Paradise Towers

Review by Daniel Tessier

Sentences you never thought you’d read: J.G. Ballard’s High Rise remade as children’s television. That’s the fundamental premise of Paradise Towers, a season 24 Doctor Who adventure, the second outing for Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor.

Stephen Wyatt, the playwright who wrote this serial, had only written a single TV script before: Claws, which had impressed both the previous production team and the new script editor, Andrew Cartmel. Claws, a drama of middle-class politics and ambition, set at a cat show, was recorded after Paradise Towers, but broadcast just before. It exemplified Wyatt’s approach to drama: taking a sideways look at everyday life, exaggerated to maximum effect.

With this in mind, taking inspiration from Ballard’s dystopian novel, published twelve years earlier, isn’t so surprising. High Rise is set in a high-end apartment block whose residents become isolated from the outside world, as they descend into paranoia, factionalism and barbarity. It’s a satirical look at the real face of western society, with the wealth and luxury that supposedly marks our progress shown as nothing but a thin veneer over something much darker.

On the other hand, it’s a brutal novel, one that is clearly an adult exploration of adult ideas, and not something that many would think to reach to for inspiration for their first script for a long-running family show. It’s not as though Doctor Who hadn’t dealt with adult themes before, but this was a period when the programme was going through its most childish phase. Paradise Towers sits in a roughly two-year bubble of pure kids’ TV, with acting, direction, design, music and budget to match. The fact that Wyatt came up with this as his submission to Doctor Who, at this time, is baffling, and the final result is remarkable. Paradise Towers really should not exist, but it’s wonderful that it does.

The four-part serial sees the Doctor and Mel – played by Sylvester McCoy and Bonnie Langford – arrive in the famous luxury apartment block Paradise Towers, primarily so Mel can try out its (singularly unimpressive) swimming pool. They find a rundown, desolate habitat, whose denizens have fractured into three groups: The all-male Caretakers maintain the Towers themselves, obsessively living to an elaborate rulebook and running their regime with the help of deadly, clawed automata called Cleaners. The all-female Kangs are their enemies, and the enemies of each other; divided into Red Kangs, Blue Kangs and the now extinct Yellow Kangs, these young hooligans graffiti the walls as they mark floors and streets as their own. Finally, the also female Rezzies – short for residents – largely keep themselves to themselves, until an unlucky Kang gets close enough to be captured. There’s nothing else good to eat these days.

It's a bizarre and unsettling set-up, one where human life has broken down into a new order where death is only ever around the corner. We later find out the explanation for this strange structure: years ago, all the able young men were conscripted for some war, leaving only the elders left to run the place, and the young girls who grew to be the Kangs. Unfortunately, as soon as you look at the cast, there’s a problem: virtually no one appears to be cast at the right age.

The Caretakers are all remarkably sprightly, mostly around forty – hardly spring chickens, but mysteriously fit and able to have not been called up for the earlier war. They’re clearly meant to be old men, gripping onto procedure as the only stable thing in a deeply unstable world. Their obsession with the rulebook even spreads to their names: there’s a wonderfully odd moment in which the Chief Caretaker takes a phonecall from Caretaker 579/14, subsection 8, about the death of Caretaker 345/12, subsection 3, and responds in all due sorrow.

Unfortunately, most of the humour around the Caretakers isn’t as subtle, but this doesn’t seem to be down to Wyatt’s script. Richard Briers – at fifty, the clear seniority figure – plays the Chief Caretaker, ostensibly the most powerful figure in Paradise Towers. The idea seems to have been for him to play the villain akin to his character in the contemporaneous sitcom Ever Decreasing Circles: petty, fastidious and obsessive, only taken to the nth degree. However, Briers, perhaps writing it all off as stupid kids’ stuff, has chosen to play it with complete absurdity. It’s not entirely the wrong choice – the Caretaker scenes have a definite Monty Python feel – but it’s exacerbated by costuming and direction. Having Briers play a “little Hitler” is very different to having him strutting around in a Hitler tache and a faux-military uniform, with a bunch of masons goosestepping. Clive Merrison (perhaps the ultimate radio Sherlock Holmes) does rather better as the more subtly pedantic Deputy Chief.

The Kangs are clearly meant to be gangs of vicious thirteen-year-olds, from their singsong schoolyard speech to their childishly overdone make-up and clothes. What we have on screen is two dozen women in their twenties looking a bit embarrassed at their first job out of acting school. Julie Brennon and Annabel Yuresh do what they can as the top Red Kangs; Fire Escape and Bin Liner, but they, like Ace in just a few episodes time, are just far too well spoken to convince as a street gang. With their strange sing-song language and rituals they end up somewhere between a bunch of creepy Victorian schoolgirls and a post-apocalyptic tribe. Aside from taking their names from amenities, their pieced-together language has some wonderful contrivances: “Taken to the Cleaners” being quite literally a terribly fate, while “unalive” is as prophetic a bit of Newspeak as you could get.

The Rezzies, at least, are cast right. Elizabeth Spriggs (Shine on Harvey Moon, Simon and the Witch) and Brenda Bruce (Connie, The Secret World of Polly Flint) are hardly ancient, but are clearly at the other end of an age spectrum to the Kangs. Their cannibalistic couple, Tabby and Tilda, are the most entertaining pair of characters in the serial. They have a sickly-sweet chemistry (no doubt due to their shared experience as aunties on Jeeves and Wooster). Judy Cornwell (Moody and Pegg, Keeping Up Appearances) is almost as good as their neighbour Maddy, who is just hungrily hunting for larger accommodation.

There’s only one other person living in the Towers, and he isn’t a Kang, Rezzie or Caretaker. Pex (Howard Cooke) is the sole young male remaining in the complex, a beefy musclebrain who was too scared to join the fighting and hid from conscription. At least, that’s how he’s scripted. Aside from appearing barely older than the oldest Kangs and barely younger than the youngest Caretakers, he’s far from the hench superhuman the dialogue is asking for. Cooke is reasonably well built, but the script is calling for a Sylvester Stallone and giving us Jimmy Nail. It would be fine if this was just Pex’s inflated self-image, but everyone talks about him like he’s all muscle, no brain, whereas he appears to be pretty well balanced in both.

So, we have a cast of grotesques, hardly any of whom appear to have been cast by someone who read the script, giving performances that spread the limited spectrum between children’s drama hour and surrealist sitcom. Into that drop McCoy, whose quiet clown persona for the new Doctor is able to shine; and Langford, who is unfortunately forced to play a character so obsessed with swimming pools she still wants a quick dip before, during and after near-murderous experiences.

Surely it couldn’t get any more sordid and sillier than cleaning robots and cannibals? Oh yes, it certainly could, for we haven’t even touched on the history of Paradise Towers. You see, the complex became infamous when its designer, Kroagnon, decided his latest masterpiece was too beautiful for nasty, dirty people to mess about it. When he refused to leave, he was seemingly killed, but his disembodied consciousness lives on, inhabiting a crude, mechanical body in the basement. The Caretakers distantly worship Kroagnon as the Great Architect, but the Chief Caretaker has been keeping the creature as his pet, feeding it undesirables, unknowingly bringing the Architect closer to life again.

Kroagnon’s temporary form appears as little more than some eyes made of fluorescent tubing and a raspy voice. Now, as I’ve said, this really is Doctor Who as full on kid’s TV, but even with this in mind this is pretty feeble… and yet, this is my earliest, albeit very faint, memory of the series, and it clearly impressed 3-and-a-half-year-old me to stick in my forming mind. It doesn’t last long, in any case, as Kroagnon is finally powerful enough to take on a new body, possessing the Chief Caretaker himself. Unfortunately, since Briers has already been playing the role at maximum silliness, there’s nowhere to go but down, and he spends the final episode shambling round like a zombie giving out orders to wipe out the remaining residents.

Of course, in the end, the Kangs, Rezzies, Caretakers and Pex all work together to defeat him and start to rebuild Paradise Towers. It’s been a strange four episodes, during which viewers have experienced a Doctor Who story like no other. It couldn’t possibly work, and yet, it’s somehow irresistible enough an idea that it does.

Paradise Towers is a wonderful oddity from Doctor Who’s final years, one which appeared to have made little impact on its ongoing story. However, recently, it began to reappear as a setting in comics, audioplays, and even two dedicated short story anthologies from Obverse Books, both with Wyatt returning to help explore the confines of the complex. Build High for Happiness!