Carnival of Monsters Episode One

The one where a giant hand picks up the TARDIS...

I never knew until I researched this story before watching it that Carnival of Monsters was actually recorded at the end of the Season 9 recording block, and held over for Season 10. I just thought I'd drop that in at the start as an example of the sort of pointless trivia that we Doctor Who fans love.

The story opens with a crashing mix of impressive and underwhelming in quick succession. There's an all too brief model shot of a spaceship coming in to land which is gorgeous, followed by a studio-bound alien world drenched in Colour Separation Overlay and cheap-looking sets. In fact, almost everything about this alien planet is cheap-looking, from the awful wigs and make-up of the cast, to the embarrassingly ill-fitting masks of the Functionaries. Oh, and there's some of Dudley Simpson's cringy plinky-plonky "fun" music for good measure. Not a prestigious beginning.

These grunting Functionaries unload the ship's cargo, which seems to consist of lots of Christmas presents wrapped in uber-70s silver paper. There's also a couple of humanoids and a clunky contraption called a miniscope, which is wheeled unceremoniously into a customs bay. These two characters - Vorg and Shirna, who are Lurmans - could come straight out of Season 22, with their garish, lurid costumes and larger-than-life personalities (in fact, in an alternative universe where John Nathan-Turner's imagination went completely crazy, I can see Vorg's bad-taste outfit being what Colin Baker ended up wearing as the Sixth Doctor!). Vorg is a travelling showman, Shirna his assistant, and the miniscope is a machine which houses a menagerie of creatures (a carnival of monsters, if you will) for the purposes of entertainment ("Our purpose is to amuse, simply to amuse! Nothing serious, nothing political"). One thing that doesn't quite make sense though, is why Vorg and Shirna have come to Inter Minor when amusement is apparently prohibited?

It strikes me that Vorg and Shirna are very colourful reflections of the Doctor and Jo, two travelling companions on planet-hopping adventures with an unreliable machine (ie, a TARDIS) in tow. Leslie Dwyer and Cheryl Hall make for an entertaining pairing, but I must admit I found all of the scenes on Inter Minor terribly annoying and mildly embarrassing. It's like the Season 24 of the Pertwee era!

So where's the real Doctor and Jo? Well, their story pans out very separately after they materialise on a sailing ship in the Indian Ocean on its way to Bombay in the year 1926. In contrast to his work on Inter Minor, Roger Liminton's set design for the SS Bernice is gorgeous and utterly convincing, and complements James Acheson's costume design, superbly capturing the period. These characters are well cast, with Jenny McCraken making a perfect flapper, and the square-jawed Ian Marter the archetypal handsome sailor. Joining the party is the wonderful Tenniel Evans, whose blustering big game hunter Major Daly is an instant highlight of the era! These actors inhabit their roles seamlessly.

After a brief encounter with a box of chickens in the hold, the Doctor and Jo soon discover that things aren't all they seem aboard the SS Bernice, especially when events are interrupted by the emergence of a savage plesiosaurus from the sea! The dinosaur effect isn't too bad at all (certainly not as bad as it could have been, and not as jarringly poor as dinosaurs yet to come in the show...), and it was wise of director/ producer Barry Letts to show the creature through a doorway rather than full-camera. Mind you, the Doctor really ought to brush up on his prehistory: he says the plesioaur became extinct 130 million years ago, which isn't strictly true as they lived during the early Jurassic period, between 175 and 200 million years ago.

As an aside... the dating of this story is a bit confused. The Illustrated London News the Doctor picks up is dated Saturday, April 3rd, 1926, which is correct, but the calendar in the bunkroom has the current date of June 4th as a Tuesday, when it was actually a Friday. Claire mentions she saw Fred Astaire in Lady, Be Good at the Empire Theatre, which opened in April 1926, so that all works too. It's just that darned calendar...

The longer the Doctor and Jo spend on the ship, the stranger events become. It's odd enough landing on a cargo ship in the Indian Ocean in 1926 when you're supposed to be aiming for Metebelis 3, but things get gradually curiouser and curiouser... Apart from the fact there's a dinosaur outside, they find a strange metal plate on the ship's floor which doesn't belong, and which nobody else can see. They also find that the time of day is out of kilter (it's evening, but still light outside), and that the human crew are trapped in some sort of time loop where they enact the same routines over and over again (a recording?). It's thrillingly intriguing, and regular mentions of the ship's absent captain make me wonder if a certain goatee-bearded baddie is behind it all!

The chopping between Inter Minor and the SS Bernice is really jarring and annoying. It's like two completely different stories mashed-up into one: an embarrassingly cheap studio-bound sci-fi story mixed with a lavishly designed period piece blessed with location filming. There's no discernible connection between the two plot strands whatsoever. That is until the cliffhanger, which admittedly is a doozy! A giant hand reaches into the ship's hold and picks up the TARDIS! I mean, WTF!? It provides an implied connection between the two story strands, but for me isn't quite explicit enough. What was really needed was a shot of Vorg reaching into the miniscope and plucking out the police box. Fan familiarity with the story means we don't see it as it would have been seen for the very first time in 1973. We know it's Vorg's hand and we know the Doctor and Jo are inside the miniscope, but that connection isn't quite clear enough to a new viewer because we've not been shown a hand going into the miniscope. As it is, viewers might presume it was a giant in the ocean outside, seeing as there's an extinct dinosaur there too!

This first episode of Carnival of Monsters is a mess, and I enjoyed the Doctor and Jo's scenes far more than those with Vorg and Shirna. It's just too jarring, in both the editing and the presentation: the Inter Minor scenes are so shoddy and cheap looking, like a kids' show. I look forward to seeing how it all comes together, but so far I'm not wowed. I'm suitably intrigued though...

First broadcast: January 27th, 1973

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Roger Liminton's design for the SS Bernice is gorgeous.
The Bad: Roger Liminton's design for Inter Minor is atrocious.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆

"Now listen to me" tally: 21
Neck-rub tally: 12 - two in one episode! First at 5m 57s when admitting they're not on Metebelis 3, then again at 21m 54s when admitting there were no plesiosaurs in 1926! The Doctor often rubs his neck when he's awkwardly embarrassed!

NEXT TIME: Episode Two...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Episode Two; Episode Three; Episode Four

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: http://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.com/2014/05/carnival-of-monsters.html

The Carnival of Monsters Special Edition is available on BBC DVD as part of the Revisitations 2 box set. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Revisitations-Carnival-Monsters-Resurrection/dp/B004FV4R9A/