Doctor Who A-Z #112: State of Decay (1980)

The fact that Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes’s version of Doctor Who was curtailed by force rather than run into the ground means it never had to go through the usual cycle of backlash and reassessment. Rather than fans getting sick of it, it was snatched away from us, meaning there was an appetite for throwbacks and homages to it almost immediately. Just over three years after The Talons of Weng-Chiang, here’s a story consciously made in that style, based on a script that – if it wasn’t for the production team worrying that it would have clashed with the BBC’s planned adaptation of Dracula – would have followed straight on from Weng-Chiang.

Put like that, it sounds like a repudiation of the past three-and-a-half seasons; forget all that silly comedy and Key to Time business, let’s start again from where we were meant to pick up. But it doesn’t feel like that, in part because the show has a brand new identity now. The Graham Williams era has plenty of character, but it’s still defined by an absence; it leans into comedy because it can’t do horror. On the rare occasions when it does sneak a bit of the Gothic under the radar, it still feels comfortingly like something you’d see in Season Thirteen. But the look and feel of State of Decay is very different to anything that would have arisen in the early Tom Baker seasons, and it’s hard not to ascribe that to the new vision for the show imposed by script editor Christopher H Bidmead and producer John Nathan-Turner.

I’ve made it clear over the last few reviews that this isn’t a vision I much enjoy, and if I was feeling glib I might note that State of Decay works better because Bidmead didn’t get much of a chance to edit it. Director Peter Moffatt disliked Bidmead’s edits to Terrance Dicks’s original script, saying that they removed the Gothic atmosphere that attracted him to direct the story in the first place. Moffatt, who had been directing television since 1960, was considered a prestigious enough signing for Nathan-Turner to allow him to overrule the script editor, and so State of Decay was saved from being gutted as surely as the removal of David Fisher’s humour gutted The Leisure Hive. But the strange, beguiling tone of State of Decay comes from more than just behind-the-scenes jousting.

Something like The Stones of Blood feels like a Hinchcliffe throwback because the show hadn’t really achieved any distance from Hinchcliffe’s stewardship yet. State of Decay, though, is recognisably a take on horror storytelling from a show that had seen Anthony Read, Graham Williams and Douglas Adams come and go. The characters and innovations they had bequeathed to the show are present throughout, not least Read’s decision to focus Doctor Who on literary, rather than cinematic, pastiche. If Dicks’s script really had kicked off Season Fifteen, it would have been made by a production team still in thrall to the mock-Hammer style of Doctor Who at the time. Rather than taking cinema as its model, State of Decay is literary from the decision to name a major character after Joseph Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla onwards. It is capital-R Romantic in the same way that The Androids of Tara is; this, rather than Hinchcliffe-Holmesian Gothic, is the strain of Doctor Who that is rather appropriately being brought back from the dead here.

The strangest thing, then, is that the newcomer Moffatt seems to understand this right away. The house style of Season Eighteen is something along the lines of the BBC-TimeLife Shakespeare series: very stage-bound, concerned largely with actors being positioned around the set like furniture, with some of the early ’80s video effects that would start to dominate the show in Peter Davison’s first season creeping in. This is a style Moffatt sticks to, but it’s a lot more effective here, part of which is down to luck. The Leisure Hive would use those video effects to simulate a zero-gravity sports game, but Moffatt is tasked with using them to superimpose a bat over Aukon’s face, which is both more atmospheric and more achievable. Even the staginess works, largely because the literary roots of the story are more central. The emphasis on actors standing together and playing off each other makes more sense in a story about vampire aristocrats preying on peasants, rather than sapping the energy from a more action-focused script.

The script isn’t as tight as the one which Dicks banged out in a hurry to replace it. The idea of incorporating Adric by having the vain youngster tempted by the vampires’ promises of eternal life is a good one, but it never really ramps up the tension in the way that – say – Tegan’s later possessions would. Part of this is down to scheduling; coming straight off the back of his debut story, Adric is simply too new an arrival for his apparent turn to evil to get much of a response from the Doctor and Romana. Romana’s attempt to talk him back round is one of a few draggy interludes in the second half of the story, even if there is a certain interest borne of scarcity to any interactions between Adric and Romana, one of the show’s most mayfly-length companion partnerships.

There’s a fine supporting cast in State of Decay, not least Thane ‘dad of Paul’ Bettany, but the story belongs to Tom and Lalla, both of whom are in their natural habitat here. We know that Baker broods like no-one else, and he gets to do more of it in this valedictory season than in any other. But too little attention is paid to what that brooding achieves. The Doctor’s fearful solemnity here is powerful enough to sell a moment – the revelation that the vampires’ spaceship is fuelled by barrels of blood – that would be ripe kitsch in any other actor’s hands. A quick look at Ward’s pre-Doctor Who CV, meanwhile, will prove that this is her home territory: a Hammer vampire film, a TV movie about Mary Shelley, one of the nastiest Ghost Stories for Christmas. None of these, notably, were damsel-in-distress roles – indeed, in Vampire Circus she’s one of the monsters. This rule holds in State of Decay, where she retains an impeccable level of control and elegance even when she’s tied up and about to be sacrificed. In both cases, it feels diminishing to refer to them as series icons. Of course they are; it’s a small pond. Baker and Ward are fully-fledged British screen icons, and should be celebrated as such.

Next: Warriors’ Gate (1981)

Graham’s Archive – State of Decay

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