It's A Kinda Magic
Kinda on DVD
Back in 1982, Christopher Bailey’s Kinda left a great many confused Doctor Who fans trailing in its wake. Not only that, but much negative opinion about the story centred on one particularly bad special effect in the final episode. That was enough for a number of viewers to dismiss it outright even though many excellent Doctor Who stories have, before and since Kinda, been at the mercy of an unconvincing Skarasen puppet, an oversized prop rat or badly realised magma monsters and Abzorbaloffs. Even the CGI dominated world of the latest series doesn’t always get away with it.
Another aspect to this which may have raised the ire of fans, or just bored the pants off them, back in 1982, was that Kinda was regarded as intelligent and literary enough to have Manuel Alvarado and John Tulloch wax lyrical, in a structuralist and semiological bent, about Bailey’s story in 1983′s Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text. In the book, Alvarado and Tulloch position the story in relation to the fiction of Ursula K. LeGuin, a science fiction writer noted for the multicultural, feminist, sociological and anthropological themes of her work, to Buddhist and Christian religious mythology and parables and Jungian theory.
Bailey’s own influences are a mix of these and, as the production text on this DVD edition highlights, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with its post-colonialist, post-modernist narrative exploring the psychological and physical transformation of Europeans as their culture and sensibilities are tested by the Congo wilderness and its indigenous races.
Kinda is also as much about the struggle between Bailey, as a writer keen to introduce high concepts into the series, the original commissioning script editor Christopher Bidmead and his temporary successor Antony Root, who both clearly welcomed Bailey’s desire to deal with, as The Unfolding Text explains, “very, very advanced ideas” that supersede what Bailey called “the gadgetry school of science fiction”, and incoming script editor Eric Saward who demanded a more rigorous rationale be applied to Bailey’s concepts. You’ll see much of this is covered in the Dream Time documentary on this disc.
As the script and Bailey’s ideas became shaped within the discipline of a Doctor Who narrative, many other influences then came to bear on how those ideas were translated to the screen. Firstly you have director Peter Grimwade, perhaps one of the most talented young directors to have briefly worked on the series, who brings his own vigour and energy, and a visual dynamism, to the production. As the tribute to him Directing with Attitude notes, like Graeme Harper, he directed from the floor rather than the gallery. You can tell in the way the performances and images interlock throughout Kinda where he manages to get some astonishing work from certain actors and pushes television technology to its limits to create startling visuals. In this instance, Kinda is not that far away from the equally potent work of Paul Joyce and an uncredited Harper on Warriors’ Gate in the previous season.
The biggest problem here is that Bailey and Grimwade are operating within the strict budgets and time constraints of a typical BBC multi-camera studio production. Therefore the paradise planet of Deva Loka, realised in BBC Television Centre, is at the mercy of specific studio conditions. Compare the pot plants, leaf strewn studio floors and fake trees of Kinda to the stunning jungle sets built at Ealing film studios for Planet of Evil and Creature from the Pit where the depth of multi-level sets, control of lighting and the use of film rather than video contribute to the success of both stories. Jungle sets are very hard to do in the harsh light of TC3. Planet of the Daleks just about got away with it back in 1973. Certainly it is clear that at some point Grimwade was made aware of these shortcomings in a production meeting and attempted to improve some of the studio work with his choice of camera angles.
However, despite some unflattering moments, he and the actors do convince us that this is a jungle planet. Another issue is of course the depiction of the indigenous species on Deva Loka. As Bailey remarks, many of the actors playing the Kinda did look as if they were filming a Timotei shampoo commercial. Wigs, grass skirts and fake tan are just more of the standard television accretions, a unfulfilled attempt to capture the essence of Gaugin’s Tahitian inspired paintings, that Bailey and Grimwade had to accept as a compromise. It’s certainly clear that Grimwade desperately wanted to make sense of Bailey’s script visually as a piece of Doctor Who while Saward was rather keen to give characters pause for explanations and rationalisations where he felt the story was unclear.
However, you should forgive it these particular sins because these three gentlemen attempt to realise, what is at heart, a stunning script with some extraordinary and symbolic themes and metaphors. There are also several brilliant performances that make Kinda into one of the most rewarding of atypical Doctor Who stories. Despite the various authors pulling in several directions at once and some unconvincing production design there’s a palpable atmosphere to the story with a boiling mass of psychological mind games layered into the narrative.
Kinda attempts to be many things and while Bailey wanted to suggest that the Mara is actually the darkness within Tegan, or within any human, that runs rampant, Grimwade switched that focus during the making of the story and made the Mara an independent force of evil desiring to cross over and possess anyone. This is tied into Bailey’s Buddhist themes about the end of time in which a demonic figure controls the rise and fall of civilisations. He also mixes in the Christian Garden of Eden and Genesis parable, a post colonial satire (although the pith helmet and explorer costumes are way too literal as is the Sanders character as an allusion to the Edgar Wallace Sanders of the River stories) and the cargo cults of the Pacific region.
The depiction of the Kinda people is compromised further where casting appeared to default to what was in essence the ‘blacking up’ of Caucasian actors. The story’s earnest, if somewhat naive, acknowledgment of themes of cultural assimilation see Kinda caught uneasily within a disinterring and reappropriation of the effects of British colonialism and the unpacking of multiculturalism by academics and cultural producers that took place in the 1980s.
It therefore emerges during a period where depictions of Britishness and race were key elements of debate. On the one hand we had the penchant for applying a certain nostalgia to British colonial rule that heavily influenced the television and cinema of the 1980s in Staying On (1980), The Jewel in the Crown (1984), Heat and Dust (1982) and Gandhi (1982) wherein the values of Empire are commercialised in line with the rise of Thatcherite conservative ideology. Equally, on the other there was also the emerging identity politics of transnational diasporas that had settled in Britain and that were articulated socially and culturally through protest and debate where as Sarita Malik explains in Representing Black Britain: a History of Black and Asian images on British Television there was frustration “at the rise of the neo-conservative hegemony in the form of Thatcherism” and “with the limitations of a liberal multicultural consensus.”
This consideration accepted, the story more fully explores the relationship between self and other, between the knowable and the unknowable, in itself perhaps one of Doctor Who’s major obsessions. We see this duality symbolised through the eyes of a major character, Tegan. Tegan’s repressed desires (the dark forces from the inside) become manifested on Deva Loka and threaten to transform the balance of nature and power. This is a contest between the unbridled knowledge and power as represented by the Mara and the innate natural, ego-less power and energy of the Kinda. They have learned to live in harmony with the wheel of time and use their most subtle physical and mental energies to walk the path to enlightenment. Bailey’s story then compares them to the technologically boxed in, repressed, anxious energy of the ‘not-we’ colonists in the Dome.
As 1995′s The Discontinuity Guide explained: “It’s ‘about’ boxes (the healing device that cures colonialism, the tank that the colonists wander about in, the pigeonholes where they want to put the Kinda) and male/female relationships, with the Doctor the only man wise enough to know he’s foolish”. There are indeed a lot of boxes in Kinda to which you can add the wicker cargo cult version of the TSS made by the possessed Aris, the Dome and its holding cells and indeed Tegan’s own mind. And they are all about holding in energy – whether destructive or healing.
This also provides the contrast between the masculine and feminine principles at work in the narrative – those of the Doctor with Todd, Tegan with Aris particularly. Cassandra May, in Doctor Who – The Television Companion, notes that “the terror and temptations that the Mara draws on are based around classic Freudian theories and phobias: the Oedipus complex, the intuitive feminine unconscious, the logical masculine conscious, rape and castration fantasies/phobias and the dangers of unleashed individuality.” The intuitive is also embodied in the figures of Karuna and Panna, aided by the casting of the superb Mary Morris as the wise woman of the Kinda, familiar to telefantasy fans from her equally effective role as Number Two in The Prisoner.
The focus on Tegan is very welcome as it gives Janet Fielding a particularly good opportunity to shine and elevates the character from the gobby air-steward stereotype into a complex woman full of insecurities. She’s quite superb in this story and it’s only spoilt by some unnecessary bickering between her and Adric towards the end as Hindle threatens to blow up the Dome. This was added in by Saward to pad out an under-running final episode. Her lasciviousness as the Mara-possessed Tegan, a brave, and at the time unique, portrayal of a companion’s sexualised self that is allowed to create anarchy amongst the Kinda, is something that the series rarely, if ever, touched upon in any depth.
It’s ironic that after this interesting treatment of a companion’s repressed ego the series tends to avoid any further exploration of the companion as a character and increasingly treats the female companions as window dressing (‘for the dads’ was the excuse that was always trundled out) or as asexual children until the introduction of Ace, I suppose. To that end, I’m glad that writer Christopher Bailey was commissioned to explore the after-effects of Tegan’s possession in Snakedance as we rarely got to see the lasting trauma of such an experience on a member of the TARDIS crew.
The obvious symbols – Todd (the typically repressed female boffin in white coat and specs), Sanders (unsympathetic pith helmeted colonial bully), Karuna and Panna (the wise old crone/young acolyte) – tend to lack some subtlety but I do like the way that the Doctor is portrayed as the ‘fool’ here as it does dovetail with the vulnerability and innocence that Davison starts to imbue the character with. The inter-play between Davison and Nerys Hughes is flirty but full of mutual respect and Todd would have made a refreshing addition to the crew if John Nathan Turner hadn’t been so determined to occupy the TARDIS with three child-like companions. Davison certainly cements his playing of the Doctor with this story and offers a nuanced performance.
Towering over all of this is of course Simon Rouse’s bravura appearance as Hindle. Both Rouse and Fielding are the two acting powerhouses running through the story – Tegan as the unshared mind, dreaming and opening herself up to ‘mind-rape’ by the Mara and thus freeing her ego, Hindle as the delusional, id-driven, broken man, repressed and repressing. Rouse truly acts his socks off here and really does manage to give you the world as seen through Hindle’s paranoid eyes. A world of invisible threats, dangerous plants, where you shoot first and ask questions later simply because you refuse to make any comprehension of the world you’ve ended up in.
He is clearly the story’s interpretation of the psychological dead end of colonial imperialism along with the blustering Sanders, an equally intriguing turn from film veteran Richard Todd. The deleted scenes on the DVD, mostly culled from the first two episodes which over ran, emphasise the performances from Rouse and Todd. Certainly Todd’s interpretation of Sanders as a more comic character comes through in those deletions.
Peter Grimwade certainly pushes the envelope of what can be done on video in Television Centre, using Quantel to take us into Tegan’s mind’s eye, pixelating his images almost as a deliberate nod to the 1980s obsession with the surface of things where its modus vivendi was ‘look at me’ when it came to exploring identity. Let’s also not forget that this was smack bang at the start of the music video boom where image compositing and video effects were becoming highly innovative and embraced non-representational styles.
If you look at Visage’s Fade to Grey video and the moments where we see Tegan visit the surreal representations of the TARDIS crew or where the Mara snake tattoo travels from host to host there are some very obvious visual parallels. You can also see this experimentation in the attempt to realise the dream states and visions that litter the story. The prophecy sequence showing how the release of the Mara threatens to re-start the ‘wheel of time’ is again rather too literal with its assortment of time pieces all counting down to some imaginary Armageddon but again Grimwade manipulates it into something strange and unsettling using a blaze of video trickery, a load of dry ice and plenty of Dutch angles to suggest the imminent end of everything if the Mara gets its way.
It might look primitive now but then it was a true sign that the surface as depth televisual qualities of music video had been embraced fully by the series with a director pushing as hard as he could to reflect the ever-proliferating video culture of the time. However, Grimwade certainly comes a cropper with the more practical effects of the TSS mobile armour and the infamous snake. The inverse of these apparent failures is that some have have noted that as the Mara is depicted as an illusory concept then an unconvincing giant snake might well be an apt form to take.
The conclusion is unfortunately rather a damp squib because the whole thing is building up to such a fever pitch that I think trying to make the darkness of the Mara a tangible thing – a huge snake – was rather doomed to failure anyway. Grimwade and company should have left the threat as unseen and unknowable but I suspect the feeling was the show must have its monsters and monsters it indeed got. However, this DVD version offers us new CGI effects for the climactic scene where the Mara is trapped in the circle of mirrors and provide an alternative, less underwhelming vision and are cleverly and skillfully matched with the studio footage.
Kinda is neither wholly about religion (e.g the parallels with Buddhism) nor the repressions of colonialism. It’s about you, me, us. It’s about how we face outwardly into the world, how we deal with the unknown sides of our personalities, our repressions and our fears. Our own Mara. Kinda is what makes for a healthy mind, an actualised self-hood, in a world that threatens to engulf us in chaos and darkness.
Extras
Commentary – With Peter Davison, Janet Fielding, Matthew Waterhouse and Nerys Hughes. Don’t expect any great insights here. I’d refer to the documentaries and production text for that. Essentially, an irreverent, often funny, load of gossiping with intermittent attempts to refer to what they are watching.
Dream Time (dur. 34′ 05″) – cast and crew look back at the making of the story. With actors Janet Fielding, Nerys Hughes, Simon Rouse and Adrian Mills, director Peter Grimwade, writer Christopher Bailey, script editors Christopher H. Bidmead, Eric Saward and Antony Root, designer Malcolm Thornton, new series writer Robert Shearman. Feel the love for Kinda from Rob Shearman in this short documentary that examines the scripting and production of the story.
Peter Grimwade – Directing with Attitude (dur. 22′ 57″) – a look at the Doctor Who career of writer and director Peter Grimwade. With Peter Grimwade, actors Janet Fielding and Nerys Hughes, writer Christopher Bailey, script editor Eric Saward, production assistant Margot Hayhoe, designer Malcolm Thornton, production secretary Jane Judge, script consultant Ian Levine, and Target Books editor Nigel Robinson. A rather poignant reminder of Grimwade’s talents as a director and presented by Mark Strickson.
Deleted and Extended Scenes (dur. 14′ 36″) – a fascinating collection of deleted sequences taken from timecoded domestic videotape copies of the story’s early edits.
Optional CGI Effects Sequence – option to view episode four with the original giant puppet snake replaced by a CGI snake.
CGI Effects Comparison (dur. 1′ 34″) – a side by side comparison of the original puppet and new CGI snake shots.
Trails & Continuity (dur. 4′ 13″) – BBC trails and continuity announcements from the story’s original transmission.
Photo Gallery (dur. 4′ 42″) – production, design and publicity photos from the story.
Isolated Music – option to watch the story with the isolated music score by Peter Howell.
Kinda is released on Monday 7th March in the UK as part of the Mara Tales Boxset. You can read Frank’s review of Snakedance here
