City of Death Part Four

The one where Scaroth goes back in time in order to stop himself having to go back in time...

This is the big one, the episode that a whopping 16.1 million people sat down to watch at 6.15pm on Saturday, October 20th, 1979. It is the single most-watched episode of Doctor Who ever, and will probably retain that record forever. Sadly, the main reason for that is not because everybody thought Doctor Who was the best thing on the box, but because it was pretty much the only thing on the box! ITV was on strike, it was completely off air, leaving just the two BBC channels to choose from, so it's no wonder that everybody plumped for Doctor Who. After all, the only other thing they could have watched was Grapevine on BBC2, which was about how trades union and community self-help groups were taking action to... oh blimey, who cares?! There's a spaghetti-headed monster on BBC1 dressed like the Man from Del Monte!

So 16 million people saw David Graham reprise his "death boogie" from last week, and those same 16 million people saw the culmination of one of Doctor Who's wittiest stories ever. Thank goodness these circumstances didn't manifest a few weeks later when it could have been The Horns of Nimon everybody saw!

City of Death Part Three

The one where Scaroth starts to go to pieces...

I love the knowing exchanges between Julian Glover and Tom Baker (and later, Lalla Ward), they're all so adept at delivering the dialogue with just the right tone it was written for. The characters metaphorically circle each other, weighing one another up, going along with the charade of false politeness. When the Doctor asks Tancredi what he's doing in 1505, the Captain replies: "I will tell you. The knowledge will be of little use to you, since you will shortly die." Wonderful stuff!

It seems that Captain Tancredi is not a distant relation of Count Scarlioni's; they are the same man, or at least aspects of the same man. They share their thoughts and can communicate mentally across the barriers of time and space. Tancredi affably explains that he is really Scaroth, last of the Jagaroth race (the spaghetti-headed aliens), and that when the spaceship we saw at the start of part 1 exploded, he, as the last survivor, was fractured into several splinters through time. So Tancredi and Scarlioni are both Scaroth, different shards of his splintered existence. All identical, none complete. What a fascinating idea. It's also rather tragic, as reflected in the solemn way the Doctor responds to the news (as opposed to a cheap wisecrack). I suppose the Doctor, as a Time Lord, can relate to the feeling of being one man being in several places at once.

City of Death Part Two

The one where the Doctor finds six genuine Mona Lisas...

Why does Scarlioni take his face off? It doesn't lead to anything other than providing a good cliffhanger, but the sense of it is lost. What is clever though, is that the carving on the great wooden doors of his chateau appropriately reflect his true spaghetti-faced countenance. In reality, they are the doors of the Hotel des Ambassadeurs des Hollande on Rue Vieille du Temple, and the carvings depict the heads of Medusa, with her hair of snakes. I googled the doors and it looks like they've since been painted red. I wonder what the Count would say about that?

Inside, it's back to a BBC studio, but Richard McManan-Smith's stunning design and decor for the chateau's interior is richly detailed. You barely get to see the corridor properly (fleetingly at the end of part 1, and only in part in this episode) but it's so well dressed, and the amount of research, not to mention time and effort, that went into designing and dressing the living room is astonishing. McManan-Smith was more accustomed to designing sets for variety and comedy shows at the time, such as Mike Yarwood or Lennie Bennett, although he had dabbled with period drama in the past, notably The Pallisers and Colditz. But here, he simply excels himself, as he does with the Renaissance scenes later on.

City of Death Part One

The one where the Doctor and Romana go on honeymoon holiday to Paris...

Ah, this one's written by David Agnew, the same bloke who wrote The Invasion of Time, so that doesn't bode well. In truth, of course, Agnew wasn't a real person, but a pseudonym first used by scriptwriter Anthony Read in 1971 for his Play for Today Hell's Angel, and later his BBC2 play Diane. Read adopted the alias for The Invasion of Time while he was Doctor Who's script editor, sharing it with producer Graham Williams, and it pops up again here as the pseudonym of Williams, new script editor Douglas Adams and writer David Fisher, who came up with the first ideas of what City of Death is based on. A bit of a mish-mash then.

The opening sequence (one of those that would've made a fab cold open if Doctor Who did them back then) features a gorgeous model set of a prehistoric landscape, centring in on an alien spaceship that vies with the Movellans' craft in the last story for sheer design creativity. This ship is a three-legged spider design, with a spherical centre housing an exposed cockpit. It's a radically different and unusual design by one of Doctor Who's unsung heroes, Ian Scoones, and it's a shame City of Death was his last work for the show. He'd also done excellent modelwork for stories such as The Ambassadors of Death, Pyramids of Mars and The Invisible Enemy.