N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!
No Doctor Who fan can be averse to change: it’s in the show’s DNA.
But following up your brand-new opening titles and the most significant re-working of the theme tune yet heard with a near-enough 100-seconds long shot panning across the deck chairs and changing tents of Brighton beach is perhaps an odd way to signify a new era of Doctor Who has begun.
It’s certainly different — I’ll give it that.
Indeed, it’s worth dwelling on some of the changes that John Nathan-Turner’s occupation of the Doctor Who producer’s chair brought to the show in The Leisure Hive.
Hindsight is of course 20/20 and whilst they may at the time have thought the previous theme tune was dated, it seems to me that the original (and from The Faceless Ones onwards the admittedly slightly reworked) version that served the show from 1963 until 1980 is as timeless a piece of music as they come. Ironically, it’s every version since — from Peter Howell to Murray Gold’s multiple attempts at updating the theme — that has sounded more of its time than Delia Derbyshire’s eerie original.
Don’t get me wrong. I love this title sequence and theme tune. The combination of Peter Howell’s arrangement with Sid Sutton’s starfield titles are so engrained in my memory of watching the Fifth Doctor that I remember being surprised upon my rediscovery of the show in the 1990’s that they had been in place for Tom Baker’s last season.
Whilst there are question marks over the use of question marks, on the whole the Doctor’s new burgundy-coloured costume works well. (In the DVD extra Leisure Wear June Hudson remarks how she thought John Nathan-Turner was a frustrated costume designer. Given the way the Doctor and his companions would dress in the 80’s, I thought this was a particularly telling comment.)
I also like the introduction of the Radiophonic Workshop as providers of the incidental music. Use of multiple composers is something that has been generally missing from the Fourth Doctor era, and whilst I’ve no intention here to slight the late Dudley Simpson’s sterling work on the show, it’ll be good to have that variety back.
What of The Leisure Hive?
It’s perhaps a little over-eager to show off its all-new-ness at times: that opening shot, the extensive use of Quantel Paintbox digital effects, quite a lot of incidental music!
And I get a more general sense that too many cooks have been near it. This is arguably not surprising. Christopher H Bidmead admitted that he’d removed a lot of David Fisher’s original humour and that he’d perhaps been heavy-handed in his editing of the script. Again, this is perhaps understandable: this was the first script he’d ever edited for any show and he and John Nathan-Turner were keen to up the seriousness and scientific content in the stories.
There’s certainly a lot of talk about tachyons.
I don’t necessarily buy the argument that Douglas Adams’ playful approach was any less scientifically serious, nor do I accept that the humour was all a bit University Rag Week. For all the silliness of season seventeen, there was a great deal of sophistication — never more perfectly balanced than in City of Death, for example.
Doctor Who has the breadth of scope and ambition to be a Wells or Verne fantasy one week and your hardcore Clarke or Asimov the next and if you don’t like it, well, there’s always next week. Nevertheless, having not watched The Leisure Hive directly after season seventeen before (well not counting back in 1980), I have to admit that the sharp contrast in tone is a bit jarring.
That of course was the intent, but for me it’s significant that the best line in the whole story is the one line that’s genuinely funny: ‘Arrest the scarf then’ says the Doctor when it’s pointed out the scarf could be the murder weapon. If only there’d been a bit more humour to balance out the tachyonic dialogue, The Leisure Hive might have been a more rounded experience.
Whilst Doctor Who has had plenty of new brooms over the years, judging from The Leisure Hive, it seems John Nathan-Turner’s was particularly sweeping.
There’s a good serial in here somewhere. The Argolins are well-designed, and the Foamasi Swiss Toni Brock makes for an oily mobster. The Doctor’s aging is impressive (both in realisation and in Tom Baker’s performance), the Quantel Paintbox makes for some unusual effects and the whole idea of a society based on providing for people’s increased leisure time is an engaging one.
Whilst at times The Leisure Hive is genuinely intriguing, despite its obvious attempts to impress, at others it seems to have had the life sucked right out of it.
All that said, it would be unfair to dismiss the JN-T era on the basis that his first story didn’t quite get it right. There is a lot here that is promising and, as I implied at the top of the post, you can’t be a Doctor Who fan and dislike change.
