The King's Demons

The TARDIS is drawn to Earth again in 1215, dropping the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough right in the middle of a jousting contest in the presence of King John. The time travellers are welcomed by the King as his demons and are regarded with suspicion by the local nobility and the peasants. The Doctor knows that it can't be right; the King would not welcome them as such and should not even be there; he should be in London signing the Crusaders' oath. With the King clearly an imposter, the TARDIS crew must find out why someone is playing with history, and what it is they hope to gain.

Another two part story, and like Black Orchid it is a cost-conscious one, using a lot of location work and a score of costumes from the BBC vaults to recreate a historical period in fine detail. Tegan gets a new outfit and runs around with her legs on display, which should have created more of a fuss even if it was pre-Victorian times. Turlough gets locked in a dungeon for most of the adventure, conveniently reducing the dialogue load as the show actually has a large cast, and to let everyone do something within the confines of 46 minutes is a bit of a challenge (something that is easily done now on the show but in those days they were still experimenting with this format as a way to fill out the season).

Oh yes. It's the Master. He escaped from Xeriphas. And he brought something with him; a shape-shifting android named Kamelion, which he uses as the double for King John. Kamelion is an interesting concept in many way; as a robot it's actually not a bad piece of work, capable of standing and sitting to deliver its lines. The shape-shifting capablities are a bit of a cop-out, as are the special effects surrounding it, but hey it's a cool looking android. In the end the Doctor takes it on board the TARDIS with him and it more or less becomes a companion, with a mind of its own and everything, but due to technical failures it is not used again for quite some time.

Back in the day when Target used to publish the novelizations of the Doctor Who scripts it became customary for authors whose scripts had been edited for television to put all the missing material back in, and in this case The King's Demons got itself a second chance at life, resulting in Terence Dudly penning a 153 page novel out of his two part script. Such an achievements may not exactly seem massive by the standards of the 300 page novels of today but back then a four or six part script usually only amounted to 144 pages on average, so providing a double length book was a feat, and also a joy for thos reading it who felt that two part stories were a bit of a ripoff.

Speaking of perceived ripoffs, BBC Video's release of The Sontaran Experiment, also a two part tale, onto DVD earlier this year means that The King's Demons will most likely see release as a solo adventure as well. My friend Derek is adamant that he will not buy these releases, as when they were on VHS they were bundled into double packs with an adjacent four part story. Myself, I'll buy andything related to Doctor Who so I don't mind at all; in fact I am curious to see what the extras package will be like on this one. Let's see some more footage - perhaps the sequence where Hugh Fitzwilliam gets annoyed at losing his jousting contest and takes off his shirt and hits the castle gym for a while... wait... wrong show. Dang.

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