The Star Beast: Ranking - N/A (although somewhere around #80)

 

The Star Beast

(60th Anniversary Special, Dr 14 with Donna, 25/11/2023, showrunner; Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Rachel Talalay) 

Rank: N/A (but around #80 if I had to pick)

 ‘Baby you can drive my shuttle-car, yes I’ve come from a far-off star, and poor Meep doesn’t know where he are…Meep meep, meep meep, kill!!! [evil cackle]'

You wouldn’t think there would be space for nostalgia in a programme that was all about change and regeneration, that reinvented itself every few years, but there is. Dr Who is a programme that worms its way into your heart and mind so that once seen you carry parts of it with you for life and going back to those times can be a wonderful thing when done right. Russell T Davies knows that better than anyone: he brought back this show the first time round, against all the odds, because he loved it and wanted other people to love it too. And he knows how much people love his era, especially the fourth year with Catherine Tate’s Donna alongside David Tennant’s 10^th Dr, particularly – that there’s been very nearly almost long enough now for the children who got hooked on this show in the 2005 comeback to have children of their own now old enough to be introduced to that series. So for the first fruits of Russell’s comeback as showrunner, something we never thought in all of time and space we’d ever see again, fans get all the heart-warming things we thought we’d never get to experience new again, most of them within the opening few minutes: a newscaster giving updates on the plot just like the olden days, the clever mirroring of how the Dr and Donna meet again and his reaction to the name ‘Rose’, allonsys, multiple what?’s, references to Nerys, the Doctor being whalloped by a mother-in-law, being trapped by plastic screensan forced to make a sacrifice, even (massive spoilers alert) the return of the Doctor-Donna: you name it - if it’s a bit of folklore that people remember about the 10^th Doctor era then it’s here somewhere.As classy as Steven Moffat was at writing for the 10^th Dr in the 50^th anniversary specials nobody’s words fit this doctor’s new teeth as well as Russell T Davies. One of the most impressive things about ‘The Star Beast’ is that it feels as if actors and writer both have never ever been away. You could beam the plot beats and most of this dialogue back through a wormhole to 2008 and nobody would notice the change: there’s all the joy, all the intelligence, all the emotion of old. And it’s wonderful.

 
This isn’t the same doctor who left in 2010 though, but a whole new regeneration whose lived that bit longer and is more in touch with his feelings (it happens with age). Russell T Davies had been busy regenerating too. After all, the Earth isn’t the same way it was thirteen years ago. We’re divided more than ever, especially the younger generations, between people who care more than they ever used to and people who couldn’t care less and Russell knows which universe he likes better. This is an era when we’re heading closer to the fascist parallel world of ‘Inferno’ than ever before, with right-wing governments arriving in power all around the world (including Holland just this week), the frustrations of modern day living splitting people apart and setting communities on another. This is a fanbase who notoriously won’t agree on anything never mind politics, so despite being a series that’s promoted inclusivity and togetherness in 99% of episodes and delivering ecology tales about green maggots and stories about 1960s revolutions and endless tales about being kind in its early days, when the series was let’s not forget made by the first female producer and black director at the BBC, there’s been a growing backlash against the perceived ‘wokeness’ of the Chris Chibnall era, as if that’s a bad thing (and even though that era had ‘Kerblam!’, the most openly right-wing pro-Capitalist Dr Who story since The Dominators’ back in 1968). Russell could have chosen to do the easy thing, told himself that he was after Dr Who being big and family and mainstream again with the new backing by the Disney corporation (surely the most family-orientated business on the planet) and that he couldn’t afford to ruffle feathers. Especially in an all-important first episode. Every other showrunner would have sat on the fence and waited. But Russell knows that all eyes are on him with this one for the first time in a long time and he might never get an audience this big again. And so he says it anyway, because that’s what Dr Who is for: fighting these social battles in public and giving a voice to marginalised voices who just don’t get seen on mainstream television (at least not without their gender or their sexuality becoming the whole character, rather than an incidental detail the way it is with straight  white middle-aged men). As much as this is a show about time travel, its always been the job of Dr Who to reflect the full range of society that watches it and has since the beginning (it was the first show to have a black man on telly in a heroic role after all, as an astronaut and a show that, when everyone else was doing blackface as a matter of course, painted Mavic Chen to make him blue). Russell’s one big regret the first time round s showrunner, as is clear from his interviews, is that he didn’t include as much inclusivity as he should have done and, while his big ambition was to put more gay characters into Dr Who to give people like him and his friends someone to seen television like themselves, he stopped there and didn’t help the other marginalised groups out too. Every era fights its own battles on its way to things become seen as ‘normal’ and accepted in society and one of the biggest battles over the past few years has been Trans rights, with disability a little way behind. Russell could have gone the other way: after all, we know from his first era that he worships at the altar of J K Rowling storytelling and could have followed her attacks on the Trans community and he wouldn’t be the first person in the gay community to pile on an easy target (indeed, he wouldn’t be the first person in the gay Dr Who writer community). But instead Russell goes the other way, puts the character of Rose, Donna’s daughter, front and centre and makes one of the most beloved characters in all of Dr Who a proud and protective mum proud of her. He even makes Rose’s non-binaryness part of the plot so that it can’t just be dismissed (spoilers again), riffing on the lucky coincidence that the Doctor-Donna’s last words in a completely different context in 2008 were ‘binary’ and having Rose’s non-binaryness become effectively a scifi superpower that saves the day (‘I’m neither, I’m more’ Rose, referring to her gender, the line that’s most got fans in a tizzy).Russell’s risking a lot to say something that matters. And that’s even more wonderful and Dr Whoy.

The same with UNIT’s new scientific advisor Shirley, who has weapons smuggled in her wheelchair and who gets to make barbed comments about being one of the most important people in the world needed to keep us safe who can’t even access most rooms, because disability access is so poor (even the Tardis has disability ramps now). Because Dr Who is for everyone, whatever half the fandom might tell you. This series should be a safe space for everyone to watch without feeling attacked – you know, in between the constant alien invasions. After all, nobody knows what it means to see someone like you on telly as much as a boy growing up gay in the 1970s and 1980s and Russell has never forgotten the power of television to shift perceptions and make what to people who don’t see something every day seem odd and strange and scary be perfectly normal and acceptable. And the Doctor’s seen everything in his travels: he doesn’t bring the ethics of the generation of viewers but something bigger and more accepting. I love the scenes of him recognising a kindred spirit in Rose who feels like an alien and an outsider because of who they are and the comparisons made to a timelord who flip-flops between genders and so is effectively non-binary too. Whereas the Chibnall era paid lip service to certain ideas some would call ‘woke’ but is really just good manners (such as giving Ryan dyspraxia and making the Doctor a woman) he never followed through (Ryan’s disability came and went, sometimes in the same scene, whereas there’s nothing Jodie Whittaker does that’s more feminine than her predecessors unlike, say, Romana) and things like that ended up as just window dressing in there for the sake of it – this is how you do inclusion properly, Rose’s gender confusion and Donna’s fierce protectiveness a part of their characters (I’m so pleased Donna didn’t end up like her mum despite her genes, dismissive and cold, but uses that big heart to fight alongside her daughter – and that even Sylvia’s trying these days, softened by the events of 2008). As much as these scenes are kicking up a fuss in fandom, they were designed to – and I’m all for it (not so sure about meddling with the past and retconning Davros out of his wheelchair that’s actually a life support mechanism mind, especially now there’s a strong good character in a wheelchair for disabled kids to point to, but that’s another issue for another review). Dr Who was always the bravest show on television. After a slight wobble, it still is. One other quick thing that’s changed since 2008 too: the truth is no longer honoured in the news the way it was. Note how this reporter is hauled away before he can discover the truth – something that never happened to Trinity Wells, but then didn’t happen to anyone in real life back in 2008 back when hurting a journalist would be seen as the worst possible thing you could do as a new regime or terrorist group (or alien invader) but would totally happen and be covered up in our age of ‘fake news’.

As well as honouring the nation’s confused youth, Russell honours his own, right down to the ‘Tuna Madras’ of his childhood (a cuisine he swears his family served him all the time, even though nobody else thinks it’s a real thing). We said in our review for Steven Moffat’s series four story ‘Silence In the Library’ that this was Moffat thinking about becoming showrunner himself in the near footage and going back to his first memories of Dr Who: reading the target novels in the library. Russell’s equivalent already sort-of made it on screen, the Tardis-travelling-down-the-motorway-as-seen-by-kids ride in ‘The Runaway Bride’, which came from Russell’s long car journeys as a child, whiling away the time by imagining the Tardis travelling alongside the car and what adventures it might get up to. There’s another source though away from the TV series: the comic books. The original version of ‘The Star Beast’ wasn’t the first Dr Who comic strip, they’d been running in the ‘TV Action’ comic since pretty much day one, when the 1^st Dr travelled with his ‘grandchildren’ John and Gillian (who were a lot less wimpy than Susan, if a bit bland, the illustrators not willing to pay the extra money for the likenesses of the real Tardis crew – even the William Hartnell profile is a bit questionable at times). But it was when Dr Who got its first magazine in 1979 that most fans got to read one rather than a  general audience and ‘The Star Beast’ was one of the first regular strips, back when the Dr was still Tom Baker. The first comic strips for the magazine, then still out weekly not monthly, are the best: they get all the most important comic artists from Marvel back when it was trying to launch the publication and get it taken seriously (before realising there was enough of a regular readership to buy the thing anyway so they could use it to train new talent for their other franchises) but with a continuity-free lightness of touch that meant it went to places the series couldn’t touch.  Back in the days before regular repeats, BBC i-player Whoniverse, home videos DVDs or Blu-rays, it was the only place fans could go back to stories over and over and we already know how Russell was stuck on long car journeys for much of his youth with nothing else to do but read and dream. Of course something like this would have made an impression. Particularly this story, which is the first since Susan left to have a proper bona fide child involved in the Doctor’s world and a setting recognisably like contemporary Britain (Sharon, the girl who finds the Meep in the story being technically the first black companion, twenty-five years before Mickey and twenty-seven years before Martha depending which one you count on screen – and another smack in the face to people who say Dr Who has gone all ‘woke’ including people of colour on screen; and don’t think I didn’t notice the Indian UNIT captain too while we’re about it). One of the ‘other’ people this strip surely inspired is Steven Spielberg, as 1982’s ET nicks the whole idea (including a first draft, when the film still had half the plot of ‘Poltergeist’, where the alien hiding amongst a child’s soft toys turns out to be secretly evil – they got changed to ghosts and separated into two films, with ET made sweet and cuddly throughout). For fans of Russell’s age, this episode is nostalgic in a whole other way on top of the 10^th Dr era, a fitting choice for an anniversary and a throwback to when Dr Who inspired him (and let’s not forget Russell was never showrunner during an anniversary before: this is his first chance to do something he could never have done during a ‘normal’ story).

‘The Star Beast’ isn’t quite the best of the comic strips (‘The Iron Legion’, from a parallel world where Rome never declined, is even better) but it is a good and worthy one, Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons delivering a very Who-like morality tale that could still only ever be told in the comics (back in the ‘classic’ series budget days anyway) with a cute monster discovered by two schoolchildren, Sharon and Fudge. This ‘furry little cheeky’ with the big eyes and floppy ears is as cute as cute can be and is being chased by ugly hulking brutes The Wrath (who look not that different to Davies’ own Hath) in green metal casings. However, in a twist that wouldn’t have been out of place in 1^st Dr stories like ‘The Sensorites’ or ‘Galaxy 4’, everyone’s got things the wrong way round and (mega huge spoilers) it’s Beep The Meep that’s evil. If you’re a new kid watching this series for the first time then the Beep is the perfect introduction, making the viewer go ‘aaaah’ then ‘aaaaagh’ in quick succession (just as you think this show’s turned soft it goes properly mad and scary) and he/she/it (I love the gag about Rose asking for its pronouns: another thing that would never have occurred to Russell fifteen years ago and the Beep choosing ‘the definite article’, my books have a gag about alien argibraffes identifying as ‘its’ so there’s something in the air) is well realised on screen, just as cute and cuddly as the comics, even if the human-like hands are a bit odd and I miss the comic strip’s internal monologue, as the Meep promises to murder in cold blood all the people that are stroking it adoringly and treating it like a big fluffy child. Miriam Margolyes can be a bit dodgy in other things, but she’s having great fun unleashing her inner monster in a story that’s about being careful about judging by appearances throughout. The story is nicely respectful to the source material too, with the original characters Sharon turned into Rose and Fudge a name-less child who has a couple of scenes. Of course the plot is all tidied away a bit quickly, sorted in 35 minutes so we can go back to the Dr and Donna and the Meep turns evil before even that, which is a bit of a shame (it lasted for seven whole issues back in 1980) but you can see why, in a special, with so much to do, there just isn’t time to do everything. As an aside, one of the stories that had just been on TV a couple of years before the comic strip came out was ‘Stones Of Blood’ which features a similar scene to this story of the 4th Dr getting a wig out of his pocket and becoming judge and jury, but not executioner, a good joke recycled.  

So, what we have is Russell’s childhood memories on screen (he’s almost exactly the same age as Dr Who…the series I mean, not the character, that would be rude), updated for modern-day children who are maybe seeing this show for the first time and want to see ‘their’ world they live in on television not some dusty relic from the past, with nods to the fans of the 2000 era and the 1980s, all juggled pretty much successfully. David Tenant and Catherine are line-perfect, as if they’ve never been away, though the scenes are really stolen by Jacqueline King as Sylvia, Donna’s mum, who has gone from being Donna’s biggest critic to her biggest protector. One thing Russell always did better than his successors was the sense of family life, of characters who exist before and after the cameras stop rolling, and that’s never more true than here as we see a family who’ve grown and changed with the times too. Even Donna, whose big tragic story the last twice we saw her was that she’s had her memory wiped and gone back to the abrasive nobody she used to be before she met the Doctor, but who has just enough Doctoryness to make her good (her very Dona-ish response, in the middle of a London invasion, that the Dr’s goodness made her give away her lottery winnings, something he totally would have done, is priceless – and it also gets the series out of a hole by making Donna recognisably ‘one of us’ again and proving that the likeable Shaun is with her out of love, not money: Donna does know how to pick them after all, given her first near-husband tried to feed her to a giant red spider). Hopefully we’re getting Bernard Cribbins’ final scenes as Wilf in a future special (the Tardis does have a disability ramp after all), but it’s a joy to hear that UNIT have been looking after him in his old age.  We don’t get to see Rose do much yet (that’s probably still to  come too. I’m surprised she wasn’t on the Tardis with Donna at the end) but I like what I see. The detail of her being a ‘toymaker’ (maybe a Celestial one? Or influenced by one perhaps?...) inspired by the Dr’s adventures and selling things she makes on etsy (another thing that wasn’t a thing in 2008) is a lovely detail too and a great way to see lots of  old monsters, if only in furry form (I so want a home-made Judoon!)

Which leads me onto another thing. More than anything else this is a showrunner returning to where he left off, in stories like ‘Midnight ‘Turn Left’ ‘Stolen Earth’ and ‘The End Of Time’, writing ‘about’ his time as showrunner and having to give up his dream job that he adored above any other (because, at the height of his fame and success, his husband Andrew Smith got sick and needed looking after – sadly he died in 2018). Russell’s never been able to let Dr Who go, much as he’s tried to do other things and had big successes with ‘Years and Years’ (a brilliant series about the world going mad and dystopian, that still ended up mild compared to real life) and ‘It’s A Sin’ (a more personal take on being a young gay man during the HIV outbreaks of the 1980s when nobody knew what it was, which even has its own Dr Who scene when the lead character we’re following becomes an actor and has a scene as an extra that looks remarkably like an outtake from ‘Resurrection Of The Daleks’) there’s been a Tardis-sized hole in his heart. Donna’s lines about how, wonderful as its been, there’s something missing from her life is as heartfelt and direct as anything Russell’s written so far and an explanation as good as any for why he came back to the show that nearly wore him out (following a whole host of events after years away, including a covid lockdown tweetathon that reminded Russell just how beloved his era of the show was and the worry that the show might be axed before a big anniversary). There’s a part of this show that stays with you forever though and there are reminders of it everywhere in life. While the 10^th Dr started out as Russell’s mouthpiece and the person he longs to be (with a lot to say and a lot of mad dashing around) in time Donna became a more natural fit (she also has a mouth on her and ‘Turn Left’ is one long worry about how Russell might have turned out without this show to ‘save’ him, to make him feel heard and inspire him to find his calling as a writer, given over to Donna and her memory is wiped, because there’s no other way she’d ever just stop travelling in the Tardis she loves it too much). In this story he’s still Donna: her memory was wiped as he tried to move on and thin about other things, but he’s been writing Dr Who stories since he was seven and can’t stop, traces of Who-yness abounding in his other writing as a sort of folk memory. The people around him, who know how the pressures of the job nearly killed him last time round (well, properly tied him out anyway) have tried to keep him from it. Burt the lure is too strong (even if, sensibly, one of the dictates of Russell taking the job is to have less episodes to make and longer time to make them – it was having to do a Christmas special every year, on top of the twelve episodes as planned,  that nearly broke him). A little like Rose, Russell finds himself making Dr Who characters, without consciously thinking about it. All that scientific gobbledegook that’s been waiting in his brain to come out the whole time is still there, waiting. And even though he knows it might kill him, he has to come back – because even if its short, this is one hell of an adventure and nobody would give that adventurous life up if they had the chance. Note, too, that Donna is fiercely on Rose’s side,  offering protection after so much debate in fandom one way or another (it would have been easy not pick sides, but Russell can’t help himself). And has given away her millions because money is not what life is about whatever ‘Kerblam!’ said (There were accusations that Rusell took Dr Who over to Disney purely for the money -  hopefully those rumours have been put to bed now, as honestly he could have got more from them making a different series).

 Of course, its not perfect. As well as the good in Russell’s writing we get the bad. There are scenes that go on too long in the middle. These characters pick some very odd moments to start opening up about their lives. Donna suddenly becomes her old self far too quickly, inspired by the sight of the Dr running as much as anyone else (she’s already seen him running earlier in the episode and didn’t twig; wouldn’t, say, the sight of a sonic screwdriver or an accidental glimpse of the Tardis give it away?) As much as we’re being led to believe ‘there’s something pulling you and me together Donna’ that might get explained later, it really is a whacking coincidence that the Dr comes across Donna in seconds and that her hubby is waiting in a taxi nearby (if this is the Celestial Toymaker doing this he’s working overtime). And the ending is suddenly resolved, in a wibbly wobbly timey wimey way, that makes less sense the more you think about it (what some fans call a ‘Davies Et Machina’, a plot resolution that comes out of nowhere). This isn’t one of Russell’s very very best, although it’s a good starting point to build on (and better than his previous average I would say). For all that, it’s a great little story. It does what it needs to do, updating an era that’s been tarnished by accusations of sexism on set and not being multicultural enough (every era of Who gets a backlash 15-20 years on, its normal; it was the UNIT era when I was growing up) without losing the hearts of what this series always was or the feel of the olden days. Ultimately ‘The Star Beast’ doesn’t undo what came before, which is what so many of us feared. I mean Donna got the perfect ending – heartbreaking and awful in many ways but perfect from a writing point of view – but this story doesn’t dismantle it, it regenerates it.

Seeing our old friends on screen as if they’ve never been away is an absolute joy. There’s moments of high drama and high comedy, mixed really really well together (something Chibnall really struggled with, before finally getting with ‘Eve Of The Daleks’): the line about the sonic paper (so good to see that again!) still thinking the Dr is a woman because it hasn’t caught up yet is right up there with the series’ best gags. And Beep The Meep is adorable (until they’re not) a great character even if he/she/it/the isn’t one of Russell’s. The cast haven’t lost their touch. Nor has the writer. The director Rachel Talalay is an old friend too, sensibly chosen. Even Murray Gold’s musical score was one of his more unobtrusive ones with nice nods to old themes and just enough balance of new ones. After a few years of characters standing around talking to each other, without much action or only one big set piece per story, it’s a thrillingly breathless rush that seems much shorter than an hour (the last Dr Who I re-watched this week for the revised review is ‘The Timeless Children’ and that felt like it lasted for seven). The result is a triumph, up there with the other anniversary stories of the past and even if it doesn’t feel quite as inclusive or as special as the multi-doctor stories, maybe that aspect of the anniversary special season is still to come? The first Russell T era was special, beloved amongst most fans. On the evidence of just this one story it looks as if the RTD2 era is going to be just as special. How things change – but how they stay the same.

+ The Tardis interior! For the most part the promised bigger Disney budget has been relegated to fight scenes, but you can really see where the money shots have gone here and it’s the right place to spend it. The sheer delight on David Tennant’s face as he ran up and down its ramps (the actor’s idea – and something he reportedly regretted after eight takes had to be made) was matched only by the smile on mine. And of all the Tardis interiors we’ve had on screen for any length of time since the 1960s it’s the one that most matches the original and best interior. It already feels like home.

–The very opening, though, is horrible. Voiceover moments that break the fourth wall never work in Dr Who, a series that otherwise tries so hard to feel ‘real’ however fantastical the setting may be, but seeing these characters talking to us about past plot developments in a void is somehow worse and breaks the entire illusion for no good reason. I understand the need to remind viewers what happened the last time we saw Donna (thirteen years is a while after all) but what’s wrong with a ‘last time’ caption and a clips montage?

BEST QUOTE: Donna’s pithy comment that if she gets in the Tardis she’ll probably ‘end up on Mars with Chaucer and a robot shark’, Russell getting in the criticism about his bonkers combinations of ideas and ‘shopping list’ way of writing stories in before his critics can.  

K9 and Company: A Girl's Best friend - Ranking N/A (but somewhere around #270)

 

K9 and Company: A Girl's Best Friend

(One-Off Special, K9 and Sarah Jane, 28/12/1981, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editors: Anthony Root and Eric Saward, writer: Terence Dudley, director: John Black)

Rank: N/A (but around #270 if I had to pick)

 ‘I bought me a dog and my dog bought me 

I made it a kennel under yonder tree 

The dog said 'affirmative' and shot baddies twenty-three 

Brendan said 'Fiddle-i-fee!'

Is a robot dog really a girl’s best friend? Especially Sarah Jane. I mean, she’s a journalist who spends her job sneaking in undercover and trying to make criminals up to no good take her seriously. The last thing she needs is a dog on wheels following her around. Equally K9’s the most intelligent creature on Earth (when the Doctor’s not there). Admittedly he’s not very mobile, but does he even need to be? Plug him into the mains and watch him take out the computer software of the world’s baddies and he’d be unstoppable. They don’t really belong together. If you think that’s an odd mismatch though, that’s nothing on K9 and production assistant just turned producer John Nathan-Turner. He’s inherited a programme he wants to make his mark on, so he can be taken seriously by his peers. The last thing he wants is a tin dog that ‘s there for all the children: just imagine K9 in the two most recent Who stories ‘Keeper of Traken’ or ‘Logopolis’ and you can’t, he just doesn’t fit. Trouble is, K9 is so popular the producer can’t just axe him outright, there would be an outcry and (probably) letters in parliament! So he hits on the brainwave of giving K9 his own programme, for a more junior audience, away from the main show, with a familiar face to keep a few old Dr Who fans watching too. That way he can tell the viewers writing steaming letters into him don’t panic – K9’s not gone, he’s just getting a different home, that’s all. JNT even won a prestigious slot for his new ‘pet’ project over the Christmas holidays, the time when non-Who children are most likely to be watching, a time generally reserved for DW omnibus repeats. Problem solved then! Well…not quite. There never was a second episode of this show. Many fans want to forget there was even a first.

Such is the tail (sorry tale) of ‘classic Dr Who’s one and only screened spin-off. Others were mooted, including the Doctors’ evil brother (an idea from William Hartnell, no less), UNIT, various Dalek franchises and Oak and Quill from ‘Fury From The Deep’ would you believe (even though one of the was mute and the most memorable thing either of them did was kill someone with their bad seaweed breath – hardly a classic starting point and even Big Finish haven’t turned that into a show yet). K9 and Co isn’t the best then but is far from the worst idea and it could have been good: two years on from its highest ever audience ratings Dr Who was undeniably popular and there’s room enough in the Whoniverse for another series or three. ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’ shows how it could have been done: in a series told from a child (bordering on teenager’s) point of view. The problem is JNT kind of loses interest in his great new concept there, being far more interested in the adult scripts of Tom Baker’s last run and the first ones for ‘his’ doctor Peter Davison. This is, effectively, the launch of a whole new show, one which only mentions the Dr very briefly at the beginning. To work it needs all the right people working overtime – instead it’s treated as kind of an afterthought. Writer Terence Dudley was hired as a safe pair of hands JNT knew well, but his work was as adult as anyone working on Who gets: gloomy dystopian government officials shouting t each other series ‘Doomwatch’ was his co-creation, alongside Cybermen originators Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler. If any series could be said to send adults hiding behind the sofa in the 1970s its that one, full of existential and highly plausible scientific dread. He’s not a natural candidate for getting into the minds of the nations’ 8 year olds and giving them what they most want to see: K9-alien battles. You kind of get the impression from this story that Dudley has never met anyone younger than middle-age in decades and they’re far more of an alien race than any Dr Who monster. What does he write as a plot for ostensibly the most kiddie-friendly Dr Who-related episode made so far? Black magic in a sleepy English village, including devil worship and human sacrifice. There’s even a chilling scene where Sarah Jane nearly gets run off the road in a tractor that’s not exactly graphic but scary enough to make Mary Whitehouse choke on her brussel sprouts. Dudley is, as it happens, a pretty decent writer of serious heavy drama and I like his Dr Who scripts more than most fans (they tend to go wrong for how they’re realised on screen, not the scripts themselves). But he has almost no sense of humour: his famous works are almost all grim. There are attempts at jokes in this pilot because it’s made for children and that’s how everyone thinks children’s telly works, but that’s all they are: attempts, there’s not one even half-laugh there and yet still the script keeps trying to be funny anyway, over and over, to make sure we get the joke (the closest is K9 not understanding what garden gnomes are. Seriously, that’s the highlight). As it happens Dudley’s script editor for this story is new recruit Eric Saward on his first ever Dr Who job: in future stories he’d have told JNT to stuff this script where the sun doesn’t shine (his wasn’t the most peaceful of eras) but for now he’s having to grin and bear it – even so, we know from later scripts that his heart isn’t in childish frothy nonsense either (partly why JNT hired him in the first place): he likes the dark, the grim, the violent. Doesn’t feel very children’s Christmas TV friendly so far does it?

Ad it isn’t. The biggest trouble with ‘K9 and Company’ is that K9 doesn’t fit this show either, feeling shoe-horned into a more adult contemporary drama that never got made. You get the sense that Dudley frankly, doesn’t like K9 either, keeping him away from the plot for most of it, which was kind of the point of the series in the first place (John Leeson tries so hard to make this script work, but there’s less for him to do than most Dr Who stories). The first draft even had K9 as secretly evil and working for The Master, to better tie in with ‘Logopolis’ and ‘Castrovalva’ (the Dr Who stories transmitted either side of this one), which would have been a lot more interesting than what we got, but isn’t exactly a sign of how much the writing team love this character. And they should: K9’s great and steals practically every scene he’s in when he’s allowed to, mostly thanks to John Leeson’s deadpan comedy timing. He’s one of the best ideas DrWho ever had, so its sorry to see him effectively confined to his kennel and made to sing Christmas Carols instead of being brilliant and saving the day in a Droctory type of way, which s how they should have done this story.

Dudley seems to hate children even more though, making Sarah’s ‘ward’ Brendon the biggest twit ever seen in the series (think Harry Sullivan in his youth if he’d been to an even posher public school but without the big heart that means you love him for his clumsiness anyway. Or an even blander, more irritating Adric). Even allowing for the fact that we’re dealing in a fictional series that’s meant to be larger than life and not always realistic, you’ve never met anyone like Brendan in your life, ever: he accepts every unlikely scifi scenario the plot demands of him without question (his curiosity about K9 lasts approximately thirty seconds) and he has the unique ‘gift’ for being both pro-active and incredibly useless, blundering into trouble, even and especially after being warned about it, a talent that makes Susan, Jo and Peri look positively cautious. The ‘jokes’ that are in this programme are nearly all at his expense, which is a problem because he’s still the closest the main viewing audience have to an identification figure compared to the glammed up adult lead and robot dog. Watching this for the first time, a fair bit older than the intended target audience and from a generation younger, even I was incredibly insulted on their behalf. At least the scenes feel vaguely child-friendly when K9’s around though: the vast majority of this story is adults hanging around doing nothing but talking – take the opening scene, which is Sarah Jane’s Aunt Lavinia and a neighbour, both of whom we haven’t met, nattering and giving the most blatant bits of exposition you’ll ever see about who Sarah Jane is and the tin dog-shaped present that’s waiting for her. Or the opening credits, which feature the world’s silliest theme tune (‘K9…K9!’) set to a surprisingly adult set of shots of Sarah Jane jogging and sipping wine, like she’s in Dynsasty or Dallas. That schizophrenia between light and dark, adult and childish, is usually one of the strongest features about Dr Who (the reason it works for such a family audience) but it’s the one big reason why this story never quite works, partly because it’s almost all talking and no action and partly because to watch it with a child is to have to explain about all sorts of uncomfortable subject matters like Devils, black magic, paganism sacrificial virgins and all sorts of other unpleasant things (and over the Christmas holidays too).

Thankfully there’s Sarah Jane and Dudley’s pretty good at writing for her, even though he never actually did in the series proper. She’s everything she used to be – curious, plucky, vulnerable, smart – and without the Doctor to share the screen with and a co-star whose, basically, grounded she gets lots of opportunities to show off what she can do. Elisabeth Sladen may have had her doubts about coming back to make this pilot privately, ending up typecast all over again just as she was beginning to shrug off her reputation as a Who-girl, but she’s never better than here, growing to fill the shoes of the beloved experienced series regular rather than be the new girl trying to get up to speed with the others as in the past. Seeing this story you’re reminded just what a pro-active companion she was compared to most others and it feels entirely natural that she drives the plot on, without there just being a Doctor or Tardis-shaped hole in the middle of this story. You’re betting on her to get to the ‘truth’ of this mystery and see through the village screts, even though she’s hopelessly outnumbered and a stranger in town. The best scenes of this story are Sarah basically talking to herself and figuring stuff out - it’s when she has to share the screen with other people the story goes downhill.

You would have thought that having a journalist with a background in aliens would be a great starting point (it will be for ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’, which very much learnt its lessons from this pilot, even if adopted son Luke starts off being a bit too Brendan-like before they find a way of making him more interesting; note that Brendan isn’t mentioned once in that series even though we meet all sorts of other people from Sarah Jane’s past). . But no: this is a story that happens to her, a Daemons-style village that seems to be situated next to ‘The Wicker Man’, full of superstitious locals who are running a coven, even the local authority figures and trying to scare her off. Sarah, of course, won’t be scared off easily, especially with a robot dog for company.  Basically a journalist is another way of saying ‘detective’ and those sorts of shows were in during 1981; the plot is recognisably like something in ‘The Sweeney’ but with Tractors to roll over rather than cars and a grumpy robot dog instead of John Thaw, though it’s a tight squeeze with her character and way out of touch with what K9’s all about.  Even this idea could have worked though if they’d played up what must surely have been the starting point: the juxtaposition of humans conjuring up supernatural entities and a logical robotic machine investigating them. Very much like ‘The Daemons’ in fact, still regarded in 1981 as one of the high points of the series, perhaps with a similar middle ground between whether magic is real or just science under a different name. There’s even the clever nod that the ‘hecate’ Goddess the coven are worshipping was accompanied by a dog of her own, making you think we’re going to be in for some spirit-dog on robot-dog action that never comes (indeed it’s never even mentioned: viewers of the slightly later 1980s wondered why they were summoning up the world’s most hopeless witch Heggarty-Haggarty). Somehow even those strands get lost, as K9 mostly gets confined to the house (or occasionally car) and its Sarah Jane who confronts the baddies.

The best scenes come in the middle of the episode when it feels as if the coven are more than they seem, that they really do have special powers or links to alien powers, that our heroes  really are in trouble. Dudley’s greatest gift as a writer is in writing for untrustworthy adults with ever-shifting motivations that you can’t pin down because what they’re saying makes sense. but viewers know instinctively you can’t trust – throw that into a child’s world, where youngsters are meant to be subservient to their elders and trust every word they say or they’re in trouble, and it’s far more terrifying to this pilot’s target audience than it would be to an adult (practically of the most beloved children’s fiction down the years are about children making good against unreliable adults). This is a particularly creepy village and the feeling of claustrophobia is well served as everyone turn out to be in on this village’s big secret: this all fits with my experiences of English village life, places where everyone knows your business and are naturally suspicious of outsiders (and nobody’s more an outsider than someone with an intergalactic pet dog). The locals aren’t the most thrilling supporting parts you’ve ever seen, but they’re also a lot better than the comedy yokel stereotypes of the UNIT days: these feel like real people with real motivations even if some of those motivations are a bit weird. Theres even a clever twist where the neighbours who have been so nice all story they can’t possibly be for real turn out to be (spoilers) erm, every bit as nice as they seem.

It looks good too: by 1981 Dr Who standards the location shooting is luxurious, making good use of Miserden a village in Goucestershire, standing in for the fictional Morton Harwood near the real Chipping Norton. So much of Earthbound Dr Who is set in London and when it isn’t 99% of the time its set in a city and it was a good idea to move out to the country, it helps ground ‘K9 and Co’ in reality in a way that the later Tom Baker stories (especially once Romana comes along and there are two timelords in the Tardis) aren’t. The setting of Winter solstice, the pagan times when the walls between our world and the next are traditionally thought to be thinner so ghouls and demons can break through more easily, is clever: its not quite Christmas but there’s a festive feeling in the air that makes it feel special, without having to stick in killer Christmas trees and all the trappings and much as continuous shooting in the dark in the modern series for no reason winds me up it adds to the atmosphere here of nights drawing in so its dark all the time. This is a story set in shadows, where you can’t quite see what’s going on and the scenes of satanic worship are the one thing story gets better than ‘The Deamons’ (because its suddenly not so silly when you can’t quite see what’s going on and how daft everyone looks dressed up). There are moments when it feels as if everything is coming together, when the stakes are higher and the jokes have stopped. But then, because this is meant for children, they have to throw in Brendan doing something silly.

Ultimately, it’s not enough. The plot does what it needs to do but not much more. There are no great wonderful scenes to go down in fan folklore (the closest is K9 discussing his features with Sarah Jane and Brendan trying to work out the science behind it all – and even that was better done with the 4^th Dr and Leela), there are no real surprises and the revelation at the end, particularly, is a real let down (there isn’t a very big list of suspects and basically its everyone: if this was a Sherlock Holmes story it wouldn’t even be a one cigarette problem, never mind a three-piper). While the idea is, at its deep core, a good one (I’m a fan of both the Sarah Jane Adventures’ and the under-rated ‘K9’ series from Australia, which is pitched a bit young and features some very irritating human children, but shows how K9 could have worked in a more child-friendly plot) and won the pilot high ratings (8.4million, not bad at all – ‘Logopolis’ highest episode, the second one, was only 7.7million), the execution leaves a lot to be desired, with most fans under-whelmed by it then and since. It was the BBC that killed the show off though, not the stars or fans or even the producer: boss Bill Cotton, who’d always been proud of the way Dr Who had grown on his watch, had been more than happy to commission this when JNT pitched it to him, but in a sign of things to come his replacement Alan Hart saw the show and particularly the pilot as a bit of an embarrassment. Dr Who itself was too popular to be in danger, but this pilot was an easy thing to put in a drawer and forget about and, well, JNT wasn’t going to fight that hard for it. Not many people were that upset over the demise of ‘k9 and Company’. It’s hard to see where a full series would have gone from here: would it have been a different village with covens each week? (That’s what the last scene hints at). The same locals turned good? Would there have been actual aliens? Had they tweaked the pilot so that it was more about Sarah Jane super sleuth, with K9 as her computer mastermind and comedy foil, with Brendan sent back off to school and a bunch of clever kids who believed in aliens, it could have been big (as of course it was when Sarah Jane Adventures did that). But no one outside the cast really cares about anything other than ratings, so you have this awful feeling that a full series might actually have been worse. A missed opportunity.

POSITIVES + This pilot had a lot of money spent on it. Admittedly most of its not spent particularly wisely, but there’s a glossiness about this pilot that stands out compared to DrWho seasons 18 and 19 either side of it. All that location filming, which in 1981 had to be done on more expensive film rather than videotape, puts it more in line with the American import series that were doing so well on British telly in 1981, partly because everyone in them always looked so glamorous and rich. They try the same with Sarah Jane in this story, giving her a posh makeover, which doesn’t work quite as well, but still: this one looks good on screen. With the sound down.  

NEGATIVES – Remember the days when K9 was the most sophisticated intelligent robot ever built? Well, apparently the makers of this pilot don’t, as they have him clumsily running into greenhouses right at the point when people need him to be quiet, running into a ladder and destroying a garden gnome. If you came to this episode without knowing the main series you’d think the Doctor hated Sarah Jane and sent K9 just to annoy her. It must be all that time being stuck in an attic in Croydon, its made him rusty.

Best Quote: K9 – ‘Your silliness is noted’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: For more larks with K9 and Sarah Jane see the K9 Annual 1983 (an extra on the DVD) which includes six new stories featuring the same cast as the pilot. It’s quite a good read actually, a cut above the average Dr Who annuals of this era (it even – shock horror – has a prediction of the future that actually happened, an article on how we might all be watching satellite television by 1990 and how one day there ‘might be as many as fifty channels to choose from’, which sure beats the articles about having bases on the moon and travelling the stars by the end of the 20^th century from the parent Who annuals) and fleshes out supporting characters like Aunt Lavinia (who actually appears in most of them), and Brendon (whose far less of a drip here) and strengthens the relationship between Sarah and K9 to the point where they’re almost a double act. Given the limited space the plots aren’t exactly taxing but in many ways are more inspired and certainly more original than the TV version. They’re a sort of stepping stone to ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’ too, making good use of Sarah’s journalistic skills. ‘Powerstone’ concerns a missing skeleton found in an archaeological dig that apparently got up and walked off  and the stone of the title which causes hallucinations and a near brush with death in a car crash just like in ‘Planet Of the Spiders’. ‘The Shroud Of Azaroth’ does feature another human sacrifice in a sleepy village, but this time it’s an acting role gone wrong as a demon is summoned by accident and causes havoc on set (the director is one ‘George Speilberg’! When K9 has ambitions to act too Sarah Jane  tells him ‘I can’t see you playing the lead in ‘Gone With The Wind’ anytime soon’).  ‘Hound Of hell’ pits K9 against a proto ‘Hound Of The Baskervilles’ which is rather clever, although sadly K9 gets written out halfway through and ends up with ‘amnesia’ (this one feels most like a TV script that never got made, down to budget-saving decisions like this).’The Monster Of Loch Crag’ is more of the same, a spooky hotel on holiday and a Laird whose trying to scare people away  (which is K9 and Company at its most Scooby Doo-ish). By the time of  ‘Horror Hotel’ the repetition is getting a bit daft, another creepy tale of ghosts and ghouls and yet another human sacrifice in the story that most resembles the pilot. The annual then ends with it’s maddest story of the lot, ‘The Curse Of Kanbo-Ala’, which is clearly based on the curse of Tutankhamen with an archaeologist working in Egypt who comes a cropper and is haunted by a ghostly Indian with a big action sequence on board a train. Would this series have run and run with stories like these? Probably not, but almost any of them would have been preferable to the pilot we did get. 

Dave Martin alone also released four K9 spin-of books (again included on the DVD), written for a younger audience than normal in 1980 after the pilot had failed to go to series. It’s doubtful that any full episodes would have looked like this though: this is K9 having adventures in space in the future a long way from the black magic of the pilot story, travelling across the stars in his see-through spaceship called (what else?) K-Nel. The plots are simple and the language sparse but the (uncredited) colourful illustrations are positively gorgeous, leagues ahead of anything in the annuals or comic strips of the time and looking more like a 1970s prog rock album. ‘Zeta Rescue’ is my favourite, a gripping tense race against time that might contradict everything that actually happens in the series (the timelords can’t visit a Megellan prison ship for reasons known to themselves, so they choose a robot dog to get them out of trouble) but works well as a spin-off. Dea is a worthy companion in the Leela mould (her lack of clothing is really pushing the boundaries for a children’s book!) and The Megellans are a worthy foe, although annoyingly there are no illustrations of them and not much of a description so you have to imagine what they look like. The other three books are ‘The Missing Planet’ about an evil company turning populated worlds into mines (with a gorgeous opening illustration of space city Tellan as it used to be), ‘The Time Trap’ about a very Battlestar Galactica book about the search for a missing battle-cruiser that’s gone missing) and ‘The Beats Of Vega’ who are exactly the clichéd little green men Sydney Newman warned us about. The four stories were collected together as the Big Finish audiobook ‘The Adventures Of K9’ in 2013, read by John Leeson, although the stories are missing a lot without the pictures to go with them.

Finally, there’s an entire spin-off series made by co-creator Bob Baker with Australian television and first broadcast in 2009 with John Leeson returning to do the voice. Over shadowed by ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ and with a ‘regenerated’ model because of BBC copyright who doesn’t look that much like ‘our’ K9, it’s a little bit childish and mostly mocked by fans. I rather like it though: it’s not as grownup as SJA but for its own niche its a neat twist on the ‘Famous 5’ stories about plucky children cut off from their old lives, their grumpy parent/guardian and their faithful dog, only in this case it’s the dog that’s the most powerful of the lot. With a lower budget than even ‘K9 and Company’ it’s easy to laugh at the alien designs especially and the way the storylines end up falling into clichés about teenagers growing up, but there’s a lot about this series to love with some excellent ideas and certainly some more realistic plots than ‘Torchwood’ ever managed. ‘Fear Itself’ is my favourite episode, a gritty story that pre-empts the London riots but taking place a couple of years early (and filmed in Australia!), with as many parallels to Dr Who proper as they can get away with (most of it taking place in a junkyard…) There was only ever one series, the franchise not having really clicked with the public on either side of the world the way its creators hoped and while Baker tried many times to get a new deal for the series his death in 2021 rather put an end to that idea. Still, because of the way Australian telly is run there’s a full twenty-six episodes out there to enjoy, which is around half of the Sarah Jane total (fifty-three).  

Kindred Spirits Volume 6 Available: 'Obedience'

 

For those of you who don't know, my 'day' job is writing scifi-romance-comedy-drama-philosophy novels. And the latest 'Obedience' is out today! Are they like Dr Who?  Not really, although you may recognise some similarities with 'Nurse Who' fro the short story 'Summer' from the Kindred Spirits short story collection 'Abundance' which, with a couple of changes (like being made on the planet Glabdihardis rather than Earth, with a Maggrumph and Camalosian as companions) is a show still going strong at the time of its 400th anniversary in 2363.  If you happen to be reading this before November 28th then congratulations! As part of Dr Who's birthday celebrations 9and the release of book six) you can get the e-book for free and take a peek at what the future holds. Or if not don't worry, its still nice and cheap: buy the paperback here or the e-book here 

Or if you're an old friend here's the news on the latest book and compendium available now:

 

 'Obedience', the 6th (standalone) volume in the 'Kindred Spirits' series is now for sale! 

 An Argibraffe? At university?!? A space war?!?!? Crystal Skulls?!?!?!? Space Dinosaurs?!?!?!?!?!? 500 Years on from intergalactic contact and it feels like the universe has gone mad. What it really needs is a re-set button...

Dotty the spotty pet argibraffe thinks she knows what the future holds: walking round the park, a bit of digging in the flower-beds, doing what she’s told (mostly) and living in the moment. However she has a secret obsession when her Human owners aren’t looking: the history broadcasts on the holovision. Soon Dotty finds that her life has changed, that she’s been enrolled as the first argibraffe student at Clandusprod Community College under the dotty Mrasianart Professor Edulearn, that the park is on an alien world and the dig is on an abandoned planet full of mysterious remains. A combination of events involving a crazed Human tyrant with a device that can turn whole worlds upside down, a talking crystal skull that only Dotty can hear and the attempted murder of her and her new friends means that soon Dotty isn’t just studying history but making it. In an era when even humanity has stopped taking humanities can a sentient pet really obtain a degree – especially when other species are kicking up such a fuss about it? Can Dotty trust her new and often, well, alien flatmates and be truly independent without her owners? How will Dotty’s team fare in the intergalactically-admired TV Quiz Universally Challenged with Maggrumph host Jeremy Paxgrumph? Can Dotty ascend just when the rest of the universe is descending into chaos? Will the twelve intergalactic species ever break free from a cycle of destruction and rebuilding, learning the lessons of the past so as not to repeat them in the future? Can someone who wasn’t even allowed on the furniture a week ago really save the entire known universe? And just where do a lost civilisation of cosmic dinosaurs fit into all this? The sixth volume in the ‘Kindred Spirits’ series, ‘Obedience’ is another mad house, a love song to history and how our ever present past can lead us to answers in our future, even when asking questions we never thought to ask.
Available to buy on all planets as a paperback or an e-book

Missed the first five volumes? Then why not buy them all together in one handy guide to all the flash-points of saving the universe over the next 500 years with 'Convergence' 

A collection of the first five volumes of the 'Kindred Spriits' series, covering 500 years of a future where the Human race has made intergalactic contact with eleven types of very different alien: the aggressive Agrosians, the pet-like Argibraffes, the bossy Belobrats, the erudite Camalosians, the friendly Clandusprods, the hungry Doosbury Giants, the scared Glabdihardits, the relaxed Habridats, the brusque Maggrumphs, the technology driven Mekkions  and the spiritual Mrasianarts. In a universe this complicated how can peace ever be simple?

The stories include:
Endurance - Romeo and Juliet with Clandusprods. Only she's already dead - and he's dying. How can the universe survive the first brush of intergalactic catastrophe when the couple who were fated to save it can never be together?

Insurgence - Earthling Eleanor moves to Mras to start a new life and finds a new love and a new purpose, especially when she has a son. But when just existing is enough to start an act of rebellion, being an off-worlder playing in an intergalactic peace orchestra is enough to start a revolution and soon her life and those that she loves are in danger.  

Province - A hundred years on and Eleron is all grown up and the leader of the Intergalactic Peace Organisation. He's found happiness at last: he has the perfect wife, the perfect job and lives in a near-perfect universe. Until some furry red aliens from the other side of the universe arrive and turn his world upside down, testing his belief in diplomacy and trust to the limit. Can a rush around a fragmenting universe stop the invaders in time?

Ensconce - Life isn't easy when you're ten and transported to an alien orphanage. It's even harder when your teacher's a Maggrumph with a short fuse, your headmaster has three heads and the adults are using you as a test subject for their new invention: red weed. Will the eleven alien children and their pet argibraffe survive to adulthood in one piece?

Abundance - Twelve aliens, six couples, an intergalactic dating service and a reality TV series in desperate trouble lead to half a dozen very different stories that are all about the one thing in the universe that's truly universal: love.

Available to buy on all planets as an e-book (it's too big for a paperback!) 

Plus which alien are you? Agrosian, Belobrat, Camalosian, Clandusprod, Doosbury Giant, Habridat, Magrumph, Mekkion or Mrasianart?Take our quiz here

Scream Of The Shalka: Ranking - N/A (But around #230)

 

Scream Of The Shalka

(BBC i-player webcast animation, Dr ? with Alison, 13/11/2003-18/12/2003, producer: Murinn Lane Kelly, writer: Paul Cornell, director: Wilson Milam)

Rank: N/A (but around #230 if I had to pick)

 ‘Victoria and Mel, it’s so good having you both in the Tardis with me again after all these years. Meet the Shalka, Shalka meet Victoria and Mel…’  

‘Scream!’

‘Scream!’

‘Scream!’

‘Oh, that reminds me, where did I put my ear-plugs?!?’

Does ‘Scream Of Shalka’ count as ‘proper’ Dr Who? The answer is it rather depends on who you talk to. At the time it was made, as the only new Who product for the 40^th anniversary, it very much was: this was the re-launching point for the series with hopes of making a whole run of these stories if they were successful, in a completely new medium once getting Dr Who made on telly seemed as dead as a dodo (not Jackie Lane, an actual dodo). Even before this webcast went out though, once a week for six weeks on the official BBC website, though, its days were numbered: nobody making this animation knew it yet as everyone was sworn to secrecy but Russell T Davies’ bigger, bolder comeback for TV was already being prepared and the new showrunner had ambitions far beyond a tiny ormer of a sprawling website only a few tech-savvy fans could get anyway. There was a time, even after the comeback, when we weren’t sure whether this ‘counted’ or not – sure the Dr never mentioned it when he was Christopher Eccleston, but it was a long time before the new series was comfortable enough to even register the ‘proper’ Drs and we only had our first confirmation that Paul McGann was canonical as later as the Dr’s human ‘dreams’ in ‘Family Of Blood/Human Nature’ in 2007 (also by this story’s writer Paul Cornell – and even that could plausibly be a fever dream, so it’s not until Matt Smith takes a walk through memory holograms in ‘The Eleventh Hour’ in 2010 we knew for sure). In the end ‘Shalka’ is not quite good enough for fans to push for it being welcomed back into the fold – and yet in other ways it feels a lot more like ‘proper’ Dr Who than the TV Movie ever did, being more quirkily British than the American re-launch.

Really though, as a project made by fans primarily for fans, you can’t help ut feel it ought to be even more Dr Whoy than it turned out. That’s not, and it should be stressed, the fault of the people making it. They had huge plans for DW’s 40^th anniversary, hatched bold ambitious plans for what they wanted this project to be, won over up and coming actress Sophie Oeknodo right before she hit big and got hold of cult hero Richard E Grant while wringing every last penny out of the measly budget and jumping over every hoop to get this story made. No its the BBC who mucked this poor project around, still suffering from the Michael Grade ‘r Who isn’t popular’ hangover that had lasted since the 1980s (admittedly the poor response to the TV Movie hadn’t helped), who were forever going back on their promise of help and promotion, not caring enough about this show to help it but caring too much in the way they interfered over and over, reducing the original promisingly punchy three-story twelve episodes down to a single storyline that rambled through six and made the only person who had any experience of running websites or working on animations for the corporation redundant just when the project was taking off. While you can point the finger at all sorts of wonky decisions along the way, the biggest difference between this and the comeback to come is that Russell T Davies had a lot of people who believed in him even when they still didn’t believe in the series and have him carte blanche to at least try things that seemed bold and radical, whereas this story had to tick all the rtight boxes and not get into too much trouble in case it was immediately cancelled. This is Dr Who, the most imaginative, elastic-breaking format of them all, with its wings clipped to keep it generic, made by committee because nobody in control of the purse strings trusts any one person making it. The few times anyone sits down to write a ‘generic DW episode’ they tend to be the worst: we have lots of different engines of different sizes throughout the show but its imagination that’s the fuel this show runs on. Alas this script might be the most generic of the lot: a screechy alien from space tries to invade contemporary Earth. It’s the sort of thing a committee who’ve watched a few episodes to get a taste but who have no love for the show would come up with which must have irritated the hell out of the genuine fans who stumped up a lot of money and all the ideas for this project who knew that was how other fans would view it too.

In many ways ‘Shalka’ is the missing piece of the Dr Who puzzle, first uploaded seven years after that McGann TV movie and two before ‘Rose’ (with the actual show anniversary falling between episodes two and three), with a foot in both camps without really having much identity of its own. It suffers from the worst of the TV Movie in its need to spend so much time going over old ground to ‘feel’ like Dr Who, while laying ground rules for what’s to come so fiercely and definitively, that the plot itself doesn’t really have room to breathe or do anything you don’t expect it to. This is a story that had some nicely original ideas that feel like ‘proper’ Dr Who that get interrupted with requests to put more ideas from past stories in - requests that, ironically, are the bits that seem the least Dr Whoey: the 3^rd Dr for instance, ended up working by UNIT by choice but here the Dr ends up crossing swords with the local military because that’s what he always used to do, The Master turns up because one of the big names from the series was always going to (and getting the rights to the Daleks off Terry nation’s estate was asking for trouble back in 2003), while there’s lots of escaping and capturing because those are the bread and butter of past episodes. You know, almost from the first plot beat, how this story is going to go: just take the Dr’s first scene when he enters a bar and, within seconds, is chatting to the bargirl in such a way that you know she’s going to end up the new companion, name-drops people from history just for the pure hell of it, says something eccentric and crazy, then works out that everyone is acting shifty because they’re scared of something (rather than because its Lancashire and people in pubs always tend to be a bit like that with oddly dressed strangers). The Shalka too are giant insects who are almost like those we’ve seen in Dr Who so many times before  but who still feel as if they’ve wandered in from some lesser scifi show like ‘Star Wars’ ‘Stargate’ or ‘Timeless’: they’re like a sentient version of the Wirrn, with a bit of Zarbi thrown in, exactly the sort of cliché someone who could draw anything on screen without worrying about rubber suits would come up with (even if they’re still a lot more interesting than their close cousins The Tritovores from ‘Planet Of The Dead’).

However the best of this story resembles ‘Rose’ and might have been more of an influence on Russell T than people realise (he was, after all, close to Paul Cornell, hence his invite to write two of the better received stories of the comeback) and you can tell that at its core this is a story being made by people as a labour of love who know their Who. The story sensibly doesn’t spend an eternity re-establishing old Drs and letting us catch up with the past for half the story – instead it gets on with it, while dropping big hints at some awful past catastrophe that took place in the past and shaken the Dr’s confidence (it’s written to be part of a series arc that never happened, with vague plans to have it be a companion who died sacrificing themselves for the Dr, although as written it could just as easily be the time war). This Dr is a spiky, grouchy, darker character, more ambiguous morally than any we’ve had before but not unlike the 9^th Dr to come, especially when he sometimes forgets himself and starts throwing Dry jokes in as if he’s a natural clown with the weight of the universe on his shoulders who, occasionally, forgets that he’s meant to be sad (very much how Christopher Eccleston will play the part). The plot revolves around the very contemporary companion (played, as well as such a sketched in character can be, by Sophie Okenodo long before she was a Hollywood star) who is either a calmer Ace or a more jumped-up Rose depending how you look at it. She’s a lot more promising than Dr Grace in the T movie anyway, it feels like she has a family and a life beyond what we see on screen, even if that life is just a few lines for now, seeming quite a lot like Rose at times. This is the first time a Dr Who story has been around since the invention of the mobile phone (something that would have changed almost all the ‘classic’ stories from the 20^th century in one way or another) and there’s a clever idea where Joe is worried about whether Alison will make it home if she runs off in the Tardis – so the Doctor points out it’s a time machine and she’s probably home right now; of course, she isn’t win when he promptly tries to ring her, pointing at a future Rose-like sub-plot where the Doctor fails in his promise to keep her safe (she’s still curious enough to leave anyway – not sure I would be!) Alison  even gets a bit of alien tech in their heads, just like in ‘The Long Game’.

There are bits of this story that are never actually tried again too, but should have been. The setting of my adopted home county of Lancashire is a neat touch (it makes a change from London), with 4000 holes, just like The Beatles once sang, only they’re all caused by the Shalka not the council and lots of fun snarky jokes  at our expense (‘I have a much bigger plan ‘What Yorkshire?!’) There are two very clever and very DWy twists that make the plot bearable too: The Shalka might live underground (just like the Silurians) and the Dr might try to broker a peace deal with them (just like the Silurians) and they might be the sort of clichéd beings that want to take over the Earth without quite knowing why (like practically every other Dr Who monster except The Silurians) but they’re a shadowy threat who attack their prey when they make noise. The tension, between a particularly noisy Doctor arriving and trying  to shock them into arriving and the sleepy village  who’ve learnt to stay quiet and have been walking on eggshells, is nicely handled, a neat idea quite unlike anything seen in the series before (and a clever subversion of the big booming explosive start to the special we expect, which starts quietly with everyone trying to keep still – the explosions come later).

The Shalka’s screaming is a clever idea too, the opposite of the usual idea where the companions scream at the monster, and it’s a little like the plot to ‘Fury From The Deep’ the wrong way round, where sentient seaweed was put in its place by the Dr’s screaming companion – here it’s the screams that scare the humans, with a sound that’s quite genuinely terrifying (and caused half the cast to get laryngitis). The Master too (played by Derek Jacobi some five years before he returned to the part, briefly, in ‘Utopia’) is not what he seems at first: the most memorable and unexpected part of the story by far is when he pulls his face off, Auton style, to reveal himself to be a robot (although it would have made more sense if he was actually an Auton). This Kamelion-like incarnation is intriguingly less of a baddy and more a sort of benign companion, stuck inside the Tardis and unable to leave (in a foreshadowing of what they tried with Missy in the 12^th Dr era, sort of). He’s fun too, much more so than he’s allowed to be the brief time Jacobi actually is The Master in ‘Utopia’, the snarling put-downs between Dr and Master very like the relationship between Derek Jaocbi and Ian McEwan’s very spiky Dry character in the series ‘Vicious’, who are so busy bitching at each other to cover up genuine affection its as if one heart loves each other and the other hate each other. There are some great, witty, very Dr Whoey lines almost smuggled into the generic plot too: ‘Oh sorry about the house’ says the Dr, nonchalantly, as he walks away from having destroyed Alison and Joe’s cottage they’ve risked their lives trying to keep safe, while another early scene has him sympathising with a homeless woman in the streets over not having a house and maybe having to live in her vehicle – he knows how that feels, after all. ‘What are you?’ Alison asks early on, in one of the story’s many clichéd lines. ‘Mildly annoyed’ is the Dr’s amusing reply. At another The Master muses on life as a robot: ‘Why did I choose existence and listening to the Doctor being right all the time, rather than a slow painful death?’ Set against this are some lines clearly there to shovel plot ideas in as the episodes were contracted though: ‘I just hope [Joe] doesn’t get killed because that would be so bad now things are so up in the air’ says Alison, reacting to certain death and alien invasion with all the urgency of someone attending a knitting group, while the Dr’s attempt to bring us up to speed with his UNIT days is all wrong: “I seem to attract the military. They’re either arresting me, making strong sweet tea, or killing my friends.” And, of course, that very military send-off: ‘I guess you just saved the universe Doctor. Good on ya!’  

For all its bright moments this is a story that ultimately falls as flat as the rather disappointing (and clearly low budget) 2D animation, without the depth of this series at its best in ways beyond the way it’s presented. The parts that thrill are only there for a few seconds and then they’re gone, while the fifteen minute format doesn’t quite work, the action interrupted by a cliffhanger every time it’s just started moving. A lot of this story relies on B movie clichés, from the Shalka on down, and the rest relies on Dr Who clichés, with more capturing and escaping that seems natural in such a rigid 75minute plot. The best moments have nothing to do with the plot at all: they’re the ones between the Dr and Alison, his eccentricity bouncing off her ordinariness, even if both halves are a bit broadly drawn in for now (you have to question, too, why this Dr whose so frustrated by humanity takes to her so readily given that the most time they share before he risks his life to save her are a few barbed comments: this is a Dr, after all, who is as spiky as we’ve seen him since he was Colin Baker, saving the universe wearily out of duty but trying to find every excuse not to and apparently hating all humans. He’s been in Lancashire before, then). There are plot holes big enough for a whole herd of Shalkas to pass through, the ending wrapped up in an all-too neat bow (as the Doctor – and you don’t really need a spoiler for this – does something clever and uses a black hole to suck the baddy out of existence, an idea that comes out of nowhere). There’s little here to keep you watching until the end except loyalty to the brand, which given that this story was meant to be away of gathering new fans who didn’t know the series is a bit of a handicap. Indeed, for all its criticisms, it should be remembered that this story has a very different audience to every other Dr Who story in this volume: this wasn’t some grand statement to make Dr Who for a whole new family audience to fall in love with, the way the two stories sandwiched either side of it were, This is a story that wasn’t aiming for the cosmos and a Saturday teatime family audience in the millions but a cult for the faithful and a few curious newbies, with an audience that only stretched as far as the BBC website, back in the day when the internet was still privy mostly to geeks and students rather than a natural part of everyday life and when most people’s technology just wasn’t up to watching it (I well remember my frustration trying to watch it on the beaten up computers at my university library when I should have been studying and waiting for each episode to upload for approximately twice the time it took to watch, because I didn’t have the internet at home till years later). It has a much smaller ambition and spectacle and has the feel of one of the extra-curricular Dr Who spin-offs, like the Big Finish audios, the comic strips or ‘New Adventures’ books than a ‘roper’ episode rather than the series proper, just one that happens to have visuals and audio at the same time. So does it count as proper Dr Who?  Not quite (its worth noting that, as yet, this story isn’t alongside other similarly extra-curricular Dr Who projects on the BBC i-player ‘Whnoiverse’) but at the same time its more deserving, and made with a lot more love, than some of the actual episodes (especially that McGann thing).

At the time it was glorious that we had any new Who at all and the shock, following the Paul McGann disaster, was that it turned out as being even halfway decent. It’s only since the all-singing all-dancing comeback that it seems like a mild disappointment, a cul-de-sac that it was probably for the best the series never followed for good (because had we not ended up back on the main road and DW had continued being made for such a small audience, it would have arguably been at least another seven years before it came back at all). Like all Dr Who animations (including the ones for missing episodes and the twin 10^th Dr stories to come in 2007 and 2009) I’m not entirely sure it’s a medium that works for Who anyway: so much of this series relies on the things between the lines and even the worst actor in the world conveys more with their eyes than a flat talking squiggle. The animation is pretty basic, bordering on poor, too, the animators with a ruthlessly cut budget sticking too closely to the faces of the actors and the B movie monster rulebook to deliver on the promise of the format and do imaginative things they couldn’t do with actors. Future DW animations ‘The Infinity Quest’ and ‘Dreamland’ look similarly low budget, with characters who move just as awkwardly and only seem to have two or three expressions but ‘Shalka’ sometimes doesn’t even match that – the only interesting bit of animation is the Shalka itself, the ultimate in bug-eyed aliens (although it doesn’t do anything interesting and the design a little too obviously ripped off the ‘Alien’ franchise). The Dr, especially, looks all wrong: a gothic vampire with perpetually raised eyebrows without the magical twinkle in the eye all the Drs, however different, share. Lancashire, particularly, is all flat and beige and straight lines which doesn’t feel like a real place at all (actually come to think of it maybe this part of the animation is bang on!...) All that said, though, its at least the equal of the bigger budget ‘Infinite Quest’ and ‘Dreamland’, stories which have far better animation and more space to do Dr Who things in the sub-plots, but without this story’s stronger ideas and occasionally sparkling dialogue. Twenty years ago this looked like the future. Now it seems more awkwardly like the past than almost any other Dr Who story, made at a time when this technology was new rather than commonplace, following rules to the letter because everything is so new that a modern production would have fun breaking. Like this Doctor, its hearts are in the right place, but it’s also stranded a very long way from home.     

 + I’ve given him a bit of a pasting as ‘The Great Intelligence’ in the stories ‘The Snowmen’ and ‘The Name Of the Doctor’ but actually Richard E Grant is an excellent Doctor, more natural in the role than his ‘Withnail and I’ co-star Paul McGann (though I would have liked to have seen more than one story by both to be sure; Paul found his voice on Big Finish as a nervier yet friendlier Dr than the rather mad one we got on screen though it took him maybe thirty stories to find it) and Grant is far far better as a two-dimensional voiceover than he is in person as a three-dimensional baddy, raising his game whenever co-stars Okenodo or Jaocbi are in the same scene with him (even if he still sounds embarrassed talking to monsters). Like the plot too is like a mixture of the Drs he came between, mixing the Edwardian vibes of McGann and the ‘midlife crisis through trauma’ of Eccleston. Grant nails the eccentricity and unpredictability of the Dr and makes the most of the lines that enable him to do more than just talk about the plot, making him darker but still likeable, with less of an extreme swim between those two halves than Eccleston manages. You totally believe that’s he’s an impossibly old alien whose seen everything, but who longs for the simpler life of his companions he can never have and I would have been quite happy to have had him around as the Dr for a while longer. Oddly, Russell T wasn’t a fan (though he liked this story, which is just as well given how many its of it he recycled in his first year), calling Grant’s performance ‘lazy’ and ‘phoned in’, the main reason why ‘Shalka’ never got a reference in the modern series. That’s a bit unfair; I’d say he’s the best thing in it by miles, he’s just playing a Dr whose maybe smaller and more muted so that his extremes of noise forcing the Shalka into revealing themselves come over more violently. Interestingly, little did anyone know it but there is a future Dr lurking in the voice cast: David Tennant plays the caretaker of an army base who only gets two lines before he snuffs it (a part that wasn’t even big enough to be credited on the original release, despite him being, even in 2003, one of the biggest names in the cast list). At the time this was the closest David had come to being in his favourite programme – he got a part in Big Finish story ‘Medicinal Purposes’ off the back of it in 2004 while playing Casanova in Russell T’s last series before Dr Who and from there it was a short hop to the Tardis doors.

 - There’s a point when The Shalka, who for the first half of the story are mildly interesting in a scary distant animalistic alien threat kind of a way, start talking about the plot in proper BBC English as if they’re sitting down with the Dr to have tea and crumpets because the plot needs someone to reveal something about their plan, done in such a clumsy way that it makes you want to throw something at your laptop.
BEST QUOTE: The Doctor: ‘I’m just popping out do so something…mildly eccentric’