Doctor Who - The Carnival Of Monsters

Drashigs In Amber

Doctor Who
The Carnival Of Monsters
UK Air date: January - February 1973
Four Episodes
BBC Blu Ray Zone B

The Carnival Of Monsters was the second story of the tenth series of Doctor Who and, although I would have seen it when I was five years old, this is not one of the third Doctor’s adventures which stuck in my mind at that young age... as much as, say, the story introducing the Sea Devils or the Series Ten closing story The Green Death, with its giant maggots (reviewed by me on DVD here). Of course, I’d read the 60 or so Target novelisations I had at the time (on numerous occasions for many of them) and this was one I must have read at least a feew times. However, this one was very much fresher in my memory in 1981 because it was one of two stories chosen (the other being the previous serial, The Three Doctors, reviewed here) to highlight Jon Pertwee’s Doctor in the special series of repeats that year called The Five Faces Of Doctor Who... which was a bit of a cheat at the time because this limited the Tom Baker repeat to being his final story, Logopolis (the only one made to briefly feature the face of the fifth Doctor at the end of the last episode before his official, proper start on the show a month or two after the broadcast of this special set of broadcasts). I remember recording all the shows on blank audio cassettes so I could listen to them again for years afterwards... microphone crammed up against the television set (these were the days before video cassettes remember). Even so, it was still not that fresh in my mind as I re-watched the story on the new Blu Ray presentation from the BBC.

The story involves a carnival showman Zorg (played wonderfully by Leslie Dwyer) and his assistant Shirna (played by Cheryl Hall), who arrive on an up-tight planet of political unrest with their sideshow attraction, The Scope. This contains miniaturised living forms taken from their own environments without their knowledge and set to replay little dramas in replica settings of their native worlds, to be gawked at by those outside on a view screen. A bit like a mini zoo crossed with an old What The Butler Saw kind of attraction.

Meanwhile, if you’ll remember the events of the last story prior to this, for his help in the defeat of Omega, the Timelords had ended the Doctor’s exile on Earth and so this is the first time since the Troughton era that he was allowed to properly fly his TARDIS to other worlds (and, more to the point as far as the BBC is concerned... more expensive locations which had to be built to look like other worlds again). However, true to what would become form in the show, The Doctor is completely unable to navigate the TARDIS consistently or correctly and so, instead of taking popular companion Jo Grant (played by the lovely Katy Manning) to Metebelis 3 as he’d intended (he’d get there eventually), the two wind up on a ship in the 1920s in the Indian Ocean, just as it’s about to be attacked by a sea monster. Of course, after a while they realise, due to the repeat action resets of the brainwashed people on the ship, that they are in a peep show and break through the seal to the artificial environments in the scope, crawling from world to world as they try to find their way out of the machine. Also in the scope are some giant, hand puppet style monsters called Drashigs, which you are never really that worried about eating them because of the limitations of the special effects at the time and, seen briefly on screen only, the Ogrons (who were used as military enforcers by the Daleks in this era of the show, if I remember rightly) plus, in their only appearance in a Pertwee episode prior to his own reappearance in The Five Doctors, some Cybermen.

Also on the crew of the ship in the 1920s is one Lt John Andrews, who is played here by Ian Marter, who would just a couple of years later become a regular on the show for the first season or two of Tom Baker's reign, as co-companion Harry Sullivan (he would also write a few of the Target novelisations before his untimely death). He does very well here as a stubborn, blundering authority figure as he tries to imprison his stowaways every time his story resets itself.

Meanwhile, on the planet on which the Scope has arrived, the political situation with allowing aliens there for the first time could lead to an incident and blow up into a war. It’s just enough to bolster up a simplistic tale which, honestly, is one of the better stories of the show from those years. It’s fairly fast paced, even if it looks a little padded at times and, while the cliffhanger chapter endings are not exactly terrifying, it’s certainly very entertaining and I have to admit, I thoroughly enjoyed looking at this one again. It’s also very well acted and the costumes of Zorg and Zirna are definitely something to write home about and make Pertwee’s Doctor, wearing his green velvet jacket and proper frilly shirt (which we all should be wearing these days, I love these shirts) look positively under dressed. It also features Pertwee making prominent use of his sonic screwdriver to blow up clods of Earth in front of him in order to try and scare the Drashigs off, in one nice sequence. The sets look kind of cheap, for the most part but, you kinda expect that with Doctor Who and you may, by this point, be disappointed if they didn’t look like they were assembled by the Blue Peter team the night before.

Not a heck of a lot to say about this one, to be sure but, still, an entertaining slice of early 1970s UK science fiction tele-fantasy which certainly shows off the heroic and unquestionable authority of Pertwee’s version of The Doctor and perhaps this is one of the reasons why The Carnival Of Monsters  was chosen to be part of the ‘Five Faces’ celebration. There’s a certain quaint and comfortable vibe to the story and this is always a winner for this kind of show.