Paradise Towers

Perhaps the worst thing you can do when making Doctor Who is to leap without looking; throughout the mid-late eighties a series of frustrating false starts were inflicted on the show. Each one was dealt with initially unwisely, with sledgehammer tactics being employed where a bit of thought and care would have been more advised. And whether it be sacking Colin Baker, reducing the season length, or axing the show altogether, the programme was never given the time to get back on its feet again. From every black cloud emerged a silver-lined new version of the show which was then changed again before it could establish itself.

Don't shake your head at the BBC though - we were as much to blame as anyone. How utterly unforgiving we were each time, with the arrival of Colin and then with "Trial" and then with Season 24. Looking back, how could we expect Doctor Who in 1987 to live up to our expectations? It didn't even have a script editor. We got what we wanted in the end - "The Curse of Fenric" in a nutshell, but we behaved like the Gods of Ragnarok en route. We wanted classic Doctor Who now, and we weren't prepared to wait while the BBC thought about how best to give it to us. "Paradise Towers", therefore, is a show on the rise, although still finding its feet after being shaken around. It's defining scene is in Part 1, when we open with new and mysterious surroundings; someone is on the run, and that someone is then killed horribly by something in the shadows... and then the TARDIS arrives, with the Doctor and his companion forced to explore to work out where they are... that hadn't happened for a
while you know.

In retrospect, this new outlook on the series was exactly what we had been campaigning for - or should have been, had anyone actually said what they wanted amid all the complaints. "Paradise Towers" starts with an original idea, not a shopping list of pre-requisites, and so isn't doomed from the outset. Now how long since this kind of thinking had been employed? And if only old Robert Holmes had still been around, he'd have relished the freedom to write something completely new. Then again, on only the second story of the season new writers were being assembled for a new era - Wyatt, Kohll, Briggs... note that two of the four writers of Season 24 would later turn out stories we now accept as classics. But it wasn't enough - we wanted it all now.

"Paradise Towers" gets as much right as it does wrong. It's made with completely the right frame of mind, but like early Troughton adventures, it still needs to shake off whimsy like a comfort blanket, the silly scene with Mel and Pex in the lift being a notable example. This feeling of uncertainty is all over a story which, lest we forget, sits between the comedic "Time and the Rani" and the more assured "Delta". It doesn't quite know whether old ladies in the waste disposal should be horrific or funny, and the characters are an odd mix of the real and the caricatured. Richard Briers, Pex and Maddy belong in a comic book (albeit a damn good one!) whilst the Doctor and the Kangs play it straight. Perhaps the problem is that it's too serious a story to take lightly, and yet it lends itself to light heartedness so well. It's a 'Cut and Shut', a tale which tries to return fear, comedy and adventure to Doctor Who all at the same time.

Above all else though, its aims are extremely worthy, so why hate it? When it would have been so much easier just to get the Sea Devils back, instead we have a new story, a new writer and a new Doctor. It may not have been the Doctor Who of your dreams, but it was the working version, the training ground from which "Greatest Show", "Fenric" and "Ghost Light" emerged. I've felt for years that all the show needed, as Sylvester McCoy is often fond of pointing out, was time. And not just time to get the last take in the can, time to build itself up, to start over, develop the regular characters and the writers. And it was time which the BBC were taking away from us, rather than giving. Fourteen episodes? Pah. "Doctor Who" got there in the end though, so those that were patient got their reward.