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Anybody remotely interesting is mad in some way or another
I am sure it did my physical health no favors to stay up late with an old serial of Doctor Who (1963–), but the mental health benefits of watching Sylvester McCoy face down a tough crowd of gods with misdirection and timing are incalculable.
Dark carnivals are older than Ray Bradbury, Charles Finney, or even Robert Wiene, but The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (1988) may have the edge on metafiction with the insatiable audience of its Psychic Circus, a sort of austerity Nielsen family impassively consuming crisps and popcorn as they rate the gladiatorial parade of desperate or starstruck acts, among them a sly intergalactic explorer, his youthful companion light-years from her planet, and an earnest anorak of a superfan still chattering about his complete memorabilia right up until the ringmaster picks his melted glasses out of the grease spot of his failed turn in the spotlight. Grounded in the desert wastes of Segonax, the circus which used to be an emblem of freedom and imagination has been parasitized into a blood-engine of amusement on demand, cannibalizing punters and performers alike: "So long as you entertain us, you may live. When you no longer entertain us, you die." The conceit could only feel more on the nose if it had aired for the program's untimely cancellation rather than the finale of its next-to-last-until-revival season.
Fortunately for metaphor, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy has more than self-satire going for it. Beyond the Doctor-companion parody, T. P. McKenna's Captain Cook makes a wickedly funny foil in his own right, a crashing colonial fossil whom even death cannot prevent from perpetrating one more long-winded, self-aggrandizing anecdote of his exotic travels, while the "unusual little specimen" of Jessica Martin's Mags, so initially docile for her punk-streaked Goth-chic, turns out the kind of recklessly delightful ally with whom Sophie Aldred's Ace, even without a good rucksack's worth of Nitro-9, can take on killer clowns with laser beams and high-kick a zombie at the endless eye of a well. The truculent stallholder played by Peggy Mount leaves off crabbing about vagabond riff-raff and hippie weirdos and beams in approval at Gian Sammarco's Whizzkid in his chipper jumper and bow tie until this Carter-esque innocent on a bicycle, too, asks her the way to the Psychic Circus. "Everyone who's up to no good goes there. We locals wouldn't touch it with a barge pole." When it was still the pride and delight of the star-ranging circus folk whose merry prankster bus weathers among the dunes like the sold-out promises of the '60's, her disdain might have come off as plain conservative prejudice; under the new management of the Sunday-suited, stone-faced trio in the otherwise deserted stands, it is obviously the forewarning of a horror film. Whatever permeates the candy-floss posters and canvas-swathed shadows of the circus, it has split the original troupe between those like Ricco Ross' Ringmaster and Deborah Manship's Morgana who enable its mechanism out of survival and those who have been destroyed in resisting it, like the tragic lovers of Dee Sadler's Flowerchild and Christopher Guard's Bellboy or the even farther gone case of Chris Jury's Deadbeat, a broom-pushing burnout whose cryptic mumblings veer off in fright from the fortune-teller's crystal ball as if he's glimpsed in it something even more fearful than the Hanged Man her pack turned up for the Doctor. Most willing of all its servants is the baleful harlequin of Ian Reddington's Chief Clown, whose Glasgow-grinning whiteface and delicate double-voiced gestures seem designed to induce coulrophobia in anyone who didn't enter the big top with it, like Ace who had to be half-cajoled, half-dared past her touchy reluctance to take a chance on the Psychic Circus. "I've never liked clowns," she declares, which feels like a joke in itself considering who she's traveling with. From his introduction trying to teach himself out of Juggling for the Complete Klutz through the finale where the transparent patter of conjuring tricks turns suddenly to the real thing, as old and strong as an amulet snatched up through a smash of illusions, the serial showcases the quirky, slapstick side of the Seventh Doctor which cannot be separated from his restless, dangerous responsibilities, murmuring as a wind of chaos picks up around him, "Things are beginning to get out of control quicker than I expected." He rattles an optimistic tattoo on a pair of spoons, blinks at a ball that went up and never came down, drops all of his juggling clubs at the blasé revelation that a successful performance only means "you last longer." His Tarot card comes true, but he might as accurately have drawn the Fool strolling out to the brink of disaster, the Magician with his mountebank's table of props. Accused of being an old hippie himself, he flashes a self-deprecating peace sign. Despite the climactic identification of its antagonists as the "Gods of Ragnarok," the serial makes little use of Norse myth beyond the visual name-drop of runestones demarcating the boundaries between layers of time, but I might have to waive my firelike default of Loki to accommodate a dark-haired little man with a paisley scarf and a Panama hat and a funny umbrella not breaking stride as a dread realm self-destructs behind him, the trickster who brought down the house. "La commedia è finita!"
The Greatest Show in the Galaxy was written by Stephen Wyatt, directed by Alan Wareing, and part of the tantalizing, short-circuited continuity of script editor Andrew Cartmel, and if its pacing is odd—the first of its four episodes plays more like a prologue than a slow burn, while its ending wraps up so fast it seems to be missing more than one beat—its production design is wonderful. Instead of a safe distanced gloss of futurism, it jumbles itself up with displaced components of the past like one of the unmooring soundscapes that Mark Fisher loved to write about, a confused and curdled nostalgia. We can be treated to the iconically sfnal sight of the pennants of the Psychic Circus fluttering against a cloudless sky in which a ringed planet ghosts like a daymoon, topped almost to camp by the addition of an alien biker gunning his space hog toward the tent like a hard rock album cover, but the circus itself is trapped in a degraded loop, as slightly unreal as if reconstructed from Ace's childhood memories of "kids' stuff" that was at once "naff" and "boring" and "creepy." A hearse full of white-faced clowns isn't scarier just because some of them are robots, but their use of colorful kites to hunt down desperate fugitives makes the sense of a nightmare, painted eyes staring down out of the sun. The ringmaster raps and freestyles echt '80's, but the robo-conductor which guards the derelict bus recites as it strangles intruders, "Any more fares, please? Hold tight, please. Ding, ding," like a murderbot by Flanders and Swann. Behind the billowing curtains are stones as old as shed blood, and behind the stones? Ace and the Doctor arrive at the circus thanks to a piece of mechanical junk mail which materializes inside the TARDIS to project its canned spiel, but they'll walk away from it only because a nazar of blue and white glass functions exactly as it folklorically should. The effect is an unsettling collage, recognizably put together wrong. No wonder the gods in their human guises look like the dead hand of a squarer age of TV. The worst fate the circus reserves for its victims is not obliteration, but conformity: "That's what you like, isn't it? Taking someone with a touch of individuality and imagination and wearing them down to nothingness in your service." Even the Doctor, we are warned by someone who should know, can't hold out forever against their hunger, their boredom, and their fickle, vaporizing tastes. And yet the story doesn't feel like it's meant to wound its audience, the one on the other side of the fourth wall or the Internet Archive as the case may be; it feels like double-speaking, which is what Seven does best, no less weird and entertaining for what it might be warning between the lines. The Doctor does an escape act. Ace activates a half-dismantled robot with the characteristically resourceful and violent mutter, "This thing had better work or I'll kick its head in." There are stilt-walkers and an astonishing request for an unissuable ticket in double time. Even around the inevitable quarry, the location shooting looks odd and dry and real. I imagine I would like a poster for the tour of the Boreatic Wastes, but I'll pass on the early collection of Ganglion pottery. This imagination brought to you by my local backers at Patreon.
Dark carnivals are older than Ray Bradbury, Charles Finney, or even Robert Wiene, but The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (1988) may have the edge on metafiction with the insatiable audience of its Psychic Circus, a sort of austerity Nielsen family impassively consuming crisps and popcorn as they rate the gladiatorial parade of desperate or starstruck acts, among them a sly intergalactic explorer, his youthful companion light-years from her planet, and an earnest anorak of a superfan still chattering about his complete memorabilia right up until the ringmaster picks his melted glasses out of the grease spot of his failed turn in the spotlight. Grounded in the desert wastes of Segonax, the circus which used to be an emblem of freedom and imagination has been parasitized into a blood-engine of amusement on demand, cannibalizing punters and performers alike: "So long as you entertain us, you may live. When you no longer entertain us, you die." The conceit could only feel more on the nose if it had aired for the program's untimely cancellation rather than the finale of its next-to-last-until-revival season.
Fortunately for metaphor, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy has more than self-satire going for it. Beyond the Doctor-companion parody, T. P. McKenna's Captain Cook makes a wickedly funny foil in his own right, a crashing colonial fossil whom even death cannot prevent from perpetrating one more long-winded, self-aggrandizing anecdote of his exotic travels, while the "unusual little specimen" of Jessica Martin's Mags, so initially docile for her punk-streaked Goth-chic, turns out the kind of recklessly delightful ally with whom Sophie Aldred's Ace, even without a good rucksack's worth of Nitro-9, can take on killer clowns with laser beams and high-kick a zombie at the endless eye of a well. The truculent stallholder played by Peggy Mount leaves off crabbing about vagabond riff-raff and hippie weirdos and beams in approval at Gian Sammarco's Whizzkid in his chipper jumper and bow tie until this Carter-esque innocent on a bicycle, too, asks her the way to the Psychic Circus. "Everyone who's up to no good goes there. We locals wouldn't touch it with a barge pole." When it was still the pride and delight of the star-ranging circus folk whose merry prankster bus weathers among the dunes like the sold-out promises of the '60's, her disdain might have come off as plain conservative prejudice; under the new management of the Sunday-suited, stone-faced trio in the otherwise deserted stands, it is obviously the forewarning of a horror film. Whatever permeates the candy-floss posters and canvas-swathed shadows of the circus, it has split the original troupe between those like Ricco Ross' Ringmaster and Deborah Manship's Morgana who enable its mechanism out of survival and those who have been destroyed in resisting it, like the tragic lovers of Dee Sadler's Flowerchild and Christopher Guard's Bellboy or the even farther gone case of Chris Jury's Deadbeat, a broom-pushing burnout whose cryptic mumblings veer off in fright from the fortune-teller's crystal ball as if he's glimpsed in it something even more fearful than the Hanged Man her pack turned up for the Doctor. Most willing of all its servants is the baleful harlequin of Ian Reddington's Chief Clown, whose Glasgow-grinning whiteface and delicate double-voiced gestures seem designed to induce coulrophobia in anyone who didn't enter the big top with it, like Ace who had to be half-cajoled, half-dared past her touchy reluctance to take a chance on the Psychic Circus. "I've never liked clowns," she declares, which feels like a joke in itself considering who she's traveling with. From his introduction trying to teach himself out of Juggling for the Complete Klutz through the finale where the transparent patter of conjuring tricks turns suddenly to the real thing, as old and strong as an amulet snatched up through a smash of illusions, the serial showcases the quirky, slapstick side of the Seventh Doctor which cannot be separated from his restless, dangerous responsibilities, murmuring as a wind of chaos picks up around him, "Things are beginning to get out of control quicker than I expected." He rattles an optimistic tattoo on a pair of spoons, blinks at a ball that went up and never came down, drops all of his juggling clubs at the blasé revelation that a successful performance only means "you last longer." His Tarot card comes true, but he might as accurately have drawn the Fool strolling out to the brink of disaster, the Magician with his mountebank's table of props. Accused of being an old hippie himself, he flashes a self-deprecating peace sign. Despite the climactic identification of its antagonists as the "Gods of Ragnarok," the serial makes little use of Norse myth beyond the visual name-drop of runestones demarcating the boundaries between layers of time, but I might have to waive my firelike default of Loki to accommodate a dark-haired little man with a paisley scarf and a Panama hat and a funny umbrella not breaking stride as a dread realm self-destructs behind him, the trickster who brought down the house. "La commedia è finita!"
The Greatest Show in the Galaxy was written by Stephen Wyatt, directed by Alan Wareing, and part of the tantalizing, short-circuited continuity of script editor Andrew Cartmel, and if its pacing is odd—the first of its four episodes plays more like a prologue than a slow burn, while its ending wraps up so fast it seems to be missing more than one beat—its production design is wonderful. Instead of a safe distanced gloss of futurism, it jumbles itself up with displaced components of the past like one of the unmooring soundscapes that Mark Fisher loved to write about, a confused and curdled nostalgia. We can be treated to the iconically sfnal sight of the pennants of the Psychic Circus fluttering against a cloudless sky in which a ringed planet ghosts like a daymoon, topped almost to camp by the addition of an alien biker gunning his space hog toward the tent like a hard rock album cover, but the circus itself is trapped in a degraded loop, as slightly unreal as if reconstructed from Ace's childhood memories of "kids' stuff" that was at once "naff" and "boring" and "creepy." A hearse full of white-faced clowns isn't scarier just because some of them are robots, but their use of colorful kites to hunt down desperate fugitives makes the sense of a nightmare, painted eyes staring down out of the sun. The ringmaster raps and freestyles echt '80's, but the robo-conductor which guards the derelict bus recites as it strangles intruders, "Any more fares, please? Hold tight, please. Ding, ding," like a murderbot by Flanders and Swann. Behind the billowing curtains are stones as old as shed blood, and behind the stones? Ace and the Doctor arrive at the circus thanks to a piece of mechanical junk mail which materializes inside the TARDIS to project its canned spiel, but they'll walk away from it only because a nazar of blue and white glass functions exactly as it folklorically should. The effect is an unsettling collage, recognizably put together wrong. No wonder the gods in their human guises look like the dead hand of a squarer age of TV. The worst fate the circus reserves for its victims is not obliteration, but conformity: "That's what you like, isn't it? Taking someone with a touch of individuality and imagination and wearing them down to nothingness in your service." Even the Doctor, we are warned by someone who should know, can't hold out forever against their hunger, their boredom, and their fickle, vaporizing tastes. And yet the story doesn't feel like it's meant to wound its audience, the one on the other side of the fourth wall or the Internet Archive as the case may be; it feels like double-speaking, which is what Seven does best, no less weird and entertaining for what it might be warning between the lines. The Doctor does an escape act. Ace activates a half-dismantled robot with the characteristically resourceful and violent mutter, "This thing had better work or I'll kick its head in." There are stilt-walkers and an astonishing request for an unissuable ticket in double time. Even around the inevitable quarry, the location shooting looks odd and dry and real. I imagine I would like a poster for the tour of the Boreatic Wastes, but I'll pass on the early collection of Ganglion pottery. This imagination brought to you by my local backers at Patreon.
no subject
First Doctor
An Unearthly Child Episode 1 (& part of 2 if you like) - the first episode. It's lovely. (I am not going to deter you from watching the other 3 eps if you want. I even like them, but as I said earlier, they feature a lot of cavemen and are not popular. Wild first serial choice. Nothing changes. XD)
The Aztecs
The Space Museum
The Time Meddler - all 3 of these are good and all deal interestingly with actual time travel issues and debates (see my Aztecs note above, tho).
The Romans - DW's editor saw Carry on Cleo and went, "I'll have some of that." Not as great as Cleo obv, but a lovely time nevertheless. (Best watched after you've met this TARDIS team, see above.)
The Tenth Planet (1 ep partially missing) - not an ep to start with for One, because it's his final story and William Hartnell's condition was already deteriorating and he's absent for some of what we do have as well. It's the first Cybermen story, the first proper base-under-siege story, and it's eerie and the tension between the Cybermen who want to 'save' the humans and the humans who feel pity for what the Cybermen have done to themselves is interesting. Also Ben and Polly who are otherwise unfairly burninated.
The War Machines is also great if you're liking One. And Ben and Polly intro, also non-burninated.
Second Doctor
The Mind Robber - if you haven't already watched this (you might have done??) - it's the trippiest 1960 episode there is. It might all be a dream, who knows? (5 eps)
Tomb of the Cybermen - for my caveats see above, but everyone else would rec it and it is marvellous for Two himself and the Cybermen are very eerie and great again.
6 parters, but very good (and Web has lost an episode): Enemy of the World - future spy shenanigans and dopplegangers and surprisingly great. Recovered in 2013.
Web of Fear - the Yeti are in the Underground - v good, v creepy, funny furry monsters, a weird enemy and the Brigadier arrives (that is the episode that was stolen and sold).
And I know, I know, but because it is amazing and if you're ever up for it: The War Games - epic 10 part finale, where the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe land in the trenches in WWI but everything is way weirder than it seems and the layers peel away and away until finally the Doctor has to face his own people for the first time. Also for fans of this TARDIS team (adorable): contender for one of the most heartbreaking endings. It also explains a LOT about Three.
Third Doctor
Spearhead From Space - alien invasion story, but 4 parts, good place to start, shot on film for emergency/strike reasons, introduces the marvellous Liz Shaw and the Doctor exiled to Earth to work with UNIT.
(As I said, I love season 7, which this kicks off, and if you like the THree-Brig-Liz combo, I recommend the whole thing, despite the 7 parters of 70s slowness. They're all really into ethical dilemmas and this TARDIS team has a very adult, smart feel. But also, the last one, which is:)
Inferno (7 parts) - don't drill into the centre of the earth! The Doctor has had enough of his exile, there's green goo (of course) and a parallel earth (for pretty much the only time in DW), and a day the Doctor cannot save.
The Terror of the Autons - (4 parts) HELLO ROGER DELGADO. ♥ (Also the lovely Katy Manning.)
The Daemons - (5 parts) but occult shenanigans in yr 1970s quaint village, with the Reverend Masters, a white witch and the BBC trying to interview the devil, and even the Doctor must believe in some magic, maybe.
The Green Death - ecological horror with GIANT MAGGOTS in Wales, thanks to the horrors of capitalism and AI and closing down the pit. (6 eps)
Fourth Doctor
The Ark in Space (might well have influenced Alien even. Also. bubblewrap ahoy.)
Horror of Fang Rock - I know this has been recced to you, the lighthouse one, with Leela and a green blob.
Image of the Fendahl - more occult goings on, but Chris Boucher style (I've said enough on this one. I love it, everyone is like, it's fine, it's not that great,
Stones of Blood - occult shenanigans again! But also Amelia Rumford, who is one of the most awesome guest characters.
Androids of Tara - shameless and wonderful Zenda pastiche. ("Next time I shall not be so lenient!")
City of Death - Douglas Adams, Julian Glover, actual real Paris. You will have been recced this, but if you haven't seen it yet, I have to second the rec.
State of Decay - Vampires!
Warrior's Gate - one of the most deeply weird ever, in the best way, I think. defies description. (These two form a sort of loose trilogy with Full Circle coming first. That has a very cool SF theme; personally I don't find it as great as the other two, but if you like the s18 vibe, which you might, it's worth knowing.)
Keeper of Traken (I'm having a sudden feeling you might have watched this? But it's an SF fairy tale with a serpent in the utopian garden.) Again, this forms a sort of loose trilogy, with Logopolis (Four's final, fighting entropy, adventure) and Castrovalva, Five's first story, but they can all still be watched individually. Logopolis and Castrovalva are more closely linked.
Fifth Doctor
Castrovalva - The Doctor goes nowhere in the style of MC Escher.
Kinda - sort of Buddhist/anti-colonialist fable? Studio bound but nevertheless weird and compelling, especially "YOu can't mend people!" (Have you watched this? YOu may have done?)
Snakedance - sequel to Kinda, also v good, entirely different setting.
Enlightenment - the Eternals race sailing ships in space. This is actually the third part of a trilogy (again) - Mawdryn Undead, which I ought to have recced because it features not only two time periods, two Brigadiers, and the world's worst assassin, but an alien undead David Collings with spaghetti on his head almost getting to play the Doctor. (The second installment, Terminus is also kind of cool and well directed by B7's Mary Ridge, but it isn't as entertaining as Mawdryn or as good as Enlightenment, but if you're enjoying yourself, the whole trilogy is a fun watch.)
Frontios - giant woodlice vs a desperate colony at the end of the universe. I love it. ("Frontios buries its own dead.") (Others would disagree, but hey.)
caves of Androzani - probably not the best place to start with Five, but it and Peter are both very good indeed, as I said.
Sixth Doctor
Revelation of the Daleks - giant funeral planet and Daleks, what could possibly go wrong? Not a personal fave but very well done indeed and a good guest cast.
Terror of the Vervoids - as I said, low-level fun Agatha Christie mystery, the most standalone part of the Trial arc.
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Just to defuse expectations, all recommendations remain subject to the thing where for whatever reason it is harder for me to watch significant amounts of television than film, but I appreciate the time and thought that went into this list! We appear to have stumbled onto an extensive but incomplete cache of classic Who on the Internet Archive, by which I mean we discovered last night that it contains multiple reconstructed serials including Shada, but is missing the entire final season of the Seventh Doctor as well as, hilariously, because for obvious reasons I felt like rewatching it, Vengeance on Varos.
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I have even less expectation of the longer ones I included, but Two is so badly burninated, and there were a couple others i couldn't not mention no matter how slight the odds on lightning striking in the right place for it to happen. Fyi is all. ♥️
Have fun with the stash - even if it has the bad taste to exclude both seven and varos!
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I do like Mary Morris.