The cerebral cortex of a pig! (Doctor Who - The Talons Of Weng Chiang (DVD))

Name: hogsflesh

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Product:	Doctor Who - The Talons Of Weng Chiang (DVD)
Date:	25.02.06 (122 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It's a damn fine story

Disadvantages: You might not like it if you're not a Dr Who fan

This is a Doctor Who adventure first broadcast in early 1977, starring Tom Baker. It’s held in very high esteem by fans, and has been voted the best ever Who story. It’s highly entertaining, and is one of the few Doctor Who stories that I feel I can recommend to people who aren’t fans. Yes, the production values aren’t so great by today’s standards; and the picture quality has that 70s BBC look that has dated badly; and the pacing of the story (which takes place over six 25-minute long episodes) is very different to what you’d see nowadays. But the story has enough lunatic inventiveness to keep you interested, and as an example of family-friendly horror there’s not much to beat it.

This was the final story in Tom Baker’s third season as the Doctor. The production team had produced a great sequence of adventures that were effectively remakes of old horror stories, and the series was never better than during the early Baker era. The shows were intelligent, scary and great fun. Talons of Weng-Chiang, the last story produced in this era, really goes over the top, throwing in elements of Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper, Fu Manchu and Phantom of the Opera. But it never loses control or allows its numerous sources to overwhelm the story – there’s nothing camp about the way it’s treated, and none of the tiresome nudge-nudge-look-what-we’re-doing-aren’t-we-clever stuff that later destroyed the series (and is sadly still in evidence in the new version).

The Doctor and his companion, the sexy alien savage Leela, arrive in late-Victorian London. (I’m going to assume everyone’s familiar with the concept of who the Doctor is and how he travels and stuff.) Meanwhile, women are going missing, and their disappearance seems to be involved with the local music hall in some way. It’s soon revealed that a Chinese stage magician, Li H’sen Chang, and his grotesque ventriloquist dummy, Mr Sin, which is really alive, are abducting girls and draining their life force to feed their master, a (made-up) Chinese god called Weng-Chiang, who lives in the sewers. The Doctor gets drawn into things, and encounters Chinese gangsters and giant rats, among other things. The ultimate explanation of what’s going on is absolutely ridiculous, but the show takes itself seriously enough that you don’t really start to wonder how they got away with it until after you’ve finished watching.

One of the main reasons this story holds up a lot better than most Doctor Whos is that it’s set in the past, so there’s no need for the set designers to come up with futuristic sets and costumes. Nothing dates faster than the future. The BBC was always very good at costume drama, and the look of the show is very good. Similarly, the story isn’t particularly special-effects heavy. The one big effect, the giant rat, is absolutely risible, but it’s on screen for such a short amount of time that you can forgive that.

Robert Holmes, the writer, was probably the best Doctor Who ever had. His scripting is deft enough that the pace of the story doesn’t flag too much, and he makes the necessary exposition scenes seem natural and unforced. He comes up with some particularly memorable characters, too, especially Professor Litefoot, a mildly eccentric police pathologist, and Henry Gordon Jago, the blustering, verbose theatre manager. A lot of the dialogue is genuinely witty, and he makes especially good use of the character of Leela. (A savage from the far-future, she is treated as a kind of Eliza Doolittle character, very much out of her depth in Victorian England, and the comic possibilities of that are played up to the full.)

The story also boasts an impressive cast. Trevor Baxter as Litefoot and the perennially superb Christopher Benjamin as Jago are both fantastic. John Bennett as the villainous Chang is also excellent, and his makeup is good enough to make you almost believe that he really is Oriental (why they couldn’t have cast a real Chinese actor is unclear, though). Michael Spice as Weng-Chiang is also wonderful, relishing his often very silly dialogue.

The two regular cast members are both on top form. Louise Jameson strikes just the right note as the sexy, naïve and rather ferocious Leela. She was a bit of a departure from the usual Doctor Who companion type (she doesn’t scream, and she kills people), and sadly she later degenerated as writers couldn’t find anything convincing to do with her. But she’s great here. There’s a particularly notable moment when, while wearing only some Victorian underwear, she falls over in some water, causing the underwear to go pretty much completely transparent. Unable to believe my eyes, I had to watch that bit seven or eight times just to make sure it had really happened.

Best of all is Tom Baker. He was the strangest Doctor of them all, and the most suitable to horror-based stories. He had a wonderful voice, booming and yet somehow funereal, but with a touch of cheerful malice lurking in the background. His ability to be totally convinced by what was going on around him while still having a completely off-the-wall sense of humour is what made him so successful in the role. There’s just something so peculiar about the way he plays the part – it’s probably the most mannered but successful performance in a light drama series until Jeremy Brett played Sherlock Holmes. Baker’s slipped into national-institution-voiceover mode in recent times, which is a shame, as it’s easy to forget just how surprising he was as Doctor Who.

This story is seriously classy, all its elements combining to make it memorable and highly entertaining. OK, maybe its view of the Chinese, taken straight from Sax Rohmer, is a more than a bit dodgy. And there’s the possibility that the violence might be a bit strong for children – Mary Whitehouse certainly thought so, and her complaints caused the BBC to emasculate the series shortly afterwards. But I don’t think so personally, and heartily recommend this to anyone willing to indulge the slightly cheap, creaky feel of the story.

(Sadly this was pretty much it for Dr Who. The next few seasons showed a sudden and inexplicable drop in quality (especially in terms of set design and lighting) and a sharp rise in the childish comedy quotient. Tom Baker was obviously bored for his last few years, and blatantly overacted. After that the series became smug, self-referential and generally unbearable. There are a few enjoyable stories from the late Tom Baker and Peter Davison eras, but only a few, and the last two doctors should be avoided by all but the most masochistically completist.)

This double DVD set has a very impressive array of extras, as do most Dr Who releases. (In fact you have to wonder what the BBC’s going to do when they run out of old documentaries and clips from Blue Peter – they still have at least 70 more stories they can release, and surely the well of extras isn’t bottomless). There’s a commentary on the whole story by various cast members (including Louise Jameson), the director, David Maloney, and the producer, Philip Hinchcliffe. This is pretty good, as they’re all genuinely enthusiastic. There’s also information text, which gives you little factoids onscreen as the episodes play. These are mildly interesting – I’d recommend running them at the same time as the commentary – but are perhaps a bit too anorak-y. And I don’t really like the font they’re in.

The best extra feature is a 50-minute documentary from 1977, called Whose Doctor Who, presented by Melvyn Bragg. It acts as a general history of the show, with plenty of clips, and interviews with Tom Baker (not with the other doctors, sadly – Patrick Troughton would have been a welcome interviewee). It also has behind-the-scenes clips of the filming of Talons, and a general examination of whether it’s too scary for children (most of the kids they talk to don’t seem to think so).

Otherwise the extras aren’t essential. The photo gallery is pretty but pointless. There’s an interview on Pebble Mill with Philip Hinchcliffe, the producer, again from 1977, but it doesn’t add much to what’s in the longer documentary. There’s some behind the scenes footage from the last episode, but it’s of appalling visual quality, and I don’t see how it’s meant to add to my enjoyment or appreciation of the show. And there are some bits from Blue Peter, where they show you how to make a ‘Dr Who theatre’ out of cardboard boxes and the like. Not as fun as it sounds.

The commentary and documentary are good, but the extras are pretty secondary anyway. The picture quality is probably about as good as it can be for something filmed when it was. But the story, if you’re a Who fan, is the big attraction. The series wasn’t this good again until 2005. And even if you’re not a fan, you’ll probably still find something to enjoy here.

It’s £19.99, which is a bit on the pricy side, but I got it on ebay for much less than that, so I’m sure you could do the same.

Summary: A classic old Dr Who story given the BBC DVD treatment