June 13, 2024

Revenge of the Cybermen

“What some men will do here for diamonds / What some men will do here for gold.”

Towards the end of 1987 my next door neighbour Matthew, who was a year older than me, said something that changed my life. Something simple. It was that his Dad had some Doctor Who on video. Not some Doctor Who he’d recorded off the telly and kept, but some Doctor Who he’d bought. What? Until that exact moment, and it’s one I vividly remember I promise you, it had not occurred to me that you might be able to get Doctor Who on video. After all, they didn’t have any Doctor Who in Ampower, the local video retail and (mainly) rental shop from which we occasionally hired films for 75p a night. Video rental shops in biggish villages in provincial England all have every VHS tape you can get, right? Right. Such is the parochialism of small boys in semi-rural England.

Matthew disappeared and returned with a copy of Revenge of the Cybermen on VHS. Could I borrow it? Of course I could borrow it. We were only next door. I was inside and watching it within minutes of finding out it existed. My first sight of Tom Baker’s Doctor since transmission viewings of Logopolis and The Five Doctors. My first sight of the “slit scan” title sequence. My first sight, even, of the “diamond logo” in that title sequence.¹ An astonishing moment in a young fan’s life of “old” Doctor Who unfolding, unanticipated, before his eyes. Going from the inconceivable to the undeniable in barely any time at all. I watched that video several times that week. Because I knew I would have to give it back. It wasn’t mine. But then I had an idea. Periodically my Granddad would carry his VCR over from his house around the corner, so that he could copy from one tape to another. Duplicating VHSes of family occasions for relatives on other continents, or editing the commercials out of films he’d recorded when out. Probably at Mass or the pub. I waited until one of these occasions, and made a hesitant request. He had no objection, and soon I’d my own copy of Revenge of the Cybermen and I’d violated the 1988 Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act. Or would have, had it been passed yet.² Gosh. It really is a very long time ago.

I watched that tape so many times that when I see the episodic version now, the extra shots around the cliffhangers³ seem a weird intrusion. Like some find the “new” bits in the Star Wars Special Edition.⁴ I don’t make that comparison wholly fatuously. For something that was undeniably ancient to a boy in his first decade (anything older than you is prehistoric when you’re a child) Revenge did not seem so. It didn't feel like an artefact from the distant past. I wasn’t watching it through a filter that excused production inadequacies. I watched it with the same eyes I’d watch the rented Hollywood films that Ampower callously stocked in preference to it. But then it was only as old then as The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe (2011) is now, and that was surely only on five minutes ago. (Anything younger than you is brand new, when you’re middle aged.)

The other way in which Revenge seems like the original Star Wars is how it promises links to other stories that may or may not actually exist. Both in the dialogue, when Doctor Who and the Commander of Nerva Beacon discuss the long ago Cyberwars, but also in how the sleeve explains⁵ that Nerva is “the scene of the Ark in Space adventure”). That sleeve doesn’t bother to explain, however, that the story starts in media res with the Doctor, Sarah and Harry arriving by time-ring, not by TARDIS, hotfoot from their previous adventure⁶, and that its final scene sees them dashing off to be in Terror of the Zygons with what Harry rightly observes is impolite haste. But taken together all these things allude at a wider world, if not in the “fictional universe” sense then in a “here are stories you can experience” sense.

But what did I like about this story, so long ago? I remember liking the explanation that gold was fatal to Cybermen because it’s “the perfect non corrodible metal.. it in effect suffocates then.” It implies electrolysis, and is good school level chemistry.⁷ I liked the slow build up as Cybership approaches across what I didn’t know were Parts One and Two. I also know I was not in any way bothered by the contradiction of Cybermen being “total machine creatures… utterly logical” and also led by a peculiarly accented, loquacious macho man character who expresses several emotions as part of his distinct personality. I also loved (and still love) the theme park ride fun of Nerva nearly crashing into the planet at the end. Watched today that sequence still makes my gut tighten like it’s the biggest set piece you’ve ever seen on an IMAX screen.

I loved the music. For all that Dudley Simpson is for many the definitive Fourth Doctor composer, I first encountered Tom’s Doctor in Radiophonic Workshop days, and then heard Carey Blyton’s score for this. It’s a great score, and while it was seemingly done against Blyton’s wishes, the addition of Radiophonic elements by Peter Howell works brilliantly. Collectively the music is creepy and weird, yet eminently hummable. Highlights include the opening refrain while Howell’s electronic cue for when the Doctor seizes a cyberbomb and threatens to “accidentally drop it” is incredibly tense.⁸

Tom is brilliant in that scene. He’s brilliant throughout. A constantly surprising firecracker of a performance. Revenge is the last story made before Robot was transmitted, when Tom was still working hard without audience feedback. He was travelling through a vacuum like the Vogans in space preparing their rocket for launch, or the Cybermen inching towards Nerva in their splendid ship across the first forty minutes of this story.

Which means that Revenge of the Cybermen is the last story shot before Tom Baker became TOM BAKER THE MOST POPULAR DOCTOR WHO EVER TM. By the time Genesis of the Daleks⁹ had finished shooting The Ark of Space Part Two had gone out and gained twentieth century Doctor Who’s highest ever TV chart placing and BBC Drama were planning to extend the series production block on the grounds that the show was doing gangbusters.

Tom is supported by an outrageously good cast. It’s not just that Elisabeth Sladen and Ian Marter as Sarah and Harry is amongst the best pairings of companions the show has ever had, it’s also that he’s surrounded by supporting television actors who can bring conviction to very little.

Ronald Leigh Hunt (Commander Stevenson) is very good at playing stiff characters without being wooden himself. William Marlowe brings resigned, curmudgeonly duty to his deputy Lester, and proper gravitas to his moment of self-sacrifice. Jeremy Wilkin is spectacular as the oleaginous Kelner in a part worse written than it’s played. Because while it’s a good twist¹⁰ that he appears to be working for the Cybermen and is then working to destroy them, he’s still a mass murderer and one seemingly motivated by money. Which does make you wonder why he didn’t just despatch the Vogan population and make off with the gold on discovering them, I suppose.

That Vogan population’s speaking members are David Collings, Michael Wisher and Kevin Stoney, none of whom are in even their second most memorable Doctor Who role, and all of whom know how to play big through prosthetics with conviction, neither disappearing beneath them nor becoming so outrageous the performance becomes a distraction from the story. Even that loquacious Cyberleader is played by an actor, Christopher Robbie, whose King Lear I’d end up watching at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre not much of a decade later.¹¹

I found out in the 1990s that it was not the done thing to love Revenge of the Cybermen, and it would be singled out as “the” weak Philip Hinchcliffe produced story over and over again, and by competing factions of fandom who otherwise couldn’t agree on anything. My suspicion is that the story’s status as the first VHS, and being asked to stand for a whole era by a fandom that remembered that era, led to it being dismissed. We’re often told that Revenge’s plot is ramshackle, and it is. But it’s no more than averagely so for a Doctor Who of its time. That writer Gerry Davis was relatively available to fandom and made little secret of his dislike of his scripts for Return of the Cybermen being heavily rewritten to become this story, may also have played a part¹².

It does also have the problem that it’s not the gritty body horror space drama that the 1960s stories Cybermen were. Which isn’t a problem if you don’t know they exist, as I didn’t in 1987. Or if you’ve seen what’s left of them recently enough to know they’re not gritty body horror space drama at all, as I have in 2024. It’s only a problem if you’re an older fan in the 1980s relying on dubious memories of a vanished past.

Yet it is undeniably true that, and almost uniquely amongst Philip Hinchcliffe produced stories, Revenge of the Cybermen never really drifts into horror. It’s something else. “A Space Adventure by Gerry Davis” is how it’s billed on the video sleeve. Now, given the scale of Holmes’ rewrite of his scripts¹³, the credit is mildly dubious, but the description is perfect.

That sounds like a note to end on. But I can’t. Because this wasn’t an end. Far from it. I knew, I’d not long been told by the actual telly, that there were 150 Doctor Who stories. I knew I’d seen maybe 15 of them. This was ten percent. Could this be done? Maybe, if you could get Doctor Who on video, it could.

There was gold in them thar hills. All I had to do was find it.