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 Panda People! At least they're easier to outrun on horseback though - they keep falling off! Wait, now you’ve got a really wide mouth and you’re rolling in mud. We must be on the planet of the hippo people! Now you’ve gone all spiky – this must be the planet of the hedgehog people!...'
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 Dr Who in the 20th century, after a nearly unbroken line of stories stretching back twenty-six 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: the series had fallen into a rut, was haemorrhaging viewers and was an anachronism in the late 1980s TV line-up. Yet that wasn’t true: Dr Who was only dying because it had been deliberately starved in an attempt to kill it, given a slot against Coronation Street where no BBC programme had ever done well and with slashed budgets, reduced episode numbers and all the things drama series need to live. What’s more, despite all these obstacles Dr Who was surviving in the dog-eat-dog world of TV drama and after a slight regression in the mid 1980s was now back at the forefront of scifi. Once again it was a series attracting talent, people who cared about this show, who used to it to say big things they couldn’t say anywhere else, with pioneering technology (the ‘Paintbox’, an early computer programme way ahead of its time) and stories about the world people were living in. Far from being the dying gasps of a programme that was doomed, ‘Survival’ seems impressively modern now and looks now like the most ‘modern’ 21st century bit of 20th century Dr Who ever made – not just because it’s the most recent (bar the ‘TV Movie’, which seems retro), but because its reflecting the real world and making comments other more scrutinised series would never dare to make. For the longest time Dr Who had been escapist fantasy 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?!?) In a story all about ‘survival of the fittest’ and how you have to adapt to evolve or die Dr Who is winning, in a story that finds so many successful new ways of doing things that Russell T Davies will keep half of them when he brings the series back in 2005. But then they killed it anyway.
Nobody knew it was really
the end when they made ‘Survival’ (with a name that turned out to be so ironic),
although most people had an inkling. This time around there was no big
announcement, no press release announcing a hiatus, no demand for certain
people on the show to go (and nothing to do with the fact that the BBC boss was
dating Colin Baker’s ex, goodness no), just a rather feeble admission in the
Radio Times saying that ‘there might be a little longer between series than
usual’. I’ll say! Sixteen years as things turn out. This time Michael Grade,
Jonathan Powell and the new whipping boy recruited to the head of serials just
in time to put his name on the announcements, Peter Cregeen, avoided all the
bad publicity and BBC switchboards being jammed with protestors by
stonewalling. All those in the Dr Who team were moved on to other jobs,
ironically all except producer John Nathan-Turner who was the one who most
wanted to leave, with the workload slowly shifting from a new season (they’d
got quite far: see the prequels/sequels section below) to putting old stories
out on video. Somehow, in all the noise and confusion, the bosses won: they
told so many people that Dr Who was dead, out of date, old fashioned and fully
of wobbly sets and that it only had appeal to some sad old fans that everyone
believed it. Everyone except yours truly and a few other people like me dotted
round Britain (the BBC having long ago stopped selling these shows to other
countries by 1989) who came in during these final years and thought Dr Who was
the most alive, most contemporary, most cutting edge series being made. That
the only thing it needed to be at the forefront of the TV schedules again was a
bit of extra money and it wasn’t going to get that, not in Thatcherist Britain.
You see, ‘Survival’ was a
story that, like ‘Greatest Show’ and ‘Happiness Patrol’, reflected the
world I lived in better than anything else on television. ‘Survival’ is a story that’s actually brutally
honest about the changing landscape and why Dr Who just doesn’t have the same
impact anymore: because it’s a series about being kind in a world that seems to
have forgotten how to be. If Dr Who ever had to end then I’m glad it ended here
though, in a story that takes us half-circle in so many ways. Our first story
set in contemporary Britain (for an episode at least) for the first time since
‘Attack Of The Cybermen’ nearly five years
ago, we see a London that definitely isn’t swinging, the way it was back when ‘An Unearthly Child’ went on the air in
1963. Ace goes back to meet her friends and see how they’ve gotten on while
she’s been exploring the universe and is horrified at how lost and desperate
they seem, finding them married, vanished or just left alone. One of her
friends, Manisha, is making a last stand and trying to raise money to stop
fox-hunting from passers by who are too busy looking after their own (surely a
metaphor for what was happening to Humans in the survival of the fittest era),
others have moved away in desperate need to get jobs, one got married to
someone they clearly don’t love by the sound of it but because it was a way out
of poverty. The others have gone missing and no one cares where (even Ace is
met with the gloriously barbed comment ‘I thought you’d died – or gone to
Birmingham’, actually an injoke given that Ben Aaronovitch’s novelisation of ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’ has two
separate endings for another of Ace’s friends). Ace is 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).
Its not just Ace and her
friends, though. Aliens invade the home counties not because it’s the best
place to control The Earth and therefore the universe but because that’s where
people are miserable and a ready source of desperation, looking for escape and
a sense of belonging, no longer 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, featuring working class characters who aren’t just the comedy
yokels or canon fodder for monsters of old but teens who are desperate, far
more afraid of Thatcherite policies than anything The Master or an alien world
full of cheetah people can make them do. This is no longer a place of hope,
where anything can happen, but a miserable place where all the good things can
be snatched away at any time. There are more mirrors with ‘An Unearthly Child’
too: a second episode takes us to a place of tribes, where people are
squabbling over basic resources in a metaphor for the cold war. Only this time
it’s an alien planet that’s a desolate wasteland and this might be our future
rather than our past if our world leaders don’t get their act together (I do
find it neat that Dr Who, a series that’s been at least partly about the cold
war all its life, ends the first time round more or less concurrently with the
fall of Soviet Russia). For ten, maybe twenty, years Who was partly a
celebration of what it was to be alive in Britain and now it’s a mirror of
everything wrong with it.
And yet that’s exactly
why the Britain of 1989 needed a series like Dr Who, especially the young and
hungry (often literally) writers that Andrew Cartmel had brought to the series.
His latest will go on to be possibly the biggest name classic Who ever had
outside the series, Rona Munro, who will go on to become a respected playwright
renowned for her gritty works about families and politics. Here though she’s a
fresh-faced thirty-year-old with a
couple of plays and an Edinburgh Fringe Festival under her belt who met Cartmel
at a lecture he was giving at a TV workshop in Scotland in 1987. She went up to
congratulate him on getting the best job in television (as she was a young and
trendy lifelong Who fan, no matter what the BBC bosses thought of the show’s
demographic) and they swapped numbers. This was her TV debut, a story for which
she was so junior they basically handed her The Master story as no one else
wanted to do it (though as a fully paid-up Whovian Rona was thrilled). Like most fan writers, though, far from
delivering the continuity filled stories everyone expects, she knows that Dr
Who is a series that can do anything, including fantasy tales set on unlikely
planets that hold up a mirror better to contemporary society in a way that
would be too harsh and on-the-nose were this a ‘straight’ drama series.
‘Survival’ is a story all
about what it is to be alive in 1989 especially for the young and ambitious who
refuse to become the feral monsters that Thatcherism demanded. Everyone in this
story is looking to belong somewhere, to feel less isolated, whether they do it
by power over another or a sense of camaraderie. Once people end up in the land
of the cheetah people all they want to do is try to get back home, to the way
things used to be, without being too changed by the experience of living
through this life where everyone is out to get you and you have to get them
first. Perivale is a direct link to the planet of the cheetah people (it never
does get a name), a land where if you stay too long your eyes turn yellow, you
start growing fangs and you end up with fur. This is a world 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. Lots of people have got trapped here
including The Master (we don’t find out how on screen but in Rona’s fine Target
novelisation he was meddling in a civil war that went wrong and he left by
controlling a kitling who took him here, to ‘his’ home), but the more The
Master has tried to control other people through hypnotism the more he’s lost
his real self. He’s set The Doctor a trap by sending a cat to lure him here,
intending to use him to get out (which is a bit odd as it happens: The Doctor
has never spent time hanging round his companions’ home towns before, it’s a
character trait that he never goes back to talk to them and watch them grow old
and The Master’s never met Ace or known about Perivale. Did he send cats to go
to every companion? Is there one in Ancient Greece hanging around waiting for
Katrina to come home? Or one in the Scottish highlands mewing round Jamie?)
Along the way a few other Perivalians become ‘food’ too, squabbling over
resources or running round in a mad panic that only makes them more susceptible
to being cheetah food, to turning into the primal ‘survival of the fittest’
mode of kill or be killed. You’re either in power, you belong or you’re toast
at the bottom of the food chain: that’s it, there are no other options.
Now if you’ve been
reading these reviews in chronological order the biggest surprise is that this
story was written by a woman. Now, we did have a few women writing for Dr Who
before, most notably Barbara Clegg with ‘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 Stones Of Blood’ by
David Fisher, though written by a man, is generally accepted as the first Who
story to put a ‘feminine’ vision of the world across. You could also argue that
from the beginning this show arguably owes more to first producer Verity
Lambert than any of the men involved in the series. However this is the first Dr
Who 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. Don’t become part of the masculine dog-eat-dog world this
story says, become a cat and run for the hills: yeah it’ll change you and make
you feral too, but who wants to stay feeling lost and hopeless? (The real dog
seen in this story is Pepsi, John Nathan-Turner’s pooch; the cat’s name has
been lost to the ages but it was a pet cat owned by a boy who came to watch
filming and a hurried replacement for the ‘Janimals’ official TV felines
brought along who licked off all the red fur dye. Hopefully Janimals didn’t
keep them in the same place as the snakes from ‘Snakedance’!
It was chance that a poster for the musical ‘Cats’ was on the North Ealing martial
arts club wall by the way: the real posters were being taken down but an eagle-eyed
McCoy spotted it and made them keep it up. He and Sophie happily added the graffiti
to the walls to make it seem ‘grubbier’) The cheetah people eat the boys but
they lure the girls to come join them, bewitching them in a subtler, sisters
together kind of a way. Their pack is formed through kindness though not brute
force: Ace befriends Karra by bringing her water, little knowing how tainted it
is, bewitched into staying by the feeling of belonging to something greater
than herself. 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. The men are brutes worthy only of being food, but the girls
offer a sense of belonging to troubled teens who feel a bit lost. Master aside,
a character who’s a victim more than a player in this one, the ‘enemy’ in this
story isn’t some hulking macho brute who wants to take over the universe and
shout at it but a female cheetah overpowered by a moon’s cycle that comes
around once a month and makes her grow ‘fur’ and brings out darker impulses she
tries to keep hidden from society. The big turning point in this story comes
when Ace sips rockpools of water from a ‘pussycat’ that have been turned by a
full moon (on a twenty-eight-day cycle) and filled with ‘life force energy’. It’s
a wonder actually that Ace doesn’t become pregnant after being on the cheetah
planet given all the pregnancy and menstuation imagery (maybe she does – we
don’t get to see what happens to her next on screen after all), but then it’s
more than just bodily functions. Ace is clearly more than just friends with
Kara. 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 used in all 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 compulsions
and intuition rather than warfare and fights (for all that people complain
about Dr Who’s ‘gay agenda’ in the modern age, Rona’s self-admitted ‘lesbian
hints’ got there first by about two decades, though she didn’t quite get her
sexually hinting working title ‘Cat Flap’ onto the final product. It was a
direct comment, so Rona says, about Thatcher’s ‘section 28’ bill banning the
mention of homosexuality in schools in case it ‘altered’ them (as if any kid is
ever inspired to do anything they hear about in lesson – it’s the playground
where they pick up stuff. The irony, of course, is that – being butch and
masculine - Thatcher was quite the lesbian icon for a while, which she hated –
Richard ‘Mike Yates’ Franklin had a whole stage play about this in ‘Recall UNIT
or The Great T-Bag Mystery’, the ‘T’ being Thatcher naturally. What better revenge
can there be against her than ‘indoctrinating’ all the kids anyway). It’s worth
noting, too, that Rona is the only writer to deal with Bill’s lesbianism
outside creator Moffat in her Who return ‘The
Eaters Of Light’). 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; it’s by one of
the modern series’ few women writers again). It’s a perfect fit for her character even
after all those other stories of flirting awkwardly with boys. She’s 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,
with a great second episode cliffhanger where her eyes turn yellow with dreams
of ‘running forever’. 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 Doctor and running off the first chance she gets but
with Ace it’s so out of character it’s a real wrench). 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 it feels ‘right’ at the end of a run of stories
about Ace growing up and learning to find herself.
Look at how the boys
react to this world. The Master is no match for it: he’s a shadow of his former
self, preying on vulnerable lost boys to get him home and losing himself every
time he tries to control someone through power. Nor is Midge, the trendy young
thing who thinks being masculine is cool. Nor is Patterson, the territorial
army sergeant who thinks the boys around him need toughening up and likes
talking about ‘survival of the fittest’ and not being able to carry around ‘dead
wood’ 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). He’s
basically a glorified scout rather than proper army (though the first draft had
him as a police officer changed by a panicked JNT who thought this might get
the series into more controversy when it didn’t need it), someone who thinks
being in control is shouting at people. To survive in this world you need to
evolve, to adapt, the way the girls do, even if that’s at risk of losing
yourself. It’s more than just felines riding on horseback though: this story
has a very different feel with no corridors to run down (we’re out in the wide
open) and no blowing things up, just gradual possession. 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 Doctor 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). It’s so hard to do
though in a world that’s pulling at your darkest most primal instincts that
even he has trouble, briefly unleashing his rage and tussling with The Master
at story’s end, as angry and out of control as we’ve seen Dr 7. This life isn’t
easy, whichever path you choose and everyone gets damaged or changed by living
like this, some more than others.
Everyone laughs when they
hear the last Dr Who story was titled ‘Survival’, but it’s not a purely ironic
title. It’s a story all about how you have to adapt and evolve and go under,
the way so many businesses and industries were learning to their cost. The
thing is, though, this has always been a series about change and adapting to
different times and even though 1989 couldn’t have been further away from 1963
in a purely hopeful optimistic way nevertheless ‘Survival’ is at one with the
series’ core message, of staying true to yourself. The central message is above
all to stay human, to stay humane, to find a way of fighting evil without
becoming evil yourself, that ‘if we fight like animals we die like animals’, a
great last moral message to end on that the show’s creators would have been
proud of. ‘Survival’ is a story about adapting and evolving as best you can
until you find the peace to be your real self again, without losing who you
are. It’s a story that asks that the viewer be as kind as possible, to not try
to control others or kick those who are down, in a ;survival of the fittest’
way Because survival doesn’t mean power or those with the most control, the way
Thatcher or Regan or The Master thinks it does (and why he so needs to be in
this story, for all the comments I’ve seen about how he doesn’t fit – he’s the
most manipulative character in the Whoniverse but his powers don’t work in this
world). It doesn’t mean the last person standing at the end of a great battle.
They’re the species who die out, because they’re so exhausted they can be
easily taken over. No, survival of the fittest means the person who adapts the
best, who gives away just enough of themselves to fit in while knowing they’re
just passing through in evolutionary terms, that times will change and they
will get to be themselves again one day. No series knows that better than a
series that regenerates it’s lead every few years and Dr Who has lasted longer
than most by embracing such changes (it’s hard to see, but the market stall in
the first episode is deliberately stocked with annuals from TV shows of Dr Who’s
vintage that didn’t last the course of time, becoming too associated with one
particular time). This is indeed the second story in a row about evolution
(following ‘Ghostlight’, filmed after ‘Survival’)
which does show rather than it was on everyone’s minds: how do we best make a
series that makes sense in 1989, given that the audience are being moved away
from Dr Who’s core values of tolerance and kindness? The answer is you wait,
until someone with the same values is in enough of a position of power to bring
it back, the way Russell T Davies did in 2005.
Mercifully what could
have been a silly story played for laughs is taken very seriously. 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 7th Dr has grown in his (and Andrew Cartmel’s) hands since his car crash of
an arrival in ‘Time and The Rani’. 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 7th 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. He’s a
character who’s spent his whole life controlling the people around him and
re-moulding them to his image and he just can’t cope when someone else does
that to him. 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-worldly,
closer to the ‘Joker’ style derange Master we got with John Simm. It’s easily
Ainley’s best work since he took over the role in ‘The
Keeper Of Traken’ and though he gets limited lines in a three-part story
the actor gives it his all, happy to be back centre stage after being comedy
henchmen to The Rani and The Valeyard. Even Adele Silva, who for a time in the
early 2000s was the most famous person who’d been in Dr Who ever and now looks,
erm, very different (thanks to a popular stint in ‘Emmerdale’ that saw her take
her clothes off in every lads mag and internet site that would ask her) copes well here as a
nine-year-old girl who’s lost her pet cat. Only this weeks’ token stunt casting
– ‘comedians’ Hale and Pace – and Will Barton’s Midge aren’t quite right and
remind you that you’re watching children’s telly rather than a real gritty
drama, but that’s what happens when you a) have to drum up publicity for the
series any way you can as the BBC sure aren’t doing it and b) 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. These characters ought to look like the queens
of the jungle, all feline and powerful, as if they could bite your head off as
soon as look at you. 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 quit and 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 even twenty years
earlier, the cheetah planet comes across particularly poorly (if ever a quarry
in Dr Who just looked like a quarry rather than an alien world it’s this one:
when The Doctor tries to go ‘home’ it’s a wonder the Ace-kitling doesn’t simply
dump him here), there’s badly staged and
rather chaotic fight on Horsenden Hill that’s all a bit flat and The Master and
co are quite obviously wearing the sort of false fangs you can get at a
jokeshop. There are a lot of problems in this story, but far from the cheap
jibes of ‘Dr Who acting’ and wobbly sets (this is an outside broadcast story
filmed on location – and up against it for time as the same OB unit were needed
to cover Wimbledon the following week) there’s nothing in this story that goes wrong
except the lack of money. Which only underscores the point about the
ruthlessness of the Thatcherist society it’s attacking.
It’s such a shame: this
story, more than perhaps any other at the end of Dr Who’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. This story, more than the
hundred and fifty-plus others, is very much a pilot version of the series Dr
Who became when it returned in 2005: a story that’s first and foremost about
the main characters too rather than the plot which is almost an extra, the
council estate setting where people are lost and desperate, a Doctor who’s dark
and troubled and the really strong gay sexual hints going on. ‘Survival’ is ‘Rose’ in every way but the budget. 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 20th century Dr Who 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, with a powerful attack that no other series would dare offer (another
reason, I suspect, why the conservative Michael Grade was so against it). How
fitting, then, that a story that warns against selfishness and
narrow-mindedness and running with the pack gets cancelled just when it’s 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 7th Dr’s character, walking off into the sunset hand in hand with Ace
because they have ‘work to do’. It’s a great speech, one of the most famous Dr Who
quotes of the 1980s for a reason and ended up being dubbed in the last official
BBC Dr Who session of the 20th century, coincidentally booked for
the show’s 26th birthday on November 23rd (regrettably it’s
the only bit of the series written by Cartmel directly, rather than whilst
editing someone else’s work: he never did write a full script for Who though he
had plans to the following year that was quietly cancelled. I wish one of the
modern showrunners would invite him to have another go, the way they did with
Rona). They said that nobody cared about Dr Who anymore, that it was unrealistic
and silly, that it had lost touch with the modern world, but that so wasn’t
true (and not just me either: Ravi, a little boy who lived down the end of Sophie
Aldred’s street, sweetly knocked on her door after episode two went out to check
she was alright, convinced no one could act being possessed that well). The
result is a first-class story that proves there was so much life in the old dog
yet (even if, erm, it’s by transforming into a cat!) and offers a totally new
twist on anything Dr Who had ever done before. The people making this series,
notably script editor Andrew Cartmel, have re-modelled Dr Who 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. That said, if Dr Who had
to end then I’m kind of glad it ended here, on it’s uppers, rather than in the
doldrums the way it was a few years earlier when it’s arguably as inventive and
groundbreaking and as ahead of its time for what other TV programmes were doing
in 1989 as ‘An Unearthly Child’ was
in 1963 but in a way that even Verity Lambert and David Whittaker would never
have dreamt of. This is still recognisably the same series though: it stands for
kindness and tolerance in a world that seems to have forgotten it and I’m
rather pleased that we end with a story that features a last appearance by a
famous villain (The Master), in a quarry, in uncomfortably hot costumes (dear
Ainley lost his cool for the only time in all his years working on the show –
on behalf of Lisa who was dehydrated in her costume and being ignored) against
the backdrop of a strike (which hit rehearsals rather than filming), just like
old times. They could have played ‘Survival’ safe, gone under the parapet with
a story full of fan-pleasing references that wouldn’t have ruffled any BBC
feathers; instead this is as dark and damning a story as any in the show’s
first twenty-six years, breaking new ground when most everyone had stopped
paying attention. It’s a more than suitable place to end the series, roughly
where they started it, with Dr Who the most unique quirky, exciting, eccentric
and pioneering show in television, a series about extraordinary things
happening in our ordinary world that you’ll never look at in quite the same way
again. It’s what should have been the start of a whole new ‘classic’ era that
instead ended up cryogenically frozen in time till Russell T comes along to
thaw it out again.
POSITIVES + This is one
of Dr Who’s most postmodernist stories, closely behind ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ and ‘Love and Monsters’, part of a series that
had been running long 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. One that just happens to
have materialised there from ‘our’ world (see the ‘prequels/sequels’ column for
a discussion of who might have put it there, though it’s really a leftover from
the first draft when this scene was set on an abandoned building site – another
comment on Thatcher’s wasting money by pulling it on projects left half
finished).
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Farewell, then, 20th
century Who – what a run that was. From Totter’s Lane to The Planet Of The
Cheetah People you didn’t half see some amazing sights across twenty-six years.
There should have been more of course and while cancellation wasn’t entirely a
surprise given events behind the scenes, nevertheless there were plans underway
for a twenty-seventh season in 1990. Unlike the original season twenty-three it
wasn’t cancelled at the eleventh hour though – more like the second or third –
so details are sketchier as to what it might have looked like. However there
were six scripts in contention for four spots (it always paid to have a backup
in case something went wrong), which would have written out Ace (she ends up
going back to school and attending Prydonian Academy on Gallifrey and becoming
The Doctor’s apprentice in more ways than one – I still can’t decide whether
this would have been a fitting and suitable end for the one time juvenile
delinquent or not) and written in a female character named Kate/Raine, a jewel
thief whose basically Lady Christina De Sousa from ‘Planet Of The Dead’
twenty years early. Sylvester McCoy would, of course, have remained the Doctor
but was considering his options as to whether he bowed out at the end of the
year or not (if he’d continued they might well have held his intended finale
back another season). Sadly, unlike the abandoned season twenty three which was
mostly superb, these scripts are a pretty weak bunch on the whole and a
definite step backwards from the 1988-89 era (if not as bad as the 1987
season).
‘Earth Aid’ was planned as the series opener, a
three episode tale by Ben Aaronovitch that’s a sort of cross between ‘The Pirate Planet’
and ‘The Pandorica
Opens’, with insect space pirates known as the Metraxi
taking over the Earth and the 7th Doctor using Stonehenge as a ‘data
vampire’ that hid the Earth in the signals it sent into space (surely, surely
Steven Moffat knew about it given the links to series five, with an enemy close
to the Atraxi in name and feel and a series finale that reuses Stonehenge; it
would be very in keeping if Moffat had looked back to what Dr Who had once
planned to do in the original series as inspiration for the new one). Big
Finish produced this as the very final edition of their short-lived ‘Lost
Stories’ range in 2011 and it’s a mixed bag. There are parts that soar with all
the verve and Dr Whoyness of the best of Ben’s script for ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’
as the Doctor digs deep to fight off a genuine threat on a large scale using
all of his wits. Unfortunately there are also parts that fall apart like the
sillier bits of ‘Battlefield’,
with Ace – a girl who doesn’t even have a driver’s license – in a Doctor-led
ruse to be in command of a battleship, even though she’s hopelessly out of her
depth (the only words she knows are all pinched from Star Trek!) The main plot
is the unlikely if original theme of food trade, which even Dr Who’s ordinary
meeting extraordinary format and one of its best writers struggle to make
interesting. Goodness knows how it would have looked on screen with a similar
budget to other McCoy stories too, though on audio it sounds suitably epic, if
a bit slow. A cautious thumbs up.
‘Animal’ would have been the debut story by Cartmel
instead and half-intended to wrap up his era with Raine’s first trip away in
the Tardis featuring lots of ld friends including Brigadier Winifred Bambera
(from ‘Battlefield’)
and the Metraxi (from ‘Earth Aid’: hey if you’re going to build those costumes
you might as well use them twice). They’ve travelled to 2001, which might be
the past now but was the future then, and another university (Margate this
time) that’s been sabotaged. Everyone dismisses it as students (Professor
Chronotis would be proud) but it’s actually a rather shambolic alien invasion.
Raine is sent undercover with a returning Ace (who may or may not have been in
the original script but is a welcome addition to the revised version) and
discovers that a student named Scobie has done something clever with a radio
antennae and accidentally beamed in the Numlocks, a rather nerdy logical
computer-driven race who are actually quite fun if you don’t think about them
too hard. They’re horrified that Human scientists are testing on animals and
decide to give them a taste of their own medicine, figuring that meat eaters
are fair game to be eaten and that feeding off their blood will help recover
the iron they need in their diets. They’re generally quite nice though, in a
more Sensorite/Ood hapless way than your average invaders, so it’s rather a
shock when The 7th Doctor reverts from a return to his earlier comic
persona to the more brutal and bloodthirsty one, using their innocence and
trusting nature against them. Ace is sickened. Again.
‘Alixion’, potential season finale, is the story
that got least far and one Big Finish decided to skip for its Lost Stories
given that there wasn’t exactly much of it to have been lost. A story by
newcomer Robin Mukherjee, set on a planet of alien monastic beetles in monk
robes (what other series would have a phrase like that?) it has a plot close to
‘The Sunmakers’
as a bank manager insect taxed its poor citizens to their limits. Had Sylvester
McCoy planned to leave after this year then it’s possible this would have been
the regeneration story, according to Cartmel, with The Doctor straightjacketed
and dosed with the psychic brainwaves of the alien beings to the point where
his body breaks down. This sounds like exactly the sort of thing JNT would have
hated though (especially if this had been his last story instead of
‘Survival’), an ambiguous ending that would have been an excuse to cancel the
series, while the aliens sound impossible to do on a 1989/1990 budget. It would
certainly have been an ill fitting way for the 7th Doctor to go,
with a newcomer baddie winning (not entirely unique – we’d had the ‘Planet Of The Spiders’
or Sharaz Jek in ‘The Caves Of Androzani’
before – but The Doctor regenerated both times indirectly because of those
foes; presumably the cackling baddies would have been free at the end). Who
knows though: for all I know in an alternate universe somewhere this became the
most loved Dr Who story and so popular it kick-started an unbroken run of
another twenty-six years.
A quick mention for Dr Who magazine comic strip
‘Emperor Of The Daleks!’ (1993), a mammoth seven part special that ran either
side of the magazine’s landmark 200th issue (#196-#203, February-July 1993). It’s an epic
take on the Dalek civil war, with the 6th Doctor and Peri at one end
of the battle and the 7th Doctor and Ace at the other with all sorts
of cameos and references to old stories. One of the odder ones: the 7th
Doctor asks the 6th Doctor to leave a mattress out in Perivale for
when he lands there because he knows he’ll need to land on it one day in ‘Survival’!
Actually it’s a reference that doesn’t quite work, given that technically the
Doctor lands on a sofa of what looks like reasonable comfort– although of
course this would be a typical 6th Doctor decision to upgrade his
other self’s request!
‘First Frontier’ (1994) is a ‘New Adventures’ novel
by David A McIntee which for the most part features the 7th Doctor,
Ace and Benny trying to stop The Master manipulating America and Russia into
turning the cold war hot, ‘Frontier
In Space’ style, in the 1950s. If you fed ‘Dr Who’ into an ai
generator it would probably come up with a plot just like this (only with
Daleks, probably). McIntee handles The Master well though and even gives him a
convincing rant about how The Doctor abandoned him to die on the cheetah planet
the last time they met. Apparently he
escaped by riding with a cheetah called Kitling who took The Master back to his
own time: 1957. A charity dedicated to helping people fight deadly alien
viruses, Tzun Canton, took pity on The Master’s (greatly altered) back story
and gave him the course of antidotes he needed to break free of the cheetah
curse, which even gave him a whole new regenerative cycle to boot. So now you
know.
Previous ‘The
Curse Of Fenric’ next ‘Dimensions
In Time’
.
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