By way of another example, the Kangs are brightly dressed, slang spouting runaway children, with big hair. Their outlandish costumes and exaggerated cutesy way of talking take the edge of the nasty undertone – that the Tower’s most vulnerable inhabitants are starving and are resorting to killing and eating rats and even people in order to survive.
By way of example, mumsy residents Tilda (Brenda Bruce) and Tabby (Elizabeth Spriggs) are cartoony cannibals, wanting to eat companion Mel (Bonnie Langford). Its lightness of tone helps take the sting out of the story’s more disturbing implications. So it is with Paradise Towers, which despite its serious themes, is a colourful, jokey affair covered by a plasticky, synth pop soundtrack. So stories like The Sun Makers and The Happiness Patrol, and even darker variations like Vengeance on Varos and Frontios create a variety of “safe” dystopias, in which the Doctor can engineer regime change in a few quick episodes. The show’s solution is to accentuate the comedy, soften the violence and have the Doctor put the place to rights at story’s end. Besides that, dystopian stories are just too grim for Doctor Who. The structure of those stories usually involves the eventual corruption of the main character as he (it’s always a he) succumbs to the savagery around him. Not that I’ve read High-Rise from which this story is famously descended, but I have read Lord of the Flies, so I know the score.īut dystopian fiction is actually not a great match for Doctor Who. Paradise Towers, however, gives us a world where authority is missing – the folks in charge have gone off to fight a war – and society is left to decay and the Tower’s inhabitants to fend for themselves. So in Doctor Who terms Nineteen Eightyfour becomes The Sun Makers (kind of). Those type of stories usually feature an authoritarian regime in place, stifling the basic humanity of the common person. It’s one of Doctor Who ‘s many attempts to portray a future dystopia. It’s a perfect setting for a Doctor Who story and one which (for the first time, surprisingly) reflected the living arrangements of many watching at home. There are often undercurrents of tension and resentment which build up over pointless rules and rituals.
You witness each other’s faintly embarrassing domestic incidents the hanging out of underwear, the clink of multiple wine bottles in a wheely bin, the muffled arguments audible through walls. Life in a flat is compact and convenient, but you share very close quarters with your neighbours. Anyone who’s ever lived in a block of apartments will recognise the anxiety about high-density living which Paradise Towers taps into.