'Rubbish! He's not hurt. He's only acting!': 'Vengeance on Varos', TV wrestling, and sadopopulism

 Between excavating the influences on my new pamphlet and protesting the state-mandated mourning period for Mrs Windsor, we haven't looked at anything to do with Doctor Who for a while. How fortunate, then, that last night my rewatch of the series, which has now reached the Colin Baker Era, brought me face-to-face with the frankly astonishing piece of television called 'Vengeance on Varos'. 

The Doctor and Peri are surprised to see I've not used this as an excuse to use that picture of Soldeed again

When we last checked in with the Time Lord of the Classic Series, he was dressed up in a ridiculous costume and regarded with suspicion. In a sense, then, not much has changed by the time we get to 'Vengeance on Varos', except for the rather important fact that at this point the costume is being worn by a different actor and the suspicion is now non-diegetic, with a series of increasingly poor decisions by John Nathan-Turner's production team leading the show to shed viewers, in some cases quite dramatically (with a million people who saw the first episode of the previous serial, 'Attack of the Cybermen', not bothering to tune in for the second). As usual, my advice is to check out TARDIS Eruditorum for the full story, but essentially 'Black Orchid' marked the last standalone before a run of tales which relied on as their 'hook' the idea of some villain or monster from the classic series returning. The producers played this up with great fanfare for the 20th anniversary series, but in fact it extends a long way either side of that: between 'Black Orchid' and the serial we're discussing today, the 1980s Who viewer has seen the astonishing returns of the Cybermen, Omega, the Mara, the Black and White Guardians, Rassilon, the Sea Devils and the Silurians (in a bumper team-up that's a strong contender for worst story in the show's entire history), the Daleks and most recently the Cybermen again, and the Master has popped up with a regularity not seen since the days of Jon Pertwee and Roger Delgado duking it out. There have been times when the show has opted to introduce a more original threat,  most notably in 'Frontios' and Peter Davison's televisual swansong 'The Caves of Androzani', regarded by many fans as the greatest Doctor Who story of all time, but the story of the show during this period is largely one of relying on 'big returns' to goose the viewing figures without making sure that (a) the episodes involving these returning characters are actually any good or (b) that the audience are properly brought back up to speed with who, say, Omega is (given that the last time we met him was two whole Doctors ago). 

They see me rollin', Tractatin'

But for my purposes in this essay I want to track a trend during the Nathan-Turner era other than the show's continual referral back to past continuity and gradual diminution in quality, which is the way the show keeps getting kinkier. This really seems to kick off once Davison has replaced Tom Baker, with the Master, in 'Castrovalva', making use of a computer which will evidently only work if he ties Adric up in it like Robin in the 1960s Batman series and it just...keeps going. In 'Kinda', the Mara has Tegan straight-up acting like Amanda Donohoe in Lair of the White Worm (which the serial interestingly predates by some years), a persona she reprises in 'Snakedance', while 'Earthshock' sees her swapping her air stewardess uniform for a Ripleyesque jumpsuit in which she can run around shooting Cybermen with hunky space Marines. Once Vislor Turlough replaces Adric in the crew things get kicked up a notch: 'Enlightenment' features queer space pirates led by a gloriously camp Queen with a sideline in sissy hypno and the TARDIS crew getting togged up in PVC 'space-wetsuits' that make them look as if they're trying a bit too hard to gain entry to an exclusive bondage nightclub. 

'Planet of Fire' sees the introduction of Peri, added to the show in an early foreshadowing of the Heteronormativity Enforcement Hour and described by Jonathan Dennis in his Black Archive book on this serial as 'the most blatant expression' of the 'treatment of the companion as something "for the dads"'. And thus do we arrive at 'Vengeance on Varos', a serial which opens with a shot of an oiled, half-naked Jason Connery chained to a wall and writhing and just piles on the kink from there. Okay, yeah, it's kinda homoerotic but it isn't as if people are watching and and visibly getting off on his suffering. Oh they are. Yeah, well, alright but it isn't as if everyone is wearing the kind of Nazi uniform Hitler would have designed if he had the same aesthetic sense as Liberace. Oh they are. Well, look, at least there isn't a character being hosed down by beefcakes dressed as Spartans. Oh bloody Hell there is. Right. But at least no-one's running around in a mask or anything. Oh hang on, here's chief torturer Quillam. Alright! But at least there isn't any of that furry shit going on!

Oh for fuck's sake.

This time, though, there's a justification for all the kink, and the fact that this serial is the most violent the show's been since the Hinchcliffe era: 'Vengeance on Varos' is about violence as entertainment. The torture sequences in the Punishment Dome are broadcast for the amusement of a viewing public on Varos itself, and exported as tapes to thrillseekers on other planets. The usual interpretation of this is that this is the show making a comment about the 'video nasties' moral panic, and there are good grounds for that, but I want to introduce another possible target into the mix: the (at the time) coming threat of satellite television, particularly Sky, and its (especially to the Reithians at the BBC) terrifying ratings juggernaut - WWF wrestling. 

This Doc 'n' Wrestling connection is suggested by the 'Greek chorus' characters, the Varosian viewers Arak and Etta, played by Stephen Yardley and Sheila Reid respectively. Arak's declaration while watching Connery's rebel, Jondar, getting tagged with a laser beam that 'he's not hurt. He's only acting!' was a familiar complaint to fans of kayfabe combat, and Reid is a different kind of stereotypical British wrestling fan - the grandmotherly old woman thoroughly absorbed in the sadomasochistic spectacle (witness both her general bloodthirstiness and her dreamily observing that Martin Jarvis's Governor must be very strong to endure three losing votes in a row). It's easy to imagine Reid's character going down to York Hall to poke the heels with knitting needles, as such fans were wont to do. Traditional British all-in wrestling, fought under the Mountevans rules, was in decline at the time 'Vengeance on Varos' aired, with World of Sport, on which it featured, having been cancelled and replaced with a wrestling-only show which ITV kept moving around the schedules, UK TV wrestling having, rather like Doctor Who at the time, entered its 'being dicked about by the executives' period. But in 1983 the Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch had taken a 65% share in the imaginatively named Satellite Television company, whose name he would change to Sky Channel the following year, and from the start of Murdoch's involvement in satellite TV broadcasts of WWF wrestling were part of the package of American imports he offered. And while, for technical and legal reasons, most Brits could only receive Sky as part of cable packages, among cable audiences the WWF shows were surpassing BBC shows in the ratings. 

How are you gonna keep 'em down on the farm when they've seen Hulk Hogan?

The BBC might not have liked it, but they could see it coming: if you wanted to imagine the future of TV in 1985, you would imagine a bright yellow boot stomping on a foreign heel's face forever. And 'Vengeance on Varos', with its postmodern first-episode cliffhanger in which Jarvis' Governor directs the programme while we watch,  was made by people with high televisual literacy, who would have been aware of coming trends. Video nasties were clearly part of the package of things being referenced, but far from the only one: consider, for example, how the serial foreshadows both 1987's film adaptation of The Running Man, and shows like Gladiators and The Crystal Maze. 

Predicting the late 80s wrestling boom is small potatoes, however, when compared to the fact that the serial also manages to predict a political trend that wouldn't even be given a name until 2017, however: what Timothy Snyder calls sadopopulism: 

Snyder explains the concept in more detail in the video above, but I like to describe it as 'voting to hurt the other guy'. The idea is that governments, in thrall to corporate oligarchs, find themselves having to pursue policies which immiserate the very people who vote for them. Unable to offer any positive hope for the future, then, they instead offer their voters not the pleasure of seeing life get better for everyone, but the sadistic enjoyment of seeing the 'others' hurt more than them. Sadopopulism explains an awful lot of contemporary British and American politics, though Snyder developed the concept based on his studies of contemporary Russia. It's an element of what I've called trollstalgia, and part of the reason for the turn I identified in my essay on 'Fear Her' away from New Labour's focus on psychological methods of managing disaffected youth to the Tory approach of just out-and-out baiting them. The folks over at Podcasting is Praxis describe the British dream as 'watching your neighbour being led away by the police': that's sadopopulism!

And sadopopulism is the political system of Varos, where the Chief Officer colludes with the oligarch Sil to quite literally weaken the Governor by forcing him to submit to public votes which, when they go against him, lead to his televised physical torture (in the novelisation, the serial's writer Philip Martin clarifies that positive votes lead to the Governor having his energy restored by the same process, working in reverse). Arak, in particular, takes pleasure in the Governor's suffering in the first episode, though his opinion changes in the second - the implication being that the Doctor's irruption into the Punishment Dome broadcasts changes things by giving the viewers a hero to root for instead of just a victim to take pleasure in punishing. 

The resolution of 'Vengeance on Varos' is a lot like the end of the Williams-era serial 'The Sun Makers': after vanquishing an inhuman oligarch, the Doctor and his companion leave the people of the formerly oppressed planet to find their own way forward. The ending, however, is left a lot more ambiguous, as we cut back to Arak and Etta, who muse on the fact that they're free - but wonder what they're going to do now, with nothing on the telly. Where do you go after sadopopulism? What do you do when you can no longer watch someone writhe as they pile on the pain? Well, don't ask me - I need to wrap this thing up so I can watch AEW Dynamite. I'm hoping Eddie Kingston is gonna beat the snot out of that poisonous little twink Sammy Guevara. The cocky prick deserves it. 

And to think I made it through a whole essay without mentioning how Quillam predicts Masked Kane!