By Roy Mathur, on 2021-12-24, at 19:11:02--23:40:44 GMT, for Captain Roy's Rocket Radio Show, Listen
I'm back after a minor sickness and ennui break; listen to last pod 417. I will, however, endeavour to enjoy Christmas, despite how grouchy I no doubt sounded in 417.
'Twas the night before Christmas, and Roy was feeling rough, but doing a show is better than dwelling on discomfort, so... enjoy, enjoy. ("Enjoy, enjoy", is something my mother says. Isn't that just the most pleasant thing to say to someone?)
Audio clips are back. Bugger copyright, if this isn't fair use, I don't know what is. The Beeb can't begrudge me a few seconds of audio stitched together from each story. The clips, like the ones on the BBC's own Desert Island Discs, will be 15 seconds or less.
Merry Christmas Eve, my dear fellow Whovians!
Fourth Doctor: Tom Baker
Companion(s): Romana: Mary Tamm, K9: John Leeson
Director: Norman Stewart
Writer: Robert Holmes (our old friend and prolific DW script editor and writer of 18 scripts).
Producer: Graham Williams (and an uncredited John Nathan-Turner, who will take over as the producer in 1980 until the old series's demise in 1989).
Location: In September 1978, there was additional on location filming in and around the beautiful reed beds and wetlands of the River Alde at Iken Marsh in Suffolk.
Broadcast: Story 102/serial 5 of season 16, 4 x 22 minute episodes, 23 December 1978--13 January 1979, following The Androids of Tara covered in pod 414.
Jodie Marsh, British stripper, page three model, bodybuilder, and a celebrity famous for being famous was born in Brentwood, Essex, United Kingdom. Hello, relatives from Brentwood, who I never ever see. (It's a very Mauritian area).
The horribly, cringeworthy, earwormy, Mull of Kintyre / Girls School (the song, not the band) mashup by Wings was the Christmas number one. The Americans pushed the fantastic Le Freak by Chic, but we wanted this. Kill me.
It is amazing the first episode even aired on the 23rd because a strike at the BBC that started on the 21st, ended on the 22nd at 22:00 with members of the Association of Broadcasting and Allied Staffs (ABS), now Broadcasting and Entertainment Trades Alliance, winning a 15% pay rise.
The Doctor and Romana, minus K9, step out of the TARDIS and onto marshy third moon of Delta Magna. They are searching for the fifth and penultimate segment of the Key to Time.
It is colony world, populated by the primitive green skinned "swampies" and newly arrived human colonists (the "dry feet"). There is a conflict between the two because of a plan to build methane power plants in the swamps, which will anger the swampies' god, a giant squid they call Kroll.
There's the obligatory running about, getting captured and escaping. But at least there is a memorable escape scene in which Doctor sings a high note to shatter a skylight. This enables them to free themselves from a creative execution device combining a rack with tendrils that shrink when heated by the sun.
Under attack from Kroll, all sides take refuge in the refinery, until the Doctor, playing out a hunch, points the Key to Time tracer at Kroll, making it vanish and the segment appear. The Doctor had deduced that Kroll, an ordinary giant quid, had reached behemothic proportions by ingesting the segment.
The Doctor and Romana leave the group of survivors, a bemused human technician and the swampies, and trudge through the swamp and return to the TARDIS, where we hear the Doctor saying, "Get back K9. Get back."
No K9 at all. Alas, poor little doggy, though I'm glad I didn't have to listen to his ingratiating voice this week.
Kroll chant and dance and drum riff, by incidental music composer, Dudley Simpson, is very catchy. I found myself chanting along to it.
Scenes of deaths and peril are numerous and creative. The sacrifice of Romana to Kroll is very King Kong. The tendril powered rack execution device is nasty and clever. Kroll grabs and chomps its victims with abandon. The arms dealer get's sucked down by the swamp. There is an actual shooting in the back. At one stage, the primitives face being wiped out by an orbital weapon.
The tribals are poorly equipped, hence the need from arms supplied by the Sons of Earth. I saw the Doctor pick up a Polynesian-style (or possible East African) war club.
There a memorable performance by Neil McCarthy, as the genocidal colonial, Thawn. Neil McCarthy was a physically huge and prolific actor, who you'll remember from many films from the 60s and 70s. Under one hell of a lot of makeup, one of his last roles was the villain Calibos in Clash of the Titans (1981). This contrasted with the largely unmemorable (thanks to the script rather than the acting), and short-lived, crooked arms dealer, played by Glyn Owen, who gets sucked into the swamp.
In the last pod 416, we talked about Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which also features cthulhuesque-like beasts; must be that kind of week.
The creature design for that beast was very affective. The actual prop, scaled up by camera trickery, was satisfactorily squidgy, green, organic, huge, and armed with long powerful tentacles with which to draw struggling prey into it's gaping, gnashing maw.
Watercraft! There are hovercraft used by the humans and canoes used by the primitives, and the Doctor and Romana.
The Doctor is even more deliberately annoying, as he often is with authority, when he is arrested by the human technicians and says, "Will there be strawberry jam for tea?" I enjoy his mouthiness and I am absolutely sure his dialogue has affected my own over the years, the other being Avon, and occasionally gotten me in trouble.
The Doctor says he's, "Nearly seven-hundred and sixty."
Colonialism and exploitation is a theme; a recurrent one of course in Doctor who, and that always reminds me of the Blake's 7 episode, Horizon (1979), which we will talk about just as soon as this jaunt through hell is finally finished or finally finishes me. This is something I love about Doctor Who, and what annoys me about some sections of the fandom who think that New Who is too socially conscious. No, both Old Who and New Who have always been socially conscious sci-fi horror dramas. As well as the unfortunate stream of keyboard warfare from whiny complaining fans every time Doctor Who gets political (through it's hard to believe that anyone too right-wing would be a fan in the first place), there have been academic papers, essays, and articles written on the subject!
I read that Robert Holmes was commissioned to write a story with the biggest creature ever featured in a Doctor Who story. The Kroll is 140 feet in height, more than mile wide, and has in excess of thirty massive, long, whipping tentacles. Wait, I don't remember seeing thirty flailing appendages, or those proportions. No, I'm not going back to check.
Mark Braxton, a reviewer bitchier than me, if you can believe that, says in his Radio Times review for the story, "A soggy off-day for writer Robert Holmes".
BBC's The Fourth Dimension postulates that in recognition of the marsh filming location, the Doctor wore three duck brooches on his coat. This was a miniature copy of the ubiquitous three flying ducks decorating UK sitting rooms in the 1960s and 70s.
For your benefit, and because I am insane, I went down the rabbit hole of kitsch. You can thank me later. I found a New Zealand site with the full run-down. (Why these Antipodeans are interested in Brit-kitsch? Who the hell knows? In the article, Know your kitsch: Three flying ducks, Moata Tamaira writes that in 1938, the Beswick Factory in Stoke-on-Trent started making "wall mounted Mallards in five sizes (as well as swans, kingfishers, swallows and a variety of other birds)." Because there were affordable, they became a popular buy for the city-bound with aspirations of country squireship. The imagery was so ingrained in the British culture as objects of aspiration, that they were famously a feature of Coronation Street's Hilda Ogden's wallpaper. (Hilda Ogden; the woman with the semi-permanent curlers, like Andy Capp's Flo). Beswick stopped making them in 1973, and due to our obsession with naff crap, originals are expensive, but knockoffs abound. The brand still exists, but bizarrely no long longer offers the ducks. Why? I don't know, embarassment maybe? They should; it's a money-spinner.
I said in the production notes section that the area on location filming was in a beautiful wetland area. It's beautiful enough to make me want to visit the place sometime in the future. The waters look easy enough to navigate in a canoe, as the Doctor and Romana do, though I'm not keen on meeting Kroll.
If you want to hear some chat about the recent season 13 of Doctor Who, listen to pod 416.