Eye of Heaven Last Man Running The Shadow of Weng-Chiang |
BBC The Talons of Weng-Chiang |
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| Episodes | 6 |  |
| Story No# | 91 | |
| Production Code | 4S | |
| Season | 14 | |
| Dates | Feb. 26, 1977- Apr. 2, 1977 |
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With Tom Baker, Louise Jameson.
Written and script-edited by Robert Holmes (based on an idea by Robert Banks Stewart). Directed by David Maloney. Produced by Philip Hinchcliffe. |
| Synopsis: A Chinese magician in Victorian England searches alongside a living, killer mannequin for the lost time machine of his master, the god Weng-Chiang. |
A Review by Finn Clark 6/5/06
What's left to say about The Talons of Weng-Chiang? It's not the most intelligent Doctor Who story, or the most interesting, or the funniest. It's simply the capstone of the Hinchcliffe era, in which everyone's at the top of their game. The script, the production and the acting are almost flawless... but I don't think that's enough to explain this story's reputation.
Personally I see two reasons for its popularity. Firstly, it's playful. Leaving aside the slight oddity that is Season Twelve, the fan-favourite Hinchcliffe stories tend to be the ones that have the most fun with the conventions of their chosen genre. Brain of Morbius doesn't just dig up Frankenstein, but almost spoofs it. Pyramids of Mars positively wallows in its Egyptology. However The Talons of Weng-Chiang goes further than any of them, ransacking every Victorian pulp cliche Robert Holmes could think of and milking them dry. It's gloriously overblown. It rips off Fu Manchu, the Phantom of the Opera, Sherlock Holmes, the Island of Dr Moreau and probably dozens more. In particular the dialogue is absurd but perfect. Robert Holmes loved language and here he creates an intoxicating world of words. Jago is the most obvious example, but even the Doctor's dialogue has been touched by the same heightened reality. Nothing's naturalistic. It's not even trying to recreate the real 19th century, but instead the romance of Victorian fiction with its clip-clopping horses on foggy London streets.
The results are vibrant and Dickensian. It's not just flat pastiche and the soulless disinternment of dead language, but instead full of wit and one-liners.
What's more, everyone's in on the act. It looks better than The Unquiet Dead, although that's not difficult. We get lots of close-ups and a rich world of darkness, fog and theatricality. It's claustrophobic, hammy and full of luscious detail. To be blunt, David Maloney directs the arse off it. Its visual compositions suck you in. The vibrancy of its theatre, the shabbiness of its "dun' like it guvnah" lowlifes, the shamelessness of its Asian stereotypes... I know Doctor Who isn't about sets and special effects, but I think in this story for once the production quality was a huge part of its success. The BBC understood period drama, having been doing classic adaptations of Dickens and his ilk for so long that they could almost do it in their sleep. The Talons of Weng-Chiang played to the BBC's strengths and as a result evokes a world that you can happily lose yourself in even when nothing much is happening.
It wouldn't even be the same with any other TARDIS crew. Tom Baker is of course a god before whom we bow in awe, who incidentally would go on to play Sherlock Holmes for real some years after doing this riff on him. However Leela is arguably even more indispensible. She's Eliza Doolittle, an endlessly entertaining fish out of water but in a way that augments the Victoriana. Ace and Rose were modern girls, bringing the audience's sensibilities into Ghost Light and The Unquiet Dead. However it's easy to imagine Robert Louis Stevenson having a ball writing about Leela in Victorian London. These episodes are worth watching just for the Leela-Litefoot comedy.
It helps that Leela rules, though. Louise Jameson is fantastic, even without her wet underwear scene. I raised my eyebrows at her grande dame moment, though ("not a word").
The story has one big problem and I'm not talking about rodents. (I only laughed once at the rat, when it was bouncing along with those cute little ears.) Robert Holmes is soaring to a height of political incorrectness that today's more delicate sensibilities probably wouldn't allow. Sometimes it's simply misunderstood. I feel the Doctor's "Well, they were Chinese ruffians" must be interpreted as akin to his "Well, the others were all foreigners" in Robot, if only because to read the line straight you've got to assume that both the Doctor and a Robert Holmes script are being both racist and humourlessly literal. Personally I think if you ignore this story's relationship to its pulp roots and get affronted at, say, its villainous Asian stereotypes, you're missing something important.
However not all of its problems are so easily justified. The lesser charge is Tom Baker's laughable Chinese intonation in episode one. Even my little brother can say "Ni hao" better than that. (However note that the Chinese man doesn't respond and a modern counter-reading could be that he hadn't understood Tom's accent!) That's unfortunate, but still more regrettable is the casting of John Bennett as Li H'sen Chang, which led to the story being banned by at least two American TV stations and drew protests from Asian-American groups. The best we can say is that it's a historical artefact. British stage and TV had long had a tradition of "blacking-up" and cross-dressing, contributing to the strange and unhealthy state of the industry in the seventies. Britain was a less racially-sensitive society, both in the roles that got written and the casting decisions that were considered acceptable. The result was an industry that made things very hard for ethnic minority actors. These things are a vicious circle. If the work isn't available, you won't nurture the talent. For example, look at the performances of the two actors of colour in the preceding story, The Robots of Death. Tania Rogers and Tariq Yunis are bloody awful, while John Bennett is superb.
It doesn't help that, like The Crusade, the story draws attention to its Caucasian actors by deliberately tackling racial themes. I will however point out that Robert Holmes subverts the racism of his source material, making Li H'sen Chang a complicated, honourable man with whom you sympathise even as he kidnaps girls to be devoured by his master. The script doesn't laugh at him. On the contrary, despite being dead he even gets the story's last word. "I'll venture the great Li H'sen Chang himself would have appreciated that." It may only be a theatrical poster, but it's still him.
Back on a more mundane plane, this is the most effortless six-parter in all of Doctor Who. The only time I felt the strain showed was during the theatre chase scene in part two. (The only competitor for the title would be The Two Doctors, also by Robert Holmes, which is essentially two interweaving stories that only come together in the last episode.) Overall Talons is a triumphant romp that could hardly fail to entertain if it tried. The Litefoot-Jago double act, for instance, is so well-regarded that it nearly spawned a spin-off TV series, yet they don't get together until episode five! Overall, delicious.