Special Features #1: Journey Into Terror

Posted on by James Lark

A tinkling, slightly out-of-tune music box plays and a monochrome picture of an eye stares out of the screen, brown on sickly yellow like a peeling illustration on a nursery wall, but as we back away from it we see that the human eye sits in the face of a doleful teddy bear listlessly propped up on a mantelpiece. We back away still further until the picture shows us a little girl, back to the artist, sitting and (we imagine) looking up at the teddy. Except that when the figure of the girl rotates, her eyes and mouth have been stitched together.

Draw your own conclusions about the provenance of the teddy’s long lashes.

The macabre juxtaposition of the childlike and the grotesque neatly sums up the yarns chosen for Late Night Story (on The Armageddon Factor, part of The Key to Time DVD box set), a series read by Tom Baker in 1978. He sits in a study, surrounded by bookshelves, cabinets, a chess set, a globe, almost as if he has arrived on the set for Professor Chronotis’ rooms a year early. Lit with a warm, autumn-evening hue, it’s basically a comforting picture; and that’s Doctor Who off of Disney Time, isn’t it? In his brown jacket he might as well be – he looks pretty much as he did after abandoning the scarf in Robots of Death (and in some episodes he also wears a paisley tie, anticipating a later Doctor). Then he eyeballs the camera, something playing around his face that might be a smile waiting to get out but that might also be a dreadful howl like the one he emits in Terror of the Zygons, and he tells stories. It’s like Jackanory, if children’s television had ever set out to traumatise an entire generation in one go.

Above: Tom Baker on Sunday 3rd August 1975 in the Odeon ‘Disney Cinema’, St Martin’s Lane, London, during filming of his links for Disney Time. Colourisation by Clayton Hickman, without whose wonderful, wonderful work a series of blogs about Doctor Who would be a little bit unseemly.

The stories all involve children – or people acting like children. There’s a sad little tale about an ill child by Nigel Kneale, a nightmarish party game in a story by Graham Greene and a stories by Mary Danby and Ray Bradbury that go for slightly more unrestrained horror. Perhaps best of all there’s a chance to hear Saki’s deliciously venomous masterpiece Sredni Vashtar, which didn’t even get broadcast. It’s a really fine selection of stories, all of them possessing a sting in the tale which in many cases lingers long after the talking is over (the awfulness of Graham Greene’s The End of the Party only sinks in as the credits are rolling over that creepy music box and Tom is already back to work at his desk as if nothing has happened).

Baker gives the tales an electrifying intensity, his eyes twinkling dangerously, his face never quite deciding whether what he’s saying is amusing or horrific, a chilling detachment that is matched by his delivery of the prose. He has an expert sense of pacing, eliding sentences in a way that is characteristically Tom Baker and pausing just occasionally to let an image sink in. He speaks the dialogue with cold humour, perfectly capturing the no-nonsense tone of the soppy stern adults and giving the younger characters an authentic innocence which is either helpless or morally bankrupt or both.

This is brilliant stuff. It is a reminder of the power of pure, unfussy storytelling, relying almost entirely on the person talking. There is little to hide behind – Baker delivers minutes on end to camera in a single shot, broken up by the occasional change of angle or slow zoom, but nothing to distract from the twin stars of the show: the writing and the storyteller. It is something television lost long ago – even Jackanory when I was growing up had started to rely a little too much on crude animations of illustrations, diluting the compelling simplicity of the spoken word (I understand that when the programme briefly came back in 2006 is was with elements of CGI, so as far as I’m concerned that can get in the sea). And television now, with is slavish desperation to be ‘cinematic’, has all-but forgotten the power of a single shot framing a brilliant performance, something that TV of yesteryear did out of necessity but which is sadly lost to children and adults alike, bar the odd Talking Heads (Bennett, not Byrne) or Mark Gatiss’ 2017 anthology Queers (if you didn’t see it, search it out).

In the 1970s, a time of storytelling par excellence, they caught Tom Baker at the height of his powers doing something to rival even the great Bernard Cribbins. And Cribbins would never have been this scary: Tom may be dressed as the Doctor, but if the fourth Doctor had been anything like this then the other Baker would not be the one saddled with the ‘darker persona’ label. It is perhaps my favourite Tom Baker performance ever and, curiosity though it is, is an example of the kind of peripheral material that we are fortunate enough to have turning up on Doctor Who home media releases. Nestling at the bottom of a long, long list of special features, it is nevertheless the best special feature ever. For all of the above reasons I have no compunction about stating that with absolute authority, even though I haven’t watched all of the other ones1.

  1. What? I had the audacity to make a top 10 without conducting exhaustive research?!! Yes I did. And I will feel no shame unless everyone who voted The Dalek Invasion of Earth the best story of the Hartnell era can prove they have listened to The Myth Makers. ↩︎

Special Features #2: All Roads Lead to Rome

Posted on by James Lark

Look Who’s Driving on The Collection: Season 20 (Blu-ray)

This feature has no right to be as entertaining as it is: in short, Janet Fielding, Sarah Sutton and Peter Davison drive from Ramsgate to a convention in Kassel, taking in various European locations along the route. It sounds like the kind of lightweight filler that wouldn’t be out of place on daytime television, and there are moments when that’s what we get – scenic aerial panoramas accompanied by jaunty stock music give us a glimpse of the feature that the production team perhaps thought they were making.

But as soon as the early 80s TARDIS crew get into a car together, something a little bit magical happens. We have already seen the easy banter between them in the Behind The Sofa Blu-ray features, in which Fielding entertainingly butts heads with Davison in what has become a trademark display of snark and grump (I have commented before that I would happily see a feature in which Janet Fielding provides a commentary on everything from now on – not just Doctor Who, *everything*); but somehow, with the need to talk about Doctor Who removed, the repartee moves up a gear and the result almost achieves an arthouse level of absurdity. It is also genuinely, tear-inducingly funny.

There must have been a point where the team making the feature realised what they had. Perhaps it wasn’t even until they started editing. But at some point it stops being a film about three people driving to Europe and becomes a film about three people being filmed driving to Europe; the whole piece is as self-aware as the three travellers staring at a row of cameras following their journey, and it is much the richer for it, because acknowledging the nature of the project removes any sense of artifice – there’s no pretence that we’re spying on three people journeying in private, they know full well that we’re watching them because they’re being followed by a crew in a van and a drone. So whilst the picturesque stop-offs are perfectly diverting, the focus becomes their conversation in the car, which, thanks to the amount of time they have known each other, the length of the journey and the acknowledged absurdity of the situation, sparkles with the kind of eloquent spontaneity that many loftier endeavours have aspired to and failed to capture.

Fielding ruminates on the deceptive nature of cows and does her vocal exercises, to Davison’s consternation. Sutton misunderstands an instruction to ‘drive slowly’ and they spend about ten minutes trying to understand directions, talking and shouting over each other as if the scene has been orchestrated by Robert Altman. They are entertainingly rude to each other, but their mutual fondness is also evident throughout, so the exchanges are caustic without being abrasive, charming without being twee.

By the end of the feature it feels a little like you have spent two days on the road with them yourself, but honestly I could have spent twice as long in their company and not grown tired of it. The only whiff of regret it left me with is the thought of how much more entertaining those TARDIS scenes in the 80s would have been if they’d given us something more along these lines.

Next: “It will be a bad cold if I go to the party. Perhaps I shall die.”

Special Features #3: Five Hundred Eyes

Posted on by James Lark

In Conversation: Sophie Aldred on The Collection: Season 26 (Blu-ray)

Even the earliest special features on Doctor Who DVDs had pretty decent production values and ambitious intentions, but the range has kept on pushing what can be done within the limitations of a tiny budget, and the documentaries of recent years are really spectacular achievements; in the age of GB News the term ‘broadcast standard’ has lost all meaning, but what we’re getting on the Blu-rays rivals BBC content for slickness. It would be tempting to think there wasn’t much more you could do for the range.

Thankfully, somebody had the bright idea to go back to basics and give us a new series of features that rely not on snazzy green screen, drone shots and snappy editing, but simply on an incisive, well-informed interviewer sitting with somebody integral to the show’s history for an hour. And you don’t get much more incisive or well informed than Matthew Sweet. Combining the rigour of a historian with the affection of a fan, his interviews have wielded brilliant new insights from Doctors, companions, producers and writers; he goes into these interviews clearly having done his homework and keen to chart previously unchartered territory, but the answers he gets are gently nudged out of his subjects, coaxed from them with boyish enthusiasm and subtle prompts. I don’t quite know how Matthew Sweet does it, but if there was a formula to being Matthew Sweet then we’d all be Matthew Sweet and that wouldn’t do at all. Like Michael Parkinson, his skill lies in saying very little and letting his guests do most of the talking.

His interview with Michael Grade on The Collection: Season 22 is perhaps the boldest mission statement to date – to take a person who has long been considered by fans (dismissed by them, even) as a villainous bureaucrat and, brilliantly, to get his take on a vital era of the show (a new perspective on ground already admirably covered, as previously discussed). Grade’s insights are fascinating (if not always persuasive), and it’s probably just as well that even as he refuses to accept that it wasn’t actually him that cancelled Doctor Who, Sweet is too much of a professional to shake him by the lapels1.

For me, however, the real litmus test was Sophie Aldred. Purely as a consequence of her willingness and devotion to the legacy of Who, Aldred is surely one of the most-interviewed-living-Doctor-Who-people-evs. Certainly for those of us who endured the ‘wilderness years’ (when we were absolutely surrounded by Doctor Who in every medium except actually on the television), Aldred was a constant and reassuring presence, always happy to indulge fans, reminisce, deliver an anecdote. So it’s not out of any lack of love for her that I did wonder if she had any stories left to tell.

The answer is, of course she does, and Matthew Sweet finds an entry point in the brilliant simplicity of asking what her first day of work was like. Aldred casts her mind back, and we’re away; from a vivid recollection of seeing her face in close-up multiplied across a bank of monitors we move backwards to the audition, then Aldred’s work as a freelance actress before Who, and we’re on a twisty, always-engaging journey through the eyes of one of Doctor Who’s most generous personalities.

For all that he lets Aldred tell her story without getting in the way (something that is far harder to do than he makes it look), Matthew Sweet’s presence is also part of the magic. Yes, he has the credibility and expertise of a respected historian, but he also has the confidence to wear his fan colours unapologetically, engagingly representing us viewers: a fan, an enthusiast, a devotee (indeed, he admits in this interview that he was one of the young fans present at Aldred’s first public appearance at a Doctor Who convention, so his personal angle follows the same timeline as Aldred’s involvement with the show). It’s a quality he brings to each of his interviews, regardless of the era of the show under discussion, and every time he uncovers gold. It goes without saying that his interviews with the Doctors are indispensable, but really it’s impossible to single out any of these features (that said, if forced to choose, I’d urge anyone to check out his interview with Nicola Bryant for the mesmerising and occasionally horrifying picture it paints of what-things-used-to-be-like-working-on-the-telly).

The results are pretty much the hallmark feature of The Collection; if you get the Blu-rays for one thing other than the best version of the stories themselves, then it’s these.

Next: “it’s like they’ve given the road a Brazilian…”

  1. Michael Grade was actually back with Matthew Sweet on the radio only this weekend, giving his ha’p’orth for a lovely programme about The Wilderness Years, and in a brief clip actually saying more than he does on the In Conversation interview with the frankly extraordinary admission that he told John Nathan Turner ‘I don’t like sci fi personally’. He was the Controller of BBC One, for crying out loud – would he have reshaped the channel accordingly if he didn’t like sport, or news? But at least Ben Aaronovitch can now consider his opinion thoroughly vindicated. ↩︎

Special Features #4: The Search

Posted on by James Lark

Actor and comedian Toby Hadoke has become something of a Doctor Who equivalent to a national treasure; for all that he enjoys a more-than-respectable career in both of the aforementioned fields, since outing himself as a fan in his one-man show Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf his name has cropped up in all kinds of Doctor Who-related media, whether in his acting roles on Big Finish audios, his comedy, his presenting work, his excellent series of podcasts, his contributions to the DVD and Blu-ray range as a presenter and commentary moderator, and indeed providing a guide to surviving Doctor Who this very week on BBC Radio 4 Extra.

His first DVD extra was a perfectly entertaining, if slightly frivolous, documentary about robots in which Hadoke more than demonstrated his ease in front of the camera. But it’s Looking for Peter (on The Sensorites DVD) that first properly exploited his particular fascination, a genuine interest in the people involved in making television (whether they be actors, writers or assistant floor managers), which, combined with a personable style and gentle honesty when speaking with and about the figures he is investigating, has given us privileged insights into a growing number of lives that might otherwise have been forgotten.

Looking for Peter starts with a simple enough concept: in the absence of any information beyond a name and a couple of contradictory sets of dates, is there anything at all that can be discovered about Peter R. Newman, the writer of an early story that is unloved almost to the point of being unnoticed? You get the impression that nobody had particularly high expectations of the enterprise: Hadoke jokes that he might at least discover what the ‘R’ stands for, and a bit of digging around for a death certificate feels like a literal dead end.

Also, how interested was anyone else in discovering more about Peter R. Newman? It wasn’t exactly keeping me awake at night. And this is where Hadoke has a knack of pulling something a little bit miraculous out of the bag, because he’s so authentic in his curiosity to discover more that he takes us with him – and thanks to some input from researcher extraordinaire Richard Bignell, he uncovers a surprising amount, manages to speak with relatives, discovers pictures and even a recording. It’s a fascinating and ultimately rather moving journey that does exactly what Hadoke expertly did in his series of Who’s Round podcasts and continues to do in obituaries: takes a name from a list of credits and fully fleshes out the person behind them. Would that we all had a Toby Hadoke to ensure that we would be remembered so completely and compassionately.

He has, of course, built on this early documentary, and a Hadoke special feature is always one of my first ports of call on any release. Whose Doctor Who Revisited is a favourite of mine and perhaps goes the furthest in unearthing Stories About People; his Weekend With Waterhouse and Living With Levene features capitalise again on his genuine interest in, and knowledge about, the people involved in the programme, giving us a really insightful look at  two characters who one suspects not many people would be able to get this much out of. It is a little too easy to take for granted the care that has been taken to make sure that the personalities behind Doctor Who are being so thoroughly interviewed and remembered; that the results are presented so warmly and engagingly is the icing on the cake.

If you’re not already subscribed to Toby Hadoke’s trilogy of podcasts Toby Hadoke’s Time Travels… well, what on earth are you doing with your life?! In Happy Times and Places he provides an informed and positive commentary on Doctor Who episodes, in Too Much Information he is giving about as comprehensive a history of the series as you could hope for in podcast form (including more rare insights into the key figures behind the show) and best of all Indefinable Magic is a series of musings on the nature of Doctor Who, fandom and all kinds of associated topics: thoughtful, informative, engaging, amusing and poignant. Essential listening; you can also support these endeavours at Patreon.

Next: “the most unflattering colour on camera – it makes you look like a sausage…”

Special Features #5: The Firemaker

Posted on by James Lark

Given the ubiquity of producer John Nathan-Turner with Doctor Who throughout the 80s, his absence from the DVD range due to his untimely death in 2002 gave their behind-the-scenes features an immediately different feel. In the 80s and 90s JNT was visible in a way that other BBC production personnel just weren’t in those days, setting the template for the chatty showrunners of NuWho and becoming almost as familiar a face as some of the people working in front of the cameras (even, some have (not always charitably) argued, casting the Doctor in his own image). It was an association that continued well after the show’s cancellation, whether he was popping up for documentaries, BSB Doctor Who weekends, the fan convention scene or in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine (who commissioned his memoirs) – and he was a pioneering figure behind the scenes of Doctor Who in home media1.

It’s a pity that he never lived for long enough to see how the Doctor Who DVD range ran with what he had started and, apart from a single interview for the Resurrection of the Daleks release, never got to contribute to it. Instead, the range gave us a chance to hear from what were once less familiar voices from the era – notably script editors Christopher H. Bidmead and Eric Saward, along with writers, directors, designers – all welcome contributors, of course, and they have given us some genuinely fresh takes, but to those of us who grew up with his familiar face never far from a Doctor Who documentary, John Nathan-Turner absence left a pretty sizeable gap2. There is, of course, a great deal of archive footage of John Nathan-Turner discussing the show, always a welcome addition to features, but unlike him, those other voices have been able to record their thoughts from the vantage point of having seen a reinvigorated Doctor Who back on the television and vindicating an awful lot of the decisions that were made in the 80s. Aside from being denied the opportunity to say a big fat ‘I told you so,’ he has been deprived of the chance to talk about his Doctor Who with the optimism of knowing that he wasn’t ‘the man who killed Doctor Who’ but was actually ahead of his time in a great many ways. He was also denied the chance to see his contribution reassessed by a great many fans and given the credit he deserves for keeping the programme alive for as long as he did.

In the light of that, a proper retrospective of his life and work was definitely due, and Chris Chapman’s documentary Showman: The Life of John Nathan-Turner (on The Collection: Season 26 Blu-ray) more than measures up to the task. The DVD range has given us many fine tributes to those who have passed on, including the lovely Jacqueline Hill – A Life in Pictures, Roger Delgado – The Master, and Chapman’s own celebration of William Hartnell through the eyes of Jessica Carney in My Grandfather the Doctor. But Showman is in a different league; the running time alone is a statement of intent, giving the man the feature-length documentary warranted by such a fascinating and important figure. It means there is time to really delve into the detail; his education and early career gets a proper discussion with the insights of people who knew him, and his pre-Who career is rightly given plenty of time as well, supported by an excellent selection of clips and photographs.

Naturally there’s plenty of footage to accompany the Doctor Who years, including associated activities like the pantomimes he populated with his leading cast members. Given the medium it is wise that we don’t delve into the realms of controversy already covered by Richard Marson’s biography, but the documentary is not afraid of confronting JNT’s flaws, confident that his qualities will shine through in the reminiscences of those who knew and loved him. The frustration of the post-Who years is fully explored, and by the time we get to the footage of an ill-looking JNT answering questions for his only DVD interview it is a genuinely poignant sight – a man who achieved a huge amount early on but found himself trapped by his success and unable to build on what he had done. It makes for sometimes sad viewing, but whilst allowance is made for regret and even anger, overall it focuses on celebrating a man who absolutely deserves to be celebrated. When it was released, Chris Chapman said he thought it was the best documentary they had made to date; whilst the Blu-ray features since continue to raise the bar, this one still has the edge on them thanks to compelling storytelling, an unsentimental tone and a fascinating, complex central figure – one who I would challenge you not to love even a little bit yourself by the time the credits roll.

Next: “he thought the costumes were a little bit silly…”

  1. They may feel a little perfunctory (even lazy) compared to what we have now, but the ‘years’ video range he produced was the first chance many fans got to see precious archive material and incomplete stories, he oversaw the release of soundtracks from missing episodes and he was the first of many people to offer a (sort of) completed version of Shada. My view of 60s Who was shaped by these products – how many of us watched Daleks: The Early Years over and over again for its invaluable glimpses of Skaro’s finest at their legendary best? ↩︎
  2. This was particularly the case when he was not able to respond to a few of the less flattering portrayals he was subjected to. Saward’s antipathy towards John Nathan-Turner is famous, and there are moments where it felt as though he’d been given the last word. ↩︎

Special Features #6: A Desperate Venture

Posted on by James Lark

Doctor Who releases have been blessed with an extraordinary amount of behind-the-scenes footage, particularly as you get into the 80s (presumably because fans on the scene were swift to squirrel everything to safety, since the Beeb itself was still chucking things away willy nilly at the time). Some releases include film trims, which play like some kind of art installation as you watch soundless, speckled film of scenes about to begin before they jump to the scene end, characters disappearing from frame in unintended jump cuts and light damage giving the whole thing a surreal sheen.

Or you can dive into the repeated takes of scenes themselves, usually represented by time-coded studio footage where retakes are necessitated by a forgotten line, a boom in shot, or very very occasionally because the director has time to request a slightly different version. Some of the later seasons now come with far more hours of raw material than of the episodes themselves; if you were so perversely inclined, you could cut together some stories almost entirely from alternate takes.

I’ll be honest, this is a bit hardcore for me, fascinated though I am by both Doctor Who and by television production. The reason is obvious: television production is a pretty boring process. Yes, you occasionally get to see Nicholas Courtney have a mini-tanty or Sylvester McCoy trip over a shrub, but more often you find yourself watching fifteen minutes of a static TARDIS sitting in a quarry because the second unit are waiting for the right light, or a lengthy close-up of the life draining out of an actor’s face while they wait for a special effect.

Sylvester McCoy’s regeneration scene is a different matter. Included as a stand-alone extra on The Collection: Season 24, it was the first thing I watched when mine arrived in the post, and I was glued to it.

Essentially, for the first time ever, this is a back-to-basics attempt to recreate the very first regeneration: a full frame high angle shot of the actor’s face mixed in with the new actor’s face with a bit of technical jiggery-pokery blurring the join – only, this time, it is not two different actors, but the same actor playing two different Doctors, so they are trying to line up the exact same face (though, because the first face is the wrong face, they hope to disguise it with the aforementioned jiggery-pokery and some eyebrow make-up).

Also, since 1966 they have somehow forgotten how to make this effect workable, because they have decided to do it with the camera at an absurd and unflattering from-the-chin angle completely zoomed into McCoy’s face. It’s partly the result of trying to do a single continuous shot from the moment Kate O’Mara enters the TARDIS, but once they’ve had three attempts at that fairly simple camera movement they’re stuck with it: the third take is the one and McCoy is told ‘just hold your position there Sylv’ while hands whip in to remove the last vestiges of the sixth Doctor and I, 35 years too late, scream at them to do another take and move the camera in rather than zoom, because whereas lining up two faces for a fairly wide-angle lens is a realistic proposition, lining up the same face while fully zoomed In requires an impossible level of precision. They assume that leaving McCoy lying there and whipping the wig off him will be fine, but an infinitesimal movement is enough to bring the faces wildly out of line, so by the time the make-up people have vigorously scrubbed the Colin Baker out of McCoy’s eyebrows they didn’t stand a chance.

What follows is a strange, mostly off-screen ballet of a production team trying to get two shots to line up, the frozen Colin-Baker-McCoy flashing up in double exposure every few seconds to remind us how impossible this task is, while McCoy is instructed to move his face this way or that and hands prod his face about in a futile attempt to try and help. As the technical car crash unfolds, there’s something hypnotic about the vulnerable figure of McCoy lying on the studio floor surrounded by this chaos. Eventually he gently suggests that if he could see what they were asking him to do he might have a better chance, which results in hasty agreement and a scurry to get a monitor into a position that he might be able to see. But for the most part he is impassive, professionally holding the same expression until they get the shot they need; it’s like a macrocosm of the turmoil he has let himself in for in the years ahead, both in the studio and beyond it. Poignantly, he begins the take dressed as the man who has just been a casualty of the same madness.

Next: ‘if you put one of everything along the bottom, I think your tips’ll go up…’

Special Features #7: Don’t Shoot The Pianist

Posted on by James Lark

Alternate soundtracks are not uncommon in the film world, but on Doctor Who, given the constraints of budget and (even moreso) time, it’s hardly surprising that directors tend to stick with their composers. A couple of unusual instances, however, give us a chance to experience stories with different musical approaches – always an interesting way to see familiar material in a new way, but in both of these cases an invaluable experience in its own right.

Jonathan Gibbs’ score for The Mark of the Rani is one of the very best Doctor Who soundtracks from the period, one that evokes Saturday teatime drama and, apart from some synth sounds to accompany the Rani’s technological interference, complements the period setting with a largely ‘real instrument’ feel that sets the score apart from those around it (Gibbs explains that there was almost an unwritten rule that the Radiophonic Workshop weren’t in the business of imitating real instruments, not least given the proximity of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the same building).

But Gibbs’ score was actually a bit of a rush job, commissioned to replace a half-finished score by John Lewis, not because Lewis’ score was deemed unsuitable but because he died before it was finished. That said, a whole episode’s worth of the first score was recorded, plus a couple of cues for episode two, which is what you can now hear on the alternative soundtrack (on The Collection: Season 22 (Blu-ray). Lewis hadn’t written for Doctor Who before, and it shows a bit – unlike the development of themes and leanings toward leitmotif that were de rigueur for soundtracks by the mid-80s, Lewis relies more on stings and atmosphere, with rising motifs at points of dramatic tension giving it a slightly repetitive feel. He is also rather dependent on synth sounds over harmony, often relying on the kind of monophony that was more in fashion in the Pertwee era for effect. When you reach episode two and the Lewis fragments at the start give way to Gibbs’ familiar music, you can feel the whole production lift.

It’s more than possible that the shortcomings of Lewis’ score were evident at the time – after all, there was a whole episode’s worth of music in the bag, somebody could simply have finished it off (there’s a precedent in Meglos, which radically changes sound-world when a new composer takes over from episode two onwards). John Lewis’ family were paid for the work he had done, but I suspect the production team saw an opportunity to bring in something superior. However, there is some correlation between the two scores, for example the ‘English pastoral’ feel of the opening (a less obvious choice than you’d imagine when you look at the usual style of Radiophonic Workshop composers) and the snare drum taking on a railway-inspired ‘diddly dum’ in the cue leading up to the cliffhanger – similarities which hint at the input director Sarah Hellings might have had when discussing the music with composers.

The opportunity to watch Paradise Towers with the score David Snell wrote for it (either on the DVD or The Collection: Season 24), which on this occasion was rejected, is even more valuable: not because it’s especially successful (it isn’t), but because it allows us to see just how much Keff McCulloch brought to the party. If John Lewis’ score feels a little old fashioned then that’s even more the case with Snell’s work, a ponderous series of cues that might have been at home in some of Peter Davison’s bleaker stories, but even in those days would have felt a little bland in the shadow of Howell, Kingsland and Limb.

The replacement score shows just how much of a gargantuan leap Doctor Who’s music was undergoing in the last few years of the programme. McCulloch’s music has occasionally been unfairly maligned by people who reckon it has aged badly (though I’ve never heard those people complain about the barrage of blips and squeals that Malcolm Clarke and Dudley Simpson gifted the early 70s); in fact, he brought a radically new sensibility to Doctor Who scoring. He heaves it into the late 80s, taking full advantage of the rich new samples available, and writes with a startlingly bold approach to dissonance, bitonality, and the use of noise. He also takes a truly cinematic approach to scoring, providing a clear sense of location and shape – something we take for granted now, but which was a rarity on television in the late 80s. Paradise Towers is not the best example of his work – and he wrote the whole thing in a couple of weeks, for goodness’ sake – but it’s vastly more effective than what it replaced, and points the direction towards even greater things to come. Just as the writers in the last three years of classic Who would meet and share ideas, you get the sense of the programme’s composers pushing each other onto greater and better things, as Dominic Glynn continues to take his writing to new heights and Mark Ayres give Doctor Who the most sustained musical development the show has ever had.

In fact, there’s another alternative score experience available in from Mark Ayres, in the demos he wrote to scenes from Remembrance of the Daleks (watch them on the DVD of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy), which provide insights into what he bring to the programme when he was employed on the basis of the same demos (and which also use themes that would pop up some time later in 30 Years in the TARDIS). This also gives us another opportunity to appraise McCulloch’s contribution (in this instance, whilst Ayres’ gift for melody, atmosphere and timing are all abundantly evident, I reckon the McCulloch is still the more effective underscore).1

But Paradise Towers remains the only complete story available with an entirely different score. Whilst it is generally accepted that the story itself fails to meet its potential due to some flawed casting, misjudged performances and bad lighting, comparison of the soundtracks shows us that it did, at very least, get the right composer.

Next: ‘I’m just going to lift your head up then drop it. Well, not DROP it…’

  1. There’s a similar option to see a scene from The Horns of Nimon set to a demo by Peter Howell (not his best work, by his own admission), though in this case the difference between the two is a whole universe apart. ↩︎

Special Features #8: The Brink of Disaster

Posted on by James Lark

However highly you rate The Trial of a Time Lord (and I rate a lot of it very highly indeed), you won’t deny that the adventure on screen pales in comparison to what was going on behind the scenes. The Trial of a Time Lord gave us larger-than-life characters like Sil and The Valeyard, but couldn’t come up with anything to rival the blinkered, single-minded villainy of Michael Grade, the frothing vitriol of Ian Levine, the bizarre spectacle of writing partners Pip and Jane Baker (Richard Marson calls them ‘the Fanny and Johnnie Cradock of Doctor Who), or the waxen, staring faces of the members of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society on a mission to shoot down their own favourite show (just imagine if one of them actually managed to get their hands on it!).

The Trial of a Time Lord climaxes in a surreal fantasy landscape of Dickensian nightmares, but it can’t hold a candle to much of the utterly bizarre TV coverage of the whole sorry affair1, to say nothing of the outlandish horror that is Doctor In Distress.2

The full drama and horror of all of this is unflinchingly depicted in Trials and Tribulations (on The Trial of a Time Lord: The Ultimate Foe (DVD) and The Collection: Season 23 (Blu-ray). The DVD range has given us a great many documentaries of the highest quality, and even before The Collection started giving whole season overviews you could find each era covered with admirable detail and style, gathering the thoughts of many of the key players and telling the story with a wealth of archive footage. But this one has the edge as it is simply one of the most turbulent and, frankly, strange episodes in the entire history of the show. Bits of it sound utterly traumatic, but that makes for excellent entertainment. It also features one of the most heroic Doctors at his most heroic: Colin Baker emerges from the whole sorry situation with dignity intact (which is saying something, given his reluctant involvement in the aforementioned venture into charity pop nightmare).

For the ultimate dramatic journey, watch it straight after Celebration, a look back at Doctor Who‘s 20th anniversary celebrations on The Five Doctors special edition DVD or The Collection: Season 20 Blu-ray, which gives a sense of just how beloved and successful Doctor Who was a mere year or so before its ignominious fall from grace.

Next: “a repetitive quality which tends towards monotony has crept in…”

  1. We are, of course, spoiled by the DVD and Blu-ray range when it comes to how much contemporary footage we are able to review. Spoiled, and occasionally scarred. I blogged about this when I first bought The Trial of a Time Lord on DVD, and it remains a wonderful, indescribable treat fourteen years on. ↩︎
  2. Doctor in Distress is itself an essential special feature and one which I have enjoyed again and again and again. The perfect accompaniment to any 60th anniversary shindig, though do remember to leave room on your playlist for its natural musical companion. ↩︎

Special Features #9: The Wall of Lies

Posted on by James Lark

Footage from Doctor Who conventions is, to be brutally honest, of variable quality, both technically and in terms of content. This is not to criticise the good folk who did a highly impressive job of getting the Doctor Who convention thing off the ground in the first place, but in the sanitised 21st century where all things Doctor Who have a carefully protected slickness to them, the wobbly video footage from last century’s gatherings can creak a little.

And yet, and yet… there’s an honesty to what’s preserved in these archives that we wouldn’t get from the overproduced present, as well as an anarchic quality that, when placed in the right hands, can yield absolute gold. And you don’t get more anarchic, or any righter, than the hands of the Fourth Doctor himself, Thomas Stewart Baker. I’m not denying the charms of a Katy Manning, or a McCoy and Aldred double act. But nobody owns the stage like Tom Baker, and nobody else can talk like him; he is perhaps the only Doctor Who celebrity (at least since Jon Pertwee died) to whom you could apply the label raconteur.

When I first watched these convention excerpts I was surprised by the fact that sometimes the stars were just announced and left to wander on by themselves, but any potential awkwardness is swept away when the giant (in every sense) form of Baker strolls on, sometimes wearing a coat and clutching a plastic bag as if he’s just walked in off the street and, grinning from ear to ear, begins to regale the audience with (it would appear) pretty much anything that pops into his head. He is effortlessly charming, occasionally savage (‘the lecherous old bags!’), unashamedly smutty (he knows his audience), verbose, absurd, and effortlessly turns out phrases that most writers would labour over for hours. And he is, it goes without saying, endlessly, brilliantly, quotably funny.

So number 9 on my countdown of best special features is The Panopticon Archive: Tom Baker 1997, to be found on The Collection: Season 17 (Blu-ray). I could just have easily chosen other appearances, but he is on particularly dazzling form here, spinning a yarn about ironing, John Lewis, The Royal Academy andl an encounter at his own gravestone, all the while ruminating on his favourite topics (God, religion and death), before he announces that he has written a book and charmingly fields questions from the justifiably delighted crowd.

Is any of it true? The odd detail, perhaps. It doesn’t really matter when you’re having this much fun – and, when a voice (which it turns out is that of Archivist Supreme Richard Bignell) asks how much of his book should be believed, Baker gives the perfect response.

Blissful, unmissable stuff. And if this isn’t the last time Tom Baker crops up on this list, you shouldn’t be too surprised.

Next: ‘somebody just said in my ear “I think that’s enough on Doctor Who“…’

Special Features #10: The Death of Doctor Who

Posted on by James Lark

Endgame on Doctor Who The Collection: Season 26 (Blu-ray) and Survival (DVD) / The Seven Year Hitch on Doctor Who: The Movie (Blu-ray and special edition DVD)

Peter Cregeen, one-time Head of Series for BBC drama, is afraid that he cancelled Doctor Who.

Endgame begins with Peter Cregeen, one-time Head of Series for the BBC, diffidently but not without pride confessing that it was his decision to ‘rest’ Doctor Who in 1989, précising the statement with ‘I’m afraid…’ in the manner of a reluctant teacher explaining to a naughty pupil that there has to be a punishment and he couldn’t change that even if he wanted to. He comes across as more judicious and empathetic than many BBC executives who have made pronouncements on the cancellation of Doctor Who (epitomised, obviously, by Michael Grade), but even so, his reasoning doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny: his claim that the programme had ‘clearly run out of steam’ looks even more patently wrongheaded now that it sits on the Season 26 Blu-ray, a collection of stories that demonstrate that Doctor Who in 1989 was doing anything but running out of steam.

Other contributors theorise about the reasons for the discrepancy between the attitude of BBC bureaucrats and what the show was actually achieving; Ben Aaronovich jovially declares that everyone at the Beeb hated sci-fi, a claim borne out by any inspection of TV schedules from the period. But as the documentary revisits the last three years of the ‘classic’ series, Andrew Cartmel’s vision and the talents who helped realise it, you are left feeling that the real problem was surely that anyone with decision-making powers had stopped watching it altogether. The closest we get to any admission of the kind is Creegan saying that nobody had any idea what to do with it. File under imagination, lack of.

Sylvester McCoy fairly convincingly green screened into Mike Tucker's design for a new TARDIS console room.

It’s pretty galling stuff for any fan of the McCoy era, well-trodden though these grievances are, but as if that wasn’t infuriating enough, the documentary then takes you through what might have been. A lot of it is speculation – who might have been the next producer, the next script editor, who could have written for the next season – but as Cartmel and Aaronovich detail ideas they’d been discussing and narrate story beats and character ideas, they build a tantalising picture of the-season-that-was-stolen-from-us, backed up by mocked-up titles, illustrations and design ideas, all the evidence suggesting that we were robbed of the chance to see a team at the height of their creative and imaginative powers continue a run of top-tier Doctor Who. For all that the documentary ends in the positive glow of the reinvigorated 21st century series, it’s always going to be bittersweet when the executives trumpeting their success are cut from the same cloth as the ones who couldn’t see what was right under their noses 15 years earlier. (The poignancy of this is further highlighted by the fact that the whole thing is narrated by David Tennant.)

For full pathos, watch it in tandem with The Seven Year Hitch, Ed Stradling’s excellent documentary about the journey towards the 1996 TV Movie which raised the bar considerably for special features on its release in 2010. From the vantage point of the present we know that TV Movie turned out to be a dead end as far as the show’s future was concerned, and in 1996 it was more than disappointing for this young fan with unrealistic expectations, but as you hear about the litany of obstacles that faced everyone involved in the production you begin to realise that it’s a miracle that we got any TV Movie at all, let alone one that, for all its shortcomings, continues to have an impact on Doctor Who today. When producer Philip Segal ends the documentary with a wan smile saying that you should follow your dreams because they’ll happen one day ‘even if it’s not in the way you expected’, there is a sense that he, too, was lucky to come out of his brush with Doctor Who with his sanity intact.

Next up: ‘her eyes gleaming and her dentures percussing with glee…’