Survival: Ranking - 59

 

Survival

(Season 26, Dr 7 with Ace, 22/11/1989-6/12/1989, producer: Johj Nathan-Turner, script editor: Andrew Cartmel, writer: Rona Munro, director: Alan Wareing)

Rank: 59

   'Ace! I'm so glad you've come back from the planet of the cheetah people! Wait, you've turned black and white and heavy and you've started eating bamboo. Oh no, now you're possessed by the Planet of the Panada People! At least they're easier to outrun on horseback though - they keep falling off instead'

 

 It's the end #7 - and the moment has been coming for a while now but it's still sad when it arrives. Oh the irony! BBC DW in the 20^th century, after a nearly unbroken line of stories stretching back 26 years, dies out with a story all about survival of the fittest, at just the point when it had regenerated into something as beautiful and wondrous as it had ever been. If you were to listen to the detractors of the day (many of them in charge at the BBC) then the cancellation was only right and proper: that the series had fallen into a rut and was an anachronism in the late 1980s TV line-up. Yet ‘Survival’ looks now like the most ‘modern’ bit of 20^th century DW ever made – and not just because its the most recent (bar the TV Movie made in America), but because its playing with a whole new wealth of ideas that make the show seem fresh and exciting again. For a long time DW had been escapist TV but now its gritty, urbane, full of characters you could actually meet (give or take the Cheetah People and even then did you see what else people were wearing in 1989?!?)
What people forget, though, is that ‘Survival’ is a story that’s brutally honest about the changing landscape and why DW just doesn’t have the same impact anymore. For starters its set in a London that definitely isn’t swinging, the way it was back when ‘An Unearthly Child’ went on the air in 1963. Aliens invade the home counties not because its the best place to control The Earth and therefore The Galaxy but because that’s where people are miserable and a ready source of desperation, not because its the in-place the universe revolves around. ‘Survival’ is set not at a school where all the teachers talk posh but a contemporary council estate, features working class characters who aren’t just the comedy yokels or canon fodder for monsters but people who become heroes not because of some moral crusade but because their lives are so tough they feel they have nothing to lose, teenagers who are far more afraid of Thatcherite policies than anything The Master or an alien world full of cheetah people can make them do. For ten, maybe twenty, years DW was partly a celebration of what it was to be alive in Britain and now its a mirror of everything wrong with it. And yet that’s exactly why the Britain of 1989 needed a series like DW. The people making this series, notably script editor Andrew Cartmel, know this and have re-modelled DW all over again to the point where it could and should have lived forever; its a tragedy we don’t get to see where the series might have gone from here. ‘Survival’ is a story that’s first and foremost about the main characters too rather than the plot, which is almost an extra (and much more like ‘New Who’ than old). Ace returns home to Perivale after two years away travelling with the Dr and she’s shocked by what’s happened to the friends she’s left behind who are, basically, ‘us’ in 1989– the apathy, the listlessness, the acceptance that life isn’t going to get better. After all she’s seen so much and learnt even more, she’s had her faith in the mystery and wonder of the universe and how wonderful it can be and it breaks her heart even more to see her former friends in exactly the same place, where she too might have ended up without being swept up in a timestorm (it’s always seemed so ‘wrong’ that our most down-to-Earth of companions got such a fairytale off-screen beginning but hey, that’s the difference between DW in 1987, when Michael Grade might have had a point about ending it, and 1989 when he most definitely didn’t). A council estate with desperate people fighting over deadend jobs in a world that’s forgotten how to dream with really strong sexual hints going on: comeback episode ‘Rose’ is closer to this story than many fans realise and suggests that actually nothing much has changed in the intervening sixteen years. Perhaps the biggest change to past stories though is that this story was written by a woman. Now, we did have a few women writing for DW before, most notably Barbara Clegg and ‘Enlightenment’ as well as some co-writers like Jane Baker and Paula Moore (with a large helping hand from script editor Eric Saward, who couldn’t be credited because of union rules) while the vision for what this show could be from the beginning arguably owes more to first producer Verity Lambert than any of the men involved in the series. However this is the first DW story that’s not about a woman’s place in a man’s universe so much as it is about a woman’s universe most men didn’t even know existed (I’m convinced that this story is at least in part a response to Thatcher: not just the misery of the youngsters because of her politics and how they’re competing over the same dwindling resources and jobs just to exist but how disappointed so many female voters were that Britain’s first woman MP just ended up being like all the macho shouty bully boys, just in a skirt, rather than a feminine alternative to masculine governing). After all, the ‘enemy’ in this story isn’t some hulking macho brute who wants to take over the universe and shout at it but Karra, a female cheetah overpowered by a moon’s cycle that comes around once a month and fills the rockpools of water with ‘life force energy’ that ebbs and flows and brings out darker impulses she tries to keep hidden from society. It’s a wonder actually that Ace doesn’t become pregnant after being on the cheetah planet given all the pregnancy and periods imagery (maybe she does – we don’t get to see what happens to her next on screen after all). It’s not subtle either: I mean,she’s basically a pussy-cat riding a pony – throw in a pink unicorn and a snake and this story would have the full set of feminine stereotypes in stories across time (and ‘Kinda’ had already used that last one). Only what’s impressive about ‘Survival’ is that it doesn’t take the easy route and be a cute pink and fluffy little girl idea of the universe but a story that’s every bit as terrifying as the ‘male’ version, just different, full of primal instincts and compulsions rather than warfare and fights (for all that people complain about DW’s ‘gay agenda’ in the modern age, Rona’s self-admitted ‘lesbian hints’ got there first by about two decades). There are many scenes that recall ‘Planet Of The Apes’ here, one of the most ‘macho’ masculine scifi films of them all, only it isn’t hairy men who are going through the change but something much subtler, much witchier, spookier, feminine. Before the Jodie Whittaker era happened I hoped it would be full of more feminine stories like this one – alas it felt as if they made her era more masculine than normal to ‘make up’ for casting a female Doctor, what with all those macho millionaires and inventors and gun-toting baddies and Top Gear style competitions and spies and Daleks running around (the closest to ‘Survival’ in the era is ‘Villa Diodati’, which gets halfway there with its spooky setting and romantic poetry; its by one of the modern series’ few women writers again; sadly even Rona Munro’s long awaited return doesn’t repeat Survival’s feminine instincts). In most other eras ‘Survival’ might have seemed a bit too out of step with the rest of the series, but this is an era that’s all about change and its a perfect fit for Ace, who till now has always been a proper little tomboy, happiest when blowing things up in a very masculine way, while showing that even she’s not immune to the siren’s call. Ace, as loyal a companion as they come, is more than happy to turn her back on her friends and ride off to a mysterious new planet with a total stranger (I mean, can you imagine this story with, say, Nyssa or Tegan? We wouldn’t have been at all surprised at the former turning all girly or the latter dropping the DR and running off the first chance she gets but with Ace its so out of character its a real wrench). The Doctor nearly loses Ace for good and even when he follows her to this mysterious un-named planet of the cheetah people and finds The Master lurking there, half-cat himself, it’s not his old adversary that has to be stopped so much as the primeval power of the un-named planet of the cheetah people and what it does to people that needs to cancelled out . This is a world, too, that causes people to turn on people they see as lower down the food chain than themselves, only what would normally be a dog-eat-dog male world is a cat-on-cat war where they hunt in packs to exploit down the weak. The Master when male, as it turns out, is no match for it: he’s a shadow of his former self, preying on vulnerable lost boys to get him home. Nor is Patterson, the territorial army sergeant who thinks the boys around him need toughening up but can’t handle the stress of what the planet does to him and has something of a breakdown (a hint, perhaps, that even the most manly man in the world wouldn’t be able to cope with what women go through every month). Notably there’s less science and gadgetry than usual in this story: the characters are driven by instinct and intuition, traditionally female rather than male strengths (although goodness knows the Dr has met enough leading women scientists and intuitive men down the years, that’s how the tradition always holds). In the end the only thing that works is (not really that much of a spoiler) the (still in this period asexual) Doctor’s determination not to give in to the darker forces and take the anger and violence he feels out on other people, keeping his masculine and feminine sides in check so he isn’t swayed by violence or instinct (this story makes so much more sense now we know that timelords can be both genders; its the human males on this world who go mad). Sylvester McCoy taps into his inner Hartnell in this story, becoming the calm inner stillness while everyone runs around him madly giving into the chaos, a last bit of sanity in a rapidly changing landscape and more proof of just how much the 7^th Dr has grown in his (and Andrew Cartmel’s) hands since his car crash of an arrival. This is Ace’s story though and Sophie Aldred is superb, switching between her usual tough-fronted-but-vulnerable teenager to a half-cat who feels the lure of the mysterious planet pulsating through her veins. Lisa Bowerman’s Kara, too, is excellent – she was an obvious pick as Ace’s fellow companion Bernice Summerfield in the Big Finish adaptations of the ‘New Adventures’ range that pick up what happens to Ace and the 7^th Dr after this story when the show was off the air. Ditto Julian Holloway (the son of Winnie The Pooh’s voice actor Sterling) who makes Sgt Patterson a bit more interesting than your routine bully, with the scared little kid peeking out underneath the muscles. Anthony Ainley too is thrilling as a more primal, low-key, desperate villain than his usual pantomime persona, losing the suaveness of Roger Delgado’s original for something far more beastly and other-wordly. Only Will Barton’s Midge isn’t quite right, but that’s what happens when you give somebody such a thankless role to play as their first TV when the best actors in the world would struggle with it. Of course it all has to mess up somewhere and that somewhere is the execution on screen: ironically enough Thatcher is the baddy twice over as rising inflation and spiralling budgets meant that this story picked up the short straw – famously a company who offered to provide excellent cheetah costumes for a fraction over the asking price were turned down in favour of a company who knocked them out in a hurry to be cheap and cheerful. The ought to look like the queens of the jungle, all feline and powerful. Instead they look like the character from the ‘Cheetos’ adverts (or Tony the Tiger if you don’t remember him) has been put through a tumble-dryer. Ironically enough we ended up full circle again, as like the ‘Tribe of Gun’ costumes in ‘An Unearthly Child’ the cheetah extras got fleas and suffered filming in a blisteringly hot summer, so much so that one of them walked home on the spot. The scenes that should be really powerful, of our heroes being surrounded by a tribe of cats (complete with multiple stage directions in the script full of meaning and expression) looks like a really cheap pantomime version of ‘Puss In Boots. Only they can’t even afford proper boots. It’s not just the costumes either, though they’re the part of this story that always gets the most flak: there’s an animatronic cat that would have looked poor twenty years earlier, the cheetah planet is realised particularly poorly (if ever a quarry in DW just looked like a quarry rather than an alien world its this one) and The Master and co are quite obviously wearing the sort of false fangs you can get at a jokeshop. It’s such a shame: this story, more than perhaps any other at the end of DW’s original run in season 26, feels like the future and a whole new beginning, only to be held back by the old problems of budget and cost-saving. Alas, in the survival of the fittest, it doesn’t matter how many great ideas you have if everyone watching still thinks everything looks silly and that’s what happened to this story. As with all 20^th century DW stories though if you’re watching this one purely for the effects you’re watching the wrong show and Survival’s ideas are more than strong enough to make up for the odd dodgy effect – and if a script can survive all that then it has a lot going for it. How fitting, then, that a story that warns against selfishness and narrow-mindedness and running with the pack gets cancelled just when its found its voice again, standing almost alone against the weight of other programmes on in the same era. Not that anybody working on this story knew for certain that it was the last, but a feeling was in the air and everyone realised was enough of a possibility for script editor Andrew Cartmel to write in one last first-bumping monologue that perfectly captures the 7^th Dr’s character, walking off into the sunset hand in hand with Ace to a universe where ‘there are worlds where the sky is burning, the sea is asleep and rivers dream’ somewhere ‘where there’s danger, somewhere there’s injustice and somewhere the tea’s getting cold’. It’s one of the most famous DW quotes of the 1980s for a reason (its very sad that Cartmel wasn’t around long enough to write a full DW script – I wish one of the modern showrunners would invite him to have a go). Closely followed by Rona’s lines about Ace ‘s friend Manisha recognising her: ‘I thought you’d died! Either that or gone to Birmingham!’ The result is a first-class story that offers a totally new twist on anything DW has ever done before and considering that its the second story in a row about evolution (following ‘Ghostlight’) its suitably inventive and groundbreaking, as ahead of its time for what other TV programmes were doing in 1989 as ‘An Unearthly Child’ was in 1963. It’s a more than suitable place to end the series, roughly where they started it, as the most unique quirky, exciting, eccentric and pioneering show in television about extraordinary things happening in our ordinary world that you’ll never look at in quite the same way again after watching, what should have been the start of a whole new ‘classic’ era frozen in time till Russell T comes along to thaw it out again. 

+ This is one of DW’s most postmodernist stories, closely behind ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ and ‘Love and Monsters’, part of a series that had been long-running enough to have writers who had grown up to this series and followed it since childhood. The best gag is that, trying to prevent a battle on the cheetah planet and imploring people to stop being violent, the Dr ends up where fans are all said to go when there’s a scary monster on screen they don’t want to look at – hiding behind a sofa.

- It wouldn’t be 1980s Who without another bit of the most random guest casting. This time we get ‘comedians’ (not to be, uhh, catty, but the term is used loosely) Hale and Pace, who run the local corner shop where the Dr gets his catfood. In a sign of just how much these parts were written for them the two comedians swapped them round on the day of shooting. It doesn’t help much – they still sound wrong and out of place, cheesily false in a story that’s otherwise all about realism. Given that so much was cut from this story (if not quite as much as ‘Ghostlight’ or ‘Curse Of Fenric’) we could have lost all their scenes no problem at all.