Meglos Part Two

The one where Meglos, disguised as the Doctor, gets all spiky...

It's tiresome enough having to watch the same bit over and over again as part of the chronic hysteresis, but to have the looped footage reprised from last week as well really takes the biscuit! There's something incrementally irksome about watching Tom Baker pretend to trip over time and again, and by the time they manage to escape the loop - by rather half-heartedly re-enacting it all themselves - I was eternally grateful to the great god Ti myself!

What puzzles me about the chronic hysteretic loop is that it's the same moment happening over and over again, but the people trapped within it remember it happening. So the Doctor and Romana have a linear memory of the amount of times they've looped, and said those words and done those things, but their physical selves keep looping backwards to start again, essentially reliving the same thing repeatedly. So are they looping back in time (as the story suggests) or simply being forced to re-enact the same moment? It's confusing, because by rights they shouldn't remember they're looping, although Meglos does say their only respite is the amount of time between the loops. Still, I'm just glad it's over with, because it was such a ridiculous way to delay the Doctor actually entering the narrative.

Meglos Part One

The one where the monster is a talking cactus...

The sheer excitement of the new opening music and titles is easy to overlook with familiarity, but they really were a huge step forward in updating Doctor Who's tired image for the 1980s. BBC1's Saturday schedule was so full of colour and variety back in 1980 (US import The Dukes of Hazzard, Larry Grayson's Generation Game, Paul Daniels' Magic Show) that Doctor Who needed to get noticed, and these sparkly, pacy new titles were just the job. I love how the starfield fades gently into the episode proper, momentarily placing the fiction among the stars.

Oh, but what a disappointing story title. Meglos. What is it, what is it supposed to mean to the viewer? It's along the lines of other story titles that mean absolutely nothing, such as The Krotons or anything written by Christopher H Bidmead. Just a one-word title, a made-up word at that, conveys absolutely nothing about what the story's about. We know now, all this time later, that Meglos is about Meglos, and that Meglos is the enemy, but coming to the story without that foreknowledge, it's just meaningless. Original title The Last Zolfa-Thuran would have been a bit better because at least then you get an inkling of what the story will be about. Calling it Meglos is just as dull as calling Paradise Towers 'Kroagnon', or The Caves of Androzani 'Sharaz Jek'. It doesn't mean anything.

The Leisure Hive Part Four

The one where Pangol incites a second war between the Argolins and the Foamasi...

The episode durations for the first two stories of Season 18 are unusually short, but the reprises also feel tiresomely long. For this episode, it lasts almost two minutes, which is rather long for an episode lasting just 21 minutes 19 seconds. And when the reprise includes dead dialogue ("Is it something to do with the random field frame?") and various people leaving rooms at an orderly pace, it becomes very humdrum.

The reprise extends the Foamasi attack on Mr Brock though, to include the defrocking of creepy old Klout (a character with not a single thing to do or say throughout). The whole thing feels a bit like they're stripping Brock and Klout, until you see their face masks fall to the floor among their clothes. It's a mix of horror and unintentional comedy, topped off by the Foamasi official proclaiming: "Now that I have your attention..."

The Leisure Hive Part Three

The one where an ally proves to be a lizard in disguise...

One aspect of JNT's stylistic revolution I've not gone into very much so far is the radically different incidental music, in this case provided by Peter Howell. Veteran composer Dudley Simpson had pretty much had a monopoly on Doctor Who for the last few years (except if Douglas Camfield was directing!), but as dependable as he was, it was certainly time for a change. Simpson's first work for the show was for Season 2's Planet of Giants in 1964, and his last was for Season 17, so he'd had 15 years (on and off) to give Doctor Who all he had, and I think, to be fair, that's what he'd done.

The switch to music provided by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop on a more permanent basis (Simpson was not a member of the Workshop, which had only scored three Doctor Whos in the past*) was another way to modernise and refresh the programme. Howell, as well as updating the theme music, scored The Leisure Hive with an ocean of gorgeous synthesised soundscapes. There are waves of sound washing over the visuals, draping and drenching it in sci-fi ambience to match the snazzy graphics and model shots. The score manages to be moody and nimble, and stands shoulder to shoulder with Brian Eno's work with David Bowie on the Low and Heroes albums, and also calls to mind the early, innovative work of musicians like Gary Numan, John Foxx and Vangelis (Howell's score sounds very Vangelis sometimes, to be extent that it starts to become the score from Bladerunner in my head!).

The Leisure Hive Part Two

The one where the Doctor ages into an old wizard...

Considering the way this episode ends (with the Doctor aged into an old, white-haired and bearded man), I think Tom Baker looks remarkably youthful in the shot where he reveals he wasn't in the Tachyon Generator at all (where he's standing in front of the TARDIS). For some reason, in that one shot, he looks as young as he did when he started being Dr Who, back in '74. Curious, seeing as this is a story about time experiments and rejuvenation (and the season has a theme of entropy as a whole).

What I like about this episode is that Tom Baker gets to be the Doctor - his Doctor - much more than in part 1. He comes out of his shell more and Tom is able to inject more personality into his performance, more of the little quirks and eccentricities that make watching his Doctor so compelling. The beaming grin is back, and the staring googly eyes, and that wonderful wit that the Fourth Doctor often uses as a weapon, or defence. When Pangol asks the Doctor how he got out of the Tachyon Generator, he replies: "Through a hole in the back". When Pangol states that there is no hole, the Doctor holds up his (damaged?) sonic screwdriver and says: "There is now."

The Leisure Hive Part One

The one where (almost) everything changes...

Welcome to the new season on BBC1, and there's a new look for Dr Who... Boy, is there a new look. It's a new everything! Practically everything changes between Seasons 17 and 18 apart from the two lead actors, and there's even some significant changes there. There's a lot to look at, so much to comment on and pick through, so let's get on with it.

I'm loving those new titles, and that new theme arrangement. It's so arrestingly new and fresh, so modern and clean and sci-fi, but it also feels so right, like it should always have been that way. After too many years of the same old (albeit lovely) time tunnel effect, and the same old picture of Tom Baker, it's a welcome development for the opening titles and music to get a good shake-up, to bring the programme firmly into the 1980s. It's a feast for the eyes and ears: the rainbow colours, the movement through the starfield, the developing head of the Doctor (Tom now looks correctly 46 rather than 40), the new logo and bubbly font. It's almost too much to take in all at once, like a Newness Overdose.

Doctor Who Decades: The 1970s

Every time Doctor Who reaches the end of a decade, it seems to be an automatic point of change and renewal for the series. Here's the second in a series of blogs looking back over a decade of Doctor Who.

The 1970s

So here I am, more than two years after I wrote about the 1960s, at the end of another decade of Doctor Who. It's not quite the end of an era, but it definitely feels like the end of Doctor Who's 1970s with the final episode of The Horns of Nimon, broadcast just 12 days into 1980. A lot changes after Season 17, and although there's another season of Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor to go, it's a good opportunity to stop, take stock and look back at what has been a rollercoaster 10 years.

Whereas the 1960s began as a mild curiosity in a junkyard, the 1970s began with a technicolour bang at a cottage hospital in deepest Essex. Doctor Who changed so much between Seasons 6 and 7 that it was almost unrecognisable to what had gone before. The War Games had been an epic finale for the season, the Second Doctor and the decade, but as soon as Jon Pertwee collapsed out of the TARDIS in Oxley Woods in Spearhead from Space - in colour, and on film - it was clear the series had a renewed impetus. Pertwee was an older leading man, but that didn't matter because this new Doctor was all about the action! It was like Doctor Who had been given an ITC transplant, and suddenly it felt like a contemporary of one of Lord Lew Grade's genre-twisting action-packed exports such as Department S or Strange Report.