4.36: The Leisure Hive

In which Barry Letts makes a triumphant return to Doctor Who.

Broadcast: August-September 1980

Watched: November 2020

The Leisure Hive, Part One

Bloody hell that’s good, and [name of season 18-hating friend redacted] is a loony.

So to what extent is this actually a conscious relaunch, and to what extent is it just that it’s a new production team? If it is conscious – is the relaunch just because it’s now the 1980s?

At any rate – this does feel radically different from what’s gone before. The titles and theme music, which I’d forgotten were about to change, gave me a proper shock-of-the-new thing I wasn’t prepared for. The incidental music is suddenly different. The Doctor’s costume has changed. 

And the direction is suddenly much more creative too – when we see the shuttle land, it’s shot from below rather than being a weird model shot; Romana explains the plot while the camera pulls back and the image is surrounded by a starfield (god knows what that’s meant to mean but it’s very cool). Plus, of course, the 90 second opening tracking shot of an empty beach with no dialogue – which, despite being quite an insane thing to do, is utterly compelling. 

The set up, the survivors of an apocalypse trying to run a business-come-memorial-to-an-atrocity, is taken seriously, in a way the aliens of the Williams era were not (“You only have to look at me to be reminded of that”). There are still jokes (I like the Doctor warning a guard there are intruders on the loose), but the Doctor doesn’t dominate the story, there’s a sense these people have a life off screen, they’re not just hanging around waiting for Tom to arrive and smirk at them. Basically: not trivial.

Other things: K9 going for a swim is weirdly annoying. As is the reference to the danger of not using the randomiser, which wasn’t used in Shada (although: never broadcast) anyway. I like the joke of the unreal transfer experiment wowing people, while the TARDIS materialises entirely unnoticed in the foreground.

A thought: a surprisingly high number of Doctors have big relaunches for their last season. Pertwee, Tom, Colin, Smith, Capaldi...

The Leisure Hive, Part Two

“We’ll just have to check it all again. That’s one thing I’ve learned from the Doctor.”

Weird foreshadowing of Logopolis 4 in the dialogue, there. The aged Doctor of the cliffhanger arguably also foreshadowing where this season is going. (Leaving an experiment without checking nothing is going to explode is a very poor show from Romana.)

Anyway – I sort of love that this is a story about a holocaust memorial that’s also a tourist attraction, it’s a very Doctor Who way of tackling this theme. I also love the way this is explained in dialogue while we see what appears to be an evil reptile trying to sabotage the whole thing.

What’s really back with this story – that we haven’t had since what, Image of the Fendahl? – is tension. That tracking shot in part 1, the bit where the guy who gets killed in part 2, the bit with the experiment – there are a lot of moments where something is clearly about to happen and the audience knows it but the programme makers force us to wait.

Lot of good design work in this story: the Argolins and the way bits fall off as they die, the model of the hive. The foamasi are less good but it’s sold through the direction. Although having said that: “Surely that’s not the woman we saw on earth” – yeah glad you had that in dialogue because the make up isn’t selling it.

Question: how the f*** did Adrian Rigelsford manage to miss the entirety of season 18 from his book? [His 1995 history of the series, The Doctors: Thirty Years of Time Travel, literally managed to skip an entire season, apparently because it was running over the page count. I cut a sentence about Rigelsford’s iffy working practices, because I refuse to worry about legals for my stupid Doctor Who blog, but if you want to read about them – the story is quite amazing – you can do in this amazing Guardian story from 2004.]

The Leisure Hive, Part Three

“For years they’ve been trying to foist restitution money on us.” I sort of love the fact the core conflict here is that the Foamasi want to make amends and the radical young Pangol won’t have it.

David Haig is *amazing* in this, btw. He’s painted green, but he really plays the moral complexity of it, he doesn’t go pantomime at all. Most of the cast are taking it seriously but he’s outstanding. (There’s a lovely bit of direction where he’s muttering conspiratorially, and he’s shot in profile entirely in the shadows even though he’s in the foreground.)

I also love the headf*ck of, “I am the child of the generator”. Also, the banker turning out to be a Foamasi.

Other thoughts: the neon logo is a proper mission statement about what the ‘80s are meant to be like because it’s all neon all the time in this story. The Tom pic in the titles is a bit weird.

There’s a whole thing in Doctor Who of this era about collars and bracelets that can control behaviour – I wonder why.

Does David Fisher have the most variable output of any Who writer? His stuff is totally all over the place. [His other stories are The Stones of Blood, The Androids of Tara and The Creature From the Pit.]

The Leisure Hive, Part Four

“You mentioned Foamasi...?”

Weird how the plot seems to run out in the first scene of this, and then we get a whole different threat. I like the way Pangol starts describing himself as “we” before proceeding to literalise it, even if it makes me think of Rimmer World. [An episode of Red Dwarf.] The helmet is a nice touch to disguise the fact they’re not actually clones of David Haig, which then turns out to be a plot point because they’re genuinely not. Neat. They are obviously different heights, and not the height of Tom Baker, though.

It does frankly go a bit wibbly. I have no idea what they’re banging on about with tachyon images, which bits are real science and which are made up, and it is a bit “stick Maguffin A in plot hole B”. It’s also not entirely clear what it’s trying to say – the guys who nuked an entire species are good, but the only offspring of that species is bad, but then they reset time (oooh, this is where RTD got the ending of Boom Town!) and try again? I’m not sure it’s very coherent as either a plot or a story. But it’s more watchable than the equally incoherent stories of the last three seasons, so.

Other things: I love the way the affair between the human scientist and Mena stays subtext. Baby Pangol is SO CUTE, even if they haven’t painted him green. Bit weird to mention the Black Guardian, a villain from the season before last who won’t appear again for another two.

Is there a reason the episodes of this one all run short?

Anyway, what a great start to a new era – can’t wait to see what’s next!

Oh.