Tony’s goin’ down the mines.
The Monster of Peladon was that reasonably rare thing in
Doctor Who – a sequel story, showing the advancement of an alien world which
acted as a mirror of political events here on Earth, and most particularly in
Britain.
The Curse Of Peladon, its predecessor in Season 9 (1972)
played out the traumas of a relatively backward planet with a good heart, an
overweening love of its own traditions and superstitions, and a feudalistic
monarchy, attempting to join a larger trade federation and fit its
idiosyncratic rough edges into the federation’s more uniform, more
technologically advanced and more fundamentally civilized self.
It was of course a
metaphor for Britain’s dithering original entry into the EEC as it then was
(the body that became the EU). When we returned to Peladon for Monster,
things in the UK had gone from struggling to worse, and Peladon was ripe for
another visit to explore the fundamental to and fro of commerce and its impact
on the lives of working people.
Peladon, as well as being
a feudal society with a medieval reverence for monarchs and lords, was a mining
community, and in 1974, that was resonant with Britain as the country faced a
miners’ strike, a battle between those who produced the country’s wealth and
those who spent it.
The Monster Of Peladon on-screen is rather fun, certainly, but
it wears its social conscience right up front on its sleeve, in a way that
makes it mystifying when Classic Who fans criticise the ‘liberal agenda’ of 21st
century Who.
If anything, the joy about
the novelization of the story by Terrance Dicks is that it mellows the social
politics out a bit and foregrounds the adventure. It does that with a subtlety
that wasn’t usually Dicks’ forte, but here, it works by keeping you focused on
the mystery, so that your nose, like that of journalist Sarah-Jane Smith, perks
up at the smell of something rotten in the state of Peladon, rather than at
man’s immortal economic inhumanity to man.
Visions of Aggedor, the
ceremonial beast of Peladon, are being used to stir up trouble among the miners
of the planet. There’s a young, relatively inexperienced queen on the throne of
this mighty and decidedly macho kingdom, there are the usual Federation
busybodies about (including everyone’s favourite, Alpha Centauri), the
Federation is at war with Galaxy Five, and Peladon isn’t entirely sure it wants
anything to do with such conflicts, despite being the best source of
Trisilicate, a mineral which is crucial to fighting and winning that war. And then
of course, there’s something extra nasty and complicated going on in the
catacombs of Peladon with a breakaway group of aliens, who are behind the whole
shebang.
They’re on the cover,
which really rather blows the suspense of the thing...
Fine, it’s the Ice
Warriors, are you happy now?
Except it’s not so much the
Ice Warriors as some Ice Warriors. In a relatively early stab at
moving away from the notion that all alien species have a single agenda, what
we have here is a breakaway group of Ice Warriors, more or less demanding a
rewrite of The Curse Of Peladon, where [spoiler alert] the Ice Warriors,
previous stalwart villains of two Troughton-era stories, turned good.
Part of the pleasure of
the novelization of The Monster Of Peladon is that it’s less intense
political thriller, more roaring good fun with aliens, while still getting in a
little feminism around the edges, as Sarah-Jane delivers the immortal line
‘There’s nothing only about being a girl’ to get Queen Thalira to buck
up her ideas about what’s happening in her kingdom and what she can do to affect
the tide of events.
It’s a story that includes
some classic Pertwee toing and froing as power changes hands time and time
again, but it handles the shifts better than many did, and certainly in the
audiobook version, it’s never quite enough to make you weary of the back and
forth.
That’s partially down to
Terrance Dicks’ writing style, which seems to have been encapsulated in the
notion that you only embellish when it improves the original, and partially to
do with a glorious, sympathetic reading by Jon Culshaw.
Yes, the multi-talented
impressionist who perhaps first came to geeky prominence for his scarily
accurate Fourth Doctor impression.
Since he did the reading
of the Five Doctors audiobook (Got that one yet? If not, give yourself a
treat), his facility with the Pertwee lisp, not to mention his ability to
deliver other characters with a resonance that makes them uncanny has brought
Culshaw’s talents more and more to bear in the Doctor Who universe, and here,
he’s faultless throughout, even when given quite the range of characters to
voice, from haughty beardy Peladonian counsellors, young Queen Thalira, the
fanatically fretful and squeaky Alpha Centauri, the Third Doctor, Sarah-Jane
Smith, and both an Ice Lord (low but oily) and an Ice Warrior (whispery and
sibilant).
Oddly then, while his
Pertwee is perfect, one of the most effective voices Culshaw contributes to the
whole thing, and certainly one that makes the pace of the reading belt along,
is that of an ordinary human by the name of Eckersley.
Eckersley’s so plausible,
and so gloriously, slappably Seventies, frequently calling Sarah-Jane ‘love’ in
a demeaning way, you almost yeeeeearn for him to turn out to be a bigger league
wrong ’un right from the start, for the sheer moral superiority it would bring.
He’s never an eminence grise, but he is eminently greasy all the way through,
while being unfortunately excellent at what he does, and Culshaw captures the
sense of him wonderfully, making him an unexpected stand-out of the reading.
Bottom line – The
Monster Of Peladon audiobook whips along, making you chuckle along the way,
and never lets you get too confused by a plot which is, at least on the face of
it, quite impenetrably complicated. It’s Doctor Who does Scooby Doo,
certainly – monster sightings plaguing business as usual and the Doctor and
Sarah-Jane getting to the bottom of it – but along the way, there’s so much
context and power-swapping even within the adventure, before you even
contemplate the political resonances with the Britain of the day, it would have
been easy for the book to have become a seething nightmare of ‘Who did
what-now?’ It not only doesn’t become that, the combination of Terrance
Dicks and Jon ‘Staggeringly Good Value For Money’ Culshaw makes it great
mysterious fun which never becomes a drag. Given the right number of hours
alone (What isolation protocols?), you can absolutely listen to The Monster
Of Peladon at a single sitting.
And if you can, you
absolutely should.
