Love and Monsters
(Series 2, Dr 10 with Rose, 17/6/2006, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Dan Zeff)
Rank: 83
'There we were, innocently enjoying our favourite TV programme as a bit of light relief and escapism and then the Abzorbaloff's cousin, Writealoff, came along and started making it out to be this big and complex series full of hidden meanings. Oh no, look at that - he's just absorbed all my time as I sit here reading yet another review...
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Yesterday we looked at what might well be the most misunderstood and maligned story of 20th century Dr Who (‘The Web Planet’); today it’s the turn of its equivalent in the 21st century, another story with good intentions at a time in its existence when Dr Who was safe and comfortable enough for the people making it to experiment, hampered by ongoing problems with time and money. They’re Ergons of a feather these two stories, the start of a long slow fall from grace when the public stopped thinking of Dr Who as a programme that could do anything and instead became a programme that had to do certain things, to stay within set parameters, where all that bravery and ambition felt out of place with the rest of the era and ended up being remembered for a slightly dodgy performance in a slightly dodgy costume, a story as adult as any Dr Who made that ended up looking like the most juvenile of children’s television. Say ‘Love and Monsters’ to most fans and they’ll groan: this is a story famous for all the worst reasons: as the first story (since 1965 anyway) that the Doctor – the whole point of the show for a lot of the audience – is barely in, which features love-him-or-loathe-him comedian Peter Kay as the only monster ever to be designed by a child (in a Blue Peter competition – he joked on set he was ‘Green Peter’!) and which is the one story in the Dr Who canon that’s less about giving fans something to think about so much as thinking about the fans themselves (many simply didn’t get the joke and quite a few of the ones who did realise what this story was really about didn’t like having the mickey taken out of them). Yes it looks silly at times, an easy target for those who were looking for excuses to take shots at a series that had been remarkably consistent across its first two years. But if you can look past how it turned out, to the ambition with which ‘Love and Monsters’ was written and how needlessly brave it is, in an era when Russell T Davies could have got away with re-hashing the same old script over and over, then there is much to love about ‘Love and Monsters’. Maybe even the monster itself.
Yes, a monster designed
by a nine-year-old popping up in an actual serious scifi programme: what other
programme would ever do that? What next, toddlers drawing Captain Kirk? Space
babies spit-painting ‘Battlestar Galactica’? Infants marking ‘X’ on an ‘X
Files’ design? The knives were out before this episode even aired and many fans
thought Russell had lost the plot. But Dr Who is a special series in that’ it
really is for everyone, of any age, and in a way it was inevitable. People
forgot once he became the BBC’s go-to heavyweight dramatist, someone so popular
the BBC even trusted him to bring Dr Who back from the dead when they’d largely
buried it themselves and tried to forget about it, but Russell T started his
career on children’s television. Specifically the series ‘Why Don’t You?’
(short for ‘Why Don’t You Switch Off Your Television And Do Something Less
Boring Instead?’ Which is a brave tagline for a programme that wanted people to
actually watch it!) A silly little series about making things out of
sticky-back plastic with little features on how everyday items worked that was
like a cross between ‘How 2’ and ‘The One Show’ (and something your parents
were quite happy for kiddies to watch), in Russell’s hands it had been turned
into a catch-all drama about all the things that really matter to children: aliens,
spies, pirates, smugglers, animals, early computers, friendship, romance, evil
teachers, basically it’s an Enid Blyton book for the 1970s-1990s come alive
(and exactly the sort of thing your parents worried about you watching). In one
of the episodes the children club together to form a group named ‘LINDA’, just
like the one in ‘Love and Monsters’ (only it’s the Liverpool Investigation ‘n’
Detective Agency’, not London). The programme finally died out in 1995 a few
years after Russell left and after an impressive twenty-two year run. After
that Russell moved on, making highly adult dramas often based on his own
experiences as a gay man growing up after the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, but
you can never take away your roots and they peep out every so often, especially
during his first batch of Who scripts which try rather harder than his later
ones to be child-friendly and feel very like his ‘Why Don’t You?’ dramas (the
burping wheely bin of ‘Rose’ and the farting Slitheens of ‘Aliens Of London/WW3’).
The closest programme to
‘Why Don’t You?’ still on the air by 2006 was ‘Blue Peter’, the children’s
programme that had been going even longer than Dr Who and always had close
links to it – not least sharing the same set for much of their run and giving
Peter Purves a career a year after getting the part as companion Steven. The
‘classic’ Dr Who DVDs are full of extras featuring Jon Pertwee popping in with
his Whomobile, John Noakes introducing Blue peter dog Shep to K9 and one story
(‘Robot’) was even given a sneak preview thanks to a technician strike that
meant an edition of ‘Blue Peter’ came from the set of ‘Robot’. Perhaps most
thrilling of all was in 1967 when, for the one and only time in the show’s
history, fans were invited to take part in a competition to design a monster
judged by the Doctor himself, with Patrick Troughton making one of his very few
appearances to promote the programme (sadly it doesn’t survive but the pictures
do with ‘Aqua Man’ a worthy winner – and way better than the Fish People of
‘The Underwater Menace’ that probably inspired it! An appearance of Patrick’s
that does survive, for Pebble Mill and ‘The Five Doctors’ has him so miserable
and confused by the questions you can see why he didn’t do many things like
this!) To think: a Dr Who fan got to make something that Dr Who himself saw!
Actually made, in the studio, by the Who model team! That’s so exciting and
now, with Dr Who gaining a whole new children’s audience, it seemed an obvious
thing to do: as a former producer of a children’s TV programme Russell also
knew exactly how well it would work for both shows as a bit of extra publicity.
Only being Russell he wasn’t just going to have David Tennant help judge the
competition and meet the star, no – with the expense of making it he was going
to have the monster appear in an actual programme. What an even bigger thrill
for all the children watching – the thought that their creations could end up
in an actual programme one day, hurrah!
A panel was quickly put
together, with Davies and Tennant along with producer Phil Collinson, with
nine-year-old William Grantham winning the under 10 category with ‘The
Abzorbaloff’ (Tennant preferred a
football monster put together by the under 7s category and joked that, as it was
him announcing the result live on air he’d just go with his favourite and
scupper Davies’ carefully written story!) You can see why Davies would have
gone with the monster. On the one hand it’s very like The Slitheen being big
and able to take over other people, so much so that they ended up from the
‘sister’ planet’ Clom (close enough to stroke the creator’s ego anyway). But on
the other hand it’s a brilliantly original design perfectly in keeping with
Who: monsters that took over humans and mentally absorbed are two a penny in Dr
Who but this one physically absorbed them: a logical extension of the Slitheen
and Zygons both, with lots of room for drama and horror and everything you need
in a good monster. He’s the logical result of a series that’s spent 44 years by
this point telling us that possession and being manipulated by a baddy to be
nasty to good people is perhaps the single most horrific thing that can happen
to you (after extermination anyway). The striking appearance, of a Mohican wig
over a green scaly body, was also very different to anything that had seen
before. It somehow looked both the sort of thing that was obviously made by a
child rather than a grown-up and the sort of thing any adult monster designer
would be pleased to come up with, a great idea slightly let down by the execution.
Sadly budget meant they had to ignore Grantham’s notes that the monster was
‘as big as a double-decker bus’ but then
there isn’t a Dr Who monster from the Daleks down that wasn’t changed from the
design due to restrictions of budget.
More of a problem is that, in order to have something physical to show off on ‘Blue Peter’, the Abzorbaloff was a man in a suit rather than a CGI special effect, which meant that it harked back a little too uncomfortably to the days of old when monsters would loom and lumber, rather than chase and pounce. The casting of cuddly comic Peter Kay doesn’t quite chime with the sinister looking chap with the mohican haircut either: Kay was one of the biggest names in show business in 2006 and Russell couldn’t believe his luck when he was contacted during the 2005 series by the star himself offering his congratulations and asking to be in it. Only, unlike the John Nathan-Turner it was hard to simply put him in as a character and have people forget who it really was: clearly Kay had to be in a ‘special’ one-off story, like say the one with the one-off monster? It’s a logical thought, but wrong: Peter Kay isn’t menacing enough s human or monster and as a comedian rather than an actor per se (only used to speaking lines he’d written himself, even when other characters similar to himself) isn’t fully absorbed by the role, ironically enough. That’s where a lot of ‘Love and Monsters’ poor reputation comes from: you can never rid yourself of the thought that you’re just watching comedian Peter Kay in a fat suit. In other words I can see why a lot of newer fans were disappointed in a rare monster they felt they could easily outrun and why even some of the older ones chuckled that they didn’t have children’s competition winners making it to TV in their day back when Who was ‘proper’, with the Abzorbaloff’ still used as an example of Who at its silliest. However I can also see it from another point of view: Dr Who is a series that was always meant to inspire the next generation of creatives, whether it be Terrance Dicks, Robert Holmes and Phillip Hinchcliffe divulging their behinds-the-scenes secrets in books, the target novels or ‘Dr Who Confidential’ showing how TV is made; ‘The Abzorbaloff ticked a lot of the boxes for what Russell wanted Dr Who to do, inspiring children in just the way ‘Why Don’t You?’ once did.
The thing is, if you’re
going to design a very different sort of monster that’s a bit like the others
then you need a different sort of story to go with them. Luckily there was one
that had been on the back-burner for a while, an idea Russell had written with
half-an eye to turning it into a comic strip for Dr Who Magazine in 2004 as a
sort of consolation prize to fans and to himself if his attempts to get the BBC
to bring back Dr Who fell apart. It was the story of an ordinary man who grew
up with the backdrop of many events from the ‘old’ series shaping his life:
spotting the Skarasen during a childhood holiday in Loch Ness (‘Terror Of The
Zygons’), a birthday party in Shoreditch evacuated after a Dalek invasion
(‘Remembrance’) and the death of his mum from a plastic daffodil (‘Terror Of
The Zygons’). It was a handy way of getting round another problem too, that the
production schedule was just too tight. By now Russell was writing his last
script for series two (the ‘Army Of Ghosts/Doomsday’ finale having already been
written; you can tell because Russell is already thinking ahead to series
three, with the first mention of prime minister Harold Saxon coming in the headline
of a newspaper Victor Kennedy is reading) and it was becoming clear that the
production team and especially the actors were over-stretched. It all stemmed
back to Russell’s pitch to the BBC in 2004 where he’d worked out that he was
best placed to make thirteen episodes of the show a year – anymore and the
filming schedule would just be too relentless. Only he and the BBC hadn’t
reckoned on the show’s success and when they came back asking for a yearly Christmas
special as well he wasn’t about to turn them down, even though it meant making
fourteen episodes a year. The solution? Make two episodes at once, with the
Doctor and companion busy on another story (‘The Impossible Planet/Satan’s Pit’
as it happened) with a single day’s filming on this story, what will become
known in the fanbase later as a ‘Doctor-lite’ episode. Russell was inspired by
his ‘other’ favourite series Buffy The Vampire Slayer (a series which inspires
a lot of his era of the show) and an episode named ‘The Zeppo’ from 1999 where
Sarah Michelle Gellar was on holiday so her friends got to have fun without
her, along with a much loved episode of ‘Star Trek: Next Generation’ ‘Lower
Decks’, about the maintenance staff you didn’t often get to see (it later
inspired a whole animated series of the things). Dr Who had never done anything
like this before (well, only with ‘Mission To The Unknown’ in 1965 and that had
Daleks to watch, plus a few episodes with Hartnell or Troughton unconscious
while the companions took over) and that was another black mark against this
story for many fans. How can you have Dr Who without Dr Who in it?
Well, future Doctor Dr
Who will manage quite well (‘Blink’ ’73 Yards’ ‘The Girl Who Waited’ and this
story’s close cousin ‘Turn Left’ for starters) but one story had to break the
mould and it was this one. Like ‘Turn Left’ the answer is rather clever too:
you make it about the Doctor, even in his absence. Like the comic strip Elton’s life is shaped
by events in other stories (all ones written by Russell, note): the Auton
invasion of ‘Rose’ (a reconstruction of which looks better now the production
team have more confidence in doing things like this), the Sycorax spaceship of
‘The Christmas Invasion’ and the Big Ben smasheroo of ‘Aliens Of London’. He even met the
Doctor once, saved from the drooling carnivorish animalistic Hoix (a last
minute monster cobbled together out of leftovers that looks quite good but was
such an afterthought it didn’t even have a name in the script, till Russell
came up with one on the spot in post-production for the end credits) and, like
many people touched by the Doctor, its turned Elton’s world upside down. Of
course he wants to know and meet likeminded people. ‘Love and Monsters’ also harks back to an idea
Russell had during ‘Rose’ with conspiracy theorist Clive: surely by now the
general public would have noticed this mysterious figure who kept appearing and
disappearing, with the same name but different faces? So he revived the idea of
‘LINDA’ (which is exactly the sort of daft name a bunch of DW fans would give
themselves, a conspiracy group from different walks of life with nothing else
in common (though, weirdly most of them from the North) meeting up in London not
to talk about Dr Who as such (that would have been a little too meta even for
this series) but to discuss ‘The Doctor’ – this mysterious figure who keeps
popping up at different points in Earth’s history wearing different faces and
who then leaves again, nobody in the general public quite knowing who he is.
However to those of us of
a certain age ‘Love and Monsters’ is so much more than that; it’s a love song
to fandom, when those of us in real life met up in real life to talk about the
Doctor, which was often the only thing we had in common. Especially in the
‘wilderness years’ era when there were no new TV programmes to talk about and
for a time not even any videos to watch, just grainy blurry old bootleg footage
(much like the shots of the Doctor filmed in different episodes) and we had to
amuse ourselves by keeping the flames going in other ways beyond being glued to
the TV. It’s a neat analogy: like the Abzorbaloff this series gets under your
skin like no other – it’s not the sort of programme you can just forget about
when it’s not on anymore and writer Russell T Davies knew that because he was
doing exactly the same thing we were, as much a part of the meetings/fan
fiction/low budget spin offs and (eventually) internet discussion board worlds
as the rest of us. He knows these people: the often shy and awkward people who
sat inside alone watching TV all day rather than going down the pub with mates
or playing football (now do you see why the soccer monster didn’t win?!) but
who had such brilliantly colourful inner lives. I remain amazed, all these
years on and having met other communities, what a creative bunch the Who
fanbase is: they’re forever writing or drawing or making art films or costumes
or even baking Dalek cakes they’ve created themselves (because the two official
Who cookbooks are rubbish). They also each have something unique to offer the
group, some individual skill or talent that might not impress the average man
in the street but to a bunch of creatives is gold-dust: its an old quote of
script editor Terrance Dicks that whereas fans of other shows picked up a scifi
book to read about other shows like theirs, DW fans read books about
everything; being passionate about DW is to be passionate about the world and
your place in it in all sorts of ways from history to science to mathematics to
languages. Basically they’re the kind of kids who grew up watching ‘Why Don’t
You?’ and ‘Blue Peter’ and taking its message that you can spend your life
creating nice things to heart. I’m always amazed, too, at how little – past the
first hour or two – people actually talk about Dr Who: instead conventions and
get-togethers (and even some of the better online discussion boards) are a safe
place to spend talking about your own projects or simply chatting about your
own life. There’s many a friendship and even a couple of romances that have
been fuelled by get-togethers by people who at first had nothing in common
except their love of a TV programme. And that’s a great thing: it’s very Dr Who
in fact, the Doctor inspiring us to come together and better ourselves. Elton
Pope is scarily close to the sort of people I used to meet at Dr Who fan
meetings: earnest, clever, funny, lonely, maybe a little obsessive for his and
society’s own good but with a wider vocabulary than most because he’s spent his
spare time researching his many passionate interests. He’s, ahem, not actually
all that different to me, albeit funnier and smarter.
And the LINDA meetings are spot on for that brand of loud jolliness and quiet melancholy, the sense that life is passing you by and never got to be as good as you thought it would when you were little, so you cling on hard to the version of you that you felt you were at your best, as a hopeful child watching Dr Who dreaming of saving the world (ignoring the fact that you long ago stopped being able to save yourself). I’ve met everyone from LINDA at one meeting or another, the Ursulas (sweet but awkward even more than Elton), Mr Skinner (quiet and flustered but well meaning and with some great anecdotes – if you’re wondering to yourself where you know the voice from actor Simon Greenall got as lucrative gig a decade later playing Orlav, one of the Meerkats in the ‘Compare The Market’ adverts), Bliss (funny and warm but slightly too intense for most people), Bridget (practical and no nonsense but easily overlooked), misfits in usual society but brilliant all. They’re very much a Dr Who group: a collection of people who have nothing obviously in common except being misfits everywhere else, finding it a safe space to delight in being different (like all the best Who fan groups). It’s a welcome part of the best of Russell’s writing: in a few short lines we feel we know these people and they all feel real (just one side note, watch Ursula’s face when Elton is called on to infiltrate Jackie’s flat and she nearly sleeps with him: she’s clearly heartbroken and quietly had the hots for Elton for years, long before the finale, insanely jealous and most upset but trying not to show it). Elton’s ELO (Electric Light Orchestra) obsession, much joked at, also makes perfect sense as a bit of character: they’re precisely the sort of band someone like him would like: hideously uncool but well known enough for other members of LINDA to sing along. They are, you could argue, an analogy for Dr Who: big sellers in thwe 1970s, by the 1980s they were so out of fashion you wouldn’t be caught dead listening to them and by the 1990s they’d been forgotten, until the use of ‘Mr Blue Sky’ on an advert made them a cult all over again in the mid-2000s (just like Dr Who!)
Then into this fun little
world comes Victor Kennedy and he spoils all the fun by taking over, setting
rules into this delightful anything-goes shambles and turning a bunch of gifted
amateurs into hopeless professionals, a readymade workforce to help him track
down the Doctor. Soon everyone’s on patrol looking out for any signs of a
Tardis and not enjoying it at all. Every fandom has people like this who in a
world of obsessives are perhaps a little too obsessive and spoil all the fun,
but Russell T gets revenge on all of them by turning them into the monster,
taking his cue from Grantham’s memorable design by having a monster who doesn’t
absorb people so much as he absorbs their souls and turns them into himself, as
equally absorbed and indeed self-absorbed (at least till near the end when he
does, indeed, absorb them physically), letting the Doctor get under his skin to
the point where he can’t think about anything else and worse making the people
around him do the same too. More than a few commentators have speculated if the
Abzorbaloff is really a comment on how fannish the series became in the 1980s
and whether he’s meant to resemble that era’s most controversial fan
‘consultant’ and go-to rich kid Ian Levine; he was the one whispering in John
Nathan-Turner’s ear about continuity and references to old programmes (and had
a big hand in ‘Attack Of The Cyberman’ in particular). Many fans saw him as the
reason why the programme went downhill and lost touch with the general public
leading to the cancellation; others blamed him for the only two projects that
actually carried his name on them the K9 and
Company theme tune and the ‘Doctor in Distress’ charity single on the
cancellation, which did indeed lead to much distress – to be fair Levine is
just as embarrassed by it nowadays as everyone else). Even now he’s a divisive
figure with online rants against the modern episodes and especially the
animations (he has a point there, although his AI-reconstructed missing
episodes are an equally bumpy ride for now, with the technology in its infancy –
maybe one day though who knows?) Someone like Russell, in charge of his
favourite programme, would surely have given thought to how it went ‘wrong’
last time and be keen to avoid the same mistakes after all. If it is Levine
though it’s a bit of a cruel joke against someone who, though he has a big
mouth (and quite a big tummy) has a big heart as well and did a lot for fandom
too (if they’d had the Abzorbaloff returning lots of missing episodes for LINDA
to enjoy I might have accepted it as some stories only exist in the archives
because Levine physically went and found them for us; Levine is said to have
hated this story at first, then got the joke and found it funny).
However I’ve always
wondered if Russell was really writing about himself, as his younger self would
seen him. On the one hand he brought Dr Who back and made it all about his idea
of the show, killing off a lot of that creativity that fans had going for them
during the wilderness years by setting a lot of rules that Dr Who now followed,
with time wars and new Doctors (its surely no coincidence this is the story
with a Blue Peter monster, as if he’s making amends and trying to inspire
children to create using Who as a launchpad again rather than stifling it; ‘Totally
Dr Who’ which ran parallel with series two feels as if it comes from that worry
too). Equally I wonder too if this is Russell as his younger self might see
him, after two years of endless work and stress turning what was once a fun
hobby into a soul-crushing job of responsibility and weight, as the writing of
Dr Who at all hours and becoming obsessed with getting every detail right was turning
him into a grumpy ‘monster’ and sucking the joy out of why he fell in love with
the show in the first place; he wouldn’t be the first empathetic writer to
worry about the continuous creation of believable characters and then
abandoning them or even killing them off after an episode or two ‘absorbing’
their life essence too. Neither man is exactly, ahem, thin either though
neither are they quite as large as Peter Kay in a fatsuit. Is ‘Love and
Monsters’ a reminder, then, that this is still only a programme and not to let
it take over his life, to go back to making it fun like it was in the days of
fan groups? Some of Davies’ last stories in his first run, tales like ‘Midnight’
and ‘Waters Of Mars’ written to the backdrop of Russell’s partner Andrew Smith
growing ill and Russell being too distracted by work to look after him fully at
first, will tap right back into that source of doubt. Because you can’t have be
fully committed to love if you’re too busy writing about monsters and if your
work turns you into one. There are a few jokes sprinkled in apparently at
Russell’s expense too: by now comeback Dr Who has been on long enough for
everyone to catch on to Russell’s un-pronounceable names: calling this one
something as silly as ‘Clom’ when we’re expecting another ‘Raxacofalipatorious’
is a great gag.
‘Love and Monsters’,
then, is brilliantly postmodern whoever it’s about: the ultimate self- indulgent
story because its about self-indulgent fans. I can see why that would go down
badly with the sort of serious fans its laughing at, but for me I love it and
can see enough of myself in the LINDA gang to get the joke. In my eyes ‘Love
and Monsters’ is a sweet nod of the head from one fan to another that
celebrates this show in all its highs and lows like no other episode, a love letter
to how this series inspires the best and worst in us depending how we react to it,
and that alone makes it special and brilliantly creative. In many ways its the
cleverest script Russell T Davies, one of our cleverest writers, ever wrote –
very different in its ‘found footage’ style (usually we don’t know who the ‘narrator’
of Dr Who is, but for one story only it’s Elton himself through a webcam, further
blurring the line between fantasy and reality, like this is the found ‘Blair
Witch Project’ of Dr Who stories) but very Dr Who by showing how extraordinary
our ordinary little world can sometimes be, even when the Doctor is barely
around at all. You’re never quite sure
how much of Elton’s memories are typical fan hyperbole and how much really
happens: it’s only at the end, with Ursula as paving slab, that you realise it
was all true. It works really well I think for a one-off: for once, rather than
trying to keep up with a Doctor several steps ahead of us, we know more than
Elton does, both about who the Doctor is and what Victor Kennedy is up to (I’d
love to know if that name was a ‘real’ fan Russell knew – it sounds very unlike
his other made up names and the only DW reference is the ‘Kennedy’ who helped
steal the Tardis in ‘Evil Of The Daleks’ – though this is the sort of story
that would make an obscure reference like that. And then laugh at people like
me for thinking of it). Marc Warren is truly excellent in what’s quite a
thankless role, getting over the enthusiasm and depression that comes from being
a Dr Who fan (his any pregnant pauses to camera while he tries to work out what
to say end up saying most of all) while Shirley Henderson takes time out from
the Harry Potter franchise to excel as fellow LINDA and blossoming girlfriend
Ursula. You come to like both of these characters a lot during the course of
this episode and cheering for them as these two lonely misfits fall in love (it’s
one of the most realistic portrayals of love ever seen in the series in fact –
at least until the horrifying moment she gets absorbed, which ought to be much
sadder than it is). The rest of the cast are excellent too, especially Kathryn
Drsydale fresh from Runcorn ‘Two Pints Of Lager and A Packet Of Crisps’ (where
her co-star was 8th Doctor audio companion Sheridan Smith).
As said, it’s Peter Kay
who isn’t quite right: naturally being a larger than life character anyway he
seizes the larger than life concept and tries to run (well, waddle – the
biggest problem with the Abzorbaloff costume is when he tries to move in it
quickly) with it, but ‘Love and Monsters’ isn’t that sort of a story at all (he
calls it his biggest career regret in his autobiography ‘The Sound Of Laughter’,
although if it’s anyone’s fault its Russell for casting him in the wrong part).
It’s a natural, subtle creature more about the existential horror of being
swept up into someone else’s obsession and watching your universe narrow, just
when it was beginning to close; not a camp drama about a big ass monster. Now
this episode could have worked with a different sort of ‘Abzorbaloff’ and the
‘Abzorbaloff’ as played by Peter Kay could have worked with another script
(maybe a Sarah Jane Adventures script more than a Dr Who one; their monsters
tended to be painted with broader strokes if only because the show wasn’t
really about the monsters at all but the complex characters fighting them), but
they can’t possibly both work in the same story as they’re doing different
jobs. There are problems too with the tone of this one: half of it is Russell
writing with his Blue Peter head on, for children, with lots of juvenile gags
adults cringe at, but the other half is for the adults who lived through the
wilderness years, with some very adult words. The cringiest and most notorious
one is the gag about how Elton and Ursula ‘still have a sex life’ even after
she’s been resurrected as a paving slab (a joke that caused many embarrassed
parents to have awkward conversations introducing their offspring to the
concept of oral sex) which is so at odds with the child-friendly shots of Peter
Kay disintegrating you’re disorientated (there’s no way any other writer would
be allowed to get away with it and a downside of the modern era, when
showrunners have a script editor but don’t really have anyone with any power
reading through their scripts and asking to cut bits out: usually Russell doesn’t
need one, but it could be argued he goes too far here). Even before the story’s
most talked about line though there are others: Ursula teasing Mr Skinner about
his ‘little kisses’ with Bridget, Jackie coming on to Elton by spilling wine
over his shirt and trying to make him take it off, the really quite horrible
scenes of ‘absorption’ (Russell isn’t as immune as Steven Moffat to killing off
his characters but he doesn’t generally do it with ones we’ve come to care for
as much as this). Even the general sense of loneliness, isolation and despair
peculiar to adults (children get lonely too but theirs is the sort of being in
a crowd forever surrounded by other children and being told what to do; this is
the adult sense of loneliness at realising you don’t have many connections with
people in everyday life and have to make an effort to keep in touch with
friends who are often too busy, while you wish someone would come along and
tell you what to do because you feel stuck: all of LINDA feel it to some extent
or other). These scenes are great on their own, but they really don’t belong in
the same story as the one with the ‘Scooby Doo/Yellow Submarine’ scene where
the Doctor and Hoix are chasing each other down some corridors getting it wrong
or the tasteless line ‘tastes like chicken’ after the Abzorbaloff has eaten Ursula
(a person we’ve come to care a lot for) or the alien who turns bright green and
has a Mohican haircut, a Bolton accent and a ‘field dampener’ walking cane (almost
as daft but thankfully less repulsive than the Slitheen’s farting). Usually
Russell’s better at balancing the tone so children and adults can watch Dr Who
together and both get something out of it – this time both are too busy being
enraged by what’s there for the ‘other’ audience. The Abzorbaloff is too
rubbery and unbelievable a costume by far. And unlike the other ‘Doctor-lite’
scenes the ones where the Doctor (and Rose) finally appear don’t really add
much at all (although it’s fitting that it’s the fanbase LINDA who ‘save’ the
day by taking Victor Kennedy with them when they think hard enough and make him
explode; although fittingly Russell’s last words written for Rose, at least for
two years, are much like her first as she gently asks Elton if he’s alright
then gets angry at what he’s been doing to her mum).
In other words yes there
are mistakes – unforgivable ones in the eyes of much of the fandom. There’s a
lot to enjoy too though: like ‘The Web
Planet’ it’s a terrific idea that survives even past the poor execution, a
welcome stab at doing something really brave and really bold and stretching the
template of Dr Who to its extremes at a point when it was in danger of getting
stale. The second year was the right time to try this sort of thing: the show
was falling into just enough of a repetitive cycle to makes you yearn for
something to break it but also established and popular enough to, ahem, absorb
an episode like this that was always going to be controversial in breaking so
many rules. ‘Love and Monsters’ might fall apart and be unwatchable in some
scenes (particularly the end) but it’s still a terrific idea, a really brave
and ambitious stab at doing something new and a great opportunity to work round
the contracted holidays of David Tennant and Billie Piper by having the show be
all about them, but through the eyes of other people. While the execution lets
down the idea in some places, in others it gets away with more than it has any
right to – the shots of LINDA boogieing to ELO, the brief but delightful Dr and
Rose cameo, the love story (more natural than most in Who), the video format
that makes it look like a youtube documentary a decade or so early. Any fan who
hates all the things going for this story is either so new to the series they
haven’t come across all the other clichés laughed at in this one yet, don’t know
enough past stories where a bad effect scuppers a decent script, haven’t learnt
to laugh at themselves or, perhaps, doesn’t know what the heck is really going
on and that series like Dr Who can go for metaphors and postmodernism. And
maybe that’s Love and Monsters’ biggest problem: every other RTD script can be
enjoyed on different levels by different people depending on their levels of
interest in the series, but for this one you really do have to be a committed
fan who survived the bleak years when the show went missing and see this as
more than a story about strangers running away from Peter Kay having a bad hair
day. But then why wouldn’t you want to be a committed fan of this series? Just
look at how much fun everyone is having, how wonderful and interesting these ‘fans’
are and how good and clever even a supposedly ‘bad’ and ‘stupid’ episode like
this one can be. More than perhaps any other story, maybe even ‘The Web Planet’,
‘Love and Monsters’ is the sort of story only a true Dr Who fan could love – because
it’s the sort of story only a series like Dr Who would ever try and make us watch,
a love letter to a series that’s brilliant even when it’s awful and unlike
anything else on television then and now.
Why don’t I go outside do something less boring instead? Because nothing is as exciting or as imaginative – nothing. Even at its most relentlessly ‘normal’ it still ends up being brilliantly weird. Besides, I would get out more but I’ve tried wheeling the telly ouside and taking it on a walk with me and it’s too heavy.
POSITIVES + Till this
point Rose’s mum Jackie has been the butt of all the jokes, the protective
mother who can’t see beyond her own hair extensions and doesn’t understand why
her daughter would want to run halfway around the universe when there’s a good
soap on the telly and oven chips in the freezer. By now, though, Billie Piper
has handed in her notice and Russell knows he won’t be able to write for Jackie
much longer. So he gives Camille Caduri a parting gift a story told from her
point of view that’s about the downside of what being around someone like the
Doctor means for the people left behind. In this episode though Jackie becomes
a rounded character like never before: she’s not the tough harridan of other
episodes but a lonely single mother who doesn’t quite know what to do with her
life now her daughter’s not around anymore. It’s Camille’s greatest moment in
the series by far as she goes from comedy stereotype to real person, sadly
doing her washing in a Laundromat (because Mickey’s not around to fix her
washing machine and she can’t afford a new one without Rose’s money) and with
the very real detail of keeping the television on all the time because her
Powell estate flat is so quiet without her daughter home. You see her living
for every last second when Rose gets a rare chance to call home and is forever listening
for the Tardis, distracted waiting for Rose’s return. Her sense of outrage,
usually a comedy moment used against the Doctor, will have you cheering when
she sees through Elton’s attempts to get close to her to find out more about
the Doctor, protective of her daughter even if it means giving up her only chance
at a lovelife (of course we can also see it from Elton’s point of view: he was
asked to do this by Victor Kennedy and it stopped being about ‘the mission’ and
more about Jackie once he started talking and found out how much he liked her;
why oh why does he hang on to Rose’s picture long after its needed? That’s
spying rule #1! But then he’s only meant to be an amateur). This idea of
‘privacy’, of leaving ‘big names’ alone, is another postmodern reference to
thefandom too I think, another of the big sea changes in what happened to
fandom during the ‘off the air’ years as conventions grew and actors became
real people with feelings who could read what you said about them online (rather
than fanzines only fans read), no longer just names on the end credits but real
people. characteristically protecting Rose with everything she’s got even when
she isn’t there. Camille’s acting also makes Marc raise his game and these are
his best scenes too (it helped that they knew each other before filming: he
even strangles her in an episode of ‘A Touch Of Frost’!)
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The latest
of the series two Tardisodes, available for download to your mobile or to watch on the Dr Who website in
the week’s run-up to the episode and officially known as ‘Tardisode 10’, is one
of the simplest: Victor Kennedy drumming his fingers and sighing just out of
sight when he discovers the LINDA website and looks for information about the
Doctor (Elton’s latest message: ‘Whops last updated ages ago, sorry!’) LINDA
don’t have an address (‘If you need us you’ll find us!’) but Victor uses his
magic walking cane to pinpoint the source of the website, changing into his
Abzorbaloff state just long enough to absorb the maid off-camera. Oo-err!
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