Doctor Who: Ghost Light [1989]

Typical of the last season of Who - this has a workable premise ineptly handled, lots of good players struggling and an overall air of haste and hysteria. The Doctor [McCoy] and Ace [Sophie Aldred] materialise in 1883, in a mansion Ace burned down in the 1980s after a bad experience with a haunting - a solid character idea that seems shoe-horned into the story, which does little to justify the essence-of-evil business since everyone seems to bungle rather than be malicious. The master of the house [Ian Hogg] is an archetypal Victorian home tyrant, who turns out to be a self-evolved alien minion with a plan to assassinate Queen Victoria - by duping a big-game hunter [Michael Cochrane] into 'hunting the crowned Saxe-Coburg' - which is bad enough, but the Doctor blunderingly resurrects Hogg's boss, Light [John Hallam], an alien recording angel who has been driven mad by the task of cataloguing earthly lifeforms and now plans to turn them all to stone to end the job [ie: to save the Queen, the Doctor imperils all life on Earth]. Also on hand are a whole bunch of other potentially interesting characters who are only vaguely used: a Neanderthal butler, a sinister housekeeper [Sylvia Sims], a mad Victorian miss [Katherine Schlesinger], another alien Control [Sharon Duce] who wants to evolve from rag-covered hag to 'ladlylike', an anti-Darwin vicar who devolves into a banana-munching monkey, a troupe of gun-toting silent maids [if they spoke, they'd have to be paid more] and Frank Windsor as a dim policeman who ends up gruesomely reduced to 'primordial soup' and served at dinner ['the cream of Scotland Yard'], plus a couple more stock bug-eyed monsters who are supposed to be Hogg's previous bodies.

The sets and costumes are BBC period standard [and arguably Schlesinger's music hall song about evolution, That's the Way to the Zoo, is the best thing here]. The Doctor is an unhelpful bystander too quickly pulled into the action and Ace gets arbitrary lumps of character development [and costume change] that needed more time to set up [though Aldred is getting better material and rising to it]. A three-parter, it's hard to say whether it ought to have had an extra episode - since most four-parters of the time have the same, headache-inducing feel. The 'action' scenes, which include a cat-fight, lurching monsters and a great deal of running around, are especially clumsy.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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