Retro TV Review: Horror of Fang Rock

1977, and Doctor Who is at the peak of its powers. The Talons of Weng-Chiang, a last minute replacement story, had ended Season Fourteen on a high, with a gothic horror script by one of the series finest and most prolific writers, a director who knew the show inside out, and the whole thing was reassuringly expensive and clearly the work of a happy and harmonious team.

Horror of Fang Rock, another replacement, opened the next series later in the year, with a gothic horror script by another of the series finest and most prolific writers, another director who knew Who of old, but this time it looks as cheap as chips and there’s clearly something going on behind the scenes.

Fang Rock had a fraught birth. It was hastily written by Terrance Dicks to replace his own The Witch Lords, a vampire tale that the BBC vetoed on the grounds that it might detract from a prestigious forthcoming BBC production of Dracula, starring Louis Jordan. The Witch Lords would eventually see the light of day in 1980 as State of Decay, but its replacement also suffered from various other problems.

New producer Graham Williams was already not seeing eye to eye with Tom Baker, two stories into production. He was also about to lose veteran Script Editor Robert Holmes, was facing a slashed budget, and was also under a lot of pressure from his superiors to dial back some of the more extreme violence and horror seen in the previous seasons.

Meanwhile, Baker, now in his fourth season as the Doctor, was already unhappy with companion Leela, as played by Louise Jameson, and now had a new producer that he didn’t get on with imposing a robot dog on him as a regular character.

Jameson, in turn, had a difficult relationship with Baker, felt her character lacked development, and wasn’t enjoying wearing either a leather leotard or uncomfortable brown contact lenses.

To cap off this happy tale, a sudden lack of studio space at Television Centre meant going to Birmingham, to use Pebble Mill studios instead. For those unfamiliar, Pebble Mill at One was a popular daytime current affairs and chat show of the 1970s and 80s, named for the small Midlands studio it was made at. Considering that TV Centre could barely handle Doctor Who’s frequent demands for the impossible at the best of times, and that Pebble Mill had more limited facilities, this wasn’t looking good, despite the enthusiasm of the Pebble Mill staff.

And just to add a bit of extra tension, the star and Director were at loggerheads. Director Paddy Russell had worked with Baker before on Pyramids of Mars. They didn’t exactly hit it off then, but they were really not getting on here, to put it mildly.

Much has been made of Tom Baker’s performance reflecting the by all accounts foul mood he was in for the month of Fang Rock‘s production. He’s sombre here, barely cracking a smile until the Doctor sits on the stairs to have a quick chat with the Rutan. But it’s not just a brooding quality at work here. How much we’re seeing of the Doctor and how much we’re seeing of Tom here is moot, but the abiding impression is that the Doctor just doesn’t really give a shit.

There’s no anger. This is one of the Doctor’s off days. He seems a bit off his game. He takes four episodes to deduce the Rutan’s species. He gets it wrong and locks a psychotic alien in rather than out. He mispronounces ‘Chameleon’. Even when rebuking Leela for her bloodlust, a moment that should ring true, the Doctor sounds more resigned than anything. It’s as if he has his own fog going on.

Paddy Russell does her best with all of this. The result isn’t the brooding brilliance of Pyramids of Mars. The lighting’s atmospheric but sometimes the overall greyness is a bit much, the monster looks a bit rubbish, the model work ranges from pretty ok to pretty poor, and the scenes with all that grey foggy CSO murk in the lamp room suffer a bit too. Visually, it’s fairly murky and not that pretty. However, look through the murk and the bad moods, there’s a lot to love in this strange little story.

Fang Rock is a typically tight Terrance Dicks four part adventure at first glance, but look deeper, this lacks any cosiness, or a happy ending. Everybody dies in this, except the regulars, who are left with a brief, awkward, tacked on last scene. The enemy lacks any real obvious modus operandi except for electrocuting everybody until the last episode, it just wants off Earth and likes killing.

It’s a surprisingly small, bleak story, a studio-bound bottle episode with a small cast. It’s a base-under-siege set in the early 20th century, where a lighthouse comes under siege from a green amphibious electric shape-shifting amorphous blob, The lighthouse, out of commission, causes a ship to hit the rocks. Three survivors reach the lighthouse, where the green blob monster assumes the form of one of the crew, and goes round picking them off. In the meantime, two edwardian businessmen and a secretary argue about shady business deals and double cross each other, whilst the Doctor and Leela run around trying to save everyone, and not doing a very good job of it.

The two gentlemen, Palmerdale and Skinsale are both scoundrels in their own way. Palmerdale is an angry bully. Skinsale is urbane and apparently more reasonable, but sabotages the telegraph, leaving them no communication with the outside world, so that Palmerdale can’t besmirch “his honour”. The secretary, Adelaide, played by Annette Woollett, is perhaps the worst depiction of a gender stereotype in the whole classic series. She screams, shouts, faints, goes into hysterics. She insults everyone except Palmerdale, who she holds a curious loyalty to despite the fact that he’s pretty horrible to her.

It’s almost as if she’s designed to be dreadful, and the actress really runs with it. She seems to mostly be there for Leela to roll her eyes at, and slap, a la Airplane when going into hysterics, she’s there to make Leela look good. In a recent interview for DWM, Terrance Dicks says that he’s not sexist and respects feminism, and recognises the evolution of companions from screamers to increasingly kick-ass independent women as necessary. He says he just likes to get ‘a rise’ out of people for taking what he sees as a gentle dig at feminism. Wherever you stand on that, Fang Rock is still extremely unlikely to pass the Bechdel test. For a show often accused of sexism, Adelaide is surely Exhibit A.

Leela herself is a bit of a mixed bag here. Louise Jameson does an excellent job as usual, and cajoles and nudges the Doctor through the plot, gets in on the physical action, and is as charming as ever.

However, it’s as if Dicks isn’t really quite sure what to make of the new girl, having not written for her before, so he tries to cover all bases. Leela clearly thinks the Doctor’s great, and listens to him, and is fiercely loyal. Yet, she’s much more bloodthirsty than in Talons or The Robots of Death here. She has no problem in stepping over the bodies in the crew room to retrieve her knife, in fact she looks gleeful, which is tonally a little off. She’s also given trousers and a jumper in this one, an experiment not to be repeated. This makes it even more incongruous, as Dicks leans more on the tribal aspect of the character and has her talk almost like the yokel folk of Metebelis 3 whilst looking like she’s going fishing. That said, she’s still Leela, and therefore, wonderful.

The other characters are the small lighthouse crew, Colin Douglas stands out as grumpy old Reuben, before and after his identity is assumed by the Rutan. When Douglas plays Rutan-Reuben the difference is striking. He is still, and mostly silent. The eerie, playful-looking smile Douglas puts on when he’s about to murder someone is very effective, and quite disquieting. From walk to demeanour, he’s an entirely different man, which makes it a wonder that it takes so long for the Doctor to notice.

Elsewhere, young Vince, played by John Abbott, is decent but clearly scared, Sean Caffrey as Palmerdale is horrible, and Alan Rowe as Skinsale puts in a fine nuanced performance as a very polite man who might just be even worse than Palmerdale.

The Rutan itself isn’t one of the best-realised monsters the show ever had by any means. It scores high on weird points though, resembling a badly poached egg, but green. It’s mostly glimpsed in long shot until episode four, when it has a chat with the Doctor on the stairs. Tom Baker seems to enjoy this, it’s slightly perverse that the first real smile he’s cracked is when having a relaxed debrief with a psychotic blob monster. Once everyone else is dead, the resolution harks back to UNIT days, basically the Rutan gets blown up, and then the Doctor blows up the Rutan mothership.

Seconds later, outside the lighthouse, and after Leela’s brief blindness and change of eye colour, it’s all larks and smiles, and the Doctor starts reciting poetry before materialising. The Ballad of Flannan Isle, recited here in Baker’s finest doomy baritone is the partial inspiration for Fang Rock. Its inclusion is therefore no great mystery, but the impression I walked away with is that the Doctor is sending what’s just happened up more than a little, and doesn’t really care. It’s more acceptable for Leela to have different attitudes to death. She’s come from a warrior background, and in her fourth story is still learning. The Doctor should know better though. The lack of any sort of remorse for what’s happened is a little jarring.

Horror of Fang Rock is a great story, but looking closer, some of the attitudes lurking beneath the murk, from aspects of the script to the way the Doctor acts are a little suspect.

Horror of Fang Rock was originally broadcast between September 3 and September 24 1977 as the first serial of Doctor Who’s 15th season. The serial was released on VHS in July 1998 and on DVD in January 2005, available via the Amazon link below. The serial was novelised by Terrance Dicks and released in March 1978.