7.6: The Happiness Patrol
In which Margaret Thatcher is far more terrifying than any monster the Doctor has ever encountered.
Broadcast: November 1988
Watched: February 2021
The Happiness Patrol, Part One
“Happiness WILL prevail.”
First question – did the show get permission from Bassets to make a monster that looked like their mascot? Were they in on the joke like Ann Robinson? [They were not! The BBC came remarkably close to getting sued.]
Even more than Paradise Towers, this feels – and bear in mind I don’t read comics as I say this – like a comic. A lot of things are sketched in very broad strokes. Or maybe it’s a panto, actually? It’s quite stage-y, people announce bits of plot or backstory to each other. At one point Gilbert M has basically a soliloquy. There are no niceties, we go straight to the meat.
None of which is meant as a criticism, just a comment on the tone. I love the hints of the blues in the incidental music at the start, the opening scene with Silas P entrapping someone, the pink TARDIS, the death squads dressed up like barbie dolls... It’s one of those that’s incredibly Doctor Who without being particularly like any previous Doctor Who. Helen A basically giving Silas P scout badges! And then killing him, for no particular reason! The very slow go-kart! It’s fun.
More signs of the new, more interesting 7th Doctor, too. “You’re no good to me like this,” he tells Ace at one point. Also at the start of the story it’s pitched like a mission: the TARDIS has landed in this place specifically because there’s a problem he wants to solve.
The only other note I have on this is “John Normington!” because he has such a distinctive voice. [Last seen as Morgus in The Caves of Androzani, four years earlier.]
The Happiness Patrol, Part Two
“I am a Kandyman of my word.”
Shamefully never quite got this as a kid, focused too much on the “misery gets you killed” thing. Now I can see it's doing something much more interesting... literalising the idea that in Pinochet’s Chile if you complained you disappeared.
The pipe people aren’t great. Helen A’s photo album is. I love that it’s a gender flipped society, but it’s just an aesthetic choice, it’s not really what the story’s about.
Ace’s “You’re scared of them, aren’t you?” is a nice moment.
For the second story running the Doctor talks a monster into doing itself serious damage. The “pull the trigger, end my life” scene is another reminder that [name of tragically Tom-brained friend redacted] is wrong about McCoy as he is about most things.
Love the cliffhanger. Not a shot of Ace in peril, just the Doctor standing before a poster realising what the auditions mean.
The Happiness Patrol, Part Three
“A depression is moving towards Forum Square.”
Some things I liked:
The list of the disappeared;
The Doctor singing in a French accent;
The scene where he’s hysterical;
The joyous riot;
The happiness patrol turning on each other, Soviet style;
The use of music to start an avalanche and crush Fifi;
The repeated announcements of growing chaos beginning, “Happiness will prevail”;
The pipe person growling, “Wicked”;
The casual way Gilbert M announces he was exiled for genocide;
The fact he legs it with Joseph C at the end (they are obviously banging);
“Tis done”, as the jazz swells and Helen A cries over Fifi's body – should have been the final shot I reckon.
But it still didn’t quite click for me. I feel like there maybe wasn’t quite enough set up before the revolution began. But these things don’t always have rational explanations.
I only realised that Ace had been separated from the Doctor the entire story until about five minutes before this ended.
Were the pipe people ever explained, by the way?
Someone explained to me after reading all this that there were major production problems affecting season 25 – asbestos causing knock-on effects across the entire BBC – so everything was rehearsed in a rush, resulting in both this and the next story filming a load of material that would normally have been cut by that point and then trying to fix it in the edit. Which is why neither quite work.
The line about Margaret Thatcher being worse than the monsters was something McCoy said in 2010, btw.
If The Happiness Patrol is ultimately an allegory for Thatcherism then this story ends with Denis running off with Geoffrey Howe. I don’t make the rules. This is just what happens.
On the subject of feeling like a comic - I had a very nice meal with Andrew Cartmel pre-pandemic and said to him that it was the most 2000AD of his stories. He agreed, but said that Curry wasn’t particularly familiar with 2000AD at the time.