Inspirations - Paradise Towers

Paradise Towers is the first story which Andrew Cartmel commissioned and saw through to completion, and therefore provides an idea of what his vision for the programme was to be. He was the first script editor on the series to be inspired as much by comics and graphic novels as by films and books.

The idea of a dystopian tower block where all the children have formed feral gangs, and some of the old people resort to cannibalism could have come straight from the pages of 2000AD.

The author of this story is Stephen Wyatt. He had written a play about the backstage shenanigans of a cat breeders club, called Claws, which had gone down very well. JNT loved it, and so invited Wyatt to offer a storyline idea prior to Cartmel's arrival.

The basic set up for Paradise Towers is that all of society lives in one vast tower block. All the young men went off to fight in a war and none have returned. The female children have formed colour-coded gangs - Red, Blue and Yellow Kangs. What men do still live in the Towers are all caretakers, led by the officious Chief Caretaker, who is hidebound by his rule book. All the other tenants are older people.

The architect of the Towers, Kroagnon, disappeared after being attacked by the residents, as he did not want any people messing up his lovely design. There's more cannibalism going on, as his brain survives in the basement and he's in league with the Chief Caretaker to obtain enough genetic material to make himself a new body. The Towers' robot cleaning machines are killing Kangs and others to feed him.

The usual starting point when it comes to looking for inspirations for this story is writer JG Ballard, and his novel High-Rise.

Architecture had gone through a negative phase in the 1960's and 1970's as the ideals of the tower block had been proven false. New communities - "streets in the skies" - had failed to materialise. Instead, there was only feelings of isolation and of the elderly trapped in their homes. The blocks themselves proved often to be made from substandard materials and were prone to damp. Some famously collapsed. Others were condemned after only a few years. Lifts didn't work and bored youngsters scrawled graffiti on every surface. Come the 1980's Architecture was beginning to fight back, with a move away from the concrete blocks.

Ballard's book tells of a luxury apartment block where society breaks down as the building suffers technical faults. The most affluent tenants at the top of the tower want the swimming pool etc. for themselves and try to stop the less affluent from the lower floors from accessing facilities. Even the lifts are claimed by rival floors, as the society collapses into violence. Instead of leaving, the tenants instead become used to life in the block and try to adapt to it. The architect is finally confronted at the top of the building.

The notion of someone being murdered in secret by a group of adults, but whose children then come under attack by him is strongly reminiscent of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies - the first of which debuted in 1984.

The Chief Caretaker is a "Jobsworth" - a phrase coined by the BBC's That's Life team. They would award a "Jobsworth" trophy each week to the most pointless and frustrating bit of bureaucracy reported to them by the viewing public. The name derives from "That's more than my job's worth...".

Playing him is Richard Briars, who was well known at the time for playing the pedantic Martin Bryce in the sitcom Ever Decreasing Circles (1984 - 1989). He portrays the character as a cross between Adolf Hitler and Blakey, the Jobsworth inspector in ITV sitcom On The Buses.

There is one male character in the story who isn't a Caretaker, and that's Pex. He was supposed to be a lumbering Stallone / Schwarzenegger sort of character, who looked tough but was really a coward. Unfortunately this intended juxtaposition between image and reality was ruined through miscasting for the part.

The Kangs speak in slogans they have heard - "build high for happiness" etc, and have names deriving from urban architecture and their surroundings - Bin Liner, Fire Escape and so forth. They are supposed to come across as quite feral, but are too well groomed and well-spoken and so the effect is lost.

The robotic cleaners didn't feature much in Wyatt's initial drafts, but emerged as JNT insisted on a monster of some sort.

Next time: bad aliens, good aliens and rock 'n' roll aliens all converge on a 1950's holiday camp, after first encountering Ken Dodd...