Season Seventeen is great! (Apart from one thing…)
The much-maligned Season Seventeen, on the face of it, has a cracking set of six stories (only five of which made it to the screen thanks to the cancellation of ‘Shada’ owing to industrial action at the BBC – well, it was the 1970s). What seems to happen is that any designer who had worked on the show during the previous sixteen years and successfully created convincing monsters was suddenly unavailable. After the return of the tatty Daleks, and a gorgeous trip to Paris (of which more shortly) we have a trio of stories with truly dismal monsters. The large, green, phallic blanket shaking about the sets in ‘The Creature from the Pit’ makes the fully-grown Krynoid from ‘The Seeds of Doom’ look like something Hollywood had bankrolled. As for the Mandrels in ‘Nightmare of Eden’ – if there was ever a dos and don’ts list for prospective ‘Doctor Who’ monster designers, surely, “Don’t make them look like cuddly teddy bears crossed with loveable Muppets” must have featured high up on the list? The Mandrels also fall firmly into the “extra in a costume” category. They are almost as bad as the Taran Beast from ‘The Androids of Tara’, which was all black fur and papier mache face, but at least the Taran Beast only makes your toes curl in embarrassment for thirty seconds. The Mandrels get more than their fair share of screen time and every moment is cringeworthy. As if things couldn’t get worse, they are followed by the Nimon, which appear to be actors in Egyptian-style ballerina costumes with an oddly-shaped papier mache mask concealing their faces. At least that story has an outrageously over-the-top performance by Scottish character actor Graham Crowden (‘Waiting for God’) to enjoy.
