In a season notorious in retrospect for its alleged levels of violence, it seems almost deliciously perverse to encounter a story like "Vengeance On Varos". (Not quite as perverse as the title. Varos has become famous for not having much vengeance on it).
At the risk of going all Sandiferesque, it's maybe worth looking at this one closer than is usual in these parts. After all, Serial 6V is usually touted as Colin Baker's best story (or his least worst, if you persist in writing off everything made post-Androzani and before Cartmel got his shit together).
Publicity at the time made much of attracting writer Philip Martin to the series, and it's rather special to see an experienced and known television writer actually getting a script on to the screen in this period of the show's history. (Personal agendas in the production office and piles of unworkable scripts from bona-fide literary SF authors tended to have made malleable newcomers and trusted cronies the most prolific writers to get the work at this time).
Martin's best-known work up to this point was "Gangsters", which started as a grim and violent 1975 edition of the "Play For Today" strand, before being spun off into a series of its own. As a darkly comic contemporary examination of racial tension and organised crime in mid-1970's Birmingham, the original play was jaw-droppingly good, with Martin himself superb portraying a crime boss with a hilariously thick Midlands accent.
As a series in its own right, "Gangsters" was less effective. The first season dropped much of its preoccupation with race and began to suffer from having Maurice Colbourne as its leading man, yet still maintained interest with its incredible location work and adoption of videotaped interiors. Season Two saw Martin returning to the screen, mainly as himself narrating the script to a typist, and as a W.C. Fields imitating assassin, who kills Maurice Colbourne's character with a mere touch. Regulars break the fourth wall, martial artists mime ineffective playground kung-fu, and Martin completes his narrated script and immediately discards it.
Philip Martin, then. A bit of a maverick with more than an irksome touch of juvenile hubris. Remind you of anybody in particular? (Hint: see below).
So what's going on in "Vengeance On Varos", then? Rather a lot, as it happens.
Firstly, there's the whole "video nasties" thing, which is a wonderfully apt concept for Doctor Who to be diddling about with, as the phrase was pioneered by the series' old nemesis, Mary Whitehouse and her National Viewers' and Listeners' Association. Basically, the total lack of a classification system in the early 1980s for the new video cassette formats allowed lashings of genuinely violent and disturbing low-budget films to obtain home video release, theoretically available to anybody irrelevant of age. The timidity of major studios to enter the video rental market for fear of decreased cinema revenues is a significant factor. (The Video Recordings Act of 1984 ultimately helped provide the basis for a system of regulation).
Also playing against this backdrop was the miner's strike of 1984-85, possibly the largest (and one of the most notorious) industrial actions the UK had ever seen. The common left-wing readings also include the alleged callousness of the government and "da system" in general when dealing with the aforementioned strike.
Sounding familiar? A struggling ex-penal colony has only one natural resource worth a damn, and that's an ore that needs to be mined. The miners would rather do something more interesting with their lives, and a fair price is sought for the commodity. Enter a sadistic and childish representative of the capitalist system, intent on screwing Varos over the price of the Zeiton-7 ore.
Varos has one other export, recordings of punishments and executions which also go down well domestically in keeping the population both entertained and subservient. Watching television seems pretty mandatory on Varos, as what passes for democracy and the voting system is tied directly to it.
Martin does an admittedly wonderful job with making television itself a large problem in the context of the story, taking a familiar contemporary concern about violent media easily accessible in the home, and wedding it to similarly genuine anxieties on the role of television as supporter of corrupt regimes.
"Vengeance On Varos" was originally written as a Davison story, and quite frankly it shows. Although it functions perfectly adequately with Baker's Doctor by necessarily turning everything up to 11 in order to compete with the character and the coat, it misses Davison's quietly shocked reactions and Janet Fielding's burning moral anger which seems necessary at the core of the story.
Personally, I can't tell which was the most morally objectionable or ultimately harmful for the culture of the 1980's; "Top Gun" or "Cannibal Holocaust"...
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