The Monster of Peladon

After the savourless stodge of Death to the Daleks, we come to a dish carefully prepared. A proper story, with mystery and political allegory: a secret traitor, an icy villain and – what more could you ask for – a giant green phallic monster with six arms who worries that humans are alarmed by it.

It's a sequel, the one instance of this Doctor returning to a previous adventure, and Sarah Jane's sharp tongue prevents it all getting too sentimental. There are brave queens deceiving their viziers, political skulduggery, ghosts and brave dashes and mad miners. When a beautiful young woman is dragged through secret passages beneath an ancient citadel, a mad-eyed man on her arm, a slavering beast on her trail, it makes you wonder how Philip Hinchcliffe could ever be thought the last word in gothic Doctor Who.

So why is it all so flipping dreary?

Why do we long for the episodes to spool by faster? Why do we yawn, tut, scratch ourselves and think of other things? Why does this whole story feel so unnecessary?

It must at least be the inevitable comparison with the fabulous Curse of Peladon. Nothing stands up to four episodes of plotting, red (or rather emerald green) herrings, and the gorgeous David Troughton being utterly serious in a jumbo purple velvet collar and silk hotpants, whilst talking to a man of a certain age with a pink streak in his hair. While the torches flicker...

It was like nothing we had ever seen on Doctor Who before, and recycling the sets only reinforces that we haven't returned to the real Peladon, not to that assemblage of alien beings, that sense of something daring and weird and authentically panto. If only Brian Hayles had taken a gamble and tried the Peladon approach with a whole new planet. To be honest, Terry Nation tried that last story with an arid alternative to swampy Spiridon and it was a total disaster – but at least he tried (and to be honest, he didn't try very hard).

Then there's the unavoidably crude politics. It's about the miners strike – so here are some miners, on strike. Do you see? Only sadly, caricaturing them as badger-like superstitious hotheads, the script manages to treat them with such insensitivity they might as well give them all Welsh accents, hire Talfryn Thomas and be done with it. Then we have Sarah Jane offering the Queen of the planet a crash course in women's lib; thank goodness for Lis Sladen's delivery or we'd all be cringing into our purple velvet sleeves.

I mean: yes, fill a story with cartoons, but have fun with it. Don't pretend you're making any kind of political analogy. Go big. Go wild. Go colourful.

I have to make an exception here for Alan Bennion, back for the third time here as an Ice Lord from Mars. He knows what he's about, and if it wasn't beneath me to make some cheap puns, I'd call him truly chilling. He's arranging the Doctor's execution and threatening the murder of hostages, and that's before the mask slips and he's revealed as a bad guy.

The Third Doctor has really lacked for enemies of his calibre. What a shame Azaxyr, leader of a Martian splinter group, isn't more the focus of this story.

Almost done now. The days of this incarnation are numbered. At one point, when the Doctor and Sarah Jane think they're slipping away unnoticed, the canny Queen Thalira cries out – with some emotion – 'Goodbye, Doctor!' And yes, you think, it's almost that time.

In one scene, with vague presentiments of Caves of Androzani, the Doctor actually seems to go past the point of mortal strength and collapses lifeless in his chair for an hour. Sarah Jane is quite rightly in bits (albeit for the second time, for the same reason, in one story) and when she says, 'I can't believe he's dead. He was the most alive man I ever knew...' Well, you feel that emotion – and you can almost kid yourself that this was his last hurrah, among the badger-men, penis people and screaming queens of Peladon.

Goodness, though, that would have been bloody weird.

The Curse of Peladon

            What is it about The Curse of Peladon?

            I enjoyed much of Season 8. I admired The Dæmons. But I was enthralled by The Curse of Peladon. I watched the first episode in a state of delight. Just the thought of it put me in a good mood. Having just finished Episode 4 with much the same feelings, I find it's probably - very possibly - my favourite Pertwee story so far (tied with Spearhead and Dæmons).

            What's so special about it?

            The Doctor and Jo Grant arrive on the world of Peladon, in a dreadful storm, when Jo really should be sipping Pernod and Black with Mike Yates in one of Tarminster's more happening wine bars. Instantly, this story has a sense of occasion. It's Saturday night on Earth, and like other teenagers in Great Britain, she has to spend a bit of time with Doctor Who before she can escape to the discotheque, for Labbi Siffre's It Must Be Love and Cilla's even more pertinent Something Tells Me Something's Gonna Happen Tonight.

            The Tardis is lost - no way out - and they are impelled up a mountain, through a secret passage, into a citadel built into the very fabric of this inhospitable world. We happily accompany them, because they're written with a lightness of touch and because Pertwee and Manning have a sublime rapport by now. The Doctor's tetchiness is wreathed in smiles and affectionate teasing.

            So we are drawn into this strange space: the cosy refuge from the storm. Inside a mountain, outside our world, out of the storm, into danger. All the lives and history of this world, boxed up in one excursion in the Tardis, parcelled up inside Jo's Saturday night on Earth. The castle on the mountain encapsulates all that is Peladon, and tonight it even seems to encapsulate the galaxy, with representatives from distant stars gathered all together.

            As the Doctor and Jo move deeper into this world, there's that cosy feeling of a world imagined entire: the world of the story. Perhaps it feels more this way because of its fairy tale quality: the castle on the mountain, the boy king who has to prove himself, the magician with his mysterious princess.

            Of course, this is an old-fashioned Doctor Who feeling, one we've had to do without for a while. It used to be that every Episode One began with our heroes walking into a new narrative and a new world. With the canvas blank again each time, the Doctor and his companion can be the vehicle for any kind of story, and any/every law of the universe is potentially unstable: we flirt with a feeling of total otherness. Normally, this is dismissed quite quickly by someone in a PVC nappy jogging across a quarry, but the challenge can inspire stories like The Celestial Toymaker (by someone called Brian Hayles). It's the televisual equivalent of 'Once upon a time, there was...'

            What deepens the pleasure of this fairy tale world is the arrival in it of the Ice Warriors. We've taken a side-step into another world,  but - a very particular world. The world of Doctor Who! Where cold-blooded cyborg viking dragons swish haughtily about, sometimes with evil plans involving space mushrooms, sometimes on diplomatic missions to Narnia. And not only that, but as soon as they turn up (looking fabulous onscreen, which is a relief after the doddery Daleks) the Doctor is once again a man who has lived and died twice. The sort of man who can remember visiting future Earth buried under ice age, as well as he can remember Elizabeth I's coronation.

            None of this is interferes with the actual story. You could watch and follow this story knowing nothing about the show - but you'd be constantly aware that it's a show about friendship over isolation, rationality over superstition, looking your best and holding your own and trying to do what's best, even when you're completely out of your depth. There's a hermaphrodite with six arms, a gremlin covered in slime riding on top of a drinks machine, and a fey young man in an outfit that could have Jacqueline Pearce saying, 'Mm, it's a bit much...' - and they all want to get along.

            Well, not the gremlin on the drinks machine. He wants exclusive mineral trading rights with a man who looks like a badger.

            The audience can follow it. The actors know what to do. The direction is fluid. Firelight flickers. It doesn't just work - it unfolds.

            At one point, the Doctor points out to Jo how drastic the situation is: it's not about a bomb about to go off. It's about a vast, diplomatic conflict. The Doctor and Jo, taking the roles of politicians, have to engage in arguments and win the support of querulous cephalopods, not to defuse a machine but a situation bigger than any of them.

            Come to think of it, that's the threat posed in The Mind of Evil and Day of the Daleks, too. But in this story - particularly because Hepesh and Peladon are well-intentioned men who make bad decisions - the story really convinces you of that threat.

            And brilliantly, in a huge progression from all her other stories so far, Jo Grant is instrumental in saving the day! The Doctor sends her into the delegates' conference to persuade them to do what she thinks should be done. Jo is an active participant in the story. She talks to everyone, argues about everything, falls in love, pleads for the Doctor's life. She doesn't just react to the action, she goes right inside that story and makes stuff happen.

            Now, perhaps I'm being sentimental, but there is something special about a writer returning to Doctor Who. Yes, of course, I'm being sentimental - I've read Robert Holmes' biography, the story of a man who kept being called back to silly old Doctor Who because it was easy to write and paid well enough, while his own personal writing projects pootled along, or more often petered out. But there is something about a writer like Brian Hayles (or indeed, Holmes or Terrance Dicks) who writes the series in acknowledgement of its basic absurdities, its impossibility, its openness.

            In the previous story, the Doctor zapped an Ogron with a ray gun. In this story, the humanoid characters are the most murderous, and even the Ice Warriors are friendly. This is a story which belongs to the world of the Doctor: transcendental, absurd, cosy, and full of ideas.

            What's up next...?