Doctor Who A-Z #108: The Horns of Nimon (1979-80)

I’ve seen good Doctor Who during this project, and I’ve seen bad Doctor Who too. But so-bad-it’s-good Doctor Who is trickier to pin down. It’s not just that the likes of The Dominators and The Space Museum are so-bad-they-annoyed-me, it’s more to do with an essential incompatibility between so-bad-it’s-good appreciation and what Doctor Who is. The template for the so-bad-it’s-good movie remains Plan 9 from Outer Space, which achieves this status through its unconvincing special effects, camp melodramatic tone and deranged plot developments. All of these things, you will note, are elements that actual, good Doctor Who can easily embrace. The Three Doctors has all of them in spades, and it unironically works.

The other thing that characterises a so-bad-it’s-good movie is terrible dialogue, and this is where The Horns of Nimon gets off to a promising start. After a long scene in which two space pilots from the planet Skonnos inexplicably fill each other in on the history of their own society, one walks off to check on the cargo. The cargo turns out to be a gang of kids from the planet Anith – including future Blue Peter presenter and disco mum Janet Ellis! – dressed in Adric-style yellow space pyjamas. The guard walks through the door, yells “Weakling SCUM!” at the Anithians, then walks off, job done.

The Anithians are being taken to Skonnos so they can be sacrificed to the Nimon, a bull-headed alien who lives in the centre of a labyrinth and has promised Skonnos’s leader Soldeed marvellous riches in exchange for the youth of their empire. At this point, the heart fair goes through the floor: this is going to be another Doctor Who story based on classical mythology. On the one hand, the characters are going to do exactly what their analogues in Homer or Ovid did, but this isn’t such a drag when the show is cribbing from Nigel Kneale or Mary Shelley. The real problem, as with Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, is that ripping out the gods from stories like this leaves the characters without motivation. There are lots of entities in Doctor Who imposing enough to fill the place of the Greek or Roman pantheon, but the Osirians, the Guardians and the Time Lords try not to sully their hands with stories as bad as this. (Indeed, the only one that works is The God Complex, one of the best stories of the revival years, which takes the absence of gods as its starting point and builds its ideas from there)

In terms of giving characters from Greek myth non-religious motivations, Anthony Read’s script comes up with one smart twist: this minotaur is actually part of a race of minotaurs, and rather than pacify the creature, Soldeed’s programme of sacrifices has actually prepared the ground for an invasion. This is inexplicably thrown away in the middle of episode three, when it would make a killer cliffhanger, and that is unfortunately par for the course in a script that keeps wasting its best innovations. Legendary costume designer June Hudson, for instance, had a fantastic idea for the Nimon – their bull heads would be ceremonial masks, suggesting but never revealing an even more horrific face underneath. This was nixed at too late a stage, meaning that while the Nimon do look fake it’s the fakeness of a bad effect, rather than the uncanny fakeness Hudson was aiming for.

So the Nimon looks cheap, and Doctor Who in general looks cheap now. Even a Time Lord can’t outrun Britain’s late-70s economic stagnation, and the story scheduled to air after this – Douglas Adams’s Shada – would be cancelled entirely due to strikes. But cheapness, as we’ve noted, can be successfully made into part of Doctor Who‘s governing aesthetic. What is less forgivable is how poor Read’s script is. You should feel something for the Anithians, young boys and girls abducted by an occupying empire to be eaten by a monster, but they’re such a dull bunch. Even when we see the Nimon’s larder, full of cryogenically preserved Anithians in plastic cases for it to eat later, the horror of the idea never comes through. It seems instead that the Nimon has found out Anithians are more valuable when they’re in their original packaging.

Read’s script is also terribly constructed, which is worrying considering he’s a former script editor, but one of its worst structural flaws actually creates one of the serial’s two saving graces. For the whole of episode two the Doctor has no role to play in the story, and ends up being separated from the action goofing about with K9 in the TARDIS. Stuck on board the Skonnos ship, Romana instead takes the Doctor’s role, protecting the Anithians and ordering the Skonnos pilots around. It’s a revelation – enough to make you wish we’d got the Romana and K9 spin-off that Warrior’s Gate seemed to be setting up. Without the Doctor, Romana is brash, authoritative and unsentimental, disarmingly comfortable with the idea of simply shooting Soldeed and the Nimon if it comes to that. It is – and I say this as someone who never had a childhood crush on this character – one of the sexiest things in Doctor Who history. If you’ve ever dreamed of having Lalla Ward in knee-high boots and red leather gloves call you a spineless worm, The Horns of Nimon is the Doctor Who story for you.

Forced out of his own series for a week, Tom Baker falls back on the show-offish clowning that makes Season Seventeen divisive. The problem with this season isn’t that it’s funny – humour should always be a colour in Doctor Who‘s palette – but that its humour frequently comes at the expense of the show’s reality. The audience knows the Daleks can’t get up stairs, K9 is a silly idea and it’s unlikely for alien life-forms to resemble ones on Earth, so we duly put it to the back of our mind as we watch. Season Seventeen keeps on making these jokes within the show, and it’s a pain in the neck. The Horns of Nimon‘s nadir comes when the Doctor successfully distracts the Nimon by waving a red rag at it. The zenith, apart from Romana, comes with Graham Crowden.

Ah, Graham Crowden. Think of Doctor Who‘s legendarily hammy guest performances – Joseph Furst in The Underwater Menace, Paul Darrow in Timelash, whatever comes to mind for you. While they have their funny moments, they are essentially egotistical; a guest actor trying to signal their superiority over a bad script, abandoning the regular cast members who have to salvage something in it. Darrow’s performance, in particular, just made me want to give him a clip and tell him to behave himself. But Crowden’s performance as Soldeed is different. For a start, I’m not sure it’s actually bad – at least, not in the sense of undermining the script. When your final scene involves yelling “Fooooools!” while cackling maniacally, there really are only so many thespian approaches you can take. I suppose some of Sharaz Jek’s dialogue is only a hair less melodramatic than this, but The Caves of Androzani has a script that supports Christopher Gable’s decision to play it seriously. Crowden doesn’t, and his choice to ham it up is utterly defensible.

Aside from anything else, there are a couple of moments where Soldeed is consciously funny, and Crowden manages to make that its own distinctive register: his eagerness to take the credit when K9 opens the TARDIS doors, for instance. But we won’t remember him like that, will we? We’ll remember him stalking the corridors of the labyrinth on Skonnos, cooing “Niiii-mon… Niii-mon” in a way that makes it embarrassingly obvious that this interplanetary empire has not yet invented the telephone. The Horns of Nimon is bad Doctor Who. It’s so bad Doctor Who. It’s so-bad-it’s-good Doctor Who, and I can’t wait to watch it again.

Next: The Leisure Hive (1980)

Graham’s Archive – The Horns of Nimon

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