Escape To Danger No.42

In 1651, political philosopher Thomas Hobbes published his most renowned work, "Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil". (Commonly known as "Leviathan", for the sake of brevity).

 

Written during the turbulent period that was the English Civil War of 1642-51, Hobbes' main concern was to address the relationship between the individual and the state, formulating an early form of what is known today as "social contract theory".

 

Far from being a cold analytic work, Hobbes was an unashamed cheerleader for the concept of absolute monarchy, a concept which England would temporarily discard at the conclusion of the Civil War.

 

The most famous passage of "Leviathan" concerns the natural state of man as being a state of anarchy, which only a strong sovereign could sort out by banging heads:

 

"In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

 

And of course, another thing that is nasty, brutish and short is "The Sontaran Experiment".

 

I must confess that I always rather enjoy Serial 4B whenever I view it, but it's almost a kind of guilty pleasure. It's not exactly the greatest story ever told, and does seem a somewhat sadistic and pointless interlude between meatier fare.

 

But it all kind of works. Well, I think so anyway.

 

 

It's an oddity in all respects, and the tales of its genesis and production are well-documented ones, which I really can't be bothered to go over here. (Except to mention that Bob Baker and Dave Martin do quite a passable job with the script, given a dog's-dinner type remit that Peter Grimwade would get rather familiar with in the 1980's).

 

 

Tom Baker on location with his broken collarbone, there. One of my favourite things about "The Sontaran Experiment" is predictably that it is entirely shot on OB video, a first for Proper Who. It gives it all a bleak, shuddering windswept realism that to this day I find rather exciting.

 

 

Having a Sontaran back on screen so soon after their debut in the previous season isn't as lazy as it sounds, and it does highlight the rather odd Proper Who concept of a militaristic alien clone species consisting of distinct individuals rather than anonymous ravening hordes. (Sarah's cliffhanger faux-pas is interesting in this regard at least).

 

 

One thing I really should get around to doing again sometime is reading Ian Marter's novelisation of the serial, as I recall it was rather good. Styre's robot sidekick certainly benefits from the power of the written word, I must admit.

 

 

Careful there, Styre. Hiding cameras in toilets could land you in no end of trouble! (Google is a merciless archive of past misdemeanours, after all).

 

 

Is that one from "Terror of the Zygons"? All those duffle coats look the same to me...

 

 

And of course, "Field Major Styre" was a veteran of the second series of Proper Who Weetabix cards, and is therefore forever indelibly imprinted upon my memory as the go-to Sontaran of choice when rummaging about in my memory banks.
 

 

The Sontarans return to Proper Who in due course, but they are never again depicted as solitary characters in their own right. Future appearances show them en masse (half a dozen or so on a late 1970's BBC budget), and they seem much the less interesting for it.

Anyway, it's not every day that you get a story where both the monster and the plot can be equally described by Hobbes' much-quoted epithet...