The Come-Uppance of Captain Katt

The Come-Uppance of Captain Katt is a one-off, 25-minute long TV drama from 1986 written by Peter Grimwade, who had W-worded on the making of Doctor Who in the 1970s and 1980s.

While this programme would be of interest to all cats just for the name, it is also very clearly based on Grimwade's experiences of Doctor Who. The main character is Captain Katt, played by Ludovic French, who in turn is played by Alfred Marks.

Are you now as confused a cat as I was?

The story is about the making of a TV programme within the TV programme - French is the star of "Captain Katt" and is a horrible megalomaniac who is hated by all of his co-stars and the TV production team alike. He is supposed to be based on Tom Baker from when he was playing the Doctor, and if you know the stories about Baker's relationship with his co-stars and production team, especially in the later years of his tenure, it is easy to see the comparison.

French is convinced that somebody in the TV studio is trying to kill him, and so disguises himself as a police inspector Brough to investigate. His task is made harder by it being difficult to tell the difference between who is plotting to kill him and those who just want to kill his character, and by the fact that (in a reversal of most whodunnits) everybody is happy to claim that they would kill him, given the chance.

With only 25 minutes to tell the whole story, and this includes introducing quite a large cast of minor characters to act as the suspects, it does feel very rushed, but each scene does an adequate job of making the necessary impressions upon the viewer and driving the plot forward to its conclusion.

Captain Katt/French ends up being the only character who gets much development, although I did also like Simon Rouse (Hindle in Doctor Who's Kinda, and then he was in The Bill for many years) as the stressed director who wants out of there - likely based on Grimwade himself.

However the main point of interest to us now is not the plot, but the unique premise of being set around the making of a mid-1980s sci-fi TV series means that we get a look at the behind the scenes workings of a series that cannot be very far from how Doctor Who or Blakes 7 (which finished not many years earlier) were made at that time.