The tonal and stylistic gap between The Horns of Nimon and The Leisure Hive is enormous, and in fairness these stories were never meant to air one after the other. Season Seventeen was famously supposed to end with Shada, a six-part Douglas Adams story that was cancelled, half-recorded, after strikes disrupted the production. A whimsical story about retired Time Lords in Cambridge, Shada probably wouldn’t have resembled The Leisure Hive much either, but then had it not gone so disastrously off the rails it might not have forced producer Graham Williams out of the door. Adams, at least, was likely to vacate the script editor’s chair as a result of the meteoric success of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but Williams might have stayed to manage Tom Baker’s final season. Instead, we’ve got a tricky but promising situation, as the potentially rocky departure of the show’s longest-standing lead is smoothed over by the production team who’ll oversee his successor.
Admittedly, not all of them will stick around for as long as incoming producer John Nathan-Turner does. The Leisure Hive is directed by Lovett Bickford, who went so far over budget he was barred from directing another Doctor Who story. Frankly, as I watched the first episode, several other reasons for this dismissal suggested themselves. Most of the first episode of The Leisure Hive deploys the rapidly-edited close-ups that Peter Grimwade would later perfect in Earthshock, but Bickford occasionally uses a Tarkovsky-length take at the most perplexing of moments. Holding on a dull model shot of a spaceship docking makes some kind of sense; this, presumably, was meant to be spectacle. But why does he do the same thing to capture a thrilling scene of the Doctor’s scarf trailing around the TARDIS? What is the reasoning behind the episode’s infamous opening gambit of some deckchairs on a windy beach, which feels like something out of Satantango? The fan myth is that Nathan-Turner wanted to pay tribute to Death in Venice, which now feels like a tasteless joke about his private life. Whatever his merits as a person, there is plenty to admire in Nathan-Turner’s stewardship of the show throughout the 1980s. There’s just also plenty not to admire, and it’s a shame that the worst stuff, in my eyes, will be front-loaded over the next few years.
It’s not a problem, for me, that Nathan-Turner’s early seasons spent so much effort removing the humour that Season Seventeen relied on. That humour is sometimes sublime, but all too often comes at the expense of the viewer’s suspension of disbelief. Even if Season Seventeen had been back-to-back City of Death-level masterpieces, too, there’s no harm in trying something different. I love the Pertwee era, but I also love the seasons produced by Philip Hinchcliffe, which are in large part an attempt to tear down the cosiness and Earthbound biases of Jon Pertwee’s tenure. The thing is, after Hinchcliffe left, the show was under strict instructions not to rely on horror, and now it’s under strict instructions not to rely on comedy. This doesn’t leave much that Doctor Who can safely be.
Russell T Davies once infamously said he preferred Earth as a setting for Doctor Who because “I’m not interested in the Planet Zog”; it’s hard not to think this is exactly the kind of story he had in mind.
The obvious, slightly sarcastic, rejoinder would be that they could try drama. But here we’re getting to my main problem with Season Eighteen in particular – there isn’t really much drama to hang onto. It’s particularly obvious in The Leisure Hive, which like the next story is clearly written for Douglas Adams to script-edit. The basic ingredients of the story – an intergalactic leisure complex, an alien mafia looking to buy it out, strange experiments with accelerated ageing and bodily replication – are made for Adams; it’s the exact mix of high-concept technology and cynical, parochial motivations that would appeal to a man who made his name writing about a race of alien bureaucrats demolishing Earth to make way for a bypass. And it’s written by David Fisher, one of the few Doctor Who writers who can keep pace with Adams when it comes to witty dialogue and wildly original plot twists, so this seems like a match made in heaven.
Unfortunately Adams leaves, so we get a match made in the other place as Christopher H Bidmead takes the script editor’s chair. A lot of fans dislike Bidmead because he frequently expressed cranky, inflexible ideas about what the show should and should not be, as if we’re offended at him stealing our job. A better reason to be critical of him is that he was often remarkably bad at actually arranging ideas into a dramatic structure, which is sort of his job here. The first episode of The Leisure Hive, in amongst all the weirdly long takes, is basically a long info-dump about how Argolin society works. The second episode concludes with the Doctor being framed for murder, which would have made a better plot hook to hang an exploration of the planet on; a lot of whodunnits are basically social X-rays wearing genre garb. But Bidmead thinks explaining Argolis is dramatic enough on its own, that we’re meant to be excited and fascinated just by being given exposition. The only emotional beat in the opening episode is the idea of the Doctor and Romana going on holiday, which is the kind of thing Adams would pitch when he’s in whimsical mode, but delight and whimsy are not on the menu here.
Bidmead was adamant that Doctor Who should do things no other show should do, rather than pastiche other stories or allegorise human society. (He singled out Fisher’s prior script The Androids of Tara as an example of what he didn’t want to see, which makes it particularly unfortunate that he was tasked with editing a Fisher script straight away) The broad issue I have with this is that I think a version of Doctor Who that can’t reference anything outside itself ironically stops feeling like Doctor Who at all. The more practical problem is that this no-satire, no-pastiche mandate makes it difficult to understand how the societies it depicts actually work. Fisher’s original script reportedly had lots of humour about how indolent the Argolins were, and used mafia-movie tropes to depict the Foamasi. This might have been corny but it would, at least, have given us a hint as to how we’re meant to view the Argolin justice system. Adrienne Corri’s cry of “I have declared a limitation!” might have been readable as a satire on bureaucracy, rather than the impenetrable slice of bathos it is in the finished version. Making a legal drama about a made-up legal system is usually a bad idea anyway; making one that isn’t allowed to even allegorically reference human laws is just self-sabotage. Russell T Davies once infamously said he preferred Earth as a setting for Doctor Who because “I’m not interested in the Planet Zog”; it’s hard not to think this is exactly the kind of story he had in mind.
There’s some good cast members among the Argolins; aside from A Clockwork Orange‘s Corri, a young David Haig does his best to create drama through sheer, thunderous conviction in the second half of the serial. Haig’s performance is a consistent strength, and the serial as a whole is not a disaster. Once Bickford has finished homaging Antonioni in the first episode it moves along at a fair old clip. The show’s new, none-more-80s aesthetic is a mixed bag; the score is horrible and inescapable but Bickford does a better job than most handling the newfangled video effects, even if the floating disembodied heads in the first episode put me in mind of the weather report skits on The Day Today. And it has Tom Baker and Lalla Ward, which puts it above something that has neither Tom Baker or Lalla Ward.
Neither Baker nor Ward got along with the show’s new stewards, though, and both of them would leave before the season was over. Ward was particularly frustrated by the removal of Fisher’s humour, and Baker clashed with Bidmead and Nathan-Turner over everything from the script to his costume. It’s no secret that Tom Baker could be very difficult, particularly in his later years on the show; his status as perhaps the show’s greatest icon doesn’t mean we should take his side in every feud. But if you want a snapshot of how misguided the new production team’s efforts to move on from the past could be, consider this: until Baker intervened, Nathan-Turner originally wanted to get rid of his scarf.
Next: Meglos (1980)
