The Happiness Patrol

Acting on what he calls "disturbing rumours", the Doctor takes Ace to Terra Alpha; an Earth colony in the future. Alpha is governed by Helen A., a strict woman who wants only one thing from her people: for them to be happy. And to keep them happy, she has had smily faces painted everywhere, cheerful music piped out from speakers everywhere, free candy for everyone. And if that doesn't make the people happy, the Happiness Patrol will find them, and make them disappear for the good of everyone else.

Doctor Who dips back into the surreal here, to an extreme length. We all know a political system like that could never really work, so writer Graeme Curry is calling for not just a suspension of the viewer's disbelief but a total incarceration and exile of it for the story's three episode length. Maybe it's possible to accept Helen A's megalomania and the cowardice of her whipped husband Joseph C (some say this is a Margaret Thatcher comment, and perhaps it is), and the fanatical Patrol members Priscilla P and Daisy K, but along comes the Kandy Man, which is exactly what the name suggests: a villain made of candy. Something to upset the makers of Basset's Allsorts.

The colonists of the planet are not the only ones under threat from Helen A's programme of happiness through terror; humanoid rat-creatures that used to live in the sugar fields have been driven out of their native habitat and forced to scrounge in the underground pipe network beneath Alpha's capital (and like so many other planets in the Who universe, only) city. The colonists call them the vermin, a typical colonist slant towards indiginous life that gets in the way of progress, but they are an intelligent species aware of their plight and desperate to find a way out. When the Doctor meets them, he realizes they are on the brink of starvation, and as such extinction as well.

Even though this is only Ace's third adventure it's easy to see how well she is going to go over with such a totalitarian regime. Her black jacket with all its badges raises the ire of the Patrol, as does her refusal to smile, sing or dance. It's a given that Ace would rebel against any authority, but when she encounters it to this extreme she almost goes out of her way to court the danger. And yes, she has more explosives with her and blows up Helen A's vicious pet Fifi when it corners her in the pipes.

Jay and I enjoyed this one on the weekend, and as he had not seen it before we were not as verbose as usual. There were the usual comments when we found something silly or puzzling, like the way the Kandy Man's eyes were constantly spinning, or why he kept his lemonade in a wine bottle. There are a few actors in Patrol who we had seen before - one in Caves of Androzani and another from Frontios - which made Jay ponder why they recycled actors instead of finding new talent. And we wondered why go to the trouble of making the TARDIS pink for one episode, or, indeed, how the paint stuck.

My usual complaint with studio bound stories like this is I never get the feeling of it actually being a city, or a large one come to that. Sure they've rearranged it and shot from different angles and darkened the shadows to make the night time setting more menacing, but if you look too closely you recognize the background and become too aware of the studio limitations (something they just manged to avoid in Paradise Towers). The answer is probably to not look too close, as with all things.

Back in 1990 I first saw this on YTV when they had the rights to Doctor Who in Canada. Littered with commercials, sound levels shot to hell and shown out of sequence it didn't make much of an impression with me at the time. It doesn't help when you've got an adventure that has already been trimmed to fit into a shorter format that it gets sliced a bit more to make room for the ads. The novelization of the story came along within a couple of years and as was the fashion at the time it expanded greatly on what the writer really wanted to achieve. Who knows how much of what was presented in text actually made it to being recorded, and therefore might end up on a DVD release. A friend of mine said at the time that The Happiness Patrol would never be released on VHS due to its use of the Kandy Man and there would be lawsuits from Bassett's as it resembled their mascot, Bertie, but it happened, so the DVD is not an impossibility. The schedule for 2008 releases looks a bit packed for now so it is unlikely we'd see it in the near future, but despite it's slightly oddball status, it would be a good one to put out.

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