Inferno: Ranking - 10

 

Inferno

(Season 7, Dr 3 with Liz and UNIT, 9/5/1970-20/6/1970, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Don Houghton director: Douglas Camfield (with Barry Letts uncredited)

Rank: 10

   ''Little miss Petra, 

Playing hard to Getta, 

Making her eyes at Greg, 

When along came a primord, 

Who without a word, 

Bit her on her leg 

Now she's big and hairy 

But what she finds so scary 

Isn't what its done to her health 

It's that Greg hasn't noticed 

He hasn't got the remotest 

After all, its 1970 so he's quite hairy himself!'

Had this new version of Dr Who with Jon Pertwee in the lead role not worked out then the series was under the biggest threat of cancellation it had ever been, following falling viewing figures across season six in 1969. When Barry Letts took over as producer in 1970 he knew it was one last throw of the dice: the show was given a dramatically reduced budget (that’s why the Doctor was exiled to Earth as a cost saving device and why so many stories ended up multi-parters) and both he and script editor Terrance Dicks were asked to came up with potential replacement series for the Saturday teatime slot. Now that Sydney Newman, the show’s originator, was no longer in charge at the BBC the show had no extra protection, no second chances; this was one last chance at regeneration and if the viewing figures didn’t go back to where they were then the show would die. It had had a long run after all: seven years was good going for any series, never mind a quirky children’s science-fiction one. Luckily for us the ideas Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks made in their holidays (their joint one was ‘Moonbase 3’) were never as loved and soon got forgotten, but then how could they be? Dr Who is a format so clever and special it doesn’t come around very often and even after seven years this story shows how many new places it could still stretch to. As the last story in season seven ‘Inferno’ could have been the end and if the show was going to go out then it was going out with a bang: the complete and utter destruction of the Earth! Of course writer Dan Houghton, the man who’d once given Terrance Dicks his big breakthrough writing for Crossroads, was never quite going to blow up our Earth or there would be zero chance for any future series at all. However he came as close as anyone connected to Dr Who had ever dared…

One of the things that impresses me most about this series is how so many of the things we think are an obvious, natural, day-to-day part of Dr Who are there from the beginning, even though most of them are so utterly different to anything created for any series ever. Trips to the past? First story. Trips to the future? Second story. Trips that are neither? Third story. Tardis? First story. Daleks? Second story. Bonkers surrealism utterly unlike anything ever seen on television? Third story. Quests? Fifth Story. Monsters who turn out to be less monstrous than Humans? Seventh Story. Plots centred round the life of a companion? Eleventh story. Plots that combine history and future? Seventeenth Story. Even the concept of regeneration (not that they quite called it that yet) that was unprecedented in all of scifi in any medium comes in just the 29th story. Walk any modern fan who swears blindly they’d never watch anything that old back to 1963 and they would still recognise practically every aspect of the show, from the theme tune to the premise to the belief that the universe is a wild and wonderful and amazing place that’s occasionally sad and scary but also pretty brilliant too. For my money the last missing piece of the jigsaw that ends up being your standard Dr Who formula turns up here though, as late as story 64: parallel universes and an Earth that’s about to be destroyed not from a monster but through man’s own greed. As the first story created from scratch by the Barry Letts/Terrance Dicks production team, it’s the last piece of the Dr Who template missing and opens up a while new universe of stories to explore.

  
What seems like a scifi cliché tired writers throw in to brighten a series up now was genuinely daring in 1970 (we’re still a few months away from the superb children’s series ‘Timeslip’ where two plucky teenagers find themselves in alternate pasts and futures, including one that’s as hot as this world thanks to global warming and decades away from ‘Sliders’ where a scientist his teacher, his girlfriend and a random soul singer – don’t ask – visit parallel worlds every week trying to get home just like the first season of Dr Who and in the century before ‘Stargate’ did something similar in stories caught at the exact halfway point between Aliens and Ancient Egyptians). This isn’t just a bit of time-filler either: ‘Inferno’ goes all out, imagining a world that might just be the most scariest ever seen in the series. Because this isn’t a world where unknown monsters are attacking unknown people, this isn’t a world where we know the Doctor is going to fix with a wave of his sonic screwdriver, this is the most terrifying unsolvable thing that any true proper liberal Dr Who fan can imagine: a right-wing government getting into power and moulding the people we love into people we would normally be asked to hate. A lot of Dr Who is about how the Doctor inspires the people around him to be the best versions of themselves, but this story is about how the whole of the environment we grow up in shapes us for good or ill. All that rigid militaristic casual xenophobia has spread even to the people we’ve come to know and love, with a Liz Shaw whose distant, a Benton whose cruel and callous and a ‘Brigade Leader’ whose utterly sadistic. It’s a world only very slightly different to ours after all: Liz has a different hairdo, the Brigadier has an eye-patch and a scar but no moustache (Nicholas Courtney always had his added in makeup and didn’t grow one for real till the reunion stories so that was easy to do) and Benton’s less formal and more, well, primordial even before he becomes a primord (‘Inferno’ is the sort of story where the word ‘primordial’ crops up a lot, as if that shift to the right is more of a step backwards in our evolution). They’re all recognisably like our friends, though, just with their weaknesses exaggerated and their strengths dimmed: Liz has always been a little cold compared to the bleeding hearts the Doctor usually surrounds himself with, a career woman who works for the military under protest but here she’s a block of ice, all too believably the same person in a different environment. Benton has always been loyal and followed orders to the letter without question, which is what makes him such a dependable and courageous ally, but a solider is only as good as the orders they carry out and these are cruel and wrong. As for the Brigadier, he’s settled down from the sharp military brain of the Troughton years into a loveable pompous buffoon who always thinks he knows best but here he’s scary, all that rigidity turned into a monster who refuses to tolerate any ideas that aren’t his own. Even though this is the first Who parallel world story it’s easily the best because we can see how these people ended up here and became so different (as opposed to, say, ‘Rise Of The Cybermen/Age Of Steel’ where it seemed to be a matter of luck and/or commerce). We’re used to being scared of the unknowable monsters but this story is about being scared of ourselves and what we can become when warped by a regime that isn’t fair and equal. After all those years of Dr Who being about exploration and bases under siege fighting monsters it finally become a moral crusade to make the world a better place and Dr ho has rarely been so inspiring. After all, the one thing this parallel world doesn’t have is an exiled Doctor to show them the error of their ways (although even there the mad scientist behind it all, Olaf Pooley, is basically a parallel world Doctor: scientifically curious to the point of risking the lives of the people around him, argumentative to those working with him and obstinate and arrogant when things go wrong – all reasons the 3^rd Doctor is forced to regenerate into the 4^th in ‘Planet Of the Spiders’).

It’s the most Orwellian of Dr Who stories this one, full of subtle hints at a regime that’s ruling by fear and lies, right down to such beautifully subtle hints as the posters of BBC visual effects boss Jack Kine on the wall (taking off the posters for the BBC’s famous 1950 adaptation of ‘1984’ where then-boss Roy Oxley did the same thing; Kine was a junior assistant on that series so it’s one of those glorious in-jokes only about three people would have got till the Dr Who guidebooks started coming out). Everyone can see what’s really happening, but everyone is too afraid to point it out so we have a world where people are blatantly lying and passing it off as the truth and assuming everyone else is too scared to point this out. This is a world of doublespeak, where your thoughts and words can get twisted and where you can’t trust anyone, even the people we normally would, because they’ve grown up realising that to survive in this world they can’t get by doing the right thing. Instead of a roughly equal democratic society where people can challenge and debate this is a world where rules are laid down with the law. Interestingly we never see what created this alternate world but there are signs everywhere that we’re in a fascist version of Britain where the Nazis won WW2: to the adults watching this who once fought in the war for real that gives this story an extra shiver of recognition. They’ve even killed off the Royal Family, the fiends (although why defeating a feudal system should make this state an enemy of democracy rather than a hero goodness knows). Like the best Dr Who stories this might be fiction, but it’s close enough to the truth of what might have been to be deeply uncomfortable. That makes an interesting point about UNIT: in our world they’re a last defence, a ‘family’ of loyal soldiers who are dedicated to keeping us safe and fighting only in self-defence, give or take the odd scared genocide under orders of the Brigadier. Despite this era of the show inheriting UNIT as a fait accompli and being uneasy about how the military could ever work in a series that, their producer at least sees as being all about friendliness, karma and democracy for the most part they’re a force for good: your face lights up when you see them because you know they’ve been trained to deal with aliens and are like the cavalry coming to recue our heroes out of trouble. Not in this world: in a military dictatorship the soldiers are all on the side of the people who rule and everyone is at their mercy, often scared into doing the wrong thing because to do otherwise is to risk your life and those of the people you love. This is a story where the vague-democracy of ‘our’ world works so much better though: just look at how scared everyone in this parallel world is in episode six, how quickly the cracks of bitterness and jealousy break through as the regime splinters as everyone fights each other – whereas in our world the worst that happens is a sort-of near miss with a car. In the parallel world we are all enemies of the state in their eyes – in our world it’s the state that’s a necessary enemy that we can still tear down if they go too far and we feel strongly enough.

Writer Don Houghton could have stopped there – goodness knows that’s enough mileage to begin with, even for a story that for budget reasons has been stretched out to a whopping seven episodes – but he goes even further by doing the most Dr Who thing ever, throwing an alien threat at this world and seeing how this slightly different world copes with it compared to our own democratic one. Being fascist, with ruthless efficiency, they’ve got there a bit quicker, reaching Armageddon point at speed: the Nazis did make the trains run on time after all, even if they cut off people’s right to go anywhere. They’re far less prepared for disaster than ‘our’ world though: nobody trusts anyone, nobody listens or collaborates and the hierarchy of obeying orders means that when their Stahlman scientist gets infected with Fendahl gas there’s no one brave enough to point out he’s wrong. Interesting, while most stories (and the first half of this one) have the Doctor rage against petty bureaucracy in this case it’s a lifesaver, literally: the delay seems courtesy of the extra debate around the safety of the drilling in the more liberal world of UNIT at the start of the story, something that seems a minor point at the time but arguably saves everyone’s lives by episode seven. All critics in this parallel world are silenced into obeying, including the Doctor who knows exactly what’s going on but, like most 3^rd Doctor stories, nobody listens to him at all in either world. This is a world held together by threats, bullying, guns and masking tape and it’s fraying at the edges long before the world is blown up. Because yes, the Earth really is destroyed, in an episode six cliffhanger that’s one of the best in the series – with the Doctor saved but returning to the exact same scenario a few hours later in ‘our’ world. Ha, get out of that one Doctor! ‘Inferno’ is gloriously tense, a seven episode thriller where the stakes get higher with each and every episode because we know how easily things can go wrong if the Doctor can’t get people to see reason and while a few later stories also see variations of the Earth blown up none do it with quite the visceral thrill of this one, while the use of the ticking clock counting down to our destruction is quite unlike anything else the series ever tried. It’s a brilliant way of upping the stakes and the second half of ‘Inferno’ is amongst the best bits of drama ever made, never mind ‘Dr Who’. 

And where does this threat come from? Rather than an alien invasion from outer space it becomes, like ‘The Silurians’ two stories earlier, a threat from the depths of the Earth itself. Only the real villain isn’t a bunch of sleeping reptiles from Earth’s past but the core of the Earth itself, exploited by man’s greed. It’s a very clever idea, having a threat that effectively goes down and up rather than side to side or from above, like usual. Houghton had been intrigued by a real-life secret drilling operation named ‘Project Mo-Hole’ which had become a byword for Cold War extremism. Both America and Russia had drilled as far humanity had ever dug into the Earth’s core. Officially both sides were drilling into the gap between the earth’s core and the Earth’s mantle out of ‘scientific curiosity’ and to collect geological samples, but given that both were doing it in competition it felt more like a case of ‘my drill’s bigger than your drill!’ by two superpowers who, for some reason, thought the cold war might spill over into the underground as well as outer space. The Americans officially got to 4.8miles below the surface; the Russians claimed unofficially to have got to 5.5miles. I’ve read a lot about this project down the years and I still don’t really know what they were trying to do – its just one of those curious quirky side effects of the arms race where two sides were doing things because of rumours that the other side were doing them even though they weren’t, with no real idea what they were doing. Houghton, as part of his research, phoned the American side up to see how it was going and got some very cagey answers: one phonecall it was still ongoing, the next he was being phoned up to say it had been cancelled, thenext that it was going brilliantly. The British Science Museum, who were collecting the data, were similarly unhelpful: yes it was still a thing but no they couldn’t point to anything concrete that the project had actually uncovered. It struck Houghton, as it must have struck most people, that it was all a colossal waste of money. We know now, thanks to the release of official documents, that actually it had stopped a few years earlier but wasn’t made public in case the Russians got wind of that and laughed at us’ the idea was only abandoned after the project, which had been given an unlimited budget by the military, cost too much even for JFK-era America and was quietly written off, but not before whispers about it had got out. Don Houghton was clearly one of the people who was whispered to and has all the same questions that I do, making the Doctor not the outsider he is but the everyman voice, the only person who can see just how stupid and dangerous the ‘Inferno’ project is (I mean, even calling it that is kind of asking for trouble). 

That trouble is a big green goo that gets uncovered and turns mankind back to his primordial, near-werewolf like state, big hairy beasties as Jamie would say. Really, though it’s not the goo that’s the ‘enemy’ but more mankind’s greed, as Professor Stahlman basically invents fracking a couple of decades too early and reckons there’s money to be made from the gas trapped deep within the Earth. He’s greedy and obstinate enough to continue even when the Earth is literally screaming in pain. As much as the primords are a real physical threat they feel symbolic too: other Dr Who stories are about how man’s future lies in the stars, reaching out to other planets and cultures, while this one finds us burying back into the darkness of the underground again like Neanderthals burying themselves in caves, fighting over resources and profits that aren’t really there. Using our mother Earth, the giver of life and abundance, to fight out our petty walls is entirely the wrong use of our resources and all the advantages evolution gave us. Watching ‘Inferno’ always used to be a chilling experience at the best of times but watching it now, post-fracking when we know man really is stupid enough to do this for real, adds a whole different layer on top, as if I’m now watching this story’s slow unravel from minor problem to absolute chaos in real time across seven episodes of my own, in some parallel universe where all the worst warnings of this story came true. All we’re missing in ‘this’ world is the sight of David Cameron (who allowed fracking to start) and Boris Johnson (who allowed fracking even to continue after environmental concerns over earthquakes were raised because, duh, if you stick a whacking great drill into something there are going to be repercussions, that’s science) turning into slathering hairy primordial primords and we’re there (and there were moments during Boris’ most unkempt months in power when I seriously wondered if that was happening). So far the Pertwee years have given us unfeeling plastic mannequins, kind aliens who woke up on the wrong side of the millennia and kind aliens who have got the wrong end of the stick and sent us some space aliens of their own, but ‘Inferno’ is the real start of the 3^rd Doctor era because despite a whole universe of aliens and threats out to kill us nobody causes more harm to man than man himself. It’s a great moral message that other Who stories had touched on (‘Planet Of the Giants’ was warning about pesticides as early as the start of season two) but here you can’t escape it: our greed will be our downfall and is of far bigger consequence to us than our galactic near-neighbours on the other side of the globe. What’s great about all of this is that ‘Inferno’ isn’t set in a time set in the far or even the near future, like so many other Dr Whos, but one that’s absolutely now just a small nudge away and it’s a story that asks us all to be on our guard not in some existential future but here and now.

That goo might not make much sense (I mean scientifically it’s a non-starter and we never get a proper back-story as to how it got there or why it affects Humanity the way it does – in a story that, otherwise, is all about asking questions the author uses a lot of deflection to make sure we don’t think about it too hard)  is one of the series’ best metaphors too which works as both a plot driver and as a symbol of something deeper. For surely it’s greed and money, the evils that drive this story and which are motivators about safety for so much of the story. Greed is infectious: everyone who starts cutting corners and trying to take more than their fair share might as well become primords for they they devolve from kind clear-thinking open-hearted individuals into monsters who only care about themselves. And the more people see other people make their money the more they become ‘touched’ by it too, wanting to keep more for themselves. It’s no surprise that big business and corporations are at the heart of this story, institutions too big to be told no: the green goo is capitalism gone mad, drilling for the sake of not information or science but profit margins. But what good are profit margins to you when your customers are all turned into hairy zombies fighting for survival? Greed is like a plague in this story that can touch everyone unless they’re very very careful. ‘Inferno’ brilliantly laughs at mankind’s arrogance foere thinking it can conquer nature when we are still in thrall to it and need to be nice to out planet to survive; that despite our intellect and technology we’re just hairy primeval beats who just learned how to shave and put on a suit; that our planet will always be the boss of us. And having that idea as early as 1970 is astonishing in retrospect: some of the more, uhh, primord-brained Humans out there still haven’t understood this message now In 2023.  

 
The real monster though isn’t the green goo or the primords or even Stahlman but the hierarchy that means no one is allowed to disagree with the star scientist or the big businessmen behind them and say slow down a minute till we know it’s safe’. Nobody has the power to step in and say ‘no’ across this story – well nobody except the Dr and of course no one’s listening to him, he’s the ultimate outsider in ‘Inferno’ who didn’t want to be sodding here in the first place. The 3rd Doctor’s at his absolute best when squaring up to authority, with all the gravitas and haughtiness of the pen-pushers he’s fighting but an insight and experience which means he can run rings round them all. That’s never more true than in ‘Inferno’, a story that gives Pertwee plenty of opportunities to huff and puff and eye-roll his way through the plot and be the dashing hero we all remember rather than the sometimes shady character of his first few stories. Some 3rd Dr adventures like making him impossibly distant and sometimes even cruel ort callous but Pertwee works best as a favourite uncle rather than a strict authoritarian and he’s never better than in this story where his hearts are breaking with the sheer suffering going on around him (Dr Who guidebooks love calling the 3rd Dr a ‘Tory’ because he’s a posh git in posh frilly shirts who loves name-dropping, but really he’s the most liberal leaning of all the generations who hates authority and power because of class or inheritance or money; he just dresses up on their terms to argue with them about it – politically he’s a natural Whig rather than a Labour voter, from the days when the working classes never got a vote. And no, that’s not a dig at Pertwee’s hairstyle, honest).

The big reason I love ‘Inferno’ so much is how cleverly it inverts what a ‘normal’ Dr Who story would do, even in an era of such change as season seven, as if the writer got the memo about the Doctor being exiled to Earth and figured they meant earth as in soil, working on his own twist on the formula quite unlike everyone else’s: instead of outer space this story is about the Earth’s inner core; rather than the Doctor being brought in as a scientist to help a UNIT military operation this time he calls them in to help him on a shady scientific project where he’s been working part-time to get power for his broken Tardis; instead of threats from advanced technological races from the future the big threat here is a slime that takes us back to our primitive selves. It’s a mirror to the usual story just as the parallel world is a mirror to our own. Even set-wise its different: as with all season seven stories this one makes great use of its one big set (Cheaper than building dozens of little ones), but has it here from the start rather than as a showcase to keep till partway through, a scientific hubbub which seems light and airy when we first see it but quickly becomes claustrophobic as the primords take more and more of it over and our heroes are backed into a series of increasingly tiny rooms. There arew lots of lovely touches that suggest people have really thought this through: the Brigade leader, for instance, has two telephones – his normal white one and a black one from whom he gets unofficial instructions from a ‘shadowy source’ above him. Forget the less than sutle eyepatch just check out the scar: though never mentioned its clear, without saying it, that this Brigadier will resort to fisticuffs (he’s always been a leader whose always prepared to do what he asks of his men: clearly he was a good soldier or he would never have been granted promotion but ‘our’ Brigadier never sees fighting as anything but a last resort when talking is hopeless, a lesson learned the hard way through The Doctor). And then there’s the soundtrack: most Dr Who stories have incidental music that’s light and airy and spacey and alien and uses that as evidence of something weird happening, but this one goes the opposite way: the alien sounds are all from stock (mostly stock recordings by theme tune arranger Delia Derbyshire such as her signature piece ‘The Delian Mode’) and they feel familiar and cosy and safe – it’s the industrial drilling that feels alien and strange and increasingly like an ‘invader’, growing in volume until by episode six everyone is shouting over it just to be heard.

What I love most about ‘Inferno’ though is the pacing and the unique way they show this collapse on screen. Generally speaking Dr Who stories ebb and flow: things build up to a climax for a cliffhanger ease off in the middle of the story then get tense again to get you to tune in next week. Not this one: what starts out as one of the slowest and most laidback of all Dr Who stories in episode one, with room for the characters to breathe and out-posh each other in haughty sullen silences and genial discussions we get to properly know them, with a bit of light digging going on in the background where its warm and cosy, has by episode seven escalated to the point where everyone is screaming to be heard, from the Earth on down, with constant background noise and a world that gets increasingly hot, with the cast visibly dripping in sweat. The monsters arrive as noises-off, as almost an incidental detail (mostly because they were: Letts and Dicks wanted a monster in there somewhere so the primords only turned up in the second draft) and only slowly move towards the centre of the story before taking it over by the second half in what becomes a fierce fight by the end that doesn’t let off steam for even a single scene (give or take the final episode). We as the audience can also see what no one in this story – except perhaps the Doctor – can see: the bigger picture, what the individual soldiers and scientists who accidentally touch the goo and are slowly transforming into but trying to hide from themselves and each other. There’s no time for padding in this story after its leisurely start, just seven episodes that each build on the last, until the end feels as if it’s a real fight to survive that we (spoilers) only just make it out of alive. Such a simple idea, but it allows this story to say so much: a lot of Dr Who is about imagining the future and preparing for the worst while hoping for the best, but never more so than in ‘Inferno’, which practically comes with flashing red warning lights for every future scenario that might be a little like this one: that it’s all very well to be curious but if you’re going to meddle with something you don’t understand then be prepared to put the brakes on, not the accelerator of greed.

‘Intense’ is the word for ‘Inferno’ – it’s a story that gives no quarter for anyone, cast or crew or viewer and which demands a lot of all three. It’s no surprise that it was this story that made its director ill, Dr Who regular Douglas Camfield collapsing from a heart condition midway through production for episode three: Letts hired him for the story because he knew it would appeal to his very un-UNIT-style military precision direction, which was already intense at the best of times. Spare a thought for his poor wife Sheila Dunn cast in this story as Petra too, who saw how sick her husband was and tried to get him to listen and for the production team to slow things down but nobody did (the message of ‘Inferno’ in a nutshell) and yet who still had to carry on acting for five weeks when he was in hospital then at home recuperating; unlike a lot of other Dr Who examples of nepotism and the director using their wives she’s really good and gets the part of a sweet but businesslike secretary who realises how misplaced her life priorities are spot-on. Barry Letts himself stepped into direct the rest of the story using Camfield’s detailed notes (he’d got as far as midway through episode six when Barry started adding a few touches of his own), rather sweetly keeping the fact quiet for decades after in case word about his friend’s health got out and people stopped hiring him for being ‘unreliable’. Both men are excellent: a lesser director or producer might have misunderstood this very different style of story but they both get the structure of how the early episodes dance as the characters beat around the bush following protocol and the later episodes are a guttural fight to the death. I don’t often raise highlights od direction 9as its harder to get an angle on than writing or acting) but some of these shots are sublime: just look at the cross-fade between primords-infected soldier Slocum picking up a wrench and delivering a heavy blow – which turns effortlessly into the Brigadier using a hammer on some nails in his cosy office.

‘Inferno’ is a story that relies heavily on its cast but they’re all on top form, one of those stories where every part is played to perfection, with everyone having fun dressing up as their parallel world selves: too much fun given one of the most famous Dr Who anecdotes of them all, about everyone turning up in eye-patches for the scene when they have their backs to the Brigade Leader who swings round in his chair in an attempt to put him off (although being the pro he was Nicholas Courtney carried on with the scene anyway while everyone else giggled; Steven Moffat loved this anecdote favourite that he wrote in a world where everyone was in eye-patches for ‘The Wedding Of River Song’, the story he was drafting when news about Courtney’s death first broke). The Brigade Leader is a nastier, tougher version of the Brigadier without the humour or the twinkle in the eye and Nicholas Courtney plays him much more like Bret Vyon, his character in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ with just the odd hint of the man we’ve come to love and respect. It’s a powerful reminder of just how much the Brigadier, a character Courtney always wore so naturally, really was just an acting job he made look easy. Liz is even harder to get right – she’s already one of the tougher, no-nonsense of Dr Who companions but the parallel world Liz needs to be tougher still, yet the moment she starts believing ‘our’ Doctor sees her soften back to the version we know and love. Caroline John nails the tricky middle ground without batting an eyelash in what’s easily her best performance of the four stories (it’s a real shame Liz never gets a leaving scene, a combination of Letts feeling the character wasn’t quite working and John finding out she was pregnant and not fighting the decision as hard as she might have done). Benton is perhaps the most changed and yet the least changed of all: he’s the same dependable soldier even if he’s working for the ‘wrong’ side now. John Levene is word-perfect too, never more so when he turns into a primord, the only time we see any of our UNIT regulars ever turned into a ‘monster’ (and a bit of a parallel world in itself, given that Levene got the part of Benton as a ‘thankyou’ on the back of playing several monsters in the 2nd Dr era).

Usually in Dr Who stories that like to break up the monotony and try something a bit different has the Doctor start acting a bit odd (think William Hartnell playing the evil ‘Abbott of Amboise’ in ‘The Massacre’, Patrick Troughton as the evil dictator Salamander in ‘The Enemy Of The World’ or Tom Baker as a nastier Doctor in ‘The Invasion Of Time’), but here Jon Pertwee has the hardest job of all, being our one link between the two worlds, but he’s never better than in this story either, especially the story’s second half where he’s the lone voice of sanity in a world that’s gone mad. Usually the Doctor is the unknowing other, the alien who can see things Humans can’t, but in this story he’s us, desperately railing at authority figures that won’t listen and trying to do the right thing when it hurts. Of all the Doctors Pertwee played him the most ‘straight’, as a dashing hero who could always be relied on to do the right thing (a surprise to many after his casting, given that he was known for his many characters and comedy voices – he was hired partly because it was thought, after Troughton, that it might be nice if the Doctor got his guitar out and did some singing from time to time).Too many 3^rd Doctor stories make him out to be the establishment but here he’s the ultimate rebel, speaking the truth even when it gets you killed. The 3^rd Doctor’s greatest strength is the way he can cut through human hang-ups to the heart of the matter without paying any attention to human institutions or hierarchies and this story needs him and is written for him in a way few others are: it’s hard to imagine ‘Inferno’ working as well with the more distant 4^th, the more manipulative 7^th or the grumpier 12^th Doctors, for instance. He’s also clever, as intelligent as we ever see him (so many writers forget that, especially in this era where The Master is the evil genius), effortlessly solving in ten minutes what Stahlman and his team have worried over for months without success. Too often lesser writers just make the 3^rd Doctor a sort of interesting complex bully, but here he’s brave and courageous and bright and brilliant and charismatic and everything you want the Doctor to be.

You get the sense, though, that the writer is even more interested in the new cast of characters he’s carved out for himself and there’s a lot of time given over to the incidental cast this week who are all equally strong: there’s a ‘snog marry, primord’ subplot going on between Dr Who regular Derek Newark’s Greg and Sheila Dunn’s Petra, who find an odd yet believable relationship in between clashing over the government’s drilling programme and for whom everything could go very wrong or very right with every throw of this story’s loaded dice. It’s a very believable romance in difficult circumstances as romances amongst the incidental cast in Dr Who stories go, although you do wonder how they’re going to stay together without the threat of imminent destruction to keep their relationship ‘exciting’. Greg starts off as testosterone city, a man’s man who likes throwing his weight around, but his passion is no match for Stahlman’s rigidness and he learns across the course of this story more than the vast majority of supporting characters, growing into a more rounded character who learns to discern and listen to the smartest person in the room not the loudest. In other words he’s proof of how a man can start off like a primitive primords (he was a caveman last time we saw him in Who after all) but who can learn, adapt and grow. Given how much the Doctyor already knows about Project Inferno when we arrive he’s our eyes and ears for the first few episodes as the plot gets explained to him; unusual indeed for Dr Who to do this with a complete stranger we’ve never met before and yet it works: Newark gets intellect as well as his more brutal animalistic side. Greg’s Petra might be just the assistant who spends a lot of the story looking for protection and wondering who to trust but she’s tough when she needs to be and you’ll be cheering on her parallel world self as she realises she’s tougher than she thought she was and stands up to the bullies around her (now this is how they should have written Liz Shaw).Olaf Pooley gets a lot of stick from fans for his reserved portrayal of Professor Stahlman(n) (the production team added an ‘n’ to the parallel world Professor by accident when making the name tags, but for all we know this military regime have banned names with single ‘N’s!) but I really like it – this is a subtler scientist than the mad ones we usually get in Dr Who, one whose used to cold hard logic but has a stuuborn streak that stops him from being more than just a Cybermen clone. It’s a part that would have been too much played full so he needs to be underplayed and you feel it all the more when the threat the Doctor’s been warning him about for years starts turning even him green and hairy and you really feel him head for a nervous breakdown, at war with himself and fate as much as the Doctor. Even the barely seen bureaucrats  are a more interesting bunch than usual and the jovial Keith Gold is the one politician in the entire ‘classic’ series that’s halfway likeable (Christopher Benjamin playing him like a contemporary Henry Jago from ‘Talons Of Weng Chiang’, not quite of the real world but in a Human batty sort of way).

The primords are, perhaps, the one aspect of this story that isn’t quite up there with the rest: we’re so used in the 3rd Dr era to seeing the Doctor come up across a suave, sophisticated baddy from The Master on down who can talk their way out of trouble that seeing the Doctor square off against a grunting squeaking werewolf doesn’t have the same gravitas somehow. There have been better makeup jobs in Dr Who too, including a second werewolf in ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ eighteen years later that’s far subtler. It’s not bad either though, especially as the primords don’t tend to be stationary long enough for you to stare at the false teeth and hair and even that makes a refreshing change: we know the Doctor can outwit even the cleverest enemy but the most brutal and basest sort? We don’t know if he will win this time. He very nearly doesn’t. The last episode feels like one of the closest fights we ever have between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in the series and the one before that is the closest the Doctor ever comes to ‘losing’ without being forced into a regeneration, unable to save an entire parallel world from its own fate. Its only the fact that ‘our’ world is a (relatively) kinder, more humane one where people listen to each other that the Doctor manages to stop the threat at all, with enough time to show Stahlman(n) as he really is. Not many Dr Who stories have the ambition of going through with their threat to blow up the world – the sort of trick a series can only really pull off once - so it really makes you sit up when the show does the unthinkable in episode six. It would have been one hell of a way to go out had this been the very last story: a last desperate warning of what not to become by a series that always had one finger on the pulse of what our world was turning into.

But of course the series doesn’t end here: this story and the three before it were all too good. There’s a special gravitas about season seven, a certain adultness (not a ‘New Adventures’ or ‘Torchwood’ adultness of sex and violence either, but more a cerebral adultness) not many other Dr Who adventures can match. As an ending it would have been brilliant; as the launchpad for a whole new series to come, bright and colourful and more compact though, its better still, pointing the way to the fun of season eight too. This is a story that isn’t afraid to show us our shadow side and consequence of our actions and is prepared to blow up a parallel world to get us to listen: Dr Who as a warning, which is a long way from the imagination of the Hartnell stories and the terror of the Troughtons. In the end it’s a direction the show won’t really follow: their confidence high and their future secure the Letts/Dicks/Pertwee era starts looking around for more long-term ideas and recurring suave baddies rather than the sharp (but not exactly short) shock of ‘Inferno’. Which is a real shame: good as The Master stories to come are, cute as Jo Grant is, cosy as UNIT become, there’s something about the tough uncompromising-ness of this story that makes it stand out. Maybe they just felt that this story was so good they just couldn’t top it’s grim passion and brutal intelligence? The result is a story that’s one of those rare beasts in Dr Who: a story that manages to balance being sophisticated and talky but never boring, full of big broad monsters and action sequences, tense and urgent but with enough room for character and detail, a cast that’s working overtime and clearly having fun doing it, where every decision pretty much goes right and nothing really goes wrong. Above and beyond all that though (or perhaps below, given the setting for the story) is the very Dr Who theme that in order to evolve and grow we have to be kind, that in the wrong environment even the best of us can become ‘wrong’ and a reminder that it only takes a slight nudge in the wrong direction to turn us all into brain-dead violent primords (for some of us it doesn’t even take that much let’s face it). We need a voice of sanity in an insane world and ‘Inferno’ is that voice at its clearest and most erudite, the Doctor’s way the only way any of us are ever going to survive. In a parallel world out there somewhere all DW stories are as effortlessly brilliant as this one, a near-perfect story which is pretty hot stuff, right down to its core. ‘Inferno’ is a story that stays with you long after the credits stop rolling, the warnings of this world just a fracking drill or a primord away. Maybe we’re closer than we think and we need to listen to this story’s warnings of a screaming Earth, now more than ever.

POSITIVES + I don’t often have room to mention Dr Who’s regular 1970s stunt team HAVOC but they work overtime in this story so it seems only fair to mention them here. There are lots of their best scenes in this story, particularly during the location work at Kent’s Kingsworth Industrial Estate, all high roofs and balconies and gas pipes (though you’ll be pleased to know in their ‘day job’ the company dealt with lighting and water utilities and storage rather than drilling and ‘Stahlman’s Gas’). Stuntman Roy Scammell performed the then-biggest stunt fall ever seen on British TV at the time when he falls fifty feet from a roof as a primord (ironically Scammell also plays the UNIT soldier who fired the deadly shot at himself!) Another stuntman, Alan Chuntz, received the worst on-set injury in Dr Who when he accidentally ‘rolled’ the wrong way and got run over by Pertwee in Bessie during a low-risk scene (he got a gash in the leg and had to go to hospital): though the stuntman’s mistake the accident really affected the star and his scenes for the rest of the day were cancelled so he could come to terms with the shock. Not that you’d know it from Pertwee’s performance when he did return, which is as mesmerising as ever (he knew Chuntz and his family well and sent a bundle of presses to his house to say sorry as well as visiting in hospital; for his part Chuntz didn’t want his friend to worry and knew it would affect him so turned up to filming long before he should have done, just to make him feel better about the accident. This production team really were a family back in 1970).

NEGATIVES - A minor point, but then this is a story so successful that only minor things go wrong. For once the Doctor is a regular fixture at the ‘Inferno’ drilling project as he’s been there for months as their ‘scientific advisor’. Other than allowing the Doctor to fill UNIT in on what’s happening rather than the other way around though, there’s no reason for it given. There’s a hint that the Doctor is there to stop things getting out of hand – but if he knew what was happening why does he even let the drilling project get this far? And if he’s hanging around to get technology to fix the Tardis and over-rule the memory losses the timelords took away from him, as some fans have speculated, well he’s not going to get that from a drilling project on Earth is he? I mean, Earth nuclear power can only get so far and if he’s after Stahlman’s Gas then, well, he’s just as bad as the rest of them. Plus the Dr’s got scientific contacts already that could be much subtler – this way he just draws the Brigadier’s attention to what he’s been doing in his ‘spare time’. You wonder why a professor as controlling as Professor Stahlman tolerates him being there even as little as he does and why the British government have allowed the Doctor free range when he’s the very definition of an ‘illegal alien’ (usually he can hide behind the protection of the Brigadier vouching for him, but not here). It’s also so sad seeing the Tardis console ripped out of its shell: I realise why, given that the seven-year-old prop was by now badly falling apart and they didn’t exactly need it now the Doctor was Earthbound ut it just looks so wrong on its own (note, too, that this is the only time we see it in colour: it really was light green, mostly because it looked pure white on the black-and-white cameras: any whiter and it would have made the picture flare).

BEST QUOTE: ‘Listen to that! That's the sound of this planet screaming out its rage!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: There are four conflicting versions of why Liz Shaw leaves UNIT off-screen (in the gap between ‘Inferno’ and ‘Terror Of The Autons’), from three different media (some of them even have Mike Yates’ first days overlapping with her last). The earliest of these, ‘Country Of The Blind’, is a short story by from the 1993 Dr Who Yearbook by Paul Cornell in which new recruit Mike’s first task is to decorate the Doctor’s laboratory (while the Doctor’s still working – he’s not a happy bunny). Liz has had an offer from Queen Mary, the new research institute at CERN – The Doctor, of course, isn’t listening and instead goes into a long-winded anecdote about another Queen Mary. She’s had enough of wasting her brain on soldiers and while she’s loathe to leave the Doctor and all his knowledge his rather offhanded assumption that she’d reject any offer to be his mere assistant makes up her mind.  She slips away without him noticing, just as the Brigadier walks in with a new case about fairies weirdly enough (possibly the ones in Torchwood!) – the Doctor starts to shoo him away then realises just how lonely he is. A nice bit of character, if not much plot.

‘Reconnaissance’ is a rather longer short story from the 1994 Yearbook with Terrance Dicks offering up his version of how Liz Shaw left. The Doctor is being impossible, expecting her to know all sorts of non-Earth things about temporal physics and finally has enough! ‘You can’t expect me to run before I can walk’ she snaps before the Doctor replies curtly ‘Run no, but surely one might hope for a few fumbling steps?’ Terrance gets in his convention-favourite line about writing Jo (‘All you need is someone to hand you your test-tubes and tell you how brilliant you are!) and seem on the verge of blows before the Brigadier turns up to insist on the Doctor accompanying him to a big committee dinner in the hope of securing extra funding for UNIT. The Brig picks up on the atmosphere when he walked in and the Doctor complains that she’s ‘touchy’, before looking forward to the dinner as he is ‘the soul of tact, a born diplomat’ – Terrance doesn’t write it but you can feel the Brigadier’s eyebrows slowly rising at this. Liz gets back to work but has an unexpected visitor,  an old ‘school friend’ of the Doctors who wants to see him. Could it be? Is it really?...Liz proves her worth, grabbing her UNIT-issued gun, aware that the Doctor doesn’t have ‘school friends’ in the usual way and concerned at an unescorted visitor wandering through UNIT. However those hypnotic eyes of his are too strong for her and soon Liz has effectively recounted the entire season seven to The Master. Made to forget everything, he sneaks off to his new ‘headquarters’ (a tent in a nearby field) while the Doctor comes back in to apologise (rather chastened by calling the committee ‘a motley crew of bungling bureaucratic nincompoops!) Heading off for a walk together as friends again Liz sees a child learning to walk and realises that she has to stand on her own two feet away from The Doctor and head back to Cambridge, slipping away without him noticing so he won’t talk her out of it. She was sure there was something important to tell him though…Dicks excels himself with this little bit of characterisation, effortlessly re-creating the mood of the UNIT regulars in one of the Yearbook highlights.

‘The Scales Of Injustice’ (1996) is the 24^th novel in the ‘Missing Adventures’ range. Written by Gary Russell it sees the return of The Silurians with a foreshadowing of ‘Terror Of The Autons’ in the use of micro-plastics. This is quite a harrowing story, far darker than the ‘cosy’ UNIT stories on TV with the Brigadier distracted by funding cuts and a disintegrating marriage and Liz emotionally pushed to her limits when she discovers a bunch of rogue Silurians (and their pet Myrka!) have been carrying out experiments on a little boy she knows. The Doctor puts everything right in time as he always does but it’s a close run thing and Liz is horrified to learn of a collusion between the Silurians and her government that runs quite the way up the chain of command. Distraught she feels she can never work for them again and walks out on The Doctor after an argument too far – upset himself he can’t quite bring himself to say a proper goodbye. A tough read, but worth it.

‘The Blue Tooth’, meanwhile, is a Big Finish audio adventure from the first series of their ‘Companion Chronicles’ range (2007), written by Nigel Fairs. The 3^rd Doctor never encountered The Cybermen on TV but he does here in one of the best stories in the range, read with aplomb by Caroline John herself. The blue-tooth technology we have now all comes from the Cybermen and was reverse-engineered from UNIT! Liz hears about a string of murders of scientists from Cambridge and goes to check on her university friend Jean. Finding her missing and a dead cat in her garden she calls in UNIT, the Doctor tying it into his own investigations. Between them they work out that the only link between the dead bodies is the university dentist. Liz goes undercover with new recruit Mike Yates but the baddies are onto her and knock her out in the waiting room. Saved in the nick of time by the Doctor they discover that the Cyber-plan is to insert blue metal into Human’s heads to control them. That makes it all sound a bit silly but in context this is one of the more tense Big Finish episodes with cybermats aplenty and it’s good to hear the Cybermen up against the most unruffled yet emotional of all Doctors. By the end Liz is in quite a state, questioning her future and her allegiance to UNIT. Highly recommended.  

Previous ‘The Ambassadors Of Death’ next ‘Terror Of The Autons’

The Curse Of Peladon: Ranking - 15

 

The Curse Of Peladon

(Season 9, Dr 3 with Jo, 29/1/1972-19/2/1972, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Brian Hayles, director: Lennie Mayne)

Rank: 15

In an emoji: 🏰 

   'Planet of hope and glory 

Head stuck in a jar 

We're the intergalactic rulers 

We really have come far 

Don't turn off my life support 

That would be insane 

We're the great minds in the universe 

And part of the galaxy's brain drain!'

  

It’s EU#1, as Britain spends most of 1972 pontificating about whether to join the European Common Market or not (the thing undone by Brexit in 2019) in Dr Who’s most glorious tale of community, togetherness and, erm, big hairy beasties. If sequel ‘The Monster Of Peladon’ is the most ‘leave’ of Dr Who stories, with a plot based around deceit and suspicion, then ‘Curse’ is the most ‘remainer’ of Dr Who stories, certain that with a bit of good faith, hope, celebrity and sticking plaster we can all become stronger together without losing our own unique identity(whatever those idiots arguing against the idea might claim). This isn’t some Star Trek utopia where strangers in the final frontier all get along from the moment they meet though: this is a universe where neighbours squabble over borders and resources and where people who naturally distrust each other and this brave new world pick fights over nothing, before finding out that there really was nothing to fear after all because your rivals are people just like you. Only we’re not talking about something as low key as a collection of countries that could be seen on the news: in Dr Who’s hands we are, of course, talking about a union of planets. 

 ‘Peladon’ is one of Dr Who’s sweetest and most uplifting stories this, full of more aliens per intergalactic mile than we’d ever seen in the series at once (only ‘The End Of the World’ matches it as late as 2005, as part of Russell T Davies’ attempts to show off how much budget he’s got for the new series) and a scope much bigger than usual even for Who. This is the sort of thing that would be thrilling any era but particularly in 1972: this is only the second time the timelords have allowed the Tardis to leave Earth following the Dr’s exile two years and eleven stories ago and the first time we’d seen a proper alien planet in colour (the other, ‘Colony In Space’, doesn’t really count, given all we see is a beige quarry). What’s really interesting is that, to a degree, ‘Curse’ goes against the grain of Who stories: till now the closest we’ve come to seeing contemporary concerns on screen was the worry over the nazi invasion of England 20 odd years on in ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’, but this one was so close to the ‘Will they? Won’t they?’ in the news in 1972 and the slow inch forward and metre back of negotiations that its main themes will be boringly familiar to anyone whose sat through British politics of the early 1970s or indeed the past few years. If anything too the ethos of ‘Curse’ rather goes against the grain of Dr Who’s world view up to 1972: most of the time London, standing in for Earth, is doing quite well on its own thankyou very much and doesn’t need anyone else (including the supposedly wonderful gifts promised by the ‘Claws Of Axos’). ‘Peladon’ should be so very wrong – and yet somehow it feels so very right. Amazingly, so, actually, given that for once the first drafts don’t sound very enticing at all (this story is really a composite of two separate stories: ‘The Brain Dead’ had the Ice warriors attacking Earth with a thing called a ‘z’ beam that turned them into zombies, which sounds the sort of thing a Dr Who writer comes up with when asked to develop a story on the spot and not up to Hayles’ usual imaginative standards. The next draft ‘The Shape Of Terror’ has a research station home to different alien cultures, Si Delta 6, attacked by pirates and the Doctor and Jo getting the blame, while the real villain is a sentient cell of ectoplasm named Energid and the Ice warriors aren’t in it at all – which sounds like the sort of thing a Dr Who writer comes up with out of desperation a minute before deadline. It was script editor Terrance Dicks’ idea to combine the two, coming up with one of the series’ most nuanced and thoughtful scripts as a consequence. 

 Taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary is, you see, very Dr Who, even when it comes to something as normally drab and boring as politics, treaties and negotiations, which suddenly take on new meaning now that its alien cultures jostling for position: I’d love to know how many viewers of this story grew up to be diplomats and civil servants, inspired by the events of this story the same way other fans were inspired to be writers, artists, scientists, mathematicians, explorers, astronauts and all the rest by other individual stories (another of the reason ‘Kerblam!’ annoys me so, restricting fans’ ambitions to being given the chance to work in an Amazon warehouse some day, if they’re very very lucky: back in the day Dr Who career options were literally sky high). What’s more Dr Who has always been about having an open mind and open heart(s), to take other cultures on their own terms and to believe that the future is going to be better than the present and no other story offers that hope as sweetly as this one. If nothing else its positive that Earth is even trying to take a seat at an intergalactic table with the ‘big boys/girls/hermaphrodites’ in the future. Until 1972 Earth has generally been the runt of the litter of the milky way; we’re not even the masters of our own solar system thanks to the Ice Warriors (who, this being one of their creator Brian Hayles’ stories, are one of the monsters at the Peladon negotiating table alongside us). And by and large in these stories ‘Earth’ just means ‘Britain’, which nearly always means that we’re alone, an island drifting in space, where nobody loves us, everybody hates us, think we’re going to eat giant maggots and Wirrns (fat ones, juicy ones, green ones made out of condoms and bubble wrap etc etc). Giving us friends in space, sometime, seems like the single most optimistic thing this series ever does – alongside assuming that we have a future at all. Too often Dr Who portrays us as going backwards and blowing each other up so, against the backdrop of the cold war, even coming into this (unspecified) future intact and with some of our dignity and respect from other aliens is optimistic. What’s more, we do it as equal partners, in a corner of the universe that has some form of recognisable democracy. 

 Even more so, Who has always been about giving a voice to those who don’t have one, of championing the under-dog against the odds and against the establishment. While not quite as one-sided as the debate over Brexit in the 2016 referendum it’s certainly true that the ‘leavers’ (well ‘un-joiners’ I suppose) were shouting loudly and longest: then as now the people at the top had investments in British firms and risked losing money if Britain ended up in a pact with other countries so they made sure they took up most of the debate. Here writer Brian Hayles writes a story all about the important of the referendum that year, of using your ‘voice’ and speaking up even when people don’t want you too and finding your voice, no matter how squeaky or weird or nervous you sound. This is a story where so many people in it are mute: Grun, the King’s champion, had his tongue cut out to make him subservient and easy to over-rule but the Doctor befriends him and recognises his rights as an individual. If this was an Orwell book (and ‘Peladon’ does feel as much like ‘Animal Farm’ in a metaphor sense as much as it does a political manifesto: ‘six arms good, two legs bad?!’) then he’s the heavy labourers that no one ever listens to, the gentle giant whose might everyone fears. Aggedor, the mythical beast that everyone is afraid of (and who comes to be associated with trade union sin sequel ‘Monster Of Peladon’) turns out to have a roar worse than his bite and is really just a giant cuddly teddy. Then there’s the newly installed King of Peladon, the person who would seem to have all the power but who is afraid to use it, shy of his own abilities and easily overawed by louder voices underneath him and a stickler for traditions and the status quo because he doesn’t have the courage for change. The only Peladonian with any voice in this story is Hepesh and he’s a big shouty gammon leaver fifty years early, older, bossier, shoutier – I even think I saw one or two campaigners around the referendum with the same red stripes in their beards. Although Hayles is a clever enough writer to make even him sympathetic; the Doctor asks him why he’s doing this in episode three and he snaps back ‘I’m scared’ before ranting about being afraid that joining a galactic federation would transform Peladon so much he wouldn’t recognise it anymore, something the Doctor tells him gently is silly and that the federation will add to his planet, not take away from it, not that the big hairy badger’s listening). As for the aliens, well, they’re not so strange when you get to know them. Even though one race is big and green and hissy, another is a hermaphrodite hexapod and a third is just a big giant head in a jar. By Dr Who standards, though, they’re practically cousins. There were lots of people who asked whether Dr Who should be doing this sort of thing but of course they should: more than anything the Peladon stories are about prejudice (everyone’s, up to and including the Doctor’s) and there’s never been a more Who-y theme than that; it’s just the means of telling that story that seems a little unusual. 

 Prejudice isn’t just a human trait: most species apparently have evolved to be plain suspicious of anyone who doesn’t think like them or look like them, even though there’s no need – the civilised thing to do is to always to look beyond your trigger re-actions at someone whose different to you and remind yourself that they’re really only ‘human’ like you (even aliens who aren’t human, but you get the drift: they’re only people worried about feeding their people and are just as scared of you as you are of them). The Galactic Federation, that should be bringing out the best in these species and encouraging trade and communication, really does seem to have brought the worst out in everyone as they all rub shoulders warily, eyeing each other out – even the species with one big eye. Of all the final frontiers in space in Dr Who none seems as wide as the gulf around the negotiating table and Hayles brings the viewer along with him, encouraging us to try to work out who to trust: does that guy in the tank making gurgling sounds have our best interests at heart? Is Alpha Centauri (the first alien species in Who to have unusual personal pronouns long before ‘The Star Beast’ got people’s knickers in a twist) really as sweet as they/them seem? Do we side with the ranty shouty man and his weak King, even though he seems to represent the working classes and they’re usually the ‘good guys’ in Who? And what about the monsters we know to be evil, the Ice Warriors, surely they’re up to something – and the Doctor is openly suspicious with us. In the end everything we think is wrong because we don’t know enough information: we’re suspicious by nature, not because we ought to be and only one of these species is on the take (and it’s not who you think either). Frankly we could do with more Dr Who stories studying the idea of this ‘culture shock’, of finding out that there are more ways of living life than your own (as English as this series is most of the time, at its best its multicultural and embraces everyone who wants to live in peace with us). As with all the best Who stories there’s little to choose between the ‘monsters’ and the humanoids we trust automatically just because they’re ‘like us’ and we’d have all solved the story a lot sooner if we’d learned to be kind and understanding from the first. 

 Jo, as it turns out, is the person whose most ‘right’ here, her naturally hippie instincts to be kind and a polite to all living things the ‘right’ way of going about things, for once even more than the Dr’s (he’s naturally prejudiced against the Ice warriors and can’t see how they might have changed since the Patrick Troughton days when they were shooting at him). Many fans have tried to find parallels between what’s happening on Peladon and Europe in 1972 (after all, Dr Who was on BBC One right after ‘The Magic Roundabout’ in this period and the ‘English’ Eric Thompson (mostly made-up) ‘translation’ of the show was actually originally a French programme about different European mascots getting along (Dougal the dog is Britain, hovering up vast quantities of sugar while France is Brian the snail, naturally) and mostly come unstuck, even though it feels as if there’s meant to be one. There’s the natural starting point that ‘England’ is meant to be ‘Earth’: after all, London stands in for the Earth in a majority of Dr Who stories and Jo ends up, thanks to a misunderstanding, representing her planet as ‘Joespehine of Tardis’ and she’s very much the British audience identification person in Dr Who in 1972 (even if some of her clothes and language are as 1960s as they come!) Earth, the new kid on the block, is the planet everyone is a little suspicious of as it was with Britain back then – we finally joined in 1973 while France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg had been in a union, under a different name, as far back as 1950. Even back then we were viewed as a sort of American stooge doing what our younger, louder little brother said rather than as natural Europeans though, an ‘outsider’ every bit as much as a timelord exiled to Earth,separated geographically from the rest of Europe by sea on all sides that made us grow up isolationist. I might be reading too much into this but note how Peladon is lost without the steadying hand of his father, a man who filled every room he was in while the King feels small; this is an era when America has got tired of Britain following it around like a little kid all the time but we didn’t want to let them (and their money) go, when our relationship was closer to ‘special needs’ than ‘special’. Part of joining the common market was to try to find a second identity with our nearest neighbours the best possible alternative to standing on our own two feet. 

 That’s what most fans presume, however I think that’s wrong: ‘Earth’ is surely ‘Peladon’, the country full of well-meaning people who are still stuck in the past, ruled by a Royal Family who are out of touch with their people, weak and inbred, struggling to work out how to rub shoulders with more technologically advanced races than us. This is a different world now though and it scares Peladon more than the others – as they, in turn, are scared by such a backward-looking nation. The Peladonians are sweet though for the most part, well meaning and polite and as much as the King should be a wet blanket he’s actually quite adorable on screen, where he’s always trying to do the right thing by everyone with the sort of English morality you only see in the movies. Peladon, though, isn’t like the other planets: there isn’t just one people to appease but whole factions (we’re not one country after all but four), all of whom want different things and no one person can represent them all: whatever you do is going to upset somebody there’s going to be a row and the crux of this story is what happens when a disintegrating, fractured planet starts making decisions with other planets who have their act together when ‘we’ clearly don’t. Hayles both sees an optimistic future where we get to work alongside our neighbours in Europe more or less happily for forty-five odd years but also sees the in-fighting and self-destruction that leads to Brexit as political advisors offer the King conflicting advice and are on the make for their own ends (especially the poor miners, the very definition of ‘miner characters’ without much screen time, desperately trying to cling on to some sort of power, even though their leaders have given them up for good and betrayed them, while blaming it all on the ‘aliens’: ironically enough this most pro-trade union of stories got hit by a strike of energy companies and power blackouts for episodes three and four which means a good quarter of the people watching the first two parts never got to see how it ended till a repeat a decade later). No wonder both Earth and Peladon look on in amazement at the other cultures who are all of one mind and agree on everything and even – shock horror – all have the same dialect and accents rather than the jumble we have. 

 It’s only a very vague fit but I like to think of Arcturus as France, a big old head in a jar that’s full of charm and nice to everyone’s face and mutters about them and plots in private, while I’ll lay odds that the Ice Warriors are supposed to be West Germany, the warmongers who have (mega huge spoilers from now for the rest of the review, just to warn you) genuinely reformed because they know how valuable peace is after centuries of war, even while when things go wrong everyone from the Doctor on down assumes they’re up to no good simply because that’s who they used to be in the past. It’s one of the greatest twists of any Who story that, actually, they aren’t and for once the Dr’s got it wrong, secretly as prejudiced as everyone else on the planet after his encounters with them (well, they did try to blow him up twice when he was Patrick Troughton – you can see why he might hold a grudge; note too that the big rivalry on screen is between Arcturus and the Martians who are close neighbours and rivals; to them both Earth and Peladon are wannabes who’ve seen better days, which is pretty close to what was happening in real life in 1972). When everyone comes together at the end and they really have nothing to be afraid of after all, despite the very different and literally ‘alien’ cultures so different to ours, it’s all incredibly satisfying and one of the series’ most naturally feel-good moments. This is why it’s so crushing when sequel ‘Monsters Of Peladon’ undoes all that good work a couple of years later and (more spoilers) just makes the Ice Warriors the baddies again: the idea that even some of the biggest villains in the universe can have a change of heart and come good is one of the most uplifting Dr Who moments of them all. It also works as a generational divide, more like the Who stories of the 1960s: to the children who’ve grown up in peace Germany/Mars are friendly noble industrial giants we ought to copy – it’s their grandparents who are still hung up on the after effects of a war that ended long ago before they were born. Similarly if you’re young enough not to remember the Ice Warriors from three years ago (and the ratings have all but doubled since then, particularly amongst the newer younger audience, so there was a good chance you hadn’t in an age before repeats and videos) you just wonder why the Doctor is acting so oddly against a race who’ve done nothing naughtier than hiss in his ear: it’s like that iconic scene of Rose’s surprise at the Doctor reacting so badly to a Dalek, in, erm, ‘Dalek’ .

Dr Who is at its best not when its shooting big laser guns at monsters, like the worst scifi series, but when it comes with sympathy and forgiveness and an understanding of different people’s viewpoints and no story demonstrates that better than ‘Curse Of Peladon’. Even though, as so often happens, they should have learned to be suspicious of the threat from within, the badgers with the red and white striped whiskers who seem to represent the working classes on Peladon. Though in another eerie foretelling of Brexit note how the working classes are whipped up into a racist frenzy because of what they’re told by ‘advisors’ who have a stake in keeping Peladon isolationist; Hepesh, the main baddy in collusion with Arcturus, is the equivalent of Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees Mogg making up lies about what those ghastly Europeans are up to without declaring their links to companies set to benefit by keeping Britain out of the EU and with a hairdo almost as silly. Honestly, this story’s only missing having the lies written on the side of a big red space shuttle and it would have got Brexit down completely. Of course our old rivals substitute France are up to no good too but they’re just being opportunists really and making an extra deal on the side (very French) and Arcturus isn’t really the baddy either – he goes along with Hepesh’s’ plan because secretly they don’t have the resources of the other planets and are afraid of being priced out the EU if more people join (no comment). In a way too, this is a story all but resources (it’s a surprise how many Pertwee era stories are- the 1960s tales have new planets as places to expore, but in this era they’re places to plunder): Arcturus wants a deal on the side, but he’d be better off trading (it would serve him right if the Doctor brought the Tythonians from ‘Creature In The Pit’ to the negotiating table, where metals are everywhere).

Hepesh talks a lot about how the Federation want to end the Peladon traditions so that his planet won’t look like his planet anymore: like all good writers Hayles gives him the space to speak his doubts, then shows him why he’s wrong: because it also means that power isn’t with individuals on the make gaslighting their Kings and communities anymore but with the people (at one stage he even bullies poor Alpha into voting his way, leading him to vote with all six arms). Hepesh is clearly an old-fashioned racist too: he sneers at the King for not being ‘pureblood’ (because the late Queen was Human. He also thinks that Peladon never never never shall be slaves and under the control strangers, but the joke’s on him because, left behind slaves is what the Peladonians will become if left behind (and indeed already are under him – it’s not for nothing that Peladon seems like our ‘dark ages’). Hepesh wants to have his giant beasts in sacred temples killing people and capital punishment for trespass even though it’s a daft tradition: the people don’t want it, the King doesn’t want it, nobody but Hepesh wants it, but everyone is too weak to say so: it’s archaic laws like this Peladon will lose, not their identity (it’s worth remembering that Britain only outlawed the death penalty in 1969, scarily close to the present day and it seemed even closer at the time of broadcast – indeed Northern Ireland still had their law in place until a few weeks after this story went out). That was one of the biggest talking points of the day amongst politically hi young things in 1972; another was the ambiguous wording of the 1972 EEC directive and whether it over-ruled individual planet’s rights or not: the official line at the time was the idea of ‘mutual recognition’ hammered out between diplomats from all countries that everyone could agree to, with no provision for what happened when members simply didn’t agree on something (would the Ice Warriors still be allowed to fight in self defence? Would Arcturus have grounds for rebellion if he provided his people with sub-standard jars to live in?) The Dr Who equivalent is far less ambiguous and more like the ruling now: the ‘Intergalactic articles of peace 59 subsection 2 ‘forbids the federation to contradict the rights of individual worlds’ (the wording now says that the EU laws take precedence when in contradiction with local laws so everyone is on the same hymn sheet). That’s what Hepesh is really scared for, even if there is a slight part of him that worries about losing traditions: the idea that he can’t be on the make anymore with rules that don’t apply to him and money to be made on the side (the real reason practically every MP who came out in favour of Brexit did so). Growing up the one part of this story I could never wrap my head around was how people let Hepesh get into power at all when he’s so obviously in it for himself. I don’t need to ask that question in the 21st century anymore. If anything this story is unrealistic because there aren’t lots of little Hepeshes squabbling amongst themselves and taking turns in the hot chair before stabbing each other in the back. 

 And then there’s Alpha Centauri, who might well be my single favourite creation in the whole of Dr Who: a diplomat and peace advocate whose impossibly wise, impossibly old, impossibly scared and frequently ignored, the voice of reason if that voice was high-pitched and squeaky. I don’t know what planet this squeaky hermaphrodite hexapod is meant to represent but I love him/her to pieces: he/she’s so sweet, so gullible and so cute. I ‘think’ the joke is that, on his planet, he’s an ‘Alpha’ male, a tough macho type – even though on his planet breeding means there are no longer divisions between males and females so he’s become a bit of everything rolled into one. In a world of Arcturians and Martian Ice Warriors though he’s become the beta substitute teacher nobody listens to (like a lot of ‘Curse of Peladon’ it’s all about perspective, not stereotypes). I know other fans find him a bit, well, rude with his big one eye sticking out of a green tube (‘Oh no They’ve made him a !%$*in’ prick!’ was director the ‘lovely’ Lennie Mayne’s colourful response when he saw the costume for the first time and told the designers to go back and have another go; ‘Oh no they’ve made him a !”&*in’ prick in a cape!’ was his equally colourful response when they turned up with their second attempt as seen on screen) and normally I’d assume it was an in-joke from sniggering designers seeing what they could get away with on children’s telly (I still have my doubts about the Vervoids: they can’t possibly have looked at that design and not found that one a little suspect). But despite being several hundred years old Alpha Centauri is really a big child that clearly hasn’t gone through anything as adult as puberty yet, easily scared and used to being manipulated by adults. Ysanne Churchman, taking time off from her day job in ‘The Archers’ (and still acting now at age 98!) is utterly delightful; unsure of how to get the alien voice right she asked the director how to play him and got the answer ‘as a fussy, gay civil servant’ so that’s what she does, making a great double act with Stuart Fell (regular Dr Who stuntman stuck inside the costume) to imbue him/her/it with more personality than any other DW invention I can think of, hopping from foot to foot when excited and cutely raising all four arms every time he/she/it has to vote. Dr Who aliens in this era tend to be scary, nasty, oppressive and dangerous, but Alpha Centauri is adorable. If ever there was a Dr Who monster I’d love to meet for real, then it’s Alpha. 

 Then again if there’s a second then it’s The Ice Warriors who were always my favourite DW ‘monster’ in a story that makes good on their ‘unique selling point’ that they’re not automatic baddies but noble warriors big on self defence and honour. Try to imagine another race in Dr Who who’ve been painted as the baddies that they could possibly get away with making good and diplomatic: The Daleks? Nope, too racist. The Cybermen? Nope, too serious. The Sontarons? Too shooty. The Weeping Angels? No thanks – humans voting for Brexit already do a good job enough of turning back the clock sixty years, thankyouverymuch. But The Ice Warriors you believe: they’ve always been a noble race driven by their own distinctive morals that means they can’t shoot anyone defenceless or fight wars before someone attacks them first and so they are here, with a returning Sonny Caldinez finding new ways of playing them just the right side of shifty (though I’m sorry originator Bernard Bresslaw couldn’t be there too). Normally the Humanoids let a Dr Who script down, but King Peladon is another great bit of casting, innocent and thoughtful, prone to doubts and prepared to listen to every viewpoint in the room before making a decision – in other words exactly the sort of open mind you need in political negotiations like this for all his confusion and ‘imposter syndrome’. David Troughton, son of Patrick, returns to the series for a third time and while his first roles were due to nepotism, the producers pleasing dad by getting his first telly roles as a UNIT soldier in ‘Web Of Fear’ and an American revolution soldier in ‘The War Games’, three years on he’s come such a long way that you can’t think of anyone else playing this role; despite being an inexperienced twenty-one-year old he’s just the perfect fit. His awkward half-romance with ‘Princess Jo of Tardis’ is highly believable too, as she reminds him of his Earthly mum and this is the single best romance in the series till Amy and Rory turn up (the ‘are they? Aren’t they?’ romance between Ian and Brabra not withstanding, although that seems to have been the actors’ ideas more than the writers’!) Some romances in Who stories seem grafted on for extra emotional manipulation but this one makes sense in a story that’s all about being ‘better together’, whether it’s King Peladon using Jo as a sounding board and moral compass as much as a wife or Peladon joining a federation of people who can give it what it truly needs to progress. Peladon’s daughter turns up in the sequel when David is unavailable and though she’s basically the exact same part just written as a girl, somehow she falls just the wrong side of gullible, showing what a hard role this is to play (David returns to Who a near-record thirty-six years later as Professor Hobbes in ‘Midnight’, although that job was as a last-minute replacement, unlike this part which seems to have been written with him in mind – probably at Manning’s request). Incidentally, David’s flatmate in this era was deeply jealous of the role because Dr Who was his favourite show and he was desperate to be on it, leading to lots of sulking and self-questioning about his own career – that flatmate was Colin Baker and in another 11 years he’s going to be acting alongside Patrick in a Doctor reunion (how very ‘Peladon’ – never give up on your dreams!) 

 And then there’s Aggedor, the big overgrown bear who lives in Peladon at the heart of a maze and who gets to eat the people Hepesh feeds to him, who tends to leave fans after a metaphor scratching their heads a little. Hayles says that he came up with Aggedor when thinking of a beast who was being used to scare people away from finding the truth and thought of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Hound Of The Baskervilles’ (and in the script he’s much more like a dog). Surely, though, at least as re-written by script editor Terrance Dicks, he’s Russia: a ‘great bear’ speaking a language we don’t understand, hidden away in a maze wrapped inside a puzzle inside an enigma on the fringes of negotiations, whose really very very sweet and loving when left to his own devices but manipulated by a charismatic leader into becoming a monster...It has to be, surely? After all, Russia was the ‘secret’ reason the EU was formed in the first place: Europe had to pool its resources ‘just in case’ the bear was unleashed on them to gobble them up because of ‘primal urges’ – even though left to his own devices Aggedor is as amenable and friendly as anyone, its people’s rhetoric bigging up the threat that makes everyone scared of him. Key scene: the Dr undoing his hypnotism by singing a Venusian lullaby to the tune of ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman’ just as he’s about to be gobbled up – one of my favourite ‘get out of that cliffhanger solutions of them all (and something no other series would ever try to come up with). My one regret of this story is that it ends with Aggedor still down in the maze instead of given an interpreter and invited to political meetings as an equal who helped save the day (being left out of the EU and thus being scared of Europeans ganging up on them in turn is a key reason for the war with Ukraine now, whatever any Hepesh in the West or East tells you). 

 While we’re on about the director, who asked to be billed as ‘lovely’ Lennie Mayne where possible, and his swearing another much loved anecdote from this story is the director’s comments that the extras in the crowd scenes weren’t scared enough at their first sight of Aggedor, the mythical beast of Peladon and their response should be ‘holy f!*^^*in’ cow!’ A few whispers from Jon Pertwee later and what happens at camera rehearsals? The whole lot shout ‘holy f!^^*in’ cow!’ in unison! Pertwee is one of those directors who goes out of his way for directors he likes and can phone in his appearances when he’s not enjoying being at work. You can tell he and Mayne get on famously, with the same method of taking this job deeply seriously but having a laugh along the way and he’s rarely better than here. Pertwee gets to be the voice of reason and a dashing hero rolled into one and feels a lot more at home than we’ve seen the 3rd Dr so far, one of many aliens on an alien world rather than the only alien on a human world. It’s an even greater story for Jo, who gets more characterisation than in all her other stories put together and Katy Manning is sublime, her innocence piercing through the duplicity of all the other shenanigans and guesswork on this planet (even though, technically, she and the Dr are the two who are ‘lying’, pretending to be the Earth delegate when the real ones are delayed until the closing credits when they make a run for it back to the Tardis!) Jo is the audience’s representative more than ever before, the youngster asking ‘why can’t we all just get along?’ when the adults bicker and manipulate each other. Her teenagery romance is exquisitely played too: you know she’s fallen for Peladon hard, but at the same time knows she has the rest of her life to live and can’t be tied down to just one planet and her loyalty to the Doctor outweighs her heart. She is tempted though: this isn’t like the half-hearted attempts to pair Leela off with Andred in ‘Invasion Of Time’ or Susan fish-slapping David in ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ but a real romance full of warm loving looks of longings, sweet little gestures and tongue-tied conversations (it’s no surprise Manning and Troughton started dating for a little while after this story too, seen out watching the world’s greatest musical ‘Godspell’ in the West End together – their chemistry explodes off the screen). By the time we get to the end of the story, baddy rumbled and the King and Jo making googly Alpha Centauri-style eyes at each other in a tearful way as they say goodbye, it feels as if we’ve been on a real journey, with important lessons learnt for us’ in 1972 as well as ‘them’ – and no one more so than the Dr, who nearly undid this bright brave new feature by treating this story as if it’s still the ‘old days’ of the 1960s. Those old prejudices belong in the past, ‘Curse of Peladon’ says, and wouldn’t it be better if we stopped being so distrusting of each other and recognised that we were all after the same thing underneath it all?: prosperity and peace. 

 This is also notably a story where, despite centuries of misunderstandings that’s led to the belief in a ‘curse’, of bad things befalling us if we break with tradition and anger our ancestors, there is no such thing really – we brought the curse on ourselves and the sooner we understand that and embrace the future the better it will be, for everybody. And surely the only way to get that is by taking the plunge and trusting that life with our neighbours really will be better in the end, however difficult the path getting there might be because we can all muddle through together. Despite being so intergalactic, then, ‘Peladon’ is also one of the most British things you will ever see and evidence that you don’t have to lose your identities when you join a larger organisation, whatever the Brexiteers might say, still people underneath it all however differently we might view the world. That’s one hell of a message for a so-called children’s show broadcast on a Saturday teatime and while Dr Who is uplifting more often than not this story, of all the 328-ish DW stories, really does make me feel more optimistic whenever I watch it. 

 Yes bits of it come a little unstuck on screen, the budget for making so many alien costumes starts to show particularly in Arcturus (whose nothing like as convincing as the similar head-in-ajar The Morphotons from ‘Keys Of Marinus’ a full eight years earlier) and the tight budget means that, despite being the only ‘off-world’ Dr Who story all year, it’s also the only story in season nine made entirely in the studio, with no location footage at all (and only one brief model shot, of the Tardis falling down a cliff- a rather odd detail that, if the Doctor really is sent here by the timelords, as they seem to be worse at steering the tardis than he is and it’s just the right way up again when we see it next – thanks to intergalactic co-operation perhaps?) The voices, too, are a little grating when everybody is speaking weird, from Alpha’s squeakiness to Arcturus’ bubbling to the Ice Warriors’ hissing, although even that makes sense this once: this is a story about people using their voices however alien they sound so the voices need to be emphasised like this (I almost wish Peladon had been one of those ‘missing stories’ simply so we could try to measure this story from it’s deeply bonkers soundtrack!) Such is the level of Brian Hayles’ writing though and his ability to create so many whole new races that feel as if they’ve lived for generations away from the screen and such is the level of acting from a cast who are extra committed to making this work that the result overcomes any little niggle and is a marvellous story, unlike any other in the Dr Who canon (and yes, I do include the lazy sequel) and unlike anything else in science-fiction, timeless in all the best ways despite being written to heavily reflect the world as it was in 1972. And funnily enough 2023 as well. I await the inevitable ‘Brexit Of Peladon’ sequel, whereby a pompous orang-u-tang brainwashes Peladon into leaving the union that was protecting it from economic disaster, with Pelaldonians stuck inside their caves watching everyone else prosper without them while they’re reduced to artificial force-field borders stuck randomly round the planet and make the occasional minor trade deals with Slitheen from Raxacoricofallapatorious with baited breath, with, umm, baited breath (especially after we got the start of the Galactic federation in the tail end of ‘Dinosaurs On A Spaceship’ and a cameo by Alpha Centauri, still being played by actress Ysanne Churchman then in her 90s).

 POSITIVES +The Peladonians have some of the best makeup ever seen in the series, very 1970s whiskery sideburns, but tinted red and made to be stripey. Peladon is one of those planets with lots of caves and tunnels and mines and the designers have clearly born that in mind, making them look like badgers living in burrows who aren’t used to the sunlight. Badgers, notoriously, have very poor eyesight and can only see what’s right in front of them too, which is surely another metaphor right there. It’s a clever idea, even if none of the Peladonians shine as individuals quite as much as the aliens do. 

 NEGATIVES - This is, as Dr Who stories go, one of the more erudite and peace-loving examples, so it’s a shame when, towards the conclusion, we end up with yet another interminable fight sequence and not one of the best ones: it’s easy to spot when its Pertwee gurning to cameras and when it’s his stunt double Terry Walsh in an ill-fitting wig. Pertwee hurt his back during rehearsals and you can tell he isn’t (all too literally) throwing himself into these scenes with his usual gusto: given that, however, it would have made more sense to cut the fight scene altogether and have an extra bit of talking because it’s just wrong for this story. Admittedly the Doctor’s fighting in self defence and he’s up against Grun, who looks as if he eats Dalekanium for breakfast and could pull space shuttles with his teeth, but it’s a shame that in this of all stories the Dr couldn’t talk his way out of difficulty without resorting to fisticuffs. 

BEST QUOTE: King Peladon: ‘Without help we will never raise ourselves from the dark ages!’ 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Monster of Peladon’ obviously – the first time Dr Who ever returns to a planet that isn’t Earth or Skaro.

 ‘Legacy’ (1994) is a novel by Gary Russell, part of the ‘New Adventures’ series set a few years after ‘Monster’ featuring the 7th Doctor, Ace and River Song prototype archaeologist Bernice Summerfield in a plot as close to dammit as ‘Curse’: a galactic federation want to bring Peladon out of the dark days but treaties keep being sabotaged, something the Doctor blames on The Ice Warriors. The interest comes from the new characters reacting to similar events: you better believe Ace isn’t standing for any chauvinistic nonsense and isn’t exactly a born diplomat, while the McCoy Doctor is much cagier and less heroic in his dealings with Peladon society, while an extra chance to see Alpha Centauri is always welcome. This book still feels like one of the more pointless entries in the series though, without much going for it beyond nostalgia while in common with the other ‘New Adventures’ there’s way more sex, violence and bad language than you might be expecting – which works in some books in the series but most definitely not in the fairytale world of Peladon! 

 ‘The Bride Of Peladon’ (2008), part of the Big Finish main range of Dr Who stories #104, sees the 5th Doctor, Peri and Egyptian Goddess companion Erimem (long story!) is much more interesting and tells a slightly different tale, with the latest Peladon Royal to sit on the seemingly cursed throne murdered and their heir kidnapped, while an Ice warrior just happens to have gone missing at the same time. Could it be the Ice warriors are back to their wicked ways?... (Spoilers): No. The 5th Doctor’s soothing presence makes him fit into this world while Peri is at her most Jo-like (sweet and kind but ever so slightly feeble) while Erimem, as a Royal herself, is never more at home during her brief travels in the Tardis. Alpha Centauri is back (though sadly not played by Ysanne Churchman- he/she/they are actually played by Jane Goddard, the wife of Who writer Robert Shearman) and Zixlyr is the worthy new Ice Warrior diplomat though it’s the new characters who sparkle. One of the better 5th Doctor stories in the range. 

 ‘The Prisoner Of Peladon’ (2009) is part of the ‘Companion Chronicles’ series and features David Troughton as King Peladon telling Tharilia - at this point still a babe-in-arms – about what happened during the 3rd Doctor’s return visit to his home planet somewhere between the events of ‘Curse’ and ‘Monster’. Alpha Centauri and Grun both appear though a lot of the other characters have moved on and while not a lot happens in this story it doesn’t happen with some style, with an atmospheric spooky feeling that’s brought alive by one of the best ‘readers’ in the Dr Who franchise. 

 Meanwhile, if you wondered what UNIT were getting up to while the Doctor and Jo were on Peladon, that’s explored in the BBC’s ‘Past Doctors’ novel ‘The Face Of The Enemy’ (1998) by David McIntee. Giving the lead role to the Brigadier in a tale that sounds more like a ‘Doomwatch’ episode, about a crashed plane with radioactive chemicals that could kill al life on earth, gives this excellent story a unique twist, not least because with the Doctor away the Brig finds himself asking The Master for help in return for the cushy commuted palatial sentence we see in ‘The Sea Devils’. 

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