Doctor Who: Paradise Towers

In 1987 Doctor Who was in trouble.  Collin Baker, the 6^th Doctor had been fired at the end of the previous season and the show had already faced cancellation once. The show, now in it’s 24^th year was considered an embarrassing dinosaur by BBC execs and ratings were not what they once were. To top of all off Sylvester McCoy’s introduction to the audience  in Time and the Rani was not what you would call a classic story. With little promise of what sort of Doctor he could be, audiences were not encouraged especially when he was saddled with a companion like Mel who ranks as one of the least loved companions of all time.

So what was his second story Paradise Towers like?

Where to begin......

Mel decides that she wants to go for a swim and the Doctor has been forced to jettison the Tardis swimming pool for some reason. So she decides that Paradise Towers, for which the Tardis has a video brochure, would be the perfect place to set down and dip her toes. The Doctor reluctantly agrees and they arrive in a giant post-apocalyptic apartment building where gangs of young women run wild (the colour coded Kangs), cleaners desperately try to impose law and order, robots are killing people, there’s a monster in the basement and the Ressies have turned to cannibalism.  My kind of holiday.

Paradise Towers continues season 24 which contains some of the worst Doctor Who ever produced. And it’s not the best example of this era, Bonnie Langford can't act. I'm sorry but I'm afraid it's true she just can't act. She says every line as if the person she is saying it to is five feet further away from her than they really are.

Or as if she was in a silent picture.

But she's in good company here, the Ressies and the Kangs mug their way though entire episodes without any shame or direction.

Richard Briers who plays the head cleaner can act as he recently demonstrated in Torchwood but he has decided not to here.  His performance has been modelled after a close study of Monty Python.

The script is ok but it's emblematic of 80's desperation to have subtext pushed to the forefront just in-case you don't get it. And the other actors don't help in that regard.  Pex for instance acts hard, as hard as he can, so you get the idea that he's suppose to be a send up of the square jawed hero, who is really a coward. Richard Briers looks like Hitler because he is a petty despotic bureaucrat who decides to commit genocide. Yes the Kaleds in Genesis of the Daleks were thinly veiled analogs of the Nazis but it wasn't shoved down your throat quite as forcefully as it is here.

The Doctor is better here than he was in Mark of the Rani but that wouldn't be hard. No that's not fair, he is MUCH better here than in Mark of the Rani.  As a critique of the dangers of bureaucracy the aforementioned Monty Python did it funnier and better. Come to that so did another recent Doctor Who release The Sunmakers.

As for the Music, well the old Yamaha Dx-7 is really getting a workout in all its midi glory.

The monster in the basement, is...terrible as is Richard Briers performance when the monster takes him over. There must be a top when you go over the top and he decides to go over that too. Something that everyone but him sights in the making of documentary, he felt “that’s just how you’d play a possessed zombie”. 

Frankly the whole enterprise smacks of a high school production.

Special Features: The writer, the script editor, Pex and Richard Briers discuss the story whilst being interviewed by Mark Ayres who wrote music for Doctor Who in the late 80’s but not this story? Admitting that the lighting wasn’t great, that Richard Briers overacted (except Richard) they also  admit that the pool scene isn’t great and that the Robot Cleaners aren’t that great. Out of the myriad of issues these quibbles seem to be small beer.

They gather three of the main girls from the 80’s who talk about feminism and how much they influenced the paradigm of the time and how they struck a blow for girls everywhere and proceed to spend the next ten minutes talking about clothes.

Audio: Nothing fancy here.  Not one but two channels of full stereo sound and your tweeters get a work out anytime Bonnie Langford screams. A commentary where they discuss how good this episode is just grates.

Video: The video quality is fine; nothing out of the box but it’s not that old so it’s not that terrible.