A monstrous suggestion: 'Black Orchid', Sapphire and Steel and more thoughts on the danger of nostalgia

'I got two words for ya...'

 By chance today I found myself watching both the Peter Davison era Doctor Who serial 'Black Orchid' and the fifth and penultimate televised Sapphire & Steel 'Assignment'. This was a nice coincidence, as one of these stories is a disappointing murder mystery 'filler' episode largely disliked by fans, and the other is the 1982 Peter Davison Doctor Who serial 'Black Orchid'. 

This is probably somewhat unfair on Assignment Five's writers, Don Houghton and Anthony Read (the only people to write for Sapphire & Steel on TV other than series creator P.J. Hammond), as at least they actually set out to write a script in which Sapphire and Steel were meant to appear from the get-go. A popular rumour among Who fans (based on comments supposedly made by Peter Davison)  is that 'Black Orchid' scribe Terence Dudley pulled a spec script he'd written for a murder mystery series out of his bottom drawer and rewrote it with added Timelord to fill a gap in the show's Season 19 schedule. 

That's a common enough practice in television, and even if it's true the rewriting done isn't insubstantial: a significant amount of the second episode of this two-parter is taken up with the Doctor veering away from the main plot to give the Chief Constable, Muir, the old get-a-load-of-the-inside-of-this-thing tour of the Tardis in an attempt to prove his time travelling bona fides (Muir, to his credit, rightly avers that the fact the Doctor has proved he is a time traveller does not necessarily disprove the murder charge he's facing, but events conspire to force everyone back to Cranleigh Hall at that point anyway); we get some nice scenes of Tegan and Nyssa learning about each other which also double as a chance to tick the 'see, it's still an educational show' box by teaching 80s kids about the Charleston and Adric...is also there, though mercifully not for long at this point, the next serial in the series, 'Earthshock', being notable for his demise and not much else. But I don't want to say much more about 'Black Orchid', at least right now - beyond pointing out that it is, to me, simply astonishing that none of the toy companies which have had the Who licence has ever produced a figure of Davison's Fifth Doctor in his Harlequin costume from this serial (if not indeed a box set featuring Tegan and Nyssa in their fancy dress outfits) - because, not for the first time, ITV's answer to the Doctor was the show treading truly weird ground - even in its filler episodes. 

I mean come on Character Options, you'll make us pay for the same figure of Paul McGann with a different bag but you won't give us this? Sort it out.

Calling Assignment Five a filler episode is perhaps a bit cheeky given that it constitutes the entire third season of Sapphire & Steel, a show which, even more than Doctor Who (proportionally speaking, allowing for the differing length in their periods of production and transmission) seems to have suffered from the perennial problem referred to by cult TV fans as 'being dicked around by the executives'. Assignments Five and Six were filmed together, but only Assignment Five was transmitted in summer of 1981, with Six being kept 'in the can' for future transmission. Unfortunately in the interim between Assignments ATV, the television company which produced Sapphire & Steel, was reorganised into Central Independent Television, whose executives threw the show out into the 1982 ITV schedule with little fanfare, some regional editions of TV Times apparently erroneously labelling it as a repeat. 

But Assignment Five is filler in the sense that Houghton and Read were 'filling in' for Hammond, who said in a 1993 interview that he had been 'working too hard on the show' and 'needed to take time out for a rest'. The result is a serial that differs in some key respects from Hammond's vision: at one point, Sapphire is able to bestow the power of telepathy on a human character who aids them in the adventure, which it's hard to see Hammond writing; there is also a bit too much of an attempt made to explain the mechanics of what's going on, leading to a lot of guff about ley lines at one point, which might have been fashionable at the time (Sapphire & Steel dating from the same era as the 1979 Quatermass series, whose creator Nigel Kneale took out his frustration on hippies by writing a story in which they gather at stone circles and get vapourised en masse) but is way too much explanation for a show usually happy to leave things ambiguous. 

This better not awaken anything in me

What Houghton and Read do get right is the series' theme of the danger of nostalgia. This was explored most effectively in Assignment Two, 'The Railway Station', but it's a common theme in every episode: timebreaks occur in situations where something from the past is held onto too much in the present, allowing the various temporal and dimensional menaces which stalk the series to occur. The situation created by the industrialist Lord Mullrine in Assignment Five almost seems set up to invite time to break in and cause havoc: a perfect recreation of the night in 1930 when he founded his company with his late partner, Dr McDee - which also happened to be the night his partner died, and also the summer solstice (ley lines are involved somehow, remember). And, inevitably, things start going wrong: guests at the party start losing their temporal grip and then being killed off, one by one, and McDee himself returns, initially to much consternation though, as the anomaly establishes its grip, the guests later begin acting as if he has always been there - and, indeed, recreating their own actions of that night, revealing the dark secrets behind Mullrine's rise to prominence. And lurking behind it all is something much darker: an apocalypse that can only be prevented by McDee's death, and which is trying to make itself happen by preventing that death. You see, he's manipulating the genetic characteristics of a virus...

And here I am, almost forty years to the day after this series was cancelled, writing about what it tells us about the perils of nostalgia, in a time when the objects of nostalgia we look back to aren't just the 1930s Mullrine recreates with fiendish attention to detail in every room of his country mansion save one, but the then-high-tech computers and gadgetry of that one room, his office (which is also the room in which McDee was fiddling with a non-computerised virus on the night he died). Here I am writing about a story from the early 1980s about viral apocalypse, in a culture which isn't even yet recovered from the pandemic which shut down the world two years ago and is facing fresh attack by a scrappy young upstart pathogen. And, of course, the elephant in the room in all these posts digging into the past is my grief over the recent death of my mother. 

I started rewatching the Tom Baker era of Doctor Who as a direct result of that grief. I needed to find something to do with my time other than just staring into space, crying and wondering what the Hell I was going to do with my life now, so one night, thinking about the memorable story of Tom Baker's 'knighthood', I decided to watch 'Robot' for the first time since...well, quite possibly the first time ever, to be honest, given that first Baker serial aired in 1974, three years before I made my own debut. And so, well...here we are.

In a way, 'Black Orchid' is an example of Doctor Who being nostalgic for itself. Much was made by series producer John Nathan Turner of the fact it was the first 'pure historical' (that is, a Who story in which the good Doc goes back in time and interacts only with humans from the past, with no Sontarans or uniboobed android mummies running around up to no good) since The Highlanders. Elizabeth Sandifer has written a lot on Tardis Eruditorum about how the JNT era is notable as one in which the show begins to engage with both its own fandom and the new technology of home video, both of which led to a renewed engagement with the past of the show (which, at the nadir of this era, led to a bunch of 'big returns' of characters remembered by the hardcore fandom but long-forgotten by most of the viewing public, which too often failed to provide their stories a dramatic hook other than the reappearance of these figures). So it's no surprise it doesn't quite pull it off, and gave Matthew Waterhouse food poisoning to boot. Trying to recapture the past is dangerous, as Sapphire & Steel tried to warn us.

All of which seems to ask the question: what the Hell do I think I'm playing with? 

And do I have the right?