Doctor Who
The Leisure
Hive
The
polarising positions of those pushing Season 18 (or JN-T/Bidmead) over Season
17 (Williams/Adams), or vice versa, have never really resonated with me.
Probably because I rate them both. If push came to shove, I’d probably assert
that the latter achieves what it’s aiming for more successfully than the former,
stymied as the Fourth Doctor’s final year is by some unfortunate choices of
companions and a lack of rapport between leads, but I have little time for the
hand grenades at dawn lobbed about in About
Time 4.
One of the
big failings of the JN-T era, predicated as it was on appearances (or
superficiality, if you prefer) rather than content, is that it couldn’t keep up
the visual ambition that informed Season 18 (and which complemented the one
season of his era where content was more than its equal); if you’re going to
foreground gloss, you need to be able to support it with atmosphere, pace and
style, especially when the stories aren’t up to snuff.
As such, The Leisure Hive stands as a format buster
that was then promptly abandoned; the JN-T run would quickly collapse in on
itself, reverting to dependable, time and budget conscious directors with less
capability than any hitherto in the show’s history (or at least, too many of
them to be compensated by the good ones), a clear sign that its producer had
little idea of what made it work when it worked (hence his infamous belief that
The Twin Dilemma was the best story
of its season). Here, though, we have grand ambition, for the most part headily
articulated. The Leisure Hive is the
story of Season 18 that has grown most in my appreciation, because of the
manner in which it so wholly embraces telling itself visually, and through mood
and tone. It’s a story you can happily soak up, to the extent that it is at
times wholly immersive, a rarity for the showthat tends to fall short in convincing
world-building.
Of course,
the flip to atmosphere, mood and tone is that it could be perceived as top
heavy, that this is all it has going for it. For all that it’s nigh impossible
to find fans reviewing the Tom Baker era without getting into polarising
evaluations of why Williams is better/inferior to JN-T, it’s the common
refrain, benevolently, that The Leisure
Hive is a worthy first try, one that stumbles, but sets out the store for
what will follow with considerable verve. “A
brave, if not altogether successful experiment” as The Discontinuity Guide puts it. The irony that Lovett Bickford, “a frustrated film director” (who came
recommended by Barry Letts), who was keen to trim the fat and make the action
as fast as possible (not necessarily aided by JN-T cutting passages he felt slowed
things down), should have achieved what Gareth Roberts memorably described as a
“qualuuded pace” is a damning one for
those complaining that not only is it slow, but it’s also very short (with episodes
barely reaching 20 minutes).
Certainly,
when the story first arrived on video, some 17 years since I had last seen it,
I was a little disorientated by that qualuuded pace. Rediscovering stories on
BBC release could be a sometimes disappointing experience, and it could take
time to feel your way back into them, resolving the cheating memory a young
mind had built up with the stark reality, but it wasn’t as if I had The Leisure Hive enshrined as a hallowed
object. If you’d asked me for a readily-compiled season ranking, it would
probably have been about sixth, above the year’s only real turkey. And yet,
like so much of the season, it had a profound effect on an impressionable mind;
as About Time 4 notes, “some of its stories feel a lot more fairy
tale than those stories which actively try to be”.
Part of
that is the visual flourish, but part of it is Bidmead’s inclusive attitude
that, as long as there’s science (or technobabble, depending on how persuasive
he’s been) underpinning it, pretty much anything goes, from monstrosities scheming
within stone statues, to disparate time zones bridged by mirrors, to arachnids
that become swamp monsters that become pesky companions, to (evocatively) a
spaceship that becomes a castle and back again; even the universe itself is
found to be held together by a whole heap of chanting (Bazza must have loved
that one).
Some of
these ideas were striking when I was eight, some of them unnerving, but mostly
it was the imagery I responded to. The Leisure
Hive in particular had Tom becoming very, very old, and then becoming very,
very many of himself. I didn’t understand the mechanism of the magic box
Tachyon Recreation Generator, and I still don’t really (you go in a box and you’re suddenly playing Zero G tennis,
while some guy serenades you with stuffy scientific theory – it doesn’t seem
like much of a holiday, particularly with the fear of corrosive radiation
should there be a breach in the outer wall), but what mattered was that it
could apparently tear Tom apart (and, in a particularly memorable passage from
David Fisher’s frequently very funny novelisation, actually tear a visitor apart to lovingly described gushers of
blood).
But I
should note – again in response to the divisiveness that can arise from 17 vs
18 warring factions – that I had no keen awareness of the changes that occurred
between seasons at that age. Indeed, until I got myself a Lofficier Programme Guide (effectively filling in
Baker era gaps post-The Making of Doctor
Who, which rudely stopped at The Hand
of Fear), I laboured under the illusion that (perhaps creatively on my
part) The Leisure Hive and Meglos were part of Season 17. Which, in
a way, some might say, they are, thematically and narratively; it’s just the
flourish that’s different. This tends to be posed as a negative, that the show
lost the humour (although The Leisure Hive
is funny, and as an advocate of Williams I can certainly confirm that
once Davison is in full gasp the austerity can lead to, well, blandness) but
gained only gloss. As Philip McDonald put it, in a slightly negative take in
DWM’s The Complete Fourth Doctor, it
is “Season Seventeen with its wings
neatly clipped, and coated in a fresh lick of paint. And it’s glossy paint at
that. A touch too glossy for some of us”.
Then
there’s the take that (courtesy of Lawrence Miles) Season 18 brought back
scares to the show, and there’d been a dearth of them in the previous era. He
even says “Look at this from an
eight-year-old’s point of view”. I was obviously an undiscerning seven-year-old
viewer of Season 17, as I was rapt when Davros came back to life, aghast at the
unveiled Jagaroth (and haunted by the imagery of the story, as evocative as
anything in 18; the parchment of an Egyptian Jagaroth, the artist’s
illustration of the cracked Time Lady), had no beef with Erato as a crappy-looking
plastic bag and was on the edge of my seat when the Doctor leaped into Eden and
was menaced by fearsome (and flared) Mandrells.
So
simultaneously, I can see exactly what people are saying (for and against, and
against and for) but perhaps because of the age I experienced them, and the
mood in which I re-experienced them, I have a quite welcoming approach to both.
However, the idea voiced by McDonald that it’s not so very different at all, by
way of pointing out the superficial ways in which it is different is, though, everything
with The Leisure Hive. It is all
about presentation, and that presentation, qualuuded as it may be, is frequently
quite extraordinary.
For me,
once the initial post-video release response to the story as “slow” died off,
every subsequent viewing has elicited an entirely different reaction. The pace
of the story creeps on you, like the POV of a persistent Foamasi. In his own,
TV studio, way, Lovett Bickford is doing exactly the same thing with The Leisure Hive that Ridley Scott is
doing with Alien; taking an old story
(or a story suited to a now old era) and making it profoundly altered through execution.
Now, you’re welcome not to like it, but it’s disingenuous to simply dismiss it
as nothing different (it’s when the trappings fall away, and there’s merely the
airlessness of the studio without the style, as in the subsequent Meglos, that the shortcomings are
exposed for all to see). As for Tat Wood’s comparison of showing some Nightmare of Eden and some The Leisure Hive to people who couldn’t
tell the difference, that applies to any Who
from any era in terms of the uninitiated, so he voids himself (so to speak)
instantly with that ruse (Wood also manages to dismiss the aesthetics of Season
18 while staunchly advocating the grand design of the Cartmel era, which takes
some doing).
Jeremy
Bentham referenced “craftsmanship” as
the most suitable summation of the story in his 1980 DWM 46 review, although “pleasant
surprise” is someway short of describing it as an out-and-out classic. Argolis
is rendered as a coherently inhabited world, one of definable spaces, light and
shade. There’s scale (the shots of the hall at night) and scene-setting
(possibly taking a leaf out of Scott’s book, Bickford lends the hive model a
sense of verisimilitude by exposing it to the elements, the dusty winds ravaging
the planet). And he gives us additional shots from without, of the Doctor et al
viewing the surface from a gallery, the kind of perspective you just don’t get
in the series.
Bickford
famously went over budget, preferring one or two cameras over the more
traditional coverage that allowed fast shooting (JN-T had to book extra studio
time). As such, the attention to framing and shallow focus is very noticeable
throughout. Some of the effects decisions impress even now; the video link
screens, for example, or the Argolin sunrise. Others are a case of being able
to see what he was aiming for but recognising the shortfall. Actors walking to
“and through” the camera (cutting to the other side) is the kind of self-conscious
flourish that distracts rather than wows. And, while the music for the sequence
is wonderful (it should be, since it’s borrowing Holst’s Mars suite), the shuttle docking sequence isn’t quite Kubrick,
since all we’re looking at is a bit of pipe moving slowly towards a hole.
Unlike
Christopher Bidmead (whose moaning on the DVD makes Eric Saward seem
restrained), I do like the opening
shot on Brighton beach. He considers it completely wrong for the story that
follows, but it doesn’t need to be “right”; it’s a prologue, a prologue for the
season to come. I’m less keen on what happens next, dunking K9, and the riff of
“I do like to be beside the seaside”
is the kind of thing, like the use of the Who
theme as an incidental (and the question marks), that’s a bit too cute for my
tastes, but as a whole it suitably establishes exactly that this is something fresh
and distinct.
As such, it
also establishes that this is a show in a new decade. For all that humour has
been excised, even if it creeps in, it’s difficult not to pair it stylistically
with the then up-and-coming TV incarnation of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at points. Pulling up from Brighton Beach and into the
stars as the hive is described, isn’t so dissimilar to the first episode of
that show, and the general musical ambience of the Radiophonic Workshop (there
Paddy Kingsland, here Peter Howell) evokes a similarly united palate. Even the
Foamasi-Argolin feud parallels the Vl’hurgs and the G’Gugvuntts (more
explicitly so in the Fisher novelisation).
Bidmead
appears to hate the less respectful touches, such as the Doctor’s “Arrest the scarf, then!”, and the
indulgences of the lead actor generally, encouraged by Bickford, who he
believes “condescended to do Doctor Who”.
One really gets the impression that Bidmead – who I rate highly in terms of what
he brought to the season –objected to others tampering with his work while he
was quite happy to do the same; he rather diminishes Fisher’s contribution,
while attempting to take the credit for tachyonics, which other sources indicate
was Fisher, albeit embellished by the script editor.
Superficial
as it may be, or maybe not when you look at how unrewarding many of the
incidentals are on the show, the score of The
Leisure Hive is hugely impressive. It marbles across the production, every
bit as important and informing as the direction. The innovation of the synth-based
composers in the ‘80s was a two-edged sword. It was definitely time to, if not
dispense with Dudley Simpson then broaden the compositional palette (as
inevitably diminishing in returns as keeping the same guy on less than gold
duties for the last 11 years of the show’s current incarnation, even if you
liked his work in the first place), but almost without exception the composers,
who can turn in accomplished work in one story are often left stranded, farting
over-ladled noise into inert drama.
Compare
someone like Roger Limb on Arc of
Infinity to his work with Graeme Harper, and its night-and-day. In general,
though, the occasional inadvisable waka-waka aside, the contributions to Season
18 are a testament to how well JN-T’s changes could suit the series. And Howell’s work on The Leisure Hive is a particular high that would rarely be equalled
during the subsequent decade. He admitted he thought the story had too much
music, but invariably the problem (later) becomes one of intrusive music, where
its attempting to drive content that isn’t there. Some of the best material in The Leisure Hive is ambient, mood-sustaining
and world-imbuing, the best that the synthesiser revolution had to offer
(alternatively, if you’re Tat Wood, it’s “cheap
electronic music of the kind most programmes of this type abandon when they can
afford real instruments”, while even Miles called it “completely out of control”; that’s probably partly why I like it,
but also because it’s melodic with it, as opposed to Keff McCulloch’s out of
control, diarrheic drum machine.
Of course,
if there wasn’t a solid plot, then no amount of production value would justify
it, and The Leisure Hive has more
than sufficient going on in that regard (the futility of war, inevitable mortality,
atonement for past errors, the fragility of a corporate cosmos, particularly
when all you have left are service industries). It even course corrects on
Fisher’s previous script, so the resolution at the beginning of episode four doesn’t signal the curtailing of any
further dramatic tension within the story. This is a piece that includes themes
of deception and sleight of hand, so it’s rather appropriate that it should be wrapped
in a new approach, where form and presentation lead the way. Brock is indulging
in deception in order to wrest Argolis from the Argolin. Hardin is indulging in
deception over his progress with tachyonics. The generator itself is little
more than a magic act, where what appears to be happening isn’t actually (or,
depending, is).
Accompanying
this are pregnant mystery and acute use of reveals. It’s common feature of the
season that internal history and prior staging are vital to the story being
presented (the E-Space trilogy, with its societies built on dark secrets or
pasts, the history lesson informing the opening scenes of The Keeper of Traken, and the past and future portends of the
Doctor himself in Logopolis), and The Leisure Hive kicks that off with a war-ravaged
society, one which nurses its own surprises in plain sight. The revelation concerning Pangol, the Child of the Generator, is a thematically strong one, and
if the fact of the Foamasi is somewhat lessened by their underwhelming reality,
the build-up during three episodes of partial glimpses, skin suits and (with an
effective “push-up” shot of Brock’s “mask”) the unsettling act of reveal, is marvellously
staged (I don’t have much time for the moan about their insectoid true form
being far too big to fit into a human
suit, and evidently RTD didn’t either, although his approach of making the
Slitheen a fabulously farty wheeze was less than inspired).
As with previous
contributions The Creature from the Pit
and City of Death, Fisher is disposed
to explore the economics that make the universe turn. Which, unsurprisingly,
are very much like our own (one might extend this to The Stones of Blood, whose antagonist is a thief, and, if Tara is
idly free of direct financial motivation for its villain, the Doctor is offered
financial reward for his services). Argolis has been brought to the brink of
bankruptcy, Hardin’s deception is motivated by diminished funds, and the Mafioso
Foamasi, or their West Lodgers at any rate, know the only way to advance in the
galaxy is through sound financial (read: underhand) investment activities.
Discussing
terms in a space boardroom could easily spell space boredom, so it’s lucky this
isn’t (boring). What is, a little, is the show’s sudden and rather grating
obsession with continuity, surely courtesy of Ian Levine, with the over-explained
Randomiser and Black Guardian points proving almost as intrusive as Bidmead’s
dedication to the value of pseudo-scientific jargon. No number of impenetrable
words and phrases can hide that the workings of the generator are mystifying. And
yet, I don’t feel cheated by the lack of clarity over how/why the Doctor is
within Pangol’s costume at the end (or why he is he, as Pangol is he, and they
are not together) because the idea behind the reveal is such a good one, is
satisfying, and feels appropriate, and “clever”, and sure, it may not make
sense but the Doctor’s clever and so probably did something clever (more than
just setting it on rejuvenate) didn’t he?
I’m less
willing to let Pangol climbing into the generator with mumsie go, though, since
other than having lost it completely it doesn’t make any sense. You can see the
writerly wheels turning over; there’s a satisfying resolution to be grasped in
regard to Mena’s aging and Pangol’s appetite for destruction, but how to get
there? In the end it’s rather fluffed (and a little alarming that Mena
instantly palms off her baby; was Pangol a victim of neglect last time round as
well?) The bit that really gets me, though, is how Mena is apparently convinced
of the success of the experiment in episode two, and then later in the same
episode she’s in raptures when Hardin tells her it works. Erm, what changed?
The play on
the adversarial nature of the races and Pangol’s xenophobic lust for power is
more rudimentary, but still looks highly advanced compared to something like Galaxy 4; the aliens are insectoid and
therefore bad (although not all of them) and the Argolin are beautiful and therefore
good (although not all of them). It’s a Thals/Kaleds kind of thing, but with
the uncertainty over clear political lines having muddied waters in the space
of two decades.
Bickford
elicits committed performances and moderated tone, even where it isn’t
necessarily on the page. David Haig invests Pangol with believable malice,
giving him an edge beyond his one-note ranting (“The life of an individual is trivial!” even when it’s your mum),
and Adrienne Cori as Mena is wonderfully weary as her decrepitude accelerates.
Everyone’s very good, in fact, from John Collin as oily salesman Brock to Nigel
Lambert as the devoted Hardin. Much has been made of the replacement of the
power-mad villains with more believable characters in the season, but the
reason The Leisure Hive in particular
succeeds is consistency. There are bum notes in the cast of almost every other
story, whether among the main players list or the guests, and it definitely diminishes
the effectiveness that much more noticeably when the whole deal is being dealt
with so sombrely.
As for the
regulars, well the treatment of K9 is inexcusable, as it is throughout the
season (drowned, decapitated, irreparably damaged); the biggest cheek is that
JN-T makes such a big thing about not liking the poor mutt, then goes and
shaves two episodes off the next season to make a duff pilot for him (but the Levine
theme tune remains glorious, of course). While you can see, when Lalla snootily
points out on the commentary, that Tom isn’t even looking at her when they’re
talking in the final episode, such was the frost that had developed, it doesn’t
actually show in the performances; Ward is still being essentially likeable
Romana at this point. She only becomes a pain in her last few performances when
she has both Tom and Waterhouse to deal with and the strain leaks out all over
the screen (it shouldn’t have got to the point where you’re glad to be rid of
her in that horribly perfunctory farewell scene, particularly when the
alternative is another season’s worth of Adric).
The Doctor: I’m
sick of being old.
She’s given
an almost Davison-esque Doctor role aiding Hardin, while Tom is given a very
striking one as the old Doctor. He may have hated the make-up (I expect Corri
didn’t say a peep about hers) but the transformation remains stunning and
persuasive. McDonald opined that “there’s
the fact that Tom Baker plainly isn’t having a good time any more” but I
don’t think that’s quite true. This was when he was widely reported to be
having health issues (he didn’t show up on Brighton beach, and not just because
it was miserably windy), and certainly he isn’t showing off the same
flamboyance of the previous era, but he’s still entirely magnetic, still has
exactly the required judgement for a scene (when he knows Hardin’s a fraud and Hardin
doesn’t know he knows he’s a fraud) and he’s still disarming us with that grin,
be it in the generator at the start of episode two, or unmasking himself in four,
and adlibbing away (that scarf line, “Have
a baby”, looking to camera in the final part). It is, of course, all very
prophetic that Tom should be aged and incapacitated as he is ill and about to
resign, ensuring the thematic entropy that informs the season is about as a
watertight as the show ever gets.
This is, also
of course, the story where the show got its big revamp, introducing a new theme
and credits just as the old hand was about to exit (the same happened with the
Pertwee time tunnel) If Meglos had
been the season opener (never on the cards, although before Tom handed in his
notice Time-flight was gunning for
the season closer – I guess it would have had someone other than Ron Jones to
make the worst of it), the overall effect would have been much less compelling.
Bickford consciously overlit sets (and, at points, shot them in darkness) to emphasise the unforgiving Argolin climes
(there’s reason here, unlike the floodlit Davison era), complementing the
costuming and make-up elements. The Argolin are surprisingly successful, since
painting actors’ faces isn’t generally a recipe for same (see also the
Swampies, Lakertyans and Jacondans), and the dropping seed pods is a simple but
effective touch.
Fomasi: You’re
going back to face trial.
Sure, the
Foamasi aren’t all that, but I still kind of love them, mainly because (Andrew
Lane’s?) incongruous vocal performance is rightly legendary: Chief Inspector
Foamasi of the Yard. There are design
elements here that are too much, like Tom’s question mark collar, and the very schematic
costume, but they’re nothing compare to what would come later in the JN-T era. Pre-knee
boots, this version of the Doctor in brogues always makes me think of his extra-idiosnycratic
Junkyard Demon appearance. And
talking of boots, while it’s easy to put it in at JN-T’s deficiencies as a
producer, credit where it’s due if he thought up the story title, because it’s
a terrific one (less so is his envisioning of it as an intergalactic Butlin’s,
but he’d have many more opportunities to indulge his holiday for the Doctor
obsession over the next decade, and even finally taking us to a wretched Welsh
holiday camp in Delta and the Bannermen).
I suppose
the ratings disaster that was Season 18 deserves comment (one wonders how Tom,
if he had stayed on, would have rationalised the downturn). In their attempts
to lob rocks at their chosen targets, Miles and Wood miss entirely. Namely that
viewers switched off because they though the story was awful (as Miles points
out, it started with ratings half those of the year before) or they thought Season 17 was so awful that
they just didn’t turn up in the first place. In the latter case, Miles seems to
think Buck Rogers in the 25th
Century couldn’t have been the sole cause of the plunge, but I think it
very easily could, and it’s the only real explanation. This wasn’t like Space:1999, which came along prior to
the new cachet of SF action cinema. People (kids) were fickle; if it hadn’t
been for dedication and loyalty, my family would no doubt would have skipped it
too, rather than turning over to Buck after Who
had finished.
There
aren’t very many ‘80s stories that stand apart as being fashioned with consistent
care and attention. About Time 4’s
essay makes a great thing of how the show at this time was reacting to Star Wars and movies generally, pointing
up Peter Grimwade’s spatial approach to Earthshock.
But Grimwade also gave us Kinda,
which good as it is is guilty of “everything looks as if it’s shot on
stage-sets” (the charge also levelled at Warriors
of the Deep), something that could hardly be said of The Creature from the Pit jungle a year earlier. Grimwade gave us fine
sequences, and Matthew Robinson was a dab hand at location work, but only
Graybags Harper showed the kind of consistency and eye Bickford has (and
penchant for handheld; was it the Hive experience
that made JN-T reticent when he was asked by Harper if it was okay?) It would
be superficial to only like The Leisure Hive for the way it looks;
what’s most to its credit is that Bickford offers a world to immerse oneself in
for 80 minutes, embellishing Fisher’s script in the best possible way, while encouraging
his colleagues to produce superb results (music, design, effects). You can call
it style over substance, but it’s some style.
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.