Doctor Who Night 2024: Eric Saward's Vision

For our 22nd* annual Doctor Who Night we watched some stories from season 22. We started with Attack of the Cybermannys, which was written by "Paula Moore" - a cunning pseudonym that Eric Saward used to fool the BBC into letting him write more scripts than he was really allowed to under their rules.

While an enormous step up in quality from the preceding story, this is a confused mess of a plot that is trying to be a sequel to Resurrection of the Daleks and The Tenth Planet and Tomb of the Cybermannys, while including topical references to Halley's Comet in a subplot that doesn't really go anywhere.

Speaking of subplots that don't go anywhere - something of a Sawardian trademark - the ultimate example of this has to be the way that escaped prisoners Bates and Stratton never meet or interact with the Doctor or Peri, and are killed off without accomplishing anything relevant to the main plot.

Another Sawardian trademark is the presence of space mercenaries - in this case Lytton (Maurice Colbourne), returning from Resurrection of the Daleks but with an almost unrecognisably different personality - whom it seems the writer would rather spend his time with than the Doctor and Companion. The early scenes establishing Lytton as a London gangster, diamond thief and all-round hardmanny seem to belong to a different show - not necessarily a bad one, but not Doctor Who.

Lytton eventually comes a cropper thanks to the third - and worst - Sawardian trademark: his love of gratuitous violence.

I always thought that radiation gravity gold was the Cybermannys' one weakness, but according to the Doctor:

"The Cybermen have one weakness. They'll react to the distress of their own kind."

I assume there's at least one Big Finish story out there about how undercover policemanny Russell somehow survived and ended up on Skaro, where he became the Kaleds' chief scientist? No? Funny how some actor reuse matters more to the superfans than others, mew.

Revelation of the Daleks, also written by Eric Saward (under his own name this time), is in general a much better story than Attack of the Cybermannys, although it is arguably an even worse Doctor Who story, what with the way the Doctor and Peri are kept away from the main plot for more than half of the duration. It is also an enormous step down in quality from the preceding story, for obvious reasons.

The parade of characters we are introduced to - who are mostly being set up in part one only to get killed off in part two - are interestingly grotesque and have a complex set of relationships with each other and with Davros, who sits at the heart of the story like a pider in its web. In many ways this is his story, showing him as a genius manipulator of the greed and vanity of the mannys around him, as well as the mad scientist we have seen him as before. It is trying to do something new with the character, and it is a pity that this doesn't extend beyond this one story, since the next time we will see him will be In Remembrance of the Daleks.

Most of the characters come in pairs, forming double acts as Saward tries to copy the writing style of Robert Holmes: Kara and Vogel, Orcini and Bostock (the obligatory space mercenaries for this story), Takis and Lilt (with a totally tropical taste), Natasha and Grigory. This gives one member of each pair somebody to tell their exposition to, which is good because this script has a lot of exposition to get through - to the point where there is a character whose role is to give a running commentary on events to all the mannys in suspended animation, a.k.a. the viewers at home.

This is the DJ, played by Alexei Sayle, a baffling inclusion even by the already eclectic standards of this story. Peri thinks he is a Space American, but it turns out he is just putting the voice on, which is ironic because Nicola Bryant is also putting the voice on to play Peri.

While the level of violence is less than in some stories this season (the worst offenders are Attack of the Cybermannys, Vengeance on Varos and The Two Doctors), it still includes a manny getting stabbed with a syringe and injected with embalming fluid. This scene is played for laughs, since even as he goes

his wig falls off, lol.

Not played for komedy is the scene with the see-through Dalek, inside which is a manny being turned into a Dalek. Doctor Who Mazagine once called this "the single most up-chuckingly disgusting thing seen in the show ever." Although this was before the return of the new series, so could easily be superseded by [spoiled for choice when it comes to this punchline -Ed]

After this season aired on the BBC, the series came within a gnat's crotchet of getting cancelled. I think it is quite clear who is chiefly to blame.

* I'm not sure how we managed that when I was only made in 2008. It must have somehow involved time travel.