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.
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