City Of Death: Ranking - 33

 

City Of Death

(Season 17, Dr 4 with Romana II, 29/9/1979-20/10/1979, producer: Graham Williams, script editor: Douglas Adams, writer: 'David Agnew' (Douglas Adams uncredited, with ideas by Graham Williams and based on another script by David Fisher), director: Michael Hayes)

Rank: 33

In an emoji: 🗼

   'In the planet of the blind, the one-eyed Jagaroth is The Count who can see best (just not as well as he thinks)'

Ah Paris, the city of culture, the land of love, the home of...a green-headed blobby alien with one eye whose millions of years old having survived the destruction of an alien spaceship in Man’s primordial past. Britain’s nearest neighbour and traditionally biggest competitor and fiercest rival France – the first ‘alien’ place to visit for most people travelling from our shores, with a culture, language continent, diet and above all weather so different to our own - has inevitably come in for a bit of a bashing on this most English of shows. The first time we saw it on screen was in ‘The Reign Of Terror’, a story warning about zealous revolutionaries destroying the status quo without any real idea of what to replace it with (definitely not the English way *let’s not talk about Ireland*). Then in ‘The Massacre’ it was the scene of a dispute that ended up as a bloodbath between Catholics and Hugenots (ha, they could have sorted out all their petty differences over some tea and biscuits because we’d never do that *glares angrily at Mary Queen Of Scots*). Even in the 21st century and ‘Vincent and the Doctor’ the country is the home of invisible monsters that cause their greatest painter to go mad and cut his ear off (not like our proper Brits such as that nice Mr Turner, who *ahem* had himself lashed to a sailing mast in order to paint the sea and covered his canvases in soapsuds and whitewash). France is the closest to being British geographically as its possible to get, even ifs culture feels so alien and is thus normally used in Dr Who as a yardstick for what could go wrong here too soon after. So it is here, where the city of love become the city of death, where an alien in count’s clothing presides over a timeloop where everything repeats itself and where the local inhabitants are under the control of a psychopath with nice manners. Maybe writer Douglas Adams was taking pot shots at the insincere fakeness of the posh French world of sophisticates, which at the time of broadcast in 1979 were in danger of causing a divide in the country between haves and have nots not seen since Marie Antoinette’s cake fetish. Maybe Douglas really didn’t like posh French prime minister Valéry René Marie Georges Giscard d'Estaing’s fiscal policy, said to be the cause of France going ‘backwards’ for the first time since World War Two. Maybe he distrusted the rise in power of French nobility at a time when England was in the thrall of punk rock and a back to basics ‘Reign Of Terror’ of our own. Or maybe he just wanted a free holiday on location? 

 Actually the truth is much more boring. Douglas inherited the setting from another writer, David Fisher, usually one of the show’s most reliable writers (composing ‘The Stones of Blood’ and ‘Androids Of Tara’ back to back the previous season for instance), was asked to come up with a spoof of the popular ‘Bulldog Drummond’ books. Fisher wrote a fascinating first draft of a story named ‘A Gamble With Time’ in which the Doctor and Romana meet a detective named ‘Pug Farquahasson’ and becomes embroiled in the tale of a rich count is funding time-travel experiments by rigging a 1920s Las Vegas casino who turns out to be a green alien. It had all the plot elements of the final story (including stolen Mona Lisas, a trip back in time to meet Da Vinci, the alien Jagaroth splintered in time – here called the Sephiroth but much the same thing - and an opening set on primeval Earth; the main differences are that the time splinters played a much bigger role: the Doctor hails a 1928 handsom cab and finds a 1979 vintage one arriving for instance, while the Mona Lisa herself breaks through as a Jagaorth in the Louvre, while the Doctor spends more time both in primeval Earth – which is a bustling Jagaroth city – and later with Da Vinci being locked up for being, well, weird basically and the Countess discovers the truth about her husband in a cliffhanger when she tears at the Counts face and finds it comes off (!), although the biggest change is the ending when the aliens die off from the common cold just like in ‘War Of the Worlds’). The production team (basically Douglas and producer Graham Williams) loved it and happily booked the cast and studio time but had three major changes (not unusual for Dr Who). The first was that gambling in a series still seen as being primarily for children was a bit of a no-go. The other was the brainwave of production assistant and future producer John Nathan-Turner who’d been working out some costs and figured that with a bit of saving here and there across the rest of the season it was cheaper to take a skeleton crew and cast oversees to film than re-create another country in a BBC studio (say what you will about some of JNT’s later dodgy ideas, he was always looking to make the show look better onscreen and this was one of his better ideas that no one else had the guts to suggest). Las Vegas was, however, a bit too far: he could manage Paris okay though and what’s more the French tourist board were surprisingly helpful (they even had a bulk deal on flights!) However the 1920s setting would have to change: they simply wouldn’t be able to hide the 1979 look of a modern city like Paris. Douglas came up with a solution that would solve all three problems (Art theft! In modern day France!) and David Fisher was asked to do a quick re-write. Only the request came at a really bad time: Fisher’s marriage was falling apart and he was not in a fit state to do anything on such tight deadlines. Which, with actors and locations waiting, was a bit of a problem.

 Normally what would happen at a time like this was that the writer would be given more time and a script moved down the season or moved to the following year, but as the story that was always meant to feature extra filming and which had hired the services of leading actor Julian Glover it couldn’t really be changed. As script editor poor Douglas was faced with writing around several settings that had already been booked and which couldn’t be changed without wasting a lot of money already spent, one that could only use a small amount of already cast actors and he only had a weekend to write four episodes in. Some Who writers thrive on deadlines that tight (that’s how most of the 1960s Dalek stories were written after all), but Douglas was notoriously bad at deadlines. He hated being pinned down to a single idea when his head was so full of possibilities that evaporated once he started fixing them on the page (he once said of the long gap between ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ books that ‘It’s not true I hate deadlines – I rather like the whooshing noise they make when they go past’). Knowing this producer Graham Williams ‘kidnapped’ him and took him to his house, sat him down in front of a typewriter with an endless supply of whisky and black coffee and wouldn’t let him leave until he was done. Douglas, who’d never worked this way in his life before (i.e. quickly) rose to the challenge quite brilliantly, conjuring up some of his leanest, slimmest writing that in the hands of other writers would seem complex but for him seemed almost simple, switching from his usual love of ensemble parts and an impossible setting in space to a specific place and time with very few characters who all come quite brilliantly to life. While the plot itself is in many ways standard fare (we’ve had posh aliens hiding in plain sight in Dr Who before and more than enough timeloops and mad scientists who create them, though never all three interwoven in one story before), it’s the sophistication and class of it all that’s new. All that and he couldn’t even be credited (because writer’s union rules meant script editors couldn’t have their names on scripts when employed on a long-running programme because it looked like favouritism and excluded other writers from getting a job (the credited writer ‘David Agnew’, is what the BBC used to use when ever events like this happened; Phillip Hinchcliffe’s first post-Who series the crime series ‘Target’ features several stories credited to Agnew who becomes their most prolific writer!) 

 The final version of the story is Dr Who at its breeziest charming and most confident, with jokes a plenty that never get in the way of the serious plot, rightly heralded as one of the greatest DW stories ever made. The script is packed with witty one-liners and clever people trying to outdo each other in clever ways rather than the more usual template of dumb people shooting down corridors, with three aliens (including Romana) all convinced that they’re the most intelligent person in the room and hiding who they really are to most people while secretly knowing that everyone else knows. Julian Glover’s second appearance in Dr Who after ‘The Crusade’ might find him playing a Count rather than a King but it doesn’t feel like demotion in his hands, as one of the first big names to ever ‘risk’ doing Who plays Count Scarlioni with all the fizz and subtlety of the big serious stage roles that made him famous. There’s not many actors who could pull off a one-eyed green blobby alien in a cravat, but he’s top of my list, playing Scarlioni as an alien so used to being in control whose become unhinged thanks to the splintering of time that’s made him come apart at the seams. Tom Baker is a delight, visibly enjoying the taste of Douglas’ wordplay in his mouth (it helped that they were drinking buddies – even in the Paris shooting where Douglas paid for his own ticket to come and get drunk with the cast as the budget wouldn’t stretch that far, spending his days hungover in the hotel bar while everyone else went out to work saying his lines) and outsmarting someone smart who really pushes him for a change. Tom Baker is a lot of people’s favourite Doctor because he’s hands-down the funniest and the most alien and flippant. That’s not always true of every story (and he’s rarely both) except here, where he’s brilliantly eccentric and gloriously funny, delivering every line word-perfectly. He’s a Doctor laughing at the absurdity of the universe and so infectious is his humour it’s hard not to laugh along with him. Lalla Ward too, in only her second story to be filmed, is clearly enjoying the chance to make Romana part-schoolgirl (especially in that risque schoolgirl costume she later regretted – she wanted to make girls watching at home feel better about having to wear one themselves only to be inundated with letters from dads telling her how sexy she looked), part wise old owl, the person everyone (including the Doctor) underestimates but is secretly smarter than everyone. You can measure quite visibly how well this future husband and wife are getting on by how their characters respond to each other on screen and, well, let’s just say this is the most loved-up we ever see them, giggling like they’re a young couple on their honeymoon (it is Paris, after all) even though there’s technically nothing in the script to hint at it (not till the 8th Dr so we see a timelord this gooey-eyed and, frankly, Romana’s a lot more plausible a love interest than Dr Grace). Time and again Jagaroth thinks he’s got the measure of these poor dumb people around him – and then the Dr or Romana will outfox him and put him in his place and he can’t handle that at all (the effect is like seeing someone stand up to your most hated school bully and outsmart them without even missing a beat, watching them get increasingly frustrated but not able to say anything because everyone’s so terribly polite). As much as Scarlioni is meant to be a substitute Frenchman whose secretly an alien, he’s no substitute for the Doctor or Romana, our substitute Englishmen whose secretly alien and whose even more polite and sarcastic back. 

 There’s also one very earthbound character to get our sympathies, another Englishman. Douglas writes in Duggan as his own ‘Bulldog Drummond’ (even the names are similar) and Tom Chadbon was cast partly because he ‘looked like Tintin’ (another period super sleuth back when this was a 1920s show), our eyes and ears for this story asking all the sumb questions we need to know whilst three aliens lollygag at each other. Douglas often wrote in ‘normal’ characters to be overawed as a contrast to the people for whom space is a normal part of everyday life (there are lots in his ‘Hitch-Hikers and ‘Dirk Gently’ series both) and Duggan is one of his best, as he tries to solve everything from a purely Human perspective, finding himself hopelessly out of his depth and getting in the way but in a more brutal, primitive way than Arthur Dent (you’d never catch Duggan giving up his beaten-up old mac for a dressing gown, for starters – you suspect he still wears his coat in bed). It’s a part that could easily have been nudged OTT on screen but Tom Chadbon nails Duggan perfectly, as a man who used to being considered smart and funny till he gets mixed up with aliens smarter and funnier than he is, asking them to talk down to his level, then resenting them for it. 

 What could have just been three clever people out-intellectualising each other is given a more down to Earth feel, though, thanks to the plot which is all about evolution and the point in every species’ life when it learns to throw off the shackles of the alien entity that’s been influencing it and stand on its own wobbly legs. Douglas’ twist on Dr Who making the ‘ordinary become extraordinary’ is that humanity is an accidental side-effect from the radiation of the Jagaroth’s spaceship as it crash-landed into primeval Earth, mankind never quite losing that feel of primeval ooze that we came from because our evolutionary process have been stranded. The crash splintered the Jagaroth into twelve parts and he’s been stranded, without the ability to fix the ship himself. Instead, across 400 million years, for all his posh manners and sophistication, he’s relied on the skills of the humans he accidentally created, basically making the Earth the garage for his broken spaceship because he can’t fix his own motor and he makes the humans his hapless mechanics, brainwashed to a warp drive factor of several quadzillion to speed them up. It’s a big intellectual debate about evolution: Paris is said to be most sophisticated civilisation, peak of humanity evolution and gentile, but it turns out that even this is a side effect of the Jagaroth’s 20th century splinter trying to change humanity to better fit his own more charming socialite personality. All the other milestones of our civilisation too (Egyptian pyramids, the Roman Empire, a Greek senate, an English noveman, even the Crusades - with hints that Julian Glover’s last Who appearance as Richard the Lionheart was just another splinter sent back through time) were caused by the Jagaroth’s other selves too. Romana makes the point at one stage that Earth is considered a ‘level 5’ planet (the only other time she mentions such a scale Ribos is a ‘level three’ for reference so we’re not doing too badly): this is a story all about how life evolves at different rates on different planets but how, despite that headstart, the same weaknesses of greed and smugness overcome us all. Refreshingly, too, a story that’s all about seeing through clever talk and game playing, full of talking and moralising and years of evolution, is resolved by (spoilers) Duggan punching the Jagroth when his guard is down, all that intellect and ability ended by a simple primal instinct (the irony being that Duggan has been ticked off for punching people left and right across the rest of the story). In any other story brute force would be ‘wrong’ but here its perfect: The Jagaroth has severely underestimated us simple Earthlings by assuming we’re too stupid to do anything, but it’s our primeval responses that overcome any breeding he’s ever given us that stops him destroying us completely. 

 There’s another sub-plot here too about authenticity, via art and what it means to different people. For the Paris elite who collect it the paintings are simply a means for money – even the Jagaroth, for all his talk of taste and sophistication can’t see the real worth in the Mona Lisas: for him they’re just a means to fund his time-travel experiments. It’s the poor people who turn up in art galleries for free to value a painting by how it looks that are the really sophisticated, evolved ones, throwing off that primordial ooze by trying to better themselves and recognising the beauty of the human condition. The idea of Da Vinci being made to draw seven Mona Lisas (so the Jagaorth has more to sell, each one considered authentic by the buyers after one goes missing from the Louvre), each one authentic (despite the Doctor going back in time to write ‘this is a fake’ over all of them!) also brings up further questions about this: what is the difference between a copy and a facsimile, a print? Why should we reject something that’s an identical copy of a work of art for not being the original? Especially if it’s by the same artist and made just a few minutes later? Was the second Mona Lisa any less inspired simply because Da Vinci made it second? It’s still by his hand after all. In real life the Mona Lisa was stolen by napoleon – we only have it on trust it’s the ‘real’ one that was returned (because 19th century France was full of art forgers). Does it even matter if the Mona Lisa looks the same? The irony is that ultimately Scarlioni is no better than Duggan. He collects pieces of art for their money not their artistic value whereas even Duggan, by the end, buys a postcard of the Mona Lisa to hang on his wall because he appreciates it more now. The only fully evolved people here are the Doctor and Romana both, who appreciate art and have overcome the occasional barbarism of their people (just note the telling scene in episode one where the timelords sit around discussing how bad the art on Gallifrey is because it’s drawn by technically competent robots who have no soul like the imperfect Humans do). It’s this imagination that allows them to defeat the count despite a 400-million year head start. 

On a similar line, why should we reject an alien as a French count? After all Count Scarlioni (the 20th century splinter of the Jagaroth) has technically been a count much longer than any French aristocrats really have – and his bloodline is a lot more pure given that he’s been split into twelve and can trace his family tree all the way back to, erm, himself. The great irony of this story too is that the Count doesn’t count anything but money – and for Douglas in the Who universe money doesn’t count for anything. Douglas’ script takes a lot of pot-shots at patronising rich people, from art critics down, which makes a neat twist on the very English type of bureaucrats the Dr’s usually bumping up against. The hint of ‘City Of Death’ is that great art has always been surrounded by bullies trying to make money out of it – such as Captain Tancredi (another Jagaorth splinter). We only see two splinters but they’re both impressively different and the hint is that both of them shaped the eras of humanity they ended up trapped in. Tancredi is like a mafia boss, he’s happy to get out the thumb screws and use torture to get what he wants, oblivious to the fact that he’s in the presence of greatness with Da Vinci’s painting. Scarioni has gone for charm and sophistication in 20th century surrounding himself with luxury but he only values paintings for the money they’ll get him (so each of these human eras has been shaped by different personality traits of the Jagaroth, each one flawed every bit as much as the Humans he sneers at? Tancredi is anger, Scarlioni pride). Even Da Vinci, the sort of person a Chris Chibnall story would have the 14th Doctor foaming at the mouth to meet, is treated as less of a special intellect and more as an old mate, the Doctor leaving him notes (in mirror writing) and casually asking for changes in his work. It’s the story’s one huge downside that the two don’t actually meet; other Dr Who writers would have written an entire story round this great idea – for Douglas it’s the punchline to an elaborate gag about authenticity and fakery. 

 Which is also why, despite it being a last minute replacement, the overseas location filming makes more sense here than any other time the series ever tries it (see Lanzarote in ‘the Planet Of Fire’ and Seville in ‘The Two Doctors’, not to mention the modern series many many trips to America) and it almost feels like an extra character. Filming a story about authenticity set in Paris completely in an English studio would have been ‘wrong’ on so many levels. The Paris location just feels ‘right’ beyond that element though: The Jagaroth thinks he’s the most terrible creature the universe has ever unleashed (especially when, in a great twist it turns out there are twelve of him scattered across Earth, all splinters caused by the original accident that destroyed his spaceship in Earth’s primordial days), but for the 4th Dr and Romana he’s easy pickings to be stopped in their spare time while they have a holiday, stopping off to do all the touristy things like go up the Eiffel Tower, visit the Louvre and run around Paris streets. This isn’t another invasion of London that’s full of the familiar and ordinary being over-run with the extraordinary; it’s an exotic alien land made even more exotic by the fact its filled with actual aliens (plus it also ties into the long-standing prejudice a lot of Brits have that the French are so different to us they must secretly be green tentacly bug-eyed aliens; the feeling’s mutual I know. Interestingly the modern series seems to have switched its prejudice over to Germany, given characters in ‘The Giggle’ and ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’). By this time Dr Who budgets had been stretched to breaking point to where many of the sets and costumes all look the same, so having this story actually film in these locations rather than just talk about them is gloriously exciting and there are some great shots from director Michael Hayes (to name just one, the moment Duggan spies the Dr and Romana from the gap in the shelves of a postcard vendor, looking hopelessly out of place, before the camera runs over to follow them, showing just how much they stand out). 

 Even so, it wasn’t just the writing that was hit by problems: not being French nobody realised that they were set to film on the MayDay bank holiday and found all the locations they’d recceed were shut, including the Louvre (even so they filmed outside, Tom Baker accidentally banging the doors so hard it set the fire alarm off and poor JNT was left to explain in halting French to the gendarmes who rushed in that they were only filming an art theft, not actually doing one!) and the café (one across the street agreed to let them film there – problem solved you might think, except that the interior scenes had already been made to match the layout and colourings so they had to fudge it by filming outside). Then Romana’s shoes went missing in transit: a ratty, jet-lagged Lalla Ward had such a row with the costumer department she quit the series when she got home never to return). Then a lens specially bought for the zooming shot of the Eiffel Tower was found to be incompartible with the camera they’d brought and none of the French shops stocked any (the problem was solved by the director’s twelve-year old son hammering it into place between takes!) Though it looks jolly the location filming was fraught and they still didn’t quite get all the shots they wanted. If ever there was a Dr Who story that looks immaculately casual despite the sheer angst going on behind the camera ‘City Of death’ is it. 

 More than any one thing, though, it’s the dialogue that makes this one sparkle. Douglas understood better than any writer since original script editor David Whittaker that the Doctor is an alien with an experience that stretches far beyond Earth habits and customs and his put-down of the Countess (the much quoted ‘You’re a very beautiful woman...probably’) and general messing around is a delight, while it’s fully in keeping with the ethos of this story that instead of out=-intellectualising the Count instead the Doctor simply tries to act stupid. Scarlioni’s not adverse to some great put downs too (‘I’m beginning to think the Dr’s not as stupid as he seems’ ‘My dear, nobody could be as stupid as he seems!’) but then everyone in this story speaks in highly quotable passages (sometimes finding a quote to pick out for these reviews is a struggle but I could have used about fifty from this story). My favourite gag: The Doctor’s note to Da Vinci which he signs off ‘see you earlier!’ A story rich in characterisation, verbal jousting, glorious technobabble and even classic insults, barely a line in this story is wasted and it feels like a story Douglas crafted on for years of his life, not something put together in mere days. Complex but never confusing, there’s a spring in this story’s step that means we don’t get any of the usual padding or duller moments and practically every scene has a good gag or character moment in there somewhere. There are fans who will tell you that ‘City Of Death’ is perfection – and they’re not far wrong. 

 Plotwise the main thing that doesn’t really quite come off is the way the timeloops are shown on screen (especially after they were done so much better in ‘Carnival Of the Monsters’). It’s annoying to see a script bursting to the rafters with ideas slow down for actors repeating themselves and worse when we see the 4th Dr and Romana rubbing their foreheads as a substitute for this powerful time stasis jump that only they can see (which, given they’re in a French cafe when they first come across it, just makes them look a bit tipsy). There’s no explanation given on screen for why the artist in the café can recognise subliminally that Romana is a timelord, giving her a time-cracked face (si he another timelord? If he is the Doctor and Romana don’t seem in the least bit curious as to why he’s working in a Paris cafe). The script makes brief reference to Scarlioni’s other selves and we get quick shots of Julian Glover dressed in other costumes and an Egyptian parchment with a Jagaroth alien hieroglyphic which are fun (and how great that Richard the Lionheart might have turned out to be another of the Jagaorth’s splinters given the ‘crusade’ uniform one of them wears as an in-joke, which changes how we think of ‘The Crusade’ completely!) but how much more fun it would have been to have seen all the different splinters and met more Counts. Poor David Graham and Peter Halliday, Dalek voices since the early days who deserved to be treated with huge respect, get thrown to the wolves in the hapless roles of Professor Kerensky and a mere soldier both (you’d think Douglas would be the perfect man to write for a dotty professor, given his background studying English in Cambridge, but Kerensky is as normal as mad scientists come in this series, with David Graham hamming it up badly and playing it like ‘Brains’ from ‘Thunderbirds’. Which was another part he played after all). I’ve seen a better special effect than the one which ages and de-ages the ‘test chicken’ too, which is mostly a bunch of wavy lines (and down to a misunderstanding the chicks delivered to the studio were black and kept disappearing from the CSO shots so the hasty solution was to paint them yellow!) Although on the other side of things the model shot of the spider-like Jagaroth ship, which blows up in quite spectacular format the end, is one of the best in all Dr Who, the perfect ship for a green and pompous Jagaroth, standing out from the primordial swamps of Earth on its tall alien haughty tripod legs (a holdover, perhaps, fro, the ‘war Of the Worlds’ ending of the original script).

 By chance probably more people have officially seen this great story (on TV at least, not counting for video or DVD re-showings or bootlegs, though its always been a big seller too and an early pick for both series of re-issues) than any other in Dr Who’s history, particularly the record breaking episode four, thanks to an ITV strike which, in the days before satellite channels, meant that there was nothing else on TV to watch (bar the rather boring sounding programme ‘Grapevine’ on BBC2, a study on farming). Some 16.1 million Brits watched the last part, at a time when the population was only 56 million (and Dr Who’s average was nearer 9million). As a result ‘City Of Death’ is a story that’s fondly remembered by many and the jumping on point for more than a few fans who’d never seen the programme before and hoped it was this good every week, always closer to the public consciousness than most stories. Or perhaps that’s just the Jagroth’s influence? Given the realness and plausibility of Douglas’ script, the authenticity of the acting and the location filming that makes you feel you could reach out and touch Paris through the screen anything seems possible with this story, an imaginative and unique idea that’s made by a team of actors and staff all going the extra mile and which has such fun long the way that it’s as infectious as any space plague. Would that all holiday films were this enjoyable. 

 POSITIVES + Yes its silly, unnecessary and frivolous but the closing scene is still one of the best and certainly most unexpected gags in the series, pricking the pomposity of Parisian elites one last time for good measure. The Tardis is parked in the Louvre (of course: it would stand out anywhere else) so the Dr and Romana end up going back there to leave at the end, passing in front of two painting experts, unexpected cameos by John Cleese and Eleanor Bron (still two of the biggest names to ever ‘do’ Dr Who, even if their un-credited appearance is barely a minute long). They both pontificate about what a battered old police box might mean in context of modern art, elaborating on their ideas, until the Tardis dematerialises in front of them. Douglas’ first big break was writing for the Monty Pythons on their final TV series, stage show and early films and he’s still one of only two people beyond the main cast to get a credit on a ‘classic’ episode (alongside Neil Innes). This is a very Monty Python joke about pomposity and John Cleese, who Douglas had stayed in touch with and knew was in the next door studio for another project that day (editing the last episode of Fawlty Towers ‘Basil The Rat’ family enough, another script about pricking pomposity), plays it in just the right clutching-at-straws-for-an-explanation way. Dare I say it, this is the best acting role I’ve seen him do, a role that asks for more subtlety than usual, even if it’s only a very brief scene, while Eleanor Bron becomes the only person to appear in both DW and a Beatles film (‘Help!’), err, other than The Beatles themselves being watched on space-telly in ‘The Chase’, which is quite the CV when you think about it (she spends more time on screen in ‘Revelation Of The Daleks’ later, but gets all her best lines here). Both actors agreed to ‘slum’ it in Dr Who if their cameos were treated as a 20th century sort of TV ‘Easter Egg’ that wasn’t promoted (for a while Cleese was going to be credited under his favourite pseudonym ‘Kim Bread’ but in the end settled for not being mentioned in the Radio Times). 

 NEGATIVES - You have to wonder why someone as intelligent and experienced as Douglas gave this story such a daft B-movie style title though. While presumably the ‘city’ in the title is Paris there are comparatively few deaths in this story and its not really about Paris anyway; that’s just where the Jagaroth ended up (because where else would he be? It’s full of posh people pretending to be sophisticated and something they’re not). It might be a weak pun on Paris being the ‘city of love’ and what it really is…but if so it’s the only Douglas Adams joke the whole story that doesn’t quite come off. BEST QUOTE: Scaroth: ‘Achievement? You talk to me of achievement because I steal the Mona Lisa? Can you imagine how a man might feel who has caused the pyramids to be built, the heavens to be mapped, invented the first wheel, shown the true use of fire, brought up a whole race from nothing to save his own kind?’

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Notre Dame Du Temps’ is a short story in the anthology book ‘Companions’ written by Nick Clark that sees the 7th Doctor going back to Paris in the middle of events in this story to collect the distorted drawing of Romana that the artists made during events in the story, taking it back to the Tardis before anyone else finds it. Years later 8th Doctor companion Anji finds it in the Tardis library when she goes rummaging and the Paul McGann version relates a bit of the story to her. ‘The Swords Of Kali’ is a comic strip where the 12th Doctor meets Leonardo and Clara turns out to be the model for the Mona Lisa in the first place! (the Doctor thinks it’s not a very good likeness but Leo captures her smile quite well). Perhaps surprisingly the events of ‘City Of death’ are never mentioned. Ditto when the Mona Lisa comes to lie and starts walking about in Sarah Jane Adventures story ‘Mona Lisa’s revenge’ (where it’s revealed she was drawn with nk taken from an alien meteorite). Amazingly no one has yet written an official adventure featuring the other unseen splinters of the Jagaroth in time (I thought there’d be a Big Finish box set by now!) 

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