The Five Doctors | Sophisticated Idiots

The Five Doctors
1983

The Five Doctors: The four doctors combine to defeat Borusa

or The Life (and Death) of Pi

or Five Will Make You Get Down Now

Let’s face the room’s elephant early doors. This reunion extravaganza is utterly undermined by the absence of Tom Baker. It’s like going to see Queen with Adam Lambert. Sure, you’ll have a great time, but you’d give anything to have seen the blighters performing with Freddie.

It’s no exaggeration to state that Baker’s decision remains one of human history’s greatest Sliding Doors moments. Up there with what if Lee Harvey Oswald had missed. Or what if Franz Ferdinand’s driver hadn’t taken a wrong turn into an alley. What if Henry VIII and Katherine 1 had a son who’d lived into adulthood.

Nevertheless, the series’ greatest ever frontman didn’t want anything to do with this anniversary show, so we’ve no choice but to suck it up and plough on regardless, just as the producers had to back in 1983.

And good Lord do they make the best of it.

The Five Doctors is obviously nonsense but it’s outrageously entertaining throughout. Stuffed full of callbacks for the fans, churning out more Easter eggs than Cadbury’s, it’s less a love letter to Doctor Who and more of an orgy.

And…Troughton and Pertwee are the studs that hold it together.

The bickering duo – the only former Doctors to appear, of course – are superb throughout and are clearly having a blast. We suspect Jon’s “reverse the polarity” line followed extensive lobbying on his part but we’ll let it fly.

We do have sympathy for Davison here. This is the best story of his era by a considerable distance but it’s great despite his presence.

He’s frequently sidelined in his own show but here, up against the might of (some of) his predecessors, he’s very noticeably overshadowed. If he’s not unconscious or mind-controlled, he’s spending most of the running time plodding about with the High Council and playing a harp. Meanwhile, his better former selves have all the fun.

It would have made more sense for the First Doctor (we’re designating Hurndell’s take as 1B out of respect for Hartnell) to trudge through all the highfalutin faffing on Gallifrey, giving the younger man the chance to get involved in the action.

Doc 5 does have one standout moment. His smug smirk as he nicks the Master’s transporter device and leaves him at the mercy of the Cybermen, is a thing of beauty. Though we dock the cowardly sod one point for abandoning his companions to the same fate.

Showrunners have obviously blown the budget by bringing back all these actors from Doctor Who’s past (leaving them a mere tenner to throw together the fiasco of a follow-up, Warriors of the Deep). They could have saved themselves a few quid by omitting the Master, who’s shoehorned in to pop up occasionally with his best Cyril Sneer impression, wave around a black dildo and get repeatedly knocked out.

We’d rather his fee had been put towards more screen time for Liz Shaw, whose horrifyingly shrill scream, by the way, still keeps us awake at night more than forty years on.

On such an auspicious occasion as the 20th anniversary, the return of the original companion, Susan, should have been a triumphant, punch-the-air moment, finally reuniting her and Grandfather and sort of making good on his “yes, I shall come back” lie when he dumped her in London. Here, they casually bump into each other in a mirrored corridor and it’s all a bit awks. Still, they quickly settle down for a rancid-looking cocktail so that’s just lovely.

It goes without saying that 1B’s ballsing-up of the Pi chess floor ruins one of the story’s standout moments, but we guess the blithering fool’s inability to remember a few numbers makes the scene even more memorable. They originally tried a ‘killer tiled floor’ idea in Day of the Daleks and blew it then too. Third time lucky.

But these niggles are mere sideshows (much like Davison) at what is otherwise a full-blown festival of fantabulousness.

The Five Doctors succeeds outrageously on every level. From the cold opening of Hartnell’s monologue (never has the 80s theme tune’s synth kicking in sent a stronger chill down the spine) to the multiple TARDIS (TARDISES / TARDI? Who cares) splintering off on their merry ways before Doc 5 rounds it all off by fleeing his Presidential duties on Gallifrey to enjoy life in his creaking ship and declaring “after all, that’s how it all started”. Perfection.

In fact, the dialogue is sharp throughout - “I must say, I’ve had the time of my lives” - and the story races along faster than Sarah Jane plummeting down a horizontal verge. It’s a re-tread of Arc of Infinity, sure, but there are many, many worse stories they could have chosen as a base layer so we breathe a sigh of relief.

It’s also refreshing to have a 90-minute story to get our teeth into (though we can’t resist speculating on where the cliffhangers would fall. By our reckoning, at “the original, you might say” meet-cute of 1B and 5, and when the Pi floor decimates the Cybermen).

Let’s leave this feature-length idea as a one-off experiment, though. There’s certainly no need to try anything foolish like two-parters of 45 minutes each.

It would be literally treason not to heap praise on the Raston robot scene. The silver surfer is awesome and such an intimidating foe that we’re astonished it never made a TV reappearance. Also, tell us please, Doctor Who nerds: is there another baddie in the series that the Doctor doesn’t get the better of? Here, he knows he’s met his match and simply sneaks away while the sprightly fella humiliates a platoon of Cybermen. He’s their Silver Nemesis, eh?

The Cybermen are routinely consigned to cannon fodder throughout this story, which brings nothing short of pure joy for the audience, who clocked that they were an incompetent villain far earlier than the producers did.

Still, the Cyber actors enjoy themselves with their elaborate deaths. The milk spewing out is surprisingly effective but the prize goes to the guy who slowly kneels himself down on the Pi floor in his half-hearted demise.

Not even the obvious flaws - the random token Dalek, the underuse of Sarah Jane and how bollock-freezing cold Wales looks - can detract from the magnificence of this story.

It’s not all nostalgic fluff either. There’s real weight here, particularly with the genuinely unsettling ending for Borusa. We may never recover from the trauma of his panicky eyes darting about as it dawns on him he’ll be spending eternity as a wall adornment in the Rassilon tomb.

The Five Doctors may not be the first multi-Doctor story but it’s the best by a mighty long way and sets the standard for all that will follow.

This is such an enjoyable romp we’d be astonished if even the Great Tom Baker didn’t secretly regret not having picked up the mic and joined the old band one last time.