"His face was full of intent
and we shook with excitement
and the victim stood up
looked strangely at the screen
as if her pain was our fault
but that's... entertainment"
Monitor- Siouxsie & the Banshees (Juju; 1981)

Poor Colin Baker never had a chance, he was a life long fan of Doctor Who, who got his dream fulfilled when in 1984 he was cast in the lead role, as the Doctor. Alas he was cast at a time when the show had hit its nadir. He made his debut in what is possibly Doctor Who's (and maybe even British Television's) worst ever hour and a half- The Twin Dilemma where in the worst scene in the show's history, the Doctor goes berzerk and strangles his female companion, and cheap shock tactics aside, it was a painfully garish and dull story through and through. A miserable, hateful viewing experience. His second story was Attack of the Cybermen, a fannish continuity nightmare of a vacuous, stale plot with the Doctor still displaying an uncomfortable tendency for violence.

But with his third story, it finally seemed like Colin would get a fairly decent story to apply his remarkable energies into. Vengeance on Varos is a rather intelligent, almost prophetic tale of exploitation, the power of the media and the burden of leadership. The action takes place on the former prison world of Varos. As the centuries have passed, the descendants of the prisoners and the guards still exist under the same hierarchy of power. But they both have to kow tow to vicious, exploitative capitalists who force the population to make use of their only exportable goods, the raw material Zeiton 7, and the video entertainment of their live broadcast tortures and executions of any deviants. Varos is a world where no-one is above execution, as its resident governor is about to find out as he faces a people's vote from a dissatisfied and bloodthirsty populace.

As I indicated above, Colin Baker's Doctor had more of a predilection for violence than most other Doctors. Something that caused controversy at the time and which many fans were deeply unhappy with. But the brutal nature of this story actually calls for a Doctor who's prepared to get his hands dirty, so for once Colin's Doctor doesn't dish out anything that's undeserved. These creeps really deserve everything they get.

And yet still the violence in this story manages to be problematic. There are three scenes where the Doctor causes the death of several bad guys. One where he rigs a lazer gun to fire a set disintegrator beam down a corridor to discourage any pursuers, and a pursuing guard runs right into it. The second where he struggles with two guards next to an acid bath (for disposing of corpses) and both fall in seemingly by accident. The third sees the Doctor make a more direct and deliberate kill with some poison vines.

Personally I had no problem with the last one because it was clearly self defense and it actually was a straight for the jugular moment, and I have no doubt that in that instance the Doctor had done Varos a huge favour. But the first kill made by the Doctor, where he rigs up the laser to evade pursuit, is mainly problematic because the Doctor has only just arrived and hasn't made an effort to understand what's going on. Indeed the problem with the other instances is partly a feeling of chickening out. Like it doesn't want the Doctor to get his hands too dirty, which is rather hypocritical. It can't have its cake and eat it too with sequences like that. It's the worst kind of contrived killings where calamity and stupidity causes the bad guys to buffoonishly, clumsily die 'accidentally' to exonerate the Doctor.

This, along with the fact that the bad guys are such lousy shots, ludicriously undermines the menace the Doctor's up against to such a degree that if you still view it as the Doctor being instrumental in the killing, there's no way you can say the situation called for those drastic measures as a last resort. Plus the Doctor's tasteless quip to the acidized guards "You'll forgive me if I don't join you" just feels horribly warped and misplaced. Not only that but as with many sickening stories of this mid-80's period, it feels like the story is going out of its way to kill off a character in as contrived and nasty a way as possible.

The main issues with the Doctor resorting to violence is that it's a betrayal of the children's morality play ideal of the show; it makes a hypocrite of him for all the times he's chastised humans for their violence; it also leaves the nagging question of if the Doctor is actually capable of taking the life of a trivial villain like Shockeye in The Two Doctors, then why did he never dish out similar treatment to mass murderers and greater universal threats like the Master and Davros, who would escape to cause more carnage (it's as if the Doctor is more likely to spare the rod if you're a repeat offender); but ultimately a hero who uses violence and destruction to eliminate the bad guy leads to lazy and witless writing, i.e. The Doctor kills the bad guys... The End.

The thing is that Vengeance on Varos isn't a witless story. It's full of thematic meat and really explores its terrain of issues thoroughly. But in terms of actual plot it is very weak and lax. It's a runaround for the most part and there are really huge sections you could cut out without affecting the plot at all. The plot is very miniscule compared to the fatty mass of padding. So in that light the violence does seem especially gratuitous and on the Doctor's part, unprecedented.

So Vengeance on Varos is not a unanimously liked story. But curiously it is the kind of story that is liked by the kind of fans who otherwise gave up on the show after Tom Baker left in 1981. And I rather count myself amongst those fans these days. There are various reasons why. Firstly because this is a self contained 'new' story at a time when otherwise Doctor Who was gorging itself on its own redundant continuity and detrius. It felt current in 1985, and oddly enough it still feels current now, and sees the show hark back to a time when it was concerned with actual global issues, and not with continuity or fan-pleasing. It's also a story nicely reminiscent of old school Doctor Who stories like The Mind of Evil and The Sunmakers. Stories that were also concerned with economic exploitation from capitalist monstrosities and brutal justice systems with a predilection for mind control (even if it's attempts to homage their black humour is second rate and leaves a bitter aftertaste).

It should be said that the first draft of this story was submitted in 1983, so it was something of a leftover of the early 80's renaissance of new ideas and intelligent concepts, and was finally brought to screen in 1985 at a time when producer John Nathan Turner and script-editor Eric Saward had otherwise lobotomised the show. So overall it feels like how Doctor Who used to be back in the 60's and 70's when it was a form of televised theatre for the masses. Crucially this feels like a piece of fringe theatre, rather like The Happiness Patrol, it's a Judge Dredd-style futurist dark satire on Thatcher's Britain. Incidentally the 80's Judge Dredd comics are fantastic source material for satires.

I've said that this is all a bit lax in terms of plot, but the actual story of Vengeance on Varos is still brilliantly told and conveyed. And if much of the action is padding, it fills the running time extraordinarily well and keeps the whole momentum going without a pause. This is something fairly remarkable for its otherwise lethargic and stale era. There is one scene of padding that grates where the Tardis runs out of fuel (it needs a refill of Zeiton 7). The Doctor believes he'll be stranded like this forever and becomes defeatist and sits in the corner sulking and being unpleasant, brutally dismissive of Peri's pleas for help. The Sixth Doctor rarely came off as anything but a jerk, but that's down to poor writing and, dare I say it, Colin Baker's pedestrian performance which plays the sulking like a huffing, attention-seeking child. This runs for two scenes, and yet somehow this doesn't upset the momentum. This is a story which only feels padded with hindsight, but whilst watching it, it manages to avoid ever being boring.

Ron Jones directs this story with real brisk pacing, energy, immediacy and intrigue. He also makes the dome complex feel believable and vast. Whilst this is for the most part the Doctor leading the cast of Robin of Sherwood in a corridor runaround, Ron's directing conveys the hellish relentlessness of the chase, and makes the maze of corridors bleak and treacherous with death traps at every corner and a seemingly never ending distance. Crucially he conveys this world of dark, dank corridors, harsh blood red lighting and a complete void of any sunshine. A cultural, spiritual wasteland, where entertainment is poison.

And I will say that the violence actually really helps this story. It's brutal and raw and cuts deep, with acid and lazer burns that make it so visceral and metabolically affecting, and intimate and angering. It stings the viewer with a rage so sharp it could cut your face off. A story that raw only comes around once in a blue moon for Doctor Who, although The Mind of Evil is one other strong example I can think of. I've often described this era as one where it was almost as if Doctor Who was dissecting itself and in the process bringing a lot of nauseating ugliness to the screen. And curiously this is one story where it seems to make that punkish, angry quality work for the show rather than against it. It actually manages to be a work of passion, and to rail its uncompromising rage against something deserving and really bring a lot of left field thought and politics and throw them at the viewer.

The violence works not just because it's there for its own sake, but to represent the long spiritual death and decay of a society. And it works, it angers and conveys real helplessness and a sense of exploitation. What we're seeing is real world. Varos could represent any country out there that's known a tyranny that spanned generations of bitter experience and degradation. It almost gives a voice to the silenced. Even though this patchy piece of fringe theatre only features a cast of a dozen, it still feels like Varos is a populated planet with a real living, breathing history and rage to it.

This story was intended as a dark satire on 80's video nasties and today works as an allegory for the nasty direction of Reality TV which is seeming more and more likely to become a charnell house each time a more depraved and sadistic pitch is put forward and each time the predatory practices of Big Brother housemate selection are exposed (i.e. specially selecting the people who are most likely to crack, for the sake of sensationalist dramatic television). I have often harped about the gratuitous mean spirited violence, obfuscational defeatism and modernist lynch mob attitudes of 80's cinema, and how that trend was contaminating Doctor Who during this period, but really if you look at the old gameshows of the 80's, it suddenly does seem like a more innocent time compared to today.

The 80's was a decade where gameshows were still about ordinary people winning through general knowledge, like in Blockbusters, or through physical fitness, resourcefulness and determination in 1989's inexplicably short lived cross country treasure hunt action game Interceptor, which was the best gameshow ever. Nowadays they're about sensationalism and exploitation, where contestants prove themselves by bearing life stuck in the petty human pirranah tank that is the Big Brother house, or enduring the verbal abuse and humiliation of middle management scum like Simon Cowell or Gordon Ramsay.

In the New Series of Doctor Who, its first season actually satirised Reality TV inspired by a similar rawness as Vengeance on Varos (and similar iconography, actually borrowing the same design for the CCTV cameras), and managed to make the Ninth Doctor's point "Do you think anyone out there votes for sweet?" into one of the most important lines of the new series. Sometimes Reality TV seems like a wake-up call for the rotten state of our vacuous insular modern culture that at times seems to be reverting to primitive tribalism. This time last year Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty had come to England to star in the Big Brother house with other celebrities and had to endure a lot of bullying from what I can only describe as "a pack of b*tches". And instantly it became clear that in our insular modern society, anything the slightest bit alien in culture, manner or etiquette is regarded with an inexplicable, instinctive fear and revulsion, particularly amongst young women, and it didn't matter how dignified or friendly Shilpa was, it just didn't make a dent in those airheads. I also felt enormously sorry for Jo O'Meara who was ludicrously made into a pariah by the show.

This story goes further and actually brings the viewer's perspective into it in a genius move of punk post-modernism. We're introduced to Etta and Arak (played by Steven Yardley who also starred in the classic 1981 TV adaptation of Day of the Triffids), a typical married couple who work hard labour and spend their home time watching TV and bitterly moaning at the screen. And we see how the media affects their moods and tastes. How the sight of a dehydrating prisoner makes the viewer consciously thirsty. But we also see the horrifying desensitisation to the sadistic images they're regularly fed.

Arak: "Oh it's pathetic. When did they last show something worth watching eh? When did we last see a decent execution?"

Etta: "Last week"

Arak: "When?"

Etta: "The blind man."

Arak: "That was a repeat"

It's like how Mike Leigh's Naked proscribed an all consuming, all decaying entropic boredom that causes people to turn towards contempt and sadism for cheap thrills in a world where TV has become a sour opium for the bitter masses, and Arak and Etta are very much Mike Leigh-esque characters. The blend of naturalism and banality between them make it far more realistic and believable in its prophetic message, and the scenes are relentless in the apathy they depict. And these Greek Chorus scenes continue, until crucially we reach crunch time in the public vote scene.

We're also introduced to Sil the figurehead of the exploitative Galatron Mining Corporation, and performed brilliantly by Nabil Shaban, who often played various dwarf characters in the surreal non-sequitor moments of The Young Ones. Sil is a repulsive little lizard dwarf with a hardon for death and suffering with a fond interest in Varos's stock of snuff movies. He is a native to the planet Thoros Beta (a planet that curiously resembles the music video to Erasure's "Chorus") and we'll see more of him in Trial of a Time Lord. He is marked as a villain by his exquisitely repellent gurgling, tongue-rolling laugh which tells you all you need to know about his sadism. He is also vicious and cranky. His presence is important to this story. Whilst Etta and Arak present a realist, banal image of Varos' everyman populace, Sil, the slimy gurgling little pervert that he is, represents a perfect metaphoric, demonised image of what they've all become. Two years before Wall Street, Sil was the image of vicious yuppie scum capitalism, dripping with contempt for all that he exploits.

Sil: "Now my dear friend, what is good price for your Zeiton 7 Ore?"

Governor: "Seven credits a unit"

Sil: "Seven credits a unit? When the engineers of every known solar system cry out for his product to drive their space time craft. A planet of fools who don't realise their lot, and don't deserve to."

And really that's a line that tells us everything we need to know about Varos. A weak, vulnerable little world exploited to death and filled with a bitter population for whom private contempt is their only luxury. Caught in the middle of this is the Governor of Varos, played with wonderful dignity and pathos by Martin Jarvis. He's exploited by his superiors and scorned by the population. There's a particularly chilling scene where the Governor is discussing with his aides how the tension of a slow execution would grab audience ratings for the longest runtime.

But when he finally meets Peri we see that he is a sympathetic character, and merely an unwilling cog in a greater machine. Peri has been separated from the Doctor, whereupon she is captured and brutally beaten. As she is brought into the studio room, she watches the chilling cliffhanger where the Doctor has fallen into one of the death traps. An unforgettable moment played brilliantly by Colin, and reminiscent of The Mind of Evil where we saw the Doctor at his most vulnerable, as here he succumbs to hallucinations of heat and thirst and finally falls to the ground, apparently dead. Peri's reaction of helpless tear soaked rage, trying in vain to hit the Governor before he restrains her is timeless. Nicola Bryant who played Peri often got the short end of the stick as being whiney eye candy with a fake Yankee accent, and yet here and throughout this story she gives a fantastic performance, and she makes this grim story hurt.

(Having said that, if your main reasons for being fond of Peri are to do with teenage nostalgia of how her sexy presence on TV got you through puberty, then this is the best story to go for. But it's all equal oppurtunity exploitation, so any women or men who prefer the sight of a bare chested nubile Jason Connery and leather bondage well oiled muscular bodyguards can also find tittilating delight here.)

Anyway the bonding between the Governor and Peri is nicely done as she represents a light of innocence in Varos' dark, hopeless world, and where the Governor has gotten used to death as his shadow, and perhaps sees in Peri the innocence he once had before his hands got stained. There's moments where the sympathy evoking doesn't persuade me, particularly when he tells his aide to give Peri a mercy killing should the worst come to the worst. Hey, doesn't the lady get a say in the matter? But still the gradual redemption is there.

A lot of radical, political creative arts are preoccupied with slagging off the people in power, simply to appear cool and 'right on', particularly in the 80's when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was a figure of unparralelled hatred in Britain. But this does exactly the opposite and really looks at the burden of leadership when having to face an angry populace who blame you for everything. This is about the Governor's relationship with his people, represented in microcosm by Arak and Etta. And Arak simply enjoys complaining about him, like a force of habit. Every eloquent televised speech the Governor makes, is ignorantly dismissed and sneered at by Arak. But Arak can't substantiate his politics, he just wants someone to crucify.

And what we see is that this violent media they are subjected to doesn't merely enfoster contempt and sadism in those who watch it, or a lack of empathy due to its dehumanising images, or spiritual decay and bad vibes, it actually makes people dumber. They're not being given an intelligent educational media, just a corrosive diet of mindless violence. And actually this breeds a scoiety that is incompetent at democracy. They have the right of public vote on politics and justice and life and death, all of which are matters they know and care nothing about. They don't know jack squat about politics, and they don't care about the sanctity of life, the media has made life cheap.

These are politically disinterested people blaming those in power for everything. Arak can't substantiate what the Governor should do better, and he doesn't care to justify his circular criticism that 'he's the worst Governor since the last one!' The Governor is simply someone who has inherited a bad situation, a trapped figurehead puppet for the system that the public can conveniently blame and scorn. Just like the well-meaning third world leaders who tried to make reparations for their predecessor, but found themselves lumbered with the same debts and exploitation left by the last ruler who squandered the country's money and world bank loans on their own vanity. Likewise Varos is a world that long had its back broken to exploitative corporations and the Governor has found the walls of the well are still being greased so there's no way to crawl out again.

Martin Jarvis who plays the Governor has gone on to play a similar tormented fascist leader in the politically sublime audio Doctor Who audio story Jubilee. Indeed the audio stories Jubilee and Neverland both have many things to say about the horrors of a lynch mob society. Pointing out well that even if a vengeful humanity really did vanquish irredeemable evils like the Daleks, it wouldn't be worth it because the killing wouldn't stop there since that bloodlust would only grow more unquenchable.

Likewise Vengeance on Varos imparts plenty of morality about a bloodthirsty society raised on lynch mob television. And not in the sickening way that say, Warriors of the Deep bullies its message into the viewer. The story argues that sometimes violence is the only answer, and it's often essential to survival. But it argues that executing leaders of a corrupt regime is not the answer, and won't in any way make things better. It's a bit like Blakes' 7, whenever Blake, Avon and his motley band of rebels were in a stand-off with the fascist galactic tyrant Servalan. Our heroes can never kill Servalan, not out of a sanctimonious belief that they'd be no better if they did (after all these were very morally ambiguous heroes), but because they know that it's better the devil they know, and that if they killed Servalan, she'd simply be replaced by another tyrant who was possibly much worse.

And actually Varos seems to say that those who cry out the loudest for lynchings perhaps shouldn't be given the right of vote, or even a voice, because the majority of them are the most ignorant, mean-spirited absolute lumpen proletariat pondscum of society. This is best articulated in the moment where the Governor is in his death chair, struggling to give his inciting speech, trying to get the words out while he is being tortured, really voicing everything of Varos' long term history of humiliation, where every man gives every bit of their effort and dignity for nothing. This is nicely juxtaposed with the scene of Arak and Etta at home, his speech falling on deaf ears, showing us the petty side of democracy and the people's vote, as Arak obtusely votes against him twice simply to be vindictive. I honestly think this was important television at a time when a large section of the British public literally wanted Margaret Thatcher lined up against the wall and shot. Because it showed that leaders can be pawns and victims and nothing is ever that simple.

Ironically the public bloodthirsty mood against Margaret Thatcher was similar to Doctor Who fandom's mood over the next few years against the producer John Nathan Turner who they also wanted hung from the highest tree. And I'd say that this has brought something ugly out in fandom ever since and has given fandom a predilection for pettiness and mean spirited bullying ever since. Indeed it's the main reason that I largely wish that Doctor Who as a show had ended in 1980 with a completed version of Shada, so that it couldn't have gotten to this point.

The reasons fandom was so hostile and out for blood against John Nathan Turner were partly down to some of the the atrocious nadir stories he was producing. On that front I'd say he brought that scorn completely on himself and he remained unrepentant for those stories and his ugly production decisions. But I also think that he was forced to stay in the job for too long. He had tried to resign in 1983, and the BBC wouldn't let him, and I think it was only after that when things started to go wrong and he started to lose it. I think he also made the mistake of moulding himself into a celebrity producer and actually engaging with fandom and delivering promises of their demands for more old monsters. He was spoiling fandom and it was inevitable that they were going to bite his hand at some point.

But mainly John Nathan Turner was being blamed for the cancellation crisis which happened immediately after this particular season. Apparently this particular story was being singled out as the reason for the show's cancellation and hiatus. The new BBC controller Michael Grade had put the show on hold amidst concerns about the increasing violent content of the series, including this story, and instructed that the show needed a rethink and to be toned down.

The truth is that Michael Grade was a nasty piece of corprate scum who had long voiced a dislike of the series and simply wanted any oppurtunist excuse to kill it off, and his move was the beginning of the end for Doctor Who. But somehow John Nathan Turner got all the blame for Grade's vindictiveness and was regarded as the producer 'who killed Doctor Who'. Really Grade only did it for his street cred, as something to make him seem cool when he was otherwise simply a stuffed shirt.

But whilst I'd like to say that Michael Grade didn't have a leg to stand on, in the argument about the show's violence, the fact is that this is the period of Doctor Who that produced some truly sadistic, hateful, twisted stories like Warriors of the Deep, Twin Dilemma and The Two Doctors, which as far as I'm concerned honestly ruined Doctor Who and turned the show into a thing of base evil with nothing but twisted scorn on humanity. Which is the other reason why I mainly wish Doctor Who had ended in 1980. Most of the blame for that must go to script editor Eric Saward, who bizzarely saw nothing wrong with having the Doctor strangling his own companion. And the fact is that under Grade's sanitising guidelines and once Eric Saward was finally removed from the show, the series gradually improved and actually became more thoughtful and intelligent.

It's a shame though that Vengeance on Varos has been rather lumped with the rest of its nasty era, or that it's message has been rendered somewhat hypocritical considering the stories either side of it. Because if Grade was picking on this story, he really was out to lunch because he'd missed the point of this story (mind you he was the kingpin of lobotomised TV). This is a story that needs its violence to get its point across, and it is actually a story about the terrible effects of being saturated with a violent, degrading and dehumanising media. It was about spiritual decay and the responsibility of broadcasters, and about how the dehumanised TV viewing audience can actually destroy the individuals in front of the camera mercilessly, and indeed it's about where violence in society comes from. And in this day and age it's more potent and relevant than ever.

I must say I've always been bothered by the ending of this story (which is why I'm deducting a star or two from my overall rating). Basically the Governor and the Doctor's rousing speeches as they face execution manages to change the mood of the viewers on a galactic scale and influence a cancelled invasion and a miraculous positive change in the way Varos is both run and regarded by the stock market. Now yes this is a story all about conveying the abstract, and yes the speeches given by the Doctor and the Governor are the kind of speeches you can imagine being destined to be quoted for historical posterity, but this is a rather too far fetched.

And yet I can't help but like the whimsy of it all. Because essentially this is Doctor Who doing what it often does, in taking and pastiching a particular fictional genre, and placing the Doctor into it to subvert it all. But in this case placing the Doctor into a torture porn film, much like Hostel, which also shares the themes of vicious capitalism and yuppie scum at their most monstrous. And by placing the Doctor into this genre, it shows him to bring the kind of sunshine and hope and heroism that is usually void in that undignified genre. So the whimsy is all the more powerful for it in seeing the Doctor completely overturn what is essentially a hell on Earth, and do it with a beaming smile and undented resolve. Indeed for its era, it marks a refreshing change from the usual depressing, defeatist for the sake of it endings. More importantly I think it really speaks for a naive but hopeful time of Live Aid 85 when it looked like TV could really change the world, as Lawrence Miles said....

"Weird and optimistic as it seems now, there was a time pre-1979 when many of the people involved in television genuinely thought the medium could make connections between cultures and break open mind-sets."

Sadly those days of enlightening TV are gone, but this is a hard hitting relic of that lost age, and one with enormous staying power. Well worth picking up (even if you already have it on video, the DVD version looks even more fantastic)

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older