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14/11 |
By Andrew Curnow (part 1) |
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16/03 |
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12/09 |
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In very broad terms Doctor Who in 1980 could be said to be a story of three men - on the one side, there's Tom Baker as the incumbent Doctor, having played the role since late 1974. On the other side there's new Producer John Nathan-Turner, and his brand new Script Editor Christopher H Bidmead, and when fans talk about the new style brought in to Doctor Who's 18th season, visually we tend to attribute it to JN-T, and script-wise and conceptually we regard it as being down to Bidmead. JN-T's reputation long ago became the subject of controversy as the show became a much less settled affair during the eighties; but Bidmead's standing has been almost untouched for two decades, with very few (if any) words said against the style and content of his single year (the whole of season 18) on the show. Until, perhaps, now... The backblast backlash appears to have begun in earnest just recently with Doctor Who Magazine publishing another one of their 'special' issues, and one that has turned out to be unexpectedly, even unbelievably, controversial. The Complete Fourth Doctor Volume Two (which sounds a bit of a contradiction in terms before we even get started) contains an article which, in a nutshell, praises up season 16 (I agree) and season 17 (I absolutely agree) by saying how much better they are than season 18 which is dreadful (I ag-- here, hold on!). To be fair, in 1980, I might have agreed, because, if I might extend my quotational repertoire to include the Centauri Ambassador from Babylon 5 (not to be confused with Blake's 7 or Star Trek IV) I was there, at the dawn of the third decade of Doctor Who. I may have occasionally hinted at my love for season 17 in 1979 which for a long time in 'official' fan circles was very much 'the love that dare not speak its name', and the last two episodes The Horns of Nimon were in fact the first Who that aired in 1980. The final story of the season (the infamous/legendary Shada) was of course abandoned, so the next time that marvellous, organ-blasting theme music crashed onto our screens, accompanied by that peerless time tunnel title sequence, ultimately arriving at the irreplaceably wondrous diamond logo, was during the Summer holidays when dear old Auntie Beeb (as she was in those days - nowadays I get the impression we're dealing with the rather disinterested Ms Beeb) gave us a couple of repeats. (Incidentally, children, repeats is what we used to have in the old days, before they invented videos, DVDs, and satellite channels.) The stories in question were Destiny of the Daleks and City of Death, the first two stories from season 17, and I can remember to this day myself, my brother, and our two younger cousins sat on the settee in Gran and Grandpa's bungalow watching the latter - part two, to be precise, with its cliffhanger of "That is precisely the question I should be asking you" (dramatic pause, luvvie) "Doctor!" Cue end titles! Wow! And then of course - how exciting! - we had a brand new series (I believe it may have been the longest for several years - I'm sure I heard somebody mention that once) starting at the end of August, before we even went back to school. More of dashing, quipping, energetic, Doctor Who, with his bubbly assistant, Romana, accompanied by the impishly cute K-9, with those credits, the music, that logo...
Not long after, the letters pages of DWM were aglow with praise for this story, and at least one correspondent of the time mentioned how much he had enjoyed that long pull back, with the stars appearing around the beach scene. Well, back then, long before I took to writing into DWM to moan about things, I kept to myself the resentful fact that I didn't enjoy that moment at all - not because it wasn't (for the time anyway) technically very accomplished and innovative, but because it wasn't the credits and titles I so very much yearned for. Even now, polished up to within an inch of its life on DVD, I can't watch that sequence without knowing how it made me feel all those years ago. So, Doctor Who was, technically speaking, back... But if I can add a Doctor McCoy (no, not that one) to my list of sources, "It's Doctor Who, Jim... but not as we know it." Many people loved The Leisure Hive from the moment it aired, many (although by no means all) embracing it because of how dissatisfied they had been with the show for the previous few years. I certainly didn't love it, although having said that, we did still watch it, in the main I have to say because it had such amazing cliffhangers - the first one sees the Doctor literally torn apart, the second sees him aged into the spitting image of Methuselah on an off day, and the third sees the whole story apparently turned on its head when smarmy old Brock turns out to be a slimy old Foamasi (and even now, my brother still likes to throw his impersonation, "Did you say Foamasi?" into conversation from time to time, so the story can't have been all bad). But I don't recall watching it with the same kind of swept-up, compulsive enthusiasm as I had experienced a year before chasing around the ruins of Skaro, or touring les rues de Paris. I still think, even at this distance and with (I hope) a more objective and more developed sense of appraisal, that The Leisure Hive is a triumph of style over substance, embracing the visual medium more than the show ever had before, but at the expense of the story. That cliffhanger to part one is the perfect example: it may look good, but narratively it makes no sense whatsoever. On the other hand, it is a story for which a lot of people have a great deal of affection. When, as I am wont to do, I started a thread complaining about this story on the ever-enjoyable Planet Skaro Message Board, Si Hart came back with this defence: I find it full of wonder. When I saw it in 1980 it seemed full of all these wonderful images that set themselves in my mind for years afterwards, K9 blowing up, the headless bodies floating in the screens, my favourite cliffhanger in the history of the show (part 1) and stuff like that. Sometimes you can't explain why you love something, and that's the way I feel about The Leisure Hive.... Since when I've always felt rather guilty about criticising it (although as much of the above demonstrates, and to get back to quoting Doctor Who like the good fanboy I really am, I'm not going to let Si stop me now!). There were of course other stories in season 18, and three of those other stories aired in 1980. But in fan circles when we say 1980, we tend to mean season 18, and when we say season 18 we really mean new-look, new style, new broom... And those are, for good or bad, firmly epitomised in The Leisure Hive.
With the well-publicised (bidibidibidi) launch of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (bidibidibidi) on ITV in direct competition with Doctor Who, and in the days beforethe VCR, it had been agreed at our house, and in the interests of democracy, that we would watch Doctor Who one week, and Buck the next. However, as mentioned above, The Leisure Hive had such strong cliffhangers that we ended up watching all four episodes of that in lieu of a trip to the other side (or at least to the 25th Century). However, when the next scheduled visit came up, we skipped Meglos part two - and so it was many years before I discovered how exactly the Doctor and Romana escaped from the gloriously-named Chronic Hysteretic Loop (and one day I hope to even understand how they escaped). While Buck Rogers (bidibidibidi) in the 25th Century may have had many things going for it (bidibidibidi of course... but mainly Wilma Deering) the episode we saw was rather naff, and was set in a Casino in space. Knowing how inventive these US shows often are, the episode may even have been called The Casino In Space (my second guess, without the aid of a safety net, would be Vegas In Space) and it was a pretty dire way to spend an hour. So that was one factor propelling me back towards watching Doctor Who the next week. But far more persuasive than that, in the week between parts two and three of Meglos (and am I alone in preferring the earlier title of The Last Zolpha-Thuran?) that pinnacle of the BBC News department, John Craven's Newsround, broke the shocking news that one of Doctor Who's longest-serving regulars was being written out later in the series! Yes, K-9 had been given his marching orders. Er, trundling orders.
I mentioned three men, but have only really covered the work of two. Since I've already gone on at rather greater length than I intended to, I'll leave the third one for another time. Whether he's the dashingly dramatic Hinchcliffe version, the unstoppable force of nature of the Williams years, or the sombre, doom-laded interpretation of his JN-T season, Tom Baker as the Doctor shouldn't be relegated to the second half of anything. But don't worry, I will be back. Because, if I can be allowed one final quote, I'm from 1980.
Part Two I can't tell you how many times I've tried to write the other half of this piece on 1980 (well, I can - seven) and each time I've found myself uninspired and uninspiring. Part of the problem has been the subject matter itself - or rather himself as, having dealt with the new men of science in the first half, it is now (or at least should be) the turn of the old man of Gallifrey. But any attempt I've made to write about Tom Baker has ended up veering out beyond the limits of 1980, which is probably unsurprising given that he was the Doctor for six years beforehand. It's still true that 1980 is an important year in terms of Tom and Doctor Who - he starts the year with the final episodes of season 17, as the wild, madcap, energetic Doctor wisecracking his way through the labyrinth on Nimos, trying to out-act Graham "Building a black hole on my doorstep" Crowden; and he ends the year a sombre, aged figure, marooned outside our universe, and (in terms of the real world) with only three more stories to go before his demise. And it's that last fact, probably more than anything, that gives me such a nostalgic thrill for 1980. I can still remember learning that Tom Baker was leaving Doctor Who - I don't think I heard the news when it broke on the Friday, so I awoke on the Saturday of 25th October to find a morose Baker (wearing, incidentally, one of those pinstripe suits that would virtually become his trademark during the 1990s) staring out from the front page of the Daily Mail announcing his resignation. The quote given was that after seven years, "There is nothing left but repetition". It seems improbable in the case of the larger-than-life Tom, yet I can't help but take that remark as being unduly modest. Perhaps in terms of the mechanics of making the show it was true - regardless of whether you're doing it in a different costume, and with a new theme tune, I suppose it is true to say that running up a corridor on the planet Argolis is probably no different from running up a corridor in the Kaled bunker on Skaro. And whether the quarry you're filming in is pretending to be the wilds of outer Gallifrey, or Antarctica, or even (in 'Bob Baker & Dave Martin go Post-Modern' or The Hand of Fear as they renamed it) an actual quarry, it is still a quarry. Maybe there's only so many megalomaniacs you can outwit before it becomes an all too pedestrian nine to five. But from the point of view of the audience, if there was one thing we never got with Baker's Doctor it was repetition. Unpredictability was virtually his watchword, and 1980 is a superb year for proving the range of that. Although it seems to have become some kind of perceived fan wisdom that Tom Baker spent his last year in the role just going through the motions (I came across this argument just the other day on the Outpost Gallifrey message board) in my opinion none of the twenty-eight episodes that went out as season 18 support that theory at all. The announcement of Tom's departure was made the day before Full Circle aired, but only because it had started to leak to the press, and holding off on an official statement would have been pointless - and yet, even if they had selected a date to release the news as opposed to having it more or less forced upon them, I don't think the BBC could have chosen a better time. For me, the return to Who that Buck's casino in space, and K9's departure, had begun, was set in concrete by the news that the Doctor himself was to change. I was born in 1971, so I had never seen any other actor in the role, and given that he had been the Doctor for such a long time, the fact that Tom Baker was leaving really was a big thing. The fact that it made the nine o'clock news is a clear sign of how high profile the programme in general, and he in particular, had become. With hindsight, we can all nod sagely and say that perhaps it was a change that the show never fully recovered from; but even at the time, although it brought with it a rush of enthusiasm and optimism for the new era, it was obviously going to be a major shake-up. So if even my burgeoning fanboy enthusiasm for the show was accentuated by all this news prior to the start of Full Circle, I think it fair to say that the presence of Who in the news probably brought with it a few more viewers for that night's episode. As a story, Full Circle is one of my all-time favourites, and of the four season 18 stories that aired in 1980 it is far and away my favourite. And, which is my point here, it is an absolute showcase for Tom Baker's acting range - it's worth pointing out that however much that era may be painted by fan lore as JN-T and Bidmead trying to change the show, and Tom getting in their way, he nevertheless did what they wanted him to (well most of the time anyway) and although that may have made him sullen and abrasive behind-the-scenes, what comes across on screen is still nothing short of professional. He may not have necessarily approved or agreed with the changes the production team were making, but in terms of the effect on the character of the Doctor, there's no doubt that he rose to the challenge. So in just one story we get Tom's moral outrage at the experimentation on the Marshchild; we get him bursting the bubble of pompous authority with the Deciders ("I'm an alien, and you don't want to drag me into a swamp...); we get humour ("I'm usually so good with children); we even get, and quite rarely for Who, some genuine emotion between the regulars, as Romana and the Doctor argue about her impending return to Gallifrey - when Romana points out that he himself once fought the Time lords, Tom's delivery of his reply ("And lost") really does tug at the heart-strings. Maybe it just shows my selfish side coming to the fore, but if I'm quite honest here, I don't really care whether Tom was hell to work with for that last year. We've all, I'm sure, worked with people who haven't been that easy to get along with, and in the case of Doctor Who it's very easy to blow it out of proportion simply because it gets reported about in interviews 25 years after the fact. At the end of the day he was an actor employed to play a part, and the final judgement of that can only really be made by the audience watching what goes out on the screen. Regardless of the individual stories, the performance of Tom Baker in season 18 is as good as anything he had done in the six years before. Different yes, very different to the year before, but still immensely powerful and eminently watchable. During his years on the show, Tom was instrumental in the show finally 'making it' in America (and let's face it, if Morecambe & Wise and Posh & Becks couldn't do it, it's obviously not that easy); he not only maintained the popular success that Pertwee had made of the show, but actually built upon it; he even, for goodness sake, actively publicised the new Doctor Who Weekly in his own time for free; and it seems curiously appropriate that on top of all that his final act, in quitting the show, made me into a bona fide fan. So yes, although storywise it was at times rather hit and miss, and although it started with a whole story missing (Shada, later released on video introduced by Tom and a pinstripe suit, and apparently retitled as Shada, Shada, Shadaaaaaa), I do, for all sorts of reasons, love 1980. I love Doctor Who. And I suppose I love Tom Baker. Be honest, deep down, don't we all.
At the age of 8 I used to keep a diary. One of those little pocket ones, with only a line per day. It had a picture of a cat on the front. My 1980 one has entries for Sundays saying I'd watched whatever episode of The Old Curiosity shop was on that night, or for the weekdays, saying about what I'd done in Maths or taking papier-mâché pigs home from school and the like. The entries for Saturday 5 and 12 January respectively read "Watched Horns Of Nimon part 3/4". The main impressions I had of that story were that: The Nimons were frightening - huge great growly things that towered intimidatingly over everyone; everything seemed to look dark grey, brown or biege; that bit with a mummified Anethan was also scary; that I was pleased to find I'd guessed correctly at the resolution of the cliffhanger to Ep 2 - that the Doctor would turn up to save them all; and that I loved the way the Doctor had a little box of sticky silver stars just like teachers did. To me then, the Doctor/Tom was a pleasure to watch. He wasn't frightened of any of the nasties, he was even able to laugh and joke at them, which was something I found reassuring and loveable, as it encouraged me not to be frightened too much either. And the Skonnans who cheered Soldeed on were dubbed "The Nimon Brothers" by my 6 year old younger brother too. If only things had turned out differently, I'd now be able to wax lyrical on fond childhood memories of Shada, but I can't because I didn't see it until I was in my 20s. I do recall the then-recently launched Dr Who Weekly alluding to it, mainly via the words "It was one of the few battles that Dr Who ever lost..." (at the beginning of an article with some photos of Tom and Lalla amidst strangers, including what looked like a peculiar old bespectacled man with a football stuck to his forehead) which allowed me to make the mistaken assumption that they were referring to a story where the Doctor had actually lost against the adversaries. But the blossoming of the Weekly during the Spring and Summer of that year does inspire quite a few memories. That strip where he regressed all the way back to Hartnell was something that seemed more exciting at the time than I am quite able to account for now. Being operated on to have a bomb placed in his stomach, meeting a deceptively cute and winsome Meep, and perhaps most shocking to me, actually becoming a Werewolf at one stage, were all various fates that awaited Cheerful Tom in comic strip form that year, before I temporarily lost touch with the comic. These are fairly well remembered, but what about all those various ancient American comic strips reused in (What was it? Time Tales?) to pad out the pages? Seemingly endless pulp strips about obsessed men building time machines or, in one case, taking a 1000 year lifespan serum and ending up, hundreds of years later, repopulating a deserted Earth with a woman called Eve (his name was Adam you see...ah, the subtlety!). Typical conundrums involved objects being sent into prehistory, knocking out an early form of life, and resulting in a present where we were all descended from dinosaurs. One I was particularly taken with concerned a man desperate to flee into the past to escape modern problems only to find each era afflicted with something worse - violent revolutions, the Black Death, vicious tyrannies, and so on, before he eventually returns to the "1980" (this date having been used to crudely replace whatever the original publication date would have been), sagely deciding that every age has its own problems. The cleverest of all was probably the man who seemed to arrive in a "primitive era" only for it to turn out he was delusional and actually confined to a hospital ward for people with mental illness. Destiny Of The Daleks and City Of Death were both repeated at the start of August, which I seem to recall mislead me into thinking The Leisure Hive would be another repeat when it was billed shortly afterwards. New music. New titles. New red clothes for the Doctor. Ho hum - these didn't actually excite much reaction at the time as I recall. I do remember the opening pan past loads of tents, with the Doctor snoring, very vividly, and also the close ups of pods falling off the Argolin's heads to indicate their rapid ageing. I missed Ep 2 for a family wedding (didn't see it until the 90s), and can well recall our visiting the local toyshop and buying a Beezer Annual and some Star Wars figures the same day the last Episode was on - I think we were playing with the figures on the rug while half watching the episode ("Oh no! An army of Pangols!"). I do remember a "Will Buck Blast the Dr?" featuire in a paper (probably the Daily Mail) with a lurid drawing of Tom's Doctor in the sights of Buck's ray gun, and indeed we did sometimes watch it after Dr Who had finished for the night, although the main thing I recall is my Mum remarking on how big Gil Gerard's behind was. Meglos is inextricably linked with The Basil Brush Show for me. Billy Boyle (later to play Danny Taurus, Pauline Fowler's would-be woo-er, in Eastenders) was presenting it then and had a regular slot with he and Basil on a rocky alien moon set where he'd be trying to get through a sci-fi story ("And he was confronted by an alien whose hair kept changing from yellow to green and then blue..." "Hang on, what's Mrs Slocombe doing there?"), as well as competing with BB's regular references to Dirty Gertie at Number 30. There were several of those I sat through, waiting patiently for Meglos to begin. As for Meglos, I really did like the "Oh blast! Here we go again!" Chronic Hysteresis bit. Loved it. Does anyone else remember seeing Matthew Waterhouse on Top Of The Pops about the time Full Circle was on, shyly acknowledging the enthusiastic presenter's introduction (he wasn't singing, just one of the audience)? Or his visit to Swap Shop, chatting with Noel on the couch, offering "these lovely K9 books" as a prize? Oh, I suppose his actual story wasn't bad either. Didn't really make much impression on me at that stage actually. A word for the sterling work of John Craven's Back Pages, which, along with its Morph strip cartoons, also gave some bits of coverage to the series, including a feature on how Tom was made up to be aged for The Leisure Hive, and another on Matthew's casting. (Indeed, speaking of Morph, it was this year, I think, which saw the first broadcast of his spin-off series, The Amazing Adventures Of Morph). State Of Decay has warm memories for me, as we watched the first episode at my grandparents house, and the final one at my other grandparents' place. Fresh sweets in dishes, decorations and Christmas lights are all immediately associated with the last episode for me. I can't watch Aukon, Camilla and Zargo's death scene without instantly being reminded of that approaching Christmas atmosphere at my grandparents... Incidentally, if you ever get the chance to see Johnny Ball's Think Of A Number from about this time...is it me or does the set look uncannily like those from The Horns Of Nimon? |
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Fashions
change over time. I'm sure the Doctor himself would agree, since
apparently leather jackets are in this year. Back in 1980 Fan Lore, Fan
Law even, held that, along with a number of other fundamental
F-A-C-T-S such as The Gunfighters being the worst story ever,
Doctor Who in 1978 and 1979, under the aegis of producer Graham Williams,
had got far too silly, and that Doctor Who in 1980, under the steady hand
of new boy John Nathan-Turner, was wonderful. Of course, only a few years
earlier fandom's official mouthpiece, the DWAS, had condemned season 14 as
being a disgrace. You know, season 14, the one with all those horrible
stories that nobody ever likes - The Robots of Death, The Deadly
Assassin, The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Given that, I suppose it's no
wonder that, as Douglas Adams once said, in these enlightened days nobody
believes a word of it.
Alas,
not to be, was it? We sat down to watch part one of The Leisure Hive
on 30th August 1980 and it had all... gone. Changed. That starfield, that
rearranged (or 'ruined' as I liked to call it back then) theme tune, and a
new, much duller logo... In fact, such was my horror that I literally
didn't believe it, and with some vague notion of a 'pre-credits sequence'
in my head (although from where I don't know - back then even US imports
were recut to put the titles on first) I assumed, nay hoped, nay prayed,
that in a minute or two the proper, the real, titles would come on.
But no, a minute or two later we were still gawking at a load of beach
huts without a time tunnel in sight. Ah, but what's this? Wait a minute. A
starfield is starting to appear around the Doctor and Romana as the camera
pulls back from them on the beach. Ah yes, I thought, this will be it, a
long pull back and then off down the time tunnel with the organ music and
the... Oh give it up, Curnow, it's only a long pull back, and then some
more dull old stars whizzing about and then some alien planet. How
disappointing.
This
is all very well, you might be thinking, but unless this section of the
Vervoid has been renamed "We Don't Really Love Doctor Who All That Much
After All" then what am I going on about? Well, 1980 was the year I very
nearly stopped being a fan, with The Leisure Hive. But in the nick
of time, and this is probably the reason that I do in fact love 1980 after
all, I found myself returning to the fold. Oddly enough it was while the
second story was airing, even though that story of a megalomaniacal
Cactus (no sniggering at the back there) is often cited as JN-T's first
turkey. 
Somehow,
the sense of occasion that this inspired, the sense of emotion even,
turned any affection I might have had for Buck and Twikki and even, sigh,
Wilma, away from them and firmly back towards the good Doctor. The
following week, reinfused with fan fervour at the sense of history in the
making that the departure of K-9 had generated, I watched Meglos
part three, which incidentally makes part two of that story the first and
last episode I've ever wilfully missed. And part three was exciting too
thank goodness, particularly the cliffhanger, and it was comforting to be
back with the Doctor, ready to watch and enjoy the adventures of this
curly-haired eccentric for many years to come...