Romana nodded seriously. No help from there apart from a slight wink.
‘Then where are you going?’ asked Duggan slowly.
‘I don’t know,’ said the Doctor sadly.
‘Nor do I.’ Romana grinned.
‘Goodbye,’ announced the Doctor abruptly, and wandered off laughing.
Duggan stood alone, holding a copy of the Mona Lisa. If something funny had just happened then only she was smiling.
With an effort, Duggan stopped worrying what his chief would make of this. Instead, he looked down from the Eiffel Tower at the city glowing beneath him. There on the lawns in front of the tower were the Doctor and Romana, standing by their little blue box. They were waving up at him.
He waved back.
‘Bye-bye, Duggan!’ they called and tumbled laughing into the box.
The TARDIS vanished, leaving a final laugh hanging in the air.
Roaring at eternity, the small-blue, large-white box was off to new adventures . . .
FIN
AFTERNOTE
ON THE SEMIOTIC THICKNESS OF A PERFORMED TEXT
OR
WHILE SHAKESPEARE PLAYS CROQUET, ROMANA SAYS JUMP
City of Death is possibly the most authored and least authoritative story in the history of Doctor Who. Just as this book was never meant to be written by me, the original script was certainly never meant to be written by Douglas Adams.
Originally commissioned from David Fisher, A Gamble with Time told a rip-roaring story about a suave Count and Countess who were rigging the tables at a casino in order to fund their time-travel experiments. Taking place in the 1920s and the 1970s, the story featured a very, very limited use of location filming in Paris.
Despite the perilous state of England’s and Doctor Who’s finances in the late 1970s, Producer Graham Williams and Production Unit Manager John Nathan-Turner managed to wrangle the budget in such a way as to give them rather more time on location than Fisher’s script allowed for. Which meant asking for a new draft from him in a hurry. As David Fisher was in the middle of an interesting divorce at the time, he wasn’t really in any position to oblige.
So suddenly and famously, Douglas Adams, Doctor Who’s script editor at the time, dragged himself round to Graham Williams’s house on a Thursday, sat in front of a typewriter and the two talked incessantly while Douglas typed. Sometimes the director Michael Hayes popped by to make coffee, read what had been written and satisfy himself that by Monday there would be a script for him to start work on.
There was, and what a script. There are about three people in the world who don’t like City of Death, and they’re steadily being hunted down. Thanks to ITV going on strike during its broadcast, City of Death remains pretty much the most-watched Doctor Who story of all time. Thanks to repeats, there was almost nothing else on during 1979, so it’s a blessing that it’s one of the best Doctor Who stories ever. I was four at the time, and even I can remember it. I had no idea what I was watching, but it kept me fascinated between Basil Brush and The Generation Game.
The thing is, what everyone was watching (over and over again) was the final, finished programme. This book is mainly based on the rehearsal scripts. The rehearsal scripts were written by Douglas Adams with ideas by Graham Williams from an idea by David Fisher. What was transmitted was slightly different. Some scenes were left out entirely in the edit, or emphases shifted around. Actors Tom Baker, Lalla Ward and Julian Glover especially took a delight in working on their lines, honing each one to a fine point. The resulting differences are surprising.
For example, whole academic papers have been written on the Doctor’s approach to sexuality based on the line ‘You’re a beautiful woman, probably.’ The original line as written was ‘You’re a beautiful woman. He was probably trying to summon up the courage to invite you out to dinner.’
Another famous example is that instead of the script’s ‘Shall we take the lift or jump?’ from the Eiffel Tower, on television Romana suggests ‘Shall we take the lift or fly?’, a rather more poetic notion that is, curiously more fully explored in Douglas Adams’s Life, the Universe and Everything and So Long and Thanks for All the Fish.
There are many other examples of this glorious refining (originally, the Doctor and Romana go looking for macaroni cheese). Many have been retained, and in other places, I’ve kept to the original, just because it’s interesting. After all, the idea of Shakespeare playing croquet is marvellous.
The transmitted version of City of Death makes a lot of Paris, especially in Part Four. As Adams himself admitted, by that point in the long weekend, he was feeling quite tired. The script for Part Four is a lot shorter and the stage directions frequently suggest that a lot of running around would be quite helpful.
So, this script is heavily based on those rehearsal scripts, with borrowings from the final televised production where it helps. You’ll be saddened to hear that the scripts don’t contain an excised subplot. They do contain several deleted, or heavily edited scenes. Of course, I’ve included all of them. Douglas Adams’s marvellously funny stage directions have been retained wherever possible. (‘Romana picks up a vase and breaks it over the Countess’s head. She goes down like a sack of turnips.’ ‘It should be perfectly clear that Tancredi is something out of a cuckoo clock.’ ‘Le Patron shrugs unconcernedly. He picks up the broken bottle neck from the table, looks at it for a moment and then slings it in the bin.’) The original scripts also include a pleasing amount more fighting, with swords, fists, feet and lots of guns. That’s obviously all back in. I’ve given the Countess a slightly bigger gun at one point, but that’s about the only change. Unless I’m lying.
Along with all that come any extra amounts of detail the script offers. For example, Douglas Adams retains the Countess’s first name as Heidi, from A Gamble with Time. This is, of course, a goldmine. On my first day of work, I emailed a friend to say, ‘The Countess has a first name! And it explains everything.’ Well, it sort of does.
The script supplied two surprises. One was at the end of Part One. I’d never questioned why the Count took his face off. It just seemed to be the kind of thing Doctor Who monsters did at the end of Part One. But, working on this, I started to worry. Why would he do that? And, of course, the stage directions tell a different, more curious story. They begin: ‘He considers his face carefully. He appears to scratch above his right eye. He pauses. He touches again, carefully.’
I read it and I wondered—could it be that the Count doesn’t really know until that moment that his face is a mask with something terrible beneath it? It would explain a lot. I wondered and worried a bit, and then I got to Part Three, where the rehearsal script makes it quite clear that the Count is only now realising who he really is, wondering if it is ‘perhaps a dream’. This is extraordinary. It’s also slightly inconsistent, but then, as is said, the interface is unstable. Some splinters of Scaroth seem more consistently self-aware than others. It explains the enigma of the Count’s marriage (although I’ve followed Barbara Cartland’s advice and stopped outside the bedroom door). This also casts the funniest scene in Doctor Who history in a new light. Part Two begins with the Doctor’s interrogation by the Count and Countess. What if this takes place just after the Count has discovered he’s not even human? It certainly puts things in a new light.
The script, and the original storyline also solve what seems a strange dead-end in the plot. The Count puts great emphasis on needing to sell seven Mona Lisas in order to carry out his experiment. But the auction never takes place. Seemingly, after millions of years of planning, the Count just hops back in time anyway. David Fisher’s original storyline makes it absolutely plain. The Count meets Romana, realises she can build him a time machine, and gets her to do it instead. Some of this survives in the transmitted version, but the rehearsal script includes a lengthy discussion between the Doctor and Romana in the cellar. Simply put, the Count meets Romana and th
rows his plans out the window. Well, which of us wouldn’t?
A Gamble with Time also gives us a name for the hapless painter, Bourget. John Cleese himself suggested the art critics should be called Kim Bread and Helena Swanetsky (I couldn’t quite honour that one). I’ve made a few other changes and elaborations, but all hopefully fairly minor. I mean, yes, obviously, I couldn’t resist filling in the gap during Duggan and Romana’s long night. She only gets one night in Paris and it seems a shame to spend all of it asleep on a chair. K-9 likewise gets a very little more to do, but sadly not much. After all, Paris is famous for its cobbled streets and presents left behind by less well-trained dogs.
In terms of research, I am indebted to the work of Francophile anthropologist Stephen Clarke (especially Paris Revealed and 1,000 Years of Annoying the French, where much can be found about Baron Haussmann, Dom Pérignon, and the peculiar English obsession with Paris tap water), to Tilar J. Mazzeo’s survey of art smuggling in The Hotel on Place Vendôme, and also to the letters of Major Gaston Palewski’s lover, Nancy Mitford (who lived in Paris during Count Scarlioni’s era and was in shrieks throughout), and finally to Paddy Freeland, who took me round Paris. But not very far up the Eiffel Tower as I’m terrified of heights.
Finally, this book is dedicated to Douglas Adams, David Fisher and Garoth of the Jagaroth, who found his soneds were urgently needed elsewhere.
James Goss, 2015
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