The Seeds Of Doom
(Season 13, Dr 4 with Sarah Jane, 31/1/1976-6/3/1976, producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, writer: Robert Banks Stewart, director: Douglas Camfield)
Rank: 133
'Hello and welcome to this week's Gardener's Universe. Today I'll be telling you how to prune your Krynoid, what to do if your Vervoid starts talking to you and which aliens work best as compost'.
Gardener’s World gone rogue today and though we’re still deep in Hinchcliffe ‘recycling’ territory, this week it makes sense – partly because it’s a really good source material this week (the greatest scifi-writer of them all, John Wyndham) and partly because recycling and composting seems very apt for a tale about rogue plants. Yes, it’s ‘Day Of The Triffids’, with an Alan Titchmarsh-like style plant-obsessed psychopath, someone who’s green fingers have led him to track down all sorts of rare foliage including sending his minions after a rare plant from outer space (the sort of thing that often appears on ‘Gardener’s World’). Only, this being Dr Who and the ordinary being turned extraordinary, it’s an alien plant with killer intentions that soon takes him and others over and gives them green fingers and other green body parts for real. It’s a story about obsession and misplaces morals because, even before the alien plants come along, Harrison Chase is Prince Charles times a quadzillion, someone who doesn’t understand people so would rather talk to plants, so obsessed with the sanctity of plants that he will happily end human life to get to them – fitting, then and very Dr Who that (it’s probably not going to give it away with a spoiler) his own plant should turn on him. That’s what happen when you go too far and lose perspective Dr Who fans, so remember that the next time you’re in a fight to the death over the last remaining cope of the season seven blu-ray in your local high street.
This is one of those
stories that I imagine looks very different depending on whether you’ve come to
it from other ‘classic’ stories or from the new series. If you’re a 21st
century baby then you might read the back of the box and think you know what’s
going on here – that the Doctor will come along and charm the plants off
everyone and that he’ll resurrect the Krynoid’s victims because ‘everybody
lives!’ Plus of course it’s a story with
fake snow, so it must be one of those jolly Christmas episodes. Not exactly:
‘Seeds’ is a story very grim and violent in tone even for this era, with a feel
that’s the opposite of tree-hugging. It’s one of those stories that comes with
a re-set button between episodes two and three because most of the cast have
been killed off and then does the same again by the end of the story. These are
people happy to kill if they get their way and get their plant, people falling
over themselves to please the eccentric millionaire who couldn’t care less
about the welfare of the people he employs. The Kyrnoids with their stings are
bad enough but at the heart of this story is the compost grinder set happy to
take in anything: compost, evidence, victims, every bit of bone and blood
recycled to keep the plants happy. This is a story where people walk around
with guns and are happy to use them – even The Doctor (though, in one of Who’s
most un-necessarily gratuitous schemes, he seems to prefer knocking people
unconscious by twisting their necks). Unlike some 4th Doctor stories where Tom
Baker breezes in and out the plot, solving it between chomping jelly babies and
playing with his yo-yo, he’s really pushed to his limits and beyond in this
one. His plans don’t always work out and he knowingly puts himself or Sarah
Jane in harm’s way and its one of the few stories where the Doctor gets visibly
physically hurt (without regenerating that is) while even without the violence
he’s at his most ‘alien’, caring nothing for the smaller picture of hurt humans
because he needs to stop the bigger one. Sarah tries to help as best she can
but she, too, really suffers and not in a ‘what will the cliffhanger be this
week?’ way but one that really makes her re-think her life choices (you can see
why her character leaves soon after). This is a story that, unlike some other
more fairytale ones on distant planets, looks as if it hurts for one and all.
Even the end is very un-Dr Who like: The Doctor both can’t and won’t save the
millionaire from his own fate (the script says the latter, Tom Baker rewrites
it slightly to be more like the former) and
when there’s no other way out he calls in one last favour from UNIT and
gets them to blow the place sky high (the poor Brigadier – who missed this
story because Nicholas Courtney was in a long-running play ‘The Dame Of Sark’,
playing against type as the sort of ruthless Nazi he would normally be
over-throwing – just missed out on being asked the Doctor to blow stuff up by
two stories!) Tom Baker is at his chilling best and becomes impossibly smug
when the body count starts piling up and people start turning green. Later on
he even gets to beat the baddy’s henchman up and watch him drown –Mary Whitehouse,
predictably, had kittens (though the scene that irked her most was the explanation
of how to make a ‘Molotov cocktail’ and her worry about what effect it might
have on all the little Aces watching; not that I often agree with her but even
I think this story tips over a little too far into gratuitous violence at times,
though it’s the sort of story where the stakes feel so high the Doctor’s just
being pushed further than he’s ever been before that you can understand it more
in this story than most. It still feels wrong though; the Doctor doesn’t even
try to talk his way out of trouble first as he usually does. So different is
‘Seeds’ to the usual Dr Who ethos of making life better and brighter that you
have to be in the right mood for compared to other Who stories – where usually
this series leaves you uplifted and hopeful about the future this one just
leaves you frustrated and more than a little drained.
There’s a big difference
between this and ‘Day Of The Triffids’ too (and remember Carole Ann Ford got
the job as Susan partly on the back of being in the 1963 film adaptation, one everyone
hates and certainly isn’t up to the book but isn’t all that bad). Wyndham is a
writer who’s a cross between Malcolm Hulke and Terry Nation: he likes putting
his humans in impossible situations where they’re down to a few last survivors
and showing how resilient and (mostly)
kind they are. The theme of every Wyndham story is that. however tough things
get, humans are tougher and that civilisation will always be rebuild from
people reaching out to help each other, sometimes against odds or inherent
prejudice (I so want to see a Dr Who version of ‘The Chrysalids’ one day as
it’s so in keeping with our favourite series and given its 1955 vintage might
well have influenced David Whittaker in the early days at least, an extended
debate about people who claim to be true Christians versus Christian values,
when they kick out an innocent girl for being a mutant – even though she’s more
human than they are). In ‘Triffids’ it’s the plants that are ‘evil’ and the
humans who are ‘good’, tipping the food chain over so that plants now gorge off
animals rather than the other way round (though Wyndham is quick to show the
Triffids are just doing what comes natural and don’t ‘think’ as such). To
Stewart the plants might be doing exactly the same, shot into space (in pairs
for some reason, almost as if they had six episodes to fill) and colonising
every planet they come in contact with, but they don’t think either – they just
do. It’s the humans who become monsters: Chase especially as he gives the
orders, but he surrounds himself with all sorts of unpleasant ‘yes men’ who are
in his employment because of their love of other green things, money. They
don’t care about human life either, not if they can have some of this eccentric
millionaire’s riches. To Wyndham the plants are the problem and the humans the
solution. To Dr Who the plants are a problem but the real root of all evil
isn’t the plant with roots but the money that makes humans do their worst to
each other.
Of course, as all
gardeners know, the real evil and the biggest obstacle to watching something
grow organically is impatience. Like many a Hinchcliffe season finale everyone
making this was more than a little rushed for time and budget. You can tell in
places that writer Robert Banks-Stewart is writing this story at speed (so
quickly that he was often still writing the next day’s shoot from a portable
typewriter while on location). He’d already written the season opener ‘The Terror Of The Zygons’ and wasn’t
expecting to work for the series again so soon, but a long list of hoped-for
scripts ended up being unworkable or running past deadline, including an early
version of ‘The Hand Of Fear’ and another a
sort-of early version of ‘The Awakening’
with a tribe sacrificing humans to living rocks. Brought in at the absolute
last minute and asked to think of something, anything, he went for an idea
close to home: Stewart lived so close to Kew Gardens he could see it out of his
window and was himself related to famous botanist Joseph Banks who had helped
catalogue and collect the first plants there (officially King George III did
all the work – and yes that plant gene runs deep in the Royal family so it
wouldn’t surprise me if they were secretly all green, especially the wave they
all do which looks exactly like a Krynoid reaching out to sting someone – but
someone needed to the actual dirty work of collecting). One of Banks’ jobs was
to work out where rare plants were around the world, work out which ones would
survive in English soil and send people off to collect them, which is
effectively what Harrison Chase does here just on a cosmic Dr Who scale. It’s a
small leap from ‘exotic plant that’s only found in the Antarctic from place
unknown’ to ‘exotic plant found in the Antarctic that came from space and was
buried billions of years ago when the Earth was forming).
So far so Dr Who and
having alien plants is a really great idea – one so obvious it seems a surprise
that it took the series thirteen years to do a story about them (especially
after touching on the damage to plant-life by man’s hand in ‘Planet Of Giants’
as early as the first year). Those parts all work great, especially in the
first two tense episodes set in the Antarctic where the seed pods are
discovered. Generally, this would normally be handled by Dr Who in a
pre-credits sequence or a voice-over, but these episodes really shine by
showing the danger humanity is in across a closed community that are trying to
contain the danger, even before one of the seeds is taken back to Chase who’s
happy to spread the spores out across England and then the world (and of course
its England. It’s always England. They don’t even bother to explain that in the
script anymore, it’s just accepted that we’re a target for mad professors,
eccentric aliens and millionaires with more money than sense by now). The first
two episodes are taut and gritty with a great deal at stake that, ahem,
‘plants’ the themes of evolution and destruction in your mind for the finale to
come. These two episodes show that Banks Stewart could write Dr Who better than
anyone, although given the time constraints they’re really more of a
collaboration between Stewart, script editor Robert Holmes (who probably added
the more cynical world view and the moralising), producer Hinchcliffe (who no
doubt added the gore and horror), director Douglas Camfield (a former writer
who always liked getting involved and most likely added the action scenes) and
Tom Baker himself (he reportedly hated this story so much he threatened to
throw it and it’s writer into the composter – in earshot of a visiting Stewart
who was reportedly heartbroken. Baker offered a swift and heartfelt apology but
he will never finish a script for the series again).
Unfortunately the other
episodes are mostly Stewart alone and, while he has a good handle on scifi as a
genre, by his own admission he didn’t know it very well and he never watched Dr
Who (even the episodes he wrote). You can tell in places that he doesn’t
understand this series and that his last folk memory of it is the UNIT days
when The Doctor was working on behalf of a bunch of soldiers and up against a
miscomprehending bureaucrat, as it very much has the same 3rd Doctor
‘feel’, just minus the big moral message that Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks
liked to bring to their stories. Without that UNIT are just a bunch of
anonymous soldiers shooting at things. You can tell, too, that Stewart’s
biggest love is really fantasy: he writes this story more in line with his
other commissions of the decade, particularly the wretched and unrealistic
‘Avengers’, where everything is weird and eccentric and a big joke. While
that’s a description that could also apply to a lot of Who the difference is
the ‘science’ part of the ‘science fiction’, that it feels as if this series
really could happen for the most part; ‘The Avengers’ is meant to exist in a
fairytale land where every human we meet is weird. The Doctor isn’t tight
because he’s been written as Steed, an eccentric posh English gentleman
surprising everyone by suddenly fighting while Sarah Jane is Emma Peel,
fighting every bad guy coolly. It’s a trait that marred ‘Zygons’ too to some
extent (and if you take the alien part out and see it as a ‘body double’ story
that’s a very ‘Avengers’ plot too) Indeed this script is aid to be very close
to an unused script The Avengers didn’t use – so much so it might not actually
have been changed that much at all. With ‘Zygons’, though, Holmes had time to
re-write it for the regulars; with ‘Seeds’ he simply doesn’t have time and even
though Tom and Lis Sladen re-write their dialogue as best they can the pair of
them still do very un-Dr Who like things when the script calls for them
to.
‘Seeds’ is even more like
two other works though. One is our old friend, Dr Who sister series ‘Out Of The
Unknown’, the BBC’s more ‘intellectual’ scifi series broadcast on BBC2 and the
story ‘Come Daisy Come Buttercup’ where a sweet old man accidentally grows a
killer alien plant (one that’s much more like a venus flytrap than the Krynoid
we get on screen) and has to cover it up when it starts eating little boys rom
next door and passing visitors. It too, is a tale of obsession and how far
you’re prepared to change your character to keep do something you love, even
when it’s ‘wrong’ (unlike Chase the old man really is nice too). It’s even more
heavily based on an even older friend, Quatermass, with one of the most blatant
rip-offs in Who history, as the ‘plant turned people’ plot is directly taken
from the third series when it happens to an astronaut returned from space (‘The
Quatermass Experiment’). Interestingly it borrows far more from the inferior
hammer horror remake with an ending of the possessed human being electrocuted
to death, rather than the far more Dr Who-like moral of the original series
(when Professor Quatermass appealed to the ‘humanity’ left inside the converted
plants – admittedly this might represent the change between 1950s and 1970s TV.
The late 1970s Quatermass IV, with the very Dr Who theme of a religious cult saved
by common sense, seemed very out of kilter in the era of punk and new wave). A
little recycling is fine, especially in an era when that’s what Dr Who seemed
to be ‘for’, but the best Hinchcliffe stories merge other writer’s ideas with
very Dr Who moments. Stewart just doesn’t know the series well enough for that
and Holmes is too busy to add that part himself. It is still a great idea and a
plot that hangs together well, even with a more fantastical plot than normal.
Mostly, though, what ‘Seeds’ lacks is the variety or lightness of touch that always
makes a very good Dr Who story great or a good bit of telly a great bit of Dr
Who. You can tell that the story was made in a hurry as it does the basic but
not much more (episode one was, in fact, delivered just two days after it’s
official commission – unheard of in the days when scripts regularly sailed
months over a deadline). It really is 150 minutes of the Doctor and Sarah
running around and getting captured and threatened without much variety and once
the Tardis arrives a few minutes into episode three there isn’t any scene that
doesn’t connect to the main plot in some way. The plot is really super simple
too: don’t get touched by a pant or you’ll turn green! There’s only so many
times you can be threatened and hissed at by the same tiny cast before the
storyline begins to drag and the fact that the Doctor ends up in episode six
using a bigger but still basically same variation of destroying the seed pod
that he used on a smaller scale in episode two seems like a cop out, as if the
writer couldn’t think of a better ending. Not that it should ever have been
dragged out to six episodes anyway; if ever a story needed a spot of ‘pruning’
it’s this one.
That said, it’s a very
watchable 150 minutes that’s made really well, with all the care and attention
missing from the script added by the people making it. Baker and Camfield both
recognised that the script was easy to send up so had a meeting in rehearsals about
what they could do, sensibly deciding that the best way to play it was to make
The Doctor scared in a way we hadn’t seen before and trying not to show it.
That’s a great conceit: The Doctor becomes darker here because he has to be,
something which almost makes it seem in character and Tom adds less jokes to
the script than he normally does. The rest of the actors follow his lead and
play it scared and desperate, with none of the ‘Dr Who acting’ that mars a few
other promising scripts in this era. Once we’re onto episode three there’s
basically two goodies, three baddies and a plant; one of them is John Challis
with a beard long before his role in ‘Only Fools and Horses’ and he’s a
revelation playing against type as a tough-nosed mercenary. Clue: he’s not the
plant. He has a great death scene too,
dragged into a Krynoid-infested lake, one that had to be recorded twice after a
camera mistake meant some crew were seen in shot (poor Challis was given a
bottle of brandy and asked to dry off and do it again!) Tony Beckley excels as
Harrison Chase, a baddy that’s the Doctor’s equal and often a few steps in
front of him who, far from being a ranting hooligan, is an educated softly
spoken man with a vision who just happens to have a pretty low idea of humanity.
Beckley, while keeping the inherent campness of the larger than life Chase,
also gives him an added steel and ruthlessness that makes him scary rather than
silly. – after a series where we’ve had
ranting possessed Humans, ranting Kraals and ranting exiled timelords and will
have ranting crystal-based Kastrians, he’s a rose between Stephen Thornes, as
it were, and his death in the hands of a great compositing machine is one of
the most satisfying in Dr Who (even if it means we never got a sequel, which is
a shame - of all stories it makes sense this one should be used for recycling).
Even the smaller parts are played well and it’s a shame we don’t see more of
them (that’s for good reason in a few cases: poor Kenneth Gilbert, playing
Dunbar, caught his daughter’s chicken pox – the spots were only discovered when
he was having Krynoid makeup applied to his arm and luckily didn’t spread to
anyone else but did leave him in quarantine for the last two episodes which is
why his character suddenly disappears; Michael McStay, playing Moberley, had a
nasty car crash on the way back from location filming which saw him in hospital
with a fractured skull and a broken leg – he does turn up for a delayed studio
shoot wearing a false beard to cover up his scars). Everyone is trying hard to
make this story seem real and they succeed for the most part. Only famous
actress Sylvia Coleridge, playing Amelia Ducat as the sort of dotty spinster
she always played, feels like she’s wandered in from an ‘Avengers’ story and
shows how differently the rest of the cast are playing things (this despite the
fact that she’s the one character here based on real life – an equally dotty
music teacher Stewart remembered from his childhood). You can tell that the
cast really bonded across the making of this story, using their ‘spare time’
when not needed filming sitting around the empty rooms at Athelhampton in the
dark, telling each other ‘ghost stories’.
The locations helps a lot
too, with three main ones that all look superb. The imposing headquarters of
The Ecology Bureau was the easiest to film – it’s probably an injoke that the
bureaucratic nightmare of pen-pushers who talk but never actually do anything
are really based at BBC Television Centre! The Antarctic is actually a quarry
in Buckland, Surrey, which looks very convincing decked out with high pressure
foam (for snow in long shots) and polystyrene granules (for snow in close
shots). Even so, it’s a bit odd to see Sarah’s breath perfectly fine in the
Antarctic scenes (made in a warm studio under hot TV lights, of course) yet
misting over at Chase’s house (filmed on location in October-November!) The
mansion house and grounds were both shot in Athelhampton Hall, Dorset, a house
built by Sir William Martyn in 1845 to celebrate his new job as Lord Mayor of
London (and very Boris Johnson it is too, extravagant, pompous and posh). At
the time of filming it had just been bought by the Cooke family who were keen
to promote its use in TV and film so it appeared in a lot of programmes and The
BBC were encouraged to promote it as much as possible (so unusually a lot of
press reports about the making of this story spent more time on the house than
the cast or the Krynoids!) It’s the perfect place, full of lots of overgrown
foliage and lots of nooks and crannies to hide in, exactly the sort of place an
eccentric millionaire would hide away. Even the soundtrack helps sell this,
with this alas Geoffrey Burgon’s only score for the series – Camfield picked
him specially after his wife Shelia (star of ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’) worked
with him on one of the BBC’s E R James ‘Ghost Story For Christmas’ episode and
admired his atmospheric use of chanting monks; this score doesn’t quite do that
but it does have a bigger, more celestial feel (lots of harp and clavichord,
unusual instruments for Who) which suits the setting of a house the baddy
refers to as a ‘Green cathedral’.
The foliage foe
themselves, The Krynoids are the opposite of the rest of the story – a great
idea that didn’t quite come off on screen. They’re based on the ‘Crinoid’, a
sea urchin with fronds that looks very like a plant with stingers (the name is
Greek for ‘lily like’ in fact), that’s one of the weirdest and most alien
looking of Earth creatures. It’s a fossil from the Jurassic period that was so
abundant (especially around the Lindisfarne island) there was a brief craze for
turning it into pendants or rosary beads. Ridley Scott used them as the basis
for the aliens in ‘Alien’ and it wouldn’t be the first time he’s ripped off the
series he nearly worked on too (he was meant to be the designer of ‘The Daleks’ before Ray Cusick got shuffled
into his seat). Unfortunately The
Krynoids, aren’t the best of Dr Who monsters in pure design terms: they’re
actually the old costumes for the Axons sprayed green not orange, with roots
added. Who isn’t a series that’s ever done menacing intergalactic vegetables
well and though fondly remembered they don’t look much more believable than the
much-mocked human tree in Mark Of The Rani or The Vervoids (though the model shot of it ‘eating’
the mansion is superb). Even the poor Tardis prop has seen better days (a sad farewell
to the original prop, which has survived endless location filming for thirteen years
now but finally falls apart in episode six, the roof falling on top of poor Lis
Sladen’s head; this is why she and Tom are a bit hysterical in the last scene –
there’s a propman out of shot holding it up).
The result is an odd and
(mercifully) unique mix of a story that seems too daft to be true and yet which
is sometimes unbearably violent and grim, a confusing mix of fantasy and real
life, where larger than life characters do unlikely things with gorily
realistic consequences. You can tell that the studio clock is ticking,
especially in the last two episodes which have more unedited mistakes than any other
story past the ‘as live’ early ones: lots of fluffed lines and an accidental use
of the theme tune ‘stinger’ accidentally left on after the recap. Though it’s
the first episode that nearly got pruned by accident: a week before transmission
the master videotape for episode one went missing, the only time this ever
happened to Who. Luckily they found it had been mis-numbered and it went out as
planned, but not before Camfield was halfway through re-editing it from raw
footage. Even so very few fans saw it after a national blackout that episode,
which is why there’s what seems like a very random recap at the start of
episode two on the DVD. At times it’s a struggle to watch in a way few Who stories
are.
Yet overall ‘Seeds Of
Doom’ just about gets away with its downsides. The idea of plant getting their
own back on humanity is a great starting point, repeated by lots of writers
precisely because it is such a good one, touching on deeper themes of humanity’s
treatment of things below him in the food chain and a vague plausibility (this
is an era when people seriously wondered if vegetable matter was growing
elsewhere in our solar system, before our probes said no for the most part).
The thought of a plant virus turning your into ‘vegetable soup’ is a stronger
idea than the usual Dr Who ‘virus’ stories and the Krynoid conversion, bit by
bit, is done better than most ‘possession’ stories too, feeling like a very
real and scary (and painful) threat. Though up against time Stewart is too good
a writer not to throw in some great lines, the best being Scorby’s angry rant
that ‘I’m not a patient man’ and The Doctor’s laidback response ‘Your candour
does you credit! (I love the gag, too, that the Doctor is president of the Dr
Who equivalent of Interflora, renamed Intergalactic Flora, but that they don’t
know much about Krynoids because ‘the researchers kept disappearing’). The fact
that everyone makes this look ‘real’ in places that also look ‘real’ sells a
great deal of this story and covers up for the fact that so much of it feels so
fantastical. We’re a long way from the sillier way evil foliage used to be
portrayed in 1960s Terry Nation stories about jungles that are ‘alive’: there
are times when ‘Seeds’ are as gripping and frightening as any Who story. More
than anything else it’s the sort of story you can show non-fans who only know
about Dr Who’s mostly unfounded reputation for wobbling sets, wobbly ideas and
wobblier acting: most of this story is set outside, the plot is easy to follow
with no scifi gobbledegook and the acting is what sells everything the most. It’s
when you’re a Dr Who fan who also tunes in for the Doctor’s eccentric
silliness, his banter with Sarah Jane and the uplifting sense that this series
gives you like no other that you come away feeling a little cheated, all a bit
action-hero and James Bondy for a series as gloriously eccentric as Dr Who and
the violence tied to a simpler plot than normal left me shaken rather than
stirred the way the very very best DW scripts do. Still, it’s a story that
lingers long in the memory this one and I’ve never looked at a compost bin the
same way again.
POSITIVES + This is still,
sadly, the closest we ever come to getting an official TV Dr Who story set in
the Antarctic (other than ‘The Tenth
Planet’ and, a snow invasion aside, that base could then be set anywhere).
I don’t know why – it’s a location crying out for a Dr Who plot. I mean it was
the last place on Earth that mankind could explore and set out into the great
unknown – a cornerstone of Dr Who as a whole – and where you’re as cut off from
rescue as any place on Earth even now. There are loads of Antarctica plots in
other scifi shows about what’s lying there trapped under the ice from days when
continents were still connected and all the things that fly in from other
planets, not to mention Hitler’s obsession with forgotten technology legends
said to still lie there buries, while over on Big Finish the ‘Sarah Jane’
series covers that feeling of cold and loneliness exceptionally well in ‘Snow
Blind’ (be warned though, rather than just jump right in there you do need the
episodes leading up to that one for the story to work). You’d think that the
Doctor would have dropped in on Scott or Amundsen as part of his name-dropping
by now too. Maybe they thought it would be hard to pull off on a BBC budget,
but The Antarctic sets are super convincing, even if the joke of Sarah Jane
being dressed in a bikini for a holiday is a bit much in the one gag in the
story (she’d have surely died of frostbite in the time it took the Tardis door
to open dressed like that – and she does it twice, with no ill effects beyond a
bit of shivering). It’s worth mentioning here too the excellent but unofficial
‘AudioVisual’ series, which is basically Big Finish before they got a license
from the BBC and with Nicholas Briggs as an un-numbered ‘future Doctor’ before
he became more of a writer and director for the series and chief Dalek for
new-Who. They did a most excellent Antarctic story named ‘Endurance’ (the best
of a highly impressive run) so it does work in the Dr Who format.
Before there was Big Finish there was BBV
Productions: a fan licensed company owned by Bill Baggs who made video and
audio spin-offs from Dr Who that used everything but the official names and
were regulars at convention and fan group merchandising stalls. ‘The Krynoid
Series’ (1999) was an audio one, a two-parter that saw a return for the titular
plants although, weirdly enough, no Doctor. Starting with the cleverly titled ‘The Root Of All Evil’ it turns out that a
lone Krynoid pod survived the events of this story, blowing across England
until nestling unseen amongst the wheat fields and hedgerows of a Yorkshire
farm. They slowly poison all the other plant-life in the area and the minister
for agriculture is worried enough to send a biologist out to investigate. Eve
Black, said biologist, reckons she’s been sent on a wild goose chase but the
more she finds the more scared she gets and rightly so in a story that doesn’t
get a lot further than this outline but is nicely tense all the same. ‘The
Green Man’ is a sort of prequel to ‘Seeds’, with The Krynoids kept at bay by none
other than The Knights Templar in the 12th century. Krynoid seeds
are discovered by medicine man Osbert whose looking for a cure for the lady of
the manor, Maud. He tries to take them home, only to be attacked by a wolf that
eats them and turns into a Krynoid hybrid! We then end up in a story more like
‘The Massacre’
as religious tensions against ‘outsiders’ spills over in the manor house,
everyone little knowing that they have a common enemy growing outside (which
naturally enough everyone agrees is the work of the devil, but they can’t work
out which religion has sent it). The story quickly ends up another ‘base under
siege’ story as The Krynoids pick off their victims one by one in what’s quite
a terrifying audio story, until (spoilers) somebody hits on the idea of ‘greek
fire’. Just like the TV story, you’ll never view gardening in quite the same
way again. Well worth a listen, especially the second one.
Around now Tom Baker and Ian Marter started working
on their story idea ’Dr Who Meets Scratchman’ between jobs, planned as a movie
with Vincent Price as the baddy and Sarah Jane starring alongside the two
authors. The duo came up with the idea during a drunken holiday and officially
pitched it, either as a TV story or a standalone film. Phillip Hinchcliffe
nodded and went aha and let them get on with it, but nobody ever seriously
expected them to sit down and write it: by now Tom was happily telling every
writer he met that he could do a much better job while Ian was still a few
years from getting his side job writing novelisations of Dr Who stories for
Target. The idea was still talked about after Ian left the series – and got a
boost when Tom Baker idly suggested to a
newspaper that maybe fans might like to chip in and got deluged with
pocket money which he then sheepishly had to send back – but the BBC were too
busy making the actual series and no outside production company wanted to know.
The friends still talked about off and on about it, even after Tom left the
series too, until Ian’s premature death in the 1980s seemed to put an end to it
for good. Tom finally got round to finishing the book and published it in 2019,
albeit with no co-credit for Ian (which seems like a colossal oversight given
it was his idea) and about 90% of the legwork was done by regular Who writer
James Goss. Was it worth the wait? Well, no, not as a book it isn’t: this reads
like fan fiction more than anything else and is closer to a scarier ‘K9 and Company’
than anything in the main series, with a holiday in Scotland for the Tardis
trio cut short by the presence of scary scarecrows who appear at the doors and
another ‘ancient force from another dimension’ (which might or might not be The
Devil). As you might expect, though, the trio of characters are all well drawn
and get a nice lot to do, Tom specially capturing the intense flippancy of his
Doctor. What’s lacking are the sorts of things Tom used to complain about so
much to the series’ writers: the character motivation that makes you start
watching, the rich dialogue that makes you keep watching and the payoff at the
end that makes you glad you were watching. The second half, in a surreal
nightmarish landscape, is a particular struggle to read, breaking all the rules
of literary writing in a part that runs (well, crawls) before the people
involved in writing it have properly learnt why the rules are there. That said,
though, the Target novelisations of the Hinchliffe horror TV stories aren’t
that much cop either when you can’t actually see them. On TV or even the
cinema, filmed in shadow, with a Hinchcliffe-style hand in charge that knows
what they’re doing and plenty of jump scares and it could yet have been a
Halloween classic. It’s actually not that far removed from one of the better
Torchwood episodes, ‘Adrift’, with its island full of persecuted souls kept
away from the mainland for their own safety and The Doctor and co blundering
into danger thinking they’re doing the right thing and looked pretty darn good.
One day someone will make a great version of this story, then, but not yet.
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Masque Of Mandragora’
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