The Greatest Show In The Galaxy: Ranking - 9

 

The Greatest Show In The Galaxy

(Season 25, Dr 7 with Ace, 14/12/1988-4/1/1989, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Andrew Cartmel, writer: Stephen Wyatt, director: Alan Wareing)

Rank: 9

   ' ‘Welcome to the new-look regenerated Psychic Circus in the 21st century under new and less bitey management! We've got so many marvels to delight your eyes and ears: a Sontaron bare-back rider, Peter Kay as a giant green clown and an Ood juggling his sense-spheres. Fun for all the family – at least on stage. Despite what you may have read in reports the ringmaster has been sacked and the circus is under new management (passing from the boomer hippies to Gen X werewolves – don’t worry, they only bite you once a month!)  We've been cleared by the intergalactic circus inspectors and nowadays the only people who get turned into werewolves are lyncanthropic members of the Royal family, honest. Of course, as people keep saying on intergalactic review websites, it’s not like the old days you might have read about, but it’s still the greatest show in the galaxy. Oh and some late good news: all the psychic circus shows past and present have been beamed up by the Gods of Ragnarok onto BBC i-player (some of the missing ones lovingly re-created in animation that looks nothing like the originals and others old episodes hacked in pieces and specially coloured so you can really see the blood!) so you can compare them for yourselves. Just don’t stare into the void too closely or you might get hypnotised. Love, an ageing Whizzkid'

Dr Who was, from the first, a show uniquely placed in that roughly as many adults watched it as children. The exact ratio varies from era to era and depending on whether the companion is, say, a savage showing her cleavage or a tin robot dog (or, both), but generally speaking Dr Who was a show designed to be, from the first, something the whole family watched together and would take something from. A lot of my favourite 1960s stories re-enact the grapple for control going on inside the family home, of whether the ‘old’ ways of war and conformity and follow-my-leader is best, or whether the youngsters are owed a brave new future based on peace and expressing individuality. ‘Dr Who’ was, in its earliest days, a chance for maturing children to come to terms with the often horrific world their war generation parents had left for them and for their parents to come to terms with the horrific future they imagined once their children have come of age. From the very first episode Susan, the token teenager, is pitched as being simultaneously the smartest person in the room and the stupidest, as if the audience at home could both aspire to be like her and laugh at her while watching the exact same scenes and it’s a narrative that continues through visions of Dalek invasions of the past and present, ‘The Space Museum’ (up the children!) ‘The Dominators’ (up the parents!) ‘The Web Planet’ (up the insect prisoners of war!) ‘The War Games’ (‘please don’t repeat our mistakes and perpetuate the same old cycles!’) and many many more. By and large this most interesting of subtexts gets dropped from the show, round about the time Dr Who goes from being a show about exploration to a show about survival (roughly when the Tardis becomes Earthbound in 1970). By then the emphasis is on how young and old alike will only survive if they put aside their differences and work together, because the presence of alien threats both makes war necessary and makes human wars seem inconsequential. By the time Pertwee took over the Tardis there’s the general feeling of relief from the adults that the children of the 1960s, who are now growing old enough to vote and start at the bottom rungs of the corporate ladders, aren’t aliens from another planet with super powers turning their world upside down in some co-ordinated plan to overpower the system but humans trying to scratch out a living and trying to make do the way they did like they were. And then Dr Who forgot about this thread, reviving it only for the odd cold war scenario (‘this could be you fighting the next war!’)

And then came the late 1980s, with a new generation in town, Generation X and the parent-child divide started all over again. Only this time the ‘parent’ was the aging baby boomer producer John Nathan-Turner and the ‘old guard’ of writers he liked to hire for the show (like Pip and Jane Baker) and the ‘child’ was the series’ youngest script editor Andrew Cartmel and the young and hungry writers he sought out to write for the show. It makes for an interesting dynamic across the Sylvester McCoy years, with interviews with cast and crew since JNT’s death in 2002 revealing what an often argumentative and frayed working environment Dr Who was, with a producer who resented the BBC keeping him in a job he didn’t want anymore and who was far more interested in fan conventions and spin-off pantos than the stories being made under him. By 1988 fanzines and the Dr Who Magazine letters page alike kept using the same phrases for the show over and over again: the show was no longer being made for the people who used to watch it (aging hippies who wanted their hero to save the universe and make it better with peace and love) and far from being a series scifi show it now resembled a gaudy ‘circus’ run by ‘clowns’. For some of the Gen X viewers living under Thatcher though, who were back living in the pre-war days of uncertainty and economic frailty, angry that their baby boomer parents - who had talked so hard and so long about making the world a better place to live in and had left it in such a sorry state politically, environmentally and socially – a gaudy circus was exactly what the 1980s were, a world where you competed over the same tired jobs nobody wanted with a fake smile, afraid that someone else would come along and take it from you. If baby boomers were clowns, refusing to take life seriously, then Gen X were werewolves, living life politely most of the month because they had to before occasionally breaking down in sudden primeval angst at the state of the world they were growing up in while their elders were in denial. They’re also ‘lone wolves’, the latch-key kids whose parents were never at home and who kind of brought themselves up, running in packs. Notice how Captain Cook have Mags her first leg up inton the ‘industry’ but lords it over her, not letting her forget it: this is so true for Generation X experiences when jobs were few it hits home more than anything (even to their younger curmudgeonly-Millennial sibling like me who remembers it well). What makes all this so satisfying is that all three Who showrunners in the 21st century are Generation Xers so the show is basically being run by a bunch of Mags nowadays: Moffat is the best match for the analogy (its all smiles and fangs!), Russell T’s idealism makes him a good match for Bell Boy and with Chris Chibnall none of quite knew week from week if we were going to get Kingpin or Deadbeat in charge. 

 The trouble was Dr Who had become an anachronism in so many ways by 1988: a show that was supposed to reflect the real world of the audience at home watching (at least to an extent) that had somehow got stuck on hippie ideals of hope and endless possibilities that no longer reflected the tiny fragmenting world so many viewers felt in a 1980s worldwide recession (‘you’re just an ageing hippie professor really aren’t you professor?’ says Ace at one point – she says it in a way that’s meant to annoy the Doctor, an early version of the phrase ‘okay boomer’, but instead he looks pleased about this). As brilliant as Dr Who became again in the last throw of its original 26-year dice some odd decisions, a lower budget (accounting for inflation) and a general sense that the BBC couldn’t care less for it meant that Dr Who was an easy target for more youthful audiences by 1988, an overhang from more innocent and naive times when people still believed in a hippie dream when the youth would get to change the world and make it a kinder, fairer place. Most Dr Who stories ignored this and made the show one last beacon of hope in an increasingly depressing world, but ‘Greatest Show’ is the one that’s brave enough to ask questions out loud, mostly ‘what happened?’ and ‘where have all the good times gone?’ Dr Who, for all its (mixed success) attempts to be modern and contemporary was still fundamentally a 1960s child dressed in 1980s clothes, but only ‘Greatest Show’ is brave enough to point that out.

As one of the few products of the baby boomer generation still on the air as a regular series 25 years on (the only boomer series still on the air without a break? The 18 month hiatus notwithstanding) Dr Who was in a unique position all over again. Just as in the 1960s it was the only place in town where parents and children could watch programmes together (admittedly not as many parents as there used to be and less and less children as the years went on, but still) and, just as in the 1960s, the show was a prime candidate to examine that late 1980s feeling that the world had taken a wrong turn somewhere circa 1969 away from hippies and into yuppies. Though he was born in 1948 and technically a baby boomer himself, writer Stephen Wyatt is nevertheless quite a bit younger than all the writers who had written for Dr Who thus far (with the one exception of Andrew Smith, still a teenager when ‘Full Circle’ went out in 1981). He was fifteen when the first episode went out in 1963 and one of the first generation of youngsters for whom Dr Who was a ‘beloved institution’ that had been there the whole of his adult life rather than a series seen as a novelty. Wyatt’s first script ‘Paradise Towers’ had already touched on how so many of the problems of the 1980s stemmed from the 1960s (particularly poor housing, ugly 1960s tower blocks that treated humans like battery hens and were so different to the utopian open-air ideals of the day). So when producer JNT suggests to Cartmel and Wyatt that they should set a story in a circus, full of spectacle (the producer even came up with the name), Wyatt – who had a slight phobia of clowns and found them unsettling – decided to write a different story, as a chance to comment on what the producer thinks the show is for, even though for his generation the show means something different. With ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ Wyatt lets full attack on everything he thought the 1960s had sold out on, making the story a mocking critique on where the show and the era that spawned it went wrong, in a tale that nonetheless feels more like ‘proper’ (i.e. 1960s) Dr Who in the way it mercilessly goes after the powers that be than pretty much anything that’s been on the air since ‘The War Games’. After all ‘Greatest Show’ is how Dr Who started, pointing out what was wrong with the world (in past, present and future) in a way that would never have been allowed on television had they come out and said all this directly – but by making it fiction with a knowing wink about what’s going on. Just compare the end of this story, as the aging hippies take over the destroyed circus, to the delight in the revolution in ‘The Space Museum’: this is the same war, just with different generations fighting it.

You see, Dr Who is the ‘psychic circus’ (the perfect metaphor! Bright and fun and mad and unpredictable and slightly dangerous, a world that’s as real as the animals in the cages and as staged as the pantomime performances), the show that once promised miracles and new planets every week, but which is now relegated to a dusty faded corner of the universe that nobody ever visits and which, despite being built out of a genuine desire to bring marvel and magic to everyone, has become a dark and scary place full of worse crimes than the ones it was trying to offer escape from. Sometimes the psychic circus is the show itself, the spectacle that even has a ‘family’ of Ragnarok Gods tuned in to watch it. Sometimes it’s the show behind the scenes, a world of fun at war with itself, a hippie ideal run by capitalists. And sometimes it’s a fan convention (a practice that took off in earnest following 1983’s 20th anniversary special at Longleat): people travel from several light years away to see it in their old banged out ‘magic bus’ that always seem to be breaking down (a fond memory of many of us 1980s convention goers – its actually the 1950s one from ‘Delta’ painted in psychedelic colours), to listen to the same old bores telling the same old anecdotes. Everyone on this world has taken something that was once so beautiful and so marvellous and so imaginative and made it wrong. The circus itself is now tatty and threadbare, hung together by string. The ringmaster in charge is a sadistic rapping alien who has no interest in the show or the star’s legacy and just wants to be hip and trendy, pretending to only be interested in entertaining while holding life and death over the people who take part, killing them if the Ragnarok ‘viewers’ turn off (surely he’s Michael Grade?! Note the sadistic way he treats all his acts as less important than the capitalist ‘monster’ he keeps in the basement) The chief clown, in charge of getting the acts together, is part human part robot, a man whose dressed in greasepaint but with a cold heart, one whose always smiling but whose grin never quite reaches his eyes (I’m amazed this one got past the ever-touchy JNT!) 

There’s a  bus conductor asking for money with menaces that represents ‘the man’ demanding we make our lives pay (umm, even though he’s a robot). There’s a stall-lady making money off the back of a circus she resents and selling products to people she actively hates (this could be any merchandise seller but my guess given Peggy Mount’s costume is that it’s Mary Whitehouse, who made a lot of money out of telling people not to watch certain programmes, particularly Dr Who). There are hippies who once worked out of love but who are now starved into and hypnotised into taking part against their will, divided into three before the Tardis ever lands: some are dead unable to cope in a world this cruel (we never do get to meet Juniper Berry or Peace Pipe) others have gone mad unable to remember how good things used to be (Kingpin, now re-named Deadbeat) and others fall into line, figuring that it’s the only way left they can make a living. Meanwhile there’s a black hole in a swamp with a magic eye sucking the life and joy out of everything in the ring that nobody dares talk about – an eye that works as a mirror, reflecting the audience’s lives back to them (which the Doctor uses in the grand finale to reflect the ‘powers’ of the Gods of Ragnarok – the audience at home – back to them, showing how damaged this world has become; the Doctor literally breaks the fourth wall in the process. Along with chunks of the other three). There are hypnotic lights in the circus tent that once promised the thrill of new worlds but that now turns the visiting youngsters into schizophrenic werewolves (this is the era when programmes like Dr Who had so many fast- cut shots they could trigger epileptic fits in particularly susceptible viewers and often had to come with warnings, though there aren’t any on this particular programme), There’s a bore from the past whose seen every show banging on about our ‘imperial past’ and how ‘it’s not how it used to be’ while talking about all the great people he used to know . There’s a young nerdy ‘Whizzkid’ collector – one I have an awful feeling is meant to be my generation, the millennial – who treats these shows as statistics and things to collect rather than something simply to be enjoyed the way they should be (*cough* of course I would never do that, ever!) There’s a young hairy biker Nord, a hell’s angel who sounded the death knell of the hippies (stabbing a hippie to death at ‘Altamont’, a Rolling Stones gig in December 1969 that meant ‘game over’  in the same way episode ten of ‘The War Games’ once did). And then there’s us, the average viewer at home, an unmoving slab of stone demanding to be entertained, with the ultimate power of life and death over everyone. 

All these metaphors are hugely clever but The Gods of Ragnarok are probably my favourite: in Norse anthology the Gods waged the war that eventually sees the end of the universe – not because of anything they did but in a fight against the entropy and chaos that sees the end of everything over time. They demand to be entertained and are easily bored so shows like Dr Who have to change pace and adapt to suit them or they go under. Really though the psychic circus and its acts are a moment of brief noise and colour in a life that sees so many of us (all of us?) trapped in place, set in stone so we can never move. The Gods know that they will crumble to death – they have all of past, present and future at their fingertips, like everyone with a television – but still they fight the ennui because anything is better than being stuck in one place. And so, for the one and only time in Dr Who (give or take the similar family watching in ‘Vengeance On Varos’ or the jokes about people needing to be entertained in ‘Carnival Of Monsters’) we are the monsters. 

Most of all, though, the circus represents ‘the man’, the system that so many Dr Who stories try to overthrow (sometimes on other planets but mostly on Earth) but which in 1988 seems to have a tighter grip on the world than ever. The psychic circus, set up by hippies for hippies, is decaying and decrepit and looks as if it’s about to fall down any minute, held together through the sheer power of will of the ringmaster, chief clown and the robots who wheel themselves amongst the landscape demanding payment. Back in the olden days it used to be a place of kindness, where people were free to express themselves, the things that Dr Who once used to try to inspire their audience with more than anything else. Nowadays being different and standing out gets you killed and kindness is a sign of weakness. The writer want to believe in the hippie ideals the show used to tell him and hints that the circus might yet recover at the end with the capitalist baddies dead and Kingpin there to lead everyone back to happiness, but for now Wyatt can’t, in all conscience, teach the audience the same 1960s values because they don’t work in this world anymore. 

Not a lot of people ‘got’ this story on first transmission (a lot of older viewers thought they were still living in the same hippie world and younger viewers were busy watching something else, because Dr Who represented that hippie world) and while a few more fans understand it now I’m still not sure this story gets enough love or respect for what it was trying to do. As a child of the 1980s watching this on first transmission, who had already fallen in love with the 1960s and everything they stood for and couldn’t understand why the world had ever moved on from paradise, this story got to me in a way few others ever did. There was no show like Dr Who being created in my day because, with a few exceptions, the need to be popular straight away meant that demographics and ratings were king and everyone played things ‘safe’ rather than risk upsetting anyone – there’s none of the experimentation and fingers-crossed hope of Dr Who’s early days and the show wouldn’t have lasted five minutes had it been new in 1988. Instead every show was mostly about investments and making money (one of the reasons ‘ringmaster’ and BBC controller Michael Grade hated Dr Who – aside from Colin Baker being his wife’s ex – was that it didn’t work the way other shows still being watched in the 1980s did, so he could never work out how to make money out of it and thus could never work out how to exploit it to make more. The answer, of course, is that it’s a hippie show and works a bit like the Grateful Dead: we sustain it as an industry, getting involved in it, creating our own worlds out of it, buying the products and treating it as if we have a personal stake in it and great chunks of it only exist because we were smart enough to preserve it when the people who created it saw it as something ephemeral – all we ask in return is an occasional blind eye over getting possessive over it).  To a 1980s way of thinking it’s ludicrous: what do you mean fans make their own content? The BBC owns everything! What do you mean there are bootleg recordings of old shows? That’s ours! Why are people inventing their own stories – aren’t there enough of the things to buy? But that’s why Dr Who survives when other shows don’t and why it came back in 2005. Even when the people making it hate it, turn all the lights out let the circus tent to rack and ruin and turn us all into zombies and werewolves, there’s something powerful about Dr Who that matters more than merely how much money it makes. No set of episodes captures that unique place Dr Who holds in our hearts better than this story (except, perhaps, Russell T Davies’ equivalent ‘Love and Monsters’).  

‘Greatest Show’ is something once beautiful that celebrated kindness and heroes that’s now being run by monsters and the people most in danger are the hippies who still cling on, hoping that some of the old magic is still there, even when that magic is black magic being used against them. That clever idea would be worthy enough for a place in my top 100 were that all, but this is also a show still capable of that magic, with several glorious memorable scenes you just wouldn’t get away with in any other series: te Doctor forgetting to set his ‘spambox’ filters on and the Tardis being invaded by a junkmail robot, Mags the teenage rebel discovering that she’s a werewolf capable of killing when betrayed by the ‘war generation’ explorer she trusted to keep her safe, the robot bus conductor taking everyone’s fares and sentencing them to death that’s a secret capitalist ‘trap’, the thing with the all-seeing eye lurking down below ready to eat people who rebel the way that Dr Who once inspired them to, the deaths of Bell Boy and Flower Child hippie idealists who believed the world was better than this, the Doctor performing circus tricks taught to him (in secret rehearsals) by The Magic Circle’s Geoffrey Durham aka The Great Soprendo (plus a few taught to him by his son who was interested in magic: everyone making this story seems to have assumed that, as a circus performer, McCoy would be able to do it all but his time in a circus was as a stunt rider who occasionally stuffed ferrets down his trousers – he’d never had to learn to juggle, though he leant his ‘escapology’ trick for another show). There are many really great really memorable images in this story that aren’t like anything else the show had ever tried. That’s really impressive for a show in its 25th year: forget the continuity references of ‘Silver Nemesis’ or ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’ this is how you pay tribute to a show that once promised to do anything and everything – by doing something that had never been done before and doing it well.  

Best of all, by a complete coincidence that given the show’s themes seems more like fate, by a happy accident this story about the importance of doing things differently ended up being made in a very different way to any other story because of the daring (and very 1960s) notion of filming it in a tent for real, one erected in the BBC car park at Elstree studios (a nightmare, given the traffic going in and out to film Eastenders, with several pauses in filming that must have led the cast and director Alan Wareing to tear their hair out). This was not, as it happened, an attempt to get a bit of the old experimental days back into the show but a side effect of the discovery by government health and safety officials of Asbestos in the roof of Television Centre that meant six weeks of repairs plus cleaning (how perfect: this story of all stories is made better because of a quick money-saving scheme put in place in the 1960s that was accidentally poisoning people – you couldn’t make it up. It wasn’t just TV centre by the way: lots of buildings from the era had the same problem and scientists had only just connected asbestos with lung damage; my high school was forced into temporary huts soon after I went in 1993 and some were still there seven years later!)  With so many TV programmes now homeless (there was a curious edict from Grade that the shows all had to be filmed on BBC property that he wouldn’t relax even in the midst of pandemonium) and Dr Who far from high on the priority list in this era JNT was ordered to cancel the show, even though all the location filming had been finished; recorded on near enough the tenth anniversary of the abandoned 4th Dr story Shada’ things looked ominous. But JNT refused to accept defeat. Even if he is made out to be the head clown who seems to hate his own show, this is the producer’s finest hour: he held the fragmenting ship together, kept putting pressure on the BBC to find alternatives and got this story made through sheer will power. JNT might not have always understood it but this story is evidence that he really did love this show and often went through hell to keep it going. It was designer David Laskey who had the brainwave that saved the show though: he’d come up with all sorts of ideas for how to erect a mock-up tent in a TV studio, but why not just build a giant tent and put in on BBC property somewhere? He re-worked his sketches (made when attending a clown convention in Brighton that happened to be on in just the right week!) with materials that were more lightweight and portable than planned and came up with the inventive idea of adding plastic insulation to the outside of the tent and painting it bright colours – this acted as a windbreak that would keep extraneous sound to a minimum. All they needed now was somewhere practical to put it. JNT argued hard with his bosses, trying to have the show made on a field next to the motorway (so all cast and crew could get to it easily) and then when he was told it absolutely had to be on BBC property having the tent erected temporarily in the Blue Peter garden. Finally he came up with the brainwave of going to Elstree where they had a gigantic car park that was barely used and (relatively) quiet. Ironically this is where the BBC’s biggest budget shows tended to be filmed (I love the irony that the closest Who ever got to recording taking place inside was an episode about how unloved the series was, filmed on the ground outside). Problem solved!

Even so, it was a fraught recording session and touch and go whether they would get it done at all: there are, in fact, a couple of shots that were never filmed because the last day over-ran (though as episode four was over-running anyway they might well have been cut). The delay meant they only had a week to erect the tent, build the sets, device a way of getting power outside without using a noisy generator, add a wooden floor so the ground would be even for the cameras with a carpet placed on top to muffle the sound plus wood shavings for atmosphere, while poor director Alan Wareing (a newbie in this role who’d just taken the director’s course, though he’d worked on the show before) had hardly any time to block out his new shots and work out where he could possibly put the cameras so they wouldn’t get in the way while seeing all the action (far easier in a studio with cutaway walls than it is inside a giant tent). That wasn’t the end of the panic either as a series of calamities hit the show: the original production manager had to quit at the absolute last minute after a family crisis, leaving JNT’s unofficial boyfriend Gary Downie to take over (so that’s a new director and an untried production manager at work on the same programme). There was a huge delay when Jessica Martin as Mags lost one of her costly prosthetic fangs in the sawdust. The rather wonderful 1/12 scale model of the tent used on location was accidentally blown up without the cameras recording and a big money shot had to be scrapped. A scene that had the Chief Clown talking to Captain Cook in his ‘cage’ went badly wrong when the door accidentally slammed shut on actor Ian Reddington’s head, breaking two teeth (he was most put out to hear a stage hand proclaim ‘I told you that would happen!’) Captain Cook himself, T P McKenna, set off an old and painful injury to his ankle doing a stunt. Everyone felt the hot lights far more than normal given they were that much closer to them – and then the weather outside grew into the biggest heatwave seen in years. Out of desperation the crew worked five days in a row without a break – the single longest unbroken ‘block’ of production iof the entire 20th century run of the show. 

This was all as close to the make-do-and-mend approach of the show’s early days as later years ever got – and yet everyone got through it. Heck, more than that – unlike other Who stories where you can tell something went badly wrong behind the scenes (‘Warriors Of the Deep’ and ‘Terminus’ spring to mind) everyone gave their all to make this story work and it shows, it really does. Had ‘Greatest Show’ been recorded in a studio as planned it wouldn’t have seemed anywhere near as real or alive as this one does. There’s a ‘holiday’ feel about this one, a ‘this-could-go-wrong-at-any-moment’ frisson of excitement we just wouldn’t have got in a studio. It could have been shambolic and had, say, ‘Time and the Rani’ been shot this way (to name the runt of the McCoy litter) the problems could all have just made a bad story worse, but no: this is a story that everyone making it cares so much about and you can tell. 

Ace is perfect for this story, a companion whose more contemporary than any companion we’d had in years and near-enough Generation X herself, giving a sly 1980s acerbic take on events (she hates circuses for a start, finding them ‘false’ and anachronistic to her harder-edged realist Thatcheristic world) but with a big enough heart to still really care for these characters. Though written originally for Mel this story wouldn’t work anything like as well with a different companion (though weirdly enough Bonnie Langford is younger by a year: Mel is your archetypal boomer hippie companion though, for all her supposed IT knowhow, always believing the best in everyone past the point of stupidity; indeed Jessica Martin is more known as an impressionist than an actor and one of her most beloved parodies was Bonnie as ‘Violet Elizabeth’, a spoilt goodie two shoes wh doesn’t know the joke’s on her). Sophie Aldred’s acting, as she has to watch Bellboy die, is heartbreaking (it’s one of the most moving deaths in Who, actually far more so than Adric’s, because he knows he’s going to death and everyone around it knows it too, but need his plan to work so much they don’t dare stop him). This show is an even better fit for Sylvester McCoy, an actor who started his career being the ‘freak’ in circuses for real and he gets to do all the magic tricks he did in his real life again not for children like he used to but for a crowd of Ragnarok statues waiting with the extermination cancellation button for any show that doesn’t make the, uhh, ‘Grade’. Everyone is giving the shirt off their back for this story, going the extra mile in some of the most horrendous circumstances any Dr Who story was ever made in – which very nearly happened, after the explosives expert got a bit too carried away being outdoors and the explosion that blows the tent up in episode four is way biggest than it should have been, thanks to a miscalculation with pyrotechnics on the air mortars they were using (ever the pro, you see McCoy flinch momentarily but then walk away because he knows they’re never going to be able to shoot it again – he said later he wasn’t sure if he had any shirt or hair left until filming stopped and he could look down!) The regulars really did go through hell making this story, not least having to eat the stall lady’s disgusting food for real (a concoction of mango, corn and custard – without the fish fingers – that isn’t acting on their faces in those scenes but real horror!)

There’s some perfect casting elsewhere in this story too: TP McKenna goes effortlessly from pitiable old man to snarling manipulative zombie (he was actually the invention of Ben Aaronovitch, helping out during meetings for ‘Remembrance’ when Wyatt needed a character for Mags to talk to in episode one but the latter loved writing for him so much he just couldn’t bring himself to kill him off: his original draft ends with a scene of the zombie Captain getting up from the crumpled circus tent and carrying on ‘Did I ever tell you about the time?...’), Rico Ross’ rapping ringmaster is nothing on the page without his sadistic glee, ‘modernising’ a show he doesn’t understand, one of the most deliciously evil creations we ever get in Dr Who. Ian Reddington is an excellent chief clown: it’s the sort of role you’re surprised didn’t go to a celebrity acting against type (the way he leers ‘let me entertain you’ makes you think, for an awful moment, they’ve cast a young Robbie Williams) but he’s perfect at balancing halfway between person and robot, his smiles coming at all the wrong times and never reaching his cold dead eyes. Jessica Martin’s werewolf is one of those supporting characters you long to come back (as indeed she did in 2022 for Big Finish), the ‘1988’ equivalent of Susan, appearing like your everyday teenager but manipulated by the adults she trusts (maybe even puberty on becoming an adult) to turn into a hairy unthinking monster just like all the rest. The ‘hippies’ who were there in the early days all get their own carefully groomed back stories (and aren’t just wet and drippy, like the fake Thals they could have been). Christopher Guard’s (a one time auditionee for the 7th Doctor, the brother of Dominic Guard who played Olvir in ‘Terminus’ and who had so much fun making this story he persuaded his actress wife Lesley Dunlop to apply for ‘The Happiness Patrol’ ) ‘Bellboy’ is especially interesting if you know your Who (the band, as well as Dr Who): in that group’s 1973 masterpiece ‘Quadrophenia’ (released two months before ‘The Time Warrior’) ‘Bellboy’ is also a symbol of the 1960s generation selling out, as a mod named Jimmy is led on a merry dance of mods and rockers, dreaming of a day when the youth will run the world, only to end up in a deadend job and crushed to find his hero, who always wore the best suits and had the best dances, working as a bellhop at the beck and call of posh rich adults. The Bellboy has traded a life of excitement for one of security and a wage packet because excitement doesn’t pay the bills and keep you fed and Jimmy is distraught that the teenager he once looked up to has become a mockery of everything he once stood for. So it is in this story: the youth of the day who were going to change the world have settled for survival on a planet that could eat them up and spit them out if it so chose, a world that was brought up to love everyone regardless of species struggling to cope in a dog-eat-dog one. Guard, McKenna and Martin has such fun they even wrote their own song to plug the story, with help from composer Mark Ayres, pitching it to BBC Records as a single: they turned it down (probably rightly as its very 1980s and makes ‘Doctor In Distress’ sound timeless by comparison with an awkward rhymes of ‘us’ and ‘circus’: it’s on the DVD with a ‘highlights’ reel of shots from the story and makes you wonder if we could have had a song for all this era’s stories: ‘Omega leant the Doctor a ‘hand’ and now the Dalek spaceship’s been banned. But what was it all planned?!’ ‘There’s some paratroopers and a Queen and lots of to-ing and fro-ing, but only the Doctor knows where everyone’s been…and where we’re going’ ‘Well I got the blues at the crossroads of Signus Alpha, fell down on my knees, but all I got for my trouble was an execution, some Pipe People and some fleas’).  

A quick word too for composer Mark Ayres who ends up writing a full 82 minutes of music for this story – the longest by far of a Who story that’s in four parts (or less). This is his first score for a show he’ll become synonymous with and he nails the brief: ‘Greatest Show’ would have been awful had the music been as light and bright and comic as, say, the one for ‘Delta and The Bannermen’ (a big reason why so many people assume that actually quite dark story is a comedy). But what Ayres managed to do is add just enough sense of subversion and nastiness underneath the fairground tones, with a hint of robotics in the synths he uses to represent the many robots working in the circus. It’s clearly the sound of someone whose actually paid a lot of thought to the visuals he’s accompanying and the one great tragedy of all this is that Ayres, who still has a lot to do with the show (including cleaning up the sound on fan-taped copies of missing episodes and occasional new linking music cues– I won’t mention ‘The Daleks In Colour’ fiasco if you don’t) arrived in the Dr Who story so late. We really needed him in the post-Dudley Simpson years! The soundtrack of ‘Greatest Show’ rightly became the backbone of the first Dr Who soundtrack CD, along with choice extracts from ‘Fenric’. 

By the end, when hippie Deadbeat recovers his ‘real’ persona as ‘Kingpin’ and helps the Doctor and Ace take back control of the circus, restoring the magic that used to be there, you want to cheer: if ever there was a turning point when Dr Who got properly good again, after five, maybe as many as ten years in the doldrums, then this was it: this is a show that’s in it for all the right reasons again, that sprinkles a little of that magic that made Dr Who so good and so brave in its early days all over the top. I wouldn’t say its faultless: you can tell that a few scenes are under-rehearsed, there are too many characters to get to know and love, a last minute decision to turn this from a three part story into a four part means we get a very leisurely first episode (Wyatt was desperate to keep the first cliffhanger intact) and while it’s fun when McKenna turns from a pompous old bore into a monster that still means we get half a story where he’s meant to irritate the pants off you. We’ve had far better werewolf transformations on TV, such as the only other one in Dr Who ‘Tooth and Claw’ – that has the opposite problem that it looks like a proper werewolf yet doesn’t act like one whereas Mags is how they should be presented, as a human desperately trying to stay human and not descend into an animal). The Gods of Ragnarok are a great idea underused: they merely appear towards the end and we never find out much about them, as if Wyatt had plans to use them more fully and simply ran out of space for their backstory but he needed a big finale so left them in and the statues themselves aren’t all that convincing either (all the more so given that these are meant to be beings as powerful as any we’ve seen in the series so far). Some of McCoy’s magic tricks do go on a bit (though in a witty line the Ragnarok Gods have taste enough to point this out!) I’m sad we never got to see a Squonk, an animal abandoned after Wyatt’s first draft and the sort of thing Vicki would have adopted and brought onto the Tardis as a Pet (we need more cute animals in this series. And no, a shape-shifting penguin and a rob robotic dog aren’t quite the same thing). The very 1980s graphics when the Doctor is trying to break into the Ragnarok tent looked horribly dated even at the time and don’t help McCoy’s tendency to gurn when he isn’t given any lines to speak. Many people find Gian Sammarco’s Whizzkid irritating too (just after his breakout role as Adrian Mole) but honestly I love the gag that he’s a little like every Dr Who fan you’ve ever met, able to reel off a list of facts and stats at a moment’s notice rather than simply enjoy being entertained. Including me, I have to confess (I even had those same glasses). He also gets some of the best lines of the show, about the circus ‘not being as good as it was in the old days’ (surely a direct riposte to JNT’s repeated comments to the press that the old stories weren’t all that and ‘the memory cheats’ if we thought they were any better than the ones he was making!)

Like many a Dr Who story in the Cartmel years it doesn’t have the time or the budget to match its ambition and at times it looks silly and childish, a look often at odds with its grim tone (something common to a lot of McCoy stories). But in this adventure, more than any other in the 1980s, that’s OK because this is a story about how people hide their true selves by pretending to be the opposite of who they are and which is daring to dream big again even when all things are against you and, honestly, this story wouldn’t have half the impact it has if everything was slick and perfect. Often in the 1980s Dr Who is unsettling because it’s gaudy and false but this story is unsettling in all the best ways – not least because we are the Gods of Ragnarok, demanding entertainment over the ’truth’. Well sometimes, when a story is really special, it manages to be both. Dr Who is often at its best when filled with an array of colourful weirdoes and I still think that this is one of the greatest shows ever put out by the greatest show in the galaxy and one that’s severely under-rated, a deadly serious story about clowns, a sharp and barbed commentary pretending to be entertainment and a big top show that’s pretending to be small even when its set in a big top and covers some of the most important themes the show ever tackled. We were robbed of so many stories like this one when Dr Who was taken off the air a year later by ringmasters and Ragnarok Gods alike who just didn’t get what scripts like this one and the others around it were trying to do. If you’re psychic enough to understand what message this circus is trying to tell you, though, it’s one of the best bits of television that ever there was, not just in Dr Who – and none the worse for the fact that, at its core, this is a story that’s all about television to begin with. I love Who when its brave and yes, as this story points out, it hadn’t been brave in a while (‘Caves Of Androzani’ is the last story to truly challenge both the Doctor and viewers back in 1983) and this story is one of the bravest, if only for pointing out that DW is no longer as brave as it was. More than anything this story is gloriously, over-powerirngly ‘real’, despite the artificial circus setting, despite the silly clowns, despite the rather awkward comedy opening: in this story real things happen to people who feel like they’re real and the regulars’ re-actions to those, of grief and numb horror, are real too in a way we haven’t seen for years. May this circus never leave town again: more than perhaps any other story ‘Greatest Show’ is about how important a show like Dr Who is to us and how, even when the wrong people are in charge of it for the wrong reasons, it can still bring hope and joy and imagination and magic to our lives. On this evidence they should have sent in the clowns to make it more often. 

POSITIVES+ The first cliffhanger is brilliant but in a way that works quite unlike any other cliffhanger the show ever had. The Doctor asks Ace if she wants to visit the circus, while knowing full well that she hates clowns (indeed, this is a story – like ‘Curse Of Fenric’ and ‘Ghostlight’ – where the Doctor seems to be manipulating events surely so Ace has to confront her phobias; just look at his sly grin in the Tardis when he goads her into visiting the circus against her better judgement). She doesn’t want to let the Dr down though and a part of her still believes in magic so she umms and aahs, making her mind up about whether to stay or leave. What she can’t see, but what the audience can, is that in the circus a teenage girl who looks just like her has been transformed into a werewolf for a bunch of sadistic clowns to gawp at and Ace just might be next. You’re screaming at her in turn not to go in, to keg it back to the Tardis and run, but equally you can’t wait to see what happens to her next week when she finally agrees. Now that’s how you write a cliffhanger!

NEGATIVES - Two characters that belong back in the ‘silly’ days of season 24 are hairy biker ‘Nord’ and comedienne Peggy Mount’s stallslady, that bygone day of a year earlier when Who had wobbled the most from what it was originally meant to be with its odd guest casts, broad comedy and pantomime feel (JNT loved putting pantos on and casting Dr Who actors in them every Christmas). Given that neither character need to be there for the plot (they’re just caricatures the Dr and Ace meet on their way to the circus) and disappear soon after I’ve often wondered if this is Wyatt’s pointed comment about what Dr Who had turned into during McCoy’s first year, a place where cliched one-note aliens do their party pieces, complete with a deeply off-beam sense of what the ‘youth of the day’ were like, all motorbikes and insults to old ladies, and utterly bonkers stunt guest casting (Peggy tries hard, more than Beryl Reid did in ‘Earthshock’ anyway, but it’s obvious she hasn’t got a clue what her lines are all about. It won’t surprise you to learn this is the only scifi entry on her CV). Daniel Peacock, as Nord, meanwhile, speaks in such a ‘comedy Dr Who acting’ voice that it does something ‘orrible to my ears (if he looks familiar to you that’s his brother Harry playing ‘Proper Dave’ in ‘Silence In The Library/Forest Of The Dead’). Very clever and entirely keeping with the theme of the rest of the story, but we still have to sit through it and I suspect these opening scenes put a lot of people off this story by assuming it was going to turn out just like all the others. Oh and there’s either some line that cut from the script or the design team made a whacking mistake: the boards round the ‘Psychic Circus’ read ‘PS’: Shouldn’t it be ‘PC’? 

BEST QUOTE: ‘That’s what you like isn’t it? Taking someone with a touch of individuality and imagination and wearing them down to nothing in your service’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: One of the more blatant Big Finish sequels around, ‘Psychic Circus’ (2020), release #261 in the range’s main Who series, is once more written by Stephen Wyatt (for the first time in 34 years!) and reunites the 7th Doctor and Ace with Kingpin and The Chief Clown (played by the ‘proper’ actors to boot!) but the big news is that The Psychic Circus is under new ownership…The Master! (The James Dreyfuss incarnation only heard on audio). It makes sense: who else would exploit hippie idealism for his own nefarious ends? Set after the events of ‘Greatest Show’ and the planet Zamayatin has desperately to distance itself from its wayward chaotic past nd the refugee circus performers with a world based on structure and rigid conformity. It’s not unlike post WW1 Germany, just the right sort of vacuum for a tyrant like The Master to fill in fact. The hippies, meanwhile, want to travel the stars in a cosmic shuttle escaping all rules, but to do that they need money and a bunch of in-fighting kicks the downfall that led to ‘Greatest Show’ all over again. It’s a clever idea and a natural sequel, but this is one of those Big Finishes that follows the original so closely there doesn’t seem much of a point for it to exist except ‘ooh I remember this bit’ and ‘oh that’s clever’; after all there’s not just ‘Psychic Circus’ links here but a long detour set on Wyatt’s other Who planet ‘Paradise Towers’, which is a bit too much continuity even for me. 

Though less closely linked as a sequel another Big Finish story ‘The Monsters Of Gokroth’ (2019, #250 in the main range) fills you in on what happened to Mags after leaving the psychic circus – for three stories she actually travels in the Tardis as the 7th Doctor’s companion! The return of Jessica Martin is a highlight of this story which features many more werewolves, albeit not from Vulpana but the first world of the title. The werewolves are certainly more convincing on audio than the ones on TV in ‘Tooth and Claw’ but the story’s a bit ‘fairytale’ for my tastes and lacks the earthiness of ‘Greatest Show’. 

That story was swiftly followed by ‘The Moons Of Vulpana’ (2019, #251) in which Mags asks to see the ‘golden past’ of her planet in ‘The Golden Millennium’ before her kind turned into werewolves. Only he’s got his timings slightly out ( no change there then…) and gets bittern by one of the recently transformed natives. Disaster! The plot then goes a bit weird as the planet turns out to be another of those medieval ones we see in Who sometimes  (Mags spends a lot of the story learning to dance for a big ballroom sequence) but there is a nice tension leading up to a grand finale.

Mags’ final story sees her reunited with Ace in the wittily titled ‘An Alien Werewolf In London (2019, #252), my favourite of the trilogy. This story really does have the flavour of ‘Greatest Show’ albeit updated for another time (though set in the 1990s it feels very 2010s). London’s Camden Lock has a burgeoning alternate scene that to modern ears sounds much like last decade’s trend for hipsters, although they’re secretly vampires, the Feratu. Ace is hypnotised into leading her old friends into danger while thinking she’s searching for treasure but the Doctor is back to his scheming best and one step ahead of them, perhaps even deliberately taking Mags along with him to make sure he has a werewolf of his own to fight back with (vampires and werewolves traditionally don’t mix very well, despite sharing a flat in ‘Being Human’). This is one of those stories that manages to be both whimsical and harrowing and while the plot is firmly out of control by the end you still find yourself emotionally invested in these characters. Intriguingly Mags is still in board the Tardis at the end, though to date this is the last we’ve heard of her, with the events of the plot leading her to lose the ‘monster’ inside her. 

Previous ‘Silver Nemesis’ next ‘Battlefield’