The first thing you notice as Dr Who’s eighteenth season begins is that everything looks, and sounds, different. It’s 1980 now, and on screen is probably the largest visible change since the last decade turnover, 1970— when the series switched from black & white to color. (Gradual changes following both shifting styles and advancing TV technology perhaps add up to more in the long run, but they weren’t so sudden that you notice them while going through in order.) So surprising is the new look of Dr Who that you almost forget to pay attention to the story itself.
It starts with the opening credits: the arrangement of the theme song, unaltered since November 1963 except for the addition of a few extra electronic trills, is gone and in its place is a synthesizer version that sounds much more like… well, I hesitated to use the word “disco” but I will because that was the word the new producer used in telling the composer what he wanted. It’s not a bad arrangement— the line of Classic-Who DVD releases still use it on their menu screens— but it is very different in pace, style, mood, everything. Going with it is a new opening animation, featuring a stars flying past like the warp drive effect in Star Trek, then forming the Doctor’s face, followed by a new “neon-tube” logo for the series title.
As the episode gets underway, more musical novelty. Dudley Simpson’s background music has gone and in its place is an electronic score produced by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (until now a sound effects department, not a music department). Background music (or incidental music as it’s called in the UK) colors everything that happens on screen and the ostentatiously electronic sound of the new music can’t help but draw attention to itself. An early eighties synthesizer sounds like nothing except an early eighties synthesizer, and it’s impossible to listen to this episode without thinking of all the low-budget sci-fi movies that started using cheap synthesizer soundtracks around the same time.
On screen, the visuals are different as well. The story opens with a long, slow, pan across Brighton Beach before finding the TARDIS and the Doctor, and that sets the tone for a lot of unusual camera angles and cinematography throughout the episode. Special effects are different, and frequently intrusive, in particular when the first scene ends on a slow pull out to a star field like that in the opening credits, and the electronic music swells in a trying-to-be majestic, Vangelis kind of sound, all for no particular reason. A new video technology has arrived in the Dr Who studios: called Quantel, it is a very early form of CGI. No three-D renderings or animations yet, but Quantel can manipulate the video image in various ways not possible before, and Dr Who will be showing it off for quite some time to come.
Meanwhile, the Doctor has a new costume. It’s all in dark purple (or maroon or burgundy or something, ask a fashion designer) and even his trademark scarf has been replaced with one that color-coordinates with the new outfit. The costume itself does not consist of clothes you might plausibly find somewhere (for example in a TARDIS wardrobe filled with clothes picked up from all over time and space). Instead it is very definitely a costume. Until now the Fourth Doctor, apart from his long scarf, has worn a variety of different coats, shirts, sweaters, pants, shoes or boots that all look like he just rummaged in some closet without much concern for what he picked out (“bohemian” is the cliche adjective used in articles about the Fourth Doctor). Not anymore.
So far I haven’t said a word about the actual story. As it opens, the Doctor has disconnected the randomizer from the TARDIS in order to visit Brighton Beach, but he’s missed the timing and they’ve landed in the middle of winter. Fed up with trying to enjoy a day at the beach in freezing temperatures, Romana suggests a more high-brow vacation spot she’s heard of: Argolis, a planet devastated by an interplanetary war whose survivors have set up a resort, the “Leisure Hive” of the title, which is meant to combine recreation with education, and idealistically a place where tourists of many planets can meet each other and learn to avoid similar interplanetary wars in the future.
Of course all is not well on Argolis. The Leisure Hive is on the verge of bankruptcy, they’re dealing with a buyout offer from the Foamasi, the race they fought in the war, an unknown saboteur has caused a series of fatal accidents (the Doctor and Romana, of course, are blamed), and it gradually develops that the young, hot-headed son of the planet’s leader is determined to seize power and return Argolis to its warlike ways.
The script, overall, is very similar to what we’ve seen in season 17. It suffers a lack of cohesion— the various subplots all turn out to be pretty much unconnected to each other rather than coming together into a single climax. On the other hand, the silliness has been very greatly toned down, and that’s a relief after the previous season. The new producer and script editor both felt that Dr Who had become a sitcom, “The Tom Baker Show,” and they wanted to put a stop to that— and that’s a very good thing. Writer David Fisher initially turned in a script with all the sorts of jokes that would have been expected in the previous year, but he and the script editor revised it to bring it in line with the desired new tone.
On the whole, The Leisure Hive is an average episode that is completely overshadowed by the all the changes in how the series looks.
Details
- Who is this new producer? John Nathan-Turner, probably the most controversial (among fans) producer the show ever had. JN-T (as he’s known) will be Classic Who’s last producer— he’ll be with the show until it finally goes off the air. For that reason, and because fans had already become quite unhappy with the series by the time it ended, JN-T is often reviled as the producer who destroyed Dr Who. On the other hand, he has just as many defenders who think he did a great job overall, and as for the final decline— it was caused by forces outside any producer’s control and he did the best anyone could in holding it back as long as he did.
JN-T’s arrival in the series coincided with the start of publication of Doctor Who Magazine and the rise of organized Dr Who fandom, and that’s part of why he became controversial: fans love to argue about these things. He was the first Dr Who producer to go out of his way to make himself a recognizable figure to fandom, giving interviews to DWM, attending conventions, adopting a trademark Hawaiian shirt as his own “costume” at publicity events (see the Doctor’s new costume above: JN-T was a strong believer in costuming as a kind of visual icon for a character, and soon not only the Doctor but each companion will have a distinctive costume).
- If you’ve been following my series of posts and watching the episodes as we go along (I know, none of you are doing that, but bear with me) then you may have noticed JN-T has been in the closing credits for quite some time: in fact he’s been the show’s “Production Unit Manager” for the last three seasons. That’s a job primarily involved with the logistics of getting the show made: how to organize who’s working when, how to stretch the tiny budget as far as it can go, and so on. By all accounts, JN-T was good at it. But it was not a creative job, and once in the producer’s chair JN-T tended to let his script editor become what these days is called the “showrunner.” This plays into the debate on whether he was a good producer or not: the real decline of the show came under script editor Eric Saward, and many of the bad decisions should be laid at Saward’s door rather than JN-T’s.
- On the other hand, a lot of the “newness” that hits you in the face as season 18 begins did come direct from JN-T, and the reason the change is so sudden directly connects to the fact that he’s been with the show for 3 years: as he said in later interviews, he’d been accumulating a list of things he’d do differently for quite a long time. In particular, his initial design emphasis was to make the show more “up-to-date,” which took the form of following then-current trends and styles. You can tell a Classic Who episode made in the early 70s by the early 70s hair and clothing styles, but the show didn’t do out of its way to “be seventies.” Now, though, it is very consciously trying to be 1980, and the result is a look and feel that dates far more quickly than other eras of the show did. Doctor Who of the eighties is aggressively eighties in a way no other era of the show tried to match its time.
In fairness, this is a hindsight complaint: at the time, no one was thinking about what the show would look like in 2013, they were thinking how it would look to viewers on broadcast night in 1980, and rightfully so. - Also coming on board, the new script editor is Christopher H. Bidmead. Bidmead’s priority was to take Dr Who in a more “hard SF” direction, with stories based on the latest scientific discoveries (The Leisure Hive draws heavily on “tachyonics,” the idea of tachyons having received a lot of publicity around the time the episode aired). Dr Who has never been very rigorous on the scientific side, though that’s varied from era to era, but Bidmead thought it was very important to have the Doctor’s dialog not be just “gobbledygook.” As is often the case, you can go too far in either of two directions, and Bidmead’s influence on season 18 may lean too far in the hard SF direction, as we’ll see. On the other hand, I’d love to see Bidmead give Steven Moffat a good talking-to about things like man-eating skulls…
- A familiar name reappears in the end credits: Barry Letts, Dr Who’s producer through the Jon Pertwee years, is credited as “Executive Producer.” Since JN-T’s previous experience wasn’t in the creative arena, Letts was brought back with the express purpose of being a mentor to him and helping supervise things on the creative side. Letts shared Christopher Bidmead’s emphasis on keeping the science fiction grounded in real science, as well as having a good eye for storytelling, and will continue in the job for the duration of season 18.
- All the changes showing on screen, and an even bigger one coming up: as season 18 got started, Tom Baker decided it would be his last. With 6 seasons already under his belt, Baker had played the Doctor longer than any other actor. In recent interviews I’ve seen with him, he freely admits he had let it give him a swelled head: he’d grown difficult to work with on set, and in interviews he takes the blame for that. With the new regime planning to rein in the way he performed the character, he decided it was time to go.
- Lalla Ward, playing Romana, had also decided to leave the series, and both JN-T and Christopher Bidmead had decided they wanted to be rid of K-9 as well. The difficulties of working with the K-9 prop had meant he was left out of stories as often as he was included in them (in The Leisure Hive K-9 gets only a cameo, although it’s nice to hear in that brief scene that his “proper” voice actor, John Leeson, is back) and the new regime felt the character was more trouble than it was worth. So the new broom has only just begun to sweep clean.
- Also gone: the randomizer, which never had much of a point since the Doctor travels at random anyway (and which, as previously noted, kept taking him to exactly the sort of places he always went to). Having disconnected it at the start of this episode, the Doctor then uses it to modify a key piece of equipment needed to resolve the story, and then leaves it behind.
In Two Weeks:
“Meglos,” 4 episodes. (I’ll be out of town next week, so see you in two!)
