By Craig Owen Jones
Bangor University
Danny Nicol’s recent comments on Doctor Who’s twenty-second
season, otherwise known as "The Trial Of A Time Lord" (1986) achieve a great deal in drawing attention to the season’s tendency to play fast
and loose with the most basic principles of jurisprudence. As an adjunct to
Nicol’s characterisation of its problems, there are some interesting precedents
in British television prior to the season’s broadcast that may benefit from
scrutiny.
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| "The Trial of a Time Lord": The Inquisitor questions the Doctor |
Many of the germane aspects of the trial depicted in this
peculiar quartet of serials from the Colin Baker era receive their most
compelling treatments not in British science fiction (Blake’s 7’s (1978-81)
dalliances with the device of the courtroom trial during its second season
notwithstanding), but in the realm of comedy. The television run of Monty
Python’s Flying Circus (1969-74) found the conduct of judges and policemen
alike to be fertile ground. Both the death penalty and the rule against bias
were satirised by a sketch in ‘The Spanish Inquisition’ (1970), in which a
frustrated judge (Graham Chapman) rails against his inability to condemn the
defendant in the light of the restrictions then recently placed on usage of the
death penalty, asserting instead his imminent move to South Africa (‘England
makes you sick!... I’m off, I’ve bought my ticket’), before declaring that, in
a final fling before leaving, the defendant is sentenced to be burnt at the
stake.
The question of reliability of police evidence, meanwhile,
was mercilessly lampooned in the Monty Python’s Flying Circus episode ‘The
Light Entertainment War’ (1974), in which a doltish police officer (Michael
Palin) is in cahoots with Terry Jones’ judge, and (ineptly) gives evidence to
implicate the defendant (Eric Idle) while reading from his notebook. The sketch
was still considered sufficiently relevant in 1979 to warrant an airing during
the Secret Policeman’s Ball, the series of occasional charity shows staged in
aid of Amnesty International throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, this
time with Graham Chapman as the policeman and Peter Cook as the defendant.
Cook provides another example that is relevant to the issues
under study. On the penultimate evening of the 1979 show’s run, Cook – taking
his cue from the outrageously partial summing-up of Sir Justice Cantley during
the Thorpe trial which had ended the previous week – delivered a monologue that
has since become known as ‘Here Comes The Judge’ that combined observations on
class and political leanings to impugn the judge’s impartiality with
devastating effect. The monologue, which brought the house down, was so
successful that it was shortly released as a spoken-word record, and is now
acknowledged as a masterpiece of British comedy. Cantley’s couching of his
comments in the language of impartiality bring to mind nothing so much as Lynda
Bellingham’s Inquisitor, whose behaviour becomes increasingly inscrutable as
the season progresses.
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| Satirising the police: Not The Nine O'Clock News |
The late 1970s in particular seems to have provided a good
deal of grist for the satirist’s mill in the way of improper conduct in both
the courtroom and the police station. Arguably the most successful satirical
programme of the period, Not The Nine O’Clock News (1979-82) was the originator
of several sketches to criticise the conduct of the police, including an
uproarious monologue by Griff Rhys Jones that begins with an extreme close-up
of what we assume is a yob bragging about his exploits during a riot in which
he assaulted several people – ‘I hate mush, cos they make me puke, right?...’ –
only for the camera to slowly zoom out, revealing that Jones is in fact wearing
a police uniform (but see below). The much-criticised ‘sus laws’ that resulted
in the disproportionate stopping and searching of black people provided a focus
for another sketch that saw Jones playing a policeman, this time one ‘Constable
Savage’, who is pulled up by his superior (Rowan Atkinson) for repeatedly
arresting the same man, one Winston Kodogo; the sketch ends with Atkinson
deciding the best place for Savage to continue his career is with the Special
Patrol Group. The SPG also received bad press in The Young Ones (1982-84), in
which the police in general are routinely portrayed as needlessly heavy-handed.
In one episode, Alexei Sayle plays a police inspector in the guise of Benito
Mussolini; in another, Rick (Rik Mayall) starts to play some music during a
party, only to have his record player destroyed – mere seconds later! – by a
police officer who asserts that ‘the neighbours have been complaining’.
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| Satirising the police interview video: Alas Smith and Jones |
But the treatment of police officers that is most relevant
in respect of Trial Of A Time Lord’s preoccupation with the admissibility of
the evidence provided by the Matrix is found in Alas Smith And Jones (1984-98),
the vehicle of NTNOCN alumni Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith. In a keenly-observed sketch set in the interview room of a police station, we see
the interviewer (Jones) questioning a suspect (Smith). Smith’s character is
clearly innocent, but Jones’ gleeful demeanour derives from his transparent
attempts to tamper with the evidence – the video of the interview shows
evidence of several clumsy edits, and in the final seconds of the video, Smith
finally appears bloodied and bruised, implying his maltreatment in the cells.
The sketch was broadcast in 1992, several years after the introduction of
recorded interviews in 1984, but it is hard not to view it as a direct response
to that policy. What it questions is not the principle of recording, but the
fidelity to the truth of that which is recorded. When we hear the evidence of a
witness as recorded in an interview room shorn of context, to what extent may
it be relied upon?
Such depictions of the adversarial process play, of course,
devil’s advocate. Smith and Jones do not seriously claim that the recording of
police interviews should be dispensed with as useless or unreliable. But they
do succeed in interrogating our understanding of such interviews as infallibly
truthful sources of evidence. The police interview sketch takes the point to
its furthest extreme; it is Kurosawa’s Rashomon played for laughs. But in its
highlighting of the mutability of evidence presented at one remove, in videoed,
taped, or written form, it asserts the centrality of authority, of ruling by
the sword. After all, the Time Lords are more or less all-powerful; and there
are several moments in Trial Of A Time Lord where the court gets perilously
close to dispensing the cosmic equivalent of victor’s justice. Unlike the
science fiction comedy Red Dwarf episode ‘Justice’ (1991), in which the crew
enter a penal space station enveloped by a ‘justice field’ within which the
consequences of an unjust act are instantly played out on the perpetrator – in
Trial the gap between the act of interrogation of one’s actions and determining
ways of dealing with them in a just fashion is improbably broad. As Nicol
notes, the contradiction between the format of the trial and the outcome is
never resolved – charges are summarily dropped, and the process is never
properly concluded.
Given the preponderance of satirical commentaries on these
issues noted above, it is tempting to view Trial in the same way, as a
metatextual comment on the way in which Doctor Who was being treated by the BBC
at the time. As is well known, season twenty-three’s story arc was occasioned
by producer John Nathan-Turner’s conviction that the show was experiencing
something akin to being on trial, with frequent changes to format and
scheduling and near-constant criticism of its tone both within the BBC and from
viewers irate at the gory, violent tenor of the programme under the editorship
of Eric Saward. This seems on the face of it to be a legitimate rationale for
the haphazard trial process that we see. After all, Doctor Who was not above
satirising the British establishment in the 1980s – one thinks of The Happiness
Patrol (1988), a trenchant comment on the Thatcher ministry. Showing a
frustratingly Kafkaesque Gallifreyan system of jurisprudence could, in the
right hands, have constituted a powerful riposte to the show’s treatment by the
BBC.
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| Campy dialogue: The Doctor and the Valeyard |
