Doctor Who A-Z #111: Full Circle (1980)

The Season 18 title sequence might just be Doctor Who’s weirdest. Not because it’s scary or experimental or anything like that – it’s just the culture shock of seeing something that’s so incredibly ’80s with Tom Baker’s face stuck in the middle of it. Despite my personal aversion to New Romantic aesthetics, I can recognise this as a feather in the show’s cap; Doctor Who nailed the early 1980s’ signature style as soon as the decade began. It would spend the next seven years or so slowly losing this connection with the zeitgeist, but let’s deal with what we’ve got here.

Full Circle is written by Andrew Smith, the first writer to come to the production office’s attention via fandom. As such, he’s often mentioned as a forerunner to Russell T Davies, Chris Chibnall and all the other one-time teenage fanboys who’ve led the show in the 21st century. A more interesting comparison, though, would be to Ian Levine, the ‘fan consultant’ who would exert a significant behind-the-scenes influence on the show some five years down the line. Unlike the scripts Levine will have a hand in, Full Circle doesn’t feel fannish in a negative way – it doesn’t hinge on any arcane continuity references, or rematches with old monsters. In building the planet Alzarius, Smith certainly includes a lot of traditional Who ingredients – teenage rebels, an out-of-touch ruling class, arcane technology with a secret origin, a monster borrowed from an SF/horror classic (The Creature from the Black Lagoon, in this case). Yet he laudably makes sure that every single one is a springboard to something new.

The world-building in Full Circle is interesting, not just because it’s good – though it is – but because it displays a certain dissonance behind the scenes. It’s ironic that Smith – and by extension an increasingly organised, opinionated fandom scene – came to the show during Christopher H Bidmead’s time as script editor, since Bidmead is perhaps the most determined iconoclast the show has placed in a position of influence. Yes, Robert Holmes reinvented the Time Lords and mostly eschewed old monsters, but his version of the show is still building on the horror approach of the Troughton era. By contrast, it’s quite hard to imagine a previous period of the show that would have earned Bidmead’s wholehearted approval. He seemed contemptuous of any kind of silliness or whimsy in the programme, which in practice gets rid of a lot of Doctor Who. Any show where the hero’s space-time machine is an old phone box clearly has silliness and whimsy baked into its DNA.

I’m not going to use this review as yet another excuse to be rude about Christopher H Bidmead, though. He seems to have done a good job editing Smith’s script, recognising that Smith’s use of trad-Who elements is very different to how they were deployed in other scripts. The problem, I think, is that Bidmead’s science-first approach already seems to have become dogma for the wider production team. The plot of Full Circle is quite similar to The Mutants, a story which took great pains to let the viewer know it was an allegory for contemporary politics. A lot of people dislike The Mutants for that – they’re wrong, and I’ve explained why – but the allegorical approach to creating an alien society is present in a lot of consensus classics like The Robots of Death. We don’t need reams of exposition about what kind of society the Sandminer’s crew come from – their gilt-edged costumes and ’20s-chic decor tell us everything we need to know.

The idea that an off-world colony in the far future would suddenly regress to Jazz Age interior design is, doubtless, the kind of silliness Bidmead would oppose. But it helps The Robots of Death feel real in ways that Full Circle, for all its many pleasures, doesn’t. Every design choice in Full Circle is going for “futuristic” in a way that ends up feeling oddly sterile. We are told that the Outlers are rebels and the Deciders are elites, but it remains frustratingly difficult to see them as parts of a believable society. It doesn’t help that the Outler we spend most time with is Adric, who joins the TARDIS at the end of this story. Saying that Matthew Waterhouse is not very good at delivering dialogue is not the hottest take I have in my arsenal, so I’ll restrict myself to saying his performance here is roughly what you’d expect and leave it at that.

Baker, though, is very good, rousing himself to the kind of moral fury his Doctor is so good at in episode three. (One area where Full Circle outdoes The Mutants is the level of sympathy it rouses for its apparent monsters: Bob Baker and Dave Martin have six episodes to do this in the earlier story, and they do it well. Andrew Smith has four, and he knocks it out of the park) Romana has a more circumscribed role, though it’s interesting to see her go back to the TARDIS for study purposes. This idea that the ship is the Doctor and Romana’s base, rather than just a vehicle, may be part of Bidmead’s apparent quest to defamiliarise it but this time it works, expanding rather than diminishing the range of what the TARDIS can do in a story.

The scenes where Romana is apparently possessed lack the unexpected eroticism of her similar moments of authority in The Horns of Nimon and The Creature From the Pit, but even this is interesting. From the skinny-dipping Alzarians at the start to the vaguely Greek classicism of the whole society, it can be read as part of director Peter Grimwade’s subtly queer authorial voice. Only K9 gets a rough deal: this is the third story in a row where he gets bashed about, although this does produce a useful trivia item to keep in your back pocket. There’s still some way to go in this rewatch project, but I am quietly confident that Full Circle is the only Doctor Who story where a companion is beheaded on screen.

Next: State of Decay (1980)

Graham’s Archive – Full Circle

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