The Awakening: Ranking - 107

                     The Awakening

(Season 21, Dr 5 with Tegan and Turlough, 19-20/1/1984, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Eric Pringle, director: Michael Owen Morris)

Rank: 107

  'And now we shall sing hymn 3546537465: Why is the Devil making eyes at me from the back of the church?

'All things dark and ugly

Loved by Malus great and small

Cavaliers and Roundheads

The Malus feeds off us all'

The scripts for the 5th Dr really are all over the place, not just in terms of quality but quantity – there’s a bunch of stories that outstay their welcome by the second episode yet go on for weeks and others that are crying out for an extra episode or three (or even four) to tell a story properly. ‘The Awakening’ is one of those latter stories, one that was pruned back to two parts by producer JNT because he thought there wasn’t enough plot for four, but really, by 1980s Dr Who standards, what we have here is enough for six. ‘The Awakening’ is brilliantly atmospheric, throwing in all sorts of ideas that are very Who and yet the series had never done before (or since): a quarter century or so before Steven Moffat comes along writer Eric Pringle has great fun playing with time. We start off not knowing if we’re in the past with time-travellers from the present dressed in slightly old-fashioned 1980s clothes or if we’re in the present with people from the past. As it happens we’re in a 1984 re-enactment of the Civil War thinking we’ve travelled back through time only to discover we’re in the present day who are re-enacting the past (specifically a battle in July 13th 1643 that destroyed the village), a revelation that ought to feel massive but because we’re down to two episodes is rather thrown away. What’s more there’s an alien hidden in a church that makes the local village civil war re-enactments more dangerous than they should be, one that turns out to be the devil (and whose a lot more believable and less on the nose than the one the 10th Dr meets) who ends up causing unstable dimensions in time that causes a boy hiding from the chaos burning most of the village to the ground in a local priest hole to fall through to the present day from the middle ages. And if that isn’t the most Dr Whoy plot of them all I don’t know what is. There’s so much here to explore, especially with all the extra sub-plots going on – yet this was the one Eric Saward and John Nathan-Turner decided to cut in half, which is so frustrating. The problem was BBC budgets were tight in this era (thanks Margaret Thatcher – Who gets its own back with ‘The Happiness patrol in a few years) and Dr Who was always a relatively expensive series to make, so the production team had two less episodes than normal to juggle with. Rather than cut the length of a story submitted by one of their more experienced writers and risking their wrath they decided the less experienced Eric Pringle, who’d been submitting this story on and off since 1975 when it was titled ‘War Games’ then ‘Angurth’ (the original name of the village) then ‘The Darkness’ (where it’s tale of a closed village cut off by a malevolent force would have worked nicely alongside ‘The Android Invasion’ and ‘Masque of Mandragora’), would be so pleased to have his story made at all he wouldn’t complain. And he didn’t: Pringle is on the record as saying he thought cutting the story down was a good idea. His agent just happened to be Peter Bryant, one time producer and script editor of the series himself in the Troughton era, who probably coached his client in just how difficult things were backstage and how it would be helpful for him just to go along with it all. But it isn’t: I really don’t see why they couldn’t have cut this story down to three alongside, say, ‘Warriors Of the Deep’ to have a really fast-paced action opening to the season. Instead ‘The Awakening’ is in such an adrenalin rush there isn’t enough time for any of it’s very clever points to really land – it’s the sort of story that feels awake in more of a manic coffee-fuelled sense. 

Though it fells a little unreal as if we’re in a play, we are anyway. Amazingly, this is still Dr Who’s only sort-of trip to the English Civil War, one of Britain’s maddest and weirdest periods and we barely scratch the surface of its intrigue, skullduggery and in-fighting across 50 minutes – surely one day we’ll get an episode where the Dr calls out Cromwell’s hypocrisies and accidentally insults his warts?! It is, along with 1066, the most obvious date the Tardis can visit, the era that shaped Britain and made it what it is more than any other. Especially in 1643 which is considered the middle of three phases that really made Englanders pick a side after successfully managing to ignore most of the war early on; this was the war that is so ironically named because it was the first that wasn’t a civil battle fought by trained soldiers on some faraway plain but ne that divided families and often had brothers fighting brothers in battle. Unlike almost every other battle Britain’s ever fought (over land or resources) it was an ideological battle to save our souls: as far as the cavaliers are concerned King Charles has been picked to rule by the divine right of Kings and has a duty to unite a kingdom that’s been at each other’s throats for far too long, a protestant Royal trying to keep the peace. To defy him is to defy the will of God and will see you thrown into the fiery depths of Hell on the event of your death. To the Roundheads though their King has lost the plot and has clearly been possessed by the devil: he’s married a Catholic wife in a land that’s almost entirely Protestant (that, unusually for the Royals in any era, he seems to have genuinely loved) and, even worse than that for most Englanders, she was French – the mortal enemy! As far as the Roundheads are concerned this is a test and if they don’t stop Charles, if they continue to give him all the power, worse might be around the corner and they’ll all be condemned to a fiery afterlife for allowing him to get away with it. As things turn out Lord protectorate Cromwell will be touched by a bit of the madness himself, believing himself to have a divine right to rule which means he too can do whatever he wants (stopping off to butcher Ireland because he’s a bit of a macho nutter) and his family get to rule the country for the foreseeable future after he’s dead; by the time his weak-kneed son hits the throne everyone agrees they’ve had enough and casts him out in favour of Charles II, whose careful not to do anything too mad (like marry a foreigner). The Civil War ends up in the history books as an era when people went a bit mad but, at the time, thought they were fighting for their lives. 

 Alas there’s almost none of that in ‘The Visitation’ , no sense of the Uncivil War as anything other than a bit of decoration – I suspect given Pringle’s carefully researched dialogue and set dates that there was a lot more of this in his original script. I mean, just look how many minor characters in this story are named after minor figures in the real civil war: John Hampden was MP for Cornwall and an early critic of King Charles I’s early demands for money who was killed by Prince Rupert in an early skirmish, John Hutchinson was governor of Nottingham who was a leading roundhead until he clashed with Cromwell once too often and got demoted (which was at least less painful than what happened to some of his colleagues who crossed Cromwell), whilst Sir Edmund Verney was a ‘favourite’ of the King who died fighting for the Cavaliers in the battle of Edgehill. Which, given that he’s the name of Tegan’s grandfather, might explain her – ahem – cavalier attitude at time-travel in certain stories. There’s also the oddly specific dating of July 16th 1643 when Will Chandler hides in a priest hole as the fictional village of Little Hodcombe burns down. It’s the date of an actual battle – admittedly pretty much every day in the 1640s had a battle somewhere – but it’s one that’s a bit of a turning point in the war, The Battle of Roundway Down, which took place in Devizes, Wiltshire. If ever a battle can be said to be divinely guided it’s this one: the Royalists seem outnumbered, they’ve ridden for days without sleep and not much food after another battle in Oxford and yet scored a crushing blow, their meagre troops wiping out 600 Roundheads and capturing 1200 more along with most of their supplies. It’s the single biggest Cavalier victory and those on the side of the King were smugly talking about how God would see an end to the war anyday now. And then they don’t: Charliebonce gets too full of himself, wastes a lot of that momentum by some truly daft decisions and before he knows where he is finds himself running away for his life up to Scotland (where, for a while, his headquarters was in my local Marks and Spencers in Carlisle. Not that it was a marks and Spencers at the time you understand). So who really did have divine right? The King who got lucky then wasted it or the Roundheads who were unlucky but didn’t give up? It’s all at one with the tangled web that’s been at the heart of Dr Who since the beginning: how much of time is fated and how much of it is down to our free will? And talking of free will there’s the very Dr Who idea of the orphan who goers to sleep while all hell is breaking loose in his world only to wake up in ours to find out the war was all for nothing and there’s been a whole bunch of Kings back on the throne anyway. So what was it all for? 

 Alas that’s all rather in the background of this story where the civil war is more an excuse for the period garb than an attempt to give the sort of detailed trips through history we got in the black-and-white era, giving this story the feel of a historical without it actually being one, something that makes it unique in the series so far. There is, however, another very good element that you can tell Pringle is trying to make the most of in his new smaller space: what are re-enactments for? They were a big deal in the 1980s when people were split between yearning to go back to ‘the good old days’ when life was simpler and less commercial and the gung-ho crowd who’d rather liked the thrill of the war in the Falklands (a war fought for far far stupider reasons than the Civil War, over the territory of an island and some sheep). They were sold as ‘authentic experiences’. But how can they be when people weren’t fighting for their lives and could put their uniform away in a drawer while they went back to real life. If not authenticity then what were people re-enacting old battles for? To learn a bit about local history? Well, you can learn a bit about food and costume and swordsmanship maybe but you can’t really learn about The Civil War from poncing about in period tunics any more than you can by reading about it in books: this was a war when everyone thought their very afterlife and those of everyone they ever loved or knew was at stake and where everyone was prepared to die for their cause. You just can’t recreate that in a fake battle where no one is meant to get hurt except in accidents and everyone can go home to their own lives again after tea. Dr Who is a series that gets as close as anything can to making the past come alive and making it real, complete with the emotions and motives of the people we meet so poking gentle fun at people dressing up for fun over something that once used to be a literal matter of lie and death is exactly what this series should be ‘for’. There’s another element too, that of healing: a demon known as The Malus has been hiding out in the local church (the only place that wasn’t burnt down in the Civil War being so far out of the way) and has latched onto the bad feeling of the day, using psychic forces to stir up the villagers and their still lingering feelings of anger against each other in 1984, passed on down the generations (although this angle is fluffed a bit in the final script). But why is the village so obsessed with a past that was so awful for their history anyway? (The whole of Little Hodcombe burnt down and had to be rebuilt from scratch). The past really shouldn’t be so alive in the present, not after so long and after a war that was long since ‘won’ but like the Malus on the side of the church the old wounds keep clinging on and fester on even though there’s no physical war to fight anymore. Even though the Village clearly had a future after this: it’s a lovely little place and has a thriving population for its size, as well as a church that survived the carnage. Generally speaking Dr Who is a series about how the past lives with us and the rippled of something someone did can affect how people behave in the present and maybe even the future, but this story is special because it asks if we shouldn’t lay some of the bad things happened in the past to rest and heal and that’s such a great idea. 

Frustratingly, we don’t really get much of that either. Instead we get a spooky action adventure story about the creepy anachronisms of the village that never quite moved on and doesn’t take kindly to outsiders even when not being influenced by an ancient form of the devil is one of its better elements of the plot. It’s ‘The Wicker Man’ with roundheads in other words (a film which, having been released in 1973, would have been fresh in Pringle’s mind when he wrote the first draft of this story a couple of years later). And to be fair that’s a pretty good plot too. Especially when they make it personal and centres around yet another of Tegan’s relatives (her grandfather this time, after other stories where we meet her aunt and her cousin – no companion gets this much family till Rose). Alas, though, that plot element gets forgotten too before it can make the most of it: we get ten minutes of Tegan worrying about where he might be and then they find him (something tells me in the original four parter that would have been worth at least a cliffhanger).So instead the story hops over to focus on The Malus (a real archaic Latin name for the devil and one that also translates as ‘apple’, leading me to long consider whether the Biblical tale of the Garden of Eden isn’t really about mankind choosing evil rather than some fruit but, hey ho, that’s another essay for another time). The Malus is one of Dr Who’s more fascinating villains: it isn’t brainwashing the people for an alien invasion but taking over the darker more warlike impulses that were always hiding in humans to feed itself and help it grow in size and power. By stirring up the civil war re-enactment and making it ‘real’ it gets a really good feast on people’s darker sides until it towers in size by the one and only cliffhanger (goodness knows how big it would look if it revived itself in 2023; Trump alone has stirred up at least a couple of feet of division). The tension really grows across the two parts, so much so that you expect this plot to grow and grow in size too, to the point where the Malus takes over more and more and becomes a bigger and bigger threat. And that just...doesn’t happen. 

 Where the second episode would normally end with a cliffhanger, Dr Who’s traditional ‘well we thought we’d solved it all but it turns out that it’s a bigger threat than I thought’ moment in the old four-parter slots, the Malus dies and everyone goes home (the Tardis presumably taking the lost lad back home again first time, not that we ever see him – it’s a sign of how little chance Will Chandler has to be part of the plot and how unfulfilling a companion he would have been even though JNT for one considered making him one that there isn’t a spin-off Big Finish series of his trips round space with Tegan and Turlough before they get him back home. I mean, they’ve done everything else). Solving the problem first time out doesn’t give us nearly enough time to explore this world and with so many characters running around we never really get to know them all. Tegan and Turlough needn’t really have turned up for all they do in this story, effectively replaced by Will (whose a little like a Medieval Adric) and Liver Bird Polly James as Jane (whose a little like Barbara but less intelligent; Polly James said yes to the series after fellow Liver Bird Nerys Hughes had such a fun time making ‘Kinda’ but doesn’t get nearly as deep a story or character to get her teeth into). Tegan’s grandaddy Andrew Verney too seems oddly non-plussed by the fact that his long lost time-travelling niece has returned seemingly from the dead so soon after her cousin also died a horrible death (in ‘Arc Of Infinity’ set just a year before this) and two years after her aunt (perhaps on the others side of the family but still) also died a horrible death (‘in ‘Logopolis’): given that his own tiny village has started killing people and locking them up he ought to be scared as anything and ranting about the family curse by now. he doesn’t even find it strange that his grand-daughter’s back in England and brought some weirdly dressed friends along (plus he seems a tad young, certainly compared to the age of Tegan’s aunt, unless there was a whopping age gap in her family somewhere). Truly, why is he a relative at all? It’s so unlikely that a small village picked out by the devil would feature one of Tegan’s relatives that you assume it just has to be a plot point rather than coincidence, but it isn’t – not in the final draft anyway. In a story this short we need someone there to pass on information in a record-quick time so the travellers know what’s going on instead of spending the traditional first episode finding it out, so we need someone they get talking to quickly, but why not just make it a passerby? You also have to say that the final plot, as tweaked by Eric Saward, knowingly or unknowingly simply recycles ‘The Daemons’ from 1971: a village cut off from the rest of the world by someone claiming to be the devil. There’s even a finale where the church gets blown up. Normally I’d put that down to lazy writing, but it sounds as if originally Pringle was trying to tell a very different, more interesting story than that. 

 On its own terms though it’s still a good little tale though. Like ‘The Daemons’ the location filming is a triumph: it’s just great to be outside again after so many studio-bound stories and to be in a place that isn’t just London or surrounding countryside. Filming took place in the villages of Shapwick in Dorset and Martin in Hampshire; ‘Little Hodcombe’ is one of the few Earthly places mentioned as ‘real’ in the series that doesn’t actually exist though it feels very much like the sort of English village that should. The church particularly is wonderful: it looks a ‘real’ part of the village but both outside and inside are a bit of a chat: the outside is part of a different village altogether (it was added to the village scenes in the distance thanks to a matte painting so clever you can’t see the join) and the inside is a superb studio set, a worthy last hurrah for set designer Barry Newbury who’d worked on Dr Who off and on since the beginning and designed more sets in the ‘old’ series than anybody – it’s fitting that this is his last job not just for the series but before retirement as it ticks all his boxes of meticulous period design and he really pulls out all the stops here. The costumes are amazing, with lots of period dress available for the extras for once too, borrowed from the BBC’s epic 1983 drama ‘By The Sword Divided’, the last time the Civil War was mainstream in British public consciousness (maybe because a few mistakes and a lack of pace given it follows just one family and takes place across a full twenty hours means it has the opposite problems of this story, being leisurely and having too much time to think between action moments. Still good though for history buffs and Who fans, especially Julian ‘Count Scaroth/King Richard’ Glover, Peter ‘Count Grendel’ Jeffreys and David ‘Poul/Mawdryn’ Collings). ‘The Awakening’ however looks every bit as good if not better despite fraction of the budget, arguably looking better across the board than any other 5th Dr story in the troubled 1980s when budgets were particularly tight (even ‘Caves Of Androzani’, its closest competitor, has a dodgy mire beast). Dennis Lill makes for a great baddy, someone who normally would be a bit of a stickler for rules and regulations but otherwise harmless turned into a monster by the bit of the devil in him being made to grow. You really feel the doubt of his underlings too, worried about contradicting him or calling him out for his actions but with an uneasy sense that something’s gone a bit wrong. The cast is great all the way down to the extras actually: that’s Peter Purves’ brief Blue Peter replacement Chris Wenner as an unspeaking soldier. It sounds good too: Peter Howell, in charge of the score, went to the trouble of tracking down the drummer extras seen in this story to play ‘real’ drums on the score and add a rat-a-tat-tat military rhythm that’s really good at invoking the period (and unlike a lot of historical stories the fact they exists alongside his usual very 1980s synths is entirely in keeping with the story’s premise). Little Hodcombe feels like a real place, with real traditions and cultures that’s been around for a lot longer than the fifty minutes we see it on screen, so much so that more than one Who fan has scoured maps looking for it down the years. The result is a very enjoyable two episodes that moves along at a pace that’s positively 21st century in stark contrast to the sometimes slow stories around it and which makes less crass mistakes than almost any other story of this era. 

 The only downside is that ‘The Awakening’ could and should have been so much more, so that by the time the credits roll it all still feels like unfulfilled potential and most of the promise in this story remains unexplored. I mean, we’re crying out for an episode three based on Hakl, the planet the Malus originated on which we hear a lot about but never actually see, never mind an extra episode exploring the origins and the war games and how the Malus took people over bit by bit (unusually the Tardis arrives after most people’s heads have been turned; if it really is a sentient being who takes the Doctor to where he’s most needed – as suggested in a few other essays by now – then for once the Tardis goofed and got the Doctor here late, after a lot of the damage had been done); again, how frustrating this story got chopped rather than one of the more deserving ones this season. Or maybe I really am seeing potential where this isn’t any: I went out of my way to get hold of the novelisation of this story by the author, hoping some of those missing scenes would be here, but while it’s one of the better written target novels it really is just a transcription of what’s on TV with nothing particular missing (and so might be even more of a wasted opportunity than the TV version). The production team didn’t think much of it either it seems, never inviting Pringle to write for the series again and being so careless that the original negative for episode one is badly scratched and in worse condition than the earliest stories from the Hartnell days (thankfully ‘The Awakening’ was picked to be part of the annual omnibus repeats the following Christmas – being a two-parter there wasn’t much to edit down – and the print used on the video and DVD has been restored from that). Ironically, too, the most seen bit of this story isn’t a broadcast part at all but an outtake, where a horse taking the Doctor and co to be locked up took a fancy to an archway the BBC team had built to cover up a bunch of modern signs (I’m not sure why, given that technically this story is set marginally in the future from the time of filming, but maybe there was a really graphic and off-putting sign on the notice-board?) The horse wouldn’t move on cue so somebody got the sensible idea of moving it’s mare to where it needed to be so it would go over to her; alas the horse bypassed it wand went careering into the archway instead, knocking it over. Weirdly this outtake was broadcast over a month before the story as part of a Noel Edmonds show ‘The Late Late breakfast’ and routinely pops up on ‘Auntie’s Bloomers’ outtakes programmes (as well as the DVD). I say the horse was only getting character: this is a story all about seeing through fake bits of history that don’t have a place in our modern world and should be torn down instead of holding us back so he clearly understood this story more than a god half the people making it! 

 The result is an excellent story but one that has more potential than anything you can point to and one where nothing goes wrong rather than where things go extraordinarily right. Still, there’s a solid guest cast, rare location filming, some brilliant effects and some of the best models in the series. I so wish one of the earlier production teams had adapted it and given it more time; however kudos for Saward for giving it life where so many other people (including his mentor Robert Holmes) had passed on it: Eric was quick to pick up on the ‘atmosphere in old houses lingering’ atmosphere, being a keen history buff himself who loved going round stately homes and museums on his days off from, erm, writing scenes for stately homes and museums (it’s odd how few writers of Dr Who are actually interested I history; I mean, even if you’re writing stories set in the future that’s just a form of history that hasn’t happened yet). I’m glad somebody took pity on this poor story as there’s a lot of such delightfully Whoy ideas in here, even if a lot of them are hanged, drawn and quartered by the time it got to screen. Better perhaps to have a great idea cut in half than a bad one extended past breaking point I guess (and for examples of that see more than a few of our bottom hundred ranked stories), especially when all the usual love and devotion of Dr Who at its most epic is lavished on a story that’s afforded every amenity except the one thing it most needs: more time. Even though it’s a story that, funnily enough, is about having too much time and how carrying around an ever present past is something best left to historians and timelords. What’s more, though it’s a story that’s very 1980s and re-creates the 17th century all too well it’s also brilliantly timeless and the themes of continued hurts and divisions carrying with us into the future we should have laid to rest long ago feels more pertinent now than ever (is it too late to pitch a sequel where the Malus is responsible for Brexit?!) 

 POSITIVES + The Malus is an amazing model shot, both when it’s seen as a huge face with green eyes peeking through the stonework of the church in the cliffhanger as a manic Doctor pulls the wall down around it and later when it turns small and becomes one of the few monsters to ever invade The Tardis, hanging from its familiar roundels in grinning glory. The bigger one is an early prototype for the Face of Boe that towers over everyone in the church and the Doctor’s discovery of it behind a wall (a complex collaboration between set design and visual effects that almost went wrong when they got the dimensions a little wrong) which makes for quite the cliffhanger. Re-creating the devil in stone form was a tough ask for any model effects team but they really nail it here – this is a being that feels like the sort of demon spoken about in the middle ages, like a gargoyle but flatter and made out of stone (and a lot better than the CGI devil dude of ‘The Impossible Planet’, whatever the advances in time and effects). The finale where it ‘melts’ is really quite something too. How the heck did they manage to pay for it all when they could only stretch the budget across two parts this time? 

 NEGATIVES - The general re-action to Adric from most fans was ‘please drop the precocious brat in space’. Quite why adding a precocious brat from times past is any better than a brat from another universe is anyone’s guess. Will Chandler doesn’t really get much more to do than run around getting under Peter Davison’s feet, though it has to be said he already showed more promise in one adventure than Adric did past ‘Full Circle’. And before you think I’m picking on a child actor for not being, well, an adult actor – it’s very much not Keith Jayne’s fault in this story but the script’s, which is so hooked on the ‘medieval English’ angle Will’s lines were written out phonetically for him to speak (I’d like to see the greatest most beloved Hollywood actors in the land cope with a script that does that to them) and even then never quite knows what to do with him. Oh and Keith was 23 when he got the role (but looked much younger - and indeed smaller - due to a pituitary gland condition; it’s quite the story – he was one of the patients being treated with a pioneering replacement donor treatment that by accident dosed him with CJD from a poorly patient without his knowledge – alas he had to give up a lot of his acting career to fight in court for compensation for himself and other sufferers and even after he won couldn’t get back into acting because of all the exaggerated media reports that stressed he was ‘dying’ because of it, making insurers a bit shaky about employing him. Thankfully he’s still very much here at age 63. Anyway, of course he’s good: he was born in Carlisle, where the best people come from, whatever Clara says). 

BEST QUOTE: Sir George Hutchinson: ‘You speak treason’ The Doctor: ‘Fluently!’