Paradise Towers Part One

The one where the Doctor and Mel visit a paradise resort that has seen better days...

The story begins with what would be a cracking cold open (aka pre-titles sequence), but which is spoilt in the edit. This is a common failing of the McCoy era, with so many episodes chopped up into little scenes to make it seem pacier, but actually it interrupts the flow of a sequence or the developing atmosphere. Here we have a terrified young girl running away from what I presume is a gang of tearaways in some dystopian future, and there's a telling clue as to what's going on in the form of the graffiti. This girl is eventually murdered by an unseen force, but the mood is spoiled by shoving a light-hearted and brightly lit TARDIS scene in the middle.

These TARDIS scenes - which will become ever rarer in the McCoy era - are rather lovely though, as they show the Doctor and Mel in a revealing light: she is excited about visiting a paradise resort and languishing in the swimming pool, he is more keen on adventure and exploration. Season 24 is determined to take Doctor Who back to basics. "Are you ready?" the Doctor asks his beaming friend. "Ready! I can't wait!" If that's not the centrepiece of a 21st century-style season trailer, I don't know what is.

But the TARDIS doesn't materialise amid the pleasures and glories of utopia, and arrives instead in the dirty, trashy, grubby Fountain of Happiness Square (nice overhead angles from director Nicholas Mallett). Sylvester McCoy is really settling in to the part now, his natural eccentricity showing through in the way he delivers lines and reacts to his surroundings. This is a fun Doctor, a man you'd enjoy being with, someone you'd find endearing and entertaining. For the first time since Tom Baker, the actor playing the Doctor has an in-built eccentricity, something Peter Davison had to dig for, and Colin Baker struggled to focus on. McCoy was born to play Dr Who.

The Seventh Doctor is a free-spirited wanderer, reacting with child-like wonder at his surroundings, finding something of interest in rats, graffiti, even a discarded motherboard. He doffs his hat at an inanimate piece of rubbish, just in case it's an indigenous life-form, and teasingly waggles his fingers in Mel's face when describing the octopoid Gulmari.

And most tellingly of all, this Doctor seems to have a natural affinity with youth (that'll help with Ace), connecting easily with the brittle Red Kangs while Mel struggles to see past their childish adolescence. The Doctor humours the Kangs in order to find out more about them, and enjoys their admiration of his high fabshion and ice hot clothes (he's dropped the tartan scarf for a paisley one, gained a Chaplin-esque umbrella, and has thankfully untucked his pullover). Just like when the Doctor copied the Lakertyans' ritual of touching the rock on the way in to the Centre of Leisure in Time and the Rani, here he insists on reciprocating the Kangs' how-you-do routine. Here is a man who enjoys and respects other cultures and traditions.

The Doctor's interest is piqued by the fact Paradise Towers should not look rundown in this way, and he's also concerned about the wipeouts, in which so many Kangs of all colours have been made unalive. Until this viewing of Paradise Towers I'd never considered the colour-segregated Kangs as a comment on racism, but it struck me here when Mel insists: "I don't have a colour." I may be naive, but I just haven't considered this before. It's certainly interesting to view the "Kang warfare" on what looks like an inner-city tower block through this lens.

The actors playing the Kangs are dressed in punkish clothes with coloured 80s wigs which slightly undermine their streetwise, rough 'n' tumble image, but it's a solid take by costume designer Janet Tharby. But whatever happened to the Green Kangs (total wipeout?).

On the design front, set designer Martin Collins plays a blinder with the gloomy, scruffy, vandalised carrydoors, complemented beautifully by Henry Barber's atmospheric lighting (love the shot of the Caretaker silhouetted against the brightly-lit arch window). There's so much world-building in Stephen Wyatt's script that it becomes very easy to believe this place really exists, thanks to the design department's commitment to the vision.

Wyatt's world-building extends to the genius use of language, giving the Kangs their own eccentric but perfectly logical vocabulary. As well as taking their names from common urban words like Fire Exit, Bin Liner and Drinking Fountain, their mutated linguistics add much colour: cowardly cutlet, how-you-do, high fabsion, ice hot, wallscrawl, carrydoors, hide-in... the list goes on. Wyatt could produce a dictionary of this lingo. It's one of the cleverest attempts at constructing a new culture Doctor Who has seen, inspired by newspeak in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Also wearing its literary influence on its uniformed sleeve is the Kafkaesque existence of the Towers' Caretakers, who supposedly patrol the carrydoors wiping away the wallscrawl but also fall victim to the unseen danger. Joseph Young gives a nicely nervy performance as the young Caretaker on patrol alone but afraid of what he might find. His dialogue is laden with bureaucratic complexity: "Caretaker number 345/12 subsection 3 reporting. I am proceeding along Potassium Street, corridor 5673 section 201, opposite door 782 on Floor 35 (north side)," he reports, before being allocated to corridor 5673 section 301. These Caretakers live in a maelstrom of categorisation and bureaucracy straight out of Franz Kafka's The Trial, or Terry Gilliam's film Brazil (released in 1985, so perhaps an influence on Wyatt?).

The corridors are stalked by killer automatic cleaner robots, but they let the design team down because they look far too clean, and are far too big and bulky. They should be smaller and more mobile, darker and grubbier, so they can loom out of the shadows, their buzz saws and blades whirring in the half-light. Instead they're how a Dalek might look if designed by Mr Blobby, offering very little menace and looking far too friendly.

The third faction of people we meet are the Rezzies in the form of little old ladies Tabby and Tilda, played with juicy theatricality by Brenda Bruce and the wonderful Elizabeth Spriggs. Their performances might be a little ripe for some, but I think it fits the colourful, larger-than-life comic book feel of this era.

Tabby and Tilda, who take Mel into their apartment for tea and cakes, are perfectly sweet, like your typical eccentric granny or crazy aunt, but there's a sinister tinge to their behaviour. It's in their keenness to fatten Mel up, their hurry to clear the dining tables of bones, and in their reluctance to recall the past. When Mel asks where all the middle-aged residents are, Tabby nonchalantly replies: "I don't quite recall, but I think they had something else to do. A war to fight or something. All such a long time ago. I often wonder whether we won that war or not!" Such amusing dialogue, but tainted with darkness. It links in with the Doctor's question to the Kangs about where all the boys are. Sent off to war, it seems?

Mel's afternoon tea with Tabby and Tilda is rudely interrupted when self-appointed vigilante Pex smashes through the front door, armed and negligibly dangerous. "Are these old ladies annoying you?" he demands. "No!" retorts Mel. "Are you annoying these old ladies?" Pex counters. Wyatt has a wonderful way with dialogue, injecting humour without resorting to broad comedy.

Pex is played by Howard Cooke (and looks like singer Howard Jones) who is always criticised as being miscast. Wyatt imagined Pex (pecs, geddit?) as a Rambo-type figure, a musclebound brute to parody American action heroes, but I've never subscribed to this. I think Cooke is fine in the part, not musclebound but not weedy either. What matters is the actor's interpretation and portrayal of the character given. I also think that if Mallett had cast a Stallone-type actor, they'd have dressed him just like Rambo, complete with straggly dark wig and headband, and with an oafish American drawl. That would have been so much sillier.

The script reveals that Pex is a coward who shied away from the war and stayed behind to "put the world of Paradise Towers to rights". In my mind, there's a fine line between cowardice and pacifism. Conscientious objectors do not need to be musclebound; indeed, I think it's more believable if they're not.

There's a great cliffhanger in which the Doctor is taken before the Chief Caretaker (Richard Briers playing Basil Fawlty playing Adenoid Hynkel in The Great Dictator), who regales our hero with platitudes and compliments: "I know who you are," the Chief Caretaker tells the bemused Doctor. "We have been waiting for this momentous visit for so many years. You are the man who brought Paradise Towers to life. The visionary who dreamed up its pools and lifts and squares. And now you have returned to your creation. You will make all those dilapidated lifts rise and fall as they've never done before. All signs of wallscrawl will disappear from the corridors of Paradise Towers. The floors will gleam and the windows will shine, and will be made as new. Fellow Caretakers, do you know who this is? This is the Great Architect returned to Paradise Towers. Bid him welcome. All hail the Great Architect, all hail!"

"What shall we do with him now then, Chief?"

"Kill him." Cue end titles.

Fantastic. Stephen Wyatt is a real find for Doctor Who.

First broadcast: October 5th, 1987

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Stephen Wyatt's clever and witty script, particularly the Kangs' lingo.
The Bad: The Cleaners are too bulky and clean to be menacing.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★★☆☆

Ace says "Professor": 0

NEXT TIME: Part Two...

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

Paradise Towers is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Paradise-Towers-DVD/dp/B004VRO84M