For the first time in its history, Dr Who filmed outside of the UK, crossing the channel to do the location work for this story in Paris. Having extracted funding from the BBC for the purpose, the production team was determined to make it show, and fill the story with a lot of scenes of the Doctor and Romana running up and down Paris streets and in front of Paris landmarks, in lieu of running up and down corridors. The location work (set to an distinctly melodic score from composer Dudley Simpson) is both a strength and a weakness of the story: a strength in that it gives the whole episode a real sense of atmosphere, making the Paris setting believable in a way that stand-in English streets couldn’t have, and a weakness in that they overindulge, spending a few too many minutes following the characters around the streets.
Besides the location, this is a delightful story and perhaps the best product of Graham Williams’s effort to move Dr Who in a more comedy direction. With a screenplay mostly by Douglas Adams (rewriting a story originally devised by David Fisher) you expect it to be funny— and Adams does a better job here of balancing the funny and the serious than he did in last season’s The Pirate Planet. He’s helped by a stellar cast, with Julian Glover playing the villainous Count Scarlioni and Catherine Schell as his charming (yet inexplicably gulllible) wife (see below).
In the story, the Doctor and Romana arrive in Paris in 1979 and immediately get caught up in mysterious disturbances in time, and in an elaborate plot to steal the Mona Lisa. Count Scarlioni has lately been selling rare art treasures, believed lost for centuries, in order to finance some dangerous time travel experiments. Now, as it happens, he’s got seven potential buyers for the Mona Lisa— and fortunately he has an extra six Mona Lisas, all perfectly genuine and painted by Leonardo himself, in his basement. He only needs to steal the “real one” in order to fool all 7 buyers into thinking they’ve got the original. But Scarlioni’s not in it for the money— this is Dr Who, and he’s actually an alien in disguise, reincarnated all through history, and trying to build a time machine to go back and fix the mistake that got him scattered through time in the first place. Unfortunately, if he succeeds the consequences will be disastrous for the human race.
A few years before playing the villain in the James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only, Glover is already showing his Bond-villain moves, suave yet menacing as he orders his henchmen around and trades quips with the Doctor. Tom Baker, meanwhile, turns in his best performance of the comedy era of his tenure: in episodes to come he’ll just go over-the-top silly, but here he’s allowed to be more comical than in the Hinchcliffe era but still restrained enough to clue in the audience he’s only doing it to distract his adversaries, and to turn serious when the the situation requires it.
Meanwhile the quips are wonderful, and the humor never undermines the story, nor even delays it. Every scene (except one, which is worth it on other grounds, see below) advances the plot, even the ones played primarily for laughs. This is overall a really fun episode.
Details
- The script is credited to David Agnew, a standard BBC pseudonym used when producers or script editors contributed a script to a series they were working on. I’ve written before about how in this era, the BBC discouraged producers or script editors from contributing scripts to their series— it was seen as a conflict of interest to sign themselves up for a writer’s paycheck on top of their salaries. (In contrast to today, when it’s part of the showrunner’s job to contribute a lot of scripts.) When they had to do it in a pinch, they often used pseudonyms to avoid the appearance of impropriety. “David Agnew” also wrote the script for The Invasion of Time a couple of seasons back, when he was a pseudonym for Graham Williams and Anthony Read. Here, he’s a pseudonym for Douglas Adams.
- In this case, David Fisher’s original script proved to have too complicated a plot. Scarlioni was making money by cheating at casinos as well as selling rare art, there were multiple trips back and forth to the Renaissance to meet Leonardo da Vinci, and various other complications. Adams rewrote it to get rid of the gambling angle, have only one trip back to the Renaissance, and clean things up in general. After the rewrite, Fisher felt he no longer had contributed enough to merit a writing credit, and rather than put his own name on it Adams went with the pseudonym.
- A few confusing bits in the story are actually relics of Fisher’s original script that somehow escaped deletion in the rewrite. At the start, an artist sketches a portrait of Romana and produces a surrealist drawing of a woman with a clock for a face— suggesting some knowledge that she’s a Time Lady. It’s never explained, but in Fisher’s original script he was one of Scarlioni’s henchmen and involved in the time experiments. Later, the face of the alien that Scarlioni really is mysteriously appears inside the time machine: that was originally part of a scene in which the time machine reveals all the different lives Scarlioni has led throughout history.
- Speaking of the alien: Scarlioni’s true form is a one-eyed creature with a green blobby head that seems to be a mass of tentacles. It’s hard to avoid asking exactly how he can pull what appears to be a simple latex mask over this head and thereby somehow acquire two working eyes (the full range of facial expressions isn’t worth questioning, that’s standard for latex masks in spy movies). It’s also hard to avoid asking how the Renaissance-era Scarlioni, let alone the ancient Egyptian Scarlioni we see at one point, managed to make themselves latex masks in the first place.
- And it’s really hard to avoid asking how the Countess could be married to him and not have noticed anything wrong (thus the “inexplicably gullible” remark above). Cast and crew had a lot of fun with this issue off-camera, but on screen… well, best not to ask.
- The randomizer attached to the TARDIS reveals exactly how useless it really is. The device meant to be helping our heroes evade the Black Guardian, by taking the TARDIS places the Doctor would never think to go, first took him to an encounter with the Daleks, and next took him to present-day Earth. I suppose at least it didn’t land him in London.
- K-9 does not appear in the episode at all. On entering the TARDIS at one point the Doctor says hello to K-9 but that’s it.
- The most famous cameo in Dr Who history, and the only scene in this story that exists solely for comedy and doesn’t advance the plot at all (but it’s worth it all the same): John Cleese plays an art critic, together with a woman who evidently was equally famous on the BBC in the seventies but who I know nothing about. The TARDIS has landed in an art gallery, and Cleese and the woman are looking at it and loftily discussing the magnificent statement of “afunctionalism” made by the artist in putting an ordinary police box in a place where is has no business being. “And since it has no call to be here,” Cleese pontificates, “the art lies in the fact that it is here!” Then the Doctor, Romana and Duggan (a detective who becomes their sidekick for the story) arrive, step into the TARDIS, and it dematerializes. Cleese and the lady art critic stare for a moment, then she says “Exquisite! Simply exquisite!” while Cleese nods in admiration.
- The cameo was Douglas Adams’ idea, who just thought John Cleese might be willing to do it— and he was.
- Taking advantage of the fact that freelance writers for the BBC at this time retained copyrights to any characters or stories they created, even when contributing to an existing serial, Douglas Adams recycled many of his Dr Who contributions into other books. For the first Dirk Gently book, he took the plot from this story and put it together with a character from his later story Shada. Which was rather cheeky of him in this case, since it was David Fisher, not Adams, who came up with this episode’s basic story. So far as I know, Fisher never complained about it.
Next Week:
“The Creature from the Pit,” 4 episodes.
