Escape To Danger No.49

It may seem strange for a Monoid of my declared interests, but I somehow managed to avoid liking The Avengers until approximately ten years ago. (That's the John Steed variety as opposed to the Captain America lot).

 

Growing up in a household where ITV channels were viewed with downright suspicion didn't help, but when I eventually became master of my own viewing habits, I never seemed able to get to grips with the show.

 

I used to think it was the cosy pastoral tweeness of (later period) Avengers that bothered me, and maybe it did at the time. But as The Avengers shares so many tropes with Proper Doctor Who, in retrospect that shouldn't have bothered me all that much. (And when you're growing up, you don't half self-justify a load of old rubbish sometimes).

 

A perceived lack of consistent VHS releases was one stumbling block, and also that I only ever seemed to wind up seeing colour Diana Rigg episodes. Whilst I persist in perceiving this as being rather a weak run of episodes, I still think the main problem lies elsewhere.

 

Avengers fans may want to cover their ears at this point, but I've come to the conclusion that their sainted and beloved Mrs Emma Peel is a bit... well, crap.

 

I'd best nail my colours to the mast immediately here and confess that I'm a Cathy Gale man. The Avengers only really started becoming The Avengers as we know it today when Honor Blackman rolled into town.

 

The character of Cathy Gale was an outstandingly unique creation, as was the interplay (occasional enmity and sexual tension) between her and John Steed. When it came to replacing her, it was a pretty cowardly thing to essentially duplicate the character and reduce it to a declawed caricature with a smugness and predictability instead of a dangerous confidence and mercurial temperament.

 

And to make matters worse for my Avengers street-cred, I'm unashamedly pro-Tara King.

 

But how does all this relate to an ostensibly Doctor Who themed thread?

 

 

Because were talking about "The Seeds of Doom", which has accumulated a bit of a reputation of Doctor-Who-Does-The-Avengers.

While there are a handful of other stories ("The Faceless Ones" "The Mind of Evil", etc), that display similar characteristics, I have to admit that Serial 4L does tick quite a few of the boxes.

Diabolical Mastermind? Check. Country house? Check. Erm... playing all day in a green cathedral? Check.

There's more to it than that, of course (and for irony's sake, it's unfortunate that this story couldn't have been the one where Patrick Newell fills the Fake Brigadier role).

 

And once again, people may want to cover their ears as they read this (and yes, I am aware of the garbled metaphor), but I'm not the world's greatest fan of Sarah-Jane Smith.

Despite this being a very strong story for Elisabeth Sladen (she performs terror in the face of sadism rather impressively), I've never seen why the character Sarah is so beloved in fandom. Then again, she wasn't my "first companion" and therefore I didn't fall in love with her as a pre-teen like so many writers of a certain age seem to have done. Which could explain it.

 

 

Unlike my aversion to Emma Peel, Sarah-Jane certainly wasn't a lazy attempt to recreate the success of the previously incumbent character. (And the more I watch the Tara King episodes, the more I am reminded of Jo Grant in Season Eight mode).

 

 

"The Seeds of Doom" is the most crashingly obvious example of Robert Holmes' theory that a Proper Who six-parter is essentially a four episode narrative and a two episode narrative bolted together, or something like that. (You also get a subplot for padding purposes, just in case you needed to be reassured).

 

As with most Hinchcliffe/Holmes stories of this period, both narratives are a homage to (or blatantly nicked from) something else, and both work very well. (Aerosol snow notwithstanding).

 

And speaking of things that have been blatantly nicked from elsewhere...

 

 

Serial 4L is a good companion piece to the Robert Banks Stewart script that opened the season, "Terror of the Zygons". Both have similar themes of possession, but "Seeds" ramps up the body horror with some surprisingly adult and genuinely disturbing transformations since, erm... the last time they tried it a few stories ago.

The whole story has a bleakness to it that many find in Holmes' work, except this time there's a realism about the production (well, as realistic as a show about aggressive and sentient alien vegetation can be) that makes it a candidate for "stories-to-show-non-fans-which-don't-require-too much-apologising-beforehand.

 

 

"The Seeds of Doom" was director Douglas Camfield's final work on Proper Who before his death in 1984. Like the similarly late Elisabeth Sladen, Camfield is held in huge regard by fans. I'm not sure how much of the uncharacteristic tone of the story is down to Camfield, but I'm certainly not of a mind to complain since I rather enjoy it.  

Apart from noting that men hiding off-camera and shaking branches around is now officially scary, it would have been a lovely irony if Camfield's first work on the series was as a production assistant, slapping the regular cast with branches as they all jogged on the spot in "An Unearthly Child".
 

 

It might just well have been, but I guess we'll never know...