Silver Nemesis, by James Cooray Smith (and Kevin Clarke)

I am getting to the end of the Black Archives! At the time of writing, there is only one more to go after Silver Nemesis, though I expect that there will be another in June.

I missed this story on first broadcast in 1988. When I finally saw it for the first time, twenty years later, I was unimpressed.

People had warned me that Silver Nemesis was pretty rubbish, and I’m afraid it is. One of my frequent complaints about bad Who, and indeed bad sf, is that all too often the means and motivation of the bad guys make no sense. In Silver Nemesis, the means and motivation of the hero make no sense: how and why did the Doctor launch the rocket into space in 1638??? The basic plot of three different sets of baddies (Cybermen, Nazis and Lady Peinforte) trying to get the McGuffin is comprehensible, but little else is. Am I unusual in finding Fiona Walker’s performance as Lady Peinforte rather poor? She was way better in CLAVDIVS. And the bit with the Queen is pretty silly.

I was a bit more positive on my rewatch three years on:

I can’t quite be as positive about Silver Nemesis [as I was about The Happiness Patrol], though again I liked it more than I had expected to. It is the first time we have had a contemporary English setting since, errr, the last Cybermen story three years ago, but it doesn’t really make enough of the normality such a set-up offers, setting us up with real (Courtney Pine) and fake (the Queen) celebrities and then bringing in Lady Peinforte and De Flores through literal and metaphorical timewarps, with added Cybermen. A lot of the bits work well, including the increasing sense of the Doctor as someone with a number of devious plans which we don’t know about (and Fiona Walker’s delightfully psychotic Lady Peinforte) but it doesn’t quite add up together.

Watching it again for this post, I felt a bit more negative. The unrealistic firefights between the Nazis and the Cybermen (often a problem with Who, see also here) are symptomatic of the problems of directing the story, which James Cooray Smith goes into in depth, as discussed below. I did not realise until I read the Black Archive after rewatching it that there are several different versions of the story which have been released on video. Eventually I will shell out for the Blu-Ray and discern between them all.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Kevin Clarke’s novelisation of his own story is:

Such was the visitors’ interest that the materialization of the TARDIS a few yards away passed unnoticed. The Doctor and Ace stepped out. Ace sniffed the damp air as she looked around.

I wrote in 2008 that:

Clarke used the opportunity of adapting the script for novelisation to put back some of the material which apparently ended up on the cutting-room floor, but the result is if anything even more confusing. Where the TV series can just about get away with characters being darkly mysterious, the written word demands a bit more clarity (thinking especially of the portrait of Ace in Windsor Castle, never explained). Fails the Bechdel test, unless the cook who Mrs Hackensack’s ancestor bribed away from Lady Peinforte was a woman. (Hackensack is a much less likely name than the TV series’ Remington for a 17th century English aristocrat; but then, so is Peinforte.)

Not much to add to that. You can get it here.

So, the previous Black Archives that I have read by James Cooray Smith were cases where either I agreed with him that the story is good (The Massacre, The Night of the Doctor) or less good (The Ultimate Foe, The Underwater Menace). In this case, I don’t have a very high opinion of Silver Nemesis, but Cooray Smith mounts a bravura defence of the story as a major classic of the Cartmel / Nathan-Turner era. I’m still not at all convinced, but I admire the passion that he brings to it, as well as the forensic detail in his research.

The first chapter, “‘Meteor Approaches England'”, looks at the context from within DW of Andrew Cartmel’s arrival as script editor in 1987, after the great cancellation crisis of 1986, and his work to assemble a team of writers who could deliver the necessary scripts. He makes the interesting point that in 1987 there were very few experienced Doctor Who writers available; Robert Holmes had recently died, and most of the other veterans were busy with other projects, or had fallen out with John Nathan-Turner, or both.

The second chapter, “The Arrow”, looks at Kevin Clarke’s career – of the newly recruited writers, he was the most experienced on paper, but that is not saying much (and the details say even less). It then looks at how the concepts of Silver Nemesis came together; the Cybermen were there from an early stage, and the weird bit with the Queen was originally intended to be the real Prince Edward, who was active in TV drama at the time; but he said no.

The third chapter, “The Statue”, looks at the difficulties of recording, mainly at the physicakl challenges of getting everything filmed combined with the problem that the two stars, Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, were very under-rehearsed due to their busy schedule working on other stories. It starts by noting that most of the guest actors were third or fourth choices for their roles. The second paragraph is:

De Flores was turned down by Charles Gray, while Anna Massey and Sarah Badel declined the opportunity to play Lady Peinforte, as did Penelope Wilton. Even the single-scene role of the mathematician was turned down by Geoffrey Bayldon, Richard Vernon and others before being accepted by Leslie French. It would be tempting to conclude that these refusals reflected Doctor Who’s declining prestige in 1988, but they are in fact common throughout the programme’s history. It’s an example of one of the usual compromises of programme-making.

The fourth chapter, “The Bow”, looks at some of the subtle allusions in the script – the fate of the muggers is a reference to the tarot, Lady Peinforte’s reference to The Winter’s Tale rewards closer analysis, and there’s a lot to say about jazz (I had not realised that Courtney Pine composed new music specially for the story).

The fifth chapter, “Critical Mass”, is the defence that I mentioned previously. Cooray Smith loves this story and is surprised that other people don’t. “Frankly, this writer genuinely struggles to understand what is not ‘explained’ in Silver Nemesis, except that which is left ambiguous for dramatic effect”. As will be apparent, I am not in agreement with Cooray Smith here, but I admire the passion of his argument.

The sixth and final chapter, “‘Re-Form'”, defends the legacy of elements from Silver Nemesis extending into New Who, and also goes into the (fairly substantial) differences between the different commercial releases of the story, including the novelisation.

An appendix lists the known script drafts for each episode, and another the scene breakdown for the first episode.

At 188 pages, this is rather a long Black Archive, but Cooray Smith has a lot to say, and says it well. You can get it here.

Incidentally, as I said last time, the Seventh Doctor has been very well served by the Black Archives; fully two thirds of his stories, and more than 70% of his episodes, are now covered by the series. Leaving aside the special cases of Withnail and I, the closest competitors are the Fourth Doctor, for whom the newly published BA on Logopolis takes his story count to over 30%, and the Thirteenth, 46% of whose episodes have been covered (though only 25% of her stories).

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Silver Nemesis, by James Cooray Smith (and Kevin Clarke)

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