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27/11 |
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In one of those idle moments that can only hit you on a Friday afternoon, I found myself wondering what I thought about Doctor Who the very first time I saw it. Wouldn’t be amazing to know what I thought of those first few episodes after all these years? Wouldn’t it be great to pinpoint exactly what it was that made me fall in love with the show all those years ago? I can’t really remember anymore you see. I can’t even really be sure when it was I first saw the series. I always thought it was the 1980 repeats, because I can definitely remember being on the floor at Grandma and Grandad’s house in Bath watching Destiny of the Daleks and City of Death there, but then I found I could remember something from most of the other season 17 stories, so I probably saw most of the Doctor Who that was shown in 1979. Let’s get a few facts in here before we start. I was four in the July of 1979. We lived in Weymouth then, and we almost certainly didn’t have a colour TV, so my first few stories would have been in glorious black and white. There were just the four of us then, this being 3 years before my brother was born, and my sister was 3 in the December of 1979. My sister was something of a livewire, and had terrorised me since she started to walk and talk and there was very little let up from her! I’m told that watching Doctor Who was something that me and Mum did together to make amends for the times we couldn’t always do what I wanted! So we watched Doctor Who together, more than likely sat on the old orange sofa that we had for so many years, and I’m told I was hooked very quickly. Indeed both Mum and Dad have commented recently that my nephew’s new found love of Daleks reminds them very much of the way I was at the same age, so maybe it was the Daleks that did it. I can’t remember ever loving the Daleks, but perhaps that’s something that has gone with my early memories of the show too? Now Destiny is often derided for many, many reasons, mostly because the received wisdom is that season 17 is rubbish. It’s sad really then that people can’t look beyond the tatty Daleks and David Gooderson’s Davros and see how brilliantly and stylishly this story is directed by Ken Grieve (why did he never come back to the show?) It has menacing shots of the Daleks shot from beneath, at least two brilliant cliffhangers, sparing use of some spangly Dudley Simpson music and despite this being the year Tom went over the top a very restrained performance from him. He’s grave in all the right places, which helps the atmosphere a great deal. Now maybe it was Tom that did it. His performance in this season is mesmerising for me. Others like the gothic early Tom, or maybe Middle Period Eccentric Alien Unpredictable Tom, but I like Season 17’s version best of all. He just looks like he’s having so much fun and he’s a Doctor I’d want to travel with. He’s very much the central figure of the season, such a huge magnetic presence on screen and I know that he very quickly became my hero. He still is. I stride to work like he does down corridors to this day! What more is there to say about Tom Baker? The silliness never seemed like silliness to me, he was the Doctor, a reassuring presence against the monsters. If he was serious when facing them I knew it was something really bad he was facing. He had that knack of just sort of making you feel that, something very special, for me at least. City of Death was of course scary and wonderful. I was rather obsessed with this story even when I was small. There’s wonderful notebook somewhere among the old toys and schoolbooks in my parents’ loft with some of my drawings from around this time, and a big favourite thing for me to draw was Scaroth. I was terrified by the first cliffhanger as Count Scarlioni pulled off his face to reveal the Jagaroth face hidden beneath. That image stayed with me for a long time, no doubt reinforced by the repeat the following summer. That and the Egyptian scroll the Countess unrolls in Part 4 with the picture of Scaroth at the end. That was one of those strange bits of Doctor Who that hides in your head for years for no real reason. Over the years I’ve written a great deal about why this particular story is the best Doctor Who story ever, so I won’t go into all that again here, I just know it’s my favourite and probably always will be. I don’t have to say much more than that. The following stories are all something of a blur really. There were bits and pieces I remembered, K9 being webbed by the Wolfweeds, the Mandrells wandering around the yellow corridors of the Empress, The Doctor, Romana and K9 walking through a tunnel in space to get onto the Skonnan ship, nothing much, but those images confirm I did at least see the rest of the season. Maybe they just suffered from not being seen again the next year or just the vagueness of a 4 year olds memory. I think more than anything K9 was my favourite thing in Doctor Who at this time. There was something truly magical about him that captivated me. Some might argue that he’d had his day by this season and was past his peak and certainly David Brierley was not a patch on John Leeson, but there was still that certain something there. It’s a love that’s still there to this day, and I’m waiting to see if there’s still that magic there and he has the same effect on my nephew next year as he did on me in 1979. Season 17 will always be a set of stories that divides fandom. Too silly, not serious, badly made we’re told, but there are good stories at the heart of it. I might not ever be able to tell you what exactly it was about the show that got into my head and caught my imagination, or what I thought at the time about it all, but I do know I’ll always defend it because if it hadn’t been for these imaginative, exciting, funny stories I wouldn’t be writing this today. I love 1979 and I always, always will.
I love Doctor Who... Well, yes, I suppose I do. Some bits of it may be better than others, and one or two bits of it may actually be, keep it to yourselves, pretty dire - but I still love it. Even The Monster of Peladon in a weird sort of way - if nothing else it makes the already good stories in the rest of season 11 look even better by comparison. To misquote Doc Morrisey, "By being the worst story in season 11, it saves some other poor blighter from that ignominy." So with that outpouring of gushy affection in mind, selecting one year as somehow deserving of special merit or praise ought to be a very difficult task indeed. And yet... And yet, to quote the McGann version of (how appropriate!) of Shada we have to go back to 1979. And in fact it was an amazingly easy choice. Being for a moment the factually-obsessed anorak that I truly am, and having consulted my beloved Programme Guide volume 1 (circa 1981) I see that Doctor Who in 1979 actually began with the broadcast of the final eight episodes of the Key to Time season - namely, the concluding half of The Power of Kroll and the whole of The Armageddon Factor. Let's get those out of the way for a moment, shall we, before getting down to business proper. Looked at now, these two final KTT stories are watchable but are by no means up in the top ranks of stories - ironically perhaps, given that the remainder of that season ("The Ribos Operation" through to "The Androids of Tara") are four of my absolute favourites. My memories of the 1979 KTT stories from the year itself are few and far between, and basically run down as follows: The Power of Kroll - I missed part 4!!! Our Sunday School at that time always had its annual Christmas Party on a Saturday in early January (yes I know - Why?) and we always ended up missing an episode of Doctor Who because of it. My memory of part 4 is therefore in fact the memory of being driven home from the party by Dad with him telling us the plot of the entire episode - while my brother and I continually chipped in with, "But what was the fifth segment?" from the back seat. As for The Armageddon Factor - for reasons best known to itself, the Bill Nighy-loving Daily Mail billed part 6 with the cryptic observation, 'Why does the Doctor seem to get younger with each regeneration?' Naturally, clued-up fanboys like my brother and I took this to mean that the Doctor was going to regenerate at the end of that evening's episode. Imagine the excitement!!! Until, that is, Dad pointed out that it was simply (if oddly) a reference to the fact that each successive Doctor is younger than the one before. At that time (post-The Making of Doctor Who but pre-Doctor Who Weekly) we knew enough of the previous Doc's to see what he meant, but not enough to point out to him that in fact Patrick Troughton was a good 12 months younger than his successor Jon Pertwee! But enough factoids. When fans talk about 1979 they aren't referring to the last eight episodes of the Key to Time - they mean season 17. And when fans talk about season 17 they either mean it as shorthand for Doctor Who at its very worst or, like me, they talk of it with a sense of absolute wonder. Season 17, the Autumn of 1979... Can it really be 25 years ago since Saturday after Saturday I followed the Doctor and his new Romana from Skaro to Earth to Chloris to Eden? Well, by the simple device of checking my calendar with a calculator I find that not only can it be, but in fact it is. As Tom might well have said that year, with a wide face and a look of mock surprise: Gosh!!! So what makes that THE year for me? What is it that marks out those stories as the Who by which, subconsciously perhaps, all Who must be judged? (Rather ironically, given that whatever else it might be in 2005, the new Doctor Who will most assuredly not be season 17 in style.) By all accounts it was a troubled year - "Destiny of the Daleks" was (depending on which account you read) either heavily rewritten by Douglas Adams from Terry Nation's scripts, or entirely written by Douglas Adams from Terry Nation's outline; "City of Death" was written almost overnight, again by Adams; "The Creature from the Pit" unfortunately caused major strife in the creature department, with by the end of it nobody on the production team being terribly happy with the end result; the director of "Nightmare of Eden" floundered, ultimately failing to complete the final studio recording, which was finished instead by Producer Graham Williams; "Horns of Nimon" was threatened with strike action... and (although even if completed it would technically speaking come under 1980's aegis) the season finale "Shada" was not just threatened with strike action, but was abandoned because of it. So given a shortage of time and money and resources, and what seems like an almost hand-to-mouth production of workable scripts, how did those twenty episodes (yes alright fact fans, or at least those of you similarly armed with the Programme Guide, I know that only eighteen of them were actually aired in 1979) earn such a place in my affection? Well, to be honest a part of it is nothing at all to do with the programme. To quote Ace from a decade later, "It was just that whole time you know". I was 8 in June 1979, the first part of the year being spent in Mrs Lamb's class at Stanwix Primary School (I remember all my Primary School teachers with great affection, my main recollections of her, which perhaps date both of us, being that she told us that boys shouldn't cry, and that she used to teach the girls sewing while the boys drew pictures!) and the second part of the year in Mr Pringle's class. I had lots of friends and we all had some great times. To quote (again, how appropriate!) Tom Baker himself from his video retrospective, "What could be better than warm friends and lots of laughs?" In some of its later years Doctor Who's role would switch from being just one element in a life that was generally pretty good, to being more or less the one highlight of the week that would keep me going (1983, and particularly 1986 onwards). But in 1979, everything was wonderful. I know now that my wife had a pretty lousy childhood, but at that time I assumed that in general everybody's life was much the same as mine - and my life in 1979 was just a dream. I daresay there were minor irritations, and at the time they probably seemed like major ones (the annual Sunday School Christmas Party among them), but there was nothing major or fundamentally affecting to disturb the still pond of my 7/8 year old life. And so Doctor Who was the icing on the cake, a bit of detailing to make things even sweeter - I don't mean to dismiss it, or to suggest that it wasn't my favourite show, because I'm sure that by then it was, and my Target collection even at that young age was probably pretty comprehensive, but it wasn't the whole of my life by any means. Perhaps because of this general haze of delight, I can't now proceed to give you reasoned and watertight arguments as to why Doctor Who in 1979 was just The Best. We know that Tom Baker was at times fairly uncontrollable during that period, and although that may have made him difficult to work with, it made the show unbeatable. At, and I know it's a cliché but it's so evidently true, at the height of his powers, the stories benefit immeasurably by his sheer presence. He carries the whole thing, and by definition all the other actors have to strive to make their mark - and they do! With almost all of the supporting players that year rising to the challenge, it can surely only be a good thing for the viewer. So what makes 1979 special for me are many, many things, but most of them aren't relevant or concrete or even especially rational. The joy is simply in knowing, for example, that my brother and I had a tape recorder for the first time and would record each week's episode on audio - that's how I know the exact delivery of Davros line "Weaponry so devastating that all matter will succumb to its power", and why I know exactly how the incidental music goes at the end of The Creature from the Pit part one. It's knowing also that, even though it's a purely visual cliffhanger, we couldn't wait to replay and listen again to the end of Destiny of the Daleks part two. It's knowing that, as I've said before, Mum told us the new story was filmed in Paris just before City of Death opened instead to an apparently alien landscape. It's remembering the sight of the Destiny... book in WH Smiths' not long after it had aired - and my logical assumption that 'the French one' would be out soon. It was on my Christmas List that year, and it's one of those supreme ironies that it remains one of only four stories that were never adapted. It's knowing that I was totally surprised by a monster suddenly appearing at the end of part one of Nightmare of Eden. It's remembering the total confusion that I felt at the end of Creature... part three. It's remembering a time when every week there would be twenty-five minutes of unpredictable but utterly compelling entertainment, with a charismatic lead actor who made you feel safe, a man with a robot dog who genuinely seemed like he could save the world over and over again, and where each episode would end with a truly great cliffhanger - even the obvious one from Destiny... part one is a great one, with Lalla Ward truly terrified, just as I was truly excited. All this, and Daleks too!!! Maybe, to cut a long story short, maybe it's just remembering a time when everything was wonderful. As season 17 aired, so Doctor Who Weekly came on the scene, broadening what we knew about Doctor Who by telling us about stories from before either my brother or I were born. There was so much out there to discover, both within those large-print Marvel pages, and in each week's episode, that it was impossible not to be swept up by it all. Above all it was a time when Doctor Who was a family show, which we watched as a family, when, as Mark Gatiss put it recently in DWM, when it wasn't considered unhealthy to be obsessed by it. As a rational (well, maybe) 32-year old, I can see that much as I loved season 17, another year produced from the same team would have been too much. Season 17 continued and amplified the trend begun in season 16 for a more fantastical and at times 'jokey' style of Doctor Who, while at the same time retaining the fundamental traditions of imaginative ideas and exciting drama. Season 17 takes it up to the line in places, but never gets to the point where I think it is just TOO silly - the closest it ever gets is the medal scene in "Shada" (which I know, I know, is 1980 and therefore not really my territory here) but since that was (supposed to be) the last episode of the series, why not? But a Williams/Adams season 18 probably would have gone too far, and in the process ruined not just the reputation of season 17 but perhaps of the show as a whole. So although, a quarter of a century later, I am unashamed in saying that I loved and still love 1979 and season 17, I'm glad that it was the end of their era. I wouldn't wish for them to have carried on into 1980. On the other hand, if that golden Autumn of 1979 could have somehow lasted forever, and if Doctor Who could have gone on and on producing story after story at that level, if things could have stayed just as they were... The irony of course is that, at the age of 8, I thought they would.
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