Love & Monsters

After the accomplished space opera of The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit we come crashing back down to Earth with arguably the most self-indulgent RTD script to date: one egocentrically centred around the producer’s previous Who efforts (with inevitable flashbacks, or reconstructions, of scenes from Rose, Aliens of London and The Christmas Invasion; and a central plot which derives itself directly from the first episode Rose) and featuring what resembles a fat, flatulent Sil with a Bolton accent from, surprise, surprise, the twin planet of the Slitheens, the contrastingly monosyllabic Clom, courtesy of an admittedly generally straight performance from Peter Kay. Kay is reasonably believable as the villain Victor Kennedy, rising subtly above the fairly cheap quips and one-liners from RTD. What is absolutely absurd however is how once Kennedy reveals himself as an alien, Kay suddenly slips into his native Bolton accent. Well, we’ve had a Mancunian Timelord previously, so why not a blob from Bolton? I don’t think it’s being a snob to prefer aliens speaking in non-regional accents – remember the stick the fans used to chuck at Stor the Sontaran in Invasion of Time for his slight London twang? And, indeed, the vaguely Glaswegian Vardans in same story? And the Canadian Cyber Leader in Revenge of the Cybermen? Not to mention the Brummie Vervoids? As far as I recall though, those were the only comparable examples to the Bolton Abzorbaloff. RTD also gifts us with the first ever alien to have its name chosen for it by the incidental characters, which further gifts us with probably the funniest moments in this fairly comedic story as Kay remarks with a hand gesture, ‘Abzorbaloff – I like that’. I suppose though this was fortunate as I was thinking prior to screening that to have a name so obviously descriptive of one’s primary function would be absurd. But what we actually have in the Abzorbaloff is a comic-book alien that smacks, particularly vocally, of the Vogons from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, wherein ‘it’ would more appropriately sit. But not in the essentially straight sci-fi of Doctor Who; well, mostly straight anyway.

The scene near the beginning in which the Doctor and Rose are chased back and forth from behind the conveniently placed walls of a corridor – the set clearly structured purely to achieve this pantomime effect – is utterly ludicrous and slapstick in the true Scoobie Doo vein. Literally, this is like watching a cartoon. It might be vaguely amusing if it wasn’t such an utter cliché. Other scenes which sit incongruously in the Who cannon for their sheer comedy include the shot of the Abzorbaloff hiding behind a newspaper as he burps from his latest absorptions, and the inevitable scatological moment when one of his absorbed victims says ‘you don’t want to know’ (where she is) as the monster lifts its hefty rump to a fart sound (or has Kennedy been buying chairs from Sunshine Desserts?). But by far the most ludicrous scene in this entire story is that of the sweating, heaving Abzorbaloff chasing after Elton Pope in broad daylight – if I’d just switched on at this point I would have assumed this was some repeat of The Tomorrow People or even Rent-A-Ghost. Well, almost anyway. Yes, this is a fairly well realised monster visually, though utterly comic-book in design, and the effect of the victims’ faces straining out from his stomach is very well done and pretty sinister in its own way (reminding me of the Timelord faces on the tomb of Rassilon in Five Doctors), but come on, this is stuff. Yes, I know the monster was created by a kid, but that doesn’t mean in turn that the entire episode has to be scripted and directed as if playing to a purely juvenile audience.

Having said this however, Love and Monsters (a title uncannily like a certain Ian McKellan film) is in other ways certainly not geared towards a juvenile audience. The obvious and tedious flirtations between Jackie and Elton aside, we have as a grand finale a rather blatant allusion to fellatio at the end when, holding the face of Ursula precariously close to his crotch, Elton inevitably ejaculates (excuse pun), ‘We even have a bit of a love life’! Or is that my own murky imagination at work there? I think not. Such innuendo might be the common fodder of most modern TV programmes post 9pm, but it has absolutely no place in what is essentially an escapist family programme. The polar – or rather, bi-polar – swings between slapstick juvenilia and libidinous innuendos are becoming uncomfortable trademarks of RTD scripts, and betray an imagination – or in some instances, lack of one – which quite clearly doesn’t fit within the parameters of Doctor Who; is misplaced in the medium altogether. This isn’t to say that RTD doesn’t display a certain flair in snatches of sharp dialogue and a certain understanding of zeitgeist, but these assets to his writing – hyperbolically inflated beyond rationality though they are – are simply not suited to Doctor Who.

Love and Monsters goes some way beyond RTD’s previous attempts to give Doctor Who a complete face-lift beyond recognition into the Noughties: it is an episode which is the true distillation of this producer’s vision for the programme, one sodden in egocentrically plugged authorial self-references, an innuendo-laden, scatological comic-strip which manages just to have the edge over previous atrocities such as Aliens of London due to its unique narrative slant via the sufficiently appealing central character of Elton Pope (who, thank God, actually likes a reasonably good band too) who draws us into his obsessive little world of Doctor-spotting, shot through his home video camera. Ostensibly this unusual directorial approach works: it is refreshing to view the Doctor through the eyes of someone else, a stranger, and ironically the few brief glimpses we have of the Doctor reveal him as a more interesting and subdued enigma than the majority of this season’s episodes so far. Maybe we actually need a little less of him in a way in future; to catch him in glimpses as one often felt with the early Tom Baker performances. What I mean is, the Doctor should be on screen as much as possible, but not always so pivotally as he has been in recent episodes. Let the incidental characters take over from time to time. Love and Monsters then serves a similar function to the penultimate Sherlock Holmes episode, The Mazarin Stone, which too only featured the central actor Jeremy Brett in scenes at the beginning and the end of the episode (but due to Brett’s ill-health). As a one-off experiment this was an interesting idea, but was inevitably blasted out of the water of credibility by too many OTT (remember that term, once seen as synonymous with the Graham Williams and latter JNT era/s?) moments. And what on Earth were those snatches of LINDAs’ extra-curricular activities all about? The shot of them jamming was not only very embarrassing, but also completely and utterly superfluous to the storyline – so why do it? Because you can? That’s not enough reason, especially within the tight confines of 45 minutes. The inevitable price of such frivolous indulgences is the lack of time to explain anything about the alien menace in question – apparently the Abzorbaloff just wants to scoff a load of Timelord and then nick the TARDIS to plague the universe with his pointless appetites. How interesting. Nothing about how did he get to Earth or anything as mundane as that.

The sub-plot of Elton recalling the Doctor appearing in his house when he was a child was nicely woven in, with a lightning-quick explanation from the Timelord regarding the nature of the menace he came to deal with: ‘a shade escaped from the Howling Halls’. It would have been better perhaps to have featured more of this sub-plot, lifted though it sounds from the Sapphire and Steel train station story.

For me this episode was a pointless gap-filler, and in the main, quite embarrassing and disturbingly reminiscent of Season 24’s comic excesses. On the conceptual and scriptural level it was evidently experimental for the Who format, which did not entirely misfire, but did serve to show that here RTD wanted to indulge himself once again, at the expense of all Who convention, but I’m left wondering, what for? Did this episode add anything to the legacy of Doctor Who? I don’t really think so. Nothing worth a third viewing anyway. This concept might have suited a Who spin-off production, but not Who itself. Love and Monsters’ boasts a uniqueness of approach which is not engaging or compelling enough to justify itself, due to its essential silliness and mawkish attempt at sentiment. It only just has the edge over the facile New Earth due to its unconventionality and knowing humour, but is a close runner up for worst episode this year so far.

4/10