Love & Monsters is the series' first ever Doctor-lite episode. When Series 2 was commissioned, the 13 standard episodes were to be produced along with a Christmas Special. The amount of time available to make 14 episodes was the same as that for 13, however.
Options were to drop one of the standard episodes, or "double bank" - i.e. have two episodes filmed at the same time. The former option was not popular, as it would mean a shorter season and 13 episodes were more ideal for overseas sales, as this was exactly one quarter of a TV station's output year.
With double-banking however, you had the problem of needing to have your regular cast in two places at the same time. The way round this was to drastically reduce their screen time, so they basically became cameos in their own series.
Davies himself agreed to write this story, and decided to have it focus on how other people viewed the Doctor from a distance. This was partly inspired by a Star Trek: TNG episode called "Lower Decks", which focused on an incident as viewed by non-regular crewmembers; and "The Zeppo", an episode of Buffy which was told entirely from the viewpoint of one particular character (Xander).
The episode began life as a story called "I Love The Doctor" (or I 'Heart' The Doctor) which was a potential comic strip by RTD.
The Elton Pope character was originally going to be female.
RTD was mainly inspired by his experiences of organised fandom. At conventions and other events he had seen people come together due to their love of Doctor Who and become friends - their friendship actually growing beyond their shared liking of Doctor Who. Whilst it remained a passion, they could enjoy other non-Who things together. However, there was a minority of people who were so diehard in their love of the show that they could not think of anything beyond it, always wanting to drag things back to the programme, whose minutiae they pored over. They tended to be regarded by the majority as killjoys, being so overly obsessed with the show.
This all formed the backdrop to the 'LINDA' group, who had the shared obsession about the Doctor but could build on this to explore other areas; and Victor Kennedy - obsessed to the exclusion of everything else.
These total obsessives had a tendency to suck the fun out of things, which probably chimed with the alien which had been planned for inclusion in this episode. (It has been claimed that Victor is based on one fan in particular - Ian Levine, who acted as continuity consultant under JNT until the two had a huge falling out. You might think that, but I couldn't possibly comment).
For the second series, RTD had organised increased cross-promotion with Blue Peter, the BBC children's magazine programme which had long been a great friend of Doctor Who. The series had featured regularly ever since the initial success of the Daleks (designer Ray Cusick had been granted a coveted Blue Peter badge). Former companion Peter Purves had been a presenter on the series for around a decade, and it became a tradition that new Doctors would appear on the programme as one of their very first publicity acts. Sophie Aldred had worn her own BP badge as part of Ace's costume, and her number one wish had been to be a BP presenter. (Offered the choice, she would probably have picked it over Doctor Who).
For Series One, Blue Peter had been invited to watch the filming of Dalek, and a specially recorded clip of Blue Peter had been recorded to appear in Aliens of London - the making of a spaceship cake.
Back in 1967 BP had featured a design-a-monster competition, which had attracted record numbers of entries. The normally reclusive Patrick Troughton had helped judge it, but in character as the Doctor only.
RTD decided that Series Two would also feature a link-up with Blue Peter in the form of another design-a-monster competition. This time, however, the winner would actually get to feature in the series itself.
Among the runners-up were a football-inspired alien and a creature named "Sad Tony", who looked a bit like a weeping clown. (David Tennant appeared in the BP studio to announce the winner, and was going to call it live on air as "Sad Tony" - just to see what RTD would do with such a character).
The real winner was the Abzorbaloff, created by 9 year old William Grantham of Colchester, Essex.
This looked like a large green sumo wrestler, and was unique in that it absorbed people, whose faces could still be seen emerging from its flesh.
To play the Abzorbaloff comic Peter Kay was cast, after he had written to RTD to express his admiration for the 2005 series. He helped work out the idea that the alien spoke with his own Lancashire accent, whilst his human alter-ego Victor Kennedy had a posher voice.
As the alien is large and green it was decided that he looked a bit like a Slitheen, so RTD decided to have him come from the twin planet of Raxacoricofallapatorius. As this had a long, complicated name, he jokingly called the twin world Clom.
The framing device for the episode was Elton Pope who, with his friends in LINDA, represented the sort of fandom RTD favoured. Elton would narrate much of the story in the form of a video diary. His experiences with the Doctor ranged from childhood to more recent events - allowing for the use of clips from Rose, Aliens of London, and The Christmas Invasion, plus specially shot re-enactments of the Auton attack.
An earlier draft had a much older Elton, whose mother had been killed by a plastic daffodil (Terror of the Autons) and who had witnessed the Skarasen attack on London (Terror of the Zygons).
Interestingly, the music references in this story, of which there are many, imply an older character, with Elton named after Elton John and his favourite band being the Electric Light Orchestra.
LINDA was inspired by one of RTD's earlier children's projects - Why Don't You...?. Then it had been the "Liverpool Investigations 'N' Detective Agency".
In order to track down the Doctor, Victor Kennedy has computer files from Torchwood, which have unfortunately been corrupted by the Bad Wolf virus. At one point he is seen reading a newspaper which mentions a certain politician named Saxon.
This means that this episode includes references to the story arcs for the first three series. This is the very first reference to Mr Saxon. If you consider that Clom will be one of the missing planets, we actually have all four of RTD's season-long story arcs referenced.
RTD enjoyed writing for the character of Jackie Tyler, and felt that actress Camille Coduri was somewhat underused. There was to be a lengthy gap between Jackie appearances (in the two Cyberman double parters), so he decided that a further function for Love & Monsters would be to show what happens to the family and friends of the companion when they are left behind. The series had never really touched on this before.
Elton would try to track down the Doctor through Rose by making friends with her mother. In the process, he actually becomes very fond of her and resents having to lie to her - only for her to find out what he's up to anyway. She shops him to her daughter, which is where the Doctor and Rose finally engage with the story proper. There had been one earlier scene (the one with the Hoix, which was unconnected to the main narrative) but the Doctor and Rose only really feature in the scene in the alley where the Abzorbaloff threatens Elton. Tennant and Piper were making The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit at the time.
The Hoix was made up of left-over bits of monster costume in Neil Gorton's workshop.
The Hoix sequence, with characters running back and forth, was inspired by the Scooby Doo cartoon series.
This episode is generally regarded as a 'Marmite' one - that being a foodstuff which people either really love or really hate. As a rough rule of thumb, LINDA types tend to like it, whilst Victor Kennedys hate it. Stupidly, some people object to it because the Doctor and Rose aren't in it enough - missing the whole point of the episode entirely.
Next time: the series attempts to make an ordinary suburban street scary - only to fail miserably...
No comments:
Post a Comment