The Masque of Mandragora

So many Doctor Who stories, so many happy memories. None of them associated with "The Masque of Mandragora", a story I perpetually never feel like watching. When I first bought the video, it was sunny outside and this alone superseded my desire to watch the Doctor larking about in 15th Century Italy. Historicals are funny things really aren't they? There's a quality associated with them, perhaps a guarantee that what we'll see won't have dated quite so much as a stab at depicting the twenty first century before it arrived, coupled with the knowledge that the BBC always did that sort of thing respectably. Yet you wouldn't buy a history book, and you might even have found it boring at school. So why would you want Doctor Who to land there?

If I'd been watching Doctor Who in 1976 I'd have loved "Masque" right up until half-way through Part 1, and then I'd have completely forgotten everything that happened after that point. It's quite helpful to us that the Doctor just happens to be giving Sarah Jane a guided tour of the TARDIS at the start of the story, but his CSO Boot Cupboard would still have been infinitely more thrilling for me than lots of people on horseback chasing about some woods. Count Frederico and Guilliano lack the screen presence of characters like Irongron in "The Time Warrior" or Grendel in "Androids", which makes me think "Masque" is one serial that's played almost TOO historically. "The Time Warrior" has a plot centred around Linx and the Doctor, and a fantasy-based story line simply coloured with a historical setting. The influence of Mandragora on the characters in "Masque" is more disparate, and tackled with less humour. It really is like being back in the past, and just as uninteresting.

Somehow even Mandragora doesn't seem as dark and evil as, say, Fenric. Perhaps that's because it doesn't seem truly interested in being evil, other than spinning about the countryside killing people at random like a Day-Glo mini-hurricane. Mandragora's problem is that it's a Who baddie that saves all its best tricks until it's too late to use them. Like the karaoke singer who holds back his complex rendition of "American Pie" until everybody's too drunk to appreciate it, the most it does is promise to "swallow the Moon". Big deal! What kind of write-up's that going to get you in the Doctor Who Monster Book? "The Doctor battled the fearsome Mandragora who menaced 15th Century Earth by almost swallowing the Moon".

There is a cliff-hanger in "Fenric" (at the end of Part 3) that stands as a shortcut for "the Doctor's really in trouble now", after which we actually get a TASTE for what this nameless evil can do: the dead rise from the sea, it thunders a lot and we actually get a sense of what the end of the world MIGHT be like. Mandragora seems, like Fenric, restricted by circumstance before it can manifest itself, but we've yet to receive any evidence of what will happen if it succeeds. Worse still, there's a really bad ending which relies on the Doctor's hitherto unseen ability to sound exactly like the main villain. Hmmm. The more I think about it, the more I think "Masque" gets off too damn lightly with the critics.

Aside from being more tempted to sit out in the garden than to watch it, my only other memory of "Masque" is of getting the video for a birthday, and amazing my Uncle with my Who collection on VHS - which at that time numbered a staggering twelve tapes. I was so convinced by his assertion that he'd never seen so many videos in his life. It's a good job the future of my collection didn't depend on me watching my last purchase a certain number of times, or "Masque" might have been my video-buying swansong. As it sits on the shelf, I can honestly say it's barely been taken out the case more than half a dozen times. Somehow doing something else has always seemed like a more exciting prospect.