Doctor Who - Ghost Light (DVD)

...have a new series of Doctor Who which is utterly brilliant. However, I've not made major revisions to the text as Ghost Light remains very much the end of an era)

Doctor Who effectively died in 1989. The franchise grasped the full significance of its key theme of regeneration, and reinvented itself as a series of bottom-kicking novels embracing the darker elements that had remained implicit in the original series. The flame was kept ...
...audio adventure, but basically, the Doctor walked into his time-travelling Police Box for the last time in the last decade but one. But it's generally agreed that the producers saved the best until last.

Doctor Who's last season was its strongest for many years, with all of its four stories finding fanatical support among some sections of the fan community. It wasn't supposed to be the end, script editor Andrew Cartmel had a definite ... more

(The following review was originally written a couple of years ago. Obviously we now have a new series of Doctor Who which is utterly brilliant. However, I've not made major revisions to the text as Ghost Light remains very much the end of an era)

Doctor Who effectively died in 1989. The franchise grasped the full significance of its key theme of regeneration, and reinvented itself as a series of bottom-kicking novels embracing the darker elements that had remained implicit in the original series. The flame was kept alive, and occasionally it belches forth a TV Movie, or an Internet audio adventure, but basically, the Doctor walked into his time-travelling Police Box for the last time in the last decade but one. But it's generally agreed that the producers saved the best until last.

Doctor Who's last season was its strongest for many years, with all of its four stories finding fanatical support among some sections of the fan community. It wasn't supposed to be the end, script editor Andrew Cartmel had a definite idea of where he wanted to take the show, but watching those last few stories, you do get the feeling that... they knew.

Ghost Light was not the last story to be aired, the show's epilogue voiceover was tacked on to the end of Survival, but it was the last to be filmed. For once, the fact that the season's budget had run out worked in the serial's favour.

Set in a single country house over the course of two or three nights in the nineteenth century, Ghost Light encapsulates all the things that Doctor Who ever did well. The period setting has been recreated sumptuously, and the house looks more like a film set than a cheap BBC serial, particularly the entrance hall where much of the action takes place.

The plot, aliens in a historical setting, harks back to various Doctor Who classics: The Talons of Weng-Chiang most obviously, but also The Time Warrior and Evil of the Daleks. The serious television viewer who despises cheap spaceship models and stuff can thus have their prejudices eased by a recognisable setting.

The heavy reliance on Gothic horror as a source is also a Doctor Who staple, especially when funked up with surrealist body horror. And the magnificent cast full of British character actors is a great bonus. And the whole thing is, very quietly, terribly subversive.

The story, for I assume most of you will need it. The Doctor arrives in a crumbling old house called Gabriel Chase with his companion Ace. Ace is what the BBC thought an '80s teenager would be like. She uses words like 'wicked' a lot. And, it is made blatantly clear in the opening minutes, she has already visited the house in the twentieth century.

In short order, the time-travelling twosome encounter a schizophrenic explorer who believes he's in the Amazon by the name of Redvers Fenn-Cooper, a Neanderthal butler called Nimrod, a sadistic housekeeper, a psychotic teenage girl, a wretched rag-clothed creature known only as Control, two reptilian monsters in dinner jackets and the light-hating Josiah Samuel Smith, apparent owner of Gabriel Chase. These bizarre grotesques are joined by a bumbling vicar with 'first corpse' almost visibly stamped on his forehead.

These characters, who all have their intimidating moments, are united by only one thing, their intense fear of... Light. With unusual restraint for Doctor Who, the splendour of Light, an alien entity dressed as a nineteenth century concept of an Old Testament angel, is held back for the third of the three twenty-five minute episodes.

The story shows a new side to the Doctor. Although Sylvester McCoy's interpretation had seen the Time Lord becoming steadily darker and more manipulative of those around him, his schemes had until Ghost Light the aim of wiping out various evil monsters. This time, however, the Doctor's just desperate to have a chat with Light. Ace wakes up halfway through the second episode to find that the Doctor's made unholy alliances with half the house's occupants, and has no idea who or what he's about to unleash.

The story's theme is evolution. Taking the controversy over Darwin's work as a departure point, Josiah (Ian Hogg) is gradually evolving into a Victorian gentleman, which has the double effect of satirising the growing power of the middle classes as a result of the industrial revolution. Beginning as a wasted figure hiding behind smoked glasses and cobwebs, Josiah appears healthier in every scene, the result of some fantastic make-up work. Similar skill is employed to depict the gradual humanisation of the bestial Control, in a Pygmalion sub-plot. From the set to the dialogue, the beauty of Ghost Light is in its detail. What are we to make of the fact that the three non-regular female characters in the story have been dressed to suggest Queen Victoria at various stages in her life (ie, young, middle-aged and elderly)?

Sights to look out for include Josiah regressing the bumbling (creationist) vicar into an ape; a Scotland Yard inspector hidden in the specimen drawer beneath the tropical butterflies (and complete with label); the devilish 'Cream of Scotland Yard' primordial soup gag; the blisteringly straight performance by Michael Cochrane as the beautifully nutty Redvers Fenn-Cooper, and Sylvester McCoy's Doctor cheerfully announcing that he hasn't got a clue what's going on as the clock ticks closer to armageddon.

On its initial TV broadcast, viewers complained that they didn't understand what was going on in this story either. Many expository scenes had to be cut for timing reasons, so there's never any explanation for oddities like the blazing snuff box. However, the surreal atmosphere evoked by these apparently random events serves the story far better than a Scooby Doo style speech explaining everything. The only point at which things go a bit nutty is in the closing scenes where people's heads start exploding and Ace is confronted with ANOTHER terrible secret from her past.

Writer Marc Platt clearly had a whale of a time researching his story and its characters, with many of the servants being nicked from Gormenghast and The Turn of the Screw. The psychotic Gwendoline is a revelation, a demure English Rose debutante who suddenly flips and starts chloroforming and stabbing people, screaming that she's sending them to Java. Eventually the Doctor realises that she is being controlled by hypnosis:

DOCTOR: I could almost forgive her arranging all those trips to Java...
REDVERS: She was hypnotised, Doctor.
DOCTOR: ... If she didn't enjoy them so much.

Sticking so doggedly to the Java euphemism appears a little strange at first, until you realise that because no one ever actually comes out and says that Gwendoline has slaughtered at least four people, including her own father, and enjoyed it, the video can slip through the censorship net. If Oliver Stone had thought of using remote colonial postings as a euphemism for mass murder, Natural Born Killers would have had a much smoother ride through the press.

There are many more things I could write about this fine serial, and the sheer richness of the source is an indication of its quality. Different lines take on extra significance on each viewing. At the moment I'm particularly struck by: 'Scratch the Victorian veneer and something nasty comes crawling out,' as one of the production's targets is the pre-conception that Victorian England was in any way a nice place to live. Sometimes I sympathise with Control, at other times Light's futile quest to catalogue life on Earth is swimming in pathos, even when he decides to try and nuke the Home Counties to bring an end to evolution.

I can never help feeling that, however good Survival (the last story transmitted) was, this should have remained Doctor Who's final adventure, in all of its twisted, Gothic, camp, melodramatic, chloroform-dampened splendour.

Of course, since writing this review some time ago, Doctor Who has been reborn, arguably better than ever before. My girlfriend has been utterly hooked by the new series, but despite a deep hatred of actress Sophie Aldred ('Rhombus face'), she has enjoyed this serial more than most of the older adventures she's seen. 

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