Vengeance On Varos: Ranking - 56

 

Vengeance On Varos

(Season 22, Dr 6 with Peri, 19-26/1/1985, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Phillip Martin, director: Ron Jones)

Rank: 56

   'Well, Arak, what's today's review like then?'

 'Oh Etta, I've given up reading them. Dr this, Dr that, too much violence, not enough violence, sardonic interplay of postmoderism principles underlying a multi-dimensional script, its the same every day. particularly this one. I think they get an alien in to write them some weeks' 

'Well, I like to marvel at the perspicacity of his wit' 

'Huh that writer lost his wits the second month when he tried to defend 'Time and The Rani!' 

'Only 56 reviews to go. What are we going to read when they're over?' 

'Dunno' 

(The screen shows static)

 

 

The 6th Doctor’s masterpiece now and one of Dr Who’s most original stories, which both delivers a critique of that very 1980s moral dilemma of video nasties and accidentally creates ‘Gogglebox’ twenty years early. ‘Varos’ has been misunderstood almost from the day it went out on air: it got complaints that it was too ‘violent’, even though it’s a story that critiques how violence has become too ingrained in modern society (with Varos very much a 1980s version of Britain). It’s a story that’s self-aware that it’s a piece of fiction, with an arch postmodernist humour that critiques Dr Who itself, but one with a lot of love for the series. It’s a tale of how Thatcherist Britain is doomed to end in misery if it continues on its current course and how it’s at odds with this very 1960s optimistic imaginative friendly series, even if it’s not the slam-dunk polemic of other stories around it. It’s the Dr Who equivalent of ‘Boys From The Blackstuff’, about the misery and depression of living in an exploited capitalist world that’s gone wrong (only the ‘boys’ are Varosians’ and the crystal is see-through). It’s a story that comes with its own Greek chorus commenting on the plot, two characters who experience the events of the story but uniquely never get to interact with anyone else in the story, a chance to see how ordinary Varosians are affected both by the restrictions of Varos society and the Doctor overturning it (because the revolution is very much televised this time around). Of all the dystopias in Dr Who Varos might well be the most horrible: you’re trapped on the planet, at risk of being tortured or executed for the slightest infraction, see all your hard work at your job be frittered away to rich slug businessmen and rather than having anything to aspire to even the highest job in the land is at risk of torture and death if the people hate you. And boy do the Varosians have reason to hate you.

Mostly though it’s a really good Dr Who story that has a lot of very real and gritty things to say, in an era when a lot of stories tended to be away with the fairies. No surprise, then, that it was written by the author of gritty Birmingham crime syndicate series ’Gangsters’ (starring Maurice Colbourne from ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’), a story that shares a lot of similarities with this one, including the arch humour and nods to camera as well as multiple characters who act like businessman Sil (even if they’re only slugs in character, not appearance). Martin was easily the biggest name to write for Who in the 1960s and many of his growing fanbase thought he’d gone a bit mad writing for a series that was suffering an image problem. Who producer John Nathan-Turner spent the entire commission breathing down his shoulder, asking for scene breakdowns (something that generally only happened with inexperienced writers) and demanding to see every draft of the script in case something ‘subversive’ dropped in (apparently the critique on violence in general and Thatcher in particular slipped past him). However there’s a simple explanation for it: Phillip wanted to write for a series his daughter Hillary, aged nine at the time of broadcast, could actually watch (and it sounds as if dad introduced her to the series partly to see what his old pal and RADA classmate Christopher H Bidmead was up to, now they were both writers). The sensible lass was a huge Whovian and had roped her dad into watching it with her too and ended each episode by suggesting he should have a go. What’s impressive though is that ‘Varos’ very much isn’t kiddies fare, even in an era of stories like ‘Timelash’ and ‘Mark Of The Rani’ that are pitched a bit younger than average: it’s a story about politics and violence and how controlling a population through fear is bringing it to its knees. It’s a story that sums up the survival of the fittest yuppie-loving money-grabbing 1980s and the sheer misery of the majority of people in Britain better than any other story (yes, even the all-round similar ‘Happiness Patrol’). And while Who stories about wicked regimes and evil tyrants are two a penny, this one is unique in that it shows how those caught at the top of the pyramid are every bit as trapped and powerless, unable to use their power to stop it. Even behind the scenes people went through hell making this story: Nicola Bryant was allergic to the feathers used in Peri’s ‘bird’ sequence, caught a chill filming the desert scene (with fans blowing in her face for hours), lost an abacus necklace she was fond of and which Peri wore when persons unknown broke into her dressing room (sharp-eyed viewers at the time wondered if it was a clue that it had gone missing by the next story!) and the ‘execution’ scene went wrong the first time, when the set with the nooses came apart (luckily without any actors being hurt!), while pity the poor policeman who pulled Nabil over on a day of shooting that had gone so late he still had his makeup on and tried to fine him for speeding – he’d been trying to get home quick because the marshminnows Sil eats – really dyed peaches – had given him the runs, which took some explaining!

Varos is one of Dr Who’s better thought out worlds, an ex-penal planet where the prisoners and prison guards have over time merged together to become one, each as lost as the other. It’s a tiny world with a population of just 160,000 (in a year where Britain’s stood at 56million for comparison) with the hint that the cruel capitalist punishments and the compulsory-viewed broadcast executions have caused the population to dwindle and that soon there’ll be nobody left to shout at. Certainly there’s not enough people to mine Varos’ only export, a mineral named Zeiton 7 that, little does everyone know it, is actually really valuable. In this democracy everyone born to the elite class has to serve out their term as governor and if the people at home don’t like their policies they can subject them to torture. The governor, then, is torn: to do the right thing by the poverty stricken Varosians longterm means short term misery and pain in the form of taxes and longer work hours, which will inevitably result in pain for him and possibly death (no governor has survived as many ‘votes’ as he has without dying). But to do the wrong thing means making things worse long-term and the suffering grow bigger, while the governor who comes after him will probably give in anyway. It’s thus is as close to a pro-Thatcher story as any Who ever made, with Martin Jarvis not so much an Iron Lady as a Cardboard gentlemen who’s always for turning, squirming this way and that because he knows that the next unpopular policy might be lethal. However they’re also pretty stupid and surrounded by the ‘wrong’ people: Sil is a businessman who’s obviously a slug, rubbing his fins with glee as the Governor sells off everything he can cheap – way cheaper than it ought to be. Martin, then, has his marsh minnows and eats them: yes Thatcher has a terrible problem, but by her own stupidity she actually made it worse.

It takes an outsider like The Doctor, not bound by the rigid rules of a stupid system, to see beyond it and put things right, turning this world upside down. But even he finds it heavier going than usual, with scenes where it really does look as if he’s dead – and not in a ‘gee the cliffhanger’s coming up’ way either. In this story he’s attacked, imprisoned and hanged at one stage (before it turns out to be a form of torture in the assumption that a man about to die will always tell the truth) as well as given a dose of a hallucinatory drug that really makes him think he’s dying in a desert and being attacked by a giant fly. What’s more this story makes it looks as if it hurts. Peri, too, has an awful time: the script’s oddest sub-plot is a ‘transmogrifier’ that takes a person’s inner demons and uses them against them, turning them into monsters, because on Varos any imagination is a dangerous thing. Remember the Doctor’s speech in ‘The Twin Dilemma’ that a ‘peri’ was a fallen angel who needed to repent? What he missed out was that the literal translation of ‘Peri’ is ‘wing’; with any other writer of this most depressingly average of seasons I’d assume that to be a coincidence, but given how erudite his scripts are Phillip Martin he probably looked this stuff up.  She’s 90% of the way to being turned into a bird complete with feathers when The Doctor finally intervenes and unlike some ‘gee that was close’ sub-plots it takes a good while for her to recover. Poor Peri: while other people are turned into insects and worms she only wants to fly away and escape. And in that sense she is all of us, trapped on Varos/Britain in the 1980s longing to be somewhere else. And even the transmogrifier, an unlikely machine that even the locals don’t know exactly how it works, has been given a better backstory than usual: it’s a side effect from Zeiton 7 that caused the miners digging it to grow claws and turn into moles, in a world that’s forever demanding they be more than they actually are. It’s what happens to the incidental characters that shocks most though as even The Doctor gets in on the act: two guards are dropped into an acid bath (something The Doctor is often blamed for, but it’s an unfortunate side effect of being a scene recorded at the end of a long day, when a first take was let through that probably shouldn’t have been: in the script it’s an accident but Colin Baker was a little too ‘enthusiastic’ with his turning around), two more are vapourised as their weapons are turned on them (this is The Doctor’s fault, as he rescues a man from execution: as it happens he’s right but on another world he might have zapped two innocent hard working dads to rescue an evil mass murderer) and the end has The Doctor rig up some vine leaves to be ‘explosive’, killing off four of the baddies. Violence has become a way of life on this planet and everyone, even The Doctor, falls into the trap. It goes too far for some (and remember this was dad writing knowing his nine year old daughter would see it!) but it’s at least it’s relevant to the plot and happens because of the drama, better handled better than, say, ‘Resurrection Of The Daleks’ (where extra violence is half the drama).  

Phillip Martin’s script fair crackles with ideas that had never been seen in the series before and which indeed could never have been done before the mid-1980s: this is the era when ‘video nasties’ contained gory material you would never be allowed to broadcast on TV in case children were watching, so what better series to make your point in than Who, still ‘officially’ a children’s series but one increasingly watched by grown-ups with debate still raging about what should and shouldn’t be in the series. Mary Whitehouse has a whole new ally/enemy in this era too with the video classification board who work to different rules than on TV. At first when videos were released they had no one to monitor them and didn’t legally have to be careful about children watching, so there was a rush of cheap ‘video nasties’ made with extreme violence or pornography or both, often available in to rent shops (some of which were in newsagents where children bought their drinks and sweets on the way home from school).Videos eventually had a censorship board that met to discuss what programmes were most suitable for which ages, which in an era when thirty years’ worth of recorded material was up for release was causing something of a backlog and some hilarious mistakes that inevitably slipped through the net due to human error (this is the era when a few gory bloody films were passed for children and yet tame films with unfortunate names got banned or slapped with an 18 certificate). Martin knew that glorification of violence went back to ‘The Romans’ though (both the empire and the Dr Who story from 1965), ingrained as a part of television history that couldn’t simply be taken out with the flash of an age code (for a start most videos sold in these early days were illegal copies anyway – it’s thought the best selling ‘video’ from the first half of the 1980s was an illegal one featuring real life executions and murders that would never have been allowed anywhere near a TV screen). It might well be significant that the censorship board had a ‘Governor’ and that the first ‘model’ of videos to be banned wasn’t the VHS but ‘Betamax’, named like ‘Thoros-Beta’ where Sil and his Mentor friends are from (the censorship helped kill Betamax off as a format and made it obsolete within years. Which was a pain for me as that’s what the first Dr Whos I grew up on were on and it was years before most of them were out on DVD or blu-ray). The Varos execution ‘jingle’ is also remarkably like the theme tune to the earliest BBC home videos just to rub it in!

Another organisation that has a ‘governor’ though is the BBC itself. An organisation that often glorified violence in return for ratings (just think of all the people killed off in soaps at Christmas!) Is this Phillip Martin biting the hand that feeds him and commenting on how much violence is allowed on television? Nabil for one took this story to be a commentary on the gung-ho coverage of The Falklands War, glorifying soldiers in a way never seen on TV before (in return, so it’s often said, for the Conservatives backing down from removing the TV license as they once threatened). Note the subtle hints dotted across this story, too: the boxing and wrestling matches that are seen as ‘entertainment’ in between the stat hangings, while this story also resembles the famous BBC production of George Orwell’s ‘1984’, where the staff working on the show got their own back on their bosses (with the director general’s image used for the ‘Big Brother is watching you’ posters and hints at ‘BB’ needing a ‘C’ at the end. Spike Milligan picked up on this for one of the best Goon Shows ‘1985’ where the BBC very much are Big Brother and ‘Room 101’ is being stuck listening to inane BBC radio programmes! The Goons in TV form, of course, were on right before Dr Who in the early days).  

If somehow all that passed you by, though (and a surprising amount of people seemed to miss the theme of Varos on first watching, including JNT!) then ‘Varos’ is still one of the strongest stories in the era because it has some of the finest characters 1980s Who has to offer. Unlike a lot of stories in the JNT era it has some excellent actors and actresses perfectly cast to play them too. Alien, unlikeable, brown, slimy, disgusting and with an evil laugh, David Cameron would have approved of Sil’s underhanded tactics here, pretending to be the saviour of the planet Varos when really he’s undermining its resources and putting the ‘I,/Me’ into its ‘Mines’. He’s the sort of ugly vain capitalist who would sell his own grandmother to make money (and probably already has), one so vain he thinks he’s beautiful and Peri ugly. He’s the ultimate 1980s alien: a smug yuppie (in an era when they called themselves ‘the beautiful people’). This conniving alien slug could have been an annoying caricature, an alien concerned with nothing except profits, but Phillip Martin’s clever script gives him some softer edges that almost make him likeable and ‘human’ for lack of a better word. Though Sil is just another slimy businessman, someone common to a lot of Martin’s works, the writer was also a fan of the brilliant Isaac Asimov and took note of an essay he’d once written about writing believable science-fiction in that it had to be plausible: for instance from what we know about life from Earth chances are it needs water to survive and land-animals are overwhelmed by marine animals in number, so odds are if there is life out there on other planets it’s probably amphibious. The original plan was to have Sil in the tank, but this would have made things difficult for the poor actor and there was a worry children might copy it, so he sits on top of tanks instead. He’s more than just a big lot of flabby skin saying ‘moisturise me’ though. It was a clever move, for instance, to make him a character who thinks he looks dignified and brilliant, then saddle him with a faulty translator circuit that makes him look like an idiot without him knowing (that pronounces words like ‘goveryurnoeeer’ and has an unfortunate tendency to get stuck on lines like ‘You lying…liar!’) Nabil Shaban is perfect casting, adding little touches that make Sil come to life on top of the script, such as his wonderful laugh (based on a snake that a friend of his had and a discussion they’d once had about how snakes might laugh) and his habit of spaying his fins in anger whenever he’s frustrated.  His casting was fortuitous: BBC producer Alan Shawcross had done a documentary on disabled actors and sent a memo round to his colleagues suggesting they should hire more underprivilidged actors when the parts demanded it. At the same time Martin Jarvis had just been cast as the Governor and his wife Rosaylnd was also involved in TV and Radio and had just been in touch with a disabled theatre company named ‘Graeae’.  Nabil was one of their founders and one of the biggest Whovians to be in the series: he’d spent a lot of time as a child in and out of hospital because of his osteogenesis imperfecta and brittle bone diagnosis, that made his legs both unstable and short. His only entertainment had been the hospital television where he’d become hooked on Dr Who since ‘The Daleks’ in 1963. Indeed, by rights JNT should have been able to go straight to him as he’d written into the programme twice, suggesting himself as a replacement for Roger Delgado in 1976 when the pre-publicity for ‘The Deadly Assassin’ suggested The Master had been involved in a ‘nasty accident’ and again in 1981 when he heard JNT wanted a new Doctor who was a ‘contrast’ with the very tall Tom Baker. Sadly he didn’t get either but I remain in hope that one day Nabil might get the chance to be The Doctor yet, especially with Russell T doing so much to have disabled actors on the show again: he’s a natural, instinctive rounded actor who takes an already promising part and makes sure that you can never ever forget it, somehow making Sil both a believable bully and the hapless victim. The story goes that JNT proudly told Shawcross that he’d done what he’d said and cast a disabled villain; the producer was horrified and checked that Nabil was okay with it, but of course as a fully paid up fan he was more than happy (after all, Sil isn’t nasty because of his height or because he has to be wheeled around but because of who he is and what he thinks. Russell T somehow forgot that lesson when re-casting Davros in a controversial children in need sketch). 

Martin Jarvis, of course, had been seen by Dr Who fans before but is cast rather better here than he was in ‘Invasion Of the Dinosaurs’ (where he’s the most with-it gentile mad scientist in the series) and ‘The Web Planet’ (where he’s a butterfly prince!) Director Ron Jones had worked with him many times and thought of him immediately on reading the script: he wanted to move away from the Thatcher stereotype and have someone at least a little likeable, someone who wants to do the right thing but is perhaps a bit cowardly to do the right thing. It’s the sort of part he always plays, but in a situation pushed to extremes you never get to hear in radio 4 dramas The Governor is also part of a twelve-person ‘elite’ from which the next governor is elected so it needed to be someone a little posh. He’s superb in the role, giving The Governor a gravitas and dignity he doesn’t always deserve.  Torture overseer Arak is played with just the right menace by Stephen Yardley (he always seems to get these sorts of roles: believe it or not he’s the middle-aged axe-wielding maniac in the goriest Torchwood episode ‘Countrcyde’ where hapless comedy relief husband Rhys, of all people, finds cut up bodies in a story where the usual Torchwood team are all known to the baddies). Only the rebels are a bit wet, especially Jason Connery as Jondar hired purely to be beefcake and because of the publicity of having Sean Connery’s son in the show (he was unknown at the time but was cast in his breakthrough lead in the title role ‘Robin of Sherwood’ while filming this very story. Goodness knows how or why: rumour has long had it that after seeing how bad he was in rehearsals, but knowing that the Radio Times had already been told about his casting, half of Jondar’s lines were given to other characters to speak). 

Perhaps the most interesting characters are Arak and Etta, who are unique in the series. They are the viewers, sitting and watching the action unfold. They have to after all: it’s compulsory to watch and vote, so we see them commenting on the action as it unfolds, reacting as if they’re watching a Dr Who story along with the rest of us. That might seem an obvious idea now with so many reality TV shows around, never mind DVD commentaries where the people involved in the show do exactly that (and the Varos one is amongst the best, as most of the Colin Baker-Nicola Bryant ones tend to be if only for their friendship and teasing) but in 1985 this was a whole new concept. Along the way they moan when nothing seems to be happening, complain that the violence was much better and gorier the week before and how implausible things are. They never get to do anything that impacts any of the actual plot or talk to characters besides each other. Yet at the same time they’re our eyes and ears for what the unseen and forgotten working class think on Varos and have some very poignant scenes as living in such a violent, miserable world impacts their marriage: he tries to ‘nick’ her vote, she threatens to have him reported and at the end, when everything is changed, they ask what they’re supposed to do next without the vacuum of regular executions to keep them occupied (it’s very much a theme Russell T Davies ‘borrowed’ for the ‘Bad Wolf/Parting Of The Ways’ finale, following on from the vacuum left by The Doctor in ‘The Long Game’, when reality TV is very much a thing). Their best line comes when casually discussing an execution that they’ve muddled up because there have been so many lately they’ve become de-sensitised to the violence: ‘You’re thinking of that other one. He wasn’t blind. Well, not in the beginning anyway!’ They’re also a postmodernist joke on ‘us’ – every time they lean forward to see more gore and you want to tick them off for being bloodthirsty you realise that you’re still watching too.

There are others dropped into the show too: The Doctor and Peri are rightly horrified that people are made to watch the horror that unfolds on this planet, broadcast live into people’s homes, a world that keeps people in place by making them afraid and having part of this world’s no-go areas make people hallucinate their fears. Only, of course, that’s exactly what the viewer is doing; those viewers we see on screen are really ‘us’ commenting that it’s not as violent as it used to be (in Varos’ pre-Mary Whitehouse days perhaps) and complaining that there isn’t as much blood and guts as in other weeks. The Doctor comments to actor Hugh Martin ‘do you always get the priest parts?’ as he’s led to his execution (he did too,in series like ‘Killer’ and ‘A Very British Coup’, though his other Who appearance is as a radio operator in ‘Terror Of The Zygons’). The playful script also plays up the cliffhangers of old, with the one and only one in this story (in the only 20th century series to use of 45minute episodes) ending with the Dr drowning on dry land watched by the governor in the control room who yells ‘Cut!’ right at the point we switch into the theme tune sting and end credits! Peri also gets to comment on how ‘these corridors all look the same’ (because they are!) and even JNT gets in on the act (that pun about how water is better bottled ‘Peri, eh?’ was the producer’s suggestion. No doubt with a tie-in advertisement in mind – Sil’s bathwater edition perhaps?!) Oddly though no one comments on perhaps the biggest joke of the whole story: they finally give up trying to make ventilation shafts seem like ventilation shafts and instead have them eight foot tall (even though people on Varos are average Human sized) so that even Colin Baker can walk through them!

Having two viewers is a neat idea that does something a bit different and – credit where it’s due – was script editor Eric Saward’s suggestion after seeing them as minor characters in the script which Martin eagerly agreed with. It’s easily the best alternation or addition he makes to any script in his six-ish years of working on the series. But then Saward was particularly close to Martin and for once was coming from the same place, rather than playing catch-up with a writer cast by his predecessor or asked for by his producer. The script had a long gestation period too, originally written for Peter Davison’s Doctor and re-written for both the new Doctor and the new companion, which helped (Saward was often playing catch-up with scripts that had needed working on quickly. Though it’s hard to imagine the 5^th Doctor and Nyssa in this world). It shows: ‘Varos’ has a unique feel different to all other Who stories (even sort-of sequel ‘Mindwarp’), different to other stories from this eras. There’s a gravitas and weight, helped by the fact that it’s all treated like a stage play (Martin had started his career in the theatre), not just with the ‘Greek Chorus’ but the longer-than-usual scenes and speeches and the relative lack of music (only a third of this story has an incidental score in an era when music was usually crammed to the rafters: there are actually scenes with, shock horror, pauses, just like the black-and-white days!) This is a world that comes with its own poignant language: people don’t eat food anymore for instance but ‘workfeed’ from the ‘food dole’, with all the implications that people live at the whim of society rather than having society run for them. What’s more, everyone in this story acts ‘normally’ for all the strange ideas: this isn’t a story where early Industrial Revolutionary era workers mill around discussing scarecrows or where H G Wells accepts everything about time travel at first glance: there’s a world-weary frustration on this planet, a sense of ‘now what?’ at every turn that rings true. You believe in this world and its people. If you were watching on first transmission in 1985 you were kind of living in it anyway.  

Colin Baker is in his element and his Doctor is never better on Tv as he gets to pontificate and harangue at length, delivering pompous emotional speeches that put him at the heart of the action in a way his two immediate predecessors never were (Ton Baker’s Doctor was distant and alien and Peter Davison’s did the mopping up job afterwards, but Dr 6 is prepared to risk all for his morals from the first. To his detriment, generally). Colin Baker his best platform for his permanently outraged Dr, shouting at a world that won’t listen to him and he’s met his match in Sil, his antithesis in a way The Master had stopped being in this era, a character ready to argue back at him but one driven by control rather than freedom and misery rather than joy. A lot of writers for the 6th Dr don’t really understand him (something script editor Eric Saward confessed later – and he pretty much created him!) but Phillip Martin gets him completely: he’s a timelord who has none of the sense of doubt the others (sometimes) have but unlike his close cousin the 4th Dr he doesn’t see the absurdism in the world either. For him, more than any other regeneration, his adventures a crusade and a moral wrong he just has to right. He’s a professor who sees the rest of the universe as his classroom of pupils and isn’t above lecturing them and punishing them when they get things wrong. He’s a more black-and-white Dr than the others, despite his multi-coloured costume, without as much mercy as the others. Which is a problem against more nuanced, pitiable characters like Davros or The Board, but perfect for a character as downright nasty as Sil and a planet so obviously ‘wrong’ as Varos. That, perhaps, is why this is the only DW story to have the word ‘vengeance’ in the title: he doesn’t so much save the day and put things right by removing the baddies as avenge the people who’ve suffered under this regime, every bit as much as the political system hurts people it disagrees with. Only, of course, the Dr is morally right and un-corruptable. Colin Baker is often the best thing in his era, but never more than here when he gets to be the Dr he was always meant to be, smarter and more learned than your average monster and not afraid to show it. Peri, too, gets a lovely lot to do compared to usual: she’s the moral compass when The Doctor isn’t there, plucky and brave in all the best ways, while her aborted change into a bird fills in a lot of details about her character, her need to rise above it all and fly away, to believe in better times (though being a botanist it’s a surprise she didn’t turn into a tree, growing tall to be above it all, like the ones in ‘Mark Of The Rani’. But better).  Peri is one of Dr Who’s great companions and Nicola Bryant one of its best actresses, even if she never gets the chance to show just what she can do; along with debut ‘Planet Of Fire’ though this is Peri at her best, sarcastic and sulky as the monsters try to have their way with her and with a put-down equal to everyone trying to put her six feet under.  It’s the moments when the pair are together that the story shines most though: now that the first two stories of ‘getting to know you’ have been recorded both actors know each other well and are having the greatest fun together. They’re a delight to watch. It’s a real shame that future writers go back to having them at each other’s throats for the rest of the season.  

It’s a shame too that Phillip Martin only ever got two Dr Who scripts on screen because he could write characters better than anybody still left writing for Who in this era; as we said in ‘Mindwarp’ his greatest strength is that he can take grotesque caricatures of people who seem hideous at first and then slowly fill in the gaps so that they have more depth than characters usually get in 90 minutes, turning a world that seems outlandish and cartoonish at first into one that becomes more subtle and real by degrees. Varos is a world that solves its problems with violence and where if you don’t like it there must be something wrong with you –a world that if you disagree with it can ‘devolve’ you by turning you into an animal, through acceleration of certain strands in your DNA. It’s a very different way of doing the things Dr Who always does, laughing at us for laughing at it, and it works so well it’s a surprise no one tried it again (there’s something similar going on in ‘Dragonfire’ what with literally dangling Sylvester McCoy over a cliff and naming characters after postmodernist theorists, but it doesn’t try anything quite as brave as this, an academic exercise rather than anything quite so ‘gutsy’). Martin is also clever at giving us exposition only when we need it, so we learn things at just the right time from multiple different characters from different points of view, rather than just having it dumped on us (perhaps the biggest reason why this script by an experienced writer stands out in a year with newbies like Pip ‘n’ Jane Baker and Glen McCoy who do that sort of thing a lot). The language too is magnificent for the most part, rich and rounded and different for every character, from the gum clipped sentences of the working classes to the Governor’s thoughtful prose to the Doctor’s impassioned speeches.

For all that though, Varos is far from perfect.  As so often happens in 6^th Doctor scripts he and Peri take an age to arrive on the scene and the opening scenes on board the Tardis as The Doctor sits round being depressed as they end up stuck in space are very out of character (I get what Martin and probably Saward were doing, by having even our hero feel the helplessness at being trapped in a situation beyond your control but the Tardis is always going wrong and the Doctor always has hope. Although as it happens this is the last time the Tardis goes wrong for the rest of the 20^th century!) Usually the joy in Who stories is watching the Doctor inspire people to do better but for once he ends up doing most of the work himself  and the Varosian rebels aren’t drawn with the same complexities and motivations of everyone else (it might be that, having been brought up on a penal colony, there simply isn’t a precedent for this sort of thing but that’s where The Doctor comes in, as an inspiration. A cut scene has The Doctor befriend Jondar after asking what got him into trouble and he says ‘curiosity’, very much a Doctory trait. We really could have done with that line back in, especially when this story under-ran with bits added at the last minute). It’s a shame Martin didn’t too more with Peri’s transformation and have the Doctor at least acknowledge it when he rescues her (although it’s just as well the intended closing line, where The Doctor offers to take Peri to a planet filled with millet, got cut!) There’s a lot to say about imagination being harmful to people who aren’t allowed to use it and who think they’re going to be trapped in the same drudgery life forever; it’s the one part of the script that feels stapled on rather than growing organically out of everything else. It would also have been interesting to see what animal he might have been too. There’s a truly woeful car chase that’s clearly under-par and under-budget and even a thought amongst fans that it’s a ‘parody’ of the Pertwee era doesn’rt excuse how poorly it’s executed. The ending is awfully sudden and violent and it’s sad to see The Doctor resorting to the sort of violence that everyone else on this planet uses. It comes out of nowhere and The Doctor and Peri go home in return for some Zeiton 7 even though the planet is still a mess and the people are still hurting. Even Sil has been shamed rather than banished (though on the plus side it leaves him free for a re-match, unlike say The Daleks and Cybermen, both destroyed in their original stories). While it fits the story, too, the amount of drab grey sets filled with drab grey people in drab grey costumes without any reprieve can get monotonous (for once the Doctor’s colourful coat and Peri’s 1980s neon leotard come in handy as a contrast!): it’s a real shame that ‘The Two Doctors’ ‘Revelation Of the Daleks’ and ‘Mark Of the Rani’ got all the location filming allocation between them for the year as the other three stories all suffer.

For all that, though, Varos is a still filled with many wonderful and memorable moments that lodge themselves in the brain. Though people talk about the violence going too far (and Martin gleefully posted a Radio Times letter about how the atrocities is the stories were ‘greater than anything in WWII on his bathroom wall) in this story it’s never gratuitous and always proving a point: you remember this story’s executions and acid baths long after similar threats in other stories have been forgotten. The Governor’s guilty conscience wondering if he’s doing the right thing leads to many a great monologue matched only by Sil’s subversive banking (Star Trek clearly borrowed him for their Ferengi as they’re much the same but Sil came first, by about twenty years) and The 6^th Doctor at his chest-beating best. The moment when the regime has been overthrown and everyone’s television screens turn blank, leaving with nothing but a vacuum in their lives, is one of the most thought-provoking ends in all of Who, as the camera turns to us at home and asks us what we’re going to do about it now that we’ve ‘seen’ through the hypocrisy of a Thatcher-type society. We can all learn a lot from Varos it seems; not least the fact that a DW script can be this daring and postmodern without it getting in the way of telling a good story, which rattles along at quite a pace and makes a lot of salient points in such an entertaining way this viewer sitting at home has no reason to complain. Michael Grade clearly hadn’t seen or – more likely – understood ‘Vengeance on Varos’ when he cancelled the show at the end of this season for being ‘too violent’ and ‘not very good’ (or maybe he thought that the dithering Governor trying to placate everyone rather than do the right thing was based on him?) This is, more than anything, an attack on the very violence he was complaining about, but done in better and subtler ways than a monster as one-dimensional as Grade could ever understand. The result is a brilliant inventive and creative story in an era when, more than any other in the 20th century, Dr Who had fallen into a rut and was recycling its own ideas. Proof that even in its darkest days Dr Who always had something worth saying and could comment on society’s failings in a way no other series ever could. There aren’t many classics in this era but ‘Varos’ is very much one, a near-perfect combination of writing and acting. Not everyone got it on first transmission, not everyone gets it now, but there’s food for thought in Varos beyond Sil’s marshminnows and a lot for fans to enjoy whatever level you want to watch this complex story on.

POSITIVES + The ‘Varos’ logo by set designer Tony Snoaden is pretty nifty, a double ‘V’ that looks like exactly the sort of thing an oppressive dystopian regime would come up with and also faintly resembles both the BBC ‘home video’ logo of the era and the most famous ‘Who’ logo, the ‘diamond one from the Pertwee era.  

NEGATIVES - The Doctor, Peri and two of the rebels (one of them played by Sean Connery’s son) are terrified because of a light distortion that’s made them afraid of…a fly. Even when huge, flies aren’t that threatening and the Doctor’s used enough to holovisions and giant ants and butterflies alike to recognise a mirage of a fly when he sees one. It’s a bit of anticlimax to say the least. It’s footage ordered specially from Oxford Scientific Films by the way, though the real sticking point was the desert scene: all of Who’s usual sources admitted they were after a decent desert film themselves and had none to spare (it eventually came from, of all places, music label EMI).  

BEST QUOTE: Peri: ‘Since we left Telos, you've caused three electrical fires, a total power failure, and a near collision with a storm of asteroids. Not only that, you twice managed to get yourself lost in the TARDIS corridors, wiped the memory of the flight computer and jettisoned three quarters of the storage hold. You even managed to burn dinner last night!’ Dr: ‘Well, I have never said I was perfect’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Varos’ was the very sensible choice for the 60^th anniversary ‘Tales From The Tardis’ (2023) series, given how relevant Phillip Martin’s tale of corruption on TV remains (‘The 21^st century’ sighs modern Peri at the end ‘It feels like Varos’. She’s not wrong there). As with the other stories in the nostalgia fest series it’s a brief top and tail to a re-showing of the episode with the 6^th Doctor and Peri bumping into each other inside a ‘memory Tardis’ and talking about old times. In some ways this is the least moving and nostalgic of the original six: Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant are always doing something together, usually on Big Finish, so we’re used to seeing them together while their time in the Tardis was a mere forty years ago rather than sixty. In other ways it’s the best: the actors’ very real affection for each other shines through in a way it wasn’t allowed to when they were making Who for real and their warm embrace is a real highlight of the series (not least because it means that Peri definitely survived the end of ‘Mindwarp’: Peri looks surprisingly good for someone who spent so many years living with Brian Blessed’s Warrior King Yrcanos!) Peri comments he got older, to which The Doctor jokes (in what sounds like a Colin Baker ad lib) ‘and bigger…and beardier!’ In case you’re wondering he doesn’t have the old coat but he still seems to prefer clashes of colour in old age judging by his clashing waistcoat, shirt and trousers! The Doctor’s been keeping tabs on Peri, hearing songs about the ‘warrior Queen’ and talks – unusually for Who – directly about fate, of how Peri’s days were ‘intended for you from that day on Lanzarote’. While the other Doctors are a bit clueless as to what’s going on, trust the 6^th Doctor to have worked out first that this is a ‘Remember Tardis’ based on stories shared, ‘memories like ripples on a pond forever moving’. Peri in turn hasn’t forgotten the Doctor, saying she used to look up at the night sky ‘and wonder which star you were spinning around’ and wondering if she would ever see him again. A sweet finale has The Doctor telling Peri (and those of us at home) that injustice and suffering turns us into who we are and makes us fighters to be proud of, before agreeing to rush back to saving the universe from itself with lots of button mashing; a bit of a clumsy speech perhaps but heartfelt all the same in a year of turmoil around the world. Perhaps best of all is the way they approach each other: back in the very first scene in ‘The Twin Dilemma’ it was a ‘bit of business’ the actors developed between themselves to have Peri and The Doctor go one way then the other as she tried to escape from him, newly regenerated and unstable; now they do it to go towards each other for a hug. Phil Ford’s finally script gives us the closure we Sixie fans have been after, painting the pair as ‘two adventurers and friends’, the way their characters should always have been.

The ‘real’ sequel is of course Phillip Martin’s ‘Mission To Magnus’, written as part of the unproduced season twenty-three (and included with the other abandoned scripts listed under ‘The Mysterious Planet’). Followed by ‘Mindwarp’, a story that did make it to telly. Sil pops up on a whole load of other stories set after ‘Mindwarp’ too, all of which are listed in the column under that story.

Previous ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’ next ‘The Mark Of Rani’

Revelation Of The Daleks: Ranking - 125

     Revelation Of The Daleks

(Season 22, Dr 6 with Peri, 23-30/3/1985, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Eric Saward, director: Graeme Harper)

Rank: 125

  'Welcome to Tranquil Repose and the DJ playing all your favourite hit songs to help you pass the time while you, uhh, pass. Let's see what the shuffle button has for you today...'Knockin' On heaven's Door', whoops no better not, you might get the wrong ideas... 'Ice Ice Baby', no better not Davros likes to get up and dance to that one and if he hurts himself he'll blame it on me...'The Doctor Who 'Talking 'Bout My Regenerations' whoops no that's been banned from up high...Let's try some classical music...Hmm 'My tiny hand is cyrogenically frozen', no can't play that ne either...'

 

Colin Baker’s only Dalek story is a really unusual and quirky tale. Usually the Dalek stories, at least in the original 20th century series, are the stories that most follow a formula: a lot of shouting, a lot of escaping, lots of things exploding, a people in danger and a big finale. This story isn’t like that though – the Daleks are cunning, exploiting such human concepts as death and grieving as an excuse to lay a trap for the timelord. It’s a comedy, of sorts, laughing at the oddities and quirks of human, though admittedly with great swathes of the cast exterminated most people aren’t laughing by the end. It’s also a largely metaphorical, existential tale where the Daleks exterminating people are really just a backdrop to Davros’ desperation to cling on to life and by extension why the rest of us do it too, with a story that (like ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’ but more so) looks at the 1980s trend for rich people cryogenically freezing themselves. Why bother, the story asks with a grim chuckle, when you’re only going to die eventually anyway. Even The Doctor, so used to ‘cheating’ death, comes face to face with his own mortality when his own gravestone (apparently) galls on top of him (and it’s of his current regeneration so he doesn’t have long left!) 

Which writer could possibly have created such an original quirky story? Well, that’s the real ‘revelation’ of the story because good gracious, no it can’t be…It is…Eric Saward, the script editor responsible for writing the most formulaic 1980s Dalek story of them all ‘Resurrection Of The Daleks’. Saward, despite not liking the Daleks at all (or, indeed, Dr Who much in this era when he keeps clashing with producer John Nathan-Turner) offered to write another story: ‘Resurrection’, for all its faults, had been a huge ratings boost and Dalek creator Terry Nation, though horrified at the story, was pleased with the extra love and attention he was getting and happy to let Eric write it. Saward felt it was unfinished business too: he’d been an extra two years in the job now (given that ‘Resurrection’ was written for the 1983 season though not broadcast till 1984) and understand both the series and The Daleks that much better and wanted to have another go. I do wonder, too, if it was atonement of sorts of having the highest death count in Dr Who (78): this story kills nearly as many (50ish?) but actually stops to mourn them and think about what happens when we die and what that does to the people around us, rather than being something that ‘happens’. Due to the strangest of circumstances it ends up being the last script Eric writes for Dr Who (at least on telly) and is easily his maturest and most thoughtful script, taking a leaf from the man who had now become his favourite Who writer, Bob Holmes. To be fair, too, both ‘Earthshock’ and ‘Resurrection’ were written under duress, at the end of difficult years that had involved much re-writing, whereas ‘Revelation’ was written under much gentler circumstances. You see, there was a problem: BBC rules meant that script writers weren’t allowed to commission themselves  and while they sometimes got away with it (pleading difficult last minute circumstances if a script fell through) the heads of the new writer’s guild were rather sticklers for following rules. New heads that just happened to be Eric’s bête noirs Pip and Jane Baker, who would have been only to eager to shop him after the clashes that went into making ‘The Mark Of the Rani’.  So the production team hatched a plan, waiting till Eric’s script writing contract ran out at the end of the year and giving him three weeks off till issuing him a new ne. Eric was now, briefly, both freelance and ‘free’ again and with nothing to stop him took off for s much needed holiday on the island of Rhodes, with some reading material and a notebook and pen to hand.

That reading material is significant because it ended up inspiring quite a lot of what made it into the story. It was Evelyn Waugh’s fairly obscure 1948 novel ‘The Loved One’, about a Brit moving to Hollywood and being surprised at the differences in culture, all centred round a pet cemetery. Not the most obvious reading it’s true, which might be Saward nicked so much of it so freely, expecting nobody else would notice: lots of the characters in this story have equivalents in the book, with ‘Joyboy’ the Brit turning into ‘Jobel’, with a sort of love triangle with a plain girl called ‘Aimie’ turned into ‘Tasambaker’. Why Tasambeker? Well, Eric also got lots of his character names and traits from the things he came across on Rhodes: Tasembeker is the local saint on Rhodes, to whom childless couples prayed for fertility (which makes sense if you twist the concept slightly to someone so desperate to be loved they end up pushing people away). Orcini, meanwhile, was inspired by the ‘Knights Hospitaller’ who ruled Rhodes in the 14^th and 15^th centuries who Eric saw as fiercely independent and relentless in their pursuit of their goals, much as Eric saw the character. ‘Stengos’ was the name of the man who ferried Eric around the island. The DJ was inspired by a bored disc jockey Eric listened to during late night drives during the ‘graveyard shift’, who acted as if he was talking to himself as no one else was listening. ‘Necros’, the name of Saward’s new planet, is the Greek word for ‘corpse’. Change the pets to people, throw in some Daleks and a DJ and you basically have the same story: which, to be fair to Eric, is how a lot of Holmes’ stories were made too (just with more obvious Hammer Horror elements).

The biggest influence, though, is the feeling: like many a Waugh book it’s a satirical piece that can either be read as it stands or read as an attack on a false way of human living. ‘The Loved One’s big message is that it doesn’t matter how much tinsel you put into the funeral ceremony or how great a person you were in life, death is the great leveller and once you’re dead, you’re dead, no redos or regenerations available. Notably no one in Hollywood will even refer to death: they use euphemisms because thinking about the harsh inevitabilities of life doesn’t fit the way they act and behave, but deny it all they will its there waiting for them eventually. The people dead in the ground don’t know or care what you’re doing on the surface and the traditions that go along with funerals are for the people living more than the dead. It’s also a book that laughs at the pointless rituals we have while we’re alive: Aimee stands out in the book because she’s the only one brave enough to be ‘herself’ and everyone mocks her for it, to the point of (spoilers) forcing her into suicide, just like Tasambeker (the only character open about her feelings) sort-of does. She’s a far more honourable character than any of the others though, who are all two-faced, pretending to like people to their face then stabbing them in the back. This spills over into Saward’s script, a world where everyone pays audible tribute to the dead but is really living off their corpses. The script is full of people who are only ‘pretending’, a neat and more intelligent  twist on his usual ‘body double’ idea (of both Cyber-converts and Dalek duplicates):  Jobel strings people along and drops them when they’re no longer needed with hints that he’s acting arrogant and being a hot catch because he knows he’s a balding tiny ugly odious little man (his death sequence reveals he’s wearin a wig), Kara acts like Davros’ perfect lackey but really she’s toppling to overthrow him, the DJ (talking to an empty room full of cryogenically frozen corpses who are fast asleep) has a ‘professional voice’ he keeps for work complete with fake American accent and even Davros himself isn’t quite what he seems to be, playing the part of ‘The Great Healer’ despite aiming to kill as many people as possible (spoilers: the head in a jar is all for show). This makes the Daleks back to being cunning and ruthless again, something Eric understands much better now than in his last script and they run the show, pushing people into doing their bidding, with Davros even luring The Doctor to Necros as part of an elaborate trap based around his own death (which turns out to be one big red herring). That’s a clever way of doing a Dr Who script and it’s well thought out, with by and large everyone ‘pretending’ in episode one and revealing their true colours in episode two.

This is also the perfect place to drop the 6^th Doctor. He is, of all the regenerations to date, the one who most seems to be ‘hiding’ his true self, with an inner insecurity hidden behind layers of anecdotes boasts and theatrics someone who wears a coat of many colours mostly because he’s afraid without it he won’t stand out from the crowd. Saward was critical of both the coat (one of the best features of his world-building is giving Necros a mourning colour of blue – actually it was meant to be white, but it started snowing on location and the cloak just disappeared on screen. Since quitting his job two years down the line Eric’s commented a lot in interviews (including a famously damning on in ‘Starbust’ where everyone involved in Dr Who winds up sounding psychopathic) on how he thought the sixth Doctor was a ‘mistake’, from casting to character to costume and you get the feeling he’s fed up of him to be honest and is far more interested in his supporting cast, so he keeps the regulars out of the action for half the story, preferring to write for his incidental characters and even has his ‘newbies’ be rude to the Doctor (such as Jobel claiming it would take more than a hundred foot tombstone to ‘crush an ego like yours’, while Peri’s comments on The Doctor’s weight were reportedly real things Eric overheard JNT say to Colin; this was not a happy place to work in 1985). Which is a shame because the best bits of this story are still the moments between the Doctor and Peri. However that’s a shame because Colin is more than up to it and gives one of his most rounded performances, gentler in his spats with Peri (which is now more like gentle teasing from siblings who are fond of each other, rather than bitter enemies), with a sad melancholic opening full of existential despair as The Doctor ‘retires’ and takes up fishing, horror at Davros’ plan and a real sense of mourning and loss when he fears Peri has been killed  far deeper and more ‘real’ than any action he’s been called on to give before (certainly far different to anyone’s reaction in ‘Resurrection’); the faker the people around him go the more ‘real’ The Doctor gets. They should have trusted Colin with this sort of thing earlier. As for Peri, she doesn’t get as much to do but at least she’s back to being a rounded person again rather than a cipher. Saward gets in a great joke about fakeness there too (‘Is that your real accent?’ asks The DJ ‘I hope so’ says Nicola Bryant nervously), while Peri finally gets to use her botany skills and bond over American music with the DJ.

Ah yes, good old rock and roll. Something that very much wasn’t in Waugh’s novel (not least because it hadn’t been ‘invented’ yet) Saward writes it in as a symbol of everything that’s ‘real’. There’s no pretending in rock music (and it’s very much rock not pop for a change, though weirdly there’s a bit of jazz in there) – the best of it is pure feeling that makes you feel ‘alive’. Much as some fans don’t understand why a DJ has been hired to play music to a bunch of dead corpses, that’s the ‘joke’ – only the dead are listening anymore to what it means to be truly ‘alive’. And that’s a very Dr Who message that isn’t in the Waugh novel. The fact that the music is turned on Davros via a ‘sonic beam’ and rock and roll socks it to the man (well, the Kaled mutant I guess) is a great moment. There’s a sense here too, though, of the hippie dream in decay, now that we’ve reached the mid-1980s and the era of Thatcherism and Reaganism is beginning to bite (the nemesis of the 1960s dream in so many ways). You might recall, if you’ve read any of about half the Hartnell reviews that touch on it, that Dr Who started as a sort of safe discussion middle ground between kids and their parents about what sort of a world they were going to inherit. Was the fact they were moving away from armies and invasions towards peace and kindness a good thing or did it just make them all wimps? (see ‘The Space Museum’ for an example of the former and ‘The Dominators’ for the latter). Though not as bald a metaphor as ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ will be, this story gets there first by pointing out the joyous tolerant equal universe Dr Who promised us really isn’t happening. A generation turned out to be ‘day trippers’ paying lip service to such ideals and had allowed the ‘wrong’ people to get into power. Even The Beatles, in this era, feel as far away from their young selves as they ever were: John’s dead (the general view is he was murdered by a ‘fan’ in a sign of the hippie community broken down, who wasn’t really a fan and never owned a Beatle album till the week he did it), George is a recluse, Ringo’s an alcoholic and Paul has just released ‘The frog Song Chorus’. Nobody but nobody, witting down to watch ‘An Unearthly Child’ after playing the latest Beatles record, could ever have imagined we’d have ended up here just twenty years later. We’ve become a nation, a generation of people kowtowing and paying lip service to ideals we don’t believe in, because in a time of recession it’s the only way to keep our jobs and food on the table. We’ve stepped away from everything the 1960s once stood for and become a nation of race riots (The Daleks are back talking about ‘purity’ again), of capitalists (everyone turns a blind eye to the fact that everyone is literally eating the dead here on Necros) and warmongers (while ‘resurrection’ seems to relish death, despite being an ‘anti-war’ story, there’s no glamour about death here: all the soldiers, including the Daleks fighting a civil war, have put their beliefs ahead of their respect for life). Death comes cheap in this world, where everyone is looking for number one – the opposite of rock and roll and it’s shared sense of community (though they can’t get the rights to the Grateful Dead it might be significant they use a poster, perhaps the biggest musical ‘community’ of the 1960s based around one band; the music they do use include ‘fake’ Elvis covers, fake Beach Boys covers, weirdly enough the real Ted Heath Orchestra and surprisingly enough real Hendrix – on first broadcast and in the blu-ray anyway, it’s replaced for the VHS and DVD, all tracks treated to some extra Radiophonic Workshop ‘whooshing’ noises to sound more ‘alien’. For once the ‘fakeness’, due to licensing costs, only adds to the message of the story about not being ‘real’). Rock and roll, that once real thing, is a dying brand spoken only to the dead now – to survive on this ruthless planet where nothing is as it seems and everyone wants your job you have to be fake or die. Though we’re on an alien planet in an unspecified date in the future (enough of a future for Humans to have spread across the universe anyway) this couldn’t  be more like Thatcher’s Britain if everyone was clutching an unemployment form and dressed in neon leg-warmers and shoulder pads.

This story, then, has a very different feel to any of the stories around it: only ‘Vengeance On Varos’ is telling anything like the same sort of damning portrayal of contemporary society and that one’s not subtle about it the way this one is, a story that makes you work for what it’s trying to say. Generally the stories from Colin’s all-too-short twin seasons in the Tardis follow a routine: lots of pontificating, big epic speeches and the 6^th Doctor blustering into a situation where he’s the focal of attention (I mean, what else was he going to be in that coat?) and pretending he knows everything, then trying to rescue either Peri or Mel who have invariably got lost somewhere along the way – usually without him noticing. Then there’s the usual Eric Sward scripts: heavy on the action, big on the battle sequences and as violent and bloodthirsty as anything seen in the series (even if most of them are meant to be anti-war diatribes). This one isn’t like either: the death mostly happened long before the Tardis arrived and its a plot that’s about considering what it means to really be alive, rather than whose going to snuff it before the end credits. Most Dalek stories, Saward-era stories and most 6th Doctor stories between them are grandiose, big on drama and action and do-gooding speeches and low on subtlety. Not this one though, which against all the odds is more thoughtful and reflective, where even the seemingly larger-than-life characters (like Davros, the DJ and even the Doctor himself) are shown to have a more melancholic, vulnerable side to them. Time and again this story does the opposite to what you expect. Far from being central to the story the Doctor and Peri don’t even arrive at the plot until halfway through and when they do far from being the big high adventurers of old she’s spooked by being on a graveyard planet (the nicely if falsely named ‘Tranquil Repose), while he’s deeply depressed by seeing what he thinks is his own gravestone (even more so when it apparently crushes him to death in the cliffhanger) and their only way in is to clumsily clamber over a wall. Hardly a big dramatic arrival. Traditionally fans tend to love the first episode (when everyone’s acting oddly) and aren’t that keen on the second (when things go back to normal) but for me they’re a pair: the whole point of this story is that you can’t pretend to be someone you’re not forever. Everyone in this story gets penalised for pretending to be something they’re not – even The Doctor, if you count the brief moment he really truly honestly thinks Peri is dead this time. The moral of the story? Always be yourself.

Of course, as things turn out, it’s all a big Davros trap, but one that shows a lot more forethought and cunning than the Daleks usually have – usually they just blindly assume they’re going to win despite all the past stories to the contrary but in this one they assume from the first that they’re going to lose. In some ways it all makes sense: one Doctor or another are always turning up to cause havoc and disrupt his plans so getting them out the way with a false adventure that gets the timelord exterminated is a great idea from a Dalek point of view. The problems is though...how do you set a trap for someone who keeps changing their face and passes time in the wrong order? Did the Daleks litter this planet with statues that looked like all fifteen-and-counting Doctors? Did the 6th Doctor just happen to stumble on the right one that looked like him and there are others looking like Hartnell or Ncuti out there just out of shot? Fair dos if he doesn’t recognise his future selves, but he has a one in six chance of stumbling across an earlier Doctor and recognising them first. There are a few other issues too: I love the dark and cynical reasoning behind the radio being played to a load of cryogenically frozen dead bodies who will never hear it, which is only hospital radio taken to a logical conclusion, but I’ve always wondered why would anyone agree to pay for this? Money’s never really been a thing for Daleks but they seem oddly obsessed by it here, using dead bodies to make moolah, though equally they don’t seem to have been here long enough for such fripperies as radio broadcasting. They must have some set aside for this  story to work. Have they successfully plundered other worlds off-screen or has Davros been doing oil of Ulay adverts in his spare time to pay for all this? Equally how did Davros escape from the Movellan virus that had definitely killed him, honest in ‘Resurrection’?

Alas, too, this script doesn’t really come over on screen. Like ‘Resurrection’ this story is oddly cast with a very mixed success. It’s great to see Eleanor Bron back again, another of the story’s close Beatle links (she was the love interest in their second film ‘Help!’) but she’s playing against type  as a ruthless backstabber and can’t quite get the part (nice to see her properly after her cameo at the end of ‘City Of Death’ though). Alec Linstead, as Stengos, is odd casting (you might remember him better as Osgood Senior in ‘The Daemons’). Hugh Walters, playing Vogel, is even weirder casting (you might remember him as William Shakespeare in ‘The Chase’).Colin Spaull (Lilt) ditto (you might remember him as Mr Crane from ‘Rise Of The Cybermen/Age Of Steel’). Also Trevor Cooper (Takis) who makes a much better Friar Tuck in ‘Robot Of Sherwood’.  Clive Swift is just awful, missing all the subtleties in the script (no surprise if you come to this after his interview damning Whovians – see ‘Voyage Of the Damned’ for more). Terry Molloy continues to be a decent Michael Wisher substitute and gets the most out of Davros, making him more mobile this story, with Roy Skelton back for the Dalek voices so at least they ‘sound’ right. It’s Jenny Tomasin as Taswembeker who gets the most mixed reaction: certainly Jonathan Powell (taking over from Michael Grade as head of BBC serials) thought she was awful and demanded a newe edit that cut some of her scenes out. But isn’t she meant to be? Tasembeker is, surely, a candidate, for one of the most thankless roles in Dr Who ever: she’s meant to be a whiny, passive, pathetic creature, one worships Jobel so only that she can’t see that it puts him off her. What else are you supposed to do with a role like that? (Although, admittedly, you don’t feel the sting of her ‘revenge’ as deeply as you should, as Jenny plays it in the exact same way, rather than the moment Tasembeker finds her ‘voice’).  Like so much of mid-1980s Who you can’t help but feel that the script is going for dark, cynical and edgy and the cast are going for light, fluffy and colourful, resulting in a story that feels weirdly off-kilter, like you’ve just seen a dark and gritty drama about custard-pie flinging or a postmodernist take on capitalism and death that’s supposed to be about, erm, Barbie dolls. There was nearly another unexpected cast member too, at least in JNT’s head: he’d got talking to none other than Lawrence Olivier, who was by now semi-retired but admitted he had used to love Dr Who and might be coaxed out of retirement for one last cameo, assuming it was small, was filmed on location (he hated the way he looked on TV studio film) and that there was no advance publicity. JNT cooked up just the thing: a horribly disfigured mutant who came out of a freezing cold pond to cough up some plot exposition and rolled around in a swamp before dying. Officially Olivier never gave a reply; unofficially he laughed and turned the idea down (he wasn’t getting in a lake for anybody!) This sequence is, incidentally, the last bit of Dr Who taped on film until the McGann TV Movie and the last time we have a story that switches between the two standards of indoor and outdoor broadcasting, a true end of an era that stretches back all the way to the show’s first year.

There’s one bit of surprise stunt casting that actually works for once. JNT realised early on that the DJ part was a role ripe for publicity and offered it to all sorts of actor-musicians and comedians: David Bowie, Jasper Carrott, Rik Mayall, Roger Daltrey, even Ringo just to ram that point about The Beatles home; Jimmy Savile was considered but, thankfully, not asked. They were getting rather desperate by the time they offered it to Alexie Sayle and JNT was more than a bit nervous: he’d read Sayle’s hilarious article ‘Why I Should Be The New Doctor Who’ about the importance of having a Marxist in the Tardis published in the November 1984 edition of ‘Foundation’, a left-wing publisher and taken it seriously rather than tongue-in-cheek. For what it’s worth the point Sayle was making, as a long lived Whovian, was heartfelt: the series had betrayed its ‘roots’ by becoming another safe adventure series, casting ‘celebrity actors’ like Peter Davison and Colin Baker rather than unknown subversives like Tom Baker, with stories that had moved away from the 1960s ideal of socking it to the man. However it was done in an affectionate, jokey way: K9, for instance, is described as ‘the one true Marxist character’ (because he always tells the truth), while timelords were referred to as ‘typical rightwing authority figures’, while the closing promise to ‘march to TV studio 8 at BBC TV centre with a bunch of mercenaries, unemployed Daleks and revolutionaries’ was never intentional. Sayle, who loved any and all science fiction could also be seen spoofing ‘Time Tunnel’ on his TV series, renamed ‘Drunks In Time’ as he fell through time and space in a drunken heap after one too many nights out with his friend (played by another scifi actor friend, none other than Peter Capaldi).  JNT, though, famously, didn’t have much of a sense of humour. Saward persuaded him though, recognising that this was exactly the sort of story Sayle belonged in and that his article was saying much the same as this story: that Dr Who had got lost somewhere along the way since the 1960s (if only because the world had got lost too). He’s a, well, a ‘revelation’, nailing both the shy ‘real’ DJ born too late for the ‘good old days’ (a rare actor believable in both hippie garn and the sort of rocker leathers Christopher Eccleston will wear as the 9^th Doctor) and the OTT exaggerated performance as the DJ (he was too shy to perform this way in rehearsals, panicking JNT so much he was nearly replaced). Given that the DJ is a reminder of everything humanity once stood for and all that was lost, yet still takes a stand and socks it to Davros even though he knows its going to get shim killed, makes this the perfect character for him to play. 

 

The result, then, is a really strong story that somehow never quite comes alive on TV, thanks to the arch performances, weird costumes and the bonkers sets (by now budget was running tight so the sets for Tranquil Repose’ were cobbled together out of anything handy). On the plus side Necros feels like a ‘real’ world that existed long before the cameras started rolling, with lots of clever touches that make the planet and its people come alive, from blue being the national colour of mourning to Davros’ supporting ‘team’ who all secretly want his job (is it going too far to say that Davros is Thatcher for the purposes of this story?) It all looks really good, filmed in Portsmouth (Bolinge Hill Farm, Queen Elizabeth County Park, Tangmere Aerodrome and the IBM North Harbour Building, which became ‘Tranquil Repose’ with the ‘Garden Of Fond Memoires’ located in their car park, with actors and crew chaperoned to make sure they didn’t pinch any ‘secret technology’; they gave their filming fee to a local school where Colin Baker later presented the cheque in person during his time off) for a change and making good use of a sudden unexpected snowstorm one that meant the diesel in the BBC trucks froze over and their usual equipment had to be taken by tractor).It’s a decent story for Davros, The Daleks aren’t in it enough but are at least back to their scheming best and The Doctor and Peri, though late to the party, are well catered for. The serious message at the heart of this story too is the sort of thing Dr Who had never done before and which still felt like the sort of thing it should be doing (and even if much of it is down to Waugh rather than Saward it’s still a less blatant steal than, say, ‘The Brain Of Morbius’ is from Frankenstein).

However there’s still something hollow deep down in this story, as it’s hard to care for any of these characters or feel for them when they snuff it. The story starts off being about cryogenics (and saward’s starting point, of wondering why you would want to live in a world where you were out of touch with everything, from technology to people and whether that would be living) turns into as gruesome horror show and then a backstabbing crime thriller, without really getting to grips with any of the three stories and not always that smoothly. Davros has lost his head and not just because it’s in a jar – he doesn’t act the way we’re used to, becoming a capitalist factory boss more than a megalomaniac scientist. The trouble with doing existential stories is that you still need a physical threat for the cliffhangers. In a story with only one it has to be good and while the gravestone toppling onto The Doctor is a brilliant meta moment in a story about wondering about mortality, the resolution to it the next week (oh it was just made of plyboard) is one of the biggest cop outs the show ever had (it could have been worse: it was shot with blood – fake blood as it turns out – but JNT panicked about Mary Whitehouse type responses and cut it out). In pure emotional terms ‘Earthshock’ is better and sells the threat more, while ‘Resurrection’ is better made, for all of Graeme Harper’s good ideas (such as filming The Daleks from below or above, to make them seem spooky, while the Glass Dalek looks really good – it’s actually a David Whittaker invention from the first ever Who novelisation ‘Dr Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks’ they’ve never been able to afford to put on television before). The overall theme, of people becoming food and cannibalism, was done better and more horribly in ‘The Two Doctors’ just two stories earlier (though nothing else about that story really ‘worked’) while more than a few people pointed out the similarities to 1973 film ‘Solyent Green’, which is basically the same story of food as fuel without the Daleks (though Saward claims to have never seen it and I believe him too: it’s the sort of plot more than one writer could come up with and Who does it better). The pacing, too, isn’t quite there: you have to sit through long periods of nothing happening (especially in episode one) then so much happens you can’t keep up with it (there’s a reason why this was the last episode broadcast in 45 minute chunks – it never quite worked).

For all the flaws though, ‘Revelation’ is easily Saward’s best work, a story that might not always get the details right but asks the awkward difficult questions this show should always ask even with the occasional lame bit of dialogue and is so much better in so many ways than his other two it’s hard to believe they’re by the same writer. In many ways Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant’s too, with lots of neat touches in design and costume and story (‘Vengeance On Varos’ is its only rival, a story that’s even more original and damning of the 1980s). Though it’s a little too quirky and convoluted to be one of the true Who classics and with a cast who should mostly have been exterminated and replaced, it’s still very very good, a neat twist on Dalek stories that are always about death and destruction by having most of the body count dead before we even reach the planet and raising a lot of interesting questions about how humans live their short lives and what they spend their money on during the long time they’re dead. It is, indeed, a ‘revelation’ (a title Saward picked after his original ‘The End Of The Road’ was turned down in the wake of the hiatus announcement and someone – probably Ian Levine - pointed out that both ‘Genesis’ and ‘Resurrection’ had Biblical titles. Thankfully they’ve dropped this strand before we get, say, ‘Letter To The Corinthian Of The Daleks I’ although I for one am itching to write ‘Deuteronomy Of The Daleks’ for the title alone).  Though not a top tier classic it’s still a blooming good story and shows that Michael Grade’s decision to ‘rest’ the show (actually an outright cancellation, till 80,000 fans blocked the BBC phonelines in protest; friends were roped in from everywhere to answer calls, including a passing Patrick Troughton) was completely wrong: Dr Who had found its feet again. Unfortunately, once it’s put on ‘trial’, things are about to go wrong for real and instead of going to ‘B….’ at the end of the story (intended to be ‘Blackpool’, to lead into the already written ‘Nightmare Fair’ – see ‘The Mysterious Planet’ for more about the season we might have got, but freeze-framed when the show’s future was in doubt; the actual last shot was intended to be the Doctor and Peri walking off into the sunset, but the snow was so bad that shot had to be dropped, symbolically) now everything about he who was up in the air. Including its future, it’s freedom and it’s quality. After all ‘Revelation’ is the last book in the Bible…  

POSITIVES + The DJ has the ‘skulls and roses’ poster for the Grateful Dead on his wall. Fantastic, this means the Dead exist in the Whoniverse and one day I might yet get my dream episode set in Haight Ashbury in 1967! Yippee!!!

NEGATIVES - The ending is a bit of a cop out and for once the Doctor has precious little to do with it. As well as the Davros-Daleks on Necros a bunch of ‘purer’ Daleks from Skaro turn up and blame the others for not being Dalek enough, with the plot basically tuning into a gang war fare between two rival tribes. They have a point - I mean, the Daleks we’ve been following have been meddling with human concepts like grief after all - but it does come a bit out of nowhere in the final episode. The last we see of Davros in this story is him being wheeled off to stand trial on Skaro. Which is at least better than just having the Doctor shoot at him, like most Saward scripts, but for all it matters to the plot the Tardis needn’t have landed on Necros at all really – he and Peri are observers here, rather than active participants  (and while I’ll buy the theme of ‘Dr Who can’t put things right the way he used to in his old days’ it’s an idea that doesn’t quite work).

BEST QUOTE: Dr: ‘But did you bother to tell anyone they might be eating their own relatives?’ Davros: ‘Certainly not! That would have created what I believe is termed consumer resistance’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: There was one bone thrown Dr Who’s way when the show was ‘rested’ – a radio series broadcast roughly four months after the broadcast of ‘Revelation’. It was, well, a revelation: odd to say now there are hundreds if not a thousand Big Finish Dr Who audios but it had never been done on radio before and a lot of people wondered if it would even work without all the visuals. There had been a standalone vinyl record in ‘The Pescatons’ and a very obscure radio broadcast ‘Exploration Earth’ not to mention the best-selling chopped-up TV soundtrack of ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ all 4^th Doctor stories from the 1970s, but they all felt like spin-offs, extras to the main course. At the time of ‘Slipback’ fans weren’t all that sure Dr Who was going to come back on TV at all; this felt like the future as well as a bit of a downward step. Inevitably ‘Slipback’ became something of a whipping boy for fandom, mostly because it didn’t quite sound like Dr Who. It was broadcast in the then children’s slot ‘Pirate Radio Four’ at a time when the show was at its most adult, so that was weird. It was broadcast in six ten minute chunks after the TV series had extended the running time from 22ish minutes to 45, which felt even weirder – every time the story gets going there’s a cliffhanger. And the whole style was most peculiar: it’s the one TV story of the 1980s where the creative team didn’t have John Nathan-Turner breathing down their necks so script editor Eric Saward gets to indulge in copying one of his favourite writers – no not Bob Holmes surprisingly but Douglas Adams, with many fans commenting that Slipback’s comedy computers and ironic guards sounded as if they came straight out of ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ (while little did anyone know it at the time but it’s a dead steal of the interactive computer game Douglas was trying to get made, ‘Starship Titanic’, which was finally released in 1998 and very confusing it is too; even when Terry Jones’ novelisation came out I still couldn’t work out how to get past halfway through the game when the talking bomb kept not quite blowing itself up and I got sat on by a parrot. Yep, one of those games).

With all the love in the world Eric is not the next Douglas (just as he isn’t the next Bob) and the storyline, about a schizophrenic computer that’s taken over a starship and tried to take it back to the time of the Big Bang while everyone is on the run from a ferocious animal called a Maston, feels deliberately made to feel confusing and disorientating. In the context of the time, when fans were calling for Dr Who to be bigger and more adult, this little peace offering was only ever going to stir the flames. Time has been kind to this quirky little oddball though. We’re more used to hearing Dr Who rather than seeing it So much 1980s Dr Who is stiff and trying a bit too hard but ‘Slipback’ is a breeze, a lot of fun that’s never meant to be anything other than silly. Because everyone important is looking the other way ‘Slipback’ manages to do things they could never have  gotten away with on telly: there’s a whole scene where the Doctor and Peri get blind drunk on the drink Voxnik for instance, a dead crib of the Fitzroy Tavern near BBC centre where Dr Who alumni traditionally hung out. Colin Baker proves to be a brilliant audio Doctor far more comfortable than he is on telly – where he sometimes seems awkward in person he really knows how to throw his voice at a character and seems far more nuanced, with a much happier relationship with Peri, more like the one’s we’ll get across ‘The Trial Of A Timelord’ (it helps that we can’t see the 6^th Doctor’s coat). Nicola Bryant is having a lot of fun being exasperated too, while the main guest star Valentine Dyall as the baddy Slarn is far more subtle and entertaining than The Black Guardian ever was (sadly the veteran actor died a mere fortnight after broadcast, with this his very final acting part in anything). No ‘Slipback’ is not the future and from the title alone is indeed a ‘slip backwards’ and would never have been a future that would have lasted very long, but it’s quite an entertaining cul-de-sac if you’re not expecting anything special. Eric wrote a novelisation of it for Target in 1986 that at one time used to be the easiest way to find this story (despite being reportedly one of Target’s lowest sellers, along with some later Hartnell stories) and given the extra space expanded on the story quite a bit without the need for endless cliffhangers, so it remains in many ways the definitive way to experience it if you’re after purely the story. However the story was finally issued on CD in 2010 so it’s much easier to find and hearing the ‘right’ voices and the weird sound effects is much more fun (my old battered copy was a cassette double-pack with ‘Genesis’ released in 1988).

‘Davros’ (2003) is the straightforward name given to number #48 in the Big Finish main range and was his first appearance away from the BBC version, played by Terry Molloy just as in ‘Revelation’. The story is a sort of prequel, set between ‘Resurrection’ and ‘Revelation’ with Davros imprisoned by The Daleks and executed early in the story (now there’s an opening!) He’s not quite dead though, just in a coma, as a couple of corpse stealers find out to their cost (one of whom is Wendy Padbury, doing a good job of playing a character about as far from Zoe as its possible to get). There’s a clever bit of continuity where Davros is rebuilt by his acolytes imperfectly, with a faulty larynx (which is why he doesn’t sound like he did when he was Michael Wisher or David Gooderson!) Meanwhile who should arrive but the 6^th Doctor, apparently pre-‘Revelation’ too after leaving Peri on some unspecified planet, oblivious to the fact his mortal enemy is hovering about Skaro in a spaceship, accidentally waking him when Davros hears and recognises his voice. A new regime is on Skaro now and on waking Davros has become legendary, greeted as the planet’s saviour. Unable to make anyone listen to his worries about who this patient really is, The Doctor decides to work undercover as Davros’ assistant (!), subtly sabotaging his work rebuilding Daleks while secretly manipulating his enemy into becoming his assistant (and even making him tea at one point!) The story then follows ‘Genesis’ to the letter, a tale  of politics, power struggles and exterminations, until Davros’ inevitable fall from grace where he ends up fighting for his life again (and quite possibly dead, or so The Doctor thinks to maintain the continuity). It’s quite a wordy audio adventure as Big Finishes go, with no Daleks for once in a Davros story, yet not actually that much Davros either despite the title: he’s asleep for the first quarter of this story and more of a ranting caricature than, say, the three-dimensional scientist of the superlative ‘I, Davros’ range. It’s great to hear Terry back in the role though and his scenes crossing swords and words with Colin are the highlights of an uneven adventure.

Finally  it’s a fond farewell to our old friend ‘Time and Time Again’ (1993), the time-travelling 30^th anniversary comic strip from Dr Who Magazine issue #207. The 7^th Doctor is trying to retrieve items from his past to make sure that his timelines stay intact when The Black Guardian tries to change them. His meeting with the 6^th Doctor at the start of ‘Revelation’ is the easiest of the lot, catching him by the river side. The 6^th Doctor’s in a grumpy mood. ‘Can’t I even catch a grumblejack in peace?’ he sighs, down in the dumps and morosely asking if having the timelines changed so he’s stuck on Gallifrey would make much difference.  The 7^th Doctor tells him that the alternate future results in ‘terrible things’ but the 6^th Doctor thinks his older self is ‘selfish’. ‘You just think it’s up to you to save the universe’ he says before the 7^th Doctor retorts that he’s not the one going around killing fish. ‘You hunt for much bigger game’ retorts Sixie ‘And we both use live bait’. The 6^th Doctor hands over one of his cat badges from the lining of his coat but adds rather sadly ‘The universe would go on you know, it would just be different. What’s wrong with that?’    

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