The Green Death: Ranking - 67

 

The Green Death

(Season 10, Dr 3 with Jo and UNIT, 19/5/1973-23/6/1973, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writers: Terrance Dicks and Robert Sloman, director: Michael E Briant) 

Rank: 67

    'Today's story: The Green Death'. Which was such a success we’ve followed it up with a number of increasingly less interesting sequels: 'The Red Robbery' 'The Orange Blackmail' 'The Grey Counterfeit' 'The Blue Drunk and Disorderly' 'The Pink Speeding Ticket' 'The Yellow Littering' and 'The Purple Jaywalking'

If ever there was a Dr Who story ahead of its time then its ‘The Green Death’, an ecological plea for us to take better care of our planet and stop trying to control nature or one day it will end up controlling us; were this story to be on air tomorrow the anti-woke police would be dismissing it as alarmist environmentalist and global warming propaganda, but instead this story went out on a Saturday teatime half a century ago back when no one was talking about this beyond a few concerned scientists. We really should have listened: I haven’t seen any giant bright green maggots around yet in our ‘real’ world but as everything else in this collapse-to-chaos story seems to be coming true it feels as if it’s surely just a matter of time. 

 So where did a show like this suddenly come from, a few weeks after fun in the sun on Skaro and escaping giant walking talking lizards in outer space? Well, I’ve always found it a rule of thumb that the best way of getting into the mindset of each different Who production team is to take a look at what they were reading, with most era of the show making the most of BBC expenses to subscribe to different magazines and periodicals. The Bidmead era under JNT was a regular subscriber of an IT magazine with all the latest tech, Andrew Cartmel had ‘The Guardian’ and though we don’t know what Phillip Hinchcliffe had I’m willing to bet there was at least a few ‘gothic horror’ papers in there. Barry Letts had a subscription to ‘New Scientist’ and ‘The Lancet’, two factual science papers. One of the issues of ‘New Scientist’ really haunted Barry: it was an article titled ‘Blueprint For Survival’ that set out, pretty much before anyone else did, that the 1970s way of living just wasn’t sustainable: that we were using up fossil fuels too fast and causing irreparable damage from the pollution we were pumping out into our atmosphere and that if humanity was going to survive far into the next century we were going have to adapt to our changing environment. Barry frequently put the Earth in danger as a matter of course and always had the Doctor around to save us from ourselves at the last moment but this seemed a very different sort of danger, self-inflicted, without any chance of anyone coming in to save us – we had to save ourselves and if everything in the article was to be believed, fast. Another paper had an article on BRAD, the Biotechnic Research and Development community that had just been formed weeks earlier to find out alternatives to living – four families in Wales lived off the land with power and crops they’d generated for themselves using windmills and solar power so that they had become fully sustainable. Barry moaned to Terrance Dicks one day over lunch that there wasn’t much point investing in the children of the future if we weren’t going to have one and what a pity it was that he’d been pegged as a ‘children’s producer/writer’ because he desperately wanted to write an adult drama showing everyone that there was an alternative to the way we were living. To which Terrance replied ‘Well, why can’t we turn that into a Dr Who story?’ So he did, with the help of Robert Sloman, Barry’s usual co-writer. 

 ‘The Green Death’ is an unusual story for all of its fame amongst fans; it sounds on paper and from its lurid title as if it should be one of the later Hinchcliffe-style horror stories, with killer creepy-crawlies created by a rogue space computer which attack people and make them glow an eerie green. Far from being about real life concerns it reads from the back of the VHS/DVD box as if its going to a bit of crazy OTT scifi fun – and it would be, were it not for the very real science that runs underneath it all. It is, in many ways, the scariest pre-Hinchcliffe Dr Who story, with its writhing wriggly maggots and people dying horrible deaths that turns their skin green (rather than symbolic deaths or passing in explosions and UNIT battles). But the maggots aren’t like the sentient giant spiders and overgrown ants in other Who stories, they’re innocent victims in all of this that are just doing what maggots do grown to full size. The real horror in this story is an abstract one all caused by the humans their carelessness and inability to see the bigger picture over their pile of profits, the faceless corporations who destroy our world while pretending it’s out of the kindness of their own hearts. ‘The Green Death’ might be the one with the maggots for a generation who remember this story better than more or less any other from the Pertwee era (mostly thanks to a post-Christmas omnibus that took a lot of the boring bits out), but really it’s a story about people and their motives, those who would sell their goo-covered granny out in a heartbeat and those living on a hippie commune living off the land and growing funguses showing us an alternative way to live. For, fifty years before companies and governments paid us to look the other way and stop talking about it, children’s scifi programme Dr Who had a serious grown-up conversation about a subject that scared children far more than any monster ever did, because the dangers in this story were real. Well, give or take the giant maggots and megalomaniac computer anyway.

 Today’s ecological heroes and heroines go on school strikes, vandalise famous artworks (because who has time for art when our survival is at stake?) and chain themselves to Inferno-style fracking machines to bring media awareness to the world’s problems, but this lot lead by a less urgent form of example because they think they have time to win us over (oh for those days again!) Professor Clifford Jones (Katy Manning’s boyfriend of the time in real life) is the most direct mouthpiece Barry created for himself, parroting many of the many views from that ‘New Scientist’ article, a sort of Earthbound version of ‘The Doctor’ finding a solution to our problems from his very hippie colony ‘The Nut-Hutch’ (a sillier but plausible variation of the BRAD technique, albeit with ordinary people not scientists) two years before ‘The Good Life’ made sustainability a thing, years before anyone else had made it a thing really. By rights this story ought to stick out like a (green) thumb but Letts, Dicks and Sloman make ‘The Green Death’ seem at one with the series by making it more of a fight between good and evil. As much as Letts talked in period and indeed successive interviews about how he wanted to be positive about business and how capitalism can be good for us, honest, this is the most hippie-ish group of characters we see in the series, the scientists of the original scientific paper now young people who have dropped out of society and who are clearly smoking mushrooms as well as growing them. So powerful is Cliff’s arguments when set against the Cybermen-style automate of BOSS the computer that you can see why Jo wants to join them so badly – they represent the direction she’s been looking for ever since she first met the Doctor, that need to do good even when he isn’t around. Letts knew that he might be leaving the show himself before too long and wants to offer the children who grew up under his watch a happy closing message, that they have the power to do good themselves (‘Planet Of The Spiders’ is a more natural goodbye to Pertwee as a Doctor, but this story is a more natural goodbye to an era). This is one of the last times Dr Who can truly let its hippie freak flag fly quite so brightly, before the new younger generation the show is always catering for to some extent come along with angrier, punkier ideals, distraught that the hippies don’t seem to have changed anything much in the end. Rather than some washed-out hippie though Professor Cliff (of course he’s a professor – that’s another difference to how they’d do it today; he’s not a schoolboy who can see through the lies of his elders; he’s better educated than anybody in this story bar the mad computer) is full of fire and idealism, so inspirational that he even moves Jo – the audience identification figure in this era – to leave the Doctor to join him at his Nuthatch complex. Not just for one story either, but for good.

 Jo’s departure is one of the best any companion gets in Dr Who 20th or 21st centuries; other characters leave through sudden soppy romances that come out of nowhere or sudden attacks of conscience or occasionally because of some great catastrophe that leaves them dead or stranded or with their memory wiped or occasionally dead stranded with their memory wiped, but this is six episodes of Jo’s agonised realisation that she’s outgrown life alongside the Doctor as merely his companion, that she wants to save this planet now, not some other planet in past or future. As much as Jo loves the Doctor she feels the need to grow roots into a soil of her own instead of the artificial life she’s been living in the Tardis, to come back down to Earth. Cliff reminds her of a ‘sort of younger Doctor’ (even before she knows how old Cliff is; for all she knows from the newspaper article she reads – in much the same way Barry once did – he could be retired, though I guess all humans are young compared to the Doctor) – but actually Cliff represents a more grown-up view of how to cope with life’s problems, someone who doesn’t run away and leg it to the nearest planet when there’s hard work to be done but who gets his hands dirty. The Doctor is fun, exciting, brilliant and encourages us to make the best out of ourselves– many many wonderful things – but one thing he never was is responsible. Cliff is. Writers always have a hard time writing out an alternate life for a companion because what could possibly compare to travelling in time and space? But Jo’s choice feels natural and their romance plausible, despite her clumsiness causing so many problems and his short temper. The fact that Jo’s head is in another place now is obvious to us at home – and yet it’s one of the few times the Doctor doesn’t see someone’s leaving coming. The Joneses’ super-hurried engagement party (because they want to travel down the Amazon looking for fungi) is a really special series finale: the Brigadier and Benton both look so sad and Jo’s on-again off-again boyfriend Mike is visibly holding back the tears but it’s the Doctor reaction that gets to you most. Pertwee’s haunted look as he leaves early to drive away in Bessie, alone, while Jo stares after him through the window watching her ‘old’ life walk out the door before embracing Cliff and the ‘new’ is one of the best scenes in all of Dr Who, even though nobody says a word: we know these characters so well by now that you don’t need to hear them speak to know what they’re feeling and it’s an exquisite, shot-perfect scene, unusually taped at the end of the day when the sun was setting (light makes more of a difference than you might think: bright light is why stories like ‘Warriors Of The Deep’ and ‘Arc Of Infinity’ aren’t better loved than they are). For all that Jon Pertwee gets to do his usual job dashing around being heroic and dressing up (he makes for a very cute washerwoman! A Pertwee addition to the script – he was written in as hiding in a cupboard) he’s effectively an incidental character in his own show here with all the stuff that actually solves the plot (and saving Jo from danger) done by Cliff. The message is clear: this isn’t a fictional world full of alien foes to be beaten by science but a real problem facing the real world and we need a real hero to solve it, not a fictional alien. Just note how Jo’s first scene with Cliff mirrors her first one meeting the Doctor, clumsily messing up an experiment. 

 Katy Manning is never better than when she’s going through the agonies of making her mind up which side to go with, playing Jo as suddenly a lot older and wiser (if still as clumsy as ever). Even though she’s a good deal older than some of the companions we used to have (Susan, Vicki, Polly) there’s always been something childlike about Jo, something idealistic and hopeful. The worry nowadays in Dr Who is how similar characters are going to get damaged, forged in fire, until there’s so little of their younger childlike selves left (Amy for instance: we first meet her as an actual child but there are few companions more grownup than her when she leaves even with discounting the extra 37 years of running for her life in ‘The Girl Who Waited’). But Jo hangs on to all that childlike wonder and spends a great deal of ‘The Green Death’ becoming independent, thinking for herself and saving others. Of all the companions in the series her arc is one of the best given the slow journey from where she started as the Doctor’s accident-prone protégé to here. Stewart Bevin is first-class as Cliff too: he could so easily have turned into a pompous and arrogant, unlikeable character but instead there’s something childlike about him too for all his learning. He’s very much like a younger Doctor in fact, educated but without losing his sense of wonder at the world. As much as it seems like nepotism that Katy got her boyfriend involved he was actually a hasty last-minute replacement: director Michael E Briant was quietly tearing his hair out trying to find the right person for the part but everyone he saw was too serious or too old, then too young and too silly. Katy suggested her boyfriend more as a way of helping and he was auditioned blind, without the director having met him – but he was so obviously right for the part he had it within minutes.

 Jo made the right choice to leave and be with Cliff if the Doctor’s scary solo destination of ‘Metebelis 3’ is anything to go by: it’s another sign of the irresponsibility and curiosity that’s going to cost this particular regeneration dear. There are lots of links between this story and the 3rd Dr’s ego-death/regeneration in ‘Planet Of the Spiders’, not least the giant insects and the blue crystal given to Jo as a leaving present but later returned; the later story hints in a gentle Buddhist kind of a way that this Dr pays for his ego and curiosity at the expense of those around him – it’s certainly not his kindest move trying to force Jo to choose between her two blokes and he would have put her in great danger had she gone with him. That all ties into the other moral at the heart of this story, as signified by the Nietzsche-quoting computer behind it all, BOSS. A computer with a conscience, unlike other super computers in Who (The War Machines’ ‘WOTAN’, Tobias Vaughan’s in ‘The Invasion’ and Xoanon in ‘The Face Of Evil’) this one is creating a new world for humanity not because it hates us or wants our resources or even because it’s having a nervous breakdown but because it genuinely thinks that it’s the best thing for us. He is, metaphorically, every company that ever put profits before people, convinced that the bigger picture is worth all the little sacrifices. What with his love of humming Wagner and copious quoting from Frederick Nietzsche he’s the single biggest Nazi outside Davros or the Daleks. 

Which leads to what this story is really about: a war not of monsters or aliens but philosophers. The Nietzsche principle of evolution was that in order to grow mankind needed to suffer, that all our big achievements had come from sticking our neck out and risking everything. His theory, made as simple as possible, is that the morals with which we abide by in society hold us back, that the idea that morality is good for us is a lie because really it keeps us trapped in respecting each other and helping each other survive, when in order to become the best that we can be with the best gadgets and creature comforts humanity should be pruned back so that only the strongest survive (‘You have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance of stable pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet’). Which sounds plausible on paper, until you realise that you might be one of the people that needs pruning. It also puts the Doctor’s surreal, scary trip to Metebelis, a world he thinks will enhance his learning but only through suffering, in a new light. This is clearly not the sort of philosophy that Dr Who adheres to normally though and Letts is clearly more in line with Nietzsche’s bitter rival Schopenhauer: that a test of true progression is how much of a fight you put up with those who aren’t like you and that progression isn’t really progression unless people share in it. For him any idea of fulfilment is an ‘illusion’ and the best way of living is to avoid pain rather than seeking pleasure and that the best quality of life comes from living quietly in a ‘small fireproof room’ because if all your progress was going to lead to hurt for anyone what was the point? The idea of ‘serendipity’, of discovery through happy accidents like Cliff’s discovery of just the right antidote, is very Schopenhauer, the principle that we will get to where we need to get, eventually, through fits and starts (by a bit of natural serendipity the name of the first show Katy Manning joins after Who, an arts and crafts show, is named… ‘Serendipity’. You can’t ake this stuff up). This all makes BOSS the perfect baddy for Dr Who – a villain who thinks that it doesn’t matter which people get harmed if it means progress. What he can’t see is that there’s no point in progress if it means killing people off and making the planet uninhabitable. 

 Of course most people just remember this story for the two-foot glow-in-the-dark maggots. They look a bit silly now, watched back fifty years on in high-definition on blu-ray when we can see them clearly and the CSO backgrounds, combining models with real life, are distracting now in our digital age (maybe BOSS and the computers won after all?!) At the time though, broadcast in the context they were meant to be seen, on analogue televisions with broadcast static, I can see why they caused as much of a stir as they did. Maggots are a primal source of fear in the same way as other Dr Who creatures like spiders and the blobby green thing that lives inside Dalek casings and the idea of them growing to full size is enough to send adults behind the sofa never mind children, especially covered in slime. The ones seen on TV were a combination of real ones (with model Bessies driving past them!), fake moving ones worked by animatronics and fake stationary ones that were, depending which sourcebook your read, either painted inflated balloons or painted inflated condoms. They’re all quite effective (or at least they are up until ne bares its teeth). The fact they make their victims glow bright green is also a very strong visual hook that keeps you watching long after the politics and philosophy start to get boring. The idea of them being down coalmines, a side effect of BOSS’ attempts to tip radioactive waste down there, is also highly believable: I mean, how many of us now what’s really going on down our mines? (It’s also the lesser explored of the two principle Dr Who sources of invasion, from the sky or the ground, but in a very different way to the Silurians or Sea Devils). 

 As it happens the Dr Who tea hadn’t been down t’pit either: the Coal Board were surprisingly helpful given that they were, in effect, portrayed as the baddies with green phosphorescent slime (it always amazes me just how many big companies were keen to appear in Dr Who, even when clearly portrayed in a bad light) and allowed Dr Who to film around three separate locations all within a ten mile radius of each other: Oglivie Colliery (now flooded and long since unusable), Troed-y-Rhiw Jestyn and Colliery Quarry, all in Deri near Bargoed, Glamorgan and RCA International Factory in Brynmawr, Powys. Only there was a problem: the Dr Who production team turned up for a meeting and asked where they could put their cameras and hang the lighting rigs. The coal board gasped: all electricity is banned down mines just in case a stray spark ignited the gasses down there and starts a fire – the single biggest danger to miners given the speed with which fire can travel and how different escape is. The Dr Who team offered to use a battery but this was out too; a number of batteries had malfunctioned and started fires. For a time the camera crew seriously discussed using clockwork cameras would by hand before, reluctantly, agreeing that it was a bit too implausible. Instead they only filmed around the mouth of the coal face, with actors allowed to travel in the pit shaft lifts under supervision; everything else you see is a set. They’re ever so convincing though: it surprises many fans to learn that those aren’t real tunnels Jo is in. Spare a thought for poor Jon Pertwee: he was busy trying to film the scene where he’s meant to be hanging several feet in the air as he hangs over the pit’s surface although, thanks to clever camera angles, he was only three inches off the ground and in no danger. The miners had heard that the camera crew were taking over the day and many of them turned up with their children to see it – who then ruined many takes by jeering at Pertwee for being such a wuss! It’s a scene he said was one of his least favourite in interviews for that reason. 

 His friends fare a little better, firmly on the side of the hippies (in no other show would the army be the good guys; most productions would have them firmly on the side of the companies – and it breaks my heart every time I see troops breaking up stop oil or anti-fracking protests after seeing this story). The Brigadier gets to be even more Brigadiery than normal (‘There’s a chap covered in slime, bright green apparently – and dead! I thought you’d be interested’), taking care of the little details after trusting the Doctor to give him the bigger picture. Benton continues to steal most scenes he’s in simply by being deadpan in the most ridiculous of circumstances and gets to be a dashing hero again. Yates is the most interesting: all too often he’s forgotten by Pertwee-era writers but you can tell Lets was fond of the character and often gives him a lot to do. Here he’s in rather a unique situation: sent undercover into Global Chemicals he’s the comedy relief for half the story, with music hall-style faints and ad libs to the Doctor-in-disguise about liking his handbag (a scene Richard Franklin turned into the mainstay of his deeply odd UNIT spin-off stage play ‘Recall Unit, or The Great T-Bag Mystery’ in the 1980s where the villain was…Margaret Thatcher. Not an alien who dressed like her or talked like her as on TV, but the actual prime minister). And then he’s emotionally damaged, broken by all the brainwashing that’s going on (and, perhaps, losing Jo) so that he ends up suffering in this story more than anyone else. This isn’t wiped out or ignored when we tune in for series eleven the following Christmas either: Letts makes it a part of his character, leading to his (spoilers) shock reveal as one of the perpetrators of ‘The Invasion Of The Dinosaurs’ and Yates’ slow recovery via ‘Planet Of The Spiders’. For a time it was all set to be Benton going through this until their parts were switched round fairly late in the day: I’m rather glad they made it like this. Benton is a salt-of-the-earth loyal type who never questions orders who would never betray his friends, but Yates has always been painted as more independent, more susceptible to arguments. And BOSS is very good at arguing. 

Sadly his minions aren’t as strong and if this story has a problem, apart from the long stretches of talking where nothing happens (this is a rare six-parter without a real sub-plot, unless you count Jo and Cliff’s romance) then it’s the way that the incidental characters are so utterly incidental to the story. Just take how Global Chemicals are portrayed. Stevens is like every other henchman Dr Who has ever had, scared of the new computer he’s had plugged in and a lackey who’ll do anything to keep his boss BOSS pleased with him. His underlings aren’t much better: Elgin is a bit of a drip and James is a bit of a drip too. The reason there are two of them is that poor Tony Adams, playing the former, took violently ill with peritonitis between filming blocks (happy to say, he made a full recovery) and Roy Skelton was rushed in at the last minute following his work as one of the Dalek voices in ‘Planet Of The Daleks’, the second of his two on-camera appearances (following ‘Colony In Space’). The hippies at the Nut-Hutch aren’t any more interesting – Cliff aside it’s a real worry if the fate of our hands is left in the care of people who are singularly so uninspiring and pathetic. The worst treated by far, though, are the miners: far from being the victims of the capitalist system that demand people risk their lives to bring the rest of us comfort (a very Nietzschean concept) they’re painted as being too thick to do any other job. Fellow writer Malcolm Hulke, a good friend of Letts, wrote the novelisation and like the conscientious objector he always was is at great paints to portray how Cliff and his Nut-Hutch colleagues came over to them: as namby-pamby lightweight rick kids who hadn’t done a day’s proper work in their lives. It’s a dynamic that would have made ‘The Green Death’ a lot stronger if it had made it to screen and an uncharacteristic lapse from Letts, whose usually so unscrupulously fair to everyone. Then again so was his research: he hadn’t bothered to check the name of the company and there really was a ‘Global Chemicals’ who wrote in to jokily point out that as far as they knew no giant insects had been created on their watch and they’d be grateful if the BBC could point this out; Letts sent an oddly shirty letter back pointing out that everyone knew that Dr Who was fictional and not a ‘documentary’. Another company, Uxbridge’s Gamlen Chemicals, wrote in to additionally point out that the Global Chemicals logo was very similar to theirs. The novelisation changes the name to ‘Pandora’s Chemical’, a nod from Hulke to Letts about the ’pandora’s box’ he seemed to have opened with his original name! Some of the CSO shots are pretty awful too: the mining trolley the Doctor and Jo use actually half-disappears in one scene, while the giant fly is a letdown compared to the giant maggots (it was meant to be a prop that was only seen in flight but it stopped working before filming – stationary you can tell it’s a big phony). Pertwee also got in trouble for pronouncing ‘chitinous’ wrong: he asked Barry who didn’t know how to pronounce it either (and indirectly led to me being told off during a biology lesson for pronouncing it wrong too – thanks guys!): yet another letter arrives in that week’s post jokily pointing out that ‘I’m writtin’ to say it’s pronounced kittin’!) Surprisingly there were no letters about one of Barry’s in-jokes: with the UNIT stories set slightly ahead of transmission (A year? Ten? Twenty? Nobody seems quite sure) he has the Brigadier phone up the prime minister whose called ‘Jeremy’; this was Barry’s forlorn and unlikely hope that the Liberal Party under Jeremy Thorpe might get in (and thus avoid him look as if he was picking on the Conservatives or Labour with this story). I like to think UNIT stories are really thirty years ahead of time and in some parallel universe somewhere Jeremy Corbyn, the best prime minister we never had, got in instead.

Even so, there’s a lot to love about ‘The Green Death’, a story that’s hearts is in the right lace even when it’s CSO or character depictions aren’t. The story has one of Who’s strongest messages, that – ironically enough – there is no Doctor to save us and we ought to learn to start saving ourselves. As cute as the plot twist, of Cliff stumbling onto just the right cure, might be it fits a story that’s all about how planet earth would look after us if only we’d let it and gave it room to breathe. As much as the title describes the ‘green death’ of the maggot-infested sufferers really this story is about ‘Green Life’ and how thinking about the environment and helping it help itself will help us all in the long run. This is more than just a sermon though: there’s a reason this era is so fondly remembered and this story in particular: Dr Who never felt more like a ‘family unit’ than when we were watching UNIT and they never feel more like characters, as opposed to plot devices, than they do in this story. The regulars all get a lot to do and Jo in particular gets a very worthy finale to her time in the series, a natural victim who becomes a heroine by the end. The depiction of the baddies could be better: for the most part we only have Yates’ word to go on how wicked everyone is there as the soldier goes undercover and his opinions are...questionable given what happens in two stories’ time. Still, making this an equal fight like usual would be wrong somehow: this is a story celebrating heroes not attacking villains, where the main contaminated ‘alien’ doesn’t even speak and where faceless companies run by computer dictate the future of mankind inhumanely, more by accident than design. This is a world that’s plainly gone wrong but one that needs a tweak rather than a mass invasion or a war to put right and this story’s strengths is how – in contrast to, say, most Chris Chibnall scripts – how each of us at home are encouraged to do our part and be on the side of the goodies, that this is our fight we’re involved with too and one that continues long past the point when Jo and Cliff leave for the Amazon. This is, in other words, exactly the sort of thing a series like Dr Who should be doing, making an important point to an audience who might not have heard about this viewpoint or thought about such things through any other source, and for all of Letts’ doubts that he could make a ‘serious’ drama out of such a serious subject in a show mostly known for entertainment, on that score ‘The Green Death’ succeeds brilliantly. The fact that ‘The Green Death’ manages to dress these big concepts up with two-foot glow-in-the-dark maggots and a mad computer and still have it come out as one of the classiest, most dignified stories of the entire 20th century run of Who is a testament to just how strong and eloquent that message is and how well it was portrayed on screen (usually this era’s Achilles heel are the effects but, reduced to one big box of lights and some maggots, the cost spread across six episodes, this one looks better than most it has to be said). Would that we all listened to what this story was trying to tell us when we had the chance. Is it too late? Have the mad computers and bureaucrats won? Of all the 20th century Who stories that deserve a sequel this one must surely be high on the list (and no, even if that is what they were trying with ‘Arachnids In The UK’, we seriously need another one than that). 

 POSITIVES +While BOSS never gets to do as much as Wotan – the original Dr Who super-computer – he does have a lot going for him in the character stakes. For a start he’s quite an educated computer, breaking off from plans of world galactic domination to talk classical music with his increasingly confused underlings and his humming is a neat addition (and do I don’t mean a technical hum, I really do mean a ‘humming Beethoven in between dastardly evil plans’ type of way). John Dearth is an excellent foe for Pertwee’s Doctor: he’s every bit as smart, opinionated and, well, BOSSY, with a charm and cheek missing from most villains in this series, never raising his voice for anything more than a laugh. I keep hoping my next Windows update will add him as the sentient being within my computer, but no luck yet. Note, by the way, that he baddies have classical music and the goodies have pop (different to practically every other production of the previous ten years): that’s ‘Electric Banana’ playing in Jo’s engagement scene, a pseudonym for psychedelic rockers ‘The Pretty Things’. 

 NEGATIVES – Even though we’re in the tenth year of the series this is only the second time Dr Who came to Wales and the first where it actually was Wales (it stood in for Tibet in ‘The Abominable Snowman’), it’s future adopted home. I’m amazed, in retrospect, that Cardiff took to new-Who being made on its doorstop so readily given that this story is filled with every Welsh cliché under the sun. For a start it’s a story that’s all about mining as if that’s the only thing Wales has going for it, everyone calls each other ‘boyo’ every other sentence, there’s a character given the most Welsh name ever ‘Dai Evans’ to go alongside a Jones (though I’m amazed there isn’t a Williams to complete the trilogy) and most unforgivably Jo, usually such a warm-hearted and compassionate soul, calls the miner who courageously sacrificed himself to save her from a gruesome death by maggot a ‘funny little Welshman’ when she hears of his death. I hope that, if I’m ever in a position to save someone from a colossal fall in a mineshaft and prevent them from being covered in green alien goo one day (stranger things have happened) somebody will be a little nicer when remembering me than that. What’s worse is that this line comes in one of those Who stories where the rest of the dialogue is of such a high standard – it’s all so unnecessary. Sloman revealed, years later, that he didn’t like Wales because some ruby players beat hi up during a match once but, as much as some of the best Who stories come from writers working out their personal grievances, this story isn’t the right place for that (and why didn’t Terrance Dicks as script editor spot it and change it?) As beloved as it is really ‘The Green Death’ is second only to the Scottish ‘Terror Of The Zygons’ for the amount of insults it gives to the population of a country and that’s story far more fun and light-hearted all round. A country that, let’s remember, paid for this out of their BBC license fee. 

BEST QUOTE: ‘You’ve seen where this efficiency of yours leads: wholesale pollution of the countryside, devilish creatures spawned by the filthy by-products of your technology. Men walking around like brainless vegetables, death, disease, destruction’.

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘The Green Death’ is one of Mark Gatiss’ favourite classic Who stories and he wrote a ‘sequel’ to the story when it was released on DVD under the name ‘Global Conspiracy’. A ‘fakeumentary’ discussing the events of the story and what happened next, it reunites a lot of the original cast (Cliff, Elgin, Taffryn, Sir Alec Douglas-Hodge and even the voice of BOSS itself) and features Gatiss as undercover reporter Terry Scanlon (who isn’t a patch on Sarah Jane). ‘It looks pretty ordinary, a nice little estate somewhere in Great Britain…Could be Chelmsford…Could be Bute...But it isn’t, it’s Llanfairfach’ he begins, as he seeks to track down the ‘real’ story of the day there was an outbreak of giant maggots. All the clichés are there; the interviewer reporting somewhere weird (a pull-back revealing that the reporter is sitting on a playground horse), interviewing his own son and pretending he’s a general member of the public, talking down to people he clearly thinks are loonies. Revelations include the fact that Stevens somehow survived and has a sort-of relationship with BOSS still and that Cliff split up with Jo and gave up his environmental protesting to create his own line of gluten-free ‘Nut-Hitch’ range (something that contradicts every other source, including ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’ and the below extra on the blu-ray edition! It would be typical of a ‘local news bulletin’ to get the wrong end of the stick on something like that though and I say that as an ex-reporter for a local paper. Sloman, incidwentally was a reporter too before turning fiction writer: his hated editor at work was named Jocelyn Stevens, inspiring the closest to a human baddy in this story). As much of its time in the post-‘Office’ (not the place where they sell stamps and mangle your parcels, the comedy series) W1A and reality TV era as the original is of 1973, this little extra is extra, well, little. 

‘Hello Boys!’ is the very Jo Grant name given to the official blu-ray promo/extra of series ten which reunites Katy Manning and her one time real-life boyfriend Stewart Bevin (professor Clifford Jones). Shot three years before Stuart’s sad death in 2022 it’s a typically sweet addition to the blu-ray range that sees Cliff and Jo returning home to Nuthatch and UNIT after half a century of saving the environment from the other side of the world. Armed with nothing more than Bessie and some anti-fungal spray they take on a shed of giant maggots just like old times (although they have scarier and more believable teeth now thanks to the wonders of modern technology!) They’re busy celebrating having saved the day when they get a call that Mike Yates is in trouble in a place called ‘Devil’s End’. Jo’s closing line ‘here we go again…’ It’s a short but sweet tribute sure to make Pertwee-era Who fans nostalgic. 

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