Reviewed by Guy Clapperton
Stars Sylvester McCoy, Bonnie Langford, Don Henderson, Richard Davies,
Anita Graham, Hugh Lloyd, Ken Dodd, Stubby Kaye, Sara Griffiths | Written by Malcolm Kohl
UK certification PG | UK RRP £19.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 74 minutes | Directed by Chris Clough
Sometimes a release of an unsuccessful production can be more interesting than those which actually got somewhere. So it is with this story; Doctor Who comes to Wales, but not as a production in 2005. This is the 1980s, the Doctor is Sylvester McCoy and Bonnie Langford is the companion. The story involves some alien masks that were tacky at the time and are now further dated, Ken Dodd being executed horribly, a female guest lead who acts with all the conviction of someone reading a shopping list and some of the most misplaced, hamfisted "humour" in the programme’s history.
And all of this makes it a more interesting watch than some of the more successful stories in earlier eras. Yes, sure, they wrote and produced them and they were popular – but in this instance it’s genuinely intriguing that someone thought this was going to work. The extras help to fill in some of the gaps. Extracts from daft sketches with Noel Edmonds and children’s Saturday morning shows are handled very much with the children’s audience in mind; this adds weight to production team members’ subsequent claims that they were expecting a Saturday teatime slot and toned the horror down accordingly. Other background information helps. The previous Doctor, Colin Baker, had been unceremoniously dropped the previous year (and insisted on going public on it) so they had to recast in a hurry; there had also been criticism of violence on the series so toning down the horror element was essential regardless of the timeslot.
So they opted for a sort of camp humour, in this case literally camp as the Doctor and Mel arrive more or less on the set of Hi De Hi. They’re there because they’ve won a holiday in a spaceport; so is the Chimeron Queen, the last of her race, because she’s running away from a massive battle (about four soldiers). So are a couple of dumb American spies, dropped in as an attempt at humour that’s just embarrassing – the sub-plot about their lost satellite fails completely to go anywhere once it’s been established. It’s this sort of sub-plot that underpins what’s wrong with the programme at this point. It doesn’t know where it’s going. Chief baddie Don Henderson plays it straight as the chief baddie. The Americans try laboured humour, Hugh Lloyd aims for doddery mysticism. Incidental musician "Deaf Keff" McCulloch realises it’s set in the 1950s and hams up the rock’n’roll like a good 'un which makes for a light tone to the story which might just have benefited from more gravitas as the Ken Dodd character dies and a whole busload of extras is wiped out when the plot has no more use for them. New Doctor Sylvester McCoy gets a rough press and he had rough ratings at the time; his scatty genius is too knowing and everyone takes him seriously far too quickly (arriving at Goronwy’s house he introduces himself, asks whether his new friends can stay a while and co-opts a load of possessions; Goronwy is bafflingly serene about all this) but that’s in the writing. History has been unkind to McCoy; he doesn’t appear to be the problem.
No, the difficulty is that this baffling, underbudgeted mish-mash of styles was trying to find a distinctive voice with so many doors slamming in its face. It’s interesting to watch it struggling and comparing this to the confident modern incarnation of the same programme; as a standalone entertainment, though, it just doesn’t gel.
EXTRAS **** Loads. Watch for the comic strip history of the seventh Doctor and an engaging documentary on Hugh Lloyd in particular.