By Roy Mathur, on 2026-05-22, at 23:11:51 to 00:24:44 GMT, for Captain Roy's Rusty Rocket Radio Show
Notable Cast: Seventh Doctor: Sylvester McCoy, Companion: Ace: Sophie Aldred, Josiah Samuel Smith: Ian Hogg; a bit of Big Finish, Rockcliffe of Rockliffe's Babies, Redvers Fenn-Cooper: Michael Cochrane; Black Orchid, Number 2 in The Prisoner on BBC Radio 4 Extra, ITV's SF The Uninvited, Nimrod: Carl Forgione; Planet of Spiders, Blake's 7, Star Cops, Inspector Mackenzie: Frank Windsor; The King's Demons, Mrs Pritchard: Sylvia Syms; Ice Cold in Alex, multiple The Saint roles, Light: John Hallam; Flash Gordon, Dragonslayer, Lifeforce
Director: Alan Wareing; The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, Survival
Writer: Marc Platt; Blake's 7 Traitor, Ghost Light and Battlefield novels, Virgin New Adv. books: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible, Downtime, Lungbarrow, var. Big Finish, etc.
Producer: John Nathan-Turner
Location: Ext: Stanton Court, Dorset, Int: BBC Television Centre, Shepherd's Bush, London, 1989
Broadcast: Story 153, serial 2, season 26, following Battlefield (pod 607), 3 x c. 25 min, 4--18 Oct 1989
Media: Target novelization by Marc Platt in 1990, VHS 1994, DVD 2004, 2012, Blu-ray 2020, BBC iPlayer since 1 Nov 2023
The UK no. 1 single is still Black Box's Ride on Time.
The staff are feeding something terrible (Josiah) living in a cell in a large Victorian house (Gabriel Chase, Perivale), and delivering it a copy of The Times. The Reverend Ernest Matthews arrives, argues evolution with Josiah and ends up being devolved into a monkeyman a spiteful experiment.
The Tardis deposits the Doctor and Ace in an attic full of lab equipment, toys, and junk. Ace says she doesn't like haunted houses. They also find a radioactive box. A confused explorer called Redvers catches them snooping. He is apparently seeking to rescue someone with exactly the same name as his own from Josiah.
Things become increasingly confused and strange as we discover a spaceship is embedded inside the house, and that Ace will burn it down in the future. We learn that the newly awoken, and maddened with rage because he can't finish his task, Light (Leader), Josiah in a state of genetic flux (Survey), a freedom-seeking lady (Control), and Nimrod (one of the larger samples) are alien explorers tasked with cataloguing Earth. Josiah unfortunately went insane, trapped Light and set on a megalomaniacal path to assassinate Queen Victoria and build a new British Empire. Various visitors to the house are enslaved, though interfering plod, Inspector MacKenzie, is converted to primordial soup and served up for dinner; "The cream of Scotland Yard."
With the Doctor and Ace's meddling, an insane Light destroys himself instead of the planet and the household is freed. Control puts Josiah on a leash (ahem) and Redvers and Nimrod decide to take the ship to explore and complete the catalogue. Redvers says, "Redvers has the whole universe to explore for his catalogue. New horizons, wondrous beasts, light years from Zanzibar." Regarding the creepy house she will one day burn, Ace says, "I wish I'd blown it up instead."
Creature design for the humans converted to reptiles in dinner suits (at least that's what I think they are) is not bad, but very good for the Neanderthal butler, Nimrod. I like Nimrod, with his great strength, polite erudite speech, and extremely menacing knife. He's an excellent henchman. I hope the live insects were kindly wrangled.
The interior sets are Victorian looking, with no noticeable wobble for a change, and the exterior shots of the house are nicely dramatic. On the other hand, the closeness of the sets and the stultifying lighting and shadow FX makes the action too immediate, with characters constantly running into one another. There's no time to build tension. It's one pantomime clash after another. That does mean though that at least flash and lightning FX contrast dramatically.
The scene with the maids suddenly all producing guns at the same time is shocking and iconic as a Greek chorus, but the prop Victorian guns used throughout are mostly too modern. However, I enjoyed the sparkly, matte grey, alien ray gun with rotating lights.
Poor Ace is taken back to Perivale to confront a haunted house she once burned down after being in creeped out in the midst of PTSD. However, Ace's trauma-laden backstory, about racist locals burning her Asian friend's flat, falls a little flat after her racist outburst of deeply buried prejudices in Battlefield. Perhaps it's included to redress her uncharacteristic outburst in the last story? The Doctor's dialogue's dynamic range is so wide, sometimes I can barely hear him. When did McCoy start mumbling? Ian Hogg's derangement is entertainingly theatrical and hammy.
The comedic My Fair Lady/Pygmalion aspect of Control becoming a lady clashed wildly with the gothic horror. I preferred the latter The Lost World/The Creeping Man/The Island of Doctor Moreau adjacent story. Liquidised plod and Ace's almost cannibalism, and monkeyfied Reverend Matthews (a pompous believer in intelligent design) is delightfully bizarre Hammer-level horror.
It's got the ingredients of a good sci-fi horror, with some interesting Ace backstory, but there's too much for too few episodes; too many characters, too much dialogue, too many themes. With no friends or family she wishes to contact, why does Ace need a phone card? (Okay, probably a bit of sarky lip from Ace to contrast Doc's tinkering with an old-fashioned blower).
Apparently, the so-called "Cartmel Masterplan" was a loose idea that Andrew Cartmel, Marc Platt, and Ben Aaronovitch had for retconning the Doctor as a colleague and contemporary of Omega and Rassillon, hence all those hints Seven keeps teasing. Evidence of this is the story Lungbarrow. Lungbarrow was passed over by JNT in favour of the Ghost Light script, though it was later published by Virgin New Adventures as a novel written by Platt (who later played down the supposed importance of the "Masterplan"). The non-canon novel explains how Time Lords are made inside biogenerators called Looms. Eventually, however, the Doctor's importance is massively amplified in Chris Chibnall's NewWho's Timeless Child retcon, which, while unnecessary, I rather enjoy. I remember McCoy saying that it was similar to something he and Cartmel discussed.
I had an inkling that the cave bear fang the Doctor gifts Nimrod is from An unearthly Child, but I could find no reference of this from my rushed research. Can you, the listener, shed any light on this?
The Doctor's dialogue, "Who was it said Earthmen never invite their ancestors around to dinner?" is a quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the voice of the Guide itself, actually).
What is a ghost light? Well... it's a light left on stage to prevent falls when the theatre is otherwise unlit. It's also, of course, light emitted from a phantasm of some kind, so it's a good double entendre title for this stagy, spooky story.
In Howe, Walker, and Stammer's Handbook: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Production of Doctor Who, on p. 714 (yes, we have finally left page 713), Sylvester McCoy says, "it's a good story... once we work it out." This echoes what I said about an overly complicated script.
I have no idea what this means and rarely, if ever, include it in my revisits, but for the terminally curious, the production code for this story is 7Q.