Posted by Craig in HTPBDET’s absence

DOCTOR: You may not believe this, but I have fully stabilised.

PERI: Then I suggest you take a crash course in manners.

DOCTOR: You seem to forget, Peri, I’m not only from another culture but another planet. I am, in your terms, an alien. I am therefore bound to different values and customs.

PERI: Your former self was polite enough.

DOCTOR: At such a cost. I was on the verge of becoming neurotic.

PERI: We all have to repress our feelings from time to time. I suggest you get back into the habit.

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.

DOCTOR: Whatever else happens, I am the Doctor, whether you like it or not.

And there it was, the end of Twin Dilemma the first story of the Sixth incarnation of the Doctor and a direct challenge to fandom and viewers generally: JNT saying in very unequivocal terms: “Tough luck if you don’t like the new Doctor – just put up with it”.

I can clearly remember feeling that someone had spat into my face.

Looking back now, it almost defies belief that anyone sane could possibly have thought that Colin Baker was a good choice for the role of the Doctor. He is a very pleasant and personable man in real life but an actor with very limited skills. The contrast with Davison could not have been more profound and alarming.

Colin Baker tells a tale about how his characterisation was based on the notion of a gradual disclosure of layers, that a hardened exterior would, over time, give way to a soft and gentle interior. When you think about it, that might be exactly how someone could perceive the way the audience viewed Hartnell – fierce and unpredictable at first, but giving way and mellowing over time.

Baker and Nathan-Turner both claimed that Hartnell’s Doctor was a chief inspiration for Colin Baker – as if the programme was going back to its roots. But the truth was quite different.

Hartnell never tried to strangle his companion. Nor did he ever maintain an attitude of aloof condescending rudeness than indicated borderline psychosis.

No, the Sixth Doctor was nothing like any that had gone before him, or, thankfully, like any who have followed him. He was a garish bully.

One way I knew that things had gone terribly wrong was that my firstborn son, who had so happily watched Davison’s Doctor, found this new incarnation “loud and mean” and he was alarmed by the attack on Peri. The other way I knew was that my secondborn son, who was just over a year old, started screaming every time he saw that ridiculous multi-coloured mis-matching coat. The Sixth Doctor had come to represent pure terror to a small child who never reacted as badly to Cybermen or Daleks.

Often there were good ideas lurking away in the eleven stories – were there really only eleven stories? His tenure did seem to last for years… – which make up the era of the Sixth Doctor but the acting and the production values robbed all of those ideas of any value.

Overwhelmingly, the Sixth Doctor was without style or charm but full of vicious and tendentious attitudes – a kind of fusion between Jack the Ripper, Professor Higgins, either Kray Brother and Iago. Common, pretentious and seething with brutality.

JNT tried everything to make people like and want to watch the Sixth Doctor, calling to aid former foes, former Doctors and former companions, and playing the Continuity Joker over and over, but he did not try the one thing that might have worked: casting a skilled actor and making the character interesting and exciting.

Many of the BG Doctor Who stories I loathe the most can be found within this era: Twin Dilemma, Attack of the Cybermen, Two Doctors, Timelash, Mindwarp and Ultimate Foe.

Although I think Twin Dilemma is the worst Doctor Who programme ever made, some of the others in this list of shame caused deeper pain.

It was during Attack of the Cybermen that my eldest decided he did not want to watch “that Doctor” and a ritual we had enjoyed together, since his birth, ended.

Two Doctors saw Patrick Troughton’s final contribution to the series and it was not a glorious one. He was smart enough to know that he could not truly re-create the sixties feeling of he and Jamie and so he went for a pastiche version, almost a caricature of his Paternal Magician, which he thought would better suit the programme he found himself in. And he was right – his performance is the very best thing in Two Doctors by a country mile. But it is not a proper reflection of the Second Doctor and it still breaks my heart that many people, who never saw his original run of stories, would judge his portrayal on this lamentable outing.

But the other reason I loathe this story is that it contains a gruesome sequence where the Doctor, deliberately and cold-bloodedly murders Shockeye. First, the Doctor renders him unconscious by strangulation (bad enough, but perhaps understandable given that Shockeye was intent on eating him) but then, when he could run away to safety leaving Shockeye to recover, he deliberately finishes him off with cyanide. There was, and is, no excuse for this. Cold blooded murder, up close and personal, should not be the kind of thing the Doctor ever does.

It was at this point that my innocent wonder at and about Doctor Who, something I had treasured and sustained since Unearthly Child, was finally extinguished. Doctor Who lost something forever on 2 March 1985 – or, perhaps, more correctly, Colin Baker threw it away.

The ghastly over-sexualisation of Peri is at its highest in both Timelash and Mindwarp and neither story has anything of real interest happening in it. Both are almost anti-Doctor Who stories and despite, or perhaps because of, camp over-acting by Paul Darrow and Brian Blessed, are dull as dull as dull.

Most irritating of all, however, is the tiresome Trial of a Time Lord arc. JNT’s scarcely concealed attack at the BBC for interfering with “his” programme. Those final two episodes are rank in every respect and, rationally, how could any BBC Executive, tasked with proper use of the public purse, have done anything other than cancel the programme.

Peri, whose light shone briefly in the magical Caves of Androzani, became utterly plastic, moaning and superficial in the company of the Garish Bully. She was the personification of pouting stupidity. She may have been curvaceous but by heavens she was annoying and utterly unlikeable. I always thought that dying was too good for her, so was rather pleased when it turned out that she had married Brian Blessed – that seemed like a lingering, painful death equal to the level of excruciating agony I had suffered listening to her monotonous fake accent and dreary moaning.

I guess it was because Peri had been so appalling that Bonnie Langford’s Mel seemed like a breath of fresh air. Yes, she had an irritating voice (but not on the Peri scale in my view) but she had style and flair and seemed to have a clear idea of her role in the Doctor’s life. I don’t think Colin Baker is ever better than in his scenes with Mel in Terror of the Vervoids; curiously, she brings out the best in him. And, in my view, Terror of the Vervoids is the best story of the Sixth Doctor’s era: it a good old fashioned Whodunnit with Science-fiction elements and it is engaging and even suspenseful in parts.

Number one son came back from school after part two of Terror of the Vervoids had aired saying that some of his friends had “liked this one” and, happily for me, he wanted to watch the rest of the story with me. Perhaps it is this, more than anything else, that makes me feel fondly about this story. But, when it was over, my son stayed away – and remained away until Mark of the Rani.

Another complaint that is often levelled at the RTD era is “how gay” it is – whatever that means. But whatever, it does mean, the RTD era does not hold a handle to the Sixth Doctor’s era of prissy effeminate boy-men being cast or bare-chested muscular he-men being cast – endlessly. Mysterious Planet even sees one character referred to as Handbag. Everything about the casting of guest performers (except the stars) and the look and feel of the programme and the costumes reeks something wrong, perverted even. This is, truly, the JNT touch at work – defiling and abusing the programme and people for his own satisfaction and personal purposes. The damage he wrought upon the programme was almost incalculable.

I have met and worked with Colin Baker. He is, as I said earlier, a very nice man. But he has limited skills as an actor and mercurial or charismatic or delightful are not terms that you would associate with his professional abilities. He is a “good sport” as they say.

He thinks of his time as the Doctor, so he says, differently depending on what his mood is. Sometimes, he is bitter about his treatment: by the BBC, by JNT and by “the hierarchy of fandom” (whoever they are). He regards himself as hard done by. Other times, in a more reflective mood, he will say simply “I tried to be the angry Tom Baker, mixing William Hartnell with the eccentric tics of the most popular Doctor ever. But only because John thought that was the way to make me different from Peter. He always wanted me to be ‘different'”.

I think of the Sixth Doctor with a sense of bemused rage: in truth, it was this period of Doctor Who which made me think I could work successfully in Television. This Doctor Who was so bad, it gave me hope. And I must thank it for that.

But…

It is also the time I stopped loving the programme and saw it, for the first time, as “just TV”. It is also the time when my children stopped our ritual of Doctor Who viewing, one which stretched back a very long way and was a key part of remembering my lost brother. Seeing my son hating this Sixth Doctor broke part of me – forever.