Doctor Who – Heavenly Pursuits – tape 405

This tape opens with another slice of Wogan, and the end of an interview  with two men about Aids. Richard Rechter (sp?) and Erik von Muller, as they are identified after the programme, as they were to appear on Open Air the next day.

Then “24 years after the first materialisation, Doctor Who steps aboard the Tardis for his 150th adventure.” Sure enough, it’s the 23rd of November, that this is Dragonfire part One.

This is season 24. Sylvester McCoy’s first, and not the finest era of the programme. Dragonfire is probably the best of a bad bunch. It’s the story which introduces us to Sophie Aldred’s Ace, first seen working as a waitress in a cocktail bar.

There’s some awesome cliffhanger-face at the end from Sophie Aldred and Bonnie Langford.

And of course, this was the episode that ended in a literal cliffhanger, as the Doctor climbed down from a ledge and was left hanging on his umbrella for no easily divined reason.

BBC Genome: BBC One – 23rd November 1987 – 19:35

Next episode here is missing the start of the titles – very lax of me.

This episode includes a scene where the Doctor distracts a guard by having a conversation about dialectics and the nature of existence. “Tell me, what do you think of the assertion that the semiotic thickness of a performed text varies according to the redundancy of auxiliary performance codes?” was a line actually lifted from an academic book about Doctor Who, Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text.

BBC Genome: BBC One – 30th November 1987 – 19:35

In part three, they even try and do Aliens, as two of the guards on the ice planet go on a bug hun. Sorry, ANT hunt, (Aggressive Non Terrestrial).

Thrughout this story, and for no good reason I can see, there’s a little girl wandering around dressed in a frilly party dress.

And at the resolution of the story, the villain, Kane, does himself in by melting his face. So now we’re doing Raiders of the Lost Ark.

There’s plenty of ambition here, but sadly the production can’t support much of it.

BBC Genome: BBC One – 7th December 1987 – 19:35

After the last episode, recording switches to Channel 4 for Heavenly Pursuits, starring Tom Conti and Helen Mirren.

The film opens with a Scottish priest, Brian Pettifer, going to the vatican to plead for a local woman to be canonized. He’s met with a lot of resistance and told the vatican doesn’t like miracles and hasn’t made a new saint for years. This is interesting, because if that was true, then the attitude changed a long in the intervening time, with plenty of recently dead people (Mother Theresa, Pope John Paul II) being fast-tracked to canonization.

He’s sent back to Scotland. “Lot of prayers. But no miracles” he’s told.

He’s the priest at his local school, wher Tom Conti is one of the teachers. He’s an unbeliever, who’s rather perplexed by all the talk of miracles locally.

He’s rather taken with another of the teachers, Helen Mirren, who’s more of a believer.

The whole school is praying to their local candidate for sainthood for a little girl who’s unable to walk, so when she recovers enough to walk, everyone assumes it’s a miracle.

Conti, on the other hand, is looking for some smaller miracle of his own, as one of his pupils, who’s assumed to be ‘special needs’, is showing improvement in his classes.

And when Conti falls from the school roof trying to rescue a pupil, he survives without more than a scratch, and even more unusual, the doctors have discovered that before the accident, he appeared to have a brain tumour, which they had not informed him of, but after the accident there’s no sign of the tumour.

This is a fairly inconsequential story that almost seems to peter out as if they’d run out of ideas, although the final scene, where the young lad, who’d been unhappy that other kids were getting their names in the paper and he wasn’t, finally got his moment of fame, was quite sweet. And I do like the way the film managed to weave its way between the miracles and the rational without ever getting caught up in one side or another.

Credit spot: Music by BA Robertson.

After the movie, there’s the start of the documentary Cannibal Tours and the tape ends a minute or so into this.

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