The Happiness Patrol: Ranking - 47

 

The Happiness Patrol

(Season 25, Dr 7 with Ace, 2-16/11/1988, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Andrew Cartmel, writer: Graeme Curry, director: Chris Clough)

Rank: 47

   'I, Rishi S, declare this Conservative party conference to order! As I look out over you all (Boris J, Liz T, Suella B, Priti P and our pet Jacob Rees Stigorax) I would like to say a few words in honour of our founder Helen A. While it is true that she turned out to be a mass criminal who made the planet miserable and her funeral was accompanied by the song 'Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead' we here today consider her policies a little too left-wing for us. So from now on in this age of austerity we have made a few alterations to government policy: the pipe people will have their pipes forcibly removed so we can fill them with sewage, all protest is to be removed under pain of suffocation by strawberry fondant, refugees are to be deported to Terra Rwanda, country and western is outlawed for being too 'sad' and people are going to have to juggle not just their current four jobs but community service too where they are literally forced to juggle and if they drop anything we feed them to the evil monster with the fake evil grin made out of e-numbers and artificial flavouring who never tells the truth. Which, following the melting of the Kandy Man, is a position now filled by Laura Kuensberg. We here on Terra Alpha are happy that you’re sad and glad that you are caught napping' 

 

Watching this the first time round as a seven-year-old watching maybe my 5th or 6th ever Dr Who story a few months after transmission, this was quite a trip I can tell you. The other Dr Whos I’d seen belonged to yesteryear – any yesteryear, that mysterious time that exists hazily before you were born, confined to anecdotal history or time machines or repeats and even the other Dr Whos I’d seen from the show’s last two series felt like stories that were either re-creating the past or the feel of the past, but this was probably the first bit of TV I ever saw that felt like the time I was living through and that concept did fuzzy things to my brain, as surely as if I’d been poisoned by the KandyMan. You see, I’d had to take that very 1960s particular brand of optimism that runs through most things from that era on trust that people actually believed in such things as possible back then and the 1970s brand of fun was fun indeed but it didn’t reflect where I was living and what the people around me were doing. A world full of people who were secretly deeply miserable though, living in a gaudy pantomime that insisted they act happy or they lost their jobs (or their life) and which tanked them up on a diet of elevator music, pills and sugary sweets: now that was a world I could understand. It felt like the forced smiles I saw on my walk to school every day as parents tried to pretend to other parents that they were doing better than they were. I saw it on the TV every time the news was on and somebody was reading out something about the latest downturn that was making us feel helpless, while power-dressed as if they’d just come from an aerobics class and with the demeanour that this was all good news eventually, honest. It was at one with the beggars I saw camping outside the growing fast food chains that now seemed to be everywhere and replacing the independent shops, where people who were so desperate for work they would do anything wore the fake smiles of a corporation that couldn’t care less about their welfare as long as someone was buying their products. It spoke of Thatcherism, that awful woman who everyone around me at once supported in public and talked down in private, the saviour who was promising better times by making everyone miserable. If the 1960s were about hope and the 1970s about joy then the 1980s were about secrets, contradictions and division, of pretending your life was better than it was and that any sacrifices were all for the greater good rather than the monsters in charge of us all. ‘The Happiness Patrol’ instinctively understood the world outside my door better than any other story I ever saw – and it still does even now, multiple comeback stories later (if you’re wondering 2000s Who were a time of larks until the bad things happened and the 2010s a time of larks interrupted by bad things happening in the wrong order, while the 1990s were a time of smooching in between spouting gobbledegook). It’s Doctor Who’s ‘1984’ this story, with everyone doing one thing and saying another. Just in 1988. In a world that’s bright pink. And with a monster made out of sweets. 

 This wasn’t a fictional world anymore, it was my world taken to a logical extreme, telling the truth by stealth without actually saying it in case it got into too much trouble – and in an upside world where nothing quite made sense. After all, it’s all topsy turvy this world, everything the opposite of what it should be. Everyone is ordered to be happy, under pain of death. The government who are meant to keep you safe are doing you harm. The guards who are supposed to keep you safe get their joy from killing killjoys. There’s a population cull while the survivors aren’t really living at all. The only freedom is living a pipe-dream in the pipes, as physical degenerates who have evolved above what’s happening on ground level. Where music has become about informing you and irritating you rather than releasing emotions. Where the confectionary that is supposed to bring pleasure can kill. Where the leader wants more than anything to be loved but who has surrounded herself with people that hate her. Where everyone hates the world they live in but nobody can do the first thing about toppling it, till the Doctor comes along. This is a world in denial, that’s lost touch with its real self, a fake world for real people that was meant to be saving them but caused real lasting harm. 

 I loved it. Goodness knows what people today who weren’t alive when it was first on or who didn’t grow up in Britain at the time so didn’t understand just what this period of time was really like think of it now, as today it just looks mad: much, I suspect, as stories from the past like ‘An Unearthly Child’ or ‘The Three Doctors’ look to me today to name but two (stories that perhaps best represent the very 1960s spirit of hope and 1970s spirit of glam-fun). I watched this story a lot, the first Dr Who video I wore out from over-use. Of course at the time everyone assumed I just liked it because of the monsters made out of sweets or because the little alien doggy was cute or that I liked the cute pipe-people who looked like moles, but actually they’re what brought the story down a level in my eyes (it’s hard to take an evil Bertie Bassett or animatronics that don’t’ seem real or masks that obviously terrible seriously even when you’re seven, though I’ve come to appreciate why all three are there more as an adult whose caught up on all the other Dr Whos and their similarly dodgy budgetary problems since): no it was the politics that won me over, the concealed anger at an entire culture that had been hijacked and was hurting people, while simultaneously blaming them and singling them out for punishment for complaining about it. I like to think this is what led, aged eight, to my only school detention when I helped organise an anti-Thatcher demonstration at my primary school, much to the mirth of our teachers (but hey it worked, she was kicked out a month later; I like to think this story inspired the Poll Tax riots too – character Trevor Sigma is taking a census to make sure everyone pays taxes after all, whether they can afford it or not, two years before this happened in real life). Now that’s the power of fiction! There aren’t many television stories I can say led me to start a riot. I suspect script editor Andrew Cartmel and writer Graeme Curry would have approved: after all, this is the epitome of those stories where the Doctor finds himself in a world that isn’t working properly and fixes it for the people, only this time the people happen to be an even more thinly veiled ‘us’ than normal and the revolution the Dr inspires is one we’re encouraged, nay ordered, to follow (and in case you think I’m over-exaggerating the metaphors here, Cartmel won his role on Dr Who partly on the back of his reply when producer John Nathan-Turner asked him comment ‘what would you most like to like to do with this job?’ and came out with the line ‘take down the government!’) For some reason some stray remarks by Sylvester McCoy in an interview about what this story was really ‘about’ made all the newspapers in 2010 and even led to Andrew Cartmel appearing on serious BBC politics programme ‘Newsnight’ (a surreal experience on a par with watching a robot made of sweets deliver executions) even though it was glaringly obvious that this was our already extreme world pushed just tipped that little bit further than we’d already gone. 

 Sheila Hancock is recognisably Thatcher, even if she calls herself Helen A, the producer getting cold feet (were they made of sweets and stuck to the studio floor with lemonade?) about just how political the show was becoming and asking the writer to scale back considerably: Curry and Cartmel were proud of the way they’d been able to re-write this awful harridan and make her neutral, not saying a word about their original intentions to the cast and crew, only for Sheila to gleefully point out in rehearsals straight away that she knew what they were up to. She totally gets this menace who casts such a shadow over her world with her casual cruelty, speaking in a Thatcher-like patter that sees her emphasis all the wrong words in a sentence like an automaton gone wrong. Best of all is that, while it would be easy to turn her into a monster (like the Cyber-Thatcher of a Lenny Henry comedy sketch that had been broadcast out in 1985) Helen A is a figure of pity: someone who deep down isn’t a tyrant so much as someone yearning to be loved but has forgotten how to express it so takes it out on everyone around her and the people under her care so they all feel as secretly miserable as her. Maggie’s hopeless hen-pecked husband is clearly Dennis, re-christened Gilbert M, whose trapped in a loveless marriage out of fear and in one of Who’s more controversial moments runs away at the end to be the with the male director of communications (I like to think this is Terra Alpha’s equivalent of Michael Grade). Helen A rules over a dystopian world where sadness has been removed forcibly, the people ordered to be happy under threat of execution (death by icing), where blues music and ‘killjoys’ have been outlawed and where people are forced to constantly smile. Everything in this world is artificial: it looks like a fast food chain in fake bright colours, the people wish their bitter rivals ‘have a nice day’ while plotting to kill them and nothing is made to last, everything is ephemeral, a sequence of sugar rushes designed to get you through the day rather than nutrition to sustain you. This is a world in a state of collapse and where everything ‘real’ has gone (quite literally) underground, with a separate life going on as normal away from the sight of the people in power who can only survive by keeping out of the sight and who appear occasionally blinking into the light. And that’s basically the plot: in those terms this story is one of the simplest Dr Who stories ever made and certainly the most one-dimensional entry in my top 100. But that’s OK: concentrating the target so much on one unlikeable monstrous figure is worth doing if you make them strong enough and by making it obvious who the target is its actually cathartic in all the best ways. Somehow, too, it’s perfect that the Doctor - that figure whose such a symbol of 1960s optimism and hope whatever decade he’s let loose in – takes down this world without even really trying. Of all the many corrupt regimes overthrown in Dr Who history this is one of the most satisfying. 

 By now the 7th Doctor era is in full swing after a bumpy start when he, too was as colourful yet bland as the era he was let loose in: ‘Paradise Towers’ did a similar job of pushing the Doctor’s uglier, darker, ‘real’ side against a gaudy background but now everyone understands this regeneration better and Sylvester McCoy understands how to do being still, dark, sad and honest against people who are fakely jolly, his real anger and disgust at being in such a (literally) sticky situation all the more dangerous in this world because nobody is used to people expressing emotion at all. It’s a strong story for Sophie Aldred as Ace in her second full adventure too as she becomes our representative even more than normal, being a girl from 1980s Perivale whose lived in a world like this herself once (before ending up a waitress on a fast food chain on ‘Ice World’), and her bravery, authenticity and resilience as a ‘real’ person makes for a great contrast against Helen A, who pretends to everyone including herself that she is all these things, but actually collapses so easily. The characters they befriend are fun too: the people caught up in this world who realise that something isn’t quite right but who are so caught up in the system that they don’t know how to rise above it until the Doctor helps them out. It would have helped the story a lot if they were properly sketched in though as they need to be ‘real’ rather than more caricatures set against caricatures: Georgina Hale as Daisy K, for instance, is the meekest revolutionary you ever did see while having the first prominent role by a black actor in many a year, Richard D Sharp as the blues harmonica playing Earl Sigma,is the story’s one bum note, smacking a little too hard of slave plantations (hastily changed from a trumpet in rehearsals as it was easier to mime – though surely a harmonica is the obvious choice, an instrument of pure emotion that’s easiest to smuggle in your pockets in a society where owning an instrument van get you killed). Even so there’s nothing here the usual Who length of four episodes couldn’t have put right – of all the stories shrunk to three parts in this era ‘The Happiness Patrol’ is the one that has too much to say to pack everything in. 

 There are, however, several great moments. The rebellion of the pipe people, this society’s literal ‘underclass’, is how the miner’s strike of 1984-85 should have gone, people of conviction tearing down all signs of hatred by combining as a community instead of being starved by a cruel government into surrender. The Doctor talking a pair of guards out of putting down their weapons by actually talking to them and getting them to think about the cost of life they see as being so small. Best of all the ending, where Margaret T (sorry Helen A) breaks down in a way we’ve never seen a villain do in Dr Who before or since, where the crumbling of her world, betrayed by underlings and husband and mourning the death of her pet Stigorax Fifi, causes Helen A to properly sob, her punishment to feel the emotions of all the wrong she’s been suppressing in her world at last. Better yet is the way everyone working on this show combines to get just the right feel so that even the worst scenes belong together. JNT reportedly baulked at the sets, which looked like cheap tacky cardboard and glitter (because that’s what they were meant to represent), re-writing the camera shots so that we saw as little of this world as possible and yet it’s the one time on Who where we needed to see the sets wobble and believe that everything was fake and kitsch (Michael Grade, spectacularly missing the point as always, chose the Kandyman kitchen as his example for putting Dr Who in room 101). The costumes and makeup are great, all visibly false wigs and plastered makeup designed to make everyone look young, taken to such an extreme that it made even the young actresses look old, each part of this world adding up to a planet that’s been lying to itself. They all play the paratroopers like American cheerleaders gone to seed, all fake razzmatazz and pomp-poms, only they’re cheering the government on instead (there was a problem with the red dye though, thickener mixed with pink food dye, which wouldn’t come off at first!) The soundtrack to this world too is one of the best, easily Dominic Glynn’s best score for the series that hits all the right notes playing much the same tunes in two different ways, one bright and false and cheery in a very 1980s digital way above ground and pure mournful blues when under. Curry was a music graduate before he turned to English Lit and writing, his dissertation at university being on the ‘grotesque’ rather aptly (Cartmel came across him on the back of a script ‘Under The Moon’ about a footballer that had won a competition judged by a friend of his from the BBC script course days he went on before getting the job) and started with the music and worked his way outwards, so the score had to be good. Even the character names help sell this story and the idea of a hierarchy system that’ got out of control. ‘Terra Alpha’ might look the fakest any Dr Who story ever did (this is the last Who story ever to be made entirely in the studio, so the guidebooks go, though to be fair ‘Ghost Light’ cuts away for a mere fraction of a second for an establishing photos of the outside of ‘Gabriel Chase’) but it feels like a real world, with its own inner rules and conventions. 

 It’s what this world says about our own that makes it so special though. I mean, this is ‘terra Alpha’ and its made clear that there are at least two other planets in this unknown solar system in the future (‘Terra Beta’ and ‘Terra Omega’) – given that ‘Terra’ is Latin for ‘earth’ whose to say at least one of these three isn’t what happens to our own planet in a few millennia’s time if we don’t heed its warnings? Everyone is trying to live real authentic lives in a world that’s patently fake, so to stay real you either crack up, give up, put up, shut up or run away underground. It’s at one with an era when people ‘disappeared’ in South American dictatorships, many of whom were our allies at the time (during Thatcher’s weird moment of megalomania when she invaded the Falklands), only the BBC and all the other media networks come to that were too scared to point this out on the news so you only ever heard it through whispers ‘underground’. I mean it couldn’t look more 1980s: what with the (rather slow motion – the extras walking are quicker!) go karts and the gunge and slides this story resembles that most 1980s of all TV programmes kiddies game show ‘Fun House’. I love the idea that to stay alive you had to be ‘profitable’ or ‘entertaining’ to earn your keep (something any desperate jobseeker who’d just lost their job for life and been thrown on the scrapheap by government policy could relate to). Unemployment in Britain was at a high of 14% the year this was written, the second highest since records began (though the Great depression era of the late 1920s/early 1930s reached 27%; see ‘Daleks In Manhattan’ for Who’s take on this). The take on this in the government-controlled media though was that this was somehow all ‘our’ fault for investing in jobs that had been perfectly safe for centuries. Everything in this world is built for profit, even when it means the wrong people being squeezed into the wrong sized holes (the moment when Ace admits she can’t sing or dance or tell jokes and so is utterly useless for being put on stage and made to work rang true for many). Instead everyone is forced to invent their own sub-culture of meaningless symbols, simply to give them something away from the gleaming public eye that’s 'theirs’. 

 If there’s a problem it’s that the story could have gone further still: I’d have loved a sub-plot about nationalising something scifi-ish to drain the blood out of it until it stops working or boasting while sending space-shuttles to illegally invade an unpopulated planet named Falklandinia or having Sheila A turn out to be a robot, a lady literally made out of iron. As much as this story screams Thatcher to those of us who were looking for it, it’s amazing how many viewers seem to have missed this sub-plot entirely on first broadcast and derided this as a garish cartoon as if that’s the fault of the people making it rather than the world they were living in. JNT’s desperate need to stay on the air and not get the BBC into trouble at a time when Thatcher had already cut the TV license fee and was looking for an excuse to cancel the network altogether means that a lot of this story’s punches are soft-centres rather than hard kicks. A lot of this story’s subtleties just get lost when you see it on screen, in bright gaudy colours: I’m in two minds about whether the original plans to make this a gritty film noir (with consideration to shooting everything n black and white till the end, when colour breaks through ‘Wizard Of Oz’ style) would have been better or not: it would have made this less like ‘our’ world but would have given it a realism that would have made people more likely to watch it in the first place (there’s no point in persuading people to take down a government in such terms that no one will actually see it). A much as reviewers like me bang on about this story’s originality there are precedents: a ot of this story is taken wholesale from George Orwell’s ‘1984’, whilst as far back as the Hartnell years there was a submitted script about a planet where it was illegal to ever be unhappy (while ‘The Macra Terror’s holiday camp full of brainwashed subversives is pretty similar all round too). There are times, as well, when this story goes too far the other way, when it goes for imagery and style over substance with its big grand gestures, which after all is the antithesis of what the moral is all about. There’s simply so much to fit in, without nearly enough time spent on the pipe people (those poor child actors!) that the story is really about: the natives to this planet who aren’t allowed to live there, their culture squeezed out by empty capitalism (just like American Indians). There’s so much going on that Sheila Hancock’s hubby John Thaw (Inspector Morse) took one look at the script and placed abet with her that they couldn’t possibly get everything done without substantial runs: in the end only the Kandy Man’s death scene was filmed on time (and you don’t really miss that sequence). 

Ah, yes: I think it’s fair to say that the killer confectionery The Kandy Man is the worst of these decisions, an unnecessary distraction that always gets all the flak for this story: to everyone who understands where ‘The Happiness Patrol’ is coming from he’s the metaphor for everything wrong with this society, which is killing us while pretending to be sweet and for our benefit, the epitome of a world that stopped caring about real people’s feelings once it started messing about with artificial sweeteners. In the script he’s a robot pretending to be human, his real nature peeking out from behind his skin, an artificial being pretending to be human in a world of real people pretending to be artificial. There’s a scene in the original script when you’re not meant to know he’s a robot and looked shocked as he slices off one of his fingers, before laughing and sticking it back on with fondant icing, creepy and sinister and designed to scare you about whose really in charge of this world. None of that’s on screen though: he’s just a collection of liquorice all-sorts banded together with sugar-glue. To those who don’t understand what this story’s doing he’s just a cheap laugh, a gimmick, evidence of how Dr Who was going downhill and being silly. In the context of the rest of the story it’s a battle we didn’t need to fight, an excuse to turn off before you get the story’s subtler messages. Even to a lot of those who ‘get’ it, ‘The Kandyman’ is OTT and stupid, with no explanation or back story as to how we end up with an assassin made out of sweets and the Doctor’s sticking his feet to the floor with lemonade that make his feet congeal (a real surprise in the script when you’re still not sure who or what he is) and his later defeat of him with vinegar seems more like a parody than a parable, utterly undoing the threat of the second biggest baddy in the story. It also brought the show all the wrong publicity, as Bassett’s All-sorts got rather heated that their child-friendly mascot had been hijacked and turned into a psychotic killer (to be fair to them they have a point; I’m amazed producer John Nathan-Turner, usually so quick on clamping down on any sort of adverse controversy that wasn’t of his own making, didn’t see the fallout coming). I’m not one of those fans who thinks he shouldn’t be there at all though: it gets a bit lost in the script but Terra Alpha’s biggest export is sugar and it’s a world heavily in debt, just as Britain was back then: the irony of people starving for need of the basics whole concocting ephemera that give brief artificial highs is perfect for an era filled with fake day-glo fast food chains and Americana. Plus as a child I’d seen the uncomfortable juxtaposition of the endless adverts for sweets followed by gruesome ones about the importance of caring for your teeth in case they fell out (as they could be shown on TV back then and were shown a lot when I was little) and as an adult I appreciate that they’re really meant to be the prescription anti-depressant drugs that kept a population dosed up to the eyeballs and pretending everything was OK, when it patently wasn’t. Though not an exclusively 1980s thing like so many aspects of this story (use peaked in the 1950s) the Thatcher speeches about how they ought to give mental health benefits claimants pills and kick them back into work suddenly made it very topical again. Even though it was the society she was in charge of and losing the job that quite possibly your parents and grandparents passed down to you when you weren’t qualified to do anything else that was making so many claimants depressed in the first place, making this very much at one with the topsy-turvy world of Terra Alpha. 

 Some fans even see an ‘acid rave culture’ reference in the constant pill-taking set against big bright colours and happy-yet-blank smiley faces, which I can see too (though those fans lived a very different 1980s to me). There’s actually very little about it in the script but it’s clear director Chris Clough (my favourite of the last gasp of Who directors) picked up on some ideas of his own: the disenfranchised youth have their own variation on rave culture: their revolution is to dance, taking back the fake smiles of the badges on their jackets (used by the powers that be to single out dissidents) and downing sweets in an era when in real life most drugs came in capsules that made them look like sweeties. Even the ‘Kandy Man’ recalls the old blues terms for drug dealers ‘candymen’ – a coincidence had it been in any other show but it ties up nicely with the blues soundtrack. ‘Acid culture’ and raves were the period’s latest demons lambasted in the press, the way that discotheques and hippies were in the 1960s episodes, the latest instalment of Who’s generational debate now siding with the Gen X kids against their boomer parents. ‘What do you expect us to do in a world that suppresses our emotions and makes us live a lie?’ this story rails with an anger rare even in this series. 

I’d love to think that this story had a hand in the revolt that saw Thatcher ousted a mere year and a week after the final episode of this story went out, a sticky end of betrayal pretty close to how things turned out here on screen (albeit without the sugar). It probably didn’t as hardly anybody else was watching this story go out live the first time when Dr Who was in the rating doldrums and it was probably just something in the air (the year before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism gave us hope that toppling tyrants who appeared to be there to stay really was possible): great art does that after all. But to my surprise I’ll come across reference to this story in the most unlikeliest of places, by people who weren’t even Whovians. Who, for instance, would have laid odds at ‘The Happiness Patrol’, which had one of the lowest of all audience figures of Dr Who’s original run, being (to date) the only Dr Who story ever references in a sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury? (This is Rowan Williams’ Easter service from 2011: ‘Some of you might just remember an episode of Doctor Who a couple of decades ago called ‘The Happiness Patrol’ where the Doctor arrives on a planet in which unhappiness is a capital crime, and blues musicians lead a dangerous underground existence…Here’s the catch: the deepest happiness is something that has crept up on us when we weren’t looking. We can look back and say, Yes, I was happy then – and we can’t reproduce it. It seems that, just as we can’t find fulfilment in just loving ourselves, so we can’t just generate happiness for ourselves. It comes from outside, from relationships, environment, the unexpected stimulus of beauty – but not from any programme that we can identify’. It did its job sneakily this story, not directly enough for Thatcher to moan about but subservient enough to give us all a feeling that we were heading down the wrong path and needed to turn. That’s certainly what it did for me as a seven-year-old. I particularly love the ending, where blues music hits the pipes that underpin Terra Alpha and explode in a cacophony of sugar and music (naturally enough, the script specifies it as a ‘minor key’, one of the sad ones), releasing the pipe people from their underground bunkers in the single best revolt seen in the series since ‘The Space Museum’. 

 Is this art? Even the monster whose a big soft-centred sweetie? (in one respect anyway!) Most certainly and all the more so because it feels so like a cartoon you don’t feel the real emotional punches coming. I love it all, even the (many) bits that don’t quite work. ‘The Happiness Patrol’ is ambitious, imaginative and biting – other Who stories had been one or two of these things before but never so many all at once. I’m kind of glad Dr Who wasn’t like this every week, as the show wouldn’t have lasted five minutes with the general public looking this gaudy every story and even as a fan all that tackiness and insincerity becomes grating (the way it absolutely should), but as one of the biggest tugs on Dr Who’s ever-elastic format I both admire and adore this story. It’s detractors say ‘Happiness Patrol’ is tacky, or sugary, or silly, but if they do then they don’t understand it or maybe didn’t live through the time its criticising: what so many reviewers nowadays miss is that it’s meant to look like that, because the 1980s looked like that, a neon world of artificial e-numbers and shoulder-pads covering up a misery that felt more like it should have been in black-and-white. The detractors say that these people are cardboard cut-outs but that’s the point too: if they’d have made Thatcher into a scary monster nobody could defeat they would only have been giving her more power, so instead they laugh at her, like we do with all the worst dictators and the people who prop her up are one-dimensional, who can’t see beyond their own survival. They say that this story doesn’t fit the rest of Dr Who, but it absolutely does: this series is all about de-fanging monsters and bringing a subjugated people hope and freedom again and goodness knows we needed a bit of that in 1988, it’s just that the target is a bit more specific and less general this week.

Fake it till you make it? Not on this show. Dr Who is all about the real, the authentic, even when it hurts (especially if it hurts) because to truly feel is human and what separates us from obsessed monsters like the Daleks or soul-less husks like The Cybermen. All Dr Who stories, no matter the planet they’re set on, are really about us’ but few do that better than this cautionary tale about the monster lurking within trapped inside a sugar-paper thin surface-world whose veneer of civilisation can be torn so easily. No story better resembles the ‘making the ordinary extraordinary’ that Dr Who has running through its core like a stick of sugary rock than making even government fiscal policy seem weird and bizarre and out-of-this-world. The fact that the planet this story is exploring is so obviously ours is what makes it so beautiful. In this age of equally cruel and sadistic Conservative governments forcing us to smile while they take our rights and making their mates rich while gaslighting us about ‘austerity’ and how ‘we’re all in it together’ we desperately need a sequel. Boris Johnson looks like he’s been put together out of badly melted sweets as it is (and I mean if we’re getting the Celestial Toymaker of all people back for the 60th then never say never about a return for a ‘fun size’ Kandyman made out of multi-coloured vapes and fruit loops – he could be a Cereal Killer! – and now that the show is on Disney they could be all postmodern and set it in a theme park). Much under-rated, much misunderstood, ‘The Happiness Patrol’ (cleverly named for the ‘Joy Division’ of Auschwitz guards ‘commandeered’ to have sex with officers as an alternative to death in labour camps) will make you cry, even while laughing. And if you get it I’m glad you’re happy. And if you don’t then I’m happy you’re sad – after all, what kind of world is it where we have one feeling and not the other? 

POSITIVES + Sheila Hancock is magnificent. She ‘gets’ that Helen A is Margaret Thatcher without, apparently, anyone filling her in about that and she doesn’t look much like the p.m. at all, but her performance isn’t a jokey parody or an impression, which would have been a comment too far I think. Instead she’s a similar bully, who doesn’t realise she’s a bully, doing all the wrong things for what she thinks are the right reasons and without being able to see the irony that her policies to make Terror Alpha a better place are actually causing great harm and making it fall apart at the sugary seams. Thatcher was a monster not because she was evil or took glee in her policies (not in the way that, shudder, psychopathic heir apparent David Cameron clearly did) but because the gap between what she thought she was doing and what she actually did were so huge and she was so convinced of her own brilliance that she would get rid of anyone who told her otherwise. Sheila Hancock totally gets this and even finds some believable humanity in her soul by the end, which is quite some going. She’d never done anything remotely like this before (well, nor had anyone else I guess – parts like these don’t come around very often) – she’s best known as a comedian on improvisation radio show ‘Just A Minute’ and for appearing in Shakespeare plays on stage. Most of producer John Nathan-Turner’s stunt casting, of putting the ‘wrong’ people in the ‘wrong’ roles, turned out to be terrible mistakes, but credit where it’s due this bit of casting was genius. 

NEGATIVES - Fifi is patently there because this is Dr Who and Dr Who needs ‘monsters’ (as if Helen A wasn’t enough!) If they were to do this in Dr Who now the Stigorax would be amazing, created out of computer graphics and probably popular enough to get her own spin-off show. For the time (and especially the budget) she’s actually pretty darn good anyway, a toy dog that sat up and beg taken apart and re-wired with new more ‘alien’ features. But still nowhere near convincing enough for what the script needs this alien dog to do – there’s no ‘life’ to this doll, no personality the way there is with K9 or even Kamelion (even the howl, provided by the director in post-production, isn’t quite right) and that’s a pity, because this story’s big denouement is Helen A weeping buckets over her death and you can’t believe in that moment unless you believe that Fifi is ‘real’. Which even to a seven-year-old she blatantly wasn’t. Instead all you can think when watching this big emotional climax is ‘I hope the Fifi prop doesn’t rust too badly with all that crying’. Apparently the Doctor met one in Birmingham in the future. I think I met more than one in the 1980s when I was living near there. 

 BEST QUOTE: ‘I can hear the sound of empires toppling’.

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The Kandyman makes a surprise appearance in ‘Trials Of Tara’, a short story from the compilation ‘Decalog 2’ and the only bit of Dr Who prose so far written entirely in iambic pentameter (take that ‘The Shakespeare Code’!) 

Previous ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’ next ‘Silver Nemesis’