The Bishop on Doctor Who: 'The Sound of Drums'

One can only marvel at how clever Russell T. Davies is. So clever, in fact, that it took the Bishop almost twenty-four hours to realise that ‘The Sound of Drums’ is built on an untempered schism of its own. Which is this: If the Master can become the Prime Minister of Britain, he does not need the Toclafane. And if he can make use of the Toclafane, he does not need to become Prime Minister of anything at all.

Davies’ justification may well be that the Master is both Evil and Mad, and concocts these rather complicated schemes just for the hell of it; and there is a temptation to believe this is true. Or he might insist it needs no justification, and what the hell does it matter if everyone is having such good fun. Still: whatever the excuse for Davies plotting house of sand, ‘The Sound of Drums’ is great fun; and any Who fan of the older type who did not enjoy this (and ‘Utopia’, before) is deliberately trying not to. It is, the Bishop must reassure, far from perfect, but imperfect things have their charm, too, as forty-four years of Doctor Who have ably proved. The highlights for us ancients were of course the fanwank, and with this and ‘Utopia’, your canonical commentator finally believes that Davies loves this show. What he has done, with flashbacks to Gallifrey and a host of things besides, is bring to bare the Doctor Who we of the old school always had in our heads when we remembered what was all those years ago. Not a re-envisioning, but a simple putting on to screen of what was already there but never shown before.

The cast: The Bishop, as always, feels sorry for the extraordinarily pretty Freema Agyeman: she has been saddled with an imbecilic role, and to make matters worse she can’t act. Still, she is extraordinarily pretty. John Barrowman, as always, is unavoidably charming, and while David Tennant is doing nothing new, that he might now simply be referred to as the Doctor is about as high a praise as one can give. Colin Stinton, as the American president, plays an American president about as well or not as anyone on British TV ever does, and the rest are fine, though special mention goes to Alexandra Moen as Lucy Saxon: she is a find. It is not entirely clear whether Davies has scripted her as Lady Macbeth or Lady the Labrador, but she realises both, and each, and neither with ease. Performing sleight of hand with a face that’s as inscrutable as it is seductive, her performance leaves the Bishop happily lost for words.*

But of course it all comes down to the Master; and the Bishop cannot help but feel a fraction churlish in not being over-thrilled with John Simm’s best go. Reaction elsewhere has largely been that he is either painfully over the top or perfectly over the top, but while both of these are true, they are not the problem; rather, the problem with Simm’s Master is that there is nothing there—no reason to believe he’s all that. Roger Delgado’s Master was never the Doctor’s intellectual equal—despite what the scripts tried to tell us at the time—but had a quiet force of personality that saw him through; Anthony Ainsley had his manic deviousness.** If the Doctor was all cosmic wit and science, they in their megalomania were art bending science to their ends: the result, essentially, a draw. Simm, without the mesmerism of the former or the devilishness of the latter, is given nowhere to go but wide of the mark; his Master is simply an impenetrable nutcase who is very, very clever, and the only reason we realise he’s clever is because the story tells us he has done some very clever things. Even his one-liners, one of new Who’s superficial strong points, are tepid.***

In fact the Master’s absent presence tells us quite a bit about why ‘The Sound of Drums’ works. Davies, at the end of the day, for all willingness to turn convention on its head, and shock the hoi polloi with one ‘guess what?’ idea after the next, is basically just a very good writer of conventional mysteries. Given time and a universe to work with, he always leaves one wondering what’s next, but his worlds are made of light and mirrors; anyone who delves backstage to see how it’s done is sure to regret having asked the magician to reveal his tricks.

*Sadly, she is unable quite to salvage Davies’ typical indulgence in the final scene, but at least her white-girls-can’t-dance act managed to distract the Bishop as the tension wilted to the strains of yet another postmodern twentieth-century reference. Never has a lack of rhythm held such guilty appeal.

**Ainsley, despite generic fan opinion, was good; and, when on form, one of the very few acceptable things about the program’s eighties run.

***That Davies has conceived the new Master as the (Tenth) Doctor’s contrapositive is as obvious as it is dumb, and was never the engine of their relationship. Delgado’s Master, armchair theorising aside, was not the third Doctor with an evil bent. Nor was he the Doctor’s Moriarty. Nor was Moriarty Holmes’ Moriarty, which is exactly the point.