Fight night on fright night: Image of the Fendahl

BEN THOMAS and FINLAY McLAREN get salty over Doctor Who‘s 1977 Hallowe’en classic.

Colby: There’s a corpse by the wood.
Fendelman: What sort of corpse?
Colby: A dead one. What other sort is there?

SIR — Will you join me this Halloween in viewing ‘Image of the Fendahl’? The tipping point between early Fourth Doctor gothic magnificence and later Fourth Doctor cash-strapped silliness. Every penny made it to the screen with this one. They even found the budget for a night shoot. Had someone won the pools? By the end of this season they couldn’t even afford sets.
I’ve always got time for a story where Tom Baker makes small talk with a cow (not Lalla Ward), or brings a white witch back from the brink with a deliberately-bungled fruit cake recipe. There are proper scares as well. The Fendahleen costumes are the last decent monster suits we’ll see until the 1980s. I even like the diddy ones with the streamers for mouths. They’d make delightful pets. They’re less trouble than owning a cat, and human souls smell better than cat food.
Also, what other kids show would have its hero assist a satanic cultist to euthanise himself with a pistol? Apart from Pingu, obviously.
Ben Thomas
The People’s Republic of Swindon

SIR – Eye fink yule find ‘Image of the Fendahl’ is the very worst example of Old Money Doctor Who that doesn’t involve black-and-white or gin-addled pederast producers. It’s worse than ‘The Mutants’. Worse even than ‘Doctor Who and the Underworld’. Fendahl really is a load of old toot.
Tom Baker, the most entertaining Doctor Who, is so obviously bored this week. Spending ninety minutes ambling towards where the plot is happening, stopping only to explain what’s going on (not much!), and scowling miserably over the fact he doesn’t have any jokes.
Possibly apocryphally, fan consensus has it that when Anthony Reed — Robert Holmes’s replacement as script editor on the programme — inherited Fendahl, he didn’t realise it was still a first draft. (Maybe he should have read the thing, it’s pretty obvious.)
The only decent bit is Part Four where Doctor Who spends fifteen minutes bigging up the monster of the week — ‘The Fendahl is death, how do you kill death itself?’ — before realising he can just blow it up. Wonderful stuff! Remember Fendahl, Doctor Who has only to be lucky once.
Finlay McLaren
Shieldinch, Glasgow

SIR! — For starters, nothing is worse than ‘The Mutants’. A forty-foot radioactive Sidney Cooke with a chainsaw cock and Space AIDS isn’t worse than ‘The Mutants’.
And you make a bored Tom Baker sound like a bad thing. A fully bored Tom is an Erato-sized speedbump. Add lunchtime gin down the Coach & Horses and you’ve got ‘The Horns of Nimon’.
Slightly-bored Tom gives us mischievous asides, like telling Adam Colby to flee in three minutes while holding up four fingers. Or staring dolefully down the camera lens and announcing: ‘Time’s running out!’
Is this Chris Boucher’s weakest Doctor Who script? Possibly. That’s praising with faint damnation. Much of the unwieldy exposition came from script-editor rewrites while Boucher was busy with Blake’s 7. The folk-horror bells and whistles cover a multitude of sins. Adam Colby gets some genuinely funny lines. Ma Tyler adds to the tradition of fun old lady eccentrics in the show.
And while the Fendahl Thirteen get imploded in the priory, the Doctor still has to dump Eustace the skull — the real threat — in a supernova for safekeeping. The evil is contained, rather than destroyed.
And yet you still disparage this very minor classic? Alas, poor Finlay!
Ben Thomas
Swindon, twinned with Narnia

SIR — Oh don’t be daft.
Doctor Who — who is fully bored this week, however many fingers he’s holding up — dumps the skull in the supernova like it’s a piece of piss! The end titles haven’t even started before Tom’s off trying to get into that week’s ‘Low Life’. So what was all the bloody fuss about?
You write that ‘the folk-horror bells and whistles cover a multitude of sins’? Do they? Really? I’m not convinced. I think what’s happening here can best be explained by Plato and his Theory of Forms. (Pleeeeeease gimme a job on In Our Time Radio 4! Pleeeeeeeeeease!)
What yer man Plato talks about here is the idea that there is a Realm of Forms, a layer of existence where the perfect examples of each object and abstract idea truly exist. While our world only holds the imperfect, Temu versions of these Forms.
And that’s why people like ‘Image of the Fendahl’ — because it seems to hold all the qualities of the Form ‘mid-1970s Doctor Who story’: a spooky English village beset by scary monsters until the day is saved by the one with the long scarf and a girl who keeps asking questions. But Fendahl is hollow. It is an imperfect copy of earlier triumphs.
It’s also the last time the programme exists in this ‘mode’. The next time the series tries to do a story like this, it’s interrupted by Crown Court in space. Fans, with their typical good taste, hate such frivolity. But really, it’s a relief. On the evidence of Fendahl, this version of Who had run its course.
Finlay McLaren
Todday, Outer Hebrides

SIR — Ooh, hark at her? She’s got her Plato out, ain’t she posh? Not the first time she’s gone Greek, is it mother?
But I digress.
What you’re failing to appreciate in your job application to the BBC Home Service (good luck with that, you’re more Heart UK) is that ‘Image of the Fendahl’ isn’t an imperfect copy of the classic Who gothic: it’s actually a curtain call. The BBC had one of its periodic losses of bottle in the face of Mary Whitehouse. Graham Williams was brought in on strict orders to tone the horror down. However, canny old Robert Holmes made sure to commission a couple of stories on his way out that were stuffed with the greatest hits of the Hinchcliffe-Holmes era. ‘Horror of Fang Rock’ and ‘Image of the Fendahl’ are a gleeful ‘Up yours!’ to BBC management on his way out.
And the suggestion that the Fendahl are beaten too easily is nonsense in the context of Doctor Who. The Daleks are supposed to be the most dangerous force in the universe, but the Doctor pisses all over them before breakfast. Fendahl is the personification of death? Big deal, he beat the God of Death in ‘Pyramids of Mars’ two seasons earlier. Are you going to say that’s shit as well? Classic Doctor Who is the journey, not the destination.
Honestly Finlay, I’m not trying to be unkind. I appreciate that growing up on a diet of deep-fried confectionery and offal has probably blunted your faculties, but please try not to embarrass yourself quite so badly in print.
Ben Thomas
The Seventh Circle of Swindon

SIR — Thank you for your letter. May I say what an honour it is to be patronised by you. Similarly, I must congratulate you on resisting the obvious temptation to call it the ‘BBC Homo Service’. Well done, you. I’ll let Nurse know to give you an extra helping of crumble tonight. Stupid old fart.
Might I remind you that the suggestion that the Fendahl are beaten too easily may be nonsense in the context of Doctor Who, but it is not nonsense in the fictional world of ‘Image of the Fendahl’, which is what we are discussing. The qualities of Pyramids can wait for another time. (It’s also dreadful by the way, just to be clear.)
Boucher’s script spends an awful lot of time hyping up the threat of the Fendahl. Part Three takes a very long detour AWAY from the plot to go and see the black hole where Planet Five used to be, a planet the Time Lords destroyed just to stop this terrible evil. ‘There are four thousand million people on your planet and, if I’m right, within a year there’ll only be one left alive.’ Doctor Who warns us at one point. (Insert obligatory Keith Richards joke here.)
That’s all the story does for three episodes. ‘Oooh watch out the Fendahl is coming!’, ‘Pretty soon the Fendahl is going to be here!’, ‘Pretty scary stuff, the Fendahl, watch out!’ — and then what happens? Boom. It’s a bit like if in The Third Man the light goes on, Harry Lime looks up, smirks, then trips on a cobblestone, falls over, cuts his head open and dies. Or if in Whistle and I’ll Come to You Michael Horden saved the day by bumping the ghost full of lead.
The story also suffers from that terrible trope ‘the omniscient Doctor’, where our hero arrives and seemingly already knows exactly what’s going on and how to stop it. This is never explained. He just does. The same could be said for most characters in the story. How does Stael know about the Fendahl? Why does he want to become a god? Why is Ted Moss involved? Why is Denis Lill doing that ridiculous accent? Who knows! And more importantly, who cares?
Anyway, if you know the answers to any of these questions, please write in to the BBC Homo Service. Unless you’re Ben Thomas, who is a cunt.
Finlay McLaren
Castle De’ath, Avengersland

Right, you preening little Gen Alpha turd, I’ve tried to keep this civil. If I wanted to be patronised by a foetus I wouldn’t have closed my back-street abortion clinic. I can’t wait to see what you’re going to try to compare ‘Image of the Fendahl’ to next. The Bell Jar? Atlas Shrugged? Lars von Trier’s Depression Trilogy? ‘Ooh look at me! I’m Finlay and I’m an intellectual! I only watch films with subtitles and I’ve read the Iliad in the original Greek!’ Scottish Adrian Mole, that’s what you are, pal!
And you don’t like ‘Pyramids of Mars’? You pre-pubescent skid-mark. I’m delighted Europe is tipping over into another world war. I’ll march you to the front line in a headlock myself, if I have to. Enjoy the weevil-infested rations and trench foot, wanker! I look forward to reading your posthumously published war poetry.
And you wash the name of Denis Lill out of your pestilent little mouth. The man’s acting royalty. He’s from New Zealand. Every part he’s ever played has been in an accent. You’d know that if you didn’t spend all your spare time wrapped up in your cot reading À la recherche du temps perdu.
Sixty years that man’s been entertaining the public, and you swan along, straight from the womb, dissing his performance. What if he reads this? He’s eighty-four years old. What if he reads your dim-witted criticism and suffers a fatal stroke? You’ve effective killed Denis Lill. Murderer!

Denis Lill 1942—2026
May you rot in hell, Finlay

Ben Thomas
Swindonghast

SIR — Thank you for your timely reply. I am gladdened that you were able to take your calloused, liver-spotted, mummified, piss-scented, geriatric hands off that twisted nub you call a cock long enough to respond.
Firstly, I must apologise for the distress my criticism of Denis ‘never knowingly under-acted’ Lill has caused you. Sincerely, I had no idea that you were Mister Lill’s legal guardian, spiritual advisor, bestfriend and sole defender. In future, I shall endeavour to submit all future opinions on Mister Lill’s acting for your approval, care of the New Zealand Ministry of Culture.
(Oh no, I’ve just phoned them and they’ve never heard of the cunt. They did say that ‘Pyramids of Mars’ sounded like a big pile of crap, though.)
Secondly, I must say I find your concern for my wartime survival touching. But touching in a sort of creepy Savile-y way. It’ll be funny, when it’s all over and someone turns to you and asks: ‘What did you do in the Third World War, Ben Thomas, you big fat cunt?’ You can say: ‘I wrote a thousand-word treatise on why “Image of the Fendahl” was good actually’. What pride you will feel. What a life well lived. Oh, and also you googled ‘What are some pretentious novels?’ The sense of achievement will be overwhelming!
Anyway, eat shit and die.
Finlay McLaren
The Wicker Man’s Left Foot, Summerisle

P.S. If Denis Lill does suffer a fatal stroke after reading my criticism, I shall of course accept full legal responsibility. I only hope his final words are, ‘At least the little bastard was right about “Image of the Fendahl”.’

From its launch in October 1995, Prospect magazine included an epistolary feature titled The Duel. Among its most famous wars of words was that between brothers Christopher and Peter Hitchens, debating the cultural and political legacy of the 1960s. Neither called the other a cunt.

The Doctor Who story ‘Image of the Fendahl’ is available to watch on the BBC iPlayer.

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