Is The Happiness Patrol really so bad as one remembers?

Or rather, perhaps, imagines that one remembers?

The whacky central idea is actually so whacky it has a surprising amount going for it. The lesbo feminists of the future have taken over, they're carrying out a vigorously efficient programme of "population control", and they are forcing everyone to wear pink and to be happy - on pain of death. So one can ignore the heavy-handed anti-Thatcherite "satire" (which had been done better by dear old Lenny Henry - the best black Doctor we still haven't had) and indeed the general air of gay misogyny that permeated much of Sly McCoy's era. (Whether they were aiming at Mrs T. herself or - closer to home, so to speak - at the likes of Mary Whitehouse, it is on reflection disturbing how many villainous, middle class "older" white women featured in old-rite Who's last three seasons. Disturbing, that is to say and, after the Rani and the Rezzies and Morgaine and Miss Hardaker, more than just a little monotonous!*)

Unfortunately though it does still all feel as if it's been done before. By the time we got to Dragonfire of course Doctor Who had gone straight through the post-modernism looking-glass and out the other side, so the space amazons themselves certainly weren't a problem. Back in the 1960s they'd have been a lazy cliché (as they almost were in the unmade Patrick Troughton story The Prison in Space): by the late 1980s though they were more of a knowing dig. And dystopian societies where it was frowned upon to look unhappy had been done in well remembered TV-series like The Prisoner and of course Doctor Who's own The Macra Terror. And post-modern lines like 'It's tasteless, smug, and, worst of all, it's badly constructed. I mean, who writes that stuff?' even feel vaguely old hat by now. And all-in-all it does just feel too much like Paradise Towers. The macabre surrealism has been turned up to 11 (and the Kandy Man is actually a verifiably iconic monster), but even brief moments of Fritz Lang-inspired horror noir can't quite touch the mind-spinning inventiveness of Dramarama's two anti-Thatcher TV plays 'A Young Person's Guide to Getting Their Ball Back' (1983), which of course featured our own dear Patrick Troughton in a supporting role, and 'A Young Person's Guide to Going Backwards in the World' (1985).

In fact the one really, really big problem with The Happiness Patrol is that it is quite simply not very good. It's not entirely clear whether the low-budget, whimsical, satirical tone of much of Season 24 really worked. Personally I'm quite happy with it, looking back: Time and the Rani is significantly better than people think it was (if you don't mind the ludicrous "science"), Delta and the Bannermen is cluttered and disjointed but also strangely haunting, and Dragonfire (once you get the joke) is genuinely funny and charming. And even Paradise Towers can be excused as a brave attempt to do something "interesting" (i.e. Doctor Who's version of J G Ballard's High Rise - and as such an unusual excursion for the show into actual "hard" literary science fiction!). At the same time though none of them is perfect, of course. We still get baddies without backgrounds or motivations - the Chief Caretaker and Gavrok especially! Minor characters are slaughtered en masse (in Delta and Dragonfire) with barely a blink of an eye. (The inclusion of a funeral scene - one of surprisingly few in Doctor Who - at the end of the Dalek story may have been an attempt to rectify that.) And there's an awful sense in which the "change of tone" that had been demanded for The Trial of a Time Lord (with Bonnie!) reaches its ne plus ultra here (with Richard Briers and effing Ken Dodd!). When Ben Aaronovitch then did a proper story set in the real world with actual "interesting" characters we surely hoped that we'd left surrealism behind.

So going back to all the silliness of the last season with The Happiness Patrol really was particularly traumatic - the shit sets, the shit performances, the shit plotting (with the Doctor's "escaping" on a go-cart† making the teeny-weeny quadbike in The Day of the Daleks seem positively credible by comparison, with his getting the drop on the supposedly terrifying Kandy Man in exactly the same way twice, and with Ace escaping and getting recaptured off screen with no explanation whatsoever), and of course dialogue so shit that it claims to be post-modern. Does the Doctor make an anti-war speech? If he does it's certainly not so memorable as Jon Pertwee's quietly wise words at the end of The Planet of the Daleks - but then perhaps that's partly because Pertwee had actually fought in a real war whereas the most dangerous thing Sylv had ever done was stick a ferret down his trousers.

No, The Happiness Patrol really has almost nothing to recommend it, and it well deserves its consistently abysmal rating. The premise is terrible, the acting is terrible, the execution is terrible. And the "satire" (such as it is!††)? That's terrible as well.

*In fact one might almost wonder about some of the young male writers' relationships with their mothers, given quite how much they all seemed to detest dominant females. But there we go!
†Odd that even after they'd got rid of the sonic screwdriver in the early '80s the Baker and McCoy Doctors still managed to make do without it!

†† It manages to be both banal (because in real life Mrs Thatcher did not employ secret policemen or rigged juries or the death penalty, and she certainly wasn't a totalitarian) and so bland that it's almost unnoticeable (which it was - because despite the actress being convinced that she was playing Helen A "as Mrs Thatcher", whom she "hated", no one at the time batted an eyelid).