Even Better than the Real Thing
Doctor Who: Mannequin Mania DVD boxset
After a comparative Pertwee drought over the last few years, suddenly old Worzel is everywhere. In a pleasingly Moffatesque bit of timey-wimey business, 2Entertain has re-released the Third Doctor’s debut story just a month after his swansong. So this Spearhead from Space release acts as a kind of perverse coda to Planet of the Spiders, and instead of Pertwee reborn as Tom Baker, we see the Doctor renewed back to his Season Seven self before he became pompous and irritating. Talking of which, Terror of the Autons is also included in this boxset which is appropriate not just because the two Auton stories are brought together but because, probably uniquely, the Third Doctor era really has two debut stories. Spearhead from Space launches the UNIT era proper focusing on its employee Professor Quatermass – sorry the Doctor – engaging with aliens, parallel universes and bureaucracy, whereas Terror of the Autons heralds an era where a new character, Doctor Condescension, leads a ragtag gang of boy scouts to many victories in an Earth landscape made entirely of Fuzzy Felt.
That’s an exaggeration obviously, but the reason this release is so striking is that here are two stories, made barely a year apart that look as if they were made in different eras, by different channels, in different universes. This is partly because due to a strike Spearhead from Space was made on film, and so looks more like Department S than the other Doctor Who stories, but while some people have commented that Terror of the Autons looks as if it was edited by Jean-Luc Godard, and to me it bears a passing resemblance to Losey’s Modesty Blaise, the truth is that nothing has ever really looked like this story and nothing ever will. It may just have scraped through the normality check in the weirded out early 1970s, but the passing of time and changing approaches to television have transformed it from odd and cheap to Brechtian and avant garde. Thanks to the Restoration Team the story now also looks cleaner and sharper than ever before, and so all the better to begin its onslaught and start reprogramming your eyes. My only qualm about the restoration (and this might be my television) is that the flesh tones sometimes look a little pink, as if the actors had just been engaging in vigorous sexual activity, but that really adds to the fun, and is a small price to pay.
But first things first: Spearhead from Space gets a re-release and there have been the usual mutterings about this (see our Revisitations 2 review) especially as it’s been packaged with a previously unreleased story. Personally I think the re-release is justified as the extras are good and the picture is an improvement, but more importantly because the sound seems a lot better than on the previous release. I believe that the Restoration Team found a better source that was a generation up (or should it be down?) from the one previously used. Whatever the reason it certainly sounds less echoey at times, although of course the TARDIS landing sound in Episode One has been “corrected”. This affects about 20 frames of the production – approximately half the number of fan suicides that greeted this shock news.
As for the story itself? Well it’s obviously of crucial significance in the history of Doctor Who: the series was floundering and could have been cancelled, and Spearhead from Space was effectively a reboot designed to save the show. Thanks to a great performance from Jon Pertwee, the emergence of writer Robert Holmes, and some wonderful scenes such as the Autons breaking out of a department store, it re-energised the programme and is rightly looked upon with great fondness by most fans. But aside from the fact it’s made on film and so looks good (the verité sequence at the hospital in Episode One is exceptional), on the whole it’s pretty thin stuff with a great deal of running around to no real purpose. There are also some terrible scenes – the first episode climax with the Doctor speeding downhill on a wheelchair is surely where Roy Clarke came up with the idea for Last of the Summer Wine, and the climax of the story featuring Pertwee gurning away with a rubber tentacle is another low point. If the denouement we see was a remount, then just how bad must the first version have been? But it’s a milestone of an adventure, and most importantly of all the Fleetwood Mac track has now been returned to its rightful place on the factory floor and only a Reynolds Girl would begrudge us that.
As I’ve mentioned already, Terror of the Autons is so odd that it would be a startling contrast to any companion piece, but the Nestene Consciousness is the only thing that really links these two stories, and in the case of the Season Eight opener it’s more like Heightened Consciousness. Holmes’s script contains a great deal of mordant humour, but it’s wildly inconsistent and I’m not sure how much of that is intentional. When, after McDermott dies in the plastic chair, Rex Farrell asks his secretary “Will you check Mr McDermott’s entitlement on termination of his employment”, it’s a funny joke but completely out of character – Farrell is a different person for the five seconds he takes to say it. This is entirely in keeping with the artificiality of much of the script, which is either a very clever post-modern satire on our reliance on plastic, or is a clumsy piece of work in which much of the dialogue is a huge, undigested info dump. The introduction of the Master is a case in point. A Time Lord is literally parachuted in with loads of exposition about the character, and so despite having never heard of him until now, we are suddenly expected to accept that he is an arch-enemy. There is no explanation as to the Master’s motives, and the Doctor himself sets the tone for their future encounters by describing the Master’s modus operandi as “vicious, complicated and inefficient “. In short, the Master is not much different to the Hooded Claw chasing after Penelope Pitstop, occasionally stopping to explain his plan laboriously just before lowering his victim slowly into a flaming pit of asbestos-covered crocodiles armed with rotating knives.
Of course, Roger Delgado is so good that he somehow manages to pull this off, and amidst all the crazy artifice Holmes also includes some fine bits of detail, such as gloomy Goodge’s egg hatred, that help give the story texture and clearly anticipate his great scripts to come. There’s a lot to criticise about Terror of the Autons, but probably it’s greatest triumph is that despite a prolonged climax which features a coach stuck in a field that just happens to be next to the radio telescope, there’s so much going on visually that it’s like being trapped in swarm of Red Admirals. The story is like the Lloyd’s building; it puts all of its workings on the surface – draws attention to its artificiality, slaps you in the face with exposition, has the equivalent of a Monty Python caption saying “SATIRE” – and yet you can’t help but wonder at it. The only truly terrible thing about Terror of the Autons is the Doctor’s bullying encounter with the minister Brownrose, when he ostentatiously mentions that he knows Brownrose’s superior “Tubby” as they are members of the same club. The Doctor is not clubbable. He left Gallifrey because he wasn’t clubbable. The whole point of the programme depends on the fact that the Doctor just isn’t like that. This complete misreading of the main character is far more disturbing than Mrs Farrell’s kitchen.
Extras:
The main accompaniment to Spearhead from Space is Down to Earth, another typically stylish offering from Chris Chapman. As well as describing the filming of the story, it also covers the casting of Jon Pertwee, and particularly concentrates on the precarious position Doctor Who found itself in after the slump in the ratings towards the end of the Troughton era. This is conveyed by doom-laden music and frequent glimpses of a serious man typing away in a dark office. That might sound a bit odd, but the visuals hold the piece together well, it moves at a cracking pace and the talking heads involved are candid about the plans that were underway in the event that the series was cancelled. Terrance Dicks and Derrick Sherwin, never ones to mince their words, are featured, as is Jon Pertwee himself (courtesy of the BBV interview seen recently on the Planet of the Spiders release), along with costume designer Christine Rawlins and Assistant Script Editor Robin Squire. Sherwin is particularly interesting about his departure from the show, and when he was offered a job helping Peter Bryant on Paul Temple apparently said “I’m going to be Associate Producer – I’m not going to be a script-editor and have everyone wipe their feet on my back!” which is a nice insight into the thankless task of being a script-editor. No wonder so many of them go mad.
The other addition to the extras is Steve Broster’s excellent feature Regenerations: From Black and White to Colour which covers the detail of what happened when the BBC made the crucial decision to move to colour transmission. A whole host of backroom crew pop up to talk about their experience at this time including Bernard Lodge, Timothy Combe, designer Roger Cheveley and old favourites Christopher Barry and Michael Ferguson. Barry makes the point that setting up the cameras took longer when colour was introduced, which had the unfortunate side-effect of giving people a longer lunch and therefore more opportunity to get smashed at the bar. I suppose that means that whenever Tom Baker worked in monochrome he was the very model of sobriety. This is a very nicely put together film, and I particularly enjoyed the contradictory comments of Derrick “We didn’t care about people who still had black and white sets” Sherwin, and Roger “We were always careful to have a monochrome set in the studio to check” Cheveley.
Derrick Sherwin also crops up on a new commentary alongside Terrance Dicks. It supplements the previous commentary from Caroline John and Nicholas Courtney that was one of the first and, perhaps because of this, was a little bit faltering and dry. Sherwin is a lot better here compared to his previous stint in the commentary box on The War Games, during which he moaned about the events of 1969 in the same way that you moan to your partner at the end of a bad day at work. He’s still quite sharp about the BBC of the time, and not unreasonably emphasises the significance of the show’s budget back then, but although you sense he’s not that interested in the show he’s much more affable than before. Dicks is much the same as usual but because this is pre-coiffeur Pertwee he doesn’t (unless I missed it) say bouffant once.
The commentary booth is a bit fuller for Terror of the Autons, with Barry Letts, Nicholas Courtney and Katy Manning engaging in a nice cosy chat while the kaleidoscopic madness unfolds in front of them. Letts is on good form, frequently castigating his directorial decisions, and going as far as to say that the scene with the Auton in the safe is “rubbish”. Manning talks winningly about her experiences on her first story although she does invoke the baby voice a few times, and most worryingly does a full impression of the troll doll. All of the controversy that the story generated is covered, but Letts is far more concerned about shortcomings such as the lame volte-face by the Master at the climax of the story, and also about the pressures that came from within the BBC about the decision to base the show on Earth. Huw Wheldon, famously a fan of the show, was particularly withering, and let it be known that he didn’t like it “being set in the real world in Brentford”. For a moment, you can picture Wheldon as a keyboard warrior in 2005, pouring his derision upon Russell T Davies’s first season.
The similarities between the start of the Pertwee era and the relaunched 2005 series have been commented on many times, if for no other reason than their shared use of the Autons and the increased emphasis on Earth as a base. Ed Stradling’s documentary Life on Earth takes a look at these similarities, but also tries to cover the making of Terror of the Autons, and some of the controversies that it generated. There’s a huge amount of very good stuff in the piece, and it looks nice (lots of split-screen effects à la The Thomas Crown Affair) but structurally it doesn’t really work. It goes from familiar behind-the-scenes anecdotes (Manning’s contact lenses are mentioned) to some insightful comments from Phil Collinson about the increased emotional development given to non-regular characters in the story and how this was taken further in 2005, but then lurches into a discussion about the portrayal of sex and violence over the years and ends with everyone talking about single-camera, multi-camera and how much they like each others respective eras. In short, there are about three documentaries struggling for dominance here, and some of the excellence of each is diluted in that struggle. It has some great contributions though, not least from Terrance Dicks who describes (“with the greatest respect”) Russell T Davies in a way that one sector of fandom will seize upon with relish.
Alongside the main documentary are a couple of smaller films. James Goss produces The Doctor’s Moriarty, a highly enjoyable, if brief, look at the Master and how the character has been portrayed over the years. Joe Lidster, Rob “sexy maroon shirt” Shearman and Jesus H Bidmead all make astute contributions, but my inner fan was particularly keen on the way Goss uses illustrations from Target novelizations (including some specially commissioned where no Target illustrations exist) to hold the piece together visually. Also good fun is Goss’s Plastic Fantastic, which features art writer Francesca Gavin and new series designer Matthew Savage talking about the role of plastic in post-war Britain. Rob Shearman crops up again, and his brief but excellent analysis of Terror of the Autons can’t help but highlight what’s missing from this release. There’s an awful lot of material about the making of the story, the differences in producing television between 1970 and 2005, and lots of reminiscences from the main actors, but there’s about two minutes of story analysis. Not to worry though – the disc also includes PDFs of the Sugar Smacks and Nestlé promotions! Who needs analysis when you can have a Proustian rush?
Mannequin Mania is released on Monday 9th May in the UK.
