Porridge

This week, thirty years ago, The Five Faces of Dr. Who season ended with a repeat of Tom Baker's swan song, Logopolis. Don't You Want Me was making its inexorable rise to Number 1. Madness' It Must Be Love was a new chart entry as is Dead Ringer For Love. Meanwhile, the slightly hysterical electronica of OMD's Joan of Arc was on its way down.
Here in the present day, I've been listening to a "new" adventure for the Second Doctor: Dick Sharples' Prison in Space. This story would have followed The Invasion in 1968 and introduced a new companion, Nik, to replace Jamie. But none of that happened, Sharples' story was never produced and we got The Krotons instead. I'm very fond of The Krotons, since it was the second entry in Five Faces. And Prison in Space is dreadful.

Simon Guerrier, a prolific if unremarkable Who author, has adapted the Sixties script as a partially-narrated play, like The Companion Chronicles series. As ever, I enjoyed hearing Frazer Hines' uncanny impression of Patrick Troughton and Wendy Padbury was also on hand to recreate the b/w era authentically. But despite Guerrier's argument that it's a satire, this seemingly-interminable story is a load of wearisome, unfunny, chauvinistic twaddle. Guerrier makes the spurious claim that it's somehow a commentary on Enoch Powell's inflammatory "Birmingham" speech but I think this is liberal academic wishful thinking. Sharples was a soap and sitcom writer; if the Two Ronnies serial The Worm That Turned (1980) really was a reworking of Prison and its "Dolly Guards", it certainly wasn't one of the texts given a Post-Structuralist reading when I was an undergrad. Sergeant Alice is described as "bullish" about four times in the script. Gee, could she be a lesbian?

 
Since Prison in Space is such a lazy farce, it gives no real sense of Season Six and even though it sounds fun for the cast, I can't recommend it at all.Why BF feel compelled to record every aborted storyline in Who history is beyond me; even director Lisa (Bernice) Bowerman comments on the similarity with the hackneyed Mission to Magnus. I wish they would employ more discernment and quality control, perhaps stemming the glut of wonky audio plays. Prison and the fairly silly Sylvester McCoy season do not bode well for the Tom Baker Lost Stories in the New Year.

However, the third disc in this Second Doctor box set is an exception. It's The Destroyers: again, a partially-narrated adaptation, this time of Terry Nation's pilot for a US Dalek tv series. This script nearly went into production in the mid-Sixties.The jazzy percussion of the theme music evokes Sixties genre tv and the production even has space for an advertising break midway through. It also uses many recurring tropes from Nation's stories: wildly inaccurate use of "solar systems" and "galaxies" (eight, here); lethal pools, predatory creatures, aggressive vegetation and Dalek invasions. Of course, it's Nick Briggs, as usual, as the Daleks but Destroyers also features a non-continuity appearance by Space Security Agent Sara Kingdom. My main gripes about this episode are a) android Mark Seven never does anything really interesting or android-y; and b) ONE American accent would have been nice. Chris Porter's Jason Corey sounds more like Jason Statham. Jean Marsh is the production's real surprise however. Her narration has a chilly quality and is used to huge effect in the coda to the story, where she unsettles the listener with a mockingly sweet tone before the deadpan delivery of "The Daleks are coming." A thin and rather predictable story which, nontheless, manages to make the Outer Space Robot People far more menacing than they are on tv. Seven out of ten Talmars.

Bronze Age comics fans may like to visit my Materioptikon blog on 100 page Super Spectaculars.  (http://materioptikon.wordpress.com/) However, not to short-change "Place" followers, yesterday I re-read Avengers King-Size Special 3 from 1969. Behind the vibrant Buscema cover, it reprints the revival of Captain America and three of the ToS wartime Cap stories.
The Avengers story guest-stars Namor and introduces one of the Asparagus People who will be massacred by Dark Phoenix. Cap is so obviously the star of the strip from here on: "The powerful figure...the mighty man with the tragedy-haunted eyes...nimble, seemingly tireless..." Honestly! Stan and Steve sitting in a tree!
When I read the Cap stories in The Titans in the mid-70s, I had no recollection of ever having seen them before, not even the origin of the Red Skull. It's possible that I had just thought they were boring Commando Books-style stories as a six-year-old and skipped them! As the man said, the memory cheats.

Next: Turkish Delight?


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