The Happiness Patrol Part Two

The one where the Doctor confronts two snipers...

Killjoys from the flatlands have entered the city to demonstrate, covering their pink uniforms with black drapes, and their faces with beautiful commedia dell'arte masks as they move through the darkened streets slowly beating a drum like a funeral cortege. This mass demonstration of public misery initially goes unpunished (Helen A allows demonstrations, surprisingly) but Daisy K tells Ace that this won't last long. These demonstrators are not allowed into the city, and so will get their comeuppance when they try to leave. This is dark material.

Meanwhile, in the Kandy Kitchen, the Doctor and Earl - a character in search of a point - are prisoners of the awesome Kandy Man, who explains what Helen A employs him for. He is her executioner, and he loves his job. "Just because she employs me as her executioner doesn't mean I can't be creative," he threatens. "Tonight you see before you the artistic, sensitive side of me. So I make sweets. Not just any old sweets, but sweets that are so good, so delicious, that sometimes, if I'm on form, the human physiology is not equipped to bear the pleasure." In essence (vanilla essence?), the Kandy Man makes sweets that kill people.

I appreciate how Graeme Curry writes him as a 'proper' character. The Kandy Man is a stroppy, petulant, short-tempered psychopath, and is written three-dimensionally, not just as the 'monster of the week'. The Kandy Man has his own thoughts, feelings, prejudices and delights, which is probably a hangover from the fact Curry originally wrote him as more humanoid, like a mad professor, but whose body was more subtly composed of sweets. I'm glad the production team went with the full-on sweetie monster look, although Curry was obviously displeased as he still made the Kandy Man humanoid in his novelisation ("He was tall and powerfully built, dressed in a white lab coat and white trousers. He wore red-framed spectacles and a red bow-tie. Several red and white striped pens protruded from the pockets of his coat. His skin was pale and was covered with a soft white powder. As he moved towards them there was a soft, sucking sound as his feet touched the floor").

The Doctor does what he does best and tries to turn the tables on the Kandy Man by weedling vital information out of him. He wants to know whether the flow of the fondant surprise can be diverted, to which the Kandy Man astutely replies: "The foam can be diverted down another pipe, but I'm not going to tell you how. Anyway, it's a hypothetical question." The Doctor plays on the Kandy Man's confectionery weakness by pretending an open oven behind him could melt him, resulting in the captor spilling lemonade on the floor and sticking his big marshmallow feet to the ground!

As the Doctor and Earl make their escape down into the pipes, the incapacitated Kandy Man yells for help: "Gil-beeeeeert! Gil-beeeeeert!" This is all like some kind of cheese-fuelled night terror. Heaven knows what lay viewers flicking over to BBC1 thought when they saw a giant man made of sweets shouting "Gilbert!" at the top of his voice. They would probably have flicked straight back to Call My Bluff on BBC2 (featuring Remembrance of the Daleks' Simon Williams), or Derek Wilton getting drunk on his stag do in Coronation Street.

Sophie Aldred doesn't have an awful lot to do in this episode, spending most of her time on the run. She has a brief return to the Waiting Zone where she is reunited with the trigger-happy Priscilla P, played with matronly steel by Rachel Bell. Curry troubles to fill out this character, almost making you feel sorry for her when she recalls how much she enjoyed her job in the anti-terrorist squad, before she was transferred to being a mere Waiting Zone guard. "I did a good job, and then they put me on this. It's not fair. I know the streets, I'm a fighter," she alleges, which is difficult to take seriously coming from someone who looks like a drag queen with a plastic water pistol. As Ace rightly replies that she's not a fighter, she's a killer, but Priscilla's belief that she's a hard-nosed mercenary is punctured by the fact she's overcome so easily when Wences helps Ace escape.

Who's Wences? Well, he is one of the cute little 'pipe people' who were driven underground when the Earth colonists first arrived on Terra Alpha (so what was the planet originally called?). At first they survived by living off the sugar beet and fondant pumped through the pipes, but recently they have begun to starve because the pipes have been empty. The rodent-like 'pipe people' are of the indigenous Alpidae race, named as such in Curry's book but not on screen, and their ratty little faces are quite sweet, as is their pidgin English dialect. When they reveal to the Doctor that they have met Ace (they call her Gordon Bennett!), the clue is in the words they overheard her using, including "Wicked".

One thing that's not adequately explained in this episode is what happened to Earl in the Kandy Kitchen. Because this story is rather choppily edited, an entire subplot where the Kandy Man feeds one of his intoxicating sweets to Earl is missing, leading the character to seem curiously out of it for no obvious reason. Later, Earl claims he has "tasted the real thing", and the Doctor asks him to describe the confectionery, proving that something's been edited out along the way. I believe it's present in the deleted scenes on the DVD, and an extended episode on Season 25's blu-ray box set would fix the problem.

Although structurally the episode is a bit all over the place - there's a lot going on, and the Doctor does get about a little too freely - there's gold dust throughout. It feels like every scene has something of enormous merit, whether it's Helen A's mock disbelief that Priscilla P was overcome by a "guerrilla unit" of "a defenceless girl and a vermin" ("Is it a joke, Daisy K?"), or the Doctor yet again turning the tables on a figure of authority when he starts questioning Trevor Sigma from the Galactic Census Bureau ("I ask the questions"). The scene where Trevor hears Earl's blues music in the distance, describing it as "a pleasant melancholy", is tenderly done, and from this moment on the Census taker is much mellower, as if changed by the concept of being happily sad.

There are two momentous scenes in this episode, both involving Sylvester McCoy, who is firing on all cylinders in this story. Its theme seems to suit him, and Curry writes for his Doctor really well. It could even be McCoy's best performance in the role. The first highlight is the Doctor's visit to see Helen A in her apostrophe-spattered home, getting off to a rocky start when Helen A says she doesn't think she's had the pleasure of being introduced to the Doctor, who replies: "It's no pleasure, I can assure you." Hancock's "How very kind" is perfectly pitched.

The exchange just gets better, as the Doctor commands a subtle control over the room without really trying, merely through strength of character. He mocks Helen A's pride at "controlling the population down by 17%", eliminating overcrowding ("No more queues at the post office!" quips the wonderful Joseph C). We know she's done this through a programme of ruthless executions - 500,005 to be precise - and the Doctor is determined to get under Helen A's skin. While she's making an announcement about the latest "routine disappearance", he creeps into her office to confront her. McCoy is wonderful in these scenes, matching the seasoned Hancock line for line.

And then there's the sniper scene. Anyone who's seen The Happiness Patrol even once cannot fail to admit McCoy is mesmerising in it. The Doctor uses words and guile to face down two snarky snipers (named as David S and Alex S in the book) stationed on a balcony to pick off random killjoys. The Doctor allows the sniper to point the gun in his face, and even encourages him to "come a little closer". McCoy is dark, understated and dangerous, delivering his lines with a growl, fixing the sniper with a steely glare. The Doctor challenges the sniper to "pull the trigger, end my life", playing on his resolve. In the end, the sniper cannot do it, and admits he doesn't know why. "No, you don't do you?" McCoy growls. This scene gives me shivers every time I watch it because Sylvester McCoy is so good. The bit where he tells the second sniper to "shut up", but still fixes the first with that stare, is masterful. This is McCoy's finest moment, another of his numerous Doctor-defining scenes (and to think some Doctors only get one, or none!).

Quickies:

• There's another lovely scene between Ace and Susan Q when the latter is sent to the Waiting Zone, and again Sophie Aldred and Lesley Dunlop shine together (it's great that Ace often gets a "buddy of the week" in her stories, whether it's Mel, Susan, Bellboy, Shou Yuing or Gwendoline). It's sad that Susan Q has essentially given up on life, "happy that it's finally over". Susan Q's spirit and soul have been destroyed by the falsities of life in the Happiness Patrol; she's borderline suicidal. It's underlying, but the implications of what's happened to Susan Q's character is vitally adult in theme.
• The realisation of Fifi in the pipes is done well, a mix of puppetry and computer graphics. It's a wonderful creature creation.
• Earl Sigma is really pushing his luck slouching in the streets dressed in various shades of grey and black, and playing sad music on his harmonica. The Doctor refers to "the brandy of the damned", taken from George Bernard Shaw's play Man and Superman: "Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned. May not one lost soul be permitted to abstain?" The Seventh Doctor must be a fan of Shaw's, as he was seen reading his The Doctor's Dilemma in Dragonfire.
• It's amusing that the Doctor return to the Kandy Kitchen just to release the sticky-footed Kandy Man so that he can stop the fondant surprise, only to re-stick him to the floor when he leaves! Also: "I am a Kandy Man of my word" is just magnificent"!

By the end of the episode Ace Sigma has been sent to audition for the Late Show at the Forum, presumably some kind of gladiatorial competition for mass entertainment, like a deadly version of The X Factor. I love the grumpy doorman (named as Ernest P in the book, and played here by Tim Scott, who was also green-skinned Chima in Delta and the Bannermen) who snaps at the impatient Doctor ("I can't do anything until I find my list, now can I?") and has a black sense of humour ("Oh dear. Doesn't look like Daphne S went down too well, does it?"). Interestingly, in Curry's book Daphne S is described as a young girl, not the older lady seen here, and certainly not the same woman played by Mary Healy at the start of part 1, as some websites claim (the book does not name that woman, but does confirm my suspicion that she'd lost someone: both her husband and son had "disappeared").

The fearful look on the Doctor's face as he wonders how long Ace Sigma will last in the Forum says it all...

First broadcast: November 9th, 1988

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The sniper scene.
The Bad: The choppy editing is distracting, resulting in a continuity error over Earl's condition.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★★★★☆

Ace says "Professor": 31 - As Ace and the Doctor spend this entire episode apart, the word isn't used once - a first!

NEXT TIME: Part Three...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; Part Three

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.

The Happiness Patrol is available on BBC DVD as part of the Ace Adventures box set. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Adventures-Dragonfire-Happiness/dp/B0074GPGN4