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Downtime When was it made? 1995 Who made it? Reeltime Pictures in association with Dominitemporal Services Limited (aka DWAS) and the mysterious Tropicana Holdings. What format was it on? Video cassette with a novel written as part of Virgin’s "Missing Adventures" series. Familiar faces Lots – Nicholas Courtney, Elisabeth Sladen, Deborah Watling, Jack Watling, Geoffrey Beevers, John Leeson and James Bree.
Familiar names It is written by Marc Platt and directed by Christopher Barry. The blurb
It is twenty years since The Great Intelligence last attempted an invasion of Earth, today its evil web is again reaching out towards us! Using The New World University as its cover and the zombie-like Chilly students as its pawns, the Intelligence now seeks to control the minds of every human being. Tangled in this new struggle are its old enemies Victoria Waterfield and Professor Travers - but whose side are they on? Fighting alone this time, without their famous scientific advisor, The Brigadier and Sarah Jane Smith of UNIT are hard pressed to decide who is friend or foe as they search for the missing Locus which still binds the Intelligence's power. Battle is joined as the Brigadier's own family is threatened and UNIT faces a monstrous new breed of Yeti!
In a nutshell… Victoria goes off to the Det-Sen Monastery in the 1970s – wearing a groovy hat – and meets up with James Bree’s lama – wearing a considerably more groovy hat. She passes some initiation test or other and is granted an audience with a stumbling figure seen only in silhouette. We guess this is the Great Intelligence.
Cut to some years later and she is running a depressing university in southern England. Its students all wear matching sweatshirts and caps and are deeply sinister. She’s looking for a locus.
Meanwhile, the Brig is retiring from his school – we find him waking up after three days asleep for no obvious reason – and has started seeing visions. He’s also got an estranged daughter and (unbeknownst to him) a grandson.
Meanwhile again, Victoria has hired Sarah Jane Smith to do some research for her. It seems to entirely consist of things Victoria already knew. Sarah Jane’s appearance in this video is a mystery to me. She just seems to meet people, wander off and then meet some new people a bit later. Then she turns up at the end, meets some more people and goes off for a cup of tea with the Brig’s daughter.
The locus is clearly something to do with the Brig and the students – ‘Chillies’ if you’ll credit it – are on his trail. The Intelligence meanwhile seems to be able to do random things by getting into computer systems. Not just any computer systems - groovy mid-90s, pre-Windows computer systems that look like this and talk to you when you log in.
Is it any good? It is very impressively made. It sounds like I’m damning it with faint praise. Like the Yes Minister line about a report that the Civil Service hate being "beautifully typed". Here’s my main problem with the whole thing – it’s an obvious sequel to the two Yeti stories of the 1960s. A clever in joke sees two characters use the secret code "NN and QQ" in conversations with an unseen base. The problem with doing a sequel to those stories is that they don’t exist on video anymore, barring a couple of episodes. It isn’t like doing another Auton story (and there’s another series I must cover at some point) where we can see for ourselves what things looked like. Now at least we have the audio CDs, back in 1995 they had the books, they had some photos and they had endless tales of how great the two Yeti stories were. We now know that the Abominable Snowmen is fairly dull – pleasant enough but not a rip roaring classic. The Web of Fear is a couple of set pieces in our collective folk memory and the birth of UNIT. The reality is that neither story was especially great. Part of the reason they weren’t that great is that the whole concept is a mish mash.
I can understand why an intelligence trapped in a Tibetan monastery would use Yeti as protection and muscle. I’m less sure where it managed to get robot yeti and those highly advanced control spheres. But we can take a couple of steps in the dark because it makes basic sense. Move forward to the invasion of London and suddenly there are webs everywhere. Why would Yeti make webs? And why would you use Yeti in London anyway? We just accept the whole thing because the Great Intelligence has control spheres and Yeti – that’s his gimmick because a previous story said so. Its only when you see a new production built on the same rules that you realise how silly it is. Here we have the Great Intelligence still using spheres (which move so slowly) and Yeti (which are strong but cumbersome and ever so slightly conspicuous). And more webs. Webs that just appear from nowhere whenever the Intelligence wants them to.
So that’s the negative – the whole thing is based on a slavish adherence to a bunch of elements which have no obvious reason to be part and parcel of the same plan. If he’s such a great intelligence you might expect him to have other tricks up his invisible sleeve. To be fair to him – in case he’s reading this from whichever void he finds himself in – he’s trying something a bit different this time. This time he’s going to conquer the internet. Or what passed for the internet in 1995. To be honest, the techie kids are just typing into Word. It looked modern back then – as did the pixelated photographs – but they aren’t fooling us. Its death by template and you know it. But his new plan still involves using spheres and Yeti and webs.
So Victoria has set up a university – one which looks fairly horrible until I remember I went somewhere equally "modern" looking and rather liked it – populated by brainwashed young people. Professor Travers – or rather the Intelligence in his body – is the mysterious chancellor. They keep talking about fathers and daughters and I still – thirteen years on from first seeing it and gosh knows how long since I started knowing stuff about stuff like this – get muddled because Debbie is Jack’s daughter but Victoria is not Travers’ daughter. She had her own father and he his own daughter. Different people. The script doesn’t help – she goes to the monastery to find her father and ends up with Travers.
The Brig turns out to have the vital locus – it’s a rather ugly, cheap looking yeti made out of wood. Once this is crushed all hell can officially break loose. The broken-loose hell is impressive – this is a video that has quality written all over it. That was the most surreal signing I ever went to. No, it looks good and sounds good (even if Ian Levine did help with the music) even if it is fairly nonsensical. The Brig keeps having visions and because they both help and hinder his efforts to defeat the Intelligence they can’t be coming from the Intelligence. So where do they come from? At least they explain where Victoria got the money to set up the university – compound interest turning her father’s investments into fortunes – but then don’t explain why she set up a university at all. The entire plan required them to find the locus and for the Intelligence to be housed in a mainframe computer. Why didn’t Victoria just buy a mainframe from (and I can’t believe I’m going to say something so geeky) IBM or BULL or Fujitsu and keep her new friend warm while she hired someone to find Lethbridge-Stewart?
Downtime requires a couple of leaps of faith from the audience but one you leap (looking before you do so) you find an astonishingly well made programme with (it seems) hundreds of extras, lots of location filming, a traffic gridlock scene in central London which must’ve been a nightmare to do, the best looking Yeti ever seen in Doctor Who and some UNIT soldiers who actually look like they might be from an elite fighting division. It looks better than anything in the first twenty six years of Doctor Who and had these semi-pro films not stopped abruptly a year or two later we can only imagine what they would’ve gone on to do.
Anything for the BBC to object to? Given who was involved I’m assuming they cleared absolutely everything with the BBC so the Corporation wouldn’t have lost any sleep over it. I particularly enjoyed how close the video cover was to the official BBC design of the time. This was meant to go on the shelf after Survival and blend the hell in.
Did it help fill the void? This probably hit the VCRs towards the end of 1995 – just months from the Paul McGann movie. There was already a buzz in the air. Downtime was a last hurrah for the old times before the glorious new times were upon us. Quaint old 60s Doctor Who getting a last airing before glitz, glamour and American money splashed all over the screen. Those watching it over Christmas 1995 perhaps dug it out and watched it again over Christmas 1996 and felt a little bit foolish.
Would it work on TV? This is the thing – it looks great but the plot is fairly impenetrable unless you happen to know the details of two 1960s Doctor Whos which no longer exist. For a fan audience it is a bit of a greatest hits album but for a general viewer it would be utterly baffling.
Verdict Production 5/5 Entertainment 3/5 Whoishness 3/5 Overall 3/5
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