17 | February | 2016

Oh, the Saturday afternoons of yore. This tape opens with Final Score. Not something I paid close attention to, as it was just in the way of me watching Doctor Who, but at least Watford were in the first division at that time.

I have no interest in football myself, but all three of my sisters are massive Watford fans, so I do like it when they’re doing well. Sadly, this week they didn’t do very well against Coventry.

There’s even a pools news section – is that a thing any more?

After this, it’s straight in to the main feature, with Doctor Who and Revelation of the Daleks. I’m afraid it’s Colin Baker’s Doctor. I really like Colin Baker, but his run as The Doctor wasn’t great. He was ill-served by a producer sick of the show, and a script editor who (by all accounts) wasn’t getting on with the producer.

His companion is Peri, played by the lovely Nicola Bryant, and again, the way her character is written really puts her in a bad light. And all of the problems with this era manifest themselves in the first minute of this serial.

The Tardis lands somewhere snowy. Peri comes out, mumbling grumpily, and walks down to the nearby stream. The Doctor emerges from the Tardis wearing a blue cape, shows it off flamboyantly and asks “How do I look”

“More comfortable than I feel” replies Peri. “This thing I’m wearing is too tight.”

“You eat too much” snaps The Doctor.

In that brief exchange is so much that I dislike about this Doctor. The first words out of his mouth are ego, the second are fat-shaming his friend. Whatever happened to “never cruel or cowardly.”

So now that my biases are out in the open, let’s continue the story. They are on the planet Necross, and the blue is for mourning. They’re there to honour Professor Arthur Stengoss, “one of the finest agronomists in the galaxy.”

As they bicker, they don’t notice the shambling figure lurking nearby.

We cut to what appears to be a funeral home, with Trevor Cooper, Clive Swift and Jenny Tomasin. An important client is being prepared. After some bickering, in which we learn that Tomasin has a crush on Swift, but Cooper tells her she’s wasting her time. So there’s a character dynamic there.

The Doctor and Peri are menaced by The Singing Detective, so the Doctor calms him down by going all Pertwee on his ass, and hypnotising him

Then suddenly, Alexei Sayle is doing an impression of Alan Freeman auditioning for Hair. His first words are “for those of you appreciative of the female form…” in reference to Peri. Oh Saward.

He’s a DJ, entertaining all the people in cryogenic suspended animation.

Then, all of a sudden, with no dramatic build up or anything, there’s a dalek and Davros, who appears to be a Futurama head in a jar. I guess he’s in the right place, then.

There are two unidentified characters running around with guns. They’re looking for ‘the truth’ about something as yet unknown – she wants to find her father’s body. At one point one of them says “I’m a doctor, not a magician”

Davros is being referred to as ‘The Great Healer’ and he’s also doing a deal with Goth Eleanor Bron of some kind.

Our two mysterious truth seekers come across a perspex dalek casing with her father’s head inside. I think it’s Jony Ive’s iDalek prototype.

Yet another star guest turns up to visit Eleanor Bron. It’s William Gaunt, playing Orcini, an assassin, as he tells us in practically his first line of dialogue.

Bron produces a low-cost foodstuff and Davros is extorting money from her. So she wants Orcini to take a transmitter to Davros, activate it, and her forces will destroy Davros.

We also learn that one of our mysterious truth seekers is the daughter of the same Professor Stengos that the Doctor came to visit.

The Doctor and Peri are still wandering around outside, when they come across a tombstone for the Doctor, who makes the immediate assumption that it’s really his, and that he must die soon. Chin up!

And this almost comes true when the tombstone topples over on top of him, leading to the episode’s cliffhanger.

So that’s the first episode, 45 minutes long, and the Doctor hasn’t even really entered the story yet.

BBC Genome: BBC One – 23rd March 1985 – 17:05

The tombstone turns out to be “all part of an elaborate theatrical effect” according to The Doctor, contradicting himself from a few minutes previously when he said it would have cost far too much to set up such a thing just for a prank.

The Doctor gets caught by the Daleks, and put in the same prison as Stengos’ daughter, so she can explain the plot to him. This is after she’d been tortured by one of Clive Swift’s lackeys. This wouldn’t be Saward-era Who without some turture.

Eleanor Bron is brought to Necross by some Daleks. And Jenny Tomasin is told by Davros to kill Clive Swift. Which she does, reluctantly. Then she’s exterminated by some Daleks.

This is all kicking off.

Peri, meanwhile, has been talking to Alexei Sayle, who, handily, has CCTV of the whole place.

Orcini finds his way to Davros, and shoots him a lot. Davros deflates. This is not the behaviour you expect of a major intergalactic warmonger.

But that Davros was a dummy, and the real Davros appears, blowing off Orcini’s false leg and doing Force Lightning on hom, while floating in the air (although because of the effects, it’s not 100% clear that he’s floating).

Alexei Sayle and Peri are under seige in his studio from Daleks, but luckily he can kill them by playing very loud music at them.

But he’s soon exterminated, and pretty soon most of the rest of the cast are brought before Davros. Bron is killed, Orcini’s steward manages to blow Davros’ hand off (which, by the way, explains his metal hand in modern Doctor Who) and Davros explains the rest of his plan – turning all the rich frozen corpses into Daleks, and turning all the poor frozen corpses into food for the rest of the galaxy.

But then, a bunch of grey daleks appear, wanting to take Davros back to Skaro. They also want to take over his batch of new white and gold daleks, but Orcini makes the ultimate sacrifice and blows them (and him) up.

So about the only people in the cast who make it through the story unscathed are The Doctor, Peri and good old Trevor Cooper.

Saward (and this season in particular) has a reputation for a lot of violence, and this story is no exception. He even has The Doctor firing a sub machine gun at a dalek. Not really my cup of tea.

After this series, the show was almost cancelled, and was off the air for 18 months, coming back with a shorter season, and the Trial of a Time Lord season, which was Baker’s last. But I put most of the blame at the feet of the producer, John Nathan Turner, who wasn’t a writer, and therefore was rather at the mercy of his script editor. He’d eventually fall out badly with Eric Saward in the next series, but I’ll save those stories for when we get to those tapes.

BBC Genome: BBC One – 30th March 1985 – 17:20

Afterwards, recording stops, and underneath, here’s Guy Kewney talking about computers. in the end of an episode of 4 Computer Buffs. One of the things he’s reviewing is a huge Commodore 64 Mouse.