Movies over that festive period had included The Man Who Would Be King and The Man Who Fell to Earth; Close Encounters and 2001: and Magic with Anthony Hopkins. The last week of December had seen both the shocking last episode of Blake's Seven and K9 and Company, the kitschy ancestor of the Sarah Jane Adventures.
It's therefore a staggering three decades too since the debut of the Fifth Doctor's pleasant open face and I've been watching it again this week for perhaps the seventh or eighth time. The first episode of Castrovalva was broadcast on Monday 4th January at 3.30 in the afternoon here in Scotland and in the evening for viewers in England and Wales. The poor Welsh! Fated to be a footnote in Dr. Who history.
Er, hang on...
My diary records the first episode as "very enjoyable" and "very entertaining". I was obviously more forgiving in my late teens of awkward Adric and his woeful crab-like scuttling, especially on the line "That is the way to E-Space!". We'd already seen in State of Decay that bratty Adric was selfish enough to consider changing sides. An arc in which the Master took him on as a companion/stooge seems like a lost opportunity. Davison, however, makes a strong impression as an unravelling Doctor and the brief and deft impressions of his previous personae is a clever twist on the flashback gimmick from Logopolis. The Master's traps within traps, on the other hand, suggest he is preparing to fail in every encounter with the Doctor. Nonetheless, I do enjoy Ainley's performance as the Portreeve.
On the fifth of January 1982, I spent the best part of six hours shovelling snow so my dad could get his car on the road. So, it was a shade ironic for me that the second episode of the story featured lush but lengthy scenes of the babes in the wood. Nyssa and Tegan develop a warm comradeship after the chilly and doomy preceding story although Sarah Sutton comes across as the better actress. Another departure of the story is that its about the newly regenerated Doctor being imperilled. The Fifth Doctor's world is full of traps for the unwary: the Tardis, as it was in Logopolis, is a disorientating. sterile, technological maze, and as in the Sixties, the external environment can affect the internal one.
The 80s are recalled as the decade where design became prominent and the 70s world of orange and brown became reviled and replaced by monochrome, pastels and brand names: Maxell, Benetton, Linn. Unfortunately Five is the second in a series of overdesigned Doctors. The Edwardian sportsman image echoed Ian Charleson in Chariots of Fire or Anthony Andrews in Brideshead Revisited. But like his companions, the Doctor's costume reduces him to a cartoon figure.
The recursion gimmick, while difficult to realise with the technology of the time, is very significant: it prefigures what will happen to the series itself. The new narrative style, partly attributable to the new twice weekly soap-style format, becomes mired in continuity references, flashbacks and sequels.And largely to please a fanbase that the production office would grow to resent and revile.
I still have a fondness for the Castrovalvans in their fairytale castle and for the potential glimpsed in Davison's hesitant and maladroit Doctor. But in a world of question-mark collars and as stories fold in on themselves, possibilities were narrowing even as Doctor Who became simply "The Doctor".
Back on Xmas Day, I listened to last year's subscriber freebie from Big Finish. Davison's Doctor is the first to participate in The Four Doctors but he's quickly overshadowed by Number Eight, the Frock Coated Ponce. Doctor Six delivers a lovely speech from a prison cell but I have absolutely no recall of what McCoy does or how the story ends. It does feature Daleks and they're always exciting on audio but about three weeks after listening to the disk, it's telling that I can't remember the plot.
There have already been suggestions that the centrepiece of Who's fiftieth anniversary should be a multi-Doctor story. My instinct that this is a bad idea but there is absolutely no point to it if the tv Doctors don't team up. That seems highly unlikely, given Eccleston's rather self-aggrandizing Working Class Hero stance;
meh, I don't think he was well-suited to the role in the first place. I wonder how many viewers of the Xmas episode would even remember him?
In part, this post was originally published in Oct 2009 on my old MySpace blog.
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Was never really too keen on Peter Davison's Doctor, thinking back on it. You could see the 'acting'. Tom Baker was probably the last half-decent one after William Hartnell.
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