DOCTOR WHO – THE COLLECTION – SEASON 23 / CERT:12 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: VARIOUS / STARRING: COLIN BAKER, NICOLA BRYANT, BONNIE LANGFORD, MICHAEL JAYSTON, LYNDA BELLINGHAM, TONY SELBY / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Doctor Who’s eventual fall from grace in the 1980s was as rapid as it was inevitable. Post-Star Wars and a new era of big budget sci-fi cinema and high-concept American TV, the show was always living on borrowed time. When BBC One Controller Michael Grade – no lover of the genre in general and Doctor Who in particular – swung the axe in 1985, it was just over eighteen months since the show had been basking in the glow of its 20th anniversary celebrations and Doctor Who looked to have secured itself a permanent place in the BBC’s affections. But dipping ratings, a new Doctor (Colin Baker) scuppered by a dreadful garish costume and an abrasive personality and a new narrative skew that took the series into some dark, mean-minded areas left the show vulnerable to attack from powerful enemies within the Corporation. Doctor Who went on an enforced eighteen-month break in 1985 (Grade had been keen to axe the show totally and it was only given a brief reprieve thanks to the weight of public opinion and an outcry from the British media), a season’s worth of scripts were written off and a new approach was needed for what was to be a truncated fourteen episode twenty third season airing in 1986.
The best that producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward could come up with, bearing in mind they had a metaphorical gun to their heads, was to reflect the show’s standing at the BBC by putting the Doctor on trial by the Time Lords in a big spaceship. This had been done before of course (in the final Patrick Troughton episode back in 1969), but doing so again at a time of creative crisis for the show just demonstrated how close to the bottom of the barrel the production team had found themselves. Instead of a bold, confident, ballsy new approach to a tired old warhorse, they effectively took significant steps towards putting it out of its misery altogether.
“The Trial of a Time Lord” is done few favours by its presentations in this latest Blu-ray boxset release (and your mileage may vary on the practice of putting out resolutely SD material on an HD format); the season succeeds, to a degree, in removing the nasty taste left by the previous series (Baker’s Doctor is less aggressive, there’s less graphic violence and general ickiness), but all that’s left is a thin stew of rather dull stories wrapped in a tedious courtroom framing device that consistently slows down any momentum the episodes may be trying to work up by cutting back to the Doctor shouting at various Inquisitors, Valeyards and sombre-looking people in funny hats.
The first four episode serial (often referred to as “The Mysterious Planet”) is a poor epitaph for classic series writer Robert Holmes, involving lots of wandering around a forest, dreary beardy primitives led by Carry On’s Joan Sims (who clearly has no idea what’s going on) and a couple of big robots lurching about entirely unthreateningly. The next four episodes (“Mindwarp”) are a repetitive bodyswap bore which sees a rapid return for Season 22’s Sil (again played with relish by Nabil Shaban) but which at least offers up a bold and shocking ending for the Doctor’s companion Peri (or so it seems). Episodes eight to twelve (“Terror of the Vervoids”) attempt to tell an Agatha Christie-style mystery set aboard a spaceliner crossed with a traditional Doctor Who ‘monster’ adventure (featuring the regrettably anatomical-looking Vervoids) but Pip and Jane Baker’s script is far too arch and clunky to carry it off. The two-part finale (‘The Ultimate Foe’) was a production disaster with Holmes dying before the final script could be written and the Bakers called in to pen a hasty last episode when script editor Saward withdrew permission for the use of his own script. Plans for the Doctor and his dark-side alter ego the Valeyard to be left tumbling into the void, potentially bringing the series to a close should Grade and co decide to finally pull the plug this time, were scrapped and the show ends on a spectacularly anodyne note which paved the way for Baker’s sacking and his replacement the following year by Sylvester McCoy.
It’s a ropey set of episodes, a sad reminder of the show’s terrible decline from its vibrant glory days in the 1970s, and even Blu-ray can’t breathe much life back into a series so clearly on its last legs. The history of the season’s troubled production is well-documented on extra features ported over from the previous DVD box set and the new special features here are left to have some fun or pick over the bones, best of the bunch being a comprehensive and charming interview with Bonnie Langford (the young stage star parachuted in as new companion Mel in a last-ditch effort to give the series a new lease of life, much to the chagrin of contemporary fans who went predictably apoplectic at the casting of a jazz-hands showbiz type into their beloved serious science-fiction series) conducted by Matthew Sweet. Elsewhere, various alumni from the series watch the episodes and comment on them, Gogglebox-style, in “Behind the Sofa,” the main cast reconvene at the Ivy for a nice lunch and a chat about the season and comedian Toby Hadoke revisits Gary Downie’s “Doctor Who Cookbook” with the help of actors who should know better.
As usual, it’s a staggeringly comprehensive release, the last word on a season probably not really worth celebrating in such style and buying it again on Blu-ray is really only just about justifiable by the inclusion of some watchable new special features.
4 out of 10 for the episodes, 8 out of 10 for the special features.
