Doctor Who A-Z #66: Carnival of Monsters (1973)

Carnival of Monsters seems to be the Third Doctor story that people who don’t like the Third Doctor’s era as a whole can get behind. There’s a very obvious reason for this, and like all very obvious reasons it isn’t quite right. Fans will tell you that its distinctive quality comes from the fact that this is the first time the Third Doctor has been allowed to travel freely in time and space, with a working TARDIS that the Time Lords aren’t controlling. If you dislike the Earthbound format of the early Jon Pertwee stories – and a lot of people do – this is the moment the show broke free of those restrictions and reconnected with Doctor Who‘s original, wide-ranging remit.

While true, this is the kind of shift that only seems dramatic in the context of a series guide. The actual experience of watching this era’s outer-space stories isn’t dominated by questions about the Time Lords’ agenda: in The Mutants they supplied a MacGuffin and nothing more, while The Curse of Peladon ended with the Doctor and Jo wondering if the Time Lords had anything to do with that story at all. If any serial in the Pertwee years represents the writers planting a flag and declaring that this show is about way-out alien planets again, it’s got to be The Curse of Peladon; an alien monarchy hosting delegates from across the galaxy is more demonstrative on this issue than a couple of space carnies bickering with a race of bureaucrats whose faces are literally grey.

And yet it’s this smallness that truly explains why Carnival of Monsters feels like a refreshing change in the context of the Pertwee era. The Curse of Peladon preserves the earthbound Pertwee stories’ key flaw of not being very good at dealing with ordinary people, but despite their far-out outfits and alien technology Vorg and Shrina are very ordinary people indeed. Barry Letts, who directs as well as produces here, was a little uneasy about just how modestly-scaled this story is, and suggested the bureaucratic antagonist Kalik should have larger political ambitions. This is duly incorporated into the story, but only on the level of noises-off. The planned coup affects the main plot about as much as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern affect the plot of Hamlet, and writer Robert Holmes has had too much fun with the dullness of the Inter Minorans to make them a serious threat. It all ends, in a fantastic line, with the plotter Pletrac declaring that he doesn’t want to be eaten by Drashigs “even in the name of political progress!”

The Doctor’s judgement of Vorg and Shrina seems to be affected by his freedom from Earth’s boundaries. He’d faced small-scale criminality on Earth plenty of times: in The Ambassadors of Death, Reegan wanted to use the alien ambassadors to rob banks, and many of the Master’s accomplices were just trying to make a quick buck or a name for themselves. Those characters seemed to annoy him more than Vorg and Shrina does. Despite his moral abhorrence of Vorg’s miniscope, he doesn’t find Vorg himself to be worthy of condemnation. Indeed, he sneaks off in the TARDIS while Vorg is making a last attempt to scam Pletrac, and the last shot is Shrina smiling gratefully at his departure. The shift here can best be understood by thinking about the restrictions the writers must have been labouring under writing Earth-set stories. The Doctor, who spent the whole of the 1960s becoming more of an explicitly revolutionary figure, can no longer effect political change. Moreover, any realistic depiction of crime must be morally instructive for the show’s young audience. The fact that the crimes in this story are extremely unrealistic allows the Doctor to obey his own morality again, specifically re-adopting the trickster’s morality which understands that a pair of petty wheeler-dealers like Vorg and Shrina are easier to forgive than the bland atrocities planned by Kalik.

There’s a delightful scene where the Doctor, whose facility with languages is usually effortless, decides he needs to speak Vorg’s language. He immediately starts communicating with the showman in Polari, the coded language used by mid-century theatrical communities: theatrical in the sense of artistic, and of homosexual. Despite this, Polari was never particularly controversial. Kenneth Williams was entertaining radio audiences with it in the 1950s. But it does feel like an attempt to re-orient the show’s morality towards the subversive, the underclass, away from the Brigadier and Tubby Rowlands. The Third Doctor’s particular brand of patrician disdain is also subverted interestingly: while he spends a lot of time talking down to and explaining things to Jo, he’s also wrong more often than usual. Jo is certainly wrong to think they’ve landed on Earth at the start of the story, but she’s wrong for understandable reasons, while his belief that they’ve landed on Metebelis III is just plain wrong. He dismisses her assumption that the “giants” are responsible for the heat ray that nearly kills them, much as in the next story he will dismiss her belief that the Ogrons are working with the Daleks. In both cases, Jo is right and the Doctor isn’t.

This does a lot to detoxify the parts of the Third Doctor’s persona that some find hard to like. It’s also very funny, and it’s worth considering that, at this stage of his career, Robert Holmes is positioned as the series’ comedy specialist. The Auton stories are at least implicitly satirical of consumerism; the second one was controversial for its violence, but Letts agreed with some of the criticism it received and vowed not to let it happen again on his watch. Holmes’s scripts are usually witty, but the satirist in him won’t dominate this much until The Sun Makers, the first script he wrote after the controversy surrounding Season Fourteen forced him to withhold the horror content he’s now more associated with. Despite not being of a piece with his script editing work, Carnival of Monsters is probably the story that made it inevitable that he would, one day, be promoted to that post. It also mints the trick of spending the first episode cutting between two apparently unrelated stories, a trick he’d repeat in his next script – one which kicked off Pertwee’s last season, introduced Sarah Jane Smith, and revived the pseudo-historical story format. In short, the future starts – or re-starts – here.

Next: The Caves of Androzani (1984)

Graham’s Archive – Carnival of Monsters

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