Carnival Of Monsters: Ranking - 51

 

Carnival Of Monsters

(Season 10, Dr 3 with Jo, 27/1/1973-17/2/1973, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Robert Holmes, director: Barry Letts)

Rank: 51

In an emoji: 🔬

   'Happy 10th birthday to Who 

They went to the zoo 

Where they met a big drashig 

In a timeloop circa 1922

(While being watched by you!)'

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a zoo and felt the same conflicting feelings I have, dear readers? As sweet as the animals are, as much as everyone can learn from seeing cute or scary (or cute yet scary) creatures in as close to their natural habitat as possible, as humane as the conditions in the majority of zoos are now, as dangerous or boring (or both) as any other alternative would be, you can’t help but feel sad that these animals have to be confined against their will at all without being fully aware of what’s going on. Even safaris, which are more about man coming into an animals’ environment than vice versa, always feel somehow artificial, like watching a manufactured stage-play rather than a real event. Most Earthly zoos are a sort of human ‘Castrovalva’, an artificial construct that looks less and less like the ‘real’ thing it’s supposed to replace the more you look at it. Yet at the same time at least it comes from human kindness. The alternative is to let animals roam in the wild, something which just isn’t safe anymore because of what other humans have done, stalking these creatures for money and ill-gotten gains or something as dumb as power over another life – with so much of this going on it seems that paying to see them rather than making money from them is the closest to a fair solution we’ve got. In other words, the only way we’ve really been able to conserve animals in any great way is through capitalism and effectively exploiting them for their own safety. You might also have been struck, the way I have, about what carnage there would be if one of the animals escaped and caused havoc in the other enclosures, even if it didn’t fancy eating you. You might, if you’re of the imaginative inclination, wondered what might happen if one of those animals ever became sentient, aware of the artificial world he lives in – and you can’t help but wonder how many of the animals confined within have secretly cottoned on to that but are powerless to do anything about it (especially if you’ve ever hung around a monkey/ape/gorilla/orang-u-tang enclosure, where I swear their behaviour is more self-aware than any of the so-called civilised hairless apes laughing at them).

 Only, this being Dr Who, the humans are some of the exhibits treated by the aliens in the exact same way as all their other animals, as something to gawk at and laugh at. Like many a Holmes script it’s the writer working out his frustrations over something in modern life he disagreed with wholesale and putting a Dr Who twist on it, making his point about exploitation and animal welfare by having humans from the 1920s pulled out of time alongside everyone else, as if they are just another mindless animal to a planet of Inter Minors. We’re so used as viewers to being at the top of the food chain it takes a while to realise that we’re watching humans as exhibits rather than exhibitors. Only, this still being Dr Who, what we see isn’t just a zoo (Jo also compares it to a ‘boy getting creatures from a rock pool’ and ‘a goldfish bowl’) but a ‘miniscope’, a machine owned by a pair of travelling showman who don’t understand how it works but who despite being greatly unsuitable are now in charge of the welfare of lots of different organisms from lots of different planets. On the page Holmes described the machine as a ‘cross between an oversized jukebox and a Russian samovar’ (a sort of big tea urn). The end design is more complicated than that: its as a sort of cross between space-age version of 1980s children’s TV factory machine Bertha, a microscope, one of those old pier ‘what the butler saw’ machines you used to get at carnivals and one of those ‘videoscopes’ that were briefly around in early 1960s youthclubs where you could actually see moving film of performances a little like MTV but twenty years early and far more ‘corporate’ (the UK TV channel ‘Talking Pictures’ are forever showing clips of these featuring The Hollies, The Fortunes and The swinging Blue jeans amongst others but they never seriously took off, club-goers preferring to hear music and dance rather than watch it). They botch it a little in execution but the original idea was that, rather than being a shared experience like television, you had to peer through a hole so only you could see it. The overall effect is of watching something illicit, peering in on something private you have no right to see (Holmes’ working title, nixed by script editor Terrance Dicks, was ‘Peepshow’, something that played this aspect up even more. This inspired some of the funniest correspondence in Who history, still in the archives, as Dicks wrote back to his good buddy explaining why they had to chance the title to the descriptive final title after as line Holmes gave Shirna in episode one, causing Holmes to write back with an enclosed advert for a ‘writer experienced in erotica and asking if she should write for that instead,. Dicks said in reply he’d already taken the job and was working on a script titled ‘The Sex Life Of Dr Who’ and debating how many organs the Doctor might have two of!) Most of all, though, the ‘miniscope’ looks like a television (in Holmes’ earliest draft its even called a ‘strobe’, like the lines that go across old television sets still very much around in 1973). In one of his most postmodernist scripts Holmes asks the audience to ask why they tune in to watch characters who are oblivious that they are characters suffering while trying to lead happy lives, with lots of gags about the fearsome drashigs being ‘loved by the kiddies’ for causing such terror and horror. Especially once the Tardis lands in this world and a miniaturised Doctor and Jo have to work out where they are. Not till ‘Vengeance On Varos’ and ‘The Giggle’ will a Dr Who story poke so much fun at the idea of this television programme knowing it’s a television programme. 

 It’s a very clever idea that keeps us guessing just what’s going on for the longest time. This is the first ‘official’ journey the Doctor’s taken in the Tardis in three years since the exile to earth was lifted by the timelords at the end of ‘The Three Doctors’ (bar the odd ‘secret mission’ on their behalf) and in this, Dr Who’s tenth anniversary year with *that* Radio Times pull-out (with a guide to all past adventures) speculation was huge as to where the Tardis might go first: an alien planet in the future? Or somewhere in Earth’s past? Somewhere we’d been before? Or somewhere entirely new? Holmes has fun teasing us that it’s one or the other, having both exist side by side for the longest time while we try to work out how the two storylines can possibly meet up and watch as the Doctor too gets more and more confused given that his readings tell him they should be on Metebelis 3 (good job they’re not given events in ‘Planet Of the Spiders’…) or a nearby planet, not a British ship in the 1920s (it’s also a matter of budget: splitting the cast in two meant that each lot would only have to be paid for two lots of recording sessions not four, which meant more money for more actors). Just as we’re beginning to work it all out Holmes throws in a simply superb cliffhanger to end episode one, where Varg’s huge hand comes down to the ship and takes out the Tardis as a bit of ‘bric-a-brac’ aught in the machine as if he’s a TV repair-man. It really changes what we thought we knew about this world, as does the end of episode three where a miniature Doctor finally breaks his way out the machine and lands on Inter Minor, growing in size, looking to all intents and purposes as if he’s ‘jumped’ from one channel telling one story to another, or maybe escaped from the confines of the TV world altogether. 

Note that the dignitaries have a very scathing view of television altogether, shooing their working class Lurmans away when they try to gawp at it, worried it will give them an imagination beyond the confines of their simple jobs. In this context worth remembering what happened the last time Bob Holmes was invited to write a script for the series ‘Terror Of The Autons’ and the way it made ordinary plastic household objects some alive was so both the single most Dr Who thing ever (making the ordinary turn extraordinary and become terrifying) and brought Dr Who its biggest criticisms about horror and violence so far with complaints from several parents that their children were afraid to take their dolls and teddy bears to bed with them at night in case they turned ‘evil’. Holmes was bemused: he knew that horror had been part of children’s literature since time immemorial and that fake horror was a way for children to confront things they would be seeing in far worse terms in everyday life in an exaggerated way that they had some control over. Readers of scary passages in a book can just skip the scary parts or shut the book altogether, while watching Dr Who on TV was, at least in the early 1970s, a family ritual: where better to confront the darkness of life than in a place where you were safe, could hide behind the sofa or change channels and where you had your family around you for comfort and safety? Not wanting to get into trouble again but also laughing at how absurd the argument is, Holmes writes in a story where the things everyone treats as play things that are semi-fictional and can’t hurt anyone get loose and turn nasty, a fearsome Drashig breaking loose and causing havoc with the wiring system, putting a world in danger, the lines between fact and fiction getting blurred. And this clearly is Dr Who: there are lots of delightful in-jokes about the restrictive nature of the series: the way there has to be a fight scene included to break up the talking (here caused by Vorg turning up an ‘aggressive’ metre on the outside of the box) and the gag that the Cybermen ‘look like blobs in a snow-storm’ (exactly how they were in their first appearance in the Antarctic in ‘The Tenth Planet’. This may also be part of his reply to his critics, that to have a ‘toothless’ Dr Who story would be to take away it’s intrinsic education in all things scary in life, that without horror people wouldn’t watch a show that’s designed to make you think outside the ‘miniscope’ of the mindless junk you’ve been trained to watch (Dr Who is a series that’s popular at least in part because it works in ways that go against the obvious things television was designed to do: as part of the BBC’s original educational remit it was meant to make the world more real and seem small, but instead it’s an imaginative show that makes the universe seem impossibly big, while instead of being used to control what the masses think and keep them in their place it stretches their imagination to make them think bigger).It’s a very Holmes thing to do in other words: he’s making a serious point but doing it while laughing at the viewer, at the censors and most of all at himself as a writer. 

 Like many a Holmes, story, too the plot is driven not by evil aliens who want to destroy the world but desperate aliens down on their luck and trying to save a bit of money by taking shortcuts in their invention they bought second-hand ‘cheap’. The entire plot would have been spared had the dignitaries of Inter Minor noticed showmen Vorg and Shirna were in breach of quarantine laws by taking it with them on their visit to the planet. Which seems odd given that this a planet of (literally) grey-faced bureaucrats who are pedantic in so many other ways: once the Doctor manages to free himself from the machine the main threat in the ‘real’ world comes when the Lurmans elect to kill him purely because they don’t want to have to go through the paperwork of explaining who he is and how he got there, which is just about the best motivation for trying to kill the lead character any alien in Dr Who ever has. It’s hilarious, too and very Dr Who the way that the story wouldn’t have happened at all had this been in a machine that did what it was supposed to. Other scifi series would have held up the miniscope as the pinnacle of invention, a glorious imaginative yet plausible bit of scifi technology, and try to awe us with the very idea of it, but like the space-rockets and transmits before them to the local population it’s just another archaic device that keeps going wrong. Holmes loves taking the mickey out of human frailties and as with ‘Terror Of The Autons’ he really picks up on the decaying feel of a show-business circus past its prime, now that people have moved on to other more humane things (I’m willing to be he had some of traumatic experience at one that scarred him in his youth!) He’s outraged at all those fake humans controlling something so primal and raw and real and wonderful as animal life and presenting it as merely ‘entertainment’ being so smug about being superior when they don’t understand what they’re really looking at at all, the equivalent of the Spice Girls covering a Beatles song. Holmes is far more scathing about the lives of the people in the ‘free’ world than he is about the people ‘trapped’ without their knowledge. 

 The point is made without quite saying it, that mankind thinks he has evolved so far that he can control other species and yet to a drashig all we really are is food. The drashigs are, for many, the weakest part of the story: one of those DW monsters that’s incredibly low budget. It’s not even a proper costume but a hand-puppet, while the author named them in the script as an anagram of ‘dishrag’, given that he had enough experience of Dr Who by 1973 to know how they would likely turn out. I have a really soft spot for them though: people have gone to a great deal of care to make them seem like real ‘monsters’: the camera technique that slows down their movement to a menacing crawl, the swamp juice that drips from their fangs and especially the radiophonic screams (actually a motor car engine in reverse) make them highly memorable. Plus they’re a rare Dr Who ‘monster’ that acts and behaves like an animal: not a sentient being, not a war race, not an insect walking on its hind legs, but a pure simple being living off carnivoristic instinct for food. The shots of it travelling over marshland (shot in Burnham-On-Crouch) are really effective (and led to one of my favourite behind-the-scenes- stories when the entire film crew was evacuated due to a bomb scare –which turned out to be the effects assistant’s alarm clock that had knocked itself on and started ticking!) This also leads to a moral dilemma I’m copyrighting as ‘Schrödinger’s drashig’: being an animal with instincts can it sense that it’s being observed? Is that why it suddenly breaks free of its sector of the miniscope when it does? Is it people with power over it that effectively gives it the power to fight back? Of course we’ll never know unless we can ‘see’ it without it sensing it’s being ‘seen’. 

You can throw in here the class struggles between the Lurman dignitaries, who have all the makeup and lines as they swan around, and the functionaries who do nothing but work. This isn’t Holmes’ most working class script (that’s ‘The Sunmakers’) but it does push the point far for a story made in 1973. The facemasks that all look the same, long considered a budget saving device, are really a clever comment on how faceless and interchangeable the masses are to the people in charge of ‘us’. They’re as much in their place and yet oblivious to it as any of the creatures in the miniscope, unable to break out of their allotted ‘compartments’. Just check out the early scene where one is zapped and executed for literally trying to ascend to another level: the dignitaries want these people in their place where they know how to control them. Note, too, how big the dignitaries seem when viewed from the confines of a miniscope, seen as big hands or eyes, and yet when we get to know the they’re really very small, tiny minded people not worthy of ‘us’. Oddly, though, the Doctor never stops to take up their plight: it’s the one ‘failure’ of this story that everything is still in much the same place at the end ass it was at the beginning, with nobody having really learn anything from this story (except, perhaps, not to buy cheap miniscopes on the black market!) Maybe that’s why people like watching other people suffer so much? It makes us feel better about our own lives and gives us some power over someone else. 

A very clever story then with a lot going on: the contrast between the bright and colourful showmen (who clearly go to the same tailors as the 6th Doctor!) and the grey Inter Minians is well handled. The weakest elements are really the poor humans stuck on the SS Bernice, scenes filmed on a real boat not a set for once, the decommissioned 1938 ship RFA Robert Dundas which was due to be scrapped but was parked in Kent’s River Medway to allow filming and cleverly filmed so it looks as if it’s out at sea, which makes for a surprisingly fair double for the Indian Ocean (though you have to feel for the actors who must have been positively frozen). We’ll talk about this in more detail under ‘The Sea devils’ but it might also be significant as a setting given Jon Pertwee’s long years on radio series ‘The Navy Lark’ (where most of the public knew him from in his pre-Who years) and with both Pertwee and producer/this show’s director Barry Letts both admirals in their youth. The idea of a timeloop constraining the humans so they don’t break out of their area or think too hard, despite a lingering sense of déjà vu, is a great one (particularly as this is the first time we had a timeloop in Dr Who – it will get so you can’t move for them in the 4th Dr era but for now it’s a really inventive idea) and the mystery behind it is what keeps the first episode moving, while going back to the postmodernist element it’s hilarious how the Doctor and Jo spend their time getting captured, escaping and getting captured again by people with short memories (which is what happens in scripts, particularly in this era, all the time!) However in practice watching the 3rd Dr and Jo have the same conversations round and around and around again is every bit as irritating for us as it is for them when we have so many other worlds in this story waiting to be explored. The characters are incredibly clichéd too, a 1920s flapper, a Harry Sullivan prototype (Ian Marter’s first role in the series) and a fusty naval captain (surely an in-joke as he’s played by Tenniel Evans, Pertwee’s great friend from his ‘Navy Lark’ days who even nominated him for the Dr role three years earlier). That is kind of the point I know with the humans trapped in time as well as space the way animals are in our zoos: if you were an Inter Minor peering through a miniscope then you’d learn little to nothing about humanity in its natural habitat, just as looking at animals in a zoo only tells you what their lives are like for a carefully controlled snapshot of time. Similarly, the snobbish colonial attitudes of the characters make it even funnier than they can’t see that they’re really just an animal caught under a microscope and put on TV for bigger aliens to laugh at in a run-down fairground attraction. The 1920s setting is spot on: like ‘Black Orchid’ we’re back in ‘Great Gatsby’ territory when posh young things dance the night away with no real regard for the horrors of the world around them, sleepwalking into another war. This is also yet another Holmes in-Joke: he wrote this story in between series one and two of BBC drama ‘The Regiment’, a meticulously researched drama that followed a military regiment in the Boer War and Imperialist India that had many boat scenes. Holmes, used to using his imagination and character development after years working for Dr Who, was frustrated at how much accuracy and research was slowing him down so was enjoying himself writing for characters who said much the same things over and over in an alien setting without fear of contradiction and who were bland stereotypes! All very clever, but unlike Holmes’ other clever ideas in this story, a real chore to sit through. 

 That, however, is nothing compared to how enjoyable the rest of this story is: this is one of the cleverest of all Who scripts by anyone from any era and one that keeps switching up the action. For my money has some of the best cliffhangers in the series, ones that really play with television as a medium: as well as the two that have been mentioned just check out the cliffhanger to episode two that sees the Drashigs first get loose, breaking all the borders between the different exhibits so that nowhere is safe. There are also some really gorgeous scenes between Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning who are at the peak of their chemistry here, acting like two old friends so used to the other by now that they know instinctively what trouble they’ll be in and how to get them out of it. Pertwee’s huffiness is always good for a comic scene and few are better than the one where he wonders if the chickens he sees are the natural life-form on the planet (whereas they turn out to be just chickens, a gag stolen almost word by word but changed to rabbits for ‘Day Of the Doctor’). Holmes is always held up by the DW community as at least a candidate for its greatest ever writer and while I don’t necessarily agree (he’s one of its most inconsistent writers, with as many bad scripts as there are good, even if the good ones are very good indeed) this is too brilliant a script not to applaud, wittily making a serious point in an imaginative script that’s utterly unique. It’s George Orwell had he written for television, the perfect DWy combination of our ordinary world and a scifi extraordinary world hitting each other head on, a world where everyone has power over someone else despite having no better idea of how the world works than anyone else (which is why its so perfect that even the Doctor, our al-knowing genius gets this one wrong!) Along with ‘The Time Warrior’ and ‘The Sunmakers’ its Holmes at his best, with some real laugh-out-loud lines. Most of which are at our expense watching at home rather than the characters’ and delivered with a knowing wink (such someone called Kalik laughing at Vorg and Shirna for their funny and unlikely names and the ‘general Strike’ referencing line the line about the Inter Minor functionaries ‘if you gave them fossil fuels they’d probably store them in hygiene chambers’!) It could all have got out of hand with the odd costumes and exaggerations but underneath all the colours these characters all feel like people you’ve met in real life: the fading showman Vorg (a bravura performance by Leslie Dyer a decade before his breakthrough hit ‘Hi-De-Hi’ where he plays a punch and Judy man not a quadzillion miles removed from this), his jaded assistant Shirna (Cheryl Hall (who had a very different breakthrough hit a decade later in ‘The Bill’ and was an early frontrunner to play Jo) and the irritated local Kalik (a tricky part played with just the right amount of world-weariness by Michael Wisher, a year before his breakthrough role as ‘Davros’). Throw in Jon Pertwee at his most ‘human’ and Katy Manning at her sweetest and resilient and you have a rare DW story where every actor is perfectly cast and every funny line is perfectly played. The result is one of Dr Who’s most impressive stories, one that’s utterly unlike anything else on TV in 1973 – or indeed any TV ever made – and all the more impressively forward-thinking for coming between two of the most backward looking stories the show ever made (10th anniversary party ‘The Three Doctors’ and second story re-make ‘Planet Of The Daleks’). Possessing both intelligence and raw animal magnetism ‘Carnival’ is 1970s Dr Who at its very best and a real highpoint of the 3rd Doctor’s era.

 POSITIVES + The title is one of the show’s cleverest, a last minute substitution for the simpler working title ‘Peep Show’. This is a carnival of monsters, but the monsters aren’t the drashigs – they’re the humanoids who lock up animals who were born free. The dictionary definition of a ‘carnival’ is ‘a public event when people get to do something silly in celebration’, which does indeed sound like the chance to see animals running around, but a drashig for one cares little for customs when its wheeled on to perform party pieces (just as a lion is king of the beasts and loses his dignity each time he’s wheeled into a circus with fangs trimmed; often literally). Finally, the title also takes a swipe at us at home for watching this story, expecting spectacle, bright colours and monsters wheeled on for our entertainment. There’s even a knowing line in the script where poor Jo is appalled that people might be watching her suffering for fun. It’s worth comparing this to the apologetic relationship fellow writer Russell T Davies has with his creations in stories like ‘Love and Monsters’ and ‘The End Of Time’ and the equally cerebral discussion of philosophy Christopher H Bidmead has in his stories ‘Logopolis’ and ‘’Castrovalva’ (next in the list!) 

 NEGATIVES - While the grey makeup is well done (and another great in-joke!), the Inter Minors all seem to be having hair issues, with bald plates that famously became detached halfway through recording without anyone seeming to notice (one shot at the very end is so bad Barry Letts intervened and had it cut before the repeat transmission of this story as part of the beloved ‘Five Faces of Dr Who’ series in 1981; they restored in the original ending for the DVD and most fans are in two minds about that). Vorg’s colourful suit also seems to be an early audition for the 6th Dr’s clashing coat of many colours and is so bright it upsets the cameras flaring a few times when he moves, while Shirna’s costume is more revealing than even Leela’s and actress Cheryl Hall even more self-conscious about that than Louise Jameson was. Even this makes for a neat contrast with the greyness of the Lurman locals, though. It might be significant, too, that this is the first story shown since the long-awaited TV debut of the two Peter Cushing Dalek films, colourful versions of the 1960s black-and-white classics: it would be very Holmes to decide to do a more bright and colourful version of the series again even though it’s now in colour! 

BEST QUOTE: Pletrac: ‘The function of this tribunal is to keep this planet clean. This Tellurian creature comes from outside our solar system and is a possible carrier of contagion. Furthermore the creature may be hostile. Doctor: ‘Would you kindly stop referring to me as ‘the creature’, sir or I may well become exceedingly hostile!’ 

Previous ‘The Three Doctors’ next ‘Frontier In Space’