--------------------------------------- Tides of Time # 15

rom onnosA look hock on 19805 DoctorWho from 1989 ancl 1994ITSEEMS very strange to be writing this article

after what seems in some ways to have been avery brief decade. It can't, surely, be nearly tenyears since the starburst title sequence and PeterHowell's rearrangement of the theme music her-alded the start of the 18th season of Ooc/or Whowith The Leisure Hive, a story that, for all itsfaults, was strikingly different to what had gonebefore. The props may not have (hanged all thatmuch, but Tom Baker was somewhat more with-drawn, the incidental music had an altogethermore sophisticated quality, and, of course, thetitles and theme music had undergone a radicaltransformation.

It seems even stranger to be retypingthe above almost five years after Ifirst did so on myoid manual type-writer. It's now over I-i years sincethe 18th season of Doctor Wbobegan, and the beginning of whatuntil very recently was the 'modemhistory' of the series, John Nathan-Turner first appearing as the

producer of the programme and ap-plying his very visible 'signature' toDoctor Wbo as it emerged from the1970s. Now it looks like we are onthe verge of a new era, with newnames behind the Doctor's future.Indeed, John Leekley, Peter Waggand the rest of Spielberg's creativeteam at Amblin Entertainment ap-pear to create a new Doctor Whofrom the stones of the edifice theBBC neglected for so long, a build-ing whose architecture was a mix-ture of various styles, sometimeswith little respect for what had gonebefore, sometimes a loving recre-ation of earlier work, but often mis-sing the crucial details incorporatedby the previous custodians.

My perspective has changed too.In 1989, I had seen very few oldDoctor Wbo stories, and had neverhad access to the pirate videos thatwere then the hard currency of the

programme's core fans. Thanks tothe OUDWS, of course, things havechanged. I still own only a fewcopies of actual stories, as I don'tthink I would ever organise my timesufficiently to watch them at the mo-ment. However, over the past fiveyears, I have been able to see mostof the series' episodes; in fact, I haveprobably watched more Doctor Whoduring my time at Oxford than atany other point in my life.

Some of my assessments havechanged since 1989, when my opin-ions were made up from impres-sions left at different ages and thejudgements laid down from abovefrom the lights of Doctor Who fan-dom. We all know now that thereare many ways in which a story canbe good and bad. The Leisure Hivewas not liked by the Heads of De-partment at the BBC because direc-tor Lovett Bickford spent moremoney on it than he was allowed to.However, when I last saw it in 1992,I though it one of the more sophisti-cated Doctor Who stories produced:the incidental music composed byPeter Howell combining with aseries of impressive visuals, such asthe spacecraft docking sequenceand the plant-like realisation of theArgolins, to create a believableworld in which a languid society,centred around individual pleasure,fails to stop the evils of the pastcoming to surface again. Having saidthat, I do think the Foamasi wouldhave been better wearing businesssuits, as in some of the originaldrawings, an image I believe thatwas rejected by the producer as tooclose to the self-conscious satiricalallusions enjoyed by his prede-cessor, Graham WilIiams, in theseventeenth season.

Ah, yes. The decade suddenly lengthens consider-ably when I recoll that there was another storyin 1980 before The LeiJlJre Hive. The Horns ofNimon, with its numerous shortcomings (ond I'msure I needn't remind anyone of them), did have

Tides of Time :t 15 '9

• •envc -eoquite on effect on some children a few yearsyounger than I was at the time. For monthsoher the close of the story, the five-, six- andseven-year aids could regularly be seen stompingaround my school playground with their handsattoched to their foreheads, fingers pointing aton angle of 45 degrees, declaiming such gemsas, "Who dares disturb the Nimon?" or words tothat effect. Unfortunately for their young fans,the Production Unit Manager on that story, a MrNathan-Turner, wasn't keen on returning theNimon as he was other creatures to have crossedthe Doctor's path in the pas!.

I have seen The Horns of Nimontwice at OLDWS. and have enjoyedit both times. It goes out of its way toparody the cliches of Doctor Wbothat script editor Douglas Adams re-portedly hated, but a number of fansthought should remain as necessaryelements in the drama whose hack-neyed natures should not be pointedout. Conidor scenes involvingSoldeed and later Romana and theNimon are repeated, for example,drawing the viewer's attention to therepetitive nature of the series; theDoctor's 'all-knowingness' is under-mined by both Romana and K9 atvarious points as well, somethingthat was then controversial, and wasdisliked by John Nathan-Turner. Itmust be time for the Society to havea look at this story soon [It comes upnext year - Edl. The Nimon aresimple and effective, and their threat,

the consumption of worlds, societyby society, planet by planet, a fa-vourite of the WilIi..amsera. Import-antly, a lot of it is played with moreconviction than may of the storesthat John Nathan-Turner put out inthe later 1980s.

The arrival of John Nathan-Turner as producercertainly sorted out the casual viewers from thefans, and indeed the hard-core fanatics from theregular Who watcher, among the nine- and ten-year aids of my area. The rival attraelion of theglossy, filmed BucK Rogers on ITV,coupled wtlhthe revolutionary change in the programme's ap-pearance meant that only hardened addicts werewatching by leisure Hive Part 3. I think that thenews that K9 would be departing was the laststraw for many of my age group. I wasn't toobothered about this - while most of my contem-poraries were only vaguely aware that at leas!one ertor had played the Doelor before TomBaker, I, as a Doclor Who Monthly reader, whowrote a synopsis of each story after it was trans-mitted to form a supplement to The Making ofDoctor Who, knew that the series had survived inthe past without K9. As we soon faund out itwas shortly to do without Tom Baker himse~. '

Since writing the above, I have seenmore evidence to the reception ofDoctor Who at the close of the19705, and have thought about theproblem of the mass audience deser-tion of 1980 more. I subscribe towhat I suspect is becoming a re-ceived opinion, that the audiencewere less than impressed by some ofthe excesses of the seventeenth sea-son, and the arrival of Buck Rogerssimply delivered the final blow, fol-lowing in the wake of Star War as itdid, although I suspect Bucle Rogerswas more vulgar Uu.dgefor yourself- Buck Rogers is being repeated onBBC 2 on Mondays at 6 p.m. - Edl.Doctor "Who was to find itself fight-ing against the perception that itcouldn't compete with science fic-tion films from the CS for the ensu-ing decade. When Michael Gradehimself expressed this view duringthe 1985-86 hiatus, the BBC were fa-tally seen to endorse this view, eventhough John Nathan-Turner's re-quest for more money so that theproduction theme could spend moretime and devote more of the BBC'sresources to the programme hadbeen consistently rejected.

A difficulty with resisting the StarWars legacy, was that both' GrahamWilIiams and John Nathan-Turnervisibly attempted to accommodate it.John Nathan-Turner did this by try-ing to make Doctor Wbo more vis-ually sophisticated, but within a fewyears the video effects and the el-egant costume designs (Foamasi andgiant cacti not withstanding) had de-generated into a parade of CSO andbrightly coloured, barely mobilealien races far worse than the bulk ofthe monsters created by the visual

effects and costume departments inthe 1970s.

Williams W:lS quoted in DoctorWbo - 77JeUnfolding Text in 1983as saying that the strength of DoctorWho was that it was part of the Brit-ish tradition of character-led drama,but he was a professional and,anticipating R2D2, introduced K9 toappeal directly to the gadget-fasci-nated child audience the tenors ofthe Philip Hinchcliffe producershipmight have been losing. But, to re-turn to the 1980s...

The news that 'Tristan' was to take over os thefihh 'Doctor Who' I think helped attract moreviewers os the season progressed. I was quitefond of The Keeper of Troken at the time, untilthe sudden revelation of the Master os the chiefvillain in the plot sent it above Full (jrde as myfavourite story so faT. The ending, as the Doctorand Adric leh, was puzzling, leaving the adver-tised new companion, Nyssa, behind, and appar-ently criminally wasting the brief appearance ofthe Master. The problem was solved by the Mas-ter's regeneration - by its nature, one of thevery few real 'horror' scenes in the series history- and the dovetailing into logopolis, a superbend to the Baker era. 11 may be criticised asbeing incomprehensible to a large sector of theviewing public, particularly as, aside from themathematics, it derived much from the pro-gramme's post, but I stili find it on excellentsend-off and the regeneration scene remains myfavourite of the six.

I noticed I put 'Doctor Who' inquotation marks there, when I wasreferring to the programme as thename of the lead character. I'm notsure if I would be so strict now-adays, now we know that there sev-eral uses of the name in the 1966/67season; one way or another. Certain-ly, the orthodoxy of the 1980s wasthat the Doctor was just 'the Doctor',not 'Doctor Who', but it was only in1982 that the character was de-scribed as such in the closing credits.

I still like The Keeper of Traken,even though we learn who the

. ",-villain is rather late in the day, andthat discovery is reliant, in part 3, onthe audience remembering who theMaster is and what he looks like,and the make-up applied toGeoffrey Beevers is different to themask worn by Peter Pratt in TheDeadly Assassin. Although the earlyreviews of the story referred to its'renaissance' theme, the look is farmore generally ancien regime thanthat: the Fosters are the stylised 18thcentury peasants, and Trakenite so-ciety seems far from the ideal worldthat the Consuls so devotedly de-fend. Harmony for the 'Whoniverse'of Christopher H Bidmead was thecause of stagnation, breeding thedecay on which the Master couldfeed.

An article by Philip McDonald inDW;\{ a couple of years ago arguedthat entropy was not just the themeof Logopolis but the whole 18th sea-son. Certainly The Keeper of Trahenis about social decay, the veneer ofperfection obscuring the moral cor-ruption of the Trakenites. That it isthe Trakenite leader who is mostaware of the problems of his society,Tremas, who becomes the raw ma-terial for the Master'S regeneration atthe end of the story leaves theviewer in a suitably pessimisticmood for Logopolis.

I don't now think that Logopolisdepends as much on a knowledgeof Who lore as I once thought,

Tides 01 Time #: 15

although it is ~tjll :1 bonus. vlost ofthe time it copes well with the factthat money had largely run out bythe time it went into production; Lo-gopolis the planet appcaring as frag-ile as the fabric of the universe thatthe computations of the Logopoli-tans were defending. The regener-ation is still my favourite, the mostorganic interpretation of the Doctor'speriodic transformations. and theflashback sequence (the first ofmany to appear in the 1980s) foronce is dramatically valid, the viewerbeing reminded how much the Doc-tor's circumstances had changedsince the fourth Doctor hadstruggled up from the UNIT labfloor, over six years ago.

1981 was the year in which there were the mostDoctor Who repeats transmitted in the 1980s.The fact that the BBC repeated seven stories -including four old ones in the BBC 2 Five huesof Doctor Who season - has to be a factor inthe ratings success of the first Peter Davison see-son. Doctor Who is something of an acquiredlaste. The magnetism of several weeks of Daleks,coupled by the formal's originality, securedviewers in 1963 and 64 (and helped to introducePatrick Troughton); they were held 10 the pro-gramme almost by the fact that it was broadcastalmosl every single week of the year. In the eraof nine-month gaps (1985·86 being something ofo special case) screening of repeats is vital to re-mind the public that the programme still exists.The lack of repeats since 1984 bears at leastsome responsibility for the low ratings that 00(-

tor Who has suffered since Season 23.

One can go too far in pursuing theabsence of Doctor Who reruns as thelost cure for the programme's ills fol-lowing 1985. The Five Faces of Doc-tor Who helped weaken theassociation of Tom Baker with therole - a wise precaution if PeterDavison was to successfully over-come his predecessor's seven-yearsignature. A5 those who have readMarcus Hearn's articles on presscoverage of the programme in DWi\1

Tides of Time # 15

;/'. .-.:.low·..••..• ~-:-~~_

may have gathered, not even JohnNathan-Turner's publicity machinecould stop newspapers from ident-ifying Tom Baker as the Doctor untilwell into Davison's time in the roleby which time the actor had alread;signalled his intention to leave.

However, the idea that the publicwill flock back to showings of oldDoctor Who stories is a false one: theratings for the screenings of TheDaemons in autumn 1992 were sig-nificantly lower than those of theGerry Anderson series and TIJe Manfrom UNCLE which preceded it, andnot even Genesis of the Daleles,which followed The Daemons thefollowing January, could improvethe series' poor showing. At leastPlanet of the Daleks, shown on BBC1 last autumn against CoronationStreet, achieved figures comparableto the Sylvester McCoy seasons inwhat had become BBC 1's schedul-ing graveyard. The decline in the ap-peal of Doctor Who through the1980s affected not just the new epi-sodes as they went out, but the olderstories which had begun with astrong hold on public affection.

192 saw the Peter Davison era start in earnestand saw - amid a fair amount of comment in:ciuding a Guardian editorial - the translatio~ ofthe programme to weekdays. While it worked inthe short term, anracting a large number ofviewers from the still at that lime very popularNationwide which preceded it, the change in dayfrom Saturday meant that the series was upliftedfrom what was popularly seen as its roots and,furthermore, lost port of ils identity. The shiftingfrom Monday and Tuesday, to Tuesday andWednesday, to Thursday and Friday, to Saturday

""l"at 5.20 p.m. (loo early for ~~4S~min~le slot toacting as a 'hook' 10 the evening's viewing) andthen 5.45 p.m. (opposite The A Team a phenom-enally successful programme which hod built upits audience substantially during the 18 monthhiatus), and thence to the 'death slot' against(oronation Street for three years, has meant thatthe production team have for some time beenunable to target the programme at a specificaudience group. The ever-changing schedulinghas meant that Dodor Who is no longer sacred.

It was still sacred enough in 1983 for theBBC to sanction a 20th anniversary special, TheFive Dodors, after the 20th season proper. I wasstill dissatisfied with the 1983 stories. Arc of In-finity didn't work as an opener, fusing TheDeadly Assossin, The Three Doctors and TheKeeper of Traken into a cocktail heady for somefans, but failing to deliver for this one. I likedSnakeJance as tying up the loose ends fromKinda and rescuing the Mora from that awfulsnake, and Enlightenment as a very intelligentand truly fantastic story, but Mawdryn Untfeatffailed for me beceuse of its undue dependenceon the show's history, with its use of the regen-eration concept, resurrection of the Brigadier,and so forth. logopolis drank the blood of Doc-tor Who past and gained life; Mawtfryn was well... undead. The Five Doctors lay somewhere be-tween these two, reminding me now of many ofthe protracted TARDlS scenes during this time,such as Tegan's (supposed) leaving scene in TheVisitotion - all a linle too cosy and damestic.

John Nathan-Turner used to talk ofearly in the 80s of Doctor Who as an'action-drama' series. It was com-monly understood by fans at thetime that he was talking of a 'return'to the Pertwee era as the collectivefan memory comprehended it tenand more years ago, a series with'realistic' performances and

.2,uncorn promising action scenes, to-gether making 'serious' drama, un-like the allegedly 'juvenile andfrivolous excesses of Tom Bakerwhe.. under the producership ofGraharn Williams.

Subsequent exposure to the di-verse fOlTI1Sof televised Doctor Whofrom the 70s has made this inter-pretation of the Pertwee and TomBaker eras obsolete, and cast doubton what Nathan-Turner was trying todo. 1 would suggest that whenNathan-Turner spoke of 'action -dra-ma' he was in fact thinking more i.nterms of his earlier background onAll Creatures Great and Small, aseries which avoided being serialmelodrama like the soap operas, butat the same time, like its successorsOne by One on the BBC and Heart-beat on ITV,derived most of its ap-peal from human interest stories setin specific times and locations.

He may have intended to com-bine elements of this with moretraditional aspects of the pro-gramme, such as technological hard-ware, alien species and the rest, inorder to create a new Doctor Whothat Nathan-Turner believed coulddo well in the context of the early80s, when the glossy American soapoperas reigned supreme. Indeed, formuch of the decade, Nathan-Tumerwas working on the BBC's answer toDallas and Dynasty, Impact, along-side Hazel Adair and Peter Ling, cre-ators not only of Compact, the 60sseries to which Impact was to be asequel, but of the notoriousCrossroads.

This interest of Nathan-Turner'sin human interest drama affected hisproducership of Doctor Who in avariety of ways. Early on, he askedJohnny Byrne, series consultant ofAll Creatures to be his script editor;Byrne refused, allowing ChristopherH Bidrnead to come ill and add amuch needed scientific and socialawareness into the 18th season .When Bidmead left, John Nathan-Turner is alleged to have then in-vited Ted Rhodes to succeed him.Rhodes had been script editor of AllCreatures but turned John Na-than-Turner's invitation down, in-stead becoming a senior officer onthat ill-fated vessel. Triangle.

More generally, as I noted in myoriginal article, early' 80s Who didbecome "cosy and domestic". Bid-mead and Nathan-Turner had set upa larger, more 'vulnerable' TARDIScrew by the end of the 18th season,

22 Tides of Time # 15

and this was used to show characterinterplay in a way that the serieshadn't done for some years. On thedown side, allusions to family back-grounds among the Davison com-panions didn't always work. Thereturn of Tegan, looking for her kid-napped cousin in Amsterdam - and'in doing so walking casually in theplot of Arc of Infinity - was a blowto credibility; her visit to her grand-father in The Awakening the follow-ing year made matters worse. DoctorWho implicitly concerns people whohave cut their ties with their back-grounds, or who have had their tiescut for them. Adric, Nyssa, Tegan,and indeed Turlough, were all tra-velling with the Doctor partly be-cause their home ties had beendestroyed in some way, and to haveTegan return to visit relatives dam-aged this carefully constructed 'or-phanage' of which the Doctor wasnot the orphan, merely the seniorresident.

Adric's death illustrated both thestrengths and weaknesses of theaction-drama format as realised byJohn Nathan-Turner and, by thattime, Eric Saward. On the one hand,the audience had learned to knowAdric over the two seasons he hadbeen in the programme. His inno-cence had been exploited by the Ur-bankans and violated by themachines of the Master. He was themost familiar member of the cast,having preceded Sutton, Fieldingand Davison. The end titles of Eartb-sbocle Pan 4 rolled over Adric's

broken badge. hammering home thefact that the Doctor had had to pav aheavier price for this week's victory.He. and the audience. had been re-minded that people die. Yet the de-mands of the programme'sadventure format required thatAdric's death he all hut forgottenwhen it came to the next stOIY,TimeFlight. a dismal failure by commonconsent, and arguablv John Na-than-Turner's first major miscalcula-tion - a few scenes shot onConcorde does not additionalviewers make, particularly when thebudget demands a large number ofstudio exteriors inappropriate to thestory's ambitions.

That year [1983] also saw my discovery of 'fan-dom'. Having heard of DWAS, and having madeup my mind to join, I at last found their address(they were a much more secretive organisationin those days) in an issue of frontier Worlds - asuccessful, but now defunct, fanzine - I hadbought at forbidden Planet in London the yearbefore, or more, to be precise, in a send up ofthe DWAS newsletter, (eleslioJ Toyroom, rechris-tened, for the occasion, The /ncestiol Boysroom. Irecommend it to very (ex-) DWAS member totallyfed up with their organisational skills ....

I was already buying the early DWB, andthe contrast between it and awere immense. aclaimed to be a 'news' publication, but its ad-vertising:copy ratio was heavily biased towardsthe former, stories being very rarely developedbeyond one-liners. DWB started as a reaction tothis incarna1ion of eT; it was only when a gotits act together that DWB, over the next year,took to its glossy, sensational format which haselevated its circulation to several thousand.

The warfare which resulted in thecompetition between DWB andDWAS has always struck me as sadand unnecessary. It is probably a re-sult of the mass-marketing of DoctorWbo as a cult, which reached itsheight after 1983, which has draggedan inflated, but confused, fan bodyin its wake. DWAS,whose foundersafter all pioneered Doctor Who as a'high concept' are still having prob-lems with an age where there areseveral paths an individual can takeif he or she wants to find out moreabout Doctor Who. DWAS membersstill generally supports the Society'sconservative stance, as it tries to stayout of controversy, but DWB is al-ways vocal in its criticisms.

DWB attacks DWAS for providinga poor service to its members, but,when they improve, accuses them ofover-involvment with market forces,copying the achievements of DWB,

which is now a growing comme-rcialempire, Drearnwatch i\iedia,al1d hasnot been a 'fanzine' for some yearsnow. DWASalso opposes the politi-cal origins of DWB. founded. as itseems to have been, with the covertsupport of Ian Levine (uncr~ditedstOIY consultant from 1980 to 1986,veteran fan, and intimate of JohnNathan-Tumer during the early1980s). which has turned it at timesinto a vehicle against Narhan-Turner,as if he were a malicious demonwhose purpose in life W:lS to destroyDoctor Wbo. Such an attitude revealsa poor understanding of the prob-lems of producing a long-runningtelevision programme in the chang-ing environment of the 1980s, andperhaps a willingness by those whoknow better to mislead the less cun-ning fans of Doctor W7JO into think-ing that there are simple answers toproblems way beyond the sphere ofinfluence of even the most activeeditor of a small magazine.

I don't think that I was alone in drifting throughthe DoclDr Who of 1983, 1984 and into 1985 ina state of near-euphoria. Things may hove beenwrong with the world, such os the African fam-ine, but Doctor Who was an institution, bowedand scraped to by BBC presenters, and seemedlikely 10 go on forever. Seven million viewers perepisode may not hove been the highest or mosthealthy figure, but the success of the programmein America would guarantee the existing 26 epi-sodes a year at least, and nothing could gowrong, could it...?

Good old Michael Grade changed that.Suddenly, Dodor Who was an out-of-date chil-dren's series, only fit to be smirked at ormocked. Most non-fans I knew thought that theprogramme was finished. Although I think therewas little doubt that the show would remmeriol-ise on our screens, there were a few nervousmoments during that 18 month postponement,some of which were justified, such as ther'~=~~-'"'-

i

Tides of Time # 15

'fourteen episode season', and some 01 whichweren't, such as the story that Colin Baker hadbeen sacked and wouldn't ~ in the new season.This rumour, as later events proved, unfortunate-ly had a good deal of subsmnre.

According to a 'interview' [all Levinegave to DWB in 1992, John Narhan-Turner encouraged the press tothink Michael Grade was to blamefor the postponement of the series.firstly because Grade had alreadybeen in the news over the attemptby Thames Television to buy futureseasons of Dallas from its makerLorimar - overturning a long-stand-ing agreement with the BBC - andalso because he didn't want to anta-gonise the real enemy of DoctorWho, his immediate superior, jona-than Powell, then Head of Dramaand subsequently the Controller ofBBC1.

The statements that MichaelGrade came out with fatally dam-aged Doctor Who as an ongoingseries, the BBC hierarchy itself burst-ing the bubble that had protected itsspecial status on television, drawingattention to its flaws without actuallydoing anything to remedy the situ-ation. That the rumours floatingaround fandom were clearly gener-ated 'backstage' makes the wholebusiness more sordid. A riven DoctorWho world was revealed, where theproducer was isolated within theBBC Drama Department and at thesame time had moved dangerouslyclose to the makers of fan opinion ata time when Levine, from within theproduction office and through hisally, Gary Levy of DWB, was ma-nipulating fandom to suit his ownpersonal, somewhat reactionaryagenda, further destabilised theseries at a time when it neededsupport.

My feelings have always been somewhat am-bivalent towards Colin Baker's Doctor. I wasquite warm towards his portrayal, but sometimesI think he went too far over the top in his use ofwhat can be called 'cultivated outrage'. Some-time his 'olienness', while of similar manner toTom Baker's characterisation during his first twoseasons, albeit with more arrogance, seems tohave deterred the audience enough for the audi-ence figures to drop by nearly three million inthe first six weeks of the 22nd season. The 45minute episodes, 0/1 to some degree badly-paced,probably also share the responsibility. Perhaps,aher an 18 month gap between seasons and 0badly structured, 14 port 'epic' - which causedviewers to switch off after episode one - veryfew would have been surprised had Oodor Who

not survived Colin Baker's dismissal.

[ still feel that The Trial of a TimeLord was a bad idea, showing thatNathan-Turner and his superiors hadnot learned form the mistakes of TheTripods, the overextended adapta-tion of John Christopher's novelswhich Doctor Who replaced on au-tumn Saturdays. As for Colin Baker, Ihad the good fortune to ask him at aconvention appearance what hewould have done had the BBC saidto him at the end of the 1986 thatthey would like him to continue asthe Doctor, but they would like himto play the part differently. Colinrightfully said that the situationwouldn't have occurred, as the BBCdoesn't work like that, but obviouslyhe would have done what hisemployers told him to do, as indeedhe always had.

The character of the sixth Doctorwas the creation of an overconfidentproduction team who misunder-stood what Doctor Who was allabout, and was endorsed by a Headof Drama who though that DoctorWho was a dated embarrassment. Asa result, it became exactly that.

Instead the world was treated to the appearanceof S~vester McCoy on the scene and a new lookfor 00(1O( Who. I think more of my age groupgave the programme a chance in 1987 (non~on sycamore leaves stuck to the monsters thisyear!), at least for Time and the Rani Unfortu-nately this season had been wriHen at speed,with no time to actually think through the direc-tion that was being token. Thus there was 0 suc-cession of good ideas gone wrong, such osParadise Towers, which, had the backgroundbeen sketched in more firmly and the temptationto do the whole thing in 0 'high camp' st~ebeen suppressed, could hove been 0 brillicnt

23satire on urban society. De/tu and the Banner-men, consisled of on offbeat firsl part, and 0

second and third part which went totally off therails; the Doctor becoming not just secondary,but superfluous. I still think it could hove beenan excellent Screen One or other one-off produc-tion, but the script was misplaced in Do(for Who.After 0 season of mixed quality, the forthcomingset of stories for the silver jubilee did not fill mewith much confidence.

I wouldn't say now that ParadiseTowers could have been brilliant, butit could have been made with com-petence. Richard Briers admitted thathe didn't take his role seriously -and neither did anyone else as a re-sult. The costumes were straight outof the worst excesses of a Bob Blockseries. Performances in a fantasyseries must have conviction, andthose in Paradise Touers didn't. Asmy grandfather said to me whenwatching part 3, "This used to beserious - now they've turned it intoa comedy." Paradise Towers neededto be bleak. Its makers couldn'tcome to terms with the situation thescripts demanded, and it remainedill a no-man's land between comedyand straight drama. It is questionablewhether the story should have beenattempted at this stage in the pro-gramme's history.

Delta stretched the audience'sexpectations at a time when a moreconservative approach with regardto story content may have beenwiser. Experimentation can be triedmore easily in a self-contained 50minute episode than in a 3 x 25 min-ute serial. The format itself wasdated by this time, as Zenith wasshowing with Inspector Morse andhis two hour investigations on IlV. Iwouldn't say that Dragonfire wasamong the best Doctor W1JOstoriesproduced, but at least its story-linewas uncomplicated and most of theperformances were sound.

Nevertheless, I received a pleasant surprise asthe 25th season unfolded. h was much bellerthan the previous two years and, for the firsttime in more than 0 decade, there were new de-velopments - as opposed to consolidation - ofthe ongoing subplot concerning the Doctor'sidentity. This theme has, of course, extended intothe 26th season. Can the Doctor be a contempor-ary of the founders of the TIme lord race, Rassi-Ion and Omega? Con lady Peinforte in SilverNemesis have been right when she implied thatthe Doctor was more than just 0 TIme lord?These ore just two of the questions that havebeen raised in the two most recent seasons.

24r:••

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Tides of Time # 15

With hindsight, one can see that thesubject of the Doctor's identity wasoverhyped in 1988 and 1989. Theline, "I'm beginning to wish I hadn'tstarted all this," in Remembrance ofthe Daleles was wonderfully amus-ing, considering its possible implica-tions for the continuity AndrewCartmel was trying to break awayfrom, but the end result of the Cart-me! approach was that the Doctorsimply found himself in a straitjacketeven more binding than that madeby Ian Levine and John Nathan-Turner in the early 1980s, and theless comprehensible. The Doctormust be a man who makes moralchoices, and his godlike actions inRemembrance, Siluer Nemesis andperhaps also Curse of Fenric implythat he had very little difficultywreaking apocalyptic vengeance onhis foes. In the long term, he is sim-ply less interesting, as the fascinationof the Neui Adtentures books withthe 'darker Doctor' has shown. Itwould have been better just to havedownplayed the mythology withwhich the three seasons beforeMcCoy and Cartmel arrived hadbeen saturated; but, by 1987, DoctorWbo present could not easily be dis-entangled from Doctor Wbo past.There were too many audiences tosatisfy, and the task could not beachieved.

There is also a conscious move to make OoclorWho more relevant to the times in which it findsitself. 'Politicol' issues, absent from much of the1980s, have reosserted themselves. The racismsubtext and the anti-thatcherism of Remem-brance of the Oaleh and The Happinen Patrolmay have been suppressed in production, butthere is little doubting the ecological concern

ib -~ -!,,"1~;

voiced in The (utse of Fenric, or the commentaryon the revival of social Darwinism in the 1980swith Survival. There have been greater attemptsat improved characterisation, notably the attempt10 give greater depth 10 Ace in the laller Iwostories, who has travelled a long way from thecaricature encountered in Oragonfire. The OoclorWho of Ion Briggs and Rona Munro, and per-hops also of Stephen Wyatt, is much more intune with my outlook as we enler the 1990s

So, here we are in the middle of the1990s. Seasons 25 and 26 didstrengthen the programme's 'liberal'values, but they tended too far to-wards the extremes of political cor-rectness. The ecology themes ofBattlefield and The Curse of Fenricwere laid on with trowels. Ace wasan attempt to bring some reality intothe series' fantasy, but she was anunrealistic character - no street-urchin talked or dressed like that -

and. heresy of heresies, SophieAldrer' wonderful though she is.was really too old for the part. Isometimes wish that Allison from Re-membrance had been the new com-panion. providing a rational foil tothe anarchic seventh Doctor.

Instead we had what was insome ways an unbalanced line-up.the Doctor and Ace both standingoutside the system: Ace as a sani-tised vision of an uneducated anar-cho-terrorist, her guardian angelbeing the god-in-waiting figure ofthe Doctor, dealing for much of thetime with problems he has set upbefore. This has an appeal on paper,and some appeal on screen, but theseventh Doctor was flawed in theeyes of the viewers because hebegan as a clown. sending the part.and the series, up. I don't think thatthis was Sylvester's intention. I un-derstand that there are out-takesfrom Dragonfire floating aboutwhich show the voice of the galleryurging him to overplay every last ac-tion. However, this is the shape inwhich Sylvester McCoy's Doctor wasfirst encountered by the viewers (alast, loyal five million) and it was animage perpetuated all the waythrough his run through the part, theDoctor Wbo caption slides for histenure always showing him strikinga comedic pose. The seventh Doctorwas, of course, fighting a losingbattle - being scheduled againstCoronation Street was the kiss ofdeath - and John Nathan-Turner'sby now flagging publicity machinehad never been enough to securethe image of the relatively popularPeter Davison Doctor, let alone that

Tides of Time # 15

of ,'dcCoy's interpretation.

it would be an incomplete ~trospective of thedecade without a brief mention of the sole pro-ducer . for every season in production in ~:~~1980s, John Nathan-Turner. One could write sev-eral books about this man and Doctor Who - hehimself has already done, and may write more.I think that he made many mistakes: the changeof title sequence and music in 1980 was too red-ical, too alienating for many regular viewers; hisobsession with the series' past, while pleasing inthe short term, ultimately resulted in overkill. Hischoice of Bonnie Longford as a companion wasan interesting gamble, but Miss Longford wassadly hamstrung by her media image. Despitethese errors, it should not be forqonen that JohnNathan·Turner successfully kept the programmein the public eye via his knack for publicity andpresided over 01 least four moderately successfulseasons.

I am not going to be embroiled inthe 'John Nathan-Turner: Good orBad?' argument here. I think myopinions of some of his decisionshave been stated or implied above.Perhaps someone else could writean article about the man for the nextTides of Time.

On the creative side, the three script editors ofthe decade (excluding Douglas Adorns and An·thony Root) have all brought a distinct flavour tothe stories which they have supervised. Chris·topher H Bidmead, in season 18, was probablytrying to make the programme more 'serious'after a year under Douglas Adams, but I feel hewas wrong in trying to tie the programme downto 'hard science'. While good, scientific storieshave their place, aNempting to place Doctor Whoon a purely scientific foundation, as TerranceDicks complained while writing Stole of Decoy,begins to appear somewhat peNy. Do(tor Who,with its reliance on time travel and regeneration,deals in rneto-sdenre, and ~ is easy for Bidmeadto forget this. Eric Saward was on advocate ofthe 'raNling good yarn', but not 011 the storieswhich he edited achieved this status; many suf·fered from poor structuring - viewers' patiencebeing tested by the interminably long TARDlSscenes, which Andrew Cartmel, his successor, hasfound superfluous. Cartmel hod 0 shaky start,with Time ond the Roni I suspect owing little tohis influence and the rest of Season 24, as previ·ously stated, being of uncertain direction. How·ever, he has nnrnrted several good, new, youngwriters to the programme, such as WyaN, Briggs,Ben Aaronovitch, Kevin Clarke and Rona Munro,who I hope will contribute under the new produc·tion regime anticipated.

Most of the scripts of the 1980s hadpotential, but they needed morework. The only script editor whoreally put the effort in was

Christopher H Bidmead. whom Iwas far too harsh on five years ago.Bidmead U'fIS writing what I termed'rneta-scieuce' - it's just that he wasdoing it using concepts with somescientific validity. III rht- cornpurerage, he was the script editor DoctorWho needed. It is a pity he could notwork with John Narhan-Turner, andthere was no money available togive him. and his successors. thefull-time assistants that they needed.John Nathan-Turner was a presenta-tion man. but not even the mostthorough producer or director coulddo much with bad scripts whichwere still unfinished when the direc-tor joined the production, as manyin the Cartmel era seem to havebeen.

There is a new production re-gime imminent. it seems. but it is notof the sort I was expecting in 1989.Amblin, according to some reports,will be unable to employ very manyBritish writers as their proposedseries of Doctor Who will be made inCalifornia, under US union rules.This is a pity, not just for the writersmentioned above, but for thosewriters from this country who will beprevented from contributing to atelevision series that has been part ofthe British national fabric for a longtime, although I am sure that thereare many American screenwriterswho are very capable of writing forthe series.

stability, coupled with the increasing impact of'the fans' on the way the series is viewed, bothby the BBC and the press. Hopefully the 19905will offer a securer future for the proqramme,and consequently more enjoyable - os long oseveryone is kept on their toes.

I would no longer agree that theI980s were an exciting time for theprogramme. for the 1980s were adecade of decline. as the viewers de-serted and the production team lostthe ability to make the series. Thetragedy is that the plug was pulledrust as writers such as Marc Platt, TanBriggs and Rona Munro were pain-fully relearning how to make DoctorWho, helped by directors NicholasMallet (as far as Fenric was C011-

cerned) and Alan Wareing. Whetherthey could have done any good isdoubtful, as the general audiencehad lost interest. Doctor Wbo - forreasons which T suspect Anthonyand James will go into their series ofarticles this year - ceased to be apopular programme, and a barrier ofincomprehension rose between itand its audience. In the 198Os,Doc-tor Who, devised as a programme toentertain, inform, and stimulate awide audience, stopped doing thetask it has performed so successfullyfor nearly two decades, and forwhatever reason, it failed.

Ma#bew KIlburn

The 19805 hove been on exciting decade for 00('

tor Who, with four Doctors, various crises, andmuch doubt over the programme's backstage

Based on an article first appearingin The Tides of Time #1