Methods for Evading Deaths, Green and Blue

I was in the mood for a Third Doctor story so this past week I watched The Green Death again. I think this Doctor Who serial might make interesting companion viewing to John Ford's 1941 film How Green Was My Valley which was also about Welsh coal miners. Ford didn't see fit to include giant space maggots, though.

I often think about how zombies seem to represent a repressed fear of or resentment for the homeless. There's something similarly evocative about unstoppable, repulsive maggots springing from the same terrible subterranean chambers where often politically inconvenient human beings toil their lives away. 1970s politics are very present in this serial which sees a group of environmentalist bohemian academics forming an unlikely and tenuous alliance with the coal miners.

There's something you wouldn't see to-day and it's obviously a bit of a strain even on the show. Such an alliance might represent a better future liberals, though. They're united against a conspicuous agent of globalism, a company called Global Chemicals, who are competing with the bohemian academics for a way to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, only Global Chemicals is doing it with dangerous green sludge that produces massive, unbiodegradable waste.

Enter Jo Grant (Katy Manning), whose last serial this is, and the Brigadier (Nicholas Courtney). The latter has an interesting dramatic placement here as a U.N. officer. He represents globalism, too, in another way, and is initially disposed to be an ally to Global Chemicals. But Jo is already smitten by Professor Jones, played by Manning's real life boyfriend at the time, Stewart Bevan. I wonder if his parents ever considered naming him Steven Bevan.

Jones is more or less the leader of the bohemian academics called the "Nuthutch" who are busy developing alternative fuels and meat substitutes. They're also all musicians and artists on the side and impress our heroes later with their taste in wine. They seem to represent a shorthand for a Beat ideal though the disconnect between academic elite and working class interests, apparently absent here, had been partially responsible for turning Jack Kerouac into a bitter old man.

But where's the Doctor (Jon Pertwee) for all this? Disappointed that Jo didn't want to join him on an alien adventure in the TARDIS, he goes off alone to a dangerous blue world to retrieve what he somewhat redundantly describes as a "blue sapphire".

He gets his olive jacket shredded for his trouble but I much prefer the outfit he's wearing when he does show up in Wales, a blue velvet coat with red piping, a blue ruffled shirt, and a red bow tie he wears under the collar.

The first thing he does, though, is to trade it for overalls to go down in the mine to rescue Jo, showing a willingness to get into the thick of things. Now there's an ideal for us all to aspire to--a man who recognises the value of aesthetic taste who also gets his hands dirty.

If I'm throwing any shade at Professor Jones it must be remembered this is the serial where Jo decides to trade her life with the Doctor for a life with the younger man--the man she directly describes to the Doctor as being like, "a younger you." I think there are a few fans who support the theory this may have played into the Doctor's subsequent regenerations being younger. But by the time the elderly Jo briefly reunites with a very young Eleventh Doctor on The Sarah Jane Adventures she still doesn't seem to regret going off and marrying the human. Maybe this played into the Doctor giving up on being a youngster for a bit and becoming Twelve.

Mutants versus Colonists

Still in a Third Doctor mood, I last week watched The Mutants, a Doctor Who serial from 1972. It'd been quite some time since I last watched it and I think I enjoyed it more this time. Probably Three's most controversial serial, it deals with issues of colonisation and the harmful exploitation of a native population.

Salman Rushdie may or may not have had the serial specifically in mind when he referred to Doctor Who in The Satanic Verses;

It seemed to him, as he idled across the channels, that the box was full of freaks: there were mutants - 'Mutts' - on Dr Who, bizarre creatures who appeared to have been crossbred with different types of industrial machinery: forage harvesters, grabbers, donkeys, jackhammers, saws, and whose cruel priest-chieftains were called Mutilasians

Aside from the term "Mutts", though, this description doesn't fit The Mutants or any other specific Doctor Who episode, instead being part of the general, exhaustingly sarcastic, impressionistic tirade that characterises the book. It's the kind of vague stab in the dark Rushdie often makes to establish his feelings on a topic he doesn't seem to have formed a coherent argument about (I'm not a big fan of the book). There's nothing called a "Mutilasian" in The Mutants but the plot involves mutations among a humanoid species which seem to have resulted from tampering with the ecosystem by "Overlords" from Earth.

This was still during the period when the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) was exiled on (more or less) contemporary Earth but it was late in that period and he was starting to make a few trips in the TARDIS again courtesy of the Time Lords who allowed him to travel now and then to carry out specific missions. In this case, the Time Lords also send him a hard green egg.

So he and Jo (Katy Manning) travel to the future and the distant space station orbiting Solos, the alien world, to try to find the one person for whom the egg will open. In charge of the space station is a man referred to as the Marshal (Paul Whitsun-Jones), a standard authoritative madman. But I like to think his cruelty is born of his efforts to keep himself insensible of what's occurring on the planet.

The Solonians are turning into giant killer crustaceans, mutants, referred to by the Marshal as "Mutts" with the quality of a racial slur. I'm reminded of Things Fall Apart or other stories about the experience of a colonised population and the particular difficulties faced by individuals who have one foot in the indigenous culture and another in that of the coloniser. This seems to be the intended metaphor for about half the serial until the Doctor, running for his life (as usual) on the planet runs into a scientist named Sondergaard (John Hollis--Lando's bald assistant from Empire Strikes Back).

Presumed dead by the Overlords, Sondergaard has secretly been researching the mutants and together he and the Doctor discover that the mutations are actually part of a natural cycle which the Overlords have prematurely triggered. So much for allegory. Unless what the story is really talking about is something closer to the idea behind the Prime Directive on Star Trek--how it's important to allow civilisations to advance technologically at their own pace. Here, the disruption takes on a physical manifestation.

In another thing reminiscent of Star Trek, the Earth humans are noticeably made up of a diversity of races--among the guards are several black men and there's even an East Asian man at the end. This was long before the quota policy the BBC has to-day so this was likely a deliberate attempt to show an Earth advanced beyond its racial and ethnic divisions. Even so, all the principals are played by white actors except for one of the guards who changes sides to help the Doctor and Jo, a black man named Cotton. He's played by an actor named Rick James--no, not the one you're thinking of--whose career as an actor was short lived. Which may have something to do with the fact that he wasn't very good at it--his performance justly received bad reviews. It seems like it's only been in recent years that British television has had a sizeable enough pool of black actors for casting directors to be discerning but even now there are only so many of the calibre of Idris Elba and Pearl Mackie. To meet quotas, Doctor Who still often has to settle for the likes of Tosin Cole or Samuel Anderson (though, to be fair, Bradley Walsh is also terrible). But the black population of the UK is up to three percent--with over a million in London--so it's at least easier to find good black actors than it was in the 70s.

The best parts of The Mutants are scenes where the Doctor is working with another scientist--Sondergaard on the planet and a guy named Jaeger on the station, whom the Doctor amusingly outwits a few times. Jaeger's played by Czechoslovak actor George Pravda who would later appear in the Fourth Doctor serial The Deadly Assassin. His thick accent does nothing to diminish his entertaining performance as a surprisingly complex character. He's masterminding the project that's ruining Solos but he's clearly unhappy with it and is continually frustrated by the Marshal's demands. There's a sense of respect between he and the Doctor even though it's kind of fun seeing the Doctor make a complete jackass out of him.

Twitter Sonnet #1261

A standing bow adorns the copper keep.
Oppressive fluff obscures the nasal flow.
Through flower buds the sleeping humans creep.
Surrounding shapes emit a pretty glow.
Behind the traded glass a story changed.
Reclaiming sets from yellow dust, a ghost.
Behind the fresher eyes the spirit ranged.
A painted screen provides a welcome host.
A liquid sheet of falling metal rained.
Absorbed in cloudy streets the sky descends.
Assertive steps presage the walking stained.
Receptive moulds incite aggressive bends.
Galactic fingers point to times of night.
Octagonal resorts endorse the light.

One Hundred Years of Three

So to-day is Jon Pertwee's one hundredth birthday. I knew it was coming so I decided to watch a nice long serial from his era of Doctor Who. I settled on the seven episode serial The Ambassadors of Death which ran from late March to early May in 1970. The third serial from Pertwee's first season as the Third Doctor, it's the only one from that season I hadn't seen more than once and I'd never seen the fully colourised version that was released in 2012. As always, the colourising is impressive though sometimes the orange spots on people's skins look a bit bright.

It's certainly the weakest of Three's first season though it's competing with three outstanding serials--Spearhead from Space, The Silurians, and Inferno. Inferno remains the only serial that's ever actually given me nightmares but the creepy astronauts in Ambassadors of Death are pretty good, too.

The faceless astronauts from the Tenth and Eleventh era episodes like "Silence in the Library" and "The Impossible Astronaut" owe a debt to these original ambassadors. But The Ambassadors of Death also has its influences. Doctor Who from the beginning was a descendent of the Quatermass serials. Few so clearly show the Quatermass influence as The Ambassadors of Death, focusing as it does on a rocket base and a mysterious accident befalling one rocket mission that turns out to have been caused by alien interference. There might also have been some influence from Marooned, the John Sturges movie released the previous year (and featured on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 under the title of Space Travellers). It's one of the reasons the first season of the Third Doctor era feels a world apart from the last season of the Second Doctor era which featured a serial, The Seeds of Death, in which the Doctor and his companions make a similar Earth rocket journey that feels more Frau im Mond than NASA.

Now Pertwee is obliged to exchange his velvet coat for realistic safety gear and mission control has Ronald Allen as a slightly more emotionally vulnerable version of Gregory Peck's character in Marooned.

Allen's performance still kills me--I love his subtle jaw wag as he seems to allow each line to pass his lips with forlorn savour. He certainly has "soap opera" written all over him and he compares oddly with Pertwee, who's always excellent.

Pertwee in his first season gave a kind of performance I hadn't seen on the show before. He clearly spent some time working out ways he could communicate outside the dialogue. I suppose you could say he chews scenery but it always feels natural and refreshing the way he'd wait before replying to a question by thinking a moment, bouncing his fist off a desk or pacing. You always got the sense of him really putting a question through his mind before formulating an answer. It also helped contribute to the impression of him as a dandy intellectual. Here's a man who sees value in taking his time.

There's also a fair amount of James Bond influence on display. When his companion, Liz (Caroline John), is asked to explain how she was captured, she wryly replies, "I ran into an old friend."

Ultimately, the serial meanders a bit much and the plot about military rogues hijacking alien ambassadors to potentially rob Fort Knox or somewhere like that is a bit thin--though I did like the shady mercenary character Reegan (William Dysart) who seems as willing to help the Doctor as anyone else. The aliens themselves work great and I love shots of them in their space suits solemnly approaching on a blinding, sun drenched road.

Twitter Sonnet #1253

The early bird became a feathered worm.
A tropic desk produced a ruler's inch.
The apple tree produced throughout the term.
And ev'ry day we saw the waiting finch.
The deepest lizards found the surface man.
A helmet hid a darkened mask beneath.
A monster bade Atlantis quit the pan.
Infernos dream of crossing summer heath.
The astronauts delivered faces down.
In time the colour turned for older tape.
A modest crop became a silver crown.
A hero wore a velvet coat and cape.
His speedy yellow car escaped the field.
But time and space the Third would never yield.

Only Fur can be Seen in the Jungle

DOCTOR: "Well, Jo? Do I pass?" JO GRANT: "You'll do. In a pinch." Get a room, you two. It's not clear why the Spiridons, the indigenous inhabitants of the world featured in Planet of the Daleks, must wear these furry purple cloaks. They're naturally invisible but it seems like they could've been forced to wear something much duller by their Dalek enslavers. I'm not really complaining, it looks really cosy.

This six part Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) Doctor Who serial from 1973 was written by Dalek creator Terry Nation, the first he'd written since the First Doctor era. As part of a larger sequence of linked serials that began with the six part Frontier in Space, the characteristic differences in Nation's writing are marked. Planet of the Daleks has been called a reworking of the first Dalek serial, The Daleks, written by Nation, and there are many reminiscent elements of that serial, welcome ones in my opinion.

I love how much the flora and fauna of the alien planet impact the story, for example. Alien planets too often become interchangeable quarries, here the Doctor, Jo, and their Thal allies must contend with spores that cause irremovable grime to spread over their targets and sinister, glowing eyes and growls from the dark.

Jo (Katy Manning), having been hit by one of those spores, is saved by a floating medicine bowl that turns out to be a Spiradon sans purple fur. The element of fantastic in the serial has a fabulous late 60s/early 70s quality and I do love it so.

When the Doctor and some Thals infiltrate the Dalek base, he throws the purple fur over a double breasted, burgundy velvet sport coat and bow tie with muted green and burgundy. I love that he takes a moment to change into this outfit at the beginning of the serial when the TARDIS is malfunctioning and running out of air. He changes from an all green outfit that would've provided perfect camouflage, even if it was too dressy, into something that sticks out like a sore thumb. But wear the same outfit for two serials? Three knows that would certainly never do. The Daleks would never understand such sartorial sensitivity. Well, we heard in the Tenth Doctor era a Dalek proclaim they have no concept of elegance.

Many developments in Planet of the Daleks depend on the non-Daleks making decisions influenced by love and fear, emotions the Daleks deem useless. The Doctor gets captured in a hasty, obviously futile attempt to save Jo from getting blasted and he's imprisoned with a Thal soldier. The two have a nice conversation about bravery which would be echoed later in the Twelfth Doctor era.

"Courage isn't just a matter of not being frightened, you know," the Doctor says to the Thal who's worried about controlling his own fear. "It's being afraid and doing what you have to do anyway."

This serial also marks the first time the Thals, the ancient enemies of the Daleks, appeared on the show since the first Dalek serial. Sadly no longer wearing their skimpy foam Y outfits. Wouldn't it be great if they brought those back in the new series? I might as well dream big.

Daleks Another Day

Watching Doctor Who on BritBox has been full of surprises for me lately. This time I watched the 1972 Third Doctor serial Day of the Daleks and discovered it was the special DVD version from 2011. Not only were the special effects radically altered but all the voices of the Daleks were changed to feature a performance from Nicholas Briggs, the man who's voiced the Daleks since the revived era began in 2005 and who's voiced them for the audio plays even longer than that (for some reason he was credited as "Nick Briggs" for the recent New Years special). For the most part, I like the special edition updates. I was on the fence at first regarding the replacement of the Dalek voices but I went back and listened to my old copy and have to admit replacing them was a good call.

According to the TARDIS Wiki:

The voices of the Daleks were redubbed by the revival-era voice actor of most Daleks, Nicholas Briggs. Having refined his portrayal of the Daleks to a degree of high confidence with his performance, his renditions of their voices are much smoother and harsher than the somewhat tentative delivery of the original voice artists, Oliver Gilbert and Peter Messaline. As this was the first serial in several years to feature the Daleks, both were new to the role of providing Dalek voices: neither of them had previously worked on the series, and they had difficulty cementing their portrayals. Producr Barry Letts decided not to use them in this role again, and for the remainder of the Pertwee era Michael Wisher and Roy Skelton became the main voice artists portraying the Daleks.

The original voices are a clipped monotone, the performers evidently failing to understand Daleks need to sound urgently peeved at all times. Briggs has that down to a science.

I can give or take most of the new effects, particularly the establishing shots of future Earth, but the new laser effects were sorely needed.

Originally the actors just pointed the guns and there was a sound effect. It's almost like the show was filmed in the understanding that there would be a special edition one day to complete it. I don't even mind the extra shot the Doctor (Jon Pertwee) takes at an Ogron in the special edition.

I never understood why the Ogrons, a brutal alien warrior race in service of the Daleks, never appeared again after the Third Doctor era. Of course they've been in audio plays and other expanded media but never again on the show. They're pretty effectively menacing and their makeup and costumes don't seem to be as restrictive as that of the Sontarans or the Cybermen. I always suspected Peter Jackson modelled the Uruk Hai in his Lord of the Rings movies after the Ogron.

The Third Doctor earns his reputation as a dandy in this serial. He spends a lot of time lounging and drinking and commenting on wine. The first part of the serial has him sampling wine from a diplomat's cellar while waiting for a ghost in a Georgian manor. In later parts of the serial, he's captured in the future by the Controller (Aubrey Woods) who eventually permits the Doctor and Jo (Katy Manning) to lounge about and drink wine. It's oddly comforting to watch Pertwee relaxing.

The Controller is one of the more interesting one off characters from the Third Doctor era. Woods plays him almost exactly like the Master with a broad, sadistic fervour. But after he wins Jo's confidence we learn that he may not have been entirely dishonest with her as he explains to the Doctor that he only serves the Daleks because he sees no hope in any alternative. Ironically, he ends up being more helpful than the guerillas who are directly fighting the Daleks, who turn out to be accidentally their own worst enemies thanks to a time loop. I wonder if Louis Marks meant to make the somewhat unusual point that subtle political manoeuvring can sometimes be more effective than direct attack.

Monster Enough and Time

To-day's Jon Pertwee's birthday so I thought I'd revisit my favourite Third Doctor serial, The Time Monster. Serialised in six parts in 1972, it served as the finale for Pertwee's third season on Doctor Who. For me, it has it all--comedy and horror, time travel shenanigans, the Doctor's strident weirdness played against the Brigadier's long suffering incredulity, and one of Jo Grant's more impressively flamboyant costumes. All this and Ingrid Pitt, too.

One of my all time favourite actresses, Pitt also appeared in a Fifth Doctor serial but she's so much better here as Queen Galleia of Atlantis. Though she doesn't show up until the fifth part of the six part serial when she and the Master (Roger Delgado) have a power play romance that seems like it could've filled a full serial.

She and Pertwee don't share any dialogue (if you'd like to see them working together, check out the entertaining Amicus anthology horror film The House that Dripped Blood) but she has a nice moment with "Jo Jo Grant".

"It's just Jo," says Jo, finally correcting an error made by the King (George Cormack) when the Doctor introduced her as "Jo--Jo Grant". She receives a wig and dress in Atlantis which are, in her own word, "Groovy", though she has to trade in the improbably badass boots she'd been wearing for most of the serial.

Jo is arguably the Doctor's meekest companion--possibly a choice by Katy Manning since she now also plays the bold adventuress Iris Wildthyme in the audios. She's good as Wildthyme, and just about unrecognisable. All of Jo's self-assertion seems to be in her wardrobe and she seems eager to strike a pose to emphasise it.

Pertwee was a very pose-y actor, too, though he did it less and less towards the end of his tenure. But I like how he fits himself into a little chair in this episode when he explains to a young man, Stuart (Ian Collier), he's not sure if he knows how to reverse his accelerated ageing.

Stuart is an assistant in a lab run by the Master--posing as a Greek physicist--and a young woman named Ruth Ingram (Wanda Moore). Stuart and Ruth have a lot of coy banter about Women's Lib, a frequently recurring topic during the Third Doctor era. During an intriguing sequence where the Doctor becomes dispersed in the Time Vortex, he communicates with Jo in the TARDIS telepathically and we can hear a number of whispering voices chattering. The Doctor says these voices are his subconscious--one of them is a woman's voice. Jodie Whittaker in embryo?

I guess a lot of people can't get past the low budget special effects but I find a lot of the weird stuff in this serial very effective, even when it's a man in a white bird costume swinging from a wire. I love the cliffhanger in the second episode where the Master transports the Atlantian priest and we see this great panicked look on the face of the administrator, Dr. Percival (Johm Wyse), just visible through a sort of sun ray effect before the end credits.

I also love the simple gadget the Doctor rigs up with forks and a wine bottle that somehow interferes with the Master's plan. Pertwee was primarily known for comedy before Doctor Who, which makes it surprising his Doctor is probably the least comedic of all. One of the things this serial is best known for is the Doctor and Jo locked in an Atlantean prison and, to quiet her fears, he tells her a story that, like writer Robert Sloman's later serial, The Planet of the Spiders, seems to be influenced by Buddhist philosophy. It's an effective moment and Pertwee sells the authority and tenderness required to make Jo and us contemplate the "daisy-est daisy" and the nature of despair to constrict one's worldview, making things seem worse than they are.

The sequences in the Atlantean labyrinth are also great and have a nice old pulp adventure quality to them. I love the slight sense of awe when the Doctor and Jo finally find the crystal.

And I haven't even mentioned the Minotaur played by David Prowse. This serial really does have everything.

May Daemons

I always like to watch The Daemons in May, the 1971 serial from the Third Doctor era of Doctor Who. Along with The Wicker Man, it's one of the things that best evokes May Day for me. It has atmosphere not unlike The Wicker Man or Blood on Satan's Claw for the way it spends time creating distinct personalities for the people of the small English village where it's set. Also the fact that much of it was shot on film, for so many scenes set outdoors, contributes a lot to the atmosphere with its slightly grimy, shadowy 70s colour feel.

One of the villagers is named Winstanley, which makes me wonder if he was meant as a reference to Gerrard Winstanley, the 17th century leader of the Diggers, one of the radical groups that formed during the English Civil Wars. With the mentions of witch trials and Matthew Hopkins the serial has plenty of 17th century references. I wonder if writers Barry Letts and Robert Sloman were setting up an allegory for the ideological conflicts of 17th century England. One could take the Master (Roger Delgado) as representing the Church of England allied with the Royalists and their belief in a divine right of rulers and episcopacy, especially since the Master poses as a vicar and it's Winstanley who first starts to mistrust him.

If that was the idea, it's kept pretty low key. More prominent than Winstanley is the local witch, Miss Hawthorne (Damaris Hayman), who's pretty charming with her slight lisp desperately trying to warn people of the dangers of tampering with the crypt an archaeologist is excavating at the beginning of the serial. The Doctor's (Jon Pertwee) gentle arguments with her about how everything she considers magic is in fact science are a bit silly. One wonders why the Doctor gets so hung up on semantics if that's really all he thinks there is to it.

The heat barrier around the village is a nice effect. They could've just said there was an invisible barrier but the black stripe on the ground and the sticks and rocks exploding when they hit the air above it underline the hellish flavour to the village's predicament.

I also really like Jo's (Katy Manning) yellow suede pant suit with purple blouse.