“Happiness will prevail” —Helen A
Story
The TARDIS materializes on the planet Terra Alpha, site of a human colony, because the Doctor has heard a rumor that something evil is going on here, and if so he’s going to put a stop to it “this very night.”
They find a city that is just too cheerful. Bright muzak plays on public speakers, the buildings are all painted in bright colors— and death squads called “the Happiness Patrol” roam the streets, dressed in pink and purple uniforms, summarily executing anyone who commits crimes such as wearing dark colors, listening to slow music, or just in any way seeming unhappy. It turns out Terra Alpha is ruled by the dictator Helen A, who has decided the way to make sure everyone is happy is simply to execute anyone who isn’t. Such people are called “killjoys” and if they’re not killed at once by the Happiness Patrol, they face death at the hand’s of Helen A’s executioner, the Kandyman, a robot made to look as if it’s made of candy.
The Doctor was quite right that something evil’s going on, and as he planned he’s going to overthrow Helen A’s regime before another day has passed.
Review
This was a severe step backward in quality compared to last week’s excellent Dalek story. The Happiness Patrol has multiple flaws, the worst being that it is almost incoherent, leaping from one inexplicable scene to another with very little sense of a connected plot.
I always like it when I can partially exonerate the writer from blame (I tend to side with writers) and the incoherence of this story can be laid firmly at the editing door. Like most DVDs, the Classic Dr Who releases have “deleted and extended scenes” among their special features (when they’re available— for the oldest episodes no such footage exists). The deleted scenes for The Happiness Patrol are an eye-opener. If someone put together a specific list of “scenes vital to the plot,” and then someone else mistakenly deleted those scenes instead of the ones left in the broadcast episode, the result would be very similar to what actually did happen. Just one example out of several: at one point Ace and an ally are pursued through underground tunnels by Fifi, Helen A’s vicious, fanged lapdog. We cut away from the chase to another scene— and never go back to it. Later, Ace is just fine, and when seeing Fifi covered in bandages the Doctor refers to Ace telling him she’d blown Fifi up. Sure enough, the scene where Ace uses one of her Nitro-9 cans to blow up the tunnel and escape from Fifi is there in the deleted scenes, as is the one where she tells the Doctor about it. Now it’s true that from the Doctor’s later passing remark we can figure out what happened— but that’s not how adventure fiction works. If you set up a thrilling, dangerous chase scene then you’ve got to show us how it ends. Not just have a character mention in passing having heard how it ended. And as I said, this is just one example to be found in the deleted scenes.
Writer Graeme Curry can’t be exonerated of all the story’s flaws, however. Its second biggest problem is that it is simply overcrowded with ideas, most of which don’t quite seem to come together, or to get the narrative development they need. We have Helen A and her Happiness Patrol, we have the Kandyman and its grumpy assistant (who turns out to be the scientist who built it), who have a whole story all their own that barely gets hinted at. We have a census taker from the wider civilization of which this colony is only a part, who wanders around but never seems to do anything. We have a stranded tourist from some other human planet who, taking advantage of a degree of immunity that offworlders seem to have (because of Helen A needing to hide what she’s doing from the higher authority of whatever human civilization is out there), wanders around playing the Blues on a harmonica and becomes an ally of the Doctor. There are Mole People (not called that in the story) living in the pipes below the city, who turn out to be the indigenous people of the planet, now oppressed by the human colonists, apparently independently of Helen A’s regime. The Mole People become devoted to Ace, but for no reason we ever quite find out (it’s not in the deleted scenes either). There are conflicts among some of the characters within the Happiness Patrol which we never quite follow.
Giving viewers or readers a sense of an unseen backstory to characters or events can add a great feeling of depth to a story. Sadly, it doesn’t work that way here: there are just too many of them, and the brief glimpses we get feel incomplete rather than evocative. The Kandyman in particular should be the lead villain of its own story: some kind of fairy-tale-style adventure (Graeme Curry says the “Candy Kitchen” was partly inspired by the famous gingerbread house in Hansel & Gretel).
Then there are some things that make no sense even when they didn’t lose important details to the deleted scenes. There’s a protest against Helen A’s regime, the protestors wearing black robes and walking slowly and mournfully in favor of their right to be unhappy if they want. The Doctor sparks this protest into a full rebellion by finding the secret to immunity from the Happiness Patrol: they all laugh hysterically while overthrowing the government. “You can’t touch us,” he laughs at the patrol, “because your logic tells you that we’re happy.” Really? The Kandyman might be a robot but the members of the Happiness Patrol aren’t. We’re really supposed to believe that the ruthless death squad of an oppressive dictatorship is so easily fooled? Sorry, the only real dramatic impression is “we’re coming to the end of the story’s run time, let’s just quit.” The protest expands to a successful planet-wide rebellion in mere minutes— not minutes of screen time, it seems to be mere minutes in story.
Then there’s Helen A’s attempt to wipe out the entire native population by unleashing her pet, Fifi, into the underground pipes. Now, Fifi is certainly a vicious little creature with very big fangs, and I have no doubt it would be very unpleasant to meet it in a dark underground tunnel— if I was by myself. But it’s the size of a lapdog and there’s an entire population of Mole People, who all carry spears. It’s just impossible to buy Fifi as a serious threat to them.
The sets for the city streets look good in and of themselves, but don’t fit the story. A complaint that designers and directors have had throughout the eighties has been a BBC rule about minimum light levels on screen: it completely defeated their attempts to make Dr Who settings suitably dark and scary when they need to be. It appears that the rule has finally been reversed, and they were allowed to go very dark and shadowy on screen, and with evident delight they did so— sadly forgetting that this particular story actually needs a very bright, cheery (indeed, offensively cheery) setting. Terra Alpha ought to look like a page from a Dr Seuss book. But something’s gone wrong between script and production when, early in episode one, Ace looks around at the darkest, gloomiest set we’ve ever seen in Classic Dr Who and says “It’s too bright and cheerful for my taste.” The director had the idea to shoot the whole thing in a film noir style, all dark shadows and odd camera angles, and in interviews everyone seems to think that was a wonderful idea. Indeed that would be a really cool way to shoot any Dr Who story but this one.
So in all, a swing and a miss for The Happiness Patrol.
Dr Who and the Political Controversy
From ever since it first aired, it was lore among Dr Who fans that The Happiness Patrol was intended as a political satire on the Margaret Thatcher administration. This came up again when, after the new series became popular, script editor Andrew Cartmel published a memoir of his years on Classic Who that included a conversation between him and John Nathan-Turner about basing the character of Helen A on Thatcher. When the book came out, BBC news filled in time on a slow news day by pretending this had raised great controversy.
The truth about the situation appears to be “kinda sorta” on the Thatcher satire— it appears that both the writer and the actress decided to base Helen A’s mannerisms on Thatcher, but the story itself was in place before anyone had that idea. On the controversy score— no, not at all. No one ever actually cared. It was actually a far more serious controversy when a British candy company protested that the Kandyman looked too much like their trademarked mascot (they dropped their lawsuit when given a promise the character would never be re-used).
Next Week:
“Silver Nemesis,” 3 episodes. The “official” 25th anniversary episode.
