"Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death"

Today is May 21st, 2015, and later on this evening, the UK charity Comic Relief will make its debut in America as NBC hosts the first "Red Nose Day."

Comic Relief began on Christmas Day in 1985, as a response to musician Bob Geldof's hugely successful Live Aid charity concerts, which raised at least £150million for famine relief in Ethiopia1 . Since then, Comic Relief has raised millions through its Red Nose Day and Sport Relief events.

Ever since that first telethon, Red Nose Day has displayed top talent year after year in sketches which lovingly poke fun at British TV shows, movies, and celebrity gossip. One of the better Red Nose Day sketches was 1999's entry, Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death, which starred Jonathan Pryce as The Master; Julia Sawalha as Emma, the Doctor's companion; Roy Skelton as the voice of the Daleks; and (takes a deep breath) Rowan Atkinson; Richard E. Grant; Jim Broadbent; Hugh Grant; and Joanna Lumley as the Doctor.

Curse aired in March of 1999, which means that it's technically a Millennium thing, but somehow I think there's a better way to look at it. I list it on my blog not as history, but as a guide to the future.

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is The Curse of Fatal Death, hosted by Comic Relief's official YouTube channel:

ANALYSIS

CAUTION: HIGH-LEVEL GEEKINESS AHEAD--BE YE WARNED

It had been barely three years since the 1996 TV Movie premiered. Thousands of fans had pinned their hopes onto it...but it was a false start. Doctor Who was simply not ready to come back full-time as a TV series, and this Comic Relief sketch looked like the best we'd ever get to new Who on TV.

As I said, though, it's a window into the future: Curse has quite a few things to its name. First off, it's The Mill's first special-effects project, and this little charity sketch led to The Mill doing most if not all of the new Doctor Who's special effects work from 2005 to about 2010 or so.

Second, it's present-day showrunner Steven Moffat's first professional writing credit for Doctor Who. He and his predecessor, Russell T. Davies, made their bones in writing for, creating, and producing shows that had next to nothing to do with Doctor Who, and in this way they perfected their craft and learned what makes for good TV in general. They got a good handle on narrative flow, dialogue, character arcs, and sustaining a 45-minute episode, all of which served to bring Who back with a bang in 2005.

Going back to 1999 for a moment, The Curse of Fatal Death is unusual as far as Doctor Who spoofs are concerned. Earlier parodies, such as those seen on The Victoria Wood Show and The Lenny Henry Show, used cheap jokes about the show's low budget, poor effects, and ludicrous dialogue, and they were mostly predicated around "Oh, God, isn't this just the stupidest thing you've ever seen?!" As a result, those earlier attempts had a nasty, mean-spirited edge.

Curse's parody, on the other hand, is much more affectionate. It's constructed as a Doctor Who story first and foremost, but it's a story that happens to be full of jokes. The whole cast works together to give the story a weight that normal spoofs wouldn't have. (It's a little bit like Airplane! in that the actors are all absolutely serious, but everything around them is absurd.)

The same goes for the sketch's impressive production values. The sets, filmed on Pinewood Studios' 007 stage, are as solid as anything you'd see on the current run of Who. (Interesting side note: The TARDIS Console Room set and the Dalek props derive from a fan-film called Devious, notable for being Jon Pertwee's final filmed performance as the Third Doctor. BBC Video saw fit to include parts of Devious onto the DVD release of "The War Games" many years later.)

There's more here than just the story's affection to the classic series, though. In many ways, Curse eerily foreshadows things that would happen in the revived series. Right off the bat, we're faced with the Doctor wanting to settle down and get married. Within the context of the Classic Series, this would have been controversial to say the least, but the New Series has done it with the Tenth Doctor and Rose's love-story, which did not have a happy ending.

Next up is the "Spikes of Doom" sequence, which involves death-traps and multilayered time-travel gambits. While it's played for eye-rolling laughs here, complex time-based stories would later appear in the episode "Blink" and throughout River Song's story arc, which was a love story told out of sequence. (In her first story, she died, but not before leaving enough room for adventures that we would see in the future, but which had already happened from her perspective.)

Third, in the sketch's funniest set-piece, the Doctor burns through his remaining lives even faster than he normally would. Rowan (Mr. Bean) Atkinson plays the Ninth Doctor; Richard E. Grant, the Tenth; Jim Broadbent, the Eleventh; and Hugh Grant, the Twelfth. And then the Twelfth Doctor dies, but comes back as Joanna Lumley, who then falls for the Master!!

The first thing we're looking at is the idea of the Doctor breaking the "thirteen regenerations limit," which was introduced fairly late in the classic run, but became part of the accepted ruleset all the same. THIS HAS HAPPENED FOR REAL in the 2013 Christmas special, "The Time of the Doctor."
The second thing we're looking at is the idea of the Doctor coming back as a woman, which was reused as the Master coming back as "Missy" in Series 8 (short for "Mistress").
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Forward-thinking aside, I have to put Curse back into its context. At the time, Doctor Who was all but dead and buried as a pop-culture institution. At best, it was a fondly-remembered piece of nostalgia from more innocent days; at worst, it was the prime example of just how much better TV is today, and how hokey it was back then.

That a Comic Relief sketch was seen as "the best we're ever going to get to new Doctor Who" demonstrates just how far a once-revered institution had fallen by 1999. Certainly, the BBC novels, Doctor Who Magazine, and several specials on Blue Peter kept it going, but it just wasn't enough. Those six years, from 1999 to 2005, were a long and lonely vigil...

I suppose I could say that, just as 1999 bridged the gap between one millennium to the next, this little sketch bridges the gap between two eras of a series that I have loved and held on to for nineteen years...twenty next May. It's slightly alarming how fast time can go by...




1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Aid#Raising_money