Hate watch: Doctor Who

In our ongoing feature on the stories fans would rather forget, BEN THOMAS puts a slug in Colin Baker.

Peri: What do you see?
The Doctor: Ah. A noble brow. Clear gaze. At least it will be, given a few hours sleep. A firm mouth, a face beaming with a vast intelligence. My dear child, what on earth are you complaining about? It’s the most extraordinary improvement.
Doctor Who, ‘The Twin Dilemma’ – Part 1 (1984)

A lot of people believe that Colin Baker was the worst actor ever to play the part of Doctor Who. This is underplaying his other achievements. For example, he’s also the worst actor ever to play Inspector Morse. In the 2010 stage play House of Ghosts for the record. It haunted the provinces for just shy of four months and failed to trouble the West End.

That is unfair. It’s not a good play, by all accounts. But Colin was generally favourably-reviewed in what was generally agreed to be a ‘grim, ghastly touring stage spin-off’ in which the star looked ‘like a man possessed… by undisguised discomfort’ (Dominic Cavendish, Daily Telegraph).

So to say he’s the worst Inspector Morse is unfair. Unfortunately, I quite like being unfair to Colin Baker. It’s a fairly gaping character flaw. And a fairly one-sided affair; he blocked me on Twitter back around 2018. Quite right too.

Is he the worst Doctor Who? That would depend on who you ask. He has his apologists. Sorry, ‘fans’. I meant fans. Since 1999 he’s appeared as his Doctor in a popular series of audio dramas produced by a company called Big Finish. And I think he’s generally quite good in them. Very good at times.

There: I’ve admitted it. I genuinely think he’s a good stage actor and, by extension, suited to radio where a heightened performance is required to make up for a lack of visuals. I don’t think his mode of performance works well on screen. He’s too bombastic and yet slightly wooden, prone to striking a pose and declaiming, which isn’t a style that plays well on camera. Colin Baker is permanently turned up to 11.

Colin Baker’s first Doctor Who story is called ‘The Twin Dilemma’. I showed it to a friend of mine a few years ago, a professional actor friend who isn’t a Doctor Who fan. He watched Colin’s performance in stunned silence for about five minutes until he finally roared: ‘What is he doing?!?’

‘The Twin Dilemma’ had everything going against it. It was broadcast after Peter Davison’s last story as the Doctor, ‘The Caves of Androzani’, which is widely considered to be one of the best adventures of the 1980s. It also had the misfortune to end up as the last story of that series (Season 21). Back then, the production team had a bad habit of running out of money before the end of each run of stories, meaning the series finale was made using whatever spare shoeboxes, Fairy Liquid bottles and sticky-back plastic were left lying around from Blue Peter.

Enter Colin Baker. (I’d rather not, given the choice.)

Introducing a new Doctor Who at the end of a season was suboptimal. If you start the series with a new Doctor the actor has a chance to bed in. Ending the series with Colin meant he had one first night, followed by a nine-month break before his first full run. An odd decision, but then the producer at the time was an odd gentleman.

How to describe John Nathan-Turner. He’s dead. That’s a fairly defining trait. But he wasn’t dead back in 1983 when he cast Colin Baker. The story, perhaps apocryphal, was that they were both guests at the wedding of Turner’s secretary, where Baker was the life and soul of the party. Peter Davison had just announced his departure, and Baker’s showing apparently convinced the producer that he’d found his next Doctor. Far easier than, I don’t know, actually auditioning actors and casting the best one. Old-fashioned of me, I know.

(Fun fact: I’ve been the life and soul of the party – i.e. blind drunk – at many barbecues and I’ve never been cast in a prime-time BBC drama.)

Back to John Nathan-Turner. How can I describe him without getting the Lion & Unicorn lawyer involved? Ah, wait. He’s dead. (Nathan-Turner, not the L&U lawyer. At time of press.)

John Nathan-Turner was famous for many things. His garish Hawaiian shirts that some say inspired Colin’s hideous Doctor Who costume. His ‘light entertainment’ sensibilities that led to accusations that he was trying to make the show look like an over-lit, shiny-floored game show. His [REDACTED ON THE ADVICE OF THE L&U LAWYER].

(Please read Totally Tasteless: The Life of John Nathan-Turner by Richard Marson for all the truly juicy details.)

Into this circus walked chief clown Colin Baker. At some point he would have been handed the script for ‘The Twin Dilemma’. There are no reports of him attempting self-defenestration after he read it, but we can’t rule it out. The story was written by Anthony Stevens, a prolific writer of period TV drama, who found tea-time sci-fi so far out of his comfort zone that he might as well have been orbiting Jupiter.

Something I found out while researching this article: ‘To the mystification of the production team, he [Stevens] began explaining away his problems [in meeting script deadlines] with increasingly bizarre excuses – most famously, a claim that his typewriter had “literally exploded”.’ (Brief History of Time Travel website.)

So, just to recap, there’s no money, barely any script, and the producer’s decided to dress up his lead actor like a migraine. But who’s directing? Oh good, it’s Peter Moffat.

As a TV director, Moffat was widely known as ‘a really nice man’. Everyone agrees on that. That’s all they ever seem to say about him. And that’s a massive red flag for competence, in my experience. Add to all this a BBC industrial strike completely banjaxxing the filming schedule and you’ve got an absolute bugger’s muddle. I never thought I’d say this, but Colin didn’t deserve this.

And I haven’t even started to talk about the story proper yet. Jesus Christ.

The Doctor: What we need is a cave, some utterly comfortless place where you and I can suffer together.
Doctor Who, ‘The Twin Dilemma’ – Part 1 (1984)

The Doctor: My blood will bubble like a raging stream. I will beg to die. And in so doing I will crave your indulgence and forgiveness.
Doctor Who, ‘The Twin Dilemma’ – Part 4 (1984)

Against all odds, there was a script ready at the start of the rehearsals. This seems to be thanks to Eric Saward, the script editor, who had to rewrite it from the ground up at the last minute just to produce something vaguely filmable. I’m minded to give Saward a pass as far as this story’s concerned as a) he did his best in near-impossible circumstances, and b) he’s still alive and may well be litigious. (Colin Baker isn’t litigious. I’ve tested that to destruction over the years, trust me.)

At least the show’s new star had some decent actors to work with. Emphasis on ‘some’. Maurice Denham is playing Azmael, an old friend of the Doctor. Denham was the safest of hands; an experienced, expressive and generous actor. His scenes with Baker are some of the best in the story. Colin visibly relaxes when they’re together. There’s also an early leading role for a young Kevin McNally as Hugo Lang, star fighter pilot. He’s predictably excellent.

Unfortunately for a story called ‘The Twin Dilemma’, the twins – Gavin and Andrew Conrad – are not good. Remember Guy Goma? The man who turned up at the BBC for a job interview and accidentally ended up being interviewed live on BBC News? It’s like that, but they’re white kids with pudding bowl haircuts and, bloody hell, there’s two of them.

I haven’t mentioned Nicola Bryant, who played the Doctor’s companion Peri Brown yet. She gets the shittiest end of the stick in this story. She is, in short order: abused, betrayed and insulted by the Doctor; nearly strangled by him in a fit of post-regenerative mania; and later forced to become a hermit alongside him so he can atone for strangling her (yeah, me neither).

Poor old Nicola wasn’t having a great time off camera either. Colin found her stand-offish at first and decided to break the ice between them by playfully biting her on the bum between takes. (Calm down, L&U lawyer. She mentions it on the DVD commentary. And I will add that they would later become great friends.)

We should address the Doctor’s post-regenerative instability in more detail. Seldom has a piece of TV drama been such a seething crucible of top-to-bottom bad decisions by everyone involved. But this choice is fatal. ‘Good news, everyone! This is your new Doctor and he’s awful. And I don’t just mean his acting.’ Our protagonist is written as a grandiose, preening, verbose and incompetent nut-job. Apparently the plan was for him to mellow over subsequent series, but Colin got his P45 before that could happen.

Given the budget and production issues, there’s very little that looks good in this story, even by the standards of 1980s Doctor Who. Kevin McNally spends a lot of the story dressed in a kimono made of Quality Street wrappers. The sets for the planet Jaconda, where most of the story takes place, look like an abandoned Santa’s grotto. There are some nice prosthetics and make-up on the bird-like natives, but unfortunately Mestor, the slug-like villain of the piece, looks like Colin the Caterpillar trapped in a calcified sleeping bag.

Oh, and the Doctor doesn’t beat Mestor himself at the end. He tries to end things by chucking acid over Mestor, like the absolute bloody hero he is, but he muffs it up. Maurice Denham’s Azmael ends up saving the day, sacrificing his life in the process. Denham’s death scene is unexpectedly moving. The Doctor’s at his side as he goes, and it’s probably Colin’s best moment in the story.

As an audition for the job of being Doctor Who – the only one Colin actually had to go through – this new Doctor is very much in ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you’ territory.

Doctor Who would return the following Autumn with Sontarans, Cybermen, Daleks, as well as the welcome return of a proper Doctor, Patrick Troughton. The damage was done, though. The series struggled and the show was eventually ‘put on hiatus’ for eighteen months.

After twenty-two years, Doctor Who was on trial for its life. (Possibly for the best if the production team didn’t bring further attention to that.)

Could Colin Baker have done anything to rescue ‘The Twin Dilemma’? No, probably not. It was a burning clown car toppling off a cliff, no matter which Doctor was behind the wheel. Is he one of the reasons it’s so bad? Yes and no. He makes some baffling choices, but he was dressed to fail. The quieter moments with Maurice Denham are quite beautiful. For the rest of the story he was the wrong man in the wrong place playing the wrong Time Lord.

I’ll never get my head around the sign off at the end of the episode. It’s one thing to serve up a steaming turd, but it’s something else to be quite so unapologetic about it.

The Doctor: And I would suggest, Peri, that you wait a little before criticising my new persona. You may well find it isn’t quite as disagreeable as you think.
Peri: Well, I hope so.
The Doctor: Whatever else happens, I am the Doctor, whether you like it or not.
Doctor Who, ‘The Twin Dilemma’ – Part 4 (1984)

One last thing: If you do want to hear Colin’s Doctor at his very best then I can recommend Doctor Who and the Pirates written by Jacqueline Rayner and guest-starring the late Bill Oddie. My wife tells me it’s her favourite Big Finish audio. I’ve commenced divorce proceedings.

Find more writing from Ben Thomas at his blog summers2theb.

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