The Happiness Patrol Part Three

The one where Helen A's empire comes tumbling down...

"There are no other colours without the blues."

The Doctor, rather than try to rescue Ace from the miracle survival act at the Forum, forgets the fact his best friend is in danger and decides instead to hang out at Forum Square while he waits for Earl. He passes the time by chatting to Trevor Sigma, who shows him just how many routine disappearances there have been on Terra Alpha in the last six months - how can there be anyone left?! He also ends up crooning jazz standard As Time Goes By into a microphone.

As much as I love this story, it's messily constructed, as demonstrated here when the Doctor's movements do not follow on logically. After expressing concern for Ace's welfare at the Forum, he then drops that concern altogether to move to a different strand of the story. This serial could have done with four episodes and a bit of a rejig.

Earl brings the drone demonstrators to Forum Square, where they shed their maudlin dark clothes and join the Doctor's ball, laughing, joking and making merry in a show of chaotic defiance. Nobody can harm them, for they are supposedly happy and content, with smiles from ear to ear (Cy Town is particularly happy, seeing as he's come back from the dead after being executed in part 1!). Sylvester McCoy edges dangerously close to overacting in his depiction of the Doctor's glee, but he just about gets away with it because forced happiness is the whole idea.

This mini demo sucks in peripheral characters too, including the usually lugubrious Gilbert M, and turns the trigger-happy Priscilla P on her superior when Daisy K appears to look unhappy about the Doctor's ball.

This seemingly innocuous party has its repercussions though, and soon the drones spread their chaos throughout the city streets, gradually making their way back to the sugar factories, where the guards join in the uprising. The Doctor has inspired an entire revolution, just by holding a party. Now isn't that perfect Doctor Who? Reports of the spreading revolution start to come in, with riots and displays of public unhappiness. It would seem this is not a peaceful uprising that the Doctor's triggered, but the people have had enough, and Helen A's downfall is imminent.

Daisy K appears to find some enjoyment, maybe even satisfaction, in her superior's demise, gently goading Helen A, and finally mocking her when she notices she's packing a suitcase. "Will you be away long?" teases Daisy, played by the unmistakable Georgina Hale. Perhaps Daisy sees her chance to grasp power, moving from K to Daisy A? Daisy isn't given very much background, but Hale manages to flesh her out enough just by playing her, because she has such screen presence.

Helen A's not having a good day at all. Aside from the fact her empire is crumbling, her husband Joseph C - played diffidently by Ronald Fraser - abandons his responsibilities for Fifi, steals her escape shuttle and runs off with another man! Who knows whether there was meant to be a homosexual undertone to the fact Joseph and Gilbert run away together, but it's there if you want it. Two unassuming men in their fading years find solace in one another, and head off into space for new adventures together. Oh for the BBC2 spin-off series, Gilbert and Joe, which would see the permanently bewildered Joseph and the prissy Gilbert travel from colony world to colony world, from drag bar to show bar, meeting wild and wacky aliens. And there'd always be a musical number two-thirds through the episode, like in The Young Ones or The Muppet Show! It would make for a very civil partnership.

We get virtually no background on Joseph C (the highest-ranking male in the story, and even he has one letter separating him from his wife!) but we learn lots about Gilbert in one brief scene in which he reveals he was exiled from the planet Vasilip after he wiped out half the population by developing a deadly germ. He arrived on Terra Alpha with the bones of the Kandy Man in a suitcase, and rebuilt his body from scratch in the form of sweets. That says an awful lot more about Gilbert's state of mind than we might understand!

Talking of the Kandy Man, he meets a sticky end when the Doctor and Ace visit the Kandy Kitchen and force him into the pipes by firing gas jets at him from an oven (great effect). The shots of him bumbling along in the pipes, the lights on his control panel flashing away, a slightly panicked gait to his walk, are nicely done. The Kandy Man's demise sees his mangled remains slide down the food pipe into the execution yard, Gilbert M announcing his final end. "Can't you just pack him up and start again?" asks Joseph C. "Not this time, he's better off this way," decides Gilbert. "The Kandy Man's gone."

It's a shame, but it's true. The multi-coloured villain who made sweets that kill people, who was "terrible when he's roused", and who answered the telephone with a hilariously humdrum "Kandy Man?" is gone for good. Or is he? As with so many elements of Doctor Who lore, the Kandy Man (or Seivad, as Graeme Curry's novelisation revealed his real name to be) has had a life beyond the TV story. He popped up as an attendee at Bonjaxx's birthday party in the 1991 Doctor Who Magazine comic strip Party Animals, while a rebuilt Kandy Man crash lands on Tara and is used by Count Grendel to capture Princess Strella in the 1995 Decalog short story The Trials of Tara. In humanoid form he turns up in the 2018 Big Finish box set Ravenous 1, in which he meets the Eighth Doctor, is melted down to a gloopy syrup, is consumed by Androgums, and has a new body spun from sugar! Doesn't have much luck, does he?

The icing on the cake in The Happiness Patrol is, of course, the Doctor's final confrontation with the fleeing Helen A. As she creeps through the darkened streets of her crumbling empire, the Doctor steps out of the shadows and forces her to face the truth. He asks her why she did the things she did, and she reveals that she just wanted people to be happy. It seems Helen A started out with good intentions, but when the people refused to do as she told them, she decided to make them, with her executions routine disappearances, death squads Happiness Patrols and prisons Waiting Zones.

Sylvester McCoy is fantastic in this scene with Sheila Hancock, as the Doctor morosely makes her see that you can't have happiness "unless it exists side by side with sadness". One helps define the other. What is the point of being happy if you can't be sad sometimes? Helen A is a suitable case for treatment, but her condition must surely be rooted in some awful trauma in her past. She's looking for strong leadership, and a world happy and content with its lot. And if that world isn't happy with what she gives them, she will force them to be happy - or make them disappear.

Helen A's ultimate downfall - and something not actually part of the Doctor's plan - is the sight of the dying Fifi, fatally injured by the collapse in the pipes. Fifi is the love of Helen A's life, the one thing she adores and covets (although she was leaving without her!), and despite her protestation that "I always thought love was overrated", the sight of her dying pet crushes her. Helen A collapses into a flood of tears as her darling Stigorax dies in her arms. Director Chris Clough affects a sweeping zoom out on a camera crane to look down on this sorry sight, and Dominic Glynn scores the moment so triumphantly as McCoy and Aldred look down on the vision of sorrow, that it brings a lump to the throat. It's remarkable, and bracing, that Doctor Who, in its own dying years, could be this good, this powerful and confident. Yes, the episode should have ended there rather than adding a weak farewell scene outside the TARDIS, but the Doctor's defeat of Helen A is one of the most affecting scenes in Doctor Who history (don't try arguing, you're wrong).

And the most disturbing thing is the way the Doctor literally looks down on Helen A's pitiful form, seemingly with little compassion of his own. When Ace asks whether they should help her, comfort her perhaps, do something, he's resolute. "'Tis done," he mutters, offering the broken woman nothing.

The Happiness Patrol is another fine example of how Doctor Who under script editor Andrew Cartmel was developing, maturing, becoming something new and exciting again. It tackles mature themes with a lightness of touch, and is written beautifully by the late Graeme Curry. It's cast brilliantly: Sheila Hancock and Lesley Dunlop both knock it out of the park, but you've also got dependable, experienced turns from Ronald Fraser, Harold Innocent, Georgina Hale and Rachel Bell. It's astonishingly well cast. It does suffer from frenetic editing - sometimes to the detriment of the narrative - and for that reason could never score a 10, but there's no denying that beneath the sugary-sweet, uber-camp veneer, The Happiness Patrol is one of Doctor Who's strangest, strongest, and most accomplished works.

Happiness will prevail!

First broadcast: November 16th, 1988

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The Doctor confronting Helen A.
The Bad: The inclusion of the pipe people is a little unnecessary and underdeveloped.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★★★☆ (story average: 9 out of 10)

Ace says "Professor": 41 - ten mentions in one episode!

NEXT TIME: Silver Nemesis...

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

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