PS Creativity > Reviews > The Classic Series > The Greatest Show In The Galaxy

It was back in 1988, when Doctor Who was in trouble, in-fact the series was practically on the way out. The long running science fiction show had been running since 1963, and up until the 70's and maybe the mid 80's, the show had remained popular and mainstream, but in the mid-80's it all went wrong as Doctor Who, the great British institution was now becoming regarded as an embarrasment.

On the one hand the period of Doctor Who from 1985-1987 saw a succession of some of the worst stories the show had ever produced. On another, the show was being driven into the ground by the new BBC controller Michael Grade, a long opponent of the series- through the cancellation crisis, a sliced budget, sporatic screening times, and an eighteen month hiatus when the show was put on hold, this all succeeded in alienating much of the loyal audience of the show.

The Sylvester McCoy era that ran from 1987 to 1989 when the show finally ended was a brand of Doctor Who that was far more niche and less populist than what had gone before. The show had a surreal, clownish and comical strangeness that seemed to suit its cheap, rough cut feel as the program was reduced to a kind of minimalism.

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy in many ways is a product of that period- probably the best product of that period. It literally is a circus show with clowns and magic acts. It focuses on the eponymous Greatest Show in the Galaxy- otherwise known as the Psychic Circus, a long running mystical circus on one of the sparsely-populated fringe planets. This attracts the attention of the Doctor and Ace who are eager to witness the circus acts, only to find that the place is a charnel house where people in the audience are taken into the circus pit where they are slaughtered in the ring for the pleasure of its mysterious voyeurs.

This is a Doctor Who episode that is far closer to outright fantasy than science fiction. The early 80's had seen perhaps the last years of the golden age of British science-fiction with destined-for-classic-status TV shows like Blakes 7, Sapphire & Steel, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Day of the Triffids. However the declining popularity of Doctor Who in the latter half of the 80's and the resistance with which the BBC were treating the program was a sure indicator that British science fiction was becoming unpopular or was otherwise being buried as a trend by the dictators of the mainstream. Fantasy fiction on the other hand was emerging as the new vogue. The 1980's was certainly a great time to be a burgeoning fantasy fan, it was a time when roleplaying games were becoming popular, as well as Choose Your Own Adventure books. Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels were in their genesis, Japanese Anime got its crossover hit with the 1987 film Akira and birthed a generation of Anime fans, groundbreaking graphic novels like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns attracted a mature readership to fantasy comics. And of course extravagant and adventurous films like The Neverending Story and Labyrinth proved to be popular not just with children but with young adults too, and even twenty years later that is still the case.

I should say of Labyrinth and The Neverending Story that I do feel the films have some rather mainstream moments and missteps and moments of trying to be too clever, but there's a wisdom and magic about both the films that I cannot dismiss, and like Doctor Who, I often find that the films have just enough flaws for me to want to reach further in to the strengths and outreaching aspects of both films to find the perfection they were aiming for.

This story is also in some ways a satire on the modern Doctor Who viewing experience during the point when the show was in trouble. The series had already done the serial Trial of a Time Lord, in which the Time Lords watched the events of the Doctor's recent adventures on the Matrix screen and shared comments on the shown events that mirrored those of its critics- unfortunately that story actually was every bit as boring as it sounds- all fourteen episodes of it, but in contrast, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy has not a dull moment in sight. It works as something of a pastiche of fan enthusiasm in much the same way as the recent Series 2 episode "Love and Monsters" does- a very off the wall episode about the Doctor meeting his stalker, an episode with some brilliance and poignancy in many ways, and the use of ELO is brilliant, though the episode is somewhat let down by Russell T. Davis' obligatory tackiness.

The Psychic Circus attracts all manner of enthusiasts- one of whom is a bespectacled boy named Whizzkid who bears more than a little similarity to the stereotypical anorak of Doctor Who fandom- right down to an opinionated view of how the Circus isn't as good as it used to be in the older days - despite the fact that he never actually experienced the older days of the Circus. In the less popular days of the show, this was how the fanboy was stereotyped- followers of the show were no longer thought of as the everyman- perhaps it should be remembered that this episode came out in the same era as Spitting Image. The episode also reflects the kind of treatment that some fans may bear from a society that considers them laughable misfits- "Is there no end to you weirdos?" complains one of the grumpy natives every time a circus-going tourist passes her way.

I like to think of this story as occupying a similar territory of 80's strangeness as films like Repo Man, Monty Python's Meaning of Life, Akira and the 1989 Australian TV series Round the Twist. It is the surreal style of the episode that allows it to take massive liberties in its rocky presentation. In a normal piece of television it would seem really short sighted for a story that is set in the future to feature modern vehicles and to have characters who look like they stepped out of Safari in the 1930's or a public school from the 1950's, but here it works somehow as naked and recognisable caricatures. Similarly most TV shows would have had viewers turning off instantly after the leading man, Sylvester McCoy makes such a poor delivery of the "It's a trap, I've fallen into a trap", or after seeing the Doctor and his companions knock the robot guards unconscious with a few light blows from juggling clubs. And yet something about this episode prepares you for the inherently silly and makes those moments wholly appropriate, and still holds your interest with its intrigue and sheer confidence of its momentum.

Actually I should point out that Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor really handles well a particular blink-and-you'll-miss-it scene where he has his back to the fortune teller at the circus and she holds up a card revealing a nasty fate for the Doctor to come (and one that pays off later in the story) and without looking at the card, the Doctor goes cold and has this wonderful precognitive reaction on his face of horror, awe and apprehension. This, alongside his manipulative confrontation with Davros in "Remembrance of the Daleks" was one of Sylvester's crucial scenes of establishing himself as a Doctor who really was time's champion. I should also note that recently in Season 2 of the New Series, a similar deadly prediction was revealed for one of the characters, leaving viewers on the edge of their seat for the season finale to see how the prediction would come true.

So what is it about this story that makes it so special? Well basically it captures, for want of a better word, the 'soul' of Doctor Who. The story doesn't really have a plot as its focus and part one of the story doesn't even see the Doctor and Ace enter the circus yet. They land some miles away from the circus and have to walk a journey there, they come across other eccentric travellers and belligerent locals, Ace picks up a few clues to a murder, and they come across incidental threats that initially function as red herrings for the Doctor's sixth sense of something evil being in the air- once the incidental threats are beaten he thinks it is safe to carry onto the circus, seemingly unaware of the evil that awaits him there. The journey basically sums up the characters of the Doctor and Ace and how they live- as rootless travellers, eager to meet others and with an insatiable fondness for the bizarre and the dangerous. To me this sums up the soul of Doctor Who just as effectively as the Doctor's speech to the insular Time Lords on the evils of the universe he has fought alone while they did nothing, or where the Doctor's morality prevents him from destroying the Daleks as he contemplates how "out of their evil must come something good", or the final moments of the Fourth Doctor and Fifth Doctor as their life flashes before them as they regenerate, reminding us of the companion's lives that they have touched, or the final words in Doctor Who's last episode "Survival" or any of the New Series episodes with their new found poignancy and radicalism.

This episode also plays a part in stripping down some of the layers of Ace's character. Ace has always been the rough and hot-headed kind of teenager in need of a parochial and principled chaperone like the Doctor, and this episode is probably one of the first to really explore Ace as being damaged goods with a lot of sadness in her life. She is shown here to have had an unhappy childhood and there are hints of repressed memories, and in her interactions with other characters it is made gradually clear that she is someone always looking for belonging with people and a bit too eager to get emotionally attached to people very quickly- that beneath the hard exterior, she is actually quite fragile, and in a story where most of the people she meets are far more emotionally damaged than she is, some being aggressive, some too wrapped up in self-pity or even suicidal, she finds herself getting hurt quite often. Interestingly enough the New Series episode "Rise of the Cybermen", which took the Doctor's current companion Rose to a parallel universe where her father was still alive, dealt quite heavily with this theme of the dangers and pain that comes with wearing your heart on your sleeve. To get back to the topic of Ace, it must be said that here Sophie Aldred pulls off a flawless performance as a more sensitive Ace, showing a particular talent for good facial acting, wearing her good nature on her sleeve and making her infectious and endearing as a character.

Through the Doctor and Ace we meet the other travellers and gypsies that make up the cast and audience of the psychic circus. The pompous explorer Captain Cook and his companion Mags are a clear mirror of the Doctor and Ace. Mags is an exaggeration of Ace's own baggage and heatedness, whereas Captain Cook bears the magnified arrogance of the Doctor but is completely antithetical to him when it comes to morality, as Captain Cook is an utterly self-serving ruthless man who goes completely against the Doctor's conventions of heroism and galvanising co-operation with others. He is a caricature, using ruthless irony to bring into sharp relief the most selfish and calloused attitudes with dark humour.

There is also Deadbeat who appears to be mentally gone initially, and represents the kind of unreachable misfit of society, his mind seemingly regressed to that of a newborn, only ever speaking in babbling imitation of others. Through the story we find out how his mind became broken by his encounter with the powerful evil that now controls the circus. He is a lost soul character that we would expect to be killed off for being too much baggae at some point, but he survives the story's progression in an unexpected and uplifting manner much like the story "Kinda" - to see a seemingly lost soul proved to count for something important in the plot, and in a way which actually makes much of the 70's era of the show seem cold blooded in the way it frequently treated the hypnotised minions of the evil Master as immediately being hopeless causes and dead weight beyond saviour.

There are characters like Nord and Whizzkid who are merely cartoon caricatures, fitting the stereotypes of punks and geeks alike. Flowerchild and Bellboy by contrast are very much the soul and pathos of being the misfit outsiders who have lost their place in the world- they very much represent the hippies of the 1960's, even when it comes to their sad tales of how it was in the old days when they were part of a subculture and had a sense of belonging and could somehow bridge internal conflicts in the group with debate and understanding. Although this is largely an apolitical episode of Doctor Who, going so far into the realms of fantasy that it barely counts as science fiction, the dialogue of Bellboy about the old days of performing in the circus before things got sinister and they ended up being its victims, seems to very much echo the view that society was once a strong, kind and co-operative place but that since the 1960's, things have become more conservative and reactionary and society has become a far meaner place to those who wish to be non-conformist individuals, forcing them to stand alone and be downtrodden. This is the kind of view that has been expressed more vividly in Mike Leigh's film "Naked" and the long running theatre play "Our Friends in the North", and shows up most Hollywood portrayals of misfits as mocking, snobby and mean spirited by comparison.

The horror aspect of the story is wonderfully done. As I said, episode one features a long stretch of journey material as the Doctor and Ace travel miles of sand dunes and open roads to get to the Circus. But even in these moments the evil of the circus is felt as a far reaching one. The bright summer's day and wide stretches of land making the characters feel like they stand out to preying eyes, vulnerable to the far reaching menace with no escape in sight, in much the same way as some of the scenes of "Planet of Fire" where Peri is being stalked over the vast rocky mountains of Lanzarote by a determined Master. But in this story that horror aspect is more than just the momentary incidental it was in "Planet of Fire". Once we get into the Circus itself things get rather more terrifying and vivid- people are put into the ring and killed and the Doctor is selected to be next, and the horrific moments are actually conveyed by what we don't see. In a story where naturalism can meet high farce and shadowy horror, the terror of the situation can be summed up in a rather sardonic exchange between the Doctor and his fellow captive Captain Cook.

Cook: A Piece of advice Doctor, it is best to keep them entertained.

Doctor: Why are they more likely to let me go?

Cook: No, but you last longer.

The program makers had gotten their wrists slapped in the mid-80s for an increase in violent content, and as such they were forced to tone the violence down for most of the McCoy era. This story ultimately stands as Sylvester McCoy's most horrific story- a story in which a lot of people die in nasty ways and in which the nastiest characteristics of people and demons are raised to the fore. It presents us with some of the most frightening sequences in Doctor Who when Ace is being chased down corridors by robot clowns, and is eventually cornered by them in a locked dark room- and the scene where Ace is being attacked by a homicidal robot bus conductor is arguably one of the most intense scenes in the old series. It gets our blood racing with wonderful pacing and completely defies conventions of what is possible on TV when Doctor Who is on the cheap even by its own standards.

The only horror sequence that can't help but come off as cheap is the Doctor's encounter with a werewolf in the ring- suffice it to say that the New Doctor Who Series recently gave us the story "Tooth & Claw" which was another story featuring a werewolf, and it was certainly a far more convincing and scary one than the one seen here.

The episode is actually very beautiful to look at, infact it is gorgeous, but everything about the circus has its savage undercurrent. The image of malignant looking clowns is a jarring image of familiar circus iconography somehow coming to represent irrepressible and utterly predatory sadism. The scenes of the clowns scouting the landscape in a jet black hearse on the hunt for escaped slaves gives the chase a distressing air of inevitability, and likewise the scenes of fluorescent kites flying in the air above becomes an unnerving sight when we realise that the kites are the eyes of the evil, hunting for victims and also that they have alluring powers of tempting its victims towards them with its hypnotic colours- making me wonder how the surrealist episode from the 1960's, The Mind Robber which dealt in hypnosis, might have been even scarier if it had been made in colour.

It reminds me very much of the episode "Terror of the Autons" (the story that first introduced the Master). It's the same kind of assault of colour blended with savage violence, and frightening subversion of the familiar, and much like in Terror of the Autons, the principle evil of the story is not motivated by ambitions for conquest or self preservation, but simply enjoys killing and abusing their supernatural powers to sadistically subjugate mortal men. This reminds me certainly of the New Series episode The Satan Pit, as this episode really does take us into a hell-pit where temptations and illusions can pierce the minds of the people and lead them to their deaths- an all powerful evil preying on people's miseries and depressions to weaken them.

The evil voyeurs of the circus in many ways are a satirical metaphor for the modern TV viewers, right down to their declaration of how "Something good has to happen soon", taking the words out of the mouth of most of the bored and disillusioned older fans of the show. The Doctor's charge at the powerful voyeurs "You're not interested in beginnings, only endings!" is a message of how the soulless gratification of television, particularly violent television can breed a dehumanising and sadistic world view.

To me the episode says as much on the topic of voyeurism and sadism as the Reality TV satire story "Vengeance on Varos" did, and says it far better. As a Doctor Who story, "Vengeance on Varos" was a clever and potent idea on the negative power of the media and violent entertainment (more potent than ever today) but its theme was let down by padding, plotless running around and gratuitous violence. Here the handling of violence is a lot less messy, it uses cutaways and the power of suggestion to horrify the audience rather than splattering us with images of blood and burning, and similarly the chases down corridors don't feel like time-killing but actually feel relentless and dangerous.

This story shows a variety of style that is hard to find elsewhere in science-fiction or fantasy. I think it's likely that even fans who are not so fond of the Sylvester McCoy era might find this story surprisingly strong and entertaining. I'd say also that this story must have been particularly taken up as an inspiration for surreal black comedy shows such as Buffy The Vampire Slayer and The League of Gentlemen, and boy does this one stand up as being fresh as ever today. Between all the motions of horror, farce, pantomime and the more soul-felt moments the story takes us on many unexpected turns, but concludes by virtue of following up enigmatic plot devices introduced early in the story. Much like the new episode Tooth & Claw, the resolution is so ingrained into the early stages of the plot that it is deeply satisfying, even if the computer special effects dent its believability somewhat- this is an episode where believability isn't really the priority- it's about losing yourself into its dangerous and relentless world.

Ultimately The Greatest Show in the Galaxy is an incredibly refreshing viewing, it's got great momentum and irresistible gusto, and it's also very multilayered. I can watch Genesis of the Daleks and The Seeds of Doom again and again and still enjoy them as favourites for what they are, but unlike them, with The Greatest show in the Galaxy, each time I rewatch it I discover something new about it that I missed before and which draws me further in. With each repeated viewing it gets better and better.

Originally posted by transvamp on August 2nd 2006 at 3:07 pm.

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