Hey everybody, Doctor’s orders, time for your Whovember medicine. We are now past the halfway mark for Classic Who, into the latter half of the Graham Williams era, and this would be the time that a certain Hoopy Frood by the name of Douglas Adams would come on board (after pitching to the show a lot of times before). Let’s dive right into the search for the Key to Time…
Year 15: 1977 to 1978 - The Ribos Operation
Chalk up another Robert Holmes script on here; honestly, it’s remarkable how much of Who’s success in the 70s was pretty much down to him. Last time, I had The Deadly Assassin, definitely one of his darker scripts, well this time he’s in a far more playful mode, far more satirical. It does show that, whilst Who as a whole was on standing orders to lighten up a bit up after the pushback to the Hinchcliffe era, Holmes could adapt to that readily. For starters, although the opening sets up the idea that this season would involve a full quest across the cosmos for an artefact capable of rebalancing Order and Chaos, in a full on Michael Moorcock kind of way, this opening story is relatively low stakes; it’s not a full on alien invasion or whatever that’s going on, it’s a confidence trick on a failed space warlord. That being said, the story makes clear that though these aren’t world-shaking events, what’s happening matters very much on a character level to everyone involved.
In fact, the stand out moment of this whole serial, and perhaps this season as a whole, is one that isn’t super vital to the plot, and nor are the Doctor nor new companion Romana involved in it at all. It’s between two guest characters, Unstoffe, the hapless sidekick of interstellar con-man Garron, and Binro the Heretic, a local of Ribos. Binro has helped Unstoffe escape, and whilst they’re lying low, he reveals why, that he too knows what it’s like to be persecuted. Whereupon Unstoffe decides to repay him in the best way he can; knowing that the beliefs that got Binro ostracised are all true, and having the best first evidence one can have of that, he lets him know the truth. It’s a beautifully done scene, actors Nigel Plaskitt and Timothy Bateson pull it off perfectly; it’s an encapsulation of the point I was making, relatively small stakes for a Doctor Who story, but massive ones for these particular characters.
There’s a lot more to enjoy about this one, including Paul Seed’s gloriously, but appropriately, OTT performance as the Graff Vynda-K, or Iain Cuthbertson as Garron, but I really want to highlight this as Romana’s debut story. Now the character was really cemented as a fan favourite by Lalla Ward’s performance as her second incarnation next season, but Mary Tamm here sets the standard for her perfectly. She’s a real change of pace from pretty much all other companions in that from the word go she’s not at all impressed by the Doctor, correctly having the measure of him as a bit of a screw up of a Time Lord. However, it’s clear that she realises that just because he is a mess of a man, there’s still plenty she can learn from him; it’s more his moral outlook, his way of interacting with the wider universe that makes him more than just someone who barely avoided dropping out of the Prydonian Academy. Tamm brought a lot to the role, it’s such a shame that with Big Finish, they were only able to do the one season with her and Tom before her untimely passing in 2012.
Year 16: 1978 to 1979 - City of Death
Ah, Paris, Je T’aime! Again, this one is a bit of an obvious choice, but when you have the peak of the more lighthearted approach Who was taking at this time, being ghostwritten by the author of that wholly remarkable book The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s hard to argue with something like that. Plus, it’s hard to argue with success; this is the serial that got the highest TV ratings for Doctor Who ever, getting for its final episode 16.1 million viewers, beating many of New Who’s biggest moments! Now admittedly that is because at the time ITV would be going through some strike action, so it was off the air for a good long while, but given that the ratings grew steadily over the course of the serial, it was more than there just being a captive audience. Mind, I wonder if during all this Douglas Adams thought “wow, thank you strikes!” right before his final script for the series, Shada, famously never got finished thanks to similar action at the BBC.
I got to see this on the big screen a while ago, at BFI Southbank, as part of a preview for the Blu Ray box set. It's a great one to experience with a live audience, just being able to share in the laughter at points, as not only is there a tonne of witty dialogue and sight gags (check out how Duggan opens a bottle of wine), the plot is a witty thing as well. The mere idea of an alien force, able to manipulate human history across multiple time periods needing to use that ability, in order to achieve that ultimate goal, to commit art fraud, is just inherently funny. It actually makes a solid point about the commodification of the art world, as few main characters bar the Doctor appreciate the Mona Lisa as a good painting, more as a piece of property, a McGuffin. If you know anything about the real life fraud going on with artworks these days (check out the documentary The Lost Leonardo for a good example), you’ll know it’s not that much of an exaggeration.
This is also Tom Baker at his peak; he is clearly bouncing off the rest of the cast so well, including Julian Glover as Count Scarlioni, and relishing the dialogue. In fact, it’s shown in script notes that he, Lalla Ward, and the others did do a bit of punching up of their dialogue, and it shows with how naturally it all flows. It can all be summed up with the perfect exchange “My dear, I don’t think he’s as stupid as he seems”, “My dear, nobody can be as stupid as he seems”. It’s remarkable that the previous David Agnew script (a pseudonym for the producer and script editor putting something together last minute), The Invasion of Time, was… rather obviously thrown together, but this one, a major reworking of a script by David Fisher, feels so well thought out and complete. That’s the power of Douglas Adams I guess, and having such a game cast and crew... it's no wonder that Doug would later borrow a couple of ideas from this for the first Dirk Gently novel. Oh, and I’d be remiss not to mention how lovely all the running around Paris is.
Next time, we hit the eighties, as we get a new look and sound to the intro, and we also see that Who isn’t quite done with Gothic storylines just yet…
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