laugh at this one effect). The return to a holiday camp setting, clearly based on the similar postmodern nostalgia of ‘Hi-De-Hi’ (the production team nicknamed this one ‘Hi-De-Who!’), is also very different to the last time we were here for ‘The Macra Terror’ in 1967. That story was partly, or so I’m convinced, the children of the 1960s showing how sinister they found the holiday camp ‘invention’ of their parents, the idea that to go away and have a good time you had to be regimented and told what to do, in your days off from being at work and being told what to do for a living, rather than being truly ‘free’ was absolute nonsense (which is the true spirit of rock and roll). Here the setting is a tragedy: the very people who are supposed to be safe and enjoying themselves are invaded and put in danger more than if they’d stayed at home when all they want to do is boogie the night away in fetching human form. Happiness isn’t something forced or fake but something fleeting, that can be taken away. The people who work in this camp are good people who know how rare precious and beautiful good times are. Most Dr Who stories are concerned with death but ‘Delta’ is more concerned with life: having fun, dancing, music, falling in love, these are all things that make up the best of the human experience (even for Navarino aliens). But that’s what makes the twists along the way all the harder: death doesn’t belong in this setting of fun and escapism, it’s incongruous in a way that it wouldn’t be if this was a base under siege or a quarry. Which makes those fleeting moments of joy all the more precious. 

 Underneath all this is one of Dr Who’s occasional romances, the age-old story of a boy falling in love with a girl, who happens to be a green-tinged alien that acts like a bee and protecting her from the aliens trying to track her down, alongside a soap opera plot about the best friend who always thought she’d get the only boy around for miles to herself and losing him to an exotic newcomer from outtatown (a long way outtatown). It’s quite sweet for what it is: Billy falls for Delta from the moment he sets eyes on her and isn’t at all perturbed by the fact she turns out to be green (if anything he’s more put out that she’s a single mother already, those 1950s social statuses kicking in rather than alien prejudice). Delta for her part has lost everything and everyone, in a dramatic opening scene, the fact she finds love just when she’s all alone in the world is sweet, only it feels more Mills and Boon than Rills and Judoon. It’s an odd one though: Delta barely says a word and when she does it’s to act gruff and defensive (admittedly most of that is to Bonnie Langford being perky and chatty, which is enough to make anyone clam up, but even with Billy she barely speaks from what we later learn about Chimerons and how their biology works and the sudden arrival on episode three of bees (kept by local mystic Goronwy and which sting the Bannermen, giving them a sort of scifi anaphylactic shock, in a conclusion that’s certainly one of the more original in Who). Bees hold an interesting place in Dr Who terms: many stories hint at them being a secret intelligence (most notably ‘The Stolen Earth’ when they get a sense that the earth is in trouble and disappear) with Goronwy seeing ore in the bees than humans do. Here, though, it’s the way their society’s built that’s important, with drone workers based around a Queen in the middle – exactly the sort of dictatorship the Doctor would normally take down, but perhaps because only the Queen is left he’s more patient with Delta, even when she seems to be taking one of the Humans over. Could it be that, as a Queen bee with hypnotic properties, Billy is actually under her spell and not really in love at all? The scene about Billy ingesting royal jelly is really quite something and after it Billy the Biker goes blank in more ways than just making goo-goo eyes (although that might just be an impression of 1950s stilted acting – it’s hard to tell with this story, where the acting is often the weak link). But then love is often portrayed in this series as a sort of chemical imbalance anyway so maybe they’re one and the same? It could be that Delta, being the last of the Chimerons, needs to mate in a hurry.

 That leaves poor Ray (really Rachel) on the sidelines. She’s spent her whole life waiting to grow up and date her childhood friend Billy (the hint is that we’re in a very small town in Wales so there isn’t an lot of choice) assuming he would be with her and trying her best to model herself on his likes. And it’s all gone wrong because of some interloper. For a while Ray was pitched as the new companion when it was known Bonnie Langford was leaving at the end of the year and JNT thought it would be good to have a bit of an overlap to see the companions team up: Ray’s a lot more interesting than Mel certainly, with a wide-eyed innocence that harks back to earlier companions like Polly and Jo, but with a feisty rebellious streak in her too that could have been good. However she’s no Ace, the companion who eventually beat her to the job in next story ‘Dragonfire’. And that’s the running theme of this story really: authenticity. Everyone on this story is trying to be something they’re not. Ray and Billy were never going to last as a couple because she wasn’t being herself. The Navarinos were pretending to be human (and getting it slightly wrong, judging by their rather OTT 1950s dress sense). Delta was hiding her true green self in a crowd. Only the Doctor and Mel are being themselves. That’s all so fitting for a story set in a holiday camp (where people are all pretending to be something they’re not) and about rock and roll (whose other essence is about being your true self even in a world that says you can’t). 

 The biggest love story going on in this story, though, is with Wales, Dr Who’s adopted home in the 21st century. While we’d had other stories set there in the past (‘The Green Death’) they’d been filmed in London, while this one was filmed in a real disused holiday camp on Barry Island. There are lots of lingering location shots and you can just imagine a true blooded Welsh fan like Russell T Davies sitting up I amazement: after all, 24 years in, we’d assumed we weren’t going to get any Dr Who stories more than fifty miles outside the capital. In many ways this story feels like a trial run for the 21st century to come: it’s quirky and goofy and strange, with a musical soundtrack and a madcap Doctor having fun before sudden lurches into something serious and some big name guest stars thrown in at the deep end whether they fit or not. Though Russell T was an adult working in children’s telly by this time it wouldn’t surprise me if this story had a really big influence on his writing. 

 On another level even deeper than that this is a tale of genocide and how everyone is deserving of love and refuge, even green tinged single mothers. The Bannermen are as wicked and cruel as any race we see, going to great lengths to destroy the Chimerons. They’re Daleks in humanoid form, pursuing the Queen even after she’s packed up and fled from her planet as the lone survivor. To them the humans in the way are merely collateral damage – they even shoot the Tollmaster, not because he isn’t cooperating but because they can (it seems unlikely he’ll blub and besides who is there to blub too? If this was the later series you’d expect the Judoon to get involved, or maybe the Wraith Warriors if this was a comic - and it does feel very very like a comic at times - but in the 20th century the universe is pretty much a lawless state). In rock and roll terms they’re ‘the man’ (well the Bannermen anyway), the rigid unfeeling uncaring system who doesn’t care who you are but are going to trample you down anyway just because they can. 

 And on another layer somewhere in the middle of that it’s the sort of story that has stunt-guest parts for four very different comedy legends that makes all three do very different things than they’ve ever done before: Hugh Lloyd, star of many a Hancock’s Half Hour, isn’t the put upon everyman he usually plays but a mysterious bee-keeper whose so unruffled by the events going on him around him he surely has to be an alien too (maybe a fellow timelord given his knowing looks to the 7th Dr; maybe even a future Doctor ‘curator’ style? Or maybe one of the timeless children pre-Doctors? After all, Sherlock Holmes retired to take up bee-keeping and there are many many other stories hinting at the parallels between the two. Although my favoured idea is that he’s Professor Chronotis from ‘Shada’ living out yet another regeneration quietly on Earth. For the record writer Kohll thought he was just a very observant human but left it ambiguous so that fans could make up their own minds).The usually ‘lovable’ Don Henderson is asked to become a brutal psychopath and is surprisingly up to the job, throwing in extra touches such as the Bannermen ritual for sticking out their tongues at each other and the raw chicken Gavrok eats (Delta needn’t worry – he’s clearly going to die of Salmonella long before he gets to her). Henderson enjoyed his time on the series so much that he seriously pitched to JNT the idea that Gavrok had a twin brother in space who’d come back for a revenge in a sequel! Richard Davies is cast against type as happy camper boss Burton (surely named for Welsh star Richard, given that this is a love story; Davies is the the grumpy dour teacher Price in ‘Please Sir!’ alongside Erik Chitty, who plays many a timelord in Gallifrey stories across the 1970s) and has perhaps the most difficult job of having to be both garish and real, but comes out of it rather well, playing up the bewilderment and the sense of a man used to taking charge and going into automatic crisis mode despite being so way out of his depth. His performance is all the better for being a comedian who plays his part totally straight part, in a story surrounded by other comedians. Ken Dodd then gives his usual harmlessly dotty routine as the tollmaster whose awarded the Doctor and Mel a free holiday (how very Who to make even something as ordinary and mundane as paying tolls extraordinary by putting them in space) and the hint, particularly given the endless publicity he did for the show, is that he’s going to play a big role. Instead he’s senselessly murdered moments later. His best line is ad libbed as he comments to a Navarino getting on board a bus with his wife ‘I see you’ve brought your bulldog with you! Oh whoops…’ Then there’s Stubby Kaye and Morgan Deare, old school American comedians added at the last minute in a sub-plot about tracking down the satellite who don’t really interact with the main plot (and added, would you believe, because JNT thought this script needed more humour!) Brian Hibbard (Keillor), David Kinder (Billy), Belinda Maybe (Delta) and Sara Griffiths (Ray) aren’t in the same league though and the scenes fall flat when it’s between one of those four together (though to be fair to Sara Griffiths she was a last minute replacement when actress Lynn Gardner injured her leg during rehearsals learning to ride the motorbike round the BBC car park; I keep reading in books that it wasn’t very serious but she did end up in hospital overnight so it couldn’t have been that minor either poor thing; she was given full pay while she recuperated and invited back as a voice on ‘Dragonfire’). 

 This is arguably the strongest story of all the six that Bonnie Langford did as Mel: you get to see snatches of a real person underneath all the aerobics and dancing, as she commiserates with Delta and tries to cheer her up with her usual shtick before just quietly empathising, while even this eternal optimist finds life heavy going by the end of the story with all the people she loses along the way. Mel is usually out of place in all her other stories (mass genocide of Vervoids, killer high rise buildings and ice planets just aren’t natural places for her very 1980s brand of go-getter to be) but she makes sense in this world, with its slight artificial air and everyone pretending to be happy. You get the sense that a lot of Mel’s chatter and cheer is really a cover up for a darker side that we never fully explore (I like to think that Fenric was trying her out as a companion before realising that Ace’s neuroses weren’t buried quite as deep; actually the audio story ‘Gods and Monsters’ claims that this story was contrived by Fenric to make Ray a pawn in his ongoing chess game with The Doctor before Ace turned up) and never more than here, in a story where she relates to Delta more than you expect and where she feels relaxed enough to let her guard down, just a little. Mel greets the idea of winning a holiday as if it’s the single best thing that’s ever happened to her and you sense that maybe it is. She actually gets to be brave in this story though and think for herself, the Doctor trusting her to keep an eye on Delta in a way he can’t entrust her to do the big and deadly dangerous things he usually needs to do. As for the 7th Doctor he’s spent his first two stories being a passenger, running away from people out to kill him and Mel but here, at last, he’s an outsider (for a kick-off he refuses to be a passenger, preferring to steer the Tardis even when Mel travels by coach) – and this Doctor is, out of all thirteen so far the one that’s most like an outsider. He might not look it, being thirty years older than the youth movement of the day, but the Doctor is the spirit of rock and roll – the true spirit, of being yourself come what may and sticking up for people who are hard done by. In this story he goes back to being a hero in a way he hadn’t been since ‘Caves Of Androzani’. Though I for one am sorry they dropped the 7th Doctor’s mangled proverbs after this as I seem to be the only fan who found them rather fun (this story has my favourite: ‘There’s many a slap twixt a cup and a lap!’) 

It’s as if ‘Delta and The Bannermen’ is doing what all the other McCoy stories do (taking a weird setting, letting some hit stunt stars of the day take part and the occasional bit of gore) and shaking them all up so that everything is topsy turvy. ‘Delta and the Bannermen’ is one of those stories that has it both ways: it’s very silly and arch and fake, then pulls the rug under our feet by giving us something very real and nasty, without warning, so that we never quite know what’s coming. It’s as if writer Malcolm Kohll (who Cartmel had met on a BBC writer’s course and got on with) only knew Dr Who from the two Hartnell Donald Cotton stories ‘The Gunfighters’ and ‘The Myth Makers’, but even they only went through their abrupt shifts in tone in the final episode; this one lurches from one extreme to the other in alternating scenes. Like ‘Paradise Towers’ just before it the result is, arguably, the wrong sort of wacky divisive story for Dr Who in the troubled year following ‘The Trial Of A Timelord’ when this series was under more scrutiny than ever before and really needed to play things safe and win lost fans back over with memories of all the things it was brilliant at. In 1987 it was not the time to do a jokey story that sent everything up and made it seem silly, then shocked viewers every chance it got. In 2023 though it’s a brave experiment that – mostly – comes off. 

 The trouble with this story, though, is that the tone shifts are a hard thing to get right.(it’s not often you find yourself laughing at a tale of genocide after all). There are many lovely moments in this story that work really well: the Doctor and Mel’s confusion in a dark creepy hangar before finding out they’ve won a holiday, the 7th Doctor boogieing the night away and trying to cheer Ray up after the dance (so much for the Doctor never dancing Captain Jack!), the sober call over the Butlin tannoy that an alien invasion is nigh, the moment when the bus of happy time tourists is blown out of the sky when the plot doesn’t need them anymore, just as we were getting to like them, the Doctor’s anger getting the better of him that ends up a cliffhanger – there’s a great outtake where McCoy misses his marks and has to deliver the line ‘I may have gone a little too far’ with his face covered by a Bannermen banner), even Ken Dodd’s death is one of the great I-can’t-believe-they-did-that moments though you’re firmly on the side of Gavrok in wanting him to be quiet. But it’s not those scenes that people trot out when they’re talking about this story: instead people will mention the times an alien child has just hatched from an egg complete with green babygrow and starts making a high pitched whine, the ‘Dick Barton – special agent’ tune commandeered by every comedian from Monty Python down to signify insincere chase music used here for real, McCoy never struggles as much as he does when called on to shift abruptly from larking about to shouting and fails at both (though his simmering anger as episode three turns into episode four is his big revelatory ‘I know how to play this moment! Every Doctor has one), Brian Hibbard trying hard to be a no-nonsense baddy which is so far out of his comfort zone, any scene with Weismuller and Hawk. 

The result isn’t exactly a triumph, Delta herself is a very bland character which is a problem when most of the plot revolves around people doing things on her behalf, there are way way waaaay too many motorbike chases (especially for a three-part story that doesn’t have the space to indulge anything beyond the main plot), way way way way waaaaay too much bad 1980s synth-filled incidental music for a story all about the power of rock and roll and a lot of awkward comedy lines that fall flat. The Chimeron costumes really are poor, all white for the adults and bright green goo for the children, using leftover moulds from Draconian heads still in the costume department from ‘Frontier In Space’. You can tell that the scripts for parts two and three were a rush job, completed in 48 hours when the submitted episodes just weren’t working. I can totally see why for so many longterm fans, who’d just struggled through the acquired tastes of ‘Time and The Rani’ and ‘Paradise Towers’, this brightly coloured bit of fluffy nonsense was the last straw that meant they never watched the show again (well, until returning in 2005 maybe). At times it’s like a Cliff Richard film gone wrong, insincere and fake. For everything it gets wrong, though, Delta gets probably twice as much right and is like one of the Elvis films done right, surprisingly tough and heartfelt in between the moments when the star is singing about doing rumbas in sports cars and being a teddy bear. Caricatures as some of them may be, you do end up caring for these characters. The plot hits all the right plot beats with clever ties into the contradictory period loves of life-affirming music, forward-looking satellites and retrogressive warfare, which between them means this show captures the real spirit of the 1950s better than any straight documentary series or drama ever could and way more than the similarly period ‘Idiot’s Lantern’ did (this was a period full of joy that WW2 had finished, tempered with the fear that WW3 could break out anytime, which is why this era’s art is mostly as schizoid and confused as it is until The Beatles and JFK between them come along to give it forward momentum). This is, you see, both the sort of series that would ruin it’s street red by casting Ken Dodd, but also the sort of story that would boost it by then killing him off! The ending, where the baddy is defeated by soundwaves, is also strangely satisfying given this is a story about the power of music to hypnotise people with its beauty (and is actually not unlike pollen to bees to impressionable ears), taking the point when rock and roll could have gone the way of every previous music fad but instead came real as the moment when things get better again. After all, it’s 1959, the 1960s are only a small nudge of time away and Dr Who will be on the air soon and everything will start swinging for real, in a world where people don’t have to pretend anymore and where everyone can start to seriously dream about being free. 

 If nothing else this story is never boring, which is more than you can say for whole great runs of stories in the 5th and 6th Doctor eras. The three-episode format, forced upon the production team when their episode budget was cut from the usual twenty-six to fourteen (which just wouldn’t compute as four part stories) is a really happy accident for much of the 7th Doctor era: even the bits of this era that don’t quite work (and there are a lot of them) are over in a flash and most every line counts, without the usual padding of a four-part story (well, only the interminable motorbike chase scenes that feel as if they’ve been beamed in directly from a 3rd Dr story; actually Kohll wrote in the motorbike scenes – in a script that specified a Vincent bike and described it in loving detail – simply so he could get the chance to sit on one!) There’s a lot to this story, and a lot of back story that gets left out, but it never feels cluttered or confusing. Best of all ‘Delta’ is an often needlessly brave story at a time when playing safe just wasn’t working anymore, one of the few Dr Who stories that is without precedent somewhere without the usual Hammer Horror/H G Wells/Quatermass/Asimov influences on show…because there’s no other series that would ever do anything quite this bonkers. In its own way this experimental story is the long lost heir of quirky weirdo stories from the show’s early days like ‘Edge Of Destruction’ and ‘The Mind Robber’ that are amongst my favourites, doing things that no other show would dare to do and I’m so pleased that Dr Who used pretty much its dying breath to snap even this show’s elastic format as far as it could go. Yes that elastic breaks in a few places, but then this isn’t your safe base under siege with old monsters story – this is an attempt to deliver something the likes of which we have never seen again which gets you extra marks for bravery in my book. Even if a part of you is thinking ‘thank goodness they never made another story like this one’. 

 POSITIVES + If you’re new and want to know if this story will ‘work’ for you then see if you find one of my favourite lines of the entire run of Dr Who funny: ‘"So you’re saying that you are not the Happy Hearts Holiday Club from Bolton, but instead are spacemen in fear of an attack from some other spacemen?" Priceless! 

 NEGATIVES - Stubby Kaye and Morgan Deare are comedians long forgotten now to most people and for good reason. I don’t see how anyone ever found them funny. I’m not even sure which lines of theirs are meant to be funny. It’s not just their performances though – this pair of wisecracking American CIA agents trying to track down the Sputnik-style satellite (because it’s the ‘other’ thing people associate with the 1950s) have been saddled with a truly excruciating script (though legend has it the pair ad libbed most of it). With so much going on these scenes really should have been cut – they have no impact on the story whatsoever and don’t need to be there at all. Most of us really wish they weren’t. At least Ken Dodd had the decency to snuff it at the end of his guest part! 

BEST QUOTE: ‘I can't condone this foolishness, but then love has never been known for its rationality’ 

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