It’s difficult to imagine how a Doctor Who story inspired by Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and J.G. Ballard’s High Rise could possibly work in the over-lit, under-financed confines of the BBC during the 1980s. It should come as no surprise, then, that it doesn’t.
‘Paradise Towers’ – despite some fascinating social themes and concepts that remain prevalent in 2011 – is ultimately a mess: four meandering episodes awash with rubbish robots, endless corridors and some acting turns even more painful on the psyche than Bonnie Langford’s piercing screams.
Sylvester McCoy stars in his second serial as the Doctor – less of the clowning, pratfalling pain in the TARDIS that he is in the other stories of his debut season, but a long way from the darker, more mysterious and vastly more interesting incarnation of the Time Lord that he became later on – with companion Mel (Bonnie Langford, of whom no more need be said) as they arrive in Paradise Towers; a dystopian alien tower block overrun with Rezzies (demonic old dears with a taste for human flesh), Kangs (gangs of teenage girls running riot and speaking their own peculiarly mangled language that isn’t so much ‘Icehot!’ as ‘tepidly lukewarm’) and Caretakers (uniformed bureaucrats from the dawn of the Health and Safety era led by Richard Briers playing, as he admits himself in the accompanying documentary, a cross between Martin Bryce from Ever Decreasing Circles and Adolf Hitler).
That actually sounds fairly interesting – and as a story, it is. Unfortunately, the realisation of it is everything you’d expect from a Doctor Who story caught in-between the pantomimic tragedy of Colin Baker’s swansong and the brief renaissance of the show. Barely watchable in 1987 and laughably dull now, it’s not so much a case of ‘Build high for happiness!’ as ‘Dig deep for drudgery’.
Extras: As is often the case with Doctor Who DVDs, the bonus materials are at least as interesting as the story they’re accompanying – and in the case of ‘Paradise Towers’, they more than make up for the lightweight main feature. In addition to the blink-and-you-miss-them deleted/extended scenes, a pointless interview with Jigsaw and Vision On producer Clive Doig about casting Sylvester McCoy and a highly entertaining commentary – in which writer Stephen Wyatt reveals that the TARDIS ‘smelt of wee’ and actress Judy Cornwell makes some timely and subtly barbed remarks about the BBC moving to Manchester – there are two fairly lengthy documentaries: ‘Horror On The High Rise’ and ‘Girls! Girls! Girls!’
The former is an entertaining look at the making of ‘Paradise Towers’ (in which writer Stephen Wyatt admits ‘I was making it up as I went along’ and script editor Andrew Cartmel reveals that making the Kangs girls rather than boys was ‘a triumph of my personal fetishism over Stephen’s personal fetishism’) but the latter is easily the highlight of the whole DVD: a retrospective look at some of the Doctor’s female assistants of the 1980s featuring Janet Fielding (Tegan), Sarah Sutton (Nyssa) and Sophie Aldred (Ace).
‘Girls! Girls! Girls!’ is rather pointlessly prefaced by Peter Purves, who gets a chance to talk like a slightly confused grandfather about ‘colourful clothes and trendy hairstyles’ and drop in a dubiously reverential reference to Margaret Thatcher running the country before the three former companions turn up. When they do, you can almost smell the open bottle of wine just out of shot as they reminisce companionably about their time on Doctor Who, with Janet taking over at every opportunity (‘I’m completely not knowing what the hell I’m doing’) and Sophie talking about the leftwing sensibilities she shared with Sylvester McCoy and sneering ‘Thatcher!’ in a way that Purves would almost certainly disapprove of.
There’s also some mutual moaning about how lucky erstwhile Who girl Lalla Ward was in the multitude of costumes she was allowed to wear and some quite poignant discussion about how joining Doctor Who all but ended the three women’s acting careers. Well worth fast-forwarding through four episodes of ‘Paradise Towers’ for.
Released on DVD on Monday 18th July 2011 by 2Entertain.
Watch the Series 6 trailer…