'VENGEANCE ON VAROS' (COLIN BAKER'S DOCTOR WHO)

First broadcast: Jan 1985
Written by Philip Martin

”MORAL: TV is bad for you. Oh. Wait a minute”
- Androzani 

Torture Porn Goes Teatime

This was a controversial story for a controversial era, criticised by foes and even some fans of the show for its supposed sadism - the point torture porn went teatime. IMDB gives it the keywords 'bare chested male', 'bare chested male bondage', 'torture', 'execution' and 'electric torture', not exactly what they said about 'Black Orchid'. 

This may well be a case of becoming the news you intended to comment on. For against a background of the ongoing Video Nasties moral panic, the scenario essentially recaps Nigel Kneale's classic dystopia 'Year of the Sex Olympics' with torture porn replacing the... er... porn-porn.

The Varosians are providing the universe's only supply of Maguffinite. (At least I think it was called that). Despite everybody else needing this for space and time travel, they are continually ripped off over its price and kept impoverished. (It may be worth noting the British miners’ strike was also much in the news at time of broadcast.) Their reliance on torture becomes a way of keeping the workers acquiescent, while providing a secondary export in selling the tapes to thrillseekers.

Yet there's an extra element which frames all this. We continually cut to Arak and Etta, two regular Varosians, watching events on their home TV as they are broadcast. The conceit is that TV on Varos is essentially CCTV - viewers will see rebels caught and punished, as this is intended to work as a deterrent. You survive this crushing life by transforming your daily masochism into your end-of-shift TV sadism. And it's this intra-story meta-commentary you focus on. (Though, bizarrely, it seems they were added only in the final rewrite.)

Neither Arak nor Etta analyses or critiques the action. In fact they just sit there and utter grumpy banalities. Which is the whole point of them. Which becomes the very point of the story. It's less a clever metafictional conceit and more a distorting mirror held up to the viewer, which makes the story feel almost like an agit-prop drama. At times it all seems uncannily prescient, satirising TV trends then still to come - 'Gogglebox' fused with 'Big Brother’, cross-booked with 'Saw'.

Admittedly, this happens partly by default. The supposed main story is, for the most part, so incidental and lacklustre you couldn't give it your attention if there was money on it. (Mostly it's a random series of encounters with cheap and unimaginative hazards, seemingly dreamt up by an accountant told to attract the BBFC guideline 'contains mild peril' as frequently as possible.) But the distinction between the two is best explained by looking at the ending. The actual ending, the story ending, is risible in extremis. It just sort of ends. Someone might as well have walked out and hung a sign up saying “and then everything was alright again”. In fact, it pretty much ends with that message read from a monitor screen.

But the cut-back to Arak and Etta verges on Beckett. Blinking in this new-found freedom they never asked for, they turn to one another:

“It's all changed. We're free.”
“Are we?”
“Yes.”
“What shall we do?”
“Dunno.”

You naturally assume at some point they'll become sucked into the main story, that the Doctor will burst into their little flat seeking shelter or something similar. The internal fourth wall seemed already established as such a filmsy partition, surely it'll get broken down. But it doesn't and it's so much better that it doesn't.

Part of the scenario is that Varos used to be a prison. But its clear, even if no-one ever says so out loud, that this is only so everybody can pretend its not a prison now. At one point we even see a set that remains a prison, but it looks pretty much like everywhere else. After all, what is wage labour but day release prison? You finish your shift, eat your ration, you watch TV and you watch your mouth. The descendants of the officers are now the political class, and the convicts the workers. Not a subtle allusion, but an effective one.

The prison setting also makes use of the limited indoor sets. Even their cheapness and basicness becomes kind of incorporated into the shabby aesthetic. Like the besieged bases of the Troughton era, production limitations are turned into an advantage – to evoke claustrophobia.

And speaking of politics... Here the chains of office are precisely that. Well-meaning politicians are constrained by a system, corralled by capitalists and chiefly there to get blamed by the workers when nothing changes. (Which it always does.) On Varos even they risk torture. Popular votes are made a binary choice, pressbuttons located handily beside the citizen's tellies. And whenever a politician loses a vote they get an electric shock, the degree proportional to the scale of their loss. 

William Burroughs once described the President as “the dumbass frontman who takes all the rap”, which is pretty much the Governor's job description. Even as he orders the arrest and execution of others he looks trapped himself, knowing he won't be getting out of this job alive. We see Arak salivating at the prospect of his demise, as he will have done with so many before.

A fitting dystopia for the era, with a metafictional conceit to bring the point home. So far, so good. However, if we look past the Governor to those corralling capitalists problems start to emerge…

There's Something Wrong With Sil

Andrew Hickey, noted 'Who' sage and fan of this story, comments “it’s not a matter of goodies and baddies, but of people being forced to fit into a corrupt, evil system, no matter what their nature.” And indeed the story’s at its strongest where this description holds.

Yet he also describes the adversary Sil as an “evil slug-like reptilian capitalist,” which seems pretty much like a baddie if ever there was. He is, it should be conceded, quite possibly right to call Sil “the last great comic grotesque of Doctor Who’s history”. Nabil Shaban gives a bravura performance, unashamedly and quite gloriously over-the-top without getting kitschy or knowing. Yet despite this there is something very wrong with Sil - and the gulf between those two quotes helps explain it.

Essentially Sil is the SF trope of the malevolent brain in the jar (here transposed into a grub in a tank), crossbred with the agit-prop standard of the wicked capitalist. And, on the surface, they fit together easily. But perhaps that's the problem, the character slips too easily into a genre in a story otherwise intent on disrupting things.

The problem with the wicked capitalist figure is that it assumes capitalists cause capitalism. Whereas in reality it is capitalism which causes capitalists. As Marx said ““the capitalist is only a function of capital, the labourer a function of labour power.” The problem with giving capitalism a face (even a malevolent face) is that it hasn't got one, it's an inhumane system because its inherently inhuman. I've argued before that the way to present those faceless corporations is as faceless corporations, issuing orders remotely and clinically – the way it was done in 'Alien'.

Or if we are to have a Sil we need several Sils, all vying to get their bid in while keeping the overall price down, all knowing they risk torture from their own corporations should they fail. Underperforming Sils could disappear and be replaced by other Sils. (Think for example of the succession of Number Twos in ’The Prisoner’.) Every player convinced the real decisions are being made elsewhere.

Worse, once you effectively remove capitalism as a motive for capitalists something else needs to be found. At which point the trap-door is thrown open to the basement of a lot of dodgy associations. There is, thankfully, no sign of anti-semitism in the portayal of Sil. But he is something of a blackamoor, a folk culture demon, a jumble of signifiers for foreign-ness. Instead of a foreigner, he's all that's foreign. While the Varosians are white he's quite literally painted black, and given two black henchmen to silently do his bidding. He talks very differently to the regular English everybody else manages. (Something diegitically blamed on a faulty translator circuit.)

Varos has hierarchies, it has wage labourers to extract goods and officials to then sell them as commodities. We see all this on the screen. But like the criminal in the mind of the tabloid columnist the capitalist is literally an alien to Varos, something from outside. Things can get better just from him going. Yet of course the longer we keep pretending capitalism lies somewhere else, intervening with but outside of our lives, the longer it will be able to stick around.

Moreover, to the foreign we need to add the missshapen. There's something creepy in learning Shanan was cast as part of an affirmative action programme for disabled actors, only to have his disability made into a visual metaphor for his villainy. Signifying villainy through disfigurement is nothing new of course, Shakespeare saddled Richard III with a hunchback. 'Who' itself has done this before now, for example with Davros. And, ultimately, is deliberately casting a disabled actor as a villain any different to deliberately casting an Asian actor as a villain?

And there's an added inducement to make capitalist villains disabled, confirming the separation between them and the supposed dignity of manual labour. For example, in the 1968 film 'Once Upon a Time in the West' the railroad magnate Morton is made a cripple. Both disability and capitalism can be seen as unnatural, deviations from the norm.

Plus, the need to make Sil the sole, or at least the primary, source of their predicament forces the story to play about as fast and loose with economics as the Tardis does with physics. If we were to get semantic about names, Sil is a word associated with a threshold (as in window sill), suggesting he's their sole link with the outside. Varos is the universe's sole supplier of the vital Maguffinite, but the whole planet seems unaware of this and the idea of sounding out another buyer seems only recently dreamed up by the current Governor. One half of the planet torturing the other half in order to flog recordings of it, that occurred to them first. At the story's end other supplies of Maguffinite are found – and the sale price promptly goes up. 

Let's give it a half mark, however. Perhaps this is in part a riposte to the commonly held view that poor countries suffer from being 'under-developed' due to a 'lack of resources'. While the conflicts that almost perpetually seem to beset, for example, the Congo are happening precisely because the country has abundant mineral deposits. The fighting occurs because there's something worth fighting over. If there wasn't, the vultures would fly elsewhere. And as the majority of the population seems unlikely to see the value of any sales, whoever might win, they'd essentially be better off if the minerals had never been discovered. And here, Maguffinite is precisely why Varos is being squeezed.

Okay, it could be claimed that criticising a 'Doctor Who' story for an underdevelped analysis of capitalist economics is kind of missing the point. The Tardis, after all, does play fast and loose with physics. Ordinarily, this objection would be right. There's not much point listing all the things a popular TV show didn't say, we're better off focusing on what it did. But by taking on these agit-prop attributes 'Varos' is something of a special case, almost setting itself up for such questions to be asked.

A Cocktail Of Poisons

It can be hard to escape the feeling the story is actually little more than one of the torture porn tapes it's supposedly satirising. It's cheap production and poor direction only add to this. The feeling doesn't come from the degree of violence, which (despite all the infamy) isn't actually high. It's more the unremitting nature of it all. The story's structured around an attempt to escape a dungeon that finds everywhere else is a dungeon too, torture and claustrophobia crossbred. You start to yearn for one single shaft of daylight to cross those dungeons. Video nasty? Well it's shot on video and can be pretty nasty.

And that’s partly due to the peculiar combination of torture and metafiction having a strangely lacing effect. Strange, but with a precursor. Darren at The M0vie Blog describes ”the set design [of the original Start Trek episode] ‘The Empath’’” as ”sofas without furniture sets, consoles without walls, chains without ceiling hooks. It is haunting and unsettling, feeling incomplete. The set design in ’The Empath’ looks wrong on an instinctive level. ’The Empath’ wanders into the realm of the uncanny, suggesting that there something fundamentally broken.”

And like ‘Vengeance On Varos’, it’s also notorious for torture scenes. (Which led to it being banned by the BBC until 1994.) Yet was that just the torture? Didn’t that uncanny set design and those visceral scenes combine to create a cocktail of poisons? Something too strange to accept, yet too harsh to dismiss as mere artifice. Different, opposing reactions are stirred in you at once. The sets on ‘Vengeance On Varos’ aren’t as blatantly Brechtian. But the metafictional aspects of the story, the ever-present reminders that everything you see was made to be filmed, creates a similar cocktail. And with both, there’s often the feeling that the creators aren’t really aware of of what they’ve created, how powerful it it and so can’t really control the dose.

Added to which the second-biggest problem after Sil... well, that's the Doctor. It's bizarre to consider the story was originally conceived for the nicer-than-nice Fifth Doctor. Because Baker is here at the height of his psychopath-dressed-as-clown persona. Before the adventure starts, he's presented as listless, sinking into a torpor. He seems to need the conflict as much as the Tardis needs Maguffinite.

And once on Varos he seems to take to life there. Virtually the first thing he does on landing is to point a laser gun at a guard. We also see him prepare a death trap using poisonous vines, and in the acid bath scene (the most infamous moment of this infamous story) not only do his actions lead to the gruesome deaths of two guards he even makes what James Chapman calls a “sub-James Bond quip”. With the protagonist himself taking such a relish in what you might expect him to oppose, it comes to feel as confining morally as those limited sets are physically.

However, the Doctor’s implication in this is less to do with any grand scheme to make him initially dislikeable, and more to do with good old-fashioned cock-ups. The guard was supposed to fall into the acid bath by accident, but poor direction left this unclear. And as scripted the other guards would have blundered into those vines. However, the real cock-up is something broader...

To quote Andrew Hickey again, he notes the story “feels a lot like '2000AD' of the period… biting political satire and ultraviolence For The Kids.” In fact the story was broadcast in place of an ultimately unfilmed script by '2000 AD's chief deviser, Pat Mills. And one of the chief ingredients of '2000AD' of the era was its irreverent black humour. However, much of this was taken out of Martin's script during editing. And when you extract the humour, what you're left with is the blackness. Where it remains seems largely confined to Arak and Etta. Elsewhere, the few lines that survive merely sink things deeper. The acid bath scene was intended to be played comedically, presumably some kind of 'black slapstick', after which the Doctor's sub-Bond quip would have been more in context.

However, we should remind ourselves that after the saccharine Davison a more rough-edged Doctor was required. If they pushed the dial too far in the other direction, it was at least the right direction. Acid bath deaths are tricky to overlook, true, but at the same time – this is kind of what he does. This could be the biggest time since ‘Power of the Daleks’ where the Doctor has behaved as such an anarchic, disruptive force – throwing everything up in the air and then abruptly leaving, figuring where and how it lands is someone else’s business. Sil's raging cry “why is everything no longer as it was?” is actually quite glorious, one of the show's signature lines.

There's little silver lining to be found with Peri, however. Particularly given the way the story insists on auto-critique, her role become self-parodic without anyone seeming to notice. She basically gets herself into rescue situations while wearing a tight-fitting top. Nicola Bryant might as well have given up on acting the part altogether and just struck model poses. As much as she's given any characterisation it's a general disgruntlement with the overall state of things, including her (non) relationship with the Doctor. 

While the only other intra-story female character, Areta, seems to have the role of a rebel's girlfriend. (Handily for her, Varos' prisons allow hairspray.) As with the wicked capitalists, this seems all the worse for a story so keen to be making some kind of a progressive political statement.

Torture to the Left, Torpor to the Right

And while we're focusing on the downside, Arak and Etta aren't entirely getting off the hook. It needs conceding that there's problems with the metafictional device itself. Those who celebrate this controversial story tend to see it as the one which “took on” Mary Whitehouse and the show's other censorial critics. But ironically it may be the one which gave them the most ground.

Certainly, if this is 'about' the video nasties moral panic the panic is less called out than used as a basis. Chiefly, this was the association of horror films with snuff movies, an accusation then widespread and about as baseless. (Mostly centred around the 1976 film 'Snuff' which, seeking publicity through notoriety, claimed to show a real murder. This stunt may have been sick but it was a blatant hoax, and was well known as such before the 'nasties' moral panic even began.)

Moreover, while 'Snuff' and some of the other films might have well deserved their 'nasty' tag home videos had become quite a working class pursuit, and much of the panic was underlain with a paternalist concern the proles were escaping the regulated world of broadcast TV. (Even commercial TV in those days operated under strict controls.) It was a moral panic in about every sense.

And, as is so often with agit prop, there's the same self-righteous middle class concern the masses aren't being educated in the way they should be, and so are complicit in their own torpor. (Think of the sanctimonious disdain so often found in Crass' 'You're Already Dead' rhetoric.) It fits all too easily with the common conservative myth that the poor are responsible for their own state of being. One just proposes regularly scheduled does of elevating costume drama, the other sub-Brechtian shock tactics.

Take Arak and Etta on their proletarian sofa. Ostensibly, they're watching 'Doctor Who'. They're watching the same scenes as us, after all, and we're watching 'Doctor Who'. But it's clear they're watching TV, just watching what happens to be on. They demonstrably don't even know the names of the characters. They're a 'Doctor Who' fan's somewhat condescending picture of the casual viewer. Had I watched it on transmission, I'd almost certainly have associated the couple with my parents, grumbling endlessly about repeats and politicians. Watching it now, 'Who' fans probably think of the gullible fools who'll watch reality TV over their readymeal dinners when they could be treating themselves to a DVD of 'The Space Pirates'. Whichever, fans of show and by association the show itself, are semi-inoculated from this auto-critique. We’re okay, the problem’s wall with you. 

In an era of interesting failures this may be the biggest of all, and you may notice I didn't qualify there which word I was referring to. If it doesn't really work, if it got confused over itself about what it was doing, there may not be any way it possibly could work. But you're not even sure if its actually trying to. It may have intended to fail, to be self-sabotaging, breaking itself on prime-time TV hoping the shrapnel it throws off breaks everything around it and chucks us Arak and Ettas off our collective sofas. A slap in the face of public taste, the Dadaist urinal of broadcasting.

Or, to misquote Arak and Etta:

“What was that all about?”
“Dunno”