Peter Fleming on Ghosts

Hi everybody. This week, Peter Fleming has written for us about his experiences with ghosts and the unexplained to mark Halloween. Read if you dare.

Boo!

Ha ha! Only pulling your legs, my friends! It’s me! Peter!

Viewers of Sprites of the Forest (1970) or The Stone Boy (1967) will be familiar with the fact that I enjoy a good ghost story, but what they may not realise is the number of encounters I have had before and since those programmes with ghostly presences in my own life.

I can recall vividly the terror I felt at my first ‘ghost’, an evil spectre which towered at the top of the stairs of the children’s home where I lived, its hideous, unearthly call echoing down the hallway. Turned out to be the shadow of one of the matrons, who enjoyed improvising on her slide-whistle on the landing long into the night to amuse herself, but the unparalleled fright that gripped me then still grips me today. (This is also why I’ve never been able to watch an episode of Clangers without screaming.)

Catharsis was the watchword when I used this memory to inspire The Ghost at No. 24 (1969), and we enlisted the help of Brian Hodgson and Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to create the sound of the Spectral Child, along with a Theremin player who charged so much money that in the end we couldn’t afford to record any pictures. And with the dialogue so sparse the whole thing made absolutely no sense. Had to put it out as a Radiophonic Workshop LP in the end. Not what I’d hoped for, although I did get paid as a session musician for bumping into Delia Derbyshire’s green lampshade in the middle of a take.

More successful was 1972’s Creak!, which I believe remains the only television programme ever to have successfully captured a real ghost on camera! The infamous shot occurred in episode 3, during a sequence filmed at the Stargroves estate (thanks once again to Mick Jagger for being so generous with the use of his house!). The camera followed our main actor round a corner, and there, down the corridor, was the figure of a man. Haggard and gaunt, he looked right down the lens, gasped, turned and ran away. Never seen such a frightening face in all my life.

These days, people there at the time try to rationalise it. ‘There’s no reason to believe it was a ghost, Peter – it might have been Keith Richards or someone,’ they’d say, or, ‘No, Peter, really, it looks exactly like Keith Richards,’ or, ‘Sorry I messed up that shot, Mr Fleming. Let me make it up to you with this signed copy of our new record, Exile on Main St,’ but with the episode missing from the BBC archive, I suppose we’ll never know for sure!

That’s not for want of trying, mind you. Left no stone unturned with my search for copies of that one, the memory really disturbed me. Searched all over the place for a film recording, or even paperwork in TV Centre. No luck there, of course; all the paperwork in TV Centre has been knocked down for flats (such was the scale of BBC bureaucracy that that did create a surprisingly large amount of space). Tried the BBC’s archive facility in Perivale too, but all I managed to do there was start a small fire and burn several newly returned episodes of Doctor Who. Luckily no announcement had been made, so fans didn’t have to face the disappointment of not being able to enjoy Patrick Troughton’s first appearance after all!

Yes, there’s sadly little chance I’ll ever find real confirmation of that little encounter with the beyond. But I still find myself making similar contact with other realms even today. Only a few months ago, I found myself the custodian of an old mask, haunted by none other than Geoffrey, Zippy and George from Rainbow! It came into my possession after an unfortunate incident at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, in which I mistook the mask for a prop from Mr Hildebrand’s Many Faces (1973). As a result, I was mistaken for stealing something that wasn’t mine, which it turned out I was, but I didn’t realise that until it was too late.

Fortunately, the culture sector in this country is so badly underfunded, the only security guard there was older than me and had to stop to catch his breath and call an ambulance mere seconds into our chase! Consequently, I finally have company on my raft after years of travelling alone. Trouble is they’ve all grown rather tiresome the last few weeks, always bickering over whose spirit is taking up the most room in one cheek or another, and they always patch things up by singing the theme from Rainbow together over and over again. I wouldn’t mind, but Zippy’s always about a semitone out from the other two, makes it nigh on impossible to sleep at night.

As you can see, my friends, the possibility that we might be contacted from realms outside our own cosy little world is always there. But I ask that you think on the account of my current situation and ask yourself: mightn’t it be better to leave well alone?

Best wishes,

Peter

Peter Fleming in Print

Hi everyone. This week, Peter Fleming has written to me about his experiences working in print during the golden age of British children’s TV. Take it away, Peter!

Hello there, my friends!

Well now, television may have been my medium of choice, but throughout my career I had a joyous creative relationship with the printed word too. And not just when typing out the scripts! (Contrary to popular wisdom, every programme we made was scripted and structured properly.)

My first taste of print publication came in the mid-sixties, when I contributed regular items based on my programmes for TV Comic. Over three years, I came up with all sorts. Puzzles with Professor Zany, to which we never published the solutions (‘Fear not, readers! A true inventor will always invent the perfect answers for themselves!’). A comic strip starring Freddie the Door, where readers were always on tenterhooks as to whether the final page would reveal him opening, shutting, or not moving at all. And of course studies from Professor Zany’s counterpart Doctor Straight-Laced, which I lifted wholesale from scientific journals! (Those, incidentally, led to the legal battle that resulted in the severing of my relationship with the magazine.)

Meatier than any magazine though, were the books! That my programmes are all lost from the archives makes clear this was not an age of home recording. No, if children wanted to enjoy the shows again, they would have to purchase one of the many novelisations published by WH Allen over the years. Penning these often gave me the chance to enrich characters in ways that time constraints prevented on the television. Who could have guessed just from watching Our Home Down the Road (1969) that grumpy Mr Mason had never recovered from his cat running away when he was a boy? Suddenly, it became more understandable to viewers why he punished the orphans so savagely every week!

As my televisual workload gradually increased (we eventually reached a point where we were producing about 20 separate series in a year), writing the books became more and more difficult. I remember sustaining multiple injuries to my wrist trying to fully novelise seven separate episodes of Ringmaster Patrick in a day in May 1973, in between spells of giving notes on the episodes as we shot them! So it was that writing duties were passed onto young actress and aspiring writer Lynda La Plante. This was a little before her big break in Rentaghost, but she certainly knew the territory – and the books’ popularity continued!

However, I later realised that sales were in fact going up with adults, and down with children. Already Lynda was growing fascinated with crime fiction, and had proceeded to add numerous gruesome storylines to the novelisations without my knowledge that had never been present in the programmes. I was irritated upon finding out, but must confess I didn’t take any action against Lynda, as at the time I was rather short on money, and quite happy for the increased revenue the books were now generating! As such, we both benefitted in the end – especially Lynda, who went on to adapt her novelisations of Sarah’s Paper Round (1975) to form the entire first series of Prime Suspect (1991).

Fan magazines that emerged after the number of programmes I was making thinned quite suddenly to zero were very sunny in their outlook, in spite of the circumstances, and I often gave interviews to them – such was my gratitude! But this came to an end in 1986, after one publication, Peter Fleming Bulletin, grew steadily more hostile, often taking an editorial line that it was my own fault no new programmes were forthcoming. It all culminated in them publishing a damning interview with myself, in which my own words were distorted to give the impression I agreed with their view that I was a liar and a charlatan – whereas I’m convinced I only said that about Mike Reid.

Away from the fan magazines, I always liked to collect cuttings from the Radio Times and national newspapers that covered my work, to make sure I had souvenirs – sadly, most of those I lost to mildew in 1987. However, I’m fortunate that some of the reviews and opinion pieces looking at my experimental mid-seventies output do survive, although admittedly in isolation they do give the impression that my work was met exclusively with horror.

However, I’m hopeful that I’ll now be able to redress the balance at long last. Yes, it gives me great pleasure to say I’ve finally got my very own Peter Fleming Annual off the ground – in spite of all the feet-dragging by the BBC and publishing house all those years ago! But you’ll have to come along to my talks in Edinburgh for a sneak peak of what I’ve conjured up for that…

Happy reading,

Peter

Peter Fleming: Have You Seen? is being performed at the Edinburgh Fringe, Heroes @ Dragonfly, 15.20, 1-25 August (not 12). Tickets are available here.

Peter Fleming on Jon Pertwee

Hi everyone. Today marks the centenary of Doctor Who, Worzel Gummidge, The Navy Lark actor and all round eccentric legend Jon Pertwee. For the occasion, children’s TV pioneer Peter Fleming has kindly written to me about his own experiences with Jon (he stresses not in the capacity of stalker).

Hello there, my friends!

My first experience with the legendary Jon Pertwee was when I timidly approached the famous ‘man of a thousand voices’ in late 1968 to give life to the characters of an animated series I’d been commissioned to make. The money we had to offer was pitiful, so it wasn’t much surprise that Jon had to turn us down. As it was, The Many-Headed Millicent never came to fruition, and Jon was to become unavailable within months, when he was cast as none other than TV’s Dr Who!

That might have been the end of our association, were it not for a chance encounter in January 1970, when, in quite a distracted state of mind and something of a rush, I mistook Jon’s car for my own sprightly yellow roadster and drove it off a pier, not realising my error till quite some time after I’d fled the scene. Jon understandably wasn’t best pleased, and thought I must be pursuing some vendetta following Millicent’s premature decapitation. Naturally, I was determined to set the record straight, but he was now making every possible effort to avoid me. It seemed to me the only sensible thing to do was put just as much effort into following him around in order to apologise.

So began the saga of my chasing Jon as he went about his business while he sped away with increasing terror in his eyes over several years. He tried hiding and disguising himself, allowing his hair to become more and more bouffant as his time on Doctor Who progressed, but I could always spot him! Similarly, I would always learn his filming schedule and get to places ahead of him, often in disguise myself, so I could leap out and beg for his forgiveness, but I never could get a word in before he used his famous martial arts on me.

One notable incident, when I charged towards him dressed first as a milkman then a cleaning lady over the course of an afternoon, actually ended up cathartically channelled into 1973’s The Green Death, and provided a welcome bit of comic relief to the episode. (Incidentally, the filming of that particular Doctor Who story in south Wales was disrupted when he discovered I’d concealed myself in his convertible caravan a few weeks before he drove it out to the location!)

As this pattern of events continued, it would often give Jon ideas for chase sequences that he fed back to his own production office – for instance an occasion where I pursued him through the countryside by car, helicopter, motor boat and finally hovercraft, which was later copied note for note in 1974’s Planet of the Spiders. I was delighted to have inadvertently inspired so many gripping TV moments for Jon’s fans – and I enjoyed watching them myself, as I considered myself a true fan of the programme when he was at the helm. There were times in the early seventies when I was a little the worse for wear, but I always found comfort watching his heroism as our friend the Doctor, in that cosy era of the series.

In fact, my determination to tune in every single week during this time, coupled with the above encounters, led some to suppose I had developed some form of obsession with Jon – but that really wasn’t the case! Did worry me that such talk might get back to him, which made me even keener to set the record straight, but once he’d left Doctor Who I wasn’t able to find him anywhere. Found out recently that he actually spent the next few years hiding out as a scarecrow just to get rid of me, although he was eventually able to monetise this – happy to help, Jon!

Nonetheless, I still miss his presence on the screen, and in the wider world with his many generous public appearances – as I’m sure many of us do. Like lots of our shared child viewers at the time, I always felt somehow more… secure watching his Doctor Who. While he was there, with Katy Manning, Nicholas Courtney, Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks to help him, the programme blossomed beautifully into real appointment viewing for me. One of television’s great families, with one of its greatest ever showmen at its heart.

Best wishes,

Peter

The Jon Pertwee Files, presented by Sean Pertwee, is available to listen to now on BBC Sounds.

Peter Fleming: Have You Seen? is being performed around the country at the following times and places:

• Fri 12^th July: 2Northdown, King’s Cross (tickets available here)
• Fri 19^th July: The Southern Belle, Brighton (tickets not available yet)
• Weds 24^th July: Comedy Balloon, Manchester (tickets don’t exist)
• Tues 30^th July: XS Malarkey, Manchester (tickets available here)
• 1^st – 25^th August (not 12^th): Heroes @ Dragonfly, Edinburgh Fringe (tickets available here)

The Four-Four-Two Customs Union Klopp Bandril Fleet Confirmatory Vote Strategy

If there’s one good thing to have come from our ongoing Brexit crisis, it’s the dissolution of my previous grudging respect for boorish football fans.

There was a time when, hearing them confidently discuss misguided signings and foolhardy strategies on the part of managers, I would conclude that, yes, these men (and they are always men) must know the sport better than Roy Evans, Gerard Houllier, player-manager Ruud Gullit or even player-manager Gianluca Vialli (I haven’t followed the sport closely since my 90s childhood spent with two Liverpool-and-Chelsea-supporting brothers).

Now, hearing the same men (and they are always the same men) discuss the benefits of no deal with the exact same confidence (the exact same ill-informed confidence with which I continue to back Remain, actually), I can see clearly that they must understand both politics and sport about as little as David Moyes (my brothers occasionally try to share their interest in the game with me, perhaps to help me keep my references bang up to date, as illustrated by the previous joke).

In boyhood, I always treated such footballing insight with the respectful, intimidated silence I felt it deserved. I was a sheltered child who shied away from sport thanks to the horror of PE lessons, preferring instead to lurk on Doctor Who forums populated largely by bitter middle-aged men. I specifically loathed PE lessons with the other teenagers in my set, realising too late that, being in the same low-ability set as me, they clearly weren’t skilled athletes, but enjoyed PE as an opportunity to fall back on their instincts for violence. Like Chris, who said his favourite beer was vodka and went on to earn the first ASBO in the town.

Today, I imagine one of those boys being put in charge of a professional team and it ending up the same way as the day in Year 10 when Ben bullied and alienated the entirety of his own side in our softball game. This culminated in me obeying his angry shriek to get off the pitch, and, to my surprise and delight, being followed off by all our other players. We sat happily and watched him grow quieter and more desperate as he continued playing alone against 11 other boys and got a well-earned thrashing. Our teacher never stopped him physically hurting us from week to week when he was in a bad mood, but she didn’t stop us walking off either, an approach that gives credence to my theory that all PE teachers are closet libertarians.

I wonder what would happen if the Doctor Who fans who inhabited the forums of my childhood got to create their own vision of the show. At last, a chance to make the show as it was always meant to be made, if only those idiots at the BBC had ever listened to people with no experience of making television. Perhaps it would be a new golden age, like the much-loved early Tom Baker years; classic after classic, brimming with rich dialogue, atmospheric design and terrifying monsters, blissfully untroubled by indulgent references to the past or the presence of women.

More likely, I suspect we’d end up with the mess of the mid-eighties, when it became impossible for fans to accurately blame any one member of the production team for declining quality because multiple forces were pulling the programme in diverging terrible directions. Which brings me right back to Brexit. A fan project if ever there was one, as power is employed to kowtow to people who were always more comfortable shouting from the sidelines about how they’d do it much better.

Whether your frame of reference is sport, sub-par sci-fi, or literal current affairs, there’s no doubt in my mind that Brexit is our political equivalent of 1985’s Timelash. Led by unpopular figures who, at the critical moment, all found themselves simultaneously operating at their lowest level. A story of scenery-chewers and android leaders used as a front for a much more malignant force. A story harking back to some glorious past that had never happened (the viewer is made to think they’d appreciate the story more with knowledge of a previous Third Doctor adventure fabricated entirely by the script). Crucially, a story whose conclusion satisfies absolutely no one.

I could have done a much better job.

Doctor Who: Enemies of the World

This week, former candidate for Governor of Georgia Stacey Abrams was reported to have watched episodes of Doctor Who to warm up for delivering the Democratic response to President Trump’s State of the Union address. Fans were delighted, but such revelations should be met with caution. There are many other occasions documented where the political impact of the programme has been far less than helpful:

• The show toying with a Liberal-governed future in the 1970s backfired, when The Green Death (1973) encouraged them to take Jeremy Thorpe seriously long enough for him to become embroiled in a murder plot, and their nod to Shirley Williams with a reference to a female Prime Minister in Terror of the Zygons (1975) pushed the public into the arms of Margaret Thatcher.
• Thatcher herself watched The Monster of Peladon (1974) as it went out, hearing its conciliatory message in the wake of the contemporary miners’ strike, but the story was so boring and sub-standard that Thatcher grew enraged, and instead decided to crush the mining communities across the UK and destroy British manufacturing and the areas that depended on it as soon as she got into Downing Street. As PM, she also watched Paradise Towers (1987), whose portrayal of lesbians as cannibals reinforced her prejudice against the LGBT community.
• Gordon Brown watched The Sound of Drums (2007) and decided not to call a snap election off the back of it. Having seen the Master elected in a landslide, he reasoned that it now seemed far more plausible than before that the Tories could get back in. David Cameron also watched the story at the same time, and decided to hang in there. (For glimpses of Britain following a no-deal Brexit, viewers are advised to go back and watch Last of the Time Lords – and no shrunken Keir Starmer in a cage is going to save you.)
• Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974) promoted apathy in the face of global warming to politicians of the day, who felt the whole issue was made to seem far-fetched by wrapping it up with the menace of scientists bringing dinosaurs back from the past. The story also made clear that the environmentalists were the baddies, and fossil fuel lobbyists capitalised on this, choosing conveniently to forget the messages of The Green Death and Inferno (1970).
• Fury from the Deep (1968) also made clear it was never the energy companies to blame if things went wrong, just the unfortunate result of parasitic seaweed monsters in the North Sea interfering (immense government funds were directed towards seeking and thwarting these creatures, in what was the biggest recorded waste of taxpayers’ money in modern history until Chris Grayling was first awarded a salary). On the other hand, The Faceless Ones (1966) did its bit against climate change by convincing parents that if they allowed their children to fly abroad, they would be kidnapped by sinister globular aliens and have their identities stolen.
• 1979’s City of Death chose as its villains wealthy European elitists who, in spite of living across the map and across different points in history, were literally all the same sinister, stinking-rich individual, later revealed to be a green-skinned, one-eyed alien in a mask. This has since been cited as a further example of the mainstreaming of Euroscepticism in popular culture, indoctrinating its child audience in good time for them to vote Leave in the 2016 EU Referendum. (For glimpses of Britain following the resulting no-deal Brexit, viewers are advised to go back and look at the drab and unpleasant set design of The Horns of Nimon later on in the same season.)

Peter Fleming and the Cheating Memory

Hi everyone. I stupidly forgot to write anything this week – sorry! Luckily, children’s TV pioneer Peter Fleming has just sent me some of his own thoughts on memory, which feel appropriate to share. Take it away, Peter!

Hello there, my friends!

As time marches on, I realise my increasingly flexible relationship with my own memories. So much of my life these days is spent looking back on my past, and my programmes from decades long since ended. With job opportunities the way they are, the talks I’ve given about my career have been all I can do to sustain myself. But this necessity has, in its own way, taken its toll on the accuracy of my recollections.

After my work for the BBC abruptly ended with 1979’s The Little Boy Who Went to Hell, I’ve kept my head above the water to varying degrees by making paid appearances at gatherings and little conferences arranged by local fan groups of mine around the country. Lovely that so many of my viewers, now grown up, are still so loyal, in spite of the programmes no longer being available to watch. The groups would often send me their regular newsletters and magazines as a courtesy, including write-ups of the meetings and talks I gave. Most kind!

They grew steadily more uncomplimentary, however. I could see that, as my fans became older, they became more disillusioned, sharing my own disappointment that no new Peter Fleming series were on the horizon. Every single letter and opinion piece, it seemed, came from people I’d met at the talks, who were perfectly good-natured in person, if a little shy and maladjusted. But on paper, they complained I was cycling through the same anecdotes over and over again, that I was telling them nothing new of my work. I understood the frustration, but more and more they took it all out on me personally, when really the issue was that, with no chance to produce anything new, I had nothing new to talk about!

Therefore, throughout the 1990s, I put a new strategy into place. The fans wanted me to say something new, so I started talking not about programmes I had made, but programmes I’d tried to have commissioned that never got off the ground. Sometimes I even made new ones up altogether, but still talked about all these as though they’d actually been broadcast! What a ruse! And with no recordings left of any of my programmes, and the resources to check for certain still unavailable, the fans could hardly argue with me about it.  And lo, the complaints stopped!

I pursued this practice freely, and by the turn of this century, first with 1999’s Peter Fleming Night on BBC2, then the 2002 BBC4 documentary, The Story of Peter Fleming, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Professor Zany’s Mad Laboratory (1962; real), I was happily generating around five behind-the-scenes anecdotes per series, regardless of whether or not they’d ever existed in the first place. Filled a lot of airtime, and the channels themselves were very grateful, since the new television programmes being produced at that point in history, I’m sure we all remember, were largely terrible!

The trouble is, as time has gone on, I’ve talked about all the programmes so frequently, real and unreal alike, even going to the trouble of making false pieces of paperwork on a typewriter to pass the time and staining them all with a teabag, my memory has become clouded. To tell you the truth, with the passing years, even I’m no longer completely sure myself which ones I did and didn’t make. It all came to a head when in 2014, a lavish BBC4 documentary was produced for the 50^th anniversary of Lady Bradford’s Talking Tea Cosies, which I’m almost completely certain I’d made up the previous year when an audience in Matlock was growing restless.

Earlier this month, I decided to make a list of all the series I currently feel sure I made in 1965:

• Wise Wizard Wilfred
• Captain Peculiar’s Sinking Ships
• Farmer Time
• The Hay Bale Mysteries
• Uncle Kenneth’s Dolls House
• The Castles of Caroline
• Star Boys!
• My Michael’s Goose
• Hopping With Frogs
• Hiding Hospitals
• Where Did Our Pilot Go?
• Seaweed Sally
• The Witches’ Magic Syrup

In all, that list would suggest that in 1965, I was commissioned to make a new series on average once every four weeks. Each of these I recall as having run for at least a year apiece, and I have vivid memories from the production of all of them, but the garden shed we were still using as our studio at this point simply wouldn’t have had the capacity for them all to have taken place, unless we went without sleep for an entire year. I’ll admit I don’t recall sleeping in 1965, but then I don’t know that anyone really remembers sleeping in any year.

Nowadays, the Radio Times archive is recorded on the ‘internet’ and the one fan newsletter that still runs, from the Bredbury Branch of the Peter Fleming Appreciation Society, has gone through it all for me, to produce a full list of the programmes they can confirm were broadcast in that year:

• David’s Ducks and Dogs

I have to say, I don’t remember that one at all, so I imagine it wasn’t very good. But I must say, it’s rather delighted me to know that perhaps my ideas didn’t dry up in the way I’d feared since the 1970s. Even now, in what are surely my twilight years, I could approach the BBC with programme ideas that they’ve never heard before! What a shame I didn’t think to do that sooner.

Best wishes,

Peter

Peter Fleming returns to Leicester Comedy Festival on Saturday 23^rd February with his award-winning show, Peter Fleming: Have You Seen? Tickets are available here.

Doctor Who: Resolution

The first New Year’s Day special of Doctor Who since 1^st January 1966’s Volcano featured a 30-second scene set on New Year’s Eve for the simple reason that it could, Resolution has a fitting title in a number of ways. It makes for a refreshing beginning to 2019, because its mix of a spectacular standalone adventure with more profound developments for Ryan makes it a much more satisfying resolution to this series just gone than we had been given three weeks before.

One big disappointment of series finale The Battle of Ranskoor Av Koloss was the loose thread of Ryan’s strained relationship with his father, dangled before us from episode one then left hanging. Here, we finally see the elephant in the room addressed, as Aaron (Daniel Adegboyega) arrives on the scene. A deadbeat Del Boy, similar to our first impression of Pete Tyler in 2005, Aaron’s character progresses differently – thanks not only to still being alive, but to the presence of the family’s next generation up in Graham.

We see Aaron from Ryan’s perspective first, all lame excuses for skipping Grace’s funeral, nothing to redeem him for his perpetual absence. It takes a talk from Graham to finally invoke some sympathy, by putting him in Ryan’s position. Where Ryan has been a son without a parent’s love, Aaron has taken his mother’s for granted. He sees an abundance of it when Graham shows him all his childhood belongings Grace kept – too late to undo his neglect of the relationship. The final showdown sees Ryan save him from danger, and a redemptive story for Aaron would need this to have been the other way round. But we at least leave with the way paved to explore their relationship next year, perhaps see it rebuilt.

Aaron and Ryan’s story is kick-started in those two key scenes, so an engaging new character is introduced with impressive economy. The same is true of Lin (Charlotte Ritchie) and Mitch (Nikesh Patel). Their romance isn’t the most original story, but for a ‘festive blockbuster’ like this, it’s all the episode needs. We like them straight away, and we feel for them, especially when it seems they might not both make it to the end. Similarly, the security guard (Connor Calland) killed on duty feels like a fully formed person within a handful of lines. We get a sinking feeling when his body is being used as a tool just seconds later – an example of the episode’s fantastic success in restoring a sense of dread to the Daleks.

Taking centre-stage for the first time in three years, it’s great to see them back. For the most part, Chris Chibnall sensibly treats them in ways often adopted when reviving them. We see it impotent at first, only for it to manipulate others and restore itself to terrifying power (see 1966’s The Power of the Daleks and 2005’s Dalek). We’re shown an especially gruesome mutant slithering up a wall, then leeching onto its host’s body and taking control. It’s the first time we’ve seen a Dalek physically possess someone, and it succeeds not least because of Charlotte Ritchie’s fantastic performance as Lin. Humanity emerges just often enough for us to know she’s still alive in there – all the more unsettling to watch.

For one episode only, we’re also given a new ‘scrapheap’ design for the Dalek. I’d have liked it to be dirtier and tattier still, but it works – even if the missiles are a bit silly. The sequence where the Dalek instructs Lin as she builds the casing also creates a visual parallel to the Doctor building her sonic screwdriver in The Woman Who Fell to Earth. This could have been developed further, and unlike previous confrontations, there isn’t such a personal connection felt between the Doctor and the Daleks. Jodie Whittaker is never less than fantastic, but a conflict like this can be invaluable for distinguishing a Doctor’s character, and here it feels like an opportunity for drama not taken.

Other moments feel like that too, with misdirected attention and unnecessary emphasis working against the story. The UNIT scene allows for a Brexit joke that could have been quicker, and the thrust of the scene otherwise is to show the Doctor and friends are fighting alone. But I wasn’t waiting for UNIT to show up. I imagine they hadn’t crossed the minds of most people watching. The scene wastes time. Meanwhile, growing piles of dead police officers and security breaches give reason for a confrontation between the Dalek and the army, yet that sequence feels out of the blue. It misses a beat of escalation. Perhaps the Doctor and friends could meet them too, try to help them, and go ignored ahead of the ensuing massacre – not a bad way to show they’re fighting alone.

Similarly, elements are left hanging loose from an impressive prologue. That the Dalek teleports itself back together from around the world isn’t made especially clear, so the other two locations established feel strangely abandoned. The same is true for the ancient society of custodians, set up and then given occasional lip service. The prologue adds scale, but it harks back to the Moffat era – complex, frenetic storytelling, with an epic, sprawling plot. But Chris Chibnall’s great skills, seen here and elsewhere, lie more in good, down to Earth, character-driven stories, for a wider ensemble cast. Scale could still be given in a way that plays to those skills, but missteps here work against him.

All that said, Chibnall’s talents are still on good display in Resolution, and it’s a satisfying story for our characters. The path to reconciliation between Ryan and Aaron has been opened up, Mitch and Lin’s love story reaches the conclusion we want, and the Doctor and friends head off wide-eyed on new adventures. Imperfections aside, this was a great piece of adventure TV for the holiday season, and provides a much more enjoyable end to the series than I thought we’d had. The appetite is suitably whetted for series 12… in 2020.

1999

As we grow closer and closer to Doctor Who having been back longer than it was ever away, I think about my generation of fandom: children who developed a love for the show in spite of there being no new series on the telly to watch. Looking back over my memories of discovering the show, I see how indebted I am to a small handful of people making TV in 1999. In one corner or another of the BBC, they were determined to keep a candle burning for the programme. In my case, the flame caught.

When my much-missed uncle died in 1998, we found a double-VHS of 1975’s The Sontaran Experiment and Genesis of the Daleks in his house. Enough to summon my lingering memories of the 1996 Paul McGann movie, cowering by the arm of our settee as Eric Roberts beat him up towards the climax. Those two Tom Baker stories (and just as importantly, the other adventures on VHS advertised on the inside cover) ignited my imagination.

My local second-hand video shop helped me explore further (thanks, The Video Crypt, and RIP). I lived close to Longleat too, and started asking my parents regularly if we could visit its exhibition (to their credit, they endured this for years in spite of it never really changing, up until it was closed permanently in 2003 to celebrate the 40th anniversary). The stories on video showed me more of the programme, and the exhibition educated me about it. I started wanting to read more of the Doctor Who books that were available, and Doctor Who Magazine.

Trouble was, with the best will in the world, they were not aimed at seven year-olds. Why should they be? By that time, there won’t have been many seven year-olds who really even knew what Doctor Who was. Watching the show itself on video was always the main thing for me, but being a young fan at that time could be an isolated experience.

Then one day, less than a year after first finding those VHS tapes, I came home from school to watch Blue Peter. I’d watched it for years, and was astonished when the usual theme tune turned into this:

Some of the clips in that opening sequence are still burned into my memory as I experienced them then (especially the bits from Carnival of Monsters and Terror of the Autons). Watching this ten-minute item about the series and its emerging online fandom, I felt like someone had made a piece of television just for me. One of my most vivid childhood TV memories.

That was only weeks after Steven Moffat’s The Curse of Fatal Death had brought the programme back for one night only as part of Comic Relief. Somewhere, in television being made now, were people who liked Doctor Who too – and felt the exact affection and positivity towards it that were felt by this seven year-old watching at home. I may not have known any fans my age yet, but there were definitely people out there who understood. This CBBC ident was another nod that I enjoyed seeing come up around the time too:

Throughout 1999, my security as a Doctor Who fan grew as I found more stories to watch on video, my confidence boosted by the TV shows that understood how good it all was. It culminated one Saturday that November, at 8:55pm, when BBC2 broadcast a Doctor Who Night presented by Tom Baker, complete with documentaries, clips galore, and my first experience of Mark Gatiss and David Walliams (an interesting first impression). This was to launch a brand new season of repeats, short-lived due to ghastly ratings, but the final boost I needed. Over that year, and over several productions, a small number of people working in TV had made me feel much surer in my feelings for a strange TV show that I hadn’t known much about before, but that I was now pretty certain I loved.

Doctor Who: The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos

Well, it had mostly been a good ride, hadn’t it? Like the equally drearily-titled The Tsuranga Conundrum, The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos has elements that make for interesting drama, and, like that episode, wastes pretty much all of them. The result is an inexcusably drab fifty minutes, and the most disappointing note for a series of Doctor Who to end on so far this century – a shame after a series full of so many brilliant moments.

Chris Chibnall was clear there would be a less pronounced arc to this season, which is no inherently bad thing – as long as there’s some progression for the characters along the way. It’s what we rightly demand of Doctor Who now. For pretty much the first time this year, characters arrive at cross-purposes, yet it doesn’t pay off. Graham openly resolves to kill Tim Shaw (Samuel Oatley), Ryan and the Doctor implore him not to, and then he finds he can’t bring himself to do it. It feels incredibly by the numbers, no twists or turns to complicate proceedings or motivations, and nothing happening under the surface. Graham full-on states his intention – there’s nothing for the Doctor or anyone else to detect. Where’s the drama in any of this?

All the story does is bring Ryan and Graham closer together, finding them some closure for the loss of Grace (something that had been examined more interestingly last week). What’s here for the other characters? What is the group’s relationship at the end of this series? Each individual has some relationship with the Doctor, and Graham and Ryan have their own bond. But how do Yaz and Graham relate to one another? What makes hers and Ryan’s relationship interesting? And how do they all feel about the Doctor as a phenomenon separate from themselves? Each week, a character has had their time in the spotlight, but as the series ends, this group’s dynamic as whole remains ill-defined.

Another trick a finale can pull is to bring back a previous villain – sure enough, Tim Shaw returns. And it’s a good performance from Samuel Oatley, but the characterisation feels inconsistent. After references to the Stenza’s legacy in The Ghost Monument, we might have expected to see Tim Shaw in the context of his society, even as an outcast – perhaps also to have seen the Stenza at the height of their powers. A terrifying army. Instead, we see Tim Shaw changed quite arbitrarily to a false god, a shouting megalomaniac with a super weapon. After seeing him as a lone, privileged hunter in episode one, denied the glory within his grasp, we could see him twisted by greed and entitlement here. But this could be any identikit sci-fi villain – and it isn’t interesting. Most frustratingly, it could be.

We see an attempt to question the Doctor’s culpability for Tim Shaw’s crimes, the price of her mercy when dispatching him at the start of the series – but it isn’t built upon. Compare to Journey’s End (2008), when Davros asks the Doctor how many have died in his name. We have seen those deaths, we see them again, we can feel their weight. We could feel the weight of the genocides that have been committed here too. But they are wrapped up in a cold, high-concept sci-fi mystery. The Ux, aliens that can create and destroy worlds, make practically anything happen, at the will of a god of their choosing, are a fascinating concept. But the way Andinio (Phyllis Logan) and Delph (Percelle Ascott) are written, they simply don’t feel like people.

Too long we’re kept asking what ‘object’ Paltraki’s (Mark Addy) crew have stolen, what the true nature of the Ux’s power is. And when the revelation comes that these objects are shrunken planets, whole worlds wiped out in the name of the Ux’s false religion, it should feel like an enormous moment – but it doesn’t. There’s no moment of guilt for the Ux as they realise their gullibility has killed billions. No misplaced guilt for the Doctor, whose mercy let this situation arise.  If the parties concerned are given no moment to feel the drama of their story, why should we? In what could be such a huge story, why do the stakes feel so bizarrely low, the drama so distant?

In what seems a telling metaphor for this all, the titular battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos has already happened. A grand title like that might, dare I say it, suggest that we would see the drama of a battle. In fact, it has been and gone, and we can feel very little of the aftermath when we only meet one character to have experienced it – and he has conveniently lost his memory of select information. Mark Addy, in that respect, is terribly wasted as Paltraki. Aside from a patchy memory and a basic assumption of competence, I could tell you nothing of the character he’s playing. A function of plot is not a person.

Doctor Who is unquestionably made by a team of immensely talented, hard-working and devoted people, and it feels churlish to attack the fruits of their labours, especially when it means ending this run of write-ups on such a sour note. The programme has had plenty of failures throughout its history, after all, including in recent years, and this finale only feels worse than those for being an uninteresting failure. So instead, I’ll finish by looking at all the things I’ve enjoyed so much about this series, which on balance has been fantastic.

Firstly, Jodie Whittaker and the other three leads have been excellent. Their relationships with each other aren’t all equally engrossing, and that has a chance to improve in 2020, but as individuals, their performances are engaging, sympathetic, and, not a given in Doctor Who, utterly loveable. Look at the wealth of new talent brought onto the writing team too, and the benefit their new perspectives have given the programme, especially with this year’s trips into the past. Those gave us real, human drama about challenging subjects from history, showing how relevant they can still prove today. For my money, the three stand-out episodes of the series.

I hope all the guest writers return, and, alongside Chris Chibnall, continue to build our characters. I want to see them come into opposition more. I want to see them feel real jeopardy more. I want to see their families more. I want to see Sheffield more too. As a location, it’s lent a fresh sense of reality to proceedings after the fanciful tendencies of the last few years, and was a big part of this series’ sheer confidence early on.

The same is true for Segun Akinola’s music, the programme’s secret weapon throughout this series, and another breath of fresh air – to say nothing of how enthralling the cinematography has been. To see in such big changes for such a successful franchise, and do it with such a winning sense of boldness, is no mean feat. And for that, in spite of a couple of weak scripts, this first series under Chris Chibnall’s leadership is to be celebrated. It’s not to be underestimated how tough it is to get people excited about something that’s been on for 13 years, and the phenomenal ratings Doctor Who achieved this year is testament to its new team’s success.

And so, for one day only, on to 2019!

Doctor Who: It Takes You Away

From guttural horror to a moving consideration of grief, via high-concept sci-fi, all wrapped up by one of the most bizarre climaxes Doctor Who has done in years, It Takes You Away continues to add colour to this series as we approach the finale. Over its fifty minutes, it feels unpredictable in structure, even uncertain what genre it wanted to be – yet somehow it holds together. It’s a roller coaster in the way Doctor Who occasionally is – and luckily this is one of those occasions when it works.

Unrelenting dread is the order of the day as we arrive at a cold, isolated setting, and feel an overwhelming sense of the unknown. The threat doesn’t feel fully defined – which we realise was deliberate upon the reveal that our ‘monster’ was nothing more than a pair of speakers, à la Father Ted. But until this point, we’re made to feel as unsure in our grasp of the menace as possible, and Hanne’s (Eleanor Wallwork) blindness is used to increase this. She wouldn’t be able to see it were she fully sighted, but she is the only one who can tell us about it, convincing us that there will be something to see.

On this point, there is something unsavoury about how blindness is treated here – simply as a way of generating mystery. And there are no consequences for Erik (Christian Rubeck) having abandoned his terrified, bereaved, blind daughter alone in the woods, with a monster of his own fabrication and with no form of communication. It’s simply skipped over. Meanwhile, the Doctor uses Hanne’s blindness to her own advantage too when writing a message to Ryan, keeping yet more secrets from her. It’s a callous move that we might have grudgingly accepted from Peter Capaldi circa 2014, but it leaves a sour taste here.

Regardless, the mystery itself is intriguing, and reels us in at a perfect pace. When a sudden shift takes our journey into the anti-zone, we feel ready for a new stage of the adventure. And more unknowns come to unsettle us. Ribbons feels like a stock sci-fi character, but Kevin Eldon brings him deliciously to life, and it isn’t hard to start painting pictures of his life in our minds, with all his creeping nastiness. Again, he doesn’t feel fully explained, and nor do the flesh-eating moths, and nor does this entire space – but enough is given to us not to feel short-changed as we’re left to fill the blanks with our own imaginations. It’s all the scarier for it.

When we arrive into the Solitract universe, we’re struck by a sense of the uncanny – it’s subtle at first, and it takes a moment to hit home that, in this mirror world, the picture has been reversed (Erik’s Slayer t-shirt is the real clue). But what summons up real dread is Sharon D Clarke’s performance as Grace. We’ve seen her so little, but we know this version of her is wrong. So little seems changed, and yet she is colder; deader. It feeds our suspicions and our fears brilliantly, but that same strategy also makes Hanne’s family more distant to us. Trine (Lisa Stokke) is a copy, just like Grace, while Erik has done nothing to invoke our sympathy, and we are shown precious little of Hanne’s relationship with either of them. Only experiencing them at this crisis point, we don’t gain an understanding of who they normally are.

But the approach serves its purpose, and all through Grace and Graham’s conversations we’re desperate for him to admit what we can already see clearly. Yet we also feel his own desperation to believe he has found his wife, and we feel his pain when he must choose between this seductive fiction and a bleaker reality. But he gains strength from his love for Ryan, and this is at last reciprocated when Ryan calls him Grandad for the first time, having had to address his own mistrust of the men in his life during his experiences with Hanne. It’s a very satisfying development for both those characters as the series nears its end.

Finding new hope in a place of isolation is the theme of the episode then, and it’s quintessentially Doctor Who that this is examined not just by meeting ghosts of lost loved ones, but in a climactic conversation with a talking frog. Opinion on this scene is inevitably split, but personally I loved it. After so many twists and turns in the episode, this felt like another welcome one, and on just the right side of lunacy.

Celebrating Grace’s spirit further through a symbol she loved, the frog also lends a sense of the child-like that suits Jodie Whittaker’s portrayal of the Doctor well, with all the wonderment she has brought to the role (as well as tying in with the bedtime story from her grandmother where she first heard of the Solitract). This final conversation could be seen as a romantic relationship ending, like Grace and Graham, but with its roots in the Doctor’s childhood, it feels just as much like saying goodbye to an imaginary friend. There was something strangely touching about that little frog.

How fantastic that, after the fresh ground that’s already been struck this year (especially with trips into history), we can enjoy such original sci-fi ideas so late on too. It Takes You Away adds yet more much-needed variety to a very strong second half of the series, and serves our central characters well too. The arcs of their development feel clear, and we have gradually come to feel, without many ‘big moments’ for them, that we know the TARDIS team perfectly. One or two misgivings on the tone aside, this was another fantastic instalment to their first season.