149 The Happiness Patrol

 Started 27-Mar

Ace is hardly in it.

What's on screen is a mixture of outrageous costuming... not just the Kandyman but the Q guard girls' pink high heels, some kind of political fairytale (which seems mostly misobserved) and personal betrayals (Helen A's hubbie and Susie Q v (the other one), the insurrectionist Pipe People, the rebellion within the Q guards (but don't they take their time to do anything?!?!)

The story seems mixed up too. It has no cohesion. The Kandyman has no actual narrative function. It's not part of the story.

Direction is very Chris Clough.

Sets are good for TV but the Kandy kitchen looks very "kids' tv".

Competent enough but neither spectacular or a disaster. It has pretentions to be agit prop or Brechtian antifa drama but this is undermined by Play School production values.



ABM Rating 2.15/4.00
LJM Rating 3.00/5.00
SPJ Rating 2.80/10   

No. 116 (out of 152)

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148 Remembrance of the Daleks

Started 24-Mar

Far from perfect but a helluva blip up.

The first really good ep since Caves of Androzani.

What makes this great?

The direction is ok. Andrew Morgan's previously undistinguished work on Time and the Rani does not hold him back.

There are some magnificent action scenes with actual pace (especially in p1) but my favourite is the final scene payoff in p4. Simple procession, with sonorous dialogue and the closing slam of a church door... wallop.

Rachel and Allison are very good. Chunky Gilmore is going well. Peter Halliday (previously The Invasion, Carnival of Monsters) as the vicar is VG. Sgt Mike has a clumsy character twist that at least gives a semblance of depth. It doesn't seem to matter to the plot. The Daleks are odd looking with their rubber wheels.

Some of the "soldiers" in the early scenes of p1 don't know much about "attention" and "stand at ease".

Effects are just going. Stunts are ambitious. The Dalek shuttle 'prop' is an attempt to make the end of p3 mind blowing but the DW budget is just not up to it. If this ever comes out on BluRay it's gonna look like one coat plywood (cause it is...) Worse it looks *very* dated in 32 years on.

Script is exciting and fresh. Unlike the previous two Dalek  stories there's some kind of a plot. The theme of racial purity ("They hate each others' chromosomes") is the thing that distinguishes this. For the first time in 4 series this is a DW story that is **about** something. There is a huge lesson in this.

Incidentally the "No Coloureds" scene is grounded and domestic and illustrates the cosy paradox of fighting Nazis yet while the home grown racists live insidiously amongst us. In the modern 2020 context of Pauline Hanson, Brexit, and Donald Trump that is something that truly resonates today.

The revisionist continuity (The Hand of Omega, the destruction of Skaro, the dark Doctor) was a bit of a strecth for DW fans at the time but it seems less of a problem compared to modern Who. This is something that has grown well with time.

Sophie's great, Sylvester makes some leaps. The devious hidden agenda Doctor is new and provides interest.


ABM Rating 3.10/4.00
LJM Rating 3.70/5.00
SPJ Rating 8.20/10   

No. 54 (out of 151)

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---

From http://www.pagefillers.com/dwrg/reme2.htm

 "You Have to Protect Your Own" by Jason A. Miller 14/12/18
Some classic Doctor Who stories age very well. Or, at least, the septuagenarian directors who recorded audio commentaries for their stories on DVD, 30 to 40 years later, wanted you to believe that. "It really holds up today," somebody would say, or "That compares very well to a feature film," somebody else would say. Uh... no. No, they don't. Even stories that I love to pieces seem hopelessly outdated today, and "special editions" don't help much; putting new video effects on The Ark in Space doesn't change the fact that the rest of the story is trapped in amber, 1975-vintage.

I was honestly expecting Remembrance of the Daleks to play very poorly here in 2018, thirty years after its production. The cheap OB video look, the Casio-inspired synth-heavy '80s score... this looks, from a distance, like a straight-to-video BBV production, not a miniature feature film like we get now on the Netflix.

But, right there in the Remembrance pre-credits sequence, you hear the voice of the Duke of Edinburgh, as the camera pulls back from the Earth to reveal a Dalek battleship listening in on 1963 radio signals. And, hey, then you realize, 30 years after recording, the Duke of Edinburgh would be played on TV by Matt Smith, the 11th Doctor. That's a pretty remarkable coincidence, the long way around, for a show that aired in the 25th anniversary season, and in the same Part One which would feature Ace nearly missing a broadcast of Doctor Who Season 1 on the Beeb. And later on in Part One, the Doctor is mistaken for an applicant for the position of caretaker at Coal Hill School. He'd come back for that job, later, too...

Almost as nice as the inadvertent future-continuity nods are all the returning players in the first two parts. Michael Sheard and Peter Halliday, beloved guest stars in years past, come back for bit parts; Pamela Salem, so dynamic in The Robots of Death, is back here with an even larger part and a center of gravity for the story as a female scientist (in 1963!). That's John Leeson as the voice of the decoy Davros, and, you know what, you just cannot have a Doctor Who cliffhanger without Roy Skelton screaming into the ring modulator at the end of Part One. As an old fan, I found that the class-reunion feel of this episode kept it fresh.

The passing of the years also doesn't dilute the very careful staging of director Andrew Morgan. It's clever how Morgan hides three major secondary characters in plain sight in the first few scenes of Part One; Rachel Jensen, Mike Smith, and the Girl, are all introduced silently walking through scenes, or sitting/standing in the background, before the story's even five minutes old and before you become aware that those characters are going to be important for the rest of the story. That's remarkably cinematic, for a series which so often employed old-school BBC directors of the "Just keep the camera still, and point and shoot, love" school of filmmaking. Also nifty is the Part Two cliffhanger, in which the camera takes the POV of a crouching Ace, surrounded by Daleks, and looking up fearfully at them -- I can't recall too many cliffhangers that took the time to work in a direct POV shot from an unusual angle like this. The hand-held camera prevalent in the OB-video stories of McCoy's era was often distracting, and mostly looks terrible when you watch the other stories again in 2018, but here's one shot that just plain works.

By the end of the story, I was so conditioned by Morgan's greatness that I began imagining allusions that might not have been intended. Ratcliffe's death running up the metal warehouse stairs seems similar to how Tobias Vaughn died in "The Invasion", but that might not have been something Morgan was aware of back in 1988, several years before that story came out on VHS. And the from-the-ground shot of the Doctor stepping out of the van to confront the Black Dalek in Part Four matches up pretty well to the shot of Robert DeNiro getting out of the car in the Godfather Part II, getting ready for his final confrontation with Don Ciccio in Sicily.

One casting choice from Morgan that seems a bit unusual in retrospect was Joseph Marcell, who has a single scene in Part Two as a cafe attendant (and what a scene). Marcell is best known in the US as the butler Geoffrey on the long-running "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air", a show about as genetically unlike Doctor Who as it is possible to get. He's charming here, more than holding his own against McCoy. The scene has no real relation to the story, but it's remarkably good and highlights Aaronovitch's skills as a writer (of which more later).

Now, Davros. Michael Wisher was the Davros, yes. David Gooderson... well, we don't talk about him. Julian Bleach and Terry Molloy are very, very good Davroses (Davri?). This story has John Leeson tease Davros early on -- he's voicing a character who is later revealed to most decidedly not be Davros. But, from the second that the Ban Roll-On Dalek wheels onto the Imperial Dalek bridge in Part Three, it is so painfully obvious that this is Davros, that the whole John Leeson charade just flies out the window, like Ace flew through the window in Ian Chesterton's Coal Hill School science lab. Any subtlety that Morgan had tried to invest the story with kinda disappears at this point.

Also unsubtle is the musical sting used to highlight Mike's betrayal when it's revealed in Part Three... after his betrayal had already been revealed in Part Two. Perhaps Keff McCullough was just showing off the percussion buttons on his new Casio keyboard? And dang, the hand-claps as the Doctor and Ace flee Ratcliffe's warehouse in Part Three is just totally radical, isn't it? As for the Renegade Daleks' "Time Controller"... you know, The Sharper Image was still an active franchise in 1988, when this story was made. Lots of us teens went and hung out at The Sharper Image, to play with the cool toys (and none of us ever bought anything, which is why The Sharper Image is now out of business). How did they think people wouldn't recognize this prop/toy?

So, Andrew Morgan, genius; the casting, mostly genius; and you can forgive Terry Molloy turning up the dial to 11,000 as Davros because, hey, this is a reunion story, of sorts. But that doesn't even touch on the writing, which is where the greatness of this story really lies.

This is clearly a "first novel" of sorts, with Aaronovitch bringing about five different complete story ideas to the table, and cramming them into one 90-minute feature. The ongoing Dalek civil war storyline is interesting enough, and the Special Weapons Dalek just about papers over the fact that Part Four is one long numbing car chase/death-ray fight. But there's the female empowerment of Rachel and Allison, the two scientists co-opted by the military. There's the cafe scene, with the Marcell's character, a descendant of slaves, imagining a world where he could have stayed in Africa. And the Hand of Omega burial scene, which allows Sylvester McCoy to stretch his acting muscles in a different direction than usual.

And then there's the racism. As one of the Classic Series' few minority writers, Aaronovitch goes all in here with pointed social commentary. Ratcliffe is a white supremacist businessman who's lured an Army Sergeant into his schemes for control of the UK. Sergeant Smith's mother, who seems like such a nice old lady, has the "No Coloureds" sign in her boarding-house window. The Dalek Civil War, Ace tells us, is predicated on the Renegade Daleks being "not pure in their blobbiness". Group Captain Gilmore, who in the '70s would have been the moral center of the story, gets ruthlessly mocked by the Doctor over the first half of the story and is always several steps behind Rachel and Allison. In the novelization, Rachel is revealed to be Jewish and has visions of the Doctor as a Talmudic figure in her childhood synagogue. These kinds of characters are all voices (for good and bad) which the first 24 seasons of Doctor Who typically just didn't include.

What's the final score? Remembrance of the Daleks: great script and great direction, masked by a very dated look and sound. It was a story I didn't quite "get" as a teenager, but watching now from Donald Trump's America in 2018, where a lot of aspiring politicians winning House and Senate primaries around the country look and sound a lot like Ratcliffe and whose campaign slogans and speeches overtly echo Mike's plea to "protect your own people" and "keep the outsiders out"? Well, I write this the week that the story broke about the Trump administration ripping apart refugee families at the border and refusing to reunite them even after the forced-separation policy was rescinded. That makes Aaronovitch's story sting in a way it didn't in 1988, the year that the US tried to elect a "kinder, gentler" President.

In Remembrance, the good guys save the day, the white supremacists are defeated, and the Daleks destroy themselves. That's one other part of the story that, regrettably, is also aging very poorly. 

147 Dragonfire

Started 20-Mar

Curiously this was celebrated as the 150th DW story at the time of broadcast. It is if you count Trial of a Timelord as 4 stories.

By our count it's 147...

After the last few Sophie Aldred as Ace is a breath of fresh air.

Ace pulls the tops of the cans and walks up to the frozen hatchway.)

• ACE: If I were you lot, I'd go for your tea break now.

(She sticks the cans on the ice.)

• KRACAUER: Why? What's in those cans?
• ACE: Nitro Nine. We've got eight seconds. Last one back's a gooey mess.

(Ace and Mel run.)

Best dialogue in ages.


The end of p1 is mystifying. The script says the Doctor's meant to be trying to reach some thing he's seen that attracts his eye. What's the director's explanation of this? Not aware of any answer. On the DVD Making of Doco his answer is not explanatory. He stumbles and apologises. And why not simply end the ep on Ace and Mel meeting the Dragon monster 30 seconds earlier? Chris Clough = dingbat.

The sets in this look very "end of the season', 'no money left'. The polystyrene foam covered in glad wrap thing for ice caves looked shit in Keys of Marinus in 1964......

Middle ep loses it a bit. The final ep has an early climax and then there's there new companion segment which is pretty good really.

Sophie is noticeably better than Bonnie. It's the writing not entirely the performance.


ABM Rating 1.90/4.00
LJM Rating 3.50/5.00
SPJ Rating 5.65/10   

No. 97 (out of 150)

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146 Delta and the Bannermen

Started 19-Mar

Not even so bad it's good.

Well, they did it. They beat Twin Dilemma.

Episode 2 is the single worst 25 minutes of DW ever made up to that point, possibly ever. It's dull, arbitrary, hard to follow, does not sustain interest, the characters are unsympathetic and looks cheap. It is rivalled only by episode 3.

Not clear what the vibe is here.

• It's not 50's nostalgic gay fun. The holiday camp and Ken Dodd are horrible.
• It's not comedy. No one tells any jokes.
• It's not  a musical. There's a song or two but they're diegetic (part of the scene in the story) (e.g. Navarrino passengers singing on the bus).
• It's not drama. The Bannermen. Delta, the bounty hunter, the dancing, the camp P.A.are cartoonish at best.
• It's not satirical. What is it's target? (Other than itself.)
• It's not exciting. The motorbike chase scenes in ep2 seem to be filmed in slow motion.

The direction (Chris Clough) is bad but it ruins the climax to ep2 when Mel, Doc and Burton visibly stop at their mark before the Bannermen guns are cocked. The goof scenes (motorbike ep2) where Sylvester suddenly has his glasses on and in the next shot they're gone are unforgivable in a modern television production.


Dialogue is execrable. Many scenes feature dialogue that makes no sense and tells a different story from scene to scene.

The plot is crazy and disappointing. The disposal of the Navarrinos when the Bannermen destroy the bus is undermined by poor direction, inappropriate performances and some awful incidental music. The scene seems arbitrary and insignificant. Why isn't this shocking? It's shocking that it isn't.

What the actual Fruit is going on when the Bannermen are lured into the honey store. They are waylaid by Garonwy's life's work of special honey falling on them and smashing... (not scary or funny.. more like boring) then they are attacked by electronic "bees". Why do bees suddenly start stinging them? Bees aren't stimulated to do this by honey or broken glass... Next scene the Bannermen have makeup red welts but otherwise they are unaffected. Garonwy doesn't seem to notice that his honey hoard is ruined.

The climax is twee. The Chimeron baby grows up enough to make an attack cry that when amplified (slightly) makes Bannermen clasp their ears in pain and collapse. And then what? Delta, Billie and Princess dork face hijack their ship and head off to the next battle? It's presented as some kind of 'happy ever after'!!!

The performances are wobbly and poor.

• Stubby Kaye and Morgan Deare look drunk.
• Hugh Lloyd (Garonwy) looks and sounds gaga.
• Belinda Mayne as the Chimeron queen and her continuity error baby are by turns stiff or appalling.
• David Kinder as Billy the druggie stalker is even worse.
• Richard Davies teeth are scary. 
• Don Henderson is hammy as fruit.

Incoherent. Not funny. Not even weird. Very, very unsatisfying indeed.

This is the depth, the bottom of the pit. This is the new, stone-cold, motherless bottom of the barrel.


ABM Rating 0.35/4.00
LJM Rating 0.10/5.00
SPJ Rating 0.25/10   

No. 149 (out of 149)

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145 Paradise Towers

 Started 17-Mar

There's a high concept SF concept at the heart of this. The actual script is not so bad either.

But the direction (newcomer Nicholas Mallet) is weak and aimless.  The performances are uncontrolled. Richard Briers is a skilled, experienced actor who should know better. Bonnie is shocking. Unreal and unrelatable, and annoying as.

Keff McCulloch's music track is just wrong. The DVD features a rejected incidental music by David Snell which is better but still primitive and poorly realised.



ABM Rating 2.08/4.00
LJM Rating 3.25/5.00
SPJ Rating 5.50/10   

No. 99 (out of 148)

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144 Time and The Rani

 Started 13-Mar

First ep goes nowhere...

Eps 2,3 and 4 aren't any good either.

The new style is plinky, plonky with pantomime costumes and staging. Pickering and Ventham (and probably Mark Greenstreet) seem to be out of place by taking it seriously.

O'Mara spends her time vamping it up, Langford is like a squeaking wig, McCoy as the new Doctor is like a cartoon.

Characters are nowhere near realistic or relatable.

The effects are newly sophisticated. But it makes stale, rotten fruit merely shiny. The animatronics in the lead Tetrap are innovative (for DW) and so is the bubble trap in p1, p2. Both have an admirable air of technical achievement but simultaneously they seem wasted.

The good news is it's NOT the worst ever. I think Twin Dilemma is gonna be hard to beat.

But this is dreary and silly.


ABM Rating 0.90/4.00
LJM Rating 1.81/5.00
SPJ Rating 1.95/10   

No. 138 (out of 147)

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143d The Trial of a Timelord - The Ultimate Foe

 Started 12-Mar



The Radio Times said:

"Colin Baker and Bonnie Langford in a tale of a group of out-of-work actors who had to keep making a pseudo sci-fi series in order to pay their mortgages."


The production calamities behind this are beyond legendary.

• The script editor resigned, flipping the slop bucket as he did so.
• The star was sacked (at the insistence of weak and disinterested management).
• The writer died (at least that was early in the piece).
• The emergency Pip and Jane was deployed (with a lawyer present).

What's on screen **is** a miracle.



ABM Rating 2.09/4.00
LJM Rating 3.10/5.00
SPJ Rating 3.20/10   

No. 112 (out of 146)

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http://www.shannonsullivan.com/drwho/serials/7c-2.htmlSerial 7C:
The Trial Of A Time Lord Segment Four
(aka The Ultimate Foe)

Appearing from within the Matrix, the Master reveals that the Doctor's trial is part of a conspiracy by the corrupt High Council, who ravaged the Earth and renamed it Ravolox to hide the theft of Matrix secrets. Furthermore, the Valeyard is actually the distillation of the Doctor's evil side between his twelfth and final regeneration. Brought to the trial by the Master, Mel helps the Doctor pursue the Valeyard into the Matrix, where they discover that he is plotting to destroy the High Council. However, the Master has also summoned Glitz as part of his own bid for power.

In mid-1985, Doctor Who producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward decided that the fourteen episodes of Season Twenty-Three would be tied together by the umbrella theme of the Doctor being put on trial by the Time Lords. The other principal architect of this concept was writer Robert Holmes. At an early stage, it was hoped that Holmes would write the first four-part segment, and then the season's final six installments. However, Holmes indicated that while he did not mind writing the introductory adventure, he was otherwise interested only in the last two episodes of the season, which would tie up the running plotline.

Having completed the first four episodes of Season Twenty-Three under the title “The Mysterious Planet”, Holmes was commissioned to write the concluding two-part serial, “Time Inc”, on February 4th, 1986. On the 24th, however, BBC Head of Series and Serials Jonathan Powell wrote to the Doctor Who production office with a detailed and highly negative critique of “The Mysterious Planet”. Holmes, who was in ill health as he battled hepatitis B, was greatly demoralised by Powell's comments, and was frustrated that he now had to put “Time Inc” on hold while he revised “The Mysterious Planet”.


 Consequently, it was not until March that Holmes was able to begin work on his script for the first episode, now retitled “The Fantasy Factory”. Progress then became even slower as Holmes' health deteriorated; Saward found himself playing an ever greater role in the writing process, effectively taking over the serial from the point where the Doctor enters the Matrix. He deviated from Holmes' original idea which, although still set in a Victorian environment, involved the Doctor encountering the Duke of Clarence, who accuses him of being Jack the Ripper and tries to drown him at the episode's cliffhanger. The title “The Fantasy Factory” was also dropped at this point. While this was happening, Saward and Nathan-Turner were not getting along, and the script editor was increasingly working from home rather than venturing into the Doctor Who production office.

On April 1st, Anthony Ainley was contracted to play the Master in the final two episodes of Season Twenty-Three. Holmes had envisaged him as the Doctor's chief opponent within the Matrix, but Saward tailored the storyline to place the emphasis more firmly on the Valeyard's machinations. Since it had been decided that the season's final six episodes would be made together as Serial 7C, some documentation now began to refer to the trial's last segment as “The Ultimate Foe” parts five and six, using the working title which Pip and Jane Baker had devised for the serial which would precede Holmes'. The matter of titles became moot shortly thereafter, when Nathan-Turner opted to broadcast the entire season as The Trial Of A Time Lord. Holmes and Saward's scripts would therefore serve as parts thirteen and fourteen of this marathon adventure. On April 13th, Saward resigned from Doctor Who, but agreed to complete the season finale all the same.



In Holmes and Saward's conception, the season's penultimate episode revealed that the Valeyard was in fact the Doctor's final incarnation. The finale then opened with the Master saving the Doctor from the quicksand while the Valeyard kidnapped Glitz. The Doctor encountered Popplewick again, who led him into a trap baited with an illusory Mel. Popplewick, too, was revealed as a construct of “JJ Chambers” -- who, in turn, was unmasked as the Valeyard. While news reached the courtroom of the High Council's mass resignation, the Master warned that the Valeyard had materialised his TARDIS around a time vent in the Matrix. If the vent were to be opened for too long, there would be catastrophic ramifications for the space-time continuum. The Valeyard -- shown to be a pitiable old man afraid of dying -- planned to use this threat to force the Time Lords to grant him the Doctor's remaining regenerations.

The Master revealed that he was hired by the High Council to murder the Doctor in exchange for a pardon, but had now decided not to follow through. The Doctor bluffed his way into the Valeyard's TARDIS just as the Valeyard opened the time vent door. Struggling, the Doctor and the Valeyard plunged into the time vent while the Master had Glitz seal the door, saving the universe but trapping the Doctor for all eternity.


Sadly, Holmes was soon admitted to hospital, where he lapsed into a coma and passed away on May 24th. Doctor Who had lost the man who was, to that point, arguably its most successful writer. Saward was devastated by the news, but was determined to complete the work that Holmes had started. Unfortunately, Nathan-Turner was now having misgivings about the downbeat ending, which had been inspired by the 1893 short story The Final Problem, in which Arthur Conan Doyle attempted to kill off both Sherlock Holmes and his arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty in a fall over the Reichenbach Falls. Nathan-Turner was concerned that this would provide the BBC with a tailor-made scenario to cancel Doctor Who, and that the viewers who followed the season for fourteen weeks were owed a genuine conclusion to the story. He also disliked the notion of the Valeyard being an evil future Doctor, since this could be seen as “wasting” one of the Doctor's lives.

And Nathan-Turner now wanted to reveal that Peri, who was seemingly killed off at the end of The Trial Of A Time Lord (Segment Two), was alive after all.

Nathan-Turner and Saward met to try to find a way to amend the season finale in a manner which would assuage the producer's objections, while still respecting Holmes' original vision. These efforts were unsuccessful, and Saward became concerned that Nathan-Turner would go ahead and alter the scripts as he saw fit. As such, on June 4th, Saward withdrew his permission for Doctor Who to use his version of The Trial Of a Time Lord part fourteen. He also asked that the programme not use the portion of part thirteen which he had written, but the BBC refused on the grounds that this work had been performed in Saward's capacity as a staff script editor. As such, the penultimate episode of The Trial Of A Time Lord would be the last on which Saward was credited. He returned to his career as a freelance writer, with his later work including drama scripts for German radio.

He also wrote linking narration for some of BBC Audio's releases of missing Doctor Who episodes, and contributed to the short story anthology Doctor Who: Short Trips: Paste Tense, published by Big Finish Productions in April 2004.



Meanwhile, with the locations for the final two episodes of Season Twenty-Three already scouted, and rehearsals set to begin in less than two weeks, Nathan-Turner had to act quickly. He turned to Pip and Jane Baker. The husband-and-wife writing team had written The Trial Of A Time Lord (Segment Three) at very short notice, and were familiar with the season's story arc. Immediately after receiving Saward's notification, Nathan-Turner despatched the script for episode thirteen to them via taxi. The next morning, he met with the Bakers at the Doctor Who production office. Joining them was a legal representative, who was responsible for ensuring that Nathan-Turner did not divulge any of the contents of Saward's script for part fourteen. This meant that the Bakers had to come up with their own way of tying together all the season's loose ends, without any knowledge of the original plan.

The new season finale was commissioned on June 6th. The Bakers delivered their version of the storyline three days later, followed within the week by the completed script. Nathan-Turner acted as the script editor; he also made some changes to the preceding episode, such as the description of the Valeyard as being an amalgamation of the Doctor's evil impulses from his own future, rather than his final incarnation. The time vent was replaced by the particle disseminator, and instead of the Valeyard being a weak man masquerading as JJ Chambers, he was now a much stronger figure masquerading as Mr Popplewick. The Master played a more overtly villainous role, as opposed to the almost antiheroic portrayal planned by Holmes and Saward, while the role of the Keeper of the Matrix was significantly reduced (much to the disappointment of actor James Bree).

The new scripts were quickly delivered to Chris Clough, who would be directing the entirety of Serial 7C. A week later, location filming for the two-part finale began with the scenes on the beach at Camber Sands in Camber, East Sussex on June 23rd and 24th. Unfortunately, the beach hut which Clough's team had arranged to use as the Master's TARDIS was found to be locked, forcing the crew to seek the permission of the Harbour Authority to break in. It was later learned that the hut was no longer the property of the Authority -- provoking an unhappy response from the actual owner, and a hasty apology from the BBC!



 Then, from June 30th to July 3rd, Gladstone Pottery Museum in Longton, Staffordshire provided the Victorian simulacrum where the Fantasy Factory was located. This marked a nervous Bonnie Langford's first work on Doctor Who as the new companion, Mel. Production then concluded with a two-day block in BBC Television Centre Studio 1. Wednesday, July 16th concentrated on material in the Master's TARDIS, while Thursday, July 17th saw the use of the courtroom set for the last time. Part of the Bakers' aim in writing episode fourteen was to incorporate its destruction, since they had loathed writing the trial scenes for The Trial Of A Time Lord (Segment Three). This was not the end of Doctor Who's twenty-third production block, however: the majority of parts nine through twelve would be recorded during the following weeks.

The conclusion of work on The Trial Of A Time Lord brought the season-long involvement of Lynda Bellingham and Michael Jayston to an end. Bellingham went on to play recurring roles in All Creatures Great And Small, At Home With The Braithwaites and The Bill, as well as appearing as a panellist on Loose Women. She was awarded an OBE in 2014 in recognition of her volunteer work, but sadly passed away on October 19th of that year after a battle with colorectal cancer. Jayston continued to amass a number of television credits, including A Bit Of A Do, Cluedo, Outside Edge and Emmerdale.

In post-production, it quickly became clear that there was no way to edit part fourteen down to the required twenty-five minutes without the narrative becoming totally incomprehensible. Instead, Nathan-Turner asked Jonathan Powell to allocate the episode a thirty-minute timeslot. Powell and the BBC brass approved of the way Season Twenty-Three was shaping up, and so the request was granted. This satisfaction was also manifested in the announcement on August 19th that Doctor Who would be returning for its twenty-fourth season.

However, any sense of euphoria was muted when the early episodes of The Trial Of A Time Lord debuted to weak ratings -- the long break between seasons and potent opposition from American action import The A-Team taking audience levels below the already disappointing viewing figures of Season Twenty-Two (although the Appreciation Index generally improved). And then, on October 29th, any euphoria was silenced altogether when Nathan-Turner was compelled by Powell and BBC1 Controller Michael Grade to inform Colin Baker that he was being replaced as the star of Doctor Who.


 In return for being this bearer of bad news, Nathan-Turner was assured by Powell and Grade that he would be allowed to move on from Doctor Who at the end of November. As such, Nathan-Turner was furious when he was told by Powell on November 28th that he was being kept on the programme for Season Twenty-Four after all. So it was that, as The Trial Of A Time Lord adjourned itself from television screens on December 6th and the news of Baker's firing was reported by the press on December 13th, the producer found himself trying to reach a compromise with Baker and the BBC.

Nathan-Turner convinced his superiors to offer Baker a contract for a final four-part adventure, which would climax with the Doctor regenerating into his seventh incarnation. Baker's counter-proposal was that he be permitted one additional full season in the lead role; otherwise, he feared that his continued attachment to Doctor Who would result in him missing out on too much work over the coming nine months. When the BBC refused, Baker walked away. On December 18th, the BBC confirmed that the actor would not be returning to Doctor Who. Then, any hope of mending fences was lost when an interview with the actor was published in the Sun on January 6th, 1987. Here Baker expressed regret at his dismissal from Doctor Who, and spoke scathingly of Grade and the cowardly way he felt the Controller had dealt with him.

Baker would go on to a long career in theatre, and continued to make appearances on television including episodes of Jonathan Creek, Casualty, Doctors and Hustle. And despite the acrimonious circumstances of his departure, Baker would maintain close ties with Doctor Who. In 1988, he replaced Jon Pertwee in the stage play Doctor Who: The Ultimate Adventure, and returned to television for the thirtieth-anniversary special Dimensions In Time in 1993. He also played the Doctor-like title character in the direct-to-video series The Stranger for BBV throughout the Nineties, and appeared as himself in the fiftieth-anniversary spoof The Five(ish) Doctors: Reboot. Most significantly, in 1999, Baker returned to the role of the Sixth Doctor for Big Finish Productions, and helped to rehabilitate the character over the course of dozens of audio plays in the years that followed.


 

143c The Trial of a Timelord - Terror of the Vervoids

Started 9-Mar

Derivative and dreadful.

By turns predictable and dreadful.

Very quick and nasty idea, directed poorly and acted in a desperate fashion.

We watched the mercifully shorter Special Edition with new title sequence and no Trial scenes.


ABM Rating 1.20/4.00
LJM Rating 2.98/5.00
SPJ Rating 4.84/10   

No. 114 (out of 145)

Link to Cumulative Rankings

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http://www.shannonsullivan.com/drwho/serials/7c-1.html

Serial 7C:
The Trial Of A Time Lord Segment Three
(aka Terror Of The Vervoids)

As evidence for the defense at his trial, the Doctor presents an adventure from his future when he is travelling with a computer programmer named Mel. Answering a mysterious distress call from the space liner Hyperion III, they find that the passengers aboard include unscrupulous scientists, secret agents, saboteurs, thieves... and a murderer. And lurking in the shadows are the Vervoids, the product of sinister botanical experiments, who will stop at nothing to destroy all non-plant life.

After the original version of Season Twenty-Three was abandoned in early 1985, one of the key decisions made by producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward was that the reimagined version of the season would introduce a new companion for the Doctor. On July 5th, an outline for the character was disseminated. Redhaired Melanie “Mel” Bush would be a computer programmer from Pease Pottage, West Sussex. Inspired by the workout craze which had recently been popularised by celebrities such as Jane Fonda, Melanie would be a vocal proponent of fitness and healthy eating. Her demeanour would vacillate between being a strong feminist and a more traditional damsel in distress. The outline also noted that Mel would be the first British companion in many years -- indeed, the first since the departure of Sarah Jane Smith in 1976's The Hand Of Fear.

Nathan-Turner and Saward had decided that Season Twenty-Three would now consist of a yearlong story arc in which the Doctor is put on trial by the Time Lords. They envisioned the evidence as consisting of the Doctor's adventures, but patterned on Charles Dickens' 1846 novel A Christmas Carol -- emanating from his past, present and future. Melanie would be introduced as a “future” companion midway through the season. Consequently, the incident which brought her into the Doctor's orbit would never be depicted, although the outline posited that she had helped the Doctor prevent the Master from committing computer fraud on a worldwide scale.


 Although the BBC had reduced Season Twenty-Three to just fourteen episodes, Nathan-Turner and Saward were keen to wring as many “first nights” as possible out of the schedule, since the initial episode of a story often provided a bump in the viewing figures. With this in mind, it was decided that the four episodes forming the “future” segment of the season would actually consist of two linked two-part serials, taking place in the same location and sharing many of the same sets (a strategy previously employed in Season Twelve with The Ark In Space and Revenge Of The Cybermen). The writers assigned to these episodes were David Halliwell and Jack Trevor Story.

Halliwell progressed quickly on his two scripts, which were entitled “Attack From The Mind”. However Story, who was commissioned to write “The Second Coming” on July 26th, struggled mightily. Despite meeting with Halliwell in order to ensure that their stories melded well, he appeared to have difficulty understanding how to write for Doctor Who. Saward also recalled that Story would become fixated on specific details, such as the image of a man playing a saxophone inside a gasometer. To make matters worse, Saward was growing disenchanted with “Attack From The Mind”, which he found listless; Halliwell's scripts were rejected on October 18th, and it was decided that the season's “future” segment should in fact be comprised of just a single four-part narrative.

Part of the challenge with “Attack From The Mind” and “The Second Coming” was that neither Halliwell nor Story had previously written for Doctor Who. Now the production team decided to turn to someone who was experienced in the programme's unique requirements, and approached former script editor Christopher H Bidmead. Bidmead had mostly recently contributed Frontios for Doctor Who's twenty-first season, although his “In The Hollows Of Time” was one of the casualties of the directive to start anew on Season Twenty-Three. On October 29th, Bidmead was commissioned to write “The Last Adventure”. Keen to avoid the issues which had plagued the development of Halliwell and Story's serials, Bidmead worked closely with Saward, submitting each script and soliciting feedback before proceeding to the next installment.


 Meanwhile, Nathan-Turner was in the process of casting the role of Melanie Bush. Given her resemblance to the new companion's character outline, it may be that he hoped all along to attract actor, singer and dancer Bonnie Langford. Born Bonita Langford, she had first come to the attention of the public when she won the talent show Opportunity Knocks at the age of five. Her profile increased further as a presenter on Junior Showtime and in the role of the shrill Violet Elizabeth Bott in adaptations of the Just William series of children's novels. Langford also appeared in the film Bugsy Malone, the variety programme The Hot Shoe Show, and in numerous stage musicals on both sides of the Atlantic. Nathan-Turner was not confident that Langford would accept his offer to join the cast of Doctor Who, but his approach came at a time when the actress was hoping that a dramatic role would help her to take on more varied parts. In December, Langford signed a contract for the final six episodes of Season Twenty-Three, with options for two further years.

Saward, who was already unhappy with Melanie as a character, was aghast at Nathan-Turner's choice of actress. The relationship between the two men had already been gradually deteriorating, but Nathan-Turner's decision to cast Langford exacerbated the situation, playing into Saward's frustration with what he saw as the producer's predilection for inviting “light entertainment” actors onto Doctor Who. Saward soon began working from home as much as possible, rather than venturing into the Doctor Who production office. Nonetheless, Langford was announced to the press as the new companion on January 23rd, 1986, in the midst of her run as the title character in the stage production of Peter Pan.

Bidmead, meanwhile, was still working on his scripts for Season Twenty-Three, which now bore the title “Pinacotheca”. He had submitted his most recent drafts on January 9th, and awaited Saward's response. Given the regular communication between the writer and the script editor, then, it came as a shock to both Bidmead and Nathan-Turner when, on February 2nd, Saward pronounced “Pinacotheca” boring and unusable.


 Saward was not the only person whose rapport with Nathan-Turner had suffered. Longtime fan Ian Levine, who had acted as an adviser to the production office in recent years, had also fallen out with the producer over his creative decisions and the sentiment that Nathan-Turner had lied to him about developments over the past year. However, Levine remained in contact with Saward, and suggested that he approach veteran scriptwriter PJ Hammond, who had created the cult classic Sapphire & Steel, a sophisticated science-fiction series which had aired from 1979 to 1982. On February 10th, Hammond was commissioned to write “End Of Term”, which soon became known as “Paradise Five”. This time it was Nathan-Turner who was unhappy with the resulting work, and “Paradise Five” was abandoned towards the end of February.

Then, on March 1st, Nathan-Turner ran into writers Pip and Jane Baker in a lift at BBC Television Centre. The Bakers had written The Mark Of The Rani for Season Twenty-Two, and had briefly been tasked with a story entitled “Gallifrey” for the current season, before it was rendered defunct by the development of the trial storyline. The producer had apparently been trying to contact them regarding the “future” segment, but the Bakers had only just returned from a lengthy sojourn abroad. On the spot, Nathan-Turner explained the situation to them, and they agreed to meet with Saward immediately. The script editor was not enthusiastic about working with the Bakers, but they had a reputation for writing quickly and so he proposed that they develop a mystery in space.

Over the weekend, the Bakers formulated a potential storyline, together with a more detailed version of episode one. Taking up Saward's suggestion, they leaned on Agatha Christie's seminal 1934 novel Murder On The Orient Express, with passengers aboard a luxury transport (in this case, the space liner Hyperion III) being killed off one by one. The story's monsters would be the Vervoids, a plant/animal hybrid whose nature was suggested by research the Bakers had recently encountered concerning a hormone shared by both plant and animal life. The name for these beings came from the vervain, a genus of semi-woody flowering plants also known as the verbena.



 With the Bakers' quick work proving acceptable, their outline was formally commissioned under the title “The Ultimate Foe” on March 6th, followed exactly one week later by the scripts. The Bakers later referred to their adventure as “The Vervoids” but, in April, Nathan-Turner decided that all fourteen episodes of Season Twenty-Three would be transmitted under the banner title The Trial Of A Time Lord. The Bakers' segment would consequently comprise parts nine to twelve. Like Bidmead, the Bakers worked closely with Saward to try to head off any major problems, but communication became poor as the script editor grew increasingly unhappy with their writing. Finally, on April 13th, Saward resigned from Doctor Who. Although he ultimately agreed to finish working on the two-part season finale, it would be left to Nathan-Turner to take over the script editing duties on the Bakers' episodes; Saward would receive no televised credit on the broadcast programmes.

Although the final six episodes of The Trial Of A Time Lord were essentially comprised of two separate stories -- the Bakers' four scripts, plus the two-part conclusion -- it was decided that they would be grouped together as Serial 7C for production purposes. As such, they would share largely the same crew, including director Chris Clough. An admirer of television since his youth, Clough had chosen to study English literature at Leeds University because the institution made a studio available to undergraduates. This led to a position as a researcher for Granada Television, which he eventually parlayed into a career as a director. His credits included episodes of Go With Noakes and Brookside, before he began working on EastEnders. There, Clough met Gary Downie, who had been a production manager on Doctor Who; it was Downie who introduced the director to Nathan-Turner.

Because the location days for Serial 7C were first on the production schedule, and were dedicated solely to The Trial Of A Time Lord (Segment Four), Clough decided to record virtually of the material for these episodes before starting work on the Bakers' scripts. This also meant that Lynda Bellingham (the Inquisitor) and Michael Jayston (the Valeyard) could wrap up their obligations to Doctor Who: the pair featured heavily in the season's final two episodes, but only in cut-ins from the Time Lord courtroom in parts nine to twelve. Consequently, these were the first scenes taped for the Vervoid adventure, on Wednesday, July 16th in BBC Television Centre Studio 1.



 The first studio block dedicated entirely to the Bakers' scripts spanned three days beginning on Wednesday, July 30th in TC3. The first two days saw material recorded in the air duct and some of the passengers' cabins (all of which were redressed versions of the same set). The 30th also dealt with scenes in the gymnasium, and the 31st with those in the TARDIS. July 31st and August 1st then both involved recording of material in the hydroponic centre, the work hut and the cargo hold. While taping the cliffhanger for episode nine, Nathan-Turner asked Langford to scream in the key of F specifically -- since this would segue perfectly into the closing theme music.

Clough's team reassembled for three more days in TC3 starting on Tuesday, August 12th. A minor emergency occurred on this day when the tube with which Vervoid actor Peppi Borza was “exhaling” marsh gas accidentally dropped down inside his mask, threatening to choke him. Fortunately, others present managed to remove the mask in time and, after being cleared by the medical staff, the actor was able to return to work. The primary focus on the 12th and 13th was the Hyperion III lounge; in addition, the cabin set was redressed as Janet's compartment on the first day, while cameras also rolled on the bridge and in the air duct on the second day. Finally, August 14th saw the completion of various corridor scenes, as well as those in the waste disposal unit, the communications room and the isolation cabin. This brought production on Season Twenty-Three to a close, albeit amidst growing concern that the final episodes of Doctor Who might now be in the can.

Exacerbating this sense of pessimism was the release on August 13th of the September 1986 edition of the science-fiction magazine Starburst. In an interview with Saward, the former script editor described the circumstances behind his decision to quit Doctor Who in considerable detail, and reserved his harshest criticisms for Nathan-Turner. Matters were only made worse when the press seized on the article as well. It was the first time that such behind-the-scenes dirty laundry had been so publicly aired, and it made Nathan-Turner all the more relieved that -- one way or another -- he had likely produced his last Doctor Who serial.

Fortunately, on August 19th, the BBC announced that Doctor Who would indeed be returning for its twenty-fourth season in 1987. However, the winds of change were already blowing. On July 16th, former Head of Drama Sydney Newman had written to the BBC to enquire as to whether a credit might appear on Doctor Who in the future identifying him as the programme's creator. Although the BBC rejected this request on September 3rd, the communication led to a meeting between Newman and BBC1 Controller Michael Grade, in which the prospect of completely revamping Doctor Who was discussed.


 On October 6th, Newman submitted a formal proposal to Grade's office. He suggested bringing back the Second Doctor, Patrick Troughton, to replace Colin Baker, with long-term plans of eventually regenerating the Doctor into a female form. The new companions would be a 12-year-old trumpet player (whose instrument could be used as a weapon, or to signal the Doctor) and her 18-year-old brother, a graffiti artist who thinks the Doctor is out of touch. The Doctor would once again be unable to control the TARDIS, but Newman proposed that the programme rely less on adventures in outer space, and more on Earthbound stories. Amongst his proposals were stories set aboard a NASA space shuttle or a Polaris submarine, an encounter with Christopher Columbus, and one in which the time travellers are miniaturised (either in an adventure similar to Season Two's Planet Of Giants which would examine the threat of DDT, or else fighting cancer cells in the body of a young patient). Grade then arranged a meeting between Newman and Head of Series and Serials Jonathan Powell. However, this went badly, and no further action was taken.

Nonetheless, one aspect of Newman's proposal was taken up: by late October, Grade had decided to fire Colin Baker from Doctor Who. In a meeting with Nathan-Turner, Grade and Powell informed him that they felt three years was enough for a Doctor -- even though Baker had only completed two full seasons, and had harboured aspirations of breaking Tom Baker's seven-season record. Nathan-Turner objected to this decision, but he was told that he would be moved off Doctor Who at the end of November if he agreed to break the news to Baker that the option on his contract was not being taken up. And so it was that, on October 29th -- three days before the third segment of The Trial Of A Time Lord began airing -- Baker learned that the Sixth Doctor was no more.



 

143b The Trial of a Timelord - Mindwarp

 Started 7-Mar

A curious mix of ghastly, dramatic, horrifying, epic last episode, a mess in the middle.

About as much as you can expect from this season....


ABM Rating 2.00/4.00
LJM Rating 1.04/5.00
SPJ Rating 4.82/10   

No. 125 (out of 144)

Link to Cumulative Rankings

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http://www.shannonsullivan.com/drwho/serials/7b.htmlSerial 7B:
The Trial Of A Time Lord Segment Two
(aka Mindwarp)

At the Doctor's trial, the Valeyard presents the Doctor and Peri's most recent adventure. The dying words of a Thordon warlord send the pair to Thoros-Beta, home of the Mentors -- including their old foe, Sil. The Mentor leader, Kiv, has had his intelligence enhanced by the human geneticist Crozier, but now his brain is outgrowing his skull. Crozier sets his eyes on Peri as the new host for Kiv's brain. But when the Doctor appears to turn evil under the effects of one of Crozier's devices, it is left to the berserk warlord King Yrcanos to save his companion.

The villainous Sil, created by Philip Martin for his Season Twenty-Two story Vengeance On Varos, had proved highly popular with Doctor Who producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward. Martin was quickly asked to bring the character back for a second encounter with the Doctor. Originally, this would have occurred in a serial entitled “Mission To Magnus”, which paired Sil with the Ice Warriors and was likely intended to be the fourth story of Season Twenty-Three. However, this adventure became one of the many casualties of the BBC's decision to delay and shorten that season, leading to the development of a new set of scripts linked by the common thread of the Doctor being placed on trial by the Time Lords.

Martin was part of the team of writers assembled for the new Season Twenty-Three, alongside Robert Holmes, David Halliwell and Jack Trevor Story. The season was envisaged as following the pattern of the 1846 Charles Dickens novel A Christmas Carol, with evidence at the trial given in the form of the Doctor's past, present and future adventures. Martin was tasked with devising the “present” chapter -- that is, the Doctor's most recent escapades prior to being summoned to face the Time Lord courtroom. Once again, he was asked to incorporate Sil into his storyline. But a more dire requirement for Martin's serial was that it should culminate in the death of Peri, whom the production team had decided to replace with a new companion, Melanie Bush, partway through the year. Nicola Bryant, meanwhile, was beginning to worry that her acting career might suffer from a prolonged association with a single role, and so she was agreeable when Nathan-Turner informed her of this turn of events.


 Since writing Vengeance On Varos, Martin had joined BBC Radio as a drama producer; consequently, staff clearance was requested for Martin's Doctor Who scripts on September 13th, 1985. The title “The Planet Of Sil” was originally applied to Martin's story, which soon became known as “Mindwarp” and designated Serial 7B. Ron Jones was engaged as director; he had helmed Vengeance On Varos and likely would have served in the same capacity on “Mission To Magnus”. Sadly, these episodes would be amongst Jones' final television work. After spending some time directing for German broadcasters, his career was prematurely curtailed by a long illness. Jones died on July 9th, 1993.

As “Mindwarp” neared production, Nathan-Turner decided that the entirety of Season Twenty-Three should be broadcast as a single, fourteen-episode serial. Consequently, Martin's story would become parts five to eight of The Trial Of A Time Lord. Amongst the cast assembled by Jones was Brian Blessed, an acclaimed Shakespearean actor who had risen to prominence on television in the police drama Z Cars. In August 1983, Blessed had been widely -- if erroneously -- reported by the British press as the man who would succeed Peter Davison as the star of Doctor Who. Nabil Shaban had also agreed to reprise the role of Sil.

Recording for the second segment of The Trial Of A Time Lord began under a cloud. The rapport between Nathan-Turner and Saward had been deteriorating for some time, as the script editor increasingly found himself disagreeing with his producer's decisions. On April 13th, Saward resigned his post but agreed to complete his friend Robert Holmes' script for the season's concluding episode, since the writer was now too ill to work on it himself. Sadly, Holmes passed away on May 24th, placing a further strain on the relationship between Nathan-Turner and Saward. The situation had also impacted rehearsals on Martin's adventure, with Colin Baker finding that no one could explain to him whether the Doctor's aberrant behaviour was meant to be a genuine reflection of the effects of Crozier's machine, a ruse, or evidence of tampering with the Matrix record.


 Parts five to eight of The Trial Of A Time Lord were largely studio-bound, taped in two three-day sessions. The first block began on Tuesday, May 27th in BBC Television Centre Studio 1. Here, an uncredited Deep Roy wore a repainted Terileptil mask (from Season Nineteen's The Visitation) as the Possican delegate. The initial two days concentrated on scenes in Crozier's laboratory and the corridors, including Peri's death scene (for which Bryant wore a bald skullcap). Unfortunately, painstaking lighting changes in the corridors provoked a labour dispute, and as a result the work proceeded slowly. Consequently, the completion of material in Kiv's chamber and profit room on the 29th represented significantly less than Jones had planned to accomplish to that point, despite permission being granted for a fifteen-minute overrun.

Happily, the second studio block, which started on Wednesday, June 11th in TC6, was a smoother affair. Nonetheless, there was another flare-up of the industrial strife which had plagued the first session, when the lighting crew objected to the lowering of two lighting rigs for use as the circular entrances to the Alphan Induction Centre. A compromise was eventually reached whereby the actual lights on these rigs would not be turned on. Tunnel and corridor scenes were scheduled throughout this block. Otherwise, the first day dealt with the sets for Matrona Kani's chamber, the cell, and the tide control room; the second with the caverns and the problematic Induction Centre; and the third with the Time Lord courtroom.

Production then wrapped up with location filming on June 15th and 16th at Telscombe Cliffs near Peacehaven in East Sussex, for sequences on the pebble beach and at the Rock of Sorrows. Unfortunately, a crewmember had accidentally noted the times of high and low tide in reverse, which resulted in the water being much deeper than anticipated when shooting the scene of the Doctor and Peri arriving on Thoros-Beta. In post-production, Jones elected to use a new digital compositor called Harry to alter the colours in these scenes. This was in accordance with Martin's scripts, which described Thoros-Beta as boasting purple mountains, a bright green sky, and a pink sea.


 The conclusion of work at Telscombe Cliffs marked the end of Nicola Bryant's tenure on Doctor Who. The actress was pleased that Peri's death represented a powerful and unusual exit for a companion. Consequently, she was disappointed to learn that Nathan-Turner had changed his mind about the manner of her departure, with the season's closing episode now revealing that Peri's death was a fiction conjured by the Valeyard. Much of Bryant's subsequent career concentrated on the theatre, although she continued to make periodic television appearances, including Blackadder's Christmas Carol, Holby City and Doctors. She reprised her role as Peri for the thirtieth-anniversary special Dimensions In Time in 1993, and on many occasions for Big Finish Productions' range of Doctor Who audio dramas, beginning with Whispers Of Terror in November 1999.

This was also Philip Martin's last televised Doctor Who story. Although much of his later work would be in radio, he continued to write occasionally for television as well, such as episodes of Star Cops, The Bill and Doctors. He novelised both of his broadcast Doctor Who adventures, as well as “Mission To Magnus”, for Target Books. More recently, he contributed several scripts to Big Finish, including an audio adaptation of “Mission To Magnus”.

 

143a The Trial of a Timelord - The Mysterious Planet

 Started 3-Mar

We watched the Bluray. Regular for eps 1-2 and the alternative cut for eps3-4. The alternative cut is mostly alternative takes rather than extra bits.

The first ep is much anticipated due to the extended delay between seires 22 and 23.

The history of which is fascinating but irrelevant, 35 years on. Such delays (2019, 2016, 2009 and 1990-2015) are almost normal nowadays however big a deal it seemed back then.

The script quality is still poor. Robert Holmes has used his old tricks: the double act (Glitz and Dibber), the paint a back story with the dialogue ("The Habitat of the Canadian Goose by HM Stationery Office", the plot about insider rebel (Merdeen) fostering escape from unreasonable, authoritarian total control (Drathro).

But the result is a mess. It does not go anywhere new. The direction is lame (consider the climax of Part 2). The courtroom scenes are laborious and overplayed. Colin is on "pompous git" drugs, Michael Jayston is a one note angry lawyer who isn't quite sure of his brief, and Lynda manages to make the Inquisitor look like a twit.
The effects are ok but the robots (Drathro/L3) and the L1 look slow and clunky by modern standards. (Boston Dynamics anyone? https://www.bostondynamics.com/)

The leads (Colin and Nicola) struggle to maintain charisma and the new crap jokes atmosphere is unentertaining. Glitz and Dibber are better to watch but their schtick amounts to a retread of something better. Joan Sims as Katryca is trying hard but lacks any subtlety. Tom Chadbon as Merdeen is efective as always but his character is ruined by the resolution to the p3 climax where Merdeen shoots Grell. It is abominable because a) it's horrible and b) inexplicably callous.

Michael Jayston (Nicholas and Alexandria 1971) and Lynda Bellingham round out quite a star studded cast (for DW anyway) but it doesn't help.

The last episode is terrible, consisting as it does of a dull 'storming the baddies' castle' sequence and all the usual tropes about sunshine and freedom "outside" and "a bomb's about to go off, get her out of here... what about you... never mind me just go....cue countdown..."

DW had attracted criticism from BBC management before but with Michael Grade and Jonathan Powell both ripping this apart and being contradictory and simultaneously denying JNT the opportunity to move on from DW the show is starting to smell... He's asking them to be sacked and they don't yet they still criticise his work. Wha--?


Allegedly JNT staged a publicity coup to reverse the DW cancellation in Jan/Feb 1985. The weak and angered BBC management subsequently removed all consideration and support for the show. It continued in reduced episode series at different, difficult timeslots with a producer who was past due for replacement (for his sake and the show's).

Why was DW still being made? Who for? Why?

What are the answers to these questions?

35 years later, I still really don't know.

Oh and the title? Mysterious Planet? It's Earth. It's given away (several times in case you miss it) in p1!!!

And the new theme music is twee... i.e. horrible.


ABM Rating 1.75/4.00
LJM Rating 2.99/5.00
SPJ Rating 4.60/10   

No. 111 (out of 143)

Link to Cumulative Rankings

Rankings Scoreboard

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http://www.shannonsullivan.com/drwho/serials/7a.html

The first half of 1985 saw a succession of grim tidings confront Doctor Who producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward. First, in February, the BBC decided to postpone the start of production on Season Twenty-Three by a full year, from Spring 1985 to Spring 1986. This, in turn, would delay the start of transmission from January to September 1986. When Doctor Who returned, it would revert to the twenty-five-minute format of its first twenty-one seasons, as opposed to the forty-five-minute episodes which the production team had implemented for Season Twenty-Two. And finally, around the end of May, it was decided that Season Twenty-Three would consist of just fourteen episodes. This flew in the face of the spirit (if not the letter) of earlier claims that the return to shorter episodes would mean longer seasons; it was also very demoralising for both cast and crew.

Under the circumstances, Nathan-Turner hoped that he might finally be assigned to a new programme, but BBC Head of Series and Serials Jonathan Powell asked him to remain on Doctor Who for one more season. As such, Nathan-Turner and Saward began to plan for the future. They agreed that the shorter season meant that they needed to approach its format more creatively than in the past, and Saward suggested that all fourteen episodes could be linked by an umbrella theme. Since none of the stories already in development would suit this structure, they would have to go back to square one and start work on Season Twenty-Three all over again.

The idea chosen by Nathan-Turner and Saward to run through the season was a scenario in which the Doctor was put on trial by the Time Lords -- effectively mirroring the series' real-life status. This met with the approval of Powell and BBC1 Controller Michael Grade, although Grade argued for the introduction of a new Doctor to revitalise the programme in the eyes of the audience. Nathan-Turner successfully defended Colin Baker, suggesting that the actor just needed more time to win over the viewers.

The production team then worked to establish the framework of the new Season Twenty-Three. The Doctor would be summoned for trial, with Time Lords from the future brought back in time to comprise the jury and officials. The judge and prosecutor would be selected anonymously by the Matrix but, as the season progressed, it would be revealed that this process had been tampered with -- raising suspicions as to the true motives of both characters. Eventually, the prosecutor would be unmasked as an evil future Doctor. The evidence in the trial would take the form of the Doctor's exploits; inspired by Charles Dickens' 1843 novel A Christmas Carol, there would be stories from the Doctor's past, present (that is, his most recent adventure prior to the trial) and future. On instructions from Grade, there would be a greater emphasis on humour over violence, following repeated viewer complaints during Season Twenty-Two.

Whereas Nathan-Turner had rejected Grade's advice to change his leading man, he did feel that it was time to replace Nicola Bryant's Peri with a new companion. Peri would be killed off midway through the season, with a new character named Melanie “Mel” Bush joining the Doctor thereafter. In the meantime, though, the relationship between the Doctor and Peri would be softened, as neither Baker nor Bryant had enjoyed the constant bickering which had defined their characters' rapport throughout Season Twenty-Two. An outline for Mel was released on July 5th, indicating that she would be a computer programmer and fitness enthusiast from Pease Pottage, West Sussex. The same day, descriptions of the trial judge and prosecutor were also distributed. These characters were now referred to as the Inquisitor and the Valeyard -- the latter being an obsolete term for a “Doctor of Law” and hence a clue to the prosecutor's true identity.

The structure of Season Twenty-Three was of great concern to Nathan-Turner and Saward, since there would be so few opportunities to enjoy the “first night” boost of a new serial. After dismissing a format consisting of two four-part and one six-part adventure, consideration was next given to reserving two episodes to set up and resolve the season's story arc, bookending three four-part serials. Soon, though, it was determined that there was no need to devote an entire episode to establishing the trial storyline. Instead, the year would begin with two four-part tales, before wrapping things up with three two-part stories. This was agreed upon in a meeting of the season's writing team on July 9th: the first and last stories would be written by Robert Holmes, the second by Philip Martin, the third by David Halliwell, and the fourth by Jack Trevor Story.

Holmes' involvement was important to Saward in particular, who had enjoyed a good relationship with the former Doctor Who script editor during the development of Holmes' recent scripts The Caves Of Androzani and The Two Doctors (as well as “Yellow Fever And How To Cure It”, which had been one of the abandoned storylines for the original Season Twenty-Three). Saward considered Holmes to be a reliable veteran scribe who had a profound understanding of Doctor Who; indeed, it was Holmes who had advised the production team in choosing the season's writers. Holmes' scripts for the first four episodes of Season Twenty-Three were commissioned on September 2nd as “Wasteland”.

In the meantime, Doctor Who continued to experience a series of highs and lows, both in the public eye and behind the scenes. While the truncation of Season Twenty-Three had heretofore been a closely-guarded secret, in early July the BBC accidentally sent a fax detailing the composition of the new season to the Doctor Who Fan Club of America instead of Lionheart, the company which distributed the programme in the United States and Canada. Although the news quickly proliferated amongst fans and even the British tabloid press, the BBC continued to deny the reports until finally acknowledging the true length of the 1986 season on December 18th. On July 16th, former writer and director Terence Dudley -- who had most recently scripted The King's Demons for Season Twenty -- wrote to Nathan-Turner offering to replace him as producer of Doctor Who if he wanted to move on. However, with the BBC unwilling to approve any of Nathan-Turner's other proposed projects, there was nowhere for him to move on to.

On July 25th, Doctor Who returned to the airwaves -- albeit on radio -- with the debut of Slipback, a BBC Radio 4 production written by Saward and starring Baker and Bryant. Consisting of six ten-minute installments (broadcast two per week) Slipback ran as part of the Pirate Radio 4 programme through August 8th. It was only the second original Doctor Who audio production, following the Fourth Doctor story Doctor Who and The Pescatons which had been released on LP by Argo Records in 1976. But while fans got to enjoy an extra adventure to help bridge the long wait to Season Twenty-Three, relations within the Doctor Who production office were beginning to fray. Amongst other complaints, Saward felt that Nathan-Turner was spending too much time wooing the programme's American fans, and disagreed with many of his choices of actors and directors. More and more, the script editor was working from home.

As Holmes developed his adventure, which was designated Serial 7A, its title became “Robots Of Ravolox” and then, by November, “The Mysterious Planet”. He drew some elements from his earlier Doctor Who work: aliens keeping a more primitive civilisation cowed and regularly claiming the two brightest youth had featured in 1968's The Krotons, while 1978's The Ribos Operation had also boasted humorous interplay between two conmen. His scripts were delivered on January 15th, 1986, at which point Holmes turned his attention to the season's concluding two-part story, “Time Inc”. The next day, Colin Baker was contracted for Season Twenty-Three, with an option for fourteen more episodes to comprise Season Twenty-Four.

A director for Serial 7A had now been engaged; this was Nicholas Mallett, a former dancer who had shifted gears and moved into television due to illness. Sometimes credited as “Victor Mallett”, he had been a production manager on shows like Blake's 7 before earning directorial experience on programmes such as Late Starter, Crossroads and Spitting Image. Mallett had begun to prepare for production while a copy of “The Mysterious Planet” was sent to Jonathan Powell for his consideration, as was routine.

Much to the production team's dismay, however, Powell's response on February 24th was scathing. In an unusually detailed commentary, he took issue with several aspects of “The Mysterious Planet”, including the slow reveal of the trial scenario, the lack of clarity as to the nature of the crisis on Ravolox, and the extent of the Doctor's involvement in its resolution. Most frustratingly for Nathan-Turner, Powell seemed to contradict Grade's edict that humour feature more prominently in Season Twenty-Three, reserving some of his most stinging criticism for elements such as the Doctor's taunting of the Valeyard and the comic banter between Glitz and Dibber.

Holmes was deeply hurt by Powell's indictment of his scripts. To exacerbate the situation, the writer had for some time been battling hepatitis-related health complications, and so it was an even greater concern that he would now have to suspend work on “Time Inc” to revisit “The Mysterious Planet”. Saward was livid, and saw Powell's memo as demonstrating a lack of respect for the veteran writer. Fortunately, Nathan-Turner and Mallett were able to convince Powell that only fairly minimal changes to Holmes' scripts were necessary. The Doctor would now learn that he is on trial early in part one, rather than at the cliffhanger. The black light power converter was introduced, replacing Glitz and Dibber's original interest in depriving Katryca of a sack of gemstones. The conmen's dialogue was also rewritten to remove the heavy use of slang.

Nathan-Turner took the lead in casting several of the roles for “The Mysterious Planet”. Both the Inquisitor and the Valeyard would be appearing throughout Season Twenty-Three, and Holmes was contemplating the return of Sabalom Glitz in “Time Inc”. Mallett's initial thought for Glitz and Dibber was to approach the well-known comedy team of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, only to learn that their schedules would not accommodate the planned recording dates. Instead, Nathan-Turner offered the role of Glitz to Tony Selby, a television veteran in programmes such as Ace Of Wands, Get Some In! and Jack Of Diamonds. Selby also counted a number of film credits to his name, including Villain and Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall (along with uncredited appearances in movies like Alfie and Superman).

Cast as the Inquisitor was Lynda Bellingham. Born in Montreal, Quebec but adopted and raised in Buckinghamshire, Bellingham had attended the Central School of Speech and Drama. She won a regular role in General Hospital before moving on to such shows as Z Cars, Blake's 7 and Angels, together with movie appearances including Confessions Of A Driving Instructor. Bellingham was perhaps best known as the mother in a popular series of commercials for the Oxo brand which had been running since 1983.

Finally, the role of the Valeyard went to Michael Jayston. A successful stage actor, Jayston had appeared in many filmed versions of Shakespeare, including a starring role in the 1970 Macbeth. He then took lead roles in movies such as Nicholas And Alexandra (with the future Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker, as Rasputin) before gravitating back towards television, including the 1975 version of Jane Eyre, Quiller and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

To ensure that Doctor Who's return to the screen made a dazzling first impression, Nathan-Turner decided to spend lavishly on the opening footage of the TARDIS being drawn to the Time Lord space station. For the first time, a motion-controlled camera would be used for Doctor Who, trained upon an elaborate six-foot-wide model of the station. The 45-second shot, filmed at Peerless Studios in Elstree, Hertfordshire, took a week to complete and cost more than £8,000. This made it the most expensive sequence in Doctor Who to that point, although some of the cost would be offset via its partial reuse in establishing shots throughout the season.

Meanwhile, Nathan-Turner had hired a young freelance composer named Dominic Glynn to provide the incidental music for “The Mysterious Planet”. At the eleventh hour, on March 27th, Nathan-Turner decided to commission Glynn to create a new arrangement of Ron Grainer's Doctor Who theme tune. He would be required to submit an initial version of his composition less than a week later, on April 2nd. However, the short notice meant that Glynn hadn't even had time to finish setting up his home studio, nor the opportunity to acquire a copy of Grainer's sheet music (though he was able to deduce it by ear). Nonetheless, Glynn was able to meet his deadline, and further refined his arrangement throughout the month of April.

At the same time, Mallett was preparing for the start of the location shoot, which took place in Hampshire from April 8th to 11th. Unusually, the Doctor Who team was effectively returning to the same area used for the preceding serial, Revelation Of The Daleks. However, because the earlier recording had occurred under wintry conditions, it was felt that there would be no objections to going back there so soon. There would also be a different appearance to the material recorded by Mallett's team, as the decision had been made to dispense with film (except for model and effects shots) and instead use Outside Broadcast (OB) videotape on location, a medium which had only occasionally been employed in the past. This would make editing easier and blend better with material taped in the studio.

April 8th and 9th were spent in the Queen Elizabeth Country Park at Horndean; the first day dealt with scenes in the wilds of Ravolox, while the second concentrated on the area around the tunnel entrance. On the 10th and 11th, the camp of the Tribe of the Free was actually Butser Ancient Farm near East Meon, a reconstruction of an Iron Age agricultural settlement in operation since 1970.

By now, Nathan-Turner had decided that the entirety of Season Twenty-Three would be treated as a single fourteen-episode story under the title The Trial Of A Time Lord. While this would provide the season with the added promotional boost of comprising the longest Doctor Who adventure ever (besting 1966's twelve-part epic The Daleks' Master Plan), Saward was wary of the decision, fearing that it would dissuade casual viewers from watching the later installments.

In fact, this was just one of a series of decisions made by Nathan-Turner which Saward felt were no longer compatible with his vision for Doctor Who. With his current contract as script editor having come up for renewal, he decided to take a leave of absence from the Doctor Who production office, during which Nathan-Turner would serve as both producer and script editor. This would also afford him the time to complete the season's final episode, which Holmes was now too unwell to finish. Finally, on April 13th, Saward resigned from Doctor Who. Powell denied Nathan-Turner's appeal for a replacement script editor, and instead encouraged him to try to repair his relationship with Saward.

In the midst of all of this real-life drama, production was continuing on the first four episodes of The Trial Of A Time Lord. Mallett's next order of business was a two-day session at BBC Television Centre Studio 6. Taking place on Thursday, April 24th and Friday, April 25th, the focus was on scenes in the tunnel, the subway, and the hut used by the Tribe to house prisoners.

Recording for the first segment of The Trial Of A Time Lord was then intended to conclude with a three-day block in TC3 beginning on Saturday, May 10th. In use were the sets for the tunnel, the subway, the areas in and around Drathro's “castle”, and the food production centre. The scenes in the courtroom were also scheduled for the last day. Roger Brierley had been cast as Drathro, with the intention being that he would inhabit the costume constructed by the BBC Visual Effects Department. During rehearsals, however, Brierley changed his mind, and Nathan-Turner initially believed that the role would have to be recast at short notice. Fortunately, the effects team had anticipated this development, and assistant Paul McGuiness was able to wear the Drathro costume while Brierley read in his lines from off camera. Mallett had also alerted Nathan-Turner to his concern that the final two episodes were badly underrunning. As such, Nathan-Turner extended some of the courtroom material, and also composed an extra scene in which Broken Tooth and Balazar argue about the route to the “castle”.

Unfortunately, work on May 12th was badly delayed when it was discovered that elements of the courtroom set had been erected in the wrong studio, and furthermore that they would require modification to be accommodated in TC3. This debacle limited Mallett's work on these sequences, and forced the postponement of the scene where the Doctor arrives on the space station. As such, this was remounted on June 13th in TC6, during work on The Trial Of A Time Lord (Segment Two).

Episode one of The Trial Of A Time Lord was broadcast on September 6th. The eighteen months which had elapsed since the concluding installment of Revelation Of The Daleks represented Doctor Who's longest absence from broadcast television to date. By now, Nathan-Turner had come to share Saward's fears that a fourteen-part story might have difficulty attracting viewers as the season progressed, and so he began to write continuity announcements to recap events; these began airing with part three. By that point, however, The Trial Of A Time Lord had already lost one-fifth of the 4.9 million viewers who had tuned in for the opening episode -- and this had already represented the smallest audience for a season premiere since The Smugglers back in Season Four. The court of public opinion, it seemed, had already delivered its verdict...

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Series 22 Post View

This would be an autopsy but what would be the point? So it's a Ratings/Stats report.

So here's the data for the last few series:

In the UK

• S19 was Monday/Tuesdays
• S20 was Tuesday/Wednesdays
• S21 was Thursday/Fridays
• S22 was Saturdays

So all change for the Brighton Line....the TV ratings are varying as much due to this as anything else.

Story	UK Viewers (millions)	Season statistics	UK viewers (millions)	Episode
5Z	9.6	S19 avg	9.2
5W	8.9	S19 peak	10.4	5Z p4
5Y	8.8	S19 low	8.1	6C p4
5X	9.6	S19 St Dev.	0.7
6A	10.0
6B	9.3
6C	8.9
6E	7.2	S20 avg	7.0
6D	7.1	S20 peak	7.7	6D p2 6F p4
6F	7.3	S20 low	5.8	6J p1
6G	7.1	S20 St Dev.	0.5
6H	6.8
6J	6.5	Add 6K
		avg	7.1
6K	7.7	peak	7.7	6D p2 6F p4
		St Dev.	0.5
6L	7.3	S21 avg	7.1
6M	7.3	S21 peak	8.0	6Np1 6Pp2
6N	6.8	S21 low	5.6	6N p4
6P	7.7	S21 St Dev.	0.7
6Q	7.0
6R	7.3
6S	7.1
6T	8.1	S22 avg	7.1
6V	7.1	S22 peak	8.9	6T p1
6X	6.8	S22 low	6.0	6W p2
6W	6.5	S22 St Dev.	0.7
6Y	7.1
6Z	7.6

Series 22 maintained it's ratings quite well. But the quality of the show took an alarming dip

Main problems were the poor scripting and the lacklustre directing but the acting is not great either.

S19 DWMB rating 66.9%
S20 DWMB Rating 66.7%
S21 DWMB Rating 60.0%
S22 DWMB Rating 39.3%


That's an appalling drop and a new low.

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Notes for statistically challenged.

avg is the mean - sum of all values divided by the quantity of values.

St Dev is standard deviation -  a measure of the variation of a set of values.

• Low standard deviation shows values are close to the mean. 
• High standard deviation shows values are spread over a wider range.