Day 346 — December 12th 2021
Delta and the Bannermen Parts One and Two
Delta and the Bannermen — Part One
Toll Port G715 is one of my absolute favourite locations from Doctor Who. There’s just something about it which looks so cool, and it especially stands out in this episode against the bright and sunny sequences in the 1950s. Some night filming is always welcome, and it feels like absolutely ages since we’ve seen the programme filming somewhere run down and industrial like this. The locations in this one are brilliant across the board, and they sort of have to be because aside from a couple of brief shots of the TARDIS interior as Doctor Who follows the bus through space this one is the first Doctor Who story shot entirely on location in twelve years.
When I did my charity tour of filming locations from the Russell T Davies era back in the summer I unwittingly included Shangri-La holiday camp in my route. The site was demolished in the 1990s and is now part car park, where I left the car while I went off to explore the tunnel from The Doctor’s Daughter and the train station from The Empty Child. There’s a handful of other locations from the New Testament around the same area, but I’m not sure that’s what people usually think of when they describe the McCoy era as being the bridge between Old Testament Who and the later revival.
So I’ve already highlighted the Toll Port as being a great shot (and just how huge does it look? The TARDIS prop looks tiny in comparison), but the rest of this episode is stuffed with great images, too. The soldiers in the opening battle resembling little plastic army men is a great idea. The idea of a time-travelling space craft which resembles a retro bus. The blobby purple Navarino dancing its way through a hologram projector.
Then there’s the gorgeous model shot of the TARDIS in space. We had a TARDIS model in the opening shot of The Trial of a Time Lord, but I don’t think we’ve had a shot quite like this one since the Tom Baker years. The lighting is great, and it makes me wish they still did this sort of thing more regularly.
I think my absolute favourite thing about this episode, though, is the entire sequence of the ‘Get to Know You’ dance. It feels so odd to see a disco like this in Doctor Who, but there’s something so wonderful about it, too. It reminds me of Black Orchid, where we had a rare chance to see a particularly fraught TARDIS team having a bit of fun, and I think it’s a sign of how different McCoy’s incarnation is that he doesn’t feel out of place having a dance with Ray here.
Not everything in this episode has worked for me. I can’t say I’m particularly buying the humour of Weismuller and Hawk, for example. I also think there’s an issue with using the TARDIS prop to represent a regular police box in this episode. Partly that’s because it would be so unusual to find one just sat in the middle of the Welsh countryside (which makes it look even more like the TARDIS thanks to its incongruity) but also because there’s no attempt to remind the viewers that the boxes were more commonplace in the 1950s. I feel like you’d get away with it had Ken Dodd commented on the unusual appearance of Doctor Who’s craft, and had a brief explanation inserted.
And I have to say that while Weismuller and Hawk haven’t done a lot for me here, the former does get the best line in the entire episode when he makes a call back to the USA;
Weismuller: ‘Hello? This is Agent Jerome P Weismuller speaking from
Wales, in England.’
7/10
Delta and the Bannermen — Part Two
I feel like I’ve gotten whiplash from watching this episode; the tone is all over the place. One moment you’ve got jokes and high camp, the next a large chunk of the guest cast — everyone we met on the bus in Part One with the exception of Delta — gets blown up and killed off. It should raise the stakes and make the whole situation seem suddenly all the more threatening, but it ends up feeling a lot like all those Eric Saward stories where the guest cast get killed off simply because they’re no required any more.
Tell you what, though, I’ve never noticed before how much it could be considered one of the McCoy era’s digs against Maggie Thatcher. No, really! When he interviewed to become the new Script Editor on Doctor Who Andrew Cartmel said — tongue firmly in cheek — that he wanted to use the series as a means to topple the government. There’s obvious examples of them taking a dig at the then-PM in the likes of The Happiness Patrol, but it does seem possible that there’s a commentary to be found in here about the sinking of the Belgrano, given that the Navarinos are blown up as they attempt to return home, and Doctor Who later gives a lengthy speech about how important it is to recognise and understand a white flag.
Or maybe I’m reading way too much into it? Probably that.
There’s a lot packed into this episode, but while that made Paradise Towers feel rich and well established, I’m finding that in this instance it’s making things a little hard to follow. I think it’s the strange mix of there being so much going on, but also having quite a leisurely pace to proceedings. Shangri-La is evacuated, but in doing so we get a lengthy scene in Burton’s office discussing his time in the war. It’s great for adding character, but not so much for the energy. See also the lengthy scenes of Billy and Delta sharing a date together. They’re vital for establishing the two of them falling in love, but they feel at odds with Doctor Who and Ray having to rush around hunting for them.
I also think this is the first episode to showcase the one downfall I think Sylvester McCoy has in his performance — he struggles a little when it comes to being angry and forceful. It’ll come to a read head in Season Twenty-Six between shouting on the Battlefield in… well, Battlefield, and ‘if we fight like animals we die like animals’ from Survival. This is the first time I’ve spotted it, though, and I find it slightly undermines the performance in an otherwise great final confrontation with the villain.
Oh and one last thing to note here, because it’s ages since we’ve been able to track down the issue of a comic being read by a character on screen (was the last one in The Tenth Planet? Surely not?) the issue of The Eagle Murray’s reading in this one is Volume 10 Issue 10, from March 1959 which fittingly talks about ‘your 1959 holiday’ on the cover!
It’s a great example of the lengths the BBC would go to with the detail when it came to period productions rather than futuristic ones — I was all ready for it to be an issue from the 1960s which I could sneer at, but no they’ve don it properly!
5/10
