For the first couple of Christmas Specials, Russell T Davies employed typical festive traditions in his scripts - subverting them to turn them into dangers to be faced by the Doctor and companion. We were given deadly Christmas Trees and tree decorations, and killer robot Santas.
A white Christmas was never down to real snow. It was the debris of blown-up Sycorax spaceships, or an artificial effect generated by the TARDIS.
Festive tunes were heard on the soundtrack - especially the perennial favourites by Slade and Wizzard - whilst those robot Santas formed brass bands playing popular carols.
Other Christmas references included the ill-fated Guinevere probe to Mars - which mirrored the real life Beagle II failure to land on the Red Planet on 25th December.
For the third Special, RTD was able to make the story festive by simply setting it on Christmas morning - even though the location was an alien spaceship, full of alien beings.
They had come to Earth as tourists, specifically to experience an Earth Christmas - or specifically a Western, Christian Christmas. The spaceship - a copy of the Titanic - has been decorated with tree and tinsel, and festive music is playing. Murray Gold's new piece, The Stowaway, has a definite Pogues vibe, reminding us of the huge Christmas hit Fairy Tale of New York.
We might have had Santa Clauses before, but so far Christmas angels hadn't been covered. We make up for that here with the Heavenly Host - clearly inspired by the Sandminer robots seen in 1976's The Robots of Death in terms of the aesthetic and the calm voices. As well as referencing the biblical host, as in a large number, the angels also act as literal hosts - performing an information service to the passengers.
The costumes remind us of the sort of thing someone might wear to play Gabriel in the local school or church Nativity play.
When the meteoroids approach, one of the passengers likens them to the Christmas star - covered more obviously in The Runaway Bride.
A new Christmas tradition is also turned to, by RTD - Christmas telly.
These days, there are some big budget movies which never see the inside of a cinema. They go straight to Video On Demand / streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, who put up a fair whack of the funding, or they end up on the growing number of specific studio-based streaming platforms - Disney being the biggest and most popular, thanks to having Star Wars, Marvel and its own massive animation history. The Paramount one relies on the Star Trek franchise.
In the pre-video age, if a film never hit the cinemas then it was simply never seen at all. In the UK, the BBC and ITV would bid for the rights to broadcast the bigger movies, and after paying out lots of money they would save them for holiday periods - bank holidays, Easter and Christmas.
One of the most popular genres of bank holiday film was the Disaster Movie. RTD clearly recalled his childhood watching these big blockbuster films on these big occasions.
One movie in particular seems to have struck a chord with him - The Poseidon Adventure.
This 1972 release starred Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Shelley Winters and Red Buttons amongst many others. The Poseidon is a luxury liner, its passengers celebrating New Year when it is struck by a freak giant wave and turned upside down. Leslie Neilson played the captain, who perishes in the initial disaster. Gene Hackman's priest character has to help a mixed bag of survivors travel through the upturned ship from the public areas to the keel, hoping to reach their rescuers. As they move through the ship, most of the survivors are killed off, including Shelley Winters who had a fuller figure by the early Seventies.
The character of Foon, played by Debbie Chazen, is inspired by Winters' character in the film.
Chazen's dad had featured in Doctor Who in 1967 - as one of The Moonbase crew. She had been offered a role as a Slitheen in SJA: Revenge of the Slitheen (the secretary Janine), but turned it down - asking RTD for a role in the parent programme instead.
Having her and her husband in fancy dress, as cowboy and cowgirl, was included specifically to explain Foon having a lasso at a key moment in the chasm scene.
This chasm was a deliberate nod to the one on the Death Star in the first Star Wars film, which Luke and Leia have to cross whilst under attack by Stormtroopers.
When it came to a ship for his story, RTD had the ready made Titanic to fall back on. This remains the most famous disaster at sea, despite more recent sinkings such as the Concordia.
2012 would see the centenary of the sinking - the Titanic having sank after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic in April 1912 on its maiden voyage to New York. More than half the passengers and crew perished.
James Cameron had directed a new version of the story in 1997, one of the biggest box office hits ever, but British viewers would have much preferred the frequent TV screenings of A Night to Remember (1958) starring Kenneth More.
The ship was very much in the public eye around the time this Special was produced.
Douglas Adams, one-time writer and script editor on Doctor Who, had created a Starship Titanic for a computer video game.
42 is one of the numbers the Doctor mentions when trying to think of the protocol override code to halt the Host attacking him - a nod to Adams. RTD also has Hardaker call Earth a Level Five society - first mentioned by Adams in City of Death.
The big draw for Voyage of the Damned was most certainly its guest star. One of Kylie's creative team - Will Baker - was a huge Doctor Who fan, and would often be inspired by the programme when it came to her live shows - hence Cyberman look-alike dancers. Baker provided the link between the production team and the Australian superstar. She was approached to appear, fully expected to turn it down due to being too busy. However, everyone was surprised when she expressed a real interest, and her schedule could accommodate the filming dates.
The first Christmas Special had fallen in the middle of Rose Tyler's tenure as companion, but the next had followed her departure - allowing for a special guest star to act as a one-off companion. With Martha Jones only staying for a single season, the same could be done here - hence Astrid Peth. With the first name being an anagram of TARDIS, fans were naturally full of all manner of bizarre speculation. (The character was originally going to be called Peth Harmone).
Another guest was Bernard Cribbins, who had co-starred in the second of the Aaru Dalek movies with Peter Cushing. He was only expected to fulfil a cameo role, in a scene which played on the fact that Earth - especially London - was coming under threat by aliens every Christmas Day (The Christmas Invasion, The Runaway Bride). (The first drafts had Buckingham palace destroyed as the Titanic smashed through it, with the Queen cursing the aliens).
The newspaper vendor (named Stan in the scripts) was making a deliberate stand by refusing to evacuate. Little did anyone know at the time that he would become a series regular, working alongside the one-off companion from the previous year's Special. His love of the Royal Family was ported over, as was his background in the Parachute Regiment.
(An almost guest star was David Jason, who was considered for the role of Mr Copper - and Hollywood actor Dennis Hopper was also thought of for this, but he only had limited availability).
Geoffrey Palmer's son Charles was now a frequent director of Doctor Who episodes. Palmer was making his third and final appearance in the show - every one of his characters being killed off relatively early on (The Silurians, The Mutants).
The TARDIS falling to Earth was included (a) to add to the drama, and (b) in order to conclude the episode on Earth. Once again, the snow is not real - it's ballast from rescue ships in orbit.
For the first time in the revived series, the Doctor categorically states that he comes from the planet of Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous. He also gives his age as 900 - despite it supposedly being 953 in Time and the Rani.
Giving Midshipman Frame the first name of Alonso was the pay-off for a joke started in Army of Ghosts, where the Doctor wanted to say "Allons-y" to someone with that name, just because he liked the sound.
Next time: Donna is back, so we have another screwball comedy set-up, in which everyone is watching their weight...
No comments:
Post a Comment