3.25: The Paradise of Death

In which I realise now that the title means not, as I thought for years, that death is paradise, but that a paradise will turn out to be deadly. Which is much less metal.

Broadcast: August-September 1993

Listened: March 2021

“A corpse could be good publicity...”

Well this is fun, obviously. It instinctively embraces the fact that radio enables you to do stuff you couldn’t on TV – multiple planets and settings, giant flying bat things, and so on. The cast are very obviously having a great time (hilariously the enormous dumb gladiator is played by Trevor Martin, who played the lead in the stage play Doctor Who and the Daleks in the Seven Keys to Doomsday; never noticed that before).

It clearly has the same concerns as the Pertwee/Letts era on TV – imperialism as exploitation, an environmental agenda, etc. There are hints of Rome in the way Parakon has to keep expanding to maintain the lifestyle and power it already has.

It’s *incredibly* packed, too. Ten minutes into the last episode I was shocked to realise we still had the big twist, the coup and the gladiatorial sequence to go. Love that Pertwee starts that last bit in drag.

Questions... why this era? Why Sarah not Jo? Why does it use neither the appropriate nor most recent theme tune? Why are we meant to be shocked by a cliffhanger that expects us to believe the Doctor died early in season 11? (Also why didn’t the Doctor pull this trick in Logopolis?)

And why do they try to stick it into a gap that doesn’t exist? Why not just put it later in the season? Would fit with the fact Sarah recognises Bessie? [Writer Barry Letts, who produced the Pertwee years, apparently just forgot, possibly confusing a break in production for a break in continuity.]

Other observations... As good as the ambitious use of the medium is, there’s still an *awful* lot of people describing what they can see. Clarinda is a *great* name for an obnoxious editor. The sequence in which Peter Miles tortures Sarah feels a bit much. The Brigadier definitely wants to bang Onya. Never spotted that subtext before. Huh, it’s Julian Rhind-Tutt.

Anyway, one of the best bits of audio Who I’ve heard, and nice to have this cast and writer back. But why on earth was everyone writing Who in the early 90s obsessed with virtual reality and cyberspace?

It has just hit me that this was only 19 years removed from the era it’s about, but that I listened to it 28 years after broadcast. We are all getting old. Anyway: next time, we are off to Albert Square to fight the Rani in Dimensions in Time.