Over the course of nine weeks, the Drama Channel ran a series of 'classic' Doctor Who stories - one for each Doctor, edited together into a single 2-hour omnibus - which, coming so close after the latest series of 'New Who', gave me an excellent opportunity to compare and contrast the two versions of the series. One of the things that has bugged me about the detractors of the new series is the way it's treated as inferior in every way to the original series. Also, in particular, this latest series has copped some flak for being 'overly focused on death and horror'. Personally - and ignoring my personal bête noire, the David Tennant era - I have found the series to be at least on a par with the original, and frequently better... Though I have often expressed the opinion that the stories could be longer - multi-part stories, like the original series, rather than a series of self-contained episodes, vaguely serving a series-long arc. As far as the death angle goes, I thought the series has always had that element and, whether by accident or design, the Drama Channel re-runs have supported what I remember.
It started with the William Hartnell-era story called simply The Aztecs, in which the very first crew of the TARDIS find themselves among people for whom human sacrifice is a common occurrence, and one of their number is mistaken for a goddess. There's at least a couple of fistfights (thankfully not involving Hartnell) and certainly the implication of death by poison and by sacrificial dagger, as well as one character rather dramatically killing himself for reasons of religious observance. Some of the sets are wobbly and the fights are deeply unconvincing (I doubt fight trainers or choreographers were common or easily available in those days), but the story is solid and there are a couple of quite funny moments - such as the Doctor not understanding that asking a woman to share hot chocolate with him amounted to a proposal of marriage. The whole bit about people from a 'more civilised' future trying to change the 'barbaric ancient culture' was a bit obvious, more than a little daft, and clearly doomed to failure, but one must remember that Doctor Who was originally intended to be 'Edutainment', so the examination of Aztec beliefs and a comparison to our own was inevitable.
The second story was Tomb of the Cybermen, in which Patrick Troughton's Doctor gatecrashes an archaeological expedition into the titular tomb... only to find the expedition is more than meets the eye, and the couple funding it have a very deadly hidden agenda. Again, it's quite violent and, while it's difficult to take the Cybermen of that era - or the ridiculously cute Cybermats - at all seriously, there's certainly a lot of implied peril. When the hidden agenda is revealed, things go all kinds of wrong, people die, but the Doctor is eventually able to save the day. Sadly, his companion in this one was one of the 'helpless screamer' variety, and not a patch on the original crew, but the story and supporting cast were pretty good, even if there was a bit of racial stereotyping... The sets were decent, but still pretty wobbly and it was obvious, by this point, Doctor Who was no longer considered 'Edutainment'. This can only be a good thing.
Spearhead from Space was John Pertwee's very dramatic introduction as the Doctor and, while he had been stranded on Earth by the politicians of his homeworld (or rather, the budget cuts and restrictions forced upon it from the top dogs at the Beeb), it still managed to be pretty imaginative and horrific. While I don't find the Autons especially scary, their system of replacing people was a little disturbing, and the 'waxwork' museum was straight out of a horror movie. The only really disturbing thing was this story's early take on the Nestene Consciousness (which only ever returned in the first ever episode of the reboot, Rose, featuring Christopher Ecclestone as the Doctor). Once it had been revealed in its plastic box, it pulsed like some enormous hideous space anus. Its tentacles, when it attacked the Doctor, were a bit rubbish though. I tend to like any episode featuring the Brigadier, so this episode made for a particularly strong intro. It's also notable for the brief glimpse you get of Jon Pertwee's tattoo in the shower scene. Yes, I said 'shower scene'.
While Jon Pertwee's time in the TARDIS - or, more accurately, out of it - tended toward Hammer Horror, it was Tom Baker's era that basically pulled out all the stops, and Pyramids of Mars could easily have functioned well as a pure horror story without any of its sci-fi trappings, with its tale of an ancient 'god' trapped on Mar and plotting its escape. Some of the (remarkably few) special effects were pretty ropey by today's standards, and some plot elements were a little vague (how did an archaeological dig in Egypt wind up inside a Martian prison?) and the Robo-Mummies looked terrible and moved clumsily - no doubt due to the clumsiness of the costume as well as the continued lack of any kind of choreographer. Interesting to see the Doctor disguising himself in one of the mummy costumes... but how did that work, if they were robots? It was a treat to see Elizabeth Sladen - who died back in 2011 - as companion Sarah Jane Smith, particularly when she got to play sniper wearing a pretty white dress in this one.
Peter Davison took over from Tom Baker while I was watching the show as a nipper so, while I still consider Baker to be 'my Doctor', Davison was the one I saw more of until the show started getting re-run. He's a bit of a contentious Doctor, since he was the youngest at the time - about 30 when he first got the role - and was perceived by a former colleague of mine to be a rather weak and pathetic Doctor. Earthshock showed him to be just as distant, arrogant and mercurial as some of the more recent Doctors, particularly in his treatment of Adric. Weirdly, this was a story I had quite strong memories of from the first time I saw it, in its episodic form, though I had completely forgotten the utterly incongruous presence of Beryl Reid in the cast. The scene where a Cyberman walks through a closed door (which had had its molecular structure altered by some sort of beam), only to become trapped part-way when the Doctor connects the spacecraft's antimatter containment system to the door (SCIENCE! This got quite a clever explanation - something along the lines of 'antimatter cannot be contained physically, so computer control constantly adjusts the molecular structure of something-or-other to keep the antimatter contained, so connecting the system to the altered door brought it back to its normal, solid form'). I also remembered to Doctor taking out one of the Cybermen by rubbing Adric's gold badge into its chest (Cybermen, we were told, are allergic to gold). This episode had a clever, if bittersweet finale, in that Adric sacrificed himself to save Earth, inadvertently causing the extinction of the dinosaurs in our distant past. It's also interesting that the series of omnibus episodes as shown a fair bit of the evolution of the Cybermen (that is, their costumes), here in their accordion-chested, moonbooted phase. Of course, for me, the best thing about seeing this story was that, back in the day, I had a massive crush on Nyssa, played by Sarah Sutton.
For many viewers, Colin Baker's appearance as the Doctor following Davison was the beginning of the end for the show. From the harlequin costume/Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat to the increasing wobbliness of the sets, it became obvious that the BBC no longer took the show at all seriously and Vengence on Varos (amusingly referenced in The Five(ish) Doctors) was pretty terrible in a lot of ways. The sight of a topless, oiled-up Jason Connery, chained to a wall as he pretended to be in the throes of torture by some kind of gun dragged on just that little bit too long to be entirely decent, the special effects were lazy (most of the budget must have been spent on the little electric carts the guards drove around in), and the Doctor was basically secondary to the story, with barely any real influence on the outcome. The supporting cast were theoretically good... but seemed to be acting as if they were on stage rather than in front of a camera.
But if the Colin Baker era was the beginning of the end, Sylvester McCoy's time had the death knell ringing in the background the whole time, and it rang loud in Battlefield. With scenes of alien 'knights' with an Arthurian schtick arriving on Earth much like the first batch of Cybertronians in the original live action TransFormers movie (though the effects here were obviously not as polished), a very confused plot involving a convoy of UNIT weapons (though only incidentally), a submerged alien spacecraft and Excalibur, as well as a scene than very nearly proved fatal for Sophie Aldred, rather than just the character she played, it was far from being one of the best stories even of the time. Add the possibility that the Doctor is actually Merlin (can't wait to see if Moffat ever references that!) and a new, grumpy, female Brigadier and you could be forgiven for thinking the story was written as a full-on comedy.
One might expect a retrospective to finish there, but Drama decided to screen Paul McGann's first and - until the 50th Anniversary - only outing as the Doctor, in the terrible, terrible American-made TV movie. I'm glad Sylvester McCoy argued himself a bigger part, as it felt more like a proper handover, but so little of the story actually made sense, and one could make a drinking game out of the number of times McGann had to spout a non-sequitur added to the script simply to remind apparently ADHD US audiences that "that thur mayun ain'tnt hyoomin... he's a ay-leen!", only you'd be paralytic within a few minutes just from his random outbursts of "I have two hearts!". Internal consistency was at an all-time low in this adaptation, and it introduced the idea of the Doctor being half human on his mother's side for no reason whatsoever (I believe this is now referred to as one of the Doctor's many fibs, intended to make it easier for his companion to relate to him. Sadly, his companion was just as implausible... though her daft surgery attire has only comparatively recently been trumped - on a weekly basis - in Body of Proof. I don't necessarily object to the daft resurrection of the Master (it's no more daft than what RTD did in his 2-part swan song), or even Eric Robert's impressively hammy performance, but the idea of the McGuffin within the TARDIS which is capable of destroying the world under certain circumstances, but which - under those same circumstances - will also allow the Master to steal the Doctor's remaining regenerations was very poorly conceived.
So, in the aftermath of that fairly decent little retrospective of original Who, I feel reassured that the style and the content hasn't changed that significantly. It's more polished, the effects are infinitely superior, but the single episode story format really isn't doing it any favours. The original series told a story over the course of, on average, about four half-hour episodes. The new series tries to tell a story over the course of forty-five minutes. Sometimes it succeeds, but far more frequently it could do with more time to really flesh out the situations and the secondary characters.
This year's Christmas special was only fifteen minutes longer than usual, but it felt just about right. The storyline hovered somewhere between Inception, Alien, The Thing and Miracle on 34th Street (the latter three being directly referenced within the story, one way or another) and was certainly an interesting take on the idea of a Christmas special. At first, it seemed a small and intimate tale, along the lines of Matt Smith's first Christmas special, A Christmas Carol, but later hinted at something far bigger and more deadly (the title of the episode was 'Last Christmas', after all) though I felt it did so in a way that belied the greater threat. I'm fairly happy with the way it ended, but I can't help wondering what it had been like if, while riding alone with Santa, when the camera zoomed in on Clara's face, it then zoomed out again to reveal Danny Pink - in his Santa suit - driving the sleigh, offering Clara a very different choice that would have tested her motivation. It would have made for a very different ending, to be sure, but perhaps a more poignant one.
I did like Nick Frost's take on a rather ambiguous Santa Claus (did he exist?), though he reminded me a lot of Richard Attenborough, circa Jurassic Park (or, perhaps more appropriately, the Miracle remake), and it was great to see Dan Starkey out of his Strax makeup.
I now have high hopes for the next series of Doctor Who... as long as the writers can steer clear of having the Doctor continually tell people to "shut up!". If they can also see their way clear to giving us more multi-episode stories with more actual story and setup, and bringing back Michelle Gomez as the Master, I'll be a very happy chappy.
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