Who In Review: Survival

I always thought there was something quite ironic about my favourite 7th Doctor story. I view the Colin Baker era as the point where the show really lost its way making mistakes in the longevity of the effects of the 'difficult' regeneration, the personality of the 6th Doctor himself, and his relationship with his companions. There were hints at the warmth needed in one or two stories in Season 22 (mainly The Mark Of The Rani), but it only actually showed in the high point of Colin's run - The Mysterious Planet. The following instalment of The Trial Of A Time Lord failed to maintain this partly because of the 'interference' by the Valeyard, inserting false sequences showing the Doctor torturing Peri, amongst other things, and the Time Lord at his most bombastic. The next serial suffered from the introduction of a rather grating companion to accompany the rather grating Doctor and the finale was an utter mess, largely due to the unfortunate events taking place behind the scenes. McCoy's first series was also a bit of a mess, seeing the Doctor portrayed as a clown in ill-fitting clothes running around brightly lit sets filled with garishly dressed extras but with some truly great ideas hidden beneath thanks to the arrival of Script Editor Andrew Cartmel. His second series saw a marked improvement as scripts began to show a darker, more alien side to the character in line with both McCoy and Cartmel's ideas on how the Doctor should be and a more down to earth companion in the guise of misfit teenager Ace. By 1989, the quality of the stories was higher than it had been since the 70s, the tone darker, the scripts cleverer and with clear messages and ideas which saw some striking production values. Battlefield started the season with some gung-ho fun which occasionally missed the mark but succeeded in bringing back both the Brigadier and UNIT with quite some style, and saw Jean Marsh portraying a magnificent villain in Morgaine and possibly the most spectacular prosthetics in the entire classic series with the Destroyer. Ghost Light tackled ideas on evolution in a densely packed script and The Curse Of Fenric gave us a fantastic horror film, and benefited greatly from stunning sets and locations as well as dealing heavily with themes surrounding Ace's past. In short, the 1989 season was stunning and, had audiences not already been turning away over the previous few years, it should have been a massive success. So I've always found it quite ironic that the last story transmitted in the original run of Doctor Who, given how good that last season was and given that it boded so well for the future, was called

Survival

From the offset, Survival looks and feels very different to what went before (and not just because it's one of only three stories which were recorded entirely on OB video). Doctor Who had very rarely found itself in Suburbia up to this point, despite the number of stories set on contemporary Earth. In fact, I can only think of the last couple of minutes of The Hand Of Fear where the Doctor drops Sarah Jane off in a similar landscape. Here we have an everyday, British housing estate which could be in any city, town or even village (there was an almost identical one in the village where I grew up) which features a mass of familiar sights; there's the shabby Community Centre, a playground with swings, climbing frames, slides and a playing field, a pub, charity shops, rows of identical middle class houses with cars parked on the streets outside the identical front gardens, even a corner shop forced to open on a Sunday (topical at the time, when many small businesses were applying for licenses to trade on a Sunday before the passing of the Sunday Trading Act of 1994). The Doctor visits (popular 80s comedy duo) Hale & Pace's shop to buy cat food and it looks and feels real! Previous stories in the McCoy era had been striking for their realism, but all had been representations of the past. Silver Nemesis is the only other McCoy story set in the (then) present day, but with its coffee shops, warehouses, castles and rolling countrysides it maintains an air of detachment - even the cringeworthy "Will you be rats" Skinheads scene, which (as do many of that story's ideas) owes much to Derek Jarman's Punk film Jubilee, lacks credibility and realism even if you ignore the terrible dialogue. Like the country villages that peppered the seasons before it, or trips around Central London in the likes of The Invasion and Invasion Of The Dinosaurs, the streets of Perivale ground the story and make Survival more tangible, but the difference here is that it's an urban landscape and so very, very normal.

Add to that Ace's response to being brought back to the 'boredom capital of the universe' and her observations as she and the Doctor walk round her old stomping grounds and you have somewhere any one of us could have grown up, and I'd wager most people could say exactly the same. Walking through my own home town, and village, I completely agree that what makes them both so terrible is that nothing ever happens there (and nearly 30 years on, nothing has changed!). It's that mundanity of a quiet Sunday in your old home town that Rona Munro taps perfectly and her script is rife with characters and references to the tedious normality of life alongside which she juxtaposes the Cheetah People and the Master.

Embarrassing confession time: in my teens, I was basically Ace's mate Ange, but without the hayfever. I wore dark colours, stood around looking miserable most of the time and collected for the Hunt Saboteurs. My mates were pretty similar, and after doing our GCSE's and A Levels everyone pretty much went their own ways. You'd hear stories through the grapevine about what people were up to, and you'd always wonder what the old gang was doing but that was it. Ace goes back to Perivale and encounters exactly the same - nobody's around any more, but instead of her mates living in a council flat across town with a baby or studying politics at Uni, some of them are being hunted by, and turned into, anthropomorphic cats.

The Cheetah People themselves aren't the series greatest example of design, but they get the message across and allow Lisa Bowerman to give Karra a fair amount of movement and personality through the fur. Likewise, the animatronic Kitlings may look a little dodgy now (and were fairly obvious at the time) but are used sparingly enough and intercut with footage of real cats for them to work (and were, regardless of how they appear, remarkably sophisticated for the BBC at the time). One of my favourite scenes featuring the Kitlings is where the Doctor and Ace are on Horsenden Hill in Part One, Ace ridiculing the Doctor's observation that there have been horses there, and in the background, out of focus, they're being watched by a black cat. It's not signposted or given a close-up, but if you notice it, it has the same chilling effect as anything from any horror film.

And like the best horror films, Survival is littered with cultural references. There's the obvious stuff like the poster for the musical Cats in the Community Centre and the tag lines Hale and Pace quote from the fictional adverts for the cat food they sell, but there's also subtler stuff - Derek wears a David Bowie T-shirt (featuring an image from his Let's Dance album which included the single Cat People) and, hilariously, while in Midge's flat Ace picks up a copy of U2's War and expresses surprise that they're still around since they were 'pulling their pensions' when she left - lucky the Doctor didn't bring her back to 2009! You also have a believable collection of survivors - Midge, the fit bad boy from school who hasn't changed since you left and is probably doing nothing with his life, quiet and timid Derek whose only dialogue comes at the very end when he thanks the Doctor and Ace for getting him home, and British Asian girl Shreela, level headed and reliable, who's mum's been climbing the walls since she disappeared; all subtly rounded characters due to little bits of dialogue and visual aides. And of course, there's Sergeant Paterson, a local member of the TA who teaches self defence classes at the Community Centre and runs the local Neighbourhood Watch. He's your regular know-it-all-who-doesn't and clearly wouldn't have survived ten seconds against the Cheetah People had the Doctor not been around to help him. This is shown by the way he bumbles around being a do-gooder in the first episode, having a go at Ace for not ringing her mother after she disappeared, pestering the Doctor everywhere he goes, and falls victim to his own 'one finger can be a deadly weapon' rhetoric when he pushes the Doctor too far. Every community has one, the neighbour who likes to tell you all about subjects you have infinitely more knowledge about than they do, and its entirely unsurprising that when he finally gets back to Perivale, the Master and Midge have taken over his self defence class and get his students to kick him to death.

And so to the Master. Delgado's original portrayal was suave and sophisticated with an amicable relationship with his 'best enemy'. When John Nathan-Turner brought the character back and had him take possession of Nyssa's father what we mainly got was something of a pantomime villain. No fault of Anthony Ainley - as Tremas he gives a rather subtle and nuanced performance; even as the Portreeve he comes across as a kindly old man. But as the Master, he was generally fairly camp, regularly over the top and tended to creep about, chuckling manically, trying to trap the Doctor with his latest hair-brained scheme. Survival sees Ainley give his best performance in the role and it's all thanks to the quality of the script. For once, he actually has a decent motive - he's succumbed to the forces of the Planet and is desperate to escape whilst fighting off the inevitable transformation into a Cheetah Person. He has a flattering new suit and is very much the manipulator of old, sitting back and getting others to do his dirty work. His best scenes are where he's sat watching events through the eyes of the Kitlings and when he's controlling Midge. And rather than the camp face-offs he had with Davison and the Bakers, Ainley and McCoy have some great dialogue together culminating in a physical brawl; no cultured sword fights here - they're rolling around on the ground trying to strangle each other! Given something to work with, something believable, Anthony Ainley shines.

Conversely, Sophie Aldred was given some of the best material of any companion as Ace. Her character was more fleshed out and more deeply explored than any of her predecessors. In the two preceding stories we learnt that she'd burnt down Gabriel Chase after a racist attack on her friend resulting in her being put on probation, and that she had a particularly difficult relationship with her mother (which the events of ...Fenric partly resolved). Her strong feelings against racism were addressed in Remembrance Of The Daleks and also in Battlefield where, provoked by Morgaine's magic, she starts to call Shou Yuing a 'Yellow, slant-eyed.....' - something very out of character for Ace but all too common a slur heard in British society. Companions had fallen for guest characters before (Ace herself had had developing relationships with Mike Smith and Captain Sorin) but previously never with someone of the same gender. The lesbian undertones of Survival are tangible but never explicit, yet are entirely in keeping with Ace's character - like Mike and Sorin, Karra is a strong, driven character. While Mike had his Fascism and Sorin his faith in the Revolution, Karra has the Hunt and Ace is drawn in by its freedom. Munro has stated that she feels that the mask Bowerman was forced to wear as Karra prevented the emotions which were passing between the two characters from being clear, but I think that it's quite clear how deep their connection lies and prefer that it's left open as to whether that connection is sexual or otherwise.

Survival has a wonderful script and is brilliantly directed exhibiting some great performances from its cast. It also has a clear influence on what was to come - when the show returned in 2005 it centred around an ordinary girl from one of the London boroughs, featured sequences set in council flats and investigated the companion's background. There was a sense of the ordinary, of the mundane, of people living out their normal, boring lives against which we witnessed alien invasions and inexplicable events. It seems perfectly normal now to see a Cyberman smashing down the door of a family's semi-detatched and terrifying them on the stairs, or the companion and her family having a drunken sing-song in a living room in Leeds, but Survival was the first to bring Doctor Who into your actual home, and at the time that made the story quite remarkable.

The entire story is about survival of the fittest, about the fight to survive, and mirrors the show's struggle to stay on air as the 80s came to an end. As the 1990s went on and the 21st Century came around it seemed that the show had lost that fight, yet it still carried on in magazines and novels, a TV movie, then audio plays featuring past cast members. That the show did survive, in various formats, until its resurrection is testament to its success and popularity. These days I find the title of this last gasp of the 80s less ironic and more prophetic. The show has survived and, thanks to Rona Munro and the excellent cast and crew, it ended its initial run on a high. It says a great deal about Munro's pedigree that she's the only writer from the Classic series so far asked to return and produce a script for the current series (and even though The Eaters Of Light may not have been Capaldi's best story, it proved that her talent hasn't faded!). I love Survival for so many more reasons than those stated above, and I love most of McCoy's stories, but Survival is the pinnacle of his era for me, and of the series in the 1980s overall.