The Bishop on Doctor Who: ‘Horror of Fang Rock’

For a name so synonymous with classic Who, there is surprisingly little material on which to anchor the impact of Terrance Dicks. Though he script edited the program for nearly one fifth of its span, he wrote—or at least is credited with writing—only five stories. He had some involvement with ‘The Seeds of Death’, which is hard to sit through. He wrote half of ‘The War Games’ which, even had it been shorn of Mal Hulke’s other half, would still be far too long. After that, despite a four year period of not just steadying the ship but getting it to float again—there is no doubt the Pertwee era is much better than the Troughton one despite both having interesting leads—it’s hard to say how much influence Dicks had qua writing (or re-writing) good episodes; and post his role behind—or perhaps putting together—the scenes, he only penned four stories, of which three were the mechanical ‘Robot’, the fallow ‘State of Decay, and the five-out-of-ten-at-best ‘The Five Doctors’ (‘The Brain of Morbius’ coming mostly from the mind of Robert Holmes). Still, if Holmes’s reputation can stand tall on ‘The Time Warrior’, ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’ and re-writing all the dialogue for seasons twelve through fourteen, it’s only fair to judge Uncle Terry on his best work, ‘Horror of Fang Rock’. So how good, the Bishop wonders, is it?

It was certainly quite alright when the Bishop was twelve, and a little scary, to boot. (Is twelve too old to be slightly perturbed by Doctor Who?) The actors, who have been dressed up to the nines by the BBC costume drama department, thesp like they think they might actually be in a costume drama, instead of doing what they think supporting types are supposed to do in Doctor Who, and the equally attentive sets could fool one into thinking there are more than three. The direction does what Who direction should—point the camera at the actors and make Tom Baker behave. The lighting may not make a studio look like an outcrop but it does make a studio feel as isolated as one, and of the regulars, Baker, discourteous though he may have been to Pennant Roberts, needs no introduction, and Louise Jameson is probably the best thing ever to have been associated with Doctor Who. After watching her the Bishop, were he to uncover some forgotten tribe of leather-clad savages in the furthest reaches of the earth, would be surprised to find they didn’t speak with RP accents.

But what of Dicks's contribution? Well. There are some marvellous lines for the actors (Leela: ‘It is fitting to celebrate the death of an enemy’. The Doctor: ‘Not in my opinion’), though some naff ones too (‘Enjoy your death as I enjoyed killing you’ is too much even for Jameson to say), and how much of the former were added by Holmes is open to speculation. The plotting is tight but still feels an episode too long (should the shipwrecked crew have been there from the beginning?), and while the claustrophobia is exactly right, it seems like something we are asked to accept rather than something we should believe (rarely has an episode begged the question of why the Doctor shouldn’t go and retrieve some plot device from the TARDIS—and if they’ve mistakenly locked the Rutan inside the lighthouse then, well, leave). The Bishop knows this is Doctor Who, but the lighthouse-diamond-destroyed-mothership thing is a stretch.* And while the episode bravely runs the Hammer Horror Who gauntlet of making the monster a bona fide monster (the Beast of Fang Rock) and making it not, it doesn’t quite succeed: one can’t help but feel a little unsatisfied when one Rutan on an island is just a stand in for a much more terrifying fleet of them in space; by contrast, the mummies in ‘Pyramids of Mars’ were correctly subsidiary, while Magnus Greel in ‘Talons’ made one feel as though the fifty-first century and the late nineteenth were actually one and the same. (Of the current series, Steven Moffat more adeptly pulls off the iconic-horror-that’s-not trick in ‘The Empty Child’/‘The Doctor Dances’ and ‘Blink’.)

And that seems to be the thing about Terrance Dicks—it’s all a bit fifty-fifty, or perhaps six-of-one-half-a-dozen-of-the-other. While he’s no doubt a better contributor to Who’s success than his Target novelisation–hating detractors say, he’s also not quite as good his supporters would ­like us to believe. On the special feature on the ‘Fang Rock’ DVD, he is asked how he would like to be remembered. His answer: professional. And he is probably right. But while it’s always nice to know there’s a professional on hand to take care of things, most of the time if we want more than nice we need a little magic on hand to spice things up, too.

*Oh, and wasn’t this show-a-bit-of-fighting-spirit-and-they’ll-run-away climax already done in ‘The Sontaran Experiment’? For two species of war-obsessed aggressors who have conquered half the galaxy between them, the Sontarans and the Rutans don’t seem to have much pluck.