Vengeance On Varos
(Season 22, Dr 6 with Peri, 19-26/1/1985, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Phillip Martin, director: Ron Jones)
Rank: 56
'Well, Arak, what's today's review like then?'
'Oh Etta, I've given up reading them. Dr this, Dr that, too much violence, not enough violence, sardonic interplay of postmoderism principles underlying a multi-dimensional script, its the same every day. particularly this one. I think they get an alien in to write them some weeks'
'Well, I like to marvel at the perspicacity of his wit'
'Huh that writer lost his wits the second month when he tried to defend 'Time and The Rani!'
'Only 56 reviews to go. What are we going to read when they're over?'
'Dunno'
(The screen shows static)
The 6th Doctor’s masterpiece now and one of Dr Who’s most original stories, which both delivers a critique of that very 1980s moral dilemma of video nasties and accidentally creates ‘Gogglebox’ twenty years early. ‘Varos’ has been misunderstood almost from the day it went out on air: it got complaints that it was too ‘violent’, even though it’s a story that critiques how violence has become too ingrained in modern society (with Varos very much a 1980s version of Britain). It’s a story that’s self-aware that it’s a piece of fiction, with an arch postmodernist humour that critiques Dr Who itself, but one with a lot of love for the series. It’s a tale of how Thatcherist Britain is doomed to end in misery if it continues on its current course and how it’s at odds with this very 1960s optimistic imaginative friendly series, even if it’s not the slam-dunk polemic of other stories around it. It’s the Dr Who equivalent of ‘Boys From The Blackstuff’, about the misery and depression of living in an exploited capitalist world that’s gone wrong (only the ‘boys’ are Varosians’ and the crystal is see-through). It’s a story that comes with its own Greek chorus commenting on the plot, two characters who experience the events of the story but uniquely never get to interact with anyone else in the story, a chance to see how ordinary Varosians are affected both by the restrictions of Varos society and the Doctor overturning it (because the revolution is very much televised this time around). Of all the dystopias in Dr Who Varos might well be the most horrible: you’re trapped on the planet, at risk of being tortured or executed for the slightest infraction, see all your hard work at your job be frittered away to rich slug businessmen and rather than having anything to aspire to even the highest job in the land is at risk of torture and death if the people hate you. And boy do the Varosians have reason to hate you.
Mostly though it’s a
really good Dr Who story that has a lot of very real and gritty things to say,
in an era when a lot of stories tended to be away with the fairies. No
surprise, then, that it was written by the author of gritty Birmingham crime
syndicate series ’Gangsters’ (starring Maurice Colbourne from ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’), a story that shares
a lot of similarities with this one, including the arch humour and nods to
camera as well as multiple characters who act like businessman Sil (even if
they’re only slugs in character, not appearance). Martin was easily the biggest
name to write for Who in the 1960s and many of his growing fanbase thought he’d
gone a bit mad writing for a series that was suffering an image problem. Who
producer John Nathan-Turner spent the entire commission breathing down his
shoulder, asking for scene breakdowns (something that generally only happened
with inexperienced writers) and demanding to see every draft of the script in
case something ‘subversive’ dropped in (apparently the critique on violence in
general and Thatcher in particular slipped past him). However there’s a simple
explanation for it: Phillip wanted to write for a series his daughter Hillary,
aged nine at the time of broadcast, could actually watch (and it sounds as if
dad introduced her to the series partly to see what his old pal and RADA
classmate Christopher H Bidmead was up to, now they were both writers). The
sensible lass was a huge Whovian and had roped her dad into watching it with
her too and ended each episode by suggesting he should have a go. What’s
impressive though is that ‘Varos’ very much isn’t kiddies fare, even in an era
of stories like ‘Timelash’ and ‘Mark Of The Rani’ that are pitched a bit younger than
average: it’s a story about politics and violence and how controlling a
population through fear is bringing it to its knees. It’s a story that sums up
the survival of the fittest yuppie-loving money-grabbing 1980s and the sheer
misery of the majority of people in Britain better than any other story (yes,
even the all-round similar ‘Happiness
Patrol’). And while Who stories about wicked regimes and evil tyrants are
two a penny, this one is unique in that it shows how those caught at the top of
the pyramid are every bit as trapped and powerless, unable to use their power
to stop it. Even behind the scenes people went through hell making this story:
Nicola Bryant was allergic to the feathers used in Peri’s ‘bird’ sequence, caught
a chill filming the desert scene (with fans blowing in her face for hours), lost
an abacus necklace she was fond of and which Peri wore when persons unknown
broke into her dressing room (sharp-eyed viewers at the time wondered if it was
a clue that it had gone missing by the next story!) and the ‘execution’ scene
went wrong the first time, when the set with the nooses came apart (luckily
without any actors being hurt!), while pity the poor policeman who pulled Nabil
over on a day of shooting that had gone so late he still had his makeup on and
tried to fine him for speeding – he’d been trying to get home quick because the
marshminnows Sil eats – really dyed peaches – had given him the runs, which
took some explaining!
Varos is one of Dr Who’s
better thought out worlds, an ex-penal planet where the prisoners and prison
guards have over time merged together to become one, each as lost as the other.
It’s a tiny world with a population of just 160,000 (in a year where Britain’s
stood at 56million for comparison) with the hint that the cruel capitalist
punishments and the compulsory-viewed broadcast executions have caused the
population to dwindle and that soon there’ll be nobody left to shout at.
Certainly there’s not enough people to mine Varos’ only export, a mineral named
Zeiton 7 that, little does everyone know it, is actually really valuable. In
this democracy everyone born to the elite class has to serve out their term as
governor and if the people at home don’t like their policies they can subject
them to torture. The governor, then, is torn: to do the right thing by the
poverty stricken Varosians longterm means short term misery and pain in the
form of taxes and longer work hours, which will inevitably result in pain for
him and possibly death (no governor has survived as many ‘votes’ as he has
without dying). But to do the wrong thing means making things worse long-term
and the suffering grow bigger, while the governor who comes after him will
probably give in anyway. It’s thus is as close to a pro-Thatcher story as any
Who ever made, with Martin Jarvis not so much an Iron Lady as a Cardboard
gentlemen who’s always for turning, squirming this way and that because he
knows that the next unpopular policy might be lethal. However they’re also
pretty stupid and surrounded by the ‘wrong’ people: Sil is a businessman who’s obviously
a slug, rubbing his fins with glee as the Governor sells off everything he can
cheap – way cheaper than it ought to be. Martin, then, has his marsh minnows
and eats them: yes Thatcher has a terrible problem, but by her own stupidity
she actually made it worse.
It takes an outsider like
The Doctor, not bound by the rigid rules of a stupid system, to see beyond it
and put things right, turning this world upside down. But even he finds it
heavier going than usual, with scenes where it really does look as if he’s dead
– and not in a ‘gee the cliffhanger’s coming up’ way either. In this story he’s
attacked, imprisoned and hanged at one stage (before it turns out to be a form
of torture in the assumption that a man about to die will always tell the
truth) as well as given a dose of a hallucinatory drug that really makes him
think he’s dying in a desert and being attacked by a giant fly. What’s more
this story makes it looks as if it hurts. Peri, too, has an awful time: the
script’s oddest sub-plot is a ‘transmogrifier’ that takes a person’s inner
demons and uses them against them, turning them into monsters, because on Varos
any imagination is a dangerous thing. Remember the Doctor’s speech in ‘The Twin Dilemma’ that a ‘peri’ was a
fallen angel who needed to repent? What he missed out was that the literal
translation of ‘Peri’ is ‘wing’; with any other writer of this most
depressingly average of seasons I’d assume that to be a coincidence, but given
how erudite his scripts are Phillip Martin he probably looked this stuff up. She’s 90% of the way to being turned into a
bird complete with feathers when The Doctor finally intervenes and unlike some
‘gee that was close’ sub-plots it takes a good while for her to recover. Poor
Peri: while other people are turned into insects and worms she only wants to
fly away and escape. And in that sense she is all of us, trapped on
Varos/Britain in the 1980s longing to be somewhere else. And even the
transmogrifier, an unlikely machine that even the locals don’t know exactly how
it works, has been given a better backstory than usual: it’s a side effect from
Zeiton 7 that caused the miners digging it to grow claws and turn into moles,
in a world that’s forever demanding they be more than they actually are. It’s
what happens to the incidental characters that shocks most though as even The
Doctor gets in on the act: two guards are dropped into an acid bath (something
The Doctor is often blamed for, but it’s an unfortunate side effect of being a
scene recorded at the end of a long day, when a first take was let through that
probably shouldn’t have been: in the script it’s an accident but Colin Baker
was a little too ‘enthusiastic’ with his turning around), two more are
vapourised as their weapons are turned on them (this is The Doctor’s fault, as
he rescues a man from execution: as it happens he’s right but on another world
he might have zapped two innocent hard working dads to rescue an evil mass
murderer) and the end has The Doctor rig up some vine leaves to be ‘explosive’,
killing off four of the baddies. Violence has become a way of life on this
planet and everyone, even The Doctor, falls into the trap. It goes too far for
some (and remember this was dad writing knowing his nine year old daughter
would see it!) but it’s at least it’s relevant to the plot and happens because
of the drama, better handled better than, say, ‘Resurrection
Of The Daleks’ (where extra violence is half the drama).
Phillip Martin’s script fair
crackles with ideas that had never been seen in the series before and which
indeed could never have been done before the mid-1980s: this is the era when
‘video nasties’ contained gory material you would never be allowed to broadcast
on TV in case children were watching, so what better series to make your point
in than Who, still ‘officially’ a children’s series but one increasingly
watched by grown-ups with debate still raging about what should and shouldn’t
be in the series. Mary Whitehouse has a whole new ally/enemy in this era too with
the video classification board who work to different rules than on TV. At first
when videos were released they had no one to monitor them and didn’t legally
have to be careful about children watching, so there was a rush of cheap ‘video
nasties’ made with extreme violence or pornography or both, often available in
to rent shops (some of which were in newsagents where children bought their
drinks and sweets on the way home from school).Videos eventually had a
censorship board that met to discuss what programmes were most suitable for
which ages, which in an era when thirty years’ worth of recorded material was
up for release was causing something of a backlog and some hilarious mistakes
that inevitably slipped through the net due to human error (this is the era
when a few gory bloody films were passed for children and yet tame films with
unfortunate names got banned or slapped with an 18 certificate). Martin knew
that glorification of violence went back to ‘The Romans’ though (both the empire
and the Dr Who story from 1965), ingrained as a part of television history that
couldn’t simply be taken out with the flash of an age code (for a start most
videos sold in these early days were illegal copies anyway – it’s thought the best
selling ‘video’ from the first half of the 1980s was an illegal one featuring
real life executions and murders that would never have been allowed anywhere
near a TV screen). It might well be significant that the censorship board had a
‘Governor’ and that the first ‘model’ of videos to be banned wasn’t the VHS but
‘Betamax’, named like ‘Thoros-Beta’ where Sil and his Mentor friends are from
(the censorship helped kill Betamax off as a format and made it obsolete within
years. Which was a pain for me as that’s what the first Dr Whos I grew up on
were on and it was years before most of them were out on DVD or blu-ray). The Varos
execution ‘jingle’ is also remarkably like the theme tune to the earliest BBC
home videos just to rub it in!
Another organisation that
has a ‘governor’ though is the BBC itself. An organisation that often glorified
violence in return for ratings (just think of all the people killed off in
soaps at Christmas!) Is this Phillip Martin biting the hand that feeds him and
commenting on how much violence is allowed on television? Nabil for one took
this story to be a commentary on the gung-ho coverage of The Falklands War,
glorifying soldiers in a way never seen on TV before (in return, so it’s often
said, for the Conservatives backing down from removing the TV license as they
once threatened). Note the subtle hints dotted across this story, too: the
boxing and wrestling matches that are seen as ‘entertainment’ in between the
stat hangings, while this story also resembles the famous BBC production of
George Orwell’s ‘1984’, where the staff working on the show got their own back
on their bosses (with the director general’s image used for the ‘Big Brother is
watching you’ posters and hints at ‘BB’ needing a ‘C’ at the end. Spike
Milligan picked up on this for one of the best Goon Shows ‘1985’ where the BBC
very much are Big Brother and ‘Room 101’ is being stuck listening to inane BBC
radio programmes! The Goons in TV form, of course, were on right before Dr Who
in the early days).
If somehow all that
passed you by, though (and a surprising amount of people seemed to miss the
theme of Varos on first watching, including JNT!) then ‘Varos’ is still one of
the strongest stories in the era because it has some of the finest characters
1980s Who has to offer. Unlike a lot of stories in the JNT era it has some
excellent actors and actresses perfectly cast to play them too. Alien,
unlikeable, brown, slimy, disgusting and with an evil laugh, David Cameron
would have approved of Sil’s underhanded tactics here, pretending to be the
saviour of the planet Varos when really he’s undermining its resources and
putting the ‘I,/Me’ into its ‘Mines’. He’s the sort of ugly vain capitalist who
would sell his own grandmother to make money (and probably already has), one so
vain he thinks he’s beautiful and Peri ugly. He’s the ultimate 1980s alien: a
smug yuppie (in an era when they called themselves ‘the beautiful people’). This
conniving alien slug could have been an annoying caricature, an alien concerned
with nothing except profits, but Phillip Martin’s clever script gives him some
softer edges that almost make him likeable and ‘human’ for lack of a better
word. Though Sil is just another slimy businessman, someone common to a lot of
Martin’s works, the writer was also a fan of the brilliant Isaac Asimov and
took note of an essay he’d once written about writing believable
science-fiction in that it had to be plausible: for instance from what we know
about life from Earth chances are it needs water to survive and land-animals
are overwhelmed by marine animals in number, so odds are if there is life out
there on other planets it’s probably amphibious. The original plan was to have
Sil in the tank, but this would have made things difficult for the poor actor
and there was a worry children might copy it, so he sits on top of tanks
instead. He’s more than just a big lot of flabby skin saying ‘moisturise me’
though. It was a clever move, for instance, to make him a character who thinks
he looks dignified and brilliant, then saddle him with a faulty translator
circuit that makes him look like an idiot without him knowing (that pronounces
words like ‘goveryurnoeeer’ and has an unfortunate tendency to get stuck on
lines like ‘You lying…liar!’) Nabil Shaban is perfect casting, adding little
touches that make Sil come to life on top of the script, such as his wonderful
laugh (based on a snake that a friend of his had and a discussion they’d once
had about how snakes might laugh) and his habit of spaying his fins in anger
whenever he’s frustrated. His casting
was fortuitous: BBC producer Alan Shawcross had done a documentary on disabled
actors and sent a memo round to his colleagues suggesting they should hire more
underprivilidged actors when the parts demanded it. At the same time Martin
Jarvis had just been cast as the Governor and his wife Rosaylnd was also
involved in TV and Radio and had just been in touch with a disabled theatre
company named ‘Graeae’. Nabil was one of
their founders and one of the biggest Whovians to be in the series: he’d spent
a lot of time as a child in and out of hospital because of his osteogenesis
imperfecta and brittle bone diagnosis, that made his legs both unstable and
short. His only entertainment had been the hospital television where he’d
become hooked on Dr Who since ‘The Daleks’
in 1963. Indeed, by rights JNT should have been able to go straight to him as
he’d written into the programme twice, suggesting himself as a replacement for
Roger Delgado in 1976 when the pre-publicity for ‘The Deadly Assassin’
suggested The Master had been involved in a ‘nasty accident’ and again in 1981
when he heard JNT wanted a new Doctor who was a ‘contrast’ with the very tall
Tom Baker. Sadly he didn’t get either but I remain in hope that one day Nabil
might get the chance to be The Doctor yet, especially with Russell T doing so
much to have disabled actors on the show again: he’s a natural, instinctive
rounded actor who takes an already promising part and makes sure that you can
never ever forget it, somehow making Sil both a believable bully and the
hapless victim. The story goes that JNT proudly told Shawcross that he’d done
what he’d said and cast a disabled villain; the producer was horrified and
checked that Nabil was okay with it, but of course as a fully paid up fan he
was more than happy (after all, Sil isn’t nasty because of his height or
because he has to be wheeled around but because of who he is and what he
thinks. Russell T somehow forgot that lesson when re-casting Davros in a controversial
children in need sketch).
Martin Jarvis, of course,
had been seen by Dr Who fans before but is cast rather better here than he was
in ‘Invasion Of the Dinosaurs’ (where
he’s the most with-it gentile mad scientist in the series) and ‘The Web Planet’ (where he’s a butterfly
prince!) Director Ron Jones had worked with him many times and thought of him
immediately on reading the script: he wanted to move away from the Thatcher
stereotype and have someone at least a little likeable, someone who wants to do
the right thing but is perhaps a bit cowardly to do the right thing. It’s the
sort of part he always plays, but in a situation pushed to extremes you never
get to hear in radio 4 dramas The Governor is also part of a twelve-person
‘elite’ from which the next governor is elected so it needed to be someone a
little posh. He’s superb in the role, giving The Governor a gravitas and
dignity he doesn’t always deserve. Torture
overseer Arak is played with just the right menace by Stephen Yardley (he
always seems to get these sorts of roles: believe it or not he’s the
middle-aged axe-wielding maniac in the goriest Torchwood episode ‘Countrcyde’
where hapless comedy relief husband Rhys, of all people, finds cut up bodies in
a story where the usual Torchwood team are all known to the baddies). Only the
rebels are a bit wet, especially Jason Connery as Jondar hired purely to be
beefcake and because of the publicity of having Sean Connery’s son in the show
(he was unknown at the time but was cast in his breakthrough lead in the title
role ‘Robin of Sherwood’ while filming this very story. Goodness knows how or
why: rumour has long had it that after seeing how bad he was in rehearsals, but
knowing that the Radio Times had already been told about his casting, half of
Jondar’s lines were given to other characters to speak).
Perhaps the most
interesting characters are Arak and Etta, who are unique in the series. They
are the viewers, sitting and watching the action unfold. They have to after
all: it’s compulsory to watch and vote, so we see them commenting on the action
as it unfolds, reacting as if they’re watching a Dr Who story along with the
rest of us. That might seem an obvious idea now with so many reality TV shows
around, never mind DVD commentaries where the people involved in the show do
exactly that (and the Varos one is amongst the best, as most of the Colin
Baker-Nicola Bryant ones tend to be if only for their friendship and teasing)
but in 1985 this was a whole new concept. Along the way they moan when nothing
seems to be happening, complain that the violence was much better and gorier
the week before and how implausible things are. They never get to do anything
that impacts any of the actual plot or talk to characters besides each other.
Yet at the same time they’re our eyes and ears for what the unseen and
forgotten working class think on Varos and have some very poignant scenes as
living in such a violent, miserable world impacts their marriage: he tries to
‘nick’ her vote, she threatens to have him reported and at the end, when
everything is changed, they ask what they’re supposed to do next without the
vacuum of regular executions to keep them occupied (it’s very much a theme
Russell T Davies ‘borrowed’ for the ‘Bad
Wolf/Parting Of The Ways’ finale, following on from the vacuum left by The
Doctor in ‘The Long Game’, when reality TV
is very much a thing). Their best line comes when casually discussing an
execution that they’ve muddled up because there have been so many lately they’ve
become de-sensitised to the violence: ‘You’re thinking of that other one. He
wasn’t blind. Well, not in the beginning anyway!’ They’re also a postmodernist
joke on ‘us’ – every time they lean forward to see more gore and you want to
tick them off for being bloodthirsty you realise that you’re still watching
too.
There are others dropped
into the show too: The Doctor and Peri are rightly horrified that people are
made to watch the horror that unfolds on this planet, broadcast live into
people’s homes, a world that keeps people in place by making them afraid and
having part of this world’s no-go areas make people hallucinate their fears.
Only, of course, that’s exactly what the viewer is doing; those viewers we see
on screen are really ‘us’ commenting that it’s not as violent as it used to be
(in Varos’ pre-Mary Whitehouse days perhaps) and complaining that there isn’t
as much blood and guts as in other weeks. The Doctor comments to actor Hugh
Martin ‘do you always get the priest parts?’ as he’s led to his execution (he
did too,in series like ‘Killer’ and ‘A Very British Coup’, though his other Who
appearance is as a radio operator in ‘Terror
Of The Zygons’). The playful script also plays up the cliffhangers of old,
with the one and only one in this story (in the only 20th century series to use
of 45minute episodes) ending with the Dr drowning on dry land watched by the
governor in the control room who yells ‘Cut!’ right at the point we switch into
the theme tune sting and end credits! Peri also gets to comment on how ‘these
corridors all look the same’ (because they are!) and even JNT gets in on the
act (that pun about how water is better bottled ‘Peri, eh?’ was the producer’s
suggestion. No doubt with a tie-in advertisement in mind – Sil’s bathwater
edition perhaps?!) Oddly though no one comments on perhaps the biggest joke of
the whole story: they finally give up trying to make ventilation shafts seem
like ventilation shafts and instead have them eight foot tall (even though
people on Varos are average Human sized) so that even Colin Baker can walk
through them!
Having two viewers is a
neat idea that does something a bit different and – credit where it’s due – was
script editor Eric Saward’s suggestion after seeing them as minor characters in
the script which Martin eagerly agreed with. It’s easily the best alternation
or addition he makes to any script in his six-ish years of working on the
series. But then Saward was particularly close to Martin and for once was
coming from the same place, rather than playing catch-up with a writer cast by
his predecessor or asked for by his producer. The script had a long gestation
period too, originally written for Peter Davison’s Doctor and re-written for
both the new Doctor and the new companion, which helped (Saward was often
playing catch-up with scripts that had needed working on quickly. Though it’s
hard to imagine the 5th Doctor and Nyssa in this world). It shows:
‘Varos’ has a unique feel different to all other Who stories (even sort-of
sequel ‘Mindwarp’), different to
other stories from this eras. There’s a gravitas and weight, helped by the fact
that it’s all treated like a stage play (Martin had started his career in the
theatre), not just with the ‘Greek Chorus’ but the longer-than-usual scenes and
speeches and the relative lack of music (only a third of this story has an incidental
score in an era when music was usually crammed to the rafters: there are
actually scenes with, shock horror, pauses, just like the black-and-white days!)
This is a world that comes with its own poignant language: people don’t eat
food anymore for instance but ‘workfeed’ from the ‘food dole’, with all the
implications that people live at the whim of society rather than having society
run for them. What’s more, everyone in this story acts ‘normally’ for all the strange
ideas: this isn’t a story where early Industrial Revolutionary era workers mill
around discussing scarecrows or where H G Wells accepts everything about time
travel at first glance: there’s a world-weary frustration on this planet, a
sense of ‘now what?’ at every turn that rings true. You believe in this world
and its people. If you were watching on first transmission in 1985 you were
kind of living in it anyway.
Colin Baker is in his
element and his Doctor is never better on Tv as he gets to pontificate and
harangue at length, delivering pompous emotional speeches that put him at the
heart of the action in a way his two immediate predecessors never were (Ton
Baker’s Doctor was distant and alien and Peter Davison’s did the mopping up job
afterwards, but Dr 6 is prepared to risk all for his morals from the first. To
his detriment, generally). Colin Baker his best platform for his permanently
outraged Dr, shouting at a world that won’t listen to him and he’s met his
match in Sil, his antithesis in a way The Master had stopped being in this era,
a character ready to argue back at him but one driven by control rather than
freedom and misery rather than joy. A lot of writers for the 6th Dr don’t
really understand him (something script editor Eric Saward confessed later –
and he pretty much created him!) but Phillip Martin gets him completely: he’s a
timelord who has none of the sense of doubt the others (sometimes) have but
unlike his close cousin the 4th Dr he doesn’t see the absurdism in the world
either. For him, more than any other regeneration, his adventures a crusade and
a moral wrong he just has to right. He’s a professor who sees the rest of the
universe as his classroom of pupils and isn’t above lecturing them and
punishing them when they get things wrong. He’s a more black-and-white Dr than
the others, despite his multi-coloured costume, without as much mercy as the
others. Which is a problem against more nuanced, pitiable characters like
Davros or The Board, but perfect for a character as downright nasty as Sil and
a planet so obviously ‘wrong’ as Varos. That, perhaps, is why this is the only
DW story to have the word ‘vengeance’ in the title: he doesn’t so much save the
day and put things right by removing the baddies as avenge the people who’ve
suffered under this regime, every bit as much as the political system hurts
people it disagrees with. Only, of course, the Dr is morally right and
un-corruptable. Colin Baker is often the best thing in his era, but never more
than here when he gets to be the Dr he was always meant to be, smarter and more
learned than your average monster and not afraid to show it. Peri, too, gets a
lovely lot to do compared to usual: she’s the moral compass when The Doctor
isn’t there, plucky and brave in all the best ways, while her aborted change
into a bird fills in a lot of details about her character, her need to rise
above it all and fly away, to believe in better times (though being a botanist
it’s a surprise she didn’t turn into a tree, growing tall to be above it all, like
the ones in ‘Mark Of The Rani’. But better). Peri is one of Dr Who’s great companions and
Nicola Bryant one of its best actresses, even if she never gets the chance to show
just what she can do; along with debut ‘Planet Of Fire’ though this is Peri at
her best, sarcastic and sulky as the monsters try to have their way with her
and with a put-down equal to everyone trying to put her six feet under. It’s the moments when the pair are together
that the story shines most though: now that the first two stories of ‘getting
to know you’ have been recorded both actors know each other well and are having
the greatest fun together. They’re a delight to watch. It’s a real shame that
future writers go back to having them at each other’s throats for the rest of
the season.
It’s a shame too that Phillip
Martin only ever got two Dr Who scripts on screen because he could write
characters better than anybody still left writing for Who in this era; as we
said in ‘Mindwarp’ his greatest
strength is that he can take grotesque caricatures of people who seem hideous
at first and then slowly fill in the gaps so that they have more depth than
characters usually get in 90 minutes, turning a world that seems outlandish and
cartoonish at first into one that becomes more subtle and real by degrees.
Varos is a world that solves its problems with violence and where if you don’t
like it there must be something wrong with you –a world that if you disagree
with it can ‘devolve’ you by turning you into an animal, through acceleration
of certain strands in your DNA. It’s a very different way of doing the things Dr
Who always does, laughing at us for laughing at it, and it works so well it’s a
surprise no one tried it again (there’s something similar going on in ‘Dragonfire’ what with literally
dangling Sylvester McCoy over a cliff and naming characters after postmodernist
theorists, but it doesn’t try anything quite as brave as this, an academic exercise
rather than anything quite so ‘gutsy’). Martin is also clever at giving us
exposition only when we need it, so we learn things at just the right time from
multiple different characters from different points of view, rather than just
having it dumped on us (perhaps the biggest reason why this script by an
experienced writer stands out in a year with newbies like Pip ‘n’ Jane Baker
and Glen McCoy who do that sort of thing a lot). The language too is
magnificent for the most part, rich and rounded and different for every
character, from the gum clipped sentences of the working classes to the
Governor’s thoughtful prose to the Doctor’s impassioned speeches.
For all that though,
Varos is far from perfect. As so often
happens in 6th Doctor scripts he and Peri take an age to arrive on
the scene and the opening scenes on board the Tardis as The Doctor sits round
being depressed as they end up stuck in space are very out of character (I get
what Martin and probably Saward were doing, by having even our hero feel the
helplessness at being trapped in a situation beyond your control but the Tardis
is always going wrong and the Doctor always has hope. Although as it happens
this is the last time the Tardis goes wrong for the rest of the 20th
century!) Usually the joy in Who stories is watching the Doctor inspire people
to do better but for once he ends up doing most of the work himself and the Varosian rebels aren’t drawn with the
same complexities and motivations of everyone else (it might be that, having
been brought up on a penal colony, there simply isn’t a precedent for this sort
of thing but that’s where The Doctor comes in, as an inspiration. A cut scene
has The Doctor befriend Jondar after asking what got him into trouble and he
says ‘curiosity’, very much a Doctory trait. We really could have done with
that line back in, especially when this story under-ran with bits added at the
last minute). It’s a shame Martin didn’t too more with Peri’s transformation and
have the Doctor at least acknowledge it when he rescues her (although it’s just
as well the intended closing line, where The Doctor offers to take Peri to a
planet filled with millet, got cut!) There’s a lot to say about imagination being
harmful to people who aren’t allowed to use it and who think they’re going to
be trapped in the same drudgery life forever; it’s the one part of the script
that feels stapled on rather than growing organically out of everything else. It
would also have been interesting to see what animal he might have been too. There’s
a truly woeful car chase that’s clearly under-par and under-budget and even a
thought amongst fans that it’s a ‘parody’ of the Pertwee era doesn’rt excuse
how poorly it’s executed. The ending is awfully sudden and violent and it’s sad
to see The Doctor resorting to the sort of violence that everyone else on this
planet uses. It comes out of nowhere and The Doctor and Peri go home in return
for some Zeiton 7 even though the planet is still a mess and the people are
still hurting. Even Sil has been shamed rather than banished (though on the
plus side it leaves him free for a re-match, unlike say The Daleks and
Cybermen, both destroyed in their original stories). While it fits the story,
too, the amount of drab grey sets filled with drab grey people in drab grey
costumes without any reprieve can get monotonous (for once the Doctor’s colourful
coat and Peri’s 1980s neon leotard come in handy as a contrast!): it’s a real
shame that ‘The Two Doctors’ ‘Revelation Of the Daleks’ and ‘Mark Of the Rani’ got all the location filming
allocation between them for the year as the other three stories all suffer.
For all that, though, Varos
is a still filled with many wonderful and memorable moments that lodge themselves
in the brain. Though people talk about the violence going too far (and Martin
gleefully posted a Radio Times letter about how the atrocities is the stories
were ‘greater than anything in WWII on his bathroom wall) in this story it’s
never gratuitous and always proving a point: you remember this story’s
executions and acid baths long after similar threats in other stories have been
forgotten. The Governor’s guilty conscience wondering if he’s doing the right
thing leads to many a great monologue matched only by Sil’s subversive banking
(Star Trek clearly borrowed him for their Ferengi as they’re much the same but
Sil came first, by about twenty years) and The 6th Doctor at his
chest-beating best. The moment when the regime has been overthrown and everyone’s
television screens turn blank, leaving with nothing but a vacuum in their
lives, is one of the most thought-provoking ends in all of Who, as the camera turns
to us at home and asks us what we’re going to do about it now that we’ve ‘seen’
through the hypocrisy of a Thatcher-type society. We can all learn a lot from
Varos it seems; not least the fact that a DW script can be this daring and
postmodern without it getting in the way of telling a good story, which rattles
along at quite a pace and makes a lot of salient points in such an entertaining
way this viewer sitting at home has no reason to complain. Michael Grade
clearly hadn’t seen or – more likely – understood ‘Vengeance on Varos’ when he
cancelled the show at the end of this season for being ‘too violent’ and ‘not
very good’ (or maybe he thought that the dithering Governor trying to placate
everyone rather than do the right thing was based on him?) This is, more than
anything, an attack on the very violence he was complaining about, but done in
better and subtler ways than a monster as one-dimensional as Grade could ever
understand. The result is a brilliant inventive and creative story in an era
when, more than any other in the 20th century, Dr Who had fallen into a rut and
was recycling its own ideas. Proof that even in its darkest days Dr Who always
had something worth saying and could comment on society’s failings in a way no
other series ever could. There aren’t many classics in this era but ‘Varos’ is
very much one, a near-perfect combination of writing and acting. Not everyone
got it on first transmission, not everyone gets it now, but there’s food for
thought in Varos beyond Sil’s marshminnows and a lot for fans to enjoy whatever
level you want to watch this complex story on.
POSITIVES + The ‘Varos’
logo by set designer Tony Snoaden is pretty nifty, a double ‘V’ that looks like
exactly the sort of thing an oppressive dystopian regime would come up with and
also faintly resembles both the BBC ‘home video’ logo of the era and the most
famous ‘Who’ logo, the ‘diamond one from the Pertwee era.
The ‘real’ sequel is of course Phillip Martin’s
‘Mission To Magnus’, written as part of the unproduced season twenty-three (and
included with the other abandoned scripts listed under ‘The Mysterious Planet’).
Followed by ‘Mindwarp’,
a story that did make it to telly. Sil pops up on a whole load of other stories
set after ‘Mindwarp’ too, all of which are listed in the column under that
story.
Previous ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’ next ‘The
Mark Of Rani’
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