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Shakedown: Return of the
Sontarans When was it made? 1994 Who made it? Dreamwatch Magazine and What format was it on? An expensive video available through specialist channels (I know I paid £16.99 for mine from Forbidden Planet) and later given wider distribution and an eventual DVD outing.
Familiar faces Doctor Who’s Carole Ann Ford, Sophie Aldred and Michael Wisher; Blake’s Seven’s Brian Croucher and Jan Chappel.
Familiar names It was written by Terrance
Dicks, music and production by Mark Ayres, directed by Kevin Davies and
the associate producer was Big Finish boss Jason Haigh-Ellery (who is also
credited for the stunts) The blurb
In a nutshell… The worst crew ever assembled are getting ready for their debut voyage in a solar yacht. How these people are expected to crew a yacht I don’t know – the two women are spoilt and whiney, one of the men is so laid back he is almost asleep for the duration and the other is so callow that you feel there is a camp fire somewhere with a singing voice missing. They are shown how to control the yacht – it uses the power of mime apparently – when a Sontaran war-wheel sends a shot across their bows. A Rutan is aboard and has already started killing people when a Sontaran squad boards the yacht.
Is it any good? It is a classic case of the good, the bad and the ugly. The good – there are some very impressive model shots of the yacht and the war wheel. These are undone though when they try to have two ships in shot at the same time. The craft in the foreground starts to wobble and looks as bad as such shots did in the late 70s in Doctor Who and Blake’s 7. The Rutan is well realised considering they were limited by what we had seen in Horror of Fang Rock. They couldn’t (or didn’t) reimagine the Rutan – it was just a shinier green blob that we’d seen before.
Jan Chappel is the best of the cast – she’s as convincing as a hard nosed space captain can be in shiny silver trousers.
The bad – the location just doesn’t work. They shot it on board HMS Belfast to give it a real, solid look but it just looks like a navy ship with a few token sci fi panels added to it. Robots of Death had a similar idea – a ship crewed by the idle rich who don’t really know what they are doing and are along for the ride because they think it will bring them wealth or glory – but Robots went the opposite way with their design. A luxurious ship to match their luxurious costumes. In Shakedown we have the truly absurd sight of Sophie and Carole Ann is posh frocks, looking as glamorous as their surrounding don’t, and the joke doesn’t work because it doesn’t come across as a clever juxtaposition, it just doesn’t look right. It’s like the location work for the Invasion of Time – the Tardis may well have huge storage areas but they don’t look right no matter how much you try to rationalise them.
The ugly – I love Uncle Terrance as much as the next fan but there are times when this script made me cringe. There is nothing wrong with the story but the dialogue feels full of place holders – lines which say what he intended to be said but which would’ve been replaced with good ones during a later draft. Either that or Terrance hugely misunderstood the target audience – Pip and Jane got away with bad dialogue because they thought they were writing for children. Shakedown was always aimed at the fan market and in those days there weren’t many children in that audience. He also makes the Sontarans silly – at one point a dense Sontaran does a bit of business and his commander literally sinks his head into his hands in despair. There is a reason no one has ever cast a Sontaran in a domestic sit com and it isn’t because they couldn’t get the rights.
Anything for the BBC to object to? The Sontarans were licensed from Robert Holmes’ estate so the BBC couldn’t object to that. The design of the Sontarans was heavily amended because the Beeb owned the actual design of the monster. Brian Croucher gets in a couple of references to "the Dentist" who he met on Metabelis 3 and who taught him all he knows about Sontarans, Rutans and their endless war.
Did it help fill the void? It got a lot of publicity
at the time – mainly in Dreamwatch Magazine which was funding it. That was
before Dreamwatch became shite so fans still bought it. In many ways it
was the blockbuster of the unofficial spin-off genre. In seven years they
(the fan-producers who made such films) had gone from Wartime to Shakedown
– an enormous leap in ambition and quality. Then the TV Movie happened and
I don’t think the momentum was ever recaptured. By the time everyone
realised there wouldn’t be a McGann series, audio was the new medium for
Doctor Who related drama. It wasn’t the end for the video but Shakedown
and Downtime (made a year later) would never be matched for ambition.
Either that or the emergence of an American conglomerate with the rights
to Doctor Who made everyone making fringe videos so nervous of a lawsuit
that they stopped making things just in case. The BBC will let a lot of
things go but the Americans will sue you for wearing a scarf if they think
it causes "confusion in the marketplace". Would it work on TV? I don’t think so. The whole
production – good though it is considering the time and money pressures
they were under – just doesn’t feel good. The acting isn’t good, the
dialogue isn’t good, the excellent special effects are undermined by
mixing them with terrible special effects and the humour is so misplaced
that a casual viewer wouldn’t ever be sure if this was straight or a
spoof. The obvious limitations are consistent with it being a spoof and
someone watching it at home may well go away thinking it is a bad sci fi
comedy which isn’t very funny rather than a very good try at making a 90s
sci fi drama on a shoestring budget. If it had worked, it would’ve been
great on TV. But it just didn’t quite work. Verdict Production 3/5 Entertainment 2/5 Whoishness 3/5 Overall 2/5
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