‘Paradise’ is the first of a fun of stories
written by writers who were young enough to have had Dr Who as background noise
all their lives. After the false start with the ‘old guard’ that was Pip and
Jane Baker’s ‘Time and The Rani’ (the last Who script of the original run to be
written by anyone middle aged or over) ‘Paradise Towers’ is always greeted as
the first story by the ‘fresh blood’ that new script editor Andrew Cartmel
breathed into the series, youngsters as young and hungry and unemployed and as
fed up with living under Thatcher as he was. Actually it isn’t: Stephen Wyatt
was indeed young and new enough to TV to remember what being unemployed felt
like, but he’d got a play on TV (the much admired ‘Claws’, a sort of cross
between ‘Paradise’ and ‘Survival’ about a group of women at a cat version of crufts
who spend their time domesticating their felines and taking out their claws,
only to go feral and rip their human competition to shreds) and he was producer
John Nathan-Turner’s discovery, hired before Cartmel was. After all season 23
had been a disaster, not just ratings-wise but behind the scenes: regular
writer Bob Holmes had died and former script editor Eric Saward had just
destroyed JNT with a hugely critical interview in American scifi magazine
Starburst, taking most of the Dr Who contact book with him when he went. While
the Bakers remained loyal JNT was horrified to find that he had no other
regulars on the books to hire. So, to his eternal credit, JNT decided that if
he couldn’t get any big names of today then he would find the big names of tomorrow,
going through the unsolicited manuscripts sent in at random to the BBC’s script
office until he found ‘Claws’ and loved it. Wyatt had, as it happened, been a
big Dr Who fan in his youth and only too happy to get all the work he could to
build up his growing reputation and if he knew about Dr Who’s low reputation
amongst the BBC officials that didn’t stop him writing for a story he’d once
loved.
The pair don’t seem like natural soulmates:
JNT, you suspect, quite liked the 1980s with his bright and exotic Hawaiian
shirts and spending your days hob-nobbing with the rich and famous while
pretending you were having a great time at all times. Wyatt, though, was that
bit younger and that bit less protected from the horrors of what living under
Thatcher and done to him and his peers in Gen X. He’d grown up on a diet of
baby boomer platitudes that all you needed was love and that everything would
be alright if you were kind to your brother and sister and that live was
plentiful and good, only to discover the one in charge kept taking things away
in the name of the economy: the free milk at school, the jobs of his friends’
parents, the sense of Britain ever having a future again, Dr Who very much
included. JNT was indeed a little unsure of what he’d got himself into,
especially when Wyatt said he’d given up watching Dr Who when Jon Pertwee took
over and that he hadn’t seen the show in seventeen years. Wyatt was persuaded
to watch ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ just going out as an idea of what the show had
become and was quite horrified: this didn’t seem like the show he remembered;
heck Gallifrey didn’t even have a name the last time he’d watched an episode.
Still, though, he had a bash, quickly learning timelord mythology and cobbling
together a ‘Trial’-like story based around Gallifreyan mythology and who The
Doctor might be. JNT murmured something encouraging then left Wyatt in the
hands of his other new discovery Cartmel. The script editor hated the drafts,
which represented everything he was trying to get away from but Wyatt was
relieved: this wasn’t the sort of Dr Who writer he wanted to write either.
Instead the two met up (Cartmel impressed that Wyatt came to his office to
introduce himself rather than treating him like the new junior partner) and had
great long talks about everything: the state of television, the state of
Britain, the state of the world, where everything had gone wrong. The trouble
was how to get that version of Dr Who into a series that had gone into a
completely different direction until Cartmel asked Wyatt who his favourite
writer was. J G Ballard was the answer, a writer who wrote not scifi but
contemporary fiction about power struggles, including a rather good little book
named ‘High Rise’ that seemed like a premonition for the 1980s with its tale of
(quite literal) social climbing as the working class of a tower block try and
keep it running for horrific wages from their cramped rooms in the basement
while being bullied by the posh people in their penthouse suites at the top. In
the book the ‘middle class’ in the middle tier gets squeezed out, committing
suicide en masse after finding they can’t pay the exorbitant new fees after
inflation and scared of moving down to the bottom, which crashes the economy
and leaves the rich stranded at the top. In the end the tower block agree to
share the workload and work together (in a very Dr Who manner)…before declaring
war on the tower block next door for their resources and starting the whole
cycle over again (in a not very Dr Who manner!) It was Cartmel who said ‘well,
we could do that…’
‘Paradise Towers’ is, if
you know the book, both very similar and very different. The sense of fractured
community comes over very strongly in both works and even though Ballard was
writing when Thatcher was still leader of the opposition it really captures her
style, especially her speeches about how ‘there is no such thing as community
anymore’ and how ‘you have to move around to look for work’, even if it meant
breaking up the family home. However there are specifics Wyatt added that
Ballard would never have considered, making it a far more direct attack. The
world of Paradise Towers has collapsed with the end of the nuclear family. In
‘Towers’ the men have been taken off to fight a war, with the residents moved
out of their natural homes (we never find out where but it could be earth for
all we know) and sent to live in a concrete monstrosity that just happens to
look like the sort of ‘overspill’ towns that had been created in Britain for
real in the 1950s and 1960s around busy cities, with people from dying towns
encouraged to move there in order to be closer to work while the shops and
industries took up more of the city centres. Places like Milton Keynes,
Telford, Skelmersdale were all built like this with the promise of being ‘new’
and ‘exciting’ places to live – but they were also cheap and built in a hurry,
in big square concrete boxes with no room for greenery or scenery and in flats
that looked identical, with no character or thought to the people living there.
They were cheap commodities, treated like cattle to keep the industries open.
Above all they were incredibly ugly (it’s always struck me as odd how cold grey
and sterile 1960s architecture is compared to their colourful music, arts and
TV programmes) and seemed to be growing more ugly with age as, by the 1980s,
many began to fall into disrepair (they had never been built to last, by and
large, but were a short term fix to what was hoped would be a short term
problem than became a long term one). The joke of the day was that the
architects who built them made so much money that they could afford to live
somewhere posh and pretty, far away from their own horrific creations
(Lindisfarne take several pot-shots at the architects of Newcastle on their
1970s albums, for instance; it’s not much of a leap to turn him into an evil Dr
Who monster and trap him in the basement). To Thatcher and her ilk the
‘problem’ with community was that the people in them were misbehaving and that
this was all their ‘fault’ because they were acting ugly. But to an empathetic
generation like Wyatt, who’d grown up on baby boomer promises that life would
be better, they were themselves the reason so many people were becoming ugly: because
all they had was ugliness to stare at every day with no prospects and no
future, a life where because risking a life in a grey cold dark prison with
regular meals was often a better prospect than growing up in a cold grey tower
block that felt like a prison in poverty without food. As for the absent or
divorced fathers and single mothers Thatcher berated in her speeches it was
also true that many had simply moved out from the most poverty-stricken areas
because they couldn’t afford to travel home from work every night or pay for
their families to join them. None of which is in ‘High Rise’ at all.
Like ‘High Rise’ though
the real problem with society is indeed the loss of community, the fact that no
‘floor’ seems to know how the other lies and blames them for all their
problems. Everyone in this place is suffering for different reasons: the girl
teenagers (all but one of the boys went to war) are running around in ‘Kangs’ –
‘Kid Gangs’, turned feral with a lack of male role models or anything much
worth behaving for. They’ve created their own artificial sense of belongings by
painting themselves bright primary colours of red, blue and yellow, something a
lot of fans see as referring to football teams but to me reflects the 1980s
school system and ‘house team colours’, that did the very Thatcher thing of
dividing you up into teams and setting your friends and you in competition with
each other. They don’t have any families or anyone to love them so they cling
together for dear life, running round the bottom floors of the towerblock spouting
their own madeup yoof language (that makes more sense than what any real
teenager was speaking in the 1980s) and covering it with their own
‘wallscrawl’, to give themselves a belated sense of identity. They’ve basically
been turned into the stereotype of boys, all macho posturing and aggression, thanks
to this Thatcherist world of survival of the fittest (the first time Dr Who
does a theme that turns up in more stories than not up to the end of the
original run), arguably the first true representation of ‘Gen X’ character in
the series now that this generation were
coming of age. As for the boys, the elderly caretakers (and they were all meant
to be elderly in the original script, OAPs long past fighting age so they
weren’t called up) have seized all the power and gone to town with it, becoming
ever more pedantic about the ‘rules’ that have to be enforced, forgetting that
those rules were originally created to offer safety and stability to people, to
help them not punish them. The caretakers have lost all sight that their job is
in the name, to take care of people – instead they’ve become a typical 1970s Dr
Who world of bureaucrats, sucking out fun and hope with their petty rules and
harsh punishments for every minor infraction. The Kangs are all scared, but to
be scared is to show weakness which means you’re first in the queue to get
squashed, so that just makes them tougher.
The ‘middle’ floors, meanwhile, are a great spoof of Ballard’s original:
instead of middle-class business men they’re ‘rezzies’, residents who are
retired elderly ladies who look as if they’re totally the wrong people to
survive in this world. And yet, on first transmission in 1987, they’re the ‘war
generation’ who grew up as survivors
toughened up by everything they saw, so they come through it the best in many
ways, feeding off prey and turning into cannibals while acting outwardly sweet
and frail (and looking as if they’re no threat). The plot twist is even
borrowed from baby boomer series (and Dr Who originator) The Twilight Zone and
the episode ‘To Serve Man’ (where we’re invited to dinner by benevolent seeming
aliens and turn out to be the main course). That just leaves Pex, the character
we’re most meant to identify with, a little older than the Kangs (so he’s a
baby boomer?) and who survives the age by doing all the things Dr Who taught us
to do: running away from war, letting the bad guys trip each other, vow to
protect those weaker than him. Nobody is talking to each other, nobody knows
each other, everyone is afraid of each other, everyone blames each other for
the mess they’re in.
Only Wyatt and Cartmel
don’t have the reverence for Dr Who that their elders did (not yet anyway): Dr
Who isn’t the solution, it’s a sign of the problem. How can a programme like
this survive into the Thatcherist age, when it stands for all the values the
Thatcher era despises so? It turns out that the series didn’t prepare the
people who grew up watching it for how to live in a world like this: it’s an
anachronism, a reminder of the days when people could afford to have hope and
optimism for the future. It doesn’t belong here anymore. So Pex is ridiculed,
an idiot who only pretends to be tough and is really a ‘cowardly cutlet’, too
scared to fight a war with his brothers, too scared to fight off any of the
‘paradise Towers’ baddies, a boy who needs protecting from the girls (back in
the days before David Tennant was the Doctor it was a given that the Dr Who
fanbase was mostly male and never more than in the late 1980s when the fanbase
dwindled). It’s clearly the world seen from the eyes of an entirely different
perspective we’ve never had on the show before: sure we’ve had other
totalitarian regimes before but always ever there somewhere, as something the
world might turn into one day here – we’ve never had a world quite as baldly
reflecting our own before, one that’s a mere tweak away from similar collapse.
More by chance than design though ‘Paradise’ feels more like traditional Dr Who
than anything the show had tried to create for years, since Malcolm Hulke’s political
commentaries indeed– this is a story firmly back in the tradition of how it had
been when Wyatt had last watched it. We’ve said in this work lots of times
already that Dr Who was almost the only programme in the 1960s that the whole
family sat down to watch and that a lot of writers spoke about their hopes and
fears for the future when their children grew up and took over, to both
extremes of the spectrum (the hippie utopia of a planet revolting and rules by
everyone under thirty in ‘The Space Museum’; the hippies getting annihilated by
bigger baddies in ‘
The Dominators’
and everywhere in between). It’s a formula the show hadn’t really done since Troughton
became Pertwee in 1970 and the children grew up and took over for real. But
here suddenly is the same argument from the perspective of another generation,
that the children of the 1960s mucked things up (something discussed even more
at length in Wyatt’s other Who story ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’, about a
bunch of aging hippies running a circus and selling out to a monster). And in
that moment Dr Who feels more like Dr Who than it has in years. Even when it’s
a story that in many ways attacks Dr Who. It’s pretty much unique: sure there’s
a handful of programme that have been around as long as Dr Who up to this point
(twenty-four years) but how many would offer full creative control to two
writers who were children when the first episode went out? For his part JNT
seems to have sensibly stayed away and let the pair get on with it.
The Doctor, of course,
famously lives everywhere and nowhere. Sensibly the writers don’t just make The
Doctor repulsed and turn him into an old fuddy-duddy; actually The Kangs take
to him from the first as he does what no one seems to have tried to do with
these feral kids: talk to them on their level and try to make things better for
them. Of course The Doctor does his usual thing at overthrowing a corrupt
system and making it better but he does so in a very different kind of way to
anything that’s ever been done before, Cartmel and Sylvester McCoy both
instinctively working out to play this Doctor and re-shape him from the generic
concussed one of ‘Time and The Rani’. It’s lucky that this story came next in
the run, both production block and writing, as it really shapes his character
to come: on first sight he appears silly, a walking hippie from the olden days
when people could afford to make stupid jokes and weren’t fighting for every
meal. But inside it all The Doctor is a survivor. Your programme doesn’t last
24 years without you rolling with the punches and changing when you need it to
so The Doctor also proves his steel for the first time in a long time (‘
Caves Of Androzani’?), proving that he can survive in a survival of
the fittest world by being the most hardass sneaky manipulative regeneration
seen so far. In any earlier story that would have seemed weird; even in some of
the later ones it can be a bit odd if you watch stories at random. However it
makes sense in this world: The Doctor isn’t dealing with flatout invasions
anymore but manipulative warped beings who need to be played at their own game
and outsmarted by their own rules. The moment the 7
th Doctor truly
comes into being is the moment, largely improvised by McCoy, where instead of
taking away a guard’s weapon he talks him out of it, daring him to shoot and
then explaining why he never will because he’s better than that (one last bit
of hippie wisdom?)
Mel is a different sort of conundrum. Wyatt is on record as
saying that he struggled to write for her because her earlier stories were
pretty generic as a bubbly character without much depth to her and the
‘production bible’ for her character written by JNT wasn’t much help: I mean
what do you do with a computer programme who lives in a place called Peas
Pottage? Ace, would have added a touch of realism to this unlikeliest of
worlds, the way she later will with the similarly dark-yet-neon ‘Happiness
Patrol’, but she’s not here yet – instead its Bonnie Langford, who is to film
noir what neon 1980s aerobics leggings are to black eye-shadow, and she has to
scream and over-enunciate just to keep up with all the larger-than-life
characters. And yet Wyatt uses Mel better than any other writer though I think
by making her the last of the baby boomers, with all the things that they were
told to be growing up: courteous, polite and kind. It’s hard to imagine any
other companion on this world but for Mel especially it’s an awakening; she
tries hard to be nice to everyone she meets, to cheer them up, to tell them
that things will get better, that peace
will out man (though she’s very much not a hippie that’s her philosophy; that
if you’re kind to others the world will be a better place, with a dash of 1980s
aerobics thrown in for good measure). Mel so very nearly pays for that with her
life: her politeness sees her nearly eaten by cannibals, her bubbly enthusiasm
sees her cheerfully get into a pool despite three whole episodes of things
trying to kill her and she doesn’t make friends with the Kangs who could save
her the way the Doctor does, because she’s a little confused by them; surely
nothing can be that bad? Her helpfulness only makes a distrustful world
suspicious of her. Even more than The Doctor she represents this series and
what it used to be. It works rather well I think, especially when she becomes a
double act with Pex, the department block’s one lone boy who says he’s
protecting her, when actually Mel’s kindness means she ends up protecting him
and being there for him in a way no one else has ever been. Usually in Dr Who
stories its being around The Doctor who makes people better versions of
themselves but here it’s Mel who inspires Pex to make his brave last stand and
sacrifice, earning the belated respect of his peers. Had Wyatt and Cartmel done
the obvious and really laid into this series in this story it wouldn’t work,
but throughout it runs that sense that, even if Dr Who’s values don’t work in
this world anymore, they are the right ones and we should have listened to
them.
Funnily enough Wyatt had
never lived in a tower block, but he did have friends who did and said later
that another inspiration for this story was going to call on them and walking
into a lift to press the buttons for the right floor, only to find the ‘gangs’
of kids that lived there had pressed every button on getting out so that his
journey was an endless one, as the lift stopped at every floor before the one
he wanted. It struck Wyatt that, even though these flats all looked the same
the people there didn’t; he sensed an almost sort of hierarchical system of
those without and those without much but with something. It seems to have
struck him as odd that they were angry and prejudiced against each other rather
than the common enemy of capitalism that farmed them all out to this same
concrete monolith in the first place. Its that eye for detail that makes
‘Towers’ seem ‘real’ with lots of little details that make this world come
alive more than most we visit, despite the sketchy background details: the
garbled phrases passed on across decades that have lost all meaning like ‘no
ball games no visitors’ (a very 1980s tower block set of rules, sucking even
the meagre fun left to the people away), the ‘build high for happiness’
advertising slogan turned into a mockery of itself, the ‘one potato two potato’
gang greeting, even the Kang names (they have no parents so have named
themselves after objects as good urban kids would do). Some of the more
successful parts of ‘Paradise Towers’ comes from that idea that you can’t trust
anyone, that no one has your back, that there’s a deadly danger around every
corner; neighbour jealousy taken to extremes. At times this setting is almost
mundane: it’s odd to think that in the days before Rose and the Powell estate
Dr Who had never done a tower block in the series before, a slice of ‘real
life’ that seems so at odds with the imagination of Loyhargilof the story
before as its possible to get, a step towards the invention of streetwise
companion Ace. At other times its incredibly weird, with its giant cleaning
robots (as large and unwieldy as ‘The War Machines’, a story Wyatt might well
have watched the first time round) and the evil monster who lives in the
basement. At its best it’s both, reflecting the 1970s trend to make the most
mundane things scary, as little old ladies stab at Mel with their toasting
forks or caretakers aiming guns at The Doctor or the robot that was designed to
clean the pool of germs and now considers any Human who gets into it fair game
(I love the idea that the top floor of this murderous survival of the fittest
tower block is a ‘leisure centre’ that is itself its most deadly floor).
There’s another thought,
too, that ‘Paradise Towers’ is making a political point. Note how the Kangs are
divided up into primary colours, all of whom have been adopted by one of
Britain’s three main political parties: The Conservatives, Labour and the Lib Dems.
All are slightly different: the blue Kangs are more organised but also more
judgemental, the reds are more feral and scattered, as if they’ve seen the
worst of the tower blocks whole the yellows are more moral and courageous – and
more dead (the liberal democrats, Britain’s leftest mainstream party, won’t be
back until Nick Clegg gets into bed with David Cameron to form the Coalition in
2010, the real world equivalent of Mel going into partnership with Kroagnon and
optimistically expecting to live through it without being stabbed in the back).
All them are gangs that are fighting each other instead of trying to solve the
bigger problem, something that seems depressingly familiar to anyone who lived
through the 1980s or indeed the 2010s when it all happened again following a
similar recession. Rather than ‘monsters’ though they’re just kids who don’t
know what they’re doing; the real baddy are the super rich and powerful like
The Great Architect who set the problem up and then simply wandered off. Sadly Kroagnon
is one of the story’s weaker aspects: it ought to be the real personification
of evil when it finally turns up in episode four but its all treated by
‘possession’, with Richard Briers as The Chief Caretaker simply playing it as a
zombie extension of his usual role. It never gets to say much or explain why it
did what it did – plus the fact that this great terrible monster was locked
into a prison that itself designed seems like the biggest stupidest thing to do
to a prisoner since everyone got locked unpin a ‘prison kitchen in ‘
The Ark’: it’s the equivalent of sticking
Christopher Wren in St Paul’s and barring the door while hoping he forgets
where he built the back door, or Gundulf of Rochester, the architect behind
Ther Tower of London, in the tower for building it wrong. Of course there’s no
other way round it: we don’t see the outside of this tower block at all and
this era can’t afford location filming so it needs to go somewhere and Wyatt
sensibly decides to stick it in the basement rather than have it take over the
top floor as per ‘High Rise’. Why have the architect there at all though?
‘Paradise’ was better when the architect behind it all had created his chaos
and then left for somewhere that really was paradise, probably never thinking
about the mess he left behind again.
A lot of things aren’t
quite right in the execution of this story too. The casting is usually one of
Dr Who’s strengths, give or take JNT’s odd bit of celebrity stunting, but
they’re all a colossal misreading of the script this story. The Kangs are meant
to be teenagers, babies when their brothers and fathers and grandfathers went
to war. They’re meant to be desperate and dirty, grazing out of bins and
uncaring about their looks (there are no boys to impress and dirt is a badge of
honour, while who do they have to impress in this world? Plus being pretty and
tidy only gets you teased and bullied, as Mel finds to her cost). Who do they
cast? Actresses who are pushing thirty and have all been to drama school and
talk really posh. They’re all good actresses, with special shoutouts to Julie
Brennan (Fire Escape) who got the job as she was married to Mark ‘Turlough’
Strickson and become friends with JNT who’d been on the look out for a part for
a character her age, Catherine Cusack (daughter of Sinead Cusack) making her TV
debut in a part unlike any she’ll ever play again (the Blue Kang leader,
un-named on screen but called ‘Drinking Fountain’ in Wyatt’s novelisation) and
especially Annabel Yuresha as ‘Bin Liner’, who gets all the worst lines but
somehow gives the best performance. Look out too for an unspeaking Nisha Nayar
as a red Kang extra who gets a much more substantial part eighteen years later
as the ‘female programmer in ‘
Bad Wolf/Parting
Of The Ways’ and thus became only the second person to play a role in both
20
th and 21
st century Who. The caretakers, as said,
should be old and doddery but they need some big names and so they get in two
leading drama-comedians. Richard Briers actually makes a lot of sense as JNT
stunt casting goes: his character Martin in ‘Ever Decreasing Circles’ is
exactly the sort of jobsworth who would have turned into a caretaker, who delights
in following rules and feeling superior when he points out that other people
aren’t. They’re the start of a run of Cartmel era baddies who aren’t evil so
much as rigid, cruel out of their refusal to change with the times and laying
down laws that are out of touch. Only Briers got it into his head that he was
playing Hitler (a man who did like his architecture its true but wasn’t into
petty rules in quite the same way, more big sweeping ideas of genocide) and did
the series as a ‘holiday from acting’, gurning for the cameras and going way
OTT (such was his star power nobody, not even JNT, fully told him to turn it
down though he did drop hints. He’s usually so much better than this: just look
at his subtle performance in Torchwood episode ‘A Day In The Death’ (2008) or
even his period work (his part as presenter in the single greatest children’s
radio series ever despite nobody seeming to remember it anymore, Cat’s Whiskers,
made the year after this is superb – he even has Sylvester McCoy back on the
show when promoting his appearance in pantomime ‘Aladdin’; Nicholas Courtney
turns up in the drama ‘When The Siren Wailed’). The assistant caretaker is miscast too: Clive
Merrison has the gravitas to be either a heroic lead or the baddie and is one
of the greatest actors to ever be in Who (he’s the definitive Sherlock Holmes
in radio four’s other greatest series, its adaptations of all the short
stories, however good Steven Moffat’s series ‘Sherlock’ and Benedict Cumberbatch
might be; he was actually a late replacement for Edward Hardwicke who pulled
out when a film over-ran– Jeremy Brett’s Watson in the TV Sherlocks, though
neither had been cast in their famous roles yet) but he got shafted with two of
Who’s worst parts: this, which only allows him to be craven and toadiesh to the
Great Caretaker and as Jim Callum who has all of two lines in ‘Tomb Of The
Cybermen’. They’re both middle aged rather than elderly and don’t get the notes
to play them in the doddery way Wyatt envisioned. Howard Cooke is a great actor
but he’s all wrong for Pex, the casting director unable to find anyone who matched
the description of a British Arnold Schwarzenegger/Sylvester Stallone type’
where the joke would be that he’s the most genetically macho person in the
tower block whose the weediest one there. Brenda Bruce and Elizabeth Spriggs
are having the time of their life as Tilda and Tabitha, the gently-spoken
friendly cannibals, but they’re not quite right either: you never quite believe
they’re truly vicious. It doesn’t help that their original quite horrific scenes
got trimmed for anyone who saw this story abroad following the Hungerford
Massacre (even though no one beyond Britain had heard of it and even though its
precisely the sort of 1980s killing that has its roots in the death of society and
family this story is talking about).
Other things go wrong
too, badly. This world isn’t as scary as it ought to be. It’s hideously over-lit:
Paradise Towers would be a scary place in the shadows with the lights turned
down after all, who is paying for the lighting?) but here you can see
everything – and what you can see isn’t usually very good. There are times
when, despite the often clever and piercing dialogue, everyone is a walking
talking cliché with The Doctor the only three-dimensional character on screen,
so when he isn’t there you have Bonnie Langford being bright eyed and bushy
tailed against the one-note comedy character Pex and a bunch of Kangs whose
characterisation is basically ‘female gang member’. Even The Doctor at times;
you wish this story had come later in the run when McCoy knew exactly how to
play him rather than siply getting there: cool, brooding, the quiet still
centre around which all hell breaks loose. Sometimes he’s just another clown in
a world of clowns in a story that’s screaming to be taken seriously so his
performance falls a little flat compared to later. As great as the backstory,
as lovingly made as all the little details are, the situation has rather backed
the writer into a corner: there’s no way he could make a world as nasty as this
for a children’s show at Saturday teatime so it turns into a grotesque parody pantomime
one, where nobody feels quite real. Just compare this story back to back with ‘Survival’,
a very similar tale of survival of the fittest in an urban 1980s setting but
those characters are real ones you know exist because you’ve met and talked to
them; everyone in ‘Paradise Towers’ is a grotesque distortion and its harder to
get emotionally invested in those. The
real trouble at the core of ‘Paradise Towers’ is that, after creating such a
realistic world that feels a lot like the one of the people watching at home,
unfortunately there’s no one like the people watching at home running around in
it. While Cartmel actively got what Wyatt was doing and helped to shape it (the
Kangs are his idea) and you can almost see the moment in episode two when it
clicks into shape for McCoy who ups his game, everyone else is clearly
scratching their heads as to what this is, delivering it like some big gaudy
pantomime, with ‘he’s behind you’ moments for the killer sadistic robots. Take
poor Bonnie whose being a trooper, giving it her all even when the script asks
her to swim in a freezing cold pool for hours (the one bit of location
shooting, in Elmswell House, Chalfont St
Giles, that had been deserted for two years with the hot water switched off
long ago, while some fireworks are let off so near her hair she thinks she’s
going to be set alight: she still acts her heart out but clearly hasn’t got the
first idea what this story is all about. ‘Paradise Towers’ is full of examples
like that, people giving their all but in the wrong direction: the caretakers
are a little too tough the Kangs a little too weedy, The Chief Caretaker too
much everything. Even the music makes everything feel flat and artificial, like
you’re stuck in s life watching an informercial (oh and praise where its due –
the informercial for ‘Paradise Towers’ turns up on what appears to all the universe
to be a DVD, a CD with pictures, back in the days when CD-roms weren’t even a
thing yet). Once again its nobody’s fault: Keff McCulloch had got his score in
for ‘Time and The Rani’ in on time and was enjoying a break when he got a
panicked phonecall: the intended score by newcomer David Snell had been
rejected (allegedly for simply repeating the five minute ideas accepted from
the demo tape over and over across the four episodes) and this one needed to be
ready within three days (the first episode at least, but the rest weren’t much
longer). McCulloch again clearly doesn’t understand this story at all and makes
it bright and cheerful and colourful where it should be dark and brooding – but
again he’s trying his best, it’s the 1980s monster of capitalism and deadlines
that have got in his way. You can’t watch good intentions or forever excuse the
problems making a story though, especially when they turn out this bad. Watching
‘Paradise Towers’ doesn’t make you go ‘what a pointed barbed comment on all the
things that went wrong in the 1980s’ it makes you go ‘what childish gibberish’
and go to watch something else; it’s only afterwards you realise that the core
of the story is actually harder hitting than pretty much anything else on telly
in the 1980s about the 1980s by this point.
After all, the fact that
this story is set on an unnamed planet in some unknown date in the future aside
(this is one of the few DW stories where we never find out a location or a
date), this story feels so 1987 it hurts. Even the alien hair wasn’t quite so
ridiculous or far-fetched at the time I seem to remember. Those are the bits
that make it look horrifically dated now, even more than other period stories, while
the pointed barbs at Thatcherism will never hold quite the sting they once did
now that we have different monsters to fight. Nevertheless ‘Paradise’ is a much
under-rated story with a message that still resonates a little more than it
comfortably should showing how nothing has really changed – The Grenfell Tower
tragedy, the mass fire in a block of flats just like this because the council were
skinflints who wouldn’t pay for fire-proof cladding, one shows how little people’s
lives matter so little to the people in charge of housing them while keeping
costs down sometimes that it’s scary. Even the euphemism ‘unalived’ for ‘dead’,
which seemed most odd at the time, makes more sense now everyone uses words like
that to spare trauma and anxiety. It’s such a shame: my heart wants me to
embrace this story’s dark aesthetic, but my brain can’t forget what my eyes
have just seen and how godawful it looks, as big soul-less monsters lumber
around slowly, led by over-acting pantomime villains chasing stage school brats
in brightly coloured hair. The world on screen doesn’t feel like ‘our’ world at
all but the sort of place you only get on bad children’s TV and DW was never
bad children’s TV before this (a few times after maybe) even when it was bad
scifi, the 1980s the monster of excess that inspired this story and which
warped it and made it turn out the way it did. Of all the Dr Who stories I
would love to see re-made this is top of my list; it needs to be dark, subtle,
concrete, monotonous, played for dread and horror and petty political
point-scoring not cheap laughs.
For all its bad parts
though, for all the scenes of old biddies with toasting forks and robot
cleaners and gang culture, I still love this story. No other series would be
brave enough to commission a tale quite this on-the-nose about how sprawling
concrete jungles cut us off from our humanities and leave people nothing to
live for. Few would dare to be as brave in what this episode says about the
political figures who leave the underclasses packed into buildings like this to
rot. Fewer would give you the satisfaction of seeing the hideous authority
figure fed to the very monster he’s been trying to placate or follow such a
dystopian vision of the future with a genuinely happy ending where everyone
agrees to work together and not have it seem trite (well, not much, not often).
Even so, you cheer The Doctor on when he puts things right and encourages the
Kangs to work together to rebuild their home. You still care what happens to
them in the future somehow, even though you didn’t when they were on screen. Many
Dr Who stories have happy endings of course, but they tend to be happy for the
people involved, whereas ‘Paradise Towers’ gave me hope for where I was living
too and as the 4th Doctor will tell you, one solid hope is worth a cartload of
certainties. ‘Paradise Towers’ might be one of those stories I can never, ever
show to a non-fan, because they’ll take the mickey out of the many many things
it gets wrong. Even I do sometimes when I’m in the right/wrong mood. But its also
the sort of story I love for the parts that it gets so right that no other
series would ever put together. All hail the great architect of this story
then, but curse all the people who carried out the architect’s rules so badly –
which, rather fittingly, is exactly what this story is all about.
POSITIVES + Pex is a great character, the only bloke in
the whole building who isn’t a scary caretaker or under the spell of the
monster lurking in the basement. He ought to be having a great time as the only
bloke in a building full of horny young women, yet they’ve ostracised him for
being a coward and running away rather than going to war, for basically being
embracing his feminine side in a world where they’ve all gone masculine (even
though refusing to do what his peers did makes him rather brave in his own way
too). Pex’s redemption and sacrifice (and revival? That’s what the graffiti ‘Pex
lives’ behind the Tardis suggests as it takes off at the end, with both writer
and actor submitting possible ideas afor a sequel that sees Pex survive to lead
th Towers back to prosperity – come on Big Finish where are you?!) is one of
the story’s better elements, even if once again what we get on screen is
nothing compared to how it was written (he was meant to be a big muscly Arnold
Schwarzanegger type not the rather weedy Howard Cooke, whose still about the
best of the actors here but his casting does rather ruin the joke of a tough
guy who no one thinks is tough). Without that twist a lot of the jokes and the
irony don’t work, but even so Pex gives ‘Paradise Towers’ a more believable
human element away from the clowning around.
NEGATIVES - So very very
many, but let’s go with the pool scene. Mel has spent three episodes struggling
to find her way up to the top of ‘Paradise Towers’. She’s survived being
stalked by cannibals with toasting forks, chased by brightly coloured gangs all
fighting one another, almost falling to her death in an elevator and nearly
being steamed alive and yet she’s somehow her normal perky self again by the
time she reaches the top. So what does she do to celebrate still being alive?
She goes for a swim. In a swimming pool that’s part of the building that’s
spent all day trying to kill her. Of course there’s a flipping monster in it
just ijn time for the cliffhanger! What did you think was going to happen?! It’s
particularly annoying because mel apparently hasn’t learned anything, even
though the rest of the story was about how naïve kind gentle and polite people
now have to up their gave if they want to survive, without going the other way
and simply turning into a monster. If a scared Mel had ambushed the robot and destroyed
it then that would have been a far more suitable ending all round (of course if
it had eaten her so we could have had Mel two stories earlier it would have
been a better story yet but that’s by the by…) One little additional
note: if you’ve been watching the swimming pool scenes for the last half hour
scratching your head going ‘I know them from somewhere’ lie I just have then,
believe it or not, they’re the same ones in Morphoton from ‘The Keys Of Marinus’ way back in 1964 that somehow
were still lying around the prop room. Their re-use seems to have been an
accident although the two stories are very similar (this is the world that
everyone is hypnotised into thinking is paradise when the reality is that
everyone is living in tatty clothes and drinking out of dirty coffee mugs). BEST QUOTE: Bin Liner:
‘Hail Pex. Hail the unalive who gave his life for the Towers. In life he was
not a Kang, but in death he was brave and bold as a Kang should be’.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: We’ve
already mention Stephen Wyatt’s return to Dr Who after a (record?) thirty-two
year gap with Big Finish’s ‘The Psychic Circus’ (2020) under ‘The Greatest Show
In The Galaxy’ as that story’s a more obvious antecedent. However Wyatt
cleverly wraps in many threads from his ‘other’ story along the way, especially
in episode two where the 7th Doctor (unusually travelling alone)
takes a detour to the same housing estate (and, just like the psychic circus,
the plot is ambiguous whether we’re there before everything started to go wrong
or after it had been put right). Kingpin’s psychic clown bus has pulled up too
and the local residents are auditioning to be clowns, capitalising on the
planet’s poverty much to the Doctor’s horror. He’s having a bad day all round
as he ends up trapped in a Paradise Tower lift with a robot, just like old/new
times! You expect the Chief Caretaker to turn up any moment now only….(mega
huge spoilers) it turns out that The Master is behind everything, in league
with the Gods of Ragnarok to provide enough acts to entertain them and feeding
off the resulting ‘psychic energy’. That makes total sense actually: the 1960s
and 1970s housing estate slums that inspired Paradise Towers in the first place
feels like they were created by someone with the sadistic qualities of The
Master already. An excellent audio adventure heartily recommended to fans of
either TV story, arguably the best of Big Finish’s 2020s output so far.
